Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
Okay, so I'm a little sporadic with this blogging thing. I'm in the process of switching jobs and coping with a fifteen-month-old whose molars are coming in and is not at all pleased about that.

I promise to make amends. As a token of this commitment, my loyal readership (which appears to consist of my sister and myself) is hereby thrown the following bone, derived from the random static of my political ponderings:

An article of faith on the Bush-hating left (ne pas penser du double-entendre, sil vous plait) is that the various means, included in the USA Patriot Act (I do hate that name) of updating the government's surveillance powers to cope with terrorists' use of sophisticated communications (computer networks, cell phones, etc.) are somehow unprecedented incursions into historic liberties.

Their fallacy is in believing that whenever a law is enacted, or whenever government's power is expanded, there is a corresponding loss of individual liberty. (Technically speaking, they actually mean that liberty is lost only whenever a law they don't like is enacted -- see below.) But that fails to take account of what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "leverage."

Leverage is the greater power that technology grants to individuals. A person in a car can go farther, faster, than a pedestrian, and therefore has more freedom to choose where he'll go in a given time. The institution of driver's licenses after the invention of the automobile was an expansion of governmental regulatory power, but whatever diminution this regulation placed on individual liberty was outweighed by the greater liberty granted by the leverage of automobile technology.

Liberals have historically acknowledged this point. Some argue for increased gun controls, claiming that while a permissive attitude towards firearms ownership may have made sense in the age of single-shot muzzle-loaders, the greater damage a gunman can do with an automatic rifle warrants greater government control. The expansion of the economic power of individuals made possible by industrialization and the development of great corporations following the Civil War convinced formerly libertarian liberals that corresponding expansion of government's reach was justified. Regardless of what one thinks of these examples, the fundamental logic is the same: when innovations give individuals greater leverage, it is possible to impose restrictions while still preserving a net gain of liberty of action.

When terrorists can use modern communications technology to leverage their potential for destruction, is it intelligent or reasonable to insist that authorities continue to be subject to restrictions that predate these innovations and do not take account of the terrorists' increased leverage? posted by Thomas at 4:08 PM

 
Two days ago, my self-described radical legal secretary decided to subject me to an hour's worth of Gore Vidal sounding off on NPR about the DANGER, DANGER of the "fundamentalist" Bush Administration's alleged intention to make America into a police state. Or at least I think it was NPR. I admit to being not particularly familiar with NPR, but from what I heard (smooth, smug tones with no challenge by the host to even the most unsupportable statements by the guest, accompanied by mellowly hip modern jazz), I assumed NPR was the station.

I suppose I could have closed my door and let her marinate in the wingnut leftism she seems to like, but I do like the partners in this firm to know that I'm actually here and working.

Anyway, it got me thinking. It's amazing how many hard leftists, who one assumes believe Joseph McCarthy was the devil incarnate (as opposed to a mean blowhard drunk who callously ruined people's livelihoods, many of whom didn't have it coming) so blithely adopt his conduct, consciously or unconsciously.

Think about it. What would one consider McCarthy's greatest sins? I would say, in no particular order, his making of unfounded accusations, his conflation of ordinary garden-variety liberals with totalitarian communists, and his lying (as in, "I have in my hand a list of Communists in the State Department" when he didn't have anything of the kind).

Listening to Gore Vidal the other day, I heard all three.

The USA Patriot Act may have been carelessly drafted and enacted, but it simply doesn't contain the liberty-murdering pitfalls Vidal and his sort say it does. Now, it's a long piece of legislation, and I've only read the extensive summary from the Congressional Research Service, but I couldn't find the awful things Vidal was talking about -- i.e. that citizens could be stripped of their citizenship if accused of terrorism.

As for the second McCarthy-style fault, comparing conservatives to fascists or eager police-state architects is no more accurate than declaring New Deal liberals to communists during the forties. Probably much less so, in fact, given the naive love affair many had developed with the Soviets during those decades. (Thanks in part to dishonest reporting -- Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize for whitewashing Stalin's terror still stands, even as the New York Time hangs Jayson Blair's head on a pike for less dishonesty.) If increasing the penalty for hacking and damaging federally-protected computers from five years to ten qualifies one as a Nazi, what do you call men in black uniforms who put children into ovens?

As for the third -- the lying -- that may be a harder comparison. Vidal et al. may not consider themselves consciously to be lying. Their practice is to repeat the general accusations of tyranny that they pick up in their cloistered milieu, without taking the time to determine whether the things they hear are true or not.

Under the law of fraud, a person who makes a misrepresentation without reasonable grounds for believing it to be true is considered to be lying just as is a person who states something he knows to be untrue. It would be fair to say that the more serious the accusation one is bringing, the greater is one's responsibility to determine its truth before bringing it. The Left's reckless repetition of received falsehood is so severe and so sustained that it must be considered to be as dishonest as conscious lying.

That brings me back to the hour-long Vidal NPR torture-session my karma-conscious secretary decided to blast through the office. Vidal was making error after error (or misrepresentation after misrepresentation -- pick 'em) in that wonderful smooth, sophisticated, smug, earnest tone he's perfected. (See Chemerinsky, Erwin.) It's a wonderful talent -- the ability to say the most ridiculous things in a tone that literally reeks of obviousness, and that radiates the idea that nobody could possibly disagree with what's being said.

It's a talent that could only be developed in a hothouse, which is what NPR, and much of liberalism in general, has become. There's no opposition; no aggressive challengers, no rocking of the boat. Vidal wouldn't last five minutes on a talk radio show; some cab driver with a cell phone would hand him his head the first time he tried passing off a falsehood in that smooth tone.

This is why the Left is perennially "shocked and appalled," "chilled" (as in "chilling effect") and finds its "dissent" being "squashed" (translation: people tell them they're wrong). They're used to an environment where people share their assumptions, and challenge is impolite. posted by Thomas at 10:51 AM

 
The Proud Duke of Somerset was a comically arrogant figure, who insisted on formalities (including requiring that his children stand in his presence) to such an extent that he disinherited a daughter who had the temerity to sit down when he dozed off on a sofa one evening. What this has to do with me, I'm not quite sure. My wife refers to me as a "duck," much as Clementine Churchill referred to Sir Winston (in private) as "pig" ( which was apparently meant as an endearment). As to whether I'm comically arrogant -- well, as Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, "it ain't braggin' if it's true."

Anyway, I hereby inaugurate The Proud Duck. posted by Thomas at 6:12 PM