Dr. Althouse:

“I haven’t been reading PoliPundit or, really, any of the debate about immigration in the blogosphere. If I had been, I probably would only write about ‘tone and tenor of the debate.’ I consider immigration a complex policy problem, and I steer clear of ideologues spouting on the topic. I hear the President gave a speech on the subject last night and that he sounded moderate. Good. He’s fending off the ideologues — I hope.”

Dr. King:

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

“… You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. … But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist for love — ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice — ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ — ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist — ‘Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.’ Was not John Bunyan an extremist — ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.’ Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist — ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

—“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Dr. King wins.

Well, Roberts seems to be suggesting a couple of different directions in his comments. One of them is radically reducing the amount of energy consumed; another is lifting government subsidies that heavily favor big, centralized power generation over decentralized production (at the level of neighborhoods or individual homes). I think actually the latter has a lot more practical potential than the former: rewiring homes to draw electricity off a local source requires quite a bit of capital up front, but drastically overhauling lifestyles to drop energy consumption by 2/3 will involve a lot more of a cost upfront. There’s also good reason to think that, once the current regime of subsidies and government-granted privileges is knocked down, the market will quite naturally adjust to more decentralized production, without needing to get people to fundamentally change their attitudes towards power consumption. (That’s leaving aside the question of whether getting people to fundamentally change their attitudes would be a good thing; maybe it would be, but I wouldn’t count on that alone, or even primarily, to solve pressing environmental or economic issues.)

Patrick,

Nobody in the feministing post is “categorically declaring positions and people as beyond the pale prior to investigation,” as far as I can tell. You’re talking about this as if feminist activists were unfamiliar with anti-feminist arguments or positions. By and large, that’s not so; most of us have had a great many anti-feminist arguments and positions thrown at us. Here’s what Alice Tiara was quoted as saying in the post you linked to: “I’ve been studying gender politics for more than a decade, and I want to talk about feminist issues on a fairly high level, which is not possible when you are constantly having to repeat yourself to men who don’t see sexism because of male privilege.” In other words, she’s studied the issue for quite some time, come to some decisive conclusions (say, that sexism does indeed exist and is in fact a social force), and isn’t interested in constantly revisiting the topic when there are other, less rudimentary issues that she’d much rather discuss.

I don’t see how this is any different from a 20th century historian who says she’s not interested in “debating” the Holocaust or the moon landing, or a serious evolutionary biologist who says she’s not interested in “debate” with Young Earth Creationists. This isn’t a matter of marking off some hoary dogma as unquestionable; it’s a matter of having some confidence in your conclusions after a lot of study and having better things to do with your time than try to enlighten the ignorant about such elementary matters. If earnest but ignorant people want to learn the basics about sexism or feminism, there are after all plenty of introductory books that they can pick up and read on the subject before they start demanding that feminists spend their time on arguing with them.

As for the means by which feminists can end male oppression of women, persuading sexists not to be quite so sexist is only one means among many, and not always the most useful. Building battered women’s shelters, staffing rape crisis centers, organizing co-operative childcare, disseminating information about reproductive healthcare, setting up abortion funds, clinic escorting and clinic defense, providing illegal abortions, refusing to do housework, etc. are just a few examples of the sorts of nonviolent direct action that feminists have employed to undermine sexism, which have little to do with either debating sexists or shooting at them. Labor unions don’t exist to persuade bosses to be pro-labor; they exist to organize workers for their own benefit. Similarly, feminist activism doesn’t exist to convince men to be anti-sexist; it exists to organize women for their own liberation.

“This is not an attitude that is conducive to genuinely democratic deliberation.”

What the feministing post says, quite straightforwardly, is that they have better things to do with their time: more interesting people to talk to and more useful ways to spend their time than rehashing Feminism 101 yet again for yet another group of dudes on the web too lazy to pick up a copy of Sisterhood is Powerful. And why should they be expected to do anything different?

The goal of the feminist movement is to stop men’s oppression of women, not to sit around “deliberating” with sexists until they are persuaded to be a bit less sexist than they are. Sometimes the second is a means to the first, and sometime it is a distraction from it or even an obstacle to it. When they conflict, the first is always more important.

Medium: ‘“Moral facts” sound like something of an oxymoron.’

It’s only an oxymoron if you presuppose that the fact-value distinction to both real and unbridgeable. But a lof of philosophers don’t presuppose this anymore (and very few did, up until at least the mid-18th century). Note that appealing to the is-ought problem won’t help you out here: moral realists can accept the problem while denying that it’s equivalent to the fact-value distinction; the philosopher would just have to hold that modal statements using “ought” assert facts, but the facts they assert have at least some irreducible normative or teleological content. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the Nicomachean Ethics 1144a.

That said, I agree with you that David Irving shouldn’t be imprisoned just for being a dishonest sack of vomit. That’s a bad thing to be, but it’s not a crime.

Patrick, I’m inclined to agree with you about moral and non-moral facts of equal complexity when the facts are complex (I’m more confident in my knowledge of various facts about the Krebs cycle than I am in my knowledge of any number of thorny casuistical questions, for example.) But I’m not so sure about “simple” facts. “It’s wrong to burn a cat alive just for the fun of it” seems at least as certain to me — I am at least as confident of it — as I am “there’s a book on this table.” Of course, I’m completely confident in both beliefs, but I can at least imagine error-possibilities for the book-belief (possibilities which are outlandish, or simply idle, but at least coherent), whereas I cannot even imagine anything that would convince me that I’m wrong about sadistic cat-burning. The book-belief is certain beyond any reasonable doubt, but the cat-burning-belief is apodictically certain; I couldn’t give it up without simply giving up on morality as such.

“Certainly, we can be more confident about natural facts than moral ones.”

I don’t agree that this is “certain,” at least not categorically. For example, it is a moral fact that it’s wrong to pour gasoline over a cat and light it on fire, just for the fun of watching it burn. It seems to be a natural fact, as far as we know, that the Universe is expanding, and that the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is moving away from us. I’m pretty confident of both facts, but I’m far more confident of the fact that it’s wrong to burn cats alive just for the fun of it than I am of the fact that the Universe is expanding. (In fact, I think that if anyone reposes less cofidence in certain moral facts, such as the fact that burning cats alive for the fun of it is wrong, than they do in empirical discoveries, then that itself may be a form of moral vice…)

“The real danger to the United States is that the threat of AQ will force us to abandon our freedoms, making us less than what we are or could be.”

This gives too much credit to Al-Qaeda’s neferious powers and puts too little blame where it belongs: on the Bush gang and their running dogs.

Al Qaeda cannot “force us to abandon our freedom” without conquering the country and imposing a totalitarian state of their own — something which they are certainly in no position to do. As far as freedom in America is killed, it will have been murdered by the free choice of fanatics and opportunists within the United States, using Al-Qaeda and the War Effort as an excuse.

Furthermore, what will have happened is not that “we abandoned our freedom.” What will have happened is that one group of people (viz. said fanatics and opportunists) have willingly taken another group of people’s (viz. their victims’) freedom. I’m sure that after the Counter-Revolution, if it comes, the freedom of folks like Alberto Gonzales and John Negroponte will be doing just fine.

Patrick,

Yes, I’d consider the Black Panther Party and SNCC during its Black Power phase to be members of the radical Left. Besides their explicit development of Marxian revolutionary thought (which they both embraced and substantially altered in order to adapt it to the situation as they saw it), it’s also worth noting that a number of other paradigmatic New Left groups at the time (SDS, Weather, the Young Lords, American Indian Movement, etc.), and other groups with roots in the radical Left (New York Radical Women, etc.) considered SNCC in its Black Power phase, and the Black Panther Party, to be leading members of the American Left.

None of this, of course, is the same thing as saying that they were correct; I take “Left” to be a term of ideological analysis, not necessarily a term of praise. As for myself, I think that there are valid criticisms to be made of the Black Power tendency, but they are mostly criticisms that applied to the New Left as a whole at the time (e.g. the pseudo-revolutionary embrace of violent, patriarchal masculinity); as for the debate between integrationist approaches and Black nationalism, I think there are important and valid criticisms on both sides, but I don’t have any strong opinion as to who’s right, all things considered (and since I’m not a member of the Black community I don’t think that any strong opinions that I had about the best way for Black people to organize themselves, or the best things for them to fight for, would be worth much anyway).

A lot of people on the Left who participated in, or supported, Black Power and the Black Panther Party criticized King in particular, the SCLC, and the emphasis on integration as the be-all and end-all of liberation for Black people. Kwame Toure (nee Stokeley Carmichael) and Jamil al-Amin (nee H. Rap Brown) were two of the leading figures, and the trajectory of SNCC from 1965 to 1967 an indicative moment. Carmichael and Brown both explicitly criticized integrationist civil rights legislation as a mere palliative, began talking about “self-determination” for Black people as the proper goal rather than “integration” into existing social structures, and aimed to align the Black liberation movement in the United States with revolutionary Leftist movements in Africa and the Third World broadly. The Nation had a bit of a discussion of the criticisms in broader historical context (reviewing the radicals of the Old Left as well as the New) back in 1998, by Robin D. G. Kelly, entitled “Integration: What’s Left?”; you can find it online at http://tinyurl.com/byq5w … Stokeley Carmichael’s SNCC position paper on “The Basis of Black Power” is also online at http://tinyurl.com/e4okd — which defends Black self-determination and Black nationalism, although it mostly leaves the criticism of the NAACP and SCLC integrationist approach tacit rather than explicit.)

Patrick,

You seriously mistake me if you think that I endorse the low-altitude firebombing of over 100 Japanese cities by LeMay’s forces at the orders of Roosevelt and Truman. They are included in the figures when I say that somewhere between half a million and one million Japanese civilians were massacred in the course of the terror-bombing. I do not think that the difference between nuclear terrorism and “conventional” terrorism by means of low-altitude firebombing is worth investing with any great moral weight. My complaints are directed against the campaign as a whole, not the use of nuclear weapons at the end of it. As for how to describe the aims of both the firebombing and the atomic bombing, Truman and LeMay made it quite clear, when LeMay said “There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders,” and Truman said, “It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.”

It was also made clear when they steadfastly refused to give any specific warnings to civilians to evacuate the areas that they were planning to incinerate. (You could object that they couldn’t warn the civilians without warning the military. That’s true, but irrelevant, if you claim that the purpose was to degrade the military-industrial infrastructure, which couldn’t easily be moved on short notice, rather than massacre the population.)

If you want to give a brief in favor of terrorism at the level of entire cities in order to coerce unconditional surrender, then you’re free to do so, but you do have an intellectual responsibility to call it what it is.

In any case, all of this to one side, whatever you may think of Truman or Roosevelt, based on his own public statements and the reminiscences of the soldiers who served under him, it ought to be pretty clear that Curtis LeMay — who actually planned and carried out the details of the bombing campaign — was nothing short of a bloodthirsty maniac who reveled in death and destruction. (He continued the theme after WWII, becoming the chief nuclear hawk among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, coined the phrase “bomb them back into the Stone Age” in reference to the Vietnam War, and became the Vice Presidential candidate for George Wallace’s 1968 Presidential campaign, on a platform of white supremacy and more militant anticommunism.) Seems like this is much clearer qualification for a Worst Ten list than sleazy politicized televangelism.

Patrick: “Anyway, setting aside this issue, people who wish to critize the United States can’t have it both ways:”

This is a false dichotomy. If you don’t accept that unconditional surrender followed by occupation was a necessary or proper goal for the war effort, then you needn’t sign on to either the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the continuation of the firebombing and an eventual marine invasion.