Armed Liberal

I’ve been rereading the Federalist Papers; among other things they’re available online as a part of the Gutenberg Project.

The most relevant is #10: Here’s a long quote:

FEDERALIST No. 10

The Same Subject Continued
(The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection)
From the New York Packet.
Friday, November 23, 1787.

To the People of the State of New York:

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

I’m also rereading Thucydides, and the important point I’m taking from there is that it is not only the mechanics of governance, but the personalities, moment in history, and social structures that keep democracy alive as well.

Democracy in Athens collapsed shortly after the death of Pericles; somehow Turkey's democracy survived Ataturk. Why?

So I broke down (and broke the piggy bank) and bought an IBM T30, the full megillah, with a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4M,built-in Wi-Fi, and a docking station. I may or may not replace the desktop; I may just use the laptop full-time.

Sigh. So much for college tuition for the Biggest Guy...actually not, I got an excellent deal from www.netliquidations.com.

One of the cookies I've gotten for doing this is the opportunity to 'meet' (and sometimes even meet) some really amazing people. There was a flurry of well-wishing emails among bloggers on New Year's, and one that I sent to Jeff Cooper started me thinking as I rode in this morning.

I told him what a pleasure it was to have made his acquaintance, and that I was impressed by his intelligence, knowledge, and most of all by the obvious decency that shines through everything he writes.

And I started realizing that decency is another of those undervalued traits; it is not unique to the Left or Right, or much appreciated by either. As Jimmy Carter showed, it alone is not enough for a leader. In fact it may be a value that is absent in most great leaders…Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman…hmmm I need to think about this...but it is a value I cherish in the people I choose to associate with and a value that is somehow demeaned in our culture.

We value honesty, passion, those who hew to absolute values. Simple decency isn’t enough.

That’s too bad. From the dictionary:

decent [di snt]
adj.
1. polite or respectable: a decent family.
2. proper and suitable; fitting: a decent burial.
3. conforming to conventions of sexual behaviour; not indecent.
4. free of oaths, blasphemy, etc.: decent language.
5. good or adequate: a decent wage.
6. Informal. kind; generous: he was pretty decent to me.
7. Informal. sufficiently clothed to be seen by other people: are you decent?
[from Latin decens suitable, from decree to be fitting]

We’re talking bourgeois values here. And one of the things that I’m muddling toward is an articulation and defense of those values.

Damn, even I can't believe that I'm doing this...

(forgot a clause)

Kevin Drum whacks another one into the stands, as he talks about the draft:

…but I have a better (and more serious) idea: mandatory national service.

This is not a new idea, but it's the kind of thing that we should be seriously discussing these days. Patriotism, after all, does not come from reciting the pledge of alliegance every day or flying an American flag in front of your home. It comes from a deep seated notion that you live in a great country and that you share some of this greatness with your fellow countrymen.

Mandatory national service would oblige everyone who lives here to give something back to their country. It would allow teenagers to see firsthand what other parts of America are like, and what their fellow Americans are like. It would allow blacks to work alongside whites, rich alongside poor, and natives alongside immigrants. It would provide a large workforce that could be deployed both domestically and internationally. It would provide manpower for our inner cities and ambassadors to the third world. Military service would count, of course, but no one would be forced to serve in the military, and the vast majority of teenagers would serve in non-military areas.

Poor kids could spend time in school, catching up. Affluent kids could spend some time doing service. Adventurous kids could go into the military. Disabled kids can contribute too.

All of them would probably benefit from a break between high school and college or work.

I’d steal management from the military for it, though. The military has done a superb job of taking in a random assortment of young kids and turning most of them into adults. This should be boot camp, not summer camp.

Sorry for not responding to the comments below sooner; we went on a spontaneous (like 90 minute decision cycle spontaneous) weekend trip to the mountains with All Three Boys and Tenacious G. Much fun was had, I realized that I may or may not have succeeded in civilizing my sons, and we just got back late tonight.

I’ll present a more thoughtful response soon.

But a quick question for all the folks who I’ve pissed off…

…we all perform involuntary servitude for three or four months a year. We get a bundle of benefits for it. No one seems to be complaining about that...

We have, in order to meet crucial national goals, drafted young men and enforced draconian labor and consumption laws. It is questionable to me whether we would be here to have this discussion had we not.

So, to paraphrase Shaw, it’s a matter of price.

It’s often as amusing to me how many of my libertarian/anarchist friends have federally-insured home mortgages, and went to state universities, as it is how upset my Proudhon-spouting radical friends are when their stuff gets stolen or my socialist friends are when they run afoul of the zoning laws.

Our relationships with the state are and have been very complex here in America. They’re gonna get more so.

Go check out Penn Jillette’s account of dealing with airport security.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that his celebrity status is what finally pulled the bureaucracy into check.

Somehow, I don’t think I’d be treated quite so well.

And aside from the overall question of whether x-raying my Bass Weejuns makes the flight any safer (it appears that in spite of the fact that Richard Ried was wearing Semtex hightops, people with sneakers are exempt from the shoe x-ray, but people with loafers aren’t), and of the overall rationality of the way we're trying to do security...

…the bigger problem with this is the fact that for the average person, hiring a private jet in case they miss their flight, or taking two days out of their busy schedule to go to a court hearing that will probably end inconclusively isn’t an option. So you swallow your annoyance and just file on board.

Penn’s trying to figure out what to do. Go tell him…

[Update: DOOOH... a friend sent this over and I engaged in premature bloggage; didn't check the date and see if there were followups, and haven't been out on the blogs so didn't realize the whole freakin' world had dealt with this. The point is useful, but I still wasted bandwith and your time...sorry...]

From CNN:

Income Level: <$50K
Tax Returns: 15.2 million
Dividend Income: $26.9B
Dividend $/Return: $1,769.74

Income Level: $50K - $100K
Tax Returns: 10.0 million
Dividend Income: $27.1B
Dividend $/Return: $2,710.00

Income Level: $100K - $200K
Tax Returns: 4.8 million
Dividend Income: $23.8B
Dividend $/Return: $4,958.33

Income Level: > $1 million
Tax Returns: 200,000
Dividend Income: $25.4B
Dividend $/Return: $127,000.00

Yup, that’s some stimulus alright. The politician-owning classes will be stimulated beyond all belief.

There will be trickle-down; perhaps I can get a job as a skipper on one of the new yachts.

And please spare me the ‘class warfare’ rhetoric. The proposal you see above is class warfare; by being so stupidly slanted, the GOP is opening the door to class warfare; their protests ring a bit hollow.

And for me, the biggest issue is that this takes a sharp serrated knife to the thin stands of legitimacy that most of us feel.

I don’t completely trust Rev. Moon’s Washington Times, but this was making the rounds this weekend:

Montgomery County police said yesterday that they will use tens of thousands of tips from the October sniper hunt to track down those who violate Maryland gun laws.

"Our goal is to reduce illegal firearm possessions and violent crimes," said Capt. Nancy Demme, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Police Department. She also said the intensive crackdown would begin in the county in a few weeks.
…

I’ll talk a bit more about the nature of bureaucracy; but one problem is that it appears to be a one-way rachet. Given the information to combat a terrorist crisis, the managerial mindset can’t help but think of new ways to use the information.

In this case, they’re just gun owners…so I guess it’s OK.

Coming up the 405 freeway on my motorcycle, I changed into the carpool lane at least 40 feet in front of the legal entrance (here in SoCal, we block most of the carpool lanes with double yellow lines); once in the carpool lane, I (along with the dozen or so cars in front and back of me) averaged about 80 – 85 for several miles, in an area where the legal speed limit is 55.

When I bought gas, I illegally held the vapor recover hood back, because the old-style hoods don’t work with motorcycle gas tanks.

Pulling out of the gas station, I had to cross a solid white line to exit the right turn lane that blocks the entire front of the driveway and continue straight on the road I was on.

Heading up Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, my cohort of vehicles averaged 65 in the marked 45 mile per hour zone. There was a Sheriff’s car in the pack, moving up and down and checking out the traffic. I was watching him as he fell in behind me, and slowed by 5 mph to show him I was paying attention.

…and so on.

What’s my point?

That we write laws that no one has any intention of obeying, and that it then becomes a kind of dance in which the legislators get political credit for ‘dealing’ with the problem, the various enforcers (police, zoning staff, etc.) get a lot of discretionary power … my Sheriff this morning has the absolute power to pull over any one of the ten or so cars in our little pod.

And, since the laws are seldom enforced, most of us don’t mind.

If speed laws were absolutely enforced…with GATSO’s (radar cameras), aggressive police enforcement etc.. how long do you think we’d tolerate them? How politically challenging would it be to pass them. But because most of these laws are of the ‘wink and a nudge’ variety, they meet with little opposition.

Here’s another example. In a neighborhood where I lived before moving to Southern Calfiornia’s Mayberry, we had a crazy neighbor. He used to get into fistfights with several of the neighbors, harass and threaten the neighborhood kids, and was subject to a bunch of restraining orders. Then he came up with a new plan. He got a copy of the zoning standards, and went on a campaign to get exact compliance on a house-by-house basis.

Much hilarity ensued, until I went over to his duplex with a copy of the zoning code, a building inspector, and the local city councilwoman, who on reviewing the voluminous file, told the city staff to just stop answering his mail.

In the case below, what’s happening isn’t concentrated enforcement against known gang members, parole violators, people under restraining orders, or in general people who have a high likelihood of committing one of the violent crimes that are the real subject of concern.

So here are two sets of facts:

I have a gun safe in my garage (which I do), and a neighbor looks in one day as I’m putting a gun in or taking it out, and sees an assault rifle (in reality I don’t own one; I’ve trained with them and they’re fun to shoot, but since I don’t have apocalyptic fantasies, I never saw the utility for a civilian…plus I have a bunch of LEO and firearms trainer friends who will let me shoot theirs if I want). On the other hand, my ex-crazy neighbor takes to parading up and down his driveway with a shotgun.

In the second case, there is a legitimate concern. I’m not so clear on what the legitimate concern is in the first, or that there is a legitimate concern that rises to the level of a policed sweep.

This goes to the core of the gun-management debate. On one hand, some people (including me) tend to believe that the issue is the people who commit the crimes; others see the tool used as the issue. To me, it’s a fruitless argument, since no one on either side is going to change sides anytime soon.

But this issue is one that we need to broaden as we talk about the bureaucratic state, and about expanding the power of that bureaucracy in response to 9/11.

And as we expand the scope of citizen paranoia (I know I was and am ambivalent about TIPS, I'll explain more soon), we wind up with stories like this:

It was the most traumatic experience the Smoak family of North Carolina has ever had, and it happened yesterday afternoon as they traveled through Cookeville on their way home from a vacation in Nashville.

Before their ordeal was over, three members of the family had been yanked out of their car and handcuffed on the side of Interstate 40 in downtown Cookeville, and their beloved dog, Patton, had been shot to death by a police officer as they watched.
...
"A lady in Davidson County had seen that wallet fly off our car and had seen money coming out of it and going all over the road, and somehow that became a felony and they made a felony stop, but no robbery or felony had happened," Pamela Smoak said.

"Apparently, they had listened to some citizen with a cell phone and let her play detective down there," said James Smoak.
...

I've been pornblogged!! Check out ErosBlog Sex Blog's response to my stance for sex and against porn.

Lots of folks have been discussing this, apparently, but I've been so freaking busy that I've just done some (at best) half-assed blogging and haven't finished two important posts.

David Adesnik over at OxBlog has decided that learning to hunt might be a good idea.

I was thinking of taking up hunting. Not because I support the NRA (which I don't), but because I think it is important to recognize that animals do not simply become food.

Here’re two stories that neatly capture much of what’s wrong with contemporary liberalism. Both from this morning’s L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’):

First, this story on the UN AIDS bureaucracy:

A U.N. special envoy on AIDS warned Wednesday that a war against Iraq would eclipse humanitarian efforts around the world, and 29.4 million Africans with the disease would be among those suffering the most.

"Wars divert attention, wars consume resources, wars ride roughshod over external calamities," said Stephen Lewis, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's representative for AIDS issues in Africa. "People with HIV/AIDS are in a race against time. What they never imagined was that over and above the virus itself, there would be a new adversary, and that adversary would be war."
…
Lewis said that perhaps only a month remained for the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a consortium of nations and nongovernmental organizations supported by the U.N., to raise the estimated $7 billion it needs for this year and 2004.

"The response to the fund has been abysmal," he said. "It is inexplicable and terribly disappointing. We haven't had a contribution to the fund since Germany gave $50 million last July."
…
"What is required is a combination of political will and resources," he said. "You will forgive me for the strong language. But ... the time for polite, even agitated entreaties is over. This pandemic cannot be allowed to continue, and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account.

"There may yet come a day," Lewis said, "when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity."

And then this gem about anti-smoking activists who intend to use their leverage against poor people by denying them housing unless they 'behave':

The Los Angeles City Council, which pioneered smoking bans by prohibiting people from lighting up in restaurants, theaters and workplaces, was urged Wednesday by a group of health activists to ban smoking in half of the new affordable apartment buildings subsidized by the city.

With the city launching an effort to provide $100 million a year to subsidize the construction of affordable housing, council members assured representatives of the Task Force for Smoke Free Housing that they would hold a hearing on the proposal next month.

"A person who smokes can live in the building. It's just that they don't smoke in the building, in the same way we have smokers who eat in our restaurants. They just don't smoke there," said Esther Schiller, executive director of Smokefree Air For Everyone.
…
Under the proposal made by the activists, the city would award housing trust funds to affordable apartment projects based on the requirement that there be an equal number of units that allow smoking and that do not allow smoking.

The city already prohibits some substances in housing such as lead-based paint, said Marisol Romero, executive director of the Hispanic/Latino Tobacco Education Network.

"Smoke-free buildings are not about evicting people who are smokers," Romero said. "Smoke-free buildings really are about giving people options, and letting people know in advance that if they plan to live in a certain building that this building is smoke-free."

Liberalism doesn't have to be this way, I'm positive. It is possible for government to help people without tribunals and pecksniffery.

I just haven't managed to articulate how it would work yet...

I appended the Smoak family story below as an example of why we needed to think carefully about passing laws that make us all violators. It has generated a fair amount of traffic and comment, so I ought to make my stance on this specific incident more clear.

I’m typically a friend to cops; literally in may cases. I often train with them in firearms, first aid, and martial arts, and I’ve gotten to know a few pretty well.

So my reaction to this story is broken into three distinct parts.

First, I think the cops did a mediocre job, but my guess is that they don’t do a lot of felony stops there, and it’s not like they get sent to Bitchen Cop School on a small town’s budget. One broader issue is the fact that small town forces get grants for equipment to gear their troops up like the SWAT guys we see in the movies, then tickets to the movies are most of the training the town fathers spring for.

I wasn’t there, have only watched the (full-length) video and read the local accounts, etc. etc. But it certainly seems more than a few things could certainly have been done differently once the decision was made to make this a felony stop. But even in saying that, I’m second-guessing on very limited information. The reported laughter of the officer who shot the dog could have been the kind of laughter you get after you've been scared to death and had an adrenalin dump (it’s happened to me), or the cruel laughter of an asshole with a gun who’s just murdered a pet. I don’t know, but it’s going to be investigated to death and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it on Court TV for a while. I think the cops acted badly, but not necessarily criminally and will withhold judgment in favor of those who will study this incident harder than I will.

Second, the dumb but critically important fact is that any time guns come out, the potential for tragedy is there. As soon as this became a felony stop (where the responding police draw weapons in advance, and generally act as though the people being stopped are True Bad Guys), the door to a tragedy was opened. Officers have negligently (I never use the term ‘accidental discharge’ in talking about guns; it is a ‘negligent discharge’) shot the people they were handcuffing, or themselves, or their partners. The people who are stopped sometimes are uncompliant and do things which make the officers believe that a gun is being drawn. There are a million ways for this to end badly, and on the scale of those things, this one went poorly but not tragically.

The issue here is the overall police pattern of behavior that overuses felony stops and dynamic entries (the whole banging the door down in the middle of the night by SWAT teams thing). Because they are so inherently dangerous, their use needs to be judicious, and right now, it isn’t; this is from a mixture of legitimate ‘officer safety first’ strategies and a pure cowboy mentality. It’s certainly more fun to be SWAT than to be Barney Fife.

But Andy and Barney managed to get stuff done, we should remember. And officer safety is most of all impacted by the respect and connection that the overall community has for the police. It’s certainly possible to make officers act in a way that makes every interaction with citizens less risky for the officer, but nonetheless raises the overall level of risk by creating a greater number of hostile interactions.

Finally, it raises the issue of communication between citizen/witnesses and the police. One of the most valuable skills a great police officer can have, I’ve been told, is the ability to stop, listen and figure out a situation, rather than constantly trying to make a situation fit into a preconceived pattern.

I wasn’t opposed to something like TIPS, if it was about teaching citizens what to look for, giving them someplace to communicate what they see, and having someone on the other end of the phone who knows how to listen.

It’s not clear whether any of those was present in this incident.

I like and respect cops. Most of them are great people who work damn hard to help keep me and mine safe at night. I appreciate what they do, and hate to see something like this that damages their profession so badly.

Thinking about my comments below, I realized that Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch said it perfectly:

"You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work."

I’m taking a break after reading page 398 of a 600 page, badly-written document, and glancing through the blogs.

Devra led me over to a new blog called LivingSmall (a name I suspiciously link to the ‘frugality porn’ I see practiced on the West Side of L.A.), which turns out to have a damn good post on eating meat, and the farming economy. She links to Wendell Barry, too, so I think I like Charlotte.

The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it's a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there's no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It's been years since I've eaten a factory farmed chicken, but it's taken longer to wean myself from supermarket meat. Call it denial, call it convenience, I fudged that issue for a long time by claiming to myself that I don't really eat that much meat anyway. Somehow though, I've hit the point of no return. I can't buy meat in the supermarket any more (don't even get me started about those terrifying five-pound tubes of ground beef that seem popular up here). It all looks sad to me now, and when I see those Hormel stickers slathered all over the pork case, I can't help but feel implicated in the terrible lives not only of those factory pigs, but of those farmers who have been convinced to build factory pig sheds that they must know, deep in their souls, are just wrong (but the kids need clothes and the mortgage has to be paid, and it's hard just to stay on the land), and for the workers in the abbatoirs and packing houses, all those Mexican immigrants who have migrated to central Iowa where they're, as usual, doing the work none of us want to do. It just looks ugly to me, and I can't buy it any more.

My future-stalking-object Jill Stewart has surfaced, with the center of her brain that produces smart vitriol fully intact!!

Check out her take on the budget crisis:

Elizabeth Hill, the state legislative analyst, who strives not to side with Democrats or Republicans, pointedly explained that corporations comprise only a small part of the roughly $70 billion tax revenue--roughly $6 billion.

That was a shock to some Assembly members. Hill noted, again rather pointedly, that “the top 5 percent of Californians pay 42 percent of the income taxes” and that just 10 percent pay 80 percent of income taxes. Furthermore, large numbers of millionaires and those making $100,000 or more have vanished. Some went broke, but others left for states that don’t make them carry as big of a load, like tax-free (and booming) Nevada.

The packed audience at the special hearing appeared stunned. The message was clear: There aren’t enough corporations and rich around to pour huge new tax dollars into state coffers and save us.

So what was the first act announced by the obviously bewildered Jenny Oropeza, a Long Beach Democrat who clearly is in over her head as chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Committee? I thought that perhaps Oropeza should announce the creation of a job-stimulus subcommittee or a budget-cutbacks task force.

Instead, she formed the Working Group on Revenue--a crew of Democrats now meeting in secret to figure out ways to tax corporations, the rich, the middle class, Internet sales, retail sales, wine sales, small-service businesses and anything else the group can think of.

I’m a Democrat who has had a snootful of stupidity from Democrats in recent years. Thinking that maybe I was being too judgmental, I called some leading Democratic thinkers to get their read on the message coming out of the Legislature.

Al Checchi, who ran against Davis five years ago and has been watching the debacle, told me, “They have thrown the money away, completely distorted the expenditures on public-sector things like huge employee pensions they cannot afford, and they will run deficits of $10 billion or more next year as well. They should stop worrying about finding new taxes that are barely going to address this and deal with the true cause: their incredible overspending.”

Not likely, considering a key member of the Working Group on Revenue is one of the most anti-middle-class, capitalist-loathing big spenders in higher public office in California, Jackie Goldberg of Los Angeles, who one legislative aide told me “has already taken control of the working group” even though she is not its chairperson. Goldberg is, officially, the Stupidest Well-Spoken Person I Know. She hatched policies that left a wake of misery in her Hollywood City Council district. My nickname for her--the Dominatrix of the Los Angeles City Council--should travel well now that she is pushing people around in Sacramento. This feminist used to corner the men in Los Angeles City Hall and cry like a baby to get her way.

I wondered why Layne was moving to Nevada!! Blogging must pay better than I thought...

Ambrose Bierce resurfaces after 100 years, calling himself The Flaming Moderate. A sample of a post you can’t miss:

Politics: In any governmental system, the majority of inhabitants get the government they deserve. There are no exceptions to this rule, but a great many corollaries. An example: Dictatorships are as democratic as constitutional republics, the method required to change the government is just different.

I haven’t published much of anything about Iraq, although I’ve written a bunch about it. Most of what I’ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is doubtless interesting, simply standing up and saying “I’m confused” seemed like a waste of my time and yours.

But I saw something the other day over at Oliver Willis’ place that made me sit up and think.

It was an article in Newsday, suggesting that members of the Administration have floated a plan to take and sell Iraqi oil to pay the costs of the invasion. ‘Spoils of war” they call it.

Now I don’t doubt that someone has floated this as a concept, but I’m also a little dubious about whether it has been adopted as U.S. policy. I Googled it, and find the same story – literally, the same story, by Knute Royce, republished in three places – Newsday, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Gulf News in the UAE. Googling Knute Royce I see that he’s apparently a two-time Pulitzer winner and the Washington D.C. correspondent for Newdsay, so he’s a credible guy. My jury's out on this one.

But thinking about this brought some small clarity to my thoughts, and I realized just what we’re doing wrong.

There are (at least) two issues at stake in our approach to the Middle East.

The first is that we (the industrial West) have profited quite substantially from Middle Eastern oil; our trading partners there have profited as well, but the profits haven’t built economies and societies that offer much to the average person.

The second issue is that in no small part in response to the dysfunctional societies that have been built and maintained with our oil money, a culture has emerged which is virulently anti-Western; it combines the anti-Western Romantic intellectual strains that flowered in the 60’s and became intellectual commonplaces in the 90’s with traditions in Muslim history of conflict with the West.

The second issue, funded by the profits of the first issue, has emerged as a chronic, low-level war that has most dramatically shown itself on 9/11, but has cost thousands of lives over the last decade in less-dramatic attacks.

The second issue is a genuine threat to us, to our allies in the West, and to the people who are forced to live in religious dictatorships in Islamist countries (note that not all Islamic countries are religious dictatorships or post aggressive threats to the West).

The problem is in no small part of our (again, the West’s) making; we traded freedom for stability in the region in order to have secure and compliant trading partners. But having had a role in raising a psychopath doesn’t mean we should let ourselves be attacked by him as a way of assuaging our guilt.

We have a clear choice; we can fight to secure a supply of affordable oil, and to intimidate the other countries in the region into maintaining our supply of cheap oil; or we can fight to dismantle the social structures that our oil money and their dictators have created and attempt to free the people who have been forced to live hopeless, squalid lives.

There’s a bunch of issues collapsed into that paragraph that will require discussion and explanation…at a later time.

Right now, I want to focus on one thing; that if we’re going to do this, we need to do it for the right reasons, or at least for reasons that aren’t transparently wrong.

If we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:

1) We aren’t in it for the oil. Not in the short run, anyway. A prosperous, stable Middle East would doubtless want to sell and exploit their natural resources. We’d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made.

2) We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.

There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward isn’t.

We need to make a grand moral gesture to make it clear to the world that 1) isn’t the case. Personally, I think that it needs to come both from the American people and businesses, from our government.

I think the whole anti-SUV thing isn’t a bad place to start. It’s an incredibly powerful symbol to the rest of the world that we’re killing people in Iraq so we can buy Suburbans. I don’t believe it should be legislated, I don’t believe they should be banned, but I think that we should each examine what we’re willing to give up to play our part in changing the world so that 9/11 is an aberration.

I do think that on a national level, we should talk about moving toward taxing energy to encourage efficiency; there are a lot of arguments about this, but I’ll make a simple one: we can buy energy from outside our economy, or we can buy ingenuity and products that save it from within it. Which one leads to jobs?

I’m not one of the liberals who has a vision of essentially 19th Century village life as the way we all should live. That goal is of people who have an essentially abstemious belief set. I don’t believe that sacrifice and frugality are in themselves character-building or good moral values. I do believe that sacrifice in the name of a goal is a good thing, and that frugality in the name of building a better future are.

So if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:

1) We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
2) We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipleline, we won’t sell them to Japan)
3) We’re in this for the duration.

If we can’t answer all three as a solid “yes”, we shouldn’t go. If we can, we should.

So about this whole blogging thing.

I’m obviously addicted (as many of you have doubtless noticed, it’s this decade’s version of crack). It seems that a lot of bloggers go through the initial rush phase, then realize that it’s incredibly time- and energy- consuming, and that it somehow doesn’t allow them to quit their day jobs, so a lot of things suffer, and they come to a crisis.

In my case, it’s mostly sleep and my home life. I have a sleep deficit that would kill a bear; a list of household chores that’s growing geometrically, and a significant other who is thumbing the pages of Lysistrata while casting meaningful looks my way.

Plus, to be honest, I don’t feel like I’m doing as good a job blogging as I’d like to. I’m not thinking things through, or taking the time to do a little more research. I’ve been working on a piece on bureaucracy and another on democracy and neither is moving along too well.

I’d like to do fewer, better posts, interspersed with a bit of day-to-day fluff. But in reality, I’m not a significant enough figure to hold even the small audience I’ve got doing that, which means I’d lose the interactions via email and comments that mean a lot to me.

So here’s what I’d like to try.

Joe Katzman is moving his blog (currently Winds of Change, although I’m lobbying for a new name) to a group blog format, and has been kind enough to invite me to be the token liberal. I have a ton of respect for him, and am deeply honored that he’d ask me.

He and I see many things in much the same way: We are both concerned about finding a path through the Islamist hatred of the West; and we see technological changes as both presenting serious threats to us and opening new doors to promising futures.

He and some of the other contributors are more warlike than I am, a lot more conservative, and he’s a religious Jew and I’m neither. It may well be that the ‘inner liberal’ who has been hidden under my frustrated criticism of contemporary Democratic liberalism will be forced to come out, which I think would be kind of a good thing. Or I’ll get pulled to the Dark Side of conservatism, in which case, I trust that Ann and Kevin will undertake a quest and mount an expedition to come rescue me.

But I’d like to give it a try. I’ll do my first post for the new site sometime late next week, and will keep this site alive as an archive, possibly as a place to do one or two lightweight things, and as a place to come home to should I choose to do that.

I’m interested in people’s reactions; what do you think of this? To quote self-proclaimed non-pedophile Pete Townsend, I really want to know…

Pat Summerall emails me:

Kevin Drum rounds up the evidence against libertarian "scholar" John Lott, a guy widely relied upon on by pundits on the right for evidence that gun control actually produces more crime. Seems Lott may have fabricated a survey he once did on defensive gun use. Is there more? Stay tuned. A more definitive takedown of Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime can be found here.

We just noticed that InstaPundit has been taking issue with Brent Kendall's new Washington Monthly article, "License to Kill: How the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad get a sniper rifle." First he decided the article was terrible, sight unseen, because the headline referred to Muhammed's gun as a sniper rifle when it was actually an assault rifle. (Never blame a journalist for his headline -- we don't pick 'em.) Then he wrote that, according to Kendall "the gun and bullets are apparently responsible for the deaths, not Muhammad and Malvo, who in this report merely occupied a Chevrolet Caprice -- an offense against automotive taste, perhaps, but no more." Surely the professor can do better than that. Blame the person, not the gun, is a favored libertarian argument against gun control, but it's silly. Muhammad and Malvo's killing spree simply would not have been possible had they not been able to illegally acquire a high-powered rifle. You can't kill from two hundred yards with a hunting knife. You can't strangle somebody from the trunk of a car.

I haven't written much about l'affaire Bellesiles, for a variety of reasons, including some personal ones (hell, may as well acknowledge it...we have a Christmas card from his dad on the mantel). I've actually had some correspondence from Lott, although I've just scanned his work and the work that has grown up in opposition and support of his work.

But I'll divert for a moment into the meta-politics here for a moment. Pat isn't interested in having a dialog about gun control. There are some 'tells' that give it away pretty quickly..."scholar" John Lott...takedown of his work...it's WWE time, folks.

And I'm not interested in being a luchador.

There are real issues around the murder rate in the United States. But since I don't live in Peter Pan's world where wishing and clapping my hands makes it so, the guns out there in the world will not simply disappear. Neither, I remind my shooting friends, will the regulation of the personal ownership and possession of guns. For the foreseeable future include figuring out how to live as safely as possible in a society where there are a whole lot of guns, and figure out how to do so while maintaining some semblance of individual rights.

The U.K. continues it's crackdown, and to what effect? They police are so buried in crime they can't even investigate property crimes any more.

And to Pat's (and the original author's) position on the D.C. shooters, I'll suggest a few words in response:

Ted Bundy
John Wayne Gacy
Julio Gonzalez

From the L.A. Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/‘laexaminer’):

Family tensions and serious illness may have led the 56-year-old operator of the Zankou Chicken chain to fatally shoot his mother and sister in an upscale Glendale home before turning the gun on himself, police, family and friends said Wednesday.

In 1981, my Parisian-born then-wife and I moved back to Los Angeles from Chicago. I’d grown up here, hated it and fled the place at 16. She’d occasionally visited it with me and saw it, as only a well-bred Parisian can, as the emptiest most soulless place on earth.

Then one night, sometime in the next year, we went downtown to the then-thriving LA Theatre Center and saw their amazing production of ‘Jacques and His Master’, stopped at Zankou Chicken afterwards, and then went to Club 88 on Pico and saw X and Los Lobos in a room slightly larger than our living room at home.

Driving home at about 3, we looked at each other, laughed, and decided that living in L.A. might not be so bad after all. My sweetie and I met my brother in the Glendale store just a month ago, and it was as ambrosial as ever. So thank you, Iskenderian family, and please accept my very personal condolences.

Read all about it over at Winds of Change.NET

Over at Winds of Change, I've got some thoughts on the war.

It's been seven days since Orange County Democrat Ann Salisbury has posted...

...coincidence, or Republican suppression of dissent??

Republicans suppress dissent. Orange County is Republican. Ann lives in Orange County. Do I have to spell things out??

We will be dispatching inspectors, and may invade Orange County if we don't like what we hear...

(From Doonsebury)


...and the problem with this would be?

Here's the deal; we're in a changing world right now, and the changes are going to hit the 'creative' businesses pretty hard. Jimmy's right that the world supported by mega-acts in turn supported by mega record sales...requiring mega-distribution, mega-promotion, and mega-corporate structures to support 'the star-making machinery behind the popular song' is probably going to get a lot smaller. It is already.

Is that a bad thing, though? The market for estates on the Costa Smerelda in Sardinia may get a little smaller; but a new door opens as an old one closes.

I'll argue that it ought to be more possible to make a 'middle-class' living as a musician or writer.

In the case of music, bands, playing small venues, supported by regional fan bases and direct sales of their music, ought to be able to generate middle-class incomes for their members. You can have kids. If your SO works, you could buy a house.

I'm under no illusion that it wouldn't be damn hard work to get there and every day once you were there. But most jobs are hard work, and the idea that an independent artist could monetize what they do on an ongoing basis...

...rather than playing Music Industry Lotto and working for nothing for years in the hopes of hitting it huge...

...strikes me as a damn good thing. I say this as a consumer of music who long ago gave up going to stadium shows in favor of clubs.

I think the same model applies in books, video, and potentially games. the current channels won't go away. The Britney Spears' of the world we will always have with us, sadly. But new alternatives will open up; we're on the verge of an explosion of new models, content, and possibilities.

Most of them will vanish, but some may just survive.

I should make a disclosure, and comment that I have a substantial personal investment in a startup aimed at making just this happen. So you could say I'm shilling for my interests.

Or that I'm putting my money where my mouth is.

Check out our new digs at www.windsofchange.net. We have some painting to do, and maybe some drapes and carpet, but the structure looks pretty sound.

I've opened with Part I of the response the Dems should have made to Bush's State of the Union speech.

Part 2 is up over at Winds of Change...education and Iraq...