The International Sentinel, the site that Carla Passino wrote the preceding commentary, actually includes an interesting entry from "Mooraq" about European and American differences:

As somebody who is daily in contact with people from every latitude, I believe a lot of this is due to the stereotypes that still guide most of our reciprocal dealings. Ask most Europeans and you will be told that all Americans are obese, uneducated and overly armed brutes bent not so much on world domination, but on covering the globe with asphalt and McDonald's drive-t(h)roughs. Ask most Americans and you will be told that Europeans are foppish imbecilles that would currently all speak German or Russian if not for the US intervention and that should give daily prayer to the US for teaching democracy to the world.

Needless to say, both views are wrong, but it is surprising how our perceptions are still shaped by these stereotypes. Take Saddam: Europeans see Bush as the sheriff shooting from the hip and asking questions later. Americans in turn see Europe as an anti-semitic continent bent on pampering Arab terrorist.

I am afraid we need some effort from both sides to improve understanding and go beyond the easy stereotypes. We have to remember that our divergences are still trivial compared to the values and the culture of democracy we share. Enemies of both would like nothing better than see us bitterly divided.

Well put.

found on Calpundit:

Glenn Reynolds links to a post by Carla Passino, who has the same complaint as Sullivan, except this time it's the Post that's too liberal and she's comparing their coverage to the Times of London. Among other things, Passino complains that while the Times says Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon if it acquires fissile material, the Post says it could produce a weapon but only if it acquires fissile material. "Two more words, an entirely different meaning," she says.

Calpundit called it "medieval scholasticism at its worst"... I just call it meaningless warhawk blather. "If" and "but only if", in these cases, mean exactly the same thing, and if anything the latter better reflects the IISS opinion, which is that Saddam does not have fissile material, won't be able to develop it without years and extensive foreign help, and it's unlikely (but possible) that he might get it from outside sources.

In other words, he doesn't have nukes and isn't likely to get them anytime soon. He wants them, sure, but I'm reminded of a saying involving beggars, wishes, and horses.

The best part is that the post in question ends with "don't you just love journalism?" Not as much, Carla, as I love "media analysis".

Every time I think this administration couldn't sink any lower...

I'll just quote:

President Bush Monday told world leaders it will be the responsibility of the whole international community, rather than the United States, to determine what kind of regime should replace Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if his government is toppled by U.S. military action, European diplomats told United Press International.

During a call to the current head of the European Union, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Bush made it clear he felt "not his responsibility to define" who or what would replace the Iraqi president, according to one diplomat

Bush "expressed the view that any alternative is preferable" to Saddam, added the diplomat.

So, we've got an administration that's willing to make the mess (for what appears to be extraordinarily dubious reasons), yet not willing to clean it up. We've also got a profound example of hypocrisy in the Bush administration claiming the importance of international input in the regime that follows Saddam, but not in the removal of the regime that exists in the first place. That's ludicrous- "regime change" is more than just busting a cap in the leaders that you don't like then letting everybody else clean up the bloody mess.

Perhaps Bush is trying to throw a bone to internationalists, but I don't that they're going to interpret it that way- it just means that the U.S. government isn't even willing to deal with the consequences of its actions. (As if the neglect of Afghanistan and Kosovo now that a new sandbox has presented itself wasn't proof enough.) If anything, this is more irresponsible than what was proposed before, because at least it demonstrated some responsibility on the part of those who were planning to arrogate the decision of which governments live and which will die.

The U.N. does not exist to clean up the messes left behind by U.S. foreign policy, Mr. President. Internationalist or unilateralist... pick one and stick with it.

Avedon makes a great point here, worth repeating:

The primaries, of course, are another matter. There, you do your best to figure out who really is the best person for the job and make every effort you can to get that person the nomination. Even school board elections are important (remember Spiro Agnew?); at the lowest, local levels you have the most power. Seats really have been won by only one vote, so people who moan about the nominees in the GE frequently have only themselves to blame. If you think about all those people who voted for Nader in 2000, imagine what they could have accomplished if they'd put their efforts toward getting progressive Democrats onto the ballots and working for them throughout the campaign. To win, candidates need more than just people who will vote for them in November; they need people who will work for them long before the general election. One reason progressive candidates have been doing so badly in the Democratic Party is that so many progressive activists have abdicated in favor of spoiler politics or even just staying home. (As I keep reminding people, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with fewer votes than George McGovern received when he lost to Nixon.)

Liberals and progressives need to nominate real Democrats and then get behind them all the way. Anyone who believes in democracy, anyone who believes in civil liberties, needs to get on board. The Republican leadership has made it clear that the only thing they care about is their own power. They'll protect their own property, but not yours. They will talk about "rights" when it suits them, but they won't enforce your rights because, frankly, they don't believe people like you are entitled to rights.

The greatest weapon the right has is apathy and "moral purity" on the left. Primaries are the place to ensure you get the candidate you want, but once it comes down to November 4th Avedon's got the right of it when she says "I've become one of those people who would vote for a yaller dawg if it was the Democratic nominee, rather than do anything that would help a seat go to a Republican."

This is probably one of the most important elections in decades. If the Republicans take all three elected branches, they'll make damned sure they can push through as much as possible on the chance that Bush might lose the presidency in '04. They're also largely united- there's a sense of movement identity on the right (and hatred of RINO-ism) that makes them much more dangerous than any equivalent electoral makeup would on the left, and a ton of holes in the judicial system that will be filled by only the most conservative nominees possible. They could push through a ton of bills, making sure that each of their sacred cows becomes law. Heck, they could even work against any sort of democratic backlash in the future, because if the Repubs win, then Scalia's probably going to become the chief justice. Then they'll follow it up by placing a conservative on the SC that will easily on Scalia's level. If not more so. And we know that the presidency work to push the whole thing even further to the right- we have a deeply conservative administration and president, and we can be sure that the cheerleading from the right will only push him farther over. Sure, he's looking at election in two years, but two years is a long time in politics, and he can do an awful lot.

If any election should inspire progressives, liberals, leftists or whatever to get out there and vote, then this is that election.

I tend to agree with the Globe and Mail's interpretation of the IISS study... it's contradictory. On the one hand, Saddam supposedly has the ability to create the nuclear devices, but he hasn't got any fissile material, any ability to create it, or any ability to acquire it, which kind of makes his nuclear program a big bust. (It's a nice make-work program for Iraqi military engineers, but other than that...) If he gets it from someone else then he might be able to make a bomb... but then again, considering what you could find on the Internet these days, most of you could probably make a bomb were you to have the fissile material.

As for chemical and biological weapons, it's somewhat less contradictory, although IISS thinks that Saddam has less than a dozen missiles that could actually get to Israel in the first place, and it's anybody's guess as to whether the bloody things would work... and apparently owing to their "impact fuses", they'd do a damned poor job of it anyway. They also say that Saddam has maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but I do wonder about Ritter's critique of that point of view... that most chemical and biological weapons degrade and that he hasn't had the ability to produce them. Dead biological weapons aren't too scary, and inert chemicals less still. I'd like to read the reasons why the IISS believes that Saddam has production capabilities, and how and why they believe that he could "resume producing both (biological and chemical weapons) within weeks or months", as the G&M said.

To be honest, I just want to read the damned thing myself. Anybody got a URL?

(I guess now we get to wait until Bush makes his big speech.)

For those who would actually want to check out such things, I've switched the privacy level on my sitemeter. I just couldn't think of any earthly reason to keep it secret when the extreme counter is public, and it's not like hiding such things provides any sort of competitive advantage. (Against who? For what reason?)

Anyway, feel free.

Y'know, considering the relatively low amount of both blogging and readership of blogs (or at least my own) on the weekend, I've gotta ask...

Is the blogosphere really just a way of killing time at work?

It'd explain so much.

Edit: Fixed a sentence.

Jay Caruso took a potshot at me today, first in a post:

(Honestly, I wouldn't have even responded to this, but what the hell... it's the weekend.)

Yep. The United States was attacked. By Al Qaeda.

Rather a lot of "imposed forgetting" going on, isn't there?

Trying to justify plunging the Middle East into violent chaos and invading Iraq that way is like a German trying to justify invading Belgium because the IRA blew up the Reichstag.

Yes Demos, attacked by Al Qaeda, and now there is evidencing surfacing that Iraq helped them before and after 9/11.

I really don't want to sound mean here, but do people who believe that the Middle East is stable and our attacking Iraq would bring about chaos, realize how utterly ridiculous they sound? 'Stability in the Middle East' is a bigger oxymoron than 'jumbo shrimp.' This was the same ridiculous argument being used to oppose the Gulf War (amongst other wrong reasons) and it's just as bogus now as it was then.

and then as a response in his comments section:

If you actually believe the Middle East has EVER been stable and that a military conflict will THEN make it unstable, then you really need a HUGE dose of reality pills

As should be obvious, Jay's using a falsely binary way of describing the situation- stable vs. not stable. Even if there is some instability in the middle east, it pales compared to what could happen, which is the exact reason why every administration since WWII has tried to protect what stability exists there. Not surprising there- he's pushing a simplistic argument, and acknowledging that degrees of things even *exist* devastates that argument almost by definition.

I mean, look at it like Pakistan. Pakistan is terribly unstable right now, yes. That happens when you have a lot of theocrats rubbing up against a military dictatorship. That doesn't mean it begins to compare to the instability that could exist there, and anybody who doesn't understand that should start mainlining those reality pills that Jay was trying to Ad hominem me with.

And as for his other argument? That "evidence" is practically nonexistent, always has been, and will remain so barring something extraordinary*. If it existed, Bush would be using it. It'd be an instant justification for invading Iraq, and save both him and others a lot of grief and effort. They would have pulled it out a looong time ago. He isn't, even though Cheney has gone on the record telling intelligence officials that he wanted the proof of such a connection to be their first priority. That says volumes.

If I was feeling uncharitable, I'd suggest that Jay should stick to taking cheap potshots at Tom Daschle, completely misunderstanding how the U.N. human rights commission works, and making nonsensical remarks about class sizes that contradict every study ever written on the subject, because he's punching above his weight. Since I'm a nice guy, though, I'll assume that Jay's just having a bad blogging week.

*Yes, it is possible that he'll pull out some sort of connection when he addresses the U.N. I find the prospect extraordinarily unlikely, however, because it makes any such address unnecessary and the entire WMD argument utterly pointless. Besides, why wait? It only means that the U.S. couldn't use the facilities and resources of its allies up until the address, damage the U.S.'s relationships with its allies, and would only work as a political tool against the Republicans who have been against it, because the Democrats have been careful to avoid positioning themselves as against invading Iraq. As a tactical move, it's weak. As a strategic tool, it's counter-productive. I can't believe the Bush admin is that stupid.

by the way..

The answer is that the picture is rather graphic proof of the one thing anti-war activists are doing their damndest to try to make everyone forget: we were attacked first. See, if people thought about that part it might make them think we actually have a legitimate reason to go to war.

Yep. The United States was attacked. By Al Qaeda.

Rather a lot of "imposed forgetting" going on, isn't there?

Trying to justify plunging the Middle East into violent chaos and invading Iraq that way is like a German trying to justify invading Belgium because the IRA blew up the Reichstag.

Edit: A little bit of copyediting. Thanks to Ampersand for pointing it out. Great cartoonist, by the way.

just to let Steven know:

It's finally sinking in amongst some that the only way they can dissuade the Bush administration is by coming up with a viable alternative, and the ones proposed so far don't cut it. Most people are now coming to understand that the existing inspection protocol was a pointless waste of time, what with Iraq in some cases resisting inspections with force of arms. (There are reports during the 1990's of inspectors showing up at a facility only to have guards fire over their heads to keep them away, while others carried boxes of "something" out the back into waiting trucks to be carried away.)

The "somethings" were documents. Not surprising, nor necessarily proof that the Iraqis have WMDs. As Scott Ritter has taken great pains to point out, documents don't produce weapons, factories produce weapons. Iraq doesn't have them.

Then again, considering that the whole post is an attempt to discredit the notion of inspections because (I'm paraphrasing here):

-"Iraq doesn't want them" (contradicted by their own statements),

-"nobody else would want Americans to command them" (based on what?),

-"the forces wouldn't be trustworthy" (and America is? I seem to recall scandals involving U.S. intel plants helped create this problem in the first place)

-"they would be ambushed by Iraqi forces" (Saddam is not that stupid)

and the big one:

-"Iraq is going to get a bomb within a few years, and the inspectors would never find it in time" (based on little but Steven's own unsupported assertions that because finished weapons can't be found, the facilities with which they are produced can't be found either, and Iraq is so close to having nukes that this is actually an issue.)

Personally, I have to bring up a timing question here. Why now? Why wouldn't Saddam have developed the weapons before now, or still have a long way to go before he could get anywhere near deployment capability? Sure, 9/11 was a huge event in the U.S. and for Al Qaeda, but it doesn't change the pace and nature of Iraqi nuclear research one whit.

Let's be honest here. The opposition to inspections from parties both offline and online has nothing to do with their accuracy or their efficiency. The case for invasion of Iraq has never had much at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. It's about a created villian that we let go when we could have killed him. It's about the desire to create a friendly client state in the region. It's aboutt he unwillingness of neoconservatives to admit that their opponents might have a point. It's about the pseudo-realist doctrine that the United States should ignore interests it has in common with other states in favor of perceived interests that differ from them. And, of course, it's about the need for an illusory focus for a focus-free war that, if handled logically, would have precious little to do with the internationally isolated, largely disarmed and utterly secular Iraqi regime.

Period.

I hate to attack such a popular guy, but what on earth is Lileks talking about?

In just 18 months, this administration has made drastic changes in the United States' approach to preserving world peace. They denounced and discarded the ABM Treaty, the no-first-use doctrine and several international accords. The first two were linchpins of international stability in the nuclear age. The last were imperfect, but important, products of nations working together to create a better world.

Linchpins of stability. Snort. Let’s assume that the US had completely, utterly, unilaterally disarmed in the 70s and 80s, while holding on to the ABM treaty and the no-first-use doctrine. There would be red flags over Paris. Well, more than usual. Without a credible deterrent, those “linchpins” were cardboard shields.As for the “several international accords” Dayton mentions, his priorities are revealed: “important” trumps “imperfect.” The tangible effect on US security and strength matters less than the shiny-eyed groping towards “a better world.” Whether a "better world" might result from a planet rid of the Taliban, the Tikrit mafia, and any other changes the coming war will force on the Middle eastern satrapies isn't even considered, because they did not originate in a position paper penned by a UN diplomat who has lunch with his Syrian counterpart and tears up his parking ticket when he returns to his double-parked limo.

Nowhere in the quoted section does Mark Dayton even make a peep about unilateral disarmament, so why does Lileks feel the need to build up a particularly precarious strawman? Absent that strawman, what exactly is wrong with Dayton's statement? The ABM treaty and no-first-use doctrine enshrine the idea of MAD, which was deeply disturbing but still key to preventing both conventional and nuclear war during the Cold War.

For that matter, what's with Lilek's baffling misinterpretation of the word "imperfect"? He seems to have that common hawk misconception that warfare is a magic wand with which one can make problems magically disappear, instead of a dangerous and chaotic tool that should be used only when necessary and with great care when such situations occur.

(I won't address the misconception of the word "interest" that occurs later on in the article, except to say that it's sad that some people seem to think that the it's against U.S. interests to have good relations with other countries.)

I don't know; although I do think that it's more and more likely that war is inevitable (whether it's just, necessary, or honest or not), the arguments in favour of it and the rebuttals of those who are against it get weaker and weaker by the day. It's gone beyond dangerous and annoying to just somewhat, well, dull.

You have GOT to be kidding me.

Courtesy of Les Dabney comes the latest spin from the idiot right: the idea that Scott Ritter is an Iraqi agent. The usual suspects (Newsmax, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, etc.) have been passing around the story that Ritter was given 500 thousand by the Iraqis to make a video. Les quotes an interview with Ritter where he takes down these ridiculous charges, and it's pretty obvious he's mad as hell:

Basically, if they call me an Iraqi agent, they're accusing me of committing a crime against my country. I find that to be a horrible charge, the absolute worst charge you could make against someone, anyone, whether they're a former Marine or whether they were serving their country in another way, as a worker or an office manager or what have you. You can't make these charges lightly. The fact that I am sitting here talking to you right now, with so much attention being put on me by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations, speaks volumes as to just how clean I've been. Shame on them. These are baseless charges being brought by people who are unwilling to debate the message that I am trying to get out, so they take the cheap tactic of attacking the messenger.

(Italics mine.) I encourage you to check out Les' more detailed quotation of the interview so that you'll be forewarned and forearmed when some idiot tries passing this off as legitimate, but I personally want to highlight how downright evil it is to use this sort of tactic against critics that make you uncomfortable. It's dishonest, it's disgusting, it's fascistic if not Stalinistic, and it's against everything that conservatives profess to hold dear.

Yet more proof that neo-conservatives have nothing but contempt for the traditions that conservatism is supposed to stand up for. No wonder the Bull Moose left.

Ignatz (by Sam Heldman) comments on that whole "southern liberals are guilt-ridden" line being pushed by Sullivan et al:

So far, it appears, I am the only person in the world flabbergasted by the arrogance of the suggestion that Southern liberals don't really have honest and considered opinions as other folks do, just manifestations of personal psychology.

...[R]ather than trying to figure out why Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus say the silly things that they do (is it that the former is ashamed of being British and therefore looking for someone to look down on, and the latter was taunted about a certain Disney character in elementary school?), I eagerly await their belated recognition that they have said something silly, or their explanation that everybody's political opinions are just psychological symptoms. And yes, you can see that this is getting under my skin a bit.

The weird thing about that whole sort of argument is that anybody who's come within shouting distance of Brock's book (and I'm tempted to set up a bloody Amazon connection, I've been hyping it so much) knows that neo-cons can be accused of a whole laundry list of psychological hang-ups and disorders. Why on earth would a group that is so vulnerable to such criticism itself attempt to use such tactics on others? Projection? The desire to "do it to them before they do it to us?" Or is it just an unwillingness to admit that a liberal might actually say something intelligent?

O. Dub has managed to summarize every warblog ever written.

Judah Ariel gives me a little hope:

Hopeful survery results from Search for Common Ground:

80% of Palestinians would support a large-scale non-violent protest movement and 56% would participate in its activities.

78% of Israeli Jews believe that the Palestinians have a legitimate right to seek a Palestinian state, provided that they use non-violent means.

A strong majority (62%) of Palestinians thinks that a new approach is needed in the Intifada and overwhelming majorities (73-92%) approve of Palestinians using various methods of nonviolent action.

Perhaps the cries of "paleostinians" are a little premature. As well as being, y'know, offensive as hell and deliberately stupid and whatnot.

(How much you want to bet this little study doesn't end up on LGF or Instapinion?)

Krugman, once again, shines a light:

if history is any guide, many reporters will soon return to their usual cringe. The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media — fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of "balance" — won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown.

...Once an administration believes that it can get away with insisting that black is white and up is down — and everything in this administration's history suggests that it believes just that — it's hard to see where the process stops. A habit of ignoring inconvenient reality, and presuming that the docile media will go along, soon infects all aspects of policy. And yes, that includes matters of war and peace.

The trouble is that eventually reality has a way of asserting itself. And in case you are wondering, ignorance isn't strength.

Whether you agree with Bush's policy positions or not, the methods by which he advances those positions are obviously dishonest. Then again, with a media desperate to accomplish the impossible task of pleasing neocons crying "liberal bias" in order to further their agenda, why not?

Josh calls it:

It's always irksome to lean in to defend someone who's wrongly accused, only to see them buckle and beg forgiveness because they can't stand the heat. But that's precisely what's happened here. Say what you want about the Times, or anti-regime change bias, whatever. The Tyler/Purdum article's characterization of Kissinger was right on target. I've explained why several times already so I won't do it again here. (For a really good explanation see this new article by John Judis.)

Josh, and the case of the NYT, has shown us something important: Big Lies work. They work well. In fact, they work spectacularly. Repeat it loud enough, and often enough, and stridenly enough, and you will wear down those who disagree because either they aren't numerous enough, not powerful enough, or not strong enough to resist it.

Who knew it would be so easy for a few conservative columnists and their yahoos-in-waiting to bitch-slap the Times into saying that up is down or humiliate two good reporters who zigged when the neos were demanding a zag?

Right over here, Josh. There's a reason I started this blog: it's everywhere, and it's appallingly easy. Frightening, too... not just because of the examples that we know about, but all the ones we don't.

Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles (which is a great read; if you haven't been there, check it out) has an excellent entry about what he calls "lies-to-children". I'll let him explain:

Terry Pratchett has a great phrase he uses to describe the way we "dumb things down" to explain them to people who lack the background to understand the real situation: "lies-to-children" (its first appearance may be in The Science of Discworld, though the idea certainly exists in Hogfather). The explanation you give when you lie to children isn't really true, but it's close enough to the truth to get the basic idea across, and you figure you can correct the misapprehension you've created sometime later, when the children are a little older.

It's like when we teach children that we vote to elect the President of the United States. In reality, we vote to choose electors, and the Electoral College votes to choose the President, except if nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes, in which case the task passes to Congress, unless it's a year that ends in three zeros, when-- but by the time you get there, their cute little eyes have already glazed over, and you fall back on "we vote to elect the President." You can explain the real process later-- barring a truly bizarre set of circumstances, they don't really need all the details.

Lies-to-children needn't be told to actual children, of course. The cocktail-party explanation of what it is that I do for a living (on the research side, at least) is a lie-to-children, whatever the age of the people I tell it to. Lies-to-children are part of the price of doing business in a technical field. The tricky part is crafting the lie in such a way as to minimize the amount of damage done through misinformation.

Being a site about science, not politics, Chad takes this concept and uses it to explain why scientific education is tricky, but it's as applicable to politics as well. Many of the principles, ideas, and concepts that people use in political debate on a popular level (when such debate exists) are based on these sorts of "lies-to-children".. where complex political or economic concepts are "dumbed down" so that the general public doesn't have to learn the sometimes extensive rationales and bases that these ideas come from. This is especially pronounced in popular economic debate, but it's present in politics as well. Political philosophy and political theory can be just as complex, as anybody who has had to wade through the first twelve chapters of "Leviathan" can attest. Nowadays it's in some respects even worse, because a lot of the empirical work in the field is based on either some sort of statistical analysis or the application of game theory.

There's a lot of problems with this. Sometimes these sorts of "lies-to-children" are deliberately crafted to support a point of view. This is the difference between science and politics; politics is usually a means to an end, and simple arguments often convince people better than more complex ones. Complex arguments often contain flaws or assumptions underlying the work that are almost inevitable due to their complexity, but a simple argument can be straightforward enough to be nearly ironclad, whether it's correct or not. It also tends to appeal more; people look for simple answers so as to order and understand the world around them.

Sometimes a simple answer isn't some sort of political weapon- as in Chad's example, it might be a genuine attempt to explain a complex system using simple concepts. Unfortunately, once a simple answer enters into the public consciousness it becomes incredibly difficult to dislodge. Qualification, complexity, and nuance is ironed out in the search for simple answers and simple solutions. Eventually, it usually displaces and competes with the complex answer itself. If it wins (and it usually does), you end up with products that rarely resemble the works that started them.

In some respects this process is necessary in order to influence the public or at the very least help them to understand the true conflicts involved, but it's highly dangerous, because any simple argument contains a number of complex assumptions, and those assumptions themselves might be controversial. Since the simple arguments require them, though, and since people depend on these simple arguments to explain the world around them, any attack on those underlying assumptions becomes a direct threat to someone's worldview, and all you get as a response is cognitive dissonance.

The world isn't simple, folks, and neither is politics. Anybody pushing simple answers, whether well-meaning or not, is usually lying to you. Whether or not it's in your best interests and in a sincere attempt to assist you in understanding something that's complex, there's complexity behind it. Without understand that complexity, you're functioning at a disadvantage, and neither do not nor cannot understand what's really going on.

I hadn't read Jason McCullough's "Hronkomatic" much, but I'm somewhat tempted to run through the archives after reading this jab:

This article, linked from Instapundit, is the silliest justification for invading Iraq so far I've seen.

Construction at the Abu Ghurayb Presidential Palace features extensive and complex water works. U.S. government web site notes that the Iraqi officials claim extensive crop damage due to drought. Photo shows use of scarce water resources to ensure that the lakes of Saddam's palaces are filled and grounds are well tended. CREDIT: U.S. Department of State.

Filling your swimming pool when there's a drought on = justification of overthrow, apparently. The suburbs of the U.S. better watch out.

There seems to be a fundamental confusion here between liberalism and realism (in the IR sense). A realist doesn't pay attention to the morality of different countries, but to their (converging and diverging) interests. A liberal, on the other hand, pays attention to the morals, but must also (in order to avoid inconsistency) look at the morality of the warfare itself in addition to the morality of the actors that is being used to justify the warfare. Yes, Saddam might be causing poverty and hardship, but the chaos that an invasion would case would create more hardship, and (very likely) a bumper crop of corpses to go along with it before everything settles down.

If one is going to argue morality, then look at it in its totality, not whichever facet you find useful.

Yeesh, now I know why Instapundit doesn't normally have a comments section: you end up with drek like this, with dozens of RightThink-spewing automatons, mistaking ad hominem attacks for legitimate criticism. A few stand out (at least Jane Galt made legitimate points, and both "pj" and Jason McCullough did their best to stand against a sea of blather), but by and large...feh.

By the way... thanks for the link, Ampersand.

One odd thing, though; Ampersand referred to one of my earlier entries as an "essay"... I just thought of it as an entry. I'm constantly forgetting just how much of an anomaly long postings are in blogdom, and a post that I think of as, y'know, adequate length is probably a monster to everybody else.

Well, not everybody.

Seeing The Forest did a little research:

I did something fun today. I went to the Heritage Foundation's PolicyExperts.org and looked up some right-wing organizations. All I did was sort by "National Research Organizations" so it shows me the entire list.

Then I started picking a right-wing organization at random and going to Cursor's Media Transparency to see who is funding them. I did this several times. Guess what I found? There are hundreds of right-wing organizations, but they are almost all funded by a foundation whose name contains Scaife, Olin or Bradley, and a few others.

The public, the media and policymakers think they hear a wide range of voices. For example, you might see on C-SPAN or MSNBC a panel with experts from five or six different organizations. But in fact the likelihood is you are hearing the voice of Scaife, Olin, Bradley or one or two other billionaires. NO WONDER so much of the national policy debate is about giving huge tax cuts to billionaires!

Try it yourself.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not about to rail against these organizations and those that fund them. What always astounded me, however, is how relatively cheap the whole enterprise is. According to David Brock, Scaife funds the whole thing for, what, 57 million or so a year? That's chump change; easily matched by someone who wanted to support the media and research arm of any liberal movement.

The catch, of course, is that there is no such movement, so how could you fund it? Between far leftists attacking the center-left in order to ensure that they're sufficiently "radical", "critical", and free of supposed hypocrisy and centrist neo-liberals (like Mickey Kaus) bashing everyone to the left of them in order to disassociate themselves with the far left and ingratiate themselves with the right, there's more movement apart than together. It's a shame. If there's one thing that the neo-cons have taught everybody else, it's that a sense of movement identity, properly channeled and exploited, can lead to extraordinary power and influence.

Warren Ellis has a weblog! Go read it, dammit!

And if you don't know who Warren Ellis is, you obviously haven't read Transmetropolitan yet. Which means that you have something to do this weekend.

Very nice breakdown of the concept of "libertarian socialism" over at Lake Effect. I tend to refer to such things as "left-anarchism" myself, but perhaps that label isn't quite accurate, and it's refreshing to read both a treatment of Noam Chomsky's politics that isn't base namecalling and an examination of the politics of the far left that looks at it as it actually is, instead of as one wants it to be (ie, TransProg.)

And to resolve an instant question: no, "libertarian socialism" is not self-contradictory. He explains why.

Avedon weighs in on the attempt by SDB to recruit feminists into the War on Islam. She ain't happy:

I have been trying to come up with a response to this rant from Den Beste but I just keep sputtering. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gah! is it wrong! Back in the '70s when I used to try to warn folks about the increasing danger of Islamofascism, the only people I could get to listen to me were the women's libbers and a few other lefties. And where were the conservatives? Why, they were telling me that all that abuse and oppression was the way things should be.

The people who are suddenly talking about the oppression of women as an excuse for war are, to my mind, coming awfully late to the cause - and not, I think, in good faith. I'm not going to jump on their bandwagon just because they are trying to hitch a ride on mine.

This is serious business. We really don't need this kind of sophistry thrown into the mix. I want to see people freed, but I don't think rewriting history is going to achieve that.
(Sorry to disappoint, Ginger, but I'm just inarticulate with disgust.)

Hardly inarticulate. Still, no matter how long the subject piece, all that's needed sometimes is a well-timed "Horseshit".

Well damn... looks like I didn't make it onto Altercation after all. Ah well; I'll have to try harder next time.

(Pity I've been busy over the last week or so; Jeralyn from TalkLeft probably noticed that I been sporadically updating and thought it was permanent or something.)

Then again, the additions are all great stuff, so I have no complaints. And it's not like I'm a heavy permalinker either, so I probably shouldn't complain anyway. Heh.

Sadly, as one friend of mine put it recently, the internet is something of an 'echo chamber,' and this means that even the flimsiest vitriol gets posted and reposted, annotated and updated ad nauseam until the accumulated pettifogging becomes a kind of beslobbered palimpsest that looks and reads like a snot rag.

Hey, don't look at me. She must have got it from somebody else. I happen to like the Rittenhouse Review, and somehow doubt that she's going to remember the E.C. effect when she's passing on the latest factoid about the demonic, monolithic "Left". No doubt, though, that this is going to be a useful quote for future Norah critics.

Poor Sully. Fact-checked beyond all recognition, forced to write articles for a site that's pretty obviously just using him to create some controversy (against their readers, for some reason) now that nobody can take David Horowitz seriously, and reduced to arguing against the obvious.

Now you may agree or disagree with the idea that Iraq is a state that sponsors terrorism. You may agree or disagree that such states should be opposed or attacked. You may have all sorts of reasons to oppose a war on Saddam. But to argue that the Bush administration has never been clear about this, that it has only recently conjured up a campaign against Saddam, or that "another war" has been "grandfathered" onto an old one, is ludicrous on its face. The issue of Iraq was on the table before the campaign against the Taliban had been waged; it was on the table before Enron hit the headlines; it was on the table when Bush's ratings were in the stratosphere; it was on the table as long ago as 1990 when Colin Powell, in the last Gulf War's endgame, helped pave the way for our current predicament.

This was the closing paragraph of his most recent article in Salon. When I read this I was rather surprised. Does anybody honestly not believe that Iraq was on the agenda regardless of whether or not it actually had any ties to terrorist organizations? Even if the Rumsfeld memo didn't imply it, many of the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration had been making the argument that invasion of Iraq is a necessity long before they came into power, and certainly before 9/11. The attacks didn't change the goal, just the rhetoric- the start of the War on Terrorism prompted a change of tactics, but not the ultimate target, which had been around (as Sullivan acknowledged) since 1990.

I mean, some of the things Sullivan says makes me wonder whether he even cares about credibility. How on earth did Colin Powell "pave the way for the current mess" in 1990? Not invading Iraq had precisely nothing to do with Al Qaeda's attack on the United States; it can be argued that the Gulf War itself did, but certainly not the decision by the previous Bush administration to obey the U.N. resolutions and restrict their actions to the liberation of Kuwait. Iraq had little to nothing to do with Al Qaeda- if such a connection existed, it would have long ago been trotted out in order to support the invasion. Sullivan's citation in the article of the belief that Saddam had something to do with it that existed shortly after the attack doesn't explain anything now, either; at first we didn't know who was responsible, but we do now. Quoting former CIA chief James Woolsey as saying that they need to "develop some confidence that Iraq is involved in terrorist incidents against us, not meaning Sept. 11" right after the attack misses the point: that confidence never was developed, and we need to function knowing that, not in denial of it. His examples of the assassination attempt on Bush the Elder and the (supposed) development of WMDs as "terrorist acts" is absurd on its face; the latter would make half the countries on the planet terrorists (including India and Pakistan) and the former tactic has been endorsed by the Bush administration itself. That doesn't make the U.S. a terrorist nation, of course- it means that such acts aren't terrorism. Saddam may be a thug, but he's no terrorist.

Without that connection, then what's the point of attacking Iraq in order to forward a war on terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda? Very little- at best, it's useful to create a (theoretically) friendly regime in the region (which we don't need, and already have in countries like Jordan), and to protect the U.S. against the incredibly dubious threat of Saddam passing WMDs to terrorist organizations that are about as friendly to Saddam as Bush is. The harm done by this sort of invasion probably outweighs the benefit, but whether that's true or not, it means precisely nothing when it comes to actually dealing with terrorist organizations...they will still have failed states to operate within, friendly regimes that the United States can't touch as they weren't demonized a decade ago (like Pakistan, which is absolutely untouchable, and is one revolution away from arming terrorists with as many nukes as they desire), sources of funding, and an increased zeal to attack the United States and its allies.

I'm not the only one that's come to this conclusion.. practically every government outside the United States has (including those in the first world) and the split within the formerly united Republican party speaks volumes. The Democrats can't critique the administration for political reasons, but that doesn't mean they agree either. More and more, no matter from what angle you look at it, Sullivan is wrong- Iraq is another war, another battle, one that predates the war with terrorist organizations (started by Al Qaeda, not Saddam) and is barely related to it. Nobody's buying the administration's arguments anymore. If Sullivan keeps on parroting them, nobody's going to buy his, either.

If that's the case, then by definition the war on Iraq is "grandfathered in". Despite administration rhetoric to the contrary, it predates the war on terror and is only dimly related to the real targets and stated goals . The Bush administration saw their opportunity to justify the war that they had been calling for for a decade within the new paradigm of a war on terror, and they took advantage of it. Whether or not this war has anything to do with or real terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda has nothing to do with it. Sullivan's (or Dubya's) transparent attempts to try to shoehorn Iraq in won't change that.

I know I start a lot of entries with this lately, but...

huh?

Jay Reding, in reaction to the TRR article I referred to earlier, had this to say:

Look, if you're going to make an argument, tossing out some ad hominem attacks isn't the way to do it. In fact, I'd love to see the Review, or any other leftists go on the record and say that a free and democratic Middle East is a bad thing. It would be great to hear them say that Iran should remain an oppresive theocracy rather than be allied with the US. If they're going to start that line of reasoning, they should finish. Let's get all the Left on the record as being anti-capitalism, anti-freedom, and anti-American. The American people deserve to see the real face of the Left.

Jay, as long as you're pulling out absolutely absurd charges (in the same entry with which you define selective quotation as "ad hominem"), why not just say "anybody who doesn't want the United States to invade the Middle East rapes kittens for fun and profit" and be done with it?

As always, nobody argues that democracy is a bad thing, least of all the Rittenhouse Review (which is, like everybody else, no member of a monolithic Left.) The question is whether or not the methods advocated by people like Michael Ledeen would a) work and b) create more problems than it solves. To pull out absurd arguments that say that "if you don't agree with my pet solution you're evil and deserve the scorn of all right-thinking Americans" only makes your own arguments look that much weaker.

In the comments section of my post on Saddam: myth vs. man (or whatever), a few people pointed out that Iraq is simply the first step- that the fact that Saddam is really just another dictator who happened to invade the wrong country at the wrong time is meaningless because he's only the first of many dictators that will be the subjects of American intervention. This isn't a new theory, although I hadn't been directly addressing it, preferring to stick with the simpler question of invasion of Iraq and what it would mean for the concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy, as well as the usefulness of deterrence. (I might set up a "best of" link on the side so I can simply point people in the right direction... at the moment, however, a quick trip to the most recent set of archives should turn up ample links to this sort of thing.)

However, as seen on The Rittenhouse Review, this sort of argument is becoming more mainstream, now being found on the pages of the Wall Street Journal in this article by Michael Ledeen, whom TRR calls "the most dangerous man in the world".

TRR isn't exactly sympathetic:

The über-hawk advocates not just one war but four wars, or more accurately, one gigantic, almost simultaneous war against Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, in that order. (Not Libya?)

Not surprisingly, Ledeen's contribution to the national debate includes some of the most dubious propositions and questionable assertions currently in circulation, all presented with an arrogant certaintude that displays a complete disregard for history, politics, religion, and, indeed, humanity.

Not that this is anything of a surprise, of course, but TRR follows up with a series of quotes from the article in question. TRR quotes a whole laundry list, but I'll just bring up one or two.

"If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support."

Um, no. Whether they have sympathy for democracy and the West or not (and why would they? Baghdad and Tehran are the home of the "Axis of Evil") they're not going to be friendly to an invading foreign power that has been demonized by their society for a generation. Whether that demonization is valid or not is unimportant- it exists, and it must be acknowledged. Any attempt to democratize the Middle East is going to be the act of a foreign power against a hostile citizenry, especially if it follows up an invasion.

(This will be especially true if the situation in Afghanistan doesn't improve, because it will prove their belief that American attempts at societal change are flighty, unserious, and transitory, to be overlooked when the Next Big Thing comes along.)

This is the other one that caught my eye:

"This war cannot be limited to national theaters; we face a regional challenge and must respond accordingly. But it is both a just war and one for which we are marvelously well suited."

Actually, the United States is unique in how badly suited it is for just such an enterprise. This the heart of the (oft-overstated) leftist critique- that the United States cares little for democracy and liberality outside of its own borders, and will act against it when its interests are involved. The United States might be uniquely suited to armed intervention, but any attempt by the United States to effect democratic change is going to be resisted hard, and long, and through the use of endless examples of American hypocrisy. Whether or not these charges are true or not is immaterial; the simple reality is that the United States is not seen internationally as either a disinterested party, an honest broker, or a force for democracy outside of its own narrow interests, and that perception will poison any attempts by the United States to introduce liberal secular democracy into the region. Even if it's done with the best intentions, nobody will believe it. While it's a valid goal and something that needs to be done anyway, attempts to force or cajole the Middle East into doing what the U.S. wants them to do will almost definitely backfire. The U.S. has too much of a history- somebody else needs to do it.

Who that "somebody else" should be is, of course, the question. I have an idea in mind, but I'll save that for later.

Courtesy of Atrios:

Media Whores Online discovered that:

CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

..."Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

This was pretty obvious to everybody who wasn't swept up in the hype, but it still bears repeating: the cases for and against invading Iraq predated the War on Terror and are only dimly and remotely related to it. An invasion of Iraq is not just another theatre in the wider war- it is a seperate conflict, roped in for P.R. purposes. (Well, aside from all those "strategic" analyses that presume to use Iraq as some sort of base of operations for a war against Arabs.)

Does anybody else find it ironic that Andrew Sullivan is hyping the fact-checking abilities of the Blogosphere:

I love the fact that the self-important pooh-bahs at 43rd Street now have to worry that they'll be corrected on a daily basis by a bunch of former nobodies. Go, Instapundit. It helps defuse the self-serving pomposity of much of the journalistic clerisy

...when I doubt there's anybody outside of Ann Coulter who's been more thoroughly and consistently fact-checked right out of the ballpark than Sullivan himself? And for that matter, what the heck is an admitted self-promoter like Sullivan doing complaining about "self-important pooh-bahs"? Not that I'm one for forced humility, but people in stone houses shouldn't throw glassware and whatnot.

Then again, his statement that "I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog" speaks volumes.

Edit: thanks to Marc Ramsey, who pointed out a nasty little mixup of mine.

Be warned- this is a long 'un.

Molly Ivans is pissed. Why? Well, I'll let her put it in her own terms:

Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?

This is the opening paragraph to an essay where she lays out precisely how and why Cheney profited from Saddam's regime and others like it- how his old company, Halliburton, made billions of dollars dealing with just the sort of dictator that he's attacking now that he's the infamous Saddam Hussein. Atrios wonders why nobody else had said it before; he has a good point, but I think it's besides the real point.

See, whether or not Dick Cheney made millions off brutal dictators isn't the issue, not really. It's an issue, and an important one, but it's not the issue. Right now he's more than just Dick Cheney- he's the spokesperson for the administration, and in some respects should be criticized in that respect. No, the important issue is, as always, "why Saddam"? As Ivans points out in the essay, Halliburton made billions of dollars not just from Saddam but from all manner of dictators just as evil as he is.

There's the rub. "Just as evil". Seems odd, doesn't it? This is Saddam Hussein we're talking about... he's supposed to be the reincarnation of Hitler, right? Gassing his own people and everything? Well, not really; I think anybody who sits down and studies his past behaviour would quickly notice that on comparison with any number of dictators, past and present, he's not actually that different. Although the right takes great pains to try to portray him differently, those who call him "just another tinpot dictator" are essentially right- there's little that seperates him from many other dictators, and compared to some, he's downright pleasant. (Mugabe easily comes to mind, but anybody who studies the history of African and South American dictatorships could probably come up with lots of others.)

See, there's been an excellent public relations job done on behalf of the United States government to demonize Saddam more so than any other dictator around the planet, it's been going on for a long time, and I personally believe it's one of the real reasons why invasion may be inevitable. What started it is simple- poppy had a war to fight. No, don't worry, I'm not about to pull out the whole "the Gulf War was all about oil" argument. The Gulf War was about a lot of things. It was about oil, yes, but it was also about national sovereignty, international stability, national security, middle eastern security, the reputation of the United States as a peacemaker (a role that Bush the Elder took seriously), and perhaps most importantly, the credibility of the United Nations as a body for resolving national disputes and organizing collective responses to unilateral attacks on one of its members by another of its members (or a non-member). Saddam did something Very Wrong, and he knew it, but he also thought that the U.S. would let him get away with it (thanks to the infamous contradictory signals he was getting at the time) and there was no way that was happening. Not where he was- not with Kuwait being what it is. Maybe if he lived in Africa it would be different, but he doesn't. The United States takes the middle east seriously.

Unfortunately, however, none of these particular justifications, as valid as they were, were really useful in convincing the U.S. to stay onside, and everybody and his dog remember that the last major conflict the U.S. public paid attention to, Vietnam, was a complete public relations disaster. One of the responses to that was the tight control over information that characterizes the U.S. military to this day, but one of the other responses was to make damned sure that the public was onside for this one. The fact that the Gulf War was probably not going to lead to heavy casualties outside of worst-case scenarios didn't matter. Generals famously always fight the last war, and the last war was Vietnam, a war that many believe was lost in the minds of the American public long before it was lost in the jungles of Vietnam. They had to make sure that people didn't sympathize with Iraq. So, they took Saddam Hussein, the dictator, and turned him into Saddam Hussein, the monster.

They did a fantastic job. (Who is "they"? Excellent question, and I won't presume to guess, although I had a friend who swore he knew somebody who worked at the P.R. firm who were the architects of the whole thing.) The news before the Gulf War was covered with stories of Iraqi atrocities, and carefully guided and shaped stories about Saddam Hussein that portrayed him as (as I said earlier) the worst dictator that the world had ever seen, basically the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. The rhetoric was fierce and unrelenting, and soon became a vicious circle, with both politicians and journalists outdoing each other in digging up rumors, stories, and theories to make the man into the monster.

By and large, the public believed it. especially convincing was when they heard that he "gassed his own people"- an act hauntingly familiar of Hitler and his horrific factory-like gas chambers. What Saddam and Hitler did are hardly the same, of course, but they're still close enough to make the connection viable and plausible, so the connection can be made and on some level justified. (It's a tactic that Cheney, and others, deliberately exploit when they pull that out to demonstrate Saddam's supposed irrationality.) Not that Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds is in any way defensible, of course, yet neither is it unique- it's only the nature of the weapon that seperates it from the sort of "ethnic cleansing" and pacification that is probably going on somewhere as I write this. The choice of weapon does not make someone any more or less dead- the genocide in Rwanda was no less a genocide because it was due to machete-wielding Hutus hacking Tutsis (and suspected sympathizers) limb from limb, over and over and over and over, day after day, as others call on the radio to slaughter the Tutsi "cockroaches"...

(Did I mention that there's much worse out there than Saddam? I don't know whether it's relieving or disturbing that most westerners have little idea just how bad it can get, and how relatively benign Saddam really is. To this day, I have trouble thinking about the genocide in Rwanda.)

In any case, the problem is that they did their job too well. Bush the Elder's administration knew that trying to depose Saddam would be much more controversial both in the U.S. and around the world than kicking him out of Kuwait. Many thought it wasn't an issue. Nobody expected Saddam to retain power after the Gulf War, yet he remains, defiant as ever. Yes, he was an international pariah, and ruled over a broken, poor, and besieged country by a combination of the fear of secret police and sheer force of will, but he still remained. This was, of course, a major problem for Washington. Between the end of the Gulf War and the start of the War on Terrorism there was a definite thread of latent hostility between Iraq and the United States. Remember, the United States never stopped operating in Iraq; the whole reason the inspectors got pulled was because the U.S. was going to start Desert Fox and resume bombing Iraqi targets. Any given issue of the National Review featured some hawk arguing that Iraq needed to be "dealt with", using the same arguments we hear nowadays- Iraq will (somehow) build up a vast array of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and (somehow) use them on the United States or its allies.

Of course, this line of argument, as old as the Gulf War, returned with a vengeance after 9/11. In most respects it's the same bloody thing we've heard for a decade now, but with a twist- Saddam's delivery system might be terrorists, and therefore getting Iraq is somehow part of the "War on Terrorism". The same hawks that were advocating the ouster of Saddam back then are either part of the administration or are closely listened-to advisors of the administration, and thanks to the War on Terror they're finally able to put their arguments into action- finally able to "get Saddam". It isn't new, of course; nothing about it is new. It's just hawks harnessing new fears to aid an old argument, nothing more.

The problem with this whole line of argument is that there's any number of dictators out there who could theoretically get ahold of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and who hate the United States. So why Saddam? Those of us who either didn't believe or didn't listen to the propaganda (for that is what it was) continue to ask that question, and with good justification. Despite Cheney's (and others') rhetoric, there are definitely worse than Saddam, and quite a few others who could theoretically develop NBC capabilities (or might even have them already) and who might theoretically use such weapons on the United States or its allies. Certainly Iran is higher on this list than Iraq, and I'd imagine that Syria, Egypt, and (possibly) Saudi Arabia would be more inclined as well. Saddam would be seriously foolish to even contemplate such a thing; he's suspect #1, watched like a hawk, is threatened from all sides, and has an uneasy relationship with theocratic Muslims that might turn his own weapons against him. So why him, as opposed to, say, Khaddafi?

If you think of him as "Saddam Hussein, the dictator", then it makes no sense, none at all. Even if he were irrational, he'd have to be near suicidal... not just suicidal, either, as it would endanger the carefully-groomed succession of his son, and his legacy as the leader of Iraq, something that he's obviously very, very interested in. It would mean that the United States would win the game he's playing, the game of survival. After all, as long as he stays in power it's a victory of a sort; the kind of victory that rankles those hawks who value U.S. preeminence over all else, but would hardly trouble anybody who understood the real interests of the U.S.

But. Look again. Look at him as "Saddam Hussein, the monster", the hideous mental creation of the Bush administration, born of the necessities of the Gulf War. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense. He isn't rational, isn't sensible, doesn't care about his own life, the lives of his family, or his precious power. He lives only to kill, to destroy, to (if he could) personally cut the throat of every westerner he sees. The Saddam of mythology is a madman, totally obsessed with the United States, and willing to do anything, sacrifice anything, if only he could kill just one more American. He gasses his own people, oppresses everyone around him, and leads a totalitarian state such as the world hasn't seen in decades. He is Cheney's "worst dictator in the world". He is Hitler reincarnate, with all that that implies, and cannot be predicted, trusted, understood, or bargained with any more than Hitler could have been. All attempts to do so are Chamberlain-like "appeasement" which, thanks to the obsessive focus on WWII by most Americans looking for historical comparisons to modern situations, are acts of almost transcendental cowardice, fear, and evil.

Unfortunately, outside of the United States this portrait of "Saddam as monster" never really took. Most see him as yet another dictator, but didn't really support him and hoped to see him gone. As I said, international pariah... at least up until the U.S. administration, emboldened by public support for the (somewhat unrelated) War on Terror/Islam/whatever and success (of a sort) in Afghanistan finally started talking invasion. When that happened, those who realized that really meant the end of national sovereignty as we know it started backing an unloved dictator whose ouster nonetheless represented something much bigger. Saddam was ignored- now, Russia is making deals with him, and country after country is lining up to publicly support his legitimacy. They don't see him the way Americans do- as this reincarnation of Hitler. They see him as what he is- a dictator, unremarkable (tragically) in his cruelty and desire for power, who invaded the wrong country and pissed off the wrong hyperpower. They wonder who'll be next.

They wonder if it might be them.

Seeing The Forest is fuming about the "big lie" techniques used by the right in this faux-debate over those supposedly anti-American NEA study guides.

What get's me is that Mona Charen knows that the NEA didn't do what she's writing. She is lying, and knows it, and is getting paid well to repeat these lies because the end result is people believing bad things about the NEA, and "liberals." And all the others participating in this lie, like George Will and Ollie North and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of this crowd. It is a lie. They know it is a lie. They are repeating it because focus groups have shown that this particular lie will stir up the public in certain lasting ways, and if they keep circulating lies like this the public becomes more inclined to vote Republicans into power so they can give big tax breaks and defense contracts to their cronies. And, of course, pay Mona Caren and the rest of them lots of money.

We know how this works. (Read "Blinded By the Right." This is from the guy that started the whole "Clinton Scandals" lie. He talks about how they do it, how much they're paid, and the people doing it. People like Ted Olson, rewarded by Bush with the job of Solicitor General of the United States.) We know that they circulate lies to achieve their political goals...

...How long can this character assassination/lie machine go on before enough of us are telling the rest of us what it is, making it ineffective? It worked on Carter and got Reagan elected. It kept Clinton from accomplishing very much. It got Bush elected. It threatens to take us into perpetual war now.

Well put, but I think that the author of the site, "Issuesguy", should remember that it's only some of these people who actually know that it's a lie; once the ball gets rolling, it can be considered truth (or "true enough") and therefore worth repeating. Someone like Will, or North, or Limbaugh might actually think that these charges are true, and are already predisposed to dismiss any attempts to debunk them as the actions of the hated liberals.

In fact, if I was going to lay a finger on the biggest problem of the "big lie", it's the latter aspect- the deliberate attempts to invalidate and discredit those who disagree. After all, any statement made publicly can be rebutted publicly, but the whole point of the thing is to sway the public... and how can the public be able to properly evaluate any argument if they've been conditioned to distrust the source? The problem isn't any single lie, or spin, or bias, or whatever. The problem is the attempts by people like Coulter and Hannity to preemptively discredit anybody who disagrees, using weak logic, base namecalling, and ludicrous strawmen.

It's not like the Blogosphere isn't prey to it either. Just look at the rabid, hateful, foaming rhetoric aimed at so-called "idiotarians" and ask yourselves what the purpose of that could possibly be. Is it to forward an argument? To advocate a position? Hardly. It's to discredit the opposition, so that readers will never give a fair reading to a dissenting voice. It's an attempt to win the argument before it begins... to use Sun Tsu-like tactics to ensure that battle is won before a sword is ever drawn from its scabbard.

IssuesGuy, if you want to change the way that people debate, the first and most important step is to deal with the ridiculous, hateful, and sickening rhetoric aimed at the left, the kind that neo-conservatives specialize in and that the left (both moderate and radical) has ignored and explained away for far too long. And yes, that includes people who, like Kaus, attempt to gain centrist cred by mocking those to the left of them, the worst scourge that both liberals and social democrats have facing them right now. Once people start treating liberal arguments fairly, rebutting the lies will take care of itself.

While I'm (briefly, I assure you) looking at USS Clueless, I should note: There's a difference between advocating something and unconditionally supporting those who cynically appropriate your issues to support their own interests.

No, Women's Studies departments don't have to support the War on Terror, because they know damned well what everybody else knows- the U.S. right wouldn't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about the treatment of women in Islam, were they not trying to find justification for going to war against it.

Upon surfing around different blogs, I had wondered what my old "friend" SDB was up to... he hadn't been linking to me for a while, and those twin shibboleths (anti-pseudonymity and TransProg) had died down as topics of debate over the last while. So I headed on over.

Some things never change.

Rothschild presents the case as a choice of two alternatives: go to war in Iraq, or stay home and be at peace. I see it as these two alternatives: go to war in Iraq, or stay home and wait for the war to come to us. There will be war; it's only a question of where it will be fought, and who will do the dying. Innocents will die, if for no other reason than because our enemies do not care about killing innocents. Our choice is not whether to spare innocents; it is to choose whether it will be our innocents who do the dying. All other things being equal, I'd prefer it wasn't.

Hesiod has done a good job of dealing with this argument from one end (why would Saddam attack us?) and Scott Ritter has done a good job of dealing with it on the other end (how could Saddam attack us?) So I'll let it be for now, except to note that he's (still!) operating from assumptions that are far from proven.

(He then brings up the question of constitutionality, but Jeff Cooper is the authority there, so I'll just link to him and let that be as well.)

Unfortunately, it seems that our little back-and-forth session hasn't really affected his arguments one whit. He quotes Matthew Rothschild (the target of this article) as saying this:

International law is quite clear: Country A cannot attack Country B unless Country B has already attacked Country A or is about to attack Country A. Iraq has not attacked the United States. And it's not about to. Saddam, as brutal as he is, loves to cling to power. He knows that attacking the United States would be suicidal.

Actually, under international law, Saddam Hussein may have a better case for attacking the United States today than Bush has for attacking Iraq, since Bush is threatening an imminent war against Iraq. But no one wants to hear that!

None of this is substantially incorrect- that concept of "defense, not attack" has been around since, yes, the Treaty of Westphalia, and is a bedrock principle of the United Nations Charter. Rothschild even has a legitimate point with that latter paragraph, as unsettling as it might be to those who believe that the United States has the authority to preemptively attack whomever it wishes.

Steven, unfortunately, doesn't agree, and revives several common SDB arguments to back that up:

Unfortunately, this argument is also totally wrong, because imminent military attack is far from the only reason that such wars, big or small, take place. I suspect Rothschild probably objects to all the cases where such wars have been fought for other reasons, but that's beside the point. Ignoring his sensibilities and looking at the actual practice of war, imminent attack on self is far from the only acceptable justification. There are several others.

Rothschild probably does object to those other wars. And? He'd be justified in doing so. Odd little bait-and-switch... Steven switches the normative for the empirical. International law doesn't ignore that other reasons for war exist, it merely proscribes them, just as national law doesn't pretend that motives for assault don't exist.

What are these "other reasons", though? Let's see:

First, it is considered acceptable to go to war to defend an ally or to satisfy a treaty obligation to an ally. Second, it is considered acceptable to go to war against a nation which consistently and unrepentantly refuses to carry out its obligations under treaties it has signed. All diplomacy is backed by the threat of force, but that requires the willingness to apply force when all other means of persuasion have failed. Finally, "self defense" covers far more territory than simply the issue of "imminent attack".

Hrm... well, let's see. The first case is pretty simple, and perfectly allowable- it falls under the category of "self-defense", exchanging a collective for a single nation.

The second case is a little trickier, but if it's a question of security, it actually still fits under the concept of collective defense. If one nation enters into a collective security agreement and then exploits it, that can threaten the security of other nations. This could possibly justify some sort of retaliation. Rarely if ever does that retaliation include actual warfare, though... the threat is usually the cutting off of trade ties or breaking off of collective security agreements. This threat is a very serious one; an isolated country is dangerously weak. Yes, there are cases where breaking a treaty might provoke violence, but it's telling that Steven fails to name a scenario where this has actually legitimately happened in the past, that wasn't condemned by international law, and that doesn't fit under the heading of "collective response to an attack on a member" . In any case, this is kind of a bait 'n switch as well, because there's no way that failing to live up to obligations prompts the invasion and eviction of the legitimate state, and therefore is inappropriate as a defense of an invasion of Iraq.

Third is this notion that "self defense" covers far more territory than "imminent attack". Indeed it does- but you can't go to war over it, or else everybody and his dog would be attacking their neighbours, under the rubric that it's "self-defense". The entire point of having an international system is so that arms-race cycles of "self-defense" don't turn into massive conflagrations. If somebody is making threatening noises, then you can complain to international bodies, cut off diplomatic ties, move troops around on the off chance that they really do invade, get your allies to gently suggest to the other party that attacking is a really bad idea. You can't, however, invade them first.

But all of that is moot, because there isn't any such beast as "international law", in the sense that he invokes it.

This was accompanied by links to earlier articles. I think I'll do the same. Failing that, go read Yuval Rubenstein decimate this line of argument. (Permalinks not working... do a page search for "According to Steven den Beste" and you'll find it). Yuval was responding to the very articles that Steven linked to, so it's quite relevant, and definitely asks some questions that Steven has yet to answer outside of referencing a quickie response from G. Hill that was quickly and decisively rebutted in Yuval's comment section.
Rothschild:

Furthermore, for the United States to take this aggressive action without the approval of the U.N. Security Council would be a violation of the U.N. charter, which the United States has ratified.

Again, true, and oddly not contradicted by Steven's response:

I think you'd be hard pressed to find any organization whose members give more lip service and less actual compliance with the terms of its charter. I don't consider the UN charter to be binding on the US any longer because few other nations on Earth bother obeying it, either. To play a game by the rules when nearly everyone else is cheating is idiocy.

Indeed.. nobody wants to play the sucker. Odd, though, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I'm not seeing anything even remotely resembling that (nor, actually, variations of this particular argument on his website.) This is certainly an extraordinary claim, and prompts a simple response- if the U.S. is not bound by the charter, then why be a member? Why claim the presidency of the Security Council, and why participate in the workings of the U.N. or any aspect of it at all? After all, as long as the U.S. is a signatory to the charter it is bound by it to the extent that it is constitutional, so if the U.S. should not be bound by the charter, then shouldn't it withdraw from the United Nations?

(For that matter, who exactly is breaking the charter, and why? Steven argued there were "other reasons for war"... if others are breaking the core principles of the Charter, then why exactly should we believe that those "other reasons" don't come into play?)

In any case, there's a simple answer: some parts of the Charter are followed and enforced more strictly than others, and obeying those that are followed and enforced strictly doesn't make you a sucker. Disobeying them, on the other hand, makes everybody else suckers. Hence Rothschild's valid argument- nations don't go invading each other and changing each other's governments- when they do, they're rightly condemned by everybody else. That includes the United States.

There's more, of course, but much of it falls under cultural generalizations and assertions that Hesiod and Ritter (as well as many others) have already addressed (those interested in the former can go here, and those interested in the latter should google up the guy and will easily come across lots of interesting stuff- this is a good start) so I'll just leave it at that. One last quotation, though:

"killing" doesn't equate to "murder". Not all killing is murder, and the death toll in war isn't "mass murder". It's not that we're going to send in the 82nd Airborne to go in and round up and slaughter Iraq civilians just because we want them dead, as much as that it isn't possible to fight a war without at least some civilians getting in the way and becoming victims of it.

Perhaps that, too, is still unacceptable. But if that is true, it would be equally true of all wars, anywhere, fought for any reason at all. When, exactly, would Rothschild ever support any war?

Killing isn't necessarily murder; sometimes killing is sadly necessary if a war is necessary. The reverse is also true, however: if a war is unnecessary (a distinction Steven misses), then those deaths are unnecessary; and if people die unnecessarily in a necessary war, then those deaths remain unnecessary. Whether an invasion of Iraq is necessary or not is the question at hand here. If it isn't, there will be a lot of unnecessary blood on American hands. It may not be murder, but it sure as hell isn't just.

(Yeah, yeah, I know; I'm flogging a dead horse here, and I'm getting the rotting crud all over my hands. It's still worth addressing, though.)

Edit: fiddled around with the wording, fixed a link or two, etc., etc. No substantial additions, except a link to G.Hill's response and the subsequent message board discussion.

In my best Blaxsploitation voice:
Daaaamn.

I'd make a comment about Mickey Kaus and Matthew Hoy and the rest, but I think at this point that, for Krugman, they're half the fun. I wonder if he ever thought that he'd be this big back in his days writing pro-globalization articles for Slate?

Hey, maybe that's why Kaus has such a hate-on for the guy! Krugman moved on up to the prestige and influence of a NYT column, but Kaus is stuck writing an embattled weblog for Slate. That's gotta suck.

Well, this is interesting:

Quiz for the Bush-Basher Brigade
1. The Big Question. President Bush should:

A) Declare war on the House of Saud.
B) Close the US Embassy in Riyadh, expel the Saudi ambassador, and state that the House of Saud is our enemy, but not make war on them.
C) Make demands, but not back the demands up with any threat of force or retaliation.
D) Declare the House of Saud our enemy and do nothing else.
E) Other

If you choose E) you must explain, IN TWENTY-FIVE WORDS OR LESS, what the other option is.

I suggest that if you cannot forthrightly answer this question, directly and without evasion, you are nothing but a kvetching, irrational child, and should shut the hell up and let the grownups get on with fighting the war.

I'll take E) Horribly mock those who think that policy should consist of sound bites.

What the hell is this? This is policy analysis, not a contest for the new Meow Mix slogan. Is Dean not able to handle longer arguments, or is this some sort of bizarre attempt to conserve space in his comments section? Sure, I can appreciate and understand why those who peddle simplistic arguments want to attack their opponents for not doing the same thing. It doesn't mean that they should artificially limit themselves, either by picking one of those choices (which contain assumptions that many critics don't share) or restricting themselves to a totally arbitrary word limit.

In any case, the quick answer would be that there already appears to be some change going on in Saudi Arabia; men and women are protesting side-by-side (with bare skin, no less), the religious police are under fire, and the House is under near-constant fire from domestic opponents. This implies that there may be change going on in Saudi, just as there is in Iran. No surprise: change does not always require the United States sending in soldiers, and if we can have change without chaos, so much the better.

Oh, and a government that uses terrorists as a weapons vector is as deterrable as a government that uses missiles. Just in case that comes up.

Antiwar.com uses a current article by Chris Hitchens in the Observer to trace his transformation from leftist to pro-war neo-conservative. They get some good hits in (especially when addressing the silly "you're wrong because some of those who feel the same can be criticized" argument), but it's more useful as an example of how radical leftists seem to be constantly reinventing themselves as neo-conservatives. David Brock's transformation from one to the other in college formed the opening (and the backdrop) for his indictment of neo-conservativism early this year, but he's hardly alone: David Horowitz and Hitchens himself are other prominent examples.

The question, of course, is why. Why would a radical leftist jump all the way to the other side of the spectrum, instead of simply becoming a moderate social democrat or liberal? What is it about neo-conservatism that prompts this sort of defection? For that matter, and this is a legitimate question... what the hell is neo-conservatism anyway, considering that its arguments, ideology, and goals seem to change more often than a runway model? It isn't libertarianism (quite), it isn't classical liberalism (quite), it isn't conservatism (quite), and it isn't especially religious (usually). Is it simply economic neoliberalism run amok within the political sphere? Is it just what David Brock described it as: a negative ideology, adopting whatever positions the left is against? Maybe, but how the hell can you formulate policy that way?

Perhaps the key aspect is its radicalism, or at least percieved radicalism. Neo-conservatism (whatever it is) gains a lot of its rhetorical power from the notion that "the liberal establishment" is running things, and that conservatism is embattled, endangered, and faces extinction. (Not to mention alliteration.) The supposedly liberal media and bureaucracy prevents the truly conservative character of the American population from coming to the fore- a conservative character that is the prime reason why the United States is (in their minds) the best country in the world. In turn, that status as the best country in the world legitimizes the United States as a "hyperpower"... not only is it legitimately powerful, but it is the only truly moral wielder of power, and therefore any organization which seeks to check that power is in-and-of itself immoral.

All well and good (although certainly debatable- any political philosophy includes differences of opinion)... but why on earth would any of this attract leftists? Well, it may be that sense of being embattled and under siege. The radical left, or at least some of those on the radical left, define themselves by the struggle against the forces of the establishment. If that establishment holds some of the same views as the leftists themselves (or at least variations of those views), though, then what exactly are they setting themselves against? And what happens when (as often happens) they find themselves on the same side of an argument as those from the opposite side of the general spectrum on an issue (such as would happen between, say, social conservatives and radical feminists on the issue of pornography?)

More to the point (and this goes back to a controversial but still illustrative section of Brock's book), what happens when the anti-establishment character of a leftist sees the liberal or left establishment actually silence a conservative? There's a big contradiction here- the left is supposed to treasure people's rights, including the right to free speech and free assembly. That student might react badly so much so that they might apply their radicalism and anti-establishmentism in a completely new direction, coming from the right instead of the left. Encouraged by their new friends on the right, they still get to fight the establishment, only they see a whole new establishment to be fought. This is what happened with Brock, and he's only one guy who happened to switch again to liberalism and write a book about it. How many neo-conservatives didn't switch back and wouldn't admit they were wrong if they did?

There's also an important nationalistic element, especially nowadays. It's partially that "best country in the world" stuff, but I think there's more to it than that- neo-cons often pull out rhetoric about the evils of internationalism and international government, yet are hardly libertarians- they acknowledge the importance and necessity of the nation-state. (Heck, look at "TransProg".) It was always present and has a lot to do with the relatively hawkishness of many neo-cons, many of whom seem to fervently believe that there's no way the United States can lose a conflict, retconning history to make it seem like Vietnam was only due to liberal squishiness. It doesn't really include the disturbing racial aspects of nationalism, though- it seems to be rooted in the American ideological conception of a nation, rather than an ethnocentric one. (Hence the hatred of multiculturalism and the obsession with immigrants being assimilated into the dominant culture, whether that culture is American or British or Canadian or whatever.)

Ok, whatever. Why is this important? It's important because right now, whatever it is, neo-conservatism happens to be (ironically) the dominant ideology right now, especially on the blogosphere. A lot of people get all offended when they're called "libertarians", replying that they don't share that movement's obsession with individual property rights and individuality. Perhaps, but the question remains about what that dominant ideology is, and neo-conservatism seems to be the only one that fits the profile. After, all, what else could there be? It ain't liberalism, it ain't social conservatism, fiscal conservatism doesn't begin to explain all of it, there's a nationalistic and somewhat imperialistic element that flies in the face of the notoriously isolationist tendencies of libertarians, it sure as heck isn't leftist, and outside of some heated rhetoric it isn't fascist either. The one thing it certainly is, though, is astoundingly hostile to the left.

It's consistent and thus classifiable, but it doesn't fit into any of these common categories (and no, Steven, "engineerism" doesn't work either), thus prompting a rather puzzled reaction from those of us who don't agree with it and work against it. I like the word "conservatarian", but it's obviously not appropriate, and the longer this ideology wields power and influence the more difficult the job of figuring it out becomes.

There's something incredibly ironic about the author of "The Satanic Verses" coming out against the invasion of Iraq. He makes some legitimate points (both about the problems with Anti-Americanism and with some legitimate causes of it), and I might look at it in more detail later.

Found on Letter from Gotham:

It is quite possible for Saddam Hussein to conclude that the United States could be severely damaged by a series of nuclear detonations in American cities. It would be absolutely rational for Saddam to conclude that he should string the world along while arming terrorist organizations whose sole purpose is to do just this. He would be thoroughly justified in believing that the US reaction would be to scurry around hysterically and mount an ineffectual military response.

He would be absolutely wrong to believe this. We would wipe him out in short order. But it wouldn’t be irrational for him to come to the wrong conclusions, and--we can't afford to test this thesis.

Odd definition of "rational" there. On what basis would he build this belief? The concept of rationality assumes that actors don't pull actions and beliefs out of thin air; they actually look at what's happened, interpret it, and react according to that interpretation. Considering that, what possible reason would Saddam have to believe that the "US reaction would be to scurry around hysterically and mount an ineffectual military response"? Other than its convenience in supporting Diane's theory? The U.S. is itching for a reason to get him, most of the world's objections are based on the idea that the U.S. needs a reason, Saddam using any sort of WMD would constitute just such a reason, and the world community has shown that it has no qualms about acting against Saddam when it is supported by international saction (witness the Gulf War.)

I commented on the sort of risk/reward analysis that Saddam would likely do earlier, and echoed Hesiod's conclusion that using terrorists to nuke the U.S. would be of such great risk for such weak rewards that under no definition of rationality would Saddam attempt such a thing. Saddam would have to be either an idiot or insane to supply possibly-hostile terrorists with bombs that could be traced back to him, and the current pseudo-debate over invasion due to the possibility that he might theoretically attack at some point in the future shows that he has zero reason to give the U.S. a reason to invade...

unless they're already about to do it anyway. Want to talk risk? Two words: Cornered and Desperate.

Update: Jim Henley, the target of this post, also responded to it. His point was less about the question of the rationality of what Diane proposed, and more the simple observation that deterrence doesn't usually fail as long as there is proper communication, which minimizes possible miscalculation. Personally, I think that the unspoken communication of the prior actions of the U.S. is pretty damned clear in-and-of itself. Henley, however, also makes a legitimate point in that ensuring the rational behavior of Saddam is the last thing the current administration wants (which is why the recent Iraqi invitations of inspectors from both the U.S. and U.N. is only further cementing world opinion against the U.S.)

Ok, I'm back, although I'm going to be playing "linker" again, at least in this post. (Then again, it's a good link.)

Originally referenced by Atrios, P.L.A. is a new and unique blog, written by Dwight and Deb Meredith. Why unique? Listen to the name: it's called "A Journal of Politics, Law and Autism".

Yes, Autism.

The entries on politics and law are well written, but not out of the ordinary except in their quality (and to the extent that any left or liberal thought online can be considered out of the ordinary), but it's the intensely personal articles about their seven-year old autistic son that make the site a must-read. I'll let Dwight describe it in his own words:

In my posts on politics and law, I hope to inform, persuade or amuse you. Those posts are for you, the reader. The autism posts are for us. For me. One of the purposes of establishing this site was to have fun writing about law and politics while forcing myself to write about autism. Writing is discipline. I hope that the discipline of writing about autism will allow me to gain some distance and some perspective. I hope to eventually be able to hold autism up to analytical thought and rational analysis. That day has not yet come...

To us, Autism is a seven-year old little boy who is not yet out of diapers and has not yet learned to talk. To kids at school or on the playground, autism is simply what makes Bobby a “retard.” To us, autism is sitting in an audiologist’s office while our two-year old son’s hearing is tested and praying that he is deaf because there is something you can do about deafness... [I]t is playing with Bobby at the swimming pool and seeing flashes of a normal happy child locked inside him and being unable to break down the wall that prevents us from rescuing our son. I have more to say, much more, but right now, at this moment, the pain is simply too great.

As of this point, this is the only entry about autism, but it already adds a powerful personal aspect to the interesting political commentary.

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.