Current View (original) (raw)
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
I have attempted to summarize the copyright debates so far in today's mail.Those interested in my views on this matter should not miss this entry.
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And for those who doubt that "all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," we have this:
Stalin's ape-men.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005
-- Roland Dobbins
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Subject: STALIN ORDERED THE CREATION OF HALF-MAN, HALF-APE SUPER-WARRIORS
>> STALIN ORDERED THE CREATION OF HALF-MAN, HALF-APE SUPER-WARRIORS: The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents. Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior. According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." <<
J Neil Schulman
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The War On Christmas
A long and somewhat rambling essay
There was a long discussion in the SFWA conference on "The War on Whatmas". I won't summarize other than to note I didn't think the discussion very substantial.
It did cause me to try a generalization, which I repeat here since it was in a closed forum:
I think there is one important point in this.
The basis of government in the US is "consent of the governed", and that generally means that the majority will prevails, except when doing that is manifestly unfair to one or another minority, in which case caution is in order.
To insure that caution and to make things work reasonably well we have elaborate mechanisms in place to thwart the will of the majority.
But note: these work only when the majority, particularly if it be an overwhelming majority, actually consents to the notion that doing these things would be unfair, and thus harmful to the tranquility of the republic as a whole. It works when the majority believes people who squeal because they are offended really are offended, and that we ought not to offend them.
Religion, though, is a rather special case, because it is mostly from religious, not logical positivist or rational ethical or ethical cultural reasoning, but religious motives and commands that the majority feels that the minority as fellow human beings have any rights at all, or are entitled to special considerations. Now of course that isn't true of most statesmen, academics, judges, and so forth; but it is pretty well true for most of the populace.
Our system is designed to appeal from Peter drunk with emotional appeals to Peter sober and rational, and it has generally worked; but I urge all of you to think on what happens when the majority finds its will frustrated over what it perceives to be trivial matters: trivial to those who object, but not at all trivial to the majority itself.
I would have thought that minorities concerned with rights against majorities would be the first to urge the display of religious symbols of religions that teach equality and good will toward all men and joy to the world, in the hopes that being reminded of their beliefs would make the majority a lot more tolerant and more willing to not merely tolerate but even embrace the strangers in their midst and those who have different beliefs.
And I would think simply on tactical grounds that acting as if the display of symbols is so offensive that the display ought to be suppressed by the public officers, most of whom themselves are comforted by the display of those symbols and the thoughts behind them, is terribly unwise.
Leave out the truth of any religion: the miracle of good government comes about when diverse peoples can live together and provide rights to the powerless. It is fairly rare in history, and usually happens in empires, not republics and very seldom in democracies. Empires acquire equality of citizens by their common obligations to the emperor (or the Policy Board, or the aristocracy that operates the empire in the name of the chief executive, but soldiers generally prefer a more personal loyalty to an actual person). The bond is supplied by their common allegiance, and the empire provides protection despite the will of the majority. And that can be quite stable, but the tolerance and good will are now entirely dependent on the good will of the emperor and the ruling classes, and if they decide that it is too costly to defend some group, they have only to remove their protection and the group no longer has any rights.
Rights in an imperial structure do not adhere to individuals and they are not rights held against the rulers. In the old USSR there were no legal rights at all: there was series of duties on the part of the public prosecutors and officials, but the notion of Hampden defying the King just had no place in Soviet Law, and there would have been no Hampden's case, nor was there anything similar in the history of the USSR. And that is merely an example of one kind of imperial structure in the modern world. The "minorities question" always bugged the Kremlin and providing protection for various ethnic minorities was a major problem for people of good will throughout Soviet history, brief as it was.
So my concern in this War on Christmas is that those who seek to manipulate the system to remove from it all traces of support for the religious principles that generated the nation may find they have done a better job than they intended; and that if enough people begin seriously to ask why they should put up with people not like them, and whom they do not like, they may come to conclusions most of those here would abhor.
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That engendered a very long thread, little of which addressed any of the points I had been trying to make. After several days, I came up with another mini-essay. I warn you it repeats some of the above.
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One more attempt at a substantive discussion.
The United States is said to be a democracy, and to be spreading democracy on the points of its bayonets and at the snouts of its Abrams main battle tanks.
Whatever else democracy means, it is that in all serious questions, the final answer lies in the votes of the majority of qualified voters; and if the will of the majority is to be thwarted, there have to be very substantive reasons for that; and those reasons have to be so compelling that the majority prefers that reasoning to its own, or the majority prefers the mechanisms that produce that decision contrary to its expressed wishes to taking matters into its own hands and simply insisting that its will prevail.
The United States in its founding document proclaims that it is self evident that all men are created equal, they are endowed by a Creator with certain inalienable rights, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. It is clear that the document does not recognize "unjust" powers, and it proceeds to enumerate a number of powers it considers unjust.
The Constitution is a compact among independent States to form a Union under certain conditions. It recognizes certain minority rights and the protection of those rights as part of the conditions under which union is possible, and pledges to confirm and protect those rights. Among those rights of states are the right to an established church (without that several of the States would not have ratified) and the right not to be subject to a National Established Church. (This is in an amendment but the amendments were adopted as an explication of the original Constitution, and nothing in them, according to the Framers, actually conferred any rights not in the original.) It doesn't explicitly state that the States are also to be free of the Federal establishment of secular humanism or atheism as an established church but I think no one would seriously argue that had that provision been inserted into the First Amendment it would have been considered needless but not controversial.
It also confers the right of the States to establish chattel slavery, to pass laws establishing that practice, and requiring the States that do not have slavery to cooperate in the return of slaves to their owners.
This last provision was as legal and as binding as any other; but it did not enjoy the approbation of a national majority, and after a while it became to be seen as intolerable to a national majority. Whatever the economic causes of the Civil War, slavery was really at the bottom and it was to make men free that the volunteers flocked to the Union Army; and while most Southernors owned no slaves and fought to protect their homeland, much of the officer corps was explicit that the fight was among other things for the retention of slavery. Nathan Bedford Forest was probably the most upfront about that, saying it openly to not only his troops but to his two black bodyguards on whom he relied for his safety throughout the war.
There was no legal way for the North to end Slavery in the South, and it took a war to make it go away. I have elsewhere argued that slavery was doomed for economic and social reasons and that the war was needless, but in fact it was ended in war fought by troops who understood that "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make them free."
In a word: religious convictions prevailed over all the legalities and contracts and courts and legislatures.
Indeed, when the Congress tried to form compromises to avoid war and prevent the spread of slavery, the US Supreme Court stepped in to thwart the will of a majority in a compromise that might have delayed the war until economic factors and the pressure of world opinion made it needless.
The point of all this preamble is two fold. First, one of the major issues in this nation was decided because religious principles prevailed over Rule of Law, either Strict or Liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and over the will of the legislatures both national and State which sought compromises to avoid war. To say that religion ought to play no part in national policies in the face of that one great truth appears to be absurd.
Secondly: the best way for most people to live under laws to which they consent -- to obtain consent of the governed -- is to break the jurisdictions down to as small a level as possible. Under our Constitution those entities are the States, which are then free to devolve various matters to counties and cities. The national Constitution, wisely in my judgment, left matters of religion up to and including the establishment of religion by law to the States. How much change to that was intended by those adopting the Civil War Amendments is fairly clear -- none, regarding religion. It was only later that Courts, not legislatures, decided that these Amendments applied to the States in matters of religion.
Thirdly: the best way to implement the will of the people and elicit consent of the governed is by legislation, not by judicial decree.
Now that may appear to be absurd: it may appear that judicial intervention is what has moved this country toward the protection of the rights of minorities. It may also be argued that is not true: that what really broke things open for minority rights, particularly rights of black Americans, was the enforcement of Civil Rights Laws enacted by the Congress which acted under its explicit authority do so; and that the passage and enforcement of Voting Rights Acts has had far more influence over local civil rights than all the Federal interventions.
Nor would that be surprising. Consent of the governed is a good governing principle precisely because it works; forcing good government on people for their own good but against their will hasn't been terribly successful through history and seems no more likely of success in the contemporary US.
Note that arguing for State, not Federal, power to decide matters of religion including such things a religious pageants and ceremonies on public property and even at state expense is not the same as arguing that any given state ought to adopt a particular practice. It depends on the state, and in my judgment on the county and city, as to what practices are acceptable to the local population.
The alternative is to force the will of a decided minority onto the population as a whole, and hope that the majority remains content and comfortable enough not to erupt with a cry of "enough!" and denounce the whole system; the eruption can be political in the entry of a sizable number of people who previously kept to themselves and took little part in politics, or direct and violent. Direct violence has up to now been the province of various fairly small minorities who are suppressed with variable difficulty. Direct action by a large part of the population would be a different matter.
The likelihood of general disobedience to the system over a matter like public Christmas pageants is very small; but every instance in which the strongly felt will of the majority is suppressed is one more time when the wisdom of the system is undermined, one more temptation.
And therefore, it would seem to me, arguing that the coercive power of the Federal Government ought to be used so that the Awful Majesty of the Law descends on some kids singing Christmas carols in school may be quite unwise, in that it is difficult to show the good that comes from that interference in comparison to the loss of respect for the law engendered by act.
Good government is close to a miracle, and good government long sustained is quite rare in history. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide, according to the Framers at the Convention of 1787. They tried to establish a new world order, and to bring about something new in history. Clearly they did that. It is not so clear that we understand how and why things work as well as they have; and it is not at all clear that we ought to push at the edges of what was established there without great provocation.
The Civil Rights Movement was a great cause for great principles, most of those derived from religious principles -- it is exceedingly difficult to impossible to justify the assumption of equality from any but religious principles. Removing the cross from the Seal of the County of Los Angeles, and forbidding the lighting of the lights in City Hall Tower in the shape of a cross on Christmas Eve, do not seem to be quite such compelling causes.
Winning the War on Christmas may well be accomplished; but the wisdom of waging that war, and the consequences of that victory, may turn out to be quite debatable matters.
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This elicited two comments. One was that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, which is irrelevant. The John Birch Society used to assert that too, but I doubt one in a thousand can give a coherent contrast between "republic" and representative democracy, and if you substitute the word "republic" for "democracy" in the above it does not change the argument one whit.
The other was
Funny how "substantive" is something that only some people are privileged to
define.
The rest get their minds read and psychoanalyzed.
which I failed to understand. Other comments were to the effect that I should not lecture, and my points were trivial.
It may well be that I have gone senile and prattle about unimportant things. I had deluded myself into a different cast of thought. In any event, I have no time for fresh words on the subject, so those, composed late at night in response to an on-going discussion, will have to do. Apologies, but I really do have to get to work.
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Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/science/20rese.html
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The South Korean scandal that shook the world of science last week is just one sign of a global explosion in research that is outstripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud.
Experts say the problem is only getting worse, as research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar.
Science is often said to bar dishonesty and bad research with a triple safety net. The first is peer review, in which experts advise governments about what research to finance. The second is the referee system, which has journals ask reviewers to judge if manuscripts merit publication. The last is replication, whereby independent scientists see if the work holds up.
But a series of scientific scandals in the 1970's and 1980's challenged the scientific community's faith in these mechanisms to root out malfeasance. In response the United States has over the last two decades added extra protections, including new laws and government investigative bodies.
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