I can has Fourth Amendment?

(If you don’t get the title, go kill some brain cells at ICHC until you recognize the subtle, incisive irony thereof.)

For those of you who aren’t as American as I am, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Simple, effective, and easily understood… you’d think.  Of course, governments are notoriously incapable of understanding the text of the documents that authorize them, and if you’ve been paying any attention whatsoever over the past few years you’ll have noticed that the Fourth Amendment isn’t that popular in the U.S. these days.

This may be changing:

• Two Patriot Act Provisions Ruled Unlawful (AOL News)

(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers)

Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

Incidentally, if “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” sounds familiar to you, it should: it’s the same act the Democrats recently renewed with even broader powers than the President asked for.  (But who’s counting?)

Judge Aiken, incidentally, is my own personal hero:

“For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law – with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she wrote.

By asking her to dismiss Mayfield’s lawsuit, the judge said, the U.S. attorney general’s office was “asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so.”

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to shout and pump my fist whilst reading an Associated Press article.  I am grateful to Judge Aiken for the (I’m sure) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Brava!

Pro-family group has close encounter with reality

It rather shocks me that I find myself approving of what this guy has to say:

• Pro-family group quits gay marriage fight (canada.com)

Briefly:

The head of a national pro-family organization says it’s time to ditch the fight against gay marriage and push instead for tax breaks and other incentives to make marriage and child rearing more attractive options.

Dave Quist, executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, said Thursday he has become less concerned about same-sex marriage since census figures released earlier this month demonstrated how rare gay marriage is.

[...]

He said a first priority should be to change the tax rules so only married couples – not those living common law – are allowed to split their incomes, thereby reducing their tax hit.

So… gay marriage isn’t the horrifying threat to uptight heterosexuality that it has been portrayed to be for decades by, well, people like Mr. Quist?  What a shocking surprise!  I agree, Mr. Quist: you should ditch your odious preoccupation with other people’s private lives and recognize that what those consenting adults do in private is no threat to your, uh, “lifestyle”.

Now, about this tax thing.  I’m not terribly happy about income taxes in general — but if we’re going to have income taxes, I’d rather they be spread simply and uniformly across the population rather than carefully tailored to fit the political prejudices of the moment (and, of course, every political prejudice of past moments that haven’t become sufficiently odious to attract an official redaction).  Among other things, I’m rather less than impressed with tax breaks for married and common-law couples.  Therefore, when Mr. Quist advocates dropping split-income tax provisions for common-law couples, I see it as a good start.

Then we have this bit:

The rising tide of common-law unions throughout North America, but particularly in Canada, was a major topic of discussion Thursday at a one-day conference sponsored by Quist’s organization. American academic Jennifer Roback Morse, who has written extensively about the merits of marriage over cohabitation, said Canadian legislators should waste no time in coming up with tax breaks to make marriage more attractive.

“We should not encourage cohabitation by treating it as if it were marriage,” she told about 60 people, most from faith-based and social service organizations.

Sixty people.  My goodness — your conferences sure are special.  The last time I gave a conference talk, I had the honour of addressing over two hundred people — and that was a rather specialized group of academics, not those who purport to represent a “moral” majority of modern society.

But enough about me — let’s talk about you, Ms. Morse.  You claim that “Canadian legislators should waste no time in coming up with tax breaks to make marriage more attractive”, eh?  Go fuck yourself and the horse you rode in.  Canadian legislators have no fucking business getting involved in marriage — or anything else pertaining to the private lives of the citizens whom they represent.  You have some fucking nerve, waltzing into a country not your own and daring to tell its politicians how they should spend my taxes!

Here’s a daring thought: let’s completely — heheheh — divorce government from the business of marriage altogether.  No tax breaks for couples, no marriage licenses, no common-law benefits, no messy divorce hearings… no problem.  Can anyone explain to me why government ought to be involved in the relationships of its citizens to begin with?

Blunt Object terminology: “accidents” usually aren’t

Someone crashed s/h/its car on the twisty downhill road near my apartment today, calling in a great many emergency vehicles (of which I saw two police cruisers, a fire truck, and three ambulances), and disrupting traffic for hours.  This happens all the time.  It’s not a particularly unsafe stretch of road — the lanes are wide and well-marked, and are separated in the particularly risky bits by concrete barriers; there is only one intersection along this road, and it sees little traffic.  Still, drivers of cars, trucks, minivans, and SUVs keep dashing their steel cages against each other (or against the aforementioned concrete barriers) with irritating consistency.

People keep calling these incidents “accidents”.  I find that very difficult to believe.

An accident comes out of nowhere.  You cannot plan for an accident, because by its nature it is impossible to anticipate.  You cannot reliably mitigate an accident, because by its nature it thwarts your existing plans and precautions.  You cannot even learn from an accident, because by its nature it is random.  No-one can be blamed for an accident — accidents are beyond human control.  If they killed more people at once, accidents would be called acts of God (because that’s apparently what God does — kill people and destroy property with earthquakes and hurricanes and such).

Fortunately, accidents are vanishingly rare.

What most grass-eaters are pleased to mislabel “accidents” are in fact fuckups.  They are the predictable results of dangerous behaviour.  They are entirely within the capacity of their perpetrators (yes, people can be blamed for fuckups) to control, mitigate, or avoid.  If you commit a fuckup (or suffer one of someone else’s commission) and survive, you can learn from it and mitigate or avoid any similar fuckups in the future.

Car crashes, for example, are mostly fuckups.  You get people driving too fast for their skills and for road conditions.  You get idiots yakking away on cell phones, or texting their friends, or reading the paper and eating lunch at the same goddamn time.  You get concerned — or irate — parents twisting around to check on their kids in the back seat.  You put them on the road together, at sixty kilometres per hour, and every once in a while they slam into something — or someone — that they could easily have avoided had they been paying attention to actually driving their fucking cars.

This is in fact good news.  If we could recognize fuckups for what they are, learn from them, learn to predict them, and mitigate or avoid them, we could drastically reduce the rate at which people fuck up.  Fewer car crashes, fewer acts of negligence, fewer dangerous construction flaws… dare I say fewer injuries and deaths?  Yes, Virginia, we could learn from our mistakes and those of others.

That blame thing, though… that’s the problem.  The vast majority of people would much rather live in a world rife with violence, death, and horror than accept responsibility for their actions.   These grass-eaters like to claim that they’re interested in — to continue our current example — reducing automobile-related fatalities, and in all due fairness they probably are… they’re just not interested enough to give credit where it’s due.

If you cause what most people would call an “accident”, it’s probably because of your own negligence.

Car crashes, for example, tend to happen when one driver cannot react fast enough to an unexpected event (like another driver pulling out of a driveway).  It is your responsibility as a driver — let me elaborate: as the pilot of several hundred kilograms of metal hurtling along a crowded thoroughfare at high velocity — first to identify potentially dangerous areas well in advance, and second to allow yourself sufficient time to react should that anticipated danger in fact materialize.  Yes, that means watching traffic signals to anticipate yellows, watching pedestrians to anticipate jaywalkers, and watching other cars to anticipate careless assholes changing lanes in front of you while you’re putting down your goddamn bull semen latte and picking up the sports section.  No-one said that piloting a tonne of screaming speeding sheet steel was going to be easy.

It is also your responsibility as a car owner to make sure that your car is properly maintained and in good working order.  Brakes a bit squishy?  Throttle a bit sluggish?  Steering heavy?  That’s your fault, princess — take your rustbucket to the shop and get it fixed if you can’t confidently fix it yourself.

For the gender police keeping track: “princess” is a gender-neutral pejorative.

Similarly, I would be very surprised to hear of an “accidental shooting” that is in fact accidental.  Firearms are (for the most part) only dangerous in one direction, and if they’re not pointed towards people (or pets, or televisions… actually, go ahead and point your guns at televisions, we can do without them) they are surprisingly unlikely to kill dozens of children or whatever the malicious spirits that lurk within firearms are popularly supposed to do at the slightest provocation.  Here’s a public service announcement: don’t point your fucking guns at anything you do not wish to shoot!  That’s ninety per cent of firearms safety, right there.  (That’s Rule Two, for those of you keeping score from home.)

While we’re at it: there’s this thing on most firearms that makes them go “boom”.  You might be familiar with it — it’s a trigger.  Now, should you come upon a strange firearm — keep your fucking fingers away from its trigger.  If nothing frobs that trigger, the gun just ain’t going to go off.  (Rule Three.)

Thus, we see that “accidental shootings” are merely mundane — if maudlin — fuckups.  In order to “accidentally” shoot someone, you first have to fuck up by pointing a gun at that someone, then you have to fuck up by putting your finger inside the trigger guard.

A depressingly overwhelming number of tragic misadventures can be reduced to fuckups.  In general, when someone dies, it’s because the decedent — or someone close thereto — catastrophically has fucked the metaphorical dog.  If we can bring ourselves to recognize the role of behaviour in what most people write off as “accidents”, we’ll probably save a few (million) lives.

But that’s not as comforting as abdicating responsibility, now is it?

In Defence of Awful Beer

Over on The Great Motorcycle Pizza Crusade, Lucky derides beer snobbery and revels in “good old-fashioned manly beers”:

• I’m Making a Stand Here

His article, in four paragraphs:

 When I think of the American standard of masculinity, I think of a sweaty guy in a Dickies workshirt, clutching a can of beer in one hand and a wrench in the other, cussing at the infernal machine he’s trying to repair.

Something seems to have gone wrong in the collective head of America, however. According to an article on Slate.com earlier this year, wine sales are going way up, while beer sales have barely increased at all.

Personally, I blame microbrews and the accompanying beer-snobbery. Beer now comes with a dizzying array of choices to make. IPA? Double Bock? Seasonal brews? Suddenly, kicking back with a cold can of Budweiser isn’t cool. Depending on your group of friends, such a beer choice could even result in scorn and derision.

If you’re smart, of course, you’ll just smile all the wider as you enjoy your perfectly drinkable – tasty, even – macro-brew which cost less than half of what their “John Hancock’s Extra Creamy Chocolate Stout Frappe… er, just Stout” did.

Then he reviews Schlitz.  (Sorry, Lucky, but any snob-snubbing cred you may have accumulated earlier in the article vanished when you used the term “mouth feel”.)

I don’t agree that microbrew and snobbery have made it hard to choose a socially correct beer, and thus driven casual beer-drinkers into the simple and tolerant world of… wine?  Nah.  Wine snobbery is far more complex and involved than beer snobbery, and the stigma of drinking cheap wine is far, far more condign than that of drinking cheap beer.

Nonetheless, I applaud Lucky’s article.  Cheap and nasty beer needs all the friends it can get, if for no other reason than simple mathematics: more people drinking cheap and nasty beer means more cheap and exquisite Czech beer for me.

If I’m a beer snob, I’m not a very good one.  Sure, I enjoy my Czech pilsners, and my Colorado porters (and stouts, and IPAs, and…) –  but when push comes to shove I’ll happily drink whatever’s on tap.

Lucky has the right idea, applauding beers like PBR and Schlitz.  My problem with awful beer isn’t so much the truly awful cheap stuff — it’s the largely awful macrobrew (Canadian, Blue, and the like) that’s no less expensive than beer that tastes good.

For a while when I lived in Edmonton, I was able to buy Molson Dry for barely over a dollar a can.  Molson Dry is hardly what I’d call an exciting beer — but for a buck a can it’s a damn fine value.  These days, I’d pay ten bucks for a six-pack of Canadian.  That’s two litres of pisswater, for those of you keeping score at home.  Thanks to the strong Euro and Czech beer subsidies, I can buy four large cans of Pilsner Urquell for ten bucks (two litres of tasty beer).  The only thing Canadian has that Pilsner Urquell doesn’t is fratsquatch appeal.  I’ll pass, thanks.

Okay, back to the Schlitz.  Lucky writes:

Cracking open the can, the first thing you’ll identify is that special “cheap beer” aroma, a strange combination of alcohol, tin can and bread. As a manly American, you wouldn’t pour your beer into a glass (unless it’s a glass that can hold more than one beer), but if you did you would likely admire the light, clear golden hue of the brew. The head is thin, and dissipates quickly.

The beer itself has a surprisingly thick mouth feel. Almost (dare I say it?) creamy. There is a slightly bitter aftertaste, but you can wash that away with more beer. As for the flavor… well, I would describe it as non-offensive. I mean, it doesn’t taste bad so much as it doesn’t really taste much at all. Schlitz is definitely a hot-garage kind of beer. It goes down easy and, for $3.64 per six-pack, you can afford to keep some on hand to refresh yourself after a hard day working on the house, in the yard, or on your bike.

That sounds about right for awful beer.  In fact, this is where shitty beer truly shines: it’s the perfect solution to the “I need something refreshing and alcoholic” problem when you can’t (or won’t) mix yourself a gin and tonic.  Sure, there are plenty of good beers that would suit (most IPAs, for example), along with the aforementioned gin and tonic, but I see, say, Schlitz as what Clausewitz would call an economy-of-force option.  You wouldn’t chug a good IPA — so if the beer’s only barely going to touch your taste-buds, why not drink something cheap?

At any rate — dammit, man, you’re drinking beer.  There’s no need to apologize, and no need to justify yourself.

Standing up to Leviathan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

No, not Clint Eastwood:

• Monks lead largest Burma protest (The Beeb)

Buddhist monks led better than one hundred thousand people through Rangoon in a peaceful protest against Myanmar’s notoriously vicious military-led Leviathan.

The monks had called for the entire country to join them in their campaign to overthrow the government, which began eight days ago, and Monday saw marches in at least 25 towns and cities, including Mandalay, Sittwe and Pakokku.

Witnesses say the demonstration in Rangoon, the largest city, was so huge they could not see the beginning or the end of it.

That is some serious sisu, there:

The military suppressed the last democracy uprising in 1988, killing some 3,000 people, correspondents say.

These protesters are free in a way that very few people on this content can ever hope to be.  I commend and admire them.

The Bad

According to this article, those protests won’t stay bilaterally peaceful for long:

• 100,000 turn out for Myanmar protest (Yahoo! news)

In particular:

[O]n Monday night the country’s religious affairs minister appeared on state television to accuse the monks of being manipulated by the regime’s domestic and foreign enemies. Meeting with senior monks at Yangon’s Kaba Aye Pagoda, Brig. Gen. Thura Myint Maung said the protesting monks represented just 2 percent of the country’s population. He suggested that if senior monks did not restrain them, the government would act according to its own regulations, which he did not detail.

That’s probably not a good sign.  Then again, neither is this:

The Ugly

Remember the last time this “international sanctions” thing worked?  Neither do I:

• U.S. to impose new sanctions on Myanmar (CBC.ca)

You know how the ‘States imposed sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq way back in the ’90s, and the regime capitulated to become a model of even-handed populism?  We can expect the same results in Myanmar, I suppose.

The United States is expected to announce new sanctions on Tuesday against Myanmar, where protests are growing against the ruling military junta, the White House said Monday.

So it goes.

Determinism vs. free will — in politics

The standard model of political thought goes something like this:

• Leftists want the government out of your bedroom and into your wallet
• Rightists want the government out of your wallet and into your bedroom

In less engaging terms: What’s described as the “political left” (modern liberals, progressives, The Left, pinko commie hippie peaceniks, &c.) tend to favour social liberties and restrict economic liberties.  Meanwhile, what’s described as the “political right” (conservatives, reactionaries, The Right, pluto-fascist fat-cat pig-dogs, &c.) tend to favour economic liberties and restrict social liberties.  If you ask a group of mixed political affiliation who favours liberty, every hand will shoot into the air.

If everyone loves liberty, why is it going away?

Fortunately, there is a grotesque overgeneralization that reliably distinguishes leftist thought from rightist thought.

Please note: I don’t believe the following whole-heartedly and without reservation.  It is — or may be — a handy political heuristic; one board in an intellectual scaffold upon which one might build a useful generalization to explain the otherwise ridiculous behaviour of certain politicians.

Here’s the idea:

• Leftists place great stock in predestination, and build their notions of what happens (and why) around that concept
• Rightists place great stock in self-determination, and build their notions of what happens (and why) around that concept

If we take these two postulates as axioms, a great deal of otherwise dumbfoundingly idiotic political thought suddenly becomes understandable (though not realistic).  They both revolve around the entirely absurd — but strangely compelling — notion of fairness, and that’s where people fuck up.

Let’s start with the leftists.  Modern leftists seem to take their political inspiration from, among other things, the most powerful civil rights movements of the past hundred-some years — feminism, the African-American civil rights movement, and the gay rights movement.  Each fights discrimination on the basis of predetermined characteristics.  We have no say in whether we are born male or female, black or white, gay or straight.  (There are of course more options in each category, but let’s not quibble for the moment.)  It is, of course, unfair to treat someone as less than human based on something with which s/h/it was stuck from birth.  These things are not amenable to human intervention short of genetic manipulation, which we (humans) can’t reliably do (yet).  So far, so good.

Things get a bit murky when we extend the “accident of birth” exemption.  For example, we have no choice in the country into which we’re born, or the economic status of our parents.  This isn’t up to us, but to a large degree it is up to our parents.  (For example: my parents were born in the United States, but moved to Canada before I was born.)  Furthermore, if I want to renounce my Canadian citizenship and become an American citizen, I can do so with a daunting but finite amount of bureaucratic labour.  (Of course, some parentally-decided circumstances — like fetal alcohol syndrome — are far more difficult to change.  One must retain one’s perspective.)

The leftists run into trouble when they — instinctively or unconsciously — apply the concept of predestination indiscriminately.   I think that (many of) the stupid bits of leftist political philosophy come from assuming predestination when it doesn’t exist.

Consider, for example, two hypothetical Canadian carpenters, both equally skilled at their trade, with equal obligations and circumstances.  The first works 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks of the year, and earns (let’s say) $50,000 in a year.  The second, in the same market, works 20 hours a week, also for 50 weeks, and earns (let’s say) $25,000 in a year.  All things being equal, the first carpenter would pay a base rate of $8,544.84 in federal taxes — that’s 22% on $13,622 and 15.25% on $36,378, or 17.09% of s/h/its income — while the second would pay a base rate of $3,812.50, or 15.25% of s/h/its income.

Work harder, and your taxes go up.  That’s not how “progressive” taxation is supposed to work!  Sure, this is a ficticious scenario, but it’s entirely plausible.

Here’s the problem: progressive taxation doesn’t account for individual free will.  Standard leftist thought on income assumes that “the rich” are inherently rich — they are born rich, live rich, have rich kids, and eventually die rich.  Likewise, “the poor” are inherently poor, “the working class” are inherently working-class, and so on.  The notion that people can earn substantially more (or less) than their parents is seen as unrealistic.  The idea that some people would choose to work less than they can is unfathomable.

This is whence comes the widespread angst over unqualified income inequality — income is seen as an inherent property of human beings, not as a result of human action.  In this arena, income disparity is a sign of unfairness — there must be something wrong with society if our second carpenter earns only half of the first carpenter’s earnings.  The notion that the second carpenter might prefer to work part time doesn’t enter the picture at all.

(I’m not saying that this happens in every case, or even in most cases; I’m just saying that the progressive-tax model doesn’t account for it.)

The same mania for personal predestination afflicts left-wing policy on all levels.  Differences in circumstance cannot be attributed to people — they must be innate.  Hence, violent criminals cannot be held accountable for their violence: we must instead blame (and restrict) the tools with which they commit their violence (guns, knives, hammers, screwdrivers, cricket balls, &c.).  Similarly, when people with NINJA loans can no longer afford them and foreclose, they cannot be held accountable — the unfair system must be at fault.  (Apparently, only governments and bankers have free wills.)

Let’s twist this knife and pull it out of the Left — the Right’s over in the other corner, looking frightened and unbloodied.

If the Left refuses to recognize any free will upon the part of its beloved subjects, the Right refuses to recognize any constraints upon that free will.  One might charitably attribute this emphasis on “freedom” to the influence of Mill, Thoreau, and de Tocqueville.  (I credit it rather to a simple-minded desire to blame the victim, but then this is not a charitable article.)

This emphasis upon freedom of will and its individualization of consequences addresses some of the problems in the above characterization of Leftism.  Violent criminals are violent because they choose to be, not because of the tools with which they inflict violence. Some people are richer than others because they work harder, not because of an accident of birth.

(Of course, some people are richer than others because of an accident of birth.  Life sucks, get a helmet.  But let’s continue.)

It’s trivially easy to see the flaw in this assumption: there are constraints upon us that are outside of our control.  Your standard Bible-thumping homophobe defaults to free will: s/h/it is fundamentally unable to imagine that gay people don’t, at some level, decide to be gay — all evidence to the contrary.  The otherwise-uninvolved racist who rails against illegal immigration does so because s/h/it believes, consciously or otherwise, that the illegal immigrants in question somehow chose to be born into a poor Mexican economy that gets repeatedly bludgeoned about its metaphorical head by our farm subsidies.

(There are, of course, reasonable and compelling reasons to be upset about illegal immigration, just as there are reasonable and compelling reasons to be tolerant thereof.  But that’s a subject for another post.)

The best approach is to defer to free will where it exists, while acknowledging natural and artificial constraints.  We can mitigate the latter by taking modest measures to promote — not ensure; that will never be possible — equality of opportunity, but we cannot create equality, and whenever we try we fuck things up.

Aggression and imperialism, for your own good

You know, if I’m going to call out Democrat partisans on their hypocrisy with respect to sexual liberty (there’s that damn ‘L’ word again), I really ought to grab some sisu and step up to the big-money table. What could possibly be of more fundamental importance to an individualist than one’s right to do with one’s squishy bits (and those of consenting adult partners) whatever one damn well pleases? How does “pervasive imperialistic violence” sound?

Here’s the basic problem: the “realistic” Democratic candidates, not wanting to be seen as “soft on terror“, are perfectly happy to strike out militarily against the bogeyman state du jour (lately, that’s Iran). Why? They’ve been doing it all along — and their “progressive” base has been behind them all the way. It’s a short step, ideologically speaking, from “government knows what’s best for the people of my country” to “my government knows what’s best for the people of all countries”. Ideologically speaking, sending thirty heavily-armed federal agents to shut down a handful of citizens growing lots of weed and sending thirty thousand light infantry soldiers to shut down a small Central American country growing lots of cocaine are equivalent.

(Please note: I’m not letting most of the Republicans off the hook, here. It is widely acknowledged that the front-running statists of the elephant stripe are imperialist war-mongers of the worst sort. They are just as guilty, but since they seem to revel in their blood-thirst I see no reason to belabour the point.)

Let’s start out with relatively small, specific issues: Clinton, Obama, and Edwards — and Iran. Joshua Frank has an opinion over on Counter-Punch:

• The Democrats and Iran

Frank writes:

To put it bluntly, none of the front running Democrats are opposed to Bush’s dubious “war on terror” or his bullying of Iran. They support his aggression in principle but simply believe a Democratic presidency could handle the job more astutely.

The astute reader will note that the Democrat power structure purports to oppose the war in Iraq, rather than the “War on Terror” or the forfeiture of civil liberties to the security state in general. And why not? The sort of people who identify themselves as “Democrats” rather than, say “liberals” (in either that term’s original or its modern sense) are perfectly pleased to support a war-monger with a “D” before s/h/its name:

• The Truth About the Daily Kos ‘Progressives’ (Lew Rockwell dot com)
• Progressive Warmongers (Lew Rockwell again)

But then there are the progressive warmongers. These are the folks who cheered on Clinton’s butchery. Some of them thought the Iraq war would lead to liberation. Many if not most of them thought that even if the US had made a huge mess of invading, it couldn’t just leave. No, the US would have to maintain the occupation. The arrogant idea was that the US could possibly improve things by staying — that the American government could liberate and bring hope and education and health care to the Iraqi people.

These progressive warmongers are in some ways the worst of the hawks. They are second only to the aggressive conservatives who would think nothing of nuking millions of Arabs and Muslims in an act of premeditated, cold-blooded, national socialist mass murder. But the progressives are a close second, since they have the arrogance to think the US government can go abroad and bring freedom, democracy and assistance to everyone all over the planet. They are the type who supported McKinley’s war on the Cuban and Philippine people. They are the type who rallied around Wilson as he waged war to make the world safe for hypocrisy.

“The United States: Do what we say, or we’ll bring democracy to your country!”

It was your foreign policy that brought on the 9/11 attacks just as much as it was the right wing’s. Those of you on the “left” who can’t even get it through your heads that the warfare state should never be trusted are less than useless. You only play into the hawkish paleoconservative, theoconservative, neoconservative hands — the right-wing forces who waged murderous wars against countless innocent people in the name of fighting communists, atheists and terrorists. Except your utopian and naive vision is worse. It is essentially the socialist vision that starved millions in trying to bring them equal portions of grain. It is the ideology that led to 100 million deaths in the last century.

What’s this? Democrat foreign policy generating knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Say it ain’t so!

Well, I could deny it, but I’d be lying:

• “We Think the Price is Worth It” (fair.org)

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.

(Read the whole thing: it’s actually worse than you think. And yeah, that’s before Dubya invaded Iraq… not that he helped any.)

Going back to Mr. Gregory’s comments:

Well, for all you who didn’t want to leave Iraq right away, out of some American-supremacist belief that the US occupation was in the best interest of the Iraqi people and “we” owed it to “them,” all I can say is: Shame on you. Hundreds of thousands have died since the invasion. It could have been much less, but you gave our imperialist government the public support it needed to keep slaughtering in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Look: we see injustice in the world, and we naturally want to do something to make it stop. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to right wrongs. The only problem is that our track record for successfully righting wrongs is abysmal. Historically speaking, the best we can hope to achieve is something like what came out of the Kosovo War, or perhaps an armed stalemate glancingly equivalent to the status quo ante bellum like the one we “won” in the Korean War. Most “moral interventions” have gone far, far worse.

Should we intervene in Sudan? Well, yes, in a perfect world: we could just fly right into Darfur and zap everyone with secular-democracy rays from our magic Jefferson wands. That’s a nice thought; have you read Candide? We tried something similar in Somalia — it didn’t go so well.

(And perhaps before we go picking on other nations for their human rights records, we should clean up our own, hmm?)

Finally, suppose we can actually pull it off, to some degree or another. Suppose we wade into — I dunno, Darfur, say — with well-trained, well-equipped light infantry and overwhelming air support, win their hearts and minds, and bring peace, freedom, and democracy (no, really!)… what then?

Even then, we’re still Team America: World Police — the big self-righteous country with all the ICBMs. The one that exports cheap debt, McDonalds, pervasive advertising, Starbucks, the War on (Some) Drugs, the War on Terror, and the sort of murderous self-righteousness that most people would otherwise associate only with Tomás de Torquemada.

We haven’t figured out how to export coercive force without turning it to smug, self-important evil, no matter how justified we think we are. We should stop until we do.

Playing with the cool kids

It might be neat to have some more traffic. Thus, I’ve created a Technorati account.

Here is my Technorati Profile.  You may find it even less illuminating than my About page here on this blog, but that doesn’t particularly bother me.