Be the Eyes of Unqualified Offerings! - I read several liberal blogs, but not any that I've seen link to the important Mother Jones article about Clinton Administration bad faith in the matter of Iraq's weapons programs. So help me out here! Send me links to the liberal blogs that have cited this article, one way or the other. They must be out there, eh? Otherwise, Glenn Reynolds would sort of have a point.

A Fanboy Does Not Compute - People who follow comics news know that the big uproar is about Marvel putting the X-Men back in spandex costumes when Joss Whedon and John Cassaday start Astonishing X-Men in April. This has caused wailing and gnashing of teeth among fans of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, now concluding, in which the first thing that Morrison did was take his charges out of flamboyant costumes and stick them in leather uniforms and biker jackets. The outrage is mildly ironic, in that devotion to the Morrison run signifies sophistication and the complaints about the clothing change have a whiff of You're messing with my continuity! about them. But one part isn't computing for me.

Observers are fitting the uniform change into the Marvel Shakeup Overstory, which goes like this: Avi Arad, head of Marvel's film division, elbowed aside former Marvel Comics president Bill Jemas because he believed Jemas was damaging the value of Marvel's licenses. Arad got sick of controversies over family-unfriendly storylines and the sort of controversy-courting that made "Nu Marvel" Nu Marvel in the first place. The edict went out to make the monthly series safe and non-controversial, for the sake of the trademark's movie appeal. Thus almost everything edgy and fun for grownups about Nu Marvel - save, so far, the Bendis-Maleev Daredevil - must go. And so the X-Men get tucked back into superhero outfits.

But how does this make sense? What did Bryan Singer's team do when they went to film the X-Men in the first place? They took them out of superhero costumes and put them into leather uniforms. So the overstory doesn't compute, or Ex-Nu Marvel doesn't even understand what made its characters movie-friendly. Which is it? Hey, you tell me.

Habits Can Be Habit-Forming - Atrios wonders where the New York State Health Department gets off declaring that only heterosexual marriages are valid in New York even though New York state law appears to be silent on the question. Maybe they're just used to that sort of thing. The constitutionally dubious delegation doctrine has had federal executive agencies essentially making law for decades now. If a similar doctrine holds in New York state politics, the Health Department surely figures it's supposed to make law. Legislators love delegation because it lets them dodge accountability. Gay marriage being a hot button issue, there are probably more than a few New York legislators happy to dodge the issue.

The minor problem is that delegation (at the national level) is an outrage against the Republic. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.) Delegation has executive branch bodies making law, which is not what the executive branch is supposed to be doing. The administrative law court system has executive branch agencies holding "court" proceedings over their own rulings. Judging law is also not what the executive branch is supposed to be doing.

Anyway, Radley Balko is proposing a federal constitutional amendment against delegation. If Atrios throws his considerable influence behind it, maybe New York State will get the idea too.

I Wonder if Caligula's Horse Did This Well - In the How Convenient! department:

US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study.

"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.

Via Calpundit and Marginal Revolution. More:

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

Micha Ghertner at Cattalarchy sees a big opportunity for the whole country here. It just makes too much sense not to try it.

Ressentiment: It's What's for Breakfast - Glenn Reynolds observes the collapse of the prosecution's case in the Milosevic trial, and all it occasions is a certain peevishness that

No doubt we'll see handwringing, doubts about intelligence reliability, and charges that the Clinton Administration "sexed up" intelligence and misrepresented

Milosevic as a genocidal dictator in order to build support for unilateral action . . .

Yeah, right, that's going to happen.

As it happens, Glenn could have seen all those things years ago, just by following the writings of those libertarians who actually paid attention to foreign policy prior to September 12, 2001 rather than getting a crash course in international relations from Mark Steyn columns afterward.

Of course, it wasn't just libertarians. A petition against the Kosovo intervention lists, among other signatories, the American Legion, the American Spectator magazine, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Oliver North AND Lars Erik Nelson, Mother Jones AND the Manchester Union Leader, Harold Pinter AND - Virginia Postrel. (Those were the days.)

Point being, a whole panoply of people on the left and the right opposed the Kosovo War at the time, and called the Clinton Administration on its exaggerations and outright lies at the time. Some of us still bring it up occasionally.

Now, the natural libertarian response to finally discovering clear evidence that a previous administration misstated the case for war, during a time when the current administration has been accused of misstating the case for war, would seem to be to ponder lessons about the structure of government power, the potential for executive abuse of classified information and the need for skepticism about government claims. Instead, Glenn seems primarily to resent that the Bush Administration hasn't gotten the free ride he imagines the Clinton Administration to have gotten. I suppose this is that small-l libertarianism I keep hearing about. But it's a damn small l.

(Via Antiwar.com blog, which has some good links on the subject.)

Queer, Queer, Queer, with Bells Ringing and Banners Snapping in the Wind - Atrios is providing strong coverage of the graffiti on the Constitution proposal. Of several items, this one and this one and this one are especially good, and the recurring Atrios thesis that the Bush Administration is going to succeed in painting the Dems as "the party of gay marriage" anyway, so the Dems need to suck it up and make the case or be run over, seems pretty inarguable.

Sing It With Me Now - Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Neilalien's incomparable comics blog
Happy birthday to you!

Four years old, people. There are older blogs, but not a ton of older blogs. Four more years! (Likely my only chance to use this cheer in 2004.)

That's Just Wrong - Stone proprietor Marc strikes at the very foundations of our civilization. He must be stopped!

I didn't know about the semi-colon aspect, though.

My own language problem is different: Figuring out which words in a title should not be capitalized in orthodox, library-style titling. It's "the little words," I know, but deciding just which words in a given title are little is where I get befuddled. A lot of times I end up just capitalizing every word. But I feel guilty - guilty as Marc should feel when he sticks his commas outside the quote marks.

As I Was Saying - Lying about Iraq's capabilities didn't begin with the Bush Administration:

In fact, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the Clinton administration's false alarms on Iraqi weapons, like Bush's, were much more than just honest mistakes. One astonishing series of events in particular illustrates the ways in which the Clinton White House cleared the path for Bush's war.

That's from "A Legacy of Lies," by Seth Ackerman in the newest issue of Mother Jones. It's a good article to have to hand the next time some Bush Administration apologist repeats some statement by Clinton people to show that the current crowd weren't saying anything the previous bunch wasn't saying. That's true, but it doesn't mean what they want you to think it means.

No doubt the four liberal bloggers to whom I sent the link this afternoon will soon alert their much larger readerships to this important work. In the meantime, you elite coterie of Unqualified Offerings followers can revisit some familiar names, like Hussein Kamel and Kenneth Pollack. Ah, Kenneth Pollack - I was right about him, you know. Ackerman makes a convincing case that Pollack is still arguing in bad faith even in his recent mea sorta culpa in the Atlantic.

Hesiod was onto Hussein Kamel's defection and how his story had been misreported before the war. But Ackerman points out that it was Pollack's colleagues in the Clinton Administration that first distorted Kamel's debriefing:

There can be no doubt that the Clinton administration knew of Kamel's testimony - all of it - immediately. An August 1995 CIA intelligence report on Kamel's weapons briefing, in redacted form, was declassified in 1996, along with millions of other documents, as part of the Defense Department's investigation into Gulf War illness. The cable, headlined "Comments On Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction," is still publicly available on an online Defense Department database.

MotherJones.com has obtained a copy. It relayed to CIA headquarters the key points of Kamel's testimony: "Iraq has no Scuds left and is hiding no Scud missile components." Missile research was being conducted, but "the work is limited to what can be done on paper." On chemical weapons, "none remained in Iraq. Kamil stressed that no agent was hidden in Iraq, either VX or any other."

1995. For six years after that, the Clinton White House kept the meal warm until the Bush White House was ready to eat. If you like the war, even now, you should thank the Democratic Party for its role in letting you have it. (Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.") If you don't like the war, don't thank anybody - anybody in government, at least.

Gaudy Several Evenings Later - Zed at MemeMachineGo has more on the science-fictional versus fantasy approaches to the superhero story. Well worth reading, though I'm not completely convinced that his two political attractors are the only possible poles of a science-fictional approach to superheroes. I think we're just waiting for someone to come up with a completely new way of addressing the problem. Zed does a great job of showing how deeply mined the existing paradigms have been, though.

Good Point - What I think Diana Moon is saying about Ahmed Chalabi and his "heroism in error" is true. (Diana: "And I do not agree that Uncle Sam is a sap.") Viewed in terms of his real customers and their desires, Chalabi and the INC provided value for value. The Bush Administration wanted excuses to go to war in Iraq; the INC came through. If the liberal fantasy that In a democracy, the government is us were true, you could say differently. But the INC wasn't working for us. They worked chiefly for themselves and secondarily for certain officials in the Defense Department and Vice President's office, including especially the top men at both those places.

Reading List - Stuff I haven't gotten to yet but mean to:

Tomorrow the World - Thomas Powers reviews An End to Eeeeevil!

Ex America by Garet Garrett.

A Prettier Jobs Picture? by Virginia Postrel.

The Much-Discussed "Pentagon Global Warming" Report in its entirety. From the intro: "The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally [sic]. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller."

I Got Your Vietnam Syndrome for You, Right Here - Nate has an interesting consideration of the Pentagon's use of private contractors in Iraq on jobs that would traditionally have been done by uniformed service members. Go there for the details. He also has a wealth of links to articles on Private Military Corporations. I'm just going to mention a couple of things that strike me:

1) As Nate says, contractor deaths are not counted among US military casualties, and reporting of them is spotty. If we added up the number of dead working for the military but not in it, our number might look a lot bigger than 545, today's death toll among US service members. As for the wounded . . .

2) So, back in the 1960s, there was this guy, Johnson. He wanted or felt obligated to fight a major land war in Southeast Asia but needed to keep the apparent costs as low as possible to preserve his domestic spending goals. So he printed more money to pay for it all. This time around, it looks like the cost being controlled is people - highly visible soldiers, dead and living. The contracting system exists to keep the troop count as low as possible, and keep the official casualties as low as possible. Once again, the government gives us accounting shenanigans to put Enron to shame, this time in blood more than treasure. (Not that there isn't plenty of that under the table.)

3) Libertarians at least long since got over assuming that mere "privatization" was necessarily a boon. There's a big difference between privatizing a railroad and privatizing an army. Privatize a railroad and it survives by wooing enough of a diverse transportation market to make money - it has to provide better value than competing ways of getting from place to place to many ordinary consumers. Privatize parking enforcement or an army and you have something else entirely. The company has a single customer, the government, and all manner of ways to keep the money rolling in that don't involve providing value for the money - influence peddling in all its forms.The first type of privatization serves the free market; the second, what goes by the trade name State Capitalism. And when the government privatizes one of its coercive functions, the incentives can be positively perverse.

4) I Got Your Revolutionary War Syndrome for You, Right Here! Folks, the United States of America, your country and mine, employs mercenaries. Let me ask this one more time: Is this really the kind of country you want?

Our Kind - Will Wilkinson considers that business about liberalism, education and academic bias, drawing on his own experience as a TA:

When I was TAing for Intro to Phil, and we were doing theism vs. atheism, it was all I could do to not make faces of exasperation and disapproval at the nuttily religious students.

There's plenty more. ("But if they really admitted how systematically shabbily and disrespectfully non-left students are treated, they know they'd have to change. I don't much blame them. But they know..")

My Little Blogosphere is Growing Up - Having started this site in the relatively early days of political blogging, I've found striking parallels in the growth of comics blogging. Neilalien's long and substantial caution against groupthink itself echoes things written back in the warblogging day.

But that doesn't mean it isn't important. Neilalien's concern is worth heeding. I'll only ever be a peripheral figure in comics blogging (another parallel!) because I have neither the time nor the inclination to be a completist about what I cover. But I should have said, anent the promises and perils of manga, that Brian Hibbs didn't sound all that stupid on the subject to me. I don't think manga is a mere fad, but the way publishers are jumping into it, it certainly looks like 2004 is a strong candidate for a bubble year. Bubbles don't just happen in markets and industries that are pure hype. Remember the dotcom bust? Sure you do. But your life is radically different than it was in, say, 1996 because of the internet, isn't it? Remember the days when you had to ask people for directions instead of plugging their addresses into Mapquest? Remember when figuring out who wrote a fondly-recollected song meant asking around until you found someone who knew? Remember a kajillion other things you did not do the way you do them now? That internet - there was something to it.

So even though manga has a loyal audience of readers, and even though it will probably still have readers after any bubble collapses, and even though we're probably just at the beginning of the bubble rather than its height, it will still be possible for careless vendors to lose tons of money selling manga over the next couple of years if they're not careful. I know a game store manager who will tell you that "Pokemon bought my house." I know that there are more game store managers who got stuck with too much stock once Pokemon was "over." The danger lurks for any lightly-capitalized business that tries to chase a rapidly-expanding but elastic market. I didn't see anything in Brian Hibbs original article that said anything more outrageous than that.

I would quibble with Hibbs on one thing: he points out that he doesn't have the expertise in-house to buy manga smartly. It seems at least possible that it would be worth his while to acquire that expertise. If he can't support the additional headcount now, then put it on the qualifications list for his next replacement hire. Even here it's worth admitting that my advice on that point is not so uncomplicated either. Hiring a manga expert means finding someone who will do merchandising on a retail clerk's salary. Almost certainly, Hibbs has to take a manga fan and teach her category management skills. But there's more to it than that. I don't know if you've noticed, but fans can be . . . fannish. They really like what they like, and often they disdain what they don't. We already don't lack for horror stories about store clerks dissing customer purchases, a cardinal retailing sin but one to which a hobbyist channel is especially prone. Manga is, as its enthusiasts never cease to point out, a very broad medium. Your manga "expert" could do your store more damage than not having one at all if you choose wrongly. So Hibbs needs someone young (aka cheap), knowledgeable, aware of and interested in what other manga fans enjoy, and trainable - someone with a head for figures and a grip on her own enthusiasms. Then, when she goes off to college next fall, he needs another one.

Speaking as a former bookseller, yeah, I'd try to find that young lady. But I wouldn't kid myself that it would be a cinch to do so.

Now just to avoid groupthink from the other end, I'll remind Neilalien that at least some comics bloggers have retail experience themselves. I think Shawn Fumo works in a bookstore, for instance. Absolutely, even my dozen years of chain store management do not equate to someone like Brian Hibbs or James Sime's long experience of running their own businesses, but some bloggers draw on at least a little relevant experience. I've probably been the biggest stick in the mud about manga's potential for renewing the field, while Shawn is one of its biggest enthusiasts. So even the retailer vote is split.

Anyway, the good news about groupthink is that as a blogosphere grows it becomes - many groupthinks! We have that to look forward to.

Conspiracy Theory - Speaking of Justin Raimondo's column today, the end of it suggests that Ralph Nader's decision to run for President may be more subtle than many Democrats who blame Nader for costing Al Gore the 2000 election think:

But if I were the Democrats, I wouldn't worry too much. For some reason, Nader has refused to run on the Green Party ticket, like the last two times: instead, he's launching an "independent" campaign, which means he has to petition to get on the ballot in all 50 states. This decision seems inexplicable, except when you really examine it . . .

In his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," Nader made it clear that he understands the huge obstacles put in front of insurgent candidates who challenge the bipartisan monopoly on the American electoral process. Surely he understands that he won't get on the ballot in more than 15 states at the most.

The ABB-ers point to Florida, where, they aver, Nader made the crucial difference: but the draconian ballot access laws in that state require 93,000 valid signatures on a petition to get an independent or third party candidate on the ballot. California, a Nader stronghold, requires a similarly formidable effort.

It is more than likely that Nader won't even be on the ballot in those two key states, and will be similarly absent from many others - and, while he can be counted on to make a big issue of this on the campaign hustings, it could be that this was the plan all along.

Could this be true? Did Nader ditch the Green Party so that he would stay off the ballot in select large battleground states? That is, has Nader deliberately structured his 2004 campaign so as to avoid costing the Dems any states? Because remember, it doesn't matter how many votes Ralph Nader gets nationally. It only matters how many votes he gets in states that are otherwise tossups.

Maybe this is why Nader is telling Democrats to "relax" about his newest run. Nader may even intend to do the Dems a favor. He attacks Bush while making Edwards or Kerry look "moderate." At the same time he exerts a certain sinister pull (hey! it just means "left!") not just on the campaign rhetoric but on the Democratic Party. That is, it may look, in his mind, like a left-liberal win-win.

Easy way to disconfirm this theory will be if he succeeds in getting ballot access in Florida and states like it (elector-rich and narrowly-divided). Other metrics will be murkier.

Tangled Web - The Iraqi Interim Governing Council says it can't make a deal on continued US basing rights in the country before sovereignty is handed over, according to Dexter Filkins in the New York Times. Not that we are worried:

Simply put, no Iraqi government could survive without the American forces, according to American commanders.

Isn't it great having wards?

Speaking of which, confirming the Unqualified Offerings theory that Justin Raimondo's columns' value varies inversely as the incidence of the I-word, today's I-word-free column is excellent on the "great having wards" theme, and that lovable scamp, Ahmed Chalabi, Hero in Error.

And on the Your Tax Dollars at Work front:

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.

according to a report in the Miami Herald. Also, the INC has announced that it is changing its name to the Iranian National Congress.

Anthraxblogging - The Hartford Courant sys the FBI may have a new target in the Anthrax probe.

Gaudy Morning After - Check out the shoes that Alison Krauss will wear to the Oscars. I want to declare my complete approval: it means that Krauss hasn't fallen into any bogus "authenticity" traps. I forget who it was who said that "country" authenticity was crap because any self-respecting real country gal, e.g. Dolly Parton, would wear two-million dollar shoes in a heartbeat.

In more directly relevant news, additional fallout from the "Tim O'Neil controversy" continues to flake down from the comics-blogging skies. Do not miss Sean Collins. Commencement:

In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. We watched it, we enjoyed it, and that's no surprise. And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous "Vertigo Shot"--that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie's paralyzing fear of heights.

Dave Fiore talks about genre, and Rose Curtin of Peiratikos distinguishes metaphor and allegory.

See also Forager 23 and Dave Intermittent, who tackles another angle I left aside, Tim's questionable assertion that only the original creators of a character can really do vital work on that character.

Gaudy Night - Note: The following post ended up much longer than I imagined it would and I don't have time to make it shorter. If you always skip the comics items, even the ones with political substance to them, you can skip down to here for another long item bashing liberals, and below that, a short one bitching about the war. This was "cover all bases day." Now then, on with the Fanboy's Note:

Picked up The Comics Journal 258 this week, because it's the special Steve Ditko issue and I wanted to better appreciate his career, most of which I know only through writing about his career.

Anyway, Tim O'Neil had a review of Grant Morrison's The Filth in the same issue, in which he spent surprising amount of review space lamenting that anyone talented would work on superhero comics, calling superheroes "inherently uninteresting." Dave Fiore had the same "says you!" reaction that I did, and contacted Tim. Tim generously expanded on his remarks in the review, leading me to two conclusions:

1) Says you! again;
2) Tim really is the natural successor to Dirk Deppey!

Teasing out the principles from the pragmatisms of Tim's argument is difficult work. For instance, at one point, he complains about the conclusion to Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, an acclaimed series for DC's Vertigo imprint. But his own text makes it clear that this was early in Morrison's career and he simply hadn't fully matured as a writer yet, so the fact that the misstep took place in a superhero title seems beside the point. I can't even remember how Craig Thompson's graphic memoir Blankets ends, but that has everything to do with Thompson's own immaturity as a writer and nothing to do with the validity of the art comic per se.

The pragmatisms are familiar enough and have considerable truth to them - all the stuff you know about the economics of the field and the pressures of periodical publication. But Tim goes beyond the practicalities. He claims that superhero comics are inherently uninteresting.

From my point of view, Tim has a deficient sense of play. As I read his item, it reveals that he is only comfortable with either something he thinks of as realism, or a particular kind of mixture of realism and fantasy that he believes the superhero story cannot attain:

Because the thing that gets to me about superheroes is that, ultimately, they're just inherently stupid. You can hem and haw all day about their metaphorical underpinnings but at the end of the day they’re too detached from reality to really say anything significant. People don't dress in funny costumes and run around on rooftops beating each other up - they don't gain superpowers and devote themselves to the common good - they don't form clubs and societies to combat evil scientists and giant purple starfish. None of these things (especially the damn purple starfishes) have any bearing or relation to reality as we know it.

The best science-fiction and fantasy stories can approach the most bizarre and unbelievable situations and imbue them with plausibility through psychological depth. Failing that (as is the case with Tolkien) writers can suspend disbelief by creating a plausible alternative to conventional psychological and societal mechanisms. Superheroes just don't work when you look at them too closely because they supposedly inhabit a world very similar to our own. The only reason the stories work at all at this point is through the virtue of a Byzantine series of genre conventions, ossified and hardened by generations of recycling, and increasingly incoherent to the uninitiated.

This strikes me as wrong at nearly every turn, though I'll grant the fact of ossified conventions. (I just think the stories work despite those conventions as much as because of them.) Two passages in the excerpt strike me as key. First the conflation of "science-fiction and fantasy," and the argument that both types of stories "work" the same way. Fantasy, at least, works (usually) by externalizing what are in our world internal conflicts, or by personifying abstract principles: making characters of ideas. Science fiction can do this too, but needn't. While science fiction and fantasy are shelved together in bookstores, the imperatives, opportunities and pleasures of the two genres overlap only - they are not everywhere the same.

The superhero story is a sub-genre of fantasy. Tim seems stuck trying to fit it into SF instead, noticing that it doesn't fit and concluding that it must be a bad part, not seeming to see the distinction between the setting where it doesn't fit (SF) and the setting where it does (fantasy).

Now maybe externalizing internal conflicts and personifying abstract principles are things Tim had in mind as "a plausible alternative to conventional psychological and societal mechanisms," but I get the impression that he was thinking more of alien psychology and sociology. Thus his subsequent objection that superheroes "supposedly inhabit a world very similar to our own." That is, they inhabit a world whose psychology and sociology are not, theoretically, alien. Again, this is only a problem if you draw the false equation fantasy = science fiction.

Thesis: science fiction must use the methods of naturalism; fantasy may use the methods of expressionism.

But there's another problem with the excerpt, Tim's objection that "People don't dress in funny costumes and run around on rooftops beating each other up - they don't gain superpowers and devote themselves to the common good - they don't form clubs and societies to combat evil scientists and giant purple starfish." No. And we don't have faster-than-light spacedrives either (dammit!). But what if we did, we sometimes ask? What would that mean? Not just the interesting but hardly cosmic question of what it would do to the future history of our world, but it also invites the question of what life would mean in the context of FTL travel. What would it do or not do to one's understanding of one's own and other people's personhood?

Well who the hell cares, right? In the Real World (where nobody forms clubs and societies to combat giant purple starfish), we don't have FTL flight, so what difference could it possibly make? The less important answer is, we might get it, and speculative fiction might give us fair warning of the existential dislocations to come. The more important answer is that understanding how our sense of meaning might change may provide a perspective on how it already is. The reason this is a more important answer is that science fiction has a terrible record of predicting technological innovation.

People don't gain superpowers and fight each other on rooftops. (Some very few of them do dress in costume and combat "evil." It's a big planet.) But the first point is merely tautological: people don't gain superpowers because people don't gain superpowers. On our current understanding of science, just about any superpower you can name is exactly as impossible as faster-than-light travel, which is to say, entirely. If our understanding changes such that physical law allows FTL travel after all, it won't change the fact that hundreds of shelf-yards of stories about FTL travel were written when it was flat-out, absolutely impossible according to "the real world."

"Gaining superpowers" is not more absurd, scientifically, than faster-than-light travel. It is as legitimate an object of fictional speculation. So one question is, if people gained superpowers, would anybody dress up in costumes and fight on rooftops, devote themselves to the common good or try to take over the world?

I can't see why the hell they wouldn't.

Here's a core truth I've noticed about the Real World. Maybe Tim has too: people are as outlandish as they can afford to be. No, not everyone. Not even most people, most of the time. But did you watch the Super Bowl halftime show? Seen Croc Files? Made a casual study of rapper aliases and street gang names? Noticed the proliferation of volunteer fire departments and neighborhood watch groups? Browsed the latest fashions on the runways of Milan? Hear about the guy with the beard in Central Asia behind some globe-spanning conspiracy to restore the glories of "The Caliphate" with himself at the head?

We are one outrageous fucking planet. If some of us could fly or shoot rays from our hands, I wouldn't put anything past us.

So we can't even rule out the viability of the superhero story as science fiction. We might suspect that most people with these awesome powers would keep it to themselves, or find some legal way to turn them to their advantage or, if too dull-witted to manage that, use them for illegal gain. But the world does not lack for do-gooders or busy-bodies (take your pick) as it is. A world of superpowes wouldn't either. And you tell those stories for the same reasons you tell the ones about outer space and FTL drives - to reflect back on the world we know.

As it happens, the science-fictional approach is what has been done to death the last twenty years. The Authority and Stormwatch scribbled in the margins of Alan Moore's Miracleman stories, and that was your political SF. X-Force played variations on Peter Parker's early career as a professional wrestler, and that was your social SF. We've had quite a lot of examination of how superheroes would interact with existing political structures and current celebrity culture, a lot of it quite good.

Me, I'm over that stuff. That doesn't mean someone won't find something else to do with the naturalistic, science-fictional approach to the superhero story. But because of my personal boredom, I currently consider it a trap. Because by the logic of science fiction, you must deal with the question of how the existence of superpowered people would affect the world. "Realistically," you can't escape dealing with these topics. Science fiction demands that the world of the story be "plausible," or at least as recognizably implausible as our own.

But that's not what interests me about superheroes right now. I'm interested in the superhero story as a way to address a set of ethical conundra that exists irrespective of sociopolitical impacts. (The Bendis run on Daredevil, by sticking to a more intimate scale than other naturalistic superhero comics, has managed to do both at once.) I want to get past the science fiction and into the fantasy - the externalization and personification I talked about above. And I don't want to bother with what the UN does about it. That story's been told. (And retold.) That's not to say I want to dispense with psychological complexity or political complexity as values. Not at all. I want to shift the focus from the culture at large (media, government, commerce) to the culture writ small (these folks over here). The step over the business about the UN and Entertainment tonight is as much fantasy as the step into powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men in the first place. But it's a step worth taking.

Unless you're just not into that sort of thing.

(Postscript: A Rose Curtin blog item and her comments on same are very much worth your time. From a comment: "[Superheroes are] perfect metaphors for a lot of things, which I find so fascinating. I think it's that lack of specificity, lack of groundedness that lets people make whatever identifications they want. It really has to do with any kind of devotion or single-mindedness or dedication, I think. Or leaders or people working in groups or corporate drones, even . . . ")

When All the Time There's This Great Plank in Your Own - Matthew Yglesias picked up on a Volokh thread about whether stupid people are conservative, smart people are liberal and, one presumes, people of average intelligence are moderates, and writes

This is all well-and-good, but the fact remains that people with a lot of schooling really do tend to be liberals.

It seems like just last month liberal bloggers were proclaiming the left wing bias of academia a myth. (See Kevin Drum and Jesse Taylor and letters from Kevin and Chad Orzel to me.) Oh wait. It was just last month. Now Matt is gently suggesting that there's something to this education makes you liberal stuff after all. ("Indeed, the right normally lauds this fact," Matt continues, "liberalism is for wussy 'intellectuals' and 'special interest groups' (i.e., black people) while regular (white) people vote Republican."

Anyway, don't worry about me. I can keep up.

What may be happening here is a familiar phenomenon: "progressives" tend to forget what they know about perceived self-interest, and class interest, when it comes time to explain themselves. If you see higher education as not just a system of transmitting wisdom but a process of reinforcing a set of values and a sense of identity, the "liberalism" of the highly-schooled seems easy enough to explain. Modern liberalism as it has evolved from the Progressive Movement period forward is an ideology of managerialism. Unruly society needs guidance to overcome the "short-sighted" perspectives of economic actors and citizens. American managerialist liberalism abjures absolute control over the totality of daily life, at least in theory, but still believes that there needs to be "someone at the wheel."

In some ways, the liberal managerialist vision may be even more attractive than the Leninist one to intellectuals, and this may have as much to do with its outlasting Leninism as the fact that the American-liberal version of Vanguard Theory is more in touch with reality than outright socialism proved to be. Under communism, the ruling class has to do even the scut work of planning - running the factories, deciding where every box of pencils gets shipped and so on. In American managerialism, aka liberalism, the Vanguard only has to do the cool jobs. The boring stuff (to your Kennedy School type) is outsourced to Republicans, Chamber of Commerce types who get a long leash but still must, when the government speaks, obey.

Plus, in the managerial-liberal state, the managerialist has the additional frisson of knowing how tough his job is. She or he does not have the socialist's conviction that of course an entire political economy can be guided from above by a sure hand. Rather, she or he has some sense that society is as massive and complex as a rodeo animal (the metaphor probably isn't the one that comes to her mind), as inertial as a tractor-trailer. The managerialist doesn't imagine that she can rewire the guts of the bronco - it will still be what it is - but judicious pressure should suffice to prevent it careering into the rails and keep it pointed in the right direction.

What is the "right direction" is subject to change, of course, and guess who decides.

Anyway, the last three paragraphs are a detour from what I set out to write, a bit of off the cuff speculation. Getting back the the idea of "someone at the wheel," the central metaphor for the welfare state, the point is simply that there is no shortage of willing hands, One way to look at it is that since managing a society is conceived as an intricate undertaking, naturally it is seen as requiring specialized training. That means the willing hands will be in school for awhile. The managerial class is large. It includes not just elected and appointed officialdom, but the class of civil servants and, around them, the advocacy groups and journals of opinion. The longer anyone spends in post-secondary education, particularly in the departments dedicated to training "the leaders of tomorrow" - political science, administration, education and the other humanities departments that even Chad Orzel's letter concedes skew left politically - the more likely they are to know, like and identify with the trainees. Shared circumstance becomes shared values - that would seem to be the very meaning of class consciousness.

Matt is a great guy. I get to see him every couple of months, on average, at blog-related gatherings, and I always look forward to it. He makes relatively little money and lives on a dodgy block. But because of his job with the American Prospect and the connections there and from Harvard, Matt is a junior member in good standing of the managerial class, and one with a bright future ahead of him because of his talent and energy. Because Matt is a great guy, people that know people like him are unlikely to find the type inherently frightening or alien. People that don't know a lot of Matts - country people, business people, people who majored in other subjects, you name it - are more likely to see the managerial class purely in terms of the power it wields, to regard it as the bronco regards the rider.

This has everything to do with why the white working class is not as reliably liberal as liberals think it should be.

But there's another way of looking at it too. I follow Matt's philosophy posts as best I can, and his point about the unpopularity of consequentialism among philosophers has relevance:

[C]onsequentialism suffers from a fatal flaw as a moral philosophy. Namely, it doesn't lend itself to the construction of normative philosophical ethical or political theories, since it implies that you ought to be asking an economist or a sociologist or a political scientist what to do and not a philosopher. Thus, folks who study philosophy and become convinced that consequentialism is correct are not likely to make careers for themselves as moral philosophers. They'll either do work in metaphysics, epistemology, etc. or else not do philosophy at all, leaving the moral philosophy jobs to be taken by sundry Kantians or Williams/Nussbaum-style mysterians. Something similar could be said about philosophy of mind and identity theory.

Turning this around, we can see that departments of political science and public administration will be happiest with a world view that maximizes the amount of politics and bureaucracy. Conservatism figures we already know how society should be run. Conservatives don't need managers, they need police. Libertarians figure society can largely run itself. Libertarians need all kinds of things, but not a lot of politicians or civil servants. Liberalism's two rivals lose by default.

The other class interest angle is revenge, but I've written about that before.

Incubator Tales II - I've been wondering for a year and a half what the successor would be to the famous "testimony" of "Nayirah" before Gulf War Phase I, about how Iraqi troops were dumping premature babies on the floor of Kuwaiti hospitals so they could ship the incubators back to Iraq, which turned out to be a concoction of the fabulists at Hill and Knowlton. Brendan O'Neill suggests in a new Spectator article that the "story" (the word takes on new meaning) that Saddam fed his political opponents into shredders is a strong candidate.

Saddan Hussein tortured and executed his enemies regardless, but that doesn't mean the shredder fable "doesn't matter." If it didn't matter, they wouldn't have made it up. The world is full of leaders who torture and execute their political opponents. The purpose of the shredder tale was to provoke an emotional reaction unique to just one of those leaders, and get citizens to put their emotions in the place proper to their intellects.