Category Archives: rights

In Defense of Drone Strikes

Posted on by
Reply

I want to expand on a couple of points from a Stratfor article by George Friedman in which he talks about the use of drones on a modern terrorist war battlefield.  Friedman ultimately finds the utility of relying on drone strikes of dubious value.  Without addressing his utility conclusion, my own conclusion is that drone strikes are a legitimate application of our national defense imperative.

Friedman suggests in a posited anti-drone argument that

What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals…. The modern battlefield—and the ancient as well—has been marked by anonymity.  The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability.  In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment.

…the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed.

When is the judgment carried out, though?  In a conventional war, an overall judgment is carried out at the war’s outset, with the decision to enter into it, and any enemy or collection of enemies after that entry is shot on sight.  In the terror war, the same total judgment is made as that of the conventional war, differing only in its mechanics—now it’s most often a two-step process.  A secondary judgment is carried out in real time in the terror war that was subsumed into the conventional war’s original judgment: an individual is identified (including being discriminated from an innocent civilian) in real time, within that larger judgment’s framework, and the strike carried out.  But this two-step process is not materially different from the totality of judgment for the conventional war, and it differs not at all from a two-step process often explicitly carried out in a conventional war: consider the capture of a city by ground troops during which the classic house-to-house combat occurs.  The framework judgment—kill the enemy wherever you find him—was carried out at the war’s start.  Now, in the house-to-house environment, the second step is carried out: is this an enemy soldier, or is it an innocent civilian?

Friedman later says

the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.  Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse.  They are not a hierarchical military organization.  Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered.
…
The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals—particularly the commanders—isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible.  Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

I’ll elide the violation of laws of war at which Friedman hints here and focus on the dispersal aspect.  I suggest that this is not so much a unique sort of war as much as it’s an extension of conventional war tactics carried to an extreme, albeit with a unique set of targets and goals.  The terrorists’ dispersal is simply an extension of conventional infantry tactics writ to a global scale.  Prior to the opening of an infantry assault, the attacking force often attempts to infiltrate as much as possible—through stealth—the defenders’ positions before firing the first shot.  The terror war’s terrorist simply carries this to the next logical step: instead of several infantry units, each consisting of a number of individuals doing the infiltrating, the terrorists’ small units now consists of individual terrorists doing the infiltrating—or the plotting of the attack.

In either of these cases, the drone strike is well within the limits of war: it’s a valid means of killing an enemy—here a terrorist, rather than a soldier—when and where he’s been found, and it’s a valid response to catching a terrorist in his infiltration process (at any stage, from planning it to mid-execution) and interrupting his intended assault.

China’s Economic Course

Posted on by
Reply

In a nation that’s facing a demographic implosion (a birth rate of around 1.5 against a rate of roughly 2.1 required to maintain current population levels, and an aging population (expected by 2050 (the current generation plus their children) to have four workers in the age band 50-64 for every three aged 15-29, and for every 100 people aged 20-64, 45 over 65), that chronically lives on the edge of famine, and that has a population increasingly aware of what could be compared to what is, the PRC government is not treating its poor or its farmers (22% of whom will be over 65 as early as 2030—the current generation) very well.  And so it’s not treating its society or its economy with any foresight.

For instance:

In December 2010, when [Fu Liang]  says a campaign of harassment drove him off the small plot where he ran a fish farm, the local government paid Mr Fu just nine yuan ($1.45) a square meter for it.

The plot was quickly resold for 640 yuan [$103.11] per square meter to a developer, a national database of land transactions shows.  The developer has built villas that sell for 6,900 yuan [$1,111.67] a square meter.

A markup of a factor of nearly 10 at each stage.  Fu’s 9 yuan meter of fish farm was worth far more than he was paid.  In another sense, it was priceless, since he didn’t want to sell.

Mr Fu now is unemployed, one among tens of thousands of former farmers who inhabit the impoverished fringes of Chengdu, a city in southwestern China.  He has no heart to start another business.  “What’s the point if the government can just destroy it?” he says.

With no sense of irony, the PRC’s new president, Xi Jinping, claims to want strengthen that demographically unstable society and its unstable economy—through property (land) ownership.  After all, as Fu pointed out,

precarious land rights mean little incentive to invest in improving agricultural output, and no asset that can be sold to fund a move to the city.  Low compensation for the millions ousted from their land—coupled with ineligibility for social benefits because they aren’t registered as urban residents—means for many a life of poverty on the edges of the cities.

And no incentive to bring additional children—boys only, mind, in a mandated one child environment, with the bias’ own long-run population sustainability implications—into the world.  And the one-child policy was put in place explicitly to achieve the population reduction about to occur sharply.

Fat chance for any serious change:

“Push forward scientific development and advance social harmony,” proclaims a banner draped across one construction site, parroting a catch phrase of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.  Mr Fu, surveying a noodle bowl of highway overpasses, said, “A few years ago, this was all farmland.”

Because farmland—the means of feeding the population—stands in the way of progress.  Xi will have a great deal of trouble reversing that, especially with the money to be made converting farmland to urban land.

A Waste of Legislative Energy

Posted on by
Reply

…and a potential First Amendment violation.  Especially in a conservative environment, this is surprising.

The North Carolina House is set to vote on a bill that would

amend the state’s indecent exposure law to expand the legal definition of “private parts” to explicitly include “the nipple, or any portion of the areola, or the female breast.”

And if such exposure were to be deemed

for the purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire

the evil miscreant could convicted of a felony and locked away in a North Carolina jail for six months.  “More mundane exposures” (whatever those are) could be guilty of a misdemeanor—and still locked up, now for 30 days.

Of course, it’s hard to discriminate such exposures from political speech, but that apparently doesn’t concern those good legislators.  And a woman’s breast is, perforce, an obscene thing, to be kept hidden away—and state legislators are far better judges of such morality than are the rubes of the villages, towns, and cities who’ve already made their choice on this matter.

Which brings me to the state’s…rationale…for this exercise.

Co-sponsor Rep Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, told members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that her bill was triggered by topless rallies promoting women’s equity that were held during the last two years in Asheville.

Oop—there’s that tacky free speech thing.

No matter; she added in all seriousness,

There’s some confusion about the law.  I think our state deserves clarity on this issue.

Never mind that there is no confusion.  The police of a town know their town’s ordinances.  They have no need of knowing the differences with another town’s ordinances; they have no jurisdiction over there.

Nor is there any confusion on the part of the state police.  They have no jurisdiction inside the town limits unless they’re enforcing a state law.  Oh, wait—let’s make a state law, and give them jurisdiction.

Early Education

Posted on by
Reply

If the regular public schools aren’t working…does it make sense to layer on another defective education level, except earlier in life?

…

In December, [President Barack] Obama’s own Health and Human Services Department released an evaluation of Head Start, the 47-year-old program for low-income toddlers, and concluded that any cognitive gains disappeared by the third grade.  HHS had sat on the legally mandated study for more than a year.

Part of the reason for the failure of preschool programs, though, is that, after passing out of these programs, the kids go into the same failing school systems as their non-preschool peers.

Progressives and the teachers unions (not necessarily the teachers themselves), though, universally oppose such successful alternatives as charter schools and voucher programs—they reject the competition that would force improvement on the public schools while providing an immediately improved environment for the children.

Such improvements would, for instance, include compensating teachers for their performance—the quality of the students passing out of their classes—rather than simply for being on the job for the requisite length of time.  In the end, this impacts teachers unions more than it does the teachers themselves; see for instance the New York City resistance to such an evaluation régime—it’s union leadership and their pocket politicians on the city council, not the teachers, that are objecting.

Is there evidence that any preschool success could be potentiated by charter/voucher programs rather than allowed to peter out as happens in existing public schools?  Not yet.  Progressive blockage remains too successful for these alternatives to be widespread and the needed research conducted.

Education, in the end, is a local prerogative, a local obligation, with standards set by and to meet local needs, even if “local” is much broader than it used to be.  This is how our educational system was designed.

The failure of the Federal programs with which the Feds have been interfering in our educational system (potentiated by union intransigence) is another reason for keeping the matter local, with the central government butting out.

Conservatism and Liberalism

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote yesterday about who a Conservative is; today I’d like to discuss the relationship between conservatism and liberalism, and how the two evolve.

The relationship between the two is fairly stable—conservatism and liberalism have generally oppositional views of how best to support our people and our country—it’s their individual roles in politics that evolve.  Indeed, the two have swapped roles since our founding.

In broad, general terms, an 18th Century Conservative holds a fundamental belief about the role of government in men’s lives similar to the more or less enlightened view delineated by Edmund Burke contemporaneously with our Revolution.

Burke has been termed a friend of the American colonies for his support for them and for their rights in the English Parliament.  However, he was a monarchist through and through.  He argued forcefully for our rights as Englishmen, true enough.  But those rights, in his view, consisted entirely of the right to be subjects of a pater familias monarchy, of a government that claimed for itself the authority to define the detail of that right, to define for today what our freedoms might be—until the monarchy saw fit to withdraw those rights, those freedoms tomorrow.  This was so because a mere commoner was viewed as incapable of reason, he could not determine for himself what was best for him: he needed the…guidance…of his betters.  Moreover, the right to govern, circularly, was an inheritable right, but only by those already comprising that government, for their superior fitness to govern was demonstrated by their being part of the government.

Set in contrast to that, as I noted in that earlier post, the 18th Century Liberal belief of the sovereignty of man over his government; the principle that legitimate government can only be formed by men themselves, voluntarily; and that liberties and responsibilities are inherent in each of us individually as gifts from God, not severally as handouts from government.  Thus, a man, says that 18th Century Liberal, has rights and responsibilities that are indivisible from him because they are inherent in his humanity, in his very existence.  And he has the innate wherewithal, from that, to determine his own lot in accordance with his own imperatives.

Then government exists to protect these rights and for no other purpose.  When such a government strays too far from this duty, the citizens of this wholly voluntary polity have an equally inalienable right (in the Declaration of Independence, our Founders aver a duty, as did Locke) to do whatsoever is necessary to bring that government to heel or to replace it with a more obedient one.  This is the very antithesis of the world of governance extant in the 18th Century Conservative’s mind.

That 18th Century Conservative’s view was repackaged and articulated in more modern terms by (among others) Theodore Roosevelt and Herb Croly, founders of the Progressive (modern Liberal) movement early in the 20th century.  Since, it has become the central theme of liberals generally (for instance, Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that she was a proud Progressive).  Here is what Herb Croly wrote in his The Promise of American Life,  in 1909:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy….  [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1904 Annual Message to Congress, had this to say:

The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce.

And again, in his 1908 Annual Message [emphasis added]:

The chief reason, among the many sound and compelling reasons, that led to the formation of the National Government was the absolute need that the Union, and not the several States, should deal with interstate and foreign commerce; and the power to deal with interstate commerce was granted absolutely and plenarily to the central government…. The proposal to make the National Government supreme over, and therefore to give it complete control over, the railroads and other instruments of interstate commerce is merely a proposal to carry out to the letter one of the prime purposes, if not the prime purpose, for which the Constitution was founded.

And again, in his 1910 New Nationalism speech:

It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business.

…

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.  It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community.  We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

Because Big Government knows best how to manage business, for what purpose a man should be required to use the fruits of his labor, and that man can be allowed [sic] to enjoy his success only in approved ways.

We’ve seen this desire in modern Liberals—Progressives—to insert Big Government into our economy, into our lives, with the 21st century nationalization of both our health insurance industry and our health care industry and with the effective control over our financial industry achieved with Dodd-Frank and its unconstrained Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

We’ve also seen the Progressive disdain for our Constitution—the product of those 18th Century Liberals—and thus for the rule of law in, for instance, unconstitutional “recess” appointments of officials while the Senate was in session and in the imposition by regulation of that which our representatives in Congress had explicitly rejected.  This is rule by the men of government, instead.

We’ve also seen their modern belief in Big Government clearly stated.  In October 2008, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, responding to a citizen questioner in Toledo, OH, who asked “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”  And President Obama said at a rally in Quincy, IL in April 2010, “I think at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”  Here is the Progressive saying in so many words that Progressives in government know better how to dispose of a man’s property, how his money should be spent, what constitutes sufficient wealth.  How a man should be allowed to enjoy what success he is to be permitted to achieve.

Today’s opposition to this Progressive liberalism is the modern Conservative: a man who now seeks to conserve those 18th century liberal principles that are fundamental to the American social compact.

Notice that: the names have reversed position, with what was once known as liberal now known as conservative, and what was once thought conservative has become liberal, but this evolution is one of name only (this often is a point of confusion when talking about liberalism vs conservatism).

But the fundamental tenets remain unchanged.  One respects the wisdom of the individual, common man and holds him sovereign over government, with rights and duties inherent in each as endowments from our Creator.  The other, in contradiction, hews to the view of government as the solution, and so government must grow to meet the problems of the day; what we obtain, and how we enjoy it, are for government to determine.

The monarchist is now the champion of Big Government and wants to change from limited government to that Big Government, while the limited government erstwhile liberal wants to conserve those principles of limited government and of individual liberty and individual responsibility.