E.G.

There are reasons to think it is against American interests for Turkey to join the European Union.  As is said here:

Long-term, Turkey’s inclusion in the EU causes real trouble for the United States, because it makes a permanent rift between Europe and the United States, along the lines seen recently over Iraq (where Turkey’s position was already closer to Paris and Berlin than to Washington), much more likely. The addition of Turkey’s armed forces makes a common European defense more feasible – which makes NATO less necessary.

In a variety of ways, Turkey’s inclusion in the EU seems to be against long-term American interests.  So why has Bush, following Clinton’s lead, so consistently backed Turkey’s membership in the EU?

Bremmer’s suggestion (in the article quoted above) is that Bush believes that Europeans so loathe him that Europe will do the opposite of whatever he says.  On this theory, Bush supports Turkey’s EU membership simply because doing so makes Turkey’s EU membership less likely. 

But if this is the correct explanation of Bush’s stated preferences, then it makes Turkey’s own behavior somewhat mysterious.  Turkish politicians have, on numerous occasions, responded enthusiastically to Bush’s endorsement of Turkey’s EU membership.  If his endorsement makes that event less likely, then, it would seem, Turkish politicians ought to try to keep Bush quiet on the issue — but they consistently do the opposite of this.  It could be that Turkish officials simply have false beliefs about Bush’s ability to positively affect the EU’s decision, but I think this would assume an inordinate degree of ignorance on the part of Turkish policy-makers. 

Another theory is that by backing Turkey’s EU membership, Bush is doing Turkey a favor — a favor which he hopes to be repaid.  For instance, in late 2002, when Bush was hoping to use Turkish military bases in the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s endorsement of Turkey’s EU membership was especially loud.  On this theory, Bush is, at least as of late 2002, willing to risk harm to America’s long-term interests in order to make the invasion of Iraq a little easier.  Given Bush’s other choices in the lead-up to the war, this would not be very surprising. 

But even after Turkey refused to let the US use its military bases in the Iraq invasion, Bush has continued to endorse Turkey’s membership in the EU.  In the summer of 2004, for instance, Bush visited Turkey and (after being greeted by an estimated 40,000 protesters in Istanbul, where Bush is extremely unpopular), he spoke of Turkey in glowing terms and reiterated his support for Turkey’s membership in the EU.

I assume that the "tit-for-tat" explanation of Bush’s stance plays a role; surely Bush gets something from Turkey in exchange for endorsing Turkey’s EU membership.  But in taking his stance on this issue, Bush makes himself appear to be "meddling" in European politics; this appearance has contributed to America’s growing alienation from traditional European allies (e.g., see here).  I would think the benefits of gaining Turkey’s favor should be counterbalanced by the costs of "chilled" relations with France and others.  Given this, one would think that, if you add into the mix the fact that American long-term interests seem decidedly against Turkey joining the EU, the balance should tip in the opposite direction, and Bush should take a stand against Turkey’s EU membership.  But apparently this is not the case.

I hope Turkey does join the EU, but I find Bush’s stance on the issue somewhat mysterious.  I’m probably leaving out something obvious which would resolve the mystery, but I don’t know what it is.

As far as I can tell, IMDB classifies both humans and animals as "actors."  For instance, apparently a dog named Rocky played a character with the name "Scrooge the Dog, a.k.a. Crazy Wheels" in a movie called The Dirt Bike Kid. 

I think there should be a separate category for animal "actors."  For one thing, animals don’t seem capable of imitation — at least, not intentional imitation — and therefore don’t "act" in the relevant sense.

Leiter is again saying that it is uninteresting that forged documents were used by CBS to support the case that Bush was a crappy National Guard soldier.  Here’s how he puts the point this time:

One illustrative example of the degraded state of public discourse in America–and of the venal contribution of the blogosphere to this state of affairs–was last year’s "Rathergate" fantasy, in which "courageous" (read:  trivial and right-wing) bloggers exposed a tree (a document of dubious authenticity), and missed the forest (there is ample evidence that Bush dodged Vietnam service; Rather’s error pales by comparison to real journalistic misinformation and careless reporting, of the kind that led to the Iraq war). 

We should all grant Leiter’s point that the press is capable of deceptions much worse than the one in which CBS engaged by using the inauthentic Killian memos, but I think this particular deception is still interesting. 

As Leiter and many, many others have stressed, it is probably true that Bush was not a good soldier.  But prior to the election, many people did not believe this.  (I suppose they still don’t, but it no longer matters much.)  To get them to change their minds, the opposition needed to present them with evidence to the contrary.  The Killian memos were supposed to be part of that evidence.  When the Killian memos were shown to be fakes, this only reinforced the belief (which, incidentally, was and is widely held on both the left and the right) that the media engages in deceptive, politically-motivated reporting.  In the lead-up to the election, people relied on this belief to help them to justify ignoring evidence which put their political favorites in a bad light.  So, by using a demonstrably inauthentic document to support the view that Bush was a bad soldier, CBS made it much easier for people to distrust the media — and therefore made it easier for people to go on acting as though they believed Bush was a good soldier, despite copious evidence to the contrary.

As Scott (via Richard) suggests, the Hot Abercrombie Chick probably isn’t really a chick.  I don’t think this should surprise anyone who has read HAC’s blog.  Despite having written a post on the subject, Scott seems to think that thinking about HAC’s real identity is a waste of time.  I’ll agree to that, but it’s a topic that interests me nonetheless.  So here you are — more wasted time. 

Whether HAC is real or not, HAC’s blog is clearly designed to exploit people’s eagerness to know what’s going on inside the head of an attractive person.  Is there anything wrong with taking advantage of that eagerness (which appears to be a near-universal part of human nature)?  Not always: Attractive restaurant employees, for instance, do nothing wrong when they rely on their good looks to get bigger tips. 

The difference, of course, is that, if the rumors are true, HAC is not really an attractive person, or at least not really an attractive female, whereas attractive restaurant employees are usually just about exactly what they appear to be. 

It is usually wrong to deceive people.  But nowadays there circulates a view that certain aspects of one’s identity are malleable and pretty much fall under one’s personal discretion.  Many people will say, for instance, that cross-dressers are not engaging in an unacceptable act of deception when they go in public dressed as a member of the opposite sex; if a cross-dressing man says he is a woman, it now sounds strange to say that he is lying.  HAC seems to be a sort of blogospheric equivalent of a cross-dresser.

By the way, in the sidebar to the left I’ve added a new Typelist: "Movies recently watched."  "+" means good, "-" means bad.

I’ve been travelling and settling back into my normal routine, so I haven’t had much time to post.  Regular posting will resume shortly.  I hope to conclude my obese libertarianism series tonight and will thereafter abandon the topic in order to move on to greener pastures.

In other news: I submitted my post on two "demands" of a moral theory to the Philosophers’ Carnival and was happy to notice it included in the recent edition.  Scroll down; it’s mentioned in the first section number eight (the first of two).

Around the blogosphere today, people are discussing the following remark by Bush:

"…I don’t see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord," he said.

(text lifted from Left2Right)

It’s interesting to notice the difference in tone between Andrew Sullivan’s post on this remark and Herzog’s at Left2Right. 

Herzog’s post is mildly critical of Bush.  But Herzog leaves open the possibility that, in seeming to claim that one must be Christian in order to qualify to be president, Bush is only offering a "private or personal reflection" on his own experience as president.  Herzog says that if that’s the case, then he has "no objection" to Bush’s remark. 

On the other hand, Sullivan’s post is far less generous to Bush.  Sullivan considers only one interpretation of Bush’s claim, according to which Bush means to say that the White House is for "Christians only," and demands that Bush retract the statement.  Sullivan seems really outraged; Herzog seems just tentatively disturbed.

This difference, I think, illustrates a general point: Claiming to be a liberal saps your credibility among conservatives and forces you to hedge, qualify and apologize in order to get conservatives to listen to you at all.  This is why I think Andrew Sullivan, as well as a few other self-identified "conservatives," is in a position to do a far better job of carrying "liberal" or "left-leaning" ideas to the right than the folks at Left2Right have been able to do thus far.

JPP points us to this face analyzing website.  I learn from it that I am a promiscuous Asian female, which is a hard truth to face, having spent many years believing falsely that I am none of those things.

Why is this blog ranked #16 on Technorati’s top 100?  There are some funny posts there, but I haven’t seen anything really hilarious so far, and it looks like it’s updated about once every one or two months.  I would think the 16th most authoritative blog in the world would have to be a bit more on the ball. 

Hmm…as I click on some more top-100 blogs, I notice that some of them don’t even appear to be blogs at all.  For instance, I claim #68 is not a blog.

This guy lists alternative rankings to Technorati’s.

At the end of my last post on this topic, I suggested a "working" version of the libertarian principle:

LP3: Persons have an absolute right to dispose of their property however they please — within their property.

In this post, I will discuss the meaning and extension of the term "property" as it appears in LP3.  This will enable us to identify the "supplement" to libertarianism which I have been promising to provide.

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