Maggie's Farm

This post about the Application of Yamashita grew out of a recent dinner conversation/debate/discussion. From a summary here, a quote:

Since the Supreme Court's decision in 1946, the United States Congress and federal courts throughout the country have relied on the Yamashita standard. Many important human rights cases cite directly from the Supreme Court decision, as does the legislative history of the Torture Victims Protection Act ("TVPA"). In citing to the Yamashita Standard for support in the interpretation of the TVPA, the United States Senate Committee stated, "under international law, responsibility for torture, summary execution, or disappearances extends beyond the person or persons who actually committed those acts -- anyone with higher authority who authorized, tolerated, or knowingly ignored those acts is liable for them." The Second and Ninth Circuits of the United States Court of Appeals affirmed this standard in their decisions Kadic v. Karadzic, 70 F.3d 232 (1995) and Hilao v. Estate of Marcos, 103 F.3d 767 (1996), and it has been repeatedly recognized as the standard in numerous human rights cases litigated under the TVPA and the Alien Tort Claims Act ("ACTA") in federal courts across the country.

The case is here: long-winded, but if you just read the summary of the opinion and the very courageous dissent, you will get the general drift:

Yamashita v. Styer, Commanding General, US Forces, Western Pacific (1946)

via Drudge. Why can't they just have smoking and non-smoking cafes and bars? Let people decide where they want to work, and where they want to go. Is that just too simple and free?

These rules are like Prohibition.

Somewhat related: Japanese govt seeks to regulate online communications (h/t, Insty)

While Maggie's Farm officially supports Pogo for President, I am supporting Fred Thompson. If you want to give him a hand, send him a few bucks here to help prime the pump. If he does well, the money will flow. Is he too laid-back? Or just sane? We will see.

Here's his new ad:

- The revival of fox hunting since the ban. (h/t, Englishman's Castle)
- Chasing foxes on Boxing Day in Olde England: Mr. Free Market (whence the photo below).
- Customs of fox hunting

We re-link Andrew Bacevitch's Wilson Quarterly essay from 2005. A quote:

"American foreign policy was never the same after King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia met with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 and pledged a steady oil supply in return for US protection."

Read the whole fascinating story of American involvement in the Middle East. It's all about geopolitics, and it is deadly serious.

Is "diversity training" a tyranny of virtue? Of course it is (see my two previous posts about benevolence yesterday). It's OK, I believe, to maintain a tyranny of virtue within the home as a parent, but public life and home life are not the same - and your ideas of virtue may not be the same as mine.

Interestingly, diversity training often leads to lawsuits (h/t, Insty). I much prefer greedy, nasty, flawed or corrupt SOBs to virtue tyrants.

I took note of two quotes in a comment by Jim C. about the Kimball piece quoted below:

'Rousseau warned that “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable … of changing human nature, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”'

Hillary Clinton, 1993: "Let us be willing to re-mold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century; moving into a new millennium."

Indeed. Does that mean that I get to redefine Rousseau and Hillary for their own good?

From a heavy-duty but brief essay by Roger Kimball, a quote:

Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,

is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.

Read the whole thing. As our readers know well, we view individual liberty as a moral issue in itself and as the American ideal.

I'd vote for Fred with pleasure. I like him, I like his ads and I do keep those guys and gals in my prayers. (I do like plenty of the other guys too, though.) h/t, Insty

A short piece at Stumbling helped me get a grip on a theme which had been nagging at me in an unformed way. As he says,

"Freedom doesn't make us happy."

If my memory serves me, Freud said sort of the same thing about freedom from neurosis. Indeed freedom does not, nor is it intended to, by the usual uses of the term happiness. However, everyone defines happiness somewhat differently for themselves, and many do not find it to be a worthy pursuit in and of itself. Indeed, many look back in their lives and recognize that some of their toughest times were their "happiest" in retrospect because they were contending with challenge and discovering things about themselves and about life.

Read the Stumbling piece.

A QQQ earlier today noted that democracy is simply an effort to provide individual freedom from State power (but it can be a path to tyranny too). We believe that freedom has intrinsic value, and is a correlate of the dignity and capacity for self-determination of the individual. It is thus a Western ideal.

Serfs and slaves know where they live and where their next meal is coming from, and thus have a foundation for material happiness. Being free is much more daunting and may not be for everybody (as Dr. Bliss often says) - but you get to chose your meal and take your own chances.

In a free country, which the US still mostly is, each of us citizens can be an aristocrat of the human spirit. (And with a little luck and a little determination each one of us, even those on welfare, can live with more material blessings than King George lll had - eg endless hot water, large-screen TVs - which I will not permit in my house -, iPods, genuine medical treatments, central heat, and abundant fresh, healthy, delicious food from all over the world.)

And, regardless of all of the above, I wish our readers a Happy Christmas and a re-birth of the Holy Spirit in all who seek it.

Editor's comment: Yes, materialists understand simple animal happiness but not spiritual and psychological aspirations, and they tend to misunderestimate the soul and the capacities of everyone, except themselves, to figure out life and reality.

There have always been elements of ironic comedy about the spectacle of Marxist academics fervently proclaiming their revolutionary message while safely ensconced in Western institutions of higher education.

Roger Kimball, in Was Jesus Christ a Palestinian Insurgent? He goes on:

As the years have passed and another generation of young radicals has settled into middle age, tenure, and pension calculations, one might have hoped that these freethinkers would have had manners enough to mute their demands for the destruction of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, “the repressive state apparatus of late capitalism,” etc. After all, blue jeans or no blue jeans, what these middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism have unwittingly been clamoring for is nothing less than their own destruction.

It is the time of year to focus on helping, remembering, and praying for the poor and the poor in spirit.

Hard Times

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay.
There are frail forms fainting at the door.
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

There's pale drooping maiden who toils her life away
With a worn out heart, whose better days are o'er.
Though her voice it would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

Editor - Here's an excellent performance of the song by Bob Dylan:

From No Left Turns, a quote:

The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”

Read the whole brief piece.

...the conflation of democracy with liberty is fallacious but I realise that we have quite a bit of work to do at the axiomatic level to bring that once obvious and widely accepted fact back into the broader intellectual meta-context. The notion that "our democracy depends on individual freedom" strongly implies that freedom should or does serve democracy. I would argue that democracy is not an end in and of itself at all but at best merely a tool by which freedom is pursued by mitigating the power of the state.

Samizdata, on The Ideological Divide

Here. h/t, Don Luskin

My favorite:

"An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well." -- Lead sentence to a May 2 front-page story by sportswriter Alan Schwarz about an academic paper alleging discrimination in foul calls against black NBA players.

From Borowitz:

December 17, 2007.
Clinton Says Being Married to Hillary 'Has Never Influenced My Behavior;' Former President Defends Role as Campaign Spokesman
Addressing questions about his objectivity as a campaigner for his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former President Bill Clinton said today that being married to Sen. Clinton "has never influenced my behavior in the least little bit."

During an interview on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show," the former president said that those who accuse him of favoritism towards his wife "have got it all wrong, because, you know, Charlie, I've pretty much lived my entire life as if I wasn't married to her at all."

Mr. Clinton added that in order to demonstrate his objectivity about Sen. Clinton's qualifications, he would remove his wedding ring and keep it off for the duration of the campaign.

"As far as I'm concerned, from this day on I'm single," the former president said.

During the free-wheeling one-hour chat, aides to Mr. Clinton gathered in the studio control room and frantically attempted to induce the engineers to cut short the interview, with one aide trying to pull a cable out of its socket in the hopes that it would plunge the studio into darkness.

But their efforts were in vain as the former president continued his unbridled monologue, at one point touching on the similarities between a president and a prostitute.

"Being a president is a lot like being a thousand-dollar-a-night call girl, Charlie," he said.  "Experience matters."

Putin.

Which is the greater lost cause: Russia or Time Magazine? 

Authoritarian-oriented Russia always loves The Man With The Whip. But why Time?

We never signed Kyoto, but we did better than all of them. Insty. Not that it matters to me at all. I believe that it's all baloney.

Speaking of which, what is Surface Air Temperature anyway? I thought only the tropospheric temp mattered.

Meanwhile, Germany pitches a fit about controlling emissions of their cars. Maybe they didn't think this stuff applied to them. Hey, why doesn't Mercedes just make a Peel P50: