WELL: I've still got a fair bit of work to do this evening (if only I hadn't slept in this morning...), so I won't have time to post much, but I wanted to leave you with some to ponder, so I offer the following topic of discussion that came up in Theories of International Relations:

Would the United States announcing a policy that any terrorist detonating a nuclear device on American soil would result in the US nuking Mecca be a successful deterrent?

WELL:

"If you are of the left, and accept all the same premises as those on the left, yet disagree with them, then either their logic is bad, and they are just stupid, or you are just failing to accept the brutal logic of those premises."

Well, I don't mean to speak for Norm Geras, the Harry's Place people, Socialism in an Age of Waiting, Oliver Kamm, and other people in the same sort of boat as I am, but...

It seems like part of the argument is about what the relevant principles are. Unless one conceives of an ideology as monolithic and ahistorical, there are always going to be fights about what it means to be a conservative, liberal, libertarian, etc. Further, one might believe that spirited fights about first principles keep ideology from becoming staid. Now, obviously, we've been on the losing side of leftist debates since 1968 or so, so maybe we should look to our neoconservative bretheren as a model, and, indeed, some of us are (just ask me sometime who I'm voting for for president), at least to some extent.

Some of us would probably also agree to the premise that at least some of our fellow leftists are stupid, but I don't know if that's different than it is for any other political orientation.

As to the last, it's precisely because we do see where brutal logic takes some leftists that we feel the need to oppose them from the left. It's one thing, for example, to deny Stalinism validity when arguing from the persepctive of the capitalist; it's quite another when one argues against it from post-exile Trotskyist positions. The rejection is more fundamental--it's the difference between saying "even if you accept the premises, the conclusion doesn't follow' and saying 'one has no reasons to accept the premises to begin with.'

LINK: Joe Carter points out that Republicans seem to take Evangelical votes for granted, while ignoring their larger interests:

"While I’ll let my Catholic friends speak for themselves, I think I can honestly say that evangelicals have more than a few major priorities not included on the list. What about genocide, refugee resettlement, and the global AIDS/HIV crisis? Why no mention of human rights abuses, religious freedom, or slavery and sexual trafficking? Where does Kerry stand on prison rape, the environment, and international trade?"

LINK: See, and I always thought Protocols of the Elders of Zion cribbed heavily from that old French book about the conversation between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell. But hey, I suppose you can't prove that, so it's okay to sell it as though the book were true...

QUOTE: I quite agree with this formulation:

"Without getting talmudic about it, I see a distinction between 'of the left' and 'on the left'. I'm happy to say I am 'of the left' in that most of my ideas and attitudes are informed by a set of enlightenment and post-enlightenment principles you identify. I'm less comfortable these days with saying I'm 'on the left', as (a) it's not clear to me what I'm signing up to, and (b) large swathes of people who identify as 'on the left' are not people I would march with."

LINK: Way to go, Jose Maria; good to see being out of power hasn't dulled his senses.

Also, you can be a good person and sign a manifesto for the liberation of Cuban political prisoners. I did.

LINK: Norm notes this is the 63rd anniversary of Babi Yar, which he commemorates by posting Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem about it, the last lines of which resonate with me as powerfully as any political idea I have in my head (a translation from my YY book, which I think is better, though I don't know Russian--but it was done by YY himself, so I hope I can trust him):

"Nothing in me shall ever forget!
The "Internationale," let it thunder
when the last anti-Semite on earth
is buried forever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood,
but in their callous rage, all anti-Semites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!"

WELL: I know I'm horning in on Chris Lawrence's territory (as he's been making the 'isn't it odd when non-Christians tell Christians what to believe' argument a bit), but the following examples of egregious bias do sort of strike me:

" * He says his son understood he had to go to Iraq because “our current President is a very devout Christian … [who] had the knowledge, and understood what was going on, and it’s far deeper than we as a people will every really know, because we don’t get the information that the President gets.” What can one say in the face of such belief? The President is simply unworthy of the trust these people have placed in him." Crooked Timber

What can one say in the face of such belief? Well, the last part is almost undisputably true, so obviously the problem's not there; the father premises his support on the notion that Bush is a Christian who has some idea of the moral gravity of the situation we're in and what he's asking soldiers to go out there and do (I don't have access to GWB's mental states, but I suppose that's not prima facie unreasonable, though maybe I should ask Joe Carter), and, on the basis of that (as well as some soul-searching about what defending our country and the value of democracy mean, presumably), the father and the son involved made a decision that fighting in this case was morally right. Call me perfectly naive, but I don't see any reason to think they were deluded to think so.

See also this post, which makes hefty use of the old 'Christians are irrational' trope, rather than actually trying to deal with or understand the basis of some Christians' moral and ethical positions.

LINK: Chris Lawrence points out there's a pretty good historical reason to believe a less-than-total vote in a democracy might still be valid.

QUOTE: Which reckless cowboy major-party presidential candidate said the following?

"We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, asn obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent -- and that the United States should support and participate in those steps."

Click here to find out.

WELL: So I take it to be one of the advantages of my probability class, with which I have a uneasy relationship (to put it mildly), is that I've now done so many problems centering around rolling a die, tossing a coin, and dealing from a deck of cards that it's likely to put me off gambling forever.

WELL: An upside of my probability class is that it's sufficiently drained me of the desire to ever roll a die, flip a coin, or do anything involving a deck of cards again that I don't really think I have to worry about ever developing a gambling addiction.

WELL: I feel the overwhelming need to point this out, which I learned via stereogum: Britney Spears and Presbyterians are anagrams. Weird.

Also, I've been debating whether or not to post this, since I'm not sure it would be taken in the spirit of mirth in which it would be intended, so I'll mention it as a 'blind item:' WHICH Duke Political Science professor bears a striking physical resemblance to the lead guitarist of a famous heavy metal band?

LINK: I have to represent for Duke PoliSci where I can (did I just boost myself in google when someone searches for 'Duke Poli Sci blog?' Did I just do it again?), so check out this op-ed by a couple of professors in our department, including one I'm currently taking a class from. With that in mind, it's probably inappropriate to comment on it, but let me just say I 'schmagree' with what he has to say.

LINK: In the spirit of not reflexively bashing Nation-types, I should mention that Marc Cooper makes quite the series of good arguments, to wit:

"But all this got me wondering… that the political litmus test that Leftists often apply to those around them reminds me of the racial purity tests favored by the old South African apartheid regime. There were all sort of official categories of “colored” or “black” depending on what percentage of impure blood one possessed.

But to be “white” – you had to be 100% white—the old One Drop Rule. So, sorry, Hitch. It seems that your opposition to capital punishment, to racism and to fascism is all outweighed by your other heretical views in the eyes of thousands of self-satisfied leftists. Whatever you have to say lacks relevance, why bother to even read you, as you have betrayed the cause? You’re but a drunken, celebrity-crazed traitor.

The truly disconcerting part of all this, to borrow a descriptor from Hari, is that lefties rarely apply this purity test to those who stand to their purported left (but who, in reality, are reactionary enemies of democracy).

Example: Hitchens is drummed out of the left because his interpretation of anti-fascism brings him to support certain U.S. government policies and even the President. But what consequences among leftists does, say, Ramsey Clark reap for joining, literally, in the defense of Milosevic and Saddam? Anybody call him a traitor to the left recently?"

LINK: this may be the funniest thing I've read in a long time:

"Unless you tell us otherwise, that is, for those of you who are now donating less than $10 a month, we will increase your donation by 20%. For those donating $10 or more, we will increase your pledge by 30%..."

A marvelous discussion of gung-ho prescriptivism in language from a chapter by my professor, Lesley Milroy, in Authority in Language:

"In an essay entitled 'The Corruption of English' (1980), Simon blames structural linguistics and literary structuralists for an alleged decline in language use and for permissive attitudes to language: 'What this is, masquerading under the euphemism "descriptive linguistics"...is a benighted and despicable catering to mass ignorance under the supposed aegis of democracy.' His essay is outspoken and full of emotive language ('pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo', 'rock-bottom illiteracy', 'barbarians', 'vandalism', etc. ).
...Critics of this kind...have an apocalyptic view in which the forces of good and evil do battle to capture the linguistic souls of our descendants."

How epic!

-Dara

I GOT YER MULTILATERALISM RIGHT HERE: David Brooks:

"And so we went the multilateral route.

Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.

And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.

Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur."

Then there's this charming development in Iran, where it's apparently now illegal for a man to beat his wife (better late than never, I suppose). Norm has another example of their enlightened legal system.

Thus I point you to Bird Dog:

"If being unilateral to stop this genocide is wrong, I don't wanna be right. This is another example of Kofi Annan's abysmal legacy. He hasn't exercised leadership here--or few other places for that matter--he's exercised followership. This genocide is happening right now. What right does Sudan have to sit on the UN Human Rights Commission? Why should the UN Security Council wait one more minute to stop this atrocity? If they can't take serious action to stop the mass murder of the Darfurs, what good is the UN except for making noble, high-sounding pronouncements? What right does Kofi Annan have to tell us we're in violation of international law when his own house is in such disarray? What moral authority does Kofi Annan have when his own house is rife with that an appalling oil-for-food scandal or when there's a rogues gallery of thugs on the human rights commission? It's time for new leadership at the UN and it's time for a Democracy Caucus."

In that vein, I do have to ask: if actual clear examples of genocide aren't enough to convince people that maybe intervention isn't the worst thing in the world, there's probably not a whole lot of point in talking to those people, is there?

FILE UNDER 'WELL DUH:' Tony Blair:

"If the violence and terror stopped, Iraq would very swiftly - because it's rich in resources, it's people are intelligent - would make progress. So my point to people is: which side should we be on now? You might have disagreed about the conflict, but there is only one side to be on now, and that's the side of people who are trying to bring democracy and hope to the country, not trying to plunge it into terror and chaos."

LINK: This is the best case for Kerry I've read thusfar (and a good reminder that I really like Ron Rosenbaum), but sadly, it rests on a counterfactual analysis of what he'd be like if he were more like himself than he's currently being--Al Gore, anyone?

LINK: A good dissection of the pathology behind the anti-McDonald's movement:

"It is striking how morally loaded some of the discussions about food are. In one of the funnier scenes, Healthy Chef Alex - a holistic health counsellor who believes in 'integrating appropriate food choices and lifestyle options' - tries to coax Spurlock away from the 'corrupt' world of meat-eating and towards a Good Life of nuts and lentils (4). Spurlock visits a school where the pupils are calm and attentive and claims that it's a result of their eating healthy school dinners from the Natural Ovens Bakery rather than the sugary fare stuffed down kids' throats in other districts. Food, it seems, is not only about taste, enjoyment or nutrition; what we eat apparently reveals something of our moral character."

And sometimes it seems to me like this particular character of critique infects other areas--the notion that some choices aren't explicable when people make them, and so have to be attributable to some mental deficiency or another (the oh-so-Socratic notion that if only people really understood what their interests truly were, they'd think like me).

It's a bit of a non-sequitur which is about to follow, but not really--this seems to quite frequently bleed over into the political realm, where (usually liberal) people say something to the effect of 'isn't it a shame that all those rural people (or whatever group you like) vote Republican?' because a 'true' ordering of preferences would put them in the Democratic party. Really, this is mostly a symptom of underdescription in theories of individual choice (if you can't understand why people make the choices they do, maybe you don't actually understand them all that well).

And it's only a short leap into crudities and 'aren't we so much better than them'-ness, which is the basis for the lack of civility in politics. It's clear to me that, though I'm not going to vote for Kerry, the world won't fall apart if he gets elected--I don't think that he wants different end results than Bush does, he just wants them by different means (or maybe isn't sure what his means would be, but that doesn't prevent him from wanting the same ends). Why this level of civility is so rarely returned is unclear to me.

LINK: I don't really understand the fetishization of some famous past leftists (as much as I sometimes like Trotsky, it's worth remembering he was one of the worst moral equivocators when it suited his purposes, and he was wrong about historical materialism, etc), the one that really never made sense to me was Che Guevara, who's good, I guess, if you want someone who was young and rebellious*, but for not much else aside from that.

*I mean, you could plausibly also like him because he opposed the exploitation of Central and South American regimes by amoral (primarily U.S., though the Soviets were just as guilty) outside forces, but if that's your thing, you could go to liberation theologians, get all that, plus something resembling unimpeachible moral authority.

UM, YEAH: This does sum up the way it feels sometimes, does it not?

"Tomorrow's Headlines, Today:

WASHINGTON POST: Under Cloud, Dan Rather Resigns; "New Media" Claims Triumph

NEW YORK TIMES: The Irrepressible Wonkette Makes Hilarious "Don't Go There" Reference While Discussing Paris Hilton's Pooter"

WELL: All due respect to Andrew Sullivan, and far be it from me to get in between a man and his self-righteousness, but how can I resist:

"But the real victims of [the conservative failure to embrace gay marriage], in the very long run, will not be gays. It will be conservatives."

Which strikes me as shoddy reasoning; after all, conservatives should've been destroyed by their much-more-clearly immoral support for various forms of Jim Crow-ism, but they've actually pretty much been steamrolling the Democrats with regularity since then. Maybe (and I suggest this with all modesty), Andrew is allowing his own interest in this issue to color how he thinks other people will view it?

BEST EVS!!! Hilarious.

Fluxblog explains.

I HEART PAUL WOLFOWITZ: No, really. This interview of the Dude by Johann Hari does explain a bit why:

"So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx.

But can we trust the Bush administration - filled with people like Dick Cheney, who didn't even support the release of Nelson Mandela - to support democracy and the spread of American values now? He offers an anecdote in response. There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? [US Deputy Secretary of Defence] Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."

With the fine eye for ideological division that comes from a life on the Trotskyite left, Hitch diagnoses the intellectual divisions within the Bush administration. He does not ally himself with the likes of Cheney; he backs the small sliver of pure neocon thought he associates with Wolfowitz. "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart. He's from a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. You know the drill - Kennedy Democrats, some of the family got out of Poland in time and some didn't make it, civil rights marchers? He impressed me when he was speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington a few years ago and he made a point of talking about Palestinian suffering. He didn't have to do it - at all - and he was booed. He knew he would be booed, and he got it. I've taken time to find out what he thinks about these issues, and it's always interesting.""

LINK: Afghanistan election update, and the news is mostly, if not totally, good.

LINK: this really makes me think, and I don't know that I have a good answer to the implicit question in it.

WELL: Andrew Sullivan's Quote of the Day:

""Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great. Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," - Donald "Get a life" Rumsfeld, yesterday. Hey, why not a civil war, while we're at it? Nothing's perfect."

All due respect to Andrew (and the usual moment of wondering what they teach people in Government at Harvard), but is he actually arguing that it's better to have no election at all than to only have part of one? Obviously having one everywhere is best, but if your effective, on the ground options are part or none, it seems obvious to me you have to take part.

LINKS: I'm not going to make any grand claim about having a solution for the current situation in Iraq (except wait and see what happens, which has pretty much been my constant refrain); I'm pretty sure, though, that you don't make things better by making them worse, for example, by saying that you're not going to hold elections when you say you're going to hold them. I mean, what sort of world are we in when the Republican is arguing that the democratic process has to push forward, though the sledding may be rough in the interim, and the Democrat is arguing that the democratic process needs to be pushed aside in favor security concerns (why not just appoint someone to take care of all the security issues, then? Well, sure, that looks a lot like appointing a dictator, but that is the sort of end-result towards which Kerry is meandering at the moment, is it not?)?

Eric the Unread:

"Out of power though, the Democrats have taken the easy and tempting road, avoiding facing-up to threats and playing games over Iraq. Visceral loathing of Bush, has led to an inability to focus on the issue with clarity."

Which does sort of remind me of the comment Michael Walzer made in "Can There Be a Decent Left?" about how it's not just that left politics nowadays tend toward the irresponsible, it's that they can't even concieve of what the responsibilities of power might entail. I'll give Kerry the benefit of the doubt and assume he just hasn't thought through the consequences of his positions on this issue; were I to attribute intentionality to him, I couldn't even manage a modicum of respect for him.

American Future catches Mr. Kerry in another outrageous moment.

Surprise! I'm not dead. And I would like to point out that we have known that Wisconsin was going to be a swing state for quite some time. I can now go dormant for another six months or so.
-OGIW

Heh

LINK: I enjoy church particularly when the preacher is fired up on his topic, especially if he's not always fired up, as that makes it easier to tell when it happens.

Norm Geras is fired up today. I suggest y'all go read. I like this especially:

"What you say and don't say - not on some particular day, but over a period, in the balance of the emphases, the silences and the sounds - is the vehicle of what you think, where you stand. The animus against politicians like Bush and Blair, the sheer unrelenting hostility and, in Bush's case, derision, combined this with a voice about the evils today threatening us which is variously muted, strangled or just rampantly apologetic, tells a bleak story about the cultural moment we are in. What price will in the end be paid for the combination remains to be seen. It is unlikely to prove costless."

Which makes me wonder why it is that certain left-of-center types (Norm, the Harry's Place crowd, even Socialism in an Age of Waiting), myself included, have ended up in this position. The answer, it seems to me, is that we'd all subscribe to something like the following statement: principle has to trump politics, every time. Trotsky must ally with the social democrats against Hitler because he understands that, even as much as his opposition is totally wrong, there's a greater priority at the moment.

You might think of it as the difference between the belief that politics is all about power versus the belief that it's about power, but also justice. If you're inclined to see principle as epiphenomenon to justify use of power by people who have it, then your political position has to be pure oppositionism. You support the war because you hate fascism, dictators and gross violations of the sanctity of human life. You oppose it because America is hegemon, and so any use of power, even for a putatively good reason, begets more of the environment one doesn't desire in the first place. It's unclear to me that a leftist anti-war position (other than that of the pacifist, which is another, easier set of problems to deal with) will not eventually reduce to this postmodern mush. So it's not really 'their morals and ours;' it's our morals and their rejection of them.

LINK: Dan Drezner discusses a story for those of us who are made uneasy by the idea of China being integrated into the world economy without first, um, taking care of what we might delicately call 'domestic concerns.'

WELL: Good to see that TNR is finally recognizing what I've been saying since at least January: Minnesota and Wisconsin are swing states. How could I possibly have predicted this, you ask, given my famous aversion to judging attitudes by polls? One only needs to look at electoral returns from each state on the state and national level (think the success of Tommy Thompson, Norm Coleman, and he relative strength of Bush in 2000), thus substantiating once again that the best way to guess how people will vote this time is to know how they voted last time.

WELL: You're probably wondering when I'm going to update the Duke Diversity Watch. I promise you, as soon as I see someone who's not wearing the uniform, I will.

QUOTE: Harry:

"So what is the point to this hypothetical discussion? Well, there is now a growing body of opinion suggesting that if coalition troops pull out of Iraq that the violence will lull and there will be a better chance of peace in the country.

There seems to me little evidence to support such a position unless you call an Islamist state run by those counter-revolutionaries who hack off the heads of their opponents and kill women for the 'crime' of going to work, a form of peace. I am sure there are some who would be capable of arguing such a position, after all there have been no shortage of people telling us that there was 'peace' in Iraq before the invasion, a 'peace' maintained by torture and mass graves.

Of course we cannot be absolutely certain that counter-revolutionary forces would take control of Iraq if the foreign troops pulled out. Just the evidence at the moment shows that even with the most powerful military on the planet at their side, the Iraqi government is struggling to defeat its enemies. That should at least give us a clue as to the likely outcome.

Everyone wants to move towards elections and an eventual withdrawal of foreign troops. The main difference of opinion at the moment stands between those who feel that troops should be pulled out now and those who think they should stay and hopefully assist the transition to democracy. Obviously there is a lot to be argued about in exactly how that assisting is done.

One thing we can be absolutely certain of in regard to withdrawal of troops is that British and American soilders will, of course, stop being targetted. It is entirely understandable that some people, knowing that, call for the end of the occupation now.

But if they choose to make that their position they should do so being fully aware of what such a withdrawal would mean for Iraqis."

QUOTE: Norm quotes a good portion from the Nuremberg Trials:

"[I]nternational law has in the past made some claim that there is a limit to the omnipotence of the state and that the individual human being, the ultimate unit of all law, is not disentitled to the protection of mankind when the state tramples upon his rights in a manner which outrages the conscience of mankind…"

LINK: Paging Joel Schlosser...

METAPHOR OF THE WEEK:

"You're a Chicken McNugget; I'm a Big Mac"

-Heavy D (though nothing will ever top Big Daddy Kane's "My rhymes'll stick to you like Skippy or Jif")

LINK: I don't know what to make of this, except to say that 2-14 is still a possibility.

A COUPLE OF THOUGHTS TO PONDER: The first here.

The second here:

"There be some that proceed further, and will not have the law of nature to be those rules which conduce to the preservation of man's life on earth, but to the attaining of an eternal felicity after death, to which they think the breach of convenant may conduce, and consequently be just and reasonable (such are they that think it a work of merit to kill, or depose, or rebel against the sovereign power constituted over them by their own consent.) But because there is no natural knowledge of man's estate after death, much less of the reward that is then to be given to breach of faith, but only a belief grounded upon other men's saying that they know it supernaturally, or that they know them that knew others that knew it supernaturally, breach of faith cannot be called a precept of eason or nature."

-Hobbes, Leviathan, I, xv

LINK: Personally, I always thought gerrymandering had the potential to be quite a good thing.

WELL: Eric the Unread has a post on responses of German politicians to the election of some far-right representitives. He ends with the question:

"While I'm not in favour of engaging with Nazis, surely if you effectively fail to argue and interact with them, challenging them at every turn, then won't it re-enforce their claim to be representing those who feel alienated from the established political parties?"

I suspect this is on to something; one clearly can't just avoid unsavory political opinions (though goodness knows I try), but neither does one really wish to have to give them the legitimacy open debate affords. I'd go for the current strategy, though it's not sufficient: having debates, explanations, etc of why Nazism is unacceptable as a political doctrine should be a standard part of education. That is, everyone ought to avoid Nazis whenever possible, but they should also know why they're avoiding them.

LINK: Eric the Unread provides eight good reasons to stay the course in iraq; I also suspect the answer to his last question is, all too often, 'yes.'

LINK: Crooked Timber does a little dissection of Andrew Sullivan's 'whoever loses the election will actually win' thesis, which actually seems pretty accurate to me. I'm still going to vote for Bush, but I have some serious worries about where his domestic policy is going (I'm all for more spending on domestic programs, and some of this 'opportunity society' stuff sounds intriguing, but I'm not sure how long he can hold off the fiscal conservative backlash; I have concerns about his position on taxes, but I'm not really convinced Kerry is better--he stands to be worse, in fact, since Kerry would have to cut taxes more to get the same reputational effect that Bush would), and I think foreign policy needs a basic statement of first principles, and to go out from there, but I have doubts that will happen (I do, however, know that Kerry's instincts on foreign policy questions diverge wildly from mine, and I am a f.p.-driven voter at the moment). So a vote for Bush is, as I see it, a vote to at least retain the possibility of democratic expansion across the world; it's not much, but it's the best I'm going to get.

LINK: Probably the best description of the situation currently facing Russia, from Socialism in an Age of Waiting.

LINK: You know, a lot of people have dropped out of the blogging game recently, but none makes me as sad as the departure of TMFTML. Where else am I supposed to go after a long day of work?

LINK: I think Pee Wee Herman used to have the old line "it's so funny I forgot to laugh." To wit.

This is marginally funnier, but how hard is it to make jokes about Matchbox 20? Did you even know they were still around?

LINK: It requires levels of coolness far exceeding my own to reference Fairport Convention in a post on The Clash.

WELL: Dear Dan Lee,

I'm very sympathetic to your desire that methodology be recognized as a separate subfield within political science at Duke. But I still think there should be a political philosophy requirement.

Nick

QUOTE: As I sat down this evening to watch some TV, I opened a bottle of Jones Soda, which said the following under the cap:

"Your job needs more concentration. Success will be achieved."

The first part of which seems awfully judgmental to me, especially considering that I spent most of the day working on a paper.

WELL: Just some hypothetical speculation about state-of-nature theory so that I'm not sticking strictly to silly stuff this weekend:

Suppose you have a population with a standard variation of skills, abilities, and intelligence. One might speculate, reasonably, that, absent a Rousseau-ian 'will of all' (a highly dubious concept, if ever there was one in political theory (and there are many)), no one can legitimately lay claim to superior political authority (Hobbes, for example, argues along these lines). You might conclude on that basis that any government is just the lucky group of people who happened to use force first and best; in this, the libertarian and anarchist seem to agree.

But I do sort of wonder about it, because while it's clear that the use of force is always tied up in issues of power, it's not clear to me that the use of force will always be the worst thing. We can certainly imagine counterfactual worlds where the use of force makes everybody better off than they'd be without it (I don't want to violate Godwin's Law, but you can guess where I'm going with that). And you can probably also buy into the Marxian notion (here Marx only insomuch as he follows Smith or others) that some coercive action actually probably benefits all--the famous baker can only not care about you if he's free from worrying, say, that someone will come along and horribly murder him on his way to work.

I don't say this to be polemical at all, even if it sounds that way--libertarianism is the only major political philosophy that's totally foreign to me (it violates oh-so-many of those Christian-deontologist-quasi-Trotskyist beliefs). I have no idea what the folk assumptions are of people who subscribe to that view, so I'm curious to hear from my libertarian readers (and I know I have a few) whether it's coercion and force as such that are bad, whether they're universally bad, or whether they're just bad in this current instantiation, etc etc.

I close with the following bit of conversation from a few weeks ago:

ME: Democracy is a lot like Communism: it's a good idea in theory, but it never works out in practice.
FELLOW GRAD STUDENT: Yeah, except it's not even a good idea in theory.

WELL: In re this, I thought I'd note that I realized today that the phrase "not a cloud in the sky" was not just a rhetorical one, and actually referred to the way weather can sometimes be. Michigan messed me up, that's for sure.

FASCINATING: This is an article I stole from The Quitters, and I happen to disagree with it thoroughly -- but I suggest that it's worth reading anyway. In it, a couple of professors attempt to categorize and label a group of young women as attempting to be "effortlessly perfect," and then go on to suggest that this is acceptable because we don't know how to change it -- at least, that's what I get out of it. I wonder if that's the wrong conclusion, if this phenomenon seems prevalent to anyone else, and if anyone else gets the impression that these writers are way off base?

-Dara

QUOTE:

"[The mature man] then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches a point where he says: 'Here I stand; I can do no other.' That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man--a man who can have a calling for politics."

-Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation"

WHY IS THIS UNIVERSITY DIFFERENT THAN ALL OTHER UNIVERSITIES*?

--Bill English looking his Tucker Carlson best at the Duke Inaugural Ball

--Duke University President Richard Broadhead and I dancing right next to each other to the O-Jays' "Love Train" at said inaugural ball

--Receiving, for being the only first-year not to win basketball season tickets, a ceremonial beer that has been handed down from first-year to first-year since 1997 (in big block letters at the bottom of the beer: DO NOT DRINK)

*In which Nick makes a vague allusion to a Seder, but probably too vague for, you know, normal people

QUOTE: From Slate's list of interesting quotations from the Kitty Kelly book:

"Page 350: As CIA director, H.W. despises Henry Kissinger and instructs his staff to refer to him as "Mister," not "Doctor." "The fucker doesn't perform surgery or make house calls, does he?" Bush says."

I think my opinion of HW just went up.

LINK: I was pretty amused by this, link stolen, as always, from Sara Butler. I'm looking forward to that first book.

LINK: Eric the Unread goes off on a bit of cant from Chechen rebel leaders:

"If you accept responsibility, you bear the consequences."

Of course, they bear responsibility for what happens regardless of whether they accept it. You certainly don't need an admission of that kind to feel moral outrage, but it's also probably the case that the outrage you feel ought to go up in direct proportion to which they try to pass the buck of moral responsibility. I'm not here to especially defend Putin's behavior with regard to Chechnya (like most international crises, there's quite enough blame to go around*), but to be backed into the situation he was facing, where there was no clear good way out, and then to try and blame him for choosing amongst the undesirable options, well, the mind boggles.

*You might think, as I do, that this is maybe less problematic than it first appears. Certainly no one is exempt from the charge of adding to the level of misery of mankind (human nature being what it is and all); nevertheless, there are some pretty different categories uses of force can be put into, depending on what underlying principles they can serve.

But, you might say, is it not the case that everyone who engages in violent action will claim (certainly al Qaeda, et al claim) to be acting in defense of moral principles, same as your 'good guys' do; how is one to adjudicate between those claims? There are two potential answers: first, one could argue that deontology of its nature prohibits relativistic claims, so the claim I'd make to moral truth cannot possibly be reconciled with any other. This is unsatisfactory because it basically requires fiat-ing in what one wishes to prove. Second, and much more persuasively, one could argue (a la C.S. Lewis in Men Without Chests, among other sources) that the most basic principles of the deontological code are omnipresent in major faith traditions and civilizations, and that to the extent that norms are reasonable to speak of in international relations, it's because some moral truths are just kind of obvious to sensible people.

METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM: relating the below quotes to the title of this post is left as an exercise to the reader:

"Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious and honest approach from a dishonest one."
-Lenin, Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

"Mature poets steal; immature poets imitate"
-T.S. Eliot

LINK: Dan linked to this SI story about good places to go see football. I find this a bit odd, since they played "Jump Around" last weekend at the basketball campout, and Dan's jumping alacrity was far behind that of several other people, myself included. I expected better from a Wisconsin alumnus.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: from Socialism in an Age of Waiting (and I don't necessarily endorse the view being presented here, unlike normal):

"Liberal democracy, as far as we’re concerned, is all too narrowly “liberal” - in the real-world sense of giving far more freedom to certain individuals and groups than to others - and nowhere near democratic enough (which is why socialists used to go on about social democracy, encompassing a lot more than simply political democracy). However, for now, and for the foreseeable future, liberal democracy, in its various forms (parliamentary/presidential, federal/unitary, old-established/newly introduced, and so on), is all there is, unless you really want to live under a dictatorship or - even less plausibly - kid yourself that you’re going to bring about a socialist revolution and introduce workers’ control any time soon. But there’s one thing to be said in favour of life under dictatorship, or wrapped up inside a socialist dream, and against liberal democracy in Britain as of 2004: in the former cases people take the political order seriously, and don’t respond to dangerous and irresponsible fanatics by giggling along with them or, worse, taking their whining at face value."

LINK: Sara Butler finds yet more reason to despair of youngish people's ideas of marriage and relationships:

"Goodness gracious, is this attitude towards marriage getting it completely backwards or what? Having a child with a man is a better way of getting him to commit than marriage is?... Despite making my head hurt, I think this raises a really interesting question: if marriage as a social institution came about historically as a way of binding men and women together and ensuring that they take care of whatever children they produce, as marriage has been weakened in our society, particularly through divorce, what kind of arrangements, if any, will spring up to do the binding-together that marriage used to be able to do? I wouldn't count on this baby-having one, as Julie does; that's just asking the very phenomenon marriage was supposed to regulate regulate itself. If a couple can't keep a marriage together for the sake of the children, why on earth does this woman think they'd be able to keep a cohabiting relationship together for the sake of the children? Still, it's just fascinating to see how completely disconnected marriage and commitment appear to be for these women."

GREAT MYSETERIES OF AMERICAN POLITICAL JOURNALISM EXPLAINED: here, or at least one that used to bother me when I subscribed to The New Republic

LINK: Pretty funny, if you follow British politics

QUOTE: Norm Geras swings for the fences and, as usual, connects:

"This means that, for example, in response to mass atrocities which are ongoing within the territory of a given nation-state but threaten nobody outside it, and where the Security Council remains inert, it would be illegal for a government to intervene unilaterally to put an end to them. I could, as some Marxists used to be in the habit of putting such things, concretize here with topical historical and contemporary examples. But it's probably needless."

Part of what gets me about the whole UN-France-Germany opposition thing is the unwillingness to recognize that any one of those actors (maybe not the UN) would be perfectly willing, under different circumstances, to pitch international consensus and do whatever was in their own best interest. And it further seems to me that this fact hamstrings most people who want to argue for greater international institutions--I would hope that everyone would prefer, in the last analysis, to act on their own conscience and not on someone else's opinion of the situation. For all ideological differences, I'd much rather have Vietnam going into Cambodia (to depose the Khmer Rouge) then have them build consensus behind doing so*. Some things, recall, are sufficiently bad that they demand action now.

UPDATE: I just noticed Chris Lawrence's thoughts on this topic:

"Furthermore, since no responsible American government will ever concede that the Iraq invasion was “illegal” (a charge not even made by Howard Dean), it will further erode official U.S. support for the U.N.‘s pronouncements on the “legality” or “illegality” of actions and for the U.N. process in general."

He also mentions the ongoing crisis in Darfur and the unwillingness of the Security Council to act on it. Unilateral intervention, anyone? Or would stopping a humanitarian catastophe be 'illegal' too?

*I like this example and try to use it in the context of international relations because I think it points out something that occasionally gets ignored: you can act entirely outside the international system, for essentially selfish reasons and yet still produce and objectively improved situation. It's not a case that fits easily into most theories of foreign policy, which is why it's worth bringing up.

NICK GOADED ME INTO POSTING: and he said I could post anything I want. So I thought to myself, what does an intelligent, hard-working, high-stress audience like Nick's (and I suppose my) readership need most?

Cuteness.

And second and third most? That's right -- More and more cuteness.

That's all I've got. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

-Dara

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

"Hope is the certain expectation of future glory; it is the result of God's grace and of the merit we have earned"

-Dante

LINK: I'm on board for all of Dan's program--especially the chicken-costume-wearing part, but I obviously disagree about the last item.

QUOTE: Also from the below (nobody can write a quality put-down like a socialist):

"The “anti-war” crowd are elitists feigning populism, nationalists feigning internationalism, rebels without a clue who are just too ******* stupid to realise that every time they accuse the “pro-war” left of being in bed with imperialism - as if supporting Dubya and Blur on just one issue, albeit a crucial one, requires supporting them on any other issue - they merely draw renewed attention to their own (fortunately ineffective) complicity with the kind of murderers and psychopaths who make Dubya and Blur look like high-minded pacifists."

QUOTE: Socialism in an Age of Waiting:

"That sums up the “anti-war” crowd in just 24 words ... Nevertheless, one thing can be said in Dyke’s favour: his motives are utterly transparent, probably because he’s too stupid to know how to disguise them. His amour propre has been severely dented and, unlike the more sophisticated bullshitters in the “anti-war” crowd (pick your own examples - there are all too many of them), he doesn’t care who knows it. Contrast the behaviour of the Respect Coalition, now boasting, insanely enough, about their “success” in splitting the Labour vote and helping a Tory to take a council seat in Tower Hamlets, for the first time in decades, while carefully avoiding mentioning the fact that their own candidate for the seat explicitly supported Saddam Hussein in his struggle to avoid being overthrown. Displaying honest stupidity in order to sell your memoirs is at least marginally less disgusting than deploying outright dishonesty in order to win votes and aid Michael Howard. Then again, what other use has the ultra-left ever had but to support the forces of reaction while pretending to be in favour of progress?"

LINK: Crooked Timber points to some of the more troubling aspects of Putin's latest attempts to arrogate more power to himself.

LINK: Whippersnapper

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Perhaps explaining why I've been finding Math 135 occasionally flummoxing (quote from my professor):

"Now let me argue by analogy: when you were in grade school, and you took physics..."

I think I was relatively precocious as a child, but that's pushing it.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Perhaps explaining why I've been finding Math 135 occasionally flummoxing:

"Now let me argue by analogy: when you were in grade school, and you took physics..."

I think I was relatively precocious as a child, but that's pushing it.

TEXTUALISM AND CONTEXTUALISM:



Managed this weekend to get into a couple of debates with various fellow grad students about the merits of context when reading a work of political theory. I'm not exactly a hard-core Straussian (despite that being the first question I pretty much always got asked on that one evening with the ICPSR people before I came down here)--contextual elements, with the right text, are occasionally quite illuminating--but one's analysis, I believe, has to begin and end with what's in the text*.

My general analogy when having this argument is to something that frequently got told to me in the art history classes (was actually first told to me with respect to the period of Caravaggio's work which The Burial of St Lucy, pictured above, represents): there are lots of interesting things a person can talk about with respect to any work of art--possible motivations and influences on the painter, where the work falls in the more general drift of their art, the compositional and iconographical elements, choices of subject matter, etc etc. But ultimately, every analysis of a work has to come back to the central question "is this in the picture?"

You can do some speculative psychology on why Caravaggio was in Sicily for this painting in the first place, and that might be interesting, but it actually doesn't tell you a whole lot about the painting--maybe he's horrifically depressed at the time, and that's why the painting is as it is, but maybe he's not--you can construct multiple theories that are sufficient to get what you see, but you have no way of judging between them, because there's not really evidence to support those interpretations. And it's odd to discuss those aspects of the picture, when there are other, equally interesting topics to comment on (the use of space, the strong compositional linearity, the choices of colors), which you don't really have to speculate upon because they're in the picture.

Similarly, with a text, there lots of things you can do with it, depending on what it is you want to do, but any political theory worth it's salt will have enough in the text alone to keep you interested in it, without a need to go further afield. To be somewhat intentionally polemical on the issue, contextualism risks either reducing a text to it's immediate circumstances and consequently making it interesting only as a historical exercise, rather than a currently important political one; or else you're imposing an arbitrary set of concerns on the text.

Part of this seems to be an issue with political theory exceptionalism: I don't know that you'd look at an IR or American paper and decide that the theory or result being offered is wholly a matter of where it falls on a discourse on greater issues in the field (though this is obviously sometimes a concern--that's presumably why there are literature reviews). A reader should, presumably, be equally, or perhaps more, concerned with whether the theory, model, etc being offered makes internal logical sense, measures what it wants to measure, and whether the evidence being analyzed supports the conclusions being advanced.

Possibly more thoughts later. Possibly.

*this was labelled as a potentially Straussian move, but I do generally hold that, while what's in a text may not be the final and most developed set of thoughts a writer has on a topic, most people don't spend lots of time writing things they don't especially find interesting or true. What's in a text is there for a reason.

LINK:

"The thesis that the so-called democratic nations have no right to resist overt forms of tyranny, because their own history betrays imperialistic motives, would have meaning only if it were possible to acheive a perfect form of justice in any nation and to free national life completely of the imperialistic motive. This is impossible, for imperialism is the collective expression of the sinful will-to-power which characterizes all human existence. The pacifist argument on this issue betrays how completely pacifism gives itself to illusions about the stuff with which it is dealing in human nature. These illusions deserve particular censure, because no one who knows his own heart ought to be given to such illusions."

-Reinhold Niebuhr, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist"

You may wish, towards this end, to spend some time here

Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
-Job 5:6-7

WELL*: Prof. Munger, below, in the comments:

"I don't see that this claim is INHERENT to rational choice theory, though of course it is generally true as an empirical matter.

But, in my 1994 book, IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF POLITICAL CHOICE, i claimed that (1) the moral point of view is actually more important than self-interest, and that (2) people do often sacrifice their "interest" to do what is right. May I recommend in particular the discussion of lifeboats and foxholes in chapter 11?"

A large part of my undergraduate education was a confirmation of both of the points he makes, and I certainly didn't mean to imply all rational choicers think this way (I mostly dropped in 'rat choicers' in because I think it's one of the more amusing nicknames one side has given the other, possibly the best since 'menshiveks'). Part of what we're doing is arguing at cross-purposes, since I have my suspicions that domestic political choices by individual actors are really all that rational (four years at Michigan will lead you to that conclusion). Nevertheless, Prof. Munger is right--rational choice theory is strictly agnostic on the question of whether or not actions have inherent moralities atttached to them. But by the fact that people who do rational choice theory are frequently concerned with only the empirical realities of how people make decisions, I think there is, other things constant, a tendency to be deflationist about morality, and that's troubling for me as a political theorist.

I'll make a point of picking the book up tomorrow (pending availability), so there may well be more thoughts were this one came from.

*I should also point out, as has been pointed out to me many times, that there were actually a fair number of people who opposed the reading of Hobbes I was arguing against. I think I probably focused a bit more on the points I felt the need to argue against, which probably happens frequently.

LINK: I think there's not a better commentator on what it's like to be a moderate in America right now than Jeff Jarvis. Check out his recent post on Sept. 11, media and partisan affiliations. To wit:

"I love the middle, the center, the mainstream, the masses. It's not just how I live, it's how I think. It's why I love this medium of ours, citizens' media, that is the sum of its limitless parts, the consensus of the whole. It's why I defended the taste of the American people and what they watched on TV when I was a critic. It's where I'm most comfortable: America, the middle."

WELL: Duke basketball campout was this weekend, which I found really tested the outer limits of people's sanity--nowhere else would I find myself defending the ontological reality of moral judgments from a skepticist nihilist at 4:00 in the morning. The definite most quotable moment of the weekend goes to Duke President Richard Broadhead, though, when discussing how we'd all come running whenever the organizers blew a whistle:

"this is sort of like a fascist summer camp... (loud cheering from the crowd)...(looks at the program organizers behind him)... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone. I only said it was like a fasicst summer camp."

WELL: So there was this moment in modern political theory today where everyone more or less jumped on the Hobbesean bandwagon and said that moral judgments are just reflective of passions, except for Joel and (I believe) Amber, who wanted to argue that good and bad are not just societal constructs. Here's how you can square that circle relatively easily:

Assume, as does the moral realist, that good and bad are ontological facts about actions that are just naturally occuring parts of their description. You can hold, then, as does the deontologist, that people can be mistaken in their judgments of what is good and bad--you can go even further, in fact, and agree with Hobbes that people almost always index their judgments of good and bad to their own desires or interests. Where Hobbes and rat choicers err is in assuming that the indexing people do implies that there are no actual moral statuses of actions.

DUKE DIVERSITY WATCH: I definitely saw a guy wearing a Rusted Root t-shirt on the East-West bus today, which brings the total number of hippies I've seen since I got here to one. He'll fit in nicely with the two hipsters I've seen (but I'm pretty sure they were grad students).

WELL: I understand I was outed as a blogger by my department chair earlier today. That sort of defeats the purpose of trying to keep him from finding me via technorati by not linking to him, so, here ya go: Mike Munger.

LINK: This looks like an argument, but it's actually just a pile of contingencies resting on an extremely dubious premise. Nevertheless, it's fun to read Matt Yglesias nowadays: it's like watching a train wreck.

QUOTE: The Hitch:

"When I quit writing my column for The Nation a couple of years ago, I wrote semi-sarcastically that it had become an echo chamber for those who were more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama Bin Laden. I honestly did not then expect to find it publishing actual endorsements of jihad. But, as Marxism taught me, the logic of history and politics is a pitiless one. The antiwar isolationist "left" started by being merely "status quo": opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush's "terrorism" and the other sort. This conservative position didn't take very long to metastasize into a flat-out reactionary one, with Michael Moore saying that the Iraqi "resistance" was the equivalent of the Revolutionary Minutemen, Tariq Ali calling for solidarity with the "insurgents," and now Ms. Klein, among many others, wanting to bring the war home because any kind of anti-Americanism is better than none at all. These fellow-travelers with fascism are also changing ships on a falling tide: Their applause for the holy warriors comes at a time when wide swathes of the Arab and Muslim world are sickening of the mindless blasphemy and the sectarian bigotry. It took an effort for American pseudo-radicals to be outflanked on the left by Ayatollah Sistani, but they managed it somehow."

LINK: This is the sort of thing I'm beginning to get used to, though admittedly an extreme example.

LINK: Sara Butler links to an interesting article in Christianity Today on marriage. Me likey:

"Maybe roommate-like status is not what we ought to be aspiring to in marriage but neither is the thrill and romance that one associates with one's fondly remembered dating days. (Why bother with marriage if the romance of dating is all you're after?) Surely what married people should aspire to is, well, living as husband and wife."

QUOTES O' THE DAY:

"[Gorbachev] called it the Sinatra Doctrine: "I did it my way," which showed his limited ability with English. It should've been the Burger King Doctrine: 'have it your way.'"

-Prof. Gelpi, on Gorby's 1988 speech to the UN, repudiating the Brehznev Doctrine

"...if I had a week to play with [the model], I could make it statistically significant. [pause] I shouldn't've said that!"

-Prof. Gelpi, proving my theory that all statistics is just a cruel joke played by professors on hapless students

"The longer l live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."

-G.B. Shaw, almost got quoted in a house argument this evening

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From one of my first-year colleagues:

"Personally, I don't trust any history-- fictionalized or not-- penned by the French."

SOLIDARITY AS A FOUNDATIONAL VIRTUE:

"There are seven keys in the musical scale. The question as to which of these keys is "better" -- do, re, or sol -- is a nonsensical question. But the musician must know when to strike and what keys to strike. The abstract question of who is the lesser evil -- Bruening or Hitler -- is just as nonsensical. It is necessary to know which of these keys to strike. Is that clear?"

-Leon Trotsky, For a Workers' United Front

"The Bolshevik does not ask the Social Democrat to alter the opinion he has of Bolshevism and of the Bolshevik press. Moreover, he does not demand that the Social Democrat make a pledge for the duration of the agreement to keep silent on his opinion of Communism. Such a demand would be absolutely inexcusable. "So long," says the Communist "as I have not convinced you and you have not convinced me, we shall criticize each other with full freedom, each using the arguments and expressions he deems necessary. But when the fascist wants to force a gag down our throats, we will repulse him together!" Can an intelligent Social Democratic worker counter this proposal with a refusal?"

-Leon Trotsky, The United Front for Defense

Look here for a good collection of RFE/RL reports, and here and here for sympathetic commentary from people with a decidedly different political perspective.

Why do I bring these up, and preface the whole thing with some quotations from Trotsky? Because politics, to actually do any worthwhile amount of work, needs to begin with a visceral (not merely intellectual) conception of the link between self and other. The impulses towards rationalized self-centered behavior are strong, and one needs equally strong, pre-rational affiliations to be able to crowd out those instincts when they're inappropriate. In this sense, to controvert the example from Shoah, you have to believe when someone else pricks their finger, you bleed.

This is beyond human as a task: no one, as Norm Geras points out in The Contract of Mutual Indifference, can actually meet the strict requirement of deontological morality (in this sense), since there is always someone whose finger is getting pricked. Nevertheless, even that feeling of being overwhelmed by one's own pre-rational responses is a sign that everything is functioning as it should: you ought to be horrified at the thought that anyone can look at what happened in Beslan (or Bali, or Madrid, or...) and not be overwhelmed by their feeling of immediate connection to the victims.

There's ample support for this view in any of the major moral philosophies and faith traditions: in Christianity, there's the view expressed by Reinhold Niebuhr's "Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist," which points out that the fact of sin in the world means that people will perpetually be caught in the midst of evil and violence of many kinds, and that a Christian cannot, in good faith, stand aside and claim those troubles are other than their own. There's the Jewish tradition sometimes embedded in a Haggadah, that "in every single generation it is a man's duty to regard himself as if he went forth from Egypt," that is, not merely look at the Passover as a historical event but ask himself how he would have felt, had he been there; this is perhaps best extended by the commentary (I believe) attributed to Rabbi Hillel on Exodus 2:12--"where there is no man, try to be one."

For a deontologist, you merely have to accept the moral rule that people who do not themselves take part in combat are not acceptable targets for violence; for a utilitarian, you merely have to believe that the world is better, on the whole, when that sort of violence is kept to a minimum.

In other words, there's no basis for failing to feel solidarity for your fellow man.

I'm a bit hesitant to use the "s" word--communist connotations and all--but it does seem to get at a core concept. People are not equal, if for no other reason than a non-uniform distribution of physical gifts (though perhaps for more reasons), but this should not, of itself, be a reason to separate you from others. It's the idea that, as Aaronovitch's column suggests, it could easily be you in that particular situation; moreover, in this particular case, it's the idea that but for your willingness to act now, it will be you one day.

JUST WHEN I THINK I'M OUT: They pull me back in again: my RA assignment for the term is to look for articles in American political behavior that are critical of the classic findings on authoritarianism, racism, and ignorance of politics. Fortunately, my undergraduate education means I'm not entirely flying blind here (thanks, University of Michigan, and Prof. Achen in particular), but I was sort of hoping to be done with American politics. No matter, though... this is the stuff I enjoy.

WELL: I think this summer's love affair with Northern Soul was pretty effectively conducted. This fall, I think, will be early 90s British House music, which happens to morph quite nicely into the Bristol-based trip-hop scene. Thus, I suggest the following to you:

"Don't Fight It, Feel It" -Primal Scream
"Back to Life" -Soul II Soul
"Mysterions" -Portishead
"Erase/Rewind" -The Cardigans (not British, I know, but still appropriate)

QUOTE: Chris Lawrence mentions in passing:

"the Democrats have had to resort to smearing... both Dick Cheney and George Bush as relapsed alcoholics."

I happened to be involved in a discussion of politics with people (who are unaware of my, shall we say, complicated political leanings, and so naturally assume that I totally agree with them) a few weeks ago where this particular bit was sort of cast into the conversation very matter-of-factly, and no one seemed troubled by a lack of, say, evidence it was true (unless you count some dodgy attempts at reading into body language and speech patterns). I understand that political affiliations are not particularly rational (I don't like John Kerry, never have, and I couldn't really give you a reason why; I've always felt the opposite way about John Edwards), and so I can accept irrational Bush-hatred, but it does occasionally boggle the mind what people let their political affiliations allow them to believe.

LINK: New Sara Butler post here, detailing "gender-related weirdness." Punchy and pithy. I often ask myself what's going on with Matt Yglesias lately, but I've sort of concluded that he's in election-induced Andrew Sullivan-style self-righteous insanity.

Also, check out her excellent work on family-related issues (troll back especially for her arguments against cohabitation) at Family Scholars Blog.

WELL: Just got back from DC, where a good time was had with OGIW and the legendary Rob Goodspeed, also co-editor of DCist, which is pretty darn cool. I think it's sufficient to say of the political affiliations of the average Duke polisci grad that both Rob and OGIW came off looking remarkably moderate. Anyway, good time was had by all (or me, at least).

HELPFUL HINT: If you ever find yourself bored in a grad-level class (not that this has happened, even in my first week of grad school), do what I do: count how many minutes it takes for someone to make a reference to the Nazis. Never more than 10 minutes, in my experience, but I hope to be proved wrong someday.

LINK: Something to keep in mind for my next trip to Borders.