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People occasionally accuse me of being a sensible liberal, or likely to lose my liberal blogger badge. This is pretty warming, since I don't really think of myself as a liberal; I think of myself as an anarchocapitalist hampered in his desire for untrammeled freedom by the practicalities of realpolitik. I.e., if I could push a button and remove all government from the world, I wouldn't do it. I think that, unpaired with some serious education about enlightened self-interest, the results would be very bad. In the interim, I tend to lean towards the left, because I think the left is somewhat more likely to preserve the freedoms I care the most about without imposing the restrictions I find most distasteful.

However, now and again I feel obliged to say something really contrarian, so here goes. I am utterly, 100% serious about this:

James Lileks is the conservative Michael Moore.

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Cory Doctorow has another story, "Liberation spectrum," up on Salon. It's most definitely Transhumanist: deeply rooted in today's technological culture, set in a fairly near future, and so on. It doesn't have the body modification elements I'd been thinking were a key component of the subgenre, although I think there's one or two offhand references to the concept.

I like this story more than "Jury Service" or "0wnz0red," possibly because the conflict between the techie founder and the need for business oversight is something that crops up all the time in my day to day work. The characterization rocks too. Lee-Daniel's got personality, and he's real, not just a carrier for the thoughts on technology. Same goes for the other characters. I'm really impressed with how much Doctorow was able to say about Mac in so little room.

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I'm not sure why Blix's latest comments haven't gotten more play. I think that when Blix says "We feel that Iraq must do more than they have done so far in order to make this a credible avenue," that it behooves us to take note. He is in fact agreeing at least in part with the US claims that Iraq has not demonstrated that they have disarmed.

This is, in my book, exceedingly good news -- we want the various parties interested in the sanctions to agree on the current state of affairs. If it's generally accepted that Iraq is ignoring UN sanctions, the matter becomes much clearer, and you have common ground on which to base any further discussion. It's hard to have a rational argument about what happens next when you can't even agree if the milk is spilt.

Mind you, there is still discussion to be had subsequent. C.f. John Le Carre's op-ed, in which he explicitly says he wants Saddam gone even though he disagrees with Bush's methods. The dissension on method but not on goals is perhaps overly complicated; certainly Lileks missed it. (Hint: when the man says he would love to see Saddam's downfall, that's probably an indication that he doesn't like Saddam's policies, including the ecological diaster's Saddam's caused.)

This does sort of make people who predicted Blix would never find fault with Iraq look silly. That's the risk of partisan punditry, though.