Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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We meet again
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kdwmson, do you put too fine a point on some things? Yes, I believe you do. Reducing a difference in kind to a difference in degree is a subtle enterprise, one with lots of room for cleverness. Being a smart guy, you seem to have found just about all of it in your concentration camp bon mot.
Do you remember my Kolkata comment which set us in each other's path a while back? Well, in looking back, I realize that just that one word was enough to conjure for you a simpering, politically correct liberal, who was so fatuously eager to ingratiate himself with brown people, and to display his anti-imperialist credentials, that he'd presumably refer to LA as the Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Angeles just so no one would mistake his credentials. Just one teensy word, and I was transformed into a bogeyman.
It never occurred to you, I suppose, that our future is potentially larger than our past, and that the morphing of Calcutta into Kolkata is nothing unusual in history, regardless of what motivated it. There was a time when everyone in the civilized West knew where Lugduni Batavorum was. If it was good enough at the time, only a pussy politically-correct liberal would change it just because of the smelly Franks, right?
So, about those conservation camps, about those usurpations by the Supreme Court.... The equivalence between say, Bergen-Belsen, and Manzanar, or between Hitler and FDR strikes most people, including me, as something of a stretch. Of course, intent can be used to excuse consequences only with certain caveats, and there are limits. No one denies that were nasty consequences arising from Manzanar --offenses against the Rights of Man. Still, compare the photographs taken in both places, and ask yourself if a clever equivalence is more than a rhetorical device.
Likewise with your so-called Supreme Court usurpations. Intent is difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean that one therefore has carte blanche to impute intent with a greater degree of certainty than it can be measured merely for the purpose of winning an argument.
Well, yes, debate permits of any rhetorical device which the imagination can supply, but in the end, it fails if it outruns the evidence, especially if your opponent calls you on it.
As for the evil consequences of Supreme Court decisions, I've no doubt there've been some, and that you can name them all, but extension of the scope of a law in a good faith pursuit of justice, and in accordance with a time-honored and constitutionally sanctioned process, is hardly a usurpation of that law.
Being smart brings with it certain responsibilities, KD. Chief among them is taking care not to outsmart yourself.
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Oy!
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Conservation camps? Trust a liberal to confuse Arbeit Macht Frei with Kraft durch Freude, eh? It's just like us. :-)
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It's no secret
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that the Enlightenment has largely been lost in the mists of time, and at a loss to rebut either Kierkegaard or Hitler in the minds of those who are still actually aware of what it had to teach us.
What chance has the Bill of Rights? Very little, I suspect, without interventions on its behalf by those of us who fear to lose what little bulwark the past has managed to bequeath us to defend ourselves against ourselves.
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Convergence?
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Your closing paragraph is where we just basically disagree: I don't believe that justice or progress come from the state or from the law in any large degree. I think those tools aren't even neutral, but are in most instances more likely to be used for destructive ends than for productive ends. -- kdwmson
No, I do think we agree on that much, as in man is the measure of all things. The tools are neutral when the social contract is honored; to honor it, you have to understand it. That's the true nature of eternal vigilance, in my opinion. No power is conferred upon an individual who understands what we legitimately owe to one another, but if that understanding is general, we stand a much better chance. Our insitutions of government are bookmarks as well as tools, and even if we have to spend more energy than we'd like in every generation explaining the bookmarked passages, and battling sophists over what they mean, consider the alternative.
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Sometimes it's too much
[Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, Karen M., and that's what our present savages want to throw on the fire of their own pitiful ambitions. The sight of much of Goethe's three thousand years blowing through the streets of Baghdad was one of the saddest things I've ever seen; it was as though I'd been present at the burning of the library at Alexandria.
And yes, shooter, I know that Mao and his successors buldozed the center of Beijing, the Taliban dynamited the statues at Bamyan, and Hitler bombed Canterbury. You may find your comfort in such equivalences; I cannot.
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Cabal? What cabal?
[Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No one has to tell a businessman when to give a kickback. Neither party calls it a kickback. It can all be done by common understanding, and anyone who lacks that quickly sees their business dwindle. -- jojo++
Yes, the internalized narrative, the superego of careerism and conventional wisdom. It's very hard to criticize, because you can only identify the effects, not the causes. You can never actually find that one fat guy with the cigar who's pulling all the strings.
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But maybe....
[Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Rupert Murdoch, right? No, wait...he isn't fat, and I don't think he does cigars.
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The wisdom of bebop-o
[Read the article: GOP presidential debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Love and character are the same thing. The chemistry that makes them so is one of those difficult things that are very simple; also the reverse.
If only pointing to it were the same as seeing it.