NEW YORK – A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act “offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.”

More at AP.

Over at Lew Rockwell, Wilton Alston ponders the under-rated virtues of not caring:

“…consider again what the term ‘market’ can refer to. Once we descend from the academic world of idealized types to the real world of human experience in which action is always subject to some form of regulation, the only useful conception of the market would be one that referred to the realm of human activity free from political regulation. This would mean that the market is correctly understood not as the realm of unregulated voluntary transactions, but as the realm of voluntary transactions subject to the regulation of ethics, custom, and spontaneously evolved law.”

~ John Hasnas, “The Privatization Depoliticization of Law“

I have concluded something very important recently. (OK, so maybe not very important, but mildly interesting anyway!) I just don’t care about a lot of stuff that used to really excite me. For instance, I don’t care:

• That Karl Rove resigned;
• That Alberto Gonzales resigned;
• That they haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet;
• Who gets selected for the Supreme Court;
• If George Bush (or any other President) gets impeached;
• Who gets elected President of the United States.

(Disclaimer: I think Ron Paul is a fine human being and a man of honor. I can say that without ever meeting him, due specifically to his great commentary on LRC and the type of principled people who rally to his support. I sincerely hope that his candidacy provides a platform from which a thousand ships of libertarian truth are launched. I actually get a rush of pride when I see him “school” losers like Jailiani about, well, anything. That said, I still don’t care about the presidency itself.)

Now, where were we?

Why don’t I care about the things I list? I could take each of these separately, and I will embellish on a few of my reasons, but basically it comes down to this. I’m an anarchist.

Sometimes we like to refine this description with terms like anarcho-capitalist, and that’s accurate as well, but let us be clear. I don’t want a better government; I want no coercive political government. I don’t want a more efficient TSA; I want no (publicly funded) TSA. I don’t want a better FDA; I want no FDA. I don’t want policemen who only stop every third brother caught DWB (driving while black); I want to be able to switch providers when the security service “hired” with my tax money wastes it while simultaneously shooting at people like me. Before anyone jumps to a conclusion and pulls a muscle, let me clear something else up. Does all this mean that I want no rules in my life? Why of course not.

As Hasnas lays out in marvelous detail in the paper linked above, civilization has always existed with rules or laws, as some may designate them. A peaceful life and the pleasant interactions between human beings have always been and will always be based upon some understanding of what is ethical and what is not. Furthermore, some of these rules will not be derived from consent. I’m cool with that. Ostrowski’s wonderful working paper provides what I think is the most useful definition of self-government with:

Self-government – no state with final authority; each person governs himself or herself; disputes among people are resolved by private courts and arbitrators; resort to private courts is encouraged by self-interest, social pressure, boycott, ostracism and market forces such as the denial of insurance and of access to real estate to those with a history of improper self-help.

Protoplasm (a dominionist for Tom Tancredo)

has me listed both under Demon Alert and Terrorist Watch. I add them to my list of epithets — nothing compares, of course, to the endearments I’ve got from my former countrymen — mostly unprintable, but I forgive them, since I know they are trying to make themselves more acceptable to society at large by pasting Bush-Cheney stickers on their windshields and telling themselves, well those Muslims had it coming to them anyway, what with Musharraf, the LOC and what not…….

“Barely readable” and “borderline hysteric” are the milder ones.

People like ideological purity and camp following. Anyone who just tries to call it as she sees it makes them uncomfortable because no one is willing to relinquish the security of a predetermined party line. If they did, even for a moment, they might see something right in the enemy. And something wrong in themselves. They might find their friends more dangerous than their foes. They might – goddess forbid – change their mind about something…..or their hearts. And there is nothing people resist more than change….

NEW DELHI – India celebrated the 60th anniversary of its independence from British rule Wednesday in a triumphant mood, with many here feeling the country is finally taking its rightful place as a major global player.

“I assure you that for each one of you, and for our country, the best is yet to come,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the nation in his traditional Independence Day speech.But with many of India’s 1.1 billion people being left behind by the country’s lightning economic growth, Singh warned: “we must not be overconfident.”

Blah, blah, blah………

Who is “we”? There’s the trouble with the state…

Who is “we,” Mr. Singh? Who is this entity that’s a “major global player”?

A small group of people (some of Indian nationality living abroad, some resident in India, some of ethnic Indian origin but foreign nationals) have made themselves and their families very rich; or come to occupy important positions: another larger group has benefited from new job creation from multinationals in India; a further group is doing well abroad. The middle class is expanding. But with all that, we are still talking only about about 250 million people in India. What about the rest? The three quarters of the iceberg below the radar of the media…

So — Indians are now independent from colonial rule by the British. A good thing.

It would be an even better thing when Indians are no longer ruled by corrupt, parasitical government bureaucrats and their corporate cronies…

“In contrast to this official Christian version of the circumstances of Jesus’s conception and birth, the Babylonian Talmud presents, in Schäfer’s words, “a highly ambitious and devastating counternarrative to the infant story of the New Testament.” In the rabbinical text that Schäfer selects to illustrate this point, it is stated that “his mother was Miriam [Mary]…. This is as they say about her in Pumbeditha: This one turned away from (was unfaithful to) her husband.” This being assumed, the Talmud identifies Mary’s lover and Jesus’s real father to be a man named Pandera–clearly a Roman name. In this account (which had an enormous impact upon some medieval Jewish polemical writings), Mary’s lover and Jesus’s true father is not only not his mother’s lawful husband, he is also a gentile–indeed, a hated Roman. From this Schäfer infers that “if the Bavli takes it for granted that [Jesus’s] mother was an adulteress, then the logical conclusion follows that he was a mamzer, a bastard or illegitimate child.” In this view, Jesus is as far from being the son of God and a pure virgin as is possible in Jewish imagination.

It is no wonder that this text is “only preserved in the uncensored manuscripts and printed editions of the Bavli.” Those were the versions of the Talmud published at times and in places where Christians had great political power over Jews and were using it harshly against them. It is thus easy to see why the Jews would want to emend such an inflammatory text, in the interests of security and self-preservation–and why the Christians would make the Jews emend such a text so that their Jewish underlings would be unable to use it to buttress their anti-Christianity. No doubt, many pro-Jewish Christians and many pro-Christian Jews today would like to forget that such a text ever existed in its original form.

But why did the Babylonian Jews go to the trouble of denying the veracity of a text that mattered only to a small Christian community that had no power over Jews (no power of the sort that Palestinian Christians came to enjoy once Christians became members of the official religion of the Roman Empire)? Schäfer gives two answers to this question. Unlike his analysis of the literary evidence, where he has some important data at his disposal, the causal explanation involves much more speculation on his part. Yet Schäfer is not a hasty or arrogant historian; he says only what he believes the evidence entitles him to say. Would that more historians were as modest.

Schäfer’s first answer to the question is psychological and political; more precisely, it concerns the influence of the political environment upon psychological motivation. In his view, the Jews of Babylonia could say about Christianity, in the person of Jesus, what their Palestinian brethren could not say because of the dangers involved. Schäfer calls the Babylonian declaration “a proud and self- confident message,” one quite different from the “defense mechanisms” that the Palestinian rabbis had to employ in their political prudence. It was a “proud proclamation” of “a new and self-confident Diaspora community.”

Schäfer’s second answer to this question is more concretely political. Here he notes that in the Persian Empire, both Judaism and Christianity were minority religions–islands of monotheism in a sea of Zoroastrian dualism (which affirmed a good god in conflict with a bad god, as opposed to the one good God affirmed by Judaism and Christianity). The two monotheistic religions were highly suspect in the eyes of the polytheistic Zoroastrian Persian or Sasanian rulers. Indeed, older polemics of Roman pagans against Jews and Christians castigated them both for their monotheism. From these political facts, Schäfer speculates that the anti-Christian polemics of the Jews might be part of “a very vivid and fierce conflict between two competing religions’ under the suspicious eye of the Sasanian authorities.”

Yet the Christians, however weak they were in the Persian Empire, no doubt had contacts with, and loyalties to, their far more numerous and more powerful brethren in the Roman Empire, and so it is plausible to suggest that the Persian authorities would have regarded Christians to be more of a political threat than their religious rivals, the Jews. Schäfer thinks that Babylonian Jewish putdowns of Jesus might have been a way of diverting official Persian suspicion away from themselves and their religion toward Christians and their religion. In other words, the anti-Christianity of the Bavli was a way for the Babylonian Jews to curry favor with their Persian overlords by castigating a “negative other.” And here Schäfer ends his fascinating book.

Peter Schäfer’s historical research and textual interpretation have implications, obviously, beyond the academy. This is a subject that profoundly affects Christian and Jewish self-understandings and mutual understandings. I can see three possible ramifications of Schäfer’s extraordinary scholarship in the context of the current Jewish-Christian relationship today.

First, at the most troubling level, Schäfer’s work might encourage those Jews who would be happy to learn that there were times when Jews were able to “get even” with their Christian enemies: a kind of schadenfreude. In this way Schäfer’s work might hinder the emergence of a more positive Jewish-Christian relationship. (Not that he is guided by such an anxiety in his scholarship, of course.) Such people could use his work to encourage Jews to speak similarly again, now that Christians are much weaker than they have been in the past. But it is naïve to think that self-respecting Christians will simply sit back and not answer their Jewish critics in kind, which would easily revive all the old animosity against Jews and Judaism. Taken this way, Schäfer’s work could also encourage Christian “hard-liners” to insist again that an animosity to Christians and Christianity is ubiquitous in Judaism and endemic to it, and that it cannot be overcome by the Jews. Why should Christians be any better when speaking of Jews and Judaism than Jews have been when speaking of Christians and Christianity?

Second, Schäfer’s work might embarrass those Jews who like to dwell on the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism in all its ugly rhetoric, and imply that the Jews have largely kept themselves above any such ugliness. For Schäfer demonstrates just the opposite. One might even speculate that had Jews gained the same kind of political power over Christians that Christians gained over Jews, Jews might well have translated their polemical rhetoric against Christianity (which, after all, posed a tremendous threat to the legitimacy of Judaism) into the political persecution of Christians, much the same way that Christians translated their polemical rhetoric against Judaism into the political persecution of Jews. Victimization does not confer sainthood. The Jews lacked the opportunity, but perhaps not the motive or the will, to practice the type of intolerance that they experienced at the hands of the Christians.

Lastly, Schäfer’s very original scholarship in the area of Jewish-Christian relations might have the effect of ending at last the “guilt trip” that some Jews have laid on Christians, according to which theological contempt and religious intolerance is a uniquely Christian problem. (It is worth noting, of course, that in our own day militant Islam makes Christian anti-Judaism a less important threat to Jews.) Jews of this mind also want a positive relationship with Christians. Yet the fact is that, at least on the level of ideas, Jews and Christians have a similar problem with the notions about each other that emerge from their respective traditions. So at a time when both religions lack the power to hurt each other politically, there remains only the arena of ideas in which to build a new and better relationship or to destroy it. For this reason, this arena should be cultivated, and protected, and allowed to grow freely and honestly….”

More at the New Republic by David Novak on Jesus in the Talmud, by Peter Schäfer, Director of the program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University.

Comment:

My quest for the historical Jesus ended a long time ago, as it did for many people, with Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial work of that name.

Generosity toward other traditions, respectful criticism of our own, and faith in the human ability to think critically — with just a little of that, the different faiths  – and lack of faith — can learn to live together not only peacefully, but fruitfully…..

It’s less a matter of scholarship than of a will to peace. Too bad that peacemakers are always as much in short supply as pundits are in excess….

“People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.

Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of “Western science,” leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.

Even the frantic Western search for “the moderate Muslim” confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12^th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16^th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all….”

The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics…”

More at Slate.