Category: Politics

While I’m thinking about Volokh, here’s another National Review article he wrote recently. Executive summary: we shouldn’t worry about military discrimination based on sexual preference, because the military does so much good for us.

Well. There you go.

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts on that Ninth Circuit decision. Not bad; this is more of a start. However, he fails to recognize that the states prrrrobably have the right to change their definition of militia with the times. He also doesn’t touch the question of what “bear arms” means. I’d really like to see someone quoting a contemporary usage of “bear arms” outside the military context.

While I’m on the subject, here’s a Volokh article in the National Review. It doesn’t really address the Ninth Circuit decision, but it does have intelligent things to say about evolving standards. How Appealing comments on the article, somewhat snidely. Well, OK, it’s just a comment on the timeline.

Via How Appealing: the Ninth Circuit today concluded that the Second Amendment confers no individual right to own and carry arms. (That link is a PDF.) I recommend reading the opinion if you’re interested in such things. I suspect the language and arguments presented therein will be core to the gun control debate for some time, at least for those who are pro-gun control.

The argument seems to rest on the meaning of the phrase “keep and bear arms.” Judge Reinhardt’s opinion states that “bear arms” is a phrase used, historically, only in a military context. Quoting Aymette v. State, 21 Tenn. (2 Humph.) 154 (1840): “A man in pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms.” Given that interpretation, he further reasons that the phrase would be nonsensical if the phrase “keep arms” had a wider interpretation than the phrase “bear arms.”

I am brutally summarizing this, and I am not a lawyer. I really do recommend reading it if you intend to mention the ruling in polite company, or even form opinions on it for yourself.

Here’s a sort of a counter argument. He doesn’t include any actual reasoning beyond a list of cases which he claims contradict the Ninth Circuit decision. The first one cited is the same decision I quoted above; I think that he might have done well to at least explain why the decision supports him and not the Ninth Circuit. Naked argument by reference is so medieval. I am hoping to see more and better disagreement soon.

Glenn Reynolds links to an article of his which discusses the problems with the general class of argument made by the Ninth Circuit, which seems to be worth reading. It doesn’t really address the decision, though. Note in particular page 30 of the decision, which postulates a sort of feudalistic state militia system in which the armies of the states are subject to federal control. This counters Reynolds’ line of argument, which requires the state militias to be protection against a tyrannical federal government. (A pity. I’m sympathetic to that line of argument.)

The White House has approved executing US citizens as a matter of policy, as long as they’re working for Al Qaeda.

Well, that’s interesting.

The spin is that any such action will wait for Presidential approval. However, the White House is not saying that it must wait for Presidential approval — just that in practice it will. The underlying assumption is that the President has the right to authorize executions without court approval, under certain conditions.

I don’t think this works. The justification is that Al Qaeda acts against American interests. There are plenty of NGOs that act against American interests. If Amnesty Internation convinces Britain to pressure the US on human rights issues, they’d be acting against American interests. By this precedent, the President would have the right to authorize executions of American members of Amnesty International.

Previously, such authorization has been reserved for cases where the American citizen is directly threatening the lives of other Americans or their allies. I.e., yes, on the battlefield you don’t have to double check with a judge and jury. This goes somewhat outside that scope.

It’s certainly true that the situation we’re in as a nation is different than any we’ve been in before. We need new rules, as I’ve noted before. However, this one fails the sniff test.

The UN weapons inspectors found their first irregularity today; a bunch of equipment tagged by previous inspectors has gone missing.

This is important for a few reasons. First off, it’s evidence that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the efforts of previous inspection teams. This counters the claim that previous UN inspectors were useless or worse than useless. Second, it’s evidence that the current UN inspection teams are capable of noticing something wrong and that they aren’t tipping the Iraqis off before the inspections. These guys aren’t a rubber stamp for Saddam. Third, and probably most important, it’s evidence that Saddam is up to something. Having positive evidence one way or another — which we don’t yet, but it’s a step in that direction — beats the hell out of maybes. I’m still anti-war but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the situation to be crystal clear no matter which way the US goes.

Once again by way of Instapundit, we bring you James Lileks on politics. This time he’s talking about the inevitable decline and fall of Europe. I don’t really have a lot of debunking to do here; I just wanted to point out the vast irony inherent in this sentence:

“Like a religion unhinged, it is desperately intense, gripped with eschatological certainties and devoted to an unswerving belief in a caricature that bears little resemblance to the actual nature of its enemy.”

The links are, of course, mine.

The NY Times ran a great article today about economic disparities between China and India. The gist of it: China and India’s economies were on a par 20 years ago, but China is pulling way ahead. The available resources are more or less similar.

The Times implies that it’s largely due to China’s unfettered capitalism experiments, which is no doubt a big part of it; on the other hand, blaming India’s copious local regulations without examining the consequences of China’s lack of regulation is a bit shaky. They do touch on the cheap labor available in China, but they don’t ask why American companies aren’t as eager to develop the Indian markets. Maybe they’re seen as already developed, not sure.

Happy Thanksgiving, by the by.

So, about NGOs. Non-governmental organizations, if you’re not down with the acronyms.

I think the events of the last five years have made it patently clear that NGOs of whatever sort can have a huge effect on the world we live in. Example one is 9/11. Al Qaeda is not a government in any sense of the word, but they’ve touched everyone who lives in the United States and most of the rest of the world. Example two is Microsoft. The antitrust trials of the last few years have been simply fascinating from the point of view of a territorial government trying to deal with an economic powerhouse whose interests don’t coincide with the country in which it resides. Further, when Bill Gates gives a hundred million dollars to India to combat HIV — that’s power; that has results.

There are organizations out there who can affect the nations of the world to a greater degree than many nations. An unlikely hypothetical: what if Microsoft decided to embargo Pakistan? What if Windows 2005 contained code that would shut down the computer if it had an IP in Pakistani netblocks? Wouldn’t be a universal barrier to operation, but it would make Pakistan’s life hard. It’d be noticed.

There’s no context in traditional diplomacy for the power that arises from non-territorial ground. It’s assumed that powerful economic interests will share the interests of the country from which they originate. The great trading companies of the colonial age were trusted to the point where they’d function as arms of the government; we see this with the Netherlands, with England, and so forth.

The Sherman Act (and other anti-trust legislation) meant that the value of such a relationship to the corporate sector was diminished. Modern communication technologies and travel times mean that there’s less value to physical location than there once was. It’s unclear how much value there is to cooperation, at this point. Microsoft knows this. If the Japanese government ever becomes less cooperative with the large keiretsu, they’ll know it as well. The rise of shady Russian capitalist endeavours? Yeah, that’s another example of the same dynamic.

Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups are the flip side of the same coin. You couldn’t organize a large globe-spanning terrorist organization without modern technologies.

It seems to me to be foolhardy to treat influential non-aligned powers as if they were second-class citizens. Ignoring the ability of either economic titans or criminal organizations is risky at best. This doesn’t mean that I think we should treat with Osama bin Laden any more than I think that parleying with Pol Pot would be wise. I think characterizing the hunt for Al Qaeda as a war is in fact appropriate; it’s recognition that we’re dealing with an entity who in nature if not in scale is a peer.

We need to take that recognition and extend it to other such entities.

The difficulty here is that such recognition is fundamentally subversive in nature. An important component of most political theory is that governments have a fundamental right to govern. The lines of thought which lead to such a right do not generally leave room for Microsoft to become a peer of Uganda.

It’ll be interesting to see if practical necessity erodes the foundations of the rule of law over the next few decades. Cyberpunk, ho.

Generally, I am not too thrilled about the proliferation of government agencies. The FVZA, however, is the sort of thing we need much more of. Good work, men.

Polly Toynbee’s article on Afghanistan one year later is excellent reading, and her writings may be instructive to those who assume that opposition to war on Iraq only comes from dedicated leftist pacifists. It’s clear from her article that the citizens of Afghanistan are really glad that the Taliban is gone, and going in was the right thing. She also reminds us that there’s more to do.

“‘I was walking with my cousin and her husband outside here,’ said another man. ‘The vice and virtue police beat them both with big sticks, beat them to pieces, blood everywhere, because her ankles showed too much under her burka. I stood there, ashamed, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t go out after that.’ He was a young Pashtun and no friend of this new mainly Tajik government, but he had no doubt that the Americans did the right thing.” That, but also this: “One woman was keen to set up a new charity for sufferers of type 2 diabetes: I suggested she look at the children’s hospital first. There had been no electricity there for two days when I visited: the two generators sent from Japan were unusable without money for the oil to run them.”

She’s four-square against war on Iraq, though. There’s middle ground, no matter how much the fringes would like to deny it.