Unqualified Successes 2002 - At the time of the 2001 awards, this site had a few dozen readers and the Maryland Terrapins were getting blown out of the Orange Bowl. Things have changed for the better! This year's format is as follows: New categories will be marked with an asterisk. Repeat categories will have last year's winner in parentheses. Before any of my fellow bloggers get their hopes up, I should state that the Unqualified Successes are not primarily intended to be awards for bloggers. So if you don't win anything, it doesn't mean I don't love you. I might not, of course, but you can't tell from this list. (Mostly.) Thank you very much to everyone who takes time to read this site, everyone who takes time to send e-mails about this site and everyone who has been kind enough to link to this site or cite items from it. Now then!

Least Dispensible Weblog - Instapundit.com (2001: Instapundit.com)

Hawk of the Year - Perry de Havilland (2001: Christopher Hitchens)

Dove of the Year - Amram Mitzna (2001: Alan Bock)

"Turning Japanese" Award, for the Best Case of the Vapors - Tie, Everyone who was convinced the Capital Area snipers must be Al Qaeda terrorists (2001: Andrew Sullivan)

Best Non-Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - The Talking Dog (2001: Mickey Kaus)

Best Libertarian in a Neoconservative Role - Brink Lindsay, CATO Hawk (2001: Glenn Reynolds)

Best Meme Insertion - "Chickenhawk" by whoever thought it up (2001: "Our Good Friends, the Saudis" by Virginia Postrel)

Best Libertarian in a Libertarian Role - Julian Sanchez (2001: Samizdata)

Least Annoying Liberal - Patrick Nielsen Hayden (2001: Ginger Stampley)

War is the Health of the State Award, Executive Branch Division - President George W. Bush (2001: John Ashcroft)

War is the Health of the State Award, Legislative Division - tie, Rep. Charles Rangel and Senator-Elect Saxby Chambliss (2001: Charles Schumer)

War is the Health of the State Award, Fourth Estate Division - David Broder (2001: Peter Jennings [broadcast], every mainstream liberal columnist in America [print], Bill Moyers [political magazines] - no way I was putting myself through all that again, so a consolidated media award this time)

*War is the Health of the State Award, International Division - Ariel Sharon

*War is the Health of the State Award, Super-Colossal All-Time Grand Prize - John Poindexter

*War May Not Be the Health of MY State Award - Hamid Karzai

*Jumped the Shark Award - "Anti-Idiotarian"

*I Seen My Opportunities, and I Took 'Em Award - Kim Jong Il

*Blog Trend of the Year - Unretiring

*Baleful Blog Trend of the Year - Public de-linking

*To Call It the Baleful Blog Trend of the Year Would Be Evidence of Unconscionable Bias on my Part - the liberal blog new wave

*Arthur Anderson Award for Innovative Accounting - OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr, for his new, lower-cost "estimates" of the cost of conquering Iraq

Special Achievement Award - Antiwar.com (2001: Blogger.com)

*Food of the Year - Chili without beans

Tagline of the Year - "Harabist," Aziz Poonawalla (2001: "We can fact-check your ass," Ken Layne)

Spouse of the Year - Mrs. Offering (2001: Mrs. Offering [same one])

Longer Boats - About my item on Tolkien as British mythology, and why the Ring saga is so land-locked, Patrick Nielsen Hayden quickly wrote:

What do you mean, "where are all the boats"? In Tolkien's mythology, sailing is how you get to Heaven, more or less. Sounds reasonably English to me.

Mariners are a Big Deal in Arda, I'll remind you. One of them was so successful, he got turned into a star, and Elrond is his son, too. An entirely Age of the World (the Second, to be precise) was dominated by dauntless navigatin' men. Eventually they decided this naval power stuff was so spiffy, they'd just use it to conquer the gods. Trouble ensued.

Even in THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Aragorn enters Minas Tirith at the head of a mighty fleet, one of the most visually-dramatic scenes in THE RETURN OF THE KING and one I hope doesn't get lost on the cutting-room floor.

Just like Patrick to confuse the issue with facts. Still: It doesn't seem like much. Where is the littoral coastline? Where are the wondrous islands? Beowulf sails a lot. Sir Patrick Spens sails. Frodo not at all.

I'm wondering now if Treasure Island isn't "a mythology for Britain."

Libertarian Simplifies Your Life - Eric Mauro e-mails about Know-Nothings, neo-confederates and other disagreeable people:

I've been wondering about that as well, after the Lott affair. Lincoln would have got nowhere being a total abolitionist, but then again there were abolitionists at the time. This is a big problem with revisionism. If you believe in the essence of electoral politics, that the electorate always makes the best decision, then you have to accept that the racist constituencies of the 20th century were making the best choice they could be expected to. It makes it a little easier to accept the idea that presidents from Lincoln on couldn't effectively establish voting rights laws (although all politicians ought to be held accountable for any violence they incited). Admittedly that is awfully close to excusing their racism. Don't know where to come down on this.

I think this problem is easier for libertarians because we don't have to believe that "the electorate always makes the best decision." For us, representative democracy is a means, not an end. The electorate gets it wrong plenty. We just figure other systems would get it more wrong.

Unmixed Signals - Say this for the Bush Administration - it has sent a message to potentially hostile regimes that is admirable for its clarity if nothing else: Get nukes as fast as you can, one way or another. If you miss your deadline, like Iraq, you can be toppled with something close to impunity. If you act with dispatch, like Korea, you're golden.

The optimistic reading of the Korean scenario is exactly that North Korea is taking advantage of the Bush Administration's obsessio focus on Iraq to arm up and secure itself from the same fate. Kim Jong-Il has figured out how the Axis of Evil works: he who has nukes survives. The pessimistic scenario is that North Korea will attempt to extort money and concessions from Japan and South Korea with its weapons just as it extorted US aid with the mere prospect of a nuclear program in the 1990s. Korea is an economic basket case of its own making, unlike Iraq, and its Communist Party may be the one that decides to take everybody else down with it.

Ironies abound here. South Korea wants to practically cut the US out of resolving what Colin Powell assures is is not a crisis. US-South Korean relations are probably the worst they've been since the 1970s. Meanwhile, North Korea is trying to cut everybody but the US out:

"There is no need for the third party to meddle in the nuclear issue on the peninsula. The issue should be settled between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S., the parties responsible for it," said the North's ruling-party newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun.

(Link via Instapundit.) I've read, though I can't find a link now, that Japan seems similarly more uneasy about what the US may do in response to the Korean situation than what the DRPK itself might do.

Darn those ungrateful Japanese and South Koreans, your neos are saying now. But here's the thing: it's their ass on the line much much more than ours. We have 37,000 troops, maybe, with a lucky shot, one or two small cities and some steelhead streams at risk from North Korea. South Korea and Japan have their whole countries on the line.

A lot of libertarians say, rather casually, no one knows how to live your life better than you do, as an argument against bureaucracy, regulation and the shepherd-client state. This is obviously wrong at least some of the time. I have family members whose lives I could do a tolerably smarter job with than they've managed themselves. The real argument is different: If you fuck your life up, you suffer the consequences. If I fuck your life up, you suffer the consequences. I may be smarter than you, some time in some ways, but I'm not infallible. But a system where you pay for my mistakes and it's my job to make your mistakes for you is a bad idea.

As so often, interventionism is the nanny state applied to international relations. The consequences of our Korean mistakes will fall almost everywhere but on us.

Unqualified Offerings Unclear on the Concept - Bruce Rolston talks about Tolkien's desire to create a mythology for England. Okay, they talk of nothing else on the bonus DVD disks too. Here's my question . . .

Where are all the boats? What self-respecting island nation's mythology is centered in a thoroughly landlocked tale?

(Is this one Seablogger can explain?)

Blogwatch Auxiliary - A few goings-on . . .

Duckboyz? - The webfooted lad announces that he too will be taking in strays, like Asymmetrical Information and On the Third Hand before him.

Spleenville - Big ol' thread on Tolkien and the merits of fantasy. Reading the chief antagonist of the thread may be hazardous to those who have high blood pressure, the surname "Nielsen Hayden" or both.

Where is Raed - Salam Pax on the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra by candlelight. Plus, how close does Iraq think we are to war? and better uses for human shields.

Colby Cosh - Fun with French, one of those unaccountable paeans to the manual typewriter and Italian cultural insecurities.

Seablogger says, America: Empire, No; Monarchy, maybe. Also, new boat stuff.

Hot Buttered Death has lots of self-test results and, yes, a Two Towers review, among other things.

Thanks to retiring Washington Redskin Darrell Green. There was a period in the mid-nineties when Mrs. Offering and I managed to get to about one game a year at the stadium. The best thing about being at the game rather than watching it on TV was the chance to watch Darrell Green work an entire play. He liked to try to bait quarterbacks into throwing to his side by laying back a step or two off the receivers. When they did though, came that famous closing speed, and the leap. You wouldn't believe a 5'8" man could get up that high. It was his jumping ability that let him hold his own with much bigger receivers. Also his smarts. Twenty years, the last two full of indignities borne with admirable grace.

People Unclear on the (Invidious) Concept - Judging from this item, Charles Dodgson may not understand the "Being a hawk means never having to say you're sorry" principle.

Surely, on the other hand, Donald Rumsfeld does.

A Fanboy's Notes, Holy Shit Department - Jesse Walker informs me, and it's apparently confirmed, that Michael "Kavalier and Clay" Chabon is writing the script for Spiderman II. I should be embarrassed to admit how thrilling I find this news. Chabon's unused proposal for the first X-Men movie can be accessed from this page of his website.

Jesse is whiling away the intervening time with year end movie "best of" lists - for 1992, 1982 and 1972.

Department of Hunh - The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck. Pretty amusing. (Link via (woolgathering).)

Eschaton-ological Mail - My brief, carping item about liberal bloggers, especially Atrios, brought some mail, which is so far running about 2-1 against me. That is, I heard from three people, one of whom was Atrios, who was very polite, one from a leftist reader who wrote "I read one of his commenters joking about cutting out Lott's heart, pretty sad stuff." and one from Zizka, whose work I had occasion to cite back when we were all discussing Orwell. Zizka's e-mail is substantial and worth running in its entirety. I will, impolitely, interrupt it a time or two. My apologies to Zizka:

I wasn't on the thread you cited, but I'm one of Atrios' "extreme" commenters, or at least I try to be, so I thought I'd respond to your snippet pasted below.

I can't blame you for thinking that liberals and Democrats should always be open-minded and temperate rather than partisan and combative, because many liberals and Democrats think that too.

Where it came from I don't know, but what a dumb idea! In order to function at all, a political party or political tendency needs to have some partisans. If you don't have some fighters on the ground, you lose.

Nobody makes such a demand of conservatives or Democrats. George Will publishes about three moderate and zero liberal pieces a year, and no one screeches. Paul Krugman -- a moderate Clinton Dem, incidentally -- is equally partisan, and a pack of jackals howls at his door 24/7.

Actually "thoughtful Republican syndrome" is legendary among cynical observers on the right. A "thoughtful" Republican is any Republican who rolls over for Democratic proposals. Obviously any Republican who isn't "thoughtful" is . . .

I take Zizka's point that "In order to function at all, a political party or political tendency needs to have some partisans." But that doesn't make such partisans interesting. As a political extremist, I regard an ardent affection for either major party as akin to an enthusiasm for Theosophy. Bright people can certainly believe such things - I'll admit to a doubt that it's the bright part of bright people who so believe - and be worthwhile reading to boot. Yeats was gaga for Theosophy, of course, but still a fascinating thinker and writer. But his ideas on Theosophy itself are not what most of us go to Yeats for.

The demand that liberals should always be temperate and judicious can come from only one place, and that is the belief that there's something so terribly, terribly wrong with liberalism that its advocacy is just plain stupid. But if you believe that, you're not a liberal. (Kaus and Peretz claim to be liberals, but they aren't. They hate liberals).

Moderates are OK with me. So are cautious liberals, and so are tweeners such as yourself. What that means is that if you agree with me, I'm cool with that, and that if you disagree with me, I'll argue. Because I actually believe what I say I believe.

Actually, I don't recall demanding anything. Nor was I complaining that liberals advocate liberalism.

I've stayed out of the Atrios/ Hesiod controversy, but to me one thing the Democrats absolutely have to do is to keep pounding away at the fact that many important Republicans are far too close to the neo-Confederates. It's not just Lott, and it's not just that one thing Lott said. Ashcroft and Sessions come immediately to mind, but we've only just started looking.

And no, not all conservatives are racists. But the Republican Southern strategy panders to the racists, and everyone who plays along with that is tainted. (Are the Democrats tainted by their association with Sharpton? Yes, but Sharpton's just one guy. He's not the Majority leader, he's not a Senator, and as far as I'm concerned he's far less obnoxious than a dozen or so of the Republican neo-Confederates in Congress. You are free to disagree).

I can't agree that there is "just one guy" like Al Sharpton that the Democrats are beholden too. The question of "taint" is genuinely interesting. Something I've been meaning to write about since Lott-ergate is this whole vexed question of where one trolls for votes. Because the issue goes way back - to the very birth of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century out of the ashes of the Whig Party. The Republican Party would not have thrived were it not for a concerted and largely successful effort to coopt the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings were hardcore nativists, anti-immigrant and especially anti-Catholic. Lincoln and the early Republicans never proposed a systematic anti-immigrant program of the sort the Know-Nothings might have liked, but they played artfully on nativist resentments, with an eye to convincing this voting bloc to fear free blacks less than free Irish. At the same time, of course, the Democratic Party was attempting not just to succor its urban immigrant constituency but to frighten it with the prospect of competition from free black labor. Southern Dems similarly played on poor white fears of competition from free blacks, a tactic that had a century yet to run on it.

My point? Oh yeah, I'm supposed to have a point. In a democracy, "taint" is structural. Parties are essentially constituent service organizations and any given constituency is going to have its disagreeable atavisms, e.g. the widespread antisemitism among african-americans and homophobia among rural whites. Politics also abhors a vacuum, so every constituency is going to get at least lip service from some party. There are votes in it.

The question becomes, how do you honorably troll for votes among people with disagreeable beliefs.

Last, we have the "just as bad as ...." canard. As I understand, the posters on LGF routinely propose nuclear genocide. Limbaugh and Coulter routinely misrepresent facts and seldom retract anything. Limbaugh, Coulter, and the Freepers routinely accuse liberals of treason. Coulter and the Freepers routinely toy with death threats. Please detail what it is that you've seen on Atrios' comment section that approaches any of this.

Atrios's own e-mail included an interesting formulation on the matter. He wrote:

I don't think rabid partisanship - i.e. "all republicans are evil" (or "all demonrats are evil") is comparable to rabid bigotry " all muslims/arabs are evil." I don't thnk Rush Limbaugh is a bigot for the things he says about liberals, for example.

I don't mind LGF's commenters when they're talking about how liberals want to destroy america and replace it with an ISlamist theocracy - this is just juvenile, if ridiculous, stuff. I mind when they think all muslims should be rounded up in camps or nuked for the sins of some of their members.

I take Atrios's point here. Certainly there's a bright line between "members of a political party" and "members of an ethnic group" - you're not a member of an ethnic group because you believe things. You're a member of an ethnic group because you got born into it. I don't think the distinction between "members of a political party" and "members of a religion" is as clean, since belief and ideas about the proper ordering of the world are in the nature of both.

I'll note also that I wondered if Atrios' site was "on its way to becoming a Democratic Party version of Little Green Footballs" since, hey, why include weasel words in the first place if you're not going to use them later. That said, I agree with Zizka that there are two key differences between the sites now:

First, none of Atrios' commenters that I've seen wish violence on "you, and anyone who looks like you," which is not the case on LGF. Second, Atrios doesn't moderate his comments. Charles Johnson does. The fact that Johnson is reportedly zealous about deleting comments he considers to be antisemitic while letting stand comments that are bigoted toward muslims gives him a level of personal responsibility that doesn't attach to Atrios. (Note: Somehow the LGF Avengers did not go into action after my original post, no doubt due to my sheer insignificance. I'll be grateful for their continued discretion.)

Having just spent way too much time among the Eschaton comments, I found some really worthwhile stuff among the dross, too.

Oh the Irony Item - Reading this Airstrip One item a symmetry finally hits me: American WWII revisionists generally accuse Roosevelt of being overly attached to Churchill. At the same time, British WWII revisionists suspect Churchill of being overly attached to Roosevelt. This isn't one of those cases where "They can't both be right," but it's still interesting.

Splash! - Electrolite finds - quite the headline.

He's also got a great Tolkien roundup with links to further reading. And Avedon Carol now has a Sideshow Annex devoted to Issues Mesoterran.

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Primarily for fellow MT users . . .

I've been meaning to brag about my Movable Type fu. Last month I decided to really learn MT, beyond just the minimum needed to get a blog up and post to it. In the course of doing so I completely redesigned my Nobilis site (dedicated to the game by R. Sean Borgstrom). Unqualified Offerings is . . . unadorned, by design. Here content is not just king - it's the whole damn kingdom. I wanted a bit more ornament for the Nobilis site. I also had the notion that I could use MT as a content manager to produce something that looked very much like a traditional website, not a blog. That turned out to be true.

By manipulating style sheets, template modules and index templates I was able to produce a traditional welcome page, as for a static site. From there the reader can choose either a weblog view or a "trad view." It would have been possible to eliminate weblog view entirely, but when you created the first ever Nobilis weblog ego reasons militate against this.

There are things Movable Type doesn't do, in the version I'm using at least, that I wish it did. For instance, you can set up a multi-category archive using BOOLEAN statements. I created a "campaign-free blog" using this technique so that people who don't want to read minutiae of our particular game don't have to. But I wish I had an "ALL EXCEPT" ("NOT") option for categories. I'd appreciate some more robust sorting options for the category index. But I was very pleased with what I was able to do with the available options.

Anyway, pretty cool huh?

Controversies Too Stupid to Waste Much Time On - There are a handful:

Bill Frist's pencils. Much has been written about this one, god knows why. Remember when Mencken said "A belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms?" It was for occasions like this.

Patty Murray, traitor. Murray is a dumbass and has the liberal Democrat's inveterate faith in economic intervention anywhere, at home or abroad. Thus she imagines that Bin Laden must be building "day care centers" because she herself would like to build day care centers. But the conservative attempt to puff up routine big government encomia (more foreign aid will make us secure!) into the next thing to aid and comfort to the enemy is a) a transparent attempt to gin up any controversy whatsoever around a Democrat in the aftermath of Lott-ergate, b) absurd and c) despicable. Tony Adragna points out that the gist of Murray's remarks accords with statements made by President Bush himself months earlier.

Robert Byrd's "white nigger" remarks. Yeah yeah, Byrd's an ex-Klansman and a pork-barrel artiste. But he left the Klan, didn't he? His blitherings a couple of years ago about how there are "white niggers" was just a ham-handed attempt by an old guy to come to terms with his changed understanding of the world. Anyone who hasn't heard people of Byrd's age - people of good will if imperfect adjustment - make similar statements in almost the same language simply doesn't talk to many people. The irony is that Byrd was trying to say he understands that the sort of racism he used to subscribe to is wrong. There was never anything to this controversy but partisan hooey.

Bill Frist's "Marion Barry" remarks. Again, too stupid for words. Barry was the deserving poster boy for a particular kind of bad urban government and people have pointed out that Frist's opponent was chair of the District Affairs Committee when the remark was made. This is straight "town mouse versus country mouse" stuff, the oldest and most enduring political divide known.

Everybody's a Cynic - Your Talking Dog all but declares that since more violence and terror will benefit both the Likud campaign and the thugs who still control Palestinian strategy and tactics, that there will be more violence and terror in the run-up to the Israeli elections. Why do I say everybody's a cynic? Because I think he's right.

TD thinks Likud is in actual trouble

. . . so look carefully at other developments affecting Likud, such as the resignation of Moshe "Musa" Alperon from the Likud Party; as you will recall, Mr. Alperon has reputedly been involved in criminal activities, and has been involved in questionable campaign activities leading to an investigation that involves high ranking Likud figures; there is also an investigation of MK Haim Katz on Likud vote buying allegations. And there is this story of a general malaise in the Likud Party. Man, if the LOYALISTS are not so sure about Likud, what about the rank and file citizenry?

but you know how these New York liberals underestimate the chances of right wing candidates - Nixon, Reagan, Giuliani, Sharon?

Remedial Greek - Strangely, classicist Victor Davis Hanson seems to forget the whole hubris thing when his attention turns to the present day:

Something strange is happening, as if all the old conventional wisdom proves daily insolvent. Each hour Saudi Arabia appears a more untenable ally, panicky as the light of truth shines into its deepest recesses. The Arab street sinks more and more into irrelevance, as lunatic as it is impotent; its anti-American hatred is to be welcomed rather than feared, given what it presently represents: gender apartheid, religious intolerance, tribalism, and anti-Semitism. Middle Eastern leaders may shake fingers and talk tough, but they have no moral credibility and still less power — and, like former Eastern European Communist hacks, are likely to become the flotsam and jetsam in a tidal wave of change.

Hey, what could go wrong!

People Unclear on the Concept - Tapped, part of an intra-left blogger brawl about race and the Democratic Party agenda that involves Atrios and Hesiod among others, asks

But then, inevitably, we come to the question of what's acceptable non-racist policy from a conservative or a Republican. (If you think it's impossible to be a conservative or a Republican without being racist, you might as well stop reading here.)

Okay, not completely unclear on the concept. Because I suspect Atrios and many of his followers haven't the slightest inclination to concede that there is an "acceptable" conservatism. He and his confreres seem to be pursuing a pretty scorched-earth partisanship. And the reader comments to his posts makes me wonder if Atrios is really "the left wing Instapundit" or if his site is on its way to becoming a Democratic Party version of Little Green Footballs.

Notes from Under the Christmas Tree - Reactions to the good stuff I got for Christmas:

Fellowship of the R - okay, enough Tolkien talk for awhile. Mrs. Offering actually bought the collector gift edition or whatever it's called, the one with the bigass bookends, because it was the only version of the extended-edition DVD in stock. But I have nothing to add on the topic. See items and links below.

Spiderman DVD - Whee! Looking forward to seeing how good the bonus material is. Haven't done so yet.

Fables graphic novel - This rocks. It reprints issues 1-5 of a Vertigo comics series written by Bill Willingham about fairy tale characters and their underground society in New York City. The Adversary has conquered the homelands. Now King Cole is the mayor of Fabletown, his executive assistant, Snow White, actually runs the place while Bigby "Big Bad" Wolf is pretty much the Fabletown sheriff. In the first storyline, Snow White's sister, Rose Red, turns up missing, maybe murdered. Is it Bluebeard, her fiance? Her boyfriend Jack (of beanstalk fame)? Bonus for libertarians: King Cole's government lacks the authority to tax!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - You have to love a pulitzer prizewinning novel whose afterword ends with a thanks to Jack "King" Kirby for influencing everything the author ever wrote. Like Colby Cosh, who seems to have gotten the same book for Christmas, I'm finding that it actually lives up to its reputation so far. (I'm early in part two.)

CDs - Buddy and Julie Miller's first official CD as a duo and Buddy's most recent solo CD, Midnight and Lonesome. This is real hillbilly music, albeit by two people who spent time in an acid rock band. They're part of the Steve Earle-Emmylou Harris-Lucinda Williams mafia. Curiously, almost all the songs on Buddy's solo album are written by Julie. She also wrote almost all the duet record material. Fabulous stuff. If I could afford the bandwidth and the possible legal woes I'd make the mp3 of their duet on "Away in a Manger" available too.

I also got Johnny Cash's American Recordings III and IV - yes, it was an Americana Christmas here at the Highclearing.com World Headquarters. Cash's voice is weaker on IV than on III. III also has his cover of U2's "One," which is pretty darn good.

UPDATE: I forgot to link the link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, which I regret. Certainly I should have linked to Colby and meant to. In fact, I woke up this morning wondering, did I forget to link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, because that is a major violation of blogger etiquette, even if not linking to Colby were a product of absent-mindedness rather than malice. Not only do I try not to do that sort of thing, but I would certainly never want to do it to Colby Cosh, whom I admire for practically everything except his execrable taste in music. Happily, blogging lets us correct these errors. (Rumor is it would even work for Gary Farber.)

Speaking of Bruce Baugh, his site has an example of what happens when a real writer gets ahold of a real topic - why it's so much harder to write about happiness than unhappiness.

Oops, Missed citing this Aziz Poonawalla essay on Tolkien's method

The essence of allegory is a homomorphism - a one-to-one mapping. The Ring is nuclear power. Sauron is Hitler. Hobbits are the English. Aragorn is Churchill. The disdain that Tolkien had for this kind of decimation of themes to mere analogy is clear in the Foreword, because it takes something timeless and forces it into a very limited temporal window. This destroys the lessons and utility of the themes themselves.

The true themes of LOTR, which are applicable to any time, are these, to name just a few: We are our own worst enemy. Evil within must be defeated before the evil without. Death. The simple heroism of ordinary people. The Pandora's box of technology. The necessity of wisdom. The vulnerability of the wise . . .

and his extended-edition Fellowship DVD review;

and Stephen Chapman's DVD review;

and Bruce Baugh's with-spoilers review of Two Towers and without-spoilers version. Excerpt:

As I remarked below, there are changes made for the film that I wish had not been made, and which sometimes interfered with my enjoyment. But since seeing TTT I've talked and chatted online and exchanged mail with friends who haven't read Tolkien, and asked them about their reactions. I have fun sometimes drawing on what I learned in historical-methods classes about phrasing questions in neutral ways and the like, because I really like knowing what others think apart from whatever I might be able to manipulate them into saying.

The reactions are quite consistent from my not-yet-trilogy-reading friends. And...they're really pretty much the same as the ones I have to the books . . .

Bruce's conclusion: Peter Jackson really has gotten Tolkien onto the screen, the essence of the thing, however much fans may quibble with the details.

More of the Rings - Good to great writing elsewhere about Tolkien, Towers, fantasy and meaning. Diana Moon posts (substantial) "impressions" to Letter from Gotham. Some of them are at serious variance with mine. She brings up interesting questions about the Christianity of Tolkien's trilogy or lack thereof:

Lastly, I was struck by the utter absence of Christianity in these adaptations and I wonder if that is the case with the books as well. The film was very violent; even the scenes that were not violent were pregnant with the possibilities of violence: the violence of nature, and of men both. This is not a criticism. Nature is violent. Human beings are violent. It's the job of artists to point this out. But in Christianity there is always the flickering possibility of redemption through belief in Christ. In this film, I don't see such possibilities. And I'm not sure whether this is a perversion of Tolkien's message or an accurate representation of it.

I should let a real Tolkien scholar handle this one, or a real Christian. (Eve? Care to oblige?) It's true that the Christian religion itself is absent from the books. We all know of Tolkien's famous disparagement of allegory too, and the Ring doesn't fit any neat retelling formula. Since I'm a blogger, and thus incapable of leaving matters to the more qualified, I'll wager that the Christian quality of the saga inheres in the centrality of abnegation to the storyline. The One Ring represents Temptation and power of a particularly worldly kind, the kind that must be not only resisted but foreclosed. The ring tempts its wielders to make themselves into gods. The Catholicism perhaps lies in the importance of mediating Authority. There is a unitary truth (Ring bad, among other things) known to wise interpreters. Gandalf and Elrond are right. They are reliable guides for the ignorant. It's not for Frodo to have a direct apperception of the truth about the Ring, to form his own relationship to and opinion of it. It's for Frodo to understand what Gandalf conveys and to freely recognize and accept the obligation this implicitly lays on him.

People who have read the books more than once can surely do better than this.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol is hosting a brilliant colloquy on the uses and misuses of fantasy as a guide to politics on the Sideshow. The capstone is a long letter from a Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which is too good not to quote:

The better a story, the more likely it is that people are going to elicit a wide range of readings from it. Glenn Reynolds reads the "King of the Golden Hall" chapter of THE TWO TOWERS as a reminder that sometimes it's necessary to stand and fight. Well, sometimes it is. For me, the moral center of THE LORD OF THE RINGS is Gandalf's advice to Frodo: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." Cue Saturday Night Live routine: "Stop! You're both right!" Eric Tam says this sort of thing demonstrates that "such hermeneutics can cut many ways." I daresay this is true. But it accords oddly with his claim that moral simplemindedness is an essential characteristic of fantasy.

On Seablogger, Alan Sullivan is writing a whole series of essays about Tolkien, starting with a personal recollection of his long love of the trilogy that touches on both Christianity and politics. More are promised.

Sticking to politics, Tolkien and the Present Moment for a moment, Antoine Clarke seems to me to get it perfectly in this Samizdata item.

Tolkien would possibly see as more complicated: the US acting perhaps like the doomed kingdom of Numenor. The US military hegemony as analogous to Galadriel taking the One Ring:

[Sam Speaks]
"But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folks pay for their dirty work."

[Galadriel replies]
"I would" she said. "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!"

. . .

The US empire to come is unlikely to be as restrained as the British Empire, because of the socialist ethos of state imposed education, and crusades such as ridding the Third World of cheap (child) labour, the War on Drugs, the War on Tax Evasion, trying to impose a worldwide age of sexual consent, banning alcohol before 21, but making it almost compulsory thereafter, the imposition of American patent law worldwide, and of course, global weapons control.

In other words, although US global supremacy starts better than the Soviet dream of a worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it could end up the same...

And he quotes Galadriel again:

"That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!"

And in the not-to-be-missed category, this Straight Dope Message Board thread that Teresa Nielsen Hayden found, which starts with "What if Ernest Hemingway had written LOTR" and spirals into increasingly brilliant insanity. TNH's own lengthy excerpt item on the Straight Dope thread has 83 comments as I type this. They are themselves sure to be worth several laughs.

Previews of Coming Attractions - Coming Tuesday, Unqualified Successes 2002! - this site's annual awards presentation. New categories. New winners for old categories. Surprises galore. (I'm assuming . . . ) Last year's winners are here.

A Fanboy's Notes: Essay Topic - Compare: Samwise Gamgee from LOTR and Iran Deckard, wife of android hunter Rick, in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Two Towers - Just got back. This is the quickie reaction. More may come later.

No, it's not as good as the first one. Part of this is Trilogy Middle Syndrome. Part of it is that the script is less surefooted - Sam's voiceover speech during the twin battles at Helm's Deep and Isengard falls off the Edge of Grandeur into the Abyss of Corn, and the coy metafictional discussion about stories between Sam and Frodo at the end strikes me as, well, a gratuitous fanboy touch. (For all I know it's in the book and faithful as hell. Too bad.) Everyone in my group also felt that the assault on Isengard was staged and shot in such a way as to make the ents look too small. Ents should be big fucking majestic things.

The biggest problem is Frodo. As a character, Frodo is largely done after the first movie - by the end of it, he's made such decisions as are his to make: to put himself through hell for the sake of others; to dare ruin and death, foresaking comfort; to sacrifice even such protection as he was vouchsafed for their sake and the sake of his quest (excepting Sam, whom he can't shake). What made the first movie work, as I argued last year, is that it got across how much it hurt to be Frodo. But now we know that. The decisive movement hereafter belongs to Sam, and we're still on the way to that. Peter Jackson and his script collaborators seem to intend Sam's speech at the end of TT to point the way for us - it's just not done as well.

Frodo's role from the end of the first book/movie on is to subside. There may be subtleties that another actor than Elijah Wood could bring to his descent. But Frodo is already on his way to becoming object rather than subject, the wishbone Sam and Gollum try between them.

Gollum! Yes, every bit as good as I had read and heard. Everything from the movement to the voice to the script is perfect here. It's so good I find myself genuinely sad the little bastard isn't going to make it.

The battle at Helm's Deep was quite fine. Quite as good as Branagh's Agincourt in Henry V? Eh. But up there. I wasn't disappointed.

Still very much looking forward to the third movie. Biggest problem there: I got the special edition DVD for Christmas and Mrs. Offering and I watched it last night as a refresher. So after part one last night and part two tonight, I fully expect to see Return of the King tomorrow. So far.

Season's Greetings - Happy New Shirts at Work Day, Loyal Readers!

And a Child Shall . . . - You know how they say it's not Christmas until your toddler has painted herself, her crib and whatever can be reached from the crib with her own poop? Well it's Christmas now!

And a Merry one to all. Peace on Earth. Good will too.

Foreshadowing, Your Key to Quality Literature as they said in Bloom County. Now, I want you to think of two things from the Gospels. First, the Last Supper, which is the basis for the Eucharist. Take of this bread and eat, for this is my body. Take of this wine and drink, for this is my blood.

Then think about what a manger is.

It's a Miracle - I've lived in the Washington DC area for just over a quarter-century and I can not remember a single white Christmas before tonight. God bless us, every one!

Game Night at Victor Davis Hanson's House - Eric Mauro says that he was inspired by Gene Callahan's "Lessons of History" essay to draw this cartoon.

Joe Strummer is Dead - One of the two heads of the Clash monster (with Mick Jones), Strummer died of a heart attack at his farmhouse in southwestern England yesterday. Here's CNN's story.

"You were silly like us," Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats. "Your gift survived it all." That will surely do for Strummer. He had the substantially dumb politics of the 70s-era euroradical. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spat it out after seeing the Sex Pistols. The Clash was a political band, and it mixed its "good" positions - opposition to the drug war, anti-racism - with the usual dumb ones like Marxist wealth redistribution and a fondness for left-wing dictators. At the same time, they were the rare leftie band that made at least gestures in the direction of true moral equivalence politically. (The "moral equivalence" against which neoconservatives rave was never really equivalence at all. It was a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which the sins of the East were justified by the sins of the West but the failings of the West were somehow not justified by the failings of the East.) "Washington Bullets," a song decrying foreign intervention, contained the lines

If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed
Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist

The same song found room to critique China's arms trade and even to praise Jimmy Carter for letting Anastasio Somoza fall.

The Clash were honest with themselves even when they were wrong. In "Safe European Home," the ferocious kickoff to the ferocious Give 'Em Enough Rope LP, young radicals (the band) go to Jamaica only to find that it doesn't live up to their fantasies, nor do they themselves:

I went to the place
where every white face
was an invitation to robbery
Now I'm sitting here
in my safe European home

And the music! There was such a thing as punk rock. It was like a waterspout erupting under your feet and coursing up through you and out the top. The Clash had it down. They lost me with Sandinista, which many Clash fans loved, but which I found endlessly noodling. Too much dub, not enough reggae. A prog rock album as far as I was concerned, with about one and a half records worth of material meandering over three discs. Combat Rock was something perilously close to that vexed term, a sellout.

But there were months after the release of London Calling in 1979 when it seemed pointless to play any other record. Give 'Em Enough Rope was a shorter, louder masterpiece too. Joe Strummer was a big part of it all. I haven't heard to much of his recent music (as Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros) but you can watch a 1999 concert at Prime Ticket.

I owe the man.

Clausewitz Had It Backward - I think it was Joe Haldeman who first suggested this, that actually, politics was the continuation of war by other means, not war the continuation of politics. The US government's Iraq policy would appear to bear that out. Right now the media is full of speculation about when (in some naive quarters, if) the war with Iraq will begin. But not only have we been at war with Iraq for months now, as this useful item by pro-war blogger Donald Sensing, a former paratrooper, makes clear, we've actually been at war for a dozen years. Whatever 34,000 sorties a year is, it's not peace. Nor is a sanctions policy that a rational observer would conclude the US never intended to be lifted short of regime change, regardless of cooperation or lack thereof with the UN inspections program. It may be wise policy or foolish policy. What it isn't is peaceful policy.

There's a phrase people sometimes use - I occasionally use it myself - but it's wildly misleading: "Gulf War I." As distinct from what happens next month. But it implies that "Gulf War I" ended at some point, which it didn't, really. It was continued by other means for awhile. No one outside the United States is fooled by this. We mustn't be either. Even if you favor this war you should understand how long you've been waging it.

Loathsome Toad Watch - Free to run for President, Joe Lieberman runs for the sewer:

Lieberman seeks video game hearings
Gore "offensive to our most basic values"

Don't worry, Avedon. He's not talking about Al.

Time for a Gerard Jones citation, I think.

Link via Franklin Harris. The Cinescope article itself is by blogger Mike Whybark.

Speaking of Physics, Chad Orzel has great items on the physicist as jack-of-all-trades, and "fermi numbers," a longtime interest of mine.

Ironies of Physics - A warm spell before Christmas, so we have to turn the heat up. When it gets colder again we'll turn it back down. When it gets real cold we have to set the thermostat as low as 62F at night. It being up in the 40s tonight we'll have to keep it at 66. Nights in the low fifties we have to jack it all the way up to 68.

Why? Unqualified Headquarters appears, to the untrained eye, to be an aging, poorly-insulated split level in a modest neighborhood. (To the trained eye it appears to be a yurt.) The thermostat is near the back door. Heat rises. So:

o The rec room is a lost cause until March.
o Little heat stays by the back door, so the thermostat's thermometer is slow to rise and the heat slow to cut off.
o Most heat rises to the bedroom/office level.

So the colder it gets, the colder the dining room stays. If you set the heat high, it never cuts off. So you set it low. But if it warms up outside, it warms up in the dining room. So if you keep the heat low, it never gets cool enough to ignite, and the upstairs freezes.

Something tells me this is a bloggers don't have editors post. But hey, it's the weekend.

Hello Out There - If you've cited Unqualified Offerings recently, thank you. I may not know it, because my freaking referrer stats are messed up. I see tallies, so it's adding up and the logs are logging, but no names by the tallies. Obviously a problem with the database software. Still not fixed, though, since Monday. I'm switching hosts next month. Wonder if it will be fixed before then.

The Way the Future Wasn't - Reader Steve Cook claims, plausibly, that in "A Brief History of the Future" I confused TL Sherrod with Isaac Asimov:

Jim, I think you may be mixing up the endings of "E for Effort" and the Isaac Asimov story "The Dead Past"; if I recall correctly -- and no promises; I haven't read _E for Effort_ in some time -- "E for Effort" ends with them getting their _Alexander the Great_ movie made after blackmailing a bunch of rich people and the inventor (or possibly the narrator, who was more of a wheeling-dealing Hollywood type) marrying the secretary. "The Dead Past" features an academic obsessed with answering a question about, I believe, Sumerian practices of worship; the technology of viewing the past in that story is not a new invention, but something that is kept under strict controls by the government, and the protaganist hooks up with young physicist who manages to create a kit version of the time-viewer; the physicist's uncle then distributes the plans, leading to
the final scene you remember.

The funny thing is that I found myself forcibly reminding myself that "E is for Effort" was not by Isaac Asimov when I was writing the essay. Clearly "The Dead Past" made an impression. And it makes sense that an Asimov story ends with the words of wisdom coming from the government man.

Now I can't remember "E is for Effort" at all, and I'm sure I read it. (Barry Malzberg made much of the story in an essay collection called The Engines of the Night, too.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home. Sign me up.

Andrew Sullivan

I believe this just might be the other shoe:

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, ``The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,'' set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

(Link via Micah Holmquist.) Sure it is. Sure it will.

People, in the immortal words of the late George Allen:

The future is now.

Recommended Reading - Matthew Hogan explains why Oppressed People Suck and why that's no excuse for you. Julian Sanchez considers the possibility that George W. Bush too is a rational actor. And Dr. Manhattan tackles the connection, or lack of connection, between Thimerasol and autism.

Your Official Creep of the Day courtesy of Associated Press.

Sometimes the Slope Really Is Slippery - Your Talking Dog reads the foreign press and learns unsettling things about - here. TD is also your source for Israeli election coverage by a New York lawyer. Today he writes

Unfortunately, despite their rhetorical support for him, your TD remains convinced that the shakedown artists in charge of the Palestinian territories (and the terrorists therein) will increase the violence to PREVENT Mitzna's election -- and God help us if Mitzna and Labor start to improve in opinion polls.

I do too, alas.

It Didn't Start with Lott-ergate - The very good Charles Paul Freund on the very bad Woodrow Wilson, the man who brought Jim Crow to Washington.

The thoroughgoing awfulness of Wilson is one area where I have no difference with the paleos whatsoever. And, piling on, the Woodrow Wilson birthplace in Staunton, Virginia, stinks as a piece of curatorship compared to Monticello. In what way? The Monticello staff has been obsessive about recreating Jefferson's great home down to its last detail. If there's a book on a bookcase, it's because contemporaneous records indicate Jefferson owned that book in that edition. If there's a blanket on the bed, the pattern and fabric match what Monticello records indicate Jefferson had. (Monticello is also forthright about the role of slavery in supporting Monticello, without being unctious about it. And the shuttle bus drivers will happily discuss Sally Hemings with you. They don't know either, though they assume so.)

By contrast, the Wilson birthplace curators are content to fill the place up with period stuff. There was a very cool German tricycle where handles rather than pedals provide the motive power. Wow, I asked the tour guide, little Woodrow had one of those?

"We don't know," she said. "But they were popular back then."

The books also were just books from the turn of the century. A copy of Chapman's Homer open on the desk in no way indicated that Wilson or his parents had read Chapman's Homer in that house. It was all simply a matter of, Look! Old stuff! And a President was born here! (Note: All this was true in the late 1980s. Perhaps they have made giant curatorial leaps since then.)

There's a small outbuilding where the Wilson family slaves lived during Woodrow's childhood days. He clearly missed them.

Can You Keep a Secret? - Look who's baaaaaack...

(Link via Letter from Gotham.)

Strange Days - If I read this column right, Jonah Goldberg thinks he isn't a neocon. He doesn't think David Frum is one either.

Eerie Prescience Watch - They all laughed when I wrote last summer that "What the left lacks is an Instapundit." Now it's got one. (One more time: "For Good - or Evil . . . ")

It's striking how well Atrios fits the model:

o Comes to wide prominence (i.e. beyond the blogosphere) by doing energetic work on a story of great interest. Check.
o Story is such that said work inspires enormous gratitude. Check.
o Not a one-trick pony. Has other things to write about. Check.
o Generously supports less widely read bloggers with allied viewpoints. Check.
o Posts fast! Check.
o Posts lots! (Lotts.) Check.
o Frequently infuriates ideological opponents. Check.
o Secret Freemason. Ch-um, shhhh!

A Fanboy's Notes, Effendi - Bruce Baugh offers an excellent meditation on mutants, Marvel and metaphors. 'Nuff said?

Also, and this may shock people, he offers good reason to believe of the RIAA that "they are lying lying lying about the impact of piracy."

Mad as Hell. Will He Take It Any More? - Radley Balko has an item that is almost stunning in its hopefulness. This could be a genuine turning point in an otherwise dire history.

Libertarian Candidate Suffers Lopsided Loss - I'm getting killed in the voting for the Koufax Awards. I blame liberal bias! Actually, I'm an interloper anyway, since the Koufaxes are supposed to be for leftie bloggers. Solid liberal Atrios was running away with my category last I checked (best series), and surely he deserves it, for all that he is a hairy-backed grifter who has left a string of broken hearts and illegitimate children up and down the Mississippi River.

Look Over Here - Due to Blogger problems, Diana Moon has relocated Letter from Gotham for the time being. Find it here. Plenty of new material including a worthwhile one on T***t L**t.

I robbed Franklin Harris of a link last night due to an editing error. I quoted him but forgot to add the citation. Franklin, I'm sorry. Loyal readers, I heartily endorse Franklin's blog, the finding of which was genuinely exciting to me. Read Franklin Harris every day, like I do.

A Brief History of the Future - What's the big idea? I see three, and they interact in potentially dire ways.

1) The Stars My Destination. At the end of Alfred Bester's classic novel, Gully Foyle distributes the super weapon, PYRe, throughout earth's civilian population, putting a fission-class explosive that can be detonated with a thought in individual hands. Either humanity will learn to handle the power, Foyle says, or it doesn't deserve to survive. Why this matters: Nonproliferation is dead, even in the militant "Bush Doctrine" version. Nukes, gas and germs are mid-twentieth century technology at most. As Donald Rumsfeld keeps telling us, you can mix germs in a trailer. Nukes are hard to make, but there's a lot of theoretically working ones out there to buy, even if some are fixer-uppers.

I'm not talking just about proliferation among states, either. I mean this stuff is coming within the reach of you and me, or at least our Moose Lodge, whether Saddam dies peacefully in bed or before a firing squad.

2. E for Effort is a short story T.L. Sherrod wrote back in the forties. Two men invent a machine that can view the past. You can't go there, but you can see anything. They figure it will help unlock unsolved riddles of history. The government man at the end rebukes them. Don't you realize what you've done, he asks? What do you think the past is, anyway? The past includes last year, last week, yesterday and five seconds ago. The men have invented the ultimate surveillance device. Now you can spy on your spouse, your neighbors, your coworkers, anyone.

Total Information Awareness, hello. And a shoutout to the counter-insurgency, too. You probably know by now that a group has posted some of Information Awareness Office director John Poindexter's personal information on the internet. (Radley Balko's reaction to this is mine too.) Nothing personal, though. The John Poindexter Awareness Office site promises to "seek total information awareness about the personal lives, purchases, relationships, entertainment interests, reading habits, and travels of each and every employee of DARPA." (Link via Gene Healy.)

As lefties keep pointing out, DARPA's TIA program mostly aims to correlate capacious commercial databases that already exist. You and I can already buy books that promise to let you Get Anything on Anybody, and the technology is only going to get better and more widely available in the normal course of things. (Watch that phrase, normal course.) Tom Sherrod looks like one of about three genuinely prophetic science fiction authors. (For another, check out Clifford Simak's story, "Huddling Place," and ask if we aren't already half in that world.)

Welcome to the post-privacy era, which I believe David Brin has actually been writing about for some time.

3. Starship Troopers. No, not the movie! What are you thinking? Remember those potted histories of the passing of the age of chivalry? Remember why handguns got the slang term "equalizer" applied to them? Supposedly the ability of any man to kill any other man with firearms made armor useless and reduced the power of the small minority that had the money and desire to outfit themselves as knightly warriors. (Some folks nominate the longbow for this honor and say it was over for chivalry after Agincourt.) Second-Amendment purists argue that its importance is that it provides for the people to keep arms they can use to overthrow a tyrannical government.

So what happens when it all changes? What happens when one class gets to wear MIT's battle suit of the future and the other has to make do with Bushmaster XM-15s and dark shirts? Afghanistan and Waco both suggest how disparate capabilities have already become, and who can afford to equip the new knightly class? (The state has been intent on keeping the best toys to itself since shortly after the civil war, with the first measures against private ownership of gatling guns.)

Here's where it gets messy.

Proliferation augurs a world in which the nation-state cannot perform its second-most basic function - ensuring the physical security of most of its citizens. Any small group with a grudge or a bad hair day will be able to kill large numbers of people cheaply and conveniently. That could lead one to suspect that the nation-state is dead already, but hasn't quite caught on. But that brings us to the state's most basic function, which is to perpetuate itself. No way will it go quietly. For its own protection, it has recourse to shiny military technology that only it can afford, and it has Total Information Awareness. Both of these tend toward positive (from the state's perspective) feedback loops - the greater the advantage in information and violence, the more you can command a revenue stream to get both cooler weapons and fancier spy systems.

What's the obvious counter to the state's overwhelming advantage in guns and armor and target acquisition technology? Uh huh. Gas, germs and nukes. Who tends to get caught in the crossfire? Yes, us.

That leaves the surveillance front. Here the implications go way beyond politics (which is just the disposition of power), but let's stick with politics for just a second. You can be damn sure that to the extent that projects like the JPAO are successful, the state's reaction will be sheer fury. As Samizdata never tires of pointing out, they tell you surveillance is nothing to get upset about, but try pointing a camcorder at a cop sometime and see what kind of reaction you get.

Fury plus power equals repression. One plausible outcome is a savage twilight struggle between spooks and phreaks. A little of that already goes on, but the spooks won't be playing any more, and the phreaks will get pretty serious themselves. To make its life easier, the state has a tendency to prohibit things that are not commonly understood as crimes, but that make the state's job harder - like, oh, paying cash for expensive things, buying lots of grow lights, stuff like that. So in the course of defending itself the state may do a few things: It may create a new information caste system, comprising a class of people about whose private lives everything is an open book - we might call these people "ordinary" but we won't be able to follow it up with "citizens" - and another class about whose private lives the first class are forbidden to investigate or report. The second thing it may do is apply all sorts of restrictions to information technology and information exchange that don't (quite) exist yet.

If that happens, we all get very, very poor.

All this will be in the name of protecting us. If the information clampdown comes it will leave a whole bunch of educated folks underemployed and alienated from meaningful work. Viz. Mohammed Atta. Now see big idea One.

Note that, while I'm a libertarian and instinctively suspicious of the state, I'm not remotely arguing that the non-state actors that will arise are your friends. The first ones - Aum Supreme Truth and Al Qaeda - certainly are not. But the state's not your friend either, and it's going to be decreasingly able to convince you it's of much use. It will try its best, though, even if it kills you.

Done! - That's it. I'm all Lotted out. (And there was much rejoicing.)

UPDATE: Kidding. Just learned that Rand Simberg has taken a break from lame WWII-themed parodies of war skeptics to write an honest-to-god screamingly funny Lott revelation. You must not miss this.

Advantage: Radley Balko! - Gene Healy and CNN's story on the BET appearance make it clear that the Agitator called it right days ago:

So long as the GOP is led by Lott, the GOP is paralyzed.

There is, for example, a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made against racially-motivated set-aside programs for federal contractors.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of not only extending welfare reform, but given its success, of cutting back benefits even more.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of ending thought-policing, soul-exploring federal hate crimes statutes.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to made against the growing support for slavery reparations.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

The official vote is scheduled for January 6, 2003. That's a dangerous amount of time to wait. One possibility is that the furor dies down enough that Lott is able to calm enough Republican senators to keep his phony-baloney job. That would be the best of all possible Democratic Party worlds. Another is that the unofficial decision date gets moved up to before New Years.

I've made it pretty clear over the past year that I have little use for the Republican Party. But if Trent Lott hangs on, Republicans won't even have any use for it themselves.

Here It Comes - Gene Healy listened to all of Lott's appearance on BET tonight (so much for Heinlein's thesis that people act always to make themselves happy) and is already preparing for the worst. ("I get the distinct feeling he’s going to demonstrate his spiritual growth by lightening my paycheck.")

Says Gene, among other things:

I don’t think for a minute that Trent Lott wants to see the reinstitution of state-enforced segregation. Nor do I think he’d sacrifice his seat making a principled stand against it, if Jim Crow suddenly became popular again. When it was popular and considered acceptable in the South, he was for it. When people awoke to its injustice, and it rightly became anathema in American political life, he was against it. In neither case was he guided by principle. Trent Lott doesn’t have principles—he has interests. Or “interest,” in the singular, more appropriately. His interest is staying in office.

There's more.

On the credit where credit is due front, Mrs. Offering e-mailed me a quote from Maureen Dowd that I can't find in her latest column. But I trust my wife who said Dowd wrote

Trent Lott says he'll appear on BET for an hour to discuss his hopes and concerns for African Americans. I have to ask. Hasn't Mr. Lott made the black man suffer enough?

That's a paraphrase, alas.

UPDATE: Reader Chip Taylor comes through with a link and a roadmap. "Eighth and ninth paragraphs" of this column, he writes:

"For a full hour, I will talk about my hopes and dreams for the people in this state and this country, regardless of their race, and to make sure that African-Americans have the opportunities that they deserve," he promised the press in Pascagoula.

For the love of Amos 'n' Andy, hasn't Mr. Lott punished the black man enough?

Thanks, Chip!

For the Defense - Various folks have dissented from the otherwise universal opprobrium directed toward Trent Lott, for various reasons. A lot of people have an understandable distrust of universal opprobrium. Others have other reasons.

From the land of curling and punting on third down, Colby Cosh warns US conservatives

. . . is there not something nasty and ill-considered, bordering on the manic, about the blogosphere's collective demand for Trent Lott's head? The argument against him generally takes the form "I know he's not a racist; I know he didn't mean it; but he's got to go anyway, because his comments are going to be used against him by the Democrats." Isn't this tantamount to accepting your political enemy's standard of judgment in such matters? And if you accept such a standard, how can you defend someone worth the defending, when the time comes?

Colby has a lot more to say that's worth reading. I think, though, that many right-wing webloggers seem anything but sure Lott is not a racist. Also, watching the story develop over time, I got the impression that the tactical concerns came second, and an instinctive revulsion first. That's true even for the worst of them. (Hold that thought.) And while it's cheesy of me to pull latitude, it's possible that even a brilliant Canadian conservative like Colby doesn't, on some level, quite grok how fraught the US race problem is for all sides.

Speaking of the worst of them, Gene Callahan doesn't like what Lott's most vociferous right-wing critics stand for - war and domestic surveillance, chiefly. I actually prefer the way he put the matter in an e-mail to the column itself, so I quote the e-mail with permission:

That's not what I meant to say. It's more like this: Let's say we're in Germany circa 1938. It comes out that Hitler likes to torture frogs. Suddenly, all these people who had been pretty quiet about him explode with fury: "The frog torturer must go!"

Now, I'm against frog torturing. But, with everything else he was doing, my response would be, "And you're upset over THIS?"

And I don't mean to trivialize the evil of Jim Crow. But, as I pointed out, it's pretty clear that Lott is not actually trying to re-institute Jim Crow. The very worst interpretation of his remarks is that he misses it but isn't trying to do anything about the fact. And my question is, "What have we come to when eviscerating the Constitution [e.g. USA-PATRIOT, Total Information Awareness, resolutions authorizing a Presidential decision to use force as opposed to declaring war, e.g. - UO] is a matter for polite discussion but this bad -- but absolutely meaningless to any policy -- remark creates a tempest and calls for resignation?"

Gene sells some of Lott's critics somewhat short here. The neolibertarians on his list have been pretty vociferous in their criticisms of the domestic security innovations of this administration and congress. I'll grant that I don't like their views on the prospect of war. Meanwhile, most of Lott's neoconservative accusers not only favor the most expansive, least subject to constitutional checks and balances sort of military action, they've also been among the foremost apologists for Bush's slalom down the slippery slope of "homeland" tyranny.

For my part, I'm just glad these folks got one right for a change.

Meanwhile, Gene's editor, Lew Rockwell, seems to think that Lott's problem is that his post-furor statements weren't whiny enough. In "What Lott Might Have Said," Rockwell fills Lott's mouth with, among other things, self-pitying resentment worthy of Nixon:

I grant that my comments were highly unusual in American public life. Even more intense than the race taboo is the rule against expressing any regret for the astonishing centralization of power in America since World War II. Question that, and you will have few friends, and legions of opportunistic enemies. Such is the fate of any dissident living under Leviathan.

Obviously, Rockwell is speaking for himself and his particular movement more than for Lott here, since there's no evidence that Lott has any particular problem with the centralizing of power. I share Rockwell's distaste for "a managerial regime that intrudes itself into every aspect of public and private life, often in the name of quelling racial conflict but in fact only creating more," but there are all kinds of reasons his site dropped off the regular reading list for me, to the extent that I risk forgetting to catch pieces by writers I enjoy like Gene Callahan and Joseph Stromberg.

I outlined my complaints about lewrockwell.com back in April. But now there's an update. As part of LR.com's coverage of the Lott fracas, they've republished a gushing letter of support to the State's Rights Party from heterodox right wing thinker Murray Rothbard. Rothbard led a fascinating, fiesty intellectual life. He's particularly an enduring inspiration to hard-core anti-state, anarcho-capitalist types. His uncompromising thesis that all governments are fundamentally gangs is one I accept to a degree greater than certain of my readers would be comfortable with.

Just as Rothbard ended his peripatetic intellectual journey in the arms of the paleos, it appears that he began with them too. The letter says, among other things

Although a New Yorker born and bred, I was a staunch supporter of the Thurmond movement; a good friend of mine headed the Columbia Students for Thurmond, which I believe was the only such collegiate movement north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Apparently all governments are gangs except southern state governments. This tenet of hardcore Rothbardianism is the one I've had the hardest time quite grasping.

I find the letter distasteful in the extreme, but keep in mind that it was written in 1949 by a 23-year-old. Problem is - and it's a big one - it was republished, clearly intended as an example of wisdom, in 2002 by someone considerably older.

One important caveat: It doesn't bother me that good writers choose to write for LR.com. It carries some worthwhile articles and links to some pieces worth reading. I even, on Gene's advice, offered them a chance to link to one of my own items within the last few months. (They declined.) In the immortal words of Jesse Walker, nothing is beneath the freelance writer.

As part of their grand strategy to increase liberty for all, paleolibertarians have embraced the confederate cause. To get an idea of what that means, let's go to the League of the South's Michael Hill on the Lott controversy:

14. And here we go, all you Confederate Southrons-Slavery is an institution ordained of God and regulated by His Word! It is not therefore “evil!”

Mr. Hill also informs readers that

"2. Sodomy is an abomination to God!" (And a hell of a lot of fun. - UO]

"6. Sex outside of marriage is the sin of fornication!" (So, to be on the safe side, Mr. Hill, go fuck yourself.)

"Whew! Now that we’re through shouting we can pause to reflect on just one more little factoid-your government here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is the biggest C[ultural] M[arxism] pusher of all. Go ahead, try and name just one of my Fourteen Points that Uncle Sambo doesn’t either legislate or otherwise tacitly support." ("Uncle Sambo?" Go fuck yourself twice, okay?)

Short. Also Sweet. - From Franklin Harris:

RE: Lott. It's very simple. If all he means by praising the Dixiecrats is that we would be better off today if we had true federalism, an apology isn't necessary. If he means anything else, an apology isn't sufficient.

Flushing the System of Trent Lott stuff is what I plan to do for the rest of the night. Bear with me, please. It'll be over soon. (Unless I get word of a link between Trent Lott and Jamaat al-Fuqra . . . )

The Comfort of Familiar Things - Someone named Kevin Walker of something called the Claremont Institute keeps sending bloggers invitations to link to whatever chin-puller they've most recently posted on their (non-blog) site. I've seen enough of them now to be able to say definitively that if you enjoy utter rehashes of current center-right conventional wisdom, and are averse to either original thought or fresh perspectives on familiar thought, the Claremont Institute is for you. Here's a piece on Republicans and health-care politics that may be the archetypal Claremont article.

Note to the Claremont Institute, not that they are likely to see it: I've done what I can for you, fellas. From here on it's up to you.

A Fanboy's Notes - RGB Bill Dowling writes about Marvel's 80s-era gay-free cosmology:

You know, I heard about that policy as well (it was attributed specifically to Jim Shooter, then editor-in-chief) and actually at the time found it to be intellectually consistent and appealing. It struck me that it was particularly a good idea not to have homosexual Mutants (like Northstar).

My reasoning was that Mutants are essentially homosexuals in Marvel. They are discriminated against, have laws passed against them for performing acts natural to them, and people cringe in fear that even their children might be one. Marvel is almost ham-handed in the way they present the Mutants as Minority in their comics, but the way it's handled is clearly more analogous to homosexuals than to races. No one ever worries that when their son reaches puberty he'll become black.

So in a literary world in which you're constantly exploring the homosexual condition through analogy, it doesn't make sense to then have a limited subset of those analogues actually be homosexuals.

My first reaction is: almost ham-handed? But that's just me. More than all their other transgressions, it's the thudding use of "anti-mutant prejudice" that has done more to ruin my enjoyment of Marvel Comics than any of their other sins. (It's actually handled pretty well, though, in the first couple volumes of Ultimate X-Men.) Among other things, isn't it absurd that the vox pop can tell the mutant supers from the non-mutant supers? And isn't the pseudo-science Marvel explains mutants with somehow more absurd than the pseudo-science it uses to explain most of its non-mutant characters? (A mutant gene, common to all mutants or something like that.)

Bill's thesis is intriguing, though, and I might even be tempted to place it above my own - "anti-mutant prejudice" actually stands in for the adolescent persecution complex and thus a narcissistic treat for Marvel's (at the time) adolescent readership.

Department of Corrections - I misidentified the Matthew Hogan item that Radley Balko responded to in my piece of last night. Radley was actually criticising one entitled "Lott, Racism, and Neocon War Party Hypocrisy." In making this correction, one thing that jumped out at me was that Matthew ascribes bigotry and "early Third Reich style" to "some neocon and fellowtraveller rhetoric." (My emphasis.) That's not the same as saying all hawks, even the ones on the expansive plan, are anti-arab/anti-muslim bigots. A key difference, I think.

My earlier concerns about the language used in some Stand Down articles stands. So does my admiration and respect for both writers.

Lott to Say - The Smoking Gun found what I couldn't - a copy of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform. The Smoking Gun rocks.

It's dispiriting to see so much talk of constitutionalism and individual liberty and opposition to enlarging the federal police power - all things that mean a great deal to me - so...befouled by their inclusion in this document, one whose fourth through sixth points make it clear that all those principles meant to them was the power to bring the full weight of state and local police power down on black chests. It's a theme, the contamination of your beliefs by odious people who hold a version of them, that I've had occasion to consider this weekend at length.

One thing alone cheers me up: their patent insincerity about constitutionalism and individual liberty and federal police power. Reading this document, you can be pretty sure that a Thurmond Administration would have enthusiastically swung the power of the federal government toward preserving segregation. You can imagine Thurmond directing J. Edgar Hoover to deal with "outside agitators," resegregating the army and passing latter-day "fugitive slave" laws to force states outside the region to support southern efforts to retard or reverse civil rights. (Viz. the Dred Scott decision, which, taken to its logical conclusions, would essentially have re-instituted slavery in the antebellum North.)

Spree Graphs - Iran Brown is the name of the thirteen-year-old boy whom Lee Malvo or John Muhammad shot in front of Bowie elementary school. He and his family met the press Thursday to talk about his ordeal. The Washington Post has two stories, both by Tamara Jones. See here and here. Oddest passage:

Iran glanced up at his mother for permission to answer a reporter's question about whether he felt angry about what had happened to him, but his mother shook her head no, and the teenager fielded a question instead about what he wants out of life.

Iran's a pretty nice story, though not without continued suffering:

Because his shattered spleen had to be removed, Iran will have to take penicillin every day for at least two years to offset the danger of bacterial infection, [Doctor] Eichelberger said. That risk decreases as patients age, he explained.

Meanwhile, Una James, mother of Lee Malvo, is back in Jamaica as of yesterday. the Post says she "may be permitted to return to the United States to testify at his trial, according to U.S. immigration officials." Or she may make her way back to the United States well before then.

She does seem to be a pretty sound judge of character, according to this earlier story:

"Mr. Muhammad is the devil," James told her son's lead defense attorney, Michael S. Arif, during a four-hour conversation Wednesday at a detention center in Bellingham, Wash.

That story also has some useful new information about the timeline of the trio's travels.

According to the order, James admitted paying $5,500 to Muhammad, an acquaintance from their previous home in Antigua, to provide her and her son with fake identification and airline tickets for separate journeys to the United States.

Una James arrived first, in June 1999, and sailed through the immigration inspection at the Miami airport, the document said. Several other accounts have placed her arrival date in 2000. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified.

James applied for asylum, saying that she feared for her family's safety in Jamaica because her niece and nephew were victims of a politically motivated killing, the document says. But, it adds, "at some point she was told that Jamaicans are seldom granted asylum," and so she withdrew the application.

She paid a Florida man named Jeremiah Neal $2500 for a sham marriage. After the December 2001 arrest in Bellingham, Washington, where she went to pry her son from the clutches of John Muhammad, she delayed deportation proceedings by filing a false claim that her marriage to Neal had ended because of abuse.

Her immigration hearings were delayed while authorities examined that petition. Last month, James withdrew it.

"She conceded that most of the information she provided . . . regarding Neal's violent abusive treatment of her was untrue. In fact, [his] only mistreatment consisted of extorting money from her by threatening to turn her in to INS, and occasional verbal abuse," the document said.

Note: That's still not a nice way to treat someone.

In fiscal news, Northern Virginia counties are seeking reimbursement from the state and federal governments for the cost of the investigation and trial prep.

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) said he had asked the state's congressional delegation to try to recoup from the federal government all or part of the $3 million in state money spent during the investigation.

The Post also has a useful summary of what is known of Muhammad and Malvo's pre-October movements. There's not a ton of new information in it and it settles few of the unresolved questions:

1. We still can't say whether Muhammad and Malvo shot Jerry Taylor in Tucson in March 2002.

2. We still don't know how Muhammad found out his wife was living in Clinton, Maryland, or even for certain that he did.

3. We still don't know if there was a purpose to the late September "return trip" to Baton Rouge, the one financed by liquor store robbery/murders, or if Muhammad met any of his "about thirty cousins" in the area on that trip.

4. There's no analysis of any possible political component to Muhammad and Malvo's motives.

No War War - A disagreement flared over the weekend between two of the starboard-side contributors to Stand Down, aka No War Blog. Radley Balko objected to the language and inferrals in a post by Matthew Hogan. I admire both writers a great deal. I don't think Matthew's item was as egregious as Radley did, or that it implies as much ethnoreligious hatred on the part of the hawks as Radley seemed to think. I agree with most of Matthew's thesis about the twinning of the forces of contempt and pity. But I do think Matthew resorts to some jargon (e.g. "the War Party") that doesn't really further the stated mission of Stand Down. Stand Down is supposed to be the place where we work to convince Iraq War skeptics. I don't think Matthew's language is maximally tuned to that end in the piece in question.

A Fanboy's Notes - Franklin Harris has been all over the "controversial" new take on Marvel Comics' moribund "Rawhide Kid," the Western character who will be portrayed as gay in a new six-issue miniseries. Lots of publicity for Marvel, lots of media attention. But Franklin notes that there's way less to this than the uninformed media imagine. There have been openly gay characters in "Big Two" superhero comics since the 1980s, and Franklin suggests that, if anything, the level of hackery expected on the Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather miniseries - no, really, that's what it's called - augurs a retrograde move.

Unqualified Offerings can actually pitch in a factoid Franklin didn't include. For a brief, ridiculous time in the mid-1980s, Marvel Comics officially held that there was no homosexuality in the entire Marvel Universe. That postponed a planned "coming out" for the mutant hero, Northstar for years.

Speaking of gays, revamping and superheroes, if you like any of that stuff, do not miss the fine comedic novel, What They Did to Princess Paragon, by Robert Rodi. The book is hard on comics fandom and comics publishing, but it's too full of accurate detail for Rodi to be anything but a fellow fanboy. Indeed, this publisher of a long-running Wonder Woman fanzine writes that Rodi was one of her big readers.

Black Hole - The Post reports that Treasure Planet is a monumental financial flop. Too bad. The entire Familia Offering loved it, as previously reported.

Meanwhile, James Bond is making a fortune after being almost left for financially dead three years ago. The adult members of la Familia Offering failed to see it tonight as the theater was sold out. So we went Christmas shopping - together - for the first time in dog years and hugely enjoyed ourselves.

Objectively Speaking - Almost forgot to note that Glenn Reynolds followed up his initial post on "objectively pro-Saddam with an amplification and partial response to his critics. (Like, um, me.) He's kindly calls my own argument "reasonable." But I can't agree that what he calls the "not-so-reasonable" argument (from Hesiod) is unreasonable at all:

Okay, that's the reasonable argument. Here are the not-so-reasonable ones. Hesiod emailed me that by supporting war on Iraq I was "objectively pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Arab," etc. This is just dumb. People who oppose war on Iraq want to cover themselves by setting up a false dichotomy: war on Al Qaeda or war on Iraq. But, since there's no reason that one conflicts with the other, that won't wash. Indeed, I think it's more likely that the two reinforce each other.

Whether it's a false dichotomy or not is very much TBD. The argument is certainly reasonable whether it turns out to be the case or not. It comprises causal assertions grounded in plausible psychology, politics and logistics. Start with the last. The country has only so many qualified intelligence analysts and translators. It has only so many trained elite troops of the kind who can usefully harry Al-Qaeda in its various lairs. Those that are shifted to Iraq are not available for duty in Afghanistan, Yemen or whichever parts of Pakistan we're secretly operating in. Bin Laden clearly desires a "clash of civilizations" between a militant Ummah and the "Jew-Crusaders." He has been making hay out of our Iraq policy for a decade already, and had what I think we have to call some definite recruiting success. It is, to say the least, reasonable to conclude that more US force will inflame more potential recruits and convince more and more Arabs and Muslims that they have a choice - these bastards who look and talk like me, or these bastards from way the hell and gone. That's good for Al-Qaeda. The purpose of political terrorism for a century and a half has been to provoke repressive countermeasures, so that more and more of "your" people will feel forced to choose you over your enemy.

None of the above is the provable outcome of what has yet to happen. But every bit of it is "reasonable." I rate it as for damn sure more reasonable than the fanciful notion that conquering Iraq will usefully humiliate the Arab world or Islamic culture or whatever into a calm acceptance of our wishes. I expect the Iraq war to be a recruiting bonanza for Al Qaeda, and to push us that much closer to the clash Bin Ladenism (and Weekly Standardism) so desires. I believe that a conquest of Iraq increases the chance that Al Qaeda gets its hands on Iraqi bioweapons or chemical arms from an unlikelihood to a near certainty in the chaos surrounding the war.

Those are reasonable if not certain objections. And from that perspective, the hawks are as "objectively pro-Osama" as the doves are, in the hawkish gestalt, "objectively pro-Saddam."

Glenn also references Micah Holmquist's objections about the incentives US policy gives to foreign leaders to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but has no real answer to them. What Micah has been doing for some time is looking at the dynamics of proliferation from the perspective of the potential antagonist of the US. Glenn writes, "That's the kind of thing I'm talking about," which seems to mean that he takes Micah's exercise in role-playing to mean he's on their side.

I've previously written that Micah expresses more sympathy with the country's antagonists than I'm comfortable with. But guess what? It doesn't matter. What matters is whether Micah's empathy gives him and us a clearer picture of how potential opponents will think these issues through. In fact, it does. If anything, what many would call Micah's "anti-Americanism" makes him especially useful to us pro-Americans - it makes him better able to imaginatively inhabit our actual and potential adversaries. The insight benefits us, because you can craft sounder policies when you know what your adversary actually thinks and wants.

(That's not to say you give them everything they want or agree with everything they think. It is to say that you're acting from knowledge rather than ignorance, or worse yet, prejudice.)

Fenian Mail from Some Flounders - Twin e-mails further the discussion of Iraq, Ireland, blowback, insurgency and terrorism foreign and domestic. More from Michael Croft, who has studied the subject in detail:

Tom Barry was not in favor of Sean Russell's bombing campaign of 1939. He favored what was known as the 'Barry Plan'. He wanted to send a heavily armed force across the border into the north, seize a town, and hold out as long as he could. Then, he'd flee back across the border with the Brits in hot persuit. They'd cross the border after him and he'd precipitate the resumption of the armed struggle, which the British would lose. That was the plan in the 1930s, anyway. Barry's tactics in 1920s-1930s were purely based on light infantry. Instead of this, the Army Council went with Russell, which had unfortunate consequences for the Irish Republic in WWII.

I am not 100% certain it's fair to consider Barry as having any role in the post 1969 IRA, which is a northern resurgence of what was previously a southern phenomena which had all but died out when the British reinvigorated (AGAIN!) it with ham-handed policies and one-sided 'policing'.

Tom also had nothing to do with the London Dynamiting Campaign of 1883-1885 orchestrated by O'Donovan Rossa (and other United Irishmen), as he was not to be born for more than a decade when it concluded. Tom's memoirs aside, he really did fit into a historical continuum that had approximately one serious rising in every generation from the late fifteenth century.
"England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity,"

I'd recommend Tim Pat Coogan's "The IRA" or "The Troubles" for a good understanding of the IRA from the time Michael Collins formed it out of the IRB to the present.

In general, I would consider domestic terrorism to be terrorism instigated by members of a society to achieve goals that are related to a country's internal affairs, such as bombing an abortion clinic, church, or federal building. I would not consider terrorism instigated to achieve goals that are related to a country's dealings in another country to be domestic terrorism. I'd call that international terrorism. And I suppose to be complete, Foreign terrorism would be 'some other poor schlub's domestic terrorism'.

Of course terrorism is one of those three person words. I'm a freedom fighter, you're an insurgent, he's a terrorist...

Rebellion is only treason when it is in the third person, as in "their rebellion". Whenever rebellion is in the second person it is always justified, as in "our rebellion". "Ben Franklin to John Dickenson, 1776, the Musical...

And from Matthew Hogan, author of the article that started this thread:

If you ever get the time to check, I was careful to use "British Isles" to describe Barry's personal activity area. As my last name will indicate, I'm hip to your writer's concerns and viewpoints.:-)

The old IRA was much nicer than the later thugs and Collins and Barry were not lefties or righties. I actually like the two a bit. But they unleashed the dogs of war and are the direct inspiration for today's pinko nihilism {"saints preserve us", crossing self repeatedly :-)}.

And yes, the old IRA shot civilians and did do violence in England (burned stuff mostly) including London, though in the last case it was killing the British Empire's chief of staff. As always such thuggery is sanitized in retrospect but the Collins-Barry axis was much more restrained than today and probably did alot less than the excesses in the course of our own Independence Revolution.

The point though is that the next threat from a war may come from those you train and excite and corasen in the previous one particularly if it was an Empire expansion in Iraq, and who spot and get enraged by other abuses your side does. As noted Collins and Barry's people also fell out (though personal respect wasnt lost even after the grave). But it says something about the corasening that one of the incarcerated in the Irish civil war went on to help form Amnesty International. And that more Irishmen were summarily executed in Kilmainham Jail by an IRA-founded Irish government than by the British in trying to suppress the rebellion. Also the people Collins/Barry inspired... Mao, Shamir....hmmmm.

Two Out of Three - Cardinal Law...Henry Kissinger...and...Trent Lott apologizes again.

"I'm not about to resign for an accusation that I'm something I'm not," Lott, a 30-year veteran of the House and Senate, declared.

He talked about his own upbringing during the half-hour new conferences, describing himself as a sharecropper's son, who "along with the South" had learned from his mistakes.

"In the days and months to come, I will dedicate myself to undo the hurt I have caused and will do all that I can to contribute to a society where every American has an opportunity to succeed," Lott said.

Translation: I've got to save my phony-baloney job, gentlemen. I am willing to get rolled by the Democrats month in and month out on budget matters, racial preferences and judicial nominees for the sake of what passes for my political survival.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Around and about...

John Quiggan, Australian liberal blogger guy, addresses Trent Lott, Orwell and Instapundit, productivity growth and the possible VX gas transfer UO wrote about last night. Start here and scroll down.

Cold Fury "objectively" sticks up for Glenn Reynolds. There is a great deal about the problems of "nonviolence." (Problems of violence are not addressed, but you can't fit everything into every single blog post.)

Population One finds kids learning the wrong lesson in civics class. (Or is it the wrong lesson?)

Micah Holmquist does not stick up for Glenn Reynolds.

Jesse Walker on suburban utopias (for real).

Virginia Postrel has decided that blogging means updating your website regularly. She has gavel-to-gavel Trent Lott coverage and an item on Clarence Thomas that points back to this classic Reason article by Edith Efron from 1992.

Timing - This Washington Post report may even be true:

The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. They said government analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey.

If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq.

If it is, remember the iron law of geopolitics: Being a hawk means never having to say your sorry. Sometime in the last month or two, the story suggests, while the Bush Administration was pressing for UN authorization to depose Saddam Hussein by force, moving thousands of troops into place and stepping up an already steady bombing campaign, Iraq may, if the report is true, have transferred chemical weapons to terrorists, maybe to use in an attack in the US or Europe.

This is supposed to prove that the hawks were right about Saddam all along. Of course, what war skeptics have said for months is that Saddam was unlikely to give "weapons of some destruction" to terrorists or to use them himself unless he became convinced that his ouster by the US was imminent. In other words, unless things began to look very much like the last couple of months.

Advantage: Central Intelligence Agency (if the report is true).

On the Other Hand the Baltimore City Council says they oppose war with Iraq.

Unqualified Offerings thinks they just want $25 billion too.

With This Rock - Turkey shares our ideals and aspirations for the suffering people of Iraq...if we can just come up with $25 billion. Dr. Evil works cheaper than that.

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave - More on the geopolitical deathmatch level the designer undoubtedly calls Everybody Against Each Other - and the Kurds, from the Lebanon Daily Star. There's a lot of interesting and dismaying stuff in this piece, more than UO feels like quoting.

You've Got Mail - Mary Kay writes:

don't know Mr. Franklin's views on bbq [ed. note: they are - shudder - ketchup-oriented], but I have to wholeheartedly endorse Thorne. I have 2 of his books and would have more if I could find them. A pointer to his website is the highlight of this day! Thanks.

MKK--bbq should be cooked long and slow and then have a tomato based sauce, not sweet, added--pork and beef are best.

Oh, oops! Mary Kay's views on bbq are ketchup-oriented too. She is otherwise, UO avers, a very nice person from her e-mails. Mustard, people. It's even in the bible, mustard.

Of course, Mary Kay and Franklin would both surely agree that what counts with barbeque is the meat itself, and that sauce is too often an excuse to cook meat badly.

Mustard, of course, has its own dangers. Last night, UO attempted a homemade mustard vinagraitte, with red wine vinegar, Coleman's mustard powder, salt and pepper. Unqualified Offerings probably went wrong in using enough mustard to thicken the vinegar. How wrong? The bottom of UO's tongue was burning. How wrong? This website had also made "dry buffalo wings" with a rub of salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper and chili powder. It ate those to cool off from the salad dressing.

A reader writes that "Aziz Poonawalla has high-level support" for his views based on this fatwa, which says, among other things:

*The terrorists acts, from the perspective of Islamic law, constitute the crime of hirabah (waging war against society)." Sept. 27, 2001 fatwa, signed by:

Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (Grand Islamic Scholar and Chairman of the Sunna and Sira Countil, Qatar)
Judge Tariq al-Bishri, First Deputy President of the Council d'etat, Egypt
Dr. Muhammad s. al-Awa, Professor of Islamic Law and Shari'a, Egypt
Dr. Haytham al-Khayyat, Islamic scholar, Syria
Fahmi Houaydi, Islamic scholar, Syria
Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Chairman, North America High Council

Advantage: Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi!

Michael Croft writes, as Unqualified Offerings kind of suspected he would, about Tom Barry:

First, a suggested clarification: Tom Barry was active in Cork, which is in Ireland. While it was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at the time, Ireland is not in Britain. While there was theoretical political union in the 1800s, Irish rebellion matches the model of colonial revolution more closely. See Michael Hechter's Internal Colonialism (The Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536-1966) for an overview of this theory.

Tom Barry was commander of a flying brigade (one of three such brigades, and the most successful, IIRC) in Cork, which was decidedly rural. Barry and ollins invented guerilla (terrorist) warfare as it is practiced in the 20th century, but if Barry spent a consecutive fortnight in Cork City, (much less Dublin), I'll be quite surprised.

GDiI describes his rural warfare experiences and is best read as either

A: a manual for rural insurgency or
B: a companion to an account of Collins' war in Dublin.

Three causes influencing the notable success of the IRB/IRA after WWI:

- Collins' ability to execute urban operations against British spies and agents.
- Barry's ability to execute rural operations against British troops.
- Dublin Castle's inability to stop either one of them. (sub cause) and the increasingly oppressive means they took to try to do so.

Three precipitatory factors leading to the Irish Civil War (1921-1922(ish))

- major differences in acceptable outcomes to urban and rural contingents
- De Valera's waffling between pragmatism and idealism. Also Gladstone.
- The loosely structured governance of the IRA which had allowed it to flourish did not provide it any means to reign in loose cannon.

In addition to the useful information and analysis, Michael seems, obliquely, to criticise UO's description of the Irish rising and what came after as constituting "decades of domestic terrorism" for Britain. (That's what led me to expect his letter, actually.) This website takes his point that Ireland itself does not constitute the "domestic" sphere for Britain. In the eyes of many, even Northern Ireland doesn't. However, UO used "domestic terrorism" advisedly, to mean terrorism in Britain's home territory. The IRA has committed many terrorist acts in England itself over the years, among other places.

Kevin Maroney points out that Josh Marshall points out that Slate points out that Treasury Secretary-designate Snow is...not that promising. Kevin writes, "The Republicans are not on your side. They never will be." which is true enough. Marshall has a decent formulation for the Snows of the world, and notes that it applies to most of the "businessmen" in the Bush cabinet:

I think you can take this a bit further though. Critics of this administration often hit it for being full of so-called Chicken-hawks, folks who are all gung-ho to get into wars but somehow never found time to put on a uniform themselves.

On the economic side of the equation, it's also filled with what I'm calling (in a piece I'm now working on) safety-net entrepreneurs. Those would be folks who talk a great game about markets and risk-taking and entrepreneurship and gumption and such but have actually made their cash in ventures which are almost immune from real risk and where their skill isn't entrepreneurship but the ability to work the bureaucracy and purse strings of -- yikes! -- big government. Safety-nets for the poor and middle-class damage character; for the businessmen, they work just fine.

Dick Cheney's career at Haliburton is almost the archetypal example; Snow's seems a decent runner-up.

The terrible thing about Marshall's accusation, from the perspective of the free market enthusiast, is its justice. Unqualified Offerings has long thought that the best part of the wildly uneven political work of Noam Chomsky is his analysis of what he calls "state capitalism." (Daniel Gross in Slate calls Snow an "access capitalist.) For an example of access capitalism often mistaken, even by some small government enthusiasts, for free markets, check out this excerpt Eve Tushnet has quoted from a book on the prison industry and prison culture.

And Another Thing I Hate About You - Unqualified Offerings was hugely entertained by this Andrea Harris denunciation of - Unqualified Offerings. It hopes you will be too. This website has thought for some time that Ms. Harris is the paradigmatic "bellicose woman" blogger, and recommends that people read her regularly if they like that sort of thing. However, Unqualified Offerings must, gingerly, "fisk" one particular passage. It is a matter of honor:

I don't know, maybe I'm just put off by his habit of referring to himself as "Unqualified Offerings" all the time and using the royal "we."

This slur can not be allowed to stand. Unqualified Offerings does not refer to itself as "we." It refers to itself as "it." It will thank people to remember that.

Not a Lott - Trent Lott says his "terrible words" were

"certainly not intended to endorse his segregationist policies that he might have been advocating, or was advocating, 54 years ago."

according to yesterday's New York Times.

Rather, Mr. Lott said, he meant to hail Mr. Thurmond's record on issues like national defense, balancing the budget and economic development rather than the views on race Mr. Thurmond held when he ran for president on a Dixiecrat platform opposing "social intermingling of the races."

Uh huh.

Here's the thing. In this context, it doesn't matter that Lott says he admires the Dixiecrat ticket's positions on economic issues and defense but not its racism. The Dixiecrat ticket wasn't offering you a list of options. It was offering you a package with racism as the main ingredient.

That means that the task before Lott is larger than he gives evidence of accepting so far. He has a couple of options:

1) Make a serious argument that asserted gains on the national security, and economic fronts would have been worth ardent support for Jim Crow at the White House level. For instance, Lott could argue that social trends are more important than political trends and that, therefore, even had the Dixiecrat ticket won power on a racist platform, the civil liberties situation of black Americans would have continued to improve at something like their historical pace. Extra credit for arguing they would have improved more rapidly. This one is a hard sell for Unqualified Offerings, because a country in which enough states went Dixiecrat to put Thurmond in the White House would have been a country in which the all-important liberalising racial culture didn't exist. So Lott could argue that, sorry, the improvements in the lives and liberties of black Americans were not worth the "budget and economic development" harms Lott believes the Dixiecrats would have prevented. He'd be very unlikely to sell Unqualified Offerings on this, let alone most white liberals, moderates or African-Americans, but the argument is there to be made, and made seriously if not convincingly. Every right-winger has a point in history where he or she looks at some proposed civil rights program and says, "Sorry, can't go for that," whether it's affirmative action, reparations for slavery, race-conscious redistricting or something else. UO thinks 1948 is obscenely early to draw that line, but anyone who disagrees should be free to make their case.

2) Shut up and take your damn lumps. Step aside.

Option one is surely closed to Lott. It would require an intellectual seriousness that few politicians possess. And there's never been any reason to think Trent Lott one of those few. As Bill Herbert puts it today

I don't believe Trent Lott is a racist. Being a racist would be proof that he had any strong convictions at all. What does the man stand for? Fiscal Conservatism? Whatever. No really, I believe you. No, I'm not being sarcastic at all. Lott's record shows that he has no principles at all, other than the Aggrandizement of Trent Lott.

The Thurmond remark was no gaffe. It was merely Lott shamelessly pandering to the audience of the moment.

The moment has changed since the weekend, as has the audience. All that Trent Lott has been doing since Monday is pandering to the different audience. We, the audience, should not be satisfied. Lott's apology doesn't matter, because the issue is not our feelings but his fitness. And his clarification doesn't clarify. His words and conduct alike remain "terrible."

Orwelliana - Reader/snowbird Mary LaCroix confirms the Orwell quote from the Winter 1945 Partisan Review:

That excerpt appears accurate. (If my scanner weren't on the blink right now, I could send you a copy of the relevant page).

It's from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 3: As I Please. (1943-1945). Item 83, pp. 335-341, published in the Partisan Review, 194*4*, not 1945, written in December 1944.

Regards,
Mary.

P.S. I will not nag you about not having your own copy of this collection, nor will I sing out "Advantage: Librarian!". Because that would be mean. And we have laws against that kind of thing up here.

Unqualified Offerings wishes Mary a Joyeux Christmas and a Merry Noel.

Doug Turnbull of Beauty of Grey doubts the issue is completely settled regardless. "The only other thing I'd add," he writes,

is that, while Orwell's later repudiation of his "objectively pro-Fascist" verbage might knock down the use of it as an argument from authority, it does not thereby actually refute the argument itself. And from what you've quoted and the essay you cited, none of Orwell's later retractions actually address his underlying concern. He admits that most anti-war demonstrators had good intentions, and not seeing and understanding this is a failure, but he does not go back on his previous assessment of what the result of those good intentions were. Is this an early case of a "non-denial denial?"

Unqualified Offerings thinks that, set in the context of Orwell's other writings, it is not. He makes a good point re "the argument itself." A couple of things to note: When the early-40s Orwell spoke of being "pro-Fascist," he didn't just mean "in favor of the governments of Germany and Italy." He was also referring to the social situation in Britain. (He felt the imperatives of war would require Britain to move significantly toward democratic socialism.) Speaking to only the war itself, Gene Callahan's recent essay praised in this space noted the difficulty of playing the "lessons of history" game even with so apparently settled an event as World War II.

Finally, Orwell's original accusation carried the qualifier, "In a war such as this." However much you think Saddam is like Hitler (and Unqualified Offerings has long since decided he's more like Stalin), 1942 Britain is simply not, by any stretch of the imagination, 2002 America. (Nor is 2002 America, by any stretch of the imagination, 1938 Britain, but Callahan has already dealt with that.)

London Letters - Nick Sweeney e-mails that Orwell's adversion to "the lunatic atmosphere of war" appeared in his "London Letter" to the Partisan Review of Winter 1945. This text does not appear to exist in unabridged form in an authoritative online archive. Someone did type out the relevant paragraphs (2-4) in a Google newsgroup. Unqualified Offerings invites anyone with a copy of the essay to substantiate or refute the reprinting:

For instance, I particularly regret having said in one letter that Julian Symons ``writes in a vaguely Fascist strain''---a quite unjustified statement based on a single article which I probably misunderstood. But this kind of thing results largely from the lunatic atmosphere of war, the fog of lies and misinformation in which one has to work and the endless sordid controversies in which a political
journalist is involved. By the low standards now prevailing I think I have been fairly accurate about facts. Where I have gone wrong is in assessing the relative importance of different *trends*. And most of my mistakes spring from a political analysis which I had made in the desperate period of 1940 and continued to cling to long after it should have been clear that it was untenable.

It should be obvious that Unqualified Offerings thinks many of our most vocal hawks are clinging to desperate analyses made in late 2001 long after it should be clear those analyses are untenable.

Doug Turnbull of Beauty of Grey e-mails that

Interesting piece responding to the Glenn Reynolds/Orwell quote. Your point that anti-war activists are, in their opinion, on the US's side is well taken. But I think you (and Glenn also, perhaps) are falling into the trap of trying to fit everything onto a single scale, and assuming that all good things are compatible.

I think that, in the current situation, the anti-war activists clearly are acting in Saddam's interests, objectively speaking. They are opposing a war that will with near certainty oust him from power and probably result in his capture or execution. Opposing a US war with Iraq is, it seems to me, obviously in Saddam's interests. I really don't see how this is a debatable point. You might object to someone claiming you're on Saddam's side, but in this case, opposing a war certainly is his side.

But the discussion doesn't start and stop there. It is possible for something to be both in Saddam's interest and in the US's interest. Getting rid of him would be a good thing, but not all good things are compatible, and it might be that getting rid of him would, as you've argued, result in a greater number of bad things happening, so that in the net it wouldn't be in the US's interests.

It's a bit of a turnaround from the usual left-right/hawk-dove arguments. Normally it's the left and doves that ignore extenuating circumstances and denounce any US action that involves compromise with a brutal dictator, or the extending of his reign. While the right and the hawks plead realpolitik and necessary evil as justification for cooperating with such unsavory characters, or looking the other way.

So I'd say you're right to object to being tarred with the pro-Saddam brush, since that's a misrepresentation of your position and your justification for it. And Glenn is wrong to imply that being pro-Saddam is, in this case, the self-evidently wrong side of the argument. But I think you're wrong when you reject the conclusion that opposition to a war with Iraq is, whatever its other merits, a position that directly benefits Saddam.

But I never said I reject the conclusion that opposition to a war with Iraq benefits Saddam. Of course it benefits Saddam to stay in power rather than to be deposed by force. I said that any benefit to Saddam Hussein is, in the considered judgment of me and the doves I call allies, immaterial. The hawks' inability to disentangle Saddam's bad fortune from our good fortune is precisely what leads people like Glenn Reynolds astray in the first place.

To the extent that the coalition frays and this prevents war, I consider the US to have been saved by circumstance from a calamity. Better my country be saved from calamity by the prudence of its rulers (though that is a doubtful possibility) but what saves my country from calamity is to be welcomed regardless. Against that, the fate of some tinpot tyrant on the other side of the globe counts for nothing.

Revise and Extend - Home under the ice, Unqualified Offerings decided to follow up Orwell's repudiation of his accusation that "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist." Orwell did, in fact, repudiate this 1942 statement in a 1944 "As I Please" column. However, the specific phrase, "the lunatic atmosphere of war" does not appear. It may be that the phrase is an internet legend. It may be that Orwell used it in some work that is not on the web. Pity. However, Orwell does express the sentiment behind the phrase in his renunciation:

In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.

The "atmosphere of hatred" is the inevitable wartime atmosphere. Here is an excerpt of Orwell's from the last "As I Please" of that same month. He is discussing a Dwight MacDonald report on a US Army hand-to-hand fighting course:

Mr Macdonald comments: ‘There is one rather interesting problem in operating the course. Although the writer never states so directly, it would seem there is danger that the student’s inhibitions will be broken down so thoroughly that he will shoot or stab the coach who accompanies him . . . . The coach is advised to keep himself in a position to grab the student’s gun arm "at any instant"; after the three dummies along the course have been stabbed, "the knife is taken away from the student to prevent accidents"; and finally: "There is no place on the course where total darkness prevails while instructor is near student." ’

I believe the similar battle-courses in the British army have now been discontinued or toned down, but it is worth remembering that something like this is inevitable if one wants military efficiency. No ideology, no consciousness of having ‘something to fight for’, is fully a substitute for it. This deliberate brutalizing of millions of human beings is part of the price of society in its present form. The Japanese, incidentally, have been experts at this kind of thing for hundreds of years. In the old days the sons of aristocrats used to be taken at a very early age to witness executions, and if any boy showed the slightest sign of nausea he was promptly made to swallow large quantities of rice stained the colour of blood.

From the same column, writing about protests against Britain's use of Indian troops in the Greek civil war that fall:

Our crime in Greece is to have interfered in Greek internal affairs at all: the colour of the troops who carry out the orders is irrelevant.
...
Our correspondent might have made the point that in an affair of this kind it is particularly mean to make use of politically ignorant colonial troops who don’t understand in what a dirty job they’re being mixed up. But at least don’t let us insult the Indians by suggesting that their presence in Athens is somehow more offensive than that of the British.

UPDATE: There is this, from 1984, too:

The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

and this, from Homage to Catalonia:

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war.

The Catalonia usage bears little relation to the 1964 usage, though.

UPDATE: Here is the (Danish) index of the site reprinting Orwell's "As I Please" columns.

Homeland Security - Unqualified Offerings has to admit that the latest security measure that President Bush proposed and Congress approved shortly before the White House formally submitted the bill has a certain logic to it. Per this report:

WASHINGTON - Acting on President Bush's declaration that "America must support its allies in the war on terror," Congress today passed legislation that will enable American citizens to aid the logistics of the international effort against Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. The Resolution Enhancing Domestic Co-Operation Against Terrorism specifically aims to help the politically important but financially strapped army of the United Kingdom meet the commitments Prime Minister Tony Blair has made toward the US effort in Iraq.

"Obviously the British military faces genuine fiscal constraints," said White House Middle Eastern Affairs honcho Elliott Abrams, "and the American people have an opportunity to bridge that gap."

Under the innovative provisions of REDCOAT, British troops will live with American families in American homes until they are called to Iraq or "other possible duties," said Abrams. Abrams and other White House officials dismissed complaints that participation in the program was involuntary.

"Families will be carefully selected by each state's Governor-General, on the basis of a thorough data evaluation," said Information Awareness Office Director John Poindexter, "and I do mean thorough."

Questioned outside Buckingham Palace, where President Bush has been visiting, White House spokesman Karl Rove stressed that families who objected to quartering British troops in their homes would have the right to appeal to the Governor-General's office "for an independent review of their case" by the Governor-General's office.

Required Reading

1. A superb essay on Stand Down by Matthew Hogan. The military conquest of Iraq has already contributed to decades of domestic terrorism - in Britain. Read "Who Was Tom Barry?" to find out how.

2. Gene Healy puts two and two together and gets...much less than four. In "What If There Isn't Another Shoe?", he wonders something that Unqualified Offerings swears occurred to it too. Excerpt:

Consider Malvo and Muhammed. Two none-too-bright jokers with a $300 rifle and no formal training repeatedly shut down the Beltway and terrorized Greater Washington for almost a month. If America really is riddled with sleeper cells, why not activate another 20 guys? Ten two-man-shooter teams, two or three different cities, months before they're all caught—the disruption and terror it would sow would be enormous. As on September 11, America would be full of fear from its north to its south to its west to its east. If I can figure this out, so can they. So what gives?

Maybe (shhhhh)—maybe there aren’t that many of them. Maybe they’re not nearly as rich in suicidal maniacs as Hamas and the Al-Asqa brigades. Maybe we’ve killed a good portion of them, and put a good bit more on the run. Maybe—just maybe—we’ve won.

Note to Gene: The rifle was worth $1600. But it was either stolen or sold under the counter for a lot less than that.

Gene's substantial piece may be wrong; his thesis is tentative; but it's carefully thought through and precisely the kind of thing you're not likely to find in dead-tree media. It's the blogosphere at its best.

Spot the Fallacy - Skip lightly over the offensiveness of this Glenn Reynolds statement today, which is much closer to the sub-basement wherein Andrew Sullivan's discourse has dwelled for much of the last year than one likes to see him coming:

I think that this "pressure of public opinion" language is a recognition by Saddam that the "anti-war" movement is objectively on his side, and not neutral.

Instead let's just ask, What's wrong with this statement? Answer: The usual. It assumes what Reynolds wants to prove, that conquering Iraq is good for the US and not conquering it is bad. If you don't believe, and many smart people don't, that conquering Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein by force offers a net security gain for the US, then Saddam's rhetoric is incidental. The real issue is the good of our country, not his, and certainly not the good of Saddam himself. Most of us who oppose this war are not only not on Saddam's side, we're not "neutral" either. We're on our side, properly conceived.

Reynolds borrows the word "objectively" from a famous jibe of Orwell's. I won't argue whether Orwell was wrong in his own usage. I don't need to, as Orwell did it himself. To quote from my Stand Down colleague, Zizka:

Unfortunately for Kelly, Orwell's phrase "objectively pro-Fascist"—standard-issue Stalinist polemic, though Orwell was never a Stalinist—was later rejected by Orwell. In 1944 he confessed that he had been driven to use language he regretted by "the lunatic atmosphere of war," and later that year specifically rejected the use of the phrase "objectively pro-Fascist" to smear people who are not fascists at all, but who do things which others believe are helpful to fascism.

Currently, when it comes to war on Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, and...) there is no objective - factual in the way the mass of the earth is factual, neutral in the way of one's opinion of the mass of the earth - view. That goes for my own view, for all that I am, of course, correct. Mine is a considered opinion. At least some hawks have considered opinions. But there is "objectively" bupkus, pro- or anti-. That includes Glenn and like-minded hawks' belief that between Saddam's job security and US interests, properly conceived, there is a zero-sum relationship.

Mail Call - Reader Leslie Hale wanted Charles Schwab for Treasury, though he didn't get it:

Would be brilliant public relations coup.

Wall Street despises Chuck, but investing public loves him after the "Let's put lipstick on this pig" commercial.

But doubt if Bush has the balls.

Needless to say, Leslie's thesis has not been disproved.

Reader/Attorney Rita Smith was concerned about the Virginia Court's handling of 17-year-old sniper suspect Lee Malvo's guardian, writing

I'm not familar with that state's juvenile code, but it doesn't strike me as unusual that Malvo would have both an attorney and a guardian ad litem. I practice in Oklahoma, and have worn both hats. In my experience, a juvenile is only appointed both when the judge wants to make very sure his rights and best
interests are being protected. Which would make sense in this case to me.

What does surprise & bother me is that the ad litem was denied access to the criminal investigative records. Ad litems normally have access to EVERYTHING, even things that no one else can see. Very strange.

I'm wondering why Malvo hasn't been charged as an adult.

Charles Kuffner notes that he has an account of the very first Terlingua chili cookoff on his own site. Beans are mentioned. The surprise ending will rock you! (Especially if your name is Michael Croft.)

And Steve Cook writes

Since Unqualified Offerings has appearantly morphed from a sniperblog to a chiliblog, let me point you to John "Simple Cooking" Thorne's website. Thorne is the author of "Serious Pig" and "Pot on the Fire", among others, and is (for my money) the best living food writer in America. His discussion of the historical origins of chili may be found here.

Sounds like a site worth checking out. Hopefully, Thorne can straighten out some very unsound thinking on the matter of barbecue by Mr. Franklin "I Also Praise Space:1999" Harris.

Not a Lott - Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds have all kinds of good coverage on the remarks made over the weekend by prominent Iraq hawk Trent Lott in praise of the 1948 Dixiecrat ticket. (Note: snarky war aside a small return on all the Pat Buchanan cracks made by interventionists.)

UO hasn't got a lot to add. Having seen media crucifixions before, it wanted to find the full version of Lott's remarks to see if they were being taken out of context. What has been quoted is

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Was it possible that Lott had made some statement about federalism or reining in the New Deal that was being suppressed? The answer turns out to be: No. C-Span has the streaming video of Daschle's remarks at the bottom of this page. (Skip ahead to minute 32. The link may move further in the archive. Thanks to Justin Katz for finding the video.) Lott's remarks come without prior context, nor with any amplification and nuance immediately following. Toward the end of Lott's speech he praises Thurmond for, among other things, "changing with the times." But that's it.

This is not a matter of "political correctness," that now-useless catch phrase. This is the top Republican in the Senate issuing an unqualified retroactive endorsement of an avowedly segregationist candidacy. For UO's fellow fans of freedom of association, let this website remind you that Jim Crow was a government program (many state governments). It wasn't just about this establishment or that deciding not to serve blacks. It was about establishments being forbidden to serve blacks. It was about the differential application of the police power and official winking at what we might call para-police power. It was about how state moneys were distributed in education, public health and other programs. Among the noble principles that desegregation sullied by using them as "philosophical shields" were federalism, private property, freedom of association and limited government. The Jim Crow State actually flouted most of these virtues rather than following them, but it didn't matter. Who wants to be seen in company like that?

Lott has shown few virtues as a Senate leader anyway. And he's a perfect poster boy for why not just libertarians but all sorts of people remain uncomfortable with the Republican Party. As Virginia Postrel put it today:

Black voters aren't the only ones turned off by Jim Crow nostalgia. The best way to position Republicans as intolerant barbarians is to keep Lott around as Senate leader. Plus he's smarmy.

She also says that the New York Times has been unusually quiet so far. Of course. The best thing for the Democratic Party isn't Lott resigning in disgrace. It's Lott hanging on so that Democrats can hammer the Republicans over Lott from now through 2004 through - whenever Lott finally retires.

Then they'll wait to see what some dumbass says at the Trent Lott tribute.

No, the only Party that stands to gain from knocking Lott off the podium is the Republican Party.

Hello There - A personal thanks to Jesse Walker and an institutional thanks to the new Reason blog, Hit and Run, for the mention. Judging by the uptick in UO's traffic, Hit and Run is already a major success.

Cf. The Entrance to Delphi - In the course of getting his rhetorical ass handed to him by the invincible Julian Sanchez regarding gay marriage, NRO scold Stanley Kurtz writes

The point of my earlier writings on gay marriage (of which Sanchez appears to be ignorant)...

Imagine being ignorant of the earlier writings of Stanley Kurtz! And now we see another benefit of blogging. As a blogger, Unqualified Offerings is well aware that it is an obscure, bad-tempered scribbler. That self-knowledge seems to elude your NRO Contributing Editors.

Fashionably Late - Reason Online starts its group blog today.

Ah Hell - Unqualified Offerings learns from Letter from Gotham that Salam Pax of Baghdad has taken Where Is Raed down. Apparently this is because his blog got mentioned by Reuters and he got scared by the visibility.

Totalitarianism sucks.

I don't think Salam read this site regularly, but my best wishes go out to him. It seems unlikely that "Goodbye/Hello Peace" was his real name, so one hopes he can stay out of the clutches of the Mukhbharat. And maybe he'll come back. A lot of retired bloggers do.

Iran-Contra Reunion Newsletter Item - You may be wondering if everybody involved in the Iran-Contra scandal is working for the Bush Administration's national security team. The answer is No. Oliver North is making so much radio money that he can't afford to give that job up. Despite a promising early sighting, Robert "Bud" McFarlane hasn't been heard from in over a year. And Adnan Khashoggi is distracted by - and stop Unqualified Offerings if you've heard this before - legal trouble.

But Elliott Abrams is back! Abrams pleaded guilty to a couple of misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress, but was pardoned by Bush 41 on his way out the door. CliffsNotes: Abrams knew everything there was to know, but didn't tell the relevant Senate Committees. Here is a list of those who could be trusted with every detail of the whole arms-for-hostages/money-for-contras folly:

The geniuses in charge of Reagan Administration security policy;
The government of the Republic of Iran;
The government of Israel;
The contras themselves;
Richard Fucking Secord;
Soviet Intelligence (North testified during the hearings that the administration knew that the Soviets were able to monitor their conversations with the Iranians, who, as we've already mentioned, knew everything).

Here is a list of those who could not be trusted with this precious information:

The relevant House and Senate committees;
The American people.

Oliver North told the Joint Committee, "This country has enemies, Senator." Going by the lists of who were and were not to be trusted with the details of the Iran-Contra group's genius, it ought to be pretty clear who he meant. And never forget this example of the mindset of that once and future crowd of geostrategists:

MSG FROM: NSRCM --CPUA TO: NSOLN --CPUA 02/27/86 16:02:23
To: NSOLN --CPUA

*** Reply to note of 02/27/86 08:54

-- SECRET --

NOTE FROM: ROBERT MCFARLANE
Subject: How are things?
Roger Ollie. Well done--if the world only knew how many times you have kept a semblance of integrity and gumption to US policy, they would make you Secretary of State. But they can't know and would complain if they did--such is the state of democracy in the late 20th century.

McFarlane's regard for his subjects was not unusual for his circle; we just happen to have caught him in an unguarded moment. Given the present Bush Administration's propensity for giving these people jobs, why would you believe even a word of what it has to tell you about National Security?

Another Triumph for Non-Intervention as reformist protests in Iran get bigger and broader too.

More than 10,000 Iranians rallied in the streets around Tehran University Saturday in a show of solidarity with the increasingly vocal student movement. Hundreds of riot police and plain-clothes members of the Basij, an Islamic paramilitary organization linked with hardliners in the Iranian government, clashed with protesters in late afternoon, beating them back with batons and fists.

It's that old open society stuff the protesters are after:

This was just the latest in a series of protests on Tehran university campuses during the past few weeks to denounce the death sentence given to reformist university professor Hashem Aghajari on Nov. 7. During a university lecture in the city of Hamedan last June, Aghajari, a veteran who lost a leg during the war with Iraq in the ’80s, claimed that Muslims should not follow their religious leaders “blindly.” Many of the protests have now become open forums to criticize the ruling clergy, including President Mohammed Khatami and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that all this is possible because:

We're not in Iran.

Hm. "Leave Until They Miss Us, America." Has a ring to it.

Ripeness is All - The Associated Press reports that more and more Palestinian leaders are saying the whole terror war thing is, you know, bad. They're not making a moral case so much as a practical one:

In an interview with the Qatari newspaper Al-Rayah on Sunday, Abbas repeated that armed attacks have destroyed all gains since Israel and the PLO signed accords that set up the Palestinian Authority as a government-in-waiting.

It would be obtuse to deny that Ariel Sharon's fierce counterterror campaign has not been the main inspiration of all this rethinking. What we have been through, though few actually called it that, was the first Israel-Palestine War, and you want to win wars if you can. (For the purposes of this item, UO is giving him the benefit of the doubt on the extent to which he helped start the war in the first place, with the armed march to Temple Mount before the election and the shelving of the Taba agreement after.) It would be a mistake, though, to think Sharonism in perpetuity will meet Israel's needs. Palestinian thinking can and will change again if Israel tries to turn its success at punishing the war of the bombers into unending control of the West Bank. Plus, Israel can't afford it. Unqualified Offerings is talking in terms of money here, not moral capital. As AP notes

Rajoub's forecast has proven chillingly accurate: 26 months later, nearly 2,000 Palestinians and nearly 700 Israelis are dead, the Palestinian economy is crushed, Israel has reoccupied the West Bank and Israeli travel bans have turned many Palestinian towns into virtual prison camps.

Israel will soon either have to let large numbers of unemployed, housebound people starve (with great publicity) or commence the biggest Meals-on-Wheels campaign the world has ever seen - forever.

Sharon belongs to that faction of the Israeli electorate that want the West Bank and Gaza forever. So any war he wages is not just to punish terror attacks but to secure possession of Greater Israel. (The best formulation I've seen of Sharon's plans for the West Bank is that he hopes to turn islands of Israeli settlements in a sea of Palestinians into islands of Palestinian settlements in a sea of Israelis.) There are all kinds of reasons why Greater Israel is not just wrong, but a bad idea for Israel itself, and we won't be rehearsing them here.

The AP article contains this fascinating opinion poll data:

A November poll shows Palestinian opinion shifting. Although 90 percent of Palestinians support attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, 56 percent now support arresting militants to stop attacks inside Israel. As recently as May, 86 percent opposed a crackdown on militias.

This is fascinating and even hopeful, and you don't see much of that in the Middle East. It demonstrates something that hard core Likudniks in both Israel and the United States deny: a distinction in Palestinian minds between the "Occupied Territories" and "Israel proper." According to the data, almost every Palestinian believes fighting the Israelis in the Territories, and one doubts they are too finicky about the methods. But a majority of Palestinians want to prevent attacks inside Israel's pre-1967 boundaries. Which is to say: It is about the Occupation.

There is a way out, people. Is Arik Sharon the one to take it? No. He is the tribune of those Israelis who abhor taking it. Israel needs a government that has the wit to accept a sustainable victory.

Oh by the Way - The next time someone says Glenn Reynolds never cites anyone who refutes one of his enthusiasms, show them this.

Chalk One Up for the Angry White Male Vet Theory - Gonna be hard to find a jihad angle in this one:

They were among the elite of the Kremlin's special forces. The cream of the Russian equivalent of the US Navy Seals, they were trained to parachute into water from 13,000 feet, to reach land in safety and to kill with stealth.
Now they face a life behind bars, after a motiveless killing spree that terrified Russia and exposed the crisis at the heart of the former Soviet Union's penniless but highly skilled army.

Artiom Sobkovich, 22, and Alexei Spilnik, 23, have admitted committing 13 brutal murders across Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic surrounded by Poland and Lithuania. Last week a third alleged accomplice, paratrooper Pavel Borisenko was arrested amid growing concerns in Russia that the bloodbath was the result of the armed forces training young males to believe they were 'supermen', then cutting them loose without support or control.

Are there some striking parallels? We report, you decide:

The Kaliningrad murders seem motiveless - the targets were security guards, young mothers, or soldiers on patrol. Sometimes Sobkovich and Spilnik stole money from their victims, but more often they seemed to have killed for fun, each murder being executed with military precision.

Hm. Victims were all Russian. Must mean they hate Russia.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes - From MSNBC's story on the resignations of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey, we learn:

1. Media bias lives! Compare this actual sentence that appeared in the MSNBC story

O’Neill also tilted against administration dogma - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.

to this possible alternate

O'Neill also tilted against administration positions - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.

and this one

O'Neill also tilted toward Democratic Party dogma - initially questioning the short-term benefits of the Bush tax cut and advocating an aggressive battle to combat global warming.

2. We may actually see a serious upgrade at the Treasury post, with both Phil Gramm and Bill Archer currently mentioned as strong candidates. (Why not Dick Armey? - UO.) Coming out of the boardroom rather than the classroom, O'Neill struck me as a bit too cozy with "state capitalism" as opposed to free enterprise. The least appealing things about Gramm, Archer (and Armey) are their stands on social issues (abortion, drugs etc.). A purely economic portfolio plays to their strengths.

3. MSNBC says Lindsey's downfall was, among other things, telling something approaching the truth about the financial consequences of a military conquest of Iraq. Alan Bock pointed out in September just how distant an approach this was. But it was still, apparently, too close for official comfort.

4. Mr. Most Influential Vice President Ever, Dick Cheney, recommended O'Neill for Treasury. In a just world, the experience would limit his influence on other issues.

Mint-y Fresh - Aziz Poonawalla seems to have a gift for coining apt terms. First it was the scripturally correct and pleasantly insulting "Harabist," for those who claim Islamic sanction for their perverted campaigns of terror and murder. Now he gives us "Clash-ist." This is not someone who still digs London Calling (and who does not?), but someone who wants to sign up for Samuel Huntington's famous "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and "the West."

Actually, rereading his second piece, the term he uses is "Clash-ian," to resemble - and Unqualified Offerings apologizes for the using a word you may well come to this blog to avoid - "anti-idiotarian." UO is not sure whether it likes Clash-ist or Clash-ian better. But Aziz sure can come up with them.

The Barber of Beirut - Here's the really important part of yesterday's Christian-Science Monitor story, "Anti-US anger grows among Arab moderates":

"Of course, our hatred of the United States will increase if America attacks Iraq," says Mohammed Nawfal, a barber. "The Lebanese have experienced much bloodshed and there is a history of bloody American involvement in Lebanon. So we feel more sympathy for Iraq than other countries because we have been there."

Now your typical neo will find Mr. Nawfal's statement purely infuriating. Weren't our occasional postwar forays into Lebanon undertaken with the best of intentions? In 1982 the US came in essentially throwing the bodies of its troops in front of the Palestinian refugee community to save them from - why, that would be Ariel Sharon! The US sought to mediate a bloody civil war and get Lebanon back on the path of (wait for it, Iraq hawks!) multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy. Before that, US troops intervened in 1958 at the request of Lebanon's elected government to stabilize the country through its election of that fall. At the time, Lebanon was threatened by Syrian (United Arab Republic) troops that had crossed the border and was suffering riots in several major cities.

Who could dislike the US after that?

What the barber would tell you, most likely, is that after arriving to save the Palestinians, the US ended up choosing de facto sides to prop up a government few Lebanese wanted. And he would likely construe the 1958 intervention as bolstering the minority Christian government at the expense of Lebanon's muslims and Druze, that US support was a cold war power play suppressing arab nationalism by design.

Do not mistake Unqualified Offerings' point here. UO is not saying Mr. Nawfal is right and we're terrible people. Unqualified Offerings is saying that what matters is that Mr. Nawfal thinks he's right and we're terrible people. The fact that we launched our interventions in the name of Good Things counts for nothing with people like Mr. Nawfal. That the interventions may have accomplished at least some good things doesn't either. (I am convinced that mitigating the humanitarian catastrophes of Sabra and Shatila really was the immediate motive for the Reagan Administration intervention, which I was old enough to follow at the time.)

Unqualified Offerings is saying, once again, that military intervention buys a country almost nothing in terms of lasting gratitude (and you can ask Mr. DeGaulle if you don't believe UO). Our coming Glorious Liberation of Iraq will simply produce legions of Iraqi Mr. Nawfals, and smaller legions of Iraqi Mr. Attas. Do not be fooled by any short-term kite-flying or parades. The real issue is not the immediate post-conquest reaction, but the mood a year from then, and five years from then, and ten.

A few weeks ago, Unqualified Offerings snarkily asserted that "The problem with neoconservatives is everybody has them." Let's be less snarky:

It's a conservative world. Sorry, liberals among you, but it's true. From continent to continent and country to country, most people prefer the familiar to the strange, whether in terms of people or folkways or governance. The West did not invent ethnocentrism, we just named it. I pluck you down anywhere in the world, outside of a major metropolis, and I will be plucking you down among people who like their own tribe better than the next tribe and the next tribe better than, well, you. What bothers Mr. Nawaf about the history of US intervention in Lebanon is less that the interventions were "bloody" - Lebanon's neighbors and its own factions far excel us there - than that we weren't Lebanese.

The essential conservatism of the entire planet is the reef on which virtually every universalist "progressive" movement has foundered. Oh, you can find factions and individuals that warm to "foreign" causes. A certain number of Ukrainians will fight for Hitler, a certain number of Nicaraguans for Lenin.

A certain number of Afghans for Brezhnev.

When it's all over, these are the folks that get strung up on the lampposts.

Right now the United States government is busy putting itself in military opposition to this one known immovable object. I do not argue that democracy, free economies and individual liberty are not "universal goods," or that certain foreigners somehow don't deserve them. I love two out of the three and find no acceptable substitute for the other (democracy). Every human alive deserves to live in these conditions. But these universal goods are very, very hard to foist on someone at gunpoint. They take root when the people in question come to want them for themselves, to insist on it by themselves and to take them, as much as possible, with their own hands. Eastern Europe was the great lesson of the 1990s. Iran looks like it might prove the point for the Noughts.

Liberty, self rule and free enterprise are anti-paternalism. Intervention in the name of "liberation" is paternalism itself. We foul our own gift when we give it by force.

Morning Murder Minute - The ATF and IRS have launched a criminal investigation of Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma. It was Bull's Eye's Bushmaster XM-15 that ended up in the car of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo back in October. According to the Tacoma News Tribune:

According to the [Seattle Times], the Bull’s Eye probe covers the possibility that the store failed to file federal tax forms for several years, that gun sales records were not properly maintained and that an employee may have stolen firearms or sold them improperly.

Investigators turned to those issues about 10 days ago after the completion of an ATF compliance audit, a process in which agents attempt to trace each weapon from manufacturer to store to retail buyer.

Early in the audit agents were unable to match about 340 weapons with sales records, but that number has been reduced to 90 through examination of other documents and receipts, The Times reported.

The owner of Bull's Eye is cooperating, but told the press his store is being made a "scapegoat."

Paperwork shows that the rifle arrived at Bull's Eye on July 2, so it was always, as Unqualified Offerings noted somewhere, impossible that it would turn out to be the rifle used to kill Jerry Taylor on a Tucson golf course back in March.

On the win some-lose some front

A juvenile court judge on Wednesday rejected efforts from the court- appointed guardian of sniper suspect John Lee Malvo to obtain criminal investigative records in the case.

Judge Charles Maxfield also denied a request by prosecutors to have the guardian removed from the case. Prosecutors had argued that state law does not require a court-appointed guardian for a juvenile who already has court-appointed lawyers.

That's from the Daily Oklahoman. You still love us, America, and that means a lot. Sunspot.com adds that

Describing his reduced role as leaving him "toothless" and "frustrated," [guardian] Petit said after the hearing that prosecutors have not given him information he sought weeks ago and are guaranteeing an incomplete report to the court. "It seems like they are trying to hide something," he said.

Petit, perhaps we haven't mentioned, is not just Malvo's guardian. He is a lawyer.

Meanwhile the NYT reported late last month that all sorts of trouble surrounds giving out the reward money.

Meanwhile, to the surprise of few Unqualified Offerings readers, there is nothing new in the way of evidence of a connection between the snipers and the Jamaat al-Fuqra group. This story rested on a single third-hand statement by a sheriff in southwestern Virginia to a Washington Times reporter that the FBI had told him "there was a connection" to an al-Fuqra community in Georgia. The story has appeared only in Washington Times family publications or in opinion organs referring back to the Washington Times piece. Even the WashTimes itself appears to have printed no follow-ups. Since that paper clearly has a motive to break any terrorism connection story, and since they haven't, two obvious conclusions suggest themselves:

1) They tried mightily to independently confirm an al-Fuqra link and couldn't; or
2) They didn't try because they were afraid it wouldn't pan out; or
3) They always knew it was a mirage and didn't want to waste resources on it.

This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - David Aldridge on certain sportswriters in Chicago and New York who won't stop obsessing over what Michael Jordan's decision to play two years with the Wizards means for his "legacy":

What amazing fortitude these men have, to be parents both to their own children and to a 39-year-old man who lives hundreds of miles away. How do they find the time to tell the world both what's wrong with their teams in their towns and to be curators of the "I Know What's Best for Michael Jordan" museum?

Meanwhile, Chad Orzel has your Maryland basketball report.

Reading Around - Coolest passage from the latest issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine, from the an item called "Inquiry and Ideology":

No political stance has a monopoly on either good or bad research.

In fact, some of the most interesting research I've read (as well as some of the most tendentious and horribly written) comes from leftist, postmodern scholars of "material culture." If you want to know about the history of shopping, about women's beauty culture, about what ready-made clothes meant to turn-of-the-century immigrants, or about the relation between modernist ideology and domestic ideals, you have to find scholars who think those questions are worthy of study. If the work is good, it doesn't matter what political leanings may have originally inspired their inquiry. Curiosity about reality is incompatible with political litmus tests.

Meanwhile, how many times has this happened to you? You read something you admire so much you intend to write an extensive appreciation of it. You don't get around to the extensive appreciation, which means you end up forgetting to even mention the article in the first place.

Which is a lead-up to saying that Gene Callahan's essay, "The Lessons of History," may be the best political essay I've read in 2002. It's a thorough dismantling of the politicized history of Victor Davis Hanson, among others. It is something close to the last word on sloppy "Munich" analogies. Viz:

Another technique for getting the "lessons of history" to favor your ideological view is to cherry-pick your examples. If you are a hawk, find every example where someone acted "boldly" and won. Ignore little events like Napoleon's invasion of Russia, or the fact that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, to a great extent, because it did act boldly in attacking Sicily. Be especially sure, in these perilous times, never to mention the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which acted boldly against a terrorist threat, attacked a country, Serbia, it believed was harboring terrorists… and ceased to exist four years later.

Simply put, this essay puts Callahan on the inside track for UO's coveted "Dove of the Year" when this year's Unqualified Successes awards are handed out.

UPDATE: Doh! Reader Dave Lull notes the original version of this item lacked a link to Gene Callahan's essay. Fixed!

New Moon - Just when Unqualified Offerings had gotten out of the habit of forlornly clicking through to the dormant Letter from Gotham, selenously-pseudonymous Diana Moon reasumed blogging months ahead of schedule. And she has quickly returned to her criminal ways (being interesting).

Unqualified Offerings just thought you should know.

Pre-War is not an adjective but a noun, writes Jim of Objectionable Content, continuing his documentation of the disunction between our stated and real Iraq policies. Another must-read.

Things to Come - The Pontificator does some useful pointificating:

Let's throw out the conventional wisdom and ask some threshold questions:

1) In ten years, will it be easier, or harder, to obtain weapons of mass destruction?

2) In ten years, will people outside the U.S.A. hate the U.S.A. more, or less, than they do today?

These are the two questions which matter. Any foreign policy that we propound should be focused on obtaining a "harder" answer to question one, and a "less" answer to question two.

This has it exactly right. And it gets to the fatal flaw of the so-called Bush Doctrine of "preemption" and militant nonproliferation. The Bush Doctrine cannot make the answer to Question 1 "harder." Oh, with massive applications of force we can make it harder for Iraq, say, to acquire weapons of some destruction. And while we focus on that, other governments and dyspeptic NGOs quietly acquire their own. Meanwhile, the Bush Doctrine, seriously pursued, guarantees a "More" answer to Question 2.

It is a recipe for catastrophe. (When the catastrophe comes, of course, the same people whose policies made it inevitable will assure us that the problem was that we didn't intervene enough.)

The Pontificator's solution to this is not the same as UO's solution. He casts the problem as a conflict between "multilateralism" and "unilateralism." Unqualified Offerings thinks that's wrong: the issue is one of interventionism versus non-interventionism. But read his item to get the full flavor of his argument. It's very much worth it. And he's spot on about the core questions.

You Got That Right - Avedon Carol points out, fondly, that Unqualified Offerings is an extremist. (See bottom of post.) That is so true! However, Unqualified Offerings is an extremist in the defense of liberty and extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

Get Your Copy Today - Great news! The latest issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine is out! This internet periodical, sometimes called "The Scene," looks like a weblog, only instead of a bit of new material every day or two (or three), you get a whole ton of material every few weeks. Unqualified Offerings hasn't had a chance to read it all yet but it looks well worth your time.

(Actually, one of her new items is a vow to update her site more frequently. Unqualified Offerings wonders, Once a magazine editor always a magazine editor?)

How's That Again? - Gene Healy has a couple of questions about this "new barbarian" thing for fellow CATO-ite Brink Lindsay.

A Fanboy's Notes - Surprisingly nonclueless, nonsmirking "thirtieth anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons" item on NPR from October 26. (Maybe UO will change its name to TardyPundit. Link is to a RealAudio feed.) They don't mention other roleplaying games, but their hook is the D&D-specific anniversary, so they have an excuse. This time.

Mailbag III - You've heard of people who play period music on period instruments. Reader Terry Cobb offers period chili:

If you interested in trying real Texas chili as it was done long ago, you might be interested in this recipe:

Ingredients

Jim Henley, 09:34 PM

Spree Graphs can be found at Lonewacko's site, where he considers the question of whether and how John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, suspects in the vast majority of murders committed in the United States over the last year, could have been caught earlier. Master databases get mentioned. Worth reading.

Mailbag II - Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg Pearson e-mailed about UO's fantasia on the series "24," in an item called "A Pack, Not a TV Show":

For the confused liberal/liberatarian hybrids in the audience:

What's the difference between 24: The Libertarian Version (see A Pack, Not A TV Show) and, for example, the TIPS program(see More In Sorrow Than In Anger Post)?

The great failure in the show is that people don't have the opportunity to rat out their neighbors to the government. But the government encouraging people to rat out their neighbors is otherwise a bad thing.

Greg informs this website that the motto of "liberal/libertarian hybrids" is "We'd rather give the Democrats our money than give the Republicans our freedom." (Greg is younger than this website, and may have missed the Clinton Administration.)

Now to the question at hand. One thing's for sure, if it were easy to answer, Unqualified Offerings wouldn't have sat on Greg's e-mail since November 15th! It's still not quite sure it can verbalize all the distinctions - UO has been somewhat conflicted on the "pack, not a herd" stuff since shortly after thinking it up in the first place.

The first distinction that jumps out between the "24" scenario in UO's fantasia and the TIPS program is specificity. The tipsters in the fantasia are responding on a volunteer basis with information related to a particular, imminent threat. TIPS, on the other hand, is forever. The next difference is that, in the fantasia, anyone might come forth with information. TIPS aimed to create a whole new class of citizens engaged in ongoing surveillance and reporting.

And yes, the government sponsorship makes a difference too. TIPS can metastasize and become more intrusive over time, growing from an "antiterrorism program" to an "antidrug" program and beyond until (likely at the behest of a Democratic President) TIPSters are reporting on everything from deadbeat dads to people who skip their auto emissions tests. TIPS reifies "busybody culture," while the "24" scenario relies on nothing more than the level of "busybodiness" we currently have.

Here's an early Offering on where busybody culture leads and what it has to do with tyranny.

Reader Peter Taylor offered a longish objection to "Acting Like Grownups," in which Unqualified Offerings took on the thesis that the United States has become "the designated driver of the planet." (UO averred that designated drivers encourage those with them to act irresponsibly. In this case, "those with them" = "the rest of the Earth.") Peter writes:

This is in regard to your suggestion that the the USA is the "designated driver" of the Western world, and that the other nations would quit being "shitfaced and obnoxious" if we quit enabling them by acting in this capacity.

Necessary editorial interpolation: It was actually others who created the "designated driver metaphor." They are credited in the original Offering. UO simply took it in a direction the originators would no doubt abhor. It should be noted that Peter's objection is to UO's extension specifically.

Also: there were shitfaced and obnoxious people before there were designated drivers, and if designated drivers disappeared tomorrow, there would be shitfaced and obnoxious people on Tuesday. But in the absence of US "care," there would be a natural pressure on other countries to act more responsibly than they sometimes do. There would still be shitfaced and obnoxious countries to be sure, but over time, fewer. Peter again:

One problem I have with this metaphor is that there is a large element of public good in keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of megalomaniacs and in "draining the swamp" in which the international terrorists breed, especially for nations that are too small to make a large contribution to the effort or to be likely to be the principal target. This public good is expensive to produce both in terms of the cost of fielding a strong military and in making oneself a higher profile target (France seems to be trying very hard to weasel its way to the bottom of Al Qaida's list of targets). In contrast, being sober enough to drive home is mostly a private good, at least for the people who are in a position to negotiate about who will be the designated driver (a drunk driver is more likely to kill himself or a random stranger than he is any of his friends). A ride home is also a private good because the driver can threaten to give rides to some people but not others.

In contrast, it is hard to drain the swamp that breeds Australia-hating Al Qaida terrorists without also draining the swamp that breeds Al Qaida terrorists who hate France.

A second problem with this metaphor is that the Western nations are not equally situated. France's contribution to an international swamp-draining coalition is unlikely to make the difference between success and failure. Furthermore, the largest and most successful countries are the most conspicuous targets. In terms of the drinking metaphor, the USA is the only person at the bar who can afford to own a car all by himself, and he is also the person who lives the farthest away, and who would thus be the most put out by having to walk home. Rather than blaming the USA for being a stupid negotiator or a psychologically naive enabler, I suggest that this is simply one of those perverse situations where the person who is physically the strongest is paradoxically the one who is in the weakest bargaining position.

A more helpful description of this problem is that we face an asymmetric multiplayer prisoners' dilemma game. I get the language of the "multiplayer prisoners' dilemma" from a chapter in Richard Dawkins' book, _The Selfish Gene_, but the same basic problem is also described in different language by Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science article, "The Tragedy of the Commons", both of which I highly recommend. Hardin warns in the context of his overgrazing ranchers scenario that "natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial."

The deluxe description of this problem may be found in Mancur Olson's book, _The Logic of Collective Action_. Olson discusses how the ability of a group of people to successfully negotiate to produce a public good depends both on the size of the group (the number of independent players) and on how evenly or unevenly the need for the good is dispersed among the players.

In short, while I see a certain degree of justice in this "designated driver" metaphor, I think you push it too far.

With all due respect to Peter, if there was ever a metaphor that has been pushed too far it's the fantasy that US military intervention somehow constitutes "draining the swamp" in which terror breeds. "Fanning the flames" is at least as plausible a figuration. As for the French government "weasel(ling) it's way to the bottom of Al Qaeda's target list," how does this not constitute defending the security of French citizens, which is theoretically the French government's top job? (The security of American, Australian, British and Israeli citizens, for example, coming further down France's list.)

In an e-mail titled, "I'm sleepless and I need a shot of NyQuil," Chris McHale writes:

Oh Lord, please stop the neocons relentless rant about the inevitably of war. Blahdeblahdeblahdeblah. Want a first class migraine? Let your ear wander to WABC Talk Radio, NYC, where, between an onslaught of depressing ads for cancer treatments and debt consolidation, you can treat yourself to 20 hours every day of fact contorting blather about liberals and borders and culture and evil ahabs armed to the teeth with WMD's ready to unleash hell on our very way of life.

The other 4 hours is devoted to alien abductions.

That's right, loyal reader. Unqualified Offerings got linked by Antiwar.com again. (For you traffic gollums, a front-page Antiwar.com link is worth about a thousand extra visits the first day, then dribs and drabs once you get moved to the Viewpoints page.)

Reader Herman Yam has been wondering which dystopian comic book future we're heading for. He offers two candidates, APPLESEED and GIVE ME LIBERTY. He also writes

I see that you sourced MERIP in your recent post on the NOI five percenters. Not that I can suggest another source, but I am rather mistrustful of them, as I am when I see the former war-blog folk sourcing MEMRI or whatever Martin Kramer's shop (Washington Center for Middle East Policy?) is. It's the same "he makes a good point, but look who he backs it up with" feeling I get whenever Aziz Poonawalla writes one of his epics and then uses Counterpunch as a reference. Or the truly bizarro incident a month ago when Eric Alterman actually linked to a John Birch related site. That reminds me to go heckle him about that. I'll give you credit for noting that the denial was a stretch and that MERIP was being sympathetic to the 5%ers. It's just the crabby conservative in me wanting them to get slapped around I guess.

My other objection was that the article sounded like another academic trying to show that he knew hip hop was serious n' y'all don't get it. I'm just tired of hearing how important any genre is because of what it generally means in aggregate. Hip-hop is not great because of what it is trying to express; individual works of it are great only if they express themselves well. I love anime and its good forms reflect all kinds of pathologies in Japanese culture. I will not say it is a vital art form (too much of it is dreck) nor will I say that Americans should immerse themselves to better "help" the Japanese with some problem, because the artistic expression of it is but a stylized snapshot.

Herman happily writes UO's apologia for it, which is an awfully nice thing for a reader to do. It also asked Mrs. Offering, who did graduate work in Middle Eastern Affairs at GWU, if she had heard about the place. She recalled it as generally pro-Arab but not insane. Plus, UO performed it's standard test for pro-Arab/Palestinian/Islam/whatever websites - plug "Jews" into the site search engine and see if anything icky comes back.

Mailbag - Unqualified Offerings has been spending the holiday weekend hanging out with the family, and really learning Movable Type. It turns out that amazing prodigies of presentation are possible once you really know the system, none of which will be evident in the appearance of this weblog. (UO is saving the fancy stuff for its gaming-related sites.)

Still, this website has three words for other MT-using bloggers: the MTInclude tag. It is your friend, particularly those of you who don't have your sidebars on your archive pages.

Anyway, let's take advantage of the news lull to get caught up on the (non-chili-related) mail.

Kevin Baker responded to this site's Offering on getting out of jury duty as follows:

Ask the judge if you can advise the other jury members on the concept of jury nullification.

That'd do it. Improbably, Maryland has one of the more explicit recognitions of the right of jury nullification - or did last time Unqualified Offerings checked. (In Britain, they've pretty much decided on nullifying the juries instead.)

Mr. Aziz Poonawalla of Unmedia e-mailed Max Sawicky and me about NoWarblog:

I do have a request. The strongest pro-war argument from the Administration is this scenario:

"Saddam evades inspectors, still manages to develop one nuke, seals it into an underwater bubbble on an innocous and untraceable cargo freighter flying some private merchant flag from the S Pacific, then sends the ship one mile off LA port and detonates."

The strongest pro-war argument from warbloggers/neocons is that a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia and destroy Islamic fundamentalism.

Can you make responding to these talking points a priority? because they are the cornerstones of the pro war argument, and if you can focus your fire on them I think the end result would be enormously more likely to have influence on the public sphere.

And here Unqualified Offerings thought the strongest argument was If we don't conquer Iraq, the hawks will run McCain against us in the primaries and hello one-term presidency. But UO supposes the Administration hasn't come right out and said that.

Briefly, there is a small but finite risk that Saddam would try to smuggle a single, untested nuclear weapon into the United States and set it off without warning. That risk is somewhat higher as long as the US and Britain continue what Jim of Objectionable Content has documented is an 11-year undeclared war for "regime change." That's a big reason that Unqualified Offerings has argued against our formal policy of bearbaiting trapped foreign leaders. But that's a small risk. You see people saying that if there's any chance whatsoever that Saddam would do this, we have to overthrow him. These people are on drugs. Because bigger nuke and germ risks get worse with the overthrow scenario. Those risks are: Nuclear Pakistan falls, or freelancing harabists in its military slip one of its bombs to a group like Al Qaeda; Al Qaeda picks up surplus Soviet nukes; the Chinese decide that the grand encirclement is proceeding too far, so they see to it that Al Qaeda gets the bomb; or, in the immediate postwar chaos of this much-desired conquest of Iraq, diehard elements of Saddam's armed forces slip some bioweapons into hostile hands.

Of these dire possibilities, only the Chinese angle seems less likely than a Saddam Bomb attack now, and all of them get worse in the aftermath of an Iraq conquest.

Without formally getting to it, this has partly constituted a response to the second argument Aziz has seen, that "a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia nd destroy Islamic fundamentalism."

Riiight. From the perspective of the Arab world, they've been enduring a half century of smack downs. It doesn't seem to have improved their attitudes. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" makes a cute cubicle poster, but not an effective foreign policy.

There are two big problems with the "humiliation" thesis, and when Unqualified Offerings says two, it means a million, but let's keep it short. First, it assumes that the target demographic for Islamic Fundamentalism would ascribe our victory in Iraq to our democracy and secularism. There's no particular reason to believe that's how they would read the outcome, even if that's how the neos read it. (Our neos, I mean.) Nor need they believe that Iraq lost because of its excessive devotion to Islamist revolution or its lack of democracy. Your young harabist wannabe is as likely to say, "Iraq fell because

a) it was insufficiently devoted to the faith;
b) Saddam was too nice - he had nasty germs and gases that he could have used against the West but didn't until it was too late;
c) the US and Britain once again successfully employed "divide and conquer" techniques, proving more than ever the need for a unified, militant Ummah.

We need to smack down one of their lackey regimes - Pakistan? Jordan? Qatar? - to provide the impetus for Islamist reform elsewhere. And more than ever we need to demonstrate that the Jew-Crusaders are vincible by carrying out a spectacular attack on their territory, is a plausible response from the target audience.

Now that Unqualified Offerings thinks about it for a minute, the notion that "a large Arab country like Iraq needs to be smacked down to provide impetus for democratic reform in all of Arabia nd destroy Islamic fundamentalism" just seems too stupid for words. We might define "too stupid for words" as the certainty that one's opponents will see the same virtues in your actions that you do.

Bill Dowling notes this appealing lesson in political economy he found on...ESPN.com:

Klingons to Make Soft-Money Donations to Appropriations Committee Chairmen: Last week, Boeing disclosed that for three years it has been test-flying a strange-looking stealth-fighter prototype called the Bird of Prey. Bird of
Prey -- that's what Klingon battle cruisers are called! Boeing has been cooperating with the Klingons? Next the Klingons will want to bill their cost-overruns to the United States defense budget.

Speaking of the defense budget, Boeing also said that it had funded the Bird of Prey program privately, at a cost of $67 million, so that any technology developed would be proprietary. Meanwhile the F22 fighter development program for the Air Force, run by Lockheed Martin, has burned through $26 billion of the taxpayers' money over a decade and is yet to field operational aircraft Number One. So when a contractor has to spend its own money, it can engineer, build and fly a radi cal new design for $67 million. When the taxpayer is footing the bill on a cost-plus basis, it takes 10 years and $26 billion to accomplish nothing but generating demands for more money. TMQ wonders if Klingon battle cruisers are developed on a cost-plus basis.

That's from the November 5th Tuesday Morning Quarterback by Greg Easterbrook. Yes, November 5th. Once again, Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that the prefix "Insta-" appears nowhere in this site's name, description or terms of use. It wouldn't even if Unqualified Offerings had terms of use.

Simon Scott e-mailed an early response to the Iraqi "parliament's" "rejection" of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. It's interesting to see how well Simon's analysis held up. Some people did much worse, assuming that the "parliament's" "rejection" meant Saddam's rejection, meant immediate war, meant Saddam was irrational, etc. Simon said:

Jim: Saddam is going to probe away at the coalition that has formed around the UN resolution. The resolution itself is ambiguous enough to allow the US to attack at any time but Saddam wants to find out if Russia and France can be prized out of the coalition again. Saddam wants some political cover for going back to the UN to see if any of the resolution is negotiable. Saddam will probably want 'clarification' on the basis that he needs to convince his parliament to come round to allowing inspectors in. Saddam can ask for terms to be further defined with a straight face with 100 per cent of his 'mp's' standing behind him.

The vote is also aimed at Blix. Saddam is sending a signal via the proxy of his parliament that inspections are likely to be difficult given the legitimate opposition amongst his people. It's saying to Blix, 'look mate you're a creature of the UN you know how these things can get difficult once things get put to a vote don't expect a quick report when you get here people have legitimate concerns.' Blix is the focus of the next 60 days in this saga. Blix is the target. Mind you mate who knows maybe Saddam will reject the resolution. Maybe intel have got the timing question wrong and Saddam has a credible WMD and wants the same respect as North Korea.

BTW they like their drapes and curtains in Iraq or what? Every government office has tons of drapes yuk.

Of course, absence of drapes would not mean that drapes were absent. Or whatever.

Treasure Planet II - Okay, Reader/Gaming Buddy Mike Jacobs asks what was so great about this movie. Here's a quick, personal view:

First off: There's no getting around the visuals - they're spectacular. But
what makes it truly special is:

The story is damn solid. That Robert Louis Stevenson guy sure could write 'em.
The movie is able to swoop from cataclysmic scale to the intimate scale very fluidly.
It has an intimate scale at all: the characters matter.
The animation on the intimate scale - frex, Young Jim Hawkins' mother's face when tucking him in - is splendid.
Emma Thompson just kills as the voice of the captain.
Everyone gets their measure of dignity, even David Hyde-Pierce's dogfaced astronomer.
There really is a controlling esthetic to it - it's surprisingly close to a coherent view of a transhuman far-future where a particular kind of style is valued over brute efficiency.
That spaceport. Wow.
God it's pretty. But I said that, didn't I?