Power and Liberty: Separation versus Tension

The Declaration of Independence says:

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., the securing of unalienable rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

When it comes time to do that, I hope that whoever has the charge of doing it will remember this lesson: separation of powers is not enough to guarantee liberty. What guarantees a space for liberty is not merely the separation of power, but a tension between the powers.

Consider, for example, AT&T's spying on the American people. "Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why."

There is a clear separation of powers between AT&T and the police. If you contract with AT&T, it has a certain power over your life because it gains access to a lot of information about you. Still, AT&T has no police powers.

The police, meanwhile, have no right to demand access to AT&T's proprietary information without a warrant.

Does this protect you? No, it does not: AT&T is happy to provide the police with everything it knows, secretly, in return for a cash payment (one that you are contributing to yourself as a taxpayer).

If the government were to nationalize the telecoms, it would lose access to this kind of spying. A nationalized telecom would have to justify its spying by warrant. By outsourcing this spying to a non-government agency, the government actually increases its powers.

So too with the "death panels," below. A nationalized single payer system would presumably have to respect the claim that you could not be denied life (or liberty or property) without due process. It might not be much better -- the VA's system simply delays the due process so long that you die anyway -- but the corporate/government alignment provides them with immediate access to a power that they could never get through Congress.

For now, the hope lies in an intensification of the tension between the states and the Federal government. There, where the powers have competing interests, there is a chance that some space for liberty will come to be between them. Tension between powers is the thing that really works.

Merely separating the powers, without a competitive tension between the powers, aggregates them just as certainly as a failure to separate them at all. Indeed, in these two examples of corporate/government collusion, the power of the state increases beyond what it could ever legitimately do should it seize the private body and run it as a formal arm of the state.

Death Panels

Remind me how stupid this idea was.

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law....

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead.

At some point, we're going to have to grapple with the idea that the government -- or, to be more sophisticated, this alliance of government and for-profit companies -- is evil by all traditional measures. Do we go along with the new ideas, redefining the good as if it were a matter of convention? Or do we deal with the government as harshly as we would with a genuine evil?

It's a serious philosophical question, one going back to Protagoras and Socrates. Is man the measure of all things, or is there some god whose opinion rules? Even if the god is "Nature," you still get a kind of telos in which pursuit of life is the good: after all, all things that can pursue their own survival, and their own furtherance through reproduction. So, even if we reason from the squirrels and the trees of the forest, we get to this idea that life is the good.

The opposite of good is evil, is it not?

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Seriously, no commentary. Just roll the tape.

Aspiring United States Air Force pilots can skip the fitness test if they are transgender and in the process of transitioning, according to new protocol determined by military officials and made public last week.

Transgender pilots who are in the middle of hormone treatment won’t have to retake the exam, which includes pull-ups, pushups, and running, if they have already failed it — so long as the Air Force commander sees that the individual “tried to the best of their ability” to meet the standards associated with their preferred gender.

R.I.P.

Steven DenBeste has died.

I didn't always agree with him (imagine that), but he was an important early voice in blogging that I read regularly when he ran the site at USS Clueless.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Good Point

Of 1,000 voters polled by Rasmussen Reports on October 18 and 19; 65% believe that Clinton broke the law with her use of a private server — and 53% believe that the FBI should have filed criminal charges.

Meanwhile, according to Sunday’s daily IBD/TIPP tracking poll, only 43% of voters support Clinton for president.

H/t Gateway Pundit, who points out that this means that more Americans want Hillary Clinton in prison than as President.

Nothing to See Here

Clinton ally donated half a million bucks to a political campaign... led by the wife of an FBI agent who was subsequently promoted and placed in charge of the Clinton investigation.

If it were the only such "little surprise," I suppose we could write it off as a coincidence. It is not, of course. Not hardly.

Final Military Times Poll: Trump Support Grows

Trump leads overall and with enlisted, among whom Clinton doesn't break 1 in 5 and finishes in a distant third place. Trump is narrowly in third place among officers, but Clinton isn't even a half percentage point ahead of Gary Johnson in that subset. Johnson is in second place among enlisted as well.

Female servicemembers look a lot like officers in their voting preferences: Trump is in third, but Johnson is the overall winner. Men prefer Trump.

As has been true in previous polls, support for Trump is strongest and for Clinton weakest among the Marines and the Army. She does better among the Navy and Air Force, but she is still behind Trump (who always wins) and, in the Air Force, also behind Johnson. She leads Johnson narrowly in the Navy, but remains a good distance behind Trump.

Both major parties remain largely unliked by the military. Nearly 83 percent of those surveyed said they are dissatisfied with Clinton as the Democratic Party’s pick to be president, and more than 65 percent said the same of Trump as the Republican nominee.

Only 4 percent of troops polled said they have abundant confidence that Clinton can lead the military as commander in chief. About 9 percent said the same for Trump. More than 60 percent of troops said they had little confidence either could.

One Marine corporal who responded to the survey wrote back, "No one seems to care that Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for leaking classified information. It's an embarrassment that she is on the verge of becoming president.”

Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice

Jonathan Haidt has a very interesting article up at Heterodox Academy by this title.

The article itself is really just the bare outline of a talk he has given on this topic. You can watch a video of the whole talk, all 66 minutes of it, there if you like. I'm going to make time soon to do that.

Here is the introduction:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?

The most obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

He follows this with an 8-point argument showing why universities must choose one telos.

UPDATE: The video is excellent. He is giving a talk at Duke University and argues that a university having more than one telos is harmful to everyone at the university, including those who are focused on social justice. I don't think I have ever seen a better presentation of conservative arguments to a progressive audience.

Also, if you are interested in recent changes at our universities or their future, I highly recommend it.

Healthy Dieting, Medieval Style

It was a lot harder to start a fad diet before the printing press, but there was a trade in ideas. One was the Regimen Sanitatus Salernitanum.

The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum was created, allegedly, by famous doctors for English royalty and disseminated in the form of a poem. It recommends, very specifically, red wine, fresh eggs, figs and grapes. It has little to say about vegetables. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of today’s health fads—it celebrates wheat, emphasizes meat, and involves two significant meals, with no mention of snacking. Water is looked on with suspicion, and juice is nowhere to be found.

But from the 1200s through the 1800s, the Regimen was one of the most well known guides to health in Europe, at a time when the stakes of staying healthy were much higher than they are now. Getting sick could be a death sentence; this regimen promised to keep people well.

The author tried it out to see how it worked. The wine, in the ancient way, was diluted -- drinking raw water made it more likely you would get sick from things in the water, but diluting wine with it meant that the harmful effects of the wine were largely eliminated, while the beneficial effects remained.

There are some aesthetic differences:

One giant difference between diet advice of 1200s and diet advice now is that Salerno never mentions losing weight or keeping skinny. In fact, all the foods Salerno smiles on, the poem describes as “fattening.” When you’re liable as not to face a famine, or at least a food shortage, at basically any time, fattening is good.

In the end, the author consulted a modern specialist for advice.

How did it stack up from a modern point of view? I asked Andrea Grandson, a nutritional therapist who specializes in metabolic health, to go over the Salerno prescriptions with me. “It sounds very healthy, with eggs, wine, and broth,” she says. Eggs are a complete protein and one of the easiest to digest. Red wine is valuable for its resveratrol and antioxidants. Broths and stews extract the nutrients from the bones and organs of animals. “They were on the right track in terms of looking for nutrient density,” she says.

But, most importantly, she said, how did I feel? Was I sleeping ok? Did I feel an afternoon slump?

The truth is, I felt great eating this food. It was simple, hearty, and filling, but I never stuffed myself.

Apparently This Is For Real?

This image is part of a whole series of newspeak lessons in political correctness from a university I'd never heard of before. I gather that they intend them completely seriously and non-ironically, even the ones about "Shemales" and how "Just Kill Me" is insensitive because of suicide. (If you 'just kill me,' how is that a suicide?)

But get a load of this one:

Two things to notice here:

1) There is apparently no such thing as an objective judgment permitted: all judgments of a person's moral qualities are illegitimate applications of someone else's standards to another individual. I believe the academic way of saying this is: "To apply someone else's standards to an individual is to treat the judger as the subject whose experience and standards matter, while the judged is a mere object against which someone else's standards are applied." To treat someone else as an object is taken to be a kind of moral affront to that person, even though it's actually impossible to understand the world without the grammatical categories of subject and object. "No one must ever be treated as an object" is another way of saying "we must give up on describing the world."

2) Since there is no objective judgment, and all judgments must be subjective, there can be no judgment at all. Everyone is entitled to live life on his or her (or whatever's) own terms, without any moral weight being imposed on them from outside of whatever feels right to them.

I expect it is completely impossible to field a winning sports team on this model as you will not win if you cannot assert that players ought to push themselves and train harder and face whatever fears they have. That fact suggests that the Chico State administration are hypocrites. Presumably they don't adhere to this practice to the slightest degree when it comes to training their student athletes for competition, nor should they.

However, the suggestion of hypocrisy isn't needed to prove the case against them. The fact is that this whole set of posters is about teaching students to judge others. You can't apply someone else's standards to anyone? What about the guy who says "retarded"?

Hypocrites and fools are these. They not only don't believe in the standards they're advocating, they don't even know that they don't believe in them.

Dogs from Above

According to the article at Science Alert, this is part of an anti-poaching program in South Africa's Kruger National Park. I liked this bit:

And even though the school isn’t sure if dogs experience adrenaline rushes like human skydivers, they say their tails start to wag when they hear the helicopter.

"The dogs are exceptionally comfortable with skydiving," Eric Ichikowitz from the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, who helped start the program, told National Geographic. "They know they’re going to work."

Looks like fun.

The Army Comes After Vets

This is the kind of thing that only the military gets away with.

The Pentagon is demanding thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of dollars back from California soldiers who received enlistment bonuses for signing up to fight for American freedoms in the war on terror. The Pentagon is even demanding pay from enlistment bonuses all way back to a decade ago.... close to 10,000 soldiers are being ordered repay their bonuses and also are being charged for interest charges and are being threatened with wage garnishments and tax liens if they do not repay.

This is due to the Pentagon determining that the California National Guard mismanaged their money while under pressure to meet enlistment recruiting targets.

So, let me get this straight. California's National Guard screwed up and offered bigger (or more) bonuses than they were entitled to do under the law. National Guard soldiers, who are not all of them expert lawyers or familiar with the intricacies of budgets, accepted what looked like explicably generous bonuses given how much retention trouble the military was having at that particular moment of the war. Now, Big Army wants the money back -- and it wants it back from the soldiers, even if they're no longer in, not from the National Guard that mismanaged the money.

Accountability in government is a great concept, but these are not the people who screwed up. This is making the little guy pay for the big guy's mistakes. Pay through the nose for them.

28 Good Ideas?

Let's take a look at Trump's closing argument, 28 things he'll do as President.  It's a long list, so I'll put it after a jump break.

Ballad of Balad

Mellow Out

The Al Smith Dinner

It was McCain's best moment in 2008. Of course, he lost.

Well, here's what we saw tonight.

It's That Kind of ... Year? Decade?

h/t (or blame) neo-neocon

Paying the Rent

When possible, it's usually best to lock in rates early.

Earlier this October, at a ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, London paid its rent to the Queen. The ceremony proceeded much as it had for the past eight centuries. The city handed over a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails to Barbara Janet Fontaine, the Queen’s Remembrancer, the oldest judicial position in England. The job was created in the 12th century to keep track of all that was owed to the crown.

In this case, the Remembrancer has presided over the rent owed on two pieces of property for a very long time—since 1235 in one case, and at least 1211 in the other. Every year, in this Ceremony of Quit Rents, the crown extracts its price from the city for a forge and a piece of moorland.

Heck of a deal, huh? Only one small detail:

No one knows exactly where these two pieces of land are located anymore, but for hundreds of years the city has been paying rent on them.

Well, it could turn out that they're somewhere important. Best to keep up the payments just in case.

Free Trade Is Good For Everybody, Right?

Well, it turns out it wasn't very good for Louis XVI:

France and Britain were longtime rivals and both countries were committed to Mercantilism, yet they struck one of the first “free trade “deals or at least the first deal premised on philosophy of free trade. Even today, many free market types will argue that trade can overcome even the bitterest of rivalries. People like making money more than they like making trouble, so the theory goes. This trade deal is proof of that.

The most notable part of the deal is that it was a disaster for France. Soon after the deal was signed, there was a flood of British manufactured goods into France. Importation of British goods doubled. This put enormous pressure on the already distressed French industries, setting off riots and revolts. Naturally, this put pressure on the already strained relations between the provinces and the crown. Most historians count the Eden Treaty as one of the contributing factors leading up to the French Revolution.

H/t D29, who adds: "We would not, of course, suggest that the guillotine is a remedy. Yet."

A Rigged System, Continued

Lots of people seem to think it's rigged. People who would presumably know.



How about those computers that count your votes? In Georgia, they record your vote on a credit-card shaped device, then wipe it after they transfer the information to the central system. At least, that's allegedly what happens. There's no record of how you voted, and the people transferring the data have nothing to look at that would indicate that the transfer was done fairly. There's also no paper ballot or receipt that could be used for a recount. That doesn't prove the system is correct, but it gives us reason to suspect the system.

In that context, then, here's some sworn testimony from a programmer who says he wrote software to rig elections. There is also a discussion thread at Snopes about him and his testimony.



George Will points out that the IRS scandal is itself proof of official attempts to rig the election against conservatives, by preventing them from organizing or collecting tax-deductible donations, and harassing them with audits.

And of course, as we (and left wing Vox) recently discussed, gerrymandering is the Fire-Breathing Godzilla of vote rigging. My Congressional district is R +27. If I and everyone I know voted Democrat this year, it might fall to R +25. Other districts are just as heavily D +. The same is true of state-level districts.

Of course the vote is rigged, in every way they've figured out how to get away with rigging it. The animating questions should be whether there's anything left that isn't rigged, and what (if anything) we can do about the parts that are. If the answer to that latter question is that we can't do anything that will legally compel the powers that be to back off their vote-rigging, we should start talking about what to do about that.

UPDATE: Another Vox piece demonstrating a proven, actual history of rigging elections -- Jim Crow, of course.

That example is hopeful, in a way, because the Jim Crow system was eventually dismantled (except, arguably, for gerrymandering -- or if you take seriously the complaint that things like Voter ID laws are intimidation efforts). But it's also a telling example for the plausibility of rigging an election. Of course it can be done. It always has been done. It's done everywhere anyone figures out a good way to do it. Often, as in the case of gerrymandering or the IRS scandal, it's done right out in the open.

The question is, what can we do about it?