If it serves the cause it can’t be illegal.
Elections
Seth Barrett Tillman: The Case of the Ship Money, R v Hampden 3 State Trials 381 (1640), and its relevance today
In The Ship Money Case [R v Hampden 3 State Trials 825 (1637), superseded by Act Declaring the Illegality of Ship-Money, Aug. 7, 1641, 17 Charles I, chapter 14], a bare majority of the judges of the Court of Exchequer Chamber voted for the Crown and against Hampden, the tax payer, who objected to being forced to pay purported taxes absent parliamentary consent.
100 years from now which will be recognized as the more odious decision? Hampden or Miller? Hampden merely opposed Parliament; Miller opposed a national popular referendum.
Read the whole, brief, thing.
(I’m guessing Hampden wasn’t one of the foreign laws our own Justice Ginsburg had in mind.)
Sell Your Soul or Lose Your Livelihood
Sebastian Haffner, whose memoir I reviewed here, describes what happened to his father–a civil servant under both Weimar and the Kaiser–following the Nazi takeover. The elder Haffner, long-since retired, had considerable accomplishments to his credit: “There had been great pieces of legislation in his administrative area, on which he had worked closely. They were important, daring, thoughtful, intellectual achievements, the fruits of decades of experience and years of intense, meticulous analysis and dedicated refinement”–and it was extremely painful to him to see this work ruthlessly trashed by the new government. But worse was to come.
One day Mr Haffner received an official letter. It required him to list all of the political parties, organizations, and associations to which he had ever belonged in his life and to sign a declaration that he ‘stood behind the government of national uprising without reservations.’ Failure to sign would mean the loss of his pension, which he had earned through 45 years of devoted service.
After agonizing about it for several days, he finally filled out the form, signed the declaration, and took it to the mailbox before he could change his mind.
“He had hardly sat down at his desk again when he jumped up and began to vomit convulsively. For two or three days he was unable to eat or keep down any food. It was the beginning of a hunger strike by his body, which killed him cruelly and painfully two years later.”
Haffner Senior was retired; he would surely have no chance for other employment if he crossed the new regime. He could either violate his convictions and sign the document, or sentence his wife and himself to total impoverishment and possibly actual starvation.
As recently as 10 years ago, it would have seemed unlikely that any American would have to face Mr Haffner’s dilemma. But things have changed. If current trends continue, it is very likely that YOU will have to foreswear your beliefs or face career and financial devastation.
Plenty of markers along this dark path are already visible. Things are worst in academia, it seems. At Yale, lecturer Erika Christakis resigned after being vitriolically attacked for suggesting that people not get all stressed up about Halloween costumes. Her husband, Nicholas, has also resigned from Yale. Ms Christakis says that many of those were intellectually supportive of the couple were afraid to make their support public: “Numerous professors, including those at Yale’s top-rated law school, contacted us personally to say that it was too risky to speak their minds. Others who generously supported us publicly were admonished by colleagues for vouching for our characters.”
Just the other day, I ran across this article, which uncomfortably parallels the Haffner story.
(Iowa State University) students are told that they must abide by the school’s policy against “harassment” of anyone in the university community. Students must complete a “training program” consisting of 118 slides online, covering the university’s non-harassment policies and procedures, and then pledge never to violate them.
But what if a student thinks that the ISU policy goes way beyond preventing true harassment and amounts to an abridgement of his rights under the First Amendment?
In that case, ISU reserves the right to withhold the student’s degree. So either the student agrees to abide by the policy even though it may well keep him from speaking out as he’d like to, or have his academic work go for naught.
Iowa State is going beyond ‘only’ requiring you to shut up about your opinions and will also require you to positively affirm beliefs which you may not share.
The attack on individuals’ careers and finances due to their political/philosophical beliefs is by no means limited to academia. There is the case of Brendan Eich, who was pushed out as CEO of Mozilla because of his personal support (in 2008) of a law which banned same-sex marriage in California. There are multiple cases of small businesspeople subjected to large fines because of their refusal to violate their convictions by baking a cake or providing other services for a same-sex wedding.
And don’t think that just because you support gay marriage…even if you support what you think is 100% of the ‘progressive’ worldview–that you are safe. Deviationism can always be found, as the Old Bolsheviks discovered during the time of Stalin. Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, herself a self-defined feminist, was investigated by the university after complaints were made about an essay she published under the title “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academia.” Kipnis writes:
A tenured professor on my campus wrote about lying awake at night worrying that some stray remark of hers might lead to student complaints, social-media campaigns, eventual job loss, and her being unable to support her child. I’d thought she was exaggerating, but that was before I learned about the Title IX complaints against me.
“Trump’s vow to end mutual absolution between parties threatens Democrats”
Some interesting speculations about the Democrats’ motives in the current election:
But once he won, something rather unexpected happened: True to his claim of being a political outsider, Trump broke with an unwritten rule that Republicans and Democrats historically had abided by. Under that understanding, administrations of both parties basically guaranteed implied amnesties for legal breaches to outgoing administrations. The best recent example for this implied agreement was the failure of the Bush Junior administration to pursue any of a number of potential criminal claims against members of the Clinton administration. In other words, any administration that made it through its term without being indicted, was basically assured of no further legal consequences.
The knowledge that one just had to survive till the end of an administration, has been at the core of quantitative and qualitative increases in government corruption this country has witnessed in recent decades, and nobody has been better in “surviving” than the last two Democratic administrations of Presidents Clinton and Obama.
[. . .]
That six days before the election Trump has in national opinion polls pulled even with Clinton, therefore, set off alarm bells among the Democratic elites. The election, suddenly, has become an existential fight for survival, far exceeding the traditional conflict for power and the spoils of power.
We, therefore, can expect Clintonians and Democratic party, in cahoots with a majority of major media, in the last few days before the election to initiate a political bloodbath in attempts to derail Donald Trump. The election no longer is about who gains or retains the privileges of power but, as Trump stated, who goes to jail.
Worth reading in full.
Human Emotions and the Nuclear Codes
Two stories about Hillary Clinton:
1–Yossi Tzur, who lost his son, Assaf, in a terror bus bombing in Israel, described the meetings with a number of American officials that he participated in when he came to this country as part of a delegation including other families of terror victims:
“We were welcomed with warmth, with empathy, all heard us and gave us their attention, well, almost everybody.”
Tzur went on to describe the delegation’s meeting with Rudy Giuliani. “You could feel the warmth of the man, his humanity, his care,” he wrote. “You could see tears in his eyes when he told the stories. The meeting was scheduled for an hour, it took almost two hours and then he stood with us patiently taking photos with each and every one.”
From New York, the delegation went to Washington for a series of meetings, one of them was in the Senate with NY Senator Hilary Clinton. Tzur recalled that “we arrived at her office in the Senate and were shown into a small meeting room, it could hardly fit all of us, it was dark, crowded, it didn’t even had water on the table. So we waited.
“Time went by, 15 minutes, 30, an hour. Her aides were embarrassed saying she is coming any minute now. After an hour and a half Clinton arrived.
“She looked as us seeing the group in the room, we could see she is not really there with us, we felt she was impatient and just looking to finish it and go. We felt really uncomfortable… Even before we could speak she said, you probably want a photo, come let’s go out, leading us to the stairs. There she asked us to stand on the stairs and one of her aides took the photo. We still wanted to talk to her, people came ready to tell her their story, she didn’t intend to hear, it looked she didn’t want to hear. With inhuman coldness she went out amongst us all and disappeared in one of the corridors leaving us shocked and disappointed.”
2–Linda Tripp, White House secretary during the Bill Clinton administration, describes the reactions of Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton while watching the horrible Waco “law-enforcement operation” (in which 76 people died, including many children) unfold on television:
“A special bulletin came on [CNN] showing the atrocity at Waco and the children. And his face, his whole body slumped, and his face turned white, and he was absolutely crushed knowing, knowing the part he had played. And he had played the part at Mrs. Clinton’s direction.
Her reaction, on the other hand, was heartless. And I can only tell you what I saw.”
Indeed, it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton does not possess the normal human complement of emotional reactions, that she is cold and robotic. Something is definitely missing there.
Democrats and their supporters keep arguing that Donald Trump must not be trusted with the nuclear codes. In my view–if a decision for or against a nuclear launch must be made, I’d prefer it to be made by someone that can understand at a visceral level what it means for real people. Which would not be Hillary Clinton, who really does not appear to see other human beings as anything other than tools in her unending power games.
There has been much discussion lately about whether decisions in war can be entrusted to intelligent robots. I’d rather not see the most important military decision of all time made by a human robot.