By the way... although I'm probably the last person on the Internet to talk about adding permalinks to a site, I do have to admit to a desire to, as Matthew Yglesias put it, "be considered for a spot on the prestigious Altercation website". The links (for those who think it's deserved), go here.

It's a good feeling, knowing that a link to my blog is attached to something this acid and funny. Go, now, if only for the spectacle of Mickey Mouse saying "...and if any snotty artist thinks otherwise, I'll shove so many lawyers up his ass, he could open a law firm in his colon!"

Well, maybe I will update (although it'll have to be short). I hadn't expected the Rittenhouse Review to include a fiery entry exhorting Americans to "[w]ake up... [y]ou’re being screwed big time from every which way including up. And not just working-class Americans, but the middle class as well." I had always thought of that as more of a Sawicky topic. Then again, considering that the spectacle that caused it was somebody honestly claiming that organized labour is in any way responsible for the mess that said Americans are in right now, it was perhaps inevitable.

(Organized labour?? Incredible. Freedom is Slavery.)

Blogging will likely be very light over the next few days, as I'm going to be out of town and quite busy. In the meantime, one observation- criticism and dispute does not always have envy at its root. Indeed, it's probably pretty rare.

There has been a mad furor over the "open letter to America from a Canadian" that was published in the Baltimore Chronicle a little while ago, one that I've noticed and followed with some interest, considering that I was "outed" by SDB as someone who uses Rogers, a Canadian ISP. I've refrained from commenting, though, partially because I didn't want to add ammo to that "TransProg" accusation, but also because I wasn't quite sure how to put my reaction.

It was with great surprise, then, that I discovered that my reaction to the letter was pretty much encapsulated by a very thoughtful and introspective article by, yes, Wil Wheaton. I'm not a regular reader of his blog, although I have nothing against it, and it was by random chance that I actually discovered his reaction.

The letter reminded him of a similar letter he received at what was probably the height of his fame in the late 80's from a girl that he had an enormous crush on. It told him

...as delicately as possible, that she just couldn't be around me any more. I was arrogant, rude, ungrateful for what I had, and I treated her like property. I was demanding, overbearing, unwilling to listen to or respect other people's opinions. I was a dick, an ass, a jerk. She described to me a person I wouldn't ever want to sit next to on a bench, much less be.

Wil's initial reaction was outrage and anger, and it was with the expectation of sympathy that he took it to one of his best friends. Instead, his friend read it, gave it back to him, and said "Wil, you should read it again, because she's right. [She]wrote you this letter because she cares about you, and she doesn't like what you've become. Frankly, none of your friends do. So you can read it again, and take it to heart, or you can blow it off, and continue to alienate yourself from everyone who cares about you, including me."

This revelation stunned and shocked him, but he couldn't simply dismiss it, and the more he thought about it the truer that it seemed to him. He took a lot of it to heart, and credits it as the reason he's not dead, drugged out, or imprisoned right now.

In a lot of respects, the open letter reminds him of this, but I'll just quote him directly instead of trying to paraphrase good prose:

back to the Open Letter. Do I agree with all of it? No. I think some of it is wildly off-base, and I think the message would be listened to by more people who need to hear it if it wasn't so inflammatory.

On the other hand, I think that America has an opportunity to walk through an open door, and take a long hard look at ourselves. The simple fact is, America, most of the world really doesn't like us. We're arrogant, irresponsible, and unaccountable. We loudly an constantly remind the world that we are a Superpower...well, with great power comes great responsibility, right?

The great thing about America is that We The People have a voice, and the louder that voice, the more insistent that voice, the harder it is to silence.

Let's raise our voice, and walk through this open door. It's scary. It is uncertain, but it is vital that we do. It will be a long process, but we can do it.

This very closely approximated my reaction to the Open Letter. When reading through it I noted a ton of scattershot accusations that were either wildly exaggerated, overgeneralized, or ideology masquerading as criticism, but on some level I agree with Wil- its central concept (that the United States is utterly alienating its foes and allies alike) is substantially true. This, as well as that missing coincidence of interests that begs the question of a lot of the "moral equivalence" arguments, is, I think, at the heart of the widespread criticism of the United States. Even if the hawks are substantially correct about the United States not needing allies to protect their interests (and I don't think they are), Wil's observation that "most of the world doesn't like us" because "we're arrogant, irresponsible, and unaccountable" makes such arguments somewhat irrelevant. Any nation that defines itself by something above simple national interests is inherently vulnerable to such critiques, because sooner or later the balance of "moral equivalence" is going to tilt the other way. I don't think anybody in the United States wants that. I know I sure don't.

J. Bradford DeLong is asking a very valid question: considering that the difference between the earnings of those with a college education and those without is approaching fifty(!) percent, why in the world is the growth of education going down?

It's a valid question, but I think it has a socio-cultural answer, not an economic answer. People are stuffed full of stories of people without college educations or who dropped out of college (like Bill Gates) who have become filthy rich, and stories about people with Ph.Ds who are driving cabs. The fact that these sorts of stories are notable precisely because they seriously buck the trends is lost if one doesn't already know that those trends exist, just as the increasing visibility of violent or spectacular crime often causes the public to feel less safe, even when (oft-ignored) statistics show that crime rates are going down.

Then again, Brad's insistence that "every American who can should go to college" contains one incredibly big assumption there.

"Can."

Yet more proof that Krugman really, really, really needs to get a blog:

Some people, bizarrely, think that I don't know that spending plays a role in the deficit. Well, duh. If you look at my book Fuzzy Math, p. 75, you'll see a table I took from Auerbach and Gale. It shows that if you replace the unrealistic assumption of zero growth in real discretionary spending with the more reasonable assumption of constant spending per capita, the projected 10-year surplus falls almost $500 billion. If you use the even more reasonable assumption that discretionary spending remains constant as a share of GDP, the projection falls more than $600 billion more. So going from zero real growth in discretionary spending to keeping such spending constant as a share of GDP - which is the implicit assumption in my back-of-the-envelope calculation above - subtracts more than $1.1 trillion from the budget projection. That's still well short of the $1.7 trillion in direct and indirect costs from the Bush tax cut (close to $2 trillion if you ignore the nonsense about expiring tax cuts in 2011), but it's substantial.

Naturally, Krugman concludes that this, plus the cuts, means the possibility of "deficits forever", even factoring in the output gap. And the common answer of "just cut spending regardless?" He covers that too:

Smaller government is a great catchphrase, until you actually start cutting things like mine safety and nutritional aid for poor children. Apparently some people even think that, as Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing to trick veterans into not getting health care.

Then again, considering the yeoman work that Max and J. Bradford DeLong have been doing lately, maybe that would be a little too much.

While I'm linking to Max and his posters, I was caught by this entry, which questions the idea of "moral equivalence". Here's Max:

Which brings us to the conservative narrative of moral equivalence. Often a radical's response to the allegation of a crime by someone deemed unsavory is to respond with some parallel deed for which the U.S. government bears responsibility. Conservatives say this is an error of moral equivalence because the USG are the good guys and the other guys are not. It is wrong to evaluate actors in light of actions because the actors are fundamentally different.

The logic here is precisely backwards, albeit ingenious. Ordinarily we would infer morality from actions. If two parties each commit murder, they are equally wrong. The moral equivalence narrative says we must begin with the implicit assumption that the USG represents the greater good, hence one may not evaluate our enemies by the same standards by which we evaluate ourselves. If we each commit murder, the USG murder deserves at least the benefit of the doubt, if not automatic approval. If the U.S. indulges the use of WMD by Saddam Hussein, our motives are honorable while his are despicable.

However much we love Mom and apple pie, the motivations, effects, and consequences for any policy must stand or fall on their own. Was it really necessary to shoot that last doggie?

The key problem here isn't one of morals, but one of interests- Americans are at least nominally on the same side as the United States Government (USG), so they're almost the good guys by default- no matter how heinous their actions, its those same American asses that they are (supposedly) trying to protect and serve. That creates a powerful incentive to look at the USG in the best possible light in the face of an opponent that threatens said asses, and in no way is the USG so heinous that it can't be defended under those conditions. The coinciding interests naturally generate the "moral equivalency" argument.

On the other hand, this provides a very useful explanatory tool for understanding the difference between American attitudes and the attitudes of those outside the United States. Without that powerful coincidence of interests, it really does come down to Max's inferrence of morals from actions. Even then a case can certainly be made in favour of the USG, but it's much weaker, especially when stripped of the domestic political battles that usually give American foreign policy its shape. The argument against "political equivalence" is much weaker, and criticism of the state can be much more strident. Thus the demonstrable difference between the attitudes of both the American polity and American elites vs. the elites and polity of other allied countries that share much of their basic culture and mores with the U.S. (like England or Canada). It's all about interests, and their influence on the interpretation of relative moral worth, moral authority, and ethical debate.

(Hey, come to think of it, I just argued against a right-wing shibboleth from a Realist perspective. See? Told you it can be done.)

You don't usually find a lot of honest-to-Marx socialists online, so it was with some sense of, what, unfamiliarity? That I looked over the new blog of "D. Ghirlandaio", called An Unenviable Situation. What I found there was interesting, if a little rough, but considering that Ghirlandaio originally conceived the blog as a collection of unpublished letters, that's perhaps to be expected, and the ideas contained aren't noticably hurt by it. It includes a rather intense attack on E.C. bloggers and Instapundit, specifically on their rather overwhelming support of what Ghirlandaio called "a letter from a group of right wing heavyweights [sic] responding to a statement by a group of German intellectuals critical of our actions in Afghanistan and opposed to an Invsion of Iraq."

I specifically liked this particular paragraph:

to idiots who think that lefties are a bunch of simpering wimps and Episcopalian sticks-in-the-mud; if we want to pretend that we're the cold and morally indifferent strategists that any serious conservative intellectual must claim to be, we need to ask the following questions: How many relationships -political, social and economic- will we have jeopardized if we invade? Will stability in the region be decreased or increased? Will the explosion that results put out the fire or spread it even more.

This is a cogent response to a critique that a lot of wingers get away with accusing the left of: being "squishy" and "unwilling to face facts" when it comes to foreign policy. This is nonsense, of course- the left can speak in terms of states, interests, power and force just as well as the right does, and the right doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on arguments backed by realist or neo-realist theory. In this particular case, the arguments against invasion are (in my own personal view) better rooted in true realism (as opposed to the simplistic versions you often hear online) than the arguments in favour of invasion, but at the very least both can draw on realism (or neo-realism; not the same thing) equally well.

While I don't agree with Ghirlandaio on all or maybe even most issues, the variation is certainly refreshing, and I'll make a point of returning in the future.

Max wrote an interesting article about populism that I hadn't linked to before, but think is worth reading. Oddly, however, he includes a series of four populist economic principles:

1 Tight labor markets, through activist fiscal/monetary policy ("democratic money") and a shorter work week (cf. the Sandwichman);

2 Easy entry to entrepreneurship, through fair and easy credit (democratic money again), and through vigorous policing of predatory corporate behavior of all types;

3 An ample social insurance system, that among other things makes the choices among employment and self-employment more appealing (through public provision of health care, among other things).

4 Labor rights -- the counterpart to anti-predation activities with regard to corporations v. small business...

... that I don't think of as really "populist" at all, but just the sort of thing that people on the center-left would be logically advocating as a matter of course. #2 and #3 would be excellent ways of turning the right's self-serving obsession with entrepreneurs back on itself, making it a useful Democratic tactical tool. It would probably stand the test of economic analysis too- while it would probably raise the ire of market fundamentalists, I don't see anything here that would offend, say, pre-NYT Krugman. Any of the four can be taken too far, of course, but the absence of them usually leads to problems as well, and there's a difference between the kind of procedural problems that can be fixed with some fine tuning and those that are intrinsic to the very concept.

(Heck, if you think about it, these sorts of proposals really amount to fine-tuning the markets' effects on society themselves.)

Anyway, this is only one part of what is overall an interesting article on populism (although I still don't quite agree with Max's fairly narrow definition of the term- anti-elitism ain't just a political economic phenomenon.) Interesting stuff, and yet more proof that Max's is one of the more important left blogs out there.

Just finished reading pretty much the entirety of D-squared Digest, a blog written by perennial DeLong comments section inhabitant Daniel Davies, and which inhabits that tricky nexus point where Insight, Left, and Funny intersect. If you read nothing else (and why not? It's new, funny, and can be read in about fifteen minutes), read this, which proves that economic analysis is best capped off with the phrase "which would, obviously, leave us in the shit"

(And my metamorphosis from "thinker" to "linker" continues. I'll write something longer tomorrow.)

I hate to write non-funny responses to funny articles, but lilek's bleat about unilateralism and the retaking of the Iraqi embassy by German police misses one key point: It had, um, already been invaded.

(By anti-Saddamites, no less.)

That's like Bush the Elder's Gulf War, and nobody complains about that, because the U.N. gave him the go-ahead and their best wishes to boot. (Nice try, lovely parting gifts, etc. etc.)

Then again, how can I stay mad at anyone who acknowledges that "there is a Simpsons line for every situation in life?" I independently figured this out a half-decade ago, and it remains as true now as it was then. I'm obviously not the original source, though, so I gotta wonder who is?

(At least, I don't think think I am. Maybe I should do a google search about that sometime.)

Edit: ack, wrong source. This wasn't IP, it was Tim Blair.

Tim Blair linked to one doozy of a Camille Paglia article that, in attempting to address the problems of the left, simply resurrects conservatarian shibboleths and sends them shambling towards the strawman legions of Camille's fantasy "Left".

I mean, how else to interpret arguments like this?

Leftists consistently misinterpret mass media and new technology, which they treat with paranoid theories of manipulation and "commodification" coined by writers schooled before the Second World War (before the birth of television). The communications revolution has blurred traditional class lines. But the Left still doggedly invokes paradigms from early industrialization, applicable today only to the Third World. The left finds "oppression" under every rock and reduces contemporary society to rote battles of the "powerful" and the "powerless".

It should be obvious to honest readers of any ideology that painting the left with such a wide brush is a dangerous endeavour at best, but is Camille honestly saying that the left hasn't developed coherent theories about television, of all things? And is she so naive that she actually thinks that questions of power are somehow irrelevant nowadays because of "mass media and technology", when critics of all political affiliations have consistently criticized the mass media for being one of the best vehicles of inculcation of ideas and values that mankind has ever seen? How could a device whose ability to distract and transfix the masses is the staple of both endless fiction and nonfiction possibly "blur class lines"? Was she asleep when people were lauding the Internet for actually getting away from the very power inbalances generated by the mass media in the first place? Who cheerleads a levelling power of television in this day and age?

(What does she think that Manufacturing Consent is about?)

Sadly, not much in the article raises itself above this sort of dubious chicanery. Perhaps it's because she's on Frontpage and has to toss red meat to the readers or get canned, or perhaps she's so desperate to attack the left that she doesn't need coherent arguments to do it. It's sad, though, because I do think that the radical left (as opposed to mainstream liberalism, which is somewhat different) deserves some honest criticism and renewal, but I've seen less and less reason to think that the right of either the quasi-libertarian or social conservative bent has the ability and objectivity to do so effectively. Nor, for that matter, does Camille Paglia.

One other thing before I leave this... Tim Blair complains that this series of complaints "will resonate particularly with Australian readers." Not being a long-time reader of Blair's blog, what's so objectionable about Australian academe?

While normally a critic of Instapundit, I've gotta give out the mad props to Prof. Reynolds (and his co-conspirator, Robert Patrick Merges) for this essay, which deals with the huge problems that currently exist in "Intellectual Property" law. Specifically, they are calling into question the constitutionality of the endless attempts to retroactively lengthen and protect the copyrights and patents of the holders of those government-granted monopolies. They address it on both legal and political economic grounds, delivering a series of devestating blows on the overblown rhetoric often used by those (like rent-seeking corporations) who defend a radical and extensive interpretation of their I.P. rights. While I don't agree with all that they said, passages like this:

[T]he value of intellectual property is that it encourages authors, inventors, and investors, to take risks "on the front end" with the expectation of reaping profits later. A post hoc reward, granted on the basis of legislative whim or influence, is unlikely to provide such encouragement as effectively as a regularized system. The vagaries of the political process dictate that extensions will not always be available, and that when they are, they may not always be granted for the most significant inventions or copyrighted works. [FN56] In addition, an important aspect of the copyright and patent system's promotion of creativity lies in the way it ensures that ideas will eventually enter the public domain. Walt Disney, after all, drew on public- domain folk tales when he created such classics as Snow White and Cinderella. Presumably, future creators will draw on Disney's work once it enters the public domain. The same is true of pharmaceutical research, or any other field of technology in which cumulative invention is the rule. Such opportunities are frustrated by legislation that keeps creative or inventive works out of the public domain for years or decades beyond those needed to encourage innovation...

... beautifully encapsulate many of the problems that currently exist and are only getting worse.

One thing that bothers me, though; when something like this comes up, it really highlights the lack of a comments section on IP's site. Issues like this deserve discussion at the source, but that isn't really possible with his current set up (which is why I linked to the article itself instead of the IP entry... there's no reason not to). I realize that it's because the adoption of typical comments systems lwould be too difficult, but surely somebody could either modify or create a comment system to fit his needs?

Anyway, said unlinked entry notes that the article is older and shorter than some others, but it's certainly worth the read nonetheless, especially if you, like myself, aren't a big fan of the arguments used in the current IP debate.

Wow. While I normally stay away from religious discussion and religious questions (outside of a certain skepticism about blogger anti-Islamicism), James Cappozola's entry about Pope John Paul II is worthy simply as an example of how good a writer James can be, and how well a blog entry can be crafted.

I'd quote, but I'd feel like I'm spoiling it, so I'll just advise going over there and reading it yourselves. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere.

Stratfor.com is an organization whose work I used to read religiously a few years back, but I somewhat throttled back on my readership after they stopped sending out those convenient email updates and locked most of their content behind the walls of their pay site. It's too bad, though, because if I had kept up on reading the site I wouldn't have missedthis article that Josh Marshall cited today when discussing the possibility not just of a war with Iraq but that the decision in favor of war had already been made and was simply being kept "under wraps", like that Homeland Security bit was.

The article itself is actually a pretty coherent and concise summary of the different factors that are pointing away from an eventual invasion. Part of that includes the elements that would make prosecuting the war itself actually difficult- including the difficulty of actually prosecuting the war without local allies, the near-universal condemnation of the idea outside the United States itself, and the reality that "given its battlefield constraints, Washington could not be sure it could contain a war on Iraq within that country's borders or manage the war's aftermath."

More important than that, however, is the recognition that "Iraq is peripheral to its primary strategic concern: al Qaeda. And while the United States may have the firepower to defeat the Iraqi army, it needs intelligence as much as rifles to defeat al Qaeda. That intelligence comes from allies in the Middle East, and the United States cannot afford for it to dry up." This has been one of the more cogent criticisms of the entire enterprise- that invading Iraq may contain one possible peripheral threat at the expense of letting an acknowledged and very real opponent in the real war on terrorism go unchecked and unwatched. It was Al Qaeda that flew the jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, after all, not Saddam Hussein, and there's no doubt that those in the administration who aren't frantically trying to spin their way into the war on Iraq they've been calling for since Bush left are aware of that. (It's not like the United States could simply pressure middle eastern governments into complying, either, because the outside pressure from the United States would pale in comparison to the domestic pressure generated by compliance with the U.S. in the face of an Iraqi invasion.)

Actually, Stratfor seems to believe that Al Qaeda may make a move soon:

Aside from some small skirmishes in Afghanistan and a few thwarted solo efforts, al Qaeda has been inert since Sept. 11. With elections approaching and the market psychology uneasy in the United States, now would be an opportune time from its standpoint for an attack.

Moreover, al Qaeda has placed itself under pressure to demonstrate that it remains intact and effective, after a spokesman announced in June that the group would strike again soon. And as al Qaeda cannot afford the perception that it was crushed by the United States, Washington cannot afford to expend all its political capital on a war with Iraq only to be blindsided by an al Qaeda attack in the United States.

Disturbing, if true, but it definitely lends itself to their analysis:

While there may have been a logic behind the Iraq campaign, it failed when it came at the expense of the war on al Qaeda. The question is not whether Washington can back down from its Iraq policy. It must. The question is how can it manage the political retreat?

In order to answer this question (and show that the administration has asked it as well), they have a rundown of the signs that the administration itself may be moving away from war, and the difficulty that it faces in doing so. Besides the oft-quoted Scowfield and Kissinger objections and the renewed vigour of the hawk's perennial thorn-in-the-side, Colin Powell, there's the continued reluctance of the administration to actually admit that they've made a decision to invade. Yes, this could be a tactic to disarm and destabilize Saddam, as both Josh Marshall and Steven Den Beste have implied, but I don't think so- the kind of Machiavellian political mastery that this would require isn't something that I've seen demonstrated by this administration; if it were so adept, Homeland Security and that little economic session last week wouldn't have sunk like stones even in the remarkably friendly press environment that Bush currently enjoys. Besides, at this point, Saddam would be more surprised if the invasion didn't happen, and I have little doubt that he's prepared for the invasion to start fairly soon- certainly for the invasion to start in September or October.

Stratfor actually makes an excellent point about some political maneuvering that is quite likelier, though:

CNN's broadcast over the weekend of al Qaeda's video library -- showing chemical gas experiments and explosives-making -- is perfectly timed to help begin refocusing the American public. The democrats will have to think twice before adopting a pro-war stance as a campaign issue while republicans will find it easy to again rally around the anti-al Qaeda campaign.

This somewhat reminds me of the complaints that were often heard this spring about the magical disappearing Osama Bin Laden; regardless, Stratfor is right in that this sort of thing is an excellent way of reminding Americans that Iraq isn't the only target or even the greatest threat, and I agree with them that "a policy reversal should play well for domestic politics."

Where does this leave the blogosphere? It'll probably leave it in quite a disasterous state. Stratfor noted a few key ramifications of this:

-There may be some squabbling within the administration itself, as the unilateralists attempt to defend their positions against Powell and the resurgent coalitionists, but nothing too drastic will emerge....[i]t should not pose much of a problem for U.S. relations with its European allies either, as they will see this as a rare case of Washington knocked to its senses by reality.

One can only imagine how many keyboards will be pounded into submission under the weight of blogger anger.

Then again, some of us will feel a little better. I happen to agree with Stratfor that...

Al Qaeda's strategic goal was to pit the United States against all of Islam, in the process giving the Islamic world a common enemy against which to unite. Washington stumbled into that trap with its Iraq policy, with Arabs and Persians, Sunnis and Shiites uniting against the campaign and thwarting U.S. intentions"

...and I've been worried about whether the United States has been dancing to Osama's tune ever since the Afghani war ended and the administration started casting about for the next opponent. Stratfor is correct in their estimation of the likelihood of diplomatic and strategic difficulties in the region, but I believe that it's far better than the alternative.

Then again, Stratfor might be wrong, but they usually don't screw up that badly, and they'll have put a lot of thought and work into this analysis. It certainly jibes with what I'm seeing, and I've been somewhat of a pessimist about this situation for a while. Yes, it might be disinformation, but I honestly doubt it.

Just because everybody else linked to this, and because it really is worth highlighting in the (unlikely) case that somebody actually uses TownHall as some sort of respectable source:

Today in the United States white people have no political representation. Whites have to struggle in the courts against government opposition to claim any resemblance to equal rights. Explicit government policies have made whites second class citizens. Whites are a dispossessed majority in their own country.

Why did the white majority allow themselves to be stripped of the equal protection clause of the Constitution? Why do whites remain loyal to the political parties that took away their rights?

What is the future for whites in a political system where both political parties pander to third world immigrants and support racial privileges for minorities? Having lost equal protection of law, what will whites lose next?

Tapped mentioned that "that sound you heard was tapped's jaw hitting the floor". Sadly, however, I remain unsurprised. The only surprise for me was that the article didn't use the phrase "uppity negroes". Maybe next time.

(Oh, and in case anybody was waiting for a substantive critique, his foundation argument- that discrimination can only exist through "purposeful action"- is utter bunk. Discrimination can and does exist unknowingly and unwittingly, as any number of sociological and psychological experts and studies have said in the past. Only by glomming onto the romantic but utterly nonsensical notion that humans don't do anything unconsciously can such a statement be justified. Sadly, all too many people think that notion happens to be true.)

Well, so much for Paul Krugman leaving Bush alone. With an assist from Blogdom's own Josh Marshall, Krugman looks at what is colloquially called "being Bushed"... a term usually used to describe the phenomenon of the President having a nice photo op with the representatives of some group of some sort, and then that group's furious discovery that away from the cameras the administration has screwed them.

The weird thing is that some of these decisions are politically insane. Take a look at this, for example:

Take George W. Bush's decision last week to demonstrate his resolve by blocking $5.1 billion in homeland security spending. This turned out to be a major gaffe, because the rejected bill allocated money both to improve veterans' health care and to provide firefighters with new equipment, including communication systems that could have saved lives on Sept. 11. Recalling those scenes at ground zero that did so much to raise Mr. Bush's poll numbers, the president of the International Association of Firefighters warned, "Don't lionize our fallen brothers in one breath, then stab us in the back."

or this:

After [the trapped coal miners'] rescue, Mr. Bush made a point of congratulating them in person — and Michael Novak, writing in National Review Online, declared Somerset, Pa., the "conservative capital of the world."

But Mr. Novak didn't mention the crucial assistance provided by the federal government's Mine Safety and Health Administration. That would have raised some awkward questions: although the Bush administration's energy plans call for major increases in coal mining, its spending plans cut funds for mine safety. More conservative budget guidance.

Krugman makes some good points about Bush's fake "populism", and the pseudo-populism that has been employed by the right for decades. What's strange, though, is that Paul needs to make it at all- this sort of deception and doubletalk should be front-and-center for most Bush critics, especially on motherhood issues like firefighters. Admittedly being a Bush critic is a target-rich environment, but why should Paul Krugman the economics prof even need to point something like this out, and why should he need to cite a blogger (even one as well-known and respected as Josh Marshall) for a story on the administration's screwing of veterans, when it's such an obvious "gimme" to his critics and to the press in general? Especially considering, as Paul noted, the vigor and ruthlessness with which the press corps attacked Al Gore for what was really a totally innocuous Op-Ed column?

Paul has become one of the premier Bush critics on the national stage, and that's all well and good- but he should be one of many, and it's disturbing to see the extent to which he stands alone. If there is a "liberal bias" in the media, its the single greatest demonstration of incompetence that I've yet seen.

David Yaseen cracks wise about TransProg.

Of course! It was the EU that was behind the protests in Genoa. Crafty devils, setting up against their own police forces; we're going to need a lot of elbow grease to rid the world of scum that evil.

That whole bit about antiglobalization protestors being displaced workers and people disgusted at the standard of living of the third world folks who work at our corporations' factories, man, we almost got suckered into falling for it.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: and people wondered why I can't take it seriously.

While quite a few articles and commentators have gone to no small lengths to point out that the United States isn't doing a bang-up job of rebuilding Afghanistan, one of the guest editorials in today's Globe and Mail brings up the aftermath of an oft-forgotten conflict nowadays: the war in Yugoslavia.

According to this article, the situation isn't pretty:

Washington and its allies have not completely turned their backs on the Balkans, but it is fair to say they have lost a great deal of their zeal for rebuilding.

In 1999, just after NATO forces moved into Kosovo, $1.5-billion (U.S.) was pledged for reconstruction. In 2001, that figure fell to $593-million. Considering that a great deal of this aid goes to maintaining the mission's personnel, it is an open question of how much is actually trickling down to the people of Kosovo.

Half of the province's population lives in poverty. Fear still reigns: Serbs cannot even go to church without the protection of NATO troops. The province was worse off under Belgrade's rule, but that is hardly a ringing endorsement for the effectiveness of nation-building in Kosovo.

The situation in Yugoslavia proper is perhaps even more dire. After the handover of Mr. Milosevic to the United Nations war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Washington and its allies pledged $1.28-billion to help the country's war-ravaged economy. While this aid was certainly welcome, Yugoslavia lost $29.4-billion in output because of the NATO bombing. Rebuilding has been slow as the country struggles with inflation and debt repayments.

A personal example: My grandmother lives two blocks away from the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The windows of her apartment were shattered when NATO bombs accidently hit the embassy. She spent two weeks in a bomb shelter but did not move back in until well after the Kosovo campaign because her apartment was in a part of Belgrade that could be accessed only by bridge, and the bridges had all been knocked down. Since that time, she has complained of breathing problems. No one -- not NATO, the new Yugoslav government or any aid organization -- offered to pay for the repairs to her home. My family was able to help; many Yugoslavs are not so fortunate.

Of course, nobody but the most ardent partisan would blame Bush for this, and I don't plan to do so. It illustrates an important point, though: any process of rebuilding in the middle east is going to require time, money, personnel and perhaps some sacrifice on the part of Americans. The rewards of doing so are great, but the dangers of doing so badly are even greater. Whether invasion of Iraq is in the cards or not, the new doctrine of "regime change" may remain, and as long as it does then it's important to remember that real change is the product of a lot of hard and (often) thankless work- not a quick, flashy bombing campaign. The difficult job will be after the invasion, not during it.

Jim Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review has been urging people to donate to the Wellstone campaign or ask people to donate if they can. As I consider it incredibly important that all three branches of the government not go fully Republican, especially right now, I'm inclined to agree with him. I can't donate personally, but I implore those readers who identify with the liberal cause, with liberalism in the United States, or the Democrats specifically to give it a long thought. Heck, considering Wellstone's left cred (that Jim has pointed out in no small detail), he's about the best choice for leftists in the state too. Even if its a small amount, it might help.

In any case, Jim said that the deadline is August 21, so if you're going to donate, do so soon. And if you need reasons, go over to Jim's site; he'll give you metric assloads. (Heck, go anyway- I link him for a reason.)

Thanks for your time.

Edit: bloody spelling errors.

Well, this is new. In response to the (valid) questions about whether invading Iraq would dangerously tie down the U.S. military and whether or not the United States truly has the ability to go it alone, Stanley Kurtz has come up with an innovative solution:

Reinstate the Draft.

The first words that come to mind are, of course, "are you daft"? Careful control of the media aside, one of the biggest differences that seperate the wars following Vietnam from those that preceded them was an all-volunteer military- that way the United States avoids the embarrassing spectacle of forcing teenagers and young adults to fight against their will in countries they've never heard of against a cause that they're not particularly unsympathetic towards. All those body bags coming home from Vietnam tugged on the heartstrings precisely because the vast majority of them had absolutely no choice, and because pretty much everybody knew that compulsory service was only for those without parental resources to keep them out of Vietnam and either in college or in the National Guard. (Hi, Dubya!)

Ending the draft was also the first step towards turning the current military into a professional one- into the "elite force" that the advertisements on TV are constantly hyping and which that new "America's Army" video game is supposed to be simulating. I was under the impression that the military had been turning people away before the attacks on 9/11, so why reinstate the draft?

Why indeed? Well, it comes back to the question of unilateralism vs. multilateralism. See, the U.S. military does have a source of other manpower- the militaries of its allies. That's the whole reason you start an alliance in the first place- so that you can rely on the other guy to help you out if necessary. One for all, all for one- collective security. For Afghanistan, it had that kind of support, which is why the U.S. had the luxury of turning away most of its allies as unnecessary, and why most of the civilized world has said that they're more than willing to help against Al Qaeda (except in cases where it would be dangerous to the regime itself, which is valid- a failed state is a terrorist's paradise.) The United States suffers from a embarrassing wealth of options when it comes to fighting the war on terrorism. Iraq, though...

Well, let's be honest- the reason why the United States is having so much trouble generating internal support for the war on Iraq is because it's having so much trouble generating external support. The arguments and reasons against it are similar, but there's an important difference- Bush can do it without internal support without that much difficulty, but fighting a war without allies in a faraway land and maintaining readiness for some other conflict is difficult at best (which is part of the reason for that "two wars" doctrine). The United States could invade and then occupy Iraq, but that would take enough time and manpower that it would be in serious trouble were some other conflict to start with a real power (like, say, China). If the United States could count on the support of its allies like it could with Afghanistan, then it wouldn't be an issue, but as it is, the U.S. would need to go it alone. Which means more soldiers, much faster. Which means a draft. Which means... well, I think you already know what that means.

It's funny.. if Stanley Kurtz weren't hell bent on arguing to a conclusion, he'd be this close to arguing against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As it is, though, he's got to go to the unpopular extent of arguing for a draft. Gotta say one thing- that'd be a gift to the Democrats. Pity that they'd then be tied down in a Nixonian war they didn't want. Maybe that's a gift they'd be better off without.

Edit: Proper word substituted for entirely the wrong one, and that angular bracket is gone.

There's some excellent work here on the left's relative timidity by Michael Tomasky in the American Prospect. I might comment more later, but for right now I'll just highlight this one important paragraph:

For the better part of two decades now, Democrats have operated according to so timorous a model of partisanship that they no longer know how to fight. They know how to argue policy. They do that quite well, and indeed they often win those arguments, if for no other reason than that so many of the policies Republicans support harken back (if I may) to the Gilded Age. But when it comes to hardball partisan politics, they've been fighting a raging fire with a garden hose. They've been afraid, even petrified, of arguing politics, of stepping outside the comparatively safe zone of policy and assertively debating the core principles that are the reason many of them enter the civic sphere to begin with. Arguing politics means challenging not only the other side's positions but the very moral and cultural underpinnings of those positions. It means using emotional arguments to link the opposition to a set of values alien to this country's best traditions. It means finding the symbolic representations of the enemy's masked agendas and exposing them. It means not only attacking the other side but defending one's own side (and not with statistics, but with moral arguments advanced with conviction). And, finally, it means doing all this on a permanent basis, day after day, with lots of warm bodies standing next to one another, saying the same thing over and over, until the media has to cover it. But all these are things the Democrats no longer know how to do.

Word, dawg.

Well, this should explode a few heads: Paul Krugman has delivered a column that has absolutely nothing to do with the Bush administration. Not that it's some sort of Bush puff piece- it just doesn't mention him in the slightest. Instead, it raises the question of whether the United States might end up in a Japanese-style funk, thanks to the combination of the burst stock bubble, the corporate governance problems, poor long-term budget prospects and the possibility of a real estate bubble bursting. He acknowledges that there has been some small growth, but makes the point that even in Japan that's been the case for a while. The issue is the gap between what a country does produce and what it can produce, which is a huge gap in the land of the rising sun and a growing one in the U.S.

Needless to say, this is worrisome as hell if true. Japan's economy is one of the bigger economic problems out there right now, but it isn't the "buyer of last resort" by any means. The United States is, and any such long-term economic malaise would affect the entire planet. (Unless, of course, somebody else takes up the slack. Maybe Europe is due for a comeback?)

Max make some good points about the concept of equality of opportunity and equality of results... not on some sort of anti-meritocratic level, but on the basis of one's identity (black, white, male, female, jewish, muslim, croatian, turkish, whatever).

Aside from the whole SDB flap, it's interesting material in its own right, and worth reading.

I think half the left-wingers in the "blogosphere" have commented on this story, and it's definitely an interesting story. The idea that Republicans are actually breaking ranks says a lot not just about the war situation as it currently exists, but about how divided Washington probably is on this issue, and not necessarily along partisan lines. What interests me the most, though, is what isn't being said. Check out what Kissinger actually said (according to the NYTimes):

In an opinion article published on Monday in The Washington Post, Mr. Kissinger made a long and complex argument about the international complications of any military campaign, writing that American policy "will be judged by how the aftermath of the military operation is handled politically," a statement that seems to play well with the State Department's strategy.

"Military intervention should be attempted only if we are willing to sustain such an effort for however long it is needed," he added. Far from ruling out military intervention, Mr. Kissinger said the challenge was to build a careful case that the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction calls for creation of a new international security framework in which pre-emptive action may sometimes be justified.

This seems to be a common thread- that there will be action against Iraq, but that it doesn't need to happen right now. It makes sense, and has always been the biggest practical argument against invasion of Iraq- even if it needs to be done, why do it right now? The political argument that Rove would be pursuing is obvious- Bush would gain the maximum political leverage from a war started fairly soon before the November elections- far away enough that wartime patriotism would be allowed to grow, but soon enough that the perils of occupation (if any) wouldn't sour the public towards the enterprise and cast about looking for someone to blame. I think that's why most people are saying somewhere between late September and early November. The problem, of course, is that everybody else knows this as well, and while it may not be useful as an campaigning tool for the Democrats, tales of wagged dogs will circulate throughout the world and the Bush administration will have almost guaranteed a much more hostile foreign policy landscape, making their job much trickier than it already is.

I think that some Republicans are realizing this- that even if they honestly believe that invasion should happen in the fall, everyone else will assume it's political, and it'll lead to hassles that are simply best avoided. That would imply that the logical time would not be this fall but next spring. Unless, of course, they're worried that support for the strike among the public will drop, but if the arguments in favor of invasion are that strong, that shouldn't matter, should it? Heck, even if it does drop, the election just ended, and they've got a year and a half before Bush and Co. face the electorate again. Assuming that the whole thing goes off as planned, that's more than ample time.

If it doesn't, of course, then no amount of buffer time will help.

I realize that this is going almost absurdly meta, but reading Terminus write this:

Whoo-boy! Demosthenes from Shadow of the Hegemon gave me a link today, along with some kind words, and my traffic has upped considerably. Thanks for that. Welcome to all of the new faces (not that I can see your faces, obviously, but... uh... nevermind), and I hope you find something of interest. Please feel free to comment or email...

...gives me a very, well, weird feeling. Not positive, not negative, just strange. Don't get me wrong; Terminus is a great poster and has a good blog (which, unlike mine, wouldn't irritate Tapped), but it's almost unnerving to think that a link from my humble site could seriously affect somebody else's traffic. Not something that Usenet or Webboards really prepares you for.

I think I'm starting to grok Instapundit.

Oh well, I'm sure it'll blow over, and soon I'll return to my accustomed, erm, anonymity.

(heh.)

Edit: There's a really interesting discussion of all this going on in Atrios' comments section, including a good examination of the problem of imposing arbitrary equivalence when discussing the relative sins of the left and right.

Spinsanity, a site that normally can be relied on for useful and coherent analysis of the media, is host to what appears to be a hatchet job by Brendan Nyhan aimed at MediaWhoresOnline. Atrios' reaction is "who cares what they think?" but mine goes a little deeper than that.

In essense, Nyhan is complaining that MWO's tactics are "polluting the public discourse"; that their attacks are overstated and overly inflammatory. Now, inflammatory they are, there's no doubt of that; but by and large, a lot of the comments they've made and insights they've written are either on the money or close enough so as to make little difference. Nyhan doesn't seem to quite understand MWO either- he either doesn't acknowledge or hasn't realized that the reason that MWO uses the word "whore" in the first place is that they're sucking up to republican elites in order to gain fame and fortune, and sacrifice their journalistic integrity to do it. They're selling themselves out- hence, "whores". While distasteful, it's an accurate representation. MWO is also supposed to be direct counterpart to all those "media research" groups on the right that aim invective at the so-called "liberal bias"; MWO's an almost direct reaction to that claim, and proof that the operative phrase here isn't "workers of the world, unite" but "show me the money". (There are others, such as FAIR, but MWO takes the "flaming invective" role that FAIR largely eschews.)

The biggest problem, though, is this notion that any low blows on the part of the left are "poisoning the discourse", as Brenden seems to think. Let's be honest- it's going to happen anyway, and to ignore that and pretend that those that are polite and respectful always triumph over mudslingers is to refight the Dukakis campaign and ensure Republican domination of American politics (and right-wing domination of the public discourse). Inflammatory rhetoric serves a valuable role because it provides something that non-inflammatory writers can set themselves against- even if they aren't really political moderates, they appear so, and therefore gain credibility.

That's why the right doesn't care whether or not Rush is accurate or not, or how many people catch him on his mistakes- he serves a vital role simply by existing. MWO, of course, isn't exactly the same (they don't get caught out in mounds of lies, for one), but what's wrong with a firebrand, especially if what he (or she) is saying is substantially true? Brenden never really answers this, instead pulling out the tired "we're above this" argument that only guarantees political irrelevance.

Also, the citation used here isn't very strong. If there were some sort of patterns being brought to light here then it would be a much more compelling article, but by and large it's just a few anecdotes from different MWO entries used to attack the site's work as a whole. Often they are taken out of context, but even if they aren't, they aren't very persuasive- they might be simply the most extreme examples of inflammatory rhetoric on a generally benign site, picked and chosen to support Brenden's claim. If this were a response only to one article then that might be different, but if you're trying to prove systemic errors, then one needs systemic proof.

I like Spinsanity and think that it's a good site, but I think that they missed the mark here. Inflammatory rhetoric is a part of politics that goes back much farther than modern western civilization, and to shut one's eyes to it is a guarantee of irrelevance. It may not be pretty, but it's true.

Those who expect a long response to Den Beste's latest entry will be sadly disappointed. I only need two words:

Strawmen Aplenty.

Nothing else really needs to be said.

Edit: Ok, I'll say six more words and quote a few to go with it:

Max tore Steven a new orifice.

I have to admit the ignorance reflected in this post is too much for my limited energies. The multiplication of slurred generalizations of groups and the incapacity to replicate progressive messages as prelude to honest critique is mind-boggling. I commend its evisceration to all my friends listed at right.

Heh.

I just found an interesting counterpart to the "why authors are sometimes pseudonymous" and "why leftists are sometimes pseudonymous" bits in a blog entry by Dominion, aka James McLaughlin. The article deals with several points that have already been common bones of contention (like whether or not a "real name" grants one any more credibility and situations where pseudonymity or anonymity aren't really an option), but brings up two points that are worthy of highlighting.

First, he notes:

most of us old timers are pseudonymous because back in the day it was considered none to wise to allow personal information of any sort to escape over the internet. See most of us came from the land of the Bulletin Board System (BBS). A BBS was sort of like a combination of usenet (people would post in what were known as SIGS or Special Interest Groups) they would play what were called door games (people would log, make a series of moves that day, then observe the actions and reactions of the other players the next day) and sometimes chat. They were usually local, set up on someone's personal PC. Since they were local, it was highly advised that you did not share personal information over the system. We used what were called "nyms" or "handles" instead of our real names. A lot of that suspicion leaked over when we moved to the internet, the worldwide implications not really striking us yet. I came up with the nym Dominion back in the day I was posting to WWIVNet and it has stuck with me though thick and thin.

It's been rather a long time since the BBS days, but the admonishment to keep personal information off the network, any network, stuck and was one of the big reasons why the cypherpunks gained relative cachet and importance throughout most of the last decade. I've been using this handle (and a few others) since the BBS days, and I remember boards that told you under no uncertain terms to keep personal information to yourself, and practically nobody used their real names on Fidonet.

Second is perhaps the best and most chilling example of how the Internet is here:

Nor should anyone discount the actual danger of people knowing who you are. Take, for example, Grady Ward and Dennis Erlich. Dennis Erlich was a high official in the Church of Scientology. Grady was merely a critic. Both of them had their doors busted down by cops, had their computers confiscated, had the peace of their life shattered, had lawsuits brought against them, supposedly for posting the Church's Stupid Sekret Skripture, but really for the crime of daring to criticize the Church.

For those who don't know, the usenet group alt.religion.scientology was largely populated by fierce critics of the Church of Scientology, and the Church wasn't happy about it in the slightest. (They don't, as a rule, like criticism much.) Past critics of the Church have gone through hell as the Church does whatever is within its power to discredit, embarrass, and intimidate those who set themselves in opposition to it, and for a while there was no greater opposition to the Church than the denizens of that newsgroup. It was through anonymous postings on that newsgroup that people found out about some of the odder, science-fictionesque material that forms the basis of high-level Scientology, and it was through the attempt to track down the anonymous posters of these materials that the Church managed to bring down "anon.penet.fi"... the biggest anonymous email remailer in the world back then.

To this day the newsgroup remains a battleground between the Church's detractors and supporters, and the only reason it remains so is because the Church can't take the battle to "IRL".

In any case, it's a good entry- I highly recommend it.

While I'm talking about intersting blogs, one perennial comment section mainstay on several sites, Terminus, has a blog that I hadn't read until now, and it's definitely worth the visit.

While I'm giving props to Jaquandor, I'll add a little extra for a very well-written article about the whole pseudonym issue, including a really compelling bit about the increasing tendency of authors to use pen names in order to get around the increasingly irritating "blockbusterization" of books, where "new" authors can get more books on shelves than established authors of only moderate early success.

You will excuse my profanity here...

MAD FUCKING PROPS go out to Jaquandor of Byzantium Shores for his email telling me clearly and effortlessly how to fix my template so that the main body is wider.

(Yeah, it was a little thing, but it's been bugging me ever since the Den Beste flap.)

Thanks a lot, Jaquandor, I truly appreciate it.

Max savages Instapundit on the statehood issue. Again, I personally see it as fairly simple; why should any part of the United States not be represented in its own government? This arrangement doesn't exist in any other first world countries that I know of; to even suggest it would be unthinkable.

Whether there's a "captive industry", or whether there "isn't enough people" or whether it's "too small" is utterly beside the point. Citizens are getting screwed out of their civil rights, and that ain't what the U.S. is supposed to be about.

Period.

Hoo boy. Apparently, the Cato institute is actually trying to resurrect monetarism. Not "keep inflation down" monetarism, but "let's get rid of the Federal Reserve and set an explicit inflation rate" monetarism.

Now, I'm not exactly an economist, but isn't this the kind of thing that was totally discredited by its complete failure in Britain? The kind of thing that real economists use as the butt of cheap jokes? What kind of ivory tower do you have to live in to think that some random corporation is going to do a better job of managing the money supply than a non-profit totally independent body like the Federal Reserve, especially nowadays? Goofy arguments aside (and I love how he chose his statistical windows to over-emphasize the effects of floating the dollar- nice touch), it's just silly on its face.

And people wonder why I can't take anything written by Cato seriously.

(Courtesy of Jason McCullough, who also thought this guy was huffing airplane glue.)

Ok, I'm staying out of the battle between Instapundit and Max Sawicky (although the attacks on the latter's credibility are astonishing- he's written enough quality economic work from a leftist perspective on that blog to guarantee at least some props), but I've gotta say that this:

I'm pro-choice, which means that, you know, I think it should be, well, a choice. A lot of people in DC say that the District is essentially a colony. Well, if so I think it's a colony that's not ready for self-government. It certainly wasn't when I lived there, and there's no sign that it's gotten better.

Provoked a simple Jon Stewartesque response.

"Whuuuuuuuh"?

Yes, that's right. Colonies don't deserve the right to self-government. Never have. Certainly that concept is the bedrock of the American system- it might as well be a constitutional amendment that "only those that will be considered suitable shall enjoy the control over their own destiny". Frankly, the DC thing has always baffled me as so unbelievably stupid that it beggars belief, but it's even more amazing that, somehow, Instapundit has unmasked himself as an oldschool Tory-esque conservative!

Weird.

Doug Turnball has taken my idea of "satisficing" (which was perhaps at the heart of this recent conflict, as it formed the basis of my initial defense against Steven Den Beste's critique) and has explained how it relates to the scientific method beautifully. He discusses the apparent "perversity" of scientists attempting to disprove hypotheses instead of proving them, how often in science there are few enough hypotheses that proof of one hypothesis can serve to disprove others (which is rarely the case in analysis; there's always a metric assload of things a human being or collection of them can do, whereas particles are usually somewhat more predictable), and why the problem of satisficing doesn't necessarily lead to some sort of PoMo hell where nothing is ever remotely provable- a topic that I hadn't touched on.

I've heard variations on it before, but I really like his explanation of what science actually is:

Science, by its own admission, is not an attempt to arrive at Truth. It’s an attempt to arrive at a valid explanation which has predictive power. That is, I want to come up with a theory that explains existing data and will allow me to predict the result of experiments in the future. A scientific theory only gains acceptance if it works, in this sense. Any alternative hypothesis which equally fit the data is, by definition, equivalent to the accepted theory. They produce the same predictions, and hence are interchangeable. So even if there were infinite alternate hypotheses, they’d all be equally good explanations of the world, rather than being equally bad.

That latter bit about infinite possible hypotheses is, sadly, not really something that you can get away with in analysis- after all, in the end people only do one thing at a time. It's still a useful response to the postmodern critique, though, because it's inherently positive- if you have a hypothesis that hasn't been disproven, then it's just as good as any other and you're entitled to it. (At least until it is disproven.)

In any case, I enjoy "philosophy of science" stuff, and Doug's post is an excellent example of science-positive writing in that field.

Nathan Newman is dealing with an interesting and somewhat surprising topic: the connection of the new movie "XXX", and terrorism. It largely deals with the difference between those who use violence as a means (like, say, Saddam Hussein) and those who look at it as an end in itself (like Osama bin Laden and the terrorists in the movie.) Nathan makes several points about the difference between the former group and the latter group and why it's a mistake to try to lump them together, but what really grabbed me was this early paragraph:

The setup is: an anarchist who could have come from the streets of Seattle-- complete with his own webcast of destroying rich folks' stuff-- collides with military-intelligence police state to thrawt terrorist destruction of the world. This could play as straight cooptation, but the hero Xander Cage probably expresses a lot of the ambivalance of global protesters dealing with enemies like Bin Laden. Quotes Cage in one scene to his NSA handler- "Before you send someone to save the world, maybe you should make sure they like it the way it is."

I've often wondered how exactly the protest movement is going to adapt to the new situation on the ground, and have been wondering since 9/11. At the moment there seems to be a split between those whose criticism of the West leads them to argue that the terrorists might have a point (although that grows weaker and weaker, in my opinion) and those who were shocked out of their movement by the brutality of the attack and who have supported the war against terrorism (which also seems to grow weaker.)

The problem is that neither of these things really had that much to do with the political economic critique at the time, whose validity stands or falls on its own, outside of any conflict between secularism and fundamentalistism. Their arguments against trade bodies, trade policy, rising inequality et al retain whatever relevance they had before the attack to this day, and it's pretty obvious that neither the public nor the protestors are going to buy the sort of "we're so prosperous it doesn't matter" arguments that were usually levelled against them previous to the attack, or the "this isn't the right time" arguments levelled shortly after. Sooner or later, it's likely that the protest movement will reconstitute itself, either because the war has become a background element in most people's lives (like the war on drugs) or because the war is basically won, and the rest is the geopolitical equivalent of a mop-up exercise.

The weird thing is that this may mean that western states might end up fighting a war on two fronts. The first is the one that everybody acknowledges and understands- the war between theocracy and secular government. Modern western governments are well equipped to deal with it, and enjoy wide support. The second front, however, is the battle of ideas between western governments and elites and the protest movement. Up until recently the former group had the advantage of ironclad support from most economists, but Paul Krugman's surprising questioning of the "washington consensus" in the national media and quite a few of Brad DeLong's blog entries have shaken that economic consensus. It's especially surprising considering that a lot of Krugman's popular economic work was built around passionate defenses of free trade and economic fundamentals in the face of "strategic trade" and protectionism- if sustained, it's a huge about-face. Such a high-profile change of heart could only bolster critiques of international regimes and bodies, were they to take advantage of it.

And there's the question.... will they take advantage of it? Well, maybe not immediately; too much revolves around the question of whether war will happen in Iraq for activists to get people interested in leftist economic critiques, and the left vs. right division is too caught up in the war. Once Iraq has been decided one way or the other, though, then it's quite possible that the high-profile aspect of the "war on terrorism" will be over and barring new attacks people will start returning to normal issues. Once that happens, I think the protest movement will reemerge, and it'll be a lot harder to explain away than it was during the 90's.

Comments sections are weird things. I write an entry about Iraq, and a discussion of international relations breaks out. Now that I've written an entry about international relations (prompted by a response to that first entry), a discussion of whether or not common law exists in the United States has broken out, largely prompted by Steven Den Beste's (apparent) assertion that common law has no place in the American judiciary. I've stayed out of it, but it's interesting nonetheless.

(And rereading that original post has made me wonder... where can one get a search engine for a plane-jane blogger blog? It'd be a nice addition for the site, but a google search turned up precious little.)

Feh. It seems like every time I turn around, the archive disappears again. Oh well, I'll try republishing a few times and hope it takes.

Edit: Bingo!

Sheesh... and I thought the whole thing was over. apparently not. then again, this is a much more substantial comment, and according to Steven "we're all friends now". So I'll trust him. (Important concept, that, but I'll get to that later.)

First, Stephen quoted a somewhat offhanded response in my own comments section as an encapsulation of my beliefs for International Relations and International Law. He did so because he said that I provided no links or citations to show what exactly I think of the whole business. Fair enough. So, before we begin, and so that anybody who wishes can figure out exactly what the hell I'm referring to when I say "I've addressed that", here are the permalinks in question. In reverse chronological order:

This entry is about the idea of agreements between sovereign states, the misperception that the world is a "jungle", that the United States as a member of the world community has certain responsibilities to live up to, and to Steven's theories in general.

This entry is one in a series of posts that I wrote in response to Robert Musil, germane to this discussion because it discusses sovereignty and the U.N.

This entry is largely about sovereignty and the sort of agreements that can be (and are) made between sovereign nations, the reason why invasion is "against the rules", and how power isn't enough; not nowadays.

This entry is about the question of whether American unilateralism is ever justified, even though it would call down the wrath of the international community. I'd say "sometimes, but not as often as one would think."

This entry is about Steven's arguments that American political culture is somehow superior to others- germane because it forms the basis for his belief that the United States should "go it alone".

This entry is about whether Europe will stop talking and start arming if it looks like talking is pointless. I think it'll happen, but some in the comments section disagreed. I talked about the possibility of Europe itself becoming a sovereign state, but I don't have that link here.

This entry is about the possible repercussions of American unilateralism in terms of other nations paying attention to it and making agreements with it.

This entry is about the question of sovereignty and legitimacy- why the United States pays so much attention to sovereignty, was (I believe) my first post on the Treaty of Westphalia, and the concept that "the affairs of a state remain their own unless and until they harm another state".

This entry also deals with the question of sovereignty, and cites a situation where collective security would trump imperial.

This entry is about sovereignty outside of the borders of the United States.

This entry is about the reprecussions of invading Iraq, and the creation of the "war of all against all".

And finally, This isn't mine, but Yuval Rubenstein's insights on the subject that Geoff Hill was responding to when Steven linked to him. Geoff's response to Yuval was pretty weak, in my opinion- it's surprising that Steven linked to it. Yuval made the point that international laws are conventions between countries, and the practical reality that states do tend to observe international law implies that they do have some force. Geoff complained about there being "no controlling authority", but in his own quotation of Webster calls that aspect "implied", not required. Besides, quibbling over the definition of the word "law" is pretty poor form in the first place; it's possible that there has simply been an implied redefinition of the word that hasn't been picked up by lexicographers yet.

This is the comments thread for that entry, where Yuval responds quickly and efficiently to Geoff Hill's critique. Zizka's insights on the treaty of Westphalia were also really good- he noted:

"After 1648 it was agreed that no ruler would try to forcibly impose his religion and the peoples of any other ruler. It was a peace of exhaustion, but it worked, and the religious wars were ended. After that time a body of international law developed which often worked. The fact that it often broke down too does not mean that it was nothing.

With an international consensus, belligerents were policed partly by their difficulty in getting allies when they were flouting international law. There was no overriding enforcer, but there was enforcement."

Word, dawg.

I've been told that "Brevity is the soul of wit" quite a few times in response to my fairly long responses to Den Beste's articles. Part of that is due to the simple volume of the text to be responded to (he's the only guy I know who arguably writes longer posts than I do), and partially because sometimes simple arguments require complex rebuttals. This case may be no different, but I'll try to keep it shorter in the future (it's not usually that necessary). If it's a real problem, most of what I'm saying here I've said before (which is no surprise, as Den Beste isn't arguing anything new here, either), so going over those archival links will probably eliminate the need to read the rest of this entry. With any luck, those links will actually work; at the very least they should get you to the archives links in question, and if they don't I'll see about putting dates on them to make manual navigation a little bit easier. By all means, read them if you wish, but don't feel compelled if you don't, and if they contradict in places, all I can say in my defense is that "I am large, I contain multitudes."

Heh.

Anyway, Steven has taken great pains to argue that, first, "there's no such thing as international law"; and second that those who attempt to define it as a short-form description of the body of international agreements, treaties, bodies and norms are trying to imply that there is controlling legal authority in order to check the power of the United States. On the first part, he has a point- international law isn't like the laws that states impose on their subjects/citizens, which is why I tend to use the somewhat more accurate term "International System". Still, the second assertion answers the questions raised by the first, and therefore is the more important of the two. On this, Steven merely asserted that this is so, without any shred of proof or logical justification- it was merely an ad hominem writ large. As he didn't give any reason why we should believe it except our good natures, I will still accept that as a definition for the informal concept of "international law". I know that's how I use it, so feel free to simply think of that definition when I say it. I'm not implying that it has the force of law in a sovereign nation, nor would I. (For a more comprehensive critique of this idea, go to Yuval's link above, and ignore Steven's citation of Hill- it was a weak response to a much stronger piece whose comments section annihilates the argument in question.)

One of the key concepts here is that of "Collective Security". What is that, exactly? Well, anybody remember the Musketeers? "One for all and all for one?" That's what it basically comes down to- it's kind of an alliance, but nowadays it's on a massive, massive scale between most of the countries on the planet. The U.N. is based on this idea; it's built on an agreement between all the states involved that they will abide by the rules implicit in U.N. membership (set out by the charter) and that they will act as a whole against those that decide to break those rules; usually through some sort of condemnation (through the general assembly), but sometimes by the authorization of direct action (through the Security Council). In many respects its a tradeoff- a member of the U.N. has their freedom to act limited, but does so with the knowledge that the actions of others will be limited as well.

Steven asks why the U.N. Security Council should be allowed to act "as a jury", and implies that there's no way that any member of the security council could decide impartially on any real conflict (as their interests get in the way), and could never therefore authorize military action. The latter assertion is disproven by the mere existence of the Gulf War, which was fully approved by the United Nations Security Council- and in the Security Council's authorizations of interventions in many other conflicts around the globe. The problem, though, is that Steven is putting carts before horses. The Security Council isn't quite a jury per se, nor is it a government or agent of government; it's merely a way of the entire collective entity that is the "United Nations" to decide whether or not somebody broke the security agreements that are at the heart of the idea of the U.N., or whether some sort of outside party (a non-member, a non-recognized state, or what have you) is a threat to a member of the United Nations. The key word is "security"; the chief goal of the council is to ensure the security (in other words, safety) of its members, and of the world in general. It can do so because it is the representative of "the collective"... no one nation can stand up against the rest of the planet.

Or can they?

See, Steven said that the whole point of it was to defend the weak against the strong. Indeed, that's absolutely true, and the entire basis of collective security. In some respects, it's a logical extension of the old "Balance of Power", where great powers would ally themselves to prevent any one power from becoming too strong and collectively agreed not to destroy or conquer each other, at least to the point that the losing power couldn't recover. The question that he asks is (to paraphrase) "why should the strong (in this case, the United States) care, if they have no reason to fear the United Nations?" Being an American, he doesn't see why the United States should bother; wouldn't they be better off going alone? It's an argument I hear a lot, and if the only part of the international system that existed were the United Nations, and were the United Nations only about collective security, then there might be a point there.

There is a lot more to the international system, though, and a lot more to the United Nations. The international system isn't just one, or a few, or a hundred agreements, it's millions and millions of them, embodied in treaties, international bodies (like the WTO or U.N.), agreements, and a bazillion informal norms and agreements. Steven called these "a garbage bin" that can justify anything, but by definition an norm can't be appealed to unless it really is some sort of informal standard. In any case, norms are kind of like legitimacy- they exist because people consciously or unconsciously agree that they exist. All of these agreements are based on the idea that "if you help me, I'll help you"... an iterated prisoner's dilemma, where most of the players involved have agreed not to turn over the evidence because they all know they'll be better off in the long run. Yuval noted that violations of international law were pretty rare, but didn't explain why, although the answer is simple.

See, the whole thing is built on trust- you have to be able to trust the other guy, and he has to be able to trust you.If you squeal during a prisoner's dilemma, they won't trust you not to squeal again. By breaking the agreement, you become a "free rider"; someone who is trying to gain the benefits of an agreement without having to deal with the consequences. By extension, all those who still abide by the deal are technically referred to as "suckers" (heh)- they're those who endure the consequences of an agreement without enjoying any of the benefits. Nobody ever wants to be a sucker.

There are two kinds of international agreements (formal and informal) and are two different reactions to one party breaking them. If you break a formal agreement, you get widespread condemnation, claims that you've "broken international law", claims of unilateralism, and in general enough bad press to sink some governments and seriously hurt others. More importantly, though, you're no longer perceived as trustworthy, so those that are involved in agreements with you will think twice about it, and may start pushing the boundaries of the various deals in order to prepare for your (in their minds inevitable) betrayal. They'll also avoid making future deals as much as possible, because that crucial element of trust is gone. They might make deals with other states they can trust, but they'll avoid the free rider. If you break an informal agreement, however, then the public condemnation and bad PR isn't really an issue (the public might not even know about it), but the question of trust remains- if both parties have informally made an agreement and one party betrays that trust, then every other agreement becomes suspect, and no new agreements will be made because the government in question can't be trusted. That's bad.

Why? Here's an example. Let's say that the United States, through the State department, had some sort of informal agreement with China about American trawlers fishing off the Chilean coast. (No idea why they'd be there, but bear with me.) There's no formal agreement, but a mutual understanding that said trawlers won't be harassed by Chilean authorities if they venture inside Chilean waters as long as the United States doesn't overfish in the region. That holds for a few years, but intense lobbying by Captain Highliner (he's an influential bastard) has led the U.S. to turn a blind eye to overfishing there. Chile notices, tells the U.S. to tell the Cap'n to lay off, the Chilean fishermen are going nuts, and the U.S. tells Chile "go screw" and fishes just close enough to international waters to duck out if the authorities come calling, and Chile doesn't have the ability to do anything about it- the deal was informal, the U.N. can't do anything about it, and the Chilean navy can't molest these U.S. boats. The fishermen are screwed, the Chilean government has a lot of unemployed mad fishermen on their hands, and Cap'n Highliner gets a new pipe.

So what does Chile do? Well, let's extend this thing.

A few years later, Chile grows a sizable piracy industry. Plants are churning out CDs and DVDs, shipments of these things are going all around the world, and those former fishermen are busily hawking Windows XP to anybody that passes by. The United States is flooded with these things, and Bill Gates wants it to STOP, but Chile doesn't have any IP laws, and the current leftist government thinks that they're a tool of global imperialism (or whatever) so it couldn't care less about arguments that they'd be good for the economy. The U.S. is losing far more potential revenue than it ever gained from fishing off the Chilean shore, and is having no luck busting the Chileans within the U.S. U.S. representatives come down, desperately wanting to stop these things, and agrees to make a deal: we tell Cap'n Highliner to lay off, and you sign on to the international IP agreements. What happens? Chile will say two words: they rhyme with "buck cough".

Why? Well, it's pretty simple- they can't trust the U.S. to its end of the deal; they know that they could sign the IP treaty and still end up with the good Cap'n back in their waters after a year and a half. If the U.S. had stuck to its earlier agreement and not caved in to domestic lobbying pressure from irate sea captains, then they could have gone down to Chile, made the deal with the Chilean government, and received fat "campaign contributions" from Bill. Instead, this ends up hurting both countries- the U.S. doesn't get its I.P. laws enforced and Chile's fishermen are still stuck hawking CDs instead of doing what they really love. And these are two agreements; as I said, there are thousands, if not millions of them. The only option the United States has is military action, which means that the United States has just gone to war for Cap'n Highliner.

Therefore Steven's long and verbose arguments about the United States "looking out for its own interests" are both right and wrong at the same time. Governments pay great attention to their interests, yes. Any government with a clue, however, will realize that their interests will be forwarded by those agreements. If the formal agreements require informal agreements then so be it- it usually ends up going both ways, as even the United States makes quiet deals at times. It's in nobody's interests for anybody to "break the deal" because there's no guarantee that there won't be some sort of agreement that they need in the future- the deal-breaker will have lost their credibility, and the sucker won't be able to make worthwhile agreements with the deal-breaker. There may be a few screwups and broken deals here and there, but that's the reason for all that public condemnation- other states will want to show that they wouldn't break that deal, and if they have in the past then they certainly wouldn't now. No state can exist outside of this system- even an economic juggernaut like the United States isn't so intrinsically valuable that everybody else couldn't get by without it, and make deals with each other if it turned out that the United States was simply untrustworthy. Besides, there are other interests besides economic and security interests- a government wants to look good, and will sign agreements in order to show its subjects (or voters) that it is a player on the international scene, that it's strong, that it respects human rights, etc. etc. etc... thus gaining increased legitimacy from those people. (This is the difference between realism and neo-realism... the former just looks at states, but the latter also looks at what happens *within* states, which is one of the reasons I'm sympathetic to it. The thirst for prestige is rooted in the conflicts over legitimacy, sovereignty, and power within any state, so any examination of that are going to be rooted in neo-realism.)

Thus, "International law", where the "controlling authority" is sovereign nations' own enlightened self interest. Whether it's "Wilsonian", "Jacksonian", or whatever, it's simply the way the world works, both between different liberal democracies and between liberal democracies and dictatorships/monarchies/social democracies/whatever-the-hell.

One more thing before I close: I'm not interested in any sort of pissing match, especially one that largely consists of Steven rewriting what he's already written and me rewriting what I've already written. The links and this post pretty much encapsulate my views on this issue, and there's not much else to say, really, without ending up in a game of dueling sources (which I'd have difficulty winning, considering that Steven usually uses popular political sources that he can link to and I'd prefer to cite journal articles where I simply can't.) If we're really "all friends here", then I'm fine with that, and hope that those who have read this little exchange have got something out of it. At the moment, however, it is over.

Edit: Bloody hell... fifty zillion visitors, and I've horribly screwed up the first entry they see. HTML *FIXED*

As somewhat of an olive branch to Steven, I'll give him this: his latest entry about the importance of logistics in WWII is pretty damned interesting.

Oddly, though, what it reminded me of (and Steven discussed the same thing in his wargaming entry) is those real time strategy games that have been relatively popular for a while now, and which have gained renewed popularity with the release of Warcraft III. The odd thing about those games is that by and large it isn't the different little units and how you use them that win the match- it's how much resources you have streaming in at any given time (the RTS version of logistics) and whether or not you can efficiently turn those resources into soldiers and tanks and acid-spitting aliens and elves and Ogre Mages and what-have-you. Even in combat resources are key- the great Starcraft player Zileas made a point of measuring one's success in combat in enemy resources destroyed (in the form of various units), not in the number of units.

Perhaps the greatest parallel, though, isn't just resources, but the safety of same. The biggest advantage of the United States both then and now is that by and large it's protected from attack; only the greatest powers can even possibly threaten its shores, and not really for very long. In some respects, it actually reminds me of a series of turn-based war games from Koei called "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", where perhaps the most important resource were provinces far behind the enemy lines where you could concentrate their entire resources on productivity rather than defense, confident that there's no way that you could ever get to them. This is true in RTS games as well- I've lost (and won) a few Starcraft games based on not just how well I could gather resources, but protect those resources, and the most valuable deposits were often the most easily defensible ones. Perhaps it's true that the United States' greatest strategic assets are Canada and Mexico- simply because unlike any other country on the planet, they alone can be sure that there is practically no possibility of a land invasion. Even a perfectly united European Union could never boast something like that.

While I'm discussing Hesiod, I should mention that he did get around to writing his own response to the Den Beste article that really started this whole thing, and did a pretty good job of it; focusing on why Saddam isn't likely to nuke those around him, why either his successor will be sane or soon replaced by those who are, why there are other options besides "invade or contain", and several other valid critiques of the argument. I agree with most of what he said, with the one caveat that he believes that Saddam either has or soon will have WMD capabilities, and I'm now wondering just how much WMD capacity Saddam really has, and whether the case hasn't been conveniently overstated by those with other reasons to attack him.

Stil, that's a minor difference of opinion, and doesn't detract at all from a good rebuttal well argued.

It would appear that there are better reasons for leftist pseudo-/anonymity than I had thought. (Courtesy of Hesiod.)

For those who haven't followed the link, there has been a concerted campaign of terror by "Freepers" against Mia Lawrence, the woman who called in Jenna and Barbara Bush for underage drinking a while ago.

Here's a few choice quotes:

-Her address, date of birth, drivers license and registration information, physical description, and even birth information about her infant child have been posted on freerepublic.com, along with calls for punitive actions...

...A freerepublic.com member who uses the screen name "tracer" recommended using her private info for identity theft:

"Giving out her driver's license no. and her DOB opens her up to mucho identity theft. It also makes background checks by 'inquiring minds' a breeze..."

...Others suggest pouring bar drinks on her and making a permanent web site with her personal info. On the web site lucianne.com is posted a link to a 2001 personal bankruptcy claim filed by Lawrence, with all its unhappy detail about her finances, including many thousands of dollars in medical expenses...

..."Robomatic" speaks up:

"One thing that I personally would never do ;) is walk into Chuy's with a LARGE bottle of buturic (sp. ?) acid and begin to liberally apply it to every surface. For those fortunate enough NOT to know what it smells like, let me only say that it smells worse than a rotting corpse and typically, the smell, immediately induces vomiting. (If I remember correctly, it is non-toxic...besides the odor) I wonder how long it would take, given that Chuys would not have a SINGLE customer for days after each application, to drive them out of business?"

Others suggestions included going to the restaurant and tying up the tables for hours with just one beverage order, passing out flyers at colleges warning students of the "narcs" at Chuy's, and even spreading reports of salmonella poisoning and cockroach infestation.

Reverend Lovejoy: "And it goes on like this..."

I'm not afraid, Steven. But if this is correct, maybe I should be.

I'm at the center of a shitstorm.

Well, maybe not, but it seems like Den Beste's attack on pseudonymity and my defense of it have attracted a lot of attention: from Jane Galt (who, as it turns out, isn't an Objectivist after all), from Tapped (as I linked earlier), from Atrios (ditto), from Silflay Hraka, from The Comedian and, perhaps most surprisingly considering how staunch a critic I've been of him lately, from the Instapundit himself.

By and large the responses have been encouraging, although many (like Jane) have made the point that there is a built in resistance to pseudonyms because you don't know what kind of interests the writer has. It's a valid point, although several people in her comments section made the point that it really isn't that big a deal here on the Internet; I know that "back in the day" it was considered a feature, not a bug. I'm honestly a little bothered by this huge debate over not what I've said, but what I am and what I represent. I decided to make this pseudonymous largely because I wanted to get away from that sort of thing, and let the points I have made stand on their own. All I can say is that I encourage those who are visiting to look around and see if they like the site, pseudonym or no. Archives are to the left. I hope.

The bear has highlighted an issue that is getting ignored lately... a possible war between Taiwan and China. As evidence, he cites this link that quotes Chinese officials saying in no uncertain terms that a declaration of independence is a declaration of war, and the Taiwanese President saying Taiwan should "walk its own road" and declare independence. This has always been a really touchy issue, and the U.S. is usually loathe to get involved or to take sides (which is why Bush was so throroughly lambasted for taking Taiwan's side early in his presidency). Now, however, the theoretical situation that Bush was referring to when he said he "stood with Taiwan" might become real.

Sadly, however, this seems to be a growing trend, and one that worries me. China and Taiwan are one thing, but the conflict between India and Pakistan has not gone away and any instability in the Pakistani government could ignite that smouldering conflict yet again. It seems that in the wake of both the Cold War and the short post-Cold War consensus that nationality and geostrategy were unimportant in the face of the collective drive for economic growth, we're ending up with a number of conflicts either happening or on the way. Oddly enough, however, the conflicts aren't really between superpowers, but between superpowers (or at the least Great Powers) and small powers.

I wonder whether this isn't the start of a period of consolidation- whether this conflict might not signal the creation and consolidation of new power blocs around the world. Conflicts such as these might not even be attempts to consolidate actual physical geopolitical territories, but perceived power, as each of these three powers (India, the United States, and China) attempt to remove countries that exist as "thorns in their sides" and challenges to their regional power. The biggest difference with the United States is that the region in question is not North America, but the Middle East.

After all, if the U.S. does invade Iraq, the United States will essentially own a valuable chunk of real estate in the region and will no doubt start making threatening noises at the House of Saud until it falls in line. No, I don't expect any sort of invasion of Saudi Arabia... too many other countries depend on their oil to allow that kind of instability to happen, even if it is courtesy of the United States. This sort of geostrategic empire-building is against the spirit of the United Nations, of course, but more and more the United States seems to be setting itself up in opposition to not only the United Nations but the very concept of collective security in general, so much so that I wouldn't be overly surprised if the U.S. didn't decide to dissolve NATO and leave the United Nations sometime in the near-to-middling future. Indeed, if it controlled the Middle East (with Israel, its client state Iraq, and a newly chastised Saudi Arabia as its regional representatives), a valid case could be made that the United States doesn't really need collective security anymore- it would be strategically self-reliant and be able to check the power of other states by controlling a fair chunk of the oil supply.

(Come to think of it, chief among these states would be Japan... could Iraq be the first step to Japan reconstituting a real army capable of force projection?)

In any case, I'm starting to think that there's a lot more going on than this conflict between the United States and the "Islamists", and I'm more and more convinced that it won't be along the lines of Huntington's simplistic "Clash of Civilizations", but something much more traditional. This is all predicated on a successful invasion and conquest of Iraq, of course, and that's not something I assume either. Still, it's worth thinking about.

From the ridiculous to the sublime. In order to stave off the Green-supporter argument that "the Democrats are no different than the Republicans", Nathan Newman wrote an excellent defense of the Democratic party. He bases it on their actions in California, one of the key states where they actually wield unfettered power (outside of vetos by what Newman sees as a somewhat DINO governor). citing numerous examples of the Democrats acting just as progressive as you please on a variety of issues. They've done everything from HMO reform to the rights of mothers to breastfeed to tenant's rights to daily overtime pay.

To be honest, it's just a logical fallacy to say that the Dems (in their entirety) are no different than the Republicans (in their entirety), and the Greens are pretty obviously trying a "invasion from the margin" attack (where a third party takes over an increasingly large group from the margins of a party in a two-party system, until the party it's trying to eliminate is left only with moderates and eventually drops out of sight), but it's still worth proving that Democrats are Democrats.

(I think, this week, that I'm going to be a little more positive. The Den Beste battle has degenerated to sheer nonsense on his side and I'm honestly sick of the whole thing. I've been spending way too much time playing "watchblog", and regular readers are probably wondering whether I think that I'm the only progressive voice out there. A shift in focus is in order, I think, and Den Beste can go hang.)

Edit: I hadn't thought of this, but I shudder to think at what would happen were the brilliant Atrios of Eschaton were to respond to this, considering his site is even more popular and he's just as pseudonymous as I am. Then again, he's probably above it.

Second Edit: Thanks to Tapped for linking to me, even if they seem to loathe light text on a black background like cockroaches in your cheerios. One thing, though: my pseudonymous name is "Demosthenes"... the site itself is called "Shadow of the Hegemon". For an explanation of both, I have a link below to my first post, which should explain things well enough.

Third Edit: As it turns out, Atrios did comment on it. He actually brought up something I didn't, noting that "there are plenty of pseudonyms on both sides of the political spectrum. People tend to ignore the issue when Bloggers they like have pseuds, and bring it up for Bloggers they don't like. Some people have no-linking (or no perma-linking) policies for "anonymous" Bloggers, which they institute on an inconsistent basis - which is fine, it's their sites". I actually didn't know about that last part- I wasn't aware that any sites cared so much about the issue. Then again, if Atrios is right, they really don't.

(And one more thing for those who are reading my site for the first time thanks to that Tapped link: I don't, as a rule, talk about myself this much. Just in case some people thought this was some sort of JournalBlog.)

Well, now I've gone and done it. Steven Den Beste wrote what basically amounts to a screed about my anonymity, and about anonymity in general. Honestly, I hadn't expected such a thing- I knew that he wasn't overly fond of anonymity, but there were a lot of other things that he could complain about, and the question of anonymity was only one of the ideas that I responded to in that entry that Steven wrote that linked me at its end (and equated me with Warbloggerwatch.) I didn't figure he'd spend so much time and energy attacking what is honestly only a mildly important point, but there it is.

And what does he attack? Well, like many others, he knows about Orson Scott Card's books, and that the character of Demosthenes inspired my current pseudonym. I don't think he read my first entry, because it explains it pretty well. (and by the way, Steven, the reason I don't link to permalinks of my own entries is because I don't trust them to work in the first place... but it's at the bottom of the first archive link, for those who wish to read it). I think I'll quote myself here:

My name, at least for the purposes of this site, is Demosthenes. It comes from two different people: a fictional character, and a real historical figure. The real one is a Greek orator by the same name, who is considered by some to be the best orator who ever lived. Although I haven’t read that many of his speeches yet, what I’ve read I've liked. The second and more important “Demosthenes”, however, is from Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”. Demosthenes is the demogogic network pseudonym of one of the main characters, Valentine Wiggin. Together with her brother Peter’s more reasonable “Locke” pseudonym, they manage to have a decisive effect on world events and world politics. They were barely teenagers.

I read this book around the same time that the public became aware of the Internet. It had a profound effect. Breathless and optimistic articles in Wired magazine proclaimed that the Internet would change political discourse forever. The Internet would bring everybody together, there would be consensus, or at least agreement on the positions of the people on either side. The cliché about “brave new worlds” was in full flower, and the possibility of a teenager changing the world by talking on the Internet seemed not just possible, but inevitable. So I took on the name “Demosthenes” to show my belief in the power of debate to change the world.

Steven argues that the books were "fantasy". Actually, they were science fiction, and one of the reasons I like science fiction is its prescience... that although it rarely predicts the future exactly, it predicts aspects of the future, enough to keep you guessing. So it was with Card's book- what fascinated me about Demosthenes and Locke wasn't so much what they accomplished, but what they represented, and how eerily they predicted that old Internet saw that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". Back when I first started using the name (and there are others), pseudonymity wasn't considered a bug, but a feature. As I said in that first entry, "times have changed, and not in the way I would have preferred." One of those changes are these attacks on pseudonymity.

Steven goes on to complain that "nobody has ever had the influence that these kids had". It shows that he hadn't really read the books much, because Peter and Valentine really didn't have as much influence and power as he seems to think- certainly not more than the President. Locke, actually, wasn't really that well known at all, and it's well established in the book that Demosthenes gained his notoriety by being a firebrand demagogue; one of the more amusing points was that Valentine knew that there were significant holes in Demosthenes' arguments, and that her father agreed with Demosthenes despite the holes. Demosthenes was well known and well respected, but didn't have nearly as much power as Steven seems to think, and certainly didn't start anything like a revolution. The key reason Demosthenes existed was so that when Locke (Peter's persona) came up with his proposal for peace, Demosthenes would be able to use what notoriety and influence as he has to endorse it, and considering that Locke and Demosthenes were bitter enemies, the proposal would gain huge credibility.

(An amusing contradiction of Steven's argument is that Locke only gained real political power and influence when he dropped the mask and because Hegemon- a position that, at the time he did it, carried little authority, power, and influence).

In any case, however, Steven is highly critical of the entire enterprise.

The idea of hoping to have "the reputation of Demosthenes grow and exist apart from my credentials in real life" is, sad to say, a bit unrealistic. Demosthenes is one voice amongst hundreds of thousands, and life just doesn't act that way. And in any case, anonymity actually impedes any progress in that direction. The nameless human behind the blog hopes that the synthetic avatar Demosthenes will take on a life of its own. It's a disturbing ambition.

This is a very curious argument for someone who actually does wield some small amount of influence in this growing medium, and who has compatriots (like Instapundit) that demonstrate it as well. Indeed, that outsize influence is one of the reasons that I've been criticizing Den Beste so heavily- he appears to be attempting to leverage a close reading of Clausewicz, a good knowledge of WWII and citation of various popular political articles into a supposedly comprehensive knowledge of political theory, political philosophy, and international relations. He makes mistakes, and I call him on them. I've been doing this because very few others have, and because his (actually well-written) arguments closely parallel those made by others in the Blogosphere, and by addressing those arguments I can make larger points. Those who have read this site regularly know that I usually use other articles as a "jumping off point" for my own thoughts on a situation, and Steven works quite well in that respect. Perhaps my greatest mistake has been to worry so much about rebutting the guy, instead of just using him as a springboard.

Anyway, back to pseudonymity.

The quotation above is followed by what is really the meat of the whole thing:

The other aspect of the argument is much more important. The human in question not only hopes that Demosthenes the avatar will become famous and respected and influential, but also that the human will never be connected with the avatar and his responsibility for the avatar will never be publicly revealed. (And now I'll go back to using "Demosthenes" to refer to the human, rather than to the avatar that human is attempting to sustain.)

And now the problem becomes clear- he accuses me of overweening ambition by deliberately misinterpreting what I said. I'll quote myself again, because the latter point was selectively interpreted and important in and of itself:

more importantly I don't want interpretation of my arguments weighed by how people perceive my beliefs and interests- I'd prefer the arguments to stand on their own, and the reputation of Demosthenes to grow and exist apart from my reputation and credentials in real life.

Steven interpreted this to say that "I want Demosthenes to become powerful and influential and famous". That is not what I meant. (I think that Steven knew that's not what I meant, and didn't care). What I was getting at was a key reason why someone chooses pseudonymity- that someone wishes to have their arguments and positions stand on their own. Most of the time when somebody says something to somebody else, what they say is filtered by the listener according to their perceived gender, age, sexuality, personality, nationality, ethnicity, and whatever else constitutes their identity. Only after all that filtering is done with does the message get through, and more often than not the real content is changed utterly by the perception of that person's interests and beliefs- as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message". This is, by far, the more important reason I chose pseudonymity- as I've said, there are people in real life who know about this blog and know that I'm the author of it. I'm not afraid of saying in real life what I say here, and I'm not one to hold my opinions back.

Why not anonymity, though? Well, Anonymity presents its own problems. If one is truly anonymous, then there is no consistent body of work and arguments that someone can refer back to when making a point or defending a point. You could be anybody, and there's no possible way of verifying that the same person who wrote the last piece is the one who wrote the current one. There is the advantage of never having to worry about what you say affecting your real life, but there's no reward for consistency and no way for people to make any connection between a work and its author. It also means that there's no punishment for screwing up, either, because the person involved can just pick a different persona and jump right back in. (Usenet featured a lot of this sort of thing by trolls and spammers who don't care about the reputation of their personae.) There's also pretty much no way of developing any sort of audience or readership, which means that your ideas get "lost in the tide"- readers have no previous history of work with which to judge whether or not they should bother with current work. THAT is what I meant by reputation, Steven, not any sort of ridiculous ambition for influence. You can see this by simply zipping on over to slashdot and checking out their "anonymous cowards", who often write insightful posts of great educational or entertainment value, but who by definition can't develop any sort of reputation for doing so- they have to fight their way past the label "anonymous" and all the other morons who have it before they can be noticed. If that even happens.

Pseudonymity addresses both of these issues. It allows for someone to exist as a consistent person, but isn't prey to that filtering mechanism. Yes, someone who develops an online persona could easily drop it and conjure up another, but they would be "starting from square one"- just like the anonymous trolls I mentioned earlier, nobody would really take them seriously, because nobody would have any reason to take them seriously. They could theoretically rebuild themselves back up, but then they're just in a situation where they need to protect their reputation again- the only difference is the name, and all the wasted time, and the necessity for proving oneself worth listening to once again.

The Blogosphere isn't the first community online, of course; there's a bunch of them, and this question of "pseudonym" vs. "anonym" vs. "real" is actually a pretty old one. For those who want to understand pseudonymity, I suggest this article about the "rape in cyberspace". You might remember it- it was that incident on LambdaMOO a while back where one person messed with the avatars of others in extremely degrading ways resembling rape, which prompted an traumatic response from the victims in question- not their pseudonyms, but the players themselves. It's a fascinating and disturbing story, but it culminates with response from the online rapist himself, saying that it was merely a "psychological device..a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence".

That prompted this reply:

They might have known. Stilted though its diction was, the gist of the answer was simple, and something many in the room had probably already surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life -- but then in real life it's possible for reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did, that what transpires between word-costumed characters within the boundaries of a make-believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO, however, such thinking marked a person as one of two basically subcompetent types. The first was the newbie, in which case the confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not, upon their first visits as anonymous "guest" characters, mistaken the place for a vast playpen in which they might act out their wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character's reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadn't been around as long as most MOOers, he'd been around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.

(Bolding mine.) That is what I meant by reputation, Steven, not this sort of overwhelming ambition. Pseudonymity is different than anonymity precisely because of that reputation, and the desire to protect it. The Blogosphere isn't the only community in cyberspace to grapple with these issues, it's just the newest, and it's the the most "pseudo" community of the lot.

With that in mind, a lot of the rest of Steven's rant becomes pointless, even if it weren't already. He seems to think that I'm afraid- he goes back to the same argument over and over again that I'm afraid to commit to my own arguments, that I'm afraid to stand behind my convictions, that I'm "cowering behind an avatar". He claims that I only "reveal it to those who are sympathetic", when one of the people who does know is rather unsympathetic to my views, and I knew that when I told him. Steven continuously and pathetically puts words in my mouth and thoughts in my head that simply aren't there and does it again, and again, and again...

Steven, I'm not afraid, and never have been. I don't believe that people would instantly reject me were I to reveal my real identity, any more than I think that other anonymous bloggers like Atrios (who is far more inflammatory than I've ever been) would be worth rejecting were I to discover their real identity. It's not about fear, it's about evading those filters of interest and identity, and about the decision to let one's insights stand on their own.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the whole sorry business is this one part:

Demosthenes has made no attempt whatever to prove that he is entitled to wield the moral authority he presumes to, by attempting to advise us as to what we should do. If he is so certain of his position, and if he wants the rest of us to act on what he says, then why does he himself not demonstrate the courage of his own conviction and himself act on what he says? Why does he ask us all to publicly embrace his opinions when he won't do so, and ask us to accept the social consequences he is trying to avoid?

And why should anyone listen to him if he won't?

It comes down to that question of legitimacy again, doesn't it? I make no presumption as to any "moral authority" except that provided by those who listen to me. If they listen, if they agree, if they act on what I say, then I have whatever moral authority that grants me. If they don't, if they disagree, or if they ignore me, then I don't have moral authority, whether I use my real name, a pseudonym, or post anonymously. If Demosthenes-the-pseudonym gained real power for some reason (which didn't happen in the books), then that power would be given by those who read with the full knowledge that I am a pseudonym, and nothing Steven Den Beste can say would ever take that away from him. Period.

Demosthenes would, I suspect, respond to that: "Listen to the arguments, not to the arguer." But if the arguments are convincing, then why doesn't the voice who presents them act as if he believes them? If anyone should follow an advocated course of action, surely the person doing the advocating should be first.

Do I not? How would you know? For all you know, Steven, I might try to put what I say here into action every day of my life. I might be standing on a street corner preaching it to everybody in sight, stopping only to duck into an Internet cafe and write an entry here and there. Even if I didn't, though, what would it matter? It's not even that "it's the arguments, not the arguer" (although that's certainly true, and Steven has neatly fallen into a textbook ad hominem)- Steven hasn't the faintest idea whether I act as if I believe them or not, except through the entirely useless act of trying to hang their validity on any reputation I might have in real life, or the meaningless act of trying to build my real-life reputation on what I've written here. (The latter is valid, of course, but doesn't matter one whit as to whether my points deserve to be listened to or not.)

Steven, I'm not ashamed of one damned thing that I've ever written. Even the stupid stuff, even the mistakes, even the bloody spelling mistakes and HTML errors that crop up far too often for my liking. I'm proud of it, and even more proud that people think that it's worthy enough to read. I'm humbled by the knowledge that people actually come back to read the site of their own free will, and feel that what I've written is important enough to leave comments on the site and emails in my mailbox, whether I agree or disagree with them. I'm even more humbled when I realize that it's not because of my real life identity, but because they feel that what I write is worth reading, worth quoting, and worth arguing over. I'm amazed and gratified that I have as many readers as I do, and the short entry with which I celebrated my first ten thousand visitors didn't even begin to describe how awed I was that such a thing could happen, and how glad I was that I didn't try to trade on whatever authority I might have "in real life" but instead made the site live or die on its own merits.

No, Steven, the only thing I'm ashamed and embarrassed about is this entry. I know that you don't like pseudonymity- you've made that abundantly clear. I know that whatever goodwill I gained from that first "here's a guy who actually argues honestly against war in Iraq" post is long gone, and I accept that as the price of consistent criticism. But to distract your readers who come to your site expecting political, military, and theoretical insights with this sort of pablum? A long attack against someone who by your own arguments seems to be beneath your notice? I somehow doubt they come to your site expecting this sort of screed (I certainly don't), and you could have addressed the response by simply saying "I wasn't directly talking about you, Demosthenes, so stop being so bloody paranoid". Instead, however, we get mad frothing rage from someone that, for all his faults, I thought was above it. It's a pity, really, and I wouldn't have responded were the issue of pseudonymity not something that needs to be defended. I hope that I have done so adequately enough to ensure that my readers will continue to visit this space. Heck, one day I might say "to heck with it" and identify who I really am. To be honest, though, the reaction I would most hope for is a resounding shurg. To me, and hopefully to my readers, it really doesn't matter.

Oh, and one admission: Yes, I do use Rogers, and therefore live in Canada. Unless, of course, I'm spoofing.

Moving away from critiques, debate, and the definition of "deduction"...Jaquandor has featured an interesting series of short reviews of all the different Bond flicks, which culminates with this entry about the most recent of the films. They're both enjoyable and informative, and it's nice to move away from reading political blogs on occasion. By all means, go take a look.

Something that you learn quickly in debate: it's fine (for the most part) to criticize someone, but if you ever call them "just another" of something, they'll go bugnuts on you. A perfect example is Just One Minute, a blog that I had described in an earlier post as "just another me-too E.C. blog". This provoked a sarcastic (and rather silly) email from it's proprietor, Thomas Maguire, which I responded to in good faith (except to point out that I both recognized the backhandedness of it and was slightly amused.) Apparently this wasn't enough, so he sent me a final email, stating "I don't expect you to pay attention to me, as I have no doubt I won't pay attention to you". Well, except for this last post. Intrigued, I checked it out, and what did I get?

Unfortunately, not much. What we get as some sort of "rebuttal" isn't especially promising- he complains about the length of the piece, gets the name of the blog wrong (missing the reference entirely), apparently doesn't like the color scheme, and apparently hasn't the faintest clue what I meant when I was talking about satisficing. Oh, and he uses that silly call-and-response "fisking" technique- no doubt expecting it to grant him credibility.

Here's a sample:

Stephen Den Beste seems to somehow believe that deductive reasoning can never come up with the wrong answer. Don't believe me? Check it out:

[den Beste excerpt]:
Deduction is prissy; it refuses to play unless it knows it can win. It requires sufficient information of high reliability, and when that is available it yields an answer which is nearly certain."

CRASH! TINKLE! (The tinkle is breaking glass, we're not scared or anything). We are not yet through the first paragraph and the author has driven his credibility into a ditch. Let me re-cap with faux quotes: "den Beste makes an overly broad statement. Don't believe me? Here is a clearly out-of-context excerpt which clearly does contain qualifications."

See, anybody who read where I went from there would have a pretty good idea that I meant that Steven's qualifications weren't enough- that even with perfect starting information, the interpretation is a problem in-and-of itself. The same people can come up with different answers to the same problem with the same evidence, and have both end up being "proven" by the evidence at hand. In fact, the point I made later that Mcguire seems to think was some sort of self-refutation was just restating this point- that Den Beste's qualifications themselves made assumptions. Then again, this is pretty obviously not a real critique.. it's just an attempt to attack my credibility as quickly (and weakly) as possible.

He then goes on to claim that my references to Den Beste were "phony":

[den Beste excerpt]:
--Which brings me, finally, to the article which inspired this entire ridiculously long post. Much of this analysis, by everyone involved, makes a fundamental assumption that Saddam, and other leaders of Muslim and Arab nations and groups, think more or less like we do -- or that they are insane.--

Already, he has ruined his argument, before I could even touch it. Amazing trick, really, and I'm quite impressed. Mixing together "Muslim" and "Arab" is fantastically wrong for obvious reasons, but so is mixing together fundamentalist leaders and strongman dictators like Hussein."

False alarm. Den Beste is apparently near the goal-line, but we have a ways to go. Is this another phony excerpt, which Demosthenes will later debunk? It is certainly NOT clear from the excerpt that den Beste has mixed anything.

The "minuteman" has asserted that this excerpt is "phony"... that it doesn't mix them up. He does this several times, pretty much ignoring every other point I made, especially the ones that didn't involve quotation. I imagine it's because he either agrees or can't think of a proper response, but I can't exactly be sure of that. Still, I'm rather confused- even if what Den Beste wrote didn't mix the two together (which it did)... what was it about that excerpt that somehow made it "phony"? It was a full excerpt, nothing left behind or left out. If Steven were making a point of making the difference clear elsewhere in the post then I might agree with this critique, or if the use of the word "assumption" referred to the melding of the two groups as opposed to the polarity of "sane like us" vs. "insane", then that might be different. Unfortunately, even a cursory examination of his other posts makes it pretty clear that that's not the case. The only distinction he possibly makes is between Saddam and the rest, but then goes on to argue that Saddam is as irrational as the rest.. just for different reasons.

(But then again, even if these two particular sections were wrong, how exactly does that invalidate the rest of the entry? All I'd need to do is edit them slightly and the rest of it would continue on, unchecked and unanswered. Neither were really critical- both were relatively minor "set-ups" for larger points? Hence the reason I'm not fond of "fisking"- forests and trees.)

Other than those two complaints, all it seems to be is endless whining about the length of the piece. Yes, it's long. I write long entries. Deal with it. Still, to complain about such a thing when I'm responding to Steven Den Beste of all people smacks of someone searching for something, anything, with which to attack my credibility. So like I said up at the top, it's probably a good idea to watch out before calling someone "just another" of anything.

I'm not quite sure whether this article from Steven Den Beste is supposed to be a rebuttal or not to my earlier comments. It would make sense that it's supposed to be one- it pretty obviously takes potshots at my pseudonymity, for starters. I've already explained why I stay pseudonymous, but in reality it's pretty simple- I don't want my arguments here to affect how people treat me in real life (unless I let them... some of my real life friends do know about the blog, but it's my decision), and more importantly I don't want interpretation of my arguments weighed by how people perceive my beliefs and interests- I'd prefer the arguments to stand on their own, and the reputation of Demosthenes to grow and exist apart from my reputation and credentials in real life.

(Then again, upon further examination, he seems to be setting up for something...)

The entry goes on to ass-backwardsly complains about the lack of quotation (which I usually avoid in order to stay away from mixing up forests and trees), and the indirect way in which I addressed his arguments (which were based on his invocation of some sort of higher, logical basis for his arguments, and his implication that it occupies the same place as real analysis). It also pulls out all the stops in trying to sway the audience to his side- whether it's praising their "bullshit detectors" (which in my experience are highly overrated, usually relying more on avoidance of cognitive dissonance than anything else), praising their boundless intelligence, or lauding the endless flows of information that we receive nowadays (although anybody familiar with blogs understands just how easily that information can be skewed or selectively displayed and just how useful a really good information collector/filter can truly be.) I somehow wonder why he bothers with that... why praise the audience in order to curry their favor when you can simply do so with your arguments themselves?

Amazingly enough, it doesn't end there. It seems to accuse me of ad hominem attacks, which is not quite the case- it is if anything ad argumentum... I'm attacking the validity of his arguments, not the man himself. (How could I attack him? I don't know him.) It implies that those with a mathematical education are somehow better equipped to make political arguments than those with liberal educations, because of their greater (?) familiarity with logic. (All it suggests to me is ignorance of the field, but anyway...)

Finally, though, it comes out into the open, crying out that his methods "[leave] me open for mockery by those who disagree with me, but that's the price I pay for trying to play fair with you." (He linked to myself and warbloggerwatch in that sentence). Cunning little trick, that- it manages to equate me with the hated warbloggerwatch, set me against his readers (who he is just "trying to play fair with"), imply that I'm not being fair to him (bolstered by the link to Warblogger watch), claim that my post was mockery instead of debunking and rebuttal (also bolstered by the WBW link), and imply that my critique was some sort of cheap insult session. Most damningly, by linking at the end of the entire entry, he has successfully set me up as being the embodiment all the sins described in this entry, and ensures that his readers will link to me and read my rebuttal only after they have been primed to read it in the worst possible light.

(Of course, he follows it up with a cry of sainted victimhood, proclaiming that "[t]he stains of their rotten tomatoes on my clothing are a badge of honor. One can be judged not only by one's enemies, but by how those enemies behave. If this is what they're reduced to, then I must be winning." This barely needs commentary- a vague sense of embarrassment on his behalf is all I can muster)

For someone who trusts his readers, Steven, you've done a damned good job of conditioning them to read my response exactly the way that you want them to. All I can say in response is that I link at the top of my entries, and don't care whether you're really Steven Den Beste, engineer, or a hobo that sneaks into an internet cafe when nobody's looking and slams out posts on the sly. I, as "Demosthenes the pseudonym" and his creator, couldn't care less.

So this is why I've never been linked on Tapped!

They complain:

On a side note, visiting LiquidList (his site) reminded us of some friendly advice we wanted to offer on blog design. Many bloggers, including some of our favorites, choose to use "reverse" colors; that is, a dark background with light letters instead of the reverse. (They include Demosthenes and Matthew Yglesias.) Tapped is sure we are not alone when we say we find this format visually irritating even when the content is intellectually stimulating. Our suggestion: Flip your colors, or offer an option to view in the negative the way Andrew Sullivan does. Please! Eye exams cost money!

Personally, I'm rather fond of the template, and Pejman seems to get by with it without too much trouble. I might switch it in the future, but I don't want to screw around with another template when Blogger is being so ornery. (Maybe if I switched to MT or Blogger Pro, but I'm not quite there yet.)

Here's hoping the content intrigues Tapped enough to make up for the "visual irritation". And for those visiting from Tapped and who want to read my response to Steven Den Beste's theories, check out the entry directly below this one. This I wrote in minutes... that took a whole morning.

Edit: Some people have complained that I haven't given enough credit to Den Beste- that his description of deduction was technically accurate. That definition, as quoted below, is that "It requires sufficient information of high reliability, and when that is available it yields an answer which is nearly certain". The former qualification is indeed true- it does require "sufficient information of high reliability" to yield an answer. The problem, however, is that it can yield multiple valid answers. This doesn't leave deductive reasoning unusable, even in the social sciences, but it does mean that one must watch out for these multiplicities of valid answers that are proven by the evidence at hand. This is what satisficing is: satisficing is when somebody "proves" one hypothesis (even when using deduction), but it's actually only one of many valid ones consistent with the evidence at hand. It also doesn't necessarily require mathematics, although mathematics certainly make the process easier. After all, the deductive chain "All men die/Socrates is a man/therefore Socrates will die" is valid whether it's described that way or as "A=D,B=A, therefore B=D (Well, actually, I guess a fully accurate mathematical description of that chain would involve sets, but you get the point.)

So: Den Beste's qualifications are valid, but don't go far enough. Satisfied?

Steven Den Beste seems to somehow believe that deductive reasoning can never come up with the wrong answer. Don't believe me? Check it out:

Deduction is prissy; it refuses to play unless it knows it can win. It requires sufficient information of high reliability, and when that is available it yields an answer which is nearly certain.

This would be true... if it weren't for the simple fact that it's extremely difficult to tell whether a) you have all the possible hypotheses, b) that your methodology for eliminating options is unimpeachably sound, c) the evidence is both accurate and means what you think it means and d) whether your evidence only supports one of them. One of the reasons I've made a point of dealing with the concept of satisficing (which is picking an answer not because it is *the* right answer, but that it's one of a series of "right" answers that you pick because it's the preferred answer) is to deal with this notion of unquestionable rightness in deduction, but how on earth could an engineer make this sort of elementary mistake? Well, perhaps because deductive reasoning's errors lie in mistakes made by the deducer, not in random chance... a lot of non-scientists who admire the scientific process get it into their heads that the human component is negligable, especially if that admiration is the basis of some sort of moral or ethical system. That's hardly true, of course, especially in the social sciences- but people still make that mistake.

To be fair, he does later acknowledge such a thing: "The real world doesn't cooperate with deduction. It's necessary to take chances, to make guesses, to work with inadequate information and information of doubtful validity." The problem is that people will deduce anyway and, in fact, they need to, in order to apply theoretical knowledge to the real world.

See, induction is normally used in the social sciences to generate theory- you observe phenomena and create a theory based on those observations, usually situating it within one of the broad explanatory paradigms in the field. If you manage to successfully demonstrate the validity of that theory, however, the whole reason it's useful is so that one can deduce with it- to take the general (the theory) and with it understand the specific (the situation at hand). It's not perfect, and definitely bears some methodological analysis before you use it, but the application of theory is a valid tool for understanding events... both past events, and future ones.

"Future events", you say? How is that possible? Well, that's the job of the analyst- to figure out what's going to happen, instead of explaining what's already happened (that's the job of the historian). Steven goes into some depth as to the nature of analysis, saying:

And if it is not possible to always be right even about normal events, where the only limitations are inadequate access to information, then how much more difficult must it be in military intelligence, where you're trying to determine the intentions and capabilities and plans of a determined enemy who is doing his best to fool you?

Actually, Stephen, I wouldn't say it's difficult per se, so much as precise. Well, my analysis knowledge comes from the recommended methods for CIA analysts, not military analysts, but the basic concept is the same: you develop as many possible hypotheses as you can (usually using the resources of as many people as you can nail down) and then find evidence that eliminates these hypotheses until you get down to the one hypothesis that is accurate. You aren't proving hypotheses, you're trying to disprove them- that way, you don't have to worry about evidence that supports several conclusions (which leads to satisficing) because that isn't what you're using it for, and you can't satisfice elimination. Since satisficing is incredibly dangerous in real-world analysis, this is really the only proper way to do it (and the fact that people don't is one of your bigger analysis problems right now.)

You use a mixture of three different techniques to do so:

1) Situational analysis. Basically you look at the situation as it stands, all the evidence that you have, and use that to look ahead and see what is likely to happen. The advantage is that there's no way you can mix up what you think is going on and what is actually going on, because they're one and the same (assuming your intel is accurate); the disadvantage is that it's incredibly time consuming and doesn't allow you to use any sort of theoretical or comparative tool to understand what's going on or what to do.

2) Historical comparisons. You compare the situation going on right now with a well-understood and similar situation that has happened in the past- what you know of what happened is used to explain what's going on. It's really useful for finding parallels and trends, but there's no theory working here and there's a huge danger in creating equivalencies that aren't there. Steven does this a lot in relation to WWII- since he knows WWII so well and thinks of diplomacy and statecraft in fairly strict military terms, it's an ideal comparison for him... although for the rest of us, the problem is that what's going on right now isn't precisely equivalent, and WWII is a dubious comparison at best.

3) Lastly, you have the application of theory... this is where you take some sort of theoretical model and apply it to the situation at hand so as to recognize what's going on. Popular with academics (whose lives revolve around the creation and application of theory), and provided that the theory works and can be applied to the specific situation, it's pretty damned useful. The problem, of course, is that any specific situation will only fit theory to a certain degree, and recognition of that degree is absolutely vital to successfully applying theory- you have to fit the theory to the situation, not the other way around. Steven tends to use Clausewicz for this- I don't see much application of political theory aside from this, and while Steven applies his own theories, this isn't a very valid way of doing analysis- other people spend their lives making theories and others reconfirming them. There's little reason to simply apply your own (poorly proven) theories when there are much better, more comprehensive and better proven theories ones out there. (Hence the reason Paul Krugman is always railing about pseudo-economists who have their own half-baked economic theories that demonstrate only ignorance of the theoretical field that really exists.)

All three are useful, but all three have their faults.

So why am I going on about this? Because Stephen has written an exceptionally long article that purports to take down the arguments of myself and Hesiod- the one that I linked to above. One of the arguments he made throughout is that he's working from "inductive reasoning" that "..part of induction is to decide not just what the chance is that a given conclusion is wrong, but also what the consequences are for a false positive or a false negative, and decide based on that which way to err." This is good as far as it goes, but shows that Stephen is going about analysis precisely the wrong way... he's attempting to prove a pre-existing conclusion, instead of taking all the possible hypotheses and using the evidence to figure out which one is valid.

Now, part of my problem with Steven's response is that for such a long response, it's actually pretty short... he only quotes me directly once, and only on the question of whether or not Saddam has WMDs. (He does use what I've said as an adjunct to one of Hesiod's arguments.) So already he has implied no contradiction with anything else I've written, and the critiques I've written of his reasoning extend far, far beyond whether Saddam has WMDs, through the question of International law, all the way down to the way that Steven engages in analysis himself, which is rife with satisficing and poor use of the three techniques I mentioned above. (He's obviously not aware of them- not surprising, as although he's someone interested in politics, statecraft, and warcraft, he's not exactly a professional and is probably unaware of just how dangerous his satisficing is for real analysis.) Throughout the entire argument, he defends his arguments based on the idea that they support his conclusions... but as I've shown above, that's meaningless, because they could support other conclusions as well, and as long as they do it's faulty analysis. By considering the question of satisficing and these three ideas of analysis, one can discover how each of his arguments in turn is fatally flawed.

-he says that his argument that Iraq has WMDs "is based on induction and might be wrong", but that it doesn't matter because he might be wrong and he might be right, and there are reports that hint that he's right. He believes that we might as well operate as if we know that WMDs are in operation there, and make analysis as if there are weapons there. This is an example of satisficing- he's already come to his conclusion, and is looking for things to prove it's true. He admits that all the evidence he cites might not be accurate but that it leans towards his analysis of the situation... but because they don't eliminate the hypothesis that "Iraq doesn't have weapons, but would really like to have them", To proceed from that reasoning is fatally flawed- you haven't really eliminated anything.

-He misreads the situation as it exists, partially by trying to set up neat little contradictions like this one:

There are really only two ways to acquire real proof: invade the place and look around without the Iraqi government impeding us in any way, or wait until a weapon goes off somewhere. Given that we're trying to decide whether to invade, and trying to prevent such a detonation, we must act before proof exists.

This is exceptionally faulty reasoning, because there are lots of questions begging. First, are there only two ways? Why? Why not three or four, and is it really a good idea to limit the hypotheses artificially right off the bat, like he's doing here? (Again, could lead to satisficing.) Is invasion of Iraq the only way of looking around without the Iraqis impeding? Considering my observation that Iraq is afraid of the U.S. using inspectors as plants, it's not a given conclusion that invasion is the only way to get unfettered access. It's not a given conclusion anyway... it's just an assumption, used to build up a chain of reasoning. You can't do that with assumptions... not in analysis, not without recognizing that it is an assumption. (Seems like Steven does this a lot.) The other question begging is whether or not that weapon will be detonated, which is surely not a proven fact in the slightest. He's engaging in faulty situational analysis here- he has to be, because there's no historical precedent that I can easily think of, and he's not applying any theory, that's for damned sure. That's fine so far as it goes, but he's not looking at the whole situation. Even if he weren't engaging in rampant satisficing that undermines his whole chain of reasoning, this sort of argument leaves any situational analysis fatally flawed.

-He misrepresents the costs of the invasion... which is surprising, because for someone who was planning on refuting my arguments he pretty much ignored a fundamental aspect of them. He said "if we're incorrectly pessimistic, it means we'll fight a war that probably wasn't necessary. That's certainly very bad for whatever nation we attack, but the cost to us of such an outcome is much lower than the effects of having one of our cities nuked." First, this isn't remotely proven, and is certainly questionable when one extends the definition of "us". "Us" as in "the United States" isn't proven, because we will have showed that the United States has no regard for international treaties and bodies, even fundamental and ancient ones like the Treaty of Westphalia. A nuked city is a very bad thing, but the breakdown of the international system may be far worse. (Or it may not, but Steven isn't even considering the point, which weakens his analysis.) If you extend the "us" to those outside the United States, then the problems of invasion become far greater, because Saddam may decide to curry the favor of a radical nation he plans to secretly escape to by using his chemical and biological weapons (assuming they exist, and Steven does) against Israel; the "us" that is Israel is therefore much worse off (nukes are bad, but there's a reason the others are called "WMDs" too). If you extend "us" to the planet, then the precedent of the United States ignoring the U.N. security council because it feels threatened by "immanent attack" means that there won't be a country on the planet that doesn't use the same excuse for preemptive attack on a weaker (but theoretically dangerous) neighbour, and assuming the U.S. doesn't care about the situation, that weaker nation is pretty much screwed. The United States would have set the stage for a true Hobbesian state of nature on the international scene, something that international law is supposed to mitigate. This might not be the case, but Steven didn't even consider it, making his analysis fatally flawed.

-his argument that Iraq kicked out the inspectors because "they were too close to finding the truth, irrespective of whether or not the Americans were using them to spy or not" is another faulty argument, preceding from an unproven assumption. First he asserts that the WMDs exist... although that's a fine one to make when making a point, when coming to a conclusion it's weak. He said that he'll proceed from that, and I don't accept it. A more important point that he doesn't address, though, is the order of importance that he places the two arguments in- saying that the first priority was to protect the WMDs, and the second to prevent the U.S. of spying. He deliberately portrays the second as an "excuse", not a "reason", but that's not an assumption he's entitled to make, as it's the very sort of argument that he uses to attack the International Criminal Court on behalf of the United States! He argues that the ICC would be "used by foreign officials to 'get' the US"; others argue that "the U.S. doesn't want to be prosecuted for all the ethically dubious things it's done in the past". Both may be right, and he acknowledges that, but in the latter situation, he reverses the "reason" and the "excuse" for no better reason than the identity of the country involved! Fine for him, an American... less so for a reader in the third world, where American realpolitik might have turned their country into a living hell for a decade or more and that has a definite interest in seeing, say, Henry Kissinger brought before the ICC and tried for war crimes. After all, if Iraq doesn't have WMDs, then the entire basis of his ordering becomes useless, and he has already acknowledged that that possibility exists. The evidence supports multiple conclusions (Iraq doesn't have WMD and is paranoid about spying, Iraq does have WMD and is paranoid about spying, Iraq does have WMD and isn't paranoid about spying but doesn't want them found), and Steven has arbitrarily chosen a conclusion based on evidence that only eliminates one possibility: that Iraq doesn't have WMDs, and doesn't care if its spied on. His analysis, then, is fatally flawed.

-he pulls a silly little side-issue into the fray, which is whether some think "the US is the problem, not Iraq". He attacks those who think that the U.S. is "too powerful, too large, too rich, too greedy... we do too much, own too many weapons, consume too much, and because of that we unbalance the world". First, he's using a simplistic cartoonish version of that argument to try to dismiss it, but that much is obvious- there's less strawmen in a Wizard of Oz audition line. The problem with this line of argument, though, is that even if they do, so what? The U.S. invading Iraq is a problem... the question is whether the U.S. has any legitimate basis for doing so. If they're criticizing the invasion based on those grounds, then deal with that, but I know I'm not, I know Hesiod isn't, and frankly the question of whether the U.S. is extraordinarily powerful is entirely beside the point except in that it's a valid data point to consider when one considers the ramifications of unilateral American action and what it would mean for collective security. It's not the only one to consider, but it's valid. Remove the "too"s inserted in there and there's nothing objectionable there... the U.S. is large, is rich, is powerful, and is greedy (how one reacts to that depends on whether or not you consider greed wrong or not). It does do a lot, it does have a lot of weapons, it does consume more than most, and there are probably ramifications to all of this. Unfortunately, it's besides the point, and any attempt to defend his arguments based on this sort of ad hominem nonsense shows more of their weakness than anything else. This isn't even an analysis error- it's just pointless red-baiting.

-Finally, he pulls out the old gambit: that "they don't think like we do", and therefore we should invade Iraq. He doesn't like that I and Hesiod use the word "insane" to describe how he thinks of Hussein, but that's because he's ascribing fundamentally insane beliefs and actions to Hussein, in that they're meaninglessly self-destructive. Hussein is not self-destructive- he's no fundamentalist, and probably doesn't even care about Islam that much except as a tool. In fact, he makes a huge, unbelievably huge error that would get most analysts fired: he takes unlikes and turns them into likes.

Which brings me, finally, to the article which inspired this entire ridiculously long post. Much of this analysis, by everyone involved, makes a fundamental assumption that Saddam, and other leaders of Muslim and Arab nations and groups, think more or less like we do -- or that they are insane.

Already, he has ruined his argument, before I could even touch it. Amazing trick, really, and I'm quite impressed. Mixing together "Muslim" and "Arab" is fantastically wrong for obvious reasons, but so is mixing together fundamentalist leaders and strongman dictators like Hussein. The entire reason Hussein has been in power as long as he has is because he isn't some kind of Islamic extremist- that's why he was a U.S. ally before the Gulf War and why he was backed by the U.S. during the Iran/Iraq war. Arguments that apply to Hussein don't apply to Al Qaeda and vice versa. At all.

(Heck, this sort of thing is usually an imperfect fit at best- Steven's trying to use theoretical analysis here, and doing a pretty poor job of it, making bloody elementary mistakes.)

Much of the rest of his article deals with Al Qaeda and their philosophy. Unfortunately, I have no problem with the war with Al Qaeda. So that's pretty much a wash. That's the real war that should be prosecuted, and which Iraq is a dangerous distraction from.

Later on he makes the distinction (which really doesn't help that much; he shouldn't have made the error in the first place) between Al Qaeda and Hussein, but once again is trying to pull together whatever he can to fit a pre-determined conclusion- that Hussein is indeed like Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, it could also mean "the evidence implies that they're similar", which does not eliminate the possibility that the evidence implies many different things, that other evidence implies that they're dissimilar that he isn't including, etc. etc. etc. Again, satisficing.

The argument he uses is a familiar one- Iraq has nukes, it might leak them to terrorists, and therefore they're dangerous. Hesiod annihilated this argument by simply asking "what if Saddam realizes that they might decide to use them on Saddam as well?" Steven didn't deal with this point except to say that Saddam would do it anyway as long as "there remains a higher chance of them getting us instead of him", which ignores the reality of "maximin"- they idea where people will reduce the penalty of a bad call instead of the reward for a good call, and which Saddam would definitely think about were his own ass and country to be on the line. Hesiod's point remains uncontradicted, and certainly valid. Steven gussies this basic theory up with a lot of utterly unsubstantiated assumptions and theories with little basis in reality, but it remains contradicted by Hesiod's basic objection, which Steven can't honestly answer, because he doesn't understand the varying interests here. (He seems to have a problem with that.) It's woefully inadequate analysis.

I mean, let's look at the risk/reward here for the action of "giving terrorists a Bomb".

Possible rewards:
-United States gets nuked. Somewhat likely, although not so much as you'd think.
-nuking of United States brings down U.S. Less likely- requires both that U.S. is successfully nuked and that it really hurts U.S.
-nuking of United States pulls U.S. out of region. Even less likely- requires that U.S. is successfully nuked, and that there's an effect, and that the U.S. doesn't go seeking revenge.
-U.S. pullout allows for pulling together of "Arab empire". Utterly unlikely.. requires all the previous data points, plus successful conquest of region, plus no other power arising to take place of U.S.

Possible risks:
-U.S. is not nuked (bomb is wasted, but possibility of getting caught still exists.)
-U.S. believes that Iraq is responsible, retaliates. (Very likely- in fact, difficult to deal with unless Iraq can somehow implicate someone else, which is unlikely)
-Terrorists attack Iraq instead (more likely- it's an easier target with little western support, and if Baghdad gets nuked Saddam is utterly screwed)
-U.S. is nuked, doesn't believe that Iraq is responsible, but becomes even more interested in region (as he's a U.S. opponent, that would be a risk, not a reward for him.)
-Israel is nuked instead (doesn't mean much to Saddam, and the U.S. will definitely become more interested in the region, which is a net minus for Saddam. He's also possibly implicated, which means that U.S. nukes him)

Sorry, Steven, but the top group doesn't justify the bottom group in the slightest. Even if Saddam had this dream, nobody can stay top dog for as long as he has without being able to unconsciously or consciously make this sort of analysis- if he does either, he'll realize that it's more trouble than it's worth. This also applies to conventional attacks- if he conventionally attacks any country in the region, he'll get thrust out- and if he uses nukes to defend his holdings, he'll get nuked in retaliation by the U.S. So that won't work either-it isn't even MAD, just AD- assured destruction. The only reason he could really have for having nukes is so that he could use them if he had nothing left to lose- to defend his current borders against invasion. And the only legitimate reason we have for invasion is, well, that he has WMDs. It's a circular argument, and very poor analysis. It's the application of theory, but application of theory that only he actually ascribes to instead of theory within the field itself. To apply untested and unproven theory is a fundamental error (even if mixing up likes and unlikes weren't), and leaves his arguments fatally flawed.

Ok, so what's the point of this long article? That Steven makes bad arguments? Well, kind of, but there's a specific reason- he talks about analysis without seeming to really understand it. He satisfices constantly, and doesn't seem to understand that other hypotheses both exist and are supported by the evidence he brings forth, or at the least aren't eliminated by the evidence he brings forth. Each of his arguments is fundamentally flawed in different ways, but all betray the dread form of satisficing... picking the most desirable among multiple possible conclusions. I'm not saying he's intellectually dishonest, but that his form of reasoning is (as I've repeated) fatally flawed. It's pretty common, actually- part of the reason the CIA recommends that its analysts adopt the forms of analysis I mentioned earlier is that they too have the same kinds of problems, and it really hurts their analysis. The fact that it is relatively common, however, doesn't change the fact that it's near-useless.

Honestly, I'm somewhat disappointed. I was expecting a grand debate on the concepts of international law and I.R. theory, on how that applies to Iraq, on the nature of the War on Terrorism, and everything else that I've critiqued Steven on for what must be going on a month now. I was actually a little nervous, because I had thought that he had this going for a while, and that I'd be crushed like a bug between the hammer of logic and the anvil of evidence. Instead, I got a weak chain of satisficing and faulty analysis, less notable for its persuasiveness than as an instructional tool for explaining the difference between good analysis and bad.

I've spent my morning rebutting this, and I have to say that I've seen better arguments in my own comments threads- I doubt Hesiod will even bother, considering how far superior his arguments are to anything I've read and responded to today. I also have no doubt that more people will read Steven's argument than my response, because he's more widely read than I am, is permalinked on more pages, and is reconfirming the beliefs of many E.C. bloggers out there, who will be far more likely to wade through a poorly-argued entry that supports their own prejudices than one that uses the flaws of said entry to make a point about analysis. Still, it needs to be said, and with any luck it will inspire some to more rigorous analysis in the future.

Lord knows, if this is the best that's out there, we need it.

I think I'll pull an Atrios here, because this comment from Michelle killed me:

Channel the shade of Diogenes? Please. I'm sure he'll actually just roll three d8s and adjust the position of his leaden legions in the sandpit that he's converted into his theatre of war-planning.

There. Now Ken Layne can't complain about the lack of funny on the site.

It would appear that I'm not alone in (perhaps) being up to Den Beste's challenge: Hesiod just wrote a well-argued and well-written response to Den Beste's (somewhat repetitive) justifications for the invasion of Iraq, including a perfect example of Saddam's rationality that I had actually forgotten:

First, we have a test case for how Saddam will react when threatened with massive retaliation for use of weapons of amss detsruction against an opopnent who can follow through: the Gulf War. James Baker explicitly warned Saddam. And Saddam didn't use his arsenal of chemical weapons against our troops, or even Israel. Why? Because he is rational, the threat was credible, and his survival was not on the line.

Moreover, Saddam has not used such weapons against any other opponent since the Gulf War.

And, we know for certain taht he WILL use such weapons. He used them to gas the Kurds. And he used them in his prolonged and bloody war with Iran. Ironically, Saddam's improving relationship with Iran proves that he is a rational actor who will do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means cozying up with a formerly mortal enemy.

Den Beste then, after agreeing that Saddam is a rational actor, goes off the deep end with this portion of his argument.

Props to Hesiod- I had totally forgotten about that part of the Gulf War, but it's about the best evidence that Saddam can be deterred that I've seen so far.

So it would appear that even without critiques based on theory (and the theoretical ones are damning enough), what evidence we have shows that the case for unilateral invasion is weak indeed. Does that mean that the U.S. won't invade? Maybe not, but it will ensure that there's no way that the U.S. can spin it to its advantage, and that pretty much the rest of the free world will remain resolute in their condemnation of the invasion.

And the Republicans were worried about Clinton losing his moral authority. If it invades Iraq, it looks more and more like the U.S. will only derive respect and authority from the point of a gun. Pity, that- despite what Den Beste seems to think, we had finally moved a little ways away from that. Oh well.

Edit: Damn, I missed this part, and it's great too:

Den Beste does not explain why Saddam would simply hand over a nuclear device to Ilamic radical terrorists, who could, at some point, just as easily decide that Iraq qould be a better place if it were run by, say, some radical Wahabi mullah? He'd have to exercise some degree of control over the operation, or risk them being used against himself. And that risk is not trivial. And the more control he exercised, the more of his fingerprints would be all over the operation. He cannot risk that his plans would be upset by, say, a Saudi or Jordanian intelligence mole in the terrorist camp would tip off the United States.

.

It's convenient to forget that Iraq is not beloved by the Islamic theocrats, but Hesiod makes an excellent point here- Iraq is a target too, and one that doesn't have much support in the West. Saddam would be jeopardizing his own regime by handing WMDs off to terrorists.. and nobody thinks he'd ever do that. Without that threat, why invade Iraq?

"...over the next few days I shall channel the shade of Diogenes, raise a virtual lantern, and seek an intellectually honest antiwar voice in the blogosphere. I expect my search to be long and ultimately fruitless, but one never knows."

Ahem. Steven? Two words:

Bring it.

Heh, I wonder if Instapundit actually meant yours truly when he talked about "all those pseudonymous bloggers [that attack] those deviating from the party line"? I know he reads this page occasionally, and I'm one of the most consistent pseudonymous critics. It'd also explain why he didn't link to anybody...he'd probably rather post an approving link to the DNC. ;)

In any case, his defense of his political non-partisanship hinges on saying that he doesn't agree with religious bloggers. While an interesting point, he's conflating religiosity and conservatism, and that's misleading... while they're connected, one doesn't have to be part of the religious right to be a conservative. Indeed, your typical neocon or quasi-libertarian online would never, ever admit to any sort of overwhelming religious fervour, and in most cases for good reason- it doesn't exist.

(Hell, how does one explain hardcore conservative atheists any other way?)

This does point out that the "liberal vs. conservative" axis is inaccurate, but we already knew that, and I've already talked about the more accurate dual-axial model (Organic vs. Individualist and Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical) that political scientists use. Leaving religion out of it, he's pretty obviously conservative as such things are currently defined. He's certainly neoconservative as Brad DeLong defined it, which is fear and loathing of anything that smells of leftism. Or that doesn't have an enormous horn.

Oh my... this bit from Brad DeLong is just great. He's talking about Mickey Kaus being outraged over slanted poll questions by organizations that work to mitigate world hunger(!) and Brad DeLong uses this as a way of showing a living example of a political transformation:

Kaus has thus passed through the third of the four stages of becoming a Rhinoceros... excuse me, a neoconservative.

The first stage is to hold that the flaws--the mighty flaws--of the center-left in American politics are important enough to more-or-less balance the flaws of the right. The second stage is to start making desperate and implausible excuses for Republican politicians and functionaries. The third stage is to lose contact with the substance of public policy issues, and focus instead on intellectual and rhetorical "errors" made by those left of center. And the fourth stage is to start acclaiming right-wing political hacks as noble thinkers, and right-wing office holders as bold and far-sighted leaders with a plan to guide us to utopia.

What more needs to be said, really? What's sad is that through the first three stages, people will still call someone "liberal" or "leftist" because of their past beliefs, sometimes including the subject of the transformation. Why liberals shouldn't be able to say "he's not one of ours- his carping complaints about our side is pretty obvious proof that he likes us about as much as angry fire ants" is beyond me; certainly the Republicans make great hay over their RINOs (instead of their, well, rhinos.)

At some point, saying "I think poor people should be able to eat" ain't enough, especially if you're playing for the other team in every other respect. After all, if all you do is spend your time complaining about how stupid and flawed and mindless and reactionary the left is, why the heck would you want to be associated with them?

The Rittenhouse Review puts their money where their mouth is, and pledges cash to the Wellstone campaign.

Count me in for moral support, at least- the current Republican party has demonstrated no reason why they should control both elected branches of government (and by extension the courts) and the Greens can only allow the Republicans to win. In the end, that's what matters- whether a party runs the show. As the Review said:

Sen. Wellstone is one of us. Let’s make sure Ralph Nader and his slavish followers, an odd assortment of weirdos who each day more and more resemble the zombie-like supporters of the psychotic Lyndon LaRouche, and who are the very same people who, in conjunction with the U.S. Supreme Court, ensured former Texas governor George W. Bush (R) would be installed as the nation’s president, don’t win another of their stupid “principled victories.”

These days, politics are for real. They are not a game. They are not a playground for a washed-up and overrated former consumer advocate who refuses to take even such basic steps as releasing his tax returns, and his deluded mob of disheveled college-aged minions. It’s time to get real. And getting real has nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called Green Party

Couldn't have said it better myself.

From the "I'm not quite sure what to think of this" file:

Upon reading some of Doug Turnball's The Beauty of Gray, I've noticed that he appears to write more in my comments section than on his own page.

I don't know whether I should be happy about this because he spends so much time here, or fearful because his own readers are sooner or later figure out what's up and come gunning for my sorry hide.

heh.

More Den Beste fun:

Steven, sitting behind his computer, has made the assertion that:

I cannot prove what follows but I'm willing to bet money on it: since the inspectors were ejected, Iraq has been going full-bore on development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. I believe that they have substantial stocks of nerve gas, probably have weaponized anthrax but I do not believe they have yet produced a nuclear weapon.

He's very careful to caution that he doesn't know whether Iraq has these weapons, and I'll credit him for that... but throughout the rest of the entry, he proceeds from the assumption that such a thing has been proven, when (as I showed a few entries ago) it is not only not proven, but sounds like a fever-dream of the American right as they thrash around for an ends to justify the means of invading Iraq and removing Saddam. (They can't do it just because they don't like him... they need some sort of justification, however weak.)

The problem, in essence, is that he assigns duplicity to one side, but ignores the possibility of it on the other. He argues that Iraq pulled a "cat and mouse game" to prevent inspectors from seeing ongoing weapons projects, but neglects to mention that American authorities have been accused by rather a lot of non-Iraqis of using the inspectors as intelligence tools to prepare for attacks on Iraq. This is a perfectly valid concern on the part of the Iraqis, and on the part of the U.N.- doubts as to the impartiality of the inspectors reflect badly on the U.N., not just on the United States, and the U.N. doesn't want to be seen as a puppet of the United States. (well, any more so.) Yes, Iraq doesn't want American inspectors, but Iraq has a damned good reason and Den Beste should know it.

His argument that Saddam is somehow not subject to deterrence is equally weak: that Saddam will arm a terrorist group, and thus gain "plausible deniability". The weakness in this argument is actually encapsulated in Den Beste's own arguments, which show that the United States is looking for a reason to invade, and plausible deniability won't be enough to stop it. Stephen knows this, I know this, and there's no doubt whatsoever that Saddam knows this. And yes, Stephen, deterrence works for nukes, too. Nukes are the reason deterrence exists- chemical weapons were only "deterred" in WWII because of Hitler's distaste for them, and in WWI not at all. Saddam wouldn't nuke Washington because Baghdad would end up radioactive glass and he'd be slaughtered by Americans three weeks after the fact. Period. You can maybe argue that a genuine nut might launch without thinking, but Saddam isn't crazy, and while he's fond of foolish chances he's not going to commit the global equivalent of suicide-by-cop.

Lastly, his argument against containment "If we contain him, then he's free to continue to work to develop more and better weapons (including, eventually, nukes), and he's free to give them to others to use against us" is ludicrous on its face. Containment can include U.N. weapons inspections (sans American intel plants) in exchange for the lifting of the sanctions on "dual-use" products. It can also eventually include "regime change", if there's a compelling reason for Iraq to do so.

Stephen has been positioned by his fellow E.C. bloggers as some sort of political authority, based (from what I can tell) solely on the length of his postings and a close reading of Clausewicz. There's no doubt that Stephen is an intelligent guy and he's certainly a good writer. The arguments that this intelligence and authorial skill are supporting, however, do not warrant the attention any more than Nick Denton's "humiliation" argument did. Those who link to him uncritically are obviously doing it for the same reasons he writes these posts, and the same reason why the U.S. government is flailing around trying to justify invasion while the rest of the world looks on in horror: instead of starting with a question and using their critical faculties to come up with an answer, they've already got their answers, and (like in the case of this post) are desperately questing about for reasons to justify the already-decided answer. Rest assured that no matter the argument made, the answer is the same: we're going to invade Iraq because the American right wants to get Saddam.

Nothing more.

Oh, and by the way, Stephen

For that matter, I also seem to have missed seeing any "alliance". (Maybe it's next to the support, under the sofa.) I see a lot of back-seat drivers, but the only nations which have acted like allies have been the UK and Australia.

You missed all the other countries that either gave material or moral support in Afghanistan, including the oft-ignored Canadians (who are also questioning the wisdom of attacking Iraq). It's also pretty damned instructional to note that the two leaders in question are Blair (who has been oft-criticized for being absolutely uncritical in regards to the Bush administration, but whose people are also questioning the wisdom of Iraq) and Howard (a loony neo-con that has his own reasons for a War on Islam.) Arguments from popularity are one thing, but the idea that only two countries among all the free world supporting the current version of the war on Islam(ism) says rather a lot, unless you're so arrogant as to think that American policy analysts are somehow granted special knowledge that, say, Canadians don't share.

It's absolutist and inane statements like this that continue to raise questions about how much warbloggers really care about the world outside the borders of the United States. Well, not so much a multitude of questions as a simple answer:

"Sweet fuck-all."

Steven Den Beste is ramming his head into trees, thinking they're forests. When confronted with the German Chancellor's (entirely understandable) argument that invading Iraq will "destroy support for the U.S.-led war on terror", he replies:

I must have missed seeing all that 'support'. (Perhaps it rolled under the sofa.) All I've been seeing is bitching and moaning and predictions of disaster and calls for restraint (by the US). Everyone seems to want a war on terror, but no-one wants any battles to be fought in it. We're evidently going to win it by sitting on our fat asses and being morally superior. This will so impress our enemies that they will cease to attack us out of respect.

For those who missed the analogy: the forest is terrorism, and the tree is Iraq. There are many countries around the world that support the United States in dealing with terrorism, but ask (rightly enough) whether invading Iraq has anything to do with that. Since most of the world isn't trying to justify an invasion of Iraq and are instead asking the question of whether it's necessary at all, the increasingly lame and laboured arguments trying to tie the two together aren't exactly making headway, and your typical European leader isn't exactly the biggest boosters of military unilateralism.

Beside that, however, is understandable unease over this "war on islamism" stuff, no doubt due to the simple fact that many countries (including no few in Europe) have significant Islamic minorities, and the razor-thin distinction between a war on Islamism and a war on Islam isn't being lost on those whose voters and (in some cases) families are under fire here. There's no reason why any country should support the United States in expanding the war in a fashion it finds odious, even if it supports the original war on terrorism (and most governments and peoples do.)

But, of course, this doesn't matter to simplistic hawks like Stephen. Either you're with us, or against us- and if you're with us, you better support every hare-brained scheme and notion that we come up with, or all of a sudden you're under the sofa. I think Stephen might want to put Clausewicz down and read some real political theory works, because he's arguing really, really bad politics.

Courtesy of Groupthink Central comes a link to a transcript of last Wednesday's Donahue show, which features Phyllis Bennis and former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck debunking a lot of the nonsense that has been surrounding Iraq. Bennis highlights the same questions I have about the enormity of the violation of international law were the United States to eliminate Saddam ("regime change" is a polite euphemism I like less and less"), and kills a lot of the warblogger-esque arguments being put forward by the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru.

The biggest spectacle, though, is Sponeck, who has spent time in Iraq and reveals that according to what he's seen, heard, and witnessed, Iraq's WMD capacity is wildly overstated. I'll quote him:

...what we see and hear every day is an attempt really to provide the American public and also members of the U.S. Congress with information that isn’t even close to what the reality on the ground is.
I think your intelligence agencies, the State Department, the government in general, know very well that what is proclaimed to be the threat isn’t really the threat. But without creating this kind of a smokescreen... you would pull the carpet away from the entire U.S. policy in dealing with Iraq as... the U.S. government is moving away from its containment policy to an occupation policy.
And as an outsider-I’m not an American, but I’m also not a fanatic. I’m simply someone who has seen recently, most recently two and a half weeks ago, I was there. I am not an arms expert, I make no claim to be.
But when I go with a German television group to two sites which are described in “The New York Times” and British press and by statements from American officials as sites that have resumed the production of weapons of mass destruction substances, and you go there and they’re destroyed, then you begin to wonder, on what basis all these allegations are made that Iraq poses that threat, even to a distant country like the U.S.?

(In response to Donahue asking why Iraq doesn't just let the inspectors in)
Mr. Richard Butler should have mentioned that. If he had been honest today in the testimony in the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee, then he would have mentioned that his organization, for which he was responsible, was misused by lateral intelligence agencies.
So Iraq is worried. The foreign minister said to me, we will let the arms inspectors come in, but on the condition that we have guarantees from the United Nations that the inspection isn’t misused for intelligence that is simply preparing the ground for an ultimate attack against Iraq. Emphasis mine

I like this less and less. I've been wondering for a while whether the chicken isn't preceding the egg in this WMD thing, and outside of the hothouse environment of the American political culture there's a lot of questions going unanswered. Still, this is incredibly important, and somewhat enlightening. Iraq has said they're willing to let in the inspectors, and what was the American reaction? "No dice, we don't care, we want to invade anyway". This makes sense; the Bush administration has never really cared about WMD except as an excuse to "get Saddam". The warblogging community and the far right doesn't appear to be much different, and this "humiliation" argument makes a hell of a lot more sense now that it looks like Iraq isn't nearly as dangerous as people are saying it was. The humiliation argument doesn't rely on Iraq being dangerous to the United States or its neighbours, so it's the one being erected now that the "he'll invade his neighbours" and "he'll arm terrorist" justifications are slipping away. It's utterly mindless, of course (why Iraq, as opposed to anybody else?) but it's not intended to be a reason, just a justification- a flexible end to justify the means.

What's funny is that all this might be an accident; a byproduct of the intense effort to demonize Saddam as some sort of neo-Hitler in order to justify the Gulf War (which really didn't need it). The Gulf War ended, but the propaganda remained, and what we're seeing is fallout from that effort infecting the body politic. It wouldn't overly surprise me, and there's no doubt that Saddam would be seen as just another tinpot dictator had he not invaded Kuwait a while back, but it's disturbing to behold nonetheless, because it betrays a disturbing credulity on behalf of the intelligentsia.

Then again, maybe that isn't so surprising itself.

I'll leave the final word to Sponeck:

A war on Iraq is also a war on an institution that the United States has helped to create, and that’s the United Nations. We are marginalizing an institution because it’s there where this discussion about how to proceed with Iraq should take place, the U.N. Security Council.

Exactly, Hans.

A little while ago, I received an email from the author of "Just One Minute" that complained that my rebuttal of Kaus was inadequate. Fortunately, I don't have to- Tapped did it for me. Ain't this InterWeb thing grand?

In any case, that wasn't my main point; my main point was that the E.C. effect (E.C. means "echo chamber" for those who were wondering) allows for selective emphasis of some arguments and viewpoints and diminishment of others. Instapundit linked to Just One Minute that linked to Kaus; all three implied something that (as Tapped pointed out) doesn't exist, but may exist, and anybody who didn't read the Tapped link would think that this unchallenged assertion must therefore must be true, just as the bazillion of idiot statements made by Rush and his sort are unquestionably believed by his listeners, despite his being caught out in enough mistakes and lies to fill several good-sized textbooks.

What's interesting for me is that this effect is somewhat restricted to certain Internet media, and isn't necessarily present in all. Usenet, for example, is a medium that doesn't allow for this sort of thing, as criticism is automatically attached to the original posting and therefore can't be selectively ignored. Webboards are somewhat more vulnerable to selectivity thanks to their more exclusive membership, but there's usually one or two that "upset the apple cart". Websites, on the other hand, are notoriously prey to selective quotation and information; but old-style websites usually update too slowly to really have a powerful effect, and without the connection, speed, and integrated community of other media, they just can't pull it off too well. They're too slow, too isolated, and too unitary.

Blogs, however, are entirely different.

They're different because they combine elements of both forum and website. They're connected to one another, they update (relatively) quickly, and there's certainly a community thanks to all the linking, cross-linking, and quotation. Because they're websites, however, there's no connection between critic and criticized; a blog can be devestatingly debunked by another blog (or anybody else on any other Internet medium), and it won't matter, because the connection between the two goes strictly one-way, and therefore commentary becomes invisible... unless, of course, the operator of the blog decides to link to it.

From this we get reinforcement of certain ideas- one blog links to another with an idea, a third links to both, a fourth links to all three, and the original links to the other three saying "these guys agree with me!" Spread this around enough, and you could have dozens, even hundreds of sites doing this sort of mutual reinforcement, and eventually it leaves the realm of individual ideas and becomes a vector for comprehensive ideologies. The slight differences between the views of any two people will no doubt create some conflict, but the reinforcement aspect will remain intact on issues that they agree on, with the inevitable conflicts merely a veneer... a gloss of difference that creates the illusion that there is any substantive disputes that exist. Each passing iteration of an idea increases its legitimacy and credibility, and if criticism does appear, the successful iterations of that idea that have gone unchallenged will ensure that the criticism will be drowned out. Even if it isn't, so what? It'll just go around again, and the critic (already drowned in defenses of the original idea) will be helpless to stop it...as how can one or even a few deal with this sort of thing?

Hence the term "Echo Chamber" and why I use it repeatedly, although I don't pretend to have invented it. The hegemony over ideas is held by the right in a large number of different kinds of media, and there are some E.C. effects that exist in other media, but it was the blogging medium that created the ideal conditions for such a thing to take place- the greatest pseudo-community that the Internet has yet seen, and the final (albeit unanticipated) vindication of Cass Sunstein's concepts of "idea filtering". He made the mistake of thinking we'd do it through agents, but that isn't the case. We don't need agents to filter out unwelcome ideas and emphasize comforting ones. As the blogging "community" has showed us, we can do it ourselves.

While I remember... thanks to Doug Turnball over at Beauty of Gray for describing my site as "one of the best and most interesting blogs out there". I have to admit that it's a little odd to be praised by the guy considering that he tends to disagree with me so much in my own comments section, but as he said in that selfsame area, "it's more interesting to talk about what we disagree about". I share the sentiment, but it's still nice to get a positive link, especially considering that I seem subject to a rather odd phenomenon where I get permalinked by a fair number of blogs, but rarely linked within a blog's editorial content itself. I would have thought it would have been the other way around considering my fairly small blogroll, but there you go.

The link was in regards to an earlier post of mine about Instapundit's lame response to a review in the New Yorker. While Doug makes some valid points about how the founders were somewhat distrustful of "mob democracy", his defense of the Senate hinges on a few points that I disagree with. First, there are actually studies in political science journals that I've read that conclude that American-style republics tend towards failure more than other systems, mostly because of their tendancy to gridlock. More to the point, though, Doug failed to engage the most valid critique in the original article: that the Senate is a profoundly undemocratic and (on a more basic level) unfair institution, because it grants far more power to individual voters in smaller states than in larger ones. This isn't the only way that small states wield a lot of power in the American system (witness the Electoral College) but it's by far the clearest and most egregious example of the phenomenon. How a nation that was built on the concept of civil equality managed to include such a blatently unequal treatment of voters based on where they happen to live is beyond me, and the argument in the article remains valid: if this were based on any other aspect of a citizen's identity, like race, class, ethnic background, language, profession, or what-have-you, the people would be up in arms. Geography is not destiny, and is not a valid reason for discrimination.

Oh, and about the blogroll? It isn't because I'm a snob, although I don't link to a site just because it's popular. (I don't link to Instapundit, for example.) It's simply because this particular template makes it somewhat of a hassle, and I usually write entries using the "blog this" widget, instead of actually going to the page. Since I'm not on the blogger site much, I tend not to monkey around with the template much. Rest assured, it's not personal. ;)

This assertion is laughable. "Kaus is burying Krugman"? This would be the same Mickey Kaus who sacrificed his credibility by claiming that everybody to the left of him is a dangerous terrorist, egged on by those horrible Marxist bastards at MWO? This is the same Paul Krugman whose popularity keeps on rising and who has been driving the public discourse lately, and who has been driving the Republican establishment (and E.C. bloggers) nuts because their carping criticisms are either ignored or brilliantly reposted on his personal page because the NY Times, understandably, would never deal with such small fry?

Riiiight.

For those who are wondering why I linked to the InstaPinion instead of to the person that he quoted... it's his uncritical and unquestioning quotation and linking that gives credibility and popularity to lame me-too E.C. blogs like "Just One Minute". I mean, what sane person attacks Brad DeLong for spelling mistakes? I can understand that Professor Glenn wouldn't want to criticize a point of view that the majority of his "Blogosphere" friends and collegues have adopted. Defending a target that so much of the blog community defines itself by opposing would be counterproductive for anybody who gains their notoriety by being a cheerleader for the medium and those who use it. He has every right to do so. On the other hand, those of us who disagree have every right to point it out. The right, and the responsibility.

Josh Marshall is taking up the question of whether Gore's populism hurt him or not. His reaction is mostly ambivalence on the subject, but annoyance that the media seems to always portray him in a harsh light. Myself, I'm seeing carts put before horses here; I keep going back to the difference in reaction between those who saw Gore's performance in the first debate at the time and those who had it filtered by the media. It's safe to say that the media was incredibly hostile towards Gore in the last election, and I think Josh is right in saying that populism doesn't really fly with the modern American media.

The problem is that people like Josh are forgetting that part of the reason a president wins or loses is the dedication of the partisans and the party that supports him. Bush had a full-court press working with him; he was being backed, aided, and spun by pretty much the entirety of the right-wing partisans of the United States and whatever right wing conspiracy does exist, whereas the Democrats were (as ever) weak and divided. They did a good job getting out the vote on the day of the election, but I think one of the main reasons that Bush kept on getting good press and Gore kept on getting bad press (aside from the desire to not "beat up on the dumb guy" on the behalf of credulous journalists covering Bush and anti-intellectualism on behalf of hostile journalists covering Gore) is because everything he said was spun in his favour by legions of supporters. To use a common sports term, the right "simply wanted it more".

Besides, is everybody forgetting the massive differences in how much money being spent? I remember that those media outlets that actually paid attention to such things brought up the huge differences in financial resources on behalf of the Gore campaign vs. the Bush campaign... Bush had a metric assload more money than Gore and was willing to spend it. Sure, Gore might have had a strong economy to back him (although he couldn't take credit for it, because the right was busily saying that Congress was responsible), but Bush had a hell of a lot more factors in his favour, and he still only barely won (if he won at all.)

Josh is right in that the media seems hostile to Al, but I think he needs to think about how far back that goes, and far deep it goes. Trying to seperate critical reactions to the Gore campaign that are happening now and critical reactions to the Gore campaign that happened at the time is somewhat pointless. They're one and the same- hostile then, hostile now.

Atrios has featured an interesting dissection of the "humiliation of Islam" argument that a lot of people attribute to Stephen Den Beste and his arguments (which I've dealt with here on numerous occasions), but which in some respects has more to do with Norman Podhoretz, prominent Weekly Standard neo-con who had a starring role in Blinded by the Right as one of the operatives who was more than happy to play fast and loose with the truth in order to get the "right" message across. Doesn't surprise me that the argument stems from him; what does surprise me is how many people are taking the arguments of a complete partisan hack as Revealed Truth.

In any case, check it out. (Including the comments section, for those interested in my take on it... I like the commentators and discussions that happen in his comments threads, and readers of this site might like it as well.)

One thing, based on a quotation of Kaus I saw on Avedon Carol's The Sideshow. What the hell, exactly, is "paleoliberalism"?

I may be no PoMo, but that thing is packed with so many assumptions, biases, political agendas and out-and-out lies that it'd take a team of English professors a week to drag them all out. I mean, paleoconservatism I can see, maybe, because it's that philosophy (at least its Tory flavour) that appeals to tradition and the past, but that just don't apply to liberalism and never has. It's just yet another attempt by neo-cons to paint their side as dynamic and "of the future", and liberalism as some variation of socialism, to be "buried on the ash heap of history". Which is, of course, entirely nonsense outside of the reflexive libertarianism that one finds in the hothouse environment of the Internet.

I'm not surprised that Kaus would use a term like that. It effectively signifies his cutting of ties with any liberal past, and allows him to keep that vital flow of positive reactions (and links) from liberservative bloggers coming his way. I am, however, surprised that he would be so blatently obvious.

(Edit: Ugh, spelling mistakes. Sometimes I wish the "Blog This" blogger widget linked up to some sort of spell checker. My apologies for the mangling of the language.)

Quite a few liberal commentators (especially Atrios) are discussing Josh Marshall's damning criticism of the Bush administration and its "roll-back on terrorism" that a new Time Magazine article has brought to light. No doubt that it's disturbing, and will hopefully put to a quick and painful death the Clausewitzian pseudo-analysis that some blogosphere types have been employing to blame the whole thing on Clinton. If anything, it shows how dangerous arbitrarily setting yourself against the actions of a previous administration can really be, like the Bushites did with the Clinton administration.

What really grabbed me, though, is this part about the attempts to equate the Clinton administration (through Robert Rubin and his non-connection to possibly unethical actions by Citibank):

It's time to say it: this is a stupid argument. It's being made by a) mau-mauing Republicans and their journalistic allies, b) morons, and c) chumps. Absent any new information those are really the only groups who can be involved. The first group I don't much begrudge. They're involved in a political fight and that's how the game is played. The second group requires no explanation. The rest are journalists -- largely, but not all, of vaguely liberal politics -- who have so long been slapped around and cowed by conservative complaints about liberal bias that the desired Pavlovian response has become second nature. In the seedy vernacular we call this being 'whipped.' The better analogy might be to the emotionally-damaged battered woman who perversely respects her abusive husband for keeping her in line.

This is why the question of liberal bias in the media is important. Not that such a thing truly exists, but because the continuing assertion of such will no doubt convince some credulous souls that it is truly the case, and the media will bend over backwards to placate the former and not lose the latter. Even if the media were liberal, it's eating out of conservative hands right now in a desperate attempt to not appear liberal, and Josh is right: "It's not a pretty sight".

Atrios has a new quiz game! See if you can identify this quote:

Goddamn you people. Goddamn you
stupid, doomed people. Enjoy your
teevee, enjoy your next two
months of economic fun. Because
it's over.

It's over, you fucking idiots.

It's over, Nader jackasses.

Thanks, to all of you. Thanks for
making this country the
mother-fucking laughing stock of
the Earth.

What I hope for those of you who
voted for Dubya, it's death. A
sad, slow death, in the night,
where nobody cares, and missiles
from Iraq and North Korea will
rain upon your fat, hydrocephalic
head.

Head over to his site for the full quotation, and don't go into the commentary section unless you've already made your guess because the answer's there.

I'll only give one hint: It's amazing how the faux-community of the "blogosphere" can overwhelm one's ideological consistency.

Enjoy!

Horowitz blathers on about IvP, as per usual, but I loved this one line:

"the West Bank must be occupied by military force, disarmed and denazified".

I'm amazed his gun-loving friends on the right haven't explained to him the contradiction between the latter two concepts. Besides that, however, what the hell does "denazification" mean, exactly? I'm aware of the efforts made to erase nazi propaganda from Germany after the war, and I'm also quite aware that it didn't quite work- that it was more the country coming to its senses than any "process". It certainly didn't quite work out the way it was supposed to in Japan, whose culture is hardly cleansed of nationalism and (sadly) xenophobia, and whose pacificism probably has less to do with anything MacArthur did and more to do with the immense psychological impact of the Big Freaking Bombs that were dropped on two of their cities? And for that matter, what the hell does either have to do with Palestine, except the enduring American propensity to think of every conflict in terms of WWII?

David's simplistic arguments don't stop there. What's up with him saying "The solution to the Mid-East tragedy is to turn the Arab-occupied West Bank over to Jordan and make it politically part of the Jordanian state?" If this were even remotely possible, wouldn't somebody have done it by now? Do the Jordanians get a say in this, and in the inevitable hostile reaction of the other Arab states in the region? Can the Jordanians give this region autonomy, and if they do so, what happens if the newly autonomous group of "Jordanians" decide to call themselves "Palestinians" and fight to get their land back from the Israelis (discarding, for the moment, the question of whether they're justified in this belief or not)? Will the Jordanian government be made responsible? Will the United States then call Jordan a "terrorist state" and invade it and replace the friendly regime with, um, a friendly regime? Will Israel attack Jordan, and annex some of the territory to ensure their security against the newly-hostile Jordanians?

Did Horowitz actually bother thinking before he wrote this, or is he content with the idea that any intelligent readers are going to consider him a clueless boob advocating useless "solutions"?

More disturbing than that, however, is the boundless confidence that David seems to have in the ability of the American government to re-educate and re-civilize Palestinian youth. I doubt he'd argue that the U.S. government does a good job of that now with its own children, and yet it's supposed to somehow brainwash Palestinian children into loving those that, in the scenario that David advocates, basically hold them and their parents hostage? Is this supposed to be some sort of induced Stockholm effect?

Well, no, of course not. It's nothing of the sort. It's just David, with his mouth writing sheet after sheet of checks that his ass can't cash. Horowitzwatch barely needs to exist when such blather continues to obviously negate itself. Who needs an offensive when the target is so busily shooting himself in the head?

Eric Alterman linked to a review of Robert Dahl's new book. The article painted the book in a positive light, and brought up quite a few valid questions about the superiority of the American system, and whether or not the Framers wouldn't have done things differently were they to have the experience that we have now. Slavery was the most egregious example of a bad constitutional judgement call, but the author of the article, Rick Hertzberg, was quite clear on how big a problem the composition of the Senate was, and how the concept of "equality of states" is problematic at best, and an example of smaller states holding the Union hostage at worst. He also brings up the fairly damning point that few other countries do it the same way, and those that have usually fail spectacularly.

All good stuff, and I was glad Alterman linked to it. Advantage: Blogosphere, and all that. Unfortunately, however, Alterman also linked to Instapundit's take on the whole thing, and upon being confronted with this reaction I was incredulous. Glenn doesn't like the article, but does a damnably poor job explaining why. He attempts to do so with claims that:

-the United States is a democratic republic, a claim meaningless to Dahl and Hertzberg's critique of its effectiveness and whether that form was really the ideal one that the founders could have chosen or would have chosen..

-that subsequent history "suggests that they were pretty damned smart to think that way", which is not only entirely unsupported, but contradicted by the examples that Hertzberg brought up..

-that attempts to make a "big deal about democracy" are somehow "propaganda", which is a transparent way of using a loaded term to delegitimize an idea without actually having to critique it..

-that liberals are only countermajoritarian until issues like school prayer or flag-burning come up ,which neatly confuses Hertzberg's critique of the structure of the Senate and the Presidency with the idea of constitutionally-supported rights, which Hertzberg does not attack and does not imply Dahl attacks,..

-that countermajoritarianism is somehow illegitimate or unethical, despite Hertzberg's arguments making a valid case that the opposite is the truth of it..

-and finally, the incredible and absolutely unsupported assertion that the "structural protections against tyranny have done more to protect freedom than the bill of rights", which flies in the face of the connection between the "countermajoritarian" aspects of the Senate and both the Civil war and the slaves that were at the center of it.

I have to wonder whether Glenn actually read the article in question, and how he was able to compose an entry with all that knee-jerking going on. I mean, half-assed attacks on political science aside... well, actually, the entire thing was half assed, so those were pretty much par for the course. This isn't a new thing, but I would have thought that the lauded and famed Professor Instapundit would put more effort into his critiques. As it is, I've read better on Newsmax.

While I'm glad that Alterman linked to an excellent article about an intriguing book, I've got to suggest to Eric that using his bully pulpit to unquestioningly link to this sort of unthinking, reflexive critique is a waste of both his time and that of his readers.

Josh Marshall wrote an entry complaining about the Daily Howler taking him to task for saying that "people never warmed up to Gore", when it was really the media that pretty much created that perception.

His defense? That it's easier to say. Well, not quite, but how else to explain this?

One can't say that people never warmed to Gore because then one is lumped in with the anti-Gore, ass-covering media conspiracy. One has to make the prescibed genuflection, stating that people never warmed to Gore because the press bought into the right-wing's long-standing and well-timed attacks on Gore's character, held him to a higher standard than the bumbling governor of Texas, yada, yada, yada.

Josh, the reason why people object to that sort of characterization is because it is incorrect, even if it is easier and puts the situation in a simpler light. While it may be annoying to have to admit and acknowledge that every time one discusses the election, there is nothing good that can come out of this sort of simplification. What starts off as a simplification of a complex situation with an understood "well, but.." will inevitably turn into that simplistic explanation. At that point, whether or not you believed that Gore was getting a raw deal "back in the day" becomes pointless, because the "oversimplification" will have become conventional and accepted wisdom. Hell, it's a pretty damned effective way of pushing a Big Lie, probably the most useful one I can think of.

Still, Josh goes even further:

In a similar fashion one can never write the grammatically elegant sentence "Gore lost the election" without a hundred yahoos writing in to say, "No, no, no, Gore didn't lose. He got more votes. He won. Bush wasn't elected, he was selected!"

First, it isn't elegant. It's short. That's it, and nothing more. It's also functionally and factually inaccurate in many respects. More importantly, if Josh is going to repeat this oversimplification and miss out on all that inconvenient truth, what's the difference between Josh Marshall and the people who (arguably) "selected" Bush in the first place? Both grant Bush legitimacy, especially considering that half the reason Bush always seemed "ahead" was because the press decided for him prematurely and therefore influenced the public's perception of the election. The only difference is that the former does it unwittingly, and the other knows exactly what he's doing and how to exploit those who are too lazy to make important distinctions.

Normally, Josh would be right, and the simplifications would be good enough. 2000 was not "normal", however, and simplifications play right into partisan hands. I hope that Josh would be willing to sacrifice percieved elegance to stymie a Big Lie.

While I'm a big fan of Tom Tomorrow's blog, I feel compelled to point something out:

Copying music is illegal.

Theft is illegal.

But...

Copying music is not theft. Period.

Copyright law and theft have very little to do with each other. Different rules, different punishments, different ideas, and different sections of the criminal code. Attempts to describe one as the other as such only reveal one's nature as either an unwitting dupe or as someone who appears to enjoy deliberate obfuscation, and attempts to describe those who point out the valid difference as mere "pirate apologists" is worse than useless. If this meaningless connection wasn't so widespread, we wouldn't be taking it on the chin every time Congress passes a new "Intellectual Property" law that serves as music industry welfare.

Atrios linked to a new and interesting blog called Pandagon.net. While checking out the entries, I ran across this gem of a post:

The trenchant fumbling for a way to refer to fundamentalist Islam has led to some fairly awkward constructions such as "Islamist"... a painful concatenation that adds no meaning to the concept (kind of like "homicide bomber", fiendishly redundant in its unnecessary particularity).... I'm not sure what prevents the mass punditocracy from calling it fundamentalist Islam.... Is it because we have such a strong fundamentalist Christian presence in America? Is it because we're used to intolerance, bigotry, sophistry and the implicit underpinnings of violence when the original text is in Aramaic rather than Arabic[?]

I've seen it said before, and said it myself, but rarely so elegantly.

It goes on to say:

Too many have, in the nearly eleven months since September 11th, reduced Islam to a man in a desert posturing in a sickening struggle, immaculate white wrap upon his head, desert-stripped gun borne on his shoulder, preaching hatred and murder. Some chortle, "Religion of peace, right," and use examples of fundamentalism as the core of one of the world's great religions, as if fundamentalists of other stripes, who may only kill abortion doctors or abuse their children, aren't just as sick, just as violent, just as despicable as those we rightly call terrorists.

Well, there is one key difference- those religions haven't declared their enmity to the United States and its principles or, when they have (as some hard core Christian fundamentalist groups have) haven't attacked it so spectacularly. After all, all this anti-Islam rhetoric started after 9/11, just as those of us who were horrified both by the act and the potential ramifications were warning at the time. Our concerns were salved by those who, like the president, claimed that the war is against theocrats and not Islam, but have become more and more justified as the net is cast wider and wider in the search for potential threats and perceived enemies.

I'd make one distinction, though: the point is not fundamentalism, but theocracy. One can be a fundamentalist if one wishes; the problem lies in attempting to turn your religious beliefs into the policy, law, and constitutional makeup of the state. Such things are hardly limited to Islam, but the right isn't going to make the comparison between its Moral Majority allies and its "Islamist" enemies. That would be political suicide.

(By the way, for those who haven't checked it out yet or were turned off by the increasingly Maxim-esque covers, Esquire actually had a really good series of stories about combat in Afghanistan. One of them was from the perspective of an American Muslim serviceman, and definitely helps one gain a little perspective on the differences between a Muslim and a theocrat.)

Sigh.

I know I shouldn't do this, as it has occupied far too much of my time recently, but I feel compelled to respond to Den Beste's latest article. A few points:

1) The claim that "There's no fairness or symmetry in international affairs. There never has been. Within our nation we try to live as civilized beings, but the world is a jungle, and despite what we'd all like to believe, it is a hostile and dangerous place where only force or the threat of force are truly effective"....

is nonsense. That was already obsolete with the Treaty of Westphalia, and was finally put to bed when multilateralism started in earnest this century. "Fairness" lies in countries making deals and sticking to them, and those deals are based more on mutual self-interest than the threat of force. The United States has done so, and benefits from those deals. Besides, there's no reason to believe that it's that much different within "our nation" either... we "try to live as civilized beings" at least partially because the threat of reprisal hangs over our heads like swords of Damocles. This illusory division between American civility and foreign barbarity definitely boosts one's American ego (to think that we're somehow special in that we obey the law and are civilized), but it's simply nonsense.

2) Den Beste is making an awful lot of assertions, delving into an awful lot of minds, and passing simple judgements on an awful lot of difficult questions through most of this piece. His simplistic interpretation of the Iraqi situation is only one aspect, although an important one. More important is his repetition of the argument that all foreign resentment and anger at the United States is rooted in a clash of civilizations. It's another big bolster to the American psyche, but doesn't really fit the facts at hand any more than the simplistic "they hate our freedom" argument does. Osama said why he was ticked off at the U.S., and while those reasons may not explain entirely why he attacked the U.S., they should not be arbitrarily ignored in favor of simplistic psychology and sociology rooted in, from what I can tell, no recognizable trends or theories within either social science. Repeating your own theories or the theories of your ideological peers as truth serves no one, even if it is convenient.

(By the way, the words "explanation" or "reason" does not mean "justification". Just in case that objection was going to spring to some lips).

I mean, this isn't a new thing: his simplistic and unwarranted description of the reason why King Abdullah of Jordan remains a moderate (he gets cash from the U.S.) defies all logic, and his cheerleading of U.S. unilaterialism remains rather disturbing in his belief that the United States should ignore the rest of the world but the rest of the world should bend at the knee to the United States. Still, it's rather astonishing to behold.

.....

Edit: another incredible assertion in the same vein:

Every nation and every people has its own agenda and its own interests. When they don't coincide with ours, they'll get different answers than we do about critical questions.

I have lamented the fact that it seems like leaders around the world spend all their time lecturing the US on what we ought to do, and precious little time trying to listen to what we think. I believe I understand why they do it now. It really should have been obvious to me; it's because it is their primary way of trying to influence the course of events. We have the ability to act, but all they can do is talk and try to convince us to act in ways which are to their benefit.

This assumes many things that are either unprove or demonstrably untrue. First, that the United States and other nations don't have shared agendas and interests that can override their differences. Second, that the United States does listen to other countries, and that other countries don't listen to the United States. They may not agree, but that doesn't mean they don't listen. The error of "I understand" shines through. Third, that the primary way of influencing the course of events is through speech- it might not be the only way, but the preferred way, which is something that the United States (or at least Den Beste) might not understand. Fourth, that influencing through speech is illegitimate, which again pits Den Beste against the entire concept of diplomacy. Fifth, that the United States shouldn't listen even if influence through speech is legitimate, because influence through force is somehow morally superior. (!) Oh, and finally, although I didn't quote it, the two ideas that the criticism of the prospects of invading Iraq are somehow not based on cost/benefit analyses and that such analyses are the only appropriate ones to be done are questionable as hell.

....

3)Iraq agreeing to inspections blows wide holes in what remains of Den Beste's arguments after the convenient and questionable psychology and sociology are pulled out, but even if it didn't his argument doesn't make sense. Why not invade Iran, who have also declared enmity and who also possess these sorts of weapons? Why not North Korea? Why not Russia, who can't be trusted to keep their material safe? Hell, why not China? This sort of justification is not suitable for invasion or regime change, but of empire, and I doubt even Den Beste is willing to make the argument that the United States could enforce imperial control on that scale.

4) as yet more proof that Steven seens to have a poor grasp on history:

I wrote about this on October 1 last year, shortly before our bombing campaign in Afghanistan began. The threat of non-support and of America-going-it-alone also hung in the air late last September, when our friends tried to get us to exercise restraint against the Taliban and hoped to get us to consider diplomatic solutions instead of military ones.

Funny, I seem to recall there was widespread support of the United States' actions in Afghanistan around the world, even if there was also dissent. Now it's all dissent, and practically no support. Even the allies that were fighting to be involved in Afghanistan (like Canada, a country that usually defers to the United States in pretty much all matters military) are questioning the wisdom of invading Iraq. Yet supposedly that doesn't matter, because they all happen to be wrong, and Steven happens to be right, based on nothing more than his absolute certainty that he knows what's going through the minds of anybody whom he happens to be writing about. Must be nice to have that kind of unshakeable certainty of the rightness of one's actions. It isn't exactly grounded in the lessons of history and of the relevant fields of study, but I imagine it makes life easier.

In the end, the simple question by one "Stuart" that started his restatement of his old (flawed) arguments is a valid one: "what gives America the right to attack another sovereign nation?"

The answer, of course, is that nothing that Den Beste has said does anything of the sort. The United States agreed to certain ground rules that define the rights and responsibilities of states and the subjects of those states. It did so as a condition of its membership in various international bodies and the international community in general. Under those rules, it currently has no right to invade Iraq, until it can prove that Iraq is dangerous to the satisfaction of the rest of the Security Council . Whether it cares or not is a different question, but the answer to the question Stuart posed is crystal clear. The United States agreed to abide by these treaties, and Den Beste himself insisted that the U.S. is a nation of laws and that those treaties have the force of law. If he truly wants the United States to no longer be bound by those laws, then let him advocate that the United States leave the United Nations, break its collective security agreements, and declare itself in a true state of nature in regards to the rest of the world. He wouldn't be alone- others have said the same thing. They might even be right. Trying to declare that such a state of nature exists when it certainly doesn't, however, is simply nonsense.

(Oh, one other thing: I just finished reading Phillip K. Dick's "Minority Report". I don't know whether the movie suits the situation as well as some argue it does, but I know damned well that the story does. The same questions that are raised by the story about unshakeable knowledge of the future are raised by the current situation, enough so that it's eerie).

Mighty Wurlitzer Watch:

I was glancing through the archives of theIndepundit, when I ran across an entry on acrylamide.. you know, that chemical that swedish scientists have been saying might cause cancer? Anyway, in order to prove that Acrylamide is overhyped he linked over to an "expert" on the Fox News website... specifically, this column by Steven Milloy.

I wasn't quite sure who this Milloy character was, but his article seemed hardly convincing. After all, since when do the Swedish scientists that brought this to the attention of the WHO care about EPA guidelines, and since when do reputable commentators use scare quotes around the word "scientist"?

Then I got to the end of the article, and discovered that not only was this guy an "adjunct scholar" at Cato (which too often means "partisan hack"), but he's also the publisher of Junkscience.com, which I had earlier encountered as the source of an incredibly dubious "debunking" of the effects of DDT that picked and chose sources that backed up its arguments and conveniently ignored those that didn't. Coupled with a link list that shows a pretty clear agenda (even if the connection to the bought-and-paid-for "scholarship" that Cato usually turns out didn't), we have an "expert" that appears to be no such thing.

Unfortunately, due to the connection between a website with an agenda, a network with an agenda, and a blogger that is either credulous or sympathetic to this agenda, we're left with quotation, argument, and sourcing that's unbelievably suspect, and an indepundit entry that's practically useless for anybody who's trying to figure out whether acrylamide is actually harmful or not.

So my question is this... what's the real deal with acrylamide, and can anybody cite someone that isn't an obvious mouthpiece with an agenda?

Well, Ken Layne was rather surprised to be added to the "lefty list" (I'm surprised by some of the additions myself... the net's being cast a bit too wide, methinks), and it promptedthis response:

I only read about 15 of these 80+ sites. Of those, I hadn't really considered any of them to be "lefty." Kaus? Jarvis? Freakin' Free-Trade-Or-Die Denton?

Have glanced at some of the other sites, but lefties generally can't write. They sound like earnest preachers. They're rarely funny. Everything's always horrible, the world is so mucked up, we have failed as a species, blah blah blah. As somebody said -- P.J. O'Rourke? -- you'll never hear a good bar described as "leftist."

First: he may be a fictional character, but somebody needs to aim Ken Layne in the general direction of Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan; if nothing else, Ellis proves that it can be done. Hell, I'll extend that to the rest of you: go read Transmetropolitan. Now. It's brilliant, funny, allegorical, poignant, horrific, enlightening, and damned entertaining all at the same time- living proof that you don't need to be Japanese or Neil Gaiman to create comics that not only transcend the genre, but transcend the label.

Second: Which blogs did he read? Tom Tomorrow, Vaara, and Atrios aren't funny?

Third: Why the hell does good writing have to be funny and unserious? I mean, I know too many "dittohead"-esque conservatives live for stupid, crude, inane and simpleminded humor aimed at their ideological opponents in order to make them feel better, but this sort of concept is astoundingly ignorant. Hell, my own namesake is living proof- Demosthenes was one of the best orators history has ever known, and he didn't need to rely on humor to make his point and capture his audience.

and finally...

Fourth: Brian, it's pretty obvious that Ken doesn't want to be on that list with the rest of us leftists. Judging by that post, the feeling is mutual. If he's going to be an ass, take your ball and go home. Let him go play with Instapundit or something.

The new story that Iraq is preparing to invite weapons inspectors is extremely interesting, if true. Various news reports over the past few weeks have made it pretty clear that the United States was planning on using the non-compliance of Iraq to weapon inspections as their official reason for going into Iraq. Personally, this bothers me much less than the idea that the United States is simply going to charge in because they don't like Saddam- it harnesses the same multilateral reasoning that prompted and legitimized the Gulf War (Saddam broke the rules and is a clear threat to his neighbours) and that has been used now to delegitimize the impending invasion.

The question that always existed, of course, was whether Iraq knew this (as is almost undoubtedly true) and whether they can do anything about it. This would seem to be an answer to both, and a fairly subtle way of playing the U.S. against the U.N. If the inspectors come in and find nothing (whether through Iraqi duplicity or because there's nothing there), then the main argument that the United States uses to justify invading Iraq evaporates, as well as the best possible avenue for the United States to legitimize invasion and regime change. The U.N. won't agree that Saddam should be removed simply because he's Saddam- as I've mentioned earlier, neither the treaties that underpin the U.N. nor the international system going back to the Treaty of Westphalia supports those sorts of actions in any way, shape, or form. The United States needs more, and everybody knows it, including Iraq. That "extra oomph" is WMDs.

Even without that, however, the mere request somewhat harms the U.S. cause. If Iraq looks to be reasonable and willing to undergo inspection, then the U.N. will no doubt begin preparations to resume that inspection, and negotiations under which that inspection can take place. While those negotations and preparations are going on, however, the United States is in almost as bad a situation as it would be if Iraq was given a clean bill of health, because any invasion would be seen as the U.S. "jumping the gun"... attempting to invade before the inspections can (theoretically) show the falsehood of the stated reason for U.S. invasion. It doesn't matter whether it's actually false or not (and it's very likely that Saddam does indeed have these weapons). The point will be that the rest of the world and especially Security Council will see one nation possibly trying to "get their licks in" because they're afraid of what investigation will actually uncover.

It might show that somebody in the Iraqi government understands U.S. electoral politics. Iraq might be hoping that if the U.S. is stymied in its plans for invasion the blame for domestic troubles and for this inaction will come down squarely on the White House. This benefits Iraq enormously. If an invasion does happen, then it looks even more like Bush is wagging the dog and Iraq looks better to everybody outside the United States; whereas if the invasion doesn't happen, it could sink the Bush Administration, and the new president won't be one with a personal grudge against Iraq for the attempted assassination of a family member. In that case, Hussein (and his successors) will remain secure.

Of course, all this depends on the United States giving a whit about what the U.N. thinks, and whether the U.S. thinks that it can invade, conquer, and rebuild Iraq even in the face of international condemnation. I have no doubt that the warbloggers feel this way, and probably most of the White House staff- but it's pretty damned certain that this isn't the dominant viewpoint at State, and all those leaked documents imply that there's rather a lot of people at Defense who aren't too keen on the invasion either.

Me, I've always considered Iraq a seperate problem shoehorned into the "War on Terrorism" using this WMD shibboleth (as if there weren't other sources that disliked the United States), and I imagine that I'm not alone in this view. Iraq's attempts to eliminate the perception that Iraq is afraid of weapons inspectors will go a long way towards the adoption of this viewpoint in the world community, and perhaps even within the United States. Rest assured that if the invasion happens and goes badly, it'll probably grow more popular within the United States as well.

There may be legitimate reasons to invade Iraq, and WMDs might well be one... but it looks like the U.S. may have a hell of a time convincing anybody else of it.

Edit: Kevin at Leanleft agrees. Nice template, by the way.

J. Bradford DeLong rips Glassman a new orifice for lying about his book and what he said at the time.

I've gotta tell you, there's very little more entertaining than watching a real economist tear a "policy entrepreneur" to shreds. I think half the reason I like Krugman's popular work so much is that he demonstrates a rare talent for this sort of work, but classic summaries by DeLong like this:

THE DOW SHOULD BE WORTH 36000 NOW!! THE DOW WILL BE WORTH 36000 SOON!! IF YOU DON'T BUY STOCKS NOW, YOU ARE MISSING THE ALMOST-CERTAIN OPPORTUNITY TO TRIPLE YOUR MONEY OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS!!

deserve every bit as much credit.

One day I hope to be this adept. (Courtesy of Atrios.)

Edit: Krugman took Glassman to task too. And by the way, anybody who hasn't gone through the archives on Krugman's official page (and the unofficial page at www.pkarchive.org) doesn't know what they're missing. Even if you don't agree with half of what he says, it's a great read regardless.

Oops.

Note to the Bush administration: when you base most of your policy decisions and defenses on a war, and when you ride in on a promise to be more honest and "grown-up" than the guy who preceded you, it's a pretty good idea not to get caught screwing with veterans' health benefits.

To be fair, these were the actions of a Bush appointee and not Bush himself, but we all know where the buck stops, and it ain't the office of the Veterans Affairs secretary. You wanted the responsibility, Dubya, so the responsibility is yours. Lap it up.

Someone should let Peggy Noonan know that the "Era of Weapons of Mass Destruction" started a long time ago.

Maybe I should apologize to Robert Musil. I was accusing Musil of incoherent rambling, but that accusation shrivels away and dies when confronted with the enormity of nonsensical blather in this Noonan article. Not being a big reader of her work, I've gotta ask: how can anybody actually take it seriously?

I'm not exactly a big booster of Robert Musil, but I loved this:

Well, Atrios confirms that he does, in fact, literally thinks that Howard Kurtz is a National Republican Committee shill. And all the little Atriettes in the comment box agree with him, too. Better that they do. Otherwise, Atrios would be labeling THEM RNC shills. Gotta keep the prols in line!

Atrios and the Atriettes? I love it! It sounds like a band you'd find in an Archie comic!

Screw the "left wing echo chamber", the "vast left wing conspiracy", or any of that noise. My vote's for "Atriettes". Thanks, Musil. That more than makes up for that "irony geiger counters" joke that entirely fell flat.

(In case the rest of you were wondering, the rest of the post is incoherent ramblings about the meaning of the word "shill" and silly attempts to draw equivalences between the NYT and Kurtz. Which, of course, has little to do with whether or not Kurtz is indeed a shill, or whether the criticism implicit in that term is correct, but since when has Musil cared about whether his arguments made sense?)

Atrios has a pair of brilliant links and quotations concerning Keith Olbermann, who left his MSNBC talk show in 1998 because he couldn't stand the idiocy of the anti-Clinton cavalcade that consumed the news that year. What really disturbed me (and Olbermann) was the revelation that people were actually talking about the possibility of a terrorist strike before the Clinton scandal really hit. I'm not saying that it would have led to real action (if I recall the era right, people were talking more about asteroid strikes than terrorist strikes), but it's rather chilling nonetheless.

(Besides, if nothing else, you have to read the comments section for some inspired trolling.)

Atrios linked to a very good article by Richard Goldstein about red-baiting. One would think that such a thing would be seen as archaic at best, but a cursory glance at Horowitz's latest screeds (and the bizarre defense of McCarthyism that graced his blog a few weeks ago) show that no such thing is true- that people can still get mileage out of calling everybody left of Rush Limbaugh some variation of "Stalinist", or "Commie", or "Marxist". Although, now that I think about it, that last one doesn't work so well- I know it's always made me think of French academics, not Russian totalitarians, and it certainly doesn't excite the middle-American "reds under every bed" McCarthyite twinges that red-baiting depends on.

What really grabbed me was the last paragraph, because it precisely echoes something that I've mentioned several times in this own space and continue to try to hammer home.

There's a lesson here about the true meaning of labels. Political correctness ought to describe blind adherence to the dominant ideology—and these days, that means American nationalism. But you'll never hear a guy with an eagle tattoo called p.c. In practice, the term applies only to those who fight the power. It's an enforcer of the order, just like its synonyms, Stalinist and Commie. In the fall of Bill Maher, you can grasp the clear and present danger of Red-baiting, even in a world without Reds. It shuts down critical thinking, and in that sense, it's the most effective instrument of conformity we have.

Now, there's no question that such namecalling isn't exactly limited to the right- just a few days ago a fairly radical friend of mine was using the word "liberal" as a pejorative (to my endless exasperation, although he was using it more in the classical sense) and the zillion "isms" that the left had conjured up to describe and pigeonhole its opponents were part of the reason why the right was able to disarm left critiques with this "politically incorrect" nonsense. A greater reason, though, is that Goldstein is essentially right- that the dominant ideology has moved in their direction, and the perils of opposing that ideology are absolutely and resolutely non-partisan. At the moment, that dominant ideology is a right-wing one (with some exceptions), and definitely such a creature online.

See, there is an additional interpretation of Goldstein's critique. He was talking about dominant ideologies on a national or societal level. Such things are undoubtedly important, but society is made up of numerous sub-groups, and each sub-group (and I'm not quite sure what kind of label to use for such things, as each one carries with it its own baggage) has its own dominant ideologies and dominant beliefs. Of course, another word for dominant is, yes, hegemonic. (It really is a handy title, isn't it?)

Here on the Internet, the hegemonic belief system is definitely a mix of some conservatism and a lot of libertarianism, depending on the issue involved and which area (or sub-medium) on the Internet you're talking about. Ironically, perhaps, Goldstein's point about political correctness is just as true here as it is in American society, as there is no doubt that to be P.C. here is to be libertarian. That's why I don't and can't take whining about being "politically incorrect" seriously here, because by and large, the arguments being (inadequately) defended are the very ones that are already hegemonic. If anything, to be political incorrect on the Net is to be liberal.

In any case, it's nice to have someone make the point as well and as adroitly as Goldstein has, and the next time somebody whines about "political correctness" on the Internet, I'm pretty confident that Goldstein has showed why they can be cheerfully ignored. (Unless, of course, they happen to be liberal.)

Comments are back up. Let's hope that they stay up, hmm?

Tom Friedman wrote an excellent defense of bureaucracy and regulation that nicely dovetails with the edit of my last entry.

What distinguishes America is our system's ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform those excesses — better than any other. How often do you hear about such problems being exposed in Mexico or Argentina, Russia or China? They may have all the hardware of capitalism, but they don't have all the software — namely, an uncorrupted bureaucracy to manage the regulatory agencies, licensing offices, property laws and commercial courts.

Indeed, what foreigners envy us most for is precisely the city Mr. Bush loves to bash: Washington. That is, they envy us for our alphabet soup of regulatory agencies: the S.E.C., the Federal Reserve, the F.A.A., the F.D.A., the F.B.I., the E.P.A., the I.R.S., the I.N.S. Do you know what a luxury it is to be able to start a business or get a license without having to pay off some official?

This goes much farther than the countries Tom mentioned above, of course- there are many notorious examples of capitalism without regulation turning into a nightmare of greed and kleptocracy, and the notion that there needs to be institutions to defend, regulate, and support capitalism isn't a new idea and shouldn't be a controversial one. Yet it is, because some people seem to believe that capitalism and the markets that it consists of are somehow alien, biological, and unknowable except through the arcane science of economics. This is nonsense, of course- markets and economic systems are made up entirely of and by people, which is why economics remains and will always remain a social science, albeit one that can benefit more from modelling than most. Whenever people forget that, though, it's practically inevitable that disaster strikes.

So we get the Savings and Loan scandal.
So we get the Russian Kleptocrats.
So we get the Albanian ponzi scheme.
So we get Asian crony capitalism.
So we get Worldcom, Enron, and all the other imploding corporations, which show that crony capitalism isn't so Asian after all.
So we get Argentina (to an extent.)
So we get endless proof that working capitalism is supported by pillars of bureaucratic regulation, linked by bridges of shining red tape.

It may not be romantic, and it may not be sexy, and it may fly in the face of those who devoutly wish that economics was a natural science instead of a social one, or that believe that There Is No God But Capitalism and Hayek Is His Prophet... but it's the truth.

Nick Denton is pushing a fairly radical idea:European Independence. Well, not independence per se, but the idea that Europe should defend itself, and not rely on the United States to provide for its peace and security. It's not a new idea, and it's one that's often brought up when people talk about "countering poles" to the United States that may arise in the future. Nick definitely has a point about differing interests- Europe and the United States are seperating and growing apart, and the latest conflicts are only exacerbating this trend.

There are, however, several problems with this idea. First, is the simple fact that the United States has an awful lot of money- it's a huge economy supporting a fairly large modern population, and that creates an awful lot of leeway for military spending.

Second: the United States is a country. It is made up of states that have given up their sovereignty (for the most part) in order to become one larger nation-state. Europe is a continent, and a supra-national body that nonetheness does not eliminate the sovereignty of the countries involved. One is sovereign, one isn't. This presents a huge problem to anyone arguing that Europe should be on par with the United States, because it would be France and England and Belgium and Germany and Turkey (etc.) that would have beefed up militaries, and they wouldn't be able to coordinate as effectively as the armies of one state under one command, which is the case with the United States. These militaries would also be quite threatening to each other, and would mean a Europe that doesn't and can't trust itself to defend itself. Hobbes pointed this out quite well when he noted that voluntary associations of military equals are insufficient to maintain sovereignty and fend off the state of nature, as they simply can't trust each other. International treaties and agreements mitigate this somewhat, but they can't completely eliminate it.

Third: the United States is not only a country, but an island. Well, it's actually a continent, but it might as well be an island, as it's surrounded by water on two sides and abundantly friendly and utterly unthreatening neighbours that depend on it for defense (and which simply can't "go it alone"... even if Mexico and Canada had equal GDP per capita to the United States, their population isn't sufficient to marshall the amount of money required.) Europe, on the other hand, isn't just beset from within, but without- they have Russia (who isn't likely to give up its sovereignty to Europe any time soon) up north, China down south, the Middle East right next door... as Brooks and Wohlforth's article about the unlikelihood of "counter poles" to the United States pointed out, the United States is a faraway, distant threat, and most of these countries have much closer ones.

Related to this point is my final one: the United States is generally more useful as an ally than an enemy. Since there are plenty of nearby enemies, and since the United States isn't an especially harmful superpower compared to some in the past, it's usually better to have them onside. It is as much in their interests to keep the United States as an ally or at the very least a neutral presence, just as it is usually in the United States' interests to avoid destructive conflicts around the world. That doesn't mean that mutual criticism of foreign policy can't exist (which is a point many bloggers don't understand and Nick Denton missed)- even if it annoys the United States or whichever other country is in question, it doesn't change the coinciding interests of the two. Europe is not going to go to war with the United States to defend Iraq, even if they feel that the invasion is wrong, as that wouldn't be in their interests any more than a hostile Europe would be in the United States' interests. There are plenty of other, better ways to demonstrate displeasure than cutting military ties based on solely on coinciding interests.

So, how can you deal with these problems? Well, Europe is, I feel, in the process of dealing with the first one - their collective economy will grow enough to match the United States at some point, if only due to sheer force of numbers, economic integration, and the end of the United States' role as the absolutely safe investment that people used to believe it was during the 80's and 90's. The rest however, can only be dealt with by one act:

Europe must become a single country.

Not several countries, not a super-national body, not some sort of collective defense agreement, none of that. It must integrate at a sovereign level, going through the same process of integration that the United States did in the 1700's to defend itself from England, the superpower of the time. This can be and probably should be a loose confederation, as there is simply too much disparity between different parts of Europe and too many ties to the historical countries. Different sub-states (or regions, or provinces, or areas, or whatever) should be allowed to keep their own culture and control over their own economies to a greater or lesser extent, so as to mitigate the effects of the single currency. Let's make no mistake, though: that the only way that Denton and all the other bloggers and pundits who want to disengage from Europe will ever get what they want and the United States will ever be absolved of the task of protecting Europe is if Europe becomes another United States. Whether it happens today, tomorrow, ten months from now, or ten years from now is immaterial- it must happen. The United States proves it can work, if as imperfectly as any other country, and the conclusion is unmistakable. The only way that one can deal with a wealthy continent-sized state is with another wealthy continent-sized state.

Edit: Unfortunately, nonsensical spouting of ideology like this is one of the big barriers to this ever happening. Glenn Reynolds says that "Europe may declare independence, but it won't take up the responsiblities that implies because it can't afford to without dismantling large parts of its social welfare apparatus, and bureaucracy in general". Sorry, Glenn, but dismantling the welfare state has little or nothing to do with the possibility and usefulness of an independent Europe- it may somewhat increase the funds available to build up a military, but the big question isn't really spending, but sovereignty. I can understand those who believe that the solution to every problem is to cut taxes and regulation, Dubya style, but if anything this necessitates more bureaucracy, not less.

Regular readers probably believe that I'm not a huge fan of Henry Hanks' work. Some might think that this is due to the fact that he never posts on the comments section of this site* without including some sort of an attack on my arguments or my credibility, and therefore it's a "he criticizes me, I criticize him" kind of situation. One problem with that: I rarely if ever read his blog, and therefore can't really claim much of an opinion one way or the other. Having noticed the disparity of him reading my site and my not reading his, I decided to head over.

Unfortunately, this is what I found:

Alterman's labeling of National Review as "far right" and Newsweek and Time as "the center" is telling. However, if there's a "far right," there must be a "far left." So what would that be? I can only see one probable answer here and that's extremist leftist groups such as anarchists and eco-terrorists. So they are now comparable to a magazine? Just as the WSJ editorial board was compared to the most extremist right-wingers earlier?

Well, it's only telling in that Newsweek and Time are definitely centrist, and any attempt to label them as "leftist" only shows how Henry is trying to redefine the center. (He isn't the only one.)

What I'm absolutely baffled by, though, is this assertion that there are no magazines on the far left. Um, Henry? Have you read Alterman's blog to any extent? Have you ever read anything else he's ever written? I ask that because he links to Tapped, which is a part of The American Prospect, a left-wing magazine- and he's written quite a few articles for The Nation, another left wing magazine. Heck, they aren't even that leftist- if you're looking for hard leftism there's everything from the "The New Internationalist" to "The Socialist Review" to several scholarly journals to... well, there's lots of them, even if they don't usually enjoy the supporting largesse, attack dog politics and loose grip on the truth that the Weekly Standard is notorious for. Why this glaring error, which throws the entire point of his post into doubt?

Sadly, not much else I read really varies much from this sort of recycled talking point. Despite Henry's continual visits to this site, I'm unlikely to return to Crooow blog anytime soon.

*Yes, the comments will return. Frankly, it's very strange to see the page without them.

Two words: Savage Smackdown.

One of the reasons I really like Krugman's official site is that he can go off on people in a fashion that would be impossible at the NYTimes. I mean, I doubt even Raines would let Krugman say something like this:

But it took about 30 seconds for the right-wing scandal machine to pounce. Robert Rubin works for Citigroup! And he was a Clinton-era icon! So he's guilty! Off with his head! Republican operatives began sending thousands of faxes; talk radio made Rubin's sins topic # 1; and Andrew Sullivan dutifully attacked Rubin in his blog. And with amazing gullibility, the likes of Tim Noah at Slate jumped on board, without bothering to check even the most basic facts.

The big joke is that the Enron deal took place months before Rubin joined Citigroup. Oh, well, maybe he had a time machine. (Reports suggest that Sullivan does - that rather than admit to a mistake he revised his post, a big no-no in the blogging world.)

Krugman is hardly alone in hammering Sullivan et al for this, but few summarize the mighty wurlitzer so well.

Hmm... I wonder if Krugman will actually start a blog down the line, once that textbook is finished up? Now that would be a fun read.

Heh. I was just going to fire off an email to unmedia about Muslimpundit's latest bit about Jihad-as-bloody-holy war (as Aziz Poonawalla is an excellent writer on the subject of Islam and the Arabic language as it relates to the Koran), and I was delighted to discover upon linking to the site that there was already one there.

So, by all means, go read it, especially if you read the original article by Muslimpundit.

Letter from Gotham's author, Diane E., partially ascribes her movement away from liberalism to, oddly enough, Instapunditwatch. A relevant quote:

I'm downright uncomfortable with sites like Instapunditwatch...He's a blogger, fer goshsakes, not a paid pseudo-pundit like Sullivan and Kaus. I have my differences with him. I can do without yet another post directing us to a blogger who thinks that targeting Arab-Americans is not racial profiling. I have reason to believe -- though cannot prove -- that after I wandered off the reservation with respect to Sully he studiously ignored my blog. So what? He's got a right to post what he wants on his blog. It's his goddamn blog.

Which is true, just as anybody else has a right to respond. And it's nice to acknowledge that Instapundit is, much of the time, about as fair in his choice of sources as the Weekly Standard. Yet she goes on to say..

I want to say publicly that I am forever grateful to Glenn Reynolds for being a clearinghouse of information about anti-Israel bias in the press, especially the British press.

See, here's the first problem- he's a clearinghouse of claims of anti-Israel bias in the press... I've looked into some of those claims, and they're based on specious and useless arguments usually based on quotes taken out of context and frustration that anyone would take a different perspective on the issue. Even aside from that, though, the earlier paragraph that Diane wrote argued that Instapundit either has a clear agenda or simply picks his links from the same sources. It makes him unreliable- you never know whether there might be a scathing rebuttal or brilliant defense that Instapundit doesn't link to because it doesn't fit his beliefs on the subject.

I am positive that the Jenin non-massacre was exposed as a fraud as quickly as it was by the amount of information that passed through the Reynolds' blog, which functions as a central nervous system of alternative analysis during crises.

I doubt blogs had anything to do with it.. it was likely the fact that the press was allowed into Jenin and hysterical rumors turning into sober reality that caused it.

In any case, this is the real problem, and proof of the inconsistency in Diane's argument. If the Reynolds blog serves as a "central nervous system of alternative analysis", then it serves a real, important function. Yet Diane's first paragraph shows that he either has an agenda or a clear bias, and perusal of any site that discusses Instapundit in critical terms makes it abundantly clear that such a bias exists, even if the simple fact that he writes for an unabashedly libertarian website didn't. This means that he's important and directly influences what information people recieve (as any editor is), and yet entirely untrustworthy... and therefore, utterly deserving of criticism.

As someone who has despaired of the unanswered influence of Robert Fisk for years, I commend Reynolds for simply holding Fisk up to the clear light of the day and exposing that man for the fraud that he is.

Rebuttal, especially the invective aimed at Fisk and his type, is hardly "holding Fisk up to the clear light of day". Fisking is just an argument style based on Usenet quotation conventions that can take arguments out of context unless handled very carefully... and I wouldn't describe most warbloggers as "careful". While it's tempting for those who agree with the person doing the rebuttal to characterize it as some sort of "washing away the profane with the sacred", that's almost never the case, and certainly not with any rebuttal of Fisk I've ever read. I'm not a big fan of the guy, but let's be honest here.

One other thing... calling the act of dumping a pitcher of water over E.O. Wilson's head fascist is an insult to those who have been the victims or dupes of fascists in the past. It was ill-advised and unwarranted (although understandable- sociobiology is a huge threat to Marxian analyses, because it undercuts historical materialism, and therefore the hard leftists that do exist in universities), but not fascistic in the slightest.

Well, now.... this is an interesting analysis. Dick Morris is arguing that the Republicans are in deep trouble down the road, because the "immigrantization" of the United States shows no sign of stopping, and the Republicans have had very little luck attempting to convert immigrants to their cause. (Not surprising... even without the constant questions about out-and-out racism, their policy choices are rarely immigrant-friendly to anyone but the most blinkered GOP partisan). To correct this trend, Morris suggests...

Powell in 2008.

Yes, Powell.

Now, I'd be the first to want to see an African-American president- such a thing would be a real sign that the racial divide is finally healing, and a real signal by the GOP that they're willing to put aside their past. If, indeed, it is their past. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen- Powell is being demonized too much by the right for the party faithful to ever accept him as their candidate- the open loathing of the State department pretty much eliminates the possibility of any candidate with a past as Secretary of State.

So if Morris is right, then the GOP is pretty screwed, because Powell ain't going to get that nomination. Then again, considering their pet neo-con wankers obviously haven't learned their lesson about Big Lies, I'm not exactly going to shed tears when they go.

Atrios is absolutely right- this is a piece of unadulterated nonsense, designed solely to shore up the reputation of the people involved (one of the authours, James Glassman, was one of the starry-eyed "New Economy" boosters that helped put us into this mess in the first place, and the other, John Lott, is far out of his field) and to try to keep the faithful happy and protect "their side" as much as anything David Brock dishonestly and slanderously wrote about Anita Hill or Bill Clinton in those pages, and just as likely to be built on a house of lies, deceit, obfuscation and misdirection as Brock revealed his own work had been at the Standard.

For those that didn't follow the link I provided (I wouldn't blame you) it resurrects the "markets hates the government" shibboleth, and attempts to use it as an explanation of why there have been enormous falls in the market over the past few days- blaming it on the proposed or pending legislation on the matter. Other than the simple fact that a lot of these drops have happened when Bush has spoken using the same kind of reflexively pro-business rhetoric that Glassman and Lott are using, the biggest question that appears in my mind is "why don't we just, um, ask some people why they're selling the stocks"?

Glassman and Lott seem to buy into the "market as alien organism" argument, but like any human institution it's ultimately made up of the actions and behavior of large numbers of human beings, and can therefore be understood, at least on a broad level, by understanding those human beings. Therefore, by studying the organs that would shape the opinions of those human beings, by asking representative groups, and by understanding on a more theoretical level how they think, one can at least partially figure out why they're doing what they're doing. In none of these cases, in no conceivable analysis of these cases, does anything like Glassman and Lott's argument come about. When the relentlessly pro-business Economist (an elite opinion-shaper) savages the behavior of American business, why should we believe Glassman and Lott? When public opinion polls (a representative sample of Americans) consistently show that American corporate leadership is less trusted than the nation's drug dealers, pimps, and/or lawyers, why should we believe Glassman and Lott? When pretty much every theory aside from the utterly discredited Glassman's theory of the "Dow 36K" argues that investors are stampeding for the door because they've discovered that they can't trust the numbers in equity markets and therefore want to invest in something where they can, why the hell should we believe this load of farm fresh faeces shovelled by Glassman and Lott?

The answer, of course, is that we shouldn't. That this is yet another attempt by the "Mighty Wurlitzer" of the right to shore up the reputation of their pet president and, more importantly, their dangerous and ludicrous market fundamentalist ideology that has led American markets to disaster just as surely as they led Russian markets to disaster- both at the hands of kleptocratic "businessmen" who are less interested in the functionality and efficiency of capitalism than those aforementioned pushers and pimps. This brand of nonsense is what they're pushing. This type of deliberate spin is what they're pimping. If you don't want to help these people pull off the most brazen attempt at a Big Lie since the "vast right wing conspiracy" began, don't let them get away with it.