"Racially Conscious" Without Being "Racist"?

I'm not convinced that the concept of "race" refers to anything real. Indeed, I am convinced it is a concept that was created to justify the re-introduction of slavery to Europe following its elimination by Christianity, once Portugal developed new trade routes to a West Africa that was hungry for trade but that had nothing much of value to offer but other human beings.

Still, the New Republic is pretty invested in the idea that race is real at least for some people, and that a connection to others of one's race -- performed at the ballot box -- yields something like social justice. So it's interesting to see them talking this way.

In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics”—an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.

Fair enough, I guess, but what are those interests? A defense of mores, of home, of culture? Aren't we usually told that having that interest is per se racist, as it suggests that one prefers (or worse, thinks superior) one's own versus another's culture or mores?

Green Party Endorses Trump Over Clinton

It's from Daily Kos, but it does sound like they're right on the facts.

The Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, posted today on Facebook a link to an “Open Letter from the Social Media Director of the Stein/Baraka Campaign,” by someone whose name was given only as “Jillian.” The message reads:

…A Clinton presidency is D A N G E R O U S … If a Trump presidency would mean that we have to fight ignorants in the streets—I’m ready for that. “

Stein commented “I couldn’t have said it better.”

Not even the “we have to fight ignorants in the street” part, Jill? Is that a call to a gang fight or a misspelling?

Literary criticism aside, I consider this sufficiently official. Journalists have been pushing Stein to answer this question throughout the campaign; it has now been answered.

Stein has been increasingly preparing her followers and the public for this idea over the last few weeks. She tweeted on Oct. 14:

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump’s, who does not want to go to war with Russia. #PeaceOffensive

She retweeted an article by her running mate Ajamu Baraka on Oct 15 titled “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump,” which states:

The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.

and on Oct. 16 retweeted Baraka’s tweet:

Expecting people of color to fear Donald Trump after all we’ve been through the last 200 years, is absurd.

On Oct. 21 she posted on Facebook an article titled:

What’s scarier than Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s plans to gut Social Security

Greens have been spreading this message heavily on social media and in articles like this that state “Donald Trump as president will do ‘less damage‘.”

The Greens are pretty radical -- I spent a lot of time with them up in Philadelphia during the DNC. Fun folks, to be sure. A lot of them were willing to come on board the Democrats for Bernie, but have the (quite accurate) sense that the DNC was rigging its process to make sure he never had a chance. A Trump protest vote would be natural for them, in a way.

And it really is the protest vote, this year. There is no one more establishment than the Clintons at this point. The whole establishment has bowed down to them, and rendered them all possible service.

Lin Carter on Conan the Barbarian

Lin Carter was most famously a writer of science fiction and sword & sorcery, but he was also a US Army infantry veteran of the Korean war. I happened across an introduction he wrote for a book building out the Conan mythology with L. Sprague de Camp. The introduction was authored in 1971, long enough ago that the book could be dedicated to "the greatest living creator of swordsplay-and-sorcery, J. R. R. Tolkien."

Even then, it seems, Carter felt it was necessary to justify the project. The justification sounds shockingly familiar.

These days, many people, including (alas!) many of my fellow science-fiction writers, seem to feel it is somehow vaguely immoral to read purely for pleasure. A story, say these wise men, should really come to grips with something critical and important, like the oil slick on Laguna Beach, or the vanishing Yellowcrested Sandpiper. At very least, such persons advise, the hero should be a Negro striving to free his people, a homosexual gaily battling for social recognition, a concerned college youth protesting the iniquities of the Pentagon by blowing up his English Lit class, or an Amerindian getting back at the paleskins by seizing control of Alcatraz.

He goes on to say that he doesn't think this is necessary, and that in any case he doubts that his generation or the next one will solve any of the social problems afflicting society. I suspect his contemporaries, looking back on recent history, would say that they are justified by the subsequent progress on social recognition for gays at least; perhaps in other ways.

Still, I transmit his words because they go to show just how long this conversation has lasted. It's not at all new: 1971 is now 45 years ago, and the fight over making sure that all the heroes are this-or-that minority resisting this-or-that oppression is still going strong.

In any case, it perhaps explains some of the attraction of barbarism. 45 years is a long time to be lectured -- longer, indeed, than most of the American population has been alive.

The Feast of All Saints

On this day, how appropriate that we can read about a very recent excavation of Jesus' tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I was there in 2014, and it is quite a site. As with the archaeologists who followed up on the legends of Troy, or the similar ones who were amazed to discover how precisely the Beowulf preserved descriptions of war-gear that would have been ancient when the poem was written, scientists who followed up were surprised by the accuracy of the tradition:

Researchers have continued their investigation into the site where the body of Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been buried, and their preliminary findings appear to confirm that portions of the tomb are still present today, having survived centuries of damage, destruction, and reconstruction of the surrounding Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City....

When the marble cladding was first removed on the night of October 26, an initial inspection by the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of fill material underneath. However, as researchers continued their nonstop work over the course of 60 hours, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. By the night of October 28, just hours before the tomb was to be resealed, the original limestone burial bed was revealed intact.

"I'm absolutely amazed. My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn't expecting this,” said Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic's archaeologist-in-residence. "We can't say 100 percent, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered for decades."

Fixing the Culture

The author of Hillbilly Elegy offers his thoughts at the end of a longer interview.

This is a problem that government can help with, but it can’t be the only solution to a number of these issues. So where I would like to think it leaves us is that each individual actor in a community is going to have a different view on how to address some of these problems.

An individual parent should pick up the book and think maybe the way I’m interacting with my kid is causing a lot of problems down the road and maybe I should try to do it a little bit better. Maybe a social worker picks up the book and says, this is the reality of how these folks are living, maybe this changes how I approach my work. Maybe a church pastor picks up the book and says look, it’s really problematic that there are so few poor kids in our churches, but there are a ton of upper- and middle-income kids in our churches — maybe I need to go out and minister to the least of these as Christ said.

There's also a diagnosis of what he thinks the left, and the right, get wrong about culture.

"Clinton Voters are Naive"

So says Molly Ball, who nevertheless seems sympathetic in a way. Not blindly so, however.

Everything that came out seemed to confirm the worst suspicions.

Her paranoid opponents said she was a part of the elite globalist cabal secretly plotting to impose one-world government by surrendering national sovereignty. And there she was, according to emails between her advisers hacked and released by Wikileaks, telling a Brazilian bank in 2013, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” She was paid $225,000 for the speech. (The campaign has not confirmed that the emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta are authentic, but many of them have been corroborated by third parties.)

Her critics had long charged that she said whatever people wanted to hear, and there she was saying behind closed doors that when it comes to policymaking, “You need both a public and a private position.” They said she was a member of the out-of-touch elite, and there she was saying she was “kind of far removed” from regular people’s struggles. They said she was too cozy with wealthy donors, and there she was telling the CEO of Goldman Sachs that she feels sorry for rich people, because “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”

In a Democratic debate in April, Bernie Sanders charged that while he was introducing legislation to break up the banks that caused the financial crisis, “Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.” And sure enough, the hacked emails showed...

This goes on for quite a while. There's a very long list of ways in which her critics have been proven right about everything.

Still, she says: "The people who believe in Clinton are naive enough to think she might actually make things better."

But why would she use her power against these things, when these things are the very source of her power?

The Scandal at the Heart of the Campaign

It is the existence of a ruling class, writes Thomas Frank:

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves....

In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery)....

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Emphasis added.

John Yoo Makes a Quick Comment on Comey

He says Comey was wrong on his reading of the statutes, wrong to make the announcement he did last summer, and wrong again to violate DOJ internal guidelines and historical practice now by announcing a re-opening of the investigation.

His reasoning is at the link, but I respect Yoo as a lawyer.

Um, admittedly, part of that respect came from watching him tie John Stewart in knots on Stewart's own show, but still.

Samhain

Always like a good bonfire on Halloween. Watch out: the fairy mounds will be open until dawn.

Ever Held A Security Clearance, Professor Lakoff?

I ask the question rhetorically, because I think the answer is apparent.

'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’

Well, sort of: it's about the communication of classified secrets in a way that was entirely too public. People have given their lives to protect classified information, and for good reason: other lives frequently depend on it.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.”

With all due respect, she was delighted to receive that scolding in place of the prosecution she deserved. Far from an act of bullying, this was an act of intense protection of her interests by a man whose duty pointed in the other direction. If you've misunderstood the context that badly, I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to publish an article from you on the subject of this case.

And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.

I'm pretty sure we can put our fingers on it. She treated classified information in a way that violated the law, endangered America's national interests and the lives of Americans charged with protecting it, and she did so for no better reason than that it was convenient for her. That's the kind and generous reading of why she did it. The more likely reason is that she was trying to dodge public records laws, which is a separate crime, in order to conceal the degree to which she was treating her office as a source of income through influence peddling.

It would not be difficult to prove that case to a jury, if we were allowed to go to a jury with it. All we ask is the chance to try.

Saudi Arabia and Feminism

Two articles:

1) A female Saudi scholar comes under fire for what some are calling feminist views, views that question whether Islamic societies protect the rights of women to a correct degree. Some who feel that societies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia most fully realize God's plan on earth find her questions to be an insult to Islam and, indeed, even to God.

2) A Saudi court has assented to a woman's request to watch her husband's judicially-ordered flogging, as it is being administered to punish him (and to recompense her) for his wife-beating. For some reason, many men are objecting to her watching as inappropriately humiliating -- but not to the beating itself, which would strike me (pun intended) as the real humiliation being inflicted.

Still, it's a move to press a woman's right to be free from domestic violence in a way not permitted in the West. I suppose in the spirit of free inquiry, it's worth asking: is this a way in which Islamic law really is stronger on women's rights, even if only in this discrete matter?

Discuss, if you like.

NYC Kills Free Speech

Excerpts from Eugene Volokh:

We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.

What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...

And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

A Good Weekend

That's Tennessee in the distance, looking north out of Cloudland Canyon. It's on the west side of Lookout Mountain, an impregnable fortress if -- like the Confederate army -- you put artillery on the long ridge, and the two ridges behind it. Armies would break like water on the central rock. The Northern forces were wise enough to wait until they could take Lookout Mountain, and then go around to the east.

I rode up there and hiked yesterday, rode back today. I stopped by my father's house on the way. He had bought a box of .22 for that revolver I mentioned. I brought it home and shot it out of my Ruger Single Six instead. Tonight I'm grilling marinated steak over a charcoal and hickory fire, while drinking a bit of pilsner.

Mountains, motorcycles, guns, and beer. Maybe it gets better than that. Maybe not.

Ricochet?

Their tagline is: "Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond."

However, they ask $5 a month or $39.99 a year to be a member with full privileges.

From time to time I read the free articles, and generally I like the tone of the place, but that's about the extent of my experience with them so far.

Does anyone have any comments on Ricochet? Is it worth it? Has anyone here tried it out?

The Empire vs. the Republic

James Pethokoukis, AEI fellow and CNBC contributor, argues that America right now looks like the Roman empire at the height of its power rather than Rome about to fall.

If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)

Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”

That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:

So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.

But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.

He links an article he wrote at Vox which argues more in depth that, since America's economy is still strong, America is OK. His entire argument is economic.

I don't care how well the economy is doing if I am not free. If the republic is dying, the state of the economy is irrelevant. After all the ink and pixels that have been used to get that point across, to not understand that the populist argument is fundamentally about political freedom and the culture of freedom is a form of self-imposed intellectual blindness.

Ammon Bundy's Lawyer Facing Charges?

In the article that Grim posted on this earlier, it was shocking that US Marshals had tackled and used a stun gun on Ammon Bundy's lawyer, Marcus Mumford.

A new report suggests Mumford may be facing charges. In this news article, it seems that when US Marshals moved to take Bundy into custody, Mumford confronted them.

Mumford got into a heated argument that ultimately led to the attorney being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Our reporters say Mumford started repeatedly yelling to Judge Brown that his client was free to go.

"When you get acquitted, you get released. That's how I understand it," said Mumford.

He said he asked the U.S. Marshals to see their paperwork that gave them authority to keep his client in custody.

It seems the marshals didn't just rush him without warning or provocation, but it is still shocking.

Happy Birthday, Royal Marines

 

The Royal Marines were formed in 1755 as the Royal Navy's infantry troops. However, the marines can trace their origins back to the formation of the English Army's "Duke of York and Albany's maritime regiment of Foot" at the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company on 28 October 1664.

Update: 352 years, to be exact.

Today's Lesson in Mythology

As appropriate for the afternoon, let me introduce you to the goddess Nemisis, whose purview is "fair distribution of rewards." She is particularly tasked with pursuing those guilty of hubris, and making sure that whatever those guilty of hubris grasped at through the sin was paid for in fair measure.

She is associated with Tyche, better known -- and beloved -- as "Lady Luck."

DB: WWI Vets Overwhelmingly Support Clinton

Some 98 percent of ballots cast from the demographic have been from veterans who are registered Democrats.

“This is tremendous news for the Hillary Clinton campaign and for the Democratic Party,” said Donna Brazile, interim chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. “We knew that if we could get a strong turnout among the doughboy demographic, we could win this election.”

Nullification

A huge win in Oregon.

A Little Clarity about the Target Audience and Methods

In previous posts on persuasion, I've been sloppy with language and that's led to some confusion. I've also changed my mind on some things based on comments to my posts. I plan to continue writing about this, so I'm going to try to clarify a couple of things. I'll do that by answering these two questions:

When I post on persuasion, who am I talking about persuading? What do I mean by "persuasion"?

Some Non-Presidential Polls

Not all of the propaganda works all of the time. Two polls show that the American people have rejected two of the Left's beloved causes, gun control and BLM.

Note that the spike in people reporting "a great deal of respect for police" is highest among... liberals (+21) and Millennials (+19). But it's greater among non-white Americans (+14) than among whites (+11, although there's not much ceiling left there).

I still think that BLM had some valid complaints, although it was clear from the beginning that their chosen method of protest was certain to fail. You can't improve relations between a given community and the police by driving that community into lawbreaking confrontations that force the police to arrest them. It's unsurprising that things have turned out this way, except that it's surprising to see the swing so strong in exactly the demographics BLM targeted for its efforts.

I Endorse This Heartily

Scientists have recreated an ancient mead from 2,500 years ago

Dogfish head brewery in Delaware has done something like this with residues found in King Midas' (well, actually his father's) tomb and in 4000 year old Chinese pots.

Mankind. Brewing. You don't get one without the other.

There's Something You Don't Hear Everyday

"Everything conservatives predicted about Obamacare is coming true."

Well, and it has been for a while now. But you don't usually hear that admitted. Obama said we could keep our doctors and our plans if we liked them. That was not true. Obama said it would bring down costs thousands of dollars per family. Not only was that not true, costs are up substantially.

We also said it would destroy the health insurance industry and leave us subject to a government takeover -- a takeover that would be used to ram Nanny State social agendas down our throats. No smoking! No drinking! No motorcycle-riding! No gun ownership! All those things are too dangerous, and raise your prospective cost to the system too much. And since we are all paying for your health care now, we "all" have a right to demand that you live exactly as we prescribe that you should.

The Telos of a University

Jonathan Haidt's video on this topic, which I mentioned in a previous post, turns out to be excellent. It's 66 minutes long; I've watched it twice and plan on watching it at least one more time. Why should you?

He seems to assume he's talking to a Progressive audience, so his arguments are made to persuade them. That in and of itself is worthwhile if you plan to try to discuss issues with Progressives.

And he argues that:

• gender is biological and real
• "safe spaces" are damaging to the students they are supposed to protect
• arguing sexism or racism solely from disparate outcomes is irrational
• some goals of social justice are unjust
• the telos of seeking truth and the telos of seeking social justice are incompatible for a university and, if both are sought equally, harmful to both truth and social justice

In the end, while he wants universities to publicly declare one or the other, he champions truth-seeking as the proper telos of the university.

More about Haidt below the fold.

Well, Obviously

Headline: "Aetna CEO Says Young People Pick Weekend Beer Over Obamacare."

So would I.

Power and Liberty: Separation versus Tension

The Declaration of Independence says:

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., the securing of unalienable rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

When it comes time to do that, I hope that whoever has the charge of doing it will remember this lesson: separation of powers is not enough to guarantee liberty. What guarantees a space for liberty is not merely the separation of power, but a tension between the powers.

Consider, for example, AT&T's spying on the American people. "Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why."

There is a clear separation of powers between AT&T and the police. If you contract with AT&T, it has a certain power over your life because it gains access to a lot of information about you. Still, AT&T has no police powers.

The police, meanwhile, have no right to demand access to AT&T's proprietary information without a warrant.

Does this protect you? No, it does not: AT&T is happy to provide the police with everything it knows, secretly, in return for a cash payment (one that you are contributing to yourself as a taxpayer).

If the government were to nationalize the telecoms, it would lose access to this kind of spying. A nationalized telecom would have to justify its spying by warrant. By outsourcing this spying to a non-government agency, the government actually increases its powers.

So too with the "death panels," below. A nationalized single payer system would presumably have to respect the claim that you could not be denied life (or liberty or property) without due process. It might not be much better -- the VA's system simply delays the due process so long that you die anyway -- but the corporate/government alignment provides them with immediate access to a power that they could never get through Congress.

For now, the hope lies in an intensification of the tension between the states and the Federal government. There, where the powers have competing interests, there is a chance that some space for liberty will come to be between them. Tension between powers is the thing that really works.

Merely separating the powers, without a competitive tension between the powers, aggregates them just as certainly as a failure to separate them at all. Indeed, in these two examples of corporate/government collusion, the power of the state increases beyond what it could ever legitimately do should it seize the private body and run it as a formal arm of the state.

Death Panels

Remind me how stupid this idea was.

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law....

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead.

At some point, we're going to have to grapple with the idea that the government -- or, to be more sophisticated, this alliance of government and for-profit companies -- is evil by all traditional measures. Do we go along with the new ideas, redefining the good as if it were a matter of convention? Or do we deal with the government as harshly as we would with a genuine evil?

It's a serious philosophical question, one going back to Protagoras and Socrates. Is man the measure of all things, or is there some god whose opinion rules? Even if the god is "Nature," you still get a kind of telos in which pursuit of life is the good: after all, all things that can pursue their own survival, and their own furtherance through reproduction. So, even if we reason from the squirrels and the trees of the forest, we get to this idea that life is the good.

The opposite of good is evil, is it not?

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Seriously, no commentary. Just roll the tape.

Aspiring United States Air Force pilots can skip the fitness test if they are transgender and in the process of transitioning, according to new protocol determined by military officials and made public last week.

Transgender pilots who are in the middle of hormone treatment won’t have to retake the exam, which includes pull-ups, pushups, and running, if they have already failed it — so long as the Air Force commander sees that the individual “tried to the best of their ability” to meet the standards associated with their preferred gender.

R.I.P.

Steven DenBeste has died.

I didn't always agree with him (imagine that), but he was an important early voice in blogging that I read regularly when he ran the site at USS Clueless.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Good Point

Of 1,000 voters polled by Rasmussen Reports on October 18 and 19; 65% believe that Clinton broke the law with her use of a private server — and 53% believe that the FBI should have filed criminal charges.

Meanwhile, according to Sunday’s daily IBD/TIPP tracking poll, only 43% of voters support Clinton for president.

H/t Gateway Pundit, who points out that this means that more Americans want Hillary Clinton in prison than as President.

Nothing to See Here

Clinton ally donated half a million bucks to a political campaign... led by the wife of an FBI agent who was subsequently promoted and placed in charge of the Clinton investigation.

If it were the only such "little surprise," I suppose we could write it off as a coincidence. It is not, of course. Not hardly.

Final Military Times Poll: Trump Support Grows

Trump leads overall and with enlisted, among whom Clinton doesn't break 1 in 5 and finishes in a distant third place. Trump is narrowly in third place among officers, but Clinton isn't even a half percentage point ahead of Gary Johnson in that subset. Johnson is in second place among enlisted as well.

Female servicemembers look a lot like officers in their voting preferences: Trump is in third, but Johnson is the overall winner. Men prefer Trump.

As has been true in previous polls, support for Trump is strongest and for Clinton weakest among the Marines and the Army. She does better among the Navy and Air Force, but she is still behind Trump (who always wins) and, in the Air Force, also behind Johnson. She leads Johnson narrowly in the Navy, but remains a good distance behind Trump.

Both major parties remain largely unliked by the military. Nearly 83 percent of those surveyed said they are dissatisfied with Clinton as the Democratic Party’s pick to be president, and more than 65 percent said the same of Trump as the Republican nominee.

Only 4 percent of troops polled said they have abundant confidence that Clinton can lead the military as commander in chief. About 9 percent said the same for Trump. More than 60 percent of troops said they had little confidence either could.

One Marine corporal who responded to the survey wrote back, "No one seems to care that Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for leaking classified information. It's an embarrassment that she is on the verge of becoming president.”

Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice

Jonathan Haidt has a very interesting article up at Heterodox Academy by this title.

The article itself is really just the bare outline of a talk he has given on this topic. You can watch a video of the whole talk, all 66 minutes of it, there if you like. I'm going to make time soon to do that.

Here is the introduction:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?

The most obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

He follows this with an 8-point argument showing why universities must choose one telos.

UPDATE: The video is excellent. He is giving a talk at Duke University and argues that a university having more than one telos is harmful to everyone at the university, including those who are focused on social justice. I don't think I have ever seen a better presentation of conservative arguments to a progressive audience.

Also, if you are interested in recent changes at our universities or their future, I highly recommend it.

Healthy Dieting, Medieval Style

It was a lot harder to start a fad diet before the printing press, but there was a trade in ideas. One was the Regimen Sanitatus Salernitanum.

The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum was created, allegedly, by famous doctors for English royalty and disseminated in the form of a poem. It recommends, very specifically, red wine, fresh eggs, figs and grapes. It has little to say about vegetables. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of today’s health fads—it celebrates wheat, emphasizes meat, and involves two significant meals, with no mention of snacking. Water is looked on with suspicion, and juice is nowhere to be found.

But from the 1200s through the 1800s, the Regimen was one of the most well known guides to health in Europe, at a time when the stakes of staying healthy were much higher than they are now. Getting sick could be a death sentence; this regimen promised to keep people well.

The author tried it out to see how it worked. The wine, in the ancient way, was diluted -- drinking raw water made it more likely you would get sick from things in the water, but diluting wine with it meant that the harmful effects of the wine were largely eliminated, while the beneficial effects remained.

There are some aesthetic differences:

One giant difference between diet advice of 1200s and diet advice now is that Salerno never mentions losing weight or keeping skinny. In fact, all the foods Salerno smiles on, the poem describes as “fattening.” When you’re liable as not to face a famine, or at least a food shortage, at basically any time, fattening is good.

In the end, the author consulted a modern specialist for advice.

How did it stack up from a modern point of view? I asked Andrea Grandson, a nutritional therapist who specializes in metabolic health, to go over the Salerno prescriptions with me. “It sounds very healthy, with eggs, wine, and broth,” she says. Eggs are a complete protein and one of the easiest to digest. Red wine is valuable for its resveratrol and antioxidants. Broths and stews extract the nutrients from the bones and organs of animals. “They were on the right track in terms of looking for nutrient density,” she says.

But, most importantly, she said, how did I feel? Was I sleeping ok? Did I feel an afternoon slump?

The truth is, I felt great eating this food. It was simple, hearty, and filling, but I never stuffed myself.

Apparently This Is For Real?

This image is part of a whole series of newspeak lessons in political correctness from a university I'd never heard of before. I gather that they intend them completely seriously and non-ironically, even the ones about "Shemales" and how "Just Kill Me" is insensitive because of suicide. (If you 'just kill me,' how is that a suicide?)

But get a load of this one:

Two things to notice here:

1) There is apparently no such thing as an objective judgment permitted: all judgments of a person's moral qualities are illegitimate applications of someone else's standards to another individual. I believe the academic way of saying this is: "To apply someone else's standards to an individual is to treat the judger as the subject whose experience and standards matter, while the judged is a mere object against which someone else's standards are applied." To treat someone else as an object is taken to be a kind of moral affront to that person, even though it's actually impossible to understand the world without the grammatical categories of subject and object. "No one must ever be treated as an object" is another way of saying "we must give up on describing the world."

2) Since there is no objective judgment, and all judgments must be subjective, there can be no judgment at all. Everyone is entitled to live life on his or her (or whatever's) own terms, without any moral weight being imposed on them from outside of whatever feels right to them.

I expect it is completely impossible to field a winning sports team on this model as you will not win if you cannot assert that players ought to push themselves and train harder and face whatever fears they have. That fact suggests that the Chico State administration are hypocrites. Presumably they don't adhere to this practice to the slightest degree when it comes to training their student athletes for competition, nor should they.

However, the suggestion of hypocrisy isn't needed to prove the case against them. The fact is that this whole set of posters is about teaching students to judge others. You can't apply someone else's standards to anyone? What about the guy who says "retarded"?

Hypocrites and fools are these. They not only don't believe in the standards they're advocating, they don't even know that they don't believe in them.

Dogs from Above

According to the article at Science Alert, this is part of an anti-poaching program in South Africa's Kruger National Park. I liked this bit:

And even though the school isn’t sure if dogs experience adrenaline rushes like human skydivers, they say their tails start to wag when they hear the helicopter.

"The dogs are exceptionally comfortable with skydiving," Eric Ichikowitz from the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, who helped start the program, told National Geographic. "They know they’re going to work."

Looks like fun.

The Army Comes After Vets

This is the kind of thing that only the military gets away with.

The Pentagon is demanding thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of dollars back from California soldiers who received enlistment bonuses for signing up to fight for American freedoms in the war on terror. The Pentagon is even demanding pay from enlistment bonuses all way back to a decade ago.... close to 10,000 soldiers are being ordered repay their bonuses and also are being charged for interest charges and are being threatened with wage garnishments and tax liens if they do not repay.

This is due to the Pentagon determining that the California National Guard mismanaged their money while under pressure to meet enlistment recruiting targets.

So, let me get this straight. California's National Guard screwed up and offered bigger (or more) bonuses than they were entitled to do under the law. National Guard soldiers, who are not all of them expert lawyers or familiar with the intricacies of budgets, accepted what looked like explicably generous bonuses given how much retention trouble the military was having at that particular moment of the war. Now, Big Army wants the money back -- and it wants it back from the soldiers, even if they're no longer in, not from the National Guard that mismanaged the money.

Accountability in government is a great concept, but these are not the people who screwed up. This is making the little guy pay for the big guy's mistakes. Pay through the nose for them.

28 Good Ideas?

Let's take a look at Trump's closing argument, 28 things he'll do as President.  It's a long list, so I'll put it after a jump break.

Ballad of Balad

Mellow Out

The Al Smith Dinner

It was McCain's best moment in 2008. Of course, he lost.

Well, here's what we saw tonight.

It's That Kind of ... Year? Decade?

h/t (or blame) neo-neocon

Paying the Rent

When possible, it's usually best to lock in rates early.

Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.

In this case, the Remembrancer has presided over the rent owed on two pieces of property for a very long time—since 1235 in one case, and at least 1211 in the other. Every year, in this Ceremony of Quit Rents, the crown extracts its price from the city for a forge and a piece of moorland.

Heck of a deal, huh? Only one small detail:

No one knows exactly where these two pieces of land are located anymore, but for hundreds of years the city has been paying rent on them.

Well, it could turn out that they're somewhere important. Best to keep up the payments just in case.

Free Trade Is Good For Everybody, Right?

Well, it turns out it wasn't very good for Louis XVI:

France and Britain were longtime rivals and both countries were committed to Mercantilism, yet they struck one of the first “free trade “deals or at least the first deal premised on philosophy of free trade. Even today, many free market types will argue that trade can overcome even the bitterest of rivalries. People like making money more than they like making trouble, so the theory goes. This trade deal is proof of that.

The most notable part of the deal is that it was a disaster for France. Soon after the deal was signed, there was a flood of British manufactured goods into France. Importation of British goods doubled. This put enormous pressure on the already distressed French industries, setting off riots and revolts. Naturally, this put pressure on the already strained relations between the provinces and the crown. Most historians count the Eden Treaty as one of the contributing factors leading up to the French Revolution.

H/t D29, who adds: "We would not, of course, suggest that the guillotine is a remedy. Yet."

A Rigged System, Continued

Lots of people seem to think it's rigged. People who would presumably know.



How about those computers that count your votes? In Georgia, they record your vote on a credit-card shaped device, then wipe it after they transfer the information to the central system. At least, that's allegedly what happens. There's no record of how you voted, and the people transferring the data have nothing to look at that would indicate that the transfer was done fairly. There's also no paper ballot or receipt that could be used for a recount. That doesn't prove the system is correct, but it gives us reason to suspect the system.

In that context, then, here's some sworn testimony from a programmer who says he wrote software to rig elections. There is also a discussion thread at Snopes about him and his testimony.



George Will points out that the IRS scandal is itself proof of official attempts to rig the election against conservatives, by preventing them from organizing or collecting tax-deductible donations, and harassing them with audits.

And of course, as we (and left wing Vox) recently discussed, gerrymandering is the Fire-Breathing Godzilla of vote rigging. My Congressional district is R +27. If I and everyone I know voted Democrat this year, it might fall to R +25. Other districts are just as heavily D +. The same is true of state-level districts.

Of course the vote is rigged, in every way they've figured out how to get away with rigging it. The animating questions should be whether there's anything left that isn't rigged, and what (if anything) we can do about the parts that are. If the answer to that latter question is that we can't do anything that will legally compel the powers that be to back off their vote-rigging, we should start talking about what to do about that.

UPDATE: Another Vox piece demonstrating a proven, actual history of rigging elections -- Jim Crow, of course.

That example is hopeful, in a way, because the Jim Crow system was eventually dismantled (except, arguably, for gerrymandering -- or if you take seriously the complaint that things like Voter ID laws are intimidation efforts). But it's also a telling example for the plausibility of rigging an election. Of course it can be done. It always has been done. It's done everywhere anyone figures out a good way to do it. Often, as in the case of gerrymandering or the IRS scandal, it's done right out in the open.

The question is, what can we do about it?

Something I've Also Noticed

A blogger I've only just learned of recently, thanks to AVI, warns that many people are conditioned to accept and even to proclaim falsehoods. A particular example that he raises, which has bothered me for decades, is the habit of naming things like subdivisions with blatantly false names.

Canadians, for instance — who are among the nicest people in the world; who wouldn’t hurt a fly; who won’t complain about anything, however painful; and will spontaneously apologize to inanimate objects if they happen to collide with them — will suddenly become downright stroppy if one expresses an idea which their betters have ruled to be “not nice.” They will tell you that they “have problems with that.”

One must resist the temptation, simply to give them problems, e.g. by using non-euphemistic language. (Example: you are allowed to be abstractly opposed to abortion; but you are certainly not allowed to be against killing babies.)

Yet, under delicate cross-examination, in the spirit of Mr Socrates’ kindly niece, one finds that they might do it themselves — might express many of these not-nice ideas — if they thought they could get away with it. (We have free speech in Canada, but only between consenting adults.) Their disapproval is an anxious concession to the requirement for niceness, with its comfortable mental and spiritual inanition. It is the line of least resistance when any third party might be within hearing. Alone, with only the not-nice person to talk with, their “problems” begin to disappear.

Secretly, I suspect that across a range of issues, and commercial products, people pretend even to themselves that they like things they actually abhor. Or rather, I think this openly, even though it may not be nice.

The advertising agencies (which work with equal enthusiasm on commercial and political products) know this. It is why Democrats and Liberals exist. It is why products that are obviously not good for any conceivable environment are sold as “ecological” and “organic.” It is why new subdivisions are called “Mountainview” when there is no mountain in sight. Or, “Meadowview” when they are in the heart of an asphalt jungle.

I am always relieved, and even impressed, when I encounter someone who does not give in to this temptation -- even if they say things that are conventionally offensive or dispiriting. On the road to Ballground, Georgia,* there is a subdivision that is actually called "The Preserve at Long Swamp Creek." Just as the name suggests, it sits on the banks of Long Swamp Creek. There's a certain honor in that kind of honesty.

* Ballground itself is descriptively named for a Cherokee game that was played there. I have always heard that it was used as a form of dispute resolution, winner-take-all.

Is It Possible To Rig The Vote?

In opposition to the proposition, this article explaining the controls.

In support of the proposition, this video of a man explaining exactly how he does it, and pondering a scheme to do it harder than ever before.

This Sounds Basically Right

I didn't read this earlier because it was billed as "Donald Trump's speech addressing sexual assault allegations." I already know what I think about that -- I think his character is such that the accusations are completely believable -- so I ignored what he had to say about it.

That was a mistake. Once you get past his denials of wrongdoing, it turns out he has something very interesting to say.

This is not simply another four-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.

The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry.

The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories, and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries all around the world. Our just-announced job numbers are anemic. Our gross domestic product, or GDP, is barely above 1 percent. And going down. Workers in the United States are making less than they were almost 20 years ago, and yet they are working harder.

It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.

Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit; Flint, Michigan; and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and all across our country. Take a look at what’s going on. They stripped away these town bare. And raided the wealth for themselves and taken our jobs away out of our country never to return unless I’m elected president.

The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.

Honestly, she should be locked up.

Let’s be clear on one thing, the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They’re a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves.

And their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy.

H/t Cold Fury, via D29.

I don't know that I believe that Donald Trump can actually fix any of those problems, but allowing for a few rhetorical flourishes, he's right about what the problems are. Organizations like those set up by the TPP and T-TIP do intend to transfer much of America's sovereignty to international councils and courts that will respond to global corporations instead of the American people. Clinton's speeches to Goldman Sachs, and the large-scale foreign money passed quid-pro-quo through the Clinton Foundation, prove that she's on board with this transfer of power from the American people to this global elite.

Likewise, of course, her Supreme Court appointments will be pointed right at stripping away the limits on Federal power that the Constitution is intended to enshrine. It's already the case that they treat the 10th Amendment like a nullity; it's increasingly the case that the religious liberty guaranteed by the 1st Amendment is a nullity. We will see all such limitations traduced if she has her way on the Court, such that the American people will no longer be self-governing but will be bowed under the will of a tiny, "progressive" elite.

It's a dark future. I don't know if it can be avoided, and I don't know that I believe that Trump is the one who could avoid it in any case. But it's where we are.

UPDATE: Bret Stephens writes at the WSJ that he regards this talk as echoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from the last mid-century. As is well known, I have no use for anti-Semitism, and certainly would regard it as a disqualifying aspect of such a theory if it were true that it was merely a renewed telling of an old myth. But these charges about the threat to sovereignty aren't "conspiracy theories," they're an analysis of the language of the TPP -- and they aren't fever dreams of the right, either, as should be proven by this article on the subject by none other than Elizabeth Warren. Now, you may have noticed that there's very little overlap in support for Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump.

UPDATE: David Foster, in the comments, proposes an analogy to the governor of an engine. The discussion it provoked in the comments section is highly interesting, which is a fact that speaks very well of his audience.

Wonder If He Came From The Old Danelaw?

An SAS soldier does what commandos do best -- with an axe.

An SAS soldier killed an ISIS fighter with an axe as he freed young girls who were being held hostage as sex slaves. According to the Daily Star, the SAS hero struck the jihadi in one blow to the skull during a mission in Syria last month. The mission was a US and British covert operation in northern Syria to free girls who were being held hostage by ISIS and forced to marry their fighters.

That's what it's all about.

Price signals

Financial markets are hard to interpret without them:

Think of zero rates as a compass that can’t point north and only spins around.

Clean Your Guns

It's kind of fun, and also...

Is the System Rigged?

Are we seriously having a debate about whether the system is rigged, rather than to what degree or just how it is rigged?

Here's the perspective from the right, today:



And here it is from the left, last week.

The system is as rigged as the politicians can get away with making it. That shouldn't be controversial. What we should be worried about are these questions:

1) Are there any parts we can have confidence in?

2) What can we do, if anything, to fix the parts we already know are rigged?

So, The UK Has Gun Control, Right?

Pulling Pigtails

So, my beard is now long enough that I can fork and braid it if I wish. I did so at the Highland Games, to the great pleasure of apparently everyone. Men who expressed this pleasure did so through a brotherly nod, or some encouraging words. (One fellow, whose beard was much longer than mine, said: "It's not a competition, it's a brotherhood.") Women who did so almost invariably came up and grabbed one of the forks, stroking and cooing over it.

Now of course this was all very pleasant. It did occur to the philosophical side of me that, were a strange man to grab a woman's plaited hair without first seeking permission, we would now consider it sexual assault. I conferred with a feminist friend of mine about this, and she explained that it's all about a power dynamic in which men have the power and women don't. I could of course stop being handled if I wished, so it's a display of my power that women should handle me if they want to. But women can't necessarily stop me, so it would be a display of my power if I were to do the same thing. She pointed out that women often fondle her plaits at work, whereas a man would never do so because it would be inappropriate as a display of power.

I'm wondering if the assumptions about power aren't baked in, though:

1) A man fondles a woman's hair: this shows male power, as the male is using his power to disregard the woman's wishes.

2) A man doesn't fondle the woman's hair: this shows male power, as the male is tacitly recognizing the inappropriateness of displaying his power over the woman.

3) A woman fondles a woman's hair: this shows male power, as it proves the tacit assumption that men have power over women in such a way that a woman's fondling is inoffensive whereas a man's would not be.

4) A woman fondles a man's hair: This shows male power, as he could stop them if he wanted to do so.

5) A woman doesn't fondle the man's hair: This shows male power, as he is too intimidating to be approached.

6) A woman doesn't fondle a woman's hair: Presumably, she just doesn't want to do so.

Couldn't it be that there is a corresponding female power, one that gives them license to touch others without permission in ways that men are simply forbidden to do? Or are we obligated to cash this out as five-out-of-six expressions of male oppression of women, even though four-out-of-six appear to be choices made by a woman?

Maybe we could even go so far as to suggest that the women who engage in this behavior are doing almost the same thing as the men who do so, and are neither morally better nor worse. That might be too uncomfortable to ponder.

The difference

David Gelerntner asks:

Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.

Let the Day Begin

The Stone Games

I will be encamped this weekend at Stone Mountain for the Scottish Highland Games. Come wha' dare.

The King Is Dead: Rest In Peace

The old way was to say, "The King is dead; long live the King." But I do not know that Thailand would be best served by another king. I just know it was well served by the last one. Many years ago when I was watching PACOM/SOCPAC issues professionally, I was continually impressed by how much better off Thailand was than its neighbors -- and how much that seemed to have to do with the wise guidance and steady hand of a good king.

Tolkien would have approved.

Cody Jinks

Tolkein's Reply to a German Publisher in 1939

From an article at Open Culture:

... It didn’t take long after the [Hobbit's] initial success for Berlin publisher Rütten & Loening to express their interest in putting out a German edition, but first — in observance, no doubt, of the Third Reich’s dictates — they asked for proof of Tolkien’s “Aryan descent.” The author drafted two replies, the less civil of which reads as follows:

25 July 1938
20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and

remain yours faithfully,

J. R. R. Tolkien

Thrust and Parry

For anyone who likes to read dueling opinion pieces:

Pete Spiliakos's article The Constitution as a Coward's Shield and Barbarian's Rock, which I posted about earlier purely in terms of constitutional rhetoric, was primarily an attack on Trump.

That attack was parried by Julie Ponzi over at American Greatness.

The Constitution as a Coward's Shield and a Barbarian's Rock

Pete Spiliakos at First Things brings up something I've noticed as well over the last decade.

The Constitution is important. ...

But the Constitution (like the Federalist Papers, and Declaration- and Founder-worship in general) has played a larger role in conservative rhetoric than a mere defense of the clear provisions of the document could do. Defense of the Constitution has become a rhetorical crutch. It has become a substitute for an agenda that is relevant to the issues of the day.

This is understandable. ...

Talking about health care policy (any health care policy) will also involve tradeoffs. It is much easier to talk about how, as president, you will protect the beloved Constitution, than to talk about how you will seek to change health coverage in the direction of catastrophic coverage (which will make some health insurance recipients nervous) and how you will seek to make it easier for new market entrants to disrupt existing providers (which will make existing heath care providers very cross). Better to mumble some things about tort reform and then go back to talking about the Founding.

...

If you make people choose between constitutionalism and their everyday concerns, the Constitution will lose.

I've met a number of conservatives over the last decade or so who were much more interested in discussing the issues of 1773, or 1803, or 1860, than they were the problems of the current day.

I'm absolutely not one of those people who think the Constitution is obsolete. It wasn't written for the times but for humanity, and humanity hasn't changed all that much. But the world does change, and if conservatives hope to influence the nation they'll have to address today's issues in ways consistent with the Constitution. And not just propose solutions, but convince a majority of Americans that those solutions will produce a better future for them than the alternatives.

But I think I'm preaching to the choir, here. Still, something to watch for.

Police Should Always Be Citizens

I have written that police work, done right, is similar to being a full-time good citizen.

Cattle get out of the fence? If your real neighbors are off at work, that's OK: there's a full-time neighbor you can call to help you catch them and get them out of the road. Somebody break into your neighbor's house? There's a full time member of the community to come take a report and serve as a witness in court, so that your neighbor can get their insurance agency to pay their claim. Same if there is a car wreck: here's a full time citizen who's ready to render first aid and serve as a witness to what happened in court.

If there's a crime, all citizens have the power to make an arrest and bring the offender before a magistrate, as well as to testify as to what happened. Even detective work is just citizen work -- which is why there are private detectives, just as bounty hunters are just using the ancient power of citizens' arrest. It's just that few people have time to spend trying to figure out a crime that happened in the past, and we benefit from having forensic resources that cost money (and require training), so we pool our resources and designate someone to get training we all pay for. But it's citizen work.

There's a riot? All citizens should get together and, guided by the officials they have commonly elected to take charge, help restore order.

The Blue Model of policing -- to adapt WR Mead's term -- is that police are instead a kind of tax-collector and agent of a distant state. The police then end up becoming divided from a citizenry that has some reason to think of them as a hostile force. That is deeply unhealthy for a nation committed to self-governance, and the natural friendship between the citizenry and the police-as-good-citizen is lost.

But worse yet is this idea, h/t D29, to have us policed by people who aren't citizens at all:

Allowing work-authorized non-U.S. citizens to work in state and local law enforcement, particularly in jurisdictions with large immigrant populations, can enable agencies to more closely represent the diversity of their community. Especially as agencies work to serve communities with a large percentage of limited English proficient (LEP) residents, excluding officers who are not U.S. citizens may significantly limit the number of applicants who speak languages other than English....

That is a deeply dangerous and terrible idea, for reasons I am surprised are not immediately obvious to the author.

Corruption in Matters of Life and Death

In the wake of an earthquake in Haiti, where poverty means that such natural disasters are systematically worse in their human toll than elsewhere, the Clinton State Department's first concern was who was a Friend of Bill.

The Trump Tape

Trump has come in for regular condemnation from me, on this page, on this exact point. I don't know that I believe he is really guilty of sexual assault, although the Epstein stories make that more plausible. I suspect that he is mostly guilty the exaggerated bragging that is common for him, and that he has a low enough character that he thought of this kind of bragging as the sort of thing that would impress other men in a positive way. That it might strike us as a pathetic lie instead probably never occurred to him; or perhaps his companion was also of such low character as to have actually been impressed.

It would appear that we are going to have one of these two disasters as President. What a tragedy for the nation.

The Least of Rings

If you were to ask most people to name the least dangerous, most beneficial branch of the Federal government, I suspect many would name the Food and Drug Administration. After all, the desire to have a safe and clean food and water supply is the #1 argument fielded in favor of a strong regulatory state. Those whose family members might have benefited from drug treatments or other therapies banned by the FDA might not view it in such a positive light, of course. Still, even there the FDA's reputation is one of being overcautious in keeping Americans safe on average -- though in effect they condemn many to death who might at least have a chance with some experimental therapy.

Should your opinion of the FDA be roughly aligned with this view, you will find this report in Scientific American to be shocking.

Irritating New Spin: It's Tyranny to Jail One's Opponent

Well, yes it would be, if jailing her were done as an exercise of political will.

No, if it was done because she broke the law. It's the President's job to see that the law is faithfully executed, a fact apparently forgotten in recent years.

Tyranny lies just as much in not enforcing the law on the connected as in any potential for unfair enforcement against the disfavored. Tyranny, and its attendant corruption, are just what we are witnessing in Clinton's case now.

Wonderful

Both presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton have ties to convicted pedophile and Democratic donor, billionaire Jeffery Epstein and "Sex Slave Island."

Clearing Browser Tabs to the Right

I haven't had much time to write for the last couple of months, but when I've come across articles I thought might make a good post, I've kept the tab open. So, now I have about 50 million tabs to open when I start my browser -- time to clear them out.

Oh, look! I can see you don't have enough links! Here, let me help ...

The Claremont Review of Books has a round-up of their articles on the election, which includes Angelo M. Codevilla's excellent "After the Republic," which we discussed here, as well as Publius Decius Mus's "The Flight 93 Election" and a bunch of other good stuff I've been working through.

Christopher Caldwell in the article Les Deplorables explores the rising use of censorship against the right in France. Coming soon to a former republic near you! (And he includes the lovely phrase panier de pitoyables.)

Here's a 2004 article you've probably seen explaining how FDR's policies prolonged the Depression by 7 years.

Arthur Chrenkoff is back!

R. R. Reno at First Things argues that "Globalization has a unifying dimension, which we rightly applaud. At the same time, though, globalization is associated with economic and cultural changes that are dissolving inherited forms of solidarity—the nation foremost, but local communities, as well, and even the family. This dissolution encourages an atomistic individualism, which in turn makes all of us more vulnerable to domination and control."

George Will argues that Congress should impeach the IRS commissioner.

Until Phyllis Schlafly passed away, I hadn't heard of her Eagle Forum.

The Myth of the Southern Strategy (from 2006).

Neo-neocon's "The Essential Trump," a collection of her writing on the man.

Dr.'s Mayer and McHugh's recent report on gender and sexuality: "Examining research from the biological, psychological, and social sciences, this report shows that some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence. The report has a special focus on the higher rates of mental health problems among LGBT populations, and it questions the scientific basis of trends in the treatment of children who do not identify with their biological sex. More effort is called for to provide these people with the understanding, care, and support they need to lead healthy, flourishing lives."

Prof. Paul Gottfried at the Imaginative Conservative gives CINOs a good old-fashioned "How dare you, sirs!"

The End of the Liberal Tradition? A New Paper Suggests Young Americans Are Giving Up on Democracy

Today's Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than Robber Barons (they're more like Skynet ...)

Whew! Well, that's a start.

Oh, look! Another article ...

Back from Boston

So, did I miss anything?

Another Set from Ray Stevens to Close Out the Weekend

The Killing Machine

Here's an interesting, longish article on Che Guevara's bloody life. One thing that stood out that seems relevant to us today was:

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others’ territory was central to Guevara’s politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people “who feel there is no place for them in the new society.”

How successful have the leftists been in implementing change here?

We Don't Know Each Other

I started thinking about this when Ymar and I got into a bit of a tiff. He made some incorrect assumptions about me that were irritating. After going back and forth a few times, it occurred to me that there's no particular reason his assumptions about me should have been right: We don't really know each other.

It isn't just that we've never met. Most of us post anonymously here because we don't want to be known. At the least, there is some group of people, co-workers or family or potential future employers, that we don't want to know our thoughts.

I don't know about anyone else here, but in addition to using a pseudonym, I also do a few things when I write or comment that I hope help to obscure my analog identity. For example, there are subjects I don't comment about because I'm known in professional circles for expertise in them. I avoid using examples from my life or talking about jobs I've had. I also don't post photos of named places geographically close to where I live.

So, it only makes sense that we don't know each other because we don't want to be known by random strangers, or by people who may be looking into our analog lives. And yet, I think we do want the regulars here to know us, and we want to know them. We may even think we do know them. Many of us have been commenting here for 10 or 15 years. I consider all of the regulars here friends, although it's a strange sort of friendship.

I also believe that this has contributed to some of the intractable disagreements we've had over the years. In analog life, I would probably know a lot more about a friend, where they grew up, what work they'd done, something about their family, etc., before I got into serious political or philosophical discussions with them. Knowing things like these doesn't often change what I say to friends, but it does change the way I say them. And, of course, the whole dimension of non-verbal communication is cut out.

There have been some significant disagreements in the comments over the years, and at those times I have regretted that we weren't at the pub or in the park hashing them out where we could more easily make ourselves understood, and where we could have a good idea of where things stood between us when the discussion was over. There have been some arguments, especially I think with Cass and Tex, where, at the end, we all just abandoned the thread, and I wondered if I had offended someone.

Analog discussions provide immediate feedback that can quickly be used to adjust our expectations for what comes next. If I unwittingly say something that's going to cause trouble, there's usually a facial reaction that warns me we might have a disagreement or misunderstanding. Then I can act accordingly, maybe explaining more or quickly analyzing what I said to look for problems, and I will know to take my interlocutor's next comment with the understanding that we may have a problem. Not so in blog comments, when I may unknowingly post something that's going to cause trouble and not have any warning of that fact until reading the reply. Blog discussions leave so much out that we normally depend on.

In the last few years I've tried to adjust the way I comment to account for these things, but especially when I'm tired, I still forget and comment as if everyone here knew me and I knew them.

I have often wished we could have a Hall gathering somewhere, a day or a weekend of getting to know each other. Unlikely, given the distances I think lie between us and the problem of coordinating our varying schedules. We can't even seem to schedule a book-club-style discussion. But maybe not impossible.

The Mississippi Squirrel Revival

A good church story for Sunday morning.