“The Constitution would be a major improvement over what we have today. But we need to realize that the Constitution itself represented a major increase in government power over the Articles of Confederation, which would have served us quite well had it not been overthrown. I’m not impressed by the bunch that foisted the Constitution on us. They were really up to no good. We’ve all but forgotten that most everyone opposed it at the time. It only squeaked through once the Bill of Rights was tacked on. The Bill of Rights isn’t perfect, but it at least had the advantage of spelling out what the government could not do. In a rather ingenious twist, even that has been perverted: it is now seen as a mandate for the federal government to tell lower orders of government what they cannot do, meaning that it ends up being a force for centralization. This is such a tragedy. If Patrick Henry could see what became of it, I’m sure he never would have tolerated it. The same might be true of Hamilton, for that matter. So long as we are talking about founding documents, the one that really deserves more attention is the Declaration of Independence. Now here is an inspiring document that shows us where we should go in the future!”
Author Archives: L
V-Tech Panel ready to go to court for Cho psych records
AP had this report, May 23, on the panel’s readiness to go to court to get V-Tech’s Cook Counseling Center to cough up V-Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui’s counseling records, now apparently shielded by Federal privacy laws:
“We’re going to get what we need, one way or the other,” Massengill said. If that fails, “we’ll have to go to the courts.”
University officials say federal privacy laws bar them from sharing the records.
Cho killed 32 people in two campus buildings before committing suicide in a classroom on April 16.
A year and a half earlier, he had been found “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization,” according to court papers. A judge ordered him into involuntary outpatient treatment, but there is no indication that he complied.
University counsel Kay Heidbreder said the laws, even for someone who is deceased, mean the records cannot be shared even among departments at the university.
As it is constituted, the panel cannot issue subpoenas to compel testimony and obtain documents. Delacey Skinner — a spokeswoman for Gov. Timothy Kaine, who convened the panel — said the governor has assured members the attorney general will help them get information.”
My Comment:
So, it’s federal laws which have actually kept this thing under wraps in the first place. Another instance where federalization has been a negative. Yet, people want more and more of it. If that is not an instance of pure brainwashing, I don’t know what is. It’s obvious that the problem is the federal government. The answer to the problem, by definition, cannot be more federal government.
And meanwhile, the press kept everyone distracted with chatter about gun control. Not a word yet about the medication supposedly found or at least observed by room-mates. Nothing about the toxicology report (yes, what about that?)
A piece on a site called Alliance for Human Research asks the same questions. It cites Dr. Anna Blake Tracy, author and executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, who finds high-profile shootings almost invariably tied up with antidepressants and cites numbers of incidents in support:
“Other famous cases include the 1998 deaths of actor Phil Hartman and his wife, a murder/suicide committed by her (Zoloft); the 1999 home and office killing spree by Atlanta day trader Mark Barton (Prozac); the 1998 shooting deaths of four co-workers by Connecticut lottery accountant Matthew Beck, who then killed himself (Luvox); and the 1994 New York City subway bombing by Edward Leary, which injured 48 (Prozac).”
She goes on,
“Most people don’t know LSD once was prescribed as a wonder drug. Most people don’t know that PCP was considered to have a large margin of safety in humans. Most people don’t know ecstasy was prescribed and sold for five years to treat depression. Few know that history of drugs, and I think that’s our biggest problem. We’re just not educated enough to have concerns.”
She notes hundreds of similar cases.
But I found one particular incident especially interesting from the point of view of the Cho shooting:
“In February 2004 in Polk Township, Pa., Samantha Hirt, hours after taking a pill for manic depression, set fire in a bedroom where her two toddlers were playing, closed the door and sat on a sofa watching television while the fire spread, killing both children. Effexor.”
Remember that arson case on Cho’s record that didn’t make it into a police file? Why ever not? Did some drug company think it wouldn’t be good PR for their product?
More in my next post.
Lesser Evils and Greater Idiots..
Another reason to vote independently:
“But (someone protests), can’t you at least admit that the Democrats are better than the Republicans? And if you love the country, or care about the world, aren’t you obligated to support the lesser of two evils, even if it’s only slightly less evil?
To which I reply: What’s really evil is being forced to choose between people on the one hand who support the war, and accuse anyone who questions it of “helping the terrorists” — and people on the other who oppose the war, criticize the war, pledge to the end the war, and then vote to keep it going.
Or being asked to choose between the village idiot and someone who’s consistently outsmarted by him….”
Read more by David Vest…
Oakeshott revisited..
In an earlier post, I attributed to Oakeshott some words that actually came from a commentator, Ivo Mosley in a paper on Oakeshott’s “A Dark Age Devoted to Barbaric Affluence”. Apologies. I have modified the old post and reposted here.
(Sigh) a nice quote too.
The sentiments were Oakeshott’s certainly but the text was the commentator’s. I mention it because several readers wrote in asking for the source.I would like to go back and verify from the original text what Oakeshott’s exact words actually were.
Mosley again, in the same piece:
“Words such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘rights’ have long histories and their meanings have shifted over time. Further, when unscrupulous operators use them to rally supporters in some great cause, such words become hazy promises of better things to come. The warm glow of anticipation may be as deceptive as the witches’ promises to Macbeth…”
My Comment:
Macbeth is good here. We really should begin to recognize the difference between words used with a proper humility toward life and experience and words used like Blackwater mercenaries sent out to do our bidding – beating up innocent reality, plundering whatever meaning we want out of it and then setting off on some other fool task.
Those thoughts are in my head today, again, because of some rather silly criticism that one or two readers sent in last week. I suppose when you have one critic calling you an apologist for Islamism and the other telling you you are a closet Zionist, you must be doing something right.
“If you would be an alternative guru ala Chomsky, you must believe in ‘the people’; if you would be a free-market guru, you must worship the golden calves of affluence and corporate power; if you would be a progressive liberal, you must genuflect to the moos of rationalism and science.”
Which is exactly what I was trying to say about my Falwell obit in a previous post. Because I don’t support a theocracy or a theocrat, I don’t necessarily scoff at every assumption of the religious, either.
And though I may defend the rights of the people against the corporatocracy, it does not follow that ‘the people’ (and we are all people) aren’t also damned fools at times and as greedy, wrong-headed and unethical as their rulers.
Which is why I can appreciate many socialist insights, but I’ll stop short of making a golden calf out of the masses or the mass mind, thanks.
And by the way, I don’t think the mass is something out there, as in a derisive term like “unwashed masses.” The poor are no more likely to be herd-like than the rich or the well- educated. Look at the lemming-like behavior of hedge funds in the capital markets, for instance. Or merger mania or the rise in private equity or the art market. The ‘herd’ is in us as well as outside.
There is a never ending supply of wisdom in Oakeshott..
A good description of him:
” [Oakeshott] is a traditionalist with few traditional beliefs, an ‘idealist’ who is more skeptical than many positivists, a lover of liberty who repudiates liberalism, an individualist who prefers Hegel to Locke, a philosopher who disapproves of philosophisme, a romantic perhaps (if Hume could possibly be called one), and a marvellous stylist.”
Hume I buy, but I don’t know about that Hegel reference.
By Way of the Mind
The world is apprehended by way of the mind
The world is acted upon by way of the mind
And all good things and bad
Exist in the world by way of the mind.
-Samyutta Nikaya
Loonies Tune Out: The Maple-Syrup Mafia Strikes
This from Chris Cook, of the estimable University of Victoria Gorilla Radio (yes Gee-Oh, as in, our furry friends… or cousins…..or descendants, depending on your evolutionary perspective and level of optimism about the human race)
“For American readers who value and feel protected by the 1st Amendment (right to free speech), it may seem strange that a country would enshrine in law the opposite condition; but Hate Crime legislation in this country is widely supported. Canada is an ethnically, and politically diverse country, consisting of minority populations from the world over, and it was deemed fair-minded to ensure all are protected from the “tyranny of the majority.” But it’s a double-edged sword, making possible an abuse of the statutes, allowing an equally odious tyranny, the stifling of dissent and criticism by a dedicated minority.
Such is, I believe, the case here.
To understand the nature of the B’nai Brith complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, it’s instructive to visit the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) website; there is explained the goals of the CJC, and their marching orders to regional branches of B’nai Brith in defending Israeli interests. The CJC’s ‘General Expectations of Canada,’ and presumably of Canadian Jews and Christian Zionists loyal to Israel, right or wrong, are to take “constructive interventions against resolutions or motions” made in Canada that:
i) blame only Israel and its policies for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
ii) indict Israel’s legitimate counter-terrorism measures with no reference to or condemnation of Palestinian terrorism.
iii) deny or undermine Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in the Middle East.
iv) employ existentially threatening language such as referring to Israel as a “racist” or “apartheid” state and apply terms such as [“genocide”(?)], or “ethnic cleansing” to the conflict.
v) are based upon inaccurate media information or Palestinian Authority propaganda.
vi) predetermine the outcome of direct, bilateral negotiations in keeping with UN Resolution 242 and 338 or circumvent such a process.
At the same time, Canada’s delegates must support and encourage efforts at the UNCHR that:
i) will ensure a comprehensive accounting of international human rights situations such that grievous international human rights issues are not ignored or soft-pedalled as a result of a politicized, anti-Israel agenda.
ii) highlight the crippling impact of continuing Palestinian terrorism – which has been explicitly legitimized in the CHR resolutions – on the peace process and on attempts to establish a true human rights regime in the Middle East.
iii) draw attention to the deficiencies within the Palestinian Authority regarding human rights and the building of a viable civil society for the Palestinian people.”
My Comment:
See how this works? Now, not only in Europe (for eg. even in Britain) and in Japan but right on our borders, it’s free speech for me but none for thee. Read more at the Peace and Earth Justice site.
Or as a reader writes:
"Let me get this right...
Its OK for Israel to be a Jewish state, but the US is NOT a Christian state and India is NOT a Hindu state...
just wanted to be sure..I am getting confused...
Is calling someone a RACIST not OK but you can still be one...what about BIGOT?
Or maybe some racists ae better than other racists...
by the way, what IS racisim..I've almost forgotten.
My head hurts..what about baby-killer, is that existentially threatening? Satanic spawn.. or rag-head... or how about Islamicist...or...subhuman vermin scum?
Can I kill you, but nicely? In an entirely politically correct, racially diverse, ethnically sensitive, gender-inclusive sort of way....?
For samples of the kind of offensive speech that would be classified as hate speech, see Citizens Against Racism and Discrimination and think about how far you’d be willing to go in shutting people up. What might the fall out be?
If what someone like Don Imus says is “hate speech,” why isn’t what Rush Limbaugh says too…or Al Sharpton…or any number of other people? Pushed to absurdity, practically everything can be construed as some form of hate of someone or at least of their strongest values. Free speech does have limits – usually when you incite people into some sort of dangerous action during war-time. When you advocate violence or assassination. But that’s not what we have here is it? Offending people shouldn’t be against the law. Sometimes it just might be our civic duty.
Here, folks, is why we need to support the one representative who has consistently fought for free speech, for the Bill of Rights, for constitutionality and the preservation of civil liberties every step of the way – Congressman Ron Paul.
Top secret Osama tape found……
“The following are excerpts from a secret transcript found in a remote cave in Afghanistan from the summer of 2000. The government and the military have kept these contents under wraps, but an anonymous source has leaked them to me. Now, I share with the world what we deserve to know. This report should finally put to rest the questions of why they hate us. It also vindicates 9/11 hero Rudy Giuliani and his scathing attack on that extremist nutball Ron Paul.
Osama: Hey, al-Zawahiri, come here! Look at this!
al-Zawahiri: What is it, Sheik? What are you reading?
Osama: I don’t know, it’s some Satanic document written in English telling all kinds of lies!
al-Zawahiri: Let me see that. Hmmm, I think I read about this in my studies. I think it’s called the constitution or something like that.
Osama: Constitution? And what is all this other ridiculous stuff attached to it?
al-Zawahiri: Those are called the Bill of Rights. They give the Americans certain freedoms.
Osama: Look at this blasphemy! It says that their government can’t make any law about an official state religion. May Allah curse these heretics!…..”
Read all about it at Lew Rockwell.
For interesting stuff about Christian fundamentalism, visit Bill Barnwell’s Blog
And in case, you’re wondering what all the buzz about Ron Paul is, read this
…..and this.
V- Tech Stonewalling on Cho counseling
Even the V-Tech review panel is getting miffed with the ongoing stonewall from Virginia Tech, according to ABC, May 21:
“When members of the Review Panel asked University counsel Kay Heidbreder if Cho had received on-campus treatment or follow-up, she said she did not know. She added that the information was protected under state privacy laws, even after Cho’s death.
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger admitted that the university should have a better answer on the question of whether Cho underwent treatment.
“Just saying we don’t know is not good enough. But we obviously need to follow the law,” Steger told the panel.
Members of the panel expressed frustration at being denied information on Cho’s treatment and follow-up.”
My Comment:
I am going to make a wild guess at what I think this means. As anyone reading this blog knows, I’ve been following this case as closely as possible, since it broke 35 days ago.
In an earlier post, I speculated that the formative event/treatment that drove Cho crazy happened in 2005-06. Not hard to guess. He was a shy guy and didn’t speak much, and he may have been prone to anger. But he didn’t snap until that year.
It’s beginning to look like V-Tech’s Cook Counseling Center is indeed the place he was ordered to go. And if the unversity’s refusal to release his records is any indication, he did go.
Let me take a risk and say I think he was prescribed drugs somewhere along the line, maybe an SSRI – that he began taking regularly (the pills his room-mates saw).
And that’s when the real trouble may have begun.
I don’t know what else might have happened.
Whether he had some sexual experience, like his relatively benign one with the escort he hired…or something that left him more humiliated.
I don’t know who his counselor was. Or whether some therapy session might not have either revealed that he had been abused or had led him, erroneously, to believe he had been abused in the way he suddenly began describing in his plays written in 2006 fall.
Who is the counselor who handled him at Cook? What sorts of pills are prescribed there routinely? Is there a pharmacy which might have records of prescriptions they could hunt up?
Can we have a closer look at the contents of the room that the search warrant disclosed?
Or, more information from his room mates about those pills?
The panel needs to be asking those questions.
And that’ s besides the questions it needs to be asking about that shaky time line.
An online comment on the ABC story follows the same line of thought I had:
“Bullets are the ultimate invasion of privacy. Anyone thinking Virginia Tech is acting out of concern for Cho’s privacy is sadly deluded. The only conclusion to be drawn from this secrecy is that Virginia Tech receives grants, scholarships or other funding from drug companies. Someone “made a phone call” to Virginia Tech administration to hush this up. And the administration withered. — America’s next bloody campus massacre may well trace back to the same psychiatric drugs that deleted Cho’s emotions and left him a robotic killing machine. Withholding facts that might correlate 33 deaths and hundreds of ruined family-members’ lives to prescription medicines cheats the medical community, researchers, patients and parents. — Is Virginia Tech only pretending to be an engineering and scientific institution? Hard science has ethical duties to publish truth, no matter whom it chafes. This institution’s secrecy casts shadows on all its research or academic work. Which studies were influenced by a phone call from a big donor? — Harvard divinity School gained international credibility by returning $2.5 million from the anti-Semitic United Arabs president. Yet Virginia Tech won’t open a file folder to do its scientific and humane duty.”
More news from a reader about V-Tech and some shady dealing there that might..or might not..have anything to do with this story. But, I want to check it out a bit. Stay tuned….and by the way, I do revisit posts to add material and links. I’ll let you know by changing the dates on the post.
I need to organize the V-Tech material so that the major posts show up as widgets – I’m just not that blog-savvy yet. Maybe, some one reading this labor of love can give me a little ‘puter advice as a reward??
T is for Trillion – Mike Chertoff will make a wreck of the border
Among other gag-worthy characteristics, the new immigration bill announced last week is said to cost over 2 trillion (yes, it seems we have a couple of trillion to spare, according to the new, new math).
A country already mired in debt and credit needs to shell out 2 trillion about as much as breaking the law is the prerequisite for citizenship under the rule of law.
The 380-page bill, fruit of three months of high-sounding wrangling, gives the immediate right to work (the Z visa), to some 12-20 million illegal workers who got into the United States before January 1, 2007. Heads of household would have to return to their home countries within eight years, and they would be guaranteed the right to return. Applicants would also have to cough up a $5,000 penalty. That’s thousand. Chump change for migrant workers, of course.
Confirmed. This administration’s math is delusional, its laws are contradictory, and now we also know its alphabet is backward:
“Z visa” is followed by “Y,” a guest worker program which has some merit to it, in so far as it emphasizes good education and skill sets. Brownie points for that. Never mind that guest workers families are broken up and they themselves usually end up held hostage to their employer’s whims and ever-changing paper requirements.
But “Y” follows “Z” in another way too. As in, Y bother. If you’re going to have a law, then apply it fairly to everyone. Or don’t have the law.
Ted Kennedy claims the whole business is about bringing people in from the shadows. If lurking in the shadows is the criterion, why not bring in the Sunni and Shia……that would also put an end to the killing of troops; it would supply cheap labor to businesses. And solve a crisis that, after all, the government did create.
Of course, the government created this one too.
Does anyone think migrant workers paid less than minimum wage are going to be able to cough up $5000? And if they could or couldn’t, would it matter? Because, we already know where this will end – with some border patrolmen hand-in-glove with criminals who will run a racket on it; with a whole industry of racketeers built on that, as there already is on fake documentation; with the innocent in trouble and the guilty off the hook. And then, finally, when the abuse stinks to heaven, there will be even more high-sounding wrangling in government (all at taxpayer expense), and everyone will decide the simplest thing is to cancel the whole thing and go home….until they come back with the next way to drive a nail into the coffin of the US economy.
So, when we are told that this alphabet of errors is not going to be recited until the number of border patrol agents has been doubled (adding 6,000 new agents, bringing the total to 18,000), border fencing strengthened (200 miles of vehicle barriers and new surveillance towers), and a verifiable, high-tech ID-card system for immigrants operational, all in the space of 18 months, let’s figure that the Noah Webster standard American usage definition of this is that it’s a whole new era of bungling bureaucracy about to be inaugurated.
And the only new money forthcoming to finance this fiasco-in-waiting will be collected from employers, who will now be fined for hiring undocumented workers.
Perfect. The federal government shunts the costs of its own inability to man the borders to tax-payers. Then it shoves off the mess of this guacamole onto its citizens.
If Americanness is defined by citizenship and citizenship is defined by law, can the government enforce its own laws while violating the law of the land?
If Americanness is not defined by citizenship, then we need a debate about that.
Nobody wants to demonize immigrants. Least of all an immigrant like me.
If money can go anywhere in the world to make a return on investment (and it should), labor should be free to move where it wants to find work.
But here’s the rub. Not all movement of capital is the genuine productive result of investment activity. A lot of it is driven by interference in the market in the form of state intervention in the money supply. The result of that is speculation – and speculative flows can flood a country, jack up the prices of everything and then in a trice flow out, creating financial disaster. That’s not the free market. That’s state-created financialization.
We know that. And the state affects the labor market like that too.
Letting labor move as it will is one thing. Subsidizing and incentivizing its movement through public services is another.
That imposes unbearable costs on local communities, bankrupts the state, and causes cultural and economic problems. Add to that another thick layer of DC bureaucracy and you have a recipe for disaster. Especially when the registration of these 12-20 million has to be done in 90 days.
In an article in the Washington Times, Emilio Gonzales, the director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services thinks that time-line should be doubled or tripled if the process is not going to go the way of the fraud-ridden 1986 amnesty of a mere 3 million people:
“We’re litigating cases today from 1986,” he says.
But, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff thinks it’s all fine and dandy.
“Chertoff told CNN that the bill would help him better focus his resources. “Right now, I’ve got my Border Patrol agents and my immigration agents chasing maids and landscapers. I want them to focus on drug dealers and terrorists. It seems to me, if I can get the maids and landscapers into a regulated system and focus my law enforcement on the terrorists and the drug dealers, that’s how I get a safe border.”
(“Immigration Breakthrough Could Pave the Way for Citizenship,” CNN, May 22, 2007)
By the way, Michael Chertoff, chief muck-a-muck of the Department of Homeland Security, knows all about how to handle terrorists.…and immigrants….and safety.
He’s the guy on whose watch New Orleans was hit, first with Katrina… and then with FEMA.
It was he who ran the 9-11 investigation. Chertoff was the senior Justice Department official on duty at the F.B.I. command center just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
With all but impossible speed, he ID’d the terrorists and made the link to Osama bin Laden. He pushed to merge domestic surveillance and foreign espionage which, until then, had been kept strictly apart under US law. (“The Patriot Act’s Impact,” Duke Law Journal, Nathan C. Henderson, November 15, 2002. Here’s the pdf file: http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+179+pdf. see also, “Crackdown,”Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker, November 5, 2001).
Chertoff also authorized the unconstitutional detainment of thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants – including Middle Eastern Jews–without charges. As head of the DOJ’s criminal division, he told the CIA how far to go in interrogations. (“Amid Praise, Doubts About Nominee’s Post-9/11 Role,” Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia, Washington Post, January 31, 2005).
With Viet Dinh, he co-authored the unconstitutional USA PATRIOT Act, enacted on October 26, 2001. (“Homeland top job to Patriot Act architect,” AFP, January 13, 2005).
He’s even done a stint as defense in a terrorist trial.
Put in charge of the 9-11 investigation, Chertoff defended Dr. Magdy el-Amir, a leading New Jersey neurologist at the heart of a terrorist web based in Jersey City, alleged to have funneled millions to Osama. Some say Chertoff may have shielded el- Amir from criminal prosecution. (“Trail of Terror,” Chris Hansen and Ann Curry, NBC’s Dateline, August 2002 and The Record, Bergen County, NJ, December 11, 1998).
Nice resume.
According to CNN, Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray of California, chairman of the Immigration Reform Caucus, had this to say about the new immigration bill:
“The ‘compromise’ announced today by Sen. Kennedy will reward 12 million illegal immigrants with a path to citizenship — what part of illegal does the Senate not understand?” he said in a written statement.
At least, we already know what part of the Constitution this government doesn’t.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says the bill “wound up being about what it means to be an American … I think we’ve got a deal that reflects who we are as Americans.”
Maybe, under this administration, we have.
“Being nice to Falwell”- some grammar rules from Michael Oakeshott
“On Human Conduct” was one of the books I found most useful in my thinking in graduate school. And the uncivility of politics (although I doubt if politics has ever been anything but uncivil) brings me back to it today.
Oakeshott wrote of the adverbial rules of conduct, which very briefly, I could translate as the how of things, the way we do them. It’s what I meant when I spoke about style being more important than substance in my Falwell piece, a piece that provoked some criticism from readers who thought I erred in “saying something nice” about Falwell. But the article was neither an exercize in pragmatism nor in dissembling on my part. It was an acknowledgment (I hope) of complexity and the unknowableness of things…a kind of genuflection, not before evangelical Christianity (I am rereading this and immediately see that what I ought to have said here is ‘Christian Zionism’, not ‘evangelical Christianity’, which is unfairly conflated with it. I will leave the original statement here a bit longer, but will eventually delete it – it shows you how we often misspeak in a hurry, using the language “in the air” even when it’s quite inaccurate or downright misleading) . A genuflection not before an influential public figure, but before our own individual limitations as rational beings, before the complexity and ambiguity of moral practice and indeed language itself – not simply our laws about free speech.
“But a moral practice,” he writes, “is not a prudential art concerned with the success of the enterprises of agents; it is not instrumental to the achievement of any substantive purpose nor to the satisfaction of any substantive want. No doubt there may be advantages to be enjoyed in subscribing to its conditions: perhaps, honesty is the best policy; perhaps speaking the truth is a condition for all durable association for the satisfaction of wants. But a moral practice, unlike an instrumental practice, does not stand condemned if no such advantages were to accrue. Indeed, recognizing and subscribing to these conditions may be expected to add to the cost of these transactions. Nor is morality a court of arbitration in which the different and often conflicting purposes of engagement and their chosen action are reconciled to one another and mean satisfactions authorized. It is concerned with the act, not the event; with agents as doers making an impact on one another and not in respect of the particular wants for which they are seeking satisfactions. (my emphasis)
No action whether it be of self-gratification or of care for the satisfaction of others, is exempt from its conditions. And no agent, whatever the circumstances of his conduct, is outside its jurisdiction.”
That’s where the adverbial rules of engagement come in: courteously, civilly, nicely, politely, kindly, generously, compassionately….
Oakeshott differentiated between enterprise associations – which have a specific goal as their end, say, making’ x’ number of cars, and civil associations governed by procedural rules – among which, he placed the state. He would, I think, have been equally opposed to a theocracy and to a state which left no room for the religious – in any real sense.
Oakeshott also saw the the necessity of a minimalist state for the existence of true diversity, not the diversity of enforced outcomes. In that sense, many of the problems we face now become moot once we return the state to its proper limits.