The purpose of government

It's to protect property, said Locke in the Second Treatise.

The perfect man and the perfect moral theory for the brazen bastards of the then rising class.

Not that I am not a political egoist.

But I am not such a blockhead as to think my personal interests, or the interests of those close to me, wholly subsumed under the money interests - or others - of my class.

Or race, nationality, religion, sex, sexual preference group, or irreligion.

The Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

Make no mistake.

In this document,  the 13 colonies declared themselves each individuality separate from and independent of their common Mother Country,  their metropole, Great Britain.

Each a sovereign and independent state with all the rights and powers customary for such.

Though they here affirm an ancient and traditional consent theory of legitimacy, in a somewhat pointedly republican and Lockean variant with justification for popular revolution against a despotic regime, they promptly pivot to the business at hand and a detailed list of abuses of the colonies and their rights by the government of the British King, justifying separation.

This war of secession did not and was not meant to create a new nation, but 13 independent and sovereign states with a habit of cooperation for their common good and a desire to continue the same.

The war effected a revolution of republicanism effortlessly and by the way, since the colonial governments and societies were already, in their local structures and outlook if not in those, now gone, that had tied them to Britain,  republican.

But it was not a national revolution and it did not create "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

It created 13 states in which slavery was legal, gathered in a loose, ad hoc association of questionable longevity, in each of which nearly everyone took such ideas not with a grain but a lump of salt.

What are you, anyway?

Three notions are regularly played with in popular, mid-level, and higher, academic culture.

1.     In the tradition of Plato and Descartes, you are your soul and your soul = your mind = your spirit = your intellect, a single non-material whatnot existing continuously over a span of time.

2.     In the tradition of Locke, anything that has your memories and your mental traits is you, though these change in varying degrees over time, anyway.

3.     In the materialist tradition, your body or at any rate your central nervous system is you.

As to the first, think Being Human.

As to the second, think Oblivion, Warehouse 13, or Eureka.

[And note that, for the attentive, Oblivion at least contains the refutation of this conception of personal identity.]

As to the third . . . . well, maybe you don’t see that a lot, in pop culture.

Can’t think of anything just now, anyway.

But that’s certainly the idea behind efforts to cryogenically preserve dead bodies until the day medical science is able to restore them to life.

Cryonics

Restore whom to life?

Why, himself, of course. Whosever body that is.

For any variant of materialism, a dead person is a dead body, and the latter is like a broken toaster.

Depending on how bad things are and on the available skills and resources, sometimes a toaster can be fixed and become fully functional, again.

A witty science fiction writer could make a very amusing Whozzat? story with such ingredients, playing these ideas off against each other.

As to materialism, the eliminative kind has the virtue of doing frankly what the reductive variety does surreptitiously.

That is, they both deny the data (pun intended) of experience.

Yup. They went there.

Top Conservative Publication: God Wants You To Have An Assault Rifle

The Biblical and Natural Right of Self-Defense

The position urged is that there is a right to self-defense, that it is God given, and that it enjoys specifically Biblical endorsement in both the Old and the New Testaments.

The position is then asserted that this entails the right to gun ownership secured in the 2^nd Amendment.

After quoting the Bible and John Locke – of roughly equal authority in the pages of the National Review – in support of a right of self-defense David French concludes with the question, “What does all this mean?”

He answers himself with a string of conclusions not one of which follows.

“What does all this mean?” he asks.

Essentially that gun control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society.

All rights — of course — are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a heavy burden of justification.

From the supposition that you have a right of self-defense it simply does not follow that you have a right to defend yourself with a nuclear weapon, with mustard gas, with weaponized anthrax, with an RPG – or with a gun.

And the burden of proof is not on others to show you don’t.

And even if we agree for the sake of argument that there are natural rights and that gun control is – as has not been shown and would not follow – a limitation of the right to self-defense it does not follow that it is, by default or otherwise, a violation of the rights of man, or that the state’s judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism, or that it must overcome a heavy burden of justification.

None of that follows.

And I warned you.

Nothing short of disarmament can stop slaughters like this, he seems to think, but does not quite say

Nixon, the liberal

Nixon at 100: Was He ‘America’s Last Liberal’?

The man I voted for in 1972, my first election.

I had attended many anti-war demonstrations in my college years, before that, and had not changed my mind that the war in Vietnam was a fool’s errand.

But McGovern just seemed too much a flake.

The conservatives still don’t like Nixon, much, though they laud and the liberals damn his early days and the whole Chambers/Hiss affair.

(Hiss, it seems to me, was guilty.)

Except for Pat Buchanan, who worked for him in the White House.

In 1968 you still had to be 21 to vote, and I wasn’t.

But Humphrey was first way too hawkish and then too sudden with a late conversion.

I would likely have voted for Nixon, then, had I been able to.

John Fund writes pollster Doug Schoen

[N]otes that Nixon’s 1974 national-health-care proposal “was a far more liberal concept than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s.”

Nixon would have required employers to buy health insurance for their employees and subsidized the employers who couldn’t afford it.

He also imposed a minimum tax on the wealthy (the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, which is only now being permanently indexed to exclude the middle class) and unsuccessfully backed a guaranteed income for all Americans.

And that’s before we even get to how Nixon embraced Communist Beijing, dumped America’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, and signed a highly flawed Vietnam War ceasefire that within two years led to South Vietnam’s being overrun by Communists.

Contrary to current mythology, when American labor supported Nixon it did not abandon New Deal liberalism, as the anti-war radicals of the time - not liberals by any stretch of the imagination, themselves, but mostly flaming reds who loathed America and wanted Ho to win - claimed.

Nor did I.

But it did abandon liberals who were happy to defend Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael, and the likes of Hanoi Jane, for whom I had no sympathy, either.

Somebody still owes us an appreciative biography of Nixon.

My biggest regret about him is that he and Kissinger didn't get us totally out of Vietnam in his first term.

But he didn't want the debacle to come on his watch.

Just like Obama stalling around in Afghanistan?

Some exceptionally hostile liberals allege Johnson would have ended the thing in 1968 if Nixon hadn’t sabotaged negotiations.

But only them and nobody else believes it.

Anyway, Fund thinks this is a litany of complaints.

In a single day in 1971, Nixon famously imposed wage and price controls in a naïve attempt to curb inflation, ended the U.S.’s last ties to the gold standard, effectively devalued the dollar, and imposed a 10 percent import surcharge.

The list of agencies he created from scratch includes the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He signed the command-and-control Clean Air Act into law and instituted racial quotas as federal policy.

“Incredible but true,” Fortune magazine recalled upon Nixon’s death in 1994. “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.”

As historian Joan Hoff has noted, “Not until the Nixon administration did ‘affirmative action’ begin to become synonymous with ‘civil rights.’”

Nixon’s most controversial federal-spending proposal was the Family Assistance Program, which would have guaranteed a minimal annual welfare payment for all Americans below a certain income level.

It was blocked by a coalition of conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats in the Senate, but under Nixon spending on Food Stamps increased from $610 million in 1970 to $2.5 billion in 1973.

Today, 47 million Americans, or nearly one in six, depend on the program.

In addition, Nixon created the Supplemental Security Income portion of Social Security, which constitutes a guaranteed annual income for the aged, blind, and disabled[.]

On things like this, possibly excepting affirmative action, Nixon and IKE saw absolutely eye-to-eye.

IKE thought the conservatives were utter crackpots.

Do you think all this means the progressive agenda is actually compatible with a kind of conservatism, now wholly obsolete, that isn't just a front for plutocrat greed or libertarian foolishness?

Maybe.

Bismark stole much of his domestic agenda from the German Social Democrats, a Marxist party from first to last.

It used to be called "stealing the Whigs' clothes."

Or maybe it was just a different kind of liberalism.

Apes moi, le deluge

Virginia Democrat Wants To Roll Back Key Environmental Rules: ‘I’m Not Going To Be Here’ To Suffer Consequences

He is quoted thus in a report by WAMU, according to Josh Israel.

State Sen. Dick Saslaw does not mince words about his support for uranium mining.

A Northern Virginia Democrat who is also the Senate minority leader, Saslaw says burying the radioactive byproduct known as tailings underground should be a solution to environmental concerns.

And he says he can’t be concerned about what might happen 100 [years] from now.

“What about 10,000 years from now? I’m not going to be here,” Saslaw says. 

“I can’t ban something because of something that might happen 500 or 1,000 years from now.“

Though his remarks as quoted by WAMU, as they appear in Israel's post, do not support WAMU's claim that he said he can't be concerned about what might happen 100 years from now, let that pass.

Burying is exactly what is now done with waste from nuclear power plants.

That is the best disposal method anyone has been able to think of, though it certainly leaves a problem that future people (if there are any, by then) will have to deal with.

If we think that too selfish and unkind to the future then we have to stop using nuclear power altogether.

Not too many folks will want to do that.

But his remarks are not actually relevant to the issue at hand, however, if the dangers under discussion are immediate and not in the far off future.

The piece by Israel is not quite clear.

Anyway, a somewhat irrelevant, or perhaps somewhat relevant, consideration is this.

Oil is not a renewable resource, nor is any fossil fuel.

A liberal once became outraged when I suggested that fact by itself was not a good argument for rationing or cutting present usage for the sake of the future.

Despite appearances, his outrage makes not one whit more sense than someone complaining you ate the last piece of pie in the fridge.

Wasn't someone going to eat it?

Why not you?

Were you only supposed to take half of it?

But then is the real complaint just that you took too big a piece?

If not, then if you took only half the next guy would have the last piece.

Why is he allowed to take the last piece, but not you?

Or was he supposed to only take half of what was left to him?

Theoretically, yes, that can go on forever.

But really . . . . 

Or were you supposed to cut the piece left to you into N equal pieces because N people might come after you, wanting a piece?

What number is N?

Mightn't more people than that come later?

And if you cut up the remaining piece into N equal pieces mightn't all of them be too small for use?

And, anyway, can't those people just eat something else?

How does anyone know something better won't be available for them than anything that has ever been available for you, including this piece of pie?

John Locke, the right's favorite philosopher, was and is much over-rated, along with his contemporary followers.

Google "Lockean proviso."

You can't as a practical matter leave "as good and as much" of a limited and non-renewable resource for those who come after you, no matter how little you take, unless that number is reasonably small.

We already know it won't be.

And we don't even know they will actually need any of it.

Mightn't they have something better?

Oh, heck.

What if you had the last piece of pie in the whole world and you knew that no food would ever be available again, after that, for anyone?

Do you want a slice of cheese or a scoop of ice cream with that pie, sir?

And coffee?

And what thinks he of rights, then? George Will, atheist.

God, the Founders, and George Will

So Conrad Black says Will is “a professed atheist”?

I have read of his irreligion before, but I wonder where and when he has professed it.

Anyway, he is one of those atheists who think it good that the plebs believe.

What then does he personally think of alleged natural rights?

It looks like he believes in the rights in the Declaration of Independence, but not the God.

Or is it just that he thinks it good that others believe in those rights, as he thinks about God?

According to author Conrad Black,

Will agrees with Irving Kristol that “it is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendental meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense.

"Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.”

Really?

Is that how he personally experiences his life?

That it is "a meaningless event in a meaningless world"?

If not, why not, since he seems pretty clearly to suppose that only religion, though false, supplies the meaning, and only for those who mistake it for true?

And is that government’s problem, anyway?

Still, he might be right (how very Marxist of him) to think, as he seems to, that with the decline in religious faith come greater demands on this, our one and only life.

So we should lie to people just to stop them making such demands?

Why?

Per Black, Will claims some key founders like Jefferson and Madison thought it good the common folk were actual Christian believers since that helped shore up their belief in the rights of the Declaration.

And Will sees (as does Black) a conflict between honoring those rights - I think he and Black are both assuming Locke's right to property is implicitly on that list - and trying to better the common fate in this life.

So much the worse for the rights, then, I say.

Why doesn't Will?

Black’s piece is interesting in more ways than one.

He is not at all happy with Will's atheism or his valuing Christianity only as a matter of expediency, whether personal or political.

Are conservatives really so obtuse as to take it for granted that of course we should not only believe what the founders believed (or wanted the hoi polloi to believe) two and a half centuries ago but want what they wanted (or what they wanted the hoi polloi to want)?

All of us?

Or are they just smart enough to pretend to be that obtuse?

Nothing short of disarmament can stop slaughters like this, he seems to think, but does not quite say

On Newtown and Gun Control

And Charles Cooke at NRO is quite right not only about that but that the federal government can’t disarm the country to any serious or helpful extent in the teeth of the 2nd Amendment.

And so?

Cooke writes,

American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure.

The 2nd Amendment pre-exists the federal government?

The state derives its authority from a document?

Not from the consent of the people?

What is this document to which all humanity owes such servile obeisance?

Perhaps his regular readers know what he has in mind.

I don't.

In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation.

In a free republic the people rule themselves and are not prevented from doing so by any institutional embodiment of someone else’s will.

And in a free republic – free in that regard, anyway – the will of the people would not be obstructed by anything like the 2nd Amendment.

There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs.

Yes, yes.

And no one thinks there should be.

Moreover, contrary to the rhetoric of many, America is not in the middle of a crime epidemic.

As laws have been liberalized over the last forty years, crime has dropped significantly.

The partial incorporation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court, along with the decline in public support for gun control and the passage of state-level concealed carry laws has done nothing to check this trend.

This could be right.

But as Cooke made perfectly clear at the top of his article, he understands perfectly well that the frequency of ordinary crime is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

And he also understands perfectly well that mass slaughters, already on something of an upswing, have increased dramatically since the Supremes began to combine 2nd Amendment honesty with the fundamental fakery of incorporation.

It is sad that all political factions in America, more and more, and including the faction of one that I am, have so much at stake in the secure and continued reign of utter fraud in our constitutional law.

After Newtown, and Before It

NRO's editors write, espousing an interesting twist on Locke,

The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked.

It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have. 

It is not that the people are allowed to arm.

It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them.

This is perhaps their opening shot in what they fear may be an emerging movement for outright repeal of the 2nd Amendment, for which no public safety argument is better than the rising tide of mass murders by people both very well armed and mentally disturbed.

Locke and his usual followers, even among the American colonials, seem to have had no idea the right to keep and bear arms is an absolute natural right on the same short – and, of course, entirely imaginary – list as life, liberty, and either property (for Locke) or the pursuit of happiness (for Jefferson).

In the constitution, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment clearly does not take that view, the right being said to exist and require safeguarding because, as a practical matter and as the framers and ratifiers believed and said, a well-regulated militia is necessary (and sufficient) to the security of a free state.

Of course, the framers and ratifiers were wrong on that point, even in their own lifetimes, as the Whiskey Rebellion and the War of 1812 both made abundantly clear though the Revolutionary War somehow did not.

The former made it abundantly clear that the armed yeomanry could not possibly stand up successfully against trained regulars in defense of liberty; they could not even do it in defense of whiskey.

And the latter demonstrated the uselessness of militia against foreign regulars in wartime.

The Brits, you will recall, pretty much cleaned our clocks in a war that took place and caused significant devastation almost entirely on our territory and not at all on theirs.

Other reasons given for the necessity of such a right in the 18th Century included frontier defense against Indians, self-defense in a society without effective police, and the daily need to feed one’s family.

None of these considerations apply in our time, of course; nor would they, if reasonable, be important enough to justify a constitutional right.

And nor would they, in the absence of such a right, justify allowing the ocean of guns in private hands in America to continue to enable such horrific disasters as that at Newtown.

So we are left with a constitutionally protected right thought necessary by its original supporters only for reasons that do not apply and the effect of which – thanks in large part to a gratuitous extension of the gratuitous incorporation doctrine – is wholly harmful.

And a right that NRO’s editors, no doubt not alone, have decided to upgrade to the short list of absolute, natural rights – all of them God-granted, in their official view – the better to defend the amendment that protects it from repeal and the right itself from common sense.

Wonderful.