First Stephen Colbert. Now Larry the Cable Guy.
This will, indeed, be a Merry Christmas.
As long as my relatives stay out of the gay apparel. Except for my brother, who everyone knows is a flaming homosexual (that one's for you, Sam).
This is why we need free democracies and free markets.
Global AIDS crisis overblown?
So we have more money available for all of these needs, from more abundant resources, rather than persistently competing for more finite resources.
Many progressives just don't get this. And the people they seek to help are hurt and die as a consequence.
Zimbabwe should be case in point for all of the most serious arguments for free democracies and free markets.
Zimbabwe's repressive politics and economic policies not only have crippled the Zimbabwean economy. They have undermined the ability to do what the U.S., European nations, and most more developed free economies are able to do: to provide their own funds for their own humanitarian crises.
But undermining a free economy in America also undermines giving to causes like the Zimbabwean humanitarian crisis, AIDS, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and a host of afflictions that the world's population faces.
And, worse, it gives rhetorical cover to repressive regimes like Mugabe's by giving him all the justification he needs for his murderous ways:
Because people must be forced to do good and only someone with a strong hand can make it happen.
There are a million little Robert Mugabe's with the same self-righteous, self-centered, circular, and seriously flawed reasoning all around the globe. In America. In Europe. In the developing world.
All around the world, there are billions of little Mugabe's arguing that people cannot be good unless forced to do so.
And no matter how many of the world's evils are perpetrated by those with power against those without power, we cannot even imagine that, just perhaps, people who do real good in the world do so out of their free will. And those who seek to compel the will of others to do their bidding generally make the world an ugly place.
It is so obvious to anyone who is not rationalizing this nonsense.
In the meantime, people die for our self-righteousness. As they always have.
And as they always will. Until we face up.
And there will be only one person and one group of people who will be responsible for all of this when all is said and done.
Me. Myself. I.
All of us.
The Economist offers some sober reflection on the attacks in Mumbai.
Mumbai counts the costs
"India’s friends and neighbours can hope for a measured reaction, but they should not assume it. After an attack on its national parliament in 2001, India mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with Pakistan. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in power, routinely accuses its successor, the Congress party, of being soft on terrorism. The desperate spectacle in Mumbai could damage Congress's prospects in pending state polls and even cost it the next general election, which must be held by May. The BJP is now choosing its words carefully but a front-page newspaper advert, presumably commissioned before the Mumbai attacks, accused Congress of being “incapable and unwilling” to fight terror; a sentiment illustrated with a large splatter of blood.
The Indian government, in turn, hopes for restraint from its own people, particularly in crowded, polyglot Mumbai. The metropolis is sometimes called “Maximum City”, because it is always pressed up hard against its limits. Its commuter trains are crushed with passengers each morning; its squalid slums hum with industry and ambition. No other city in India bears such colossal inconveniences with such phlegmatic grace. No Mumbaikar would describe the city as liveable; yet many Mumbaikars cannot imagine living anywhere else.
But this attack on its people and landmarks represents an enormous test of Mumbai’s civic temperament. Its assailants may have wished to provoke a backlash against Muslim inhabitants—which in turn would help to radicalise India’s vast Muslim minority. Even after the last of the terrorists have been killed or captured, that is how they could still hope to win."
That last reflection is what we need more of in our efforts to combat terrorism. We need observers and political leaders who can think past their outrage to consider long term consequences of how we respond.
The Economist is right. A backlash against India's Muslim community or a rush to judgment against Muslim Pakistan's intelligence forces (a rush to judgment that is now a regular pattern among India's Hindu population) without evidence and without discriminate action against only those responsible would be foolhardy and reap serious political consequences, in the long term, especially more civilian and military deaths.
Those responsible should have been confronted better at the time of the attacks, if accounts of military and law enforcement not firing on these terrorist actors are true.
At this point, as much as possible and resonable, any of those conspiring or responsible who are still alive need to be brought to justice alive and face trial. If they must be killed because other options are impossible, then so be it. But we are smarter to bring them to justice, when possible, to avoid polarizing Muslim public opinion and losing support from Muslims in India and in the world, generally, for otherwise worthy efforts.
I can always count on the Economist for clearheaded consideration of these types of events. Living and thinking about these matters in a country that has successfully engaged political efforts to end terrorism gives one some pause for reflection on all the best alternatives to deal with this kind of ugliness.
I don't know enough about the until recently unknown group responsible for these attacks, the Deccan Mujadeen, to know if they can be politically coopted. I know those responsible must be brought to justice. It does appear that part of their grievance has to do with Kashmir, a resolution of which situation - one that would, ideally, involve self-determination for Kashmir, independent of both India and Pakistan - would likely help reduce the basis for such grievances, though groups like this may find grievances where others fall away.
The Foreign Policy blog speculates that the Deccan Mujadeen may be related to the Lashkar-e-Toiba, an Islamist group based out of Lahore, Pakistan and founded in the Kunar provice of Aghanistan, whose grievances are also related to Kashmir, in addition to broader aims of Islamic rule. And the BBC is reporting that the one attacker captured alive, Azam Amir Qasab, is now saying that the group had received training from Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that has found backing, in the past, from Pakistani intelligence.
Foreign Policy is reporting that terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna is indicating that the Deccan Mujadeen are most likely related to the Indian Mujadeen, an Islamist group responsible for at least 5 attacks in India in 2007 and 2008, and considered a shadow group for Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who is suspected to be fronted by the Indian Mujadeen and to have been infiltrated by Al Queda. Both groups have strong Islamist claims, in addition to grievances associated with the Kashmiri province, meaning their aims are Islamic rule, in addition to more narrow claims against the Indian government.
I have to say that the emails from the Indian Mujadeen and those claiming to be the Deccan Mujadeed look very different to me.
The Indian Mujadeen emails appear to me to be more directly Islamist in their language, focussing more on the religious grievances of an Islamist group against Hindus fighting Muslim mujadeen and is more offensive in its aims of imposing Islamist "justice" on a recalcitrant Hindu population.
One such email reads:
"... Here we are back - the Mujahideen of India - the terrorists on the disbelievers - the radicals of Islam - after our triumphant and successful assault at Jaipur, once again calling you all, who disbelieve in Allah and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to accept Islam and bear witness that there is none to be worshipped except Allah, and that Muhammad (peace be upon him) is the Messenger of Allah. Accept Islam and save yourselves.
O Hindus! O disbelieving faithless Indians! Haven’t you still realized that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute idols are not at all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered?
We call you, O Hindus, O enemies of Allah, to take an honest stance with yourselves lest another attack of Ibn-e-Qasim sends shivers down your spines, lest another Ghauri shakes your foundations, and lest another Ghaznawi massacres you, proving your blood to be the cheapest of all mankind! Have you forgotten your history full of subjugation, humiliation, and insult? Or do you want us to repeat it again? Take heed before it is too late!
So wait! ................ Await now……….! Wait only for five minutes from now! .... Wait for the Mujahideen and Fidayeen of Islam and stop them if you can - who will make you feel the terror of Jihad. Feel the havoc cast into your hearts by Allah, the Almighty, face His Dreadful Punishment, and suffer the results of fighting the Muslims and the Mujahideen. Await the anguish, agony, sorrow and pain. Await, only for 5 minutes, to feel the fear of death...".
The Deccan Mujadeen email, on the other hand, emphasizes political grievances and is more defensive in its posture, still referring to the historical political and military conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, but not with the same focus of punishing Hindus for their religious leanings.
From the Deccan Mujadeen email:
"We inform and warn India's government to stop the continuing injustice against the Muslims. Return all the states seized from the Muslims. We are that "nation" that never forgets its history and repeats its history again and again. The fresh examples of which are Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and Kashmir.
Whatever you had to do you did that and what we had to endure we endured that … This is now our innings and we won't let it go from our hands. We will play our innings with style …
We know India government won't take this warning seriously…. So we are determined that this warning be made real … You have already seen its vivid example in Mumbai.
Hindus, don't think India's ATS [anti-terror squad] and army are laced with modern weapons and are also courageous.
This attack is a reaction to those actions that Hindus have been carrying out since 1947. There would be no actions now, only reactions. … And it will continue till we take revenge for every injustice done to us. … It will continue till we take back all our seized states …
Hindus now give up thinking that martyring of Muslims' mosques, weakening Muslims' economic condition through riots, and putting educated youths in prison will weaken the confidence. No, not at any cost. …
Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan"
This email by the Indian Mujadeen from September 13, 2008, reported on in the following Monday in the Deccan Herald, has a more similar political tone, perhaps nullifying that distinction:
"The Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for the Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Jaipur blasts killing at least 130 people in a span of four months, has now threatened to carry out attacks in Mumbai, report Agencies.
Accusing Mumbai Police’s ATS of harassing Muslims, Indian Mujahideen said in its email that it was closely watching the ATS.
'You should know that your acts are not at all left unnoticed; rather we are closely keeping an eye on you and just waiting for the right time to execute your bloodshed. We are aware of your recent raids at Ansarnagar, Mograpada in Andheri and the harassment and trouble you created there for the Muslims,' the group said in the email they sent to various media houses on Saturday evening.
'You threatened to murder them and your mischief went to such an extent that you even dared to abuse and insult Maulana Mahmood-ul-Hasan Qasmi and even misbehaved with the Muslim women and children there,' the email said.
'If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians – Vilasrao Deshmukh and R R Patil,' the email said. 'You are already on our hit-list and this time very very seriously.'
The terror outfit also threatened to target a senior Rajasthan police official. 'All the Mujahideen who shook Jaipur are absolutely safe and secure, and are preparing for our next targets, one of which is A K Jain – the DIG of Rajasthan,' claimed Indian Mujahideen.
Jain has been instrumental in arresting several SIMI members in Rajasthan in connection with the May 13 serial blasts in Jaipur. The mail bears two signatures at the end – Guru Alhindi and al-Arbi."
I don't really know if this is a distinction enough to make a difference. Either the Indian Mujadeen are resposible or they are not. But it does cast some doubt in my mind that this might be the case, especially since the Indian Mujadeen is also a very recently organized group for grievances that I'm sure are widespread throughout India and Pakistan. Meaning groups could crop up anywhere and without notice, until attacks occur. Meaning it still could be an independent group. Hard to know.
What I do know is that those responsible must be brought to justice. I would highly advise that they be killed only if other options are unreasonably dangerous. The political and potential military consequences of capture (meaning more civilians and military personell killed) versus killing those responsible are serious enough to give pause to those who would seek to shoot first and ask questions later.
The resolution of Kashmir needs attention completely independent of these attacks. But working on a resolution of that problem would likely undermine a significant source of grievance for such groups. I don't know enough about India's political system to know in what ways opening up their political process might dissuade Muslims (and Hindu nationalists) from violence, but it is worth exploring.
The more the Indian government stays focussed on bringing those responsible to justice and not on retaliation, the more cooperation they are likely to get from the Muslim population and the less likely they are to engage in the kind of attack that might alienate and radicalize Muslims in the way the Economist is describing in this article. The resolution of Kashmir nor any other political effort should be done in haste as some kind of reinforcement for this behavior. But, long term, finally resolving that matter will go a long way to undermining the political oxygen for groups like this.
Let us hope that the Indian government takes measured action that will leave the people of Mumbai, India, and others more safe rather than less safe as a consequence. We saw how terrorists could provoke a mature democracy like the United States into missteps following 9/11. I am concerned that a more volatile and less grounded democracy like India's will be similarly provoked.
Mistakes will be made. Though, in this game, they have very grave consequences. The most important priority is that they be avoided as much as possible, because people die when they are made, and that we learn from them when they are made, and when people die as a consequence.
There are many in America, today, who are still unwilling to acknowledge our mistakes post-9/11.
But the hopeful fact of American democracy that I pray will be true of India, as well, is that enough people recognized problems in our responses that a reconsideration is being made in the United States for how we respond more thoughtfully and less reactively to future threats.
Let us hope that India follows the wise advice from the Economist, here, and avoids mistakes that could cost more lives.
Amity Shales writes a very nice rebuttal to Paul Krugman's spend-tax-and-regulate proposals, as of late.
The Krugman Recipe for Depression
In a social scientific debate, facts are a bitch. Mr. Krugman is about to discover that they even trump a Nobel Prize.
A thoughtful profile of the most effective and brilliant modern day Mark Twain.
Paul Krugman will lose this debate. Mark my words. Because he's wrong.
About That New New Deal
Two nobel prize winners (among many, many others). One of them has to be right and one of them has to be wrong.
I'll give you a clue about who's wrong. It isn't Milton Friedman. Or Mona Charen, on this question.
"The conventional wisdom has had a rough time of it lately among scholars. You know the fairy tale. You were probably taught it in school. During the 1920s, America practiced laissez-faire economics. The 1920s were seen, as historian Amity Shlaes put it, as a period of 'false growth and low morals.' Greedy businessmen got out of control and created a market crash in 1929. President Hoover, obedient to Republican ideas concerning noninterference in the market, did nothing. The economy spiraled into a depression. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, banished fear, inaugurated the New Deal, and put America back to work.
A series of recent books has demolished the myth. Some of Roosevelt's reforms were salutary (the Securities and Exchange Commission, reform of the Federal Reserve) but the New Deal's chief object was never achieved -- it did not solve the nation's unemployment problem. The CATO Institute's Jim Powell points out in 'FDR's Folly,' 'From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2. At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent. ... Living standards remained depressed until after the war.' Stanford University history professor David Kennedy has acknowledged, 'Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.'
Amity Shlaes' 'The Forgotten Man' reminds us that FDR was a class warrior with a vengeance, always at pains to pin the nation's ills on 'economic royalists' who had, he claimed, depressed wages, fixed prices, and conspired to keep all of the nation's wealth in their own greedy hands. FDR's war on businessmen (which featured not just rhetorical but actual criminal prosecutions) spread fear and timidity throughout the entrepreneurial sector. Shlaes writes, 'The New Yorker magazine's cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.'
It is only recently that the New Deal myth has really taken hold. At the time there was less pretense. In 'New Deal or Raw Deal?' Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College quotes Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Testifying before the House Ways & Means Committee in May of 1939, the FDR ally and acolyte did not sugarcoat it:
'We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot.'
On balance, the New Deal damaged the nation profoundly by extending and deepening the Great Depression. No other downturn in American history lasted so long or afflicted so many."
Mona Charen and Milton Friedman are right about this. Paul Krugman is wrong. And Mr. Krugman is about to get a serious comeuppance, Nobel Prize or not.
That's why we have social sciences. To keep us honest. Someone is right and someone is wrong here. I have few doubts about who that is.
If Paul Krugman doesn't, he should have doubts very soon. If he's honest, that is.
That's the big if in the middle of the room.
What a sweet life.
Indiana woman dies at 115 as world's oldest person
She was a teacher in a one room school house who never touched liquor or tobacco, who loves education, but, following custom, left the field to raise children. She nevered married after her husband died in 1939. And she dies on Thanksgiving, 115 years after her birth.
A long life of family, love, and learning.
Doing good never yielded better rewards.
Godspeed, Edna.
The trick is not necessarily to indulge this part of ourselves (though that happens to). It is to embrace it and accept it.
Goddamn. I am digging Kathleen Parker a lot, these days. It helps that she's hot. But it's far more important that she is brilliant and has my kind of thinking and values.
Looking for Change in the Wrong Places
"Again, setting aside specific policies, Obama's example could have society-altering effects, especially in the African American community. By his example, he telegraphs the following messages: Being smart is good; education is good; being a good father is essential. Being an egghead is cool.
Conservatives insist, correctly, that culture matters. Many liberals think so, too, by the way. Why, some liberals even stay married their entire lives to the same person and raise children to do the same.
You want Ward Cleaver? Meet Barack Obama. Michelle is June Cleaver with a law degree. Family values don't get more traditional than those of the Obamas, who ooze marital bliss and whose adorable daughters make feminist cynics want to bake cookies and learn to smock.
Though we may perish of boredom, the Obamas may do more to elevate the American family than all the pro-marriage initiatives conceived by those who claim to speak for the deity. As a family unit, they're not significantly different from the Bushes, but they can be an inspiration in particular to African Americans.
Despite strides in some areas, the African American community is the most damaged in our culture, in part because of misguided policies that have decimated the family. Aid to Families With Dependent Children, for instance, was predicated on no man in the house, sending fathers fleeing from parental responsibility. Although other demographic groups are fast catching up, blacks today have the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate -- about 70 percent.
The fallout from fatherless homes can be measured in poverty and crime rates. Justice Department figures from mid-2005 show that 12.9 percent of black men in their late 20s were in prison or jail, compared with 4.3 percent of Hispanics and 1.6percent of whites.
Bias undoubtedly plays a part in the imbalance (the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparity is but one example). But the correlation between absent fathers and crime has been well established by decades of social science.
The change we've been waiting for may not be immediately quantifiable, but personal responsibility, educational ambition and smart public diplomacy -- all by example rather than exhortation -- could go a long way toward curing what ails us."
Nothing hotter about a woman who is unapologetically caring, genius, and has the courage of an independent mind.
Kathleen, if your husband ever leaves you, and you need a shoulder to cry on, I am a really great listener (I'll probably tell you to go work things out, but I wouldn't mind a little conversation with you). And if you have a sister, call me.
For those who yearn for the world to get medieval.
Iranian man sentenced by court to be blinded by acid
It always seems insane to me that we still live in a world that has not learned the lessons about an eye for an eye. And that our excuses, as my main man, Jesus of Nazareth, The Baddest Carpenter in Town, famously opined, always fail to account for the fact that it is not others that most need forgiveness.
It is us.
Bjorn Lomborg writes powerfully in The New Economy about the policy choices we face with climate change.
Misusing the inaction argument
"One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.
The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, used the inaction argument when he presented the European Union’s proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020, at a cost that the Commission’s own estimates put at about 0.5 percent of GDP, or roughly €60bn per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50 percent increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the Commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).
But Barroso’s punchline was that “the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction.” In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing “could even approach 20 percent of GDP.” (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated – most models show about three percent damages.)
So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5 percent of GDP to avoid a 20 percent cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible – until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.
The 0.5 percent-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about four percent). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius (nine-hundredths Fahrenheit). Thus, the EU’s immensely ambitious programme will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.
In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20 percent of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5 percent payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.
The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.
For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at the Berlaymont headquarters, which will save one ton of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1bn, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1bn windmill doesn’t negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we still have to pay by the end of the century.
The EU’s argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the aspirin doesn’t prevent that outcome. The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that might actually save the leg.
Likewise, it is negligent to focus on inefficiently cutting CO2 now because of costs in the distant future that in reality will not be avoided. It stops us from focusing on long-term strategies like investment in energy R&D that would actually solve climate change and at a much lower cost."
The larger question for me on global warming is how we square ourselves with the policy failures of efforts like the Kyoto protocol and engage more effective efforts through more genuine public-private partnership.
I am not encouraged that we will see that kind of genuine partnership anytime soon, given the left-wing celebration of strong-arming public policy questions, these days.
The most promising climate change measures are coming from the market, at this point, I'm convinced. It is not for the failure of good intentions among environmentalists leveraging for regulation. It is because of the general failure of regulatory approaches like Kyoto to deliver when more genuine collaboration is needed to tackle problems like global warming.
It will take some years of failure with this more regulatory approach for liberal demoracies to adopt policies that support more genuine, collaborative private-public partnerships, which are the only efforts that have much change of success.
And thank goodness for a liberal democracy where our policies can be honestly debated and discussed so that our efforts can be focused on solving problems rather than defending our failures.
That broader marketplace of ideas, and not power or even the rule of law, is the brilliance of liberal democracies. And thank goodness we are able to take that fact of liberal democratic life for granted.
A fascinating look at educational opportunity in developing countries at the Economist.
The yawning gap in education within developing countries
"GLOBAL public spending on education rose from a median 4.5% of GDP in 1999 to 4.9% in 2006, according to a new report by UNESCO, the UN's education agency. The poorest countries invested 3.5%, compared with 5.6% by the slightly richer middle income countries, and 5.3% by developed countries. But spending money wisely also matters. Huge inequalities exist between the richest and poorest within many countries. In India, a 17-22 year old in the richest quintile has had an average of 11.1 years in education, compared with only 4.4 years for those in the poorest quintile. This gap is also big in Peru and the Philippines. The difference in Bangladesh is similar to that in Nicargaua, a much richer country, showing it is using resources more effectively."
Check out the article for a fascinating graphic breakdown of average number of years of education in each country.
Education is one of the central matters of concern to me that keeps my liberal commitments honest. It is plainly clear to me that liberal education, meaning the development of the conscience and intellect, is one that is best done consistent with liberal principles, meaning ones that respect independence of thought and action, freedom of choice and conscience, free and honest substantive engagement and learning, and an honest attempt to address inequities while acknowledging that inequalities of effort, commitment, and merit are inevitable in any society, and especially a liberal society that does and should reward merit.
Socialism is not liberal, in this context, insofar as it, inherently violates the consciences and judgments of independent actors in a liberal democracy. A commitment to one's neighbor is neither mutually exclusive with a democracy that respect freedom of conscience and choice and it is best facilitated by that kind of freedom that better acknowledges that coerced commitments are not real commitments at all and that free commitments are the only ones likely to deliver the highest quality opportunities for all people.
Public education in developed countries and developing countries, as conservative free market economist Milton Friedman and liberal poverty economist Amartya Sen both argue, are ones that must occur consistent with liberal principles, meaning a respect for freedom of conscience and choice by rich and poor alike.
Public education, hence, must become more liberal and democratic, meaning more free and self-determined, for real progress to occur on this front and almost all fronts of liberal democratic progress. School choice and commitments to educational opportunity for all children are necesary for this kind of progress. Government-funded education is a compromise on this principle that is worthy in many instances. But it is not the ideal that a more genuinely liberal democratic education - that is voluntarily provided and funded by independent schools, teachers, and administrators and chosen freely by independently-acting parents and students - has to offer.
The compromise of this principle by government funding to assure educational opportunity should not be confused with a more genuinely liberal education, that is freely chosen, engaged, committed to, and funded, to develop free and independent consciences and intellects.
Force is generally inconsistent and mutually exclusive with a genuinely liberal education, except in the case of real physical danger to those involved. It's use should be minimized and avoided as much as is reasonably possible and voluntary efforts should replace compulsory efforts as long as we take the principles of a liberal education and liberal democracy seriously.
This is not just a matter of abstraction. Such education is critical to undermining the oppressive hold of repressive and illiberal governments and institutions around the world. North Korea is no more liberal for its leftist dictatorship than Saddam Hussein was conservative for his right wing authoritariasm, and both, rightly, are most powerfully challenged by citizens with liberal commitments. And liberal education - meaning education that embraces a commitment to free and independent conscience and intellect - is necessary to debate, criticize, and undermine the illiberal commitments of governments organized around force as a governing philosophy rather than by a respect for individual conscience and choice. And those liberal commitments are fundamental to almost all of the most important quantity and quality of life indicators for people around the world.
Freedom makes possible both the safety and substantially better quality of life enjoyed in liberal democracies, and education is fundamental to developing the commitments, including and especially a commitment to reason as the foundation for understanding and resolving important problems in a culture, that guarantee that more people live, live longer, healthier, more decent, more honest, worthwhile lives. Almost all serious quality of life indices correlate broadly with stronger liberal commitments. And liberal education is the fundamental commitment that makes possible others within a culture.
This is one of the most critical questions for the 21st century and future of liberal democracies. The stakes are too high to take liberal education commitments less seriously than they deserve and to guarantee the freedom of conscience and choice that are fundamental to the development of robust liberal democracies that offer better lives for all of us.
This is the commitment of a liberal conscience. That all people should have better lives. No matter who or where they might be.
I generally agree with this argument. Though I do not cry when courts affirm individual liberties when they are not explicitly given expression in the law.
Gay Marriage and the California Courts
Griswold v. Connecticut is not based on an explicit protection for privacy in the Constitution. But I do think the individual liberties involved warrant some kind of legal affirmation, even as I prefer that affirmation to come from democratic politics.
I definitely think a culture that affirms individual liberties is a stronger and more reliably mature liberal democratic culture. But I'm not in a hurry to revisit every court decision that affirms liberties based on our liberal democratic traditions.
What matters to me is that America and all liberal democracies take their liberal and democratic traditions more seriously and strengthen their commitments to free and self-governing socieities, independent of courts. Democratic outcomes - referendums, initiatives, legislative decisions, and the individual attitudes in the culture, generally - are better barometers of that commitment. Court rulings, generally, I think, offer protections for freedoms when majorities are not prepared to support them. That is a precarious way to affirm liberty, long term. But it is not a mortal sin. And challenges to majority rule based on principles of individual liberties and constitutional principle is a long and proud tradition in American juris prudence and the history of liberal democracies.
I don't know if majorities support the rights of Aghani women to vote and get an education. I certainly hope they do or will come to such a commitment. But I have no issue when Afghani courts interpreting that Afghani constitutional principles affirm such rights even if they do not explicitly make such affirmations or if majorities do not support them. They may be reversed. They also happen to be on the right side of the question.
Democracy is ideal. Court decisions that come down on the right side I can live with.
Thomas Sowell has some very nice perspective on the current economy and its would-be political saviors.
'Jolting the Economy'
From that column:
"Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has declined by less than one-half of one percent. In fact, it may not have declined even that much-- or at all-- when the statistics are revised later, as they very often are.
We are not talking about the Great Depression, when output dropped by one-third and unemployment soared to 25 percent.
What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.
For that, the politicians need lots of hype, and that is being generously supplied by the media.
Whatever the merits of trying to shore up some financial institutions, in order to prevent a major disruption of the credit flows that keep the whole economy going, what has in fact been done has been to create a huge pot of money-- hundreds of billions of dollars-- that politicians can use to give out goodies hither and yon, to whomever they please for whatever reason they please.
No doubt we could all use a few billion dollars every now and then. But the question of who actually gets it will be strictly in the hands of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It is one of the few parts of the legacy of the Bush administration that the Democrats are not likely to criticize.
Much as we may deplore partisanship in Washington, bipartisan disasters are often twice as bad as partisan disasters-- and this is a bipartisan disaster in the making.
Too many people who argue that there is a beneficial role for the government to play in the economy glide swiftly from that to the conclusion that the government will in fact confine itself to playing such a role.
In the light of history, this is a faith which passeth all understanding. Even in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, increasing numbers of economists and historians who have looked back at that era have concluded that, on net balance, government intervention prolonged the Great Depression.
Many of those who have, over the years, praised the fact that this was the first time that the federal government took responsibility for trying to get the country out of a depression do not ask what seems like the logical follow-up question: Did this depression therefore end faster than other depressions where the government stood by and did nothing?
The Great Depression of the 1930s was in fact the longest-lasting of all our depressions.
Government policy in the 1930s was another bipartisan disaster. Despite a myth that Herbert Hoover was a "do nothing" president, he was the first President of the United States to step in to try to put the economy back on track.
With the passing years, it has increasingly been recognized that what FDR did was largely a further extension of what Hoover had done. Where Hoover made things worse, FDR made them much worse.
Herbert Hoover did what Barack Obama is proposing to do. Hoover raised taxes on high-income people and put restrictions on international trade, in order to try to save American jobs. It didn't work then and it is not likely to work now.
Perhaps the most disastrous of all the counterproductive policies of the federal government was the National Industrial Recovery Act under FDR, which set out to do exactly what the politicians today want to do-- micro-manage businesses."
The empirics on this are pretty clear, actually, to objective observers who have not bought into the hype. This downturn is not a depression. And even the romanticism of the New Deal legacy reflects a poor and terribly incomplete understanding of the Depression. This was straightforward consensus among economists before the disillusionment with the Bush Administration. I very much doubt that the current politicial moment will sustain a substantial and long-standing change in that consensus.
Because the facts just do not support the revision.
In fact, if there were a period where the facts will flatly contradict an important ideological lens on events, this is as good as period as any.
What matters is what is true, not what I can make a case for. That is the nature of empirical observation and conclusions.
And the truth, mark my words on this one, will set us free.
Congress has made bureaucrats into legislators
Sutherland's maxim: Adherents to ideology are at their best when they are illustrating what fuckin' morons adherents to other ideologies are when they are at their worst.
Progress.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A refreshingly insightful and genuine article from Bill Kristol, this morning. Definitely want to check this piece out.
Admit We Don't Know
"And it was Lincoln who wrote, in his second annual message to Congress, in December 1862: 'The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'
I’ve worked in government. It’s hard to do much thinking there at all, let alone thinking anew. But Obama and his team will have to think anew, and those on the outside who wish to help will have to think anew too, if we’re to have a chance of rising to this daunting occasion."
It's the strongest bit of wisdom in conservative thought. That people, and those in government especially, are better off admitting when they do not know and what they cannot do, than to pretend to know or be able to do more than they can.
He's right. It is the single biggest weakness for Americans to face, right now. That we think we have more answers than we do.
We are better off acknowledging this fact, all of us, intellectuals and average folks, alike, than we are taking off on damned fool adventures to nowhere.
Being honest about what we don't know is not weakness. It's strength. The strength it takes to be honest about our vulnerabilities.
Acknowledging that we do not know is the first step toward discovering new insights and correcting the problem. As much as is humanly possible. And no more.
Bill Kristol definitely just earned my respect. And it came from his honest humility rather than his vast knowledge.
More of us could learn from that example.
The current political moment is a serious misunderstanding of what it means to be a liberal democracy.
Liberal means liberty. Democracy refers to the right of people to govern their own affairs.
This period is neither more liberal nor more democratic, by those standards. Meaning, though many of us live in liberal democracies, the notion that we are making progress on the road to becoming more liberal and more democratic is not borne out by the illiberal efforts of those with power to undermine liberty and self-determination by liberal democratic peoples.
This moment is hardly progressive by any liberal democratic standard.
And political leaders in both parties are in for a rude awakening at how illiberal practices by government square with liberal democratic peoples' need and pursuit of greater liberty and democratic self-governance as the standard for their progress.
Those principles mean something, even when we pretend that they do not.
Thank goodness we live in a liberal democracy that can correct for the illiberal practices of our political leaders.
There's just no end to the progress, is there?
Britain May Ban 'Happy Hour' As Alcohol Related Deaths Rise
One day we will have banned all that ails us. Only then will we recognize the only real progress available to humanity. When our betters have finally forced it upon us.
American Democratic Idol.
There was a reason the Greeks abandoned direct democracy.
I think it had something to do with reality television.
Stephen Colbert is the new Stephen Colbert.
For those who take freedom for granted.
Myanmar court hands comedian 45-year prison term
This is why I don't.
I don't care what excuses people give for repression. I don't care what excuses those in liberal democracies give for giving ammunition to repressive forces in Myanmar and around the world. I don't care if those responsible will not take responsibility for how their repression helps thugs like this regime to rationalize their own thuggishness.
I intend on being an honest reality check for those hostile to freedom and friendly to repression of all kinds for as long as my life permits.
And that, and not the embrace of repression, is what courage looks like. No matter what bullshitting people may do to the contrary.
Power is often and generally the refuge of cowards who care too little about its appropriate use and the consequences of its abuse.
Thank goodness there are people like Maung Thura to be an honest reflection of courage when our cowardice is too much for us to bear.
Taking freedom seriously is a tough job. Thank goodness people like Maung are willing to do it.
If only his observers in the free and democratic world took liberal democrac values so seriously.
After a discussion with a colleague about his interactions with some religious fundamentalists in his family, I think I understand, now, why people with repressive philosophies are able to go so long pretending like their stubbornness is the same thing as being righteous and right, especially on questions where they are so assuredly wrong.
Because they are used to bulling their way through such conversations.
Not with me, they're not. And never will be.
You think you can bull your way through a discussion on freedom and repression with me, you got another think coming.
One thing is for sure, if you don't walk away doubting whatever your self-righteous assertion of truth is with me, it, generally, is not because of me. It's because you weren't listening very well in that conversation.
And those who don't listen well don't get treated like they have more truth than they have to offer because they just can't imagine that they might be wrong.
We need more people to challenge the self-righteous among us. Me included. Challenge me. Think hard and engage me seriously. Demonstrate how I'm wrong.
But, for God sakes, stop pretending that your opinions are more final than anything in this world could ever be.
Genuine liberals - meaning those who take liberty seriously - will only keep that flame afire insofar as they are willing to challenge those who would persistently compromise and whittle away those liberties for their own repressive ends.
This political era will be a referendum on that tactic for undermining our liberties.
And it is a referendum that liberty will win.
Noone has a monopoly on wisdom. Noone has a monopoly on folly. Noone has a monopoly on virtue. And, most assuredly, nooone has a monopoly on vice.
It is one enormous marketplace of humanity out there.
And each of us gets to choose what contributions, good and bad, we have to offer. And choose again, tomorrow, if we don't like what we brought to the table today.
Freely choosing what we have to offer the world, good and bad, wise and foolish, is the one birthright that each and every one of us has no matter where and to whom we happened to be born.
If you do not like what is available in that marketplace, now is your time to choose your contribution.
Kathleen Parker is brilliant and brave in her Washington Post column, this morning.
Giving Up on God
"As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.
Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.
I'm bathing in holy water as I type.
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.
Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.
The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.
But they need those votes!
So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.
Short break as writer ties blindfold and smokes her last cigarette.
Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.
Here's the deal, 'pubbies: Howard Dean was right.
It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs.
Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they've had something to do with the GOP's erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified by Emory University's Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.
Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last summer can't have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends sales meeting."
Someone needed to say it, Kathleen. What both parties need to work on is more reasoned bases for their policies and, hence, more reasoned debates and discussions to form future policies.
Religion can play a role in that discussion. So can secular thought. And neither have a monopoly on wisdom.
But the reasoned idea that policy should follow from the most rigorous and intelligent insights into liberal democratic policy should be the basis for all politics and parties in liberal democracies. And the recognition that no one person, party, ideology, or group of any kind has any sort of monopoly on that wisdom must center in any party and democracy that is going to propose pragmatic and thoughtful solutions to our myriad of democratic challenges.
Many fallacies of reasoning plague our public sphere. Religion hardly has a monopoly on error any more than it has a monopoly on wisdom.
But those people who mistake their religion for more profound and practical wisdom about people and life than it really has to offer do need to face the honest intellectual challenge of thinking outside of that all too narrow and foolish box.
Republicans can follow Rich Lowry's advice and ride the train of social conservativism, if they want. And they should get used to losing elections, long term. The larger reason is that even religious Americans want pragmatic solutions to America's problems that their religion often fails to deliver, even when they do not recognize that fact.
And the more direct reason is that our politics needs to be more honestly squared in values that are most important to religious and non-religious Americans alike: a genuinely free and democratic culture. Americans should be free to take seriously the values of their religion. And they should be free to not take those values seriously when they do not infringe on the freedoms of their fellow citizens.
It is that kind of respect for freedom of conscience that Pilgrims, Pilgrim, Catholics, Quakers, and so many early Americans sought for themselves when they first settled America. And it is that freedom of conscience that we should respect today and that offers an important opportunity for Republicans to build a bigger tent than the one they inhabit today.
And bigger tents for all people, ones that genuinely have room for all people and all Americans, are the exactly what America and the liberal democratic and illiberal and undemocratic world needs today more than anything else.
What America and the liberal democratic world does best is look after others like we look after ourselves. When we are at our best, that is. And when we are not, people mistrust us for good reason. Because when we don't, we are generally looking after ourselves at the expense of others.
And any and all of us should only trust one another when we genuinely care about one another and each others' interests. Everything else is bullshit. Whether we believe it is ordained by the Almighty or a fact of our persistent narrowmindedness.
Kathleen and I would hope that we all aspire for something more broadminded.
We need more of it in America.
If America is wondering why much of the world thinks of us as greedy, spoiled, and self-centered, this might be it.
Paul Krugman could do with a little of this perspective.
Might help him distinguish between absolute poverty and relative affluence. And an economic slowdown and a Great Depression. And power and honesty.
We would all do better to make those distinctions, these days.
Bret Stephens pens a very insightful and timely column for Democrats in power today.
'No Excuses' for Liberals
From that column:
"With the election of Barack Obama and huge Democratic majorities in Congress, liberals must now practice something other than the politics of nostalgia and what-if.
This is a politics that has been in the making since at least 1968, though its real origins probably go back to 1944 and the first great liberal what-if: What if an ailing FDR had died nine months earlier, and been succeeded by the great progressive icon and polymath (and original moonbeam), then Vice President Henry Wallace?
In that case, perhaps, desegregation would have happened sooner, universal health care would be with us today, and the 'century of fear' that Wallace predicted as the outcome of the Truman Doctrine would have been avoided by means of a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union.
From that moment on, the liberal what-ifs multiply in dizzying profusion. What if John F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in Dallas and lived to get the U.S. out of Vietnam before it fully got into it? What if Robert F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in L.A. five years later? What if Jimmy Carter hadn't been so earnest, truthful and unlucky? What if Ronald Reagan hadn't proved such an adept political mythmaker? What if Donna Rice hadn't been pictured on Gary Hart's lap? What if Willie Horton hadn't been given a furlough? What if Bill Clinton hadn't squandered his political gifts with cheap trysts? What if Bush v. Gore had gone 5-4 the other way? What if 9/11 hadn't intervened to give the Bush administration its mandate for another bout of the politics of fear? What if John Kerry hadn't been sandbagged by Osama bin Laden's last-minute video intervention?
This liberal narrative of its own near-misses, bad luck and tragic interventions of fate is supplemented by a parallel liberal tale of unbridled conservative malevolence. Republicans may be the stupid party, but they've been fortunate in their evil political geniuses -- Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove -- all of whom have succeeded in bamboozling the public into voting against its own economic interests.
As for conservative electoral successes, these are explained almost entirely as a function of political dirty tricks (cf. 'October Surprise') jingoism (Star Wars, Grenada et al.) and racism ('Southern strategy'). 'The legacy of slavery, America's original sin, is the reason we're the only advanced economy that doesn't guarantee health care to our citizens,' writes Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in 'The Conscience of a Liberal.' Who knew that a straight line connects the ideas of Jefferson Davis and Milton Friedman?
(Only lately has this history been turned on its head, so that liberal pundits now bemoan the passing of those great conservative ideas men who presumably are crying tears in heaven over the GOP's capture by the likes of Sarah Palin.)
The upshot of all this has been an amazing lack of introspection among the frequently wronged, but never wrong, liberal American hard core. Politically, this hasn't yielded such great results: The number of Americans who self-identify as liberals continues to fall, to 21% in 2008 from 22% in 2004, according to CNN. (The number of self-identified conservatives held steady at 34%.) Then again, without that hard core Mr. Obama's primary triumphs would never have been possible.
Now the long wait is over, and the liberal ship has come in. In Mr. Obama, liberals have a president who seems to have stepped out of the last episodes of the West Wing. He has the Congress in his left pocket, the news media in his right pocket (or is it the other way around?), and he floats on a tide of unprecedented international enthusiasm. The Republican Party has no obvious standard-bearer, as it did in Ronald Reagan after Gerald Ford's defeat in 1976. It could well spend the next four years, or eight, tearing itself to pieces.
Instead, the only things that stand in Mr. Obama's path are what Marxists like to call 'objective factors': the financial crisis, the mess in Detroit, the disposing of Guantanamo detainees, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian hostility, Chinese assertiveness, maybe the disintegration of Pakistan.
Mr. Obama will get, and deserves, a period of political grace. Let's say a year. After that, it will become increasingly difficult to attribute whatever mistakes he makes to the legacy of his predecessor. American liberalism, such as it is, is finally being put to the test that fate has denied it these last many decades. Succeed or fail, this time there can be no excuses."
Democrats need to take this concern to heart. Should they not, the fate of the previous time that American power was concentrated in one party is likely to be repeated.
It is the learning and not the ideology that makes for better governance and ideas. Should liberals fail to take that notion seriously, both are likely to fail them this term of power.
This is why I love Charlie Rose. Because he always brings out the best in people.
And this is George Will at this best.
We need George Will, right now, more than ever. These are the days when I thank goodness for him.
Because he says with intelligence and decency what people need to hear, even when they don't want to hear it.
Has it not occurred to Democrats, yet, that their current governing philosophy is the opposite of John F. Kennedy's famous first inaugural call to service, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
Today's Democratic message is, "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what government can do for you."
Perverse.
Most of life is making the same mistakes over and over again, until the day you figure out that you are a serious dumbass. And then realizing, after you have discovered the error of your ways, that you are still a serious dumbass.
Most of history is people being serious dumbasses with no correction. Until we learn the above.
Issues from Flight of the Concords.
George Will delivers where he is brilliant.
Welcome to Socialism
This is why intellectual integrity and liberal values matter.
So we can be honest with ourselves when we are acting inconsistent with them.
Conscience is borne of such integrity and values.
Power, in all its soft and hard forms, is checked and challenged by those values and that integrity.
And, over time, it is shaped by them.
And that, and not by legislative, executive, or judicial fiat, is how liberal democracy, and the liberal conscience that underpins it, operates.
Sally: No. I like it. No. That's a good philosophy. No. No. No.
Schroeder: That's your new philosophy, huh?
Sally: Yes. I mean no.
Schroeder: But, Sally, anything that takes only a minute can't be very lasting. For instance, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony took over...
Sally: No.
Schroeder: I can't stand it.
Sally. I can't stand it. I like it.
I've been thinking a lot, this weekend.
I've been really unhappy with both the teaching and political work, lately. I'm just worn down by endless and mindless arguments with people about why they are capable of more than they think they are capable of and why there is so much opportunity for them to take advantage of in the world, both of which beliefs underpin much of my teaching and thinking.
I guess I've gotten to a point, after 3 years of having those discussions around the lives of kids with both kids and adults that I'm just tired of trying to convince people, all the time, that they are capable of more and there is more opportunity available to them than their fears might otherwise lead them to believe.
Many people, I'm learning, would rather stubbornly hold onto their fears than more honestly face the risks involved with pursuing lives that really matter to them or that accomplish things that are important to them and to others.
And I guess I'm just at a point where I think que sera, sera. If people want less for themselves, so be it. And if they want more, there is a whole world available to them.
I'll write my book. I'll teach out my scholarship. I'll study investment more seriously. I'll probably write and perhaps teach, in one capacity or another, for the rest of my life.
But after my scholarship is up in a year and a half, I'm not sure that I will be teaching, anymore. And I'm not sure I want to teach in a university, necessarily. I might want to get a Ph.D., just for the study purposes. But I'm not sure, anymore, that this is necessarily a route I will take in my life. I may just invest and write for a living and see where that takes me.
Anyway. As I said to Brandi a million times - and which we argued about a million times; Brandi and I had this very silly running argument on the meaning of this phrase - que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be.
I don't bullshit enough to be a teacher or a policy scholar. I need a job where honesty pays. I'm thinking investment.
All I know is that everything politics touches it makes dishonest.
I just can't live my life like that.
If the point for the repeated radical propaganda was to convince me that markets don't work and government does, it is doing a piss poor job of doing so.
Why Spending Stimulus Plans Fail
That might have something to do with the fact that Democrats and the left are dead wrong on this issue.
And worse than being wrong, they lack the courage to face that they are wrong. Maybe it's the pussy tendency to shrink from anything that might be difficult no matter how decent and honest. That does seem to be a common denominator for being a leftist, these days.
You know why Democrats are in deep fuckin' shit during this period?
Because crowing from the sidelines is easy. When you have power and you can't deliver - which they can't - everyone sees what a fuckin' fraud your ideas are.
And boo-fuckin'-hoo for the fuckin' mindless bullies of the Democratic Party.
When all is said and done on this question, Democrats have long lost my respect. And they will lose power and the central justification of their outdated and wrongheaded economic policies.
You doubt that?
How long you willing to live with failure?
I hope it's a long time.
Maybe Keith should consider sports again.
Either intellectual honesty is en vogue again. Or people are really getting more intellectually honest. I can't really tell, most days.
The Same Old Change
From that piece:
"There are lessons here for everyone. Polarized Republicans and Democrats justify the means by which they practice politics by their self-described exalted ends. The only constant is they'll each do anything when out of power to regain it -- and anything while in power to retain it. All candidates say almost anything to get elected and call it idealism. Then when in office, they renege on what they promised and call it realism."
Lord Acton had something to say about that propensity. I'm trying to remember the phrase. Power. Absolute power. Something about people being liars and shitheads to get it and maintain it. Something along those lines.
Sounds about right.
Be nice if honesty were taken as a serious virtue in politics and life.
Until then, I think maybe young people can be cut some slack while their less-than-honest parents, teachers, professors, journalists, bankers, police officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, political leaders, and all the rest cut out the dishonesty.
Dishonesty is a fact of life among folks always scared about what other people think about them. Power compounds that problem a hundred-fold. And mistrust is the quite natural byproduct of all that lying.
Be nice if we told the truth more often, wouldn't it? Be nice if intellectual honesty was how life worked more often.
Until then, we shouldn't be surprised when shit falls apart, when our kids don't trust us, and when noone trusts the government, even when their power is needed, all because we decided to pretend that our dishonesty and power-mongering and nastiness had no consequences.
Be nice if we could cut that shit out.
"It's just like they say, you have throw money in a hole and set it on fire to make money."
In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
I don't need no stinkin' girlfriend. I think I need to marry the Nancy Fichandler and her pro-hole agenda.
Must be something in the water.
E.J. Dionne and Thomas Sowell, both in one day, write pieces of real substance, absent narrow partisan interpretations of the world and the people in it.
No Monopoly on Hope
And E.J.'s conclusion - that McCain's emphasis on fear rather than hope as a more noble, and thusly effective, animating spirit for Americans and for people, generally - is a spot-on reflection on the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Fear is the seed of its own undoing, often, when it is used to manipulate others. All manipulation is its own undoing, at it turns out, when people wise up to being manipulated.
Soft power. Hard power. Whatever means of manipulation is engaged.
Conscience, in the end, is what animates human beings and the liberal democracies that best facilitate the development of that conscience.
Doubt that? Keep watching.
And you might want to consult some of the many, many people who made possible our ability to think it, express it, and live in a world that takes it seriously.
Thomas Sowell has been far too partisan and self-righteous in his interpretation of recent events, by my lights.
But then he goes and writes something brilliant.
"Intellectuals"
I can't think of a single disagreement I have with this column.
And it goes to why I trust noone to have all the right answers, no matter how smart they are (myself included). Because they so often don't. And, often, their failures have serious consequences, including intellectuals.
And not a single one of them likes to admit when they are wrong.
Plato was wrong. Philosopher kings are a bad idea. Average joe kings can often be worse, but not always, depending on how open they are to being wrong relative to their intellectual brethren.
A strong intellectual understanding of the world is definitely important. But being open to the fact that your framework and any and all its facets could be wrong is more important. Humility and decency trump intelligence, in my book. And they certainly trump intellectuals who are pricks or bullies, both of whom deserve the brush off no matter how smart they may or may not be.
Power, as Lord Acton observed, should be entrusted very little at all to anyone. That's what it meant to be a liberal to those who invented the term that both conservatives and progressive lay claim to today.
Liberal means liberty. And wiser people like Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wolstencraft, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, and their contemporaries like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Amartya Sen, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Ghandi, and the rest knew that.
They knew it because it was and they knew and know that it was the oxygen for real life, learning, and growth for the fate of humanity.
It is not a claim that is the mantle of any ideology, any country, any religion, any race, any ethnicity, any gender, or any one man or woman.
Freedom, and the right to determine one's own life and destiny, is the claim of every one of us. And it is not dependent on our economic, political, ideological, national, religious, racial, ethnic, gender or any other status.
Self-determining freedom is the claim of each human being independent of the claims to power of others, no matter what intellectual or other station they occupy.
No amount of intellectual rationalization of the power to encumber liberty makes it right or so. It only makes it one in the long line of rationalizations for circumventing and undermining the more genuine liberal democratic values and relationships that allow for more independent conscience and interdependent collaboration around individual conscience to take root and flower.
Intellect can be used to promote those liberal democratic values. And it can be used to stunt or block that growth.
But it is that claim to conscience that is more fundamental than any intellectual rationalization to the contrary.
And freedom and democracy will always offer those who take them seriously to challenge those who would take them too lightly.
William Raspberry comes out of retirement for this gem of a column on what a President Obama says about the state of racial politics in 21st century America.
A Path Beyond Grievance
As I read this brilliant little reflection, I was alerted to two other colums that Raspberry wrote when he was retiring that are equally powerful. The first is about his efforts to promote education and child welfare in his retirement.
What I'll Do Next
And the second is a real beauty about anticipating the ugliness reaped from polarization sown in American politics.
Our Civil Disagreement
That's what it looks like to have the big picture on life and politics.
And you'll notice a consistent theme on that big picture: it comes from a man with a big heart.
Make no mistake. That's what strength looks like.
Thank you, Mr. Raspberry, for the heart and mind you have to offer.
A recent exchange I had on an international debate board I visit off and on:
Listening to the coverage of the American election, you'd think that the last eight years didn't happen, internationally speaking, and that all is sweetness and light.
Bullshit.
Regards,
M. Graham
Yeah, that's my concern, Murray. That's why I voted Obama, for all of my misgivings about his economic policies, which I think are bad for everyone. Because I'm concerned about Americans - conservatives, especially, but not exclusively - who are taking the lesson from the last 8 years, "As long as I got the power to do it, what the fuck are you going to do about it?"
A lot of liberals have that mindset, these days, as well. Which is the problem. I have to choose between 2 sets of assholes with the same fucked up logic. I hope Mr. Obama is a step in the right direction, in foreign policy matters, at least.
But I take heart from the fact that it took almost the rest of the century for Britain to give up her empire, long after the notion of empire was discredited in World War II. The idea that democratic power can swagger it's way through problems will also take time to unravel, largely because everyone only seems concerned when someone else is doing it.
I think we're moving forward. Just painfully slow.
After another 4 years, hopefully we will have learned that Democrats are just as likely to run roughshot over people they don't like when they have power. And the politics will reflect that lesson learned. And the parties will adapt to Americans' looking for more freedom to live their lives without such assholes mucking things up all the time.
I have some confidence, Murray, that this is how things will play out, given some time.
In retrospect, it looked like the notion of empire would never end. It took up most of human history. But it most assuredly left the scene, largely as it was discredited in the democratic discussion and the marketplace of ideas. The idea that power can resolve all our problems - the heart of the problem with empire, ironically - will similarly fall out of fashion once people figure out that it is a false god.
But first people have to be willing to give up the false god.
It will take time. And then, like post-World War II and World War I, when the quest for empire had ravaged the lives of millions of people, we will have to move on. Because we'll have no other choice.
It is easy to understand, now, why humanity did so many horrible things, in the past, with power. Because they were afraid. And our fears, I'm beginning to understand, can rationalize almost anything. No matter how irrational and destructive.
Eventually we learn the lesson. That's the one thing we can bank on, Murray.
Jesus in heaven. Is there any way that you can do spiritual corrective surgery on the permanent condition of my head being 6 inches up my big fat ass?
Thank you, Baby Jesus. Say hi to the old man.
I do sometimes wish that there were a way to force away the tragedy and bad stuff that happens in the world. There just isn't most of the time.
What we are left with is wisdom we have or do not about the world, that we share and do not about this world.
Our kids aren't going to do what we want them to do often. Which is good, if we could give our pride a rest for a moment. It means they will determine their own lives. Which is as it should be. It is their life, in the end, not ours.
What we can do, when all is said and done and we've done everything to offer what wisdom we have to offer and done what we can to be a better example to them, is to live our lives and love them.
Every damn fool notion to the contrary has always fallen apart over the course of human history. And for good reason. Because everyone wants the freedom to determine their own lives. Whether we like it or not.
It's the best thing my parents gave me.
And it is likely the most important thing I will have to offer my kids, when all is said and done.
When I think about all of the things I have to offer my kids, this is the one that my parents offered me that I cherish the most.
Thanks Mom. Thanks Dad and Marilyn.
Thanks to all parents, family, teachers, and friends who let me get life figured out for myself.
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