Our mind . . . functions on a dualistic model of perceiving and organizing the world into mutually-exclusive categories. We organize our experiences, through both formal and informal methods of learning, around “either-or” concepts. Something is either “A” or “non-A,” “animal” or “vegetable,” “hot” or “cold,” a process that unavoidably leads us to see the world as a series of divisions. That the rest of the universe functions in an indivisible manner, without any apparent awareness of the partitions into which our minds have organized it, is a further limitation on our capacities for understanding.
When I wrote about the Donald’s change of troop positions abroad last week, it was less than completely clear that the US President aimed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as well as Syria. But multiplereports on the day I posted “Strategic Disengagement” make it clearer: about half of America’s 14,000 troops stationed there are scheduled to exit.
Why not all?
Well, you can see how entrenched foreign intervention is for American leaders. While most of the GOP policy establishment howled at Donald Trump’s betrayal of the cause (whatever that cause is, exactly), so, too, did many of the Democrats. And they seem awfully earnest. More earnest than one has reason to expect from the objectors to “George W. Bush’s wars.”
Even Noam Chomsky came out saying that the U.S. should stay in Syria to save the Kurds, and Howard Dean tweeted that American troops must remain in Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights.
What we are witnessing are eternal programs that do not ever — and cannot ever — fulfill their basic purpose. No amount of occupation of Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq is going to give us what the neoconservatives promised: freedom and democracy and jubilation in the streets.
Freedom and democracy do not work that way.
There is a term for such impossible-to-win/impossible-to-stop policy messes: “self-licking ice cream cones.”
The term means a “self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself,” which is just standard operating procedure for domestic bureaucracies.
On December 28, 1797, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason, after being tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine had been an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense. Paine then moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him. Paine had not earned friends in the Revolution with his vocal opposition to capital punishment.
“During the whole of my imprisonment,” Paine later wrote, “prior to the fall of Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me, but without success.”
Paine’s imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America. Future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.
With the publication of Paine’s The Age of Reason — a great part of which he wrote in French prison — the American population turned against him,and he died penniless in New York in 1809.
On this date in 1832, John C. Calhoun (pictured above, in his most famous but hardly most becoming portrait) resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.
On the difference between citizen control and a cheap imitation. . .
Rob Port likes something I do not: North Dakota’s Senate Concurrent Resolution 4001.
I have previously applauded Port in this space, for his excellent political commentary on Say Anything Blog, columns for the Forum News Service, and on his WDAY AM-970 radio show in Fargo.
Today? Boos.
The constitutional amendment, pre-filed for next year’s session by Sen. David Hogue (R-Minot), would require any future constitutional amendment petitioned onto the ballot by citizens and then passed by voters in a statewide General Election to . . . pass the Legislature twice — in two separate sessions — to be enacted.
Hogue’s amendment exterminates the power of the people to bind their representatives constitutionally, arming the Legislature with a veto to overrule the people.
Port worries that the ballot initiative process has “become an avenue by which deep-pocketed, mostly out-of-state interests” are “buying their way onto the ballot and drowning out opposition with expensive marketing.”
He points to Measure 1, an ethics amendment, funded by “Hollywood activists.” In full disclosure, Liberty Initiative Fund contributed$250,000 from “out of state” to help a North Dakota committee place Measure 2 for “citizen only voting” onto last November’s ballot. But these measures were sponsored and voted for by the citizens of North Dakota, who have every constitutional right to work with folks from outside the Peace Garden State. Even me.
This is worse than the “overkill” Port admits. It changes the rules so that the people could no longer check their elected officials, but only beg those officials for any desired reform.
Thus defeating the very purpose of the citizen initiative process.
On December 27, 1657, a group of English citizens in Flushing, New York, who were not themselves Quakers, signed a petition protesting the persecution of Quakers, a document that has become known as the Flushing Remonstrance. An eloquent statement of the principle of religious liberty, it is widely regarded as a forerunner to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
The petition was delivered to Director-General of New Netherlands, Peter Stuyvesant.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
—James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 in: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)
Students and faculty at the University of Southern California are upset because a popular dean of the Marshall School of Business, James Ellis, has been fired by interim USC President Wanda Austin. Hundreds have rallied in protest and petitioned for his reinstatement.
Why the ouster?
The administration has offered a vague indictment about “lack of diversity” and problematic handling of racial- and gender-bias complaints. There’s apparently a commissioned report, the Cooley report, about the complaints. But few have seen it.
“Jim has not been allowed to see the Cooley report, despite repeated requests to do so by him, his legal counsel, a trustee, and me,” says donor and USC board member Lloyd Greif. “Nobody has seen it.”
Greif argues that no complaint dealt with by Ellis’s office “alleged any egregious conduct, and none of them involved inappropriate behavior by Jim.”
Was old white male Ellis expelled for presiding over a too-little-diverse student body (and perhaps for being inadequately “diverse” himself), as determined by an arbitrary standard?
Without transparency or due process, who could know?
But lack of any official accountability suggests some warped notion of “diversity justice” is being applied here, a notion that dismisses rational goals and relevant facts to focus only on whether the ethnic/gender/other-unchosen-trait makeup of a sub-population sufficiently mirrors that of the general population.
If so, is this a standard that should be applied universally?
No matter how you answer that question, note what is not being focused upon: providing a good education.
On December 26, 1799, four thousand people attended George Washington’s funeral where Henry Lee III honored him as ”first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
The Decembrist revolt againt Tsar Nicholas I occurred on the 26th of December in 1825. It was, alas, put down. Later revolts would prove less liberty-minded, more communist, and far bloodier.
