::Freespace::

The 50's: Early in the week, Sandefur, perhaps deliberately, perhaps out of habit, brought up one of his and my pet debates (Actually, it wasn't his fault. Atrios brought it up).

Criticizing the 50's has become vogue, partly because it's a good, indirect way to attack rigid values systems. The 50's are nearly inseparably connected in the mass conscious as a decade of enforced morality. Flaws in the fifties, therefore, are a delight to those who want to make the idea of moral absolutes look bad. Relative morality is the rule of the day now, and anything more is oppression.

Sandefur and I have gone round and round on the issue, and neither of us has budged, so I won't bore you with too much of my side here.

But I can't help but make this one point:

A good part of the arguments against the 50's, particularly that made by the movie Pleasantville, is that the 50's culture was the result of an "enforced innocence." People were either afraid of or intimidated by exploring boundaries and pushing limits.

Such a notion is laughably historically inaccurate.

If you had been at the point you are in your life right now during the 50's, rather than remembering the 90's, that decade of your life would have been spent in the 40's, a decade of food and oil rationing, violent war, and holocaust.
Instead of remembering the 80's, you would be remembering the 30's, a decade of economic depression, record unemployment, organized crime running rampant, and nationwide poverty.

In the real world, those guys in the bowling alley in Pleasantville wouldn't have been mad about someone disrupting the only way of life they ever knew. They likely would have spent time serving in the war, abroad, with all the violence, sex, alcohol, and gambling that are the cliches of military service.

Fifties culture wasn't about people shielding themselves from the unknown. It was a culture of people who had been through hell, and were now trying desperately to shield themselves from its return.

They perhaps went overboard. Undoubtedly, their children grew up to reject the inhibitive attitudes their parents seemed to espouse. They only felt the stern hand of discipline, and failed to learn the lessons of the decades that led to their upbringing. Theirs was the generation that initiated the eye-rolling at the stories of walking uphill in the snow to school. Yeah, whatever, pop, was the attitude of this generation. Life is fine, and you're just mean.

In contrast to the contemporary portrayals, it was the rebelling children, not the parents, who were naive. It was the children who thought all was well, and that the world could not touch them. Hence their rejection of rules and limitations, hence rock and roll and hippies and war protests and the entire decade of the seventies. Life is peace and sweet and roses, and the only real danger is the cruel hand of "the man."

The answer lay somewhere in between the two views, and between the two views is precisely where the outcome was. Perhaps the nation needed a decade free from the economic turmoil and international violence of the previous decades to allow them to deal with the tough domestic issues of equality that the 50's and 60's brought to a head. With our bellies full and our guns back in their cabinets we were finally able to deal with issues the nation had set aside for far too long. And a nation of children who were rejecting the other admonitions from their parents were more capable of setting aside old and useless ideas of bigotry and intolerance.

But innocence? The men and women of the fifties were by no definition naive. Let's not discredit the place to which they brought the nation, just because it still needed some building from there.

Progressivism: These posts on the rationale behind the French headscarf ban reminded me of one of the several books I’m halfway through at the moment, Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise And Fall of The Progressive Movement in America. McGerr explains that legal segregation was not—as I had always assumed—instituted simply by reactionary rednecks; it was actually a Progressivist scheme for cutting down on lynchings and race riots in the South, as well as for ensuring the “proper” ordering of the races. “Nationwide, lynchings escalated in the 1880s and peaked at 230 in 1892,” writes McGerr. (Think about that. That’s more than one every other day for a year.)

[T]here were 115 reported lynchings in America in 1900; 106 of the victims were black…. [M]oderate whites…preferred the antebellum slaveholder’s paternalist judgment of African-Americans: the black man was a submissive child, not an uncontrollable beast. Moreover, the moderates understood some basic realities: blacks were too numerous, their labor too important, for them to be driven from the South; corrupt elections, extralegal lynching parties, and race riots threatened the social order, damaged the region’s reputation, and put economic development at risk. Obviously there had to be some new means of stabilizing race relations.

The solution, crafted in the 1890s and the 1900, was a dramatic intensification and codification of segregation…. Through differing mixtures of law and custom, every Southern town, city, county, and state tried to achieve two goals: first, to send an unmistakeable message of racial inequality that would intimated blacks and reassure whites; second, to deprive blacks of so much economic and political opportunity that they could never threaten white power….

Were it not for segregation, wrote one of Mississippi’s white newspaper editors in 1910, the state would have had “more race clashes and dead niggers than have been heard of since reconstruction.” It was a self-serving remark, but truthful, too. The boundaries of Jim Crow seemed to bring a measure of stability to the South: lynchings fell off from 115 nationwide in 1900 to 57 in 1905. (pp.187-89)

I take three lessons from this. First, that, like so much else that the Progressive movement attempted, this “rational solution” was a putrid failure. Second, that among the reasons for that failure was that with bigotry, the only solution is something far, far more difficult—you’ve got to change the culture—which was only accomplished by Martin Luther King (who appealed to something the Progressives repudiated: the Declaration of Independence). Third, that peace without liberty is always attainable—and never worthwhile. It has not escaped my notice that these lessons are applicable in many other areas of life.

Regarding Henri: This is from the Sleeping Beauty DVD special features, from an excellent short entitled "Four Artists Paint One Tree."

"The best advice I have ever given to students who have studied under me has been just this: Educate yourself. Do not let me educate you."

I'm reading from Robert Henri in response to a question often asked in letters from Art students. However they put it, it always boils down to this:

Students become confused by honest admiration for one school of painting, mixed with recognition of the success and popularity of another style, along with advice to follow a still different approach. Frequently a student will ask which one he should imitate.

Robert Henri would advise, don't imitate anyone. He says, "One of the great difficulties of an art student is to decide between his own natural impressions and what he thinks should be his impressions." And on another page, "Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them."

Time after time, in his Art spirit, Henri says, "Be yourself." --Walt Disney

I admit to being terribly guilty of this. Rather than write stories or essays from the heart, I sometimes feel I'm attempting to create something that fits what I think a short story or essay is supposed to be.

Too often, I attempt to impress rather than make an impression.

The result is stilted and awkward. It's too derivative to touch anyone else, and it's too withdrawn from who I really am to be cathartic for me.

But I'm trying.

(For further reading, check out Ray Bradbury's Essay "Zen in the Art of Writing," in the book by the same name.)

Tom Lehrer Flashes: The Elements.

If you're a fan, you should also check out the interviews linked below the toon.

D'oh!: Brock Sides points out I was mistaken about Moore and Smith. A quick check of Michael Moore's website shows Smith has never, in fact met with Moore.

I apologize. Moore is only as elusive as Smith, not more so.

Unreal: Speaking of Pixar, while recovering from the effects of the kryptonite, I watched Monsters, Inc., again. The artistic quality is much higher than that of the Toy Story or Bug’s Life movies, and even, I think, of Finding Nemo. The humor isn’t as good—it’s aimed at a much younger audience—but the light! It’s really astonishing. I really look forward to seeing what Pixar will do on its own.

Libertarian Bookworm: This week, I thought I’d mention one of my favorite books, a little-known work about China called The Tyranny of History by W.J.F. Jenner.

Jenner’s thesis is that China’s tyranny is not only due to its embrace of communism, but to a deep-seated cultural conservatism. In his view, China is a prototypical “stasist” society, which has no appreciation for the “dynamism” that lies at the heart of capitalism. (Jenner wrote before Virginia Postrel devised these terms, but his book fits extremely well with her Future And Its Enemies.) Jenner shows, through examples from cultural and political history and the arts, “a tendency that goes right across the culture: the rule that thou shalt commit no novelty, unless it can be hidden or else disguised as a reversion to something from the past that has been lost.” This anti-progress attitude combines well with an obsessive anti-individualism which existed even before the communist revolution, and has only been accentuated by it. Communism, of course, rests fundamentally on a denigration of the individual—on teaching that the individual’s only moral value lies in his service to the state. Although such a teaching is usually defended on the grounds that this results in greater happiness for the people in the society—which turns out not to be true, either—the fact is, this teaching has much less to do with accomplishing prosperity or the promised freedom of the working class, than with keeping people under control. As Jenner writes, anti-individualism flourished most horribly during the Cultural Revolution, during which its true purpose became clear:

Being Chinese in the twenty years from 1956 involved making conscious choices to do things the hard way, like the city kids sent to remote parts of the countryside at the end of the 1960s who deliberately did farm work with their bare hands instead of using tools, who did not rest from the midday sun in summer and who gloried in making the most meaningless of sacrifices. Few can have been more pointless than the self-destruction of Jin Xunhua, a former Red Guard who drowned in August 1969 in a vain attempt to recover from a swollen river a floating telegraph pole that was no longer part of a communication network but was simply a length of driftwood. The incident was given the full treatment by the propaganda authorities, who made no attempt to hide what by any standards but Maoist ones would have been a waste of a young life. They turned it into an act of martyrdom. It was almost as if the very disproportion between the possible gain and the actual loss was something admirable in itself and another sign of national moral superiority: nowhere else in the world could match the pure revolutionary dedication of China’s proletarian youth armed with the invincible thoughts of Mao Zedong.

The only problem with Jenner’s characterization is the “almost.” Communism is fundamentally about inculcating a sense of servitude—of duty, and Jin’s martyrdom taught, not that one ought to choose a life which most effectively improves the standard of living of one’s fellow man, but that one ought always to serve, and to place one’s life as zero in his standard of values. This may have been a most extreme version of that teaching, but as Jenner shows, it was not original to Mao, or even to communism, in Chinese history: “the creation of an army of forced labour in penal settlements is a return to practices much early than those of the Qing [dynasty], going right back to the extensive use of convicts and state bondservants by the Qin regime 2,200 years ago. Then, as now, the stat had a vested interest in keeping large numbers of prisoners working for it in exchange for little more than their food and clothing. Then, as now, the state used its power to benefit itself at the expense of its subjects…. Accounts of life in today’s camps carry one back to the penal world evoked by the surviving regulations on the treatment of prisoners in the Qin Gulag, 2,200 years ago.”

As I have repeatedly emphasized, you cannot have a free society without a sense of independent thought inculcated in the citizens themselves. Skepticism, curiosity, a sense of challenging authority, is absolutely indispensable to a free society. It is in a tyranny only that the people must do as they’re told, be what they’re told, move where they’re told, and serve others, instead of pursuing their own visions. But, Jenner writes, Chinese culture begins at a very early age to crush any spirit of independence.

You are discouraged from such naïve forms of behaviour as saying what you think or feel without first considering whether your frankness may damage a relationship that could be useful to you. Only bad children put their own interests and feelings first. A good and clever child is one who learns well by rote, who can reproduce book knowledge or practical skills as accurately as possible, who says the right thing…. Chinese upbringing puts little emphasis on raising sons and daughters to find their own ways in life or encouraging mental independence….You are not encouraged to defend your privacy and autonomy within the family—your letters are for any member of the family who can read, and you will be thought selfish and unnatural if you try to keep your acquisitions to yourself.

And, as if to prove Karl Popper’s comments on education, the Chinese education system does not try to inculcate critical thinking or analysis, but only memorization: “This may be good for learning skills and accumulating data, but it does little for the ability to think independently and analytically or to question received wisdom…. Chinese education cannot accommodate originality or unorthodox approaches. It rewards those who perpetuate existing orthodoxies, which is good for continuity, and bad for innovation.”

Jenner ends on a depressing note: China’s problems would only begin if communism were to fall. “[T]he crisis is profound, general, and insoluble within the present conventions…. [It is] misleading [to think]…that it only needs the Communist dictatorship to collapse for China to become a land of sweetness and light.” Now, some would reply by pointing to Hong Kong as an example of a successful, free society with the same cultural mores as China—as proof that Chinese culture is not fundamentally antagonistic to freedom. I do not feel qualified to make a judgment on that. But Jenner’s book certainly does expose some important truths about freedom in general, and the need for independent thought and a sense of individualism. It is distressing to see so much of American society adopting these anti-individualistic mores; teaching children by rote; trying to put down the independence of youth and teach them to serve society and distrust innovation and experiment. Freedom and individualism may be disruptive to “society,” but only where that “society,” like the tyrannical regime of China, is not worth preserving to begin with.

Previous entries of the Libertarian Bookworm are here.

Eminent domain: The Kansas legislature has defeated a bill which would have restricted the power of local redevelopment agencies to steal your home and give it to Costco or Walmart or whatever. “‘You have to recognize that there are those occasion when the public good is better than the private good,’ Sen. Jim Barone, D-Frontenac, said.” Which reminded me of,

Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interest of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that “The public, c’est moi”—and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.

Ayn Rand, The Monument Builders, reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness 88 (1964).

Meanwhile, Minnesota wants to build two new sports stadiums, to make some cash off of other folks’ property. The public good and all....

Cool: A beautiful photo of the “green flash” at Countertop Chronicles.

Auctions: Okay, so you may have heard about the missle silos being sold on Ebay, but have you seen the video ?

Dave Barry's Complete Guide To Guys (A Fairly Short Book): The movie?

So, Um, Can I Have The Money Back?: No.

Sounds of Silence: Seems Sandefur believes so much in liberty his very core cries out for him to grant it to all creatures, even those which he has consumed.

Or, as is more likely, his very core cries out against the drastic drop in quality that has come to his blog since he allowed me to grace his bandwidth.

Perhaps the FDA should mandate I come with a warning label.

My silence: Forgive; I appear to have eaten some bad shrimp. It has, of late, been set at liberty once again, but I remain somewhat the worse for the encounter, and will therefore be blogging little, if at all, for a while.

Fame!: Got a permalink from the New York University Democrats—heaven knows why. But I’ve reciprocated.

Restitution: One of the serial abusers of California’s Business & Professions Code §17200 has agreed to repay some of the money he extorted.

Clarke's Apology: I haven't heard it. I haven't seen it. But I've read it. And I don't care for it.

"Those entrusted with protecting you, failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard but that doesn't matter because we failed."

There are several points to be made here.

The first one is the most obvious. Finger pointing over September 11th is pointless. As Sandefur already pointed out, this commission is pointless.

I hate to break this to everybody but we already know who is responsible for September 11th. They've claimed responsibility. Some of them died right along with the people in the towers, some of them are in prison, and some of them are still being hunted.

I have to agree with what Dennis Miller said yesterday--when the unthinkable happens, can't we just accept that it was, by definition, unthinkable? Can't we just give all sides a pass?

The second point is perhaps more vital. Is it really the responsibility of the government to protect us from "bad" things? I've blogged before about the paradoxical belief that everything is somebody's fault, but none of it is my fault.

I disagree with the notion of the Federal Government as "parent" and the people as "children," largely because of the condescending implication that the government knows what's good for us better than we do (Actually, most people who subscribe to this philosophy do believe this).

However, the preamble to the Constitution makes it clear that one of the responsibilities of the Federal Government is to "provide for the common defence."

So where is the compromise? I can tell you without hesitation that I, personally, did nothing to prevent the September 11th attacks. In fact, I was (and remain) and outspoken critic of the uselessness and inconvenience of airline security, so I may have even helped the terrorists, in some small way. Do I owe anybody an apology?

There are legitimate questions here. If someone did, in fact, allow September 11th by negligence, it's vital to discover it.

Which is the third point--for Clarke to blame the federal government for September 11th through an apology is audacious. Like a backhanded compliment can pat you on the back while slapping you in the face, through this apology he manages to simultaneously seem caring and sympathetic while vicariously transferring responsibility to an administration he is no longer a part of and seems to have some vendetta against.

Imagine I, after guest blogging here, went back to my own blog and posted, "On behalf of everybody associated with Freespace, I want to apologize for plagiarizing posts." I'd be distancing myself from the problem while leaving suspicion on everyone else whose ever been associated with this fine weblog.

Even couched in terms of an apology, it remains an accusation.

What is Clarke getting out of all of this?

Phrases: Bear with me, but with all due respect, to be perfectly honest, at the end of the day it's like, literally not rocket science to address this issue in on going attempts to push the envelope.

Simmons Slaps Cage Fighter: Richard, not Gene. My favorite phrase from the report? "[The victim's] face was slightly red, but it was probably not from being slapped."

Quark!: Quark quark!

More on Rush Limbaugh: Okay, so Erik Peterson mentioned how he and I used to go to the library to “research” Rush’s show, so I have to tell the story. So one time—this was near the end of the school year, when there was little to do anyway—we get a pass to the library and we’re sitting there listening to the Rush Limbaugh show, and we decide to call in. Why not? We ask to use the phone, and since it’s an 800 number, we’re allowed. The problem is, the thing doesn’t have a redial on it—old phone, you know? So we start taking turns. I dial, get a busy signal, and redial, for fifteen minutes, then Erik does, then I do, and so on…time goes on, and all we get is busy signals.

An hour or two goes by, us dialing like mad, and finally we get through! It starts to ring! The excitement by this time was electric. It rings a second time...then a third...on the fourth ring, just when we start to wonder, we hear the radio say: “You’re listening to the Best of Rush Limbaugh. Rush will be back with a live show on Monday!”

Another ensemblog: I’ve been invited to contribute my legal knowledge over at Panda’s Thumb. Reading the biographies of the other contributors, I feel totally overwhelmed, but I’ll do my best. My first post is here.

Talk Radio: It's fun to have Limbaugh come up, since over a decade ago Mr. Sandefur and I would get passes to the library to do "research" for our competitive speech class, and then hang out in the librarian's office listening to Limbaugh.

Since then, my feelings for talk radio have been all over the board. As area manager for six stores, I'm in the car a lot, hanging out with the radio. Inevitably, after a few weeks it wears my patience thin, driving me to audiobooks, but for some reason I keep coming back.

KFI here in Los Angeles epitomizes all the facets of talk radio, earning them the Radio & Record Awards News/Talk Station of the Year for 2004.

You have Bill Handel, the smart guy with the crack research staff. Although he does his best to insert calculated offensive comments whenever he can, he manages to put on one of the most informative and interesting shows on the radio (Rush listeners will remember Handel taking over the Limbaugh show on 9/11 after the New York broadcast center went down).

On the flip side sit John and Ken, the most talentless hacks ever to pick up a megaphone. Despite my agreeing with them on nearly every issue they care about, their mindless, angry banter and meandering speculation can get ludicrous. By the time they've been on a subject for an hour, they're often speculating on their speculations about their own speculations, the opposite of Handel's thoughtful and well-researched discussions. I'll bet these guys can tell you a lot about their belly buttons (They're popular, though, because they do local issues. They don't even do them well. They just do them).

The breath of fresh air is Phil Hendrie, whose show is now nationally syndicated. The show's a send-up of the talk radio genre, with Phil not only hosting but also doing the voices of the "Guests," a bizarre group of characters with penchants for suing people at the drop of a hat, abusing their power as president of homeowners associations, cashing in on tragedies, and other topics sure to generate angry calls from people not in on the joke.

The other two KFI staples are well-known enough--Limbaugh and Dr. Laura.

Limbaugh really is the best, no matter what personal idiosyncrasies one may have with him (Most people I talk to about him make a comment something along the lines of, "Yeah, I like Rush, but he doesn't know a thing about _________, with _________ being their pet issue). Yeah, his show's not perfect. And yeah, he really can sometimes get myopic in his defense of right-wingers and criticism of left-wingers. But he still sets the tone for everything on the radio that day, and that's a huge accomplishment, not to be negated.

As for the Doctor, I classify her in the same category as reality TV and game shows. Let's exploit people by dangling a carrot in front of them in exchange for their humiliating themselves. In this case the carrot is peace of mind and happiness, which she glibly dispenses. Yeah, I agree with her answers a lot of the time, but so what? As Phil Hendrie demonstrated, even Bud Melman can solve somebody else's problems.

So instead I listen to Sean Hannity, not because he's all that insightful, but because he's able to get good guests.

And rather than John and Ken, I listen to the absolutely delightful Larry Elder, the Sage from South Central and (on Fridays) his dear mother. His program is both entertaining and informative, but its best quality, in a way that's hard to describe, is how logical it is.

I really enjoy his ongoing attempts to get Michael Moore on his program. If you've seen Roger and Me, you know its about Moore's attempts to get an audience with General Motors CEO Roger Smith. This was supposed to show how aloof and uncaring and inaccessible corporate dictators can be.

Moore has met with Smith a couple of times since then, including once on his short-lived show TV Nation, where Smith came down and changed the oil in a truck to demonstrate CEOs can do what their employees do.

Moore, however, has never agreed to be interviewed by Elder.

I'll admit to being more entertained by Moore than most people who voted for Bush, but it's fun to see him become the victim of his own polemic.

Oh, and a Post Script: The best thing on KFI is Mike Nolan, the traffic guy. I know that's nuts, but for some reason I dig him.

Speaking of Rush: Limbaugh’s always at his most eloquent when talking about entrepreneurialism. I love small business owners so much that I really enjoyed his comments yesterday. Check em out. Here’s the article he’s talking about. I’ll just add that I think it’s really amusing that we now hear complaints about an “undermining of America’s long-established employer-employee relationship,” when all these years we’ve been told that the great Evil of capitalism is that very relationship!

Albright: Like Mr. Peterson, I listened to the Albright testimony on the Rush Limbaugh program yesterday, as I was traveling to San Jose. I was struck particularly by the following:

I think you have to ask people that were in the Bush administration as to how they saw things on this particular issue, but I do think, in all fairness, that 9/11 was a cataclysmic event that changed things and they must have had similar reactions, but clearly there are many issues and many questions now about how they were responding to the terrorist threat and how seriously they took it. You are going to have some other witnesses here who will be more capable in responding to that question than I because I know nothing beyond what I read.

This is a veritable study in the politician’s skill of indirectly impugning—making allegations without really making them. It’s the sort of B.S. that we came to expect from everyone in the Clinton administration, and that is utterly unproductive in actually addressing the problem at hand—namely, what we can do to fix the government in a way that will better prevent terrorist attacks. It was a “cataclysmic event that changed things.” So what? “There are many issues and many questions now.” Granted, but that’s what the hearings are to address. “Other witnesses…will be more capable of responding.” Then why did we call Albright? “I know nothing beyond what I read.” So her entire testimony is hearsay?

Grandstanding is always annoying. But when it comes to the September 11th Commission, it is an especially sad state of affairs that each side is more interested in pointing the finger of blame than in actually coming up with an answer. And this followed statements like

ALBRIGHT: Well, I have no way of judging what happened inside the Bush administration from January to September.

GORTON: Well, you do know that nothing happened?

ALBRIGHT: Well, I do know that, but I also do know that many of the policy issues that we had developed were not followed up….

I am reminded of my great economics teacher, Dr. Gary Wolfram, who once said to us, “You know, the government isn’t serious about curing AIDS. If they were serious about curing AIDS they wouldn’t spend time setting up commissions and foundations—they would take all the money they spend on AIDS research and put it in a big pot and they’d say ‘We’ll give this to the first person to cure AIDS,’ and then they’d stand back.” The same is true of the September 11th Commission. If people were serious about finding out what went wrong, they would not be worried about blame or self-vindication, but would address the issues squarely. But that is simply too much to ask.

Harlan: Prof. Bernstein’s post on Harlan’s Plessy dissent is great. One might also mention that Harlan was also a former slaveowner, and that, according to the recently published memoirs of his wife, he wrote the Plessy dissent with the same inkwell that Roger Taney used to write the Dred Scott opinion.

For Those Who Don't Watch C-Span: Since I got home a bit early today, I caught a bit of Maddie Albright testifying before the Sept. 11th committee. If you’re wondering why the hub-bub has popped up over the Clarke book, here’s the deal.

For months and months the Democrats were calling for an independent investigation into September 11th. Part of this was simply because of their own frustration at the numerous ongoing investigations that dominated the entire last term of Clinton’s Presidency--they wanted some of that turned back around on the Republicans.

Now that the investigation is happening they’ve come to a terrible realization.

The pre-9/11 government was Clinton’s government. Bush had only been in office for eight months when the towers fell. Nearly all of our information about and retaliation against Al-Qaida came from their watch, not Bush’s. They're on trial all over again.

The hype over Clarke’s book—the hyping of which took up nearly half of the Democratic Senator’s 15 minutes to question Albright—is a desperate attempt to keep the focus on Bush, even though the spotlight has turned to focus laser-tight on them.

Panda’s Thumb: There’s a new blog out there dedicated to evolutionary science, and Ed Brayton of Dispatches from The Culture Wars is a contributor. As a hard-core Dawkins fan, I’m sorry they chose a Gouldian title, but it still looks good. Incidentally, if this post on Dembski interests you, check out the brand new issue of NCSE Reports, which contains a lengthy discussion of Dembski. (Not on line; you have to join to get it.)

Blogger in Baghdad: Robert Alt’s blogging from the front lines deserves more attention than it’s getting. He just got shot at by a missile.

Protecting people or states?: Unlearned Hand sent me this post asking about the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. He rightly accepts that the clause, pre-14th Amendment, only prohibited federal interference with state religious establishments, and did not protect citizens against state religious establishments as it does now. Then he asks, “[if] the 1st Amendment…did not…protect the people against the states…[,] what was going to protect the people against the states?” He provides a few suggested answers.

My answer is this: as with slavery, religious establishment was an issue that the framers did not have the political power to face head on at the federal level. In Virginia alone, with the weight of men like former governor Thomas Jefferson and former delegate to the Continental Congress James Madison behind it, it still took ten years to pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Attempting to abolish religious establishments by federal law—which, by the way, Madison did attempt—would simply have been an impossible task, and the framers of the Bill of Rights instead settled for a federal hands-off approach, with the liberals hoping that at some future time, the states would abolish religious establishments on their own.

Consider, for example, the controversy over the No Test Oaths clause in the Constitution. It rather surprised the framers that this clause was as controversial as it was. The clause was introduced at the Philadelphia Convention by Charles Pinckney; Roger Sherman of Connecticut objected, calling it “unnecessary, the prevailing liberality being a sufficient security ag[ain]st such tests.” The motion passed without further comment. But Antifederalists seized on it as evidence that this was a Godless Constitution, which would open federal offices to Jews, “Infidels,” “Turks,” &c. See, e.g., Luther Martin, The Genuine Information XII, Feb. 8, 1788, reprinted in 1 Debate on The Constitution 655 (B. Bailyn, ed., 1993) (some people are “so unfashionable as to think that a belief in the existence of a Diety, and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers[.]”); Letter from William Williams to the printer of the American Mercury, Feb. 11, 1788, reprinted in 2 id. 193; Debate in the Massachusetts Ratification Convention, Jan. 30, 1788,; Edmund Randolph, speech in the Virginia Ratification Convention, (June 10, 1788).

As Gerard Bradley writes, it would seem that “the Framers had misread, or at least insufficiently considered, the spirit of their age.” Gerard Bradley, The No Religious Test Clause And The Constitution of Religious Liberty: A Machine That Has Gone of Itself, 37 Case W. Res. 674, 694 (1987).

That the liberal framers—by which I mean, framers who believed in religious liberty, like James Madison—faced opposition that they simply could not overcome, answers Hand’s other point: when he writes that the framers “were concerned not so much with a particular vision of individual liberties as with the protection of the states’ sovereign power to make unique and independent determinations of how to regulate those rights.” No! No, no! While there were certainly those who did seek to protect the powers of the states, the framers of the Constitution were not among them. That’s why Madison says

is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a government, without which the objects of the Union cannot be attained, that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object. Were the plan of the convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be, Reject the plan. Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be, Abolish the Union. In like manner, as far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be, Let the former be sacrificed to the latter.

Further, the Declaration of Independence, 1 Stat. 1, 3 (1776) explicitly limits the sovereignty of the states—the states have may only do those “acts and things which independent states may of right do.” (emphasis altered). Rufus King, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, all acknowledged the limits that the Declaration placed on state sovereignty. Although conservative historians have embraced an interpretation of the American Revolution—fantastically called “classical republican”—which holds that when the framers spoke of liberty, their primary concern was with protecting the liberty of the states to regulate, that was not the motivating factor behind the Constitution or the Establishment Clause. Rather, the Clause was an unfortunate compromise with the 18th century’s version of the Religious Right, in the same way and for the same reasons that other parts of the Constitution compromised with slavery.

Finding Distribution: Here's the list of Pixar's requirements for its new distributor. It's too bad for Disney they couldn't find a compromise in this.

You have to be pretty damn low: To burgle a fire station while the guys are out rescuing people.

Perversity: The cravenness of the Guardian is hardly news, but this obituary of the late terrorist preacher Ahmed Yassin (which I saw via Rye Beer) is pretty astounding. Some parts sound as though they’re talking about Martin Luther King or something:

In truth, neither Arafat nor Yassin had [Nelson] Mandela’s special greatness. But of the two, it was Yassin, the founder-leader of the militant Islamist organisation Hamas, who came closer. The reason was not to be found in his beliefs—which, in their narrow, obscurantist, religious frame, were far removed from the South African’s lofty humanism and compassion [yeah, I’ll say!]—but in the facts of his career, and the part that certain, very personal, qualities—of selflessness, simplicity, conviction and a true sense of service [ah, what a sweet, kindhearted terrorist; practically a kitten!]—played in bringing it to fruition.

Yassin had personal glory largely thrust upon him. [Better than having nails and other debris thrust through one’s abdomen on a city bus, I suppose] He was in his late 50s, and a very sick man [yeah, I’ll say!], before he became a really potent force on the Middle East stage; and, as a prisoner in enemy Israeli jails, he had little practical to do with the devastating suicide bombings, from which, more than anything else, he derived that force [Little practical to do. Practical. He preached and exhorted, but he didn’t actually strap a bomb to himself. Well, I suppose Hitler and Stalin had little practical to do with their respective holocausts].

Radical chic lives.

Update: Cox & Forkum are overly optimistic. And Myria at It Can’t Rain... has it just about right.

Alma mater: Steven Minor at SW Virginia Law Blog thinks the Libertarian Bookworm was hinting that Madison’s greatness can be attributed to his going to Princeton instead of William and Mary. Well, I’m not saying it. But Jefferson sure didn’t think highly of William and Mary. On the other hand, hating one’s undergrad alma mater is probably a good indicator that one learned a lot there.

I'll Keep This Brief: We often lament the MTV generation's attention span, and how the subsequent soundbite-centered newscasts affect people's understanding of news events.

Here's a great article on how it's affecting the financial markets as well, from the boys at The Motley Fool.

Ironically, the majority of the problem with the media isn't lack of information so much as information overload. The world has shrunk so much its no longer a matter of finding news stories to report on, but rather a matter of picking and choosing which stories one wants to report.

Magazine-style shows are the worst. With the entire world at their fingertips, the producers of such shows do not simply peer at the world and reflect back what they see. They are instead left to decide what "aspect" of society they want to focus on, and all such aspects reflect their own agendas.

The last time I watched 60 Minutes, they did an expose on corrupt repairmen. Their hidden cameras captured all sorts of mischief, including charges for work that wasn't done and work being done that wasn't needed. Pretty scary, right? All our fears confirmed, right?

Until you realize, near the end of the piece, that the repair shop they targeted wasn't chosen at random, but was selected because of the large number of complaints filed against them. The repair shop was under investigation by the DA, and had a ton of pending litigation.

They had flown their reporter and camera crew and everybody to The Middle Of Nowhere, USA, because some producer in some production meeting had said, "Hey! I've got it! Let's do a story on how corrupt repair people are!"

Never mind that their having to fly to the middle of nowhere to find such a corrupt repair shop might suggest shops that corrupt are hard to find. Their point got made. Repair people are corrupt.

And that's the news. Good night.

Only In Japan: It's sort of like Seabiscuit, only in reverse.

From The Dodgson Book: I don't have a Commonplace Book, but I have The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. This comes from an Oxford pamphlet called "The Dynamics of a Parti-cle" that began with the couplet

"'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article."

On Voting

The different methods of voting are as follows.

I

ALTERNANDO, as in the case of Mr. _____ who voted for and against Mr. Gladstone, alternate elections.

II

INVERTENDO, as was done by Mr. _____ who came all the way from Edinburgh to vote, handed in a blank voting-paper, and so went home rejoicing.

III

COMPONENDO, as was done by Mr. _____ whose name appeared on both committees at once, whereby he got great praise from all men, by the space of one day.

IV

DIVIDENDO, as in Mr. _____'s case, who being sorely perplexed in his choice of candidates, voted for neither.

V

CONVERTENDO, as was wonderfully exemplified by Messrs. _____ and _____ who held a long and fierce argument on the election, in which, at the end of two hours, each had vanquished and converted the other.

VI

EX AEQUALI PROPORTIONE PERTURBATA SEU INORDINANTA, as in the election, when the result was for a long time equalized, and as it were held in the balance, by reason of those who had first voted on the one side seeking to pair off with those who had last arrived on the other side, and those who were last to vote on the one side being kept out by those who had first arrived on the other side, whereby, the entry to the Convocation House being blocked up, men could pass neither in nor out.

Pleasantville: Atrios gives 50s nostalgia a well-deserved shove.

Atlas Picked (a banjo): Good for this guy. Now if we could just get Bill Gates to do the same.

From the Commonplace Book:

“…[T]here’s nothing like a confession to make one look mad.... Never confess! Never, never! An untimely joke is a source of bitter regret always. Sometimes it may ruin a man; not because it is a joke, but because it is untimely. And a confession of whatever sort is always untimely. The only thing which makes it supportable for a while is curiosity. You smile? Ah, but it is so, or else people would be sent to the rightabout at the second sentence. How many sympathetic souls can you reckon on in the world? One in ten, one in a hundred—in a thousand—in ten thousand? Ah! What a sell these confessions are! What a horrible sell! You seek sympathy, and all you get is the most evanescent sense of relief—if you get that much. For a confession, whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer’s character. Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware of. And so the righteous triumph secretly, the lucky are amused, the strong are disgusted, the weak either upset or irritated with you according to the measure of their sincerity with themselves. And all of them in their hearts brand you for either mad or impudent….”

Joseph Conrad, Chance 180-81 (New York: Doubleday 1957) (1913).

Zinn: Glad to see Zinn getting a little abuse. It’s a fraction of what he deserves, however. Zinn’s book—which is required reading for many history students, and was for me—is a mix of distortion, silence, and outright lies, with next to nothing by way of scholarly support. His book is to serious historical analysis what Intelligent Design is to biology. As I wrote in my review of Bruce Herschensohn’s Passport in the last issue of Liberty,

It was particularly absurd for western intellectuals to ridicule those who warned of the threat posed by communism, since communists did not disguise their wish to conquer the rest of the world. "Every leader in the world should have read Mein Kampf," says one of Herschensohn’s characters, "but they didn’t. The irony of totalitarians is that so often publicly say what they plan-and no one who can do something to stop them reads their words until the plan is well on its way to enactment." Yet those who came to dominate the Democratic party in the wake of the 1968 convention, and who now hold tenured faculty positions and endowed chairs in our universities, continue to ridicule the notion that the USSR posed a realistic threat to the United States or the rest of the world, and describe America’s part in the Cold War as "imperialism." Chomsky, for instance, calls the Cold War a "pretext" for policies designed by the wealthy "to keep the poor nations in control." Howard Zinn, whose People’s History of the United States is among the books most commonly assigned by college history professors, says the Cold War was a method for "solv[ing] problems of control," by which American politicians

established a climate of fear-a hysteria about Communism-which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders. This combination of policies would permit more aggressive actions abroad, more repressive actions at home. Revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia were described to the American public as examples of Soviet expansionism-thus recalling the indignation against Hitler’s aggressions…. The United States…[thereby] created the kind of coalition that was needed to sustain a policy of intervention abroad, militarization of the economy at home…. [C]ountless Americans…may have been led by the failure of the capitalist system in the thirties to look favorably on Communism and Socialism. Thus, if the Establishment, after World War II, was to make capitalism more secure in the country, and to build a consensus of support for the American Empire, it had to weaken and isolate the left.

It is revolting that these interpretations are received with respect even while more facts of Soviet tyranny are coming to light each day, while refugees continue to risk their lives to escape Cuba, and while starvation continues to plague North Korea. In 2003, the Australian newspaper The Age described a new innovation in China: mobile execution vans that can administer death for political crimes during house calls. No doubt this story, too, was just capitalist propaganda.

Bread pudding: In response to my confession that I flew 3,000 miles to eat bread pudding, a Mr. Richard Feder, of Fort Lee, New Jersey, writes, “Bread pudding is one my favorite desserts, so I’ll be trying it at the Oval Room some time soon. If you’re in DC again, however, I should say that M&S Grill has fabulous chocolate bread pudding and its a very reasonably priced establishment. You can get an interesting, hardy, raisin and white chocolatish, bread pudding at Bilbo Baggins restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, too. Now that I get to thinking about this, it might be worthwhile to create bread pudding website as a resource, giving a little history and posting reviews nationwide from people who want to send in a fairly precise review along with a photo.” I think I’ll leave that suggestion for any web entrepreneur out there who wants to give it a shot. For myself, I’ll note that the Oval Room’s dessert menu no longer lists the chocolate bread pudding, for some reason. I hope they have not discontinued it—although, in a place that fancy, I’m certain that they would whip it up for you if you asked.

Radiation man!: Here’s an entire book about David Hahn, who conducted nuclear experiments in his garden shed as a kid. (I mentioned him in my review of John Varley’s Red Thunder in Liberty last year.)

Skepticism of rape claims: Wendy McElroy writes that the recent Naomi Wolf fiasco shows that feminists have “cried wolf” too often: “our cultural assumptions have shifted. The claim of victimhood is no longer enough to make listeners suspend their critical faculties, even when made by a noted feminist.” I think it is way too early to make that claim.

What you missed over the weekend: Libertarian Bookworm focused on books about James Madison. Also, scientific fraud at the British Medical Journal. (Plus a followup.)

Kudos: I don't have time to post much before I have to jet off to work, but I want to commend Freespace here, on its own stage, for its coverage of the Inland Empire fires.

I spent Saturday morning on the volunteer clean-up crews that were helping clear wood and metal and ash from some of the properties up in the Deep Creek area.

I balked when the Vietnam Vet who coordinated the crews said to brace ourselves for a shock if we hadn’t seen it yet, and that it reminded him of a napalm strafing. I’m pretty hard to faze, and I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff.

Well, I didn’t break down and cry or anything, but let’s just say I was fazed.

Devastation is a good word for it. But then you’d find strange things whole. The contents of a refrigerator. A child’s nightlight. Some of the woodbeams from the driveways still had Christmas lights wrapped around them.

Thanks for keeping us all on top of things while it was going down.

Hey, Everybody: Thanks, Timmy. I'm looking forward to an interesting week.

Guinn v. Legislature: Well, today, the Supreme Court accidentally denied cert in Guinn. I’m sure they’ll soon realize their error and issue an order “granting as improvidently denied”….

Dem bones: If you’ve read Jack Horner’s Digging Dinosaurs, you’ll recall his explanation of how he and a colleague for baby dinosaur bones in a little junk shop in Montana. It turns out that that discovery led to a series of legal battles which has come to an end after more than 15 years.

Guest blogger: This week’s guest blogger is Erik “Doc” Peterson. We went to high school together (ten years ago, dear God!) at Eisenhower High School in Rialto. Then he went off as a missionary to Brazil, where he ate roots and lizards and things. He reads and writes science fiction and children’s books, and regularly blogs at Musings from The Doc. Please welcome Erik Peterson.

More on the acupuncture article: A Mr. Richard Feder, of Fort Lee, New Jersey, writes, regarding the British Medical Journal article I mentioned,

The BMJ is actually not one of my favorites because it often publishes stuff like this so it can create controversy. (One of the reasons its publications have received so many Ig-Nobel awards.) Now it will get lots of scientists submitting good rebuttals. As a scientist, I do think that this is a good thing. The best way to shoot down a theory is to bring it out in the open and shoot it down. That is what will happen. This is not an unscientific paper, just a poor one. BMJ seems to publish poor papers if they will be controversial.

Part of the problem here is that some journals like to have some controversial articles. A great scientific reputation is important but they also like to have their name appear in the mainstream press. Remember when Nature published the paper about water having a memory after all solutes had been diluted out? They make sure that the papers maintain a minimal genuflection to science and they know that real scientists will publish papers to debunk it. They will do the correct controls and we will find out what the results are. To be fair, the authors did see an effect. We may believe that the placebo effect explains it all but someone needs to show it. That is why this is a poor paper. That work should have already been done.

This is one reason I am becoming less enamored of the big subscription based publishers, which I believe BMJ is. They have pressures on their content and on their access rights that professional society journals (such as PNAS) do not. They like a little controversy, which gets their name out there because it probably helps increase subscriptions. What you are complaining about is a side effect of this model. Scientists will debunk this stuff but it is out there nonetheless. This is one of the reasons I favor many of the open-access efforts because they will not have the same pressure to create controversy, since they are not strictly subscription-based.

At least the acupuncture experiments were submitted and given a perfunctory review (my guess is that the entire paragraph in the conclusions about proper controls was added due to a reviewer’s comment. They did have a control, just not the best one. So they danced around. If I had been reviewing the data, figure 2 would have set me off. That data looks way too scattered to get be certain that the two curves are really that different.) This shows the low level of science in ID work, because they can not even find a journal that would stoop to their work at all….

I tend to ignore poor science papers, because usually they just disappear. No one follows up because they are poor. But poor papers published in a good journal are there for a reason, one that often clashes with the ostensible purpose of the journal….

Fame!: Thanks to Countertop Chronicles for the link.

Fame!: More on the British Medical Journal article (and Jacob Bronowski) at Pharyngula.

Naming conventions: The ladies are still talking about last names, but David Weinberger is talking about his first. Why is it that folks call him “Dave,” he asks. I’ve wondered a similar thing—why people who do not know me from Adam call me “Tim.” (E.g., the comments section here.) Now, in today’s oh-so-laid-back, who-are-you-to-think-you’re-better-than-me culture, it’s just a sort of an ultra-democratic slap on the back to be called Tim, and I’ve got more or less used to it, although I have sometimes reminded people that I do have a constitutional right to be called by my last name. What I think is really odd is how people will shorten it to Tim even when they refer to me more formally—people who don’t know me, and who are talking about me to third parties, will call me “Tim Sandefur” even though they’ve had to check my Geocities page to get my name in the first place, where it’s written out “Timothy.” I use “Timothy” when I write, and go by Tim among people who know me, and I insist that editors use “Timothy” when publishing articles by me. So why would a person knowing only my full name as it appears in an article, nevertheless shorten it? I find it hard to imagine someone calling Prof. Volokh “Gene Volokh.” The answer is that, as Weinberger writes,

much Web writing feels so immediate, so personal, that even though the architecture of the relationship is one-to-many, and thus is formally like the broadcast architecture, it’s more like the one-to-many at a party where a group of us are telling stories, giving each other the floor. Furthermore, for much of Web writing, especially blogs, the distance between the author and the work is erased. We are who we write.

Well, not to be standoffish, folks, but if you don’t know me, no, it is not all right to call me Tim (or Timothy). And if you cite an article of mine, I’d prefer you write my whole name, so that I do not get confused with that ghosthunter in Indiana or Iowa or whereverthehell it is.

Decline of the west: I heard about this on Dr. Dean Edell’s show today. This is an article from the British Medical Journal—one of the premiere medical journals in the world—assessing the scientific validity of acupuncture. But as Dr. Edell pointed out, if you look carefully, you’ll notice something missing: namely, there is no control group to this “experiment.” The authors admit that there is, consequently, no way of telling whether the allegedly positive results are the consequence of acupuncture or simply a placebo effect. But the authors then say “One hypothesis might be that the effects seen in the acupuncture group resulted not from the physiological action of needle insertion but from the ‘placebo effect.’ Such an argument is not relevant to an assessment of the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture because in everyday practice, patients benefit from placebo effects.” (pp.4-5 (emphasis added)).

It is absolutely incomprehensible to me that something like this would be published in a legitimate medical journal—far worse, I think, than an unthinking review of creationism literature in a legal journal. That people do these “experiments” is bad enough, but that it would be published is, I fear, indicative of an increasing willingness to tolerate the worst sorts of mystical balderdash—not just tolerate it, but acknowledge it dressed up as if it were respectable science. Thirty years ago, Jacob Bronowski said he was

infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it…. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken—but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are waiting to somebody’s past, too, and not necessarily that of our future.

The Ascent of Man 437 (1973). I, too, have long believed that the greatest threat to Western Civilization—greater than Islamic terrorism by far—is scientific illiteracy. To see respected scientific publications stooping to such shoddiness in the face of what is a genuine crisis in scientific literacy is cause for despair. The editors of the British Medical Journal ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves for publishing this nonsense.

Incidentally, Dr. Edell followed his criticism up by pointing out that he knows several doctors who prescribe these “alternative remedies” knowing that they are nothing more than placebos, but they do so in order to soothe the patient, and, in Britain, with its socialized medicine, to keep costs down. Since the patient will feel better, and won’t keep coming back to the office for more “free” treatment, these doctors are willing to jettison their scientific integrity.

Update: I am glad to see at least one doctor (a DVM) has already responded to this challenge to science. You can add your response here.