Tag Archives: Left

News

Are liberal lawyers and law professors in favor of open debate?

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Here’s a great post over at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog.

The topic of the post is a high-profile meeting  of lawyers and law professors at NYU Law School to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision that allow businesses to make political donations to candidates in the same way that trial lawyer organizations and teacher unions and abortion providers do. The meeting was supposed to be an open and honest debate on the issues. Was it?

Excerpt:

The most disturbing aspect of the meeting was that everyone took for granted that the the decision had been wrongly decided. There was no free trade in ideas about the correctness or incorrectness of the decision; only a discussion about how to overturn the decision.

In their modus operandi the assembled lawyers were ignoring the marketplace of ideas in favor of their own dogmatic beliefs. These defenders of the marketplace of ideas were constitutionally incapable of finding any merit whatever in an opposing viewpoint.

If you refuse to allow an idea (whether a policy or a belief) to be tested against reality, then the question becomes who has the strongest faith. True believers are willing to fight and die to prove that their strength is strongest, thus, most true.

[…]Why were the assembled liberal lawyers so lathered up about the Citizens United decision. Simply, because they believed, dogmatically and unthinkingly, that corporate money was fundamentally corrupt and corrupting. Corporations were sinners; they had acquired their money by less than idealist means; they had no right to try to influence the democratic political process.

Again, dogmatic belief leads to a fighting faith. Why? Perhaps they wanted to maintain their own monopoly control of correct opinion. The greatest enemy of free trade in ideas today is the monopoly on dogmatic belief that is maintained by the educational and media establishments.

Surely, opposing views are aired, through conservative talk radio and through Fox News. But these engines of the free market in ideas are often subject to attack. Those who prefer a more mercantilist, monopoly control over the marketplace in ideas, want to invoke the fairness doctrine to shut down much of conservative talk radio. They often try to discredit Fox News for trafficking in hate speech.

As several of the commenters on the Times site pointed out, none of these great legal minds seem to have the least problem with the influence that labor unions exert on elections through their political advertising. At a time when the political power of labor unions has brought states, cities, and counties to the brink of bankruptcy… lawyers are about to go to war to stop corporations from spending money on political advertising.

This post highlights a change in my own views. I once wanted to be a lawyer, you see. And my judicial philosophy was one of idealism and judicial activism. But after reading Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” three times, I am now a strict constructionist, while respecting rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Legislating from the bench now seems to me to be the wrong point of view. Injustices need to be fixed by legislators elected by the people, not by an appointed oligarchy of out-of-touch judges. So don’t ever say that I don’t change my mind when confronted with the evidence! It happens all the time. Well, sometimes.

News

Investigation shows RPGs and RPG rounds found at “Collateral Murder” site

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The Weekly Standard explains the story.

Excerpt:

Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military “murdered” a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi “civilians” in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but “Collateral Murder,” as Wikileaks describes the incident.

The Weekly Standard article states, “several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG”.

Now consider this post from the Jawa Report, which talks about the after action investigation of the events, and has a clip showing a man holding a long object that looks like an RPG. If you look as the frames from the video, it looks more like an RPG than an AK-47 assault rifle, since there is no curved magazine, but instead a short, stubby grip and a round warhead on the end of it.

Here’s the smoking gun frame:

That looks like an RPG-7 warhead not a curved AK-47 assault rifle magazine

In my judgment, it looks like a Russian RPG-7 or a Chinese Type 69. An RPG is an unguided rocket-propelled grenade that can destroy a Humvee (Hummer) and kill everyone in it with one shot.

An RPG-7/Type 69 looks like this:

And an AK-47 looks like this:

And what’s more, the investigation report (cited by Jawa) says that RPGs and live RPG rounds were found next to the bodies.

The investigation report states:

We remained above the engagement site while Bushmaster sent ground forces to the site. Bushmaster arrived and reported 11 x AIF KIA and found RPGs and RPG rounds at the site. We also witnessed a loaded RPG lying 2-3 blocks south of the engagement site. Bushmaster reported that the first child was wounded and pulled from the van. We were unable to determine that there were children in the vehicle and never saw any children prior to or during the engagement. After viewing the gun tape, were able to determine that both wounded children came from the van. Bushmaster immediately MEDEVAC’d both girls to FOB Loyalty for medical care.

Bushmaster is the call-sign for the ground force that was being covered by the helicopter. The ground force was composed of Humvees. Humvees that would likely be destroyed by an AT RPG round. (And probably by an HE round, too.) At the Jawa Report post, you can see a photo taken from the dead journalist’s camera of the Humvees rounding the corner and coming into line of sight to the RPG-armed terrorists.

I’m sorry, but this is war. This. Is. War. Bad things happen in wars. The world is not a perfect place.

Journalists like those who were killed should not be embedding with terrorists and then expecting to be immune to collateral damage. Our American military forces are the most honorable and moral soldiers in the world. They do their best to follow the rules of engagement. In this case, they acted appropriately. I am thankful and proud of their self-sacrificial service to protect my liberty and the liberty of the Iraqi people. Shame on those in the leftist media who question their judgment. Shame! Shame!

News

MUST-READ: How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness

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Minette Marrin

Story by Minette Marrin here from the UK Times.

Excerpt:

In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.”

The culture is passed on, as you might expect. Lone grannies are significantly more likely to have lone and workless daughters than grannies with husbands or employment, and the same is true of their daughters’ daughters. Baby daughters (and baby sons, too) are imbibing with their mother’s milk the idea that men, like jobs, are largely unnecessary in any serious sense.

The problem with this new type of extended family, Dench says, is that it is not self-sustaining but tends to be parasitic on conventional families in the rest of society. In fact, it appears to lead inexorably to the nightmare of an unproductive dependent underclass.

Clearly one of the worst problems with such a subculture is that although it’s not self-sustaining it has a powerful tendency to replicate itself. A boy in such an environment who grows up without a father figure is much less likely — for many well documented reasons — to turn into the sort of young man a girl could see as a desirable husband. A girl who grows up without a father never learns how important a man could be in her own child’s life. She will not see her mother negotiating an adult relationship with a male companion, so she won’t know how to do it herself or imagine what she is missing.

Before anyone starts to point the finger of blame at such girls, it’s worth remembering that many of them are simply making a rational choice. Badly educated at a rough sink school, facing a dead-end, low-paid job that won’t even cover the cost of childcare, such a girl will naturally decide to do what she wants to do anyway and have a baby to love. She knows she will be better off having welfare babies than stacking shelves and better off, too, if she avoids having a man living with her, even supposing she could find one from among the antisocial, lone-parented youths on her estate. That is because the state subsidises this rational choice, disastrous though it has proved, and has done so for decades.

Women quite understandably now talk of such lifestyle choices as their right. They’ve been encouraged to. And the state has actually made poor men redundant.

Please read the whole thing, this may be the most important thing I have ever posted on this blog.

I want to suggest that it is women’s embrace of radical feminism that has caused the shortage of men. The “compassion” (just give bad people your money!),  and moral relativism (don’t judge me!), etc. that young, unmarried women seem to like so much these days are in direct opposition to marriage, family and parenting. It undermines the reasons why men marry in the first place. And I’ll explain why.

First, moral relativism. Women today seem to have lost the ability to filter out men based on whether they can commit and fill the role of father and husband. They prefer to “have sex like a man” and to not judge anyone. But the reason why they refuse to make moral judgments is because they don’t want to be judged themselves. Instead of learning how to be a wife and mother, women have embraced partying and hooking up. But hooking up (and friends with benefits, and cohabitation) DO NOT result in a man committing to a woman as a husband and father for life.

Second, big government. The solution that women embrace because of their fear of abandonment by men is to lobby for more and more government programs to give them security no matter how they choose. They don’t want to restrain themselves in order to avoid causing expensive social damage, e.g. – STDs, abortion, divorce, etc. They just want to do have fun and then have someone else pay the costs. But if working men have money taxed away to pay for things like abortions and welfare, then they cannot afford to form families on their own – especially if they want to raise Christian children outside the day care/public school system that they are paying for but won’t use.

Could it be that the reason that men are no longer suitable for marriage is because the incentives they had to marry (regular sex, the respect of filling the role of protector and provider, being able to lead the family spiritually in the home, and having well-behaved hand-raised children) have been taken away by moral relativism and big government? Could it be that the man shortage is caused by women who CHOOSE to be irresponsible about who they have sex with, and who CHOOSE to rely on bigger government as a fallback for their poor decision-making?

You all know that I want to fall in love and get married. This is probably the number one thing stopping me from doing that. The feminist idea that men are evil and can be replaced with government programs is now dominant in the West. This basically means that my children will be less prosperous, less free and less secure than I am. I do not want my children to have the poor character that results from being dependent on a secular left government for their livelihood. And I am also concerned about the kind of world the children will live in as the traditional family, which is a bulwark against state power, declines in influence.

I wish women started to think about how marriage and parenting really work. Instead of thinking about recycling and vegetarianism, women should be thinking about forming their own character for the role of wife and mother. They should be thinking about how to strengthen men’s roles instead of weakening them through premarital sex and big government. They should have the attitude of wanting to learn about obstacles that will prevent a good marriage – and not just ideas but threats to the finances and liberty of the family. They should not believe that “everything will work out as long as we love each other”. Love takes preparation and work.

By the way, this article from the libertarian Cato Institute explains more about how the government creates financial incentives for people to break up families and harm children.

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