I still read Juan Cole, although it’s hard for me to be moved to write about anything he says – I glean interesting nuggets of information for future research or thought, but it’s long been clear to me what and how he thinks – and, sadly, he’s one of those people who are busy making reality conform to their theories, rather than trying to improve their theories against reality.

But I caught this this morning – a response to Professor Cole from Yaacov Lozowick, the Director of Archives at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and it had two points – one brutally negative one about Prof. Cole and one so right on point in terms of the moral center of balance required of actors in the world that I thought I’d link and cite.First – Prof. Cole. He claimed that someone named Tzipi Livni – I’ll look her up – had no standing to denounce terrorism, because her father was an Irgun terrorist.

First of all, Livni is not responsible for her father’s crimes except if she is proud of them and declines to denounce them. If she won’t denounce them, she has no standing to argue to the UN that it should prevent holding office.

There’s something immensely creepy about ‘declining to denounce’ as a moral failing. Somehow Arthur Koestler comes to mind. Personally, I don’t care whether the Palestinians – or anyone else – denounces terrorism. I just want them to stop supporting and doing it. If Livini is proposing sensible things (and I can’t speak on whether she is or not) who cares about her views of history – and more particularly, her father?

While I believe in the shaping power of discourse, I don’t believe in thoughtcrime. I gather that professor Cole does.

Finally, here’s a comment on morality and action that is worthy of Hoderer. Lozowick:

Finally, since you keep returning to the subject, even though historians tend to stay away from it, a comment about morality. Like you, I also feel it to be so important that historians need to confront it. More important, however, my position is of a citizen, before a historian. Because you see, the decisions we make are usually morally fraught no matter what we do, because human lives are involved. When we make wrong decisions, people die. On both sides of the conflict. Believe it or not (I expect you won’t), we do not wish anyone dead, on either side – though of course, we rightfully have no compunctions about killing those of our enemies who are striving to kill us. That caveat, translated into real-life decisions, made in real-life conditions, almost always with no connections to academic constructs of the sort you seem to prefer – that caveat is what makes morality so very very complicated.

Contrary to your parting shot (The Livnis know only one way etc), Tzipi Livni clearly is far more aware of the ambivalences of reality at war than you seem to be.

I’d love to see some ambivalence like this from Professor Cole, if he were capable of it.

Ali Eteraz, with whom I’ve had a bunch of interesting and useful discussions, has a piece up at Comment is Free at the Guardian – the first in a series on ‘The roots of Islamic reform’.

Since 9/11, “Islamic reform” has become an all-purpose phrase: equally a western impulse to protect itself from Muslim violence and a humanist notion aimed at assisting voiceless Muslims. It has also been espoused by Wolfowitz and Blair in service of their neo-colonial ambitions. Yet, the politics of Islamic reform are part of a much larger debate about power: one that goes to the heart of Islam, and connects back to western foreign policy.

Now for me, this is the 100% interesting question – because there are a set of competing belief sets within Islam today – as Islam explores its reaction to modernity – and our future relations with Islam will depend largely on the which belief set winds up as dominant.

I have argued for some time that there are a range of outcomes in the collision between Islam and the West; many people (including many commenters and posters on this blog) are suggesting that we are war with Islam – I’ll suggest that there aren’t nearly enough dead people for that to be the case. If Islam as a whole was at war with the West (or vice versa), we’d see many, many more people dying in Southwest Asia, India, the Middle East,Africa, and Europe than we do. Neither do I think that inside every Muslim is a suburban Californian waiting for the right social environment to come out.

An expansionist but nonviolent Islam is something we can live with – but an expansionist and violent Islam may not be. Understanding how Islam will evolve and how we in the West can promote the former and discourage the latter is an important issue, and I’ll suggest one worth a lot of study and thought.

Because if we can’t make that happen, the only lever we will have is power.

George Skelton and Mickey Kaus note that the Democratic legislature in California lied to us once again – and the Governator let them get away with it.

Let’s back up and recall the precise promise.

In 2005, Schwarzenegger was backing a goofy redistricting proposal on his special election ballot. It would have forced a mid-decade redistricting, rather than waiting for the customary next census. Worse, it would have required any redistricting to be approved by a statewide vote, a political consultants’ bonanza.

If voters would reject the governor’s ballot proposition, Perata told me, “Our commitment. . . is to fashion a bipartisan solution in a thoughtful way and put it on the ballot next year.” Ditto, said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles).

The Schwarzenegger measure was soundly rejected by nearly 60% of voters.

Then the Democratic leaders didn’t deliver.

I know we should know by now that when legislators promise to stop drinking and hitting the kids, and this time, we mean it, we really mean it they are lying. Maybe they mean well, and they are lying to themselves as well, or maybe they are lying consciously to us.It doesn’t matter.

For me, I’d gladly sign on to the flawed referendum that was slammed in 2005. Anyone going to propose it?

And can someone deal with the Democratic staffers who are breathing hyperbolically about the electoral “reform” bill proposed by the Republicans, and get them to lower the level of fire-and-brimstone faux moralizing?

On Thursday, California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres announced the launch of an exciting program called Fraud Busters to combat misinformation being spread by proponents of a misleading initiative effort (“The Presidential Election Reform Act”) which would make California the only large state in the union to award its electoral votes by Congressional District, instead of by statewide popular vote.

“We want activists around the state to help us stop the Republicans from stealing the White House and stealing California’s electoral votes,” said Torres. “We are asking our activists to be the California Democratic Party’s frontline team and help us stop the Republicans from spreading their lies around the state.”

In order to ensure that Republicans hold the White House next year, well-connected GOP operatives are attempting to put an initiative on California’s June 2008 ballot that, if passed, would all but guarantee the Republican nominee could steal 22 electoral votes from California in the November 2008 presidential election.

I’d feel soooo much better if a) the Democrats hadn’t talked about doing exactly the same thing in North Carolina (with approving noises from the MyDD folks) until pulling it at the direction of the national party, who apparently realized that the few electoral votes they’d gain in NC wouldn’t offset the ones they’d lose in California. And if one of the main reasons the democrats scuttled districting reform here wasn’t because they want to protect the gerrymandered Congressional seats that they have managed to engineer for themselves. Per Kaus:

The big hang-up was fear that Nancy Pelosi would oppose any measure that ended gerrymandering of Congressional districts as well as state legislative districts.

Like the European autocrats in the post below, our political class seems to be uncomfortable talking to us as adults.

And for me, I can’t help but wonder how a party that showed some respect for voters and their intelligence would fare.

Does anyone else find it outrageous that the UK and Netherlands are planning on subordinating their national laws to the EU in the face of wide public opposition without allowing the public to vote on the matter?

David Miliband today warned against “institutional navel-gazing” in Europe as he made clear the government would refuse to bow to calls for a referendum on the EU draft treaty.

The foreign secretary used a keynote address to the Labour conference to tell delegates that Europe would not divide his party as it had divided the Tories.

Calls for a referendum have come from the trade unions, the Conservatives, the rightwing press – including a full-scale onsalught this week from the Sun – and a cross-party alliance including several Labour backbenchers.

Despite mounting pressure, Mr Miliband held the government line that the EU draft treaty would go to parliament, rather than be put to a vote of the general public.

The foreign secretary said Europe should focus its sights on the problems beyond European borders “that define insecurity within” rather than worrying about its internal workings.

He said: “It doesn’t need institutional navel-gazing, and that is why the reform treaty abandons fundamental constitutional reforms and offers clear protections for national sovereignty,” he said.

“It should be studied and passed by parliament.”

I can’t understand why the residents of the UK are tolerating this. I’d love to hear from people with more political and cultural knowledge than I have on it.

Check out the talk by Alan Johnson (UK Labor politician, trade union leader, and contender for the PM role w/Gordon Brown professor and editor) over at Harry’s Place.

Our children are going to need to live in a combative democracy in which the mass media and the political and intellectual class are comfortable with the proactive defence of the liberal constitutional order and the open society.

Being ‘comfortable’ for us in the UK means two things, I think.

First, having the will and the resolution to promote that order and that society as non-negotiable normative ends. So enough with the apologetics for them and the self-hatred for us.

Second, understand that when we wage the battle of ideas and defend our way of life we must live up to the highest ideals of our democratic inheritance. We must honour the memory of those who fought and died for it. And are dying for it. So enough with rendition, ghost sites and torture.

Let’s pass our democracy on to our children, but let’s make sure its one they feel such pride in that they will defend it in turn.

Interesting, good stuff, with concrete suggestions for UK policy.

Speaking of data – Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) has a neat piece of dystopian fiction up at Radar magazine – called “Scroogled”. The subtitle:

Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life?

A few quotes:

“It started in China,” she went on, finally. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction.”

Greg sighed. He knew Google’s reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail – even if you sent mail to a Gmail account – the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.

“They were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn’t illegal in China.”

Greg shook his head. “Why did they have to put the servers in China?”

and

“We’re drafting a team for Building 49…”

“There is no Building 49,” Greg said automatically.

“Of course,” the guy said, flashing a tight smile. “There’s no Building 49. But we’re putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Maya’s code wasn’t very efficient, you know. It’s full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You’d be the right guy, and it wouldn’t matter what you knew if you were back inside.”

“Unbelievable,” Greg said, laughing. “If you think I’m going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Greg,” the man said, “we’re not smearing anyone. We’re just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone’s Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy.” He loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. Greg retrieved two coffee cups—Google mugs, of course – and passed them over.

“We’re going to do for our friends what Maya did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That’s all.”

Greg sipped his coffee. “What happens to the candidates you don’t clean?”

Read the whole thing, as they say. It’s about more than the specific topic of social graph data – but it’ll get you thinking a bit.

I’ve spent the day in the discussion forums on the social graph/network (the hot issue of the day is what to call it) and while I see the word ‘privacy’ a lot, I haven’t yet found the nugget explaining how privacy is going to work in an era of social graph as exportable, universally mineable data. I’ll keep looking, and as always, welcome pointers to what I may be missing.

Welcome, Instapundit readers…and everyone check this out as well…

Let me pull something over from my professional life for a second, because I think it’s consequential enough that you folks ought to know about it. It’s not something I’ve done but something I’ve been reading about.

Google and other companies (Six Apart, among them) are going to open their API for social graphs.

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

What’s a ‘social graph’, you ask…it’s a map of the connections between people and between people and content.These graphs are deeply meaningful because they are not random; they are full of meaning because they track our behavior, contacts and interests.

When I was designing my version of Pajamas Media, I wanted to construct a social graph connecting readers and blogs and use that data to predict what new blogs people might like, and to cluster ad placements to targeted groups of readers. I thought – and still think – there’s a ridiculous amount of value in that data. There is also a series of problems with that data, and they are at root problems of privacy.

Because the tradeoff for the usefulness of having someone suggest new blogs I’d find interesting is that someone has to know what blogs I read. And to the extent that I read blogs that I don’t want people to know about – blogs about sex, psychological issues, political positions antithetical to my public persona – that’s potentially a problem.

I thought I had an elegant solution to the problem for my PJ’s design (hey, I can’t tell all my secrets), but still saw (and see) this as the crux issue a system like this will have to get around.

But now much bigger fish are stepping into the market, and they are doing it with data much more serious and personal than your blog-surfing habits.

Google is announcing that it will create a series of open API’s (data interfaces) that will allow other people to write systems that will allow them access to an undetermined set of Google’s social graph data. What data does Google have? Well, pretty much everything. My email from my Gmail accounts; my search history; my blog posting and links if I keep them on Google tools; the links to and from my blog if the Google spider is set to capture them; the YouTube videos I watch, and so on…

Now the folks doing this are serious and smart people. They have explicitly talked about the issues of privacy. here’s Six Apart’s David Recordon:

An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.

* You should own your social graph

* Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands

* It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet

* Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn’t always be connected

* Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems

* We’re going to release code and demos soon

The privacy and security implications of this are pretty staggering, if I’m interpreting this correctly. They are solvable – I did a baby solution as noted when I designed the system for PJ’s, and I don’t doubt that the horsepower of this group can propose useful solutions.

But I’d be a helluva lot happier of they had started with the basic principles and mechanisms for ensuring privacy and announced those first – before releasing working code modules.

I’ll be digging into this more deeply, and may have some posts here to talk about it. Meanwhile, discuss among yourselves, and personally note that I welcome our new Redwood City overlords…

Mary Mapes has seized on Dan Rather’s Quixotic attack on CBS at a bloody shirt (enough metaphors yet?) to wave in defense of the truthiness of their journalism about President Bush.

Go read the whole thing, but move the drinks away from the keyboard when you do.

It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush’s National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.

What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.

To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War — and then covered it up — was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.

Actually, we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.

And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush’s former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president’s official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.

We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.

Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the “a,” the dip on the top of the “t,” the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.

It was a deceptive approach, and it worked.

These critics blathered on about everything but the content. They knew they would lose that argument, so they didn’t raise it. They focused on the most obscure, most difficult to decipher element of the story and dove in, attacking CBS, Dan Rather, me, the story and the horse we rode in on — without respite, relentlessly, for days.

Oh my Freaking God.

Look, Mary, let me try and explain it to you. I’ll make it simple, I don’t have a lot of time.

I don’t for a second doubt that Bush pulled strings to get beneficial treatment. Similarly, I don’t doubt that Kerry gamed the system to leave Vietnam before his tour was up. People game systems all the time – and in both cases, it’s a legitimate issue to raise when someone is running for office.

But the fact that Bush may have used pull doesn’t justify lying – or careless assertion of facts that can be easily disproved – to do a hit piece just in time for an election. Let me put it another way:

Captain Dudley Smith: Would you be willing to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect you knew to be guilty, in order to ensure an indictment?

Ed Exley: Dudley, we’ve been over this.

Captain Dudley Smith: Yes or no, Edmund?

Ed Exley: No!

There’s a reason why we let guilty suspects go free when cops plant evidence.

Mapes and Rather got a hard-on for Bush, and were blinded by the glee that they’d be able to lay a hard hit on him just in time for the election. Sadly for them, they stopped paying attention to the details.

Mapes, delusionally, claims that the typographic facts about the documents they hung their case on are themselves ‘deceptive’ and that the documents are ‘fake, but accurate’. If Mapes and Rather had been honest journalists, they would have run with the provable facts about Bush’s military history – they would have has a much less sexy story, but a real one.

And Mapes is just off her freaking rocker when she claims that the fact that attacks on Bush were met with brickbats while ignoring that attacks on Clinton were equally met with personal vendetta.

But then zombies were never very smart.

Instapundit linked to this farewell (literally, sadly) lecture by Carnegie Mellon videogame and 3-D presentation professor Randy Pausch (creator of Alice, which I think is a really cool tool). He has terminal pancreatic cancer, and gave a farewell lecture which was stupendously moving – go read the whole thing.

But he said one thing that kind of riveted me.

Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.”

As someone who’s experienced more than his share of setbacks, let me tell you the truth of that message. I’d hate to have lived a life with no walls for me to push against.

The best teachers, as always, teach us as much about life as anything else.

I have a piece up in the Examiner on my son’s enlistment. It ends:

I fed him and paid his tuition. He’s taken those materials, and now the man he’s used them to become has set out to navigate that wide, risky world. I watched his back again as he walked down our driveway last night.

From now on, I’ll do my best to see that our leaders are watching his back as well.