links for 2009-03-05

• Hitchens in Beirut « the human province
  "In order to illustrate how he knows so much more about Lebanon than anyone else in the room, when pressed, the only “true revolutionary” he could come up with was Walid Joumblatt. To this, the audience mostly just laughed out loud. I would have felt sorry for Hitchens if he hadn’t been such a pompous ass."
  (tags: blog middleeast rightwing)
• Violence Today: Actually Exisit Barbarism, Socialist Register 2009 edited by Leo Pantich and Colin Leys
  "The opening essay offers an overview of the scale and variety of contemporary violence while also taking up once again the question of socialism versus barbarism. Other essays analyze the nature and the roots of paradigmatic cases of violence around the world."
  (tags: literature international marxism capitalism war)