Dan Kohn writes: “It is shocking that there is not more of an outcry over the unlawful detainment of radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ suspect Jose Padilla.” The old bleat that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” is brought up, and that’s the hook for my comment.

Lincoln may have said it first; it fits Lincoln’s pattern – a plausible homily which, if examined closely in the light of real history rather than fairytales, proves (if anything) the opposite of the proposition in support of which it was invoked.
( . . more . . )

Vin Suprynowicz often complains about decay in the separation of state powers, particularly about public school teachers (and other employees of the executive branch) holding part-time legislative office; today’s column is on that subject, and the link ought to be up any minute now.

Various Anglosphere constitutions specify a threefold division, legislative – judicial – executive; I wonder whether other cultures have a similar concept but a different notion of the natural cleavage. Dan Goodman, though he has since forgotten it, once imagined a culture where institutions are classified by the length of their time-horizon.

For three centuries beginning in 930, the Norse settlers of Iceland enjoyed the literate world’s nearest thing to a stateless society; possibly the largest non-nomadic society ever to lack territorial monopolies in government. Competition between the goðar (customarily and poorly translated as ‘chieftains’) is often blamed for the feuds that led to annexation by Norway in 1262; so why did the evils of anarchy happen only when the system became less competitive?

Roderick Long (cited at Gene Expression) concisely explains what went wrong. As usual, the fatal flaw was a non-competitive element: a church tax, imposed on the households of a territory. Another flaw was a restriction on the number of goðar – analogous to taxi medallions. These two features concentrated wealth and power in a few families.

I think it was indirectly through a link from Long’s essay that I found Sean Gabb’s “How to Destroy the Enemy Class”, a manifesto for the first libertarian Parliament.

Tibor Machan misreads the Declaration of Independence:

It requires “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” which reduce a government to “absolute despotism,” before secession is justified.

On the contrary, the sentence containing that phrase states a sufficient condition. The necessary condition is stated in a more famous sentence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, . . . that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . . . Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes . . . . But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

In other words:
Secession is legitimized by any state act that tends to weaken, rather than defend, the rights of the people. A revolt over trifles is not illegitimate, but it is unwise; better the devil you know. Yet the conditions complained of were so severe, so far beyond “light and transient”, as to make secession not only legitimate but mandatory.

The phrase “Iron Curtain” was coined by Churchill in a speech in Missouri, if memory serves. Is there a known source for “Cold War”?

Update: Dan Kohn did the legwork and got the goods:

Cold War
This term for a conflict between nations that falls short of all-out war was coined, appropriately enough, by George Orwell in October 1945. Many, including Safire, credit Bayard Swope, a speech writer for Bernard Baruch[,] for coining the term in a draft speech in 1946. Baruch didn’t use the phrase, though, until 1947. But Orwell beat him to the punch in an article in the Tribune.

Dan adds, “BTW, Churchill’s speech is here“.

USS Clueless defends American unilateralism again:

[quoting a British paper] “a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration’s hands”. We in the US refer to that as “liberty”. I know it’s a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we’d like to keep it. We think it’s pretty damned important.

No, that’s sovereignty, not the same thing at all; though Steve is right in saying our ancestors fought a war for it (when they already had considerable liberty). Liberty, on the other hand, is defended precisely by tying the administration’s hands – or so Americans once used to say.

(While I’m up, democracy is also not the same thing as either liberty or sovereignty.)

If we persons of pallor are all descended from Charlemagne, we could still one-up each other on what fraction of our ancestry is royal, or how few of the links in the chain are female.

If a genie offered me three wishes, my third (after a godlike physique and knowledge of all human languages) might be for a genealogical database covering the last million years. It would be fun to find out, for example, who are my most distant living kin.