CFA relaunches

By Aziz P. -
As promised, CFA v2 has launched (didn't want to get left behind by DFA after all :) Its a spiffy new site with user registration, moderated comments, a news aggregator, and a forum. However, given that Trippi has his own site now, it's not clear what role he plays in CFA, or even what role CFA still intends to play in general (the About page still comes up with Page Not Found).

My earlier critiques of CFA still stand - I think that they expected to parlay the Dean movement's momentum into a PAC of some sort but utterly failed to deliver the content or the leadership to rally around. If not for the indomitable blogging efforts of Adam Mordecai the place would be as vacant as the leadership vacuum at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But it is nice to see that CFA has relaunched as a community site, which I think goes some way towards addressing those critiques. Rather than pointless "summits" which never materialized, a community site will allow for more participation at the user level, and maybe give CFA the direction it's been lacking until now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali
Read more