QUOTE:

"...this was 60 years ago, before Nietzsche and Heidegger became the common sense of every high schooler."

-a certain unnamed political theorist who happens to be at Duke this weekend, on Strauss' critique of historicism in Natural Right and History

QUOTE:

"True Christians are meant to be slaves."
-Rousseau, The Social Contract IV, ch. 8

...which probably explains why we don't mind representation.

More seriously, it's been interesting to me this time through the political theorist canon that I've become much, much more sympathetic to Hobbes and basically repudiated everything Rousseau stands for (his arguments are generally tests to see how many absurdities one can pile into a solitary work).

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"...and then we move on to the expletive part..."
-my stats professor. I believe he meant to say 'the exponential part,' but I find the meaning to be pretty similar either way.

THIS IS A CALL: To all the theory/IR or IR/theory people in the department who will still be taking classes next year: is anyone interested in putting together a directed reading group of early modern theory/IR writers (Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, Vattel, etc), who all nicely tread the line between theory, IR, and policy? If so, leave a comment or send me an e-mail; if I get enough support, I may suggest this to a professor...

LINK: Not to rain on Andrew Sullivan's parade with respect to Hitch's announcement of his voting intention (what do they teach people in Government at Harvard, anyway?), but Andrew's argument always seemed to me that he's supporting Kerry in order to hold Bush accountable for his failures. As I read Hitch's announcement, he's voting for Kerry to hold him accountable for his rhetoric, and to force the Democrats to get serious about international politics. I don't know if that's as much of an agreement as Sullivan seems to think it is.

LINK: I send you off to SIAW on the topic of purity and the company one keeps in politics.

LINK: Via Socialism in an Age of Waiting, I see that John Peel has died. Not being British, I'm unable to have the same fond memories of him that are appearing on British blogs, but I do remember discovering fairly early on, when I'd make the hours-long trip to Ann Arbor to visit siblings/buy albums, the involvement of John Peel in an album was always a good sign of redeeming musical value, a hard thing to guess at for certain in the pre-internet days (and before every album in a band's catalogue got reissued, and... life was difficult in the early-to-mid 90s, was it not?).

Oh, and "Teenage Kicks" is a pretty darn good song. The man had taste, it's hard to deny...

QUOTE: Eric the Unread:

"This "keeping your head down" is a particular branch of thought at the moment. To be fair, it is equally applied to those threatened by extremist Islamic terrorism, as well as Iraqis living under Saddam. As long as we keep our heads down enough, Al Qaeda won't threaten us. That is, if you are sure that you are not offending them by working in a large building in New York or other target they have decided to hit."

HEH: via Norm:

"In short [for Derrida], the notion of objective truth is incoherent, and the rule of law unjust. As Wolin points out, the first of these conclusions is itself incoherent, since it presupposes the objectivity it purports to deny. The second is typical of the postmodernist penchant for ludicrous overstatement and for striking radical postures that have no sane implications for political action. Justice, obviously enough, calls for both particularity and generality: attention to the particularity of cases, and general rules to prevent bias and special pleading. The silliness of Derrida's pronouncements on the injustice of law is nicely brought out by Wolin though the story of the philosopher's arrest in Czechoslovakia in 1981. Suddenly subject to a genuinely arbitrary decision process, Derrida found himself impelled towards the thought that humanist norms like the rule of law might have some value after all. Undaunted and with 'great lucidity', however, he rationalised this odd experience by positing a new philosophical category in which contradictory thoughts confront each other without 'intersecting': 'the intellectual baroque'."

LINK: You know, I love the Hitch as much as anyone, but he's a bit off his rocker here:

"I am assuming for now that this is a single-issue election. There is one's subjective vote, one's objective vote, and one's ironic vote. Subjectively, Bush (and Blair) deserve to be re-elected because they called the enemy by its right name and were determined to confront it. Objectively, Bush deserves to be sacked for his flabbergasting failure to prepare for such an essential confrontation. Subjectively, Kerry should be put in the pillory for his inability to hold up on principle under any kind of pressure. Objectively, his election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq."

I, too, would relish Democrats actually having to be serious and not merely snarky about foreign policy for a change (even in the Clinton era, when they at least had a vague handle on the concepts of humanitarianism and the value of democracy*, it seems to have been based off of policy triangulation, rather than principle). And certainly Bush's conversion on these issues should offer hope, but you can think of Bush perhaps as a man waiting for his cause; that is, he was uniquely well-suited to grasp the new geopolitical realities (so much of the carping over his leadership is because he himself pushed the standards of what is expected of a President in his handling of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and in Afghanistan). I don't know that one can have the same faith in Kerry, though I'm certain many do.

*Interestingly, in my IR class, we've been reading a bit of the democratization literature, and it's funny to read Democrats singing the virtues of universal democratization)

WELL: I have no idea how my housemates can do the getting-up-early-in-the-morning thing. Totally insane. I'm up this early in the morning because I had to put finishing touches on my (slightly overdue) paper on Leo Strauss and Richard Tuck for my history seminar. Boy, that Leo Strauss: even with Lenin, I can get the upshot of what he's saying on the first read. I'll also observe that I was seeking (in Natural Right and History) to find something he said that was just ridiculously unclear, I was actually pretty unsuccessful: his individual sentences all make sense: it isn't until you get up to the page level that it all becomes gibberish.

I've also composed half a poem in his honor, but I'll spare y'all from that here.

Oh, and if you want a slightly less deeply biased view of Strauss (with whom I actually agree pretty substantially on some things), you can check out the answer to question #13 here.

WELL: Apparently my umich.edu e-mail account has been shut down sometime between now and the last time I checked (a month ago?). If you sent me an e-mail to that account and didn't get a response, that's probably why. My new e-mail address can be found on this page.

HEHE: Whedon Out of Ideas (via Defamer):

"Buffy creator/fanboy Messiah Joss Whedon pulls out of his deal with 20th Century Fox TV because he has "run out of series ideas" and saying "I'm not interested in taking money that I don't earn." Did no one explain to him that the whole purpose of an overall deal is to collect paychecks from the studio while pretending to be thinking up new series ideas? The whole system is coming apart at the seams! What's next, agents acknowledging they're parasites and drowning themselves en masse in the Pacific?"

OR, PERHAPS, MOVED TO A RED STATE?: From Slate's article on whether Republicans or Democrats are nicer:

"Reflecting on the sting of being called "a******" during my travels through Blue America, I wonder: If I were truly a Bush supporter, how long would I be able to endure a life filled with epithets before I gave up on the shirt?"

WELL: Just a general question out there to my readers who have finished (or even just started) graduate education--how many classes did you take, on average, in a term? I got an interesting perspective on this earlier today, and so I'm interested in possibly getting some data and an idea of what's typically expected across programs before I launch into any grand disquisitions on the subject.

THREE THINGS I'VE BEEN THINKING OF A LOT LATELY: All the moreso after Dr. Feaver's talk on Friday night:

A. "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none, a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one."

-Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian

B. The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis:

"1. Thou shalt resist the evil one with all power; thou shalt be courageous, intelligent, and stubborn.

2. Thou shalt not spread false rumour, nor accept empty phrases, but shalt speak the truth.

3. Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it, that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment to wrong causes.

4. Thou shalt renew the life of thy soul, that civilisation may find thee ready after the fires of war.

5. Thou shalt aid in building a community that offers all of good-will a fair chance, justice, peace, and truth.

6. Thou shalt not withhold thyself from common suffering, but shalt live here with a warm heart and judge thine enemy in justice.

7. Thou shalt not be passive only, but shalt turn thy soul to the permanent risk of life.

8. Thou shalt not safeguard the purity of thy soul in pernickety ways, but shalt follow thy destiny in the great order of the world, and not withhold alliance in the fulfilment thereof.

9. Thou shalt pursue light even in the darkness, for light remains light.

10. Thou shalt realise that the basis of thy life is not "must" but "may", not "law" but "mercy"; this is thy consolation, thy creed , and thy power as a Christian Netherlander."

C. From my file of various thoughts I've collected (so I can make no assertions about the correctness of the citation):

'It is not thy part to finish the task, yet thou art not at liberty to neglect it either'.
-Rabbi Tarfon, (Talmud, Pirkei Avot 2:16)

WELL: blogger's eaten four of my posts in the last three days, just in case you're wondering why I haven't updated.

Well, there's that and my NSF proposal, which eats up virtually every waking minute I have (though I may respond to some of the objections I got to my proposal here, should I have the energy).

Otherwise, back Monday.

SCIENCE IT UP: Blogger ate no less than three of my posts yesterday, which was probably a good thing, as they were at various (high) levels of snarkiness. But to recap:

*In response to a question by one of our German exchange students, I noted that Yankees-Red Sox is much more like Real Madrid v. Man U than David v. Goliath, no matter what Sox boosters say.

*It'd be great if the department were offering intro stats; that way, I wouldn't have to answer questions like "how many raisins would you need to have on a cookie, on average, to have a 99% probability of at least one raisin per cookie?"

*I realized that my APSA online profile allows me to choose a title for myself; what's more, it's a title field, rather than a pull-down menu of options. I very nearly made myself "Grand Vizier Nicholas Troester," until someone with a lot more common sense than me suggested that might not be a good idea.

WELL: Chris Lawrence comments on people who hate polls. Scene: my American Political Thought class from two years ago. We're discussing polling and whether or not it's representitive of mass opinion; the professor asks if anyone thinks it is. No one volunteers to stick up for polls. Quoth the professor: "You guys go to Michigan... how can you not trust polls?"

I guess we were just too smart for that.

YET ANOTHER ELECTION I SHOULD PROBABLY PAY MORE ATTENTION TO: And, you know, vote in*. Chris Lawrence explains.

*Especially as, you know, I'm sort of straddling the border between these two camps at the moment. This might require revealing more of my thoughts on political science more generally, and we all remember how well that went over last time...

LINK: I point you in the direction of Joe Carter's discussion of whether Christian libertarianism is possible:

"The main complaint I have with most libertarians is that they often work backwards from a grievance to the development of their core beliefs. Christians, on the other hand, must start with Biblical principles and work their way to a coherent political philosophy."

It also strikes me (though perhaps incorrectly) that libertarian arguments are generally process-arguments, as opposed to substance arguments: a libertarian is presumably forced to be thoroughgoing with respect to what government can and cannot do: that is, it can't do things you like if the process is wrong, just as much as it can't do things you don't like. But perhaps I'm simplifying too much.

Two posts in less than 24 hours... I think this is a new record for me. This has nothing to do with politics and it is so adorable that it will make your teeth ache.

-ogiw

LINK: If you're feeling especially bold (and know a thing or two about American politics), Norm is running a contest in which one can try to guess the outcome of the election. Could be fun.

LINK: Interesting mixtape (which violates several of the rules of mixtapes, but they're made to be broken), but I do find the side-one, track-one inclusion of "Revolution" to be a bit odd.

LINK: This is pretty funny.

To counteract that little w in the corner over there where my profile used to be, I give you Fifty-One Thoughts on the Apparent Sexiness of John Edwards.

4. If Edwards is sexy, what kind of sexy is he? Is he sexy in the dangerous, you'd-like-to-sleep-with-him sense? Or is he sexy in the innocuous, teenage crush sense? I think it's more of the latter. Go to a rally and talk to the forty-five-year-old groupies going wild for Edwards. They sound like they're on TRL.

5. Bill Clinton, of course, was sexy in the former sense. He was sexy in the dangerous, you'd-like-to-sleep-with-him sense. Actually, Bill Clinton was sexy in the dangerous, you'd-like-to-sleep-with-him, and-after-you-slept-with-him, he-slept-with-your-roommate sense.

6. But we miss that playa, don't we?

-OGIW (ke '04)

SAD BUT TRUE: I was just unable to think of any piece of fiction I could recommend as especially good*. Perhaps this is a sign I need to lighten up on the political science a bit.

*Actually, I managed two recommendations (Franny and Zooey and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). In fairness, some of the things I normally suggest (The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities) had already been read, and I was encouraged to avoid Russian literature (thus depriving me of Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, etc) and poetry. Still...

HEHE: I especially enjoy Dayton, Ohio's letter, though most are either amusing or well-reasoned (sometimes both).

Those Americans... they'll surprise you every time.

LINK: SIAW has a nice little sampling from a writing of Karl Kautsky; a good reminder not to judge any movement by only it's most vocal (or historically 'successful') members. I'm mostly familiar with Kautsky as the recipient of Trotsky's vitriol in Terrorism or Communism, but perhaps I'll have to take a closer look.

FILE UNDER 'UM, YEAH:' Norm reports:

"Iraq tried to manipulate foreign governments by awarding contracts - and bribes - to foreign companies and political figures in countries that showed support for ending sanctions, in particular Russia, France and China, the final report by the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group said earlier this month.

But Annan said it was "inconceivable" that Saddam's activities could have influenced policy in the countries concerned."

The reading of which put in me mind of a passage from Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved (which I happened to be re-skimming this weekend):

"There is a famous, extremely dense verse by Christian Morgenstern, a bizarre Bavarian poet... which is quite apposite here, even though it was written in 1910... A verse so German and so pregnant that it has become a proverb and cannot be translated into Italian except by a clumsy paraphrase: 'Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf" (What may not be cannot be)."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: courtesy the novelist Irme Kertesz (from Kaddish for a Child Not Born):

"On the other hand, I then probably said, and this is important, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good. For that very reason I am no longer interested in Fuhrers, Chancellors, or other sundry titled usurpers, regardless of how many interesting details you muster concerning their spiritual worlds; no, instead of the lives of the dictators, it is, exclusively and for a long time now, the lives of the saints that interest me. This is what I find interesting and incomprehensible, this is what I cannot find a rational explanation for."

WELL: An interesting demographic note from church yesterday: there are seven other people in my new members class, three already with PhDs, another done with prelims for her PhD, and another persuing an MDiv. This leads me to conclude that either that stuff people said about the research triangle having the highest proportion of PhDs in the country may be true, or perhaps Presbyterians are just wicked smart.

PRE-EMPTIVE, PREVENTIVE, AND HUMANITARIAN: Bill Wallo asks a pretty good question of pro-war types:

"On the other hand, I don’t see as many “pro-war” folks honestly assessing the “pre-emptive strike” side of things as I’d like; far too many of them seem locked into the “well, everybody thought the WMDs were there” line of defense. It still doesn’t really address whether “preemptive” war (or the so-called Bush Doctrine) can be articulately defended, or whether “humanitarian intervention” actually works."

In the mess of pro-war discussion, there's sometimes as many as three different types of arguments being offered:

pre-emptive: we believe an attack or threat is immanent, so we strike first.

preventive: we believe that an attack or war will eventually be fought, possibly on terms that are disadvantageous to us (such as, for example, Iraq possessing nuclear weapons), so we strike before there's even time for a threat to arise.

humanitarian/regime change: our moral obligations do not allow us not to act in response to a degenerate situation within a regime.

Obviously, the Bush administration has offered versions of all three arguments. For myself, I think I've clung mostly to the third, but I never exactly turned down rhetorical help from the other two, when it could be provided. As to the first two, the moral argument for pre-emptive war is that, given that a conflict will occur (this is perhaps a hard supposition to hold in the case of Iraq, but it doesn't seem so ridiculous in the abstract), and given an interest in minimizing the costs of war, the most efficacious possible action is to produce a first strike so overwhelming it will encourage the other side not to retaliate. Obviously, there's a moral justification that can be offered (given that you're in the amoral situation of a war, this is one way to try and make it a quick and relatively painless one), though it has to be weighed against a couple of entirely subjective factors (belief in the immanence of a threat and the absence of other (acceptable*) resolutions). It's not a decision to be made lightly, but by no means do I think this option should be off the table**.

Preventive war is on much shakier moral ground, since it requires not the actual presence of a threat, but only the supposition that a threat might arise. I don't believe that this can be countenanced in foreign policy, and I don't think it should be (at least not as an exponent of purely realist concerns about relative military strengths). This is one where it's probably in everyone's best interests to remove it as an option straightaway.

Regime change is a sub-category of preventive wars which replaces the purely negative concerns of prevention (the fear of being surpassed) with something positive: the belief that liberal governments are the only ways of maintaining peace, security and growth across the world. Nevertheless, I think the assumption here always has to be in the negative: unless some conditions are met which would allow us to assume liberal government could take root, we should avoid this option (I've listed some of those conditions before, and I'd be happy to do so again, if there's interests; note also that this is why I supported regime change in Iraq but do not support it in, say, Iran or the Sudan).

Finally, there's humanitarian motives. These are, in a key way, essentially different: preempitve and preventive doctrines look primarily toward the future and the gauging of threats; humanitarian motives look primarily to the past and present, and say, 'what has been, and what continues to be, is offensive to us as human beings. We have the capability to stop it, and we can let it go no further.' This is the argument to hang one's hat on***. To sidestep Bill's big question, it's irrelevant (to some extent, anyway) whether or not one succeeds in a humanitarian intervention: certainly on the individual level, we don't judge the value of the humanitarian act on it's results (though good results are better, there's something valuable and meaningful in the effort, but perhaps more on this later, if it's still not clear).

*I think that not every outcome is preferable to peace, and I'll quote y'all some Locke as justification if you want it.

**All the moreso because I doubt, as a matter of geopolitics, that anyone else is willing to take it off the table.

***I recognize there's a problem here because this sort of logic tends to run roughshod over the language of national sovereignty (that is, this could equally be applied to slave-holding America as it could to Iraq). Part of the answer here has to speak back to the difference between liberal and autocratic regimes: a liberal regime can and should be pressured to make changes, though not militarily, because to change is to move within the traditions of rights discourses, etc, which have already been established. An autocratic regime can appeal to nothing but caprice, which suggests another range of policies (more militarily-based) might be in order. But these things, as always, are meant to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

THOUGHTS ON THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES: having just gotten back from seeing it: I'm amazed that anyone thought this would make for a good movie, and as a friend noted, it's shocking to think of the number of people who okayed the Che-swims-across-the-Amazon scene, which was so over-the-top I couldn't help but laugh.

More seriously, I can see how Che ended up as a fascist: he's working both the alienation of man due to the modernization of the means of production and the harkening back to a golden age (based on race, of course), which was cruelly ended early. And this was a sympathetic portrayal.

LINK: I feel enormously flattered by both the tremendous compliment which SIAW paid to me, and also with their gracious reply, with which I entirely agree:

"Our intention was to highlight the presentation of those arguments, both by the academics themselves and by their sympathisers at the Guardian, as if the mere fact of their being “prominent” and “expert” made their arguments worthy of everyone’s attention. Only a certain kind of academic, imprisoned within a set of unexamined assumptions about the proper role of “intellectuals” and the benighted ignorance of the masses, could sign up to such stuff in the first place; while most “regular citizens” (we think) would be at least a little warier of seeing the world in such black and white terms - and, regrettably, a lot more modest, even self-doubting, about putting their arguments forward."

LINK: I preliminarily point you to Joe Carter's post on modern-day slavery, about which more thoughts later.

THOUGHTS ON PIPES: Daniel Pipes came to speak at Duke tonight under the auspices of the Duke Conservative Union, and partly as a response to the coming PSM conference this weekend. It should surprise no one familiar with my views on Israel (peruse the blog archives particularly in spring and summer of 2002, when I was writing about this a lot more) that I agreed with the general upshot of what Pipes had to say; particularly, I think the following sentiment is true:

"The conflict will be over when Jews in Hebron need no more security than Palestinians in Nazareth"

...which seems to me to be a pretty moderate sentiment. A couple of other notes:

*Pipes hinted, though he didn't quite phrase it this way, that part of the problem for Israelis is a disconnect between what the Palestinians once promised to be willing to do, and what they've subsequently done. You can actually probably broaden this out in theoretical/IR terms: what happens (empirically, or should happen normatively) when two sides engaged in a conflict temporarily cease hostilities on the premises of some promised concessions, and then one side backs out on the deal? What's the appropriate level of response? What does this do to possibilities for future negotiations?

*Pipes said what was really needed was not any of the various strategies for ending the conflict, but for there to be a change of heart on the Palestinian side. He put forward an argument that's probably not prima facie ridiculous and said that what makes defeat in wars really stick is the willingness of one side to give up its goals (thus WWI does not really end, thus WWII; thus North Korea could erupt any day into war; thus we no longer worry about the moral threat represented by South Africa). I think it's probably more interesting to take this argument from the other side: are there instances of negotiated settlements which were not also accompanied by one side being willing to give up that have lasted (Korea strikes me as potentially the only example)?

*One issue on which I strenuously disagreed with him was the question of whether new, non-Arafat-approved leadership for the Palestinians might be a sufficient condition for peace. I would suspect that were we ever to see such a person, their very existence would indicate the presence of a public which was agitating against Arafat, and it'd be foolish for Israel not to recognize that as a serious movement in the right direction, one it'd be worth meeting in kind.

*Also, I have a little skepticism about his accounts of leaders v. mass publics, but I don't know enough on that topic to comment at all.

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY: He's not #1 on my blogroll for nothing, you know

QUOTE: Norm, whose ability to get freshly worked up on this issue every day is really an inspiration to me--I should be so lucky as to be able to go out and argue like that everyday:

"This is the primary moral lie of the anti-war - in fact, anti-liberation - party: to deny that there were good regime-change reasons, or to let them count in practice for nothing. (The supporting empirical lie is to pretend that these reasons weren't part of the case as made at the time.) There are people who opposed the Iraq war in a way that could and can be respected - without denying the weight of the reasons on the other side, or trying to make out that the pro-war case was confected merely out of subterfuge and lies. But from the beginning their voices have been overwhelmed by the louder and more numerous voices of the subterfuge- and lie-sayers, themselves (as I have often suggested) unable to live comfortably with their own moral lie."

LINK: SIAW probably has a point here, as, speaking only for myself, I do tend to slip into philosopher-king mode on occasion.

"Pardon our populism, but we’re a lot more impressed by the views of millions of ordinary voters than by those of all the academics in the world. Democracy and human rights are safer in the hands of people who directly benefit from them, soberly appreciate their value and rightly fear the alternatives than they are in the hands of overpaid, overfed, overpraised intellectual snobs who take their considerable safety and excessive comfort for granted, and spend far too much of their time sneering at those who don’t belong to their self-regarding little subculture, but are expected to pay their salaries nonetheless. The convergence between reaction and “radicalism” continues, here taking the form of academic elitism blended with liberal self-righteousness - but that’s news?"

Which is a little odd, because (if I understand the point here), SIAW wouldn't mind people taking the views they're taking, so long as they took them in virtue of their being regular citizens (and voting); but once they take on the role of academics, their points somehow become elitist?

I suppose this is the not being willing to go into Marxism that's holding me back.

LINK: Spend some time with the picture attached to this post.

QUOTE: Sara Butler lets loose:

"Excuse my complaining for a moment, but I’m getting a little tired of gay marriage advocates who seem think they discovered the topic of marriage and that no one in our society was even talking about it until the issue of same-sex marriage came up. I’ve criticized some opponents of same-sex marriage in the past for paying too little attention to the other dangers to marriage in our society, and I still think there are people out there who do that. It’s just not true, though, that everyone who opposes same-sex marriage falls into that camp. But it sure is useful for advocates of same-sex marriage to suggest that’s the case, since it if it were, it would support their argument that the only reason anyone opposes same-sex marriage is because they hate gays."

WELL: It strikes me as a bit funny that when a Bush operative in South Carolina in 2000 noted that John McCain had a daughter who was not white, this was perceived as a horrendously low blow on the part of the Bushies. Yet, somehow, when John Kerry notes that Dick Cheney has a daughter who's a lesbian, it's beyond the pale for Republicans to complain that there might be something else going on besides merely noting a fact.

I'm not really taking a position on which is the right view to have (probably both, in both cases), but trying to excuse away something you've excoriated in the past isn't exactly the height of consistency.

NO, REALLY: I do love y'all... I just got swamped with work for a bit; I'll be back to post (my thoughts on Daniel Pipes' lecture at Duke tonight, for one) after I'm done with dinner and my reading for IR.

LINK: I pass on to you the following, titled "Why WV debunks everything I ever learned in political science."

LINK: I have to appreciate the spirit of this post; fight the power and whatnot.

LINK: Joe points out this Slate article on who different authors would be voting for, which includes the following bit I found really interesting:

"To enumerate these reasons [to vote for Kerry], to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary."

Actually, I'm not sure I've ever heard them enumerated once. So feel free to discuss them in the comments, with perhaps specific reference to what makes them 'fundamental.'

LINK: I suppose the only thing that matters here is that they're being encouraged to vote, right? I look forward to hard-hitting looks into how ending all federal taxation and our unilateral invasion of Canada might prompt more young people to vote.

WELL: I feel like this quite a lot:

"[If you think that there are too many links to Normblog in this post, think again: it's arguable that there aren't enough.]"

LINK: Norm notices a big shift in meaning on behalf of some anti-war types:

"Note well the phrase 'by whatever means they find necessary'. Not even 'whatever means necessary', which would allow the Stoppers the getout of to-ing and fro-ing about whether some particular brutality - the blowing up of children, the decapitation of hostages - was in fact necessary to secure such ends. No, just whatever means."

WELL: Bill Wallo on justifications for Iraq:

"The other point is a difficult one as well, and it is the humanitarian perspective. I’ve long said that I thought the only real justification for invading Iraq was to remove a brutal dictator. From a humanitarian viewpoint, the challenge is clear: do you intervene at the possible risk of violent conflict, or do you try to wait the dictaor out? There are a number of issues associated with this dilemma, because dilemma it is: neither course of action is particularly palatable, and both will lead to suffering.

Intervention for humanitarian purposes only mushrooms: very quickly one has to wonder why military intervention doesn’t occur in a number of places. Why not intervene in the Sudan, for example, if we intervened in Iraq? The suffering in the Sudan is as significant and widespread as any suffered in Iraq, so if “humanitarian” reasons are the basis for military force then we should be marching into countless conflicts around the globe.

The other problem is the one I think we’re facing in Iraq: “regime change” is difficult to impose from the top down, or from the outside in. Bringing democracy, self-rule, and the idea of individual freedom to a region like Iraq is a laudable goal, and I firmly believe that the Middle East is “capable” of democracy. That isn’t the problem. The problem arises when it feels forced upon them by an outside source."

Gene from Harry's Place:

"On the other hand, I agree that the Bush administration deliberately exaggerated the thin evidence on WMD to win support for the war (though I'm quite sure they believed Iraq had such weapons). If Bush and company had been scrupulously honest, it's unlikely they would have won enough support in Congress to authorize the war. The truth is that making a case for the intervention on purely humanitarian grounds would not have been enough. Those of us who supported the war on those grounds were essentially "going along for the ride."

Does this make me (hopeless liberal that I am) feel uncomfortable and morally conflicted? Am I angry about subsequent mismanagement of the reconstruction effort? Yes to both questions.

But I also have to face what is to me an even more unpleasant fact: that if the Bush administration had been straight with the American people, Saddam Hussein and his legion of thugs might still be in power and continuing their atrocities.

I don't pretend to like it, but there it is. I wish I could feel as pure and righteous as some on both sides of the debate."

The Dude:

"He'd earned the right for the presumption of guilt. I wanted there to be at last in the White House a president who would think the worst of Saddam Hussein--who would make the worst assumption. Because all the other arguments contain the implication, at least, that if he said he had no weapons we're honor-bound to believe him. 'Cause he wouldn't prove what he'd done with the ones he had once declared having had. Presumption of guilt works for me in this circumstance."

(See also Joe Carter.

What do all of these have in common? They're all re-asking themselves to justify their positions on Iraq; even though I took some anticipatory positions when this all got started (the US can only lay the groundwork for democracy, not make it itself, nor can the results be judged at all in the short term), I still have a long list of things that I wish had happened otherwise, and I feel the need for a better-described theory for how we cash out our moral obligations in the international realm. But the point is that you see the constant need to work over logic which reflects the fact that the underlying issues are being taken seriously. You don't really see anti-war types doing the same.

But then, of course, they don't need to, because they were right, right?

IGNORANT, STUPID, OR A MORAL BARBARIAN? I'm going to take up Norm's question here, since I think it's an especially good one:

"Is this man ignorant, stupid or a moral barbarian? I'm happy not to count him among my acquaintances and so I'm unable to say. Then there's a 'Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return' letter; which, used like this, if you think about it, makes everything OK, since we can all shunt the blame and guilt ever backwards, and jeepers, you know, Osama, Blair, Straw, beheaders, Bush, Saddam, Stalin, Hitler, what's the bloody difference? Finally there's someone wanting Blair impeached for war crimes."

We can certainly rule out the possibility that he's stupid, because every leftist knows the difference between authoritarian governments and democratic ones, and the difference between intentional and accidental violence, right?

We can also presumably rule out ignorance; we think leftists like these misinterpret the facts and their moral obligations, but we don't think they're unaware of the existence of both.

I suppose this leaves moral barbarian, and a tempting choice it is (and quite possibly correct, as well). But I think there's one other option for a response: perhaps these people aren't really leftists at all: if you wanted to criticize along these lines, you'd note that there's very little talk of moral obligation*, very little about natural rights or underlying principles of liberalism (rule of law, universal sufferage, etc), and NOTHING about international solidarity. Whatever 'leftism' they can claim is merely an epiphenomenon with respect to what's actually driving their politics. Perhaps it's time for us to stop thinking of them as being merely off about this one issue.

*though much talk of morals, which is not at all the same thing. It's one thing to get sanctimonious about the killing of innocent people, and quite another to discuss, really and seriously, what's to be done about that killing, about how we do not have the option available to us to turn our backs on our fellow human beings, to really look at what our morals will require us to do, and to constanly come back to these questions and ask ourselves to prove and re-prove them, about which more above.

DEMOCRACY: It's good for what ails you

LINK: This is funny (via Barcepundit-in-English):

"(2004-10-10) -- French President Jacques Chirac announced today that Jacques Derrida, the father of the intellectual movement called deconstructionism, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, "if indeed 'death' can be said to mean anything beyond the biases of culture, language, religion and philosophy."

"Of course, we can't assert anything positively about Monsieur Derrida's recent failure to exist," said Mr. Chirac, "We can't even state that he ever did exist, since he may have been a mere metaphysical projection of our own prejudices against absolutes. However, in as much as we may categorically claim anything--Mr. Derrida will not likely be showing up for work tomorrow. Although, who is to say?""

...but this is funnier, because it gets much closer to how absurd discussions of political theory can sometimes get.

LINK:

"#4 This should actually be higher up. Create an internet home for the Duke Grad Revolution. Maybe a blog or something. A place where the hundreds, I mean THOUSANDS, of supporters will flock to for sharing information. As of now, I suppose this is the spot. I guess we need an email address too. Man, this is union-building stuff is a lot of work."

Dan will be pleased to know I've reserved dukegradrevolution.blogspot.com. No really--check it out.

LINK: It's good to know that there's still a length of bloggerly obsessivenss I have yet to hit

THE REST IS SILENCE: I was going to use some space here to continue the rather vicious textualist-contextualist debate from earlier this afternoon, but, to be honest, it pretty much killed my interest in ever discussing that set of issues again. I'll afford myself one last exception: it seems pretty clear to me that you're either a textualist or a historian, and if political theory's about the latter, it probably has no place in political science.

UPDATE: In the spirit of conciliation and moderation toward my fellow political theorists, it's probably a good idea to clarify what I mean when I say "textualism," which I discuss in the comments here, and, I think, includes a heavy and significant place for context when it's appropriate for the theoretical issue you want to discuss.

WELL: In the spirit of appropriating other peoples' holidays, here goes my shot at national poetry day (great britain):

Something Fall-ish:

'Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'

And then she:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.';

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.

'Ah, do not mourn,' he said,
'That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.'

Something appropriately moody:

THERE is a mountain and a wood between us,
Where the lone shepherd and late bird have seen us
Morning and noon and eventide repass.
Between us now the mountain and the wood
Seem standing darker than last year they stood,
And say we must not cross—alas! alas!

Something appropriately ancient:

TO LICINIUS

(Horace, Odes II, 10)

You'll do better, Licinius, not to spend your life
Venturing too far out on the dangerous waters,
Or else, for fear of storms, staying too close in
To the dangerous rocky shoreline. That man does best
Who chooses the middle way, so he doesn't end up
Living under a roof that's going to ruin
Or in some gorgeous mansion everyone envies.
The tallest pine shakes most in a wind storm;
The loftiest tower falls down with the loudest crash;
The lightning bolt heads straight for the mountain top.
Always expect reversals; be hopeful in trouble,
Be worried when things go well. That's how it is
For the man whose heart is ready for anything.
It's true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters;
It's also true that Jupiter takes them away.
If things are bad right now, they won't always be.
Apollo isn't always drawing his bow;
There are times when he takes up his lyre and plays,
And awakens the music sleeping upon the strings.
Be resolute when things are going against you,
But shorten sail when the fair wind blows too strong.

WELL: Dan has a good point below, and it was probably an unfortunate combination of my being tired and my having a bad day that led me to such a dispicable low of name-calling, especially bad for someone like me who wants to bridge the gap between political theory and the rest of political science. Perhaps I'm just picking up bad influences.

WELL: Discuss the morality of the following sentiment, with reference to current exaples:

"...we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism."

-V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Childishness and the Petit-Bourgeois Mentality

WELL: In the spirit of giving nicknames to everybody (I've given no less than six to one of my housemates), I thought I should mention that everyone should feel free to refer to Dan Lee as "Stat Boy" (gotta love the PTI connection) whenever he starts going on about methods.

LINK: It's National Poetry Day; Norm celebrates with a snippet of Eliot I could've sworn I've seen somewhere before recently...

(inside joke, sorry)

YOUR LINK OF THE DAY: Since my impending probability exam is forcing my attention to venues other than blogging: apparently, Defamer reports, Matt LeBlanc (of Joey fame; I understand he was in some other show before it), is in talks with the WB to put on an hour-long drama based on Machiavelli's The Prince. As a political theorist, I look forward to it with bated breath.

I never knew he had so many levels.

THOUGHTS ON THE VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: I know one thing for sure now: John Edwards and John Kerry have a plan for America--a clear plan--and they're going to tell us about it because we deserve to know.

WELL: From a conversation last night on Locke, in which Ali was explaining his interpretation to me:

ALI: [finishes his explanation]
ME: It's Friedrich Engels, right?
ALI: Yeah
ME: Well Friedrich, that's an interesting theory you have there, but I'm not sure it works out...

WELL: About the post below where I discuss why I'm not a republican: I don't take my dichotomy to be anything resembling complete (I acknowledge the existence of National Greatness Conservatism, whose flag I'm pretty willing to carry, though acknowledge it only as a sub-stream of R thought). But the two biggest at-the-moment strains appear to be of the all-regulation-is-bad and other-things-constant-less-regulation-is-better-than-more kind*, and I don't see myself fitting into either of those, for reasons I detailed. I'm not especially eager to replace being an abused minority within one party to being in an abused minority of the other party (especially when the alternative is to be one of those oh-so-desirable independent voters**).

*I assume that if my conceptions here are incorrect, any of my fellow first-years who happen to be republicans will be happy to gently disabuse me of them.

**I actually feel like an independent voter (as opposed to a disaffected D), which I didn't about, oh, a month ago, and is probably attributable to said fellow first-years

QUOTE: Those in my history and methods of political theory course should anticipate my arguing something along these lines:

"...the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity."

and also:

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

wherein you could replace "poetry" with "political theory" and get my general view of things.

QUOTE: from John Locke, that proto-neoconservative/quasi-Trotskyist:

"In all states and conditions the true remedy of force without authority is to oppose force to it. The use of force without authority always puts him that uses it into a state of war, as the aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly."

(The Second Treatise of Government, ch. 13, para 155)

WHY BE 'OF THE LEFT' WHEN YOU'RE PRETTY MUCH THE ONLY ONE OUT THERE? Socialism in an Age of Waiting has some thoughts on this topic:

"Second, he has a long studenty sneer at the expense of “pro-war” leftists who, according to the voices in his head, claim to represent the majority of the left, when in fact (it says here) “most of the world left” opposed the liberation of Iraq. From someone who claims to have read and understood the writings of Victor Serge this is extraordinarily poor stuff. Like Serge, some of us happen to be a lot more interested in the majority of human beings, and what they want, need, believe, etc., than in the cognitive dissonance of the majority/plurality of the left, which in the 1930s favoured, or failed to oppose, Stalinism, and has variously romanticised and misrepresented Third World dictators, First World terrorists and all kinds of other anti-democratic groups ever since, just so long as they’re careful to spout the kind of rhetoric that easily impresses postgraduate students and the more desperately trendy bandwaggon-jumpers among their supervisors. Whether our view, at any given time or on any given issue, coincides with that of a majority of self-styled leftists, who in any case are all too often tellingly isolated and marginalised from the majority of human beings, seems deeply uninteresting compared to the bigger question of why so many leftists have so often forsaken basic commitments to democracy and human rights in order to align themselves with -" (bolding mine)

Which puts me in mind of a quotation of that great Marxist Lenin (cue your mental Robert Conquest poem now, let's begin, "There once was a great Marxist Lenin..."), from "Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder":

"If you want to help the 'masses' and win the sympathy and support of the 'masses,' you should not fear the difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the 'leaders'..., but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perserveringly, persistently and paiently in those institutions, societies and associations--even the most reactionary--in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found."

Which is to say, given that I think I'm right about politics (and I do), and given that there's at least some left tradition for me to draw on which supports those convictions (and there is), and given that I think it's important that everyone else think about politics in the right way (and I do), then it looks like it behooves me to take the fight wherever it needs to be taken.

LINK: Jeff Jarvis may have a point here, given that the value of the marginal dollar spent on internet political advertising has to be higher than that for TV.

QUOTE: It occurs to me that Norm makes some good points about contextualist readings of texts here:

"Postmodernism isn't reducible to the banality which Marc gives for it: that every human perspective is a rooted, or situated, one; otherwise Karl Marx, just for one example, would have been a postmodernist, instead of claiming as he did to develop a scientific approach to history and political economy. In its authentic texts, rather than on Marc's street, postmodernism deprives us of all rational means for discriminating cognitively - that is, between explanations, theories, truth-claims - better from worse. This is a serious matter. And it also deprives us of all rational means for discriminating morally better from worse. Instead, these become matters of cultural context, perspectival preference, and authorial or personal edict."

Which is to say, if a text is nothing but the circumstances behind the guy who chooses to write it, and there's nothing objective in it at all, then there's really no difference between Karl Schmidt and Alexander Hamilton, except that their environments were different--and, to take it one step further, had you switched the men around in space and time, each could've produced the others' work.

Except this is insane, right? There's something about Reinhold Niebuhr that wouldn't allow him to be Machiavelli no matter what the milieu around him was, right? Perhaps I just haven't advanced enough in my studies to have grasped the nuances to this position.

LINK: Big ups to Dan Lee and his ongoing struggle to unionize Duke TAs. Power to the people!

SO WHY ON EARTH AM I NOT A REPUBLICAN*?

...given that I'm best described as a conservative on social issues, I'm very strongly drawn to third-way economic policy, I take the (more or less) neoconservative line on foreign policy, and I'm voting for GWB?

Two reasons:

1. I don't imagine I'll ever be disabused of my deontology; I accept that our relations to each other require certain special moral and ethical obligations, and that there are just some things where it's okay to use the coercive power of the state to resolve some of the pricklier issues of life (regulation of the meatpacking industry always struck me as a perfect example of a reasonable use of state power). So I'm never going to buy into the assumption of the libertarian wing of the Republican party that everyone should be able to go off and do their own thing, nor can I agree with the general view of the rest of the R's (some exceptions, I know, and I have my little shrine to David Brooks and Christopher Caldwell (and John McCain) for a reason**) that less state power is always better.

2. It's true right now that the Republicans are home to my version of foreign policy, which is far and away the most important issue for me; but it's unclear to me that this is for-certain the future direction of the party--it's not a coincidence that Henry Kissinger was a Republican. You can probably count foreign policy idealists in the Republican party on two hands (and that's only if you count Paul Wolfowitz four times), so I'm in wait-and-see mode on this one. But this issue, more than any other, is likely to impact my future direction with respect to the parties.

*especially given that I'm not a Democrat anymore

*not really

LINK: I'd point out that, in addition to all the caveats Mystery Pollster makes about this most recent Newsweek poll (so breathlessly sent to me by Our Girl in Washington in a moment of schadenfreude), I'd add the following: 49-46 doesn't actually tell you very much about where things are going, because there's still some softness in the numbers. Given GOP gains in GOTV over the last two election cycles, Kerry probably has to be in the 51-52 range just prior to the election to have a reasonable chance of pulling it out. Couple of other points:

*Exactly how much higher can Kerry go? I've not looked at the post-convention numbers for Kerry, but he seems to have rarely, if ever, topped 50% in the head-to-heads (I could well be wrong about this). But if you believe, quite plausibly, that the general orientation of the voting public is around 50-50, you should expect the numbers to be converging to 50-50 as the election draws closer. Without a look at the methodology, I'd suspect what happened is that Kerry-voters who are loosely affiliated probably came back into the fold for the sample taken by Newsweek, and the numbers they get reflect that.

*This still doesn't say much of anything about Bush's numbers. I assume he's going to underperform relative to his actual support, because some of his loose affiliators have been temporarily scared off. It's also not entirely clear to me that we're seeing an actual reflection of the support of his base; you could probably make a decent argument that it doesn't really matter at all what he did in the last or any other debate, because his strategy does not seem to be based around them at all.

WELL: I'm now a card-carrying member of the American Political Science Association. Now all I have to do is figure out how to become a card-carrying member of the NSF grant-winning association (though, honestly, I don't really see them with cards so much as mid-80s-style gold chains and stuff).

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Since I'll be off at various activities: how does one 'look like a Republican?' Discuss using specific examples, including any meaning under which Dan Lee could not be said to look more like a Republican than me (thus defeating the explanatory value of the variable).

I should point out that I'm not disputing that I may well look like a Republican (except when I get too lazy to shave and I get the Leon Trotsky-looking goatee action going on); I certainly wear the Duke uniform with regularity--I'm just used to being places where large numbers of people didn't wear the uniform, that's all.

LINK: Oh dear:

"Dutch intelligence officers raided the home of Kenneth Bigley's brother last night. An intelligence officer from the Foreign Office is understood to have accompanied them to Paul Bigley's home in Amsterdam.

The raid came amid claims that the British hostage was free to roam his kidnappers' home in Iraq and was "caged" only for terrorist videos.

Paul Bigley's computer was seized and he was interrogated about his alleged contact with the Tawhid and Jihad group, which yesterday claimed responsibility for Thursday's killing of at least 35 children in Baghdad..."

LINK: Heh.

LINK: Harry's Place has some good links to interviews with possibly the only not-boring political band ever, the Manic Street Preachers. Says Nicky Wire:

"I dunno, I just think, anyone who's influenced by No Logo as a book I just don't have time for, because it's just the Janet and John of politics. All young hip things quote that as a reference point for what's going on in the world, maaan.

If you read Engels or Marx or Gramsci 20 years ago you'd know that already."

LINK: We're now into the part of the election season where polls actually tell you something useful about people's possible votes. Thus I point you to Mystery Pollster.

Also, there are few things I enjoy more than horse-race election predictions, so I point you to our fearless leader.

LINK: I would only add to this list the observation I saw elsewhere: "outsourcing in Afghanistan is the reason everything's going so badly there, but I remain firmly committed to outsourcing on Iraq."

LINK: I assumed Chicago was a good school, but look at how Sara Butler busts out the Latin on family scholars blog (note: this will probably only last until the template gets fixed).

DUKE DIVERSITY WATCH: well, it was octoberfest on the quad on West Campus today, and the prospect of beer on meal plan points will bring out the weird ones. Sure enough, there was a group of about six kids sitting out, with a sign proclaiming their "love-in;" they had a hookah, which was impressively outside-the-bounds; but they all looked pretty normal, except for the guy with a goatee and no shirt, which is really more of a beat poet thing than a hippie thing, but hey, it's Duke, you take what you can get...

INTERESTING STUDIES IN POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: Jeff Jarvis

LINK: Consistent with my support for hegemonic sports teams, I link approvingly to this. Go Yankees!

VRWC WATCH: Isn't it an odd coinicidence that the US begins a serious move against Iraqi insurgents the day after the Presidential debate about national security?

That Karl Rove sure is a genius.