Un Hombre Sincero
The Saturday Guardian features an incredible essay by Salman Rushdie (or Uncle Salman as we like to refer to him around these parts.) In it, he poses the question: “What is a fact?” and trots out answers that various factions in the so called “war on terror” might provide.
I have some sympathy with all three “biases”. Self-investigation followed by self-exoneration is never convincing. However, it’s hard to work up genuine sympathy for a failure of niceties towards people who would never consider upholding such niceties in return – to stick up for the human rights of people who despise the idea of human rights. And yet the growing evidence of ugly behaviour is distressing in the extreme, not because of the injury to the detainees, but because of the injury to ourselves, to our identity as free and moral people living “under law”, to our sense of what we stand for and who we are; and that identity is, or should be, something that conservatives and liberals should both be determined to defend.
And then he quotes Marti. Go read the essay here.
