Month: May 2009

Up From Buddhism, Ctd.

John Horgan's article on Buddhism sparks a reply from Buddhist-esque blogger Scott Payne:

…non-attachment isn’t the same thing as detachment. And in fact, what one starts to realize when one really sits with the idea of non-attachment is that rather than withdrawing from the world altogether, one is actually freed to engage with and experience the world more vividly because one isn’t busy mistaking the transitory for the eternal. One anchors one’s ultimate presence in the eternal, the recognition that ultimately one is united with the ground of being (God), but that one is also a manifestation and expression of that ground that exists and operates in the world of form (samsara). As such, one is freed to articulate the most profound and beautiful expression of that ground one can muster without mistaking the expression for the ground itself (kind of like no mistaking the world as dictated by ideology for the world itself, to use a politically focused metaphor) and so one can avoid becoming weighed down too heavily by the objects of that world and ultimately navigate the terrain of that world in a more skillful and compassionate manner.

Beautifully and movingly put.

Taming The Prince, Ctd.

Linker responds to my post:

Andrew here appears to be admitting that a principled rejection of torture may very well come at an enormous cost to the United States. How many cities would be too many to lose? How many “countless” lives would we be willing to see extinguished for the sake of the principle that we ought never torture? If the principle is absolute, then the number has to be infinite: the United States should accept its own destruction rather than torture a single individual.

But I submit that this can’t be right. Our leaders have a moral duty, a solemn responsibility, to defend the common good — to defend the nation against those who would destroy it — and when the threat is sufficiently grave, this moral imperative may demand that we diverge from our moral principles. How far should we be willing to go in defending ourselves?

Long ago, I conceded that in the one-in-a-million chance (a scenario that has never happened and almost certainly never will) that a terrorist could defuse or locate a weapon of mass destruction in a highly populated city, and there were minutes to spare, and we knew the suspect knew, a president could try torture as a very, very last resort, if he subsequently presented himself to the relevant legal authorities for trial. (I imagine a jury would acquit if the event occurred in incontrovertible good faith).

But apart from that, I simply do not believe that torture ever provides the accurate intelligence we need to prevent such an attack; and believe that more laborious intelligence and much more skillful non-coercive interrogation is the only way to prevent it – and, even then, the chances of being able to do so completely are alarmingly slim in the very long run.

So the dilemma doesn’t really exist in the practical world. But I freely concede that in an open and free society, with the dangers inherent in Jihadist terror, in an age of mass destruction, there will almost certainly come a time when we will have to endure serious human and physical damage. Unless we get much smarter or get really lucky, this will happen. It only takes a handful of people in a vast country with relatively open borders to do enormous damage, as we found out on 9/11. And they didn’t even have WMDs. If Jihadists really want to murder us (and they do) and if weapons of mass destruction get into their hands (and what are the odds against that at some point in our lifetimes?) then we will have to endure what the British endured in the Blitz and the Germans endured in Dresden and the Japanese endured in Hiroshima.

And if we do not have the Constitution on the other side of it, the victory will be theirs’. Yes: that’s what America means – freedom, not total security. Man up and face it, like the first Americans did. Believe in our system as powerfully as they believe in theirs’.

Souter’s Political Leanings

Orin Kerr thinks that labeling Souter a "Yankee Republican" is ridiculous:

…consider the fact that the two Justices on the current Court who vote most frequently with each other are often Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg. Looking at the current Supreme Court Term, for example, the Souter/Ginsburg pairing is the most common: They have fully agreed with each other 88% of the time. The next closest pairings are Scalia/Roberts at 83%, Roberts/Alito at 81%, and Thomas/Scalia at 79%.

I think it is generally recognized that Justice Ginsburg is not a Yankee Republican, and that she would not have been a Republican if the GOP had not become more conservative. Everyone pretty much agrees that Justice Ginsburg is very much a Democrat and at least somewhere on the left. But if the Souter/Ginsburg pairing is the closest pairing on the Court, closer than Thomas/Scalia, then isn't it a little strange to say that one is a liberal Democrat but the other is a Yankee Republican who only "seems" liberal?

I meant the term Yankee Republican primarily as a cultural moniker, but it's also true, I think, that its current incarnation is almost certainly closer to the Ginsburg view of the world than that of the current GOP or Thomas and Scalia. It is no accident that New England has pioneered marriage equality. I will grant one caveat, of course, and many readers noted it: Kelo.

The Dems Embrace Nuclear?

InsideEPA has the scoop. Bradford Plumer reacts:

[W]hen McCain tacked on nuclear subsidies to his own cap-and-trade bill back in 2005, he ended up losing four votes from liberal Senate Democrats. So it always seemed like there was a trade-off on this issue—add incentives for nuclear power to woo Republicans, and you lose votes on the left. But if [EPA senior counsel David] McIntosh is correct, it sounds like liberal Dems would rather cave on nuclear than see the whole bill go down in defeat this time around.

Thank God. I'm hoping for some technological breakthrough but, barring that, any plan for reducing carbon emissions without nuclear power is posturing. It's like the Glenn Reynolds position that you can cut pork to fiscal balance. It's pandering and preening and politics – not serious climate change policy.

Who Will “Sister Souljah” Them?

COULTEREvanAgostini:Getty

It’s time to reclaim conservatism from Coulter and O’Reilly and Limbaugh and Hannity. Reihan:

Conservatives don’t need higher volume. Conservatism at its best is a tough and demanding creed. To sell it, you can’t call people who’ve lost their jobs and their homes “losers.” You need to sell the virtues of a growing and flourishing economy and the free-market policies that will make it happen. Because conservatives aren’t a majority, hard-edged accusations of socialism wind up alienating millions of potential allies — voters who are a little uncomfortable with Obama’s spending, particularly if it threatens to saddle their children with debt, but who recognize that the government needs to act to stave off an economic collapse.

Take yours truly. I’m not a Democrat and if pushed, I’d have to say right now I’m a libertarian independent. I’m uneasy about Obama’s long-term debt, to say the least, but I’m intelligent enough to know it’s not Obama’s as such, but mainly Bush’s, and I’m also cognizant that the time to cut back may not be in the middle (or beginning) of a brutal depression. On most issues, I side with what used to be the center-right, but the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?

Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders – from the dumb-as-a-post Steele to the brittle, money-grubbing cynic, Coulter and hollow, partisan neo-fascist Hannity.

I’m waiting for the first leading Republican to do to these grandstanding goons what Clinton once did to the extremists in his own ranks: reject them, excoriate them, remind people that they do not have a monopoly on conservatism and that decent right-of-center people actually find their vision repellent. And then to articulate a positive vision for taking this country forward, expanding liberty, exposing corruption, reducing government’s burden, unwinding ungovernable empire, and defending civic virtue without going on Jihads against other people’s vices.

If today’s “conservatives” spent one tenth of the time saying what they were for rather than who they’re against, they might get somewhere. But the truth is: whom they hate is their core motivation right now. That’s how they define themselves. And as long as they do, Americans will rightly and soundly reject them.

Kindle’s Big Screen

But the NYT shouldn't kid itself about a knight in shining armor:

Amazon will reportedly unveil a new large-screen Kindle Wednesday. The company just scheduled a press conference for Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. in New York City at Pace University. Get the subtle hint?

Despite that subtle hint—holding a press conference at a university (textbooks people!)—a lot of folks are missing the big picture of these large screen Kindles (Techmeme). A bevy of outlets are talking about how big screen Kindles will save the newspaper industry (as if we’re all married to reading broadsheets) …

The reality: If Amazon is going to save the newspaper and magazine industry it will just be a side effect on the way to tackling a much bigger market: The college textbook industry, which carries some meaty margins.