Why I Don’t Want Bad Takes to Go to Waste

Henry George’s epitaph marks the case he provided for disentangling economic exchange from political privilege, an insight he knew “will not find easy acceptance.” Photo by Mattercore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“Bad opinion pieces in papers of record” are getting a bad rap from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The congresswoman took to Bluesky on December 2 to suggest discussing “thinkers we find valuable” and avoiding “linking to bad columns” so that “incentives change” for news outlets chasing attention (and, presumably, ad revenue).

Such voluntary mindfulness avoids the appeal to force in Ocasio-Cortez’s previous intimation that  “one billionaire … shouldn’t be allowed to own so much of the internet.” (Would a flourishing Bluesky be satisfied with a valuation of $999,999,999?) The Dr. Evil a couple years back was not Twitter purchaser Elon Musk but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose holdings included the Instagram where Ocasio-Cortez posted.

Still, that’s halfway to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s maxim that “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” The “better argument” of the other half may well come from a cold, hard look at the “fallacious argument.” Sagan and Druyan note John Stuart Mill’s contention that truth arises from “collision with error,” elaborating that “if we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”

Such pallor might blanch Bluesky’s atmosphere if it drowns out a no-longer-silent majority. Ocasio-Cortez’s November takeaway on the site: “[A]n echo chamber just won a presidential election.”

That interpretation is unconvincing when Trump’s constituency compounded consistently nationwide, amid the ruins of early-2000s interventionist expansionism and a level of economic elitism that made a landlord playing a boss on TV seem like an upstart.

In particular, support for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was bolstered by Thomas L. Friedman downplaying warning signs in New York Times rather than New York Post columns. Friedman wanted to “take a very big stick” to pop a “terrorism bubble;” Ben Burgis reminds us that outside of Friedman’s own bubble, “what the bubble-bursting meant in practice was that hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives.”  And while Marxists like Burgis are blamed for ideological groupthink in academia, he follows Marx in challenging capitalist economics with counterargument rather than dismissal.

Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” promptly became one of the most infamous examples of his own phraseology doing the sucking.  In 2009, The Spectator‘s Alex Massie observed that laughing at “the sheer gawd-help-us ghastliness found on the Gray Lady’s op-ed page” via Friedman was uniting the blogosphere, sharing a takedown from liberal muckraker Matt Taibbi at the alt-weekly New York Press linked by Reason libertarian Matt Welch, who in turn got it from The Atlantic‘s conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Such post-Bush unity didn’t eventually last in those publications, let alone push more editorial oversight onto Friedman.  But his assertion that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15” can serve to perfectly crystallize a contrasting vision of the sort of market that results when neither burgers nor bombers receive handouts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Hey, Joe, Pardon Me (And Everyone Else)

Usa one nickel 1984

On December 1, outgoing US president Joe Biden issued a pardon for all federal crimes his son, Hunter, “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

Can he do that? Yes. Constitutionally, the president exercises “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

Should he have done that? As I’ve noted before, in my opinion Biden should pardon EVERYONE convicted on unconstitutional gun and/or drugs charges, since the Constitution explicitly forbids the federal government to regulate guns and, under the Tenth Amendment, confers no authority on the federal government to regulate drugs. So those charges, at least, should never have been filed and should certainly be pardoned.

Why did he do that? While Biden the Elder correctly claims that the charges against his son were politically motivated “lawfare” aimed at using the son to damage and thwart the father, the real reason is that he IS a father.  Not many parents would, if they could prevent it, allow their children to go to prison, especially for non-violent offenses. Joe Biden just happened to have the power to prevent it. I can’t really blame him.

I’ve also argued that Biden should pardon his predecessor and successor, Donald Trump, for all the stuff he’s been accused, and even convicted, of. Since Trump is clearly going to get away with his crimes — many of them publicly confessed and even bragged about by Trump himself —  a pardon is just about the only way to officially and indelibly inscribe his guilt on the public record.

And hey, while he’s on this pardon subject, how about the rest of us?

Yes, all of us — or at least most of us.

Biden could save the taxpayers a lot of money by issuing a mass pardon for all non-violent federal crimes committed prior to the date of the pardon. Rape, murder, etc., no. Drug “crimes,” unconstitutional weapons charges, financial crimes, etc., yes.

The federal prison system would immediately be done with capacity problems, and could at least temporarily cut staff and various costs (food, medical care, etc.) in a big way.

The Department of Justice would instantly clear most of its existing case backlog, and get rid of a whole bunch of prospective future prosecutions. Some of its prosecutors could return to the private sector and those who remained could concentrate on the future and the most vile existing cases instead of chasing drug sales and small-beans embezzlement from past decades.

Have YOU committed a federal crime? Have I? Probably. There are so many laws on the books that it’s impossible to know, let alone obey, all of them.

Did you know, for example, that you can be imprisoned for up to five years and fined up to $10,000, (see 31 U.S.C. § 5111) for leaving the country with more than $5 worth of nickels?

Wouldn’t it be nice to sleep well in the knowledge that all your trivial past offenses have been erased?

Pardon us, Joe.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Netanyahu, Gallant, and “That Juris-My-Diction Crap”

On November 21, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Hamas military chief  Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri (aka Mohammed Deif), Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and  former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, all on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It’s unclear whether Deif remains alive.  Hamas’s official statement on the warrants was a call to “expand the scope of accountability to all criminal occupation leaders.”

The more interesting reaction comes from the Israeli regime, which has announced its “intention to appeal to the court along with a demand to delay implementation of the arrest warrants” … while simultaneously reiterating its pre-existing denial of the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israel, Israeli actions, or Israeli citizens.

Well, which is it going to be? Does the ICC have jurisdiction or doesn’t it? If it doesn’t have jurisdiction to issue the warrants, it doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear an appeal of those warrants.

The Israeli jurisdiction claim is based on the fact that Israel is not a member state of the International Criminal Court.

But the state of Palestine IS a member state of the International Criminal Court, and the alleged actions for which the warrants were issued took place in Palestine, not Israel.

ICC jurisdiction comes in two flavors:

First, jurisdiction over citizens of member states who allegedly commit war crimes or crimes against humanity, no matter where those crimes are committed.

That’s the jurisdiction which applies to Mohammed Deif. His alleged crimes were committed in Israel, but since the state he resides in is under ICC jurisdiction, Deif is under ICC jurisdiction.

Second, jurisdiction over war crimes or crimes against humanity allegedly committed in ICC member states, regardless of who, from where, allegedly commits them.

That’s the jurisdiction which applies to Netanyahu and Gallant. The alleged crimes were committed in Palestine.  Netanyahu’s and Gallant’s Israeli citizenship doesn’t exempt them from ICC jurisdiction any more than me being from the United States would exempt me from prosecution in, or extradition to, Poland for a murder I stood accused of committing in Warsaw.

It’s that latter jurisdiction which Netanyahu and Gallant deny — but which they would necessarily have to recognize to enjoy standing to appeal the warrants.

Instead of making up their minds, they’re resorting to the usual Israeli regime policy of loudly demanding their own absolute exemption from, while crying everyone else’s absolute obligation to, “international law” and “rules-based order.”

Naturally, they’re backed up on that dodge by their friends in Washington, DC, who proclaim the same policy for both the US regime and its Middle East welfare client.

But those exceptionalist demands are clearly wearing out their welcome elsewhere. Netanyahu and Gallant probably shouldn’t plan near-future vacation trips to ICC member states.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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