I’ve had a nagging thought since the election about why many people vote for Republicans when they “should” vote for Democrats. In the midst of all of the pieces discussing why people whose economic interests would predispose them to vote for Democrats vote for their “values,” I almost never see violence mentioned. Many Republicans simply view violence more favorably than Democrats. This truth is so deeply embedded in the images (and self images) of both parties that it is scarely discussed.

Take, for example, the fact that John Kerry does not support the death penalty. (At some point, he backed off on that and said he would support capital punishment for some terrorists.) I thought this would be a huge political issue when Kerry was initially nominated. It turned out not to be, because the Republicans never needed to trot it out. It was obvious to everyone from Kerry’s activities post-Vietnam that he was not enthusiastic about the application of violence, so they didn’t need to tar him on the death penalty.

Just speaking for myself, I’m incredibly uncomfortable with actual violence. I play violent video games, I watch violent movies, I enjoy a good murder ballad. At the same time, war, terrorism, and the death penalty make me sick. I find the idea of beating one’s kids to be utterly repugnant. I’m an enthusiastic student of military history, and I realize that violence is sometimes the only sane response to a threat, but I still hate it. I get no pleasure from the idea of anyone dying, not even people who are completely monstrous. Even people whose deaths would undoubtedly be a good thing for everyone else in the world. It may be necessary, but I never find it pleasant.

And that puts me out of step with a big portion of the country. The truth is that some large number of people think that beating (err, spanking) your kids is completely appropriate. The news of an upcoming execution actually makes them happy. The idea of going to war gets them downright excited. These are the people who dismiss the stories of Abu Ghraib or a Marine murdering a wounded Iraqi prisoner or of a family fleeing a battlefield being gunned down at a roadblock as our soldiers just doing their best to get the job done. Think back on Ron Silver’s speech at the Republican convention. This guy, a liberal on any social issue you can name, supports President Bush simply because he thinks the answer to America’s problems is killing a lot more people.

I can remember John Kerry and John Edwards talking on the campaign trail about hunting down and destroying terrorists, as if they were going to do it themselves. I found it to be absurd, and it was obvious that it was their attempt to close the violence gap. Couldn’t be done. People know. I favored John Kerry because I knew he’d be more reticent about using violence than President Bush. It doesn’t surprise me that the people I’m talking about opposed him for exactly that reason. And I think that when you look at the number of Democrats who voted against Kerry, you’d find that they did so because he wasn’t comfortable enough with the application of violence. Bush may be incompetent, but he’s not going to err on the side of caution when it comes to killing people.

Tivo is planning to start displaying banner ads while you fast forward. What a terrible move. I was planning on buying one of those Humax Tivo/DVD-R combo boxes at Christmas, but now, not so much.

Last night, the Jon Stewart mentioned the organization Amend for Arnold on the Daily Show. You can guess what they’re working on. I’m not leaving the country because President Bush was reelected, but if we amend the Constitution and elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will leave. And I’ll go to Austria and do everything I can to ruin that country for revenge.

So I’m now seeing spam on a PHPBB bulletin board I run in the form of users who sign up and set their URLs to porn sites. No kidding. I assume it’s yet another way of boosting the PageRank of a site, but honestly I have no idea.

I’ve put forth the theory (which I didn’t come up with on my own) that the main root cause of terrorism of the al-Qaeda variety is not poverty or even lack of dignity but rather the absence of outlets for legitimate political expression. A Harvard study seems to confirm that theory. Interestingly, the theory shows that the correlation is on a curve. The most free and most repressive societies experience the least terrorism. The fact that the countries with the most freedom tend not to suffer from terrorism is right in line with what I’ve thought, but the fact that the most repressive societies also suffer less from terrorism also makes sense. The government controls people’s lives to such an extent that they can’t really organize terror cells.

So lately I’ve been on the front lines of the Web services war. Well, it’s not really a war since I’m not fighting anyone, but it feels that way. Here are a few of my findings so far:

• It’s not uncommon to find Web services that don’t adhere to any “standard.” I wrote a web service for a client to use that was based on a web service they were already using. It was totally ad hoc.
• SOAP is a pain. I’ve sat down and tried to figure out SOAP several times, and have never come away really understanding it. I still haven’t gotten used to writing SOAP services using Axis that I can call using the Axis libraries. The idea of writing SOAP services that will be called from .NET applications totally freaks me out.
• REST is fun. If you’re going to deploy a Web service from scratch, it sure seems like REST is the way to go, mainly because it’s just like all of the other Web apps you’ve written except you don’t have to deal with presentation stuff.
• Even if you do follow the “standards,” integrating with your clients is still a major league walk through the swamp, same as it ever was.

Reading a review that tells you the headphones you already own are the best always brings on a little glow on a Monday morning. I think the writer should have included Shure in-ear headphones in the review. I have a pair of Grado SR80 headphones, but I’ve been thinking about a pair of Shure E2c’s to carry around with me as well.

All the way back in 2002, Josh Marshall recommended a book about the German invasion of France in 1940 called Strange Victory, written by Ernest R. May. The book basically turns the conventional wisdom on why France fell so quickly to the Germans in World War II on its head. Before reading it, I had thought that the French lost because they were vastly outgunned, unprepared for war, and had staked everything on the ridiculous Maginot Line. According to May, who goes back to contemporary accounts to reconstruct the events leading up to the battle of France and the battle itself, France (and Britain) were instead done in by their command style and poor use of intelligence. The Germans used intelligence analysis and wargaming to come up with the only plan for invading France that could possibly work, and the French failed to anticipate that plan and positioned their troops in the worst possible configuration to thwart that plan. Then, once Germany invaded, it took the French days to determine what Germany was up to and respond to it. As they say, by then it was too late.

The story itself is quite gripping, but as with any good history book, there are plenty of lessons to be learned that we can apply to the events of today. The book gave me a healthy new respect for the degree of uncertainty under which war planning occurs. In that light, I’m inclined to regard our efforts in Afghanistan as much more successful as I had been before. After we invaded Afghanistan, I was unsatisfied with what we had achieved, in that the warlords are still in power, much of the country is outside the control of the central government, and elements of the Taliban are still operating. While I do think we could have done more against al-Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of routing the Taliban, I think that what has been achieved in Afghanistan is notable. Part of my change of heart involved reading Strange Victory and part of it has to do with looking at Iraq. Given the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m sure that the people planning for both wars thought that Iraq would go even better than Afghanistan. It has a better educated, more modern populace and we were sending in a lot more troops. Just as Iraq has been a remarkable failure, Afghanistan has to be qualified as a remarkable success. It could still fall into chaos, but Afghans are clearly better off than they were under the Taliban.

The book also gave me a healthy respect for what war leadership takes. I don’t have any more sympathy for the Bush administration, which seems to have a preference for fixed ideas and assumptions based on political convenience rather than common sense that would make the French government of 1939 envious, but I do see how any government can fall into the patterns that the Allies did in 1939 and the US and UK governments did in 2002 when they were preparing for the war in Iraq.

In any case, if you’re into history in general and military or diplomatic history in particular, I recommend this book highly.

Do you think the computer algorithm that ranks the news stories at Google News and chooses the pictures that accompanies them chose this one?

Gmail is rolling out access to email via POP to all users. Here’s the info, you may have to be a Gmail user to see it. I don’t think I’ll back up my Gmail messages via POP, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to.