A Little Winter Fell on My Patch of Wilderness
I don't own any wilderness to speak of, but wherever I am I find some to befriend. Here it was today.
A Former KGB Officer on Ideological Subversion
Note the date on this is fully thirty years ago, at which time he felt that the first stage -- demoralization -- was complete. Consider how far we've come since then in running down America, its Founders and its Constitution, as an aspirational ideal.
This was the official plan of the KGB, and one that they used effectively in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. (Also in Asia.) Why didn't it work here? Possibly because the Soviet Union collapsed, and so the professionals behind the program weren't there to leverage and guide the moment of crisis when it finally came. The Marxist-influenced intellectuals actually became in charge, rather than being shot against the wall and replaced with professionals.
But also possibly because the crisis was never great enough to overcome the American capacity for force. You couldn't roll tanks into America like you did in Czechoslovakia, and the country was always too big, too spread out, and too well armed to rule with a secret police. We can't even manage to get people to stop selling each other drugs, let alone effect totalitarianism.
In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history. Recovering a natural patriotism and a proper admiration for the ideals of human liberty remains a major part of the work to be done.
There's a much longer interview with the same man here, for those who want to learn more.
This was the official plan of the KGB, and one that they used effectively in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. (Also in Asia.) Why didn't it work here? Possibly because the Soviet Union collapsed, and so the professionals behind the program weren't there to leverage and guide the moment of crisis when it finally came. The Marxist-influenced intellectuals actually became in charge, rather than being shot against the wall and replaced with professionals.
But also possibly because the crisis was never great enough to overcome the American capacity for force. You couldn't roll tanks into America like you did in Czechoslovakia, and the country was always too big, too spread out, and too well armed to rule with a secret police. We can't even manage to get people to stop selling each other drugs, let alone effect totalitarianism.
In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history. Recovering a natural patriotism and a proper admiration for the ideals of human liberty remains a major part of the work to be done.
There's a much longer interview with the same man here, for those who want to learn more.
The Seventh Century Lives
A genetic study of Britain shows that Britons still live in the same places as their ancient kingdoms of 600 AD.
In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.Interesting. That does not hold for the United States.
The Texas Plan
Wow, Tex. Your governor really gets it.
Here, per the document, are the nine constitutional amendments Abbott is backing:
I. Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State.
II. Require Congress to balance its budget.
III. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.
IV. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law.
V. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
VI. Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.
VII. Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.
VIII. Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.
IX. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.
No Offensive Lingo Allowed!
The next logical step in purging New Orleans of offensive speech has arrived:
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu should explain why anti-abortion banners festoon the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground, since he has decided to be the arbiter of what symbols are so offensive that they must be removed from public property, City Councilwoman Stacy Head said at a recent meeting....I'm really not sure if she seriously thinks he should pick up this responsibility and run with it, or if she's chiding him for having 'decided to be the arbiter of what symbols are so offensive that they must be removed from public property.' The latter would be a clever argument: the mayor has definitely opened himself up to a nest of legal issues.
As a woman, Head said, she feels like the banners are a nuisance since they "negatively influence the perception of my civil liberties as a woman. I believe I'm being discriminated against." ...
"We are looking to the admin to decide which objects and symbols are appropriate for the city on city property. Which ones offend us. Which ones are negative," Head said. As a woman, it offends her to have to drive by them and be reminded of the oppression, she said. Does that give her standing to call for their removal?
Head called the banners "political signage for a particular position that I perceive as a nuisance. I perceive it as offensive. I do not see it is a promoting awareness."
Hillary for Prison Update
This one's going to be hard to wave away.
In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.There's still time to get your signs.
That should be game, set, and match, yes?
Lone Wolf in Eric Blair's Backyard?
The officer did well:
Hartnett was shot in the arm multiple times after 13 shots were fired into the vehicle. He was able to return fire and hit the suspect, 30-year-old Edward Archer, who has survived. Police are now confirming the situation as a terrorism investigation and have revealed the suspect admitted to carrying out the shooting in the name of Islam after pledging loyalty to ISIS.I see via Instapundit that the weapon used by the terrorist was a stolen police firearm.
"He [the suspect] said he did it for his religious beliefs," police officials said Friday in a press conference.
Judgment and Prejudice
On the one hand, it's good that the Germans have accepted responsibility for the Nazi movement and are now reflexively opposed to prejudice.
The inability to make considered, rational judgments because of a fear of prejudice is a category error. That is a quite serious philosophical mistake. It is perfectly possible to avoid prejudice without suspending one's faculty of judgment permanently. For example, you could elect to accept people who are Muslims and refugees if and only if they as individuals embrace your values. Some do, and some don't, and yes that may mean breaking up families in terms of whom you accept.
Normally we wouldn't want to do that on principle -- which, by the way, is another way of saying that we have pre-judged these situations have have a pre-judgment, a principle, we reflexively apply. Having principles is also a kind of prejudice, a pre-judgment. Sometimes principles have to be set aside based on the facts that make the cases unusual. In this case rational judgment may suggest it:
That's not prejudice, it's the judgment of reason applied to the truth of the facts.
Anti-Islam demonstrators were outnumbered by 10 to one in Cologne tonight as the city’s famous cathedral turned out its lights in a symbolic protest against the Pegida movement.On the other hand, prejudice is "pre-judgment," and being opposed to pre-judging someone or something should not require you to suspend post-judgment in the face of evidence. In the wake of an attack by more than a thousand Muslim refugees on German women, and the confession by police to victims that they cannot guarantee women's safety and that women should thus avoid the city center, it's not prejudice to oppose taking new refugees. It's not prejudice, but appropriate and rational judgment, to assert that this culture is not compatible with your values and that you don't want it in your country.
The so-called “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the West” (Pegida) had planned to hold a march there following weekly rallies in Dresden but only 250 supporters showed up, compared to more than 2,000 counter-demonstrators.
They lined the Cologne’s largest bridge as the cathedral stood in darkness, holding placards reading "refugees welcome", "I heart immigration" and "no Nazis here".
The inability to make considered, rational judgments because of a fear of prejudice is a category error. That is a quite serious philosophical mistake. It is perfectly possible to avoid prejudice without suspending one's faculty of judgment permanently. For example, you could elect to accept people who are Muslims and refugees if and only if they as individuals embrace your values. Some do, and some don't, and yes that may mean breaking up families in terms of whom you accept.
Normally we wouldn't want to do that on principle -- which, by the way, is another way of saying that we have pre-judged these situations have have a pre-judgment, a principle, we reflexively apply. Having principles is also a kind of prejudice, a pre-judgment. Sometimes principles have to be set aside based on the facts that make the cases unusual. In this case rational judgment may suggest it:
The horrifying story of an “honor killing” in Germany spotlights the sheer madness of importing millions of unvetted, unassimilated migrants.Normally we wouldn't want to break up families. Here's a case in which it would have been a good thing for her to be separated from her mother and father and brother. She would have fit into German society quite well. They will never.
The victim, a 20-year-old woman known as “Rokstan M,” is one refugee who had a strong case for asylum. She was gang-raped in Syria, emigrated to Germany two years ago, and found employment with the German government as a translator.
However, she strongly suspected her family wanted her dead for being “unclean,” and her suspicions appear to have been confirmed, as the German police believe her father and brothers slaughtered her with knives and buried her body in a garden, allegedly at the instruction of her mother.
That's not prejudice, it's the judgment of reason applied to the truth of the facts.
ISIS Kills Female Journalist
Not for being female, but for being a journalist. A good one -- the kind who perform a true service to civilization.
A Second Exchange
As a point of rhetoric, it's interesting that CNN set this up the way they did. They could have chosen another crime victim who would have been less sympathetic, which would give the President an easier out. Instead, they put him in the position of having to affirm her right to keep and bear arms, and to clarify that he does not intend to do anything that would make it harder for her to own a firearm.
That may or may not be true -- it may simply be that he has no capacity at the moment to do anything that would make it harder for her to own a firearm, but that he would be happy to create the "Australia style" rules he has referred to several times as his ideal if he only had the power. That seems likely to me. Still, it is an interesting moment. Imagine how it must sound to a gun-banning progressive: do they see it as merely useful rhetoric to get the camel's nose under the tent, or are they appalled to see him surrender the basic concept that firearms in the hands of citizens are a basic right that is justified by the need to defend against things like criminal violence?
UPDATE: Meanwhile, in California, a whole new list of handguns are now illegal... but that's not the President's proposal.
UPDATE: Congress may be sending him a test for this. Why shouldn't DC recognize the concealed carry permits of the states, if as he says he's not opposed to law-abiding citizens like her using firearms for the purpose of protecting themselves and their families?
UPDATE: Commentary's Noah Rothman says that this exchange, taken together with the Clinton email, the terrorist attack in Philly, and another plotted by refugees just arrested, makes it a very bad day for the narrative.
Chris Kyle's Widow Takes on the President
It's a pretty amazing exchange, and one that speaks well of our country at this late date.
She says you 'can't outlaw murder,' which of course is misspoken somewhat: murder is outlawed in all fifty states. Still, when addressing someone as prominent as the President of the United States, it's not surprising if you get nervous and don't speak as clearly as you would at your dinner table. To his credit, the President did not pretend to misunderstand her for rhetorical advantage.
He does say something I think needs clarification:
"[W]hat you said about murder rates and violent crime generally is something we don’t celebrate enough,” he agreed. “The fact of the matter is that violent crime has been steadily declining across America for a pretty long time. And you wouldn’t always know it from watching television. Now, I challenge the notion that the reason for that is that there is more gun ownership. Because if you look at the where the areas are with the highest gun ownership, those are the places that the crime hasn’t dropped down that much."I'm not sure if this statement is false, or if he's just thinking of 'the areas' at a specific level where it happens to hold true statistically. What I think is true is that gun ownership rates have declined somewhat in spite of a vast increase of real numbers of firearms, which is to say that somewhat fewer people own many more guns. These people are the sort of people who have wealth to invest in durable goods they don't require for survival. By that I mean that once you have about three guns, if you chose carefully, you've covered your bases: a rifle for distance shooting including hunting, a shotgun for small game or home defense, and a handgun to fight your way back to the longarms. If you buy more than that, it's because you like or collect the things, or participate in sports involving specialized arms, or something similar.
So, if 'the areas' means 'areas where middle to upper-middle class households with money to invest in guns,' I don't think it's true that the crime rate is especially high in those areas. If it hasn't declined much, it's only because those areas are small ball for violent crime in the first place.
Still, maybe he means something else. It'd be helpful if he would expand and clarify these remarks, because I'm not sure what he's getting at. The decline since 1993 or so is so sharp -- we're talking about a halving of violent crime -- that it would be really strange to find many places where crime 'hasn't dropped down that much.' The ones that come to mind are the poorer regions of cities like Chicago, which have robust gun control laws but also serious poverty, drugs, and gang problems. Those aren't the people who accounted for the vast increase in private firearms that these two are discussing.
Yay For White Privilege!
The Baltimore Sun publishes a piece by a woman whose judgment is... remarkable.
Also, by the way since her framing story happens in Florida: those permitted gun owners in Florida are extremely well-behaved.
I'm less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore, I declared as we discussed the issue, than I am by those permitted gun owners. I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore's illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by "the game."So... segregation is a good thing now, from the white liberal perspective? 'You know, I'm not endorsing it, but it does keep me safe...'
Also, by the way since her framing story happens in Florida: those permitted gun owners in Florida are extremely well-behaved.
“Since 1987, the state of Florida has issued 2.5 million concealed-carry permits,” Raso says in his latest opinion piece for the NRA News network. “Of those, only 168 people have committed firearms crimes. That’s .00672 percent of the total amount issued.”*It's not a bad idea to discuss gun safety with the parents of your children's friends, of course. You can make an informed judgment about whether you want your kids playing with them based on the outcomes of those conversations. What she wants instead is universal gun registration worked into a "searchable database" that would identify gun owners for her convenience -- or that of criminals who want to steal guns, or government officials who want to round them up. That's a much less reasonable proposal.
Marjah Update
Former SEAL Congressman demands answers on how our forces got trapped in Marjah for hours without relief.
NYT Writers on Property and the West
First of all, you don't really own anything, so get that out of your heads.
So, should the government own all the land out West? Absolutely -- unless we give it back to the Native Americans.
An idea common among conservatives — and surely an assumption of the protesters in Oregon — is that the past fully explains private property. For example, perhaps you paid for your phone or were given it as a gift. That’s why you are entitled to it. So in general we might say that if you paid for something or were given something, then you are entitled to it.Got that? It's hard to see how it's unjust for "the government or anyone else" to take your property.
But is that true? Suppose I steal your car and sell it to my friend Dugald. Is Dugald entitled to the car because he paid for it? You probably want to say “no.” Buying something doesn’t give you entitlement unless the seller was entitled to the thing first. So a transfer of property from one person to another is rendered illegitimate if the seller got the property through unjust means.
But now think back to your smartphone. What are the chances that the money you used to buy your phone can be traced backward through your employer, your employer’s customers, and so on back through history without passing through the hands of a serious injustice? Slim to none. The same can be said for the seller’s side of the transaction. Chances are excellent that your phone arrived in your hand only after the exploitation of workers, abuse of the environment, theft, fraud, human trafficking, or any number of deal-breaking injustices....
So despite its appeal to conservatives, the idea that history alone explains private property is hard to make good on. On this theory, the mere fact that we were given things or paid for things won’t determine whether we are entitled to those things. At worst the historical theory implies that no one is entitled to any private property. And if our property isn’t legitimately private, it’s hard to see how it’s unjust for the government or anyone else to take it from us.
So, should the government own all the land out West? Absolutely -- unless we give it back to the Native Americans.
Righteousness
AVI notices a change in the language.
I wonder what the shift portends. At one point it was helpful to degrade the very idea of righteousness as a means of advancing behaviors that were considered anti-social by society. Yet now they find that they need it, as a means of shaming a public that strongly disagrees with them on the issue they're currently devoted to advancing.
I wonder what the shift portends. At one point it was helpful to degrade the very idea of righteousness as a means of advancing behaviors that were considered anti-social by society. Yet now they find that they need it, as a means of shaming a public that strongly disagrees with them on the issue they're currently devoted to advancing.
Being Stalked By A Predator
Want to rob a 65 year old woman?
The 65-year-old woman who was Bontaites’ alleged intended victim, told police she had stopped at Mobil on the Run, 1050 South Willow St., around 11:30 p.m. after leaving work. She got back on South Willow Street and stopped at a traffic light when she noticed a dark-colored sedan behind her. She told police she had “heightened concern” as the vehicle followed her into her apartment complex parking lot at 640 South Porter St.How do you think this story turns out?
The woman entered her apartment complex and noticed multiple vacant parking spots, so she parked as close to her building as possible hoping the other vehicle would vacate the area. Instead, the sedan parked close to her. She exited her vehicle and walked toward her apartment building. She immediately heard a vehicle door close and the sound of a person quickly walking up behind her.
Illegal Guns in Chicago
From the city where there were nearly 470 murders last year, a story about the (already completely illegal) guns favored by the city's gangsters.
So we have the tools we need to deal with this particular threat. Neither new laws nor new tools are necessary. As the NRA recently pointed out, the Federal government even has the laws it needs to send these drug gangsters away for as much as a decade each if they are caught with a gun.
This should be a solvable problem with existing laws. If anything, Chicago should move to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves rather than looking for new restrictions on guns. They have the tools and the laws they need. We just need the President to do his actual job, rather than scheming for new restrictions on the rights of honest Americans.
From that hierarchy, a few patterns emerge. The city’s criminals, for instance, prefer semiautomatic pistols to revolvers and generally seek out cheap junk guns. What’s also notable is the type of gun that doesn’t appear among the top models seized. In 2014, Chicago police recovered only three assault weapons associated with criminal incidents. “Often there’s a misimpression about the importance of assault guns and assault weapons, and it’s important to point out how rare that is,” says Phillip Cook, an economist at Duke University who studies underground gun markets. “The guns being used in Chicago for crime and murder are by and large very ordinary pistols.”Indeed, they're not even especially powerful pistols, if you take a look at the chart. Aside from the one .357 Magnum, none of these firearms are capable of defeating even lightweight IIA body armor. The .357 can be stopped by full scale Type II armor. Glancing at a popular police body armor online store, it appears that they chiefly sell the even stronger IIIA and III armors.
So we have the tools we need to deal with this particular threat. Neither new laws nor new tools are necessary. As the NRA recently pointed out, the Federal government even has the laws it needs to send these drug gangsters away for as much as a decade each if they are caught with a gun.
This should be a solvable problem with existing laws. If anything, Chicago should move to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves rather than looking for new restrictions on guns. They have the tools and the laws they need. We just need the President to do his actual job, rather than scheming for new restrictions on the rights of honest Americans.
Woah
Headline: "Pentagon may upgrade hundreds of troops to possible Medals of Honor."
Lower standards across the board.
Lower standards across the board.
'A Depressing Election We Need'
The Washington Examiner hosts a comment on the current election:
For instance, the candidates leading the polls in either party — Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans — are not just viewed unfavorably by voters overall; they are the most unfavorably viewed by Americans out of all of the candidates running.What's the cure, then? An election between Clinton and Trump would suggest what therapy? I think I know, but it isn't one any candidate is proposing.
To put this in context, during the entire slog of the 2012 election, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney sustained a brand as unfavorable as Clinton or Trump. John McCain, John Kerry and George W. Bush all enjoyed "favorables" of over 50 percent during their presidential campaigns, even though two out of the three were ultimately never elected president. Today, only one out of four Americans think the country is on the right track. Americans continue to express deep economic anxiety, and the president's job approval remains low, with particular disapproval for handling of foreign policy....
The depression of voters seems like nothing to celebrate, and a Clinton vs. Trump election is not one I'd savor. Disgust and disdain at Washington may manifest itself in a whole host of ways, for good or for ill. But like many illnesses, those unpleasant symptoms are often part and parcel of the process of being cured.
What a depressing campaign this has been. But it also just may lead to the election we need.
Heavy Metal
A fellow I know is behind this campaign. He's not the one named in the article, but the one who suggested it to him.
A Liverpool professor has backed a campaign to rename a “super-heavy” periodic element in memory of Motorhead frontman Lemmy.You can sign the petition here.
A petition is calling for one of four newly-discovered elements to be named “Lemmium” in tribute to the rock superstar, who died earlier this month.
More than 28,000 people have backed the campaign since it started two days ago.
When good sons go . . . military
Bookworm Room, who lives in Marin County surrounded by progressives, reports an odd development: some of her hyper-progressive neighbors have sons who are choosing to join the military. The parents are starting to change their attitudes.
The End of Christmas
The Last Day of Christmas is upon us. January 6th ordinarily is taken to mark the day that the Wise Men located Jesus, which is thus the point in the Christmas story that the world abroad first celebrated the lordship of the king of kings. This year today is officially 'the Wednesday after Epiphany Sunday,' but the date of 6 January remains an important anchor for that feast.
There are of course some differences among the several Christian traditions. It is not my wish to dwell upon those, but to wish everyone a Merry Christmas one last time. Until next year, I hope you have had a joyous feast and a moment for faith.
There are of course some differences among the several Christian traditions. It is not my wish to dwell upon those, but to wish everyone a Merry Christmas one last time. Until next year, I hope you have had a joyous feast and a moment for faith.
"What’s the Difference Between a Socialist and a Democrat"?
Chris Matthews asks Hillary Clinton, who can't answer. Apparently Matthews had already asked her puppet, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and received the same non-answer.
The question isn't hard to answer, so it's interesting that these figures are dancing around the answer.
A Socialist believes that, to the greatest possible degree, the means of economic production should be owned by the Public and not by individuals or corporations. Practically this means that the government should own the means of production as much as is practicable.
A Democrat believes that, to the greatest possible degree, power should be invested in the citizenry broadly considered, rather than in some elite. It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.
There is thus no necessary connection between the ideologies. One can be a non-democratic Socialist, as the Communists often were. One can be a Democratic Socialist, as European parties sometimes claim to be. And one can be a non-socialist Democrat, as in fact most American Democrats have historically been.
The connection between the two is nevertheless not accidental, even if it is not necessary. Aristotle explains in the Politics that democracy is government by the many (rather than the few or the one), and that the poor are always more numerous than the rich. One of the thing the poor tend to want from government, even in ancient Greece, is for it to redistribute wealth to them from those who have it currently.
Aristotle warns against this tendency strongly. It will destabilize the state, he says, for the rich to be deprived of both power and their property. They will respond by hiring mercenaries to overthrow the democracy, which will lead to the harms of political instability or war. On the other hand, in a system that is governed by an elite (an aristocracy, for example), redistribution of wealth is an important point of public policy. The poor must be made physically secure from starvation and the harms of poverty in order to support a state that denies them political power. They can cause an insurrection too if their interests are completely ignored by the powerful.
Thus, Socialism should be regarded as the sickness of Democrats. It is an illness to which they are particularly prone. That does not mean that Democrats are wrong to favor government by the many. It just means that the position entails certain risks which have to be guarded against faithfully. Other positions entail other risks, so it is not a unique failing of Democrats that such a risk exists. This one just happens to be the one to which they are especially likely to fall prey.
As, apparently, they are currently doing.
The question isn't hard to answer, so it's interesting that these figures are dancing around the answer.
A Socialist believes that, to the greatest possible degree, the means of economic production should be owned by the Public and not by individuals or corporations. Practically this means that the government should own the means of production as much as is practicable.
A Democrat believes that, to the greatest possible degree, power should be invested in the citizenry broadly considered, rather than in some elite. It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.
There is thus no necessary connection between the ideologies. One can be a non-democratic Socialist, as the Communists often were. One can be a Democratic Socialist, as European parties sometimes claim to be. And one can be a non-socialist Democrat, as in fact most American Democrats have historically been.
The connection between the two is nevertheless not accidental, even if it is not necessary. Aristotle explains in the Politics that democracy is government by the many (rather than the few or the one), and that the poor are always more numerous than the rich. One of the thing the poor tend to want from government, even in ancient Greece, is for it to redistribute wealth to them from those who have it currently.
Aristotle warns against this tendency strongly. It will destabilize the state, he says, for the rich to be deprived of both power and their property. They will respond by hiring mercenaries to overthrow the democracy, which will lead to the harms of political instability or war. On the other hand, in a system that is governed by an elite (an aristocracy, for example), redistribution of wealth is an important point of public policy. The poor must be made physically secure from starvation and the harms of poverty in order to support a state that denies them political power. They can cause an insurrection too if their interests are completely ignored by the powerful.
Thus, Socialism should be regarded as the sickness of Democrats. It is an illness to which they are particularly prone. That does not mean that Democrats are wrong to favor government by the many. It just means that the position entails certain risks which have to be guarded against faithfully. Other positions entail other risks, so it is not a unique failing of Democrats that such a risk exists. This one just happens to be the one to which they are especially likely to fall prey.
As, apparently, they are currently doing.
Stand Down Orders in Benghazi
Was there an order to 'stand down' in Benghazi? As we all know, it has been repeatedly denied by the government, which claims that no forces were available to respond and there were no stand down orders given.
The guys who were actually on the ground say it absolutely happened. (Advance to 7:10.)
Their opinion is that 13 Hours is unusually accurate for a war film. It certainly has the potential to be explosive. American Sniper proved to me that there's an appetite for this kind of movie. Let's hope it does well.
The guys who were actually on the ground say it absolutely happened. (Advance to 7:10.)
Their opinion is that 13 Hours is unusually accurate for a war film. It certainly has the potential to be explosive. American Sniper proved to me that there's an appetite for this kind of movie. Let's hope it does well.
Marjah
More than a dozen U.S. Army special operations soldiers are trapped in Marjah, Afghanistan, taking cover in a compound surrounded by enemy fire and hostile Taliban fighters after a U.S. special operations solider was killed earlier in the day, senior U.S. defense officials told the media late Tuesday....I trust you know what to do.
The joint U.S. and Afghan special operations team was sent to Marjah to clear the area of Taliban fighters, who have retaken most of the town since November.
There were nine airstrikes on Tuesday in support of a clearing operation.
"Scores of Women" Attacked in Germany
Just one of those things you have to accept in order to ensure the benefits of increasing diversity, I suppose.
UPDATE: In Missouri, a woman has a different experience.
UPDATE: Germany will have much to reflect on this week.
UPDATE: So far, reflection is going predictably wrong.
“The government’s loss of control is not only taking place on the borders,” wrote Alexander Marguier, deputy editor in chief of the monthly political magazine Cicero, in its digital edition. “For whoever gives up control of who enters the country no longer has control over the consequences of this action.”Indeed.
UPDATE: In Missouri, a woman has a different experience.
UPDATE: Germany will have much to reflect on this week.
UPDATE: So far, reflection is going predictably wrong.
On The Underlying Tensions in Oregon
A good piece on how Federal environmental policies are destroying traditional Western ways of life, such as ranching and mining. That's true in West Virginia, too, but out West the Federal government actually owns most of the land -- and it would like to own more.
To me this is a story much like the Yazoo land scandal, except that instead of selling the land to a corporation the government is refusing to sell to anyone. That policy ends up making citizens less free than they would be if they could own their own means of production, including the land on which they graze. While some national parks and refuges are a great idea, the West is vast -- vast enough that the government could do everything we'd want them to do without owning half or more of the land in these states.
The effect of government ownership of most of the land in your state is to reduce a large part of the citizenry from free landholders to tenet farmers subject to the whim of their landlords. It is to reduce the scope of human liberty substantially. Property ownership is one of the rights the Revolution was fought to protect -- indeed, for the many Founders who were politically aligned with John Locke, it was first among those rights. These policies put the liberty that comes with ownership out of reach, and along the way are crushing out of existence a traditional American culture of great nobility.
The federal government owns more than half the land in the state, as it does across much of the West. It used to be routine for ranchers to get permits to graze cattle or cut timber or work mines — a way to make a living from the land.We all agree that natural beauty is important, and the environment represents a kind of national treasure. But the culture of the West is also a kind of national treasure. The people might be self-sufficient, as once they were when they could own the land they worked.
Then came increasing environmental regulations, and the federal land became more for owls and sage grouse than for local people trying to feed their families, said Soper, 39, who lives 100 miles up the road in Bend.
To me this is a story much like the Yazoo land scandal, except that instead of selling the land to a corporation the government is refusing to sell to anyone. That policy ends up making citizens less free than they would be if they could own their own means of production, including the land on which they graze. While some national parks and refuges are a great idea, the West is vast -- vast enough that the government could do everything we'd want them to do without owning half or more of the land in these states.
The effect of government ownership of most of the land in your state is to reduce a large part of the citizenry from free landholders to tenet farmers subject to the whim of their landlords. It is to reduce the scope of human liberty substantially. Property ownership is one of the rights the Revolution was fought to protect -- indeed, for the many Founders who were politically aligned with John Locke, it was first among those rights. These policies put the liberty that comes with ownership out of reach, and along the way are crushing out of existence a traditional American culture of great nobility.
Should Conservatives Support "Industrial Scale" Clemency?
The American Conservative suggests that it would be both moral and practical to release many, many more prisoners than we do.
Why is it moral? For one reason, because we put too much faith in the law qua law.
What's being asked for here is not pardons by and large, but clemency. They would remain under the disabilities associated with being a convicted felon. We just wouldn't be responsible for them.
Good idea?
Why is it moral? For one reason, because we put too much faith in the law qua law.
In the United States, our civic religion is the Rule of Law—we have no monarchy, and we are less tribalist than more ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation-states. Instead the highest symbol of our nation is a legal document, with its own legalistic cult and rituals. To be sure, the rule of law is in many ways an ideal of rational order and equality without favoritism. But a spillover effect is the tendency to treat all legal codes as if they were handed down from Mount Sinai, no matter how unreasonable or cruel they may be.Why is it practical? I'll cite just one argument here, though you can read the rest if you like:
Devotion to the Rule of Law has an ugly side in resentment of executive acts of mercy, at the level of practice and high theory. Immanuel Kant, often thought of as a Birkenstock-wearing human-rights guy, was one of the most vicious retributivists in the history of moral philosophy, an implacable opponent of royal clemency. In 1764, Milanese philosophe Cesare Beccaria argued that the same crimes must carry the same punishment regardless of the perpetrator’s rank or station, no exceptions—a radical proposition for its time. This sounds unobjectionable, but this Enlightenment universalism has had harsh ramifications in the American context where, combined with Puritan moral panics and the authoritarian heritage of slavery and Jim Crow, it has frequently made for a justice system with a tendency to degrade and “level down” to an egalitarian level of misery....
At the founding of the country, executive power was seen not as a violation of our self-image as a “nation of laws not men” but as a necessary and healthily legitimate part of any popular government. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 74: “the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered.” Without pardon power, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Justice John Marshall also upheld clemency as “an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws.”
Our incarcerated population is also aging rapidly, and though older prisoners have far lower recidivism rates, few states are availing themselves of geriatric release. For instance, Virginia in 2012 granted geriatric release to less than 1 percent of about 800 prisoners eligible, according to the state parole board. Meanwhile, as the Virginian Pilot reported, “during the same period, 84 inmates died in state prisons.” Running high-security nursing homes is neither compassionate nor fiscally sound—another reason to restore and expand clemency.That seems like a reasonable case to me. Some prisoners ought to die in prison simply because of the magnitude of their crimes -- Charles Manson, perhaps. Others really shouldn't be in prison, even if they were pretty hard-core thugs as young men, because they pose no threat that would justify paying for both guarding them and caring for them in their age.
What's being asked for here is not pardons by and large, but clemency. They would remain under the disabilities associated with being a convicted felon. We just wouldn't be responsible for them.
Good idea?
Joining the NRA
A couple of essays broke today on joining the NRA in spite of reservations, one featured at InstaPundit and the other at Hot Air. The upshot of both are that the NRA is not really the premiere gun rights organization in America today. It has in the past endorsed gun control laws in order to appear reasonable, and it has in the past accepted compromise positions that furthered some of our interests at the expense of others. That may be a virtue or a vice depending on how you see American politics, both in general and at this specific moment.
What actually annoys me more than the compromises is the propaganda they run in their magazines. Even on years when it is clear that there are no dangers to gun rights, the NRA's magazines always read like the next Great War is on the horizon. This is for fundraising purposes. I generally maintain membership with them only in years when there really is a danger because it is difficult for me to respect an organization that is not completely honest with its membership.
In terms of better organizations, the Second Amendment Foundation is mentioned prominently for its role in Heller and other court cases that have advanced the ball on forcing the government to recognize the Second Amendment. I wish fervently we could do as much for the Tenth Amendment -- it would be a great start if the government at least admitted it was really in the Constitution and really ought to be binding in some way or other.
Another organization I like is the Gun Owners of America, which insists on a no-compromise position.
All the same, the NRA is about to take it on the chin in the next election cycle. The Obama administration has pledged to make gun control a top issue in his final(!) year in office. Hillary Clinton -- and other Democrats on stage at the first debate -- named the NRA as an "enemy." Whether or not they're the best, it's going to make a huge difference whether or not they can show increasing support as a consequence of this push.
So, today, I signed back up with the National Rifle Association. I want them to be able to point to big increases in membership as the main consequence of the Democratic Party's return to gun control as an issue. We need to keep teaching this lesson until they give up on it. Gun rights are not going anywhere. We will not surrender our liberty for the false promises of government-granted security. The government couldn't keep those promises even if it were wholly serious about them. To be able to do much more than it does it would have to override our rights to privacy and independence.
Even then, it simply can't keep you safe. Just because criminals and terrorists choose their victims carefully, the police will not be there when you need them. Not because they don't want to be -- I think mostly they fervently wish they could be. It's probably why they joined the force. But they can't be. They can only come when they're called, and then it will take as long as it takes.
Finally, a government that truly obtains a monopoly on arms has subjugated its population. No free nation can accept that status. We must never put ourselves in the position in which the government can do whatever it wants to us, and only refrains if it wants to refrain. One person or a small group cannot defend themselves against the government, which is good because it enables the government to keep the peace. Nevertheless, it is in the interest of justice that any government should have to fear mistreating a plurality or majority of its citizens. It is the best thing for everyone if those elected to office know that they will be held responsible for their actions by a people that is ultimately stronger than they are.
It is time to teach that lesson again. They think they want to pick this argument up again. Let's remind them why they'd rather not.
What actually annoys me more than the compromises is the propaganda they run in their magazines. Even on years when it is clear that there are no dangers to gun rights, the NRA's magazines always read like the next Great War is on the horizon. This is for fundraising purposes. I generally maintain membership with them only in years when there really is a danger because it is difficult for me to respect an organization that is not completely honest with its membership.
In terms of better organizations, the Second Amendment Foundation is mentioned prominently for its role in Heller and other court cases that have advanced the ball on forcing the government to recognize the Second Amendment. I wish fervently we could do as much for the Tenth Amendment -- it would be a great start if the government at least admitted it was really in the Constitution and really ought to be binding in some way or other.
Another organization I like is the Gun Owners of America, which insists on a no-compromise position.
All the same, the NRA is about to take it on the chin in the next election cycle. The Obama administration has pledged to make gun control a top issue in his final(!) year in office. Hillary Clinton -- and other Democrats on stage at the first debate -- named the NRA as an "enemy." Whether or not they're the best, it's going to make a huge difference whether or not they can show increasing support as a consequence of this push.
So, today, I signed back up with the National Rifle Association. I want them to be able to point to big increases in membership as the main consequence of the Democratic Party's return to gun control as an issue. We need to keep teaching this lesson until they give up on it. Gun rights are not going anywhere. We will not surrender our liberty for the false promises of government-granted security. The government couldn't keep those promises even if it were wholly serious about them. To be able to do much more than it does it would have to override our rights to privacy and independence.
Even then, it simply can't keep you safe. Just because criminals and terrorists choose their victims carefully, the police will not be there when you need them. Not because they don't want to be -- I think mostly they fervently wish they could be. It's probably why they joined the force. But they can't be. They can only come when they're called, and then it will take as long as it takes.
Finally, a government that truly obtains a monopoly on arms has subjugated its population. No free nation can accept that status. We must never put ourselves in the position in which the government can do whatever it wants to us, and only refrains if it wants to refrain. One person or a small group cannot defend themselves against the government, which is good because it enables the government to keep the peace. Nevertheless, it is in the interest of justice that any government should have to fear mistreating a plurality or majority of its citizens. It is the best thing for everyone if those elected to office know that they will be held responsible for their actions by a people that is ultimately stronger than they are.
It is time to teach that lesson again. They think they want to pick this argument up again. Let's remind them why they'd rather not.
Pilgrimage Update: Success!
I thought it was a dodgy choice to do this in December instead of April as Chaucer recommended, but he claims to have had a Medieval antecedent who left 'on the same day' in 1365. Of course, that was in the Medieval Warm Period! But perhaps God favored his endeavor. Certainly here it's been the mildest winter in a long time.
A former physics teacher has completed a 700-year-old pilgrim's journey using only medieval clothing and equipment. Steven Payne began walking from Southampton's Mayflower Park to Canterbury on 16 December, carrying a goodwill message from the Pope. The 52-year-old slept in his cloak, sometimes in fields and hedgerows or in structures built in medieval times. He was greeted by the mayor of Canterbury and canon of the cathedral when he arrived on Tuesday afternoon.
Armed Protests & Attorneys General
It seems there is widespread agreement even among III Percenters that this Oregon situation is neither the time nor the place for an armed protest. An interesting tidbit uncovered in the readings, though...
As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC officeThat protest was different in a key respect: people needed access to the Columbia ROTC office. This thing was shut down for the winter anyway. Nobody was going to need to use it until sometime in the Spring. It's the sort of place you could stage a protest like this without actually inconveniencing anyone else for at least a few months.
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon.
Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”
What's Going On In Oregon?
Wretchard of the Belmont Club passed this link recently, which I take for an endorsement of it. If, like me, you hadn't heard of this conflict until last night -- well, there turns out to be a lot behind it that you haven't heard yet.
UPDATE: D29 suggests some further reading inside the comments. Here also is Reason on the absurdly harsh sentences, which the 9th Circuit Court upheld on the grounds that they've seen worse. The Constitutional protection withers because the government has gotten by with worse abuses in the past?
UPDATE: D29 suggests some further reading inside the comments. Here also is Reason on the absurdly harsh sentences, which the 9th Circuit Court upheld on the grounds that they've seen worse. The Constitutional protection withers because the government has gotten by with worse abuses in the past?
The Last Segment Is Really Worth Watching
You can skip the rest if you like, but the space exploration bit should be seen.
Reaping the Whirlwind
Fareed Zakaria's notice of the increased death rate in blue-collar white Americans, from suicide and drugs, draws this comment from Glenn Reynolds:
It was the election of two different two-term Democratic presidents who did not enforce immigration laws, and one two-term Republican who was not especially exercised about it, that led to the massive demographic shift over the last three decades. If you elect a President for whom they are a priority, that massive wave of immigrants are still first-generation. They could be expelled, if enough anger is focused upon the matter.
Even without the increased anger, last year more natives of Mexico left the United States than came here. Why not? People have a natural preference for home. If Mexico and other Latin American states improve, many of these people would go home just because they'd rather be there than here. If increasing anger drives a nativism that becomes harsh and unwelcoming, even more people will feel inclined to depart. They'll take their families with them willingly. The demographic 'destiny' would then change, and what Zakaria thinks impossible would become real.
It would, however, be a very ugly time. The expressions of such anger and nativism are not beautiful.
What is driving all this anger? Perhaps it is the fact that the government, under the current administration, is actively taking sides against these workers. It's also the triumphalism of the cultural left, which is openly salivating about being able to put the older, whiter America in the grave. These are choices too, choices with consequences. These people are not fools just because they don't have a college degree. Having less education may make their response more visceral, but it won't keep them from noticing what is being done and who is doing it. They can hear the voices that hate them. They can hear how happy those voices sound when they posit a world in which these American workers and their families are no longer important.
In fact, even if we avoid the period of anger it would be completely unsurprising if America became less 'ethnically diverse' again -- not by changing actual demographics, but by absorbing later-generation immigrants into a new definition of 'the majority.' That has happened to the Irish, to the Germans, to the Italians, to many Jews, and could very easily happen to Latinos as well. There is no reason for us to insist on going through the ugliness that is likely to follow.
Still, avoiding the anger will be hard to do because the anger is not unjustified. It is clear that a generation of policies have been in place to effect this reduction, that new policies are being put in place to further it and cement it, and that the fall of these people and their families is deeply and earnestly desired by the cultural allies of the politicians effecting the policies.
What happens if the anger turns outward? That is indeed the question, and people should give it some thought. It would be wiser and better for those driving the underlying causes of this anger to stop and consider the effects of their actions.
Psychologists say that depression is anger turned inward. What happens if it turns outward?That's the right question. Zakaria misses it completely, being so invested in the narrative that America is becoming more ethnically diverse that he fails to notice that it was an artificial process that could be fairly easily reversed. Nothing can be done but to accept their miserable fate, he suggests:
Working-class whites don’t think of themselves as an elite group. But, in a sense, they have been, certainly compared with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and most immigrants. They were central to America’s economy, its society, indeed its very identity. They are not anymore. Donald Trump has promised that he will change this and make them win again. But he can’t. No one can. And deep down, they know it.In fact, it was an immigration reform act in 1965 that altered America's immigration policies to favor the Third World instead of the First as they had traditionally. Laws that can change one way can change another.
It was the election of two different two-term Democratic presidents who did not enforce immigration laws, and one two-term Republican who was not especially exercised about it, that led to the massive demographic shift over the last three decades. If you elect a President for whom they are a priority, that massive wave of immigrants are still first-generation. They could be expelled, if enough anger is focused upon the matter.
Even without the increased anger, last year more natives of Mexico left the United States than came here. Why not? People have a natural preference for home. If Mexico and other Latin American states improve, many of these people would go home just because they'd rather be there than here. If increasing anger drives a nativism that becomes harsh and unwelcoming, even more people will feel inclined to depart. They'll take their families with them willingly. The demographic 'destiny' would then change, and what Zakaria thinks impossible would become real.
It would, however, be a very ugly time. The expressions of such anger and nativism are not beautiful.
What is driving all this anger? Perhaps it is the fact that the government, under the current administration, is actively taking sides against these workers. It's also the triumphalism of the cultural left, which is openly salivating about being able to put the older, whiter America in the grave. These are choices too, choices with consequences. These people are not fools just because they don't have a college degree. Having less education may make their response more visceral, but it won't keep them from noticing what is being done and who is doing it. They can hear the voices that hate them. They can hear how happy those voices sound when they posit a world in which these American workers and their families are no longer important.
In fact, even if we avoid the period of anger it would be completely unsurprising if America became less 'ethnically diverse' again -- not by changing actual demographics, but by absorbing later-generation immigrants into a new definition of 'the majority.' That has happened to the Irish, to the Germans, to the Italians, to many Jews, and could very easily happen to Latinos as well. There is no reason for us to insist on going through the ugliness that is likely to follow.
Still, avoiding the anger will be hard to do because the anger is not unjustified. It is clear that a generation of policies have been in place to effect this reduction, that new policies are being put in place to further it and cement it, and that the fall of these people and their families is deeply and earnestly desired by the cultural allies of the politicians effecting the policies.
What happens if the anger turns outward? That is indeed the question, and people should give it some thought. It would be wiser and better for those driving the underlying causes of this anger to stop and consider the effects of their actions.
A Year in the Life of Grim
I was thinking back this evening on how much 2015 has been a difficult year. I decided it would be good to go back through my photographs from the year to find some things to be grateful for. It has been a difficult year in several respects, but it turns out that it I had a great year that somehow ran concurrently with the difficult one. I'm glad I looked back. Here's hoping 2016 is a good year, too.
Islam and "America"
An interesting simile:
What is America? What does it mean to be an American? It seems as if there are at least some wrong answers, so the question isn't meaningless. It seems as if it might overlap with many of the answers one might give to the question "What is Islam?" That's not a meaningless question either, again because there are at least some wrong answers. A problem is that some of the right answers to the second question are wrong answers to the first, and vice-versa.
Can the celebration of wine drinking be Islamic? To Ahmed, the answer is: obviously, yes. It is Islamic insofar as this celebration is expressed, for example, in the terms of such classical Sufi metaphors for “the experience of intoxication with the Divine,” as well as the more mundane recognition of wine’s virtues as a social lubricant. The extensive medical literature of the premodern Islamic world attests openly to the latter fact. As the 10th-century physician and philosopher Abu Zayd al-Balkhi put it, “It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation…and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and effectively as does drinking wine together.”The whole article is worth reading, actually. But I'm struck by this particularly. "What is Islam?" then becomes a question like "What is America?" It's a surprisingly all-encompassing question without any easy answers. John Wayne, in describing his love for America, dwelt on her physical beauty. Clearly, from his movies, that wasn't all he loved about America. Trying to figure out what America was and what it ought to be is a major theme of many of his movies, especially the Ford productions like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
To say that wine drinking is un-Islamic may be akin to saying that the refusal to serve in the military during a period of wartime conscription is un-American. In the view of some citizens, such a refusal may well violate the essence of Americanness, in addition to violating American law; to others, however, this act may rather fulfill and epitomize the requirements of citizenship. By Ahmed’s logic, the refusal to serve in the military is not just American in spite of its opposition to other, contradictory values associated with Americanness, but precisely because of it.
What is America? What does it mean to be an American? It seems as if there are at least some wrong answers, so the question isn't meaningless. It seems as if it might overlap with many of the answers one might give to the question "What is Islam?" That's not a meaningless question either, again because there are at least some wrong answers. A problem is that some of the right answers to the second question are wrong answers to the first, and vice-versa.
Bill Cosby Charged
I don't mean to imply by this post that he is not innocent until proven guilty, but I am encouraged to see such a celebrity brought before the courts given the serious and not incredible charges against him. I hope the process will be thorough and fair, the truth arrived at, and justice done.
May power and political connections also prove to be impotent as a bar to justice.
May power and political connections also prove to be impotent as a bar to justice.
Fool Me Once, Shame on You
Richard J. Davis thinks Hillary Clinton should set some ethical standards for herself.
She broke it.
Why would we be convinced that she was going to keep an agreement with herself, when she didn't keep a written and allegedly binding agreement with the President of the United States?
The reason that nearly sixty percent of Americans say that Clinton is dishonest is because she is dishonest.
How dishonest? "In a league of her own."
Nobody should be fooled by any statements about ethics coming from the former Secretary of State. They're no more trustworthy than any of her other statements -- or her signature on a legal document.
This then may be the ideal time for Clinton proactively to take steps to minimize the potential damage to her candidacy from other sources of controversy: the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees earned by former President Clinton. Such steps need to include significant restrictions on who the foundation will accept donations from as well as on where the former president will speak for money.The thing is, Clinton did set an ethical standard for herself when taking the job of Secretary of State. It was a written agreement she signed with the incoming Obama administration.
Taking these steps now is particularly important for Hillary Clinton because one area where her poll numbers remain problematic is whether she is viewed as honest and trustworthy....
It is important to understand that the issue regarding the Clinton Foundation is not whether the foundation is (or was) a conduit for illegal bribes and it certainly is not about whether the foundation does truly humanitarian work. I am not aware of serious evidence that the former is the case.
She broke it.
Why would we be convinced that she was going to keep an agreement with herself, when she didn't keep a written and allegedly binding agreement with the President of the United States?
The reason that nearly sixty percent of Americans say that Clinton is dishonest is because she is dishonest.
How dishonest? "In a league of her own."
Nobody should be fooled by any statements about ethics coming from the former Secretary of State. They're no more trustworthy than any of her other statements -- or her signature on a legal document.
No Reason the President Shouldn't Spy on Congress, Right?
I mean, many of them are members of the political opposition -- and talking with foreigners, no less. Obviously the President needs to know what they're saying.
To-may-to, To-mah-to
From an amusing list of 'best (or worst) media corrections of 2015.'
“Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.” --- The Dallas Morning News.I also like this line from one of the corrections: "There is nothing to be gained in trying to explain how the error occurred." I'll have to save that one to use on my wife.
Waco Update: Defense Lawyer Barred Access to Evidence
...unless he agrees to sign a release form that forbids him to discuss the evidence with the press.
Callahan’s motion states he has not been able to receive the information, after numerous requests, because he won’t sign a condition of release regarding talking to the media....So it's not that we don't want to taint the jury pool by having the matter discussed before the trial. It's that we want to make sure our tainting of the jury pool goes unchallenged.
The motion states District Attorney Abel Reyna should not be allowed to limit the release of evidence based on an agreement regarding media after he gave an extensive TV interview explicitly designed to erode the defendants’ presumption of innocence.
Magical Thinking Is Good For You!
A satire, sort of.
I’m not just talking about vaccines, but we can start there. A lot of people have judged us harshly in recent days for not vaccinating our nine young children. That’s fine. I myself was held down and vaccinated when I was young. I understand that vaccines bolster vulnerable immune systems by stimulating your body’s natural defenses... And if you want to live and die by the wholly effective, risk-free, and affordable breakthroughs that Western medicine has produced, that’s fine. That’s your right.
But don’t expect me to come along on that joyride of lies.
...
Whenever a friend gets cancer, I make sure to tell her about the power of vitamin C and a can-do attitude. I’ve lost so many friends to the acidic nightmare of chemotherapy. They’re still alive; we just don’t talk anymore. Thanks a lot, Big Pharma.
Don’t get me started about sugar. Don’t get me started about gluten. Don’t get me started about mercury or fluoride. Because I will literally never stop talking about it.
The Rule of Law
Not a good in itself.
ISIS clearly thinks it is doing something moral here by regulating away the worst practices of its fighters, and thus mandating that they treat the women they take as slaves with 'compassion,' both while raping them and at other times. In fact, they have codified the worst abuses into the law: the slavery and the rape themselves. Now the law will permit them to feel good about themselves for avoiding a few bad practices in the performance of their monstrosities.
Fatwa 64, which effectively justifies the systematic rape of women and girls, says it is necessary to set out rules because "one of the inevitable consequences of the jihad of establishment is that women and children of infidels will become captives of Muslims".The confusion is easy to fall into. Aristotle himself says that justice is lawfulness plus fairness, to paraphrase very loosely, and it can thus kind of sound like obedience to the law is a good in and of itself. But that isn't really what he means: on a closer reading, he means to say that it is good to obey the law if the law is properly structured.
Among the disturbing list of rules are that 'owners' of mother and daughter captives, or sister captives cannot have intercourse with both and that owners and their sons cannot have intercourse with the same woman captive.
They also state that owners should not cause the captive women to abort if they are pregnant, should not sell her to an owner they know will treat her badly and should treat her with "compassion"....
In order to deal with the women captured by fighters, IS has established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery.
Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour. And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and 'neither evening nor morning star' is so wonderful; and proverbially 'in justice is every virtue comprehended'. And it is complete virtue in its fullest sense, because it is the actual exercise of complete virtue. It is complete because he who possesses it can exercise his virtue not only in himself but towards his neighbour also; for many men can exercise virtue in their own affairs, but not in their relations to their neighbour.Emphasis added. Law is justice insofar as it commands the behavior that virtue itself would command. In that way, obeying the law is complete virtue from the perspective of your neighbors: though it does not insist on your virtue in private matters, where neighbors are concerned, a rightly-formed law mandates that you act rightly toward them.
ISIS clearly thinks it is doing something moral here by regulating away the worst practices of its fighters, and thus mandating that they treat the women they take as slaves with 'compassion,' both while raping them and at other times. In fact, they have codified the worst abuses into the law: the slavery and the rape themselves. Now the law will permit them to feel good about themselves for avoiding a few bad practices in the performance of their monstrosities.
Mutiny?
So you might think, from reading Reuters' report on Gitmo.
In general, that's not a bad thing. It's good if the military is restrained by the law. Places where it has not been have not always turned out well. Willingness to obey 'the leader's orders' instead of the law is not healthy.
Besides, there's this:
With judgment like this, it would not be surprising if a few feet got drug in the Pentagon.
Since Obama took office in 2009, these people said, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo.The problem is, the actual things the report cites sound like genuine legal concerns. A big part of this may be the President's penchant for ignoring inconvenient laws running up against the military's penchant for running everything by the SJA as an ordinary part of the staffing process. It's hard to get the Pentagon to do things that are legal but only questionably so, or debatably so. Even at lower levels of organization a lot of cover needs to be available before people take risky actions. The closer you get to the guy on the field of battle, the more freedom there is. The higher you go, the more the legal structure ossifies and the decision-making process becomes averse to running legal risks.
Negotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like "punching a pillow," said James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen."...
When the State Department added the four Afghans to a list of detainees prioritized for transfer in the summer of 2013, Defense Department officials resisted. At a meeting at the Pentagon, a mid-level Defense Department official said transferring the four "might be the president's priority, but it's not the Pentagon's priority or the priority of the people in this building," according to current and former administration officials present at the meeting.
In general, that's not a bad thing. It's good if the military is restrained by the law. Places where it has not been have not always turned out well. Willingness to obey 'the leader's orders' instead of the law is not healthy.
Besides, there's this:
Afterwards, State Department officials began referring to them as the "JV four" or "Junior Varsity four," for their seeming lack of importance to Taliban fighters.Hmm, there's that "JV" again. I understand that none of these people apparently have military experience, so that college or high-school metaphors are all that work for their thought process. But don't you understand that the Junior Varsity often becomes the Varsity later in their career? That's why schools bother with a JV team: as a training ground and feeder for future star players on the big field.
With judgment like this, it would not be surprising if a few feet got drug in the Pentagon.
Against the Royal Presidency
Charles C. W. Cooke:
As I write, the president of the United States is openly promising to finish off his second term with a flurry of extraconstitutional activity. By the power invested in his “pen and phone,” Barack Obama intends to wield his “executive authority” in order to institute a set of environmental rules that the people’s representatives have declined to grant him; to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in direct defiance of Congress’s will; and to further circumvent a series of immigration laws that have been on the books for decades.It's a good point. Everyone has been mocking Mrs. Clinton's claim that "I wouldn't keep any school open that wasn't doing a better-than-average job" on the grounds of its innumeracy. What strikes me about it is her assumption that, as President, she would of course have the power to close a local school if it failed to perform.
Tamir Rice Killing: No Charges For Police
I find this decision surprising given that Ohio, where the shooting occurred, is an open carry state. Now, children are not allowed to open carry in Ohio: an unaccompanied child carrying a pistol would be cause for concern. However, in order to realize that it was a child and not an adult carrying the pistol, you would first have to take note of the fact that you were dealing with an unaccompanied child.
So if it were an adult carrying a gun in the park, given the open carry law there is no reason to presume criminal intent. If it is a child carrying the gun, there is no reason to treat the case as being threatening in the way that an adult with a gun would be. The officers' defense is that they thought the child was an adult, and that the child appeared to draw the firearm. That may well be true.
However, that's odd: normally the defense is not presented to the grand jury. Normally the grand jury would hear: the child wasn't breaking any laws, even if the child looked like an adult the pistol they were carrying might well have been legal under the law, and yet the child was shot dead so immediately that the shooter's judgment is unlikely to meet the rational-man test. That would get you charges, and you'd work out at trial whether the defense was sufficient to find that the accused were not guilty of those charges.
It's going to be hard to convince people that this isn't a rigged game when the standards are so different. You can say that it's about the law enforcement system protecting its members and not about race, maybe, by pointing at the Waco shootout as evidence that being white doesn't always help you much: there the police shot at least four of the nine dead with rifles, but the only people facing indictment are bikers whom the DA apparently can't tie to any specific act of violence at all. The system just doesn't work when the police are behind the trigger.
Still, this was a child.
UPDATE: Allahpundit reminds me of why this seemed familiar to me:
It's hard to endorse the standard if it is not anything like evenly applied.
So if it were an adult carrying a gun in the park, given the open carry law there is no reason to presume criminal intent. If it is a child carrying the gun, there is no reason to treat the case as being threatening in the way that an adult with a gun would be. The officers' defense is that they thought the child was an adult, and that the child appeared to draw the firearm. That may well be true.
However, that's odd: normally the defense is not presented to the grand jury. Normally the grand jury would hear: the child wasn't breaking any laws, even if the child looked like an adult the pistol they were carrying might well have been legal under the law, and yet the child was shot dead so immediately that the shooter's judgment is unlikely to meet the rational-man test. That would get you charges, and you'd work out at trial whether the defense was sufficient to find that the accused were not guilty of those charges.
It's going to be hard to convince people that this isn't a rigged game when the standards are so different. You can say that it's about the law enforcement system protecting its members and not about race, maybe, by pointing at the Waco shootout as evidence that being white doesn't always help you much: there the police shot at least four of the nine dead with rifles, but the only people facing indictment are bikers whom the DA apparently can't tie to any specific act of violence at all. The system just doesn't work when the police are behind the trigger.
Still, this was a child.
UPDATE: Allahpundit reminds me of why this seemed familiar to me:
But that’s half the story. The other half is the fact that the county prosecutor, Timothy McGinty, extended these two cops the same exceptional courtesy that Darren Wilson received in the shooting of Michael Brown — namely, he presented all the facts to the grand jury instead of only those facts most beneficial to the prosecution’s side. That’s good procedure, as it means someone who’s likely to be found not guilty at trial can go free sooner due to lack of probable cause. Wilson, who was cleared by Obama’s DOJ in the Brown shooting, is a perfect example. But only a very few lucky souls, usually police officers facing high-profile charges of excessive force, seem to benefit from that sort of prosecutorial diligence.At the time, I remember saying that this is what we should always do -- and that the shame was that we so rarely do it. How many of those Waco indictments would have been thrown out if the prosecutor presented the full facts (such as, for example, the fact that they apparently have no idea precisely who shot anyone)?
It's hard to endorse the standard if it is not anything like evenly applied.
Motörhead Mourns
Let us pause to note the passing of Motörhead's Lemmy Kilmister, who has died at the age of 70.
UPDATE: Just to archive this photo, as a reason to like the old rocker.
UPDATE: Just to archive this photo, as a reason to like the old rocker.
Four Views of the Good Life
Brief summaries only, but not bad introductions. Here is Aristotle's, which is of course the best one:
The others are Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche, the most recent being the least decent.
The others are Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche, the most recent being the least decent.
Monstrous Heroes
This focuses on the Icelandic sagas, but it's a feature of Northern European literature more generally. Culhwch and Olwen, which appears in both the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rydderch, has a long list of Arthurian heroes many of whom have monstrous qualities.
The Feast of Holy Innocents
I wrote about this last year. It is a somber moment in the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Great news in medicine
I'm late, as usual
I wanted to post this on St. Stephen's Day, but I got caught up with doing nothing all weekend. So enjoy:
St. Stephen's Day
The day after Christmas is St. Stephen's Day, who has the honor of the appointment because he was the first Christian martyr (unless one counts Christ himself). Thanks to the Clancy Brothers, however, I always think of it as Wren Day.
Hey ho! for the day after!
Home again and glad of it: up and back in one day is a long haul. Our neighbor was kind enough to let the dogs out twice and feed them, though one was on strike and nearly refused to go out till we got back. They sure don't like it when we leave.
All kinds of food gifts have to go straight to my church or maybe one of the local nursing homes. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here!" Not that I didn't appreciate the food gifts enormously, but in the real world I can fit a couple of bites of each into any fathomable food budget, and the rest need to do their excellent work under another roof.
At Christmas dinner, two of my young male relatives admitted to weeping during the screening of the new Star Wars epic. So OK, OK, I'll go see it. Here is how Ken Burns would tell the story of "Star Wars."
All kinds of food gifts have to go straight to my church or maybe one of the local nursing homes. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here!" Not that I didn't appreciate the food gifts enormously, but in the real world I can fit a couple of bites of each into any fathomable food budget, and the rest need to do their excellent work under another roof.
At Christmas dinner, two of my young male relatives admitted to weeping during the screening of the new Star Wars epic. So OK, OK, I'll go see it. Here is how Ken Burns would tell the story of "Star Wars."
Hey! For Christmas!
We were late to midnight Mass, because I had relied on my memory about when it started instead of checking. It was a pleasant Christmas Eve, though, filled with Christmas tradition. This morning the family all gathered for joy and company, which lasted through a late lunch feast.
My sister declined to drink any of the gallon of Christmas mead I made for her, because she announced that she was with child. The mead will be even better next Christmas. She has had grave difficulty in the past, so I hope she will this time both mother and child shall come through whole and hale. If so, we can toast the birth with the mead we would have drunk this year.
I hope you have all had a fine Christmas Day, and will have the opportunity to pursue the Christmas joy throughout at least some of each of the traditional twelve days of the feast.
My sister declined to drink any of the gallon of Christmas mead I made for her, because she announced that she was with child. The mead will be even better next Christmas. She has had grave difficulty in the past, so I hope she will this time both mother and child shall come through whole and hale. If so, we can toast the birth with the mead we would have drunk this year.
I hope you have all had a fine Christmas Day, and will have the opportunity to pursue the Christmas joy throughout at least some of each of the traditional twelve days of the feast.
Drinking (And Some Singing) With Bing and Frank
They used to know how to throw a party, back in that old America.
The Hall Christmas Party Is Completely Voluntary
No kidding.
"Hey listen gentlemen, it’s totally up to you to attend,” said CSM Marc A. Scott during the course of an hour-long briefing. “We want people there that actually want to be there and have fun.... That being said, we’ll be having a quick accountability formation in front of Vapiano at 1925,” he said. “Yes, I know this might be a bit of inconvenience for an accountability formation being at the venue and not on post, but it’s still expected.”Nobody needs to bring me a bottle of my favorite beer or whiskey who attends, either. That's completely left to your discretion.
...
“Also, don’t forget, there’s a mandatory recall for clean up detail at 2130. You might want to show up ten minutes early for that. Sober. Sergeant Major doesn’t want any DUIs now. You all know the Polizei doesn’t play. The MPs and Sergeant Major don’t either. FYI, those attending will be given a four-day. Those not attending will have a room inspection with full field lay out."
Join the Virginia Citizens Defense League
I don't know if any readers live in Virginia, but their anti-gun governor just announced an end to reciprocity with 25 states on firearms carry permits. Virginia is an interesting state on gun rights issues. It's the home of the NRA, but it actually has more restrictive laws than most American states on firearms carry. The large population of Washington, D.C. government employees drives politics in the northeastern part of the state much farther to the left, and to affection for government as a solution to problems, than is common elsewhere in the state. The southern and western parts of the state thus end up living under laws that are quite different from the ones they would choose for themselves.
For those of you who may live there, though, the best organization pointed at the state-level gun laws is not the NRA, but the Virginia Citizens' Defense League (VCDL). I used to be a member when I lived up there, and I find them to be deeply engaged with the state legislature and local politics in a helpful way. It will be difficult for anyone to undo the governor's executive decision until the next gubernatorial elections, just as it is hard to undo the President's series of executive orders via a Congress that has to get past his veto. Nevertheless, if anyone is going to be successful in restoring your rights, VCDL is the organization.
Their website seems to be having some issues this morning due to heavy traffic, which is a good sign. Check back through the day or tomorrow as necessary.
In the meantime, residents of Virginia who may lose the right to carry in other states if those states retaliate may pursue a permit in Florida, which is widely accepted nationwide. Residents of other states who have to travel to Virginia may obtain a nonresident permit that is specific to Virginia. So there are workarounds to this executive order, which are attainable at the cost of a few extra tax dollars payable to another state.
For those of you who may live there, though, the best organization pointed at the state-level gun laws is not the NRA, but the Virginia Citizens' Defense League (VCDL). I used to be a member when I lived up there, and I find them to be deeply engaged with the state legislature and local politics in a helpful way. It will be difficult for anyone to undo the governor's executive decision until the next gubernatorial elections, just as it is hard to undo the President's series of executive orders via a Congress that has to get past his veto. Nevertheless, if anyone is going to be successful in restoring your rights, VCDL is the organization.
Their website seems to be having some issues this morning due to heavy traffic, which is a good sign. Check back through the day or tomorrow as necessary.
In the meantime, residents of Virginia who may lose the right to carry in other states if those states retaliate may pursue a permit in Florida, which is widely accepted nationwide. Residents of other states who have to travel to Virginia may obtain a nonresident permit that is specific to Virginia. So there are workarounds to this executive order, which are attainable at the cost of a few extra tax dollars payable to another state.
My Inner Language Curmudgeon Comes Out
Recently, I read Michael Walsh's The Devil's Pleasure Palace, and in a few spots he uses the biblical metaphor of "new wine in old bottles." Grrr.
Although. Some translations do have it this way, with a footnote that the bottles are actually wineskins. Still, the metaphor isn't clear in these terms. If you didn't already know, it would be natural to ask "What's wrong with new wine in old bottles, as long as they've been properly washed?"
It's like the world has a vendetta against clarity.
Then, today, Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit posts:
This, however, is going too far. Much too far. And Sarah hails from Europe, and all Europeans are wine experts, so there's no excuse for this!
Here's Matthew 9:17:
Anyway, you probably knew this, but I had to get it out of my system. Blame Grim; he gave me posting privileges.
Although. Some translations do have it this way, with a footnote that the bottles are actually wineskins. Still, the metaphor isn't clear in these terms. If you didn't already know, it would be natural to ask "What's wrong with new wine in old bottles, as long as they've been properly washed?"
It's like the world has a vendetta against clarity.
Then, today, Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit posts:
NEW WINE IN OLD CASKS: Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark public schools failed miserably — here’s where it went wrong.
This, however, is going too far. Much too far. And Sarah hails from Europe, and all Europeans are wine experts, so there's no excuse for this!
Here's Matthew 9:17:
What does it mean? Different commentaries have different explanations, but I like the explanation that it is a reminder to keep an open mind. It's amusing to think of the brains of the close-minded bursting and dribbling out when confronted with new ideas."... Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
Anyway, you probably knew this, but I had to get it out of my system. Blame Grim; he gave me posting privileges.
Well, That's Encouraging
The Obama administration insists that it is safe to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees because we have “very extensive screening procedures” in place. “It involves our intelligence community, our national counterterrorism center, extensive interviews, vetting them against all the available information,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes recently declared.
He left out one fact: Those screening procedures are so broken that, State Department records show, they let in more than four times as many suspected terrorists as they keep out.
Fairbairn-Sykes V. KA-BAR
An article on the different philosophies behind the two classic designs. It's from the HROARR site for Historical European Martial Arts. It turns out that there's a Marine Corps connection to nearly all of these blades, even the famous British one -- Fairbairn and Sykes worked with a USMC Lieutenant on the design in Shanghai, one Sylvester Yeaton.
Here's an old commando telling stories about the Fairbairn-Sykes blade.
Here's an old commando telling stories about the Fairbairn-Sykes blade.
Former Marine Tells DMV His USMC Cap Is Religious Headdress
DMV buys it.
Snopes looked into it, and doesn't seem to find anything to dispute about the facts. The author of the piece doesn't sound too happy about it, though.
Snopes looked into it, and doesn't seem to find anything to dispute about the facts. The author of the piece doesn't sound too happy about it, though.
"In Hopes That St. Marx Would Never Be There"
A Marxist Christmas from Existential Comics.
UPDATE: Read alongside this story for a pleasant, ironic twist.
UPDATE: Read alongside this story for a pleasant, ironic twist.
Losing Faith in Democracy
I am this morning reading two very different sources claiming that Americans and our European allies are losing faith in democracy. One is the left-wing Vox, which might be dismissed if it were alone, but the other is Defense One considering the fight against Islamic extremism. That's a different enough source and context that it makes the claim worth considering.
Vox gives as its evidence five propositions. The first is that Americans trust our political institutions less. This is true. We talk about the "Confidence in Institutions" poll every year, and it's been a disastrous couple of decades for American institutions for the most part. However, it isn't just the political institutions that Americans trust less. Only three institutions garner majority trust: the military, small business, and the police. Two of those are government institutions, but not democratic ones -- coercive ones. The Federal institutions garner less than a third of voters for the Executive/Judicial branches, with Congress only getting 8% trust.
The general trend in that poll, though, has been for Americans to trust institutions in general less. Banks are down from the upper 50s to the 20s; organized religion from the 60s to the 40s. Public schools are down from the upper 50s to the upper 20s. Newspapers are down from around forty percent to the 25 percent range.
The police and the military are mostly unchanged, which is the real mark of their success. The military's historic low came after Vietnam, but with the odd high attached to momentary military victories, it's been right around where it is. The police are 52% in the beginning, 52% now. Faith in the criminal justice system is very low, but it's improved over the years: Americans expressing confidence in that institution rose from the teens into the twenties.
So it seems as if the issue isn't democracy, here, it's a collapsing faith in institutions generally. That could indicate a rising tide of individualism, which has certainly been observed during the same period (the mid-1970s to the present).
Next up is "young Americans giving up on politics." Eh, youngsters have always been bad about showing up to vote. That's generally good for democracy, as they don't yet understand the world they live in. This is proven by the third argument, which has to do with whether young people perceive it as "essential" to live in a democracy. Far fewer do than their elders -- but that's how they've been educated. They've also been taught to believe a lot of other nonsense they'll sort out in the real world. The other propositions they offer about America are for increasing support for fringe positions ("I hope the military takes over" garners support from 1 in 6 -- but it's a proposition I'll bet is disproportionately disfavored by actual veterans of the military).
What about the Defense One argument?
My sense is that the real fear isn't that democracy may be losing strength, but that the people may be electing the wrong kind of candidates. Both authors suggest that the rise of right-wing nativist parties represents an enemy of democracy or at least of 'the universal values of liberalism.' That's not clear to me. It may be that one of the universal values is love of home, love of country, love of the way of life that is one's own. That's not incompatible with liberalism. It is incompatible with overarching super-governments that force everyone to live by all and only the same rules and not enforce border controls.
That's the common flaw of the US Federal government and the EU right now. The reaction against both is, I think, fundamentally democratic. It's the people who are furious about it, and who are going to the polls to try and stop it. They are doing so by electing political parties that organize for the purpose of running in democratic elections.
Someone is losing faith in democracy, but it isn't these people.
Vox gives as its evidence five propositions. The first is that Americans trust our political institutions less. This is true. We talk about the "Confidence in Institutions" poll every year, and it's been a disastrous couple of decades for American institutions for the most part. However, it isn't just the political institutions that Americans trust less. Only three institutions garner majority trust: the military, small business, and the police. Two of those are government institutions, but not democratic ones -- coercive ones. The Federal institutions garner less than a third of voters for the Executive/Judicial branches, with Congress only getting 8% trust.
The general trend in that poll, though, has been for Americans to trust institutions in general less. Banks are down from the upper 50s to the 20s; organized religion from the 60s to the 40s. Public schools are down from the upper 50s to the upper 20s. Newspapers are down from around forty percent to the 25 percent range.
The police and the military are mostly unchanged, which is the real mark of their success. The military's historic low came after Vietnam, but with the odd high attached to momentary military victories, it's been right around where it is. The police are 52% in the beginning, 52% now. Faith in the criminal justice system is very low, but it's improved over the years: Americans expressing confidence in that institution rose from the teens into the twenties.
So it seems as if the issue isn't democracy, here, it's a collapsing faith in institutions generally. That could indicate a rising tide of individualism, which has certainly been observed during the same period (the mid-1970s to the present).
Next up is "young Americans giving up on politics." Eh, youngsters have always been bad about showing up to vote. That's generally good for democracy, as they don't yet understand the world they live in. This is proven by the third argument, which has to do with whether young people perceive it as "essential" to live in a democracy. Far fewer do than their elders -- but that's how they've been educated. They've also been taught to believe a lot of other nonsense they'll sort out in the real world. The other propositions they offer about America are for increasing support for fringe positions ("I hope the military takes over" garners support from 1 in 6 -- but it's a proposition I'll bet is disproportionately disfavored by actual veterans of the military).
What about the Defense One argument?
You can’t beat a surging ideology with no ideology or higher sense of purpose. In the face of the persistent challenge of violent Islamist extremism and the global recession of freedom, what the world has needed is a powerful reaffirmation of the universal relevance of liberal values. Instead, the democratic West has been retreating into moral relativism and illiberal impulses.Hm, now that does sound familiar. Even here in America, we've seen some evidence if "moral relativism" and "illiberal impulses" from the ruling party. Rigged votes are the order of the day in Congress -- the Iran deal, for example, was an exercise in pretending from start to finish. The Clinton campaign's weekend ploy with the DNC is another example, but the Clinton strategy is fundamentally anti-democratic: the real strength of her campaign is in having used a political machine to round up the superdelegates of the party, making it nearly impossible for actual voters to choose another candidate than her. The DNC has structured itself in such a way as to insulate itself from democracy.
The assault on liberal values has been a defining feature of the democratic recession. During the past decade, democracy has typically ended not with tanks rolling in the streets or the president shutting down parliament, but rather in suffocating increments: with a regime steadily rigging elections, limiting opposition rights, taming independent media, and criminalizing the work of independent organizations.
My sense is that the real fear isn't that democracy may be losing strength, but that the people may be electing the wrong kind of candidates. Both authors suggest that the rise of right-wing nativist parties represents an enemy of democracy or at least of 'the universal values of liberalism.' That's not clear to me. It may be that one of the universal values is love of home, love of country, love of the way of life that is one's own. That's not incompatible with liberalism. It is incompatible with overarching super-governments that force everyone to live by all and only the same rules and not enforce border controls.
That's the common flaw of the US Federal government and the EU right now. The reaction against both is, I think, fundamentally democratic. It's the people who are furious about it, and who are going to the polls to try and stop it. They are doing so by electing political parties that organize for the purpose of running in democratic elections.
Someone is losing faith in democracy, but it isn't these people.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)