MotoGP in Catalunya, Spain this weekend. The most exciting 90 seconds I’ve ever seen of the world’s most exciting sport. (video at link)

And for fun, listen to the Italian narration:

These guys are playing chess at 1.5G and 200mph…amazing.
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There’s an old legal term – “admissions against interest” which is something a witness reports that is ‘an admission of the truth of a fact by any person, but especially by the parties to a lawsuit, when a statement obviously would do that person harm, be embarrassing, or be against his/her personal or business interests.’ In other words, something that undermines you. One thing I look for in commentators is an occasional admission against interest; it tells me someone is honest, and gives their words more credibility.

So today, over on Politico, the New America Foundation’s Flynt Leverett rehashes his Spiegel interview and flatly states “Ahmadinejad won. Get over it.“

Now, personally, I know for a fact that I don’t know enough about the Iranian elections to state any position with certitude. I do know a few things, though, and one of them is that the US commentariat’s dance around this issue is only slightly less complex than the actual politics within Iran itself. Second-intention positions seem to be commonplace, and I’m spending way too much effort trying to read through the actual words and understand what the commentator is really doing.

In Leverett’s case, I did a fast Google, and came up with a list of his articles, and read them.

Let’s see what he has to say about the North Korean missile and nuke tests:

As for Iran, the leadership’s motives may be more mixed. U.S. foreign policy expert Flynt Leverett says Washington needs to do more to reassure Iran, because despite President Obama’s calls for improved relations, Tehran believes the U.S. is still pursuing the policy track of former President Bush.

“What I’m concerned about is that the promise of this early rhetoric will be undermined by this lack of new initiatives, and particularly if the administration continues to try and use its professed willingness to engage Iran, to muster more international support for intensified sanctions, I think that’s going to undermine the credibility of any diplomatic initiative,” he explained.

Let’s see what he has to say about Bush’s policies:

We got into this dilemma because we essentially don’t have a strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. By “we” I mean the United States and the Bush administration. The Bush administration has deliberately ruled out direct negotiations with Iran either over the nuclear issue or over the broad range of strategic issues that you would need to talk to Iran about if you were going to get a real diplomatic settlement on the nuclear issue.

The administration has, literally for years, ruled out that kind of strategic dialogue with Iran. In the absence of that sort of approach, that sort of channel, the administration is left with two options, one of which is to try and get something done in the Security Council. It has been foreseeable literally for months, if not for longer, that Russia and China at a minimum were not going to be prepared to support serious multilateral sanctions or other serious multilateral punitive measures on Iran. This is not a surprise. As I said, it’s been foreseeable literally for months, but the administration, without a strategy, is going down this feckless road anyway.

(He goes on in this interview to extol the apparently fraudulent Swiss Memo)

And what does he have to say about the Obama Administration?

President Obama…should not be excused for [his] failure to learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East – that the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation. The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

…What is hard about the Iran problem is not periodic inflammatory statements from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or episodes like Ms. Saberi’s detention. What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy “right” would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.

To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan – a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.

It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People’s Republic of China and to reorient America’s posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America’s interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision, political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President Obama – contrary to his record so far – will soon begin to demonstrate those same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran.

So, basically, he’s all about giving the Iranian regime whatever they want. OK, that’s fine – but let’s weigh that as we look at his somewhat sketchy claims about the election.

First, to the poll. Flynt says:

But the one poll conducted before Friday’s election by a Western organization that was transparent about its methodology – a telephone poll carried out by the Washington-based Terror-Free Tomorrow [A.L. – his employer ,which he doesn’t mention] from May 11 to 20 – found Ahmadinejad running 20 points ahead of Mousavi. This poll was conducted before the televised debates in which, as noted above, Ahmadinejad was perceived to have done well while Mousavi did poorly.

Then go read the ABC demolition:

An outfit called Terror Free Tomorrow claims in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that the contested Iranian elections likely were not fraudulent, since a pre-election poll it sponsored showed the declared winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a big lead.

TFT’s own data, though, tell a different story – as, oddly, did its own previous polling analysis.

The poll, done by telephone last month, found 34 percent support for Ahmadinejad vs. 14 percent for Mir Hossein Mousavi. The incumbent led by “a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual margin of apparent victory in Friday’s election,” today’s op-ed says. “Our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.”

Strange, then, that TFT’s analysis of these same data last month predicted a runoff.

Then he claims that the result – 60+% for Ahmadinejad – is almost exactly what he got in the last election:

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Um, he got 61.69% of the vote in a two person runoff, after getting something like 20% of the vote in the preliminary, multiparty election – the one like this one.

Look we could go on, and in reality all of the evidence we’re talking about is indirect, circumstantial and incomplete. And none of us – not even the vaunted Juan Cole – really understand the pre-Copernican insane complexity of Iranian politics.

I do know about one subject that’s close to this issue, and that’s counting votes.

And the claim that tens of millions of hand-written paper ballots were counted in three hours is, like Leverett’s flimsy arguments above – simply bullshit.

There are doubtless good arguments made by legitimate commentators supporting the legitimacy of the election outcome. This wasn’t one of them.
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I’ve spent much of the weekend trying to subtly keep up with the news from Iran on my Blackberry (I made a family commitment to keep the laptop off – a matter of unfortunate timing on my part). Patterico has a good roundup of sources, but if you can’t follow anything else, I’d go to Twitterfall and look at #iranelections. This is raw rumor right now, but the analysis can – and should – wait.

I firmly believe that the right thing for the US and Western governments to do is to make encouraging noises about the will of the people and do, exactly, nothing. Any action in these next weeks by us as a nation will have far more unintended consequences than we can imagine.

But we, as a people, can do quite a bit. If there ever was a time to let activists, media, and leaders in the Middle East know that “the whole world is watching” that time is now. Follow Twitter, read blogs, share them with your friends. Accept that much of what you read is wild rumor and try as best you can so sift through it for grains of truth.

Find sites where pro-freedom (and by that I mean simply ‘pro-fair-elections’) Iranians are communicating, read them, and let them know with comments and emails that you are watching.

Let’s see how 20th Century repression, in the interests of 14th century ideology, reacts to 21st century open communication tools.

I don’t believe that Twitter and Youtube will bring down the repressive religious oligarchy in Iran. I’m not that much of anoptimist. But it will weaken the hold they have on the Iranian people – and in time, that may allow the Iranian people to find their own path to their own brand of freedom.

And – as a side note – all of us will know a whole lot more about the Iranian state a month from now than we know today. So let’s reserve the policy suggestions until some dust has settled – please.
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I’ve written a lot about the adventures of Biggest Guy (about to get a heck of a lot more adventurous this summer, I’d say) and maybe not as much about my other sons. Middle Guy’s real adventures start this weekend as he graduates with distinction from Thurgood Marshall College at the University of California at San Diego.

The economy seems to have dented his plans to go get an entry-level finance job in Hong Kong or Singapore (there don’t appear to be any…) but I have a feeling that by Fall he’ll be in a time zone far away starting his own very real adventures.

I want to take a second and publicly praise him for his hard work, smarts, and most of all for the empathy and heart that he displays every day. He’s a helluva human being, and as my goal in life was always to raise better men than me, I can say with confidence that I’m 2/3 of the way there.
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So we’ve got another mucker, this one a right-wing nutjob with a long criminal history.

And as sure as the sun rises, we’re seeing the political slinging and dodging begin. The lefties are wagging fingers and saying “see!! The DHS report you all slagged was soooo correct!” and the righties are bobbing weaving and covering up.

This is a boring and stupid game, and it has one point only – to delegitimize one’s political opponents.

Look, if you can’t tell the difference between Michelle Malkin and some unemployable whackjob who walked into the Fed with a shotgun, may I suggest that whatever you’re using as a discriminator may need some serious work?

Having said that, there is a toxic sludge in our public life – that comes up in a variety of ways – on the right, on the left, around issues like animal rights, the environment, gun rights, etc. – that we all need to see, identify and isolate.

Jesse Walker actually has a very good post on this over at Reason:

Why did the DHS report come under such fire? It wasn’t because far-right cranks are incapable of committing crimes. It’s because the paper blew the threat of right-wing terror out of proportion, just as the Clinton administration did in the ’90s; because it treated “extremism” itself as a potential threat, while offering a definition of extremist so broad it seemed it include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power; and because it fretted about the danger of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.” (Note that neither the killing in Kansas last month nor the shooting in Washington yesterday was committed by an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.) The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.

Let’s start talking – all of us – about what it is that distinguishes someone who is vocally unhappy with fiscal policy direction from someone who walks into the Fed with a shotgun. When we get that sorted out, let’s see how well that distinction applies across the political spectrum.

And as a side note, let me pass a virtual beer to the guard who shot the whackjob – making a head shot against an active shooter armed with a rifle is good shooting. One for the good guys.
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I read this and almost choked on my Morning Thunder. Here are the closing grafs of an editorial in today’s LA Times:

It’s tempting for supporters of gun control — including this page — to hope that the high court will rule that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t apply to the states. That would be a mistake and would give aid and comfort to conservative legal thinkers, among them Justice Clarence Thomas, who have questioned the incorporation doctrine.

We were disappointed last year when the Supreme Court ruled that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right, giving short shrift to the first part of the amendment, which refers to “a well-regulated militia.” But we also believe the court has been right to use the doctrine of incorporation to bind states to the most important protections of the Bill of Rights. If those vital provisions are to be incorporated in the 14th Amendment, so should the right to keep and bear arms.

Holy Cow.

I give them full credit here for intellectual honesty and consistency. One of my frustrations has been the willingness of organizations like the ACLU to pick-and-choose among the rights enumerated in the Constitution; it devalues the claims they make about the sanctity of certain rights that they are willing to pick and choose which rights should be sanctified.

Freedom doesn’t mean much if it’s only the freedom to do what each of us agrees with.

So attaperson, LA Times.
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So I’ve been watching the dust clouds of the Halloween-style egg fight between Ed Whelan and Publius which culminated today in Whelan apologizing to Publius for outing him.

And I’ve been mulling this over more than a bit – particularly as a formerly pseudonymous blogger myself – and I think Whelan was mistaken in apologizing (at least to the extent he did). Here’s what I read that made me decide this after some thinking.

It’s the post from the ‘poor me’ post that Publius (nee John Blevins) put up ‘fessing up and explaining all the reasons why it was important to him to blog under a pseudonym.

Now when I first went into this, I have to admit that Publius wasn’t a blogger whose work I could immediately put into a frame, and so my initial (wrong) reaction was that he was a poo-flinging monkey like tbogg, and my thought on his being outed was ‘fair cop.’ Live by the poo, die by it, I said to myself…

But because I tend to try to check my facts before I take positions, I took some time and read a bunch of publius’ work, and he’s in a whole different ballpark, league, sport than folks like that. He’s a serious blogger, albeit an aggressive liberal, and someone whose posts I’ve read and admired in the past.

But having said that, I think that he’s got it completely backward when he talks about why it was important to him to blog under a nom de plume. Here’s what he said:

As I told Ed (to no avail), I have blogged under a pseudonym largely for private and professional reasons. Professionally, I’ve heard that pre-tenure blogging (particularly on politics) can cause problems. And before that, I was a lawyer with real clients. I also believe that the classroom should be as nonpolitical as possible – and I don’t want conservative students to feel uncomfortable before they take a single class based on my posts. So I don’t tell them about this blog. Also, I write and research on telecom policy – and I consider blogging and academic research separate endeavors. This, frankly, is a hobby.

Privately, I don’t write under my own name for family reasons. I’m from a conservative Southern family – and there are certain family members who I’d prefer not to know about this blog (thanks Ed). Also, I have family members who are well known in my home state who have had political jobs with Republicans, and I don’t want my posts to jeopardize anything for them (thanks again).

He wrote under a pseudonym to shield himself from the consequences of his words. I think that’s exactly backwards.

When I started writing as Armed Liberal – in my very first post – I wrote that

I’m choosing not to identify myself … right now … for a variety of reasons. I’ll start by standing on the time-honored tradition of anonymous pamphleteering, which I believe blogging fits neatly into. My significant other has a fairly political job (although she doesn’t believe so). And finally, I’m trying to disassociate the value of what is set out here from any judgment you might make about me.

[emphasis added]

I didn’t believe it was as important to shield myself (and mine) from what I wrote as it was to have what I wrote stand on its own. I’m not insensitive – and I wasn’t in 2002 – to the concern that what I wrote might have an impact on my living or on my life.

But first and foremost for me it was a vehicle to put ideas forth deprived of any claim to authority (I was a student of Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar! I’m someone who works inside the process and can explain it!).

And when my real life and my blogging life intersected in a meaningful way, I dropped the pseud and stepped out.

So it bothers me more than a little that the primary defense that Publius wants to mount is that it might impact his work or hurt his family’s feelings.

It especially bothers me when he says that

And yes – I criticized Whelan rather harshly. But that’s what the blogosphere is about. Blogging is not for the thin-skinned. And you would think that someone who spends their days trying to destroy other people’s reputations in dishonest and inflammatory ways wouldn’t be so childish and thin-skinned.

I’m sorry, but pitchers who throw at the head shouldn’t be shocked when an occasional bat comes loose and soars out toward the mound. People who see the root of blogging as critcising people harshly and offending where they can do forfeit some of the claim to courtesy which is really what weak pseudonymity (it wouldn’t be too hard to track down any of the pseudonymous political bloggers, really) is really all about.

So on both of those counts – because I think he was making the claim to pseudonymity for the wrong reasons, and because I think that what he really regrets losing is the freedom to throw elbows and then go sit innocently at his family table, I – a formerly pseudonymous blogger – think that Whelan committed a minor infraction of manners at worst.
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Things are about to get very interesting in Sacramento, where the public employees unions are dropping the mask…

The relationship between Democratic leaders and some of their labor benefactors has turned particularly frosty: Many of the programs union members rely on for paychecks — and the unions rely on for dues — have been slated for deep cuts.

For example, there are pledge forms being passed around to lawmakers by a major labor union that might have attracted takers in budget battles past. The union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, wants the legislators to sign statements of support for up to $44 billion in new or higher taxes on the wealthy, oil companies, tobacco and other industries, products and people.

But so far the drive hasn’t produced a single signed form, even from the Democrats who normally march into California’s budget fights in lock-step with organized labor.

…so today, the labor-sponsored politicians are reading the – forgive me – tea leaves and pushing back.

“Many public employee unions, teacher unions [are] thinking that they were thrown under the bus in the last budget,” said Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D- Montebello). “So now they’re asking themselves: If these Democrats are not going to stand up for us, then what good is it to have them there?”

The union leaders say they are appalled that Democratic leaders are talking openly now about decimating government programs without first making a stand for bigger, broader tax hikes that could substantially offset budget cuts.

“Democrats came to Sacramento to help people,” said Marty Hittleman, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “I know they did not go there to destroy government. For some reason, they are unwilling to stand up and say ‘This is not what I was elected for.’ “

But even some of the most liberal Democrats say some union leaders are ignoring the reality of an angry public, a sour economy and a state government approaching insolvency. Moreover, more taxes would require Republican support in the Legislature, and the minority party has made clear that there will be none.

When you hear ‘reformers’ explain that we need to abolish the supermajority for budget and tax approval, remember these words.

In part, this is interesting fallout from the failure of the budget propositions. Then there were differing interpretations of why they had failed: the conservatives said it was the new taxes, the liberals said it was the spending limits. I thought we’d know the truth pretty quickly, and from this article, it seems we do.
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I haven’t read anything that just took the vacuity and indolence of the American chattering class, put it into words, and nailed it to the church door quite as well as this thumbsucking ‘conversation’ between Gail Collins and David Brooks in the New York Times.

Please, God. put them behind a paywall so I can ignore them, like the rest of America.

Here’s the premise, an interesting one, actually: There are three ‘wedge issues’ in modern politics – values-driven issues that fracture interest-based coalitions, and are a large part of why blue-collar labor abandoned its political sponsors in the Democratic Party. They are:

Guns, Gays, and Abortion (add Affirmative Action to the list and you’ve pretty much got all the wedge issues covered).

Here are our two pocket intellectuals setting the stage:

Gail Collins: David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

If you think of abortion, gay rights and gun control as the Big Three, it seems to me the nation is moving in very different directions…

David Brooks: Gail, I confess I do shy away from these issues, not because I don’t have views but because I find the tenor of the debates so unpleasant. For example, I have the impression that we’re in the middle of their weird battle of the murders. Liberal media outlets play up the murder of the abortion doctor by a pro-life extremist. Conservative outlets play up the murder of the Army recruiter by a Muslim extremist. Some people on both sides seem to feel that their view of the world has been affirmed by the atrocities of a certain set of extremists, and so seem to feel a sense of vindication from these crimes.

Brooks – who speaks for the ‘average American’ in these circles, believes that they really don’t think about these things…they just want to be nice to each other:

I think there is a consistency to how most Americans view these Big Three social issues. People are seeking the positions that will help them reserve the invisible bonds of community.

Americans increasingly see gay relationships as just another part of the fabric of connections that make up their communities. As a result Americans are becoming more accepting of civil unions and gay marriage.

People also treasure the specific subcultures they inhabit. Guns are an essential part of life for people who live in rural communities. Well, it’s not the guns per se. Rather the threat to limit gun ownership is seen as an assault by urban people on rural life and rural communities. That is the reason gun rights are defended so fiercely and why it is politically dangerous for anybody to challenge them.

Finally, on the subject of abortion, Americans are pulled by conflicting communitarian impulses. On the one hand, I think most people sense viscerally that somehow an abortion is a tear in the moral fabric – whether they are pro-life or pro-choice. On the other hand, they don’t feel communities can be formed on the basis of compulsion and they are uncomfortable imposing such complex and uncomfortable moral decisions on one another. So they seek out some mushy middle ground, while oscillating, sometimes in a more “liberal” direction and sometimes in a more “conservative” one, as now.

Yeah, we’re brainless cattle who decide important issues based on our connections to others…not.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people on a variety of sides of all three (all four, actually) of these issues, and the reality I’ve experienced is that people think very hard about them, hold deep beliefs about them, and while they may not be able to give broad historic or ideologically grounded arguments for their beliefs – they manage to articulate them – even in passing conversation – far better than the luminaries sucking at the NYT teat. Yes, we’re all human, and our opinions are formed in part by our ‘tribes’.

But that does not – nearly – mean that we have no ability to articulate our understandings or beliefs, to discuss them, and to move and be moved in those discussions. The hard reality is that many of us have deep-rooted beliefs that, in essence decide those issues for us. Let’s look at Gail Collins on gay marriage:

Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can’t see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off.

Note that to her, there’s no … issue … around gay rights. They simply ‘are’. No one, or at least no one worth talking to, could possibly make any kind of substantive argument against gay rights worth considering.

Yet almost all of us were brought up in a culture that has for a millennium ostracized homosexuality; and it would be good if she would recognize that breaking those cultural bonds is hard – and made harder when the images of what it means to be gay come from Castro Street or Santa Monica Boulevard and not the PTA or house next door. So there’s a measure of cognitive dissonance because when the average American family thought about gays, it thought about Sodom, San Francisco bath-houses (not that most people were clear about exactly what was going on in those places…), pedophiles, and that spinster piano teacher and her ‘cousin’ who lived down the street, and then it became about Will and Grace and then about that handsome and brave young Olympic diver and then about Doogie Hauser MD – and suddenly the cultural messages about what it meant to be gay or be in contact with gays were all confused and suddenly not nearly as clearly negative as it used to be.

In part, I’ll argue that was helped along by a substantial change in gay culture itself; it became mainstream and relatively nontransgressive.

She feels the same way about guns (i.e. there is no real substantive issue, only a political one):

Gun control currently feels like a lost cause. If a big Democratic majority doesn’t have the will to stop an amendment to the credit card bill permitting people to carry concealed loaded weapons in national parks, I don’t have much hope.

The idea that there are people … me, for example … who might be able to make a moral and practical argument for why allowing concealed carry in national parks located where concealed carry is itself legal never occurs to her.

It never occurs to Brooks either:

People also treasure the specific subcultures they inhabit. Guns are an essential part of life for people who live in rural communities. Well, it’s not the guns per se. Rather the threat to limit gun ownership is seen as an assault by urban people on rural life and rural communities. That is the reason gun rights are defended so fiercely and why it is politically dangerous for anybody to challenge them.

No, no, a thousand times no. I don’t live in the country, my neighbors who shoot don’t live in the country, we’re not a part of some weird secret subculture that only allows membership to those with guns. That’s patently absurd.

People who own guns and who think that owning and possessing guns is OK often think that it’s a positive good, and can … shockingly … make arguments to that effect. The concern about gun regulation has only a little to do with concern that the ‘city folk’ will dominate; people who fear widespread gun ownership don’t believe people can or should be responsible for their own safety, and people who fear banning guns don’t believe in anything else.

And here we begin to see why these are fracture lines; not because of some sociological or anthropological explanation, not because of the politics of the issue (although such explanations are available to us), but because people’s beliefs are vastly different.

And no where is this more true than abortion, where short of the most dedicated pro-life activists, people I know are perfectly capable of having an ‘on one hand and on the other but this is trumped by’ discussion about the value and costs of abortion, but where each side – even the uncomfortable committed on each side (like me) have a deep belief about what is right that closes the argument.

Brooks goes on:

I’m not sure I’m expressing myself very clearly, but what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

Yes, but each group wants the peace that comes from its values being uncontroversially widespread, and on these issues, we’re not likely to get that for quite some time.

I’d suggest that these are fracture line issues because they are not ‘instrumental issues’ where I can horsetrade a little loss here for a little gain elsewhere. They are issues which touch on the deepest values we hold as members of the society – what is an appropriate relationship; who will defend me and as a consequence have power over me; what does it mean to be human and have rights.

I’ll suggest that the better, more American solution is one that acknowledges that we are a people who live together who share many, but not all, values, and that those values change over time. That allows for a free competition of ideas and ideals, and that limits what we can and will do to coerce each other.

But most of all, one that acknowledges just exactly what these deep thinkers deny – that the people whohold opposing views to us do so genuinely, and are entitled to respect for those views with which we deeply disagree.
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