Departing for the Road
First light, my son and I will be departing on motorcycles for the big ride on Memorial Day weekend. Hopefully there might be good stories or pictures from the road. Or, perhaps, you may not hear anything for a while. I'm not taking a computer, though I can blog from my phone in a limited fashion should that seem like a good use of my time.
I expect to be back Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the weather. It's a little hard to say right now how that ride back will turn out.
Golden Age
Our friend David Foster has pulled together a summary post with links to several others, on the question of whether wages and happiness stagnated or fell in America over recent decades. Here are a couple of more links on that subject which tend to take the position that fiat currency is responsible for a lot of disruption.
Terrorism and Genocide
It's probably a mistake to universalize a lesson from a single loser like this guy who murdered two Israeli diplomats for no apparent reason except "Free Palestine." It was obviously, definitionally, an act of terrorism because he shot noncombatant civilians (employees of an Embassy, even, with diplomatic protections) in order to advance a political agenda.
However, his own personal and inexplicable decision to travel across several states to shoot two random people is obviously not part of a strategy by an organized group; these weren't even two crucial officers of the Embassy, just two young employees of no special importance. The other groups the shooter associated himself with -- BLM, ANSWER, etc. -- are the ordinary sort of Left-wing political groups that winks at violence, and maybe the occasional riot, but they're not executing a Hamas-style orchestration of terror on an organized scale. These groups are self-described radicals, but not "terrorist organizations" -- even though they occasionally produce an actual terrorist like this one.
It does point up how strange our cultural debate is at the moment about these two terms, though, "terrorism" and "genocide." We do have functional definitions if we wanted to use them, but mostly people want to use the emotional weight of the language rather than restricting themselves to its rational meaning.
Genocide, for example, has a definition. It's a new word, too, so the usual drift of natural language hasn't affected it much yet. We might say our present debate was natural language trying to exert itself on the definition, but a brake on that is that the word was newly coined and then codified in an international treaty. It's a very strong case for a word that means something.
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[9]
There's a little bit of ambiguity, but not much. "Killing members of the group" doesn't mean, say, two members: the DC shooting wasn't an act of "genocide" even though the shooter explicitly targeted these two Jews for their group-membership.
This can extend to very large numbers in cases of war in which two ethnic groups or national groups are fighting each other, because their intent is not to destroy each other as a group, only to win their war aims. I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.
Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.
Is what is going on in South Africa genocide? The President and the media both have very certain opinions about that. Definitely there has been a campaign of killing/harming Boers in order to extract their land and resources to transfer to another ethnic group. The government of South Africa denies there is any intent by the government to engage in genocide, but that isn't a requirement under the convention: the fact that a large political party seems to be encouraging and celebrating all this (as President Trump decided to point out in a rather theatrical fashion this week) without the government doing much to discourage them may satisfy the requirement.
If the Boers had their own government, you could say that there was a war aim of seizing their land -- South Africa's history over the last two centuries is riddled with that. "Genocide" didn't exist as a term when Shaka Zulu was around; the Boer Wars might not qualify because the British attempting to subjugate the Boers were "white" as well, although I think they recognized a real ethnic difference between themselves in those days. However, the Boers are not a state or state-like entity waging a war, either offensive or defensive; like the Uighur (who definitely are suffering a genocide), they're a subjugated population whose government hates them.
It seems like we should be able to get to clarity on this, given that we have a relatively clear standard that is formally codified. Our cultural institutions are not even trying to build a case either way, though; they're just asserting that it is obviously or obviously isn't.
So, Who Was Really President for Four Years?
So, we don't really have a government that respects the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is violated outright in several places; Maryland, which I will be in this weekend, considers it a three-year prison "misdemeanor" to carry some of the items I normally keep handy. The 10th Amendment is a dead letter. The 4th and 8th are violated by outsourcing. The government is evil, frankly, and much in need of dissolution.
Who was actually in charge for the last few years, though? Not the elected President, who is the only Constitutional officer in the Executive branch (the VP has his duties entirely within the Senate unless he/she steps up to take the Presidential office).
The answer is Weber's: the administrative state, unelected and undemocratic, was running itself.
I don't think they mean to be the enemy of all of us; I think they conceive of themselves as our betters and protectors. They are, however, the enemy of all of us. They defend their own interests, and are a positive threat to human liberty.
A Manual for the Ages
One hesitates to say anything even a little bit positive about the Nazis, but listen to just the first bit of this to learn about the manual they included in their Panzers. It shows an awareness of the costs of government that is enviable, even if nothing else about their program was.
Courtesies of the White
A rare privilege:
The three royals are allowed to wear white in front of the Pope because they are Catholic Queens and Princesses.They are each one of only seven women in the world who have 'the privilege of the white' – or the ability to wear white when meeting with the Pope.Called le privilége du blanc in French or il privilegio del biacno in Italian, the special tradition is extended solely to designated Catholic queens and princesses and is reserved for important events at the Vatican, such as private audiences, canonisations, beatifications, and special masses.Normal protocol for papal audiences requires that ladies wear a long black dress with a high collar and long sleeves and a black mantilla.
An American woman can, of course, wear whatever she wants.
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