Queensland Madness Continues

I realize none of you reside in Queensland, and so you may be wondering why I keep drawing your attention to the place. The reason is partially that it is a shocking example of how quickly the ancient liberties can be lost.

Of course, it's only tyranny for a few, for now: those who are thought to be enemies of the state. And anyone who knows them.

Previous installments have covered the suspension of licenses for tradesmen who continued to work with motorcycle clubs deemed -- via no due process, but simple government declaration -- to be outlaw clubs. Then we saw some initial moves to strip these clubs and their members of legal protections, via a campaign to paint lawyers who defend them in court as members of the "criminal conspiracy," so that they might lose their law licenses as well.

Now, we see that "tradies" who lose their licenses because of alleged ties to "bikies" will not be told why their license was pulled. They will have no capacity to challenge the claims in court, or even to know the details of the accusations.

From July, plumbers, builders and electricians have to resign their gang membership and associations with bikies or face automatic deregistration.

Police have already begun compiling secret "criminal intelligence" files on tradesmen with suspected links to the 26 gangs outlawed last year.

But under the laws, the tradesmen and their lawyers will be prevented from hearing or testing the police allegations of their bikie links that are given to regulators or in closed hearings for workers' appeals.

Civil libertarians and the unions have condemned the police secrecy, saying that even suspected terrorists were allowed the right to have their lawyers present and challenge allegations at closed hearings relating to national security.

So much is being washed away, so very fast.

How Americans Breakfast

As seen from Europe.

Fear and loathing in the shopping aisle

Everyone's favorite meddler, Michelle Obama, announces improvements in nutritional labeling:

“So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product?” she said. 

Saying hapless moms want to do the right thing, Obama suggested many give up in defeat because they can’t decipher current nutritional labels without “a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope or a degree in nutrition.”

That's a solution right there:  government subsidies for nutrition school tuition for all hapless moms.

We run into these shoppers all the time.  They're vapor-locked, cart adrift in the maximum traffic-blocking configuration, gazing slack-jawed at the shelves.  They're clearly violating the "find it, kill it, drag it out of the store" shopping mandate of civilized people.

The only possible solution is to replace labels with EZ-to-follow instructions:  "Eat this," or "Do not eat this."  Or maybe we can just have the government ship healthy, nutritious, approved food in pre-measured packets to each home.  And then require a license for home cooking.  You can never tell what people might put in their food if they're given free rein.  There are children in those homes, you know, and besides, we'll be the ones paying their medical bills.

The Tea Party and Aristotle's Rhetoric, Part 2: The Three Means of Persuasion

This series is both an exploration of the Tea Party and of Aristotle's rhetoric, so feel free to comment on either. Please don't feel that you need to discuss the topic through Aristotle.

In Part 1, I explained why I thought the Tea Party had been weakened by a failure to understand and use rhetoric skillfully. As a way of exploring this, and how to correct it, I used Christof Rapp's SEP article, Aristotle's Rhetoric. The main points from that post and the resulting discussion are that Aristotle believed the best use of rhetoric was to persuade people with the truth, that a form of syllogistic reasoning called the enthymeme was an excellent way to do that, and that the Tea Party needs to find common ground with the public and other movements from which to begin pursuing their goals. In Part 2, I will begin exploring the technical aspects of rhetoric and how the Tea Party could improve.

Aristotle's Rhetoric claims that there are three technical means of persuasion. That is, these means depend on a method, and the method depends on knowing what is and isn't persuasive. In addition, 'technical' implies that these are things provided by the speaker, not pre-existing conditions.

These technical means are "(a) in the character of the speaker, or (b) the emotional state of the hearer, or c) in the argument (logos) itself." The speaker wants to seem credible by displaying practical intelligence, a virtuous character, and good will, all in his speech. Emotions can change our judgments, so the speaker must arouse the hearers' emotions, and to do that he must have a good understanding of human emotion. Finally, the speaker should demonstrate to the audience what the situation is, persuading by argument.

Of the three, Aristotle emphasizes the argument, and he gives two methods for it. Induction works from particulars to a universal, using examples. Deduction works from things already believed to something different being necessarily true because of those presuppositions. In rhetoric, deduction uses the enthymeme, a form of syllogism, but one in which, because we lack complete knowledge, is of necessity somewhat less formal than the logical syllogism. Typically, they take the form of 'if - then' or causal 'since' or 'for' clauses.

E.g., 'If X is the case, we should do Y,' or 'since X is the case, ...' or 'X is the case, for Y results in X and we know Y is true.'

From this discussion, it seems to me that the Tea Party could do better in all three technical areas. One problem with coming to grips with the problem, however, is that everything the Tea Party says or does is distorted by the lefty media (i.e., most mainstream media). For example, the media and the Tea Party's political opponents (but I repeat myself) have done a good job of character assassination, so has the Tea Party failed to do what it could to establish its good character, or has its massive opposition simply outshouted it? It's hard to say, but I certainly think the Tea Party could do a better job with all three techniques.

Probably the Tea Party's single biggest rhetorical failure is in understanding the emotional state of the audience. Actually, I believe the Tea Party has seriously erred in understanding who the audience is. The proper audience is that great middle of the electorate who are not already politically opposed and who could be persuaded. Too often, Tea Partiers publicly speak as if they are talking to other Tea Partiers or to their acknowledged political opponents. This is why, I think, their rhetoric is too often extreme: they are stoking the fires of the base, or they are attacking their enemies. There's a time and place for both of those, but mostly the Tea Party needs to understand those who are unaligned and persuadable and adjust their rhetoric to persuade them. Those are the emotions it is important to understand and work with.

Meetings

If there's a loner scale, I must score about 97 on it.  That's not to say I don't need human contact (beyond my husband), because I certainly do--just not very often.  When I do get it, there's one form I can barely tolerate:  the Meeting.  Need me to rub shoulders with crowds to get a job done?  No real problem, as long as it's not a daily thing.  Recently I've become what the Episcopal Church calls a "lay eucharistic minister," otherwise known as either a lay reader or a chalice bearer, who reads part of the daily lessons or prayers during Sunday services and helps administer the sacramental wine.  That's a sort of human contact I enjoy very much.  Want to gather in large numbers to produce music?  Great!  My other favorite sort of gathering is the barn-raising variety:  there's a big task to get done, and large numbers of people to work in joint harness until it's finished.  I quite enjoy a quarterly meeting of the local Woman's Club to pick up trash along the roadside.

Where I draw the line is a gathering of humans to follow some kind of vague agenda and stumble through a drawn-out process of reaching decisions (or, more often, not managing to reach any).  Those make me homicidal.  Law firms are very much given to them, especially the sort that drag on all day long to no apparent purpose.  In recent years, I've ruthlessly pruned back on social activities that give people a right to expect me to attend meetings.

So it was with real chagrin that I read an email from my county Republican party chairman last night, casually explaining that, for obscure reasons involving the security of the documentation for Tuesday's primary election,  I would be required to hang around until the post-election precinct convention is concluded.  After thirteen hours of manning the polls.  I do not think so.  I think I have an alternative solution, which will not violate any state election laws.  If I'm mistaken, and catch any flack for it, it may turn out that I'm going to be out of town for any future primary elections.

Unexpectedly

The conventional press gives the President his usual pass for not foreseeing the obvious.  The American Interest explores the curiously blind smugness:

We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media.  Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box.  How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do?  Well bred and well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

As far as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political leadership these days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining table (unless they are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally reasonable people who see the world as we do, and are motivated by the same things that motivate us.  Many people are, of course, guided by an outlook not all that dissimilar from the standard upper middle class gentry American set of progressive ideas.  But some aren’t, and when worlds collide, trouble comes.

I'm skeptical of the value of pure diplomacy, but surely one thing it can do is ensure that we have a corps of people who have studied their corner of the world and learned something about how its inhabitants think. --OK, who am I kidding?  It's nothing new to make know-nothing political appointments to ambassadorships, but there still needs to be a solid base of professional staff who know something about their host countries instead of congratulating themselves and their masters that geopolitics are a relic of the barbarous past.

It was a great week in which to announce the proposed dismantling of the military.

H/t Ace.

The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago

Bachelor Week

So, I've been away from the Hall for a great while.  Mostly due to work picking up, but partly due to just falling out of the blog-reading habit.  Hopefully, posting now won't offend our kind host.

I find myself in an unusual position.  My wife is in the Virginia/DC area because her parents are in town from LA, and will be so for several days, and as my parents live in Richmond, it was a good opportunity for her to see all four of them.  But as I have to work, and someone must watch the cats, I am at home; a bachelor for the first time in a long while.  As I said, this is unusual for me, but presents me with a great opportunity.

For you see, while my wife is a wonderful lady with many fine qualities, she has one flaw.  She does not like spicy food.  I myself cannot get enough.  So I am making a crockpot of my award winning (winning a chili cook-off in the office counts, right?) Hellishly Hot Habanero Chili:

1.5 lbs spicy turkey sausage
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
1 30oz can diced tomatoes
1 pint sized jar hot salsa
2 cans Goya red kidney beans
4 heaping tablespoons chili powder
6 habanero peppers

Un-skin the sausage, dice half the onion and mince one clove of garlic. Brown the sausage with the diced onion and minced garlic, throw it into the crockpot. Dice the rest of the onion, mince the other two cloves of garlic, throw them in the crockpot. Pour in the tomatoes, beans, salsa, and chili powder. I de-seeded and minced the peppers (which probably cut down a lot on the spicy) and threw them in the crockpot. Put it on high heat for about four hours (till I went to bed) stirring occasionally. Low heat over night, and low heat until we ate it at lunchtime. You don't need to baby it.

That's the recipe as I made it for the contest.  It's not near as hot as you would expect.  So this time, and because only I will be eating it, I bumped everything up a notch.  More habaneros, I used Rotel hot tomatoes instead of normal diced tomatos, I used spicy chili beans instead of the red kidney beans, and I used a hotter sausage this time.  It's cooking now, and I am a happy happy man.

Just thought I'd share.

Environmental perspectives

Nice article about what it means to be an uncute animal with economic value to humans, or without economic value to humans.  The article includes this picture, which looks like something right out of The Matrix:

Horseshoe crabs' blood uses copper instead of iron.

H/t, as usual on Saturdays, to Rocket Science.

How to survive a night in your car

This kind of article is increasingly relevant in these days of global warm/cooling.  All of the advice sounds reasonable, but would there be any room left in the car for the driver, let alone passengers?

• Bottled water (at least four quarts) 
• Snack foods, particularly nutritious energy bars 
• Raisins, dried fruit, nuts, candy bars 
• Strike-anywhere, waterproof matches and small candles 
• A flashlight with extra batteries 
• First-aid kit 
• Folding knife and multi-tool 
• Emergency flares 
• An extra winter coat, mittens and a wool cap 
• Winter boots 
• Toilet paper 
• Cellphone and charger 
• A space blanket 
• A spare blanket or sleeping bag 
• A portable radio with spare batteries 
• Tow rope 
• Nylon cord 
• Flagging tape 
• Chemical hand and body warmer packets 
• Jumper cables 
• A small shovel 
• Tire chains 
• Rock salt, sand or kitty litter to provide added traction when stuck on a slick surface.

DL Sly, you live in a challenging climate. What do you carry around in your truck?

Putin's real problem

As Paul Rahe notes at Ricochet, Putin understands very well that the only people facing any real threat from the President of the U.S. are his domestic enemies:

Russia does not now have the means by which to pursue [its global ambitions], and it is not going to acquire the requisite means. . . . Russia is a banana republic with nuclear weapons.  Economically, it is almost as dependent on resource extraction as Saudi Arabia, and the pertinent resource is slowly being depleted. . . .  At the same time, Putin's Russia is ignoring the only strategic threat it faces.  The United States is not Russia's enemy.  It is not even a rival.  We once had an interest in containing and dismembering the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.  We have no interest in further reducing Russia's extent; and, insofar as we see Russia as a potential trading partner, our interest lies in Russian economic development.  The same can be said even more emphatically for Germany, France, Britain, and the other countries in Europe. 

There is, however, one country with an imperial past and a renewed craving for empire that has territorial ambitions which make of it a threat to Russia, and that country is China.

The Smart Ones

Well, they had the right institutional ties, anyway.

Palin said [during the 2008 election campaign]:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.

But never fear such indecision now! The President has declared that "there will be costs" if Russia invades the Ukraine. For example, they may have to pay to fuel their tanks and trucks.

Friday Night AMV

Prop-punk?



I thought there was a subtext about WWII in this; pretty much ends up the same way, although there is also a nod to E. R. Eddison.  In any case, you should always have a wingman.

"Don't make me come back there"

Thirteen years ago,  Jonathan Rauch wrote about his creed of "soft communitarianism," an alternative to both the most anarchic forms of libertarianism and the bureaucratic formalism that is strangling our country:

In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life."  Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy.  Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive. 

To [radical gay activist Michael] Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive.  Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. . . .  In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives. . . . 

I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things.  They are not.  A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says.  In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive.  Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not:  that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives.  Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors.  Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.   The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults.  But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual.  What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like?  How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave? 

THE fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms?

Rauch favors a rejection of mindless, intrusive zero-tolerance legalism that he variously calls the Hidden Law, genteel hypocrisy, tacit decency codes, and a determination to avert the public eye from anything that's not scaring the horses.  What this approach lacks in logical consistency it makes up for in humane effect:

Without Hidden Law, life in society becomes like the home life of a 15-year-old boy whose parents never stop shouting, "Billy! What are you doing in there?"

Rauch poses interesting questions on soft communitarianism and gay marriage:

Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong.  This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option.  It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it.  But this is wrong.  Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction."  Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged.  Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law.  It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society:  The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred. 

Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals.  I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals.  And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage.  When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals.  "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage."  Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.

Parallel universes

Megan Kelly demolishes HHS Sec'y Sibelius.  Warning:  your President feels aggrieved that you might get information from this source.



Watching Hagan slip and slide is fun, but the really good stuff is towards the end.  And Kelly's guest is absolutely right:  everyone watching only the news outlets the President would prefer we watched will agree totally with Sebelius's version of events, not to mention with Harry Reid's.

Chivalry on Steel

Maybe you can do it without the horse.

Rolling

It's a good idea to question what you see on the Internet. Maybe.

Elephants as Natural Slaves

This post is mostly for Cassandra's enjoyment, because she'll like the article, but I'll take a moment to answer the question the authors ask in the tagline:

"We now have solid evidence that elephants are some of the most intelligent, social and empathic animals around—so how can we justify keeping them in captivity?"

Well, we can justify it precisely because of their limited access to reason. In the Politics, Aristotle suggests that some men are slaves by nature. Specifically, those who "are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned."

What he means by "for them it is better" is that the slaves themselves will enjoy better results if their affairs are managed for them, i.e., if they are not left to their own devices. This should be an improvement that they themselves could recognize, rather than one that comes from outside of them (i.e., not "I think you would be better off if you lived as I want," but rather, "I realize that, though I'd prefer to do heroin every day, and would choose it if I were left free, it really would be better if I weren't free to make that choice").

Because they have enough reason to see the good, but not to choose it, there is a kind of objective justice to organizing their lives for them. This is true even if they don't choose this state, because it's the ability to choose to do what they can see would be better that is at work. Thus, if a judge should involuntarily commit an addict, the addict may be angry about it, and certainly wouldn't have chosen commitment for himself. But he should be able to see the justice of it, to recognize that in an objective way he will be better off for it.

So it is possible to justify the captivity of elephants in the same way. Note, though, that the force of Aristotle's assertion that there is a kind of just and natural slavery is to bracket it as the only acceptable kind. It turns out to be a harsh criticism of every kind of actual slavery being practiced in his own day.

We might apply a similar critique to our favorite zoo.

Republic VIII

An excerpt, for Tom but also for Cassandra, from Plato's great work on politics. But for one line, it sounds like something she has been saying to me for years. How many of these markers do you see around you?

“Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain[.] ... Liberty.... is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”

“How?” he said.

“Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.... [T]hose who obey the rulers... it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught.... Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?”

“Of course.”

“And this anarchical temper,” said I, “my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.”

“Just what do we mean by that?” he said.

“Why,” I said, “the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.” ...

“The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young... for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.”

“By all means,” he said. “And the climax of popular liberty, my friend,” I said, “is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.” ...

“And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them.” “I know it very well,” said he.

“This, then, my friend,” said I, “is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.”

Peer review

It ain't what it used to be.  Even the laziest and shallowest reviewer should have known there was something wrong with a paper entitled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce," whose abstract states that the authors "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact."