Tag Archives: current events

What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Cecil the LionI imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.

“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.

However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.

I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.

Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…

So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…

What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…

If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”

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Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).

Bloom touches on many of these themes of moral psychology in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

 

There’s more to see:

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Vladimir Putin

Brian Lamb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say [Putin] was a ‘Cheka’?

Anne Applebaum: Putin was a member of the secret police, which was later called the KGB. And the old name — the Leninist era name — for the KGB is the Cheka. And Putin has described himself as a ‘Chekist,’ which is an old fashioned word for secret policeman.

Brian Lamb: What does that mean to you?

Anne Applebaum: The first time I heard him say it, it filled me with horror. It’s like somebody saying, “I was a Brownshirt.” It has very, very unpleasant connotations.

Brian Lamb: Why do you think he says it?

Anne Applebaum: He says it because it gives him an aura of invincibility. ‘We were the people behind the scenes who were running the old Soviet Union.’ The term still commands a certain amount of respect in Russia. A poll was done recently which showed that some 60 or 70 percent of Russians still think Lenin was a great man who contributed to their country. So he’s echoing a respect for the Russian Revolution.

Brian Lamb: I read a story in The New York Times about Saddam Hussein which read just like [accounts of the Soviet Gulag] —  the enemies lists that they had, the kind of people they put away, the torturing that went on. How much of this is still going on around the world?

Anne Applebaum: I would say a great deal. The Stalinist regime — and later the Krushchevite and Brezhnevite regimes in the Soviet Union — actually spread their techniques, and they taught people around the world how to run police states. I have no doubt that, through the East Germans, Saddam Hussein’s police state was probably set up with Russian or Soviet advice.

It is not an accident that so many of these systems share so much in common; there was a set of techniques, they were deliberately spread. The Soviet camp was exported to China; the Chinese exported it to North Korea. The North Korean Gulag that exists today sounds, from what little we know about it, very much like Stalin’s Gulag.

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From Anne Applebaum’s 2003 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History.

I sometimes think it all boils down to names. We had Roosevelt (Dutch for “rose garden”) then Truman (Old English: “honest man”); Chamberlain (“servant of a bed chamber”) then Churchill (“church’s hill”) and Attlee (“from the meadow”).

They had Stalin (“man of steel”) and his henchmen: Kamenev (“man of stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lenin (“from the River Lena”) — and Trotsky (The name on one of young Lev Bronstein’s fake passports, which wound up catching on).

Putin, though he mysteriously lacks a single antecedent family member who shares his surname, lays claim to a strangely appropriate etymology: “on his way”, “on his path”.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post more on this topic as well as excerpts from Applebaum’s book, which as far as I can tell is now considered the preeminent history of the Soviet prison and slave labor system (a Google search for “gulag book” displays it first, above Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago). Gulag concludes with a clear-eyed rumination on the post-Soviet psyche, especially as it is expressed by today’s Russians and enacted in the 20th century atavisms of their largely popular Chekist-in-Chief. Writing in her epilogue a decade ago, Applebaum observed,

[T]en years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families…

Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Unlike most attempts at mass psychoanalysis, these considerations are hardly trivial, especially as we attempt to internalize what is happening in Ukraine and perhaps anticipate the Chekist’s next move.

On a brighter note: I recommend not only Applebaum’s substantial book, but also her columns, which are printed in The Washington Post. Along with Danielle Crittenden (wife of conservative political commentator David Frum), she has also published a cook book on Polish comfort food — and though I can’t speak to its merits, I can say that when juxtaposed with her work on the famines of Stalinism makes her probably the most versatile author I’ve cited on this blog. (Below: Applebaum and Crittenden; below that, Applebaum with her sons and husband, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.)

Anne Applebaum and Danielle Crittenden Anne Applebaum and Family

Racism, Israel, and a Public Lavatory in Budapest

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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z

Charlie Rose: In traveling last week through Hungary and Eastern Europe, what did you discover about anti-Semitism today?

Yair Lapid: That it exists. Listen, in Hungary, there’s Jobbik, which is an Anti-Semitic party – the party that has tried to push a bill mandating a countdown, a limit to how many Jews there are in Hungary. This is in 2013. They have 11% of the seats in the Hungarian parliament.

Yet when you live in America, you don’t feel it too much; especially in New York, which is still the largest Jewish city in the world. But when you are [in Europe] you feel it.

While I was there, I took my son to visit a weird place. I took my son to visit a public lavatory. Why?

Because in February 1945, my father was this thirteen-year-old kid in the Budapest ghetto, and he was living in a basement the size of this stage with 400 other people.

And by February, the Russians were approaching Budapest. So the Nazis along with the Hungarian Fascists started to take the Jews in death convoys to the Danube River. There they ordered the Jews to dig holes in the ice, and then they would shoot them into the Danube. And the Danube was red.

One early morning, they gathered the people from my father’s block. It was a death convoy of about 600 people, and they began to march them towards the Danube. At a certain point along the way, a Russian plane flew low over this convoy, causing turmoil – shouting and screaming. And my grandma was there – my grandfather was already dead in Mauthausen concentration camp – but my grandma was there, and she pushed my father into this little public lavatory and said, ‘You have to pee now.’…

And he did ‘cause he was a good kid, and she closed the door behind them.

And from this convoy of 600 people, 598 were dead under the ice of the Danube River by sundown.

But my father and my grandmother were standing, by themselves, in the middle of the street, next to this little public lavatory, and they were freed – they could go anywhere. The whole world was open to them. Here in America, the Midwest: there were thousands of miles that no one had settled. Or Australia from Melbourne to Perth, which you can fly over, and for five hours you won’t see a single soul.

Soon Paris was liberated and London was free, and yet my father – a thirteen-year-old Jewish kid – had no place to go to.

And many years later, he and I went to Budapest together, and we were walking down the street, when suddenly he stopped and he began to cry. I didn’t understand, because the street was empty and there was only a public lavatory. And he said, ‘This is it. This is where I was reborn. This is where you were born.

And this is the place I realized that I would survive and soon need a place to go.’

And this is why we need the state of Israel. Because we always need a place to go.

Yair Lapid

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From Charlie Rose’s October 7th interview with Israeli Minister of Finance Yair Lapid at New York’s famed 92nd St. Y.

In the above photograph: Lapid posing in his home office in Tel Aviv following an Associated Press interview.

Lapid is a fascinating political figure who, in his recent foray into government, stands as a model for what kind of leader a functioning democracy should attract. After a successful career as a writer and television personality, Lapid felt compelled to “put his money where his mouth was” and found his own political party, Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). This decidedly moderate party, which stands between the left-wing Israeli labor party on the one hand, and Netanyahu’s center-right Likud and Naftali Bennett’s conservative Jewish Home on the other, won 19 seats in the Knesset in the last election and is now the second-largest party (behind Likud) in the Israeli parliament.

Lapid, who maintains close ties with his counterparts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, steered Yesh Atid to partner in the governing coalition. He was then nominated to be the Israeli Minister of Finance, and just last week the Israeli government posted an “enormous budget surplus”.

Lapid’s meteoric rise and sustained popularity among the Israeli people may seem anomalous to us in the United States, where so often public figures (especially those from the entertainment industry) make ill-advised forays into politics, only to look plastic, inept, or overwhelmed when under the hot lights and mics of the media. Yet as you can see illustrated handsomely below, Lapid projects a suave authenticity and acuity that are both rare, reassuring, and compelling.

The Ethics of State Secrecy: Why the Obama Administration Is Wrong about Edward Snowden

11 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Freedom

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Ludwig Von Mises

[Edward Snowden’s] disclosures of NSA documents were certainly “unauthorized disclosures” as has been charged, but there is no reason that any government authorization should be required. Indeed, it is quite absurd to suggest that government permission should be required to disclose evidence of government criminality. But what of the remaining property-based claim that Snowden’s actions involve the “theft” of government property?

This question can be dealt with in a similar manner, by consideration of the ordinary rules pertaining to the use of property in criminal dealings. When a private firm commits a crime using its own property as an instrument of wrongdoing it loses the right to claim ownership as a safeguard against investigation. If an investigator confiscates digging equipment and barrels of toxic waste from a private firm accused of dumping these on the property of others it is no bar to this action if the firm presents a receipt showing that the equipment belongs to them. (Indeed, this would be taken as further evidence linking them to the alleged crime.)

Government claims to ownership have no special status in this regard, and do not override these ordinary principles of property rights. In fact, the situation for government claims of ownership is even weaker than for a private enterprise, since the latter will generally have acquired the tools of its criminal dealings with its own money. If a private firm unlawfully dumps toxic waste on the property of others, it is likely that it has at least legitimately purchased its own barrels and digging equipment without having also stolen these. On the contrary, government agencies are built on a system of coercion, where the resources for their operations are extracted through forcible payment from the public, i.e., through taxation. Unlike in a private firm, this gives rise to a situation in which the “shareholders” of government are forced to contribute the instruments of further criminal activity, whether they wish to participate or not. Government claims to ownership of the property in its possession are extremely dubious, and this is made more so when the claim to ownership is made in order to shield knowledge of its own operations from those very shareholders. When the claim to ownership is made to prevent the disclosure of documents detailing further criminal actions by the government, the appeal to property rights is thrice-damned!

In the case of private crimes it would be unusual that the accused wrongdoer would present a claim to ownership of documents linking himself to a serious crime. Most would want to do everything possible to avoid corroborating ownership of items proving their criminal guilt, and even if this were to be a fruitless endeavor, it would be regarded as the height of chutzpah to claim the protection of property rights to evidence of criminal wrongdoing! But government is altogether unashamed of such absurdities. Faced with clear publicized documentary evidence of extensive lawbreaking by its own agencies, the government screams across the news media “Those are our secret documents! How dare they be stolen from us!”

Notwithstanding the legitimacy of Snowden’s disclosures of classified NSA material, one objection that has been raised against his actions is the fact that he went outside the official government-sanctioned channels for oversight of its agencies. According to this view, the reporting of government misconduct and criminality must be reported within the rules calculated by that same institution, by reporting to government oversight agencies or Congressional committees. If agencies of the US government engage in secret acts of despotism, an aspiring whistleblower must meekly turn to other agents of the government and ask, “Please Sir, tell me which forms to fill out. How might I go about filing a complaint that suits your requirements?”
Edward Snowden

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From the essay “The Ethics of State Secrecy” by Ben O’Neill, posted on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website.

Thanks C. for sending this my way.

The Edward Snowden story is the most compelling American political story since September 11th, 2001. I originally posted a short essay in defense of Snowden only a few hours after the news media began to cover his case. I took that essay down for fear that I may have spoken too soon, and that perhaps there was a hidden, more sinister side to the narrative. Yet in the time since, I haven’t really changed my mind, and I’m enthused to find out that some 25% of Americans now ‘strongly oppose’ the federal government’s largely unrestrained, unwarranted mining of our cell phone calls, private emails, and online communication — essentially everything we say. (24% ‘strongly support’ such action.)

What’s so fascinating, however, about this story is not Snowden himself, contrary to what our personality-obsessed media will tell you. Rather, it’s the allies you will find on whatever respective side you take here. Our ossified legislature and deeply partisan political discourse have been ideologically scrambled in a way I have not seen in my lifetime. This issue has Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul linking arms in opposition to the NSA’s covert programs. Michael Moore and Glenn Beck, those two great clowns of American political theater, have each expressed staunch support for Snowden, and that bipartisanship generalizes. I’m not a libertarian, but I’ve been checking the Mises Institute a lot for information on this — and I think their publications have been for the most part right on the money.

If we consent to these secret actions now, how intrusive will the government’s future secret programs be?

The picture above is Ludwig Von Mises: a man who escaped the holocaust, taught himself English, and less than a decade later had written On Human Action, an over one-thousand page exploration of libertarianism and classical liberal economics.

F.A. Hayek once toasted Mises at a party, saying, “I came to know Ludwig mainly as a tremendously efficient executive, the kind of man who, as was said of John Stuart Mill, because he does a normal day’s work in two hours, always has a clear desk and time to talk about anything. I came to know him as one of the best educated and informed men I have ever known…”