Armed Liberal

Ken Hirsch paints a ‘rational’ response to nuclear terrorism, in response to a scenario by Eugene Volokh, which is different from and as scary as mine.

When I wrote the scenario below, I had two thoughts in mind: First, that the small ‘chattering classes’ of the left and right keep forgetting hysteresis, the tendency for systems set in motion to overshoot, and the impact when the large, silent center finally takes a position; and second, the complexity of the real world, which resists being reduced to simple if>then formulations.

First, let me say about the scenario, that I think that it, or something like it, will remain a reasonable possibility (not a 1:5 chance, but not a 1:10,000 either) for the foreseeable future. The reality is that we live in a world in which a large number of people dislike us, don’t respect us, and see their interests directly challenged by our efforts to defend ours.

I’m not, as Avedon Carol suggests, painting this as a nightmarish ‘if we don’t invade Iraq’ scenario. On one hand, if we allow folks who hate us to get stronger, it becomes more likely. On the other, as we bring the hostility out into the open, it becomes more likely. The Iraq issue is a separate one that I’ll try and address later (as soon as I figure out where I stand).

Without getting too deeply into what it itself an immense and complex topic, I believe that our interests are, in line with American character, an odd mixture of blind, shortsighted self-interest, noble humanitarianism, and naiveté. We want simultaneously to preserve our cheap oil and cheap Nikes, and to see that everyone else gets some, too.

Right now, we are, along with Europe, an island of prosperity and relative safety in an increasingly impoverished (we’ll talk about that in a minute) and unsafe world.

This represents a massive supply of ‘potential energy’ in the social and political sphere, and this reservoir of energy will drive international and domestic politics for quite some time into the future.

About impoverishment – I am aware of the various studies showing that the objective level of world poverty may be declining. But impovrishment – the ‘feeling’ of being poor – increases, as both the traditional social structures that support people break down, and as they are immersed in the mediaverse that shows them an idealized vision of the prosperous life in the West.

So let’s stipulate that the issues Neal Stephenson raises may be valid, even if his outcomes are outlandish.

When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology to other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel, once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would call prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anybody else: music/movies/microcode (software)/high-speed pizza delivery.

And as the march of technology assures that the handheld iPAQ that I use every day has more processing power than (pick your obsolete mainframe), absent a massive and probably unworkable effort, the technology of warfighting and of mass destruction similarly moves downscale and becomes more and more widely accessible to those pissed-off people.

So one of these days, one of the containers off San Pedro may very well contain someone’s message of destruction and hate.

We’ll survive it. I don’t believe that anyone except possibly the Chinese will be able to threaten the U.S. with massive destruction, and they are as a state, likely to be reasonable and deterrable as were the Soviets.

But how will we react? That’s the $64 million question.

Right now we have two polar positions, occupied by relatively small and vocal groups of people. The larger majority are either confused or inattentive, with some general feelings – they’d rather not be seeing dead people on TV, and they’re kind of pissed off about 9/11. I’ve spent the last six months talking to almost everyone I meet about this stuff…store clerks, cab drivers, hair cutters, kid’s teachers, coworkers, and my decidedly unscientific poll is what has led me this conclusion.

It is my belief that both poles are relatively well-intentioned; they just have very different view of what the world looks like and as a result how best to deal with it. But I don’t think either side has clearly thought their positions through, nor do I think that they have thought through the real consequences of their positions.

For the hawks, the reality is that we are talking about a return to colonialism. There’s a problem: In the old colonial days, colonies paid for themselves through often-brutal extractive practices. I’m not sure how the economics work today, but I’d bet that they are still uneconomical. Ideally, this would be an enlightened colonialism…and to be blunt, given a choice between Idi Amin and a colonial administrator, I’ll bet the average Ugandan would take the administrator every damn day. But it will stretch us financially and morally.

For the doves, the reality is that we are talking about Fortress America, about an autarky. Unless we are willing to hold the world’s biggest potlatch and simply give our wealth away…and maybe even then, given my belief that the roots of the struggle against the West are in the struggle against modernism…we will still face implacable enemies abroad. We will need to withdraw militarily and economically from the rest of the world; maybe not totally, but substantially. Our economy is big enough to do it; our standard of living will fall, but it’s in a slow decline anyway, and attaining a stable sustainable level of economic activity brings other possible benefits.

I detest both ideas. Intellectually, I rebel against a colonial future; and I know in my heart that we will never be able to build walls high enough to keep the rest of the world out.

In my mind, the primary discussion we should be having as a nation is how we will address this issue in the long run.

And as a part of that discussion, we need to openly discuss and firmly establish how we will respond to the kind of scenario I paint, or Eugene Volokh paints. Because if we wait until it happens, we will be driven by the way that the silent middle jumps, and my belief is that that jump will be extreme (in either direction) and virtually impossible to control.

Fear and rage are never good mental states to make life-and-death decisions in.

Rob Lyman has a great post on PETA, meat, and hunting (I've always subscribed to the People for Eating Tasty Animals version, myself). I made a shorter comment:

2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.

He also catches the amusing point in the 'Uppity Negro' comments:

And why in heaven's name would you issue death threats against a guy called Armed Liberal?

The New Republic Online has a great article on angst in the art world. Check out After Disenchantment. A sample:

Disenchantment has itself become a fashionable attitude. The people who cannot get from Experience A to Experience B have based an entire aesthetic on their inability to weave things together. Turn the pages of Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, an ultra-hip anthology that has just been published by Phaidon, and you encounter a mood that tends to be hands-off, formulaic, and terminally ironic in the work of more than one hundred artists, some of whom are unfamiliar, some of whom are very familiar, such as Luc Tuymans, who specializes in wan, nearly monochromatic vignettes, and Elizabeth Peyton, who paints the youth of today with the manipulative sensitivity of a high school student on the make. The cream-colored cover of Vitamin P is decorated with tablet-shaped details from paintings. The message is that painting is good for you. Vitamin P is meant to be an optimistic book, but the artists and the critics involved carry such a baggage of stylish pessimism and are so determinedly post-everything that their plea for the re-enchantment of painting seems little more than another attitude.

Erin O'Connor, over at CantWatch has a great, annotated transcript of a Hardball dialog between my man, Stanley Fish, and Thor Halvorsson of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). A live Fisking...

Had lunch today with a youthful colleague from the Netherlands, and we had occasion to discuss our various vehicular indiscretions, and the response of the local constables.

I was ticketed last year on my motorcycle by a local policeman with a laser speed detector; I saw him at a distance, but I assumed he was using radar. Motorcycles have a small cross-section, so we have to be relatively close to the radar gun to register. Sadly, that isn't the case with a laser.

I slowed down with what I thought was plenty of distance, and was shocked, really just shocked to be pulled over. I was cooperative, the officer was polite, and instead of writing my ticket for the actual speed he’d measured, reduced my speed, raised the noted speed limit, and so meaningfully reduced the severity of the ticket (and fine).

My Dutch friend and I discussed the pros and cons of fighting tickets (I almost never fight them; I have been lucky enough never to have received a ticket I didn’t deserve, and I view it as a kind of tax on speeding). But I have a number of friends who do and have successfully fought tickets in court.

My friend was somewhat shocked. In the Netherlands, tickets are given by teams of police officers, who collect the fines on the spot. There is no appealing to a court. There is no discretion on the part of the officer. If you are pulled over, you are guilty, you pay your fine, and you go on. Unless they impound your car on the spot, which they do for various moving violations.

Somehow, this difference typifies the American attitude toward government. Personal, messy, possibly forgiving (or possibly the opposite, if you are less practiced at dealing with police officers than I may be). My rights equal those of the officer in front of the court (in theory, anyway). In the Netherlands, the officer is the state.

Now there are arguably advantages to that system. Minorities get tickets at the behest of an objective radar gun, not a possibly prejudiced officer. The powerful have a harder time getting off by simply being who they are.

But something is lost, as well. Some call it the difference between being a citizen and a subject; I’m not completely sure how to express it. But it’s an important difference. The imperfections of our system aren’t something to necessarily be rationalized out of existence. In some ways, the imperfections are the system.

I need to think about that some more.

My Central Valley bud Devra points out Ampersand’s comments about conflating anti-semitism with criticism of Israel.

She tags a few good points…although I think Goodwin’s Law applies, and that the term “Nazi” is most usually used as a meaningful-conversation-stopper; I think there has to be a distinction between some uses of the term…for example, some of my motorcycling and climbing friends have called me ‘the Safety Nazi’ with mixed levels of warmth, which I don’t find terribly insulting because I am inflexible about safety, and the use of the terms feminazi or econazi, which I’ve heard used to apply to folks who are equally inflexible about feminism or ecology. Both have an element of the dismissive about them, and could, in some light be seen as insulting.

But to call Jews ‘Nazis’ is a different level of the game, in no small part because it is a targeted and intentional insult aimed at the heart of their cultural and racial history. It isn’t an indirect or general insult, it is a intentional slap in the face no less than the other “N” word.

And because I usually use anecdote to make my points, here’s a personal one.

As a teenager, my brother went through a phase of his life when he was simply convinced he was black. He dated black girls, hung out with the black kids at school, spoke in that soft middle-class West Los Angeles version of a black drawl with traces of black urban grammar. I never quite figured out where it came from; both of us has been in part raised by strong black men who were close friends to our checked-out parents, but I’d simply acknowledged my status as a mutt and always been comfortable with it. Maybe it connected with him in some deeper way, I really don’t know.

Later in life, he would fall into his ‘wigro’ role among black friends or co-workers.

Until one day, he got fired because in the heat of an argument at work, he’d called a black co-worker by the ‘n-word’. He called me in tears and rage.

He’d used the same word, collegially, a dozen times, he told me. He couldn’t understand why, now, his colleague had called management and management had summarily fired him.

I told him that I understood, and that if he’d worked for me, I’d probably have fired him, too.

The issue is that insult derives from context and intention.

To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.

And to wave that off is simply as morally indefensible as what my brother did. At least he learned his lesson.

I’ll add a ‘geopolitical’ point as well. The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

Looking over at Blogcritics, I found this review of Coyote vs. Acme, one of the funniest things ever written, if you think Chuck Jones sits at the Right Hand of God, as I do. That reminded me of a lesser-known but equally brilliant piece by Frazer (who is up there in the People I’d Like To Have Dinner With list), his Lamentations of the Father

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

The normally eminently sensible Andrew Edwards steps in it with this comment:

(NOTE: I still favour war on Iraq, for what it's worth. But I'd be willing to put that off for a couple years to see GWB handed his ass on a plate in the next two elections)

Have they no shame? I'd imagine not...

Here’s the key text from today’s N.J. Supreme Court decision regarding replacing Torricelli on the November ballot(emphasis mine):

And the Court having concluded that the central question before it is whether the dual interests of full voter choice and the orderly administration of an election can be effectuated if the relief requested by plaintiffs were to be granted; And the Court being of the view that

[it] is in the public interest and the general intent of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate a ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all other qualifying parties and groups.

Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 10 N.J. 435, 441 (1952);

And the Court remaining of the view that the election statutes should be liberally construed

to allow the greatest scope for public participation in the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to allow the voters a choice on Election Day.

Catania v. Haberle, 123 N.J. 438, 448;

If the law of the land is that we should have a choice on Election Day, why do the courts tolerate the outrageous gerrymandering that creates essentially one-party seats?

It’s important to have two parties on the ballot, you see, but it doesn’t really matter whether there’s an election or not.

Here are two great articles on the subject. First, from this Sunday’s L.A. Times (actually, a good damn issue…): In California, Politicians Choose--and Voters Lose. Here’s a quote:

What if the World Series had been played during spring training, the commissioner of baseball having picked the competing teams? Baseball fans would be outraged. Yet something similar has happened to California elections. In the vast majority of legislative and congressional districts, we have no general election contests this fall because the races were decided in the spring primaries. The political stadium is dark.

How many competitive races for the House of Representatives are there in the Southland? None. How many competitive races for the state Senate? None. How many for the Assembly? Two--at most.
…

That's what a politician likes--the fewer voters, the better, and especially if they are the most partisan ones. Candidates beat their breasts about what hard-core partisans they are, and the tiny number of people who go to the polls respond by electing the most hard-core partisans in both parties.

The result is a largely dysfunctional Legislature. Members chosen in a closed primary, with a minimum of voters participating, come to Sacramento intent on representing the narrow partisan positions that got them there.

Is it any wonder they cannot negotiate a state budget? Passing the budget--it was two months late this year--is the most important and most difficult thing a legislator does because it requires compromise and negotiation. The current system encourages exactly the opposite.

One Republican who might have broken the budget impasse this summer privately told friends, "Look, I can't afford to cross my primary voters; they demand that I hang tough." The sentiment was the same on the Democratic side. A look at the shadow Legislature elected in March shows future members will be even more ideologically rigid.

Californians might remember this when they cast their meaningless votes in November for their preordained members of the Legislature--if they bother to vote at all.

The 2002 elections for Congressional Representatives will be the first conducted under the new districts drawn following the 2002 Census. Although important issues are at stake in November, most of the districts' borders have been gerrymandered so skillfully that the typical race's outcome is predetermined. Time Magazine estimates that 394 House seats are "safe," 29 are "almost safe," and eleven are "toss-ups." That's eleven toss-ups out of 435 separate elections.

In contrast, 8 of 34 Senate seats are said to be toss-ups. The Senate is more than ten times more competitive than the House, in large part because Senate races are fought over entire states, which can't be gerrymandered. With districts, however, by carefully redrawing boundaries, parties can ensure that that most of their incumbents enjoy a comfortable majority.

This is the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended for the House of Representatives. They wanted the House to represent the views of the public by allowing voters to make wholesale changes in their Representatives every two years. The Senate, in contrast, with its staggered six-year terms, was supposed to provide a brake on popular passions.

Both parties are guilty as hell in this.

My own Congressional district…once one of the few competitive districts in Los Angeles…was ‘readjusted’ with the conservative areas of Palos Verdes given to the next district south to make it a safe Republican seat, and the more liberal areas of Santa Monica added to make it a safe Democratic seat.

Why not just let the party staff and donors pick the Congressmembers directly? Why do they even bother filling my mailbox with inane crap?

Can you tell I’m more than a little put out by this??

You should be too.

If you go to the url for the New Times: http://www.newtimesla.com/, you'll wind up at the site for the L.A. Weekly.

It appears that the parent corporations of each have pulled a swap; The Voice/Weekly group gets L.A., and the New Times group gets Cleveland. Unbelievably sleazy.

The redirect is a new low, though, even for a left-liberal paper that fights unions among its own staff and also can't stand competiton.

Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and their L.A. Examiner have a lot more.

More tomorrow.

In other news, Dwight Meredith has one of the most sensible decision trees on Iraq that I've seen to date. Why the hell aren't any of the national figures taking with that kind of thoughtful determination?? DWIGHT FOR SPEAKER!!

And in an issue I'll have to address Monday, Ross at The Bloviator takes on Reynolds on the issue of "is violence a public health issue". I have some thoughts...

Well, it’s definitely a king-hell weird day.

First, and foremost, the shootings in Maryland, well covered by a number of new sources and bloggers today. Check out Dean at ‘Blogs4God’, for local details. There’s a lot of discussion on whether this is terrorism, a spree killing, or something else, and obviously there isn’t enough information to have an opinion.

For now, I’ll call it a ‘mucking’ and suggest again that everyone go read ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. It looks like the bad guy used a rifle from the back of a panel van, possibly with another sick SOB driving. He most likely parked where the back of the van could cover a place where there were a number of pedestrians targets and waited.

I have a hard time imaging how you defend against this with a traditional LEO response; you can pull all the box vans in the area and hope to get lucky, or more likely, someone will get a glimpse of a plate or distinguishing feature, or someone will overhear a plan or remember seeing something odd, a gun store will be able to track the ammunition, and he’ll be tracked and, hopefully, captured. I hope the arresting officers are careful…

And here I’ll jump in with a pro-gun point, and compare two events, one indirectly mentioned by Susannah Cornett.

In 1984, in San Ysidro, CA (near San Diego), a nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a McDonald’s with three guns, and killed 21 people.

In 2002, at Los Angeles International Airport, another nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a terminal concourse with two guns and killed two people.

The difference?? At LAX, an armed, trained ticket supervisor (with the help of some others who declined the shooter's offer to be victims) engaged, shot and killed the shooter as soon as he opened fire.

In the event of a ‘low-level’ (and believe me, to the families involved, this isn’t ‘minor’, or ‘low-level’ or anything except apocalyptic…) terrorism, or random acts like this, the police are here to investigate, cleanup the mess, investigate, and when they find the Bad Person, overwhelm and hopefully arrest. This is a good thing. It’s just not too useful to the 3rd through 19th people who die, if you know what I mean.

Look, this is an old and tired set of arguments. Lots of folks don’t like guns, are horrified that anyone would own one, and firmly believe that incrementally ratcheting down the number of people who own guns is the best way to avoid these kind of tragedies.

In an ideal world, they’re right.

In this world, they’re wrong, as Australia and the U.K. suggest:

The one crime [in the U.K.] that has shown a stubborn unwillingness to fall is assault, especially street robberies. Police have been recording a 20 per cent rise in muggings, yet the BCS suggests there has hardly been a rise at all.

But let’s look at this instrumentally.

We have two ‘success’ stories in dealing with terrorism this go-round. Flight 93 and LAX. I’m not suggesting that we arm passengers with handguns (although I do think we’re crazy not to have immediately allowed pilots to have them). I am suggesting that the only form of defense that is likely to work while there the bodies are still breathing is to involve every one of us as an thoughtful, active observer of our environment, and someone who is willing to act appropriately when it is called for.

In some cases, that will involve larger numbers of people with guns.

They can be officers, standing on streetcorners, costing us tax dollars, and nosing deeper and deeper into our lives, or they can be citizens. Our pilot. The ticket agent. Our neighbors.

Some of then will screw up. Some of them will do bad things.

But the reality is that they screw up and do bad things right now. And as far as I can tell from other folks’ experience, it doesn’t get better as you try and take the guns away.

And it doesn’t get worse as you let people have them, either.

Think about it. Think about San Ysidro, and think about LAX. Think about how hard it will be to have a policeman catch the Maryland shooter at just the right time in just the right place.

For those of you repelled by firearms ownership outside the agents of the state think about this: Even if you don’t agree with John Lott that crime has gone down in must-issue states (where average citizens who pass background and training requirements can get permits to carry guns), I have seen no evidence that remotely and reasonably suggests that it has gone up.

So if it doesn’t effect crime, and it could effect terrorism or ‘mucking’, what’s the issue?

Think about the 19 lives difference, and wonder whether they could have been saved before you answer.

Dean Peters, of blogs4god comments:

Thanks for the link. And thanks for your discussion on a topic I've been agonizing over. For some time now, the thought of my wife and daughter at home without a reasonable means of defense was on the back of my mind from time to time.

Now it is an obsession. I think to myself, "what if the murder[s] need a house to hole up?" I mean he/they had to drive by MY HOUSE 2 to 3 TIMES to get to or away from a couple of the slaughters.

Yeah, I know, raging paranoia, but 40 years in a safe neighborhood instantly turned into shooting gallery makes me think ... what if I saw the muzzle of a gun out of the back of a step-van ... what could I do, throw my keys at his eyes across the parking lot?

Yeah, I know, we don't want vigilantes. Trust me, I'm not one of them.

Its like a friend said to me when discussing whether or not to arm the pilots. "It's a shame that the most well armed individual is someone who's smuggled onto a plane a pair of nail clippers ..." My friend also lives here in the middle of the danger zone.

Thanks for the link. And the discussion.

I'm putting in for my 7 days this afternoon.

-- Dean Peters

Simply put, simply owning a gun will not make you safe, but it will bring on a while new world of responsibilities. On the first point, Col. Cooper (not Professor Cooper) said: "Owning a handgun doesn't make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician." On the second point, you need to think carefully how you will deal with this new responsibility in the context of the responsibilities you apparently already have…your wife and children.

I cannot stress enough the importance of training…training for you in how to use the gun, and training for you, your wife, and children on how to be safe in the presence of guns.

I devote two weeks a year to firearms training, and probably spend another week a year with my sons and SO reviewing firearms safety issues.

I’ll suggest visiting the firearms links on the left, just to get a sense of the and two excellent books by Mas Ayoob as starting points: In the Gravest Extreme The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection and The Truth About Self Protection, Mas is excellent at talking about the ‘context’ of the use of firearms by citizens.

Find a local instructor, or email me at the address at the upper left and I can help you find on in your area.

A gun is not a talisman that automatically banishes evil. It is a tool that can help good people defeat it, though.

I'm on the road. See everyone Monday. Try not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I'm gone.

Great comment from Stephen M. St. Onge:

Thinking about the never ending gun control arguments, I had a possibly original idea:

Carrying/not carrying a gun is controversial because of the message it sends, not because of the effects of the guns themselves.

Guns are tools for doing harm to people, but outside of video fantasies, someone carrying a firearm is highly unlikely to use it during any given day -- or year. What makes the gun so controversial is that the gun carrier is sending a message: 'I think we live in a violent world, where we might be attacked at any time, and if it happens, I'm going to deal out some violence too.'

The principled non-carrier is also sending a message: 'I think we may live in a society where violence could occur at any moment, but I refuse to be part of the culture of violence. By refusing in advance to prepare for violence, I will help stamp it out.'

In short, one says "I'm dangerous, watch out for me,", the other "Give peace a chance." What's really at stake is a question of how people ought to live.

No wonder the issue is so highly charged!

I’ll characterize it differently. One side is dealing with the world as they wish it were, and the other with the world as they are afraid it is.

Look, I like to eat, and spend a decent amount of time in East and South-Central L.A. making my taste buds happy. Many of my Westside and beach-community friends are horrified at this idea. They are convinced that if they drive to The Pit or King Taco #1, they'll be robbed or worse. The reality is that I’m at greater risk from the fat in the ribs and the lard in the beans than I am from being attacked while I'm there eating.

Having said that, I exercise and eat the good bad stuff in moderation, so that I can manage the risk.

Possessing some skills and tools to defend yourself is also a part of managing one’s risk.

I’d like to live in a world where I could eat burnt ends two meals a day without effect. I don’t…

Lots of other sensible and less-sensible comments; as time permits today, I’ll promote them and respond.

Oh, and I had a great trip, thanks for asking.

Here are some comments from the San Ysidro post below, with my comments interspersed.

My views on gun control aren't as strong as they used to be, but I just gotta point out: at the airport, we're dealing with armed f/t security prepared for the worst. (In several European airports, police patrol El Al baggage claim holding automatic weapons.) Unless we're going to have armed guards right at the entrance to McDonalds (which they have in Israel now), a suicidal shooter is going to get off more rounds there than at the airport. Maybe not 21, OK. But some.

I get kinda worried by people who think a gun permit conveys Spidey-Sense, too. They're gonna be shooting up mailmen and paperboys. Maybe even themselves.

Andrew Lazarus

I didn't follow your reference to Australia. Care to clarify?

-- tim Dunlop

Steve L., I think you missed my point. I think that the significant difference between the McDonalds shooting and the LAX shooting is that at El Al check-in counters worldwide, there are armed, alert security personnel whose full-time job is protection. I think it's a dangerous fantasy to believe that armed fellow passengers in line could have done a better job of stopping this suicide attack. In fact, I put that right up there with dreaming that you're Spiderman. A surprise attack where the terrorist just wants carnage and doesn't intend to survive and there isn't already someone on guard is going to be "successful", maybe not as successful as the 21 victims in the McDonalds but a lot more than the two victims at LAX.

If we really have a lot of gun-toting honest citizens who think their superhuman reflexes are going to head off unexpected, unprovoked terrorist attacks by other gun-toting malevolent citizens, I think I'll stay in the basement until the crossfire dies down.

-- Andrew Lazarus

Hartin's post is an example of exactly the kind of thing I object to. He believes, and would have us believe, that England and Australia are terribly dangerous places. That's false. I know that there are some statistics floating around, but I know people who have lived in both places.

He believes, and would have us believe, that armed self-defense has always been the primary source of personal safety. That's false too -- the rule of law works a lot better.

St. Onge says that someone carrying a gun is unlikely to use it in any given year. Sure, but a statistically small number of uses can be pretty awful.

If "concealed carry" is by permit, it is a form of gun control. And if carriers are screened, I don't have a big problems with that. Most second amendment guys don't want any regulation or registration at all, though.

Note that both St. Onge and Hartin are totally passive about the "causes of violence". We're just a violent country, nothing can be done about it, gun ownership isn't the cause, and since we're a violent place we should all arm ourselves. Somehow the fact gets lost that, even after arming ourselves, we're still less safe than people in a lot of other countries.

If I have a gun, I can protect myself against fists, clubs, and knives. Against guns, only maybe. The initial advantage is lost, especially because an evildoer with a gun has the initiative.

Nobody took up what I said about the third-world places where every man is armed and armed self-defense really is the only safety you have. Those are NOT safe places.

-- Zizka

And at what point in history – before the foundation of modern police forces by Robert Peel in London in the 1820’s – was armed self-defense not the ‘primary source of personal safety’? You flatly misread history there.

It’s no more true that 2nd Amendment absolutists want ‘no regulation’ than that gun control advocates want ‘no guns’. The reality is that both political organizations are increasingly radicalized. Sadly, because I know that the large majority of gun owners would accept some reasonable regulation (I know I’m handwaving a bit here), as long as it was tied to some irreducible right rather than being this year’s slice of the salami.

No, the issue isn’t that we’re a ‘violent country’ so we should do nothing; it’s just that we are a violent country and this piffle about gun control gets in the way of finding and fixing the problems that make us so.

Your facts about armed self-defense aren’t true either; the average gunfight takes place at close range, a number of shots are fired, few if any hit, and it takes ten to fifteen seconds.

Hartin: I find your analysis simplistic. There are societies that are highly armed that are relatively safe against personal crime, and ones that are terribly dangerous. There are societies that are lightly armed that are safe and I suppose there are ones that are dangerous, although, frankly, I'm having a hard time thinking of one. I've spent about 2 months in the UK over the last 5 years, and believe me I wasn't walking around scared. What bothers me the most about your argument, however, is that it appears to me to be based on symbolic or ritualistic thinking. In other words, the UK and Australia are going to have high crime because they've gotten on the wrong side of the Gun God and the right to self-defense. Sometimes you look like you're writing a statistical argument (one which I suspect is false: Australia is a safe country), sometimes you seem to believe that a philosophical/historical argument compels the desired statistical results. I don't think so.

I've decided that some gun control groups have indeed missed the target: the target is gun crime (and I suppose gun accidents), not gun ownership. But your metaphysical arguments don't sway me.

-- Andrew Lazarus

This thread all got started from the comparison of the 21 dead in the San Ysidro massacre with the 2 dead at LAX, with the clear implication that more people carrying guns around McDonalds would have cut down on the death toll. And I've been saying that is only very partially true. Even people carrying guns (but who are not armed security guards looking for troublemakers) won't get the drop on a suicidal lunatic who comes in gun[s] blazing. First they'll have to put down their Big Macs.

You don't seem to accept this. Hence I am very worried that your faith in the defensive capabilities of firearms is exaggerated.

-- Andrew Lazarus

This has been a relatively civil thread on a heated and controversial topic; I want to thank everyone – even you, Andrew! – and look forward to more. Maybe we can find a path through this together. We certainly won’t do it alone.

Everyone has a Secret Plan. Admit it, if you were suddenly found to be the secret heir to an unknown branch of royalty, and your words was suddenly about to become law, you’ve got some kind of plan for what you’d do. Ban cars. Ban advertising. Ban fat people. Ban diet food. Make everyone buy a lhasa apso.

In my case, other than the obvious school for wayward supermodels that I’d be forced to open on the island of Catalina, it has involved gun regulation (driver regulation, too, and disarmament, and taxes, but we’ll have to wait on those…).

We have two problems to solve simultaneously.

On one hand, it is useful to carefully screen people who were buying guns to make sure they weren’t criminals, insane, etc. etc., and better still, had some reasonable amount of training. It would even be nice to be able to ballistically test all the guns out there so when a crime was committed, we’d know what gun did it and where it was likely to be, and to require that my guns be tested before I can buy ammo for them or carry them legally.

On the other hand, there are a large group of people in this society who hate guns, and devoutly wish to make them go away…at least except for the ones they get to carry (see CA state Senator ‘Beretta’ Perata) or their bodyguards carry (see Rosie). And these people are close to the levers of power, and it isn’t hard to imagine that one day they’d get those levers, and use them to do whatever they could to take guns away from everyone who wasn’t them.

Solving the first problem isn’t too hard (assuming people comply) technically. But you wind up with this big list somewhere of who owns guns and what guns they own.

And that feeds the potential that people like me see for the second problem, in which Rosie and Sen. ‘Beretta’ Perata team up to use that Big List to target all the known gun owners out there and forcibly take away their guns.

Which I think, for a variety of reasons, would be a Bad Thing.

So one day I was thinking about this, and then I had to go to traffic school. This is a California institution in which a traffic offender, such as I was once, get their record cleared and insurance premium protected in return for sitting through an eight hour class in traffic laws and traffic safety.

It turned out that there was a class just down the street from where we live.

Sadly, it wasn’t staffed by supermodels. But it was a private agency licensed by the State to certify that I had been trained.

Which gave me the germ of an idea, which as germs do, grew.

Why does the government have to keep the Big List?

Why can’t I get my certification from a private list-holder, who agrees that under specific conditions, they will release my data to the courts or police, or to a firearms dealer checking on me?

Some of them could be open and easy about my data.

Some of them could be run by rugged survivalists who keep their data centers under mountains in Idaho with EMP bombs next to the RAID arrays.

All of them would have to be subject to audit, and post an immense bond to assure performance. I’m sure the NRA and other gun-rights organizations would be the first to become registrars, and I’d be happy to have them register me.

They would store ballistic data about my guns, and training data about me, and check me against the government’s ‘do not sell guns’ list periodically.

When a crime was committed, the police could submit the ballistics to a query engine that would query all the registrars, and the one holding the registration would return the data.

When the police got the appropriate warrant, they could check an individual and see what guns they owned.

I can envision a time when an attempt is made to change the laws and pry the data out of the registrars, and I’m sure that the registrar that I entrust with my data would be happy to wipe the database before turning it over.

It’s not a perfect solution, or a fully-baked one (unlike the supermodel idea), but it keeps coming back to me as a framework that might allow both sides in this issue to get what they want. As usual, I look forward to people's responses to see if I'm out of my mind again...

Forbes.com: Massachusetts Finds CSFB 'Smoking Gun'. I've been talking with some friends about the runup in wealth during the boom years, and I keep asking the question: was there any real wealth created, or was it all just staged market perception? (Yes, I know that one can lead to the other, but there must be some way to allocate between the two. Max?? Brad??)

Based on emails and discussions below (and because I'm too damn busy to get any writing done right now), I thought I'd repost something I wrote some time ago. Looking at it, I don't see anything I'd significantly change.

REPOST - WHY BE AN ARMED LIBERAL?

I’ve actually gotten a fair number of emails asking me this; they presuppose that the only valid position for a liberal is to be disarmed, and the only valid position for a gun owner is to be a conservative. I’m neither. I own guns, and have spent a fair amount of time, energy and money becoming at least moderately competent with them. And let me state bluntly that while the politic thing for shooters to say in public is "I just shoot [trap and skeet] [a few targets] [to hunt birds].", that I do all those things, and in addition have trained hard to become competent in defending myself by, if necessary, shooting people.

I’m also a liberal, who believes that the government has the obligation, not just the right, to work to make our society, nation and world a better place. Which better place ought to be one in which fewer people are physically threatened seriously enough to need to resort to shooting people.

The intersection of those two beliefs – which on their face seem to be incompatible, but which I believe are not – defines a lot of what I believe about politics and the nature of good government.

Let’s talk a little bit about the armed side of it. Why be armed in today’s society?

Well, I’ll suggest four reasons:

1) It’s fun. Shooting is a pleasurable sport, things go “bang!!” loudly; well-hit clay pigeons gratifyingly disintegrate into a cloud of dust.

2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.

When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.

I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility – the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.

3) It is useful. The sad reality is that we live in an imperfect world, one in which some people prey on others. They may do it because it is a kind of crude redistribution (you have a BMW, he would like one); because they are desperate, or because they are deranged. They may have been damaged in some way by their genetic makeup or their upbringing. Or they may just be evil.

Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I don’t care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that “America had it coming” on 9/11. “Maybe. So what?” People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it. Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state.

There are bad people out there, folks. Some of them are tormented by what they do, some don’t care, some may revel in it. Someday, you may be confronted by one. What will you do?

4) It is the politically correct thing to do. I say this with all appropriate irony, but I am also a believer that an armed citizenry does two important things to the American polity:

a) it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the individual and the State. I am pretty dubious about the apocalyptic fantasies of those who believe that a cadre of deer hunters could stand up against the armed forces of the U.S. or some invading army. In reality, I think that the arms possessed by the citizens of the U.S. are primarily symbolic in value, much like the daggers carried by Sikhs. But, having lived in Europe, I think that the symbolic value carries a political and social weight;

b) it makes it clear that we as citizens have some measure of responsibility for ourselves. The tension I talk about above is one between self-reliance and mutual reliance. In England today, a subject (I am careful not to say citizen) faces increasing limitations on the right of self-defense; the State is moving toward an absolute monopoly on the use of force. It should not be hard to imagine that the character of both the relationship of the individual to the state and of the individual’s relationship to society is vastly different under those circumstances. By being armed, I am taking responsibility – literally, the responsibility of life and death – on myself. When the state cannot entrust individuals to act with some significant responsibility, except as an adjunct of the state, we will have truly lost something that is a key part of what makes our politics work (note that I think that the same thing is happening in the EU today, with the same effect).

There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.

Sometime soon: how to be a liberal in a society that values freedom, and why freedom is critical to building an effective and durable liberal society.

In a valiant effort to keep from becoming the perpetual ‘Gun Channel’ of the Blogoverse, I went to Barry’s reply to my post on calling Jews ‘Nazis’.

My points included:

The issue is that insult derives from context and intention.

To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.

The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

But then he jumps the shark, as we say here in L.A. He explains that I missed his main point:Unfortunately, none of the folks who responded to me explained how someone saying "I favor divestment from Israel to pressure the Israeli government to remove settlements" is anti-Semitism. Instead, people responded to me about the word "feminazi."I thought my second point address this, but he goes on. I’d like to collapse his argument, but it’s tough to do, so I’ll just quote extensively:

It's not Cathy Young's opinion; it's not Larry Summers' opinion; and I presume it's not the opinion of anyone who agreed with Summers' speech. Why? Because Summers's speech presented a radical new idea of anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism in effect, even when there isn't anti-Semitic intent. In this new version of anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitic action is one that hurts Jews, whether or not prejudice against Jews - "intent" - is involved. (Say, if an earthquake levels a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, is that anti-Semitism?).

But here's my problem with Israel's paritsans - they want to have it both ways. When it comes to criticizing liberals, they use the broadest definition of anti-Semitism imaginable, so that even a purely political action against the government of Israel, conducted by folks who have never shown any sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, is
anti-Semitism.

First, let me plant a flag on the hypocrisy issue. Lacking other values, it seems that the only meaningful criticism available to Bad Philosophers is internal inconsistency. The reality is that human thought and behavior is complex and ambiguous. Consistency is valued, but it isn’t the only value, nor, in my mind, the highest. I’m sure we’ll be talking about this later.

Next, in my original post, I concluded with the demand that Israel’s critics take a clear position on the survival of Israel, and it’s survival ‘as a Western and predominantly Jewish state’. My issue with Barry’s defense of the divestment petition and other criticisms of Israel’s actions – or one criticism, because as Meryl points out there are a host of others – is that they fail to either a) take a stand that says ‘Israel is an illegitimate country and needs to be dismantled,’ or b) ‘Israel has a right to exist in the face of outside attacks and here is a plan whereby it can do so.’

Because last time I looked, ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ was still the rallying cry.

When ‘peace’ activists propose a plan in which they act as human shields in Israeli restaurants and schools, instead of for terrorist leaders, I’ll take the quotes off their label.

Meanwhile, I’m unconvinced, and I’m afraid Barry and I will have to agree to disagree for a while. I’ll think about the feminazi thing though (although it’s never been a term I’ve used, it has been one I’ve tolerated use of in my presence…I’ll think about that).

There’s more, and some of it even includes criticism of Israeli politics that have helped create the situation, and an interesting questions raised by correspondent Evan Weisberg:

Third -- although this is less a point than a question -- what does it mean for Israel to have a "right" to remain a "Western" state? What does it mean for it to have a "right" to remain a "predominantly Jewish" state? Does Australia have a right to remain Western? Does Armenia have a right to remain predominantly Christian?

Here's someone who has some concrete suggestions to make:nathan_lott. He manages to both applaud the move of the African-Amercian polity to the mainstream (driven, I imagine by the black soccer moms I now see here in the formerly lily-white South Bay), and make some concrete and excellent suggestions (schools and housing) on what 'reparations' for Jim Crow might look like.

I'm wary of 'reparations' for slavery (or even for Jim Crow) as a justification for doing the right thing. I think the books on slavery were balanced by the blood of white boys spilled to free slaves during the Civil War...a simplistic construction, but nontheless true.

But that doesn't mean nothing needs to be done. I like to think of it as nation-building...for our own nation.

Check nathan out and see what you think.

Frequent commenter Mostafa works in the securities industry and has now started his own blog (hopefully we will keep at least some of his frequent and smart comments, even if he persists in disagreeing with me once in a while). He's starting a series on the markets which promises to be interesting.

Permalinks aren't working (is happening to me as well, so it's a Blogger problem), so just go to meaux's stream of consciouness...

In recent news, Los Angeles County is hustling to keep from rolling down the shutters on a large portion of the public healthcare infrastructure.

Meanwhile, voters in Oregon are looking at a statewide ‘one-payer’ plan (which appears to be getting mixed reviews, at best).

So here’s another thought-question for the folks out there: How would we know when the public health system here had collapsed? What would that collapse look like, and how would we react?

The problem seems pretty simple; Hospitals are morally and legally mandated to care for patients with little regard for their ability to pay. Some of those costs are covered by state and local government, some by the owners of hospitals (who are simultaneously declaring record profits on one hand, and going out of business on the other), and some by insured patients, who face cost pressures as hospitals try and stay solvent.

So the cost of taxes and insurance goes up, meaning fewer people can pay until < sarcasm> there is only one insured, tax-paying patient, and he (Bill Gates) is covering the costs for all the rest of us.< /sarcasm>

Clearly, we’re in an untenable position, and headed into deeper water on a leaking boat.

So, back to my original question: How do we know when the system has finally broken? What will it take to get the necessary political will to deal with the problem?

In Monterey being a corporate spouse...back Monday.

FYI:

DIAGNOSIS CRITICAL:

An Urgent Call for a Healthy Los Angeles

A Town Hall Meeting on health care issues in your community

Sunday October 20th, 2002
2:30 - 5:30pm
Agape International Spiritual Center 5700 Buckingham Pkwy Culver City, CA 90230

with featured guest speakers:
Warren Olney - Panel Moderator from Radio Station KCRW

Assemblyman Gil Cedillo - California State Assembly

Dr. Thomas Garthwaite - Director and Chief Medical Officer for the LA County Department of Health Services and Local Community Leaders

Eleven public health clinics and all school clinics closing. Trauma centers threatened. Reductions in hospital beds and funding for private clinics anticipated. 5000 jobs lost. 2.5 million residents without health care covereage.

There are solutions for a healthy LA. Find out what we can do!

PARTNERS
Community Health Councils
Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace
Office of the Americas
www.NonviolenceWorks.com

ADDITIONAL SPONSORS
Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas
Agape International Spiritual Center
SEIU Local 434B
The Gas Company
T.H.E. Clinic

--thanks to Bob Morris!

Back from a great weekend in Monterey and a stupendous motorcycle ride back down most of the two-lane roads in Central California. Blogging will resume shortly.

I obviously (and sadly) forgot to tell people not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I was gone…

So open the mailbox this morning, and have a pair of emails from Ralph Albertson. I haven’t got any really stupid or abusive email so far. I’m genuinely impressed at the level of comments and email I’ve received to date, so I’m going to quote these screeds in full and comment:

Your pro-gun arguments are specious to the point of being farcical. Perhaps you are merely unaware of the large number of children that are injured, maimed, or slain by "accidents" involving guns in their homes or perhaps you actually love your guns more than your children. In any even, if you will list your home address, I will be more than happy to report to the your nearest child protection agency for child endangerment.

Now there is another NRA nutcase sniper shooting people at random. That is another excellent example of your argument in action. In Stockton, one of your people uses a similar weapon to shoot up a schoolyard and murder children. Rather than act to protect the lives of children as the English did in a similar case by banning weapons, NRA people like you fought regulation, which proves again that you love your guns more than your children. The blood of thousands of innocent American who are murdered by guns in this country every year is on your hands. You must be proud to be gun scum.

http://www.childhealthmonitor.org/DirectorySearch.php?topic=84

http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsafety/statistics.htm

Professor InstaCracker Seeks To Deflect Attention Away From NRA

Professor InstaCracker, gunloon and NRA water-carrier, is beating the drums complaining nobody is looking into the Maryland (Montgomery County) Shootings as a potential Al Qaeda terrorism attack. Professor InstaCracker vaguely cites Al Qaeda training manuals as 'evidence' this could be a terrorist attack.

While terrorism as a motive for these crimes cannot be discounted, it should be noted the Al Qaeda manuals advised would-be terrorists to take advantage of lax US gun laws (the very same laws Professor InstaCracker would do away with) to obtain firepower.

However, this shooting spree doesn't really fit the mold of a terrorist attack; one would think a terrorist would select crowds and would attack in a more dispersed area in order to maximize terror. I suspect InstaCracker knows this as well but is engaging in a bit of misdirection to deflect attention from the far greater possibility these senseless murders are the result of yet another of the NRA's apocryphal "law-abiding citizens" exercising the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Another NRA killer on the loose.

You’re not a moron for opposing guns; that’s a legitimate position to take, albeit one that I think is wrong (albeit is a long word that means ‘although’). You’re a moron for believing that overheated rhetoric and namecalling will do anything except vent whatever personal frustrations you may have with your life, and make you look foolish in public, which in the long run will add to the personal frustrations you have with your life. It’s a sad negative feedback loop.

You want to challenge my beliefs or Glenn Reynolds’ beliefs, step up and challenge them. That’s what this is about. But you’ll have to actually do some thinking and work to do so.

I’d suggest that you start with the CDC databases, where you’ll learn that swimming pools are far more dangerous to American children than guns are, something sadly borne out in my personal experience (I have two friends who have lost children in swimming pool drownings). So your concern isn’t with the safety of children, but with banning guns, and you're shilling behind dead children to make your argument. OK, that's sleazy, but you need to make a case. And unless you’re prepared to actually attempt to construct an argument, do it someplace else.

You see, this is arguments…abuse and stupidity are down the hall.

In polar opposition to the stupidity below, Barry over at Ampersand had the class to email me and ask me to clarify what he thought was my position on divestment and anti-semitism, an area where we have disagreed in the past. He stated that he wanted to have an argument around my real position, rather than a strawman, and went out of his way to privately contact me and try and confirm what he understood my position to be.

We may disagree on issues, but for this he’s the Blogger Of The Day as far as I’m concerned. My reply to him is below:

OK, here's a first cut:

>As I understand it, the argument you're making connecting divestment
>campaigns to anti-Semitism can be summed up this way:
>
>1. Anti-Semitism is bigotry against Jews.

OK

>2. "Divestment from Israel" campaigns single out Israel, among all the
>nations (many of which are worse than Israel), for activist opposition.

Unlike other 'divestment' candidates (South Africa the best example), the threat to Israel is external and real; South Africa faced no meaningful threat to it's existence as a nation, nor did the white or colored South Africans face a real, organized threat to their lives. Divestment supporters don't take this into account when criticising Israel's actions, nor to they have a realistic response. Mandela wanted to see non-whites get their equitable share of political and economic power; the core positions of the Palestinian political powers remain a vague commitment to a two-state solution in English, and 'from the river to the sea' in Arabic. None of this is dealt with or remarked on in the pro-'peace' or pro-divestment comments I've read.

>3. There is no reason to single out Israel, except that Israel is a Jewish
>state.

I don't believe that's why the divestment campaign has focussed on Israel; I think it is for a variety of reasons: 1) I think that the philosophical bent is linked to the anti-colonial, anti-modern philosophical strains I've discussed at length in the blog, and Israel represents both colonialism - both in its foundation after WW2, and in it's effectrive treatment of the Occupied Territories - and modernity, in its embrace of technology, markets, and pluralism. I wonder what the discussion would have been like if Israel's identity was as self-consciously socialist as it was in the 50's. 2) I think that it is the natural inclination to root for the underdog, and (as when I was in school) the visual rhetoric of powerful war machines bearing down on a peasant population tends to drive arguments.

>4. Therefore, the reason pro-divestment activists have singled out Israel
>is
>that Israel is a Jewish state.

Don't think that.

>5. Therefore, pro-divestment activists are anti-Semites.

I do think they are anti-Semitic in a variety of ways; they accept the hateful rhetoric promulgated by many of the Palestinian organizations (how would the broad student community react to a poster suggesting that the secret ingredient in Afican-American 'soul food' was white babies? No one in this half-century would have even _thought_ of saying or doing such a thing), and I think the pro-PA student movement discredits itself by excusing that kind of behavior; and more, importantly I do connect the existence of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state (this has its own problems that I'll probably write about soon) with the 'state' of the Jewish people thoughout the world (note: I'm not Jewish; but I did grow up in a predominantly Jewish community). And what I do not see on the part of the divestment activists or any of the pro-Palestinian 'peace' community is any thoughful response to the real threat to the existance of Israel and the people who live there. The best I can see is the possibly sincere hope that if they lay their arms down, the Palestinians will do the same; something sadly not borne out in recent history.

I think Israel has done some illegal, immoral, and stupid things, partly from a knee-jerk reactiveness, partly out of fear. I do think that the palestinians have been screwed over, by the israelis on one side, and by the other Arab states and their own insane leadership on the other.

As I've said many times in the blog, I think that the average Palestinian isn't a monster, but someone who wants food, shelter, work, the love of their family and a better future for their children - none of which are in wide supply today.

Does this help stake out a position that's clear??

And thanks for asking me to explain...in careful discussion, we have a chance to find a common ground in this mess.

A.L.

Ann Salisbury reminds us all to get off our butts and register to vote Right God Damn Now. She is, as she almost always is, absolutely right.

As disgusted as I am by the Governor's race between "SkyBox/ATM" Davis and "Daddy's Money/Simple" Simon, I'll be flogged if I'm going to miss my chance to cast a vote in this. Even if it is to write in Obi-Wan Kenobi, or just simply vote Green.

Ross, over at the Bloviator has a bunch of information on what the CDC is doing around the smallpox issue.

I love it when government actually kinda works...it sounds like smart people are looking at this in a constructive way.

1. A meaningful tax on oil. As long as we are abjectly dependent on oil from the Middle East (or anywhere abroad), we will always face the accusation that we are acting to protect Ford Excursions and GM Hummers rather than any other national or international interest we may claim.

Some people say it will destroy our economy. No it won’t. Instead of shipping dollars abroad on something we use once(to be recycled as bank deposits, or invested in William Simon’s business ventures), we’ll spend them on products and services that we create within our economy.

It should be phased in, over a period of several years. It could be passed now, and not take effect for two years, and we would be able to begin the process of planning for higher energy costs.

I know this has been a political non-starter for twenty years, but since we're about to go to war, maybe we could sack up and at least start discussing the issue?

There’s more detail, but I’ll lay it out in the next day or so, along with a detailed talk about 3rd party gun registries and how they actually might work.

2. Bill Simon’s withdrawal from the California Governor’s race. He’s going to get spanked (I even have a bet on this), and right now the best thing he could do would be to withdraw, let Riordan or someone else embarrass Davis in the election and destroy Davis’ plans to run for President. A last-minute campaign à la New Jersey might actually rescue this from becoming one of the worst electoral campaigns of the year.

Oh – world peace and domestic tranquility would be nice, too…

Rob Lyman pulls me back into the gun issue with a damn interesting philosophical piece.

Partly, this disagreement arises because the parties are talking about different things. I have no doubt that reducing gun ownership among drug dealers whould reduce urban violence. I just don't see how bugging hunters and target shooters will accomplish that. The anti-gunners, on the other hand, don't make a very clear distinction between me and an urban gang-banger. We both have handguns; we are both "potential" murderers.

...on the way.

One of the difficulties of dealing with matters in much of the Middle East and Third World in general is the ‘brittleness’ of the governments there.

This is raised in the questions raised by Chris Bertram a few days ago, in his commentary on the Thomas Pogge article (pdf file) on the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in resource-dependent countries. Bertram and Pogge start by pointing out that political power in a place like Nigeria is the path to wealth – by Western standards – for the individuals in power. They take this further, to suggest that the West is immiserating the populations of these countries by accepting the legitimacy of, and trading with, the kleptocrats.

And it is certainly the case that many of our problems in the Arab world are the result of our desire to have compliant trading partners – as we have in Saudi Arabia – whose interests may not intersect well with their population. The anger of the population, logically directed at their rulers, then is redirected by the rulers and cultural institutions that they explicitly support first at Israel and the United States, and then secondarily at modernity in general.

Having mounted this tiger, there is no safe way for these governments to dismount.

I don’t know how to respond to Bertram on the issue of ‘legitimate ownership’ and who should get to determine it; the sad reality is that for most of human history, the definition of property was ‘what I could keep others from taking’. They aren’t wrong about presenting the problem, but we’re short of the kind of enlightenment – as well as the kind of Enlightenment – that would enable justice to be done.

There are a whole slug of problems to be addressed here; I’ll start with the straightforward one.

We somehow continue to expect that cultures which have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years will suddenly, on contact with us, dissolve and allow their members to simply join ours.

Now the reality is that Western, market-based culture is corrosive of traditional cultures. But it itself has a cultural base; I’ll make the Weberian argument that can be seen in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, and suggests that capitalism, and the self-restraint necessary for a culture to succeed in capitalism, is different than the unselfrestrained accumulativeness in more ‘backward’ societies. Weber said:

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has re-mained backward.

Bear with me...I'm having problems with archives and publishing. I've submitted a request, and am puttering around with it myself. I need to get the new site together...

BWAA-HA-HA!!!

Well, look at us...there's still some decorating and cleanup to do, but the MT port seems to be working.

If you commented between about 2000 and 2200 Pacific time, please check to see if I got your comments moved over; apologies if we lost them!

Huge thanks to DJ and RR for all the help...