WELL: I think last night was unofficially under the Chatham House Rule, or else it was entirely off the record, but let it suffice to say that I now have a pretty good idea what grad students do with their free time.

LINK: Sometimes the small, elegant touches are the best ones--I just noticed the exit symbol at Harry's Place. Very nice.

FOLLOW-UP TO THE BELOW: And if you really wanted to put the screws to JK, you'd ask the following:

Counterfactually, suppose that the war with Afghanistan was preceded by the sort of international trouble which preceded the war with Iraq, but all other facts of the case remain true. Do you still invade?

WELL: I feel a little bit better having seen some negative-ish reactions from other people Yglesias and Jarvis), so I feel all right pointing out the three big openings JK gave to Bush last night:

1. JK went after more than a few members of the Bush administration before declaring that negative politics was bad and he'd play no part in it. Bush can either: 1. come out and vigorously defend said figures as his friends and fellow public servants or 2. point out the irony of saying you want to stay positive after going negative, or of speaking about how you'll bring people together, provided they are not now Vice President, Sec. of Defense, etc.

2. He proposed lots of new-ish sounding programs, and tax cuts, and somehow thinks this will all work out happily. You can write the script on this one.

3. There was a lot of emphasis in the foreign policy parts on pragmatic details, like strengthening alliances, and an insistance on not submitting f.p. for the approval of others. Three weaknesses:

a. he seemed to do a good job being a little, um, insensitive to current allies (where's the love for Great Britain, I ask you? to say nothing of what Poland, etc, must mean to him), as well as nations we're not currently hostile with (Saudi Arabia). Bush can point out, rightly, that pissing all over your current allies is not much of a way to make things better.

b. he seemed a little vague on specific current non-Iraq hotspots, little countries like North Korea, Syria, Iran, and the Sudan. I'd love to see the Kerry plan for dealing with any one of these, and I imagine Bush would, too.

c. There was a lot of high-flown rhetoric about exporting American values abroad, which will at some point allow Bush to ask whether or not creating a successful democracy in Iraq would be worth the war there. He says no, and that high-flown rhetoric begins to look a little bit more empty. He says yes, and you sort of have a vindication of Bush's policy.

QUOTE: Easily the single most effective argument Bush has offered in awhile, and a notable weakness of Kerry's. Here's to hoping he exploits it for everything it's worth:

"Over the next four years we will continue to defend our homeland, we'll continue to defeat the terrorists abroad. Yet, in the long run, our safety requires something more. We must work to change the conditions that give rise to terror in the Middle East: the poverty, and the hopelessness, and the resentments that terrorists too often exploit.

Life in that region will be far more hopeful and peaceful when men and women can choose their own leaders, when the people can decide their own future. A free and peaceful Iraq, a free and peaceful Afghanistan will be powerful examples to their neighbors. Free countries do not export terror. Free countries do not stifle the dreams of their citizens. By serving the ideal of liberty, we are bringing hope to others, and that makes America more secure.

By serving the ideal of liberty, we also serve the deepest ideals of our country. Freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world."

LINK: Crooked Timber invites us to discuss the implications of the following from Trotsky:

"Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals."

Well, it seems like (from context) Trotsky's talking about how a set of domestic policies which were mostly about trying to consolidate power over internal opposition required the Stalinists to abandon a principled foreign policy in favor of a point-by-point manipulation of friendly elements overseas in order to further consolidate their power internally.

In other words, a fine description of the Democratic Party.

QUESTION: So last night John Edwards said about terrorists: "we will destroy you," which was generally taken to be a sign that he and Kerry would be tough on terrorism. If Cheney (or Bush) had said it, it'd be interpreted as another sign of their reckless cowboy mentality, right?

WELL: Just in case you were wondering what was up with yesterday's posts, I have a more or less instinctive reaction to get snarky at whoever is annoying me at the moment, and yesterday, those people were the Democratic Party. You might see more of the same tomorrow.

QUOTE: Chris Lawrence:

"Yesterday in Ann Arbor was cold, rainy, and dreary—to the extent I actually had to switch on the heat in my apartment last night, lest I freeze to death (good thing I decided to have the gas switched on after all). Today, on the other hand, it’s around 80° and sunny, and supposed to stay in the 80s through the next week or so. Weird."

What Chris doesn't know is that this is the relatively stable portion of the year, weather-wise. In spring and fall, 40-degree shifts are, if not common, then common enough that no one notices them*. We just check the weather a lot more (one of the many reasons I'm happy to be moving to a more stable climate).

*I think my archetypal Michigan weather story is the day I went to class this winter where I bundled up as normal, went to class and returned as normal, and turned on the TV when home, only to discover that the temperature was hovering around 0, and every school in the area (even the Ann Arbor schools, which never close) was closed for the day. We just don't really notice these things after a while.

QUOTE: OGIW (who's in Boston right now) and I, first thing this morning:

OGIW: I was on the floor last night!
Me: had too much to drink, huh?

WHICH IS WHY I WON'T BE VOTING FOR THEM FOR PRESIDENT: David Adensik:

"I'd go one step further: It's extremely disappointing to see Democrats talk only about alliances and multilateralism while completely ignoring the imperatives of democracy and human rights. The Democrats used to be the party of the idealists, but now their claim is tenuous at best."

QUESTION: Is there any claim that political candidates make that's more disingenuous than claiming they can create new jobs*?

Also, what the heck is wrong with John Edwards' voice?

*Unless you're FDR, and you're literally having the government create jobs.

QUOTE: Sara Butler:

"My peers, to the extent that they do think about their future as mothers (I'm 22), know that the tension between work and family will eventually be a big issue for them, a much bigger issue than for their husbands. Some of them think it's unfair and some think it's the way things are supposed to be, but all of them seem to reach for absolute answers: being a working mom will either have no affect on one's children or be the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, staying home is either completely unimportant or totally necessary. Flanagan admits that at one time she felt the latter, and I think this piece is in many ways just a description of the things that lead to her believe there isn't, unfortunately, an easy answer, just plenty of "grinding anxiety and regret." If working is something that many women do for themselves, that doesn't have to mean it's selfish, but neither does it mean it's the most important thing you do just because it's self-expressive or what have you."

LINK: Dan Drezner discusses the Democrats' tendency to exploit African-Americans in their convention speechmaking, as part of a discussion of Barack Obama's speech last night.

I also read the speech, which was exactly the sort of post-Reagan and Clinton lovefest you'd expect:

1. Something upbeat and personal
2. A homespun anecdote about parents/grandparents etc, preferably happy and involving working to achieve their dreams
3. A reference to presumably real people the speaker has met at some point, to show he's in touch with the common people and actually pays attention when people talk to him.
4. A veiled reference to how the other side is pure evil (my fav from Barack: "And out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.")
5. An insistence that, really and truly, electing him and his side will result is puppies running through fields and rainbows and feeling like you're a kid again.

(repeat as needed)

QUOTE: David Adensik:

"ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO REPRINT: Here are some of the fascinating stories that the NYT has brought us over the past two days.  While you're reading them, ask yourself one question: How many of these stories would be exactly the same if they were printed two weeks ago or two weeks now? 

My answer: None of them.  But go ahead and judge for yourself:

1. Democrats resent George Bush

2. Democrats really wish Al Gore had won in 2000

3. Democrats still love Bill & Hillary

4. John Kerry always wants to talk about Vietnam

5. Teresa Heinz Kerry refuses to shut up

6. John Edwards may not have enough experience

7. The most important issue in this election will be national security

8. And finally: Have you heard about this new guy Barack Obama?  He's black!"

LINK: Norm does a nice little discussion of the Hitch on F9/11. I happened to have a similar conversation last night with a good friend of mine, who brought out the "it's okay that it's biased, because it's meant to counter the dominant bias the other way." This, of course, prompted me to ask why, given the valid critical but evenhanded points which could be made, it was at all necessary to be biased. She was of the opinion that Americans wouldn't necessarily recognize the truth if they saw it, or not be able to differentiate the reality from the bias.

That's good old-fashioned liberal bias for you, right there: the American people can't figure things out on their own, they need to be appropriately (and, sometimes regrettably) cajoled and manipulated to end up with the right opinions.

THE RAT CHOICERS AND QUANTS WHO HAVE DESCENDED UPON MY NEIGHBORHOOD: have reminded me that if any of said quants or other Dukies in the area were interested in, say, getting a pitcher of sangria from Dominick's at some time later on this week, they could drop me a line at my duke e-mail address (nrt at youknowhatsit.edu) and I'd probably respond in a timely-ish manner.

WELL: I came across this bit in the Montaigne I quote somewhere below:

"'What ought I to choose?'--'Anything you wish, so long as you choose something!' A daft enough reply! Yet it seems to be one reached by every kind of dogmatism which refuses us the right not to know what we do not know."

What I thought when I read this was the similarity it has to what is often said about voting--"make sure you vote, doesn't matter who for, just so long as you vote." Now Montaigne is playing devil's advocate in this particular passage (he's supporting Pyrrhonism as a philosophical doctrine if one refuses to believe in God), but his essential point is that when looking for explanations physical and metaphysical about the world around us, it makes no sense to cling to a position just so that you have a position to defend.

Similarly, it seems to me, with politics. If you think that which parties, candidates and propositions you support will actually make a difference in what ends up happening in government (and well you should, if you want to take politics seriously), then contending that taking any old position will somehow be beneficial to the process is silly. It's far better, if you have no opinion on a contest, to take no position at all on it; or, at least, this will give a marginally more rational final result.

I do wonder whether GOTV efforts rely on a similar scheme, only they advocate that people who have no position themselves take up a certain position. Then again, I imagine the people who are brought to the polls by GOTV are people who have positions but wouldn't be (otherwise) voting for other reasons. Then again, I'm not an Americanist, so I couldn't say for certain.

LINK: Reading this discussion by norm of the argument that since Iraq was not, at the moment of invasion, in humanitarian crisis, invasion on humanitarian principles wouldn't fly, I was reminded to the preface Hannah Arendt added to The Origins of Totalitarianism in the 1950s, arguing that the relative relaxation of the gulag under Khrushchev was a definitive sign of a thaw in totalitarian behavior; neither argument holds up particularly well to scrutiny if you want to the terms involved to keep relevant meanings. Me likey:

"For you have to grasp the full secret of this kind of argument - the argument that military intervention in Iraq might have been justified at some earlier point, but not any longer since the killing had 'ebbed' - and this secret is that the great majority of the victims are already dead. I can improve on that, actually. All of the victims of murder, whether of mass slaughter or serial individual butchery, are already dead. And some that aren't, soon will be already dead. It doesn't take very long to kill a human being; and it doesn't take very long to kill thousands upon thousands of them. In Rwanda, going on a million were done to death in a matter of months. If you discount the already dead from your calculation of the morality of a given regime change, a given humanitarian intervention, you thereby put a value of next to nothing on anyone who is still alive, but menaced with the proximate threat of being killed. For there's only a fleeting few moments between being alive and being violently dead, and once people are dead (the way the world works), they're immediately dead already. If their lives, once taken, are worth nothing to the moral case, then the lives of others yet to be taken aren't going to be worth very much."

LINK: Heh:

"Jonathan Freedland makes some very valid points in his Guardian piece today but in the midst is this:

More than a million Britons took to the streets to oppose the war. Of course, governments should not bend to every public whim. But when close to a majority of the country reaches a settled will on a matter of great import, that surely shouldn't be ignored. Yet the war went ahead anyway, endorsed by a large majority in the House of Commons. Whatever your views on the Iraq question, this surely amounted to a democratic failure: the system did not fully reflect the views of the people it is meant to represent.

To which blogger Laban Tall replies: Apparently a large majority in the House of Commons amounts to 'democratic failure'. I think it's called representative democracy, Jonathan - we've had it for some years now.

Well, I think Freedland might actually have had a point if a large majority of the country was against war. The Spanish election showed what happens to a government when 70-80% of a country opposed the war but the government went ahead with supporting it anyway.

But as Freedland himself admits, in Britain, the Stopper position was backed by only close to a majority of the country. Close to a majority being presumably, slightly less than a majority.

Or in other words, a slight minority."

LINK: Interesting post by Harry at Harry's Place on what 10 years of Blair have meant for the the left in Britain. I find the dual contentions that Blair can easily attack the left as being a kind of force for small-c conservatism and the general failure of leftist criticisms of Blair to seriously affect him to have some parallels to America: I certainly find it easy to attack people on the left on a wide variety of issues, and I think the first fact is largely begot by the second. That is to say, if it weren't the case that so much leftism is small-minded and anti-, rather than pro- (compare vituperation of Bush to love for Kerry), it wouldn't be so easy to take shots at the Democratic Party and other further left elements.

Also, I'm a fan of the idea of 'Christian democratic centrism' in all its forms.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From Michel de Montaigne, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond:"

"The laws you cite are by-laws: you have no conception of the Law of the Univese. You are subject to limits: restrict yourself to them, not God. He is not one of your equals; he is not a fellow-citizen or a companion. He has revealed a little of himself to you, but not so as to sink down to your petty level or make himself accountable for his power to you. The human body cannot fly up to clouds--that applies to you! The sun runs his ordered course and never stops still; the boundaries of sea and land can never be confounded; water is yielding and not solid; a material body cannot pass through a solid wall; a man cannot stay alive in a furnace; his body cannot be present in heaven, on earth, and in a thousand places at once*. It is for you that he made these laws; it is you who are restricted by them. God, if he pleases, can be free from all of them: he has made Christians witnesses to that fact. And in truth, since he is omnipotent, why should he restrict the measure of his power to definite limits?"

*Oh, those crazy Catholics...

LINK: Things to miss about Europe: four channels covering the TdF live. At least I have my copies of L'Equipe with the big color photos of Lance on the cover...

WELL: So, general thoughts on the European experience:

*Frankfurt reminds me a lot of Washington DC, in that both are company towns, except the company is the European banking industry and not the American political establishment. Everyone speaks English. The Mexican food is surprisingly good.

*Flying RyanAir from FF to London was like being on the Knight Bus in Harry Potter--no assigned seating (interesting sidenote: you could tell the Americans/Britishes from the Continentals because the former were the ones who, when asked to queue up to get ready for boarding, actually got into a line; the latter were the ones moving seats out of the way and elbowing as needed to get to the front of the line), so there was a mad dash across the tarmac to get seats. Upon entering the cabin, the pilot informed us that we had five minutes left in our window to get airborne. Flight was, uh, a bumpy experience.

*Dr. Johnson was right: whoever is tired of London is tired of life.

*Note to the bartender at the Long Island Ice Tea Shop: when most people make a margarita, it has more than three shots of tequila and two ice cubes. For your future reference.

*Camille's friend Brittany gave me a very helpful hint for getting by in London: pretend all the prices are in dollars, not in pounds (you'll go mad thinking about how much everything costs otherwise). Nevertheless, it did occur to me fifteen minutes into our showing of Mean Girls in Picadilly Circus that I'd just paid 18 dollars to see the film.

*Anecdote for those who favor socialized medicine: one of Camille's dear friends, with whom we stayed, has appendicitis the week before we got there. But, since it's not immanently threatening to burst, she got put on a waiting list to have it removed. If she's lucky, she'll get to have the procedure in five months or so.

*Much love to Brittany for being a fabulous travel companion in London and Allison for personally overseeing my intoxication on the last night in London.

*Point-counterpoint: the people at Notre Dame de Paris when I visited were loud and very much into taking flash photographs of everything; at St. Paul's in London, everyone was very quiet and subdued when inside, all the moreso when services and concerts were being held. Benefit of charging a cover, I guess.

*Taking Eucharist at St. Paul's, I had a "whoa! that's not water in there!" moment.

*My complaint about the Louvre: when you have as excellent a collection as they do, you think they'd do a better job of presenting it. Two main faults I saw:

a tendency to just throw things up on the wall ('we have fifteen Titians? Eh, just put them up anywhere"), especially vexing when they were mixing Ren.-Mannerist-Baroque paintings rather freely, and the aforementioned Titians, which got pared (rather randomly) with vaguely contemporaneous English portraiture.

the terrible problem of many of the paintings being washed out by a combination of aritificial lighting and skylighting: nothing worse than only being able to see the bottom third of an Annibale Carracci.

But, then again, they had Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus, which forgives a lot of sins in my book.

*Dijon: ugly stereotype moment: I was in a restaurant, and the woman serving me asked what I wanted to drink. I asked for a Hoegaarten, as the sign for them was prominently displayed. She said she didn't understand; I thought maybe I had Englishized the name, so I tried again. She nodded, went behind the bar, and pulled out a Coca-Cola, motioning to ask me if it's what I wanted. Because, you know, I'm an American, and that's what we drink (similarly annoying was whenever I was asked if I wished to conduct a conversation in English after beginning it in French).

*That being said, the second Troesterian proverb: Elijah was fed by the ravens; I was fed by a nice old French barkeeper.

*When spending seven hours on trains yesterday to get from Dijon back to Frankfurt, in poorly ventilated cars when it was 85° or so, I was reminded of my favorite sketch from De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising:

Please listen to this simple De La style I'm gonna sing
It's strongly directed to all the misery you're bringing
Now I'm not all about dissing someone else personnel
But there's no quota on your odor
That's right, you smell
Now you might feel a little embarassed, don't take it too hard
And don't make it worse by covering it up with some Right Guard
Before you even put on your silk shirt and fat gold rope
Please take your big ass to the bathroom
And please use
(A little bit of soap....

*I think any claims to cultural superiority the Germans might wish to level against the US can be effectively turned by noting the extreme popularity of a giant dancing cockroach and purple hippo who makes lewd gestures in that country.

*Never in my life have the skills I learned from my Orienteering merit badge come in so handy: I frequently went without maps and just used landmarks to navigate. My crowning acheivement was getting back to the place Camille and I had dinner when I got to FF by remembering how we got there step by step from the one time we'd done it two weeks ago. Woot woot, as OGIW might say.

I'M BACK: Blogger is being excessively dumb and not letting me post like normal. Feh. Thoughts on Europe up in a bit.

CROWN ME KING OF THE POLI SCI DORKS or VIOLATION OF THE BLOG HIATUS NUMBER 5:

Yes, I did drop everything I was carrying to take a picture of the statue of Condorcet when strolling down the Seine.

Vacation is lovely, though all the walking is finally getting to me.

VIOLATION OF THE BLOG HIATUS #4: Lesser men (and by that, I mean "smarter men") would be tempted to view the near-Biblical deluge that appeared as I attempted to buy a voltage converter (none of them, it seems, will work for the only electricity-powered thing I'm bringing) as a bad omen for the trip to come (I head for the airport in about an hour). I am not that smart, so full speed ahead.

I leave you in the capable hands of my co-bloggers, who might actually be tempted to post something. Maybe. Probably not.

I also leave you with the following two promises:

1. The words "Vichy-loving" will come out of my mouth at least once on Bastille Day, when Camille and I will be in Paris

2. I will pioneer the use of Fraspanglish (French when I can manage it, Spanish when I forget words or phrases, English when all else fails, and in Germany). Look for the UN to adopt it as the official language of international diplomacy in a year or so.

VIOLATION OF THE BLOG HIATUS #3: Oh kids, it's that time of year again--the greatest sporting event in the world is gearing up, and it turns out that my man for this year (Joseba Beloki) is sitting the Tour out to focus on the Vuelta a Espana (loser). We're getting the same "Jan Ullrich's not going to screw it up this year" propaganda we always get*, which means it's pretty likely he'll screw it up.

Bad things about being in Europe: I won't have time to watch whole stages (5 hours or so, sometimes longer in the mountains) as I have for the past several years.

Good things about being in Europe: I have an automatic start to every conversation: how does the General Classification look today?

*OLN just compared Ullrich to the Red Sox. God bless those Canadianeses, eh?

VIOLATION OF THE BLOG HIATUS #2: Two words for you, dog: Rick Pitino

VIOLATION OF THE BLOG HIATUS #1: simply disgusting, indeed: Crooked Timberite makes what would be a specious allegation even if the substance of the post were true (have these people never heard of letters*#? Or is it the case that evangelical Christians by their very nature support violence against those who disagree with them), but much more egregiously makes the same allegation without bothering to peruse the actualy supposed offensive source in question so as to, you know, potentially verify what he's saying before going off half-cocked.

And shame, also, on the commenters, who seem to have ignored the first two comments which suggest (on the basis of having done actual research) that the post approvingly mentioned is actually, on substance, wrong (or not obviously right). But then again, it'd be a shame to get in the way of massive self-righteousness, no?

*rather like an old form of e-mail, except addressed to people's houses, and written on paper.

#and you can't claim, I don't think, that it's the mere publication of someone's address that leads automatically to the potential for violence: otherwise, the telephone book people would have a lot to answer for. You can only make that assumption if you think there's something uniquely wrong about the people involved.