When Stephen Colbert announced his “candidacy” for the Republican nomination last week, and urged his viewers to vote for Herman Cain as a vote for him, I worried that this would hurt Ron Paul, because the people most likely to vote for Colbert are probably also the people most likely to vote for Paul. I’m no longer worried, and I now respect Colbert even more than I already did:
(H/T David Kramer at the Lew Rockwell Blog)
Via Brian Doherty at Reason, some chick writing in the women’s section of Slate concludes, as summarized by Doherty, that “young men like [Ron] Paul’s ideas because they are black and white and simplistic and make the young men feel smart.”
I resemble that remark, although I can no longer call myself a young man.
If there is Law, there is not one Law for the people who constitute the State and another Law for everyone else. The same Law applies equally to all.
It’s as simple as that.
“And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. (Preach it, preach it) God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.
But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. (Amen) The God that I worship has a way of saying, “Don’t play with me.” (Yes) He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, “Don’t play with me, Israel. Don’t play with me, Babylon. (Yes) Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.” (Yes) And that can happen to America. (Yes) Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening. And we have perverted the drum major instinct.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon (4 February 1968)
“I know there’s been a lot of controversy lately about the quote on the memorial,” Obama, the nation’s first black president, said at a service project at a school in Washington in honor of today’s King holiday. “If you look at that speech about Dr. King as a drum major, what he really said was that all of us could be a drum major for service, all of us could be a drum major for justice, and there’s nobody who can’t serve, nobody who can’t help somebody else.”
Dr. King also said in that speech that all of us could be a drum major for peace.
Here is something else Dr. King said in that speech that is particularly applicable to “the nation’s first black president”:
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. (Yes) And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important.
I learned via IOZ that the words in the title of this post are inscribed in the granite of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in D.C., and that some people aren’t happy about it. They think these words inaccurately paraphrase the words of the sermon from which they’re taken, and make King sound like “an arrogant twit.” The State has heard their prayers, and is somehow now going to change the inscription. After reading the actual sermon, I think the inscription is just fine the way it is, for reasons I explained in a comment on IOZ’s post.
It’s not the prospect of getting your face eaten off by hungry rats, or of whatever you most fear befalling you. No, it is the fear of ultimately betraying those you love, of preferring your self to them, of preferring that what you most fear be done to them rather than to you, and thereby discovering that your love was a lie, and that you yourself are less than nothing. It is the fear of doing, and being, what you hate.
The so-called Problem of Evil, widely considered as the strongest argument against the existence of God, is typically framed by asking why bad things happen to good people. But the real Problem of Evil is this: Why do “good” people do bad things? Why do we ourselves not do what we believe to be right? Why do we fall short, by the testimony of our own consciences? In this, I believe, and not in cancers or tsunamis, or even in man’s inhumanity to man, is found the greatest obstacle to faith. It is found not in what others do to us or each other, but in what we ourselves do, or fail to do.
In theory, then, as the Stoics might say, our Happiness and our Beatitude is in our own hands. Yet even so, “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. . . . I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” Those of us who have foolishly gotten ourselves addicted to cigarettes know this better than anybody, and are reminded of it daily.
The answer, if there is one, is to understand, before we ever get to Room 101, that we are less than nothing, and that only God is Good. Perhaps then we will find in ourselves the strength of the martyrs. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” The modern ear revolts at this: Am I not good? Why did God create me to be nothing, and so weak? Why, if he is our Father, and loves us, does he demand our abasement, and our abject subjection to Him? But, in truth, the Son is equal to the Father. God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is more us than we are ourselves. It is we who have made ourselves nothing. It is as easy as the Stoics say. It is as easy to lay down your life for your friends as it is to throw away those stupid cigarettes.
I believe there is salvation even for Winston Smith and for Julia. Perhaps, as barbaric as it sounds, there is a Purgatory, wherein what we fear most finally befalls us, and wherein we may discover for ourselves, if we didn’t discover it in this world, that the “sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
H/T John Regan
On a related note, Rick Horowitz writes (emphasis added):
You might pity us [criminal defense attorneys] because of our clients. “Oh, god!,” I hear more often than not. “How could you defend that person? How hard that must be!”
The truth is, though, that sometimes our clients are not guilty. Even those who have committed some crime have often not committed the crime of which they are accused. And even when they have — yes, please think about this! — even when they have, it was an accident. A one-off incident that will never recur again.
That’s not at all to say that it’s okay. It’s not to say that all should be forgiven. However much it might actually be as effective in preventing future crimes, I know of no one who will say, “Go, and sin no more.”
Well, okay. Maybe I’ve heard of One. But we know what happened to Him.
From an article in The Arizona Republic about how crazy Jared Loughner was/is:
In August 2007, Loughner put a cryptic question to Giffords at a public event: “What’s government if words don’t have meaning?”
It seemed an attack on the very legitimacy of government. Giffords fumbled for a reply. Loughner wouldn’t forget it, her or his question.
Three years later, the same question appeared in the last line of a YouTube screed called “Introduction: Jared Loughner.” The lengthy post read like a manifesto.
. . .
Loughner thought money not backed by gold was unconstitutional. That those in power kept it by controlling grammar, words, numbers and symbols; that the CIA and FBI read his online messages; that spaceflight and organized religion were frauds; that teachers and government used mind control.
. . .
Such ideas anchor a number of New Age spiritualist websites that blend theories of lucid dreaming, secret knowledge and government conspiracies, along with several other concepts Loughner wrote about.
It’s unknown whether Loughner accessed such sites, but the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and extremists, commented on the similarities soon after the shooting.
Taken as a whole, the ideas dovetail with the message of a 2001 full-length animation film “Waking Life,” which news reports said was among Loughner’s favorites.
. . .
In an online post, Loughner named [Philip K.] Dick and George Orwell among his favorite authors. Orwell’s classic “1984″ depicts a totalitarian government that can change history by altering language and climaxes when the hero is tortured into submission by agreeing that “2+2=5.”
. . .
He started calculating his life earnings and what he’d paid for education.
. . .
Retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, whose career focused on mass shooters, says a common trait is what she calls an “injustice collector.” Such shooters often collect grudges, let them ferment and unleash an act of revenge far out of proportion to the initial insult.
It clearly appears that Jared Loughner was indeed clinically insane at the time he committed the terrible actions for which he is incarcerated. What’s disturbing about the article in The Arizona Republic is that it seems to imply that certain ideas (rational in themselves) were part and parcel of his insanity, and that these ideas are therefore as insane and dangerous as Loughner is.
This very blog is “an attack on the very legitimacy of [the] government.” When I first read this opinion issued by the Indiana Supreme Court, my immediate response was to write: “Words, including the words of which the law is made, are worthless.” (Cf. Loughner’s “What’s government if words don’t have meaning?”) The irrationality and the injustice of the court’s opinion literally left me speechless.
Mass shooters are commonly “injustice collectors”? Well, here is just one well-regarded blog, titled Injustice Everywhere, which is exactly that.
“Waking Life” is a damn fine movie. According to Wikipedia, its title is a reference to philosopher George Santayana’s maxim: “Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.” Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, and included it on his ongoing list of “Great Movies.”
A lot of people, including a lot of lawyers, are beginning to realize that education, including law school, is a scam.
Is it crazy to think that money not backed by gold is unconstitutional, or that the CIA and the FBI (like the Southern Poverty Law Center) monitors “extremists” online? Is it crazy to regard Orwell’s “1984″ as prophetic, and to see his prophecy being fulfilled before our very eyes? Do we not hear, even in this Arizona Republic article itself, the advent of Newspeak, i.e., “the destruction of words” (cf., again, Loughner) and of nuance and distinction, in the equation of attacking “the very legitimacy of government” with insanity?
Loughner is indeed crazy. He’s lost it. But did the State, which shackles and steals from its subjects and then tells them to fly, help drive him mad? How many other fragile minds and desperate souls, especially in this time of artificial and aggravated poverty and unemployment, will be driven by the State’s crimes and doublethink to such madness?
Deliberate and premeditated violence that is gratuitous and unnecessary is madness. It was Loughner’s madness. It is the State’s madness.
I disavow that madness. I fear Room 101. Therefore I speak, while we still can, in spite of the Thought Police.
I like that I was born on Michaelmas. I like that I’m a Libra. And I like that this was the #1 song in the USA on the day of my birth:
In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, died in a plane crash while flying to a prep school in New England. “There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,” he told me. “I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.” He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: “She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
On Tuesday the US presidential cycle reached its first major milestone, with Iowans caucusing to determine the fates of the GOP’s contenders. As the unofficial start of 2012’s election madness (in fact already well under way), Iowa offers an opportunity to reflect on what rehashing the whole fatuous pretense every four years actually means.
In the systems prevailing around the world today, those of political decision-making, public policy is crafted by an infinitesimal fraction of society — one whose interests are not at all representative of the general population’s. Historically, the state has provided the means through which a circle of rich, ruling elites shifts its costs onto an unwary public and monopolizes the benefits of productive activity.
Since its naissance as the institutionalization of conquest and theft, however, the state has come to be regarded as something else entirely. Today, the state, the great predator of the innocent, enjoys a reputation as guardian of the weak and attendant of justice. And practical politics — that liturgy of the modern state in which the opera of elections is substituted for a government of, by and for the people — has been instrumental in varnishing that reputation.
Intermittent rituals like Iowa, rather than presenting a real opportunity to influence government, serve to pacify a populace victimized by government at every opportunity.
As a matter of course, allowing a privileged few to formulate rules for all results in rules calculated to favor those few. Free and open competition, based on equality in rights and fairness in exchange, is never the operating principle in an arrangement whereby some people have a legal prerogative to decide how everyone can use their resources, both tangible and intangible.
Instead, the modus operandi of the political process has always been and will continue to be that of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. As Duke University economist Thomas J. Nechyba succinctly described this phenomenon, “[T]he ‘winners’ are a concentrated few for whom it is easy to organize politically while the ‘losers’ are a diffuse many who barely notice why it is they are losing.”
Such is the nature of monopoly and the reason that it necessarily relies on the coercive, preclusive power of the state.
Among campaigning politicians, the constant rhetorical refrain is fixed on practical solutions to problems facing the country, on “making government work” for ordinary folks. But the representative politics that Americans recognize just isn’t designed to do anything outside of cementing and legitimizing a system of state-enforced corporate capitalism.
Whoever ends up in Washington, money and influence will be waiting there to secure privileges, expressed as laws and regulations that shackle competition. Politicians and their votes will go to the highest bidder, the benefits of obstructing genuine individual rights and voluntary exchange going to the most well-connected.
Getting money out of politics is made impossible by the very nature and definition of politics. The state is an agency of an economic ruling class, and elections are its exiguous attempt at public relations. Real democracy in a stateless society would mean consensually organized groups administering their own affairs, free from aggressive, external rule.
Corporate execs and our “public servants” were the big winners in Iowa. The best the rest of us can do is pull out our votes, withdrawing our participation and getting down to creating the kind of society we want outside of politics.
“Rick Perry Pulls Out in Frustration After Santorum Surges From Behind,” courtesy of Radley Balko (and Dan Savage).
Mark Draughn is disgusted.
First, let me recommend Mike’s recent post on Nietzsche. Although I don’t know much about Nietzsche, based on what I do know Mike’s conclusion seems quite right.
I was most recently prompted to rummage around the internet for a refresher on Nietzsche by finally reading my copy of Community Technology by Karl Hess. This in turn prompted me to rummage around for Peter Kropotkin, who is one of the few thinkers quoted by Hess in that book, and whose ideals mesh nicely with my own. Here is a good summary of Kropotkin:
This brings us to the conception that Kropotkin had of anarchism as reflected in “The Conquest of Bread” and his other works. He doesn’t seem to see anarchism as a political ideology on a par with, say Marxism, but rather he sees it as a constantly present tendency within human groups. Anarchism, then, is more of an anthropological category than a political one for Kropotkin. In his “Mutual Aid” he looks at the ancient European tribes, the medieval city states, the guilds, and even the animal world, for examples of solidarity, self-sacrifice and mutual aid – all aspects of the anarchist idea. In “The Conquest of Bread” he does the same. He highlights events from the French revolution where associations of labourers sprang up to till the soil together. He looks at aspects of Russian and Swiss peasant communal land use as well as the English lifeboat crews who voluntarily aid seamen in distress. This is where Kropotkin’s real worth is – in the field of history and ethics. Of course some of his historical conclusions can be criticised: medieval cities were not as democratic and peaceful as he would have us believe. But he did illuminate an aspect of human history which had been completely neglected. Academics of the nineteenth century were heavily under the influence of neo-Darwinist ideas which sought to justify both capitalism and imperialism. Kropotkin was one of the very first to attempt to refute the ‘survival of the fittest’ idea. The basic point that humanity has made most progress under conditions of co-operation runs through the length and breadth of “The Conquest of Bread”.
And this in turn reminded me of “The New Idol” in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I’ve quoted in full before, and quote again in full below, and which I hereby designate as the official anthem of this blog:
Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states.
A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears to me, for now I will speak to you about the death of peoples.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”
It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers are they who lay snares for the many, and call it state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there are still peoples, the state is not understood, and is hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.
This sign I give to you: every people speaks its own language of good and evil, which its neighbor does not understand. It has created its own language of laws and customs.
But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen.
Everything in it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites often. It is false down to its bowels.
Confusion of tongues of good and evil; this sign I give you as the sign of the state. This sign points to the will to death! it points to the preachers of death!
All too many are born: for the superfluous the state was created!
See how it entices them to it, the all-too-many! How it swallows and chews and rechews them!
“On earth there is nothing greater than I: I am the governing hand of God.” — thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees!
Ah! even in your ears, you great souls, it whispers its gloomy lies! Ah! it finds out the rich hearts which willingly squander themselves!
Yes, it finds you too, you conquerors of the old God! You became weary of conflict, and now your weariness serves the new idol!
It would set up heroes and honorable ones around it, the new idol! Gladly it basks in the sunshine of good consciences, — the cold monster!
It will give everything to you, if you worship it, the new idol: thus it buys the lustre of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes.
Through you it seeks to seduce the all-too-many! Yes, a hellish artifice has been created here, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honors!
Yes, a dying for many has been created here, which glorifies itself as life: verily, a great service to all preachers of death!
The state, I call it, where all drink poison, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.”
Behold the superfluous! They steal the works of the creators and the treasures of the wise. Education, they call their theft — and everything becomes sickness and trouble to them!
Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.
Behold the superfluous! They acquire wealth and become the poorer for it. They seek power, and the lever of power, much money — these impotent ones!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus pull each other into the mud and the abyss.
They all strive for the throne: this is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne! Often filth sits on the throne. — and often also the throne on filth.
Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Foul smells their idol to me, the cold monster: foul they all smell to me, these idolaters.
My brothers, will you suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better to break the windows and jump into the open air!
Escape from their foul stench! Escape from the idolatry of the superfluous!
Escape from their foul stench! Escape from the steam of these human sacrifices!
The earth is yet free for great souls. There are still many empty sites for the lonesome and the twosome, surrounded by the fragrance of tranquil seas.
A free life is yet possible for great souls. He who possesses little is that much less possessed: blessed be a little poverty!
There, where the state ends — there only begins the man who is not superfluous: there begins the song of the necessary, the single and irreplaceable melody.
There, where the state ends — look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Overman?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
A couple of amateurish observations:
How does Nietzsche’s supposed Darwinian affirmation of the Will to Power comport with, for example, these lines, and other lines, in the above: “They seek power, and the lever of power, much money — these impotent ones! . . . ”
Nietzsche values “peoples” over “states.” But he does not appear to advise a return to, or reformation of, “peoples,” as Hess and Kropotkin seemed to do. Rather, he observes that there are “still many empty sites for the lonesome and the twosome, surrounded by the fragrance of tranquil seas.” Perhaps that is because “peoples” really are dead, and there’s no going back. “States” have killed them. The conscious and organized effort that Hess wrote about in Community Technology wound up being a failure. Perhaps nostalgia for neighborhood is just that — nostalgia.
But who knows. Nietzsche, famously, is easily misunderstood. Conversely, he must be hard to understand. It seems at least clear that he was a man, and a philosopher, of many apparent contradictions. I feel no great urgency to study him closely. “The New Idol” is enough. I already take too many of my ideas secondhand, a tendency he himself no doubt would have looked down upon. To the limited extent I understand him, I take him to be for life and the affirmation of life, and to be a denigrator of dogma and mediocrity. I’m on board. God is dead? Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
According to Wikipedia, a favorite motto of Nietzsche’s, taken from Pindar (although I haven’t been able to find on the internet the source for this claim in either Nietzsche or Pindar), was: “Become what you are.” What if, before Abraham was, you are? That’s aristocracy for you. And humility.
Via Tampa Bay Fox (H/T Scott Greenfield):
A Pinellas County teenager says she was suspended from school and charged with a crime just for posting a karma comment on her Facebook page.
Allie Scott is a junior at Osceola High School. The 16 year old says it all started in the school parking lot last month when she parked her brother’s car in another girl’s spot. She was asked to move it, and when she did at the end of the day, the car had been scratched up with a key.
Without naming who she thought did it, she posted this comment on her Facebook page: “Oh, so you keyed my car. Your karma is going to be a whole lot worse than that.”
In light of this story, I fully expect to be arrested and charged criminally any day now for writing this recent blog post, especially since the target of my prayer for Justice was not (as was Ms. Scott’s) some unnamed private citizen but unnamed agents of the State. (Presumably, the only person whose feelings could have been hurt by Ms. Scott’s Facebook comment would have been the criminal actually guilty of keying her car. The same limitation is true of my blog post, which was directed only at those, whoever they are, and they are many, who are “responsible for innocent men and women sitting in prison this Christmas.” If the shoe fits, wear it.) But can you blame the State for wishing to nip in the bud even the mere desire of people for Justice by punishing its expression, even if that expression explicitly leaves Justice to God (or to karma)? After all, if enough people hope bad things happen to bad people, that hope could eventually lead them to become impatient with God and to make bad things happen to bad people, a class which includes a disproportionately high number of State employees. Marie Antoinette, among others, discovered how dangerous such impatience can be.
For the record, although the State itself has no qualms whatsoever with actually visiting evil upon those it deems evil or a threat to its interests, and although there is something to be said for wanting the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everybody else, I recognize, in spite of the blog post I refer to above, that wishing evil upon anyone, or laughing and rejoicing at suffering which befalls those who’ve inflicted unjustified suffering on others, falls short of the Christian ideals I profess: “Avenge not yourselves, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I Will repay, saith the Lord.”
But those who wield and live by the sword of the State are in no position to judge.
One of my oldest and best friends, an artist type who like me is going through a rough patch in his life, out of the blue and apropos of nothing sent me the following text last night:
Dude. you are far too intelligent to be squandering your talents in this box. take charge of your life! all of us, our friends, admire you. though we all give you shit. you are the best of us! do it!
I texted him back:
Dude thanks man what you said is timely I’ve got some ideas they no longer involve being a hero they involve being a baker or something like that but in this day and age that is outside of the box I admire you too you and I are more alike than we would care to admit the real challenge in this life is to make an honest living if we can do that we have done something extraordinary it is okay if we are not paid for our poetry there are no paid ministers in the religious society of friends
But Jesus was still silent and said not another word, so that Pilate wondered at him.
You’re at Sanford and Son’s. Without legal justification, you shoot Fred twice at close range, intending to kill him, and he falls to the floor, with your gun still pointed at him. Lamont, seeing this, instantly pulls out his own gun and points it at you. Seeing this, you shoot and kill Lamont.
Can you claim self-defense as legal justification for shooting and killing Lamont?
No, you can’t, you say? Congratulations! You know the law better than all of the judges on the Indiana Supreme Court.
To all prosecutors, judges and jurors responsible for innocent men and women sitting in prison this Christmas, and for depriving their children of Santa Claus: Fuck you and yours too. God’s mercy is for the merciful and the just. You’ll get what’s coming to you, and I pray to the Baby Jesus you get it sooner rather than later. I hope your Christmas is as shitty as your victims’ will be.
From Chapter VII, titled “Illegal Judges,” of Lysander Spooner’s Essay on the Trial by Jury:
It is a principle of Magna Carta, and therefore of the trial by jury, (for all parts of Magna Carta must be construed together,) that no judge or other officer appointed by the king, shall preside in jury trials, in criminal cases, or “pleas of the crown.”
This provision is contained in the great charters of both John and Henry, and is second in importance only to the provision guaranteeing the trial by jury, of which it is really a part. Consequently, without the observance of this prohibition, there can be no genuine or legal that is, common law trial by jury. At the common law, all officers who held jury trials, whether in civil or criminal cases, were chosen by the people.
. . .
We can all perhaps form some idea, though few of us will be likely to form any adequate idea, of what a different thing the trial by jury would have been in practice, and of what would have been the difference to the liberties of England, for five hundred years last past, had this prohibition of Magna Carta, upon the king’s officers sitting in the trial of criminal cases, been observed.
The principle of this chapter of Magna Carta, as applicable to the governments of the United States of America, forbids that any officer appointed either by the executive or legislative power, or dependent upon them for their salaries, or responsible to them by impeachment, should preside over a jury in criminal trials. To have the trial a legal (that is, a common law) and true trial by jury, the presiding officers must be chosen by the people, and be entirely free from all dependence upon, and all accountability to, the executive and legislative branches of the government.
I hate to admit it, but I think Gerry Spence is probably right. There is no Santa Claus. Furthermore, faith in his existence is arguably insidious:
I don’t know what they would do to us if we were teaching our children from the time of first thought that Santa Claus was a lying fiction that represented the degenerate corporate money structure and was created only so Americans would buy a lot of junk at Christmas for their kids in order to insure the profits of the corporate king.
And what would happen if you taught your kids that Jesus and Santa were in competition with each other—as a matter of fact, as it turns out, Christmas is not the celebration of the birth of Christ, but it’s the time when Santa comes and, if you are a kid from a poor family trying to scrape enough together to eat, it is obvious that Santa does not love you as much as he does the rich kid, because the rich kid got a new bike and you got nothing, which teaches that money and virtue are somehow related, and that being poor is the first sin.
But then Gerry goes on to conflate believing in Santa with believing in God:
I have no problem with the various religions or with Santa. The human species is born with that overriding instinct of all instincts – survival – the other side of which is the fear of death. So we invent whatever belief systems are necessary to cope with that omnipotent fear, and we are born Baptists or Catholics or Muslims depending on the parents we drew out of the big basket in the sky. Doesn’t seem like much of a basis to kill each other because of the parents, along with their beliefs, that we, and they, drew out of said big basket in the sky.
No honestly religious person can argue with the proposition that the propensity to kill, or even be angry with, each other over religion is one of the most diabolical temptations with which Satan has bedeviled the heart of man and besmirched the name of God. But it is awfully simplistic for Gerry to then dismiss religion itself as having been “invent[ed]” to “cope with” the “omnipotent” “fear of death.” I prescribe The Way to Divine Knowledge by William Law as an antidote to both Gerry’s confusion and the diabolical temptation he describes.
On a related note, Ryan at Absurd Results links to an extraordinary post by James Altucher titled “My Lawyer is Dead,” this excerpt from which “scares the crap” out of Ryan:
Tired starts when you can’t get up in the morning. When you can’t look your wife in the face and say good morning but there’s no way to avoid it day after day. When you have kids that you just don’t know how to support and you start losing the ability to care. When you have clients and you think, “ugh, not another f-ing one of these.” When you have to drive two hours to meet some shitty guy who you know is going to just get a free consultation out of you but you do it anyway.
Day after day. No day different. Maybe you had other dreams. but maybe you didn’t. Everyone told you that being a lawyer would make you a lot of money, would bring you safety. Safety that would protect you to death. But who are you going to make happy today? Your mother, because you are alive, her little baby? Your wife? Your kids? Your customers? The ones who appreciate your art? When will it finally matter?
Here’s how Altucher’s post ends:
And one day you wake up and everything feels light again. You don’t feel surprised about how happy you feel. It’s natural. There are no worries. No clients. No bank accounts. No bathroom stalls. You jump out of bed. The window is open and you fly out. You skim through the trees and laugh. You fly to the moon and back. You forget who your clients were. You forget what your name was. You forget the irregularities of the nuances in SEC law. You forget everything. You’ve shed your body a million years ago and you’re no longer tired.
You were a shitty lawyer. And now you’re not.
Indeed it is. The State doesn’t need the money it extorts from the people whose labor has earned it, and by disbarring and sending to prison a 69-year-old criminal defense lawyer (and forcing him on pain of harsher punishment to admit that he was “wrong”) and thereby terrorizing other producers tempted to follow his example, it satisfies the greed of that class which has discovered that it is easier to live by the sword of the State than by labor.
Here’s Henry George on taxation:
We propose to abolish all taxes save one single tax levied on the value of land, irrespective of the value of the improvements in or on it.
. . .
That the value of the land alone would suffice to provide all needed public revenues—municipal, county, State, and national—there is no doubt.
. . .
It would get rid of taxes which necessarily promote fraud, perjury, bribery, and corruption, which lead men into temptation, and which tax what the nation can least afford to spare—honesty and conscience. Since land lies out-of-doors and cannot be removed, and its value is the most readily ascertained of all values, the tax to which we would resort can be collected with the minimum of cost and the least strain on public morals.
. . .
When we tax houses, crops, money, furniture, capital or wealth in any of its forms, we take from individuals what rightfully belongs to them. We violate the right of property, and in the name of the State commit robbery. But when we tax ground values, we take from individuals what does not belong to them, but belongs to the community, and which cannot be left to individuals without the robbery of other individuals.
And here, via Roderick Long, is an excerpt from an article by an economist in the 7th edition (1830-42) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica explaining why no people “not altogether enslaved” would tolerate an income tax:
Taxation of Income Impracticable
The difficulties in the way of assessing income are of two sorts: 1st, The difficulty of ascertaining the amount of the annual revenue of different individuals; and, 2nd, Supposing that amount to be known, the difficulty of laying an equal tax on income derived from different sources.
It would be useless to dwell at any considerable length on the first of these heads. Incomes arising from the rent of land and houses, mortgages, funded property, and such like sources, may be learned with tolerable precision; but it neither has been, and, we are bold to say, never will be, possible to determine the incomes of farmers, manufacturers, dealers of all sorts, and professional men, with anything like even the rudest approximation to accuracy. It is in vain to attempt to overcome this insuperable difficulty by instituting an odious inquiry into the affairs of individuals. It is not, indeed, very likely that any people, not altogether enslaved, would tolerate, in ordinary circumstances, such inquisitorial proceedings; but whether they did or did not, the result would be the same. The investigations would be worthless; and the commissioners of an income-tax would in the end have nothing to trust to but the declarations of the parties. Hence it is that the tax would fall with its full weight upon men of integrity, while the millionaire of “easy virtue” would well nigh escape it altogether. It would, in fact, be a tax on honesty, and a bounty on perjury and fraud; and, if carried to any considerable height – to such a height as to render it a prominent source of income – it would undoubtedly generate the most barefaced prostitution of principle, and would do much to obliterate that nice sense of honor which is the only sure foundation of national probity and virtue.
Thus commented Bill St. Clair on a post by Claire Wolfe in which she asks a very pertinent question: What if Ron Paul won?
If Ron Paul wins (and is not assassinated by the people the government is really of, by, and for), I for one would love to see him eliminate forthwith the Department of Health and Human Services, since he recognizes that DHHS is unconstitutional, and since he has already promised that if elected President in 2012 he’ll eliminate the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior, and Education.
Back in 1999 a congressional colleague of Dr. Paul’s, Dave Weldon, who like Dr. Paul is a pro-life physician, sent to Dr. Paul, and to every other member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a law review article I wrote which demonstrates that women have a legal right to know that induced abortion increases breast cancer risk and that the National Cancer Institute (which is part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of DHHS) are bigger liars than Big Tobacco ever was.
Hopefully he remembers.
Jay P. Greene’s Blog, which is focused on education policy, gives me a hat tip in a post by one of his friends, Greg Forster, titled “Choice Is Not Chaos.”
On the topic of education policy and the subject of Greg Forster’s post, I’ll quote Thomas Jefferson again, who in 1810 wrote in a letter to Judge John Tyler:
I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength.
- That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.
- To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.
But this division looks to many other fundamental provisions. . . .
And in 1816 Jefferson wrote in a letter to Joseph Cabell:
If, however, it is intended that the State government shall take this business into its own hands, and provide schools for every county, then by all means strike out this provision of our bill. I would never wish that it should be placed on a worse footing than the rest of the State. But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council, the commissioners of the literary fund, or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience. Try the principle one step further, and amend the bill so as to commit to the governor and council the management of all our farms, our mills, and merchants’ stores. No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to.
Albert Jay Nock explained:
The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle of “states’ rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit, but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination, because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.
That’s a comment, which I second, on this YouTube video of Ron Paul’s responses at the ABC Iowa GOP debate:
(H/T LewRockwell.com)
Screw my principles, I’m voting for the man. See also:
(H/T Bryan Brown)
“As a moral proposition, it is perfectly self‑evident that, unless juries have all the legal rights that have been claimed for them in the preceding chapters, ‑‑‑ that is, the rights of judging what the law is, whether the law be a just one, what evidence is admissible, what weight the evidence is entitled to, whether an act were done with a criminal intent, and the right also to limit the sentence, free of all dictation from any quarter, ‑‑‑ they have no moral right to sit in the trial at all, and cannot do so without making themselves accomplices in any injustice that they may have reason to believe may result from their verdict. It is absurd to say that they have no moral responsibility for the use that may be made of their verdict by the government, when they have reason to suppose it will be used for purposes of injustice.
. . .
Every man, therefore, ought to refuse to sit in a jury, and to take the oath of a juror, unless the form of the oath be such as to allow him to use his own judgment, on every part of the case, free of all dictation whatsoever, and to hold in his own hand a veto upon any verdict that can be rendered against a defendant, and any sentence that can be inflicted upon him, even if he be guilty.”
– Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), Chapter X
“With this in mind, it is interesting to observe that although all our public policies would seem to be in process of exhaustive review, no publicist has anything to say about the State system of land-tenure. This is no doubt the best evidence of its importance.”
Nock added in a footnote:
The French school of physiocrats, led by Quesnay, du Pont de Nemours, Turgot, Gournay and le Trosne — usually regarded as the founders of the science of political economy — broached the idea of destroying this system by the confiscation of economic rent; and this idea was worked out in detail some years ago in America by Henry George. None of these writers, however, seemed to be aware of the effect that their plan would produce upon the State itself.
Perhaps, then, this idea (supported to a greater or lesser extent by, among others, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley Jr., Clarence Darrow, Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Ralph Nader, etc.), rather than Thomas Jefferson’s “Ward System” or Lysander Spooner’s “Trial By Jury,” is the one thing needful, from which these other necessary and essential reforms would naturally follow.
I’ve invited readers on several occasions to compare for themselves the “intellectual integrity” of the 2-1 Indiana Court of Appeals decision that would have freed Tyrus Coleman on Double Jeopardy grounds with the “intellectual integrity” of the 5-0 Indiana Supreme Court decision reversing the Court of Appeals and reinstating Mr. Coleman’s conviction and 45 year sentence. Let’s do that together now, shall we? It won’t take long. (For the factual background of the case and boilerplate summaries of the law of collateral estoppel / issue preclusion / Double Jeopardy, you’ll need to read the decisions themselves.)
Here, in the following two paragraphs, is the entirety of the Indiana Supreme Court’s “analysis”:
Here, Coleman seems to contend that because of the brief interval between the two shootings, they necessarily amounted to a single transaction. Thus, the conclusion is that Coleman’s general fear of death or great bodily harm applied equally to Jermaine and Dye. This argument is unavailing. To begin, Coleman was charged separately with the murder of Jermaine and the attempted murder of Dye. See Appellant’s App. at 17. It is true that in the first trial, the trial court did not instruct the jury on the elements of self-defense separately with respect to each victim. See Appellant’s App. at 112. However, during summation Coleman’s counsel specifically addressed the separate shootings and argued each was justified by Coleman’s reasonable imminent fear of death or serious bodily injury from Dye, and then from Jermaine. See Tr. 1 at 378, 382-83, 388, 390-94.
Further, for the sake of argument we accept as true that the jury’s acquittal of Coleman on the murder charge in the first trial was based on its belief that Coleman acted in self-defense. But, the jury could have rationally concluded that the act of self-defense was in response to the conduct of Jermaine only. The jury was not bound to believe that Coleman likewise acted in self-defense with respect to Dye. Stated differently, the jury could very well have determined that Jermaine so threatened Coleman and others on the property that he was justified in using deadly force to protect himself and others from Jermaine. The record shows for example that an armed and agitated Jermaine had attempted to gain access to the studio in pursuit of Sharpe, and that although Coleman fired his weapon first at Dye, it was only Jermaine and not Dye who actually pointed his own weapon at Coleman. And there was testimony that Jermaine fired his weapon in Coleman’s direction. Tr. 1 at 208, 300-02. Coleman responded by firing at Jermaine resulting in fatal injury. In essence the acquittal relating to the murder of Jermaine even if based on self-defense did not amount to the jury determining that Coleman acted in self-defense with respect to the attempted murder of Dye. Thus, in retrying Coleman the State did not relitigate an issue that was necessarily decided by the jury in the first trial. Instead, the jury was asked to make the determination of whether Coleman acted in self-defense when he shot Dye. This issue was not decided during the first trial. Thus, collateral estoppel did not bar relitigation.
Here was the Court of Appeals’ analysis:
In order to acquit Coleman of murder based upon self-defense, the jury must have determined that Coleman reasonably believed that deadly force was necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to himself or third persons or the commission of a forcible felony. Because of this determination, the jury necessarily had to find that, when he shot Jermaine, Coleman was not committing a crime that was directly and immediately connected to the confrontation, that he did not provoke a fight with another person with the intent to cause bodily injury to that person, and that he had not willingly entered into a fight with another person. As the shootings of Dye and Jermaine happened within three seconds of each other, the jury’s determination must have meant that Coleman had not willingly entered into a fight with Dye, that he had not provoked a fight with Dye with the intent to cause bodily injury to Dye, and that he was not committing a crime that was directly and immediately connected to the confrontation. Stated another way, the jury must have believed that Coleman was in a place that he had a right to be; that he did not provoke, instigate, or participate willingly in the violence; and that he had a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. See Kimbrough, 911 N.E.2d at 635. Therefore, in acquitting Coleman of murdering Jermaine based upon self-defense in the first trial, the jury must have necessarily decided that Coleman’s use of force against Dye was also not a crime. If Coleman’s use of force against Dye was a crime, then the jury could not have reasonably determined, pursuant to the final instructions given, that Coleman’s use of force against Jermaine was justified. Thus, the doctrine of issue preclusion barred the State from re-litigating the issue of whether Coleman’s actions against Dye constituted attempted murder.
Now, let’s go back to the two paragraphs of the Supreme Court’s “analysis” in light of the Court of Appeals’ analysis.
The first paragraph rejects as “unavailing” an argument that was never made. Coleman didn’t contend that simply “because of the brief interval between the two shootings” his “general fear of death or great bodily harm applied equally to Jermaine and Dye.”
That leaves the second paragraph. Look at it closely. Its entire substance is comprised of this conclusory assertion:
[T]he jury could have rationally concluded that the act of self-defense was in response to the conduct of Jermaine only. The jury was not bound to believe that Coleman likewise acted in self-defense with respect to Dye. . . . In essence the acquittal relating to the murder of Jermaine even if based on self-defense did not amount to the jury determining that Coleman acted in self-defense with respect to the attempted murder of Dye.
Now, contrast that again with the Court of Appeals’ analysis. It’s as if the Court of Appeals had argued “Socrates is a man; All men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal,” and the Supreme Court responded with “Socrates is not mortal. Because we said so.” But in this case, an innocent man is serving a 45 year prison sentence, and his children are growing up without a father, because they said so.
After I wrote my last post, I thought, as I often do, that I’d just written something controversial and, not unreasonably, likely to get me in “trouble” with the Indiana attorney Disciplinary Commission.
But a moment’s reflection reminded me just how un-American this whole notion that “public confidence” in the State is a good thing is. Even were the government much less evil than it currently is (and government at its best, according to Thomas Paine, is but a necessary evil), it would be un-American to “trust” it.
This is because presuming the government Guilty is a necessary corollary of the presumption of Innocence accorded actual living, breathing human beings. You’re on a jury and the State is asking you to convict the man sitting at the table in the courtroom furthest from you? Locking a human being up in a cage like an animal is normally a heinous crime, so presume the government Guilty and its intentions malicious until it has proved to you the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. (And since the State doesn’t trust you to determine the consequences for the defendant should you convict him, and doesn’t even trust you with the knowledge of what it intends to do to him should you convict him, you should accordingly interpret this burden to be sky-high.) A state supreme court has reversed a court of appeals decision that would have set a man free, and has thereby reinstated his conviction and 45 year prison sentence? Presume it Guilty unless it published a carefully reasoned and factually accurate justification of its momentous decision and explained exactly why it thought the court of appeals got it wrong. Congress just passed a bill authorizing the President, at his discretion, to “declare” (in secret) a citizen of the United States to be an Enemy of the State and to detain him without trial until the end of the “War on Terror”? For God’s sake, presume it Guilty:
Via Doug Berman, U.S. District Judge James Zagel said today, in sentencing former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to 14 years in prison, that the damage caused by Blagojevich
is not measured in the value of money and property. The harm is the erosion of the public trust in government; [people’s] confidence in and trust in government.
Sounds to me like Blago deserves a medal along with a prison sentence. The judge’s 14 year sentence itself justifies “erosion of the public trust in government.” See (also via Doug Berman) this op-ed, by the the director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, published in the Chicago Tribune prior to Blago’s sentencing:
Rod Blagojevich is a lucky man. He is lucky that the U.S. attorney’s office is asking U.S. District Judge James Zagel to send him to prison for only 15 to 20 years. He is lucky that the prosecution is not asking for him to do 30 years to life in prison, which is the amount of time called for by federal sentencing guidelines — the laws that set punishment in federal cases based on the severity of the crime.
Blagojevich is especially lucky that he is not my recent client, a drug-addicted man who grew up on the South Side and pleaded guilty to selling two ounces of drugs to a government informant for $200. I represented this man, and the same U.S. attorney’s office asked Zagel to follow the sentencing guidelines strictly and send him to prison for up to 27 years. Luckily for Blagojevich, the prosecutors filed a motion asking for a far lighter sentence for the former governor who, they themselves contend, deeply damaged the integrity of the political system by trying to hand over a U.S. Senate seat in exchange for $1.5 million in donations and then blatantly lied about his conduct on the stand.
But hell, for all I know Blago is innocent of the charges for which he’s been convicted. Sure, Blago, after boisterously proclaiming his innocence in the media for all that time until he was convicted, now admits “I’m guilty,” and the judge in determining his sentence dutifully gave him (presumably years of) credit for “accepting responsibility,” but this kind of tidily coerced “confession” means nothing. And even his “confession” itself further erodes “public trust in government,” by underscoring the essential nature of politics a/k/a law-making:
There is a line between routine politics, horse trading and campaign politics… I thought they were permissible and I was mistaken.
Coincidentally, the Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court announced his retirement today, and the Indiana Attorney General had this to say:
I was privileged to have been present at the investiture of Chief Justice Shepard in 1985 and he has fulfilled his pledge to transform the Indiana Supreme Court into one that is nationally respected and whose legal insight and analysis serves to lead the development of the law.
But Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is “nationally respected,” and wrote back in 2003:
I have argued cases all over the world, and I have never encountered a legal system as result-oriented as that of Indiana or a chief justice as self-protective as Chief Justice Randall Shepard . . . .
As for the Court’s “legal insight and analysis,” compare the intellectual integrity of its less than 2 pages of “analysis” in the case of Tyrus Coleman with the intellectual integrity of the analysis in the court of appeals’ decision it overturned, thereby condemning to prison for decades an innocent man whom the court of appeals would have freed on Double Jeopardy grounds. Does it not drastically erode “public trust in government” to thus deprive a man of his freedom, and his children of their father, with such meager explanation, on what seems like a whim or worse?
IOZ got some grief from a commenter the other day for espousing anarchy while refusing to set forth his personal vision for a just society, of how he thinks things should be and how he thinks things should work. I myself have set forth my own vision multiple times on this blog, and did so again in a comment on IOZ’s post:
I don’t think a “grandiose plan to remake society” is called for. Get rid of the legislators; get rid of the judges (but not the jurors); get rid of the federal, state, and county governments (except, perhaps, as confederations of even smaller governments); and you’ll still have Law. You’ll still have what Nietzsche called the “song of the necessary, the single and irreplaceable melody.”
Another commenter made a good point in response to the commenter who was giving IOZ a hard time:
what you’re clutching at seems to be this: how does one utter the words “power be properly asserted by the proverbial people” or “heedless, half-cocked campaigns” or “fraudulent national accountancy” or “monstrosity” without having some sort of critical frame (which critical frame is itself a system)?
See, I don’t harbor any illusions that civilization as we know it will ever be “reformed” into anything remotely resembling a just society. My vision for a just society is principally just a “critical frame” for condemning civilization as we know it. Civilization as we know it will break before it will be “reformed,” before it becomes just. By eroding “public trust in government,” by recognizing the State as Our Enemy and as the coldest of all cold monsters, we hasten the arrival of that impending apocalypse.
So again, Gov. Blagojevich: Thank you for your service.
By publicly announcing my support for Matt Brown’s Tempe Criminal Defense blog in my last post I didn’t mean to slight the other worthy contenders for the 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 in the Criminal Justice Category.
In a recent comment on Jamison Koehler’s blog I credited him with “prompt[ing] what I regard as some of the better posts on my blog.” (Whereas I typically don’t have anything to add to Matt Brown’s posts, because I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything he writes.) But Jamison appears to be leading the race in the Criminal Justice category by a lot of votes, so he won’t miss mine.
I did. My decision would have been harder if some other truly excellent criminal justice blawgs weren’t conspicuously missing from the list, like Jeff Gamso’s, Norm Pattis’, and John Regan’s.
I hope Matt Brown, the author of Tempe Criminal Defense, will in honor of the occasion of being nominated to the ABA’s beauty pageant take the opportunity to clean up some of the broken links in his Blogroll (if not remove a couple of the less respectable ones).
