A strange thing happened a few weeks back when I went to the Café Promenade at the Mayflower Hotel for an off-the-record interview with an unpaid adviser to the non-campaign of unannounced presidential candidate Fred Thompson.
Fred Thompson showed up.
Update 6/2/07: Apparently this episode was partially based on a true story. Picture and article here.
Left-handed pitcher Matt White has almost no chance of making the opening-day roster. He is 0-2 with a 16.76 earned-run average in seven major league appearances.
White, however, could become the wealthiest player in the clubhouse, quite a distinction considering Kent has made $67 million, Gonzalez has made $63 million and Nomar Garciaparra has made $61 million.
White owns a rock quarry in Massachusetts that could eventually produce more than $2 billion worth of mica schist flatstone, which is used for walks, patios, steps, walls, hearths and ponds.
The stone was formed 400 million years ago from sandy mud sediments deposited on an ancient sea bottom. White's father is operating the quarry, which is off to a modest start, producing $60,000 worth of stone last year.
A geologist, however, told White that as much as 24 million tons of the stone is on the mountainous 50-acre property, which White purchased from his aging aunt so she would have enough money to live in a nursing home.
"We had no idea the rock was there until I started clearing out a couple acres to build a house," White said.
But I had brought up the subject of discrimination by private business-owners,
which was roundly defended at the table in the name of restricting government to
the most minimal level of intrusion on the individual, in hardcore,
true-believer libertarian style. (Believe me, the readings expressed the most
morbid fear of government you can imagine.)
Ann Althouse has recently written on her blog about attending a conference sponsored by the Liberty Fund about the writings of Frank S. Meyer. One of the topics during the weekend was the issue of State's Rights. Meyer supported the idea of federalism and State's Rights, and so did apparently many of the Libertarian and Conservative attendees of the conference. Althouse wrote:
I am struck ... by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas. I'm used to the way lefties and liberals take themselves seriously and how deeply they believe. Me, I find true believers strange and -- if they have power -- frightening.
During later posts and a running dialog with Jonah Goldberg she explains that this primarily refers to the fact that the libertarians and conservatives failed to recognize their responsibility to repudiate the real world (evil) effects that the ideology of State's Rights has had. In effect she is arguing that since those who supported slavery and Jim Crow used the idea of State's Rights to support their position, every time someone rises to argue for the idea of State's Rights, they have a duty to repudiate slavery and Jim Crow.
Jonah Goldberg correctly rejects this. He correctly identifies this as unfair to those on the Right, but fails to really develop any arguements to support his position. In some comments submitted to Althouse's blog, I try to develop some of these missing arguements, and I'm going to extend them here.
1) First of all, the idea of State's Rights is literally fundamental to our Republic. Our whole system of government was predicated on the idea that the federal government was subordinate to the States. This is explicitly laid out in our Constitution. There was no arguement prior to the Civil War that the State's Rights position held primacy, and was seen as a moral good. It is only after the Civil War that the idea of Nationalism takes control, and is seen as morally superior. For the last 150, we have seen a struggle between these competing ideas, with the Right usually supporting State's Rights or federalism, and the Left supporting nationalism. (an interesting aside: before the Civil War our nation was almost always referred to in the plural, the United States are. After the Civil War it is almost exclusively the singular, the United States is.)
2) Our nation has been making compromises with the evil of slavery since before its founding. Our Constitution was forced to make accomodations for it, and some of the more important early pieces of legislation are compromises over the issue. I argue that the taint on the idea of State's rights produced by the supporters of slavery (and later segregation) is just another one of these accomodations our nation has been forced to make.
3) This "duty" to repudiate also seems to be exclusively the purview of the Right. It is clearly a strategy of the Left to force the Right to behave defensively as much as possible. Thus while the Right is forced to repudiate (and punishes) Sen. Lott for his remarks apparently supporting racism, the Left is allowed to continue to support Sen. Biden and Sen. Clinton after their blatently racist remarks. It is simply undeniable that no Republican could have survived making the kind of racist remarks that the two Democratic senators did. Republicans are forced to defend their handling of the Foley scandal, even though they forced Foley to resign. Yet few people in the national media brought up the case of Gerry Studds, who not only survived his much worse scandal and continued to serve as a Democrat in Congress, but was rewarded with a sub-committee chairmanship. When a Republican president attempted to obstruct justice while in office, he was forced to resign by Republicans. When a Democratic president attempted to obstruct justice while he was in office, the Democratic party defended him. When a Conservative nominee for the Supreme Court was accused of sexual harassment, he was pilloried by the Left (specifically feminists such as NOW). When a Republican Senator was accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault, he was hounded out of office by the Left. (specifically feminists such as NOW). When a Democratic president was proven to have committed sexual harassment and sexual assault, he was supported and defended by the Left. (specifically feminists such as NOW) The outright and blatent hypocrisy of the Left in these cases is astounding, but yet the Left still manages to consistently force the Right to behave defensively. Althouse's position on State's Rights is just another example of this.
4) Other ideas have resulted in real world effects that are considered evil. Althouse herself cites the case of communism:
Imagine a left-wing conference going 9 hours talking about Karl Marx's ideas and disqualifying discussion of the evils wrought in the name of communism.
Well as I and another commentor point out in her comments, this is usually precisely what happens. As pointed out, the most repeated phrase ever uttered in the history of economic theory is: "true marxism has never been tried!"
I myself attempted to develop an arguement concerning abortion; and eugenics. The Left embraces the premise that there is a fundamental Right to have an abortion. Many of the early pioneers of the movement to legalize abortion believed in eugenics, and in using abortion to further their aims. Margaret Sanger, who founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, explicitly advocated using abortion to improve humanity. Today, proponents of abortion make explicitly eugenic arguements to support abortion. The most frequent and widely approved arguement is that there would be millions more criminals today except for abortion. This arguement is set forth in the book Freakonomics. As Ramesh Ponnuru points out in his book Party of Death, in a paper that eventually led to Freakonomics, it is acknowledged that the arguement is based on race:
abortion disproportionally effects Black children
crimes are committed disproportionally by Blacks
therefore crime is reduced by reducing the Black population
Imagine someone on the Right trying to make this arguement. It is explicitly racist and eugenic. Many on the Left also point out that abortion reduces the number of handicapped children born as a justification for abortion. Again, this is an explicitly eugenic arguement. In the real world abortion disproportionally effects the poor and minorities, which is exactly what people like Sanger intended.
So we see the idea of a right to abortion not only resulting in real world eugenic effects, we also see the Left explicitly embracing these effects as a justification for abortion. No one on the Right embraced segregation as a justification for State's rights.
So, we are either left to assume that the Left sees eugenics as a positive good, or the Left ignoring the real world effects of an idea based on a "deep belief in an idea".
5) So my question for Althouse is:
Does the Left have to explicitly repudiate eugenics, and the real world eugenic effects of abortion, whenever they discuss, defend and support the idea of a right to abortion? If not, why not?
| Roy Beck's celebrated demonstration of the population consequences of current U.S. immigration policies has entertained and shocked audiences across the country. This video is packed with the facts and analysis that make moral and practical sense of a complex and highly contentious issue. | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more. | |
| Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm | |
| Literate Good Citizen | |
| Fad Reader | |
| Book Snob | |
| Non-Reader | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz | |
85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!
Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz
Oh what have we done? America I know the Republicans had gone soft, and been captured by Washington D.C. The Republicans deserved to lose the House. I get it. But the Senate too?
You may have thought you were electing Conservative Democrats, and for the most part you were. But the problem is, the Democratic leadership couldn't be more liberal, some down right moonbatty.
These next two years are probably going to be ugly, and not just for the U.S.
I) Iraq
A) The Democrats have to pull us out of Iraq, their base will demand it. They will spout the usual nonsense, the same tired promises we gave Vietnam in the 70's. But the Islamic fanatic will know the truth. Let's be honest, once the troops are gone, they're not going back in, and no one in the region is going to allow us to station our troops in their country.
B) Shortly after we pull the troops out, Iraq will descend into a three way civil war.
1) The Democrats will immediately say "see, we told you so", being either unwilling, or too blind to see that our pullout is what caused the civil war.
2) Tens of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds will be killed in the fighting and reprisals.
3) Iran, Syria and Turkey will probably dismantle Iraq, (in the name of stopping the civil war) and divide the pieces between them, and no one will do anything about it.
a) Turkey has been struggling to preserve its young western democracy. This will fall. The only question is whether or not the military is still strong enough to install a military dictatorship, or if the Islamic fundamentalists will take over.
C) This will be the final straw. After Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq, no one will trust American assurances and promises anymore. (Would you?)
1) South Korea and Japan will go nuclear. Taiwan will try to do so also. North Korea with the bomb and American fecklessness are just too dangerous for them.
D) Afghanistan will descend back into tribalism and lawlessness, and either the Taliban or a military dictatorship fronting for the Taliban will take over.
E) Pakistan will either become a military dictatorship or be taken over by the fundamentalists.
Either way, the tensions between Pakistan and India will rise, and conflict could erupt. Which could be extremely dangerous, since both have nuclear weapons.
F) Worldwide terrorism will arise, and we will be attacked at home and abroad.
G) The morale of our armed forces will plummet. Soldiers who have been proud of what we have been doing will start to question their sacrifices. Recruitment will drop. We can only hope things don't go as bad as they did in the 70's after the betrayal of our military and the South Vietnamese.
II) Immigration
A) There will be an amnesty bill, and a guestworker program. Pres. Bush and the Democrats agree on this issue.
1) We will begin a process that will see at least 15 million illegal immigrants given legal residency, and a minimal path to citizenship.
2) There will be about 10 million more Mexicans living in Mexico that will be given residency and/or citizenship through legacies (parents, spouses, children).
3) By 2008 there will be at least 5 million more illegal residents waiting for the next amnesty.
4) By 2008, Mexico will be receiving $30 billion or more a year in remittances from the US. Most of this money will come from the underground economy, and so will be untaxed, and directly siphoned off from the American economy.
B) The fence just authorized by Congress will never be built.
C) There will be waves of immigrants from Haiti and Cuba also.
1) there will probably be a repeat of the Mariel boatlift in Cuba, as Cuba empties its prisons, and when the current Cuban regime topples, all bets are off.
III) Washington D.C.
A) The lawyers are going to get fat. There will be countless hearings and investigations.
1) There is at least a 30% chance the Democrats will try to impeach Pres. Bush. There is a 100% chance that articles of impeachment will be filed. Hell, some already are.
2) There is a bigger chance that the Democrats will try to impeach V.P. Cheney.
3) Def. Secretary Rumsfield and his high level subordinates will spend most of the next two years testifying in front of Congress.
4) The Democrats will hold hearings over using Haliburton, ignoring the fact that it was the Clinton administration that began awarding it government contracts.
5) There will be hearings in Congress dealing with the CIA, in which the moles who have been leaking classified documents the last six years will testify about how awful things have been during the Bush Administration. The State Department will send their share before Congress also.
Maybe I am being unduly pessimistic. I hope I am. But history, and human nature, tells me otherwise.
