Sullivan points out that the Atheist Alliance International has chosen a symbol for atheists:

Atheists Who Are, Unfortunately, On Earth

Atheists In Space!

The Red Sox are dominating the Rockies 13-1 in the top of the ninth.  Fortunately, this is the first of the first two games in Boston, so perhaps Colorado will be warmed up by the next one. 

Even if you aren’t a Colorado fan, do you really want to see another Red Sox championship?  I mean, c’mon, they’ve already had their quota for this century.  Twice in the same decade would be unseemly.

St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’ catalogue just arrived, and it includes Andrew Louth’s forthcoming book in SVS’ “The Church in History” series, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071.  Fr. Andrew’s book will be available as of Nov. 15.  If it is as good as the two other volumes in the series that I have, Meyendorff’s Imperial Unity and Papadakis’ The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, we should all be in for a treat.

The RedState ban of new arrivals (less than 6 months) voicing support for Ron Paul (it seems that the precise terms of the ban have often been lost in the back and forth) has been generating a lotofonline mediaattention.  The old “there is no such thing as bad publicity” rule applies here–at least for Ron Paul.  The ban ironically rewards the Paul supporters, both reasonable and obnoxious, with additional media coverage of our candidate.  It makes more people ask a question that’s very helpful to Paul: “What do Republicans have against Ron Paul?”  If RedState really wanted to vex and irritate the Paul supporters, they would never have turned whatever annoyance they felt from the legions of Paul supporters into a major story.

Even though the ban is aimed at his supporters (some of whom probably are as obnoxious and crude as they are accused of being–this is the Internet, folks, deal with it), the impression it leaves is that RedState is trying to cut Paul and his message out of their site, which redounds to Paul’s advantage and puts RedState in an awfully awkward position.  Frankly, I find any post-ban complaining from Paul supporters about censorship a little silly, if only because proper libertarians and conservatives should acknowledge the right of voluntary associations (which is what a community blog is) to govern their memberships as they see fit.  It is government censorship that should exercise us, not the stance of a few community blog mavens.  Nonetheless, a decision taken out of frustration will be seen to have been taken out of fear and a feeling of inferiority.  In the end, the ban is just one sign of the inability of the modern movement to maintain its support for the dreadful policies of the last six years and still have a space for antiwar libertarians and conservatives.  If the war takes priority over everything else, as it seems to have done, it really becomes impossible for the movement to accommodate those whose chief difference with the movement is over the war.   

These folks run a politics and commentary blog, but they seem to have no grasp on how politically clumsy their move truly is.  There are already millions of people who think that the GOP and the movement are incapable of rationally coping with dissent, and this has just given them another reason to believe it.  If politics is supposed to involve persuasion, RedState has just abandoned any attempt at persuading Paul supporters that there might be some grounds for compromise and cooperation.  The typical objection is that Paul supporters are already implacably opposed to the rest of the GOP field, so there’s no point in trying to win any of them over.  That’s certainly one way of approaching the problem, but it is a loser. 

Think about it: Republicans and conservatives are already reportedly badly demoralised.  Turnout is likely to be a major problem next year.  Fundraising already is a problem.  Who is generating some enthusiasm and better-than-expected fundraising?  Ron Paul.  Whose supporters do the geniuses choose to ban from talking about their candidate?  Ron Paul’s.  If I were Tom Cole and interested in maximising turnout next year, I would be banging my head against a wall at such patently self-destructive tactics.  RedState is prominent and well known enough that its decisions will have consequences far beyond its own precincts.  The thing is that Ron Paul supporters have known all along that they were not welcome in the modern GOP–this is just one more helpful reminder.   

Update: The Politico story has an interesting detail:

Redstate founder Erick Erickson said he woke up this morning bombed with hundreds of e-mails, “the overwhelming majority very angry.” His own readers, though, loved the ban.

“It is the most recommended user diary in Redstate history,” he said.

That will simply reinforce the view of Paul supporters, such as myself, that RedState’s readers and we have little in common.  This was not exactly news to me, but it is worth being reminded that this is not some arbitrary decision handed down by the people who run the blog, but is quite representative of the opinion of the regulars there.

Second Update: It’s a bad sign for RedState when Kossack diarists are more politically astute than the RedState folks.

Nation:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that Colbert is preferred by 13% of voters as an independent candidate challenging Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani.

Via Yglesias

I suppose this means that Colbert has also received the “Colbert bump.”

I’d like to see Giuliani and Clinton square off because she can beat him given how narrowly he is defining his candidacy. And the fact that David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Pipes are advisors to Giuliani makes folks like me salivate.

Whether the Republican Party knows it or not, a Romney/Hagel ticket or Romney/Huckabee ticket would be much harder for Hillary Clinton to tackle.

Steve Clemons here makes the mistake that is always a danger for all observers of the political scene (I have made this mistake myself more than once): confusing the objectively horrible quality of the candidate and his advisors with his electoral viability.  According to this thinking, candidates who are being advised by loopy militarists will never get elected in a presidential election.  What makes me think this is untrue?

If we trust the head-to-head matchup polls as much as we trust the nationwide primary polling, Giuliani is one of the more competitive candidates and more of a threat to the Democrats than most of the others.  I think both sets of polls are probably misleading and are still driven by name recognition, which is why McCain and Giuliani consistently outperform their rivals, but if we are going to grant Giuliani the status of frontrunner on the basis of such polls we have to acknowledge that he is polling as one of the better-performing Republicans vs. Clinton.  According to the current polling, every Democratic matchup against Romney means a Democratic landslide (against Edwards, the margins have gone from an amusing 15 or so to the ridiculous 25+), while Giuliani is supposed to be reasonably competitive against any Democrat.  We really should not trust much of this national polling on the candidates, but given what evidence we have it seems positively crazy for a Democrat to hope for a Giuliani nomination to avoid the terrible threat of Romney.

Remember how I recklessly predicted Fred Thompson taking first place in New Hampshire?  Yeah, well, it would help if he actually goes to New Hampshire again (he’s been there once), which he doesn’t seem intent on doing anytime soon:

A key supporter to former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) joined a rival campaign Tuesday morning, telling The Hill that Thompson is clearly not intending to campaign seriously in the first-in-the-nation primary state.

Former state Rep. Dan Hughes was in line to serve as Thompson’s state chairman, but Hughes said Tuesday he is joining Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign as state vice chairman instead.

Thompson’s apparent reluctance to campaign in the Granite State has rubbed many voters and officials there the wrong way, and it could get worse. One source told The Hill on Tuesday that Thompson is not planning to file to run there personally, sending a surrogate instead.

So perhaps Thompson’s new strategy is to reject both the old and the new methods of running for President: he refused to start early and he won’t pay attention to the early states.  Thompson labels criticism along these lines as talking about “the process game.”  Well, I suppose, but it is also known as the electoral process, which tends to be important in getting elected.  Thompson may be one of the first candidates to to try to run by first ignoring substance and then ignoring process.  He did say his campaign would be different!

For clarification, in baseball I believe it is generally considered permissible to support a team from the same league in the post-season (this is especially true of National League fans, who are morally obligated to oppose any AL team in the World Series on the assumption that this team will very often be the Yankees), but only if the team is not a division rival.  The more bitter of a division rival the team is, the less acceptable supporting their post-season play will be.  Supporting your team’s historic, bitter division rival is obviously entirely unacceptable.  Doing so as part of political pandering should normally result in deportation, but standards are slipping.

P.S.  There is one gray zone, which may permit supporting the team that defeated your team in the latest round of the playoffs on the grounds that you may find some consolation in having lost to the overall champion, but this is generally viewed as a weak excuse.  This does not usually conflict with the no-support-for-division-rival rule, since it is relatively rare, even with wild cards, for division rivals to meet in the playoffs.  If there is a direct conflict, as there was in the Yankees-Red Sox matchup a few years ago, the division rival rule obviously takes precedence.

P.P.S.  There is also a general New York exception for all non-New York fans, which means that in the event that either New York club reaches the World Series or (horror of horrors) there is a subway series, it is not only permitted, but positively encouraged, for them to support the non-New York team or simply pretend that the entire thing is a bad dream.

There is a very long, but fairly interesting New Republic book review article on the modern state of classical music, its popularity (or lack of it) and classical music’s apologists.  There’s a lot to it, but this part struck me as especially worthwhile:

The morally charged dichotomization of surface and depth is a romantic trope that–as the musicologist Holly Watkins has shown–goes back at least as far as the writings of Hoffmann. Between Hoffmann and Wagner, however, the metaphor of depth had been claimed by German writers as a national trait; and just as nationalism underwent its general transformation from a modernizing and liberalizing discourse into a belligerent and regressive one in the later nineteenth century, so the notion of spiritual depth had been turned into a weapon of national and racial aggrandizement in Wagner’s hands.

I remember Prof. Lukacs remarking in Democracy and Populism, I believe it was, on this tendency that he identified in German thinkers to ascribe superior value and truth in terms of such “depth.”  However, I would challenge the idea that nationalism really underwent a transformation over the course of the nineteenth century, when the heart of romantic nationalist myths is the idea of an enduring essence or character that the nationalist scholar or artist claims to be able to define and interpret.  You often hear this–the “good” nationalism of the liberal revolutionaries turned into the “bad” nationalism of a Bismarck and so forth, but the “good” nationalism was almost always intent on unification (which usually involved war) and expansionistic (because it was liberal and therefore eager to spread the revolution and, on a less high-minded note, to open new markets for “the nation”).  In the mid and late nineteenth century nationalists, many of whom remained political liberals throughout Europe well into the twentieth century, were even more likely to engage in warfare to “redeem” the “lost” territories and countrymen still living under foreign rule.  Nationalism was belligerent in no small part because it was liberalising and modernising.  The strange thing is that we still credit the early nationalists’ self-justifications for their enthusiasm for conflict, when we are quite willing to criticise their later heirs.  We imagine a transformation and a difference where there was neither. 

Used in an exclusionary way, as Wagner does in the citation given by Taruskin or as, say, Zambelios did when addressing Western folklorists who threatened to interpret Greek identity and culture in a way that contradicted his classicising impulses, this essentialism means that only those who truly belong to the nation can understand it or participate in its cultural life.  This rhetoric of depth and essence is, in fact, an appeal to abstraction and an actually very superficial, limited grasp on culture and is used as a means of shrinking cultural participation and production down to the confines of a national dogma. 

Nationalism was always belligerent, warring against the political status quo, against legitimate governments that “denied” national unification, often enough against the Church, and against the past of the nationalists’ own people(s) and country/countries.  It was the bane of the civilised world for most of the nineteenth century and for all of the twentieth, and it was fundamentally the same thing.  

It is, of course, history that has often suffered most violently at the hands of nationalist redactors, and nationalist theories of history are almost by definition “regressive,” so to speak, in that they are almost all defined in terms of a golden age, an age of decline, and the age of palingenesis, which, in theory, is simply the recovery of the supposed golden age (whose character is suitably re-imagined to match whatever suits the liberal nationalist fantasy about his own virtues).  On this point, for example, I have happened to see an English-language textbook on Romanian history sponsored by a Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi that treats the period of the Danubian Principalities as one in which “the Greeks” are merely an annoying, troublemaking intrusion that the Romanians were well rid of, and the enormously productive and active life of the Greco-Romanian culture of the Principalities receives little or no attention.  This is a travesty of a fairly impressive period in Romanian history.  (Of course, it was part of the pre-independence period, and therefore not to be credited with as much importance.)  Bucharest and Iasi were shining examples of an international cultural Hellenism in the early modern period, and the educated elites of the Balkans referred to themselves as Hellenes as a statement of their cultivation and status, taking a name that had no particular ethnic connotations for them, and embracing Greek language and literature much as the educated in western and central Europe used Latin.  Pre-Phanariot rulers cultivated at their courts an idea of a revived Byzantium, understood as a Christian empire and not along the strictly ethnic and irredentist lines of the Megali Idea.  Much or all of this is expurgated out of the history of the Romanians in question.

As many of us have known for a long time, Giuliani is a treacherous baseball fan, having turned against the Dodgers when he lived in Brooklyn and now allying himself with the Red Sox.  It’s as if I were to start cheering for the Cubs or Cardinals because my own team had been eliminated.  It’s absurd.