Brian,

Whom do you mean to refer to by “We?”

Whoever that may be, do they “respect” the careful, systematic enforcement of unjust laws? Or only the just ones?

This is an issue of some consequence, after all, since there happen to be an awful lot of unjust laws at the moment. Immigration law among them.

lirelou: Every protest against any government policy brings out its share of moonbats and radicals with old axes to grind.

Are you claiming that carrying a Mexican tricolor in an immigration protest qualifies you as a “moonbat” or “radical” with “old axes to grind”? If so, do you feel the same way about Italian-Americans carrying the Italian tricolor on Columbus Day, or about Irish-Americans carrying the the Irish tricolor in St. Patrick’s Day parades?

lirelou: Immigration needs to be fixed, and the protests will perhaps pressure Congress to get on with it. But no one who has entered this country illegally should be allowed to jump ahead of those who’ve obeyed the law and remained outside pending adjudication of their immigrant visas.

The simple solution to this “problem” is to decriminalize all immigrants immediately without requiring any further paperwork. Then there won’t be any queue to “jump ahead” in.

lirelou: We do need immigrant man (and woman) power, but we must ensure that it is brought in to this country in accordance with the rule of law.

Why?

Brandon,

Could you explain in some more detail which expenditures are being counted as “defense” expenditures? For example, are V.A. benefit pay-outs being counted as “defense” or “non-defense”? What about “Homeland Security” grants to state and local governments? Are 100% of debt interest payments being counted under “non-defense”?

Brian,

But the ban is an invasion of religious liberty, and one which was pushed by western politicians deliberately targeting Muslims, n’est-ce pas?

LoneSnark,

I’m not defending Mugabe’s policies. I’m saying that the white planters — who are overwhelmingly either robbers, the heirs of robbers, or people who knowingly bought land from robbers — aren’t in any moral position to complain about it.

LoneSnark: “Because the statute of limitations on grand theft has expired. Or, if you prefer, because the quick-deed duration of five years has expired without contestation.”

What statute of limitations? What duration? Are these elements of positive law that the otherwise rightful owners of Zimbabwean land agreed to abide by, or are they numbers that you’ve made up for them? If the previous rightful owners can be identified then they have as good a right now as they did then unless they’ve agreed to quitclaim their interest in it. If they cannot, then that only makes the farmland unowned land available for homesteading. It does not make it the respectable personal fief of the robber.

LoneSnark: “Either-way, to make a system of land management work you have to have a way of proclaiming ownership.”

Here’s one: the land to the people who till it.

Feudal land-claims granted by the Rhodesian government do not confer any legitimate ownership, so the land either rightly belongs to the people who owned it before it was stolen (if they can be identified) or to the people who have homesteaded it by cultivating it with their labor. On large plantations with many farmworkers, that means that the greater part of the land rightly belongs to the farmworkers, not to the planter. The planter has at the most a claim to the share of the land that he personally occupies or has cultivated.

Dain: Rad, I agree with the French head scarf ban comment, but in the Sudan isn’t the aggresion going in the direction of Christians and ‘animists’?

You’re probably thinking of Khartoum’s war on southern Sudan, which was supposedly settled by a brokered peace treaty in January 2005 (after two years of negotiations). How stable that is remains to be seen, but the human rights catastrophe that currently has Sudan in the news is the ongoing genocide against farming peoples in Darfur, in western Sudan. The victims (as well as the perpetrators) in Darfur are overwhelmingly Muslim; the conflict is divided along ethnic and socioeconomic lines rather than religious or geographical ones as it was before.

I think bin Laden’s claims that this is all the result of divide-and-conquer politics by the “Crusader-Zionist” axis are silly. The imperialists in Khartoum and their hired killers in Darfur have plenty of their own reasons and interests at stake in slaughtering Muslim farmers. But setting the debate over the explanation to one side, it is empirically true that the victims in Sudan are, indeed, Muslims, and that bin Laden is correct to claim that the genocide involves professed Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims.

“He sees France’s banning of headscarves in school as part of the Western war on Islam.”

Well, isn’t it?

“He sees Muslims as victims in Sudan.”

Well, aren’t they?

Mugabe and the regime he commands are appalling. But what makes you think that the white farmers in Zimbabwe have any legitimate claim to the land they’re sitting on? Because the colonial government of Rhodesia stole it, fair and square?

Brandon Berg:

But by the very same logic, you’re not allowed to throw innocent people in jail to create the sort of society you want to live in.

But Brandon, you’re not entitled to do that.

Incarceration of the innocent is a moral crime and the victims of it are owed both release and proportional compensation from their victimizers.

That does not, contrary to your claims, entail that you can’t incarcerate anybody. “You can’t morally incarcerate the innocent” doesn’t entail “You can’t morally do anything that risks incarcerating the innocent.” But it does entail that you’re under some obligations of restraint.

First, you’re obliged to use violence only to the extent that it’s necessary to defend yourself and others from the threat posed by the individual person you’re using it against, since anything further involves not only taking a risk that you’ll harm the innocent, but taking a gratuitous risk that’s neither justified nor excused by the right of defense. You’re entitled, sometimes, to risk harming innocent people in order to defend against a concrete threat. You’re not entitled to risk harming anybody in order to preemptively ward off alleged future dangers posed by unspecified and unrelated third parties.

Second, you’re obliged not to use violence so as to make it impossible for you to compensate any innocent people that you may hurt, if you can possibly avoid it. If you’re going to risk hurting innocent people then you had better be prepared to do what you can to ameliorate or make up for the damage that you’ve caused, should it turn out that they were innocent after all.

Incarcerating people for crimes doesn’t categorically violate these obligations. Incarcerating alleged criminals just to serve as a “deterrant” to anonymous third parties does violate the first obligation, and you have no right to do that. Deliberately killing prisoners as a “deterrant” directly violates both of these obligations.

Either it’s okay to accept a certain false positive rate in the justice system because it ultimately makes us safer on average, or the rights of innocent people are sacrosanct, and we have to avoid punishing criminals altogether.

“A certain false positive rate?”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

—George Orwell (1946), “Politics and the English Language”

Brandon Berg: Doesn’t the same logic apply to imprisonment? The state imprisons far more innocent individuals than it executes, and while it’s worse to be executed than to be imprisoned for twenty years and then released, imprisonment is still irreversible. A person may be released from prison, but one who has whiled away his youth in a cell can never really be made whole again.

I’m not a big fan of arguments from the possibility of innocence (plenty of innocent people are killed; but I think the death penalty is morally indefensible even when the condemned is clearly guilty as hell). But I don’t understand the argument that you’re making here. It’s true that you can’t get back the time lost while you were unjustly incarcerated, or undo the pain that was inflicted on you by the incarceration itself. But it’s not true that nothing can be done toward making you whole again: besides being released, you can also be compensated for the wrongful harm that was done to you. Whether or not that can ever fully make up for the wrong done you, it’s more than can be said for judicial murder of the innocent: there’s no possible compensation for the wrongfully executed. (Their estates can be paid off, but so what?) So how do you go from pointing out that no policy offers 100% restoration to the wronged to a defense of a policy that absolutely guarantees 0% restoration of the wronged?

Or, to put an AnCap spin on it, suppose you’re choosing between two privately-governed communities: One in which you have a .01% chance of being murdered and a .001% chance of being executed unjustly, or one in which you have a .02% chance of being murdered and no chance of being executed unjustly. Which do you pick?

I don’t know; I figure it depends in part on what you value in a society. But I think that this question actually changes the subject rather than responding to Sean’s point, anyway. He is not making a claim about what sort of society you should prefer to live in if you had to choose one. He’s making a claim about what you, personally, are or are not entitled to do: you are not entitled to commit premeditated murder, whether or not it helps produce the sort of society in which you would like to live. Now, maybe you think that he’s wrong about that; if you’re a strict consequentialist, for example, then one of the things you probably have to reject is the idea that, body count being equal, there’s any moral difference between doing murder and failing to prevent murder. But if so, that’s the point at which the argument needs to strike; offering two hypothetical societies for choice is just going to sidestep the point that Sean was explicitly trying to make.