Author: Crowhill Report

I’m sure you’ve all heard the story. A man is doing a project in the woods when he comes across an old fence. It’s in his way. Should he tear it down or not?

Chesterton said (as I understand the story) this question divides liberals and conservatives. The conservative says, “don’t tear down the fence until you know why it’s there,” while the liberal says, “this fence was built by dead white males, get rid of it.”

I don’t agree with that characterization. (Or caricature.) I think understanding why the fence is there before you tear it down is something that both conservatives and liberals can agree to. It’s just common sense. Only a reckless ass would tear down a fence without knowing why it was there.

But I do believe the story exposes a difference in temperament.

The conservative is going to feel nervous about tearing down the fence. The fence represents the wisdom of the past. Even if he thinks he knows the reasons for the fence, he’ll have a nagging suspicion that he might not know all the reasons for the fence.

The liberal sees the fence as hemming him in. It restricts him. It embodies somebody else telling him what to do. It’s a restraint he wants to cast off so he can feel free to pursue his own life.

Both of them acknowledge the basic wisdom of understanding why the fence is there before tearing it down. But they have very different intuitions and feelings about tearing down the fence.

• Isn’t it curious it was announced right after Elon Musk made his deal to acquire Twitter? (A: they were probably planning it for a while before then, but may have made the announcement in response to the Musk news.)
• Where does the constitution give the federal government the power to “control disinformation”? (A: nowhere.)
• Whatever power this organization is going to have, does Biden want his Republican successor to wield it? (A: Biden can’t think hard enough to answer that question.)
• If Republicans retake the House this year, will they defund it? (A: they should but they don’t have the courage to do it.)

In response to the leaked ruling on abortion, many on the left are revising the idea of packing the Supreme Court. For example, they could try to put five new liberal justices on the court to overwhelm the voice of the conservatives.

This strikes me as a little silly, and very like other proposals where you wonder what’s going to stop the other side from doing the same thing once they take charge.

The goal should be to make the court less political, not more, and I’ve often thought the best way to do that is to make it way bigger — and to make the terms shorter — so that no individual justice would have that much say over things. (Remember when almost all controversial cases came down to how Anthony Kennedy was going to vote?)

Imagine there were 58 Supreme Court justices. Eight would be appointed by the president (and confirmed by the Senate), and the other 50 would be appointed by the States. Each would have an 8-year term, so — generally speaking — each president would appoint one justice every year.

Any given case would still be decided by nine justices, but they would be randomly selected from the pool of 58.

This would substantially water down the role of any single justice and would make the composition of the court more responsive to the mood of the people.

The question is, would that pool of judges be more or less polarized? It wouldn’t help de-politicize the court if the 58 justices ranged from crazy on this side to crazy on that side, so the randomly selected nine might go too far one way, or too far the other.

One way to avoid extremism is to have a more diverse group of people making a choice. Gerrymandering is a problem because political parties draw lines that allow them to have safe liberal seats, or safe conservative seats, which tends to push the candidates to the extremes. If a congressional district is mixed, they’re more likely to elect someone who is closer to the center.

I’m sure how to apply that concept to this issue. but it’s worth considering. I.e., broaden the base of people who get to select Supreme Court justices.

But the more time you spend thinking about this, the more you realize there is no perfect procedure that’s going to get moderate, reasonable decisions out of a collection of partisan politicians. We might be able to bend things towards less partisanship, but we’ll never get rid of it. And it might not even be a good idea in any event.

I signed up for Blinkist, which is a service that reduces books down to about 15-20 minutes of audio. It’s a nice service, and I like it so far.

The most recent one I listened to alternated between he and she when referring to the unnamed “someone.”

It was annoying as Hell. Every time they said “she,” it was like my brain paused and did a quick check. “Who are they talking about now? Who is this ‘she’?”

“He” means “a person; anyone.” When I hear “he” used in an indeterminate way, I realize it doesn’t necessarily mean a man. It just means a person.

Would it be better if there was some other pronoun for that purpose? Maybe. Ask a linguist. I don’t know or care. The point is that “he” is the indeterminate pronoun in English. “She” is not.

Whoever did this particular Blink probably thought they were being oh so inclusive and tolerant by switching back and forth between he and she. But that’s comical. There are 45 (and counting) other pronouns they’d have to use to be properly “inclusive,” and imagine how annoying that would be — switching between he, she, ze, ey, em, eir, per, ve, fae, etc.

Every time they did it, my brain would have to pause and think, “Okay, who is the person who goes by ‘ve’ again? Oh, damn! They’re just trying to be woke.” It would completely disrupt the experience.

Which is entirely not the point of an indeterminate pronoun. It’s supposed to give your mind a break. “I’m just talking about someone — anyone. Don’t worry about figuring out who it is. It doesn’t matter. When it matters, I’ll tell you.”

This “my pronoun” business throws all that on its head. You have to constantly think about the “gender identity” of the person under discussion. Which is the agenda of the people who are pushing it — to retrain our brains to be constantly thinking about what “gender” someone identifies with at the moment. It’s torture, plain and simple.

But that’s getting slightly off the topic, which is the indeterminate pronoun.

Which is he. Get over it.

A few random thoughts.

• As a moral matter, it would be nicer to have a national decision on abortion. As a political / constitutional matter, there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable dispute that this should be decided at the state level.
• The U.S. is among the most radical in the world when it comes to abortion laws. We keep company with the Chinese and the North Koreans in our very permissive rules. In arguing its recent case, Mississippi said, “fully 75% of all nations do not permit abortion after 12 weeks’ gestation, except (in most instances) to save the life and to preserve the physical health of the mother.”
• There is a distinction between (1) a policy objective (e.g., ensuring women have access to abortion), and (2) the means you use to get there (e.g., creating a federal rule on something that ought to be decided by the states). While everybody takes a “whatever it takes” approach from time to time, Jonathan Haidt argues the political left is more likely to break rules to achieve a policy objective. My observation of the political scene generally agrees with that. Consequently, I’m not all that shocked that someone at the court leaked this alleged decision, and I think the odds are good it was a liberal who did it.
• My prediction: Chief Justice Roberts will find a way to cave to the liberals. I don’t know precisely how, but I’m fairly sure he’ll find a way.