Separations

A liberal writer ponders why other liberals are welcoming an increasing role for religion in public life.

Going back to Jefferson and Madison, the idea behind separating church and state has been to prevent the state from forcing taxpayers to pay for other people’s religious practices. Fair enough. But in order to get religious conservatives to go along with that principle, secular liberal thinkers felt they had to give them something in return. And what do religious conservatives want? They want to be able to express their deepest religious convictions in the public sphere. They want to pray at town meetings, to place religious symbols in government buildings and on public lands, and, more generally, they want the state to acknowledge the importance—and perhaps also the truth—of their religious heritage.

So here we have the makings of a compromise: Liberals would get a ban on state funding of religion, and conservatives would get state-sponsored religious recognition...

Except that the Roberts court, like the Rehnquist court before it, isn’t interested in taking this deal. In exchange for greater acceptance of religious practice and symbols in the public square, they have given up, well, nothing. In a series of 5–4 decisions, conservative majorities have rejected the ability of taxpayers to challenge state funding of religion...

If giving up your side in exchange for nothing looks like a shoddy compromise for liberals, what else might explain acceptance of Justice Kennedy’s new coercion principle[?]

See, the legislature is where you go to make compromises with the other side. When you try to fight your battles in the courts, you're going to get decisions on one side or the other. That's the nature of the beast.

The preference for waging war against conservative ideas in the courts is based on the hope that the battlefield itself is biased against conservatives. This follows from three ideas: 1) The judiciary must, in order to do their jobs, be highly educated. 2) The academy has largely been captured by liberals, which means educated people will have been taught to think by liberals most of the time. 3) As a consequence that re-enforces the bias, peer pressure among the highly educated is to conform to left-leaning ideas. Thus, the courts are much better ground for locating the real power of government than the legislature in which the general population gets most of the vote in selecting representatives. If the courts will just go along with stripping legislatures of the power to create laws that transgress against the principles of the left, it doesn't matter very much if you win or lose elections. When you win, you can pass new laws in line with your principles. When you lose, you can relax because the courts will throw out new laws that you'd oppose.

Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to this approach. One of them is this one: when the court goes against you, it generally goes all the way. The other one is that politicizing the courts damages the legitimacy of two whole branches of government. The author really wants the courts to come up with political compromises here, in order to rewrite the laws in a way that would satisfy everyone. That's a legislative function. Should the courts take over the legislative function while also embracing the power to set aside legislatively-enacted laws that violate principles held by the educated elite who make up the judiciary, the court has effectively gelded the legislature. The legislature will not be respected as a co-equal branch of government if its power is completely co-opted by the courts.

By the same token, since Federal judges are not elected (and in this court serve lifetime terms) their decisions have no democratic legitimacy. When the legislature rewrites the law, it does so with the direct involvement of the people's representatives. Those representatives, should they defy the people's will, can be replaced at the next election. Unelected judges who cannot be replaced ought not to perform the legislative function in a republic that claims to draw its legitimacy from the will of the people.

So, grammercy for coming up with a viable compromise. I think people might go along with it. Take it to the legislatures, and at the state and local level as well. Make the argument. Point out that Jefferson and Madison are on your side. You might convince some people. Stop trying to get the courts to alter the playing field such that laws you don't like are forbidden to legislatures. Instead, play fairly and talk with the people with which you disagree instead of suing them.

Crazy idea, I know. But I'm pretty sure it's how the system was supposed to work.

Well, Obviously

When large groups of female students on a campus claim they feel unsafe if they cannot utilize their constitutional rights to carry a firearm, does it cause a massive uproar and immediate shift in policy? When pro-Palestinian students rally, chanting phrases that make Jewish students feel unsafe, does the student body call an emergency meeting with the plan of silencing the pro-Palestinian students?

Of course not.

But, when a single Muslim student calls a movie like ‘American Sniper’ racist...

Islam isn't a... oh, why bother.

The Rifle Team at Harvard

Increasingly I find myself reading news stories and thinking, "We talked that all through ten years ago." The important lesson may be that blogging is a waste of time.

Today the story that is wasting my time and energy is this story about Ivy League schools taking up rifle teams. Yes, fully ten years ago we had that all out here at the Hall.

[I]f any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.

Francis Parkman wrote that. If you don't know who he was, you should look him up. If you're a Harvard man and you don't know, your school has failed you: as it has if it produced you without teaching you to shoot a rifle or use an oar.

In Celebration of Blogger's About-Face

...some sexually explicit content.



Seriously. Don't watch that at work. :)

Good News For The Clinton Administration

The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails....

Unlike other offices within the White House, which were always exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the Office of Administration responded to FOIA requests for 30 years. Until the Obama administration, watchdog groups on the left and the right used records from the office to shed light on how the White House works.

No more of that!

Premise Good, Conclusion Bad

Crooked Timber draws our attention to a new British law called "Prevent" that seems to impose serious restrictions on the kinds of political ideas you can advance in certain public spaces. There's some sort of exemption for institutions of higher education, since professionals might need to study dangerous ideas. However, they are still meant not merely to monitor but to "engage and consult students on compliance with their Prevent duty."

So, Grim Can Start Posting All That Sexually Explicit Content Again

An update on the Blogger porn content policy

This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy stating that blogs that distributed sexually explicit images or graphic nudity would be made private.

We’ve received lots of feedback about making a policy change that impacts longstanding blogs, and about the negative impact this could have on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities.

We appreciate the feedback. Instead of making this change, we will be maintaining our existing policies.

Sustainability

It's not always clear what we mean by it:

That fossil fuels are finite is a red herring. The Atlantic Ocean is finite, but that does not mean that you risk bumping into France if you row out of a harbor in Maine. The buffalo of the American West were infinite, in the sense that they could breed, yet they came close to extinction. It is an ironic truth that no nonrenewable resource has ever run dry, while renewable resources—whales, cod, forests, passenger pigeons—have frequently done so.

Something Short and Sweet on a Monday Afternoon

H/t the Anchoress

Collective guilt for thee, not for me?

There was a piece to a National Review article that I saw on Ace's page that touched on the idea that the protesters and inciters in Ferguson have some level of culpability in the shooting of the two officers outside of police headquarters there.  And it's an article worthy of reading.  But I think both Ace and the author (Andrew McCarthy) missed a salient point.  While the usual suspects in Ferguson are complaining about being tarred with the brush of the shooter (just as they did with regards to the ambush assassination in New York City), they have no problem tarring all officers in those police departments with collective guilt.  We hear about "command climate" and "institutional racism" and all manner of reasons why the entire structure is corrupt.  And yet when someone from within their ranks (quite literally) shoots a cop, suddenly it's "bad actors" and "we had nothing to do with it".

So which is it?  Is everyone on both sides culpable for the actions of "bad actors" from within their ranks, or are we to judge individuals on their own merits and faults?  Because I have no stomach for the hypocrisy of either side claiming that they should be held to different standards.  Last time I checked, we have a system where everyone is equal before the law.

That "Unprecedented" Letter from the Republican Senators to Iran

Over the weekend, I had a liberal acquaintance link the following image on her Facebook:

And while I normally have a great deal of tolerance to publicly post ideas I disagree with, this one bothered me, specifically because I happen to know a bit of history about this very question.

You see, during the Carter Administration, the President (through his State Department) negotiated a treaty with the Soviets.  The name of this treaty was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II Treaty of 1979 (more commonly known by the acronym SALT II).  And, generally speaking, the treaty was pretty bad for the US.  It committed us to limitations in the very systems most feared by the Soviets, and in return they "promised" to limit the same classes of weapons (which they lacked the technology to duplicate on the scale we had).  Before ratification before the Senate occurred, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  So the Senate balked.  And in 1986, they flat out repudiated the treaty, and it was dead.

So, what would happen if 47 Senators told the "Russians" that they "shouldn't trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal?"  Well, I don't know about the exact number of Senators that killed SALT II (but I do know that it was Democrats who held the majority in the Senate in 1986, so that should tell you how bad the deal was), so it may not have been 47.  And they didn't tell the "Russians" since it was actually the Soviet Union back then.  And as for "they shouldn't trust us" I think the author is saying that "we won't ratify this piece of dreck" is saying "not to trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal", but if that's how the Iranian theocratic dictators want to take it, I don't really care.

So I basically summarized all this, linked to the details of the treaty and called it a day.  Strangely, no debate followed.  I guess pithy quips via image macro are only so clever when there's no competing history to refute them.

Yeoman Farmers

It used to be when a Kennedy would marry, we'd get a whole set of stories about how they were "American royalty," and this wedding was therefore somewhat like the marriage of prince so-and-so to some duchess or other.

Nobody anywhere thinks that about Dakota Meyer marrying Bristol Palin. Dakota Meyer has a better claim to the virtue of courage, at least, than any prince I can think of who has lived since the Hundred Years War; Palin is certainly from a family of high political connections among a certain political party. Yet I think it's fair to say that no one would mistake them for royalty.

Even better, no one would mistake them for people with aspirations toward being royalty. That's the real difference.

That no one would make the comparison might be a way in which some people look down on them as not being fit for membership in the aristocracy. That they would be horrified by the comparison says something about their own character. The something said is deeply American.

Good luck to a young couple. Marriage is hard, but it can be wonderful.

Why Our Enemies Are Doing Well

The answer is straightforward:

* Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the world; our enemies know everyone else.

* The mandarin’s distaste for physicality: We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody nose.

* And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies know, firsthand, the stuff of life.

...

[W]hen new blood does enter — through those same “elite” institutions — it’s channeled into the same old calcium-clogged arteries. And we get generals with Ivy League Ph.D.s writing military doctrine that adheres cringingly to politically correct truisms and leaves out the very factors, such as the power of religion or ethnic hatred, that prove decisive. Or a usually astute commentator on Eastern European affairs who dismisses Vladimir Putin as a mere chinovnik, a petty bureaucrat, since Putin was only a lieutenant colonel in the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and didn’t go to a Swiss prep school like John Kerry.

That analyst overlooked the fact that Hitler had been a mere lance corporal. Stalin was a failed seminarian. Lenin was a destitute syphilitic. Ho Chi Minh washed dishes in the basement of a Paris Hotel. And when the French Revolution erupted, Napoleon was a junior artillery officer.

Certainly it's the weak and the poor who have the most interest in overturning any given system. But Peters, though not wrong, has only half the answer. The problem isn't just that the elite is both insular and so detached from the real world as to be largely immune to the pain their bad decisions cause. That's true, but it's not the whole truth.

The other half of the problem is the old problem of scale. We talk about this here often under the heading of Schumpeter's economic principle; it's more familiar to military science as the OODA loop. Our institutions are so large and so intricate in their approval chains that there's a huge advantage in terms of how fast a decision can be made and acted upon for streamlined organizations. Putin just issues orders, after all. ISIS isn't very big. USEUCOM or USCENTCOM has to socialize a plan among all their staff sections, who reach down to subordinate commands for input and then hash out a plan among themselves before they present it to their general. Most likely, he will need to push that plan up to the Pentagon if it represents a radical change to existing strategy. They have their own process before an answer comes back down, and the easiest answer is to push the suspense for the decision to the right while we ask a few more people. If the change requires a change from an interagency partner, their bureaucracies have to get involved too.

Even if the President were replaced with someone with new-blood ideas and the will to enact them, the bureaucracy would still have to go through at least a basic staffing process to ensure that it carried out the decisions in an orderly fashion. Because the bureaucrats are part of the existing order, there will be many who drag their feet or otherwise resist firm leadership (remember the CIA's campaign of leaks to the press about Bush's programs?).

In the absence of firm leadership from a President with such ideas, the system is almost too ossified to move at all. This is a real issue even for those leaders who are correctly motivated and trying to do the right thing.

What has to be done to address these challenges is to create a new way of responding to them -- one that isn't part of the bureaucracy, and that doesn't answer to it. A lot of the success of the special operations community comes from the fact that it operates on a much shorter chain. Were Congress to issue a letter of marque to a private organization tasked with fighting ISIS, that organization could act with Congressional authorization without any need to be directed by the State Department or the other executive bureaucracies at all.

It's absolutely true that we need new blood from outside of this elite, people who are more familiar with and in more direct contact with real life. We also need for them to be able to move fast and hard. They need to be able to make a call and make it happen with the same speed that our enemies can leverage. Otherwise, even our great strength and wealth will but little avail us.

Hardest quiz ever

I've never done this badly on an internet quiz before: only 50%.

A higher authority

The White House is taking that letter more seriously than I expected:

Sure, it’s tasteless for the American president to go over the heads of the American legislative body and appeal to an unelected council of international diplomats in order to outmaneuver his domestic opposition. This kind of behavior is also precisely what the American people have come to expect from Barack Obama.

Scots Magic

A joke I heard today:

An Englishman and a Scotsman go to a pastry shop.
The Englishman whisks three cookies into his pocket with lightning speed.
The baker doesn't notice.
The Englishman says to the Scotsman:
"You see how clever we are? You'll never beat that!"
The Scotsman says to the Englishman:
"Watch this, a Scotsman is always cleverer than an Englishman."
He says to the baker,
"Give me a cookie, I can show you a magic trick!"
The baker gives him the cookie which the Scotsman promptly eats.
Then he says to the baker:
"Give me another cookie for my magic trick."
The baker is getting suspicious but he gives it to him. He eats this one too.
Then he says again:
"Give me one more cookie... "
The baker is getting angry now but gives him one anyway. The Scotsman eats this one too.
Now the baker is really mad, and he yells:
"And where is your famous magic trick?"
The Scotsman says:
"Look in the Englishman's pocket!"

Honor and Food

As I assume is well known to readers here, in the United States Marine Corps it is a standard that leaders do not eat until their men are fed. This is a point of honor, because honor is sacrifice of your interests for the good of others in your community. The leader occupies a position of honor, which means that when there is a sacrifice to be made, it properly belongs to him to be the one who makes it. The leader sees that those under his command are fed first, and only then takes time -- if there is time -- to eat himself.

So I read with interest this article about an attempt to re-invigorate traditional Japanese foodways, in which the person in the position of honor also has a duty related to the order of the eating of food. It's just that it's the opposite order:

“The principal is the first person to eat lunch,” says Masahiro Oji, director of the Ministry of Education’s School Health Education Division. “If he gets sick none of the rest of the food gets served."

Different practical concerns prompt a different order, but the deeper issue is the same.

That Glow

Way back in 2004, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas admitted that "the media ... wants Kerry to win. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic .... There’s going to be this glow about them ... that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points."

Apparently their relationship to Hillary Clinton is slightly different.

Sleeping Dogs

Apparently in China, they should be left lying.

No Progress

Grim's Hall, 2008:

I looked up the definition for "sexism" today, and I find that it is defined as "the sense that one sex is inferior to, or more valuable than, the other." We have a number of ways of expressing the same concept: "male chauvanism" or "female chauvanism," "misogyny," and so forth.

What we don't appear to have is a way of expressing a concept that recognizes the real differences between the sexes in a way that honors them. As far as I know, there is no word in the language for a "a sense that though the sexes are genuinely different, both are necessary and valuable." That is to say, we have a lot of ways of describing a problem, but we have no way of talking about the solution.

I've tried to use the term "chivalry" in this context -- that men should regard women, though different, as wonderful and valuable, and should take care to listen to their concerns and help make a world in which they feel welcome.

Two things happened when I did that, which point up the severity of the problem. The first is that it was pointed out to me, by a well-meaning and kind-hearted woman, that I was offering good advice to men, but nothing for women. If "chivalry" is right for men, what is the female version of recognizing the differences between themselves and men, honoring men, and trying to make a world in which we also feel welcome and valued? I have no answer to that question: there is no word I know of that applies.

The other thing that happened was that certain feminists received my use of "chivalry" as a sort of code-word for male chauvanism.

The Daily Mail, today:

They found men whose answers led to them being classed as benevolently sexist smiled more while playing the quiz game and chatting. They were more patient while waiting for their female partners to answer the trivia questions and warmer, friendlier and chattier than those who were hostile sexists... Study co-author Jin Goh said: 'Benevolent sexist men hold women in high regard and are willing to sacrifice themselves to save and protect women.

So, OK. Let's ask the same questions. What is the female version of what is on display in men seeing women as valuable, listening to their advice as a civilizing influence (an impulse rather unfairly degraded by being phrased as "putting on a pedestal"), and trying to do right by them and show them that they are safe and welcome in public places?

And why should we receive men who do it as bad? There are some senses of the word "strong" in which women are stronger than men. There are others, including the most fundamental sense, in which this is not the case. That fact is a fact simply: can't we be honest about it? Can't we show each other honor while recognizing each other's imperfections? If we can't acknowledge the truth about each other's imperfections without failing some assumed duty of respect, talk about putting on a pedestal!