Now They Fear The Introverts

I just read something that brought a smile to my face:  the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association are seriously considering whether to label introversion as a personality disorder.  Make no mistake, headshrinkers are the handmaidens of power, and the powerful now truly fear the reflective among us.  They should, because we're no longer buying the cartoon versions of happiness, politics, or history being blared at us.  Schools were transformed into factories of conformity and obedience long ago, but even that has proved inadequate to churn out enough good little workers, consumers, and voters to ensure smooth sailing.  No, now any deviation from the extrovert's craving to fit in will be condemned as "sick."  Damn, it's easy to be a rebel today.  

More Annoyances

The game Words With Friends on Facebook.  I can have a row full of good letters but still lose because my opponent used up all the letters first.  Profligacy truly is a modern virtue; it is enforced by both the Federal Reserve and video games.

The game Mario Kart on Wii.  I get way out in front only to be blasted so the herd can catch up.  It's egalitarian and noxious.

People who illegally enter this country and act offended when they are denied governmental largesse or are told to leave.

Anyone who who uses the phrase "you can't turn back the clock" in a political or cultural debate.  Principles are timeless.

People who hike all the way up a mountain and don't even pause five minutes to reflect before going back down.  I'm not talking about the ones who are doing fast-paced exercises, just those who have a beautiful view and some silence to cherish but toss it away.

On a related note, any gas station that has mini-TVs at the pumps.  Are people now so frightened of sensory deprivation and -- gasp -- a reflective moment that a TV is absolutely necessary?

Anyone who drinks diet soda on the belief that it's more healthful.

Another song using Mick Jagger's name in the lyrics.

People who start smoking weed around me just as casually as if they were having a drink.

School teachers who complain about having to prepare students for standardized tests.  If you're doing your job and teaching the kids well in general, they will easily pass a standardized test.

Ninety percent of plaintiffs, who should blame themselves or God for what happened to them.

The fact that modern Americans demand prosperity and safety at the expense of liberty -- and destroy them all in the process.

The fact that modern fiscal and monetary policy are designed to force responsible people to subsidize the foolish choices of others.  Apart from the sheer unconstitutionality of it all, I have no moral duty to "bail out" failed business, keep debtors in their homes, prop up those inflated home prices to benefit the real-estate industry, supply birth control to skirt-chasers and harlots, or educate their kids.  Once upon a time, life confronted people with the harsh consequences of their folly, and they would actually learn from it and mature.  Forcibly re-distributing wealth among private citizens is bad enough, but punishing excellence to reward mediocrity is suicidal.

The Constitution's Curious Evolution Regarding Sodomy

When United States troops fought and died in the Civil War, they were likely unaware that their mission was to forbid the States from outlawing sodomy any longer. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, in their desire to codify the Civil War’s aims, likely lacked this awareness as well. But wherever those men are now, they must be proud that over a century later the Supreme Court unearthed their true intentions and declared that sodomy enjoyed the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection. They can rest in peace knowing that their efforts were not in vain.

Of course I’m being humorous, for the Supreme Court made no attempt to honor those men’s intentions when suddenly discovering in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas that States could no longer outlaw sodomy. In all honesty, the Court’s decision should come as no surprise at this point, for it is well-established that the Court has long since jettisoned finding justification for its rulings in the language and history of the Constitution. Instead, the Court has fallen into the habit of looking at societal trends and its own sense of “fairness” to reach its conclusions, thereby functioning as the super-legislature it has appointed itself as. Lawrence even adds the twist of looking to modern foreign law in order to ascertain what our domestic Constitution truly means, so the Court has fulfilled its legislative function with a zest often lacking in the stolid deliberations of mere congressmen and senators. And better still, we again have Sandra Day O’Connor, along with her equally-timorous cohort Anthony Kennedy, to thank for it.

Similar to the abortion debacle, sodomy was an issue that the Court visited twice in as many decades. Back in 1986 the Court held narrowly, but correctly, in the aptly-named Bowers v. Hardwick that absolutely nothing in the Constitution or our nation’s history indicates that States lack the discretion to criminalize such behavior. When the issue resurfaced in 2003, the Court had no compunction about reversing itself, despite having refused to reverse itself on abortion for the ostensible reason of preserving the Court’s legitimacy. Taking the Court at its word, we must deduce that Lawrence’s reversal of Bowers undermined the Court’s legitimacy a great deal.

Justice Kennedy’s lead opinion set the parameters of the “analysis” in a predictably lopsided manner that telegraphed the ultimate result: “The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these [moral and ethical] views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” The most patent flaw in this statement is that the “whole society” is not at the mercy of one State’s decision. Quite the contrary – the whole society is at the mercy of the Court’s decision, which should produce some degree of restraint. A more fundamental error implied by Kennedy’s formulation is that a State should justify its policies, which is exactly the reverse of the constitutional paradigm – States presumptively possess the power to do as they please in the absence of a specific constitutional prohibition. Kennedy, not the States, bears the burden of proof, and it is a burden that he utterly fails to carry.

No matter, because Kennedy sets his own burden of proof. According to him, only recent history post-dating the Fourteenth Amendment need be consulted: “In all events we think that our laws and traditions in the past half century are of most relevance here.” Not only may Kennedy ignore the temporal setting of the Fourteenth Amendment, he may also ignore its geographical setting and look to recent European trends to support what is surely his pre-determined outcome: “Of even more importance, almost five years before Bowers was decided the European Court of Human Rights considered a case with parallels to Bowers and today’s case. . . . The court held that the laws proscribing the conduct were invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights.” In view of this stellar reasoning, we must presume that Kennedy is prepared to strike down the death penalty as well, since Europeans loathe it so passionately.* In a final flourish of fecklessness, Kennedy points to the increasing number of States that have exercised their discretion to de-criminalize sodomy, which somehow is meant to prove that States lack discretion to decide the issue at all.

Sandra Day O’Connor makes her hypocritical presence felt by also voting to strike down the law and repudiate Bowers, even though she is the one who insisted on upholding Roe merely because the Court should stick to its guns.  In a supposed exercise of judicial sobriety, Justice O’Connor shops around for a different pretext for her desired outcome and plucks the “equal protection clause” off the shelf. Even though this still does nothing to conform her decision to the Fourteenth Amendment’s purpose, she soothes her conscience by charging that the law in question targets only homosexual sodomy rather than sodomy in general, and that it therefore violates principles of equal protection. Under this rationale she would have voted to uphold the law if it had banned both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Justice Scalia skewers these clowns rather deftly in his dissent, singling out O'Connor for her blatant hypocrisy of upholding precedent in Casey but treating it like toilet paper in Lawrence.  He nevertheless suffers from the major defect in the Court’s modern reasoning: he treats the artificial doctrine of “substantive due process” as valid. What sets Scalia apart is that he attempts to tether this open-ended doctrine to “fundamental liberty interests” that are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Since sodomy lacks roots in American history, he argues, “substantive due process” has no role to play here. Yet Scalia should know that it’s impossible to let this genie halfway out of the bottle – once the Court reserves the right to strike down laws on something so amorphous and non-textual as “substantive due process,” qualms about restraint amount to whistling in the wind. As for O’Connor’s self-indulgent ramblings on “equal protection,” Scalia rightly observes that her objection could be leveled at state laws that do not recognize homosexual marriage, and incredibly enough, that is precisely what is happening today.

In a prescient closing, Scalia writes the following:

One of the benefits of leaving regulation of this matter to the people rather than to the courts is that the people, unlike judges, need not carry things to their logical conclusion. The people may feel that their disapprobation of homosexual conduct is strong enough to disallow homosexual marriage, but not strong enough to criminalize private homosexual acts–and may legislate accordingly. The Court today pretends that it possesses a similar freedom of action, so that that we need not fear judicial imposition of homosexual marriage, as has recently occurred in Canada (in a decision that the Canadian Government has chosen not to appeal). . . .

At the end of its opinion–after having laid waste the foundations of our rational-basis jurisprudence–the Court says that the present case “does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” . . .  Do not believe it. More illuminating than this bald, unreasoned disclaimer is the progression of thought displayed by an earlier passage in the Court’s opinion, which notes the constitutional protections afforded to “personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education,” and then declares that “[p]ersons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do.” . . .

Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct, ante, at 18; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” ante, at 6; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution,” ibid.? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case “does not involve” the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court. Many will hope that, as the Court comfortingly assures us, this is so. 

Scalia was deadly accurate, for we are now through the looking glass and must confront a decision by a federal district court and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that the Constitution requires States to acknowledge homosexual unions.  In other words, the same Constitution that left States free to outlaw homosexual conduct now compels them to embrace it and elevate it to the historical status of marriage between a man and a woman -- with no corresponding amendment whatsoever.  This insanity has gotten out of hand and no longer even really concerns homosexual conduct.  I personally agree that government should not interfere in private sexual conduct among consenting adults, but what we are dealing with here is a blatant assault on the rule of law and the right of communities to define their own mores.  There is no "ban" on homosexual unions anywhere in the country, rather a refusal by most communities to acknowledge them.  To decree that communities must acknowledge them -- while desecrating the Constitution in the process -- is a form of tyranny far worse than anti-sodomy laws ever were.  If anything, it is forced sodomy on a societal scale.

_____________________________________________________________________________

* I authored this sentence in June of 2004, partially in jest. In March of 2005, though, it indeed came to pass that Justice Kennedy took a swipe at the death penalty in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005). Kennedy again elevated foreign law over our domestic Constitution to decree that States must follow global trends and cease executing persons who committed their crimes when they were younger than eighteen years old, no matter how convincing the evidence of criminal pre-meditation.

Obama Degrades The Presidency Even Further

The presidency has shed its humble constitutional role in a number of ways over the years, what with unilateral presidential wars (lacking the necessary declaration of war by Congress), unilateral executive agreements (lacking the necessary two-thirds approval by the Senate for treaties), and unilateral executive orders carrying the force of law (lacking actual legislation to support it). 

The lives, liberty, and property destroyed as a result of all this were terrifying to contemplate when Obama assumed office in 2009, but he has managed to make the situation even worse.  To the mountain of illicit presidential practices, Obama has now added the assassination of U.S. citizens without due process of law and refusing to execute the laws passed by Congress concerning the deportation of illegal aliens.  When considering these in tandem, it is clear that the president no longer cares about his oath of office or even represents the American people -- we are to be targeted on his say-so against the Constitution, but illegal aliens have nothing to fear from him even though it's his constitutional duty to target them.

We are entering the final stage of transition to totalitarianism:  when even the pretense of law vanishes.  For the more perceptive, the federal government has been totalitarian for quite some time because it has long acted as though its power is boundless and that the Constitution may be ignored if "necessary."  The fact that the federal government didn't exert this boundless power made no difference; the arrogant presumption of being able to do so was totalitarian regardless.  That potential energy now has gone kinetic and become visible to the common man.  As I wrote in my first book seven years ago:

Critics of viewpoints such as mine howl that America is still the most free and prosperous country on Earth, which in truth is more an indictment of the world than a compliment of modern America. The indentured servant surely occupies a better station than the outright slave, but that is no cause for the indentured servant to celebrate. We are entitled to far more than what we now have, and we need not resign ourselves to indentured servitude for sheer gratefulness that things might be even worse. And things will become worse anyway if we don’t act. How much time remains until our laughable pretense of constitutional government gives way to full-blown, unabashed dictatorship? It could be years, months, or even days. Only a few more nudges would push us over the edge into the totalitarian abyss, at which point any peaceful strategies will lose their effectiveness.

This may be a point of ethnic pride, but political liberty and the rule of law depend on "squares" like the WASPs who founded this country, people who are now mocked for our priggishness, rectitude, and self-denial.  But the joke's on all of you.  I love the America that my ancestors founded, for even with its imperfections it was far superior to this degraded husk of a republic that my contemporaries now infest with all their vaunted verve.  The grandeur they wrap themselves in is not their own, but the remnants of what my people created.  Enjoy what little of it remains, and you're welcome for the memories.    

Hands Off Syria

Here we go again.  Perfectly consistent with its pattern of violating the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles -- a pattern I have discussed at length in settings such as Latin America, Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran -- the federal government is now beating the war drums to intervene in Syria's civil war.

Let's review.  Under the international legal order that the United States was instrumental in establishing after the Second World War, military force may be used only 1) in self-defense; 2) in defense of others; or 3) when authorized by the UN Security Council.  There is no warrant under international law for using force against a nation merely because of its internal strife.  That was the same excuse the Japanese used to invade China; that Italy used to invade Ethiopia; and that Germany used to invade places such as Czechoslovakia and Poland.  None other than Justice Robert Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court -- when he sat on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg -- condemned all excuses for initiating war against a nation that had not attacked another nation.

Our own civic deity, Abraham Lincoln, told Europe to keep its mittens out of our affairs during the War Between The States.  That war claimed more than 650,000 lives and saw plenty of innocent (Southern) civilians slaughtered, so it's rather odd to hear the same federal government that perpetrated and profited from the slaughter complain about a much smaller variant of it elsewhere, let alone as an excuse to intervene and stop it. 

I'm glad Russia is refusing to play along; there will now be no veneer of legitimacy provided by the Security Council.  I would submit that such an approval would be ultra vires anyway because the Council's authority does not extend to purely domestic matters, but the absence of approval is certainly good enough for me.

Do I cheer what the Syrian government is doing?  Of course not, but that's not the issue.  We live in an imperfect world in which we must pick our poison.  The poison of national sovereignty can be bitter, but it is sweet as ambrosia when compared to the alternative of hegemonic globalism.  I've said it before, and I will say it again -- competition among rival sovereignties is the ONLY proven restraint against government power.  The elites hate national sovereignty because they are political monopolists who hate competition.  If they succeed in destroying national sovereignty, there will be nowhere left to run.

Zombies In Our Midst

A while ago I spoke of zombies and vampires to discuss why the mythology behind them has exploded in popularity.  According to a spate of recent news stories, however, zombies seem to have escaped mythology and now stalk reality.  See here, here, and here.

Rest assured these are not zombies; notwithstanding, you should be afraid.  Western society is collapsing because there remains no spiritual, moral, or rational bedrock to support it any longer.  When people forget their ancestors; believe there is nothing sacred; that they are mere animals; that life is disposable; that "right" and "wrong" are just words; that force may be employed to extract wealth and toil from others; and that happiness resides in matter and its acquisition, you have a powder keg primed to explode.  The fuse is lit because we sold our soul to gain the world, but now we're losing that too.  Psychosis is the last refuge from a reality that is terrifying and -- now that we are stripped of transcendence -- incomprehensible.

I have witnessed firsthand the insanity people are capable of when they believe in nothing but their own appetites.  Since those people are now the majority, we truly face a "zombie" apocalypse when they have nothing left but human flesh to feed upon. 

Random Thought

It just occurred to me that "Social Security" is a phrase diametrically opposed to "individual liberty."  Language always gives up the ghost.