Why the debate over detention matters

Hotair, a favorite conservative video site I frequent, offers this bit of evidence that the debate about detention matters.

Abu Quatada: Radical cleric to be released in 24 hours

'Qatada, who is accused of giving advice and support to terrorists including the leader of the September 11 hijackers, has been described in official documents as a 'truly dangerous individual' who was 'heavily involved, indeed at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa'eda.'

He has been convicted twice in Jordan in his absence for conspiracy to carry out bomb attacks on two hotels in Amman in 1998, and providing finance and advice for a series of bomb attacks in Jordan planned to coincide with the Millennium.

It was those convictions which allowed him to argue in the Appeal Court he would not get a fair treatment in his home country.

With the prospect of extradition removed, the Ministry of Justice has been forced to release him by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

The bail order was signed this afternoon and he is expected to be released from Long Lartin jail in Worcestershire tomorrow.

He is will be electronically tagged and put under a 22-hour curfew at his family home in Acton, West London.

He will not be allowed a mobile phone or access to the internet and the bail conditions include a long list of Islamic radicals with whom he is banned from communicating, including Osama bin Laden."

This detention debate is not over with, yet. Basing important matters of national security on political correctness rather than sober judgment is a mistake. The British authorities are doing their best to account for the situation, here. But their dilemma illustrates why we need to think carefully and thoroughly about how such matters get resolved reasonably.

And, more broadly, still, this illustrates why on-going engaged reasoned and practical policy discussions and debates need our attention rather than the distractions of the politics of personal destruction.

The stakes are too high to engage important questions any other way.

Luckily, we're up to the challenge.

A Father's Day message to remember

I'm voting for John McCain, at this point, at least until I hear from Barack Obama that he is not pressing for a withdrawal (and abandoning his regressive trade, health care, and other economic policies would be persuasive to me, as well).

But I have to say that when Obama makes speeches like this one, he makes it very difficult for conservatives to dismiss him.



That's how it should be. That's what I want to keep seeing this election. I want to see both of these candidates keep taking the high ground and competing for who can take the highest ground, not who can sling the lowest blows.

This is a good opening gambit by Obama. We'll see what McCain has to offer.

And I have to say for McCain's sake and the sake of conservatives, if they go for the low blow, they're going to get their asses handed to them. And if they keep down that path, I might be one of the people handing it to them.

Buck up, little soldiers. Make your children proud this election.

And if you don't, look forward to sitting it out for 4 years.

Because we are changing the way elections are run, this time around.

Happy Father's Day.

Boumediene and the future of liberty

I'm still reading the decision, but, while I share conservative concerns about terrorists escaping justice to freshly kill more Americans, Boumediene looks like a good decision to me.

This argument within the decision looks exactly right to me:

"That the Framers considered the writ a vital instrument
for the protection of individual liberty is evident from the
care taken to specify the limited grounds for its suspension:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not
be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion
the public Safety may require it." Art. I, §9, cl. 2; see
Amar, Of Sovereignty and Federalism, 96 Yale L. J. 1425,
1509, n. 329 (1987) ("[T]he non-suspension clause is the
original Constitution's most explicit reference to remedies").
The word "privilege" was used, perhaps, to avoid
mentioning some rights to the exclusion of others. (In
deed, the only mention of the term "right" in the Constitution,
as ratified, is in its clause giving Congress the power
to protect the rights of authors and inventors. See Art. I,
§8, cl. 8.)

Surviving accounts of the ratification debates provide
additional evidence that the Framers deemed the writ to
be an essential mechanism in the separation-of-powers
scheme. In a critical exchange with Patrick Henry at the
Virginia ratifying convention Edmund Randolph referred
to the Suspension Clause as an "exception" to the "power
given to Congress to regulate courts." See 3 Debates in
the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the
Federal Constitution 460­464 (J. Elliot 2d ed. 1876) (here
inafter Elliot's Debates). A resolution passed by the New
York ratifying convention made clear its understanding
that the Clause not only protects against arbitrary suspensions
of the writ but also guarantees an affirmative
right to judicial inquiry into the causes of detention. See
Resolution of the New York Ratifying Convention (July 26,
1788), in 1 Elliot's Debates 328 (noting the convention's
understanding "[t]hat every person restrained of his lib
erty is entitled to an inquiry into the lawfulness of such
restraint, and to a removal thereof if unlawful; and that
such inquiry or removal ought not to be denied or delayed,
except when, on account of public danger, the Congress
shall suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus").
Alexander Hamilton likewise explained that by providing
the detainee a judicial forum to challenge detention, the
writ preserves limited government. As he explained in
The Federalist No. 84:

'[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been,
in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments
of tyranny. The observations of the judicious
Blackstone . . . are well worthy of recital: `To bereave
a man of life . . . or by violence to confiscate his estate,
without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious
an act of despotism as must at once convey the
alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but
confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to
jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is
a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more
dangerous engine of arbitrary government.' And as a
remedy for this fatal evil he is everywhere peculiarly
emphatical in his encomiums on the habeas corpus
act, which in one place he calls `the BULWARK
of the British Constitution.'' C. Rossiter ed., p. 512 (1961)
(quoting 1 Blackstone *136, 4 id., at *438)."

I have read many of the criticisms of the court and I am making my way through the decision and the dissents. So I am open to my early impression being wrong on this matter.

Guaranteeing habeas corpus does not seem like sound judgment, to me, at this point, because no terrorists will ever escape justice. They undoubtedly will. As they undoubtedly do currently. As they undoubtedly would, do, and have under any legal regime, no matter how security-minded, liberal or illiberal. It would be very difficult to argue that more illiberal regimes that engage in more indefinite detentions without such concerns for civil liberties in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the like do not continue to have problems with known terrorists escaping justice or terrorism being effectively wiped off of their political radar screens. Each of these countries arguably have far worse problems on both counts.

The question is are we willing to follow such examples, to similarly sacrifice liberal democratic values, with such poor results to show for it?

Guaranteeing habeas corpus seems to me to be good law, at this point, because it comes to terms with this fact of justice, no matter the legal regime, and affirms that an independently important judicial priority is guaranteeing that innocent peoples' liberties are not sacrificed, and certainly not indefinitely, without some kind of recourse to challenge such detention and expect those detaining them to present evidence that demonstrates that their detention is just. Without such evidence, they should not be in detention in the first place, or, at the very least, a clearer and more obvious path to securing evidence should be clear in the minds of those detaining them because the reasons for detaining a suspect are so clear and warranted. Those whose mindsets and policies are driven around fear rather than evidence get impatient about civil liberties and due process when lives are at stake.

And that is exactly why habeas corpus is such an established legal principle. And that is the point that the court is making in this decision.

A serious concern for civil liberties is the future of conservativism, liberalism, and liberal democracy, because it is the only decision that is squared with liberty and the liberal democratic values that underpin them.



I'm open to being persuaded differently on this question, by either American conservatives or British Laborites, whose similar position is argued in this video, convinced of the case for more indefinite or longer detentions. I don't want Americans or anyone killed by terrorists any more than anyone else. I am persuaded by the Labor representative in this discussion that some kind of procedure for petitioning to hold suspects that law enforcement, military officials, and prosecutors have more confidence are, in fact, terrorist suspects, while evidence is being gathered, is needed. But allowing the terrorists to scare Americans, Brits and others into abandoning our liberal democratic values is exactly the point of terrorism, as London's conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, argues eloquently in that discussion of civil liberties.

I've read a lot of the praise and criticism for the decision. Now I need to plow through the decision and its dissents.

As well as respond to Courtney's question, read and work on my book, clean my apartment, do a character sketch for this theater script my roommate and I are working on and coordinate work on this film idea, get this Father's Day card out, today, continue reading Intelligent Investor and do my financial and investment work, work on lesson plans for next year, get Devang's boxes sent out to him, and try to manage my time, money, energy and resources to get all of this done.

Perhaps I'm a little too ambitious. How someone so ambitious could be so goddamn lazy, I have no clue, but somehow I manage it.

One thing at a time.

Starting with Dad.

It's the little things

It's the little signs of progress that warm my heart.

James Q. Wilson - Can I Be a Meaningful Blogger?

"A lot of readers have suggested that I am not a helpful blogger because I refer people to other studies for data to support my arguments. These critics are probably right. Were I devoted to blogging full time, I would quote all the data and summarize all of the studies, thereby getting nothing else done. I had assumed when I started my blog messages that people would pause, think, and look up facts. A few have, but most seem to have opinions they like to express quickly. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it doesn't advance knowledge. Let me join the opinion parade by offering a few of my own: This country imprisons too many people on drug charges with little observable effect. A better solution can be found in Hawaii, where a judge uses his powers to keep drug users in treatment programs (it's called Project Hope; look it up). The costs of crime are hard to measure (so are the costs of confinement). The reader who does not want to drive five miles to find the book, Prison State, that discusses this in detail is wasting my time and his. It is not hard to study deterring crime, but I can't imagine trying to teach someone in a blog how to do a regression analysis. I wish I could do that, but it would take time, and blog commenters seem not to have much time."

The fact that the most prominent proponent of "broken windows" policing seems to be advocating some form of drug legalization is a great sign.

You combine Rudy Giuliani's courage in taking down mafia figures - people engaged in serious and dangerous criminal activity - with a greater attention to liberty around issues where freedom is a better corrective than law enforcement or stiffer sentences - drugs and guns are two of many such places, to my mind - and you will have much more effective law enforcement, a culture of liberty which better promotes responsibility around such issues while acknowledging the limitations of governance, and liberal democratic commitments that we can be proud of.

And this is an important sign that this is, likely, the direction in which we are moving.

Free peoples can't romanticize repression for very long. It goes against their grain. It also violates common sense and leads to an awful lot of failure that responsible people will want to correct.

There is a reason that humanity works from less freedom to more freedom over time. It's not just because it's sweet or because their mommies told them so.

It's because it makes for better citizens and societies.

You doubt that? Spend some time in North Korea or Iran. Then come back and tell me how great repression works.

I'll keep my freedom, thank you very much. And I expect more and better.

Because that what it means to be an American. And to love liberty and democracy.

Geek alert

This is totally a nerdy aside, so be warned.

I am reading a really excellent book written by my undergraduate thesis advisor, David Ericson, the most thoughtful and decent political science professor or professor of any kind I studied with at Wichita State University - that's why I wanted him as my advisor - called Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America - that argues the exact idea that is responsible for why Dr. Ericson had so much influence on my thinking and on me.

His book is a brilliant and elaborated argument for how proslavery and antislavery arguments before the civil war were both made in the tradition of American liberalism - "a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values" - and how those arguments, and Abraham Lincoln's historically contexual antislavery argument of "a house divided against itself cannot stand," in particular - guided the historical events that led to the civil war.

Dr. Ericson puts responsibility for war squarely on the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln, arguing, I think correctly, that the American civil war was not inevitable, but rather the result of Lincoln's argument and the reaction of Southern moderates to that argument.

Civil war military historian James McPherson has argued, I think accurately, as well, that the American civil war could likely have been resolved diplomatically with intervention by the French government admidst the war.

But Dr. Ericson gets to the heart of the matter in this book: the American civil war could have been averted by the participants, up front, and specifically by Lincoln, by other options. And the most serious option that matters to me and I think follows from Ericson's overall reasoning is that it could have been resolved given a commitment to a more genuinely and liberal democratic argument in favor of peaceful debate over the matter of slavery arriving at a consensus that would resolve the question as a matter of law and, in the process of having that debate, persuading the consciences of slaveholders and non-slaveholders, alike, to give up slavery as an illiberal institution. The fact of so many European countries, including the British Empire, abolishing slavery by law rather than by civil war is prima facie evidence that the United States could have resolved the question of slavery than by other means than civil war.

That war is the bloodiest in American history. It killed 600,000 people. And it is the avoidance of such civil wars, ironically, that inspired Thomas Hobbes to make his original argument, in the Leviathan, for governments premised on reason rather than on the domination of one religious group over another or on religious premises, at all, and which helped Great Britain and other countries to adopt governing principles that aimed and largely succeeded to transcend the kinds of civil wars that divided the American union.

It is an important argument about arguments, ideas, and choices and their responsibility for the unfolding of world events. And it is the most important influence that Dr. Ericson had on my thinking and on my life.

The failure to take the debate over ideas and arguments seriously enough likely, in my mind, led to the unecessary deaths of 600,000 Americans that might have been avoided with a more sustainable and workable political resolution based upon a democratic debate that persuaded Americans of the need to abolish slavery.

And it is the failures of power and the failures of those who have it and aspire to have it to take seriously such debates, the arguments that underpin them, and better ideas arrived at by such reason, that is the most serious and tragic mistake of governance and humanity in all of its history, I believe. It is responsible for more human misery than any of the mistakes that humanity has been subject to, I believe.

And it is a legacy that can end only as humanity and its governing leaders take responsibility for the mistake.

And correcting that mistake is the focus of my writing and my life.

Talk about a teacher having an impact on a student's life.

Thanks, Dr. Ericson. For everything.

North Korea, Norwegian Black Metal, and Vice TV

Andrew Sullivan, again - goddamn, that guy is on the cutting edge of so much shit - shares this video tour of North Korea, this morning, that points me to a really exciting, interesting new news source - VBS.TV, Vice magazine's on-line video portal - that I have a feeling I will be visiting often.




And if you can't get yourself worked up about a behind-the-scenes look at the Not-So-Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea, then Vice TV features stories like this one on the Norwegian Black Metal scene.



And if your curiosity about Scandanavian death metal is not piqued, you might check out this visit Vice folks take to the heart of Sudan.



It's a whirlwind of domestic and international news, music, and assorted stories you're not gonna find on network TV, that's for sure.

All I gotta say is: mainstream media is in deep shit.

D-Day

Great Satan's Girlfriend reminds me that today is June 6, the 64th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.



D-Day is one of the most important reminders of the sacrafices are, at times, unavoidable in the cause of freedom and democracy.

It is also a reminder, for all of our insecurities about liberal values being weak in the face of governing philosophies of force and repression, that liberal democratic values clearly make us stronger, by any objective standard.

Not only do those intimidated by the likes of Hitler and his formidable use of force for whatever purposes they deemed worthy forget that he lost this battle and that war, but that all of the serious governing philosophies of force - Nazism, Communism, Fascism, imperialism, theocracy and Jihadism, Baathism and other cults of personality - have all either long since lost power or grow weaker with the march of freedom.

In the case of Normandy, that was for a reason:

"Although there were several well-known disputes among the Allied commanders, their tactics and strategy were essentially determined by agreement between the main commanders. By contrast, the German leaders were bullied and their decisions interfered with by Hitler, controlling the battle from a distance with little knowledge of local conditions."

What is missing is not an empirical basis for the notion that freedom and democracy serve us better, even in wartime.

What is missing is the courage for us to acknowledge it as so, so scared are we of our own liberal democratic shadows and so much do we lack confidence in our own decency and nobility of purpose.

It need not be that way.

And today is a good day to remember that.

To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world

In honor of Bobby Kennedy and the 40th anniversary of his tragic assassination, today, I wanted to offer a glimpse of why I take Bobby Kennedy's legacy as seriously as I do.



Bobby and I would have our disagreements, if he were alive, today, I am sure. We both have a passionate concern about real poverty, the people around us, and improving the conditions of the lives of our neighbors. Where Bobby was a lifelong liberal who often looked to the heritage of his party - an affiliation I shared most of my life - to government to solve those problems, I am a independently-minded policy thinker who sees a government as often a temporary solution, around most issues that are not directly related to national and international security and domestic law enforcement, that needs to give way to freely engaged efforts by a democratic civil society to look after our neighbors and be our brother's keeper.

Where Bobby was loyal to the American Democratic party and all of its ideological failings and blindspots, I am a political independent, loyal to all decent peoples, a cautiously idealistic realist, inspired by the noblest ideals of all humanity and highly disillusioned by both major parties in America and most who seek power in the world and their self-righteous tendencies towards pious assumptions of final answers on so many serious policy questions that they do not nor could they ever have in any final form, who simultaneously assumes, largely, a good faith commitment on the part of most political participants and most liberal democratic and often many illiberal and undemocratic citizens to address questions in ways that they care about passionately and sincerely, if often wrongheadedly. I am a liberal and a conservative in both of their most noble liberal democratic traditions and aspirations, I hope. And I am and have been subject to each of their sanctimonious and foolish shortcomings, as well, sadly.

Where Bobby saw a Vietnam War irrevocably lost, a source of seemingly endless unnecessary tragedy, and desperately needing an American withdrawal, I see of that war as I see of our current war, a tragic but noble effort to liberate millions of people from the grip of despotism and autocracy that can only be abandoned at the expense of many innocent lives. Both wars were engaged poorly, I believe, with the United States failing to take nearly seriously enough the fears and aspirations, the consultation and the self-determination of two sovereign peoples, too careless with its enormous power and the trust it is founded upon, and with failures of pragmatic political and military planning associated with both efforts which led and continue to lead to far too many unnecessary and tragic deaths, of Americans and of Iraqis and Vietnamese.



Bobby Kennedy was a man subject to such failings, as well. As am I.

But Bobby also embodied America's and liberal democracies' most noble aspirations, as well.

And most noble of all is his commitments to humanity articulated in these two beautiful speeches, and, most especially, the final lines from his impromptu eulogy for the Reverend Martin Luther King.

"My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

To tame the savageness of man, and make more gentle the life of this world.

I have never heard a stronger articulation of the aim of humanity and its governance.

And this speech is the finest, I believe, I have ever heard from any American politician.

For all of our romance with "swagger and bluster and the wielders of force," at this tragic point in American and world history, Bobby Kennedy is an important reminder for all of us of the perils of the divisions and painful realities such swagger reflects and sows.

As Bobby said it much more eloquently:

"For when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color, or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who are different from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies. Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great. But we can perhaps remember, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life that they seek as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, surely this bond of common fate, this bond of common roles can begin to teach us something, that we can begin to work a little harder, to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

It is for this reason that Bobby Kennedy is one of greatest political figures in American history, and one of its wisest thinkers and leaders.

And it is for this reason that I mourn and mark every 5th of June, not just this one.

"To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world."

We will do our sincere best, Bobby. Godspeed.

"I can't hear you. Take those boogers out of your mouth."

A friend recommended Zach Galifianakis, recently, and I located this gem.



Pretty hilarious and adorable.

Nice way to get the day started.

Back to Hobbes.

Torture and the realities of force as a governing philosophy

Andrew Sullivan alerts me to Taxi to the Dark Side, winner of the Academy Award for the 2008 Best Documentary, that I'll have to see if I can get my hands on it, when I get the chance.



It is very troubling to witness what people will rationalize, foolishly, in the name of fear.

I actually do believe in exceptions on matters of torture. I agree with experts that, typically, winning the confidence and relative trust of captives is more likely to yield more reliable information and that torture tends to yield less reliable information by means that are often very ugly, especially when one considers the innocent people against which torture is too often used.

There are times, though, when I would be willing to make exceptions. They are rare and ones easy to rationalize in uglier directions. But there are times when danger is genuinely imminent, when interrogators are clear, without doubt, that they are dealing with someone who is responsible for and/or has important information about that imminent danger, when time is of the essence and is too short for more decent efforts to yield information, and when more aversive, aggressive methods have a higher likelihood than more trust-building measures to yield information. The least possible necessary aggression and force should be used, generally. But I have a broad tolerance for compromising that principle when lives are on the line and other methods are not likely to save them in time. Such circumstances are rare and generally hypothetical. But I think it is valuable to acknowledge and discuss and debate them, up front, so that interrogators are less likely to rationalize torture.

But, generally, torture is both wrong and counterproductive. The case of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, cited in this documentary, who was tortured to provide testimony to a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Queda developing chemical and biological weapons capability, is an excellent example of the problem with this tendency when torture is used.

It is a classic and foolhardy human tendency to turn to tough when we are afraid, when deeper, more honest and reflective thinking is what is needed. It is the oldest, most tragic, and most pernicious of mistakes of human history.

The rationalization of force for whatever purposes, even when our purposes are undermined by force, is the oldest, most destructive, most foolish tendency in human history.

In fact, it was because of this tendency, in the religious wars of 16th and 17th century Europe, where millions of people lost their lives over hundreds of years of struggle to forcibly convert Protestants and Catholics and to determine which religious followers would govern nations, that people like Thomas Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and so many other political thinkers, challenged this notion that force rather than liberty and reason should guide our consciences and the ways we govern.

Modern liberal democracies are so removed from that horrific and tragic legacy, that we have the luxury of forgetting its destruction and its valuable lessons.

Torture is a function of that legacy, not the inevitable villain amongst the heroes of force as a governing philosophy. It is this philosophy and its ugly history that has rationalized torture and its ilk for the long stretch of humanity.

And that is the still tragic history of regressive periods, like our most recent and still historical and political period, when force rather than freedom and reason is rationalized as a means to finally rid the world of its vices, like torture, and their practitioners.

It has never accomplished either. It never will accomplish either. And the illusion that it might has plagued humanity at least since the beginning of civilization.

And today, as then, it has left a wake of human destruction that is undoubtedly unparalleled by any other human vice imaginable.

It is time for that legacy to end.

The last throes of ideology

Brilliant analysis, after my own heart, by Janet Dailey in The Daily Telegraph, this morning.

The death throes of 20th-century ideology

Just a taste:

"You and I, and the millions of despairing Britons who are either personally victimised by these idiotic policies or who sympathise with those who have been, can see clearly not only that common sense and proportionality are vanishing commodities in public policy, but that those in power seem to be losing their grip on recognisable reality.

So who is it, then, that is technically insane? Lots of people, obviously: this mania has infected whole swaths of the governing and public administrative classes.

In order to understand how perfectly ordinary functionaries - and even some seemingly lucid politicians - have come to be swept up in mass psychosis, we need to understand what all these various instances of it (not to mention dozens of others, which there is no space to list here) have in common. What is the thread that runs through the obtuse failure to understand the consequences of not collecting rubbish, of making the police (and the hospitals) conform to Soviet-style production targets, and of using draconian espionage techniques on blameless citizens?

It is the confusion, the desperate disorientation of a collapsing belief system. What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority.

The notion that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Because they have taken so much power over our lives, we feel free to blame the governing classes for everything that goes wrong. And they feel they must address our every difficulty because everything is their fault. (Indeed, their interventions so frequently exacerbate our problems that we are actually quite right to blame them much of the time.)

When there is a real crisis - not just dog poo or over-loaded wheelie bins - the solution always follows the same formula: take more power away from the people.

For example, the price of home-heating is now a serious problem, so what does the Government suggest? A return to zero VAT for heating fuel, which would lower the price instantly and significantly for everyone? Nope. What they propose is a hugely intrusive programme (at present illegal under data protection laws) in which private financial information about the poor would be handed to power companies, in the hope that the disadvantaged might be given more leeway in paying their bills.

So somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall, someone could have the power to decide which of us is deserving enough to have the confidential details of our hardship handed over to some anonymous manager at British Gas or Npower for their compassionate consideration. (Why not medical records, too? Surely the chronic sick could be given heating privileges?)

This madness is not all Gordon Brown's fault. He just happens to be the man presiding over the final moments of a political philosophy that has reached a dead end."

Brilliant. Dead-on. And much more genuinely liberal and democratic, in the John Stuart Mill and Alexis DeToqueville sense of those terms, than any of the nonsense pretending to be both this political period.

This is one of the central theses of my book. Ideology functions, today, much like religion in 16th and 17th century Britain and Europe. Protestants and Catholics fought and warred over which sect had rightful claim on legitimate religious authority and political governance throughout Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was these wars, in Great Britain, in particular, that inspired Thomas Hobbes to write The Leviathan as a treatise in favor of reason and secular thought to guide and provide legitimacy to governance. This is the reason Hobbes is considered the father of modern political science. His writing was a turning point in enlightened thought and reason, inspiring many Europeans, and, later, Americans, to commit themselves to reason as the basis for modern life that could transcend such bloody and pointless divisions and wars.

Ideology, I believe, serves a similar, if moderately more reasoned, function in 20th and early 21st century liberal democratic politics. Politics and matters of governance are not only seriously confused and confounded by ideological political battles. Reasonable policy, and the reasoned debate and discussion for pragmatic policy, is seriously distorted and obscured by ideology and its adherents. And more genuine liberty and democratic engagement is undermined by ideology and its commitment to power at the expense of both liberty and more reasoned policy and use of force, when force is necessary and the only best option.

And Janet Dailey does a nice job of illustrating the insanity that ideology, especially the ideology of power and the state settling matters of personal and public morality, engenders in contemporary life.

Ideology, like religion, is a lazy person's means of letting groups and an established body of thought attempt, futilely, to think for us, rather than taking up the responsibilities of independent and critical thought, judgment, conscience, and subsequent action more seriously and honestly.

Ideology is the last throes of humanity in its immature state attempting to settle its problems by the intellectually and otherwise lazy and dishonest means of power and imposition rather than by engaged and honest liberal and democratic thought.

And like its dubious ancestoral precedents in religious warfare, ideological warfare will and is similarly failing to reasonably and pragmatically address our most serious problems because it cannot do so.

Only reasoned thought and engagement offers that opportunity.

And folks like Janet Dailey and I make those arguments and wait for the world to come to terms with the limits of ideology and power to resolve our most serious problems and conflicts.

And if the efforts of Hobbes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, DeToqueville, Mill, Wolstonencraft, Dewey, Hayek, Friedman, and the like, offer us any guide, it is that though such a wait involves patience, history has a way of vindicating reason and liberty and more honest, genuine, and democratic engagement over the pursuit of power of so many illiberal forces that the hubris of those who would substitute power for free thought and conscience is stunning, to say the least, if not ultimately doomed.

My theoretical work in the use of least possible necessary aggression addresses the issue of how and how much force should be used when it is necessary and no other real options exist, not just when the use of force suits our fancy or our self-righteous notions of the world, and offers a guide for how the most limited government reasonable can be effectively employed to address the limited issues that government, and government alone, can do effectively and a plan for how many functions that liberal democratic and even illiberal and/or undemocratic governments have assumed but perform more poorly than a liberal democratic civil society would perform can be transitioned to a freer, more decentralized civil society that provides for needs independent of central governing authority.

Liberal democracy - meaning, a free egalitarian, meritocratic, democratic community and marketplace of ideas, choices, and consequences - is still the most viable and workable governing and living arrangement available, more honestly and thoughtfully conceived. And though the use of force is an important and limited function of a more genuinely conceived liberal democracy, it is incompatible with liberal democracy as a central governing philosophy. Hence the reasonable conflicts between liberal democracies and their illiberal, force-driven counterparts throughout the 18th, 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.

The early 21st century, as Janet Dailey wisely observes in this piece, have been the last and regressive throes of 20th century statist, power-driven ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. And the failure of those ideologies will give way to a patiently cultivated commitment to independent thought and reason guiding political thought and governance in the 21st century and beyond.

Pragmatic reason is the only practical guide to policymaking now or in any era. And that it has been overcast by ideological battles, in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and religious battles in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, is a foolish legacy for the world to come to terms with if we want more reasoned, effective, and honest policies and liberal democratic societies and cultures in the future.

And recognizing the problem of ideology for what it is, as G.I. Joe would say, is half the battle.

Or as Shakespeare might have put it:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

- The Trial of MacBeth, Act V, Scene V

Here's to signifying something.

Freedom and virtue

Freedom, like reason, science, technology, and the rest, is a source of good in the world. But like those other sources of good, freedom is not necessarily used for good or evil, alone. Freedom is the rich soil from which virtue, and all things that flow from it, grows.

It is soil that must, because of our initial vulnerability, be planted with seeds by others before virtue can sprout.

But virtue's seeds cannot, ultimately, be tended to by others, primarily. We must grow our own garden ourselves. There will be weeds and parasites that threaten the growth of virtue. At times, they may overwhelm its blossoms.

Still virtue must, in the end, be nurtured and harvested by each person in their own soil.

Virtue that is hovered over or controlled by another, is not real virtue, in the end. Real virtue does not need the control or oversight of others. We might seek or accept the input of other gardeners. But if virtue is not grown by our own hands, if conscience does not make our final judgments, if self-discipline does not, finally, come from ourselves, then it can never fully express itself and never fully mature. Discipline that is forever imposed by others never really becomes self-discipline or independent judgment and maturity at all. Only our own consciences, the fruits of our own labors and reflection, can develop the seed of virtue, lest we be stuck in the immaturity that is found by being tended to, persistently, by another. And, even then, it is only how and what we learn and how to thrive that determines the trajectory of our growth or lack thereof.

Many of us begin with soil that is rocky, dry, infertile, or otherwise difficult to grow from. But grow we must. And no amount of oversight from others can ever, ultimately, grow the harvest that only we can cultivate. And our dependence on that oversight, and its false promise, at long last, is the source of so much failure to mature, grow, and thrive by, all too tragically, the vast majority of humanity.

Freedom does not guarantee virtue, any more than repression.

But it does offer far richer soil, the only real soil from which virtue can grow, in fact, and the only real opportunity, for virtue to grow sustainably and fulfilling the promise of its seed to thrive given conditions that support its development.

If we do not live under such conditions, we must create them.

That is life's clearest lesson.

And the need to create conditions that support our growth, even if they do not currently exist, is the basis for the march of freedom, and virtue, and genuine progress for humanity.

Rationalizations for power and the use of force

David Rees gets to the heart of the rationalizations of power and the use of military force, during this period, in this really hilarious post on Thomas Friedman.

Thomas Friedman "Suck-on-This" Anniversary Celebratory Book Excerpt

First, the video (you gotta see it to believe it):



"'Suck. On. This.' Three little words every lonely, lovelorn Middle Easterner longs to hear. What Iraqi or Iraniani or Afghanistaniani doesn't secretly hope to open their shabby, sand-caked door to find American boys and girls leaning seductively against the wall, smacking their Zionist Bubbalicious, and inviting -- demanding -- someone suck upon their flawless American private parts? Atten-SHUN!

Or was Thomas Friedman suggesting that Iraqis needed to suck on the American boys' and girls' guns? In that case, when the American boys and girls go house to house, saying 'Suck. On. This,' maybe they should stick their guns right in front of the Iraqis' mouths, pressing the cold steel against their lips, so the appropriate response is obvious. Gives new meaning to the phrase BLOWBACK, doesn't it?

But wait, sports fans! Maybe I took too many "Left-Wing Dummy Dumb-Dumb Pills" this morning, and have misinterpreted what Friedman meant! It makes more sense that Friedman wants the Iraqis to suck on the very concept of American-ness, fellating the values and heritage that make our way of life the envy of the world. Or, perhaps he thinks the Iraqis should give even more ambitious blowjobs-- and suck not only on American-ness, but also on the principles of Western Enlightenment thought, with special emphasis on free-market, representative democracy. Talk about a mouthful! (YUM!)

Of course, knowing those stubborn Iraqis, they'd probably resent being forced to suck on something so awesome. I bet they wouldn't even swallow."

It is pretty remarkable, really. The rationalizations of power and the use of force that people engage in.

It almost makes you want to cry for Robert Mugabe or Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il or the Chinese Communist government, so hard is their job wielding force as a governing philosophy, maintaining a strong state in the face of recalcitrant citizens.

Francis Fukuyama gives the Chinese government a great big hug in his most recent blog post he so sympathizes with the need of the Communists to maintain a big, macho "Strong State."

I want to cry with folks like Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman about the dilemmas of forcing the world into compliance with their greater wisdom - I mean, really, can you watch an interview like Friedman's there or read a post like Fukuyama's and doubt their greater wisdom? Come now - but then I remember all the people who have died or been imprisoned or otherwise had tragedies made of their lives in the name of that hubris.

And I, for one, am humbled.

But apparently humility is for the weak. Not big macho men like Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama.

Death, destruction, and endless tragedy, apparently, only emboldens the strong amongst us to rationalize force as a governing philosophy - liberty and democratic engagement are for the weak, you see, who do not understand the genius that is embodied in power for whatever purposes they deem it necessary - against the weak, who do not know enough about their own interests to wield liberty freely without offering sufficient obedience to the strong.

So, sometimes, the strong must say, to all of us, really, not just the Iraqis:

Suck. On. This.

Otherwise, what would this world come to, really? Peace and harmony and kumbaya, you fuckin' hippie.

No. Thomas and Francis are right.

Sometimes the world just needs to learn three simple words:

Suck. On. This.

Really. It's for our own good.

"Yeah, I did"

That's why conservatives are jumping all over Scott McClellan. I kept seeing "snitch" all over conservative websites. Drudge Report. Wonkette. And I kept thinking, "Snitching about what? What was Scott saying that was not already public knowledge?"

And then I saw this interview:



"But that was a very disillusioning moment for me when I found out, uh, when the press, it initially hit the press. And we were in believe it was in North Carolina, if I remember correctly. And a reporter shouted out to the President, is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this previously, it was classified information, but the President does have the legal authority.

Walked onto Air Force One and the President asked what was the reporter was asking.

And I said, 'He asserted that you were the one who authorized Scooter Libby leaking this information.'

And he said, 'Yeah, I did.'"

That's why the shit's hitting the fan. All of the vitriol and accusations of financial motivations for this book seemed terribly premature and overreaction by conservatives to me.

But now it all makes sense.

Power represses honest engagement and reflection.

But not forever. Only as long as people are afraid.

I'm not a big fan of snitching - in this case, the prosecutions just need to end; Scooter Libby never should have been prosecuted in the first place and notice how much more information we get from someone coming forward voluntarily rather than through that ridiculous and vindictive prosecution - but we do need more honesty to clean up politics, more people being less afraid, not more prosecution.

Prosecution, like other forms of power, tends to repress more honest engagement and reflection, no facilitate it. That's why liberal thinkers wisely advise us in the direction of greater freedom and not less, prosecuting less human folly, not more. If prosecution or power really could solve more of our problems, Nazism, Communism, theocracy, and repressive government of all kinds would all have made and make more sense. They do not. Because power undermines a more honest citizenry, and more honest efforts to address our problems, it does not facilitate it. That is what Lord Acton was getting at, if we could all just take two seconds to think on the matter.

Scott, fuck the critics. Keep speaking honestly. Congress needs to step the fuck off and let an honest discussion of this war and our dysfunctional, vindictive, and repressive political system clean things up and stop romanticizing their own power to do so.

It's the fear of snitching when people fuck up, and the exacting of harm on those who do, that undermines more honesty. Obviously there are times when we must use force to contain people or defend ourselves. But that is why it is so important to be so discriminating about when that should happen. And that is why we presume in favor of freedom. Because the rationalization of our vindictive and aggressive natures and counterproductive thinking is so tempting.

It's always everyone else who we think we need to be suspicious of, especially when it comes to power, we tell ourselves. Never us.

And that's the problem.

And that is why we presume in favor of liberty and against the notion that power will or can accomplish more than it will or can. Or that we are safe with its use because we, uniquely, favor the right causes for its use.

None of us have any final say on the right causes. And believing so is the bane of human history.

And there is much tragedy left in the wake of that tendency.

More honesty. Less repression. More freedom. Less force.

Let's make sure that George Orwell's efforts were not in vain and sacrificed on the altar of our own vanity.

More truth. Less power.

Skepticism and self-importance

Andrew Sullivan posts this terrific challenge to our self-importance.



It is a challenge to skeptics and intellectuals like Andrew and myself and all thinking people in the world, including the most thoughtful, as much as it is to those with governing power.

That's what I like about Andrew. He knows this better than most people.

We all need to know greater humility. All of us. Me especially.

The foolishness of force as a governing religious philosophy

Vatican: Excommunication for female priests

The sexism and foolishness in this decree are not difficult to understand.

We are just too stubborn to learn the lesson.

Because, sadly and strangely, too many are convinced that repression is responsible for our security, even more tragically and bizarrely, our liberty, and everything that we hold true.

And so we rationalize ugly, sexist rules like this one.

This is not difficult to understand.

We are just too stubbornly foolish to face up to our self-deception.

We are too stubbornly foolish to face up to the bullshit.

And I, for one, am tired of the bullshit.

The insanity of force as a governing philosophy

Fulbright scholarships canceled for 8 Gaza students

You've got to read this story to believe it. I can think of no other single more clearly counterproductive policy by the Israeli government than this in solidifying enmities against Israel, other than the occupation, about which Israeli conservatives seem to be digging their heels in, at this point, or the killing of innocents, which is policy for Hamas. So Hamas rationalizes killing innocents, and Israel rationalizes imprisoning Palestinians in Gaza, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad rationalize terrorizing Israeli citizens, and Israel rationalizes its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And on and on and on.

And innocent Israelis and Palestinians, like these students, are subjected to the killing and repression of their governments or non-governmental terrorist actors, with no way out. And these governments and terrorist groups ask them coldly, if they dare protest, "What are you going to do about it?"

The one hope that the world has amidst its ugly and repressive ways is democratic engagement - education, thought, communication, free expression, debate, discussion, freedom of choice, learning about one another, understanding, compassion, friendship, family, love, wisdom - and the Israeli government shuts all of that down for a few Gaza students who could bring all of that back with them to this godforsaken situation or work for greater understanding and peace between Israel and Palestine from outside of Gaza, if they, quite reasonably, choose not to return. The one real hope that Israel and the Palestinians have for resolving their differences honestly, decently, and peacefully - to allow their children to seek and create a better future - and Israel and Hamas choose to repress and imprison these people instead.

This is what force as a governing philosophy looks like, for those who were curious about rationalizing it in liberal democracies, by the way. We so take our freedom for granted, we often need a healthy reminder of just how poorly force and repression as a governing philosophy have served humanity for much of its existence. And what it looks like to try to kill, imprison, and leverage our problems away rather than learning how to handle them better together, as much as possible.

This is no way to govern. It is no way to live.

And it is a legacy we must end.

How the use of force often undermines its ends

Fareed Zakaria shares good news on the terrorism front. And his analysis is a nice snapshot at how those romanticizing force to further political ends - the central purpose of terrorism - might want to reconsider the practical consequences of such a strategy.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear

"You know that we are living in scary times. Terrorist groups are metastasizing all over the globe. Al Qaeda has re-established its bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hizbullah, Hamas and other radical Islamic groups are gaining strength. You hear this stuff all the time, on television and on the campaign trail. Amid the din, it's hard to figure out the facts. Well, finally we have a well-researched, independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism, released last week by Canada's Simon Fraser University. Its findings will surprise you.

It explains that there is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, 'Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never described as such.' To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions. The MIPT notes zero deaths that year from terrorism; and START, seven.

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined 'significant' attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the 'extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.' These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Bena-zir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,' writes Mack. 'Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.'

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period."

The truth is that force as a political tactic generally fails, in the long-run, despite sometimes achieving narrow, short-term objectives, and should be weighed very carefully as an option with very serious costs, including counterproductive consequences for our long-term objectives, and only one option among many.

We need to learn to use the least possible necessary force, when it is appropriate, and no force at all, when it is not.

But, in the meantime, failure can be as solid a teacher as more careful thought and planning, and generally it is one if not the most important teacher for most people. Failure will have to be our teacher, on this matter, it appears, because we have proven to be quite stubborn fools on this matter.

But it cannot last forever. Noone wants to fail forever, no matter how embarrassing it is to face or acknowledge failure. We will face it. Give us time.

In the meantime, it's good to know that the folks who need to learn this most are doing so with increasing frequency: our terrorist enemies.

Cowardice and power

I am convinced, at this point - as I read coverage of possible peace deals between Israel and Palestine and Israel and Syria, and as I read the vitriol being slung around this Presidential election season - that the single most serious obstacle to progress on most serious policy issues is not a lack of will, power, knowledge, and certainly not pressure or leverage.

The single most serious obstacle to progress on most issues is cowardice.

And it is a particular and perhaps the most pernicious form of cowardice: the pride associated with not ever, and certainly not very often, admitting that we are wrong. About anything. And certainly about anything that matters most.

An important part of the problem is that all of the power and manipulation, the pressure and the leverage and others forms of aggression, make it very difficult for people to let down their emotional defenses adequately to acknowledge mistakes or the need to rethink.

But watching a world, liberal and illberal, that is perpetually rationalizing illiberal practices, consistently rationalizing forcing their way through issues that need more respect for conscience and the thoughts and judgments of others, it has become clear to me that the only way out of this mess of cowardice is more courage.

Meaning, cowardice got us into so many of the messes we face. Cowardice is the animating feature of terrorism that cannot reason or engage respectfully with those whom terrorists have disagreements and kills innocents instead. Cowardice is what animates a polarized liberal democratic politics that is more insistent on forcing others to submit to our will than on engaging in free, good faith, and honest democratic discussion that builds understanding rather than enmity. Cowardice is what animates all efforts to overpower those who disagree with us rather than to reason with others and to take reason and its rigors seriously.

The cowardice that animates so many power engagements and uses of power is the rationalizing logic of terrorism, despotism, Communism, theocracy, genocide, organized crime, and so many of the ugliest facts of contemporary life. And it is a cowardice that, sadly, liberal democratic peoples share with each of these uglier commitments and crimes of petty and dangerous people.

And liberal peoples are too beholden to their illiberal impulses to give up the practices that give such people the cover they crave to continue their ugly practices

It is our cowardice that keeps us stuck in our most serious dilemmas, I am convinced. Not the cowardice associated with avoiding anything that smacks of danger and aggression. That cowardice is the one we are most afraid of (it's kind of a funny fear to have, when you think about it).

The cowardice that keeps liberal peoples stuck is the cowardice associated with refusing to acknowledge that, perhaps, they might not fully understand the problems they face. That they might be wrong. And that they might need to engage those they disagree with to understand, more fully, whether we are in fact wrong or not.

It is the cowardice of terrorists and despots. In fact, it is this cowardice that is the animating logic of terrorism and despotism.

And, today, liberal democratic peoples have embraced this cowardice as their own. With very little to show for it, too, tragically.

You see it every time an Israeli or a Palestinian argues that peace is not achievable. It is clearly achievable, with partners who are willing to make peace. It is only unachievable because such people poison that well and want others to join them in their ugly rationalization.

You see this cowardice every time that anyone of any ideological stripe claims to have more answers than they do - which is more often than not, really - or that ideology offers them or anyone more answers than it does because ideology is forged in the heat of issues of the highest stakes, like somehow the heat of high stakes makes one more likely to have a better understanding. More often such heats clouds understanding, because it stalls us in incomplete and self-righteous ideas of the world. Such is the reason that most thinking people do not turn to religion to resolve most serious problems of reason in the 21st century. Because it too often offers answers with much heat and little light.

And the temptation to believe that heat rather than light is needed to solve most serious issues is a problem of cowardice, fundamentally. It is a instinctive tendency to turn to aggression, the instinct that most consistently betrays a thinking humanity trying to avoid the mistakes of unreasoning animals that we so often compare ourselves to in an effort to understand ourselves and this instinct, rather than the one quality that most consistently solves humanity's serious problems: our reason and understanding.

Aggression obscures reason and understanding. It drives them below ground, as people become afraid to talk and reason more honestly and openly, more with one another rather than at one another's expense, and undermines our fuller capacity for more genuine understanding. More pernicious, we have a million variations on aggression as a means of containing it, but generally just rationalizing it in different forms, which still undermine reasoned discussion and understanding all in the name of promoting them and containing such aggression.

Human beings have forever had ways of intimidating one another into thinking in ways that some among us approve, talking in ways that some approve, behaving in ways that we proscribe, and otherwise trying to limit freedom not to protect one another so much as to protect our cowardice that such freedom is the cause of all of our problems to deflect responsibility from all of the aggression, all of the force and repression, that we engage with one another, and with ourselves, as a means of protecting our cowardice and our emotional defenses meant to reinforce for ourselves that it is others and not ourselves who are responsible for the ugliness that we often have to offer one another in lieu of more genuine and honest reason and understanding.

But the nature of cowardice is that people are too afraid to acknowledge its presence. And to acknowledge their responsibility for it.

It is this cowardice that romanticizes and refuses to even consider the ineffectuality of leveraging our way to progress. It is this cowardice that so confuses the language of force and pressure that no action can be taken that cannot be characterized outside of its language, so fearful are we that we would wither in our vulnerability were we to consider a world that where less force was the standard for our progress and not perpetually more force.

Less force, less brutality, less warfare, less ugliness, more decency, more compassion, more freedom, more liberal and enlightened commitments have always been the standard for progress in liberal cultures, but even in illiberal cultures, in any empirical, meaningful, honest way.

But somehow we have twisted that logic in our fear and in our cowardice to face how this fear has animated our ugly behavior and the tragic consequences it has yielded.

And the saddest feature of all of this cowardice is the animating purpose of it all:

To avoid admitting that we might be wrong.

Can you imagine a more tragic and foolish reason for so many people to die or have lives destroyed?

To avoid admitting that we might be wrong.

Something so simple.

We are wrong on a million matters of ordinary life. We are wrong about what directions to take in an unfamiliar city. We are wrong about which ventures might meet with success. We are wrong about what teams might win games that we follow. We are wrong about which outfits might look attractive once we wear them. We are wrong about what efforts might fix our automobiles or our computers or any number of things we might be having problems with.

But, for some reason, with all of the clear and undeniable wrong opinions and choices that we experience in our daily lives, we cannot even conceive that we might be wrong on the most serious issues we face.

It certainly could not possibly be because we are never wrong. That is a literal impossibility.

And yet we so often behave as if that is the fact of the matter. When it could not possibly be.

And we do so, down deep, because of this cowardice. This cowardice that tells us that heat and not light is responsible for our successes. And someone or something else is responsible for our failures. And that we could not possibly be wrong on the most important and high stakes issues we face because to acknowledge such fallibility and uncertainty would be to acknowledge a fear that many of us cannot bear to admit that we live with: that we often really don't know how to address our most serious issues.

It is the humility of people like Karl Popper turned on its head. It is the arrogance of never admitting wrong thinking or wrong doing. And it is an arrogance and a cowardice that is more prevalent than not, really. Among all of us.

At one point in my life, I used to think that this was a cowardice that was most reserved for common people. People like my family. People with very little education or understanding of the world.

But with age and maturity, I have come to realize that it is an arrogance and cowardice that animates all levels of society. And it often animates more powerful circles in society more than other circles since this is where people have the most to lose from admitting their fallibility.

So we stay stuck in our cowardice. And we rationalize its presence. And it destroys more lives. And we stay stuck in the cowardice. And we rationalize its presence. And it destroys more lives. And we stay stuck in the cowardice. And we rationalize its presence. And it destroys more lives.

And on, and on, and on.

We turn to power, often, to solve problems in good faith. Our intentions often fail us. But we often come to those intentions in good faith.

But, too often, we turn to power to satiate our cowardice in the moment. But it is never satiated. Cowardice never is. But we turn to it again and again like a drug addict who never quite learns that the drug does not offer the comfort that they imagined that it might. And if turning to that drug destroys us in the process, then so be it, we rationalize. The drug of power could not possibly fail us like the soft, naive musings of reason.

Reason is for cowards. Understanding is for punks. Thinking and listening is for soft-hearted fools.

Power will satiate us and resolve our problems, this time.

It must. Because our fear of reason, but really our fear that we have been harboring all along - that we may be wrong, or worse, that we may not know the answers the problems we face - is one so compelling, because of our cowardice not because of some external force, that we cannot imagine facing it honestly.

This is the dilemma that we face today. And it will not go away until we face it. And we will remain mired in the same problems until we do.

And history will keep marching along right past all of those mistakes that we refuse to acknowledge or even consider in the process.

In the end, eventually, we want problems solved. And our desire for solutions and a path out of the unnecessary tragedy overwhelms our pride and our cowardice.

And then, and only then, will we find any genuine sense of security in the world.

Until then, we live with this cowardice. And all of the tragedy that is the fruit of its labor.

Step away from the stupid

Keith Olbermann sure does get on his high horse, don't he? I guess we all do.

Maybe we all need to step down from our saddles for a bit. Let's stop talking up all this assassination talk, what da'ya say? Some pyscho's going to see it as an opportunity and do something tragic. And that goes for Keith Olbermann as much as for Hillary Clinton.

Does anyone else giggle a little whenever Keith says, "Good night and good luck," at the end of each segment, these days?

This is why employing heat instead of light is such a stupid way to conduct liberal democratic politics. Because it generally solves little and creates more problems than it honestly or effectively addresses.

The last 8 years should be plenty evidence of that fact.

If we weren't all being so fuckin' stupid, that is. And kinda blind and utterly unable to acknowledge our own failures.

Darkness before the dawn, I think.

Why? Because we can't keep fuckin' up forever. Eventually we'll want to stop eating all the consequences.

We're morons, not hopeless.

Keith Olbermann. Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama. John McCain. George Will. E.J. Dionne. Andrew Sullivan. Michael Kinsley. Joe Nye. Francis Fukuyama.

And God knows I'm a fuckin' dipshit.

Whole fuckin' lot of us. A bunch of fuckin' morons.

Not hopeless. Not bad people. But there's plenty enough stupid to go around for everyone.

Power and its pursuit makes people stupid, I'm convinced.

Lord Acton had it half right. Power makes people stupid. And absolute power makes people really fuckin' stupid.

Wisdom for the ages.

In the meantime, as always, we have plenty of time to wisen up.

It's just a fuckin' shame that it always takes so long and so many people get hurt, in the meantime.

Let's not make this one of those times, what d'ya say?

In the meantime, let's ante up and step away from the stupid, why don't we?

Because God knows we've got quite the surplus as it is.

Bullshitting (or not) our children

I'm not even voting for Obama, at this point, and I know this is a good sign.

Lieberman's Step-Son: I'm Voting for Obama

Although I have to say that the more McCain's buddies in the press and the Senator himself open their mouths, the better President Obama sounds to me.

If he would say that he would stick with Iraq, I would swallow hard on his regressive economic policies and vote for the Senator from Illinois. God knows it would be nice to have a gay-friendly President for once.

One day, perhaps I can vote for a President who actually means it when he says that America should be a free country.

But, in the meantime, it's nice to see that the poseurs who behave otherwise can't fool the people who matter most:

Their children.

Joe Lieberman and other good people in the world need to take a long, hard look at why their children are not persuaded by their examples or their thoughts about politics and life. Because it says something about what too many people of Hillary Clinton's generation do not understand about how the world has changed and the directions in which it is moving that makes it very difficult to believe that people of this mindset can really lead anyone anywhere.

If John McCain would embrace gays and lesbians and not condescend them and if he would consider foreign policy options that are outside of his comfort zone and that of too many conservatives in Washington, it would be very difficult for me to vote against him.

But it is this disconnect that people like McCain and Clinton have with people of my generation and just people different from them and that they don't understand very well, generally, that is their biggest liability, right now.

And Barack Obama's capacity to understand and reach out does, indeed, make him a much more attractive candidate, all and all.

Perhaps conservatives will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in this election. Perhaps they deserve to.

Or perhaps they, too, can do better.

Perhaps we can all do better this election.

If we were going to do it, these are the two candidates who were most likely.

Here's to hoping for something better this campaign.

Weezer's Red Album

I can't think of a song that quite captures the attitude of this generation better.



I'mma do the things
That I wanna do
I ain't got a thing
To prove to you
I'll eat my candy
With the pork and beans
Excuse my manners
If I make a scene
I ain't gonna wear
The clothes that you like
I'm finally dandy
With the me inside
One look in the mirror
And I'm tickled pink
I don't give a hoot
About what you think

And, in addition to the failed international security policies he advocates, this is why Charles Krauthammer can fuck off.

It's nice to see Weezer with something more to say than how they'd like to live in Beverly Hills.

This is why I originally loved these boys.

Enjoy.

A little sanity in this time of paranoia

Court: Texas had no right to take polygamists' kids

We have have slowly but steadily been going fucking insane in this country over paranoia about child sexual abuse. And this case has been one of serious concern for me of just how much callousness we will rationalize in the name of that paranoia.

"The state never provided evidence that the children were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court approval, the appeals court said.

The state never provided evidence that teenage girls were being sexually abused, and never alleged any sexual or physical abuse against the other children, the court said.

It was not immediately clear whether the children scattered across foster facilities statewide might soon be reunited with parents.

Every child at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado was taken into state custody more than six weeks ago, after Child Protective Services officials argued that members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints pushed underage girls into marriage and sex and groomed boys to become adult perpetrators.

'The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department's witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger,' the court said in its ruling, overturning the order to keep the children by state District Judge Barbara Walther, a former family law attorney.

The appeals court also said the state was wrong to consider the entire ranch as an individual household and that any abuse claims could apply only to individual households."

And then, get this:

"The sect children were removed en masse during a raid that began April 3 after someone called a domestic abuse hot line claiming to be a pregnant abused teenage wife. The girl has not been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax."

A hoax. 400 children taken from their parents. And now it all may have been a hoax.

This was all for the children, remember. And 400 children may have just been forcibly removed from their parents' care because of a hoax.

What the fuck is wrong with us? As with every regressive, repressive period that the world has ever witnessed, our fears have turned us to cowardice and paranoia, and to running roughshot over our neighbors to appease that cowardice.

Justice is constituted in individual cases, not allegations against an entire community and a presumption of guilt that tears children away from their parents 400 at a time.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

Concerns about sexual abuse, in this case, may have been warranted. Concerns about murder in every generation are warranted. That doesn't mean that we run all over people that we have suspicions of - for more reasons, in this case, than a concern about child sexual abuse, if we were honest with ourselves - and take their children away from them out of our self-righteous zeal.

We have gone off the bend, is the truth. Ever since 1999 and that pedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church, we have lost our bearings, and lost faith in the heritage of liberal democratic thought, engagement, and presumptions that is the anchor for everything we take for granted in free societies.

We have become a nation of bullies and scolds. And then we bully and scold our children to not be the same. It's a fuckin' nuthouse, is what it is.

And then, like any dysfunctional family worth its salt, we all sit around and say, "This is how it has always been and this is how it will always be. Or this is how it has to be to keep us safe (or financially secure, or whatever excuse will do). And there's nothing I can do about it."

Except there is. We could own up. We could take responsibility for how out of control we have gotten in the name of being in control of our own repressed obsessions and, fruitlessly, in control of other people around us.

We could work up the courage to get honest about what a mess we have made of the world in the name of controlling it. In mental health, it's called a control issue. And the world has been going through and continues to go through one big collective control issue. And it has clear consequences for anyone not being defensive of our bullshit and how badly things have gone with our rationalizations of this repressive, regressive direction.

We are obsessed, is the truth. We are obsessed with this issue of children and sex. And this is but one illustration of the ugly direction that such an obsession creates. It's the repression that makes the obsession all the more powerful.

And this is one very important case to remind us of the virtues of liberty that we take lightly at our own risk.

If there are evidenced individual cases of genuine child sexual abuse among this sect, they should be investigated.

But bullying and scolding our way through such issues has clearly been counterproductive, to anyone not being defensive of such efforts.

These parents deserve an apology, is the truth. And for those who have been innocent of these charges and have had their children taken from them in the hopes of wrangling up child abusers, I am sorry and cannot imagine what a traumatic experience this might have been for you and your children. For those children who might be abused, among this group or in any situation, I am sorry for their pain, as well.

But we have got to grow up and stop letting our fears rather than our reason, understanding, and geuine compassion guide us.

There's a million excuses for why we've been such pricks during this period. None of them matter. We just need to stop being such pricks and stop pretending like being assholes to one another doesn't matter, when it so clearly fucks everything up.

We are all so wrapped up in our righteous indignation that we just can't give up the bullshit. And that is the problem with righteous indignation. It's inevitably wrapped up in bullshit. Because noone is right all the time. And people who think they are right all the time or that their friends are right all the time are the biggest bullshitters of all. Ask Stalin and Hitler.

We need to give up the bullshit, is the truth. And own up to what callous shitheads we have become in the name of ridding the world of callous shitheads. It's a fuckin' circus, is what it is.

And, every once in awhile, it is nice to get a little sanity amidst this circus of a regressive, repressive political period.

Good call by the Third Court of Appeals in Austin.

Perhaps a little sanity might do us some good.

Because God knows the insanity has worn on my last nerve.

Our heads catching up with our hearts

I have to say that I am immensely proud of the effort by Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the Bush Administration in handling what is an enormously complicated situation in addressing emergency humanitarian needs in Myanmar.

World faces limits to getting aid into Myanmar

"After initially agreeing to one flight on Monday, Myanmar's leaders have opened the door to daily flights by Marine and Air Force C-130 cargo planes. As of Saturday, the U.S. military had flown 21 C-130s loaded with about 500,000 pounds of aid into Yangon from their makeshift base in Utapao, Thailand.

Another four flights left Friday from the U.S. military's emergency headquarters at Utapao Air Base, in central Thailand.

'At this time, the needs are so immense, they are so large, that we're taking some risks to hope that we can get the assistance through to the ones who are most in need,' said USAID administrator Henrietta Fore. 'There is an enormous humanitarian urgency to this effort.'

Thai and Indian military missions also have been approved, and British, French and Australian warships were converging on the area.

Still, the U.N. and the international Red Cross say that between 1.6 and 2.5 million people are in urgent need of food, water and shelter. Only 270,000 have been reached so far by the aid groups.

Malloch-Brown estimated that 24 C-130 flights a day would be needed to meet the crisis — far higher than the current level. And, so far, U.S. requests to bring in helicopters, one of the few means of reaching the worst-hit regions, have been denied.

Myanmar's government has less than 40 helicopters, most old and in disrepair, and some 15 transport planes, primarily small jets unable to carry hundreds of tons of supplies.

The lack of motion is all the more visible because of the vast resources that are available to help.

Because of an annual exercise scheduled well before Cyclone Nargis hit, the U.S. has 11,000 troops in and around Thailand, and a Marine ship capable of conducting amphibious landings and long-range helicopter operations is just 30 miles off Myanmar's coast.

The French navy ship Le Mistral was waiting some 13 miles outside Myanmar's territorial waters, hoping to go in and unload its cargo of 1,000 tons of food — enough to feed 100,000 people for 15 days. The aid also includes shelters for 15,000 people.

France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert warned Friday that the government's refusal to allow aid to be delivered to people "could lead to a true crime against humanity.'

Frustrated by the inability to use such resources, dozens of U.S. congressmen signed off on a letter to President Bush asking that the United States join any international effort to intervene in Myanmar's stricken Irrawaddy Delta region by bypassing the junta's efforts to interfere with aid.

For the time being, the U.S. military will not send in aid without Myanmar's approval. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, have publicly stated that coercive intervention is not on the plate.

'We're not going to do anything unilaterally,' said Lt. Col. Douglas Powell, a spokesman for the U.S. relief effort, dubbed Operation Caring Response.

'Our hope is that they will see we have the means and the capabilities,' he said. 'We need them to take the next step and allow us to do more.'

Aid organizations also expressed doubt that unauthorized air drops would be effective.

'At best aid air-drops can only be a partial solution, at worst they give the illusion that somehow we are addressing this ever worsening humanitarian crisis,' said Jane Cocking, a spokeswoman for the British aid group Oxfam. 'The biggest risk is that aid airdrops will be a distraction from what is really needed — a highly effective aid operation on the ground.'"

Working with the military junta in Burma is delivering in ways that operating by force never could. Americans are pressuring the junta in this situation, but is there anything where Americans or others don't pressure these days? After awhile, that makes that debate kind of moot because the variable can never be assessed fairly without alternatives, and my explanations still explain the situation better, I think. The junta does not want to be shown up by outsiders and is suspicious and does not want to allow outsiders in, but they know they and their people need the help. Working with them diplomatically is working much more effectively than coercing them or using unilateral or even multilateral force. A coalition of the willing could intervene without U.N. Security Council approval. But to do so, at this point, would be foolish.

The patient diplomacy that Robert Gates and administration officials have engaged in is very admirable and clearly much more effective than routes by force.

It also helps that everyone is on the same page with this emergency rather than squabbling and bickering between one another about who is to blame that nothing is being done. There is some agreement that Burma's military junta is to blame. But there is some realism, I think, that playing blame games doesn't get basic needs met for those who need them.

The question all of us need to be asking ourselves, right now, is "What rule made all of this possible?"

Is it international law? Is it our concern for being prosecuted for war crimes? Is it domestic laws about generosity and sharing the wealth? Is it the 10 commandments (though shalt not let thou neighbors go without emergency supplies after a cyclone)?

And if it isn't any of those things, what is it?

You know what it is?

It's our general good will. It's our decency. It's our consciences.

It's the fact that, despite all of our flaws, we are basically decent people.

And no rule could or does make that possible. It couldn't if we wanted to it to with all our hearts. It would always be our hearts that would make the difference.

It is long overdue that our heads catch up with that fact about our hearts. And stop taking our hearts and those who have big hearts for granted. And start appreciating those who care enough to make sure that such situations, like this one in Burma, get taken care of.

And I, for one, would like to thank Secretary Gates, President Bush, the entire Administration, the military folks who are transporting supplies, the people who offered up all of the things being offered to meet peoples' needs, the Thai government and those in Thailand offering up a launching pad for our operations, the French Government and all of those in France who are working to provide supplies, and all of the people around the world providing supplies and transport, the non-profit people on the ground in Burma providing help and reporting on this situation, the folks working in the United Nations to get some kind of movement on this issue, the people in Burma coordinating this effort, the journalists who have daily reported on this crisis, and everyone who has done their bit to make sure that these people, and the folks in China, and all such folks around the world, get taken care of.

Thank you. I appreciate all of your efforts.

Here's to our heads catching up, better, with the love in our hearts.

It's about goddamn time.