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Lucretia hosts the bar this week, as Steve and John extol the virtues of Japanese whisky while trolling the left for its latest futile attempt to take down Justice Clarence Thomas. Lucretia celebrates a brew pub in Arizona that stood up to the braying mob that resents real beer drinkers who like the Federalist Society, which deserves to go with a lighter highland malt. And in our “This Week in Democrats” segment, which pairs well with a dusty, peaty whisky, we wonder why the left is suddenly trying to push out Dianne Feinstein, and the problem this creates for Gov. Winsome Newsom, among other amusements and free entertainment Democrats provided this week.
John then walks us through the puzzles of the fast-moving case involving the revocation (stayed for the moment) of the aboritificent drug mifepristone, which turns quickly to a too-brief discussion of natural law and abortion, and why, to borrow once again Stan Evans’s great line now more applicable than ever, it is a good thing Republicans are pro-life, since they spend so much time in the fetal position, unable to offer even the simplest public argument for their stance on the issue. (To be continued. . .)
Finally, Steve and Lucretia wonder why the leak of classified documents showing that the situation in Ukraine is very different from what we’ve been told (some people might call the party line a “lie,” but that’s just some people) isn’t seen as the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam. Instead, we’re being treated to a spectacle of government secrets unveiled by the cast of High School Musical: Gamer Sequel.
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Wokeonomy — Economic system based on ESG investing.
J. Budziszewski’s book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide offers an excellent and accessible discussion of the philosophical issue at the root of John Yoo’s exit question.
The Republican response to Dobbs has been very disappointing to me, someone who’s not pro-abortion as much as I do not want it to be illegal. (My preferred cutoff date is 8 weeks, but I would compromise at 15 weeks, per Roe.) Progressive, well-to-do, elite-schools-educated white women don’t care a whit about principles and certainly know nothing about the democratic norms which they claim only Trump has broken. They ridiculously feel under attack by right-wing Christians of all stripes and so see Dobbs as taking their rights away (which is why they continue to refuse to see the Biden administration’s unmitigated failures). Their delusion is only bolstered by the Texas judge’s ruling on the abortion pill, South Carolina’s proposal to charge women who get an abortion with murder, and by DeSantis signing the bill to limit abortion to six weeks. I had hoped that state legislatures would not act without receiving vigorous public input and comment—that there would be democratic debates in every state. But no. The leaders of both parties seem unwilling to hold onto the center. If Republicans don’t wise up, pro-life voters could see passage of a national right to abortion up to 22 weeks. . . . If I felt compelled to do something about abortion, I would drop politics entirely and focus only on the establishment of maternity clinics and do everything I could to get that information out into the public. That effort has a far greater potential of “saving babies” than showing people pictures of dead fetuses (though morally justified) and of truly changing hearts and minds.
*** DING DING DING ***
1000%
***Drop the legal threats.*** The legal threats are going nowhere, politically. In fact, they are definitively going south. They are ***NEVER *** not going south.
Hand out Plan B pills, instead.
The “amount” of people backing or not backing a particular thing, or how the question is asked is an easy logical way to look at it; but I think there is a deeper explanation to John’s question. ALSO, I’m not sure if that answers the question he actually asked.
How I understood it was: If natural right is so natural, why don’t people naturally look at the world through that lens?
“If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
Is it reasonable to tweak the quote to say something like “if what is true and good were to govern all man’s rationality, neither external or internal controls on man’s understanding of what is right would be necessary”
Mankind has the ability to choose between good and evil, the ability to be tricked, manipulated and lead down false paths.
If that wasn’t true, then all the marketing departments at the most successful companies wouldn’t exist. Sophistry wouldn’t be effective.
That doesn’t mean natural rights are not true, especially when they are at odds with the most power hungry and the most insidious of us, often found in activist groups and governments of all kinds.
—-
One other perspective, is maybe the reason the masses don’t naturally come to these conclusions is because of human’s ability to manipulate and change our environments so easily and successfully. It’s hot out? We turn on the AC. There is a gash in the earth where we want a road? We build a bridge. There is some illness? We have medicine that saves someone who would have otherwise died.
Because people see the ability to manipulate nature (in a broad sense), do you fault the masses in thinking that abortion isn’t just another one of those ways to solve an inconvenient obstacle? After all, it works for so many other obstacles…
If we stop and think, I believe people naturally agree with natural rights. The life of the average person is so fast, changing and manipulated as it is, that people don’t have the chance to come to these conclusions. Instead we have to seek these points out from @lucretia on the Powerline Podcase…
Anecdotally, when I have the opportunity to quickly walk people through a natural rights perspective on something, I never get a reply that says “YOUR WRONG” or “that’s not the right way to look at it”. They either take the point at face value with no pushback (which would be John’s answer to coming to that conclusion naturally), or they say nothing while in deep though and the conversation moves on to something else; as being forceful and humiliating isn’t always the best course of action (although pleasurable, like how Steve and John get pushed around time to time by you know who).
I’m pretty sceptical regarding a federal district judge’s ability to issue nationwide injunctions.
Since Congress can specify the jurisdiction of inferior courts, writing a statute that requires a District Court of Appeals signoff on any nationwide injunction by a district judge would solve a lot of these problems.
Your comment reminds me of a question I’ve long had but for which I’ve never received a good answer: Why did human groups from different geographies not develop the same language?
OK, a few more woke-related neologisms:
Wokastrophe — Destruction of American colleges by secular progressive ideologies.
Wokiepedia — Collection of articles on various topics, arranged alphabetically and presented through a secular progressive ideology lens.
Wokeology — Study of secular progressive ideology.
Symphony wokchestra — Musical organization that first requires blind auditions to prevent discrimination and then drops blind auditions when the results are less than hoped for.
Woke-alicious – The delicious irony resulting from secular progressive ideologies backfiring on those who instituted them (see previous entry).
Antidisestablishwokementarianism — Movement opposed to establish secular progressive ideologies as the national religion of the United States.
I’m a believer of natural law, but am skeptical on how to apply it in legal jurisprudence.
For example, would the second amendment be an example of natural law? No. But the right to self-defense is, in my view. And the right to overthrow a government even, which is one reason there is a second amendment.
So should a judge issue an opinion on the second amendment based on natural law? It gets weak after that.
I share John Yoo’s skepticism, as much as I’m a believer of natural law (and I’m not sure that Yoo even believes in it at all).
Interestingly, your examples provide a fairly straightforward way to understand how natural law does indeed inform specific provisions of the Constitution. When the Supreme Court actually took up the question of how the Second Amendment should be interpreted (DC v. Heller, 2008), those in favor of limiting private ownership of guns wanted the Court to use the “militia” clause to say only the National Guard was guaranteed the “right” to own firearms. Scalia instead issued a decision affirming the individual right, based upon the historical record and the right to self-defense. However, because Scalia was a self-avowed “positivist,” he did not reach the natural law argument (as he should have) that the Second Amendment was clearly a civil right designed to protect not only the natural right to self-defense but also the natural right to exercise (meaningfully) the right to revolution. Both the natural right to self defense and the natural right to revolution are articulated in the Declaration of Independence–not made up out of whole cloth. In other words, the idea that natural law informs the Constitution is not some ethereal, amorphous set of ideas that are manipulated or made up for the purposes of advancing a specific agenda. The natural law that informs our Constitution is found in the social contract theory of the Declaration. We see Madison tie the Constitution to principles of the Declaration directly in Federalist #43: where Madison argues that the ratification of the Constitution by less than the unanimity of the 13 states is required by what he calls the absolute necessity of the case:
“Principled woke” – this is when “principled conservatives” push the woke tropes. e.g. David French on Drag Queen story hour
I think there are 2 ways to look at this.
First: The one that your are rightly weak after is that you can’t just let every lone wolf off of seditious acts or terrorism in the name of the right to overthrow the gov. If you were to explore cases like this more closely, I’d imagine those people did things due to cult behavior and or mental illness.
Second: Making judgments on the basis of natural law IS vital to upholding the Constitution and our natural rights. For example, a judge should never rule in favor of limiting your ability to bear arms.
“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The infringed part is key for the judges.
Example: here in WA they are trying to make it illegal to buy a pistol grip, any rifle with a picatinny rail, outlaw any accessory or attachment, I sh** you not, barrels that are THREADED.
To conclude, judges aught rule on grounds of natural law in the second case. Limiting our right to revolution aught not be tolerated. BUT at the same time, that same judge can’t free someone claiming they were revolting… I think it’s clear that a declaration of independence has to be drafted with a substantial amount of serious people backing it in order to make that kind of claim legal. Then there is also the right to defend yourself and so on.
So in order to uphold the rights to use guns to those two ends, judges aught be making decisions based on natural law.
Rate my answer in relation to the ones you have gotten lol
I’d have to dust off my anthropology 101 notes, and I am no expert, but I think there are a lot of interesting similarities in languages. More than people think. These traces of similarities flow along geographical lines. The further a population is from another, the larger the difference until they become totally different. Rapid communication on the other hand has started to increase similarities.
For example east and west coast accents and vocab is now basically the same for 30 year olds.
Chinese is now much more standardized. I remember not being able to understand many mainland dialects, but now you can basically communicate with anyone who speaks Beijing Chinese.
Technological advances aside: That telephone game, where you have a line of 50 people, one repeats a few sentences to the next. By the time it gets to the 50th person the original message is totally different. With enough time and space, the same happens with language.
The real question is: why hasn’t the world developed the same opinions as @lucretia
Our genius VP
https://twitter.com/rncresearch/status/1648163331491131392?s=61&t=UKLH2-24egSn4VVwl0Ofqw
Wow.
From where I sit, a straightforward textual analysis of the Second Amendment leads to the conclusion that the right to keep and bear arms is a natural right, since the text does not specify whence comes that right – it just is. Naturally. That the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed inescapably implies that the right existed in full, before the drafting of the Second Amendment.
I am aware that one impediment to the idea of a straightforward textual analysis of the Second Amendment is that it is so poorly worded:
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
What’s with the first and third commas?
IIRC, Justice Scalia also addressed the fact that subject-verb-object interpretation of the poorly written sentence necessarily concludes that the Second Amendment-protected right is an individual right, not one limited to organized militia such as the National Guard.