Cite Them Right Direct Quotes

Paul Bloom is a proponent of the power of reasoning in moral persuasion, arguing that we have direct evidence of the power of reasoning in cases where morality has changed - over time, people have been persuaded to accept gay marriage, for example, or to reject slavery. Reasoning may not be as fast as intuition, as Haidt claims, but it can play a role in where those intuitions come from. Bloom cites an idea Peter Singer describes in his book “The Expanding Circle”. This is that when you decide to make a moral argument - i.e. an argument about what is right or wrong - you must to some extent step outside of yourself and adopt an impartial perspective. If you want to persuade another that you should have more of the share of the food, you need to advance a rule that the other people can agree to. “I should get more because I’m me” won’t persuade anyone, but “I should get more because I did more work, and people who did more work should get more” might. But once you employ an impartial perspective to persuade you lend force to a general rule, which may take on a life of its own. Maybe tomorrow you slack off, so your own rule will work against you. In order to persuade you struck a bargain with the group’s shared understanding of what’s reasonable. Once you’ve done this, Singer argues, you breathe life into the internal logic of argument. The “impartial perspective” develops its own dynamic, driving reason forward quite apart from the external influences of emotion, prejudice and environment. Not only can the arguments you advance come back to bite you, but they might even lead you to conclusions you didn’t expect when you first formulated them.

narrative. The beginning of the rule of law4 – it is often said, and is largely true – in Britain coincides with the signing by King John of the Magna Carta (the Big Charter)5 in 1215. This has two key chapters, which make clear that a person cannot be punished without due process, and that such a process cannot be bought, delayed or denied. These are critical principles in our judicial system today. As it happens, Magna Carta was in force for precisely two months (when Pope Innocent III annulled it on the grounds it had been obtained by compulsion, calling it ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’), and did not directly lead to modern jury trials in any significant way. As an articulation of principles of justice, it owed much to existing texts, such as the coronation oaths of Anglo-Saxon kings and the law codes of Henry I. The Pope also called Magna Carta ‘void of all validity forever’. He was wrong. It has survived as both a romantic gesture and a useful precedent6 to cite as our courts became more professional and individual rights became more established. The more significant, but less heralded, legal development came a couple of centuries later with the articulation of the principle of habeas corpus. The full phrase is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum: ‘may you bring the body before the court’, which sounds pompous or funereal. What it means, though, is that everyone has a right to be tried in person before being imprisoned. If someone is held by the state without trial, a petition using this phrase should get them either freed or at least their status interrogated by a judge. Two Latin words contain the most effective measure against tyranny in existence. As time progressed in this country, then, we see

I would like for us to dwell on the notion of “dictators killing their own people,” which is quite problematic and misleading. First, the notion presumes that killing one’s own people is only done by directly using weapons and prisons, as commonly cited when referring to Arab dictators, but it overlooks the many other indirect ways through which a state can kill its own people, like denying them decent, livable wages; healthy, chemical-free, non-cancerous foods; access to decent basic healthcare and good education; and many other basic human rights that are a privilege not a right in the US. Never mind that the US doesn’t even come close in providing these basic needs whose lack can easily make any state responsible for “killing its own people”, I am not disclosing a secret when I say that the US equally fails in the test of not directly killing its own people through imprisoning and shooting blacks, immigrants, and Muslims. The second serious problem with the statement of dictators “killing their own people” is the failure of many so-called academics and intellectuals who contribute to knowledge production in interrogating it in an honest manner, which, to me means that the starting point is always to look at how the US kills its own people. Once that is determined and confirmed, it would be hard to make the case that the US is in a position to go around the world hunting other authoritarian regimes who do kill their own people. This fact makes many academics and intellectuals—unless willing to pay a high price for speaking the truth—complicit with the agendas of the warmongers who have been exterminating the people of the Middle East for many decades now. As a result, one can’t help wondering whether the real job of many feeble and co-opted intellectuals and academics in America is to simply aid the establishment in promoting itself as a “free democracy”, and consequently aiding it with its false mission of “democratizing” other nations.

Later that month, the State Department’s inspector general reported that a handful of Hillary’s e-mails contained information that was classified at the time the messages were sent. While it’s not possible to send e-mails directly from the government’s classified systems to outside accounts, there are a few ways in which classified material can end up in outside e-mail—for example, information that should have been classified was not categorized that way by the sender, or someone unwittingly included secret or sensitive passages in a message sent outside the classified systems. Hillary and her aides argued that she was being railroaded by agencies retroactively classifying information in some cases, and, in others, citing material that was not marked classified when it passed into and out of her in-box. Ultimately, what they were saying was that Hillary clearly didn’t intend to transmit classified information—a legal distinction that would become important when federal investigators considered whether to charge her with a crime. In addition, the vast majority of the e-mails that included classified material were traded with people who had security clearances consistent with the levels at which the information in question was classified. That is, Hillary wasn’t giving out secrets to people who shouldn’t have had them; she was just e-mailing the right people on the wrong system. But from a public relations perspective, the technicalities didn’t matter. Hillary had told the nation that she didn’t traffic in classified information, and government investigators put the lie to that assertion day after day. In many cases, the twists and turns—the discovery of more highly classified material—played out first in stories leaked to the media for maximum impact.