Ever Held A Security Clearance, Professor Lakoff?

I ask the question rhetorically, because I think the answer is apparent.

'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’

Well, sort of: it's about the communication of classified secrets in a way that was entirely too public. People have given their lives to protect classified information, and for good reason: other lives frequently depend on it.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.”

With all due respect, she was delighted to receive that scolding in place of the prosecution she deserved. Far from an act of bullying, this was an act of intense protection of her interests by a man whose duty pointed in the other direction. If you've misunderstood the context that badly, I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to publish an article from you on the subject of this case.

And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.

I'm pretty sure we can put our fingers on it. She treated classified information in a way that violated the law, endangered America's national interests and the lives of Americans charged with protecting it, and she did so for no better reason than that it was convenient for her. That's the kind and generous reading of why she did it. The more likely reason is that she was trying to dodge public records laws, which is a separate crime, in order to conceal the degree to which she was treating her office as a source of income through influence peddling.

It would not be difficult to prove that case to a jury, if we were allowed to go to a jury with it. All we ask is the chance to try.

Saudi Arabia and Feminism

Two articles:

1) A female Saudi scholar comes under fire for what some are calling feminist views, views that question whether Islamic societies protect the rights of women to a correct degree. Some who feel that societies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia most fully realize God's plan on earth find her questions to be an insult to Islam and, indeed, even to God.

2) A Saudi court has assented to a woman's request to watch her husband's judicially-ordered flogging, as it is being administered to punish him (and to recompense her) for his wife-beating. For some reason, many men are objecting to her watching as inappropriately humiliating -- but not to the beating itself, which would strike me (pun intended) as the real humiliation being inflicted.

Still, it's a move to press a woman's right to be free from domestic violence in a way not permitted in the West. I suppose in the spirit of free inquiry, it's worth asking: is this a way in which Islamic law really is stronger on women's rights, even if only in this discrete matter?

Discuss, if you like.

NYC Kills Free Speech

Excerpts from Eugene Volokh:

We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.

What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...

And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

A Good Weekend

That's Tennessee in the distance, looking north out of Cloudland Canyon. It's on the west side of Lookout Mountain, an impregnable fortress if -- like the Confederate army -- you put artillery on the long ridge, and the two ridges behind it. Armies would break like water on the central rock. The Northern forces were wise enough to wait until they could take Lookout Mountain, and then go around to the east.

I rode up there and hiked yesterday, rode back today. I stopped by my father's house on the way. He had bought a box of .22 for that revolver I mentioned. I brought it home and shot it out of my Ruger Single Six instead. Tonight I'm grilling marinated steak over a charcoal and hickory fire, while drinking a bit of pilsner.

Mountains, motorcycles, guns, and beer. Maybe it gets better than that. Maybe not.

Ricochet?

Their tagline is: "Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond."

However, they ask $5 a month or $39.99 a year to be a member with full privileges.

From time to time I read the free articles, and generally I like the tone of the place, but that's about the extent of my experience with them so far.

Does anyone have any comments on Ricochet? Is it worth it? Has anyone here tried it out?

The Empire vs. the Republic

James Pethokoukis, AEI fellow and CNBC contributor, argues that America right now looks like the Roman empire at the height of its power rather than Rome about to fall.

If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)

Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”

That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:

So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.

But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.

He links an article he wrote at Vox which argues more in depth that, since America's economy is still strong, America is OK. His entire argument is economic.

I don't care how well the economy is doing if I am not free. If the republic is dying, the state of the economy is irrelevant. After all the ink and pixels that have been used to get that point across, to not understand that the populist argument is fundamentally about political freedom and the culture of freedom is a form of self-imposed intellectual blindness.

Ammon Bundy's Lawyer Facing Charges?

In the article that Grim posted on this earlier, it was shocking that US Marshals had tackled and used a stun gun on Ammon Bundy's lawyer, Marcus Mumford.

A new report suggests Mumford may be facing charges. In this news article, it seems that when US Marshals moved to take Bundy into custody, Mumford confronted them.

Mumford got into a heated argument that ultimately led to the attorney being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Our reporters say Mumford started repeatedly yelling to Judge Brown that his client was free to go.

"When you get acquitted, you get released. That's how I understand it," said Mumford.

He said he asked the U.S. Marshals to see their paperwork that gave them authority to keep his client in custody.

It seems the marshals didn't just rush him without warning or provocation, but it is still shocking.

Happy Birthday, Royal Marines

 

The Royal Marines were formed in 1755 as the Royal Navy's infantry troops. However, the marines can trace their origins back to the formation of the English Army's "Duke of York and Albany's maritime regiment of Foot" at the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company on 28 October 1664.

Update: 352 years, to be exact.

Today's Lesson in Mythology

As appropriate for the afternoon, let me introduce you to the goddess Nemisis, whose purview is "fair distribution of rewards." She is particularly tasked with pursuing those guilty of hubris, and making sure that whatever those guilty of hubris grasped at through the sin was paid for in fair measure.

She is associated with Tyche, better known -- and beloved -- as "Lady Luck."

DB: WWI Vets Overwhelmingly Support Clinton

Some 98 percent of ballots cast from the demographic have been from veterans who are registered Democrats.

“This is tremendous news for the Hillary Clinton campaign and for the Democratic Party,” said Donna Brazile, interim chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. “We knew that if we could get a strong turnout among the doughboy demographic, we could win this election.”

Nullification

A huge win in Oregon.

A Little Clarity about the Target Audience and Methods

In previous posts on persuasion, I've been sloppy with language and that's led to some confusion. I've also changed my mind on some things based on comments to my posts. I plan to continue writing about this, so I'm going to try to clarify a couple of things. I'll do that by answering these two questions:

When I post on persuasion, who am I talking about persuading? What do I mean by "persuasion"?

Some Non-Presidential Polls

Not all of the propaganda works all of the time. Two polls show that the American people have rejected two of the Left's beloved causes, gun control and BLM.

Note that the spike in people reporting "a great deal of respect for police" is highest among... liberals (+21) and Millennials (+19). But it's greater among non-white Americans (+14) than among whites (+11, although there's not much ceiling left there).

I still think that BLM had some valid complaints, although it was clear from the beginning that their chosen method of protest was certain to fail. You can't improve relations between a given community and the police by driving that community into lawbreaking confrontations that force the police to arrest them. It's unsurprising that things have turned out this way, except that it's surprising to see the swing so strong in exactly the demographics BLM targeted for its efforts.

I Endorse This Heartily

Scientists have recreated an ancient mead from 2,500 years ago

Dogfish head brewery in Delaware has done something like this with residues found in King Midas' (well, actually his father's) tomb and in 4000 year old Chinese pots.

Mankind. Brewing. You don't get one without the other.

There's Something You Don't Hear Everyday

"Everything conservatives predicted about Obamacare is coming true."

Well, and it has been for a while now. But you don't usually hear that admitted. Obama said we could keep our doctors and our plans if we liked them. That was not true. Obama said it would bring down costs thousands of dollars per family. Not only was that not true, costs are up substantially.

We also said it would destroy the health insurance industry and leave us subject to a government takeover -- a takeover that would be used to ram Nanny State social agendas down our throats. No smoking! No drinking! No motorcycle-riding! No gun ownership! All those things are too dangerous, and raise your prospective cost to the system too much. And since we are all paying for your health care now, we "all" have a right to demand that you live exactly as we prescribe that you should.

The Telos of a University

Jonathan Haidt's video on this topic, which I mentioned in a previous post, turns out to be excellent. It's 66 minutes long; I've watched it twice and plan on watching it at least one more time. Why should you?

He seems to assume he's talking to a Progressive audience, so his arguments are made to persuade them. That in and of itself is worthwhile if you plan to try to discuss issues with Progressives.

And he argues that:

• gender is biological and real
• "safe spaces" are damaging to the students they are supposed to protect
• arguing sexism or racism solely from disparate outcomes is irrational
• some goals of social justice are unjust
• the telos of seeking truth and the telos of seeking social justice are incompatible for a university and, if both are sought equally, harmful to both truth and social justice

In the end, while he wants universities to publicly declare one or the other, he champions truth-seeking as the proper telos of the university.

More about Haidt below the fold.

Well, Obviously

Headline: "Aetna CEO Says Young People Pick Weekend Beer Over Obamacare."

So would I.

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.