Joe

Adventures in Neocon Land

I am currently plowing my way through the fourth installment of David Weber’s Safehold series. For those of you not already involved in this particular method of wasting time and brain cells in equal measure, the basic plot…doesn’t really matter. It’s mostly all a setup to allow Weber to stage elaborate 18th-century naval battles (though maybe it’s early 19th? I’m not enough of a naval historian to know) in a universe that also contains androids, BEMs, FTL travel, and semi-intelligent AIs. Like Weber’s Honor Harrington stories, the Safehold series is more-or-less an ode to Horatio Hornblower, only this time with actual sailing vessels and cannons.

The novels bounce back and forth between details about the political and religious climate of Safehold and ripping great naval battles. Those reading just for the latter can safely skip about 60% of the pages (and pretty much pass on vol. 4 entirely), but for those few of us who actually enjoy the world-building, the other stuff is interesting if for no other reason than that it shines such a light on Weber’s own political beliefs. Let’s just say that “subtle” is not a word that a sane person would use in describing Weber. And, like most of the writers who found stardom writing for Jim Baen, Weber leans decidedly rightward.

For starters, the omnipresent bogeyman in the series – one who is referenced on nearly every page, but who appears only rarely – is one Zhaspahr Clyntahn. Meanwhile, Weber’s great conquering general is Hauwyl Chermyn. The fourth volume revolves around an ever-larger collection of protagonists who are (a) living in what is pretty clearly the analogue of the British Isles and who (b) fight off an oppressive universal (dare one say catholic?) church by forming its very own, modestly reformed version, while (c) using their navy and marines to dominate the seas and conquer pretty much everyone whom they perceive to be a threat.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “You’re on volume four of that?” To which I can only say: Did I mention that Weber writes really ripping naval battles?

But all of this got me to thinking about what looks to be a pretty significant trend in adventure-oriented stories: Pretty much all of them (and certainly the best of them) seem to embrace a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with what we might think of as a liberal worldview. I’m talking about people like Forester, O’Brien, Kipling, Burroughs (the Tarzan one, not the Beat one), Tolkien, Heinlein, Lucas, Rowling – or we can skip modern(ish) examples and go all the way back to people like Homer and Mallory. In every case, there’s a single theme: All you really need to triumph over the forces of evil are a few heroic individuals and a band of ragtag but faithful followers who can be turned into a disciplined (and generally unstoppable) army. Our heroes win a battle (or, more often, a big-ass war), and then happily end their days engaging in a bit of benevolent despotism over the conquered barbarians. For the villains are nearly always barbarians – or, worse, decent people who are easily duped by a few truly evil leaders and who will require more benevolent despotism “for their own good.” In really extreme cases (see Tolkien and everyone who writes fantasy afterward. Also maybe Kipling.) a little bit of ethnic cleansing is necessary before we can get down to the really serious business of glorious absolute monarchy.

Even when our adventure stories take on what looks like a more quintessentially “liberal” worldview, these more traditional – conservative? neoconservative? – attitudes persist. I’m thinking here of Dances With Wolves and its three sequels (The Last Samurai, Avatar and District 9). Yes, you might be fighting against the forces of colonialism or racism (or a little of both), but in the end, you triumph by aligning the natives with the Power of Western Male Individualism. (Yes, sometimes there are technically females involved. But they are typically Heinlein-style Men With Perfect Breasts. I’ll leave the deconstructing of gender stereotypes to people who are better at it, though. The same goes for critiquing the trope of the surprisingly-Western “natives.” I’m self-aware enough to recognize the white male-centricness of the adventure genre, but am probably also too deeply steeped in that culture to have anything useful to say about it.)

My point (and yes, there really is one, buried under all the digressions) is that I wonder whether or not the myth of the heroic individual isn’t necessary to make a really good adventure story work. Maybe all good adventure stories need to turn on the existence of a small group of people with the courage/brains/grit/etc whose possession of said characteristics is the very thing that allows them to save the day. Maybe only a hero straight out of The Book of Virtues can really sustain an adventure worth reading/watching. I mean, what would a truly liberal cosmopolitan adventure story even look like? Goblins who realize that their life prospects are way better if they unionize and then collectively refuse to a (very brief) career of catching Legolas’ arrows for the (Saru)Man? Martians who engage John Carter to open up trade routes between Earth and Mars rather than perpetually stealing the princess he wants to marry? Stories of leaders who come to power because the citizens are really annoyed at high unemployment rates? That all sounds rather boring.

Or, rather, it sounds a bit like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Which is something that I hugely enjoy reading, but which is also (a) not adventure-like at all and (b) essentially unfilmable. Because, of course, pretty much nothing happens in any of the books. Or, rather, stuff happens, but it all happens off-screen while the protagonists have long conversations during the months it takes to travel between planets. And even the action that does happen is not the result of the heroic actions of a few rugged individuals. It’s generally the product of the forces of sociology and economics and basic human nature. That closer to a liberal account of how the world works.

But it makes for a pretty boring adventure story.

Angel in Mismatched Shoes

So, I’m riding the Metro home the other day, reading Facebook on my Droid (I live in the future!) when I come across Steve Johnson’s post celebrating “awkward and maladroit metaphors, like wild horses sneezing on the rocks.” As Steve invited others to join in, I spent a couple of entertaining stops writing up my metaphor. At this point in the story, I should tell you that, in one of those strange things that my brain tends to do, I had kind of been obsessing over Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden, a book in which, quite disappointingly, the best line is in the blurb. Nonetheless, I’d been a little bit obsessed with Bizarro fiction all day, and my metaphor reflected it. Eventually, I responded to Steve with:

Celebrates horses sneezing on the rocks, like a hunchbacked angel in mismatched shoes wandering the streets of Calcutta and drinking despair through a straw.

Yes, I know. Not really all that great. I freely admit that “inspired by” does not, unfortunately, equal “as talented as.” (Exhibit A: Lada Gaga. Madonna. Case closed.)

Nevertheless, the image nagged at that part of my brain that says, “Hey, write something about this.” I ignored that part of my brain (as I usually do of late), but it didn’t seem to work. So I tried sending it into a drooling stupor by watching some summer television. Still didn’t work. I even tried numbing it with alcohol. That made it worse.

So finally I just wrote the fucking thing. It’s below the fold. Probably slightly NSFW, depending on where it is that you happen to work. At the very least, it should convince about 90% of my friends to block all my posts. Assuming that all the philosophy crap hasn’t done that already.

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Flashforward and Circular Logic

So, Caroline and I finally got around to watching Flashforward. We’d been TiVOing since ep. 2, but we missed the first episode. And ep. 1 disappeared from Hulu before either of us watched it. So we collected about 7 episodes before we actually started the season. Since then, we’ve watched almost all of them in short order. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that I’ve been watching it obsessively, and Caroline has agreed to come along for the ride. I’m going to toss out a few thoughts about the show below the fold, so if you’re trying to remain spoiler-free, you should go read something else now.

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Terrorism, Acts of War, and Military Trials

As you’re probably already aware, there’s been some disagreement with the Obama administration’s plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York civilian court. Among the objections is the claim that trying terrorists in civilian court commits one to a “law enforcement” view of terrorism rather than a “war on terrorism” approach. Now as a general rule, I’m rather opposed to the rather overworked and almost always grossly misleading War on an Abstract Noun language. By and large, our WoaANs have effectively been wars on drug users and poor people – or most often, a twofer of poor people who use drugs.

That said, the war metaphor might not be as problematic in the case of international terrorism. Certainly many terrorists invoke war language to describe their actions. So should we take terrorists at their own word, and accord them military trials (which generally entail fewer protections for the defendants than do civilian trials)? Matt Yglesias says no, claiming that if you do so:

you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.

But not so fast, says Norm Geras.

The opposition Matt sets up here between war and crime – between ‘a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people’, on the one hand, and murder or mass murder, on the other – is too sharp. War may (sometimes) be legally and morally acceptable, but that doesn’t mean there is no criminality within war. There is – as defined by the laws of war. One is not therefore bound to choose between treating individuals as participating in a war and treating them as criminals, if that is what they are. Under the assumption of universal jurisdiction, international humanitarian law allows for war criminals and those responsible for crimes against humanity to be prosecuted in the civilian courts of any country. And terrorism is murder even when it is ‘a kind of war’.

Now I’m inclined to agree with Geras to a degree. The line between terrorism and war crimes is not as bright as Yglesias makes it out to be. I am personally inclined toward the view that terrorism is best defined as the deliberate targeting of noncombatants to achieve a political objective. That makes the 9/11 attacks and the Ft. Hood shootings both acts of terrorism, albeit on different scales. But that definition also makes the allied firebombings of Dresden and (at minimum) the atomic bombing of Nagasaki acts of terrorism. The latter two acts are also rightly defined as war crimes and should have been treated as such. (And, yes, I am fully aware that only the losing side is ever actually tried for its war crimes. It doesn’t make such acts any less criminal.)

But not all acts of terrorism are acts of war. I think one would be hard pressed to give any sort of plausible story that portrays Tim McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City as an act of war. The same goes for the Unabomber, the DC Sniper and the Ft. Hood shooter. Terrorists, yes. War criminals? Not so much.

KSM and 9/11 is a tougher call. Indeed, I think it’s something of a judgment call. I could probably get on board with either side – or, at the very least, I’d say that it’s a question about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.

Still, I think that there is a serious risk of inconsistency present for many of those who are now arguing for treating KSM as a war criminal. As Geras rightly points out, international humanitarian law does in fact allow for war criminals to be prosecuted in the courts of any country. That specific international humanitarian law is the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 146 specifies that signatories “shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.” Those “grave breaches” are defined in Article 147 as:

those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

That pretty well describes the 9/11 attacks and KSM, and I think that anyone wanting to try KSM as a war criminal is legally in bounds to do so. But if one does wish to use the Fourth Geneva Convention to define KSM and company as war criminals, one will also probably need to pay attention to the last sentence in Article 146, which reads:

In all circumstances, the accused persons shall benefit by safeguards of proper trial and defence, which shall not be less favourable than those provided by Article 105 and those following of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949.

In plainer English, that means that if you want to try someone as a war criminal, you have to treat him as a prisoner of war. Meaning no “cruel treatment and torture,” and no “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Which pretty much rules out waterboarding the dude 183 times.

So here’s the deal. If you think that the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on torture somehow don’t apply to KSM, then it’s a bit hypocritical to argue now that he’s a war criminal. If you’re going to charge someone with war crimes under international law, then that same law also requires that you treat them as prisoners of war. In other words, a war criminal gets the full set of Geneva Convention protections, not just the ones that happen to best fit your preconceptions (or, perhaps more to the point, not just the ones that best line up with the agenda of your favored political party.)

*Note: Just to be clear, I’m not accusing Geras of inconsistency. He actually supports trying KSM in civilian court and has argued that those who tortured KSM should be prosecuted. I don’t know of anyone specifically arguing both for torturing KSM and for now treating him as a war criminal, though I do recognize that there is one particular political party whose members by-and-large were okay with torturing suspected terrorists at Gitmo and who are now outraged at the decision to try him as a civilian. It’s unclear to me how many members of that subset are interested in attempting to justify that split on any sort of rational grounds and how many of them are simply okay with whatever Their Side does and displeased with whatever The Other Side does.

Robocalls

If you live in Virginia (or, I suppose in NJ or NY-23) and happen still to have a landline for whatever reason, then I’m sure you have a very special reason to be glad that election season is over for another year(ish). By the final week, Caroline and I were getting 3 or 4 robocalls a day (in our case, mostly urging us to vote for Bob “Women Should Be Barefoot and Pregnant” McDonnell, but YMMV). The blitz of calls prompted my friend Dale Miller (we’re not related so far as I know, but we are both Mill scholars with overlapping interests in political/moral/legal philosophy) to posit that political robocalls ought to be subject to some restrictions. I countered that doing so would likely fail on free speech grounds. We had an interesting set of exchanges that are mostly buried in a comment thread. Seeing as how a bunch of y’all are lawyers, though, and that a bunch more of y’all are political consultants, I thought some of you might want/be able to add in your $0.02.

For starters, some ground rules: We’re going to just stipulate that robocalls are annoying as all hell. And we’re going to bracket the question of whether they work. I suspect that there’s probably pretty good evidence that they do. My evidence for this is basically that really smart campaign managers seem willing to pay for them, and they must have good reasons for doing so. (Although seeing as how some of those same managers pay to put signs in the median of ever single road in the Commonwealth, my faith might be misplaced here.) Also, it’s probably not the smartest thing in the world to start a Con Law discussion with someone who is currently teaching Con Law, especially when you last looked at the literature somewhere around the spring of ’05. That’s really less of a ground rule and more of an observation. But I digress.

Anyway, here’s the gist of the argument thus far.

JM: Political robocalls might well be annoying, but they are clearly a form of political speech. And the Court has consistently ruled in favor of political speech over annoyance. The standard in Cohen v. California would apply here: you might find the speech irritating, but if so, you can always avert your gaze (in this case, by unplugging the phone.) That might be inconvenient, but your being inconvenienced isn’t adequate reason for limiting political speech.

DM: The “avert your gaze” standard in Cohen doesn’t apply. Cohen was on public property. Your phone is in your own private home. Moreover, my voicemail automatically picks up the content of said calls, so simply turning off the phone isn’t even equivalent to turning off my TV to avoid those ads. I’m stuck hearing them either way. Robocalls are closest to direct mail, but even there, I can choose when to pick up my mail, and the high price of mail limits the extent to which I am inconvenienced anyway.

Dale goes on to suggest at least limiting the times during which candidates can call. That doesn’t strike me as terribly unreasonable. Nor does it seem to me as if subjecting political candidates to Do Not Call registries would be Constitutionally problematic. After all, the First Amendment gives me the right to say as I wish, but it doesn’t guarantee me an audience or a particular platform. (Which is too bad, because I think I could publish a really kick-ass political magazine, if only the Constitution would guarantee me some readers. And some advertisers.)

That said, I’m not sure it’s possible to do things like limit numbers of calls. I think that Cohen is probably still the right answer, wrt the annoyance factor. One can, after all, ditch the voicemail feature. And these days, one can communicate by plenty of other methods (e-mail, cellphone, skype, etc.), so it’s not as if one can plausibly argue that turning off the landline would be unduly burdensome.

Then again, I’m a philosopher, not a lawyer. And I’ve rarely found the law lining up with the clearly-articulated, internally-consistent sets of reasons that philosophers tend to offer.

Voting and Democracy

Some of you may remember that once upon a time, I was the token non-anarchocapitalist blogger at a place called Catallarchy. The old site has had a name change (it’s now The Distributed Republic), and it has reinvented itself as a community site. If you play nicely — and by that I mean say interesting things and refrain from acting like a dick — Jonathan will promote your stuff to the front page, even when he thinks you’re wrong. Well, I still read DR daily, even though I can’t write for the site any longer and most of the regulars from my day have moved on to other things. Still, if you’re not keeping up, you should be. There’s some interesting stuff going on. Case in point: a new blogger going by the name “Lenin of Liberty” (and no, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean either) has put up two of the best posts I’ve read in quite some time.

In the first, Why the U.S. Constitution Works, LoL (geez, the abbreviation is worse than the name) offers a qualified libertarian defense of democracy. For those of you not in the know, a lot of radical libertarians are pretty skeptical of democracy, preferring something like polycentric law or building floating cities.* So it was fun to read LoL defending democracy right in the heart of the lion’s den, as it were. I’m intrigued by some of his arguments, and particularly interested in his discussion of Score Voting, which strikes me as an improvement on the single transferable vote that I have favored for a while.

When it comes to scale, however, we part company. I strongly favor proportional voting. LoL does not. For those of you who aren’t Dale or one of my former students, that basically means that I’m in favor of (a) a wide variety of political parties and (b) a  system of voting that results in numbers of legislators from those various parties being in rough proportion to the number of people in the country who support those parties. Wow, that sounds complicated. Here’s the simpler version. If 8% of the voters actually favor the Green Party, then in a proportional system, there would be 34 or 35 Green Party representatives in the House. The Libertarian Party would have some representatives, the “socialists” or Democrats, as the non-crazy people call them, would have some and so on. Hell, Ralph Nader might even be able to win himself a congressional seat, which would be awesome since then we could justify writing about his surrealist ads. LoL, however, thinks that proportional representation is “dangerous,” even going so far as to play the Hitler card (possibly the only lowpoint in either essay).

So why the disagreement? I think it really comes down to a claim LoL makes in one of his comments. When asked whether he thinks democracy is an end in itself, LoL replies:

I think democracy is a means to an end: not too bad government that kind of serves the people. Better government with democracy requires better people; that is, a population with better knowledge of good government. (I’ll address this important point in a later post.)

I do want our government to be more democratic than currently. Libertarian views are under-represented and the current system has biases as mentioned by commenters here and by Moldbug. But I also want near term stability; the herd can panic, and outliers can be disruptive.

I don’t think this is quite right. I agree that the herd can panic and that outliers can be disruptive. But I think that those drawbacks might be inextricably linked to the very thing that makes democracy valuable in the first place.

This all comes back to Mill. (And, really, what doesn’t?) More specifically it comes down to my somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of Mill. I think that our autonomy — that is, our capacity to make our own choices — is inextricably linked to our happiness. We could have been built in some other way; one can imagine (sort of) a being that derived intense pleasure simply by virtue of directly observing the mathematical principles that govern the universe. I’ll leave it to those of you who are more creative than I to come up with more interesting examples. My point is just that while we might be able to imagine beings whose happiness was not tied up with their choice-making capacities, we wouldn’t likely be able to relate to such beings. That’s because for us, autonomy cannot be separated out from our happiness. It’s contingent that we happen to be built this way, but given the way we are built, autonomy is a necessary condition for real happiness. Also now I can use the phrase “contingently necessary” which is almost as nice an oxymoron as “legal ethics.” (Hi sweetie. Just seeing if you read this far.)

So what’s all this weirdness have to do with with voting? Well, if autonomy really is fundamental to human happiness, then voting is probably going to have to carry somewhat more weight than LoL assigns it. Autonomy is about governing myself. But since direct democracy isn’t really feasible (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to go into here, as I’m already closing in on 1000 words), representative government is our best bet for carrying out our autonomy in the public sphere. A representative democracy that fails to be representative, however, is sort of missing the point. When we leave large chunks of people unrepresented — when we fail to give them a voice at the table — we have effectively denied them the meaningful exercise of their autonomy.

This is all getting really abstract and into the weeds, enough so that anyone who is still following any of this (both of you) has probably already heard me go on about it all before. The takeaway points:

  1. Proportional voting rocks.
  2. You should be reading The Distributed Republic.
  3. Posts that mock libertarians, conservatives and Naderites get way more attention than those that try to do philosophy.

* I’m not actually opposed to polycentric law or to seasteading; both sound to me much like Mill’s experiments in living writ large (though I do have a few reservations about how well this sort of thing scales up). Mostly that’s because I’m convinced that in open competition, some sort of democracy will ultimately beat out a “pure” libertarian system. If I’m right, we’re hardly worse off for having had the competition. And if I’m wrong, well, it’d probably be good to know that, too.

Bad Lectures

So I just got back from a lecture at Cato on James Bennett’s new book, Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold. (And, no, I’m not going to bother linking to the book, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.)

Now probably I should have known better, given the rather silly subtitle. But I did write a chunk of my dissertation on Mill’s arguments for proportional representation, and it’s a system that I still think is inherently superior to our current first-past-the-post, Single Member District system. So I figured that it might be interesting to see what Bennett had to say about the issue. Now I haven’t read the book (it just came out today, and Amazon said it was still unavailable when I checked this morning). But I can tell you that, if the lecture was any indication, there’s little reason to bother.

Let me start by saying that Bennett is probably the worst public speaker I’ve ever heard. And, my friends, I have sat through a 90 minute Habermas lecture. For those of you who haven’t had that pleasure, just imagine trying to sort through the incoherence that passes for post-Kantian German philosophy in a thick German accent by someone who also has a very serious speech impediment. And yet Bennett was actually worse. Every third line or so was an attempt at a (lame) joke, most of which consisted of snarky Heritage/Republican talking points, including the tired old line about Al Gore inventing the Internet. Because that one never gets old, does it? Only, he flubbed his own snark. Every single fucking time.

But worse than Bennett’s terrible delivery is his apparent decision that the principles of social science apply only when they lead you to results that you happen to want. See, Bennett starts out with the observation that the Single Member District generally leads to a two-party system. It’s a principle known as Duverger’s Law. Now bear in mind that James Bennett is a professor of economics. At George Mason University. And he introduced himself as an expert in public choice theory. So obviously when faced with a principle grounded in good public choice analysis, one which shows that a particular structure inherently leads to a particular sort of outcome, his natural conclusion is to alter the structure. Right? Right?

Only, not so much.

Bennett spent all of two sentences on proportional voting. And he says that he opposes it because it could leave people in rural areas (upstate NY was his example) underrepresented while the cityfolk elect all the representatives.

Seriously? Does the man have even the foggiest idea how proportional representation works? I did some back of the envelop math. According to the U.S. Census, New York state had about 19.3 million residents in 2007. About 11 million of those in New York City or on Long Island. Heck, I’ll even give you Erie (home of Buffalo) and Westchester Counties, which gets you up to 12.9 million. That’s about 67 of New York’s population%. New York likewise has 29 Representatives in the House. Which means that if every single urban (and I use that term loosely, as it does include Buffalo, Westchester and Suffolk Counties) voter banded together to choose people from their very own regions, they could, at most, elect 20 people. That leaves 9 representatives to be divided up among the rest of the state. Guess how many of New York State’s 29 Congressional districts currently represent people outside of NYC/Long Island/Westchester/Buffalo

. If you guessed 9, you win the prize.

So I can’t figure out whether Bennett simply doesn’t understand proportional voting, hasn’t bothered to actually do any math, is shockingly stupid, or has some other agenda. I mean, I don’t want to get too deeply into assigning motives to anyone. But Bennett made it pretty clear that while he often dislikes both parties for failing to be sufficiently libertarian, when push comes to shove, his sympathies are with one of the two major parties. And, shockingly enough, it turns out that that same party happens to perform better…where was it again…oh, yeah, in rural areas. Indeed, as it turns out, in our current SMD system, Republicans are vastly overrepresented in the U.S. legislature. Hrm.

So what, then, was Bennett’s solution? Repeal campaign finance reform.

Yes, that’s the solution of the social scientist. Apparently repealing campaign finance reform will also repeal Duverger’s Law. There was no discussion of how exactly that causal mechanism is supposed to work. It probably involves underpants.

Unfortunately, the other members of the panel weren’t much better. There was Theresa Amato, who (a) ran Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign (thanks again, Ralph) and then (b) ran Ralph Nader’s 2004 campaign anyway. I could maybe even forgive four years of temporary insanity, if only she hadn’t wasted part of my afternoon arguing that the media is responsible for the meme that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore. Now I don’t want to let Gore off the hook for having run a terrible campaign, but still, it strikes me as at least vaguely possible that the fact that Nader campaigned aggressively and won 10,000+ votes in a state that Gore lost by 537 votes might be at least partially responsible for the meme that Nader cost Gore the 2000 election. Just a thought.

Then there was Hans von Spakovsky, whose main contribution to the event was taking exception to Bennett’s claim that members of the FEC tend generally to be partisan hacks. Von Spakovsky assured us that was false. He then went on to tell us that the failures of the electoral system are all due to the machinations of Democrats while good Republicans like him fight their efforts. Later today, von Spakovsky willl be appearing at the National Association of Dramatists to deliver a keynote lecture on irony.

So, to sum: Terrible lecturer. Ignored principles of social science in favor of preferred political hobbyhorse. Even worse commenters. Hours of my life that I can never get back. /rant.