…which sounds like something Wonkette should be writing about.

OK, I’m seriously depressed about the Presidential election (as U. Utah Phillips would say, “It’s good, though!” – explanation here, listen here). Nothing changes my view below, but right now I’d like a do-over on the nominating conventions, if one could be offered. I’ll get some sleep and be better in the morning, honest…

So let me turn to the fun-filled California ballot. We’ve got government by initiative here in California, which was the reformer’s tool against the Union Southern Pacific back in the day, and is now sadly the tool most often used by large corporations to mount Astroturf campaigns when getting things though the Legislature proves to be too expensive. What’s even sadder is that sometimes it’s the best way we have to make laws.

Here’s a list of the propositions, with links out the League of Women Voter’s great ‘Smart Voter‘ site.Over the next few weeks, I’ll try and dig into each of them and comment.

Proposition 1A.
Protection of Local Government Revenues — State of California

Should local property tax and sales tax revenues remain with local government thereby safeguarding funding for public safety, health, libraries, parks, and other local services? Provisions can only be suspended if the Governor declares a fiscal necessity and two-thirds of the Legislature concur.

Proposition 59.
Public Records, Open Meetings — State of California
(Legislative Constitutional Amendment)

Shall the Constitution be amended to include public’s right of access to meetings of government bodies and writings of government officials while preserving specified constitutional rights and retaining existing exclusions
for certain meetings and records?

Proposition 60.
Election Rights of Political Parties — State of California
(Legislative Constitutional Amendment)

Shall the general election ballot be required to include candidate receiving most votes among candidates of same party for partisan office in primary election?

Proposition 60A.
Surplus Property — State of California
(Legislative Constitutional Amendment)

Shall the sale proceeds of most surplus state property pay off specified bonds?

Proposition 61.
Children’s Hospital Projects. Grant Program — State of California
(Bond Act. Initiative Statute)

Shall $750 million general obligation bonds be authorized for grants to eligible children’s hospitals for construction, expansion, remodeling, renovation, furnishing and equipping children’s hospitals?

Proposition 62.
Elections. Primaries — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute)

Should primary elections be structured so that voters may vote for any state or federal candidate regardless of party registration of voter or candidate? The two primary-election candidates receiving most votes for an office, whether they are candidates with “no party” or members of same or different party, would be listed on general election ballot. Exempts presidential nominations.

Proposition 63.
Mental Health Services Expansion, Funding. Tax on Personal Incomes above $1 Million — State of California
(Initiative Statute)

Should a 1% tax on taxable personal income above $1 million
to fund expanded health services for mentally ill children, adults, seniors be established?

Proposition 64.
Limit on Private Enforcement of Unfair Business Competition Laws — State of California
(Initiative Statute)

Should individual or class action “unfair business” lawsuits be allowed only if actual loss suffered? Only government officials may enforce these laws on public’s behalf.

Proposition 65.
Local Government Funds, Revenues. State Mandates — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment)

Should reduction of local fee/tax revenues require voter approval? Permits suspension of state mandate if no state reimbursement to local government within 180 days after obligation determined.

Proposition 66.
Limitations on “Three Strikes” Law. Sex Crimes. Punishment — State of California
(Initiative Statute)

Should the “Three Strikes” law be limited to violent and/or serious felonies? Permits limited re-sentencing under new definitions. Increases punishment for specified sex crimes against children.

Proposition 67.
Emergency Medical Services. Funding. Telephone Surcharge — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute)

Should the telephone surcharge be increased and other funds for emergency room physicians, hospital emergency rooms, community clinics, emergency personnel training/equipment, and 911 telephone system be allocated?

Proposition 68.
Non-Tribal Commercial Gambling Expansion. Tribal Gaming Compact Amendments. Revenues, Tax Exemptions — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute)

Should tribal compact amendments be authorized? Unless tribes accept, should casino gaming be authorized for sixteen non-tribal establishments? Percentage of gaming revenues fund government services.

Proposition 69.
DNA Samples. Collection. Database. Funding — State of California
(Initiative Statute)

Should collection of DNA samples from all felons, and from
others arrested for or charged with specified crimes be required with submission to state DNA database? Provides for funding.

Proposition 70.
Tribal Gaming Compacts. Exclusive Gaming Rights. Contributions to State — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute)

Upon tribe’s request, should the Governor be required to execute a 99-year compact? Tribes contribute percentage of net gaming income to state funds, in exchange for expanded, exclusive tribal casino gaming.

Proposition 71.
Stem Cell Research. Funding. Bonds — State of California
(Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute)

Should the “California Institute for Regenerative
Medicine” be established to regulate and fund stem cell research with the constitutional right to conduct such research and with an oversight committee?
Prohibits funding of human reproductive cloning research.

Proposition 72.
Health Care Coverage Requirements — State of California
(Referendum)

Should legislation requiring health care coverage for employees, as specified, working for large and medium employers be approved?

I listened to the debate on NPR; it was interesting to listen, as opposed to watch and to try and fill in the images with my imagination. Kerry did well in terms of his persona; I went in expecting a pompous windbag and he wasn’t one. Bush did less well in persona; fragmented, repetitive (although Kerry did keep repeating sideways points that meant “I served in Vietnam”).I want to look at the transcript before I make a call on substance; each of them had some clinkers, although I think Kerry has some eye-openers; supplying nuclear fuel to Iran and “getting the troops out in six months isn’t a commitment, it’s a goal”.

Bush didn’t jump on either one of them. he missed his opportunity to channel Churchill in response…“You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.” It seems like kind of a no-brainer.

Joe commented that he’s going to post on what crappy choices we have [here it is: ABTG (Anybody But These Guys)]. I think I’m pretty much in agreement with that basic thought.

It’s funny. I went to the Reason event last night, and was chatting with some of the luminaries there about how impressed I am with the blogging community as a whole. And, to be honest, I think I’d rather listen to almost any two bloggers than listen to these two.

ABC News:

CORAL GABLES, Fla. Sept. 30, 2004 — After a deluge of campaign speeches and hostile television ads, President Bush and challenger John Kerry got their chance to face each other directly Thursday night before an audience of tens of millions of voters in a high-stakes debate about terrorism, the Iraq war and the bloody aftermath.

The 90-minute encounter was particularly crucial for Kerry, trailing slightly in the polls and struggling for momentum less than five weeks before the election. The Democratic candidate faced the challenge of presenting himself as a credible commander in chief after a torrent of Republican criticism that he was prone to changing his positions.

It’s 1:45 pm Pacific time on Thursday as I post this….

Not as bad as Lapham’s column, but a bit embarassing, I’d think.

(click to see full size)

Update: On reading the whole ABC article (it’s been taken down, but I still had it on a browser – full copy below), it’s pretty innocuous and fairly obviously a placeholder for the final article.

But just to keep them honest, here’s the full transcript – we can check after the debate to see what they really put up:

CORAL GABLES, Fla. Sept. 30, 2004 — After a deluge of campaign speeches and hostile television ads, President Bush and challenger John Kerry got their chance to face each other directly Thursday night before an audience of tens of millions of voters in a high-stakes debate about terrorism, the Iraq war and the bloody aftermath.

The 90-minute encounter was particularly crucial for Kerry, trailing slightly in the polls and struggling for momentum less than five weeks before the election. The Democratic candidate faced the challenge of presenting himself as a credible commander in chief after a torrent of Republican criticism that he was prone to changing his positions.

Bush was expected to confront questions about leading the nation into war on the still-unproven premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He also has faced accusations that he lacked a strategy to deal with the violence and chaos that have left more than 1,000 Americans dead and that the Iraq war has diverted U.S. attention from al-Qaida and other terrorists.

With a record of four years in office to defend, Bush had a debate strategy of being optimistic about Iraq but acknowledging that times were tough. His stance is that Americans know he is a decisive leader even if they don’t always agree with his decisions and that Kerry has taken conflicting positions on Iraq and can’t be trusted to lead the nation.

Although Kerry voted to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, he says he would not have followed Bush’s path to war a path that alienated allies and, the Democrat says, left Americans less secure. Kerry argues Bush is out of touch with reality, paints too rosy a picture about Iraq and lacks a strategy to end the crisis.

Kerry also says Bush has neglected other major problems like North Korea and Iran, two nations suspected of pursing nuclear weapons.

Kerry, in a taped interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday, said, “George Bush is scaring America. He’s talking terror every day, and people see terrible images of what’s happening in the world, and they’re real.”

Bush spent the morning comforting hurricane victims on his fifth survey of Florida areas hit by storms. At the Martin County, Fla., Red Cross center, Bush thanked volunteers for showing “the true heart of America. We long to help somebody when they’re hurting.”

The debate’s focus on Iraq was sharpened by bombings in Baghdad Thursday that killed three dozen children.

Ahead in the polls, Bush could afford to settle for a debate draw while Kerry needed something to break the status quo. Some Democrats saw the debates as the last chance for a Kerry breakout.

Thursday night’s meeting at the University of Miami was the first of three Bush-Kerry debates over a two-week period. Neither side was underestimating its importance with a TV audience of 30 million to 40 million expected. Almost a third of people surveyed say the debates will be a deciding factor in how they vote.

The first debate drew the nation’s attention to hurricane-battered Florida and its political importance. Florida swung the presidency to Bush in the disputed 2000 election and could determine whether he wins re-election.

The debates were staged under a rigid set of rules negotiated by the candidates’ representatives to limit spontaneity and opportunities for back-and-forth exchanges.

On the Net:

Transcript will be available at:

Over at Volokh, Orin Kerr posts three challenges to hawks.

First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea? Why/why not?

Yes I do, for exactly the same reasons that I gave before the invasion:

…a part of what I have realized is that as long as states – particularly wealthy states – are willing to explicitly house terrorists and their infrastructure, or implicitly turn a blind eye to their recruitment and funding, we can’t use the kind of ‘police’ tactics that worked against Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction. The Soviet Union and it’s proxies offered limited support to these terrorist gangs, but they didn’t have a national population to recruit from and bases and infrastructure that only a state can provide.

So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do…but that’s weather, and I’m worried about climate.

…

I believe that a sufficiently aggressive terrorist action against the United States could well result in the simple end of the Islamic world as we know it. I believe that if nukes were detonated in San Pedro and Alameda and Red Hook that there’s a non-trivial chance that we would simply start vaporizing Arab cities until our rage was sated.

I’d rather that didn’t happen. I’d rather that San Pedro, Alameda, and Red Hook stayed whole and safe as well, and I believe the answer is to end the state support of terrorism and the state campaigns of hatred aimed at the U.S. I think that Iraq simply has drawn the lucky straw. They are weak, not liked, bluntly in violation of international law, and as our friends the French say, about to get hung pour l’ecourager les autres…to encourage the others.

You’ll note that the pattern of state behavior by Arab states over the last 18 months has been overall positive; from Libya to Lebanon, we are seeing baby steps away from the abyss. Pakistan is apparently allowing US experts to ‘safe’ their nukes against theft as it negotiates with India. The Palestinian Authority PM is questioning their strategy of terror.

Clearly there are nonstate actors who are fighting us with all their power, and will continue to do so until they run out of resources, people, or will. But they are not being and will not be fed at the rates that supported their growth in the last decades.

Second, what reaction do you have to the not-very-upbeat news coming of Iraq these days, such as the stories I link to above?

I expected it, since history happens in historic time – rather than according to the faster pace of television news cycles. It’s obviously tragic – and more so since I do believe that some severe missteps in the beginning of the occupation opened the door to wider unrest. But this is going to be a contest of sitzfleisch more than cleverness. I worried about that as well – also before the invasion:

How do we do this in a way that won’t mean that we’ll be back next year, and the year after, and the year after that?

Because otherwise, we’re playing King Canute, lashing the tide as a demonstration of the limits of our worldly power. We can push back our enemies. We can weaken them. We can even kill them all, if it comes down to that.

But can we stick this out long enough to make peace with them? Or rather, to fight them hard enough and long enough and still have the stomach and heart to offer the average person on the ground in Tikrit or Jakarta something worth living for? Because that’s what it will take to have a chance that they will make peace with us.

This is uncharted territory. I can’t think of an example in modern history where it has worked.

I think we’ll readily win the clash of arms. But as the Israelis have discovered, I believe that this is more a war of stomach, heart, and backbone than one of arms.

Third, what specific criteria do you recommend that we should use over the coming months and years to measure whether the Iraq invasion has been a success?

I doubt that there are very many indicators that will operate over a period of months that will be terribly fruitful in the overall strategic evaluation (as opposed to evaluating the tactics that make up the overall strategy). I think we need to set a timescale in increments of a decade; we’re still in Germany a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I think the macro indicators are three: the rise of a just civil society in Iraq (I think the democracy there is going to be damn imperfect, even by Florida standards); the commitment of the American people to that goal (just civil society in Iraq, by means that may change as circumstances unfold); and the commitment of the Iraqi people to that goal (i.e. what we’re seeing now is neither a mass uprising nor an attack by an organized skilled, well-equipped foe – which suggests that overall, the Iraqi people are – if not on our side, not violently opposed).

I think the short term metrics are the classic ones; electricity availability, kids in schools, hospital beds functioning, crime, the level of insurgent violence. But those will spike and ebb; we can’t be panicked by the spikes and we can’t get cocky because of the ebbs.

I think that most of all, a sense of realism about the scale – in effort and in time – of the project we are engaged in is necessary. Bush hasn’t done that, and that’s arguably his biggest vulnerability.

One of the neatest projects Spirit of America has done is the ‘tools project’ in which they provided tool belts to the graduates of the construction training program run by the Seabees.

Well, one of the graduating classes was covered by CNN, and it gives me a lot of pleasure to see that the tools mattered to the Iraqis who received them.

More Iraqi tradesmen are taking the classes, and more tools are needed. It doesn’t take much, and at the end of the day it will mean a lot.

Via Harry’s Place (where I seem to crib everything from these days…) a great article in the Guardian on ‘exhibition killers’ and the media’s complicity (that would include us in the blog universe) in their humiliation and killing.

Suppose, for a moment, that we in Britain faced a fascist insurgency, which kidnapped a few Jews and black people. Should we negotiate for their lives by releasing Neo-Nazi bombers and racist murderers? Or would we calculate how many more Jews and black people would, as a result, wind up in cellars with knives to their throats?

In my piece below, I called the victims ‘bloody Post-It notes‘ left for us by the terrorists. In many ways, the use of their lives in this way – as objects to draw media attention – makes their murders far worse because the murderer denies them even the small respect a killer can grant a victim; that of acknowledging the personal hate that is the basis for the killing.

This week, I’ve been working on two consulting projects (good news, because we need the money; bad news, because I’m too busy to blog or do much else) and Littlest Guy and Middle Guy are getting into the school groove, which makes our mornings kind of chaotic.

TG mentioned on Tuesday that her bike had a new rattle; I went out and confirmed that the chain was a bit loose, checked to make sure the brakes and suspension were all OK, and we agreed that we’d adjust the chain and go over the bike this weekend.Wednesday, she complained about the rattle again, and so I walked her bike up and down the driveway, and heard a slight rattle from the front end. Again, headstock, brakes, all felt OK, but I suggested she take the car to work. She disagreed, and rode to work all week.

I finally got some time today, after a quick lunch with Michael Totten and Roger Simon and a Long Beach Opera event. I put the bike up on front and rear stands, pulled the brake caliper off so I could get the front wheel off – and the brake pads just fell out of the caliper.

The locating pin that held them in the caliper had vibrated loose and fallen out.

The caliper is made so that it would be difficult – but not impossible – for the pads to just get shaken out while riding, leaving the brakes nonfunctional. Fortunately, they didn’t fall out as TG rode to or from work on the crowded Harbor Freeway all week.

The point here is simple – it’s worth checking things out if they feel wrong. And until you do, it might make sense to park whatever it is that feels bad. Don’t just assume everything is OK, as I did, and in so doing put my wife at risk.

We dodged a bullet this week. We might not next time, and you might not either.

Cathy Seipp has a new column up at National Review Online about Dan Rather, the cultural divide, and her personal experiences in bridging it.

It’s hard to remember now how lily white great stretches of southern California used to be, but they really were in those days, and by white I mean really white. My dark-eyed, brunette mother often said she felt surrounded by the Burghers of Munich. Visitors would occasionally feel free to look at her and inquire: “So are you Spanish or Portuguese or what?”

Not that I was exactly a Tragic Mulatto, but we never quite fit in. We were liberal, upper-middle-class (in attitude, not income) Jews, from Canada, surrounded by people descended from Okies from Muskogee. My mother volunteered for the George McGovern campaign in 1972 and I helped stuff envelopes.

What I only realized after I grew up and moved away was how decent and tolerant these boring, suburban neighbors were. They were certainly puzzled by our family’s exotic ways; my divorced mother ran her own business out of the house, and installed three phone lines in each room, including each bathroom, by herself.

They were also occasionally shocked by notions like Jesus speaking a foreign language, and now and then there were attempts by concerned classmates to save me from an unpleasant future in hell. One evening, a movie about the Rapture was shown at the local (public) high-school as community entertainment. Still, I never heard that distinct gasp of disbelief and hostile, shocked amazement that I often hear now, when people discover that, yep, I’m voting for Bush.

Go read the whole thing, and then I’ll echo her comment and amplify it.

About fifteen years ago, I moved from Venice Beach to Torrance – politically, from deep-Blue to bright Red – and believed that I’d moved from the progressive, tolerant center of the world to a place where I was sure to be a neighborhood outcast for my liberal ways.

And, surprisingly, I wasn’t. Many of my neighbors disagreed with me, and we had some interesting debates at the PTA, but on a basic level I was more than tolerated, I was accepted.

Which is more than I often am at dinners in Brentwood or the Pacific Palisades when I explain that I supported the war in Iraq, or that I shoot for sport.

My real epiphany on the subject took place about four years ago, at a December dinner in Arizona with a group with whom I’d just finished a shooting class. This is a group that is – on average – politically so far to the right that they can barely tolerate the un-Christian, statist ways of the GOP. As we’ve emailed about the election, they point out that GW Bush is a bit of a wimp, but they’ll probably vote for him anyway.

This was during the Supreme Court debates over the 2000 elections, and the television before dinner was on the news, as a heated discussion on the election took place. As may be obvious, I was the only defender of Al Gore and the Democratic efforts to win the vote in Florida in a room full of armed men (handguns are never an inappropriate fashion statement in this group).

As we sat down to dinner, the host asked each of us to say a few words of Grace. Most were religious in nature, and then they finally came to me, and I said “Please God, let me survive this meal and get home safely. The property is so large and my unmarked grave would be so small…”

People spilled their drinks laughing, and we went right back into the argument.

And I realized, amazingly, that these men and women – who disagree with almost everything I believe about government and politics – respected my right to take a stand and my opinions far more than people who agreed with me on the issues. They were in fact more tolerant of diversity than my Venice Beach neighbors.

I’m still digesting that.

In his incomprehensibly celebrated book “The Lessons of Terror“, Caleb Carr makes the critical error in the first sentence of Chapter One:

Long before the deliberate military targeting of civilians as a method of affecting the political behavior of nations and leaders came to be called terrorism, the tactic had a host of other names. From the time of the Roman Republic to the late eighteenth century, for example, the phrase most often used was destructive war. The Romans themselves often used the phrase punitive war, although strictly speaking punitive expeditions and raids were only a part of destructive war.

Terrorism is not “…the deliberate military targeting of civilians as a method of affecting the political behavior of nations and leaders…” and has never been. The key error is the use of the word military, which implies some level of identifiable centralized control.Total war – the kind of war practiced in tribal societies, in which (as an example) the city is sacked and burnt, the men and boys killed, and the women and children taken as slaves – is not terrorism. Strategic war, as threatened through my childhood and young adulthood, in which the possibility that cities would be vaporized, or as practiced in Hamburg and Tokyo and Dresden in World War II – is not terrorism.

Those may be war crimes, as we define them today (although I will point out the unique character of Western society in which we are willing to find our own troops, as well as those of the defeated forces, guilty of war crimes), but they are not terrorism.

They are not terrorism for two simple reasons.

They are carried out by identifiable agents of a power (tribe, city, state) who bears the moral and physical hazard of having carried them out. They are carried out against people who are at least given the sad dignity of being the objects of violence, not bloody Post-It notes left behind to send a message to some abstract ‘other’.

Terrorists do neither.

And that matters, for both practical and moral reasons.

Dead is dead, you may say. What possible difference can it make?

But there is a difference. And the difference is both moral and practical.

Let’s address practicality first. The hardest part about winning wars is managing them – simply deciding that you won’t ‘kill everyone and let God take his own’, but to stop the violence at some point and let some people live. Wars that don’t have rules are called massacres. The notion of tit-for-tat is as old as recorded history. Going to Thucidydes (via Kagen’s great retelling):

On a cloudy night early in March 431 over three hundred Thebans sneaked into Platea guided by Nauclided, a leader of the Platean oligarchic faction who, with his traitorous supporters, wanted to destroy the democrats who were in power and turn the town over to Thebes. The Thebans expected the unprepared Plataeans to surrender peacefully and, threatening no reprisals, invited all the townspeople to join them.

[The Plateans fought back, defeating the Thebans]

…the Platean woman and the town’s slaves, screaming for blood, climbed to the rooftops and threw stones and tiles at the invaders. The disoriented Thebans fled for their lives, pursued by the natives who knew Platea’s every feature. Many were caught and killed, and before long the survivors were forced to surrender.

[The Theban relief couldn’t get to the town and withdrew.]

Although the forced withdrew, the Plateans executed 180 of their captives regardless. By the traditional standards of Greek warfare this was an atrocity, the first of many that only grew in horror as the years of war went by. But a sneak attack at night in peacetime was also outside the code of honor of the hoplite warrior and seemed therefore to warrant no protection for its perpetrators.
(emphasis added)

In tit-for-tat, whose who abide by the rules in turn can expect to have the rules upheld for them. Recent neurobiology has suggested that this impulse – to ‘fairness’ or if treated unfairly, to revenge – is one that is deeply rooted in the brain.

Brian Knutson, a Stanford University psychologist who studies the neural basis of emotion, says the Swiss report is the first to make the neurological link between fairness and the striatum.

“Instead of cold calculated reason, it is passion that may plant the seeds of revenge,” he notes in a accompanying commentary.

The study also reveals that revenge seekers are completely blinded by passion, Fehr points out. As volunteers considered whether to pay up to get payback, researchers noted that the medial prefontal cortex became active. In previous studies, this area of the brain has been linked to weighing the costs and benefits of taking action. Even as scientists gain a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of fairness, others are trying to understand its origins.

Sarah Brosnan, an Emory University anthropologist, says an important question is whether a sense of fairness is something people pick up in school, home or church, or whether it’s a concept that has been hardwired into the human brain over the eons.

In continuing work with capuchin monkeys, Brosnan and her colleague Frans de Waal of Emory have found compelling evidence of an evolutionary origin. The monkeys, it turns out, know a raw deal when they see one.

We humans are also literally unable to think clearly when blinded by the desire for revenge or to redress perceived unfairness.

Military discipline exists to overcome this monkey rage, both to improve the odds of an army’s success and to ensure that the commanders of that army can remain in command once the emotions of battle – rage, fear – revenge – take hold.

The strength of anonymous terrorist attacks – that the weaker target will not use it’s superior strength to simply massacre those it believes are at fault – is a brittle one when confronted with those emotions if they mount too far. Russia has been unstintingly brutal in repressing the Chechen guerillas – and may be far more brutal in repressing Chechen terrorists.

But I don’t reject terrorism only out of fear that it will make us do bad things – although I worry about that. I reject terrorism, and believe it must be rejected rather than seen as ‘diplomacy by another means’ because I believe that the states that it would birth would be horror shows.

The existence of discipline over force is itself a key, I believe, to the recognition of a power as a state and the key to the foundation of a state based on political power, rather than terror and tyranny. I talked about Max Weber and the PA, but let me requote him here:

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics” for us means striving to share power, either among states or among groups within a state.

Because political movements that subscribe to terrorist tactics (and again, I’ll make a clear and significant distinction between terrorism and guerilla warfare) explicitly reject the notion that they are the source of the terrorist’s right to use violence, the key element needed to support a political state (as opposed to a tyranny) is missing.

Israel was founded in part by terrorists. But when they blew up the Altalena, the government of Ben-Gurion reclaimed its monopoly on violence, and claimed the State of Israel as a political state. Can you imagine a Palestine in which Arafat sunk the Karine A? Or in which the PA officials who he ‘arrested’ afterward actually spent time in jail?

Terrorism, even if successful, is not a path to liberation. It is instead a path to the kind of tyranny and madness we see today in the West Bank and Gaza, that we saw in Afghanistan’s soccer stadiums as crowds gathered to watch the executions.

I’m working on something about terrorism – the deep distinction between terrorist violence and equally deadly non-terrorist violence – in the form of a critique of Caleb Carr’s book.

But real life – weddings, work, kids – is keeping me away from the computer this week.

Meanwhile, go over to Harry’s Place and read “brownie” about the latest murder in Iraq…

That there are still people in the west who believe such groups would be susceptible to any realignment of US foreign policy in the Middle East, is nothing short of bewildering. At best, it’s unfathomable naivety. At worst, it’s 24-carat, cognitive dissonance.

UPDATE: More here about those who want us to “listen” to Osama, as well as links to pictures and video.