The normally eminently sensible Andrew Edwards steps in it with this comment:

(NOTE: I still favour war on Iraq, for what it’s worth. But I’d be willing to put that off for a couple years to see GWB handed his ass on a plate in the next two elections)

C’mon Andrew, you don’t mean that, do you?? If you really believe war in Iraq is in the national interest, screw electoral politics. I’m tired as hell of both sides playing this as a wedge they can use come this November or November 04. I’d like it, just once, if one of them…one public-voiced Senator, one Congressmember…took a position that wasn’t nakedly and obviously clasping for partisan advantage.
Have they no shame? I’d imagine not…

Looking over at Blogcritics, I found this review of Coyote vs. Acme, one of the funniest things ever written, if you think Chuck Jones sits at the Right Hand of God, as I do. That reminded me of a lesser-known but equally brilliant piece by Frazer (who is up there in the People I’d Like To Have Dinner With list), his Lamentations of the Father

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

This guy obviously has kids.

My Central Valley bud Devra points out Ampersand’s comments about conflating anti-semitism with criticism of Israel.
She tags a few good points…although I think Goodwin’s Law applies, and that the term “Nazi” is most usually used as a meaningful-conversation-stopper; I think there has to be a distinction between some uses of the term…for example, some of my motorcycling and climbing friends have called me ‘the Safety Nazi’ with mixed levels of warmth, which I don’t find terribly insulting because I am inflexible about safety, and the use of the terms feminazi or econazi, which I’ve heard used to apply to folks who are equally inflexible about feminism or ecology. Both have an element of the dismissive about them, and could, in some light be seen as insulting.
But to call Jews ‘Nazis’ is a different level of the game, in no small part because it is a targeted and intentional insult aimed at the heart of their cultural and racial history. It isn’t an indirect or general insult, it is a intentional slap in the face no less than the other “N” word.
And because I usually use anecdote to make my points, here’s a personal one.
As a teenager, my brother went through a phase of his life when he was simply convinced he was black. He dated black girls, hung out with the black kids at school, spoke in that soft middle-class West Los Angeles version of a black drawl with traces of black urban grammar. I never quite figured out where it came from; both of us has been in part raised by strong black men who were close friends to our checked-out parents, but I’d simply acknowledged my status as a mutt and always been comfortable with it. Maybe it connected with him in some deeper way, I really don’t know.
Later in life, he would fall into his ‘wigro’ role among black friends or co-workers.
Until one day, he got fired because in the heat of an argument at work, he’d called a black co-worker by the ‘n-word’. He called me in tears and rage.
He’d used the same word, collegially, a dozen times, he told me. He couldn’t understand why, now, his colleague had called management and management had summarily fired him.
I told him that I understood, and that if he’d worked for me, I’d probably have fired him, too.
The issue is that insult derives from context and intention.
To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.
And to wave that off is simply as morally indefensible as what my brother did. At least he learned his lesson.
I’ll add a ‘geopolitical’ point as well. The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

Had lunch today with a youthful colleague from the Netherlands, and we had occasion to discuss our various vehicular indiscretions, and the response of the local constables.
I was ticketed last year on my motorcycle by a local policeman with a laser speed detector; I saw him at a distance, but I assumed he was using radar. Motorcycles have a small cross-section, so we have to be relatively close to the radar gun to register. Sadly, that isn’t the case with a laser.
I slowed down with what I thought was plenty of distance, and was shocked, really just shocked to be pulled over. I was cooperative, the officer was polite, and instead of writing my ticket for the actual speed he’d measured, reduced my speed, raised the noted speed limit, and so meaningfully reduced the severity of the ticket (and fine).
My Dutch friend and I discussed the pros and cons of fighting tickets (I almost never fight them; I have been lucky enough never to have received a ticket I didn’t deserve, and I view it as a kind of tax on speeding). But I have a number of friends who do and have successfully fought tickets in court.
My friend was somewhat shocked. In the Netherlands, tickets are given by teams of police officers, who collect the fines on the spot. There is no appealing to a court. There is no discretion on the part of the officer. If you are pulled over, you are guilty, you pay your fine, and you go on. Unless they impound your car on the spot, which they do for various moving violations.
Somehow, this difference typifies the American attitude toward government. Personal, messy, possibly forgiving (or possibly the opposite, if you are less practiced at dealing with police officers than I may be). My rights equal those of the officer in front of the court (in theory, anyway). In the Netherlands, the officer is the state.
Now there are arguably advantages to that system. Minorities get tickets at the behest of an objective radar gun, not a possibly prejudiced officer. The powerful have a harder time getting off by simply being who they are.
But something is lost, as well. Some call it the difference between being a citizen and a subject; I’m not completely sure how to express it. But it’s an important difference. The imperfections of our system aren’t something to necessarily be rationalized out of existence. In some ways, the imperfections are the system.
I need to think about that some more.

Erin O’Connor, over at CantWatch has a great, annotated transcript of a Hardball dialog between my man, Stanley Fish, and Thor Halvorsson of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). A live Fisking…

The New Republic Online has a great article on angst in the art world. Check out After Disenchantment. A sample:

Disenchantment has itself become a fashionable attitude. The people who cannot get from Experience A to Experience B have based an entire aesthetic on their inability to weave things together. Turn the pages of Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, an ultra-hip anthology that has just been published by Phaidon, and you encounter a mood that tends to be hands-off, formulaic, and terminally ironic in the work of more than one hundred artists, some of whom are unfamiliar, some of whom are very familiar, such as Luc Tuymans, who specializes in wan, nearly monochromatic vignettes, and Elizabeth Peyton, who paints the youth of today with the manipulative sensitivity of a high school student on the make. The cream-colored cover of Vitamin P is decorated with tablet-shaped details from paintings. The message is that painting is good for you. Vitamin P is meant to be an optimistic book, but the artists and the critics involved carry such a baggage of stylish pessimism and are so determinedly post-everything that their plea for the re-enchantment of painting seems little more than another attitude.

Note how this fits into my discussion of doubt as a philosophical base.

Rob Lyman has a great post on PETA, meat, and hunting (I’ve always subscribed to the People for Eating Tasty Animals version, myself). I made a shorter comment:

2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.

but his is more thorough and pointed. Check it out.
He also catches the amusing point in the ‘Uppity Negro’ comments:

And why in heaven’s name would you issue death threats against a guy called Armed Liberal?

Is he on my blogroll yet??

Ken Hirsch paints a ‘rational’ response to nuclear terrorism, in response to a scenario by Eugene Volokh, which is different from and as scary as mine.
When I wrote the scenario below, I had two thoughts in mind: First, that the small ‘chattering classes’ of the left and right keep forgetting hysteresis, the tendency for systems set in motion to overshoot, and the impact when the large, silent center finally takes a position; and second, the complexity of the real world, which resists being reduced to simple if>then formulations.
First, let me say about the scenario, that I think that it, or something like it, will remain a reasonable possibility (not a 1:5 chance, but not a 1:10,000 either) for the foreseeable future. The reality is that we live in a world in which a large number of people dislike us, don’t respect us, and see their interests directly challenged by our efforts to defend ours.
I’m not, as Avedon Carol suggests, painting this as a nightmarish ‘if we don’t invade Iraq’ scenario. On one hand, if we allow folks who hate us to get stronger, it becomes more likely. On the other, as we bring the hostility out into the open, it becomes more likely. The Iraq issue is a separate one that I’ll try and address later (as soon as I figure out where I stand).
Without getting too deeply into what it itself an immense and complex topic, I believe that our interests are, in line with American character, an odd mixture of blind, shortsighted self-interest, noble humanitarianism, and naiveté. We want simultaneously to preserve our cheap oil and cheap Nikes, and to see that everyone else gets some, too.
Right now, we are, along with Europe, an island of prosperity and relative safety in an increasingly impoverished (we’ll talk about that in a minute) and unsafe world.
This represents a massive supply of ‘potential energy’ in the social and political sphere, and this reservoir of energy will drive international and domestic politics for quite some time into the future.
About impoverishment – I am aware of the various studies showing that the objective level of world poverty may be declining. But impovrishment – the ‘feeling’ of being poor – increases, as both the traditional social structures that support people break down, and as they are immersed in the mediaverse that shows them an idealized vision of the prosperous life in the West.
So let’s stipulate that the issues Neal Stephenson raises may be valid, even if his outcomes are outlandish.

When it gets down to it–talking trade balances here–once we’ve brain-drained all our technology to other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel, once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would call prosperity–y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anybody else: music/movies/microcode (software)/high-speed pizza delivery.

And until that smearing happens, there are a bunch of people out there who will be seriously pissed off at us.
And as the march of technology assures that the handheld iPAQ that I use every day has more processing power than (pick your obsolete mainframe), absent a massive and probably unworkable effort, the technology of warfighting and of mass destruction similarly moves downscale and becomes more and more widely accessible to those pissed-off people.
So one of these days, one of the containers off San Pedro may very well contain someone’s message of destruction and hate.
We’ll survive it. I don’t believe that anyone except possibly the Chinese will be able to threaten the U.S. with massive destruction, and they are as a state, likely to be reasonable and deterrable as were the Soviets.
But how will we react? That’s the $64 million question.
Right now we have two polar positions, occupied by relatively small and vocal groups of people. The larger majority are either confused or inattentive, with some general feelings – they’d rather not be seeing dead people on TV, and they’re kind of pissed off about 9/11. I’ve spent the last six months talking to almost everyone I meet about this stuff…store clerks, cab drivers, hair cutters, kid’s teachers, coworkers, and my decidedly unscientific poll is what has led me this conclusion.
It is my belief that both poles are relatively well-intentioned; they just have very different view of what the world looks like and as a result how best to deal with it. But I don’t think either side has clearly thought their positions through, nor do I think that they have thought through the real consequences of their positions.
For the hawks, the reality is that we are talking about a return to colonialism. There’s a problem: In the old colonial days, colonies paid for themselves through often-brutal extractive practices. I’m not sure how the economics work today, but I’d bet that they are still uneconomical. Ideally, this would be an enlightened colonialism…and to be blunt, given a choice between Idi Amin and a colonial administrator, I’ll bet the average Ugandan would take the administrator every damn day. But it will stretch us financially and morally.
For the doves, the reality is that we are talking about Fortress America, about an autarky. Unless we are willing to hold the world’s biggest potlatch and simply give our wealth away…and maybe even then, given my belief that the roots of the struggle against the West are in the struggle against modernism…we will still face implacable enemies abroad. We will need to withdraw militarily and economically from the rest of the world; maybe not totally, but substantially. Our economy is big enough to do it; our standard of living will fall, but it’s in a slow decline anyway, and attaining a stable sustainable level of economic activity brings other possible benefits.
I detest both ideas. Intellectually, I rebel against a colonial future; and I know in my heart that we will never be able to build walls high enough to keep the rest of the world out.
In my mind, the primary discussion we should be having as a nation is how we will address this issue in the long run.
And as a part of that discussion, we need to openly discuss and firmly establish how we will respond to the kind of scenario I paint, or Eugene Volokh paints. Because if we wait until it happens, we will be driven by the way that the silent middle jumps, and my belief is that that jump will be extreme (in either direction) and virtually impossible to control.
Fear and rage are never good mental states to make life-and-death decisions in.

I’ve harshed Hesiod and Sullywatch over language and tone, and while I’ve been impressed at the work Charles at LGF does in bringing Middle Eastern news to light, I’ve got issues with his comments section; the omnipresent tone of Arab-bashing and chest-beating, at a time when we need to proceed with determination, care, and seriousness is part of what led to my ‘thought experiment’ below (and which I’ll follow up on as time allows today).
Then this charming set of comments over at Aaron’s ‘Uppity Negro’ blog was pointed out to me:

[sorry, crabby] I feel a collecting-spree coming on, & I’m afraid Armed Liberal’s blinky, doe-eyes are looking mighty fine. Can I have’em, Aaron? Can I?
Posted by: Neogrammarian on September 16, 2002 05:21 PM
As long as I can have the ears.
Those necklaces of them look quite fetching.
Posted by: Aaron on September 16, 2002 05:41 PM

So, trying to figure out how to comment on them, I can only think of one response…molon labe, kids, molon labe.
[a few folks wanted to know what ‘molon labe’ meant…I added a link]

We’re back, after a snap 3-day camping and kayaking trip to Catalina with the Littlest Guy and two other couples with similar-aged kind. You wouldn’t _believe_ how much [stuff] you have to take when you’re wrangling kids…beautiful, beautiful weekend. I’ll get caught up and comment on the comments and events later, along with an explanation of the intent of the ‘thought experiment’ below.