I give Matt Yglesias grief a lot, which should be construed to mean at least two things: first, that I read him a lot, because I think he’s good and important enough read him all the time (I’m still short on time, and my news and blog reading is suffering); and second, that I think that he represents a solid center of one of the most important groups in the Democratic Party. I happen to have some core disagreements with that group, and my arguments with Matt are often arguments by proxy with them.

So now that I’m firmly in sucking-up mode, let me send you over to a stunningly sensible post by Matt on gun control and the assault weapons ban. It’s sensible not only because he takes the position that I think makes the most sense on the ban – “Why bother?” – but because he enumerates what I think are the exactly correct reasons for taking that position, and further looks with a fairly clear eye on the policy and political consequences of the core gun control positions.

No quotes, the whole thing’s good, go check it out.

Remember the discussion on the level of contremps we can expect on Election 2004? I’ll modestly look down and burnish my nails on my chest, now – here’s Monday’s New York Times:

Mindful of the election problems in Florida four years ago, aides to Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.

Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.

Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights.

As noted, unless it’s not close (possible, but unlikely), we’re going to be in court for quite a while; imagine if you would, what the court cases will be like if there are major terrorist attacks that have any impact on voting…

Like a lot of other people, I read Anne Jacobsen’s article ‘Terror in the Skies, Again?‘ with interest and not a little anxiety.

Tenacious G read it, and asked me what I thought. My reply was – “I’m not sure, and I think it would be good if all of us were a bit uncertain as well.” I see that Donald Sensing shares some of my skepticism. Here’s the deal; having flown a fair amount lately, I’m eminently convinced that much of the security in place is what Bruce Schnier (I’d strongly suggest subscribing to his e-newsletter, and I owe a review of his book) calls ‘theatrical security.’ So the general concerns raised in the article are more than valid. But as to the story itself, let me counter by telling one of my own.A long time ago, I took a one-day writing class from a semi-famous writer through UCLA. We met in Westwood village, in a building that had once house a club I used to go to, and the class was fun and somewhat useful. Most useful – and fun – was the incident that happened right after we regrouped for lunch.

The building entrance was on an alley, and as I walked back with a few others from my burger, I noticed three homeless men, sitting on the steps, eating their lunches. One was daintily eating a yogurt with a plastic spoon, and I remember remarking “What a healthy guy!!” as we went up the elevator.

A few minutes later, one of the women students dashed into the classroom, exclaiming that she’d been confronted by a homeless man with a knife. I moved to the front of the room, and asked her ‘did you see the knife? what did he look like? where did this happen?’ and was told he’d been in the corridor, she was sure she’d seen the knife, and he was a homeless guy. The teacher locked the door and used the room phone to call the University police.

Then, as I walked to the door and opened it to look and see what was going on, one of the homeless guys – my yogurt-eating guy – was walking by. I stepped in front of him and told him “Hey, man, you can’t be in here. You need to leave right now – come on with me and I’ll walk you out.” Another man from the class stepped out to join me, shouting instructions at the homeless guy – “Show me your hands! Do it!” and generally acting like he had Monster Kody standing in front of him holding a boo-yah. I told him to shut up or leave, so he was silent as we walked the homeless guy out to the elevator, rode down with him, and walked him to the street. I asked him: “So, do you have a knife? Did you show it to a woman wearing a yellow shirt?” “No, man, I don’t have a knife. I was eating my lunch and I asked her for some change, and she freaked out.”

Then I saw the white plastic handle of a spoon sticking from his back pocket.

Hmmmm. I thought, He probably did have something shiny in his hand…

Homeless people generally don’t commit armed robbery on civilians (non-homeless people); they have no where to run to, no means of escape, and they are usually smart enough to know that they’ll be busted right away for it (note that this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be attentive when walking down a dark alley with one, just that you’re more at risk from a bunch of teenage kids). But they are scary, and it’s a more logical narrative to me that when one person – already scared by the presence of a homeless man where he wasn’t supposed to be – saw a homeless man with a plastic spoon in his hand, she read it as ‘knife!!’ and reacted appropriately (note that trained police officers have been known to make similar mistakes).

Similarly, there are two competing narratives we can construct out of Jacobsen’s story.

On one hand, a dry run or failed mission by a group of terrorists, as she suggests.

On the other, a group of foreign musicians, already somewhat out of place, being bad-vibed beyond belief by the rest of the passengers, and so acting with a less-then affable demeanor, and doing what I’ve done in the past when flying with large groups of people, which is to walk around and congregate so we can chat.

Which do I think is the case? I have no idea. Would I have prevented them from flying? Probably not. I think that the idea of limiting the number of Arabic men flying together is kinda absurd; no one’s taking a plane over and flying it anywhere these days, and if I want to blow a plane up in midair, I don’t need 14 men to do it.

So what would I have done? TG wanted to know, and the answer is pretty simple. I’d have walked up to them and chatted. Annoyingly cheerfully. “Hey! How you doing? You waiting for the bathroom, too? Where are you guys from? Where you going? Isn’t that cool?” Their responses – both verbal and nonverbal – would have determined what happened next.

I’ve done things like this in the past – in a parking structure with four thugged-out kids. There are a couple of reasons why it’s a good idea. First, because it lets you set the tempo for whatever is going to happen. My parking lot kids may have been would-be muggers (I was once unsuccessfully mugged in a parking structure in Santa Monica), or four honor-roll kids out for a night in the town. By walking up to them and asking a question – “Hey, do you know how to get to the Edwards movie theaters from here?” – I created a situation in which they would react, one way or another, on my timeline, rather than theirs, and in a setting chosen by me, rather than by them. By being cheerful beyond belief, instead of saying something confrontational like “You’re creeping me out,” I don’t unnecessarily start a confrontation, or leave four good kids muttering about racist assholes as I walk away. I’m more sympathetic to women, who use the ‘Model Mugging’-approved technique of telling someone “You’re making me uncomfortable, please back away,” but I still think a more cheerful wording and tone could be used to convey a similar message.

So, in Jacobsen’s case, simply walking up to the suspicious characters and introducing yourself would have gone a long way to sort out what was going on – and at no meaningful cost.

Well, as always, I’m following the Tour de France pretty closely. Today was a huge day for Lance Armstrong as he sets out to win his unprecedented sixth Tour – he now leads his closest opponents by over two minutes and he has made a clear statement that can’t help but challenge Ullrich and Hamilton’s confidence.

And for all those you join me in yelling “Go, Lance!”, here’s an article about how Lance…goes…

On any given stage, however, watch for the helicopter shots; the wide-angle full-peloton views that can’t help but show it all. At the edge of your TV screen and at the back of the pack, you might spot a rider — sometimes solo, sometimes braced by a hand-on-the-back from a teammate — coasting close to the roadside, his torso turned slightly askew.

Is he doing what you think he’s doing? “Yes,” says Danny Nelissen, Eurosport’s Dutch cycling commentator and a former eight-year veteran of the pro peloton.

So maybe I should follow less closely…

For good Tour coverage, I’d go to the TDF Blog, and to Velonews.

More later, including comments on the spat between LeMond and Armstrong, and the story of my honest-to-God lunch with Eddy Mercx and Jacques Anquetil.

Well, I tip my toe back into blogging (and reading blogs), and I find that Matt Yglesias has once again written the thing that makes me go “Huh?” today.

I imagine that after another attack people will still feel, on a gut level, like we ought to retaliate, but there really won’t be anything to be done. Just as Australia and Indonesia didn’t respond after Bali, and Spain didn’t respond after the Madrid attacks, if someone blows up Grand Central Station there’s not really going to be much of anything we can do in response. A lot of people, myself included, would find that pretty unsatisfying on an emotional level, but it’s hard to see any reasonable policy options.

There are so many things wrong with this…Let’s start. Factually, things certainly were done after Bali and the Spanish railroad bombings – as I assume Matt knows. Some good police work went into arresting Abderrameb Hammadi Afandi, and pursuing Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet until he committed suicide. In Bali, Imam Samudra is awaiting execution for his leadership of the attack.

So he’s obviously talking about a military – as opposed to legal – ‘something’. And the problem is, on what planet do we imagine that we can arrest these guys and try them faster than they are recruited? Recruited – in large part, I’ll bet, by watching videos of the successful operations carried out by their predecessors. Note that more successful attacks in Israel seem to lead to more attackers; the successful attacks themselves are the advertisement.

When my kitchen sink is full of ants, killing the ants I see is primally satisfying, but doesn’t do much to stop the colony from sending more.

At some point, you have to disrupt the system that makes people like this, and the systems that recruit, train, and organize them. That’s difficult to do in general, and effectively impossible to do when they have states that are willing to shelter and succor them.

That’s the core difference, I think, between Matt’s philosophy on these things, and mine.

There’s another difference, and simply put, it’s that I see Matt’s success as driven in large part because he articulates – very well – the beliefs and thoughts of a certain group within the Democratic Party and the left. And when I read the quote above, as a Democrat, I cringe. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of Michael Dukakis’ response to Bernard Shaw. And I don’t think that’s going to play any better this time than it did then.

An interesting new-to-me blog, ‘Global Guerillas.’ by John Robb. Followed a link from DefenseTech, which led to an interesting post on the mechanisms of emergent action by ant colonies, bloggers, and (claims the writer) terrorists.

Stigmergy is a term used in biology (from the work of french biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse) to describe environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors (for example, ants use pheromones to create trails and people use weblog links to establish information paths, for others to follow). The term is derived from the greek words stigma (“sign”) and ergon (“to act”). Stigmergy can be used as a mechanism to understand underlying patterns in swarming activity. As such, it can be applied to the understanding of the swarming attacks of diverse global guerrilla groups.

I’m intrigued, but not yet completely sold on this, but it’s definitely a writer worth reading, and a set of concepts worth pursuing.

UPDATE: As usual, our comments section kicks the discussion up another notch or two – esp. “Laocoon” and team member Robin Burke.

Blogger John Emerson, of ‘Seeing the Forest‘ is raising a bet about the coming election. His (original) bet is:

I’m willing to bet $50 at 30-to-one that we’ll see problems in the 2004 Presidential election as bad or worse than those in the 2000 election. Your $1500 says everything will be OK, my $50 says that there will be major problems — as bad as or worse than 2000.

He later tightened it to:

You are betting that none of the following will happen:

1. Whoever is in office on Jan. 21, 2004 is not there because he’s been elected. Either Bush stays in, or a caretaker is appointed.

2. The November election does not take place as scheduled, but is postponed.

3. In a significant number of states (greater than the margin of victory) the vote in the electoral college is not based on a count of the votes (for example, the state legislature intervenes).

4. Some unprecedented intervention decides the election, as in 2000.

5. Major branches of government openly defy President Kerry and refuse to obey his orders.

I’ve left out the “denial of legitimacy” point because there’s a 100% chance that many conservatives will not accept President Kerry’s legitimacy. [Ed. – would have been a nice touch if he’d added ‘…as many liberals have not accepted Bush’s.’]

So what do I think? I think it’s a sucker bet, because – having seen that the courts and formerly ministerial process of vote-counting are now up for grabs – both sides are certainly making plans for their post-election campaigns.

Unless it is a blowout election (which is possible, but not likely) both sides will launch stiff administrative and legal campaigns around the voting and vote-counting process, which means there’s a significant chance that the results will be delayed, and that the decision will be made at some level in the judicial system.

This ignores the very real possibility of an election-eve terrorist attack. The U.S. isn’t Spain, and the immediate emotional reaction to such an attack is as likely to be Jacksonian as it is to be more isolationist. While I don’t think that delaying the elections in such an event is a good idea (unless critical communications infrastructure is somehow down, making it hard to actually run the election), I’ll bet that the losing side will be in court after such an election claiming that the election should have been delayed – thereby delaying the outcome.

So let’s do a four-way matrix:

Close election + attack = challenge & delay (he wins)
Close election = challenge & delay (he wins)
Blowout + attack = challenge & delay (he wins)
Blowout = no effective challenge (he loses)

So if you think the odds of a major attack are high, and the odds of a close election are high – his 30:1 odds suddenly don’t look so good. And it isn’t because of some nefarious plan by the Trilateral Commission (kidding!!) to create a theological dictatorship (anyone read Heinlein?), it’s the natural development of a litigious, rules-based political process where shame is nonexistent and voters appear to have short memories (if the political class had shame, they wouldn’t do this – think of Nixon’s response to the 1960 Chicago results, and if voters had memories they’d punish candidates who ‘gamed’ the system).

This makes the issues of voting process and vote-counting (up to now the province of true election geeks) something we need to address in a serious way in terms of the technology, the administrative procedures, and the legal wrapping around it. Hmmm…

Hi!! Remember me?

I’ve missed this; more commentary and news may follow, time permitting. But I’ve run into something too interesting not to share, partly in the hopes that someone else may be able to look more closely at the small connection I’m seeing and explore how much substance is contained there. And at its core, I think there is a gem of such good news that I stopped reading and started typing this right away.

Last year, in writing about terrorism and philosophy, I made the claim that modern Islamism was deeply influenced by Western political philosophers (and, I claimed, by the Romantic movement that could claim a descendent in Nazism). This came from some peripheral references in the chunks of Qutb I read that made me think of Fanon, and by the close fit of Fanon’s Romantic beliefs into the worldview of radical Islamists.

Well, to quote one of my favorite books – “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” It turns out that the connection may be more direct than my casual fantasies.I picked up Bernard Lewis’ collection of essays ‘From Babel to Dragomans‘ and have been working through it in my odd moments. One of his essays, on Pan-Arabism, makes the following connections:

…the first theoretical statement of pan-Arabism is the work of a certain ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (?1849 – 1902), nowadays generally regarded as the ideological pioneer of pan-Arabism…He is principally remembered for two books, both of which were attacks on the Ottoman Sultanate in general and on the reigning Sultan, Abdulhamid II, in particular…The second [book], entitled Umm al-Qura (The Mother of Cities, i.e. Mecca)…is hardly more original than the other [Lewis suggests that Kawakibi’s first book was a hash of Della Tirannide, by Alfieri], being to a large extent a reflection of the views expressed by the English Romantic poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt in his book The Future of Islam, published in 1881 and setting forth the idea of an Arab Caliphate.

Bin-Laden’s core philosophy is thus the restoration of something that never was – an Arab (as opposed to Turkish) Caliphate. Something suggested originally by a British Romantic poet. The philosophical lineage is there; now it just needs to be explored. Blunt’s book is at the UCLA library, and sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go pick it up and report.

But we’re not done yet.

Lewis continues:

The second intellectual precursor of pan-Arabism was another Syrian, this time a Christian, Negib (Najib) Azoury (birthdate unknown – died 1916). Azoury was a Maronite or Uniate Catholic Christian who studied in Istanbul and Paris and later became a provincial official in Jerusalem. He left his post in unknown circumstances and seems to have been condemned to death in absentia in 1904, when he fled to Paris. In the following year, he published a book, Le reveil de la nation arabe. He spent most of the remaining years of his life in Paris, where he formed an organization – probably a one-man show – called the ‘Ligue de la patrie arabe’ … The name, it has been remarked is reminiscent of the anti-Drefusard ‘Ligue de la patrie francaise’, which flourished in the late eighteen nineties. His writings reflect the anti-Semetic obsessions with worldwide Jewish power which were current in anti-Dreyfusard circles…

So the roots of Islamist thought can be seen as going back to the salons of London and cafes of Paris. That matters, both because it shows that the philosophy we’re fighting against is a relatively recent one – this isn’t thousands of years old – and that it had other paths to follow:

The new and significant elements in Kawakibi’s writings are 1) his clear and explicit rejection of the Ottoman Caliphate; 2) his insistence on the Arabic-speaking peoples as a corporate entity with political rights of its own and 3) most radical of all, his idea of a spiritual Caliphate which would presumably leave politics and government to a secular authority separate from religious authority and law, entirely within the scope of human decision and action.
(emphasis added)

That last is why I’m posting this on a Good News Friday.

Because I believe this demonstrates that there are roots in Islam – in recent Islam – that we need to water and cultivate as a part of creating our own ‘Good Philosophy’ antibodies to Bad Philosophy. That won’t be easy, but I’ll suggest that we have to try.

I’ve been working with a bunch of people on Spirit of America, including Jeff Jarvis. In New York last week, getting ready for Jim Hake’s trip to Iraq (he’s there now) we set out some principles we thought would help organize this as quickly and effectively as we’d like and is necessary.

One of them was ‘absolute transparency’.

That put me in a bit of a bind, because as someone behind a pseudonym – or someone who has done a lot around these issues from behind a pseudonym, I wouldn’t be keeping that commitment.

So in talking to Dan Gillmor, for his column in today’s Mercury-News, I made a decision.

“Ollie-Ollie Oxen Free,” is how the kids put it.

My name is Marc Danziger, I live in the Los Angeles area, and I am the new C.O.O. for Spirit of America. We have BIG plans in store, and the blogosphere will play an important role.

More to come later….

You may have noticed that my posting has been light in the past week. Some of you may even find that a good thing … <g>

But, as happens with bloggers sometimes, things in my material life have changed, and those changes – which are all good, and in fact even more than good – mean that I need to take a break from blogging for a while.

I have an opportunity to work on a project that is too interesting and challenging to pass up. I expect it to be fairly all-consuming, which means I’ll have less time than I do now. And because it is peripherally in the public sphere, I need to think carefully about how it would interact with what I write for my own amusement and education here.

I may be back in a week or so. I may just toss something out once a month or so. I may even see if I can merge my real and electronic selves. I may not. Don’t know yet.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in these discussions; thanks especially to those who disagreed and made me think and study harder, and sometimes even change my mind. Keep it up while I’m gone. And, as I usually ask:

Please don’t kill anyone or blow anything up while I’m away.