National Priorities

(Crosspost from Redstate)

Your nation, the land you call home, is divided. It has for longer than anyone can remember been controlled mostly by two parties, each of which knows, in its heart of hearts, that the land must be reunified if you are to deal with the threats facing you and to seize the opportunity to lead the human race into a new era.

The worlds you may discover will have to wait until you deal with the cancer of militant Islam. At least, that's what Ferdinand and Isabella decided.

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The year was 1492. For the people and rulers of Aragon, Castile, and Leon, seven centuries had passed since the Muslims had invaded -- seven centuries of hiding in the Pyrenees and beginning the slow Reconquista. They built castles to stake out the territory they slowly won back (whence the name "Castile"). They had succeeded in reclaiming all of the Iberian Penninsula except for the Christian Portugal and the last remaining Muslim stronghold, Granada.

Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were cousins, whose marriage would eventually result in a unified Spain. In early 1492, however, while their union and unity was a powerful force, the country remained divided among Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, and Valencia.

When Genoan sailor Christopher Columbus came to Ferdinand and Isabella wanting ships to sail across the sea to find a trade route that didn't require dealing with the Ottomans or the desert, they thought it was a good idea that would have to wait. They had a more pressing priority: defeating Islamic militants.

Only forty years earlier, the Islamic Ottomans had finally ended the Roman Empire (in one of its many incarnations, before and after) by conquering Constantinople. What solace it must have been to the Spaniards when, in 1492, they did in fact drive the Muslim Moors out of Granada.

But once the threat of an Islamic state on their soil was ended, Ferdinand and Isabella could sponsor this Columbus fellow. National priorities now allowed exploration and expansion, rather than merely purification. But purify they would, and through the disgrace and painful decades of Inquisition, their country became Spain.

And what of our national attention, dear reader? We had begun exploring the frontier of space, but our priorities are swayed mightily by the spectre of Islamic militarism. The space program goes on, but our government knows that its first responsibility is not to explore, but to defend. Once the threat of militant Islam is ended, we may again start the search for new worlds.

While history seldom repeats itself, the drag and waste that is the Global War on Terror will only end when we kick the terrorists off the pages of history. It would be entirely foolish to allow them to gain a foothold in space, and to that end we must crush them before any further exploration ourselves.

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SpeakTruthiness to Power

Our culture is falling apart. Culture, as someone put it, is "what you know everyone else knows". It's difficult to think of my ideas as naturally correct and obvious to all when many of those around me think that truth is relative (unless one is speaking it to power).

Looking back, I think it all started when we faked going to the moon. Silly, isn't it? The Moon, as if it's a place we could actually go, and not a nightly mass hallucination orchestrated by radio broadcasts and fluoridated water. When will you people wake up?

Is anyone alive now who remembers the moon before radio? Of course not, because contrary to popular misinformation, radio was invented by the Chinese in 1121 AD, and brought to Europe by Marco Polo.

Actually, the moon-landing-as-hoax inanity is just a short rest stop on the long journey from enlightenment to truthyism.

The Enlightenment, for those six people reading this far who aren't history weenies, was a period following the Protestant Reformation, from around 1600 to 1800, especially the 18th century, culminating in the American and French Revolutions. Enlightenment thinkers reached back across the centuries to classical Graeco-Roman philosophy, combining it with dominant Christian faith, to propound ideas such as natural law, scientific independence from theology, and the guillotine for anyone who wore a white wig.

Since the Enlightenment, or perhaps even before radio, we Westerners have generally interpreted physical events in the world -- an apple falling from a tree, mold growing on bread, a volcano making an island where there was once only ocean -- in terms of a growing knowledge of physical science. We generally saw in humankind's interaction with itself and the world the hand of either a Divine watchmaker or a Grandmaster, either observing or guiding our affairs for His own amusement. Some, of course, saw merely a watch or chessboard, with no attendant Creator or Player. But to whatever degree we viewed the world through eyes of Faith or eyes of Realism, we regarded it basic and unassailable that when the apple fell, it fell. Why it fell depended on your version of "why".

Emotions, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder, as any married man will promptly attest. That inherent relativism does not apply to trees falling in forests, refrigerator lights, or the actual state of being in the world; trees fall whether we are there or not, the refrigerator light does go out, and truth is truth, regardless of anyone's opinion of it.

When my children were old enough to understand, I explained it to them this way, so that the pernicious evil that is relative truth would not find fertile ground: "Do you see that building over there? Suppose it became abandoned, and fell into disrepair, and was torn down, its foundation removed, and grass planted where it used to be. Every last trace of it gone, and no record was kept of it. In a thousand years, would anyone believe that building had been there? Probably not. But their belief doesn't change the fact that the building was there."

The truth is not determined by its beauty or popularity, nor is falsehood proved by repugnance or unpopularity.

Existentialism, and its incident concept that all truth is relative, have found a new friend, or perhaps spawned an offspring lately. Criminologists have long known that witnesses to a crime will see the same events in sometimes wildly different ways, depending on their vantage point, mood, and psychological makeup. That observed phenomenon, and the wisdom of requiring "two or three witnesses" to establish the fact of guilt, have spawned a general belief in the social sciences that truth, along with beauty and emotion, is whatever we believe it to be.

As Francis Bacon (one of those Enlightenment guys) noted, relative truth is not a new concept. "What is Truth?", smirked Pilate, rinsing the blood from his hands. Like a used car with a new coat of wax, it seems unwilling to stay among its equals in the junkyard of ideas.

The willingness or eagerness to ignore Occam's Razor and distrust the obvious leads directly to reading into public affairs a variety of conspiracy theories. It leads not only to doubting the accepted explanation why an apple falls, but doubting that the apple fell at all.

Seen through this lens, it is completely unsurprising that the American Left, who generally accept the notion of relative truth, have difficulty adjusting to world events as they unfold. It also leads to some predictable and disheartening results. Among the items of scantily clad lunacy to which processing relative truth leads are:

• Ronald Reagan made a secret pact with Iranian fundamentalists to make Jimmy Carter look bad
• Bill Clinton was impeached solely because Republicans were "trying to overturn the election"
• Al Gore would be president today if only Katherine Harris hadn't stolen the election in Florida
• John Kerry would be president today if only Diebold hadn't stolen the election in Ohio
  
• Osama bin Laden is a CIA operative who orchestrated 9/11 to justify the PATRIOT Act
  
• Osama bin Laden was not involved in 9/11, but the CIA is framing him to empower President Bush
• Dan Rather's paltry attempt to impugn President Bush with forged documents
  

That list (some of which are from a 2004 article by Oliver North) barely scratches the surface.

I'm not sure if Stephen Colbert realized what an apt term his "truthiness" would turn out to be. It describes so well the activity of those who view truth as relative, since by their standards there is no Truth, there are only viewpoints and ideas that are "truthy". But this clamoring, stumbling, pressured speech of "truth" to the powerful presumes otherwise. Why the urgency? Why the fervor? After all, how can you be sure the apple fell, or that it was even an apple?

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A class of one

Where did the concept of "class" originate? The idea that the world is made up of groups of people, fixed in their strata, fueled into action only by Greed, Envy, or the lust for power?

In ancient times, the oligarchic, aristocratic, and feudal systems of government enforced the notion of class by keeping power and wealth in the hands of a few. There was always a certain amount of fluidity to the classes, however. A Roman soldier could be rewarded with land and fame, so much that the need for more land helped fuel the Roman expansion. Merchants, tradesmen, and farmers have often been able, to one degree or another, to raise their fortunes by skill, diligence and discipline. Countless prodigals have spent their family fortunes on wild living, never to return from the hog pen. There has always been mobility, though it may not have seemed so to the masses.

Karl Marx, who took the notion of class to new heights, saw as inevitable that the working class, those whose hands do the work from which others profit, would bond together, while self-interest would keep the greedy capitalist parasites too preoccupied to unite. His naive model of capitalism, that of the factory with workers and owners, partly explains his disdain of it, but his view of history as a revolutionary class struggle waiting to happen has poisoned academic minds for over a century.

It is this concept of class which most sharply divides American politics. People have either the mindset of being a One or part of a Many. Conservatives generally think of people as individuals needing government to keep them from killing each other, to protect them from outsiders and from itself. Liberals believe government can and should make things right between classes of people, and that by doing this those outside will see how nice we are and ignore us.

The primary virtue, to a person in the Leftist religion, and of left-leaning branches of the Jewish and Christian trees, is a belief in "social justice", or decreasing the gap between "the rich" and "the poor". It presupposes that there are homogeneous classes of people. They treat everyone in a class as the same, whether they got however wealthy they are by inheritance, theft, skill, or hard work, and whether they became however poor they are from handicap, bad luck, or laziness. It doesn't matter how you got where you are: it is "unjust" for one to have more, or for another to have less. Government exists, by their thinking, to enforce that version of equality.

But are any of us ever, truly equal? Do two neighbors who have the same occupation and income level live identical lives? Of course not. There is always a difference in the standard of living between any two people. While the Marxist would call that a a difference without distinction, that dismissal is a result of seeing capitalism through a simplistic lens. People in a capitalist economy have an endless array of options to ply their hand at this occupation or that one, or even to invent something totally new. People are not stuck in place, like cattle in a herd; they are free to move up, or down, in status as their ability and diligence take them.

So I chafe when someone beats the drums of class envy, stirring up those who feel they have no hope. The drumbeat most often resounds to the chorus, "You have no hope but we who beat the drums". I hear their clanging, but I know that only I can help those in my class -- for only I belong to it.

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Hate, March, Terrorize

What we have here ... is a failure to generalize.

Certain crimes of hate, violent political demonstrations, and flying an airplane through the World Trade Center all have something in common.

In what follows, please note that I am not calling for repeal of hate crime laws or a ban on political rallies, any more than I would call for a ban on airplanes because they can be used for destructive purposes. The purpose here is only to show that hate crimes and political rally violence are terrorism, and should be treated as such.

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What is terrorism?

Wikipedia says there are "hundreds" of definitions. In essence, they all come down to this:

Terrorism is the use or threat of violence by civilians against civilian targets to induce political change.

There are obviously special cases to be asserted, such as paramilitary groups under indirect control of government. The definition of "civilian" blurs in the context of guerrilla warfare, in which combatants try to blend into the surrounding non-combatant population. Guerrillas may in fact engage in terrorism, or commit war crimes, or may operate strictly according to the ethics of war; in any event, the definition of terrorism above accommodates their case.

War crimes are distinguished from terrorism in that either the perpetrator or the victim of a war crime is an acknowledged combatant while the other is a civilian. That is not the entire scope of war crime, which is only discussed here to help build by contrast the understanding of terrorism.

The civilian leader of a country, when acting in his official capacity in control of its military, cannot, by definition, be guilty terrorism. Support of terrorist non-government organizations may make him responsible for terrorism, but that is a different situation than the use of a country's military.

Terrorism is also distinct from common civilian crime, because terrorism is political in motivation. A group destroying a building as a diversion in a bank robbery is not engaged in terrorism, while a person threatening to kill an official's pet to sway his vote is.

An area of civilian crime, crimes motivated by group differences, has been dubbed "hate crime". Hate crime laws have been enacted in several of these United States and in Canada. They typically include hostility against a person, group, or institution based on "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender" as aggravating factors for sentencing guidelines. Sometimes they curtail "hate speech", or speech against a person or group based on those aforementioned factors.

Hate crime laws fail to afford equal protection under the law, because their impetus was the special case of those intolerantly violating the civil rights of others. Such laws usually fail to be designed or enforced such that all anti-group violence is wrong, only that against the protected groups. In some cases they outlaw mere offensive speech. Since these laws specify certain classes of people for additional protection under the law, they facially do not afford equal protection. Their unfairness is caused exactly by their failure to see crimes of hate as action designed to send a political message.

Crimes motivated by the outward differences between groups of people are political in nature if their perpetrators seek to send a message to others through the crime. They seek to control or influence behavior, to govern, by threat of force. Burning a cross in a yard is obviously intended to send a message to the owners of the yard, or the home's occupants, and to drive away those like them.

A distinction could thus be made between one-on-one crime between in which the perpetrator and the victim do not share the same group membership and one-on-many or many-on-one crimes. It would be a rarity for a hate crime in which one person acts against a group or a group acts against an individual not to be intended to send a message designed to control group behavior. Even if the primary intent is not to send such a message, one will clearly be sent. Group hate crime is thus seen to be inherently political, and falls squarely under the rubric of terrorism.

Crimes between individuals are a different matter, however. What difference is it to society if one man kills another in a rage over their ethnic or other differences, rather than over money or jealousy? In any case the victim is dead, and a murderer is among us. Hate crime laws elevate one kind of motive over another, making all others into mitigating or extenuating factors. But they fail to get at the real problem, which is attempting to control the behavior of others through the threat or use of violence. The problem with hate crimes is not the crime itself, but the added communication of the social message: the problem with you is what kind you are.

The crimes of hate that we should punish differently than other crime are the ones that are violence by civilians against civilian targets to induce political change. We should punish all such action, not distinguishing its victims.

Recently, student groups at several American colleges and universities have demonstrated against military recruiting at their campuses. One protester, thinking himself clever, carried a sign reading "I'm already against the next war!". The message he intended to send, of course, was that the Bush Administration would rush into another war as it had rushed, with barely over a year of diplomacy, into Iraq. The actual message is somewhat different: there is no acceptable war, no matter what the cause. Our national future would indeed be in peril if that were a majority view.

Demonstrations are one thing, but vandalism and mob action to exercise political influence are another. They are the use or threat of violence by civilians against civilian targets to induce political change.

Violence must not be a substitute for political discussion, organization, or the ballot box. The problem with crimes of hate, violent demonstrations and vandalism, and other acts of terrorism is that they seek to manipulate and control people and force change through violence. Those who engage in such activities must be stopped, and those who would look the other way are complicit in the cause of terror, as well.

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Traitriotism at the CIA

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Quoting from the G o o g l e's cache of as retrieved on Apr 17, 2006 02:35:57 GMT.

Prior to joining CSIS in August 2001, Mary O. McCarthy was a senior policy adviser to the CIA's deputy director for science and technology. Until July 2001, she served as special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council (NSC) Staff, under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 1991 until her appointment to the NSC, McCarthy served on the National Intelligence Council. She began her government service as an analyst, then manager, in CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, holding positions in both African and Latin American analysis. From 1979 to 1984 she was employed by BERI, S.A., conducting financial, operational, and political risk assessments for multinational companies and banks. Previously she had taught at the University of Minnesota and was director of the Social Science Data Archive at Yale University. McCarthy has a B.A. and M.A. in history from Michigan State University, an M.A. in library science from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast (University Press of America, 1983).

Read her testimony before the 9/11 Commision.

See that she gave $7500 in 2004 ($5000 to Ohio Dems, $2000 to John Kerry, $500 to a PAC ) to the Democratic Party and affiliates. Not to get too personal, but according Fundrace her husband gave another $2500 , so together that's $10,000. That Fundrace Neighbor Search shows that she lives in a very Blue neighborhood, but that may just be because it's in Bethesda.

A reporter covering a symposium where she was a presenter in 2003 wrote, "McCarthy was restricted from speaking freely on some topics because of her CIA background." So she kept secrets sometimes.

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On the Nature of Justice

Words are slippery little beasts. Despite our effort to use them for actual communication, they refuse to retain their meaning long enough to be reliable. So it is with the word "justice". A particular bit of linguistic tomfoolery has taken, or perhaps has followed, the American Left down a path divergent from our common heritage in Liberal thought.

About 2500 years ago, Plato wrote The Republic in an apparent attempt to define justice as the thing which a properly constructed government should achieve. One of his more cynical notions is that justice is a compromise between getting what we really want, which is to take advantage of our fellow man, and our fear of being the victim of another. We construct governments and have invented "justice" to sugarcoat the bargain: we will give up the ability to abuse others so that we are safe in turn.

Plato probably never heard of the Biblical prophet Micah, who perhaps 200 years earlier had said, "He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" He contrasts selfish actions with justice, mercy, and humility, implying that justice is not selfish, nor is it the only good; mercy and humility may require that we lay our thirst for justice aside.

We teach our children that justice is right and correct. We teach them that it's wrong to stand by while others are hurt, wrong to defend incorrect actions, and that justice will be rewarded in the end. In fact, Plato says, the worldly acclaim we receive is really all the benefit there is to being just. We might say today that his God didn't keep track of karma.

That cynical view of justice ignores that there is in each of us both a higher self and a criminal. While the criminal can only find the benefit of praise in seeking justice, the higher self is satisfied only when doing what is good and right and pure. The criminal would like nothing better than to act unjustly in secret while receiving public praise. The higher self wants justice not for ourselves only, but for all. But the foregoing concerns only the motivation for wanting justice, not what it truly is.

Informed by the works of Plato, Cicero, Francis Bacon, and John Locke, the American founders recognized Natural Law.

A natural law is analogous to the laws of physical science, but applicable to humans. One such law is the Law of the Harvest (which came to me from Dr. Charles Stanley): a man reaps what he sows. It is an inescapable aspect of the human condition: if a man plants corn, he will harvest corn and not wheat; and if he does not plant, he cannot harvest. Although the purpose or exact nature of cause and effect is the stuff of metaphysics, I simply postulate that there are causes and related effects, and that among these are that what a man sows, he reaps. While it is possible to effectively circumvent the Law of the Harvest, doing so is unjust.

We often mistake justice for mere vengeance. The difference between justice and vengeance is that if justice is seeing that what a man sows, he reaps, then vengeance is seeing that what a man sows or reaps from others is sown for him and for possibly for all he holds dear, as well.

From the point of view of a society wanting to protect itself, justice is seeing that one guilty of a crime is held accountable, and also that the innocent are set free. Society comes between a crime's victims and the accused, not demanding revenge as the victim might like, but keeping the evil apart from the good. The just person or State will favor neither a strong defendant nor a weak one, but must look with indifference at the status of the defendant in court.

There are those who see justice in different terms than these, however. For them, justice implies an active effort to make human interaction fair. They see justice as an economic level playing field: a just system must afford everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. Further on that scale, some insist that true justice is only found with equality of outcome, a wholly different goal than the American ideal, which is equality of opportunity. For those who pursue social justice, the outcome, rather than a particular action, is what determines justice.

The social justice movement, highly influenced by John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), redefines the word "justice" to include equality of outcome. Drawing from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, Rawls said that the conditions for all people in a just society must be as similar as possible. Justice is thus equated with fairness, moving away from the Classical Liberalism of the American founders and toward Marxism.

Active social justice is essentially Marxist collectivism. The movement has come to have its own particular world view, a way of viewing morality and virtue that often clashes with the traditional understanding of the meaning of those words. As I understand them, the fundamental tenets in the "social justice" branch of the collectivist tree are that:

• Freedom includes "economic freedom", or the absence of financial consequences
• Peace is a higher good than political freedom, which is said to be meaningless without economic freedom
• Justice means "social justice", which is decreasing the gap between the weak and the strong, rich and poor, employer and employee
• Social Justice is virtue, and the highest good; virtuous people are those who seek social justice
• Any action is virtuous if the cause it furthers is virtuous
• Any action is evil unless one is virtuous.

However, since there is not yet a way to effectively raise the fortunes of the downtrodden, bridging the gap between rich and poor effectively means handicapping the successul rather than helping the unfortunate.

The terrible danger inherent in allowing the ends to justify the means, especially in a political ideology advocating social upheaval, should be historically obvious. The greatest despots in history began their reigns as idealists wanting a better nation, and believing that this end justified any action they needed ot take. From John Kekes' article on the French Revolution (Why Robespierre Chose Terror, City Journal, Spring 2006):

These atrocities were not unfortunate excesses unintended by Robespierre and his henchmen but the predictable consequences of the ideology that divided the world into "friends" and less-than-human "enemies." The ideology was the repository of the true and the good, the key to the welfare of humanity. Its enemies had to be exterminated without mercy because they stood in the way. As the ideologues saw it, the future of mankind was a high enough stake to justify any deed that served their purpose. As Loomis puts it, "[A]ll who played a role in the drama . . . believed themselves motivated by patriotic and altruistic impulses. All . . . were able to value their good intentions more highly than human life. . . . There is no crime, no murder, no massacre that cannot be justified, provided it be committed in the name of an Ideal."

I call on the American Left to turn away from the view that any action in pursuit of virtue is virtuous. I ask them never to conflate justice, fairness, and the redistribution of wealth and power. I plead with them to return to rationality and the ways of common sense. And I beg them to help restore the unity of ideals which not long ago we shared.

The future is going to be difficult without a common language.

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