Sunday, May 23, 2010

“The tragic flaw in Paul’s philosophy” plus 2 more

“The tragic flaw in Paul’s philosophy” plus 2 more

The tragic flaw in Paul’s philosophy

Posted: 22 May 2010 09:37 PM PDT

We have never met Rand Paul, Kentucky's brand-new Republican nominee for the United States Senate, but we would bet almost anything we have that there isn't a racist bone in his body, despite his recent statements decrying the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Paul, like his father, Ron Paul, is simply an honest follower of a superficial and ultimately dangerous philosophy called Objectivism, which holds that personal selfishness is the proper and moral purpose in life, and that any constraints on that selfishness are crimes against liberty and therefore immoral. Think of Gordon Gekko's "Greed is Good" speech in the movie Wall Street, and you have the basic idea of Objectivism.

The philosophy of Objectivism was the brainchild of novelist Ayn Rand, who wasn't a philosopher and really wasn't much of a novelist, either. An intellectual anti-communist who had come to America from the USSR on a student visa in the '20s, Rand wrote a couple of best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, that were to form the basis of Objectivism, which sneeringly rejected altruism in favor of enlightened self-interest.

Because Objectivism was a radical philosophy that seemed at odds with the precepts of all of the world's great religions — Christianity especially — it proved attractive to some young Americans of an intellectual and rebellious bent. Rand became a cult figure, and it wasn't long before her philosophy took a political turn with the advent of the Libertarian Party.

Libertarians — and that is what Rand Paul is, his current Republican tag to the contrary — cling to Rand's Objectivist teachings religiously, so when Paul remarked last week that he did not believe that private businesspeople should be forced to serve anyone they didn't want to serve, he was not motivated by racism, but by Objectivism and its "moral" philosophy of individualism and personal liberty.

The problem with Paul's position, of course, is that it is an enabler of racism, and it attracts racists for whom Paul and true Libertarians normally would have no brief.

There are other problems for Paul, of course, the immediate one being the firestorm of outrage his recent statements fomented. Libertarians are known for standing up for their principles, and it was ironic, and a little sad, to see Paul pull a Trent Lott late last week and back off from his earlier statements, finally going so far as to state that yes, he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act — public accommodations section and all — had he been in Congress in 1964.

Rand Paul doesn't know it, but he has an even larger problem than the political fallout from last week's statements, and it's a problem all his Libertarian colleagues share. The problem is that back in the early '60s, their high-flown laissez faire arguments played into the hands of people like restaurateur Lester Maddox, who once handed out axe handles to his white customers so they might drive African-Americans away from his eatery.

Libertarian philosophy may profess to abhor racism, but it also turns a deaf ear to pleas for justice, such as this unforgettable passage from the late Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

"[W]hen you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your 6-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, … then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair."

To argue that the government has no role in bridging this "abyss of despair" is silly sophistry at best, reminiscent of the Laputons in Gulliver's Travels, who dabbled brilliantly in abstract theories as their people starved. At worst, it gives aid and comfort to the racists who still live among us and hope for a return to those evil times.

We do not believe Rand Paul is a racist or anything close to it. But racists are rallying to his banner today because of his shallow and misbegotten political philosophy.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Van Gaal vows to stick to his attacking ways

Posted: 22 May 2010 03:51 PM PDT

MADRID (AFP) – Bayern Munich coach Louis van Gaal insisted he will not be changing his football philosophy despite seeing his team beaten 2-0 by Inter Milan in the Champions League final here on Saturday.

The Bavarians enjoyed two thirds of the possession at the Santiago Bernabeu and mustered almost twice as many shots as the new champions but two successful strikes from Diego Milito made the difference.

Even so, Van Gaal said he will always stick to attacking football and suggested that the loss of French star Franck Ribery to suspension had been decisive.

"After the match I shook every player's hand, that's a lot for me. We lost but to shake hands means I'm proud of them," he said.

"We mustn't forget that we had to face a very difficult style of play, it's difficult to play Inter.

"I think we played attractive football for our fans but you can lose and we must be in top shape to succeed against a team like Inter and today we weren't.

"That's also because it's more difficult to attack than defend and we had to attack in reduced space.

"That's what many German teams do but Inter are a bit better playing that style and have players who can make the difference.

"That's what I found in my analysis, that they can make a difference in wide open spaces.

"But it's our choice to play this attacking style, they (the players) can do it but have to be in top shape.

"It's not new, you can see Inter every Saturday and also Bayern and see Champions League match statistics on possession: Barcelona and Bayern have the highest ball possession.

"It's a choice of style of play and we choose a very difficult style but then you can also lose and today we lost.

"I don't think it's respectful towards the other players to talk about (Ribery's loss) but still I must say that if you play this style you need a creative player and Franck Ribery is very creative.

"But it's always simple to say after a defeat that Ribery was missing, but we played Lyon without Ribery and against Juventus and we played half the season without him."

Van Gaal did admit that it was his team's defensive frailty that had cost them as centre-backs Martin Demichelis and Daniel Van Buyten were each beaten by Milito when he scored his two goals.

"It was no surprise to me how the match went, the surprise is that we lost.

"But we tackled Inter that way, we knew how they would line-up and we knew that our type of play would be very difficult to play against them.

"We know inter normally have excellent organisation, their defence is organised in an excellent way.

"We have to defend better. We know Milito and (Wesley) Sneijder can be decisive players and that's the way it went."

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Elena Kagan's Writings Offer Clues To Her Judicial Philosophy

Posted: 22 May 2010 08:50 PM PDT

WASHINGTON — Elena Kagan, a Supreme Court nominee without judicial experience, has suggested in writings and speeches over a quarter-century that when judges make decisions, they must take account of their values and experience and consider politics and policy, rather than act as robotic umpires.

Not since 1972 has a president picked someone for the high court who hasn't been a judge. So what the 50-year-old Kagan has said about judging might be the best indicator of the kind of justice she would be.

Republicans have said that because Kagan hasn't left a trail of judicial opinions, they will pore over her records as a Clinton White House aide and academic for any clues. Her speeches and papers from her time as dean of the Harvard Law School and, before that as a law professor and graduate student, are certain to get close attention at her confirmation hearing in late June.

Her words stand in contrast to the more technical view of judging voiced by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearing five years ago. Roberts said he considered himself an umpire merely calling balls and strikes.

Kagan apparently has never directly addressed Roberts' comments. Republicans have held his description of the job as a model of judicial restraint and used it to criticize President Barack Obama for what they call his support of judicial activism – judges imposing their own views on the law.

But Kagan put forward a different idea of judging in a 1995 law review article.

"It should be no surprise by now that many of the votes a Supreme Court justice casts have little to do with technical legal ability and much to do with conceptions of value," Kagan said in a review of Yale law professor Stephen Carter's book "The Confirmation Mess."

Kagan quoted Carter approvingly to say that to decide the hard cases that rise to the level of Supreme Court review, justices must use their judgment. When they do that, Kagan said (again citing Carter), their "own experience and values become the most important data."

It may be hard to divine just what Kagan meant, but it's "not calling balls and strikes," says Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris.

Last year, Republicans chided Obama for saying his first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, would bring empathy – the ability to see things from another's point of view – to the bench. A leading Obama critic, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has said the empathy standard is "this feeling standard. Whatever that is, it is not law. It is not a legal standard."

Obama stopped using the "e-word," but recently Justice Anthony Kennedy offered up a defense of empathy – in words similar to Kagan's. He suggested there was nothing controversial about it.

"You certainly can't formulate principles without being aware of where those principles will take you, what their consequences will be," Kennedy said at a speech in Florida on May 14. "Law is a human exercise and if it ceases to be that, it does not deserve the name law."

Kagan had been recently made the Harvard law dean when she spoke to a group of Princeton alumni in 2003 about judicial review, the courts' power to review the actions of the other branches of government.

In handwritten notes that were among the thousands of pages of documents Kagan provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, she said judicial review "should be exercised w/ caution" because it involves overturning the actions of popularly elected officials.

Interpreting the Constitution is not mechanical, she said. If it were, it "wouldn't be issue," Kagan wrote in abbreviated notes.

Interpretation, Kagan said, "necessarily + inevitably" involves "political + policy questions."

She referred in her notes to the court's Bush v. Gore decision that effectively ended the recount of votes in Florida after the 2000 election and Vice President Al Gore's hopes of becoming president.

Kagan did not offer her own view about the case, only that it was an example of the difficulty judges face.

After receiving her law degree from Harvard in 1986, Kagan spent two years as a law clerk, first to Abner Mikva when he was a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington and then to Justice Thurgood Marshall.

But even before she studied law at Harvard, Kagan wrote her master's thesis at Oxford University in England about the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren's leadership from 1953 to 1969.

Kagan was critical of the way the Warren court reached some of its most important decisions in favor of criminal defendants, saying it used poor legal reasoning that allowed later justices to scale back some protections for defendants.

She seemed sympathetic to what the Warren court was trying to do, "correct the social injustices and inequalities of American life," but quarreled with how it did that.

Near the end of the 130-page paper, Kagan took her first stab at explaining how a judge should make tough calls.

Decisions "should be based upon legal principle and reason," she said. At the same time, Kagan said, "The law, after all, is a human instrument – an instrument designed to meet men's needs."

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Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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