I was recently forwarded this 2-year-old Non Sequitur as part of an email "memorial chain" for the victims of the Holocaust. My suspicion is that this is an exercise in preaching to the choir: the recipients of this email memorial will probably say "Amen," but think nothing new and do nothing new because of it.

Maybe this blog is a similar exercise in choir preaching, but it continues to bother me that history's atrocities are blamed on "extremists."

Extremism is just a dirty word for logical consistency. Don't blame Nazism on logical consistency. Blame it on the root philosophy — a philosophy of government and economy that very few in the choir understand beyond the central emphasis that the Nazis hated Jews and murdered millions.

Here's what I wrote about all this 2 years ago:

I, extremist

Today's Non-Sequitur is upsetting on several levels.

Seeing Danae in a concentration camp had the effect on me I'm sure Wiley sought. And I'm the last person to claim that there's anything inherently wrong with references to Hitler or the Holocaust (see "In Defense of Referencing Hitler") but when you make such comparisons, you'd better be clear on the parallel, and you'd better be right.

Having learned where and why the old man involuntarily received his numerical tattoo, Danae wonders why he hasn't had it removed...

I don't know whether Wiley meant to be targeting neocon war hawks, the Religious Right, the Bush administration, or extremists in general, but the words he chose explicitly target all political extremists, which would include me.

As Karl Hess wrote for Barry Goldwater,

...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Every attack on political extremism is an attack on principle. The consistent application of principle is by definition extremist (so long as we're actually defining terms and using them consistently, rather than appealing always and only to emotional reflexes). It should be clear to anyone who can keep his knee from jerking for 30 seconds, that the problem isn't extremism per se, but rather which ideology is being applied in the extreme. Extreme pacifists will tend to behave quite differently from extreme nationalists. Extreme libertarians (i.e., liberal anarchists) will not lock people up just because of their background, whereas extreme egalitarians already have.

The standard attack on extremism is not an appeal to reason, but its opposite: the conflation of ideologies and the decrying of principle.

So according to Wiley, extremism in the defense of liberty can lead to another Holocaust. Try to figure that one out!

The problem isn't only with confusion on the words principle and extremism; there's also the standard problem that comes from the leftist map of politics. The Left and Right dichotomy may have started with 18th and 19th-century French republicans, but it has been applied throughout the world (especially the West) by 20th-century socialists.

First the Left is defined as progress, as it was for the French (and for classical liberals in general, back when progressives were the people who opposed the Ancien Regime). But now "progress" is linked to the State as egalitarian regulator, social safety net, etc. Thus "Progressives" are always calling for bigger and ever more pervasive government.

The Right, in contrast, is anyone opposed to the Left, anyone opposed to their vision of progress. We are the reactionaries, again by definition. For the socialists who controlled and continue to control the political language of Establishment intellectuals, all opponents of socialism are rightwing -- to varying degrees. So the classical liberals were rightwing, but then so were the fascists.

You might object, isn't fascism just nationalist socialism? Didn't the national socialists oppose liberal capitalism just as much as they opposed illiberal Communism? Sure, but to the left-socialists, any non-egalitarian socialists weren't real socialists. Since the fascists claimed to be defending the bourgeoisie and were, in fact, the dominant opposition to the Communists in many parts of the world, they were really the Right. Maybe these rightwingers said they opposed free-market capitalism, but any good socialist could see right through that: fascism was clearly the epitome of capitalism! (I'm not making this up.)

It didn't matter that classical liberalism and fascism are completely at odds, ideologically -- that one is based on individualism and laissez-faire, while the other is based on national collectivism and economic corpratism -- the Left just asserted that one led inexorably to the other, and we've been lumped together as rightwing extremists ever since.

I have no emotional attachment to the word extremist. I'm not trying to hold onto it the way I'm trying to hold on to the word liberal. I just don't like it when people throw more mud into already muddy waters.

• See Rothbard on moderation.
• See BK on moderation.
• See BlackCrayon.com on centrism.

Postscript to anyone who says that this is "just semantics": if you care about justice, if you care about meaning, then a just semantics is exactly what you care about.

PPS: If the leftwing scare-tactic smear term is "extremist" then the rightwing scare-tactic smear term is "radical". They're not equivalent terms, since radicalism is about perceiving both the problem and the solution as being at the "root" or foundation of the status quo, whereas extremism can designate any position, pro- or anti-radical, taken to the extreme. I am a radical extremist in the Rothbardian tradition, which is neither violent nor revolutionary. (Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard himself was responsible for some confusion on this point back in the 1960s.) Not all extremism is violent, just as not all radicalism is red.

As neural told me,

The quotemaster at qotd.org, G. Armour Van Horn (who signs his introductory comments "Van") has given some hints before of having libertarian leanings. He's suspicious of government in general, has expressed a past appreciation of Ayn Rand (with the standard disclaimers), and has a fondness for Thomas Jefferson. I've never sensed anything radical about him, however. Until this morning.

Today's mailing was the first hint, the first subtle sign of blasphemy against our secular religion.

Today's introductory comments begin, "I no longer participate in politics directly…"

Sound familiar?

Here's the whole message:

I no longer participate in politics directly, but for months now I've been drawn to watching the presidential race with much the same fascination a bystander might evidence at the scene of a multiple-vehicle road accident. Alas, things appear to be getting ugly, I thought a little cynicism from the ages would be in order. Note that one of our contributors, newsman Edward R. Murrow, was born a century ago today.

Today's Quotes:

• "The politicians were talking themselves red, white, and blue in the face."

  – Clare Boothe Luce, 1902–1987

• "Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision."

  – Dick Armey

• "The politician in my country seeks votes, affection, and respect, in that order…. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved."

  – Edward R. Murrow, 1908–1965

• "The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

  – Franklin P. Adams, 1881–1960

• "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

  – Henry Louis Mencken, 1880–1956

• "My choice early in life was either to be a piano–player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

  – Harry S Truman, 1884–1972

Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The system of free enterprise has been dubbed capitalism in order to deprecate and to smear it. However, this term can be considered very pertinent. It refers to the most characteristic feature of the system, its main eminence, viz., the role the notion of capital plays in its conduct.

That's from chapter 13 of Human Action.

I think Robert Murphy's summary is even better:

Capitalism was originally a smear term for the system of free enterprise, meant to imply that this system only serves the narrow interests of the capitalists. However, the term is a good one, for the very notion of capital — of summing the market prices of the resources available for a project — is inextricably linked to monetary calculation, which itself can only occur in a capitalist society.

I was a free-market advocate before I became an advocate of capitalism. The free market is an ethical concept, not an economic one; it is merely the recognition that nonaggression needs to apply to exchange as much as it applies to anything else. (Robert Nozick summarized this idea as "capitalist acts between consenting adults.")

Capitalism is a separate issue and a separate agenda — a positive agenda, in contradistinction to the negative agenda of nonaggression, a utilitarian concept rather than an ethical one — but the more I learned of economics, capital theory, and economic history, the less I could understand the left-libertarian position of embracing the free market while rejecting capitalism.

The free-market anticapitalists define capitalism as any system of political privilege for current capitalists, especially as it suppresses bottom-up competition, entry-level entrepreneurship, and the rights of labor. But we already have plenty of other terms to cover that idea — mercantilism, corporatism, even fascism — but what alternative is there to indicate the universal benefits of capital accumulation, capital structure, and capital calculation — all of which result from the private ownership of the means of production?

In fact, private ownership of the means of production (that is, of capital) was the technical definition of capitalism, even among the anticapitalists who coined the term! The idea of political privilege for capital owners was just an assumed consequence, a conflation of definition and theory.

The only advantage I see to accepting this linguistic conflation is to conciliate the heirs of the New Left, to tease out of them a more consistent individualism without tripping their anticommercial reflexes. But aside from what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, this strategy, it seems to me, does more than postpone anti-economic prejudices; it implicitly promotes them.

Faced with these same prejudices, many anti-anti-capitalists adopted the label of "free enterprise," but that term, taken literally, tells us nothing more than "free market" does. It certainly indicates nothing about the structure of ownership or of the means of production.

Until a free-market anticapitalist can offer me a useful alternative label for the utilitarian economic concept Mises called "capitalism," I'll stick with his reclaimed word.

Here's my editorial peeve for the day: people seem to have decided that "as such" is a fancier way of saying "therefore." Not only is it not fancier, it's also incorrect.

Here's what the Chicago Manual has to say on the subject:

Q. This might not be a point of grammar so much as a question of style, but how would you define the usage of the phrase “as such”? Could you argue for a strict explanation of when its use may or may not be appropriate? Many thanks for tackling this one.

A. I’m glad you asked. Literature and speech abound with dangling usage of this phrase. “As such” is not a substitute for “therefore.” Rather, “such” must refer to an antecedent noun or noun phrase in order for “as such” to make grammatical sense (and yes, it’s a matter of grammar). As a test, ask yourself “as what?”

Correct: We were a gaggle of skinny, giggling adolescent girls. As such [As what? As a gaggle of girls], we were immediately drawn to the crowd of tall, goofy boys.

Correct: The matter was left to a group of indecisive ninnies. As such [As indecisive ninnies], they resorted to the toss of a coin.

Incorrect: Because of the accident, he arrived at the dock an hour late. As such [As what? No antecedent], he missed the boat and forfeited his deposit.

Food quotes from qotd today.

By combining the first and last quotes in the list, we get an interesting synthesis:

1. "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." – Adelle Davis

…

5. "A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner." – Francis Bacon, 1561–1626

It seems to me that quote 1 is normative and quote 5 is descriptive. When the two are combined, we get a new statement: It is best to be a bachelor.

I'm not advocating that position. I'm just noting it.

First we have Harry Truman saying,

"I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to."

Now I learn of this gem from Truman's successor:

"You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that's assault, not leadership." – Dwight D. Eisenhower

If only it were true. If only the presidency were a ceremonial position, an elected figurehead, the secular equivalent of a spiritual leader whose advice we were free to accept or reject by our own criteria — if only the Declaration of Independence were taken literally, with "the consent of the governed" understood to mean the individual consent of the individual governed — then I wouldn't feel nearly so frightened by the upcoming elections. Clinton, Obama, McCain? They don't seem so scary if you think of them as holding positions equivalent to those of the pope or the Dalai Lama.

What do you think? Did Truman and Eisenhower feel embarrassed by the overtly coercive nature of the executive office, or were they merely embarrassed by the idea that the rest of us might be on to them?

No matter what else you might think of George Washington, he deserves some credit for a more candid assessment of the position he inaugurated:

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force.
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

From the word-a-day that I do subscribe to:

I think it's funny that a disease can have a sequel, but that you call it a sequela.

But according to the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary, the medical definition is not the primary one:

Sequela \Se*que"la\, n.; pl. {Sequelae}. [L., a follower, a result, from sequit to follow.]
One who, or that which, follows. Specifically:

1. An adherent, or a band or sect of adherents. "Coleridge and his sequela." – G.P. Marsh.
2. That which follows as the logical result of reasoning; inference; conclusion; suggestion. Sequelae, or thoughts suggested by the preceding aphorisms. – Coleridge.
3. (Med.) A morbid phenomenon left as the result of a disease; a disease resulting from another.

I think it's interesting that, according to definition #2, sequela is the opposite of non sequitur; I would have expected sequitur to be the opposite of non sequitur.

A friend, who subscribes to a different word-a-day than I do, sent me zeugma:

His email included the following examples:

1. "He flew off the handle and straight to Rio."
2. "He lost his hat and his temper."
3. "Miss Nipper shook her head and a tin canister, and began, unasked, to make the tea."
   (From Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens)
4. "Councilwoman Rankin would rather press flesh than clothes."
5. "He drove his car recklessly and his wife crazy."

Got any others? Feel free to leave them in the comments.

My friend messaged me recently, saying "I don't think I can finish this article," followed by the section that stuck:

"Democrats will respond that Thomas, Alito and their allies on the Court are the true judicial activists who are working to return us to the dark laissez-faire days before the New Deal."

Of course, the Democratic distortions of history should be irrelevant to a principled constitutionalist, but we all know that principled people of any sort are few and far between. Consequentialism rules, literally. And bad history rules among the consequentialists.

I learned a lot during the first 35 years of my life. I've spent most of the past 5 years doing a lot of unlearning.

Here's a historical corrective worth passing along:

On January 26, 1893, Abner Doubleday died in Mendham, New Jersey. In 1905, Albert J. Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods manufacturer, established a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. After two years of questionable study (and primarily on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony from an elderly man of doubtful sanity), the commission concluded that Abner Doubleday formulated the essential rules of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (the current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Even though scholars have totally discredited the claim (Doubleday's own obituary says he disliked outdoor sports), the myth lives on. In his 1973 book "The Man Who Invented Baseball," Harold Peterson expressed it all in a beautiful example of chiasmus:

"Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball,
baseball invented Abner Doubleday."

That's from the weekly newsletter I get from www.DrMardy.com, a website "for lovers of wit and wordplay," which was recommended to me by a lover of chiasmus.

I just got my first monthly newsletter from Merriam-Webster, included in which was a list of the most frequently looked-up words of December 2007. The one I didn't know was ...

That image is from the dictionary that comes with OS X. It doesn't quite capture the feel of the word. Here's Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: peck·sniff·ian

Pronunciation: ()pek|snifn
Function: adjective
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Seth Pecksniff + English -ian
: marked by unctuous hypocrisy : selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence : SANCTIMONIOUS, HOLIER-THAN-THOU <pecksniffian cant> <legislation designed to correct injustice and to translate pecksniffian phrases into living realities — Nation> <a censorship that is … pecksniffian suppression — Springfield (Massachusetts) Union>

Seth Pecksniff, by the way, is one of the characters in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, someone memorable enough for an eponym, but not, apparently, for his own page at Wikipedia (unlike many other Dickensian characters).

Why was pecksniffian one of the most frequently looked-up words last month? According to the newsletter, it's because the word "was used by Bill O'Reilly a few times last year, and his use caused the word to spike in the daily list of words that are looked up online."

You may think I'm highlighting this particular word as a comment on recent rumblings in This Movement of Ours. Maybe I just think it's a useful word.

From Slate via LRC:

There are good reasons for Americans to be interested in the ancient world. Over the last few years, there has been a deluge of American movies, television series, and novels based on antiquity: 300, Alexander, Troy, and Rome on HBO. It's easy to see why these simplified versions of ancient history and classical mythology strike a chord in contemporary America. For obvious reasons, we are interested in stories about the growth and collapse of a great and greedy empire, or about a clash between Western and Eastern civilizations. We are fascinated by tales of war, especially those that present it as glorious, tragic, and a long time ago. Ancient history is always popular when people feel close to an apocalypse: It allows us to face, obliquely, the knowledge that our own culture too will end.

– "The Renaissance of Latin: Why a dead language is becoming popular," by Emily Wilson

Worth quoting in full:

Stating the Obvious

Posted in Lapsus Linguae at 10:45 pm by Administrator

Guest Blog by Jennifer McKitrick

Watch news, a talk show, or the like, and notice how many times you hear the word “obviously.”

About the flooding in the Northwest the other day:

“Residents are obviously trapped and obviously in need of supplies.”

Umm … what they were showing was houses with water up to the 2nd floor. Maybe they had been evacuated. Maybe someone had just come by and delivered a boat load of supplies. I don’t know. Neither of those things were obvious.

About “baby Grace,” the dead toddler found off the coast of Texas (before she was identified):

“Her family is obviously very worried about her and loves her very much.”

No one knew who her family was, or if indeed they had been the ones that killed her. In fact, her mother and stepfather are now in custody.

I think the use of “obviously” often corresponds closely with what is usually meant by “presumably.”

If you just take “obviously” out of the sentences in which it appears, oddly what is left is something that the speaker is in no position to assert. But somehow “obviously” qualifies what they say, as if they are taking it as obvious. Since the “news” is so often involved with guesswork and presumption nowadays, it’s no wonder that they would often employ words which hedge what they say. What is a wonder is the irony of using “obviously” to characterize something that is not only not obvious, but not even known to be true.

Either that, or it’s just a verbal tick, like “err” and “ummm.”

Jennifer McKitrick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Vice-President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society.

Austro-Athenian Empire

This week, A.Word.A.Day is doing not words but 2-word phrases of the pattern X's Y.

Today's phrase was curate's egg, which is based on an 1895 cartoon from Punch magazine.

A.W.A.D's email didn't include the cartoon, but Wikipedia's entry for "curate's egg" did, so I provide them both here:

This week's theme: whose what?

curate's egg (KYOOR-itz eg) noun

Something having both good and bad parts.

[From a cartoon in Punch magazine (London, UK) in which a timid curate (a junior clergy member), when served a stale egg at a bishop's table, tries to assure his host that parts of the egg were edible:

Right Reverend Host: I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!

The Curate: Oh no, My Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!

The cartoon was drawn by George du Maurier and published in the Nov 9, 1895 issue of the magazine. That makes it one of the very few terms whose origin we can pin down to a specific date.]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"One act of sportsmanship by London Irish and a moment's opportunism by Saracens separated these two sides after a curate's egg of a match." David Llewellyn; Saracens 24 London Irish 20; The Independent (London, UK); Nov 25, 2007.