Trump: A Grand Plan And A Vision?

Tyler Cowan:

.....I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician…He [Yafei] worries that strategic competition has become the new normal and says that “trade wars are just the tip of the iceberg”.

…In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington. Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong…

My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the US first president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skillful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

....And Who Should Scape Whipping...

7/23/18 

Ok, it’s out of context, but:

...and who should ’scape whipping...

In Canada when I was young and green, and not dry behind the ears, whipping was part of the punishment available for sentencing under our Criminal Code.

It was eventually outlawed on some rationale in Canadian terms of cruel and unusual punishment.

But honestly, I’m starting to wonder: had the Danforth shooter lived, considering the guy who murdered 10 innocents by driving down a Main Street in Northern Toronto, considering the brutalization or killing of children, vicious rapes and other egregious, shocking heinous criminal acts at a minimum, why not some flogging as part of the punishment, maybe a stroke or two at the end of each year of the sentence, giving the guilty something to dread for the entirety of the year?

Consider the 4 policy pillars of criminal sentencing:

Specific deterrence: why not?

General deterrence: why not? 

Rehabilitation: why not on the theory, “I’ll never do that again”?

Retribution: you betcha!

On The Greatness Of The Equalizer 2

7/21/18

On The Equalizer 2 (with a maybe a few spoiler alerts but not really):

Denzel Washington at the centre of every scene in The Equalizer 2 is what makes it simply terrific for the kind of movie it is.

What kind is that? 

I’d say it’s the Equalizer kind, a guy operating on his own intense code of honour, with a sunlight clear black and white discernment of right and wrong and good and evil, and doing the right thing in meting out violent, often lethal, justice in redressing vast imbalances between the victimizing wickedly strong and the victimized innocent weak. 

If you totally don’t want to see the opposite of Merchant and Ivory or My Dinner With Andre or Claire’s Knee or Taste or Cherry, then give Equalizer 2 a wide pass. It’s not for you.

But if you don’t mind or, more, like me, simply enjoy, justice dispensing violence, some righteous maiming and killing, then get with it, the sooner the better. The movie is great in that and it’s more than that too. 

Denzel Washington makes it something much more than your one dimensional Rambos or Schwarzenegger flicks. He’s a fantastic, charismatic, compelling actor who simply draws you in to the very heart of whatever he evokes. He makes you doubtless believe that Robert McCall can do everything he does; and he makes you devoutly agree with his every emotional, physical and intellectual reaction to whatever he comes across, witnesses and confronts.

Plus the movie tells a hell of a good story, is fast moving, with sensational camera work and excellently crafted action sequences.

And it’s artful too, including in:

the symbolism of the coming storm that blasts its way through the movie’s long climactic near to last scene; 

the play of the storm strewn chaotic, blindingly opaque , dusty greys, an extended metaphor for the fog and greyness of obscuring, murderous evil that posits and acts on its nihilistic posit that nothing matters, until that posit is righteously swept away by the indefeasible force of necessary but redeeming and clarifying violence; 

the skilful knitting in of a number of sub-stories that only layer and add to the centrality of what the Equalizer does and who he is and are not in the slightest any kind of distraction; 

the nicely woven in psychological evolution in McCall throughout the movie as he comes to some sort of terms with his past, that being at one with his symbolic rebirth;

and in the continual evocation of the movie’s framing theme  of “in search of lost time,” as a copy Proust’s novel keeps recurring in different scenes so as to be a kind leitmotif for McCall’s main psychological preoccupation and his coming to some portion of peace with it.

The Equalizer 2 has gotten uniformly mediocre reviews that generally run on the theme that Denzel Washington’s great acting makes a bad movie bearable. 

I disagree.

Without him, it’s true, it is hard to see the movie as good as it is, but isn’t that true of so many quality movies that have brilliant acting at their centre? What would they be without it? 

The flaw in this recurrent reviewers’ theme is the line of reasoning that because Denzel Washington is so brilliant and the movie behind him is quite less so, he makes a bad movie better. But that doesn’t follow: the brilliance of the former needn’t take away from the estimable quality of the latter. 

Rather, I’d put it that he makes a good movie so much better than it would be without him. But really here, how can we know the dancer from the dance?

I give The Equalizer 2 a 4 out of 5 for the kind of movie it is: it’s got a great beat and you can dance to it.

An Exchange On Privacy As A Necessary Condition Of Liberty And Roe v Wade

https://basmanroselaw.blogspot.com/2018/07/what-flows-legally-and-logically-from.html

Part of an exchange on my view, linked to, that Roe v Wade is rightly decided in that the privacy is a constitutionally protected right since it’s a necessary condition of liberty, all pitched on the assumption—affirmed by SCOTUS case law—-that constitutionally protected life doesn’t start at the moment of conception.

What I wrote that my friend answered is linked to.

My Friend:

.... I agree with your conclusion but think that  what you wrote raises three questions:

1) Are you saying that privacy is a right protected by the Constitution the way freedom of speech or freedom of religion is? If so the consequence would be that a State could make no law infringing it.

2) If you are saying that privacy is part of the general liberty that is protected by the Constitution, the Constitution does not absolutely guarantee all liberty but does guarantee one will not be deprived of it without due process. I think what you are saying is that a law infringing privacy cannot be justified under the due process clause but here the issue of when life begins may be relevant, as a State’s interest in infringing a person’s privacy right might be considered differently if it is to protect life that has begun.

3) Your argument is a rejection of the originalist approach that since the authors of the 14th amendment did not think it prevented States from prohibiting abortion, it cannot be interpreted to mean that...

Me:

.... Thanks for the thoughtful response.

If you agree with my conclusion, what in a nutshell is your reasoning?

1. I’m saying that I think it’s a fair proposition to say that the Constitution protects citizens’ liberty regardless of the wording of the Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. So that, on that general understanding, the state can’t prohibit any act  without justification. So, assuming protected life doesn’t start at conception but some time thereafter, for the before-time the state would have no greater right to forbid an abortion than it would have to forbid liposuction or preventatively having your appendix out or tattoos or getting them removed. I think that autonomy in thought and action short of harm comes within natural rights, is an aspect of liberty and comprises any common sense understanding of privacy. So in precise answer to your question, it’s not an express right like speech. 

2. I agree 100% with your second point. Absolutely the argument from liberty or privacy within liberty bows to protected life. When protected life begins is one totally fundamental line of argument; and if it begins at conception, then privacy is either irrelevant to the analysis or it weighs less than the life to be protected on the constitutional balancing scales.

3. Your third point raises an interesting issue from the standpoint of originalism and it may present another hole in it apart from your good point, made before, about evolving or changing facts or understandings of facts. Your example then was solitary confinement, assuming we latterly learn it’s individually utterly devastating. The issue, as I have it, isn’t what the authors meant as such as what was the then communicative content of the textual legal words as evident in their public use. But what happens if the word used, say liberty, must be understood logically by its necessary and sufficient conditions, just as I say privacy is a necessary condition of liberty, or is necessarily latent in it? Originalism, as I understand it, isn’t committed to “penumbras and emanations;” but what happens if judicial attention turns to what is necessarily implicit in the legal word used, as may be the case with privacy within liberty in Section (1) of the 14th Amendment? I think originalism has to step aside or modify itself....

A Few Comments On The Opening Sentence of Robert Nozick’s Preface To His Anarchy, State, And Utopia

7/20/18

On this statement by Robert Nozick in his  opening sentence to his Preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which book I’ll cop to having stared at more than read, though I’ve read and listened to things about it. 

... ....Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)...

I wrote this to a libertarian friend of mine:

......There are a lot of things you’ve said but at least for now I’ll piece off one of them, perhaps aptly because it seems the fundamental starting point for you.

On Nozick’s prefatory statement, and at the sure risk of me not getting the depth and breadth of his arguments, why isn’t it too bald? 

My thought is that the issue of natural rights as against rights by social conferral is *somewhat* like nature against nurture. That’s a stale debate and that issue is better understood in their dynamic and inextricable relation. Except that there is something more innate, irreducible  and invariable in the nature of one’s nature than in the idea of of an irreducible core of natural rights. 

In the former, one’s nature, very little will improve (say) given intellectual capacity or athletic ability or other kinds of basic talents. But rights can be taken away at the flick of a switch on some (good or bad) notion of the public good. That, as I remember it, was Meiklejohn’s argument against natural rights: the many instances of their curbing and, more rarely, evisceration speak to their vulnerability and how they can stand in fear and trembling before the power of the state. The idealization and the pure privileging of rights as such owe themselves to the existence of the necessary minimum of social consensus, the necessary glue, for any relatively free society.  Just as Richard Posner argues “the constitution is not a suicide pact.” 

So that’s one critique of Nozick’s statement. And it might be called an empirical critique based on the totality of all these many instances. 

Another is the theoretical attenuation inherent in isolating either rights from social conferral or conversely social conferral from liberty. Nature without nurture is the child raised by wolves, a lesser nurture I guess, an unsocialized zombie. Of course wiithout nature, there’s nothing to nurture. So the emphasis on natural rights taken to an extreme is fetishized individualism that cuts against what binds a state, a consensus sufficient enough to allow highly diverse individuals, diverse in all manner of ways, to live together safely. And, more obviously, the overemphasis on social conferral, the collective good, the overall interest over the individual interest and individual liberty leads to some form of autocracy, bending towards totalitarianism. 

So that  might be called an analytical critique. 

The analytical answer to that critique might be a model that sees rights and conferral, liberty and the common good (which is separable from equality, but might be located under equality just as a shorthand), the individual and the collective, as in constant never-to-be-finally-resolved tension, each with its necessary claims on the other, each always seeking to encroach on the other, with resolution being a series of case by adjusting and balancing. (I think this is Isaiah Berlin’s argument on rights—in which essay I can’t remember, that the assertion or imposition of some rights come at the expense or weakening of others, which goes hand in hand with his student Michael Ignatieff’s formulation of social policy as often a choice between the lesser evil in recognition of our fallibility and limited horizon for wisdom.) 

So maybe the the analytical critique raises what might be called a pragmatic critique.

I tried to get at some of these points by a different path in my note on what may be a contradiction in Nozick’s account insofar as that account was explained to me in the lectures I listened to a few years ago.....

——— 

This is my note on what might be a contradiction in Nozick’s account:

..... ....Either this is a telling argument against Nozick’s  libertarianism or I'm missing or mistaking things.

Nozick argues that independents are to be forcibly incorporated into society. Even if their rejection of it is their right, they pose a danger to what they reject (thus on a utilitarian basis decreasing the happiness of those accepting society by increasing their fear.) They can live in society obeying its laws or be dealt with by the monopolizer of force if their rejection leads to law breaking and worse. Since ought entails can, there is no moral duty to do the impossible. On this basis, the state does not lose legitimacy by that forcible incorporation: it is impossible to deal with the independents otherwise. In one way of understanding this, that incorporation comes down to the sheer power of the state compared to the relative powerlessness of the independents. 

�Now, to take this one step further, what if a majority in the state want national health insurance. (Getting it increases their happiness.) What position can the minority take who oppose but are perforce required to help fund it through their taxes, or, even more pervasive, take the example of the welfare state? Does the state lose its legitimacy by forcing those opposed to these policies to support them by making the opposers pay their taxes? Does the reasoning for the forcible incorporation of the independents without sacrificing legitimacy lose its force in relation to forcing dissenters from welfarism without, the argument is, by analogy, losing legitimacy? I'd think that those who oppose welfarism would continue to insist on their opposition but would do so conceding legitimacy. 

�So if Nozick is:

�as I understand he is, a social contract theorist;

�and if he agrees that the basis of social contract theory is consent;

�and if he rejects any proposition, as I understand he does, advanced by some that since unanimous consent in any state is impossible the state, any state premised on deep individual pluralism, is therefore necessarily illegitimate;

�then his notions of consent and legitimacy necessarily brook majorities that hold to policies that he stands fundamentally against.

�If so, then what exactly is the core of his notion of  legitimacy, and what does that core do to the illegitimacy of the welfare project some argue against? Arguments pro and con specific policies on the basis of legitimacy run up against the concession of legitimacy to the state even as majority policies breach libertarians' central thesis of deep pluralism not to be trenched upon. And so, finally, arguments against say welfare policy can cite that central thesis, but can't with consistency, I don't think, assert the illegitimacy of that policy. Or can they?

�No doubt there are frailties in this reasoning. I'd be happy to see that set out...
——————————-

What Flows Legally And Logically From Privacy As A Necessary Condition Of Liberty

7/20/18

(This note doesn’t deal with the question of when protected life begins, which is a profound and fundamental question in this whole debate, but only with the criticisms of Roe that 1. it’s a poorly reasoned decision; and 2. one big reason for that is the U.S. Constitution has no provision for a right of privacy since the word is nowhere there mentioned.)

My argument is that if privacy is a necessary condition of liberty then,

1. The U.S. Constitution protects it as a right;

2. What Americans do in their zones of privacy—i.e. within their own spheres not affecting anyone else—short of harm is protected by the U.S. Constitution; 

3. and that, therefore, on these bases, Roe v Wade is rightly decided. 

That is confirmed by at least the 9th Amendment—....The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people....—

the10th Amendment—....The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people....

—and Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:

..... All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws....

referring more specially to:

1. no law...shall abridge the privileges or immunities  of citizens...and 

2. ...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty and property, without due process of law....

To nearly end where I begin, in this last part of 14(1) of the Constitution “liberty” is specifically mentioned. So if privacy is a necessary condition of liberty—how could it not be?—then by necessary implication there’s a constitutionally protected right of privacy.

And two final points:

When Justice Douglas speaks of penumbras and emanations in Griswold v Connecticut, privacy as entailed by liberty is surely one correct example.

and

I think I finally understand what substantive due process means: life, liberty or property can’t be taken away by an irrational law: just as there must be procedural due process, how can there not be substantive due process: justice must reside in the substance as well as in the forms of the law.

The End

What Trump Said In Helsinki: Whatever It Is, It Isn’t Treason

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/397212-president-trump-is-tougher-on-russia-in-18-months-than-obama-in-eight

Me: 

I get the sense that the anti Trumpers are going overboard now, treason blah, blah, blah, and are hurting their cause.

They have a good solid criticism of Trump here but by getting extreme they’re diluting the seriousness of the point they have to make and driving sensible people away from it.

Might not the pro Trumpers note how Obama coddled the Iranian regime turned his back on the green revolution protestors who tried to get change going and then made a deal that gave Iran a pathway to a developing a nuclear bomb and argue that that’s worse than what Trump said to and about Putin, noting too that Trump has been in action tougher than Obama towards Russia? 

Just asking.

M:

You may want to review the US definition of Treason. Some of Trump's statements may well contravene the letter and spirit of their legislation governing such maters, such as "Giving aid and comfort" to the US's enemies."    The question of Trump's possible treason turns, I'd say, on whether cyber attacks can be construed as an act of force intended to overthrow the legally elected government of the US.  But that's just me, of

Me:

If you consider this text of the crime, albeit without checking the case law:

.... Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States....

“giving them aid and comfort” at a minimum modifies “adheres to their enemies”—and without getting into the odd locution, “their enemies,” as though the different states as plenaries have different enemies—to commit the crime, then, at a minimum:

there has to be a legally cognizable war between Russia and the U.S., which probably needs some official act to signal that state of affairs for Russia to be an “enemy” within the terms of the text; 

“aid and comfort” probably has to have some material grounding more than a statement that, paraphrase, “I have no reason not to believe Putin,” (which statement, to add to the difficulty for the argument for treason, Trump has recanted as misspoken, and has reconstructed as, paraphrase, “I meant to say, ‘I have no reason to believe Putin.’”);

how can “aid and comfort” arise in a context of a meeting aimed at improving relations between the two countries with a view to deescalating tensions between them precisely to avert or reduce the possibility of war, either hot or cold?

and how can “aid and comfort” arise in the context of a good faith belief that speaking publicly civilly to Putin is in America’s best interest geopolitically and generally? 

As well there is the great policy unwisdom of plucking out, abstracting and stretching elastic statutory language to cover and, so, criminalize what one is politically opposed to, however deep and fervent that opposition may run. The cant word these days for doing just that is “weaponizing,” making a weapon out of things, here a statutory phrase, not meant for such use, for ideological come political ends.

On the reasoning of this extension of “aid and comfort,” Obama would arguably have been treasonous when he was caught on a hot mike whispering to Medvedev that he should tell Vladimir that he, Obama, would be more flexible after the next elections precisely at a time when NATO was encircling Russia more and more and Russia was cyberically disrupting as much as it could in the U.S. And he might have been treasonous in coddling Iran during the green revolution, in not reacting against the peppering of American ships by Iranian patrol boats and on and on and on. 

The foregoing paragraph doesn’t mean to make these arguments but rather to illustrate the extremes weaponizing “aid and comfort” for political ends can get to.

It occurs to me, too, that “aid and comfort” has to be seen in the context of Trump so far in action quite arguably being tougher on Russia than the previous administration was.

Yet Another Note On The Right Of Privacy And Why Roe v Wade Is Defensible Law

7/17/18

Another question from an interested Canadian layman:

To my brilliant U.S. friends who’ve taken con law or to anyone who knows or has a theory: is there a difference between a constitutional right and a constitutionally protected right?

So (say) the right to bear arms, such as it is, or the 1st Am rights, freedoms and liberties are explicit or express constitutional rights. 

But what about the right to do anything not explicit or expressed in the Constitution that you simply want to do that the state can’t proscribe without adequate justification?

If the American Constitution at the times of its ratification and of the adoption of the Bill of Rights secures the individual rights “we the people” had then at common law and the inalienable rights the Declaration of Independence gives voice to, which the government is created to secure:

....The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.... 

and 

.... The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people....

then aren’t, quoting the 9th Amendment, those “others”—which the fact of enumerated rights isn’t to be construed to disparage or deny—constitutionally protected rights?

The reason I ask yet again (in my unflagging effort to try to vindicate the constitutional law reasoning—as separate from the result—of Roe v Wade against the across the board conventional pillaging it gets from left and right) is this:

as I just bracketed, I want to try to get at the principle of constitutional law that makes it clear that there *is* a right of privacy that the U.S. Constitution protects, the existence of which poses a question of a different order than does the question of when fetal life begins such that the state is right to intervene to protect it.

(I understand that I may have garbled and distorted the bits and pieces I use to cobble my questions together. 

I’ll obligingly and happily receive any clarifying and correcting instruction: after all, getting straightened out is part of my pursuit of happiness.)

P.S. To Just Preceding Note On Black Identitarianism

Me:

K, Before you run off, or after you come back, consider this: there are commentators, public intellectuals and so on who write and speak on race and ethnicity who, I’d argue, deserve such a characterization and there are those who don’t. So while the characterization is vulnerable to its own reductive and insulting application, my thought is we have to, if we’re of a mind to, push past that possibility when we see the word and consider its use in relation to whomever and whatever and take stock of the actual case made.

As for me being the “better man,” never mind 4 paragraphs: I don’t need to read 4 syllables to reject that out of hand.

On Black Identitariansim And Related Issues

7/16/18

An exchange over:

https://quillette.com/2018/07/08/the-fear-of-white-power/

Me:

The fear of white power as seen by a half black—Nigerian, half white—Polish, PhD student now living in England.

His argument might surprise you.

But it being in the fine online journal Quillette, a good representative of the IDW, will tell you it’s thoughtful, clearly and accessibly written and goes contrary to received narratives.

K:

Fear of White Power? Oh c'mom Itzik. "Black Identitarians"? Using a phrase like this implies so many questionable premises that I don't even know where to begin. And for the record, Ta-Nehisi Coates is brilliant, provocative, accessible, and has street creds, which I think is where a lot of the criticism comes from. He did not attend an Ivy and was a college drop out so, the thinking may go, where does he get off talking about race and inserting himself into these conversation where he has no place. I have always detected an underlying element of classism when reading criticism of  Coates. I read about 4 paragraphs of this article and said to myself, "aw, forget it." This is yet another area where we agree to disagree. I have never heard of this magazine so I did a quick google search which suggested that this is a "right center" magazine with a libertarian bias. One quote was "They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes" and I would suggest that "black Identitarians" is not only loaded but, at least to me, offensive.

Me:

I think it a good article that makes a lot of good points.

In answer to what you say:

1.

Black identitarians as used by Adekoya (“A”) in his essay has a clear and distinct meaning. A definition of “identitarian” I like is ....The set of ideas arising from an ontology of identity..., with ontology being a key word in it. 

So to whom A refers are those who make blackness a fundamental premise of their analysis of things, the exclusive prism through which they see things, the standard by which they judge things and the measure of all things. That way of seeing the world and seeing others in the world is a fetter that distorts and is reductive of the complexity of the world and all who are in it, the complexity of their own identity and those they attempt to squeeze into it, making of blackness an abstracted Procrustean bed. 

2.

Coates exemplifies this kind of thinking and that is what makes his writing so vulgarly reductive, seeing the world only as a pitched struggle between us and them, seeing whiteness as a pervasive and ubiquitous enemy, arguing that only some kind of transformational social upheaval in the nature of a violent struggle will ever bring racial harmony and equity to America, seeing all whites as pig cousins to the official pigs in police uniforms who oppress and, so, suppress blacks under the hard pressing fist of systemic racism, not seeing any change in racial relations in America or fundamental improvement for black Americans between then, as he defines then, o’ so long ago, and now, denying people of his skin color agency while reducing them to their color and generally being a grievance monger in chief. 

A makes many good points against the utter reductive crudity of the picture Coates paints. And on that metaphor, Coates is a primitivist whose “sensationalism” blinds people better to how lurid his work is. And I could care less where he did or didn’t go to school: I judge him by the character of his content not by the pedigree of his sheepskin. 

3.

Telling it is to me that you read four paragraphs of A’s essay then quit. So you have no real basis for judging it. You’d need to read the whole thing. A is a scholar. He knows things. He marshals arguments. And he offers evidence in support of them. He can be disagreed with but not after 4 paragraphs and a broadside into the sidebar of Ta-Nehisi Coates. You’ve made hardly any incursion into A’s essay. 

And similarly, it’s simply peremptory to dismiss Quillette by a label you attach to it. I out of hand dismiss that kind of dismissal of it. It has published some superb articles, intelligent, well researched, well written, accessible, plain spoken and totally no bullshit, (which, of course, isn’t to say they can’t be disagreed with.)

The article , for example, on the #metoo hysteria in the sliming of the Canadian writer Steven Galloway is a model of stunning reportage that went at least a year in the making. 

And the articles, for others, by Coleman Hughes on American focused black identitarianism, as contrasted with A’s British focus, in which Hughes gives more space to kicking Coates out of his intellectual bed, are terrific and certainly worth reading for more than four paragraphs —as is A of course—if only to get a smart, thoughtful, thought through and eloquent argument for a set of ideas you might profit by contending with. 

Speaking with a friend of mine just recently, the phrase came up that I like a lot—“received narratives.” Quillette is precisely about asserting excellent counterclaims to them for the open minded to consider and argue over.

K:

Point taken Itzik. Let me ask you a question: would you be as sanguine about this term if your thoughts and reasoning were reduced to something called, “Jew Identitarianism”? Would that that give you any pause about the appropriateness of this term?

Me:

Absolutely. I’d think about it, consider the arguments made and then come to my view of the issue. 

And before I see any such argument made, I can presumptively tell you that for as much as I recognize a dimension of reflexive tribalism in my support for Israel, I’d make the same set of arguments against Jewish identitarianism, which I see no little of and don’t like, that A and Hughes and others, take Glenn Loury for an instance, make of the black variety of it.

In Brief Defence Of Roe v Wade And Casey v Planned Parenthood

7/10/18

Sincere question from a simple minded Canadian:

Why aren’t Roe or Casey defensible constitutional law?

1. If the state can’t tell you without justification that you can’t decide to have your appendix or tonsils removed or get a tattoo or cut yourself or what kind of sex to have in the privacy of your bedroom, 

2. then how can it tell you can’t have an abortion before viability?

I.E. what legal principle allows  you to do 1 but doesn’t allow you to do 2?

This is of course a different question than when life begins such that the state should protect it, which is a real question.

It’s a question that goes to the heart of the overarching criticism of Roe, that there is no constitutional right of privacy.

I’ve always thought that 1. correctly exemplifies the rationale for abortion before viability. 

What am I missing?

It must be something.

On The Wisconsin Case Vindicating Campus Free Speech

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/wisconsin-supreme-court-strikes-blow-for-academic-freedom-john-mcadams-case/

7/8/18

Me:

Good short piece on court vindicating professor’s right to free expression and ordering University to reinstate him with full pay.

Professor strong in refusing to apologize for what he’d said as the university’s condition for him coming back to teach.

Even though university private, Marquette, it breached its own contract with professor in using his agreed upon right of (not egregious) free speech as cause for suspending him.

A prof:

I find this a difficult one.  I don't think McAdams should have been subject to disciplinary proceedings, but his action was one (a) taken by a professor with tenure against a graduate student instructor, (b) involved the unnecessary naming of the instructor in his blog post, and (c) seemed to be, at least implicitly, aimed at Abbate's rights as an instructor in *her* class (whether or not anyone agrees with her approach, or not).  Generally,(a) is the one that bothers me the most.

Me:

A few thoughts:

You acknowledge the central argument of the piece.

Now whether what he did was ok can I think be argued both ways: 

Normally, I wouldn’t think it appropriate for any academic to slag another (different from a scholarly disagreement). 

But what about something that’s so important that, it’s reasonably felt, it requires public comment?

Here the TA, if French has the account right, displayed a kind of close mindedness in and out of class in the face of a student who wanted to make a point, discuss the matter. It’s a close mindedness that cuts against what the university is about.

The student felt aggrieved and wanted to do something about it and found an ear in a prof who, I surmise, was known as a conservative.

The prof taking it forward perhaps reasoned that what the TA’s foreclosure did is a microcosm of a terribly pernicious larger trend plaguing humanities departments everywhere, that of an official party line on a range of issues and a party that brooks no heresy and lashes out where it occurs.

The prof may have reasoned, reasonably enough, that speaking privately to the TA or the department head would be pissing into a pc wind and that sunlight would be the best medicine.

Hence go public.

This account doesn’t seem implausible to me.

A few points that could be made against are:

The student was disreputable in secretly taping the conversation.

Is there any sense in which the TA was right to foreclose discussion on the analogy of a student in a relevant class wanting to dispute evolution or deny the Holocaust or argue that blacks are genetically inferior and so on? I can see at least certain claims about homosexuality being an utter waste of class time, beyond discussion and hurtful in their ignorance to others in the class. On this point, I’d need to remind myself of what I don’t have at hand—what the student wanted to assert. 

It may have been better, if he hadn’t indeed done it, for the prof first to have gone to the TA and talked it out with her, see if he could have talked her out of her foreclosure or see if she could have convinced him of her position and told her if she persisted in what he took to be an egregious position microcosmic of a serious threat to a proper liberal arts education, then he’d blog the issue naming names.

And the prof should have been concerned with the secret taping unless he could see his way to thinking in the circumstances, it was necessary. Think Lindsay Shepherd. 

I can imagine any number of nuanced rebuttals to all these points, but as my mother used to say with quite an edge to her voice, “Enough already!”

Note On The Upcoming SCOTUS Confirmation Hearings For Trump’s Second Pick

7/7/18

The estimable Amy Wax, former Harvard Medical School grad, then Columbia law grad, now tenured law prof at U Penn, an ivy—wow, thems are some rootin’ tootin’ credentials—once spoke about who gets to clerk for SC judges, how they’re at the top .0X% of the top 1% of who’s IQ and analytically smart in America and how that sheer brain power in their cases is married to sheer disciplined, hard work in mastering the demanding the complexities of law at the highest levels. 

So the ones of these who in the modern era become SCOTUS judges or nominated to be one—Harriet Miers an exception proving the rule—almost always have that awesome brain power, prodigious work ethic and, in most cases, great political and personal skills, and are inestimable in action in their realms, one being answering Senators’ questions in confirmation hearings.

They simply, usually, dominate the room, with their brilliance. Of late, Gorsuch, Roberts and Kagan come particularly to mind. It’s atypical, though it happens, when a Senator can actually engage one of them in an exchange of near equals. 

Typically the nominees run rings around the Senators, and not occasionally unintentionally make the Senators look hapless.

Come the upcoming confirmation hearings, what with what’s at stake, what with D hysteria and what with them as unfettered, shrill Kabuki political theater, they have to be the greatest show on earth.

I’ll watch them gavel to gavel, stem to stern, from the first minute to the last. 

I wouldn’t miss them for the world. 

I’ll be fascinated.

On Drake On Canada Day, July 1, 2018, From The 6

7/1/18

This may be blasphemy given it’s Canada Day.

Drake’s not all that. 

With all due apologies to my grandkid Roxy, 11, who loves him, I have a real problem with him.

He is a matrilineal Jew who grew up in TO’s plush Forest Hill and went to its neighborhood high school Forest Hill Collegiate.

I don’t hold that against his work: it’s the work that counts not the life circumstances.

It’s that he doesn’t rap, sing, the way he talks. He comes across as faux inner city, faux ghetto, 

Take Biggie Smalls for instance. He refused to rap about what wasn’t true to his experience, albeit he embellished his experience. That’s ok poetic license, I think. But he impressively said, paraphrase, “I’m not poor. So I can’t rap about that. I’m not on the  streets anymore. So I can’t rap about that. I’m not on the hustle anymore. So I can’t rap about that.”

So, it seems, given the nature of rap, its origins, what’s thought to be it at its best, fidelity to experience, authenticity, is *one* criterion for evaluation.

Wanna be ghetto guy, inner city G, Drake isn’t who he artistically pretends to be.

I note the distinction here between great artists who self consciously and publicly adopt a persona for artistic purposes like the brilliant Marshall Mathers, Eminem, as Slim Shady or even the mediocre Beyoncé as Sasha Fierce. Others too. But Drake, on the other side of that distinction, leaves no artistic room between his pretend self and his real self. In his work, he pretends they’re one.

Apart from the fakery, I’d tell Roxy that his work is weak, soft, essentially pop. But she’s 11 and his gussied up teeny bopperism works for teeny boppers. It reminds me of when my daughter Aviva, Canada’s greatest refugees’ rights lawyer, at around the same age liked Diana Ross doing Billie Holiday better than Billie Holiday being herself. That changed.

Anyway, on the last point I digress some.

But why not?

Happy Canada Day, eh!