My largest complaint is that the book is not intellectually rigorous; it contains a series of assertions, but they don’t necessarily follow from each other. To be fair, politics wouldn’t exist if it were possible to prove or disprove every assertion through logic. Still, it galls me to see Levin put together a chapter which masquerades as a logical argument but in fact is nothing of the sort.

Take his chapter on faith, for example. As an aside, in just three pages, Levin proves the existence of God! His argument works like this:
1. Premise: The Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
2. Premise: The Founding Fathers were paragons of humanity and their legacy is comprised of perfect documents whose every implication, no matter how far from the purpose of the text, was understood and intended by them.
3. Premise: Unalienable rights only exist in the context of an absolute moral code.
4. Premise: An absolute moral code can only exist supernaturally; a human moral code cannot be absolute.
5. Premise: It would be terrible if an absolute moral code did not exist; people would then have to think about the ramifications of their behavior. In fact, people are incapable of behaving morally or ethically without strict guidance from a supernatural power.
6. Deduction: Given 1 and 2, you should believe in God because they did.
7. Deduction: Given 3, 4, and 5, you should believe in God because failing to do so means that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not actually technically unalienable. This contradicts 1 and 2. Therefore, God must exist!

There are any number of problems with this train of logic, but the biggest ones come from premise 2. Here’s a funny thing: he never explicitly states premise 2; he just assumes it’s a fundamental part of his readers’ worldview. Even so, I disagree with it. These people were smart, innovative, and dedicated to the nation they were helping define, but they were still human. It makes no sense to take their works as holy writ, perfect and infallible, then prove that God himself only exists because they said so.

If you don’t implicitly accept 2, both deductions fail to stand. As it happens, I also have major problems with 5. I don’t want to get into those here, though; it would only distract from my point, which is this: Levin rolls on and on like a juggernaut through this book, laying out argument after argument without stopping for breath. The vast majority of them are flawed. Refuting them all would require me to write a book of my own, and I don’t feel like doing that. Instead, I want to write a more general counter, explaining where I stand.

Fundamentally, I start politically with libertarianism: people should be free as much as possible to do whatever they want, and government should be constrained to the minimum necessary. However, I only need one example to point out why we do want some government instead of none at all: Somalia. That place is an anarchist’s dream; it hasn’t had a real government for over 15 years now. It is a terrible place to live.

So if we do need some government, what should its functions be? Let’s start with the most important one: establish the rule of law. That right there fixes Somalia’s biggest problem. However, it introduces another one.

Nobody’s conquered Somalia because it’s a violent shithole with few natural resources. A bunch of nations have the military capacity to just kill every Somali and take the land, but they don’t because that’s evil. Taking over without just killing everyone there means establishing the rule of law, and to say that’s hard is an understatement. Establishing the rule of law where it doesn’t exist is very difficult; particularly when the particular laws you want to impose aren’t the same ones the majority of the people want. This is the problem the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, and in Somalia in 1993. If, however, the people have a central government that they respect, conquering the nation becomes a lot easier. You just have to get the government to surrender, instead of forcing every person to on their own. The second priority of a government then needs to be this: defend itself and its people from external threats.

It might be interesting to live in a nation whose government restricted itself to those two principles. If nothing else, it’d be a test of how the free market actually holds up in comparison to a government for ensuring the quality of life for the people. Still, to the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t been tried since the middle ages. (Those sucked for the simple reason that 99% of people were serfs who had no rights and whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short.) Since then, every government on earth has had a third priority: the construction and maintenance of necessary infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports, power lines and facilities; all these are traditionally government projects which fall under the infrastructure category.

Here’s where it gets political: infrastructure segues somewhere, in a messy and ill-defined way, into social services. The Founding Fathers were convinced, for example, that an efficient Postal Service was critical to the success of any democracy. Is that infrastructure, or social service? Is it more important to have the capability to cheaply transport pieces of paper, or bits of information? Finland recently established that broadband access to the internet is a legal right of every citizen. Is that the way to go?

I’m of the opinion that there are certain social services that the government should make available to every citizen. A stable national currency. Fire departments. Education, through at least a high school level. Health care, to at least a minimal standard, in the fields of emergency medicine, pharmacology, ob/gyn clinics, pediatricians, preventive medicine, and geriatric care. I’m not saying that the government should claim a monopoly on these services or that individuals should be required to avail themselves of the government’s offerings; I see no reason to deny the market the ability to compete to provide premium services. However, baseline offerings should be free to every citizen.

Calling these services rights seems a little silly to me. I wouldn’t mind, for example, if the government refused to treat the lung cancer of someone who’d smoked for 40 years, or obesity at all. You can’t deny someone their rights, but you can allow them to forfeit access to social services through personal choice. I’d argue that each of these services is productive for the government to provide because each of them improves the nation as a whole. The benefits of fire departments and a national currency should be self-evident. Public education, since its institution a century ago, has been a sore spot for most of that time, but I haven’t heard anyone arguing that children should not have the option to be educated regardless of their parents’ circumstances. Mostly, people agree that it is a good thing to have. 100 years forward, I expect people to treat health care the way we do public education now: a national service that, while often outperformed by the private sector, is so manifestly useful that essentially nobody is seriously arguing that it should be done away with.

Here’s the thing: there are services that government provides which aren’t rights, but which are nice. Streetlights are a good example. It costs a fair bit to erect a streetlight, and even more to keep it supplied with electricity and replacement lightbulbs. You could argue that streetlights reduce crime, or that they enhance driving safety, but I’ve seen no statistics about that and would actually tend to be skeptical even if they were produced because studies like the ones which would produce those results often have some sketchy methodology. Even Levin doesn’t complain about streetlights, though you’d expect him to: a government boondoggle with unproven results siphoning money out of the taxpayer? Call Rupert Murdoch! Have a Tea Party!

Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of things, streetlights are cheap, and they’re nice to have. Through general affluence, technology, or rarity of necessity, other services sometimes become cheap and nice also. How much would it cost to maintain soup kitchens sufficient to entirely eliminate starvation in America? How much does it cost to maintain a single wing of F-22s (to say nothing of the purchase price!)? Which better serves the needs of the nation: preventing our citizens from dying directly, or maintaining an air superiority fighter without an opponent?

As it happens, starvation isn’t as weighty a problem as obesity; don’t misunderstand me as crusading here for the anti-starvation cause. The point is that if the cost is small enough, it can be worth providing a service which is unnecessary but nice.

Levin’s boojum, the demon he fears above all others, is the Statist: a terrible creature devoted purely to the consolidation of power in the government and the elimination of individual freedoms. There’s a wonderful description on page 15 of how utterly terrible this monster is. It’s a fierce and entertaining straw man, and a rhetorical trick that he may be physically addicted to. They’re everywhere! The media is full of them; the courts are comprised of them; the entire Democratic party is a thin front for them. Been to college? Beware, all those academics are Statists! Believe in separation of church and state? You’re a Statist! Think human activity is causing global warming? You’ve been taken in by a Statist conspiracy! Want the government to provide communal services? You’re on your way to being voted Statist of the Year! Also, actors are pretty much all Statists: “It is the rare actor who challenges the fraternity.”

Alas, though Levin goes on at length about the media’s tendency to invent a Terror of the Month, there’s no satisfying pull quote about inventing straw men to serve a political purpose. It seems he’s a bit too introspective for that.

Levin closes his book with a Conservative Manifesto: a list of goals and assertions which summarize his political position in a traditional, elephant-shaped package. At best, he comes off as someone who’s honestly trying to work for the best future of the nation, even if his methods and goals diverge from mine. At worst, it’s hard to believe he inhabits the same universe that I do. We have this in common at least: we both believe that people should seek to understand the world around them and work to improve it for the future. We both are glad to live in a society in which we can disagree vehemently and in writing about the way the nation should be run. We both think that individual liberty is the premise, and the Constitution is the basis, of the US system of government.

We just disagree about everything else.

Luckily, Obama didn’t try to make that argument. Instead, he showed that there was a better way. McCain had one point of argument: that he had the experience to make correct judgement calls. Obama doesn’t have as much experience, and he doesn’t pretend to. What he does have are well thought out, articulate plans. Instead of relying on the judgement of experience to guide him from crisis to crisis, he intends to anticipate the crises and head them off before they grow.

One of the telling moments in the debate was when the moderator asked exactly what the candidates would give up to pay for some sort of economic bailout. Obama listed his priorities: he will not give up on energy independence, healthcare, and education. He would like to invest in infrastructure if there are sufficient remaining funds. Everything else, by implication, could be cut as necessary to balance the budget. McCain, by contrast, had a half-baked proposal to cut federal funding for everything except military and veterans’ spending for one year. Cutting infrastructure maintenance, education, medicare–it’s hard to believe McCain actually thinks that this is a viable proposal. It’s a stunt, designed to sound good so long as you don’t think about it. There have been plenty of those recently from his campaign.

On the foreign policy side of things, McCain believes that victory in Iraq is the key to the GWOT, and he will pursue it at any price. Obama, on the other hand, believes in seeking the first causes: Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and other terrorist organizations.

In short, Obama won this debate. McCain presented himself and his points well, but his positions just can’t hold up to reality. His speeches didn’t stand up to scrutiny, and he showed himself to be willing to make absurd proposals so long as they sound good. Obama was calm, articulate, and ready to lead. He stuck to the truth, and was willing to admit when his opponent had a good point. This is the man we need to elect.

The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property.

However, the Army Times reports:

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

It’s no secret that the Army’s experiences in Iraq, Somalia, and other low-intensity conflicts have brought new focus to peacekeeping operations. They’ve even got their own Official Military Phrasing: Stability and Support Operations.

From the Army Times:

The 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

…

This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

From the globalsecurity definitions:

Support Operations provide essential supplies and services to assist designated groups. It relieves suffering and helps civil authorities respond to crises. In most cases, Army forces achieve success by overcoming conditions created by man-made or natural disasters.

That’s all right, then; that seems to be the intent of the posting. There’s nothing wrong with using troops to aid in disaster relief, and if the military was overflowing with troops with nothing to do in light of our long history of peaceful foreign policy, there’d be no real problem with designating a unit to that express purpose.

However, it is important to remember that Support operations are extremely closely associated in the military mind with Stability operations:

Stability Operations apply military power to influence the political and civil environment, to facilitate diplomacy, and to interrupt specified illegal activities.

Given troops trained in SASO operations, stationed in the US, I do not trust President Bush not to abuse their capabilities and attempt use them to influence the political and civil environment. Posse Comitatus exists precisely to prevent this sort of use within the US. Now, it has been substantially weakened.

I will close with this section from the wiki:

HR5122 also known as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act was signed by the president on Oct 17, 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Section 1076 (Text of Hr5122) is titled “Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies”.

Removing the legalese from the text, and combining multiple sentences, it provides that: The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines hinders the execution of laws or deprives people of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws. The actual text is on page 322-323 of the legislation.

As of 2008, these changes were repealed, changing the text of the law back to the original 1807 wording, under Public Law 110-181 (H.R. 4986, Section 1068,) however in signing H.R. 4986 into law President Bush attached a signing statement which indicated that the Executive Branch did not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal.

---

President Bush Signs H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 into Law

Today, I have signed into law H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. The Act authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, for military construction, and for national security-related energy programs.

Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 28, 2008.

On the one hand, I am forced to agree with this guy on some points: not all worldviews have equal merit, and some are simply better than others. On the other hand, I believe that one trait which increases a culture’s merit is exactly the xenophilia that this guy decries.

Why is it important to celebrate diversity? Because people have a hard time with subtlety, and so any culture which does not intentionally take joy in difference will inevitably find itself drifting toward prejudice, and toward injustice. If people believe subconsciously that the barbarians elsewhere aren’t really human, they’ll never be able to treat them consciously as equals.

The questionable premise is that traditions, beliefs, and practices in all their ethnic and historical profusion self-authenticate their claims to truth, beauty, and goodness. Not only must all the ‘voices’ be heard, whatever they come up with must be treated with respect … Open-ended diversity is thrust upon us as a positive object of obligatory good feeling.

Here is the problem: accepting, and even taking joy in learning about foreign cultures and lifestyles does not imply that one approves of them or would want to include every feature in one’s own daily life. Look at the atrocities against women that the Taliban committed in Afghanistan: it is important to learn about what went on there, even if only as a cautionary example of the problems associated with a fundamentalist government. Respecting that culture boils down to taking individuals from that culture on their own merits and refraining from intervention*.

It is important to remember that the case of the Taliban approaches the worst case possible. For most other cultures and civilizations, there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Look at Europe to discover the benefits and penalties associated with a more socialistic stance. Look at Japan to see what happens in a liberal democracy when society still places huge pressure on people to value their duty to others above themselves. Look at most places in the world, and one can see both benefits and penalties associated with the choices that society made in contrast with our own. However, one can only objectively look at those cultures if one first accepts that they have an inherent right to exist, and that acceptance can only come if one’s own culture celebrates diversity.

Should an ethnic attachment to astrology be included as a legitimate discipline in college curricula because politicians and bureaucrats in India submit decisions bearing on public issues to readings of the stars? Should tribal shamans be licensed to practice “alternative” medicine? In postmodern jargon, is not one scientific or medical “narrative” as good as another?

There is absolutely no reason why An Introduction to Indian Astrology could not be a perfectly legitimate college course. For a student of Indian culture and folklore, such a course might be essential. Accepting other cultures does not at all imply that we must attempt to import every feature of every culture that we come in contact with; such an approach would obviously be both chaotic and futile. However, it is perfectly feasible to take other cultures seriously on their own merits.

As for alternative medicine, one must first realize what a license to practice medicine is: it is official certification that the doctor in question uses techniques and tools which have been proven, statistically and rigorously, to work. Any “alternative” technique which can offer proof–the double-blind, statistical kind–that it works, is inherently an acceptable tool for a licensed doctor. Alternative medicine is comprised of remedies which cannot offer that proof; as such, there is no reason to license its practitioners. Neither is there any reason to prevent them from setting up alternative clinics, so long as they do not masquerade as a licensed doctor. Either one believes in the practitioner as well as the remedy, or one does not.

An uninformed, unsuspecting student body, awash in diversity rhetoric and pedagogy, maneuvered by solemn, earnest action plans shaped by diversity ideologues, might be led to think that ethnic violence and hatred, alive and readily visible around the world, has nothing to do with ethnicity and its inherent premise of exclusiveness.

The author of the article in question has taken great pains to utterly demolish a straw man. There is no great pressure to accept other cultures in a completely valueless, utterly morally relativistic setting. That would be nearly impossible, if it is possible at all. Every person has some deeply ingrained set of criteria for judging other cultures, in whole or in part. Mine is simple: cultures are ranked in order of their ability to maximize liberty per capita. Other people might value personal safety as more important, or conformity to some religious text. Regardless of which criteria one uses, they can only be applied objectively if one first accepts that other cultures have an intrinsic right to exist. This is the celebration of diversity that needs to be, and generally is, applied in the educational system of our culture.

Iraq’s politicians want a specific US withdrawal date before they’ll agree to any Status of Forces Agreement. I applaud this! We need such an agreement for the presence of US forces in Iraq to remain legal past the end of this year. It’s nice to see that Iraq’s politicians are willing to take a hard line to protect their own sovergnity. More importantly to me, this is exactly what we’ve been claiming to have been working towards all this time: an independent Iraqi government which is willing and able to take control of its own nation. That they’re taking a hard line on this is exactly the sort of proof I’d want to see that they’re ready to take the reins.

The Tragedy of the Anticommons is a nice piece with an interesting premise:

We hear a lot about the “tragedy of the commons”: if a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will try to exploit as much of it as possible. Villagers will send all their cows out to graze at the same time, and soon the field will be useless. When there’s no ownership, the pursuit of individual self-interest can make everyone worse off. But Heller shows that having too much ownership creates its own problems. If too many people own individual parts of a valuable asset, it’s easy to end up with gridlock, since any one person can simply veto the use of the asset. The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste.

The point is that modern, extremely restrictive copyright and patent laws may be having effects precisely opposite their intended purpose, which is to encourage creativity and invention. This is easy to believe, but the reward for reform is even more immediate: it might decriminalize anyone with a full iPod.

Back in the hangar in my unit, we had this big old tank of compressed air. And it had a big six-inch blowout valve on the bottom that could vent the whole thing. So I took this PVC pipe and ran it out of there, and downscaled it down to a half-inch internal diameter. And the thing about that is, it’s the perfect size to fit a tube of chapstick. So I was playing around with this, and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I decided I would shoot it at the TOC. I did not expect it to go through the wall. The casing, the tube itself peeled off of it, but the chapstick itself splurted right through like some kind of sabot round. It ended up all over one of those big-ass wall maps. It sounded like a mortar had gone off, and the hole in the wall pointed straight back at my shop. That’s how I got my second Article 15 that tour.

In my first deployment, people from back in the US were always sending us candy. It was great for a while, but there’s only so much candy you can really eat, so we started putting together little candy bombs that we could throw to the kids to make them happy. Still, some of the kids were little punks, throwing rocks at us and shit. And what are you going to do? You can’t shoot them, you’d feel terrible, and you might get in trouble. So what I did is, I started putting together “Disappointment bombs.” They were in the same kind of plastic bag the candy bombs were in, but I put in ham from the MREs, and canned anchovies that I’d left out in the sun for a few days, and sometimes just junk out of the trash. The commander loved it, thought it was funny as shit, but eventually the colonel heard about it and made me stop. I thought it was the funniest thing, though, seeing them eat that ham; if they’re going to throw rocks at us, at least I can make sure they go to hell.

Wives! Wives are terrible. I had a Joe in my squad, it was his fault anyway ’cause he married a barracks whore, she had some nice titties but she was the dirtiest skank. She’d had sex with half the guys in the platoon. Anyhow, he goes to Iraq, and first thing, she sends him pictures of her having sex with some other dude. He’s barely into his deployment and she’s divorcing him and getting half his stuff. The cool thing though is that she’s dead now. Single car crash only a year later.

There are countless stories like these, small morality tales sounding like fables. In the end, it doesn’t really matter that they’re coarse, or if they’re true; only that they entertain for a few minutes while waiting to be able to clock out. I listen with half an ear as I read, or game, or whatever, and I can’t help but worry that if I stay in the army, my stories will gradually come to sound like these.

The citizens of the US have wanted for years to get out of Iraq. The citizens of Iraq want to know when we’ll leave. The war actually becomes illegal on the New Year. Yet despite all this, McCain plans to keep US troops there until they have “establish[ed] a stable, prosperous, and democratic state in Iraq that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists.” He doesn’t come right out and say “indefinitely,” or “forever,” but that’s more or less what it comes down to.

Staying in Iraq is ridiculously expensive. We are in a recession. Osama bin Laden’s stated strategy four years ago was to drive the US into bankruptcy. I can’t help but think that it has succeeded more than our efforts to catch him have.

We’ve been in this situation before. The lessons should have been learned: a nation, even our nation, can lose a war even if it wins every major engagement. Sometimes the only reasonable option is to concede defeat and go home.

I can’t help but get angry that Bush has kept us in this war; I am furious at the notion that we might invade Iran. The fact that McCain still enjoys 40% in the polls worries me, because I can’t imagine what mindset it would take to support him. This war is costing more than we can afford. We’re already suffering consequences from the overspending. It takes nothing but to keep up with the news to know this; it’s not that hard to put the causes and effects together. Regardless of any other issue, anyone who wants to see this country prosper should vote against McCain. Voting for him just takes money out of your own pocket.

We have invaded Iraq with the stated intention of effecting a regime change. Nowhere except the accusations of liberals was the statement that we were doing this for the oil. Why is it a problem that, even when faced with the opportunity, we are not stealing the oil?

You can’t have it both ways.

Let’s say that by June 30, there were no more US soldiers there at all. That it was decided that the UN could step in if they wanted to, but we weren’t going to wait for them. That individuals could contribute as much time and money and effort as they wanted to reconstruction, but the nation wasn’t going to put another dime into it.

Does anyone seriously think that Iraq wouldn’t erupt into anarchy and chaos?

If it did, would it really be our problem? The Iraqui people don’t seem to like the occupation; the fact that they continue killing soldiers whenever and however they can demonstrates this. It seems that gas prices are going to rise no matter what we do; why not spare the expense of the occupation, let them take themselves to hell. Or maybe, if they demonstrate more maturity than I expect, they’ll organize their own police, hold their own elections, act rationally. That would be best, really; the government would be more stable than something propped up by Uncle Sam’s helping hand, because it would have come about independently. But for some reason, I don’t really think that it would happen like that.

Democracy seems to only take root when the people want it, though. It works in the US becuase the people were willing to revolt to acquire it. It works in Europe and Japan because they have similar cultures; whether or not they would have arrived there without the influence of the US, their people value the benefits it provides enough for it to be stable. (It may work well in other places, too; I only named the places that I can think of off the top of my head.) The thing about democracy, though, is that you can’t enforce it; you can’t point a gun to someone’s head and say “you must vote now” and expect reasonable results. You can’t require an expectation of freedom.

We can’t build Iraq into something resembling the US. The Iraquis have to do it themselves. While they’re busy at it, the best thing we can do to help is to remove our soldiers, open trade with them. Nothing more. If at some point they look at the US as a role model instead of the Great Satan, then we’ll be en route to true victory. Until then, maintaining a military presence only ensures that we’ll continue spending money and manpower, and they’ll keep resenting us a little more every day.

If pulling out results in civil wars in Iraq, if it results in death and starvation and all sorts of injustice–that’s not our problem. We shouldn’t have to be the world’s police. We wouldn’t have appreciated it if someone had stepped in during our own Civil War, decreed that the South had a point, separated the nation, put down troops to ensure that their decision held. We need to let them figure out their own sanity, becuase we can’t supply it for them.