From Crooked Timber: Books I Did Not Read This Year. Also see the MetaFilter thread this post inspired. (And note well the title that dominates the thread!)

This strikes me as a not-very-cricket lede for a news article:

The U.S. military death toll after 10 months of engagement in Iraq reached 500 on Saturday, roughly matching the number of U.S. military personnel who died in the first four years of the U.S. military engagement in Vietnam.

This strikes me as inappropriate for a couple reasons. I’ll, of course, expound.

1) The WaPo never explains why they’re making this seemingly random connection. I mean, why not mention the death toll from the Spanish-American War? Or why not “…roughly matching the size of The Price Is Right’s studio audience” or something as seemingly arbitrary? Obviously, we know what the WaPo‘s insinuating (In less than a year, we’ve racked up the death toll of over four years in Vietnam!!! This war is at least four times worse!!), but they may as well come out and say it, and defend the connection they’re trying to draw.

2) Even though they didn’t say it say it, I think they can be attacked for saying it anyway. The wars in Iraq and Vietnam are similar in that they involved the U.S. sending soldiers to a foreign country, and the similarities pretty much end there. And the Post knows this:

Noting that many Americans polled before the war began said they anticipated about 1,000 combat deaths, Kull said, “There are no signs of the population going toward a Vietnam-style response, in which a large minority or even a majority says, ‘pull out.’ ” That goal has steady support among 15 to 17 percent of the public. …

The casualties remain far lower than those incurred during the 14-year U.S. engagement in Vietnam, when a total of 58,198 troops were killed, including 47,413 combat deaths and 10,785 nonhostile deaths.

So … a lot of people expected at least this many deaths in the first place, and at any rate, it doesn’t seem like 60,000 people are going to die anytime soon over in Iraq. If the Nasra Cong start getting all guerilla on our asses Tet-style, then we’ll reassess this comparison. Meanwhile, WaPo, you can’t have your quagmire and eat it too.

You know, really, not that many American soldiers have been killed in this war in Iraq so far, comparatively. Add up all the coalition combat and non-combat deaths, and you get something like 592 soldiers. Compared to Vietnam’s 58K or Korea’s 54K, that’s nothing.

At least, that’s the narrative I hear in the back of my head sometimes.

But I opened my Esquire magazine this month and found one story that really reminds me why war is always a sad thing, even if the deaths don’t number many tens of thousands, even if it turns out to be necessary. The magazine asked the families of the fallen to pass along the soldiers’ last letters home. Read one:

Read more…

Writing my prior post on the drug war, I cited a statistic given by Eric Schlosser in 1997, that more people are in prison for marijuana violations than for manslaughter or rape.

But five years is a little while for stats like that, and I wondered when I posted it if that amount had changed. Well, according to AlterNet, last year’s stats actually paint a starker picture.

The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report reveals that police arrested an estimated 697,082 persons for marijuana violations in 2002, or nearly half of all drug arrests in the United States. This amounts to one marijuana-related arrest every 45 seconds.

The total number of marijuana arrests far exceeded the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Of those charged with marijuana violations, 88 percent were charged with possession only. The remaining 12 percent were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes cultivation for personal and medical use.

Really interesting MetaFilter thread on how the Oscars should handle the potential nomination of Gollum. If they wanted to give out a Best Supporting Actor nod, who gets it — Serkis or the animators?

Obligatory link to Gollum’s MTV Movie Award appearance (Quicktime, 8 megs).

What is going on over at TNR?

Last week, they announced the guffaw-inducing endorsement of Joe Lieberman for the Democratic candidacy. “Only Lieberman–the supposed candidate of appeasement–is challenging his party, enduring boos at event after event, to articulate a different, better vision of what it means to be a Democrat,” the editors wrote.

Only Lieberman has the strength of character to draw boos from his own party!

“If you’ve lost The New Republic,” goes Howard Kurtz’s quote, prominently displayed at the top of the “TNR Primary” main page, “you’ve dug yourself a hole in the Democratic primaries.” And they said irony was dead.

Not content to merely consign the magazine to irrelevance for the remainder of the primary cycle, however, someone had the bright idea to make this “point-counterpoint” about the endorsement into a centerpiece article.

Only it’s more of a “point-point,” seeing as how the authors don’t actually disagree. They’re both arguing that the endorsement was a really, really crackheaded idea.

And they’re right. But we’ve already established that the endorsement had about as much of an effect on electoral politics as Britney’s marriage (when you’ve lost the New Haven Register, you’ve dug yourself a hole blah blah blah…). How do they expect someone to care about this excruciating metacoverage of an article no one cared about in the first place? Or is Peter Beinart just seriously into self-torture?

Answers, please, anyone…

OK, it’s not a blog exactly, but it’s pretty cool, whatever you want to call it. The King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, publishes handwritten missives to his people every day on his website.

I wish President Bush did that. Oh wait. I don’t.

See this BBC article for more.

Forget The Atlantic Monthly. All the real journalism is happening on The Daily Show (RealPlayer req’d). (Via Atrios.)

From “More Reefer Madness,” by Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic:

In California thirty-one state and federal drug agents raided Donald P. Scott’s 200-acre Malibu ranch on the pretext that marijuana was growing there. Scott was inadvertently killed during the raid. No evidence of marijuana cultivation was discovered, and a subsequent investigation by the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office found that the drug agents had been motivated partly by a desire to seize the $5 million ranch.

If you haven’t read the article that begat the book, give it a whirl. It’s a catalogue of hypocrisy, futility, ruined lives, and government corruption, all borne out of an initiative that cost $10 billion for law enforcement in 2003, and $19 billion overall (PDF).

So far, in 2003, 50,342 people have been arrested as part of the War on Drugs, reports the War On Drugs Clock. Oh wait, make that 50,346. Almost half of these arrests are for marijuana offenses. “More people are now incarcerated in the nation’s prisons for marijuana than for manslaughter or rape,” said Eric Schlosser in 1997.

Just sayin’.

Do you think people who’ve never heard of a blog actually find this article interesting?

The linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy — a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Well isn’t that poignant.

Really, what is the New York Times Magazine‘s target audience? I’m more and more beginning to suspect it’s a group of time travelers from half a year ago, curious about what cultural developments have transpired in the interim. Next week in the NYTM: What is a “metrosexual”?

UPDATE: There’s some quality snark about this article flying over on MetaFilter. Sample:

“It was early September, the start of the school year in an affluent high school in Westchester County, just north of New York City, where I was focusing my teen-blogging expedition. The halls were filled with students and the walls were covered with posters urging extracurricular activities. (”Instant popularity, minus the hazing,” read one.) I had come looking for J., a boy I’d never seen, though I knew many of the details of his life.” – Such the brave anthropologist, this Nussbaum, hacking her way with a machete through the dense tropical jungles which encircle NYC, to dare to meet the exotic, tribalistic young savages of the Westchester County suburbs!

She’s lucky that these bone-in-the-nose primitives did not just throw her into a big kettle and boil her for dinner.