Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • The Swerve – Too Close to the Truth

    … like right there!

    (HT: Language Log)

  • Patriotism Redux

    I’ve written before on what citizens owe their country, and blind support is not patriotism in my view. I think that a blind support, my country right or wrong, would be analogous to suicidal tendencies in a person. I wrote on this before, amongst others in my posts Patriotism: What Do I Owe My Country? (2008) and My Country, Right or Wrong? (2009).

    I would still stand by both of those posts, but I want to link to some newer discussion. The issue has come up again in connection with attorneys who represented people accused of terrorism, and the suggestion that they should not serve. Robyn Blumner discusses that here and I agree.

    There is an unfortunate tendency to treat “accused” as guilty, so criminal defense attorneys are automatically trying to get bad guys off. But the integrity of the justice system requires their service in this fashion, and they should be congratulated and rewarded, not demeaned.

    I found the Blumner post via Dave Black Online, and since his blog doesn’t divide into posts, I’m going to quote his take on patriotism here:

  • True patriotism is love of country, not love of government. Neo-patriotism is mindless worship of the state.
  • True patriots refuse to honor government above God. Neo-patriots gladly deify government.
  • True patriots understand loyalty as adherence to the ideals upon which the country was founded. Neo-patriots believe in blind submission to the bureaucrats currently running it.
  • True patriots believe that eternal vigilance is necessary to keep politicians under check. Neo-patriots are willing to entrust their lives to politicians thinking this means loyalty to the ideals spelled out in the Constitution.
  • Neo-patriots think that if you criticize U.S. foreign policy or the country’s obsession with security you are “unpatriotic.” True patriots believe that the exercise of critical judgment is absolutely necessary to any civilization that is to stand or forge ahead, and that it is both their right and duty to criticize their government.

In the final analysis, I concur with President Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.”

Just so!

  • Replacing Social Darwinism

    Well, the label at least. I think we’d like to ditch the concept as well, but that’s probably harder. I suspect ditching the label won’t work either.

    But Michael Zimmerman would like to do it and I agree with his reasons, even though I suspect people will continue to use the label that best advances their political agenda.

    “Social Darwinism” isn’t something Darwin advocated. It doesn’t result from his theory. It has a loose correlation at some points. What gets me is why one would consider the way things happen in nature a basis on which to determine what we, as humans, should do. For example, the earth shakes and destroys buildings, but if I arrange for an underground explosion such as to destroy a few buildings, it would–and definitely should–be a crime.

    In any case, if you’re more creative (or more optimistic) than I am, go help him out in the comments to his post.

  • Judge Jim Gray on Drug Legalization

    One of the things that annoys me in our national discourse is the way those on the left refuse to recognize the inefficiencies of government on their favorite projects while those on the right do the same thing with theirs. The phrase “legitimate function of government” is a license to all sorts of evils, most importantly the idea that since government must operate courts and have police, military, and other security services, somehow these legitimate functions will tend to work well.

    But the factors that make government work at less that the best efficiency in social welfare programs lead to inefficiency in these other roles as well. The problem is measuring success and then rewarding it or penalizing failure as appropriate. By their own standards government agencies do not fail and there is little in the universe that cannot be managed if you will give the right agency more money–in their own terms.

    One great boondoggle in this country is the drug war. We’re losing it. We have been from the first. Now please don’t put me in the category of folks looking for a new high. I avoid even over-the-counter pain killers. I don’t use alcoholic beverages. I’d like to reduce drug use, but it doesn’t seem to me that we’re managing to do it. So consider me someone dragged toward this point of view against his own will.

    OK, I’m not an expert. Watch this video. He does has some claim to being an expert. I dislike the section that looks like a slap at law enforcement (which he immediately denies, but still …). It’s not law enforcement’s fault if they enforce the law. That’s what we pay them for. I do agree that drugs provide an exceptional opportunity for corruption.

    Give it some consideration.

    (HT: Dispatches)

  • Respect for Other Prayers

    According to the Christian Post:

    About a dozen delegates did not attend the prayer of Johari Abdul-Malik.

    “I’m going to be somewhere else saying the Lord’s Prayer,” Delegate John Cox (R-Ashland) told CBN News. “It’s just not something that I feel like I can condone as an individual.”

    Yet when I get into conversations on the topic of public Christian prayers, I’m regularly told that other people shouldn’t be bothered. They can just observe a moment of silence.

    Concerns surrounding the prayer were not driven by the fact that it was a Muslim prayer but by the troubling associations the imam has.

    Sorry, but I don’t believe it. The explanation given, that two of the 9/11 hijackers attended the same mosque, at a time when Johari Abdul-Malik wasn’t there, just doesn’t wash for me.

  • Congratulations to the British

    According to Newsweek, Britain’s Court of Appeals has ordered the release of information on the torture of a British resident while in U. S. custody (HT: Dispatches). Both the Bush and then the Obama administrations have argued against releasing this information and threatened the British with refusing to share intelligence if it was released.

    I think a good friend lets you know when you’re wrong and a good ally holds you accountable, even and especially when you fail to do it yourself. We are very, very wrong on the issue of torture in this country. In a small but important way we’re being held accountable.

    Kudos to the folks who did it!

  • More on the Citizens United Case

    I commented on this case earlier, and I still stand by what I said, but via Dispatches from the Culture Wars I found this article by Julian Sanchez, and he asks a very valid question.

    On the one hand, maybe for all our folly we’re basically engaged enough—or the people who decide to vote are engaged enough—that we can sift through the media maelstrom and figure out, on average, whose principles, character, and record best represent our community. On the other hand, maybe we’re a bunch of chimps who will vote for the shiny thing. I incline toward the latter, but I’ve never been all that big on the intrinsic virtues of democracy. I just have trouble wrapping my head around the view that combines these two beliefs: (1) The wisdom of the people, on the whole, justifies not just the installation of Candidate A over Candidate B, but a whole array of coercive state policies, and also (2) We’re really easily led, and will sell our firstborn to Altria if a slick ad says to. It seems strange for both those things to be true.

    Perhaps he’s a bit pessimistic, but it seems to me that the concern in this case is a bit paternalistic. We can’t manage as voters to sort out the various ads that we see, but we are somehow qualified to choose the people who will decide just what ads we will get to see, and how we can group together to pursue our political goals.

    That’s the problem with a sort of “elitist democracy.” The elite have to make sure that the rest of us vote for the right people. The people we vote into office are somehow qualified to decide which messages we should hear while we decide whether to vote them back into office again.

    I believe that corporations do have a great deal of influence on how elections go. They have even more influence on the crafting of legislation after the election. But there’s a funny thing here. No matter how many laws are passed regulated elections the influence doesn’t seem to change. It makes one wonder whether those legislators are all that well qualified to deal with excessive influence.

    Of course the corporations most involved in the election process are exempt from this regulation–the press. The traditional media are free to put their message in front of the people without regulation. That’s as it should be, but it makes one wonder why a few paid ads by other corporations are somehow so dangerous, while an entire season of biased reporting by supposedly objective media is such a major danger.

  • Justice Thomas on Citizens United

    I don’t find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Justice Thomas very often, but Allan Bevere calls attention to remarks he made in Florida (NY Times), and I think he makes some very good points.

    Allan says:

    Interesting, isn’t it? In the fear over the corrupting influence of lots of money, some folk haven’t even considered the corrupting influence of regulating speech.

    Just so. Head on over to Allan’s blog and comment. I’m going to close comments here.

  • Few Knew Health Care Bill Got No Republican Support

    I don’t think this is a major issue against the Republicans, in the sense that I don’t think they should be criticized for managing to be united in opposing something that they, well, oppose. That’s good politics, and if they really do oppose the bill (and I’m not certain about some of them) it’s honest politics as well.

    But the voters need to know what their representatives are actually doing, thus I was not surprised, but nonetheless dismayed to learn that according a Pew Research poll, only 32% of those polled know that the senate version of the health care bill was passed without a single Republican vote, while only 26% know that it takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster.

    Why do people need to know that sort of thing? How do you know who is doing what if you don’t understand the basic of the process? Knowledgeable voters are critical to the success of democracy, and we have a serious problem.

    I note that the news story in which I picked this up, Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, there was no mention of the fact that Republicans did better on the quiz than Democrats. Being an independent, I’m not as concerned here, but it’s an interesting result.

  • Supreme Court Favors Free Speech

    That title should illustrate the interesting types of headlines that have heralded the Supreme Court decision permitting advocacy ads by corporations and presumably unions in the time leading up to an election.

    The one from CNN reads Supreme Court eases ban on business, labor political spending, which is fairly calm and tells us approximately what the Supreme Court did. (I intentionally slanted my headline.) MSNBC.com, on the other hand, reads Supreme Court rolls back campaign cash limits, which implies action somewhat broader than the Supreme Court actually took.

    I welcome this court decision. I have never been able to understand how either public financing of campaigns or restrictions of what people can say around an election can be squared with free speech. It seems to me that the first amendment to our constitution has taken a beating in the area of campaign finance.

    I do understand the claim that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals, yet at the same time it seems to me that freedom of association should cover that with regard to corporations or to unions.

    I think this is also an area in which we should carefully measure results. Campaign finance regulations have a tendency to make criminals out of people who are otherwise trying to obey the law because they are often difficult to interpret. If the other guy interprets them more broadly than you do, you are at a disadvantage. If you interpret them too broadly, you can end up going to jail.

    What I think many people fail to realize is that large government bureaucracies don’t control the tendency of large corporations to overstep their bounds. Rather, they tend to end up with people from the industry regulating their friends in the industry. Thus “regulatory failures” should not be surprising in the case of banks or investment firms. The people who regulate them are largely tightly connected to the people who work in them.

    The same is true in the case of campaign finance. The current major parties select those who wind up on the Federal Election Commission, and the people in power create laws that work best for the large parties, making it difficult for minor parties or independent candidates. Today on TV I heard a commentator hit the nail on the head. (I wish I could remember her name.) She said that this decision had a good chance to drastically weaken the power of the two major parties.

    While that may frighten folks in Washington, I think it would be a great thing for the country. It will fit well also with the information age and particularly social media. I don’t think it will make as much difference as some of the pundits are saying, but it will surely make it possible for many more players to influence politics, and to do it openly.

    Update (1/22/2010):

    Allan Bevere links to my post, and there is a good discussion going at his blog, though it is largely populated by folks on the other side. The link to the opposed viewpoint he provides is at The Country Parson.

    Two more useful links:

    1. The Volokh Conspiracy with a short summary of the meaning of the decision
    2. Dispatches from the Culture Wars
      Key quote: “The standard reaction seems to be: “Oh my god, corporations can now spend tons of money to influence the outcome of elections.” But I’ve got news for you: They already do that. They always have. And the campaign finance laws did not prevent it.”