No! But, at the same time, also yes.
Wishful Thinking on Violence
Shooting News Weekly (h/t Instapundit) has some valid criticisms of "violence interrupter" programs from Blue states, but this isn't one of them.
After Pritzker touted his meetings with “community violence interventionists” and state-funded “peacekeepers,” praising these “trusted messengers” whose “genuine relationships with the community are crucial to mitigating violence,” some uncomfortable information emerged. As first described by CWB Chicago, one of the “peacekeepers” Pritzker was photographed one-on-one with was apparently wanted on outstanding criminal warrants in four states; worse still, six days after the photo-op, the man was allegedly involved in a high-value commercial burglary culminating in a car crash that killed an innocent motorist.The awkward photo showing Pritzker grinning alongside the “peacekeeper” has now been removed from the governor’s website. Seeking transparency on how (or even whether) the participants in taxpayer-funded violence intervention programs are vetted, the activist group Judicial Watch initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information from the governor’s office on vetting, background or other checks, and selection criteria both generally and specifically with respect to the “peacekeeper” in the photo-op, including knowledge of his criminal history and warrants.
Sorry, but who do you think could possibly act as a 'violence interrupter' except someone with gangland ties? That's who's causing the violence! You need an interlocutor with enough trust and standing in that community that their words will carry weight among the gangsters.
I've been talking about the Iraq period lately, and how we were successful in bringing violence way down from 2007-2009. Who do you think we met with? It wasn't UN leaders or peace-centered NGOs, I can tell you that. It was the leaders of the very tribes who had been shooting machine guns and mortars and rockets at us not very long ago.
One of them had been a general officer in Saddam's Special Republican Guard. That guy was extremely instrumental in bringing peace and setting up a tribal council that could field effective militias to bring control to the area. He had respect among the people we wanted to move out of the insurgency and into cooperation. He understood the military enough to grasp exactly what we wanted, and was embedded in the tribal life enough to convey it to them on terms they could accept, and to serve as an intermediary for negotiating a peace.
If you want to play this game, you can't be too picky about who you sit down with. You might even get to like them after a while; I often did.
"Why Did You Have Real Bullets?"
I also missed this bit.
Apparently the sense of safety and entitlement among these upper middle class women is such that they assume that the police are there to protect them, even from the police themselves. That's not really what police are for; indeed, Federal courts and even the Supreme Court have been clear that the police have no duty to protect you.
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.... [this pertained to] a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman's pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.For hours on the night of June 22, 1999, Jessica Gonzales tried to get the Castle Rock police to find and arrest her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, who was under a court order to stay 100 yards away from the house. He had taken the children, ages 7, 9 and 10, as they played outside, and he later called his wife to tell her that he had the girls at an amusement park in Denver.Ms. Gonzales conveyed the information to the police, but they failed to act before Mr. Gonzales arrived at the police station hours later, firing a gun, with the bodies of the girls in the back of his truck. The police killed him at the scene.
That's what the police are for: they exist to kill or imprison at the convenience and for the purposes of the state. The bullets are always real.
It's strange that these protesters had come to the conclusion that the police are a threat, but never realized that the police are meant to be a threat to them as well.
Bad for the VA
Just yesterday we were celebrating a positive change on a core Constitutional right; today, a negative one that will discourage effective treatment of disability.
Veterans and their advocates slammed a new rule by the Department of Veterans Affairs for determining disability compensation, predicting it will lower their payments for service-related illnesses and injuries.The rule, effective immediately, states that a disability level must be based on how well a veteran functions while on medication and not on the underlying impairment itself.
Essentially, the rule is that if treatment is successful, your disability rating can be lowered (thus lowering your monthly compensation for the injury). That will tend to discourage things like taking one's medication as regularly, pushing one's self in physical therapy (which is uncomfortable, even painful, but highly beneficial), and otherwise engaging the process wholeheartedly.
Several of my friends have VA disability ratings, and as high as 100%. Is the person with the 100% disability rating really incapable of doing anything at all? No, that is not the case. What is the case is that every one of these people have suffered injury and life-altering damage, and only through hard work and effort have they been able to regain something akin to what life might have been like had they not chosen to serve in combat. That effort and pain shouldn't be punished.
Perhaps it would be better, if these sorts of savings are a concern for the Federal government, not to start so many wars. Perhaps; but if I were a gambling man, I'd wager we're just about to start another one with Iran. The politicians are always willing to roll the dice with servicemembers' lives, and in fairness those who enlisted knew that when they took the oath. All the same, gambling with their lives brings about a responsibility that the government shouldn't be allowed to shirk.
UPDATE: The VA backs off of this one.
Good for the VA
The Veterans Administration has for decades been undercutting the Second Amendment rights of many of its members. It has finally stopped doing so, and is instead working to undo the harm they have caused.
The Lenten Fast
My experience of taking a dry month last September/October in preparation for my last Strongman competition was encouraging. I have decided to do the Lenten fast from alcohol as well, since I did not find the month so very hard and in fact noticed significant benefits. Perhaps aligning it with a religious observation might bring spiritual as well as physical benefits: we shall see.
A Trinity of Observations
Lent begins today, it being Ash Wednesday. As mentioned, the Lunar New Year just occurred, which occasions lengthy celebrations in the Far East. Also, it is now Ramadan. Two of these involve fasting, the other raucous feasting; but it does mark a period in which much of humanity will be irritable, either from hunger or deprivation or, alternatively, from hangovers.
Late February is a tough time to pick for a time of deprivation and fasting, but it does have the effect of heightening the experience.
Year of the Fire Horse
Happy Lunar New Year. This is the Year of the Fire Horse, the least auspicious year in the 60 year Chinese astrological cycle (12 animals x 5 elements). It is a year marked historically by calamity, and children born this year — especially female children — are considered unlucky in Chinese culture.
However, it is also considered a time for bold action to try to offset the luck cycle. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was begun on this year in the last cycle; it also turned out to be a great calamity in spite of the boldness of the attempt.
Requiescat in Pace "Gus" Duvall
An actor with many memorable roles, Robert Duvall described "Gus" McCrae as his favorite and most meaningful. There are many memorable scenes with that character, some of which are referenced here pretty regularly.
The one I think about most, though, is this one. The first time I saw it, it seemed almost cruelly flippant; but the longer I live, the more I agree with his companion's conclusion. "He's right, boys. The best thing you can do with Death is ride off from it."
Now we ride off from his. Dust to dust.
Public School for Slow Learners
AVI is reflecting on Sunday School.
I was thinking of something by CS Lewis in relation to this - something about the world as a hotel vs. a prison vs. a school - and tracked it down today.
Christ said it was difficult for “the rich” to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, referring, no doubt, to “riches” in the ordinary sense. But I think it really covers riches in every sense—good fortune, health, popularity and all the things one wants to have. All these things tend—just as money tends—to make you feel independent of God, because if you have them you are happy already and contented in this life. You don’t want to turn away to anything more, and so you try to rest in a shadowy happiness as if it could last for ever. But God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness. Consequently He may have to take all these “riches” away from you: if He doesn’t, you will go on relying on them. It sounds cruel, doesn’t it? But I am beginning to find out that what people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run. I used to think it was a “cruel” doctrine to say that troubles and sorrows were “punishments.” But I find in practice that when you are in trouble, the moment you regard it as a “punishment,” it becomes easier to bear. If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.
Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable.
At the sheriff's debate this weekend, the sitting sheriff was discussing a program he's introduced into his jail to allow prisoners access to GED qualified courses, with an eventual possibility of proctored exams to gain a GED. In that sense the prison is become a school. You can't leave, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but you do have a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so.
Yet if you go to our public schools these days, you'll find they are surrounded by fences, with single points of entry, with metal detectors and armed deputies guarding them and inspecting your bags for contraband. You can't leave during school hours, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but there is a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so.
You might get a degree that's the rough equivalent of a GED, maybe; I would wager that the average GED holder knows more than the average high school graduate, because they cared enough as an adult to study when nobody was forcing them.
The school buses are yellow instead of white, there's more color on the walls, you have a little more choice of what clothing to wear and you do get to go home and night and on weekends. Still, the similarities are striking. Prison is just public school for slow learners, I suppose.
A Feast in Iraq
I came across this picture this morning while looking for something else, but since I was just talking about some of those meetings and conversations with the tribes it seemed relevant. This was taken from a meeting at a tribal compound near Mahmudiyah in February 2009. The feast followed a meeting between ourselves and their sheiks, one of whom was a US-educated engineer. It was a majestic feast, featuring boiled sheep, rice, vegetables, and those delicious sheets of bread you can see draped over everything to soften from the steam.
I imagine they had watched Lawrence of Arabia, and were trying to live up to expectations to some degree. Exactly as pictured in the movie, we never saw any women there -- though you can see one of ours in the photo. Everyone was armed, but we felt enough trust with them at that time to remove helmets. In 2007 we were getting attacked daily, but in 2008 there was very significant improvement. I stayed for the first half of 2009, and I think that year only once did a patrol I was with get fired upon. It seemed like we had won.
Cf.
In academic or legal publications, one occasionally sees the abbreviation "cf.," which means "confer." It usually follows a claim or a case law finding, with the intent being that you consider it against an alternative claim or finding that the cf. cites.
So here is a good example:
The New York Times: Gabbard’s 2020 Election Claims Put Her Back in Favor With Trump. "Ms. Gabbard appeared at a warehouse in Fulton County, Ga., where ballots from the 2020 vote were stored. As the F.B.I. conducted a raid, she observed and oversaw their work. After the operation, Ms. Gabbard met with the F.B.I. agents and put Mr. Trump on speaker phone to address them... with the renewed investigation into baseless claims about fraud during the 2020 election, she is back in the spotlight, and Mr. Trump’s good graces." [Emphasis added.]
cf. Not The Bee: FBI says they have found major irregularities in the 2020 election in Georgia. "Yes, they are officially investigating whether Fulton County conspired to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The irregularities, including illegally certified ballots and thousands of double-scanned ballots, led the FBI to establish that there is probable cause to raid the election office and look for motive. Here are the five major irregularities cited...."
I wonder how much longer the 'baseless/no evidence/unfounded' language game can continue? There's lots and lots of evidence now. Proof is still being established, but evidence has been clearly demonstrated for years.
Follow-Up On The Sheriff’s Debate
I went to the event. Nobody was checking voter registration cards or IDs. There was no obvious security or LEOs with pepper spray either. That was all talk.
Mostly the debate was exactly what you would expect. The only very interesting thing was the question about ICE. Sheriff Farmer described the process by which ICE might issue a detainer for someone the deputies had arrested, and that it was up to ICE whether or not to drive out and pick that person up. He said he would cooperate with Federal agents if they did, but didn’t go any farther than that.
His opponent said that he would “aggressively” cooperate with ICE, and used most of his time on that question to rhetorically paint illegal immigrants as inherently bad people, and then to tie them to murder, rape, human trafficking, and child abuse. That was the biggest difference between the candidates apparent in the debate.
I thought the sitting sheriff displayed an appropriate amount of realism as to what can be accomplished with the resources and budget of this rural North Carolina county. His opponent promised to do more, but of course he did.
A good question from the audience touched on the common peace issues raised in the last post. Both candidates gave proper answers grounded in being employees of the people and bound to provide security for public debates without taking sides, regardless of their personal ideology. I don’t know if they both meant it, but they did at least know that this was the right thing to affirm.
The Common Peace
Not long ago... ok, it was nearly twenty years ago... I was in Iraq working with the tribes as we were trying to bring peace to a long-troubled land. One time I had a conversation in my bad French and a tribesman's bad English (but very good French) about Thomas Jefferson. We talked about different ways of approaching democracy, of trying to achieve fairness in outcomes, of trying to get past Sunni/Shia or Arab/Kurd/Persian divisions, as well of course as resolving the old unsettled tribal feuds that were behind a lot of the trouble.
I think about that a lot these days.
Tomorrow the Republican party here locally is holding a candidate debate and meet-and-greet for the candidates for sheriff. They have decided, the GOP, to rent a private room so they can close the event except to registered Republicans, who are supposed to present their voter registration card at the door. A local GOP party official has been posting on Facebook about having Democrats who show up arrested for trespassing, and has alluded to the possibility of pepper spray being employed against them.
Now I should mention that, although this is a primary election, there are only the two Republican candidates; whoever wins the Republican primary will be the sheriff. That is partly a failure by Democrats to field a candidate, but it does have the effect of eliminating both Democrats and unaffiliated voters from the chance to see the candidates debate for the quite important public office. The decision to privatize a public good is coherent with a lot of Republican ideas -- some of which I agree with, such as privatizing public education given the collapse of the effectiveness of the public education system in much of the country -- but here many citizens will be excluded from even listening to the discussion.
It seems to me that upholding the common peace, which allows us to debate and discuss our problems together even when we disagree, is a matter very much germane to the question of who would make a better sheriff. It's certainly something we should be thinking about; that common peace seems somewhat frayed of late.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
I can't recommend highly enough a biography of John von Neumann, "The Man from the Future," by Ananyo Bhattacharya. The author's appealing style, choice of anecdotes, and mastery of a wide variety of scientific fields make him a skilled and entertaining biographer.
Von Neumann, born in 1903 to a wealthy, titled Jewish family in Budapest, was one of an unparalleled outbreak of geniuses from that doomed demographic cluster, including Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. As Bhattacharya notes, even in such august company, if Teller and Szilard seemed like men from Mars, von Neumann hailed from another galaxy. Later, at the IAS in Princeton, where he regularly rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, von Neumann struck contemporaries as the sharpest of the three.
Bhattacharya calls him the Man from the Future because he played the part of Johhny Appleseed in so many new fields. Few mathematicians affected so many areas, from quantum mechanics to the Manhattan Project and the nascent computer business, including some of the first stirrings of interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence. Along the way he planted some of the earliest seeds of political and economic game theory as well as nanotechnology.
Edward Teller was among the many colleagues who marvelled at von Neumann's ability to speak to that crowd's often precocious children. Teller said that von Neumann managed to speak to Teller's 3-year-old son as an equal, and he always rather wondered if von Neumann wasn't communicating with his colleagues by the same technique. He was never unapproachable or condescending, however, but unusually sociable and well-liked.
Von Neumann's father, who saw the writing on the wall even before World War I, insisted that his sons study something remunerative and learn the many languages that would ensure their ability to earn a living in whatever new country they might be forced to adopt. His mother, an accomplished musician, insisted on piano lessons. To please his father, von Neumann enrolled in the University of Göttingen. On the train there, other students, knowing a little of his already promising published career, assumed he would be studying Maths. No, he said, I already know Maths. I'll be studying Chemical Engineering. He excelled by giving it a minor fraction of his attention while he continued to pursue his real interests, including overhauling troubled fields in mathematics. To please his mother, von Neumann took piano lessons. His family wondered why he seemed to do little but play scales, before they discovered he was making appropriate noise while he read a book on the piano stand.
He lived to be only 53, dying the year after I was born.
Against Chivalry
Here is a woman actively working against the goods that the virtue of chivalry embraces.
Don't do this, not that any of you are dumb enough to do such things. Many men have been exposed to a great deal more violence than women, and are prepared to deal with it at a higher level. No one should want that sort of equality to be achieved.
Embracing the Inner Knight
Sly sent this article from the American Thinker on a topic well familiar to readers of the Hall.
Parts of it are better than other parts even though it is on a topic near and dear to my heart. For example, of course the CIA doesn't swear an oath to "eschew deceit" as a knight might have done; keeping such an oath would rather eliminate the value of such an agency. Nevertheless the CIA officers who in my youth taught me very much were often the most patriotic of men and women, highly honorable and upright, and loyal to a fault to the American project. That was what allowed such good and honorable people to engage in shadowy projects without losing their core.
And then there's this section:
Are we better, as a society, without virtue? Are we happier, as a people, since the philosophers declared that God is dead? Do men behave more or less honorably than they did in the past? Have pornography and the indulgence of strange sexual appetites taught people to respect each other and behave nobly? Are there fewer rapes and murders now that several generations of men have been disarmed of their masculinity? Do we kill fewer people during war because we have chosen science over moral conviction? Are our streets safer because we have decided that decrying sin is too “judgmental” for our modern tastes? Do we have more selfless heroes, brave knights, and noble leaders in this age?
These are rhetorical questions, but in fact it's hard to say what the truth is about some of them. It seems likely, for example, that there actually are fewer rapes: the crime rate has been falling since 1992, and even though rape reporting is higher among women than in previous generations, there seem to be fewer rapes. The statistics are also muddy because FBI changed its definition in 2013 in order to capture more things as "rape," which gave the appearance of a huge sudden spike but was really an artifact of this definitional change. Even given increased reporting and also a definition change to expand the category, however, we do seem to be down from the 1992 high. I don't of course suppose that men being "disarmed of their masculinity" is the cause of this even if there is a correlation; but the rhetorical question's answer isn't as obvious as the author supposes.
Likewise, the conclusion:
But we are not a happy people. We are not a brave people. We are not an honorable people willing to fight each day for what is right.
Speak for yourself, sir. I know some very brave and honorable people, and even a few happy ones.
Dialectical Liberalism
Dad29 sends an article built around the concept that Liberalism failed by succeeding.
If Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn’t make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. “Liberalism has failed,” Deneen writes, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” In other words, liberalism “has failed because it has succeeded."...To put it simply, it’s not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to “limit” freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others....Pope Leo argues that if we concentrate on seeing the truth more clearly, we will be less prone to “short circuit” human rights by proliferating falsehoods that promise freedom but don’t deliver:The right to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and even the right to life are being restricted in the name of other so-called new rights, with the result that the very framework of human rights is losing its vitality and creating space for force and oppression. This occurs when each right becomes self-referential, and especially when it becomes disconnected from reality, nature, and truth.This 250th anniversary of our nation is an opportune time to reexamine any qualms we might have with political liberalism. For if we suspect that liberalism has “failed” because it has allowed us to be too free, we should consider the possibility that it is we who have failed because we have lost sight of the crucial truths that our Founders considered self-evident.
There are a lot more specific examples in the article which I won't cite here; you can read them if you like. You can also read reviews of both books widely; here's one from the LA Review of Books which, as you can imagine from the home of Hollywood, isn't a fan. The reviewer cautions that "the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence" -- the date of the review is 2023, the height of the Biden Administration. The shadow of Dark Authoritarianism is always rising in LA.
These authors all seem to think that the choice is between the Old Way and the New Way. What strikes me immediately is that the conflict fits neatly into the dialectic. In the dialectic, a thesis is rejected and an opposing antithesis appears; but eventually people figure out that neither is quite right, and work out the good things that each side had. This is called the synthesis.
Dialectical political theories have a bad history: both Hegel and Marx were champions of them. The error, though, lies in thinking that the logic of the dialectic is a pure logic that can therefore be worked out in advance. Marxists have been writing for more than a century (almost two!) on the inevitable workings of the logic of economic history, only to find their predictions always falsified.
As we very often discuss here, the physical world isn't logical but analogical. All analogies always break; part of the work is figuring out where the break is going to happen. This is the I.3 point that I kept returning us to during the reading of the EN: it's a category error to attempt to apply strict logic to ethics or politics, as if you could provide proofs for them.
Still, the core idea that we are working towards a synthesis of the Old Way and the New Way is very likely true. We should be looking back at the Old Way to see what was good about it, as we also look at the New Way to identify what were genuine improvements we'd like to protect in the synthesis. On such terms, the task isn't "reactionary" but progress -- just progress in an orthogonal direction from the way in which "progress" has been defined by the New Way for so long.
"Your President is mad"
I'm not sure exactly how it went when the Marines retrieved the U.S. flag from WHO headquarters, but I'm thinking of this scene from The Wind and the Lion:
On Rights: Religion, Philosophy, History
We've had an interesting discussion for the last few days on the nature of rights. This is not the first: the Hall also had a significant debate on the subject in 2007. It's collected on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," and is well-worth reading through on your own because we are likely to tread the same ground again. A series of the posts are by Joel Leggett, who is both a lawyer and Marine -- retired from the latter, I think, these days -- on how to interpret the relative influence of faith, philosophy, and history on the rights we enjoy.
To summarize (unwisely, no doubt; I'll surely miss something from that debate in trying to frame it in a few paragraphs), religion gave us Natural Law. Really, the concept originates as so much with the Ancient Greeks. We have a couple of later mentions before the Middle Ages on record, such as from Cicero. The Medieval Scholastic philosophers became very interested in it. St. Thomas Aquinas formalized an Aristotelian understanding of Natural Law, but as a subordinate to the Eternal Law of God. Yet Natural Law remains superior to Human Law, which has some power but is mutable unlike either of the higher laws. He also distinguishes all this from what he calls the Old Law, in which he found things of quality but that were gladly replaced with the Law of the Gospel, which you will notice is not the same as the Eternal Law (nor could it be, since it didn't once exist and now does). If you follow the link under 'Ancient Greeks' above you'll find similar traditions in other religions, but they are not our tradition: it was not informed by them, and indeed only recently have Western scholars become aware that such traditions existed.
Natural Law, in any case, does not necessarily give us natural rights. The Church did not come up with the idea of the right to keep and bear arms; nor freedom of speech in any sort of sense similar to our own; and while it does teach a kind of freedom of conscience, it has sharp limits and is bounded by error and heresy. One hears Catholics (especially Jesuits) and other Christian leaders talking of human rights, but they are not the source of them: they have simply applied religious and scriptural justifications backwards onto an inheritance for which religion was not responsible.
Natural rights are, in the sense of 'rights existing as concepts' rather than 'rights that actually exist,' a creation of philosophy. The line of thinking runs from Aristotle (remember all the different sorts of 'equality' in the EN) through the Stoics (who deepened this idea of human equality) through Cicero. As you'll see, and as you would expect given that philosophy was almost exclusively taught within the Church during the Middle Ages, theologians were often involved. Yet we really find the first expressions of what would become the American notion of rights in John Locke, even if the roots are deeper.
17th-century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life, liberty, and estate (property)", and argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. Preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property was claimed as justification for the rebellion of the American colonies. As George Mason stated in his draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, "all men are born equally free", and hold "certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity." Another 17th-century Englishman, John Lilburne (known as Freeborn John), who came into conflict with both the monarchy of King Charles I and the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, argued for level human basic rights he called "freeborn rights" which he defined as being rights that every human being is born with, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or by human law.The distinction between alienable and unalienable rights was introduced by Francis Hutcheson. In his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson foreshadowed the Declaration of Independence, stating: "For wherever any Invasion is made upon unalienable Rights, there must arise either a perfect, or external Right to Resistance. ... Unalienable Rights are essential Limitations in all Governments." Hutcheson, however, placed clear limits on his notion of unalienable rights, declaring that "there can be no Right, or Limitation of Right, inconsistent with, or opposite to the greatest public Good."
But again, even if these foreshadowed our rights, they weren't actual rights that anyone enjoyed. To find the roots of those things coming to be, we have to look at neither religion nor philosophy but history.
In much of Europe, the nobility and knighthood remained a separate and special class. Not so in England:When William the Conqueror took possession of the English crown he organized it as a complete feudal state. But England had a large population of freemen in addition to the mass of the unfree and the Norman kings never made any legal distinction between knights and other freemen. The freedoms which were inherent in feudal vassalage went to all freemen as vassals, direct or indirect, of the king...The right of all freemen to the privileges of vassals was clearly accepted in England from the Conquest, but found its first clear expression in the Magna Carta. This document was stated to apply to all freemen. It also contained in specific form a statement of the most basic of all liberties -- the right to due process of law.Thus in England as the unfree became free they acquired the same legal status as knights of the feudal world. Individual liberty was part of the fundamental law.He goes on to point out some exceptions to his general thesis: for example, no one had the right to 'freedom of religion' until after the Reformation; freedom of the press is likewise a much later invention (and indeed, there was no printing press in 1066).The English kings went on to further conquests in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and so forth; thus they spread this idea abroad.
The right to keep and bear arms comes from this, even though it can be philosophically defended (as I have written about extensively myself, especially here). So too the right to trial by a jury of your peers. So too habeas corpus. So too did the idea of franchise, which the Normans applied to the Thanes they came to call 'franklins,' i.e., 'a little Frank' rather than a proper one like themselves. In spite of their disdain for the Thanes, they recognized the danger of suppressing them and the wisdom of granting them knightly rights in order to maintain their consent to be governed.
The right of freedom of religion came out of the exhaustion with the religious wars, not philosophy or religion -- though you can formulate either a religious or a philosophical justification for it. Freedom of speech as we have it in America came from the Anarchists, as we recently explored: it existed in a much more restricted form from the 1st Amendment, but the form we have came from a series of lawsuits defending kinds of speech that the government felt free to ban and to punish as late as Woodrow Wilson. Freedom of the press likewise: just publishing a pamphlet describing how to use a condom was cause for arrest and prosecution until those same lawsuits brought about our current right.
Empirically you can see that real rights, actual rights, need a practical defense. They need, as I have been arguing for a couple of days now, a community, a people, who have them as values and will defend them with blood (or, in the case of the Anarchists, with effective lawsuits -- a point important to Mr. Hines).
As I said the other day, "[t]he idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible." You will not have rights without that, regardless of whether or not you are entitled to them. Obviously I think that philosophical and religious defenses of rights are worth spending time on, since I have spent so much time on them myself. However, if you really want to have the right, you must fight for it -- and you must find people who will fight alongside you. That is the concept of frith, which was important to the 2007 debate: frith is a cognate of both friend and freedom.
Raising citizens
From "The Salt-Box House," a proofing project at Gutenberg, a 1929 sketch of pre-Revolutionary War New England by Jane de Forest Shelton:
[A]ll feats of skill and daring were welcomed. Fear was not cultivated. To be brave, to be skilful in whatever one set a hand to, to accomplish everything undertaken, to surmount difficulty, gave life a perpetual goal. Nothing was more clearly demonstrated in the later conflict with disciplined armies than that he that had been faithful in little would be faithful also in much. That the hour of emergency must be the hour of triumph is one of the great underlying principles for the success of a venture or a country.
A Disappointing Turn
I've been very disappointed with the Trump administration on the 2nd Amendment, although here as in so many other cases I am much more pleased with his administration than I would have been with President Harris'. I never really expected him to be a crusader on the topic -- he's from New York City, after all, which prosecutes even transportation of unloaded and locked firearms to a shocking degree. However, he talked a good game and hired some legitimate figures, so I had some hopes.
These hopes have not exactly proven justified. This latest thing out of DC is just another example.
Pirro didn't walk back her statement that anyone bringing a gun into the District will go to jail, as well as her insistence that permit-holders from jurisdictions outside the District of Columbia would face charges for carrying in D.C., but she did try to clarify those remarks.
The 'clarification' amounts to explaining that what she said is just DC law, as indeed it is. But as Cam Edwards (a journalist with very solid pro-2A credentials over decades) goes on to point out, she's already established that she won't enforce DC law for DC residents; this is just one step beyond that.
Pirro has already declared that, in her view, D.C.'s ban on openly carried long guns and possession of "large capacity" magazines violates the Second Amendment and violations by lawful D.C. gun owners won't be prosecuted. If Pirro is willing to make a judgment call about the constitutionality of those statutes, then it stands to reason that she can do the same with D.C.'s lack of reciprocity... as well as its gun registration requirements.And if Pirro wants to charge someone with a valid Virginia or Maryland carry permit simply for carrying an "unregistered" gun and ammunition in D.C., that suggests that she finds those statutes 2A-compliant; a position that puts her at odds with the 2A community and even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who has suggested that a lack of reciprocity violates the Second Amendment.
Laws repugnant to the Constitution are null and void, someone once wrote. Prosecutorial discretion is a tool very widely abused, but a tool all the same. They don't want armed citizens near the seats of power, though, not Republican politicians and not Democratic ones.
An Outlaw's Prayer
Ammon Bundy, who led an armed standoff of a Federal wildlife refuge against Federal agents in 2016, has like his father always been pretty good on Constitutional and historical arguments. He also has thoughts on Scripture, as those things apply to the issue of illegal immigration and the whole business around ICE.
The Constitutional case is defensible; the historic arguments are pretty good at establishing a custom and tradition grounding; the 'making up for the sins and mistakes of our history' is not persuasive to me as all such arguments generally are not. For example, here's a post from fifteen years ago called "Against Human Rights." The idea that you have rights without the corresponding polity or community that defends the space in which those rights can be actualized is ahistorical and pragmatically indefensible. If you want to join the polity or community, well, you have to start with respecting their norms, culture, mores, rules, and maybe -- maybe -- their laws.
Likewise, not to accuse him of liberalism except in the broadest, Classical Liberal sense of the word, but this is an area where liberalism is insufficient. There is a genuine human universal that liberalism cannot see or explain, and has no answers for in play here. There's a reason Amelia is so instantly popular, and it isn't racism or meanness: it's that universal that liberalism (nor capitalism) has any way to defend.
Still, I am in the mode of advancing interesting and sincere arguments whether or not I agree with them. This one is strong in places; I'll leave the Scriptural arguments to the readers, some of whom are much more deeply engaged in that than I am.
In honor of the gentleman, Mr. Bundy, a Johnny Paycheck song. This is from the album that partly got him sent to prison; the title, "Armed & Crazy," at least didn't help his defense on the charges of having shot a man in the head while high on cocaine. Which, you know, was true -- that didn't help either.
Snowbound
This has been a busy few days. The official total from the weather report in Sylva, which is thirty miles away and about 2000 feet lower, was 12 inches. They didn't come up into the mountains to measure (nor, very quickly, could they have; nor could they yet!). Here's my last measurement before I gave up, midday sometime:
I still can't get to the road except on foot, but the temperature has broken freezing. Up til now, the only melting has been from direct sunlight, plus some sublimation. Now we might actually see some progress. The roads will refreeze tonight when it gets back down below freezing, though.
NCDOT issued an order mid-day that no chemical/salt treatments of roads were to be done except in response to a direct need by emergency services. Naturally that meant that, when an emergency occurred, there was a good chance the treatment was too late to do much good. There was a two-alarm fire over to Cashiers/Sapphire; it sounds like they had a very interesting time getting fire engines to it.
The power was out for quite some time, but the blessed and honorable linemen got it on very early Monday. I take it that means that the state highway was cleared enough to let them access the power station and maybe clear some downed lines.
It's been quite an adventure.
A Two-Fire Night
Even Conan wanted in when it hit -4 with wind chill. I have a fire in the wood burning furnace and another in this beautiful fireplace that I don’t use often enough. Today’s the day, though.
UPDATE:
To Raven's point.
Obstruction, Catharsis, Etc.
I really expected to catch some flack for What Are the Obstructionists Fighting For? and am a bit surprised that I haven't -- although the weekend is just beginning, so maybe everyone is loading magazines right now.
With that and Who Are "We the People"? I was of course engaging some things Grim said, but it wasn't meant just for him. My attitude about this whole blogging thing is that the regulars here are intelligent and all have experiences and knowledge I don't. So, when I throw something like that out, what I'm really interested in is disagreement. If you disagree with something I've posted and can explain why, that is a gift. It helps me refine my own thoughts and maybe even change them, and I'm better for that.
This topic seems to have brought out Grim's desire to slow down and work through the issues well. I respect that, but at the same time, I wrote those two posts because I should be writing a historiographical essay on the shift from medieval virtue ethics to early modern deontology and how that influenced blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. Blah blah blah.
But I couldn't get this topic out of my head, so I decided to just get it out here in writing. It was cathartic, and these are the best explanations I have right now, although I know I must be wrong about some things because I'm human. So, have at it. I'm just trying to understand what's going on and how to deal with it all productively.
Ammunition
So it’s emblematic of my life that my first email today was about establishing a new ammunition company in Central Asia. I don’t think I will help with this, though I easily could. It’s a couple of phone calls for me.
How did I get here? I just want to ride motorcycles. 9/11, I guess; it retasked my entire life. The people who did that don’t deserve this level of influence over my entire life. I need to try to pull it back into my control.
After… yeah, I get it now. That’s how I ended up here.
Hey
A number of the most serious questions of all are coming up all at once. I'm trying to get you to think seriously about them, and I'm greatly encouraged to see that Thomas &c. are trying to do so. This is good. Be patient with each other as we do it. These decisions are critical, and we only get one shot at them. Let's talk about them, as we have been, in mutual respect and due honor. It's a hard moment. You're all doing well. Even if we get it right it may all go wrong. Strength and honor.
What Are the Obstructionists Fighting For?
What are the goals of the obstructionists* in Minneapolis?
- Prevent the removal of illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes in the US as well as all other illegal aliens
- Hold onto illegitimate political power in the House and Electoral College
- Protect the ability to fund Democrat causes through defrauding federal programs
- Protect the ability to gain political power through election fraud
- Provide a testing and training ground for further nation-wide organizing and obstruction
- As much as possible, reverse the elections of 2024 and obstruct the will of the people of the United States until Democrats can retake Congress and the Presidency
- Ultimately, in the long term, to gain power over the US through whatever means necessary (mainly fraud), strip us of our rights, and rule us similarly to the way the UK is currently ruled. This means disarming the people, eliminating genuine free speech via "hate speech" laws that punish their critics, guaranteeing access to abortions and to gender transition treatments to children, and eliminating freedom of conscience and religion by mandating religious organizations and individuals subordinate their consciences to progressive moral codes (e.g., being arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, the Little Sisters of the Poor being forced to provide abortion coverage, no right for doctors to refuse to perform an abortion, no parental right to prevent gender transition by schools, etc.).
Those are the things the obstructionists in Minneapolis are fighting for. It may also be clarifying to note a few things for which they are not fighting.
What are the obstructionists NOT fighting for?
- Natural rights: They don't believe in natural rights and frequently infringe on the rights of their fellow citizens, forcing drivers to pull over and prove they don't work with ICE, demanding patriotic clothing be removed in order to avoid harm from a mob, ramming ICE and BP vehicles, invading a church during services, destroying the property of hotels that host ICE and BP agents, etc.
- American ideals: They believe the Founding Fathers were evil men who set up an evil system to maintain their own power and privilege and oppress the poor, non-whites, women, etc. They want to replace the Constitution, or at least re-interpret away every bit of it they don't like.
- Popular sovereignty: They don't care about the will of the people; they believe themselves engaged in the highest moral crusade and anyone who opposes them, even if that is a large majority of the people, not only can but should be trod under on the road to achieving their moral vision. They feel fully justified rigging elections, assassinating opponents, and doing whatever else is necessary to win the power to achieve their goals.
I feel sorry for the obstructionists. They have bought into a worldview based on a pack of lies. As they constantly remind us, they firmly believe they are the good guys and the rest of us are fascists. They are sincere, but they are wrong, and empathy for them is suicidal. They are the foot soldiers of tyranny, much closer to being fascists than the rest of us, and they must be resisted.
Any backing away from immigration operations in Minneapolis will be taken as a victory and will give a tremendous boost to similar obstruction operations across the blue cities in blue states. Their victory in Minneapolis would be another step toward our eventual enslavement. With the UK's sad slide into tyranny, the US has been able to stand up and at least give the British people venues to hear the truth and to express it. If the US falls to a UK-like tyranny, there will be no one to save us.
###
* Why "obstructionist"? I'm using "obstructionist" to differentiate those actively obstructing federal law enforcement from peaceful protestors who are lawfully exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and speech. Grim and another source I respect have objected to calling them insurgents, so although I do think this is the early stages of an insurgency, I will refrain from labelling them that until I've considered this more thoroughly. Maybe insurrectionist would be better? I need to think about it.
Who Are "We the People"?
In Grim's discussion of ICE Watch earlier this week he brought up the question of popular sovereignty:
What the government at all levels ought to take time to consider is how deeply the sovereign citizenry is rejecting this in at least some localities. I don't know or claim to know just what that means; perhaps we should, as we have often discussed, divide the nation in some way to allow the divergent political views space. Nevertheless, citizens are allowed to diverge in their opinions. Nobody has the right to use main force to compel Americans to abide by their preferred ideas about how we should be governed.
My question here is, which citizenry is relevant to the situation at hand? In our federal system, some powers are given to the federal government, in which case the relevant citizenry is all American citizens. These actions affect us all, so we should all have a say. Other powers are reserved to the states, in which case the relevant citizenry is the citizens of the respective states, and the citizens of other states should keep their noses out of it. Immigration belongs to the federal powers and we all have a stake in it, so the relevant sovereignty rests with the people of the nation.
Why? There are two main reasons. First, that is the system we have agreed to as a nation. If this agreement isn't acceptable to some, then they should work to change it. That is enough, but, second, as it stands, illegal aliens are counted in the census and count for apportionment for the House and Electoral College. This means that if some states cooperate with ICE and the illegal aliens there are deported while other states refuse to cooperate and keep their illegals, those latter states gain real advantages in the federal government. This would punish law-abiding states and reward law-breaking states. That is why immigration is a federal issue and the proper level of sovereignty is the American people as a whole, not the people of an individual state, much less an individual city.
In 2024 the citizens of the United States expressed their will on federal matters by electing Trump and giving a majority in the House and Senate to Republicans. Trump ran heavily on enforcing federal immigration laws. This is the will of the relevant citizens. Sovereignty, in the end, means the exercise of power, or, as Obama said, elections have consequences. Being part of the sovereign citizenry in the Republic means accepting that, not obstructing it.
Protest is a right. I have exercised that right lawfully as have millions of others. However, while it takes cover among legitimate protesters, the mass, organized obstruction of immigration enforcement happening in Minneapolis is not a lawful protest and it is not an expression of the will of the people. It is obstruction of the will of the people and a rejection of the sovereignty of the people as properly expressed in the 2024 elections. These obstructors are petty tyrants who will be more than happy to tyrannize us all if they get the chance.
Sasquatch
In Virginia, armed protesters are demonstrating against the new radical Democratic Party authority's attempts to constrain their rights. This is important, and something we must not lose sight of in the larger context. Armed protests are an American right, as arms are. Our heritage is Lexington & Concord, which were exactly about an attempt by a government to disarm the people.
UPDATE: Virginia has advanced what the media is happy to call an "assault weapons" ban; but the definition of "assault weapon" embraces most firearms in common use.
ICEWatch and Insurgency
A warrant officer from the US Special Forces weighs in on how similar he thinks the ICEWatch patrols are to an insurgency.
With due respect to the gentleman, having a Signal chat is not evidence of a military organization. I have several myself, without in any way being involved in an insurgency. It's just good sense these days to use end-to-end encryption to keep from being spied on by corporations, even more than governments.
What ICE and other agencies are doing is deeply questionable and of reasonable concern. Keeping an eye on them and reporting any abuses is sensible and good citizenship. We are meant to be a self-governing society. Citizens should keep watch on every activity of government, and restrain it as they feel is appropriate. It is, after all, the citizens who are the ultimate sovereigns of the United States.
That doesn't mean that some groups don't get out of hand and over-react, of course.
Still and all, if this were an insurgency instead of a citizen watch there would be a lot of dead cops. Americans have 400,000,000 guns in private hands and trillions of rounds of ammunition. There are a lot of angry protesters, and some of them armed: but there aren't any dead cops. There are two dead protesters, so far.
What the government at all levels ought to take time to consider is how deeply the sovereign citizenry is rejecting this in at least some localities. I don't know or claim to know just what that means; perhaps we should, as we have often discussed, divide the nation in some way to allow the divergent political views space. Nevertheless, citizens are allowed to diverge in their opinions. Nobody has the right to use main force to compel Americans to abide by their preferred ideas about how we should be governed.
A self-governing people will diverge. Sometimes compromises can be reached; sometimes not. Liberty implies diversity of opinion. We probably all agree about the color of the blue sky, but experience demonstrates that we have very different opinions about many things. If there is to be a free society, there has to be room for that.
First Principles on Arms
It's astonishing to see even well-regarded scholars who have long backed Second Amendment rights, like John Lott here, suddenly reverse themselves. It's very solidly within the American tradition for American citizens to bear arms; to watch public servants who are engaged in exercises and report, as citizen journalists, on whether they are behaving well or badly, on whether they are obeying or breaking the laws. If you are a public servant, whether a volunteer firefighter or a police officer, you should expect people to watch you do what you do and to talk about it freely. If you misuse your power, you should expect to be held accountable. That is the American way.
Some of those people may be armed: again, this is America. If you stop by the local gas station here, you'll see at least two men with pistols on their belts on an ordinary day. They aren't criminals, they're usually employees. Has anyone ever needed to use a gun on duty? No, not once. Why? Partly because everyone knows there will be a couple of armed employees making sure you don't rob the place. We have illegal immigrants and their associated cartels here, but we don't have the chaos of Juarez. It's safe enough that they don't need the guns precisely because they have the guns.
Lott knows all that. We all do. It's critical not to lose sight of your first principles in the moment.
Ice Updates
I'm seeing reports of 700,000 people being out of power, but fortunately for me I am not one of them. Nevertheless last night I stayed up late preparing for the possibility of the intense cold that's coming getting here without us having any power (as still may occur: more freezing rain is on the way this afternoon). I created a little 'yurt' structure out of tarps tacked up to contain the warmth from the wood-burning furnace, lined the floor with blankets, and dug out extra warm clothing for everyone. Hopefully we will be fine.
As the 'other' ICE story continues to develop, the Washington Post today is running a video analysis that shows that the victim had in fact been disarmed by police before they shot him ten times.
I want to take a moment here to praise the officer in the grey jacket who handled the disarmament: he was the only one in the videos who gave the sense of acting with professional collectedness and good judgment. He kept focus on the only thing that mattered and took immediate steps to resolve that problem and reduce the threat of lethal force being necessary. If everyone had behaved as well as he did, this would not have happened.
The New York Times has a similar analysis:
Video of the encounter shows Mr. Pretti, a U.S. citizen who had a permit to carry a firearm, stepping between a woman and an agent who was pepper spraying her. Mr. Pretti is then hit with pepper spray before a group of agents pin him down, restraining and disarming him. Agents then fired shots into his back and motionless body.Trump officials immediately labeled Mr. Pretti a domestic terrorist, claiming without offering evidence that he had been out to “massacre” federal agents. They have underscored that he had been armed with a handgun, but video of the encounter verified by The New York Times shows that Mr. Pretti never drew his weapon.
I wonder how much of this is going to turn out to be a function of inadequate training. In a chaotic situation, you do tend to devolve to your level of training. The Trump administration, in its rush to field a much larger ICE force, has cut the training of ICE agents from 21 weeks (five of which was Spanish language, all of which has been cut) to 6 or 8 weeks (sources differ).
For contrast, Marine Corps bootcamp is 13 weeks, and that's just basic training: only after that do you really begin training for your job. 0311 Riflemen then go on to another 14 weeks at the School of Infantry, while those with specialized roles in the infantry do that and then also another month -- just to be basically trained as what is commonly called a "grunt" who follows the direction of experienced NCOs in action.
Watching the video, I am struck by how badly trained the agents seem to be. Their use of tools like pepper spray is ineffective; their beatings are also not properly targeted to effectively stop their target, so that even at 8 to 1 they were never quite able to subdue him. Aside from the one agent in grey, whose mind seemed to be working, they gave the impression of being scared and unable to perform effectively. I suspect a lot of the bad decisions made here were the result of them simply not having the training or experience necessary to perform well under stress.
I have expressed concerns about having a masked force that can't be effectively held to account; here we see that from the President on down there is a movement to refuse to hold them to account. But the accounting shouldn't stop with the agents. The conditions that allowed this kind of thing to happen began with some bad decisions from on high to cut training requirements, which haven't been rethought in spite of multiple tragedies or the clear evidence of intense political opposition by many American citizens.
Who has the standing to bring such accountability? In Minnesota the attorney general is Keith Ellison, whose corruption and partisanship are watchwords. The governor likewise, in addition to which he is the same Tim Walz who lied about his military service for years. The Federal administration is lining up to avoid it (not for the first time: remember when the government just bulldozed the site after the Waco massacre?). There is no one at the state or the Federal level I would trust to treat this matter fairly, which is of possibly even greater concern than the continued existence of a barely-trained, masked, armed force being sent out into charged conflicts on a daily basis.
In such a situation, like the agent in grey did, the thing to do is to calm down and act rationally to reduce the threat. Many people at all levels have an opportunity to do this, both in and out of government. It would be good to think about what each of us can do in that regard.
Safety first
I used to resent all the anti-lawyer articles and jokes, but I've been largely won over.
Modern corporate training is built to produce a checkbox, not a mechanic. Modern consumer documentation is built to win a deposition, not to teach you anything. Modern “how-to” media is built to monetize attention, not to transfer skill. Those are three different poisons, but the lawyers are the one that made the first two mandatory.
And you can see the societal consequences everywhere. Repair literacy collapses. Trades become credential-gated while simultaneously deskilled. People lose the ability to reason from symptoms to causes. Everything becomes a black box serviced by a priesthood. Machines become disposable because maintenance is treated as unauthorized tampering. The consumer gets trained into passivity. The worker gets trained into compliance.
Ice and ICE
We are on the verge of what looks locally to be a major ice storm; we have been told to expect to lose power, possibly for several days (5-10 days being the order of magnitude of the worst predictions; hopefully it'll be better than that). I have a generator, but only a gasoline powered one, so if that happens we'll only have short bursts of power and internet. Maybe it won't, though; or maybe if it does the power company will get to us more quickly than they worry that they will. It's good to be prepared; we're well-stocked with food and firewood.
By the time this particular emergency has passed, I hope we have clearer information about the ICE shooting today. It looks and sounds outrageous, but early reports are often wrong: I do share the sentiments in the cautionary note put out by The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus:
[The Caucus] describes itself as an 'unapologetic defender of the Second Amendment,' released a statement saying it was 'deeply concerned' by the shooting and calling for an investigation by state and federal officials. It noted that many facts remained unknown."Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights,” the group’s statement said. “These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed, and they must be respected and protected at all times.”
I'm inclined to say that ICE should be abolished like all Federal police agencies: the general police power is one the Founders intended to belong to the states, though they granted the Secret Service authority to combat counterfeiting and similar specialized offenses fairly early. I had hoped to start the abolishing with the ATF, but if you're going around shooting lawfully-armed American citizens -- a nurse with a carry permit, at that, meaning that his background would have been fully investigated and that he had no criminal record -- you could quickly and justly rise to the top of the list.
But we'll see what facts develop over a few days. For now, I have more immediate problems locally. Good luck to all of you in the storm's path. Keep warm.
Patriots of the Caribbean
Utah Senator Mike Lee and Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett introduced legislation in December to make privateering great again with the Patriots of the Caribbean bill. (It's amusing to me that they both represent landlocked states.)
Here's maritime historian and privateer Sal Mercogliano's analysis of it:
Maria from Germany
Maria from Germany on X.
German, but very similar video to the Amelia videos. I wonder if it will catch on there.
I didn't know about the German outlaw Schinderhannes (Johannes Bückler).
Vengeance in Iran
A story out of Venezuela confirms that the US was assured of internal help to oust Maduro.
The question of the day is: who's playing that role in Iran? If you haven't noticed, we now have substantially more firepower in theater than we did before the Gulf War or the Iraq War. Iran also breaks the last link to the West and Africa for China's Belt and Road project -- the Russia-based one was cut by the Ukraine war -- just as Venezuela cut China's main cord to the Americas. I don't get the sense that most commentators understand this, but as crazy as this team is, they're rolling it all up.
The main reason we should do it is not global-strategic, though there are global-strategic reasons that might suffice independently. It's definitely in the US national interest. Also, it's personal. The President gave his word that he would protect the protesters, and Iran murdered them by the tens of thousands. There must be an accounting for that. The world we live in only respects strength and honor. If we don't keep our word we show neither.
Radicals in Virginia
Virginia is a pretty state; I lived there for two years in the early 2000s, and travel through there often. The Shenandoah region is full of busy little cities and long stretches of open road. If you have more time, the Blue Ridge Parkway stretches out of North Carolina into Virginia, formally terminating at the gates of the Shenandoah National Park but actually continuing through the park as the aptly-named Skyline Drive.
It is a shame to see what's happening there now that they have given the Democratic party full control over the state's mechanisms. I think it's striking that one of their 'day one' bills was to forbid election audits and hand-recounts of machine-counted ballots.
The blue cities keep pushing not just to consolidate their wealth and power, but to destroy the culture of the more traditional parts of the states they dominate. Every time they gain power, the cities press for abortion until the moment of birth (to include partial birth), DEI programs to re-educate the population (witness the day-one attacks on VMI), and of course the most expansive gun control they can squeeze through (in defiance of the Supreme Court as well as the state's traditional laws).
It's always sad to watch.
Physical Rhetoric
It's purely a demonstration for effect, but the results are clear enough. This kind of physical 'rhetoric' should put an end to some of the crazier verbal rhetoric, but it probably won't.
Threats & Lies
Two local newspapers, the Sylva Herald and Ruralite as well as the Smoky Mountain News, have jointly published an article in response to threats they have received. The threats cite other threats, in an ongoing controversy about whether -- I am not making this up -- the local public library should remain in its inter-county system or become independently managed by the county.
This is, in fact, the hottest political controversy in the county and has been for some time.
The anonymous email claims “these individuals encourage agitation and unprofessionally mock duly appointed FRL board members and elected county commissioners. Such unethical behavior seriously undermines the Sylva Herald’s credibility and opens this newspaper up to legal ramifications and public embarrassment.”
I do not share the opinion that mocking the duly elected county commissioners in any way damages one's credibility.
“YOU MUST CEASE publication of all falsehoods, slander, and spin,” the email continues without offering an example. “The Sylva Herald must CEASE ALL COLLUSION WITH EXTREMISTS. Period. Furthermore, Dave Russell and Beth Lawrence should resign immediately. Dave Russell doesn’t even live in Jackson County and regularly disregards objective truth while concealing facts. He has also been caught red handed by his own words making threats.”
The newspapers went ahead and published a list of the alleged extremists; I am sorry to report that I didn't make the cut. One who did is Antoinette MacWatt, the widow of a local Marine Corps veteran and a supporter of staying in the existing public library system -- obviously an extremist viewpoint, having a strong opinion about a public library.
“This is your only warning. We will not respond to you,” it reads. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
All I can figure is that the Republican side -- obviously aligned with the ones sending these anonymous emails -- has decided that the controversy is working for them in the local elections, or else has figured out some way to grift off control of the very limited budget associated with a local public library. If they've managed the latter they must be quite clever, a cleverness quite masked by their chosen mode of communications.
Chess is Haram?
Pretty much everything about Islam, that false religion built around a false prophet, is at least a little bit crazy. Mormonism is just that too, though, and nobody really gets upset about Mormons (more coffee for the rest of us). I knew that very good things like dogs and bacon and beer were haram ('forbidden'), but today is the first time that I've heard that chess is.
Apparently it mostly is, though there are some schools that consider it permissible as long as it doesn't cause you to gamble or miss prayers or anything like that. I suppose one could gamble on a chess game, although I have never heard of anyone doing so.
Don't get me wrong; I don't hate Muslims or Islam or anything like that. I've met some very good Muslims, some of whom even kept to these ideas about haram and halal at least for themselves (and for the most part). I don't have any problem with people living however they choose, as long as they don't try to coerce others into submission.
Chess, though? That seems like maybe the 'wise scholars' just weren't all that smart and got their feelings hurt. Chess is a great game, one that reliably rewards careful and deep thought.
Breaking Up NATO?
If Trump insists on acquiring Greenland regardless of Denmark, Europe, or the Greenlanders' desires, one possible outcome could be the end of NATO. Is that intentional on Trump's part? Is that part of what this is about?
Would getting the US out of NATO be a good thing for us? NATO has been such a fixture that I've never given it much thought. It could save us a lot of money, at least in the short term with base closures, withdrawing troops deployed to Europe, etc. Also, given most of Western Europe's insistence on being colonized by Islamist settlers, having lax immigration requirements for travelers and immigrants from Europe may well be a security risk. On the other hand, I've generally assumed that allies are helpful at least in intel sharing and that they maintain a certain stability that is good for us. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe Trump doesn't care about that anymore.
I can see how NATO may have harmed Europe, allowing them to ignore their own defense and their own people and instead to go crazy with their globalist dreams, but I don't know that that's the case. It would seem to fit a common conservative critique of welfare undermining independence and work ethic, though.
What do y'all think? Is Trump trying to get us out of NATO? Would that be a good thing? Or am I just way off base with this?
The Schismatic Archbishop
Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who has the Catholic Church's authority for the US military, has endorsed the disobeying of orders by soldiers whose conscience is offended.
We've talked about this periodically through the history of this blog, most recently when some Congresscritters decided to endorse the position. Sometimes it is morally proper to disobey orders, especially if those orders are shockingly immoral, this being the legal standard that came out of the My Lai massacre. Other times inferior officers give orders that are unconstitutional, which should be disobeyed because they are inherently mutinous.
Too, one of the ways in which Medieval political philosophy was superior to Modern political philosophy lies in the division of the temporal authority from the spiritual. You couldn't get to totalitarianism when the King and the Pope were competing sources of ultimate authority; both always had a claim on loyalty, and yet their interests differed sufficiently that even when they happened to align broadly there was a tension between them. Liberty finds its home in the tension between powers, which is why the American system of dividing powers between the branches of the Federal government and between the Federal government and the states has been so conducive to a life in which liberty remains possible.
Still, how surprising to see the Church come down on the side of defying authority. Well, in a way; in another way he is endorsing the sovereignty of the King of Denmark. He is, however, suggesting that Americans who have taken an oath of obedience to the President of the United States and the officers he appoints would be morally qualified to forswear that oath.
“Greenland is a territory of Denmark,” Broglio told the BBC Sunday. “It does not seem really reasonable that the United States would attack and occupy a friendly nation.”Asked whether he was “worried” about the military personnel in his pastoral care, Broglio replied: “I am obviously worried because they could be put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”“It would be very difficult for a soldier or a [M]arine or a sailor to by himself disobey an order,” he said. “But strictly speaking, he or she would be, within the realm of their own conscience, it would be morally acceptable to disobey that order, but that’s perhaps putting that individual in an untenable situation — and that’s my concern.”
It's perfectly tenable; I imagine they would be detained in Fort Leavenworth for some time, those two words sharing as their root the Latin tenere, "to hold." Holding the position would lead to one being held for having held the position. A soldier refusing orders because the sovereign of a different nation has a different opinion about the matter is not going to work out congenially, however.
Arms & the Protests
In this video, an angry screaming mob assaults a man and forces him to remove his shirt because it says the word "Freedom." A keffiyeh-wearing protester advises the man, "Take it off and you won't get hurt." The protesters here clearly feel empowered to engage in actual violence.
Other groups of protesters in Minnesota have begun bringing long guns to the protests. Notice that the hysteria is quite absent from these scenes: guns clarify the seriousness of the situation. There's no room for playing around. You're too close to the fire.
It's kind of an inversion of these few lines from Orthodoxy:
We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.
All that wild misbehavior comes from a lack of fear of consequences. Their faces are covered; the governor is on their side; and no one at all is armed, least of all the victims. All those things are walls protecting them from the fall. Remove the walls, and the song shall cease.
Meanwhile, a commenter here notes the irony of a forthcoming arrest on MLK Day. That too is an interesting juxtaposition: his protests were both peaceful and polite, at least on the side of the protesting group. Likewise, Dr. King's protests were more effective.
In any case, that group of protesters is not likely to evade consequences. I certainly wouldn't want to have drawn the personal attention of Harmeet Dhillon as a prosecuting attorney. "Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time," she said. From what I have known of her, I expect she means it.
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