The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Why We Can't Have Nice Things

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has refused to submit his weekly essay, saying he is not in the mood for disputation or argumentation of any kind. I have therefore taken it upon myself to provide today’s post.}

Blaise Pascal (from Pensees):

On what shall man found the order of the world which he would govern? Shall it be on the caprice of each individual? What confusion! Shall it be on justice? Man is ignorant of it.

Certainly, had he known it, he would not have established this maxim, the most general of all that obtain among men, that each should follow the custom of his own country. The glory of true equity would have brought all nations under subjection, and legislators would not have taken as their model the fancies and caprice of Persians and Germans instead of this unchanging justice. We should have seen it set up in all the States on earth and in all times; whereas we see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth. Fundamental laws change after a few years of possession; right has its epochs; the entry of Saturn into the Lion marks to us the origin of such and such a crime. A strange justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.

Men admit that justice does not consist in these customs, but that it resides in natural laws, common to every country. They would certainly maintain it obstinately, if reckless chance which has distributed human laws had encountered even one which was universal; but the farce is that the caprice of men has so many vagaries that there is no such law.

Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

Doubtless there are natural laws; but good reason once corrupted has corrupted all. The result of this confusion is that one affirms the essence of justice to be the authority of the legislator; another, the interest of the sovereign; another, present custom, and this is the most sure. Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; all changes with time. Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. It is the mystical foundation of its authority; whoever carries it back to first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just, obeys a justice which is imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has gained for it so much pomp and reverence. The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. We must, it is said, get back to the natural and fundamental laws of the State, which an unjust custom has abolished. It is a game certain to result in the loss of all; nothing will be just on the balance. Yet people readily lend their ear to such arguments. They shake off the yoke as soon as they recognize it; and the great profit by their ruin, and by that of these curious investigators of accepted customs. But from a contrary mistake men sometimes think they can justly do everything which is not without an example. That is why the wisest of legislators said that it was necessary to deceive men for their own good. We must not see the fact of usurpation; law was once introduced without reason, and it has become reasonable. We must make it regarded as authoritative, eternal, and conceal its origin, if we do not wish that it should soon come to an end.

Sokal Me Once, Shame on You; Sokal Me Twice...Won't Get Sokal-ed Again

{N.B. Alan Sokal was the perpetrator of a famous academic hoax (the 1996 “Sokal affair”) when his entirely fabricated, jargon-laden, and heavily footnoted research paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was published by Duke University Press’s “Social Text,” the editors of which took Sokal’s paper seriously. To my knowledge, I am the first to use “Sokal” as a verb.  [Alan Sokal - Wikipedia]}

Patrick Fagan, formerly Lead Psychologist for Cambridge Analytica, has written opinion pieces for The Spectator, The Critic, and other publications. ¹ He has a distinctly right-wing perspective; for instance, he wrote last month about the “Hellish” dangers of proposed “vaccine passports” (“Passport to Your Soul”) which, he predicted, will be used to identify and to repress (or reprogram) political dissidents. He has also opined in print about the “Lockdown Lobotomy” and about how “Face Masks Make You Stupid” (that latter no doubt explaining the mental incompetence of surgeons, dentists, and other masked medical professionals, not to mention Zorro and the Lone Ranger).   

A year ago, in a fascinating article at The Spectator World (September 2020), Mr. Fagan pursued the question “Is Liberalism Really a Mental Illness?” After a certain amount of jocular banter about how both sides (Left and Right) commonly accuse the other of being insane, Fagan gets down to business dissecting the pathology that is modern Liberalism.

[NB: I am here taking Fagan’s article and his research citations at face value, but I am aware that his article may be a spoof. Not wanting to be Sokal-ed, I suggest we proceed with caution.]

Fagan begins by conceding that “Evidence is plentiful that pathology can exist on both sides of the political spectrum. However,” he continues, “there is also evidence that liberalism may be associated with its own unique disorders.” What is the evidence? Fagan is happy to provide it:

Firstly, the modern self-identified strain of ‘liberalism’ is explicitly correlated with mental illness. Studies of the mentally ill have found that they tend to vote less conservative and more liberal (Howard and Anthony, 1977; Kelly, 2014). More recently, Kirkegaard (2020) analyzed the General Social Survey data and found that extreme liberals had a 150 percent increase in the rate of mental illness compared to moderates. Conservatives — even extreme conservatives — were 17 percent and 24 percent less likely than moderates, respectively, to have been diagnosed with mental illness. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center’s March 2020 American Trends Panel Survey similarly showed that 38 percent of ‘very liberal’ whites have been told by a doctor that they have a mental health condition (compared to 20 percent of moderates and 15 percent of the ‘very conservative’).

[Professor Arguendo, reading over my shoulder, objects that those last numbers may only reflect the fact that liberals are more likely than conservatives to consult with a doctor regarding emotional or mental distress.]

Fagan presents additional evidence:

More broadly, conservatives tend to be happier (Napier and Tost, 2008), healthier (Subramanian and Perkins, 2009), and — you guessed it — more attractive (Peterson and Palmer, 2017). Believing, as they do, that they have personal responsibility for their lives, they also tend to live longer (Kondrichin and Lester, 1998; Smith and Dorling, 1996). Studies suggest that liberals, meanwhile, are more likely to drink alcohol (Yakovlev and Guessford, 2013), take drugs (Nour, Evans and Carhart-Harris, 2017), and be promiscuous (Hatemi, Crabtree and McDermott, 2017). These unhealthy behaviors perhaps share a common neurobiological root with liberal political beliefs.

Have researchers been able to identify causative or contributing factors, either environmental or biological, for this illness (Liberalism, that is)? Fagan’s anecdotal explanation triggers my Sokal alarm:

“A disorder called the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) sheds some light. Miller and colleagues (2001) reported on a 63-year-old patient who was conservative before developing bvFTD. She then became ‘politically opinionated’ about her anti-conservative political beliefs, to the point of confronting strangers; she started dressing in a more casual manner; and she developed an interest in animal rights; altering her preference for collecting jewelry to collecting stuffed animals. As if these qualities weren’t suggestive enough of many antifa types, the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration lists the following among the symptoms of the disorder: rude and offensive comments, inappropriate sexual behavior, neglect of personal hygiene, binge eating, repeating words or phrases, clapping (it remains silent on the emoji ‘clap’ which has become so ubiquitous), rereading the same book over and over again, questionable financial decisions (see $150k liberal arts degrees; not to mention the left’s blind addiction to government borrowing), frequent and abrupt mood changes (see 2015-2020), and, perhaps most crucially of all, blaming others for the consequences of socially unacceptable behavior.”

Let us move on to Fagan’s summary of “pathological liberalism,” reminding ourselves yet again that this may all be a hoax:

Overall, there seem to be three main traits which define what one might call ‘pathological liberalism’, all of which may have a core of reduced threat sensitivity. The first is an extreme openness to new things and tolerance of ambiguity. Liberalism is indeed associated with the personality trait ‘openness to experience’: that is, adventurous and tolerant of new ideas and change (e.g., Schoen and Schumann, 2007; Vecchione et al., 2011).

On this point, Fagan bends over backwards to be fair:

Looking at personality more broadly, conservatism tends to be associated with preferences for stability, order and structure, while liberalism tends to be associated with curiosity, creativity, and novelty-seeking. It is also — credit where it’s due — associated with thinking deeply and rejecting simple solutions (Jost et al., 2003; Carney, Jost and Gosling, 2008; Jost, Federico and Napier, 2009; Caparos et al., 2015). Indeed, liberals tend to have more gray matter in the part of the brain that deals with processing signals for potential change (Amodio et al., 2007; Kanai et al., 2011; Schreiber et al., 2013). Liberals are more likely to prefer abstract art (Wilson, Ausman and Mathews, 1973) and have messy workspaces (Carney, Jost and Gosling, 2008).

Fagan continues:

The second determinant of pathological liberalism is extreme emotionality and empathy. Liberals tend to be more empathetic (Hirsh et al., 2010), and more agreeable in general (Schoen and Schumann, 2007; Vecchione et al., 2011); they are also more likely to reject group loyalty (see Haidt, 2012) and, as discussed, are less prejudiced towards ‘out-groups’. From a neurobiological perspective, political liberalism has been linked to activity in the part of the brain that deals with interpersonal trust (Belfi, Koscik and Tranel, 2015). Bringing this all together, a study of Twitter users found that those following Republicans used more words emphasizing group membership (such as in-group identity, national identity, and religion), while those following Democrats used more emotional language (e.g., feelings, anxiety, positive emotions, and expletives; Sylwester and Purver, 2015). Many researchers have explored the concept of pathological altruism (Oakley et al., 2011), in which charitable giving actually does more harm than good (by, for example, fostering dependence and undermining organic economic development. One illustration comes from the donation of second-hand clothing to countries like Kenya, which has all but killed the once-thriving garment industry there). When liberal altruism becomes pathological, it can also be at the subject’s own expense. For example, a survey by the American National Election Studies in 2018 asked respondents to rate how warm they felt towards their own race compared to others. All groups were biased in favor of their own except for one: white liberals, who feel warmer to others than to their own people. In other words, in contrast to all other groups, white liberals put others above themselves.

[Professor Arguendo: This last finding contradicts conservatives' claim that they, unlike liberals, do not even see race, although they could probably pick Martin Luther King Jr. or Rev. Al Sharpton out of a lineup if need be.]

Continuing his analysis, Fagan confirms that the stereotype of the self-hating liberal is entirely accurate: “This prostration before other groups introduces the third trait that defines pathological liberalism: low self-esteem. Die-hard liberals seem to live in a world of self-loathing: they believe they are born dirty thanks to new varieties of ‘original sin’; and they never recognize the good things their history has contributed, instead campaigning to actively ‘dismantle’ their own culture. Their protests are invariably forms of self-abuse or self-abasement, like lying in front of traffic or getting on their knees.” ² One is tempted to scream at Fagan, a la John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious!" But perhaps he is; the jury remains out.

Fagan persists:

A function of low self-esteem is also believing that one has little control over one’s life. Research has indicated that having an external ‘locus of control’ (i.e., believing that your fate is determined by powerful people and forces) is typically linked to a leftist ideology (e.g., Levenson and Miller, 1976). In surely one of the great reversals of history, a 2019 Cato Institute survey found that just 33 percent of people identifying as ‘very liberal’ agreed that ‘[their] life is determined by [their] own actions’, compared to 52 percent of those who are very conservative. It in turn makes sense that those who feel less in control of their own destiny would support ‘free’ healthcare, ‘free’ education, more welfare, and more regulation. As Edmund Burke said, ‘Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.’

Predictably, Fagan brings Marxism into the analysis (you knew he would get to it eventually):

This external locus of control has recently manifested itself in victimhood culture — the Marxist belief that one is a perpetual victim of omnipotent but invisible power structures, from which only the same Marxist authorities can rescue such victim groups. What is less well known is a recent paper which found that those who exhibit these ‘virtuous victimhood’ behaviors were more likely to have ‘dark’ personality traits, including narcissism (Ok et al., 2020). ³ Twenge, Zhang and Im (2004) explain the contradiction between low self-esteem and narcissism in terms of locus of control; the pathological liberal likely believes that, when something good happens in their life, it was their achievement; when something bad happens, they are the victim of oppression. Pride is the vice with the strongest correlation with narcissism (Veselka, Giammarco and Vernon, 2014). This narcissistic culture of pride is another defining trait of pathological liberalism — even manifesting in parades to celebrate pride. A ‘born this way’ mindset which embraces unhealthy lifestyle groups like the obese can only lead to disaster.

Again—Fagan’s article may be a parody, a put-on, a send-up; but even if it is, I think it’s brilliant—which I would think, of course, being a self-hating liberal. If nothing else, Fagan gives liberals an opportunity to see ourselves as others see us; there is always value in that.

Is liberalism really a mental illness? - The Spectator World

¹ For those of you who don’t recall, Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm which specialized in data mining and data analysis. It had its fifteen minutes of fame in the years 2013—2016, due to its allegedly dicey involvement in elections in various countries, including Great Britain and America. CA had links to Britain’s Conservative Party and to American right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer; the company may or may not have engaged in Russia-related hanky panky. It’s out of business now, so what difference, at this point, does it make? I don’t really care; do you?

² Professor Arguendo interjects: “Conservatives tend to be more traditionally religious than liberals. Traditional religious believers engage in ritualistic self-abasing behaviors: such as bowing, genuflecting, kneeling, kissing inanimate objects, putting ashes on their forehead, publicly confessing their unworthiness, etc. It is religious conservatives, not secular liberals, who promote Original Sin as the cause of human venality; liberals are the optimists about human nature.”

³ An exasperated Professor Arguendo would like to remind everyone that contemporary conservatives loudly and persistently claim victimhood at the hands of, among others, the Liberal Elite, Cancel Culture, the fake-news Lamestream Media (aka "Enemies of the People"), the Thought Police, the Deep State, the Pizza-gate pedophiles, the CDC, your local Health Department, and all the other clandestine forces operating to undermine the American Way of Life. 

Lights, Camera, Libel!

{Being my third and final look at the life, times, and legacy of Grigory Rasputin.}

It should come as no surprise that Rasputin, a man whose life was filled (allegedly) with sex, violence, and palace intrigue, found his way not just from Siberia to Moscow but all the way to Hollywood—not in person, alas, but through the narrative of his life and through his larger-than-life reputation. As a result, the motion picture industry learned a valuable lesson in how to avoid charges of libel.

In 1932, having acquired film rights to Alfred Klabund’s 1927 novel Rasputin, MGM Studios signed the three Barrymores—John, Ethel, and Lionel—to star in a film titled Rasputin and the Empress. Lionel Barrymore would play Rasputin, John would play the role of his assassin, and Ethel, of course, in her first appearance in a “talking” motion picture, would play Tsarina Alexandra. Though the plot utilized the confessional memoirs of Prince Felix Yusupov, the man who claimed to have planned and executed the murder of Rasputin, the filmmakers took numerous liberties with the known facts. Most egregiously, the movie portrays Yusupov’s wife, Irina (renamed “Princess Natasha” on screen) as having met Rasputin and having been either seduced or raped by him, none of which had happened in real life. Outraged, the Yusupovs sued MGM for libel.

The ensuing trial took place in 1934, as explained here by Rod Hollier:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Limited produced a film in which a man named Rasputin brought about the destruction of Russia but was subsequently murdered by Prince Chegodieff and others. In the film, a combination of both fiction and real-life facts, Princess Natasha had sexual relations with Prince Chegodieff, one the murderers of Rasputin, but was also raped by Rasputin. In real life, Princess Irina Youssoupoff was married to Prince Youssoupoff, the man who assisted in the murder of Rasputin. The imputation is that Princess Irina Youssoupoff was raped by Rasputin. 

The jury found in favor of Youssoupoff.

The judge concurred. According to Hollier, “Lord Justice Slesser stated: ‘Not only is a matter defamatory if it brings the plaintiff into hatred, ridicule, or contempt, by reason of some moral discredit on her part, but also if it tends to make the plaintiff shunned or avoided and without any moral discredit or her behalf. One may, I think, take judicial notice of the fact that a lady of whom it has been said that she has been ravished, albeit against her will, has suffered in social reputation and opportunities of receiving respectful consideration of the world. I, for myself, cannot see that from the plaintiff's point of view it matters in the least whether this libel suggests that she has been seduced or ravished. The question whether she is or is not the more or the less moral seems to me immaterial in considering this question whether she has been defamed.’”

Back then, a woman’s reputation was still worth something; damages awarded to Princess Irina amounted to, in today’s dollars, over $25 million.

The Yusupov lawsuit did not lead to greater accuracy in Hollywood storytelling, but to the inclusion of a boilerplate “all persons fictitious” disclaimer that now accompanies all movies: something along the lines of “The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. Any resemblance of film characters to actual persons (living or deceased) is coincidental. No identification of characters with actual persons (living or deceased) is intended or should be inferred.” That disclaimer, however worded, does not serve as a “get out of libel free” card, but it does make it harder for lawsuits against filmmakers and studios to succeed.

Despite the inauspicious precedent and lasting effects of Rasputin and the Empress, Hollywood took another shot (so to speak) at Rasputin in 1966 with Hammer Films’ Rasputin the Mad Monk, starring the incomparable Christopher Lee as Rasputin. The movie focused on “Rasputin's terrifying powers both to work magic and to seduce women,” elements which cinema audiences do seem to enjoy. The writers disguised the various supporting characters sufficiently that no lawsuits were filed, and no reputations were impugned—except, of course, Rasputin’s.  

The cinematic lure of Rasputin persists. ¹ In 1996, Alan Rickman and Greta Scacchi starred in a TV movie, Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny. The two lead actors, and the show itself, won several awards (Emmys and Golden Globes); Sir Ian McKellen, in the role of Nicholas II, was praised for his performance as well. In 2014, Russian filmmakers produced an eight-part TV miniseries, Rasputin, with a narrative structured around the Russian government's investigation of Rasputin's murder. More recently, the 2019  Netflix mini-series The Last Czars re-told Nicholas and Alexandra's story in what one critic dubbed "a surreal Wikipedia entry brought to life". Rasputin was portrayed by Ben Cartwright, which no doubt came as a shock to loyal viewers of Bonanza (not to mention, to Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe).

No movies or TV shows have been made about the life of poor Khioniya Guseva.

________________________________________

¹ The Lure of Rasputin would be an excellent title for a book and/or movie!

Sources:

Rasputin and the Empress - Wikipedia

Rasputin the Mad Monk - Wikipedia

(1) Why All Films Have This Disclaimer - YouTube

Rod Hollier, Case Summary: Youssoupoff v Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Limited (1934) — The Law Project

Thanks to the magic of YouTube, both Rasputin and the Empress and Rasputin the Mad Monk can be watched in all their libelous glory: (1) rasputin the mad monk 1966 full movie - YouTube  

You can also find Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny on YouTube: (1) "Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny" - Complete 1996 TV-Movie - YouTube

The Last Czars is available on Netflix; the Russian-made Rasputin can be watched on Amazon Prime. 

 

"A Just and Well-Ordered Society"

"To work for the common good is the greatest creed." (Woodrow Wilson)

Adrian Vermeule—former law clerk for SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia and for Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals—teaches law at Harvard. In a highly controversial essay at The Atlantic, he says that we need a new “common-good” interpretation of the U.S. Constitution; fortunately, he also happens to know what the “common good” entails, so there won’t be any need for interminable debate over what it means.

In his essay, Vermeule outlines the guiding common-good principles he wants “read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution”:

respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality”—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.

Bagging two birds with one stone, Vermeule urges the rejection of moral relativism and cultural pluralism, each a longstanding bete noire of the Right:

The claim, from the notorious joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that each individual may “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,”  and so on—fall under the ax.

Common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. Unions, guilds and crafts, cities and localities, and other solidaristic associations will benefit from the presumptive favor of the law, as will the traditional family; in virtue of subsidiarity, the aim of rule will be not to displace these associations, but to help them function well. Elaborating on the common-good principle that no constitutional right to refuse vaccination exists, constitutional law will define in broad terms the authority of the state to protect the public’s health and well-being, protecting the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds—biological, social, and economic—even when doing so requires overriding the selfish claims of individuals to private “rights.” Thus the state will enjoy authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals who so often place their own satisfactions (financial and sexual) and the good of their class or social milieu above the common good.

Professor Vermeule will no doubt take it as proof of the soundness of his proposal that he will receive—and is already receiving—vociferous criticism from both the political Left and the political Right. The latter will accuse him of trying to turn the government into a monstrous social-engineering enterprise, while the former will accuse him of abetting the authoritarian streak in American politics and the theocratic tendencies of the religious Right. Eric Levitz, at New York, characterizes Vermeule as wanting judges “to reinterpret the U.S. Constitution as a charter demanding the subjugation of infidels to ‘rulers’ who share all of Adrian Vermeule’s views on God and good government”; whereas conservative commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty, while not entirely at odds with Vermeule’s proposal, likens it to garden-variety Progressivism, which Dougherty dislikes, in its reliance on government to impose its views of the common good.

According to my crack research team at Wikipedia, Professor Vermeule, a convert to Catholicism, has been known as an advocate of something called “integralism,” which it explains as:

“A Roman Catholic political doctrine which calls for the abolition of the division between church and state, in order that the resulting theocratic state can promote a religiously-determined "Highest Good" in place of the personal autonomy of a liberal democracy. Their ideal is to create this new confessional Catholic regime through "strategic raillement", or transformation from within institutions and bureaucracies, rather than by winning elections. The groundwork for a full integralist regime would then be in place when liberal democracy dies. The new state would ‘exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens’.”

Such advocacy explains why Eric Levitz accuses Vermeule of trying to sneak a Catholic theocracy into America disguised as “common-good constitutionalism”. While Rod Dreher hopes to lead the Christian faithful into quasi-Benedictine exile, Vermeule wants to baptize the government, especially the presidency, and anoint it an instrument of God’s will. The fact that our current Supreme Court includes five members—a voting majority—of the Catholic faith may give Vermuele hope that his proposal can be enacted: with no constitutional amendment even required, the justices can simply apply common-good principles to arrive at godly verdicts on the cases before them.

As things stand, I don’t think Professor Vermeule’s ideas will gain much traction; but if you ever happen to see his name floated for the federal judiciary, please sound the alarm. I’m all for things like the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity; but I’d rather not have them spelled out for me and enforced by a government claiming not just popular support but divine sanction.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/

Another Fein Mess

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has recently opined that the media should no longer have the privilege of operating behind enhanced First Amendment protections as provided by the 1964 SCOTUS decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas believes it is high time that journalists be held liable for libel, and Bruce Fein (at The American Conservative) concurs:

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) obtusely places a First Amendment premium on irresponsible reporting. As a result, it creates a sanctuary for libelous behavior if the targets are public officials or public figures, and raises the bar to “actual malice” on the part of the suspected libeler. This protects journalists even when falsehoods are published first and investigated only later. While the 1964 precedent was created during a time of chronic government lies, the media’s credibility has since been shot to pieces due to leaks, fake news, and a rush to publish.

Fein cites no less than Thomas Jefferson to make the case for keeping the press on a short leash:

As Justice Thomas elaborated in his opinion last week, there is nothing in the text or history of the First Amendment that justifies such a perverse journalistic incentive for fake news. Indeed, the actual malice rule impairs media credibility by protecting untruths resulting from journalistic negligence. Thomas Jefferson observed more than 150 years before the actual malice rule in a letter to Pennsylvania Governor Thomas McKean:

“[The press is] lying to such a degree of prostitution as to deprive it of all credit. And the fact is that…even the least informed of the people have learnt that nothing in a newspaper is to be believed. This is a dangerous state of things, and the press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible…I have therefore long thought that a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses.”

This quotation either proves Thomas’ and Fein’s case, or it demonstrates that politicians have always been at odds with a free press and that, mutatis mutandis, there is nothing new under the sun.

My counter-proposal to the Thomas/Fein argument is this: let’s hold politicians, office-seekers and office-holders legally responsible for their lies and/or demonstrable falsehoods. Why, after all, should a government official be allowed to lie with impunity to members of the Fourth Estate and, by extension, to the public? There are no more egregious peddlers of disinformation than professional politicians and their various enablers. We have heard the argument advanced that “It’s not a crime to lie to the NY Times or to CNN,” thus excusing a barrage of brazen prevarication; but if, as Fein and Thomas suggest, the NY Times and CNN can be taken to court for printing inaccurate stories, then so too should public figures who habitually economize with the truth or who constantly engage in self-aggrandizing bullshit (to use the officially-endorsed Presidential term).

To be clear, I’m not advocating we jail politicians for their reflexively dishonest statements; instead, I believe that the courts of proper jurisdiction should impose substantial fines for such statements (the fines, if necessary, can simply be deducted from the office-holder’s salary)—again, not only for blatant lies (e.g. “They want to take away your guns, your airplanes, and your cows”) but also for willfully ignorant statements (e.g. “I’m creating CO₂ as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola. your Dr. Pepper and your Perrier water. It’s necessary for human life. It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, doesn’t cause cancer, doesn’t cause asthma. There’s nobody that’s ever been admitted to a hospital because of CO₂ poisoning”). The fines need to be punitive; these bastards can afford it, after all, and nothing less than reaching deep into their wallets is likely to get their attention.

No one needs to lie to the media; anyone can say “No comment” or “I’d rather not discuss that” or “None of your damned business”. If public figures persist in lying, they should be held accountable. ² Think of it this way: if we could fine politicians for lying to us, the accumulated monies could almost certainly wipe out the national debt—heck, the falsehoods peddled by our current President alone could restore our fiscal standing!

It’s fine with me, then, if Bruce Fein wants to overthrow NY Times v. Sullivan. Will it be fine with Fein, however, if we fine, among others, our current Liar-in-Chief, President Pinocchio?

_____________________________________________

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/end-the-first-amendment-sanctuary-for-fake-news/  

¹ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/19/joe-barton-gop-congressma_n_205549.html  

The quote is a decade old, and Rep. Joe Barton is no longer in office (due, in part, to his having inadvertently posted a nude photo of himself onto a Twitter account), but I think Barton's statement remains fairly representative of the genre.

² I should point out that Bruce Fein knows a bit about official dissembling: he served in the Reagan administration and was counsel to the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran, which  wasn't quite as big a deal as, say, "Fast and Furious" or Benghazi, but which had its fifteen minutes of fame.  

Judge Not

In "Judging the Judges" (at Current Affairs), Brianna Rennix and Oren Rimni critique the role of judges in our system of criminal justice, and they are not impressed: 

Judges are odd and uniquely frustrating creatures. Most have the demeanor of an especially hidebound DMV attendant, but their power and prestige gives them even more control over our day-to-day lives. Judges are often the last thing between you and imprisonment, deportation, homelessness, poverty, or the loss of your children. Their courts are tiny fiefdoms, and everyone who enters must cater to their whims. 

Rennix and Rimni provide a brief history of how our judiciary has evolved: 

How did we get to this point? What are judges actually for? Historically, judges were basically people who were good at dispute resolution at a time when state enforcement wasn’t really a thing. They needed to be able to come up with judgments that parties would actually follow, instead of just, say, murdering each other. This judicial role makes some kind of abstract sense. In less regulated times, judges were probably pretty useful practical agents of community order, and even sometimes of justice.  

Here in the U.S., we no longer live in a time where it’s typical for vigilantism and blood-feuds to break out on a large scale if the judge doesn’t make a decision the parties will willingly accept...So what function do judges perform now? Rather than just making pronouncements on what would be equitable in a particular dispute, judges are—theoretically—supposed to faithfully apply codified law. We’ve made a policy shift over the years that strongly favors “predictability,” in place of “justice,” as the chief virtue of the legal system. It’s a well-accepted principle of the judicial craft that the important thing is to have a rule, rather than to necessarily have the right rule. (Having the right rule is merely a subsidiary concern, if it’s a concern at all.) We’d much rather have all “similar” cases or issues get decided the same way, instead of different ways, even if this leads to worse practical, real-world results overall for more individual people. 

The "impartial" application of codified laws turns out to be problematic: 

Evidence suggests that judges are not capable of being impartial at all. Factors as insidious as racial and class bias, as reasonable as background and knowledge, as mundane as when the judge last ate a meal, and as calculated as the judge’s ambitions for career advancement or political office, all clearly influence their choices. Numerous studies have shown the way many of these factors (not legal standards or arguments) lead to predictable patterns in rulings. And the reality is, most judges, and most people who closely study the activities of judges, know they aren’t impartial. When judges exalt impartiality as the highest virtue of legal adjudication, they are usually doing so disingenuously, or with significant psychological blinders raised. Judges who most vocally pretend to impartiality are often those who practice it the least. 

Do we even want impartiality, the authors ask, or do we want justice (or at least our version of justice)? 

Even if judges could be impartial, in theory, is that something that anyone even wants? Laws are inextricably linked with politics, so even the most neutral application of the law has a political dimension. And when people talk about who they want as a potential Justice it’s clear they base their preferences on who shares their opinion on issues like free speech or abortion. We rarely hear a conservative complain about Scalia’s judicial activism, or a liberal bemoan that RBG wasn’t impartial enough. This is because, deep in our core, we want partiality. Even where we have different conceptions of what “justice” means, we do actually want judges to advance justice rather than merely law. 

Law, in practice, turns out to be a matter of what you can get away with: 

The other problem with impartiality (besides being near impossible and possibly undesirable) is that a lot of seemingly “impartial” legal standards—like the famous “what would a reasonable person do” standard—are inherently subjective, so that it’s hard to say what an “impartial” application would even mean. The law is full of attempts to determine what “reasonable” behavior would be in a particular situation. It should shock no one (except lawyers) that people often have wildly divergent views of what “reasonableness” means in any given situation. For courts, the “reasonable person” standard has a disturbing tendency to align with whatever best suits the positions of those in power. Think of all of the police officers whose shootings of unarmed black people have been deemed “reasonable”—and then say you want a judicial system run by “reasonable” or “impartial” judges. 

Rimni and Rennix argue that, from the standpoint of public policy, activism and legislative reforms are better options than "judicial activism": 

The temptation to view judges as potential saviors often seems to sap progressive will for reform efforts through electoral and legislative channels. We currently have a legislature that is chronically unresponsive to genuine public concerns, and an ongoing concentration of de facto governing power in the president and his executive agencies. In this context, it’s understandable that people want to think of the judiciary as the last, best hope of American democracy. But even an optimally moral and courageous judiciary can usually only engage in obstructionist tactics, which a sufficiently determined executive will then maneuver around, unless the public finds some other way to make this politically inexpedient. The danger of reposing too much power in the judiciary, too, is amply illustrated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, where the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the exact kinds of reforms that would have made the legislature more beholden to the real interests of the majority of their constituents—and which would thus have reduced the importance of the judicial deus ex machina. If we aspire to a form of democracy where there is an actual connection between the organizing efforts of the general public and the subsequent behavior of our elected officials, pushing for reforms to make our elected government more responsive to popular concerns is a better route than relying on distant elites to undo the mistakes of other elites. When you put power in the hands of unaccountable elites, you never know what they will do with it. 

The authors close with some suggestions on improving the judiciary and the system it serves: 

One, we should break any habit of looking to the law as a primary source of social change...changing the law is usually the middle- or end-point, rather than the starting-point, of on-the-ground changes in human social behavior.  

Secondly, when we do seek to enact legal change, one of our concerns should be to craft legal standards with an optimum humane baseline, so that the role for judicial discretion, so far as possible, is forced in the direction of mercy. Attempting to make perfect legal rules for all cases is a futile exercise, but we can at least shut off some possibilities for bad exercises of discretion.  

Basic morality remains the only proper standard by which to assess whether someone is a “good” judge or not. A good judge is someone who uses whatever discretion and whatever legal tools are at their disposal to reduce human suffering. They actively seek to understand the human impact of the cases in front of them. They are humble enough to admit what they don’t understand, and to solicit whatever information or advice they think will help improve their understanding, so that they can make a decision that they believe will be really helpful to people. They care about what happens to the parties in the case.  

As a bonus, Rennix and Rimni have appended to their article a brief but highly entertaining section called "Some More Radical Solutions to the Judge Problem". The suggestions therein are threefold: "No More Judges," "Improve the Judges," and "The Same Judges, but We Respect Them Less".  A couple of brief excerpts:  

Aspiring judges have to forfeit all their personal wealth and complete a rigorous ten-year public service program...they will spend time in nursing homes, prisons, rehab centers, public schools, garbage collection routes, daycare centers, agricultural worksites, emergency rooms, the kitchens of fast-food restaurants, and the like. [Once appointed] they will live on a comfortable but modest salary. 

Outdated markers of hierarchy, like forcing people to stand when the judge enters the courtroom, or address the judge as "Your Honor," should be eliminated...when hearing cases, the judges will sit at an ordinary table, on the same level as litigants, rather than on an elevated stand.  

We might also recommend (as do Rennix and Rimni) that we abolish "the prolonged caging of human beings". Or perhaps, as part of improving our judges, we ought to require that every prospective judge spend a year in a cage—that might inspire some empathy and some ingenuity regarding alternatives to incarceration.  

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/judging-the-judges

Sympathy for the Florist?

The estimable Alan Jacobs (Snakes and Ladders) re-posts the following from Mark Movsesian (St. John’s Law School, New York): 

Suppose, I asked [my] students, an observant Jew has a florist shop. One day, a customer, who is also Jewish, comes to the shop to say she’s getting married and would like the florist to do the wedding. “That’s wonderful,” the florist says. “Where will you get married?” The customer replies that the wedding will be at a local nondenominational church, because her fiancé is Christian, and she, the customer, isn’t very observant. The florist thinks about it and then says, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t do your wedding. It’s nothing personal; I’m sure your fiancé is a fine person, as are you. It’s just that as an observant Jew I don’t approve of interfaith weddings. For our community to survive, we must avoid intermarriage and assimilation. Please understand. There are many other florists who can do your wedding. I’ll even suggest some. But I can’t, in good conscience, participate, myself.” What result? 

In posing this hypothetical, I was not so interested in how the case would come out under current law. Rather, in good law-school fashion, I was trying to show the students that these are complicated questions and that they need to consider both sides. Much to my surprise, the students were uniformly unsympathetic to the florist. There should be no right to decline services in this situation, they told me. The florist was not acting reasonably and in good faith. […] 

Conservatives often assume that controversies like Masterpiece Cakeshop reflect changing sexual norms and an intolerance of resistance. That’s correct, in part; one definitely senses a “you-lost-get-over-it” sentiment on the other side. And yet, the students’ reaction to my hypothetical case suggests that something else is going on as well, that the dispute is not about sexuality as such. Rather, it’s about not allowing people to draw moral distinctions that exclude others and hurt their feelings, no matter what the justification. That’s what the florist was doing in my hypothetical case—and that, I think, was what bothered the students. 

Jacobs titles this entry "no feelings may be hurt," and his conclusion is this:  

A fascinating case study for people who tend to think these disputes are all about the sexual revolution. As it turns out, and as I have sometimes suggested, demand for the affirmation of sexual choices may simply be an example of a greater demand, that for the affirmation of all the self’s choices. The real principles here are (a) I am my own and (b) the purpose of society is to empower and affirm my claim that I am my own. 

Movsesian and Jacobs are correct that these disputes are not primarily about "the sexual revolution". They are wrong, however, when they claim the real issue is either "hurt feelings" or "the affirmation of all the self's choices"; the former is explanation is unconvincing and the latter makes no sense given that the florist (in Movsesian's hypothetical) did not have his choices affirmed by the students.

In fact, what we have in this situation—and in the real-life situations after which it is modeled—is a conflict of seemingly legitimate but mutually exclusive claims: a customer claims the right to service from a public business and the proprietor of said business claims the right to refuse service for personal (in this case, religious) reasons. Both claims, taken separately, seem reasonable and defensible; what then ought we to do?

When rights, or alleged rights, collide, society has a mechanism for resolving the conflict. That mechanism is called "the law" and in America it has, since the 1960s, made it very clear that publicly operated businesses must serve the general public and that proprietors do not have the right to make invidious distinctions on the basis of race (the old Jim Crow laws), gender, sexual orientation, or religion. By that standard—which is the standard under which we currently operate—Movsesian's students were absolutely right to be "uniformly unsympathetic" to the florist, who was confusing his personal religious beliefs (interfaith weddings are wrong) with his responsibilities as the owner of a business licensed by the State to serve the public. The florist is entitled to his beliefs, but to the extent that they lead him to discriminate against certain customers, he cannot operate his business on that basis.¹    

Does a Catholic florist have to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding? How about for a Jewish wedding, or a Protestant wedding, or an interfaith wedding, or a pagan wedding, or a Wiccan wedding? How about for a wedding of two Catholics who are legally divorced but who remain married (in the Church's eyes) to other people? How about a wedding of two people who have been brazenly co-habiting for a decade? In all those cases, the Catholic qua Catholic may disapprove; but the Catholic qua proprietor of a publicly licensed business has to follow the law and treat all customers alike. 

It is not, as some contentious critics claim, that a citizen has to leave her religious beliefs at home when entering the public square. It is that she has to acknowledge the existence of other beliefs that differ from and sometimes conflict with hers; and she must accept that there is therefore a demarcated realm in which law trumps belief. Otherwise, we would be left with a welter of irreconcilable claims and at the mercy of each other's "deeply held religious beliefs," arbitrary preferences, stubborn prejudices, or personal whims—with no way to distinguish among them as to their legitimacy. That's no way to run a public square; that's a recipe for discrimination, discord, and disaster. 

http://blog.ayjay.org/no-feelings-may-be-hurt/

¹ He could, for instance, close his shop on the Sabbath--as long as it was closed to all customers and not just to a select few. 

Legal Briefs

At First Things, in the course of hyperventilating over two recent court rulings (in India and New Zealand) that grant legal rights to natural objects such as rivers, Wesley Smith asks "should secular law inscribe distinctly religious beliefs into a nation’s statutes and secular court rulings? ¹ Imagine the hue and cry if the Host in Catholic Communion were legally recognized as the body and blood of Christ. The screaming would break decibel machines!"

Smith may be right; on the other hand, our legal system recognizes something called "the seal of the confessional" as a legitimate reason for Catholic priests not to reveal information about crimes past, present, or future. To my knowledge, no decibel machines have yet been broken over this, except on the rare occasion when some court dares hint at compelling priestly testimony--and then the screaming comes from people like Wesley Smith who are outraged about violations of "religious liberty". 

On the actual legal issue in question, vis a vis rivers, Smith waxes wroth:

In the latest phase of this descent into metaphysical madness, two rivers have been declared to be legal “persons” endowed with human-style rights. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted the same legal rights as a human being. The reason? The Maori tribe considers the river sacred and an “ancestor.” Religion was also why an Indian court declared the Ganges River, considered sacred in the Hindu faith, to be a “person.”

Sacred rivers, sacred mountains, sacred lands: personally, I see nothing wrong with protecting such places, and if the only way to do that is to declare them to be "legal persons," so be it. If we can legally baptize corporations--i.e. piles of money--as if they were human beings ("Corporations are people, my friend!" chortled Mitt Romney, not recognizing that he'd borrowed a meme from the movie Soylent Green), then I don't see why the Ganges, the Whanganui, the Nile, the Jordan, the Amazon, the Rhine, the Tiber, the Thames, the Seine, and the Mississippi (to name a few) shouldn't get equal treatment. They've all been around longer than any of us and they'll all be around long after we're gone: so long, that is, as someone looks out for their interests.
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https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/03/rivers-declared-to-be-persons

¹ Does Wesley Smith have in mind "religious beliefs" like prohibitions against abortion? No, I'm pretty sure he does not.
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Matt Stoller (at The Baffler) is no fan of SCOTUS, at least when it comes to the court's rulings on economic issues:

Since long before Citizens United or Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court has been a disaster for democracy. The influence of Robert Bork and the Chicago School of libertarians has been undermining the rights of Americans in the economic and political arena since the late 1970s. In 1978, the court effectively struck down state usury limits with the Marquette decision, leading to the modern credit card industry and a massive spike in personal bankruptcies. To understand how fundamentally counter-democratic the impact of this decision was, consider that a usury limit was actually one of the first laws that many states passed when they formed themselves as states. In one fell swoop, the high court overturned the democratic underpinnings of the American political economy...The result of the court’s rulings on the concentration of economic power since the late 1970s is a corporate cartelization of financial power unrivaled since the robber baron era.

Stoller says that the problem is not one of partisanship on the court: "when it comes to the legal ratification of political-economic power," he writes, "it often doesn’t matter whether a justice was nominated by the Democrats or the Republicans." Stoller identifies liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer as "acolytes of extreme conservative jurist [Robert] Bork on antitrust [issues]," a charge which is disheartening, if accurate.

Desperate times call for desperate measures; faced with the prospect of Neil Gorsuch being named to the Supreme Court, Matt Stoller thinks that time is here. He offers this fusillade of suggestions for curbing SCOTUS:

It’s time for citizens to demand that Congress stop kow-towing to the legal establishment club and use their own power to reshape the Supreme Court to serve American democracy. Nothing in the Constitution prevents our making the Supreme Court a panel of a hundred judges, so that offending one wouldn’t be a big deal. Nothing prevents forcing the sitting judges to ride circuit all over the country, so that a Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas couldn’t just sit in D.C. and radiate power outward to parts of the country they never see. Nothing prevents Congress from putting televisions in the court, so that Americans can watch the people who are making crucial decisions that affect—and curtail—their rights. Nothing prevents Congress from investigating the judicial junkets that the justices now soak up, such as the luxury hunting trip funded by wealthy interests that Scalia was savoring when he died. Nothing prevents the executive branch from indicting Clarence Thomas for taking a half a million dollars in bribes undisclosed through his wife’s relationship with right-wing think tanks (yes, he did this, and yes, the Obama administration did nothing about it). Nothing prevents Congress from simply limiting the jurisdiction of the court, and exempting key laws from judicial review should the court thwart the obvious needs of a democratic society.

That, it must be admitted, is quite an agenda; and you thought that conservatives were the ones whipping up animosity against the courts?

Stoller does add this caveat: "None of this," he cautions, "should be done lightly. Congress needs to make a case, a very public one, that the court is standing against the needs of our democracy, before embarking on the reformist options embedded in the Constitution."

In the end, however, Stoller believes that the notion of judicial independence is but a fiction and that Supreme Court justices (Stoller doesn't weigh in on judges in general) are but politicians in black robes:

But fundamentally, Congress needs to recognize that the Supreme Court is a political institution and is shaped by politics. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is willing to subvert norms to seize power on the court, the strategy can’t be to wait forty years until [Neil]Gorsuch is gone. It must be to reclaim the court for American democracy. And that means understanding that the court is actually susceptible to public opinion. The justices are at the end of the day simply politicians, and the Constitution is a very flexible document.

Of course, if justices are politicians, then they should be elected rather than appointed, an idea that has made Charlie Pierce's list of  "the worst ideas in American politics" (Pierce considers a "balanced-budget" amendment to be the absolute worst).  I'm not sure that Neil Gorsuch, or the Roberts Court in general, or the corporate-friendly rulings of Ginsburg and Breyer, are worth abandoning our belief (naive as it may be) that courts can sometimes rise above narrow partisan interests to actually safeguard our liberties; and given the tenor of politics these days, I'd hate to see the judiciary thrown into the fray.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/gorsuch-filibuster-stoller

BFD Part 2

Some further thoughts on the Levin/Breitbart/Trump accusations against President Obama:

If you read through the Breitbart summary of Levin’s charges, you’ll see that Levin is not actually accusing the Obama administration of breaking the law. According to Levin, the administration requested FISA permission for a wiretap of Trump last June; it was denied, and Levin does not claim the administration went ahead and installed a wiretap illegally. Instead, the administration supposedly returned to the FISA court in October with a revised wiretap request, which was granted; the wiretap was installed, but legally, with court permission.

Levin further charges that Obama broadened or stretched NSA and other government agency boundaries in order to “seed” incriminating evidence against Trump in order to preclude the new administration from suppressing or destroying it. Levin does not say this was illegal; he merely claims it was politically motivated and part of a silent, behind-the-scenes “coup” against the incoming President.

Thus far, then, even if we grant Levin’s claims for the sake of discussion, the Obama administration followed the law. It’s not as if Barack Obama is being accused of dispatching his own secret “plumbers” to clandestinely wiretap the Trump Building; in the Levin scenario, the administration honored due process and went through the courts for authorization, based on evidence already gathered through normal intelligence channels.

Which leads to this consideration: it shouldn’t be at all difficult to prove or disprove that much of Levin’s narrative. Either the FISA court(s) did or did not receive requests from the Obama White House to surveil Donald Trump; and those requests, if made, either were or were not granted. I’m fairly certain that Congress could find all this out within 24 hours, and I suggest that the appropriate members of Congress do so immediately.  There are records kept of such things, you know.

Finally: if it turns out that the Obama administration did wiretap Donald Trump with authorization from a FISA court, then a full investigation is necessary in order to determine what the evidence was that supported such a wiretap in the first place. If Obama, acting out of purely political motives, somehow hoodwinked a FISA court with flimsy, manufactured evidence, then we deserve to know that and Obama needs to be held accountable.

If, on the other hand, the courts authorized a wiretap because there was genuine, credible evidence of Russian influence on the Trump campaign—well, we deserve to know that too.

And if, lastly and contra Mark Levin, there were no wiretaps or even wiretap requests by Obama against Trump: then Mark Levin and Donald Trump both owe Obama and this nation an apology, and Donald Trump ought to resign.  

My god, has it only been six weeks since the inauguration?  

Monday Miscellany

First, let’s pause for a moment to remember the victims of last Friday night in Sweden.

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This weekend, Rush Limbaugh explained to Chris Wallace why Barack Obama was able to get major legislation passed when he took office in 2009:

You have the first African-American president. You have everybody falling all over themselves to acknowledge that, to reward that. Obama was going to get everything he wanted in the first year because if anybody opposed it, they were going to be accused of being a racist, or a bigot, or who knows what.

Rush, with his usual acumen—he is, after all, the popularizer of the “Barack the Magic Negro” meme—hit the nail right on the head: Barack “I’m black” Obama, our first affirmative-action President, benefitted from the usual deference displayed in America towards people of color and the privilege that comes from being black. Like blacks across the country in all walks of life, Obama got to go to the head of the line and no one dared say a word in opposition.

What’s interesting is that Mr. Limbaugh, who does not even see race but can still opine about it, has long insisted that millions of people voted for Obama only because he is African-American; yet Limbaugh steadfastly denies that anyone at all voted against Obama for the same reason. Apparently only liberals see race; color-blind conservatives merely view the issues rationally and dispassionately, as Martin Luther King would have wanted.

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Rod Dreher (at The American Conservative) has been publicly fuming about the court ruling against the mild-mannered Washington grandmother and florist, Barronelle Stutzman, who refused to do a floral arrangement for a wedding between two men (long-time customers of hers, as it happens). The courts (state courts and appellate courts) have consistently ruled that Ms. Stutzman’s religious beliefs do not allow her to discriminate among paying customers, and that selling (and arranging) flowers for a wedding in no way constitutes an endorsement of said nuptials.

Nowhere in Mr. Dreher’s fulminations does he either acknowledge or deny the relevant undisputed fact: Ms. Stutzman was breaking the law. Perhaps the law ought to include a “religious conscience” exemption, but as currently written in Washington State, it does not. The courts could not have ruled otherwise—unless, heaven forfend, they were to substitute their own judgment for that of the state legislature and thereby make law from the bench; which, as we know, is the very definition of meddling judicial activism.

I would also note that Dreher’s insistence that courts should defer to Ms. Stutzman’s “conscience” is passing strange in itself. Mr. Dreher is no fan of the modern (Protestant) individual whose conscience is the final authority; shouldn’t Ms. Stutzman at least have consulted some clerical authority before deciding, all on her own, what her religious beliefs did and did not allow? Next thing you know, every Tom, Dick, and Martin Luther will be claiming the authority to interpret Scripture and to discern God’s will all on their own.

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Does religion have a future? The best way to figure that out, of course, is via an algorithm which enables you to run computer simulations from which you can then extrapolate in order to make your prediction. What you need is this:

Plus, of course, some good data; or says Boston University philosopher and theologian Wesley Wildman, along with his colleagues at the Modeling Religion Project.

Michael Fitzgerald, writing at Nautilus, sums up what the MRP has concluded thus far:

The Modeling Religion Project continues to refine its models and build new ones. One of its recent models looks at how religion and violent behavior interact. And the team is currently working on a Holy Grail of sorts, LuCy, short for “lucid cybernetic agent,” and a nod to the hominid fossil that is over 3 million years old, to plumb deeper into the origin of religion.

So far, Wildman says, the project has shown that both supernatural and non-supernatural societies can and do occur, depending, of course, on the variables. When he looks past the project, though, Wildman sees the perennial emergence of supernatural ones. People have a basic propensity—a biological imperative—toward a desire to ascribe actions to an agent, a being, even one we cannot see, Wildman says. “Every generation is born supernaturalists.”

That's quite a powerful algorithm, alright, which can conclude that both kinds of society (supernatural and non-supernatural) can and do exist, "depending, of course, on the variables."  I can't wait to find out what the Modeling Religion Project has to say about "how religion and violent behavior interact"; I sure hope they get LuCy online before it's too late.   

http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/atheism-the-computer-model

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According to thousands of mental-health professionals who have never met him, much less examined him, our so-called “President” Donald Trump is—not to put too fine a point on it—certifiably nuts:

Nearly 60,000 mental health professionals have diagnosed President Donald Trump with a type of insanity that is often compared to an alcoholic’s lack of honesty and impulse control. Sparked by Change.org petitions by a top former Johns Hopkins professor and a California congresswoman, the psychiatric community has declared that Trump suffers from “Malignant Narcissism.”

In diagnosing Donald Trump, mental health pros are breaking with a decades-old precedent. After Barry Goldwater won a 1969 defamation lawsuit when psychiatrists called him crazy in Fact magazine, the psychiatric community put in place a “Goldwater Rule” in their ethics handbook that forbids diagnosing public figures.

So why are psychologists breaking with tradition now? A big problem during the Goldwater scenario was that there weren’t objective criteria for diagnosing mental health conditions at the time. Therapists used all sorts of jargon and their best judgment—but they were all over the place. Since then, however, the community has put in place official, objective standards in their bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short). This makes it possible to unanimously agree on diagnoses.

As someone who has a fair amount of experience in this area, I can honestly say that last paragraph, and especially the final sentence, is among the funniest things I have ever read.  Shane Snow, author of the article, has a great future ahead of him in comedy.

https://blog.shanesnow.com/donald-trump-and-the-definition-of-insanity-82ab6db008c4#.sgoja5eiy