Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives.Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations. For centuries, while her book hibernated in the Butler-Bowden estate, Kempe was completely unknown.
It would have been a great tragedy if that book had been burned. One wonders how many works of great interest have been, over the years, for idle reasons or impassioned ones like Henry VIII's desire to weaken the Catholic Church by destroying its libraries.
Exit question: Would a federal assault weapons ban even be constitutional in light of the recent SCOTUS decision in Gruen? AR-15s are very much “in common use,” a key factor in the Court’s reasoning, and nearly all of them are used for “lawful purposes.” (Much more so than handguns are.) So how could Congress lawfully ban them presuming they had the votes to do so?
The Cicilline bill – which currently has 211 Democratic co-sponsors and no Republicans – would make it illegal for anyone to “import, sell, manufacture, or transfer” semi-automatic rifles that have certain “military features.” These features include a “detachable magazine” or “a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds.” Semi-automatic pistols and shotguns with similar features would also be covered.
Once they have left their mythical past behind, and scored successes against neighboring peoples, they become aware of their own power, knowledge, and uniqueness.
And self-analysis requires a distancing of the self from itself, in order to view the object of study in its entirety.
As an act- and one whose very being is an act- it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-Principle, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object seen in that act- self, is itself.6. Thus we have shown that there exists that which in the strictest sense possesses self-knowing.
Herodotus, for his part, is happy to travel but thinks the Greek world best, especially Athens, which he seems to prefer (Histories 5.78) to his native Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, which is under tyrannical Persian sway. Thucydides has Pericles utter some of the most patriotically beautiful words imaginable on the greatness of Athens and the indomitable Athenian spirit (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35–46). Aristotle considers it quite clear, in many different passages of his works, that his Greek compatriots are culturally superior to other peoples. So these men, and others, are able to analyze and even question their own traditions without thereby slipping into oikophobia.
The crushing naval victory at Salamis, won by poor and simple oarsmen rather than by comparatively wealthy, landed hoplites, leads the poor to demand more rights. This is why the conservative Plato views that battle in a negative light (Laws 707a–c), even though it was a Greek victory. He feels that it caused a more assertive citizenry of individuals who believe more in themselves than in the community, and he is echoed by Aristotle at Politics 1274a and 1304a.
Increasingly, the rich and the poor, the democrats and the oligarchists, come to hate each other more than either group hates the Persians. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for (and outlet of) the people’s wrath. Human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other Greeks, and other Athenians.
[D]ependence makes people resentful and miserly, and the more they receive from the state, the less they will respect it. This is why there is often a dynamic of mutual strengthening between oikophobia and government largesse, and oikophobia and the entitlement mentality go hand in hand.... Once this sense of entitlement becomes the predominant outlook, the citizens of a state begin to compete more with each other, while the external enemy recedes into the background.
Weirdly, the suspect is both mentally incompetent and also capable of making sophisticated home-made guns. That seems an unlikely combination, but it's not impossible. As Wretchard points out, a Japanese cult once figured out how to make functional sarin gas weapons. Crazy people are not good agents, so he's unlikely to be both crazy and someone's pawn. He might be faking the crazy, I suppose.
An incredible new theory established as the “block universe” theory asserts that time does not actually “flow like a river”; rather, everything is ever-present.Dr. Bradford Skow, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes that if we “look down” on the cosmos as if it were a piece of paper, we would see time stretched out in all directions, just as we perceive space at any given time.
Cambridge University Press has made free four of its six books on the subject. Unfortunately the one of probably greatest interest to most of you, Early Christian Women, is not one of the four (though you can still buy a print copy, they are quite expensive). You can get a book on Pythagorean philosophers who were women, however, as a free download. If you've enjoyed the ancient philosophy commentaries here, you may well like learning about these thinkers.
The others may also be of interest especially to the feminists among you, but they are outside my area so I can't offer any useful remarks: mostly for being too contemporary, but one for being a Korean Neo-Confucian of whom I admit I've never heard before this morning.
More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserves release to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices hit record highs.... The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986....
Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance (RELI.NS) refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo headed to China, another source said.
Honestly, I can't believe I've never heard anyone suggest this before. Not only that we need the Electoral College federally, but that we should extend it to the state level to counteract the new 'big states', the megalopolis city-states that run our lives.
Razorfist's (aka Rageaholic's) shtick is to be crude and drop a lot of F-bombs- I even debated not posting the video- so be forewarned that there's more vulgarity here than you'd normally expect in the Hall- but it's too good an idea he's presenting to not post this- so I beg your indulgence this once-
I think this is an idea whose time has come, and even if we were unsuccessful in implementing it, a Democrat party/media complex would be too busy fighting this to go after the Federal Electoral College, which would itself be a win.
This isn't a good review of John McWhorter's recent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Nope. For that I'd have to do a lot more work and time is short.
In brief, McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at Columbia U., argues in six quick chapters that CRT and all that racial wokeness is a new religion that is unintentionally racist and harmful to black Americans. He calls the members of this new religion the Elect. He offers a way to genuinely help black children instead of teaching them all that CRT nonsense and a way to deal with the Elect.
McWhorter is a leftist and starts by saying he's writing for fellow leftists. While he doesn't say what his own beliefs are, in arguing that wokeness is a new religion, he treats religious belief as essentially irrational, unprovable, and not amenable to rational argument. He reminds me of Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist who is also on the left but who argues for Enlightenment rationalism as well as freedom of thought and speech.
As for helping black children, his answers are nothing new: "1. End the war on drugs." "2. Teach reading properly", i.e., via phonics. And "3. Get past the idea that everybody must go to college" and focus a lot more on vocational education.
His method for dealing with the Elect is remarkably similar to what I've heard from the right. In a section titled "Just say no", he writes, "What we must do about the Elect is stand up to them. They rule by inflicting terror ..." A key part of that, he claims, is that people need to get over their fear of being called racists in public (172-3). You can imagine what he says in the next section titled "Separation of church and state." Finally, he offers sample scripts for how these conversations with the Elect might go. Kinda interesting how he imagines them.
A significant part of the value of this book for me was how he gets to these conclusions. I won't even attempt a summary; the value is in his complete arguments, because he argues rationally from the left's viewpoint.
There are things I disagree with McWhorter about, but it's a good book, a quick read, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic, especially if you live or work in a woke environment.
Christian nationalists believe that their country’s national policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future.Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap.On TikTok, ideologues from both ends of the spectrum are weaving together a shared visual language using 4chan memes, scripture, Orthodox and Catholic iconography, imagery of holy wars, and clips from movies or TV...It’s no accident that this community is burgeoning on TikTok of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said.
Christianity could be associated with a fascist movement because both the faith and the ideology are corporatist. That doesn't mean 'corporation,' but rather comes from the Latin corpus meaning 'body.' The idea is that the Church or the state is a kind of organism, and the different parts of the organism have different functions. This is by analogy to the way that the hand or the eye are different organs with different functions, but each of which is part of a greater whole that it serves according to its functions. The Pope or Leader is supposed to be the brain; the eyes are inquisitors or police; the hands are the people who do the work they are assigned and directed to do.
Fascism gets its name from the Roman fasces, a device that was both a weapon and a symbol. The fasces was a bundle of sticks bound together, sometimes with an axe head bound up in one end. Roman magistrates carried one to administer corporal punishment, but more to symbolize the way the Roman order worked: the sticks were individually brittle and weak, but bound together they became strong.
The trick is that some version of that idea is necessary for any successful politics: if you can't come together in common purpose, you aren't going to build any sort of state. It is thus not merely fascists who have reason to talk this way; any political philosophy at all is going to have to do it. Anarchists may wish to do without leaders, but they can't do without common purpose and people pulling together to get things done. Together we are stronger, and it is only by pulling together that we get the garden dug and weeded and harvested.
So you do get communities of a corporatist mindset in Christianity -- abbeys and monasteries and religious orders and the like -- but of course you do, because you couldn't build a society that didn't have some version of that idea. The presence of a necessary condition is not surprising just because it was necessary.
There's something similar at work here, I think. Christianity is under attack -- I see memes designed to mock and belittle it every day -- and not only nor even especially from 'the East' but from those within our culture. Pulling together in defense of it is the only way in which it might survive.
Also, I notice the two images that they pulled as exemplary are not unhealthy messages by themselves. "Revolt against the modern world not because it is modern but because it is evil" says one; perhaps you might substitute "insofar as it is evil," but otherwise this is a traditional message for every age. The second one features a knight wearing Crusader livery, and says "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." That's a healthy message.
According to Jean le Bel, when Bruce was dying he asked that Sir James, as his friend and lieutenant, should carry his heart to the Holy Land and present it at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a mark of penance. John Barbour, alternatively, has Bruce ask that his heart should simply be carried in battle against "God's foes" as a token of his unfulfilled ambition to go on crusade. Given that Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since 1187, this second is perhaps more likely.
THE DEATH OF a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces.... The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front....Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” ... Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry.
For the years since 2016, I've been reading journalists who inform me that Vladimir Putin was symbolic of right-wing white nationalism broadly, and that the Russian Orthodox church was aligned with Putin in trying to create a Christian nationalism also broadly aligned with this sort of white nationalism. But here are people who feel like it is their moral duty to "kill Russians" in order to make Europe safe from "Asiatic hordes." (Are there Asiatic hordes? China's population is headed off a demographic cliff.)
Several pages down into the report, we get a clue.
As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.
Now they've got photographs of a guy with a tattoo on his head, which indicates some level of commitment (assuming it's not photoshopped). It's hard to tell, though, how much of any of this is more than the fevered imaginations of people who spend a lot of time online -- even the ones who actually went to Ukraine.
In a notable essay, University of Chicago political theorist Ralph Lerner captures this essential function of the Court. The Court is, in his terms, “a republican schoolmaster,” bringing to life the enduring text of our fundamental law and applying it to a new age. As Lerner notes, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the Court early in its tenure as “the educator, molder, or guardian of those manners, morals, and beliefs that sustain republican government.” The Court thus has an educational task—bringing each generation back to consider anew the foundations of the American republic.The Roberts Court faces a tough task because it must speak to the American people through channels in which most messengers and interpreters—the press and the academic world—are radically hostile to its messages. Indeed, their hostility is magnified by the recognition that Court is now the one institution historically dedicated to reason, which progressives do not control. Progressives may have an easier time accepting that elections may sometimes go against them: politics can be dismissed as an arena of base interests and manipulation. But when an institution dedicated to reasoned deliberation and interpretation is not aligned with the progressive program, it creates a serious threat to progressive hegemony over social thought. The Court’s opportunity to contest that hegemony and restore the fixed foundations of our republic thus provides the crucial social context of its opinions this term.
...the Constitution’s text should ideally be understood today as the Framers would have understood it. And the Court makes clear the benefits of its interpretation to the public. On controversial issues on which the Constitution is silent, democracy offers the flexibility to make varied compromises over time....Because the dissenters cannot contend that anyone thought that the provisions of the Constitution at the time of their enactment contained a right to abortion, they advance three distinct attacks on the majority’s originalism. First, they suggest that, at least on issues of concern to women, the document’s original meaning may not be binding, because women did not participate in making the Constitution. It is true that women did not vote to ratify either the original Constitution or the Fourteenth Amendment. But how does it follow from that observation that the Constitution should be interpreted to include a right to abortion? No evidence suggests that if women had voted in the ratification process that a right to abortion would have been on the agenda. Even now, the percentages of men and women who favor and oppose abortion rights are roughly equal.......the Constitution provides a mechanism for evolution: the amendment process. In contrast, there is no provision that delegates to judges the authority to “evolve” the Constitution. Indeed, in his famous defense of judicial review in Federalist 78, Hamilton was at pains to dispel the anti-federalist fear that equitable interpretation would give the courts the freewheeling authority to consolidate all power in the federal government. Not so, said Hamilton: they would be bound by “strict rules.”
The Supreme Court has been the favored mechanism for altering the Constitution for decades because amendments are very hard to come by. They require a level of consensus almost impossible to achieve in America today. Yet by insisting on them, and rolling back to the Constitution as it was adopted rather than as it was adapted by earlier Courts, the Supreme Court is being genuinely conservative. They could move faster, even though their present speed appears to scare the Democratic party a great deal. They are, instead, simply rolling back and insisting on change coming through the democratic process.
That may, indeed, teach people to use that process again -- and how to use it.
Today also marks the passage into eternity of the last Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. I never met him, but he remained very active in the American Legion for a long time. Other Legionnaires describe him as one of the kindest and most respected members of the organization.
He received the Medal of Honor for actions on Iwo Jima, described at the link.
Sonny Barger has died at 83. He was, most famously, the leader of the Hells Angels charter at the Altamont music festival's great disaster. The culture turned against them after that -- until then, the Angels were appearing regularly in movies as they were picaresque and picturesque, and readily available in Hollywood. However, it is my judgment that they were the only ones there who acted with honor.
Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books. He continued to ride motorcycles, write books, and to advocate against smoking (which caused him a vicious bout of throat cancer in earlier years).
His final message to the world ends, "Keep your head up high, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor."
UPDATE: Aggie says the first link bothers his antivirus, so here's a photo of the statement by Sonny announcing his death.
...if Ornato calls her an outright liar? Major disaster. Not just a legal disaster, in that a key witness to potential criminal charges for Trump will have suddenly been blown up, but a political disaster for the committee. It’s unconscionable that they would put a witness on television to make an allegation that shocking without having run it down first. Republicans will say that if they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — separate fact from fiction with the SUV incident, there’s no reason to believe they did so in other aspects of the investigation.
I can't believe anyone is still using the word "unconscionable" with regard to Congress as if it didn't obviously apply to them all of the time. "Congress is unconscionable as usual," sure. "It would be unconscionable for Congress to..." as if that suggested they surely wouldn't do that thing, no.
When a Texas woman found an unsecured M4-style rifle inside an unlocked Texas National Guard truck Monday, June 27, she took matters into her own hands by, well, taking the weapon into her own hands.“Today, I got my hands on a fully automatic weapon thanks to the stupid, irresponsible #TexasNationalGuard #OperationLonestar who left their vehicle running & unlocked with guns inside on the side of the road,” Marianna Wright tweeted Monday. Operation Lone Star is the long-term deployment of Texas National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border within the state. “Guess the truck could’ve been mine, too. #PublicSafety, #Texas Style.”
If it had been a Hummer it could have been. They don't even have keys. I don't know why they left the keys in the pickup they were using, but that's commonly done with fire/rescue people in case somebody needs to move the thing out of the way of another responding vehicle.
It's been a long time since I heard anything but bad news about the Boy Scouts of America, but the Washington Post today has a story of a 15 year old Scout who escaped from the wreckage of the recent Amtrak derailment to comfort the dying truck driver.
Officials say that the number of people who perished in a hot trailer in San Antonio on Monday has risen from 46 to 50 people, with 48 people pronounced dead at the scene and two other people dying in hospital care after suffering from heat related illness...While the vehicle involved bears the colors and DOT number of Alamo-based Betancourt Trucking and Harvesting, company leaders say that the vehicle information was “cloned” or illegally copied. They say that their truck has been used to haul grain from Harlingen to Progreso and has not been in San Antonio recently, and that their trailer is in the company lot.“Our [refrigerated trailer] is sitting right in the yard. That one in San Antonio is not our trailer,” Felipe Betancourt Jr told San Antonio Express-News.
If there is a view from modern biology, it is that genetic information structures the flow of energy and materials. To a first approximation, biology is understood in terms of information networks and control systems. Even the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behaviour of molecules and their interactions and reactions, can be recast in terms of information – Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life – where does all this information come from? Within the realm of biology, we already have a simple explanation: natural selection sifts through random differences, favouring what works, eliminating what doesn’t, generation after generation. Information accumulates with function over time. We can quibble over details, but there is no conceptual difficulty here. At the origin of life, though, this view will not do. Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function, which is to say, the origin of biological information. . . .
Thinking about life only in terms of information is distorting. Seeking new laws of physics to explain the origin of information is to ask the wrong question, which can’t be answered precisely because it is not meaningful. A far better question goes back to the formative years of biology: what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter? The idea that there is a vital force, that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter, was disproved long ago and is now only wheeled out as a straw man to burn – even though it’s an understandable illusion for anyone who has shared van Leeuwenhoek’s captivation with busy animalcules. Yet biochemistry – my own discipline, which deals with the flow of energy and materials through cells – has, with a few notable exceptions, been blithely indifferent to how this unceasing flux might have arisen, or how its elemental imprint could still dictate the lives and deaths of cells today, along with the organisms they compose. You and me.
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis has finally gotten married after decades of putting his devotion to the Marine Corps and the rest of the U.S. military above his personal life. And he did it in the most Marine way possible...
Yes, with Elvis in attendance.
From VDH, on the "Great Reset":
Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor.
Those precedents certainly didn't turn out as intended. Are there any counterexamples of centralized policies billed as "Great" by their advocates that actually did what they promised? "The Great Depression" doesn't count because it wasn't something people were advocating for being great, just something they were enduring.
The number of American troops in Europe has risen sharply in the four months since Russia invaded Ukraine, from about 65,000 in mid-February to 100,000 today.That increase, one of the most rapid U.S. military buildups on the continent in the post-Cold War era, has no clear end date or any obvious metrics to determine when troops could come home or be repositioned to other theaters such as the Indo-Pacific.Instead, their mission is to deter further Russian aggression and prevent any attack on NATO territory. That goal will prove difficult to measure and could justify a years-long mission as Russia and Ukraine settle into a slow, bloody war of attrition in the Donbas.The long-term consequences for the U.S. and its foreign policy priorities could be significant, some analysts say, because Washington likely can’t afford to maintain such troop levels in Europe over the long haul without sacrificing resources in the Pacific.
Speaking of the Pacific, Taiwan is facing increasing threats from Beijing, which is also loudly opposed to American military activities in the South China Sea.
We don't have the force structure for a two-theater conflict at this time, not even if one of them is limited to 'reassuring' Europeans with increased presence. We aren't going to get it, either, because recruiting has become a serious challenge in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle -- and the refusal by the military to hold anyone accountable.
“This is the start of a long drought for military recruiting,” said Ret. Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank. He said the military has not had such a hard time signing recruits since 1973, the year the U.S. left Vietnam and the draft officially ended. Spoehr said he does not believe a revival of the draft is imminent, but “2022 is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.”
The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007.
Things are so bad that the Army is dropping the requirement for a high school education -- not even a G.E.D. will now be required. Retention is also bad, with big bonuses being pondered as a means of trying to keep the people who have been willing to serve in the past. The Army is also fronting cash bonuses for new recruits -- up to $50,000 just to join the Army. In spite of the economy being terrible, and worsening, military service is not appealing with the command environment so broken.
It's hard to remain a great power when your people stop being willing to fight for you, but it is a problem the US Federal Government has brought upon itself. If they cannot restore confidence, and find ways to educate youth to want to serve -- and to have the physical capacities to do so -- they will not remain a power that bestrides the world.
I have just been made aware that there is an annoying captcha requirement on comments for some people. I’m not sure why. According to the settings page I have that turned off.
To whit:
Any ideas on why it’s bothering some people and not others? Or how to keep it from bothering anyone, more to the point?
From City Journal:
Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are no more. Like Plessy v. Ferguson before them, Roe and Casey were constitutionally and morally indefensible from the day they were decided, yet they endured for generations, becoming the foundation of a mass political movement that did all it could to prevent their overruling. Thus, like the overruling of Plessy, the overruling of Roe and Casey was by no means inevitable; it was the result of a half-century of disciplined, persistent, and prudent political, legal, and religious effort. The victory in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was earned by the coalition of teachers and students, priests and parishioners, lawyers and politicians, who, through efforts as humble as parish potlucks and as prominent as federal litigation, brought about the most important legal and human rights achievement in America since Brown v. Board of Education.
The analogy I would have thought more proper is to Dred Scott. The twin abortion decisions adopted a similar logic, after all: that there was a class of human beings, X, whose rights or interests another class of human beings, Y, did not have to respect. Rather, Y as a class was entitled to dispose of a member of X in whom they stood in the right kind of ownership relation in order to further their own interests. "My body, my choice" as a slogan disposes of the idea that there is another body to be considered, or another being: it asserts that only the one kind of being really exists or really matters.
All my life I have heard versions of the argument that only women should really be consulted about abortion: "No uterus, no opinion." Yet to accept this is to make a core philosophical error, one warned against since at least Aristotle: no one should serve as the judge in their own case. Women are of course very deeply interested in the disposition of this question of abortion rights. It is that very interest that makes it hard for them to render a just verdict, which by the nature of justice ought to be disinterested. The Viking-age hero Egil Skallagrimsson, offered the opportunity to judge in his own case, settled everything in favor of his family; here, everything was settled by class Y in the interest of class Y, and the interests of class X were completely obliterated. Abortion was acceptable all the way to the moment of birth, and arguments were increasingly being offered that it really ought to be acceptable even after.
Now the matter remains unsettled, but it is at least open to the people -- all the people, and not only the interested class -- to debate and consider how to proceed. This seems to me to be right and proper. In this matter I have no more say than any other citizen; I can offer philosophical accounts of what seems right, but each of you will have to judge and vote and advocate accordingly. It will doubtless be done in ways I think wrong, as is usually true on every question, because democracy depends on a common opinion and the opinions of most people are not generally given to philosophical rigor.
Yet at least it will be the common sense of communities that decides this question, and not that of an interested class or an elite among the judiciary. Perhaps few will prove to be truly disinterested; likely different communities will arrive at widely different judgments. Such is life. Justice is more likely, all the same, now that the matter is before the people broadly and not only the few.
In a tribute to the tight weave of religious fanaticism, patriotism, and similarly noxious elements in a country supposedly predicated on the separation of church and state.... Again, the “taking of innocent human life” has long been America’s game – just Google the words “US bombs hospital in Afghanistan”. Of course, there has been plenty of innocent post-embryonic life taken on the domestic scene, as well – and not just in extrajudicial police killings of Black people and Native Americans. As it turns out, poverty is also deadly in the US.
I have not had a chance to read the decision yet, let alone the concurrences and dissent, but if you wish to discuss it in the meantime here is a space.
UPDATE: The Justice Department is appalled and determined to do everything it can to oppose this decision.
UPDATE: Seen on FB.
- In the midst of a labor crisis, the Department of Labor boasted that it was turning 2,300 American Job Centers previously focused on helping displaced workers find jobs into hubs of political activism. These new federally funded voter registration agencies were given guidance about how to bring in organizations to conduct “voter outreach.”
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services likewise announced plans to turn community health centers into voter registration agencies, using thousands of health care facilities to focus on voter registration and turnout.
- The Housing and Urban Development Department sent notice to public housing authorities that they should begin voter registration drives and participation activities. Previously, officials had been barred from electoral activities because they receive federal funding.
- “It is presumed residents of public housing might disproportionately vote Democrat. … The executive order targets people receiving government benefits who might think their benefits depend on one party in power,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told the Daily Signal.
- The Department of Education sent “dear colleague” letters to universities, telling them that Federal Work Study funds could now be used to support voter registration activities, contrary to previous guidance. The change was made without having gone through any rulemaking process to allow the change.
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it’s using its child nutrition programs to push voter registration and enlisting state, local, and federally funded employees to implement voter registration drives in local schools.
- The Commerce Department produced a massive, 113-page report which likely took four agency officials many hours to generate. It directs local voting board members about polling stations and poll worker training.
Of course it is good that citizens should vote, if they are interested, engaged and educated -- and if indeed they really exist, and are in fact citizens. There's nothing in principle wrong with voter education and registration; it could be good governance. Yet it does look like the safeguards are being voided once again, and activity previously forbidden on ethical grounds is becoming mandatory.
In a major expansion of gun rights after a series of mass shootings, the Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, a ruling likely to lead to more people legally armed. The decision came out as Congress and states debate gun-control legislation.About one-quarter of the U.S. population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, which struck down a New York gun law. The high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade split the court 6-3, with the court’s conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.Across the street from the court, lawmakers at the Capitol sped toward passage of gun legislation prompted by recent massacres in Texas, New York and California. Senators cleared the way for the measure, modest in scope but still the most far-reaching in decades.Also Thursday, underscoring the nation’s deep divisions over the issue, the sister of a 9-year-old girl killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, pleaded with state lawmakers to pass gun legislation.
It's already a problem to link the court case to the actions in the legislatures. The court wasn't ruling on 'guns' per se, but on a particular controversy brought before it that has nothing to do with the particular bloody shirt the reporter wants to wave. The issue was specifically about law-abiding citizens who belonged to a shooting club, all of whom have perfectly exemplary records as citizens, who objected to not being able to transport their firearms for shooting matches and similar purposes.
The legislatures can consider the one matter, the court was asked to consider a particular other matter. It ended up doing so on principled grounds that apply broadly, but there is no reason that a court case arising from the facts in New York city five years ago should be decided based on the passions of a moment in time five years later.
Also, why would this ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States only affect states containing "about one-quarter of the U.S. population"? Rulings by this court affect all states and all Americans.
What the reporter means to say is that only one-quarter of the population lives in states that don't already comply with the general principle that you can carry a firearm in public as an ordinary matter. That means that three-quarters of us already do live with the rules the Supreme Court acknowledged today. Most of us live in areas with much lower crime rates, including gun crime rates, than in those areas pondered by the reporter -- places like Chicago, D.C., New York, or Los Angeles. These include major metropolitan areas as well as rural paradises like my own.
In point of fact, though the headline describes the nation as 'divided,' the division has a clear majority/minority split that runs against her favored position. My firearms carry permit is recognized by 38 states including my own.
38 states is, coincidentally, the number required to call a constitutional convention, propose a new amendment to the Constitution, and then ratify it. It is the three-quarters supermajority that the Founders pondered as sufficient to justify altering the basic law. The Supreme Court has done nothing but bring the outlier minority into line with the general consensus of the United States of America.
That's a painful process, as few know better than citizens of the South, which has so often been the object of the Supreme Court's edifying attentions. However, it is widely admitted these days that for the most part those painful adjustments have been to the general benefit and improved morals. In the fullness of time, it may be that these minority states will likewise come to see the wisdom of respecting the genuine dignity, and encouraging the martial virtues, of their citizens.
