Content by Maximos
Posted at 12:48pm on Feb. 7, 2008 Oblivion Beckons
By Maximos
I want, at some level beneath that at which my conscious political reasoning occurs, to like John McCain - to like him in the sense that I could support his candidacy, or at least reconcile myself to it. His personal narrative is compelling, though I might admit to being tired of hearing about events which lost their salience before I entered primary school. His opposition to the attempts of the Bush administration to normalize torture as an element of American policy is heroic. Even the idea of the much-reviled campaign-finance-reform legislation holds its appeal for me. In execution, the legislation has been an abomination, so much so that one suspects that the stated intentions were merely a noble lie cloaking the actual intentions; but the idea of draining the DC swamps of the corrupting influence of various malefactors of wealth - well, that's a wonderful idea, if it entails shutting down K Street, and eliminating the corrupt and corrupting revolving door between business, lobbying, and government work. I'll give McCain begrudging credit for the idea, at least. (Note carefully my phraseology: CFR would have been meaningful had it aimed to shovel out K Street and the like; as it exists, it is nothing more than a cynical incumbent protection scheme.) Furthermore, I'll even credit McCain with "inadvertent prescience" for his role in the Gang of 14 episode; the Almighty knows that we'll need the prerogative during the coming nomination battles, if only the courage can be mustered to use the power and endure the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy - but if we genuinely believe that jurists who misconstrue the Constitution in certain ways oughtn't be doing so, and that their rulings are travesties of fundamental law, then it follows, logically, that the Democrats are not entitled, by virtue of electoral victories, to pack the courts with such hacks. Wrong is wrong.
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Posted at 12:25pm on Aug. 13, 2007 What "Fighting Them Over There" Really Means
By Maximos
Via Rod Dreher:
Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.
"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.
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Posted at 2:09pm on Jun. 5, 2007 A Notice for An Evocation of the Age
By Maximos
My latest post, an attempt at characterizing the broader historical moment through which we are passing, is up at What's Wrong With the World, the group blog to which I contribute.
Thoughtful dissent is welcomed.
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Posted at 5:31pm on Jun. 2, 2007 A Notice for "Imagine...."
By Maximos
"Imagine..." is the title of my latest short piece over at What's Wrong With the World, the group blog to which I contribute.
"Imagine..." is a lighthearted little allegory concerning an aspect of the immigration controversy which now troubles the body politic.
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Posted at 2:24pm on Apr. 12, 2007 Innumeracy as Hieroglyph
By Maximos
One might be forgiven for surmising that sheer innumeracy is a requirement for advancement in the American establishment when even fellows of the Council on Foreign Relations, the establishment of the establishment, as it were, exhibit the vice. Nevertheless, such innumeracy seldom appears unadorned, but requires a bit of intellectual scaffolding if it is to present itself as persuasive; a popular form of such scaffolding is the discussion of demographic trends, the type erected by Shannon O'Neil in a recent LA Times piece, in which the effort is made to dismiss concerns about immigration as being exercises in irrelevancy.
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Posted at 4:34pm on Nov. 29, 2006 On Casting Pearls
By Maximos
Yesterday, I posted a blog entry in which I endeavoured to critique what I consider to be a fatal flaw in the political strategy of the pro-life movement. That strategy has emphasized the election of Presidents, and later Senators, amenable to the nomination and eventual confirmation of jurists adhering to an originalist philosophy of jurisprudence to the Supreme Court, the operating assumption being that such justices would be likely to restrain, and even reverse, in certain cases, the enthusiasms of previous Courts for the conjuration of novel "rights" ungrounded in the original understanding of the import of various Constitutional clauses. It has also emphasized repeated legislative efforts to, ahem, bring the Court to the realization that it is not the only authoritative branch of government. That strategy, moreover, has been predicated upon the assumption that, under the structural logic of the Constitution, the very separation of powers obliges the Court to - apparently - enter into a sort of give-and-take negotiation over the scope and limits of "rights" which do not actually obtain according to the Constitution itself.
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Posted at 2:25pm on Nov. 28, 2006 A Pro-Life Argument Built Upon the Sands
By Maximos
I will not make so bold as to venture any predictions as to the future of the abortion issue in American politics. Well, not quite. I am, being a pessimistic sort of person, skeptical that all of the efforts of conservatives and pro-lifers to secure the nomination of certain types of jurists to the courts will eventuate in the results we expect - or merely hope. The law is a complicated thing - perhaps unnecessarily so, yet necessarily unnecessary, if my meaning may be grasped - filled with many idols. Public opinion is an uncertain thing, manifesting movement away from the sacred totem of Roe yet seemingly unbending in its attachment to unprincipled exceptions, such as those for rape and incest. Public opinion, alas, appears favourable towards that grim, Moloch-like (Because it combines the elements of both sacrifice and commerce, in which the Phoenicians excelled.) research involving the destruction of embryonic life, on forthrightly utilitarian grounds; and that research is an article of religion among its advocates largely because in its presuppositions, externalities, and ambitions, it reposes upon the substrate of the abortion culture. Inconstancy, thy name is democracy.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 1:40pm on Jun. 1, 2006 On Derbyshire on The Party of Death
By Maximos
Ramesh Ponnuru's fine work on the fealty of many intellectual and political elites, particularly on the left side of the political aisle, The Party of Death, despite its status as a lucidly written and cogently argued presentation of the Culture of Life position on our ongoing cultural and political struggles over the relationships between and among science, progress, autonomy, law, and human life, has failed to garner much critical attention from those who reject the Culture of Life, yet decline to concede membership in its antinomy. This unfortunate phenomenon has been noted at Redstate, and has occasioned much spirited dialogue on lefty blogsites - to which I refuse to link - and at Ross Douthat and Reihan Salim's blog, The American Scene, these two threads running to well in excess of 50 comments apiece, totals which, while not entirely unprecedented, are at least atypical for highly literate, wonkish blogs.
However, there has been at least one serious attempt, on the part of a non-Culture of Life partisan, to reckon with the argument of Ponnuru's book. John Derbyshire, hereafter to be referred to solely as the Derb, has published a verbose, sprawling review for The New English Review in which he attempts a rebuttal of Ponnuru's thesis.
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Posted at 10:57am on May 3, 2006 On Culture and Condescension
By Maximos
From time to time, one of the regulars here at RS, having read one of my comments on the immigration question - most frequently, one having to do with the inevitability and undesirability of the cultural fragmentation that is the logical consequence of the present immigration regime - will note my tagline and query me concerning my pessimism. My tagline reads:
My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.
The tagline, for those not familiar with the great liturgical music of the Western Church, is a translation of a conjunction of two verses from the book of Job found together in the texts of the Requiem My interlocutors, then, wish to know whether my pessimism might have a corresponding remedy, whether I envision anything that might be done to avert the 'mourning' part.
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Posted at 9:13am on Mar. 13, 2006 Ideas Without Consequence
By Maximos
One of the noblest aspirations of the founding generation was that for the cultivation of a spirit of public sentiment bereft of the dangerous political vice of faction, the elevation of sectarian, or sectional, interest, above the interest of the nation considered as a whole. Indeed, it was a noble aspiration; and a naive one. The spirit of faction is inextirpable from human nature; one need only flit lightly through the pages of history, or train a wizened gaze upon the present political landscape of America, or even simply watch a few John Hughes films from the 1980s, contemplating, in true postmodern fashion, the lessons of the archetypal American high-school experience: cliques and discrete, invidiously defined and grouped social formations are inescapable, save in the most extraordinary circumstances.
Hence, one ought not be bewildered by the appearance or persistence of factions within the conservative movement itself; a movement that has traditionally reverenced those things that are permanent and adiding, most especially those truths that bear upon the human person, cannot very well imagine, or indulge the illusion, that human nature has been overcome through its ministrations, the vice of faction eliminated and the virtue of unanimity realized. Now, this is by no means to urge upon the reader the notion that faction is always and everywhere a vicious thing, or that unanimity is everywhere and always a virtue. Surely, examples could be multiplied, nearly without limit, of some lonely and heroic figure standing against the tides of his age, or of some groups which, in point of fact, did possess greater perspicacity than others at some crucial juncture of history; conversely, examples could with equal ease be multipied, of instances of unjust and vicious uniformity, of disquieting conformities which have entire societies plunging headlong into some abyss of unreason and depravity. It is only to suggest that perhaps the incipience of a conservative crack-up is a permanent feature of the landscape, an ineliminable characteristic of the movement.
One is, however, fully within his rights, to remain vexed, piqued in his discomfiture, at the appearance of factional sentiment utterly bereft of rational pretext, all but wholly devoid of substantive objections to the phenomena it subjects to its preening condescension. Such, I submit, is the case with respect to much of the vituperation with which Rod Dreher's book, Crunchy Cons was received by some in the mainstream of American conservative thought: a spasm of denunciation and invective which, when rationally analysed, reduces to the claim that because some thing is not instead some other thing, that it is therefore a bad thing, as though, for example, the problem with a Cocker Spaniel is that it is not a Mastiff.