BLOG PARTY RECAP….So what do bloggers chat about when they get together? Here’s a miscellaneous assortment of stuff from last night’s get together with David Adesnik of OxBlog, Pejman Yousefzadeh of Pejmanesque, Robert Tagorda of Priorities & Frivolities, and Mark Kleiman of, um, Mark Kleiman:
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Is chess getting too deterministic and therefore less interesting at the highest levels? Answer: yes. Solution: play Go instead.
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Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power really is a classic that ranks right up with Machiavelli, but only if you get a copy of the slender and elegant first edition, not the bloated and execrable second edition.
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Jimmy Carter deserves a lot of credit for the democracy promotion agenda later adopted by the Reagan administration. The Reaganites didn’t want to adopt it at first, but eventually did because too many people in their own party began insisting on it. (But Carter himself never promoted democracy effectively because he was too committed to non-interventionism.)
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Eugene Volokh is a very good Scrabble player.
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It’s pretty hard to know what’s really going on in Iran these days. But if the moderates gain power in the next election it might really mean something.
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Most lefty bloggers are actually pretty moderate liberals: me, Josh Marshall, Atrios, Matt Yglesias, Jeralyn Merritt, Brad DeLong, etc. (Atrios is a hardnosed partisan, but his politics are actually fairly centrist liberal. Surprise!) Most righty bloggers are actually libertarians, not conservatives.
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Is France afraid of what Saddam might say during a war crimes trial? The consensus was that everything there is to say has already been said (after all, it’s not a secret that France sold him lots of arms). On the other hand, the spotlight of a trial might be something they’d like to avoid.
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Genealogy is a lot easier for me than it is for someone whose ancestors are all from Iran.
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If cats get hungry enough, they will eventually come downstairs even if they are extremely skeptical of strangers wandering around their house.
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No one likes postmodernists. None of us do, anyway.
Today’s pomos strike me as a perfect example of what happens when you take a perfectly respectable idea (different cultures are different, not necessarily inferior or superior) and take it to such an extreme that it loses all grounding in human experience.
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Clark/Dean or Dean/Clark would be a great ticket. However, it’s probable that both men have such large egos that neither one would be willing to serve as the other’s veep.
There was lots more, but you get the idea. Sort of like a blog except with real people….
