The American Conservative

Is using LSD and other psychoactive drugs on on accused (not convicted, let’s remember) terrorists a Bush administration policy? Justin Rood at TPMmuckraker investigates:

Giving detainees drugs like LSD and PCP seems stupid to the point of absurdity.

So I was surprised to discover that in 2002, Justice Department lawyers carefully considered the issue and advised the White House that it was okay. In their view, it was acceptable to force detainees to ingest “mind-altering substances,” as long as it was not intended to cause months-long bouts of serious mental illness.

How do we know that? Because in August 2002, the Justice Department gave then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a 50-page document saying so. And a follow-up document in 2004 reaffirmed it.

Read on. Sometime after 9/11, the United States became a Terry Gilliam movie.

A classic from Murray Rothbard (who also takes a well-deserved shot at economists /econometricians invading other fields):

In recent years, economists have invaded other intellectual disciplines and, in the dubious name of “science,” have employed staggeringly oversimplified assumptions in order to make sweeping and provocative conclusions about fields they know very little about. This is a modern form of “economic imperialism” in the realm of the intellect. Almost always, the bias of this economic imperialism has been quantitative and implicitly Benthamite, in which poetry and pushpin are reduced to a single level, and which amply justifies the gibe of Oscar Wilde about cynics, that they [economists] know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The results of this economic imperialism have been particularly ludicrous in the fields of sex, the family, and education.

So why then does the present author, not a Benthamite, now have the temerity to tackle a field as arcane, abstruse, metaphysical, and seemingly unrelated to economics as hermeneutics? Here my plea is the always legitimate one of self-defense. Discipline after discipline, from literature to political theory to philosophy to history, have been invaded by an arrogant band of hermeneuticians, and now even economics is under assault. Hence, this article is in the nature of a counterattack.

[Read the whole thing here.]

The Oxford University Press blog probably merits a link.

…of book-blogging inanity that I issued a while back. See his selections here.

In other news, I’ve added the University Bookman to the website links. Both Jesse and University Bookman editor Gerald Russello have pieces in the forthcoming issue of The American Conservative, as it happens. Gerald asks whether Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet would sign on to the latest incarnation of the national-security state and (in case you can’t guess the answer to that one) offers their alternative. Jesse reviews Robert Greenfield’s recent biography of Timothy Leary and sheds some light on the acid guru’s appearance in National Review once upon a time…

Some days, nothing but the latest coloring book from Sean Hannity arrives on my desk. Today, though, there’s a bumper crop of good reading, including Robert Higgs’s Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Darryl Hart’s A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State, and a new book by Ralph de Toledano, Cry Havoc: The Great Bring-down and How It Happened, which looks at the influence of the Frankfurt School, Wilhelm Reich, and other radical thinkers who made a quiet (sometimes not-so-quiet) revolution in this country last century.

Hart’s book is especially noteworthy: the author is both a conservative and a Christian, one who following J. Gresham Machen objects to politicizing the faith for causes either left or right. The book promises a more nuanced (not to say interesting) take on Church and State than what’s found in most (if not all) the other recent volumes on the subject.

From Russell Kirk’s Academic Freedom, 1955. (“Crawley” was a professor of medieval studies, and a good one, who’d had Communist ties. He disavowed them and swore he’d teach only the American Way of Life.)

…Professor Crawley never taught The American Way of Life in his classes. He did not know what The American Way of Life is, and neither do I. And even if he had believed in some dim ideology of Americanism, he would have been false to his trust as a servant of truth if as he had endeavored to indoctrinate students … in this dim ideology. He would have been as false to his trust as if he had taught The Marxist Way of Life. Professor Crawley, as a genuine scholar, always rose superior to indoctrination; in that he was worthy of academic freedom. But he ceased to be worthy of academic freedom, at least for the moment, when he agreed to pretend that he had been a propagandist for One Hundred Per Cent Americanism.

With all the Mark Foley sleaze in the news, perhaps we should think back to things relatively normal — like Bill Clinton ogling another man’s wife.

This article would be worth a link for its mention of a folk song called “Hang Earl Warren” (“to a sour apple tree/His impeachment still won’t fill the bill for folks like you and me”), but it has much else to commend it as well.

Daniel Larison and historian William Hay have both responded to that provocative Viereck post of mine. There’s a limit to how far I’ll defend Viereck, but I should be able to answer at least a few of the charges against him. It’ll have to wait, though; blogs demand instant response, but deadlines are more demanding still.

On another topic, I’ve added William Norman Grigg to the blogroll, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

I don’t listen to any real hippie music, but I’ve been enjoying Tom Petty’s cover of “Something In the Air” lately. It must be nice to look forward to revolution. On the other hand, I think I know some right-wingers who can relate to the lyrics “hand out the arms and ammo / we’re gonna blast our way through here.”