Those who write treatises of natural law can only declare what their own moral sense and reason dictate….Where they agree, their authority is strong; but where they differ (and they often differ), we must appeal to our own feelings and reason to decide between them. — Thomas Jefferson, 1793

Brookhiser, Richard. Alexander Hamilton, American. The Free Press, 1999. p 171.

Tom posted this at 11:22 PM EST on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 as Philosophy

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I was browsing old issues of National Review (don’t ask) when I found these pithy aphorisms. Enjoy!

From the pages of NR, Sept. 11, 1987:

1. Everybody knows everything.
2. Who says A must say B.
3. Just as good, isn’t.
4. You cannot invest in retrospect.
5. Wherever there is prohibition there’s a bootlegger.
6. In every project there’s a Schlamm.
7. You can’t divorce yourself.
8. Every member must pay his dues.
9. No excuse, sir.
10. If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.

As I understand it, Rule #6 refers to Willi Schlamm, who was the sort of person who’s often right but always is a walking hemorrhoid.

Hubbard posted this at 8:16 AM EST on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 as Conservatism, Humor, Philosophy

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Is this guy’s. Lying around for 23 years unable to move or communicate, most of that time spent alone as people presumed you were just a piece of fleshy furniture. It’s the stuff of horror movies.

What’s more frightening? Reading that story and then having to deal with a loved one in a coma. Do you plug ‘em in, possibly sentencing them to years or decades staring at the ceiling, fully conscience but without meaningful interaction? Or do you pull the plug and deprive them of a chance at meaningful life once science catches up with their condition?

Me? I’m on the respirator for as long as it takes (I like to let as many people as possible know that). But that’s easy for me to say, not having spent 23 years in unfathomable boredom.

Apollo posted this at 2:37 AM EST on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 as Philosophy

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David Goldman, writing as Spengler, asks the basic questions that neither Bush nor Obama seemed to ponder:

Which countries are inherently friendly, which are inherently hostile, and which are neither friendly nor hostile, but merely self-interested?

Which countries are viable partners over a given time horizon, and which are beyond viability?

Where can we solve problems, and where must we resign ourselves to contain them at best?

Where can we make agreements in mutual self-interest, and where is it impossible to make agreements of any kind?

What issues affect American national security in so urgent a fashion that we should employ force if required?

He also provides some goals for an American agenda: 

Speeding economic recovery;

Maintaining the integrity of the reserve role of the dollar;

Preventing rogue states from acquiring nuclear weapons or prospectively rogue states from using them – I refer to Pakistan;

Fostering the stability of key countries, especially China and India, and, above all,

Maintaining a technological edge of American weaponry so great as to give America strategic flexibility in all theaters.

And finally he proposes things that should NOT be on the American foreign policy agenda:

Iraqi or Afghani democracy;

Palestinian nationhood;

Georgian independence;

North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership for Ukraine.

Quite a bit packed into one column.   I disagree with his assessment about the Dalai Lama—American should stand with the oppressed against their oppressors—but it’s mostly a pragmatic view of what should be done.  There doesn’t need to be democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan, just regimes that won’t actively help America’s enemies.  A provocative column, well worth pondering.

Hubbard posted this at 2:17 PM EST on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 as Philosophy, We're all DOOMED

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This is an atrocious article for several reasons: its poor argumentation, pathetic attempt use of strawmen,  its shameless exploitation of Ted Kennedy’s recently-departed ghost, etc.  All of that pales, however, in comparison to this quote:

Kennedy knew – as his friend Congressman Barney Frank says – that Government is nothing more than the name we give to the things we choose to do together.

My astronomy club is not government.  My outdoors club is not government.  My trade-association employer is not government.  This group blog is not government.  Nor are whatever other private associations or relationships I choose to make outside of a very limited set of institutions.

From the depths of my libertarian soul, screw you and all you stand for, Robert Creamer.

Tom posted this at 12:22 PM EDT on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 as Health Care, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Philosophy, Politics

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We here at Federalist Paupers, nee Snarky Bastards, got started snarking at each other over varieties of libertarianism (Jamie and Tom), conservatism (Dorothy and Apollo), and outright misanthropy (yours truly).  We later added a token liberal (Geoff).

We drifted somewhat thanks to a minor election in 2008.  It seems as though we all got a little burned out on contemporary issues, so perhaps we need to reboot the debate.  If Star Trek and Batman can do it, we can, too?

I haven’t read any Evelyn Waugh yet, but I like the anecdotes about the man.  Whenever people would bore him, he’d make a point of taking out his hearing aids.  After reading his definition of conservatism at First Thoughts, I need to read more of him:

Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions.

I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; That his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; That the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; That sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons; That the intellectual communists of today have personal, irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit.

I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; That there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; That the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace.

I believe that the inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of elimination; That men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; That such a system is necessary for any form of co-operation work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.

I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply thus: mankind inevitably organizes itself in communities according to its geographical distribution; These communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire local loyalty; The individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these natural limits.
A conservative is not merely an obstructionist, a brake on frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do.

Civilization has no force of its own beyond what it is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.

Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace.

Thoughts?

Hubbard posted this at 10:52 AM EDT on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 as Conservatism, Philosophy

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I started reading this review because I thought it was going to be about white guys with Asian chicks. It sorta was. But it mostly wasn’t. Instead, it turned into some weird Said-ian rant where the reviewer turns what, at worst, seems to be the author’s fetish into some sort of vile racism. That’s what I get for reading a review from some guy who has a column in The Guardian: you don’t toe the po-mo line, you’re a racist.

It seems that the author’s thesis is something along the lines of this: through sexual interactions between East and West, the Eastern harem and open prostitution culture was turned into a generally monogamous culture, and the Western culture of shaming sex was turned into a much more permissive sexual culture. It sounds sorta vaguely interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing, but, again, I started reading because I thought it was going to be about white guys with Asian chicks.

At this point we get the truly boring part of Hari’s review, where he insists on continuing his condemnation rather than to actually be interesting:

This is, in the end, a darker and bleaker story than the one Bernstein wants to tell. European and American men really did find sexual liberation in the East. Some returned home and helped to sexually liberate their own countries in ways we all benefit from today. But the freedom came at the cost of exploiting an extreme form of patriarchy in the countries they went to, and to imply that the beaten-down, deeply deprived women wanted it is revolting.

An interesting discussion is this: if the author’s thesis is to be believed, how much Western sexual liberation is worth how much Eastern sexual exploitation? That is, how much value do we place on the trade-offs here. Leftists are uninteresting because they don’t like to talk about tradeoffs. This is a problem of ideologues generally, but it is particularly a problem of Leftists; conservatives, as keepers of the Tragic flame, frequently view trade-offs as a part of their ideology. This is why we are party poopers.

But the situation Hari outlines in the paragraph above doesn’ts strike me as dark or bleak in any serious way. On the one hand, he says we have a culture gaining someting “we all benefit from” (whether that’s true or not, I won’t discuss; this is about Hari’s argument). On the other, we have the mere “exploitation” of an already existing “extreme form of patriarchy.” I’m no expert of the sex lives of Flaubert and Burton, but it doesn’t sound likely that any additional women were forced into sexual servitude to accomodate them. Rather, they took advantage of women who were already subjugated. That doesn’t make it right, but the end result of Flaubert and Burton refusing to take advantage of these women would simply have been some Eastern man stepping up to the plate as a pinch hitter.

So on the one hand, Hari believes that all of Western civilization benfitted from this. On the other, we have some Eastern women who were occaisionally exploited by Westerners rather than Easterners. If that’s not Pareto Optimal, it’s at least very close. But instead of noting this obvious implication of what he’s saying, Hari would rather get on his post-modern high horse, and negate a large, culture-wide benefit with a few scattered tragedies that resulted in no ultimate net loss. As I say: uninteresting.

Apollo posted this at 12:44 AM EDT on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 as Philosophy, Race

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Marty Perez on the president’s self-congratulatory, manipulative style:

[H]istory has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom. And, sometimes, in an American president’s mind.

The truth is that Barack Obama has a penchant for these narratives and yet an inclination to rise above them. Two grand but antithetical stories about the same problem, awaiting him and his Olympian skill for the discovery of “common ground”: That is Obama’s favorite script. He regards himself as a kind of unprecedented referee between histories and philosophies. He likes to think that he can see what others cannot see and that, therefore, they must come to him if they wish to live in peace and with meaning. He did this with race in the Philadelphia speech, articulating what blacks see from their end of the periscope and what whites see from theirs. (Until, that is, he had to dump his minister from the campaign truck as a matter of survival. “Common ground” is sometimes not discovered so much as invented, or imposed.) A man of not especially discriminate empathy, he sees himself in the Whitmanesque sense of containing multitudes.

In addressing American intelligence and security professionals at the National Archives, the president again aimed at bridging differences by showing that apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all and that everything will go together, if only for as long as he is speaking.  National security that never compromises national values? No problem. National values that guarantee national security? Say it and it will be done. Yes, we have values that elevate and restrict us at once, the ideal of free men and women that procedurally protects also the guilty and the wicked–and never mind that, absent energetic domestic and international defenses, these principles would be outmaneuvered and outclassed on both fronts. And again at Notre Dame, the same above-it-all structure of rhetorical conciliation was applied by Obama to the subject of abortion. “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” Nice enough. But the debate on abortion will not be so tidily retired. All of this is rising above but not really reconciling.

One of the surest signs that someone is being intellectually dishonest is when they refuse to acknowledge flaws, contradictions, or trade-offs to their policy proposals or philosophies.  If we do things my way, everything will be self-reinforcing and beneficial.  There is no acknowledgment either that the world is messy or that people are messy, and that ideas and feelings are sometimes irreconcilable.  To paraphrase Madison, such problems may not exist among the angels, but they do among us humans.

Though I’d argue that this kind of thinking is more pronounced on the political left, it’s hardly foreign to the political right.  Here’s David Frum on Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny:

What should conservatives think or do about this [the financial] crisis? Levin offers a couple of pages of argument that the whole thing was brought about by overweening government. That’s partially true, but only partially. (Indeed among the actions for which Levin blames the government is the failure to raise interest rates in 2005 and 2006 to prick the housing bubble as it inflated. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan refrained from doing so because his libertarian instincts recoiled from the suggestion that he as a government official should decide that asset prices had risen “too high.”)

It’s also true however that manias and bubbles do occur in marketplaces even absent government. They occurred much more often in the less-governed 19th century than in the heavily governed mid-20th. New Deal financial reforms – disclosure requirements, margin limits, and regulation of securities exchanges – have contributed to the greater stability of modern finance, a lesson we have all painfully relearned from the disasters unleashed by the unregulated derivatives market…

None of this interests conservatives very much right now, and it interests Mark Levin not at all. Levin thinks there is nothing to learn from the present crisis, and indeed seems to regard the whole enterprise of learning as ideologically suspect. It’s very striking that nowhere in this book does he ever engage the ideas of intelligent people on the other side. He quotes stupid statements from a fringe group like Earth First! But he flinches from any encounter with any more substantial opponent. He lives in a sealed mental universe, into which nothing new or unsettling can ever penetrate.

I want to give Mark Levin some credit for Liberty and Tyranny. It is in its way an ambitious book, an attempt to offer a major political statement. Levin is not a stupid man, and Liberty and Tyranny is not a stupid book. What it is, unfortunately, is an airless and isolated book, an exercise in pure ideology radically quarantined from the life around it.

Tom posted this at 1:45 PM EDT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Conservatism, Ex Pede Herculem, Philosophy

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I complained about some excerpts of an Obama interview the other day. Well the full interview is out, and it’s much worse than the excerpts revealed. His comment about closing Guantanamo in order for us to serve as a “good role model” came in the context of what can we do about Egypt’s thousands of political prisoners.

Justin Webb: You’re making this speech in Cairo. Amnesty International says there are thousands of political prisoners in Egypt. How do you address that issue?

President Obama: Right. Well, look – obviously, in the Middle East, across a wide range of types of governments, there are some human rights issues. I don’t think there’s any dispute about that. The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion – those are not simply principles of the west to be hoisted on these countries.

But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity, the danger, I think, is when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture.

And I think the thing that we can do, most importantly, is serve as a good role model. And that’s why, for example, closing Guantanamo, from my perspective, as difficult as it is, is important.

Because part of what we want to affirm to the world is that these are values that are important, even when it’s hard. Maybe especially when it’s hard. And not just when it’s easy.

What a stupid, vaccuuous thing to say. I titled my previous post “Not Getting It;” if I were doing it again, it would be “Really, Really Not Getting It.” Comparing prisoners at Guantanamo with political prisoners held by a tyrant is the sort of relativist claptrap I’d expect from a stoned protester, not the president. It gets even worse when one considers that Obama has no plans to release Guantanomo prisoners, or to even give civil trials to many of them. What does that say about his opinion of Mubarak’s prisoners? Is he fine with them getting the same treatement as the scum of the earth that we’re holding in Guantanamo? Would everything be fine if Mubarak just moved his prisoners to different prisons?

This is the sort of thoughtless relativism that has broken the moral backbone of Western Civilization; it’s saying that men who save old women by pushing them away from buses should stop it, lest they serve as an example for men who kill old women by pushing them in front of buses.

This man is a moral nitwit who wouldn’t know how to question his own assumptions even if he wanted to. Those who fell for his thoughtful-professor shtick are just a bunch of rubes.

Apollo posted this at 12:56 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 as CHANGE!, Philosophy

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“A wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Jamie posted this at 2:19 PM EDT on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 as Philosophy

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Our president, on why the federal government will now pay to destroy embryos in scientific research:

“It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda – and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

So if, let’s say, we could learn things about radiation by paying poor people to eat food containing radioactive material, our ideologies – that all people are equal, and that researchers shouldn’t take advantage of the poor – shouldn’t get in the way. Or, in a marginally less extreme example, let’s say that we could learn something by experimenting on terminal cancer patients in ways that will almost certainly kill them, our ideology – that we should not kill people in pursuit of scientific research – shouldn’t get in the way. Or, in a marginally less extreme example, let’s say that we could learn something by cloning terminally ill patients and experimenting on their clones, our ideologies – that cloning is wrong – shouldn’t get in the way.

Oh, wait:

Obama also said the stem cell policy is designed so that it “never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction.” Such cloning, he said, “is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society or any society.”

I guess that ideology can get in the way of scientific research. Perhaps there are other situations where ideology – our conceptions of right and wrong – should get in the way of unfettered science. Why is it again that the Bush policy was wrong?

Apollo posted this at 9:25 PM EDT on Monday, March 9th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Philosophy, Science & Evolution

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A search for the words Afghanistan civil war turns up just over 2 million hits. A search for Iraq civil war turns up just over 20 million. You’ll note that the hits for the latter search are pretty dated.

There was a time when it was all the rage for people to say that there was a “civil war” in Iraq. At the time, I thought it was foolish to focus on whether it was or wasn’t a civil war (looking back, I think that post has stood the test of time in a way the “civil war” hubbub hasn’t).

However, why aren’t the same people who called for us leaving Iraq because we shouldn’t get caught up in another country’s civil war calling for us to leave Afghanistan? It seems plain that, under any definition, what’s going on in Afghanistan now is a “civil war.” The non-government faction formerly was the government. It exerts full control over certain parts of the country where the government controls nothing. Whereas the terrorists in Iraq aimed mostly for violence in pursuit of more violence, the Taliban legitimately wants to regain control of Afghanistan. In Iraq, the factional violence didn’t start until after our arrival, pointing to our presence as a main instigator, whereas the internal fighting over who controls Afghanistan well preceded our arrival. Remember, we didn’t “invade” Afghanistan, so much as we aided the faction opposing its then-government. What’s going on in Afghanistan is factional violence in pursuit of the political control of a state. If that’s not a civil war, what is?

Yet, even as Afghanistan’s civil war descends into Mexico-like levels of violence, I’m not hearing many people say we should flee. Is that because the whole “we shouldn’t get involved in someone else’s civil war” meme was nothing more than one of the many nearby tools the anti-Iraq war crowd grabbed, not a legitimate statement of foreign policy? I thought it was a silly argument then, and I think it would be a silly argument now. Does the fact that no one’s applying it to Afghanistan imply that they perhaps recognize it wasn’t a very good argument?

Apollo posted this at 12:44 AM EST on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 as Philosophy, Politics, Politics and the English Language

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This post from Yuval Levin is particularly worth reading. One of the most persuasive arguments in the anti-abortion arsenal is that, besides conception, there is no objective definition of when life begins, thus discussions of trimesters and whatnot are nothing more than ways of defining away human beings, as has been done throughout history by people we now regard as villains (slaveholders, Nazis, etc.). The story Levin references peddles the bizarre notion that “conception” means implantation in the ovary. I guess pro-abortion types are aware of the effectiveness of this argument, and are trying to lie their way out of it.

Also note, as Levin points out, that the BBC story is soft-peddling eugenics as fighting disease. To paraphrase O.W. Holmes, I guess, three generations of cancer patients are enough.

I had a biology teacher in high school who had cancer. In our lessons on evolution, she frankly described her chemo-induced sterility and asked whether or not it was a good thing that she wouldn’t be passing along her defective genes. That, I still think, is a morality question worthy of discussion. What I don’t think should be open for discussion is whether it would have been better to simply kill her because of her defective genes. The BBC evidently agrees, but for very different reasons. For them, it is obvious that she should have just been killed from the beginning. What amazing places the culture of death is taking us.

Apollo posted this at 2:51 AM EST on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 as Philosophy, Science & Evolution

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It looks like Joe Barton (R-Bailoutistan) is on the “Why the hell not?” bandwagon:

“If we can give the AIG’s and the Wells Fargos and the JPMorgans of the world — each of those individual companies — between $40 and $45 billion,” then certainly the carmakers deserve a $15 billion bridge loan.

The key word there is “deserve.” I believe it was Aristotle who defined justice as “Giving each man the bailout he deserves.”

Apollo posted this at 10:01 PM EST on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 as Bailoutistan, Philosophy

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The absolute contempt that gay marriage advocates have for the democratic process is jawdropping.

“The core purpose of a constitution is to protect minority rights,” said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It’s the law of California that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry.”

That is such crap. Complete, absolute, total crap, and I could almost guarantee that 9 out of 10 constitutional law professors would agree with it. That’s why lawyers believe it.

The core purpose of a constitution is to define how a free people is to govern themselves: how bills become laws, who can hold offices, what powers each office has. Protecting rights is incidental to that.

A document that laid out the rules for how the government worked but didn’t specifically protect any rights would still be a constitution, but a document that just “protected” rights without laying out how the government worked would not be. When you start viewing a constitution as nothing more than a method of vindicating supposed rights, all you get are lawsuits and rule by lawyers.

It is the law of California that its people have the fundamental right to govern themselves, subject only to the restraints of their good sense and the Constitution of the United States. Things get wild and woolly when you give a people the ability to amend the constitution with a majority vote, but democracy is, everywhere and always, wild and woolly.

But that doesn’t change the fact that living in a democratic republic compels a respect for the majority and a respect for all citizens to select rules of government that reflect their values and traditions.

The damned thing passed on Tuesday, and on Wednesday there are already lawsuits – attempts to substitute the rule of lawyers for the rule of law. When you so fundamentally disrespect the majority’s right to self-government, you have no legitimate claim that the majority is disrespecting your right to use a specific word to describe your personal relationships.

Apollo posted this at 10:46 AM EST on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 as Philosophy, Politics, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution

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