|
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-94
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
—
Other issues:
Syria:
Civil War:
Covid-19 Transmission:
Opioid crimes:
> What's hilarious is that it looks like McKinsey gave Purdue advice between 2008-2010 on how to boost up opioid sales, when apparently both the client and firm knew that such a strategy would lead to overdoses, then came back in 2017 to essentially give Purdue a PR strategy on how to apologize for all the people they killed. This was when everyone and their mother knew that Purdue was facing an existential legal crisis. So you paid McKinsey to dig you a hole, then paid them to help you climb back out. <
Use as open thread …
NemesisCalling@84 continues the idiocy, simultaneously claiming judges are superseding their proper powers while praying for them to create imaginary citizens in the womb. Judicial “activism” was never a problem when it was the Taney court disappearing the humanity of millions in the Dred Scott decision. The right *not* to bear and unwanted child is exactly the kind of right that should be understood as an unenumerated right reserved to the people! But political conservatives have no interest in the rights of the people, but of property…or sometimes, tactically, the rights of states. Taney was a states’ rights man. States’ rights are not the people’s rights, never were and have always been in opposition to the people’s right. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are in conflict. The Constitution was not an amazing stroke of wisdom, much less divine revelation, it was a hodgepodge of compromises, with deliberate ambiguities (like “well-regulated” militia!) What it meant was often deliberately deferred in hopes that later politics would resolve the issue definitively.
Nor was federalism, states’ rights and the Constitution a problem when the Melville Fuller court handed down the Lochner decisions. Again, judicial activism deliberately eviscerated the Fourteenth Amendment to preserve the rule of the minority.
The attempt of the Supreme Court to reverse FDR’s election and deny the legislative majority the power to legislate was not a problem for supposed checks and balances, will of the people types. In fact, the real agenda of the ranters against judicial activism was exposed by their fury at the efforts to reign in the Supreme Court, calling it “court packing.” That didn’t prevent the same kind of people from screaming for the impeachment of Earl Warren…for protecting the rights of the people! The so-called ideas promulgated by the likes of NemesisCalling are incoherent nonsense, based upon a flagrantly false version of history, shameless double standards, and simple-minded piety that takes nonsense about the Constitution protecting “us” from Big Government as meant in good faith. Political conservatives stand for powerful government that can oppress the majority to defend the property of the minority. That was the goal of the Constitution.
Don Bacon@86 cites an imaginary “authority,” which is no authority at all. Openly admitting that the Constitution was not a work of genius, that it was a fundamentally reactionary terminus to the American Revolution, roughly homologous to the Directory in France, those are the politically incorrect principles. The moth eaten myths peddled by reactionaries like this are politically correct in the literal sense of the phrase, political ideas that conform to the interests of the powers that be. (Of course, the very phrase, “politically incorrect” is meant to signal virulent opposition to the left, which means rabid commitment to fraudulent history.)
Don Bacon@87 tries to hide the opposition to freedom by claiming “Congress” has no right to legislate against human rights, which is historical nonsense. It is also ambiguous on the repressive legislation by states, which have violated human rights by laws establishing a church, to take a less contentious issue than laws protecting slavery. Also, the common mental reservation whereby “human rights” really only mean “property rights,” takes that away even in principle. In principle, judicial review, a doctrine that began not so much with John Marshall, but perhaps Edward Coke, in the resistance to the increasingly absolutist Stuart monarchy, is a defense of the people’s rights not just against the king, but against the king’s corrupted Parliament. Everyone raving about judicial activism wants the courts to attack human rights, reverse the verdicts of elections the conservatives lose and prevent majority rule by legislatures. Every one of them!
William Gruff@89 postures once again as some sort of scientific thinker, coyly pretending that invoking Marx is some sort of ju jitsu that can turn the left’s own authorities against them. Like everything Gruff says, it is ridiculous. The ludicrous pseudo-concept of the PMC in another comment, for instance, is anti-Marxist to the core, being a deliberate conflation of multiple social categories, a deliberate confusion of class as defined as property interest with social status as defined by the speaker’s prejudices and a substitution of a quasi-conspiratorial view of politics for a class analysis. In this comment, the claim the notion of natural rights are refuted by a shark merely serves to display the fundamental contempt for humanity that animates Gruff’s comments. (What Gruff is like in private life is a different issue, though it seems likely enough that every mirror has justified Gruff’s hatred of mankind. But maybe not, maybe I’m just too annoyed by the BS>) At any rate, natural rights of the person facing a shark or a covid-19 virus are matched by the natural rights of the shark and the virus. If the person has a harpoon gun or the governor forbids excessive numbers of people staying in a room for over an hour singing and shouting, the shark and the virus can lose, naturally and rightly.
Of course, the real issue for honest thinkers is, what are the natural rights of people in their dealings with other people Maybe William Gruff should have been beaten to death in the crib by parents who could see what was coming. Talk of natural rights means something when talking of about death squads. Babble about sharks and viruses are like SF writer Robert A. Heinlein covering up his BS by talking the natural right of a man drowning in the ocean. But, if you really want to get tough-minded (not that any political conservative ever is, they’re just mean-spirted and small-minded and bigoted,) try this: Natural right is what people can get by force. The thing is, given the need for social peace, the natural right is for the likely winners of a violent struggle to get their way without the cost of actual violence. That is, the natural right is for *the majority* to rule. No political conservative believes in majority rule. There aren’t even very many liberals in the US who believe in this!
There are a weak-kneed, namby pamby kind of political conservatives who have some vague notion that the law’s the law and that makes everything that happens according to the legal forms just. I can only remind you, that by this standard, Shylock should indeed have gotten his pound of flesh. The notion that the means justifies the ends, instead of the other way round, is strictly for moral imbeciles. (The real problem with the means justifying the ends, is and has always been, the difficulty of separating means and ends in real life.)
Posted by: steven t johnson | Nov 30 2020 20:29 utc | 135
|
