It’s late at night, and I’m still thinking about US foreign policy, Iraq, and war. One of the most common arguments from the pro-war camp (they bang it like a drum), is that being against going to war with Iraq is the equivalent of the appeasement of the Nazi regime that took place at the beginning of the World War II. The short story of appeasement is that Germany was making certain demands, and the British government thought that by conceding to some of those demands, a larger war could be avoided.

Does this sound anything at all like what’s going on with Iraq to you? Iraq has a devastated military, nobody is afraid that Iraq is going to start a war with them, and indeed, Iraq is making no demands of the international community. They want the sanctions against them lifted, but they’re not making threats to get them lifted. (They have in the past, and when they did, they were assured that they’d get a savage beating if they carried out those threats. That seemed to work.) My point here isn’t that we should allow Saddam to continue to run Iraq, but that claiming that opposition to the war constitutes appeasement is just, well, stupid.

On the other hand, how would you describe the agreement of some Arab countries to participate (or at least tolerate) the war? What we have is the most powerful country in the world threatening to invade another country in a war of aggression, and set up a military government in that country after it wins. This country recently intervened in a civil war in another country, set up a client regime, and still has troops on the ground in that country. It’s also well known that certain elements of this country’s government have visions of ongoing war against various other countries and replacement of their regimes as well.

Could the acquiescence of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Muslim countries to war with Iraq be seen as appeasement of the United States? Are they not making concessions that they don’t agree with in hopes of avoiding war themselves? I bet you that Syria (as the state most devoted to the pan-Arab nationalist philosophy) would say they were.

What’s my point here? Mainly, that people should shut up about appeasement. It’s a lame and pathetic argument that really has no basis in history. Unless they’re prepared to listen to Arab states talk about appeasement of the US, they should stop talking about appeasement of Iraq.

Update: I’ve posted more on appeasement.

In the LawMeme article I linked to today, there’s a site called The Political Compass that assesses your political views on two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. It’s more interesting than most of the silly quizzes that you see on the Web. I wasn’t surprised to find out that I skew somewhat to the left and strongly toward the libertarian.

I’m quoting this letter from Keith Olbermann to Jim Romenesko’s media blog in its entirety because the letters page doesn’t provide permalinks. Anyway, Olbermann is really, really mad at News Corp:

Occasionally one accepts the fact that there is a company called News Corp, just as occasionally one accepts that there are terrorists, or that there are people who scam grandmothers out of their savings. And then Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp does something so rapacious, so pathetic, that one must stand up and say no more, and call for all legal and moral measures to stop it. The latest? News Corp’s scandal sheet, the New York Post, reported that a baseball Hall of Famer was blackmailed into cooperating with a best-selling biography written about him — blackmailed under threat that the woman writer would otherwise claim the Hall of Famer was gay. Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Famer, was the subject of the only recent best-selling baseball biography written by a woman. He has now quit as a special instructor for the Dodgers because the team is also owned by News Corp. The New York Post previously published another homophobic gossip item last spring that led Mike Piazza of the New York Mets to feel he had to publicly announce he was not gay. News Corp also owns Fox Television, Fox News Channel, and other companies which produce products structurally similar to “news.” And News Corp also owns Harper Collins publishers — the very company that printed the biography about Koufax in the first place. Their book. Their tabloid. Their team. Their scandal. It stinks. Just like News Corp does.

I worked for that company for three years. They were swine. Many companies are swine. This is something else. This is the triangulation of swine — three bullies beating up one kid called decency. I still have a contract with the publishers, Harper Collins, to write a sports book. I will not write it for them. I’m sending the money back. They certainly could use the dough. It might enable Rupert Murdoch and his employees to buy their souls back.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s bitter corporate politics. That’s why I found the story of SWT (the GUI toolkit IBM developed as an alternative to Swing) to be so interesting. The fact that some or all of the story may very well be fiction is completely irrelevant — we are talking about an anonymous mailing list posting here. (Link via Blogging Roller.)

The Laurie Garrett email fiasco is turning into an event of major proportions (at least in the small pond of blogging). You may remember that I linked to her email to friends about Davos the other day, mainly as a springboard for my own thoughts about what imminent events might do to the global economy, and how that scares the crap out of me, but the meta-story around the email itself is pretty compelling on its own. Here are some links:

• the original email
• the MetaFilter thread
• Garrett’s reaction to the MetaFilter thread
• LawMeme article about the controversy
• Bruce Sterling’s annotations to the original email

Update: UPI piece by Shaun Waterman

Josh Marshall has finally posted part two of his interview with Ken Pollack (author of The Threatening Storm, a book that discusses our options with regard to Iraq), and even better, the whole interview on its own web page. Pollack is probably the best articulator of the pro-war case out there right now.

On the other side of the coin, the weapons inspectors are complaining that our tips on what too look for in Iraq are worthless.

Salon picked up the voting machine story this week, which is a good sign. The next thing you know, it will actually be reported in the major media. If nothing else, what should come out of this story is that all voting machines should produce a physical record of each vote. The idea that electronic voting machines would only tabulate votes electronically is absolutely amazing to me, because there are just too many ways to game the system and if there’s no physical record, then it’s impossible to go back and audit the results. Honestly, I think that each vote should be assigned an ID, and that two physical copies should be produced, one of which can be taken home by the voter if they choose to do so. But at minimum, they physical vote that is produced should be in a human readable format that can be checked by the voter before they leave the booth and put the vote into a ballot box. Computerized touch screen voting is a good idea, you can create much simpler user interfaces that way, but they’re worthless without a physical audit trail. Oh, and it goes without saying that we ought to be checking into the conflict of interest issues raised in this story as well.

I’ve updated how the RSS feed works. If you notice any problems, please send email.

I’ve decided that the time has come to do something more sensible with my RSS feed. Right now, the code that generates my RSS feeds just strips all of the tags out of my items, which means, basically, that they contain now outbound links or formatting. As you know, many of the entries on this site do, in fact, contain both formatting and outbound links when you read them with your browser (though, ironically enough, this post contains neither). The reason I originally did what I did to the RSS feed was to make sure that it is always valid XML and to prevent all you people from just reading the site with your RSS tool and never coming by to visit in person, thus damaging an ego that you perhaps thought was unassailable. However, you readers are the consumers of the site and more importantly, of the RSS feed, and I want to make it better for you. I’m definitely going to stop stripping out the tags, and I’m deciding whether to post excerpts of each entry to the feed, or just copying the whole posts into the feed. I don’t know of anyone misusing the feed (by just running it on their own site without my permission), so I’m tempted to just spew out the entire posts to the feed and let the chips fall where they may with regard to unique visitors per day. If you have an opinion on this, please let me know.

SpamAssassin 2.50 is out. This is the big release with the Bayesian filter and a bunch of other new spam trapping features. I’ve already installed it and tested it, and it appears to work. It seems to me that spammers are starting to try to evade SpamAssassin’s ruleset, or try to make their spam shorter and less spamlike in general, and more of it was getting through. Hopefully the new release will let less spam fall through the cracks. (I have to say, though, that even though things had gotten worse, SpamAssassin was still probably catching 90-95% of the spam that I get.)

Update: It looks like there’s some work to be done to get the Bayesian filter working. I have to dig a bit more into that.