One of the better things you could read today is one NYT Op-Ed. Excerpt:
In what is perhaps the most important manifesto of anti-Communist dissent, his 1978 “Power of the Powerless,” [Vaclav] Havel expresses this very clearly. Modern democratic societies offered “no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it.”
These are not the views of a naïve idealist who came to terms with “reality” as soon as he assumed the presidency, something confirmed by Havel’s 2006 autobiography, “Briefly, Please.”
He chose the title as a sign of opposition to the stupidity of the commercialized media, which convert everything into mindless platitudes for rapid transmission. The book’s American publisher inadvertently proved his point by changing its title to something more marketable and banal, while also confirming the fairy-tale nature of his story: “To the Castle and Back.”
In post-Communist countries, newborn capitalists’ faith in capitalism was so ardent that even members of the Chicago school of economics, who came rushing in as advisers on how to move to free markets almost overnight, seemed like careful idealists, while John Maynard Keynes was shunned as practically a Communist.
But Havel saw a new danger. “I am also an opponent of market fundamentalism and dogmatism, for which the snide brigade” — his term for “journalists who sneered ironically at everything they felt was not capitalistic enough” — “have branded me a left winger.”
(Slawomir Sierakowski, Vaclav Havel’s Fairy Tale)
Not exactly as predicted, but Harold Camping’s world has come to an end 26 months later than predicted. I had a deprecatory adjective before the word “Harold,” but de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Even Slacktivist observes the principle, writing a pretty restrained remembrance. Excerpt:
One problem with Camping’s “encyclopedic” knowledge of the Bible is that the Bible is not an encyclopedia. He thought it was, treating it as an almanac of coded “prophecies” foretelling the future.
When his lifelong desperation to decode those prophecies led him to his disastrous date-detting in 2011, I felt bad for him. He struck me as a true believer. Yes, he was selling snake oil, but I’m not sure he knew it was snake oil.
Darn, when Fred’s good, he’s really good. And when he’s bad, as in trying to spring a “Gotcha” on Hobby Lobby, he’s maddeningly bad.
My daughter-in-law did a “TRX” training session, and when I looked bemused at her report, she said I should Google it. I did so Tuesday night, and clicked through on one link. Now TRX ads are everywhere I go on the Internet.
I probably will find the onslaught intensified now that the three letters have appeared in my pseudonymous blog.
This is doubly creepy:
- It illustrates the power of Google to dominate the internet.
- It illustrates the inability of Google to understand what really matters, even to one aging individual.
So I’m a little skeptical of the transformative power of Big Data (the link to which article I found, of course, via Google).
The iconoclast identifies the dominant symbols of an ethos, and then seeks to discredit or destroy them. In Mother Theresa, [Christopher] Hitchens recognized perhaps the greatest living icon of Christianity, charity personified—a sacred symbol he sought to profane. In 1994, a quarter century after Muggeridge’s conversion to Christianity, Hitchens published Missionary Position, an attack on Mother Theresa. Had the defender of the weak become a bully? Not quite. Hitchens appears to have recognized a fact he would never admit, perhaps even to himself: Mother Theresa was impervious to any assault he or anyone might make against her.
Okay, so what’s the dominant symbol of our post-Christian consumerism?
Smart-aleck remarks aside, Doran has written a nice remembrance of Hitch on the second anniversary of his death.
Federal criminal law started out being sparse and interstitial in the early years of the Republic, but that’s no longer true. Federal criminal law today is extensive and massively punitive.
It covers a lot of offenses, like low-level drug possession, that almost everyone agrees are more appropriately matters of state, rather than federal, law enforcement. It includes a number of extremely broad fraud and false statement offenses. And it includes a lot of regulatory crimes that aren’t matters of ordinary moral intuition. What’s more, there are many overlapping federal crimes, and federal sentences are often quite severe.
As other scholars have observed, it would be a mistake to see this body of law as a real code of conduct. At the least, Congress hasn’t provided anywhere near the enforcement resources that would be needed to fully prosecute all these crimes. In practice, federal criminal law functions as a set of tools that prosecutors can use to achieve convictions or plea bargains in cases where they feel they need to punish reprehensible conduct or get a dangerous person off the street.
I don’t think this is a normatively attractive legal architecture. I basically accept the critique, articulated most powerfully by the late Bill Stuntz, that this this structure gives too much discretion to prosecutors and too little accountability to Congress for the scope of its enactments.
(Prof. Zachary Price, guest-blogging at Volokh Conspiracy on selective enforcement of law. Emphasis added.)
Longtime readers will see this coming:
Did you really think that we want those laws observed? . . . We want them broken . . . . There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of lawbreakers — and then you cash in on guilt.
(Atlas Shrugged)
I’m heartened when I read or hear others acknowledging plutocracy, and I confess that it had to be called to my attention. I wish I could remember who it was that found the magic words to blow my fog away. I owe them.
All Things Considered had a story Tuesday night that touched some of the same themes as this Wired story. Yet I don’t think the private high-tech company employee buses is quite the icon I’m looking to smash.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 