Housekeeping II, Now with MORE Technology or, What's a Semi-Comics Blogger to Do?
More changes so that you, the reader, get no more Jim Henley than you need. I already pointed out the new RSS feeds for Only Comics (A Fanboy's Notes) and No Comics (Fanboy-Free). I've also made some changes for those of you who, like me, don't use newsreaders.
Everything continues to be posted to one blog, Unqualified Offerings. But you can now choose the view.
The Main Index - this page. All items appear here - politics, comics, culture, fitness, dear diary, gossip, whatever pops into my prematurely (so I insist) grey head to publish. Starting this week, Fanboy's Notes and Fitness items will be published using MovableType's Extended Entry function. If the post is of any length whatsoever, most of it will be hidden on the main page. If you click "MORE" you get the whole thing on the archive page. The index page is for readers who want at least the option to read everything. It's easier to scroll past the comics and weight loss items going forward, but there's enough there that, if it grabs you, you won't miss it.
A Fanboy's Notes index page - The new structure of the main page is a sop to the site's non-comics-oriented legacy readership. This page is for comics/geek material readers who don't want to wade through a lot of political complaints. It's the last 15 Fanboy's Notes items displayed in their entirety.
Fanboy-Free index page - If it galls you to even have to see the beginning of a comics post, this view will preserve you from that tribulation. Note that some items will be coded as both "Fanboy's Notes" and "Main" - I think of them as "Foods Touch items" - and they will appear here.
Fair and Balanced Housekeeping! - Time once again to update the Unqualified Offerings blogroll. October's New Crew has been scattered to the appropriate sections of the permanent blogroll, and a dozen new links added.
Near and dear to my heart are the libertarians. Overlawyered is Walter Olsen's great chronicle of absurdity and excess in the legal system; HotLiberty dares to ask the question, "Can a young CATO refugee find happiness and sanity the country's flaccid appendage, Florida?" Pre-CATO refugee Brooke Oberwetter provides commentary with an emphasis on local DC issues for OberNews.
Our liberals this month are Pandagon and Oliver Willis. Both have achieved an eminence beyond my ability to further burnish - file these links under Long Overdue.
File under A Style All Their Own both Chrissy Rockwell of A Fine Idea at the Time and Anton Sherwood of the decidedly old-school . . . muttered the ogre. Defense Tech is Noah Shachtman's chronicle of national security news.
The Intermittent, Trickle of Consciousness and Immediacy are comics&culture blogs. Intermittent is quite new, while Immediacy claims archive as far back as July 1990. (B-but! Mickey Kaus invented blogging in 1999!)
Our sole conservative hawk addition is Outside the Beltway. I keep looking.
Stupid Flies! The Continuing Series - From MSNBC this morning:
Clearly our enemies need to read Andrew Sullivan more. Or less. I can't say, really.Nov. 8 — The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia closed all its missions on Saturday - a working day in the gulf - after what the United States said was credible information terrorists were about to carry out attacks. Meantime, U.S. officials, citing new intelligence indicating a threat similar to the one that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told NBC News that al-Qaida terrorists could soon use cargo planes to strike targets in the United States.
Wait Just a Minute There - The buzz today is that "HE DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH THAT WOMAN AFTER ALL!" because, at least in New Hampshire, Oral sex is not adultery.
writes Eugene Volokh about a New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling. But hang on. Bill Clinton didn't say "I did not have adultery with that woman, Ms. Lewinski." (Nor did he say, and anyway, we were in New Hampshire, so never mind. But that's neither here nor there.) He said s-e-x. And the court refers to "non-coital" acts as sex acts. Now Clinton apparently also said that oral sex wasn't cheating. Here the New Hampshire Court seems to back him up. As to what the Court's wife might think, the Volokh Conspiracy and Kevin Drum are silent.The brief summaries I've heard describe the court as ruling that homosexual sex isn't adultery, but that's only half the story: The court specifically said that "Homosexuals and heterosexuals engaging in the same acts are treated the same because our interpretation of the term 'adultery' excludes all non-coital sex acts, whether between persons of the same or opposite gender."
(Butt sex doesn't count either! Whee! Did the Free State Project people sense that this ruling was coming? Is this going to mean more libertarians moving, or more libertarian spouses forbidding them to move?)
Take One - Agitator Man Group member Nick Weininger offers "The Case for Cutting and Running" today. Nick is a good writer, but I'd like to see his case strengthened some.
First, what does "cutting and running" mean in this context?
Okay, get Saddam and get out. I instinctively support this policy over either "Get out regardless" or "Build a beacon of democracy, or what passes for it, in the middle east." Simply put, I feel guilty about leaving Saddam out there with a good chance to regain his job and visit retribution on all those Iraqis who have tipped their anti-Saddam hand since April. I think of what could happen to Salam, or Riverbend, or the Salams and Riverbends I'm not even aware of, and I quail.by which I mean: staying just long enough to finally find and kill Saddam, then ending the "nation-building" effort in Iraq, drawing down forces there to much lower levels, and redirecting overall military strategy back to fighting al-Qaeda-- is the best of the (admittedly awful) options. It would save us loads of blood and treasure, get us out of a corrupt, doomed business, and set us on the road back to non-interventionism, a road we've got to get back on for the long term anyway.
This position is not without its dangers, though, particularly if you're paranoid enough. (If the administration wants to stay in Iraq, but has declared that it will leave once it captures Saddam, it has a disincentive to capture Saddam.) But it beats the Democratic and Republican versions of "Do the job right," which assumes the job can be done. (A bad assumption.)
Like I said, I've hardly begun to formulate my own case for why and how. So it's a bit cheeky of me to tear into Nick's, but it's a sympathetic tearing into! He frames his case as a rebuttal to the three most common arguments for "staying the course."
This is by far his worst argument. Ironically, "nations owe nothing to nations" is akin to the "Samizdatist case" for the war - that tyrannical nations do not merit the protections of sovereignty inherent in the Westphalian nation-state system and free(ish) nations may do with them as they will. I think they're wrong too. Nation-states are facts - social facts, but facts all the same. If you toss out the concept of mutual obligations among nations, I think you end up with far more mayhem among nations, which would be very bad for individuals. We libertarians are antiwar because we expect that war will, in general, abridge liberty, and fewer obligations between nations means more war.1. We owe it to the Iraqis to reconstruct their country, since we bombed and invaded them in the first place. For one thing, the whole idea of national obligations reeks of collectivism. Individuals owe things to other individuals; nations owe nothing to nations. In particular, those of us who opposed the war from the beginning don't owe it to anyone to be taxed to pay for the consequences of others' folly.
But let's say nations don't owe other nations anything. Can nations owe individuals? Be very careful about saying no. It's hard to square "no" with the Bill of Rights, substantive due process and a whole bunch of other things on which we rightly insist.
We very much want to say a government has obligations to its own citizens. So the remaining question is, can a government have obligations to the citizens of other nations? Does Mexico have a negative obligation to not bomb Texas? I'd say so. If Mexico does bomb Texas, does it have a positive obligation to make good on that harm? I find it hard to say that the United States government, which has disarranged the lives of individual Iraqis in a thousand ways, some good, some bad, has no obligation to them. The question of what that obligation is, how it may be prudently and well-discharged, and what concerns may trump it are open, and beyond the scope of this post. But they are real enough, however hazy in outline.
This argument is getting there. But here is where there is a very limited sense in which "flypaper theory" is true. Not the mad version that all the world's terrorists will obligingly flock to Iraq and busy themselves with attacking our troops. But a weaker version in which the ones who do flock to Iraq have to deal with our forces. The concern over leaving a "terrorist haven" is that it will become a place from which terrorists can plan strikes on US targets here and abroad, and that an unfriendly Iraqi government will have more incentive than ever to connive at that.2. If we pull out of Iraq, it will become a haven for terrorists. Maybe so. But what the heck is it now, then? Given the ease with which various insurgent fighters are apparently able to move around, it's hard to see what good the occupation is doing on that score.
To be fair, Nick favors the Afghanistan model - keeping special forces in Iraq to root out al Qaeda activity - but I wouldn't call this non-intervention. We are talking highly mobile strike teams able to kick ass and take names throughout the country. Kicking ass and taking names breeds humiliation and humiliation, not poverty, breeds terrorism. Kicking ass and taking names means the US reserves major extraterritorial privileges in "post-occupation" Iraq - quite enough to inflame Iraqi-nationalist, Arab-nationalist and muslim sentiment.
I favor "cutting and running" because then the foreign jihadis get all the native resentment - we're no longer around to inspire it. An Iraqi goverment may well do a better job of clearing out the Islamist Foreign Legion than we can.
I largely agree with Nick's section 3. A minor irony of hawkish rhetoric is the Bin Laden himself says Beirut and Somalia showed we're weak weak weak argument - ironic because Bin Laden and his sympathizers say lots of things, such as how they hated the Iraqi sanctions regime, our policy toward the Palestinians and our military presence in Saudi Arabia. Somehow this one thing (about American resolve) that Bin Laden says out of all of them is the one we're supposed to credit. And it just happens to be the one that points toward more war rather than less. How 'bout that.3. Pulling out of Iraq will embolden our enemies by demonstrating to them our lack of resolve. This is a very good argument for hunting down and killing Saddam Hussein. It's an even better argument for hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar (remember them?) It's not a good argument for staying on in an adventure of the sort that tends to make us enemies in the first place, and draws off resources from the aforementioned hunting down and killing.
Still "a right-wing peacenik knows that there's something to the problem of 'rewarding terrorism' by pulling out after, and visibly in response to, attacks," wrote, um, me, about two weeks after this blog began. (I wrote about the problem most directly last fall.)
But the hawks push the insane version of the insight. We should never have pulled out of Beirut or Mogadishu! Oh, what should we have done instead? Stayed the course! And? And prevailed! Over whom, exactly? Our enemies! Mohammad Farah Aideed and Hezbollah and, um, whoever else was in Beirut back then. There were others, I think. And how would we have done this? More troops! More bombs! More resolve! And this would have solved things how? We would not accept failure!
Oh.
And as Nick, to his credit, points out, "all options suck right now." Cut and run sucks less, but there's lots more to say about why and how than I've managed to say so far.
Unqualified Offerings Looks on the Bright Side - So there won't be any Turkish troops either. (To go with the Indian, Bengladeshi and Pakistani troops that will not be patrolling Iraq.) Okay, I told you (and you in particular) that there was no bonanza of foreign deployments awaiting a UN resolution. But that's not the point. The point is, it's a good sign that there won't be any Turkish troops. Because the Iraqis didn't want any and the US actually heeded them. This is not only far better conduct than I feared, it's smarter than I could have hoped. We are, in terms of force structure, screwed. But less so than we would have been otherwise, because the extra division of Turkish troops would have brought more than a division's worth of trouble with it.
Not at All - Sean Collins recommends the latest from Christopher Hitchens and, in a shot across the Unqualified Bow, wonders (rhetorically?) if I consider Hitchens "one of those national greatness types" like the odious (to me, anyway) David Brooks.
No, I don't. (I know it's no fun to burn down a perfectly good straw man just because it got dressed in your clothes and you don't relish the confusion, but sometimes I'm no fun.) I think Hitchens' essay is full of bluster and silliness, and consider his counsel on this matter unwise. But what separates Hitchens from Brooks is that Hitchens is not writing to excuse and even encourage US human rights abuses. You find no hint in his article of apologia or urging for "brutal measures" or "atrocities" that will, from the compost of the passive voice, "inevitably" bloom. Hitchens has as long a record of excoriating American "brutal measures" as Brooks does of excusing them.
I blame Hitchens for naivete, and I take naivete very seriously. Because Brooks is right that what Hitchens wants entails what Brooks condones and implicitly desires - our "brutal measures" and "atrocities." But Hitchens is a work in progress and he may yet get it right.
The Bad Lieutenant - Tacitus has a starkly personal memoir of his time in the army, trying to cope with command, clinical depression and a culture unsympathetic to the idea of clinical depression at the same time. Superbly written. He imagines, wrongly, that it somehow invalidates the "chickenhawk" critique of certain war enthusiasts who are not him nor could be if they tried. But that's a minor matter. The essay is not to be missed.
Quickie Comics Blogging - Stuff I bought and didn't buy this week . . .
Palomar just wasn't in the budget this week. I'd crave it even without Alan David Doane's recommendation, though, and I did at least hold a copy in my hand. Gorgeous package.
Alias 28 - If Brian Michael Bendis knew how to end a story he would rule the world. Actually the series ends effectively. The Deus Ex Marvel Girl that concludes the Killgrave arc, less so.
Empire 4 - I enjoy this and can't wait until the protagonists all die horribly. This issue makes a start.
Supreme Power 4 - in which it develops that artist Gary Frank is not so good at fight scenes. Once upon a time this would have made it impossible for one to make a living drawing superhero comics. Times have changed. I don't really like the new Nighthawk costume. All in all, this issue is off the mark set by the first three.
1602 3 - borrowed. Ironically given my decision to drop the series, I found the third issue not so dire as the previous two.
Arrowsmith 4 - Carlos Pacheco. He's good. The story continues to be inventive in a dozen little ways. The art I could look at all day. The hand of the author weighs just a little heavier this issue on the gallant-hopes-versus-horrid-experience irony, Great War species. But a book I'll continue to look forward to.
Formerly Known as the Justice League - The Mary Marvel bits are funny. But with the exception of the second issue, this just isn't as much fun as it was the first time around. Boy, that was fun though.
New X-men: Assault on Weapon_Plus TPB - Dang, something big is in the offing, that's for sure! I hope Xorn can help Jean and Hank heal Emma Frost! He's probably my favorite character of the series! Why are you looking at me funny!?
Looking Backward - Of the various Democratic complaints about the "stolen election of 2000," the one I hands down found hardest to credit was the baseless claim that all those people in Palm Beach County couldn't possibly have meant to vote for Pat Buchanan. The argument rested on sloppy generalization - "Palm Beach County is home to many Jewish retirees, therefore all residents of Palm Beach County must be Jewish retirees, and Pat Buchanan is the reincarnation of Goebbels himself, therefore he couldn't have gotten any votes." As it happens, I've been to Palm Beach County, and it's like any place else in Florida - west of US1 and East of the Tamiami Trail and you're in cracker country.
Regardless. Tonight I'm reading a Hot Liberty report on Dick Armey's book tour stop in Palm Beach County, and come across this:
The connection is left as an exercise for the reader.2. Palm Beach Republicans are an ugly bunch. I mean this mostly looks-wise, but a few questions were surprisingly xenophobic, bordering on the Buchananesque. Really, with all that is happening right now, why should half of the questions be about immigration?
(Jim's official position on Florida 2000 archived here.)
I Love the Nightlife - Ban the Ban is a grassroots DC group fighting a proposed ordinance that would ban smoking in all DC restaurants and bars, regardless of the wishes of their owners and patrons. It's pretty obvious that anyone who wants to open a nonsmoking bar, club or restaurant may do so. This is about force.
By the way, this is not an "astroturf" organization. It's run by actual DC residents, mostly libertarian, whom I've met. (Yes, the "hilariously in-group sourcing" crowd!)
UPDATE: Joanne McNeil writes to inform me:
Noted, but if they haven't slept on Gene Healy's couch, they don't matter.Thanks for the link! But despite the blog line up, we aren't "mostly
libertarian." Nearly half of the members of Ban the Ban are registered Green.
Word! - One of my poet pals sent around this passage from "The Excellency of the English Tongue," by Sir Richard Carew, who died November 6, 1620:
What can one add to that but, Fuckiin' A!Againe, for expressing our passions, our interiections are very apt and forcible: as findeinge ourselues some-what agreeued, wee cry Ah ; yf more deeply, Oh ; when we pittie, alas; when wee bemone, Alacke; neither of them soe effeminate as the Italyane Deh or the French hélas. In detestation wee saye Phy, as if there withall wee should spitt ; in attention, Haa ; i[n] calling, whowp ; in hallow-inge, wahahowe: all which (in my eare) seeme to be deriued from the very natures of those seuerall affections.
Actually, It's a Perfectly Good Reason - As you know, a characteristic, quadrennial ritual of our republic is upon us: breathless speculation, in the face of logic and what is now a lengthy history, that one of the major political parties is heading for a brokered convention. Kevin Drum, who has links to the latest incarnation of the popular (among reporters) delusion, writes
Hey, lazy is effort enough when the answer is within reach! We don't just have a historical record extending back half a century. We have our knowledge of the causes of that history. Long primary campaigns and divided conventions are not in the perceived interest of the eventual nominee. They lead to hurt feelings among activists and late starts on the general campaign. They delay the all-important tacking to the center. I believe they have financial implications too - money spent early (fighting a difficult primary campaign) is money that can't be spent late.I've been discounting this possibility myself, but mostly based on the lazy reasoning that it hasn't happened for 50 years, so it's probably not going to happen this year either.
So, bad for the winner, no matter who the winner is. That means that it's bad for the apparat too. The apparat wants to win for all kinds of reasons - they believe in their party's ideology, to the extent that it has one; they stand to incur a great deal of blame for any loss (like, of, allowing a brokered convention situation to develop); and they got their positions because they are competitive people.
The above also makes a brokered convention bad for the losers. Because the holdouts can expect the faithful to glare accusingly at them too, when it all goes south because of the problems adduced two paragraphs ago. The holdouts also believe in their party's ideology. You may think the competitiveness factor cuts in the opposite direction for them as for the apparat, but you'd be wrong. The losers have a future, or would like to. They might see themselves in the winner's cabinet or they might see themselves mounting the winner's podium four years hence - either way, they have an incentive not to drag out what the smart money begins to insist is a fruitless campaign.
"Brokering" never went away exactly. It's just as front-loaded as the primary schedule. You still concede defeat and release your delegates, usually with an endorsement of Some Other Guy. But you sure as hell don't wait until convention week to do it. That would earn you nothing but trouble, and that won't change, even with increased granularity in primary delegate-awarding.
Ooh, Look! Invisible Hand! - Useful article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today, based on a new Bureau of Labor Statistics survey:
Footloose readers may wish to check the survey itself to find the income-maximizing locale for their vocation. (Link via Outside the Beltway.)The comparisons -- available in the federal government's latest annual compensation survey -- seem to defy logic. But experts say that's because people overestimate the role that local cost of living factors play in determining wages.
The fact is, they say, supply and demand in a particular profession and the strength of labor unions in a city weigh just as heavily in what people are paid.
And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows - "In an interview with 13 News Wednesday night at a Grand Valley State speaking engagement, Nugent put his odds of running for Governor at 50/50." So says the website of WZZM 13.
Mmory Lane - Two years ago in Unqualified Offerings:
From "Wilderness of Mirrors."Among the reasons we don't know more, one stands out: The perpetrators don't want us to know more. bin Laden himself denied any role initially, though his subsequent public statements amount to a tacit admission of guilt. The National Greatness types insist that Iraq must be behind the attacks because, because - well, they hate us! The Hashemite Restoration crowd (Unqualified Offerings is in the junior auxiliary) think that prominent Saudis are at the very least accessories after the fact. Paranoid ravings on this very website imply that bin Laden might be anything up to and including a secret operative of the Saudi government. And Mustafa "Blood Libel" Tlass maintains it must be the Israelis because everyone Mustafa Tlass knows is a dipshit and complicated stuff is beyond them.
One year ago in Unqualified Offerings:
From "One Man, One Vote, One Last Time?"In down moods, I wonder if we've already seen our last "free and fair elections." The combination of zeal and suspicion you can see today on partisan websites reeks of decadence - reeks, really, of the Imperial. And there's that word again.
Worthy Cause - Teresa Nielsen Hayden fried her hard drive. She's put up a tip jar for those interested in helping to defray the data recovery costs. In return you get a fascinating Way We Live Now meditation on how it feels to lose your electronic history, followed by an informative comment thread about preventing and repairing such disasters. Also, the following music jokes, which Teresa herself told me this very weekend. (For the full story on that, see Glen Engel-Cox and Chad Orzel.)
Teresa has a lot more good jokes like that on her hard drive, and she'll share them with you if only.Q: What's the rarest sentence in the english language?
A: Isn't that the banjo player's Porsche?Q: What do you say to a banjo player in a three-piece suit?
A: Will the defendent please rise?Q: What does it mean when a drummer drools out of both sides of his mouth?
A: The stage is level.Three bassists walk past a bar.
It could happen.
Comics Mailbag - Late last month, I suggested that the problem of repetitive material when serial stories are collected into paperback could be solved by a trick the publishing industry calls "editing." Jesse Walker wrote in to say that
Jean Lansford writes in to correct my memory about eerie precursors of the War on Terror in bronze-age Marvel Comics. Did the Mandrill drop several floors of the WTC on the crowd in a mid-seventies issue of Daredevil? Not quite:If you look at the old Pogo collections, you'll see that Walt Kelly did exactly that. Lose a panel here, add one there, and presto -- a series of strips becomes a novel.
Jean, you can save yourself the trouble. I am absolutely convinced you are right, now that you remind me.I'm fairly certain it was the radio tower atop the Empire State Building. Confirmation will have to wait until after this cold departs. I just don't have the energy to go through my unmarked comic boxes right now.
Time to Sing Kumbayah - Donald Luskin and Atrios have made up. This is genuinely good news, though it may have cost me, personally, 75 bucks. Not that I am bitter.
(Okay: I was in consultation with the editor of an online publication about an article. Heaven knows if he'll still want one, and his e-mail box is full anyway.)
Terrorism and Tyranny - Via Arthur, the transcript of James Bovard's Booknotes appearance.
It's the System - The hell of it is, it is the system. You know all the controversies you read about on other blogs, like who misquoted whom, and how so-and-so is or isn't the menace/poltroon his/my enemies say he is? I read those and generally find that the debunkers have a good case. The quote was sliced crooked or interpreted tendentiously. So-and-so is not so bad as his critics say. It's all been about psyching up the team before the big game. This holds regardless of party for most cases.
The problem is that structurally we've gone substantially wrong. Arthur Silber makes this point in regard to the recent CPI/Iraqi contracting brouhaha.
By the way, Arthur and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, two men who have together substantially raised my previously low regard for Objectivists, have joined the Liberty and Power group blog.
Is There an Echo in Here? - John Hawkins of Right Wing News continues his impressive series of interviews. This week, it's crashing bore Michael Medved. Blahblahblah. "Losertarians." Blahblahblah.
Don't miss it.
Piling On - Slacktivist on Brooks:
Contains links to revealing interviews with Israeli Army officers suffering the burden of their own Brookses.This is moral cowardice masquerading as bravado. Brooks, while attempting unconvincingly to adopt an air of macho, "hard-headed realism," is clearly terrified and desperate. He is so wide-eyed with terror that he has soiled himself -- ethically if not literally.
Some Sons of Bitches Are More Equal Than Others and David Brooks wants us to be the equalest sons-of-bitches ever. His New York Times column today contains a lot of standard-issue propaganda maneuvers - invoke the atrocities of the enemy to get an emotional reaction, intone solemnly that we must "stay the course" and so on. Ah, but what course? The one that takes us from here
to here:Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein's government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children
Atrocities like beheading a woman in front of her children and mother-in-law to send a message to all our real and potential opponents? Of course not. We are not low-tech like that. And we never, never discuss specifics in advance. We will keep the talk at the abstract level of "atrocities" and "brutal measures." When the specifics occur, we'll file them under media bias.It's not that we can't accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.
Let me be perfectly clear: We are not as bad as Saddam Hussein. But we could be if we work at it. The David Brookses of the world want us to work at it. All the while they will insist that, somehow, no matter what "brutal measures" we have to adopt we will ourselves remain irreproachable. Anything else would be "moral equivalence," and we can't have that because we decide.
Here is the thing you must understand about David Brooks and Max Boot and William Kristol and the whole "national greatness" gang. The "brutal measures" are not regrettable means to a noble end. They are a noble end. The national greatness types have been bemoaning America's supposed softness and urging it to toughen up since the mid-1990s. The war on terror has simply been their opportunity to sell a preexisting product. That product is, chiefly, your sons and daughters, brothers, sisters and schoolmates shooting foreigners. Some of the foreigners shot may indeed be our enemies. Others may be the sons and daughters, brothers, sisters or schoolmates or our enemies. Or at least standing somewhere in the vicinity of where our enemies are or have been or may think about being. No matter. The real enemy is "decadence," which is their word for liberty.
We are not as bad as Saddam Hussein. But should we become so, David Brooks will be there to approve our conduct and to damn its critics. And David Brooks is doing his bit to move us as far Saddamward as possible. He'd have made a fine Ba'athist, at least in the high life days.
Success Has a Thousand Fathers but according to Alan Framm of Associated Press, "only a handful of senators appeared" for the voice vote on the $87B Iraq-Afghanistan funding bill.
The Modulator places the exact count of Senators on the floor for the voice vote at 5, four Republicans plus Byrd. Not sure where he gets the number but it's consistent with Framm's "handful."[West Virginia Senator Robert] Byrd was the only one to say "Nay."
Is this any way to run a railroadempirelight unto the nations of the world?
Foods Touch Item - My God. We're almost up to enough libertarians who want to write about comics to start a group blog. Link via Franklin Harris, who would of course be our third.
I was thinking of writing something about the current Fantastic Four storyline myself, given how it plays with the problems of benevolent hegemony. It's a critique of neo-imperialism and of the Ellis/Millar Authority at the same time. ("IT'S WIDESCREEN, AUTHORITATIVE." FF#60.)
Reading Around the Comics Blogosphere - In less than a month, the comics blogosphere has exploded. It is now officially bigger than I can keep up with. It reminds me of the sudden growth of the political blogosphere just about two years ago. Since I'm a fitful comics blogger at best, I expect to become even more peripheral to the action than I have been, and I want to apologize to all the people I miss linking. Anyway, stuff . . .
Dirk Deppey and retailer Brian Hibbs had an important colloquy about the industry and what it can and can't hope for from the bookstore market. Hibbs' cautions strike me as consistent with what I remember about the retail book market. Dirk makes a good point when he argues that, given the weakness of the default channel, publishers would be crazy not to try to get as much as possible out of the bookstore opportunity, especially those publishers whose material ill fits the Direct Market's prejudices.
Sean Collins weighs in on two controversies that the undersigned Mr. Semi-Comics Blogger has barely followed. He sounds pretty reasonable. I always liked Black Lightning. There's a connection here to Dirk's points about the Direct Market. Not only should there be black superheroes, but they should do well. Black Americans are disproportionately victimized by crime; black kids face a magnified version of the "power anxiety" that afflicts white kids. The success of "black interest" books in the 1990s proved that there is an eager audience of black readers out there. I was out of the hobby during the heyday of Milestone Comics, but I wonder if they didn't make a mistake yoking themselves to DC's distribution operation. Whoever wants to sell black supherero comics will probably need to build his own distribution channel from scratch.
Ultimate Neilalien. Your favorite palindrome returns his nominally Dr. Strange-oriented weblog to its roots with a lengthy report on - Dr. Strange. Specifically his recent appearances in various Marvel titles.
Anthologies Worth Reading. New reviews from Johanna Draper Carlson.
I hardly know what to say. The Comics Burrito reports on a fathers' rights protest in Britain where men are dressing up as superheroes and staging sit-ins in high places. This should provide a pretty good test of that "no such thing as bad publicity" maxim, for comics publishers and fathers' rights groups.
Reading Around - Ginger Stampley needs a job. So does my blogchild, Michael Croft. If you need a technical writer (Ginger) or a QA/CM guy (Michael), they would be solid choices. And they'll relocate for the right offer(s). To the best of my knowledge, you do not have to hire them as a set, but may simply pick the one you like better.
Diana Moon notes some conceptual problems involving the name "Instapundit" and a sudden aversion to "day-to-day events" that don't happen to be Maureen Dowd columns.
A Real Fixer-Upper - Want "constructive suggestions" from a peacenik? Justin Raimondo points to Iraq's 1932 and 1958 constitutions as serviceable founding documents for a new Iraqi state. (Recall that we keep hearing Iraq needs one of those before we can leave.) I've started the 1932 document, "DECLARATION OF THE KINGDOM OF IRAQ," but nothing to report yet.
Speaking of Justin Raimondo, in the marginal notes to the same column he reports that "my forthcoming book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection" is due out this month. It had better have a lot more new information than this Sunday Herald article on alleged Israeli espionage activity in the vicinity of the 9/11 hijackers or I'll consider it a waste of perfectly good pulp. The Herald has some new reporting of a minor sort - they found the witness who phoned in the tip on the famous United Moving van, for instance - but mostly rehashes previously reported tidbits. Those who argue that Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the hijack plot and declined to warn the US (the extent of Justin's argument - he does not claim that "Israel did it") still have some might-be's and no must-have-been. So far I see no reason to change my previously expressed views on the subject. (See also here.)
I can sign off on the quoted passage from Matthew Barganier's latest column without reservation:
More proof of media bias. Hesiod reports that rebels fired on a second Chinook yesterday but missed it. So why isn't the Bush-hating media running front-page stories about that helicopter, and all the helicopters that didn't get shot down yesterday, huh? Huh?Are we going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?
Well, if "problem" means "opposition to imperial lunacy," then I, for one, plan to be part of it. That the hawks want us to ignore the proof while we're drowning in the pudding is understandable. The war was not won by defeating the Iraqi army; if anything, the war has gotten worse since it "ended." Spring's boasts have soured as fall's bodies and bills arrive on American doorsteps. But the hawks need to divorce the war from the occupation in order to save their meaningless victory from its awful consequences. So they call for bipartisanship, they implore us to think of the future, they upbraid the obstructionists, they do everything but explain how today is not the tomorrow we once warned them about.
Don't be fooled. The war debate rages on because Iraq is just the beginning. Enlist in the Bush corps now – even for the noblest of reasons – and, like many reservists, you'll be in for more than you ever imagined.
Atrios takes a break from his busy schedule of slagging Gregg Easterbrook to run an informative letter from author and veteran Christian Bauman. See also his already-famous "Cher item" from last week.
Daniel Drezner says there's less than meets the eye to the recent Center for Public Integrity report on patterns in Iraqi contracting.
NaGNoWriMo - As you may have heard, it's National Novel Writing Month:
I'm going to participate, dammit, with a twist: I'm going to write a graphic novel. The script for one, I mean. I am no artist. I'd love someone to draw the story I have in mind - hell, I'd love someone to publish it and make me piles of money, but first things first. (Just don't tell Dirk Deppey it's about a, well, a, uh, superhero.)The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Here's the bright side for you, loyal readers. Unlike other blog participants, I will not be putting my output online. So you're safe. Bruce Baugh is putting his output online, but he's a professional novelist already. I will post occasional brief progress reports, but that's it.
Anger, Sorrow - The poor bastards were heading off on leave. 16 dead, 20 wounded as of tonight. This was a helicopter crash caused by an exploding projectile, so you can just imagine what "wounded" means.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Too partied out between last night and this morning to write much. Perhaps not coincidentally, weight this morning was 163 and waise size 32.75". Both number represent an increase from last week. I only made one cardio session last week, plus a couple of 2-mile walks, and no weight training. This holiday must come to an end. Oh, on the minor irony front, I ended up having no occasion to wear a Halloween costume. We'll get 'em next year.
More next week.