Ariel Sharon has proposed a new "disengagement plan" in his recent speech at a conference in Herzliya. The plan calls for Israeli forces to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, behind a perimeter marked by the "security fence" currently under construction. (The fence mostly follows the 1948 Israeli-Jordanian border, but juts out in places well into the West Bank.) The plan also calls for some settlement outposts beyond this perimeter to be dismantled.

The plan has drawn mixed reviews. about 60% of Israelis support it, but many on the left doubt that it will actually be implemented. Meanwhile, the right complains that it represents a victory for terrorists, and a defeat for settlers.

I have a more mundane objection to the plan: it's doomed to fail. The standard argument for withdrawing behind a security fence is that it has succeeded in Gaza, since no suicide bombers have launched attacks on Israel from there. But it's also the case that from Gaza--where the IDF never launched a full-fledged invasion of all the cities, as it did in the West Bank--there has been a steady rain of crude rockets on adjacent Israeli lands, such as the Gaza settlements and the town of Sderot (inside pre-1967 Israel). If the IDF were to "disengage" from the West Bank, it might well be able to prevent suicide bombers from penetrating its security perimiter. But it would be incapable of preventing massive barrages of rockets on towns near the perimiter--including several major Israeli cities.

What would Israel do in such a situation? if it returned to the West Bank in force, it would be no better off than it is now--indeed, worse off, since it had afforded the terrorist organizations time and space to regroup and rejuvenate themselves. If it restrained itself from re-entering the West Bank, it would have to respond from a distance, using weapons, such as artillery and helicopters, that are much more likely to cause collateral civilian damage, and thus earn condemnation from world opinion. And it would run the risk of international "observers" or "peacekeepers" entering the territories in Israel's absence, and turning into de facto defenders of the terrorists' turf.

The security fence is clearly a necessary measure for the protection of Israelis. And the Israeli far right's complaints notwithstanding, there's nothing wrong with the removal of a few settlement outposts, if it improves Israel's security situation. But abandoning the West Bank to the mercy of Arafat's goons, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the rest is good neither for its inhabitants nor for their Israeli neighbors. Israeli politicians should stop treating this option as if it were a remotely viable one.

In early December, the New York Times published an ominous-sounding account of the harsh measures being taken by US troops to quell guerrilla forces still operating in occupied Iraq:

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …

“If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.”

Both Eric Rescorla and Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell noted the new American tactics with great consternation. I offered comments to each, based on my previous arguments, suggesting that their concern was misplaced.

Well, I didn't expect such quick vindication. According to the Washington Post,

At the heart of this tightly woven network is Auja, Hussein's birthplace, which U.S. commanders say is the intelligence and communications hub of the insurgency....U.S. commanders said they dealt the insurgents a major blow when they decided Oct. 30 to isolate Auja, surrounding it with fence and razor wire so the sole exit was past a U.S. military checkpoint. Russell said this move severed the insurgency's intelligence and communications hub from the outside campaign.

Of course, this latter account could be exaggerated, or even entirely misguided. But so far, at least, my analysis appears to be holding up pretty well.

If I were an advertising executive for Remington or Norelco, I'd rush to produce a last-minute holiday ad campaign based on this picture.

In a pre-dawn sweep, German police raided over 1,200 homes of suspected followers of a Turkish Islamic radical named Muhammed Metin Kaplan.

Thousands of confused German students took to the streets in protest, worried about losing access to their SAT prep courses.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can restrict "soft money" contributions to political parties and restrict purchases of political advocacy advertising in the period immediately preceding an election. Meanwhile, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that contributions to terrorist organizations are constitutionally protected, unless it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the contributor knew of the recipient organization's terrorist activity.

The solution for campaign organizations is obvious: they should take their cue from foreign terrorist groups and establish a clandestine network of interlocking "charitable" and "political" organizations, with money being secretly funnelled from the former to the latter via elaborate money-laundering enterprises, preferably in foreign countries. A corporation can hardly be held responsible, after all, if its donation to the "World Regulation Relief Fund" results in an attack ad against a local congressman being purchased by a tangentially related foreign political organization--right?

I can think of no better way to clean up the financing of American campaigns. Thank goodness for the uncanny wisdom of the federal judiciary.

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum mourns the lack of a "national debate" on the recently-passed Medicare reform bill. "[W]e as a nation have lost our appetite for grand domestic policy debates," she laments.

These sound like admirably democratic sentiments--until one considers who she meant by "we". Surely she didn't expect the average family to debate the finer points of Medicare reform over the Thanksgiving dinner table. Heck, the likes of Matthew Yglesias, Daniel Drezner and Oxblog's David Adesnik--none of them exactly strangers to policy wonkery--have all conceded that the subject of Medicare is one truly powerful snooze-inducer. Perhaps Anne Applebaum has a stronger stomach for it, but if so, she's in rare company.

In fact, the whole idea of "deliberative democracy" is rather dubious to begin with. After all, if the public ought to be ruminating on the minutiae of every issue, then what on earth is representative government for, anyway? Even if the public were competent to engage in such niggling discussion, they would have neither the time nor the inclination to do so, being far too preoccupied with their own lives to dwell, Applebaum-style, on such matters.

In practice, the system works quite well with much less public involvement. Voters get riled up over a few specific, fairly straightforward issues that they can grasp--Applebaum mentions two recent ones: telemarketing and spam--and happily leave the details of the rest to the political insiders, with the understanding that if they're handled sufficiently incompetently that they become visible problems, then politicians' heads will roll.

After all, that's how CEOs deal with underlings, or customers with merchants. All that they require is accountability, not micromanagement, and the threat to do business with someone else usually (eventually) suffices to produce competent results. If I trust the food I eat, the home I live in, and many other necessities of life to this system, then why not the laws that govern me, as well?

Matthew Yglesias, the sole American (as far as I know) who actually pays attention to Canadian politics, notes that a movement is afoot there to introduce proportional representation (PR) into the Canadian electoral system. This development is a source of some amusement to me, for reasons of personal experience. I spent a little time in Israel in 1990--a year that does not exactly stand out as a high point in the annals of Israeli politics. The electorate at the time was very nearly equally divided between the two major party coalitions, and both began resorting to a series of increasingly dubious maneuvers in an effort to establish a bare majority in the country's parliament.

During my stay, I heard numerous friends explain to me that the underlying cause of the problem was Israel's system of proportional representation. PR, they explained, removes all accountability from individual members of parliament, who win their seats based on their positions on their party's list, rather than on any direct support from voters. It thus rewards craven party hacks over politicians of broad stature whom the party leader might consider a threat. It also gives considerable power to small, unaffiliated parties, who can then sell their loyalty to one or the other major coalition at an arbitrarily large and unseemly price. What was needed, my friends argued, was a system of parliamentary districts--like the Canadian one.

Of course, I was familiar with the Canadian reality, and I patiently explained to my friends that in fact Canadian members of parliament are about as likely to be craven party hacks as their Israeli counterparts. Because party leaders determine who will fill the executive, cabinet and top civil service posts should their party form a government, they completely control the levers of power, and voters thus almost always vote based on party leadership rather than the identity of the local back-bench candidate. Backbenchers thus owe their election prospects--and their hopes of rising in the party leadership--entirely to their status in the party.

As for the mercenary aspect of PR, it's simply replaced by the old-fashioned pork barrel. Many ridings have a tradition of loyalty to one party or another--or even to whichever party appears about to win--and milk that loyalty for lucrative government handouts. The only difference between this form of bribery and the kind experienced in Israel is that the constituencies being bribed in Canada are geographical rather than broadly political.

Finally, district-based voting--at least with a "first past the post" voting system--has the drawback of tending to exaggerate the mandate of the most popular party, often giving an absolute majority in parliament to a party with perhaps a third or so of the popular vote. Of course, this setup has its advantages as well: with majority governments more likely, horse-trading to form coalitions is much less common. But those majority governments also have much greater political power than their popular vote would suggest they deserve, and thoughtful Canadians have thus long believed that PR would be a fairer, more democratic system.

In fact, it seems to be a popular conceit in just about every democracy that problems such as pork-barrel politics, cynical political horse-trading, and party hackery represent subtle flaws in the system's plumbing, and that a few careful adjustments to its gaskets and stopcocks can simply make the ugliness go away. In reality, just about any reasonable system will soon bring the voting public the government they implicitly want (and richly deserve), through the straightforward process of politicians being punished for displeasing the electorate. If Israelis--or Canadians--really didn't want politicians haggling for goodies for their constituents, then they could refuse to vote for politicians that did so. If Canadians--or Israelis--really didn't want to be represented in parliament by party hacks, then they could refuse to vote for parties that nominated them to stand for parliament.

Somebody, though, is voting for these people--enough, in fact, that they're still getting elected. 'Nuff said.

Journalists have been on a bit of a thumbsucking tear since Stephen Glass, author of numerous wholly fabricated stories at the New Republic, recently appeared at a panel on journalistic ethics, following the opening of the film "Shattered Glass", based on his "career". Reaction to his return to the public eye has been, to say the least, less than effusive. Andrew Sullivan excoriated Glass' self-serving new pseudo-apologetic public demeanor. Jack Shafer spent a couple of articles pondering just what kind of brutal tortures might be fitting punishments for his crimes. Jonathan Chait, ever the intellectual, worried that his case might distract people from the real problem with journalism: that not enough writers see the world exactly the way Jonathan Chait does. Other scribes speculated on the nature of Glass' psychopathology, or applauded the film's brisk pacing and sharp characterizations.

None of these recent commentaries, however, address the main journalistic theme of the film: that Glass' perfidy succeeded because his colorful, zany, almost comic-novelistic stories seduced readers, colleagues and editors alike--and that all of them should have been paying more attention to the articles' intellectual content (let alone their basic accuracy) than to their flashiness. Glass' hilarious touches--the orgy at the Young Republicans' convention, the workoholic stockbroker who relieved himself into a medical contraption to avoid having to leave his desk, the teenaged computer hacker with his own agent for job contract negotiations--were (as Shafer pointed out five years ago) "too good to check", not because they confirmed strong real-life suspicions--or even because they catered to wishful expectations or simplistic prejudices--but rather because their energy and vividness, their perfect balance on the edge between plausibility and wild absurdity, made them fascinating to read whether they were true or not.

Perhaps the reason why this point hasn't been adequately addressed in all the journalistic commentary on the Glass story is that journalists themselves, far from recognizing this problem, continue to admire brilliant Glass-style scene-painting, even as they condemn the fabrications it made possible. Modern journalists worship the craftsman who can evoke settings and characters with a few deft sentences, turning an otherwise unremarkable story into irresistible reader-bait. Witness New York Times journalist Rick Bragg, who made a career out of such stories, gently (if somewhat condescendingly) sketching the rural American South and its honest, simple, hardworking folk--until he was fired, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, for letting stringers do his legwork for him, and applying his magic pen to places he'd in fact barely seen. Some commentators certainly criticized his exploitation of uncredited apprentices. But none denied his writing skill, or questioned its value to his newspaper. All that was asked of him was that he 'fess up and give at least partial credit to the people who did his actual reporting for him.

Of course, in these days of wire-service and cable-channel commoditization of hard news, and (if I may say so myself) bloggers providing high-quality thought-provoking commentary and analysis for free, about the only thing journalists can market themselves with anymore--apart from their deeply ambiguous, mutually compromising relationships with leakers--is their polished writing. And so they milk their skills for all they're worth, celebrating their most accomplished storytellers--until one of them turns out to be, well, just a bit too much of a storyteller.

When Michael Kelly died while reporting from Iraq during the recent war there, he was lionized by his former colleagues--not for his legendary devotion to the truth, or his deep insight into the topics he covered, but rather (understandably) for his personal warmth and kindness and (more worryingly) for his "incandescent" writing and "unparalleled gift for editing prose". It was also mentioned in passing that Kelly's editorship at the New Republic was less than entirely successful--tactfully eliding the point that its legacy included Stephen Glass' blossoming career as a writer of powerfully compelling falsehoods. Perhaps now, when the Stephen Glass story has returned to public attention, it's time to consider the possibility that Kelly's great strength and his great failure may not have been entirely unrelated.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is bemoaning the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred that dominates partisan debate in today's America. "I'm afraid that America is now transforming into.....the political moonscape that I remember when I was a student in England in the 1980's," he writes. "Left and right came from different social classes, lived in different areas, attended different schools and despised each other." Andrew Sullivan has similar thoughts.

Kristof and Sullivan should stop worrying so much. The bitter rancor that typifies the current left-right divide in the US is a cyclical phenomenon, riding on the confluence of a trio of polarizing factors that will inevitably dissipate:

Political change. The decade of the 1980's in Britain was the Margaret Thatcher era, when the dominance of welfare state politics was being challenged by the rise of a new free enterprise-oriented middle class. Like all momentous changes, that one brought the conflicting interests of rival political coalitions into stark contrast, as old compromises became irrelevant and new ones had yet to be stricken. The sharp rightward shift in American politics in the post-Clinton era has shaken things up here in similar fashion, and the scrambling over suddenly up-for-grabs assets (the fealty of the judiciary, for instance) is bound to get somewhat testy.

Momentous issues It would be nice if partisan debate over the war on terror could be polite and genteel. Unfortunately, the issue is of such obviously enormous importance that disagreements about it seem petty unless they are themselves claimed to be of deep and monumental importance. There's no point whatsoever in carping about the details of homeland security or the war in Iraq--if there's any disagreement at all, it must be asserted that it is the nation's very safety--perhaps even survival--that is at stake. Such circumstances don't exactly encourage restrained rhetoric.

A polarizing leader. it's hard to imagine a more polarizing figure than Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" who ruled her party absolutely and came to embody everything her party, faction and constituency stood for. Likewise, Bill Clinton, a president facing (after 1994) a House and Senate united against him, became, in effect, the sole major national political figure to represent his half of the electorate. And George W. Bush, because of the dominance of the presidency in the suddenly-crucial foreign policy arena (and partly because of a leadership vaccuum in Congress these days, especially on the Republican side) has found himself with an almost Clintonian level of pre-eminence when compared with any of his political allies. Needless to say, all three of these politicians were passionately adored and embraced by their "own" side--and intensely hated and excoriated by their opponents.

Of course, these three factors tend to decline with time, as political waves of change peter out, as the intensity of major crises dissipates, and as dominant leaders eventually lose their aura of invincibility and are shunted aside. As Kristof notes, "Europe has matured and become much less polarized" since his time there. There's no reason not to expect a similar outcome here, in due time.

Naomi Wolf apparently believes that the easy availability of Internet pornography has soured America's male youth on the idea of real, live sex with real, live women. "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women," she writes. Matthew Yglesias, an instance of the demographic in question, ridicules the idea. Daniel Drezner, a former instance of same, concedes that Wolf's hypothesis may apply to some men, although not most. In fact, the statistics completely vindicate Yglesias' skepticism: sexual activity among young men has been fairly steady over the last decade--declining very slightly, but still quite high, by the standards of previous decades. If the Internet has been suppressing male libidos, the effect has yet to turn up in the data.

And that's hardly surprising. To put it bluntly, men were deriving titillation from the available imagery--or from their own imaginations--long before Naomi Wolf arrived on the scene, and without ever losing their taste for actual sexual experience. The pornography available today may be more vivid and explicit than in the past, but that doesn't mean that a modern-day Jud Fry is any more likely to be satisfied with it than with the naughty postcards of years past.

But what Wolf really objects to, it turns out, is not that boys aren't interested in sex--indeed, all the signs suggest that they still are--but rather that they don't value it as much as they used to:

When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Now....[b]eing naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars.

Wolf should trust her own economic reasoning a little more: if "being naked is not enough" these days, perhaps it's simply because there are no longer "more young men who wanted to be with naked women than....naked women on the market."

Of course, Wolf has always been a strident third-wave feminist advocate of female sexual "empowerment"--i.e., women enjoying casual, recreational sex every bit as enthusiastically and uninhibitedly as men traditionally have. What she apparently never realized, until now, was that much of the fun of it for her--that is, the wonderful feeling of being valued, and appreciated, that she apparently used to be able to win with her sexual favors--depended on her being relatively unusual, among women, in her approach to sex.

But now that women like her are, in effect, a dime a dozen--and are unfortunately often treated that way, as well--she's suddenly forced to consider, to her horror, the possibility that her sisterhood's successful campaign to turn women on to "hooking up" may have destroyed the very source of the pleasure they sought to promote. No wonder she prefers instead simply to blame it all on Internet pornography....

Although Thomas Friedman's ideas are usually shallow and foolish, they often expose, in instructive ways, the vicissitudes of the "conventional wisdom" in American foreign policy circles. An example is his column about the differences between the Iraqi resistance to American occupation and the Vietcong's resistance to American troops during the Vietnam war. Says Friedman:

The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge — a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.....A vast majority of Iraqis would reject them, because these bombers either want to restore Baathism or install bin Ladenism.

Now perhaps in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war, when information sources were conflicting and difficult to assess, such a reading of history might have been excusable as a preliminary assessment. But in 2003, it is simply embarrassing to read Friedman implying that the Vietcong--a fully controlled arm of the North Vietnamese army--were somehow polar opposites to their Khmer Rouge allies, or particularly popular in the South, or fighting so that Vietnamese could "rule themselves".

Of course, Friedman isn't really interested in the truth about the Vietcong--to him, the Vietcong are more important as characters in an abstract morality play than as a real, live historical guerrilla/terrorist organization. The storyline of the play is always the same: a ragtag collection of rebels fighting for freedom against an evil oppressor ultimately win by rallying popular support to their side, winning the people's "hearts and minds". What Friedman is saying about Iraq is not that this plot doesn't apply, but merely that the plucky rebels are the Americans and their allies, not the remaining opposition.

The problem with this script is that it's based on three false assumptions:

That the "hearts and minds" of a national population are ever united in supporting a particular political faction. I've already dealt with this fallacy.

That "hearts and minds" are won through displays of kindness, fairness and generosity. As I've mentioned before, even the nicest group of soldiers in the world quickly wears out its welcome in a foreign land, simply by being foreign and military. Political support is based on much more than just individual or group conduct.

That winning "hearts and minds" is the (only) route to victory. How long would Saddam Hussein--or any of the current governments in the Middle East, for that matter--have lasted if that premise were correct? In practice, political factions win power through a combination of public acceptance, loyalty from a core segment of supporters, and physical intimidation.

These three misconceptions, taken together, lead to a long-established pattern of Western misunderstanding of foreign civil conflicts: a faction of power-hungry fanatics gains control of some area through sheer ruthlessness, then claims to have won the "hearts and minds" of the area's cowed populace. Western observers either take this claim at face value, or else attempt to challenge it by being kinder and gentler than the fanatics--in which case, the tactic fails, and the observers conclude that the ruthless fanatics must, indeed, have won the "hearts and minds" battle. The entire West then abandons the region to suffer under the pitiless reign of the fanatics.

We can only hope that the same dynamic doesn't once again play itself out in Iraq.

Gregg Easterbrook has once again been tripped up by his views on religion. This time, he's complaining that while physicists propose all kinds of wild, incomprehensible models of the universe--multiple hidden dimensions, for example--spirituality gets no similar respect in academic circles. "To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea," he writes, "while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause."

Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy and Eric "Educated Guesswork" Rescorla have taken Easterbrook to task, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that string theory's idea of hidden dimensions is actually scientifically defensible, whereas Easterbrook's "spiritual dimension" is not exactly bursting with empirical or theoretical support. However, I believe they miss the more fundamental sense in which Easterbrook is off-base.

Imagine, for a moment, that we were to take Easterbrook seriously, and consider his "spiritual dimension" a valid scientific concept. What would we do? Well, we'd ask physicists to conduct experiments, work out theories, and generally explore the possibility. And let us suppose that they did so, and concluded that the "spiritual dimension" is in fact the seventh of the ten-or-eleven dimensions currently being proposed by string theorists, with its properties and behavior governed by such-and-such set of equations. Would Easterbrook be any happier?

Not at all. For the whole point of the "spiritual dimension" of which he speaks is that it's not describable in scientific terms. As he notes when discussing "intelligent design" theory (what Eric Rescorla correctly calls "warmed-over creationism"), "[w]hen it comes to intellectual rigidity, there's little difference between the national academy declaring that only natural forces may be considered, and the church declaring that only divine explanations may be considered."

Well, neither Easterbrook nor the church acknowledge the possibility that God might just be a boring old physical phenomenon, governed by a bunch of differential equations--but he likely doesn't see anything wrong with that. Such a claim would be incompatible with Christianity as just about every Christian understands it. Similarly, "intelligent design" and a "spiritual dimension" are not simply bad science, but rather non-science. Easterbrook believes there's more to the universe than science, and he's entitled to believe that. But he's not entitled to demand that his belief be considered in any way relevant to the scientific endeavor.

The fact that both science and (Jewish or Christian) theology assume an independently existing reality (or "truth") doesn't mean that both pursuits necessarily have to--or are even remotely likely to--converge on the same version of it. They are in fact two decidedly different approaches to knowledge, and appreciating them both means recognizing that one has very little to say about the other, and that they needn't be--and probably can't be--fully reconciled. Then again, Easterbrook's mocking treatment of science makes it quite clear that he's not really interested in such a reconciliation at all. Rather, he'd like both to be governed by (his own) "common sense"--which is clearly more thoroughly informed by religion than by science.

The New York Times apparently doesn't want Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize for journalism revoked. Times editor Bill Keller writes, "[a]s someone who spent time in the Soviet Union while it still existed, the notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps." Eugene Volokh disagrees: "No-one is suggesting that the Pulitzer people and the Times enter into some conspiracy to pretend that the award had never been given....This isn't airbrushing history; it's correcting error."

Volokh's argument is superficially appealing, and the Times is obviously not without a vested interest in seeking to avoid an embarrassing revocation of its reporter's honor. But I believe Keller's point actually reflects a more accurate view of such prizes in general, and the Pulitzers in particular. For in fact they do not represent today's consensus verdict on any particular past year's best reporting, but rather the consensus of the Pulitzer committee of the year in question. Moreover, it is doubtful that Duranty's is anywhere near alone among all past Pulitzers in being considered today to have been awarded "in error". And it is entirely possible that decades from now, several past Pulitzer winners will be seen to have been even more egregiously chosen than Duranty's.

Thus to revoke Duranty's prize today would be to imply--completely falsely--that the historical list of "unrescinded" Pulitzers reflects a current consensus regarding the best journalism of past years. Such a consensus would in fact be very difficult to achieve, and quite possibly less useful to catalog, in the end, than the choices of contemporaries reflected in the unaltered Pulitzer list.

That Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer is a blot upon the prize's reputation. The only purpose of rescinding the prize today would be to imply--again, completely falsely--that today's Pulitzer committee is somehow less prone to the shortsightedness that led to Duranty's being honored seventy years ago. Future generations are free to judge that for themselves, and would be foolish to rely on this year's committee to make the decision for them.

Both Oxblog's Patrick Belton and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds have concluded that a fascinating first-hand account of travelling through Cuba is in fact a searing indictment of that country's economic mismanagement and political repression. Oddly enough, I got a very different impression of the place from the piece. The Cuban countryside, it seems, is sadly poverty-stricken and backward. But it's not so much repressed as resigned--the people lead their simple, spartan, difficult lives as best they can, and many of them believe the government's propaganda simply because it's the natural thing to do. It is only those with unusual ambition, energy and initiative who chafe under the heavy hand of governmental regimentation. And what fraction of the population fits that description is far from clear.

Now, I don't deny for a second that Cuba would be better off with a freer economy and polity. I believe that idyllic ignorance does not exist, and that those who are satisfied with their lives only because they don't know of better alternatives are better off enlightened--even if they may end up sadder as a result. To me, knowledge and understanding are the essence of humanness, and mere uncomprehending bliss is no substitute.

But taking a moral position against such ignorance is not the same as objectively failing to recognize its existence, even its prevalence, in benighted corners of the world. Few peoples, for example, suffer more from their government than the North Koreans, who live under a regime of unparalleled cruelty and incompetence, who have repeatedly faced famine and starvation over the years, and who can be executed merely for trying to escape their vast national prison. Yet it's unlikely that all that many North Koreans, heavily regimented and information-starved as they are, can see through the official government's lies and blame their "Dear Leader", instead of the regime's numerous claimed foreign enemies, for the horrible conditions in which they live.

In fact, ignorance isn't even a prerequisite for ruinous political self-delusion. The Palestinians who continue to endorse the terrorist "armed struggle" that has impoverished and immiserated them, the former East Germans wallowing in "Ostalgie", the neo-luddite Westerners who shun the marvels of modern medicine, modern agriculture, and other modern technologies that have so improved their material living conditions--all are choosing to embrace choices that are objectively associated with severe hardship. It would hardly be surprising if many Cubans, insulated as they are from information about conditions elsewhere, choose to believe that their lives, their country and their leaders are every bit as great--relatively speaking, at least--as their government tells them.

The case of Terri Schiavo, a profoundly brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband wants to disconnect her feeding tube so that she may die--and whose parents and siblings want to keep her alive--is one of those hard cases that ought to give even the most self-assured moral thinker pause to consider other perspectives. Ideally, one might hope for a rich public debate on the subject, leading to a democratic consensus as to the necessary conditions for concluding that someone ought not be kept alive, and the proper role of various parties' preferences in determining that decision.

At least that's what one would hope for if one were not a fanatical devotee of American Legal Religion. But here's Slate's Dahlia Lithwick foaming at the mouth over the people's representatives' unbearable uppitiness in daring to pronounce on the issue:

Whether one believes that Terri Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state" or a "minimally conscious state" is immaterial. Whether one believes that her blinks and smiles are signs of cognition or automated reflexes is similarly not the issue. All that matters is that these disputes are governed by law, that the law says Michael Schiavo is her legal guardian, and that his decision ought to have been final.

Since 1990, when the Supreme Court decided Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, there has been a constitutionally protected right to decline unwanted medical procedures. How does the Florida Legislature justify overriding that decision and its own Constitution—which guarantees a right to privacy and allows residents or their legal guardians to terminate life support—by enacting a "law" that expressly violates that right? And how dare Jeb Bush call for the appointment of a new guardian for Schiavo? The courts have already named one—her husband.

To Lithwick, the courts make the law; any so-called "law" produced by mere legislators is insolent usurpation of judicial prerogatives, and should be ignored. One wonders how Americans can ever hope to establish democracy in Iraq, when this kind of rank contempt for it is so commonplace back home.

It's not terribly surprising that Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned his speech to the Islamic Summit Conference into a foul anti-Semitic diatribe about how "the Jews rule this world by proxy". After all, he has a long history of anti-Semitic pronouncements. Nor is it exactly shocking that the delegates attending the conference gave him a standing ovation. After all, anti-Semitic hate literature has been a staple in public discourse throughout most of the Islamic world for years. What was more interesting, however, was the occasional reaction--from the New York Times' Paul Krugman, for example--to the effect that, sure, the guy may be a wild-eyed Jew-hater, but as Muslim leaders go, at least he makes the trains run on time.

Now, I'm normally the last one in the world to trot out such trite analogies to World-War-II fascism. But in this case, I think the chairman of the Anti-Defamation League has it exactly right. The reason the analogy is appropriate is that although few people today are aware of it, those who made excuses for Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the rest--at the beginning at least--were hardly all moral monsters or clueless ignorami. Rather, they looked at the unappetizing smorgasbord of potential leaders available for a collection of seemingly ungovernable countries in the throes of economic collapse and social chaos, and decided that a bit of over-the-top racial rhetoric was a small price to pay. Think of it as a geopolitical version of Moynihan's concept of "defining deviancy down": When an entire region's leadership consists of ruthless, deluded incompetents, then a ruthless, deluded competent seems appealing by comparison.

The problem with this reasoning, of course, is that ruthless, deluded leaders never stay competent for long. Eventually, demagogues who flirt with violent rhetoric reach the point of being compelled to live up to their bombast, with disastrous results. Gamal Abdel Nasser, to choose one famous example, rode his fiery brand of Pan-Arabist militancy to de facto leadership of the entire Arab world in the 1950s. But he found himself trapped by his own ideology in 1967, failed to back down from a recklessly escalating confrontation with Israel, and ended up provoking his own devastating military defeat.

We don't know where the Malaysian Prime Minister's rhetoric will lead him--or perhaps his successors--but chances are that it will not be particularly good for Malaysia. No leader is perfect, of course, and dictators are generally less perfect than most. (Democracy provides a useful quality control mechanism, if nothing else.) But among leadership flaws, the willingness to discount reality entirely, repeatedly, and in public, is a lot more serious than Krugman et al. seem to recognize.

The folks at the Volokh Conspiracy and "Crooked Timber" are discussing their favorite (and least favorite) bumperstickers. I can't resist mentioning one I saw recently: it was bright red, and bore the slogan, "if this sticker is blue, you're driving too fast."

Well, Oxblog's Josh Chafetz liked it.

An update to the Easterbrook story: Easterbrook has apologized, and The New Republic has also apologized to its readers, excoriating Easterbrook's comments, but accepting his apology and defending him against charges of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, ESPN has summarily fired Easterbrook, who used to write an excellent weekly football column for them. (It's unclear, though, whether Easterbrook's crime in their eyes was singling out Jews, or merely singling out Disney CEO Michael Eisner, whose empire includes ESPN.)

Many pixels have since been rendered on this matter, including by Meryl Yourish (who accepts Easterbrook's apology) and Roger Simon (who accepts it with reservations). Perhaps the most interesting take is Mickey Kaus'--he thinks that Easterbrook simply got carried away with his rhetoric, recklessly casting about for any argument that came to mind, and stumbled on an offensive one. (Kaus who is a former journalistic colleague of Easterbrook's, also recalls once making a similar blunder himself.)

My own best guess as to Easterbrook's thinking (not that it necessarily matters) is that he appears to be something of an "Old Testament Christian" who thinks of his stern religiously-derived morality as common to both the Christian and Jewish traditions. (He writes in his apology of belonging to a joint Jewish-Christian congregation, of emphasizing the Jewish roots of Christianity, and of berating the Jewish producers of violent movies in exactly the same way as he did the Catholic Mel Gibson for the same transgression.) He therefore felt entitled to address the two Jewish film producers, not just as fellow Americans, but also as quasi-co-religionists.

His key error, then, was to forget that he's not Jewish, and hence that if he tries to tell certain Jews how they should behave as Jews (rather than simply as people), he's walking straight onto a moral minefield. A Jew haranguing other Jews who make violent films by invoking the lessons of the Holocaust would merely be engaging in incoherent sophistry. But a Christian scolding Jews for failing to learn the lessons of the Holocaust cannot but sound suspiciously as though he's threatening a future refresher course.

Gregg Easterbrook, of all people, has echoed--and in The New Republic, of all places--a standard, and extremely stupid, criticism routinely levied at Jews. Complaining about brutal violence in Hollywood movies, he writes,

Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.

Now, these two film executives' religion are obviously staggeringly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Why not their race? Their sex? Their belly button orientation? The first part of Easterbrook's entirely vacuous argument makes equal sense--that is, none at all--if any of these categories are used in place of faith. (Yes, there are awful people with "outies", but does that excuse the behavior of these "innies"?)

But the real peak of Easterbrook's illogic is his reference to "[r]ecent European History" as an argument against Jews "glorifying the killing of the helpless". In fact, the only inference that Jews in particular are better placed than Gentiles to draw from the Holocaust, by virtue of their experience of suffering, is the practical observation that "glorifying the killing of the helpless" is, all things considered, a lot safer than failing to do so. And presumably that's not the lesson Easterbrook has in mind.

There are also a great many more morally salutary lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, of course--but these are not lessons that Jews are particularly well-placed to receive, or needful of receiving. (One never hears, for example, assertions that the Palestinian Arabs' history of collective misfortune should have taught them the horrors of militant nationalism.) On the contrary, it is the decendants of 20th-century Europe's Gentile brutalizers of Jews, rather than Jews themselves, who stand to learn the most from the negative example of their ancestors. After all, if there's no such a thing as a cultural propensity towards some kind of behavior--say, racist violence--then Jews have no more or less reason to worry about emulating their ancestors' murderers than anybody else. And if such cultural propensities do exist, then why would one expect to find dangerous ones in the cultures of the victims of past atrocities, rather than in those of the perpetrators?

I won't waste any time discussing the radioactive a-S-word, but for insulting irrationality alone, Easterbrook deserves all the opprobrium Meryl Yourish and Roger Simon can throw at him.

Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan are strangely giddy over the news: a state with a strong populist tradition has elected, by a plurality in a multi-way race, a charismatic, muscle-bound showbiz figure with a weak political track record, a somewhat tainted sexual past, and a suspiciously vague policy platform. I suppose Kaus and Sullivan are buoyed by their memories of the spectacularly successful result the last time this happened....

The key factors in the above discription, of course, are "weak political track record" and "suspiciously vague policy platform". It's a common myth in democratic countries that a good, decent, intelligent leader can simply look at each of the day's issues, choose the sensible position to take in every case, and then take it, thus winning the accolades of a grateful populace imbued with the same straighforward good sense. Unfortunately, the public are neither particularly imbued with good sense, nor inclined to use what little of it they have to overcome their own selfish interests, prejudices and superstitions.

Fortunately, though, democracy doesn't need a particularly wise, high-minded electorate. All it needs is a collection of people with enough vigorously competing interests, prejudices and superstitions that the exhausting task of brokering among them tends to impede leaders from causing any grievous harm. A really superb leader can even spot a few nuggets of popular consensus hidden in the cacophony, and cater to them--usually, though not always, to the good.

What almost always sinks the "outsider" candidate is his or her inability to recognize and take advantage of those instances of consensus. Elected to knock some sense into slimy, business-as-usual politicians, the outsider typically believes him- or herself to have a deep, natural rapport with the common people that allows him or her to disdain pandering and poll-taking and simply intuit what the public wants. Of course, such a person inevitably confuses "what the public wants" with what he or she personally wants, and ends up spearheading unpopular campaigns on behalf of hobbyhorse causes.

Perhaps the latest outsider candidate, faced with a colossal state budget deficit, a hostile state legislature, and a choppy economy, can rapidly acquire the skills that more polished politicians take years to hone, and build a solid constituency for various popular initiatives while offending as few voters as possible. And with roughly the same likelihood, the politicians he defeated might take up bodybuilding and learn to excel at the art of playing a Hollywood action film hero.