…the Saints did play like champions.  And it was a pretty damn good game right up until the end. After that interception, though, you could tell the Colts were rattled.  Peyton Manning especially.  That was the nail in the coffin right there, except it was the Colts and they’ve pulled back from worse brinks before.

I enjoyed the game.  I don’t watch much in the way of sports, but I do love a good football game.  On that note – anyone here read any good sports-bloggers?

Oh, and I knew this ad would get some blog-traction today.

For a slightly more dystopian take, read this.  Given the state of affairs we’re in over the growing and consumption of certain illicit plants this is not so far-fetched.  And if it is far-fetched, then so is the war on drugs.  So is the light-bulb ban.

My favorite ad – probably the stuff from Doritos.  I laughed the hardest when that kid slapped the guy for taking his chip.

And I’m pretty excited about the new Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie, which I hadn’t heard anything about until last night.  I was a big fan of Gladiator and I’ve always been big on Robin Hood stories.  I remember seeing Kevin Costner’s version when I was ten, in a movie theater in Florida.  The audience cheered after Morgan Freeman’s speech.  Yes, those were simpler times.  I still have a soft-spot for that movie, warts and all.  I mean, who cares about the accent?  If anything, Costner’s performance led directly to some really good lines in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

You can have an open-thread here if y’all would like….

P.S. – I’m with Sonny Bunch (in the comments) on this one – to some degree.  I think the ad was a parody of enviro-extremism, but I also think it didn’t take seriously the question of the security state.  In other words, while it parodied the green movement, it laughed off the very real threat of the creeping security state, which can use green policies as easily as it can use marijuana or terrorism to grow and further intrude upon our privacy.

I’m always amazed to read essays on classical music from the 18th and 19th centuries. The writers, often with no more musical training than I have (i.e. none), also would have necessarily had to listen to the pieces performed live, maybe only once. And yet, their attention was such that they picked up on nuances that elude me after hearing these works dozens of times. There are many works I have never heard unmediated by some form of recording and playback technology. And I wonder if music, possibly the most abstract of the arts, doesn’t demand direct attention bordering on meditation. When I read Proust’s description of Swann’s total rapture at the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata (fiction, but seemingly rooted in a common experience of the late 1800s), it’s hard not to wonder if the technology that we now live our lives steeped in doesn’t somehow objectify music, turning it into a thing that can be easily chopped up, replicated, and manipulated, or silenced and neglected; if it doesn’t also handicap our aesthetic and emotional response by reducing the spiritual in music to its empty digital husk.

I thought about this while sitting in an uncongenially wooden pew in Toronto’s lovely Trinity St. Paul’s Centre waiting to hear the baroque orchestra Tafelmusik (with bass-baritone Tyler Duncan) perform Bach’s cantata 82. Perhaps this minor cynicism was triggered by a page in the program begging people under-30 to come for “pay-what-you-can” discounts; the absence of more than four other people in this packed audience who were below the retirement age; and that one of them, roughly my age, sat in front of me and jittered throughout the performance, unable to get through an aria without pecking and fondling his Blackberry. I finally had to close my eyes to focus. Can you even catch wind of Bach while trying to IM jokes to your girlfriend?

The music, of course, rewards close attention. Jacques Barzun emphasizes: “Bach’s genius for adapting music to meaning”, particularly in the cantatas and the three Passions, pointing out that the St. Matthew Passion: “is not a virtuoso exercise in patterning but the fusion of patterns with dramatic purpose: there is a text, the words describe a scene, the music fits the words and the action.” The scene here is especially profound: a pious old man witnesses the incarnation before his death. The music is deeply and emotionally expressive. I think it also captures something we’ve discussed here in the comments: how religious believers live in the tension between time and timelessness, Becoming and Being, Immanence and Transcendence. [Read more →]

Ages, places, and nations sometimes have characteristic architectural forms. Sometimes these forms, like vinyl-clad McMansions, or the decrepit and vaguely totalitarian National Mall, tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know, and surely most places and times have an architecture of that kind. Other forms are characteristic not only of some virtue or vice in a society, however, but its self-understanding. The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.

Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below. This gratification, I suggest, is one of the many ways in which modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages.

Nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble. The systematic use of the method, institutionalized in journals and laboratories, is characteristically modern, but the psychology of the scientists who employ it represents a Christian ideal. Many scientists seem to feel a passionate, personal joy at the ordered reasonableness of the universe, or more specifically, that it is reasonable, but its reasons are never exhausted. This joy is a species of the joy in being qua being that Aquinas, speaking for the Christian tradition, claimed to be the proper disposition of all Christians toward the created order.  You have to know some scientists personally, I think, to realize that scientists are like this, because scientists themselves are not encouraged to articulate it, though sometimes you do hear statements in the press about how a new finding is “really darn cool.”

Being happy merely to see and to understand, as scientists are, is the feeling responsible for observation decks, whose most intellectually incurious and aesthetically stolid visitors thrill with joy as they marvel at the works of Man and discover how familiar neighborhoods tessellate. Though surmise about the psychology of ages past is hazardous, I’ll venture to guess that the civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history.

I write all of this by way of introduction, since this is my first post at the League and much of my blogging will be characterized by choleric and occasionally intemperate hostility towards liberal democracy and industrial capitalism, such that you might mistake me for a Front Porcher in an ordinary gentleman’s clothing. So, while I am interested in the alienation of man from himself that is peculiar to modernity, I don’t forget that modernity has created new possibilities of experience we would do wrong to abandon. I also believe that the joy I described above animates the best bloggers on the internet, and I hope it will characterize my own blogging here.

Daniel Larison makes a point that should be blindingly obvious were it not for the need for our talking heads to turn every single election into a referendum on the talking heads’ own framing of the President’s agenda:

“What we have been seeing in all of the elections over the last year is a readiness on the part of the electorate to oust the parties that have traditionally held sway in the district or state in question….The candidates that could best address the local concerns of voters prevailed. Those identified with distrusted political establishments or discredited national parties failed.”

I assure you, the average New Jerseyan is smart enough to recognize that their state governor has approximately no relevance to the President of the United States.  I am quite certain that the foibles of the New Jersey state Democratic Party and of former Governor Corzine, and the state’s own economic problems had about 1000 times more to do with why there is a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion right now than anything related to President Obama or Democrats in Congress.  As early as March or April of last year, Democrats in this state were already certain that Corzine would lose.  Indeed, Christie led in every single poll taken between January and September of last year, almost always well outside the margin of error.   Even casting aside that this was a governor’s race, it seems rather unlikely that New Jersey voters were already looking forward to sending President Obama a message a week after he was sworn, and less than 3 months after they had overwhelmingly voted him into office. 

 It was only in September and October, when it became clear that Christie was just another establishment Republican, that Corzine caught up in the polls and turned it into a meaningful race again.  Ultimately, Christie pulled it out by four points, but this was a far cry from the 10-15 point leads he was consistently polling in July and August.  For anyone who had actually been following this race, the shocking thing wasn’t that the People’s Republic of New Jersey elected a Republican; it was that a Republican with a reputation for fighting political corruption almost blew an opportunity to rout a Democratic Party and administration known primarily for its corruption and incompetence.  Yet somehow the meme that came out was something along the lines of “New Jersey Voters Send Obama a Message.”

But most importantly, as Larison points out, when times are tough, voters blame incumbents.  They don’t just blame the party in power in Washington – they blame the people who are supposed to represent them, they seek out more competent candidates, or they savage the establishment of whatever party is most relevant.  That’s what happened in NJ, it’s what happened in NY-23 (both with respect to Hoffman’s destruction of Scozzafava and the Dems’ ultimate victory), and it’s at least arguably a big part of what happened in Massachusetts, where angry voters combined with a terrible Dem candidate and a very good Republican candidate to create a perfect storm. 

To the extent voters are sending a message to Washington, it’s simply this: It’s not all about you.

Not much to add to this one, except to say that it gives us an amazing window into the paradoxes of a country facing the pressures of globalization and traditional culture (what used to be called The Lexus and The Olive Tree). Or in this case, The Cell Phone and the Camel.

Politically, the video shows that the country cannot be viewed solely through the lens of its small (but potentially quite dangerous) al-Qaeda presence.

The rebellion in the north involves the Shi’a Houthi people, so there is no real likelihood that al-Qaeda would merge with that movement. The secessionist movement in the South, however, does have the potential to be co-opted byal-Qaeda. But  if the US keeps funneling money, arms, and/or training to the Yemenese goverment without paying much attention, the President and his cronies will use that opportunity to eliminate domestic opposition, broadly labeling anyone who criticizes them “al-Qaeda.”

Anyone recall Pakistan under Musharraf?

Opponents of high speed rail make several points about its viability: rail is a “19th century” mode of transportation; rail would be under-used and therefore would need massive subsidies to function; infrastructure in the cities connected by high speed rail is not sufficient to make this form of transportation efficient or cost-effective; even if rail is eventually necessary, right now it is impractical due to the ready supply of cheap oil.  Others point to the fact that the contracts for these rail systems will largely go to foreign companies, thus raising questions about their stimulative effects here at home.

I think these are all very good arguments.  And if we had an endless supply of oil and gas, and thus an endless source of cheap fossil fuels for our car-culture, I think that they would be good enough arguments to discourage any support of federal high speed rail projects.  However at some point I believe we will be short enough on fuel that it will become cost-prohibitive to commute or travel long distances in cars.  Having a rail infrastructure in place at that point will be instrumental in shifting toward a less car-driven economy. Local efforts to remake cities along more pedestrian and mass-transit lines can be more focused since the big inter-city travel routes will be developed already.

Of course there are difficulties. Rail suffers the same disadvantage alternative energy suffers: that is, heavily subsidized fossil fuels and a modern infrastructure built entirely around the use of fossil fuels make any effort to compete nearly impossible – at least not without further subsidies.  Removing subsides for fossil fuels could help level the playing field, but I don’t see that happening ever really. No politician wants that blood on their hands.  Nor do I see a sensible carbon tax replacing the silly and probably doomed attempt at cap and trade.

Via Andrew, Jonathan Bernstein thinks the Democrats should pass the bill regardless of the public’s distaste for the process:

Reconciliation is thirty years old, and there’s nothing at all wrong with using it to pass legislation.  What’s more, pass and patch (or pass-then-patch) involves passing health care reform through perfectly normal, regular, procedures — and then fixing the original bill through reconciliation.  Now, granted, Republicans are apt to complain about procedure, and it’s true that Americans don’t like partisan squabbles and don’t like hearing about procedure.  But once the bill is passed, it seems very likely that the national press will tire of procedural complaints about a bill passed weeks, and then months, ago.

Second, it’s a real mistake for Democrats to worry too much about how Republicans will portray things that they do.  Republicans are naturally going to bash Democrats for everything; should Democrats respond by doing nothing?  Surely not.  Democrats should do things that they believe are good for the nation.  Democrats believe that health care reform is good for the nation.  They are, like it or not, going to be attacked for health care reform. Those who get their information only from Republican news sources will believe those attacks — but people who get their information only from those sources are not swing voters.

Regardless of my own feelings about this bill – which are mixed, to say the least – I think Bernstein is correct.  The electorate has a short memory. Tangible results stick in that memory far more than abstract procedures. Six months after the bill is passed, most Americans will still not know what reconciliation is, which deals were struck, and so forth, but a healthy portion of voters will know that healthcare reform succeeded (for now).  More Americans will be glad to hear that an end to pre-existing conditions clauses has been hammered out then will become emotionally revved up over the Democrat’s handling of the process.  It’s possible that the bill will remain unpopular, but it’s hard to see how giving up entirely will look any better for the Democrats.

That being said, I don’t think the Democrats have what it takes to push this thing through reconciliation or patch it up after passing it in the House.  Unlike their opponents, the Democrats have very lackluster party discipline.  The centrists are already calling a halt, and the progressives in the House seem unwilling to pass the Senate bill because it’s too conservative for their taste.  The president hasn’t taken much of a leadership role either, and so the bill remains in legislative purgatory.  My guess is that Keith Hennessey is correct, and the bill is dead. 

Perhaps legislators can come back with more modest proposals in the future, but I imagine it will be far in the future.  While I would love to see market reforms in the health insurance market, I don’t believe that Republicans are very serious even about their own ideas.  This is largely the basis for my own support of the Democrats’ bill.  While there are certainly libertarians and conservatives with alternative proposals for healthcare reform, Republican leadership has historically been against any changes to the status quo.  I don’t think the status quo is sustainable.  If the bill dies, I’m not really sure what we can expect.  If I thought the Republicans would take up the cause of a bill like Wyden-Bennett and join ranks with Democrats to push something through as an alternative, I would be more optimistic.  As it stands, every outcome looks grim.  Healthcare costs in the public and private sector continue to rise unsustainably, and our system is too broken to do anything about it.

P.S. Reconciliation is not necessarily a budget-restricted procedure, however due to the Byrd rule that is now the case.  However, anyone who thinks that the budget and healthcare reform are not inextricably linked needs to talk to Paul Ryan about the matter.  Healthcare is the budget, and without addressing it we will never be able to right this fiscal ship.

I’m just not feeling the serious blogging today. So following on Will’s post noting the stoopid spat between Obama and various Nevada politicians I give you further variations on what I term, “I am duly offended, Mr. President…”

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t head on down to Boca Raton to shuffle board your worries away when you’re worried about your 401K.

McCain: I heard that…

Crist: I am not gay… unless that sort of thing would help me in a Democratic primary…

Grayson: Republicans want you to die!

—

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t suck back a bunch of cotton candy at Disneyland before riding the Matterhorn without proper health care coverage or travel insurance.

Feinstein: I think we do go slower on the Matterhorn. People do not understand it. It is so big it is beyond their comprehension. And if you don’t understand it when somebody tells you it does this or it does that and it’s not true, you tend to believe it, even though it isn’t true. It’s hard to debunk all of the myths that are out there. In my view when people are earning, when their home is secure, when their children are going to school, and they are relatively satisfied with their life and there’s a problem like the Matterhorn – they want it solved. It doesn’t threaten them. The size of this ride threatens them. And that’s one of the problems that’s got to be straightened out.

Hunter: Yeah, that’s going to be part of this whole thing. It’s not just gays and lesbians. Its a whole gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual community. If you’re going to let anybody no matter what preference – what sexual preference they have that means the Matterhorn is going to probably let everybody in. Its going to be like civilian life and the I think that that would be detrimental for the Matterhorn.

Schwarzenegger: It’s not a tumor!

—

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t go moose hunting in Juneau without your bible close at hand.

Begich: Alaska is also not just a moose freezer.

Stevens: A moose is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s, it’s a series of tubes.

Palin: Death panels! Death panels!

Sullivan: Is Trig really the offspring of a magical moose mercilessly hunted by humankind who, ironically, handed him to Sarah Palin to give him a “normal” life? We’ll never know because Palin won’t release the medical records!

Feel free to add your own variations in the comments.

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Western literature begins with The Iliad and, until recently, it was assumed that no educated person in the west could have skipped it. Set during a few days in the tenth year of the Greek assault on the Trojan city of Ilion, the epic perhaps refers to an actual war, but remembered dimly and filtered through a storyline of gods interacting with men, and men being undone by pride, anger, arrogance, and lust. Kierkegaard wrote that the Iliad was the perfect epic because it combined a great poet with a great subject matter. The Greeks saw it as their foundational text: all of Greek literature afterward is, to some extent, a gloss on Homer. Robin Lane Fox: “(The epics) were admired from their author’s own era… to the end of antiquity without interruption.” Even today, it stands up as a nearly flawless story abounding in heroics, psychological drama, and ironic commentary on the lives of men.

The epic in fact begins with an irony: we’re told it’s the story of the devastation caused by Achilles’ uncontrolled anger, and yet it’s clear from the start that it’s the arrogance of his commander, Agamemnon, that is causing all the trouble. Agamemnon, as head of the Greek fleet besieging Ilion, has taken for his concubine the daughter of the local priest of Apollo in nearby Thebes, and this arrogance has moved the god to afflict the Greeks with plague. Finally agreeing to return the girl, Agamemnon decides instead to take Achilles’ own slave girl, a slap in the face of his greatest warrior in front the entire Greek army. In a sense, the Iliad begins with a question we can all relate to: What to do when your boss is a jerk? [Read more →]

Matt Yglesias likens transparency in Congressional negotiations with transparency in family negotiations:

Think about a family negotiation over whose house you spend the holidays at, or who goes to watch Billy’s soccer game on Saturday. At the end of the day, wouldn’t everyone be worse off if the whole extended clan had the right to watch the negotiation on C-SPAN? More to the point, wouldn’t knowledge that the proceedings were going to be seen by others bias the negotiation. If your husband says “you don’t even like your cousin John” then you more or less have to protest and insist that you do too like him and any proposal predicated on the idea that you don’t like him needs to be rejected.

And that’s how it would go in negotiations. I think people think that if there were more transparency, the dread special interests would have less hold over the process. But I suspect the real result would be the reverse. What happens when you reach a compromise is both sides agree to sell some folks out in pursuit of some bigger objective they care more about. But in a transparent process, nobody would be willing to even hypothetically entertain the idea of selling anybody out.

Ezra Klein adds:

Of course, if the whole clan was watching, the husband would never mention your antipathy to your cousin John. And that’s the bigger problem: Hard issues never get discussed at all. You’d have some private talk and then some fake public negotiations where you followed a predetermined conversational route to the ending you settled on behind closed doors.

Now, this is true to an extent.  One significant difference between family negotiations and government negotiations is the set of incentives.  There are no lobbyists when a husband and wife decide where to spend Christmas (unless you count the kids or the competing relatives).  Nor is there typically a great deal of money at stake. And while family negotiations are typically quite personal, government negotiations are not.  Obviously hashing out disagreements about our family members is not something we want to do in public because, at the end of the day, we’d like to maintain some ties with even those family members who we may be complaining about.  These same deep bonds simply don’t exist in the public policy arena.  So it is not merely a difference of scope but a difference of kind which causes this analogy to fall apart.

Would lobbyists and government officials simply negotiate behind closed doors prior to negotiating in public as Ezra suggests?  Probably.  However, there are other ways to make the process more transparent.  Even if negotiations remain behind closed doors, certainly the results of these transactions could be made more visible.  Certainly there could be a better way to publicly advertise who is being lobbied by whom.

This is the information age after all.  The trick isn’t a lack of information – the trick is distributing that information and making it as easy to understand for as many people as possible. 

A simple solution would be to treat our congressmen (and women) like NASCAR drivers.  Simply stick a bunch of sponsor logos and industry stickers all over them so that we can see that when Congressman A votes for more farm subsidies, it’s because Big Agriculture is paying him to.  Or when Senator Y votes against defense cuts, it’s because [insert weapons manufacturer here] has donated to his re-election fund.  Have their staffers do the same.  Have each bill enacted in Congress prefaced with a "This bill is brought to you by…." credits section.

And so on and so forth.  There are plenty more ways (and even some not-tongue-in-cheek ways) to make the connections between our representatives and the special interests they represent more obvious and accessible.  Not all special interest influence is necessarily bad either – but it’s good to know who is at least ostensibly pulling the strings – and how hard.

Big news from the ICC today,

Appeals judges at the International Criminal Court have ordered the chamber to reconsider its decision to omit genocide from an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president.

The ruling in The Hague on Wednesday follows an appeal by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to charge al-Bashir with genocide.

Moreno-Ocampo, who has implicated al-Bashir in the deaths of 35,000 people, said a genocide charge would ensure “the world knows what happened” to victims of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“I believe it is important for the victims. That is why I am pursuing these charges,” he told the AFP news agency.

Erkki Kourula, an ICC judge, said the pre-trial chamber’s decision to not include genocide was based on an “erroneous standard of proof”.

I know that the very idea of the ICC is a somewhat controversial one in the non-signatory US. There are questions about what jurisdiction such an entity has and how much its actions infringe on the soverignty of independent nation-states. There is also the complaint that the ICC, like the UN, is too much a conceptual organization, that in a practical sense it doesn’t work and, in fact, couldn’t ever work.
Those concerns/complaints are fair and it is precisely because of them that I see the ICC’s pursuing of al-Bashir to be incredibly important. The blood curdling situation in Sudan is precisely why I can never bring myself to a place of true and unyielding isolationism or full-throated pacifism.

There are events and actions in the world that demand our attention and demand action — some times forceful action — to avert needless and discriminatory suffering and bloodshed. But there has to be a system in place, some kind of means of determining a burden of proof, a dispassionate and disinterested path of due process, and an increasingly established set of laws that ensure fairness as well as justice.

[Read more →]