The author paints an overly rosy picture of the history of unions and race. In South Africa in the first half of the 20th century the (white) unions often supported apartheid policies, as such policies kept their members from having to compete with black workers. Some may later have come around to an anti-apartheid stance, but claiming that unions have always been natural anti-racists is misleading.
Given the Communist past of many neoconservatives, why exactly is it so surprising to see Communists in Iraq acting neoconnish?
While we're mentioning the able Mr. MacLeod, this brings to mind for me the brilliant line from one of my favorite sections of _Dark Light_ (or was it _Cosmonaut Keep_?):
"Elections are *so* undemocratic."
Of course, if we had a system where representatives were chosen by random lot, we'd probably have stories about the company that writes the random-number-generator routines...
Points taken on Tonkin and Pearl Harbor-- but Ikram gave an even better example with his reference to the Spanish-American War. I think that one meets the standard of "an aggressive, shooting war against the US's long term policy interests to serve the short term domestic political agenda of a particular party." Some, indeed, would argue that the Spanish-American war was the Big Turning Point between republic and empire.
So: not just decades worth of course to reverse, but an entire century. Whee.
While I basically agree with Krugman's point here, I think he's writing as if this sort of corruption and lying were new in American politics, and this strikes me as clearly wrong. Lying us into war is a very old game, and often not a Republican game. Two words: Tonkin Gulf. (I might add "Pearl Harbor", too, but then I'm a kooky radical revisionist anarchist).
Now, depending on your temperament, you can take this as heartening-- look, this sort of thing has been happening for decades and we've survived, Bush is just giving us more of the same; or you can take it as depressing-- damn, we've been going down this rotten road for decades, it'll take decades more to reverse course. I tend to oscillate back and forth.
No, Ashcroft doesn't count; he's a power nut, not a gun nut. He believes, at the present moment, that support for RKBA is to his political advantage. If and when that belief changes he will no doubt jettison his "principle", as he has done in the past on other liberty issues, notably states' rights.
The rest of the politicians you mention fall in to the same category. I am skeptical of the idea that anyone in political office has any real, deeply held beliefs about much of anything, other than the desirability of their remaining in office.
lightning, can you give a single example of a "gun nut" who really doesn't "know or care about the erosion of other rights?" I gave several examples in my last post of gun nuts who do, in fact, know and care.
A few points I haven't seen made in this discussion.
1. I don't know of any serious gun-rights advocates who claim that gun rights are effective bulwarks of liberty *in the absence of* either
(a) other essential rights like free speech and free assembly, or
(b) a culture in which people are willing to risk their own safety to preserve liberty against government.
For example, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (http://www.jpfo.org) is the most firebreathing extremist RKBA group I can think of; and if you look through their educational materials it's clear that they place emphasis on defending the whole Bill of Rights. And Jeffrey Snyder put it quite nicely at the end of his pro-gun essay "A Nation of Cowards":
"This is the uncompromising understanding reflected in the warning that America's gun owners will not go gently into that good, utopian night: "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." While liberals take this statement as evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun owners, we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong sentiments about their printing presses, word processors, and television cameras. The republic depends upon fervent devotion to all our fundamental rights."
2. To evaluate the importance of gun rights as a factor in-- or at least a correlate with-- preserving liberty in general, you need to look at what happens when gun rights are varied while other factors are held as constant as possible. Comparing Iraq to Canada utterly fails to do this, since there are so many other factors that fail to be even close to constant.
One way to get a better comparison is to ask: when the level of gun rights in one country changes over time, do other rights tend to change in the same direction? I'd argue that the examples of the US, Britain, and Canada in the 20th century all give strong positive answers to this question: governments that take gun rights away tend to take other sorts of rights away at the same time. Dave Kopel did a detailed article on the British case called "All the Way Down the Slippery Slope" which is very much worth reading; it's at http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/SlipperySlope.htm.
The aforementioned JPFO would add that there exists a correlation between anti-gun laws and genocide in a variety of countries; see their site for examples.
Now the strength of this conclusion depends on what sorts of rights you consider important; and even if true it only demonstrates correlation, not causation. But it is, at least, an argument to which the Iraq-and-Canada thing isn't a very good response.
3. Graydon's point about the necessity of organization for resistance is well taken. The Founders understood this-- thus the "well-regulated Militia" clause of the Second Amendment. So did the citizen militia groups who organized in the early 1990s and were promptly denounced as crazy racist extremists by all "respectable" opinion. It's a shame they never really got off the ground; it's also a shame that some of their members really were crazy racist extremists. Another addition to the long, long list of good ideas discredited by their advocates.
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| 2003 | 8 |
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