• The Agony of Syria by Max Rodenbeck | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/agony-syria/?page=2

    The main reason that Syria’s agony has gone on so long is not because large numbers actively or enthusiastically back the government. The Assads do have supporters beyond their Alawite core, but such outsiders are mostly seekers after spoils, such as Bedouin tribes that have gained some special favor, or business clans that won lucrative concessions from the Assads. Their numbers have dwindled rapidly in recent months, ironically, again, largely because the government’s own brutality has made it increasingly clear that the regime is untenable as is, and incapable of reform.

    Abu Tony, a Christian activist in Damascus, says with a shrug that the influx since the spring of thousands of desperate refugees into the capital has made it plain, even to the well-insulated wealthy or to those who took comfort in blocking their ears to anything but state propaganda, that this is a criminal regime. The increased pace of defections does not surprise him. “The inner circle think they have a Samson option, to threaten to destroy the whole country,” he says. “But they will find there is nobody left to carry it out.”

    What has so far made many Syrians reluctant to sacrifice for the revolution is not loyalty to the state but fear of chaos. They have seen neighboring Iraq and Lebanon descend into years of sectarian warfare. They know that forty years of the Assads’ ostensible secularism have not succeeded in burying Syria’s own confessional resentments. Quite realistically, they expect that even after the regime falls, there may be worse to come.

    Just what that might be, no one can predict with confidence. Even more than in other dictatorships, Syria’s long years of tyranny have left a lingering pathology of mistrust. Much of Syria’s elite is tainted by association with the regime. The organized opposition is fragmented. Its meetings have the tenor of an Afghan Loya Jirga, where impressive-looking people turn out to represent themselves and a few cousins, and most energy is exerted undermining other factions.

  • Are Hackers Heroes? by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/are-hackers-heroes

    In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world…. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

  • Our Romance With Guns
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/our-romance-guns

    Like so much else in the United States, the costs of our infatuation with guns are not evenly distributed. In 2008 and 2009, gun homicide was the leading cause of death for young black men. They die from gun violence—mainly at the hands of other black males—at a rate eight times that of young white males.2 From 2000 to 2007, the overall national homicide rate remained steady, at about 5.5 per 100,000 persons. But over the same period the homicide rate for black men rose 40 percent for fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, 18 percent for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, and 27 percent for those twenty-five and up. In 1995, the national homicide rate was about 10 per 100,000; the rate for Boston gang members, mainly black and Hispanic, was 1,539 per 100,000. In short, it is not the typical NRA member, but young black and Hispanic men in the inner city, who bear the burden of America’s gun romance.

    #armes