HIATUS: As though the lack of posting didn't make it obvious enough, I'll be on hiatus for a little bit, seeing all the sights the northland has to offer, as well as seeing various family and friends. I'll probably violate the hiatus once or twice, as internet access permits, but I should be back in the swing of things after the new year.

QUOTE: Robert Prather speaks the truth:

"Christmas is a lot like a stay of execution in grad school..."

...which is why I haven't been blogging much lately. But that will probably change soon.

LINK: It's been a long while since I've found a nice blog written by someone with whom I disagree entirely about politics which I do not find shrill or alien (I'm looking at you, Yglesias and Left2Right), but I must say I do enjoy reading Marc Cooper: he's just the right mix of smug and angry.

LINK: Eric the Unread has a good little expose up on the complete and total insanity of Juan Cole:

"Of course Iraq the Model should be popular with those who think democratic freedoms are important, not just right-wingers. However, these days it seems that the left have to be miserable doommongers who have lost hope in the idea that all peoples of the world are capable of, or even desirous of, progressive and democratic political systems.

The left, and the intellectuals who feed them their sugary doggie treats, are so far up their own anti-imperialist arses bleating about George Bush, that those they should naturally be supporting are forgotten as minor inconveniences in their increasingly desperate efforts to be proved right on Iraq."

LINK: I think this is a slight oversimplification of the role of natural rights and the origins of the state in modern political thought:

"My feeling is that objections to Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence should focus on what we think people’s rights are, substantively, rather than where we think they come from. But let me comment on the God vs Man question anyway. Actually, let Roberto Mangabeira Unger comment on it, from his Politics:

'Modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than an expression of an underlying natural order.'"

I presume this argument is given to demonstrate that the contractarian nature of social organization somehow precludes the typical natural rights discourses. Obviously, these two appear side-by-side in Hobbes and Locke*. One could argue (as I probably would) that Hobbes isn't really committed to natural law (though he seems to spend a large amount of Leviathan substantiating it) and Locke isn't really all that committed to the social order being unnatural (though his system, at least in theory, presupposes individuality). Clearly, there's a tension between the two ideas, but I don't know if that is really as big of a problem as it is sometimes made out to be.

That is to say, I think one can tenably argue that society is unnatural or contractual, but the rules that govern society are natural, because the moral laws that guide the interaction of all human behavior are prior to even the founding of a society.

With this as preamble, a little more of the CT post:

"The Constitution of the United States is a decisive political expression of this conviction. It doesn’t preclude deep and shared religious convictions — it just doesn’t presuppose them."

I'll grant that, but with two notes I think worth making:

1. natural law discourse isn't wedded to the notion of a God, though it is of course much stronger for it (as Robert Prather points out in the comments, one of the fringe benefits of a God-given set of natural rights (and the recognition of them as such) is that no state has the power to take them away)

2. this is the thing that always annoys me about the Constitution--among other things the Bill of Rights does, it backwards-ly supposes that the state has a right to define what are rights and what aren't (and does this, confusingly, by declaring what rights the state doesn't have--thank you, Anti-Federalists)

LINK: Hitch has an interesting point here:

"Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" (my italics). Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism.

Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival.

Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives."

It seems like there are two potential answers here:

1. The one Hitch mentions: turning Afghanistan into the state which produces all of our more-or-less legal opiates; while it's perhaps (moral considerations aside) a good short-term solution to the problem, it doesn't give any real incentive to move beyond poppy production (why, as he says, wait five years to get decent vine-related crops when you can be cashing in in six months?), and it still seems open to various ways of cheating on such agreements as may be made (there's still money to be made from illicit opium production, and there's no reason why one would stick to giving everything they grow to the US).

2. The alternative would be for the US government (or, better, groups of investors) to float five-year loans or subsidies to various technological and agricultural ventures to even out the costs of engaging in economic behaviors beneficial to the society at large. Sure, it'd cost merry bushels of cash, but a stable, democratic Afghanistan is worth investing in, right?

LINK: Chris Lawrence thinks it might be Love Canal, but as someone who grew up in a place where dioxin was (well, okay, "was" is sort of controversial, as no one can really agree on whether it was or not) existent in somewhat-greater-than-natural quantities (thank you, Dow Chemical Corporation), I can assure you that it's at least as safe as the semi-regular releases of the gaseous version of hydrochloric acid we used to get.

QUOTE: David Velleman, who at least wins points for candor:

"Nothing I say in my subsequent posts will be of any interest to people whose position on abortion depends on religious authority. When I speak of compromise on the subject, I do not envision compromise with them."

LINK: Zing!

LINK: I certainly hope that this is intended as a postivist statement and not a normative one:

"Regardless of U.S. intentions, the view reflected in Shujaat's cartoon eye is one that is widely held. The U.S. is not in a position to lecture other nations about human rights violations."

You could criticize this with the old Hitchens view that past moral failures only obligate current actions more, or with the view that it's because no one raises the salience of human rights issues that they never get dealt with (so the very act of bringing them up is the first step toward actually making progress with respect to them), or else the Christian view that we are all, of course, imperfect and led to fall short of where we ought to be, but our obligations don't index at all to our success or failure to act on them.

LINK: It's not exactly a new point being made, but someone at left2right says something critical about the left which is actually a criticism and not an opportunity to bask in self-righteousness:

"This is true, but it seems to me that this did not convince enough voters who were concerned about domestic security issues so the question is why not. Well, if I were an undecided voter I would be concerned about things like the following. The New York Times asked delegates at the Democratic and Republican convention about which issues they thought were most important. 2% of Democratic delegates said terrorism; 15% of Republican delegates mentioned terrorism. Only 1% said homeland security was important. Michael Moore went around the country proclaiming there was no terrorist threat. Those who attacked the Patriot Act rarely proposed changes which would be more effective in protecting us against domestic attack, as opposed to changes which would protect us against increased governmental surveillance. It wasn’t clear that the Democratic activists or Kerry saw domestic security as a central issue comparable, say, to preserving Social Security or to doing something about the health care mess.

Now it may be that the view that terrorism is not a threat, or it is relatively minor when compared to other threats, is correct. Perhaps we ought to be more worried about a bird-flu pandemic and less worried about another 9/11. If that is the case we ought to be making that argument. But if that view is incorrect, and if the threat of terrorism is a long-range and serious one, then we would be making very different arguments. We would attack the tax cuts for depriving us of funds that ought to be going to the military, or homeland security, or intelligence gathering. We would be arguing for more troops in Afghanistan where the goverment basically rules only Kabul."

LINK: Dan Drezner asks which book that's most famous in one's field that they've not yet read. I made a list of these at the beginning of the term, but, sad to say, I've succeeded in crossing most of them (and all the major ones) off the list. In the spirit of the game, I'll confess to never having made it all the way through Democracy in America, and I can promise you it'll probably never happen--I think it's probably the most overrated book in political theory--if you gave me a couple of years to travel and 900 pages to write, I could probably come up with some good observations about American society--heck, the first David Brooks book established that it's certainly possible.

LINK: I should fess up and share a link to Stylus Magazine, particularly their "I Love the 90s" feature, which is much less derivative than I remember similar VH1 series being (more interesting topics, for one, skewing toward the cool and nerdy, thus lengthy sections on Daisy-Age hip hop and the KLF, whose "Justified and Ancient" (which I am currently listening to) is clearly the best house song about cows featuring vocals by Tammy Wynette ever recorded--a competitive field, let me tell you)), and also provided a great way to avoid writing about arms races/early modern political theory.

LINK: This post of Joe's both hits on a topic I've been meaning to get around to discussing (separation of church and state*), and also makes a good point:

"But a sense of shame is exactly what is missing from many of my fellow Christians who opposed the war and yet never did a thing to end the suffering of the Iraqi people. Liberal evangelicals often talk about the need to focus on justice. But they limit it to the to the issue of poverty and believe that the only just war is that which relies on class warfare. People suffering such injustices as rape, torture, and murder can expect to find some earnest concern but they shouldn’t count on any actual intervention, particularly if it might entail bloodshed (and certainly not if it would mean a liberal Christian sacrificing their own life)."

*Still no concrete thoughts on the topic, except that a thoroughly secular state is exactly as prejudiced as a purely theocratic state. It also seems like the establishment/practice/belief in action set of categories ought to be meaningful--the state can't ever establish a religion, should probably err on the side of not restricting practice (except where that practice violates other laws--no human sacrifices), and everyone, it seems to me, should be allowed to use policy (though perhaps not law) as a means of putting their belief systems into action. One of the interesting side consequences of this is that it proscribes a pretty minimal role for the state, but, as I say, I haven't entirely thought it through yet.

QUOTE: Chris Lawrence:

"However, someone will have to explain to me later why health researchers are allowed to make inferences about the entire human male population from a study of just 29 subjects. They’d shoot me if I tried that."

It's probably because they're, you know, real scientists, not those fake-y 'social science'-types. So everything they say must be true.

LINK: Sara Butler quotes extensively from an interesting new book:

"If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem — these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today — suicide, misogyny, and drugs — with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world."

LINK: Heh

CONGRATULATIONS: To Jared and Lori... a little late, but the sentiment's still the same.

LINK: Proof, if you needed it, that brilliance in the academic realm does not translate into brilliance in the political realm, from Kwame Appiah:

"Part of the truth here, I think, is that American anti-intellectualism contains a seam of intellectual insecurity. It's not that the no-nothings are sure we're wrong, it's that they're afraid we'll win the argument, because we're better at arguing. They feel about us the way many Greeks appear to have felt about the Sophists: sure they won the argument but that was not always because they were right. But they're also not sure that we're wrong. The discussion about what we ought to be doing about the cultural divide seems sometimes to presuppose that they'd want to talk to us if we showed up respectfully and offered, as we now say, to "dialogue." But they don't want to talk to us, a lot of them."

Because, as we all know, evangelical Christianity requires you to check your brain at the door. I mean, for a guy who says:

"What would not be helpful would be a new form of condescension..."

and yet makes his side the 'intellectual' one and the people who oppose him the 'anti-intellectual' side. It's certainly not the case that people might reasonably disagree about matters of ontology and epistemology (which seems to be the big divide to me--what is the case in the world, and how do you justify that belief); it was always made clear to me in my philosophy questions that there were some opinions which were out of bounds (belief in God, or in nonmaterial aspects of the world). This is just one of those things where certain* folks want to applaud themselves for not just being right, but being more noble and more open, too.

*but by no means all people who share their political convictions. I agree with SIAW, Norm, and the Harry's Place people quite a bit even though we have different ways of getting to the same outcome. I think the much more intelligent way is to note that there are many ways one can get to a good answer for a policy outcome, and so long as that way isn't really beyond the pale, it's okay.

I DON'T THINK IT'S COINCIDENCE: That when I went in to my probability final, it was gloomy, foggy and miserable. When I was done, the sun was out and the temperature was pleasant...

LINK: Indeed.

LINK: PooterGeek's post reminds me fondly of my junior high days, and also reminds me of this bit from Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That:

"Yet when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse, I reminded him, or he me, I forget which: 'Of course, the trouble is that at any given time one always finds at least two really decent masters in the school, among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among the five or six hundred. We shall always remember them, and have Lot's feelings about not damning Sodom for the sake of just ten persons*. And in another twenty years' time we'll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and say: "I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection," and we'll send our sons to Charterhouse for sentiment's sake, and they'll go through all we did.'"

*Which reminds me of this, one of the all-time great time-wasters when you have actual work you should be doing.

A (SORT OF) DEFENSE OF THE STONE ROSES: norm has a post on, among other things, the Stone Roses:

"Exactly! Any album poll, it's always up there. It's top, or in the top 5, or the top 10. I wouldn't have it in my top 50. It's OK is all you can say for it."

Having just bought the album, and being something of a long-time fan of "Fools Gold/What the World is Waiting For" and "Where Angels Play," I'm tempted to dispute this somewhat. It's very true that the whole of the album feels like less than the sum of its parts, and I've not quite been able to figure out why, since I think all the songs fall somewhere between merely good ("Waterfall") and the truly excellent ("Made of Stone"). John Squire is, of course, generally amazing, though it does occur to me that he plays a large number of songs in the key of D. And certainly, if you contextualize the Stone Roses (against Madchester narrowly or music from Manchester in the approximate period of 24 Hour Party People), they're even better--Ian Brown can at least kind of carry a tune, something Shaun Ryder can't really claim; the only two bands from Manchester that I can think of as being clearly better than the Roses are the Smiths and pre-1996 Oasis*. Which is to say, I can sort of understand being ambivalent about the Roses, though they might (just barely) crack my top 50... hmm... there's a Christmas break project for me...

*And Joy Division, obviously, but I consider myself lucky in that their music has never really spoken to me (though I do love me some "Disorder")

LIKN: Jeff Jarvis points out a non-David Brooks member of the NYT editorial page saying something sensible.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: In honor of being done with modern theory (for a bit), from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

BOSWELL: But, Sir, does not Rousseau talk such nonsense?
JOHNSON: True, Sir; but Rousseau knows he is talking nonsense, and laughs at the world for staring at him.
BOSWELL: How so, Sir?
JOHNSON: Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know he is talking nonsense.

LINK: I'm totally playing this at my next party.

thanks to discoshaman for the link

LINK: For those interested in this sort of thing: A collection of stories from Slate on Romania.

QUOTE O' THE EVENING: Just now, on IM:

ME: just proof that all you really need is to be provacative...
ME: I'm pretty sure I spelled that wrong
ME: as I don't think there's a cow in the middle of that word
ME: provocative

BYOOTEEFUL: Dan Drezner:

"UPDATE: Hey, it turns out there is a tenured political scientist at a top twenty institution who's a blogger. Michael Munger -- chair of the department of political science at Duke, former president of the Public Choice Society, a prolific scholar who lists his occupation as "professional wrestler" in his Blogger Profile -- has had a blog since June of this year. [He also appears to be threatening you with bodily harm--ed. Oh, yeah, I'm really scared of some candy-assed, penny-ante North Carolina blogger who calls himself "KGrease"? Bring it on, Duke boy!!!]"

Killer Grease replies:

"I'm going up to f***ing UChicago with a bat. Meet me at the Midway, Danny D, cause you are goin' DOWN."

I would so buy a ticket to Chicago just to see that.

Incidentally, I'd totally put my money on K. Grease in that fight.

LINK: David Brooks has a nice little column on John Stott (more here). I especially liked his quotation from Stott:

"It is not because we are ultra-conservative, or obscurantist, or reactionary or the other horrid things which we are sometimes said to be. It is rather because we love Jesus Christ, and because we are determined, God helping us, to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ."

LINK: Oh, those crazy religious nuts, er, wait...

or perhaps this is just confirmation for what Ali and I were arguing in modern political theory the other day.

HEH: SIAW:

"Meanwhile, of course, as a quick glance at any of the usual outlets will show, the media and political sections of the great coalition for peace, stability and complacent fantasy are still doing their best to keep up with the academic section, generating still more selective indignation at the curious failure of everyone on the planet to fall into line with their preconceptions. A majority of those who voted in the US election preferred Bush to Kerry? It must be because they’re all fundamentalist rednecks who probably want to bring back slavery. The ultraleft whackjobs who control the Stop the War Coalition can’t get more than a few hundred people (at best) to protest against the bloodthirsty neo-Nazi in 10 Downing Street? It must be because everyone else is being brainwashed by the media. The media are failing to get across to the public the message that the Coalition forces in Iraq are brutal mass murderers and the “resistance” are just like the Viet Cong and/or the Free French, only more sensitive to cultural nuances? It must be because everyone is being brainwashed by the ... um ...
Just in case you’re in danger of taking any of these people at their word, and inferring that the great British (or any other) public is as obsessed with Iraq, as self-deluding about it and as incapable of coherent thought as they are, here’s some welcome news from the book trade on the sales of certain over-hyped titles (via Norm Geras, who cites the Evening Standard and, though the link seems not to work, the Scotsman):

* Revolution Day by Rageh Omaar of the BBC - 16,000 copies sold;
* the memoirs of Jon Snow, chief propagandist at the absurdly misnamed Channel Four News - 9,000 copies sold;
* the memoirs of Greg Dyke, former Director General of the BBC - fewer than 6,000 copies sold."

QUOTE: you know, I was never much of one for Wheel of Fortune, but then again, Pat Sajak:

"There’s another possibility; one that seems crazy on the surface, but does provide an explanation for the silence, and is also in keeping with the political climate in Hollywood. Is it just possible that there are those who are reluctant to criticize an act of terror because that might somehow align them with President Bush, who stubbornly clings to the notion that these are evil people who need to be defeated? Could the level of hatred for this President be so great that some people are against anything he is for, and for anything he is against?

As nutty as it sounds, how else can you explain such a muted reaction to an act that so directly impacts creative people everywhere? Can you conceive of a filmmaker being assassinated because of any other subject matter without seeing a resulting explosion of reaction from his fellow artists in America and around the world?"

MAYBE WITHOUT THE GIANT DEMON WORM-THING...

Ann Arbor is Overrated:

"...Doesn't anyone else want to see their former high school go down in a Buffy-season-3-style demolition?"

LINK: For your latest update on Ukraine, the Telegraph, or, better, Discoshaman:

"From the quick bit I saw on the TV here, everyone was smiling, including the "sick" Yanukovych. With only the above info, it's hard to say what the significance of this is. I need to know what kind of constitional reform. To date, that phrase means a weakening of the president in favor of the PM. We'll have to see what it means here.

A lot of the activists here at this spot aren't happy about the agreement. There's always an undercurrent of mistrust that he's too timid, so I'm taking this with a grain of salt. But it does seem like an ambiguous step at best."