Looking back over a decade that was pretty great for China, India, much of Eastern and Central Europe, Brazil, and some parts of Africa but bad for the United States, it really is sobering to reflect on how contingent it all was.

As you know, I’m a firm believer in the idea that election results are dominated by the fundamentals. But you do have exceptions, and the United States Presidential election of 2000 was clearly one of them. Which is to say that the outcome was so close that it easily could have gone the other way without any titanic world-historical events having been different. The Palm Beach County ballot could have been designed differently. A small number of Ralph Nader voters could have flinched at the last minute and pulled the lever for Gore. And more broadly very small differences in campaign tactics very plausibly might have altered this one. And I think American politics and public policy would have taken a very different—and much better—course.

I know some progressives try to comfort themselves with the thought that had 9/11 gone down under Gore’s watch, the ensuing right-wing savaging would have killed him. But I really think that’s a big mistake. The rally ’round the flag effect would have been smaller than what you saw for Bush, but still real and substantial, and the strength of the rabid right would have preventing the GOP from ducking effectively. Democrats not only probably would have made congressional gains in the 2002 midterms, but the temporary post-9/11 spike in public confidence in government would have created a much more promising environment for progressive policies than the one you see today.

Here’s something I’m not sure we’ll ever really understand, but I wonder in a nagging way why it is that the Bush administration decided to take the line that all its illegally interrogation techniques weren’t really torture, or weren’t really illegal. Why not do the reverse? Why not admit, straight up, that past laws and treaties adopted by the United States of America sharply constrained the nation’s ability to deploy brutal interrogations and demand that congress change the rules? All evidence is that torture remained fairly popular long past the point when George W Bush himself had become unpopular. And that was even without any prominent political figures actually saying the words “torturing suspects should be legal.”

If Bush had said in the winter of 2001-2002 that he wanted congress to repudiate the Geneva Conventions as outdated in an era of terrorism, does anyone seriously think that the Senate Democrats would have stood in his way? Back then you had highbrow magazines like The Atlantic arguing that “what’s needed is a little smacky-face.” It would have been a great wedge issue for Bush, reflected a policy course that they intended to pursue anyway, and would have spared them a lot of problems down the road.

Did they just prefer the idea of breaking the law to changing it? Did they know on some level that they were in the wrong and didn’t want to own their own actions? It’s weird.

Spencer Ackerman tries to problematize the conclusion that the underpants bomber incident really represents a grievous intelligence failure. You should read his whole analysis. But in brief, while by definition letting a bomber on an airplane is a failure, based on what was actually known about Abdulmutallab, excluding him from flying would involve erecting pretty substantial barriers to entering the United States in ways that would have real costs. As I said before, the key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes’ theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.

Read, for example, this account of looking retrospectively at Abdulmutallab’s time in London. The fact of the matter is that there’s nothing in his behavior during this period that distinguishes him from any number of other young, reasonably devout Muslims living in Britain. He had political opinions that are outside the mainstream for a white Christian living in the United States, but so do virtually all Muslims.

John Burns is a great reporter, but I think this graf in the piece is analytically suspect:

That view, if confirmed, would offer a stark reaffirmation that Britain, the United States’ closest ally, continues to pose a major threat to American security. Critics in Britain and the United States say the British security forces, despite major increases in budgets and manpower in recent years, have not yet succeeded in adequately monitoring, much less restraining, the Islamic militancy that thrives in the vast network of mosques that serve the nation’s 1.5 million Muslims — and on university campuses across the country where nearly 100,000 of the 500,000 students are Muslims, including many, like Mr. Abdulmutallab, from overseas.

It’s just not the case that the possibility of a guy going to the UK, becoming radicalized, going to Yemen, acquiring an idea about how to smuggle explosives onto a plane, boarding a plane in Amsterdam, and attempting to detonate the device constitutes a “major threat to American security.” You don’t want to minimize the threat that a couple of hundred people might get murdered. We punish—severely and rightly—individuals who knowingly murder as few as one person. Murdering a whole plane full of people is very bad and we should try hard to stop it from happening. But the detonation of a plane just isn’t a major threat to our security. Civilian planes have been destroyed before, they’ve crashed before, and the country has suffered a much worse terrorist attack and in a broad sense it’s always turned out okay.

The other point is that monitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.

We had a lot of comic book adaptions in the zeros, and the best of them, contrary to what you might have heard, is Iron Man. I promise you that this is a better movie than The Dark Knight. Go back and watch them again if you don’t believe me. I’m not sure what’s led people to get confused about this—I think maybe people have decided that the use of a darker color pallet makes Dark Knight more serious, which is itself a lot sillier than using bright colors in your comic book adaptation. Dark Knight isn’t even as good as Batman Begins!

Let me just emphasize that in my view you really need to rewatch mainstream hit movies to form sound opinions about them. This is stuff that’s meant to be replayed on cable until the End Times. To just stay within the intra-Batman comparisons, once you already know what’s going to happen the tension totally drains away from the ferry-bomb stuff. By contrast knowing the Ra’s al-Ghul reveal makes the earlier training scenes cooler, it doesn’t ruin them.

I spent the decade as a real comic book adaptation completist, so I can tell you with some confidence that Daredevil and Elektra are the two worst of the decade. Considerably worse than the awful Fantastic Four 2. But which is the very worst? I think that to give a fair answer I would need to rewatch them but that’s a fate too horrible to contemplate.