Sebastian

Iraqi Irregulars

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–Sebastian You’ve probably already seen this, but in case you haven’t  Phil Carter has an interesting post about Iraqi Irregular units.  He is ubeat about the development: The essence of "foreign internal defense" (FID), which is essentially what the mission to train Iraqi forces is, is to leverage the existence of an existing warrior class … Read more

Sociology

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The Larry Summers incident (which if you don’t know about it already you probably don’t want to–though if you insist they have a good discussion with plenty of links over at CrookedTimber) reminds me of an issue I’ve always had with sociology.  The super-short version of the incident is that Summers (Harvard president) made some … Read more

This is Torture, This Cannot be Tolerated

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This is why there shouldn’t be ghost prisoners that interrogators think they can do anything they want with.  SAN DIEGO – An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA (news – web sites) interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture — suspended … Read more

Jane Galt on Eason Jordan

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Jane Galt struck the perfect note on the Jordan issue: But then he was fired, and the media, to my mind, went off the deep end with a fifty-pound weight around its neck. A fellow from CJR called bloggers "the drooling morons of the lynch mob". A New York Times pieces made it sound as … Read more

Ruminations at In-N-Out on Valentine’s Day

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Tonight, for no apparent reason, I went to In-N-Out Burger.  It is the burger chain with excellent burgers and nothing else.  It isn’t that the rest of their food is bad–they literally have no other options.  I’ve always known that my roommate had trouble making decisions.  He is the one that makes the waiter come … Read more

Peace Process News

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This story (Officials: Abbas Fires Top Gaza Security Commanders, After Mortar Attack Threatens Cease-Fire) represents one of the most hopeful things I have seen come out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in quite some time. Palestinian Cabinet Secretary Hassan Abu Libdeh said Abbas took "punitive measures against officers who did not undertake their responsibilities, which led … Read more

The Inner Ring

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A recent post (which I’m not linking to since I don’t want to talk about that subject here) reminded me of one of the most interesting little pieces I read about 15 years ago.  C.S. Lewis had a 1944 speech (it appears to be something like a commencement speech) in which he clearly identifies a very key human motivation.  He describes peer pressure better than many psychologists:

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This is a Test

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I know it sounds stupid, but I’m a bit emotionally exhausted from my last post and the responses to it in the four places I’ve posted it.  So instead of writing the post I wanted to, I want to take advantage of the fact that I’m a conservative writer with a liberal audience and conduct an informal and unscientific survey which is attempting to test how separate the conservative and liberals sides of the political blogosphere are. 

Don’t google it, at least until after you answer.  If I say "Eason  Jordan CNN Scandal", do you know what I’m talking about? 

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Exhortation

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Well here is the post I never wanted to have to write.  I have noted before that I am in the odd position of being a conservative writer with a mostly liberal audience.  I’m usually ok with that, but sometimes I want to direct my writing to a conservative or Republican audience.  There has been … Read more

Koranic Duels Ease Terror

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Via Paul Cella, I see this fascinating CSM report: When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen’s Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster. Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in … Read more

Bridge

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A couple of readers have expressed interest in talking about the game of bridge.  I’m altogether too happy to do so, but the interests of not boring regular readers who come here for political discussions, most of it will be found below the fold. 

But before we get there I figured I might as well talk about the game a little bit and explain why I like it so much.  For those familiar with other major card games, bridge has elements of similarity.  It is a trick-taking game along the lines of hearts or spades and it usually is a trump game like spades.  It is played with two pairs at a table with each pair bidding how many tricks they think their combined hands can take depending on what suit is trump.  It is easier to take large numbers of tricks than in the game ‘spades’ because at the end of the bidding one of the pair ends up putting his hand on the table for all to see and the play of that hand is controlled by the other member of the pair.  There is an incentive not to underbid by large scoring bonuses at the game level (9-11 tricks depending on the contract) the small slam level (12 tricks) and the grand slam level (all 13 tricks).

What is special about bridge?  It has two defining characteristics which appeal to me more than in other card games.  Complexity from simple framework, and skill.  The first is fairly obvious, but the second seems strange to those who are unfamiliar with bridge.  In a tournament setting, the effect of luck is dramatically reduced.  This is done using what are called ‘boards’.  After shuffling a hand at the beginning of the day each hand is put into boards with designations for which hand goes to which player.  When they are played, instead of being returned to a full deck, each hand is placed back into the board and the board is passed on to another table.  You compete not with the players you sitting down against, but rather the players who are sitting the same direction as you.  After a few boards are played at one table you move one direction and the boards move another.  That way you can’t complain about getting all the ‘bad hands’ because everyone is playing the same hands and doing the best you can with them.  (Techinically these forms of bridge are called ‘duplicate bridge’).  As a result, good players can almost always outperform bad players.  This is kind of nice because it allows you to directly compare results at a card game.  (Which is the explanation for my little joke in the category).  One of the interesting things about bridge is the numerous bidding systems which people have developed off the rather simple core bidding language allowed. 

If you are interested in starting bridge, I suggest either that you find an ACBL chapter nearby and take lessons, or do what I did and read a few good books on the subject and play on the internet.  I don’t have a good book for learning the most rudimentary mechanics (though I think there is a "Learn Bridge in 30 days" book and a "Bridge for Dummies" book.)  But once you understand the mechanics I would strongly suggest Dorthy Hayden-Truscott’s "Bid Better, Play Better".  The bidding system she teaches is slightly outdated, but her analysis of how to think about a bidding structure will serve you well no matter what you choose later.  I would specifically not recommend any of the teaching books by Root which are so popular.  They are too dense for an average player to understand.  I would also reccomend any of the "Points Schmoints" books by Marty Bergen.  He has an excellent writing style and is able to break down some common judgment problems into easy-to-understand thought processes. 

The rest of this post is likely to be completely incomprehensible to those who don’t already know bridge.

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UN Food For Oil Scandal

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The preliminary report on the UN "Food For Oil" scandal is now available (warning this is a huge PDF file).  Since I played bridge tonight (we won) instead of reading the 246 page report, I can’t offer my commentary.  I will update this post with links commenting on it as I find them. 

Useful Distinctions

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This post was partially sparked by my co-blogger Hilzoy’s post on the often unhelpful-to-conversation category know as "the left".  It is a constant source of frustration that in political discussions (and generally in life) people use drastically overbroad categorizations in highly misleading ways.  While it certainly can be overused, the art of making useful distinctions … Read more

Frustrations With the Social Security Debate

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I have a few deep frustrations about how the Social Security debate typically plays out.  1.  Is it a pension program or a safety net program?  It seems that whenever I have the debate, the Social Security advocate will adopt whichever position is orthoganal to what I’m talking about–often flipping back and forth in the … Read more

The Right Question II

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Today’s entry is inspired by Mark Kleiman.  Persuading eight-year-olds to demand unhealthy food and expensive athletic shoes, thus making those items staples of second-grade culture, is a nasty trick to play on the parents of those eight-year-olds. Indeed, it is nothing less than a commercial assault on the natural hierarchy of the family, where the … Read more

Why They Hate Us Revisited

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Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post on the dynamics of terrorism and democracy.  I think he makes a key mistake that when analyzed further can actually be very helpful: As today’s Friedman offering notes, but doesn’t seem to process, a lot of your radicalized Arabs in the world are people of (mostly North African) Arab … Read more

Random Whining

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You all know one aspect of me pretty well, but not another.  I play volleyball about 20 hours a week.  I wasn’t an athletic child, so I take great pride in the fact that after many years of work at it, I’m actually really good at a sport.  It keeps me fit and lets me … Read more

The Right Question I

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This is the first in what I hope will be a continuing series.  It isn’t meant to be particularly partisan.  I call it "The Right Question" because I’m not going to attempt to provide an answer–I hope that it will spark discussion.  Today’s question was sparked in my head by this post at Crooked Timber.  … Read more

Why the NYT Pisses Me Off

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Some days you are just going along fairly well and then something really sets you off.  I was having a good day until Powerlineblog directed my attention to this NYT article on IraqTheModel.  IraqTheModel is a generally, though not reflexively pro-American weblog run by three Iraqis.  Last month, as the authors met with the President, … Read more

CBS Scandal

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The coalescing opinion on the more liberal side of the blogosphere (among the few willing to talk about it at least) seems to be that the CBS problem in appropriately dealing with almost certainly fraudulant documents while reporting was caused mostly by a competitive rush to publish a sensational story instead of political bias.  See … Read more

Torture

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Torture.  I’m not for torture.  The term has gotten tossed around a lot lately, and I fear that it is going the way of the term ‘war crime’–if it includes just about every treatment we are somewhat uncomfortable with, it isn’t useful.  The International Red Cross seems to want to ban any "system devised to … Read more

Sociological Tangent

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Warning, I would be completely unsurprised if many of you who come here for political griping find this completely uninteresting.  Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post going about masculinity, femininity and what people want in a mate.  This reminded me of something I had been thinking about a while back regarding gay culture and socialization.  … Read more

Social Programs

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Jane Galt mentions a statistic which generates some snark from Crooked Timber and a discussion about poverty levels, knowledge and access to food.  Rather than jump in completely I want to try to take the wonky mediation approach.  I presume that we can agree that poverty is undesirable.  I further presume that it is true … Read more

Gov. of California

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I was hopeful about Schwarzenegger when he was elected mostly because I didn’t think you could do worse than what we already had in California.  He has actually done quite well, but if he pulls off the stuff in this speech I’ll be totally sold.  This isn’t going to make friends, but it is a … Read more

Food And Drug Administration

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While I’m talking about changes to cherished institutions, let’s talk about the FDA.  There needs to be some control regarding drug distribution and claims about drugs, but I’m far from convinced that the FDA’s current approach is anything near the optimal approach.  Mark A.R. Kleiman (a liberal I respect but often disagree with) is apparently … Read more

Social Security

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There has been quite a bit of wrangling lately about whether or not there is a Social Security crisis and if there is, exactly when it becomes a crisis.  Instead of wading in to that again, I’m going to talk about how Social Security has changed, and how it could change again.  (If you are … Read more

Posting Rules Reprise

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I haven’t talked to my co-bloggers about this, but I’m taking this opportunity to repost the posting rules.  If I say something out of line, I’m sure they will set me straight.  In other words, to quote the Vigilantes of Love, "I could be wrong, I could be wrong, but I really don’t think so." 

We have had about four examples of threads which have degenerated into hellish examples of ugliness while us regular posters have been on vacation. 

Quit it.

I will be the very first to admit that I have, on occasion, responded inappropriately to people.  I’m not as good at setting the tone as Moe was.  But people… please try to respond to ideas.  Please try to explain ideas.  Please try to come up with ideas.  Please try to think things through.  Please respond to people who disagree with you without becoming monsters.  I think we have an excellent site here, and it is one of the few places where people have been able to come from different sides to talk about lots of different things.  The blogosphere doesn’t need dKos III, FreeRepublic IV, LGF V, or heaven help us WashingtonMonthly II. 

So I’m reposting the posting rules.  But as we know from the discussion of law around here, the letter of the law doesn’t always cut it.  Fortunately we are all adults here, (or if you aren’t we are going to give you the courtesy of treating you as one) so think about the spirit of the rules–pointed discusssion without vilification.  So without further discussion, the posting rules…

Be reasonably civil.

No profanity. For the record, ‘hell’, ‘damn’ and ‘pissed’ are not considered ‘profanity’ for the purposes of this rule; also for the record, the more offensive racial slurs and epithets will be deemed to ‘profanity’ for the purposes of this rule

Don’t disrupt or destroy meaningful conversation for its own sake.

Do not consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake.

Like Tac, we don’t ban for ideological reasons (unless you’re a Nazi or something equally vile) and/or simple disagreements (never mind that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to find someone who can manage to disagree with Katherine, von and me on the same topic). We’re all adults here, so I’m sure that this should be sufficient – with one caveat: there are a couple of notable trolls out there who will be banned the moment that they show up. As of 1:18 PM EST, Sunday, November 30, 2003, they haven’t, so if you’ve made a post here before then I’m not talking about you.

Lastly, just a reminder that Left and Right have very broad definitions and that people are going to take it personally if you inform them that of course all Xs eat babies, should they themselves be Xs (or Ys trying to keep things cool).

UPDATE (05/19/2004): As you may have noticed, we delete and ban spambots on sight. This is because comments sections are for original and/or interesting thoughts, not mass postings. Therefore, please note that if I come across a overly-long comment that is obviously a cut n’paste job, out it goes, no apologies, no regrets. Small cut n’pastes are fine; entire articles are not: when in doubt, it’s too long. Mind, if you have seen or made a comment elsewhere that would be perfect for a particular thread, you are more than welcome to link to it; just don’t give us the entire thing. We don’t have unlimited storage space.

ANOTHER UPDATE (10/24/2004): Calls for the assassination of any politician will be subject to immediate banning. An exception is made for legitimate military targets in time of war; due to the unique nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, members of the Palestinian Authority are to be considered ‘politicians’ for the purpose of this rule.

The above should be explicitly not read as being a prohibition on (but is not limited to) criticism, vituperation, espousal of conspiracy theories, disagreement, speculation on personal habits and/or motivations, expressions of contempt, unfavorable extrapolations of past behavior in order to guess future behavior, mild cursing or any other traditional method of expressing disapproval with a politician’s policy positions or personality, provided of course that such behavior does not violate another of the Posting Rules.

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Regarding Saudi Arabia

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I think it is quite clear that Saudi Arabia is a big part of the problem in the spread of the dangerous side of fundamentalist Islam.  I submit that there are two major problems in dealing with them, one economic and the other cultural.  First, they have a lot of oil which we want them … Read more

The Future and Its Enemies

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While in vacation mode, I’m still reading.  Today’s entry is about my airplane book, The Future and Its Enemies:  The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress by Virginia Postrel.  I know I’m about two years late to this book.  I’ve been meaning to read it for some time, and ran across it in a bargain bin near my sister’s house in Colorado. 

Virginia has a key idea which clarifies some of the difficulties we have in analyzing  polticial cleavages along a left-right split.  She speaks of dynamists and stasists.  In her description, dynamists are willing to embrace the messy nature of unguided social and technological change, while stasists do not.  In her terminology stasists come in two major varieties–reactionaries and technocrats.  Reactionaries wish to control change by reversing it and returning to a previous (and quite possibly mythical) golden age.  Patrick Buchanan is used throughout the book to give examples of reactionary thinking.  I think the choice of ‘stasist’ is revealed to be a bit poor when Virginia goes on to describe technocrats.  Technocrats attempt to tightly control change, often with the idea that an elite number of top-down experts can efficiently control and direct the important changes in society. 

Our new awareness of how dynamic the world really is has united two types of stasists who would have once been bitter enemies:  reactionaries, whose central value is stability, and technocrats, whose central value is control.  Reactionaries seek to reverse change, restoring the literal or imagined past and holding it in place.  A few decades ago, they aimed their criticism at Galbraithean technocracy.  Today they attack dynamism, often in alliance with their formier adversaries.  Technocrats, for their part, promise to manage change, centrally directing "progress" according to a predictable plan.  (That plan may be informed by reactionary values, making the categories soewhat blurry;  although they are more technocrats than true reactionaries, (William) Bennett and Galston inhabit the border regions).

I think this concept is useful to think about, but I suspect it is more distracting to describe both concepts as adhering to stasis than it would be if she called it something else.  The choice is made somewhat more understandable because many technocrats are utopian–they desire a beautiful endpoint.  Both technocrats and reactionaries believe that they know or can find the one best way to do things.  They then attempt to use the government to enforce that way of doing things.  Thinking about this helps me to clarify some of the strange twists that modern American politics takes.  The bulk of conservatives are dynamist with respect to economic thinking.  They have a split with respect to social issues.  Some of them are dynamist, a few are technocratic, and many are reactionary.  Some of those who are reactionary are also reactionary with respect to economic issues (e.g. Buchanan).  Liberals tend to by dynamist with respect to social organization.  They have a split in the economic sphere.  Many are technocratic, many are reactionary, and a few are dynamist in orientation. 

This post is about to get rather long because I intend to use extensive quotes.  So I am hiding it below the extended body.

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I am not Blogging About This

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For Christmas, instead of writing about politics, I think it would be fun to write about the books I’m reading.  Today I’m reading from:  Metamagical Themas by Douglas R Hofstadter.  It is a bit tougher going than his Godel, Escher, Bach.  But it is fun trying to comprehend an intellect as profound and wide-reaching as … Read more

Music Blather Friday (on Thursday)

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I’m writing today from Castle Rock, CO. And the ‘CO’ is for cold. My point of information for today is that Denver is rather colder than San Diego. Last night I went to see the movie version of the “Phantom of the Opera”. The sets were amazing. The costumes were beautiful. The cinematography was excellent. … Read more