To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The State has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led, almost exclusively, with his left [hand]. And Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken "The Oath" with the only good hand he possesses -- his right.

I have nothing but pity in my heart for the Chief Witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But, my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime. She has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But, what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did.

Now what did she do? She tempted a negro. She was white and she tempted a negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.

The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Lincoln County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen -- to this Court -- in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted; confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption, the evil assumption, that all negroes lie; all negroes are basically immoral beings; all negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is in itself, gentlemen, a lie -- which I do not need to point out to you.

And so, a quiet, humble, respectable negro, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against two white peoples. The defendant is not guilty. But somebody in this courtroom is.

Now, gentlemen, in this country our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality!

Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this man to his family.

In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson.


Closing arguments in the courtroom
by Atticus Finch


To kill a mocking bird
Harper Lee

THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
by Thomas Sowell




When you try to condense a book representing years of thought and research into a half-hour talk, a certain amount of over-simplification is inevitable. With that understood, let me try to summarize the message of The Quest for Cosmic Justice in three propositions which may seem to be axiomatic, but whose implications are in fact politically controversial:


The impossible is not going to be achieved.

It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.

The devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.


Cosmic justice is one of the impossible dreams which has a very high cost and very dangerous potentialities.
What is cosmic justice and how does it differ from more traditional conceptions of justice-- and from the more recent and more fervently sought "social justice"?
Traditional concepts of justice or fairness, at least within the American tradition, boil down to applying the same rules and standards to everyone. This is what is meant by a "level playing field"-- at least within that tradition, though the very same words mean something radically different within a framework that calls itself "social justice." Words like "fairness," "advantage" and "disadvantage" likewise have radically different meanings within the very different frameworks of traditional justice and "social justice."
John Rawls perhaps best summarized the differences when he distinguished "fair" equality of opportunity from merely "formal" equality of opportunity. Traditional justice, fairness, or equality of opportunity are merely formal in Professor Rawls' view and in the view of his many followers and comrades. For those with this view, "genuine equality of opportunity" cannot be achieved by the application of the same rules and standards to all, but requires specific interventions to equalize either prospects or results. As Rawls puts it, "undeserved inequalities call for redress."
A fight in which both boxers observe the Marquis of Queensberry rules would be a fair fight, according to traditional standards of fairness, irrespective of whether the contestants were of equal skill, strength, experience or other factors likely to affect the outcome-- and irrespective of whether that outcome was a hard-fought draw or a completely one-sided beating.
This would not, however, be a fair fight within the framework of those seeking "social justice," if the competing fighters came into the ring with very different prospects of success-- especially if these differences were due to factors beyond their control.
Presumably, the vast ranges of undeserved inequalities found everywhere are the fault of "society" and so the redressing of those inequalities is called social justice, going beyond the traditional justice of presenting each individual with the same rules and standards. However, even those who argue this way often recognize that some undeserved inequalities may arise from cultural differences, family genes, or from historical confluences of events not controlled by anybody or by any given society at any given time. For example, there was no way that Pee Wee Reese was going to hit as many home runs as Mark McGwire, or Shirley Temple run as fast as Jesse Owens. There was no way that Scandinavians or Polynesians were going to know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara-- and no way that these Bedouins were going to know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians.
In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.
This perspective on justice can be found in a wide range of activities and places, from the street-corner community activist to the august judicial chambers of the Supreme Court. For example, a former dean of admissions at Stanford University said that she had never required applicants to submit Achievement Test scores because "requiring such tests could unfairly penalize disadvantaged students in the college admissions process," because such students, "through no fault of their own, often find themselves in high schools that provide inadequate preparation for the Achievement Tests."1 Through no fault of their own-- one of the recurrent phrases in this kind of argument-- seems to imply that it is the fault of "society" but remedies are sought independently of any empirical evidence that it is.
Let me try to illustrate some of the problems with this approach by a mundane personal example. Whenever I hear discussions of fairness in education, my automatic response is: "Thank God my teachers were unfair to me when I was a kid growing up in Harlem." One of these teachers was a lady named Miss Simon, who was from what might be called the General Patton school of education. Every word that we misspelled in class had to be written 50 times-- not in class, but in our homework that was due the next morning, on top of all the other homework that she and other teachers loaded onto us. Misspell four or five words and you had quite an evening ahead of you.
Was this fair? Of course not. Like many of the children in Harlem at that time, I came from a family where no one had been educated beyond elementary school. We could not afford to buy books and magazines, like children in more affluent neighborhood schools, so we were far less likely to be familiar with these words that we were required to write 50 times.
But fairness in this cosmic sense was never an option. As noted at the outset, the impossible is not going to be achieved. Nothing that the schools could do would make things fair in this sense. It would have been an irresponsible self-indulgence for them to have pretended to make things fair. Far worse than unfairness is make-believe fairness. Instead, they forced us to meet standards that were harder for us to meet-- but far more necessary for us to meet, as these were the main avenues for our escape from poverty.
Many years later, I happened to run into one of my Harlem schoolmates on the streets of San Francisco. He was now a psychiatrist and owned a home and property out in the Napa valley. As we reminisced about the past and caught up on things that had happened to us in between, he mentioned that his various secretaries over the years had commented on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word. My secretaries have made the same comment-- but, if they knew Miss Simon, it would be no mystery why we seldom misspelled words.
It so happens that I was a high school dropout. But what I was taught before I dropped out was enough for me to score higher on the verbal SAT than the average Harvard student. That may well have had something to do with my being admitted to Harvard in an era before the concept of "affirmative action" was conceived.
What if our teachers had been imbued with the present-day conception of "fairness"? Clearly we would not have been tested with the same tests and held to standards as other kids in higher-income neighborhoods, whose parents had at least twice as many years of schooling as ours and probably much more than twice as much money. And where would my schoolmate and I have ended up? Perhaps in some half-way house, if we were lucky.
And would that not have been an injustice-- to take individuals capable of being independent, self-supporting, and self-directed men and women, with pride in their own achievements, and turn them into dependents, clients, supplicants, mascots? Currently, the Educational Testing Service is adopting minority students as mascots by turning the SAT exams into race-normed instruments to circumvent the growing number of prohibitions against group preferences. The primary purpose of mascots is to symbolize something that makes others feel good. The well-being of the mascot himself is seldom a major consideration.
The argument here is not against real justice or real equality. Both of these things are desirable in themselves, just as immortality may be considered desirable in itself. The only arguments against any of these things is that they are impossible-- and the cost of pursuing impossible dreams are not negligible.
Socially counterproductive policies are just one of the many costs of the quest for cosmic justice. The rule of law, on which a free society depends, is inherently incompatible with cosmic justice. Laws exist in all kinds of societies, from the freest to the most totalitarian. But the rule of law-- a government of laws and not of men, as it used to be called-- is rare and vulnerable. You cannot redress the myriad inequalities which pervade human life by applying the same rules to all or by applying any rules other than the arbitrary dispensations of those in power. The final chapter of The Quest for Cosmic Justice is titled "The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution"-- because that is what is happening piecemeal by zealots devoted to their own particular applications of cosmic justice.
They are not trying to destroy the rule of law. They are not trying to undermine the American republic. They are simply trying to produce "gender equity," institutions that "look like America" or a thousand other goals that are incompatible with the rule of law, but corollaries of cosmic justice.
Because ordinary Americans have not yet abandoned traditional justice, those who seek cosmic justice must try to justify it politically as meeting traditional concepts of justice. A failure to achieve the new vision of justice must be represented to the public and to the courts as "discrimination." Tests that register the results of innumerable inequalities must be represented as being the cause of those inequalities or as deliberate efforts to perpetuate those inequalities by erecting arbitrary barriers to the advancement of the less fortunate.
In short, to promote cosmic justice, they must misrepresent what is happening as violations of traditional justice-- as understood by others who do not share their vision. Nor do those who make such claims necessarily believe them themselves. As Joseph Schumpeter once said: "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
The next thing the idealist will do is character assassination. All those who disagree with the great vision must be shown to have malign intentions, if not deep-seated character flaws. They must be "Borked," to use a verb coined in our times. They must be depicted as "A Strange Justice" if somehow they survive the Borking process. They must be depicted as having some personal "obsessions" if they carry out the duties they swore to carry out as a special prosecutor. In short, demonization is one of the costs of the quest for cosmic justice.
The victims of this process are not limited to those targeted. The society as a whole loses when its decisions are made by character assassination, rather than by rational discussion, and when its pool of those eligible for leadership is drained by the exodus of those who are not prepared to sacrifice their good name or subject their family to humiliations for the sake of grasping the levers of power. This loss is not merely quantitative, for those who are willing to endure any personal or family humiliations for the sake of power are the most dangerous people to trust with power.
In a sense, those caught up in the vision of cosmic justice are also among its victims. Having committed themselves to a vision and demonized all who oppose it, how are they to turn around and subject that vision to searching empirical scrutiny, much less repudiate it as evidence of its counterproductive results mount up?
Ironically, the quest for greater economic and social equality is promoted through a far greater inequality of political power. If rules cannot produce cosmic justice, only raw power is left as the way to produce the kinds of results being sought. In a democracy, where power must gain public acquiescence, not only must the rule of law be violated or circumvented, so must the rule of truth. However noble the vision of cosmic justice, arbitrary power and shameless lies are the only paths that even seem to lead in its direction. As noted at the outset, the devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.

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Nobody with open eyes can any longer doubt that the danger to personal freedom comes chiefly from the left. - F.A. Hayek

Where have all the Conservatives Gone?

There is always hope, as long as one can think.

I vote for that one. I still get chills hearing it.

Yeah yeah, I can see the brits on here rolling their eyes already. Eat it and smile. You people didnt deserve Churchill...he was too good for you, heh heh

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My Political Blog (Last post Feb 14) - My MySpace Page

"The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world except in the abodes of the guilty goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unweakened by their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Winston Churchill

What a shame those Scotch Lowlanders, the lower-than-shark-excreta Presbyterian "Soupers” (Catholic writers frequently referred back to the Famine, alleging that evangelical Protestants had taken advantage of relief schemes, using the promise of food to gain converts. These converts were referred to derisively as "soupers" or "jumpers") so easily forgot these words of Cafflik defiance, eh?

These Pommie-toadying genetic curs, who sold their yellow souls for a sip of Proddie broth, couldn’t wait to play prison warder to their own kind; the white Irish (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)s, on the Kraut King’s Ulster PLANTATION.

(Yep, that’s where the word comes from!)

The same bum-sucking British Blockleiters eventually became the loud-mouthed but lily-livered “Scotch-Irish,” cowards who still come-in-on-the-grouter to crow over a braver cocks kill.

“The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree” – does it?

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"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

"My loving people,

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field."

speech to the troops at Tilbury dock 1588
Just before the glorious defeat of the Catholic led Spansh Armada
God save the Queen!

Winston Churchill, the British wartime Prime Minister, made an outspoken attack on the Irish Government and in particular Eamon de Valera in his radio broadcast on VE Day. Churchill maintained that the British government displayed restraint on the Irish state while the de Valera government were allowed to "frolic with the Germans". Churchill maintained that the British could have invaded the Irish state but displayed "considerable restraint" in not doing so. de Valera replied to Churchill in a radio broadcast....

"I have here before me the pencilled notes from which I broadcast to you on 3 September 1939. I had so many other things to do on that day that I could not find time to piece them together into a connected statement. From these notes I see that I said that, noting the march of events, your Government had decided its policy the previous spring, and had announced its decision to the world.

The aim of our policy, I said, would be to keep our people out of the war. I reminded you of what I had said in the Dail that in our circumstances, with our history and our experience after the last war and with a part of our country still unjustly severed from us; no other policy was possible.

Certain newspapers have been very persistent in looking for my answer to Mr. Churchill's recent broadcast. I know the kind of answer I am expected to make. I know the answer that first springs to the lips of every man of Irish blood who heard or read that speech, no matter in what circumstances or in what part of the world he found himself. I know the reply I would have given a quarter of a century ago.

But I have deliberately decided that that is not the reply I shall make tonight. I shall strive not to be guilty of adding any fuel to the flames of hatred and passion which, if continued to be fed, promise to burn up whatever is left by the war of decent human feeling in Europe.

Allowances can be made for Mr. Churchill's statement, however unworthy, in the first flush of his victory. No such excuse could be found for me in this quieter atmosphere. There are, however some things which it is my duty to say, some things which it is essential to say. I shall try to say them as dispassionately as I can.

Mr. Churchill makes it clear that, in certain circumstances, he would have violated our neutrality and that he would justify his action by Britain's necessity. It seems strange to me that Mr. Churchill does not see that this, if accepted, would mean Britain's necessity would become a moral code and that when this necessity became sufficiently great, other people's rights were not to count.

It is quite true that other great Powers believe in this same code-in their own regard-and have behaved in accordance with it. That is precisely why we have the disastrous succession of wars-World War No. I and World War No. 2 and shall it be World War No. 3?

Surely Mr. Churchill must see that if his contention be admitted in our regard, a like justification can be framed for similar acts of aggression elsewhere, and no small nation adjoining a great Power could ever hope to be permitted to go its own way in peace.

It is indeed fortunate that Britain's necessity did not reach the point when Mr. Churchill would have acted. All credit to him that he successfully resisted the temptation which, I have no doubt, may at times assailed him in his difficulties and to which I freely admit many leaders might have easily succumbed. It is indeed hard for the strong to be just to the weak, but acting justly always has its rewards.

By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr. Churchill, instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already bloodstained record of the relations between England and this country, has advanced the cause of international morality an important step-one of the most important, indeed, that can be taken on the road to the establishment of any sure basis for peace.

As far as the peoples of these two islands are concerned, it may, perhaps, mark a fresh beginning towards the realisation of that mutual comprehension to which Mr. Churchill has referred for which, I hope, he will not merely pray but work also, as did his predecessor who will yet, I believe, find the honoured place in British history which is due to him, as certainly he will find it in any fair record of the relations between Britain and ourselves.

That Mr. Churchill should be irritated when our neutrality stood in the way of what he thought he vitally needed, I understand, but that he or any thinking person in Britain or elsewhere should fail to see the reason for our neutrality, I find it hard to conceive.

I would like to put a hypothetical question-it is a question I have put to many Englishmen since the last war. Suppose Germany had won the war, had invaded and occupied England, and that after a long lapse of time and many bitter struggles, she was finally brought to acquiesce in admitting England's right to freedom, and let England go, but not the whole of England, all but, let us say, the six southern counties.

These six southern counties, those, let us suppose, commanding the entrance to the narrow seas, Germany had singled out and insisted on holding herself with a view to weakening England as a whole, and maintaining the securing of her own communications through the Straits of Dover.

Let us suppose further, that after all this had happened, Germany was engaged in a great war in which she could show that she was on the side of freedom of a number of small nations, would Mr. Churchill as an Englishman who believed that his own nation had as good a right to freedom as any other, not freedom for a part merely, but freedom for the whole-would he, whilst Germany still maintained the partition of his country and occupied six counties of it, would he lead this partitioned England to join with Germany in a crusade? I do not think Mr. Churchill would.

Would he think the people of partitioned England an object of shame if they stood neutral in such circumstances? I do not think Mr. Churchill would.

Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain's stand alone, after France had fallen and before America entered the War.

Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliation's, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?

Mr. Churchill is justly proud of his nation's perseverance against heavy odds. But we in this island are still prouder of our people's perseverance for freedom through all the centuries. We, of our time, have played our part in the perseverance, and we have pledged our selves to the dead generations who have preserved intact for us this glorious heritage, that we, too, will strive to be faithful to the end, and pass on this tradition unblemished.

Many a time in the past there appeared little hope except that hope to which Mr. Churchill referred, that by standing fast a time would come when, to quote his own words: "…the tyrant would make some ghastly mistake which would alter the whole balance of the struggle."

I sincerely trust, however, that it is not thus our ultimate unity and freedom will be achieved, though as a younger man I confess I prayed even for that, and indeed at times saw no other.

In latter years, I have had a vision of a nobler and better ending, better for both our people and for the future of mankind. For that I have now been long working. I regret that it is not to this nobler purpose that Mr. Churchill is lending his hand rather than, by the abuse of a people who have done him no wrong, trying to find in a crisis like the present excuse for continuing the injustice of the mutilation of our country.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Churchill has not deliberately chosen the latter course but, if he has, however regretfully we may say it, we can only say, be it so.

Meanwhile, even as a partitioned small nation, we shall go on and strive to play our part in the world continuing unswervingly to work for the cause of true freedom and for peace and understanding."

Churchill described de Valera's response as 'masterful'....

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Yes, but the Spanish are not REAL Catholics!

Number of Rat-Catchers in the world - 1.1 billion

Number of poor-man's RC's, i.e. Anglicans, in the world - 17 million

Ergo, democarcy-wise, my "faith" is right and yours is wrong.

However, I freely acknowledge the Anglican faith as a renegade form of Popery with a proportionate amount of pedophiles and cross-dressing mincing lisping poofters in it as it's parent church.

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"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

Martin Luther King Jnr

Winston Churchill (Reminiscences upon the event of Pearl Harbor)

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Read this post quick before the mods delete it!