Dirks said, "Simply "taking to the streets" without controlling your message at least as effectively as GE and ABC/Disney do is to invite ridicule and to lose the middle."

Agreed. I am not proposing that we all grow our hair long and wear patchouli oil (although I'm not opposed to that either). I am also not proposing that we not control our message.

I am saying that Anonymous is at least partly right and we need to get our clean, non-hippie, message-controlled asses out in the street.

In defense of dirty hippies, the reason many of them became dirty hippies was because rational argument was not getting through. A more dramatic form of communication became necessary.

Look up April 17, 1965, and October 21, 1967.

According to Wikipedia:

On April 17, the SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights activist group, led the first of several anti-war marches in Washington DC, with about 25,000 protesters.

That's too small to count but you're right about October 21, 1967. Wikipedia again:

"The next day, a large demonstration took place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. As many as 100,000 demonstrators attended the event, and at least 30,000 later marched to the Pentagon for another rally and an all night vigil."

I revise my remarks but the point is still pretty much the same. We didn't get seriously into Vietnam until about 1963, so late 1967 is about 4 or 5 years later -- just about where we are right now, although we've suffered far fewer casualties.

Let's get our clean, non-hippie, message-controlled asses out in the street!

Even if individual events were -- as you quaintly put it too small to count -- the cumulative numbers were huge.

I'm not really debating exactly when mass protest became effective in the 60's, my point is just that we need to do that again NOW. We've done a little of it so far, but Anonymous was basically right that we did some before the war and once or twice since then and on a small scale locally (I've been to some of these), but we need repeated, large-scale protests like those that happened repeatedly and on a large scale in the 60's. I'm not sure that small scale protests really cumulate into anything like the large scale ones do. There may be a threshold that has to be reached to really affect mass opinion.

We don't really disgaree, bro. And I'm definitely not trying to devalue the efforts that people like you made before 1967 or whenever. In fact, my opinion of you went up enormously when I read that. Thank you for your longtime devotion to fighting for justice.

BTW: on a personal note, I was too young to be there in 1965 but I was teargassed twice at anti-Vietnam protest marches in the early 70's.

"Drezner claims that I have a "very strange definition of imperialism," yet Rose himself has explicitly argued that the U.S. is now an empire and that we ought to be. In an April, 2003 Slate article entitled "How to Run an Empire," Rose wrote..."

LOL. Awesome, Glenn. In one short update Glenn completely destroys Rose and Drezner.

Pandyora said, "To put it bluntly, your generalizations lack factual support. Far from being imperialist, the foreign policy community in general hold restrained opinions."

To put it bluntly, you have misunderstood Glenn and your facts are irrelevant.

Glenn is talking about the FPCers who get covered in the media and invited on TV, i.e the ones that matter. That FPC is heavily skewed in an unrestrained, pro-war mongering direction.

Look at Foreign Affairs' description of their methodology:

"Respondents were asked to self-identify their ideological bias from choices across a spectrum: very conservative, conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, liberal, and very liberal. Twenty-five people identified themselves as some level of conservative, 39 identified as moderate, and 44 identified as some level of liberal. To ensure balance, the survey was weighted according to ideology to make the number of weighted liberal respondents equal to the number of conservative respondents."

The idea that they had to weight liberals in their sample down tells you a little about how unrepresentative this sample is of the population of real FPCers who get covered in the media and invited on TV. Even weighting the liberals down to be equal in numbers to the conservatives is a joke.

Atrios calls it the "No Liberals On TV Rule". You saw virtually no opposition or serious questioning of the war on TV and very little in the newspapers either. What little there was in the papers was drowned out by far more volume of material published on the front pages.

Back to the drawing board, Pandyora. You'll have to find another bogus rationalization to defend the media whores, the FPC, and the libhawks.

Drezner said, "[...] You accuse the foreign policy community of holding "rigid ideological views." After hearing reports about, say, YearlyKos, in what way are the outsiders you want included in the coversation more ideologically diverse? Indeed, would a netroots-driven foreign policy community be any more tolerant of ideas than the group you've been lambasting?"

What a fatuous idiot! Pretending not to notice the obvious illogic of his position! Even if it were true, as it is not, that there was no ideological diversity among Yearly KOS attenders, obviously adding them to the FPC would extend the diversity of the FPC, which currently doesn't represent them at all. Only a simpleton could miss this point.

But worst of all, this is a classic straw man argument. Glenn didn't argue for replacing the current FPC with KOS fans. He argued against a monopoly of any kind and opening up the FPC to those who got it right on Iraq. Why is that so hard for conservatards like Drezner to grasp?.

I argued much earlier that a simple litmus test was whether or not someone argued responsively and without ad hominems. Drezner's attack on a straw man is a form of non-responsiveness and a sign that his counterarguments to the actual arguments must blow, otherwise he would make them.