Yes, there’s a blog for everything. This one recounts the hanging in London on this day in 1833 of Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls – for sodomy. Fro the London Courier at the time:
The culprit, who was fifty years of age, was a fine looking man, and had served in the Peninsular war. He was connected with a highly respectable family; but, since his apprehension not a single member of it visited him.
The execution of this veteran lit a spark that eventually helped end this barbarism.
"(E)xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking," – George Kennan, as cited by Greg Djerejian.
When you read Greg’s post, you begin to understand how great a gamble a McCain administration would be. Think: Bush with less caution.
Mark Penn is still giving advice.
A reader makes an important point:
It is true that, by their actions in Iraq, Bush and Cheney have ceded any claim to the moral high ground as far as a response to Russia’s involvement in Georgia is concerned, but I think that the difficulty of the US position goes back farther than that — to the policies of NATO expansion in general, and our policies regarding Kosovo in particular, that began with Bush I and Clinton.
Kosovo, like South Ossetia, is a minority province in a state that resulted from the breakup of a communist "confederation" of states.
Its inhabitants, like those of South Ossetia, sought independence. When the armed forces of the "sovereign" country of Serbia took steps to assert control over the breakaway province, NATO stepped in to protect the citizens of Kosovo and restore the peace, largely by trying to obliterate the capacity of the Serbian army to retain the province. NATO’s previous expansion into the Balkans made this possible, because, by the time of that conflict, Kosovo was more in NATO’s backyard/sphere of influence than Russia’s.
But that being the case, how is Georgia’s claim of sovereignty over South Ossetia entitled to any more respect than Serbia’s claim of sovereignty over Kosovo?
Why aren’t the ethnic Russians who form the majority in South Ossetia just as entitled to independence and self-determination as the ethnic Albanians who form the majority in Kosovo?
It should be recalled the Russia has bitterly opposed NATO’s policy with respect to the defense, and now recognition, of Kosovo, and NATO’s expansion into former Soviet Republics. It should come as no surprise that Russia would invoke the same principles of "peacekeeping" and rights of self determination to protect its turf in the Caucusus and challenge the whole idea of NATO expansion into Georgia. (Aren’t we glad we don’t have a treaty obligation to defend Georgia now?)
I think the whole issue of NATO expansion, which started in the first Bush administration, has gotten out of hand, and that GWB’s support of Georgia’s inclusion in NATO was foolishly overambitious. Americans need to be more patient. In 20 years, most of eastern Europe has become, to an amazing extent, part of the "West." The former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia aren’t going to be pried away from the Russians quite so easily, or in the same manner.
Manzi tackles global warming:
Hedging against the risk to future generations of potential unanticipated impacts from global warming is a legitimate job for the U.S. government. Ideally, it would be tackled by the governments of the small number of countries with a sophisticated technology development capability acting in some kind of coordinated fashion. A massive carbon tax, a cap-and-trade rationing system, and the attempt to use the government to control the evolution of the energy sector of the economy are all billed as prudent reactions to this risk, but each is the opposite: an impractical, panicky reaction unworthy of a serious government.
Artist Wafaa Bilal’s 30 day performance piece, Shoot an Iraqi, allowed internet users to aim and fire a paintball gun at Bilal. It was highly successful:
All told, 60,000 shots were fired from an astounding coalition of 128 nations. The website logged 80 million hits. “It’s been very hard,” he tells the diary. “It united people, it divided people, but that’s what art is supposed to do.”
Opus gets it almost perfectly right.
Bryan Finoki mulls over a metaphor:
…certainly, people aren’t floods; and perhaps, like floods, mere walls cannot contain them. Nor should migrants be treated with equivalent barriers of borderland floodgates and levees. In some ways, I wonder, how the discursive use of the flood/migration analogy might only contribute to the acceptance of a political logic that assumes migration can somehow be managed in much the same way as broken and overflowing hydrology.
[…]
Nevertheless, my purpose here is less to try and argue the merits – or lack of – using fluidity as a productive metaphor, but (after all this excessive verbiage) just to show a few examples of how issues of “illegal” immigration, national security, and active floodplain control are very literally – and very eerily – being handled together in the U.S. government’s attempts to “secure” the Mexican border.
Where once the government may have been able to boast progressive environmental conservation, we now seem to be getting a strange experiment in security preserves instead. Not security measures designed to protect the environment, but environmental augmentations that might be meant to protect the security measures themselves.
Levi van Veluw puts all sorts of crap on his head and then takes a photograph. Here he is, growing a landscape:
And here’s how he looks as a carpet:
A reader writes:
While you have denounced John McCain’s campaign tactics as "shitty," you’ve generally ignored some of the more vicious misrepresentations on the part of the Obama camp, the most egregious of which has to be their campaign to tar McCain with oil industry corruption allegations–the epitome of which has to be their "pocket" advertisement. Given that McCain has never shown "big oil" a whit of favoritism, Obama’s attempted smear on McCain’s indisputable integrity is at least as base a move, if not more so, than anything McCain has done. And while the "celebrity" ad was more than a bit silly, their "The One" web ad really was quite funny–I showed it to my largely apolitical 17 year-old sister, and she found it to be hilarious. More to the point, it actually serves a legitimate purpose: trying to drive a wedge between the notions of Obama, the phenomenon, and Obama, the candidate. Just about everybody, unless you’re somehow pathological, loves the Obama phenomenon. The McCain camp, however, needs to remind people that however fun this whole phenomenon may be, Obama is just a man who wants to be president, who has to be judged on his qualifications. And their "The One" ad seems to me to be a perfectly balanced and clever way to do that.
I know that you want this campaign to somehow be an unprecedented paragon of integrity, but I imagine if you actually think about this race in historical context, you’d realize just how incredibly civil it is.
There’s been no hint of swift-boating, or any similar such smears. The McCain camp’s fudged a couple of numbers and used humor to try to take away some of the shimmer of the rather ridiculous angelic-like aura that’s surrounded their opponent. Considering that this a political campaign, neither of these should be the least bit surprising. This is not "Rovian politics," this is normal. Indeed, the fact that you can get so worked up with moral outrage about the McCain campaign’s bit of number fudging just shows how incredibly genteel this race actually is. (I’d challenge you to name a close presidential race–or a close anything race–in U.S. history that’s more polite than the one we’re witnessing.)
On Iraq, I don’t quite understand your outpouring of support for Obama. The fact that Maliki has seemed to endorse Obama’s policy does not mean that anyone who thinks U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq past 2010 is a delusional neoconservative maniac. Maliki’s own military believes that a coalition presence will be required until at least 2015, and astute, if perhaps quite biased, Iraq observers believe that Maliki’s endorsement was in response to his perception that Obama is going to win and in response to his own domestic political concerns. I’d remind you that it’s the Iraqis who’ll have a firm control over the ceiling of the number of American troops in Iraq, while our president always has control over the floor. Given how perilously close we were to defeat in Iraq (at which point Obama’s essential position was that we ought to give up, I have to mention), and how hard-fought the gains have been, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want the candidate most likely to keep troop numbers near the Iraqi-controlled ceiling instead of the candidate who’s shown the greatest tendency to want to set an arbitrary American floor.
Lastly, you’ve suggested on more than one occasion that McCain is as bad or worse than Obama as it relates to fiscal issues. Yes, McCain’s proposals may cost more theoretically, but I have to point out that the vast majority of McCain’s legislative agenda, particularly anything remotely related to tax cuts, will be utterly dead on arrival. McCain doesn’t need to come up with spending cuts to offset his initiatives since most of the initiatives stand no chance of passage. Finding spending cuts would be a purely academic exercise that would do little but cost McCain votes. With Obama, by contrast, will get whatever he wants through congress. Just about every dime of his spending program will be enacted, and given his history in the Illinois State Legislature (though I really wish we could get a more even-handed account of that time in Obama’s political career than the statistically-challenged Stanley Kurtz) that’s likely to just be the tip of the iceberg. McCain has shown a very, very consistent record of fiscal responsibility, while Obama has nothing but empty promises and a record that shows the opposite. I say that we should trust a candidate’s record as a proper indication of what they’re likely to do when in office, not what they say in the year they’re running for president.
Look, I understand how you find Obama tempting. So do I. If even one house of Congress were in Republican hands, I’d consider it. But I really don’t want the only check on the Democrats’ agenda to be a 42-seat–if that–Republican minority in the Senate. McCain, if elected, will ensure the continuation of divided government (which you, only two years ago, so heartily endorsed), and he will send the Republican Party in a new, and indisputably desirable, direction after the last eight years of damage. McCain may not be perfect, but at the very least, he still merits a conservative’s honest consideration. And you really ought to give him that.
The Dish 