11:47 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Two Weeks Notice: Rather than realize he's in a spider hole and stop digging, Howard Dean has decided to repeat his unfortunate comments on Saddam's capture:

In Midwest campaign stops and an interview, the former Vermont governor said developments both abroad and at home give credence to his assertion two weeks ago that the United States is "no safer" with the capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

"If we are safer, how come we lost 10 more troops and raised the safety alert" to the orange level, Dean said Sunday night in Ankeny, Iowa.

"All the other Democrats pounced on me and beat me up and said how ignorant I was about foreign affairs," he said. "I think most people in America agree with me today and it's only two weeks later."

News Flash! Saddam was captured two weeks ago, and not everything is better yet!

If Dean were only invoking the continued attacks to make a cheap political point, I would understand. (Not agree, but understand.) But the "most people in America agree with me" line gives me the disturbing impression that he actually believes his own argument; maybe he really thinks that an orange alert 14 days later implies we're no safer with Saddam in custody. It makes me wonder if a President Dean would undertake any foreign policy effort that needs more than two weeks to produce results.

Fact is, I agree with Dean that we must do more to secure our ports, Russian nuclear weapons, etc., as part of the war on terrorism. But I don't get the sense that his foreign policy goals are so much more finely nuanced than those of President Bush (who, after all, told the nation that "The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq"), or that he'd be at all capable of working with a Republican majority in Congress to achieve them. From someone who says openly that he needs to "plug that hole in my resume," it's hardly comforting.

 

7:28 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Christmas cheer: Inspired by Sasha Volokh, who translated "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" into Latin (as well as rewriting it in Catullan hendecasyllables), I decided to attempt the following as my ninth Shakespearean sonnet:

No. 9. "Ode to Rudolph"

I sing of RUDOLPH, antler'd, red-nosèd,
   Most fearless Rangifer, who serv'd as guide
   To sainted NICHOLAS, of bearded head,
   Throughout a foggy globe-encircling ride.
A new DIOGENES, both beast and god,
   An outcast from his fellow caribou;
   No mind paid he to the mean ground he trod--
   No games played he, but rather did pursue
A harder path, through cloud-encrusted night.
   For who, so burdened with a load of toys,
   Could hope, without the benefit of light,
   To cheer the well-behavèd girls and boys?
Fair CLIO, Muse, in poetry and prose,
Sing of RUDOLPH, of luminescent nose.

UPDATE: Old English joins the list.

 

2:43 AM :: Stephen (contact)

A redesign! After being impressed by some of the winners in the Blog Design Showcase -- especially Dan Benjamin and John Martz -- I've decided to change the design of this web log and of my web site generally, to push the two closer together. After many long nights with pico, it's now done. Feel free to explore, and if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know!

 

8:45 PM :: Stephen (contact)

An Unexpected Endorsement: Al Gore may have gone for Dean, but as Instapundit notes, another 2000 candidate has kind words for Joe Lieberman:

When US President George W. Bush visited Canberra in October, he told his friend John Howard that the Democratic candidate who, if he won the primaries, would be his most formidable opponent in the 2004 presidential election was Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman.

What a fantastic irony it would be if the capture of Saddam Hussein this week led to the derailing of former Vermont governor Howard Dean's anti-war candidacy and Bush had to face the formidable Lieberman in November.

One thing you can say about Bush is that he is expert at winning elections and his assessment of Lieberman -- Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and the most hawkish of the Democrats -- is a fascinating insight into the role he thinks national security will play in November's election.

Which sort of makes sense: what other Democrat would have responded to Hussein's capture by saying "Hallelujah, praise the Lord"? Who else can use the line that "I wrote the bill that created the Homeland Security Department," or charge that "If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a more dangerous place"?

For comparison, a recent cover of the National Review featured a picture of Dean over the headline "Please Nominate This Man," and Karl Rove was overheard saying of Dean supporters, "[T]hat's the one we want... Come on, everybody! Go, Howard Dean!"

 

3:29 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Nothing to do: There's been a good bit of attention to the student government race at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank--especially the following exchange, as recorded by the AP:

At a debate, the Hamas candidate asked the Fatah candidate: "Hamas activists in this university killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Bir Zeit kill?"

The Fatah candidate refused to answer, suggesting his rival "look at the paper, go to the archives and see for yourself. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades have not stopped fighting the occupation."

Fatah set up models of Jewish settlements and then blew them up with fireworks...

Hamas countered by blowing up models of Israeli buses, a tribute to the dozens of suicide bombings its members have carried out in the past three years, killing hundreds of Israelis.

What's even more frightening, however, is the following:

Student issues were barely touched on because the Palestinians' main problem is the Israeli occupation, candidates said.

"We have been living under hard conditions. Our students are going through checkpoints, many of them have been scared and arrested, so this is our life now. Our life is resistance," [Fatah candidate Khaled] Samara said.

Hamas said fighting Israel is the only issue. "We are a resistance movement and without resistance we have nothing to do," said Moussa Kiswani, a Hamas activist.

This is the clearest sign I've yet seen that politics in the occupied territories have been eviscerated. Like other corrupt elites in the Arab world, the Palestinian Authority has an interest in hiding its ineffectiveness, telling its people that meaningful improvements in their lives can come only after Israel withdraws from the occupied territories--a claim that Hamas charities are proving false every day. But I never knew that this claim had infected politics right down to the level of student government.

The only way for Israel to obtain a lasting peace, it now seems, is to make the falseness of this claim radically apparent--to convince individual Palestinians that there is life outside the struggle. After all, what is there to negotiate with a movement whose entire identity has been shaped around murdering civilians on buses? And how can one reach peace with an organization which admits, without irony, that "without resistance we have nothing to do"?

 

3:05 PM :: Stephen (contact)

From a Restaurant: Another in the "where am I blogging now?" series -- I just finished lunch at the St. Louis Bread Company, one of my old haunts (now known outside St. Louis as Panera), and decided to try out their universal Wi-Fi. Fresh sandwiches and free wireless access... Ah, it's good to be home.

 

8:09 AM :: Stephen (contact)

From Mid-Air: Apologies for light posting; I'm writing this from 38,000 feet, as I fly home for the holidays. (Of course, this entry won't be posted from 38,000 feet, since unfortunately my wireless access isn't that good...) It's my first time returning to the U.S. since October 2002, and I can't wait to get home. My one regret is that I've got a seat over the wing, and unlike some Airbus models, the Boeing 777 doesn't have a real-time sky-cam for its flight information screens. Oh well; only 2,798 miles left before the connection in O'Hare...

UPDATE: Now home, well-rested, and able to post again...

 

10:25 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Philosopher seeks same... Hmm--looks like Prof. Brian Leiter is a more controversial figure than I originally realized. To be fair, though, I should add that this post of his is one of the funnier things I've read recently. (Perhaps it should be read in conjunction with these...)

 

9:59 AM :: Stephen (contact)

This Just In: "Godfather of Soul" James Brown has been appointed "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk" by Secretary of State Colin Powell. The move was announced at a Dec. 6 dinner for winners of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.

Brown's appointment, however, must still be approved by the Parliament Funkadelic, which has been riven by disputes between the Get-Uplicans and the Get-Downocrats. Brown has made no secret of his party affiliation, repeatedly calling on Americans to "get up, get on up" and adding that he wanted to "get up and do my thing... Movin', doin' it, you know." There is no report of whether a Downocratic filibuster is in the works, but prominent Downocrats Kool & The Gang have suggested a compromise plan to "get up with the get down."

President George Clinton praised the prospective appointment for his "Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication," and said that the Parliament should "Give the people what they want / When they want / And they wants it all the time."

He then departed on the Mothership for an intergalactic love summit.

 

6:31 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Open House: A new Dean fundraising letter, trumpeting Al Gore's endorsement, closes with the following line:

And I look forward to January 20th, 2005, when we follow the example of another great Tennessean, Andrew Jackson -- we will throw open the doors to the White House and let the American people back in.

I assume that Dean only means this metaphorically; when Andrew Jackson actually opened the doors to the White House in 1829, we all know how that turned out.

(Isn't it odd, though, that a candidate so solicitous of Native Americans would offhandedly refer to the architect of the Trail of Tears as "another great Tennessean"?)

 

6:14 PM :: Stephen (contact)

And I thought Wolfowitz was smart: Okay, so what diplomatic genius dreamed up this? Didn't anyone realize that blocking French, German, and Russian companies from reconstruction contracts would just dig the hole in relations deeper? Secretary Powell was begging NATO for help in Iraq as of five days ago--did anyone sit down and think, "Hey, let's insult two of our NATO allies over Iraq, and then ask them for troops"? Heck, do State and DoD even talk to each other any more?

(Andrew Sullivan, by contrast, considers this one of the administration's "best decisions yet.")

 

6:06 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Thoughts on Theodicy: I've been puzzled by the fact that people so often attribute unexpected good fortune--and only good fortune--to a greater force in the world. There's nothing wrong with feelings of gratitude, and it may be understandable to see football players kneel and pray in the end zone, or to read album liner notes containing shout-outs to the Lord. Ill fortune, though, is treated very differently; it takes a certain kind of spiritual fortitude to attribute a stray bullet or a terminal disease to the influence of Providence. (And how many receivers have you seen pray after dropping a catch?)

What I find strange about this pattern is that it seems to go against what I take to be our psychological needs. Human beings seem to have no problem accepting unpredicted benefits; finding a $20 bill on the street makes us happy in a way that isn't diminished by its contingency. A friendship that results from a chance encounter is no less valuable than one long-expected, and might even be treasured more because it was so unlikely and unforeseen. Similarly, we don't mind if comedies achieve their happy ending through a deus ex machina--there might be groans in the audience, but we smile and clap anyway.

But the situation is very different when it comes to unexpected losses. A play that ended with the hero inexplicably run over by a bulldozer in Act III would strike its audience as deeply unsatisfying (to say the least). In fact, some of the most anguishing moments in literature are in fact those caused by contingency--killing a loved one by mistake, missing the message from Verona because of the plague, getting hit by a car while running to meet a true love on top of the Empire State Building, etc.

And as in drama, so in life. While we'd be happy to think that we just got lucky in our successes (in school, in a career, etc.), we have trouble accepting the idea that our failures were just as random. The suggestion that events easily could have happened differently--that there is no reason behind them, that it was all a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that our suffering might be ultimately purposeless--strikes us as truly terrible. And it's easy to see how fear of such unpredictable and unavoidable disasters could cripple our desire or ability to act.

Kant, in exploring this question, concluded that a belief in a divine being and in a rational explanation for events was a precondition for a moral life. He was not arguing that these beliefs could be justified by empirical observation, or that there was some "higher" route to the truth beyond scientific investigation, or even that individuals had to be motivated to act rightly by the promise of Heaven. Instead, Kant noted that our success or failure in achieving moral goals is often out of our hands, and if the universe were truly indifferent to our choices, we might feel that we have no chance of succeeding. Without a belief that the cosmos will cooperate, Kant wrote, the moral law would be "fantastic, directed to empty imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false."

Kant's argument is therefore the opposite of my earlier suggestion regarding Four Quartets, that there's a strong case for the possibility of right action (and a nobility that might motivate it) even in a world that's only getting worse. One possible explanation for the difference, however, might be Kant's alleged lack of what is sometimes called a non-ideal theory. (Ideal theories show what the world would look like if everyone obeyed the moral law; non-ideal theories must account for the fact that some people will break the rules.) If your system requires you to tell the truth to everyone, even the ax murderer at the door--as some have interpreted Kant--then to follow it you'll need a pretty darn strong conviction that everything will work out for the best.

But if a non-ideal theory is available, it might no longer be necessary to believe that the world is fundamentally on our side; our ethical system would then be specifically designed for the messy world in which we live. Non-ideal theories are often difficult to construct, especially in a framework of binding rights (consider Thomas Nagel's attempt in "War and Massacre"), and there's a real danger of constructing ad hoc exceptions to existing rules. But these theories have the strong advantage of teaching us how to live in a world that picks no favorites. They might not do much to salve our contingent, unexpected and perhaps undeserved wounds--nothing short of a full-blown theodicy really would--but they might teach us how to bind them up and go on.

 

7:29 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Let justice roll down like waters... There's an interesting NYT profile of Joe Lieberman this morning, which paints him as a man too principled and genial to win the Democratic nomination. But what I found particularly interesting was this:

"He's a kind of rara avis," said Colin McEnroe, a writer and the host of a drive-time talk radio show on WTIC-AM in Connecticut who has known Mr. Lieberman since the 1970's. "What you have in Joe Lieberman is a guy who was shaped by the 60's, who marched with Martin Luther King, whose beliefs were forged in the crucible of being at Yale in a time of social change.

"You've got all that, but that's fused with--he's an Orthodox Jew. And there are things that go along with that that are perhaps more conservative in nature. You can't look at Lieberman the way you would look at some other Democrat of a comparable age and lineage. He's a different guy. He believes in the dream of Martin Luther King, but he also believes in the Old Testament."

Hmm... Martin Luther King and the Old Testament. What an odd combination. Who else might fall in that category?

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

Another interesting point: for all the accusations of being "Bush lite," Lieberman was rated one of the most "socially liberal" senators by National Journal in 2002.

 

6:38 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Exchange of values: I'm still not sure what to think about the Cuban embargo. While I'm sure that Castro's regime deserves to be sanctioned, I worry that the ban on trade and tourism may be hurting the wrong people, and perhaps even solidifying Castro's hold on power. Some evidence for the benefits of commercial exchange is provided in today's New York Times:

The need to leave Cuba crystallized for Mr. Valdés this summer, he said. After returning from a tour in Spain, he went to Varadero Beach, a resort east of Havana. While there, he said, he could not rent a scooter because they were available only to foreign tourists. Embarrassed and frustrated, he asked a Cuban-American from Miami, who happened to be at the same resort, to rent the scooter for him.

"There I am, a Cuban, a worker, from a good, responsible family, and I can't rent a scooter in my own country," Mr. Valdés said, suddenly angry, his voice rising at the memory. "And this man from Miami, who maybe left in a raft the year before, gets to do whatever he wants in Cuba and he is treated as a señor. I knew, then, it was time to leave."

It's telling that the movement to build a classless society in fact erects the most rigid divisions between the haves and the have-nots. Perhaps bringing the two into closer contact will make people start to wonder why.

 

10:40 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The Hollywood Conspiracy: After vigorously criticizing writer Tariq Ali on this site, I decided to borrow his book The Clash of Fundamentalisms from a friend, to see if I had been unduly harsh. I haven't finished reading it yet, but bizarre paragraphs like this don't exactly inspire confidence:

After 11 September there was much talk of re-entering Somalia to avenge the debacle of 1992. On 17 October 2001 a meeting of Hollywood chiefs 'committed themselves to new initiatives in support of the war on terrorism' [sic--the source is not indicated]. The first of these is a disgusting, racist, $90 million film, Black Hawk Down, whose design is embarrassingly obvious: to stir primitive patriotic sentiments to justify a war in Somalia if it becomes necessary. Its washington premiere was graced by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and veteran war criminal Oliver North. (p. 281)

While we're on the subject of the "embarrassingly obvious," we might note that the aforementioned Washington premiere took place on Dec. 18, 2001. So, had a $90 million film really been planned, cast, filmed, and distributed in only two months? Of course not--the publicity machine was already up and running in February, seven months before 9/11 and well before director Ridley Scott had joined the conspiracy to re-invade Somalia. (And the bestselling book had been published in 1999.)

I'll reserve judgment on the book as a whole, but it still surprises me that the most elaborate conspiracies are proposed when the facts are easiest to check...

 

7:25 AM :: Stephen (contact)

At Last, Good News on Trade: I've often wondered why the Bush Administration was willing to burn up America's political capital abroad on an issue as trivial as steel tariffs. (It's not like there's a war going on, or anything.) But today the NYT reports that the White House is ready to roll the tariffs back, using the WTO's ruling against them as political cover.

Avoiding a needless trade war with our allies is obviously a good thing--especially when we need their cooperation and good will on so many more important issues. But although I like the result, I don't like the implications of a "WTO made me do it" repeal--by painting our international agreements as the villain, it can only diminish popular support for free trade, along with the credibility of our trade commitments abroad. (Of course, if Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) ends up as the Democratic nominee, we'll soon have two protectionists running for President...)