Links to Consider, 3/21
Vaishnav Sunil on Islamophobia; Mariam Memarsadeghi on the Iranian women's rights movement; Katherine Mangu-Ward on legalizing marijuana; Ryszard Legutko on democracy run amok
poll data consistently shows that over 50% of Muslims in Britain think homosexuality should be criminalized, over 39% think wives must always obey their husbands, and over a third refuse to condemn violence against those who insult Mohammed. Think about that last statement. In an anonymous poll where one can reasonably rule out fear as a motivation, a third of British Muslims supported, in principle, the right for Muslim vigilantes to enforce Islamic blasphemy law with violence in Western societies.
It can be true that all the Muslims you know are reasonable. It also can be true that there are a lot of Muslims now living in the West who are anything but reasonable.
So why did the Woman Life Freedom revolution fail?
The most obvious reason is that the regime has proven adept at sustaining fear through widespread brutality—executing protestors, torturing even children, conducting its campaign of sexual violence against the detained. That brutality is paired with a sophisticated, well-funded cyber army dedicated to defaming and dividing the opposition. Those efforts have kept Iran’s democracy movement from achieving united leadership.
I am waiting for President Biden’s hot mic promise to have a “come to Jesus moment” with the mullahs.
In February, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a draft report noting that “unlike the research consensus that establishes a clear correlation between [blood alcohol content] and crash risk, drug concentration in blood does not correlate to driving impairment.” In other words, we don’t yet have enough information to make sound laws. A return to prohibition will make obtaining funding and data for continued study more difficult.
Last Wednesday I went for a bike ride, and it seemed as though every time I was near a car I smelled marijuana. So I sure hope that it does not impair driving. In general, she cites studies that are favorable to legalization.
I came away from her essay with the impression that for every study, there is an equal and opposite study. Depending on which study you choose to believe, pot is either bad for you or pot is harmless. But if there is a study that finds marijuana provides long-term cognitive benefits to the user, that would be news.
Interviewed by N.S. Lyons, Ryszard Legutko says,
Democracy, as I understand it, is a system of procedures that secures a safe transition of power. It is not a system of ideas, an ideology, an article of faith, or a philosophical outlook, and should not become any of these. Excessive democratization leads to excessive politicization and a tendency to interpret everything in terms of a power struggle, like in a multiple-party system. The differences between the political parties are not intellectual because they are not usually resolved at a seminar through an exchange of arguments but at the ballot box, where one of the contestants acquires power and the legitimacy to use it within the existing rules. If we reduce intellectual and artistic differences to politics and partisanship – as it has been happening for some time now – then ultimately it is also political power, not truth or beauty, which settles every controversy.
…In the name of democracy, one can violate the elementary procedures of democracy and present it as a higher form of democratic culture. For instance by excluding certain parties from the political system (as happens in the European Parliament) or preventing millions of voters from attaining any influence on politics by discrediting them as “populists.” The most recent example is, of course, the Polish case from which we started our conversation. All these horrendous practices are hailed as the victory of democrats over populists.
His concern is with the tendency for politics to take over every sphere of life (religion, family, and so on) under liberal-progressive government.
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“Democracy, as I understand it, is a system of procedures that secures a safe transition of power. It is not a system of ideas, an ideology, an article of faith, or a philosophical outlook, and should not become any of these,” says Ryszard Legutko. And yet democracy and the democratic moral intuition have been with humanity for much of our history as a species and perhaps even among the species from which we evolved. As Encyclopedia Britannica briefly summarizes:
“It is plausible to assume that democracy in one form or another arises naturally in any well-bounded group, such as a tribe, if the group is sufficiently independent of control by outsiders to permit members to run their own affairs and if a substantial number of members, such as tribal elders, consider themselves about equally qualified to participate in decisions about matters of concern to the group as a whole. This assumption has been supported by studies of nonliterate tribal societies, which suggest that democratic government existed among many tribal groups during the thousands of years when human beings survived by hunting and gathering. To these early humans, democracy, such as it was practiced, might well have seemed the most “natural” political system.
When the lengthy period of hunting and gathering came to an end and humans began to settle in fixed communities, primarily for agriculture and trade, the conditions that favour popular participation in government seem to have become rare. Greater inequalities in wealth and military power between communities, together with a marked increase in the typical community’s size and scale, encouraged the spread of hierarchical and authoritarian forms of social organization. As a result, popular governments among settled peoples vanished, to be replaced for thousands of years by governments based on monarchy, despotism, aristocracy, or oligarchy, each of which came to be seen—at least among the dominant members of these societies—as the most natural form of government.
Then, about 500 BCE, conditions favourable to democracy reappeared in several places, and a few small groups began to create popular governments. Primitive democracy, one might say, was reinvented in more advanced forms.“
So, historically, humans have had something of a democratic moral intuition. Is "safe transition of power" a satisfactory explanation for this intuition? Perhaps we should ask what is it about democracy that might enable safe transitions of power? To this end, we might ask, why don’t we simply adopt sortition? Sortition, “also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy” as wikipedia helpfully informs us, would provide safe transitions of power and has the advantage of precluding all the faction, campaigning, and wasteful spending on media propaganda.
That sortition doesn’t recognize the superiority of some individuals or classes of people as leaders and thus society would forego the potential gain of investing power in these individuals and classes, is one possible rebuttal. So then, is an important element of democracy not that it is a way of allowing the superior to demonstrate their own virtue relative to other superior individuals through persuasion? The rebuttal to this is of course that the voters may be misled or lack information to truly understand the highly complex problems of society today. The answer to this of course is that is why democracy requires frequent elections, so that the voters can correct their mistakes. And this too might be an important element of why democracies permit safe transitions of powers: frequent elections allow do-overs, allow mistakes to be corrected.
Yes, but ceding control and power to a superior class of technocrats would eliminate all those mistakes in the first place, may be the democracy-skeptic's rejoinder, the technocracy argument. To which, see the Dr. Kling's first link about the Iranian technocracy and its violent suppression of women not willing to submit to such rule. And now we have Tusk telling the mullahs “hold muh beer.” And even in the timocratic USA (timocracy is a form of government in which possession of property is required in order to vote: property qualifications to vote in the United States were present in all the 13 states that eventually adopted the Philadelphia constitution, were prevalent late into the 19th century, and constitutional until 1964 and the adoption of the 24th Amendment) the most technocratic, most independent, and least democratically correctable institutions have been the most dangerous, incompetent, and destructive. See: https://www.history.army.mil/brochures/somalia/somalia.htm, F-35 readiness https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105341, (indeed “F35,” like countless other 3-character combinations – Sct, NYT, AMA, ABA, MLA etc., etc, - stands as a complete and total refutation of the technocratic intuition) and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL. Might “the world is such a complex place today that it is beyond the capacity of voters to rationally respond” be best understood as an exculpatory indulgence, a weaselly excuse for establishment incompetence?
Bastiat succinctly stated the basic simplicity of political questions in The Law back in 1850. As he put it society has three choices:
(1) The few plunder the many.
(2) Everybody plunders everybody.
(3) Nobody plunders anyone.
Democracy historically has been associated most powerfully with the third option, consistent with the literature on the psychology and tradition of our democratic hunter-gatherer ancestors. And in consensus democracies we see the transformation of plunder to wealth enhancing collective action. Look at an index of median adult wealth by nation. Thus, it is not surprising at all that free trade ideology arose from the democratic moral intuitions that prevailed and shaped the medieval city states. Everyone, even those with an 80 IQ are fully competent to judge which option is prevailing at the moment, and to judge if there is a candidate that might not be as bad as the others on offer. Bastiat saw constitutional limits on the power to plunder as welfare enhancing, but of course, in the US we have a Supreme Court that is apparently aghast at the notion that the constitution might in anyway inhibit exercises of government power. And this is perhaps why the governance of a direct democracy such as Switzerland is so completely superior in every respect to that of the United States. Leading us to perhaps the least important of the reasons why democracy tends to afford safe transitions of power: consensus democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_democracy#Examples )
is highly correlated with both prosperity and human development. Countries with traditions of consensus democracy such as those in much of Europe offer outcomes that are highly attractive to their citizens and are less likely than others to suffer crises of legitimacy.
What might be the most important reason that democracy tends to afford safe transitions of power is that it is consistent with the Christian moral intuitions that gave rise to individualism. (The book to read here is Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual.) Without the connective tissue of democracy, individualism is indifferent to governance and polities disintegrate into networks of personal connections. Governance then, as we are witnessing in the USA today, suppresses individualism itself in a continuous war to impose conformity. The roots of individualism, as Siedentop demonstrates, lie within Christian moral intuitions, so it is no surprise that proponents of technocracy as well as our government are waging war so furiously on those intuitions.
Even putting individualism aside, even from a collective perspective, this popular craze for professing disgust with the idea of democracy or a reluctant tolerance of it at best, is an anti-civilizational.
It was Guizot who asked:
“...suppose a people whose external life is easy, is full of physical comfort; they pay few taxes, they are free from suffering, justice is well administered in their private relations – in a word, material existence is for them altogether happy and happily regulated. But at the same time, the intellectual and moral existence of this people is studiously kept in a state of torpor and inactivity; of, I will not say, oppression, for they do not understand the feeling, but of compression. We are not without instances of this state of things. There has been a great number of small aristocratic republics in which the people have been thus treated like flocks of sheep, well-kept and materially happy but without moral and intellectual activity. Is this civilization? Is this a people civilizing itself?”
Thus, one might ask, does not democracy (consensus democracy at least) provide a means for “a people civilizing itself?” And is this process of “civilizing” not an important element of what enables democracy to enable safe transitions of power?
While it may very well be understandable given the general irrelevance of its current constitution and its electoral praxis that the people of the United States have grown increasingly indifferent to constitutionalism, politics, and the institutions of government, one might ask in the absence of, or in an environment skeptical of the promise of democracy, what might compel people to demonstrate loyalty to the polity?
Those who may be interested in the continued existence of a distinctly American polity might consider whether scapegoating “democracy” is truly the efficacious route to resolving the current crisis of legitimacy or whether the radical reforms necessary to recognize and exploit the legitimate virtues of democracy might offer a more pragmatic alternative.
The medical literature becomes more anti THC every day. The psychiatrists and addiction people present articles every day on the bad effects of THC. The European literature shows that ANY THC causes impaired driving. This agrees with the old USN studies from the 1970s on why carrier pilots who had smoked THC within 7-10 days were crashing into the carriers. (Survivors only, which took a while to get enough). Marijuana appears to be more carcinogenic for lung cancer than tobacco. 30% of people who use any THC products in States where it is not prosecuted have THC abuse syndrome, ie are defined as "addiction". This is higher than ETOH by far. The few studies which claimed no bad effect suffered from lag issues, ie too soon to show the effect. ER visits from THC and MVA involving THC are high and rising in Colorado. Her article is an example of "both sides syndrome" not an exploration of the issue.