Steve renamed his blog Smythe’s World ‘The Concerned Troll‘ – and given the amusing nature of that would-be dismissal by the netroots tools, it’s a great blog title. I wish I’d thought of it…

But Steve’s not only clever, he’s moral.

Racist Quote of the Day:

Oh oh….looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

—T.Bogg (referencing a photo of the Secretary of State).

There’s an amusing debate going on in the blogosphere over whether Imus is a liberal or a conservative, as if that makes any difference. If “nappy-headed ho” comes out of your mouth when you describe a female college basketball player, you’re a racist. If making a lewd reference to a black prostitute is what comes to mind when you need to dis Condaleeza Rice, you’re a racist. And it doesn’t matter if the nazis over at LGF are pretending to take offense.

I have never understood the notion that liberals like Tom (of TBogg) – who would spasm into rageful unconsciousness listening to a white redneck talk smack about a black man or a woman somehow feel free to bring out their inner Tom Mezgers if the target isn’t on their side of the angels.

An old post from armedliberal.com back in 2002 which seems highly appropriate in light of yesterday’s Duke acquittals, and this post at Maggie’s Farm:

The War on Bad Philosophy continues.

I’m still working today, so I can’t give this the depth it deserves, but I want to point folks to an article on Free Speech and Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, a Randian liberal arts professor, and commentary on the article by Arthur Silber on his blog Voice of Reason. (link originally via Instapundit)

First, I’m not a big fan of Rand and Randians. As a group, they tend to exhibit the confusion between logic and reason that many bright teenagers display (I should know, I’ve got two…). But while there is a framework in both articles I’d take some exception to (and will when I get a moment), there are a couple of 18kt gems worth pulling out and handing around. From Hicks:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don’t let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don’t let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don’t let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality – which is the same goal as affirmative action.

A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of “anything goes” in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation – they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups’ speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

I haven’t read a better description of the postmodernist take on speech and power.

I believe Hicks to be off base in his explanation of the root of this construction; he explains it as a political tactic adopted as the previous tactic – affirmative action – began to fail. He’s wrong; this is a manifestation of the underlying philosophy behind affirmative action – the primacy of group identification, and the construction of politics as conflicts between identified groups.

I’d suggest going back to Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’ for a historic touchstone.

A bit more bloggage then back to work…

…2002 was an interesting year, wasn’t it?

(Sorry, I just love the Glenn Gould movie)

So I broke down and subscribed to Foreign Affairs. I want to learn what the smart folks (like Dan Drezner, who has an article in the Marc/April issue) are thinking and writing about. I acknowledge my lack of expert knowledge and think it’d be good to hear what expert have to say.

So this month, along with Drezner’s article, there’s a lead article by Ray Takeyh on Iran, in which he argues strongly for detente. He argues, in fact, for the inevitability of detente, because of the strength of Iran.

In order to develop a smarter Iran policy, U.S. leaders must first accept certain distasteful facts – such as Iran’s ascendance as a regional power and the endurance of its regime – and then ask how those can be accommodated.

OK, there’s some things to think about in that.

But – no where in the article is there anything about the demographic issues or the potential collapse of Iranian oil revenues – and the political implications that presents for the “endurance of its regime”. Now it may be that those issues are overblown; there are certainly arguments to be made.

But I’d say that it’s pretty difficult to talk about Iran and our long-term strategy with them without dealing with these issues – or at least raising and dismissing them with some arguments that hold some weight.

And it’s difficult for me to sit down and accept the authoritay of someone who is a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign relations and author of ‘Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic’ when he tells me that Iran is an unstoppable force in the Middle East and doesn’t deal with the reasons why Iran may either be a hollow power – or why it may be motivated to be aggressive within a specific window of time. If this is what the leading experts are doing – heaven help us all.

Then Noah Pollak sent me a note announcing the new issue of Azure, the magazine he’s involved with.

In it, David Hazony (editor in chief of the magazine) has an article on ‘The New Cold War’ in which he details the issues in containing Iran.

By most measures, Iran is an easier mark than the Soviet Union. It does not yet have nuclear weapons or icbms; its Islamist ideology has less of a universal appeal; its tools of thought control are vastly inferior to the gulag and the KGB; and its revolution is not old enough to have obliterated the memory of better days for much of its population. In theory at least, it should be much easier for the West to mount a similar campaign of relentless pressure on the regime – from fomenting dissent online, to destabilizing the regime through insurgent groups inside Iran, to destroying the Iranian nuclear project, to ever-deeper economic sanctions, to fighting and winning the proxy wars that Iran has continued to wage – in order to effect the kind of change of momentum needed to enable the Iranian people to bring their own regime down the way the peoples under communism did in the 1980s and 1990s.

This article cuts closer to my presuppositions and beliefs than Takeyh’s; it stands as a counter to his arguments about the inevitability of Iranian power with an argument about the necessity of countering it.

But it’s more in the nature of a polemic than an analysis.

And the question, of course, is whether it’s the right polemic. And some analysis would help make that case. Or Takeyh’s.

My dad was a very good gambler. The best bets he made were ones where the suckers other bettors saw the odds differently than they were really.

I’ve argued for a long time that the progressive netroots weighs more in the consciousness of the political class than it does in political reality. I was meaning to do a post on the Political Arithmetik post showing netroots-fave Edwards 4th and stalled when Jeff Jarvis did a much better post for me.

“Boy, those results don’t look like those from Gallup – from the real voters. At the Politics Online conference in Washington a few weeks ago, I remember one of the many pundits there arguing that Hillary has no grass roots support and momentum because you can’t find it in the blogosphere. Well, maybe in one blog.”

The political blogs are all about Edwards and Richardson, and the polls are all about Hillary.

It’s a fundamental mistake to presume that because one narrow slice of the chattering classes (us) happens to be all excited about a candidate – like, say Ned Lamont – that the enthusiasm is shared by the larger electorate.

I think there’s a lesson there for the netroots – especially the wannabe political consultant class netroots – and I’ll cite my perennial source John Schaar:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

My Examiner column is up – “Why liberalism matters in an age of excess”

…our new Gilded Age risks both ruining the republic, as those forced out of the game withdraw their political and social allegiance … and ruining our economy as those who are winning the game focus on capturing value rather than creating it.

Tim O”Reilly has a post up on building more civility into blogging.

His suggestions are:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

4. Ignore the trolls.

5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

As someone who supports having a civil blog, I ought to be 100% in support. But I’m not quite…#1 I do support, but possibly not the others. Which is somewhat self-contradictory, I know.

Thoughts?

Ali Allawi’s book ‘The Occupation of Iraq‘.

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country – a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”

“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.

I’ve got a high tolerance for incompetence and mismanagement – since much of human history seems to be based on it – and so I don’t throw my hands up in despair when people talk about how incompetent the occupation has been.

But if we’re going to get better at it, we’d better list and learn from our mistakes.

Who is Kathleen Parker, and what century is she living in?

A column in the Washington Post:

On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.

Why, because toddlers don’t have fathers?

She dismissed the effectiveness of women in combat:

Women may be able to push buttons as well as men can, but the door-to-door combat in Fallujah proved the irrelevance of that argument. Meanwhile, no one can look at photos of the 15 British marines and sailors and argue convincingly that the British navy is stronger for the presence of Acting Leading Seaman Faye Turney — no matter how lovely and brave she may be.

She must have missed Sgt. Leah Ann Hester’s story.

Mark Bowden has a brilliant article up in the Atlantic on interrogation in Iraq, and its role in finding Zarqawi.

“We both know what I want,” Doc said. “You have information you could trade. It is your only source of leverage right now. You don’t want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade. A guy as smart as you – you are the type of Sunni we can use to shape the future of Iraq.” If Abu Haydr would betray his organization, Doc implied, the Americans would make him a very big man indeed.

There was no sign that the detainee knew he was being played. He nodded sagely. This was the kind of moment gators live for. Interrogation, at its most artful, is a contest of wits. The gator has the upper hand, of course. In a situation like the one at Balad, the Task Force had tremendous leverage over any detainee, including his reasonable fear of beating, torture, lengthy imprisonment, or death. While gators at that point were not permitted even to threaten such things, the powerless are slow to surrender suspicion. Still, a prisoner generally has compelling reasons to resist. He might be deeply committed to his cause, or fear the consequences of cooperation, if word of it were to reach his violent comrades.

Stuff like this is why it’s worth it to subscribe to the Atlantic.

…from $13,000 in pledges. Not as good as I’d hoped, not as bad as I feared.

If someone would go over and pledge $100, we’d be over $13,000.

Just click here…

I’ll do a link roundup tonight when I’m done with work.