West's Founding VI: Right of Revolution

This is a section of fundamental importance that he treats very briefly. He shows through citations to the Declaration of Independence, New Hampshire's constitution and the preamble to New Jersey's 1776 constitution that the right to revolution is firmly established in the founding documents. (127-8) I'm going to quote the latter two because they are not as immediately familiar.

NH: "whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind." (128)

NJ: "allegiance and protection are, in the nature of things, reciprocal ties, each equally depending upon the other, and liable to be dissolved by the others being refused or withdrawn." (ibid)

West points out that this is not license for any minority to reject a government because it disapproves of the laws or loses a legitimate election (even a hotly contested and strange one like the election of 1860). The election of an opposing party does not justify revolution; but if that new government should violate its duty to protect and secure the natural rights of the people, it can. 

The New Hampshire constitutional language is very nice. It establishes three conditions that all have to apply before the revolution can be justified.

1) The ends of government are perverted, and,

2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,

3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.

Our current case satisfies the first two of these, but we are still trying 'other means of redress,' as we ought to do. The ends of government are obviously perverted in the present case, where a government feels that public health might require mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns but also is allowing vast numbers of people with the very disease they fear to enter the United States illegally, and then is shipping them around the nation. The ends are perverted when we see (as mentioned yesterday) rioters who burn our cities let free by prosecutors, but those who tried to defend home and community persecuted and ruined under color of law. The ends are perverted when the national security state is turned into a partisan weapon, as the National Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism explicitly does (and in the absence of actual terrorism). The ends are perverted, too, when the executive and judicial branches collude to usurp the authority of state legislatures to determine election laws, and thus (demonstrably, and quite outside of any need to establish fraud in the election) decide elections outside of the legal and constitutional framework. The reader can easily add others. 

The public liberty has been under increasing threat -- restrictions on religious free exercise; freedom of speech under constant attack by the unconstitutional union of corporate and government power to suppress rights the government is forbidden to suppress; a President who speaks of banning all semi-automatic weapons in direct violation of the Heller decision and therefore of the 2nd Amendment; a similar government/corporate conspiracy to vacate 4th Amendment privacy protections; etc. Again, the reader can easily add to this list.

We are saved from revolution in the moment by the third criterion, the pursuit of other means of redress. Audits to establish the facts about weaknesses in our election systems, state legislatures' reassertion of their right to make laws to protect both voting rights and election security, and court cases to challenge unconstitutional acts by the Federal and state governments are such means. These are peaceful and lawful, and it is right and proper to pursue them. 

Note, however, that the New Hampshire language follows the Declaration in asserting that -- should all these conditions be satisfied -- revolution is not merely a right but a duty. "The people may, and of right ought," they said in New Hampshire; the Declaration, just after the discussion of prudential reasons to suffer ills as long as they may prove transient, adds that if the ills are not transient and sufferable the people have both the right and the duty.

West points out the Declaration's language on the need for caution and patience. "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." (129) Prudence, the Aristotelian virtue, is the guide here; and West says that "[o]nly prudence can judge how far 'evils are sufferable' in the unique circumstances of a particular time and place.” (ibid)

Let us hope that Prudence guides us wisely; and that those in power find at least a shadow or reflection of that virtue, and have the wisdom not to prevent the success of our efforts to seek redress through peaceful means. 

Painless

A fourth police officer who responded to the Capitol riot on 6 January has committed suicide. That's statistically unlikely, points out PJ Media.

The MPD has 3,800 officers, meaning that the force has had a suicide rate of just over 4 per 1,000 in just the last few months.

In 2019, the national suicide rate was about 0.14 per 1,000.

Even with 2020’s higher suicide rate (we couldn’t find final figures in time for today’s column), an MPD officer is about 25 times more likely to die by their own hand than a typical American.

The ratio skews even more towards the extreme when you consider that not nearly every one of the MPD’s 3,800 officers responded to the riot.

But who’s going to investigate? The same MPD that’s taken such poor care of its own officers? The FBI that may have enticed and entrapped protestors into becoming rioters?

It's easy to imagine the mafia agreeing to eliminate Jeffrey Epstein at the behest of powerful people who could provide useful favors, and also political protection from any investigation (the official finding was, of course, suicide). The cascade failure of prison security systems meant to prevent suicides also made it look much more like murder than like a suicide.

It's pretty hard to believe in a similar conspiracy to murder police officers to keep them from talking about what they saw on 6 January. 

That leaves actual suicide as probable; but what then explains this extraordinary rate? Not PTSD, surely, given that there wasn't actually severe violence -- no machinegunning of the crowd, no massive death toll of any kind. It's just bad luck, I suppose; statistics only appear in broad enough segments, and for whatever set of reasons it just so happened that a statistically unlikely band of suicides occurred. 

Definitely it is the sort of thing that gives additional heat to our national discourse, though. Yet we are not the main matter: we should pray for their souls and families. 

The Foggy Dew Performed by Daoirí Farrell

Yesterday's "Parting Glass" introduce me to RTE - Raidió Teilifís Éireann, or Radio Television Ireland, which seems like their version of NPR. Here's another from them:

On Gaslighting

It’s probably unhelpful to frame this, as he does, as the backstory on vaccine hesitancy. It surely does play into that, but that is a small part of what he shows to be a much bigger story: Brexit, 2016’s election, “Russiagate,” Mueller, two impeachment’s, claims of mass racism...

Why doesn’t anyone have any trust anymore? 

A Submarine Analogy

Wretchard on, among other things, lockdowns by analogy to movies about submarine hunting.

Arguments by analogy always break; the point is to decide if the breaking point of the analogy is before or after the useful lesson. This one seems like a stretch, traversing both the distance between infectious disease and warfare on the one hand, and the fiction/true-life distinction on the other.  Wretchard is one of the smartest people out there, though, so I'm going to give him leeway to make his argument.

West's Founding V: Consent of the Governed

Moving along to chapter six of the first part, West reminds us that the Founding idea was that government was created by the consent of the governed, and is sustained only by the continuing consent of the governed. There are at least three kinds of consent:

1) The initial formation of the social contract; 

2) Period elections of representatives, which provide the citizenry with the chance to alter the government's membership according to their will;

3) The right to withdraw consent, i.e., the right of revolution should the government fail to abide by the contract of (1) or the fair elections of (2). (Today we will only treat (1) and (2).) In the absence of a declared withdrawal of consent, consent is supposed to be sufficient.

In his discussion of (2), West approaches one of the criticisms leveled against the Declaration: that it is not a democratic document per se, but would allow for any form of government that would secure natural rights. West argues that this view is wrong, as the Declaration's complaints against the king include specific complaints that he refused to honor their democratically elected legislatures. He ignored their decrees, and he taxed without their consent, and this anti-democratic character of his rule is part and parcel of the violation of natural rights. 

Why should this be so? When people move out of the state of nature by creating a government, they might consent to many potential forms. Locke -- West does not mention -- cites the story of Jeptha from the Book of Judges to give an early account of how this might work. (This is in Locke's First Treatise on Government, which almost no one reads; everyone reads the Second). As long as everyone consents to the bargain, and the new authority secures their rights, isn't the bargain fair? 

West thinks that the Founders did not think so. He says that the idea of representation is so central to their concept of what just government looks like that it constitutes an entire second criterion to what the Founders thought just governance was about. 

This is not a view I've held myself, but I can see where he is going with it. I have tended to say, "The sole legitimate function of government, according to the Declaration of Independence, is to secure the natural rights of the people." West's argument is that a just government actually has to do two things, according to the Declaration: it has to secure natural rights effectively and not subvert them, but it also has to ensure the people are able to fairly elect representatives who will provide the ongoing consent that the nation requires. 

If so, this is definitely an outgrowth of the British tradition of which the Founders were part. The kings of England and the United Kingdom slowly lost their ability to rule without the consent of Parliament, especially in matters of taxation. The presence of representatives fairly elected, without whose consent the king could not act, is a feature the British kings unsuccessfully resisted. It is plausible that to a British national of the eighteenth century this concept of being due representation was as fundamental as the concept of natural rights. Without representatives, there is no guarantee that initial consent will continue; if stripped of honest representation, the people have every right to withdraw from the contract.

Note that this representation is legislative in character. The executive need not be elected; he might even be a king, or he might be elected indirectly as in our Constitutional order. The legislature is where our right to representation firmly resides, as it was the legislature that was supposed to be the first and most powerful branch. The First Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law..." because if Congress cannot make the law, the executive cannot enforce the law, and the courts cannot try cases regarding that law. 

Our whole system has slipped out of gear on that issue. Since the New Deal's establishment of a vast Federal bureaucracy, the production of laws has become more a matter of executive rule-making than formal legislation. Courts have set themselves up to create interpretations of laws that are in effect new laws, thus legislating from the bench. The actual legislatures have far less power than designed, and the demon of being subject to legislation without representation has escaped.

Who Burned the Bonnehomme Richard?

The Navy has charged a sailor, but won’t release his name or apparent motive. 

Black Agnes

Here lies a good story, and quite a character, from the War of Scottish Independence. 

700 to Attend Obama’s Birthday Party

Quite a shindig. 

The Parting Glass Performed by Freddie White

 I just discovered this version.

West's Founding IV

The next section includes a lot of inside baseball, where West is working out disputes with other scholars (especially but not only Harvey Mansfield). There are three 'clarifications' West wants to lay out before he proceeds with positive arguments from the Founders on natural rights.

1) "Self Evident Truths." West makes the plausible claim that what is meant in the Declaration by "self-evident" is really "we all agree about this." The claims about human equality are not, in fact, self-evident. In fact, the evidence of your eyes will tend to argue against the notion that we are all equal. We have games like the ongoing Olympics to sort out questions about inequalities even among the very most unequally talented. People are smarter, stronger, wiser, and also weaker, slower, more foolish. It's the most obvious thing in the world. 

This is a topic I've written quite a bit about, and my sense is that 'equality' among humans is generally only possible given a third party. Let's say that I'm a father, to illustrate, who has three sons. These sons are not equal: one is the oldest and another is the youngest, one is the strongest and another is the weakest, etc. But they are all equals in that they are all equally blessed, by me, in bestowing upon them an equality of inheritance. In that sense they are in fact exactly equal. 

It happens that this is the kind of equality the Declaration posits, i.e., 'they are endowed by their Creator' with equal natural rights. But this isn't "self-evident" -- I had to give an argument for it. 

West points out that scholars have sometimes treated the arguments for natural rights given by the Founders as dispensable because of this claim that the natural rights are "self-evident." They aren't, in fact, except perhaps in the sense he means. You do have to prove that they exist.

2) "Why should nature be a standard for right?" This is a crucial question. I'm not sure from reading West's account if he understands the depth of the opposition. Hume raised an objection to the whole idea that 'ought' can be derived from 'is.' Why should it be true, as Aristotle says, that an eye 'should' see because it ordinarily can see? Why isn't a blind eye just as good, in its own way, or perhaps even better in that it can enable different approaches to understanding and grappling with reality? 

West gives this about two pages, which isn't enough. It's one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy. My own answer, summarized, is that you can only ever get an ought from an is. If it is possible to get an ought at all -- another fundamental and difficult question -- it has to be from the things that exist. Whether you get them from natural organs and functions ('an eye should see because that's what eyes evolved to do') or reason as Kant does (reason exists, after all), from virtue (what makes a virtue is that it excels, i.e., it has practically valid results), all these things reason from what is. There is no access to a discussion of 'ought' outside of reality; and thus, reasoning from nature, i.e. what is, is not only a reasonable thing to do it is the only thing to do.

But that is also too brief, much too brief. West quotes Hamilton: "The sacred rights of mankind are... written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal powers. (81) Would that it were so!

3) "The God of Nature." West rejects the idea that Deism was very important among the Founders, imputing to them a more ordinary form of Christianity. However, he does allow them the Enlightenment conceit that human access to reason is sufficient to deduce laws in (and of, which is not quite the same thing) Nature. 

Here he claims to be interested in refuting those scholars who want to say that the Founding is hopelessly religious, rather than rational, and rooted in divine revelation. His (again very brief) discussion of natural religion is weak and limited to my ear, but I am accustomed to the Medievals who were very interested in this question and pursued it with great discipline. The point is that if you want to know about God, you can know him through his works; and nature, writ large, is one of his works. There are significant limits to this approach, which Aquinas and Avicenna explore in ways that West does not. 

He is not that interested in the question, however, which may explain his brevity and inattention. He is interested in clearing the Founders of having relied upon revelation in the ordinary sense of 'God told me.' That's fair; they mean that they deduced ideas about God's will from God's work, not from the whisperings of angelic messengers audible only to themselves. (Muhammed is thereby supposed to have learned the divine law about what to do if a mouse fell into the butter you had churned this morning: to whit, God says to cut out the contaminated part and keep the rest.) 

I'm leaving out all the internecine feuds with the other scholars. These are the key ideas from this section. 

Licklog Gap

 

“Before becoming part of the national forest, the grassy meadows of the region were used as pastures for herds of cattle. Cattlemen would put rocks of salt in holes or cut outs in logs.”

I know a high meadow still used that way. They’ve got a handsome crop of calves coming up. This view is from a little over five thousand feet, where it was seventy degrees and sunny today. Songbirds were singing, a veritable paradise even in August. 

Songs of Love and Hate, 1971

Bringing Back the Great Depression

Descendants of the FDR administration are uniting to try to get the Biden crew to adopt the same disastrous policies. 

I knew one of these people decades ago; she was a professor at Armstrong (now part of Georgia Southern). Even then she’d built her career as a historian around apologist efforts for her grandfather’s work in Roosevelt’s cabinet. 

Our government is so ossified in its bureaucracy now that it probably can’t learn any new tricks anyway. It won’t help to bring in people literally trying to restore failed policies that haven’t been new ideas for a century. 

Never-, sometimes-, always-Trump?

Salena Zito thinks about Ohio:

Paul Sracic, a Youngstown State University political science professor, ... adds that it would be a big mistake to think that Ohio's sudden reddening was just about former President Donald Trump. “These voters clearly liked the former president, but they are not a cult," he says. "They were just waiting for someone like him to come along, and when he did, they were overjoyed. They’ll still turn out in droves to hear Trump because he still says the things they want to hear and in the way they want to hear them."

* * *

“Jacksonians were attracted to law and order Republicans such as Nixon, or the patriotic anti-communist, Ronald Reagan,” Sracic said. "But they usually considered themselves Democrats since they tended to be working class and associated the Republican Party with the wealthy. Trump converted the Republican Party into the Jacksonian Party; this change is likely permanent, and future Republican candidates will adopt this message.”

A Harder One

The wisdom of strangers

From a PowerLine comment: Programs are voluntary until people figure out they're rubbish, then they become mandatory.

Songs of Doom

Two country pieces, both of them odes to lost times as well as sorrowful worries that the world to come will not be one we will like. 

Waylon Jennings played off the last one during a cameo he made on Married With Children. He said, “Men like us are dinosaurs. Real, live, dead dinosaurs.... The only thing wrong with being a dinosaur is there’s no future in it. But there is one hell of a past. Be like the mighty Tyrannosaur, and while you can, leave deep prints so everyone remembers we were here. Leave deep prints.”

No More Masks

I passed through Asheville today, expecting to find a total resurgence of the mask mania that characterized it last year. In fact very few people responded to the CDC by returning to their masks. 

One young lady at a raucous bar explained: “I did the right thing, but I’m not going to let a bunch of Republicans screw up my summer.” I assume she meant ‘by not getting vaccinated,’ since Republicans hold no power at the Federal level and even at the state level only control a legislature whose power has been largely usurped by the governor and the courts. 

The non-Karen voters

Instapundit reports both an encouraging outbreak of sanity among voters and an opportunity for Republicans to makes inroads into Democrat strongholds:

Overall, a majority of voters — 55 percent — agree that “despite good intentions, shutting down businesses and locking down society did more harm than good.” Only 38 percent disagree, with the rest unsure.

But the really interesting part is the racial breakdown: White Democrats reject the idea that lockdowns did more harm than good by a 30-plus-point margin. Nonwhite Democrats, on the other hand, are evenly divided.

The divide widens on the question of whether government officials will hold on to too much power in the future: 62 percent of voters say yes. Nearly two-thirds of white Democrats disagree. But note well: By a whopping 64-27 margin, black Democrats fear that officials will abuse their vast new powers.

Stands to reason

Numbers don't lie.

West's Founding, III: Against Criticisms

West is aware of the need for someone writing today to defend the Founding against claims that it extended its allegedly universal claims only to white men, and only in defense of their power. He attempts this in Part I, Chapter 3.

First, he distinguishes between rights and power. "The language of the founding documents did not exclude either blacks or women from equal natural rights," he says, then quoting Congress' 1774 declaration, a 1776 address to foreigners fighting for the British that appealed to their notion of natural rights, Georgia's revolutionary 1776 constitution, and another 1777 affirmation by Congress. (62-3) If West is right about what was meant by equality -- that all are rightly born free of masters -- then the fact that political power was not distributed equally was not what the Founders intended by 'equality.' They had hoped (as per the last section) to enshrine political power among the especially virtuous, not all people equally. The rights of all to be free of slavery, though, were recognized as universal.

Of course that leaves the actual fact of slavery. West cites the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (Pennsylvania), which states that there is a "duty" to "release them from thralldom" because though "the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion.... it is sufficient to know that all are the work of the Almighty hand." (63) He also cites in the same place the abolition law in Rhode Island, and the fact that the Revolution was in fact accompanied by an intense period of manumission: "By 1810, more than a hundred thousand slaves had been freed." (ibid.)

As for those who kept slaves in spite of the Revolution, West has several citations from them in which they acknowledge the injustice of it. (65) Jefferson, he suggests, regarded it as both an intolerable injustice and yet a necessity because there was no practical way to release slaves without tempting a mass murder similar to the one that occurred in Haiti. (41) The fact that a hundred thousand slaves were indeed released without a mass slaughter is evidence against Jefferson's position, but the fact of Haiti's 1791 revolution and massacre gives evidence that Jefferson was not completely out to sea on this possibility. Jefferson knew and admitted that he knew that what he was doing was a violation of natural law and therefore a monumental injustice. The Founding was tainted by bad practices, but it was not unable to see the injustices being committed among its members.

Furthering this discussion, West cites pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun in a few places where Calhoun is condemning the Founders for being too devoted to this whole equality notion. Rather than the Founding principles being easily transferrable to the Confederacy, as is sometimes suggested, the Confederacy and its predecessors needed to reject the Founding explicitly. (64, 75)

On women and Native Americans, West has different arguments but claims that both were considered equals in the "natural law" sense he is framing as fundamental. Women are equals in that sense, he writes, but considered themselves to have a different role in society than the exercise of political power (a complimentarian view still defended by some communities, e.g., the Amish and some Orthodox Jews). He quotes Abigail Adams, certainly no shrinking violet, on this score, and a number of her contemporaries. (66-7)

Native Americans were not considered racially different at the time of the Founding, West says, only culturally so. He cites in support Patrick Griffin, who "argues that white settlers 'did not vie Indians as an alien race and did not refer to Indians by their physical features." (71) This may have some weight, because in the Colonial and Revolutionary period intermarriage was quite commonplace on the frontier. It is clear that a racism that embraced Native Americans arose later, of course, just as it is clear that the 1915 era KKK disliked Jews as well as Blacks even though Jews seem to have been regarded as equals in Antebellum Savannah (where they fought in duels against Christian gentlemen, the fullest proof that they were regarded as equals who must be answered even at risk of one's life). 

What the Founders looked down upon about the Native Americans was their way of life, which they regarded as "savage." We know this because they say so, for example in the Declaration of Independence. In fairness, West says, just as the Declaration says the Native Americans did "often fight by means of indiscriminate and merciless killing of all ages, sexes, and conditions," and the British really did use them as irregulars on the frontier. (71) That did not remove their equality under natural law, but it did mean that they were criticized as barbarous and dangerous.

Maybe that's true. Certainly the record of interactions there involves a mixture of ruthless war and negotiated peace (the latter of which infamously often ends up being betrayed and treaties broken). There is intermarriage, there is cohabitation, there are frequently people of mixed heritage who seemed to be accepted without prejudice in the early era. I don't know that it's right, but it isn't completely out of order with what I know of the time and place.

West buys some trouble for himself in trying to rope in a discussion about relative intelligence for different peoples, citing Charles Murray et al. His claim is that the Founders would not have accepted that a difference in relative intelligence justified a reduction in rights, or an inequality in the natural law sense he has been defending. He might have been wiser to have avoided bringing what is really a historical debate about what the Founders thought into a contentious present day debate about whether race is in any sense 'real.'

That said, West has good citations in support of this position to Jefferson ("whatever may be the degree of talent [of blacks] it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others") Benjamin Franklin (who remarked after a visit to a school for black children, "Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children"), and Alexander Hamilton ("their natural faculties are probably as good as ours... The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience"). (69)

Likewise, he has Declaration signatory Benjamin Rush condemning the principle that intelligence ought to give power over others. "But supposing our author had proved the Africans to be inferior...: will his cause derive any strength from it? Would it avail a man to plead in a court of justice that he defrauded his neighbor, because he was inferior to him in genius or knowledge?" (70) That implies that Rush was not convinced of the proof, but also that he thought the proof was irrelevant to the question of rights. 

West is trying to put a lot in this short section, which has to carry the weight of defending the Founding against a set of vicious attacks as well as a large number of misunderstandings (if West is right) by major historians and scholars. It is clear that he has found and marshalled at least a lawyerly defense, which should give us reasonable doubt about the condemnations to which the Founders are often subject. Whether it proves his case requires longer reflection and further study.

West's Founding, II

West has a bedrock notion that he wants to convey. That notion is that equality and liberty, as the Founders understood them, were the same thing: specifically, both terms mean that no one is born a natural slave. We are all born free, and therefore we all are in that strict sense equals.

That puts him at odds with most of the scholarship, which have treated equality and liberty as being different notions -- even opposing or incoherent ideas. If we are really free, then inequality will surely result as natural talents, differential fortunes, and other things create unequal results. (As West points out, the scholars are led astray here by de Tocqueville, whose use of the term 'equality' is the French and not the American notion, and really is a commentary on 'equality of condition.') 

It also creates a conceptual problem because the Founders definitely do believe that some people are natural aristocrats. By this they meant roughly what Aristotle meant, i.e., that some men are more capable of excellence, i.e., "virtuous" than others. Jefferson says this explicitly in his letters, but he is not alone. James Wilson wrote, "When we say that all men are created equal, we mean not to apply this equality to their virtues," which may vary widely. (73; all page numbers in this series will be to West unless otherwise noted.) The Founders, like the Greeks, take it as a matter of first importance to identify those who are exceptionally virtuous for government service and refer to this mission over and over in their state constitutions and similar statements (ibid).

Nevertheless, this capacity for excellence does not create a natural class of masters: the idea is that free and equal men shall choose their leaders from among themselves. The power of legitimate governing arises from this election, without which no superiority in intelligence or virtue (which are not equivalent terms) justifies the exercise of power of one over another.

West's project ends up treating a number of terms as being actual equivalents: "In these documents," he writes, "'created,' 'born,' an 'by nature' are equivalent terms. 'By nature' means as they really are, independent of customs and traditions. What human beings really are -- with respect to freedom -- is individuals who are neither the masters nor the slaves of other people." (25) This gives rise to the concept that human beings have a natural right to be treated in accordance with that equality, which in nature (i.e. pre-politically) is absolute. Social compacts may create a class of governing men with legitimate power, but in nature there is not one.

Likewise, even social compacts end up being limited because there are some parts of this equality that cannot morally be given away. These are the 'inalienable' rights, which include "life, liberty, and property" or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but also several variants West finds regularly included in the many lists composed by the Founders in various documents. "Other rights sometimes mentioned include reputation, keeping and bearing arms, freedom of speech and press, and assembly." (27-8) All of those except 'reputation' have survived to us at least as ideals; that one, I notice, is a right to defend one's honor. Our society has tried to dispose of honor as a value, though it is in fact impossible to do that; instead we end up fighting over whether George Washington or George Floyd should be honored with statues and street names. The Founders' earlier model, which entailed a right to defend honor with violence, was defensive: it was not a right to initiate violence, but to demand that no one be allowed to sully your honor without being subject to answering to you for it.

The consequence of this idea of natural right is that everyone is "rightfully free of the violence of others," an idea we usually today hear mostly from libertarians. (28) This also imposes natural duties of others not to impose upon us their violence, within only the limits of ensuring the public peace (e.g., religious liberty is not coherent with endorsing the sacrifice of even one's own children). (33)

This collection of natural rights and corresponding natural duties is, together, what West believes the Founders meant by "natural law." This set of laws must be respected by any decent government, and a government that comes to violate these things is  -- as the Declaration will tell us -- rightfully set aside. It is out of order not only with human nature but nature in general, and thus the will of the author of Nature, however you conceive of that. Jefferson wrote that it applies to all societies and to foreign policy, i.e., the interaction of societies. "[T]he moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society." (39)

West points out that this idea does not imply a lack of conflicts, even violent ones. "In the founders' theory, it is possible for one person to have a natural right to violate the natural rights of another," he says, pointing to an example from Jefferson about two ships that meet at sea, one starving and the other well-supplied. The right to life being the first natural right, Jefferson said, the starving ship would have the right to extract food by force should the other ship refuse to sell them food. The right to property, although also a natural right, is derivative of the right to life: you are entitled to collect and use property as a way of sustaining your own life. (40-1) It is surprising to find a right to piracy, you might think, but in fact pirates and the American colonies had an interesting historical relationship and a lot of American ideas were tried out by buccaneers first. 

Nevertheless West is clear that this "does not create a rightful claim against others to provide [those with unequal resources] with resources -- except in extreme circumstances[.]" (49) "Modern liberal rights are not natural because no one possesses food, transportation, respect, and access to medical care by nature." (ibid.) I note that he is using the term "respect" here as a non-natural right, whereas "reputation" was a natural right -- one rather difficult to disentangle from 'respect' in ordinary language. He has in mind Rawls' usage, which is that those who are not respected by society have a claim on having respect somehow 'transferred' to them, which is unworkable.

This argument exposes West to a large number of criticisms from scholars; he exposes himself to more, as I will explore in later sections. The most obvious current criticism is that the Founding was either hypocritical or racist, sexist, etc., in denying equality and liberty. He has quite a bit to say about that, so I will treat that next.

A Philosophy of Pornography

We were talking at some length here and at AVI's place about the way in which the virtual, and especially pornography, alters the sense of self in the young. Arts & Letters Daily linked to a philosopher who is working on this, and she says some of the nicest things about conservative thought I've ever heard from someone on the left. 

I put it to Srinivasan that her critique shares some of its spirit with conservative objections to porn: the worry that porn’s logic of commodification corrupts the value of sex, manifest perhaps in the creeping feeling—all too easily evoked whenever one finds oneself choosing from a menu with pictures—that one is engaged in something debasing. “I totally agree,” Srinivasan says—“the conservative way of putting it is that we have this kind of sacred thing that’s being degraded by being placed on this screen. I more specifically want to say the thing we’re losing is a certain kind of creative capacity which then gets dulled by its over-reliance on the screen.”

Such arguments, she adds, are another reason to read conservative philosophers—“to understand that part of us, which is very much drawn to and recognises the truth in conservatism, because it’s a very false radical politics that thinks that progress does not come with loss.”

That's a very keen insight as well as a kind word. You may or may not find that you agree with her thoughts on pornography, but that much we can surely appreciate.  

Socratic Humility

A fun exploration of Socrates and his method.

Socrates: What is courage?

You: Courage is being willing to take big risks without knowing how it’s going to work out. 

Socrates: Such as risking your life? 

You: Yes. 

Socrates: Is courage good? 

You: Yes. 

Socrates: Do you want it for yourself and your children? 

You: Yes.  

Socrates: Do you want your children to go around risking their lives? 

You: No. Maybe I should’ve said that courage is taking prudent risks, where you know what you are doing. 

Socrates: Like an expert investor who knows how to risk money to make lots more? 

You: No, that isn’t courageous. . . .

When I first encountered Socrates, it was through the Laches, and so the question of what courage was happened to be the first question I found him considering. I thought, as a teenager, that I would answer thus: "Courage is the quality of doing the right thing even though it is dangerous." 

On the reflection of many years, I still think that's not a terrible definition. It avoids the riposte sketched in the article: "Do you want your children to go around risking their lives?" Not for no good end, but you do want your children to do what is right. Sometimes this might entail risking life or limb, but you want them to have the quality they need to do what is right even if someone or something is threatening them. 

What Socrates would probably say to that is, I think, to press me on whether that means that the virtue is a form of knowledge, and therefore could be taught; and if so, why it was not always possible to teach it, why some men turned out to be cowards in spite of careful instruction.. That was one of his favorite lines of inquiry. As you know from reading much from me on the subject, I think Aristotle gets this one right: it's not so much a form of knowledge, as it is a state of character that is attained by practice and habituation. You can only change yourself so much, and some people thus turn out to have more potential for courage than others just as some have more potential for swimming than others. 

[For all of Socrates'] influence, many of our ways are becoming far from Socratic. More and more our politics are marked by unilateral persuasion instead of collaborative inquiry. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious enough, you’ll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive.

Sometimes it is necessary to be intolerant to preserve a spirit of honest debate and deeper inquiry. It is not ideal, it is not desirable, but it proves to be necessary at times. Yet more often we see people closing off debate not to preserve an honest and reasonable discussion on terms of mutual respect, but to enforce what is merely the preference of the rich and powerful. That seems to be the fate of the current moment, at least. Perhaps we can do better if we can find a way to throw it off.

On The Subject

The Olympics are considering dropping weightlifting. 

Olympic weightlifting has never been an interest of mine, and in fact it strikes me as extremely weird. None of the lifts that I think of as the core, major lifts are actually in the competition. For example, all three of the Powerlifting lifts from the previous article are omitted. The overhead press is simulated to some degree by the clean and press, and since the legs are stronger you can probably clean the weight if you can press it. Still, for a sport called "weightlifting" it seems to be more about explosive, dynamic movements than the simple ability to lift weight.

The reason they are thinking about cutting the sport is because of doping. Now there they might take a page from Strongman and Powerlifting, and simply stop worrying about it. You want to see how strong a human being can be? Well, let them do whatever they want to prepare for the competition. This has the nice side effect of eliminating any trans*-competition concerns because, if you're going to let them juice with whatever they want, there's no reason to worry about natural hormones. 

(I am myself a purely natural guy; no performance-enhancing drugs of any kind have I ever used. From my perspective, though, the reason to be strong isn't to win the Olympics -- it's to maintain robust good health and physical capacity for as long as I am able. Taking dangerous supplements would be counterproductive if that is the end.)

Rhetorical Techniques for the Modern Age

From the Bee

You Need To Work Harder

While I have doubts that this young man and I would agree on the definition of 'a Nazi,' in principle it's reasonable to want to be strong in order to defend yourself and others from aggression. This is not going to get it done, though:

"At his best, he could squat 335 pounds, bench 200 and deadlift 280."

I don't even warm up at those weights, and he is on the order of half my age. 

H/t: Dave Reaboi.

West's Founding, I

I have read at this point the introduction and the conclusion of West's Founding, as well as the first three chapters. Reading the introduction and the conclusion first, by the way, is the right way to read any historical monograph. It's not appropriate for most works, but with historical monographs like this one it will greatly ease the process. The introduction tells you what the author intends to say; the conclusion tells you what the author thinks he or she has said. That gives you a clean map of the argument, and so everything in the middle falls into focus quickly and easily.

West is taking up a position in a dispute between academics, one that is (as he says) in basic agreement with a number of other scholars: he names Thomas Pangle, Paul Rahe, William Galston, and Michael Zucker. He is opposed by the great figures of the Establishment, including Supreme Court justices like William Brennan, scholars like Ralph Lerner, and even great names like Gordon Wood and Dwight Eisenhower (who says, in one of his surviving documents, that he found it very difficult to defend the American philosophy against charges of selfishness and immorality brought by a Soviet general he met during the war).

That the weight of names is against him West attributes to a failure of American education. Much of this he locates from the 1960s onward, when he believes the meaning of words like "equality" and "rights" changed so substantially in the minds of scholars that they were no longer able to hear what the Founders were saying in their own writings. There was already a substantial loss of meaning by the mid-20th century, though, when the New Deal's approach to welfare had altered American ideas about justice to such a degree as to account for Eisenhower's inability to defend America against Communist attacks on its principles. (West gives an account of early American approaches to welfare in the conclusion, which he says were present from the beginning of the nation -- though at the state level rather than the Federal level, as the Founders thought appropriate for almost all powers.)

What he wants to argue is that the Founding principles were:

A) Coherent philosophically, deriving from their understanding of Natural Rights;

B) Moral and decent on their own terms, and definitely in contrast to the ones offered by communism and socialism;

C) At least possibly true, and certainly useful.

The third claim is metaphysical and substantial. First of all, it relies on a notion that a claim about something like natural rights could be true, as opposed to what our contemporaries like to call "a social construct." Something about reality must exist that can sustain truths across generations, regardless of what people think about those things. This is an idea that is as unpopular as it is easy to be in the current environment, although it was popular as recently as the gay marriage debate: people asserted that sexuality was true in this way, being in-born and not a matter of thought or choice, and thus that no government could transgress this truth. (That position has since been abandoned in favor of the idea that identification, which is a decision of the mind, is what really matters.)

That there is a human nature that sustains this truth West defends but ultimately decides not to rely upon. Whether or not the claim is true, he says, the claim is useful. Such a claim is perhaps the only thing that can tie down a government to some idea of justice that it itself does not have the power to edit. Thus it is useful because it restrains the powers of the world, and keeps at least some things out of their hands. 

He defends the utility of the claim against both the early Modern model -- that power structures are of divine warrant -- and the Marxist one that inexorable dialectics produce evolutions in power structures. People are free and equal, just as the Founders claim, and thus able to make choices about self-government. These choices, per West, are better than submission to the claims about what God or History would impose upon us, which claims end up being merely the will of the powerful. We are free only if we believe we are, and capable of self-government only when we reject the impositions of the powerful: those who "belong to a class anointed by God, by History, by moral credentials earned by serving the disadvantaged, or by Harvard and Yale."

That is the basic plan of the work. I shall get into the arguments in the next post. 

New Philosophy Reading: The Political Theory of the American Founding

For my next longer work, I'll be reading The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. It is available in several formats including Kindle from Amazon if you want to read along.

West takes an unusual view of the Founding among scholars, although I think it is ordinary among ordinary Americans. Specifically, he believes that the Founders had a pretty uniform view of what made their program right and just, as opposed to being driven by variant ideas of republicanism and liberalism that were in tension with each other. This coherent view is the view of natural rights, which is to say the rights all people have prior to the formation of a government or a social compact. 

These natural rights, he argues, also create moral duties: if you have a right to be free from being murdered, everyone else has a duty not to murder you. Many of these duties must be respected even after a social compact is formed, and cannot morally be surrendered as part of any such compact or formation of government. These rights are the ones the Declaration of Independence calls inalienable. 

West's view is thus that the American Founding has a lot more moral content than most scholars believe today; but he is also (he claims; I haven't gotten there) to argue that the Founders had a larger moral vision for the inculcation of virtue in the citizen. 

One thing we will be exploring as I post about this book is the debate Joel and I were having about whether the Declaration ought to inform the Constitution. Initially what I find him to be saying about that is that the constitutions and the Declaration inform each other: that is, the state constitutions that pre-date the Declaration often give fuller explanations of what terms like "equality" mean, and how they arise, than the Declaration itself bothers to do. However, later constitutions (like New York's of 1777) specifically refer back to the Declaration's language and project. Thus, the two kinds of documents end up being in dialogue with each other even though they serve different purposes. 

If any of you care to read along, I'll be doing a series of posts about it similar to what I did with Weber's lecture and the recent books of Plato that we've read through. 

A Question Arises

 Because sometimes I have more time than good sense.

There is growing chatter that President Joe Biden (D) will be out as President by November, whether by resignation or by 25th Amendment action. Say that occurs, at some time in the next year or two.

Who would a President Kamala Harris (D) get for her Vice President?

There would no longer be a way to break a tie in the vote to confirm, so at least one Republican would have to agree with the Progressive-Democrats on any nominee, or at least one Progressive-Democrat would have to agree with the Republicans.

Who could make it through that gauntlet that Harris would be likely to nominate?

Or would she finish out the term without a Vice President? In which case no other tie vote could be broken for the duration of that term.

That last would seem a fine motive for the Republicans en masse to Just Say No to any Harris nomination (running the political risks thereof), thereby blocking all further Progressive-Democrat moves until at least 2025 (for the potential political rewards).

Eric Hines

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

One More Before We Let the Blues Go

 

Go for it

I mean really go for it, LOLGF.

Lord Dunsany

Not the deservedly famous one, but the current one. He is engaged in a “rewilding” project on the estate. It’s worth reading about. 

Blues Weekend: Some Greats

Blues Weekend: Younger Players & Older Instruments

 

RIP Jackie Mason

This skit seems relevant all over again:

Blues Weekend: Stevie Ray Vaughn

In his autobiography, BB King praised the musical talents of Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt, but he said the only white musician he knew who had the soul of the blues was Stevie Ray Vaughn.

I think Tex can sympathize with "Texas Flood" these days.

Blues Weekend

Let's do one, per Tom. Why not?

Here's Samuel L. Jackson tearing it up on a new blues track. Now, you know who this guy is, so there is a language warning. (For gun guys, there's another warning: he apparently thinks a .44 can carry an inexplicable number of rounds.)

Here's an older piece.

And another very excellent piece, by Johnny Lee Hooker.

And you know what, why not, here's the Blues Brothers -- who built out a first-class blues band -- doing their love song to Chicago.

I guess they'd be called out for cultural appropriation or whatever these days, but mostly it would be by people who didn't have legitimate chops like their band did. 

Music for Freyja's Day

(Or Frigg, who may or may not be the same goddess.)

Following up on Tom's concept, some music for the day.

Here's one for our adventurous truck driver from earlier this week.

This one is more for the video than the psychedelic soundtrack.

That last one came to my attention because of the band's participation in a psychedelic Western story album, which is musically a lot better but lacks the awesome motorcycles.

NSA Reviews Itself

NSA reviews itself and admits that, in fact, it has been collecting and unmasking Tucker Carlson's name... but it denies that it has been collecting his communications. 

Well, actually, they didn't deny it in any sort of official way. Sources familiar with their internal investigation denied it to the media for them. 

The NSA never promised transparency, of course. 

Resisting Jadris

Speaking of COVID tyranny, congratulations to Michigan whose citizens finally managed to strip the evil governor of her ability to arrogate herself tyrannical power.

The emergency powers act had been declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court in October, but prior to the repeal the law remained on the books for potential future gubernatorial abuse.

A group called Unlock Michigan led the petition initiative, collecting more than half a million signatures, and the Senate voted 20-15 to approve the initiative last week. The state House then voted 60-48 in favor of the petition to repeal the emergency powers act. Whitmer had previously vetoed attempts by the legislature to abolish the law, but is powerless to veto it this time because the initiative is citizen-led.

Well done, Americans.  

'That's Cultural Appropriation, Karen'

Literally, her name is Karen.

I can see how this probably did irritate people whose grandmothers and great-grandmothers had been making the stuff. Karen's statements do sound like 'I've discovered and improved upon this trashy little dish, and now it's good food that you'll like.' 

The Asian-American experts don't agree on what she should have done instead. They do want to have their culture treated with more respect, which is universal among human beings. 

Learning from other cultures is intensely valuable, and we all benefit from it. 'Appropriation' is not a valid complaint in my view; but being treated with disrespect by those who are taking things up from you is.

Appetite for Tyranny

I read the NYT's morning briefing, in part because it helps me know what the ruling class is telling its aspirational members to think.

On Wednesday, they had a piece urging the FDA to just go ahead and approve the vaccines without completing its full process.

Think of it this way: In the highly unlikely event that the evidence were to change radically — if, say, the vaccines began causing serious side effects about 18 months after people had received a shot — Americans would not react by feeling confident in the F.D.A. and grateful for its caution. They would be outraged that Woodcock and other top officials had urged people to get vaccinated.

The combination means that the F.D.A.’s lack of formal approval has few benefits and large costs: The agency has neither protected its reputation for extreme caution nor maximized the number of Americans who have been protected from Covid. “In my mind, it’s the No. 1 issue in American public health,” Topol told me. “If we got F.D.A. approval, we could get another 20 million vaccinated,” he estimated.

Today there is a lengthy argument in favor of just instituting vaccine mandates.

[V]accine mandates cause intense disputes. But when supporters win the argument, public health has often benefited. Guy Nicolette, an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out to The Washington Post that colleges have long required other vaccines, like the one for measles. “It’s staggering how well a mandate works on a college campus,” he said.

Dr. Aaron Carroll, Indiana University’s chief health officer, has noted that the country’s victories over many diseases — including smallpox, polio, mumps, rubella and diphtheria — have depended on vaccine mandates by states or local governments. “That’s how the country achieves real herd immunity,” Carroll wrote in The Times. (In the U.S., a national mandate may be unconstitutional.)

Nice to hear that last bit raised as a concern, at least for now. I remember President Obama pointing out that it would be unconstitutional for him to just use an executive order to create something like DACA, up until he did in fact do exactly that when it proved the only way to get his way. Perhaps they mean it this time, though. 

If you'd like to read an argument actually persuading you that vaccines are mostly safe and a good idea, however, here's Paul Goepfert, M.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has what strike me as a very plausible account of why my major remaining concern -- long term side effects -- is probably not worth continuing to carry. I found his account very plausible; whereas I find the NYT's preferences provoke rebellion even as suggestions. 

Nailed it again.

CNN airs hour-long PSA on warning signs of dementia.

Walken Into Friday

Not our usual fair, but fun to watch ...

I had no idea Christopher Walken had a dance background.

Bit o' Music for Thor's Day

 A set best paired with Old Crow, neat or on the rocks.

Moon Over Caledon, Part II

The second part of the short story is now available on Amazon, for free, if any of you wish to read it. The third part will appear on the 30th.

The Cost of Red Tape for Small Businesses

 

I think if two government agencies have conflicting regulations, when an inspector from one of them shows up, the business owner should be able to point the conflict out to the inspector and the other agency should have to pay the fine.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

"...and we'll all stay free." 

1942 sounds pretty good. 

Bee Stings

Inspiring: US Women's Soccer Team To Boycott Scoring Goals Until Racism Is Defeated

I'd prefer that they boycott representing the US, given that they really shouldn't want to represent anything they believe is evil, but this works.

AOC Says How She Accidentally Glued Her Face To Her Coffee Table Is A Clear Failure Of Capitalism

Wisdom from our favorite economic genius.

Ben And Jerry's Introduces Fun New Flavor 'Push The Jews Into The Sea Salt And Caramel'

Scientists Warn That Within 6 Months Humanity Will Run Out Of Things To Call Racist

I'm not sure we have that long.

Adventures in Truck Driving

So tonight a semi-trailer driver decided to allow his GPS to direct him back to Asheville. He apparently didn't notice the sign that says "WARNING: TRUCKS NOT ADVISED TO TRAVEL THIS HIGHWAY." That's ok. Anyone can just ignore that. That's only advisory, after all. 

Then he allowed himself to be directed by GPS off of the highway onto a very narrow secondary road that runs across the top of Neddie Mountain, which is helpfully called "Neddie Mountain Road" so you'll know that it's not the right road for a semi. There he became stuck trying to manage a hairpin corner with crumbling shoulders and precipices on both sides.

Pity the poor driver. He's a young black man, he's in the middle of mountain country full of Confederate flags and hillbillies he's been taught to fear his whole life, he's stuck in a truck full of valuable cargo, and it's getting dark.

So he calls for a wrecker, which a tractor-trailer capable wrecker has to come from Asheville and takes hours to get there. He has to sit there alone for hours and hours until help finally comes. Now it's fully dark and they're trying to haul him out. They get him out, and realize that not only can he not get through that curve, they can't get their wrecker through it either.

So they call the Volunteer Fire Department. It's now fully dark, and we have guys out with flashlights helping them painstakingly back the whole way back to the highway that was never a good option for a truck like that to begin with. The wrecker can probably turn around maybe a half a mile back, but there's nowhere on that narrow road to turn around a semi. 

We'll get him out, but I imagine it will take all night. Then he's got to drive back to Asheville using the long way that he was trying to avoid in the first place.

UPDATE:

Entrapment

The hell you say.

The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. [Note: there are only six accused plotters.--Grim] The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.

An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.

We've all seen the "alleged evil right-wing plot turns out to have been invention of FBI/ATF" movie before. If we're at the point that they've infiltrated these organizations thoroughly enough to have two informants on the payroll for every defendant, we can surely declare victory on Joe Biden's "Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism" and go home. We're in more need to counter the Federal police, who are apparently out there creating violent plots all the time. 

Arizona Poll

78% of Arizona Republicans doubt Biden won based on the initial results of the audit. That's interesting, but even more interesting to me were some of the statistics the article cited.

Despite Biden’s victory, Republicans carried every countywide office in Maricopa, save for the sheriff (which an incumbent Democrat held), including flipping the county recorder and winning the open treasurer seat.... 

Add to this fact that very vocal Trump-supporting members of Congress, like GOP Reps. Andy Biggs and Debbie Lesko, won their re-election contests in Maricopa County districts by massive margins, and now the red flag is starting to go up.

That does seem odd! Hm... 

Existential Troopers

I have felt like this for the past 8 or 18 months, I suppose.

Porn Stars and the Right

Apparently a female porn star -- "Brandi Love," which I assume is a pseudonym -- was turned away from the Turning Point USA conference. TPUSA is a youth-oriented conservative movement of some sort, one that I don't know well. Its leadership is smug about their decision. 

I wouldn't be inclined to turn anyone away at the current moment, least of all because they were a sinner. Donald Trump, for all his flaws (and sins) certainly did not look down on porn stars. Nor, per se, did another figure of some importance.

Of course, I am a sinner myself and not much inclined to throw stones from my glass house. Perhaps these are better people than me, more upright and moral, and thus more fit to condemn; but they still are going to need people to effect a democratic solution. 

The entry to heaven is said to be narrow, but roads made by men should be wide. If you make the road too narrow, no one can follow you; and perhaps you cannot keep to that road yourself.

What is a “Pudding”?

Americans have a very different answer than the British, who almost can’t answer at all. My favorite British puddings are savory: black pudding, for example, is made with blood and oatmeal. It is often served as a breakfast food. 

Meanwhile, an airborne virus with a 10% fatality rate

North Texas reports a rare case of monkeypox, imported via a commercial flight from Nigeria. Those of us who were vaccinated for smallpox before that routine practice was discontinued around 1980 are believed to be immune.

Don't worry, V.P. Harris is safe

This seems like a high positive COVID test rate for a bunch of vaccinated public serpents, even if they were crowded in a private jet without masks, while fleeing to the nation's capitol to break a Texas quorum and get photo ops with Kamala Harris. The Texas House Dems can't very well admit they weren't vaccinated, so I have to assume they took one of those tests with a zillion replications that is almost guaranteed to produce false positives. I'm not getting the point of the exercise, though. To cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccinations? On their own claim to have been vaccinated? To irritate the VP's staff by admitting that they put her at risk, or force her to argue that vaccinated people don't have to wear masks, or needn't quarantine? Why get tested in the first place? If there's no political capital to be made from the whole exercise, I suppose we have to chalk it up to idiocy, no great leap. I guess they could be hoping they'll all be quarantined in D.C. for a few weeks, but the special session in Austin will last until August 31.

Carnyx

Black Rifle, White Flag

It's understandable, given the pressure around 'domestic extremists' and a counter-terrorism strategy from the White House aimed at Americans on the wrong side politically, that some people would want to try to negotiate a separate peace. Black Rifle Coffee is led by such people.

It's ok. They love Big Brother now. 

Black Rifle professes to be eager to put some of its fiercest and trolliest culture-war fights behind it. “What I figured out the last couple of years is that being really political, in the sense of backing an individual politician or any individual party, is really [expletive] detrimental,” Hafer told me. “And it’s detrimental to the company. And it’s detrimental, ultimately, to my mission.”

Hafer and Best were talking in a glorified supply closet in the Salt Lake City offices, where potential designs for new coffee bags were hanging on the wall. One of them featured a Renaissance-style rendering of St. Michael the Archangel, a patron saint of military personnel, shooting a short-barreled rifle. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Hafer knew a number of squad mates who had a St. Michael tattoo; for a time, he wore into battle a St. Michael pendant that a Catholic friend gave him. But while the St. Michael design was being mocked up, Hafer said he learned from a friend at the Pentagon that an image of St. Michael trampling on Satan had been embraced by white supremacists because it was reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd. Now any plans for the coffee bag had been scrapped. “This won’t see the light of day,” Hafer said.

“You can’t let sections of your customers hijack your brand and say, ‘This is who you are,’” Best told me. “It’s like, no, no, we define that.” The Rittenhouse episode may have cost the company thousands of customers, but, Hafer believed, it also allowed Black Rifle to draw a line in the sand. “It’s such a repugnant group of people,” Hafer said. “It’s like the worst of American society, and I got to flush the toilet of some of those people that kind of hijacked portions of the brand.” 

Canceling St. Michael the Archangel because some bad people may 'embrace' him is going a long way to prove your loyalty. Hafer says they won't start a "Black Lives Matter" coffee line, though. I'm not sure why not. As the journalist who suggested it during the struggle session interview pointed out, it would help them get clear of many despised former customers.

Thought Experiments Down the Slippery Slope

My friend Jim Hanson (formerly Uncle Jimbo of BLACKFIVE) has a few narrative expressions of concern about the direction of America. His models -- which he gives up front -- are 1984 and Brave New World, and he intends these to be speculative warnings along the same lines. It's not that we'll necessarily get there... but we have gotten a lot closer to 1984 than we had hoped, even with Orwell's warning.

Demons and Monsters

Two from the Babylon Bee. "According to sources, the demon will be moving to somewhere he'll feel more welcome, like Washington D.C."

The Dignity of Pirates

An amusing description from the opening of a history of the Normans.

The gulf stream flows so near to the southern coast of Norway, and to the Orkneys and Western Islands, that their climate is much less severe than might be supposed. Yet no one can help wondering why they were formerly so much more populous than now, and why the people who came westward even so long ago as the great Aryan migration, did not persist in turning aside to the more fertile countries that lay farther southward. In spite of all their disadvantages, the Scandinavian peninsula, and the sterile islands of the northern seas, were inhabited by men and women whose enterprise and intelligence ranked them above their neighbors.

Now, with the modern ease of travel and transportation, these poorer countries can be supplied from other parts of the world. And though the summers of Norway are misty and dark and short, and it is difficult to raise even a little hay on the bits of meadow among the rocky mountain slopes, commerce can make up for all deficiencies. In early times there was no commerce except that carried on by the pirates—if we may dignify their undertakings by such a respectable name,—and it was hardly possible to make a living from the soil alone. The sand dunes of Denmark and the cliffs of Norway alike gave little encouragement to tillers of the ground, yet, in defiance of all our ideas of successful colonization, when the people of these countries left them, it was at first only to form new settlements in such places as Iceland, or the Faroë or Orkney islands and stormiest Hebrides.

Apparently in the high English society that considered itself descended chiefly from the Normans, in the year 1886, 'pirate' as a description was thought to be at least somewhat respectable. Maybe they were still thinking of Sir Francis Drake.

No Longer Worried

Charles Murray is a pre-Boomer, born in 1943, which makes him 78 years old. He published his most (in)famous work, The Bell Curve, in 1994, which is almost thirty years ago now. At that point he was already almost sixty, and you might have thought him ready to speak uncomfortable thoughts without too much fear of being (as we would say now) canceled. Yet for nearly thirty years I have heard his defenders pointing out that he was misunderstood, that he didn't really say the things that he is most hotly criticized for having said.

Instapundit just posted a link to his new book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Here is how it describes itself:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

Emphasis added. That's exactly the claim his defenders have been trying to walk away from all this time: that the things we tend to describe as structural racism are in fact the fault of minority groups, because they are (a) less intelligent on average and (b) more violent (perhaps because they are less intelligent). He has apparently decided to embrace this idea and use his last years in defense of it. 

I don't know that I believe that (a) is true; I am persuaded that at least some of the counterarguments I've read over the year are plausible. Claim (b) is true as a matter of empirical fact, although just why it is true is the real issue. Are some groups more violent because their situation is less tolerable or just, or are they more violent in some inherent -- perhaps even essential -- way? 

I notice the top-rated review accuses Murray of "soft pedaling" and "sugarcoating," which is definitely not how I would have described this approach. 

Another reviewer has an insight that poses an immediate danger of confirmation bias to me: "An honest appraisal of the differences in criminality between groups by actual data. What I took away, however, is that in cities of 500,000 or less these group differences are much less evident and important. What this book seems to be is a reasoned argument for a post-urban society. Most, if not all of the pathologies of modern life are associated with large urban populations."

It's not quite all -- there are still plenty of drugs in rural America, for example. It may really be most.

Debate: "Should the Declaration inform the Constitution?"

My opinion is that the Declaration of Independence is far more important than the Constitution. The Declaration is permanent, indeed eternal. It speaks of the Creator who endowed human beings with inalienable rights, for one thing. For another, it describes the purpose not only of this or that government but of every possible future government: to secure those rights. 

The Constitution, by contrast, has a beginning and an end. It began as a replacement for an earlier attempt to build a government coherent with the aims of the Declaration, and it will end when the government it created finally fails the Declaration's test. 

That is not the only opinion, however. Barack Obama thinks the Declaration is irrelevant, and that eternal truths are undesirable. 

Barack Obama treats that claim with a certain condescending dismissiveness. “The great thing about America,” he said, “is that our institutions do not rest in any claim to an absolute truth.” With a wink, he says that we all know now that all men are created equal was not really a moral truth. And yet this was important for Obama to denounce the hypocrisy of the Founders, such as Jefferson, Washington, Madison, who owned slaves. But wait, if all men are created equal was not a fact, a moral truth, then there was no moral wrongness in making slaves of other men. Then what was the problem, that the Founders have been inconsistent?

That quote is from an edifying debate hosted by the Federalist Society between Hadley Arkes and Toledo Law School Professor Lee Strang. There's a lot going on in the discussion, but one of the points I think most worth raising is against the idea of positive law as a source of values. If a thing is right and good because the law says so, well, men make the laws and the laws could thus say anything. This is framed as a law school discussion in front of then-Professor Amy Coney Barrett, but it is in fact a debate at least as old as Socrates' feud with Protagoras, or his debate with Euthyphro. 

Censor Our People, "Please"

The White House admits that it is 'flagging' online posts for censorship by technology companies like Facebook. Lawyer Ron Coleman is currently conducting a legal action against such censorship, which he argues is unconstiutional. 

"As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned 'a private entity can qualify as a state actor,' subject to First Amendment protections, under three circumstances. See Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019)....

* "'When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,' see Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974); 

*"'When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,' see Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982); or

*"'When the government acts jointly with the private entity." See Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982)."

This is what the wise guys commenting on this thread - unsurprisingly - seem to not know when they say, "Muh private company"

Ron Coleman was in Philadelphia on November 3rd when Republicans were forcibly kept from performing their legal (indeed mandated by law) poll watching duties. He and his fellows conducted a successful lawsuit that day, obtained a court order, and then had the city government simply ignore it. 

Moon Over Caledon

So I wrote a short story, which will be published in three parts over the next few weeks, for Kindle's new "Vella" serial fiction project. It's clearly inspired by REH's approach to fiction, which I think we could use more of at this time. It's called "Moon Over Caledon," and I think it'll even be free to read -- you only have to pony up 'tokens' on this model if it goes over three parts, which it won't. 

A Mean Old Man

Today the shop called to say that my Jeep was ready. I said I'd be by this afternoon and they said okay, but when I got there the place was closed and locked up. 

Well, hours went by and they didn't come back. Finally this old man came, long white beard, and he got out and was unlocking the door. I went up to the window after he'd gone inside and said that I inferred he must work there since he had keys.

"No, I don't work here," he said. "I own the m*****f*****." 

Well, I said, I'd like to pay to pick up my Jeep. 

"Have you been working out?" he said.

"Not today," I replied.

"How are you going to pick it up then?"

So after a while he agreed to let me come in and pay for the Jeep repairs, and then he showed me the old clutch they'd pulled out of it (which had shattered impressively). This entailed a lot of probing questions from him about whether or not I understood how a clutch works, which I do. I just don't have a lift at home that will reach the bottom of a raised Jeep, and didn't feel like trying to replace the clutch without one. 

I paid him, which required a lot more cussing from him as he tried to work the machinery for the credit card ("I used to could work these things, but they changed it all around"). He cussed his grandchildren who don't answer their phones when he needs them to remind him how to work the machinery. Finally he did figure it out. I got my keys back and was ready to go. 

I stuck out my hand. "What's your name?"

He reached for my hand, answering, "Carl," and I shook his hand firmly. 

He gasped and I let him go. "Sorry!" I said.

"No, that's good!" he replied, eyes wide. "You don't meet a lot of men anymore. I asked if you worked out, but clearly you do. What do you do, bench press?"

So I mentioned Strongman, and he knew all about it, Atlas stone loading and all that. He was very into it. He turned out to be a very cool guy for a mean old man.