Society

A Mild & Messy Rant, inspired by John Jay

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Thank you, John Jay, for the post below. I started a comment & kept ranting, so made it into a messy post. It remains more a thrown out comment than coherent response. And, of course, mostly I think you are quite right.

Nonetheless, I think Mencken got it really wrong and is an irritating forefather of some of the worst about our culture today – especially his emphasis upon cynicism and his lack of gratitude for the rich tradition we have been given. His belief we need aristocrats is characteristic of his misanthropy which seemed to come from a narrow & bitchy soul. I remember picking up his essays to read on break & feeling physically ill – the pages seened strewn with spittle & venom. You have shown, however, that he did have both a sense of humor and common sense.

Sure post modernism is impenetrable because it is idiotic�being impenetrable is a power play for one thing. This is the same device that the theorists want to be called philosophers & contend they are discussing philosophy. Well, they are writing impenetrable prose about quite abstract, counterintuitive, and often just weird ideas. That doesn�t make it deep.

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Stupid Journalist Tricks and Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” Law

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Strange Women Lying in Ponds eviscerates a tendentious Miami Herald article about Florida’s new self-defense law.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney is quoted in the article:

What you’re going to see is drug dealers using this [i.e., the new law] to settle scores, and the Legislature has basically given them permission

Timoney should know better. Perhaps he does. This quote reflects poorly on him in any case. The Herald plays along, because the reporters and their editors are either too lazy to do a little research or because they like what Timoney is saying or both. The fact is that no matter the changes in the law, anybody who shoots another person is going to receive full investigative scrutiny and be prosecuted if the shooting was not in self-defense. That’s as it should be. (To its credit the article provides a quote from the NRA’s Marion Hammer, who reasonably points out that criminals have claimed self-defense since long before the new law was enacted. However, Hammer’s one quote is offset by numerous quotes from opponents of the law, most of whom ignore the law’s substance.)

In particular, the article’s emphasis of State’s Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s comment that the new law complicates prosecutions misses the point, and the authors mislead by not providing more background on the law. The very reason the law exists is that prosecutors like Fernandez Rundle had gained a reputation for being too willing to prosecute otherwise-law-abiding individuals who defended themselves against violent attacks. The new law exists in part to clarify the legislature’s intent that good-faith attempts at self-defense not be punished. The law would not have been proposed, then easily passed and enacted, if there were no problem with prosecutors who abused their discretion.

UPDATE: A follow up by SWLIP.

(Related posts here and here.)

Remarkable — and Harsh — Photos from China.

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The photos are here.

If there had been color film in the late 19th century USA we would have seen carnage like this as we began to climb the curve of industrialization, ordinary people routinely killed by trains, etc. Except we had democracy and were able to enact laws that led to greater public safety.

The Chinese have a long way to go before their economic take-off can become safe and clean as well as fast.

These images are remote indeed from the glittering skyline of Pudong.

I look at these and I think that the Chinese have a lot on their plate.

I Want to Know What Ginny Has to Say About This

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According to this blog post, the number one goal for baby boomers over the age of 50 is to lose weight.

I have to admit that I am feeling some conflicting emotions about this.

My interest in history has convinced me that living in past centuries was Hobbsian in that life was nasty, brutish and short. In fact, the majority of the world�s population still lives that way. I�m extremely grateful to be living at this time, in this country, where eating too much is a concern for people who would have probably died of old age a century ago.

On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that there should be some other goals that these people should try and achieve.

The rest of the top ten list also strikes me as frivolous. Number 2 is write a book. Goals numbered 3, 4, 5 and 7 is to take some sort of elaborate and expensive vacation.

I’m 42 years old. Does that make me a baby boomer?

Considering this list, I certainly hope not.

(Hat tip to Triticale, the Wheat Guy.)

Hayek on Tradition

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Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason — logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively replaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and displace other groups.

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of SocialismThe Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

(I remembered this passage when reading Shannon’s prior post, entitled On Tradition.)