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.

 
The Orange County Register recently had a panel discussion on the future of residential real estate prices in the county. They published a story on it under the headline "Bullish on O.C. house prices." (Link from this site.)

Scott Simon, a manager at the bond trading giant PIMCO based in Newport Beach, probably had the least bullish outlook. He pointed out that 82% of home purchases in California last year were made using exotic interest-only or negative-amortization loans, which are highly risky in everything but a rapidly appreciating market. (He also pointed out how unusual it was for real estate to appreciate at a greater rate than the prevailing interest rate.)

Another guy stated that the reason Orange County's house prices were rising, and would continue to rise, was job growth, and a supposed excess of demand over supply.

Hogwash. If job growth and population growth are leading to a "huge excess of demand over supply," then why has inventory skyrocketed since last summer? (And has only slightly declined during the traditional holiday slowdown?)

What this moron doesn't comprehend (or care to) is that a guy saying "I wanna house" doesn't constitute "demand." Demand consists of a guy saying "I wanna house" and having the financial wherewithal to do something about it.

You need to have an income well into the mid six figures to afford an Orange County home using sustainable financing. There are simply not enough six-figure incomes to go around, when the MEDIAN house price in Orange County is over $600,000. Think of the vast plains of semi-dilapidated ranchers in Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park, Fullerton, etc. There are simply not enough professional, managerial, or high-skill workers in the Orange County economy to pay for all of them that come onto the market in the ordinary course of things. posted by Thomas at 10:27 AM

 
Lileks expands on Rodney Dangerfield's remark to Kurt Vonnegut in "Back to School". posted by Thomas at 11:24 AM

 
It's been awhile since I posted last, but I just noticed this morning that four people actually took a look at this dust-encrusted site last week. So I thought I'd bore you guys away with some dull thoughts on constitutional law.

Since it's Supreme Court nomination season, the subject of abortion has come up. More specifically, the subject of how the Constitution can be understood as protecting a right to it when neither abortion nor the "right of privacy" upon which the Court's abortion jurisprudence is based can be found anywhere in the actual constitutional text.

Without going into endless detail on the arguments, I thought I'd address one of the arguments I've seen presented to explain where the right of abortion is to be found: the idea that the right to abortion is derived from the 9th Amendment, which states that the "enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Some Pro-Roe people argue that's all it takes to enshrine abortion in the Constitution -- that is, even if abortion isn't specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, it's one of the rights "retained by the people."

The problem with this argument is that it's way too broad, which is why the federal courts have pretty much avoided using the 9th Amendment as a basis for striking down laws. If a court had the authority to declare anything at all a right "retained by the people," this would amount to an absolute judicial veto power over anything the legislature might do. Moreover, unlike a presidential veto, it can't be overridden, except by a constitutional amendment. It's very unlikely that the Framers, with their concern for checks and balances, meant to give any branch of government -- even "the least dangerous branch" -- such an unchecked power.

The 9th Amendment was enacted at the insistence of those, such as James Madison, who didn't want there to be a Bill of Rights in the first place. Their thinking was that the Constitution's structure itself protected individual rights just fine: Because the Constitution set up a system of enumerated powers of government, and those enumerated powers didn't include the power to restrict speech, establish or restrain religion, or infringe on the right to bear arms, an affirmative guarantee of those rights was superfluous. They also feared that listing affirmative rights might lead government to ignore the limits of its enumerated powers and expand its power to the limits of the Bill of Rights -- which, interestingly enough, has largely been done, the Commerce Clause having been expanded into virtually a general federal police power to pass laws without even a laughable connection to the regulation of commerce between the states.

The bottom line is that the 9th Amendment was never intended to be judicially enforceable. It's simply too broad and too vague. It contains no internal standard by which a court could determine what rights are "retained by the people," and so would (if it were judicially enforceable) give judges absolute discretion in policymaking. A judge could declare, for example, that the people's rights include a right to housing, or health care, or any number of things that are properly understood as political rather than constitutional questions, and requrie that policy be formulated accordingly. No matter whether one agreed with the court's policymaking or not, the point would be that those policies would have only the barest minimum of democratic legitimacy. True, there is some connection between elections and judges; people elect executives who appoint them. But the ability of an individual voter to influence policy is diluted by every layer of representation that is added between him and the person making the ultimate decision. Putting total power in the hands of life-tenured judges would render democratic consent virtually a symbol, nothing more.

The 9th Amendment should instead be treated as it was intended -- as a reminder to the government that just because the Bill of Rights set up a last-ditch backstop, it shouldn't throw the ball past the catcher's glove -- the sphere of government power as established by the body of the Constitution's enumerated powers. posted by Thomas at 11:37 AM

 
Watched "Flight of the Phoenix" on cable last night. A pretty good flick, except for the annoyingly Hollywood-pompous-and-banal declaration of the "wise" stranded passenger who declares he believes in "spirituality", not "religion", because the latter "divides people."

The irony of that statement -- by which the speaker neatly divided the world of believers into the righteous, open-minded believers in "spirituality" and the wicked, intolerant religionists, was obviously lost on the screenwriter.

Religion is an attempt to discover and live by universal truths. The problem is that it's practiced by people, who are different, which results in different conclusions being drawn, resulting in the religious world being divided among those who accept each diverse conclusion. In "spirituality," the search for truth is more individualized -- with the result that the world of "spirituality" is divided, at least in theory, between each different-thinking individual.

(I do notice that a large number of self-proclaimed believers in "spirituality" have the same bumper stickers, are informed by the same media, have the same opinions on a broad range of issues, etc., suggesting that a large part of what is called "spirituality" is actually a discrete ideological tradition -- and one which, also in my experience, generates at least as much animosity in its adherents towards heretics and heathens, only those words aren't used.)

So the question is whether the divisions that occur as a result of both religion and spirituality will be drawn between groups of like-minded people, or between individuals. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. At least religionists don't pretend they're not being "divisive." (They get to be self-righteous for different reasons.) posted by Thomas at 11:56 AM

 
Judge John Roberts has come under fire from environmental groups because of his dissent in the Rancho Viejo v. Norton case, in which he questioned whether the Endangered Species Act, passed pursuant to Congress' power under Article I, section 8 of the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce, applies to "a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California." That is, we're not dealing with an interstate toad here.

Judge Roberts' reasoning is consistent with the Supreme Court's holdings in the Lopez and Morrison cases, in which the Court, for the first time since the 1940s, ruled that the Commerce Clause is not a license for the federal government to regulate any old thing. There has to be some connection between what is regulated and interestate commerce that passes the laugh test.

Typically, this argument -- essentially a procedural one interpreting the mechanics of the Constitution -- is being spun as supposedly showing that Roberts opposes environmental protection. As I wrote in my last post, this is consistent with the Left's confusion of judges with legislators. A constitutional law judge is supposed to apply the law, not make it. (Common law judges are a different story, but we're not dealing with the common law here.)

Saying that Judge Roberts is opposed to environmental protection because he doesn't conclude that the Constitution, as it's written, gives the federal government a particular regulatory power is like saying that if a judge thinks the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments forbids us to flay rapists alive and impale their heads on pikes, he's in favor of rape. posted by Thomas at 10:41 AM

 
An op-ed piece in yesterday's Boston Globe suggested that Catholic judges should be disqualified from hearing abortion-rights cases.

The author, one Christopher Morris, points out that during the last election, certain Catholic bishops suggested that the Eucharist ought to be withheld from John Kerry because of his political support for abortion. As I understand it, this is consistent with the Catholic Church's position that politicians may not support abortion rights, as this purportedly denies justice to the unborn.

Morris goes on to say that the bishops ought to be asked whether the same threat of denial of communion would apply to a federal judge who refused to overrule Roe v. Wade and its line of cases -- and then seems to assume that it would.

The problem with Morris's logic is that he misunderstands the essential difference that there is supposed to be between a legislator and a judge -- which isn't surprising, since an awful lot of political liberals don't seem to see much difference.

Without passing judgment on whether the Catholic Church is right to make a Catholic legislator's political position on abortion a criterion for judging his faithfulness, it seems unlikely that a legislator and a judge would be treated the same way. A legislator has discretion as to what laws he promotes. In constitutional law, the function of a judge, on the other hand, is to say what the law is. A judge is not empowered to hand down any decision he pleases: if the law says one thing, that's what the judge has to say. Given the Catholic Church's emphasis on free will, it's hard to see how the Church would deem a judge's application of a constitution that supposedly contained a right to abortion to be an act of willful wickedness.

Morris can be forgiven for assuming that a judge has the same discretion as a politician to allow or forbid abortion, since more and more of the social-liberal agenda is being advanced by judges acting as politicians, declaring the Constitution to contain mandates to allow this or that despite the manifest absence of any such constitutional content. The whole "privacy" line of cases beginning with the Griswold decision and running through Roe, Casey, and Lawrence are glaring examples of what happens when judges begin with the decision in mind and work backwards to come up with arguments (however facile) to support the preordained conclusion.

But that's not the way the Constitution is supposed to work, and with any luck and the appointment of a few more honest jurists, it will stop working that way. posted by Thomas at 11:48 AM

 
Lileks and I are thinking similarly about intelligent design. Which makes me feel warm and fuzzy; "great minds think alike" and all that. Difference is, his thoughts get read by gazillions of people, and mine just get preserved for posterity.

For all the historians mining my writings to track the progression of the Great Man's thoughts. Which will happen someday. Really. Or maybe not.

Anyway, via the Corner at NRO, I ran into this, from an upstate New York newspaper:

"Diary of a mad liberal trapped in Stupidland (reg. req'd.) By Beth Quinn

Day 1,654. I continue to be dumbfounded by how dumb he really is.

I don't know why I can't just accept it as some of the others here at the outpost have. We've known it for more than four years. Even so, my jaw drops whenever we get a harsh reminder.

Today he told a captive audience of journalists that teachers in what is left of our public school system should be teaching "intelligent design" as an equal alternative to the theory of evolution.

"Intelligent design" is his code word for creationism – the belief that God waved a magic wand one day and – poof! – there we were, fully evolved humans standing in the garden, partially clothed and hankering after apples.

The mere fact that he was made president should be proof enough that we aren't even yet fully evolved! We were headed in the right direction, but logic has now taken a U-turn down the neural pathways of the collective American brain into a cul de sac labeled The Dark Ages.

And now he wants creationism – a belief as anachronistic as the sun revolving around the earth – elevated to the status of scientific theory.

***

Actually, I thought this was all settled back in the 1920s. But here we are. Millions of people of both logic and faith have no problem with the idea that God and Darwin can coexist. They figure God created the raw materials for humans, then humans evolved so the species would survive. That's still a heck of a creation!

***

Yet now the leader of the free world – if not free thought – wants teachers to tell our children that creationism and evolution are equal but different scientific theories."

And much more, in a similar vein.

My response:

"Dear Ms. Quinn,

I have little use for the "intelligent design" argument, and I know you've got a "Bush Is Dumb" template to cram the facts into, but when you say "intelligent design" is just a "code word" for creationism -- that is, the full-bore literal Genesis-style magical poofing of the whole biological world into existence in one week a few thousand years ago -- you're just wrong. If I may posture as one of the citizens of Stupidland, 't'ain't that simple.

One of the problems with "intelligent design" is that it's too broad a term. (Sort of like "liberal" or "religious right," but that's another story.) "Intelligent design" can include old-school creationism -- but it can also encompass the more nuanced version of creation that you mentioned approvingly in your column.

It's not "Dark Ages thinking" to state, correctly, that given what is known the age of the earth, the amount of organic material on it, the rate of mutation of genes, and some other factors, the odds against basic cells appearing spontaneously are very long. Some of the logically possible conclusions to draw from this are (1) we're still missing some key facts, which may show spontaneous evolution of life to be more plausible; (2) we just got really, really, lucky, or (3) at some point, there was some fiddling with the parameters.

Would having a biology teacher include that last sentence in the unit on evolution (a theory which must absolutely be taught, the howls of the genuine snake-handlers notwithstanding; it's the prevailing scientific consensus on the origin of species, and the only theory by which biology makes any sense at all) be so stupidly horrible?

I suspect what gets people of traditional faith upset about evolution is that many of its leading lights, including Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, used evolution as a kind of vehicle for defending their own atheism -- and in so doing, went beyond the theory's capacity. As you correctly pointed out, faith and Darwinism aren't necessarily incompatible. But it's not just the traditional religionists who insist that they are. When a simple person of traditional faith is confronted with a highly educated scientist who says evolution proves there's no God, he or she may not understanding that evolution proves no such thing -- and faced with a perceived choice between contesting the reality of evolution and abandoning faith altogether, may accept battle along those lines without recognizing the falsity of the choice.

And it's not as if "intelligent design" would be the only instance of stupidity in schools. If I had a dime for every social studies teacher I had who subscribed to the labor theory of economic value (usually without being aware of it, or knowing David Ricardo from Ricky Ricardo) -- well, I could almost buy an ice cream cone." posted by Thomas at 12:46 PM

 
Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy has ruffled some feathers by describing American professional soldiers as "mercenaries" and comparing them to Hessians.

That was just wrong on so many levels that I had to respond, via e-mail:

"Dear Professor Kennedy:

I was frankly astonished to see a history professor at an elite university compare modern American soldiers, even imprecisely, to the "Hessian" mercenaries imported by George III to fight in the American Revolution. The comparison breaks down on too many levels to count.

Not only are modern American soldiers not "mercenaries" in the traditional sense of soldiers of fortune who fight for the highest bidder, but technically, neither were the Hessians. George III acquired German regiments not by hiring individual soldiers or companies (as Renaissance princes might have hired German landsknechts or Swiss pikemen), but rather by making arrangements with the rulers of the petty German states for their units to be put at British disposal. The hapless individual German soldiers themselves were generally conscripted, not hired in the manner of traditional mercenaries.

The founders' enthusiasm for militias and distrust of standing armies is well documented. It's also largely accepted that the enthusiasm for militias was remarkably naive and generally led to disaster after disaster as militias proved unable (with some notable exceptions like Bennington and Cowpens) to cope with professional soldiers. The quintessential example of the folly of relying on militia was the battle of Bladensburg, in which the militia defending Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 ran off at the first salvo of British rockets and let the capital be burned.

Incidentally, President Jefferson was so enamored of the "citizen military" concept, and so concerned (like you) that a standing military would tempt the country to adventurism that he essentially scrapped plans to expand the Navy -- the branch of the service perhaps least suited to the "citizen-soldier" concept because of the great expense of ships -- and poured resources into tiny coastal-defense gunboats, to be manned by wartime volunteers. The gunboats turned out to be virtually useless against the threats to American maritime interests that followed, including North African pirates (too far away for a coastal force to reach) and the British blockade in 1812 (who wants to take on a heavy frigate with a matchbox gunboat?)

That's where I think you make your greatest mistake: Fundamentally, the purpose of a military is to win wars. A generation of military leaders has concluded that a conscripted force is less effective than a professional one, especially in a modern battlefield environment in which extensive training and individual motivation are at a premium. Switching to a conscripted force, in the judgment of those who are in the best position to know, would make the military less effective. A less effective asset is one that is more costly to use. "More costly" in a military context means that more people get killed. When you're asking men to place their lives in harm's way, there is no excuse for allowing secondary considerations to detract from their effectiveness and increase the odds that they will be part of an increased cost.

I suspect that your perception that there is a separation between America and its warriors is a regional or perhaps an ideological thing. Vast numbers of Americans either serve, have served, have friends or relatives who do or have, or at one point seriously considered military service. (For the record, if Stanford's admissions officers had accepted my own application back in 1990 instead of collapsing in hysterical laughter, I had a naval ROTC scholarship lined up.) People with these links to the military may be a little rarer on elite university campuses, but America hardly has an insular warrior class to anywhere near the extent of your argument." posted by Thomas at 3:42 PM

 
On NRO Financial, John Tamny explains why he doesn't think the American current-account deficit is a problem.

My response, e-mailed to him:

"Dear Mr. Tamny,

Interesting article in today's National Review Online. I think you may be overlooking one of the negative consequences of large American trade deficits -- the effect on the American housing market.

You wrote, correctly, that "all trade logically must balance," and noted that dollars flowing out of the country to buy cheap Chinese goods generally come back in the form of investment, driven by "foreigners' insatiable appetite for U.S. equities and land, along with our public and private debt."

Foreign investment in American equities is generally a good thing: It supplies American companies with money to use for capital investment, ideally making American business more productive. But foreign investment in American land -- directly, through purchases, and indirectly, through purchases of mortgage-backed securities -- is different. That's because a house, unlike a security, has characteristics both of an asset and of a consumer good. And houses are generally not fungible; people are often reluctant or unable to relocate, and have to pay what the market demands. For various reasons, renting a house is not a perfect substitute for ownership.

Those Americans who desire to own homes primarily as consumer goods -- i.e. to live in them -- are being forced to compete with investors armed with funds either directly brought from overseas, or raised thanks to extraordinarily cheap credit that foreign dollar holdings have enabled. The result is that in many markets, the costs of homeownership dramatically exceed the cost of renting equivalent housing, home affordability is near record lows, and unusually large numbers of purchasers are only able to buy using exotic mortgage interests that are only viable as long as housing prices continue to appreciate dramatically.

In other words, foreign money has tended to squeeze out the marginal home consumer-buyer by increasing the degree to which housing is an investment vehicle rather than a consumer good. In southern California, it is virtually impossible for even a relatively well-off household (like mine) to afford a home even in a marginal area without resorting to a death-or-glory negative-amortization option ARM -- because people using those risky vehicles are bidding up prices on the same houses conservative purchasers are in the market for. These risky loans are often bundled into mortgage-backed securities and sold off to those dollar-flush foreign investors you discussed, minimizing the risks to the loan originators but not to the borrowers themselves.

In short, foreign dollar holdings are forcing American homebuyers to expose themselves to significantly greater risk than buying a home used to entail -- because the housing market has been transformed largely into an investment market, with correspondingly increased risk. It's made the American Dream into the American Gamble.

On the one hand, cheap foreign manufacturing provides me with the opportunity to buy my daughter a Barbie for a few bucks less than it would have cost to make her in America. The flip side of cheap foreign manufacturing is a trade imbalance that returns dollars to America in the form of investment, which lately has flowed less into productive sectors of the economy and more into inflating the cost of an essential consumer good/asset hybrid.

Two bucks off the price of a Barbie in exchange for tripling the cost of an ordinary suburban house in seven years. Not what I'd call a fair trade." posted by Thomas at 12:13 PM

 
From an interview of a British sociologist and theologian in The Spectator, some similar thoughts to those I expressed in my last two posts:

"Forget your mental image of a sociology professor. David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the LSE, is a softly spoken conservative Anglican. His critique of the concept of secularisation, begun in the 1960s, brought a new rigour to the study of religion in Britain, and established a flourishing conversation between sociology and theology.
Inevitably, we begin with the issue of the hour: Islam and violence. Professor Martin does not settle for the easy mantra that all religions are naturally peaceful. Instead, choosing his words very carefully, and pausing to ask whether his comments are printable, he tells me what he thinks.

‘I wish that I could sound more positive, but the bombings don’t come as any surprise to me. There is a deeply rooted ideology of violence in Islam — a military psychology. Of course most Muslims don’t want to go around bombing people, but those few who do turn to violence are able to find a certain amount of justification in the Koran. I suppose that might not be the most helpful thing to say, but it seems undeniable.’

Is it not a religion of peace? ‘Well, it seeks peace, but on its own terms. As Rowan Williams has said, it’s a fine religion, but it places a high premium on victory. And I think that’s right, and I fear that many young men will see violence as the means to that victory. There’s a large enough mood of militancy in Islam for it to be a real problem. And that’s not just a recent thing caused by resentment over Iraq and Afghanistan: it’s been emerging over several decades throughout the Middle East and Pakistan.’

Does Islam find it harder than other religions to reform, to incorporate secular liberal values? ‘The problem is that it came into contact with the modern world very fast, so it reacts with horror at the sheer range of options in secularism. That seems like confusion and chaos when your tradition is based on a single right way of behaving and strong warnings against the infidel. The Koran is a very “us and them” book. It’s hard to see how a Muslim school dominated by the Koran can encourage assimilation, and can promote the idea of equality between the sexes, for example." posted by Thomas at 12:36 PM

 
Hugh Hewitt, on his blog, wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion."

My response, expanding on my previous post below:

Dear Hugh,

On today's blog, you wrote, "The idea that all of Islam is the problem is a fringe opinion." I deeply respect your judgment, but I think you may be going a bit too far -- or possibly I'm misreading your meaning.

In one sense, you're right: Ultimately, the responsibility for jihadist outrages lies firmly with the heretical death-cultists who perpetrate them, not with the rest of the world's Muslims, who reject their ideology and tactics with varying degrees of unequivocation.

But I don't think you can avoid considering whether Islam is just horribly unlucky, to have had such an awful run of bad apples bob to its surface, or whether there is something to Islam, as an ideology, that will tend to produce a disproportionate share of violent fanatics.

I don't see how any one could argue that basic cultural assumptions can have no effect on the frequency with which certain characteristics occur within a population. Consider Max Weber's "Protestant work ethic" thesis, or the argument in Michael Novak's book "On Two Wings" that the cultural assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition inclined Americans to embrace liberty. Since all religions, like all ideologies, have a human element, all religions have flaws along with the good in them. The leaders of my own Mormon Church like to say the Church "makes bad men good and good men better." I like to add "and proud men insufferable, and unstable men absolutely nuts." On the one hand, we produce a disproportionate number of strong families; on the other hand, we can be insular and lacking somewhat in individual initiative and in cutting-edge creativity. It's all part of the package, and each religion's package contains a different mix.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our hearts. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with GoogleMaps directions printed on the inside. The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it can't produce just as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

Islam's particular ideological package seems, along with the good Islam accomplishes, to be producing a disproportionate number of international terrorists, and making it difficult for any large portion of the Islamic world fully to reconcile itself to pluralism and modernity. The point of observing this is not to denigrate Islam -- it is to acknowledge that Muslims, if they are to make their religion as noble as it has the potential to be, need to work harder than others to overcome their religion's apparently built-in susceptibility to misinterpreted by disproportionate numbers of those marginal minds, who can be found in any religion and will always be with us.

When you're second best, as the old rental car ad goes, you try harder. When you recognize you have a handicap, you work to overcome it. To pretend that Islam, as an ideology, has nothing at all to do with violent fanaticism is fantasy, and will only serve to discourage Muslims from undertaking the proper measures to put their house of faith in order." posted by Thomas at 4:30 PM

 
So Congressman Tom Tancredo thinks that one possible response to a jihadist nuclear attack on the United States could be to bomb Mecca.

Islam Isn't Going Anywhere.

As if it needs saying, I think that's a really, really bad idea -- even though I suspect it would make a lot of people horrified by televised images of the radioactive ruins of, say, Boston feel better for a few hours. Even if one took the position that this really is a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations between Islam proper and the West, I can't think of any major religion that ever went away simply because its holiest city was destroyed. Judaism didn't end with the destruction(s) of the Temple, after all.

I'm sure plenty of two-bit cults have been annihilated and forgotten over the centuries -- but it's a lot easier to do that kind of thing when the adherents of a religion are all behind the walls of one city, which you can lay waste and be done with it, Assyrian-style. Islam is never going to be beaten out of existence, even if anyone wanted to do it -- not with close to a billion people scattered around the whole world.

Islam, As Presently Constituted, Has A Problem.

Most Muslims are not international terrorists. But most international terrorists appear to be Muslims. It's not "Muslim-bashing" to question why this is.

A person with a truly decent character and enlightened mind can immerse himself in virtually any religion and find in it the foundation for a sublime spiritual life. The problem is that there is not an unlimited supply of decent, enlightened souls on the earth. With a very few truly saintly exceptions, most of us have at least one or two smudges of human viciousness -- which we are loath to acknowledge -- in some dark corner of our characters. And vast numbers of us couldn't reflect our way out of a paper bag with Google Maps directions printed on the inside.

The problem with Islam is not that, applied by the best that apply it, it cannot produce as much enlightenment as other religions. The problem is that it's insufficiently idiot-proof.

The Old Testament of the Bible contains plenty of accounts of God's chosen people waging whatever the Hebrew word is for "jihad" -- but those are historical accounts, not hortatory passages. The Koran, on the other hand, does have more than a few passages, aimed directly at readers, directing them to make war on the unbelievers. There is a strong sense that what ultimately matters is membership in the ummah, or Islamic world -- an attribute, incidentally, which Islam shares with not a few Protestant Christian sects that believe that Christian identity is all important, surpassing even the living of a Christian life. (I refer to the variation on the widespread Protestant doctrine of solafidianism -- salvation by faith alone -- which holds that once a believer adopts Christianity by an oral confession, his salvation is assured regardless of what he does later.)

It takes a particularly enlightened mind -- or an enlightening philosophical environment -- to reconcile a religious teaching that God is concerned mostly with whether a person identifies with a particular group with the reality of pluralism. Protestant Christianity in America has succeeded in making this reconciliation without too much of a mess (the odd abortion clinic bomber aside), I submit, because of two things.

First, Christian doctrine was largely formulated by the apostle Paul, who was highly educated and immersed in Hellenistic philosophy and culture, with the result that the civilization that developed in Christendom became a kind of hybrid between Athens and Jerusalem, as Leo Strauss put it. The "Believe as we do or be damned" aspect of Christianity -- which undoubtedly is there (see Mark 16:16; Acts 4:12) -- is thus balanced at least somewhat by a tradition of reason and universality.

Second, the American civilization in which what is probably the most significant concentration of Protestant Christianity is found has from the beginning been a pioneer of respecting different traditions, largely because since its earliest settlers were themselves religiously diverse, there was no alternative.

Islamic culture thus may face an uphill battle if it is to avoid producing a disproportionate amount of religious aggression. posted by Thomas at 12:52 PM

 

Predictably, even before the bodies of the latest victims of jihad have been recovered, the usual suspects make the usual noises: It's all our fault -- the bombers are motivated by justifiable anger over American or British foreign policy, and who are we to be outraged over the murder of civilians when civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the West Bank?

Leaving aside what ought to be the elementary distinction between intentionally killing civilians and doing so accidentally -- just as there is a distinction between a fatal car crash and a murder -- what assurances can the appeasers give us that their prescription (give terrorists what they want) would stop their attacks?

They (meaning that certain inverse-jingo Left constituency whose motto seems to be "the opponent of my country, right or wrong") point to the fact that terrorists aren't bombing Sweden -- a more or less free country -- and declare this evidence that it's not "freedom" that the terrorists hate, as is sometimes said, but particular policies of particular countries.

Unfortunately, there's no way of testing this hypothesis without actually putting it into practice, which carries risks of its own, more about which later. Let's say, though, that we take George Galloway's advice and pull out of Iraq. And Afghanistan, too, since the London bombers mentioned that campaign as well. To make sure the bases are covered, sell Israel down the river, too, cutting off all aid and cooperation.

Would that really work? Would jihadists really say, "Thanks, America; you've satisfied our grievances. Go back to your pleasant infidel lives; you'll hear nothing further from us"?

Maybe. It seems to have worked for Spain: After the Spanish cut and run from Iraq, nobody's blown up any more trains there.

Even if it's true that Spain's capitulation bought peace in its time, though, I wonder whether that approach would work for the United States. No offense to middle-sized European states, but they're a dime a dozen. Your local jihadist can cross Spain or Sweden off his target list without putting himself out of business; there's always Britain, or Denmark, or Italy, or Australia -- not to mention the Great Satan itself.

And why should we expect a jihadist to want to put himself out of business? Even more or less sober Western activist groups don't shut down when they get what they want; they find new raisons d'etre and keep operating -- and fundraising. Look at the ACLU, for example; by all rights, they should have declared victory over real threats to civil liberties thirty years ago and disbanded along with the March of Dimes (which, having beaten polio, should also have closed up shop). There is too much capital and meaning invested in these causes for them to go away. Instead, they focus on smaller and smaller details, while investing them with the same breathless significance.

It is reasonable to expect that jihadists are similarly constituted. As Christopher Hitchens eloquently wrote, the jihadists' list of grievances is rather longer than their Western apologists would have it. That list goes well beyond the usual Iraq-Afghanistan-Palestine trinity to, for example,

"[t]he grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way."

In other words, these are people who have plenty of grievances with which to justify their manifest love for murder. 9/11 happened before there ever were American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And that brings us to the next point: I believe that even if every country in the world could buy off terrorists by refusing to stand against them, the United States would be the one exception. The jihadists need at least one enemy, and we're the enemy of last resort.

They need an enemy because they're not men enough to deal with one of the hardest things in the world to deal with: cognitive dissonance involving their most deeply-held assumptions and beliefs.

Islam, for those who take it seriously, is an all-encompassing worldview. As I understand it, based on my limited study, Islam posits a far greater degree of divine involvement in the world than many other religions, and certainly the modern deist-influenced Western outlook. Islam takes the idea "God is in control" virtually to the molecular level, with virtually everything that happens being not only preordained, but actively caused by acts of divine will.

It also teaches that righteousness, as set forth in the Koran, is rewarded. And there's the rub. Most any Muslim with eyes to see will notice that Islamic civilization, by and large, doesn't seem to have been particularly favored in comparison to the West since about the 1300s. (Or 1500s, if you count the Ottoman pinnacle.) The ummah is technologically backwards (importing the implements of modern civilization from their infidel inventors), militarily impotent, and widely impoverished, with the exceptions more or less limited to elites who grow rich and corrupt selling uncreated natural resources to the civilized world.

How can these things be? How can the infidels prosper and the righteous languish? Recall that, unlike its monotheistic Christian and Jewish cousins, Islam doesn't have the example of a Babylonian captivity or a crucified Savior to remind that "whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12:6). It seems to me that there isn't an easy reconciliation between what Islam promises, and what has been the lot of Islamic civilization for the past five hundred years or so.

Except one: The Islamic world would be prospering, but for the opposition of an Enemy.

I have at times struggled with cognitive dissonance with respect to certain aspects of my own Mormon faith, which frankly isn't the easiest thing to swallow whole, as even its founder Joseph Smith acknowledged. (He said if his revelations hadn't happened to him, he probably wouldn't have believed them himself.) I have the advantage of an education rooted in the Enlightenment, and parents who raised me to think for myself and be true to the conclusions I reached. What of the Muslim extremist who has none of these advantages? Faced, on the one hand, with the prospect of being forced to question that perhaps there's something in the faith of his fathers that's retarding the civilizations saddled with it -- or on the other, blaming his civilization's dysfunction on a powerful enemy, which option will he choose?

For too many, that's an easy choice: It's all the Enemy's fault.

That's why appeasement won't work to pacify the jihadists any more than it has worked against other aggressors in the past. If not Iraq, then Afghanistan. If not Afghanistan, then Palestine. If not Palestine, well then America will be blamed for Muslim states not going completely theocratic to the jihadists' satisfaction. Or for refusing to give sharia courts jurisdiction over expatriate Muslims, as radical Muslim activists are seriously pressuring some European countries to do. Or for allowing Islam to be criticized in public. It will always be something.

Or maybe I am not generous enough to the throat-cutting jihadists. Maybe they are more reasonable than I give them credit for, and taking the Left's advice to pay the Dane-geld really would get rid of the Dane, so to speak.

I don't think so, but more to the point, the Left can't truly say so with any certainty. Recall that these are often the same people who advocate the "precautionary principle," requiring that no action be taken until it can be proven perfectly safe. Who insist that the world sacrifice literally trillions of dollars to fight the yet unknown effects of global warming. Yet they are willing to risk the usual result of appeasing an aggressor -- that the aggressor takes what is offered and, emboldened, asks for more and more -- without any more certainty than their blinkered ideology supplies.

I don't know how to win this war. I fear it will be long, and may never end entirely. While I don't believe that Islam, per se, necessarily results in murderous jihad, I suspect there may be something in its martial origins that will never cause a disproportionate number of Muslims to read it in the way today's jihadists do. Any religion, properly approached by a person of humane character and an enlightened mind, can become a beautiful force for good. I just think it takes a more enlightened mind to reach that point from Islam than with other faith traditions.

And since Islam isn't going away, the only way its violent manifestations will be kept to such a minimum that the war can be declared over will be for Muslims overwhelmingly not only to repudiate, but to crush the (arguably) heretical jihadists with the kind of ruthlessness that the jihadists' own hardness requires. As in, if an imam stands in the mosque to incite the murder of us infidel "apes and pigs," the congregation needs to rush the pulpit and tear him apart. There would be two possible motivations for the congregation to do that: either genuine disgust and rejection of the message, or fear that the message will result in a JDAM landing on the mosque roof next Friday. I hope the former will happen before the latter becomes necessary, but I have no confidence it will happen before the jihadists get lucky again -- possibly even luckier than 9/11.

All I know is that losing isn't an option. The jihadists' long list of grievances is inexhaustible.

posted by Thomas at 12:41 PM

 
Liberal columnist Bonnie Erbe compares the United States to Iran. Unfavorably.

Key quote:

"After all, wouldn't it be a relief to join a society [Iran] in which religious tyranny is gossamer compared with the version we now face in the good old U.S. of A?"

That's right: Allowing an invocation at a high school graduation, or wanting to preserve the right of self-government against judges who invent Constitutional principles out of whole cloth, is worse than beheading "apostates" and "fornicators" in the town square.

Sheer gibbering lunacy, of which we may expect much more as the Democratic Party, increasingly dominated by a hard Left that actually believes this stuff, gears up to slander any jurist President Bush may nominate to the Supreme Court whose views on constitutional law fall rightward of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's. posted by Thomas at 2:25 PM

 
An open letter in response to a column saying President Bush "co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent":

"You may not have chosen the title of your column "Bush co-opts symbols of patriotism to silence dissent" -- I've had my own unpleasant experiences with poorly-phrased captions that distort the meaning of my writing -- but I must say if President Bush is trying to "silence dissent," he's doing an awfully poor job of it. "Dissent" is shriller now than ever, and, I would add, more heedless of its effect on this country's welfare.

Do you honestly think the Left's hair-trigger criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq campaign are totally free from political motivation? Can you honestly envision Republicans being taken seriously if, in 1943, they'd been anywhere near as vituperative against the Roosevelt administration as Democrats are being now? There were plenty of opportunities. The Sherman tank was a lightly-armored deathtrap; thousands and thousands of young men died due to poor planning, strategic errors, and ghastly mistakes; civilians died by the truckload under Allied bombing; and prisoners often got far worse treatment than having their religious books dropped on the floor or being led around naked on a leash by hillbillies. The difference was that the political opposition recognized that defeat would be disastrous, and for the most part managed to subordinate their partisanship to the national interest. We are clearly not the same country today.

Calling it "shameless" to speak of 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath betrays a remarkable lack of thoughtfulness. The President did not say Iraq was involved in 9/11, but rather than 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, awakened us to the realization that we had underestimated the ability of our enemies to harm us. You seem to think our response should have been to go after the particular enemies that succeeded on 9/11, and continued to ignore the others -- including hostile regimes that gave every indication of pursuing weapons that could inflict even worse damage than we'd suffered. That is a suicidally shortsighted approach.

Do you honestly believe that an American defeat in Iraq would not have horrific consequences on American security? Just as the American surrender in Vietnam emboldened Communist ideologues around the world (sorry to sound like an old-school red-baiter, but facts are facts), strengthening the global influence of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and heating up the Cold War to dangerous levels of tension, shouldn't you at least consider that an American defeat in Iraq will enhance the prestige and influence of the jihadist faction within Islam that really, truly wants our civilization destroyed?

You may try to distinguish your dismissal of the mission American troops are engaged in from lack of support for the troops, but objectively, you are not on their side. American soldiers, by and large, are convinced that they are engaged in a worthy cause. You are free to disagree with them -- your enlightened, educated outlook, after all, may give you more wisdom than their practical experience -- but please don't pretend you're not doing so. Objectively speaking, you are working for their cause to fail. Great powers aren't defeated by guerillas; they lose when they get tired and go home. You are trying to make that happen.

You spoke of the President "conflating" war and patriotism -- and then you turned around and gave us a nice, misleading example of "conflating" of your own. The poll you cited, showing that 58% Americans disapprove of the administration's handling of the Iraq campaign, does not, as you suggest, prove that a majority of Americans believe we were "misled" into war. Those two sentiments are distinct. I, myself, disapprove -- in retrospect -- of many of the Administration's decisions regarding the Iraq campaign. I have reservations -- now -- as to whether the campaign might have been a strategic error in the larger war on jihadist terror, in the same sense as the Italian campaign of 1944-1945 might have been unnecessary to win World War II. But that most emphatically does not mean I sign onto the Michael Moore/MoveOn.org chorus of "Bush lied, people died." It's simply not true, and only a Chomsky-addled simpleton with a mind welded tighter than an Acura chassis could think otherwise in light of the plain historical record.

You see, this is why litigators are often so dismissive of journalists' argumentation skills. If we tried to pull a slick little switch like you just tried, opposing counsel would be all over us like white on rice, followed shortly by the judge bellowing at us for trying to mislead the court. posted by Thomas at 12:47 PM

 
Interesting thoughts on the modern Left being in a state of arrested adolescence.

I've had that idea more than once. posted by Thomas at 1:53 PM

 
Jonah Goldberg likes his constitutions dead, not "living."

I agree with his argument. But I wouldn't phrase it that way, because it cedes to liberals the proper meaning of the concept of a "living Constitution." The liberal use of that phrase was nicely articulated by Al Gore: "I would look for justices of the Supreme Court who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document, that it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people."

In other words, the Constitution means whatever a majority of judges thinks it ought to mean.

Contrast that with Antonin Scalia: “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle. That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that — thumbs up or thumbs down — as their personal preferences dictate.”

I hold, along with the authors of the Declaration of Independence (and their intellectual predecessors going back to John Locke, etc.) that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Accordingly, in order to have legitimacy, any action by government official -- whether by a president, legislator, bureaucrat, or judge -- must be based on an expression of the people's consent to be governed in that manner.

The federal courts derive their power to issue decisions from their authority to decide questions arising under the Constitution and its amendments. The Constitution and its amendments, in turn, derive their legitimacy from the fact that at various points in history, the representatives of the people consented to be governed by them.

It follows that, in order to maintain their legitimacy, the federal courts must interpret the Constitution consistent with the original meaning of its text. That is what its framers consented to -- nothing more or less. When a federal judge takes a Constitutional text and declares that while the original meaning may have been X, the modern American consensus is that it ought to mean Y -- and rules as if the text actually did say Y -- he's taking an action that has no foundation in any expression of popular consent, and it lacks democratic legitimacy.

If the consensus of the American people, informed by their "constantly evolving experience" does indeed hold that the Constitution ought to say Y instead of X, the Constitution provides a mechanism for the people to enact that consensus into law. That is how the Constitution is a "living" document, and it seems to me that it is no less "living" in this sense than it would be if judges were able to manipulate it according to the conventional wisdom of the law schools. Ordinary people are "living" just as much as lawyers; some might even say more so. ("You call this living?!" I thought to myself the other night at 12:30 a.m., trying to finish a project.)

The Constitution lives by being carried forward by common consent from generation to generation, being amended -- again, by popular consent -- as needed to update it as the principles of the American people evolve. Ultimately, the heart and soul of the Constitution is the principle of consensual government it was designed to implement. Ironically, the judicial imperialism liberals are talking about when they speak of a "living Constitution" kills that very soul , by breaking the link between the application of Constitutional principles to present facts and the democratic expressions of consent that gave those principles their legitimacy. posted by Thomas at 11:15 AM

 
Someone has proposed seizing Justice Souter's New Hampshire house to make way for a "Lost Liberty Hotel." Complete with the "Just Desserts" cafe. [Via Drudge.]

Classic. More thoughts on the Kelo decision later, I hope. posted by Thomas at 12:11 PM

 
Again, I'm behind the curve.

I sent this to Senator Harry Reid the other day, on the subject of his weeping and wailing and gnashing his teeth over the fact that Karl Rove remarked, while discussing the moveon.org/Michael Moore-style Left, that a certain species of liberal was less disposed to an aggressive response to terrorism:

"I understand you are upset at remarks by Karl Rove suggesting that "liberals",after the attacks of September 11, 2001, tended to favor less aggressivemeasures in response than conservatives.

As a broad generalization, I don't see how anyone could argue with that. I remember the liberal partners and staff of my former law firm being very much opposed to a military response to those attacks. On the other hand, not a single conservative of my acquaintance wanted anything other than the full Sherman-through-Georgia treatment not only for the terrorists proper, but for anyone who gave them an ounce of aid and comfort. Obviously, not all liberals, and certainly not all Democrats -- not all of whom are liberals, even now -- were of the Phil Donohue "let's reach out" mindset. If you weren't -- don't worry. Karl wasn't talking about you.

I do find it a little hard to take that you should demand Rove's resignation sosoon after you tried to spin the furor over Senator Durbin's outrageouscomparison of military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, the Communistgulag, and Pol Pot as some kind of right-wing conspiracy. I find it disturbing that the Democrats' leader in the Senate can't see his way clear to give Mr.Durbin the Trent Lotting he deserves, even after his weaseling apology. (If Itried his apologizing style on my wife -- "Words can be misused ... IF you took offense" -- I'd be sleeping on the couch for a week.)

Propagandizing for the enemy is, apparently, something to ignore -- but making acommonplace general observation about genuine differences between the degrees to which liberals and conservatives favor the use of military force is grounds for firing someone. I expect partisan leaders to be partisan; that's your job. Itjust bores me when they're quite as obvious about it as you have been, and when their selective outrage is as forced as yours. Get rid of Dick Durbin, Howard Dean -- and for that matter, yourself, for calling President Bush a liar without backing it up as a gentleman would -- and then perhaps we'll talk about raising the tone of civility in Washington. I'll be donating to your opponent in the next election." posted by Thomas at 10:21 AM

 
Housing bubble spreads like a virus

Since house prices in my immediate neighborhood have in some cases increased fourfold in 8 years (from $175,000 to $675,000), I have no problem at all announcing the existence of a real estate bubble. The fundamentals of the economy have not altered so drastically in less than a decade to justify a quadrupling of the price of an existing asset category. All booms bust, and all deviations revert to the mean. Eventually, that is. And "eventually" can unfortunately be a long time.

One effect of house-price inflation is that people who suddenly find themselves with tons of equity in their property from runups in large metro areas are fanning out into previously un-bubble-touched markets looking for "investment" opportunities, marveling at low house prices in say, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, or Visalia (low, that is, compared to Los Angeles, San Diego, or the Bay Area) and bid up prices in those places far beyond what the local economies enable actual residents to pay.

This bubble, spreading from big rich cities into the hardscrabble hinterlands, is causing people real pain by turning a basic consumption commodity into an investment vehicle.
I am an economic conservative, but what I see just screams for government intervention. Government helped create this problem, by facilitating cheap credit. Money creation is a tool that government should have in its box to mitigate panics and recessions, but as has been pointed out on this blog, the Federal Reserve's classic methods of injecting liquidity don't target it well. Instead of being used for productivity-increasing capital formation, the increased liquidity is being used to inflate the housing market, allowing people who had the resources to get in on the game in the beginning to speculate and get rich, while people who just want to purchase a house for its traditional shelter use are forced to pay increased prices and undertake levels of risk inappropriate for their preferences.

The government ought to recognize that housing speculation is bad for the economy and bad for people in general, and take steps to prevent all the liquidity it must occasionally create in response to economic crises from slopping into unhelpful speculative uses. One possible response might be to end any kind of preferential tax treatment for owning more than one home; another might be to tax capital gains from the sale of existing residential property (other than a primary residence) as ordinary income. The whole point of preferential tax treatment of capital gains is to encourage investment, after all, but I can't for the life of me see why the government would want to encourage "investment" in house flipping.
These measures would not constitute activist government -- they would actually reduce government manipulation of the economy, by removing subsidies of harmful economic activity. posted by Thomas at 10:49 AM

 
Supreme Court "medical marijuana" decision about politics, not pot.

Not only do I blog way too sporadically, I'm way behind the news curve. But I have been meaning to comment on the Supreme Court's decision in Gonzales v. Raich, upholding the federal government's power to regulate the intrastate use of "medical marijuana" pursuant to the Constitution's commerce clause.

People tend to perceive Supreme Court decisions politically, judging them in light of the result they produce. (They may be excused in this, because since at least the 1960s, the Court's jurisprudence has in fact become more results-directed, seeming at times to begin with the policy result in mind and twisting and turning to draw some connection between the Constitution and the result, as in the infamous "penumbras and emanations" invented to discover a "right to privacy" that does not actually appear in the Constitution's text.) So naturally, Gonzales v. Raich is being interpreted by the general public as an expression of the Court's hostility to marijuana generally.

Ultimately, though, Gonzales v. Raich was not a decision about marijuana. Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Thomas -- three of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court -- dissented from the Raich majority because, as Justice Thomas eloquently put it, if a California resident growing medical marijuana for her own use in her backyard is considered subject to regulation as "interstate commerce," everything is, and the Constitution's federalist system of separation of powers between state and federal government goes up in smoke. [No pun intended.]

The liberal bloc on the Court, on the other hand, is determined to nip in the bud [OK, fine -- pun intended] any idea that federal government's Constitutional power to "regulate interstate commerce" doesn't mean it can regulate anything it wants. The principle of federalism, to them, has uneasy associations with "state's rights," which they in turn associate with John C. Calhoun, Jim Crow, and worse. After all (goes their thinking), Texas and Utah are states, and if we don't keep them on a short leash, heaven only knows what unenlightened redstatery they'll try to pull.

To preserve the federal government's dominance of the states in every sphere, and to keep the Constitution's pesky federalist principles hidden under the rug, liberal jurists have no problem at all throwing a few sick people under the train. Power trumps compassion every time.

That said, I've always been suspicious of the argument for "medical marijuana." The evidence that smoking marijuana as a palliative for pain, glaucoma, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and so forth is more effective than other, legal drugs appears to be anecdotal at best. I often suspect the push to legalize "medical marijuana" is more of a disguised effort to destigmatize marijuana generally, dressing the cause up with a few sympathetic sick people. If that is the case, I'm not impressed. It strikes me as similar to potheads extolling the manifold industrial uses of hemp. Uh-huh -- right. It's all about ropemaking. Deceptive argumentation bores me. posted by Thomas at 10:05 AM

 
So George Lucas thinks George Bush is Darth Vader.

The problem with American ignorance of history is that smug, self-satisfied gazillionaire filmmakers can think themselves ever so clever for making comparisons that wouldn't stand five seconds in the face of real historical analysis.

If the almost comically mild measures the Bush administration has taken to step up counterterrorism defenses in this country after the worst terrorist attack in history make George Bush a Sith Lord, then Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would each have been contenders for the title of Evil Emperor. Interning or relocating a whole ethnic group or suspending habeas corpus (Roosevelt and Lincoln's wartime curtailments of civil liberties, respectively) makes allowing delayed-notice records-search warrants seem like chump change, I'd think.

If Lucas really wanted to reflect present political realities in his last Star Wars film, maybe he should have had the movie go like this:

The Jedi council (a hierarchical, self-selecting elite) come to convince themselves that the Republic is becoming a dictatorship. They base this conclusion -- irrationally, because they, as a closed group, close their minds to dissenting opinions -- on the fact that a popularly elected government's enacting wartime measures for which the Republic's history provides ample precedent, and which the independent judiciary does not find inconsistent with the Republic's constitution. They become so convinced of their conclusion, and so desperate that the unwashed masses don't see things the way they do, that they decide that extreme measures must be taken to save the ignorant citizens of the Republic from their blindness. Ultimately, they fatally weaken the Republic's legitimacy and institutions, leading to the installation of a dictator from one extreme or the other.

Weimar Germany, in other words, with the liberal intelligentsia hyperventilating so much over the relative (to them) conservative government that it was too weakened to resist being swallowed by a nasty bunch who really were all those things the center-left accused the center-right of being. posted by Thomas at 4:24 PM

 
Apparently, Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in his continuing scorched-earth campaign against a number of President Bush's judicial nominees, has made a weasely reference to the contents of one of the nominees' confidential FBI files.

There are serious consequences for disclosing the contents of those confidential files (including being booted from the Senate), so Reid didn't actually say what was in the nominee's file -- only that there was a "problem" with it.

That's incredibly chickens**. The insinuation can't be refuted, or defended against, or put in context without knowing what's in the file. Senator Reid is essentially asking us to take his word for it that whatever is in the nominee's file is sufficiently bad as to disqualify the nominee. He's not the most credible judge of this, obviously, being on a crusade as he is to sink those nominees that won't advance a liberal agenda in the courts.

One thing that annoyed me in the article linked to was the statement by a former Republican staffer that "Harry Reid is a disgrace to the Senate and to [his] Church of Latter-day Saints." That last bit is totally irrelevant (and misstates the name of the Church). Sure, Harry Reid is a jerk. And, as it happens, this particular variety of his jerkery has a bit of a Mormon touch to it in his using confidentiality considerations to prevent an accused from defending himself. But for Pete's sake, who accuses Ted Kennedy of being a bad Catholic, or Olympia Snowe of being a bad whatever-the-heck-she-is? Mormons seem to get held, not necessarily to a higher standard, but certainly to a standard that takes their faith into consideration. Ideally, Mormon politicians wouldn't have so much attention paid to their religion. posted by Thomas at 11:07 AM

 
Saints preserve us; the theocrats are coming, according to more and more mainstream liberal voices.

The most legitimate criticism of Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign (aside from its cynicism) was that he had a nasty habit of tarring garden-variety liberals and hard-core Stalinist subversives with the same brush. (Of course, in some of the more cloistered left-of-center quarters, there is a certain denial that there were any hard-core Stalinist subversives at work within the American left in the forties and fifties, which doesn't stand rigorous factual scrutiny.)

The present "Dominionist" red scare is of a piece with McCarthyism on its worst day. The tactic is transparent: (1) Dig up a genuine religious radical from under a rock, whence he's been advocating the death penalty for adulterers; (2) find an issue on which he and a mainstream religious conservative share an opinion, such as preserving the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form; and (3) offer this as evidence that the two people share the same ultimate goals.

One notices a small breakdown in logic between steps (2) and (3). Let's play that game again: Karl Marx advocated progressive taxation and free public education; Democrats also support progressive taxation and free public education; ergo, Democrats are Marxists. (I actually did run across a letter to the BYU newspaper opinion page where a student made that argument. He was an idiot, too.) posted by Thomas at 1:08 PM

 
Saints preserve us; the theocrats are coming, according to more and more mainstream liberal voices.

The most legitimate criticism of Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign (aside from its cynicism) was that he had a nasty habit of tarring garden-variety liberals and hard-core Stalinist subversives with the same brush. (Of course, in some of the more cloistered left-of-center quarters, there is a certain denial that there were any hard-core Stalinist subversives at work within the American left in the forties and fifties, which doesn't stand rigorous factual scrutiny.)

The present "Dominionist" red scare is of a piece with McCarthyism on its worst day. The tactic is transparent: (1) Dig up a genuine religious radical from under a rock, whence he's been advocating the death penalty for adulterers; (2) find an issue on which he and a mainstream religious conservative share an opinion, such as preserving the Pledge of Allegiance in its present form; and (3) offer this as evidence that the two people share the same ultimate goals.

One notices a small breakdown in logic between steps (2) and (3). Let's play that game again: Karl Marx advocated progressive taxation and free public education; Democrats also support progressive taxation and free public education; ergo, Democrats are Marxists. (I actually did run across a letter to the BYU newspaper opinion page where a student made that argument. He was an idiot, too.) posted by Thomas at 1:08 PM

 
As Terri Schiavo dies, I keep coming back to the phrase "death with dignity," which figured large in my law school con-law and biothics classes.

I've always been uneasy with the whole phrase "dying with dignity." By my calculation, there have been approximately six truly dignified deaths in the past two thousand years, and I may be overcounting. There's nothing particularly dignified about death, no matter how you try to pretty it up. Really, the things that we say make a "dignified" death are truly rather the last few moments of dignified life. You say a few noble last words, exhale, and then what's left of you starts to go bad immediately. In the modern world, you're likely to be immobilized and helpless flat on your back in a hospital or hospice bed, dependent for your comfort on the kindness of others. The addition or subtraction of a few more or less IVs and tubes hardly makes any difference to the indignity of it all. Even a heroic death on a battlefield is hardly better -- messy stuff tends to splatter everywhere and more likely than not you wind up facedown in mud. As an ocean lifeguard, I performed CPR on a man who had a sudden cardiac arrest on the beach. He was a man who for all I know had lived a wonderful life, but there he was clammy and crusted with sand and frothing with sputum as he died in front of a gawking crowd, with cursing lifeguards and paramedics slamming down on his chest. Nothing dignified about that at all, let me tell you.

Death sucks. It really takes faith (or a mature philosophy, which I believe draws its wisdom from divinity even if it does not acknowledge that Source) to afford the process any kind of dignity at all. Faith and philosophy are incidents of life, not death. Yet the slogan "death with dignity" seems to me to be too often marshaled to diminish those very things, and make man -- the only creature with a capacity for these things -- little more than an old sick cat to be put out of its misery. posted by Thomas at 11:09 AM

 
Rich Lowry in National Review Online has a piece today that echoes my post of January 18, on Democrats' belated attempts to put a religious gloss on their politics after getting shellacked in the last election, apparently in part out of a perception that they're dismissive of the concerns of religious people.

Essentially, Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, in his latest incarnation as a revival preacher, is trying to make the case that not only are Democrats deeply religious, they out-Christian the Christians.

Essentially, his argument is that Christian conservatives focus too much on the "peripheral" teachings of the Gospel, as they consider, for example, sexual morality to be, and neglect the "weightier matters of the law" like mercy and justice. They "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," if you will (see Matthew, ch. 23). (A side note -- I strongly suspect that Mr. Dean has no more knowledge of the Bible than a cherry-picked verse or two, because if he had any sense and wanted to make his argument stronger, he'd cite precisely those passage instead of the shopworn cliches he uses instead.)

The idea is apparently that Democrats are so strong on the "mercy" issue (although they're not so keen on "judgment," as in their inevitable "who are YOU to judge?!") that they can safely ignore the "peripheral" matters. It doesn't work that way. As I noted below, Matthew 23 blasts the religious formalists for "pay[ing] tithes of mint and anise and cumin" (i.e. satisfying the formal requirements of their religion) but neglecting the moral core. But it also advises people "not to leave the other [i.e. the other religious duties] undone.

In other words, you don't get an exemption from the "thou shalt not commit adultery" part just because you support a 5% increase in Head Start funding.

Dean also quoted the New Testament passage about it being harder for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. In that case, Dean needs to go on a serious diet if he's going to fit through that needle's eye -- he would qualify as "rich" by most standards. As would the billionaire (by marriage) John Kerry, George Soros, Barbara Streisand (and the rest of the almost-uniformly-Democratic Hollywood elite), and Michael Moore (who would need to go on a serious diet).

I read the "camel through the eye of a needle" passage in Matthew 19 in context with the passage that follows, in which the apostles are "amazed" at what Jesus has just said about the rich, and question whether it is possible for anyone to be saved. Jesus responds that salvation is impossible for men to accomplish alone, but "with God all things are possible." It appears, then, that the "camel through the eye of a needle" passage is in effect a setup for a larger point -- that all people are deeply flawed and need divine redemption, with the attachment of the rich to their possessions being merely the particular flaw that is manifested once people get rich. The non-rich, it is implied, have their own needle's eyes to squeeze through.

No matter how hard Democrats may try to position themselves as a party friendly to faith (advice to Mr. Dean: trying to argue that conservatives are "bad Christians" is probably not the way to go; try showing that you are equal to conservatives in your respect for faith before you try to argue you're superior), they have a major problem in that there is a perception that while not all Democrats are hostile to Christianity, those who are most hostile to or exaggeratedly fearful of Christianity do tend to fall on the liberal side of the spectrum. I have absolutely no constructive advice on how to solve that problem, frankly, other than to suggest that the way Mr. Dean is trying to solve it is probably not going to work very well. posted by Thomas at 10:42 AM

 
On "Hubris"

At some point in the last few days, I read the reference to "hubris" that put me over the top and made me absolutely sick of the word.

One thing I've noticed is that the users of the word tend overwhelmingly to be politically liberal, with the cultural assumptions that this has come to involve now that politics has become so much of a comprehensive identity for so many people.

"Hubris," of course, is the theme in ancient Greek drama that the gods punish excessive pride and self-confidence, or comparison of mortals to the gods.

That's fine, as far as it goes. The Judeo-Christian First Commandment basically says as much: "I'm God; you're not." Should be obvious, but it isn't.

At the same time, it sometimes seems as if any bold enterprise is immediately criticized for its "hubris." To that extent, and to the extent that human progress depends on people stepping beyond the bounds of what is thought to be possible, the concept of "hubris" is a dead weight holding us back.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachaean Ethics, distinguished between pride, which he stated was good, and vainglory or arrogance, which wasn't. The difference is that pride is an accurate self-assessment of one's own good qualities, while to be arrogant is to have a higher regard for onesself than is justified. The problem is that it's hard for imperfect humans to take an accurate measure of anything -- much less of one's own self. To avoid arrogance, and also to account for the inevitable errors in self-measurement, a person must consciously assign a lower regard to himself than he believes is justified. But in doing so, he risks undervaluing himself, and concluding that he is capable of less than he truly is, and thus failing to fill his potential.

Sometimes the only way to find your limits is to bang your head into them. That may mean overreaching, or setting your sights too high. The ancients (and modern liberals) might call this hubris. I say, hubris away, and if and when Nemesis shows up, kick his ephebophile Greek teeth right down his throat.

This is totally separate from taking a proper measure of the potential costs and benefits of an action. It's one thing to be overconfident of your chances of success; it's another to ignore the potential consequences of failure, which you can never discount. There's no weakness in saying "I'm confident I can do this; however, if it turns out I can't, I will cause a lot more harm than the good I'd do by succeeding."

The bottom line is that it's not overconfidence itself that is dangerous; that seems to me to be a concept that could only have been invented by losers who want to hold others back. The dangerous thing is not being clear-eyed in calculating the costs and benefits of a course of action, and ignoring the potential downside.
posted by Thomas at 1:30 PM

 
On a news show the other night (I think it was "Hannity & Colmes; I wasn't paying close attention as I was just passing through the living room), I heard DNC Chair candidate Tim Roemer attribute the Democrats' loss in the Presidential election to their supposed failure to articulate their true philosophy. The implication was that it wasn't the Democrats' message that was the problem, it was their failure to get it across; the message itself being so manifestly desirable that no majority could ever oppose it.

Apparently hoping to get some of those "moral values" thingies that so many people cared about in the last election, Roemer remarked (I paraphrase from memory) that Jesus talked more about concern for the poor than moral issues.

As far as hackneyed transparent ploys for the Christian vote go, all I can say is that line is about as fresh as "Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Britney Spears?"

The problem with Roemer's argument is that it presumes, as if self-evident, the proposition that only Democrats care about making a decent provision for the poor. Look, Tim -- all of us (hard-core Randian objectivists excluded) want to see that the poor, who are always with us, suffer from their poverty as little as possible. We differ as to the means for minimizing this suffering. Some of us Republicans think the best way to minimize the effects of poverty is to help people to stop being poor. That means supporting rational economic policies. There is a strong case to be made that the 1994 welfare reform (by putting time limits on people's eligibility for public assistance), by providing the impetus to seek employment, has lifted thousands of people out of poverty.

I look at the Democratic Party's present public proposals, and I see precious little in the way of anything that promises to provide real help for the poor. Most of the party's energy appears to be dedicated to expanding entitlements for the middle class or perpetuating government's control of such entitlements. (See Social Security and Medicare.) As for education, the party is so dominated by state-sector unions -- teachers' unions in particular -- that the party's only call is for more public money (which has consistently been increased without effect) rather than for substantive reforms that may actually help fix failing schools, which are disproportionately located in poor areas. Affirmative action slots go overwhelmingly to upper middle class students and business owners, and in the case of education, there is a strong case to be made that it does more harm than good.

The Democrats' problem is that the United States already spends buckets of money on programs ostensibly intended to help the poor. Poverty's persistence in spite of those programs suggests -- at least as one rational possibility -- that those programs are poorly designed or operated, calling into question the Democrats' judgment on how best to fight poverty.

So Ed Roemer presentation of a choice between one party which cares for the poor and another party that does not is a false one, and his claiming of a divine mandate for his political philosophy is rubbish. Jesus never advocated a welfare state, let alone one in which state-sector unions called all the shots and were entitled, without question, to ever-increasing funding without regard for results.

But back to his "Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about moral issues" line. While the statement may or may not be true (my past readings of the New Testament give me the impression that if it is, "helping the poor" doesn't beat the theme of living a holy life by too many references), the fact remains that Jesus did talk about "moral issues." In Matthew 23, Jesus condemned hypocrites for paying too much attention to religious formalities at the expense of the "weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith." He went on to say of those "weightier matters," "[T]hese ought ye to have done" -- but, significantly, adds "and not to leave the other undone."

In other words, by all means, remember that pure religion is to help the widows and fatherless in their affliction -- but don't forget the other stuff, either. The "other stuff" -- the "moral issues" that Tim Roemer seemed to denigrate -- is important, too. In fact, as the past half century has demonstrated, abandoning the "other stuff" -- the internalized moral restraints that help keep a society together and running smoothly -- tends to increase the number of widows and fatherless that need to be cared for. I have particularly in mind the damage left-liberal ideology has inflicted on marriage. Men don't need much of an excuse to revert to their natural horny state; reducing marriage from its original highly-protected status to a contract which may be breached with even fewer consequences than are triggered by breaches of ordinary civil contracts has had disastrous results in creating hordes of "fatherless" children.

So let's sum up. As far as "helping the poor" goes, what we essentially have is two parties that both strive for that goal, but differ in their proposed solutions. As far as the "moral values" issue goes, the Democrats have pretty much surrendered the field. In other words, on one side, you have an unambiguous "yes" on one question and an unambiguous "no" on the other. On the other, you have a "yes" on the first question (even granting for purposes of argument that Republicans "care" less for the poor than Democrats) and an unambiguous yes on the other.

What Roemer is saying, essentially, is that "sure, we think your 'traditional values' are medieval hogwash, but you should still vote for us because we're good on that other stuff Jesus talked about." Whether it's right or wrong, a religious voter isn't likely to buy this.

[UPDATE] I just noticed I referred above to both "Tim Roemer," which is the guy's actual name, and "Ed Roemer." I have no idea who "Ed Roemer" is, or why I typed that. Corrected.


posted by Thomas at 4:30 PM