The Prince of Darkness Speaks

Rupert Murdoch has used his latest corrupted acquisition, the Wall Street Journal, to make public his beliefs about the future of journalism.  He appears to be setting the stage for a deal between News Corporation and Microsoft wherein Microsoft pays News Corp. to prevent its stories from being aggregated by Google.  News Corp. wins by making money, and Microsoft wins by getting customers to look at its new Bing search engine, which has exclusive access to many of News Corporation’s wildly popular holdings, such as the Wall Street Journal.

I must admit that I half agree with Murdoch.  There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make an arrangement like this, and no reason the government should have anything to say about it.  Google has essentially been stealing Murdoch’s content, and turning the traffic that it generates into revenue.  Furthermore, as Murdoch says, the model is unsustainable.  In short, Murdoch’s absolutely right that the arithmetic does not work; current journalistic enterprises will not be able to generate enough revenue from their current business model to cover the costs of producing content.  And it’s not the government’s job to fix this.

But how, precisely, does Murdoch plan to fix the problem without help from the government?  My guess is that if a consumer can get from Bing to a Wall Street Journal story without spending any money, a Google computer can too.  Ultimately, the only thing standing between Google and the Wall Street Journal is the law, and those who currently decry the mean old law stopping them from doing things they want to do will soon be seeking the protection of intellectual property law.

Murdoch asserts that in the end, news consumers are smart enough to know that news isn’t free, and that if they want value, they’ll have to pay for it.  If Murdoch ever watched Fox News, he’d know that most of his holdings are mere memetic masturbatory organs, and consumers are smart enough NOT to pay for that.  Just because a million people watch a program doesn’t mean the ideas in that program are new or that the people presenting them invented them.  Just Monday, Glenn Beck spent nearly an entire episode rehashing the work of Andrew Breitbart.  Why should Fox be making money for that?

In the long run, everyone will get their just desserts… but some people will be surprised to be eating crap sandwiches instead of money pie.

The Prisoner: Free For All

In society, which is by nature coercive, is democracy a reasonable approximation of freedom?  Or can freedom be achieved by means of democracy?  Number Six learns the answers to both questions in “Free For All”.

At the outset, Number Six assumes that elections in the Village are a fraud.  Even a dictator holds elections, and the support for Number Two for leader seems overwhelming.  Besides, why should a prison (or a society) give its members the right to choose their own leader?  If one is forced to be in the Village, and forced to follow its rules, what meaning does the ability to choose a leader have?

Number Two persuades Number Six that this choice has deep significance indeed.  The winner of an election can advance his own agenda.  By holding office, Number Six could promulgate his ideals of freedom and independence.  Number Two also remarks that elections are good for morale; people like to have a choice.  In a way, this advantage is the same as the first one.  Elections make Number Six and other individualists happy by giving them a chance to run for office and advance their agendas, but elections also satisfy other people’s urges toward individualism by allowing them to vote.

Phrased this way, both advantages appear deeply cynical, because they are both concerned with keeping people happy.  What is important is not true freedom, but the appearance of freedom.  Once the election is over, Number Six defeats Number Two in a landslide, but finds that he can’t use his power to change anything.  He gets access to Number Two’s office (because he is the new Number Two), but it’s just filled with buttons that make chairs appear and cameras that survey the Village.  Number Six tries to use the speaker system to declare everyone free and start a general escape from the Village, but as soon as he does, men in uniform appear and subdue him.  In short, the one thing he desires, freedom, is not achievable even once he is the leader.  His platform of individualism makes him unfit to lead, because of the inherent contradiction between individualism and the leadership of a coercive society.  The election was not designed to provide him with freedom, and it was not designed to let him advance his objectives.  It was designed to make him THINK he could advance those objectives – freedom and individualism – within an unfree system.

“Free For All” also satires the media, which play a large role in propping up the illusion of choice in democracy.  As soon as Number Six declares his intention to run for office, the journalists bombard him:

Journalist: How are you going to handle your campaign?
Number Six: No comment.
Journalist (writing): ‘Intends to fight for freedom at all costs.’  How about your internal policy?
Number Six: No comment.
Journalist (writing): ‘Will tighten up on Village security.’

The media are not concerned with Number Six’s thoughts; they are determined to seize upon their preexisting knowledge of him or any shred of information he provides to make an interesting story.  When he refuses to comment, they put words into his mouth; when he says something, they change it.  They are inevitably, necessarily distorting.  This is an oft-repeated grievance, but the frequency of its repetition does not excuse the behavior.  The media are the tool by which the benefits of election – the illusions of choice, debate, and freedom – disseminate to the people.

Website Review – Lifeforliberty.org

Those visiting Lifeforliberty.org will want to start from the rear, where the breadth and organization of the website is at once visible, although in fairness to its authors, it was meant to be read from the front in a linear fashion; I will suggest quickly clicking through each page to reach the table of contents.

Lifeforliberty.org is a call to action for the implementation of several core libertarian desiderata.  It advocates non-violent protest as a means to achieve these desiderata, providing a brief sketch of how non-violent protest works, what it can hope to achieve, and what level of activism will be necessary to achieve a national impact.  The conclusion is that roughly 250 protesters, over 25 metropolitan areas, could cause sufficient disruption to garner national media attention.  This is predicated on the assumption that only one major highway need by blockaded in each area to create a sufficient disruption.  I am no expert on civil disobedience, so I will note evaluate this.  It is simply Lifeforliberty.org’s goal.

Being a thinker, my interest in Lifeforliberty.org is analytical.  What do these people want, why do they want it, and why have they chosen the means of non-violence as  their means of achieving it?

Lifeforliberty.org wishes its protesters to continue their actions until five demands are met: disassembly of the Federal Reserve, substitution of a national sales tax for a national income tax, enactment of a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, enactment of a states’ sovereignty amendment, and enactment of a campaign finance amendment.  Though it will add significantly to the length of this review, I feel it necessary to deal with these demands one by one.

1) The dissolution of the Federal Reserve is an interesting idea.  This has been a pet project of Ron Paul, and many others, for some time.  On a principled level, I am not sure that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.  Congress’s old excuse for everything, the interstate commerce clause, appears to justify an organization whose function is to provide stability to the federal economy.  On a practical level, I think that this stability is a desirable thing.  I resent the recent incursions of the Federal Reserve into morally questionable territory, but I do not think it clear that these incursions were a necessary result of the nature of the beast.  After all, these actions were unprecedented, and perhaps with some legal tweaking, they will also be unrepeated.  For those unconvinced of the Federal Reserve’s importance, this link explains its basic functions, while a brief but rigorous excursion into macroeconomics, such as the one provided by Olivier Blanchard, should provide an understanding of why these functions are important.

2) The demand for the repeal of the income tax, and its replacement with a sales tax, makes me hang my head in shame for all libertarians.  While the income tax has become an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of citizens, this is again not the nature of the beast, but a result of Congress’s addiction to social engineering through taxation, and the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to stand up to Congress.  Furthermore, the idea that a national sales tax would not quickly be plagued by every single one of the problems that currently plagues the income tax is naive beyond expression.

3) The enactment of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is perhaps Lifeforliberty.org’s most intellectually persuasive idea.  While macroeconomists, including the excellent Paul Krugman, often strongly make the case for the critical importance of expansionary fiscal policy – usually entailing massive budget deficits – I think that historically, it remains to be seen that such policy will not ultimately poison every nation that embraces it.  It is not easy for a democracy to elect a leader who promises higher taxes and lower spending, particularly with the old Republican canard – still obsessing the popular imagination – that promises higher revenues through lower taxes.  The macroeconomists appear to have the weight of current history on their side, because even with recent events, public debt as a percentage of GDP has remained relatively stable (look at the graphs on the right).  But it will not necessarily always be so, and some form of legal straitjacket, even if it is less restrictive than the one envisioned by Lifeforliberty.org, is an intriguing idea.  Public debt cannot rise above 100% of GDP anyone?

4) Enactment of states’ sovereignty amendment… I had hope to provide a link for the further explication of this idea, but it does not appear to have much backing in the libertarian, or even states’ rights communities.  Most people are simply in favor of a return to the Tenth Amendment.  Ignoring this minor philosophical difference, I will make a few remarks.  First, it seems to be the opinion of many legal scholars, as exemplified by a recent Harvard panel discussion, that the Constitution, while a very good thing, is not necessarily the pinnacle of good governance.  In particular, a government strictly constructed according to the Constitution may not be able to provide the level of stability and safety that it is necessary for a modern nation to have to survive.  Nonetheless, I personally think that it ought to be considered desirable to have our federal government on a firmer legal footing than the one it is currently on; if the Constitution becomes nothing more than a scrap of paper with antiquated ideas, then the limitations on the powers of our government essentially disappear.  Perhaps amendments to the Constitution are the way to do this, but that a states’ sovereignty amendment will be a panacea is not at all clear to me.

5)  The idea for a campaign finance reform amendment is as naive as the national sales tax, and merits no discussion.  Campaign finance reform itself, of course, merits a serious national discussion.

In short, Lifeforliberty.org makes a variety of demands, some more coherent and interesting than others, but many, at various levels, hopelessly naive.  While I do not wish to spend too much time kicking naive thinkers while they’re down, I must note that occasionally, Lifeforliberty.org’s rhetoric gets the best of it: “None could claim that the implementation of any of these five measure [sic] would bring irreparable harm to our beloved nation, while it has become undeniable that not acting upon these issues has led us upon a [sic] inexorable road to ruin.”  In the first place, I just did deny that we’re on the aforementioned road to ruin, and I’m hardly the most hostile audience these people will encounter.  In the second place, if this statement is true, then this movement should meet with virtually no resistance at all.  Should I start buying canned goods now?

Lifeforliberty.org does contain a couple of interesting ideas.  First, “We shall not cease until ALL of our demands, every last one, has been legally instituted in the full spirit of their intent!”  In short, the composers of Lifeforliberty.org have proposed to gather a group of 250 like-minded people, use these people to lay a stranglehold on our nation, and not to remove their grip until their demands are met.  While they characterize their movement as non-violent, from this perspective, it appears that they are proposing to take the rest of us hostage.  Either they believe their message is totally self-evident and will meet with universal embrace – which is evidently not the case – or they wish to impose their idea of good governance on others by what amounts to force.

The use of such force is the hallmark of a radical ideology.  In a previous post, I discussed that for a radical ideology to be logically coherent, it had to meet three criteria: it had to be of critical importance to the national dialogue, it had to be of immediate importance to the national dialogue, and it had to be obvious to the vast majority immediately upon hearing.  While Lifeforliberty.org effortlessly passes the first criterion, believing their message to be of the utmost importance to the survival of freedom, they present little argument that action is needed tomorrow, next week, or next year – indeed they present no timeline for the expected decay of our great nation – and it seems clear that their message is not manifest to everyone (unless I am exceptionally dense).

What I have advocated here is further discussion, rather than the immediate action that Lifeforliberty.org proposes.  Interestingly, Lifeforliberty.org has an answer for this too: “At this juncture, to hold on to the hope that situations will significantly change within the existing state of affairs goes beyond mere foolish denial and flies into the realm of flagrant irresponsibility.  One must have the courage to relinquish empty hope before one can rightly consider an alternative course of action.”

I found this statement fascinating.  It often does appear to me that our national dialogue is hopelessly corrupt.  The major news organizations appear to cater to twelve-year-olds, the most-listened-to talking heads are irrational bombasts, and good ideas seem to get little circulation.  Am I just wrong?  Is it my evaluation that is skewed, and my dialogue that is corrupt, or is Lifeforliberty.org correct?  Perhaps it is in fact true that mere talking will never solve anything, that the right voices will never be the loudest and most-listen-to.

What is the reason for optimism?  Oddly enough, I think China is the reason for optimism.  In China, the citizens of the free world have the opportunity to witness a brutal, repressive regime, a nation utterly repugnant to all lovers of freedom and humanity, but also a nation of rising power, of economic prestige, and soon, of prosperity and happiness.  In short, China gives the free world the perfect antithesis of all that we hope to be.  In this way, in a dramatic history of peoples more powerful than any voice, perhaps we will discover who we truly wish to be.

On the Decline of Morals – Woe, Woe, Woe!

In a salute to David Brooks’s latest column, I thought I’d join the ranks of conservatives and old people everywhere by writing a sassy little piece on the decline of morals in our corrupt society.  To make the piece even more banal, I’ll start off with the recent current events cliches of Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and, you guessed it, Roman Polanski.  We’ve departed quite far from Catiline’s purpose today.

The recent misdeeds (or attention thereto) of Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and Roman Polanski seem to share one thing in common: an arrogant contempt for rules and norms.  In Kanye’s case, he decided that, although the VMA organizers had already come to their conclusions, and had decided in opposition to his own personal opinion, his own opinion carried sufficient weight and importance that, courtesy aside, it had to be made forcefully known, in such a way as to overshadow the decisions of the awards committee.  Similarly, in Joe Wilson’s case, although decades of precedent and tradition had assigned another man, publicly elected by a system implicitly accepted by all law-abiding citizens of the country, the place and time to speak, is own interpretation of facts and events was of such weight and urgency that he had the right to violate precedent, tradition, and common courtesy to make his ideas known.

In just the same way, Roman Polanski, long ago, when he decided to flee our country and our justice system in so un-Socratic a way, decided that, although he had implicitly accepted the rules of our country for the duration of his stay here, his own skin was of sufficient importance that laws should be broken, flouted, and discarded according to his own personal sense of discretion.

(Perhaps my respect for the authorities in each of these cases is exaggerated… perhaps, in this, we see one of the very germs of conservatism: conservatives tend to respect authority, tradition, precedent, etc., while liberals are often inclined to be more… liberal… or humane to those who flout these precepts.)

I think it’s important to recognize that in each of these cases, the sense of personal arrogance and importance is the germ of radicalism.  Radicalism is by definition any doctrine or system of thought that is predicated on the discarding of old rules and ideas.  I do not mean, by the association of these rude individuals with radicalism, to disparage radicalism; nor do I mean to contemn these individuals (however much they ought to be contemned) by terming them radicals.  There are situations where radicalism is appropriate.  But to understand what these situations are, we must first understand what radicalism is, and how to recognize it.

Any time someone advocates the breaking of a serious law, as Roman Polanski did, they are advocating radicalism, because they are advocating that the existing system of laws, by containing whatever law that was the particular target of their disobedience, has become so corrupt that it is open to question by individual citizens.  Making the law optional, only to be applied where individuals judge it appropriate, is essentially an invitation to anarchy.

Likewise, in polite society, one does not interrupt people; one does not upstage another person intentionally and rudely; one waits one’s turn and expresses one’s opinion calmly.  To violate these rules is to leave the realm of polite society; it is to announce that one has knowledge so immediate, so manifest, and so important that no further discussion is merited, that no one else’s opinion need be heard.  This is because if everyone behaved like this all the time, no conversation would be possible; hence, by convention, everyone avoid behaving like this all the time, so that conversation will always be possible, except in the aforementioned circumstances of immediate, critical, and manifest knowledge that must be communicated.

To clarify this last point, if Joe Wilson had been announcing that he had personal knowledge of a plot to assassinate the President in the next ten minutes, his interruption would have been merited.  Indeed, if he had personal knowledge that the President had sworn an oath of fealty to Russia and was conducting a communist overthrow of the United States, his interruption would have been merited – for such information would be of such immediate concern, and so important, that it would bear immediate attention, especially in light of whose conversation he was interrupting.  Many conservatives, I think, may be thinking to themselves, “But that’s exactly what he was doing.”  It’s the third criterion that Joe Wilson lacked; the knowledge that he presented was not manifest; it was not incontrovertible or indisputable.  It is in fact, still, weeks later, the opinion of many people that he himself was incorrect in what he said.

To repeat a point made earlier, there are situations when radicalism is appropriate, or at least logically consistent.  For instance, green terrorists may appropriately be radicals.  In their analysis, it is obvious that the Earth is headed for imminent catastrophe; the rest of us have ignored this fact despite its obviousness, and so we must be terrified into the action that will save us.  In just the same way, Islamic terrorists believe that it is incontrovertible that the moral balance of the universe hangs on a precipice, and that they must take immediate action to save it.  We can see that if we accept the premises of the green or Islamic terrorists, their actions make sense.  They have obvious (to them) information; it is of supreme moral importance, and it is of such critical importance that it bears immediate action.  We can – and do – dispute the epistemology, the methods by which these people have acquired their information and evaluated it, but we cannot dispute the logic of their actions.

Where radicalism becomes logically inconsistent is when it is applied to persuasion.  When radicalism is manifested in what we might call an act of verbal terrorism, as per Joe Wilson or Kanye West, it breaks down.  The object of Wilson’s action, and West’s if we may avoid extreme cynicism, was to persuade people.  Since we, who they would persuade, are not radicals, it is clear that their information is not manifest to us.  In fact, in both cases, it is mere opinion, unsubstantiated in any way by their own words.  What they are really asking us to do, then, is to share in their own personal, mystic understanding of the Truth.  But the attempt to communicate a mystic understanding is by definition impossible.  If Kanye West really believes what he said, he should be out buying all of Taylor Swift’s CDs and burning them, only taking time to tell people about his beliefs during bathroom breaks.  Likewise, Joe Wilson should be bombing hospitals or something.

So why is all of society doomed?  Two points make a line; Joe Wilson, Kanye West, society.  I see shades of radicalism in a lot of what is now called political discourse.  Fox News is an excellent example of the unbalanced presentation of facts, the bad-faith arguments, and the shouting matches and disingenuous arguments that have come to characterize our discourse.  No longer do we attempt to persuade, but to indoctrinate.  By abandoning the normal methods by which people seek to attain the truth, media organizations like Fox have essentially accepted the premise that it is no longer necessary to question the truth; to them, it is obvious, no longer open to question.  It is so obvious that the radical conditions apply; reasonable question and answer can be discarded, and we can use any artistry or ingenuity we have to get people to agree with us.

Roman Polanski and the French

This time the cheese-eating surrender monkeys have gone too far.  In contemplating the recent detainment of Roman Polanski, the man who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, the New York Times cites the opinion of a former French cultural minister, Jack Lang:

“…for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.   ‘Sometimes, the American justice system shows an excess of formalism… like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly.’”

In essence, Lang’s point is an argument that individuality should trump the laws.  Because Roman Polanski is a great artist, the venial sin of having sex with a minor ought to be forgiven.  After all, it’s been a long time, and it’s just a little law that was broken.  He’s paid his dues and then some, right?  The characterization of the American justice system as “running amok” (the Times’s, not Lang’s) and “an infernal machine” “inexorably and blindly” advancing seem intended to communicate the idea that the American justice system is behaving in an out of control way, and being destructive rather than creative.

This idea is exactly correct, if you consider that art and civility are being destroyed by that nasty business of the detention – much more nasty than coercive sex with minors.  It is not correct, however, if you consider that the American justice system is not so much “running amok” as doing exactly what its creators intended for it to do, which is to administer justice, blindly and dispassionately.  The justice system was intended to create justice, not to preserve corrupt artists.  It was intended to be blind!

Nonetheless, Lang and the Times seem to believe that at some point, the justice system should just stop if the art community and the good people of France tell it to do so.  Because it does not, it is “running amok”.  They seem to believe that it is the duty of prosecutors to wink and condone the sins of the great, rather than being so formal, and to weigh the balance of a person’s accomplishments before prosecuting his crimes.

The point is a good one if you believe that the rich, the powerful, and the talented should be above the law.  It suffers, though, if you believe that laws exist precisely to enforce a certain level of equality and decency that are apt to be discarded by those rich and powerful.  To the Times, I say “For shame!”  Recall the story of Charondas, dictator of Catana: in order to prevent the intimidation of the public by displays of force, he ordered that no citizen should be permitted to wear arms in public assembly, on pain of death.  One day, after suppressing a band of brigands who had been causing terror in the city, he rushed to an assembly on the subject, forgetting to disarm.  A citizen reproached him for breaking his own law, to which he responded, “I will rather confirm it.”  So saying, he drew his sword and slew himself.

Charondas, unlike Roman Polanski, acknowledged the supreme value of laws over the judgment of individuals, which is so often blinded by a moment’s vicissitude or the perspective of inflamed passions.  One might even argue that Charondas saw that, even if it appeared unjust that he himself should be punished for a law that he had not intended to break, the greater justice was that it be forcefully illustrated to all of the citizens that the law must always be obeyed.

Charondas had the humility of Socrates, another Greek who had great respect for the law: the story of “Crito” lays out Socrates’ reasons for accepting the capital punishment at the hands of his people despite the apparent injustice of the sentence.  Wikipedia summarizes the arguments with more clarity than I could possibly preserve.

Charondas and Socrates had the humility to put the laws over themselves even when the stakes were their own lives.  Polanski had the arrogance to put his own enjoyment above the laws for far lower stakes.  I will hope that the laws punish not just his original misdeed, but the damage his arrogance – or cowardice – has done to the idea of blind and equal justice across the board.

A footnote: the Times has recently come under fire (summarized here) for inadequate coverage of the Acorn scandal.  Its excuse then was that it was incompetent.  What’s the excuse this time?  How does a supposedly illustrious journalistic enterprise excuse this piece of wandering, rhapsodic crap?  Is this bag of bigoted anecdotes journalism?  Are you kidding me?

Against Torture

In my writings on the right to bear arms, I’ve been hard on some of the writers at salon.com, so I thought I’d note that some actual thought is going on over there also.  Glenn Greenwald, here, provides an extremely good dissection of what was apparently a horrendous piece of journalism by the Washington Post.  The first half of Greenwald’s article is a frustrating argument against the contention of the Post article itself, that torture provided good information.  This part was frustrating to read, because it misses the obvious point that whatever information it provided, the torture was both illegal and immoral.  Fortunately, Greenwald eventually gets to this (more) important point in the second half, and provides us with some catharsis.

I mean seriously… torture is illegal… if you condone torture, you condone breaking the law, whenever, in your judgment, it’s okay to do so.  I mean, that’s basically the argument that the fascist talking heads are making: they think, that in their judgment, the ends justified the means, no matter how illegal and immoral the means were, so the rest of us can just shut the hell up.  Ergo, if any minority anywhere thinks any depraved, criminal act would benefit the majority of the nation, they should undertake it.  I heartily recommend Crito to any ignorant buffoon who doesn’t understand the idea that laws come before men.

Edit: I’ve been doing some thinking and it occurred to me that there is one aspect of this analysis that Greenwald overlooked.  The Post might not be writing this piece out of any desire to appear conservative or to support Dick Cheney… their true motive may be related to the fiction now vigorously pursued in our national dialogue that a “fair and balanced” debate will present two sides to every issue, no matter how factually incorrect or outrageous one of those sides will be.  In other words, the Post may be going out of its way to present a perspective on torture that appears to “balance” its generally “liberal” tilt, despite the fact that it understands – or at least believes – the piece to have little merit.  Gaaaaah.

William Kostric and Patriotism

I have been surprised to see that the issue of William Kostric has been receiving an increasing amount of media attention, rather than a decreasing amount over the past several days.

Before reading further, I would beg anyone who has not done so already to watch Mr. Kostric’s interview with Chris Matthews, and then, if you’re interested in my reaction, to read my initial post.

I have been disappointed to see the level of emotion and inflammatory rhetoric that have gone into the responses to this interview, and to Mr. Kostric’s initial action of going to a protest with a gun.  It seems that many people will insist on negatively characterizing the entire issue simply on the basis of a visceral opposition to guns.  For an example, see this post.

I am no longer sure that I am not emotionally biased when I say that Kostric was “eloquent” in his interview with Matthews, but I still think that if you listen to what he is saying, you can hear that there is a sincere and considered position coming from someone who is a mere citizen of this country – not a news commentator.  I would hold Matthews to a much higher standard than Kostric, but all he does is scream and yell.  I do not see how this makes him look good.

What lessons can we take away from the Kostric episode?  First, I think we should all aspire to be “informed, polite” citizens, as with Kostric’s plea at the end of his interview.  It is only through calm, but accurate and researched debate that we can arrive at both understanding and truth.

Second, I think we must ask ourselves more deeply why we believe what we believe.  For example, a comment I frequently hear in debates on healthcare is this: “Every other civilized country has it, except America.  Why not here?”  Why not here, indeed?  What do we believe makes our country unique?  What principles and ideals, if any, should characterize us?

Third, if at the end of calm research and considered thought on what makes America unique, we decide that we are fervently against the right to bear arms, and ardent advocates of universal healthcare, can we still have any respect for someone like William Kostric?  Can someone completely disagree with us and still be a patriot?

William Kostric: American Hero

It began like any other protest against healthcare in the news these days… President Obama was traveling to a small New Hampshire town to give a townhall-style meeting to a group of concerned citizens, to answer their questions about the healthcare bill presently in Congress.  Along the way to the meeting, protestors lined the streets holding signs.  One man, standing inside the grounds of a local church, held a sign saying, “It is time to water the tree of liberty!”  And then, it got crazy: the man was wearing a gun.

The news media reacted in a frenzy, trying to ascertain the man’s motives and the legality of his actions, repeatedly asking the local authorities why the man had not been arrested.  The response was simple: to wear a gun on private property is not against the law in New Hampshire.

There are times and places in history when events come into focus, interact with other events and forces, and create new meanings.  This was one of those times.  The second amendment of the United States Constitution has long guaranteed citizens the “right to keep and bear arms”.  The first amendment has guaranteed citizens the right to “peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”.  This man, William Kostric, chose to exercise both of those rights, the right to bear arms and the right to speak freely, at the same time.

In exercising his rights, William Kostric shocked America.  He shocked the liberal news media, which has long maintained that guns are shocking and barbaric, their end always death.  He has shocked many Americans, long conditioned to believe that, whatever the second amendment said, decent, law-abiding citizens cannot carry guns in public.  Yet William Kostric was within the law.

When asked to defend his actions, Mr. Kostric replied that he was merely exercising his rights, and that rights not exercised tend to be lost.  In exercising his right, Mr. Kostric stood up for the rights of millions of other Americans who treasure the right to keep and bear arms.  In exercising this right, he has become an American hero.  Heroes are exceptional people; they perform acts of courage and valor.

Doubtless, Mr. Kostric checked the law, and made certain that he was within his rights in painting his sign and carrying his gun, but he could not be certain that the fascist “secret service” of the President would not arrest him anyway, that his rights would not be trampled on and violated.  He risked the disapprobation and censure of his fellow Americans, most particularly the blowhards of the news media.  And he did all this to make a statement: we retain our rights.

Chris Matthews, who has turned out to be a sadly representative portion of the news media, showed precisely how distorted the public discourse in America has become when he interviewed William Kostric, and attempted to divine his motives.  I encourage everyone to watch the interview.  In short, Matthews becomes emotional and shouts at Kostric, repeatedly rudely accosting him.  Kostric responds calmly, stating that his views are detailed, begging viewers to research them, but graciously summarizing them and detailing his complaints.

This interview is symbolic of what the discourse in America has become: blowhards with sexy thirty-second soundbites dominate thought.  They are rude but impassioned, crazy but moderate, uneducated but opinionated.  Every one of Matthews’s questions is answered, but he does not concede that he has treated Kostric unfairly.  He instead condescendingly responds to Kostric that “…you speak in a different way than most people.  I think, what the trouble is, you alarm many people to believe that when you bring a gun, violence might be afoot, because they associate a gun with violence, and they associate a gun with force.  But you say you’re not interested in using force to get your way politically.”

Let us pick this statement apart: first, Matthews complains that Kostric speaks in a different way than many people.  What exactly does this mean?  Syntactically, it means that he uses a different manner of speaking than many people… if this is what Matthews means, he is being at best condescending, at worst, attempting to distract attention from the content of Kostric’s statements, which he clearly finds threatening.

Next, Matthews complains that Kostric alarms people by carrying a gun, because people associate a gun with violence.  This is the height of disingenuousness.  As Kostric pointed out, the other protestors were not alarmed; nobody was “hitting the decks”.  The alarm was in the news media, who was all over the fact that Kostric was wearing a gun.  They amplified the fact and contextualized it by juxtaposing it with the possibility of violence.  Matthews himself is the real source of the association that he speaks of.

Finally, he says “But you say you’re not interested in using force to get your way politically” as if this is incredible… that someone who possesses the miniscule amount of power that a hand gun contains would not wish to wield that power to inflict his will on others.  Mr. Kostric’s tongue is clearly a far mightier power than his gun, as he calmly replies that he is not interested in using force, as if Matthews had asked a polite question, not nearly accused Kostric of having criminal intent.  Matthews’s inability to understand the simple concept of exercising a right so that it will not be lost is telling.  There are no brains in the news media today.

In the end, it appears that Mr. Kostric merely brought his gun to the protest to make a statement: even in our era of waning civil liberties, there are some states, and some locales, where our original, constitutional rights, can still be exercised.  We forget how far we are straying from our roots.

Huzzah, Kostric!

A final note: Despite the Matthews interview, the news media has done a horrible job in explaining William Kostric to the American people representative of this is Joan Walsh’s piece at Salon.com, which attempts to depict Kostric as a violence-advocating radical.  I will leave you to read the this piece, compare it to Kostric’s interview, and decide which is faithful.

On America – I

Bret Stephens has written a wonderfully ironic piece in the Wall Street Journal today.  He laments modern society’s glorification of the vulgar and tasteless, including the likes of Paris Hilton, Princess Di, Michael Jackson, and, unfathomably, Keith Olbermann.  He contrasts the character of these people with the astronauts of the Apollo missions.

The basic thrust of his argument is that heroism, or greatness, requires some sort of personal code of honor.  He goes on at length to compare the astronauts to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and contrasts their modest reserve in the face of public scrutiny to the effusive soul-barings of modern celebrity.

This is a lot of claptrap.  Mr. Stephens is not providing a clear-cut distinction between a set of people who do have a code of conduct and a set of people who do not.  He is merely expressing his preference for a particular code of conduct shared by some subset of Apollo astronauts and not shared by some subset of modern celebrities.  Hedonism, acquisitiveness, and straightforwardness, which Mr. Stephens detests, are as much personality traits as stoicism, reserve, and secrecy, which Mr. Stephens admires…

And all of these things are indeed more often personality traits than premeditated behaviors.  Anyone who pretends that the majority of his interactions with others are governed more by premeditation than by his natural mode of interaction is a liar.  Mr. Stephens presents no evidence, nor even barely any assertions, that the traits he admires in the Apollo astronauts are in any way a deliberate pattern of behavior.

To him, perhaps, they are virtues, but I think that the public may be free to find different virtues necessary for heroism.  Caesar, they say, was so vain that he would pluck the hairs from his face with tweezers to avoid unsightly stubble.  And yet Caesar’s name will surely live on for longer than Neil Armstrong’s.  (For this appears to be Mr. Stephens’s measure of heroism.)  Moreover, Caesar was ambitious to a fault, and perhaps even to a fall.  He was forthcoming and effusive, having recorded his own memoirs – what Mr. Stephens might equate to a personal confessional, something he ridicules.

I think that accomplishment and ability, which Mr. Stephens barely deigns to mention in passing, are surely far greater measures of greatness than anything he discusses in his article.  I suspect Mr. Stephens’s article was merely an attempt to ridicule Keith Olbermann and perhaps Barack Obama, while simultaneously elevating to heroism those astronauts who thrust their own religion into the spotlight – readings of Genesis on public television for crying out loud – it’s a direct contradiction of his own point that great people ought to be modest and hide their personal beliefs and causes!

If Bret Stephens isn’t a moron, he at least writes like one.

On Current Events – I

The fifth day of future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings is about to begin.  Republicans, determined to oppose President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court on any grounds whatsoever, have found two central issues.  The first is what has already been dubbed the “empathy standard”: Obama’s statement that in choosing a Supreme Court nominee, he was determined to choose someone with empathy.  This statement has been widely interpreted to indicate that he intended to select a liberal judge.  The second issue is a comment made by the nominee herself in a 2002 speech: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

It is only taken out of its cultural context that Obama’s comment appears anything but commonplace.  In modern cultural, “empathy” is a quality frequently attributed to “bleeding heart liberals”.  Liberals have empathy for the environment and the poor people who depend on it, they have empathy for the victims of war, they have empathy for those who suffer under the weight of others’ prejudice.  It could plausibly be claimed that the only group for whom liberals have no empathy is that small, increasingly fringe group of jingoistic, moronic SUV drivers who oppose them.

Obama’s comment, in this context, can be seen as nothing more than a reassurance to those groups that are frequently the targets of empathy that he will find a judge inclined to rule with their best interests in mind.

What is most ironic about the current media hullaballoo is that everyone understands this! Republicans would not be the least bit upset by the notion of a judge who employed empathy, except that they understand precisely that that empathy applies to everyone but them.  Democrats would not in the least support such a judge except that they thought such empathy would be employed on their own behalf.

And so a huge firestorm in the commentariat rages on, with one side claiming that empathy is crucial in making decisions, that the ability to understand why a claimant makes his claim is the very bedrock of true understanding, and thus judgment, and with the other side making furious appeals to the notion of blind justice.  Both claims have some merit, but neither is made with much sincerity.

Sotomayor’s comment, like Obama’s, has been manipulated into a controversey despite the fact that there is relatively little in it to stimulate.  A much more intellectually meaty comment would have been this: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.”  On this comment, we could feast.  We could first consider the legitimacy of the notion that there may be inherent differences in wisdom between men and women, or between one race and another.  We could then apply the notion that despite the existence of such differences, or because of their nonexistence, we must still judge every person as an individual.  We could remind ourselves that while one gender or race may be on average wiser than another, an individual person’s intellect could not plausibly be predicted by his gender or race.

But not so.  Sotomayor made her statement with the strict caveat that the wise Latina woman had a “richness of experiences”.  Clearly, Sotomayor was referring not to a woman who is racially Latina, but to one who is culturally Latina, for only in such a context could we expect such a woman to have, in many aspects of life, significantly different experiences from a white man.

Since the experiences of our youth, the cultures in which we were raised, and every moment of our experience leading up to this very point in our lives have profound impacts not just on our perspectives, but on the very way our brains work, it is hard to think that one sort of past experience might not be better than another.  Judges are not, and will never be, all identical.  The ways in which an intellect can be shaped to the necessary characteristics of a judge are undoubtedly as numerous as the judges who now exist.

The only thing we are left to speculate on is this: what, exactly, is the richness of experiences that the average culturally Latina woman would undergo that would make her a superior judge?  Sotomayor’s assertion of the superiority of one set of experiences over another indicates either a deep understanding of the precise experiences necessary for the training of future judges, or mere cultural chauvinism.

Catiline will in all things assume the best of those he observes: Sotomayor, being a nominee to the Supreme Court, must surely have uncommon wisdom about all things judicial… surely she has considerable knowledge about what the best experiences would be for young someday judges to undergo in order to become as wise as she is.  Surely she understands, in a way to which few educators can aspire, the precise mechanisms by which experiences had in the formative years of our lives can reach through and shape many years of technical training and adult life.  Though she has spoken of it in only the most general terms so far, parsimoniously indicating only that the experiences of a Latina woman are superior preparation of the judiciary, Catiline is hoping that Sotomayor will be more generous with her wisdom in the future.

Training for law now starts at a very late age, and is mostly technical in nature.  Catiline wonders… if Sotomayor could distill for us the fundamental elements of Latina culture that make it appropriate for judicial education, perhaps we could collect those elements, concentrate and emphasize them, and begin making prospective judges at a much younger age.

Furthermore, until now, qualification for law school has largely been measured on the basis of such dry quantitative measures as grades and standardized test scores (LSAT anyone?).  But Sotomayor can clearly see more deeply than such tests. (For if such tests were perfect, and Sotomayor correct, we would expect Latinas to have overwhelmingly higher performance than other groups.  Catiline suspects this is not the case.) Perhaps Sotomayor could elucidate for judicial educators how to determine whether prospective law students have achieved the necessary mental machinery for superior judgment usually acquired by early immersion in Latina culture.

Catiline is confident that such explanations, and such wisdom, is forthcoming, and once he is suitably convinced of the judicial-pedagogical excellence of Latina experiences, Catiline is prepared to hope that all of his Supreme Court justices will be Latina!