LINK: In the interest of embarrassing the hell out of my friends who never read this, I found this picture of Sara Penny (under Tuesday, July 23, and on the right). The blonde hair is new to me: I've only ever seen her with black hair (including this past Thursday). Anyway, just goes to show what kind of odd stuff there is on the internet if you're bored enough to look for it.

FISKING: From responses to Dara's blog:

" I think I'm in partially the same place you are, in regards to my "morals" being internalized and conservative, rather than reasoned and liberal. The way I've decided to deal with it is to make certain that I'm exposed to the situations that I reason are right but feel are wrong. That way I can recondition myself to feel that they are at least ok.

Another thought is, if you haven't done X once, how can you know whether X is right or wrong for you..."

I see at least two huge problems with the argument presented here.

1. There are, of course, all sorts of things I don't need to do to know that they're wrong for me; to use my favorite loaded example, I don't need to kill a Jew to know that killing Jewish people is wrong (and not even just 'for me:' I'd be happy to make that a general moral rule).

2. The suggestion that you can habituate yourself into thinking that things that were wrong are now right seems to have nothing but troubling consequences, at least to me.

WELL: My last Christmas gift to y'all didn't quite pan out as I'd hoped. So instead, something else to be thankful for this Christmas.

MY CHRISTMAS GIFT TO MY FRIENDS: Sit back and watch the Republican Party self-destruct over the next month. It'll be great :o)

WELL: I find your use of quotation marks around deep to be pejorative, but that aside, point taken. After receiving so much abuse over my major from so many science/math guys, it's nice to be able to occasionally turn it around, and doubly nice when I can do so by proving that you're illiterate.

Just kidding.

And, actually, if you read it, there's a key phrase: "of that sort." Perhaps David, who can magically understand the context of any passage, can tell us what the sort of judgments Rilke is referring to. Well?

I HATE TO FLOG A DEAD HORSE, BUT:

"I don't have time to mock this fully (big math exam tomorrow), but I will tomorrow. Hey, if I write "sorry prof, but I won't let math proofs sway me. The theorems don't 'feel' right to me" on my math exam tomorrow, I wonder if I will get full credit.

To quote David Spade: "it's called reality. look into it sometime.""

I understand you're too busy with your math proofs to learn very basic things (e.g. reading in context), but your general inability to understand anything in the English language that is not the prima facie meaning is quite amusing.

To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein (from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, of course): "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." Were the words there too big for you?

Good luck on your exam, by the way (some arch-nemesis I am).

BORING SPORTS STUFF POSSIBLY ONLY DAVID WILL FIND INTERESTING: but I still care about it anyway. Oh ye gods... Getting rid of El Duque and Nick Johnson is fine, I guess, assuming that Colon can be counted on to repeat last year's performance (20-8, 2.97 ERA). But Juan Rivera? Yeah, that's a good idea: they don't have enough decent outfielders, so they might as well get rid of their most promising prospect... oy!

LINK: Just a little something humorous from me to you.

MORE ON THE EU: Will Hutton, who is hardly as much of a Euroskeptic as I am, gets a good sense of what is going wrong with the EU right now. To wit:

"Thus the accession deal essentially casts the people of Eastern Europe as second-class citizens, as they are all too bitterly aware. It will be ten years before they fully qualify for every EU programme because, given our stance, the EU's budget will not allow more - they will get only a fraction of the cash that Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal have received. The hope is after this protracted transition they will still become equals, and that in the meantime the flood of inward investment capitalising on their low wages and access to rich EU markets will boost their growth rates and living standards sufficiently to compensate....

But even if they maintain growth rate rates twice that of the West, it will still take 30 years to close the gap - 30 years before we can seriously contemplate putting in place common EU standards, processes and rules. Any hitch, though, and even that optimistic prediction would fall. In the meantime, Western Europe has to contemplate the newly-embedded inequalities with which it has to live and which it is unwilling directly to relieve - and still devise a way of driving an idea of Europe forwards.

In some respects, it would have been better to have solved this problem before accession (even delaying or phasing it), but that was politically impossible. What now has to happen is that we have to devise a way of governing a political jurisdiction with widely varying degrees of economic and social integration. The only solution, and the one to which the European constitutional convention is heading, is a really robust statement of what makes Europe distinct - a declaration of values - and which gives it common purpose despite enormous diversity. And if a member state does not want to sign up, it can and must leave."

LINK: My Thatcher paper, unfortunately, has sparked my interest in the politics behind the EU. Last week's Copenhagen summit was of great importance, and this will get you up to speed on what's going on.

LINK: TNR has, I think, the best suggestion thusfar on what Gore should do now: head the DNC. Well, he couldn't really make things worse...

LINK: There's nothing like making a non-story a story by some creative use of the English language. Generally hilarious.

QUOTE: Andrew Sullivan:

"But don't they realize that the only reason we have inspections at all is the threat of military force?"

-I think this is the germ for an argument that could respond effectively to David's posts about how the Bush administration must be kicking itself right now. But the full explanation will have to wait until after the Thatcher madness is over.

HITCHENS SPEAKS: and we all should listen

LINK: Interesting point of view

LINK: this is beautiful. Incidentally, I'd be interested in hearing David's take on the whole Trent Lott gaffe issue.

PRIMARILY FOR DAVID: This nice piece in Slate on the differing directions of Apple and Microsoft. I have to say something, though: as a life-long Mac person, who loves everything about the Mac OS, I can't stand OS X. It's impossible to use, it's slow and I have no idea where anything is. I'd actually rather use a Windows computer than OS X... what is the world coming to?

LINK: Debbie Stabenow comes close to articulating a Democratic policy on taxes. Progress!

ESSENTIAL READING: Absolutely chilling profile of Karl Rove and the Bush White House. I'm really flabbergasted and left speechless by it. Anyway, a must read if you want to talk about the state of politics in America.

LINK: Democrats have a reason to be thankful, and Republicans have a reason to worry... exactly the way it should be.

Oh, and the cause of keeping hot women (relatively speaking) in the Senate won out. Good for me, good for America!

LINK: Serious, or just depressingly accurate? Ann Coulter gets called on it.

QUOTE: From Jay Nordinger to you:

"Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York -- and about the most delightful and knowledgeable and interesting politician around -- has made his New Year?s resolutions. Wanna hear a few of them?

'I will avoid France as a place to vacation. France leads those countries in the Security Council that are the enemies of Israel. [Same goes for Mexico ' says Koch.]

I will not support National Public Radio in any way. NPR's reporters and management delight in unfairly attacking Israel.

I will not watch ABC's World News Tonight anchored by Peter Jennings. For many years, Jennings has specialized in vicious and unfair portrayals of Israel intended to injure the Jewish state and lionize Palestinians. Also, the BBC News is horrifically anti-Israel, and I will shun it completely.

Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for her outrageous assaults on Israel. I will no longer read her works.'

How you like them apples?"

LINK: You know you've been a dumbass when you're getting hammered from the hard Right about Strom Thurmond. I'm with Andrew Sullivan: replace Lott as Majority Leader! Preferrably, of course, with someone just as stupid and ideological, but an easier lightning rod for criticicism: Mitch McConnell leaps to mind...

ALRIGHT: David and I agreed wholeheartedly on something. This state of affairs simply cannot remain.

I THINK THAT THIS is the sort of thing that's typical of Democratic agenda setting right now. I got this list of goals sent to me by e-mail from one of the groups I'm loosely affiliated with:

We need our Democratic representatives in Congress to fight day in and day out for our progressive ideals. As Democrats we believe in these principles…

-Expanding economic opportunity, improving the standard of living for all Americans and improving access to skills and training.
-Establishing universal health care for every member of our society.
-Promoting social justice and using government to help those who cannot help themselves.
-Improving the quality of public education as the best means to create better opportunities for all children.
-Protecting the environment and securing our natural heritage for future generations.
-Saving Social Security and rejecting plans to peg it to risky market indicators.
-Balancing a strong national security with personal liberty.
-Holding corporations accountable for lying to employees and misleading stockholders.

What I think is exceptionally interesting about this is that none of these proposals actually means anything. Nor, for that matter, are any of them linked to actual codifiable proposals. Yes, we've decided to boldly take a stand to "help people" and "punish people who do bad things." I'm amazed Democrats did so badly last time around with ideas like these...

REPLY TO DAVID: It will shock all five of my regular readers, but I actually agree with most of what he has to say. Bush screwed himself over by only making part of the case against Iraq (though Britain put out a white paper, I believe, on Hussein's human rights abuses this past week, which might be the precursor for more significant action). But this is still only a potentiality-- no one will know for sure how things will go on the 8th, when Iraq has to hand over a list of all of its relevant WMD programs, and no one knows what might happen after that. But, in general, he did screw something else up again, and quite badly, and it might be some time before we can recover our foreign-policy bearings.

And again, he's absolutely right that Democratic officials have been too slow in pointing this all out. There are a complex of reasons for this, all of which are cynical and political-- what moron's going to go against the President when someone like Max Cleland (who lost three limbs in Vietnam, for goodness' sake) can lose when he's even nominally opposed to the President's foreign policy. Further, there's the long-standing rift in the party between Radicals (who think inspections are just a precursor to war, which they'd oppose, so they don't do anything) and DLC/Blue Dog style Democrats, who are mostly characterized nowadays by having no positions on anything.

Where David is wrong is in assuming that what the people who write for political journals, etc, don't actually make a difference. Any good student of the early-80s Conservative revivial will tell you that it happened, in part, because of places like the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Cato Institute, etc etc spent the best part of a decade doing things like writing articles on policy options that were picked up by politicians. Same deal with the 90s Conservative revivial and The Spectator and The Weekly Standard. To use a more current example: anyone familiar with Robert Reich's recent syndicated column on potential Democratic tax strategy was not at all surprised to hear John Kerry advocate that same proposal last Sunday as part of his campaign kick-off. And it's also likely that people who follow these things weren't surprised, because temporary rollbacks of payroll taxes have been kicked around in Left policy circles for the last two years.

So to answer your question (what do you do when both parties have failed?) is to elect new people who share your ideas. But for those people to win, they need to have dynamic new ideas. And you don't get them those new ideas by sitting on the sidelines complaining about how neither party is any good. You have to, you know, write in magazines and journals and try and get the better ideas out.

LINK: I pass this along without comment. I think it speaks for itself.

response to David forthcoming

I DON'T MENTION THIS FOR ANY PARTICULAR REASON: but the brilliant young man who wrote this is obviously a brilliant young man!

AND, since I've been, in the view of some, in the pocket of Bush et al when it comes to foreign policy, a brief listing of disagreements I have with the current administration: insufficient support shown to allies who want to do more fighting terrorism (Italy and Australia, in particular); lack of engagement in southeast Asia, particularly the Phillipines (aside from the Abu Sayyaf kidnapping rescue operation, which was rather spot-on); the unwillingness to make the massive investment needed for building up Afghanistan, particularly where military strength is concerned; lack of support for dissident movements opposing the Islamic state in Iran and the Yasir Arafat in Palestine; complete neglect of the significant but solvable economic and governmental crises in sub-Saharan Africa (Zimbabwe in particular); dealing with the bad guys against the pluralist secular opposition forces in the Sudan; propping up the horrifically corrupt Saudi regime; not sufficiently strengthening economic ties with Great Britain to provide a more effective counterbalance to the growing clout of the EU; neglecting the well-being of any nation to the south of us in our hemisphere (the odious legacy of Kissinger lives on, I'm afraid); and... well, I guess that's it.

FOR THOSE OF YOU: not yet of a mind on the Iraq question, a few things which might help point the way:

1. Taking Sides, Christopher Hitchens' last column for The Nation, in which he outlines the Liberal case for regime change in Iraq. Importantly, he notes, the cause has to go forward even if we're suspicious of the motivations of the people making the decisions (as we should be)

2. Of Sin, the Left and Islamic Fascism, another by the Hitch. Here, I think, he critically makes the point that our failures in foreign policy in the past obligate us all the more to push for the right things to be done today. And you get some arguments that lay the groundwork for

3. Can There Be A Decent Left?, Michael Walzer's legendary excoriation of his Liberal fellow-travelers. I think it rather effectively makes two points: 1. That Liberals can't conceive of actually holding power, and so don't formulate positions based on having to deal with complicated situations pragmatically, and 2. that there can be a Left foreign policy that isn't, as Margaret Thatcher might put it, "wet."

I recommend, additionally, everything Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul have written on the subject, and the same goes for what's-his-face at The New Republic. That's not so helpful, I guess. But here, of course, context is everything: a good Iraq policy ought to be applicable to how we deal with every other state in the world (Afghanistan, Iran and Nigeria). So the real question is, what precident do we want to set?

QUOTE: I suppose I should be used to Dan Savage saying things I agree with politically, but I'm still occasionally surprised. From the latest Savage Love:

"Confidential To George W. Bush: Ann Landers advised presidents, and now that I own her desk, I'm gonna start. So Saudi money may have financed the Sept. 11 attacks. Can we go ahead and invade Saudi Arabia now and get it over with, please? If we're serious about halting the spread of Islamo-fascism, I think we should fight the problem at its source—or sources. America's dependence on oil enriches the Saudis, who turn around and spend the money (our money!) promoting fanatical hatred of the U.S. all over the world. Here's a thought, Mr. President: Let's shit-can the tax cuts for the super-wealthy and invest the money in alternative fuels, wind and solar power, and the development of affordable electric cars.

This won't stop Islamo-fascism, of course. We're still going to have to fight these bastards; unlike some of my lefty pals, I'm all for fighting the bastards. But I don't think it makes much sense to fight Islamo-fascism and finance it at the same time."

REAL IM CONVERSATION:

notbyrondorgan: did you ever hear Mark Twain's joke about German sentences?
RoseBriarD: I don't think so
notbyrondorgan: want to hear it?
RoseBriarD: I suppose you mean read it...
notbyrondorgan: I suppose I do
RoseBriarD: well that would be fine too then
notbyrondorgan: so he's at an opera, and some people want to leave in the middle of it
notbyrondorgan: and he says "thanks, no
notbyrondorgan: I'd like to stick around for the verb"
RoseBriarD: hehehe
notbyrondorgan: not quite as good as the Benjamin Franklin pick-up line I learned last night
notbyrondorgan: but always good for a linguistics laugh
RoseBriarD: *l* yes indeed. What's the Ben Franklin one?
notbyrondorgan: most people are of the opinion there are only 10 commandments
notbyrondorgan: I believe there to be 12
notbyrondorgan: the eleventh being that we should increase and multiply
notbyrondorgan: and the twelfth being that we should love our neighbor (he was sending this in a letter to his neighbor's wife when he was in France)
notbyrondorgan: now, I am curious as to what you would think about my religiously keeping these last two
notbyrondorgan: if it should cause me to break one of the previous ten, that I should not covet my neighbor's wife
notbyrondorgan: which, I must confess, I do constantly
notbyrondorgan: ---end quote---
notbyrondorgan: I thought it was pretty smooth myself
RoseBriarD: wow, what a freakish bastard! ....*giggle*
notbyrondorgan: hehehe
notbyrondorgan: yeah
notbyrondorgan: and he was 66 when he wrote that
notbyrondorgan: writing to a 32 year-old woman, by the way
notbyrondorgan: who absolutely loved it
RoseBriarD: augh! Scary scary scary scary!!!!!!!!!
notbyrondorgan: that's the French for you
RoseBriarD: Yes. Yes, it is.
RoseBriarD: *shudder*....*giggle*....
notbyrondorgan: hehehe
RoseBriarD: I remember we just trashed Ben Franklin in my AP history class for doing this kind of stuff...but we never read what he wrote...
notbyrondorgan: oh, I've come to the conclusion he's great
RoseBriarD: ah, he was a punk
notbyrondorgan: no kidding!
notbyrondorgan: that's why he was great
notbyrondorgan: and intelligent, and smooth with the ladies
RoseBriarD: *l* well he wasn't boring, that's for sure
notbyrondorgan: sort of like an old-timey Notorious B.I.G.
notbyrondorgan: hehehe
notbyrondorgan: just kidding
RoseBriarD: *shakes head while supressing giggles because they hurt*

LINK: Michael Kinsley... is he being serious? Can anyone tell?

"Throughout the revolution of technology and globalization that has been going on for two decades, responsible mainstream commentators, pundits, analysts, and miscellaneous gasbags (including this one) have taken the view that progress is a good thing. Some people are unfortunately caught in the gears of change, but society as a whole benefits. It's not very complicated if you know a bit of economics. You've got your "invisible hand" (that's free markets), you've got your "comparative advantage" (that's free trade), you've got your "perennial gale of creative destruction" (that's competition and new technology), you've got your "can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" (that's attributed to Joseph Stalin, but never mind). The losers in this process deserve sympathy and help, but special pleading must not be allowed to thwart or slow this process.

We must distinguish, however, between special pleading and legitimate alarm about deeply troubling developments. It is one thing to sacrifice textile workers and auto workers on the altar of progress. It is quite another to start throwing journalists into the flames. And the difference is? Well, it's very different. Completely different. Couldn't be more different, quite frankly, my good madam, because … because … well, it occurs to me that I'm a journalist. This puts the whole situation in a new perspective."

LINK: TNR's Iraq Watch, which tells you everything you need to know about the world situation. And a little bit of humor, too!

"French President Jacques Chirac reportedly asked Tony Blair the following question two months ago: "How would you be able to look [your son] Leo in the eye in 20 years' time if you are the leader who helped start a war?" But the more urgent question seems to be: How much would you pay to see Chirac, for years a close and personal friend of Saddam, along with scores of French-speaking Third World kleptocrats, justify his decades of malfeasance and corruption to a room full of toddlers? Reality TV at its best: This could be a winner."

CONVERSATION OF THE WEEK:

Jack: so, is (our great-uncle? great-cousin? something like that?) Frankie police chief yet?
Me: Yup
Jack: Well, you know what that means...
Me: I can do whatever I want in St. Clair Shores?
Jack: Yup
Me: Well, so long as he's working, I suppose...