Normality Versus Hegemony

     Quite a long time ago, I read a semi-humorous article written by a man who was left-handed. The thrust of the article was that “it’s a right-handed world:” i.e., that commonplace devices and the conventions of the world cater to right-handed persons, and that left-handers must cope as best they can. Being rather young at that time, I was somewhat intrigued by this revelation. It set me on a kind of quest: I went looking for ways in which ordinary things embedded the assumption that their users would be righties rather than lefties. As you can imagine, I found a multitude of them.

     However, the discovery did not cause me to infer that the world is prejudiced against lefties, nor that lefties are treated unfairly. It did accentuate the importance of normality – conformance to the most common patterns – in easing one’s journey through life.

     Left-handedness is not normal. That’s not to say that it’s “unnatural,” or “perverse,” or bad in any other sense. It’s merely uncommon. Lefties constitute about 15% of the population of the United States, according to recent surveys. Thus, one who is pursuing a “mass market” for his new device will more likely orient it toward righties, if handedness matters to its use.

     This is not wrong or evil; it’s merely good sense. It does mean that lefties will have to cope with burdens righties don’t. But that’s also the case with persons distant from the norms for height, weight, and general intelligence. More, there are specific occupations in which left-handedness is a valued asset; pitching and orthopedic surgery are two examples.

     This highlights the difference between normality and hegemony.

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     In our time, attempts to conflate normality and hegemony are rife. It’s normal:

• To be right-handed (~85%);
• To be heterosexual (~97%);
• To have two arms and two legs (~99%);
• To have the “normal” five senses (~99%);
• To prefer the company of those who share one’s race, religion, or ethnic heritage (~100%).

     None of these conformances to various norms confer privileges beyond a degree of convenience. Yet they matter. The lefty, the homosexual, the amputee, the blind and the deaf, and the member of a minority race, creed, or heritage must all find ways to cope with their minority standing. It’s no one’s “fault;” it’s merely the way things are. Yet there are activists determined to impose those minorities’ preferences upon the rest of us by political means, as if not Nature but the State had decreed their disadvantages.

     And far too many of us let them get away with it, most commonly in the name of “compassion.”

     It’s not that long ago that the overwhelming majority of Americans would have known how wrong that is without needing time for reflection. But the conflation of normality with hegemony has penetrated so deeply into the public consciousness that many of us react in precisely the opposite fashion – by reflex conditioned in by the relentless propagandization of those aforementioned activists.

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     This is on my mind this fine July morning due to a phrase I first encountered quite recently: “sundown segregation.” It refers to the natural human tendency to prefer the company of others like oneself when there are no overriding considerations (e.g., one’s occupation). That tendency is why America has “Chinatowns,” “Germantowns,” “Little Italys,” and the like. It’s also the main reason why American Negroes tend to concentrate geographically, despite racialists’ claims that they’ve been “herded into ghettoes.”

     Political initiatives to combat that wholly natural tendency are, in a word, unnatural. It takes no more than ordinary intelligence to realize and deplore this, just as it would take no more than that to condemn a State decree that 50% of all marketed devices be oriented toward the convenience of the left-handed. Yet such initiatives have multiplied. They receive a truly unnatural degree of acquiescence.

     What too many good-hearted persons fail to realize is that the overt rationale for such initiatives is nothing more than a cover for the all-important covert motive: the desire of the power-hungry to assert absolute hegemony over every aspect of human life.

     In some cases, it starts innocently. Just as it’s normal to have two arms, two legs, and five senses, it’s normal for a person so equipped to feel sympathy for the plight of the amputee, the blind, and the deaf. Just as it’s normal for an American to be self-supporting (or a member of a family with an adequately functioning “breadwinner”), it’s normal to feel sympathy for those who aren’t, whether by reason of incapacity or tender age. Power-mongers have learned how to latch onto such sentiments and politicize them. Thus “programs” are born to redress such “iniquities,” so the “afflicted” can feel “included.” Note that such programs tend to be eternal, by reason of the natural existence of such persons...and that they swell in a fashion detached from the prevalence of the “afflictions” they purport to relieve.

     In other cases, there’s nothing innocent about it. I hardly need to tell any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch about the inroads black racialist mouthpieces, homosexual activists, and flacksters for “undocumented immigrants” have made into America’s politics. The salient thing here is that those inroads were paved with propaganda: ceaseless beratings of the majority about supposed “injustices” done to those minorities. Power-mongers and members in good standing of the political class have exploited them to the hilt.

     Were we to stipulate that some true injustices have been inflicted on members of minority demographics, wouldn’t it still be a far greater injustice for the State to penalize the overwhelming (and wholly innocent) majority of us to redress them? Wouldn’t that constitute a perversion of the very idea of justice: the punishment of the guilty without penalty to the innocent?

     You know the answer full well.

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     The above might seem too obvious to emphasize...which is why I repeat so frequently that obvious means overlooked. The gulf between the claims of “rights” and “injustices” and the cupidity and malice of the grievance-mongers that make them should be highlighted, yet it’s far more often ignored. Given the Main Stream Media’s swiftness to seize on exploitable occurrences to feed the grievance-mongers’ furnaces, coupled to politicians’ readiness to leap onto podia and trumpet “causes” in which we should all be compulsorily enrolled, the importance of reversing the tide has never been greater.

     A final thought: normal does not imply good or better. Majorities have no rights nor privileges as such, all pseudo-democratic notions notwithstanding. Assertions of hegemony through demography ought always to be resisted and refuted, no matter what demographic might claim it. It’s merely the irony of our place and time that minorities – groups outside the norm and distinct from it – should be waging a largely successful campaign to wield hegemony over the rest of us.

Racial Madness

     It would seem that we haven’t seen the last of it:

     Gangs of blacks are targeting Walmart departments stores and other outlets all across the country in targeted attacks while terrorizing shoppers and perpetrating retail theft and property damage, police say.

     The latest black mob was a planned attack on a Walmart in Macon, Georgia on Tuesday where shoppers were injured — including a disabled man in a motorized wheelchair — merchandise was destroyed and stolen, and at least one arrest was made.

     The group of about 50 blacks ransacked the Macon Walmart causing an estimated $2,000 in damage, all in an effort to “see how much damage” they could wreak.

     During the 1:45 AM attack, mobbing blacks pulled a disabled man from his wheelchair and threw him to the floor.

     A black suspect who was later arrested reportedly told a Walmart employee: “This was a planned event, and that they had planned to see how much damage they could cause.”

     Have you heard of any rampaging mobs of white teenagers trashing shopping centers or terrorizing passers-by, Gentle Reader? I haven’t.

     I have a few other questions:

• According to The Telegraph, the mob originated at a nearby party. Who owns the location of that party?
• Were there any adults at that gathering?
• Why has only one suspect – an idiot who returned to the store to retrieve his dropped cell phone – been arrested?
• Will the Bibb County authorities pursue the identities of the other rioters vigorously, that restitution may be extracted from them, or will they leave it to Walmart’s insurers to cover the destruction?
• Apparently, the aforementioned idiot has a mother and a father, who came to collect him after his arrest:
  • Are they Christians?
  • Are they married to one another?
  • What responsibility will they take for having reared the criminal pictured below?

     I imagine that the store’s managers and other staff will have questions of their own.

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     Incidents such as this are the fruits of several converging influences:

• The destruction of the Negro family by welfarism (69% of Negro children are born out of wedlock);
• Racialists’ incitement of resentment and entitlement syndrome among American Negroes;
• Failure to enforce the law and to prosecute lawbreakers when race is a factor;
• The weakening of parental authority over minor and adolescent children;
• The loss of influence among religious authorities.

     In many ways, the last of the above factors is the most important one. Hearken to Clay Christensen in the following brief video. Trust me; it’s worth your time.

     Rose Wilder Lane made approximately the same point in The Discovery Of Freedom. It’s not the fear of arrest, prosecution, conviction, and punishment that safeguards life and property, but the near-to-unanimous respect for those things that Americans feel...or perhaps we should say, in light of the developments of recent years, that Americans once felt. Such respect can be acquired in only two ways:

• By symmetry arguments and perturbation analysis, a tough intellectual journey;
• By the inculcation of moral norms as sacred precepts.

     In a nation of approximately normal intellectual distribution, widespread respect for the sanctity of life and property depend heavily on the power of religious convictions...and sad to say, the distribution of intelligence in these United States is no better than normal.

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     The Left has deliberately set out to create racial divisions. Its mouthpieces have repeatedly told American Negroes that they’re “owed,” that “Whitey” is determined to “keep them down,” that they’re not responsible for their own condition – and that their young are not responsible for their own deeds. How could we have expected any results but the ones before us? Even if all the contentions above were true, which they most assuredly are not, the resulting resentments and lack of respect for moral and social norms would have eventuated exactly as we have seen. Sowing the wind always reaps the whirlwind.

     Factor in the halving of so many Negro households, the weakening of parental authority, and the disdain for religious authority so many youth exhibit. Is it not clear that we’ve been sitting on a huge sociological bomb – a bomb that might be in the process of exploding as we watch?

     Daniel Patrick Moynihan pinned it many years ago:

     In a paper prepared for the Progressive Policy Institute, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and William A. Galston wrote that "if the economic effects of family breakdown are clear, the psychological effects are just now coming into focus." They cite Karl Zinsmeister:

     There is a mountain of scientific evidence showing that when families disintegrate children often end up with intellectual, physical, and emotional scars that persist for life. . . We talk about the drug crisis, the education crisis, and the problems of teen pregnancy and juvenile crime. But all these ills trace back predominantly to one source: broken families.

     As for juvenile crime, they cite Douglas Smith and G. Boger Jarjoura: "Neighborhoods with larger percentages of youth (those aged 12 to 20) and areas with higher percentages of single-parent households also have higher rates of violent crime." They add: "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and time again in the literature; poverty is far from the sole determinant of crime." But the large point is avoided. In a 1992 essay "The Expert's Story of Marriage," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead examined "the story of marriage as it is conveyed in today's high school and college textbooks." Nothing amiss in this tale.

     It goes like this: The life course is full of exciting options. The lifestyle options available to individuals seeking a fulfilling personal relationship include living a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual single lifestyle; living in a commune; having a group marriage; being a single parent; or living together. Marriage is yet another lifestyle choice. However, before choosing marriage, individuals should weigh its costs and benefits against other lifestyle options and should consider what they want to get out of their intimate relationships. Even within marriage, different people want different things. For example, some people marry for companionship, some marry in order to have children, some marry for emotional and financial security. Though marriage can offer a rewarding path to personal growth, it is important to remember that it cannot provide a secure or permanent status. Many people will make the decision between marriage and singlehood many times throughout their life.

     Divorce represents part of the normal family life cycle. It should not be viewed as either deviant or tragic, as it has been in the past. Rather, it establishes a process for "uncoupling" and thereby serves as the foundation for individual renewal and "new beginning

     Need I say explicitly how important the loss of respect for religious authorities and precepts has been to family dissolution?

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     A race war has been in progress for some time now: at least a full year. Catalogue the “knockout game” attacks of black youths on white passers-by. Chronicle the “flash mobs,” always uniformly composed of black teens and young adults. Consider outbreaks of racial violence such as we’ve seen in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland. Ponder the full significance of the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin and the hounding of Officer Darren Wilson out of his job and career for killing Michael Brown, in both cases in defense of their own lives.

     But don’t stop there. Go on to survey and comprehend the reactions of black racialists and how the media has kowtowed to them. Ponder the wholly gratuitous intrusions into these affairs of Barack Obama and Eric Holder. And try to imagine how things could possibly get better, rather than worse.

     We’re in for some dark times. Prepare accordingly.

The Ultimate Manifesto, Part 1: “Judicial Restraint”

     We heard rather a lot from John Roberts, during his confirmation hearings, about the importance of judicial restraint. It’s one of the shibboleth phrases of the Right, to which obeisance is paid but seldom is more than lip service given. Just this past week, Jeb Bush, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nod, echoed the phrase when he was asked about how he would select federal judges were he elected.

     So what do these worthies think it means? Not the dictionary meaning, mind you, but the meaning its most conspicuous users put to it by their actions.

     One interpretation of the phrase is found in the judicial doctrine of stare decisis. That’s rough Latin for let the decision stand. Its black-robed users mean by it We defer to earlier decisions of this body, feeling it would be wrong to overturn them. Wrong why? Sometimes there is no reason other than stare decisis itself: the unwillingness to overrule an earlier decision, sometimes because subsequent law and government action might have been founded on it, sometimes out of an unarticulated fear that it might somehow reduce the authority of the Supreme Court.

     Viewed thus, judicial restraint protects tyranny quite as well as anything else.

     The role of the Supreme Court as stated in the Constitution seems relatively simple and straightforward:

     The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State; —between Citizens of different States, —between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

     In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. [Article III, Sections 1 and 2]

     The most important of all the authorities – note that I do not use the word “powers” here – the Supreme Court has undertaken, “judicial review” of the law for Constitutional fidelity, is conspicuously absent from that list. It was arrogated to the Court by Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison, and has never been seriously challenged.

     Let’s stipulate for the purposes of this tirade that “judicial review” is an authority somehow implied to the Supreme Court by the Constitutional phraseology. Inasmuch as judges routinely claim the authority to proclaim the law – anyone who’s ever sat on a jury has heard a judge say to that jury that “I am judge of the law; you are judges of the facts” – it’s as well established de facto as any other authority ever claimed by a court. Is it even conceivable that “judicial review” includes the authority to rule against the text of a law on the basis of the Court’s notions about what its drafters and those who voted on it intended?

     The most extreme extension of the notion of “deference to legislative authority” could not possibly embrace this assertion of judicial telepathy. Yet that was the foundation for John Roberts’s execrable majority opinion in King v. Burwell, his most recent rescue of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare:

     It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner. See National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., dissenting) (slip op., at 60) (“Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.”). Congress made the guaranteed issue and community rating requirements applicable in every State in the Nation. But those requirements only work when combined with the coverage requirement and the tax credits. So it stands to reason that Congress meant for those provisions to apply in every State as well. [From the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts ]

     This, then, must be taken as consistent with John Roberts’s conception of “judicial restraint.” In his masterpiece The Vision of the Anointed, the great Thomas Sowell wrote:

     Those who argue for this view of the judge’s role – for “judicial restraint” – often say that judges should follow the “original intent” of laws in general and the Constitution in particular. Yet ironically, this very phrase has been seized upon by opponents and given meanings far removed from that of those who use it. Professor Ronald Dworkin, for example, argues against original intent on grounds that “mental events” in the minds of legislators or writers of the Constitution are difficult or impossible to discern. But of course, nobody voted on what was in the back of somebody else’s mind. What was enacted into law were the meanings of those words to others – in short, the public meaning of words. As Justice Holmes put it, the relevant question was “not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used.” Those who have urged judicial restraint have been very explicit that they did not mean to delve into the psyches of lawmakers, but to begin with the public meanings of the words the lawmakers used, as of the time they used them....

     Far more is involved here than a mere misunderstanding. Power is at the heart of the dispute. Although New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote of the Constitution’s “expansive phrases that would be given contemporary meaning by each generation,” generations do not vote on the constitutionality of laws. Judges do,. Thus the current generation’s decisions are not replacing those of a previous generation; judges’ decisions are replacing those of the current generation by imposing their own revision of what a past generation has said. The replacement of historical meanings by “contemporary meanings” is a major transfer of power to judges, not only from other branches of government, but from the people. It is an erosion of self-government and an imposition of the social vision of judges in its place.

     When I wrote just yesterday that law and the rule of law no longer exist, this is exactly what I meant. Today, black can mean white if five “Justices” of the Supreme Court decree it to be so...and no one can do a damned thing about it.

     There is no longer law; there is only the will and whim of those in power...and they have made it their top priority to own the courts, from the lowest to the highest. What, then, of the citizen’s supposed duty to obey the law? Upon what is it founded?

     More anon.

The Fatal Decisions

     Is it even imaginable that the “Justices” who just voted to:

1. Ignore the written text of a bill and all the collateral evidence that says “and we really mean it this way;”
2. Seize political control of the oldest and least political of all human institutions;

     ...don’t know what they’ve done?

     The Supreme Court has just written into our “Constitutional” framework that:

• The text of a law doesn’t matter;
• The text of the Constitution doesn’t matter;
• What a majority of “Justices” imagine about what those who passed the law intended are of decisive legal weight;
• There is no human practice, custom, tradition, or institution which the State cannot seize and tax, regulate, reorganize, or completely redefine to suit itself.

     The entire edifice of constitutionalism has just been ceremoniously trashed. Oh, we could see it coming from miles away. At least, I could; I’ve been watching this progression too closely and for too long to harbor any illusions about it. However, I must admit that I didn’t expect it to happen quite so rapidly or precipitously. Alvin Toffler would have something to say about that, wouldn’t he?

     We will pay for this in blood. I can only hope that the first persons to render up their due will be those selfsame “Justices.”

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     Allow me to tote up what we have lost, these few years past.

     There is no longer a Supreme Law in these United States. Indeed, there is no longer law as Americans have traditionally understood it. Therefore, there is no rule of law. How could there be, when judges have arrogated the privilege of rewriting the actual text of a law to reach a decision in harmony with their preferences?

     Without law in the customary sense, there cannot be a legislature with definite powers and responsibilities. At this point, Congress is either omnipotent or powerless, depending on the correlation of forces inside the Washington Beltway.

     There is no longer a president as the Constitution defines the office: one who presides, enforcing objectively defined laws arrived at by a legitimate, well specified procedure, rather than ruling by decree. Instead we have an Orator-In-Chief with dictatorial powers. How did we choose the current bearer of the title? According to his skin color? Great God in heaven, what will the next one be like? At least the Romans had one Marcus Aurelius. When will ours arrive?

     There is no longer any branch of government that we can accurately call “the people’s representatives.” The House of Representatives, utterly controlled by the GOP, supposedly the party of limited government and strict Constitutional construction, has done nothing to head off any of the overreaches of the Obama Administration or the federal bureaucracy it commands. Should it fail to impeach John Roberts for his treason, the Senate will have revealed itself as a high-priced club of no consequence.

     There is no longer a default assumption of probity for judges. Actually, that fantasy died some time ago. A judge who can rewrite a law, or nullify a solemnly agreed contract simply by calling it “unfair” or “unconscionable,” is not to be trusted...and that is now within the powers of any man who dons the black robe and mounts a judicial bench.

     No, I’m not telling you anything you couldn’t have figured out for yourself. Maybe you had already figured it out, in which case all the above is just my concurrence. Allow an old man at least one cri de coeur before he throws up his hands in surrender.

     R.I.P.U.S.A. We hardly knew ye.

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     I’ve gone from dreading a Second American Revolution to hoping for one. If I were young and hale, I’d surely march with it. I might even try to touch it off myself.

     My friend Dystopic has reminded us that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Have you ever wondered what Karl von Clausewitz had in mind when he wrote that? I articulated it as explicitly as I could in the Foreword to this novel:

     Other prominent science fiction writers have delved into the possibilities of a society that’s resolved that there shall be no State. However, none of the ones with which I’m familiar address the sociodynamics of such a society: the forces that would shape its development, with special emphasis on those that would tend to tear it from its founding premise. For me, that’s the really fascinating thing about anarchism. You see, it’s been tried, with varying degrees of longevity and success, many times in the history of Man. Yet there are no anarchic societies left on Earth as I write this foreword.

     Well, except for one: the whole of the human race.

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.

     When a society has no agreed-upon written law that 98% or more of the participants willingly respect, there is nothing but rule by naked force, according to the will and whim of the dominant power. Global society has been relatively peaceful and stable these past few decades – I said relatively, Gentle Reader; brush up on your history if you think otherwise – because the dominant power has been that of the United States, which had no imperial ambitions and was fairly reliable about doing what its political masters said it would do. Over the course of the last six years we’ve seen what happens internationally when those conditions dissolve. I put it to you that we’re about to see what happens domestically, as well.

     The whole point of a political system is to arrive at the law: to produce it, maintain it, and enforce it. But law has just been revealed to be nonexistent, a phantasm. Therefore politics, the mechanism by which we attempt to avert rule by naked force according to the will and whim of the dominant power, has just been revealed as pointless. Add that in a nation whose citizens possess an estimated 300 million firearms, the “dominant power” isn’t as dominant as its masters would like to believe. If we weren’t talking about the United States – if the country of interest were some blood-soaked realm in the Balkans, for example – what would you expect to happen?

     Ask yourself, in all honesty, whether the conditions and premises that have averted that sort of development from our country are still in force.

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     If there’s anything more to say about law, politics, and government under these circumstances, I can’t conceive of it this fine June morning. Perhaps that will pass; perhaps I’ll see things in a rosier light in a day or so. Being optimistic by nature, I’ll hope for that and turn to other things for the nonce. Perhaps I’ll derive some motivation for my novel-in-progress from all this crap. That, at least, would be pleasant.

     Have a nice day.

The New Salem Trials

     The Left has been straining to impose “narratives” upon America for quite some time. My earliest memory of clear evidence of their reliance on this sort of propaganda technique is from the 2004 presidential campaign, when CBS News used a forged TexANG memo in an attempt – thankfully, unsuccessful – to smear George W. Bush out of a second term as president. When the forgery was made plain by forensics and investigation, the refrain we heard was that “the narrative was right even if the facts were wrong.”

     I’m pretty sure the lineage of “Narrative Uber Alles” goes back much further than that. What’s remarkable about the present day is how openly the Left uses outright lies, and then castigates those who expose them and subject the arguments founded on them to skepticism. Consider the following from a writer for The New Republic:

     The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases, and other times in subtle but persistent ways. Mortgage discrimination against black families over the last century is an example of a structural, on-the-books bias that had an extraordinarily damaging impact on African Americans; but the fact that black children are read as older and less innocent than their white peers, while neither a law nor a regulation, is of a piece with the overall oppression of black folks in America, resulting in subtle treatment by teachers and authority figures that alienates black children from wider society starting at a very tender age. These disparate forms of discrimination come together, in the left imagination, to form a tightly composed set of prejudices and policies that are difficult to disentangle. Making sense of oppression, therefore, requires looking at entire systems of oppression, not just specific instances or behaviors.

     The right, on the other hand, tends to understand politics on the individual level, which fits in neatly with a general obsession with the capital-i Individual. Thus, the right tends to pore over the specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, concluding that if those particular situations were embattled by complications or mitigating factors, then the phenomena they’re meant to represent must not be real either. And if a few highly publicized rapes turn out to be murkier than first represented, then rape itself is not a crisis, just a regrettable and rare anomaly. The positive version of this approach is the elevation of people like Joe the Plumber, individual cases that purportedly show the value and effectiveness of conservative politics. It isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level.

     As an economics professor once said of a colleague’s reasoning, this is so bad it’s not even wrong. It reveals an invincible ignorance about how the process of reasoned argument actually works. But more significant yet is the open display of intellectual and moral arrogance: a distinguishing mark of leftists’ attitudes for some years now.

     This is significant for two reasons. The first and more obvious is that one who fails to grasp why his argument is viewed with skepticism when the “facts” on which he’s founded it are proved false isn’t merely ignorant; he’s stupid. Coupled to a superficial eloquence, it testifies to a process of indoctrination at whose core is the premise that facts don’t matter if your “values” are good. One who has internalized that premise cannot be educated without first being deprogrammed.

     The second reason is even more important: The attitude of superior wisdom and morality is itself a weapon in the Left’s hands, in that it enrages us in the Right and deflects us from making our own cases. Such an outraged reaction has been observed among many conservatives, including some of demonstrated intellect and wide knowledge.

     [A brief but useful tangent: The “assumption of differential rectitude” (Thomas Sowell, The Vision Of The Anointed) is easily shown to be circular. Why does the leftist think his intellect and morals are superior to those of us in the Right? Because his political positions are themselves superior. Yet he rejects all evidence against his positions, to the point of accusing those who present it of evil motives. Why? Because we’re intellectually and morally deficient! As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum. Here’s a sample rejoinder for your consideration:

     “You shriek about ‘police racism,’ but when pressed to deliver evidence, all you have are fables and conjectures. So there’s really no basis for concluding that mistreatment of minorities by our police is a significant problem – and you can’t see that. Worse, you scream at me for being ‘unconcerned about the problem’ you can’t substantiate. That marks you as being too stupid to talk to and unfit for polite company. Have a nice life.”

     Feel free to use the above as a template, edited suitably for whatever Cause you happen to be confronted about.]

     The proper reply to the Left’s attitude is amusement, with or without audible laughter. Mind you, we must never become arrogant about our own positions; that would constitute jumping into the moral-intellectual pit with them. However, an amused dismissal of their positions and of them as well is something leftists find massively humiliating. It enrages them, which nullifies their proselytizing powers.

     The Left hasn’t produced a figure of significant intellectual stature since John Kenneth Galbraith. Its historical champions have been refuted so completely that their corpses probably blush when they hear their names mentioned or their works cited. So why not take amusement at their pretensions? Especially since it’s wholly justified by the record.

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     There is a place for anger in political outreach. When the Left creates villains out of wholly innocent men, anger is the appropriate response. When the Left tries to claim good intentions in having done so, the anger should intensify. When the Left attempts to counterattack by impugning the motives of those who’ve disproved them, thereby creating additional victims of their slanders, the anger should become white-hot. But the appropriate causes for our anger are always individual injustices; the appropriate targets of our anger are always individual perpetrators.

     Consider the disgraced Sabrina Rubin Erdely. This woman has lent her byline to the defaming of a University of Virginia fraternity. She did so in full knowledge that:

• The accuser, “Jackie,” had never filed a rape complaint with the police;
• That “Jackie” would not name her supposed assailant;
• That the alleged rape had taken place long ago, such that objective evidence that it had occurred at all would be impossible to assemble today.

     Erdely was possessed by “the narrative” to the advancement of which she was committed. Never mind that that “narrative” is founded almost entirely on a single highly tendentious survey performed at a single university. Never mind that a great many professed “rape survivors” are no better able to substantiate their “victimization” than is “Jackie.” Never mind that in lending Rolling Stone’s pages to such a story, she was knowingly eschewing the sort of diligent process of investigation and confirmation appropriate to so serious a charge. “The narrative” was all that mattered.

     That’s evil – and not evil under cover of darkness, but in the light of the noonday sun. That’s an appropriate cause and target for righteous anger. It’s also consistent with the Left’s pattern of behavior since Tawana Brawley at the least.

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     The Salem witch trials were among the grossest miscarriages of injustice ever to occur on this continent. You’ll hardly find anyone to argue against that proposition. But it’s worth a few moments’ thought over why.

     Men and women were put to death entirely on the word of their accusers, every one of whom was a teenage girl who would herself face punishment except for her claim of ensorcellment. There was absolutely no evidence apart from those accusations. The court that condemned the accused was deaf to the questions of honesty that should have been raised about the accusers, probably because it was anxious to maintain and exercise its theocratic authority. Most ludicrous of all, an accused who protested his innocence was automatically condemned, while one who “confessed” was allowed to live! That the era in which these atrocities occurred was one in which the fear of witchcraft was rampant cannot excuse a “court of justice” from its duty to seek the truth.

     The Left’s various promotions of “rape culture,” “police racism,” “homophobic discrimination,” and so forth descend to a still deeper depth of evil, in that even after the accused have been exonerated by objective means, leftists continue to press their claims as if no such thing had occurred. They never apologize to those whom they’ve slandered and in some cases ruined socially and financially. They merely move on to the next opportunity to proclaim their “narratives,” still wholly convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority. The quote from the despicable Elizabeth Bruenig in the opening segment is quite representative. Indeed, even the contemptible Tawana Brawley, who has been revealed for all to see as a liar, continues to profess her “victimhood” – and is celebrated among black racialist mouthpiece groups.

     Be angry at individual malefactors for their individual deeds. Be amused at the pitiable Left’s pathetic attempts to press their cherished “narratives” upon us with fables and garbage surveys. It means they lack facts...and as is made plain by the sequel, they lack both the intelligence and the moral standards that would entitle them to a hearing.

Point / Counterpoint

Two fascinating items from the weekend provide a most revealing glimpse into two contrasting mindsets. The first is from a state legislator from Vermont:

Vermont, if memory serves, observes the Second Amendment in all its glory: i.e., its laws recognize the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This is sometimes called “constitutional carry:” no permit is required to acquire a handgun, nor to carry it publicly. The number of Vermonters who exercise their rights to carry is unknown...as it should be.

Apparently, Miss Carlson is dissatisfied with this state of affairs. Whether Vermonters are aware of her opinions is also unknown...but they’re not likely to remain unaware for long.

The second item comes from the reliable, redoubtable University of Tennessee Professor of Law Glenn Harlan Reynolds, also known as InstaPundit:

Ignorance of the law, we are often told, is no excuse. "Every man is presumed to know the law," says a long-established legal aphorism. And if you are charged with a crime, you would be well advised to rely on some other defense than "I had no idea that was illegal."

But not everybody favors this state of affairs. While a century or two ago nearly all crime was traditional common-law crime — rape, murder, theft and other things that pretty much everyone should know are bad — nowadays we face all sorts of "regulatory crimes" in which intuitions of right and wrong play no role, but for which the penalties are high.

If you walk down the sidewalk, pick up a pretty feather, and take it home, you could be a felon — if it happens to be a bald eagle feather. Bald eagles are plentiful now, and were taken off the endangered species list years ago, but the federal law making possession of them a crime for most people is still on the books, and federal agents are even infiltrating some Native-American powwows in order to find and arrest people. (And feathers from lesser-known birds, like the red-tailed hawk are also covered). Other examples abound, from getting lost in a storm and snowmobiling on the wrong bit of federal land, to diverting storm sewer water around a building.

Please read it all.

“Not everybody favors this state of affairs,” indeed. For when the law, by its very luxuriance, cannot be known in its entirety by any person – when regulatory bodies that legislative oversight, much less Constitutional authority, are permitted to pass regulations with the force of law of which no private citizen is informed – the law has gone through a great and unacceptable transformation: it has become the private, secret property of the State.

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The relevance of this situation to firearms law is especially strong, as the fifty states and the District of Columbia each have their own firearms laws and regulations, some of which are under legal challenge due to recent Supreme Court decisions. Thus, a man with carry rights (permitted or otherwise) in his home state is under obligation to determine to and through what other states he can travel armed without putting himself at hazard of legal penalty. Should he confuse the laws of one state with those of another, his mistake could tell heavily upon him and his family. Particularly firearms-hostile jurisdictions have levied harsh prison sentences and stiff fines upon Americans utterly innocent of any true wrongdoing. In some cases, the victims’ cars and other personal possessions have been confiscated.

But ignorance of the law is no excuse, right? Right?

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If you read yesterday’s tirade, you should be concerned, at the very least, about the state of law and justice in these United States. Yet believe it or not, I know people who will defend the legal status quo to the point of a screaming fit. “It’s got to be that way!” Many of them confuse this situation with the “rule of law,” whether deliberately or otherwise.

It’s an unstable situation for at least two reasons.

First, there can never be sufficient enforcement nor prosecutorial nor judicial power to enforce all the laws extant in a uniform fashion. Laws that go unenforced implicitly weaken all law, and the rule of law itself as a governing concept. Their consequences include such ideas as “laws are for the little people.” When ordinary private Americans see politicians and celebrities granted special exemption from the laws – recall the David Gregory incident? – the damage is fatally compounded.

Second, once the notion has been accepted that the law, because of its volume and complexity, cannot be uniformly enforced, prosecutorial discretion becomes the sole determinant of who the victims will be and how badly they will suffer. Prosecutors become more powerful, de facto, than any other public official. Those in whose souls resides a seed of corruptibility are tempted to use that power. Some of them will succumb.

“Law has lost its soul and become jungle.” – Bertrand de Jouvenel

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Juries willing to acquit in defiance of a trial judge’s instructions can only do so much to offset the malady described above. Even if every such jury were aware of its powers and all of them used them in every applicable instance, indictment and trial are themselves terrible ordeals to undergo. The accused citizen is often unable to maintain a job and an income. He’s usually bankrupted by lawyer’s fees, if nothing else. His familial relations will be affected as well. And of course, his reputation is likely to suffer regardless of the ultimate verdict.

Only the complete rejection of the existing corpus juris and its replacement by a penal law utterly dependent on the common understanding of justice – what used to distinguish between malum in se and malum prohibitum offenses – can correct the travesty that law and justice have become. But that cannot occur as long as there exist legislatures that feel free to disregard the constraints of the Constitution, prosecutors who believe themselves empowered to discriminate between accused citizens, regulators allowed to write “laws” beyond the legislated law and without oversight...or millions of Americans who think “there oughta be a law” is a respectable thing to say or think about any deed not covered by Commandments Five through Eight.

Food for thought.

King’s “Justice”

     It’s a measure of the uselessness of American media that I had to learn about the following atrocity from an article in The New Zealand Herald:

[United Against Nuclear Iran] was founded in 2008 by a former CIA director and a group of retired diplomats to advocate against the nuclear Iran.

Its board includes former directors of foreign intelligence services including the U.K.'s MI-6, Germany's BND - and Israel's Mossad.

One of the strategies pursued by United Against is a campaign to "name and shame" entities that trade with Iran.

The organization named [Greek Shipping magnate Victor] Restis, who in turn sued United Against for falsely claiming his companies were "front men for the illicit activities of the Iranian regime."

     So far, nothing out of the ordinary, right? Ladies, hold on to your boyfriends: This is where things get really interesting. When the suit reached the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a third player emerged:

The Department of Justice intervened in September, asserting the state secrets privilege.

That so-called privilege doesn't come from the Constitution or from statute.

It's an unwritten judicial rule that allows the Government to block discovery of information through ordinary litigation "when disclosure would be inimical to national security," as the district court described it.

What followed would be comical if it weren't so serious.

The government asserted privilege "by submitting classified declaration by the head of the department which has control over the matter."

But even the identity of that official is itself a secret that the court declined to reveal.

The Government said that "disclosing even the identity of the agency involved creates an unwarranted risk of exposing the information it seeks to protect."

The court accepted that argument.

     That’s right. Restis was denied access to the one and only legal path to restitution because Uncle Sam has secrets that might be “endangered.” What secrets? About what subjects? Collected by whom? You’re not cleared to know that.

     But we’re not quite done yet:

Having barred access to information, the court went on to dismiss the case altogether.

Even if Restis could prove his case without the excluded evidence, the court said, it was "convinced that further litigation of this action would impose an unjustifiable risk of disclosing state secrets."

That is, even if the court were to block discovery of any actual state secret, the mere fact of the lawsuit would have a tendency to endanger national security - even if the trial took place entirely in secret.

The court thus came perilously close to saying that the case should be dismissed because it might be embarrassing to the Government.

The trial judge, Edgardo Ramos, admitted that the outcome was "harsh."

As he put it, "plaintiffs not only do not get their day in court, but cannot be told why".

     Scared yet?

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     Time was, we thought of the great judicial dangers to the private citizen as arising from such outrages as the Star Chamber, wherein an individual could be put at hazard of his life and freedom for “offenses” that fell under no statute, or for unspecified offenses. In the case above we have an almost perfectly opposite example: an individual is denied access to the courts because the State deems it contrary to its interests to allow it, but declines to say why.

     That happened in the United States, Gentle Reader. In my home state of New York.

     If the government can demand such a thing in a civil matter and have the demand honored by a supposedly independent court, it can do so in any matter whatsoever: civil, criminal, or petition for redress of grievances. The courts, supposedly the people’s defense not only against the predators among us but also the predators above us, have been nullified as instruments of justice. Their first obligation is to defer to the demands of the State.

     The needs of the State come first, don’t y’know.

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     Why hasn’t this story appeared in an American organ? Do the barons of the Main Stream Media think it insignificant? Do they consider it perilously inflammatory? Or do they deem it not of interest to the majority of their dwindling readerships?

     I can easily imagine some publisher saying “Well, it’s a marginal defamation suit filed by a non-citizen, and the slanders hadn’t gotten around yet, and besides, this sort of government interference with the courts doesn’t happen all that often anyway, so what’s the big deal?” Minimization tactics. Keep the sheeple docile by reducing the destruction of justice to a minor matter, a triviality. The hell of it is, that’s a rationalization a lot of people would accept. “Wouldn’t happen to an American.” “Practically no one’s heard the slanders, so it’s almost as if they never happened.” “Protecting state secrets? Well, if they’re important enough, I suppose.”

     I think of this as the “hole in the leather” principle. Leather garments are altered only at great risk, because a hole in leather is forever. You can’t fix or patch such a hole. Neither can you fix or patch a gap in the legal system that allows the government to demand that a suit be dropped without saying why. Once that State privilege has been accepted—even once—it cannot be repaired.

     In the absolute monarchies, a king could get away with this...for a while. But kings are mortal and vulnerable. Charles I of England was beheaded for similar crimes. It’s a bit more difficult to behead the federal government of the United States. Granted that the notion has a lot of appeal.

There is no law. Barack Hussein Obama has demonstrated this.
There is no justice. The dismissal of Restis v. United Against Nuclear Iran has demonstrated this.
There is no redress of grievances against the State. This has been demonstrated too many times to require examples.

     Panama’s looking better all the time. I’m told the politicians there stay bought.

     Have a nice day.

     [Applause to Keith at Crusader Rabbit for the original link.]

Lawlessness Among The Law’s Supposed Guardians

Perhaps when Ralph Waldo Emerson said “You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong,” he was being a trifle optimistic. Consider this, for instance:

[G]iven that prosecutors often face no consequences for misconduct, it's not surprising that some are willing to lie about it.

That's what happened in the California case of The People v. Efrain Velasco-Palacios. In the course of negotiating a plea bargain with the defendant, a Kern County prosecutor committed what the California appeals court called "outrageous government misconduct."

What prosecuting attorney Robert Murray did was produce a translated transcript of the defendant's interrogation to which he had added a fraudulent confession. The defense attorney got a copy of the audio tape of the interrogation, but it "ended abruptly." Eventually, Murray admitted to falsifying the transcript, presumably in the hopes of either coercing a plea deal, or ensuring a victory at trial.

When the trial judge found out, charges against the defendant were dismissed. Incredibly, the State of California, via Attorney General Kamala Harris, decided to appeal the case. The state's key argument: That putting a fake confession in the transcript wasn't "outrageous" because it didn't involve physical brutality, like chaining someone to a radiator and beating him with a hose.

Did you know that the California Democrat Party – apparently with the blessing of the National Democrat Party – has “canonized” Kamala Harris as the Golden State’s next United States Senator? Would you say California voters might want to know about the above events before they reach for the levers? I certainly would.

But that’s not the end of this tawdry tale:

Murray suffered no actual punishment for his wrongdoing. As a report in the New York Observer notes: "For reasons beyond comprehension, he still works for the District Attorney Lisa Green in Kern County, Calif." Murray does face the possibility of discipline from the California bar, but even disbarment would be a light punishment for knowingly producing a false document in a criminal proceeding.

Why hasn’t the man been tarred, feathered, and run out of California on a rail? Because no other state would have him?

Can you hear Juvenal whispering Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I can.

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Meanwhile, we have this frightening article from the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead:

Consider what happened to Nicole Gainey, the Florida mom who was arrested and charged with child neglect for allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house.

For the so-called “crime” of allowing her son to play at the park unsupervised, Gainey was interrogated, arrested and handcuffed in front of her son, and transported to the local jail where she was physically searched, fingerprinted, photographed and held for seven hours and then forced to pay almost $4000 in bond in order to return to her family. Gainey’s family and friends were subsequently questioned by the Dept. of Child Services. Gainey now faces a third-degree criminal felony charge that carries with it a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail.

For Denise Stewart, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether or not she had done anything wrong, was sufficient to get her arrested.

The 48-year-old New York grandmother was dragged half-naked out of her apartment and handcuffed after police mistakenly raided her home when responding to a domestic disturbance call. Although it turns out the 911 call came from a different apartment on a different floor, Stewart is still facing charges of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

And then there are those equally unfortunate individuals who unknowingly break laws they never even knew existed. John Yates is such a person. A commercial fisherman, Yates was sentenced to 30 days in prison and three years of supervised release for throwing back into the water some small fish which did not meet the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission’s size restrictions. Incredibly, Yates was charged with violating a document shredding provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was intended to prevent another Enron scandal.

I’ve been advised to avoid articles such as that, for the sake of my blood pressure.

Whitehead makes some telling points about the “policing for profit” phenomenon that’s been observed in several locales. He has a valid point about the perniciousness of the incentives, but I hasten to add this: As we’re talking about persons in government jobs – police, prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats – no financial incentive is required to evoke this kind of behavior. They’re in those positions because they worship power over others above all other things. They like nothing better than to exercise such power. The rightness or wrongness of the occasion might never even reach their conscious minds.

Given that they’re protected from retribution for their misdeeds, in some cases by “sovereign immunity” and in others by chummy relationships with those who have the power to hold them to account, how could we reasonably expect them to resist the temptations they face?

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Perhaps when Emerson wrote that “You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong,” he implicitly assumed that the guardians of the law could be trusted with their powers and responsibilities. I can’t comment on that. However, I know of someone who can:

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can be neither observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

Lord Acton had it right. Indeed, he might have understated the problem. Now if you’ll kindly excuse me, I think I should lie down for a bit. Have a nice day.