Another One Goes off the Blogroll

This is paranoid bull-crap. Any blog that strays far from reality — as Agoraphilia has, too many times — cannot stay on my blogroll. Bye-bye.

"The War": A Second Reaction

I have now watched the first three episodes of Ken Burns’s The War. The second episode reinforced my reaction to the first episode:

War is not glorified (nor should it be), but Burns makes a strong case that war can be necessary — contrary to the anti-war mantra that substitutes for thought on the Left.

The War illustrates that, however necessary a war, victory may be attainable only at a very high price. (That illustration is especially valuable for the generations whose only war was the seemingly quick-and-easy Gulf War of 1990-91.) The War also makes the case, graphically, that there can be no alternative but to pay that very high price when one is faced with brutal, fanatical enemies.

The third episode further supports that view. But the third episode also spends a lot of time on issues with racial dimensions; specifically:

“the forced removal and internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans (62 percent of whom were United States citizens) from the West Coast of the United States during World War II.” (Wikipedia)

government-enforced racial segregation in the armed forces (and, sometimes, among workers in defense plants), against a backdrop of racial tension.

The internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans remains controversial. I have no doubt that racial hatred (inflamed by the attack on Pearl Harbor) enabled the decision to remove Japanese nationals and persons of Japanese origin and descent from the West Coast. But The War neglects to mention the military considerations that justified the action. (See these three posts, for example.) The War, in other words, engages in the kind of second-guessing eschewed by the U.S. Supreme Court when it opined in the case of Korematsu v. United States (1944). Justice Black, writing for the 6-3 majority:

To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot — by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.

It is right to give time to the internment; it was a significant (and temporary) event arising out of our prosecution of the war. But it is wrong to give a one-sided presentation of that event.

The segregation of blacks — and black-white conflict — on the other hand, were nothing new in America. Racial segregation had been (and would remain, for some years), a government policy. Would it have been too much to expect a government that was battling ferocious enemies abroad to take time out to desegregate the armed forces, desegregate civilian life, and deal with the resulting racial conflict (of which there was already enough)? The short answer is “yes.” That is not to excuse government-sponsored and government-enforced segregation. It is simply to call, once again, for perspective and balance, which The War does not offer. A viewer lacking historical perspective (and there are many out there) might well conclude that segregation and racial tension arose from the war effort.

The War redeems itself, to some extent, by giving expression (perhaps too subtly) to these truths: However imperfect the United States of 1941-45, it was far more perfect than its militaristic, inhumane enemies. Americans of Japanese and African descent could hope for (and would realize) a better future here; they could have had no such hope for a world dominated by Japan and Germany.

Ahead of His Time

The problem that faces us today … is due to the inherent contradictions of an abnormal state of culture. The natural tendency … is for … society to give itself up passively to the machinery of modern cosmopolitan life. But this is no solution. It leads merely to the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place.

As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members. The home is no longer a centre of social activity; it has become merely a sleeping place for a number of independent wage-earners. The functions which were formerly fulfilled by the head of the family are now being taken over by the state, which educates the children and takes the responsibility for their maintenance and health.

From Christopher Dawson’s essay, “The Patriarchal Family in History” (1933), collected in The Dynamics of World History (1956). (Paragraph break added: LC.)

Let us hope for an incremental bit of progress on one front: parental choice in the schooling of children. (By progress, of course, I don’t mean the kind of “progress” sought by regressive “progressives,” who would have us and our progeny bow to the almighty state — as long as they control it.)

Evolution as God?

In a lot of ways, evolution is like unto theology. “Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures,” said Damien Broderick, “or they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.” And indeed, the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet’s surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics. Doesn’t that all sound like something that might have been said about God? (Eliezer Yudkowsky, “An Alien God,” Overcoming Bias)

Whence the stuff of which evolution was made, and the structure (i.e., laws) of physics that enabled it to be made? Answer that, Mr. Yudkowsky, before you get too invested in the claim that “Science has already discovered the sort-of-godlike maker of humans – but it wasn’t what the religionists wanted to hear.”

Yudkowsky wants to believe in only the first of four logical possibilities about the Universe:

1. Everything just is — without an outside cause or overarching design. Scientists claim to find “laws” governing the behavior of matter, energy, time, and space. But such laws only partly explain the universe; there is no grand unifying theory of everything. And those laws are subject to change as science unveils new aspects of matter, energy, time, and space — as it does continuously.

He ought to consider the other possibilities, including this one:

4. There is an external force or consciousness that brought everything into being. That force or consciousness may merely have set things in motion, or it may play a continuing role in some or all aspects of existence. The intentions of the external force or consciousness are known to religionists, by revelation and/or faith; science is inadequate to fathom those intentions or to prove that the universe conforms to an underlying “design.” Those who reject this fourth possibility as “unscientific” — that is, most scientists as well as the typical libertarian/Objectivist — can do so only by accepting one of the equally unscientific (i.e., untestable) possibilities outlined above.

In a sequel (“The Wonder of Evolution“) Yudkowsky reveals (in so many words) his fear of considering that fourth possibility. He does us a service, however, by adverting to a sentence from Thomas Henry Huxley‘s “Ethics and Evolution” (The Romanes Lecture, Oxford University 1893). Here is the sentence in full:

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

Elsewhere, we find this commentary on Huxley’s observation:

As his critics were not slow to point out, however, Huxley’s supposition that man can combat cosmic processes comes strangely from a Darwinian. For Darwin’s principal thesis is that man is part of Nature and subject, therefore, to its “cosmic forces,” in no sense standing outside or above them.

The subsequent explanation — that ethical progress is part and parcel of evolution — leads to this question: How do we “know” that we should move in a certain direction, ethically, in order to be more nearly perfect? Assigning evolution the role of judge is tantamount to assuming the answer, namely, “evolution is all.” But that cannot be the answer (except in the mind of an obdurate atheist), because there remains this scientifically unanswerable question: Whence the stuff of which evolution was made, and the laws (structure) of physics that enabled it to be made?

If you want to disbelieve in the fourth possibility, just say so. But don’t cloak your disbelief in the language of science, for science can neither prove nor disprove any of the possibilities.

And Your Point Is?

Jim Harper (Cato-at-Liberty) says:

The story [this story: LC] says that unlicensed driving dropped by a third when New Mexico de-linked driver licensing and immigration status. Actually, unlicensed driving dropped by two thirds, from 33% to 11%, lower than the national average.

Which means that a lot of illegal aliens are driving legally in New Mexico. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

Here We Go Again

David Friedman, in “When Is a War Not a War?,” writes:

The problem is that the “War on Terror” is at least in part a metaphor. It is in some ways more like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, a project given emotional force by analogizing it to a military conflict, than it is like WW II or the Korean War.

Suppose the President declared a War on Crime–as, for all I know, some President at some point has. Is he then entitled to arrest people he claims are criminals and hold them without trial for an indefinite period of time–as prisoners of war?

The analogy is not perfect. The attack on the World Trade Center was more like an act of war than it was like a bank robbery. But it was less like an act of war than the Pearl Harbor attack was, not only because the targets were not primarily military but because the attackers were not agents of a hostile state. The War on Terror is not as metaphorical as the War on Drugs. But it fits the pattern of war as usually and literally understood poorly enough to make a policy of taking people prisoners and holding them without trial until the war is over at best problematical.

Friedman tries to equate war-fighting and crime-fighting by relying on the surface similarity between the phrases “war on terror” and “war on crime.” But a war on crime, if such there were such a thing, would exercise an entirely separate and distinct aspect of the president’s constitutional authority than does the War on Terror. The president cannot, under the rubric of a war on crime, “arrest people he claims are criminals and hold them without trial for an indefinite period of time–as prisoners of war.” A president might well announce a war on crime,” but it would not be a war (in the constitutional sense), it would an exercise of executive authority conducted by the non-military apparatus of government within constitutional bounds, that is, respecting Amendments I, II, IV, V, VI, and VIII of the Bill of Rights. The Framers of the Constitution understood the difference between war and crime (even if Friedman does not), and did a very nice job of distinguishing them in the Constitution.

The War on Terror is a real war, given that its components (e.g., operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, clandestine operations elsewhere overseas) are conducted under authority granted by Congress (i.e., the functional equivalent of a declaration of war). The president, as long as he acts under that authority — and as long as the U.S. Supreme Court sides with his interpretation of that authority — is conducting a war, not fighting crime.

The president’s authority to conduct the various components of the War on Terror was granted as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center. Friedman is playing word games when he suggests that that attack “was less like an act of war than the attack on Pearl Harbor, not only because the targets were not primarily military but because the attackers were not agents of a hostile state.” Since when do attacks on civilians not count as acts of war? (The dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example were ultimate acts of war, aimed at forcing Japan’s surrender.) Since when do anarcho-libertarians (as is Friedman) view acts by non-state entities as somehow lacking authority because they were not explicitly authorized by a state (as far as we know). Is cold-blooded murder somehow less of a crime if it is committed by an anarchist gypsy, as opposed to a fascist functionary, for example?

Friedman seems dismayed by the prospect of enemy combatants being held indefinitely because there might be no end to the War on Terror. But why the dismay, if they are enemies? Friedman would answer: Because they have not been tried and found to be enemies. Friedman (along with his fellow anarchos and the anti-war Left) argues from one erroneous premise (the War on Terror isn’t really a war) to another (therefore, it must be an exercise in criminal justice), in order to reach a desired conclusion (prisoners in the War on Terror are entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights). This they do, even though those prisoners are enemies who would spit on the Bill of Rights.

What to do about those enemy combatants who might be held indefinitely? My take: If military necessity dictates indefinite detention, so be it. The alternative? Take no prisoners.

War and justice are two different things, as the Framers wisely understood, and as Friedman — and his fellow anarchos and their brethren on the Left — cannot seem to understand. Wars are fought to protect the rights of U.S. citizens, not to strengthen our enemies in their quest to harm U.S. citizens and their legitimate economic interests.

We do not live in “one world.” And even if everyone in the world were endowed with equal rights (a concept that I reject), no one would be entitled to attack what we in the U.S. enjoy. To rephrase what I wrote here,

the sovereignty of the United States is inseparable from the benefits afforded Americans by the U.S. Constitution, most notably the enjoyment of civil liberties, the blessings of more-or-less free markets and free trade, and the protections of a common defense. To cede sovereignty — by allowing other nations a say in our laws or by treating our enemies as equals under the Constitution — is to risk the loss of the benefits we derive from the Constitution. That is why we must always be cautious in our commitments to international organizations and laws, and resist the temptation to treat enemies as if they were entitled to the very benefits they would deny us.

“War” is not “justice”; “nationalism” is not a dirty word.

"The War": An Initial Reaction

I taped Ken Burns’s The War for later viewing. Later is now; I watched the first episode last night.

My initial reaction: War is not glorified (nor should it be), but Burns makes a strong case that war can be necessary — contrary to the anti-war mantra that substitutes for thought on the Left.

The War illustrates that, however necessary a war, victory may be attainable only at a very high price. (That illustration is especially valuable for the generations whose only war was the seemingly quick-and-easy Gulf War of 1990-91.) The War also makes the case, graphically, that there can be no alternative but to pay that very high price when one is faced with brutal, fanatical enemies.

The series could not have been aired at a better time. Perhaps it has (in a small way) contributed to Americans’ somewhat more optimistic views about the war on terror and the war in Iraq. The main reason for optimism, of course, is the impression that the anti-insurgency campaign is succeeding.

More later.

Bum Dope

An econblogger whose posts I read regularly says:

At this website (WHOIS Search database), you can look up the real name of the owner of any website on the Internet.

Via Reason.

It doesn’t work if a site’s URL is xxx.blogspot.com, xxx.typepad.com, or the like. Nor does it work if the owner of a site has masked his or her identity.

The Fallacy of Particularism

UPDATED, BELOW

Here. Robin Hanson makes a mistake that is common to “rationalists”: He examines every thread of human behavior for “reasonableness.”

It is the fabric of human behavior that matters, not each thread. Any thread, if pulled out of the fabric, might look defective under the microscope of “reason.” But pulling threads out of a fabric — one at a time — can weaken a strong and richly textured tapestry.

Whether a particular society is, in fact, a “strong and richly textured tapestry” is for its members to determine, through voice and exit. The “reasonableness” of a society’s norms (if they are voluntarily evolved) should be judged by whether those norms — on the whole — foster liberty (as explained here), not by the whether each of those norms, taken in isolation, is “reasonable” to a pundit inveighing from on high.

UPDATE (11/01/07: Hanson has updated his post (first link above). But he digs himself a deeper, rationalistic hole when he says

I’ll now only complain about [Russ Roberts’s] bias to hold his previous beliefs to a lower standard than he holds posssible alternatives.

He should complain, rather, about his own, too-easy willingness to reject the wisdom of inherited beliefs on the basis of statistical analysis.

Wrong

Ross Douthat writes:

Maybe it isn’t a conscious strategy for the Democrats, but it makes a certain sense: Take from the super-rich, who aren’t tax-sensitive, and the pretty-damn-rich, who will probably vote for the GOP no matter what, and give to upper-middle class professionals, a constituency where the Dems have been making inroads for a while now.

Sorry, Ross, but it’s evident that the “inroads” are more like “surrender.” Higher taxes on the super-rich and pretty-damn-rich will affect constituencies that have pretty much gone over to the dark side (the Democrat Party, that is).

A Non-Believer Defends Religion

Theodore Dalrymple, writing at City Journal (“What the New Atheists Don’t See“) smacks down Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and their ilk. Dalrymple’s case is made all the more convincing by his admission, in the second paragraph of the essay, that he is a non-believer.

Among Dalrymple’s many excellent and well-aimed observations, this is my favorite:

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith…can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality.

I (an agnostic) have made that point, and others, in my various defenses of religion against the “new atheism” of Dennett, Dawkins, et al.:

Going Too Far with the First Amendment
Atheism, Religion, and Science
The Limits of Science
Beware of Irrational Atheism
Religion and Personal Responsibility
Science, Evolution, Religion, and Liberty
Science, Logic, and God
Capitalism, Liberty, and Christianity
Debunking “Scientific Objectivity”
The Big Bang and Atheism
The Universe: Four Possibilities
Einstein, Science, and God
Atheism, Religion, and Science Redux
Religion as Beneficial Evolutionary Adaptation

Hillary Meets Cass

By which I mean that Hillary Clinton, who would control the blogosphere, is of a mind with Cass Sunstein, who would regulate speech in order to make it “more free.”

"Resources" Updated

I have updated my list of reference links, to eliminate links that were broken or which pointed to the wrong page.

Parents and the State

Timothy Sandefur (Freespace) has it almost right:

[T]he danger of allowing the state to control such decisions [whether a child must have a blood test] is far greater than the threat here [to public health]…. Give the state the power to take children away from parents for the children’s own good, and you have opened a door to the persecution of religious minorities….

Not to mention the denial of the right of parents to educate their children in private schools or at home, as the parents see fit.

But…I wonder if Sandefur means that the state should never have the power to take children from their parents, for the good of the children. Never? Not even in the case of children who are abused persistently?

It’s true that, in such cases, intervention by other parties (e.g., friends, family, church) would be preferable to intervention by the state, given the state’s power (and demonstrated ability) to act peremptorily and capriciously. But, given the dearth of private intervenors (because the state has so deeply sundered the social fabric), we are forced to rely on the state as the intervenor of last resort.

Huh?

A lucid and rather sympathetic exposition of Austrian (Hayekian) economics by J. Bradford DeLong, an admitted non-believer (see second paragraph under IV.B).

Related posts:
Liberty and Its Prerequisites (scroll down to “The Evolution of Libertarian Thought: The Unification of Economic and Personal Liberty”)
More Hayek

See also: F.A. Hayek Articles & Books, Etc. (links)

Baseball Roundup

REVISED, 10/29/07

In light of the outcome of the 2007 World Series (Boston Red Sox over the Colorado Rockies, 4 games to zip), and other baseball events of the past year or two, I have updated several posts:

A New Curse for the Red Sox REVISED TODAY
The Next Winner of the World Series? RE-REVISED TODAY
The Meaning of the World Series
Pennant Winner vs. Best Team
Baseball’s Losers
World Series Contestants: Not [Always] the Best Teams

A Tale of Three Franchises

The American League had eight teams from 1901 through 1960; the National League had eight teams from 1901 through 1961. I have written elsewhere about post-1960/61 expansion and its influence on the quality and competitiveness of baseball. I focus here on three of the AL’s original franchises: the three with the worst overall records, among the original eight, from 1901 through 2007.

The three franchises — now known as the Oakland Athletics, Minnesota Twins, and Baltimore Orioles — are noteworthy not just because they, among the original eight, have won the lowest proportion of regular-season games. They are noteworthy also because they were the among the six major league teams to pick up and move in the span 1953-61. (The three NL teams that moved were the Braves, from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953 — and thence to Atlanta in 1966; the Dodgers, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958; and the Giants, from New York to San Francisco in 1958)

Going back a bit, the American League’s eight original franchises had stayed put from 1903 through 1953. The Baltimore Orioles franchise (1901-2) became the New York Highlanders in 1903 (renamed the Yankees in 1913). The Milwaukee Brewers franchise (1901) resided in St. Louis (as the Browns) from 1902 through 1953. The Browns, in 1954, became — and remain — the Baltimore Orioles.

One year after the Browns’ shift to Baltimore, the Philadelphia Athletics jumped to Kansas City, where they played 1955-67. The A’s then packed off to Oakland where they have been from 1968 to the present.

Then came the metamorphosis of the Washington Senators, often last in the American League during the years 1901-60. The Nats (a nickname of yore) were reborn in 1961 as the still-extant Minnesota Twins.

Why did the Browns, A’s, and Senators move? Short answer: Fans don’t flock to see losers. And losers they had been, and often continued to be. Here are their season-by-season records for 1901 through 2007 (overall records shown in the legend):

And here are easier-to-read (and more informative) nine-year records:

Fans of the reborn Browns (Orioles) and Senators (Twins) didn’t suffer long before the replanted franchises produced winners. The Orioles got a fresh start under new ownership, following Bill Veeck‘s disastrous years at the Browns’ helm. The Senators/Twins remained under Calvin Griffith‘s control for more than two decades, however. So, it would seem that a change of scenery (more tickets sold to newly enchanted fans) can go just as far as a change of ownership (more money to spend on players’ salaries).

What about the A’s? They moved to Kansas City under new ownership, after more than five decades under Connie Mack and his sons. But that didn’t pan out; the A’s remained a lousy team. Another new owner (Charles O. Finley) moved the team from Kansas City to Oakland. A few years passed and the A’s became big winners, for a while. In this instance, success followed both a change of scenery and new ownership.

New ownership can work against a team, of course. It has in the case of the O’s, whose resurgence in the 1990s was reversed by an especially obnoxious and meddlesome owner, Peter Angelos. In that vein, it is obvious that the New York Yankees‘ resurgence in the mid-to-late 1970s is owed to George Steinbrenner. But if Steinbrenner can take credit for that resurgence (as he would), he can (but will not, I am sure) take responsibility for the Yankees’ mediocrity from the early 1980s to early 1990s, and for their inability to win a World Series since 2000.

Anyway, the tale of the A’s, Senators/Twins, and Browns/O’s is this: persistent mediocrity and failure, punctuated by fleeting glory. The O’s came closest, of the three teams, to having a baseball dynasty (from the late 1960s to the early 1980s), but the Yankees they never were. The long periods of failure on the part of the A’s were self-inflicted in the days of Connie Mack‘s ownership. (Follow the link for more on that.) The failure of Washington’s baseball teams seems to be a law of nature, as evidenced by the records of the original Senators, the expansion Senators, and the Expos/Nationals, a.k.a Three Losers.

In the zero-sum game that is baseball, failure is self-inflicted. You either spend the money it takes to win, and spend it wisely, or you do not. Yes, the Yankees have loomed dominantly, most of the time, from the 1920s to the present. And, given that, some teams must have losing records. But why — so often and so persistently — have those teams been the A’s, Senators/Twins, and Browns/Orioles?

It almost makes me believe in destiny.

In the Pipeline

When I resumed blogging in earnest on July 1 — after eight months in which I seldom posted anything of substance — I had a backlog of about thirty posts in draft form. I have, since July 1, polished and published many of those drafts. I also have deleted a handful that seemed, in retrospect, not worth pursuing.

My backlog of draft posts now numbers nine:

The United Way or the Highway?

There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Health Care

Is America Resegregating? And So What If It Is?

Cell Phones and Driving, Once More

Creationism, Intelligent Design, Science, and Politics

Homosexuality and Other Gender Matters

The Folly of Contractual Libertarianism

Liberty, Harm, Nationalism, Federalism, and Individualism

A Summing Up

Will all see the light of day, in one form or another? Will I continue to blog after the nine have been published or purged? Stay tuned…

Election 2008 Factoid

The presidential election markets at Iowa Electronic Markets are showing a dip in Giuliani’s chances for the GOP nomination and (therefore?) a slight increase in the expected vote share for the Democrats’ nominee.

Where’s the Gipper when we need him?

GIGO

See conclusion #3, here. Be sure to follow the link to the 8th-grade exam from 1895.

Clarification: Conclusion #3 (which is part of a post at Carpe Diem) and this post are about public education. “GIGO” stands for “garbage in, garbage out” — a phrase that was common in my early days as a defense analyst. It’s a shorthand way of saying that the results produced by a model will be erroneous (“garbage”) if the model itself and/or the input values chosen to represent the model’s parameters are ill-founded or empirically incorrect (“garbage”). (Much like today’s climate models.)

I don’t mean to refer to today’s public-school students as “garbage” (though some undoubtedly are just that). What I mean is that they are taught too much “garbage” (socially relevant clap-trap, sex education, etc.) and, therefore, not taught enough readin’ (including Latin and other languages), writin’, ‘rithmetic, geography, and history* by teachers who actually know those subjects. That has happened largely because public education in this country has been taken over by a cabal of university “education” departments and teachers’ unions (both Left-wing), which dictate the kinds of clap-trap being taught in (most) schools and discourage the thorough training of teachers in those subjects that are worth teaching (readin’, etc.).

As for the students, their main deficit — aside from having been let down by the “system” — is the growing absence of one or both parents, because the of the marked increase in the incidence of working mothers, divorce, and illegitimacy over the last 50 to 100 years. Today’s students (on the whole) therefore suffer (relative to their predecessors of 50 to 100 years ago) from a lack of parental interest, guidance, and compulsion.

I haven’t discussed manners, obedience, and violence because the differences between now and 50-100 years ago are too painfully obvious.

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