Re: Br'er Tim and the Bug Hole

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

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At 5:13 pm -0500 on 11/12/97, Monty writes:


> Physician heal thyself!  Much of your discussion consists of ad
> hominem attacks with little content such as the paragraph quoted
> above.

I sure if you actually read what I wrote, you actually might find one or two,
and when you do, I'm sure you'll find while Tim far exeeded me in quantity,
that *my* ad hominae were *much* better. So? Are you flowcharting the
discussion as well? :-). (Though, I think if you did, you'd find that I'm
hammering his ass there, as well, which is probably why there's a little bit
more foam at the corner of his mouth than usual at the moment... Oops.
*Another* ad hominem. So sorry.)

> The Foucault discussion quoted is worth reading.  Unfortunately, it's
> been a long time and I cannot provide a reference.

Frankly, I find Foucault tiresome. Self-referent relativism is always
tiresome. Politically correct self-referent relativism is the most tiresome
kind.

> At any rate, the upshot of his argument was that there are often
> attempts to ensure freedom, but in reality it can only be assured
> through its exercise.

If you lived here you'd be home now? Please.

> He gave the example of a building in France which was designed to make
> people feel free.  Instead of winding little corridors and small rooms
> where people would be locked away, it had a large open courtyard and
> it was designed so that when you entered the building, everybody could
> see you and you could see them.
>
> Foucault argued that in the context of people who are free, this
> building would have the intended effect.  In the context of a fearful
> and oppressive society, the effect would be quite the opposite.
> Everybody would feel that they were being watched all the time.

And the point is, as it almost always is with Foucault, that meaning is a word
game entirely dictated by culture, and no culture is better than any other,
and, so, like I said above, "If you lived here, you'd be home now". The
effects of architecture on people is pretty much a fact, as I expect that any
prisoner of Auschwitz ("Arbeit macht frei"?) would tell you. Unless, of
course, you've seen the pictures of SS men herding prisoners using machine
guns with empty chambers and the safties on. That, however, is more a question
of ignorance than anything else, I'd say. Ironic, I suppose, coming from me,
who wouldn't know whether a gun had a round in the chamber, either...

> If Tim believes that a judge has committed a capital crime, I want to
> hear about it.

Right. The judge made a decision that Tim thinks the judge should die for.

My point is not the fact of whether the judge committed an "executable"
offense, or didn't. It was that Tim made a thinly veiled threat. To wit, Tim
implied that the Judge should be executed for his court decision. I'm saying
that guys with associates' degrees in "criminal justice" would love any reason
to make Tim a new wife of one of their permanent jail residents after a, um,
crack, like that, and Tim, more to the um, point, seems to, um, up the ante,
by sauntering down to the the jailhouse and pissing on the guard's shoes.

Metaphorically, of course. :-).


> If Tim and others fail to exercise their right to say
> what they believe, then it is likely those rights will be suspended in
> due time.

Like I said before, it makes sense, but not because Foucault said it. Broken
clocks, and all that. Besides, Monty, I hate appeals to authority almost as
much as I hate ad honminae. I mean, Tim appeals to authority all the time, so
why should I? ;-). (Double score, for those of you who are keeping count :-))


> It seems to me that Tim said "The judge in the Paladin case committed
> a capital crime" and not "The judge in the Paladin case committed a
> capital crime and should be gunned down in the streets like a dog."

Frankly, I believe that the two sentences above are exactly the same thing,
and you're making a false difference between them. I'll grant you that Tim
said what he did say on this list, however, and that what he really meant at
the time, only he'll ever know, but that it was pretty apparently a wish (if
not a threat, if you want to pull semantic hairs until one bleeds) that the
judge be assassinated, because a judge can't be killed, legally, for *any*
decision he makes. I expect that gunning the judge down in the street like a
dog would fit Tim's bill quite nicely.

And, again, Tim's simply wishing it so in public might make him elligible for
the jailhouse dating game, if not that hilltop fandango I mentioned earlier.

> Tim is a good writer.  If he meant the latter I am sure he would have
> written the latter.  If anything, the term "capital crime" suggests a
> legal proceeding.

I'm quite certain, that since there's no legal way in this country to execute
a judge for making *any* decision, that Tim's "capital crime" is a thinly
vield reference to street justice, and nothing less.

> Personally, I don't consider violation of oath of office a capital
> crime.  But, the judge should be fired.  He clearly isn't taking the
> Constitution very seriously.

Not the point. The point is Tim's implied threat of violence to a sitting
judge.


> >Yes. Fine. Tim has courage. God bless him. Hope he enjoys his
> >firefight.
>
> I don't understand why you keep insulting Tim.  Your first post was
> insulting and comments like these are likewise insulting.

Me? Insult Tim? I meant everything I said, there, and, in my first post, I
meant it without any, um, malice aforethought. Tim is the one who seems to
take the facts so personally. And, if you haven't noticed, I keep repeating
the same point, though, Monty, you still don't seem to get it yourself: Tim
keeps predicting the end of the country as we know it, in some kind of violent
cataclysm, and, as if to precipitate that, he keeps saying outrageous things
in an apparent attempt to piss off law "enforcement" people, particularly the
ones with all the surplus military hardware.

Whether they listen to him, or not, is immaterial, though it may become
material if he keeps threatening judges with "capital punishment" for making
(admittedly stupid, if not scary) judicial rulings he doesn't like.

Those, Monty, are the facts, and they're pretty much indisputable.

And, Monty, here's another fact: the world isn't going to end on Thanksgiving
Day, much less at the beginning of the millenium. Armed storm troopers are
probably *not* going to decend on the denizens of this list and haul them off
to newly built gulags in the Rockies somewhere, or whatever the current
fantasy of the moment is.

It'll be the same old shit, on a different day. Though, maybe, the cost of
moving money will be a little lower from one day to the next. :-).

> The book I am reading is called "The Aurora: A Democratic-Republican
> Returns" by Richard N. Rosenfeld.

Okay. Here's where I cop to bad craziness. It's now time for me to fess up and
get my butt hammered like a gentleman. :-).

> >Right. And then Adams passed the Alien and Sedition laws. And then
> >the Supreme court took him out. Game over.
>
> We must be reading different books.

Maybe I was reading the Cliff Notes version. :-).

> After the editor of "The Aurora" was publicly beaten by Federal
> troops, citizens of Philadelphia formed an armed militia and stood
> guard outside the offices of the newspaper.  That's why it wasn't
> suppressed.

Well, to salvage what's left of my tattered reputation on this, :-), at least
I can take solice in what I said about 150 years of prior democracy being more
of a factor than legal fiat...

>  Jefferson's reply (page
> 902):
> > I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the
> > Sedition law, because I considered and now consider that law to be a
> > nullity as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to
> > fall down and worship a golden image... [The discharge] was
> > accordingly done in every instance without asking what the offenders
> > had done or against whom they had offended but whether the pains
> > they were suffering were inflicted under the pretended sedition law.
> > It was certainly possible that my motives... might have been to
> > protect, encourage, and reward slander; but they may also have
> > been... to protect the Constitution violated by an unauthorized act
> > of Congress.  Which of these were my motives must be decided by a
> > regard to the general tenor of my life.  On this I am not afraid to
> > appeal to the nation at large, to posterity, and still less to that
> > Being who sees himself our motives, who will judge us from his own
> > knowledge of them, and not on the testimony of Porcupine or Fenno.

Sounds an awful lot like the guy who wrote the Bill of Rights to me. More in a
bit.


> 1. Publius was John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.  Jay
> and Hamilton were leaders of the party attempting to subvert the
> Constitution.

Mostly Madison, I believe, and, oddly enough, a protoge of Jefferson at one
point.

> 2. The Federalist version of the Constitution was intended to have
> aristocratic elements - the Senate and the President.  Adams even
> suggested privately that the Senators should have life long terms and
> that Senate seats should be hereditary.

Yup. There's that aristocratic will to power, and all that. Here a magna
carta, there a magna carta, everywhere a magna carta... :-). Meanwhile
everyone who worked for a living already knew they had a democracy disguised
as a republic, whether it was written down somewhere or not.

> 3. The separation of powers failed completely during the Adams
> administration.  The Federalists had control of the Congress, the
> Executive Branch, and, I suspect, the Supreme Court.

So it seems.

> 4. The rights and freedoms of Americans were protected only by the
> fact that the voters threw the bastards out.  Something to keep in
> mind when people tell us that the voters are less trustworthy than
> career politicans.

Right. Which is the only straw of prior argument I can hold onto in this whole
deluge. :-). I should have read my Cliff Notes better. ;-).

> 6. Jefferson did not write the Bill of Rights.  He was in France at
> the time and was pleased to hear these amendments had been added to
> the Constitution.

I don't believe that's right. I believe, if you check it out, that Jefferson
sent the Bill of Rights to the Constitutional Convention from France, and that
Madison, ironically enough, had a hand in getting it passed. The Bill of
Rights and the Constitution were then ratified together as a single package on
a state by state basis. Madison and Jefferson were on friendly terms
throughout the Constitutional process.

Unless, of course, "History Your Mother Never Taught You" says otherwise. :-).

Before he left for France, Jefferson wrote what I think amounts to the
Constitution of Virginia, which includes a bill-of-rights-like section in it.
I can't remember the document's name, but it's on Jefferson's tombstone as one
of his few self-acknowleged accomplishments.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>