I’ve never understood the fascination with electing judges. I’m a political junkie and I usually leave the ballot space for judges blank simply because I don’t know enough about them to make an informed decision. More reason to have governors appoint judges ($):

Nine out of ten American judges stand for election. The theory is admirably democratic: if the people who make laws are elected, why shouldn’t those who interpret them be too? But that theory is increasingly coming into conflict with the idea that judges should be impartial.

Until recently, judicial candidates were usually prevented from saying much, on the basis that it could later raise questions about the courts’ independence. Conservatives have long fumed that such curbs have let “activist judges” hide their views on subjects such as abortion; the restrictions, they add, infringe free speech. In 2002 the Supreme Court agreed: in Republican Party of Minnesota v White, it struck down Minnesota’s “announce clause” prohibiting judicial candidates from airing their views on disputed issues.

Allow me another plug for the one, the only, Dead Pool 2005… and tell ’em we sent you. It’s all in good fun, and there’s no fee to enter, although Lair may get testy with you if you don’t have a blog. All you have to do is pick the 15 semi-famous people you think are gonna die in 2005. So, in the immortal (or at least immoral) words of Gwen Stefani, ”what you waitin’ for?”

Jane Galt is amazed to discover Britain’s television police, responsible for ensuring the BBC gets its £121 a year from TV-watching Britons—even if they never watch the BBC. From the article:

The fee is very much a part of British life. It is a criminal offense for anyone with a television set not to pay it, whether they watch the BBC or not. Fee-evasion cases make up 12 percent of the caseload in magistrates’ courts. Although most evaders are fined, 20 people were imprisoned for nonpayment last year.

The BBC took in £3.9 billion ($7.5 billion) from the fee in 1993, but 5.7 percent of television owners still failed to pay. TV Licensing regularly carries out campaigns to warn them about the consequences of inaction that say, for instance, “Get one or get done” – “getting done” being slang for getting caught.

Enforcement officers visit homes and businesses about three million times a year. They have a variety of weapons at hand, including a law that requires retailers to notify the government whenever someone buys a television; a database with TV-owning information about 28 million Britons; and specially equipped vans and hand-held devices that can detect unlawful television-watching.

The predecessor of the TV licence, the radio licence, went away in 1971. For more details, visit the TV Licensing website, where you can learn about the TV licence in 12 different languages.

We finally have a new title for the war on terror: The Long War. The term comes from General John Abizaid and is passed along via David Ignatius. Here’s a clip of Ignatius’s column:

Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.

I traveled this month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the “Long War” to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom’s turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the longer-term process of change in the Middle East, which Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.

“We control the air, the sea and the ground militarily,” Abizaid told one audience, and in conventional terms, he’s unquestionably right. From its headquarters near the huge new U.S. airbase in Qatar, Centcom’s military reach stretches in every direction: To the west, the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet has its base in Bahrain; to the north, the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its task force are steaming on patrol in the Persian Gulf; to the east, more than 17,000 troops are working to stabilize postwar Afghanistan; to the south, about 1,000 troops are keeping a lid on the Horn of Africa. And to the northwest lies the bloody battlefield of Iraq, where nearly 150,000 of Abizaid’s soldiers are fighting a determined insurgency.

For all of America’s military might, the Long War that has begun in the Middle East poses some tough strategic questions. What is the nature of the enemy? If the United States is so powerful, why is it having such difficulty in Iraq? What will victory look like, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world? And how long will the conflict take?

Over the long term, what we are trying to do is alter a culture. To marginalize the radical Islamists, in the same way that Nazis have been marginalized, and show the moderate Muslims of the Middle East that they can practice their religion peacefully and that modernity isn’t something to be afraid of. As the earlier link explains, it won’t be easy. The Muslim culture in the Middle East doesn’t recognize the seperation of church and state and the only way the leaders in the Middle East have succeeded in the past is through despotism. Of course, this served their own ends as well, so I’m not convinced that despotism is the only way to govern in the ME.

A couple of years ago an economist, Alan Krueger of Princeton, ran a test to see if terrorism is tied to poverty, which is a fairly common claim. The answer he got was no. Instead, he found that it’s tied to political repression. Winning The Long War will require undoing the repression of the Middle East and convincing the people that they can live in an open society.

Not a small task, not one that will be won through the military alone and not one that will end any time soon.

I’ve mentioned this before, and I favor evolution over ID, but I thought I would address one of The Evangelical Outpost’s commenters, Mr. Ed:

Why is it that simple? It seems you are making ‘science’ an arbitrary label. What is it that makes ID antithetical to science. And what is so different about the set of deductions that leads to a theory of evolutions and the set of deductions that leads to a theory of ID?

You know, it occurs to me that there is a solution to the teaching of ID in schools: have school vouchers.

Here’s a bit of a doozy from ESPN.com:

Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama has been chosen by the United States Soccer Federation for the first home qualifier in March when the national team will face Guatemala.

It will be the third time Birmingham, home of Auburn University, will host the national team, but it is the first World Cup qualifier for the stadium. In March of 2002, the U.S. beat Ecuador 1–0 on an Eddie Lewis goal – but the stakes will be much, much bigger on March 31st.

Aside from the minor geographic problem with the article, though, it also appears they got the date wrong, which means I’ll be watching on ESPN2 (since I teach Wednesdays) instead of going to Birmingham for the game.

A Kansas sports page editor is inviting a visit from the media neutrality goons:

The Associated Press is the largest news-gathering agency in the world. In this country, it hasn’t had any real competition since United Press International went belly-up about a quarter-center ago. The AP’s mantra, like all media, is to report the news.

At the same time, however, the AP manufactures news. That’s what a poll is. Manufactured news. Polls are released Mondays or Tuesdays because those are the traditionally slow news days, and the polls fills air space on radio and TV and columns in newspapers.

Basically an AP poll is a bunch of media-types—in this case sports writers and sportscasters—who band together to produce news that isn’t really news in order to sell more newspapers and lure more listeners and viewers. There’s nothing wrong with that in a business sense, but more and more, newspapers, in particular, are beginning to sense they’re sending the wrong message.

The media engaging in agenda setting and making up news? Never!

My cousin Melvin Ely’s most recent book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War continues to draw rave reviews; the latest is from James A. Miller in Sunday’s Boston Globe.

Update: Joe Gandelman uncovered the article on his own and has some interesting thoughts (and discussion) on the matter. Comments of my own below the fold.

In spite of a good deal of trivial knowledge on other subjects, I went into The Aviator knowing almost nothing about Howard Hughes other than he was involved in both movies and airplanes, and little more. Knowing a good deal more now, having seen the movie and read a bit on him, he seems like a fascinating figure with most of the qualities one expects from someone that accomplished so much.

He was eccentric, to put it mildly. He had an apparent mental disorder and he’s remarkably like the typical Scorsese protagonist. He’s tormented, he treats women like objects—though he needs them horribly to stay balanced, and his life becomes increasingly unbearable as he distances himself from them—but he doesn’t descend into violence (at least in the movie), unlike Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta.

I’m surprised to say that this movie is better than Gangs of New York, but not by much. It took me a while to forget that Leonardo DiCaprio was playing Hughes, but after thirty minutes or so I had accepted it. DiCaprio did a really good job, but it’s hard for him to age as a character. He still has a boyish quality. Oddly, though, in spite of this, he got better as the movie progressed because the movie works well. In spite of its length (almost three hours), I never looked at my watch, which I did about twenty minutes into Ocean’s Twelve.

It’s a fascinating movie and, if you like Scorsese movies, you will love this one. Surprisingly little violence, almost no nudity (typical) but some bizarre dementia, like obsessively peeing in bottles and becoming reclusive.

[I said I would see it a couple of weeks ago, but obviously didn't since it only went into wide release yesterday.]

What follows is a rather long excerpt and it is excellent, but the entire essay is worth a thorough read. David Brooks has done well on his first set of Hookies (to clarify, the column is linked to by Mr. Brooks and is written by Mr. Dalrymple of City Journal):

Anyone who lives in a city like mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?

I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.

But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet’s death, with some—today’s Sunnites—following his father-in-law, and some—today’s Shi’ites—his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.

The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.

In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs.

Mr. Dalrymple has written an excellent essay. He points out, correctly in my estimation, that over the long run the radical Islamists will lose and modernity will win. Eventually they will have created so much misery, and will have fallen so far behind the rest of the world, that “winning” will be impossible. In the mean time, the people that are trapped by the radicals will live in misery and others will live less secure lives than they otherwise might.

At a time when multiculturalism is being touted as a virtue in and of itself, without regard to the nature of other cultures, I am thankful that we are not paralyzed to inaction. My hope is that our current actions in Iraq will make the long run much shorter.

Update: Brock makes a good point in the comments: Mr. Dalrymple is focusing on the broader Muslim culture and I'm conflating the broader culture with the radicals. See the comments for more discussion.

Tim Blair is doing the heavy lifting on Christmas and has compiled a number of quotes, broken down by month, from the past year. One of his commenters did a spin on the “I Have A Scream” speech by Howard Dean, which is hilarious:

And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to Space Mountain, we’re going to the tea cups and Mr. Toads Wild Ride and the Pirates of the Carribbean and the Jungle Adventure and the Matterhorn! We’re going to the Haunted Mansion and Main Street and It’s a Small World! And we’re going to the Tiki Room and the Coutry Bear Jamboree and the Luau and a character breakfast! And then we’re going to the Electric Light Parade. To take back Cinderella’s Castle! YEEEAAARGH!!

If you begin your discourse with the notion that your political opponents are sociopaths, you’re not off to a good start. Apparently Barbara O’Brien does precisely that. Steven Taylor provides a good response to her claim that people on the right are “sociopaths” (I followed the link from Chris’s post that wonders whether we here at Signifying Nothing are indeed “right wing”).

Since Steven has already addressed her in some detail, I want to address a more narrow topic: her forgiveness of Lew Rockwell and his fetishists simply because they oppose the Iraqi war. This I find simply amazing. My disdain for Rockwell is known (look here) and I should add that I have a similar disdain for his contemporaries, Paul Craig Roberts and Jude Wanniski. They all fit under the labels “paleo-con” or “paleo-libertarian” and I find them all equally reprehensible. Each time one of them publishes, the sum of human knowledge is diminished.

I’ve gone into my own views with regard to natural liberty just recently and I don’t want to rehash it again. I do want to mention that, at a quick glance, my views might seem similar to those of Rockwell, et. al. They’re not.

The Rockwell fetishists are using their opposition to the Iraqi war as a means of giving greater exposure to some views—such as homophobia and xenophobia—that I find intolerable. They’ve been apologists for Jim Crow as well, which you won’t find me doing.

Why, when they throw the far left a bone, such as opposition to the Iraqi war, do purportedly rational and “reality-based” leftists overlook numerous flaws? Is it because they find America and its supposed “world hegemony” more appalling than the very real views of these idiots? I don’t know why, but it’s there for everyone to see:

Now, a rightie reading this might be saying, you are stereotyping righties. Well, no, I don’t think so. There are conservatives who write with reason and factual support, but they don’t tend to be part of the rightie pack. A good example is the libertarian Lew Rockwell site, which features a lot of articles with which I do not necessarily agree, but to which the authors have applied some independent reasoning and factual support.

But then, as Mr. Rockwell does think for himself and considers facts, he is not a big George Bush supporter.

The bald truth is that to be a Bush supporter means that you are (a) ignorant of what’s going on; (b) suffering massive cognitive dissonance; or© are a soulless sociopathic bastard.

The NYT has a fascinating, for me, article on the free market leanings of Mongolia. Given its geography—it’s landlocked between Russia and China—I find it kind of surprising that they have such strong pro-market and pro-democracy leanings. Their current PM is apparently a student of Hayek and Friedman:

In the army, he was so diligent in running a Revolutionary Youth unit that he won a scholarship to study Marxism, Leninism and journalism in the Ukrainian city of Lvov. Now, his Liberty Center foundation, which promotes political and legal reform, is overseeing translations into Mongolian of the works of Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek.

The turning point for Mr. Elbegdorj came in 1989, when the Soviet grip began to weaken. He quit a comfortable job as a reporter for a military newspaper to found Mongolia’s first independent newspaper, called Democracy. Soon, he was a charter member of a group that is now revered as the 13 First Democrats, and took the lead in the protests that toppled the country’s Communist government after a 70-year rule.

For protection in the neighborhood, Mongolia is counting on close ties with the United States. To encourage that, it has sent 180 soldiers to Iraq, dropped visa requirements for American tourists and made clear its desire to sign a free trade pact. It regularly unrolls the red carpet for visiting American officials, most recently Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the commander of United States forces in the Pacific.

Asked if Mongolia would continue to send soldiers to Iraq, the prime minister’s face clouded.

“If America asks us to send a fourth contingent,” he started. Then, noticing a telepathic elbow in the ribs from an aide across the dinner table, he brightened and said with the ambiguity of a seasoned politician, “We would discuss it in the cabinet.”

One for the News of the Weird file: the Palestinian Authority’s investments included, until this week, a $3.1 million stake in a chain of bowling alleys in the Northeast Corridor.

Alan Henderson has generously added us to his blogroll, but thinks I’m an “evil law prof”; actually, I’m an evil political science prof who teaches con law because the other evil political science prof has better things to do, and he’s the chair—so what can I do?

Heidi Bond clarifies that Mac OS X isn’t Linux, which probably explains why I could never figure out how to configure anything important that wasn’t in Preferences. She also links Gus, who started DynDNS.com a few Internet eons ago and whose creation helps keep Signifying Nothing on the air… our real hostname is lordsutch.dyndns.org.

Steven Taylor calls Signifying Nothing a “righty blog,” although I’m not sure any of us make particularly good right-wingers… though if you, like me, visit west Jackson or Orange Mound (substitute your favorite inner-city slum) and the first thought in your head is “40 years of failed social policy” instead of “residual racism,” I suppose that might be evidence of “rightiness.”

Too clever by half.*

Will Baude asks:

Does anybody find libertarian Linux-users sexy?

Heidi Bond responds that at least the Linux-using part may increase perceived sexiness, but also adds that ”[t]here are plenty of people who run Linux who I wouldn’t date.”

Undoubtably this is a pressing question for our time—not to mention our blog. Presumably Brock’s wife finds him sexy, although I don’t know that Brock would consider himself a libertarian; if pressed to judge, I’d say Brock is tall and handsome, and thus probably considered “sexy” by women, but neither of those attributes derive from his politics or his choice of operating system.

Robert runs Mac OS X, as does Heidi Bond’s boyfriend, which may count as “Linux usage” for sufficiently vague definitions of “Linux” (i.e. operating systems that use a lot of GNU software and use a kernel patterned after that of the Unix operating system). I have no idea whether Robert is sexy, since I’ve never met him and don’t generally judge the sexiness of other guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that), my assessment of Brock notwithstanding.

Nobody has called me sexy lately, but for the most part I haven’t gone to great lengths to advertise either my libertarianness or my Linux usage in the “real world”; there may be individuals who think I’m sexy, but they haven’t told me that or otherwise indicated they think I’m sexy in an unambiguous manner—defined in my world as “not made blatantly obvious,” so I could be oblivious to such matters.

So, Mr. Baude’s question is now in order. Let the debate commence.

The next time a student complains about a con law exam, I think I’ll assign them this question. Then again, I did give them this one on my second exam (open book, take-home, and optional):

In United States v. Lopez, while the Supreme Court did not overturn Wickard v. Filburn outright, the Court clearly staked out some limitations to Congress’s use of its power to regulate interstate commerce. With that precedent in mind, consider the upcoming Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Raich, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals argued that federal regulation of the noncommercial cultivation and distribution of marijuana exceeded Congress’s commerce clause powers. You should consider the following questions: Does Raich meet the standard for interstate commerce outlined in the Lopez test? How does Raich differ from Wickard—or, aside from the crops at issue, does it not differ at all?

I also gave this one on my first exam:

In 2007, the Supreme Court will hear the case Lewis v. Boulder County School District, in which perennial Pledge of Allegiance challenger Michael Newdow represents Sally Lewis, a 16-year-old atheist and high school student in Boulder who objects to the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, added to the pledge by Congress in 1954 (codified at 4 USC 4). Lewis advances essentially the same argument on the merits advanced by Newdow in Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District (2004); however, Lewis’ parents, English professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder, fully support her challenge to the law and have permitted Newdow to represent her in her case against the school district.

In the meantime, Congress has passed the Pledge Protection Act of 2005, which was signed into law by President Lieberman.* The Pledge Protection Act provides that no court created by Congress shall have original jurisdiction in any challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance, nor shall the Supreme Court have appellate jurisdiction.

How should the Supreme Court decide the case at hand? Consider the issues of jurisdiction and standing, as well as the decision on “the merits.” In particular:

• Does Lewis have standing to sue?
• Is the Pledge Protection Act of 2005 constitutional?
• Is the inclusion of “under God” in the pledge an unconstitutional establishment of religion?

Consider the court’s precedents on standing and jurisdiction, as well as the political circumstances that gave rise to the Court’s decision in Ex parte McCardle. Your response will be fortified by reference to the legal and attitudinal approaches to judicial interpretation outlined in Chapter 1 of the [Epstein and Walker].

Ok, maybe I am an evil con law prof after all.

"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.

Crichton’s subject is today’s fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton’s subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.

[....]

Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous—or perhaps beneficial.

One of the good guys in “State of Fear” cites Montaigne’s axiom: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.” Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported “many signs” that “Earth may be heading for another ice age.” Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” “Continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska’s armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.

Update: Crichton's name corrected in post.

Once again I find myself in agreement with Joe Lieberman:

A rejoinder to this rejoinder is now being beta-tested by Sen. Byron Dorgan: Republicans exaggerate the “crisis” of Social Security, which can be fixed with a few modest tax hikes. Uh huh, in the sense that a bankrupt man might still be able to manage his car payments . . . if you ignore the fact that he owes house payments too.

House payments, in this case, are the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, which vastly outstrip even the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, by a margin of $62 trillion to $10 trillion. For several years, the nonpartisan board of Social Security and Medicare Trustees has flagged these figures, which everyone ignored. Joe Lieberman last year introduced a Senate bill to recognize these obligations in the federal budget. He was ignored.

Yet since Mr. Bush introduced the subject of Social Security reform at his party’s September jamboree, public debate has surged ahead of the White House and its Democratic sparring partners. USA Today, to give the underrated McPaper its due, produced a report in October forcing Medicare into the picture, noting it would take $53 trillion invested today to cover the $200 trillion in shortfalls the program is expected to generate just over the lifetimes of today’s youngest workers. By Monday night, even Peter Jennings of ABC News had decided there’s a story here.

If anyone is interested, I have some Gmail invites and have already inundated my family, friends and acquaintances with the past ones. If you want one send me an email; you can find the address by holding your cursor over my name below the post.

The GayPatriot thinks that pro-gay-rights advocates have “red state” demographics working against them (þ: InstaPundit). They may also have some problems in their base—in states “blue” and “red” alike. Here’s some numbers among self-identified Democrats from the exit poll we did in Jackson (estimated margin of error ±3.6%, α=0.05):

Now, I would expect Jackson voters (black or white) to be more socially conservative than those in the nation at large, but I don’t think that 40-point margin between black and white Democrats would be that much smaller in, say, Oakland or Boston.

Of course, turning this into a working cross-cutting cleavage for Republicans is going to be hard work as long as the GOP can’t keep its semi-regular bigot eruptions under control.

Earlier I mentioned, however briefly, my preference for natural liberty—and being left alone in the process. The Professor has a piece over at his MSNBC site that captures my thought pretty well:

My criticism of the United Nations continues to generate hostile email along the lines of “you just don’t like the U.N. because it stands in the way of world hegemony by the Evil Bushitler and his Likudnik neo-con cabal.”

Uh, no. In fact, I’m not a fan of U.S. “world hegemony” at all. Being the world’s preeminent military and economic power has its pluses, but not many. Countries with little else to boast of may draw great solace from military power—the old Soviet Union did that, and many older Russians are still nostalgic—but American don’t care about such things nearly as much. We have better things to do, and most of us, or our ancestors, came here to escape the problems of the rest of the world. We’d much rather someone else dealt with them, and left us alone—though when we express such sentiments we are then accused of “isolationism,” often by the same people who are otherwise complaining about American “imperialism.”

Brad DeLong, whom I like much better as an economist, has a couple of posts that drive my point home. One, which is unintentionally galling, I think, has a discussion of some Republican congressmen going to India to find—horror of horrors—that they don’t care about us. Boo hoo. India has done nothing to help us—they don’t agree with our approach to Iraq and the war on terror—and I’m having a hard time understanding why we should care.

As India sees it, the coming century is a race between them and China for global dominance. Nevermind that it’s only been a couple of decades since India solved their starvation problem and they have yet to dismantle the leftovers of feudalism. Even if they become an economic powerhouse, I don’t see how we lose anything. The only thing they really have to offer us is trade and I think we should take it. Trade with them. End of story.

India becoming a major power shouldn’t be viewed as a threat to us. China could possibly pose a threat to us, in a military sense, but I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about it. We will continue spending a good deal more on defense than the rest of the world and it will take decades for China to pose a threat to us, outside of nuclear weapons. On that, they would be insane to attack us because our nuclear arsenal is going nowhere unless we launch it against someone. I don’t think they want that, so, again, I’m not sure how we lose anything.

Then Brad has a rather cute post on the reaction of the right to the possibility of torture in Iraq and elsewhere. He ends it with the following statement:

I would say it’s at least nine months past time for the intellectuals of the right to start “speaking more loudly about these worrisome trends.”

If you wonder why I prefer a “natural liberty” approach to the rest of the world, this helps explain why. Thanks to the internet, I’ve been reading foreign newspapers for a few years now and it hasn’t “furthered my understanding” in the sense that most multiculturists yearn for. On the contrary, it’s convinced me that we should stay out of their affairs and involve ourselves with them as little as possible outside of commerce. Brad’s writings on politics are a good example of this, but it gets worse when you read foreign newspapers. They’re very quick to blame America when things go wrong and slow to accept responsibility for their own problems.

I might have more to say about this later, but I’ve got a couple of other things to do. I'll close with a Jefferson quote that seems more apt with each passing year:

"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural Address, 1801. ME 3:321