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Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, has an interesting article/essay (warning, its very long so be committed to reading it) about the conflict raging in the Gaza strip. What his piece does is look at the types of wars that Israel has fought with its Arab neighbors over time. In the opening he writes that:

With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.

This is an interesting characterization to me for many reasons. Cole’s article made me think (in a somewhat unrelated tangent to this article) about the current conflict.

I agree with the term “micro-war” because it does seem that these wars are significantly different from conventional warfare. While these wars are different in the sense that they don’t necessarily involve the “infantry, artillery, armor and air forces [that] played central roles” in earlier conflicts their seriousness is still conventional. What I’m worried about is that by characterizing these conflicts as “micro-wars” the press (assuming that this term gets spread in mainstream media) may be creating a situation in which the public begins to believe that these are simply small conflicts that aren’t lasting and that if we just give them time they will resolve themselves. I know this is a little different from what Cole means by micro-wars, but this is just how I see the majority of the public interpreting this term.

Furthermore, I have become concerned that in this age countries have begun to think that wars that they engage in will be resolved quickly (i.e. U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.). What worries me is what happens if a “micro-war” that doesn’t necessarily have the full commitment of a nation’s military force becomes a much larger conflict that cannot be resolved quickly? We saw in Iraq what can happen when a country undertakes military force without a contingency plan for after the fighting. So long as Israel, and other countries for that matter, enter into these conflicts with plans for getting out and for stabilization then the problems can be mitigated. If they begin to enter into conflicts over religion, territory, etc. without thinking past getting what they want then these “micro-wars” could become “macro-wars” pretty quickly.

Link to Juan Cole article.

Last week Boing Boing published an article that has video links to a 6-part interview between Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown, a magician and illusionist who has become increasingly known for his “mind-reading abilities.” The interview is interesting in that Brown gives a pretty clear explanation of what code reading is and how psychics are able to appear as though they know the most intimate of details about you when they are really just reading you’re expressions and reactions.

Here’s the link to the Boing Boing article and here’s a direct YouTube link.

The always interesting Andrew Sullivan has a great post up today in which he quotes Anthony Gottlieb on the correlation between religion and fertility. Part of the quote reads:

Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

It seems to me that what Gottlieb defines here as “conventional wisdom” would simply be repudiated through the events of the last few decades. With the growth of the technology industry many aspects of business have become more and more industrialized and yet since the 1970s much of the nation has seen a religious revival.

The link to fertility is also interesting from a personal background. It does seem to me (despite the fact that I grew up in a very conservative and very religious area) that my friends who came from backgrounds of large families were more religious. Furthermore, even those that weren’t religious in a traditional sense were what many would call “spiritual.”

Here’s the link to Sullivan’s article and the link to the original Gottlieb piece.