Category Archives: Politics

Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

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Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in History, Politics, War

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A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

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Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Biography, Politics

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Margaret Thatcher

“I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, ‘How could you?’)

I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways, since for all her glib ‘free market’ advocacy on one front she seemed to be an emotional ally of the authoritarian and protectionist white-settler regime in Rhodesia. And it was this very thing that afforded me the opportunity to grapple with her so early in her career…

Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bow lower!’ Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. ‘No, no,’ she trilled. ‘Much lower!’ By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words ‘Naughty boy!’

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called ‘the smack of firm government’—that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of ‘Thatcherism,’ as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.”

Margaret Thatcher 2

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A segment from Christopher Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22.

I thought of this encounter during the recent GOP debate in which Carly Fiorina dispensed one by one with her male counterparts, spurring even The Donald to bow in submission (a first for him, no doubt). That their particular clash came on the heels of Trump’s terrible comment about “that face” only doubled the association to Thatcher, whose looks, despite what Austin Powers may’ve thought, had more than a few fans on the left and right. (I’ve heard similar compliments about Carly, confirmed just a few days ago by a female journalist friend who interviewed her last week.)

It was Thatcher who once mused, in a poached version of a famous labor union saying, that, “being powerful is like being ladylike — if you have to say you are, you probably aren’t.” The same goes for other adjectives, like smart, classy, rich, and many of Trump’s other favorite words which he likes to apply to himself. Yet it’s precisely this do-don’t-tell orientation which makes a female politician like Thatcher so potent. What you think you see ain’t necessarily what you’ll get. As Mitterand said, “she had the eyes of Caligula and mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”

If you’re at all familiar with Hitch’s work, you’ll know this type of fixation on and flirtation with women were central to his persona. His best pal, Martin Amis, along with Amis’s father Kingsley and several other Englishmen of those generations, had a lot to say about Mrs. Thatcher — most of which didn’t have to do with her stance on Rhodesia. Martin uses the above interaction as a basis to analyze Thatcher’s appeal to the English male psyche. In an excerpt pulled from his essay collection The War Against Cliché, he writes:

I once discussed Mrs Thatcher’s feminine qualities with Christopher Hitchens who had recently spent some time in her company. This was his verdict: ‘Oh, she stinks of sex.’ And this is my father, Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs: her beauty, he writes, is ‘so extreme that… it can trap me for a split second into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2200. The fact that that is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence).’ Helplessley I reach for the commonplace about the glamour of power. I could further infuriate my father’s shade by adducing another cliché: English nostalgia for chastisement. Philip Larkin shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the Prime Minister (‘I adore Mrs Thatcher’). Larkin was a great poet… he once asked Mrs Thatcher, who had professed herself a fan, to quote a line of his. She blinked and said, ‘All the unhurried day/ Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’

I like that she could quote Larkin. Counts for a lot in my book. What would my Larkin nomination be? I’m glad you asked. “The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said.”

By the way, is his repetition of  “saying, in effect…” in the first paragraph a rare Hitchens misstep? Watch him relay the encounter below.

You can also move on:

How Christopher Hitchens Became an American Citizen (Or, a Case Study in the Need for Immigration Reform)

17 Monday Aug 2015

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“The American bureaucracy very swiftly overcompensates for any bright-eyed immigrant delusions. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human. When folded — along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, the only department of state I had ever hoped to command — into the vast inner space of the Department of Homeland Security, the resulting super-ministry was more like the Circumlocution Office than a reformed bureaucracy. My Canadian friend David Frum, who was actually working in the White House and had had a hand in writing the famous ‘axis of evil’ speech, had his personal paperwork lost when he applied to become an American. Ian McEwan was put under close arrest and hit with an indelible ‘entry denied’ stamp while trying to cross from Vancouver to Seattle for a big public reading: it would have been of little use to him to plead that the First Lady had recently asked him to dinner…

Innumerable times I was told, or assured without asking, that I would hear back from officialdom ‘within ninety days.’ I wasn’t in any special hurry, but it grated when ninety days came and went. Letters came from offices in Vermont and required themselves to be returned to offices in states very far away from the Canadian border. Eventually I received a summons to an interview in Virginia. There would be an exam, I was told, on American law and history. To make this easier, a series of sample questions was enclosed, together with the answers. I realized in scanning them that it wouldn’t do to try and be clever, let alone funny. For example, to the question: ‘Against whom did we fight in the revolution of 1776?’ it would be right, if incorrect, to say ‘The British’ and wrong, if correct, to say ‘The usurping Hanoverian monarchy.’ Some of the pre-supplied Qs and As appeared to me to be paltry… Q: ‘What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?’ A: ‘It freed the slaves.’ No it didn’t: that had to wait until the Thirteenth Amendment, the first United States document to mention the actual word ‘slavery’ (and not ratified by the State of Mississippi until 1995).

Christopher Hitchens

Having previously been made to go to a whole separate appointment in deepest Maryland just to be fingerprinted, I sat up on the night before my Virginia one, and decided to read slowly through the Constitution… One had to admire the unambivalent way in which these were written. ‘Respecting an establishment of religion,’ said the very first amendment, drawing on Jefferson’s and Madison’s Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom, ‘Congress shall make no law.’ Little wiggle room there; no crevice through which a later horse-and-cart could ever be driven. Alas for advocates of ‘gun control,’ the Second Amendment seems to enshrine a ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’  irrespective of whether they are militia members or not. (The clause structure is admittedly a little reminiscent of the ablative absolute.) And the Eighth Amendment, forbidding ‘cruel and unusual punishments,’ is of scant comfort to those like me who might like that definition stretched to include the death penalty. If the Founders had wanted to forbid capital punishment (as, say, the state constitution of Michigan explicitly does), they would have done so in plain words…

For a writer to become an American is to subscribe of his own free will to a set of ideas and principles and to the documents that embody them in written form, all the while delightedly appreciating that the documents can and often must be revised, so that the words therefore constitute, so to say, a work in progress.

This was all rather well set out in the passport that I immediately went to acquire… Human history affords no precedent or parallel for this attainment. On the day that I swore my great oath, dozens of Afghans and Iranians and Iraqis did the same. A few days later, I noticed that I had sloppily gummed a postage stamp onto an envelope with the flag appearing upside down. I am the most frugal of men, but I reopened the letter, tore up and threw away the envelope, invested in a whole new stamp and sent Old Glory on its way with dignity unimpaired. A small gesture, but my own.”

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From the closing of the chapter “Changing Places” in the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

Below: Hitchens takes his oath of citizenship with the Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, on April 13, 2005. You can read more about the event and its lead up in Hitch’s piece in the Atlantic in the following month “On Becoming American”.

Then read on:

Hitchens Citizenship

Politics Is a Strong and Slow Boring of Hard Boards

07 Friday Aug 2015

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Portrait of German political economist and social scientist Max Weber (1864 - 1920), a founder of the discipline of sociology, who called himself 'The Enemy of the Squires' and championed the cause of social and economic reform in Wilhelmine Germany, circa 1910. His most famous work is 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' (1905) in which he explored the cultural and religious roots of Western capitalism. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth — that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.”

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Max Weber, writing in the final paragraph of his truly edifying political-philosophical essay, “Politics as a Vocation”. You’ll find it in his Essays in Sociology. (Buy the book, but the whole thing’s here.)

Though Weber wrote his essay in German, adapted as it was from a 1919 lecture he gave to the Free Students Union in Bavaria, I can’t help but love the double entendre of “boring” in the opening sentence. Whenever there’s a showmen performing rhetorical tricks — like a magician proudly parading his assistant or waving a colored hankerchief — reach for your pocket, and see who’s pulling out your wallet.

Thanks to my friend M.S. for reminding me of this one.

There’s more:

Our Students Are Taught to Feel but Not Think

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Politics, Psychology

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Thomas Sowell

“Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and — more importantly — in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that ‘professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.’ As Professor Ravitch concludes: ‘Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.’ In short, it is not that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

The phrase ‘I feel’ is so often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term — and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them…”

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Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.

Below, watch Sowell debating American schools in a 1981 episode from Buckley’s Firing Line.

More:

The Problem with Our ‘Immigration Policy’ Is We Don’t Have an Immigration Policy

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

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Thomas Sowell

“When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are taking about and which period of history.

One of the things about the immigration debate is they talk about immigrants in the abstract — and there are no immigrants in the abstract.

An additional problem is that we don’t know who those people are that are already here. They may all be PhD’s from the University of Chicago, in which case they should all stay. Or they may in fact be people who majored in sociology at Berkeley, in which case we should get them all out of here as soon as possible.

But we don’t know. And that’s one of the problems of our so-called ‘immigration policy’: we don’t have an immigration policy, unless we control the border. It doesn’t matter what our policy is; if anyone who wants to cross the border can cross, our policy is just a bunch of words on paper.

And especially when they talk about people in agriculture. This is a country that has had a chronic surplus of agricultural output for decades on end, costing the tax payer billions upon billions of dollars. […]

Any discussion of people in the abstract drives me crazy. Because there are no abstract people. One hundred years ago, people understood that. So when there was a debate about immigration, there was a multi-volume set of tomes about the characteristics of immigrants from various countries — how do their kids do in school, what is there crime rate, what is their disease rate. All those things. That matters.”

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From Thomas Sowell’s interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson last December.

In case I need to say it again, I don’t agree with some of the things I post on here. This is one of those things. Still, I love Sowell’s panache in this interview as well as the clarity of his seminal work Basic Economics, a primer on market economies that’s quoted in the opening paragraph above.

There’s more:

Jefferson and the Bible

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by in History, Politics, Religion

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Thomas Jefferson

“Mr. Jefferson was a public professor of his belief in the Christian religion. In all his most important early State papers… there are more or less pointed recognitions of God and Providence. In his two inaugural addresses as president of the United States, and in many of his annual messages, he makes the same recognitions… declares his belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of ascriptions of praise of the Author of all mercies; and speaks of the Christian religion as professed in his country as a benign religion, evincing the favor of Heaven. Had his wishes been consulted, the symbol borne on our national seal would have contained our public profession of Christianity as a nation. There is nothing in his writings or in the history of his life to show that his public declarations were insincere, or thrown out for mere effect. On the contrary, his most confidential writings sustain his public professions, and advance beyond them into the avowal of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments…

From his second Inaugural Message, December 15th, 1802: ‘When we assemble together, fellow citizens, to consider the state of our beloved country, our just attentions are first drawn to those pleasing circumstances which mark the goodness of that Being from whose favor they flow, and the large measure of thankfulness we owe for His bounty. Another year has come around and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion, at home.’

From his third annual message, October 17th, 1803: ‘While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved, let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence, which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative counsels while placed under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.’

He contributed freely to the erection of Christian churches, gave money to Bible Societies and other religious objects, and was a liberal and regular contributor to the support of the clergy. Letters of his are extant which show him urging, with respectful delicacy, the acceptance of extra and unsolicited contributions on the pastor of his parish, on occasions of extra expense to the latter, such as the building of a house, the meeting of an ecclesiastical convention at Charlottesville, etc. He attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation — sometimes going alone on horseback, when his family remained at home. He generally attended the Episcopal Church, and when he did so, always carried his prayer book and joined in the responses and prayers of the congregation. He was baptized into the Episcopal Church in his infancy; he was married by one of its clergymen; his wife lived and died a member of it; his children were baptized into it, and when married were
married according to its rites; its burial services were read over those of them who preceded him to the grave, over his wife, and finally over himself. No person ever heard him utter a word of profanity, and those who met him most familiarly through periods of acquaintance that they never heard a word of impiety, or any scoff at extending from two or three to twenty or thirty years, declare religion from his lips. Among his numerous familiar acquaintances, we have not found one whose testimony is different, or who entertained any doubts of the strict justice, sincerity, truthfulness and exemplariness of his personal character.”

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Pulled from the Jefferson chapter of William Slaughter’s 1878 book Reminiscences of Distinguished Men.

I’m sorry for the recent hiatus. I’ve been really busy with real business.

In a letter to his eldest daughter, Jefferson cited his personal declaration of faith, which he made in the following letter to his friend, Benjamin Rush, on April 21st, 1803:

Dear Sir:

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.

To this rather elastic, New Testament self-definition of Christian, it’s worth adding that Jefferson — who spent a good chunk of his retirement splicing his own, naturalistic version of the Gospels — was found to have hand-written the entirety of Psalm 15 on the inside cover of the prayer book mentioned by Slaughter.

As a small additional note: in 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was appointed along with Franklin and Adams to the committee to design a national seal. Adams suggested Hercules as the seal’s central figure. Franklin recommended Moses standing atop the Red Sea. Jefferson sided with Franklin, but also wanted it to include Pharaoh and Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic brothers who led the Anglo-Saxons in their fifth-century conquest of Britain.

Read on:

Killing Saddam, Resurrecting al-Qaeda

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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ISIS

Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.

They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.

Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.

If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.

Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.

So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.

It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.

So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.

__________

Messrs. Wright and Kreisler, chatting about Wright’s fantastic chronicle of the origins of the war on terror The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Keep going:

Lawrence Wright

The Obvious Futility of the Drug War

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Political Philosophy, Politics

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Milton Friedman 2

“More police, more jails, more stringent penalties. Increased efforts at interception, increased publicity about the evils of drugs — all this has been accompanied by more, not fewer, drug addicts; more, not fewer, crimes and murders; more, not less, corruption; more, not fewer, innocent victims…

Legalizing drugs is not equivalent to surrender in the fight against drug addiction. On the contrary, I believe that legalizing drugs is a precondition for an effective fight. We might then have a real chance to prevent sales to minors; get drugs out of the schools and playgrounds; save crack babies and reduce their number; launch an effective educational campaign on the personal costs of drug use — not necessarily conducted, I might add, by government; punish drug users guilty of harming others while ‘under the influence’; and encourage large numbers of addicts to volunteer for treatment and rehabilitation when they could do so without confessing to criminal actions…

I do not believe, and neither did [the American founders], that it is the responsibility of government to tell free citizens what is right and wrong. That is something for them to decide for themselves. Government is a means to enable each of us to pursue our own vision in our own way so long as we do not interfere with the right of others to do the same. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, ‘all Men are… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed.’ In my view, Justice Louis Brandeis was a ‘true friend of freedom’ when he wrote, ‘Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasions of their liberty- by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning. but without understanding.’”

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Pulled from Milton Friedman’s 1989 WSJ article “Bennett Fears ‘Public Policy Disaster’ — It’s Already Here!”. You can find it in his seminal collection of writings on public policy Why Government Is the Problem.

I am certainly in Friedman’s liberty-centric camp. Nonetheless I think arguments against the drug war can rest securely on several other foundations, including the fact that this generations-long “war” has been a fundamentally disruptive, rather than pacifying, force for our society. Johann Hari, whose new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War is next on my reading list, shared the following insight about one of the most orderly people on the planet, the Swiss:

Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalized heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic — it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives.

I stress again — Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously…

The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick — it’s true. That is what happens.

Hari continues, reflecting on the even more dramatic example presented by the Portuguese experiment:

In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse…

They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart…

The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack. But” — and this is the crucial next stage — “take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.”

Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain — they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy — but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidized jobs and microloans to set up small businesses.

Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts.

It’s been nearly 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down.

Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years.

Like I said, I’m on the same page as Friedman. These guys are too:

Douglas Murray: “I Don’t Have an Israel”

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Politics

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Douglas Murray - writer

“There’s a book that came out at exactly the same time as the Charlie Hebdo atrocities. It’s by Michel Hollelbeq, and it’s called Submission — some of you have read about it.

There’s a point in this book which I think is extremely important for what we must think of, which is how to impart an urgent concern for free speech beyond the people in this room and to wider society.

The most critical point in this novel… not to give away the whole plot, but there’s a French professor. It’s 2024 and France is becoming a Muslim country. The Jews are all leaving, and this professor who’s not Jewish — he’s an atheist Frenchman, likes his pleasures, you know — and he’s speaking to a Jewish friend who says she’s off to Israel.

And there’s a very, very important point in the novel where this man realizes he doesn’t have an Israel.

Now, this is a very, very important thing to tell people in this country, and it goes far beyond the Jews.

I don’t have an Israel. This is it. If you care about a decent, democratic, broadly pluralistic society in which you can live the life you want to live, this is the best deal and I don’t have a get out option. Now other people need to know that.”

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(Slightly modified) remarks from Douglas Murray during last month’s panel on free speech and the future of Europe at London’s Central Synagogue.

There’s more on the topic: