"War is not the instrument he thought it was"

Hilzoy has a long and beautiful post on why using war to set up democracy in other countries is so hard. There are lots of reasons for this, but the reason she discusses hadn't really occurred to me before.

we should never forget how astonishing it is that people vying for power are willing to concede even when they believe that the rules have been broken, out of respect for the rule of law and for courts they believe to be profoundly in error.

In many countries, there are no established procedures for resolving conflicts, and certainly none that command the kind of allegiance that would lead people to yield even when they believe that they deserve to have won. In those countries it will always be tempting to think: well, this election was stolen from us, and this year-old Constitution is unfair; why not fight for a better one? Wouldn't our opponents do the same?

This is especially likely in a country in which the price of losing a political struggle has always been not just being in the minority party in Congress, but death or subjugation. And it takes a long time to learn to trust that losing power will not cost you your life or your freedom, when all your experience to date has taught you the opposite.

When you use force to liberate a country, like Kuwait, that has only been occupied for a short time, you can hope that its people will accept their previous government, and that whatever made that government function in the past will have survived. But when you liberate a country like Iraq, a country whose people have been brutalized, you risk loosing Hobbes' "war of all against all" on its people. You remove the sovereign who has kept that war in check, without thereby creating any of the political virtues that allow alternate forms of government, like democracy, to function.

Thank you ma'am

Elizabeth Edwards has a nice post on the whole Ann Coulter brouhaha. I'm happy that she's using this as a way of attacking homophobia:

Although her words did not hurt us, they may have hurt some in the gay community. We are all sick and tired of anyone supporting or applauding or introducing hate words into the national dialogue, tired of people thinking that words that cause others pain are fair game. And we are sick and tired of people like Miss Coulter thinking that her use of loaded words about the homosexual community in this country is remotely humorous or appropriate.

In general, this is how people should respond to homophobic or racist language -- hit back against the speakers for being prejudiced. Enough progress has been made on the more crude variety of racial slurs that even outside polite society, they do more to damage the speaker than to humiliate the target of the language. It won't be long until antigay slurs work the same way, and every bit of scorn that we throw at people who use the slurs brings that time closer.

Old Crow Medicine Show

I just saw them live for the second time in Austin, and it was wonderful. In the past I've posted lyrics to my favorite OCMS songs, "James River Blues", and "I Hear Them All", both of which they did (the latter beautifully). Ketch Secor's high-energy fiddling was spectacular. My head was one of three off which his harmonica ricocheted when he tossed it into the crowd halfway through the show.

Life Marches On

The first post is this short thing on the whole Edwards bloggers mess. Now I'm going to go eat a donut and feel better.

...mmm, yummy maple-glazed donut. Here's a post on why American liberals tend not to get recognized for supporting reforms in Iran.

Bill Donohoe is going down

This week the FDR campaign rejected pressure from Anthony Comstock, keeping Molly Ivins and Mother Jones on staff, and winning the heart of Tom Paine. Or at least, that's how this werewolf imagines it. Read about what actually happened here.

Passion of the astronauts

Sometimes you can read a news story and instantly visualize the made-for-TV-movie that it will spawn. The lede graf (is that what they call it?):

An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said. She was arrested Monday and charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts.

This part is just really weird. I don't know if it'll go in the movie:

When she found out that Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she wouldn't have to stop to urinate, authorities said.

Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.

More Johnny fun

Yesterday I applauded the Amanda-hiring and Iran-engaging ways of John Edwards on Ezra's blog.

Johnny and Amanda, sitting in a tree...

...W-I-N-N-I-N-G. Or so all good people hope. Congratulations to Amanda on her new job with the Edwards campaign!

Welcome to the Hellmouth

I haven't been posting much recently because I've been on the road, and preparing for the job talk at BGSU. But I liked this line from Spencer Ackerman, discussing the appearance of apocalyptic Shiite death cults in Iraq: "We don't need Petraeus in Iraq, we need Buffy the motherfucking Vampire Slayer."

Norms! Norms! Norms!

I think my friends up at the University of Michigan would like this.

Speaking of which, I'm going to be seeing them soon! Here's my travel schedule for the end of January and the beginning of February:

January 25-29: Cambridge, MA
January 29-31: Ann Arbor, MI
February 1-4: Bowling Green, OH
-Possible trip to Chicago to visit my sister, Supriya Sinhababu-
February 4-15: Ann Arbor, MI

Then I return to Texas, where we're doing a Nietzsche conference and I'm commenting on a paper.

Did you guys write this song for me?

I'm listening to the Decemberists' "Yankee Bayonet" right now (you can download it from this guy), and I have this eerie feeling that the song was written to satisfy basically every lyrical preference I have. I like folk songs where girls sing about their soldier lads fallen in battle, and folk songs where the soldiers sing about the girls back home, and this is both at once. I'm on record highlighting the poignancy of references to death in which becoming food for scavengers is discussed, and the girl says to her dead man, "But you are in the ground with the wolves and the weevils / All a'chew on your bones so dry." I like songs that tell stories with mild supernatural content, and the guy appears to be a ghost, or at least a dead guy singing. Furthermore, it's a really nice duet, all pretty and acoustic, and I'm a wuss. A happy wuss.

Two Edwards posts

The first one is on Daily Kos. (Yes, I post there sometimes!) I was trying to let the Kossacks know about how Edwards fought back against the Bush-McCain escalation plan last night on Jay Leno's show. People liked the poll at the end.

The second one started as a way of trumpeting Kate Michelman's endorsement of John Edwards, but segued into a defense of the positive right to have an abortion. It gets kind of Rawlsy at some points (I've been reading a fair bit of Rawls lately).

Run, Rudy, Run!

If you buy the conventional wisdom that Rudy Giuliani is too liberal on abortion, gun control, and gay rights to win the Republican nomination, you should want him in the Republican primary. Anything that forces John McCain to humiliate himself with more Stupid Politician Tricks is good for Democrats. Since Giuliani and McCain will be splitting whatever votes are available to Republicans Republicans don't trust, a Giuliani candidacy will put pressure on McCain, and push him into more electability-reducing panders to the GOP base. Unelectable Republicans like Gingrich and Brownback, who are more appealing to the base, have better chances of winning the primary if there's a strong Rudy candidacy that cuts into McCain's votes.

Drunk global poverty posts? fuck yeah.

What happens when I try to post on how to deal with poverty in Third World countries while being drunk off my ass? This, I guess. It's mostly a blockquote of stuff from a good article on the subject, so I don't think it shows too many signs of my current inebriation, but I'm guessing there are some.

Jefferson's Koran

This story gave me a little bit of yay:

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.

At Eazy-E's Crib

Yesterday Ezra was taking the day off, which resulted in me posting hot sweaty John Edwards Spring Break pictures, and also linking to John Derbyshire's recent discovery about the horrors of the health insurance system.

Perhaps in rewards for my services, Ezra has tagged me with a meme, which I will participate in shortly on his blog.

Iodized Salt Makes You Smarter Than Borat

There's a neat article in the NYT about efforts to iodize salt in Kazakhstan. Iodization is cheap and prevents many health problems. The PR battle is the hard part, and the iodizers rose to the challenge:

One female volunteer went to a bus company and rerecorded its “next-stop” announcements interspersed with short plugs for iodized salt. “She had a very sexy voice, and men would tell the drivers to play it again,” Ms. Sivryukova said.

Even the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, who is a hero throughout the former Soviet Union for his years as champion, joined the fight. “Eat iodized salt,” he advised schoolchildren in a television appearance, “and you will grow up to be grandmasters like me.”

Mr. Karpov, in particular, handled hostile journalists adeptly, Mr. Zouev said, deflecting inquiries as to why he did not advocate letting people choose iodized or plain salt by comparing it to the right to have two taps in every home, one for clean water and one for dirty.

Johnny And The Golden Eggs

I'll start with this from Rick Perlstein, a year ago:

These programs make life in America fundamentally better... these gooses, Social Security, Medicare, lay golden eggs. They manufacture Democrats.
It is the duty of every generation of Democrats to produce new geese to lay 70 years of golden eggs. It is the only way our party has grown—as Bill Kristol puts it, by reviving the reputation of the Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests.

There's a sizable and increasing chance that 2009 will present the Democratic Party with a historic opportunity. The Senate calendar favors Democratic gains, and our House majority is large. Congressional investigations will degrade the Republican Party's brand identity further. If we can get a progressive Democrat into the White House, we'll be able to do things that make American life fundamentally better, and which voters remember for decades to come.

It's this opportunity that makes the John Edwards campaign so exciting. He's got the ambitious antipoverty program, and all indications are that a whole bunch of similarly progressive economic proposals on issues like health care are on the way. While other candidates -- including both Obama and Clinton -- try to maintain moderate reputations by publicly distancing themselves from bold economic proposals like single-payer health care, Edwards doesn't. I don't know for sure what sort of plan he'll come out with, but the policy guys working with him are solid progressives. All this and his base in the labor movement make him the one candidate who can absolutely be relied on to do his best for the economic left.

I recall Hilzoy's excellent post on Barack Obama's legislative accomplishments. He has, in fact, done a lot of good stuff in the Senate, and proven himself to be a very able legislator. He's worked across party lines with moderates like Richard Lugar and conservatives like Tom Coburn to get some useful stuff done. (I had no idea that anybody had done so much good stuff in the expiring session of Congress until I read Hilzoy's post.) But it doesn't go far enough in answering the really pressing question for the next presidential election -- will Obama be able to capitalize on a historic opportunity to put solidly left-wing ideas into effect? Obama strikes me as better suited for 2000 than 2008. Obviously, his past legislative performance isn't a good sign that he won't capitalize on the historic opportunity, because he was working under conditions where nothing like that was possible. But his unwillingness to commit to left-wing proposals makes me worry that he's trying to play some kind of triangulation game. It's still possible that he could be the guy we're looking for. But he'll have to come out and prove it.

Meanwhile, we've got Edwards polling ahead of McCain 43-41, while Hillary loses to McCain 47-43 and Obama loses 43-38. As I've argued many a time before, Edwards is uniquely suited to beat McCain in a general election. I like the way Petey put it once -- "We're through the looking glass here, people!" This is the year where the hard data keeps showing the candidate of the left to be more likely to win than the moderate alternatives. It's also important to remember that popularity doesn't lose all its value once you're elected -- a president's poll numbers help legislators decide whether they want to align themselves with his ideas. We'll need that to get ambitious economic proposals through.
If you wonder why Edwards has sort of been an idee fixe for me ever since I started blogging, that's a big part of it. We have the means to our greatest ends at our fingertips, and I'll do whatever I can to make sure we don't throw away this historic opportunity.

Fine-Tuning: The New Creationist Strategy

That's the topic of my latest post at Ezra's blog. The occasion is Sahotra Sarkar's article in the American Prospect on the move towards fine-tuning arguments. The second half of the post is the following argument, which uses the possibility of dualism against fine-tuning. I'm curious whether I've presented it in a way that non-philosophers will be able to understand.

In this response I'm assuming that what really strikes us as miraculous about our universe and provides the force behind fine-tuning arguments is the presence of minds. A universe with mindless life (maybe, a bunch of bacteria) wouldn't count as especially different from a universe with no life at all.

Now suppose dualism -- the view that minds are non-physical -- might have been true. I'm not asking you to suppose that dualism actually is true, but only that there's an alternate way things could've been, perhaps very different from the way things actually are, in which dualism is true. If the non-physical minds that dualists talk about might have existed, there's a variety of different possible psychophysical laws (laws governing how minds are attached to physical objects) which could have obtained. Even if we had different physical laws which don't allow for the large-scale physical phenomena that support minds in our universe, we could've also had different psychophysical laws which allow other sorts of physical matter to have minds.

The resulting picture makes the existence of minds seem like a far less miraculous thing, and eliminates the impulse to posit a Creator who set things up just right. Sure, it's kind of interesting that our universe is one in which the physical laws do so much work in making minds possible. But there's a huge variety of other possible arrangements of laws -- in particular, arrangements involving psychophysical laws which allow for an abundance of minds -- that would do the same thing. So there's no reason to think our universe really is fine-tuned by a divine creator after all.

On Obscene Sexual Expressions

I'm rather proud of this post I just put up at Ezra's blog, describing the unusual way in which I hear obscene sexual expressions, and why I don't use many of these expressions. It was fun to write, and I hope it'll be fun to read.