Islam Is Not Islamism
I take Krauthammer’s side in this debate with Mark Steyn regarding Geert Wilders. In simplified terms, Wilders believes that there is no distinction between Islam and radical Islam. Or, perhaps the difference for Wilders is between Islam and fake, watered down Islam. I’m no scholar of Islam, so I cannot engage the debate at the level of discussing what “true” Islam is. But I have spent a good deal of time studying what it means to have a consistent worldview, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that few if anyone has a truly and thoroughly consistent one. And we are often faced with examples of where strict adherence to a worldview may lead to grisly results. Christianity, or certain variations, for example, view abortion as murder, and thus might justify or even compel violence in preventing it. Obviously, most of us are thankful that adherents to such worldviews decline the urge to practice strict consistency.
Similarly, as I have suggested before (e.g., here and here), a consistently practiced purely secular worldview would lead to absolute relativism—not only on moral issues, but on every other kind of truth, be it abstract or concrete. Now, secularists certainly don’t agree with me about that. And this is a somewhat lofty, metaphysical debate, still carried on hopefully in good faith, and usually in the context of debates in universities or in academic journals or, ahem, in blogs. At any rate, I certainly wouldn’t go around insisting that the rest of the world treat my position on the debate as a foregone conclusion.
I suggest the same goes for Geert Wilders. He’s entitled to his view, but his is not a foregone conclusion, or a widely accepted conclusion, or even much of a respected conclusion. It is still in the R&D stage, so to speak. It may be the topic for stimulating discussion and debate on university campuses and whatnot, but one should tread awfully lightly before using it as a launching-off point for crafting new legal or social policy.
Why Mass-Transit Exuberance Should Make You Nervous
Matthew Schmitz at the League is bothered at conservatives’ attacks on mass-transit’s proponents as shills for European style Progressivism.
[T]hey [e.g., Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnoru at NRO] continue to dismiss liberals who argue for mass transit on the basis that these liberals might be looking to foreign templates. This is extremely unhelpful. Mass transit is not the love child of left-wing infatuation with Europe. It’s a policy with a long American history that should be debated on its merits.
I replied with the following in the comments:
In fairness, mass transit does go hand in hand with Progressivist planning agendas: these days, you don’t get the kind of density that warrants mass transit without a firm grip on land use planning. To laser in on the real critique conservatives/libertarians are making (or, perhaps, should be making), land use planning, including the push for mass transit, would be just fine were it a response to what people really wanted. Now, maybe, in some places, it is. But my guess is that, outside the very old American cities whose densities owe to the booms in American industry during the 1800s, roads tend to serve transit needs as well or better, for less money, and nominal difference in environmental concerns. This leaves goosebumps as the primary motivator for mass transit initiatives.
An example. I live in Long Beach (south LA county) and commute to Irvine (Orange County). The commute is 25 miles, and I’ve found the right times of day to ensure I’m not on the road longer than 30-35 minutes. A friend of mine in LA who commutes 15 miles from Hollywood to Santa Monica each day, by contrast, averages an hour each way. Why? Because Angelinos have drunk the mass transit Kool-Aid and keep dumping bonds (serviced by higher sales taxes, which is the wife and I head south to do our shopping) into one rail boondoggle after another. Orange County, by contrast, spends its transit dollars on wide open freeways, and lots of ‘em.
Would it be cool to take a trolley or a shiny new train to work? Sure! It’s why I visit Disneyland sometimes. If I want to go about my life, though, the smart money’s on freeways.
Though it’s at the southern tip of LA county, Long Beach still shows symptoms of the mass transit disease. A few years ago, I was sitting in at a city council meeting, and listened as Suja Lowenthal—an urbanist proselyte just like her father-in-law, Alan—carried on for something like 20 minutes on a soliloquy about some idyllic urban paradise of the future that sounded almost borrowed from a passage from a Robert Heinlein novel. There was no point to her speech that I could discern. She was just full of beans over the mass transit systems she had seen elsewhere and wanted us to know how eager she was to get to work spending our tax dollars to build her own life-size train set.
Now, downtown LB is kind of a hip, somewhat dense little pocket. But there’s simply no justification for some kind of grand retrofitting of this city, particularly just because some freshman councilmember’s got the glad eye about trains and trolleys. Everyone here has cars. It’s a suburban community. Next item on the agenda, please, Ms. Lowenthal.
And that ought to go for every city council member throughout the country. Unless you were elected to build trains, keep it to yourself.
[Revised.]
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John Eastman Wins the CRA Nomination
…by a landslide, receiving 80% of the vote. From Eastman’s website:
CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN ASSEMBLY GIVES EASTMAN OVERWHELMING ENDORSEMENT
March 7th, 2010
The California Republican Assembly, California’s largest volunteer organization and dubbed by Ronald Reagan as the “conscience of the Republican Party,” today overwhelmingly endorsed John Eastman for Attorney General. In the balloting, Eastman received 197 votes (80%), while State Senator Tom Harman picked up 40 votes and Steve Cooley just 8 votes.
“With today’s overwhelming endorsement of John Eastman for Attorney General, the CRA has spoken loudly and clearly about who the best candidate is to represent our conservative values and turn our state around,” commented Ken Mettler, President of the CRA.
“The CRA has long been the benchmark by which Republican Primary candidates are measured,” said Eastman. “That’s why I’m so proud to have picked up their endorsement today.”
Having just recently stepped down as Dean of Chapman Law School, John Eastman’s campaign has gotten off to a fast start, already adding the support of Former US Attorney General Ed Meese, Former Governor George Deukmejian, Congressman Tom McClintock, and some of the most well-known conservative talk radio show hosts in the country. Eastman, a former Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is widely respected as one of the top conservative legal minds in America.
A Glimmer of Hope: Public Sentiment Toward Unions Cools
This made my day:
If this is true and all the “we put our lives on the line” and “your kids need us” and “we are America’s beating heart” nonsense has finally lost its hold on our imaginations, maybe we can bring these guys down to earth. Fiscal sanity might not be just a pipe dream anymore.
UPDATE: Amity Shlaes in an OC Register op-ed agrees:
But [the unwillingness to challenge unions is] changing, as evidenced by the Star-Ledger’s decision to shame the Marlboro educators. The public is beginning to question the legitimacy of public unions’ power because taxpayers know that commitments for worker health care and pensions are busting state budgets all over the country.
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A Good Warm-Up for the Academy Awards
Here’s a well-done “template” for any dramatic movie preview you’ve ever seen.
I’m a little troubled that I could actually be moved by a fake film. Goes to show that to a large extent, films really are just about pushing your buttons to get a response.
No, Californians Still Don’t Realize How Badly They’ve Stepped in It
Robert J. Cristiano’s piece at New Geography gives a nice snapshot at the decline and pending fall of the once great state of California. In short, take the prosperity, open spaces, and renowned public education system of the 60s, add draconian environmental and developmental regulations, a defense bubble, a tech bubble, a housing bubble—and spendthrift, bubble-loving legislators cranking up the one-way entitlement-spending ratchet with each iteration—and heap on a generous helping of public employee pension disease, and you’ve got the current California train wreck.
Those who don’t live in California might be wondering, do Californians understand the mess they’re in? The answer: Clearly not. For example, down here in Southern California (we capitalize the “S” in “Southern” because our inanity is so distinctly our own) the counter-productive diversion du jour is throwing supergraphics proprietors in jail. The LA City Attorney, Carmen “Nuch” Trutanich—my former boss during law school—has filed a lawsuit against 27 defendants in a war against the $7 billion supergraphics industry, which involves the displaying of large ads on the sides of buildings in and around Hollywood. In the current economic climate, some cities might balk at the notion of obliterating that much economic activity and the tax revenue generated from it. But LA is a uniquely and bizarrely principled place. For some odd reason, Nuch has been dutifully working to get ads torn down in time for the Academy Awards. Most (in)famously, Nuch strategically threw one building owner in jail over an entire weekend, finding a judge willing to set bail at $1 million. For displaying an ad on his own building. Seriously.
The hostility to such a lucrative industry is puzzling.
Of course, many LA-la-landers applaud these efforts as a long-awaited crackdown on a serious “blight” to their community. A blight to the community? Down in Orange County, we call LA a blight to the community. These things are relative. Nuisance law has a doctrine called “coming to the nuisance,” which says that if you knowingly purchase property next to a smokestack, you are estopped from complaining about the smoke. In the same way, how does one voluntarily take up residence in Los Angeles and complain about overexposure to media and advertisements? Irony of this magnitude causes reverberations in the brain that can do serious damage to the psyche.
Then again, these things also are relative, as one must ostensibly already suffer some psychic damage to set up shop in LA.
Or, these days, anywhere in California.
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My Suspicions Confirmed: Government Workers Earn More
A lot more. So much for trading off salary for stability. Paycheck, pension, leisurely hours, virtual guarantee of never being fired—government employment has the private sector beat. From Reason:
“Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector,” according to a USA Today report. In jobs where there are private equivalents, the feds are earning $7,645 more on average than their private counterparts.
(Private sector beat out feds in jobs where there are very high barriers to entry due to licensing requirements or powerful unions, such as lawyers, veterinarians, and airline pilots.)
There’s a chart, too, if you want to see how much less you make worker for the man instead of The Man.
I’m not sure I agree, however, that the fact that lawyers are highly regulated is the reason they don’t make the list. I found out recently that Supreme Court clerks make about $40k a year—just shy of a federal highway maintenance worker. But these folks are looking at north of $200k signing bonuses from law firms when they emerge from that vow of poverty. So in this way, the government is actually (gasp) adding value that the private sector is willing to pay dearly for.
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Ends and Means
It looks like the League is experiencing some technical troubles, as some of their recent posts have gone missing. I caught this one on my Google Reader, and had to comment:
Following up a bit on my “General America” piece, I wanted to add that I find the “all markets all the time” position within conservatism to be somewhat unfulfilling as well. Market solutions are only solutions insofar as they do not necessarily perpetuate problems quite so badly as government solutions. Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth. To base an entire philosophy of governance along these lines is somewhat short-sighted, I would argue.
Perhaps this comes down, paradoxically, to the philosophy of choice –that very thing which rests at the heart of both liberalism and capitalism and, for that matter, contemporary conservatism. There is something fundamentally antithetical to conservatism – or to the way conservatism has been classically understood – about the notion that choice should rest at the epicenter of society, should so inform all public debate and should so define who we as a people. With choice you must also parcel competition, liberty, and a host of other ideas which conservatives and libertarians especially hold dear. That these things are the best vehicles for our economy is hard to debate, but that a world of limitless choice, fierce competition, and little if any public sector (or ‘commons’ for that matter) is best for society in the long run is a more difficult claim to make.
This is not to say that we should scrap free trade or limited government or any of these things – only that as a philosophy, man cannot live on free trade alone. A conservatism not rooted in tradition is not really conservatism at all. A conservatism focused too entirely on market solutions inevitably ends up falling short, and may as well be libertarianism with a dash of culture war populism sprinkled on for flavor.
Similarly, a conservatism which takes its first philosophical baby-steps only as far back as the American revolution is doomed to perpetual immaturity.
This is a perpetual debate, of course—this question of what are the true “ends” of political society. But saying things like “choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society” raises the inevitable question: instruments for what? It’s no good to set up a system to ensure things like liberty, unless and until those things get in the way of achieving [name your favorite cause].
Simply put, the notion that liberty is only a means to achieve some higher good is an evil bit of nonsense that assumes that liberty itself is not as high a good as some pet cause.
There was something Schwarzenegger said a while back along these lines:
The horrible thing about politics is that, the more they attack each other, the more that they try to derail each other, the worse it is for the people. That’s why … you know, you’ve got to go beyond just the principles. You’ve got to go and say, “What is right for the country right now?”
When we abandon ideals in order to get cool stuff through government intervention, we do so by forfeiting the only kind of justice that humans are capable of. Abiding by first principles is rigorous and often keeps us from enacting neat bits of legislation that sure seem like swell ideas. But it is this focus on process-oriented justice that keeps us from devolving into the tyranny of ends-oriented justice.
“I Think We Need a Ruling on This”
Over the holidays, I ritually go through my favorite Christmas movies. Among the more unlikely members of that set is The Ref with Denis Leary and Kevin Spacey. In the opening scene, Lloyd (Spacey’s character) and Caroline are meeting with their therapist over their many marital issues, one of them being Caroline’s affair. After Caroline suggests that, under the circumstances, hers “shouldn’t even be counted as an affair,” Lloyd expresses the importance of being able to enforce the basic content of the words we use.
Dr. Wong: Lloyd, how do you feel about Caroline’s affair?
Caroline: He just wants me to wear a red “A” and sleep in the basement.
Lloyd: Is that so unreasonable?
Caroline: Everything’s either black or white with him. You know, he doesn’t… he doesn’t see where he’s responsible. And I mean, it just didn’t mean anything to me. It shouldn’t even be counted as an affair.
Lloyd: I think we need a ruling on this.
