Try it again?

After a lapse of three years during which I have been sparring on some online groups interested in politics - some moderated and some less structured - I think I have finally made a resolution I can stick with to return to this format for sharing my views on subjects political, cultural, or otherwise of interest - of interest to me, anyway. In significant part, this decision has been necessitated by the need to reclaim a big chunk of the few potentially productive hours I have available each day. Hundreds of emails daily, often merely trading insults, has become a very unwelcome way to start my day online just to sift through the trash for the rare bits of reasonable debate or sharing of useful informattion. I'll start with some book notes. One of those rare bits of useful information from those online ddiscussion lists was a heads-up to catch Ben Shapiro on C-SPAN this last weekend. It was well worth the time to hear him ecplain and illustrate the thesis of his book Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans. I've added it to my Amazon wish list. In the course of looking up the Shapiro presentation, I tuned into C-SPAN for a good part of the afternoon and evening and found several other intereting books and authors. Highly recommended is Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia. Mackey, the CEO of grocery retailer Whole Foods, presents a refreshing view of the role of business in society. This one also goes on my wish list. Quite interesting, but not so highly recommended is Michelle Alexander's speech based on her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Ms. Alexander prsents a great deal of material that folks with libertarian leanings, myself included, should find troubling. Where I think she begins to go off in unhelpful directions is the point at which she, echoing explicitly the tactical shift in the public career of Dr. King, shifts from "civil rights" to "human rights." Civil rights is ground upon which liberals, libertarians and even conservative constitutionalists can find common ground. These diverse perspectives may not reach the same conclusions on specific quetions about the meaning of some provision of the Bill of Rights in relation to a particular set of facts; but they can share a common vocabulary and agree on the seriousness of the issues involvef. Thus, when Ms. Alexander is discusing omething like the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, she is speaking a language we understand and making reference to principles we respect. In her attack on the drug war, Ms Alexander shifts to rather more vague concepts of human rights, some of which come down to little more than disparate racial impacts of the law prove a violation of human rights. The shift is both unnecessary and unhepful. The drug war is a civil rights issue; to the extent the federal government is involved (going back to the Harrison Narcotics Act) it trespasses on subject matter not delegated to it by the Constitution and, therefore, reserved to the states or the people as stated in the Tenth Amendment. To the extent that enforcement of the drug laws tends to rely on unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourth Amendment is immplicated and court rulings allowing such abuses need to be addressed - but there is no benefit is shifting ground for that debate from the proper application of ancient civil rights to arbitrary new standards of human rights. Another point missed by Ms. Alexander relates to her thesis that the abuses to which she rightly calls attention are prima facie evidence of a revival of Jim Crow - whites oppresing blacks. She completely ignored, in her speech boadcast on C-SPAN, the role played by many black leaders in abetting the drug war hysteria. Accusations were made that drugs were being funelled into black communities as an act of genocide by whites. When crack cocaine came on the scene and quickly gained popularity in minority communities, it was alleged by some black leaders that the system didn't treat this threat to black people seriously. This played a role in getting enhanced penalties for drug crimes. There's plenty of blame to go around on all sides for a federal drug war which is both unconstitutional and ineffective - indeed, counter-roductive - policy.