Tab dump 21-04-09

Excellent article in NY Times where a Times reporter and photographer wound up in the middle of a pitched infantry battle after an ambush near a riverbed in Afghanistan, in which the troop miraculously lost only one of the men. The story makes you feel really sorry for the soldiers, but is, obviously, completely one-sided. The journalists were completely embedded. Dramatic and engaging, the article gives a good description of combat on a strategic level that newspapers hardly ever cover anymore. And more to the point: probably shouldn't cover anymore. It ends up being a riveting story (with unbelievable multimedia: recordings of interviews and the sound of the actual combat, slideshow of incredible photos, etc.) from a more or less bygone age of media.

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Jokes from the cultural revolution.

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"Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism" by Terry Eagleton:

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?