Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
We Need a Label
I generally don’t like political labels. I think they often do more to impair communication than to enhance it. However, the “woke” label is now widely used, and it would be nice to have a counter-label that means, basically, “I am not ‘woke’ and I reject the ideas and values ‘woke’ implies.” I described myself in a conversation today as a “traditionalist/Burkean conservative,” but that’s not a tagline that trips off the tongue, and it will never become popular.
James Delingpole or one of his guests mentioned “sound” as a term gaining currency, and as having approximately the meaning I seek. I’ve never heard it used and so I’m a little skeptical, but I nonetheless agree that some label for those of the deliberate and considered ‘not-woke’ crowd would be useful. I don’t much care for “sound,” but I’m open to suggestion. Whatever it is should be something vaguely positive, difficult to pun into a pejorative, ideally evocative of measured and solid — yes, “sound” — consideration, and unburdened with potentially troubling associations.
Published in General
I like the original, English enlightenment. Locke FTW
I think that Trump’s mistake was that his experts were the epidemiologists. He didn’t bring in any economists.
So, does that mean Burke saw the Glorious Revolution as a repudiation of the Norman Conquest? His use of the word “ancient” would suggest, in my mind at least, a longer timespan than a mere 622 years.
Woke? He “woke” up. I “wised” up. I’m wised.
Good choices.
Abortion
I start with America’s ideal:
Because we’re starting with a “self-evident” truth, we don’t need to prove or otherwise support it. According to our idea, then, each human being has the right to life. We know that unborn babies are human beings and that, according to our laws, they are innocent. We’ve learned from horrors such as slavery, eugenics, and Hitler’s “Final Solution” that granting anyone the power to decide which innocent human beings do not have basic rights is a bad idea. Pro-choice advocates try to get around this by relabeling the unborn as “pregnancy material” or “non-persons” and that, based on their new labels, they have no right to life.
That leads to the question of whether relabeling a thing changes it in any substantial way. During his speeches, Abraham Lincoln often asked his audiences how many legs a dog would have if a tail was called a leg. “Five” was always the shouted answer. “No,” Lincoln would respond, “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
Bottom line: No one should have the power to determine which innocent human beings should be denied human rights, and certainly not the power to deny rights to whole categories of human beings.
The Death Penalty
The U.S. ended the death penalty in the 1970s for a short time. It turned out, however, that a “life sentence” didn’t mean that a convicted murderer would be locked up for life. All too often, killers were released after only a few years and they murdered again. People who had been against the death penalty changed their minds. They still weren’t sure about the morality, but they reasoned that a murderer who had been put to death couldn’t kill again, and they were willing to settle for that.
Fast forward and we’ve discovered innocent people who pleaded guilty to murder and were sent to jail. Years later, DNA tests proved their innocence. They’d pleaded guilty because the prosecutors threatened them with the death penalty if they didn’t cop a plea. Currently, well over 90% of all criminal cases are settle by plea agreements, and all too often those agreements were coerced.
Bottom line: I oppose the death penalty at least until our justice system is overhauled.
Moral of the story: The government screws up almost everything it touches.
Not all of us are passing on that particular.
Richard, re your #65 (too long for me to copy and still comment):
You have not created an argument based on pure reason.
In your abortion argument, you have relied on “self-evident truths.” That’s a premise. You have inserted an additional one, the idea that the “innocent” cannot be killed, which is not actually in the Constitution. There has been a great deal of disagreement, over the centuries, about whether innocent people can be killed.
You have assumed that a fetus is a person. This was not the case at common law. There has not been consensus about this.
You have assumed that slavery, eugenics, and Hitler’s “Final Solution” were wrong. Many people disagreed about this, historically. You have not demonstrated that they are wrong, based on reason. This is another unsupported assumption.
In your capital punishment argument, you repeated your assertion that an innocent person cannot be killed. Have you thought about how this applies in wartime? To someone killed accidentally while someone is acting in legitimate self-defense?
You asserted, without proof, that plea deals are proof that the criminal justice system is unreliable.
Finally, and inconsistently I think, you conclude that you oppose capital punishment “at least until our justice system is overhauled.” This seems to keep open the possibility that you would support capital punishment, if the system were better. But wouldn’t it have to be perfect? Since you have asserted, as a basic premise, that an innocent person must never be killed.
This is not rational proof. It is rhetoric — and pretty good rhetoric — but it is based on unproven assumptions and postulates.
This is the problem that I see repeatedly. Many people, including very smart people, think that they have a moral code or public policy position that is based on reason, and don’t seem to notice that it is based on postulates or assumptions that have not been proven by reason (and, in my view, cannot be proven by reason).
For the record, I agree with you about abortion and I disagree about capital punishment.
For me, “conservative” means prudent or risk-averse and has nothing to do with preserving anything. When the US constitution was written, it was conservative, because it built on thousands of years of study of philosophy. It was radical and new, but prudent and robust against the weak link of human nature.
I’m going with inquisitor. We get to wear swords and persecuting those who disagree with you is back in fashion.
Scottish Enlightenment provided the founding principles for America. Smith, Watt, Madison.
I already have a label for you, Jerry. Several, actually.
But what I meant was that it would be nice to be able to say “I’m not ‘woke'” without making it sound like one just hasn’t arrived yet, but might at some point.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that “woke” isn’t really a self-descriptive phrase on the left. Maybe only those of us on the right use the word. Maybe most people on the left don’t associate it with anything in particular. In that case, perhaps we don’t need a countervailing term of our own.
On the right, “woke” describes a pretty clear set of beliefs: America is an unjust and racist country, a privileged white male majority systematically oppresses every other real and imagined subset of the population, and nothing short of cheering the destruction of everything we hold dear will expiate our guilt.
And as for my use of the plural first person pronoun, making it singular would miss the point. I do think we would benefit, collectively, from having an easy way to express disagreement with the broad pathology of wokefulness that doesn’t require us to be bogged down in detail and on the defensive. This isn’t something that I wish I had. I wish we all had it. And seriously, is there’s some aspect of “woke” with which a self-described conservatives would find himself in agreement? I think we could get by with a single word for “unwoke,” at least for the vast majority of us.
I once sat on a jury for a murder trial. It was not like the kind you see on TV, it was the real kind. There was no physical evidence or DNA evidence. There were 3 witnesses. A person from across the street,an adolescent that refused (at first) to testify, and preliminary statement by a guy who was killed before trial. That was barely enough to convict, but I could not have done a death penalty on that weak evidence. It is wrong to say that punishment should be based on the quantity of evidence, rather than the heinousness of the crime committed. For that reason I am against the death penalty except for extraordinary crimes like terrorism.
I don’t know if anyone has already suggested this, we could be the Wide Awakes. An internet search shows that comparisons have already been made between the Woke and the Wide Awakes. Here is the Chicago chapter’s mission statement from 1860, taken from Wikipedia:
“I’m not woke, I’m wide awake.”
I kind of like that.
I agree with Richard generally, but there are times when there is irrefutable proof that someone actually committed a capital crime. Cameras, for example. Or witnesses who well knew the accused. Then I would think that called for capital punishment.
I still think “He wised” is a good rebuke to “He woke”. “Listen to him, he wised.” “You’re woke but I’m wised. I been around. And you fail to realize… You feel, I reason. It’s a different thing entirely.” No good,huh?
Well, we’ve got to start somewhere. I don’t think that I need to prove the existence of the Universe or start from “I think therefore I am.” We’re talking about abortion in the United States, so it’s reasonable to start with U.S. law. U.S. law stems from the Declaration’s statement that government is instituted to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution establishes the form of the government that was created to do that.
Amendment 5 of the Bill of Rights states the conditions under which the government is allowed to take the life, liberty, or property of a person judged to be criminal via due process:
Note that it does not lay out the conditions under which an innocent person can be deprived of their rights. I take that to imply that the taking of innocent life is unconstitutional (war is outside the scope of the Amendment).
Note also that the Amendment uses the word “person.” That’s why pro-choice advocates are careful to claim that unborn children are not “persons,” and are therefore not protected by the Bill of Rights.
Constitutionally, there are three options:
SCOTUS chose to come up with a fourth (and, in my opinion, unconstitutional) option that the parents have the right to decide based, not on the 9th Amendment, but on the Constitution’s “emanations and penumbras.” The question is still unsettled because the case was decided by the Court without debate by the people or their representatives, because the Court chose to not to ground their decision in the Constitution, because Progressives have pushed the few restrictions that the Court left in place to the point of elimination, and because many people believe abortion to be murder of innocent human beings.
Continued
Per the 5th Amendment, unborn children are innocent. They have not been found guilty of any crime by any process, “due” or otherwise. The remaining question is whether they’re “persons.” I answered that in post #65.
How about “Happy?” The left never seems to be happy.
Good one. In that spirit, can we start calling Democrats Locofocos again?
“Political police”? That sounds more than a bit sinister.
I was with you right up until this statement, because it’s way too easy to define “terrorism” down to include relatively petty crimes.
Think of them as Red Guards even before red became the Republican color.
I don’t know anything about formal debate and very little about formal logic, so we may be talking past each other. What would the outline of a pro-life argument based on pure reason look like? What would be the (or a) starting point?
You must provide a reasoned proof for absolutely everything. For example, you must prove, based on pure reason, that it is morally wrong to kill an innocent person. You must prove, based on pure reason, that a fetus qualifies as a person.
I think that you’re on the right track, in looking for a starting point. To build a moral system on the basis of pure reason, you must have no postulates or premises. I think that this is impossible.
You can engage in argument and rhetoric, based on postulates or premises that you assert as agreed. This is where you started, with your reliance on the self-evident truths set forth in the Declaration. The problem with this type of argument is that the proponent has not proven the validity of the supposedly self-evident truths.
The effectiveness of the post-modern approach, and its technique of “deconstruction,” results from its ability to attack any argument by questioning the premises (the “self-evident truths”). Anyone committed to basing a moral system on pure reason will be unable to defend against such an attack.
I once had a useful argument with a friend about capital punishment, one of the topics you addressed. His argument was not the same as yours. He asserted that “the government cannot kill people for punishment.” I tried to figure out why he held this view, and I disagreed with it. He had no underlying reason for it. He considered it a “self-evident truth.” Since I disagreed, we could find no common ground on the issue. This is not a criticism of my friend — any moral code is going to require such postulates.
Thanks for this account. I disagree with the highlighted portion. It might be appropriate to have a different standard of proof for a capital case.
I don’t practice in the area, so I’m not familiar with the nuances of capital cases. I think that the same standard is used — “beyond a reasonable doubt” — but that there is separate consideration of the heinousness of the crime and other sentencing factors, which might reach the same practical result as requiring a higher standard of proof before entering a death sentence.
To counter “woke” I nominate “wised”. But you looking for a label to use in ordinary everyday conversation? Or are you looking for a nationally televised label, one used on twitter and facebook, and political ads? And are you looking for a new name that appeals to the young and hip? Because woke only had meaning to some people.
Wizened?
Jerry, you’re speaking with quite a lot of authority here. Are you prepared to defend your argument with pure reason?
Jerry’s write up implies that no argument can be defended with pure reason. I have a standard response to radical skeptics / post-modernists who argue that (1) any text has an infinite number of possible interpretations, and (2) no possible interpretation is more valid than another. I agree with their first point and disagree with their second. I ask them to imagine trying to defuse a bomb with the help of a training manual. There may be an infinite number of ways to interpret the manual, but there are a very few interpretations that will keep them alive. I think my argument is valid, but I don’t think that it’s based on pure reason.