Entries from February 2003 ↓
February 27th, 2003 — brain-candy
A pop-culture reference pops up in the book you’re reading. You can pull part of the idea from context, but there’s some shade of meaning missing:
Pupils contracted painfully against sun-bright halogen, she squints into an actual mirror, canted against a gray wall, awaiting hanging, wherein she sees a black-legged, disjointed puppet, sleep-hair poking up like a toilet brush. She grimaces at it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who’d insisted on comparing her to Helmut Newton’s nude portrait of Jane Birkin.
Who is Jane Birkin? I hold William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in one hand and type “Jane Birkin” into the Google Toolbar with the other.
I see what Cayce Pollard sees in the mirror. I read about a film I have to find, an album I must listen to, the meaning behind a song I enjoy.
The ex-boyfriend sees some Swinging London in her, a breathy singer, a tragic exploited actress, a screen lover of Brigitte Bardot; rawness and exhibitionism and erotic magic. She doesn’t see it.
Reading is new. And old, like a Bible concordance. And newish, like a deconstruction of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
February 26th, 2003 — impolite company
The Agonist has a graphic in red and blue (those iconic electoral colors) showing public opinion worldwide towards the war in Iraq.
Dana has collected dozens of photos of the February 15 protests from around the world, a heart-breaking sea of faces and bodies with nothing in common but the conviction that this war is wrong.
And, Win Without War is sponsoring today’s Virtual March on Washington, where hundreds of thousands of citizens have volunteered to call their Senators and the White House today to voice their opposition to the war. I’m scheduled for 5:09 pm. There’s still time.
February 25th, 2003 — impolite company
The essence of chess is this: remove your opponent’s options until none are left. And then this civilized, metaphorical representation of war is over. The players shake hands and walk away.
The Bush Administration is playing a game of chess against Saddam Hussein, only — when the Iraqi leader has run out of options, that is when the real war will begin.
UNSCOM has found that the Iraqi missile, the Al Samoud 2, is capable of traveling 193 km (120 mi), putting it in violation of the 150 km (93 mi) limit for offensive weapons permitted under the disarmament order which ended the Gulf War. Iraq insists that the UN-estimated range of this missile is overstated, since the estimates are not taking into account the lessened range of the missile if it were fully loaded with fuel, guidance systems and warhead.
“Makes no difference”, Hans Blix says, and demands that the Iraqis begin destroying these missiles by this Friday. And this is where the options run out.
There is no guarantee that if Saddam begins destroying these missiles that the crisis will be over and the US and its hawkish allies will call off the dogs of war. However, if he does destroy the missiles, he will be removing one of his more effective weapons, leaving him less able to defend his country should the war begin. Saddam must choose between the unlikely scenario that the US will back off if he cooperates, and the likely scenario that he will be markedly weakened if he begins the dismantling. He is being backed into a corner, checkmated, and it would not be surprising if he were to erupt and turn the table over.
February 24th, 2003 — impolite company
In commenting on Robert Kagan’s article “Power and Weakness” in Policy Review Online, Lawrence Solum describes how he “…was struck by the One Minute Philosphers versions of Hobbes and Kant that are figuring as rhetorical tropes.”
He quotes from Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace, where Kant claims that peace is only possible in a republican political system, where those making the decision to go to war are also those who will bear the costs and deprivations of the war.
“But, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.”
Solum’s point is that Kagan has completely misunderstood Hobbes and Kant (of whom I must say I have an imperfect understanding, too.) Solum’s take on this is that this passage from Kant “is the fundamental rationale for regime change in Iraq. Because Iraq lacks a republican form of government, it will be a constant threat until a democratic regime is established.”
That conclusion of Solum’s struck me strangely, because as I read Kant’s words, I was applying them to our government. I was thinking about how the current administration is determined to pursue this rush to war despite the ever-decreasing support of the public, the protestations of the global community, the potentially ruinous costs of war and reconstruction, and the ingenuous arguments of connections between Hussein and bin Laden.
I wasn’t the only one who read the article this way. In a subsequent entry, Professor Solum quotes a letter he received from a reader, Andrew Feller, who, although he supports the use of force to remove Hussein, he is “… horrified by the continued dismissal by the administration of both the value of public opinion and of the necessity of consultation with Congress.” Solum’s response perfectly encapsulates the Bush Administration’s biggest problem. “In my mind it highlights the crucial role that trust plays in a democratic polity. Hawks and doves on Iraq differ on many issues, but one of them is the their willingness to trust the Bush administration.”
That is exactly right. This administration has so damaged any shred of credibility on so many issues that those who believe in any of this government’s positions are becoming fewer in number each day. The Turks don’t trust us and are demanding they be paid like mercenaries for their support of the war. The Kurds and the Iraqi opposition don’t trust us, even though they should be our natural allies. The world community doesn’t trust us, since this administration has unilaterally abrogated so many treaties. Domestically, the administration has shown it is not to be trusted in its unstinting dismantling of the Bill of Rights, its unprecedented insistence on secrecy from the American public, its conveniently-timed terror alerts based on information experts term “garbage“, and its non-stop reverse-Robin-Hood sham of an economic stimulus plan.
While I don’t believe that Bush & Co. will “resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons,” I also don’t believe that they will share in any of the suffering brought on by this war. Their children, will, like Dick Cheney during Vietnam, have “other priorities” than military service. Their companies will profit by the inevitable rise in oil prices which will accompany a war. Their jobs and pensions will not be affected by inflation or recession.
Our leaders are acting as “the proprietor and not a member of the state” and they are just as illegitimate as the despot they seek to remove.
February 18th, 2003 — time-wasters
From dive into mark. Randomly-generated words from my front page, (badly) poetry-ized by moi.
February 15th, 2003 — impolite company
If the Democratic Party had any sense at all, they would immediately offer this woman a job as a campaign consultant. There is room for two parties in our political system, but, as it currently stands, the Democrats — so fearful of possibly offending anyone, or of being labeled with “The L Word” — have become indistinguishable from the Republicans in everything except their access to money.
In two short articles, she lays out rules for the new political reality. First, she addresses the candidates, saying:
Let me spell it out for you. The Republican party–the grand old party of Lincoln–has allied himself with the craziest fundamentalist segments in our society. Their multibillionaire backers fund pseudo-intellectual think tanks whose job is to sugar coat the poison pills they are bent on feeding our society. They own the voting machines their candidates win on; they own the media that reports the news to the American people. The airwaves are full of their shock troops: obscene, tasteless, small-minded bigots whose role is to keep the faithful riled up. They do not care about truth and justice. They care about winning, about instituting their Christian version of Sharia on the country, and keep the “rest of us” in our place.
Wow! She advocates directness, unity against personal attacks on the other Democratic candidates, realizing that the national media are not the friends of the Democrats and the necessity of focusing on the local media and local voters in the manner of the late Paul Wellstone.
Then she turns to the Democratic Party itself — what she calls, “The Circular Firing Squad”:
In their flight from “being associated with Clinton”, they have turned the Democratic party into “republican lite”, neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. They have alienated the core faithful and given independents and undecideds no reason to vote for Democratic candidates. The message from the DNC is either “me too!” or “not me!”. The ongoing scramble for position by those who would be president augurs another season of the merry slimeball fight the party engages in every four years; by the time the survivor gets to the actual election he looks like he’s been trampled by slugs. And the poor bastard gets there just in time to be eaten alive by the Republican attack machine, while his own party squeals in fright and runs in the other direction
I wish I’d said that. And I hope someone is paying attention. She’s not just ranting and ripping things apart. She’s got some very fine observations. Unfortunately, I have no great hope that anyone’s paying attention to anything but the pollsters.
February 15th, 2003 — time-wasters
If you’re in the UK, you can buy this really cool phone. Color screen, powered by Microsoft Smartphone, Microsoft Outlook syncing, MSN Instant Messenger, camera attachment, MP3 player, web browser… We’ve got nothing like that over on this side of the Atlantic. And certainly not for £149.99 (US$240). I haven’t even seen any PocketPC devices for under US$300. Of course, Guy‘s got one. Not that I’m jealous or anything…
February 15th, 2003 — groupmind
Devra posted a heartfelt examination of her “Fear & Anxiety” over the gathering perfect storm of current world events. Jeralyn picked it up over at TalkLeft.
Part of Devra’s fears were based on the contradicition between a “…President who embraces Fundamentalist Christian theology as a guide to governing in Foreign Policy. And who rejects ‘Christian Charity’ as a guide to governing in Domestic Policy.” She continues:
If you are a Fundamentalist Christian, you are probably perfectly comfortable with the idea that the government should be ‘Faith Based’ – provided that Faith is a Christian, Bible-centered one.
But how is this any different from the many ‘Faith Based’ Muslim nations of the world? The Taliban does come to mind, here, as does Saudi Arabia.
Dean takes this as an example of “…the religious bigotry that seems to underlie Devra’s paranoia…” And this is where I wind up shaking my head in amazement.
Devra, I wouldn’t worry about Dean. He’s a very confused man.
The headline of his site says he’s “Defending the liberal tradition in history, politics, science and philosophy.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be all that clued in on the meaning of liberal. In his blog entry entitled “Who Is Dean?”, he tells us, “Politically, I do not like labeling myself…”, and then after a suitable semi-colon pause, he labels himself, saying: “I consider myself a conservative liberal.”
Some more head-shaking, so I follow his link to his “Are You a Liberal?” entry and I become more certain that he really doesn’t have much of a clue. He takes his definition of a liberal from the dictionary, without even acknowledging that the first definition he quotes for liberal: “Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry” is almost directly contradicted by the same dictionary’s definition of conservative: “Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.”
He’s also very fond of the word “bigot” in all its forms, and he’s very quick to use it against any view which diverges from his. On the “Are You a Liberal?” page, he uses the word more than 20 times, twisting it around until it has lost whatever meaning it may have started with. When a commenter on the post says that the statement, “Homosexuality is a sin” is a bigoted statement, Dean calls him a religious bigot, followed by an immediate appeal to traditional, orthodox, authoritarian attitudes: “Does that mean you think Orthodox and Conservative Jews, the majority of Christians, and the majority of Muslims are all bigots?” If all those fine people believe homosexuality is a sin, then it must be bigotry to oppose them. (I think the Dean disease must be catching: I’ve used “bigot” more times in this article than I probably have in all my life.)
But we’re not done. Dean says that it’s bigoted to call someone a bigot. The proper response to an expression of bigotry is to say, “I respect your beliefs, even if I don’t agree with them.” Gosh. I’ll remember that the next time someone calls me a “cheap Jew bastard,” or my friend an “ass-fucking abomination who deserves to get AIDS.”
Of course his several posts on the main page where he calls the French and Germans “The Axis of Weasels”, then decides that weasels are too noble to be compared to the French — those aren’t bigotry, right? Or where he links to that broad-minded newspaper, The New York Post with its front page photo of the UN Security Council meeting with the French and German ambassadors Photoshopped into weasels– that’s not bigotry, either, right?. Those are free-thinking, liberal views. He has certainly come to his conclusion about the weaseltry of the “Old Europe” by careful analysis of the way things look from the French and German points of view. “I respect your beliefs, even if you are a bunch of cheese- and kraut-eaters.”
Of course this “liberal” is also for war against Iraq — sorry: he’s for the liberation of “the people” of Iraq. These are the same people we’ve starved for 12 years and who we will now proceed to “Shock and Awe” into little bitty smithereens, until we’ve conquered — sorry: “liberated” — their land, handed it over to the oil companies, and then neglected to include any aid for their country’s reconstruction in our budget. (Or was that Afghanistan?)
(Obligatory disclaimer: Saddam is a bad bad man and an illegitimate ruler. He was recently elected in a supposedly democratic manner, where, in fact, the voters had no choice in their input. As opposed to the US, where the majority of voters had no choice in the outcome.)
I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time on this oxy-moronic “conservative liberal” — maybe it’s because he’s abusing a fine philosophy. Or maybe it’s because I’m a bigot.
Or maybe it’s because I understand — truly and deeply — what Devra is talking about. I have taken to heart all the great qualities of this country, believed in them, believed that the deficiencies would be healed, and that one day we would truly be the ideal imagined by the nation’s founders and by every freedom-seeking individual in the world. But lately, the only word to describe my feelings about my country is “heartbroken.”
February 14th, 2003 — the animal kingdom
So long, Dolly. The Roslin Institute announced today that Dolly the sheep — the first cloned mammal — has been put to death after being diagnosed with a progressive lung disease. Although she was only 6 years old, she’d been cloned from a 6-year old sheep and she seemed to be exhibiting many of the symptoms of an 11 or 12 year animal. Nature is a funny thing.
February 14th, 2003 — impolite company
So, Instapundit is probably the best known of the bloggers, but it’s still a little presumptuous of Glenn Reynolds to claim, as he does in this Boston Globe article that, although reaching consensus in the blogosphere:
…is like herding cats …most everybody open to persuasion has been largely persuaded by Colin Powell. There are lefty and libertarian bloggers who are against it, of course, but there are far more bloggers who are pro-war than the reverse.
On what is Glenn basing his statement? (He phrases it as a statement of fact, not as opinion.) Blogger is reporting that as of January 6, it had registered over 1,000,000 users. Then there’s Movable Type, Slash, LiveJournal, and who-knows-how-many other systems and sites. To claim any commonality among this group is ridiculous, and for the reporter not to note the bias of his source is unprofessional.
[Via Roger Ailes]
