LINK: If you haven't seen this curmudgeonly clerk post in response to people who try and quote silly Old Testament laws to prove that we should ignore everything in the Old Testament (or whatever it is that the particular interlocutor thinks should be ignored, in this case, prohibitions against homosexuality), you absolutely must. It's brilliant:

"Secondly, the comparative proposition being put forward is argumentatively flawed. The basic premise of the argument is that if one accepts the Old Testament's condemnation of homosexuality, then one must endorse all other moral teachings located in the Old Testament as well, or else be guilty of cafeteria Christianity. But, of course, if a Christian were to cite Deuteronomy 5:17 in support of the proposition that murder is morally wrong, no one would derisively countercite Leviticus 11:9-12 and think it a sensible let alone clever refutation. In short, we all readily accept some principles from the Old Testament while discarding others and seldom if ever think twice about it."

LINK: You know I'm a liberal because I see no problems with this argument

LINK: Diotima totally beats out Matthew Yglesias on this one. Says Matt:

"Here's what bothers me about "abstinence-only" sex ed. It assumes that sex is this terrible thing that people only do because they fail to "control themselves" and that leads only to disease and emotional distress."

Except that, of course, I'm an advocate of abstinence-only sex ed, and I don't actually share any of those assumptions about what sex is like: in the right conditions, there's nothing not to like about it, but I think you have to be realistic about the logical capacities of 16-year olds (or, God forbid, those younger*) to recognize the right conditions. If they learned that not giving into their throbbing biological urges whenever the mood strikes is not the end of the world (and this seems to be an odd entailment of Matt's views), that would certainly be a good thing, right?

LINK: Sara Butler has some well-put considerations on the undergrad hook-up culture, including a critique of me, though I think we're in agreement about the issues involved (though, quite probably, I dropped about seven hidden premises and assumed them to be in there).

"And this is why I'm not a huge fan of the Wendy Shalit types who argue that it's women's responsibility to keep men virtuous, sexually and otherwise, 'cause men are just pleasure-seeking predators, but women are different, women feel stuff beyond sexual pleasure. Rather than depressing young women like myself with this impossible task, wouldn't it make more sense to encourage everyone, men and women, to think about sex a little differently. I think men might be more receptive to this message than we seem to assume."

LINK: evangelical outpost makes an interesting point on same-sex marriage. While prefacing what follows with the statement that I think I agree with Joe on this one, I do find the following bit of argumentation a little confusing:

"But civil marriage is more of a political issue than a moral one. While my moral beliefs inform my position, ultimately the decision is a political one and subject to political compromise."

The reason this seems odd to me is that it doesn't seem clear to me how this argument works for same-sex marriage and not, for example, for abortion, where the moral argument seems to be the genesis for the political one. As a matter of fact, I was arguing with a friend last week that I might be inclined to take entirely the opposite position: I can separate my moral view on abortion from my political view on it, because the two don't seem to encroach on each other overmuch, but it seems that I can't really do that with same-sex marriage, because while churches do not perform abortions, they certainly do perform marriages, and it'd be foolish to believe what happens out in the wider culture won't eventually work its way back into the church.

It may well be the case that the two aren't the same for a reason I'm not seeing right now, or that there's some sort of intervening argument I'm missing--in either event, I'm more than open to changing my mind on this one.

QUOTE: Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about class stratification in higher education:

"The deeper reality is, however, that there's relatively little an institution like Harvard can do at this point to eliminate the intense class stratification in higher education. Making it easier for students from low-income backgrounds to pay the bills is worth doing, of course, but the number of people who were truly unable to pay under the old system (which offers a lot of aid, along with subsidized loans, and easy access to employment) is simply way too small to account for the fact that 74 percent of students come from households making over $80,000. The culprit is that, as John Edwards could tell you, we have two (it might be more accurate to say three or four, but that would make for a worse speech) primary and secondary education systems in this country, and even the richest university can't undo this on the back-end."

LINK: kristin madpony had apparently not been to the library in her almost four years at college. This seems inconceivable to me, but maybe that's just because last term I was there three times a week or so to pick up more books.

WELL: Back from the weekend of craziness. Did we find ourselves one evening drinking beer and going over the Rothenberg Report's predictions on Senate races? Yes. Other observations:

1. There's one place on 495 where it splits itself in three different directions. This is insane.
2. It's amazing that I've been to Washington maybe 20 times in my life, and been to, say, The National Gallery a dozen or so times (heck, I've been to the National Archives multiple times), and yet I'd never once made it to, say, the White House or the Lincoln Memorial. Both have now been taken care of.
3. I almost, almost bought myself an FDR paperweight for my desk. If only it hadn't been $35...
4. There was a huge exhibit in the American History Smithsonian on The Beatles. As I commented to OGIW, it seems to me like the Beatles are, at best, tangentally connected to, you know, American History--and are probably less important than some of the things they could've covered.

WELL: I'm off tomorrow morning on the 10-hour drive I can do in my sleep, to go visit OGIW in Washington. Insanity will take place, no doubt, as well as many, many debates about politics (which were off-limits when she visited here a couple of weeks ago). Should be fun. Needless to say, posting will be limited to not-existent until (probably) Monday night (when I'm done with my classes).

LINK: I think I want to start a new category called "Weird Link of the Day": something that I find the in course of my normal blog browsing that just seems... weird. Today: Will Baude discusses the etiquette behind telling a woman her draws is showing, yo.

Nevertheless, this is pretty funny.

LINK: Sara Butler discusses Amy Lamboley's take on people who have children versus people who don't. Having a job which allows me to witness hundreds if not thousands of parent-and-children interactions per weekend, I think there's a little bit of truth in both their positions: Ms. Lamboley is right that anyone who observed lots of parents with children might conclude that while bad parenting might be an explanation for a fair bit of the scenes that occur, there might just be something in the fact of having children that causes otherwise rational people to lose it totally, and this might cause said observer to conclude having children is entirely not worth it.

That being said, of course, Ms. Butler is right "that having kids is taking on the ultimate duty," (not unlike marriage in some respects, I think) and that people willing to devote themselves totally to it will avoid many (though, goodness knows, not all) of the "problems" a casual observer notices.

QUOTE: This Diotima post made me laugh out loud.

LINK: things like this always warm my heart. Two thoughts: 1. looks like eggs of freedom Bush sowed in the Middle East are beginning to bear fruit, 2. was anyone else as surprised as I was that there are 700 liberal intellectuals in Syria. More power to them.

LINK: Interesting NYT story on a guy working to dispel myths about Protocols of the Elders of Zion, such as the notion that it has any basis in reality. I'm sort of interested in that book imagining a conversation between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, though I'll have to learn French to read it (then again, I have to learn French anyway).

QUOTE: This is hilarious, no matter your feelings on the politics involved:

"Dr. Gregory Mankiw
Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers
Executive Office of the President
Washington, DC 20502

Dear Dr. Mankiw

I noticed in the recently released Economic Report of the President that there was some consternation in the defining of manufacturing. It could be inferred from your report that the administration is willing to recognize drink mixing, hamburger garnishing, French/freedom fry cooking, and milk shake mixing to be vital components of our manufacturing sector.

I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operator, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal. I do have some questions of this new policy and I hope you will help me provide answers for my constituents:


* Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College?

* Will the administration commit to allowing the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) to fund cutting edge burger research such as new nugget ingredients or keeping the hot and cold sides of burgers separate until consumption?

* Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good?

* Do you want fries with that?

Finally, at a speech he gave in Michigan this past September, Secretary Evans announced the creation of a new Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing. While I understand that it takes a while to find the right candidate to fill these positions, I am concerned that five months after the announcement no Assistant Secretary has yet been named. I do, however, know of a public official who would be perfect for the job. He has over thirty years of administrative and media experience, has a remarkable record of working with diverse constituencies, and is extraordinarily well qualified to understand this emerging manufacturing sector: the Hon. Mayor McCheese.

With every good wish,
Sincerely,
John D. Dingell"

LINK: I'm more inclined to believe Gregg Easterbrook's criticism of The Passion because he also says things like this:

"The point about theology is so simple and basic that it is in danger of being lost in The Passion of the Christ debate--and surely is lost in the movie itself. The point is that according to Christian belief, all people are equally to blame for the death of Christ, and all people are redeemed by his suffering and resurrection. Jesus' ministry and story had to happen somewhere. That it happened among Jews and Romans is no more significant than if it had happened among Turks and Persians or Slavs and Finns or any other groups. All people are equally to blame for the death of Christ, and all people are redeemed by his suffering and resurrection."

I'm still going to see it (after this weekend, of course). So no one spoil it for me by telling me how it turns out.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: things like this and this make me think of this, which I once had the good fortune to see performed live:

And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The "Internationale", let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.

NEW BLOG: Not actually new, but new to me: Hipster Detritus, a nice stopover point for my music obsessions.

Especially this post:

From ILM, a LiveJournal-spawned mix-CD meme that makes you assemble a mix like so:

1. Your favorite song with the name of a city in the title or text.
2. A song you've listened to repeatedly when you were depressed at some point in your life.
3. Ever bought an entire album just for one song and winded up disliking everything but that song? Gimme that song.
4. A song whose lyrics you thought you knew in the past, but about which you later learned you were incorrect.
5. Your least favorite song on one of your favorite albums of all time.
6. A song you like by someone you find physically unattractive or otherwise repellent.
7. Your favorite song that has expletives in it that's not by Liz Phair.
8. A song that sounds as if it's by someone British but isn't.
9. A song you like (possibly from your past) that took you forever to finally locate a copy of.
10. A song that reminds you of spring but doesn't mention spring at all.
11. A song that sounds to you like being happy feels.
12. Your favorite song from a non-soundtrack compilation album.
13. A song from your past that would be considered politically incorrect now (and possibly was then).
14. A song sung by an overweight person.
15. A song you actually like by an artist you otherwise hate.
16. A song by a band that features three or more female members.
17. One of the earliest songs that you can remember listening to.
18. A song you've been mocked by friends for liking.
19. A really good cover version you think no one else has heard.
20. A song that has helped cheer you up (or empowered you somehow) after a breakup or otherwise difficult situation.

my list will be posted in the comments. Feel free to make fun of it, or post your own.

LINK: I know lots of early 20-something girls, so I'll leave it to them to tell me whether they think this description of them is accurate or not.

(Link via Diotima)

LINK: Jeff Jarvis defends the two-party system.

This reminds me, of course, of the debate I had with a number of my far-flung friends as the 2000 Florida mess was shaping up. The Greenies said Gore lost because he was insufficiently liberal, and there was no real difference between Gore and Bush, and no one really thought either would do a good job. The rest of us replied, of course, that Bush and Gore combined got about 100 million votes, whereas Nader had only a few percent of that: if people think Democrats and Republicans aren't doing a good job looking after their interests, they're certainly not engaging in any behavior that demonstrates that. I think that still stands as a pretty good argument for the two-party system.

LINK: InstaPundit on NYT reporters using the same source for multiple stories, and doctoring the quote and attendant description for their purposes. Wish I had thought of that back in my journalism days.

WELL: I have no idea who Edward Gorey is, and yet I was still tremendously amused by this:


You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're
normal, but deep down you really just want to
strip off your clothes and roll around in
chicken fat.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla

LINK: Yglesias has a good point about the Rod Paige-NEA as "terrorists" kerfuffle:

"A person doesn't accidentally confuse teachers with terrorists thanks to poor word choice."

Very much so, very much so.

LINK: So a lot of people having been complaining (rightly) about this Adbusters editorial against neoconservatives (with the Jewish ones conveniently asterisked for you, how nice of them). Of course, this sort of argument is silly: it's worth pointing out that over 90% of the list is composed of men: no one in their right mind would say that this entailed that all men are neoconservatives, or that there's something about being a man which makes one much more likely to be neoconservative.

LINK: Kevin Yaroch has a good post taking Howard Zinn to task for some particular inanities. Me likey:

"There are a couple of reasons that [proportional representation] would be a bad idea in the United States. The U.S. is much less geographically homogeneous than Israel, and individual regions often have distinct interests, which means that a PR-elected wouldn't represent the interests of many areas sufficiently — especially if we also do away with the electoral college, as Zinn also suggests. (Getting rid of the electoral college by itself isn't such a bad idea, though.) There is also another more important problem, which is the lack of party discipline in the U.S. In a country like the UK, where party discipline is very strict, one Labour MP is about the same as another Labour MP because they all tend to vote the same way, and run the risk of expulsion from the party if they don't. (This is very common in Westminster-style systems.) In the U.S., this is obviously not the case at all. The difference between, say, David Bonior and Ted Kennedy is really quite large, and our system of elections needs to be able to differentiate between the two in some way."

LINK: Very interesting and thoughtful post by Sara Butler on Sex and the City and feminism. A couple of thoughts:

1. I always took the message of the show not to be "it's liberating to be a slut," but rather, "what your sex life is like has nothing to do with what you're like." Obviously, the second one is far too facile to be useful--whether or not you're promiscuous is going to have a lot to do with what sort of person you are. But, then again, if you look at the four main characters, the amount of sex they have isn't really an integral part of who they were conceived to be (with the exception of Samantha); e.g., my informal survey over winter break of the dvds I owned confirmed my theory that Charlotte (the "nice" one) was second only to Samantha in number of men, ahem, involved with. But you tend not to think of that when you think of Charlotte--or you don't think of it first, which is sort of the point.

2. Feminism always seemed to me (when explained to me by my mother and sister) to be one of those things that's a really simple idea (my formulation would be something like "men and women are more alike than not alike, and so should be treated more the same and less as though they're two separate species") that, due to it's basic simplicity, has far too many entailments for it to be adopted on its own ('liberalism' strikes me as another example). So perhaps the difference in definitions comes from the different more basic sets of beliefs of the groups involved, rather than a fight over what 'feminism,' as such, is. Maybe this is obvious, but it did strike me as a thought.

QUOTE: A fine example why I still like Andrew Sullivan:

"And then, along comes Sean Hannity, whose new book has the following obscene title: "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism." Why obscene? It is obscene for Hannity to purloin a sentence from the Lord's Prayer in order to advance his partisan political views. And yes, it is also obscene to equate terrorism and despotism with liberalism. Hannity isn't worthy to speak the word "liberalism," a long and complicated and deeply Western political tradition that is the only reason he can actually publish a book like this and face only criticism. To place it in the same context as "terrorism" reveals that this man has no understanding of what this war is about. It's a war in defense of liberalism, in defense of pluralism, in defense of the various peaceful Western political traditions that Islamo-fascism would snuff out in an instant. Even if he wants the word "liberalism" to describe merely a kind of decadent left-liberalism, it's still unconscionable. Peaceful Democratic leftists, however misguided, are not terrorists. Hannity, of course, is a thug. But that shouldn't mean we should simply ignore this kind of slur. This moral equivalence is as disgusting when it appears on the right as it is when it appears on the left. So why is the right so quiet when it is displayed by one of their own?"

LINK: Ah, the First Discourse, how I love thee. I recognized I'd made the right career decision when trying to decide what to do this evening, eventually landing on going to Angell and JSTOR-ing papers of potential future professors.

Rousseau and I are gonna be spending lots of quality time together, I suspect. Though not as much time as I'll spend with Montesquieu.

QUOTE: Wonkette:

"Education Secretary Rod Paige dubbed the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, a "terrorist organization." What gave them away? The rulers? The chalkboards? The detention slips? We understand they do have access to books that explain how to make a bomb."

LINK: You just have to love that someone can do a short post on what's going on in Haiti and point you to a resource like Haiti Pundit.

LINK: I find this to be amusing, and have also found it to be pretty much true.

LINK: OGIC documents the silliness behind ABC's attempts to promote the Oscars. I especially liked this one:

""In addition, characters on three ABC daytime soaps—'General Hospital,' 'One Life to Live' and 'All My Children'—will talk about the awards show, saying they plan to watch the Sunday telecast or attend an Oscar party. They will stop short of saying they are watching on ABC because the network figured that was obvious."

Also, it seems like there's a logical problem with this one:

"ABC has asked writers on its prime-time series to weave the Oscars into their story lines. In an episode of 'It's All Relative,' for example, one character will get mad at another who breaks the remote control, spoiling plans to watch the Oscars."

even if the remote control did get broken, why wouldn't you still be able to watch TV? Goodness knows I manage to keep up my busy TV schedule despite perpetually losing my remote.

FREUDIAN SLIP: from ABC news today (via the e-mail they send):

"World News Tonight: US Sends 50 Troops to Iraq"

then later:

"CORRECTION: World News Tonight: U.S. Sends 50 Troops to Haiti"

as OGIW said, "Haiti, Iraq... I get all those Carribean islands confused"

LINK: The Corpus Callosum (that's the thing that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, no?) highlights a couple of interesting suggestions about governmental reform:

The biggest potential hurdle is time, up to about 4 hours total with 40 questioners (but only about 2 hours with 20 questioners per session). This seems challenging at first, but on reflection, I'm just as happy with that. Given the amount of time that Presidents (and Congresspeople) spend in fundraisers and other political events, I think they can spend 4 hours per month on some direct, unscripted interaction. I think this would shake things up mightily, and for the better. Both the administration and Congress would be more visibly accountable. Constituents would have more reason to communicate with their representatives. The process would be unaffected by congressional leaders and their parliamentary tricks. And most importantly, the Presidency would become less insulated.

Interesting, but would never actually work. The President would either know or easily be able to anticipate the questions from his party (wink wink), and people from the opposition would use the time to make speeches to make themselves sound good. I think these are general principles observable in House and Senate committee hearings, as well as British Question Time.

But I really, really like this idea:

"Let's also make it a requirement that the President include a financial statement in the State of the Union address. He or she would be required to sign it, much like CEO's now have to sign off on the accuracy of the company's financial statements. The financial statement would have to account for anything that results in current or future governmental expenditures. So if bonds are sold, that counts as an expense. Also, the government would be charged depreciation on infrastructure. Thus, if they defer something like highway repairs, it doesn't give the appearance that they actually have saved any money. Putting off necessary expenses, or using bonds to pay for ongoing expenses, are expenses that necessitate an eventual tax increase, but it is an expense that the next Administration has to pay for. Let’s make the administration that generates the expense accountable for it."

I'M TRYING TO COME UP WITH A JOKE ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH GREEK MEN, BUT THE RIGHT WORDING ELUDES ME:

As the Cassandra of evangelicalism...

ALSO: Sullivan had a good bit on He Who Must Not Be Named:

"He's a far-left, paranoid Democrat who delights only in hurting his own party."

It of course then occurred to me that schadenfreude for your own party seems to be an entrance requirement for being a Democrat. I'd rather have a good centrist candidate than a flaming left-winger, and take joy everytime lefties nominate one of their own and fail, and I'm sure my more liberal friends wouldn't mind if every DLC-backed candidate lost this year, even if they were replaced by Republicans. I get the impression this sort of thing doesn't happen on the other side.

WELL: So Andrew Sullivan has this argument he's been tossing around for the last few days, and it really sort of baffles me:

P1. Conservative Protestants dislike homosexuality, based on their plain-text reading of the Bible
P2. Conservative Protestants approve of divorce, while ignoring their plain-text reading of the Bible
C. Conservative Protestants are hypocrites

I have no specific objections to any of the above (for purposes of this post, anyway). But Sullivan then seems to imply that what should follow is that Conservative Protestants should abandon the first premise, so that they can be consistent.

But, of course, abstracting from the particular subject at hand, it's not clear why the tension should be resolved for the pragmatic concerns involved, and not towards the normative goals. I've seen this come up a few times recently on various topics, and it strikes me as odd: if you've got a normative principle you accept (for us cps, the inerrancy of a plain-text reading of the Bible), why would you ever act against it?

QUOTE: this is reasonably amusing:

"The last time large-scale religious warfare broke out in the West, it took hordes of marauding Swedes to even the odds. Unlike the Thirty Years War, however, the battle over Mel Gibson's new movie, The Passion of the Christ, has involved only verbal slings and arrows (and, to date, no marauding Swedes). But there is one important similarity between the two events. As every high school student knows, it can be difficult to remember who fought in the Thirty Years War, which side they were on, and why they were fighting. Likewise, the cast of characters debating Gibson's movie--which opens nationwide on Wednesday--can also be hard to keep straight. "

QUOTE: CalPundit, on our President:

"Sure, he's a Bush, but even so how did he manage to convince the vast majority of the Republican party apparatus that he should be their favored candidate? After all, he had minimal experience, he obviously didn't have any special intellectual or personality characteristics that make you sit up and take notice, and his father wasn't even that popular with most Republicans after his dismal loss in 1992." [emphasis mine]

Now, I've not agreed with him about everything he's ever done, and I'll punt on the question of his intelligence (though he strikes me as one of those kids who sat at the back of the room and made sarcastic comments to his friends mostly because he wasn't interested in what was going on, not because he was dumb), but man, how can you say he doesn't have any special personality characteristics? were you paying attention for the week after 9/11?

I still don't know if I'll vote for him or not, but it's very clear to me that he's exactly the sort of person I want to be President, personality-wise.

LINK: Good roundup of opinions on He Who Must Not Be Named, especially Yglesias':

"Forget the twisted grammar; The Nation isn't pure enough for Nader! Perhaps that explains the thinking behind his bid for the presidency."

LINK: Kevin's right:

"I should note, however, that [Edwards'] constant anti-trade posturing is not endearing him to me further."

the fact that the Democratic Party is even entertaining the possibility of this debate just goes to show how completely in trouble it is. The argument is not hard: free trade means more capital flow, stronger industries, further division of labor, and benefits to everyone.

Free trade, is, after all, the perfect example of a Lyaponuv function.

LINK: I'm violating two of my rules here (not linking to Salon pieces, because of the stupid daily pass system, and not blogging about He Who Must Not Be Named), but Todd Gitlin is really just that spot-on:

"Nader, of course, has grander designs than being a fraction of his previous fraction. Making his announcement, Nader referred to the "100 million nonvoters" he thinks he speaks to and for. It's especially peculiar to think that nonvoters are counting on him at a time when turnout has risen, sometimes impressively, in almost every Democratic primary and caucus so far this year. But leaving that aside, if you take a hard look at the turnout argument, you see that the legions of nonvoters are the spectral cavalry of the marginals -- the phantasmagorical saviors waiting in the canyons. Nader invoked them in 2000. Howard Dean invoked them this year. They are an argument of last resort in political fantasies.

But here's the truth: There's no evidence that nonvoters differ from voters in any radical ideological way. They are not bashful saints biding their time as they hold out for perfection. They are mainly low-income people who want practical results. Their cynicism about politics comes from the lack of precisely that, practical results. They don't want prophecy or a new party. They have no more faith in Ralph Nader's version of the "liberal intelligentsia" than in any other."

LINK: CalPundit discusses the universal disdain for the current apportionment system. But he also buries an important premise:

"Not only is this self-evidently bad, but it's one of those odd issues in which, as near as I can tell, virtually everyone is in favor of making the system fairer and less partisan."

the missing premise being "Not only is this self-evidently bad, but it's one of those odd issues in which, as near as I can tell, virtually everyone who has spent time thinking about the apportionment of House districts is in favor of making the system fairer and less partisan."

this, of course, reduces the relevant portion of the population considerably, and suggests an explanation other than the career-mindedness of elected officials for the lack of anything being done.

WELL: My thoughts on the Nader run:

The smartest thing the eventual Democratic nominee can do is just completely ignore him. Sure, it's true that if a relatively small number of people had not voted for Ralph in Florida or New Hampshire, Bush would not be president now (God help us all). But presuming that the Dem nominee needs to protect his left flank is based on two fallacious assumptions:

1. That the people who voted for Nader would have voted for Gore otherwise... it seems like you could believe that these people would collect around some or another fringe candidate... also, there is the non-trivial possibility that 3% of the country are actually Green Party supporters, and wouldn't transfer their votes even had the Green candidate been someone less likeable (to them).
2. That the people who voted for Nader would've voted at all otherwise

And, anyway, had Gore turned a similarly small number of moderate voters over to him (from Bush), the same result would obtain. In fact, there's reason to believe this is a much easier outcome to facilitate: people on the edges, idologically speaking, tend to be a lot harder to appease (what concessions would the Ds have to make to appeal to the average Green voter? I shudder to think), whereas centrist voters tend to be swayable by much easier means: personal appeal or a broadly designed policy goal ("let's save the environment!") will pull in a potentially larger number of votes with the smallest of outlays of resources (and without being forced to take on positions that scare off other voters).

WELL: lots of thoughts on the Ralph Nader announcement:

Joe Carter thinks it might be a bigger problem for Republicans than Democrats. I think the analysis that he won't be repeating the "Republicans and Democrats are the same" lie from last time, but I don't think this is going to benefit the Democrats. After all, he gets his marginal votes from Ds, not Rs. A much more likely line of attack is "everything that's happened in the last four years is the Democrats' fault, because they had the opportunities to stop Bush but chose not to." This would be bad for the Ds, obviously, and in no small part because many of them have capitulated on various parts of the Bush agenda (I tend to think that's a good thing, on the whole, but I'm also not a potential Nader supporter).

Josh Claybourn thinks Nader's poll numbers indicate he still has a significant base of support. I tend to think this is just his announcement-related bounce. Keep in mind, after all, that The Nation (which was very much divided on Gore/Nader in 2000) has already come out telling Ralph not to run. People on the left want to win more than anything, and they know they're not going to win with Nader.

LINK: If true, very very good news.

QUOTE: Norman Geras has a very nice post at A Fistful of Euros abot Primo Levi:

"Once again there is here, I believe, the mutual illumination of uncommon and common experience. Everyone wants to be lucky enough not to have to wake up, ever, to what the prisoners at Auschwitz daily faced; yet, except for the very, very fortunate if there indeed are any this fortunate, most people know on some level what it means to wake from 'the illusory barrier' of sleep to a heavy, unresolved burden, an enduring pain or trouble. The knowledge informs our understanding of what Levi recounts, and is also deepened by it."

and I found The Drowned and the Saved to be incredibly moving, which is the normal reaction, I suppose. Nevertheless, I still prefer Viktor Frankl, perhaps because he makes statements like these:

"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

QUOTE: good point:

"Dude! Politicians seek re-election. Only the very best statesman can rein in our passions and lead us to justice in the process, and there aren't many around these days. And while you may be able to cost the President re-election by not voting for him, but don't be so arrogant as to think you can enable him to win it - or solve all our problems - simply by stirring up other religious conservatives. There are a lot of people out there who need convincing, and that is the bottom line.

We'd be better off giving leaders less credit for their accomplishments and less blame for their errors, because we, the voters and activists, are the material and instruments of American politics - we make all things possible or not. If you want to make America better, and want Bush to be a better leader in an election year, YOU have got to motivate and energize HIM -- YOU have got to provide the leadership so that the White House can act. Lay down some fire, and not just the brimstone kind."

LINK: I like evangelical outpost's suggestion for dealing with the civil unions issue:

"Some conservatives and libertarians may see no need for the government to expand the definition of civil unions in any manner. But the political reality is that the change is inevitable. The issue is no longer when civil unions will be recognized but what form they will take. By desexualizing the issue we preserve the government’s purpose (a social institution that brings stability to our society) without endorsing behavior that many of us consider immoral.

Besides, why should we extend social and government benefits to a group based on sexual orientation while excluding others who are equally worthy? Why extend civil unions to the lesbian couple down the street but not to the elderly sisters who live next door?"

Though I recently advocated a somewhat stronger version of this: why not just write all that marriage/civil union stuff out of the law? Name someone you want to have hospital visitation rights, someone you want to have custody of your children, etc etc, and not have to specify any relationship between the two people at all, which seems to really avoid all the problems of civil unions (I think, though I may be wrong).

LINK: I don't buy this sort of argument about Bush's decline in popularity--it doesn't necessarily show electoral weakness on his part. What it shows is that, as the election is approaching, Democrats begin to think the Republican president may not be doing as good a job as they previously thought, and Demcratic-leaners begin to lean more Democratic. If you believe (as I do) that the split in the country at the moment is probably about 45-45 Democratic-Republican, then you should be surprised to see numbers that reflect that, especially as the election draws closer.

QUOTE: Jared Bridges:

"No sinner is good enough to justify himself/herself before God. No matter if a person is a promiscuous homosexual or a "pretty good guy" who tells a white lie every now and then, both need God's grace. This fact should not delude us into thinking that murdering someone carries the same weight as stealing a Snicker's bar."

QUOTE: A very good point from Gene at Harry's Place:

"Speaking on the death in 1962 of one of the great people of the 20th century and one of the great figures of the democratic Left-- namely Eleanor Roosevelt-- Adlai Stevenson paid tribute by saying, "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness."

Lately I've been wondering why-- when it comes to Iraq-- there is so much darkness-cursing on the Left, and so little candle-lighting. Why do antiwar leftists seem more intent on finding reasons for despair about events than in identifying and nurturing reasons for hope?"

QUOTE: Wonkette can't resist having fun with this:

"Americans have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it's being stuffed down their throats and they don't like it."

Which I would say was unfair and crass if the exact same joke hadn't occurred to me when I read it.

LINK: Diotima is right about Omarosa (point also made well here):

"Omarosa's problem isn't just the way she asserts herself, but the way she's unnecessarily not nice to the people around her."

but she's wrong wrong wrong about this:

"Of course, the real outrage of last night's episode was Tammy getting the boot rather than Katrina."

Sure, Katrina screwed up by delegating the lease negotiations to Bill (Will? I could only kind of pay attention last night?), but man, if you can't count on someone to give everything for the team they're on, what good is that person?

LINK: As a huge fan of George Kennan--the "containment" guy, one of the best of the Liberal anti-Communists, one of the people who makes me feel continually that it's okay to call myself a liberal, that there really is something honorable and noble in that tradition--seeing him get kind words from Colin Powell is really nice.

QUOTE: Terry Teachout proves once and for all that there's no such thing as an unfunny Leon Trotsky joke:

"Right at this moment I feel like Leon Trotsky, post-axe."

LINK: this is a pretty amusing description of political ideologies. You'd be surprised (given my tirades against it earlier this month) how often I most closely correlate to libertarianism. To wit:

"The most egregious example of government waste is...

CONS: the Department of the Interior's $600,000 outhouse.

LIBL: the Department of Defense's $600 toilet seat.

LBRT: the $100,000,000 in emergency funds to buy air conditioners for poor people during the blistering heat wave of 1998. Although, I'm sure there are people who honestly believe that if all those air conditioners saved just one life, then it was indeed a small price to pay.

COMM: the Department of Commerce's entire budget."

WELL: all the stuff that was sort of getting in the way (the paper on the flaws of incompatibilism, the paper on Thucydides, the waves of joy for getting into Duke, and the fear that my life might end up being like Teenage Fanclub's "Your Love is the Place Where I Come From" (great song, by the way)) are all now much more manageable. Woo!

LINK: I could totally do this

DUDE, SAY SOMETHING ABOUT POLITICS: Josh Marshall (and OGIW, who probably can claim non-incidental responsibility for the win) is under the impression that the Dems' win in the Kentucky-6 special election means something. OGIW in particular avers that this deflates my thesis about lower than expected turnout in states that will go decisively to one or another candidate*. But, then again, look at the voting pattern of the counties in KY6--they're definitely largely a swing area, which means that's to be expected (though whether or not it translates to Ds winning the area in November remains to be seen, and I'm skeptical about it).

*Also note that this theory is based on a Kerry-Bush matchup, where people become less enamored of their candidate as time goes on. Edwards in the race might screw everything up.

DESERT ISLAND TOP FIVE: in the spirit of the fact that winter seems to have given up entirely, as it is practically tropical in Ann Arbor and has been for the past few days (real temperature: 40° or so), and it's been sunny for pretty much the entire month of February (and thus no campus-wide case of SAD), and as there seems to be the immanent danger my life might turn into a Teenage Fanclub album, I think it's high time for the following top 5 best songs about summer:

5. "1979" -Smashing Pumpkins: the sound of you and your friends spending the entire month of August driving around all day looking for something to do and finding nothing (but probably only in high school--no one has that kind of time after that).

4. "Summertime" -DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince: somehow, I have a strong emotional attachment to this song despite the fact I've never a. done any of the things mentioned in the song and b. never been any of the places mentioned in the song.

3. "Summertime" -Sam Cooke: everyone has their favored version, and a list wouldn't be a list without it, but I prefer the very clean-sounding hauntingness of this version.

2. "Summertime Rolls" -Jane's Addiction: fell into a sea of grass/ and disappeared among the shady blades. Indeed.

1. "Hot Fun in the Summertime" -Sly and the Family Stone: not any summer I've ever had, but the thought that someone once had one like this is just as good.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: Nick Hornby:

"All these years later and Suicide still feels like a shot in the head," an enthusiastic reviewer remarked when their first album was re-released; a couple of decades ago, that would've been enough to make me want to buy it. ("A shot in the head! Wow! Even The Clash only felt like a kick!") Now, however, I have come to the conclusion that I don't want to be shot in the head, and so I will avoid any work of art that sets to recreate that particular experience for me. It's a particularly modern phenomenon, this obsession with danger. And, in the end, it's impossible not to conclude that it has been borne out of peacetime and prosperity and over-education. Would the same critic have told someone coming back from the Somme that a piece of music "feels like a shot in the head," one wonders? And if he did, would he really expect the chap to go charging off to his local music emporium?

LINK: The sort of guy we all should be supporting:

"West is a comedian, social critic, hedonist, and Christian, but until College Dropout came out last week he was known primarily as a producer. A typical West beat uses samples of old records in conjunction with live instruments to summon the woody, musky feel of '70s soul without devolving into a period piece...

West's productions probably are not the reason he is experiencing such rapid success. It's his sense of self: He's funny, and he can parody himself, which is rare as hen's teeth in hip-hop now. Anyone who puts a completely sincere song about God ("Jesus Walks") and a completely insincere exercise routine ("The New Workout Plan") on his debut record is not unduly worried about what people will think of him."

LINK: I was highly amused by this, since I got all of them:

TEN HIPSTER-BAITING* STATEMENTS TO GET THE PARTY STARTED

1) "Elastica was actually an improvement on Wire because their songs actually go somewhere and are danceable; 'Connection' is superior to 'Three Girl Rhumba' because the Wire song doesn't go KAPOW!"
2) "Yeah, I like the solos on Marquee Moon. They remind me of the E Street Band gone psychedelic."
3) "What's wrong with Interpol sounding like Joy Division? It's not like Joy Division's gonna make any more records anyways."
4) "If rudimentary drumming ruins the White Stripes for you, I'll be glad to take that copy of the Ramones' first album off your hands, too."
5) "You know what Sleater-Kinney need? A wah-wah."
6) "What the Rapture has that Gang of Four didn't is an interest in making disco something other than fucking depressing."
7) "You hear the new Liz Phair? Apparently she learned how to sing!"
8) "They peaked with Dirty."
9) "He's wearing a trucker hat? Oh, sorry, I didn't notice."
10) "At least Is This It didn't have any 17-minute long songs about dripping candle wax on Joe Dallesandro's nipples or some bullshit like that."

LINK: I like the second one, though I wouldn't, of course.

AMEN TO THAT: Sara Butler:

"Personally, I really just don't think I could take myself seriously any more if I ever started going to a church that called itself "Spirit Garage.""

I like these people because they were nice enough to say I could come study political theory with them.

Not nice enough to offer me money, though... but still, I'm really happy and stuff.

DO: note the newness on the left-hand side. I promise no more flip-flops on which candidate I support for at least another week...

eeeeeeeexcellent: except for the Nazi part, and the massive headache I got trying to read Being and Time:


You are Martin Heidegger! Your reputation is
stained a bit by the fact that you were a
member of the Nazi party, but your
groundbreaking Being and Time is still
read by a whole lot of people. You overuse the
hyphen, and make up a lot of words. You died in
1976.


What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via Diotima)

OGIW and I around 9:00

OGIW: kerry won, yes?
Me: "Edwards running stronger than expected" CNN says
OGIW: good.
Me: which, in 'we can't tell you the results yet'-speak, means "has either won or finished very close 2nd"
OGIW: yeah. i figured

LINK: I found it a little discongruous that I was reading this really, really good post on moral dilemmas (about which thoughts later) whilst listening to "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You (Tonight)" by spinal tap.

LINK: be impressed by Wonkette's indignancy at the Drudge Report for doing so much to spread a malicious and false rumor. Yeah, spreading unsubstantiated rumors really is bad, especially if it's 60% of what you've been posting about since then.

COOL NEW BLOG: Which is not especially new: Harry's Place, which looks like a really good liberal-but-not-too-liberal British blog. Read, read.

LINK: Matthew Yglesias captures Andrew Sullivan being oddly arbitrary:

"For one thing, I can't wait for Andrew to bring his enthusiasm for having the public sector account for 33% of GDP to his adopted homeland -- I believe we're at around 18% right now. Tell you what, I'll be a "small government conservative" too and settle for 25% Everyone's happy!

But really, why would you have an arbitrary target like this. Say there were a really, really, really big war -- mightn't government spending need to go way up? I mean, I don't know, maybe it wouldn't, but it seems like it might."

QUOTE: A very nice post on the use of 'evil' to describe political figures:

"The other obvious problem with a liberal who says Bush is evil or a conservative who says Clinton is evil is that they’re denying their capacity to make broader judgments about the existence of evil. If Bush is “evil,” for example, then is Saddam Hussein “double-plus evil”? Do you take the more cynical calculation that there’s no difference between Bush and Saddam? Or do you take the tack chosen by the Ramsey Clarks of the world that anyone opposed by “evil” is automatically good? (This is the rationale Clark, who believes that every American President is evil, used to justify defending Milosevic and the Rwandan genocidaires.) Once you start down the road of “good” and “evil” in American politics, you wind up with either a pretty bizarre set of values, no internal consistency, or both."

LINK: good post from exvigilare.

LINK: OGIC has a good post in response to the "If you had to live in a song, what would it be?" question. I especially like her second answer (best line: "and if your homework brings you down/ we'll throw it in the fire and take the car downtown"), as it's one of my favorite David Bowie songs*.

My personal answer? "A Summer Wasting" by Belle and Sebastian**.

*my favorite being "Always Crashing in the Same Car" from Low, which is the logical precursor to The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out."

**I would definitely not want to live in the song that came directly after it on iTunes, "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart," by the Manic Street Preachers.

LINK: I'm with Joe on this one, but, then again, my sympathies with aristocratic forms of government are well established: far, far better that we have undemocratic* forms of government with well-formed laws than democratic ones that make things like theocracy possible.

*relatively undemocratic, anyway. I'm not sure you can stray too far off the mark on this one.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE FOR A REALIST THEORY OF DEMOCRACY: from Matthew Yglesias:

"Philips was not convinced. "NAFTA, in my mind, sent our country in a tailspin the day it passed in 1997," she said after the forum. She said she hadn't decided who to vote for yet and would still consider Kerry."

LINK: In the words of Kent Brockman, you could probably say that this barely qualifies as news.

Haiku - by Sophie Hannah

The fact of it is
Haikus are bloody easy
But they're often crap.

(via normblog)

LINK: In the spirit of mending fences with Joe and irritating everyone else I know, I pretty much entirely agree with his analysis about this.

IRRESPONSIBLE RUMOR-MONGERING:

ESPN is reporting that ABC radio in New York is reporting* that Greg Maddux is going to sign with the New York Yankees later this week.

Maddux, as you no doubt know, is also represented by A-Rod's agent (Scott Boras), and there are versions of the how-the-deal-got-done story that had Yankees GM Brian Cashman calling Boras before the A-Rod stuff began to talk about another player he was representing...

it's almost certainly untrue, but I just thought I'd torment OGIW a little bit.

*this has the same journalistic credibility as "my friend x's friend told him that..."

QUOTE: TNR

"Edwards's final jab of the evening was a spontaneous outburst in response to a long Kerry soliloquy about his Iraq war vote. Kerry was asked whether his affirmative vote authorizing the president to go to war made him feel "any degree of responsibility for the war and its costs and casualties." He went on for 476 words without answering directly. "That's the longest answer I ever heard to a yes or no question," Edwards said."

LINK: I can sympathize with TruePravda on this one. I had a conversation with a Christian friend recently in which she asked me which good Christian rock bands she should be listening to that she wasn't listening to already, and I had to admit that I don't actually ever listen to Christian rock. Even though it really shouldn't have, it did make me feel like I was doing something wrong.

LINK: If you're feeling a little down about your country, be sure to check out the comments on this post from BuzzMachine

INCIDENTALLY: I ran spell-check on the post below ('eighth' always looks spelled wrong to me), and the spell-checker definitely did not recognize 'blog.'

LINK: Best A-Rod related blog header, hands down.

Bernie Williams having to bat eighth, huh?

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without restraint."

-Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 15

"But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

-James Madison, Federalist No. 51

NOTES FROM LAST NIGHT:

Let's get this party started: "Gimme Some Lovin'" -Stevie Winwood
Let's get this party started right: "This Charming Man" -The Smiths (you wouldn't think it was that dance-able, but my oh my)

LINK: Ah, Community... fufilling the highly biased view I have of you...

UM, NO: this doesn't really work:

"1. On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs.
2. Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church.
3. Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who acts as bagman.
4. Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says.
5. Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government.
If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft."

Why is it wrong? Consent. There is no direct analogy between 1. and 5. because the threat is not the same. To put 5. into 1. in the correct way: "An official agent of the government mails me a demand for money," except, as you will note, the demand of the government official is not the same as the demand of the person on the street because their penalties differ. There are only two options with the man on the street: do what he says or suffer immediate physical harm. There are three options with the government official: either you can comply, fail to comply and suffer a harm that is of entirely a different kind (you're unlikely to be killed for refusing to pay your taxes, even if you refuse to pay them a lot), or fail to comply and go someplace else that has laws you find to be more amenable to your situation. Everyone who is a citizen of a country makes an (implicit or explicit) agreement to abide by the laws that country passes, right or wrong. If you think there's no hope for change, you can always go somewhere else*.

*Hobbes and Locke both assert versions of this view

CHRISTIAN LIBERTARIANISM:

I actually (though perhaps not surprisingly, being a liberal) side with Matthew Yglesias over Joe on this one.

The essential view is the Christian libertarian one, which (as I understand it) posits that each person should look after their own moral development, and apportion their money as they can to whatever causes strike them as the best to give their time/money/energy to. To bring the state in to act as a coercive agent in getting people's money from them is just plain wrong. Yglesias, I believe, concedes that, ideally, our selfish (self-interested, however you want to phrase it) desires would work out in the aggregate to benefit everyone approximately equally well.

But the problem, from the liberal point of view, is that it seems like a fact that not everyone is benefitting equally (though I'm not especially beholden to this as a desirable condition)--in fact, it seems to be the case that some people, in a pure economic libertarian system, are always going to go insufficiently cared for, or will be required to make choices that, ideally, people shouldn't be forced to make. This seems to create a moral dilemma: you can have total economic freedom, but only at the price of the well-being of others*.

When Yglesias says "The key is to help those in need by hook or by crook," what he means is that for those who feel the moral imperative created by the presence of insufficiently** well-off people, who know also that the job just isn't getting done in the private sector, something has to be done, and this is where the state comes in. I have some more to say about the Locke-Rousseau underpinnings to this particular argument, but I'll see how this first part gets received and maybe go from there.

*you might object, of course, that the number of people this applies to is very small--but then, I'd contend that the moral imperative to help your fellow human beings is the same whether the number involved is one or a million--I'm not a utilitarian, as you may recall. You might also object that perhaps all of the people who fall into this category have done something to put themselves there--crime, drugs, choosing to drop out of school. But, I'd reply, if you still believe they have a soul worth saving, I don't think it's a stretch to say you could imagine a sense in which you have an obligation to minister to the body as well as the spirit.

**When I talk about sufficiency, I mean it in a roughly Lockean sense--I have no problem with people dividing up what there is in whatever way they see fit, so long as they leave sufficient for everyone else to be able to live decently well. I punt, for the moment, on what constitutes 'decently well.'

what? What? WHat? WHAt? WHAT? WHAT!!! WHAT!!!!! WHAT!!!!!!!

--me, to my TV, about thirty seconds ago

I must now go be delirious with joy.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Gang of Four:

"I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love,
we just don't think that what goes on between two people
should be shrouded with mystery."

ALSO: Since the Hillary-health care thing has been coming up quite a bit recently, I just thought I'd put in a plug for The System by David Broder and Haynes Johnson. Ignore their editorializing--they do a really good job of showing that it takes a village to screw up a major policy proposal, not just one person.

WELL: The real question is whether or not it's true: does character really trump issues? One would be tempted, taking a realist outlook on democracy, to say yes--it's certainly the case that policy recommendations are really just calculated to appeal to certain constituencies, and have a high chance of never coming to pass.

But does that mean that issues really don't matter? If we follow the character logic regressively back to its obvious genesis, you'd be forced to argue something like the following: a candidate with a really trustworthy persona and absolutely no positions on any issue should be the most electable sort of candidate there is. But this is rather obviously not true. Positions on issues matter for the same reason that anything else about a candidate matters: the willingness to talk about taxes, or foreig policy, or whatever, says something about the ordering of preferences and signals to a voter what sort of person is talking in a really meaningful way. And, of course, these sorts of judgments are built into the way we think about politics (even if we don't do it consciously): consequently, a statement of the form "The character of the candidate is itself the only "issue," and it is furthermore the only "issue" about which a thinking voter can be expected to make up his or her mind," can easily be interpreted to be bordering on the incoherent*.

*that doesn't mean I don't think the Hitch isn't right, it's just a lot more complicated than he's letting on.

QUOTE: A really good appreciation of John Edwards:

"Edwards is the first politician who, when he talks to a room full of middle-class people, doesn't necessarily seem to be promising something to them. Sure, he's a little vague about just where the line is between the "Two Americas" -- it's "the rich and powerful" and "everyone else." But when he gets specific, when he starts talking about the ten-year-old girl who goes to sleep hoping that it isn't as cold tomorrow as today because she doesn't have warm enough clothes -- it's got to be apparent to any audience that he's not talking about what he's going to do for them. He's making a moral claim about what our country owes to those who have the least, not promising something to everyone who "works hard and plays by the rules." And, shocking as it is, that's a big deal. And it matters that it comes from a candidate who is generally perceived as a moderate -- if only because he's a southerner -- rather than the leftmost candidate in the race. Although I think that's a very subtle distinction, and I agree with every word of Joel Rogers' argument in The Nation, "Progressives Should Vote For Edwards".

It also, surprisingly, permits a kind of optimism. The Shrum populism is just a complaint, it doesn't lead to a structural revamping of the economy that would really change the circumstances that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful. Edwards' vision, on the other hand, suggests something that it is within our power to change. We can do something for that ten-year-old girl, we can generate what the folks at the Economic Policy Instittute call "broadly shared prosperity." "

LINK: Jonah's hanging it up for awhile, which is really sad, because for about a year he was my absolute favorite writer on issues tangentally related to politics (until The Hitch came on strong after 9/11). Maybe he'll be back sooner than he thinks. I can always hope...

LINK: evangelical outpost provides your daily dose of moral philosophy.

DOES IT REALLY MATTER? Michael Totten says no:

"Kerry isn’t my favorite person. He certainly isn’t my first choice for president.

But, you know? I just don’t care about his sex life. I really don’t. We aren’t electing the pope or the chief marriage counselor."

But let's suppose there's something to the thesis that a candidate's character matters (I'd certainly support that proposition in some form or another). Does this part of a candidate's life matter? I'm not convinced that it does--it doesn't tell me anything particularly meaningful about how the person will act in making spontaneous political decisions (in the way that other aspects of character, like sincerity of religiosity, might). Then again, it does clue me in to the fact that whoever it is doesn't make the smartest of decisions in their personal life. So I suppose I'm strictly indifferent (in a game-theoretic sense) on this issue.

LINK: Actually, I have read it, and I wholeheartedly agree--voting based on issues is a little silly. You have to vote based on personality. On that basis, the only Dem I'd vote for this time around is Edwards--I trust him in the way you should trust a presidential candidate. However, it's looking more and more like he's toast, and I don't get quite the same fuzzy feeling from a ticket where Edwards is the veep--mostly because I don't trust Kerry at all.

That being said, there is a rather big ideological fight going on in the Democratic party at the moment, and a bigger one in the future as electoral prospects for Democrats brighten: you're either a Clintonista (in that you think government should not automatically be assumed to be the best way to get things done) or you're a left-wing/progressive/Deaniac, who think that getting programs done matters far more than how they're implemented. And, to put it mildly, we've been getting kicked around since 1995 or so (and the Welfare reform bill), sufficiently to the point that if this years' nominee isn't one of us (and he won't be), 2008's has to be one of us, or we start jumping ship (Joe might not think this is a bad outcome, but if we're Hillary Clintons in the Democratic party, we're John McCains in the Republican party... so consider yourself warned). And, simply put, HRC is the person in the best position to win amongst prospective 2008 candidates*... unless there's someone else you can think of who could do it.

*keep in mind as well that she'll be defending her Senate seat in 2006--if she wins, that will likely demonstrate that she has some appeal not solely derivable from her being Bill Clinton's wife.

OH: and don't mind a little personal thing, I hope: to my foreign correspondent (the one in Germany, you know who you are), my e-mails aren't going through for some reason, so the short-form question: when are you going to be done working? I'll aim for sometime around then.

WELL: Amanda Butler (who's on this crazy good-theoretical question-tear lately) asks about the comparative ethics of torture to prevent further injury to soldiers versus that to protect civilians from further injury. It's an interesting post. My thoughts:

Obviously, I'm not a utilitarian, so the moral status of torture is constant for me--it's always wrong (which is not to say it should never be done). That being said, I think the differentiation works this way: torturing anyone from the opposite side is something of a crapshoot, ethically speaking: sometimes the circumstances suggest that it's okay to do (such as when large numbers of civilians are threatened) and sometimes it's not okay (when the comparative advantage to be gained is small), but, significantly, there's no hard and fast rule to determine when to torture and when not to torture (this is presumably exacerbated by the fact that no one knows what the potential torture-ee knows, if anything). This suggests, in a purely game-theoretic sort of way, that it will always make sense to torture someone from the other side: the potential for information gain is great, and the marginal increase in inhumanity that would occur in the war would not really be that great.

But, of course, it's one thing if it's someone else's people being tortured, and another thing entirely when it's your own. Civilian leaders would (hopefully) feel that exposing their men and women to any more risk than necessary is unacceptable, and thus would agree (because this logic would apply to most every government everywhere) to artificially and irrationally* move the acceptable behavior. This seems to me to be a good explanation of where the convention against torture comes from.

The difference between situations (that is, the troop-saving versus civilian-saving) is because soldiers, in some sense, sign on to the fact that they may well end up dying as a part of their service, and because behaving rationally** in this situation would have a result, generally speaking, worse than if there were no torture***.

*in the sense that it makes far more sense to torture if there's going to be any potential benefit from it
**in the same sense as above
***because we can easily construe the hypothetical in which an armed forces tortures all of their prisoners and comes up with no information, which seems to fail morally on either a utilitarian or deontologist system of morality

LINK: A very good appreciation of Immanuel Kant, even if you don't particularly like him.

TODAY'S RANDOM MUSIC THOUGHTS:

1. I've been listening heavily to Lodger and Low (crazy Berlin-era, Eno-influenced insanity from David Bowie, but it's post Young Americans, so it's all ridiculously catchy. ridiculously catchy), and it occurs to me that he's one of those people whose reputation for being, you know David Bowie overshadows the really consistently good work he did for quite awhile (Bruce Springsteen strikes me as another one of these).

2. A Small Victory discusses what it's like to be an R.E.M. fan these days, especially when you go back to the old albums and you realize that they used to be so, so good, and just aren't anymore. Sigh...

3. I was speculating a few days ago that there are really two things that make a difference what kind of music you end up liking (if you're one of those people who go crazy over music): what you listened to first, and whether or not you play an instrument/were in a band. I think my musical taste is probably entailed by the following facts: I listened to R.E.M. almost exclusively for about three years (6th grade through 8th, when I discovered Patti Smith, etc), and I played in several bands of marginal quality in high school, and continue to play guitar today. Just a thought.

LINK: I'd like to retract all of my previous unfavorable statements about Howard Dean. He's apparently come to his senses.

LINK: Wonkette floods the zone on Kerry coverage*. OGIW (who is actually not going to be in Washington this weekend, so will revert temporarily to JA3G (Just Another Ann Arbor Girl) discussed various versions of the story (apparently, Washington was positively abuzz today), and how this is much, much more interesting than the Bush 'AWOL' story**.

*you know what I mean (wink wink)

**I also thought it's more interesting than the Democratic primaries, though I'm probably just saying that because my guy's getting stomped.

LINK LINK LINK: JE may have a little life in him after all, if any of this is true.

WELL: So a number of people (including my fabulous Foreign Correspondent) have asked about the Hillary Clinton thing to the left in approximately the following form: "you're not actually going to vote for her ?"

And how.

First, I think it's a given that the Democrats are going to win in 2008. Call it a consequence of the Feiler Faster Thesis that the inherent tension within the conservative movement (or, really, pick any of the inherent tensions you like--I prefer the one between economic libertarians and those who think it's more important that Rs get reelected, whatever the costs) is going to boil over by then. There's lots of anecdotal evidence that demographic trends and positions on issues favor the Democrats in any time frame that's not between now and November.

So the real question is, who do you want winning in 2008? Make up a list of people with reasonable shots (if this campaign season has taught us anything, it's that the list of contenders you could've made 18 months ago would look very much like the people who ended up doing rather well), and name me a Democrat you'd rather have. She's emphatically not (as I understand it) a part of the really freaky left-wing portion of the party--she may be the last best hope of us Third Way Democrats (as John Edwards will be getting out of politics soon). And she could win. Sure, she has that shrew-like image in some parts of the political world, but if you want to get lots of those freaky left-wing-types riled up, there's no better way to do that than by making ad hominem attacks against a 'strong' woman (in scare quotes so you can make your own apt-ironic judgment on the term).

QUOTE: Jonah Goldberg says it so I don't have to:

"How else to explain the dizzying spin that Kerry's victories in Tennessee and Virginia prove he's "electable" in the south? Umm, note to the dreamers: Winning a Democratic primary in a Republican state is not the same thing as winning an election in a Republican state just as winning your fraternity's three-man basketball tournament doesn't make you eligible to play in the NBA."

LINKS: My Kerry thesis is gaining traction, or a variation of it is, anyway: John Chait and Will Saletan both note that Kerry's support is based largely on two things: 1. no one really knows anything about him besides that he served in Vietnam and 2. everyone thinks everyone else is going to vote for him. Neither of these is likely to last.

LINK: Amanda Butler poses an interesting scenario, and I'll see if I can't get a decent answer sometime quickly:

"Could the United States even fight against seccession at all? What kind of credibility would we have on the world stage, what kind of sanctions and punishments could (and would?) other countries inpose on us?"

GOOD POINT: Tacitus:

"Remember the old days? Remember when it didn't matter what you did -- or didn't do -- during Vietnam, 'cause that was then, and anyway folks were young and unaccountable? Remember back when it was the hallmark of crude, vicious politics to go on fishing expeditions merely for the purpose of embarrassing a sitting President? Remember? Remember the defensive, indignant Democrats of the '90s and their principles?"

LINK: Donald Sensing has a really good post on the unintended effects of the bombings in Iraq:

"The target was a line of men waiting to apply for positions in the Iraqi security forces. A wounded man whose legs were almost blown off said from his hospital bed that "God willing" he would return to security duty when healthy again. The WashTimes reports,

'Another of the wounded, Abbas Hussein, 39, an army veteran looking to re-enlist, said the would-be volunteers in line "were all happy and excited."

"I wanted to rejoin because I love my country, the great Iraq," he said. "I wanted to protect the people."'"

LINK: Leave it to The Nation to make me re-think my long-standing (by which I mean since 1998) love for all things John Edwards.

A ROUSING DEFENSE OF MY SCHOOL (OR SOMETHING): Democritus at Tacitus can't understand how it is that minority applications might drop off after the Affirmative Action rulings by SCOTUS. Obviously, they're not very familiar with important primary effects (such as the number of people who have imperfect information about the rulings and changes to U of M's admissions policy, and may be making the decision not to apply based on their incorrect understanding), nor very familiar with secondary effects (like negative press as a result of the rulings (either claiming the University had gone too far in supporting AA or arguing that by changing their standards, they were selling out minorities) which would lead potential applicants to have a more negative definition of the University than the would otherwise).

Then again, there's this possible explanation for Democritus' criticism, which comes out in the comments:

"You always struck me as a Spartan, democritus. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Gee, what made you notice? :)

I went to Michigan State as an undergrad. Road-tripped to Ann Arbor numerous times (they had better Chinese takeout). Still can't stop laughing at the fact that most of U of M's student population is from New Jersey."

Clearly this is a perfect example of MSU trying to take it out of U of M. Perfidious!

I'LL TAKE THAT BET:

"You can't talk about Vietnam every day until November."

-John Chait on John Kerry

WELL: So I've been thinking a little lately about the theory that's been getting more and more play, which says that voting blocs are very fluid at the moment, and it's hard to say where people's loyalties lie, so, for example, the poor job-recovery part of the economy will hurt Bush in Ohio (or Missouri, or Tennessee, etc), because the sort of blue-collar voters who normally turn out for the Republicans either won't turn out or will vote Democratic. I even had a conversation with OGIW where I floated this thesis, and she emphatically agreed with me. It was then that I knew something had to be wrong with it.

Then I read this Matthew Yglesias post on polls (ignore his conclusions, they're not particularly interesting), which goes to demonstrate one of the central theses of realist democratic theory: people often have no idea what they're talking about*, so look at what they do, not at what they say. Which means your best reliable predictor for how people are going to vote is how they voted last time, not how they say they're going to vote this time. Think about the states that are typically designated as in play**--they're virtually all states the Dems won in 2000. So it doesn't matter if Bush doesn't get Macomb County Repubs to turn out--he's probably not expecting to win in Michigan anyway, and if those MCR's return to type and vote for Bush, he might end up winning unexpectedly. In other words, until you start seeing polls where Kerry is running above 55% nationally, assume everything is going on like normal.

*in the sense that most people don't follow politics that closely, so their opinions are liable to sway wildly over time, even if their voting behavior never changes

**note to OGIW: Florida is not in play--if the Dems couldn't get it done in 2002, they're not going to get in done in 2004, especially with that open Senate seat.

LINK: I found this explanation of behavior in the primaries to be interesting; you may not--it's very political behavior-oriented.

LINKS: Joe links to this post on the growing divide between Christians (and Diotima links to this good post about what evangelicals are not). From the first:

"What's the difference? Born again Christians - and I consider myself one - are convinced that Christ was God in bodily form and that Jesus "was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead." For us, it is Christ's bodily resurrection that defines who Jesus was, and that furthermore, we understand Christ to be alive now. Hence, we say we have a "personal relationship" with Christ because we know him as a living being with whom we are in spiritual communion.

Because this fact defines our relationship with Christ and the way we understand Christian faith itself, it generally compels born-again Christians to emphasize Christ resurrection and divine identity over other aspects of his ministry. After all, take away Christ's resurrection and his self descriptions of his divinity, and all you are left with is his ethics."

Actually, it strikes me that this maps very closely to what the difference is, but it's not really the difference itself. To get to that sort of belief (very Nicene Creed-y, or perhaps more Apostle's Creed-y) seems to require beginning with a fundamental belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. If you're inclined to take it seriously, then you have to take it all seriously, and it's going to get under your skin (as it were) in a way such that it becomes the basis of everything. If you're committed to something less than that, it seems, it's not impossible that you'd have the same beliefs as the former sort of person (though it's unlikely), but what you're going to choose to emphasize are the parts that stand up the best apart from all the other parts.

LINK: I like to think that the skills I'm developing at good ol' U of M are coming in handy for something. Sometimes they do: e.g., using my close-reading skills of primary texts to decipher the meaning of "Bombs Over Baghdad" by OutKast. My Greek Political Thought professor is no doubt proud .

DO: note the new "at the moment, this blog endorses" on the left.

WELL: It does strike me that at least one more of these is not like the others, namely, being a conscientous objector. I'm not going to make the facile and easily rejectable claim that everyone who claims CO status actually deserves it--but it seems to me entirely possible (to couch my example in terms Joe is more likely to be sympathetic to) that a very serious, literal-minded Christian (read as 'fundamentalist,' but probably only in the way we're all fundamentalists) who argues that one of the more prominent aspects of Christ's teachings is the idea of non-resistence (e.g. Matthew 5:39*) towards evil, which seems to necessarily include unwillingness to fight in wars. I'm aware, too, that this person's ability to exercise their right is going to be largely influenced by the fact that they're surrounded by Christians who take their positive obligations towards others to be important as well, even in such cases as that means fighting and killing in war. But, I think, the two strands have to co-exist with one another.

*thank you, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible for saving me from an unspecificed amount of time trying to find the appropriate citation.

LINK: Norman Geras' interpretation of Arendt's 'banality of evil' is so good you must absolutely drop everything and read it right now:

"I also have a wider theoretical misgiving about the emphasis on perpetrator normality: this is that it runs the risk of permitting the sociology and psychology which is involved in trying to understand what happened to displace the ethical perspective."

So we know he's not a determinist (not a hard determinist, anyway); the interesting question is whether his sort of moral analysis is compatible with utilitarianism, because it seems to me to be very much not, which is a little surprising based on my (no doubt misguided) conception of how geras' thought-processes work. Or it'd require some sort of rule utilitarianism that would end up looking awfully like deontology*.

*but then again, all rule utilitarianism looks like an attempt to sneak in deontology without crediting it as such, so maybe I'm not the most unbiased of observers.

LINK: My thoughts about the Grammys were similar, except I thought the Hey Ya! peformance was a little flat.

TODAY'S TERM WHICH ABSOLUTELY MUST CATCH ON: Ho-mentum

LINK: I'd like to say I'm a little surprised about this, but I'm not... especially after OGIW tried to convince me that two HoDo 2nd-place finishes somehow constituted his not being out of the race.

Speaking of, I've seen the poll numbers for Tennessee and Virginia, and Edwards is toast.

BOY, DOES THIS PUT MY DAY IN PERSPECTIVE: The away message of my nursing school friend:

"nothing like cathing a man with one testicle to start your day off right"

Makes 6.5 hours of class seem not quite so bad...

Heavens, where to start? Your bloggy goodness for the day, until I get back from my freedom and moral responsibility seminar and have time to post something new:

Sara Butler takes Gloria Steinem down a peg (or three). It's both highly amusing ("Rrrrraaggrrrr! We LOST on Title IX! They won! This woman is on crack! She's completely lost it!"), and acutely observed ("The completely unsophisticated, stereotypical and painfully inaccurate treatment of religious conservatives, the worn out Marxist themes, oh, and apparently Gloria Steinem has picked up a theology degree somewhere along the line...").

LINK: If you enjoy arguments about cutting utilitarians/libertarians down to size, you'll want to be following this set of arguments. Me likey:

"If the State of Texas is not entitled to its moral intuitions, then what entitles Bainbridge to his? Or, to state the libertarian premise more precisely, why should Bainbridge's moral disgust alone justify a prohibition, even if it is shared by a majority of the polity?

I think that Bainbridge's post suggests that libertarianism has its limits—even among its supposed adherents. I suspect that few, if any, persons are true libertarians in moral matters. The libertarian no-harm principle simply fails to account for intuitional moral misgivings that each of us possess and that serve as the foundational assumptions of our respective worldviews. Libertarians frequently attempt to sidestep such when-push-comes-to-shove moments by denying that an activity "x" is, in fact, harmless. But, ultimately, we are all legislating our morality. Some people are just more honest about it than others."

LINK: I'm a little weirded out because just this sort of thing was used a hypothetical example in this weeks' sermon.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE GRAMMY SEGMENT IN WHICH EARTH, WIND AND FIRE, OUTKAST, THAT BAND WITH THE WICKED COOL LAP STEEL PLAYER, AND PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC ALL PLAYED TOGETHER:

We elected the wrong Clinton.

LINK: Hilariousness from David Brooks.

QUOTE: We've all been here at one time or another, no?

"if monday rolls around and the house is still without dsl goodness, i'm packing my bags and heading home. because i can go a week or two without diet coke. i can even turn the cell phone off and stay away from the mall AND the tv. but so help me God, if i miss participating in any juicy online winter sales because of this sorority sabotage, there will be hell to pay. Hell. To. Pay."

LINK: this seems a little troublesome, depending on how much thought you put into what heaven will be like when you get there (true to my Christian existentialist ways, I never really think about it. I'm sure it will be nice, but I didn't get into Christianity for a desirous vacation spot in the afterlife, and I have plenty to think about in the meantime).

I really don't like this, though:

"By holding such populist visions at arm's length, the churches have tacitly admitted that heaven puts religious faith itself in a dubious light. Belief, it can easily seem, is just the quarter you put into the divine slot machine in order to win the jackpot of the afterlife."

Which really just seems like an adapted version of Pascal's Wager to me. As my Philosophy 202 GSI once put it, though, the willingness to be won over by this sort of argument (I'll believe in God just in case...) indicates the unseriousness of the person espousing the view. And, of course, I've never really been to a church that had a lot of problems with talking about the afterlife (or not talking about it, which seems to mostly indicate that it's not a particularly big problem), but then again, I've mostly kicked around Reformed-style churches, so maybe it's different elsewhere.