Trusting the Taliban

As the President of the United States abruptly ended and fled from his press conference on Afghanistan, a reporter yelled out the question: "Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?"

It's an excellent question. One of the problems with the Biden administration's "strategy" of trusting the Taliban is that the Taliban forces are irregulars. Even if a Taliban leader promises something, he has no mechanism to ensure the forces on the ground know about his promise -- let alone abide by it. Even if the leaders that the State Department are talking with are sincere, they aren't able to discipline their forces well enough to ensure compliance. 

The situation is bad enough that even ABC News and NPR are turning on the administration. CNN is allowing their in-country correspondent to point out that the evacuation ground to a halt overnight, Qatar is refusing to take any more refugees, and that there is simply no way that they will be able to evacuate the planned numbers in the allotted time.

Their tribal ties persist, but they are under intense strain because of the horror the administration's actions have provoked. You can tell that CNN Correspondent Clarissa Ward thinks of herself as part of the team: even in her hostile interview with John Kirby, she speaks as 'the one who has to look them [i.e. Afghans] in the eyes,' meaning that she feels she is in a way a spokesperson or a symbol of the American administration. Yet she is doing her best to tell the truth, and being genuinely brave in a situation that very suddenly became unstable. 

Meanwhile, a new report shows that the Biden administration promised allies we would leave a stabilizing force in Afghanistan as recently as June. Even the British were given no warning that we had changed our minds and were pulling the rug out. 

Also, the Pentagon is openly contradicting the President on the facts on the ground. The Pentagon is being honest: al Qaeda is definitely still there, contra what the President told the press, and Americans are definitely not getting to the airport without difficulty. They're admitting that Americans are being beaten by the Taliban's forces and driven back in some cases.

It's not clear if Biden has lost his mind or is simply lying, but even his own appointees and favorites among the press can no longer stand to lie for him. That suggests the end is near for his Presidency.

Luke 22:36 / Havamal 38

Elite Education

My own has not been elite, but public state school, except for two years. In the early 1990s I attended the Paideia School in Atlanta for my last two years of high school, and that is very much a feeder school for elite education (although my family could not afford to send me to such). The youth I encountered there were completely different from anyone I had ever known before; the education included exposure to the progenitors of Critical Race Theory, and Critical Theory in general, to alternative religions including Wicca (then a tiny minority, now bigger than Presbyterianism), and of course to intense forms of feminism. 

So I read this essay from Swarthmore with a kind of interest. He is arguing that elite education is, on its own terms, despicable and impermissible. 

Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

Well, indeed: this is what the Marxists (or Hegelians) would call an internal contradiction, the sort that will ultimately force you to evolve to a new plane of understanding. But all of reality is supposed to be like that, if you read Hegel.

He's read Marx, anyway.

On my first day of teaching at Swarthmore I was asked if I would serve as faculty adviser for the Conservative Society. This came as a surprise. I was just about to publish a book called Plato as Critical Theorist, my job talk had been about the ideal of socialism and I had recently voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Did the students know something I didn’t? The answer was yes. They knew that student societies can only exist if they have a faculty adviser, for one thing, but they also knew there was no one else they could ask. The fact that I had written an article called “Why Conservatives Should Read Marx” was sufficient to demonstrate my interest in engaging with conservative ideas and, given the political climate at Swarthmore, that was all they felt they could ask for. “You could give us a critical eye on our activities,” the society’s president wrote, “and help us come up with hard questions for our guest speakers and for ourselves.” I worried about my reputation on campus but decided I couldn’t let the students down.

Good for you. It's a start. 

It's a hard question, though. There really aren't any schools for ordinary people that are even capable of aspiring to the level of education you'd want in whomever you put in charge. There should be; Catholic schools should teach Aquinas and Aristotle, and even Avicenna and Maimonides. They should be able to train you in the modern and Enlightenment theories without committing to them, showing you where they are strong and where they might be weak. 

Ultimately the goal has to be training those few of the ordinary people's children who have both the interest and the aptitude, that they might be raised to the Guardians (as Plato put it -- and in no way endorsing Plato's totalitarian model). The governing system needs to be voluntary, so that no one makes money off of command of others. You have to make your money off of service to others. That's the only moral way, the only way to avoid the corruption that Weber points out is a necessary feature of constant government (see the archives on Weber). 

This is also Aristotle's insight, re: his decision that only the middle class can be trusted with political power because they'll want to politics to the bare minimum so they can get back to earning their living on their private economic activity.

Yet someone ultimately must exercise political power, even if as a volunteer; and they need to be virtuous, and they need to be educated. The elite generally are not virtuous because, for reasons of their class, they live in luxury and ease. Virtue requires practice, and practicing in circumstances of hardship. It cannot be cultivated to a great deal in luxury.

But education requires ease, as Plato and Aristotle note: you cannot sit and study if you must work all the time. The elite thus easily build a surplus of education, but a deficit of virtue as compared to ordinary people.

A strenuous education was Plato's response: put them to hard training, military training, so that they cannot avoid developing the difficult virtues. Yet they will also be subject to education, and provided just enough ease for that. Theodore Roosevelt argues for the strenuous life on similar terms, although he was himself too much an elite to understand how his beloved cowboys were unlikely to have the leisure to grasp Plato at length.

It is a very difficult matter. Some combination of hardship -- war, ideally, if Aristotle is right; training for war at least, if Plato is right -- and leisure has to be made available, and for everyone who shows the potential to understand. Yet the hard work also has to be done; firewood has to be cut, or pipelines run; water must be carried from the river or the well, or plumbing maintained.

We have not reached any kind of ideal. Rule by the educated is enervating because they lack virtue. It is what is killing our society right now. Rule by the virtuous is right and proper, but they also need not to be ignorant of the knowledge that the wise of endless generations have produced. That requires education, of some kind and to some degree.

Pause and reflect on this. 

Goodnight, Sonny Chiba

The martial arts film star has died at 82. Quentin Tarantino was impressed with him; not only was he featured in Kill Bill (Volume One), as noted, his Street Fighter films were introduced in the opening scene of True Romance (an underappreciated movie). Here are some of those scenes.

He might also have been influential in William Gibson's choice to set the opening of his breakthrough novel, Neuromancer, in Chiba City. 

West's Founding XI: Honor and Shame in Politics

This is an underappreciated area of philosophy, though it is where I have spent an awful lot of my time. West points out that political power is insufficient to actually govern, and as such that what the Founders called the "law of fashion" (see prior posts) ends up being the most important law of all. What people happen to honor, or are willing to shame, ends up governing a great deal more of human behavior than the positive law -- and can even alter whether or not the positive law can be enforced, or upon whom, as we saw in the non-prosecution of last year's BLM riots (versus the objectively similar behavior on display on 6 January, which are being aggressively prosecuted because of the comparatively unfashionable nature of the perpetrators).

West points out that politics not only ends up depending on these forms, it can influence them as well. Funeral orations, speeches in general, the granting of and celebration of military awards and decorations, and political symbolism are all ways of using honors to hold up ideals for aspiration. West has an extended discussion of the Great Seal of the United States that intends to show how the Founders held up the Roman model as a kind of ideal, and likened their project especially to Virgil's heroic treatment of the founding of Rome. 

To some degree this underlines a problem with this approach, which is that fashions change and therefore honors of prior generations wash out. The Founders may well have been just as careful in their construction of the symbolism of the Great Seal as he says; and perhaps it had their intended message, down to the untranslated Latin references to Virgil, in their own generation. No one except a few specialists now reads Virgil in Latin; almost no one reads Virgil at all. The symbolism is lost, the honors are not noticed, and the symbol now looks just like a weird pyramid with an all-seeing-eye atop it.

Similarly, the fashion of respect passed that caused the daughters and granddaughters of Civil War Veterans to erect so many monuments to their fathers and grandfathers at the close of those mens' lives -- the great period of Civil War monuments is 1900-1920, when a youth of 20 in 1860 would have been 60 to 80 years old. The Daughters of the Confederacy knew their fathers and grandfathers, as did the parallel Union organizations. They honored them as much for the men they had been later in life, acting as fathers and grandfathers, as for what they did in the great and terrible moments of their youth. But they also honored that, because they had grown up hearing the stories of sacrifice and suffering from their elders. 

None living today knew the men, nor heard their stories from them. And so, to us, the monuments -- which are honors -- are important only for our own purposes. Few of us care for them even for their historical interest; almost none care for honor itself so much as to revere the impulse to honor one's elders for its own sake. Therefore our present generation destroys such monuments for their own internal reasons, honoring themselves instead (and not apparently even caring whose monuments they are, or what they did, as witnessed by the destruction of monuments to Lincoln and Grant as well as Lee and Stonewall Jackson). 

These are titanic matters of the first importance to human society; few understand how powerful or how deep they are. West's chapter is a little dry, but at least its presence shows that he is cognizant that it is a topic that deserves discussion. 

Assabiya

Lee Smith and Rod Dreher are making an explosive charge about the CIA's operations in Afghanistan.

The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.

This is part of an overarching analysis of why the American elite has comprehensively failed, and why the barbarians in Afghanistan found them easy to beat. 

Dreher warns that he thinks the likely outcome is a totalitarian system, such as the one that replaced the Russian Empire after the fall of the Tsars. I think that's wrong; the totalitarians are the ones in the elite now. What's likely here -- as R. E. Howard wrote -- is likewise the return of barbarism. Our barbarians are healthier, though: strong, honest, and with a love of liberty enforced with arms. 

The French, Too

Under the commander in chief, our military is less daring and capable than French police. C’est dommage. 

That Was Four Days Ago, Five

People are pointing out that it was only two days ago — Monday — when Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban were falling to their deaths from American planes. Fair; apparently the President has lost track of time. 

In two or three days, though, it will have been four or five days ago. Had he given the answer then, when it was accurate, it would have been a horrible thing to say. How can you trivialize this, least of all by suggesting that the passage of a few days should put us beyond it? On 9/11, twenty years ago, we saw people choosing such a death over the horror of their situation; and it remains deeply tragic after all this time. 

PRC Funded China Trips for Anti-Audit Dems

Surprise. 

Hey, why would Chinese Communists be aligned with those trying to suppress audits of the election? Coincidence?

State Dept. Bureau In Charge of Afghan Evacuation Defunded

Trump's State Department -- which chafed under his authority the whole four years -- never really wanted to establish the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau, but Trump wanted it to prevent Benghazi-style embarrassments. Biden's team defunded it in June, so it wasn't there to help evacuate Americans in Afghanistan.

Communists Outed by Communist Purge

Current Affairs is a lefty magazine that extends even to outright Communism at times. For example, from their current edition here is an argument that you should be breaking things at work (to keep your capitalist bosses from replacing workers with machines); and here is an argument that gay marriage was secretly just a plot by the wealthy to obtain benefits for themselves (one that, along the way, celebrates the descent of American sexual culture into complete chaos). 

The magazine just fired almost all of its staff because they were trying to organize a worker's co-op.

Not a surprise for those who read the history of actual Communist states.

UK Forces Still Running Patrols into Kabul

Apparently hotly opposed by the US commander, the UK's 2Para are running patrols to pick up and transport citizens -- theirs, Irishmen, but also others who want to be moved safely -- to the airport. Read this exclusive thread on the topic.

Czech Republic Enshrines Right to Arms in Constitution

The language is peculiar to my ear, but it's an honorable action all the same.

The amendment states that “the right to defend one’s life or the life of others, even with the use of weapons, is guaranteed.”

Read about how this came to be at the link. 

The idea, according to one person quoted in the article, is to form a civilian militia. 

Maybe you ask why this additional constitution law helps us to secure our civil gun ownership against EU restrictions, because EU restrictions are more powerful than basic laws of EU countries – this constitutional right is just first step. The second step, which will follow and already is in our parliament and senate for discussion is, that the our government – especially our Ministry of Interior affairs in, collaboration with Ministry of Defense, make a project which is called “defined state backups” and that means that all gun owners can sign to a special training with guns covered by state armed forces. This course should deepen the civil gun owners skills to defend lives before special police forces arrives. It is our reaction on terrorism and the cases with active shooter in schools, public areas, etc. We know that the police cannot be everywhere. That means that all the gun owners which undertake this training and make a promise, will become let’s say part of interior security. The interior security is one of a fields where EU has no rights and then we can say – OK, you cannot tell us which kind of guns or size of magazines we can have, because this is strictly in our competition for our internal safety.

That's precisely correct both conceptually and as a means of execution. 

A Happier Topic

Here is a collection of online, searchable 18th and 19th century cookbooks. One of them is a treatise on brewing beer from 1795, which points out that even in those days government was screwing up basic things: brewhouses were required by law not to move their coolers without notifying the excise official, but brewers in private homes could move them about the house as conditions warranted. 

Lars Walker on the State of the World

Our old friend Lars Walker, translator and author of numerous books (some of which we've delved into deeply here), has thoughts about the future. 

I don’t want to write about the state of the world. I’m not very happy about the state of the world, or the nation, or the state, or the community.... At bedtime, I’ve been reading Jeremiah. Appropriate, in a tragic way. There’s Jeremiah, this young man who loves God, and what job does God give him? “Tell the people to repent or they’ll be punished. They won’t listen to you, but tell them anyway.”

“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The problem is, His idea of wonderful is different from ours. From mine, anyway.

If I didn’t have a strong impression (very likely wrong) that I have a Calling to finish my Erling saga before I die, I’d be strongly considering taking up an even more unhealthy lifestyle, just to avoid the disaster that seems inevitable now.

One might reasonably take up riding motorcycles, which brings joy even in times of crisis. Alternatively, one might stick around in the hopes of dying honorably in battle -- it seems more and more likely that we might get a chance. 

The important thing is to live and die with honor. If you want advice I would say to finish your saga, but practice with your sword as well.  

Austin Bay: Afghanistan Debacle Inexcusable

 It didn't have to be this way. A well-executed withdrawal would have saved their lives and perhaps saved the anti-Taliban government. The acronym is NEO -- Noncombatant Evacuation Operation -- "the departure of civilian noncombatants and nonessential military personnel from danger in an overseas country to a designated safe haven ... "

The U.S. military is highly skilled at NEO. Even a NEO involving an area as large as Afghanistan could have been planned and prepared in 30 to 45 days if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had coordinating power and the State Department arranged for temporary refugee housing in third-country safe havens. The decision to withdraw from the huge air base at Bagram was utterly stupid, at least until threatened Afghans were extracted.

President Joe Biden gave his withdrawal speech on April 14. There was time. Incompetent, arrogant and oblivious White House leadership compounded by obscenely bad interagency planning created the horror we witness and the slaughter to be.

UPDATE: Hey, how about Ryan Crocker? 

 “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” Crocker, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 2002 to 2003, then again from 2011 to 2012, told The Spokesman-Review.

“To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care,” he added.

Crocker, who also represented the U.S. in Afghanistan under the Bush administration from 2002 to 2003, said the collapse of Afghan forces amid the U.S. troop withdrawal was the result of “a total lack of coordinated, post-withdrawal planning on our part.”

“That’s why this is all so sad,” he added. “It is a self-inflicted wound.”

A Modest Proposal on Afghanistan

People are treating the Taliban like they're ten feet tall, but they haven't actually won a gunfight with us in twenty years. Why not take Bagram back by force, and stage a proper retreat action once we've secured Kabul? 

We wouldn't have to stay any longer than necessary to pull out the eleven thousand Americans there, plus our soldiers and Marines. We also don't have to accept letting the Taliban roll over us or dictate terms to us.

Sweden and Its Example

Sweden's seven-day moving average of deaths has been zero for a little while now. Two weeks ago, people were critical of the government's 'laxity' given the new variant; but it's still zero two weeks on. 

Our county locked down way back a year and a half ago, but has been back to normal for quite a while. Almost no one wears masks, restaurants are open for in-room dining, businesses are back open. I gather that's typical for rural America. I keep mentioning that we haven't had a death since February, but I got to thinking maybe that's just good luck. Maybe deaths are higher in other rural counties; surely they are in the cities. 

Now if you go to the CDC website to look at county-level data, here's what they'll show you first: 'community spread.'

Looks terrifying, right? But you have the option to select for 'deaths,' and in rural America deaths are at zero in much of America; in some places there are still single digit or low-double digit deaths.

So rural America is less prone to death; that makes sense because of less crowding and so on. It's almost the same for the metro counties, though, with a handful of exceptions.

It seems as if there's plenty of room here for a Sweden-style solution to most of America, at least. 

Of course, you could take the position that 'even one death is too many,' and lock down like New Zealand at the first confirmed case. But they're a remote island nation where keeping cases to zero is an imaginable goal, even if it's probably impossible in the long run. That's not true of the United States, where international commerce is centered. Even if we had control of our southern border, we'd still have a lot of people coming and going at ports and airports across the country.

Ten Thousand Journeys

The approximately ten thousand American civilians left in Kabul have been told to head to the airport, but they’re on their own getting there. 

Hope the women had the foresight to buy burqas. 

West's Founding, X: Sex and Marriage

West points out that there is little in the Founding core documents on these topics because they were quite uncontroversial matters in the Founding era. Nevertheless they are so important to our own time that he decided they merited a chapter. He had to dig deeper to come up with material, looking at state and local laws, legislative statements and debates, court cases and rulings, even personal correspondence between John and Abigail Adams. 

The findings are not very surprising. The Founders endorsed a rational, reasoned account of traditional Judeo-Christian moral views on sex and marriage. They rejected Islam's approach by name (235), not because of prejudice but because they felt it degraded women's natural right to equality and reduced them to near-slavish status. They approved of monogamous marriage, barred polygamy, sodomy, and bestiality; they banned prostitution and pornography as being contrary to the success of marriage, which they viewed as a fundamental institution of a natural society -- as well as a natural right of men and women, provided they took only one spouse of the opposite sex and with due reflection.

West finds that the laws on sex were very strict, but barely enforced. In principle sodomy was a capital crime in many places; Jefferson proposed to reduce the penalty to castration for men and nose-piercing for women. Massachusetts' adultery law prescribed public display on the gallows followed by whipping of up to 39 stripes, plus imprisonment and/or fines. In fact, though, there is no evidence that these corporal penalties were carried out, and there are only two recorded capital cases West could find. One of these was in a case of sodomy against an unwilling youth, and as a result the death penalty might have been as much for the rape as for the homosexuality. The other might have been a bestiality case, but it is not clear. (230-1)

This was how Georgia handled sodomy cases even in my own lifetime. In principle it was a felony, whether the sodomy was oral or anal, homosexual or otherwise. In practice almost no one was ever prosecuted for such a thing; the only case I know of was of a guy who admitted to it on the stand in the course of his divorce case. He ended up going to prison for what he'd confessed to under oath, but his wife (an equal partner in theory) was not prosecuted because she had not confessed.

West says, "For the most part, this de facto 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on sexual misconduct continued from the founding until... the 'surge of interest in victimless crime, in vice, in sexual behavior, at the end of the nineteenth century," i.e., the rise of the Progressive age. West documents that it was the Progressives who banned birth control, and pushed for aggressive enforcement of sexual morality laws. He quotes one of the Progressives on the subject, who wrote that the "purpose of the state... [is] the perfection of humanity;... the perfect development of the human reason, and its attainment to universal command over individualism[,]" (234) The 1910 encyclopedia article on crime praises the apparently rising crime rate because "it is almost in every case due to the enactment of new laws, police regulations, etc., with the stricter enforcement of social and hygienic regulations -- an indication, therefore, of social progress rather than the reverse." (ibid)

The common law inherited from Britain that continued at the Founding did place a significant limit on women's equality if and only if they became wives: their legal personhood was collapsed with their husband's ('one flesh' and all that), and he was therefore in charge of any money and property they held in common. Single women and widows had the same civil rights as regarded owning property or businesses (witness Betsy Ross), but this was not true for married women whether or not they had children. (237). 

These laws were not immediately changed at the Founding, because the status of the family was uncontroversial in the society of that time, but they did begin to change in ways that asserted women's natural rights after 1776. Courts as early as 1816 held that, though a wife could not make a legally binding contract under the common law, husbands were bound to obey any contract their wife made provided that it was reasonable. (238) Courts also departed from the English common law that permitted husbands to "moderately chastise" (i.e. beat) their wives, holding that "the right of chastising a wife is not... recognized by our law." (ibid) The continual evolution of the laws after the Founding was in that direction, until we arrived where we are today. 

Another thing that changed after 1776 was that American women no longer were expected to abide by their parent's wishes on whom they should marry, but were free to choose their husband. (241) West claims that "After 1776, the American family was increasingly based on a new view of wives as equal partners with their husbands, although men and women were still expected to occupy partially separate spheres in life." (ibid) He cites a number of publications from the period that praised women as the moral center of the family as evidence that women were increasingly entrusted by society with the right to make decisions about what morality required of their families as well as themselves. "Historian Linda Kerber has called this new idea of women's role 'republican motherhood," West notes, citing her work Women of the Republic. (ibid)

Once again West cites Locke mostly to point out that he has seen little evidence that the Founders read him on the subject; once again he does not cite Kant, whose work is quite close to the approach West attributes to the Founders. Kant, just as West says the Founders did, essentially endorsed the Judeo-Christian traditions on sex and marriage but put a coat of 'practical reason' paint on them rather than citing the tradition or the Bible. Kant also reasoned that marriage was a natural right of individuals, so much so that any individual had a right to insist that a society that had somehow not made legislation permitting marriage must do so on demand. Kant likewise reasoned to the conclusion that sex was only permissible in marriage, in a 'natural' way (i.e. one capable of producing children), and that marriage was a natural law institution consisting of exactly two parties of the opposite sex from one another. The Kantian project and the Founding project are quite different, but they are both expressions of the Enlightenment in this way (although, as you will recall from earlier sections of this review, West thinks the Founders were fairly suspicious of the Enlightenment's claim to rely on reason alone as a guide).

In any case, this chapter is unsurprising but was worth putting together. This is true even though I imagine it was a lot of work, compared with other chapters, because it required a lot more digging. Still, it is helpful to have it all spelled out.

Harmless enemy, treacherous friend

Mark Steyn.

The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we're Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

The President's New Statement on Afghanistan

The President's speech today was (a) preposterous and (b) discouraging. It was preposterous to claim that we will now focus on the counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan, which we have just lost all capacity to perform at all. It was preposterous in the extreme to claim that "We planned for every contingency!" in the wake of the obvious failure of military planning for this retreat.

It was discouraging because the President chose not only to accept no responsibility for himself ("The buck stops here!" he said, before walking away without taking a single question). He also chose not to ask anyone on his team to accept responsibility. Every officer involved in the planning of this withdrawal should be cashiered, and some might reasonably be prosecuted. Instead, it sounds as if the President intends to push the blame as far away from his team as he can, so that no one will actually be held accountable for this massive failure. 

He was strident on the non-issue: almost everyone agrees that it was long past time to leave Afghanistan. He had nothing at all to say about the actual issue, which is a titanic failure of military order. This mismanaged retreat is an issue in and of itself. We had a perfectly good airfield at Bagram we could have used to handle the withdrawal, which is highly defensible and without a large civilian population around it. Instead we've got 6,000 Marines and Paratroopers trapped on a single runway, overrun with civilians who are trying to climb on the plane, endangering all of our forces and also all of the civilians. It's a complete military failure; again, every officer involved in the planning should be cashiered. 

Retreat is one of the most basic military maneuvers, so central to the reality of military life that it had a bugle call that everyone was once supposed to know how to fall in on when it was sounded. A strategic withdrawal is different from a tactical withdrawal in scale, but not in substance. The line of retreat is established, rear guard forces form up to defend the retreat, falling back when a new rear guard is ready to protect them as they fall back. (A sort of reverse of the bounding overwatch maneuver used to advance under fire.) We should have fallen back in stages onto Bagram, evacuating as we went until everyone was gone. The embassy could have been abandoned long ago, before the military withdrawal began. Any civilians we wanted to take out could have been taken out before we pulled support for the Afghan forces, and before we pulled out our own people. 

What I heard President Biden say today was that he was right about everything, brave to take on this difficult decision, and steadfast in the face of all criticism. What that means is that he has learned nothing, is determined to learn nothing, and insists on no one else learning anything either.

The Girl I Left Behind Me

They were mostly males, this time. There's a lot of sadness among those who were in Afghanistan for the ones they got to know, whom they cannot save.

I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we called Cowboy. He always wore this cowboy hat and an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school age.

Cowboy was a good student. His family, who all worked on base, was incredibly proud of him. He wanted to go to college in America. But there weren’t colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too shit. No program to help kids like him. I looked.

I wonder if he’s dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different.

But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.

We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.

And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening.... 

You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into. No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more hypocrisy.

No more pretending it meant anything. It didn’t.

It didn’t mean a goddamn thing.

It's not just veterans. Here's a staff writer at The Atlantic, the kind of person who has contacts he can call on at the Open Society. They have almost infinite resources. They could have helped, if only they'd had time. Why didn't they have time?

In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.”...

At the travel agency Khan heard that there were no seats left on any flights before August 27. By then his wife would be unable to fly, the government of President Ashraf Ghani would have fled, the Americans would be in full evacuation mode, and Kabul would lie open to the Taliban. But on Saturday morning in the U.S., Julie Kornfeld, the pro bono lawyer who has been advising Khan, found three seats on a Turkish Airlines flight and an organization called Miles4Migrants to pay the cost. Khan and his family were scheduled to leave Afghanistan on Tuesday and arrive in Houston on Thursday. With the U.S. visas and tickets in hand, Khan told me that Saturday, August 14, 2021, was the happiest day of his life. He sent me a video of his 3-year-old son in their rented room, dancing an Afghan dance of celebration.

Today, Sunday, the Taliban are in Kabul. President Ashraf Ghani has reportedly fled to Tajikistan. American officials are burning sensitive documents and evacuating the embassy for the airport. All the Western diplomatic missions are being abandoned. The neighborhood where Khan was renting a room has become dangerous, and he and his family have fled, walking six miles to another hiding place. He needs to find a facility that will administer the COVID-19 tests required by the airlines. He needs to get his family to the airport. He needs two more days.

Saturday was already too late. Let's have one more, from Bari Weiss' contacts.

We met in 2011, when we were both working for an Afghan news organization. He was 19 then and had never known a country at peace. He was also very cute, and the other American girl and I would anticipate prayer times because he would roll up his sleeves to do his ablutions. We surreptitiously called those moments “muscle o’clock.”

Once, when we thought there was a Taliban threat to our office, he told me not to worry. “I will protect you,” he said then. “And Allah gave me the heart of a lion.”

The Taliban didn’t hurt us that day, but on Sunday they took over his city. “I cried so much,” he told me.

He was trying to get a visa to leave — everyone in his neighborhood knew he’d worked for the Americans, it was only a matter of time before the Taliban learned it, “and then you know what will happen to me.” He needed one more document: a letter from a supervisor who had stopped returning his emails. On Saturday, I got help from some D.C. friends to track the supervisor down. The supervisor responded immediately, saying the young man had “worked tirelessly to help the U.S. mission in Afghanistan,” and had “regularly placed himself in harm’s way without any objection.” 

I was relieved he’d gotten this ticket out. But by Sunday it was clear it was too late; the Taliban weren’t letting anyone leave.

Why didn't they have more time? Because of yet another cascade failure of our systems, a story that is becoming very commonplace. Planning a retreat is a basic military function. It's not magic. At one time any student of West Point could have done it, would have known when and how to do it. 

Now apparently whole bureaucracies of West Point students can't manage it, not with all the resources in the world. Not with four years of time to plan under the previous Commander in Chief, whose intent to withdraw they resisted so thoroughly as not to make a plan; not with seven months under the current one, whose intent proved ultimately the same.

They failed us, and they failed those some of us came to care about. They placed themselves above the elected leadership, assumed their own superiority, and consequently left thousands at the mercy of the merciless. 

The President's Statement on Afghanistan

The situation in Afghanistan is currently complete collapse, but we are about to insert five thousand Marines and Paratroopers to try to restore control over the airport. At that point we will be facing a situation worse than Saigon in 1975, and potentially as bad as Xenophon's Anabasis (should there not be enough jet fuel at the Kabul airport to manage the evacuation, and resupply proves unrealistic, and the brigade or so of American forces thus have to evacuate overland) or Teutoburg Forest (should the Taliban manage to overrun and destroy our forces, which is unlikely given that these are regular forces with air support -- but also not impossible). 

This is an inexcusable disaster brought on by a complete failure of military leadership and the intelligence community, but also by the civilian leadership's failure to take it seriously or to hold their bureaucracies' feet to the fire on honest information. 

Indeed, the President issued a statement yesterday that has already been completely passed over by reality.

First, based on the recommendations of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence teams, I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 U.S. troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of U.S. personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.

It is too late to help anyone at risk from the Taliban advance. They've taken the presidential palace and the US embassy in Kabul.

Second, I have ordered our Armed Forces and our Intelligence Community to ensure that we will maintain the capability and the vigilance to address future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.

Too late. We will have no foothold in Afghanistan, or near Afghanistan, from which to maintain the vigilance that might underwrite any capacity to act against terrorist threats there. 

Third, I have directed the Secretary of State to support President Ghani and other Afghan leaders as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement. Secretary Blinken will also engage with key regional stakeholders.

Ghani fled the country this morning.

Fourth, we have conveyed to the Taliban representatives in Doha, via our Combatant Commander, that any action on their part on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts U.S. personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.

They appear completely unconcerned about that, having taken Kabul in spite of these threats.

Fifth, I have placed Ambassador Tracey Jacobson in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies. Our hearts go out to the brave Afghan men and women who are now at risk. We are working to evacuate thousands of those who helped our cause and their families.

You'll be lucky to evacuate your embassy employees and the Marines and Paratroopers you're deploying. If you fail at that, there will be female State Department employees turned into Taliban wives and we will lose thousands of the best men remaining in American life. 

That is what we are going to do. Now let me be clear about how we got here.

You can read that if you want, but it's not worth the candle. He isn't clear; and he thinks it's everyone else's fault. 

UPDATE: The top American diplomatic official, the Charge d'Affaires, has been evacuated. We did not have an ambassador because the Biden administration never bothered to nominate one. 

Saturday Music

Had a good ride today, abbreviated by the rising storms of afternoon. By early evening the storms on the mountain were epic. It reminded me of the stories of wizards or martial arts masters who lived high on storm-shrouded mountains. 

Dragging pegs through the mountains on a fast motorcycle is as good as it gets short of war. It’s better yet if your woman is with you, as my wife was today  

Top Terror Threats

Per DHS. 

Make Orwell Fiction Again

The Alternative to Police

Regarding an Atlanta shooting last year...

Today a Fulton County grand jury indicted two men involved in the shooting. According to prosecutors, both men were members of the Bloods gang and were manning the roadblock where Turner was shot because Rayshard Brooks, who was killed by a police officer in the nearby Wendy’s parking lot, was also a member of the Bloods gang....

“There are many more who will never be criminally indicted but should be indicted for their allowing a situation like this to happen in the city of Atlanta,” attorney Mawuli Davis said Friday. “We’re clearer now than we’ve ever been that this was absolutely preventable and did not have to happen but for the city surrendering a block, a neighborhood, to what has now been described as a gang.”

It could have been a well-regulated militia of responsible citizens, but the government seems hostile to that idea and tries to prevent volunteer civil defense organizations from operating. Or it could have been professional police, but I hear the idea is to defund those and eliminate them from these neighborhoods. 

The world is what it is. Somebody is going to be keeping order with guns. If you don't like the cops, you can have the community. If you don't trust the community and you don't trust the cops, you suppress both; but you're going to end up with gangsters instead. Maybe you like your local gang, and you think they're a better option. Maybe they are. 

Better be sure.

Collapse

The Taliban are staging a very rapid reconquista of Afghanistan, apparently taking our intelligence and military experts by complete surprise in spite of 20 years of investments in knowing what is going on in that country. They're capturing major amounts of war materiel we have apparently left behind for them (probably they can't long maintain the Blackhawks and MRAPs, even if they can operate them;  hopefully they'll find good use for the small arms supporting the righteous cause of their brother Muslim Uighurs). 

It's bad enough that we spent 20 years training an Afghan army that fell apart at the first touch. It's worse that we had absolutely no idea of how strong the Taliban was even at the last. There was no successful infiltration by these intelligence agencies with the infinite black budgets, no visibility on what they were capable of doing. 

The real lesson is that our institutions have failed. The military never lost a gunfight above the squad level, but they never came close to attaining the conditions for winning the war -- or even understanding what was possible in a place like Afghanistan. The intelligence services are complete failures. The brass should be cashiered, almost across the board; the intelligence community disbanded and replaced. 

But so too so many of our institutions, which are ossified and immobile, helpless and beyond reform. This includes the institutions that would be tasked with reform, such as Congress. 

The Soviet Union did not long survive its adventure in Afghanistan; it may well be that the US Federal Government will not either. Afghanistan itself was too far away to wound us, though it bled us of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Yet the rot it reveals in our institutions looms like a sudden terminal diagnosis in the life of a man. 

Massive IQ Drop in Children

It’s just one study, for now, but 15-22 points is huge. 

Strange swings in confidence

 I've seen this chart before, but not showing differences between Americans and Brits.  It's odd enough that the confidence levels should be so consistently different between the two populations, but what's even weirder is--there are people who think they could survive a fight to the death with a grizzly bear, etc., unarmed?  And there are people who think they couldn't beat a cat or a rat unarmed?

Don't we all feel like we live in a Dilbert cartoon?

A good interview with Elon Musk, including an anecdote about optimizing processes that really should have been eliminated in the first place:

"[T]here were these fiberglass mats atop the [Tesla] Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery. And it was the one point choking the battery pack production line. . . .

“I tried to fix the automation, like, make the robot better, make it move faster, shorter path, increase the torque, delete the reverse 720 degrees on the bolt cause that’s unnecessary. Go forward fast, not at a 20% rate but at a 100% rate. And instead of spackling glue on the entire battery pack, just put little dabs of glue because the fiberglass mats are sandwiched between the battery pack and the floor pan anyways so all you need is something to hold it in place until you bolt the battery pack into the car.”

And after doing all of this work on automation and acceleration and simplifying Musk finally wondered what the purpose of the mats was in the first place.

“I asked the battery safety team . . . . I said ‘Are they for fire protection?’ And they said ‘No, these are for noise and vibration.’ . . . Then I asked the . . . noise vibration harshness team ‘What’s it for?’ and they said fire safety.”

“So, literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon, okay,” Musk said. He added, “Actually, I feel like I’m in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently.”

. . . [T]hey put microphones in two cars, one with the mat and one without and found no one could tell the difference. So after all of that, they deleted the mats “and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell that was a complete pile of nonsense.”

That Should Do It

Cases up, deaths down

From Issues and Insights:

It's getting rare to find reporting that focuses on hospitalizations and deaths instead of whatever they mean these days by "case counts," but it's out there if you hunt hard enough. Bloomberg started carrying daily updated charts many months ago. I check them often to compare the 7-day-average "case" trends against the "death" trends: big uptick in cases, small impact in deaths.

On the other hand, in just the last couple of months I've learned of two friends-of-friends in their 60s or 70s who died of COVID: both were unvaccinated, and neither pursued monoclonal antibody treatments. I don't get it. Texas Governor Abbott just announced this week that he was opening a number of outpatient antibody infusion clinics, but no one I talk to seems to have heard of the treatment at all, though it's FDA-approved and seems to work brilliantly. There's a nearly complete press blackout on the subject. It has to be administered fairly early; you can't wait until you're in dire straits and hospitalized.

West's Founding IX: Moral Laws

We are reaching the heart of what interested me about this book: the refutation of many scholars, whose work has influenced my own understanding, who held that the Founders had not meant for the government to morally shape individuals as a matter of respect for individual liberty. West is going after some big players here, including Gordon Wood, Alan Gibson, Harvey Mansfield, and Peter Onuf; he is also partly rejecting Thomas Pangle, Jean Yarbrough, and even Leo Strauss (to whom he is obviously philosophically aligned to some degree, but whose arguments he finds flaws with on several occasions). 

West is doing it right, too: not offering a different interpretation, but offering new textual evidence that seems clear-cut on the point. It is possible that he is leaving things out; for example, at one point he offers an argument that the Founders often aimed at a generalized Christianity, but he doesn't mention Jefferson's well-known kind words about Islam. Now, those words were more foreign policy and diplomacy than anything else, and there is more to the story. Still, the fact that it goes unmentioned makes me wonder what else he has omitted that might not fit his vision.

The silence proves nothing, however; his actual inclusions are very impressive. 

One of them has limits he is up-front about. He quotes John Locke on the 'four kinds of moral law,' and notes that there is no evidence he knows of that the Founders used this concept (though some of them read the book in which it is mentioned). (188-9) Rather, West says, he is bringing it up to give us a framework for considering how the Founders' actions can be interpreted. Locke is himself following Aquinas' tradition for the most part, which West doesn't mention at all. 

Locke's four laws are: 

1) Divine Revelation ("Eternal Law" for Aquinas)

2) Natural Law ("Natural Law" for Aquinas)

3) Civil Law ("Human Law" for Aquinas)

4) "The law of fashion and private censure" (This is not a kind of law for Aquinas, but rather the domain of honor and shame)

For the first, he has citations even from Jefferson that a foundation on the divine is the only firm foundation for the defense of liberty. (190-1). Divine law is known to us only by revelation, and reason cannot access it directly. 

Natural law is derived by reason from what is observed about Creation; to know God's works is to learn something about God and God's intentions. What reason can derive about the moral structure of the world is of the second water, but it is still higher than man-made civil law. Human-made laws that violate natural law are and ought to be void; as we have seen throughout, the Founders thought a system of civil law that violated natural rights ought to be overthrown. 

Civil law is the least interesting category. It should serve the natural law by spelling out consequences for violating the natural rights of others, and by offering non-violent ways of settling disputes ('torts,' for example). Here too is public education, which is supposed to shape and train the virtues in the hope of raising up citizens fit for a free society, its offices, and its duties. 

The fourth category is one that I wouldn't normally think of as being a sort of law, but West makes a good case that the Founders might have done. As he points out, the Founders used this a lot to try to shape moral society through praise, condemnation, celebratory speeches, funerary speeches, honors, shames, and so and and so forth. 

West is also good on the limits of Enlightenment thought in the view of the Founders. A lot of scholars view the Founding as an Enlightenment project. West shows that the Founders, though aware of the Enlightenment and interested in it, were also skeptical of how far pure reason could take you. He has good citations to Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Washington's Farewell Address. (198-200)

So, if the ultimate metaphysical ground for natural law is the divine law, ought government to promote religion? West argues that the Founders were strongly in favor of this almost across the board; he gives an argument that Washington thought the government should promote religion even if it were thought to be a false religion rather than to leave the common people without a divine warrant to encourage their practicing of good habits. (Confer with Aristotle's arguments, well known to readers of this page, that virtue is a kind of habituation of one's character through practice until excellence becomes habitual.)

West concludes that the Founders were open to government promoting religion, and less open to government supporting a particular religion. They defended free exercise, but did not defend the idea that all religions were equally deserving of support from the government. As Tom noted in the comments below, states did in fact have state religions at and after the Founding. West argues that, at the Federal level, there were three basic approaches to what ought to be done:

1) A specific Protestant denomination;

2) "[W]hat Adams called 'the general principles of Christianity'"

3) "[T]he God of Liberty who endows all men with inalienable rights, who is identified neither as biblical nor anti-biblical." (212)

Perhaps other approaches are possible, but that is what he thinks the Founders did.

The chapter closes with some other clear-cut encouragements by the Founders in the direction of actively using government to develop citizen virtue. The strongest one is militia service, which is meant to inculcate courage but also the sense that the defense of the free state is a personal duty of every citizen. Jefferson thought we should all carry guns, and use them regularly:

"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind... Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks." (216) Jefferson means here taking walks in the country, and shooting small game and birds-a-wing over land. There are too many people for that today, and too many cities, but it was common practice even among proto-environmentalists like Aldo Leopold in his A Sand County Almanac.

That also brings to my mind my favorite quote from Francis Parkman, one of America's great early naturists and educators. "For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar."

I am convinced, with only the reservation mentioned above, that the Founders were hugely interested in shaping American moral character in salutatory directions. They could adopt this without much fear because they had an idea of the good to which 'salutatory' pointed that was rooted in natural law. The great hazard of a similar movement today -- that 'health' would become aligned with the interests of the state and its powerful corporate bedmates -- was not present because of a robust, rooted philosophical tradition. 

Rogues in the House

The title of one of REH's Conan stories, and also this song by a band called Ironsword.

Aristotle On Shame

As regards a weekend discussion at AVI's, shame actually functions similarly to justice-as-lawfulness in Aristotle's ethics. Yet he is much less willing to assert that shame's encouragement of virtuous behavior is a kind of virtue than that justice-as-lawfulness is at least sort-of like virtue.

Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. It is defined, at any rate, as a kind of fear of dishonour, and produces an effect similar to that produced by fear of danger; for people who feel disgraced blush, and those who fear death turn pale. Both, therefore, seem to be in a sense bodily conditions, which is thought to be characteristic of feeling rather than of a state of character.

The feeling is not becoming to every age, but only to youth. For we think young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, but are restrained by shame; and we praise young people who are prone to this feeling, but an older person no one would praise for being prone to the sense of disgrace, since we think he should not do anything that need cause this sense. For the sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions (for such actions should not be done; and if some actions are disgraceful in very truth and others only according to common opinion, this makes no difference; for neither class of actions should be done, so that no disgrace should be felt); and it is a mark of a bad man even to be such as to do any disgraceful action. To be so constituted as to feel disgraced if one does such an action, and for this reason to think oneself good, is absurd; for it is for voluntary actions that shame is felt, and the good man will never voluntarily do bad actions. But shame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a qualification. And if shamelessness-not to be ashamed of doing base actions-is bad, that does not make it good to be ashamed of doing such actions. Continence too is not virtue, but a mixed sort of state; this will be shown later. Now, however, let us discuss justice.

In a way this is a strange conclusion, because justice-as-lawfulness is going to end up turning on either fear or shame: the coward is pushed to the front by law, but only because he fears being put to death for disobeying the law, or because he fears being shamed as a coward by his community. The law's requirement is a rational principle, though, whereas shame is merely an emotion -- one that might be rightly or wrongly felt.  

Even so, it is 'conditionally a good thing,' shame -- the condition being that it produces right action. Virtue is not good only conditionally, because it produces right action essentially.

Georgia Update

Ballots rejected by the machines were returned to election poll workers, who were allowed to alter them and then have them count. "In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia's largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County[,]"

The article notes that isn't enough to swing Georgia, which had a final margin of almost 13,000; but that's just one county, and it's just one mode of changing votes. (Recall, too, the Time Magazine 'Secret History of the 2020 Election' in which one of the things the self-described conspirators claimed to have done was to have recruited an "army" of poll workers on their side.)

West's Founding VIII: That the Founders Intended to Develop Public Morality

So we begin Part II of West's book, "The Moral Conditions of Freedom." This first chapter is devoted to simply proving, against a host of leading scholars, that the Founders took it to be part of the purpose of government to inculcate virtue among the citizens. West accomplishes this by quotations from founding documents and charters. 

He begins with three documents that focus on the education of the citizenry, including the 1785 charter for the University of Georgia (quoted here). "As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not necessity, and that the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens. When the minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and with evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature." (165-6)

Scholars have wrongly thought that 'liberty' and 'republicanism' -- or 'liberty' and 'virtue' -- were opposed to one another. The concept, as West reconstructs it through quotations to these scholars, is that liberty is about doing what you want; virtue is about doing what you ought (and republicanism, requiring virtue, ends up being a kind of freedom-that-binds-you, a paradox of sorts). Some go as far as suggesting that the Founders rejected, through their embrace of freedom of conscience, any notion that the government should try to train its citizenry towards virtue. 

Returning to the state constitutions and other foundational documents, West shows many clear examples that this conception is wrong. In addition to The Federalist, he gives the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: "no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." (175) He finds similar language in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; and similar language to the opening quote from Georgia in North Carolina and Massachusetts. 

Likewise above the state level, he has quotations from the 1776 resolution of the Continental Congress that the powers they were claiming were "for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as for the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties[.]" (176) That puts the defense of natural rights -- life, liberty, property -- in the last and perhaps fundamental place, but raises the preservation of 'virtue' as well as 'peace and good order' to near parity.

This should be no surprise, West suggests, given that the Founders equated moral law with the very natural law they were intending to enshrine. Jefferson is quoted on his foreign policy, which he describes as "the moral law of our nature" which is "the moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator," adding, "The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany him into a state of society[.]" (177) Hamilton also: "the established rules of morality and justice are applicable to nations as well as to individuals; that the former as well as the latter are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements, to respect the rights of property..." is natural law, and also the moral law. (178)

Private virtue is not enough, given that not all are equally capable of virtue nor inclined to it; and so, moral institutions are required. (181-3). In this, West says, they are in agreement with "philosophers both ancient and modern." (184) He quotes a scholar who mentions Aristotle by name, but cites a different section than the one that occurs to me, to whit, Aristotle on the function of law with respect to justice:

Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour.... What the difference is between virtue and justice in this sense is plain from what we have said; they are the same but their essence is not the same[.]

What Aristotle means here is that the law should compel everyone to act as if they were virtuous. Thus, the coward will be enjoined to act as if he were brave, and punished if he does otherwise; the temperate and the intemperate will be required to act temperately, etc. This means that justice (i.e. lawfulness) and virtue are the same in terms of the conduct they produce, but not the same in essence: the virtuous man does it because he is virtuous, without compulsion, and thus is better than the lawful. 

West notes an important difference in that the Founders separated public virtue from private virtue, leaving a great deal more leeway in private life. Not complete leeway, as he points out: even religious liberty is not unlimited in these charters, which say that it cannot excuse 'licentiousness.' (175-6, 180) Yet I believe he has successfully shown that the Founders thought of encouraging the virtues necessary for citizenship as a task that government and especially its educational systems both should and must undertake. 

UPDATE: West doesn’t mention him, but the want/ought discussion of liberty and virtue is also present in fellow Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. For Kant, what proves that a rational being is free and not driven like an animal by base desire is his ability to choose what he ought instead of what he wants. Even metaphysically freedom is proven by doing the virtuous thing instead of the desirable thing. 

Farewell, Afghanistan

U.S. State Department advises all remaining Americans to leave Afghanistan "immediately," but also that they're on their own about doing it because the American government can't help them anymore. 

The Most Serious of People

Coincident to the former President's titanic birthday bash (to which climate envoy John Kerry took his private jet), the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is taking fire from the New York Times for the second year in a row. Iowahawk reports.

Olympic Nonsense

The gold medal karate match was won by the guy who got knocked out in it, because the actual winner was disqualified for having kicked too hard. 

That's not how fighting works, guys. Even in We Are The World happy globalism land, if you got knocked out you're not the one who won the fight.

Dilation

DOJ to Investigate Phoenix Police

Police in Phoenix had better be very circumspect in how they deal with any protests for a while. 

In a news release, the department announced the “investigation will assess all types of use of force by PhxPD officers, including deadly force. 

“The investigation will also seek to determine whether PhxPD engages in retaliatory activity against people for conduct protected by the First Amendment[.]"

Funny thing about that: Phoenix is also where the Arizona audit is happening. Its results are due soon. You wouldn’t imagine that there might be “mostly peaceful” protests planned to coincide with those? How astonishing is it that it will also coincide with this period of local police suppression by the DOJ?

Just a coincidence. 

Intrigue in Saudi Arabia Threatens CIA Network

Here is an interesting story that has made the Swiss papers. (If you're curious about the URL, ".ch" is the country code for Switzerland, or "Confœderatio Helvetica" as they are properly known.)

The upshot is that the relatively recent shift in the Saudi royal family displaced a number of formerly powerful guys, some of whom had CIA ties as well as ties to Saudi intelligence. Now they're abroad, the Kingdom would like them back, and they're trying to avoid being sent home by filing lawsuits. These lawsuits entail revealing a lot they know about how the Agency has been operating in the Middle East -- much to the consternation of the United States government. 

You probably won't read this story in the US press, which is slavishly devoted to the intelligence community. Nevertheless I have confirmed the details with Saudi contacts, who view the guy as a fugitive and are rather incensed that our government is meddling in his hoped-for extradition. 

Poor Man’s Son

REH Was Right: Babylonian Edition

Ancient Babylon had an advanced form of mathematics we had thought was invented by Pythagoras. 

Bonnehomme Update

The accused has been identified as a BUDs washout with a hatred for the Navy. 

The Eviction Moratorium as a Practical Test of West

West's book, which we have been examining, laid out three tests for justified revolution. 

1) The ends of government are perverted, and,

2) Public liberty manifestly endangered, and,

3) All other means of redress are ineffectual.

Now the end of government is the defense of natural rights, and property is a natural right of the first water according to the Founders. The eviction moratorium not only forbids landlords from exercising their private property rights, it creates felony Federal crimes -- without legislation -- should they dare to do so. This is clearly perverse: the natural right is being not just refused, the natural right is being criminalized. 

Public liberty is manifestly endangered by this. For one thing landlords are being bankrupted, causing them to lose the property that it was their natural right to possess and use. They are threatened with prison, a very pragmatic loss of liberty.

So what about condition three? The prior CDC moratorium was challenged in court, and ruled unconstitutional by the Sixth Circuit. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh affirmed this judgment in his dicta. (UPDATE: see Elise in the comments of the previous post for an alternative reading of what Kavanaugh did.) The Biden administration issued another CDC moratorium anyway, in spite of the courts, and admitting that the courts will probably reject this one too. 

On Tuesday, President Biden said he's conferred with constitutional scholars, and the "bulk" of them say the most recent CDC order is "not likely to pass constitutional muster."

"But," he added, "there are several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort."

So Biden asked the CDC "to go back and consider other options that may be available to them.”

“Whether that option will pass constitutional muster...I can’t tell you,” Biden said. “ I don’t know.  There are a few scholars who say it will and others who say it’s not likely to.

“But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

So what happens when we see that the other means of redress are in fact ineffectual? West quotes the Essex Result (of 1778): 

"the equivalent every man receives, as a consideration for the rights he has surrendered [in leaving the state of nature to form a social compact]... consists principally in the security of his person and property... [F]or if the equivalent is taken back, those natural rights which were parted with to purchase it return to the original proprietor." (137)

Note the specific requirement to defend person and property. Both are being taken by force: their property is effectively seized, their rights over it at least temporarily void, and their persons threatened with felony prison terms if they disobey this lawless order. They went to the courts, obtained relief, and were denied it by executive usurpation. 

Prudence may caution landlords to try the courts again, in the hope that the second time around the government might agree to restore their rights and perhaps compensate them for damages. If this is a transient harm, as the Declaration suggests, it might be borne in patience. 

Nevertheless please note that it is exactly the kind of offense that dissolves the social contract under our founding theory, restores the right to resume the state of nature, throw off the government, and constitute a new one. The powers that be do not seem to understand that they are playing with fire. 

West's Founding VII: Natural Rights and Public Policy

This will be the last section on Part I of West's book, which is a description of the political theory of the Founders as he understands it. Part II, "The Moral Considerations of Freedom," follows after. 

Both foreign and domestic policy can be derived in a few short strokes once the principle is accepted that government's sole purpose is to secure the natural rights of the citizenry. In West's formulation, the Declaration lays out foreign policy succinctly when it speaks of "one people [dissolving] the political bands which have connected them with another, and [assuming] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them[.]" A people have a right to do that; but because it is only a 'free and equal' station to which they are entitled, their new government has no right to interfere with any other except in cases of self-defense. (141)

West does not like the term "isolationism," which he describes as pejorative. Nevertheless he approves both of Hamilton's and Jefferson's refusal to join the French Revolution's attempt to export its ideology, and their criticisms of France for shifting into an ideology-exporting mode. (145) Washington's discussion of 'entangling alliances' (especially referring to France) was repeated by Jefferson in his own day, in spite of his pro-French leanings. (ibid) West's basic idea is that the natural rights theory requires America to mind its own business, leaving other nations to do whatever they do -- be they tyrannies or principalities -- so long as they do not threaten the citizens of the United States and their natural rights. 

On domestic policy, West points out that the modern conception of law enforcement that focuses on police is a great departure from the Founding approach. In early America, there were no police departments. Law enforcement was a whole of government approach, but much more limited in what exactly it tried to regulate. The legislature passed laws, the executive brought indictments, the judiciary tried the case and if guilt was proved assigned back to the executive the execution of sentences. Yet only a very few things were taken to be matters of law requiring government action (and this mostly at the state level). Murder, robbery, and the like required the government to step in and protect the natural rights of citizens to be free of such things. In more minor cases, the legislature passed laws giving citizens access to the courts to sue each other for damages related to natural rights like property or reputation. Most of life did not involve the government. (150-1)

Nevertheless, West adds, "limited government did not mean weak government. Instead, government was to be strong in its proper sphere and not involved at all anywhere else." (153)

West is sharply critical of the contemporary approach to using laws to regulate every aspect of life, to try to prevent injury in advance (as e.g. via building codes). This ends up being destructive to the natural right of liberty by constraining people's every action in the course of their employment, and requiring them to submit proofs of their obedience to the government just from day to day. The Founders rejected this approach, he says, and only allowed harms that have already occurred to be treated at law. This served as an important limit on government power. (154)

The most important aspect of the rule of law, and the one we are seeing lost today, is equality of the enforcement of the law. Just yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of a Democratic governor in the state of New York being found by the Attorney General to have violated numerous laws yet being charged with violating none of them. This is a double failure: on the one hand he is entitled to a presumption of innocence which she denied him in her press conference declaring his guilt; on the other, he will not face the hazard to liberty and property before the courts that his  (alleged) violation of his victims rights entitled them to see him run. Likewise we see people who have attacked Federal buildings in Portland released without charges, night after night, while people involved in the Capitol incursion on 6 January held without bail for many months, while Congressional hearings declaring their guilt are held and new powers are granted to police to pursue such people. Likewise, too, we have seen how the DOJ handles cases against Clintons and their allies versus Trumps and theirs. 

What is to confine the government here? West points out that the idea of separation of powers and federalism were meant to be functional. Natural law theory does not actually require either one, but having the powers separated was supposed to make violations of equality before the law less likely. Federalism was supposed to restrain both states and more importantly the Federal power by decreasing its sphere. Concentration of power makes abuse of power more likely. (160-1)

How about the Bill of Rights? Madison mocked what he called 'parchment protections,' and Hamilton according to West agreed. (161) However, West says, these guarantees were 'not totally ineffectual' for as long as the political theory of the Founders prevailed. (162) Only once it was lost among the elite as a guiding light did these statements of immunities and rights become things that the courts would not enforce, and that other officials would ignore at their pleasure. 

Just yesterday, Joe Biden announced he was extending a program limiting the property rights of landlords in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court had said that was unconstitutional without further action from Congress; they are doing it anyway, because who cares what the Supreme Court says about the constitutional rights of people like landlords? The Court may come back and say it again, but until they get around to it power to limit the natural right to property is unconstrained; and it may just be violated again after a second ruling as easily as after a first. This shows both that the Founding political theory has been rejected by the government, but also that Madison and Hamilton were right that these 'parchment protections' do not by themselves secure any of our rights. They must be enforced by living men.