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Christopher Carr
“The police are people who give help
each and every day
If you’d like to help people,
then joining the police is A-okay!
‘Cause people helping other people
is what this world’s about,
and police are surely people
we couldn’t do without!”
~ People Helping Other People, from Barney and Friends
This video shows Henderson, NV police not only not helping a man in diabetic shock but beating him up:
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Hannah Dreier reports in the Contra Costa Times:
Without a new kidney, Jesus Navarro will die.
The Oakland man has a willing donor and private insurance to pay for the transplant. But he faces what may be an insurmountable hurdle in the race to save his life: He is an illegal immigrant.
Administrators at UC San Francisco Medical Center are refusing to transplant a kidney from Navarro’s wife, saying there is no guarantee he will receive adequate follow-up care, given his uncertain status…
…If transplant doctors working with illegal immigrants are in a bind, so are the Navarros.
“We don’t know what to do,” said Navarro’s wife, watching her husband chase after their 3-year-old daughter. “It’s like we’re on a ledge — we can’t go here or there.”
I can understand situations where there just aren’t enough resources to save everybody, where doctors and administrators and government officials make their best efforts, but it just isn’t good enough. But here, Jesus Navarro has insurance and a willing donor (his wife!). He’s made it to the top of the list, and he’s being refused treatment because of his immigration status. Is this excusable in any way, or do we really live in that place?
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"Thomas Hobbes" by Leon Douglas
In my last post on this topic, we got through Hobbes as relative and Hobbes as overstated. To continue our discussion:
Claim 3: There is a significant difference between political and personal liberty.
Lockeans love to claim themselves the true lovers of liberty, but their liberty is political by nature: the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to rebel against an unjust leader, etc. Hobbesians are most concerned with the first of Locke’s three inalienable rights: the right to a peaceful existence, wherein personally-meaningful activities can be pursued. That is to say, peace and stability trump discussions of essentials. As long as I am effectively free, that is all that counts. Who cares about the structure of our legislative process or checks-and-balances or bipartisanship or whatever so long as I am able to pursue freely my chosen career of saxophonist?
That is not to say structural issues don’t matter, but they should be seen as means to an end rather than as ends themselves.
Claim 4: The freest nations are the ones with the most effective court, police, and military systems.
By “most effective” I certainly do not mean most expensive; nor do I mean largest or most powerful. If one dedicated protector of peace is enough to prevent Precinct 13 from being overtaken by those who threaten the social contract, then that dedicated protector is more than enough.
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legitimate rule
Since Rufus and Jason have covered Hobbes in such excellent detail thus far, my contribution to this discussion will be more about tying up loose ends.
As a student, I read Hobbes four different times in four different contexts for four different unrelated courses, and that’s how I feel Hobbes is best approached: through a plurality of heterodox methodologies and interpretive structures. We’ll attempt to do that below.
Claim 1: “Hobbesian” is a relative term.
A question at the center of any discussion on Hobbes is often: what does the eponym “Hobbesian” mean, essentially? Jason made reference to Wittgenstein in his most recent post on the topic. Rufus asked the question non-rhetorically. I’ll expand on the discussion of semantics and claim that the best definitions of “Hobbesian” stand in contrast to other prevailing ideas of the period.
Hobbes is usually studied in relation to the positions of Locke and Rousseau. Regarding Hobbes and Locke, Hobbes felt that universal surrender to an absolute sovereign is the only way to secure civil society, while Locke’s political thought went on to serve as a primary influence for the American democracy. In contrast to Rousseau’s optimism about human nature – that men are inherently good – Hobbes argued that men are inherently weak; in contrast to Rousseau’s belief in the noble savage and the morally-cancerous influence of civil society, Hobbes believed that the state of nature was a state of perpetual suffering and that only the stability of civil society could foster human flourishing.
These two ideas: (1) the Hobbesian positive (commonly called pessimism about human nature); and (2) the Hobbesian normative (the necessity of a strong, central authority) comprise an internally-consistent school of thought that stands with Lockeanism and Rousseauvianism as one of the three pillars of social contract theory. The debates hashed out centuries ago between these three thinkers still rage strong today.
Claim 2: More than Locke and Rousseau, Hobbes is overstated.
When we discuss Hobbes, the focus is on what is excluded. When we discuss Locke, we are eminently inclusive. Perhaps because our national mythos is so deeply rooted in Locke, every value judgment we’ve made on Hobbes’s normative has assumed a certain totalitarianism, that without some Seventeenth-Century despot sentencing traitors to death and razing villages for failing to meet turnip quotas the whole Hobbesian system falls apart and we all eat each other.
On the contrary, a cold and distant monarch is often a maximizing condition for liberty. It has been paraphrased that a libertarian (i.e. – one who places liberty above other societal values) is someone who wants the government to run only the military, the courts, and the police force. What are the military, courts, and police force but Hobbesian bulwarks to keep us from slaughtering each other? We tend to forget or neglect the Hobbesian base on which the Lockean superstructure is built – both in terms of American society and in terms of intellectual history. We conflate power with authority, assuming this authoritarian base must be a person – a totalitarian dictator – when it can just as easily be an institution or a shared belief.
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In light of Rufus’s most recent post, I came across this serendipitous passage in the book I’m presently reading: [click to continue…]
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“In normal times, evil would be fought by good. But in times like these, it must be fought by a different kind of evil.” — Aereon, The Chronicles of Riddick
It seems Ron Paul’s moment has passed here at the League, and we’ve implicitly chosen instead to support some other Republican contender. I find myself perhaps the only one here who still supports Ron Paul for the Republican nomination. (Please correct me if I’m wrong). In a field full of turds, pursuing a maximin strategy is the only way to avoid getting your shoes dirty (consider this vis-a-vis Paul’s defense of earmarking), and Paul is the maximin.
Let’s imagine: we’re all professors and the various Republican candidates for President are our students. The final exam for my class (your class may be different of course) covers material from non-interventionism to peaceful cosmopolitanism and is worth 40% of a candidate’s grade. The midterm – worth 30% – covers opposition to expensive and counterproductive domestic “wars” on substances or abstract ideas (See my last post for why I value these issues over others – essentially, it’s because they’re bigger issues no matter which way you look at it). Every Republican but Paul and Huntsman (who seems to be out of the race at this point) fails the final exam. Paul is the only candidate who passes the midterm.
Outside of this, Paul had a mediocre performance in lab, nor did he turn in any problem sets: he gets a C in my course. But all the other candidates failed. If there was ever a right-in-front-of-your-nose, how-could-you-miss-it, blatantly-obvious application of the phrase we love so much around here “perfect is the enemy of the good” (or even “good is the enemy of the mediocre”) Ron Paul being a viable candidate for the Republican nomination is it.
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Kimmi 
Ryan Bonneville 
Elias Isquith 
Murali 
James K 
Alan Scott 
Patrick Cahalan 
Will Truman 
Will H.