How to achieve "Victory" in Iran

Tami asks, as a reaction to the casus belli issue, what exactly "victory" would be in a conflict with Iran and how it's possible with the enormous problems the U.S. Army is facing right now.

It's a good question. The answer is that "victory" can end up being subjective, and the perception of how to get there even more so. People disagree about how to achieve victory; one side may be right, another may be wrong, but there's still going to be disagreement.

In the case of Iran, the Powers That Be in DoD clearly still believe that victory is possible from the air, and from the sea. Thing is, it's only the U.S. Army that's truly bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other branches are, if anything, somewhat underutilized right now.

(Air and sea power is pretty useless in fighting an urban insurgency.)

Here's the strategic breakdown. The key issue with Iran is whether it can be cowed into capitulation, or humiliated into a domestic revolution. Either way, the Iranian nuclear threat is diminished: in the former case, the mullahs are disarmed enough that US (and Israeli) strategic preeminence in the region is unquestioned, and in the latter case, the theory is that more democratic, pro-Western forces than the Mullahs would succeed in a revolution, and the US (and Israel) retains regional strategic supremacy. Humiliation would provoke the revolution, because it would show how weak the leadership actually is, and others would seize the opportunity.

The American neoconservatives have always been of the opinion that this is possible, and that air power can do this, whether land-based (the Air Force) or sea-based (the Navy). Blow up enough of the infrastructure that the Mullahs depend on, and the people will revolt, because they don't hate the United States anywhere near as much as their government masters do, or as much as they hate said masters themselves. A revolution will take place again in Iran, but this time, it'll be a revolution by supposedly pro-western elements, such as Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which they've been careful to avoid applying the "terrorist" label to. They'll then open up the country to American troops and American influence.

That's how the United States would, theoretically, win without ground power, and how they could win with their forces in Iraq still bogged down.

Of course, a lot could go wrong. There are a ton of assumptions there. I don't agree with a lot of them, principally the idea that bombing the crap out of Tehran would foment an anti-Mullah revolution instead of a "rally 'round the flag" effect. It's never been quite clear why they think this would be the case, beyond the most powerful Orientalism the world has seen since the sunset of the British Empire. It's contradicted by America's own experiences and any objective historical analysis of the region.

Nonetheless, Tami, that's how they think they'd win.

God help us all.

"Weird how selling out involves no money."

Quick reminder, on the off chance that Duncan was serious:

the big money in politics comes after you've "sold out", not during.

This sort of thing makes me miss 2002.

Casus Belli

One of the big questions about any upcoming American attack on Iran is the justification they'd use for it. They need a casus belli.

They now have it.

My guess is that there's more going on here than we're reading in the news. There is nothing in the Guardian or in, from what I've seen, any other papers about why Iran did what they did. Certainly the Iranian commanders aren't dumb enough to think that there wouldn't be repercussions for this activity, so there would have to be a justification from the Iranian side.

(Judging by how touchy they are about it, I'd imagine that the British were either acting on the Iranian side of the Shatt-al-Arab river, or interdicting ships headed to Iraq from Iran, or both. The Royal Navy apparently insists they were in Iraqi waters. They'd probably do that no matter what, not being blithering idiots themselves, so I don't find that entirely credible.)

(I know that if I were looking to set up a casus belli by deliberately provoking the Iranians, this would probably be how I'd do it.)

In any case, for those out there panting at the thought of getting to attack Iran, might I remind you that you already have two wars that you haven't won yet? I'd suggest dealing with them before opening up a third front, especially when one of those (Iraq) will become a nightmarish insurgent hell the second the bombs drop on Tehran.

Halliburton Killed My Cat!

I finished "Imperial Life in the Emerald City", and it is as thorough an indictment of the Republicans and their corporate allies as you could ask for.

I had always believed that the problem with the occupation--other than its central goals--was that loyal, ideological staffers are the worst people you could ask to do the difficult and tricky work of reconstruction. Chandrasekaran's book, however, showed that it was even worse than that- that qualified people were being turned away and Halliburton was using its political connections to get away with murder.

I didn't know how true that latter assertion was.

I only found out when I read the following passage. It's the one that affected me the most out of perhaps all of them, and if you're the type to "catblog", I doubt you'll disagree.

After Uday's menagerie was moved into Baghdad's zoo, most CPA staffers assumed that humans were the only species in the green Zone, save for the bomb-sniffing dogs and the odd feral cat skittering among the housing trailers. The CPA's senior adviser to the Ministry of Environment pronounce the Emerald City a wasteland, devoid of wildlife.

Alex Dehgan knew better. He was a biologist who had spent three years observing animals in the wild. Every time he walked around the Green Zone, he kept his eyes peeled. He saw bats over the pool at night, barn owls in palm trees, and desert foxes in remote corners of the palace garden. "The Green Zone was filled with life, he said. "it was beautiful, and it seemed like everyone in the Green Zone was unaware of them like they were unaware of many other things."

The other humans did notice the cats--and kittens--scampering in the garden and the trailer parks. Staffers named them and played with them during breaks. They even stole cartons of milk and cheese from the dining hall for their newfound companions.

When Halliburton managers discovered the pets in their midst, they asked the marines guarding the palace to shoot the cats on sight lest they spread illnesses.

Dehgan deemed it bad science. "The danger of disease was probably infinitesimally small,", he said. "this wasn't done with any thought to the psychological value that these cats provided."

When the execution orders were announced, CPA staffers saved their favorites, hiding them in trailers, in bathrooms, in the pool house. David Gompert, Bremer's security adviser, kept a cat he named Mickey in his palace office. Mickey was watched over by Gompert's security detail, but he still managed to chew through several sensitive documents.

The Halliburton cat killers finally got wise to the asylum strategy and deployed Filipino contract workers on a hunt-and-kill mission. They opened every trailer while the occupants were at work and rounded up every cat they found.

One night in June, a woman stood wailing outside her trailer. She was due to ship out in two days and had taken her cat to a veterinarian for the necessary shots for entrance to Aemrican. Whens he returned to her room, she found a note from the death squad informing her that her cat had been seized because it was against the rules to house animals in the trailers.

"They killed my pet," she sobbed. "I hate them."

She ain't the only one. Halliburton and it's CPA allies wouldn't listen to an mammalian biologist (Dehgan) because he had the audacity to be based out of the State Department. Instead, they issued a senseless and cruel order, and when people defied it, instead of approaching the owners and coming to a solution, they dispassionately and cowardly crept into peoples homes and killed their cats.

So just remember, folks, the next time you see a cute picture of a kitty on your favorite blog, that were it up to Halliburton, they'd conjure some bullshit excuse, and then they'd take the thing out back and blow its adorable little brains out. And why? Because they know the president, and that's all the authority and expertise they need.

And Now For Something Completely Different

We present to you:

Surfing Rodents



Discuss amongst yourselves. And thank Bitch Ph.D for the link.

Welcome to the Green Zone, Check Your Brain at the Door

I've finally gained the opportunity to read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald Kingdom. I'm only a few chapters in, but already it's horrifying.

More than that, though, it's educational. While everybody is aware that there was little in the way of reconstruction plans, Chandrasekaran is one of the first to highlight the idea that Garner (and to a lesser extent Bremer) were set up to fail. The reason why? That old villian Ahmed Chalabi. The office of the Vice President and the neocons at DoD were absolutely intent on handing over power to Chalabi, but knew that the CIA and State (as well as the old hands at DoD) would vigorously fight the idea. Any attempt to hand over control to Chalabi had to be done through the back door, so they deliberately hobbled Garner and the ORHA, with the hopes that in desperation they'd turn to Chalabi and his exiles for support. That would (so the theory went) legitimize Chalabi and set him up to be the logical successor to Garner.

That, uh, didn't work. Both because Chalabi was completely unsuited to the job and openly mocked in most of Iraq, and because making it happen meant that they had to systematically remove almost every qualified applicant for work in Iraq, because they were either familiar with Chalabi and didn't trust him, or were too close to State and the CIA, or weren't sufficiently loyal enough to the Republican party.

Meanwhile, junior Republican congressional staffers got to be big cheeses in Iraq, and bring that unique brand of governing incompetence that you can only really get from doctrinaire Republicans to the people of Iraq.

Lucky them.

On Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

So supposedly the guy confessed to being the mastermind behind everything Al Qaeda has done, if not everything everybody who doesn't like the United States has done, ever.

That confession came after a long stint at Gitmo and another unnamed secret CIA prison. He had no access to lawyers, and enjoyed plenty of waterboarding and other pleasant forms of "coercion" we've probably never heard of.

I trust I don't have to explain to you folks why I find that a little questionable? Sketchy? Dodgy, perhaps? Sure, he almost certainly had a lot to do with 9/11, but we knew that before he started getting (almost) drowned for days on end.

All this is going to prove is that nobody outside the Republican party trusts the US government anymore.

No, Really, This Time It's Gonna Work!

Color me skeptical about the idea that the surge is working. Robert Kagan argues that his brother's vaunted "surge" is leading to greater security. What's it based on, you ask? A pair of Iraqi bloggers notorious for toeing the Bush administration line (they're Pajamas bloggers, summing THAT up), Brian Williams not being quite so afraid, and "cracks in the Shiite governing coalition".

Er, yeah.

Call me when Riverbend backs any of this up. I'm not going to be holding my breath waiting, though.

The Topic That Shall Not Rear Its Head

Has reared its head over on Eschaton, where we see Atrios crying foul over the idea that somebody might take offence to a post where he says, essentially, that he doesn't link to your blog because it SUCKS.

(Yes, that's actually the name of the post. "Why your blog sucks".)

Now, I'm pretty confident that Atrios won't read this, as I don't update enough or in the right "Glenn Greenwald" fashion, and have committed the (previously unstated) unpardonable sin of having light text on a dark background.

(I wonder how he handled blackboards as a former academic, but I digress.)

Still, were he to read this, I'd suggest a few points:

#1: Every blogger, no matter how well read, tends to suffer from "Ted Barlow syndrome"; the belief that nothing you say or do or write matters. I think it's a bit of a misnomer, in that almost EVERYBODY suffers from this problem- with bloggers its just a little more apparent because they actually do have a venue for what they're saying. This is why people complain about not being read, but the alternative is potentially talented writers simply stopping entirely.

Like, well, Ted Barlow.

#2: He needs to learn himself some Pagerank. Yes, blogrolls matter.

#3: He needs to learn himself some manners. Whether or not you agree that blogrolls are an important community- and identity-building tool, I think everybody can agree this is kind of a bad move. Telling people that are ostensibly on the same side as you "Go away, your blog sucks and you suck for writing it" is pretty goddamned wrongheaded no matter how you look at it.

(Individual arguments and opinions? Sure. Go nuts. But a generalized "piss off and die?")

#4: He's starting to sound a little like a winger. Not in his opinions, but in how he's presenting them. In both of the pieces I linked to, he didn't quote a single word of the critical blogs that he's supposedly responding to. Indeed, the "your blog sucks" posting features such a lovely bit of strawman argumentation that it would make a Fox News anchor weep:

7) An elite cabal of bloggers, all on the Hillary Clinton for President campaign payroll, have conspired to suppress your original voice by any means necessary, including the implementation of very elitist and anti-democratic peer review systems such as the open posting and "recommended diary" system at Daily Kos. This is certainly an interesting theory, and one which several blogs seem to be devoted to exploring, but absent further evidence you might want to look for alternative explanations.

Gimme a break. If Atrios wants to respond to critics like skippy and Mary Scott O'Connor, then by all means, I recommend that he do so. Both have put forward excellent arguments about the nature of blogrolling and of the concept of a "blogosphere" itself that deserve to be engaged seriously and honestly. Screwing around trying to be funny is just insulting. It's also more than a little sad: it smacks of an affectation of not caring that is contradicted by the existence of the posts themselves.

Oh, and as for #5?

If you think skippy or MSOC's stuff on the blogrolling controversy is a reason why either blog "sucks", you're out to lunch. O'Connor's entry on Kos was one of the best, most savage pieces I'd read in a good while, and skippy's entries on this issue have been consistently interesting and (unlike "your blog sucks") often really funny.

Of course, I might just think this because my blog sucks, along with everybody else that Atrios tossed overboard.

Somehow, though, I think I'll continue to "look for alternate explanations".

The Cripple's Crusade

People had been asking, almost from the first day the "surge" was announced, where the soldiers were going to come from. After all, the U.S. Army and National Guards have been practically crippled by the constant tours in Iraq. Who would be sent? There was nobody else to send.

Now we know.

The United States is sending its wounded to battle.

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

Can we believe these denials of a massive "reevaluation" on Feb. 15? Well, here's one case:

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. "My [health] is deteriorating," she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. "My spine is separating. I can't carry gear." Her medical records include the note "unable to deploy overseas." Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week.

Nothing about this is really new. Iraq has forced down recruitment standards across the board: people who were previously seen as too old, too mentally challenged, or too uneducated for service are being actively recruited. A draft is (currently) politically impossible, as is taking in minors, so this is one of the few options left to them to keep the numbers up.

Of course, as TPM points out, this could be an isolated incident. I personally doubt it, though. What it is is one more symptom of a military slowly devouring itself to fight Bush's war.

Somewhere in Pakistan, Osama just keeps on laughing.

Progressives and Genre Fiction?

I realize that the attempts to try to turn the movie 300 into some kind of paen to Bush's fight against the Islamic Hordes is a little nauseating, and maybe I'm a little biased on this...

but what is with progressives being (and pardon my language) complete dicks about genre fiction?

The only thing sadder than arrested development is those moaning about it inside the armor of their own proud ignorance.

Honestly, anybody who actually writes "graphic...ahem... novels" deserves a good swift kick in the behind.

(And no, you're not excused either, James. Trying to burnish anti-conservative cred by taking cheap shots at Captain America is just ludicrous. The arc that led up to his demise, apparently, featured political positions on his behalf that would probably cause Rush Limbaugh's head to explode.)

You Gotta Be Kidding, Right?

I realize that Bush is almost certainly going to pardon Libby when his two years are up. Fine. That's the way the game works.

That said, why on earth is there even a debate over whether he should pardon him now?

If some people imagined a verdict in the criminal trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. would calm the political passions surrounding his fate, they may have forgotten two words with a combustible history: presidential pardon.

The 11 jurors had barely pronounced Mr. Libby guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury on Tuesday when a new donnybrook broke out.

“Now President Bush must pledge not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct,” declared Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader, taking a stance echoed by other Congressional Democrats, some editorial writers and bloggers on the left.

From the right came a Wednesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which thundered that “the time for a pardon is now,” a point of view shared by The Weekly Standard, National Review and conservative admirers and friends of Mr. Libby. Many of the calls for his pardon demanded immediate action, instead of a wait for appeals to wend their way through the courts.

Of course he shouldn't be pardoned. There no question of his guilt, and this "underlying crime" stuff is absolutely meaningless, as the whole point of having perjury as a crime is because perjury irretrievably muddies the waters on that count. Getting away with crime would be trivial if people could lie with impunity, as you could easily compel witnesses to lie their faces off for your benefit.

Besides, the question about an underlying "crime" is unimportant compared to the question of whether there was an underlying act that could have led to criminal prosecution were there not perjury involved. After all, no act is technically a crime until you are convicted of it. That's the distinction between Clinton and Libby- Clinton lied about an entirely legal act (getting a hummer at the office) whereas Libby lied about endangering the entire extended espionage network of someone under non-official cover.

(And it's not even clear that Clinton perjured himself. He mainly split hairs over the definition of "sex".)

I know that the conservatives want to stand by their man. I also know that the right to pardon rests with a president for good reason. Still, this is just ludicrous. There's no grounds for pardon either legally, morally or politically. If the case was decided poorly, that may be grounds for an appeal, but if Bush simply scoops up Libby and says "nah, I don't like that result", then why bother with the whole thing? Might as well just parade the accused in front of him, and decide whether they live or die by a thumbs up/thumbs down system.

Then again, conservatives seem awfully fond of Rome. Maybe there's a connection there?

So much for Libby

Guilty on 4 of 5 charges.

This is Starting to Become a Problem

That stock market drop in China (and the shockwaves coming from it) made sense, and at the time I thought of it as simply a correction of a somewhat-overheated economy.

Now I'm not so sure. According to the BBC, the global markets are continuing to take hits- largely due to an exploding Japanese yen taking bites out of that country's exports, continuing questions about the stability of China, and other concerns about the state of the US economy.

Asia's regional economy wasn't the most stable thing to begin with. Now, I'm starting to get a little worried.

Hah! From Zero to Lack of Credibility in One Post

Like I said a few posts ago, I do retain some interest in Canadian liberal politics after the leadership battle. That means that, among other things, I read some Canadian blogs, including the always-interesting Calgrit.

In Calgrit's thread on the whole polling issue, as well as Jason Cherniak's, there has been a veritable carpet-bombing by one commentator by the name of Erik Sorenson. A quick scan of his site shows that the man has a serious hate-on for Stephane Dion.

Unfortunately, said quick scan also showed that he not only has no idea what a push poll is, he thinks David Suzuki is a terrorist.

Oh, and he also uses scare quotes for the Suzuki "foundation".

He's free to post wherever and whatever he wishes, of course. Still, I really don't think the Liberals should be taking political or policy advice from guys like this. File it in the round bin and move on.

Japan and the "Comfort Women"

Remember how I mentioned that Asia is a really tricky part of the world right now? Part of that is due to American mishandling of North Korea. Part of it is because of China and North Korea being, um, China and North Korea.

Part of it, though, is due to Japan's issues with its past. Things are improving, but every so often, you get something like this:

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said there is no evidence that women were forced to become sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II.

He told reporters there was "no evidence to prove there was coercion", adding "we have to take it from there"...

..."There has been debate over the question of whether there was coercion," Mr Abe told journalists on Thursday.

"But the fact is, there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested."

"That largely changes what constitutes the definition of coercion, and we have to take it from there," he said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiitake later said the Japanese government did not agree with the US congressional resolution, but still honoured the 1993 statement.

The resolution before the US Congress seeks to reject the revisionists' moves by calling on the Japanese prime minister to "formally acknowledge, apologise and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women.

Needless to say, Korea and China aren't happy, and neither is Congress. The annoying thing is that if you split hairs enough, Japan has a point. Girls were coerced, and the Imperial Army definitely procured these women, but many of them were forcibly coerced by locals or were "volunteers" (that didn't want to starve, but they weren't forcibly coerced.) It's difficult to prove that the Imperial army directly and forcibly coerced these women. That's why Japan can plausibly deny it.

That said, it barely matters, and Japan shouldn't be splitting hairs on this. There is the possibility that they'll have to pay compensation, but the regional problems that this engenders are far worse than the costs of compensation. It's more about the conflict within Japan over their wartime record, and over what that means for Japanese identity itself. It's sort of like the continuing open wound that is America's history of slavery- people would prefer to move on and pretend it didn't happen and that it doesn't have effects to this day, but it does, and you really have to face it and accept it.

I have confidence that both Japan and the United States will face their history square-on. Many within both countries already do, and after all, if the Germans could face up to the Holocaust, then Japan and the US (and everybody else) can face up to their pasts too.

In the meantime, though, this inadvisable move on Abe's part is likely to spark outrage in the region. More of THAT, they don't need.

Statistical Weighting in Online Surveying

Did a quick blurb over on Jason Cherniak's site in response to this entry on polls in Canada showing that the Conservatives are wildly ahead of the Liberals.

Cherniak's problem is that they were online surveys, and the Internet ain't exactly the most demographically representative place in the world. People pointed out (rightly enough) that you can fix that with weighting.

I responded in some detail, but it broke down to two things that bother me about online surveying:

1) The Internet's somewhat abstracted nature means that people may be less likely to either tell the truth or carefully consider their comments. Anybody who's read a blog (or Usenet, or a web forum, or pretty much anything here, really) knows that people often post at length and repent at leisure, because of the prevailing belief that nothing that goes on here really matters.

(That's at the root of good ol' Ted Barlow disease, which is bloggers quitting because they believe that what they write doesn't really matter. I can commiserate. But I digress.)

That could mean that people are less likely to respond carefully and honestly to a poll for the precise opposite reason that they lie on other polls: instead of being too concerned about what it says about them, they'll think it doesn't matter at all. They won't carefully consider the questions or their answer. They'll just vote for the rhinoceros party because it's funny.

2) Demographic problems can be avoided through weighting specific socio-economic groups. The problem, though, is that weighting can massively increase the likelihood that misrepresentation of those specific groups can take place. If you take a poll and there are something like two people from a specific small (but significant) group, no matter HOW you weight them you're going to have problems. If, for example, poor people on the Internet are disproportionately inclined towards conservatism compared to the poverty-stricken population as a whole, and they're overweighted, it's going to REALLY screw with your poll.

And, yes, conservatives really are overrepresented on the Internet. That's the reason this site was created, remember?

Oh, and 3) The respondees are inherently self-selected, even more than in phone and mail polls. You can't weight to correct for that, either.

I don't think phone polls are perfect, of course. Neither are mail polls (the response rate for mail polls is abysmal.) But I really, really don't trust online polling. Not when Zogby was doing it and it showed Kerry way ahead in 2004, and not today with Angus Reid doing it.

A Small Addendum on the North Korea Thing

One of the reasons why this matters is because the United States didn't really live up to its promises to North Korea in the 1994 agreed framework. To be blunt, they were supposed to get light water reactors and enough know-how to run them, and that didn't really happen. It kind of sort of happened, but the United States dragged its feet, confident that it just needed to buy time until Kim Jong-Il's regime finally, inevitably, fell.

It hasn't fallen.

That's why things are so screwed up right now. That, and Japan's fierce (and understandable) outrage over North Korea kidnapping Japanese to teach Japan's language and culture to North Korean agents, but the basic justification is the North Korean "cheating" serving as a justification for America neglecting its own promises, thus allowing NK to charge that the deal was already broken.

Hindsite is 20-20.

(Or 20...19...18...17...)

North Korea's Cheatin' Heart?

Maybe, maybe not. It would appear that the evidence that North Korea was "cheating" on its negotiated settlement with the United States during the 1990s is as sketchy as I had always thought it was. Apparently North Korea was, quite possibly, not pursuing a uranium-based bomb at all.

The disclosure underscores broader questions about the ability of intelligence agencies to discern the precise status of foreign weapons programs. The original assessment about North Korea came during the same period that the administration was building its case about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, which turned out to be based on flawed intelligence. And the new North Korea assessment comes amid debate over intelligence about Iran’s weapons.

The public revelation of the intelligence agencies’ doubts, which have been brewing for some time, came almost by happenstance. In a little-noticed exchange on Tuesday at a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joseph DeTrani, a longtime intelligence official, told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island that “we still have confidence that the program is in existence — at the mid-confidence level.” Under the intelligence agencies’ own definitions, that level “means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views” or it is not fully corroborated.

“The administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has resulted in a fourfold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea,” Senator Reed said in an interview on Wednesday. “If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea’s ambitions with their accomplishments, it’s important.”

Two administration officials, who declined to be identified, suggested that if the administration harbored the same doubts in 2002 that it harbored now, the negotiating strategy for dealing with North Korea might have been different — and the tit-for-tat actions that led to October’s nuclear test could, conceivably, have been avoided.

The strongest evidence for the original assessment was Pakistan’s sale to North Korea of upwards of 20 centrifuges, machines that spin fast to convert uranium gas into highly enriched uranium, a main fuel for atom bombs. Officials feared that the North Koreans would use those centrifuges as models to build a vast enrichment complex. But in interviews this week, experts inside and outside the government said that since then, little or no evidence of Korean procurements had emerged to back up those fears.

The bolded part is what's key here. Intel agencies screw up all the time. Intelligence is a difficult game, especially when you have counter-intelligence activities that are often almost as sophisticated as the spies' work itself.

What bothers me is that now we've established a pattern. They're not just fools and liars, they appear to be serial fools and liars. I mean, does this sound familiar to anybody else?

But David A. Kay, a nuclear expert and former official who in 2003 and 2004 led the American hunt for unconventional arms in Iraq, said he had found the administration’s claims about the North Korean uranium program unpersuasive. “They were driving it way further than the evidence indicated it should go,” he said in an interview. The leap of logic, Dr. Kay added, turned evidence of equipment purchases into “a significant production capability.”

So. First they cook the intel on Iraq, then on North Korea. Now, somehow, they expect anybody to take them seriously on Iran? Hah.

Even worse is the effect this is likely to have on regional partners like Japan. Japan has pretty wholeheartedly thrown itself into supporting the American position on North Korea, but now we see indicators that Kim Jong-Il might not be the aggressor that the uranium cheating would imply. The whole situation of him getting screwed by the Americans and then responding in turn suggests that he is pretty much exactly as I had always suspected- terrified of losing power and willing to defend it, but neither mad nor overly inclined to gallivanting around the region. Because the Japanese have believed that he is an aggressor, though, they've taken steps that he (and everybody else in the region that dislikes Japan) is almost certain to find threatening in-and-of themselves.

An Asian security dilemma would be an absolute disaster, worse than anything going on the middle east. Everybody knows this, yet it seems like George W. Bush and his neocon cronies may have inadvertantly done their best to start one.

Worst. President. Ever.

(Edit: cred should go to Tapped for mentioning it first.)

So Much for the New Republic

If the Aspers are running it, it's going to be roughly as progressive as the National Review.

For all TNR's past issues, this is an unfortunate development for American progressivism.

Oh-Em-Gee Soft On Terra!

I'm sure people have figured out by now that I'm not writing on Canadian politics as much as I used to. The liberal leadership race is over, and after all this time I'm still conflicted about what it says about the state of liberalism, as it was such an incredibly ideosyncratic exercise.

Still, I do have to ask this.

Why on EARTH does Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper think that yelling and moaning about how his opponents are soft on terrorists is going to work in Canada? Not only does it belie his (expensive) advice to not sound too American, but it's simply not going to have that great an impact on a public that does not share the United States' formerly laser focused concern about terrorism. Even in America the terrorist argument is weaker and weaker by the day, and the Conservatives are trying to use it on Canadians?

Cripes.

(And just as they were doing so well with those attack ads, too.)

Get Well Soon, Steve

Best wishes and hope for a speedy recovery to Steve Gilliard, who is going in for open heart surgery in order to clear up an infection from his last surgery. Steve's always been a reliable and eminently readable blogger, and here's hoping hey can get back to that as soon as health permits.

Somehow I doubt this will work

While it is, perhaps, laudible that Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent format, has gone legit, I somehow doubt that a service that doesn't even let you own the media you pay for is going to be successful, especially in the face of iTunes.

Plus, he's going to have to deal with the multitude of bittorrent traffic blockers that are out there nowadays. If his content gets through, the illegal content gets through, so no matter what happens he's going to have difficulty.

The worst aspect, though, is that as far as this article implies, the only media player that will play his files will be Windows Media Player. Those who, like myself, swear by third party media players will be out in the cold.

Good luck, Mr. Cohen. You'll need it.

Short bit on RSS

After being roundly criticized in an earlier post for filling up someone's RSS feed with all this meta stuff (hope the new entries are more to your liking?), I fired up the ol' RSS reader and realized that all I'm serving out is headlines.

So I've switched to full feeds.

(Speaking of which, I'm not sure if I'm that fond of my reader. Any recommendations?)

Oscar Post!

Not planning on going over it overmuch, but I do have to compliment (what the hell) President-Elect Gore and Mr. Guggenheim on their victory, and Forrest Whitaker for finally getting the recognition he has so richly deserved.

(Even if he didn't get that well-deserved Emmy for his turn on The Shield.)

Ditto for Scorsese and his wins for The Departed.

As for the Gore presidential thing... I personally think it's far, far less likely today than it was on Saturday. Honestly, since that would have been the best venue to announce, I suspect that he's not going to. I would like to be wrong on that, as I still think he would be an excellent candidate and a likely winner, but it feels like the Dem powers-that-be still can't get over the idea that everybody is to blame for electoral failures but themselves.

Iran launches rocket into space

So, it looks like Iran is able to launch rockets into space, according to the International Herald Tribune. They may just want it as a status symbol, but this isn't exactly going to defuse tensions with the US much.

A New Initiative I Support:

The independent bloggers' alliance.

Another Blogroll Entry

Upyernoz, while complaining that communities aren't movements, also pointed out that he linked to me for a good long time while I had never linked back.

My response, and correction is to your right. I'll freely admit that I didn't add as many people as I'd like. The reason's pretty simple- those links are hard coded, as I'd never gotten around to setting up and implementing a blogrolling account. Still, it was an oversight, as upyernoz is a decent blogger, albeit a little too inclined to defending "amnesty".

The offer remains: provided you aren't advocating killing off all the muslims or whatnot, I'll be happy to swap links. Not as a Kossack, or an Atriette, or a whatevertheheck people call themselves. As a blogger, and a liberal, and someone who believes that the internet can be a force for progressivism, provided we let it.

Is this a bass-ackwards jab at us exiled Atrios blogroll members?

In a post that's supposedly about Jeff G. ("pasty"), Atrios posts up a blogroll from 2002.

You'd think that he'd, um, be a little less inclined towards such things, all things considered.

Rescuing from the Memory Hole

Haloscan has a way of making things disappear, so I figured I'd respond to a comment Skippy made on the blog itself.

Here's what he said in response to this entry:

well, demosthenes (and thx for the link, and the support, btw), i'd further suggest that if you spend time (in my case, 5 years) participating in a community, only to be told that the community no longer supports you, but you are expected to keep supporting the community, it becomes emotionally masochistic to continue to do so.

to be really, really honest, on a personal level, if kos had just sent me an email explaining his change in policy vis-a-vis the blog's newly focused direction, with a small apology and and a "thanks for your support in the past i hope i can count on it in the future," i, on a personal level, would not be so bent out of shape.

but on a macro level, i am infuriated that kos especially spent the last 5 years garnering progressive support (not to mention writing talent and traffic), only to suddenly switch directions into a dnc blog w/o so much as a by your leave (plus, suddenly all the munchkins in the land of kos are spouting the party line that it's "his blog" and he can "do what he wants" with it, when his previous proclamations were all about citizens taking back government).

he pretty much used the populous approach to get himself a chair at the table. huey long would be proud.

I don't disagree. Hell, I got purged too, albeit from a different site, remember? I'd always been kind of arms length, largely because of other commitments and the needs imposed by pseudonymity, but I like to consider myself part of the progressive community too.

(I'm not sure, but I believe I coined "conservatarian", so I'm even down with that whole Yes I Coined That Phrase thing.)

What Kos doesn't get is that he's a member of a community, not a leader of one. He (among others) have been seduced into to thinking that since their websites are sub-communities in their own right, they don't need to worry about the broader progressive community as a whole. Why worry about some guy with some random blog named "skippy" when you're creating this great big beautiful community? When you've got people falling all over themselves to provide content for your site in the form of those "diaries"?

Yet it is precisely that kind of community-building that the right seems to understand better nowadays. The point of blogroll linking is not merely creating a portable favorites list, but creating a shared community and shared sense of identity. If you share a link with someone, on some level you state "I am like them". Even when you link to conservatives, you inherently give them some degree of respect and shared identity; you state "yes, I think you're a putz, but I also think you're a peer. You can be both."

As we've seen, the shared progressive/liberal identity desperately needs this kind of reinforcement. because it is that lack of shared perceived identity that allows for self-proclaimed "centrists" to attack everybody to their left. If they thought "they are like me", they wouldn't do that, because they'd believe that every attack boomerangs back in some respect. They might privately say "shut up, putz", or might respectfully say "I disagree" in public, but wouldn't try to freeze them out.
Because they don't have that perception of shared identity, though, they keep on trying to score points on everybody to the left of them.

So, shared identity is at the core of a community. Here's the problem. By building and presiding over these communities, Kos (and Atrios, and Josh Marshall, and MyDD, and Arianna, and a lot of other "top-tier" folks) is reinforcing a division of identities and communities.

As I'd mentioned earlier, there is a fundamental distinction between a "diary" on a website like Kos and an independent blog. The former exists at the whim and will of the website's administrators; if somebody at Kos doesn't like a diary, they can take it down or even ban them. That power irretrievably prevents a shared identity between Kos and his diarists. He will always be more powerful than them, will always carry that identity of "community administrator/website owner", and they won't.

Yet, it goes both ways. Kos can never, ever be a Kossack. He can never engage them in a free and clear fashion. I'm sure he'd like to, but he cannot, because he owns that space. He can never be "one of the guys", no matter how much he'd like to. The same goes for Atrios and the Atriettes, Arianna and her various diarists and commentators, etc. Even if they can become administrators, that distinction will never go away; and if they become administrators, they too will become distinct from the userbase itself.

The situation is entirely different for, say, me and skippy. Even if Kos and Atrios and Glenn Greenwald no longer link to us, the fact remains that we are peers. I have a blog. Atrios has a blog. skippy has a blog. Kos has a blog. There is no proprietary relationship there; Kos can't kick me off his site, because this isn't his site. He can do whatever he pleases to my diary over there (which still exists simply as a funnel and introduction) and molest my comments over there to his heart's content. Were he to post a response here, I could log into Haloscan and do the same damned thing to HIS posts. And you know what? It wouldn't matter, because he has his own site too.

As much as Kos and Atrios might not want to, if they want to engage me and skippy, they must do it as peers, rather than as superiors. That's what a shared identity is built on, and that shared identity is what a community is built on, and that community is what progressivism and liberalism is based on.

And that, clearly, isn't what Kos and the top-tiers want anymore. For whatever reason, they've decided that they'd prefer to build their own little communities that they can preside over. They want Kossacks, and Atriettes, and whateverthehell people who post on TPMCafe and the Huffington Post call themselves. They want mutually exclusive communities of subjects, instead of a community of peers.

If they do link to other sites, they (apparently) want the power to pull that link at any time, for whatever reason, and to receive "amnesty" for it, no matter what it means to the community. They want to be able to extend and retract their favor, like Renaissance Princes, to whomever pleases or displeases them. Why do you think Atrios kept on going on and on about "helping out smaller blogs" They, bizarrely, appear to want to be patrons, not peers.

(And, yes, I'm aware that Kos wants his blog to be more "campaign focused". More the fool is he, if he thinks such a beast is even possible, let alone desirable. Retracting your favor for writing about the wrong thing is as much the game of a Prince as anything else.)

Say what you will about Instapundit. I probably have. He, at least, gets it. Every time he links to someone, he says:

"I'm a peer with this person. We're all part of the great conservative project together. Is he someone worth listening to, like myself?

"Indeed".

No, I don't know where this comes from. Maybe Kos et al spent a bit too much time hobnobbing with the Powers That Be. Maybe they're a little embarrassed about being lumped in with the lowly bloggers, and want to place himself above them. Maybe, with Kos, he wants to be able to tell Dean that he has an army of people who'll do what he says, so as to get the DNC's extended favor.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is that it's like cutting off your arms so that your legs seem more useful. It's foolish, it's silly, and it's the finest news the Republicans could ask for.

DRM Summed Up

(DRM is Digital Rights Management, by the by.)

From a random comment on an ancient Digg piece on DRM on the Xbox360 that I nonetheless loved:

"When i die do my digital rights die with me? Will my children be criminals for listening to music I paid to download?"

I had to think about whether that would be the case for a little while. I'm still not sure.

That sums up the issue, if nothing else does.

Objectively Pro-Terrorism

The Republicans (and their online sycophants) loved using that term in 2003. Unfortunately, apparently they should have been looking closer to home, as it looks like a major Republican donor and member of the "White House Business Advisory Committee" was, er, funnelling money to Al Qaeda.

Oops.


(Original link was on Drink Liberally in New Milford.

More Kos vs. Skippy

Why? Because it amuses me.

Skippy, completely unable to "let it go",had been told by "mo betta meta" that Kos himself actually defended his blogroll purge.

Skippy points out one major big of strange wrongheadedness that's popped up here: that since having a long blogroll supposedly diminishes the value of each link, that justifies the pruning. Skippy saw it as silly and vaguely Republican to try to limit choice, but I personally just see it as (oddly enough) bad economics.

Think about it. Each additional blog entry, assuming that Kos is right (and it's a HUGE assumption with no basis in fact besides its usefulness to Kos, Atrios, and all the other purging majors) may diminish the number of hits for each other blog entry slightly. Here's the problem: unless each new entry diminishes the number of outbound visits to other blogs by more than it generates in and of itself, you're still going to have a positive effect on the aggregate.

If a Kos link to Skippy generated a thousand visits a week, then the only way to justify it would be if it reduced the number of outbound visits on all the other blogs put together by more than a thousand. Considering he only has about, what, 32 links to other blogs, that's one HELL of an assumption. Honestly, it's ridiculous on its face, not even counting the need to compensate for the amount of ill-will that something like this generates, and the problems with google rankings that he continues to studiously, hilariously ignore.

Most of the rest of the Kos entry follows an old pattern: A bit of "if you want to be visible, post comments on Daily Kos, post diaries on Daily Kos... really, just shut down that ol' blog of yours and come join the Kossacks" coupled with "how DARE smaller bloggers question me! The PRESUMPTION! I will grind them into PASTE", along with a touch of the Logan's Run-esque idea that any blogger that has been around for too long and isn't Kos needs to go the hell away to make way for the "new blood".

(Yeah, I'd warn that "new blood" to watch their backs, except that Arianna Huffington and Brad DeLong, along with the rest of 90% of his blogroll, ain't exactly new to the scene. So he's pretty much just lying to save his ass.)

My favorite argument, though, is "No, I don't have a responsibility to help other bloggers. Let somebody else do it." Well, no, not by law or anything. But the idea that the big guy should help raise up the "little guy" is pretty goddamned important in most liberal circles.

Jon Swift was right: the weirdest thing about all of this is that the conservatives are linking like you'd think a liberal would, and liberals are linking like you'd think a conservative would. Maybe that's why the Republicans tend to do better in elections- individualistic rhetoric aside, they know what wins elections and debates, and it ain't "I got mine, Jack, so push off."

Kos got his. We get to push off.

Best Thing I've Read All Week

A vignette from Second Life:

On Help Island, a naked man is performing a slightly horrifying bump-and-grind in the middle of the landing site, and he won’t stop screaming into the chat channel. “Help me! Someone stole all my clothes and now I can’t stop dancing! I’ve only been here twenty minutes!”

I honestly think this should be Second Life's new tagline.

Happy Lupercalia! (Edit: ancient variant of furries "yiffing"?)

It's too bad that so many nifty old Roman holidays were sanitized. Just as Saturnalia sounds like more fun than Christmas is (and Christmas is pretty fun), Lupercalia beats the heck out of St. Valentines day.

Sacrificial rites, ritualistic whippings, drugs, an ancient variant of the modern "key club", and Werewolves? I'll take that over little candy hearts anyday.

Edit: I'm not sure, but some sources I've read said that part of the ritual involved young men running around in wolf skins to symbolize the she-wolf spirit that Romulus and Remus nursed from.

If that's true, then that whole thing of people dressing up like vaguely anthropomorphic animals for sexual purposes may be way older than any of us thought.

(Wonder how the Second Life crew are going to celebrate?)

Say What You Will About The Man's Linking Policy:

You gotta love a guy who, consciously or unconsciosuly, uses Battlestar Galactica slang when ragging on Hillary.

Most of the presidential candidates have gotten the "I fracked up the vote" stuff out of the way last year. It's not the most compelling tack to take -- if their judgment was so poor as to vote for the darn thing, why should we promote them. We talk about DC being a place where people fail upward. Do we really want to encourage that within our own party?

But in any case, pro-war Dems who have unequivocally admitted their mistake don't have to offer tortured justifications for their war. They can honestly take Clinton pollster Mark Penn's advice...

Frackin' A.

Al Franken for Senate!

Yep, he's running in 2008.

I think he definitely has a shot. He's clearly trying to continue the legacy of Paul Wellstone's seat, so he won't need to compromise his liberalism, and has hometown cred. He's not quite as leftish as Wellstone was (one somewhat critical piece by Paul Hogarth noted that he supports NAFTA and was somewhat pro-Iraq in 2002). I honestly doubt that be a huge problem, considering Al's such a prominent Bush critic.

No, the most important issue is ensuring that he develops a strong relationship with the party apparatus in the state so that they feel like they have a say in his candidacy and his policies. High profile candidates have a way of overshadowing the bottom-up mechanisms that are the lifeblood of politics. He'll need to be careful to ensure that even if his celebrity gets him media exposure, he still takes the time to connect with the people who will be trudging around in October and November trying to convince other people to vote for him.

He does that, and I think the Senate will be a far more interesting place in 2009.

Silver Lining

Thanks to the Marcotte issue, every Republican with even a tertiary connection with a conservative blogger will be a target for the same sort of criticism.

After all, I don't know if you've read the bile coming out of, say, the Loud Goat Fornicator (y'know, LGF) contingent lately, but it'd be simplicity itself to hang it around the other guys' necks.

(Of course, Republicans tend to draw on people from BS "institutes" and think tanks. Fortunately, if they're the David Horowitz style of 'scholar', it's even easier to ferret things out than with bloggers.)

Good Marcotte Piece That Raises a Question...

I enjoyed reading this piece by Amanda Marcotte talking about the contradictions between the bilious attacks she's endured and biblical teachings.

(I was disappointed to read that she had resigned from the Edwards campaign. I have no doubt whatsoever that were she backing a Republican, the situation would be entirely different. I also have no doubt that this will do absolutely nothing to stop the right's attacks and accusations; they'll simply pull it out again and again to attack Edwards and ignore Amanda's resignation.

I don't think that this will help either the party or Edwards in the long run, as it'll simply embolden the smear artists, but it's Amanda's life.)

Anyway, she said something that intrigues me:

In fact, from everything I understand, much of the history of Christian misogyny is one 2,000 year long backlash against early female power in the church.

A quick question to my reader(s) out there: can anybody point to where this comes from? Amanda didn't cite anything specifically, and I'm not that knowledgable about this particular issue. Googling is an option, of course, but I figured I'd send it out there first.

A Useful Object Lesson

So, I assume everybody saw the AEI guy, Chris Horner on Jon Stewart. He was trying to claim that global warming is some kind of huge conspiracy. He didn't have much luck; Jon shut him down pretty thoroughly, and it wasn't exactly a huge moment in climate change policymaking.

That said, it WAS a great object lesson in that bugaboo of political discussion: talking points. Horner's comments were a textbook example of someone trying to obfuscate the issues by using deceptive talking points. Being textbook examples, I figured they'd be useful for a little friendly tutoring on both talking points and how to shut them down.

So beginneth the lesson.

Talking point the first: Global Cooling. He pulled out the idea that people have been going back and forth between saying that the Earth is cooling and the Earth is warming for a long time now. Like all good talking points, it included a specific and easily understood example: that people used the example of the Titanic, back in the turn of the century, to argue that the Earth is cooling. He then mentioned the idea that people thought that the Earth was warming back during the "dust bowl" period, then cooling in the 1970's, and now saying it's warming.

It's an effective talking point. It reveals a specific and abundantly silly example, and then quickly rattles off every switch subsequently, without even discussing the validity of the underlying ideas and science. He can't do that, because he's still pretty weak on that score, but by dropping that one example he can paint all the rest with the same brush.

How to shut it down? Simple: break down that connection. Jon Stewart did that by bringing up the science; that's how you break down the "we used to believe in global cooling" people too, by saying that the fact that that prediction was wrong does not mean much for the accuracy of this prediction. Indeed, if you know anything about science, you know that wrong predictions are part of the process, and the "global cooling" theory wasn't anywhere near as sound as global warming was. Once you've broken that connection, you can get to the science, and you're on far better ground. Fortunately, you can do it pretty much simply by mentioning the science, so it's not hard.

(If you wanted to mock it, you could say that we used to believe that there were only four elements. Should we chuck out atomic physics because alchemists were wrong then?)

Talking Point the Second: Jon asked how such a huge conspiracy to defraud the public about global warming could exist; were the scientists lying? Chris responded by saying "oh, no, not the scientists", but then started talking about how Enron was massively enriching itself through emissions markets. The goal here is to try to pull a reversal on global warming critics by claiming that they're the dupes of big, corrupt businesses, and used Enron as an example.

(One could call this the "guilt by association" trick. All of these use that theme of course, but this one focuses on name-dropping anything immoral even tertially related to the subject at hand.)

This is a kind of "defense through offense" talking point- he was preemptively insulating himself and his "side" against charges of being dupes of big business by saying that the OTHER guys are the dupes of even worse businesses. It plays on liberals' anti-corporate sympathies and makes them wonder whether maybe the (supposedly brave and individualist) anti-warming activists are simply "speaking truth to power". Of course, this is all wrong; Enron's failing was in deceptive accountancy, and has nothing at all to do with energy markets themselves.

How to shoot it down? Just press on the "uh, and this matters because..." idea, just as Jon did. All the organizations and scientists that AREN'T Enron have exactly as much credibility as they ever did, no matter what Enron did with their books. I don't even believe that highlighting Enron is necessarily a bad thing; it's intended as a quick, almost subliminal jab, and isn't supposed to be fully aired out. It's ridiculous, and even Chris knows it's ridiculous, so he tries to slip it under the radar. Pull it out, make fun of the "so, what, Enron's crooked accountants made all the scientists discover global warming" bit, and he'll lose credibility and likely get defensive... just as Chris did.

Getting defensive provoked talking point the third: "I heard this one guy say..." Chris, when pressed on the supposed communist nature of environmentalists, brought up a German environmentalist that said that "he wanted to see the day where you'd be punished more harshly for cutting down a forest than selling a child into slavery". Nasty stuff, right? Except for one thing: it's just one guy. You can find nuts supporting ANY cause, and Chris gave no indication that this guy was in any sort of leadership role. It's much like the other ones, in that it uses one specific case to tar a whole class of attitudes, but I see this as a specific type precisely because it's so common and allows for such a wide variety of uses. It's a VERY common and pretty effective rhetorical tool; people like it and journalists LOVE it when complicated issues are drilled down to interesting personalities, so they'll latch onto these personalities all out of proportion to their actual importance.

(Ferreting out comments for this purpose is the entire raison d'etre of MEMRI, by the way.)

Jon showed how to shut this down, too: point out that it's just one guy. Unless you can prove a bunch of people believe this or that he's in a real leadership position (ie, not a "community leader", but someone people actually derive opinion from) he's useless as any kind of an indicator. Again, doing this properly (with assertiveness and a touch of bemused humor) will play merry hell with the other guy's credibility; he'll try to save it by saying that this guy is representative, at which point he'll either go too far fighting back (as Chris did with a stupid Hitler comparison that torpedoed his credibility) or you can simply pull out somebody, ANYBODY else who has a different opinion, and all of a sudden their "representative" isn't representative of anything.

In any case, you get the idea. It's a good idea to keep an eye out for these sorts of games; when you find them, shut them down. Do it with humor instead of indigation, though. Jon is effective precisely because nobody can call him "shrill" and being castigated on his show doesn't give you the "politically incorrect" cred that comes from being criticized by a progressive in some circles. If you laugh at them, they'll realize you don't take them seriously; and above all else, these guys desperately want to be taken seriously.

So just laugh at them, while pointing out just how goofy their talking points are. THAT, they're not equipped to handle.

Wanna Be a Writer?

Here Ya Go, courtesy of Charlie Stross, who details exactly what the writer's life is like.

A sample (of the lengthy but compelling piece):

Somewhere in those several hours you will hopefully write something. Unless you're already an A-list writer who can pull advances in excess of $50,000, you'd better either pump out an average of 1000 finished (polished, edited) words of prose per working day, or go looking for a day job. There are roughly 250 working days in a year (I'm assuming you take a couple of days a week off, and have vacations and sick leave), so that's 250,000 words, which is about two ordinary-length novels and a couple of short stories. Some writers do a whole lot more than 1000 finished words per day; some do fewer. If you do fewer and you're at the low-to-middling end of the pecking order, you will not be able to earn a living at this career. Many writers do 250,000 words a year and still can't make a living. They may have part-time jobs, to make ends meet, or a full-time job and do the writing thing in the evenings and at weekends. It's a treadmill.

In addition to writing you will:


pore over copy-edited manuscripts, correcting editorial mark-ups
write
grovel over galley proofs, looking for typos
write
keep track of your expenses and petty cash and do all the 1001 things that any small business person has to do to keep HM Revenue and Customs off your back
write
enthusiastically deal with the press and interviewers, no matter how small or obscure the outlet — publicity is always a priority unless you're big enough to hire a PR manager
write
deal with correspondence to your editor(s) and agent in a prompt, professional manner because if you ever get yourself a reputation for being difficult to work with you are so screwed ... (luckily editors and agents know that only lunatics and eccentrics want to be full-time writers, so no small amount of their time is dedicated to insulating you from the demands of other publishing folks, and vice versa)
write
persuade your bank to accept cheques drawn on currencies they've never heard of
write
learn more than you ever wanted to know about international double taxation treaties and the associated exemption forms
write
answer your fan mail (if you're lucky enough to have fans)
did I say "write" often enough? I meant "write, even when you're sick to the back teeth of it, when the current project is an interminable drag, when you can't even remember why you ever agreed to write this bloody stupid book, when your hands ache from RSI and your cat's forgotten who you are and your spouse is filing for divorce on grounds of neglect".

And that's just for starters.

So, uh, yeah. Enjoy!

(He does admit that there are positive aspects; you're doing what you love, for one, and its one of the few jobs where it's advisable to structure your work life around your social life, rather than the other way around. But it's not easy.)

Edit: Even if you don't want to read the entry, you MUST all read the comments. Everything from an embittered game designer to rants about the value of MBAs to wedding photography to S.M. Stirling being, well, S.M. Stirling. Anybody who remembers what Usenet used to be like will know what an entertaining show THAT is.

Gotta say: I really miss having incredibly long, intense, interesting comment threads like that. I should see if the old YACCS account is still up.

So You Know How Every Idiot Supporting Torture Uses '24'?

Yeah, apparently that's no coincidence. The writers over at Fox who create the adventures of SuperJack are, well, let's just hit the money quote:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who participated in the discussion, praised the show’s depiction of the war on terrorism as “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options.” He went on, “Frankly, it reflects real life.” Chertoff, who is a devoted viewer of “24,” subsequently began an e-mail correspondence with Gordon, and the two have since socialized in Los Angeles. “It’s been very heady,” Gordon said of Washington’s enthusiasm for the show. Roger Director, show creator Joel Surnow’s friend, joked that the conservative writers at “24” have become “like a Hollywood television annex to the White House. It’s like an auxiliary wing.”

So, yeah, 24 (which was once a pretty good suspense thriller) has slowly devolved into pro-war and pro-torture agitprop.

Figures.

Surnow has been confronted again and again by real military personnel who have real interrogation experience trying to tell him that what he depicts on the show doesn't work in real life and is negatively influencing real interrogators in Iraq, but he can't be bothered to listen, busy as he is conferencing with the likes of Roger Ailes about future shows. So Jack keeps torturing.

Now, I'm pretty strident about freedom of speeech- even more so that I used to be. Surnow has every right to put out his show. But, of course, we now have every right to remind people about that "auxiliary wing".

(Me, I was done with 24 a while ago. If I want science fiction and superheroes, I'll choose Battlestar Galactica and Heroes; and if I want "gritty", I'll choose The Wire or The Shield. Vic Mackey's way more interesting as a torturer anyway.)

Gotta Give New Presidential Candidate Barack Obama One Thing:

It was one hell of a speech.

A few new blogs added to the roll

Two belong to Martin Wisse, Wisse Words and Prog Gold. One is My Left Wing, because MSOC's rant about Kos was freakin' glorious.

Anybody else want on board this little ship, just drop a line.

Another question you should be asking...

I love Digby. Don't get me wrong. He's Edit: she, apparently, my mistake one of the best bloggers out there, and has been since he flew solo on his site. She deserves every hit he gets. I'm exceedingly proud that I'm as well-placed on her blogroll as I am, and try to comment on her site when I can.

That said, why is she on Kos' blogroll, when skippy isn't? Both are outspoken mid- to long-length pseudonymous web diarists. Both started around the same time, and neither are resolutely campaign-focused (which is what Kos was supposed to be all about with that blogroll, right?)

I'm not saying Kos should delink Digby (nor would I EVER,), but inquiring minds...

edit: I'd never actually asked about digby's gender- figured it was male from the male pseudonym. Error corrected, and if you see old posts that say "he", just chalk it up to the failure of standpoint feminism.

If my point wasn't proven...

the fact that some random diarist, whom I'd never even heard of, decided to remove the tags "intro" and "kos" from my self-introductory diary entry on Daily KOS says everything I ever could have written about exactly how important, and how necessary, independent blogs really are.

To use some vulgarity in quoting a favorite character of mine, Warren Ellis' Spider Jerusalem: "No fucker rewrites ME."

Just For the Record

Pandagon's a great blog, and Amanda Marcotte a great blogger, no matter what reactionaries and opportunists say.

(Even, unlike skippy, they don't link to me yet.)

You Know When Something Has Become Disastrous?

When it provokes something like THIS. My God, I thought skippy was pissed. Maryscott O'Connor has torn a strip off Kos that will almost certainly NEVER heal. Among other things, she points out something that guys like Kos and Atrios (and their defenders) often miss; that the traffic from their blogrolls that they see as miniscule is actually vitally important to other, smaller sites in order to introduce new readers.

Clearly, there is no "Amnesty" here. There wasn't ever going to be. It was a fantasy or an excuse, but it never truly existed.

Me, I just have one question: why? Were I Atrios, at this point, I'd toss the whole kit 'n caboodle back up and simply divide them between "current reads" and "old friends" or the like. Ditto with Kos. No matter how you feel about "community building"...

(and if Kos thinks that not building a progressive community online is important as Maryscott implies, He. Is. Insane.)

...you have to at least realize that making progressive enemies for reasons that are utterly foolish and facile is unbelievably bad PR.

And, in many respects, the same goes double for Duncan/Atrios, who doesn't do all that single-site community building stuff on his blog that is still, at its core, the same Blogspot blog that it ever was. He can't pretend that he's building this giant Myspace-style community like Kos is, those 400 page long comments threads notwithstanding. Why did he even bother with this?

More importantly, barring a kind of wounded stubbornness that is unseemly in adults, why continue it?

I Love Irony

The original reason Atrios gave for The Great Purge of '07 was that he wanted to promote smaller, overlooked blogs.

By and large, that didn't happen, as a quick perusal of his blogroll reveals. Most of the blogs listed are the Usual Suspects, the big group blogs that anybody who's even heard of a blog can type from memory or already has an RSS feed of.

Yet, by removing skippy and provoking him into an absolute torrent of linking, Atrios has somehow managed to introduce at least one reader, yours truly, to more good blogs through skippy's site than I've read in a good while. I imagine I'm not the only one.

So, uh, thanks?

More Medieval Than Advertised?

You know that armor that the military is trying to ban? Dragon Skin? Here's a video of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMHhw_w1qs

(I'd embed, but Youtube isn't behaving.)

Notice something? The Dragon Skin... is Scale Mail!.

The more things change...

(From http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/7/114814/3131)

Edit: Just finished watching this. It's astounding. That Kos diarist (Occam's Hatchet) is right... why the HELL isn't this stuff standard issue?

Kos Diary

Since I started a Kos account in order to write comments on that site, I put up a little diary entry explaining who I was and what this is. For those interested, it's here.

And no, it's not going to be replacing this site in the slightest.

Skippy on the Warpath

Skippy (a great individual blogger that I'd been remiss in not linking to earlier) has been on an absolute tear over this "screw the little blogs" thing. Most of it is because he didn't take his delinking at Eschaton as calmly as your host did ("frothing rage" would be a better description), but he's pointing out all those issues of egalitarianism that are really bothering me about this whole thing.

It's really turning into a "big vs. little" conflict. Chris Bowers at MyDD was the source of the "screw you, kiddies" sentiment that seems to have turned this nuclear, Kos has been thrown into it, and it's turning into a huge slapfight all around. So it's not doing the liberal blogosphere any favors. For once, their conservative counterparts actually look good, because if there's one thing Instapundit is good at, it's linking to the little guys.

(Even if they're absolutely insane.)

There are other problems here, though, with this shift from independent blogs to group-blogs and subsidiary "diaries". I already mentioned that the one that bothers me the most is editorial freedom. If "diarists" are forced to choose between toeing the party line or languishing out in the wilderness, that's going to get reflected in their writing, and how readers perceive it. That charge against Kos from the wingnuts saying that he controlled the blogosphere was ludicrous because of independent blogs, not the Kos diaries, where he really could exercise that kind of control. The same is true of all sites that have subsidiary diaries, like MyDD and TPMCafe.

Another, more ominous issue is a financial one. Let's face it: if you're writing a popular diary, you're not seeing a dime. It's all going to the site admins. They might maybe share a little, but the advertising dollars are headed their way. There's a real problem there: administrators could start making a point of not linking to other sites' diarists and subtly encouraging their diarists to "keep it in the community", in order to maximize ad rates, clickthroughs, and revenue. The act of delinking an independent blog opens you up not only to the charge of being censorious, but the charge of trying to rub them out for financial gain... and even if you aren't intentionally doing that, the charge is going to happen.

This is a website design truth as old as the hills. Once you have a reader, you're supposed to try to hang on to them, unless they decide to click through something that you're going to make money on. That's also the absolute worst way to try to build a broader community; taken to its conclusion, it hives the Internet off into gated enclaves with strict moderation and little connection to the "outside world". Kos is already starting to kind of feel this way; The Huffington Post (as good a read as it is) definitely is. That's not what blogging is about, not at all.

Besides, if you want a big gated community, you should probably just go to the Something Awful forums. The actual Something Awful satire website, I feel, never quite survived the loss of Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka as a regular contributor, but the forums are probably the best (and certainly the biggest) around. Kos, MyDD, TPMCafe and the like aren't going to catch up to huge forums like this or uber-social sites like Myspace and Facebook, but that seems like what they're trying to do.

And, of course, it's a blow to internet pseudonymity, because the administrators can easily make real-world identification a condition of entry. Kos doesn't now, but Huffington does, and fear of lawsuits brought on by the complete lack of anything like common-carrier status might make that inevitable.

I don't think this is a positive development, and I'm absolutely shocked that Instapundit can see it and Kos can't.

In any case, I've added skippy to my own tiny blogroll, and I'll repeat his promise: link to me, I'll link to you. assuming you're progressive and your content doesn't make me want to punch something. I didn't have that rule before, and manually adding these things is a pain (I really need to set up a damned blogrolling bar) but heck with it. Let me know.

MyDD on the evolution of blogging...

Mydd:

Now, more than three years later, it has come to the point where the early structure of the progressive political blogosphere has been almost entirely done away with. The days of the major, solo content generator, pundit blogger are all but over.

A quote about cold, dead hands springs to mind. As I said over on Atrios' site, there's going to be at least one, dammit.

In any case, I'm very uneasy with the idea that at the end of the day blogs are essentially going to be little more than online magazines, with multiple writers, sections, collective mastheads, investigative journalism, huge forums and the like. All that is well and good, but it's also essentially The Washington Monthly or Newsmax or the like, except with shorter, differently arranged articles.

That's not what a weblog is.

At the end of the day, a weblog is just a journal, and the essentially egalitarian and individual nature of the enterprise is what makes it valuable. You lose that at your peril.

More Floor Crossing Madness in the Great White North

Garth Turner, the firebrand former Canadian Conservative who was kicked out of the party for not playing ball with its rather imperious leader, is now, apparently, a Liberal.

(And yet, somehow, not a single Republican in the Senate has moved to give the Dems that Joe-less 51 seat majority. )

(You'd think 2008 would be looming large.)

In any case, I'm not sure exactly how this affects Canada's rather precarious minority government, but I THINK it means that NDP leader Jack Layton is probably weeping behind a bottle of scotch right now, because for a few glorious weeks he controlled the balance of power and now he doesn't.

(Hat tip: Oliel again, who called it early.)

Does anybody still take Joe Klein seriously?

I think, at this point, that the credibility is pretty much shot.

Then again, I've thought that before, and here we are.

(Hat Tip: Atrios)

Web 2.0

Found kind of a nifty presentation on what "Web 2.0" is supposed to mean on Youtube.

It feels a bit too much like a circa 1999 Wired article, but it's nifty enough. The "teaching the machine using tags" stuff is a bit much, but the points about ease of content posting and the differentiation between form and content is at the heart of the whole blogging phenomenon. People use blogs, at their core, because they're an incredibly easy way to present a constant, readable flow of content without having to muck around much with HTML. That's really all that "Web 2.0" is- the technology facilitating user-created content. It's not about labels "teaching the machine" or any of that folderol.

(And no, I'm not disparaging labels just because I don't want to go through my archives and label everything now that I've switched to the New Blogger.)

(That's a big part of it, of course, but not the only reason.)

By the way, I'd encourage all my readers (all three of you) to go bug Atrios to keep me on his blogroll. OG bloggers need to stick together, dawg.

Yglesias Summarizes Privatization

I'll just let the man speak:

The trouble with government work, as opposed to the private sector is that there's a lack of efficiency. It's important to understand, however, that there's nothing intrinsically efficient about private sector work. No magical "it's the free market" dust comes and renders private enterprises effective. Rather, the idea is simply that an inefficiently run private enterprise (and there are many) would simply go out of business. An inefficiently run government office, by contrast, goes out of business when it loses political support and sees its budget grow as long as it maintains political support. Thus, you see public sector dollars flowing to whatever there's a strong political constituency for, whereas private sector dollars flow to wherever well-managed firms are meeting demand.

Then enter government contractors which, as The New York Times points out, have exploded to unprecedented levels under George W. Bush and the late unlamented Republican congress. Here you have private enterprises displacing government. Why? For the private sector efficiency, of course! But you don't actually get that efficiency. It's still a government program. Funding is still being determined by political support. The cash doesn't go to companies that can do a really good job, it just goes to companies that have political clout -- i.e. ones that recycle a share of their profits into campaign contributions. It's essentially the worst of both worlds, since you get the inherent problems of the public sector plus the need for owners to be taking a slice off the top in profit margins. It is, however, a very good deal for politicians interested in union-busting and for politicians interested in raking money in from government contractors. Shockingly, the GOP loves it.

Bingo. This is the main reason why everybody should look at sole-source contracts and hidden bidding processes with enormous suspicion. It doesn't really take that much time or change before something that once seemed honest turns into political cronyism. The fair-minded people who might have propelled privatization aren't necessarily going to retain control of the process, and those that acquire control will usually have friends and supporters who want a little taste as a reward for all their hard work.

Besides, as someone pointed out in Matthew's comments, the key is not "private sector", but "competition". There is nothing efficient about a monopoly, even though they're private entities. The desire to maintain monopolies itself often leads to political rent-seeking, because the last thing an inefficient monopoly wants is real competition, and if it's cheaper to buy political clout instead of making the business more efficient, that's the choice they'll make.

(A good thing to remember the next time you hear someone bleating about wonders of "The Market".)

On a More Serious Note

I haven't linked the IPCC report yet, and I should. So here it is, or at least the policymaker's brief.

(Warning: it's a PDF. I know those things can get a little error-prone.)

So if you're gunning for that sweet AEI dollah-dollah payday, that's where you start.

I Should Read Conservative Bloggers More Often...

It's really, really funny when someone tries to take down Joe Wilson and pulls a boner like this:

Like Bond, Joe went to Niger, a country only known for yellowcake and junk email...

I almost don't want him to know that Niger and Nigeria are different countries. It's so much FUNNIER that way.

Hilarious Follow Up to That AEI Bit...

Watching reactionaries try to defend it is almost as funny. Endless verbiage to make one simple (yet dumb) argument: "the scientists need to be paid by somebody, so why not Exxon?"

The answer, equally simply? Because they aren't being paid for their insights, they're being paid for having the "right" results. For all that these "Big Lizards" tools fulminate about leftie academics, no university does this, and reputable think tanks don't do it either. They might pay for researchers to do work about subjects they agree with, and might even hire ideologically-compatible researchers. What they don't do is buy results. If, say, Brookings gives a research grant to a Ph.D, they don't say "and make sure you come to the conclusion that Iraq was a fine idea".

They say "research Iraq and tell us what you find". At WORST they might bury poor results, but that is worlds different, and while researchers might not get future grants from, say, the Sierra Club, you'd have to be profoundly naive to think that they couldn't find an employer.

(Like, say, the AEI!)

And Universities are, of course, different beasts entirely. The whole tenure system exists because this very idea of paid results would cause 99% of legitimate academics to break out in hives. Academics tend to become more successful by going against received wisdom, not for it.

I realize that this is a terrible day for the right blogosphere- the IPCC smacked down pretty much every argument by the deniers and the AEI has just been thoroughly discredited. Still, you'd think they'd do better.

All Right- This is Handy!

Now we have a simple way of ensuring that those who we really shouldn't listen to on Global Warming are easily identified.

All you have to do is check to see if they were involved with this:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

I trust I don't need to explain why this is very, very bad science, or the pall that it would cast over the careers of anybody who accepted this money.

The best part, though, is that it pretty thoroughly discredits the American Enterprise Institute. They can't even pretend that they're a neutral, scientific group anymore, or that their research is worth the paper it's printed on. This announcement makes it impossible to verify that any AEI study is scientifically worthwhile; if they're doing this now, there's no reason to believe that they haven't done it before and that they won't do it again.

Were I even peripherally involved with the AEI, I'd make a serious point of disassociating myself with them RIGHT NOW. This is, from a conservative researcher's point of view, beyond disastrous.

(I couldn't be happier.)

Iran attacks in the next few weeks?

US News:

The US News Political Bulletin has learned Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly concerned that President Bush will order air strikes against targets in Iran in the next few months or even weeks. They cite as evidence the tough warnings from senior Administration officials, including the Commander in Chief, that Iranian help for insurgents in Iraq is leading to the deaths of US troops and Iraqi civilians. Democratic insiders tell the Political Bulletin that they suspect Bush will order the bombing of Iranian supply routes, camps, training facilities, and other sites that Administration officials say contribute to American losses in Iraq. Under this scenario, Bush would not invade Iran with ground forces or zero in on Iranian nuclear facilities. But under the limited-bombing scenario, Bush could ask for a congressional vote of support, Democratic insiders predict, which many Democrats would feel obliged to endorse or risk looking like they weren't supportive of the troops. Bombing Iran would also take attention away from the troubled situation in Iraq and cause a rally-round-the-president reaction among Americans, at least for a while. But Democrats add that an attack on Iran would probably be condemned around the world and would precipitate an Iranian response that could dramatically worsen Mideast turmoil and have unforeseen consequences that could be extremely damaging to the United States.

First, to reiterate what may be a tired point, can someone PLEASE MUZZLE THESE IDIOT "INSIDERS"? They're wagging the dog themselves by setting up the "feel obligated" line for the Republicans and sabotaging any message control by the Dems.

Anyway, here's hoping the Dems aren't that dumb. 2002 wasn't THAT long ago, the should still remember the lesson from that: that it doesn't matter what you do, you're gonna be slimed as unpatriotic anyway. Especially since public opinion on this is going to likely be somewhere between poisonous and murderous.

Whoops!

Looks like the very first industry-funded attack on the IPCC report just got leaked, courtesy of DeSmogBlog.

Only read a bit, but it seems like it's the same old, same old. "Too complex to really understand", "the sun is getting hotter", "all the data is taken in urban heat islands", etc. There are some new ones (I personally liked "climate scientists aren't using proper econometric methods and it invalidates their findings, but we won't say how or why"), but for the most part it seems like the same crap that has been rebutted on RealClimate.org over and over again.

Still, it IS pretty detailed for a rebuttal of a report that hasn't come out yet. Which makes sense, because they've actually been writing this for a year now:

Finally, Weaver pointed out that the whole Fraser Institute analysis is based on a document that is almost a year out of date. “I was most surprised that this analysis was written based on our second draft” (released in Spring 2006), said Weaver. “We incorporated changes in response to well over 1,000 reviewrs' comments before preparing a final draft last fall.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately), it's very likely that anything that these guys have cooked up that might seriously damage the science of global warming has already been raised and responded to. That makes it really unlikely that this is going to sway any scientists.

Of course, it's not supposed to. It's supposed to provide academic cover for business to continue doing what they're doing and ideologically biased legislators to support them. That's no surprise; that's what the Frasier Institute is for.

What I'm concerned about isn't that, but whether the media is going to portray this as he said/she said. Considering they likely have little idea what the science is and are still (at least somewhat) cowed by loud conservative mouthpieces, I'd say the odds are pretty good.

Pity.

Gore's on a roll

First the nominations. Then selling out stadiums. And now, Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Honestly, this just seems to get more and more bulletproof. The Nobels, as the article said, are chosen in November and announced in December. Thanks to the accelerated primary schedule, many bellwether states will be holding their primaries around February.

It is concievably possible that Al Gore will go into those early primaries having just won the Nobel Peace Prize a few months earlier. Unless Hilary saves the world from an asteroid hit with her laser vision or something, she's going to be REALLY hard pressed to compete with that.

Campaigns or no, the stars seem to be aligning for Gore/Obama '08.