The Proud Duck

2007-01-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

I've said before that the greatest hardship poor Americans have to deal with is having to live with other poor Americans. That's not to say the poor are necessarily less "moral" than the wealthy -- there are plenty of rich people who are utterly wicked, as the Bible itself points out again and again, and who'd think nothing of stealing their own grandmother's life savings between rounds of golf. But the wealthy tend to keep their disorder private. Ken Lay may have been defrauding millions of people of their life savings, but I'm sure he was a nice enough neighbor, and very unlikely to steal your car stereo.

And having your car stereo stolen, your kid robbed at gunpoint, your daughter raped, etc. is probably the greatest suffering imposed by American poverty. By most objective measures, poor Americans' material standard of living -- based on living space and consumption of goods -- is comparable to the standard of living of many ordinary non-poor Europeans.

The problem is that economic inequality does matter in this one regard: Public disorder tends to become concentrated in those communities that are poorer relative to others, regardless of their absolute wealth. The reason for this is that public disorder arises largely from private disorder -- people's unwillingness to police themselves, leaving only the imperfect controls of the police to impose order. Private disorder is correlated with poverty; people with poor impulse controls aren't likely to be high achievers. People who are competent enough to rise in society will naturally prefer to leave disordered communities -- segregating them further as enclaves of lowlifes and making them even more disordered.

A liberal might say that the solution is then to eliminate economic inequality. She would be wrong. Eliminating economic inequality entirely is impossible, short of the full Harrison Bergeron treatment, since random contingency will always allocate talent, personality, and good fortune differently. And as long as even some inequality persists, people's natural inclination to self-segregate with people of equivalent class will persist, and the neighborhoods at the bottom will always be the roughest -- for the simple reason that people with sufficient means will always want to escape them. Thus, even with Sweden's relatively low economic inequality, there are of course still neighborhoods where a woman can't walk alone at night. (Those neighborhoods happen to be largely populated by Muslim immigrants, BTW, which is really starting to cheese the Swedes off, but that's another matter.)

Even though poverty is associated with disorder, with the poorer neighborhoods more disorderly than affluent ones, the absolute level of disorder in the poorest communities can vary. Cultures influence behavior. A culture that successfully imposes greater informal restraints on behavior will still have its poorest neighborhoods be the roughest ones -- but those roughest neighborhoods will be less disordered than the worst neighborhoods in a society whose culture does not impose such restraints. Thus, even though South Los Angeles and South Malmo (I'm guessing here) may lie at the bottom of America's and Sweden's respective wealth-and-order scales, South Malmo will be less disorderly than South LA -- because Swedes are less disorderly than Americans.

In other words, making America more like Sweden won't solve the problems many liberals claim it will -- because Americans aren't Swedes.

2006-10-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

Logic from Iran's nasty little tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"If the Holocaust is real why are those who have the opposite opinion about it being arrested and jailed?"

I'm no fan of the laws in Europe that prohibit questioning the Holocaust -- history should always be open to debate, and even if the evidence for an occurrence is overwhelming, the answer to a crackpot who denies it is ridicule, not prosecution. History may not be a true science, but it partakes enough of scientific and academic methods that criminalizing getting the "wrong" result is not acceptable, and will inevitably put a damper on energetic inquiry. It's not a coincidence that the logic of criminalizing one's scientific opponents has spread to the global warming debate, for example, with at least one global-warming proponent advocating "Nuremberg trials" for global warming "deniers."

But back to A-Jad (like that? Like A-Rod, and a lot easier than typing "Ahmadinejad" and having to look up the spelling each time). Someone needs to ask the question back at him: "If Islam is real, why are those who have the opposite opinion about it being arrested and jailed -- or killed?" The penalty for apostasy in Iran, of course, is death. Add hypocrisy to the long list of the little bearded schmuck's vices.

2006-09-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

Right after the first eleventh of September, I penned a quasi-Coulterish rant urging that the United States issue a formal ultimatum to any country with any ties to any international anti-American terrorist group, declaring that the United States would treat all such groups and any nation that supported them as constructively comprising an anti-American alliance. Further, we would deem an attack by one to be constructively an attack by all, and hold each alliance member responsible. There would have been no silliness about including North Korea in this "axis of evil" (which was transparently an effort to suggest that there wasn't anything particularly Islamic about our present enemy). We should have required that each nation grouped as a member of this enemy alliance take immediate, concrete steps towards ending support for terrorist groups and cooperating with American counterterrorist efforts, as a condition of getting off the s--- list. The conditions would be severe indeed, to the point where we wouldn't really expect the more obstinate of the bunch to agree. That would be the point. The ultimatum would expire in a week, and would be followed by an immediate Congressional declaration of war. A real one, not one of the squishy "authorization to use military force" quasi-declarations. The attack on America on 9/11 was serious enough for us to have finally reached into our 1941 toolbox, and it's rather poor that we didn't.There should have been none of this democracy-building idealism (although I have to confess I was hopeful in the beginning that the Administration's strategy of setting up a model democracy in the Middle East might have been a viable strategy). Instead, since we obviously can't conquer and hold the entire Middle East, we should have done what we profitably could.In the old days, when a local despot got out of line, some great power or other would send over a few ironclads, send a landing party to seize the customs house, and run the country's trade for the occupier's benefit until the local pasha/nawab/caudillo got tired of living on dog food and made peace. This had the benefit of not getting too many of the occupiers killed (you could seize an economic center of gravity without making too big a footprint, thereby inspiring insurgent resistance and risking your supply lines), and of helping defray the occupation's costs. True, it didn't always work (see Cinco de Mayo), but Iraq's not looking so great, either. I doubt even Rumsfeld, knowing what we know now, would have gone in again.I think President Bush's administration made its greatest mistake in taking a halfway solution. Afghanistan was a no-brainer -- it was harboring al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda dunnit, full stop. I think a majority of Americans would have supported the All-In Real Axis Of Evil Tournament option set forth above. Instead, the Administration, by going several bridges too few, went one bridge too far in Iraq. It went beyond the obvious, without adopting the truly global approach that would have allowed people to comprehend the global threat. As it was, people reasonably wondered why Iraq got unlucky, and not, say, Iran or Syria. The administration was left with the WMD argument -- which really did make Iraq look like a preventive war, as opposed to one campaign in a global responsive war on all terrorists and all their state sponsors.

2006-07-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Via Lileks, this gem from the inimitable (thankfully) LA Times columnist Joel Stein, who completely freaked out when a local real estate broker stuck a flag in his lawn:

So the reason I didn't want to put a flag outside wasn't because I disapprove of our international policies. It was because I didn't want to associate myself with the other people who put them up, and with their unquestioning, tribal, us-versus-them, arrogant mentality. Though I love being American, I don't want to proclaim it as the sole basis of my identity.

As long as we're speaking of arrogance, let's review: Joel thinks the other people (not "some") who put up flags must have an unquestioning, tribal, us-versus-them, arrogant mentality.

This really shouldn't need much of a response, but since Mr. Stein gets paid to write a column at a major, if declining, newspaper, and since the Times does exercise some selection in deciding who to hire, there could conceivably be some people who are even thicker than he is. So here goes: It's possible to love being American without making it the "sole basis" of one's identity. I am a member of a family, of a church, and of a country, among many memberships of which I am proud. To paraphrase a better wordsmith than I am, it is altogether fitting and proper that I should be so. Something about "the mystic chords of memory, stretching back to every hearth and patriot grave" comes to mind.

All those loyalties make up parts of my identity. Does that make me "tribal"? I guess it does, to some point. "Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land?" My ultimate loyalty is to what is right, but I'm not an island. I owe duties of loyalty to those closest to me. I believe that this means that when the interests of, say, a family member and a stranger honestly conflict, or those of my country and another, and the moral equities are otherwise equal or too close to call (that is, when it's not a case of one being clearly in the wrong), I should favor my family member or my country over the stranger.

This may be a little too sophisticated for the self-anointed sophisticates to comprehend. I am not saying "my country, right or wrong." I'm saying that in a close case, where reasonable arguments can be made by both sides, the side I should pick is the side closest to me.

Loyalty and patriotism aren't just about picking sides, either. It's plenty possible to fly the flag without making any comparisons with other countries. We can love freedom and other good things both in the abstract, and as they are expressed in our country's heritage. As an analogy, I love kindness and humor and beauty and self-sacrifice both in the abstract, and (more thoroughly) as my wife Danielle exemplifies them. Loving those qualities in her doesn't mean I can't also be moved when they appear in others, which may be why I find myself moved not only by genuine expressions of American patriotism, but also by the honest sentiment of foreign patriots for good things as they are expressed in their countries. The French generally annoy me, but danged if I don't like Smetana's "Ma Vlast" cycle, or the scene in "Casablanca" when Victor Lazlo has the band play "La Marseillaise," both of which appeal precisely because they are expressions of patriotism.

(Note to Danielle: This does not mean I go out of my way to appreciate beauty, etc. in other people than her. Really. Not even at the beach.)

I would imagine that most people who fly the flag would agree, if it occurred to them to analyze the reasons they do the things that come naturally to them. I have rarely encountered an actual specimen of the kind of mindless nationalist Joel Stein seems to think we all are. I have, however, encountered one whole lot of Joel Steins.

Joel Stein is tribal, too. To a great extent, he's basing his identity upon what he's not: He's not a flag-waver, with all the simplistic arrogance that supposedly entails. The irony of his criticizing an "us-versus-them" mentality in an argument that specifically defines himself as opposing another group is something that may not entirely escape him: "Like everyone else, I'm just blindly trying to fit in with my clique." I just wonder if all the other "cliques" have such a cardboard impression of the others.

2006-06-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

As we approach the Fourth of July, we're told that America is apathetically sacrificing liberty in the name of fighting terrorism.

Horsepucky. Utter steaming horsepucky.

To everyone who says the NSA's monitoring of telephone calls to international calls to numbers associated with terrorist suspects is the end of liberty as we know it, consider this:

When they passed laws banning smoking indoors (I don't smoke and am generally annoyed by people who do, but not everyone thinks as I do), you didn't care. When they mandated seat belt and car seat laws (and imposed ghastly fines on people whose two-year-olds decided to throw tantrums and climb out of their car seats just as the minivan pulled up next to a cop -- speaking not entirely hypothetically here), you didn't care. When they cranked up tax rates to the point where ordinary people can expect to see up to 40% of their incomes taken (here in California), depriving them of the freedom those funds would have given, you didn't care. When you banned fireworks because some idiot burned his fingers or worse, you didn't care. (Long live Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, and Stanton -- last champions of sulferous liberty here in OC!)

And if there's a chance that if I make a phone call to a telephone number associated with terrorists, someone might listen in -- I don't care.

All government is a trading of liberty for security -- "to secure these rights [of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men." Which is why Benjamin Franklin never uttered the silly phrase, often attributed to him, that "those who trade liberty for security deserve neither." I trade my liberty not to quaff a case of beer and go on a joy ride, for my security not to be killed by someone who thinks that's a good idea.

Right now, in response to the new and uniquely challenging threat of terrorism, liberty has been restricted far less than it has been in pursuit of other objectives, including the war on drugs. If a truly essential liberty comes under attack, I'll meet you at the barricades. Right now, I'm more annoyed by fireworks bans than I am by anything that's being trumpeted as the End Of American Democracy As We Know It. It just isn't so.

2006-05-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

Cinco de Mayo is as good a time as any to post my long-delayed thoughts on the illegal immigration issue. (I meant to do it on Monday, the day of the May 1 "day without an immigrant boycott/protests.)

There are approximately 11 million illegal aliens in the country. (I know the term isn't politically correct, but "undocumented worker" or "illegal immigrant" just doesn't accurately describe their status. They're foreign nationals -- aliens -- who are in the country illegally. Calling them "undocumented" suggests that there was just some sloppiness in processing paperwork, and "immigrants," to me, connotes regular, legal immigration, with an understanding that their presence will be permanent.)

It would be very difficult to deport them all. In addition to the practical difficulties and the expansion of government power that would be required, it would probably cause a major shock to the economy. In addition, it could be argued that it wouldn't be fair to those here illegally. True, they violated the law in coming here (and, typically, in forging documentation to indicate eligibility to work). But the government has made virtually no serious effort to enforce the laws they violated. Illegal aliens may be said to have a reasonable expectation that the same benign (from their perspective, at least) neglect will continue.

In civil law, there's a concept known as "adverse possession," under which a person who does not own property, if he occupies it openly for a certain period without the true owner taking steps to end the unlawful possession, can obtain title to the property. A related concept is that of the statute of limitations, where a person must act to enforce his rights within a certain time or waive the right to enforce them. The idea is that allowing people to "sleep on their rights" and bring up old claims long after they accrue would cause disruption and uncertainty, by leading people to expect to be let alone and then going after them.

So I think that people who have been in the country for a long enough period -- say, five years or more -- ought to be given some process by which they can apply for legal residency. There are some problems with this approach -- it may unfairly benefit the illegal aliens who have jumped to the head of the line, and how do we determine whether someone's been here for five years, for example?

The key would be that any kind of new regularization process must be coupled with effective enforcement of the law going forward. Previous amnesties or regularizations have appeared only to encourage further waves of migration by people hoping to get legal residency in the next amnesty.

Start with a border barrier -- a real one, not a "virtual" one. I'm sorry if that makes Mexico feel bad -- it should, having failed to organize its society in a way that can provide for its own. Mexico needs to clean its own house before it makes demands on the United States. Even if it can't get its legendary corruption under control, it can start by giving Americans access to the Mexican economy (where they can't presently own property or work) as Mexicans have to the American economy. That would go a long way towards equalizing the labor/capital imbalance that draws Mexico's surplus labor north. Allowing the imbalance to be balanced by a mutual, rather than a one-sided, flow of labor and capital will also reduce the inefficiencies involved in taking people out of their linguistic and cultural environment and forcing them to adapt to life in a foreign country (although that inefficiency is probably shrinking as much of the United States is becoming Latinized)

And don't tell me we can't put up thousands of miles of fence -- we've built thousands of miles of highway, and a fence is a lot cheaper.

Second, establish a more foolproof and convenient method of checking people's eligibility to work. The Social Security card's technology hasn't changed since the '30s. How hard can it be to make the card electronic, like a credit card? Set it up so the employer can swipe the card and check it against a database. Set up a system to deal with the inevitable glitches. (And hire some people with higher IQs than DMV workers to staff it.) Restrict dramatically the number of documents that can be used to establish identity and eligibility to work, requiring a showing of good cause to use other documents than the most common and most easily checked.

It's asked rhetorically why we don't just turn verification over to American Express. I'm presently litigating a couple of credit-reporting cases, in which mistakes by creditors may have caused damage to consumers, so obviously mistakes do happen. But that's no excuse to write off verification altogether, especially if we work to make the system as foolproof as humanly possible.

Finally, although I obviously wouldn't want to go around randomly deporting people, I think there's a strong case to be made for having local police check the status of people they arrest in the course of ordinary law enforcement. My native Costa Mesa has attracted a lot of grief for having its police refer illegal aliens arrested for certain crimes to the INS. I think it's an excellent idea. I know an arrest doesn't automatically mean a person is guilty -- but since a person can only be arrested on probable cause, a person arrested has generally conducted himself in such a way as to draw attention to himself. If you're here illegally (and you're not eligible to stay under a regularization program), you ought to keep your nose cleaner than everyone else. Otherwise, the effect is that police would have to be closing their eyes to more-or-less obvious violations of immigration law, which can't have a positive effect on respect for the rule of law.

The problem with the present wink-and-nod system (totally aside from the strain that effectively-unregulated immigration places on the social and physical infrastructure) is that it basically penalizes people who want to obey the law. When there's no enforcement, the only compliance is voluntary. And when there's an economic advantage in violating the law (as cheap illegal labor often gives), non-enforcement rewards the most dishonest. That is a step in the direction of the corruption that helps drive Mexicans here in the first place.

2006-03-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently gave a speech in South Africa, defending her innovation of looking to foreign law in interpreting questions arising under the U.S. Constitution.

Leaving aside the soundness of her argument (I think it stinks; that's a long argument for another day), she displayed a pettiness towards those who disagree that is unworthy of a judge, let alone a member of the Supreme Court. She stated that she'd been alerted to a post on a radical website where someone had suggested -- possibly even seriously -- that she should be done away with in order to save American democracy. She also stated that Justice Roger Taney, in his infamous Dred Scott decision (which created out of nothing a constitutional principle that the government had no right to restrict the spread of slavery) had criticized the use of foreign precedent.

That's called "guilt by association." It's shoddy logic and it displays deep bad faith and contempt for civil debate. But let's play along, shall we?

Justice Ginsburg is a constitutional nonoriginalist -- that is, she believes that in interpreting the Constitution, she believes she is not bound by what the Constitution's actual text actually meant to the people who wrote it, but rather than she may substitute her ideology for the clear original meaning of the text.

I reject this, for a fairly simple reason: I believe, with the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. It follows that a provision of the Constitution derives its authority from the fact that it represents an expression of the consent of the people who selected the representatives who drafted it, to be governed according to that provision. It continues to have its authority by virtue of the fact that we continue to consent to be governed by it, rather than exercising our democratic right to change or abolish it.

But if a judge substitutes her judgment for the plain text that was actually consented to, the chain of consent is broken: There has been no popular consent to be governed by the new "interpretation" (in practice, often strained sophistry that cannot honestly be said to be one of multiple reasonable interpretations of what the text actually means.)

That would be the short version of my counterargument. It's the one I would make, because I believe one's opponents deserve a good-faith, reasoned rebuttal. If I were Justice Ginsburg, on the other hand, I might just point out that she's a nonoriginalist, and Justice Taney was a nonoriginalist (the Dred Scott decision being based on Justice Taney's racist philosophy rather than on any specific provision of the Constitution's text), and therefore she's just as shabby as Taney. But that wouldn't be fair.

As far as the nutcase website that called for Justice Ginsburg to get the Pelican Brief treatment, I could just as easily point to the posters on the popular left-wing website dailykos.com, who presumably sympathize with Justice Ginsburg's nonoriginalist philosophy as long as it advances their politics, and thus tar her by association with people who've also advocated political violence.

In my first law firm, there was a liberal paralegal who took part in protest marches organized by International ANSWER, whose organizers include old-school Stalinists. That's one difference between (many) liberals and me: They have no problem associating themselves with making alliances of convenience with supporters of totalitarianism, while I (and most of the people who share my political thinking) wouldn't even consider joining in, say, an anti-tax protest if it were organized by neo-Nazis or the like.

And that leads this meandering rant to the upcoming movie "V for Vendetta," a comic-book action movie set in a dystopian near-future fascist London. It's clear that the filmmakers (the Wachowski brothers) are suggesting that the society portrayed is a possible outcome of present American politics -- the premise is that the government has used the threat of terrorism, as "America's war" grows worse and worse, to suspend all liberties and set up a "faith-based" dictatorship.

Sheesh. At least when Joe McCarthy went around darkly suggesting that his political opponents were in league with totalitarians, there were real live Stalinists mucking about. These guys seriously think that their opponents want to set up a dictatorship -- based, I suppose, on hyperventilations about liberty dying because the FBI can ask a library if Ahmed Death-to-America Shahid checked out a book on How To Make A Bomb With Six Household Chemicals.

Fine, it's a movie -- but lots of people honestly think (if "think" can fairly describe the random electrical activity caroming around their skulls) that there's something to it.

2005-12-16T10:27:00.000-08:00

The Orange County Register recently had a panel discussion on the future of residential real estate prices in the county. They published a story on it under the headline "Bullish on O.C. house prices." (Link from this site.)

Scott Simon, a manager at the bond trading giant PIMCO based in Newport Beach, probably had the least bullish outlook. He pointed out that 82% of home purchases in California last year were made using exotic interest-only or negative-amortization loans, which are highly risky in everything but a rapidly appreciating market. (He also pointed out how unusual it was for real estate to appreciate at a greater rate than the prevailing interest rate.)

Another guy stated that the reason Orange County's house prices were rising, and would continue to rise, was job growth, and a supposed excess of demand over supply.

Hogwash. If job growth and population growth are leading to a "huge excess of demand over supply," then why has inventory skyrocketed since last summer? (And has only slightly declined during the traditional holiday slowdown?)

What this moron doesn't comprehend (or care to) is that a guy saying "I wanna house" doesn't constitute "demand." Demand consists of a guy saying "I wanna house" and having the financial wherewithal to do something about it.

You need to have an income well into the mid six figures to afford an Orange County home using sustainable financing. There are simply not enough six-figure incomes to go around, when the MEDIAN house price in Orange County is over $600,000. Think of the vast plains of semi-dilapidated ranchers in Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park, Fullerton, etc. There are simply not enough professional, managerial, or high-skill workers in the Orange County economy to pay for all of them that come onto the market in the ordinary course of things.

2005-11-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Lileks expands on Rodney Dangerfield's remark to Kurt Vonnegut in "Back to School".

2005-10-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I posted last, but I just noticed this morning that four people actually took a look at this dust-encrusted site last week. So I thought I'd bore you guys away with some dull thoughts on constitutional law.

Since it's Supreme Court nomination season, the subject of abortion has come up. More specifically, the subject of how the Constitution can be understood as protecting a right to it when neither abortion nor the "right of privacy" upon which the Court's abortion jurisprudence is based can be found anywhere in the actual constitutional text.

Without going into endless detail on the arguments, I thought I'd address one of the arguments I've seen presented to explain where the right of abortion is to be found: the idea that the right to abortion is derived from the 9th Amendment, which states that the "enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Some Pro-Roe people argue that's all it takes to enshrine abortion in the Constitution -- that is, even if abortion isn't specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, it's one of the rights "retained by the people."

The problem with this argument is that it's way too broad, which is why the federal courts have pretty much avoided using the 9th Amendment as a basis for striking down laws. If a court had the authority to declare anything at all a right "retained by the people," this would amount to an absolute judicial veto power over anything the legislature might do. Moreover, unlike a presidential veto, it can't be overridden, except by a constitutional amendment. It's very unlikely that the Framers, with their concern for checks and balances, meant to give any branch of government -- even "the least dangerous branch" -- such an unchecked power.

The 9th Amendment was enacted at the insistence of those, such as James Madison, who didn't want there to be a Bill of Rights in the first place. Their thinking was that the Constitution's structure itself protected individual rights just fine: Because the Constitution set up a system of enumerated powers of government, and those enumerated powers didn't include the power to restrict speech, establish or restrain religion, or infringe on the right to bear arms, an affirmative guarantee of those rights was superfluous. They also feared that listing affirmative rights might lead government to ignore the limits of its enumerated powers and expand its power to the limits of the Bill of Rights -- which, interestingly enough, has largely been done, the Commerce Clause having been expanded into virtually a general federal police power to pass laws without even a laughable connection to the regulation of commerce between the states.

The bottom line is that the 9th Amendment was never intended to be judicially enforceable. It's simply too broad and too vague. It contains no internal standard by which a court could determine what rights are "retained by the people," and so would (if it were judicially enforceable) give judges absolute discretion in policymaking. A judge could declare, for example, that the people's rights include a right to housing, or health care, or any number of things that are properly understood as political rather than constitutional questions, and requrie that policy be formulated accordingly. No matter whether one agreed with the court's policymaking or not, the point would be that those policies would have only the barest minimum of democratic legitimacy. True, there is some connection between elections and judges; people elect executives who appoint them. But the ability of an individual voter to influence policy is diluted by every layer of representation that is added between him and the person making the ultimate decision. Putting total power in the hands of life-tenured judges would render democratic consent virtually a symbol, nothing more.

The 9th Amendment should instead be treated as it was intended -- as a reminder to the government that just because the Bill of Rights set up a last-ditch backstop, it shouldn't throw the ball past the catcher's glove -- the sphere of government power as established by the body of the Constitution's enumerated powers.

2005-09-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Watched "Flight of the Phoenix" on cable last night. A pretty good flick, except for the annoyingly Hollywood-pompous-and-banal declaration of the "wise" stranded passenger who declares he believes in "spirituality", not "religion", because the latter "divides people."

The irony of that statement -- by which the speaker neatly divided the world of believers into the righteous, open-minded believers in "spirituality" and the wicked, intolerant religionists, was obviously lost on the screenwriter.

Religion is an attempt to discover and live by universal truths. The problem is that it's practiced by people, who are different, which results in different conclusions being drawn, resulting in the religious world being divided among those who accept each diverse conclusion. In "spirituality," the search for truth is more individualized -- with the result that the world of "spirituality" is divided, at least in theory, between each different-thinking individual.

(I do notice that a large number of self-proclaimed believers in "spirituality" have the same bumper stickers, are informed by the same media, have the same opinions on a broad range of issues, etc., suggesting that a large part of what is called "spirituality" is actually a discrete ideological tradition -- and one which, also in my experience, generates at least as much animosity in its adherents towards heretics and heathens, only those words aren't used.)

So the question is whether the divisions that occur as a result of both religion and spirituality will be drawn between groups of like-minded people, or between individuals. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. At least religionists don't pretend they're not being "divisive." (They get to be self-righteous for different reasons.)

2005-08-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Judge John Roberts has come under fire from environmental groups because of his dissent in the Rancho Viejo v. Norton case, in which he questioned whether the Endangered Species Act, passed pursuant to Congress' power under Article I, section 8 of the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce, applies to "a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California." That is, we're not dealing with an interstate toad here.

Judge Roberts' reasoning is consistent with the Supreme Court's holdings in the Lopez and Morrison cases, in which the Court, for the first time since the 1940s, ruled that the Commerce Clause is not a license for the federal government to regulate any old thing. There has to be some connection between what is regulated and interestate commerce that passes the laugh test.

Typically, this argument -- essentially a procedural one interpreting the mechanics of the Constitution -- is being spun as supposedly showing that Roberts opposes environmental protection. As I wrote in my last post, this is consistent with the Left's confusion of judges with legislators. A constitutional law judge is supposed to apply the law, not make it. (Common law judges are a different story, but we're not dealing with the common law here.)

Saying that Judge Roberts is opposed to environmental protection because he doesn't conclude that the Constitution, as it's written, gives the federal government a particular regulatory power is like saying that if a judge thinks the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments forbids us to flay rapists alive and impale their heads on pikes, he's in favor of rape.

2005-08-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

An op-ed piece in yesterday's Boston Globe suggested that Catholic judges should be disqualified from hearing abortion-rights cases.

The author, one Christopher Morris, points out that during the last election, certain Catholic bishops suggested that the Eucharist ought to be withheld from John Kerry because of his political support for abortion. As I understand it, this is consistent with the Catholic Church's position that politicians may not support abortion rights, as this purportedly denies justice to the unborn.

Morris goes on to say that the bishops ought to be asked whether the same threat of denial of communion would apply to a federal judge who refused to overrule Roe v. Wade and its line of cases -- and then seems to assume that it would.

The problem with Morris's logic is that he misunderstands the essential difference that there is supposed to be between a legislator and a judge -- which isn't surprising, since an awful lot of political liberals don't seem to see much difference.

Without passing judgment on whether the Catholic Church is right to make a Catholic legislator's political position on abortion a criterion for judging his faithfulness, it seems unlikely that a legislator and a judge would be treated the same way. A legislator has discretion as to what laws he promotes. In constitutional law, the function of a judge, on the other hand, is to say what the law is. A judge is not empowered to hand down any decision he pleases: if the law says one thing, that's what the judge has to say. Given the Catholic Church's emphasis on free will, it's hard to see how the Church would deem a judge's application of a constitution that supposedly contained a right to abortion to be an act of willful wickedness.

Morris can be forgiven for assuming that a judge has the same discretion as a politician to allow or forbid abortion, since more and more of the social-liberal agenda is being advanced by judges acting as politicians, declaring the Constitution to contain mandates to allow this or that despite the manifest absence of any such constitutional content. The whole "privacy" line of cases beginning with the Griswold decision and running through Roe, Casey, and Lawrence are glaring examples of what happens when judges begin with the decision in mind and work backwards to come up with arguments (however facile) to support the preordained conclusion.

But that's not the way the Constitution is supposed to work, and with any luck and the appointment of a few more honest jurists, it will stop working that way.

2005-08-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Lileks and I are thinking similarly about intelligent design. Which makes me feel warm and fuzzy; "great minds think alike" and all that. Difference is, his thoughts get read by gazillions of people, and mine just get preserved for posterity.

For all the historians mining my writings to track the progression of the Great Man's thoughts. Which will happen someday. Really. Or maybe not.

Anyway, via the Corner at NRO, I ran into this, from an upstate New York newspaper:

"Diary of a mad liberal trapped in Stupidland (reg. req'd.) By Beth Quinn

Day 1,654. I continue to be dumbfounded by how dumb he really is.

I don't know why I can't just accept it as some of the others here at the outpost have. We've known it for more than four years. Even so, my jaw drops whenever we get a harsh reminder.

Today he told a captive audience of journalists that teachers in what is left of our public school system should be teaching "intelligent design" as an equal alternative to the theory of evolution.

"Intelligent design" is his code word for creationism – the belief that God waved a magic wand one day and – poof! – there we were, fully evolved humans standing in the garden, partially clothed and hankering after apples.

The mere fact that he was made president should be proof enough that we aren't even yet fully evolved! We were headed in the right direction, but logic has now taken a U-turn down the neural pathways of the collective American brain into a cul de sac labeled The Dark Ages.

And now he wants creationism – a belief as anachronistic as the sun revolving around the earth – elevated to the status of scientific theory.

***

Actually, I thought this was all settled back in the 1920s. But here we are. Millions of people of both logic and faith have no problem with the idea that God and Darwin can coexist. They figure God created the raw materials for humans, then humans evolved so the species would survive. That's still a heck of a creation!

***

Yet now the leader of the free world – if not free thought – wants teachers to tell our children that creationism and evolution are equal but different scientific theories."

And much more, in a similar vein.

My response:

"Dear Ms. Quinn,

I have little use for the "intelligent design" argument, and I know you've got a "Bush Is Dumb" template to cram the facts into, but when you say "intelligent design" is just a "code word" for creationism -- that is, the full-bore literal Genesis-style magical poofing of the whole biological world into existence in one week a few thousand years ago -- you're just wrong. If I may posture as one of the citizens of Stupidland, 't'ain't that simple.

One of the problems with "intelligent design" is that it's too broad a term. (Sort of like "liberal" or "religious right," but that's another story.) "Intelligent design" can include old-school creationism -- but it can also encompass the more nuanced version of creation that you mentioned approvingly in your column.

It's not "Dark Ages thinking" to state, correctly, that given what is known the age of the earth, the amount of organic material on it, the rate of mutation of genes, and some other factors, the odds against basic cells appearing spontaneously are very long. Some of the logically possible conclusions to draw from this are (1) we're still missing some key facts, which may show spontaneous evolution of life to be more plausible; (2) we just got really, really, lucky, or (3) at some point, there was some fiddling with the parameters.

Would having a biology teacher include that last sentence in the unit on evolution (a theory which must absolutely be taught, the howls of the genuine snake-handlers notwithstanding; it's the prevailing scientific consensus on the origin of species, and the only theory by which biology makes any sense at all) be so stupidly horrible?

I suspect what gets people of traditional faith upset about evolution is that many of its leading lights, including Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, used evolution as a kind of vehicle for defending their own atheism -- and in so doing, went beyond the theory's capacity. As you correctly pointed out, faith and Darwinism aren't necessarily incompatible. But it's not just the traditional religionists who insist that they are. When a simple person of traditional faith is confronted with a highly educated scientist who says evolution proves there's no God, he or she may not understanding that evolution proves no such thing -- and faced with a perceived choice between contesting the reality of evolution and abandoning faith altogether, may accept battle along those lines without recognizing the falsity of the choice.

And it's not as if "intelligent design" would be the only instance of stupidity in schools. If I had a dime for every social studies teacher I had who subscribed to the labor theory of economic value (usually without being aware of it, or knowing David Ricardo from Ricky Ricardo) -- well, I could almost buy an ice cream cone."

2005-07-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy has ruffled some feathers by describing American professional soldiers as "mercenaries" and comparing them to Hessians.

That was just wrong on so many levels that I had to respond, via e-mail:

"Dear Professor Kennedy:

I was frankly astonished to see a history professor at an elite university compare modern American soldiers, even imprecisely, to the "Hessian" mercenaries imported by George III to fight in the American Revolution. The comparison breaks down on too many levels to count.

Not only are modern American soldiers not "mercenaries" in the traditional sense of soldiers of fortune who fight for the highest bidder, but technically, neither were the Hessians. George III acquired German regiments not by hiring individual soldiers or companies (as Renaissance princes might have hired German landsknechts or Swiss pikemen), but rather by making arrangements with the rulers of the petty German states for their units to be put at British disposal. The hapless individual German soldiers themselves were generally conscripted, not hired in the manner of traditional mercenaries.

The founders' enthusiasm for militias and distrust of standing armies is well documented. It's also largely accepted that the enthusiasm for militias was remarkably naive and generally led to disaster after disaster as militias proved unable (with some notable exceptions like Bennington and Cowpens) to cope with professional soldiers. The quintessential example of the folly of relying on militia was the battle of Bladensburg, in which the militia defending Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 ran off at the first salvo of British rockets and let the capital be burned.

Incidentally, President Jefferson was so enamored of the "citizen military" concept, and so concerned (like you) that a standing military would tempt the country to adventurism that he essentially scrapped plans to expand the Navy -- the branch of the service perhaps least suited to the "citizen-soldier" concept because of the great expense of ships -- and poured resources into tiny coastal-defense gunboats, to be manned by wartime volunteers. The gunboats turned out to be virtually useless against the threats to American maritime interests that followed, including North African pirates (too far away for a coastal force to reach) and the British blockade in 1812 (who wants to take on a heavy frigate with a matchbox gunboat?)

That's where I think you make your greatest mistake: Fundamentally, the purpose of a military is to win wars. A generation of military leaders has concluded that a conscripted force is less effective than a professional one, especially in a modern battlefield environment in which extensive training and individual motivation are at a premium. Switching to a conscripted force, in the judgment of those who are in the best position to know, would make the military less effective. A less effective asset is one that is more costly to use. "More costly" in a military context means that more people get killed. When you're asking men to place their lives in harm's way, there is no excuse for allowing secondary considerations to detract from their effectiveness and increase the odds that they will be part of an increased cost.

I suspect that your perception that there is a separation between America and its warriors is a regional or perhaps an ideological thing. Vast numbers of Americans either serve, have served, have friends or relatives who do or have, or at one point seriously considered military service. (For the record, if Stanford's admissions officers had accepted my own application back in 1990 instead of collapsing in hysterical laughter, I had a naval ROTC scholarship lined up.) People with these links to the military may be a little rarer on elite university campuses, but America hardly has an insular warrior class to anywhere near the extent of your argument."

2005-07-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

On NRO Financial, John Tamny explains why he doesn't think the American current-account deficit is a problem.

My response, e-mailed to him:

"Dear Mr. Tamny,

Interesting article in today's National Review Online. I think you may be overlooking one of the negative consequences of large American trade deficits -- the effect on the American housing market.

You wrote, correctly, that "all trade logically must balance," and noted that dollars flowing out of the country to buy cheap Chinese goods generally come back in the form of investment, driven by "foreigners' insatiable appetite for U.S. equities and land, along with our public and private debt."

Foreign investment in American equities is generally a good thing: It supplies American companies with money to use for capital investment, ideally making American business more productive. But foreign investment in American land -- directly, through purchases, and indirectly, through purchases of mortgage-backed securities -- is different. That's because a house, unlike a security, has characteristics both of an asset and of a consumer good. And houses are generally not fungible; people are often reluctant or unable to relocate, and have to pay what the market demands. For various reasons, renting a house is not a perfect substitute for ownership.

Those Americans who desire to own homes primarily as consumer goods -- i.e. to live in them -- are being forced to compete with investors armed with funds either directly brought from overseas, or raised thanks to extraordinarily cheap credit that foreign dollar holdings have enabled. The result is that in many markets, the costs of homeownership dramatically exceed the cost of renting equivalent housing, home affordability is near record lows, and unusually large numbers of purchasers are only able to buy using exotic mortgage interests that are only viable as long as housing prices continue to appreciate dramatically.

In other words, foreign money has tended to squeeze out the marginal home consumer-buyer by increasing the degree to which housing is an investment vehicle rather than a consumer good. In southern California, it is virtually impossible for even a relatively well-off household (like mine) to afford a home even in a marginal area without resorting to a death-or-glory negative-amortization option ARM -- because people using those risky vehicles are bidding up prices on the same houses conservative purchasers are in the market for. These risky loans are often bundled into mortgage-backed securities and sold off to those dollar-flush foreign investors you discussed, minimizing the risks to the loan originators but not to the borrowers themselves.

In short, foreign dollar holdings are forcing American homebuyers to expose themselves to significantly greater risk than buying a home used to entail -- because the housing market has been transformed largely into an investment market, with correspondingly increased risk. It's made the American Dream into the American Gamble.

On the one hand, cheap foreign manufacturing provides me with the opportunity to buy my daughter a Barbie for a few bucks less than it would have cost to make her in America. The flip side of cheap foreign manufacturing is a trade imbalance that returns dollars to America in the form of investment, which lately has flowed less into productive sectors of the economy and more into inflating the cost of an essential consumer good/asset hybrid.

Two bucks off the price of a Barbie in exchange for tripling the cost of an ordinary suburban house in seven years. Not what I'd call a fair trade."

2005-07-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

From an interview of a British sociologist and theologian in The Spectator, some similar thoughts to those I expressed in my last two posts:

"Forget your mental image of a sociology professor. David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the LSE, is a softly spoken conservative Anglican. His critique of the concept of secularisation, begun in the 1960s, brought a new rigour to the study of religion in Britain, and established a flourishing conversation between sociology and theology.
Inevitably, we begin with the issue of the hour: Islam and violence. Professor Martin does not settle for the easy mantra that all religions are naturally peaceful. Instead, choosing his words very carefully, and pausing to ask whether his comments are printable, he tells me what he thinks.

‘I wish that I could sound more positive, but the bombings don’t come as any surprise to me. There is a deeply rooted ideology of violence in Islam — a military psychology. Of course most Muslims don’t want to go around bombing people, but those few who do turn to violence are able to find a certain amount of justification in the Koran. I suppose that might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it seems undeniable.’

Is it not a religion of peace? ‘Well, it seeks peace, but on its own terms. As Rowan Williams has said, it’s a fine religion, but it places a high premium on victory. And I think that’s right, and I fear that many young men will see violence as the means to that victory. There’s a large enough mood of militancy in Islam for it to be a real problem. And that’s not just a recent thing caused by resentment over Iraq and Afghanistan: it’s been emerging over several decades throughout the Middle East and Pakistan.’

Does Islam find it harder than other religions to reform, to incorporate secular liberal values? ‘The problem is that it came into contact with the modern world very fast, so it reacts with horror at the sheer range of options in secularism. That seems like confusion and chaos when your tradition is based on a single right way of behaving and strong warnings against the infidel. The Koran is a very “us and them” book. It’s hard to see how a Muslim school dominated by the Koran can encourage assimilation, and can promote the idea of equality between the sexes, for example."

2005-07-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

Hugh Hewitt, on his blog, wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion."

My response, expanding on my previous post below:

Dear Hugh,

On today's blog, you wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion." I deeply respect your judgment, but I think you may be going a bit too far -- or possibly I'm misreading your meaning.

In one sense, you're right: Ultimately, the responsibility for jihadist outrages lies firmly with the heretical death-cultists who perpetrate them, not with the rest of the world's Muslims, who reject their ideology and tactics with varying degrees of unequivocation.

But I don't think you can avoid considering whether Islam is just horribly unlucky, to have had such an awful run of bad apples bob to its surface, or whether there is something to Islam, as an ideology, that will tend to produce a disproportionate share of violent fanatics.

I don't see how any one could argue that basic cultural assumptions can have no effect on the frequency with which certain characteristics occur within a population. Consider Max Weber's "Protestant work ethic" thesis, or the argument in Michael Novak's book "On Two Wings" that the cultural assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition inclined Americans to embrace liberty. Since all religions, like all ideologies, have a human element, all religions have flaws along with the good in them. The leaders of my own Mormon Church like to say the Church "makes bad men good and good men better." I like to add "and proud men insufferable, and unstable men absolutely nuts." On the one hand, we produce a disproportionate number of strong families; on the other hand, we can be insular and lacking somewhat in individual initiative and in cutting-edge creativity. It's all part of the package, and each religion's package contains a different mix.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our hearts. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with GoogleMaps directions printed on the inside. The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it can't produce just as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

Islam's particular ideological package seems, along with the good Islam accomplishes, to be producing a disproportionate number of international terrorists, and making it difficult for any large portion of the Islamic world fully to reconcile itself to pluralism and modernity. The point of observing this is not to denigrate Islam -- it is to acknowledge that Muslims, if they are to make their religion as noble as it has the potential to be, need to work harder than others to overcome their religion's apparently built-in susceptibility to misinterpreted by disproportionate numbers of those marginal minds, who can be found in any religion and will always be with us.

When you're second best, as the old rental car ad goes, you try harder. When you recognize you have a handicap, you work to overcome it. To pretend that Islam, as an ideology, has nothing at all to do with violent fanaticism is fantasy, and will only serve to discourage Muslims from undertaking the proper measures to put their house of faith in order."

2005-07-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

So Congressman Tom Tancredo thinks that one possible response to a jihadist nuclear attack on the United States could be to bomb Mecca.

Islam Isn't Going Anywhere.

As if it needs saying, I think that's a really, really bad idea -- even though I suspect it would make a lot of people horrified by televised images of the radioactive ruins of, say, Boston feel better for a few hours. Even if one took the position that this really is a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations between Islam proper and the West, I can't think of any major religion that ever went away simply because its holiest city was destroyed. Judaism didn't end with the destruction(s) of the Temple, after all.

I'm sure plenty of two-bit cults have been annihilated and forgotten over the centuries -- but it's a lot easier to do that kind of thing when the adherents of a religion are all behind the walls of one city, which you can lay waste and be done with it, Assyrian-style. Islam is never going to be beaten out of existence, even if anyone wanted to do it -- not with close to a billion people scattered around the whole world.

Islam, As Presently Constituted, Has A Problem.

Most Muslims are not international terrorists. But most international terrorists appear to be Muslims. It's not "Muslim-bashing" to question why this is.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our characters. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with Google Maps directions printed on the inside.

The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it cannot produce as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

The Old Testament of the Bible contains plenty of accounts of God's chosen people waging whatever the Hebrew word is for "jihad" -- but those are historical accounts, not hortatory passages. The Koran, on the other hand, does have more than a few passages, aimed directly at readers, directing them to make war on the unbelievers. There is a strong sense that what ultimately matters is membership in the ummah, or Islamic world -- an attribute, incidentally, which Islam shares with not a few Protestant Christian sects that believe that Christian identity is all important, surpassing even the living of a Christian life. (I refer to the variation on the widespread Protestant doctrine of solafidianism -- salvation by faith alone -- which holds that once a believer adopts Christianity by an oral confession, his salvation is assured regardless of what he does later.)

It takes a particularly enlightened mind -- or an enlightening philosophical environment -- to reconcile a religious teaching that God is concerned mostly with whether a person identifies with a particular group with the reality of pluralism. Protestant Christianity in America has succeeded in making this reconciliation without too much of a mess (the odd abortion clinic bomber aside), I submit, because of two things.

First, Christian doctrine was largely formulated by the apostle Paul, who was highly educated and immersed in Hellenistic philosophy and culture, with the result that the civilization that developed in Christendom became a kind of hybrid between Athens and Jerusalem, as Leo Strauss put it. The "Believe as we do or be damned" aspect of Christianity -- which undoubtedly is there (see Mark 16:16; Acts 4:12) -- is thus balanced at least somewhat by a tradition of reason and universality.

Second, the American civilization in which what is probably the most significant concentration of Protestant Christianity is found has from the beginning been a pioneer of respecting different traditions, largely because since its earliest settlers were themselves religiously diverse, there was no alternative.

Islamic culture thus may face an uphill battle if it is to avoid producing a disproportionate amount of religious aggression.

2005-07-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Predictably, even before the bodies of the latest victims of jihad have been recovered, the usual suspects make the usual noises: It's all our fault -- the bombers are motivated by justifiable anger over American or British foreign policy, and who are we to be outraged over the murder of civilians when civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the West Bank?

Leaving aside what ought to be the elementary distinction between intentionally killing civilians and doing so accidentally -- just as there is a distinction between a fatal car crash and a murder -- what assurances can the appeasers give us that their prescription (give terrorists what they want) would stop their attacks?

They (meaning that certain inverse-jingo Left constituency whose motto seems to be "the opponent of my country, right or wrong") point to the fact that terrorists aren't bombing Sweden -- a more or less free country -- and declare this evidence that it's not "freedom" that the terrorists hate, as is sometimes said, but particular policies of particular countries.

Unfortunately, there's no way of testing this hypothesis without actually putting it into practice, which carries risks of its own, more about which later. Let's say, though, that we take George Galloway's advice and pull out of Iraq. And Afghanistan, too, since the London bombers mentioned that campaign as well. To make sure the bases are covered, sell Israel down the river, too, cutting off all aid and cooperation.

Would that really work? Would jihadists really say, "Thanks, America; you've satisfied our grievances. Go back to your pleasant infidel lives; you'll hear nothing further from us"?

Maybe. It seems to have worked for Spain: After the Spanish cut and run from Iraq, nobody's blown up any more trains there.

Even if it's true that Spain's capitulation bought peace in its time, though, I wonder whether that approach would work for the United States. No offense to middle-sized European states, but they're a dime a dozen. Your local jihadist can cross Spain or Sweden off his target list without putting himself out of business; there's always Britain, or Denmark, or Italy, or Australia -- not to mention the Great Satan itself.

And why should we expect a jihadist to want to put himself out of business? Even more or less sober Western activist groups don't shut down when they get what they want; they find new raisons d'etre and keep operating -- and fundraising. Look at the ACLU, for example; by all rights, they should have declared victory over real threats to civil liberties thirty years ago and disbanded along with the March of Dimes (which, having beaten polio, should also have closed up shop). There is too much capital and meaning invested in these causes for them to go away. Instead, they focus on smaller and smaller details, while investing them with the same breathless significance.

It is reasonable to expect that jihadists are similarly constituted. As Christopher Hitchens eloquently wrote, the jihadists' list of grievances is rather longer than their Western apologists would have it. That list goes well beyond the usual Iraq-Afghanistan-Palestine trinity to, for example,

"[t]he grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way."

In other words, these are people who have plenty of grievances with which to justify their manifest love for murder. 9/11 happened before there ever were American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And that brings us to the next point: I believe that even if every country in the world could buy off terrorists by refusing to stand against them, the United States would be the one exception. The jihadists need at least one enemy, and we're the enemy of last resort.

They need an enemy because they're not men enough to deal with one of the hardest things in the world to deal with: cognitive dissonance involving their most deeply-held assumptions and beliefs.

Islam, for those who take it seriously, is an all-encompassing worldview. As I understand it, based on my limited study, Islam posits a far greater degree of divine involvement in the world than many other religions, and certainly the modern deist-influenced Western outlook. Islam takes the idea "God is in control" virtually to the molecular level, with virtually everything that happens being not only preordained, but actively caused by acts of divine will.

It also teaches that righteousness, as set forth in the Koran, is rewarded. And there's the rub. Most any Muslim with eyes to see will notice that Islamic civilization, by and large, doesn't seem to have been particularly favored in comparison to the West since about the 1300s. (Or 1500s, if you count the Ottoman pinnacle.) The ummah is technologically backwards (importing the implements of modern civilization from their infidel inventors), militarily impotent, and widely impoverished, with the exceptions more or less limited to elites who grow rich and corrupt selling uncreated natural resources to the civilized world.

How can these things be? How can the infidels prosper and the righteous languish? Recall that, unlike its monotheistic Christian and Jewish cousins, Islam doesn't have the example of a Babylonian captivity or a crucified Savior to remind that "whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12:6). It seems to me that there isn't an easy reconciliation between what Islam promises, and what has been the lot of Islamic civilization for the past five hundred years or so.

Except one: The Islamic world would be prospering, but for the opposition of an Enemy.

I have at times struggled with cognitive dissonance with respect to certain aspects of my own Mormon faith, which frankly isn't the easiest thing to swallow whole, as even its founder Joseph Smith acknowledged. (He said if his revelations hadn't happened to him, he probably wouldn't have believed them himself.) I have the advantage of an education rooted in the Enlightenment, and parents who raised me to think for myself and be true to the conclusions I reached. What of the Muslim extremist who has none of these advantages? Faced, on the one hand, with the prospect of being forced to question that perhaps there's something in the faith of his fathers that's retarding the civilizations saddled with it -- or on the other, blaming his civilization's dysfunction on a powerful enemy, which option will he choose?

For too many, that's an easy choice: It's all the Enemy's fault.

That's why appeasement won't work to pacify the jihadists any more than it has worked against other aggressors in the past. If not Iraq, then Afghanistan. If not Afghanistan, then Palestine. If not Palestine, well then America will be blamed for Muslim states not going completely theocratic to the jihadists' satisfaction. Or for refusing to give sharia courts jurisdiction over expatriate Muslims, as radical Muslim activists are seriously pressuring some European countries to do. Or for allowing Islam to be criticized in public. It will always be something.

Or maybe I am not generous enough to the throat-cutting jihadists. Maybe they are more reasonable than I give them credit for, and taking the Left's advice to pay the Dane-geld really would get rid of the Dane, so to speak.

I don't think so, but more to the point, the Left can't truly say so with any certainty. Recall that these are often the same people who advocate the "precautionary principle," requiring that no action be taken until it can be proven perfectly safe. Who insist that the world sacrifice literally trillions of dollars to fight the yet unknown effects of global warming. Yet they are willing to risk the usual result of appeasing an aggressor -- that the aggressor takes what is offered and, emboldened, asks for more and more -- without any more certainty than their blinkered ideology supplies.

I don't know how to win this war. I fear it will be long, and may never end entirely. While I don't believe that Islam, per se, necessarily results in murderous jihad, I suspect there may be something in its martial origins that will never cause a disproportionate number of Muslims to read it in the way today's jihadists do. Any religion, properly approached by a person of humane character and an enlightened mind, can become a beautiful force for good. I just think it takes a more enlightened mind to reach that point from Islam than with other faith traditions.

And since Islam isn't going away, the only way its violent manifestations will be kept to such a minimum that the war can be declared over will be for Muslims overwhelmingly not only to repudiate, but to crush the (arguably) heretical jihadists with the kind of ruthlessness that the jihadists' own hardness requires. As in, if an imam stands in the mosque to incite the murder of us infidel "apes and pigs," the congregation needs to rush the pulpit and tear him apart. There would be two possible motivations for the congregation to do that: either genuine disgust and rejection of the message, or fear that the message will result in a JDAM landing on the mosque roof next Friday. I hope the former will happen before the latter becomes necessary, but I have no confidence it will happen before the jihadists get lucky again -- possibly even luckier than 9/11.

All I know is that losing isn't an option. The jihadists' long list of grievances is inexhaustible.

2005-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

Liberal columnist Bonnie Erbe compares the United States to Iran. Unfavorably.

Key quote:

"After all, wouldn't it be a relief to join a society [Iran] in which religious tyranny is gossamer compared with the version we now face in the good old U.S. of A?"

That's right: Allowing an invocation at a high school graduation, or wanting to preserve the right of self-government against judges who invent Constitutional principles out of whole cloth, is worse than beheading "apostates" and "fornicators" in the town square.

Sheer gibbering lunacy, of which we may expect much more as the Democratic Party, increasingly dominated by a hard Left that actually believes this stuff, gears up to slander any jurist President Bush may nominate to the Supreme Court whose views on constitutional law fall rightward of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's.

2005-07-01T12:47:00.000-07:00

An open letter in response to a column saying President Bush "co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent":

"You may not have chosen the title of your column "Bush co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent" -- I've had my own unpleasant experiences with poorly-phrased captions that distort the meaning of my writing -- but I must say if President Bush is trying to "silence dissent," he's doing an awfully poor job of it. "Dissent" is shriller now than ever, and, I would add, more heedless of its effect on this country's welfare.

Do you honestly think the Left's hair-trigger criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq campaign are totally free from political motivation? Can you honestly envision Republicans being taken seriously if, in 1943, they'd been anywhere near as vituperative against the Roosevelt administration as Democrats are being now? There were plenty of opportunities. The Sherman tank was a lightly-armored deathtrap; thousands and thousands of young men died due to poor planning, strategic errors, and ghastly mistakes; civilians died by the truckload under Allied bombing; and prisoners often got far worse treatment than having their religious books dropped on the floor or being led around naked on a leash by hillbillies. The difference was that the political opposition recognized that defeat would be disastrous, and for the most part managed to subordinate their partisanship to the national interest. We are clearly not the same country today.

Calling it "shameless" to speak of 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath betrays a remarkable lack of thoughtfulness. The President did not say Iraq was involved in 9/11, but rather than 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, awakened us to the realization that we had underestimated the ability of our enemies to harm us. You seem to think our response should have been to go after the particular enemies that succeeded on 9/11, and continued to ignore the others -- including hostile regimes that gave every indication of pursuing weapons that could inflict even worse damage than we'd suffered. That is a suicidally shortsighted approach.

Do you honestly believe that an American defeat in Iraq would not have horrific consequences on American security? Just as the American surrender in Vietnam emboldened Communist ideologues around the world (sorry to sound like an old-school red-baiter, but facts are facts), strengthening the global influence of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and heating up the Cold War to dangerous levels of tension, shouldn't you at least consider that an American defeat in Iraq will enhance the prestige and influence of the jihadist faction within Islam that really, truly wants our civilization destroyed?

You may try to distinguish your dismissal of the mission American troops are engaged in from lack of support for the troops, but objectively, you are not on their side. American soldiers, by and large, are convinced that they are engaged in a worthy cause. You are free to disagree with them -- your enlightened, educated outlook, after all, may give you more wisdom than their practical experience -- but please don't pretend you're not doing so. Objectively speaking, you are working for their cause to fail. Great powers aren't defeated by guerillas; they lose when they get tired and go home. You are trying to make that happen.

You spoke of the President "conflating" war and patriotism -- and then you turned around and gave us a nice, misleading example of "conflating" of your own. The poll you cited, showing that 58% Americans disapprove of the administration's handling of the Iraq campaign, does not, as you suggest, prove that a majority of Americans believe we were "misled" into war. Those two sentiments are distinct. I, myself, disapprove -- in retrospect -- of many of the Administration's decisions regarding the Iraq campaign. I have reservations -- now -- as to whether the campaign might have been a strategic error in the larger war on jihadist terror, in the same sense as the Italian campaign of 1944-1945 might have been unnecessary to win World War II. But that most emphatically does not mean I sign onto the Michael Moore/MoveOn.org chorus of "Bush lied, people died." It's simply not true, and only a Chomsky-addled simpleton with a mind welded tighter than an Acura chassis could think otherwise in light of the plain historical record.

You see, this is why litigators are often so dismissive of journalists' argumentation skills. If we tried to pull a slick little switch like you just tried, opposing counsel would be all over us like white on rice, followed shortly by the judge bellowing at us for trying to mislead the court.

2005-06-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Interesting thoughts on the modern Left being in a state of arrested adolescence.

I've had that idea more than once.

2005-06-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Jonah Goldberg likes his constitutions dead, not "living."

I agree with his argument. But I wouldn't phrase it that way, because it cedes to liberals the proper meaning of the concept of a "living Constitution." The liberal use of that phrase was nicely articulated by Al Gore: "I would look for justices of the Supreme Court who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document, that it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people."

In other words, the Constitution means whatever a majority of judges thinks it ought to mean.

Contrast that with Antonin Scalia: “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle. That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that — thumbs up or thumbs down — as their personal preferences dictate.”

I hold, along with the authors of the Declaration of Independence (and their intellectual predecessors going back to John Locke, etc.) that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Accordingly, in order to have legitimacy, any action by government official -- whether by a president, legislator, bureaucrat, or judge -- must be based on an expression of the people's consent to be governed in that manner.

The federal courts derive their power to issue decisions from their authority to decide questions arising under the Constitution and its amendments. The Constitution and its amendments, in turn, derive their legitimacy from the fact that at various points in history, the representatives of the people consented to be governed by them.

It follows that, in order to maintain their legitimacy, the federal courts must interpret the Constitution consistent with the original meaning of its text. That is what its framers consented to -- nothing more or less. When a federal judge takes a Constitutional text and declares that while the original meaning may have been X, the modern American consensus is that it ought to mean Y -- and rules as if the text actually did say Y -- he's taking an action that has no foundation in any expression of popular consent, and it lacks democratic legitimacy.

If the consensus of the American people, informed by their "constantly evolving experience" does indeed hold that the Constitution ought to say Y instead of X, the Constitution provides a mechanism for the people to enact that consensus into law. That is how the Constitution is a "living" document, and it seems to me that it is no less "living" in this sense than it would be if judges were able to manipulate it according to the conventional wisdom of the law schools. Ordinary people are "living" just as much as lawyers; some might even say more so. ("You call this living?!" I thought to myself the other night at 12:30 a.m., trying to finish a project.)

The Constitution lives by being carried forward by common consent from generation to generation, being amended -- again, by popular consent -- as needed to update it as the principles of the American people evolve. Ultimately, the heart and soul of the Constitution is the principle of consensual government it was designed to implement. Ironically, the judicial imperialism liberals are talking about when they speak of a "living Constitution" kills that very soul , by breaking the link between the application of Constitutional principles to present facts and the democratic expressions of consent that gave those principles their legitimacy.

2005-06-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

Someone has proposed seizing Justice Souter's New Hampshire house to make way for a "Lost Liberty Hotel." Complete with the "Just Desserts" cafe. [Via Drudge.]

Classic. More thoughts on the Kelo decision later, I hope.

2005-06-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Again, I'm behind the curve.

I sent this to Senator Harry Reid the other day, on the subject of his weeping and wailing and gnashing his teeth over the fact that Karl Rove remarked, while discussing the moveon.org/Michael Moore-style Left, that a certain species of liberal was less disposed to an aggressive response to terrorism:

"I understand you are upset at remarks by Karl Rove suggesting that "liberals",after the attacks of September 11, 2001, tended to favor less aggressivemeasures in response than conservatives.

As a broad generalization, I don't see how anyone could argue with that. I remember the liberal partners and staff of my former law firm being very much opposed to a military response to those attacks. On the other hand, not a single conservative of my acquaintance wanted anything other than the full Sherman-through-Georgia treatment not only for the terrorists proper, but for anyone who gave them an ounce of aid and comfort. Obviously, not all liberals, and certainly not all Democrats -- not all of whom are liberals, even now -- were of the Phil Donohue "let's reach out" mindset. If you weren't -- don't worry. Karl wasn't talking about you.

I do find it a little hard to take that you should demand Rove's resignation sosoon after you tried to spin the furor over Senator Durbin's outrageouscomparison of military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, the Communistgulag, and Pol Pot as some kind of right-wing conspiracy. I find it disturbing that the Democrats' leader in the Senate can't see his way clear to give Mr.Durbin the Trent Lotting he deserves, even after his weaseling apology. (If Itried his apologizing style on my wife -- "Words can be misused ... IF you took offense" -- I'd be sleeping on the couch for a week.)

Propagandizing for the enemy is, apparently, something to ignore -- but making acommonplace general observation about genuine differences between the degrees to which liberals and conservatives favor the use of military force is grounds for firing someone. I expect partisan leaders to be partisan; that's your job. Itjust bores me when they're quite as obvious about it as you have been, and when their selective outrage is as forced as yours. Get rid of Dick Durbin, Howard Dean -- and for that matter, yourself, for calling President Bush a liar without backing it up as a gentleman would -- and then perhaps we'll talk about raising the tone of civility in Washington. I'll be donating to your opponent in the next election."

2005-06-24T10:49:00.000-07:00

Housing bubble spreads like a virus

Since house prices in my immediate neighborhood have in some cases increased fourfold in 8 years (from $175,000 to $675,000), I have no problem at all announcing the existence of a real estate bubble. The fundamentals of the economy have not altered so drastically in less than a decade to justify a quadrupling of the price of an existing asset category. All booms bust, and all deviations revert to the mean. Eventually, that is. And "eventually" can unfortunately be a long time.

One effect of house-price inflation is that people who suddenly find themselves with tons of equity in their property from runups in large metro areas are fanning out into previously un-bubble-touched markets looking for "investment" opportunities, marveling at low house prices in say, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, or Visalia (low, that is, compared to Los Angeles, San Diego, or the Bay Area) and bid up prices in those places far beyond what the local economies enable actual residents to pay.

This bubble, spreading from big rich cities into the hardscrabble hinterlands, is causing people real pain by turning a basic consumption commodity into an investment vehicle.
I am an economic conservative, but what I see just screams for government intervention. Government helped create this problem, by facilitating cheap credit. Money creation is a tool that government should have in its box to mitigate panics and recessions, but as has been pointed out on this blog, the Federal Reserve's classic methods of injecting liquidity don't target it well. Instead of being used for productivity-increasing capital formation, the increased liquidity is being used to inflate the housing market, allowing people who had the resources to get in on the game in the beginning to speculate and get rich, while people who just want to purchase a house for its traditional shelter use are forced to pay increased prices and undertake levels of risk inappropriate for their preferences.

The government ought to recognize that housing speculation is bad for the economy and bad for people in general, and take steps to prevent all the liquidity it must occasionally create in response to economic crises from slopping into unhelpful speculative uses. One possible response might be to end any kind of preferential tax treatment for owning more than one home; another might be to tax capital gains from the sale of existing residential property (other than a primary residence) as ordinary income. The whole point of preferential tax treatment of capital gains is to encourage investment, after all, but I can't for the life of me see why the government would want to encourage "investment" in house flipping.
These measures would not constitute activist government -- they would actually reduce government manipulation of the economy, by removing subsidies of harmful economic activity.

2005-06-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Supreme Court "medical marijuana" decision about politics, not pot.

Not only do I blog way too sporadically, I'm way behind the news curve. But I have been meaning to comment on the Supreme Court's decision in Gonzales v. Raich, upholding the federal government's power to regulate the intrastate use of "medical marijuana" pursuant to the Constitution's commerce clause.

People tend to perceive Supreme Court decisions politically, judging them in light of the result they produce. (They may be excused in this, because since at least the 1960s, the Court's jurisprudence has in fact become more results-directed, seeming at times to begin with the policy result in mind and twisting and turning to draw some connection between the Constitution and the result, as in the infamous "penumbras and emanations" invented to discover a "right to privacy" that does not actually appear in the Constitution's text.) So naturally, Gonzales v. Raich is being interpreted by the general public as an expression of the Court's hostility to marijuana generally.

Ultimately, though, Gonzales v. Raich was not a decision about marijuana. Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Thomas -- three of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court -- dissented from the Raich majority because, as Justice Thomas eloquently put it, if a California resident growing medical marijuana for her own use in her backyard is considered subject to regulation as "interstate commerce," everything is, and the Constitution's federalist system of separation of powers between state and federal government goes up in smoke. [No pun intended.]

The liberal bloc on the Court, on the other hand, is determined to nip in the bud [OK, fine -- pun intended] any idea that federal government's Constitutional power to "regulate interstate commerce" doesn't mean it can regulate anything it wants. The principle of federalism, to them, has uneasy associations with "state's rights," which they in turn associate with John C. Calhoun, Jim Crow, and worse. After all (goes their thinking), Texas and Utah are states, and if we don't keep them on a short leash, heaven only knows what unenlightened redstatery they'll try to pull.

To preserve the federal government's dominance of the states in every sphere, and to keep the Constitution's pesky federalist principles hidden under the rug, liberal jurists have no problem at all throwing a few sick people under the train. Power trumps compassion every time.

That said, I've always been suspicious of the argument for "medical marijuana." The evidence that smoking marijuana as a palliative for pain, glaucoma, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and so forth is more effective than other, legal drugs appears to be anecdotal at best. I often suspect the push to legalize "medical marijuana" is more of a disguised effort to destigmatize marijuana generally, dressing the cause up with a few sympathetic sick people. If that is the case, I'm not impressed. It strikes me as similar to potheads extolling the manifold industrial uses of hemp. Uh-huh -- right. It's all about ropemaking. Deceptive argumentation bores me.

2005-05-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

So George Lucas thinks George Bush is Darth Vader.

The problem with American ignorance of history is that smug, self-satisfied gazillionaire filmmakers can think themselves ever so clever for making comparisons that wouldn't stand five seconds in the face of real historical analysis.

If the almost comically mild measures the Bush administration has taken to step up counterterrorism defenses in this country after the worst terrorist attack in history make George Bush a Sith Lord, then Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would each have been contenders for the title of Evil Emperor. Interning or relocating a whole ethnic group or suspending habeas corpus (Roosevelt and Lincoln's wartime curtailments of civil liberties, respectively) makes allowing delayed-notice records-search warrants seem like chump change, I'd think.

If Lucas really wanted to reflect present political realities in his last Star Wars film, maybe he should have had the movie go like this:

The Jedi council (a hierarchical, self-selecting elite) come to convince themselves that the Republic is becoming a dictatorship. They base this conclusion -- irrationally, because they, as a closed group, close their minds to dissenting opinions -- on the fact that a popularly elected government's enacting wartime measures for which the Republic's history provides ample precedent, and which the independent judiciary does not find inconsistent with the Republic's constitution. They become so convinced of their conclusion, and so desperate that the unwashed masses don't see things the way they do, that they decide that extreme measures must be taken to save the ignorant citizens of the Republic from their blindness. Ultimately, they fatally weaken the Republic's legitimacy and institutions, leading to the installation of a dictator from one extreme or the other.

Weimar Germany, in other words, with the liberal intelligentsia hyperventilating so much over the relative (to them) conservative government that it was too weakened to resist being swallowed by a nasty bunch who really were all those things the center-left accused the center-right of being.

2005-05-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in his continuing scorched-earth campaign against a number of President Bush's judicial nominees, has made a weasely reference to the contents of one of the nominees' confidential FBI files.

There are serious consequences for disclosing the contents of those confidential files (including being booted from the Senate), so Reid didn't actually say what was in the nominee's file -- only that there was a "problem" with it.

That's incredibly chickens**. The insinuation can't be refuted, or defended against, or put in context without knowing what's in the file. Senator Reid is essentially asking us to take his word for it that whatever is in the nominee's file is sufficiently bad as to disqualify the nominee. He's not the most credible judge of this, obviously, being on a crusade as he is to sink those nominees that won't advance a liberal agenda in the courts.

One thing that annoyed me in the article linked to was the statement by a former Republican staffer that "Harry Reid is a disgrace to the Senate and to [his] Church of Latter-day Saints." That last bit is totally irrelevant (and misstates the name of the Church). Sure, Harry Reid is a jerk. And, as it happens, this particular variety of his jerkery has a bit of a Mormon touch to it in his using confidentiality considerations to prevent an accused from defending himself. But for Pete's sake, who accuses Ted Kennedy of being a bad Catholic, or Olympia Snowe of being a bad whatever-the-heck-she-is? Mormons seem to get held, not necessarily to a higher standard, but certainly to a standard that takes their faith into consideration. Ideally, Mormon politicians wouldn't have so much attention paid to their religion.

2005-05-02T13:08:00.001-07:00

Saints preserve us; the theocrats are coming, according to more and more mainstream liberal voices.

The most legitimate criticism of Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign (aside from its cynicism) was that he had a nasty habit of tarring garden-variety liberals and hard-core Stalinist subversives with the same brush. (Of course, in some of the more cloistered left-of-center quarters, there is a certain denial that there were any hard-core Stalinist subversives at work within the American left in the forties and fifties, which doesn't stand rigorous factual scrutiny.)

The present "Dominionist" red scare is of a piece with McCarthyism on its worst day. The tactic is transparent: (1) Dig up a genuine religious radical from under a rock, whence he's been advocating the death penalty for adulterers; (2) find an issue on which he and a mainstream religious conservative share an opinion, such as preserving the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form; and (3) offer this as evidence that the two people share the same ultimate goals.

One notices a small breakdown in logic between steps (2) and (3). Let's play that game again: Karl Marx advocated progressive taxation and free public education; Democrats also support progressive taxation and free public education; ergo, Democrats are Marxists. (I actually did run across a letter to the BYU newspaper opinion page where a student made that argument. He was an idiot, too.)

2005-05-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

2005-03-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

As Terri Schiavo dies, I keep coming back to the phrase "death with dignity," which figured large in my law school con-law and biothics classes.

I've always been uneasy with the whole phrase "dying with dignity." By my calculation, there have been approximately six truly dignified deaths in the past two thousand years, and I may be overcounting. There's nothing particularly dignified about death, no matter how you try to pretty it up. Really, the things that we say make a "dignified" death are truly rather the last few moments of dignified life. You say a few noble last words, exhale, and then what's left of you starts to go bad immediately. In the modern world, you're likely to be immobilized and helpless flat on your back in a hospital or hospice bed, dependent for your comfort on the kindness of others. The addition or subtraction of a few more or less IVs and tubes hardly makes any difference to the indignity of it all. Even a heroic death on a battlefield is hardly better -- messy stuff tends to splatter everywhere and more likely than not you wind up facedown in mud. As an ocean lifeguard, I performed CPR on a man who had a sudden cardiac arrest on the beach. He was a man who for all I know had lived a wonderful life, but there he was clammy and crusted with sand and frothing with sputum as he died in front of a gawking crowd, with cursing lifeguards and paramedics slamming down on his chest. Nothing dignified about that at all, let me tell you.

Death sucks. It really takes faith (or a mature philosophy, which I believe draws its wisdom from divinity even if it does not acknowledge that Source) to afford the process any kind of dignity at all. Faith and philosophy are incidents of life, not death. Yet the slogan "death with dignity" seems to me to be too often marshaled to diminish those very things, and make man -- the only creature with a capacity for these things -- little more than an old sick cat to be put out of its misery.

2005-03-25T10:42:00.000-08:00

Rich Lowry in National Review Online has a piece today that echoes my post of January 18, on Democrats' belated attempts to put a religious gloss on their politics after getting shellacked in the last election, apparently in part out of a perception that they're dismissive of the concerns of religious people.

Essentially, Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, in his latest incarnation as a revival preacher, is trying to make the case that not only are Democrats deeply religious, they out-Christian the Christians.

Essentially, his argument is that Christian conservatives focus too much on the "peripheral" teachings of the Gospel, as they consider, for example, sexual morality to be, and neglect the "weightier matters of the law" like mercy and justice. They "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," if you will (see Matthew, ch. 23). (A side note -- I strongly suspect that Mr. Dean has no more knowledge of the Bible than a cherry-picked verse or two, because if he had any sense and wanted to make his argument stronger, he'd cite precisely those passage instead of the shopworn cliches he uses instead.)

The idea is apparently that Democrats are so strong on the "mercy" issue (although they're not so keen on "judgment," as in their inevitable "who are YOU to judge?!") that they can safely ignore the "peripheral" matters. It doesn't work that way. As I noted below, Matthew 23 blasts the religious formalists for "pay[ing] tithes of mint and anise and cumin" (i.e. satisfying the formal requirements of their religion) but neglecting the moral core. But it also advises people "not to leave the other [i.e. the other religious duties] undone.

In other words, you don't get an exemption from the "thou shalt not commit adultery" part just because you support a 5% increase in Head Start funding.

Dean also quoted the New Testament passage about it being harder for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. In that case, Dean needs to go on a serious diet if he's going to fit through that needle's eye -- he would qualify as "rich" by most standards. As would the billionaire (by marriage) John Kerry, George Soros, Barbara Streisand (and the rest of the almost-uniformly-Democratic Hollywood elite), and Michael Moore (who would need to go on a serious diet).

I read the "camel through the eye of a needle" passage in Matthew 19 in context with the passage that follows, in which the apostles are "amazed" at what Jesus has just said about the rich, and question whether it is possible for anyone to be saved. Jesus responds that salvation is impossible for men to accomplish alone, but "with God all things are possible." It appears, then, that the "camel through the eye of a needle" passage is in effect a setup for a larger point -- that all people are deeply flawed and need divine redemption, with the attachment of the rich to their possessions being merely the particular flaw that is manifested once people get rich. The non-rich, it is implied, have their own needle's eyes to squeeze through.

No matter how hard Democrats may try to position themselves as a party friendly to faith (advice to Mr. Dean: trying to argue that conservatives are "bad Christians" is probably not the way to go; try showing that you are equal to conservatives in your respect for faith before you try to argue you're superior), they have a major problem in that there is a perception that while not all Democrats are hostile to Christianity, those who are most hostile to or exaggeratedly fearful of Christianity do tend to fall on the liberal side of the spectrum. I have absolutely no constructive advice on how to solve that problem, frankly, other than to suggest that the way Mr. Dean is trying to solve it is probably not going to work very well.

2005-02-04T13:30:00.000-08:00

On "Hubris"

At some point in the last few days, I read the reference to "hubris" that put me over the top and made me absolutely sick of the word.

One thing I've noticed is that the users of the word tend overwhelmingly to be politically liberal, with the cultural assumptions that this has come to involve now that politics has become so much of a comprehensive identity for so many people.

"Hubris," of course, is the theme in ancient Greek drama that the gods punish excessive pride and self-confidence, or comparison of mortals to the gods.

That's fine, as far as it goes. The Judeo-Christian First Commandment basically says as much: "I'm God; you're not." Should be obvious, but it isn't.

At the same time, it sometimes seems as if any bold enterprise is immediately criticized for its "hubris." To that extent, and to the extent that human progress depends on people stepping beyond the bounds of what is thought to be possible, the concept of "hubris" is a dead weight holding us back.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachaean Ethics, distinguished between pride, which he stated was good, and vainglory or arrogance, which wasn't. The difference is that pride is an accurate self-assessment of one's own good qualities, while to be arrogant is to have a higher regard for onesself than is justified. The problem is that it's hard for imperfect humans to take an accurate measure of anything -- much less of one's own self. To avoid arrogance, and also to account for the inevitable errors in self-measurement, a person must consciously assign a lower regard to himself than he believes is justified. But in doing so, he risks undervaluing himself, and concluding that he is capable of less than he truly is, and thus failing to fill his potential.

Sometimes the only way to find your limits is to bang your head into them. That may mean overreaching, or setting your sights too high. The ancients (and modern liberals) might call this hubris. I say, hubris away, and if and when Nemesis shows up, kick his ephebophile Greek teeth right down his throat.

This is totally separate from taking a proper measure of the potential costs and benefits of an action. It's one thing to be overconfident of your chances of success; it's another to ignore the potential consequences of failure, which you can never discount. There's no weakness in saying "I'm confident I can do this; however, if it turns out I can't, I will cause a lot more harm than the good I'd do by succeeding."

The bottom line is that it's not overconfidence itself that is dangerous; that seems to me to be a concept that could only have been invented by losers who want to hold others back. The dangerous thing is not being clear-eyed in calculating the costs and benefits of a course of action, and ignoring the potential downside.

2005-01-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

On a news show the other night (I think it was "Hannity & Colmes; I wasn't paying close attention as I was just passing through the living room), I heard DNC Chair candidate Tim Roemer attribute the Democrats' loss in the Presidential election to their supposed failure to articulate their true philosophy. The implication was that it wasn't the Democrats' message that was the problem, it was their failure to get it across; the message itself being so manifestly desirable that no majority could ever oppose it.

Apparently hoping to get some of those "moral values" thingies that so many people cared about in the last election, Roemer remarked (I paraphrase from memory) that Jesus talked more about concern for the poor than moral issues.

As far as hackneyed transparent ploys for the Christian vote go, all I can say is that line is about as fresh as "Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Britney Spears?"

The problem with Roemer's argument is that it presumes, as if self-evident, the proposition that only Democrats care about making a decent provision for the poor. Look, Tim -- all of us (hard-core Randian objectivists excluded) want to see that the poor, who are always with us, suffer from their poverty as little as possible. We differ as to the means for minimizing this suffering. Some of us Republicans think the best way to minimize the effects of poverty is to help people to stop being poor. That means supporting rational economic policies. There is a strong case to be made that the 1994 welfare reform (by putting time limits on people's eligibility for public assistance), by providing the impetus to seek employment, has lifted thousands of people out of poverty.

I look at the Democratic Party's present public proposals, and I see precious little in the way of anything that promises to provide real help for the poor. Most of the party's energy appears to be dedicated to expanding entitlements for the middle class or perpetuating government's control of such entitlements. (See Social Security and Medicare.) As for education, the party is so dominated by state-sector unions -- teachers' unions in particular -- that the party's only call is for more public money (which has consistently been increased without effect) rather than for substantive reforms that may actually help fix failing schools, which are disproportionately located in poor areas. Affirmative action slots go overwhelmingly to upper middle class students and business owners, and in the case of education, there is a strong case to be made that it does more harm than good.

The Democrats' problem is that the United States already spends buckets of money on programs ostensibly intended to help the poor. Poverty's persistence in spite of those programs suggests -- at least as one rational possibility -- that those programs are poorly designed or operated, calling into question the Democrats' judgment on how best to fight poverty.

So Ed Roemer presentation of a choice between one party which cares for the poor and another party that does not is a false one, and his claiming of a divine mandate for his political philosophy is rubbish. Jesus never advocated a welfare state, let alone one in which state-sector unions called all the shots and were entitled, without question, to ever-increasing funding without regard for results.

But back to his "Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about moral issues" line. While the statement may or may not be true (my past readings of the New Testament give me the impression that if it is, "helping the poor" doesn't beat the theme of living a holy life by too many references), the fact remains that Jesus did talk about "moral issues." In Matthew 23, Jesus condemned hypocrites for paying too much attention to religious formalities at the expense of the "weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith." He went on to say of those "weightier matters," "[T]hese ought ye to have done" -- but, significantly, adds "and not to leave the other undone."

In other words, by all means, remember that pure religion is to help the widows and fatherless in their affliction -- but don't forget the other stuff, either. The "other stuff" -- the "moral issues" that Tim Roemer seemed to denigrate -- is important, too. In fact, as the past half century has demonstrated, abandoning the "other stuff" -- the internalized moral restraints that help keep a society together and running smoothly -- tends to increase the number of widows and fatherless that need to be cared for. I have particularly in mind the damage left-liberal ideology has inflicted on marriage. Men don't need much of an excuse to revert to their natural horny state; reducing marriage from its original highly-protected status to a contract which may be breached with even fewer consequences than are triggered by breaches of ordinary civil contracts has had disastrous results in creating hordes of "fatherless" children.

So let's sum up. As far as "helping the poor" goes, what we essentially have is two parties that both strive for that goal, but differ in their proposed solutions. As far as the "moral values" issue goes, the Democrats have pretty much surrendered the field. In other words, on one side, you have an unambiguous "yes" on one question and an unambiguous "no" on the other. On the other, you have a "yes" on the first question (even granting for purposes of argument that Republicans "care" less for the poor than Democrats) and an unambiguous yes on the other.

What Roemer is saying, essentially, is that "sure, we think your 'traditional values' are medieval hogwash, but you should still vote for us because we're good on that other stuff Jesus talked about." Whether it's right or wrong, a religious voter isn't likely to buy this.

[UPDATE] I just noticed I referred above to both "Tim Roemer," which is the guy's actual name, and "Ed Roemer." I have no idea who "Ed Roemer" is, or why I typed that. Corrected.

2004-12-14T20:22:00.000-08:00

In the words of Indiana Jones, "Didn't [this guy] ever go to Sunday school?"

Jon Meacham, writing in Newsweek about the biblical Christmas story (predictably, he insinuates the whole thing was custom-tailored in the first century to enhance Jesus' messianic credentials) offers this whiplash-inducer to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bible:

"Enraged and jealous, Herod orders a massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem—thus connecting Jesus' birth with the first Passover, when God spared Israel's sons from the same bloody decree by Pharaoh." [Emphasis added.]

Or not. Passover commemorates God's sparing Israel's sons not from a "bloody decree by Pharoah," but from His own "bloody decree," which fell rather spectacularly on Egyptian first-born sons according to the account in [i]Exodus.[/i]

An interesting subject -- I've always questioned whether the "virgin shall conceive" passage in Isaiah doesn't refer to an event in Isaiah's own time rather than Christ's (the context suggests that if the passage is Messianic, it is so by a double meaning). But Meacham annihilates his credibility on this subject with that kind of junior Sunday school mistake.

2004-11-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

For the sore loser files.

If "know your enemy" is good, helpful advice, you'd expect the political faction with the least accurate understanding of its opposition to lose. I think it just did.

I think conservatives have a far less simplistic understanding of left-liberals than the reverse, possibly because so many national cultural institutions display the left-liberal conventional wisdom so forthrightly and inescapably. You have to have your head tucked several feet deep in the sand to miss the point of view of Hollywood, the networks, the major broadsheet newspapers, the news weeklies, the universities, etc. You definitely get a clear picture of where they stand and what they think -- it's on display for the whole country to see.

Conservative ideas, on the other hand, aren't so pervasive. While there are plenty of conservative voices, they often must be sought out actively -- which, if your sensibility is liberal or apolitical, you may not be inclined to do.

The result is that the conventional-wisdom left-liberal may become cloistered, and have his opinions hardened into the kind of unbelievably stereotyped caricature displayed in the editorial linked to above. (Summary: Middle America consists of ignorant, non-critically-thinking religious fanatics led blindly by amoral corporate pirates.)

The problem with presenting one's opposition as such a caricature is that the people you're trying to persuade may actually know a conservative or two, and notice that the caricature doesn't match the reality. They may know, for example, an evangelical Christian who doesn't handle snakes, who is well-read, who can hold his own in a reasoned discussion, and is generally a nice person. (True, that person's wife may have big hair and an appalling taste for saccharine music, even incorporating it into hands-raised, eyes-closed, swaying church service, but we can't all be Episcopalians.)

The farther the caricature diverges from the reality, the less the credibility of the person presenting the caricature. The Democrats' present problem is that an awful lot of its partisans think the opposition is too stupid to live. I've encountered this intellectual vanity myself -- and I've often found it's actually backed by intellectual reservoirs about an inch deep. The Socialist Paralegal (mentioned below), for example, is bright enough, but has proven that he knows a lot less than he thinks he does. (The Patriot Act, for example, doesn't mention library records anywhere.) It's not what left-liberals don't know that hurts them; in many cases, they actually know quite a bit. It's what they think they know that isn't so.

Even when you're right, proceeding as if you're ten times smarter than the opposition is a suicidal political strategy. People don't like know-it-alls, and they don't like to be talked down to. And they especially don't find it convincing when, if you disagree with them, they get all emotional and think that yelling "Listen to yourself!" over and over is a good way to win an argument.

2004-10-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

Lileks has an excellent rant today. A sample:

Keeping the country united? Good luck. Imagine FDR running a war with a press composed of cynical snickerers who derided the president as a rich old cripple who thought the best way to defeat Tojo was a war in North Africa and preached defeat every day through the hard slog of the Pacific theater. Imagine running a war with an entertainment industry that declined to make a single movie about the conflict - why, imagine a "Casablanca" where Rick and Sam argue about whether America started it all because they didn’t support the League of Nations. Imagine a popular radio drama running through the early 40s about a smart, charismatic, oh-so-intellectual Republican president whose bourbon baritone mocked FDR’s patrician whine, a leader who took no guff from Stalin OR Hitler! Lux Soap brings you, The West Wing of the White House! Imagine Thomas Dewey’s wife in 1944 callling the WW2 a war for oil; imagine former vice presidents insisting that FDR had played on our fears after Pearl Harbor. Imagine all that.

Those people may well want the country united -- but only if it's united behind them.

2004-10-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

So Elizabeth Edwards says there won't be post-election riots "if we win."

Columbia's Todd Gitlin says "I would not be surprised to see outbursts of political violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the Weather Underground of the 1970s" in the event of a Bush victory.

Republican campaign headquarters are being vandalized, stormed, shot up, and burglarized across the country on almost a weekly basis. (I'm waiting for some heads-up Democrat to direct me to reports of Democratic offices getting the same treatment; given that "everyone does it" seems to be their standard response to charges of election fraud, the only explanation for their not making that tu quoque argument here is that they can't.)

New left-liberal motto: "Terrorists: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"

2004-10-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

I try to keep up a little on events in Utah, where I went to school. Probably because of the state's dominant, conservative Mormon culture, many other churches tend to the liberal end of the religious spectrum, if only to keep them from getting lost in the background noise.

Utah's Episcopal bishop, the Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, is of the liberal Episcopal persuasion, which is almost a redundancy (at least as far as that church's clergy and leadership are concerned), but isn't so everywhere.

The Episcopal Church -- the American branch of the Anglican Communion -- is a little off the Anglican reservation these days over the issue of homosexuality. The Anglican Communion recently called (politely) on the American church to apologize for appointing an openly homosexual bishop, which the larger Anglican organization still considers to be inconsistent with binding scripture and church teaching. (The Anglican Communion is full of Anglicans from Third World countries, whose conservative religious philosophy Western liberals tend to find primitive and unsophisticated.) The Episcopal Church responded politely by saying, in effect, sorry for the trouble, but we're not going to change. The Episcopal statement justified its stance on homosexuality by saying the subject is "openly discussed and increasingly acknowledged." I'm still not quite sure what that's supposed to mean, unless the Episcopal Church sees its mission as reflecting the general culture instead of helping guide it.

In any event, the Rev. Irish of Utah defended the Episcopal declaration of not-budging with a statement that included a reference to her being unwilling to "turn back the clock" on this issue.

That's what got my goat. The Episcopal Church can do as it pleases. Even if the Bible is pretty emphatic on the kind of sexual relationships that are recognized as morally admirable (a really short list that doesn't include gay sex), it's not as if anyone, even the most conservative Christians, accept everything in the Bible as binding. It's always possible to interpret some things as having gone out of the gospel at the time of the New Testament, or to interpret others metaphorically. Some of the interpretations require strain-inducing mental gymnastics to justify, but in more skeptical moments I have to ask, what in religion doesn't?

No, what bugs me is the reference to a "clock." Clocks tick inexorably from one hour to another (unless my little daughter knocks my alarm clock off my nightstand and I discover this after my alarm doesn't go off, causing me to oversleep and be late for a morning court hearing and get scowled at by a judge). People have no effect on the march of time; morning goes to noon which goes to dusk no matter what we do.

The Rev. Irish, and the (inevitably) liberals who use the phrase "turn back the clock," seem to view history the same way -- that time and human events roll on regardless of human inputs, with the fulfillment of liberal philosophy the inevitable and uncontestable result. That view is lazy, arrogant, and complacent, and for such a well-educated bunch as your standard-issue NPR/PBS pride-in-critical-thinking liberal, it's inexcusable.

There is no clock. History is shaped by the people who live it. Sometimes they shape things right, and sometimes they make mistakes. A better analogy would be that people are navigating a tangle of highways. If they drive a few miles in what they later determine to be a wrong direction, it's perfectly acceptable -- even necessary -- to go back to the fork in the road and take the other -- or, more often, cut across some surface streets and try to pick up the road not taken further along.

"Progress" isn't inevitable. I dispute whether the "progressive" liberal agenda is even progress, since I believe it rests on unsustainable, fantastic illusions. It's up to us to keep civilization alive and improve it, and if that means acknowledging mistakes and making them right, it's no shame to change our minds about a decision made in the past, the liberal "clock" notwithstanding.

2004-10-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

Working in the legal profession, I'm surrounded by conventional-wisdom NPR/PBS left-liberals. Over and over again, they express wonderment at how I could possibly be a conservative, being far too well-mannered, well-read, educated, physically fit, etc. (I'm starting to think they're just flattering me to get me to take on more of their work.) They honestly seem to think that conservatives are all drawling, irrational, bad-haired and big-bellied hicks.

George W. Bush is hated by these people not for what he's done, but for what he is. Except the "what he is" that these people hate, is a caricature. Respectable left-liberals hint darkly that he's setting the country on a course towards fascism or theocracy -- fever-swamp slanders made with increasing frequency, and in increasingly respectable quarters, by people who either don’t recognize or don’t care that they’re slandering millions of their neighbors at the same time.

If Kerry wins, the Democrats won’t question their myths. Left unchecked, they will strengthen and fester. Democracy requires that the side that comes in second has to be willing to accept the verdict of the voters. When you honestly think the other side is fascist, that's impossible. You don't accept government by Nazis, ever, democratically elected or not. Perpetuation of left-liberals’ conceit that theirs is the only respectable opinion is a real threat to republican government – a more fragile thing than I think many left-liberals assume.

2004-09-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

As long as I'm in the letter-posting business, here's one I sent to CBS:

SIR:
Defending a document based on its content, not on its authenticity, is something I expect from a religious apologist, not a news organization. CBS might as well be claiming that even though the Donation of Constantine was forged, its content (a purported selection of the Bishop of Rome to be the head of the Catholic Church) is still true. Leave the question "What is truth?" to the metaphysicians, and do your job as journalists.
I do notice that your statement uses the word "accurate" instead of "authentic" in describing the memos. I presume that this word choice is not accidental; that, having failed to reproduce the memos in question on any 1972-vintage typing equipment (despite what must have been an afternoon of desperate scrambling), and having failed to find any credentialed document expert (typewriter repairmen and handwriting analysts don't count) willing to stake his reputation on a statement that the documents are authentic, you are essentially conceding the documents are forged.
"We publish forgeries, but only if they're accurate" is not a slogan CBS wants to stand on. Your source has lied to you. You have no obligation to maintain his anonymity. In keeping his identity secret, you are an accessory to journalistic fraud.
Since you show no signs of coming clean, I intend to contact my Congressman and request that he request that hearings be opened on this issue, as I doubt that CBS will not do the right thing absent the application of the subpoena power.

2004-09-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

A letter I submitted today to my hometown paper (well, sort of -- the OC Register is closer both geographically and ideologically, but their comics page stinks, and I need "Frazz") the LA Times. Since, after a long and unbroken string of publishing my submissions, they've taken a pass on my last few, I offer it here humbly for your enjoyment.

***

To the Editor:

In the face of overwhelming evidence that CBS News "60 Minutes" show attacking President Bush's military record was based on forged documents, anchorman Dan Rather still insists the documents are authentic, telling the Washington Post, "Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not, I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill."

If this passes for an evidentiary standard among journalists, lawyers need to make room for newsmen at the bottom of the "most trusted" list. In litigation, the person making a charge carries the burden of proof -- requiring litigators, if they want to win, to double-check and document their facts in meticulous detail. I couldn't produce a 1961 document purporting to show that Dan Rather kicks his dog and then demand he demonstrate his innocence with "definitive proof" that my document could only have been produced on a 21st-century computer. It's not enough to allege, as CBS does, a theoretical possibility the document might be authentic; the person offering documentary evidence must authenticate it. CBS is attempting to influence a Presidential election with documents that would be inadmissible to prove a $10,000 plumbing contract.

***

Comments may be added by clicking on the time of the post, below.

2004-09-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com feature printed response by that newspaper's Public Editor to a person who criticized the paper's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to identify the Islamist terrorists who killed over 300 people, largely schoolchildren, after taking over their school and holding the kids hostage, without food, water, or toilets, for three days.

I thought the PE's reasoning stank, and sent him my thoughts:

Attn: Public Editor
SIR:
Via Opinionjournal.com, I read that you defended the Tribune's reference to the terrorists of Beslan as "militants" or "rebels."
You wrote, "No intellectually honest person can deny that "terrorist" is a word freighted with negative judgment and bias. So we sought terms that carried no such judgment."
Absolutely appalling, and factually incorrect. True, calling someone a "terrorist" involves a "negative judgment." So does calling a person who commits rape a rapist -- but it also happens to be a factually accurate statement. One can be a "rebel" or a "militant" without shooting child hostages in the back. You can't do that and not be a terrorist -- a word whose objective definition surely includes a person who intentionally inflicts bodily harm on noncombatants for political purposes.
Maybe it is true that "one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter" (although I suspect that only holds if the "another man" is morally bankrupt). Maybe the line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" can be fine in some instances. But murdering children after torturing them for three days is so far beyond the pale of any kind of legitimate tactic of resistance that no term but "terrorist" can possibly be accurate -- unless you want to say there's factually no difference between the Beslan murders and that rebellious militant George Washington.
Words have real meanings, and a journalist whose livelihood focuses on using words should know better than to use words improperly out of an exaggerated concern about "judgment." Use good judgment, and use the right words.

***
Comments may be posted by clicking on the time of the post. (I'm going to have to type that at the end of each post until someone shows me how to update the blog's code to include a visible "Post a Comment" link.)

2004-08-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm now happily settled into a decent-sized law firm -- a different experience from the two smaller outfits I've previously worked with. The first firm's Liberal Partner (mentioned a few months back) has been replaced by the Socialist Paralegal. In other words, my hapless opposition has gone from a kind of mild-mannered, soft-jazz NPR conventional wisdom liberal to a self-styled radical who thinks that Prescott Bush supported the Nazis (short answer: he didn't; long answer: look it up yourself) and that Dick Cheney is the fount of all evil.

The Socialist Paralegal apparently likes to argue politics, as I discovered a couple of weeks ago when he wouldn't leave my office for an hour and a half when I really had to get a project done.

The main thrust of his main argument appears to be that Republicans are hypocritical for wanting "small government," but -- according to him -- only when it suits them; otherwise, they want to control people as much as do Democrats. (He's one of those people who thinks the difference between the mainstream parties is generally insignificant.)

I'm trying to inform the Socialist Paralegal, or "SP," on the difference between conservatives and libertarians. While many libertarians lean Republican, it's true that libertarians are often greatly dissatisfied with that party as being excessively statist. Some of these criticisms are valid, especially with respect to Republican officeholders; let a man get his hands on the levers of power, and he may start to enjoy using them a little too much. Others are simply unrealistic. Anyway, though, assuming that support for limited government is appropriately considered a Republican article of faith, the Republican positions cited by the SP claims conflict with the limited-government ideal are not the contradictions he argues they are.

First, I don't agree that conservatives and liberals are equally interested in "control." As examples of Republican "controls" over private behavior, the SP cites the issues of abortion, gay marriage, and drug restriction. (I have also had the pleasure of a lecture on the environmental benefits of hemp. I never knew there could be such a need for a fiber with half the strength of nylon and twice the cost.) Even combined, these issues can't compare to the Democrat urge to regulate everything under the sun. Furthermore, individually, I submit these issues aren't the clear-cut evidence of "control" as they're claimed to be.

First, abortion. I've often heard this issue discussed with some line about how the government should stay out of the bedroom, as if this issue involved nothing more than regulation of people's private sexual lives. But abortions don't take place in bedrooms. They take place in clinics, which are subject to all kinds of regulations already. Less semantically, the thing that distinguishes abortion from other issues involving personal sexual conduct is that at some point, it becomes impossible to deny that a second party is involved. You can argue that birth control is entirely a personal matter; it's harder to argue when an eight-month fetus is involved that the matter doesn't involve a second person, or something close to it. (My daughter, incidentally, was born a month early. She looked and sounded pretty human to me.)

Somewhere along the continuum of human gestation, there is a point where society needs to draw a line dividing the respective spheres of personal autonomy and interpersonal relations, in the latter of which spheres the government should legitimately exercise its power to protect the weak. Since the protection of life is such an elemental responsibility of government (governments, after all, are instituted, according to the Declaration of Independence, to protect, among other unalienable rights, the right to life), if government may legitimately intervene in any sphere, this would seem to be one.

Neither does the debate over "gay marriage" involve a government restraint on personal behavior. It is not argued (at least in this debate) that the government should prohibit a particular variety of sexual conduct. Rather, the opponents of gay marriage are actually being more libertarian than its proponents: Since civil marriage is a government institution -- a quasi-contractual relationship defined and enforced by law -- expanding the scope of that institution expands the scope of government. In this particular case, it would expand the scope of government to compel a majority of the country's citizens to afford the incidents of marriage to a coupling they would rather not.

Drug prohibition is probably the toughest of the SP's three challenges, to the extent that the prohibition -- like mandatory seat-belt laws -- is intended to protect individuals from the consequences of their own potential misconduct. Many conservatives do, in fact, oppose drug prohibition; for example, support for some kind of decriminalization frequently appears in National Review. On the other hand, drug prohibition is not designed only for the protection of the potential user from himself. The abuse of mind-altering drugs, by altering a person's judgment, may cause him to endanger others. Of course, some substances are probably more potentially dangerous to third persons than are others; for example, drugs that increase aggression or cause psychosis might be more legitimately restricted than drugs with a milder effect. It may well be true that certain controlled substances are actually less interpersonally dangerous than alcohol, for example, which contributes to traffic accidents, domestic violence, child neglect, and the like. Frankly, I tend to think the prohibition on drugs other than tobacco and alcohol isn't so much a determination that the former are necessarily more interpersonally dangerous than the latter, as a conclusion that two social drugs (whose use is too firmly entrenched in the culture to eradicate) are enough.

But assume for the moment that the SP is correct at least in some respect -- that conservatives really do want to enforce controls on personal behavior. Might not these proposed restrictions actually further the cause of limited government, rather than diminishing it? Specifically, might conservatives not be concluding that government efforts to shape the national culture, by steering people's behavior into healthy channels, minimize the kind of destructive conduct that creates a perceived need for even greater government intervention?

For an example, take the case of single parenthood. One of the most reliable ways for a person to guarantee that she will be poor is to have a child while unmarried. And while it's of course not universal that the children of single parents have behavioral problems (my stepson clearly does not), a disproportionate number of young people who act poorly were raised by single parents. Raising a child is expensive and hard; it's even harder when all the burden is on one person. My hat is off to someone who is able to do it right, unassisted -- but there are clearly not enough such champions in the field. Increased poverty, neglect, and crime results; in turn, government feels pressure to intervene to mitigate these problems. Government attempts at mitigation inevitably develop into ponderous programs, top-heavy with bureaucracy and tending, like all institutions, to self-perpetuation. The result is increased taxation and regulation, restricting freedom perhaps far more than some small steps at guiding the culture would have done.

Altering your course a few degrees at the beginning of a flight involves a lot less effort than trying to get back on course after you've flown an hour on the wrong heading. (Microsoft Flight Simulator has been eating up shameful amounts of my time; my wife would prefer I delay risking splattering myself against a mountainside until the kids are older and I have more insurance.)

So the question is this: Is it possible to be both socially and economically libertarian? Or is the only way for an economically-libertarian society to remain so -- in the face of pressure for government to step in to relieve the human suffering caused, in large part, by personal misconduct -- to withdraw a few steps from absolute social libertarianism, aiming to so shape the culture so that damaging personal misconduct is minimized and the pressure for government relief reduced?

I think it is.

2004-07-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

The other night on TV, I caught a debate between a conservative and a liberal talk show host. The discussion turned to the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Naturally, the conservative had some strong words against it.

The liberal talking head's response was to ask whether the conservative believed everything in "Fahrenheit 9/11" was untrue.

I've heard this kind of argument before. It sets an impossible and a false standard. An argument can make nine indisputably true points, tie them together with one lie, and the result will be as false and dishonest as if all ten points had been lies.

The premise of "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that the Bush administration is manipulating the war on jihadi terror for the pecuniary interests of its members and their friends, and that administration members' relationships with Saudi Arabian interests, in particular, influence foreign policy to the country's detriment.

The 9/11 commission report, released yesterday, knocked a couple of the movie's main points on the head. First, the movie's contention that the Afghanistan campaign's real purpose was to pave the way for a Unocal pipeline across the country takes a hit, in that it appears that the pipeline project was a kind of Clinton-era "vaporware." That is, it seems that the project was conceived by the State Department in 1998 as a kind of carrot to be offered to various of the fighting Afghan factions, including the Taliban, to persuade them to stop fighting. It was doubtful even at the time that the pipeline would ever be built; in fact, Unocal ultimately decided it didn't want to be involved.

Applying Occam's toothbrush, it seems to me that the most obvious reason for the Afghan campaign was that, oh, the country's government was allowing the place to be used as a base for the terrorist group that blew a big hole in New York's skyline.

The second hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" takes from the 9/11 commission report is the movie's contention that the Bush adminstration flew bin Laden family members out of the country, without allowing the FBI to interview them, during the time when flights were grounded after the attacks. In fact, they didn't fly out of the country until regular airline flights resumed (I got on a plane myself that same week, figuring an Orange County-Salt Lake City flight wasn't a likely target for anyone -- although everybody gave a wary look to the poor lone Arab businessman in first class). The FBI did have a chance to interview the people it wanted to speak with. And the decision to allow the Saudis to be flown to a central location in Tennessee (presumably to save them from the lynch mobs that Michael Moore thinks Americans naturally become, in their natural stupidity; see "Bowling for Columbine" and his comment that Americans are the stupidest people on earth) was made by Richard Clarke, of whose judgment the Left thought so highly when his testimony to the 9/11 commission was seen as reflecting poorly on President Bush. In other words, Michael Moore thinks that a decision made by a person who apparently never liked Bush all that much, somehow was influenced by Bush family connections to Saudi interests. I suppose any dots can be connected if you curve the lines enough . . . .

So while it may not be true that every word of "Fahrenheit 9/11" is false, including "and" and "the," the fact that the various accurate statements are tied together by falsehoods, renders the entire conclusion false, not to mention shallow, mean-spirited, and demagogic. To the extent any Democrat doesn't repudiate it (and John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Terry McAulliffe have all spoken favorably of the film, with only a fraction of reservation expressed if any), he shows himself no gentleman.

2004-05-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds, on Instapundit:

"I'm not a "my country, right or wrong," guy. But I do think that if patriotism means anything it means giving one's own country the benefit of the doubt -- of which, in the case of this war, there's not really much need for -- and that the people I was discussing in that post are doing quite the opposite and adopting a "my country -- of course it's wrong" attitude. To root for your own country's defeat is to separate yourself from its polity, to declare it not worth saving or preserving, to declare the lives of its soldiers less important than your own principles. It's not always wrong, but it's a very a drastic step, as drastic as deciding to mount a revolution, really, and yet it's often taken by superficial people for superficial -- and, as in this case, tawdry and self-serving -- reasons.

If Bush really were Hitler, it would be different. A Nazi America wouldn't be worth saving, and its polity would be worth separating oneself from. But we're so far from that situation, as Young herself notes, that such discussions are entirely academic, and those who are rooting against America in Iraq have hardly demonstrated the moral courage and personal sacrifice that such a serious step demands, if it is to be taken seriously. If Bush is really Hitler, is filing slanted copy a sufficient response? But the real problem isn't that Bush is Hitler -- just that he's a Republican, which puts a very different face on things. I don't think that Young is one of those Libertarians who denounces the very concept of patriotism, but (though I could have been clearer in my post, I guess, but this seemed painfully obvious to me) I think that she should have thought this column through a bit more."

I reached a similar conclusion a while ago. A patriot is a friend of his country. A true friend doesn't rush with unseemly haste to believe the worst of his friend.

2004-05-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Since it appears that a couple of people a week are still reading this site, notwithstanding the utter absence of new content since March, maybe I should start each post with a hearty mea culpa. I'll abbreviate it "MC" and move on.

In last Sunday's Los Angeles Times, which I subscribe to mostly because it contains the local "Daily Pilot" paper and because of the "Frazz" comic strip (the OC Register's comic page is a big steaming amateurish pile of ... ink), the paper's editor John Carroll gave himself and his fellow "real journalists" (as opposed to the "pseudo-journalists" on Fox News or the Web) a big, fat, preening, self-congratulatory kiss on the backside -- which would speak wonders for his flexibility, if I weren't only being figurative.

The gist of the column was that REAL journalists owe a duty to the public to be ever-so-careful in verifying the facts they present are correct, and making sure the public is informed of the things it needs to know. (What it needs to know, of course, is determined by Carroll and his friends.) He pointed to a study that suggested watchers of Fox News were more likely than consumers of other media to subscribe to certain "myths" about the war on terrorism.

Of course, as many people pointed out, the "myths" the study focused on were all generally "right-wing" myths, including the idea that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda or that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. (Actually, there is evidence that both "myths" are true; whether it is persuasive evidence depends on your standard of proof.) The study ignored pervasive "left-wing" myths, like the concept that President Bush said Iraq was an "imminent threat" (he didn't); that the war would be easy (ditto) or that he claimed Iraq had sought uranium in Niger (he didn't say that, and now it appears that Iraq did, in fact, do so.) A fair study would have discovered that the converse of what it found is also true -- left-leaning people are drawn to left-leaning media, and tend to have left-leaning misconceptions. And that wouldn't have been news at all.

After asking rhetorically how the newer, non-liberal media outlets could have left their readers and listeners so "in the dark" as to swallow these "myths" (dang, I'm getting like Reuters with the scare quotes here; next thing you know, I'll be referring to "terrorists"), the Times promptly buried the discovery of a sarin gas artillery shell in Iraq on page 8. And then dropped the story pretty much altogether -- there may have been a follow-up story buried somewhere equally deep, but I've been too busy to see much but the front page, and there was certainly nothing on this potentially earthshaking discovery there.

The irony gives me a headache. The Times faults other media for supposedly failing to report the whole story -- and then, not even a week later, buries major news deeper than a dead Pharoah. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the like-thinking Times staff of "real journalists" just don't think the sarin gas is newsworthy, and that their thinking is colored by their political perspective.

WMD found? Move on, nothing to see here; let's raise the bar a little higher for refutations of our "Bush LIED!" charge and go back to important stuff like Iraqi thugs getting the "Pulp Fiction" treatment.

This brings us to the question: can what the press chooses to emphasize effect the outcome of a war? Clausewitz recognized that a country's will to fight is as important a component of its warmaking abilities as its actual armed forces. Since literally destroying the American armed forces is generally not a high-probability outcome, especially for lightly-armed irregulars, the only real strategy that can conceivably work is one based on attacking the country's will. The North Vietnamese used this strategy very well, and the jihadists seem to be learning from their example. Convince enough people that the war on jihadist terror, or any of its battles, isn't worth the cost, and they win.

An enemy focusing on a will-reducing strategy would try to control the flow of information to the other side's public. He would emphasize stories that make the other side look bad, or that side's cause hopeless, and suppress stories that detract from this picture.

Where is the line between responsible journalism, with its commitment to telling the whole story and informing the public, and propagandizing for the enemy?

It's a tough call. Journalists don't necessarily have to support the enemy to present the news in the same manner he would want; the nature of American media is to pay more attention to bad news than good. "If it bleeds, it leads," and all that.

The problem is that I think the coverage of the Iraq war goes beyond this built-in bias for bad news. So many American journalists have essentially the same mindset -- a kind of conventional-wisdom liberalism, sharing its assumptions (and utter lack of historical perspective) with so many other organs of establishment culture. For many journalists, Vietnam is the template; if the troops aren't home by Christmas one year after the first shots are fired, it's a quagmire. Others have a misguided understanding of the principle of evenhandedness that leaves them constitutionally incapable of taking their country's side in any particular quarrel.

The media's incessant coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which has continued far longer than any normal people seem to want, is an example of this. The proper thing to do would be to investigate the abuses, punish the guilty, decide on some reasonable measures to minimize the risk of a recurrence, and move on. The more we flagellate ourselves over this, the more ammunition we give to our enemies. Let's clean our house, acknowledge the shame, and turn our backs on it. That means no wallowing, no Senators posturing, and no using it for political advantage.

2004-03-03T13:43:00.000-08:00

THE GREAT GAY MARRIAGE DEBATE

An interesting debate on the "gay marriage" issue developed on a message board I frequent (www.ldstalk.com). I found myself writing some fairly long essays in the thread, and got some essay-length responses. It was a fascinating debate, and I think it's worth preserving. Warning -- this is VERY long. But worth it.

It started out with my response to the original post:

Posted by TheProudDuck: Feb 25 2004, 12:24 PM
I may be responding to someone who's already gone, not to mention engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, but here goes:

QUOTE
1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control. (You just imagined the penguins. Anyway, penguins are unnatural: they're birds, they fly underwater. Nuff said.)

Not a serious argument. I agree. If men acted according to their unrestrained natures, human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

QUOTE
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid becasue they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can't legally get married because the world needs more children.

One of the main reasons the institution of marriage exists is because of society's interest in providing a stable environment for the raising of children. Since it is reasonable to expect that a man and a woman sleeping together regularly may produce children in the ordinary course of things, whether they intend to or not, it is appropriate for a society to set up in advance the legal framework that will apply to the union, so as to regulate that environment.

The fact that some marriages do not produce children doesn't change the rationale for recognizing marriage as a legal institution, any more than the fact that some people will never pay capital-gains tax means that those tax laws shouldn't exist. The framework is there for when it's needed, and often it can't be known in advance whether marriage's child-sheltering institutions will be needed. Couples who don't intend to have children may change their minds. Couples who thought themselves infertile, by reason of age or otherwise, may not be.

The (relatively minor) exceptional category of elderly couples who are pretty much definitively infertile, to whom the primary rationale of marriage of providing a stable environment for childraising almost certainly doesn't apply, affirm the institution of marriage by their participation in it.

You would have us say that because exceptions exist -- i.e. some people to whom the chief rationale for marriage doesn't apply -- therefore the rule shouldn't exist, either. That reminds me of a very liberal lawyer I once worked with, whose favorite tactic in arguments against a particular rule was to think of some outlandish exception wherein a person might be hurt by it. Obviously, not every exception can be anticipated. Set up the rule, and if there are significant exceptional cases, make rules to accommodate the exceptions.

QUOTE
10. Children can never suceed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why single parents are forbidden to raise children.

See the above about exceptions to the general rule. Reasonable people may conclude that, in the aggregate, there are significant differences between men and women, and children are enriched by an environment where they experience a mother and a father who each provide their unique attributes. Occasionally, because of divorce or death or other circumstances, the ideal may not be possible. I do think that adoption law, as a general rule, should favor married two-parent couples over singles.

QUOTE
3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

QUOTE
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

Unless you accept the argument that ALL homosexuality is genetically determined (which is a stretch), then it's possible that environmental influences may affect people's developing sexuality. One of the environmental factors that could reasonably be expected to have an effect is the acceptance of something by society. If something is viewed by society as acceptable, society will get more of that thing. Look at the use of racial slurs. It's (generally) not illegal to use them, but you're much less likely to hear them than you would have been fifty years ago. Because society doesn't accept their use.

QUOTE
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if Gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.

Ah, the bootstrapping argument: "We liberals have so diminished the meaningfulness of marriage already that you might as well let us tear it the rest of the way down." I guarantee you it wasn't social conservatives who enacted Nevada's marriage laws, or instituted no-fault divorce, or created the social atmosphere where marriage is taken lightly.

QUOTE
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are property, blacks can't marry whites, and divorce is illegal.

A perfect example of the tendency of the living to think themselves superior to the dead: Every traditional arrangement must be inferior to the contemporary wisdom. "Divorce is illegal"? When was that? Certainly, divorce used to be a lot harder to obtain, but it's been legal in some form or another for pretty much all of recorded history. And it's far from clear that the present state of divorce law is the ideal, given the pain it tends to cause. For every divorce that benefits both parties, there's at least another that does more harm than good. "Women are property" -- OK, the Romans got that one wrong. That hasn't been true for a long time, although women's rights did take a long time to develop to their proper place. "Blacks can't marry whites" -- Anti-miscegenation laws are a relatively recent invention (most didn't exist until the 19th century) that ran their course over the span of a few generations.

How about "The punishment should fit the crime"? Or "no punishment may be inflicted unless a law has been broken"? How about the canons of statutory interpretation? The common law? The Golden Rule? All of these things are at least centuries old. Sometimes, the fact that an institution has stood the test of time suggests that it may be a good idea, having been "naturally selected" from among other institutions that were found wanting and discarded.

QUOTE
6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.

Couldn't agree more. On the legislative side, we have the abolition of slavery, the 13th through the 15th Amendments, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- the basic framework of civil rights in this country. On the judicial side, we have Brown v. Board of Education -- which itself built on a trend, pushed along by representative institutions, of greater civil rights (like President Truman's integration of the military). On the other hand, the judicial side also has to answer for the Dred Scott Case, the Slaughterhouse Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the Lochner decision.

I happen to think that democratic government, expressed through republican institutions, works pretty well. As a default rule, I tend to favor the means of government that maximizes the degree to which decisions are taken by the consent of the governed. That inclines me to prefer the decision of a popular majority to the decision of a judicial elite except in exceptional cases.

QUOTE
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire counrty. That's why we have only one religion in America.

The values of pretty much every major religion, actually. The laws of a country ought to reflect its general moral sense. We have laws forbidding cruelty to animals because a majority of the people feel that it is wrong. The sense that a marriage between a man and a woman is the most moral sexual arrangement doesn't have to arise from any particularized religious tradition any more than animal-cruelty laws do.

QUOTE
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Interesting choice of deviant sexual behavior there. If I made that argument, you'd jump on me for "comparing gay sex to bestiality," or something equally juvenile. I do notice that people on your side are desperate to avoid the slippery-slope argument -- that's why whenever someone points out that a sexual ethic based on consent could lead to acceptance of [insert bizarre sexual practice here], he's instantly accused of "comparing" gays to people who indulge in that practice -- a colossal logical fallacy engaged in with enthusiasm by people who take pride in calling themselves "critical thinkers."

The main argument for acceptance of homosexual sex is that it's a consensual sexual practice, and that gay "marriage" is also a matter of consent. But if you make that argument, you are making the same argument for every other consensual sexual practice, or consent to a formalized sexual arrangement. You make it very hard to argue against marriages between multiple parties (hello, Tom Green!) or close relatives (provided, say, they are tested for possible genetic defects that might be expressed in their children).

QUOTE
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven't adapted to things like cars or longer lifespans.

Well, let's see: If you listen to environmentalists, we haven't adapted to longer lifespans; the population of the earth is said to be outstripping its "carrying capacity," and we'll all be starved or globally warmed to death. And frankly, I don't think we're adapting all that well to the changes we've made in society's view of marriage already. Childbearing without marriage, which has become much more acceptable in the past half century, is probably the greatest single cause of poverty in this country. So yes, I do think that maybe we ought to give a little more thought to altering such a fundamental societal institution. A little more thought, that is, than is required to post twelve smart-arse straw-man characterizations of the argument against such a change.

The idea of the "precautionary principle" is generally espoused by the political Left. It's the idea that new technology or practice shouldn't be adopted unless its proponents can offer conclusive proof that it won't cause any harm. Of course, it's virtually impossible to prove a negative, and the idea is counterproductive, but it's interesting that the same people who demand absolute proof that, say, genetic engineering won't cause any harm, are willing blithely to accept an unproven modification of an ancient social institution.

QUOTE
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a "seperate but equal" institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

Constitutional law does recognize that different treatment for men and women is sometimes justified by differences between men and women. Laws making distinctions between men and women (i.e., Selective Service) are evaluated under an "intermediate scrutiny" standard, as opposed to the "strict scrutiny" standard applied for racial distinctions. That's because the distinctions between men and women -- and between marriages between men and women and same-sex couples -- are real, while the distinctions between races are insignificant.

Posted by curvette: Feb 25 2004, 01:09 PM
I would think most people who care about family values would prefer to see homosexuals in monogomous, long term relationships than the promiscuous lifestyles that they are notorious for.

Posted by TheProudDuck: Feb 25 2004, 08:49 PM
I would think so, too. But that still leaves us with the following questions:

1. Will "gay marriage" serve to channel gays towards "monogomous, long term relationships" and away from the "promiscuous lifestyles that they are notorious for"? From my observations, it seems that those gays who want committed, long-term relationships (mostly women) already have them.

2. Even if there were some such channeling, would any gains be outweighed by the potential downside of further acceptance of alternative sex practices?

Let's say that the current number of gay people who live monogomous lifestyles is 10% (a wild-donkey guess). If "gay marriage" succeeds in channeling 10% of gays away from promiscuous lifestyles, but, by increasing social acceptance of homosexuality, leads to an equivalent 10% increase in the number of people who act on same-sex attractions (i.e. an increase from 5% of the population to 5.5%; I'm using compromise estimates here), what you've done is that for every one gay person you channel away from promiscuity, you've encouraged ten more people to act on gay attractions -- eight of whom will be promiscuous, if the percentages stay the same. So your net gain is -7 people steered away from promiscuity. It's like when Homer Simpson tried to get rich as a sugar magnate.

Of course, my numbers are pretty much pulled out of the air (except for the estimates of the percentage of the population which is actively gay and the percentage of gays who are more or less monogamous). But given the great difference in size between the gay population and the general population, a small percentage change applied to the general population will have a larger absolute effect than a large percentage change applied to the gay population. The numbers would have to be something like a 10% increase in gay monogamy and only a 2% increase in general gay activity for you to see a net decrease in the number of promiscuous gay people. I think that's unlikely.

And that assumes that an increase in gay promiscuity is the only potential downside for "gay marriage." I think a general reinforcement of the ethic that consent is the only basis for evaluating the morality of a sexual practice is a bad thing for society, and I think "gay marriage" would have that effect.

So Curvette, in answer to you, I believe that "gay marriage" is unlikely to be a cost-effective means of delivering the social good you mentioned.

On top of all that, I can't shake the impression that for a large number of "gay marriage" advocates, the movement to impose such an institution on the country (and since a majority of the people will almost certainly continue to oppose it, it will have to be imposed by activist courts in opposition to public sentiment -- a major difference between this issue and desegregation, which a national majority supported), while it may contain many people of good will who are motivated by the concerns you cite, it contains as many or more people who simply want to see the moral consensus in favor of marriage as the sexual ideal further diminished. In short, I think a good number of the "gay marriage" advocates are not acting in good faith, and would not themselves be likely to enter into such "marriages" even if they were recognized.

Posted by TheProudDuck: Feb 26 2004, 01:38 PM
QUOTE (sgallan @ Feb 25 2004, 10:05 PM)
**** If something is viewed by society as acceptable, society will get more of that thing. ****

One: Well okay..... if so, I have no real problem that. Once it societally acceptable few will.

Two: Could you become Gay? I couldn't. But from the movie Stripes, "I am willing to learn. Is there a school they send you too?" LOL.... still wouldn't work though. Sadly, I am a flaming heterosexual.

The rest of your argumentation, while good, is Lawyerly rationalization to win a point, or debate. High level spin if you will. I can rationalize anything myself. But I am nonetheless not compelled. Instead I see a person held hostage to a political party, and it's agenda, combined with an in-bred religious paradigm, with the additional factor of being raised in a conservative family in what was once the bastion of California conservatism.... Orange county.

This is all cool. It's part of what makes politics so interesting......
--------------------
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Stephen Roberts

Arguments first, analysis of my subconscious "hostage" status second.

QUOTE
Two: Could you become Gay? I couldn't. But from the movie Stripes, "I am willing to learn. Is there a school they send you too?" LOL.... still wouldn't work though. Sadly, I am a flaming heterosexual.

As I am now, I don't think I could, either. If my early sexual development had taken a different course, who knows. Any further detail would probably provide WAY too much information to be posted on a message board.

But isn't it reasonable to conclude that some people who identify themselves as gay could be physically attracted to members of the opposite sex? Look at the co-founder of Word Perfect, who decided he liked men after fathering a family. Clearly at least some, er, parts of some gay men are capable of arousal by women.

Likewise, doesn't the existence of bisexuality support the idea that some people are attracted to either sex? Or, to put it more crudely, that plenty of men would screw a snake if someone held it straight for them?

Isn't it possible that some people, who felt somewhat physically attracted to both men and women, might choose to pursue one attraction over the other as a result of social conditioning or moral conviction?

In other words, I think it's likely that while there probably is a small core of effeminate men who are so hard-wired that way that they would never be attracted to a woman (I think my old singles ward had a couple of these guys), there's a larger group who's capable of going either way, under particular circumstances. (And some of them do!) As I said, I think society's outlook is a significant factor for this fence-sitting group.

As for characterizing my arguments as "high level spin," I guess I'm flattered; the partner I work for spends most of every other day telling me how low level my spin is. I'm a little surprised you'd consider me held "hostage" to caricatured Orange County conservativism, having been around so long. (Is there anyone on these boards who's been around as long as we have?) Most people at BYU and my extended family considered me fairly liberal with respect to religion. Some people on these boards would probably agree. I think for myself, not some "agenda" (it's curious that one's own ideas are "principles" and the other side's are its "agenda!").

Part of the disadvantage my side has in this debate is that we've only recently had to articulate the practical grounds for positions that, only a decade or so, pretty much everyone took for granted. Where was the press for gay marriage in the liberal decade of the 1970s? The idea was a non-starter, because the worth of marriage as currently constituted was considered so long proven that long, thoughtful defenses weren't necessary.

But now, here comes the other side, simply slapping a "civil rights" sticker on their position and expecting the rest of the country to roll over and accept, or be branded bigots and have our arguments dismissed as mere rationalizations. Marriage, I think, is one of those things like courage or patriotism that is strongest when least analyzed: it's a good thing, period. But make us defend it, and argue against what we consider to be ill-advised proposed changes to it, and our arguments must necessarily be long and involved, because so many practical arguments over the years have gone into making marriage as unquestionably good an institution as it was once considered. We have to unpack those centuries of experience, and restate the arguments. That's a lot harder to do, and harder to keep an audience interested in, than simple slogans about "civil rights" and "people who love each other."

(Much debate back and forth while I attended to actual work, then:)

Postedby TheProudDuck: Mar 1 2004, 07:50 PM
Dang -- I spend a day or so doing some actual work, and six pages' worth of thread goes by.

In case anyone's still interested in anything said several pages back, Cal wrote:

QUOTE
PD-I don't have time right now to respond to everything you have said but:

1) What exactly do you think gay marriage imposes on the rest of us?
IMHO opinion gays just want to be left to enjoy the same right to cohabitaion and protections under the law as the rest of us. How does that impose on YOU?

There is a breed of secularist who breaks out in hives every time a high school choir sings a Christmas carol -- because he interprets a government-affiliated expression of religious sentiment as a government endorsement of a religious principle he doesn't hold, and is offended.

Although I think society bends over too far to avoid giving such an offense, a sound principle is involved: People should generally not be compelled to affirm a belief they do not hold. In a democratic society, it's at least partially true that the official position of the government is effectively the official position of the collective society.

The special status afforded to marriage is at least partially a declaration by society that a monogamous union of a man and a woman is a morally admirable thing. A majority of the people in this country do not believe that a same-sex coupling is as morally admirable as a marriage between a man and a woman. To mandate same-sex "marriage" would be to force a majority of the country to declare, at least by democratic proxy, a moral belief that they do not hold. The fact that gay "marriage" is in the process of being imposed by one state's supreme judicial court and another state's lawless officials makes it even worse.

So if a secularist has a right to be offended by the public suggestion that there is a God, with which he profoundly disagrees, shouldn't he expect that someone else might be offended by a public stance on a profound issue which that person disagrees with? Leave the First Amendment and its implications out of this for a moment, and focus on the underlying harm that the modern interpretations of the First Amendment are meant to address. I submit that the same principle is implicated here.

Scott -- "I contend that we are both sexual prudes. I just believe in one fewer moral sexual practices than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible couplings, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

(Apologies to Stephen Roberts)

Posted by TheProudDuck: Mar 2 2004, 11:58 AM
QUOTE
When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible couplings, you will understand why I dismiss yours." ****

Actually, I cannot think of any couplings I dismiss between consenting adults. Not a one. Live-ins. Polygamy. Man on man. Women on women. Swingers. As long as all parties are okay with it, and nobody gets killed or mutilated I am okay with it as well.

All right, then; you recognize one fewer criterion for disapproving of sexual conduct than I do. You draw the line based on two criteria: consent and "nobody gets hurt."

As to consent, I believe that there are occasions where society is justified in disregarding two parties' consent. For example, in law, a person can't consent to a contract in which he waives the right to sue his doctor or lawyer for malpractice. The transaction between the professional and his client involves more than merely the two people involved; it also implicates society's interest in policing professional practice.

I think that given how powerful sexuality can be in overpowering people's ability to think rationally (similar to drugs), society has a legitimate interest in trying to keep the sexual atmosphere from getting completely out of hand. While a society may pass laws against indisputably destructive sexual practices like child molestation, laws can never be enforced perfectly. When a society, on the one hand, sends a general message that people should gratify whatever sexual desires they may have, and sends a more specific message that certain behaviors are still unacceptable, people whose chemistry or environment has formed their sexuality so they fall on the wrong side of the line receive a very mixed message. Human nature being what it is, they have every reason to rationalize that what they want to do really isn't so bad -- the inability of minors to consent, after all, is only a legal fiction, which gets more and more tenuous the further into adolescence a person gets ...

So when society simultaneously says "Do what you will" and "Don't do X, Y, and Z," society must expect that some people will conform their behavior to the first, and more general, of these contradictory commands.

As for "nobody gets hurt," your second criterion -- Isn't this just as arbitrary as my criteria? Couldn't a person reasonably take the position that consent, alone, is sufficient? A person's body is his or her own, isn't it? There are plenty of people (also invariably left of center) who believe in the "right to die" -- to commit suicide. If a person has a right to end his life, or consent that it be done, why can't he consent to end his life as a filet mignon d'homme on the plate of some German cannibal? Of course I'm not making this scenario up.

Bottom line is, we both draw lines. You draw the line at consent-plus-no-injury; I draw the line at consent-plus-no-injury -- plus a sense, part rational and partially derived from the religious tradition I have chosen as my general moral framework, that marriage is the most proper form of sexual expression.

A question occurs to me, Scott: Are there any forms of sexual activity that you consider less morally admirable than others, but that you would nevertheless not want criminalized?

QUOTE
Following your train of thought..... why don't we (again) outlaw mixed race marraiges. And of course we need to bring the sodomy laws back on the books. Oral sex too. Of course nowadays these concepts are no longer considered valid. Give it 10-20 years and the same things will be thought about Gay marraiges.

Why would my train of thought lead to outlawing mixed-race marriages, or sodomy laws, or restrictions on oral sex? No significant part of the public would want these things. My train of thought is simply that if it is offensive to a secularist to have his government seem to endorse a religion with which he disagrees, it is also offensive that the general public have their government endorse a moral proposition with which it disagrees. The whole concept relates back to the general idea of government by consent that is the foundation of the whole Anglo-American tradition of ordered liberty. Governments, as the expression of the public will, should try, to the greatest extent possible, to avoid contradicting their constituents on matters of the deepest conviction.

In any case, it strikes me that there are three ways a legal regime can address a particular practice: It can (1) forbid it; (2) tolerate it (society may or may not have moral objections to the practice, but does not either prohibit it or encourage it), or (3) give it special recognition and status. In 10-20 years, will there be a special institution giving society's approval to oral sex -- call it "orriage"? "Sodomage"? By your logic, the iron laws of history must not only strike down barriers to sexual practices, but lead to their special recognition by society.

QUOTE
Though the events in San Francisco and other places may be ahead of the societal curve a bit, I think the idea is to bring the issue to the forefront so people can be educated a little.

And I think the "idea" is absolutely lethal to consensual government. Public servants are responsible to the law. Gavin Newsom is every bit as out of line as that judge in Alabama with his Ten Commandments monument. While I doubt we're going to go the way of Haiti anytime soon, when public servants elevate their personal beliefs over the law -- making their jurisdiction into a government of men, not laws -- that's completely inconsistent with republican government. Those officials need to be impeached every bit as quickly as the Alabama judge was removed.

Posted by Sgallan: Mar 2 2004, 12:57 PM
***** A question occurs to me, Scott: Are there any forms of sexual activity that you consider less morally admirable than others, but that you would nevertheless not want criminalized? ****

Between consenting adults I do not put my values on others. So morality has nothing to do with it. As far as the rest of your essay; it's a pretty good defense of the various Islamic laws regarding the same issue. Why not just stone them to death? Or entrap and torture them like is going on in Egypt. Same with adulters, and any other sexual activity you may not like?

*** Why would my train of thought lead to outlawing mixed-race marriages, or sodomy laws, or restrictions on oral sex? No significant part of the public would want these things.*****

They used too. They do in many parts of the world. It's where the line is drawn.

*** My train of thought is simply that if it is offensive to a secularist to have his government seem to endorse a religion with which he disagrees, it is also offensive that the general public have their government endorse a moral proposition with which it disagrees. The whole concept relates back to the general idea of government by consent that is the foundation of the whole Anglo-American tradition of ordered liberty.*****

Yeah, but there is also the issue of the majority subjucating the minority. It is why we are a Democratic Republic and not a pure Democracy. Heck, if we were a pure Democracy both you as LDS, and me as the skeptic, would be outlawed.

**** In any case, it strikes me that there are three ways a legal regime can address a particular practice: It can (1) forbid it; (2) tolerate it (society may or may not have moral objections to the practice, but does not either prohibit it or encourage it), or (3) give it special recognition and status. In 10-20 years, will there be a special institution giving society's approval to oral sex -- call it "orriage"? "Sodomage"? By your logic, the iron laws of history must not only strike down barriers to sexual practices, but lead to their special recognition by society. ****

Yep. And throughout history laws and practices have indeed recieved special recognitiion by society. From racial issues, to womens rights issues, to even childrens rights issues. Just takes awhile.

*** And I think the "idea" is absolutely lethal to consensual government. ***

It's worked in the past. And our Government didn't implode. Though it did come close during the Civil War. But heck, if our country is so polarized that an issue such as this can tear it apart.... then it's time I guess. But I somehow doubt it.

***** Public servants are responsible to the law. Gavin Newsom is every bit as out of line as that judge in Alabama with his Ten Commandments monument. While I doubt we're going to go the way of Haiti anytime soon, when public servants elevate their personal beliefs over the law -- making their jurisdiction into a government of men, not laws -- that's completely inconsistent with republican government. Those officials need to be impeached every bit as quickly as the Alabama judge was removed. *****

And perhaps he will. But like the Ten Commandments thing it has brought an issue to the forefront. In this case the issue deals with civil rights. Many do not think homosexuals should have them. I happen to think they do. Slowly but surely it seems as though society is coming around though it will take longer to be sure.

Posted by TheProudDuck: Mar 2 2004, 02:47 PM
QUOTE
***** A question occurs to me, Scott: Are there any forms of sexual activity that you consider less morally admirable than others, but that you would nevertheless not want criminalized? ****

Between consenting adults I do not put my values on others. So morality has nothing to do with it. As far as the rest of your essay; it's a pretty good defense of the various Islamic laws regarding the same issue. Why not just stone them to death? Or entrap and torture them like is going on in Egypt. Same with adulters, and any other sexual activity you may not like?

I think you're missing my point, which is that I am capable of taking the position that something is immoral, but should not be illegal, while as I understand it, you draw the line between sexual behavior you have no moral problem with, and behavior that you think should be criminalized (rape, abuse, etc.) Your position, incidentally, is essentially J.S. Mill's, namely that society is not justified in restraining, either by law or moral disapproval, of any conduct that does not directly harm other people. I think Mill was wrong (in particular with respect to the "directly" part), but that's a debate for another day.

As for your comparing my essay to the Sharia laws about stoning and torturing sexual deviants, how is that any more fair than the (often criticized) tactic of comparing gays to pedophiles?

What you're asking is why, if I'm not willing to grant same-sex coupling the recognition of marriage, I don't go "all the way" and decree that gays be crushed under walls, Taliban style. The answer is simple: because that would be grossly disproportionate to the social good I hope to gain. So, in my opinion, would be criminal laws against gay sex. The remedy to what I still believe to be a real problem (the encouragement of sexual libertinism) can't be so destructive of liberty, or so disproportionate, that it causes more harm than it prevents. We shouldn't criminalize less-than-ideal sexual expression for the same reason we don't impose the death penalty for running red lights.

QUOTE
*** Why would my train of thought lead to outlawing mixed-race marriages, or sodomy laws, or restrictions on oral sex? No significant part of the public would want these things.*****

They used too. They do in many parts of the world. It's where the line is drawn.

And it's up to us to use good judgment in drawing that line. Like it or not, both you and I draw lines as to what sexual conduct is acceptable.

QUOTE
*** My train of thought is simply that if it is offensive to a secularist to have his government seem to endorse a religion with which he disagrees, it is also offensive that the general public have their government endorse a moral proposition with which it disagrees. The whole concept relates back to the general idea of government by consent that is the foundation of the whole Anglo-American tradition of ordered liberty.*****

Yeah, but there is also the issue of the majority subjucating the minority. It is why we are a Democratic Republic and not a pure Democracy. Heck, if we were a pure Democracy both you as LDS, and me as the skeptic, would be outlawed.

I doubt that last bit, especially in California. There's simply no popular sentiment for criminalizing skepticism or Mormonism. You might want to give people a little more credit. After all, Britain has no First Amendment, and yet minority religions aren't criminalized. (Although I think that Britain, like most of Europe, "walk[s] to the uplands of tolerance by the easy paths of indifference.")

Just as a majority, in a consensual system of government, should not be allowed to impose on a minority things the minority could never be reasonably expected to consent to, the reverse is also true: the minority should not be able to impose its values on the minority. The trick is to balance these two things, not to empower the minority with an absolute veto. (That was what did in the Polish republic of the 18th century.)

QUOTE
**** In any case, it strikes me that there are three ways a legal regime can address a particular practice: It can (1) forbid it; (2) tolerate it (society may or may not have moral objections to the practice, but does not either prohibit it or encourage it), or (3) give it special recognition and status. In 10-20 years, will there be a special institution giving society's approval to oral sex -- call it "orriage"? "Sodomage"? By your logic, the iron laws of history must not only strike down barriers to sexual practices, but lead to their special recognition by society. ****

Yep. And throughout history laws and practices have indeed recieved special recognitiion by society. From racial issues, to womens rights issues, to even childrens rights issues. Just takes awhile.

So, to follow up -- do you seriously think there will eventually be a special official institution centered around oral sex? Maybe "Monicage" would be a better name ...

*** And I think the "idea" is absolutely lethal to consensual government. ***

It's worked in the past. And our Government didn't implode. Though it did come close during the Civil War. But heck, if our country is so polarized that an issue such as this can tear it apart.... then it's time I guess. But I somehow doubt it

QUOTE
***** Public servants are responsible to the law. Gavin Newsom is every bit as out of line as that judge in Alabama with his Ten Commandments monument. While I doubt we're going to go the way of Haiti anytime soon, when public servants elevate their personal beliefs over the law -- making their jurisdiction into a government of men, not laws -- that's completely inconsistent with republican government. Those officials need to be impeached every bit as quickly as the Alabama judge was removed. *****

And perhaps he will. But like the Ten Commandments thing it has brought an issue to the forefront. In this case the issue deals with civil rights. Many do not think homosexuals should have them. I happen to think they do. Slowly but surely it seems as though society is coming around though it will take longer to be sure.

Again, it seems to me that it's too easy to appropriate the name "civil rights" and force the other side on the defensive. I think gays DO have civil rights. Forcing me to accept an institution called "gay marriage" is a civil wrong.

Posted by sgallan: Mar 2 2004, 03:03 P
The answer is simple: because that would be grossly disproportionate to the social good I hope to gain.****

And to me your "social good" in this instance is bad and hurtful to many kind people I know. But as is often the case with conservative positions; actual people seem to count less than paradigms. It is why I could never become a conservative. Your policies are mean. Almost purposefully so. The other sides are often no less detrimental, but at least theirs is usually because of stupidity.

*** And it's up to us to use good judgment in drawing that line. Like it or not, both you and I draw lines as to what sexual conduct is acceptable. *****

Which is why we are having this conversation. But as usual the conservative positions are behind the curve, and the liberal positions (like what is going in in SF) are ahead of the curve. I am curious to see how it washes out. Constitutional Amendments however are only rhetoric. It's a hard document to change and cooler heads from both parties tend to understand the implications of such Ammendments. Thank goodness.

*** I doubt that last bit, especially in California. There's simply no popular sentiment for criminalizing skepticism or Mormonism. ****

Now you missied my point.

*** Just as a majority, in a consensual system of government, should not be allowed to impose on a minority things the minority could never be reasonably expected to consent to, the reverse is also true: the minority should not be able to impose its values on the minority. The trick is to balance these two things, not to empower the minority with an absolute veto. (That was what did in the Polish republic of the 18th century.) *****

Except perhaps when it is a case of human rights. But, because you think of the homosexual as deviant because of their sexual activities you also somehow think they are devoid of the rights of the rest of us.

*** So, to follow up -- do you seriously think there will eventually be a special official institution centered around oral sex? Maybe "Monicage" would be a better name ... ****

Sure, why not (I can do cynicism too).

*** Again, it seems to me that it's too easy to appropriate the name "civil rights" and force the other side on the defensive. I think gays DO have civil rights. Forcing me to accept an institution called "gay marriage" is a civil wrong. ****

I don't believe that you do. By not allowing Gays to marry you put them in an almost impossible position to do something you and I take for granted..... make a legal Union as a couple. Oh, you may suggest non-marraige Unions. But the legalities, and contract involved, in making those Unions as marraiges are today, would be a thick document requiring a lot of money to make...... and it would STILL have loopholes. Even if you could somehow make an airtight document you are STILL societly ostracizing them. And why do you do this? Because of the sex? Because of an ancient tradition? Well slavery and the subjucation of women were pretty ancient traditions. The latter is still a way of life in many countries. But in this one it has gone by the wayside. As should this one.

Posted by TheProudDuck: Mar 2 2004, 04:18 PM
QUOTE
And to me your "social good" in this instance is bad and hurtful to many kind people I know. But as is often the case with conservative positions; actual people seem to count less than paradigms. It is why I could never become a conservative. Your policies are mean. Almost purposefully so. The other sides are often no less detrimental, but at least theirs is usually because of stupidity.

I think you give the other side too much credit. The Democratic rank and file may elevate "paradigms over people" without understanding either the paradigm or the harm, but I think the leadership knows exactly what it's doing, and counts cynically on its constituents' stupidity.

Take the school-choice issue. The public education unions want the public education monopoly to stay seamless, so the party they own opposes virtually any efforts to introduce meaningful choice into the mix -- and condemns children who care about school to be dragged down by their peers in failing schools who don't. Real people, sacrificed to a "paradigm."

Or take the issue, currently pending before Congress, of whether a murderer of a pregnant woman may be charged under federal law with a double homicide (as is the case in California). The abortion-rights activists don't want a single crack in the idea that a fetus, up to birth, is nothing more than body tissue, so they fight that; the families of murder victims be damned.

Sometimes, though, people get hurt in the name of the larger good. The Endangered Species Act has destroyed the livelihoods of whole communities in logging country -- real misery, but perhaps worth it. Our legal and tax systems routinely ruin people's finances. Sometimes that's necessary in order to finance the whole society; if we tried to arrange too many compassionate exceptions, we could swallow the whole system.

I don't think the sexual culture of this country is healthy. (I don't necessarily think the sexual culture of the 1950s was perfect, either.) I think that diluting the unique status of marriage any further will do more harm than good, which is why I have reluctantly to take the position I do knowing that decent people may be hurt.

QUOTE
Except perhaps when it is a case of human rights. But, because you think of the homosexual as deviant because of their sexual activities you also somehow think they are devoid of the rights of the rest of us.

What rights are homosexuals "devoid of" that the rest of us have? Only one "right," as you define it -- the right to compel people to deem a union of two people of the same sex a "marriage," just as morally admirable as a real marriage. Right now, I don't have that right, either.

QUOTE
But as usual the conservative positions are behind the curve, and the liberal positions (like what is going in in SF) are ahead of the curve.

Uh huh. Like those liberal positions on Keynesian economics, unconditional welfare, and accommodation with the Soviet Union were so far ahead of the curve.

QUOTE
It's a hard document to change and cooler heads from both parties tend to understand the implications of such Ammendments. Thank goodness.

Much easier to get a "legal realist" judge to change it for you without changing it -- and so we get to the realm of penumbras and emanations, and different meanings of "is", etc.

QUOTE
But the legalities, and contract involved, in making those Unions as marraiges are today, would be a thick document requiring a lot of money to make...... and it would STILL have loopholes.

With no more than a couple of legislative tweaks, I could arrange to cut and paste the relevant language from the California family code into a form contract which would be available for ten bucks.

QUOTE
Well slavery and the subjucation of women were pretty ancient traditions. The latter is still a way of life in many countries. But in this one it has gone by the wayside. As should this one.

For every tradition that has been branded a relic of barbarism and discarded, there are a dozen others that continue to stand the test of time. It's the exception rather than the rule for a truly bad idea to last long. If they aren't discovered for their flaws and rejected by the society in which they arise, they destroy the society and themselves along with it. I don't think society's view of same-sex couplings as less morally preferable to marriage is the equivalent of slavery, and I imagine you'd find quite a few descendants of slaves who'd think so even more vehemently.

Posted by sgallan: Mar 2 2004, 07:53 PM
PD -

Part of the problem with these kinds of discussions is you (the collective version) are always right, and all good, while the other side is always wrong, and all bad. And vice-versa. And you wonder why people like me stay in the middle (save on freedom and rights type issues for me). Well to me both of your poop stinks. Badly. I have been following the process for far too long to buy into such a polarized position as you are selling. I mean no wonder society as a whole is so polarized. It is agenda thing personfied by the "all good all bad" stuff. At least in the past people could posture on the outside and deal on the inside. No more. The sides actually seem to dislike each other. And neither has any problem with spreading that "they suck we don't" paradigm. Your personnal attitude is typical and is why I am - like many people - disgusted with politics and politicians. I mean I can hear your spin on FOX, over and over and over, every single day. And I can hear theirs on a combination of MSNBC and CNN. As far as your positions as to sexual things..... reminds me of the old saw.... "Democrats want in your wallets and Republicans want in your bedrooms". Neither of you are conservative however; you both want control. LOTS of control. The emphasis is different. So on this battle, because it is personnal, I will continue to battle on the side I am on, with the understanding - considering the changes in the past 25 years - things are coming around. That conservatives are against this sort of this isn't suprising. One, they have always had issues with things sexual. Two, it is a way of exerting control they rather enjoy.... much of it religious based. And third, because they really don't mind being mean. And don't mind hurting people who do not fit in their box. I really believe this. I have been around enough, and close enough a follower of politics, to have had it validated again and again.

But then again, you'll disagree. Because your wing of the part is all good.... of course.

Posted by TheProudDuck: Mar 2 2004, 09:32 PM
I tend not to think much of the conceit that one is "in the middle." It's too easy to say "a pox on both your houses" and think yourself above it all. While a thinking person will rarely if ever agree exactly with every official plank of a party platform, the two-party system in this country has traditionally (as in, since the Federalists squared off against the Democratic-Republicans) served to group generally like-minded people together in broad coalitions -- kind of like European parliamentary systems do in practice, with their dozens of parties, except without those systems' risk of giving kingmaker status to extremist parties and thereby increasing their power. I think it would be a rare person who, after giving careful consideration to the ideas generally associated with each side, would find his own ideas equally distributed on both sides. One will always be slightly more one way than the other.

Having determined that my own thinking tends to fall on the Republican side, it is true that I tend to criticize Democratic positions more. I figure that the other side is best situated to criticize Republicans, and don't need my help. (Although there is a certain red, puffy-faced anti-intellectual numbskullery about a certain flavor of Orange County Republican that does try my patience.)

And given what you said -- "But as usual the conservative positions are behind the curve, and the liberal positions (like what is going in in SF) are ahead of the curve" -- I'm not sure I'm convinced that you're as much in the middle as you said. Although you did clarify that you leave the "middle" on "freedom and rights type issues." Your leanings strike me as generally libertarian.

There's a strong libertarian tradition in my extended family, to the extent that several members are planning to perform the singularly useless exercise of voting for the actual Libertarian Party. My own thinking is that social libertarianism, taken to extremes, makes economic libertarian untenable. Societies are kept together and functioning, and restrained in their self-destructive tendencies, both by law and by culture. Where constructive social restraints are relaxed (as has been the case with inner-city family life), families and the larger society literally fall apart. Poverty spreads along with illegitimacy; the rising generation isn't socialized properly, and governments, in turn, feel irresistible pressure to intervene to solve the resulting problems. So bureaucratic control increases (and since it's inegalitarian to focus that control only in problem communities, the control is imposed over everyone). Taxes have to be raised to pay for program after ineffective program. As government's involvement increases, so do opportunities for lawyers to skim their share.

In short, there's an inverse proportion between the effectiveness of society's "little platoons" of private virtue, as Edmund Burke called them, and government control.

Tell me -- do you really believe that mainstream conservatives are as anxious to regulate "bedroom" conduct as "the other side" is anxious to regulate economic matters? Name one conservative figure who, in the past decade, has advocated criminalizing private, consensual sexual conduct. (Criticism of courts for inventing a right to such conduct, when it clearly doesn't appear in the Constitution, isn't the same thing.) There's the abortion issue -- but since when do abortions take place in the bedroom? That's hardly just a "sex" issue; what draws such passion to the debate is that it potentially involves questions of life and death. Frankly, given the Bush administration's essential abandonment of restraint in domestic spending, it seems to me that both parties are a lot more interested in wallets than bedrooms.

"Old saws" often contain more pith than truth.

QUOTE
I mean no wonder society as a whole is so polarized. It is agenda thing personfied by the "all good all bad" stuff. At least in the past people could posture on the outside and deal on the inside. No more. The sides actually seem to dislike each other. And neither has any problem with spreading that "they suck we don't" paradigm.

I don't particularly like this polarization, either. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that as demographic mapping techniques have improved, the parties have gotten really good at redistricting their officeholders into safe seats, where they can just appeal to their bases and don't have to worry about building coalitions. Part of the problem, too, is that our governmental system has been so effective at making compromises, that all the easy compromises have been made -- and the only issues left are the ones where compromise is virtually impossible. On cultural issues, the polarization may largely be a function of "your side's" very success -- it's taken so much of the ground, with the assistance of a like-minded judiciary, that the other side may reasonably suspect that the give-and-take is all give for them.

Posted by sgallan: Mar 2 2004, 10:03 PM
**** Frankly, given the Bush administration's essential abandonment of restraint in domestic spending, it seems to me that both parties are a lot more interested in wallets than bedrooms. ****

This point I'll conceed as a practical matter. Though bedrooms seem to be more of interest in an election year. Must cover ones political base.

I'll admit to being a social libertarian to a point. My values and mores are not yours. And I can provide ample anecdotal information (my family) where your mores, and control preogatives - which assume the doom of society, if such mores are relaxed -, do not work for our situation. I can even extend such information to my peer group as well. I am old enough to be able to look back now. And we could trade statistics, and their interpetations, to each prove our point, to the point a debate could go into the thousands of posts. I could also google up plenty of quotes to show various politicians saying things to prove my point. But do you really want to go there? That kind of stuff is so cheap and out of context as to be useless.

Basically you seem to suggest that homosexual marraige is a doom and gloom senario for society as we know it. I see it as society growing up..... as it has done the past as well. I think your views are partially upbringing based, religion based, and of course political party based. All of which suspect any who do not practice a morality you proscribe too. A conservative morality. Change scares the conservatives. This is probably a good thing as the other side can also get a bit carried away. One slows or balances the other. Otherwise, I see the one side purposefully hurting an entire group of people. And I simetimes wish a homosexual child on those people. I think it may be the only way they could truly gain any perspective.

2004-02-18T19:21:00.000-08:00

The main reason I'm skeptical of ("have contempt for"?) the concept of a "living Constitution," as advocated by liberal legal scholars like Laurence Tribe and as recently endorsed by Justice Kennedy in Texas v. Johnson (the case overturning Texas sodomy laws on the basis of what appears to be a recognition of a Constitutional right to freedom of sexual expression) is that it frees judges the duty of ever having to make decisions that are distasteful to them. This is inconsistent with the ideal of the rule of law -- the idea that the law is superior to the rulers.

A jurist who subscribes to a legal philosophy that holds that the legitimacy of a judge's decisions arises from a particular law, whose legitimacy in turn arises from the fact that this law was duly enacted by a means by which the consent of the people to be governed by the law was expressed, will occasionally find himself forced to apply the law in a manner with which he personally disagrees. A judge who opposes decriminalizing marijuana, for example, might find himself forced to conclude that Constitutional provisions of federalism require that a state law's medical-marijuana law be upheld.

A jurist who believes the Constitution's meaning changes over time, on the other hand, will never face the same moral challenge of deciding between his politics and his commitment to the law. If he believes that the purpose of the due-process or equal-protection clauses is to allow judges to enforce prevailing standards of what ought to be legal, he will almost certainly determine that these "prevailing standards" are those he himself holds.

Empirical evidence bears this out. The "non-originalist" approach to Constitutional law invariably results in the finding of Constitutional rights to the exact same liberal values that happen to be held by the decisionmakers themselves. As far as I can find, there has never been a case where a liberal Supreme Court justice applied non-originalist reasoning to arrive at a decision inconsistent with his or her own politics.

Like many nominally religious people, they have created a god that has the advantage of never disagreeing with them.

2004-01-25T13:31:00.000-08:00

The Corner on National Review has been tossing around the idea, now that John Kerry appears to be the Democratic presidential frontrunner, that his Vietnam service may re-ignite old arguments about that war. It's an interesting thought, since the two sides on the original arguments have largely gone on to remain politically opposed, although on different questions.

My view on the question is that the great flaw in the Vietnam war was lack of judgment (the worst of all "ills afflicting men," according to Sophocles.) In retrospect, the decision to fight a war that might have been expected to do more harm than it could have been expected to prevent, the conduct of the campaign, the acceptance of an attritional strategy, and the domestic political considerations that led the Johnson administration to escalate the war were all ill-considered decisions that caused great harm.

But it's not for lack of judgment that the most vocal of the Vietnam protestors, and their latter-day ideological heirs, faulted America for its participation in that war. Rather, they largely defined the war as arising from unjust motives. It wasn't that the decision to fight was ill-considered, but rather that we were on the wrong side. Even Martin Luther King, right on most other subjects, couched his opposition to the war in terms that described America as an aggressor. Others accused the United States of seeking economic advantage (although it would seem that we had all the rice and coconuts we needed).

Part of this problem, I think, went back to McCarthyism and its embarrassment of the anti-Communist cause. The unspoken rationale was that a communist insurgency really wasn't that bad; that it was essentially a revolt against oppression and therefore shouldn't be opposed. (Arthur Schlesinger once remarked that if McCarthy and his merry men had gone after undercover Nazis, nobody would have objected.)

One of the defining distinctions between a conservative and a liberal is that, by and large, the former views Nazis and Communists as equally evil totalitarians, while the latter tends to see some features in Marxism that at least partially mitigate its butcher's bill (which is often attributed to the ideology's never having been "properly applied.") Keep in mind that I'm referring here most to the hard Left, as opposed to the average NPR-listening, PBS-watching conventional wisdom liberal, who probably hasn't thought things this far through.

So the conservative is inclined to think that opposing communist attempts at conquest or insurgency as a good thing in principle, with the degree of opposition to any particular campaign a matter for judgment.

Things get interesting because a nation's exercise of collective judgment is affected by the conduct of individuals, which conduct may be immoral in a way the actual exercise of judgment is not. In other words, government officials may place career advancement or ass-covering foremost, and may be less than truthful in their presentation of facts, or less than forthcoming about the reasoning behind their conclusions. There was enough of this in the 1960s military and government culture that there are individuals who do bear moral guilt for what happened there.

But that moral guilt does not attach to the United States as a whole, because it's hard to see how the ultimate American aim in Southeast Asia was anything but legitimate, even noble, namely, the prevention of the spread of a tyranny with a clear record of inflicting human misery. Maybe the "domino theory" was flawed; maybe communism wouldn't have spread beyond Indochina, or if it had it wouldn't have mattered. (Although the "dominos"in Laos and Cambodia did topple in short order after the fall of South Vietnam, with horrific results in the latter case, and I'd imagine there would have be plenty of Thais, Malaysians, and Indonesians who'd take exception to the idea that it didn't matter if they'd gotten the Khmer Rouge treatment.) Yes, after 1989, it became conventional wisdom that communism was inherently flawed and couldn't endure, but that wasn't clear at the time.

And even if one described the Vietnam war as "somebody else's civil war" (and it was largely a case of one country conquering another, the Viet Cong having been largely destroyed by 1968), it's not as if liberal conventional wisdom opposes intervening in civil wars; witness Bosnia and Kosovo. (Although the hard-core Left is happy to oppose those things, too; witness Michael Moore on Kosovo -- i.e. we were dropping bombs on people who hadn't done anything to us. Of course, he complicates things by endorsing for president Wesley Clark, who commanded the Kosovo expedition Moore once condemned. Keeping up with these people isn't easy.)

Bottom line, after extended unedited stream-of-consciousness ramble -- The problem with the Vietnam war was poor national judgment, not malice or greedy motive. No nation will ever be free from mistakes, although a free nation, by preserving the means of correction from within, will probably make fewer of them.

This brings me to the theme which a lot of Democrats are making with respect to the present war -- i.e. that their patriotism is being questioned for their opposition to the war. I hear a lot more Democrats insisting that their patriotism is not in question than I hear Republicans actually questioning it; in fact, nobody has yet to provide me with an actual example of a Democrat's patriotism being impugned by a major Republican figure. (On the other hand, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean have both explicitly impugned President Bush's patriotism.) Maybe they protest too much; maybe they've found it to be an effective political tactic, or maybe the Left has never gotten the British "Khaki Election" of 1902 (in which the Liberals were characterized as being on the side of the Boers in the Boer War) out of its collective mind.

Most of the Democrats, especially the celebrity kind, who protest this phantom questioning of their patriotism, in fact have nothing wrong with their patriotism. They may be underinformed or sophomoric in their criticisms, but it's entirely possible to be an underinformed and sophomoric patriot; there are plenty of those on the pro-war side. However, I do think there comes a point where a person's criticism of his country becomes so constant, one-sided, and malicious, that to call him a patriot -- a friend of his country -- is to destroy entirely the meaning of friendship.

While a friend may see his friend's faults and strive to correct them, a friend does not automatically take the opposing side every time his friend has a quarrel. A friend does not invariably believe the worst of his friend, and impute to him the worst possible motives in every case. A friend's friendship is not conditional on his friend's conforming himself in every respect to what the first person thinks the friend should be.

So while a dissenter may well be a true patriot, and in many cases one who does his country the highest service, I also think it's fair to say that someone who thinks behaves towards his country as described above, is not his country's friend. Especially when, in ascribing to his country the worst possible motives, he's consistently wrong. I may occasionally misjudge my friend, and do him wrong, suspecting him of some weakness; if so, it behooves me to apologize and try to avoid making the same mistake. But the chronic, self-proclaimed dissidents who wrongly judge America time after time, and will only think kindly and behave decently towards their country if it is a socialist utopia, are not patriots if the word is to have any meaning.

Maybe that doesn't mean anything. Maybe to be patriotic is nothing more morally significant than to like chocolate. A true liberal internationalist might well say that patriotism, far from being something that one should object to have questioned, is actually a negative trait. But then, that person should not object when his patriotism is questioned; if patriotism is a bad thing, then someone who questions yours is paying you a compliment.

Ironically, after having written way too much about this, the practical result of the above is negligible. If a person is actually no patriot, that's his business. I believe patriotism is one of those deeper things that is strongest when least spoken of. Patriotism, or the charge of its lack, should not be used as tactical leverage in political maneuvering or reasoned debate. A democratic country operates best, and makes its most informed and legitimate decisions, when discussion of the country's course is reasoned and deliberative. To accuse a critic of a particular policy of lack of patriotism does nothing to refute the merits of his argument -- and it's the whole point of democratic debate is that it takes all available facts and viewpoints into account. (By the same token, of course, mature Democrats ought to avoid waving the bloody shirt of "you're questioning my patriotism.")

2004-01-21T19:14:00.000-08:00

Seems that a Google search of "The Proud Duck" (make sure to include the quotation marks) brings up this blog one step from the bottom of a list of eight, just below some kind of lesbian porn website. What that kind of website has to with ducks, proud or humble, I'm sure I don't want to know.

Nancy Pelosi, in her response to the State of the Union speech, repeated the tired line about the Iraq campaign being "unilateral." Maybe President Bush needed to mention the seventeen other Coalition nations he left unnamed in his speech. (Iceland deserved at least an honorable mention.)

You would think that a party so full of people who pride themselves on their intelligence -- and a representative from the Bay Area, in particular, which place is even intellectually snobbier than most -- would have a hard time calling "unilateral" a campaign that had the support of three of the five most powerful militaries in Europe. That's not to mention a host of other countries that, great or small, are providing real help that a Democratic party that prides itself on respecting the little guy shouldn't belittle.

More State of the Union thoughts: President Bush's speech was generally good, especially the foreign policy section at the beginning, but too much of the domestic-agenda portion reminded me of Bill Clinton -- lots of harmless little feel-good initiatives, each costing a few million or billion hear or there.

The worst part was that line about immigrants taking jobs that Americans won't do. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Immigrants take jobs that Americans won't do at the low-ball price that employers want to offer. For the right price, you bet I'd pick peaches. No student debt required, for one thing. Does nobody mow lawns, or bus tables, or work construction, or pick produce in New Hampshire, or any of the other states where the illegal immigrant presence is minimal? Of course not. It's just that these things don't get done by the equivalent of an indentured-servant class that you can underpay, and depend on the state government to pick up the slack.

2004-01-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

OK, so posting every two months probably isn't the best way to cultivate a devoted Net following. Must improve.

I find myself these days having imaginary arguments with the Liberal Partner in my former firm, who I once told that our political differences were accounted for by his growing up among Utah redneck Republicans (and I hasten here to point out that since he grew up in Ogden, the rest of Utah won't take offense or exception to the "redneck" designation), while I grew up within range of the mighty wind that rushes from Costa Mesa north to the great vacuums of Hollywood liberals' minds.

I tend to win the imaginary arguments -- but then I thought I tended to win the real ones. (Have since learned that political arguments with one's boss may not be all that great a method of cultivating job security. Note that I did say "former law firm.") The Liberal Partner's backstop argument, as far as I could tell, was the phrase, "Listen to yourself!", preferably delivered at higher-than-average pitch and volume. I think the expanded translation of that phrase works out to "Every respectable person knows the argument you're making isn't ... well, respectable."

Anyway, the argument I was having (and winning, of course) with the Liberal Partner today was a rematch of one of our real arguments, in which he was trying to argue that bombing Serbia and the odd embassy into rubble over the civil war in Kosovo was a good thing, and using force against Iraq wasn't.

Instead of addressing the merits of the particular question, I examined our argument in terms of someone's definition of a liberal as a man who's incapable of taking his own side in an argument.

Now, the Liberal Partner wasn't the kind of liberal that holds that the United States can't do anything right. (See Chomsky, Clark (the loopy former attorney general, not the mildly loopy candidate), et al.) That kind did, of course, protest bombing Slobodan Milosovic, even if not as loudly as it later protested bombing Saddam and his merry men.

Anyway, my thinking was this: Men are fallible; institutions and nations are human institutions; therefore, no nation will always be right in its foreign policy. The converse is also true; no nation will always be wrong, if only because fallible men must fail to perfect even depravity. Presumably even the Khmer Rouge managed to install a stop sign or two correctly. So the "my country is always right" and the "my country is always wrong" crews are both foolish.

Is it likely that those occasions on which one's country happens to be wrong will always occur within the periods in which the opposing political faction is in control? One party may be more objectively right than the other, but neither party, being a fallible human institution, will always get it right. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that there will be occasions where a thoughtful person will conclude his country is in the wrong of an international quarrel.

That's why I thought the Liberal Partner's fairly enthusiastic support of the Kosovo war, and his absolutely enraged opposition to the Iraq war, was not reasonable. Both wars were, I think, close cases (in a way that the war in Afghanistan was not): Neither had the approval of the United Nations; both were opposed by significant allies and several other nations; both were "optional," in the sense that the world wouldn't necessarily end if they hadn't happened, and there was some ambiguity to the justifications for both conflicts (i.e. in Kosovo, there was "ethnic cleansing," but it was happening on both sides -- and still is being done now, but exclusively by the side we backed, to the rate of about a thousand murdered Serbs a year -- while in Iraq, while the regime murdered hundreds of thousands of people, most of the victims were already safely dead in the regime's crushing of the rebellions of the early '90s; by 2003, the Saddam regime's evil had, as far as I could tell, settled down to "only" an occasional murder of a dissident or a dozen.)

I ultimately came to the conclusion, if a little tentatively, that the Kosovo war was the right thing to do. As for Iraq, the facts seemed pretty simple to me: Evil dictator has been stupid enough to break a cease-fire and give the world legal grounds to get rid of him; we shouldn't let that slide. Now, there was a difference in the intensity of my support for the Democrat-ordered Kosovo war and the Republican-ordered Iraq one, which can probably at least in part be attributed to my political alignment (although 9/11 may have also lowered my willingness to let things slide generally). But it's interesting that this difference is so much less than the difference between the Liberal Partner's "Kosovo is a great humanitarian duty" and "Iraq is an evil, conquering resource grab to be compared to Hitler's aggressions."

2003-11-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

The incomparable Lileks, reviewing "The Matrix Revolutions," dismantles a commentator who, in the process of providing yet another tedious layer of metaphysics to the generally-enjoyable "Matrix" trilogy, argues that the only way for there to be peace is for no one to believe in anything.

That's not a new idea, of course; remember Lennon's "Imagine."

Leaving aside the question of whether the abolition of all deeply-held beliefs would lead to pax universalis (wouldn't we still scrap over material goods, as primates have been doing since we came down from the trees?), this seems like an unworthy shortcut to a laudable goal. It reminds me of a line from Churchill's "History of the English-Speaking Peoples", written of Charles II: "He walked to the uplands of tolerance by the easy paths of indifference."

Tolerance produced by apathy is no virtue, any more than is sobriety produced by distaste for alcohol. Or for that matter, sobriety enforced by authority. To be morally praiseworthy, an act must be freely chosen, and its attractive alternative rejected. There's no glory in being "tolerant" when you just don't give a rip. Tolerance is believing something strongly yourself, and respecting others' right to believe just as strongly in its opposite.

2003-10-29T16:43:00.000-08:00

SCHIAVO FEEDING TUBE:

The LA Times recently published a couple of letters ranting (literally, pretty much -- they were nasty) about how awful it was that right-wing pro-life zealots had gotten Terri Schiavo's feeding tube replaced. I think we're more divided that most of us realize; if people see this situation as a simple battle between the "right to die" and absolutist religious insistence that life, or anything like it, must be protected, their anger at the other side has completely blinded them.

Look -- we're not dealing with a case where a woman is brain-dead, with no hope of recovery. Nor is it a case where her clearly-expressed wishes not to be kept alive artificially are being disregarded. What we have here is a classic conflict of interest, as well as a legitimate question of what evidentiary standards are required to be satisfied before making a grave and irrevocable decision.

The facts are simple: Terri Schiavo may never come out of her persistent vegetative state, or maybe she will. In addition, she may have at one time expressed a wish not to be kept alive with a feeding tube, or maybe she didn't.

With respect to the first uncertainty, it's undisputed that people do occasionally come out of persistent vegetative states. In fact, some people thought to be in such states are actually conscious, but unable to communicate or move. Such cases may be rare, but not unheard of. As someone else pointed out today, it's odd that the Left should be so concerned about the possibility that an innocent man could be executed, and outright dismissive of the possibility that a conscious, living woman could be starved to death because of an erroneous diagnosis of her brain's condition.

In other contexts, the more serious the decision to be taken, the stricter is the evidentiary standard. When the court system is contemplating a man's execution, an evidentiary "gold standard" is supposed to apply. (It doesn't always, but there has yet to be a proven example of an innocent man's execution since the death penalty was restored in the late seventies.) The statute of frauds is another example. The law requires that certain contracts be in writing, because it is considered that they are so serious, or so otherwise susceptible to dishonesty, that allegations of an oral contract are not allowed.

One would think that when a life is at stake, the same kind of elevated evidentiary standard ought to apply. If you need a writing to establish a real estate contract, maybe we ought to require that an expression of a wish not to be kept alive with a feeding tube must also be in writing. The concept of a living will is well-established in the law, and it's incredibly easy to make one. It's just too easy for someone simply to say that a person once told them, with no other witnesses, that the person didn't want to be kept alive.

In fact, it was no trouble at all for Terry Schiavo's husband to say that she made such a statement. Conveniently, it happened while the two of them were watching television, alone. And that leads me to the second thing that I think should absolutely jump out of the page or screen of whoever reads about this story: the husband's colossal conflict of interest.

A little background, for anyone unaware: Mr. Schiavo has taken up with another woman, who he will be free to marry once his unconscious wife dies. In addition, he stands to obtain a significant sum of money upon her death.

In the legal profession, we disqualify lawyers for one-tenth of that conflict of interest, and in questions less than one-thousandth as serious.

Of course, the cases of the conflicted attorney and the conflicted husband may not be analogous. The spouse of an unconscious person will very often stand to benefit, through life insurance or the like, from the unconscious spouse's death. And a person's husband or wife, being generally that person's most frequent companion, would be the person most likely to hear an offhand comment about not wanting to be kept alive with a feeding tube or the like. In short, the most likely source for any evidence may also be the most unreliable.

This seems to me to argue for a requirement, like the statute of frauds, that a desire to have treatment withheld if a person becomes persistently unconscious must be expressed in a writing.

Of course, that may penalize persons who genuinely desire not to be kept alive in persistent vegetative states, but who simply haven't gotten around to writing their wishes down. On the other hand, in that case, the difficulty in knowing whether an unresponsive person is actually unconscious comes back into play. So we have to balance the potential harms from each course (i.e. allowing removal of feeding tubes despite the absence of reliable evidence vs. requiring a writing or other less potentially ambiguous evidence to make the decision). An unconscious person won't be conscious that he is being artificially maintained, while a conscious person who is unable to communicate will certainly be conscious that he is dying, if his feeding or maintenance are being removed. On the balance, it seems to me that dying slowly while being conscious but unable to do anything about it is far worse than continuing to live unconscious.

This balancing seems fairly clear to me, but reasonable people can differ. I don't think, though, that Schiavo's case is even close. The husband's conflict is so blatant that I simply can't see how he could remotely be considered trustworthy.

2003-10-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Another illustration of how much elementary school has changed since I was there.

I have a feeling that the local zero-tolerance authorities in question wouldn't have been amused at my 4th-grade cover art for a book report on "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (B-25s bombing a city skyline) or my 7th-grade Alistair McLean wannabe short story (international man of mystery pursues terrorist in hunt that culminates in shoot-out on golf course). Maybe their intervention might have made me a touchy-feely "All Things Considered" listener. Or maybe it would have turned me into an actual resentful homicidal maniac they would have thought I already was.

I couldn't help thinking whether these people would have suspended Goya (for that stark painting of the Napoleonic firing squad gunning down Spanish civilians) or Delacroix (for "Massacre at Chios" or, heaven forbid, "The Death of Sardanapalus.")

In another context, the zero-tolerance mushmind in question blandly said something to the effect of "Rules are rules, and if we make any exceptions, we can't enforce the rules at all." Nonsense. Rules are meant to solve specific problems, and prevent specific harms. If their application results in consequences that do nothing to serve their purposes, either the rules or the application is flawed. Anglo-American common law recognizes the concept of "equity," which goes beyond the letter of the law when justice requires it. Now, that concept can be taken to extremes, too -- but to fall back on "Rules are rules" is lazy, unimaginative, and craven.

2003-06-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

Reading Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, decided today, brought back memories of the time when, in a constitutional law class, I gagged over what Scalia deliciously calls the "sweet mystery of life" passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey -- the one that reads, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (The Court then went on to hold that the decision to define one's own concept of existence to deny the separate existence of a human fetus, and express that definition by destroying it, was a fundamental constitutional right.)

Bullfeathers. First, my own present view of the abortion issue is that it ought to be legal (though it is not required to be so under the Constitution) for all purposes early in pregnancy, but the more developed the fetus, the more serious must be the reason for abortion. If 'twere done, in other words, 'twas best 'twere done quickly. Once you start having to break bones, cause pain, and extinguish rudimentary human consciousness (i.e. after a few weeks of pregnancy), you ought to have a damned good reason for it.

Flakiness -- as in when a person is in denial over the pregnancy and waits forever to do something about it -- doesn't cut it. We don't excuse flakiness in other contexts. Negligence law routinely bankrupts people, not on the basis of any malice on their part, but because they failed to fulfill duties expected of them. Why should a woman who panics and leaves the scene of a fatal car accident (hardly less stressful a situation than an unplanned pregnancy) be thrown in jail, while flakiness in the abortion context has to be coddled? (This, of course, doesn't apply to later-term abortions because of health dangers that don't immediately appear.)

Anyway, I digress. The point is that even if the right to define existence is at the heart of liberty, it does not follow that any particular action can be justified by the recognition of that right. I may have the right to define existence, as Descartes did, as a function of thought -- "I think, therefore I am" -- and then conclude that the less a person thinks, the less his existence needs to be recognized. And then I might conclude that a person who leads a "lesser" existence, in terms of the extent of his consciousness, or thought -- infants, Alzheimer's patients, Pacifica Radio listeners -- may be disregarded, or dispensed with, more readily than people with more advanced consciousness and therefore (according to this definition of "existence") more advanced existence.

I would be completely within my rights to think this way (and completely wrong). But that doesn't translate into my right to act based on this thinking. I can't track down a poster on DemocraticUnderground.com and whack him for his kidneys because since he doesn't cogito as well, he doesn't sum as much. (Yes, that's incorrect, but if I used the correct Latin mood, even if I knew it, nobody would catch the reference except for a couple of NRO guys.)

When I first read Casey, it added yet another sun-bleached brick to the towering ziggurat of my conviction (cool 'phor, huh?) that with the exception of a couple of justices who actually analyze the law and try to apply its meanings (and are routinely despised for it), the average Supreme Court justice is a politician, not a judge. They start with the end in mind. Their opinions are not analysis of the law, but nothing more than plaster to coat the studs and chicken wire of their predetermined decisions. {/metaphor generator}

2003-06-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

Having recently surveyed a selection of hard-left web sites and publications, and having also discussed politics with some generally pleasant liberal acquaintances of mine, I've come to the conclusion that the combination of President Bush's close election, with the constitutional flukes in Florida, and his adminstration's response to September 11 have pushed left-liberals completely over the edge. They are actually enraged in their hostility for Bush and everything he stands for, to the point that they accept and perpetuate patent falsehoods about administration policy without a moment's thought of engaging the critical-thinking faculties on which they tend to (generally unjustifiably) pride themselves.

The "Bush lied about WMD" refrain, for example. Granted, when they've been wrong about virtually everything about the war in Iraq, it's hard to fault human beings for clinging to the one straw they think they still have. But while perceptive conservatives concluded early on that President Clinton was, with respect to his personal character, a pig, we tended not to be quite so vehement about calling him a liar in the particular circumstance of l'affaire Lewinsky until we actually saw his ... er, evidence on her blue dress. For one thing, when you accuse someone of lying and you turn out to be wrong, you look not only petty but stupid, as Bill Simon found out when he thought he had ironclad proof Gray Davis lied about accepting contributions in the governor's office. (He hadn't.)

Not only that, but conspiracy thinking is running rampant on the left. And that's what strikes me as being the real evidence of real danger: The left is approximating the anti-government far right of the early nineties. There are already hard leftist "direct action" groups that commit violence against property. The way the left is moving, it may be only a matter of time before there arises a left-wing Timothy McVeigh.*

*Not that Timothy McVeigh was entirely free from leftist ideology himself. Along with his anti-government hatred, he also had a beef with powerful corporations and was apparently somewhat into "animal rights," both of which things are generally associated with the left. Interestingly enough, a certain German who resembled Charlie Chaplin also combined his generally far-right ideology with these far-left ideologies.

2003-06-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

From Mark Steyn:

If I understand correctly, the British, having won the war, are now demanding a recount. Across the length and breadth of the realm, the people are as one: now that the war's out of the way we can go back to bitching and whining that Blair hasn't made the case for it.

This is all very odd. In Kirkuk the other day, they found another mass grave, this time with the bodies of 200 children who had been buried alive. Yawn. Doesn't count. Wake me if they find a toxic warhead among the teeny skulls. The naysayers were wrong on so much - millions of refugees, Vietnam quagmire, Stalingrad, etc - you can't blame them for clinging to the one little straw that hasn't shrivelled up and slipped between their fingers: Come on, Tony, where's the WMD?

2003-06-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

So far, my loyal readership appears to consist of myself and my little sister. (Who's a brilliant and accomplished artist, and not really little, but acknowledging she's in her twenties means I'm in my thirties, and I'm not entirely reconciled to that fact just yet. Especially since I'm not in the Senate yet, or a published author, or anything else that I was supposed to have done by now.)

2003-06-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

Starting a new job tomorrow, which pays the princely sum of $5,000 more than my last one. At least I can mention some larger clients on my resume now. I feel like I've moved from AA to triple-A. Slowly climbing the ladder, I guess. At this rate, I'll be working at O'Melveny in approximately 75 years.

I'm repeating my mantra: Blog entries should be small and frequent. So far, everything I've posted here has been long and infrequent. (Except "infrequent" can mean "frequent," too, can't it? Kind of like "flammable" and "inflammable." Who invented this language, anyway?)

2003-05-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm a little sporadic with this blogging thing. I'm in the process of switching jobs and coping with a fifteen-month-old whose molars are coming in and is not at all pleased about that.

I promise to make amends. As a token of this commitment, my loyal readership (which appears to consist of my sister and myself) is hereby thrown the following bone, derived from the random static of my political ponderings:

An article of faith on the Bush-hating left (ne pas penser du double-entendre, sil vous plait) is that the various means, included in the USA Patriot Act (I do hate that name) of updating the government's surveillance powers to cope with terrorists' use of sophisticated communications (computer networks, cell phones, etc.) are somehow unprecedented incursions into historic liberties.

Their fallacy is in believing that whenever a law is enacted, or whenever government's power is expanded, there is a corresponding loss of individual liberty. (Technically speaking, they actually mean that liberty is lost only whenever a law they don't like is enacted -- see below.) But that fails to take account of what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "leverage."

Leverage is the greater power that technology grants to individuals. A person in a car can go farther, faster, than a pedestrian, and therefore has more freedom to choose where he'll go in a given time. The institution of driver's licenses after the invention of the automobile was an expansion of governmental regulatory power, but whatever diminution this regulation placed on individual liberty was outweighed by the greater liberty granted by the leverage of automobile technology.

Liberals have historically acknowledged this point. Some argue for increased gun controls, claiming that while a permissive attitude towards firearms ownership may have made sense in the age of single-shot muzzle-loaders, the greater damage a gunman can do with an automatic rifle warrants greater government control. The expansion of the economic power of individuals made possible by industrialization and the development of great corporations following the Civil War convinced formerly libertarian liberals that corresponding expansion of government's reach was justified. Regardless of what one thinks of these examples, the fundamental logic is the same: when innovations give individuals greater leverage, it is possible to impose restrictions while still preserving a net gain of liberty of action.

When terrorists can use modern communications technology to leverage their potential for destruction, is it intelligent or reasonable to insist that authorities continue to be subject to restrictions that predate these innovations and do not take account of the terrorists' increased leverage?

2003-05-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, my self-described radical legal secretary decided to subject me to an hour's worth of Gore Vidal sounding off on NPR about the DANGER, DANGER of the "fundamentalist" Bush Administration's alleged intention to make America into a police state. Or at least I think it was NPR. I admit to being not particularly familiar with NPR, but from what I heard (smooth, smug tones with no challenge by the host to even the most unsupportable statements by the guest, accompanied by mellowly hip modern jazz), I assumed NPR was the station.

I suppose I could have closed my door and let her marinate in the wingnut leftism she seems to like, but I do like the partners in this firm to know that I'm actually here and working.

Anyway, it got me thinking. It's amazing how many hard leftists, who one assumes believe Joseph McCarthy was the devil incarnate (as opposed to a mean blowhard drunk who callously ruined people's livelihoods, many of whom didn't have it coming) so blithely adopt his conduct, consciously or unconsciously.

Think about it. What would one consider McCarthy's greatest sins? I would say, in no particular order, his making of unfounded accusations, his conflation of ordinary garden-variety liberals with totalitarian communists, and his lying (as in, "I have in my hand a list of Communists in the State Department" when he didn't have anything of the kind).

Listening to Gore Vidal the other day, I heard all three.

The USA Patriot Act may have been carelessly drafted and enacted, but it simply doesn't contain the liberty-murdering pitfalls Vidal and his sort say it does. Now, it's a long piece of legislation, and I've only read the extensive summary from the Congressional Research Service, but I couldn't find the awful things Vidal was talking about -- i.e. that citizens could be stripped of their citizenship if accused of terrorism.

As for the second McCarthy-style fault, comparing conservatives to fascists or eager police-state architects is no more accurate than declaring New Deal liberals to communists during the forties. Probably much less so, in fact, given the naive love affair many had developed with the Soviets during those decades. (Thanks in part to dishonest reporting -- Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize for whitewashing Stalin's terror still stands, even as the New York Time hangs Jayson Blair's head on a pike for less dishonesty.) If increasing the penalty for hacking and damaging federally-protected computers from five years to ten qualifies one as a Nazi, what do you call men in black uniforms who put children into ovens?

As for the third -- the lying -- that may be a harder comparison. Vidal et al. may not consider themselves consciously to be lying. Their practice is to repeat the general accusations of tyranny that they pick up in their cloistered milieu, without taking the time to determine whether the things they hear are true or not.

Under the law of fraud, a person who makes a misrepresentation without reasonable grounds for believing it to be true is considered to be lying just as is a person who states something he knows to be untrue. It would be fair to say that the more serious the accusation one is bringing, the greater is one's responsibility to determine its truth before bringing it. The Left's reckless repetition of received falsehood is so severe and so sustained that it must be considered to be as dishonest as conscious lying.

That brings me back to the hour-long Vidal NPR torture-session my karma-conscious secretary decided to blast through the office. Vidal was making error after error (or misrepresentation after misrepresentation -- pick 'em) in that wonderful smooth, sophisticated, smug, earnest tone he's perfected. (See Chemerinsky, Erwin.) It's a wonderful talent -- the ability to say the most ridiculous things in a tone that literally reeks of obviousness, and that radiates the idea that nobody could possibly disagree with what's being said.

It's a talent that could only be developed in a hothouse, which is what NPR, and much of liberalism in general, has become. There's no opposition; no aggressive challengers, no rocking of the boat. Vidal wouldn't last five minutes on a talk radio show; some cab driver with a cell phone would hand him his head the first time he tried passing off a falsehood in that smooth tone.

This is why the Left is perennially "shocked and appalled," "chilled" (as in "chilling effect") and finds its "dissent" being "squashed" (translation: people tell them they're wrong). They're used to an environment where people share their assumptions, and challenge is impolite.

2003-05-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

The Proud Duke of Somerset was a comically arrogant figure, who insisted on formalities (including requiring that his children stand in his presence) to such an extent that he disinherited a daughter who had the temerity to sit down when he dozed off on a sofa one evening. What this has to do with me, I'm not quite sure. My wife refers to me as a "duck," much as Clementine Churchill referred to Sir Winston (in private) as "pig" ( which was apparently meant as an endearment). As to whether I'm comically arrogant -- well, as Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, "it ain't braggin' if it's true."

Anyway, I hereby inaugurate The Proud Duck.