Wise Guys

"The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are." Francis Bacon from Of Seeming Wise

I think Bacon got the countries mixed up, although after the last election in Spain, where the voters succumbed to terrorist pressure, maybe the wisdom of both is in question.

Another View On Taxes

The piece Doing Good with Other Peoples' Money (June 29) elicited a couple of replies including the following from my brother Bill. See the Feedback section for another. Bill writes:

It appears that the discussion of taxes misses a most important point that, once recognized, may lead anyone who is interested to a different perspective on the subject. There are taxes and then there are income taxes.

According to the Constitution of the United States: "Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." But the founding fathers who crafted the Constitution had no idea that the above section would lead to an income tax. And it wasn't until the 16th amendment that income tax was instituted, almost 140 years later.

The XVI amendment states that: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." It was ratified in 1913, the same year that the Federal Reserve was established. Prior to this time, there was no Federal Income Tax. There's a connection here but that's probably best left for another post.

It's also interesting to note that under the Federal Reserve, the dollar has lost approximately 98% of it purchasing power since 1913. This is the hidden tax known more commonly as inflation, the true rape of the American people and that fact isn't open to interpretation. Consider the following from economist John Maynard Keynes:

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose... If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer."

So when talking about taxes, it really doesn't matter if you are a Republican or Democrat. Both parties are analogous to vehicles on a superhighway..the Republicans are in the right lane, knowing that they will eventually get to the destination..absolute socialism. The Democrats are in more of a hurry and are in the left passing lane determined to reach their destination as soon as possible. The income tax is the way they will accomplish their goal because it enables the politician to reach into your pocket, take your wealth, and redistribute it to those they want to be beholden to them, and Hillary (the Socialist's Socialist) has no problem telling you so.

If you were to look at a demographic map of the US showing the density of the population that voted in the 2000 election you would see that it shows a concentration of Gore voters around urban areas while the George Bush constituency was more rural. Why is that? Because many of the people living in urban areas live there precisely to take advantage of the largesse Alexander Tyler speaks of in the following quote:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses from poor fiscal responsibility, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."

The loop-hole in the Constitution that makes this possible is the phrase "The Congress shall have power to .. provide for the general welfare of the United States" in Section 8 of the Constitution. Surely the founding fathers never expected it would be exploited as it is today.

When this country was founded, it was established as a republic, and as such, the individual was considered a sovereign entity, hence the Bill of Rights. The individual states also shared that status but over the years, the Federal Government has gradually morphed the U.S. into a democracy which is what Mr. Tyler laments in his quote above. A democracy pays no consideration to sovereignty of the individual or the state and as a democracy, the Federal Government has usurped the freedom and legitimacy of both the individual and the state. A democracy is about majority rule. A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what they're going to have for dinner.

For more on this topic, see here.

The 100 Most Spiritually Significant Movies

Evangelical Outpost brings word that Arts and Faith has come out with a list of the 100 most spiritually significant movies. As with any such list one wonders why some selections are on it and some aren't. I haven't seen all of what's on Arts and Faith's list, but much of the films I have seen I apparently failed to recognize as spiritually significant.

I don't know why, for example, Winter Light, Romero and Leap of Faith are not on the list, and Dogma, Fight Club, and American Beauty are. I'm not saying these movies weren't well done (Well, Dogma was pretty awful) only that I'm not sure what their spiritual significance was (Although, as I think about it, American Beauty did do a pretty good job, inadvertently, I suspect, of showing the absolute banality and sterility of the lives of the main characters, all of whom were complete secularists in whose lives religious belief played no role whatsoever, so maybe I shouldn't criticize that movie's selection to the list). Anyway, de gustibus non est disputandum (there's no disputing matters of taste).

Go to Evangelical Outpost and see how Joe Carter rated some of the films. I'd be interested to know what Viewpoint readers think should be added or deleted.

A Ticking Time Bomb

Here's an interesting item from the Washington Times. It seems that Senator Kerry has actually been charged with heresy by a Roman Catholic lawyer in the Boston Archdiocese. The lawyer, Marc Balestrieri, argues that Kerry's pro-choice stance on abortion amounts to heresy in the Catholic Church and since the bishops apparently refuse to do anything about it, he will.

"Heresy is a public, ecclesiastical crime," said Mr. Balestrieri, 33, whose complaint is posted at www.defide.com. "It affects entire communities. It is one of the greatest sins you can commit."

If the Boston archdiocese declines to act on the charge, Mr. Balastrieri is entitled to appeal to Rome. This has no doubt given Church officials a case of heartburn, and could be a ticking time bomb during the election run up. The question is who will be most likely to look bad, Sen. Kerry or the Catholic Church?

Faith In America

Ali at Iraq The Model writes movingly of his feelings about the handover. He describes a scene where he and a number of his medical colleagues are having a small celebration:

Then suddenly Mr. Bremer appeared on TV reading his last speech before he left Iraq. I approached the TV to listen carefully to the speech, as I expected it to be difficult in the midst of all that noise. To my surprise everyone stopped what they were doing and started watching as attentively as I was.

The speech was impressive and you could hear the sound of a needle if one had dropped it at that time. The most sensational moment was the end of the speech when Mr. Bremer used a famous Arab emotional poem. The poem was for a famous Arab poet who said it while leaving Baghdad. Al-Jazeera had put an interpreter who tried to translate even the Arabic poem which Mr. Bremer was telling in a fair Arabic! "Let this damned interpreter shut up. We want to hear what the man is saying" One of my colloquies [sic] shouted. The scene was very touching that the guy sitting next to me (who used to sympathize with Muqtada) said "He's going to make me cry!"

Then he finished his speech by saying in Arabic,"A'ash Al-Iraq, A'ash Al-Iraq, A'ash Al-Iraq"! (Long live Iraq, Long live Iraq, long live Iraq).

I was deeply moved by this great man's words but I couldn't prevent myself from watching the effect of his words on my friends who some of them were anti-Americans and some were skeptic, although some of them have always shared my optimism. I found that they were touched even more deeply than I was. I turned to one friend who was a committed She'at and who distrusted America all the way. He looked as if he was bewitched, and I asked him, "So, what do you think of this man? Do you still consider him an invader?" My friend smiled, still touched and said, "Absolutely not! He brought tears to my eyes. God bless him."

Another friend approached me. This one was not religious but he was one of the conspiracy theory believers. He put his hands on my shoulders and said smiling, "I must admit that I'm beginning to believe in what you've been telling us for months and I'm beginning to have faith in America. I never thought that they will hand us sovereignty in time. These people have shown that they keep their promises."

Beginning to have faith in America! Now if only some of our politicians, journalists, and celebrities could do the same.

What Would Ayn Rand Say?

If there are any Ayn Rand type libertarians out there who believe that the U.S. had no business launching Operation Iraqi Freedom it might be interesting to get their response to the words of the master herself on the subject. In 1963 she wrote:

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self interest, not of respect for the nonexistent "rights" of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses. From "Collectivized" Rights (Emphasis hers)

Her argument, I think, was that rights do not inhere in nations, rather they inhere in individuals. The nation has a "right" to exist only insofar as it embodies the collective rights of the individuals which comprise it and freely choose its leadership. The chief right of the individual is the right to one's life which entails the right to be free. Any government which denies these rights to its people has no legitimacy and no right to exist. In short, the destruction of such a government violates no right possessed by the tyrant government.

Rand, I think, would say today that the Bush administration was not duty-bound to liberate Iraq, but they had the "right" to do it. I wonder how many of her libertarian devotees would agree.

Standard Muslim Pedagogy

Little Green Footballs has a piece that shows that the beheadings we've seen of American "infidels" at the hands of terrorists is not an aberration, but is a tactic taught to Muslim schoolchildren throughout the Arab world.

What Do They Know?

Undecided voters who might be considering a vote for John Kerry in November should ask themselves what it is about the Massachusetts senator that has won him the support of pornographers like Howard Stern and Larry Flynt, Hollywood ditzes like Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore, raving wild men like Al Gore and Howard Dean, the Communist Chinese, North Korea, Vietnam (Hanoi), and the French. What do they all know that maybe the rest of us should?

Progress in the War on Terror

NewsMax.com has a report about part of the 9/11 Commission's Staff Statement #15 that has been pretty much ignored by the media. The report notes that:

"Since the September 11 attacks and the defeat of the Taliban, al Qaeda's funding has decreased significantly. The arrests or deaths of several important financial facilitators have decreased the amount of money al Qaeda has raised and increased the costs and difficulty of raising and moving that money.

"Some entirely corrupt charities are now out of business, with many of their principals killed or captured, although some charities may still be providing support to al Qaeda.

"Moreover, it appears that the al Qaeda attacks within Saudi Arabia in May and November 2003 have reduced - perhaps drastically - at Qaeda's ability to raise funds from Saudi sources. Both an increase in Saudi enforcement and a more negative perception of al Qaeda by potential donors have cut its income."

This is not to suggest that the war on terror is anywhere close to being won, but it does suggest that things are certainly moving in the right direction.

Avoiding Armageddon

My brother calls my attention to this essay by Pat Buchanan concerning the United States' unfortunate capitulation to the United Nations in the matter of whether the International Criminal Court would have legal jurisdiction over American troops. Buchanan is surely correct to be alarmed at the prospect of the same people who incessantly condemn Israel while giving the Palestinians a pass, the same people who put Libya and Iraq in positions of oversight of human rights violations, the same people who stood by impotently while Hutus butchered 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda and did nothing to stop the slaughters in Bosnia and Kosovo, he is surely correct to be alarmed at the prospect of these same people, most of whom come from countries which are themselves failed, corrupt oligarchies, hauling Americans before a court and imposing legal penalties against them.

The thought of Americans being tried in a court of law by representatives from states like Syria, Iran, Somalia and other precincts in the semi-civilized world is ludicrous. It is just as ludicrous to think that our soldiers could expect a fair hearing from states like France, which would like nothing more than to slap us in the face, and the Peoples' Republic of China which would do whatever it could to weaken the ability of America to project power around the world.

The United States, with all its flaws, is still the glue that is keeping the world from collapsing into chaos. The attempt to gain more and more control over the application of American power will, in the long term, diminish the ability and resolve of the U.S. to maintain that power. If, as is fervently hoped by many, the United States were eventually to be reduced to the military and/or political level of, say, France, it is almost inevitable that the Mideast and subsequently the entire world would go up in flames.

If one doubts this consider what would happen in Asia if the U.S. ceased to be able to project power into this region. North and South Korea would quickly be at each other's throats, as would the Peoples' Republic of China and Taiwan. Japan and other states in the region would be unable to stay neutral and would get sucked into a hellish vortex of war that would consume the entire Pacific rim.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel's Arab neighbors would seize an opportunity they had been denied by American might for fifty years and invade Israel spawning a conflict that would almost certainly result in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

A similar scenario would doubtless play out on the Indian subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and would also almost certainly culminate in a nuclear exchange. Africa, too, would break out in renewed tribal and racial violence.

Europe would be thrown into turmoil by its Arab populations and by renewed fighting in the Balkans. These stresses would exacerbate old hatreds and open old wounds between the countries of Europe which have warred repeatedly against each other for two thousand years, and would doubtless bring at least some of them into conflict with each other again. It's hard to imagine the carnage that would result from all of this. The world teeters on a tightrope over a hellish chasm and it is only the balance pole of American force that has kept us from plunging into that abyss.

None of this is to say that submitting our troops to the jurisdiction of the ICC will cause the world to collapse immediately into a cauldron of unprecedented killing and destruction. It is to say, however, that submission to the ICC is a step in a process of weakening the hope and threat that American force will be employed to preserve peace and justice in the world. It's a step toward making the application of military might less credible since the United States will inevitably grow more reluctant to exert its power for fear that her sons and daughters will be held legally accountable by those who despise us for our values, success, and power. To the extent that we find ourselves unable or unwilling to act when circumstances warrant, to that extent we hasten a world-wide Armageddon.

Keeping America militarily strong is a necessary condition for maintaining peace and justice in a world filled with people who would like nothing more than to precipitate a global orgy of death and destruction. Military power, however, is not a sufficient condition. We must also have the will to use that power, and, most importantly, we must have moral goodness to match our military might. We need to be willing to use our power, unencumbered by constraints imposed upon us by those whose motives are less than exemplary, but only when the cause is right and just.

There are many at the U.N., and in the ranks of the American left, who think that the best hope for world peace is to make America weak. They are tragically mistaken, in my view. The way to keep the world from destroying itself, the way to keep the world from realizing the death wish it seems to be consumed by, is to keep America strong and to ensure that she is good. If we fail in either of those the future of the world is a nightmare.

Doing Good With Other Peoples' Money

Senator Hillary Clinton in a speech yesterday in San Francisco:

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Give her credit for honesty. Most liberals are not this forthright about their plans for your pocketbook. My question is, though, why don't the people who always want to take money away from the rest of us just give away their own wealth instead? Hillary is very well off since her husband struck it rich with his new book and can certainly afford to donate a fat sum to the U.S. treasury.

Her party's standard-bearer, John Kerry, who has probably never worked a day in his life and is certainly not working at his current job in the U.S. Senate, is rolling in his wife's former husband's millions. They don't need all that. Why don't they just give their fortunes to the government if they want Washington to have more and let everybody else keep what they've had to work to get?

Of course, that'll never happen. It's a lot better to just rape the taxpayer.

Why the Media Underreports Religion

There is a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Gal Beckerman about why religion, a matter of such importance to so many in this country, and a matter which impacts so heavily upon our society, gets such paltry coverage from journalists. She writes:

However central belief and faith might be to the American populace, our news media seldom puncture the surface in their reporting on religion. The various institutions are scrutinized, sometimes with great rigor, as a former cardinal in Boston might confirm. But it generally takes scandal or spectacle to get even the large denominations on the front page. And even then, the deeper belief systems of these religions are left unexamined. The theology and faith of the believers is kept at arm's length, and the writing is clinical. The journalist glances at religious community as if staring through the glass of an ant farm, remarking on what the strange creatures are doing, but missing the motivations behind the action.

The bulk of her essay describes what most religion coverage is like and explores the reasons why the media doesn't do a better job covering it. She dismisses the possibility, rather obvious to some of us, that journalists are simply hostile to the religious world view:

[A]lmost 80 percent of journalists [have] some religious affiliation. This also confirms what journalists report anecdotally: that there is a wide range of religious belief inside newsrooms, that many reporters and their families are deeply involved with their religious communities....[So that] while a lack of empathy and literacy might very well contribute to the problem, this can't be the whole story. Not only, as the recent polls show, is it not true that reporters are too secular to get faith, but it shouldn't really matter. No religion writer would say that one has to be a believer to understand believers. And although the knowledge problem is real, more and more religion writers are specialists and could potentially be a source in the newsroom for reporters who aren't. The "secular newsroom" seems to be a myth, and the knowledge gap certainly surmountable. Something else seems to be at work here, something more systemic.

But a few paragraphs before this Beckerman had acknowledged that:

[R]eligion writers remain a tiny minority in the newsroom (there are about 200 of them working at secular newspapers). More of these journalists are coming to the job with theological training from seminaries and divinity schools, and many of them are fighting every day to get stories about faith on the front page. But with rare exceptions, such as The Dallas Morning-News, which has a weekly six-page religion section and a team of four reporters covering different aspects of belief, most papers have only one, maybe two, religion writers who can barely keep up with the hard news of religious institutions, let alone explore deeper questions of faith. Editors and owners simply do not make religion a priority, and journalists are not encouraged to make it a part of their stories.

It would seem, then, from this that a big part of the problem really is that the people who make the decisions, the people with the power, are indifferent to matters of faith however important it might be to the lowly reporters. Beckerman, however, suggests that the problem is more one of religion and journalism inhabiting to different epistemic worlds. She frames it this way:

On the one hand, there is journalism, premised on the notion of objective reality. To report is to write about what can be seen, heard, touched, smelled. Journalism is grounded in this world and embodies a belief that everything can be known. On the other hand is religion, which is fundamentally about mystery and the unknown. Faith is grounded in this notion, that we surrender ourselves to greater powers beyond our reach. How can journalism, then, welded as it is to the known world, contend with faith and belief?

But this just seems to be another way of saying that journalists, or their editors, working from a naturalistic worldview, are antipathetic toward, or simply not tuned into, religion and regard it as they might regard the horoscope page. Religion stories are a sop that they offer to the intellectually unwashed to entice them into buying a paper, but they have no intention of expending much of their resources on it.

What's the solution? Men and women tend to live out in their work what they believe to be ultimately important. Their beliefs infuse and suffuse their work and their lives. Thus religious believers, especially young people of faith, need to continue "the long march through the institutions" that has already been under way for some time. People to whom the gospel is personally crucial need to enter journalism, just as they need to enter the education profession, the profession of law, the film industry, the music industry, and everywhere their deepest beliefs can exert influence on their work and ultimately on our culture. When eventually editors and reporters are people for whom the core doctrines of religious belief are of paramount importance in their lives then matters of faith will be receive the attention they warrant.

Beckerman closes with these wise words:

By excluding faith, we miss the core of so many stories - What motivates people to act? What are the beliefs that give meaning to our lives? What ideas are we willing to live and die for? If journalism means to relay the day-to-day saga of our society, it can't continue to ignore these questions.

The CJR article is a little long, but anyone interested in media coverage of religion should read it. Thanks to Byron at Hearts and Minds for the tip.

The Handover in Iraq

For one Iraqi's thoughts on the turnover of political control see Mohammed at Iraq The Model. He concludes with a heart evidently overflowing with sincere gratitude:

A big greeting to the courageous and noble man; Mr. Bremer whom we saluted this morning. He proved that he's the right man for the tough times. He struggled together with his Iraqi brothers to overcome the hardships in a critical era for this country and the whole world. I'm going to miss his presence and so are many other Iraqis because we feel that who left today is one of Iraq's sons.

A big greeting to the men who decided to bear the responsibility of Iraq's safety and Iraq's future. They needed courage and faith to decide to work for Iraq in this hard time. May God help them guide this country with wisdom until the day when elections come.

It's hard to appreciate the efforts of all those who helped us to get our freedom and rebuild our country. We will never forget them. We will keep them in our hearts. God bless Iraq and her people. God bless America and her people.

God bless all the coalition forces who supported operation Iraqi freedom. May God bless the souls of all those who sacrificed their lives to free Iraq.

I don't know how many Iraqis Mohammed speaks for, but it's for certain he doesn't speak for the embittered souls at Truthout.org who are convinced the U.S. is "tucking tail and running" to escape a disaster of our own making. The good folks at Truthout are just distraught that all their predictions of inevitable catastrophe in Iraq have yet to come to pass, but just wait. They will. William Rivers Pitt of Truthout writes:

The American people are not comfortable dealing with words like "total failure" and "ruined credibility," but these are words that all of us are going to have to become accustomed to.

A process that began in September 2002 as a coordinated propaganda blitz to convince Americans they were on the verge of being gassed by an Osama-Saddam Axis of Doom, a process that was swathed in flags and a snarling, nationalistic patriotism, a process that has in the last 22 months delivered 855 dead American soldiers, thousands of gravely wounded American soldiers and over ten thousand dead Iraqi civilians to our collective doorstep, has now concluded with a farcical handover of 'sovereignty' in the dead of night.

"Total failure" and "ruined credibility" are the watchwords for the day. A process that never should have begun in the first place, a process which had nothing to do with defending the United States, has led us to a place where every 'goal' put forth by the Bush administration, no matter how stupid or simple, has turned to ash. This is the great gift Mr. Bush has delivered to us: A midnight deal, a washing of hands, and a quick exit out the back door. Honor and integrity indeed.

Pitt is right to mourn the deaths and woundings of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, but the rest of this piece sounds more like the ravings of a fanatic who realizes he's about to be discredited before the whole world. I think Mohammed in Iraq probably has a better grasp of things there than does Mr. Pitt

Iraq and Yellow Cake

Remember the furor over President Bush's claim that Iraq was seeking Uranium ore from Niger? Remember the gleeful scoffing when one of the pieces of evidence turned out to be a forgery, putting large dollops of egg on administration faces? Well, it turns out that three European intelligence services had independent evidence of the truth of the administration's assertions. The Financial Times has the story. Thanks for the tip to Power Line which closes their piece with this:

The Bush administration has known this all along. So why did it withdraw the Niger claim, rather than defending it? Who knows. It's too late now, in any event. If the administration thinks it can pull this chestnut out of the fire at this late date, it is mistaken. What Bush said was true, but the facts ceased being important long ago.

Probably true. The public has only a limited ability to absorb new information once it has decided that something has been proven. The masses, unfortunately, base their opinions on impressions rather than upon reason or facts. The impression that Bush was bamboozled by a forgery about Iraqi attempts to buy Niger yellow cake has been fixed like a stain in the public consciousness and will probably be almost impossible to eradicate, no matter how much evidence accumulates.

The Irony of Abortion

Opinion Journal has a piece that argues that abortion in America cost the Democrat party about six million voters in 2000, that the cost will be even greater in 2004 and increase every election afterward. It's an interesting analysis and, if valid, extremely ironic.

Torture Redux

Viewpoint has argued before (6/6/2004) that much of what is being written and said about the awfulness of the Bush administration with regard to the matter of torture is hard to credit. Not only are his critics using this issue in a disingenuous fashion to hurt the president politically, but Bush himself is hard to take seriously when he says that he would never order torture.

If it is true that he would never permit someone to be tortured then what would he do in the very plausible scenario of a nuclear bomb hidden in a major city set to go off in ten hours. Suppose one of the terrorists has been captured but will not divulge the location of the bomb. If the President would not order him to be tortured to extract the information needed to save millions of lives then I suggest he is profoundly wrong and is derelict in his responsibilities as president.

Some readers may blanche at the suggestion that torture might ever be the right thing to do, but the question of torture is not as simple as sound bites on the evening news would have it.

For example, the terrorists in Iraq have recently kidnapped an American Marine. Suppose they threaten to behead him as they have done to others. Suppose further that the Marines have captured an insurgent they have good reason to believe knows where the kidnapped Marine is being kept. He will not divulge the information. Should he be subjected to physical or psychological coercion in order to get the information out of him?

That would be an interesting question to pose to the critics who are trying to skewer the president with this issue. If their answer to the question is no, would they say the same thing if the kidnapped Marine was their brother, or their son? If the critic knew that his/her son's life could be saved from the horror that befell Nick Berg and Paul Johnson and Daniel Pearl, but it was not because American forces were prevented from using methods which might cause pain for the terrorist, would the critic not think that something is out of moral kilter? If he would still say that torturing a terrorist would be wrong even if it were necessary to save his son's life then is he not saying that the physical and psychological well-being of a murderer is more important in his hierarchy of values than the life of his son?

In other words, the questions we should be asking about torture are precisely the ones which so shock the president's opponents. We should be asking not whether torture should ever be used, but rather what constitutes torture and under what circumstances, if any, is it morally permissable. Perhaps some pacifists would still insist that torture is never justifiable, but I suspect that most people would agree that if we found ourselves in either of the scenarios mentioned above torture would be not only morally right, but the refusal to use it would be morally appalling.

Iraq The Model

Ali, an Iraqi writing at Iraq The Model, makes an interesting observation about the economic circumstances of the average Iraqi in Baghdad. It goes against the grain of what has been reported about the employment (and security) situation there. He writes:

I found there that it has become very common that some restaurants and hotels are using work agencies to get workers from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the Philippines. Moreover, many families in Baghdad started to hire maids through work agencies; the family would pay 1300 $ for the agency to cover the travel cost of the maid who will get a monthly payment of 100 $ at least.

The question is why don't these people hire Iraqis instead? And why do these people (workers) risk their lives in coming to work in such a "chaotic area"? I think the answer to the 1st question is that most Iraqis can easily find a job that pays more than 100 $ with less effort and commitments. For example a kid (in summer vacation)who help in cleaning the streets and river banks get paid about 120$ by the city hall a month for about 5 hours work.

The answer to the 2nd question can be explained in 2 ways; there seems to be lots of job opportunities in Iraq as a result of private businesses' improvement and an increase in the life standard of a good proportion of Iraqis that made this process (importing workers) a real business and that enabled Iraqis to pay reasonable amounts of money to those workers that make it worthy the risk. The other answer might be that the security conditions in Iraq is not that scary to prevent workers from coming to Iraq and also that Iraq job market seems better for simple workers at least than that in India, Philippines, Sri Lanka and many other Asian countries!!

For years before the war the opposite was true, and no foreigner workers were able or interested to come to work in Iraq, and after all this "destruction and chaos and imminent civil war" this seems to have changed and Iraq has suddenly become a place that attracts many jobless people from different countries! Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation other than what I suggested?!

Death Throes of an Insurgency?

Robert Alt of No Left Turns makes a few interesting observations on the current state of affairs in Iraq from his perch in Baghdad. Key passage:

It now appears that Zarqawi may have been just outside the safe house bombed yesterday. If so, then he survived, but suffered a very close call. This is the third safe house that the Coalition has bombed this week. When coordinated attacks were launched in multiple cities, they were handily put down. The terrorists are making death throes. I have little doubt that they will launch more attacks in the next week which will be carried with splashy headlines by a hyperventilating press. But their objective will not be accomplished. The transition will proceed, and their attempt to relegate Iraq to despotisms of the past will fail.

Let's hope.

Sudan

Genocide in Sudan has been on-going for over twenty years with hardly a peep out of the media or the U.N. Go here for an overview of this terrible situation (Thanks to Instapundit for the link). See also here.

Here's a test. The governing party in Khartoum, which is carrying out the starvation, displacement, slaughter and enslavement of millions of Sudanese, are (insert ethnicity) ________ . Their victims are (insert ethnicity) ________. The forces carrying out the bloody atrocities in Sudan are (insert religion) _________ and their victims are (insert religion) _________. If you're not sure of the answers you may go here to find them, but I suspect most readers won't have any trouble figuring them out.

Here's another question: Why do you suppose the media has been reticent about publicizing what is the worst case of genocide since, well, at least since the Hutus killed almost a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and maybe since the Jewish holocaust of the early forties? For the answer to this question consult the answers to the questions above. Meanwhile, imagine the media reaction if the perpetrators of this horror were Israelis and the victims were Palestinians.

A third question: Should the U.S. intervene to stop the killing or should we merely try to negotiate an end to the genocide? What if negotiations fail? What if intervention means the loss of some American lives and the loss of some innocent Sudanese lives? Should we just walk away and excuse our indifference by simply saying it's none of our business, these people are no threat to us? How is this choice between intervention or non-intervention morally different than the decision the Bush administration was faced with prior to invading Iraq?

I assume that those who believe Bush had no business going into Iraq would look at the pictures of the starving Sudanese children and read the ghastly stories of butchery and say that, nevertheless, if negotiations don't work then we should do nothing more than pray for those poor people, and maybe try to send relief aid. I guess they would also be able to offer some moral justification for permitting a horrific evil that we have the means to end if we had the will to use it, although I don't know how convincing it would be.

I further assume that anyone who reads about the plight of these long-suffering, terrified and helpless people and decides that we should do whatever we reasonably can to help them, including sending in the Marines, will also agree that Bush did the right thing in going into Iraq to depose a tyrant whose murderous rule was no less brutal than that of the ruling party in Khartoum. If they don't I would like to know what the salient moral differences are between the two situations which would justify intervention in Sudan but not in Iraq because frankly I don't see them.

Darwinian Pagans

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that read: Pagan Pride - Doing Good Is My Religion.The car also had a Darwin's Fish on the trunk so I assumed the owner of the vehicle is a Darwinian pagan. I also assumed this means that he/she would deny that a personal, transcendent, creator of the universe, i.e. the God of classical monotheism, exists. This interested me. How does such a person, a Darwinian pagan, determine what Good is? How does he recognize it in order to do it? What and where is the standard to which an act can be compared to see if it can be considered Good? And even if the Darwinian pagan could recognize it, who would he think he should do Good for? The species? The race? Himself? How does one decide which it should be? Whichever it is, it certainly seems to follow that anything one does to promote one's self, race, or species over others is good. This, of course, means that charity, compassion, and altruism would be Evil.

If Good is whatever aids one's own survival as an individual or a species then there can be nothing wrong with ignoring the weak and the poor. Indeed, there can be nothing wrong with genocide. Is Good for a Darwinian whatever promotes the survival of the fittest? That's what the Nazis believed, of course. Perhaps our pagan friend would reply that good is whatever feels right to the person doing it, whatever does not offend his conscience, but if so, then if it feels right and doesn't offend the conscience to treat people cruelly then cruelty would be Good.

Even if some act did offend the conscience, why should that make it wrong for a Darwinian pagan? In the evolutionary scheme of things, after all, our conscience is merely a vestige of blind, natural processes that shaped us for life in the stone age. It's little more than a psychological appendix so why should it be allowed to determine our behavior today?

I know it's unwise to make too much out of bumper sticker slogans, but the Darwinian pagan seems to assume that Good is something that's just out there waiting for people to do it when in fact, there is no Good if the Darwinian pagan is right about there being no transcendent moral source and authority. If we've evolved from primordial slime then Good and Evil no more exist for us than they do for other animals. All there are are things people do, those things are neither Good nor Evil in a moral sense, any more than a cat killing a mouse is Good or Evil.If God doesn't exist then, as Nietzsche said, we need to get beyond our archaic religiously based notions of Good and Evil and realize that morality is just a matter of each of us deciding for ourselves how we should live, and no choice is any better or worse, in moral terms, than any other.

When the Darwinian says that doing Good is my religion he reveals a confusion deep in his thinking. He is appropriating a concept, moral Good, that makes no sense unless theism is true while at the same time he implicitly denyies that theism is true.

It seems each of us is faced with an alternative. If we believe that Good and Evil are real and not just our subjective interpretation of things, then we have to look for a basis for them outside of ourselves and the only adequate basis is the God of classical theism.

If God is a conclusion we wish not to accept then we need to face up to the fact that our talk of Good and Evil is literal nonsense. "If God is dead," Dostoyevsky wrote, "then everything is permitted." The choice, in other words, is between God and moral nihilism.