Michael Walzer has a short, sharp online-only piece for Dissent about the Georgian crisis. A few points in response: (A) Walzer’s point (1), about how Russia’s war is an “unjust war,” seems to fail to recognize a distinction whose essentiality to discussing the justice of war Walzer himself is most responsible for promulgating, namely the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, or just cause and just conduct. Clearly, Russia’s behavior fails appallingly on the second score. But the first is murkier. The Russian invasion was of course hardly launched for humanitarian purposes, and as Walzer notes, “the Russian claim that the Georgians killed or injured 2,000 civilians [isn't] credible.” Nonetheless, Georgia triggered the conflict with an unjust attack on Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists. It can’t be that Russia doesn’t even have an arguably legitimate interest in protecting them.

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This afternoon I saw this noir-ish Batman film with my nine- and 10-year-old grandsons. And an observation about my choice of viewing companions: had I recalled this from Jim’s review at UO:

There are lingering scenes of children being menaced; acts of great cruelty; a pitiless death for a central character; and sustained scenes of people being tempted toward monstrous acts of cowardice. That’s good stuff if you’re a grownup - it’s really a very smart movie, albeit written by people with only a fitful understanding of how people talk. But get a sitter.

I might not have taken them. However, I discussed it with their daddy and my daughter-in-law — who were aware of the reputation for violence in the film — and we decided we’d follow the same protocol we all did after I took the boys to see Iron Man: employ it as a teachable moment revolving around the moral implications in the film.
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Unbeknownst to me (and needless to say, this comes totally unprompted and without any financial incentive), “Burning Birthdays,” the first EP of the Harlem Shakes — a phenomenally talented band that happens to be fronted and bassed by a couple of pretty good friends of mine — has been available for download on itunes for a while now, and at less than $0.99/song (!). You should do yourself a favor and check it out. Start with “Sickos,” their signature song. I wish I could give a detailed description of their music but it’s too eclectic for simple characterization; closer to punk than anything else but not particularly close to punk. Sadly, one can’t do the Harlem shake to any of their songs — at least not easily — but otherwise “BB” is pretty close to flawless. And think of the opportunity to tell people you were into them way back when; or, if you’re a hipster douche, you can tell people about how you liked them before they sold out their values and all the real music fans who followed them.

English journalist tries to eat what Michael Phelps does in a day; gets a small fraction of the way through; fails miserably; gets sick. Obviously, the thing for Phelps to do is seek out more variety in his diet. What could go wrong with that? Hot peppers are a lovely addition to most any savory breakfast or lunch food, and would go a long way to cutting through the disgusting (I’m assuming) taste of all that mayonnaise.

Sort of….

Tom Maguire has a few justified chuckles at the expense of some tested and ready practitioners of the august profession of journalism innumerate hacks at the Grey Lady. Clearly, the fourth estate would be better off if its members were required to undergo some basic quantitative training — not even necessarily anything involving actual computation or problem-solving, just enough to get a grasp of basic concepts — and the whole nation might be better off as a result as well. (At the very least, it would not be possible — to paraphrase a former Dean of Admissions at Yale — to shoot every reporter in the country, recruit pajamas-wearers to fill every, um, cancelled position, shoot all of them, and then recruit a third string journalistic corps with scant if any diminishing of the substantive quality of reporting.) That said, it’s sort of cute that Maguire thinks business school credentials would stand our press in markedly better stead. Sure, there are exceptional B-school grads; there are also exceptional J-school grads. And really now — has he met many Harvard MBAs? They’re supposed to be the best of the lot, and…let’s leave it at that. (more…)

Christopher Hitchens wants to know, in re: the 79 billion dollars of petrol-fueled surplus funds the Iraqi government is expected to accrue by year’s end, if “we [may] take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq’s liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing.” Well, before we decide whether we owe Wolfowitz an apology, it might be helpful to take account of what Wolfowitz actually said. Wolfowitz’ 2003 statement to Congress on the eve of the invasion didn’t refer to “Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism” — and note the classic Hitchens gambit of putting his own highly tendentious characterization of an event into other people’s mouths, the better to stack the deck rhetorically in favor of the moral blackmail* sure to come within a few paragraphs — but it did include a handy timeline and some dollar estimates: (more…)

Nell’s comment in Mona’s thread on Jon Henke’s condemnation of Jerome Corsi - got all that? - deserves more prominence:

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The odious Jerome Corsi’s hit-piece book on Barrack Obama is premiering at No. 1 on the NTY Bestseller list. At the newish conservative/libertarian site, The Next Right, Jon Henke — who gave me my start blogging (at a now defunct blog) — says what needs to be said about the right’s ongoing reliance on this malevolent smear artist: (more…)

Oh, I’m not done with the Commentards yet. Here’s what Sam Munson highlighted as the Comment(ard) of the Day: (more…)

The worst blogger on earth, writing for the worst site on the world wide web (including all the porn), demonstrates the nonideological idiocy undergirding her entire output quite apart from her laughably slavish partisanship, dishonesty, and stupidity:

Rove’s analysis [of state-by-state contests] should put much of partisan punditry into proper perspectiveational polls are fun but largely irrelevant. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani’s double-digit leads months before the first votes were cast?

Jesus H. Christ. How many confusions is it possible to pack into two short sentences? (more…)

For reasons I might explain some other time, I have the professional qualifications of a NCAA strength and conditioning coach. So it raised my eyebrows just a bit to come back from al-Quds to the land of Coca-Cola to find Matthew Yglesias offering Michael Phelps the sort of advice you’d expect a professional blogger to offer a champion swimmer:

The story [of Phelps eating ≈12000 calories/day] is written in such a way as to make it seem as if he eats this exact same set of meals every day, but it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and again, no. That’s insane. (more…)

I’ve now read all of Joel Salatin’s book on the politics of farming, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. I enjoyed it a great deal. One sentence review: This book could make a libertarian out of me . . .

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Matthew Yglesias, long one of my favorite bloggers, has begun publishing from his new home at Think Progress. For those of you keeping score at home, this is Matt’s umpty-umphth edition of his internet-web "blog."

Daniel Larison has written a lot about what a disappointment Barack Obama is from an anti-interventionist perspective: the amount of “humanitarian interventionism” in his rhetoric, the “sensible, serious” and idiotic assertion that we need to expand the most bloated military in the world, and too much willingness to accept the hawkish rhetorical frame on Iran. But Larison’s new post on John McCain’s harsh anti-Russia rhetoric suggests why, despite everything, Obama is the better anti-interventionist candidate of the two people who might really win the White House by far. Obama will disappoint us around the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular with his willingness to continue “engaging” with the region using Predators and MRAPs. But he shows no evidence of wanting to start a new Cold War with Russia or, for that matter, China. McCain and the “defense” “intellectuals” around him would like to do both. This isn’t surprising: rebuking George isn’t going to justify a new round of massive military hardware spending. Worsening relations with Russia and China will. A McCain presidency would waste vastly more money on great-power conflicts we shouldn’t exacerbate, and return the risk of nuclear war from the Museum of Old Fears to a prominent place our daily mental furniture.

Jennifer Abel just posted this at her blog:

I’m toying with the idea of abandoning libertarianism just long enough to buy a Che Guevara T-shirt and lead a Glorious Revolution of the Proletariat. And when this day arrives, the first mofos up against the wall will be the CEO, investors and executives of a loathsome company called oDesk.

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I was mulling over Will Wilkinson’s quickie environmentalism post as possible fodder for here. Since then it’s become widely linked and controversial. In a follow-up, Will responds to his critics. I’m not endorsing or disclaiming his arguments in this latter post. Honestly, I’m mostly trying to get a post up before August 6 passes with no post! My quick reaction to the first post was, "Will’s being too blithe here." But the matter needs reflection.

Should Catholics asked to stick $1 in the church box before lighting a holy candle in offering for their prayers be met with mandatory signs that the church is making the wicks available only as “entertainment?” A new law in the UK requires fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to so describe their services upfront, and as that first link shows James Randi’s Swift site not only approves, but thinks the same should apply to various religionists. Indeed, in a more recent post, Randi’s site declares: (more…)

As I see it, the rule is either

1. White candidates are sometimes presidential;
2. Black candidates are sometimes presumptuous.

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Via Jesse Walker on the mutualists yahoogroup, The Nation prints an excerpt from Naomi Klein’s and Avi Lewis’ introduction to Sin Patron, a book on the recuperated enterprises of Argentina.  My favorite passage: (more…)

One last thing before I leave for the Holy Land: Anyone who hasn’t yet seen this needs to drop everything and watch.

Contra David Weigel’s prediction (linked below) that John McCain’s lies about Barack Obama would blow up in his face, Daniel Larison notes that McCain has a history of getting away with this sort of thing:

Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn’t enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero. The same will happen concerning McCain’s lies about Obama.

Ah, but McCain laying about Obama and McCain lying about Romney are not ceteris paribus cases. Everyone hates Mitt Romney. (more…)

Myself, I’ve used Firefox almost exclusively as a web browser for over three years. But if you are using IE and at some sites it is causing you to crash, here is why.

Staying classy, the McCain campaign launches a new Spanish-language ad trying to drive a wedge between Obama and Latinos by dwelling on the senator’s failure to call out Latin American states or cities during his speech in Berlin. This is the kind of high-risk strategy Team McCain will have to pursue to have a shot at winning, but it seems to me a potentially fatal mistake for them to launch these sorts of ridiculous attacks this early. The evidence is mounting that the mainstream media are not only falling out of love with McCain, but losing all patience with him — including his most preposterously stalwart defenders. And it’s only the beginning of August. The conventions are still weeks away. Unless the Obama campaign is struck by sudden fatal incompetence, the likeliest way for this campaign to play out is surely the scenario David Weigel envisions: “at the rate McCain’s cranking out attack ads and lines about Obama lusting “to lose the war,” the higher the odds he’ll wreck his image. And then Obama can say whatever he wants about McCain without much blowback. I can’t believe McCain doesn’t remember how this works.”

Sincere thanks to Rick Perlstein and Eve Fairbanks, whose (apparently independent) detection of Riefenstahlian themes in John McCain’s execrable “celeb” ad makes my view that the shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were meant (in part) to play on racial anxiety about black man/white woman pairings the sensible centrist position. Now, nobody besides the most preposterous of pro-McCain hacks is actually defending the content of the ad, but the fact that people I respect and admire immediately found it as obvious that there are no racial undertones to the ad as I found that there are such undertones gives me pause (and I hope, gives them pause too). Don’t just take my word for it; here’s Robert George, who appears to be of at least two minds on the question, noting that the fear-of-miscegenation trope has particular resonance when the women concerned are blondes. In other words, this is not an open-and-shut case.

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The Etonian, Oxonian, Bullingdonian Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson endorses. Which only serves to underscore the McCain campaign’s point that Senator Obama’s global popularity makes him comparable to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

There’s an old wistful joke I heard frequently in my days as a Dissentnik to the effect that if you asked the old New York intellectuals about their favorite flavor of ice cream, their answer would begin with an analysis of the division of labor in ancient Babylon. The roots of the latest round of hostilities among rival Jewish political camps — in addition to the Daniel Levy summary Jim links downblog, check out Todd Gitlin — stretch back at least as far the origin of the admonition within the community not to air out grievances “in front of the goyim.” That’s what makes the apoplexy over Joe Klein’s references to “Jewish neoconservatives” and “divided loyalties” so silly. Head over to Commentary’s “about” page. Notice the fourth tab down on the TOC on the left, “Israel, Jews, & Judaism,” falling underneath “Politics and Society,” “American & the World,” and “Culture & Religion.” Now have a look at their mission statement:

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. [my emphases]

In other words, the magazine that regards itself as “the flagship of neoconservatism” regards the question of “the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel” as on a par with the most important of all political questions. More precisely, of course that’s Commentary’s position. It is a Jewish neoconservative magazine, until recently funded by the American Jewish Committee, whose fundamental political allegiances are to a set of now-familiar foreign policy positions both for the United States and Israel. What exactly is one supposed to make of a group of strutting, ignorant, dishonest, censorious Jewish bullies who accuse other Jews of being anti-Semites and self-loathers for pointing out their divided loyalties when the bullies themselves advertise those divided loyalties prominently on the website of their “flagship” publication? What Joe Klein’s statement of the obvious — and the Commentary apparatchiks’ increasingly embarrassing failure to enforce the equation of stating the obvious with anti-Semitism — has helpfully demonstrated is that these bullies are as powerless as Polonius and his wagging finger unless people choose to be afraid of them. (more…)

People who, unlike your correspondent, didn’t drop out of MIT claim to have solved the solar-energy-storage problem. The libertarians in our audience should note that federal grants were involved.

I agree with a great deal of what Daniel Levy writes in the Huffington Post about the battle between Joe Klein and Commentary’s blogger stable, but he does offer the opportunity to critically examine a commonplace among liberal Jews, which is to say, the vast majority of Jews, since the Iraq War: (more…)

Many commenters noted a recent attempt at an “on the one hand, on the other hand” piece on Barack Obama’s European trip by the New York Times, in which News Analysis-er Steven Erlanger took Obama to task for being “vague” on, among other issues, “chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on American poultry imports.” As the host of AOTP’s Happy Funtime Animal Hour, I of course perked right up!

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Once and apparently no longer future McCain strategist John Weaver got a load of the maverick’s latest spot — that would be what Atrios aptly calls the “uppity negro who wants to fuck your sister” ad — and he’s had enough: (more…)

Not “General Betray-us,” but this attempt to capture the youth vote what vote exactly? by likening support of Barack Obama to herpes. Well done folks. Glad to see you’re putting your members’ dues to good use:

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In due course, I should have something more substantive to say about all this (you can probably guess where my sympathies lie), but for now, I’d just like to pose the open question of whether gentiles find this sort of thing remotely interesting. I’m not referring to the debate over US foreign policy towards Israel and the middle East, which includes a surfeit of material that should hold most people’s attention, but the second- and third-order rearguard action amongst neocon and anti-neocon Jews over who is and isn’t a true friend to Israel, a self-loather, etc. I’d guess that bitchy infighting is generally amusing, all the more so when it involves infighting over who truly represents maybe 1% of the electorate, and especially given what must be the immensely entertaining paranoid insecurities of one of the sides in the squabble, but only up to a point. After that, it becomes as byzantine and dull as Keith Gessen’s feud with Gawker. (Not exactly relatedly (but this doesn’t seem to deserve its own post), I might be missing the point and/or joke Spencer Ackerman is trying to make here, but it seems neither mysterious nor disappointing to me why the Hill didn’t assign Jackie Kucinich to do a write-up of how hot her step-mother is.) But my intuition about what the non-chosen make of Semitic royal rumbles is surely corrupted by lifelong exposure to them, so I’d like to open up the floor especially to those of you who aren’t fellow Red Sea pedestrians. A corollary question: more Jew/Israel content at AotP, or no?

It’s good that Ezra Klein is kicking off the inevitable word games with the name of the likeliest next VPOTUS, Tim Kaine, but I would have expected him to do a little more than Kaine-can/can’t puns given the richness of the material. We are, after all, talking about the most ubiquitous fantasy villain name ever.

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Dick Armey just now on MSNBC: “John McCain knows that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives.” So let none say that Senator McCain doesn’t have a goddamned clue what he’s talking about. He’s seen that Schoolhouse Rock video, like, twice.

We’re adding a book page to this site. Here we list political books that were recommended by one of the writers of this site. I’ll also list these books here. For the most part, I’ll leave it to the individual writers to mention, in the comments, why they feel certain books are good. Do also see Matt of 37 Signals comments about Omnivore’s Dilemma. Those of you who admire Kevin Carson’s insightful writing on this weblog will also want to buy his book. Personally, I’ve been meaning to buy “Seeing Like A State” since I first read about it over at Crooked Timber.

If you’ve been meaning to buy any of these books, I hope you’ll buy them by clicking through to Amazon from this site. Since we get some small commission through Amazon’s affiliate program, you’d be helping us out with the expense of running the site.

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Glenn Greenwald gets him some learning from Democratic party hacksolon Ed Kilgore:

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Our researcher and sometimes editor — as well as intelligent person on whom to bounce ideas off — Jennifer Abel, is on the list of speakers at the 2008 Connecticut Liberty Forum: A Call To Action in Promoting and Protecting Liberty In Connecticut. Scroll down — Jennifer is the knock-out redhead. Congrats, Jennifer!

A further word about my musings on how to shift the judicial and regulatory system to be more congenial to personal liberty (by means of maximally severe punishment of violations of what laws and regulations remain): According to the framework I’ve sketched, drunk drivers would get away with their DUI if they didn’t get caught, and face no punishment at all, whereas drunk drivers who get caught would face punishment; that is (duh) already the case, but the difference is that in my framework, those who get caught would face never being able to drive legally again, so the gulf between the two outcomes, despite there not being any inherent moral or public-interest difference between the two cases, would be greatly amplified.

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My post downblog on Bob Novak’s hit-and-run on an elderly pedestrian sparked a debate on access to driver’s licenses and whether senior citizens should be required to retake their driver’s tests. Of course, because seniors vote in disproportionate numbers and have powerful lobbies representing them, any policy of singling them out for increased scrutiny is a non-starter. But that’s not so bad, ultimately, because raising the standards on driving tests, and requiring re-tests at regular intervals throughout one’s life — perhaps every 5 years, perhaps every 10, perhaps every 20 — would be both fairer and better policy. The fact is that there are all sorts of reasons why one’s competence behind the wheel can decline, some related to aging, many others related to any number of chronic physical and mental conditions that can strike at a variety of ages. And though such a policy shift would (obviously) impose new restrictions on drivers, a) the benefit — namely fewer drivers on the road and much greater competence among them, hence much safer roads — presumably outweighs the burden of spending a few hours at the DMV every so often, and b) there is no real legitimate libertarian concern in the first place, because except on privately owned tracks, getting behind the wheel doesn’t just impose risks on a driver and those who voluntarily ride with her. And perhaps most importantly, c) significantly ratcheting up the standards for acquiring a driver’s license can be a stepping stone to making society friendlier to liberty in general. With greater confidence that drivers are for all intents and purposes uniformly competent to handle high-speed driving situations, for example, there shouldn’t be any barrier on non-libertarian grounds to raising speed limits and/or creating autobahn-type options which would, in turn, greatly ease road congestion and traffic-induced stress, and thus be a boon both to productivity and overall quality of life (even if only at the margins).

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AOTP readers are more than familiar with a large cross-section of the strong, and arguably decisive objections to voting for Senator Obama. But the problems we libertarians/civil-libertarians/anti-warriors have had with the candidate, especially recently, hardly exhaust the very good reasons to oppose him. Someone for whom opposition to abortion rights and other forms of reproductive freedom is more salient than any other issue would be more or less rationally obligated to support any marginally better (by those lights) alternative. Likewise with gay marriage and other social conservative issues. A sufficiently rich person motivated exclusively or nearly so by short-term self-interest — especially on the assumption that restrictions on liberty don’t really apply to persons of sufficient wealth — would have a clear rationale for supporting Senator McCain, which conclusion could only really be shifted by an antecedent shift in that person’s priors (i.e., getting her to take other factors into consideration besides her marginal tax rate). There’s lots more where those examples came from, and there are people who can make the good case against Obama much more persuasively than I can.

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