Revealed at Last! Who DOES Watch the Watchmen? - Eve Tushnet does, in a justly-lauded essay on the Shakespearian method to the classic Moore-Gibbons miniseries. If you ever read Watchmen, this essay is well worth your time.

Big Yes! moment: "The superhero stuff has gotten the most attention, but in my opinion the infusion of existential questions into the murder-mystery tropes is more crucial to the book."

Biggest Maybe... moment. Eve has a plausible take on the thematic importance of the pirate comic interludes:

The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter's crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book's greatest destruction. I am pretty sure that part of the point of the pirate comic is to suggest that Veidt is wrong, that his deadly plan was not the only way to prevent World War Three.

Like I said, plausible. But another possibility has to be considered: the castaway stands not for Veidt but for America, and the "auto-genic carnage" (to coin a phrase), for the logical outcome of America's Cold War national security policies. If that's the case, the valence of the interpolation changes radically. Now, something to consider: Eve talks about the "realism" of the world of the Watchmen, its tangibility. So, let us recall that the pirate comic exists within that world, being read by a kid in that world, and it was perforce authored in that world too. It's a horror comic. So, which anxiety are writer and/or artist likelier to have that motivates the tale, an anxiety about a retired superhero's secret plan or an anxiety about a country's nuclear policy?

Note that this doesn't settle the issue. The pirate comic can easily mean one thing to its (notional) creators and another thing entirely to us. It can mean both things. Eve's entire essay is about the twinnings, near-symmetries and false symmetries of Watchmen's architecture.

For what it's worth, I always thought that, with the end-matter mock-essay "Dr. Manhattan: Super Powers and the Super Powers," Moore did just a little too good a job of mimicking an academic Soviet apologist. Watchmen is - I state the crushingly obvious - only about superheroes to the extent necessary to be about America, and as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible. But it's been years since I read the book and who knows if I will think the same when I reread it. And it's here in front of me as I type, and reread it, thanks to Eve's inspiration, is what I'm going to do right away.

(John Jakala provides, like me, but footnotes to Tushnet, but they're good footnotes. Check it out.)

Wilderness of Magazine Archives - You know how a lot of magazine websites hold their newsstand content back from web publication for a bit? Harper's website just got up to 1975. Link via Polytropos, who offers a pretty good recap of what is, for such a comparative whelp, ancient history. I think he might be missing one possible angle though.

As Nate notes, the article appeared in Harper's March, 1975 issue under the pseudonym "Miles Ignotus" (Latin: "Unknown Soldier") and advocated seizing the Saudi oilfields. I recall a similar article in Playboy sometime between 1975 and 1978. Or was it Penthouse? Clearly, I read it for the articles - I just don't remember which one I read. But where was I? Oh yeah, the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, attacked the article in a television interview, saying that the author was "either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union."

Actually, Nate points out that the best available evidence is that it was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

(So Akins got two out of three! And some of your firebreathing conservatives always did think Henry the K was working for the Kremlin! But I'm losing the thread again.)

Okay, Nate talks about the practicality and the ethics of the "Ignotus Plan":

Anyway. It's an interesting read, especially because a matter-of-fact policy argument that's so brutally aggressive would never fly today. We're left with the question of whether, in those smoke-filled back rooms, the architects of America's current foreign policy look back on assessments like Ignotus' with chagrin or with nostalgia.

Here's the possibility I think he's missing: what if the article was the plan? That is, what if the point wasn't to advocate seizing the Saudi oil fields, but to be seen to do so - to send a Kissingerian message about not pushing the US too far? If that were the case, you would want the Saudis to be able to figure out who the real author was, and you'd sacrifice Akins (who got fired about a month after the interview). Might be worth following Akins' future fortunes to see how soft a post-ambassadorial landing he made. There may not really have been a desire to seize the oilfields at all, for all the reasons Akins and Nate, from their positions thirty years apart, rehearse. But there probably was a desire to make the Saudis think we might seize them, or that we could one day be pushed to it. If Ignotus really was Kissinger, that strikes me as the most likely explanation.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated II - Thanks to everyone whose vote made this site a finalist for a "Drysdale" (best non-liberal blog). Now whoever gets the most votes among the finalists will win the award. Apparently you vote by simply posting a comment to the Drysdale finalists item saying who you want to win.

Just mentioning.

Fair Warning - There's an outside chance that this site will have a bit of a service interruption some time over the next couple of days. It could be down as much as a week. Or not.

Shoot if You Must this Old Grey Head - Paging Barbara Fritchie - they're after the Stars and Stripes again:

So the Pentagon is basically telling us that the reason Stars and Stripes exists - to provide a real newspaper to troops during wartime - is just too gosh darned expensive to fund. And we're talking about just a few million dollars here, piss in a pot for the Pentagon's bloated budgets. It's not about money. It's totally political. It's about trying to kill Stars and Stripes.

As the article points out, "this comes just a few months after our survey of the troops got front page play in the Washington Post and was a huge embarrassment to the Pentagon."

Will Wonders Never Cease - Christopher Deliso quotes Derrida on terrorism and I find myself seeing the old French bastard's point. Derrida suggests that "One day it might be said: 'September 11' - those were the ('good') old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!"

Now, you may be thinking, at first blush, not another European intellectual aestheticizing the brutality of the September Massacres! Spare me! But that is not what Derrida is doing at all, as his next statement makes clear:

...(however) nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it knows it, and that's what's scary."

In other words, Derrida fears the passing of an era when the scope of a terrorist act was at least comprehensible. Because there is no real "End to Evil," the day is coming when the threats to the West will be everything from rogue nanotech to designer viruses. I would add that there is no reason to think enemy "rogue states" will play a substantial role in fostering such terrorism. They will mostly be incapable of producing the bleeding-edge weapons terrorists will wish to wield. No, as with the September Massacres, the terrorists will succeed by commandeering our own productions and turning them against us. This may happen by outright theft, as with the planes used against New York City and Washington DC, or suborning cooperation from disaffected members of our military-industrial complex. Of course, disaffected members of our military-industrial complex may cut out the middleman and engage in terror themselves, as may have happened with the still-unsolved anthrax attacks.

Against this real, major and long-term threat, we've erected - distraction. It's as if the goal was to keep ourselves so busy there would be no time for darker and larger thoughts about the scope of our danger. As Deliso puts it:

The US government knows it too, but admitting as much would not reassure the people. Therefore it must substitute the old enemy, and the old war - a specific villain (Saddam) in a fixed place (Iraq) - for the inescapable reality that the rules have been changed. Without an Iraq War thrown into the mix, and without the media whipped up into a subsequent frenzy, the government would have had to publicly confront the unpleasant reality of the new world disorder on two fronts: first, an historical one (the disastrous results of a policy of massive global intervention); and second, the philosophical one (the reality that the "war on terror" is a farce due to terrorism's very non-territorial and globalized nature).

I've previously considered some of the implications of the present situation and the situation to come in "A Brief History of the Future." And is even a single Presidential candidate discussing the larger problem? Not that I've heard.

Let's Play What If? - The Financial Times story on Ahmed Chalabi's joining the call for early elections in Iraq contains the following passage:

US officials have said direct elections cannot be held without an accurate census and voter registration, which could take months or years.

Okay, here's the game. It's January 2003. Saddam Hussein agrees to "free and fair elections" but allows that it will take "months or years" to complete "an accurate and voter registration."

What is the Bush Administration's response?

Department of Priorities II - Self-styled freelance journalist and activist Eric Smith sent around a press release about his theory that the US has already captured Osama Bin Laden and the Bush Administration is waiting to announce the news at a politically propitious time. I see no reason to believe that that has happened, and little reason to believe that it wouldn't. Conspiracy theory? Sure, but there are plenty of those to go around on all sides. But one particular passage struck me as a perfect summary of a particular kind of left-liberal mindset:

The consequences of surrender will be incalculable: one by one, like dominos, institutions we cherish will fall -- environmental laws, social security, independent media, healthy advocacy groups, assistance for the unemployed, impoverished and disenfranchised -- and, foremost, the right to choose our leaders.

Transfer payments, regulation and "health advocacy groups." (Eat more fiber!) Those are the big things that come to Mr. Smith's mind. Not habeas corpus, "extraordinary rendition," revocation of citizenship, or that Bill of Rights stuff. And again the misconception that "foremost" is "the right to choose our leaders" when foremost is the right to be free of "our leaders" in broad areas of our lives. It's the Bush Administration's dogged assault on this real "foremost" right that marks it as a menace.

Bet he's in trouble with someone for leaving abortion off his list, though.

Department of Priorities

As you can see from that Globe and Mail piece, the Canadian press continues to be all over this story despite the search on and threatened arrest of Juliet O'Neill (which seems to be totally backfiring). The American press, which might well have stronger legal protections than any country in the world, runs wire stories about Arar's lawsuit on page 17. The White House, as far as I can tell, has not been asked about the case once. But God knows we needed 48 hours of hand-wringing over Howard Dean's Iowa caucus speech.

Katherine at Obsidian Wings. (Who else would it be?)

I Forget, is Two a Trend? - Another conservative blogger writes to complain about something I wrote. Kevin Holtsberry e-mails

I think your post about small government conservatives was a bit disingenuious. The very next sentence after the paragraph you quote is: "The major programmatic fault of the speech is also that of his presidency: There was too much spending." Combine this with the fact that the paragraph above says "most" makes your point rather unfair. It may be true that small government conservatives have little voice in the Republican Party but NR's editorial doesn't prove your point, hence the two cheer thing.

Well, I don't think I was disingenuous at all, oddly enough. There's a lot more to "small-government conservatism" than spending. There's federalism, there's constitutionalism, there's separation of powers. There's the notion that government should shy from social engineering. Everything in the paragraph I quoted shows the President contravening those principles and NR cheering him for it. (PATRIOT Act, funding for marriage promotion, butting into state control of schools - drug testing - and marriage laws, federal abstinence education. "Here's today's movie, Health Class. See Joe not putting his dick in Jane? Do just like Joe.") I notice that NR's editors don't even manage to sound as upset about spending as John Cole. (I like John Cole, but I think we can all agree he's a partisan Republican.)

If small government conservatism were just about spending, the combination of SOTU and the NR editorial would still establish that 1) the president has nothing for SGCs; and 2) NR's dismay at this is minor. But small government conservatism is about federalism, constitutionalism and the sense that there are things the government shouldn't mess with. It's not the same as libertarianism by any means - a small government conservative may be just fine with a local school board instituting drug testing - but the belief in federal limits is, or used to be, a core conviction of a sizable swath of the Republican Party. Those folks have been abandoned at best and at worst betrayed.

Responsible Mail - The item about hawkish responsibility for Iraqi outcomes in general and Tacitus' responsibility in particular drew several e-mail responses, not least from Tacitus himself:

Re: "For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight."

Wow. I never argued that at all. I said you lent your legitimacy to a pro-Stalinist organization (damning enough in itself); not that you were "personally responsible for starvation in North Korea." I'm really surprised you'd resort to this sort of dishonest statement. It's worthy of....well, Kieran Healy.

As for my "minimizing" the dangers of shari'a, that's refuted in the comments to the post you link to, and discussed here as well. . Short version is that saying that I minimize it is baseless. The comparison of shari'a vs. Ba'athist law was made by others to whom I was responding -- as a read of Kip's original post should have made clear.

Finally, since I know you read this thread (which is merely one of many) from a while back -- I would assume that the charge that I simply do not pay attention to the actions and shortcomings of the leadership would not be hurled in my direction.

I don't mind policy disagreements, as you know -- in fact, I am moving closer to your position these days in any case -- but I do think this post of yours was pretty egregiously misrepresenting.

There are a few issues to disentangle here. First, on the matter of International ANSWER and penumbras and emanations I'll plead not dishonesty but memory - I certainly didn't reread the original. I just did reread it (some days this job isn't worth it) and I concede Tacitus' point about what he was actually saying. My bad.

Re minimizing the dangers of Sharia. In retrospect, I may not have placed sufficient weight on the italicised (by me) phrase in the passage below:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

but in toto, it still seems coy to me - 1. Introduce comparison. 2. Disavow comparison. 3. Wonder if comparison doesn't after all have something to it. I doubt I'm the only one for whom the disavowel got lost. I appreciate the clarification. I've seen the unclarified version from a lot of hawkish commentators in the wake of the Sharia story, though, so I'll point my original response to the Sharia-Saddamism comparison wholly at them.

On the issue of the shortcomings of the leadership and Tac's attention to same, my problem is that the item he cites dates from late June. I still think that rather late in the game, given the Wolfowitz testimony of late February alone.

Rereading my article, I wish I had left the ANSWER stuff out of it and had managed a sunnier tone. And as I said in the update to that post, my argument with Tacitus is as nothing compared to my argument with the Bush Administration, or even with most other hawks. But I stand by more core critique:

The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them.

Among stronger criticisms of Tacitus than I am comfortable making, Richard Puchalsky's e-mail makes a point about "total foreknowledge":

[Tacitus] must have had strong suspicions that it might happen or he wouldn't have been warning about it for months, as he points out in his own defense.

Sean Collins e-mail re Sharia isn't as bad as Saddam justifications should be understood, in light of Tacitus' clarifications, to apply to apologists who are not Tacitus:

I mean, isn't that the whole point of the new hawkishness: that tyranny, terrorism and theocracy are ALWAYS unacceptable, no matter who's using them? That's certainly why I got on board--I was ashamed of fifty years of "he's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard" foreign policy.

To say "sharia's bad, I guess, but hey, Saddam's gone!" is to miss the entire point of going into Iraq in the first place.

The kid's got a good heart. I hope one day he'll see the distinction between "fighting fascism" and fighting fascism on behalf of other fascists, which is so often what we end up doing.

As Opposed To . . . ? - Ronald Bailey has a good piece on HSAs at Reason's site, but has unwittingly activated one of my tics:

Because health spending in the United States soared by 9.3 percent in 2002, the largest increase in 11 years, according to a report from U.S. Health and Human Services officials in the journal Health Affairs. (The total spending was $1.6 trillion, around $5,440 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.) Health care expenditures now account for about 15 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.

My instant reaction is, So? We spend a lot on health care. Health care is good. The ideas behind health care are

1) You don't die as soon as you would have otherwise.
2) You get better from illness or injury.

Those sound like pretty valuable outcomes. Value attracts spending dollars. What's a better use of your money - not dying as soon as you would have otherwise, or one of the cool new TVs we have now? You can't watch TV when you're dead. One of the reasons health care costs have gone up is that there are ever newer and cleverer ways to not die so soon, and those ways cost money.

Don't get me wrong. There may be all kinds of problems with the way we're spending our health care dollars, starting with the fact that our system is based on "insurance" that is less insurance as such than a system of service contracts. Instead of pooling risks, group health "insurance" as it exists pools certainties. And because it's tied so tightly to employment, it makes things harder for the unemployed, the self-employed and even businesses than things need to be. Moving to a model of HSAs and genuine insurance (pooling risk), may alleviate the flaws of the present system. But the mere fact that health care spending is a certain proportion of GNP, or rising at a certain rate faster than inflation is itself no proof of a problem.

(Note: I'm mostly just echoing something Mickey Kaus said years ago.)

Do Not Adjust Your Set - The site may look momentarily weird as you check in tonight. Some of the "under the hood" changes are billowing up through the seams of the hood from time to time. I'm trying like hell to fix the text selection problem in Internet Explorer but not, so far, having much luck at it.

However, for diehard NS4 users for whom I broke the main page, I've added an NS4 index page. I may not be the most popular blogger out there, but I surely have the most indexes.

UPDATE: The text selection problem still defeats me. I give up for the evening. People who are dying to quote from Unqualified Offerings can still

o View | Source in IE
o Just select and go in Opera or any version of Mozilla

Still working on the problem.

Do You Not Exist or Do You Just Not Count? - Small-government conservatives, I mean. Take a look at National Review's unsigned "Two Cheers for the Speech" editorial:

There was something in the speech for most conservatives. Law-and-order conservatives learned that the president is prepared to defend the Patriot Act during the campaign. Free-market conservatives got a renewed call for making the tax cuts permanent, beefed-up health savings accounts, tort reform, and - above all - continued support for personal accounts in Social Security. Social conservatives got increased funding for abstinence education, drug testing in the schools, rhetoric against steroid abuse by athletes, and, perhaps most important, some presidential support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Small-government conservatives are certainly "free-market conservatives" too, but once you get past tax cuts, HSAs and rhetorical nods in directions the administration has no intent of actually going (tort and social security reform), Bush's SOTU address has less than nothing for you. It is useful of National Review to point out, if only by omission, the complete elimination of limited government as a Republican Party principle.

That About Sums It Up - Peter David explains why I can't watch American Idol.

Some of these people, the moment they open their mouth, it's clear they don't know an E flat from a Salt Flat. Why then in God's name would the producers send them up the line? Only one answer comes to mind: Knowing these people are horrendous, they send them before the three judges and the TV camera specifically so they can humiliate themselves on national TV. I'm not sure why I never realized that before, but that has to be the case. 'Wow, this guy is so awful, we've got to share him with America." Seems kind of--oh, what's the word--cruel.

Also, they seem to go for the sorts of bombastic pop singers that keep Diane Warren in business. But the cruelty thing is the real problem.

"See, They Return, One and by One - Andrew David Chamberlain is back with the sort of simultaneously philosophical, economically rigorous and plain funky libertarian blogging that you can't get here. See "METROSEXUALS, KARL MARX, AND MAKING OUT IN THE BACK SEAT" among others.

Stray SOTU Stuff - Most useful SOTU commentary I've seen so far . . .

Gene Healy with a contrarian take on the "steroids in sports" passage."

Kevin Drum has your metric system for you, right here and here.

Related to the second Drum link, Electrolite vamps on Smoking gun-related activity program initiatives.

Tacitus asks, "What about the role of athletic supplements in marriage? What about activist judges who defy the will of the people who want athetic supplements? What about marrying your athletic supplements?" and other stuff. (Scroll up and down.)

Also from Tacitus, and this is important:

Is there any question that the Patriot Act reauthorization is meant to play the same role in the '04 cycle as the Homeland Security bill did in '02? Not too classy.

Bush's SOTU speeches have been useful because they really have heralded the way he has tried to govern (viz. the Axis of Evil speech where Bush fully incorporated the doctrine of "preemptive" "defense".) If there was any remaining doubt that under Bush's leadership, the Republicans have become an authoritarian party, this speech removes it. Small-government conservatives, libertarians and traditionalists can no longer imagine that Bush's Republican Party is somewhat wrongheaded. It is an outright menace.

New Republic Writer Jim Henley is how I'd like to be referred to from now on. After all, I sold them a single article back in 1993. In Andrew Sullivan's world (scroll down to "FIFTH COLUMN WATCH"), ever publishing a single article with a venue makes you a "[that venue] writer," and - hey how about that - Andrew Sullivan was TNR's editor when my article was published.

Maybe I'll get new business cards.

Tired - The Swedish Mobile acted up in a major way today. I got home late and am way too tired to deal with SOTU, Iowa, superhero thoughts, Captain America thoughts or the, you know, massive demonstrations in Iraq. So you'll have to look elsewhere for stuff to read. For instance, Katherine at Obsidian Wings has finished her series on Maher "The US sent me to Canada and all I got was this lousy two years of unending hell" Arar. (Scroll up from the bottom. Memo to Katherine: scrolling up and reading down at the same time sucks. Better to have a header post with links to all 13 installments that the reader can keep coming back to.)

Annals of Cheek - From an op-ed in the NYT by Lebanese law professor and author Chibli Mallat:

The way forward, then, is simple. The 10 members of the governing council whom I met with agree on this: the council, as a national unity government, should be unconditionally recognized as in charge of Iraq's destiny, with the support of the United States-led coalition and whoever else wishes to join in a democratic course of reconstruction.

As such, the council would be deemed the official interim government of Iraq - making the United States plan to select a national assembly by July 1 unnecessary. The council would be empowered to draft a constitution and set the parameters for what a new government would look like and when and how it would be elected.

Pretty amazing. Mallat talked to ten politicians, all of whom agreed that it made a great deal of sense that the organization in which they held power should be maintained, strengthened and perpetuated. I don't doubt that his reporting of their sentiment is accurate.

(Via Hit and Run.)

Actually It IS Your Responsibility - kip at Long Story Short Pier blames the hawks for the IGC's imposition of Sharia. ("Blame" is a word that, like "firetruck" starts with F and ends with -UCK, right?)Tacitus calls his argument "ridiculous":

The logic of the critique above is ridiculous, as it assumes total foreknowledge of all events and consequences.. One might as well blame Abraham Lincoln for the Klan and Jim Crow. Had he only not invaded! The fact is that I've been discussing, warning, fulminating, and exhorting on the need to confront and ward off Shi'a theocrats in Iraq for long months now.

For the benefit of those keeping score at home, yes, this is the same Tacitus who argued (if that's the word) that those of us who marched in an ANSWER-organized antiwar rally gave off penumbras and emanations that made us personally responsible for starvation in North Korea and a bunch of other stuff including, I believe, dutch elm blight.

But that's not the point. The point is, Tacitus is wrong on every count. The critique does not assume "total foreknowledge of all events and consequences." It simply assumes, correctly, that intentions are not enough - your responsibility extends not just to the desired but to the likely and foreseeable results of your actions. You can be responsible for bad outcomes even if you did not foresee them if you should have foreseen them. Conservatives have no problem recognizing this truth when it comes to domestic policy. When liberals desire benign outcome X, but the policy they implement results in dire consequence Y, conservatives blame liberals, and rightly. We hold alcoholics to account for the gap between intentions and results. I meant to take the kids to the park but I lost track of time. *Hic!

In the case of Tacitus specifically, it's all well and good that he's been discussing, warning and so on for long months now. What he should have been doing for long months before that is reading his goddam Hayek, particularly the part in The Road to Serfdom about where the enthusiasm for central planning comes from. One of these days I'll dig out the exact quote - it becomes more relevant by the day. But in paraphrase, large diverse coalitions will form in favor of central planning because the constituent members of the coalition each favor some specific policy that central planning would enable. The problem is that the various policies favored by the various factions tend to be incompatible - so once the planning regime comes, many, many people find themselves disappointed.

The Iraq war and occupation have been run by people stupider and more venal than Tacitus, who is neither stupid nor venal. But as a citizen he had a responsibility to see the actual decision makers for who they were. The minute that Paul Wolfowitz stated that Iraq lacked the sort of ethnic and sectarian strife that plagued the Balkans, Tacitus and every other intelligent hawk should have thrown the replay flag. Upon review, the principled hawks needed to realize they were being asked to back a war led by clowns. The incumbent duty strikes me as obvious.

One other matter. Echoing comments I've seen by other hawks, Tacitus minimizes the Sharia decree by comparing it to the horrors of the previous regime:

Presumably Iraqi women would have been better off under the constant threat of outright execution or rape at the Mukhabarat's hands; now, horrors, they must face Islamic law! I'm facetious here -- Islamic law is pretty bad, and it's definitely unjust to make a population live under it. (Not sure the family law part is as bad as a murderous police state, though.)

It's not that there's nothing to this argument, but there are two problems: 1) it's true that, in principle, every Iraqi woman was at risk for arbitrary execution or rape at the hands of the Hussein regime. But from the perspective of an Iraqi woman rather than an armchair theoretician, it's a question of odds. What were the chances of any given Iraqi woman would be arbitrarily executed or raped? What are the chances that a given Iraqi woman will fall foul of Sharia in the new domestic code? If the second odds are substantially greater than the first, then Iraqi women really may feel they are worse off. That's not for me to say, of course, but it's not for Tacitus to say either. 2) It has yet to be established how much better than the Hussein regime future Iraqi governments will be. It would be fatuous to say that Iraq has seen its last massacre, arbitrary detention or extrajudicial execution.

UPDATE: You know, rereading the above, it spends too much time on Tacitus and not enough time on the US goverment. The real responsibility lies with the latter.

Bridging the Generation Gap - More gaming news from the weekend: we took the plunge and bought Offering Boy his first Yu-gi-oh! cards - two starter decks, so that he and I could play each other. I have stayed away from collectible card games until now, and avoided encouraging OB in that direction too - the last thing I want to be doing is driving him to tournaments on Saturdays and explaining why I won't shell out for $5 booster packs. But he started playing with schoolfriends this week and clearly enjoyed it and hey, like his dad is going to forbid him to play games.

Anyway, having now played several games, I understand why kids play collectible card games - they can read the goddam cards. That puts them ahead of me, unless I squint. If the light's bad? Forget it.

Kind of fun, though. I realize Yu-gi-oh is far from the most sophisticated CCG out there, and I can see the little tricks in the rules that are meant to encourage you to BUY MORE CARDS. But like I said: fun.

Welcome Interstate Managers - RealOne is streaming the most recent Fountains of Wayne album this month. I had liked the single, "Stacey's Mom," a lot, but what it didn't prepare me for was how beautiful this album is. Many songs have a reflective quality and a lyricism I didn't expect. "Valley Winter Song" is my favorite. "All Kinds of Time" is a stunner - a lush, stirring ballad about - football. No really. Lots of funny, trippy stuff too, a nice country pastiche, and a couple of guitar-pop rockers, but it's the ballads that make this CD a revelation. Two thumbs up. They're both mine, but I'm making an effort here.

Happy Martin Luther King Day - Spent the afternoon with Nate "Polytropos" Bruinooge and gaming buddy Classic Dave playing Paul Czege's My Life with Master. It turns out that the game deserves its substantial reputation. Very easy to pick up; the mechanics are simple but intricate and certainly enable the players to produce "gothic style" stories together. At ten bucks it's a steal. I could say that the games' themes of domination, accomodation and resistance are appropriate to the holiday, but really, we were just taking advantage of the day off. For actual appropriate to the holiday material, Sean Collins has posted the entire text of the 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I admire King's politics while having no use for his economics. But more than anything I'm in awe of his courage. MLK Day is the holiday that demands that each of us be that much braver than we're comfortable being.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Sincere condolences to hoosier Radley Balko after today's Indianapolis-New England game. I was pulling for you. But congrats to Charles Dodgson, whose Pats really are a nice team, though their continued success risks more "face down individualism" from his state's senior senator, which would suck. And to Atrios, diehard Eagles booster, neener neener neener from your NFC East neighbor.

I'll be rooting for the Pats in the Super Bowl, but not rooting against Carolina. I like them, and Steven Davis still has my heart. But I almost always root for the AFC team if the Redskins aren't playing. Predictions? Are you kidding?

UPDATE: Adam at Throwing Things offers the Five Stages of Eagles Grief, which I found immensely cheering. Also, the Curse of William Penn.

Best Wishes - So I thought to check to see if Our Man Deeds (aka "John Galt") had anything on today's big explosion at the too-well-named Assassin's Gate entrance to the CPA's Green Zone. He didn't. Then I got to worrying.

"We have indications that some of those that were killed were American citizens, U.S. contractors," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said during a news conference in Baghdad. "We believe the current number at two. We're waiting for firmer confirmation."

Which description fits John Galt (among many other people). I hope he's okay. And I regret all the Iraqis killed in the attack too.

Sigh. The Sydney Morning Herald notes that "A suicide driver detonated a powerful car bomb outside the main gate to the headquarters compound of the US-led coalition yesterday, killing at least 25 people and wounding about 130, as the United States prepared to ask the United Nations to play a far greater role in Iraq." There may well be a relation. The pattern of past spectacular attacks is that they've acted to discourage UN and other international involvement in the occupation.

Meanwhile, in John Galt's most recent available message we see all the frustrations to which the social engineer is heir. The Shi'a aren't playing ball. The IGC's sharia thing threatens the rule of law. Will "John Galt" ever connect what he finds himself doing with what his namesake had to say about grandiose state schemes? I hope he is well and whole and will have the time to decide such a question is worth pondering.

(SMH link via Counterspin.)

Dept. of Interesting Stray Finds - While researching the previous item I happened upon an interesting Ha'aretz article about Israeli government leaks to the press.

In most cases a leak relates to the start of contacts with some Arabs, and after the leak, the contacts are usually broken. There is scarcely any doubt that the leak is aimed at thwarting the contacts and even smearing those Israelis trying to nurture connections with the Arab side.

There is also a message here to the Arab side - the person with whom they are making contact is not someone who can keep a secret, and he is best avoided. In many cases, this has succeeded. The Arab side is put off because it has realized that on the Israeli side there is usually someone - not necessarily the person with whom they are talking - who will leak what is going on.

The news peg is recent leaks about preliminary contacts between the government of Syria's Bashar Assad and the government of Israel. It chronicles the cycle of contacts, leaks and ruptures in loving detail. Worth reading.

Dept. of On the Other Hand - Diana Moon finds a Guardian article suggesting that, pace the Reuters piece I linked earlier, Libya's nuke program was surprisingly far along. The article is about Libya's centrifuge purchases, and a reported seizure of a German ship by the Italians last October that was carrying 1,000 complete centrifuges to Tripoli. Plot twist at the end:

While US government sources have claimed that the seizure persuaded Col Gadafy to do his deal with Washington and London, diplomats and analysts closely following the nuclear trade are convinced that the ship was impounded because of information provided by the Libyans.

According to this version circulating in Vienna, headquarters of the IAEA, Col Gadafy told the CIA about the shipment as a goodwill gesture to convince the Americans and the British that he was committed to the deal being negotiated.

Two things about the Guardian story give me pause: 1) British press! 2) I trolled Google News for contemporaneous stories on the October shipment seizure and found nothing. I class it among the counter-intuitive things that nobody made a big deal of it at the time. But the point is, Libya's nuke program may have been a bigger deal than I've been suggesting. Or it may not have. You know.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - As announced last week, personal data appears at the end of the weekly fitness blog item going henceforth, not the beginning.

That Didn't Take Long Dept. - In, perhaps, less time than the American food industry ruined the low-fat diet concept, it is quickly doing the like for low carb diets. In the former case, doctors and the government said "reduce your fat intake." Before you knew it, the "Snackwell's phenomenon" inundated us with untold "low-fat" junk food, laden with sugar and more than up to the task of ruining your lipid and insulin levels and packing on the pounds. I notice just this month that, with the newfound respectability of controlled-carbohydrate diets, including studies that seem to show that, at the very least, controlled-carb diets are no less effective than low-fat diets for losing weight and controlling cholesterol, there is suddenly a profusion of low-carb product, a lot of it junk food. (In some cases it is simply that previously-existing low-carb foods and snacks are finally hitting mass distribution channels .)

Just last year, if you wanted to do a "low-carb diet", you pretty much ate

Meat, Poultry and Fish
Vegetables
Salad Oils
and eventually, nuts and berries and certain fruits.

You recognised that if you indulged in a beer or french fries or pizza you were cheating. Now all of those and more are readily available, if expensive, in "low-carb" versions. Some of them are, like Snackwells et al, high-calorie and not so good for you. (And a lot of them, like the candy bars, taste like crap.)

The thing is, under the old low-carb diet plan, if you favored unsaturated fats over saturated then you were mostly putting Good Things in your body. Despite the myths, Robert Atkins himself warned that, no, you couldn't really eat a whole steak every day, that things like bacon and sausage should be occasional foods because of the nitrates and other dubious ingredients and that "delicious" low-carb alternatives to popular high-carb foods were not to be confused with staples. Nutritionists might quibble about the proportions of what you were eating, but they wouldn't yell, "Stop eating vegetables!" Now increasing numbers of people will decide that low-carb dieting means controlled-carb candy bars and pancakes etc. etc. etc.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Subway commercials for their Atkins-friendly wraps are cute, and really, a whole-wheat wrap instead of a fluffy white bun is a good idea. But the bacon alone means it should be an occasional rather than every day item.

On the other hand, I got a kick out of my local supermarket today, which had a hand-lettered "Excellent for Low-Carb Diets" sign on the buffalo wing sauce shelf. Ain't it the truth! Buffalo wings were a staple of my strictest-compliance Atkins period. The Buffalo Wing Diet. (Ever ask the waitress for double celery? I have.)

In other fitness blogs. Bunch of stuff this week. Gene Healy has an "Imitation Diet Blog Post", with a link to Jeff "Hot Liberty" Kiely's review of Diet Rite Tangerine soda. It's bravura. (I hate their cola, though.)

Gene also links to Tyler Cowen's precis of Discover Magazine's distillation of " an extensive Harvard study, started in 1976," which I thought might be the Framingham Nurses Heart Study, but may not be. They are very hard on the USDA's "support the American grain and dairy industries" food pyramid. The book is Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

Bruce Baugh is down two more pounds, and shares his plans for the next phase of his project.

Meanwhile, Sandy Szwarc has part two of her TechCentralStation series. I was hard on part one last week. One of my complaints gets addressed in the second installment:

Oftentimes, weight loss is not attributable as much to exercise but to calorie restrictive diets and such weight loss is rarely long-term. But many researchers maintain regular exercise can be an important part of maintaining a stable weight and "tends to reduce risk of the weight gain that often accompanies aging," according to Blair.

Which was what I said. Szwarc's major purpose is to encourage exercise for reasons of health rather than weight alone. I can't gainsay the effort. I haven't clicked through all her links this time around to see if she's overselling her case, which is that the benefits of exercise outweigh the benefits of weight loss on pretty much every front you care to fight - heart attack risk, blood pressure, lipid levels, you name it.

So much for the public-spirited portion of this week's entry.

What I dd to "prepare" for a marathon this week.

Walked a mile. (Whee!)
Lifted weights.
Read the intro and first chapter of Marathoning for Mortals in Borders on my lunch hour.

I think it's fair to say we're still in the very early stages of marathon training.

Vital signs: Weight 166, up four pounds from last week, still in the 161-166 range within which it's been fluctuating since October. Waist still around 33.5". Resting pulse back down around 60.

Pick on Calpundit Mail - Disagreeing with the substance of UO's recent "Pick on Calpundit Night" was reader - Kevin Drum. Go figure! I criticised Kevin's arguments about the proper scope of self-government and his interpretation of a study of political donation patterns by educators. Kevin writes

Since you don't have comments, just a couple of quick reactions:

1. I think you took my use of the word "generation" a little too literally. I just generally meant that people alive today rule themselves, not people who have been dead for 200 years. And the opposite of strict constructionism is not no rules at all. The constitution provides useful guidelines and helps to institutionalize a certain amount of inertia. That's fine. However, institutionalizing in toto the beliefs of men long dead isn't.

There's a good middle ground here. I suspect it will come as no surprise that I think that middle ground is the most useful place to be.

2. The donation data isn't a perfect proxy, but it's still pretty good data and indicates that universities aren't leftist monoliths. And I imagine that business schools *do* tend toward free market conservatism, which is every bit as political as anything in the humanities. Besides, I'd like to see some decent evidence that lefty profs advocate leftyness in the classroom. I suspect there's a lot less of it than conservatives imagine.

As for administrators, I don't think they come mostly from the ranks of the humanities. I don't have any evidence of this, just personal experience, so I could be wrong. However, I think that the liberal cast of many universities actually comes far more from the students than anywhere else, which is hardly surprising. What else would you expect from a bunch of smart 18-year-olds? But they get over it.

I still think "generations" and "rule themselves" are generalizations that contain the sorts of assumptions that positively beg unpacking, which is why I tried to unpack them. From my perspective, to speak of a cohort "ruling themselves" is almost always to misspeak, "democracy" or no, for the reasons I stated in my original item.

Kevin added an addendum in a second e-mail:

I forgot: the fact that the constitution is so hard to amend is exactly why I think strict constructionism is so flawed. Since it's nearly impossible to amend, there *have* to be other ways of making fundamental changes.

(Besides, I think I remember reading that the founders didn't really expect the amendment process to be quite so hard. Guess they screwed up on that one.)

The latter I never heard or read. As to the former, fundamental cultural changes are possible through social processes. Fundamental changes to the structure of government, or to the structure of the political economy, should be hard. During the debate over ClintonCare, for instance, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that it was the kind of sweeping change that one should not want enacted by narrow partisan margins. That Congress and the Courts have gone along with such fundamental changes as the administrative law court system and enabling legislation (laws that empower executive bodies to make what amounts to law, rather than making law themselves) is the great scandal of the modern age.

I can see why this doesn't bother managerialist liberals so much: the changes have been friendly to the managerialist liberal agenda - not just substantively (more and wider regulation), but philosophically (increasing the scope of the purview of politics). And I can see why a liberal considers this to be "a good middle ground." It's a darn comfortable place for them! But not for me.

Chad Orzel wrote in about the politics of academia argument. I wrote that, if campus conservatives and libertarians were concentrated in "nonpolitical" departments like engineering, as Kevin suggested, and liberals and leftists predominated in "political" departments like history and humanities and in the administration, then we could still meaningfully speak of college politics as skewing left. Chad writes

The narrow, literal interpretation is certainly true-- the politics of the people involved has no effect on the content of specific courses. But if you think the content of a college education is defined entirely by what goes on in the classroom, you're mistaken. Even the academic part of a college education has a large out-of-class component.

Politics plays basically no role in setting the course content, true, but I have no doubt that the majors in the department have a pretty solid idea where my political sympathies lie, and also those of the rest of the professors in the department. We interact with students before and after class, crack jokes during lectures, and make small talk at various department functions-- all of those things help convey our thoughts on issues of the day.

Does that amount to political indoctrination of the type that the nuttier right-wing commentators accuse English departments of? No. (Of course, English departments don't engage in the sort of brainwashing that the nuttier right-wing commentators accuse them of, so maybe that's a bad example...) Does it have an effect? You'd be crazy to think otherwise.

Education in a specific academic discipline is not just a matter of conveying specific bits on information from faculty to student-- there's a mindset that goes along with that information. It's no accident that most physicist tend to think in similar ways-- part of the training in the discipline is an informal sort of indoctrination in the way that physicists look at the world. Some of that indoctrination comes through discussing politics with faculty (or overhearing faculty discussing politics), and the mindset that results ends up affecting the way physicists approach political issues.

(Chicken. Egg. Oyako donburi.)

So, I don't think you can write off more political slants among more technical departments as unimportant coincidence-- these things do have an effect, through the syllabus or otherwise.

I wrote back that the difference was that in the humanities, your ability to regurgitate your professor's political views could determine your grade. Chad responded that he considered that less obtrusive than the softer bias in nonpolitical departments. There we'll have to disagree.

He also wrote about the issue of self-government and constitutional flexibility:

They made it so hard to amend precisely to allow each generation to govern itself, free of strict constraints forced into law by previous generations. Things like, say, a flag-burning amendment, or an anti-gay-marriage amendment. Those things should be hard to force into the Constitution, because they're damnably difficult for future generations to get rid of.

But they also made it hard to forbid flag-burning legislatively, no? What's the phrase, "To govern is to choose?" That's surely true. But it needs to be extended a little: To govern is to choose - for everyone. Whether they like it or not.

Ginger Stampley offers a minor clarification of her use of the "talking stick" idea:

I believe you are in error in suggesting that I use the talking stick as a metaphor for politics. The talking stick originally comes from a meeting model that is applicable to political meetings; I merely applied it to my game, which was in dire need of a control method to ensure that certain players weren't getting overlooked.

My political talk philosophy is a lot closer to "anybody can talk, but I don't have to listen", which is not really the talking stick model. The talking stick plan makes you listen to the person who has it.

I appreciate the clarification. The fact that it comes from a meeting model applicable to political meetings convinces me that it is indeed a valid metaphor for liberal conceptions of "self-government," but clearly the application was mine and not Ginger's.

Happy Mailblog Day! - They play football, we play catchup. Today is the day for responding to reader mail on which I've been unconscionably sitting this month. (And maybe last month too.) Let's start with Matt Taylor who wrote in about gay marriage. I wrote last month, anent the arguments of certain anti-gay-marriage conservatives like Maggie Gallagher and Eve Tushnet that there was no "individual right" to marriage, that that was beside the point - there was still an equal protection issue. Matt writes:

On whether same-sex marriage is an issue of individual rights or equal treatment, Jim Henley wrote:

"There is no constitutional 'right' to food stamps. Food stamps could be ended tomorrow legislatively, and no one could say Boo, from a legal perspective. However, the equal protection clause makes it clear that, if you do have a food stamp program, it's constitutionally forbidden to have food stamps for 'everyone but Jews.'"

I disagree that marriage is not an issue of individual rights. Jim's argument assumes that the US constitution is the ultimate authority on rights, but historically that document has not recognized all the rights that are generally accepted today. For example, the right of women and non-whites to vote were only recognized in later amendments.

Consider that, if the Federal Marriage Amendment were passed, then later repealed, the repealing amendment might contain language like this:

"The right to civil marriage shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex, sexual identity or sexual orientation."

It seems to me that human rights enumerated in law should derive from some broader philosophical framework, so that we have some basis for arguing how the law should be made more just. Many Christians would likely suggest that the Bible is the proper source of this framework; however, non-Christians like me, and Christians who belive in a secular state, would prefer a more universal, logically-grounded approach, whether it be libertarian, communitarian, or some other philosophical system.

Personally, I believe that marriage should not be considered something people are given by the government, but rather something they decide to do as individual couples. Banning same-sex marriage restricts the freedom of gay people to enter marriage contracts, and therefore violates their fundamental rights.

Take this analogy: if states refused to recognize changes of residence for non-white persons, it would violate both equal protection and individual rights. Equal protection is violated because the benefits of residency (voting, social services, etc.) are denied to a class of people, but individual rights are also violated because freedom to move from state to state is restricted.

The very thought of a government-issued "interstate relocation license" strikes me as an obvious violation of rights, even if it were issued without any discrimination against particular classes of people. That we don't view a state-issued "marriage license" the same way is just a historical accident.

For more responses to my equal protection argument, see the archives of the Marriage Debate Blog, where my original item was cross-posted. Start with the aptly-named Ogre and work up.