The past few months have seen some fascinating new cleavages emerge in the post-September 11 policy community. I hadn’t chronicled them here through sheer being on vacation-ness, but it’s time to catch up. I expect all future fellow disputants in matters political to have read up.

The most recent was the very public split between Christopher Hitchens and The Nation. Hitch is his usual articulate self as to the reasons why, but by being relatively polite by his own standards, he is actually trumped by this piece in the New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum did not need to bring up Enron and Bush’s intelligence, in part because lefties do have a point in both cases, albeit an irrelevant one in the context of how to act post-September 11. These are diversions from an otherwise excellent polemic; the piece makes me wish I had had a subscription to the New York Observer when I lived there. I suspect it and the New York Review of Books are two publications I will slowly ease into over the coming years.

The must-read foreign policy article of the summer was Robert Kagan’s piece in Policy Review. Fareed Zakaria issues a rebuttal of sorts in the New Yorker, but with the American left too much in disarray to offer a credible contribution to the debate, the disagreements that are left are more about degree than kind.

If anybody has any other candidates for must-read policy articles from past few months, especially from the left (European or American), I’d love to hear about them. I’m still digesting the implications of the conclusions these articles draw.

[Fri, Oct 11 2002 – 10:53] eurof (email) “The past few months have seen some fascinating new cleavages emerge in the post-September 11 policy community.”

Then you don’t show any pictures!?! Hopefully you weren’t referring to Christopher Hitchens’ various cleavages. He’s quite gross and fat I understand.

Does Condoleeza Rice have a fascinating cleavage? I don’t know, you don’t show it, you just link up to some dull war arabs good bad US bad good crap. Get some tits and bums on your blog, before we all fall asleep!

[Fri, Oct 11 2002 – 14:03] mike strassel (email) eurof,i thought you just aquired a set of tits and buns?

[Fri, Oct 11 2002 – 14:20] Matthew (www) (email) How wonderful. Even people who have only met Eurof once or twice can see through his mindless blather.

[Fri, Oct 11 2002 – 15:31] Felix (www) (email) T&A to one side, Stefan is completely wrong about Rosenbaum.

[Mon, Oct 14 2002 – 02:41] eurof (email) Just give it up, Matthew. At least I’m under no misapprehension that I’m saying anything constructive.

Mike, I assume you mean Yianna, who has very nice thingys indeed. But I am at work during the day and miss her. If Stefan would just put up a “gentleman’s section” or link to the things I know he looks at late at night, all I’m saying is is his blog would have a wider audience.

[Mon, Oct 14 2002 – 10:56] Felix (www) (email) Yeah, Stefan, why don’t you include a pr0n section on your links page? (You might go for that sort of thing late at night, I’m more a morning man myself, but it takes all sorts, right?) It seems to me that those links would be used a lot more than pretty much all of the ones you’ve got up there at the moment. I can only conclude that not including them means you’re a prude, not willing to be seen as someone who visits such places.

[Mon, Oct 14 2002 – 10:58] Felix (www) (email) Oh, and my full response to Stefan’s post can now be found on the website which Stefan helpfully redesigned for me. Thank you, Stefan!

[Mon, Oct 14 2002 – 14:05] Matthew (www) (email) oh, that we could all glide over life’s little annoyances (war, terrorism) on a surfboard of flippancy. how envious i am, little eurof, that your life is so uncomplicated.

[Tue, Oct 15 2002 – 02:58] eurof (email) i’m sorry for not taking the weight of the world on my shoulders matthew you loser. i am, after all, the world’s remaining superpower with a vast military arsenal to go and right the wrongs that beset us all, which i direct from my armchair at home. like you, i am planning the coming campaign in iraq on a map stuck to my wall with blu-tack, using felt-tip pens. i am also the only voter in all the world’s democracies. it is entirely appropriate for me to spend my energies clarting on about all these things i can directly affect.

if only you knew how much i despise you.

[Tue, Oct 15 2002 – 09:37] Felix (www) (email) Children!

I think we should all stop fighting and spend all the spare time at porn sites instead. Pity Stefan doesn’t know of any.

[Tue, Oct 15 2002 – 19:40] Matthew (email) eurof; perhaps that comes from having a sad little banker life where you can’t actually affect much of anything at all, except to prompt occasional imperceptible movements in stocks no-one cares about.

and what’s a clart when it’s at home?

[Wed, Oct 16 2002 – 07:22] eurof (email) Actually, Matthew, you embarrass me with your brutish stupidity. The donkey I received as part of my dowry understands more about what I do than you. Understand that unlike yours, my life is not a constant search for approval from others, and that I don’t care if people don’t care if stocks i trade in move perceptibly or not, and in fact would be upset if they did move as a result of my trading, because it would mean i am getting crappy prices.

You fail to grasp the fact that I am working for myself, for my own gratification and financial gain, and have at least the illusion of being in control. I could fail. I am taking responsibility for my actions. You, cowardly, embittered journalistic hack as you are, must wait for others to act before you write about them, mostly to condemn, and can only write what your masters say is OK. You are the poodle of those who do. In my own admittedly microscopic way, I am a doer. So when you look at it, this sort of makes you my bitch, don’t you think?

Clart is a verb. There is no such thing as “a clart”.

[Wed, Oct 16 2002 – 10:28] Matthew (www) (email) how wrong are you? let me count the ways

1. clart is a noun. (the OED says: b. A dirty person (Sc.); a ‘cheap and nasty’ thing; hypocritical talk or flattery (north. Eng.)))

2. clart, when it is a verb, can’t possibly mean anything that makes sense in the context in which you used it. a) it’s a transative verb, so you’d have to clart yourself, and b) it means to smear with dirt or cause to plaster or stick. “clarting on,” therefore, is meaningless, but then again, considering what came before, that’s not entirely a suprise.

3. your tiny little unilateral world is a cosy myth of your own making designed to compensate for your utter inability to engage with anything of substance or complexity. you, not i, are the cog in the wheel, the financial drone numbly performing monotonous functions that could just as easily be performed by smarter-than-average mice.

4. you are morose, all the time. that destroys your claim to be working for your own personal gratification. or, if you think you are indeed working for your own personal gratification, you’re not doing a very good job of it.

5. donkeys, along with goats, northern cyprus, turkey, oil tankers and triremes, are on the list of banned words. you broke the rules, dolt.

i don’t despise you. i pity you and your tedious little mind.

[Wed, Oct 16 2002 – 12:26] eurof (email) Clarting on as i meant it means continuing in hypocritical talk or flattery. I suppose it is northern. But do try and think outside the dictionary. Life is not scrabble. Anyway, clarting’s what you do. You are a hypocritical fawning wretch.

I may have been a financial drone in the past, but the functions i now perform are definitely not repetitive, nor simple. Clever little mice might have a chance at doing OK in long-only benchmark-tracking fund management, as a Swedish Yucca plant proved in 2000-2001, but in a hedge fund environment they would quickly blow up and have their money taken away. Of course this also happens to humans.

As for being morose, well it has been a hard few days, but things are going better for now. Now go back and scribble the formulaic pap your boss assigned you about what someone else did recently, collect your wage-slave salary and revel in the “safe” mediocrity that is your destiny.

Me, I live on the edge, dude.

[Wed, Oct 16 2002 – 22:19] Matthew (email) if long-only benchmark-tracking fund management constitutes an edge, i’d hate to see your definition of cutting. dude.

[Thu, Oct 17 2002 – 05:58] eurof (email) wot are you on about? are you still trying to insult me? whay are you so ineffectual?

[Thu, Oct 17 2002 – 17:09] Matthew (www) (email) are you trying to insult me by impugning my insulting skills in a desperate attempt to shift the argument you’re so clearly losing?

learn to type.

[Thu, Oct 17 2002 – 17:22] Matthew (www) (email) ok. this is boring now. can’t we gang up on someone else?

[Fri, Oct 18 2002 – 11:56] eurof (email) how about. . . stefan?!? i mean, that’s just the obvious choice. let’s wait for him to write something, anything, and then see who can be rudest about it, even if it’s good.

on current form, that won’t be you, let’s face it. but you can still have a try, can’t you? never say die, old chap! soldier on!

[Fri, Oct 18 2002 – 13:36] Matthew (www) (email) kim’s father, who has become a devoted reader of this blog, has been worrying that we really, actually, in real life don’t like each other. i was going to reassure him that wasn’t the case, and then decided i wouldn’t.

this reminds me of those not-missed eurofian pillow fights. you just can’t put it down, can you? were you beaten as a child?