No Guts, No Glory

OK, I'm going to go out on the limb and make a "Democrats are going to kick butt" prediction for the midterms next week. My thinking is that the "Likely Voter" models are based on previous elections, and this isn't going to be like them.

So I see the Senate with 50 Dems (including Lieberman) with 49 Republicans and 1 independent.

The Dems will pick up 30 seats in the House, which would roughly reverse the current standings.

(Comments ridiculing my prognostication skills are welcomed. But if you don't put something down yourself before next Tuesday, expect to be met with chicken noises.)

Iggy's Popped

Much as we amateurs and commentators would like to pretend otherwise, professional politics is skilled work. It takes years of practice.

It was therefore always rather arrogant of Michael Ignatieff to imagine he could start right at the top, particularly in a country he has not lived in for three decades.

The mess he has made of recognizing Quebec as a "nation" is evidence enough.

First, his supporters in the Quebec branch of the federal Liberal party make a big show of a resolution calling for recognition of Quebec as a nation in the Constitution. His people claim this as a big victory over Dion and Rae.

But once English Canadian Liberals react to this affront to the fundamental principles of Trudeauism, Iggy claims he is saying nothing different from the others. He now says he doesn't want quick constitutional change. So he has raised expectations among nationalists, and then said he will not meet them.

I want to return to the substantive issue later, but the man clearly is not a reasonable alternative Prime Minister. IQ and looks are no substitute for experience.

Khawaja and the dangers of ideology

Last week, Mr. Justice Rutherford of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, as a result of a constitutional application by an accused terrorist, severed clause 83.01(1)(b)(i)(A) from the Criminal Code.

What does that mean, you ask? Before last Wednesday, there were two ways to prove that an act or failure to act was a "terrorist activity" -- the first was to show that it was one of a number of offences under international law. The second involved proving that it was "in whole or in part, for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause." That wasn't enough, of course. Lots of perfectly lawful things -- arguably including Pith & Substance -- are in whole or in part for political, religious or ideological purposes. A terrorist activity has to kill somebody, or endanger their life, or cause serious risk to public health or safety or -- at bare minimum -- cause serious property damage or disrupt an essential service in a way that might do one of those things. But, before Wednesday, if you did one of those bad things just for kicks, or for love or money, it wasn't terrorism. Now it is.

The first thing I noticed in reading Justice Rutherford's decision was how lackadaisical the process of constitutional litigation has become in this country. No expert witnesses were called on the critical subject of the policy reasons for distinguishing religious and political violence form other forms of violence. Instead, the judge was just given large amounts of undigested reading material -- without objection from either side. None of the assertions in the academic literature (which is largely unsympathetic to national security concerns in this country) were subject to cross-examination. We wouldn't run a significant personal injury case this way, but the government appears willing to let a major part of its anti-terrorism policy be shot down on the basis of garbage evidence. The judge rightly complained about this. Heads ought to roll at DOJ.

Traditionally, the Anglo-Canadian criminal law has ignored motive in deciding whether a particular crime has been made out, although it is often important in sentencing. Personally, I am unable to see much of constitutional significance in this distinction. The law has never thought that motive was irrelevant to the seriousness of criminal activity, and I can't see why the state should be prevented from defining certain crimes in terms of motive.

On the other hand, I can't dismiss the idea that inquiry into the motives of people committing what are admitted to be criminal acts creates some risks to freedom of expression and religion. This is a problem libertarians have pointed out -- with little effect -- in relation to hate crimes. Assault is already illegal, but if it is a bigger deal because it is motivated by discriminatory beliefs, then it is, of course, relevant to ask people about their beliefs during trial. This may well be unfair to people with nasty -- but legal -- opinions.

On the other hand, it is -- I think correctly -- argued that racial violence has the unique potential to dissolve civil society in a multiethnic state. If it isn't ruthlessly crushed, and subject to specific sanction, Toronto or Vancouver could look like Sarajevo or Beirut.

I suspect the same thing is true of terrorism. It has an effect on social order that random violence does not. As Solzhenistyn remarked, without an ideology, Shakespeare's villains all stop at about a dozen corpses. Human nature doesn't need religion or politics to generate violence -- greed, lust for power or jealousy will do -- but without religion or politics, it is just retail violence.

Surely, an expert could have told Mr. Justice Rutherford as much. But he couldn't see it on his own.

Pharmascience Inc. v. Binet, 2006 SCC 48 -- Who's in charge of handing out leave here?

In Pharmascience, the Supreme Court of Canada decided whether the word "on" in s. 122 of Quebec's Professional Code means every governed professional or everybody. If it's the former, then syndics (officials in charge of professional discipline) can order the production of documents from anyone, whether they are part of the profession the syndic has jurisdiction over or not.

The Quebec Court of Appeal thought the grammatical meaning of "on" in context was ambiguous, and invoked the principle that legislated search power must be clear to prefer the more restrictive interpretation. Justice LeBel, with a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada, disagreed.

The Pithlord speaks what can be gently referred to as "Western Canadian High School Francais." I can follow Stephen Harper in full oratorical flight, and could tell you the score in a game carried only by Radio-Canada. But I am not going to pronounce on the proper reference of the pronoun "on", especially since I suspect it is a Gallic plot to confuse Anglos in revenge for Agincourt. If the Quebec Court of Appeal think the linguistic issue is murky, I have no reason to disbelieve them. But it's LeBel's native language too, so what do I know?

But you don't get to be a contender in the "Best New Canadian Blog"* category by being shy to offer an opinion on a subject just because you don't know anything about it. And, after some reflection, I found I did have an opinion after all: this decision should never have existed in the first place because leave shouldn't have been given.

As the Canadian legal blogosphere's most prominent ectomorph has pointed out, all is not well with the mix of cases the Supremes take. Bar association meetings and Continuing Legal Education events across the country are filled with moaning about how the Nine don't resolve the pressing issues of somebody's practice, except when they are about how the Nine screwed everything up in their latest unfathomable pronouncement.

Now, to be fair, the time of the Nine is a scarce thing. They have to refuse to hear more cases than they can hear. So if we are going to be constructive critics, we have to bitch about what they are hearing, as well as what they're not.

And that is one of the things that makes Pharmascience so mystifying. If there is one type of litigation that can safely be left to provincial appellate courts, it is litigation that turns on the interpretation of ambiguous provisions in provincial statutes. No one else cares, and if the court has really screwed it up, the legislature can fix it relatively easily.

So no thumbs this time, but a blank stare of incomprehension.

Case Comment of Pharmascience Inc. v. Binet, 2006 SCC 48

Photo of Mr. Justice LeBel from Supreme Court of Canada collection. Credit Phillipe Landreville

*By the way, how's that going, L? You remember the deal...

R. v. Krieger -- Thumbs Up

The right to trial by jury is one of those things that Anglos can be insufferable about. The English developed it, and it became a bulwark against tyranny, so we like to bring it up when we are mocked about our spotty complexions.

One implication of a jury trial is that ordinary citizens can occasionally refuse to convict because they disapprove of the law the accused is charged with violating. In the seventies, Henry Morgentaler took advantage of this possibility and was acquitted of violating the provisions restricting abortion then in the Criminal Code, even though he was obviously violating them. The Supreme Court of Canada reversed the acquittal, and found Morgentaler guilty. In effect, the 70s-era Nine found him guilty, even though no jury of his peers would.

Interestingly, Trudeau reacted by abolishing the power of appellate courts to overturn acquittals, as opposed to order new trials. The right to a jury trial for matters where there could be a sentence in excess of five years was put in the Charter. Canada during that era reaffirmed the old English principle of trial-by-jury.

Fast forward to our current controversies. Grant Krieger grew his own marijuana for allegedly medicinal purposes. He was charged, and elected a jury trial. His defence, like Morgentaler's, was the murky common law defence of necessity.

Rather outrageously, at the end of the evidence, the judge told the jury that they had no choice but to find the man guilty. As the Supreme Court quotes the trial judge referring to some jury members asking to be excused:

It is apparent that some of the members either didn’t understand my direction this morning, that is that they were to return a verdict of guilty [Emphasis in Supreme Court of Canada decision]

This is clearly inappropriate for a judge in a jury trial. Many long-winded speeches of dead English jurists could be cited on the subject, but it is unnecessary, since the Crown conceded as much.

The Alberta Court of Appeal -- rather oddly, I think -- thought matters were improved by the fact that the jury deliberated quite a while, notwithstanding the judge's clear instruction that they find a verdict of guilty. The Supremes couldn't see what that makes things any better -- it might make things worse, since it suggests the jury had a lot of doubts about what the judge ordered them to do.

A good day for an ancient right.

Case Comment of R. v. Krieger, 2006 SCC 47

Here are Alex's thoughts on the case. He discusses the jury nullification angle, which I might do something on sometime.

Prince Myshkin reviews Richard Dawkins' new book

"I came home in the morning by the new railway and talked for four hours with a man in the train; we made friends on the spot. I had heard a great deal about him beforehand and had heard he was an atheist, among other things. He really is a very learned man, and I was delighted at the prospect of talking to a really learned man. What's more, he is a most unusally well-bred man, so that he talked to me quite as if I were his equal in ideas and attainment. He doesn't believe in God. Only, one thing struck me: that he seemed not to be talking about that at all, the whole time; and it sruck me just because whenever I have met unbelievers before, or read their books, it always seemed that they were speaking and writing in their books about something quite different, although it seemed to be about that on the surface. I said so to him at the time, but I suppose I didn't say so clearly, or did not know how to express it, for he didn't understand."

--The Idiot>, as translated by Constance Garnett

I am quite sure that the God in which Dawkins disbelieves does not exist. I am not as sure -- although it may be true -- that someone believes in that God, and so Dawkins is doing something useful.

But then it is inevitable that our conceptions of the Absolute will fail to actually be the Absolute. The commandment against idolatry is a stern reminder of that. We do not -- cannot -- know as we are "known". Nor are we "known" by a knower like us, or a big invisible all-powerful version of us. I'm not sure how far Dawkins has advance the argument beyond that.

Update: Terry Eagleton makes some of the same points as Dostoyevsky/Myshkin, but in the style of a man trained in Trotskyist and academic-lit-crit polemic.

Imperial Oil Ltd v. Canada -- Thumbs Down

Nothing quite stiffens up the sinews and summons up the blood like a decision on when foreign exchange losses are fully deductible from income for tax purposes.

The Alpha and Omega of the Pithlord's approach to tax policy is Kenneth Carter's* line that "a buck is a buck is a buck." In other words, I am a believer in the Haig-Symons doctrine that income just is increase in wealth plus consumption. Any attempt to distinguish between increases or decreases in the value of assets (capital gains/losses) from other forms of income is doomed to be arbitrary and ad hoc.

But whatever its merits, the distinction is with us. And so, every taxpayer wants to portray good news as a capital gain, but bad news as an income loss. The Man feels exactly the opposite, of course. Since the distinction is actually bogus, this gives a lot of opportunities to tax lawyers to feed their families. If I were a better person (or a tax lawyer), I wouldn't resent this, but I'm not, so I do.

One issue that comes up from time-to-time is whether the foreign exchange gains/losses of transactions conducted in non-Canadian currencies are capital or income losses/gains. The governing principle, I am lead to understand, is that the same characterization that applies to the non-currency part of the transaction, applies to the whole of it. If I buy stock in a Malaysian company, then the whole of my loss--whether attributable to undisclosed financial irregularities by senior management or a tanking Canadian dollar -- is a capital loss. If I buy and sell widgets in Kazakhstani dinars (or whatever), then it's a business loss/gain and is taxable (or deductible) as ordinary income.

Along with this principle (and necessary to make sense of it) is the principle that the only currency for the purposes of Canadian law is the Canadian dollar -- every element of a statutory formula must be translated into loonies.

The Imperial Oil case turned on a type of transaction that is a capital one, but is specifically designated as deductible from income by the Income Tax Act -- the redemption of debt obligations. There's a long and boring story about why that is, but that need not concern us here. Imperial lost some US money buying back some debentures, but because the Canadian dollar fell between issuance and redemption, it lost even more Canadian money. The Rev allowed the non-currency related loss as deductible from ordinary income, but said the exchange loss was a capital loss. In other words, it said the first principle didn't apply.

If those were the rules, the Pithlord would be unconcerned. We could maybe say that the foreign exchange aspects of all transactions are always capital gain/losses. But we don't and never have, so the Rev was wrong, as the Federal Court of Appeal found.

Bad as the Rev's argument was, though, it wasn't as bad as the one that the majority of the Supremes came up with. Instead of abandoning the principle that the characterization of the foreign exchange aspects of a transaction follows the nature of the transaction, they abandoned the principle that Canadian law always uses Canadian dollars. So now the amount of the loss is calculated in US dollars, even though it is defined in terms of two different magnitudes (roughly, the amount the debentures were issued for and the amount they were redeemed for).

The majority quotes one charmingly innumerate House of Lords decision to abandon a rather basic principle and thereby cause reams of confusion. The Court remarks that the principle that all magnitudes must be measured in Canadian dollars isn't in the Income Tax Act, but it is in section 14 of the Currency Act, as both parties apparently pointed out. The majority mentions this, without reasoned response. The principle that "all magnitudes must be translated into Canadian dollars" has been abandoned for "most magnitudes must be translated into Canadian dollars" without any guidance on the appropriate exceptions and without any reason for muddying everything up. In addition to patriotism, as your Grade 7 Science teacher ought to have told you, it is just darn important when measuring things to use the same measure all the time.

Case Comment of Imperial Oil Ltd. v. Canada; Inco Ltd. v. Canada, 2006 SCC 46

*Someone really should put the Carter Commission report online.

The Fantasy Foreign Policy

Matthew Yglesias makes the sound point that, however bad Bush's foreign policy may have been, it is sanity itself compared to the fevered dreams of the neoliberals and neocons. If the Weekly Standard and the New Republic had their way, the US wouldn't just be in an unwinnable war in Iraq, but in Syria, Iran, Sudan and God knows where else as well. With fantasy troops. However reckless Bush is, he does have to actually implement his policies.

Interestingly, the foreign policy of Tory Canada resembles more closely the fantasy foreign policy of the neoliberal/neocon axis. Who cares if we don't have enough soldiers to meet our commitments in Afghanistan? We can always send sailors instead! No thought is taken for the fate of our navy, because this is Canada where left and right alike view the armed forces as ideological fantasms. We share an illusion of not having any security needs, and therefore treat foreign policy as simply vicarious identity politics.

Naturally, the big foreign policy debate in Canada today -- just as our biggest commitment since Korea has been exposed as a clear overcommitment -- is whether the (dim) foreign minister called his ex-girlfriend a dog. We haven't been a serious country about these matters for almost half a century, but this is a new low.

Update: The Minister of National Defence has announced that the navy will not be used for operations in Afghanistan. No resolution yet on the canine controversy.

Silly Country

Apparently, there are no people in the United States named "Pith Lord". No one with my real name either.

Riverbend on whether 600,000 really died

I try to avoid mere link blogging, but everybody should read Riverbend's latest. A secular Iraqi cries for what has happened to her country.

(Via Lawyers, Guns and Money)

The Gitlin-Ackerman Manifesto

Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman have put together a manifesto for American liberals in answer to Tony Judt's charge that their tribe has acquiesced in Bush's foreign policy.

The manifesto rightly assails Bush for his violations of international law and the American constitution in how he has prosecuted the "Global War on Terror" and the invasion/occupation of Iraq. Good stuff, but it sits uneasily with the signatories support for the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, neither of which fit in nicely with the UN Charter or Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

I also can't endorse the following statement of vulgar Rawlsianism:

When debating policy in the public square, our government should base its laws on grounds that can be accepted by people regardless of their religious beliefs

I doubt this stricture is applied solely to governments. After all, it isn't so much governments that debate policy in the public square, as politicians and citizens, and it would be an inappropriate limitation on democracy to prohibit the latter from bringing their religious commitments to the public sphere. I'm not sure there even are "grounds that can be accepted by people regardless of their religious beliefs," and dispute that it is acceptable to keep people from asserting religious values in the public square. I doubt the signatories have Buddhists for a Free Tibet or Quakers Against the Death Penalty in mind. But what they ask is basically impossible: in Canada, political scientists have long found that religious affiliation is a better predictor of voting behaviour than almost anything else. You might as well have a manifesto denouncing the tendency of the tides to get your feet wet.

Which brings me to the Manifesto's embrace of reason. I'm big on science, and I agree that Bushian Republicans have a bad record in regard to it, but the insistence by American liberals and like-minded progressives in other countries that equality is an empirical fact, rather than a normative guide, is a significant hassle for scientists. Left-of-centre types have also had non-reason-based objections to economic science in my lifetime.

Don't get me wrong. Bush has been a lawless President, and one unusually impervious to empirical disconfirmation, and most of these criticisms hit home. I intend no moral equivalence. As Daniel Larison -- no liberal by any definition -- puts it, "You can vote for the Republic, or you can vote for the Republicans." But even in a short piece, American liberals show some of their own limitations.

Comments

Up to the present, the Pithlord has moderated all his comments. For the benefit of the literatus, I will explain that this means that I saw each of them and had to approve them before the general public could read them in Haloscan.

I am going to experiment with unmoderated comments. For now, you can just open up the Haloscan box, type away and press Post. I may have to take further anti-spam measures in the future, but here's hoping that this will work.

This will not be an exercise in free speech absolutism. Contrary to popular belief, when Al Gore invented the Internet, he did not thereby repeal the laws of defamation, uttering threats, advertising non-FDA-approved pharmaceuticals or spreading seditious libels against our sovereign. The right to comment will be subject to such reasonable limits prescribed by the Pithlord as would be demonstrably justified in a police state with me as sole despot.

I won't delete something just because I disagree with it, or it is politically incorrect, but I also won't provide for any right of appeal.

I should note that all my commenters so far have been persons of great taste and discernment. I particularly welcome Fred S.'s objections to my politics and sense of personal self-esteem. Of course, I also enjoy the more like-minded commenters too. Please keep it up!

We're Doomed

I always doubted the reports that Bush, just prior to the Iraq War, was unaware that there was a sectarian division between Shi'ites and Sunnis in the country he was planning to invade. Don't get me wrong: I don't like the guy, and am generally willing to believe bad things about him. But it apparently derived from some emigrés he met with at that time. And I have heard from second-order hearsay that Bush in person is actually quite different from the amiable doofus he likes to appear as on TV screens.

But now Jeff Stein reports that a large number of senior American policy makers and national security officials still don't know the difference.

Here's Terry Everett, vice-chair of the House subcommittee on technical and intelligence issues, and apparently a nice guy, with an epiphany he ought to have had a while ago:

“One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Urban Bias in the John Hopkins/Lancet Iraq Mortality Study

At Mike Dunford's science blog, I asked whether the streets/intersections method of selecting a sample in fact led to an urban bias in the John Hopkins mortality study. A Kevin Donoghue made the following response, which I pass along to you:

Pithlord, the clusters were assigned in such a way that, at the outset, as far as possible every household in Iraq had an equal probability of inclusion. Admittedly an isolated farm or village might have had no chance, but no survey really lives up to the textbook ideal of a random sample. I can't see that a household in a small town containing a hundred homes or so would have been any less likely to get included than a household in Baghdad.

If isolated farms and small groups of houses are very safe/(unsafe) that would bias the mortality estimate upward/(downward), by an amount which depends on the proportion of Iraq's population living in such places. AFAIK that proportion is very small.

I suspect Mike's main reason for de-emphasising that concern is he doesn't know which way the bias (if any) goes. Most likely nobody does.

Update Via Deltoid, here is an interesting take from UK Polling Report.

It's an honour just to be nominated (*cough*)

Some thoughtful soul is hosting a 2006 Canadian Blog Awards.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Innumerate vs. Non-innumerate criticisms of the John Hopkins Mortality Study

There's been some confusion about this in the comment threads. So let me set this out:

*Criticism that the sampling exhibited various biases. (NOT INNUMERATE)

*Asking where all the bodies are. (INNUMERATE).

*Making reference to the wide confidence interval. (NOT INNUMERATE)

*Referring to Iraq Body Count or other media-report-based sample as disproof (INNUMERATE)

*Questioning whether the Sampling Protocols could have been executed flawlessly in the circumstances of Iraq (NOT INNUMERATE).

*Refusing to believe the number because it just seems too high or because there is a midterm election in the US next month, or because the Iraqi and American governments don't like it or because snooty leftists have referred to it. (INNUMERATE)

You're welcome.

Pithlord approved links:

Andrew Gelman

Tim Lambert (any of last ten posts)

The BBC (includes Iraq Body Count criticsms and responses by study authors to other criticisms)

Iraq Body Count's own press release

Mike Dunford, Take 1 (critical of the John Hopkins study) and Mike Dunford, Take 2 (reconsidering some of his criticisms

Dunford Take 2 walks back from his original criticism that the sample was biased to urban areas, although he doesn't say why.

Benedict's Regensburg address and "Radical Orthodoxy"

I am far from learned in the ways of theology, but one thing that struck me in reading Benedict's Regensburg address was the similarity between his themes and those of the "Radical Orthodoxy" theological movement. (The latter is a mostly Anglo-Catholic trend in academic theology with connections to the current Archbishop of Canterbury. Its leading lights are John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock).

This is an interesting fact in part because Radical Orthodoxy is politically leftist, not rightist, and hostile to the "Global War on Terror" (as, of course, Benedict has been).

Milbank:

Luther entertained no such project [as "knowledge by faith alone"]: on the contrary, he broadly accepted the framework of late medieval nominalist philosophy. Now this philsophy was itself the legatee of the greatest of all disruptions carried out in the history of European thought, namely that of Duns Scotus, who for the first time established a radical separation of philosophy from theology by declaring that it was possible to consider being in abstraction from the question of whether one is considering created or creating being. Eventually this generated the notion of ontology and an epistemology unconstrained by, and transcendentally prior to, theology itsef. .. The very notion of a reason-revelation duality, far from being an authentic Christian legacy, itself results only from the rise of a questionably secular mode of knowledge. By contrast, in the Church Fathers or the early scholastics, both faith and reason are included within the more generic framework of participation in the mind of God [...]

"The Theological Critique of philosophy" in ed. J. Milbank et al., Radical Orthodoxy

Benedict:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.

Milbank:

In the year 1277, the Christian West reached its crisis: certain drastic edicts issued by the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury meant that it decided more or less to outlaw the common Hellenistic legacy of Aristotle fused with Neoplatonism, and blended with allegorical readings of the Hebrew Bible, which it shared with Islam, Judaism, and Byzantium. A common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation--—which has also tended to favor social participation--was rendered impossible. The West went in one direction and Islam in another, since Islam, too, inclined in this period to outlaw this perspective. Islam became a doctrinally orthodox, scriptural, and legalistic civilization to the exclusion of dialectics and mystical theology (apart from newly enhanced Sufistic tendencies).

The conventional view is that from that point forward, the West became secular and Islam became theocratic. But that seems to me to be a half-truth. In fact, by abandoning the shared mystical outlook, Western Christian theology started to look more and more itself like Islamic orthodoxy; it started to read the Bible more like the Qur'an, allowing only the literal meaning and construing that meaning more narrowly than it had. The new stress in the fourteenth century, that only God's will makes things true and right, echoed earlier Islamic Kalam theology and some of the ideas of Al-Ghazali.

Benedict:

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word.

The common narrative is the following:

*Patristic and meideval Christianity was characterized by a beneficial synthesis of faith and reason. The critical concept was Platonic "participation" as the link between the created and the creator.

*This synthesis was first disrupted in Islamic thought, where Platonic and Aristotlean conceptions of divine rationality were thought to limit God's freedom.

*The Islamic emphasis on God's freedom as against God's rationality migrated to Europe through Duns Scotus and the nominalist late scholastics (boo!)

*Duns had a huge impact on the Reformation and on modern philosophy and, through it, the scientific idea of rationality and the liberal concept of justice.

*The whole thing leads to a dangerous choice between nihilism and fundamentalism.

*Islam and Western secularism are not opposed -- they are variants of the same heresy.

*We need to somehow get back to the Patristic/medieval way of thinking about faith and reason.

I'm not learned enough to know if Benedict and Milbank are theologically related by common descent or mutual influence. Milbank thinks the counter-Reformation, with its emphasis on the authority of the hierarchy and ultimately the Pope was also part of the unfortunate development of modernity; not surprisingly, that theme is absent from Benedict's lecture.

Much of Milbank's political analysis has the weakness of a lot of Chomskyan critiques -- the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. UNOCAL seeking pipeline opportunities in Afghanistan and American toleration of Saudi norms in the interests of making a buck are denounced in neocon terms, but neoconservatism is denounced as imperialist. Milbank makes some sensible points (terrorists are not like medieval pirates) and some not-sensible ones (" Detailed and objective analyses by Le Monde and many other reliable sources show that what is currently being played out in Afghanistan is not a war against terrorism nor a response to the attack on the Twin Towers, but le nouveau grand jeu de Kipling. Multiple interests are trying to seize control of one of the largest pools of natural resources in the world in the former Soviet and largely Islamic territories to the north. " Dude, there are cheaper ways to get natural resources.) Benedict is a bit more worldly.

But the critical point, which few of my bretheren and sisteren on the secular left have grasped, is that we cannot begin to understand the issues of the day without learning some medieval theology.

Will Kim Jong Il Live to See the New Year?: Kremlinology Today

I still think that if China's loss of patience with the Korean dictator is genuine, he isn't long for the world.

A data point comes from Mr. Spog, who notices this article in the Korea Times. It seems the Chinese media is full of articles about how ancient northern Korean kingdoms were really part of China.

Apparently, this bold new direction in historical scholarship really got underway in 2003. Andrei Lankov, the Russian expert quoted in the Korea Times piece, thinks there are parts of the NK elite who would welcome some attention to their internal politics from their elder brother in socialism.

One Bad Argument on Abortion

Well, there are a lot of them. But the one I want to take on is Scott Lemieux's. He says that those who would make abortion illegal but do not support serious criminal sanctions against the woman seeking the abortion are in a contradiction, at least if they accept that women have the same moral agency as men.

In one of his comments threads, I argued that this didn't work against abortion opponents who think of abortion as morally wrong, but not as wrong as infanticide, as most do. Other commenters made similar points at greater length.

In fact, most of us combine the following views about something:

*X is wrong.

*X should be legally suppressed.

*Not everyone involved in X should be subject to criminal sanction.

For example, I suspect most Democrats believe that American employers hiring illegal aliens are doing something wrong, and that there should be some legal consequences, while opposing criminal sanctions against the illegal aliens. They are hardly thereby denying moral agency to undocumented Hispanic workers.

There are a lot of prudential and moral reasons that a person might oppose criminal sanctions against women seeking abortions, even if they thought the law should step in more often (my own position) or even all the time (not my position).

Update: Scott responds here.

It's tricky defending views you don't hold, especially on issues it is possible to lose friends over. I'm not a pro-lifer, but I don't think the position of wanting to suppress abortion without criminalizing women who seek them is inconsistent. In addition to the relatively abstract issue of whether a particular argument is a good one or not, there is the problem that seeking to furhter polarize people's opinions on abortion on the grounds of "logic" may not have good consequences.

To address Scott's challenge, I can think of a couple of reasons that a pro-lifer might think criminal sanctions inappropriate:

*Criminalizing something much of a society thinks is permissible is often a mistake, even if that part of society is mistaken about the moral issue. That's basically my view of spanking. I might support criminalizing it if there was a social consensus against it, but I hardly want to drag ordinary parents away to jail when such a consensus doesn't exist.

*Many women seeking abortions do so under conditions of economic or social duress. This would be even more true if abortion was legally unavailable. A person opposed to the legality of abortion could regard this as mitigative, even if not justificatory.

Is (Genuine) Papism Consistent With Liberal Democracy?

Noah at Gideon's Blog notices that this is the interesting question arising out of the Linker-Douthat debate at The New Republic.

Since JFK, no one doubts that operationally secular or operationally Protestant Catholics can be good liberal democrats. But what about those who take seriously the magesterium's authority over matters of faith and morals? Did the problem exist? Did Vatican II solve it?

This was a central issue in Canadian history: the dominant view from Durham to Trudeau was "no." Quebec had to drop its traditional Catholicism (as it did in the mid-sixties) to be properly liberal-democratic. What Durham failed to realize was that French Quebec was not going to peacefully give way to the self-evidently superior Anglo-Saxon way of life. What Trudeau failed to realize was that the only possible replacement for the old Catholic Quebec was ethnic nationalism.

One striking fact about traditional Catholic societies (e.g., Quebec, Ireland, Spain) is how sudden the process of liberalization is, and how quickly those societies settle into an indifferentism about the issues of sex and death the Church is clear about. They seem to pretty clearly vindicate Grant's suspicion that only one of the "religion of progress" and traditional religion could inhabit the public sphere. In principle, perhaps liberalism or libertarianism could be neutral between comprehensive conceptions of the good, but it never seems to work out that way in practice, particularly outside the traditionally Protestant world.