CLTs

An estimated 400 million acres of US farm land will change hands in the coming decades. What should sustainable agriculture look like in communities of the near future?
Community land trusts provide regionally based structures for affordable access. #CLTshttps://t.co/v4ktOQZ7y6

— Schumacher Center for a New Economics (@Center4NewEcon) January 19, 2022

"Give Us a King"

Leaders have been deceiving the masses forever. Jews begged Gideon to rule over them. Gideon answered, “I will not be your king.The Lord will rule over you”. Immediately Gideon ruled as king..never mentioning the Lord.Gideon even named his son Abimelech..meaning “son of the king”

— Jay Bart (@SimmonsBart) March 21, 2021

Manceaux Dueling Pistols

#Brownells own Caleb Savant & the legendary Steve O are back at #RockIslandAuctionCompany checking out an elaborate pair of presentation dueling #pistols made by Jules Manceaux in 1843! Don't miss this cool bit of #history!https://t.co/LcDnAeqqjb

— Brownells, Inc. (@BrownellsInc) February 20, 2021

The Political System is a Farce

I’d like to encourage all Virginia voters, regardless of political persuasion, to urge our gubernatorial candidates to never again mention what underwear they’re currently sporting. Please for the love of God. https://t.co/A3vciW80kX

— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) February 3, 2021

But What Means to Obtain the Desired End Results of "Justice" and "Equity"?

Some people have too much stuff, which undermines their wellbeing & stresses the planet. At the same time, others don't have enough stuff, which undermines their wellbeing. That's why we have to fight for equity & justice along w/ reducing overconsumption. https://t.co/bSzkUXIePf

— Annie Leonard (@AnnieMLeonard) January 2, 2021

A Matter of Justice Difficult to Resolve Thanks to Oligarchy and Statism

“The main obstacle preventing a younger generation from entering #farming is a lack of access to land,” says @YoungFarmers. https://t.co/MmulCLCCCn

— Rodale Institute (@RodaleInstitute) December 28, 2020

I just wish S had been willing to push the implications for our present world of crisis a little further

Ah well, 'English Shanin' explores in his book (& will soon be further exploring on his blog) some places where actual Shanin won't quite go 😀https://t.co/JPYzdlgc9g

— Chris Smaje (@csmaje) December 27, 2020

Preparing for today's @Center4NewEcon board meeting, I am rewatching @GeorgeMonbiot's lecture calling for change to the way we manage land.

"There isn't enough land for private luxury, but there's enough for private sufficiency & public luxury."

💚https://t.co/dHL61tVrnK

— Niamh Leonard (@niamhcauleo) December 17, 2020

Restorative Justice

I am not opposed to what it implies (rehabilitation/rehabilitation/re-education) though the name itself is misleading. But restorative justice cannot be exercised in a state that is by its very nature dysfunctional and opposed to true human formation. "Restorative justice" is possible only at a small scale, in true communities.

On the justice system of small tribe in PNG. Hyper local, hyper homogenous, their approach is the opposite of modern Western systems. Human scaled law? https://t.co/leMcwAVzjF

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) December 16, 2020

The Need for... Distributism

"Taking the rising value of property and the growth of landless populations into account for the first time, the report calculates land inequality is 41% higher than previously believed."

Our small farmers need permanent, affordable access to #land.https://t.co/k15IvtjnAR

— Schumacher Center for a New Economics (@Center4NewEcon) November 27, 2020

Though painted with too wide a brush, Andro Linklater still creates a fascinating and imaginative portrait of the history of land ownership. https://t.co/a4LzqTCv14

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) November 27, 2020

Edit.

A new study has revealed just how concentrated farmland ownership is: one percent of the world’s #farms operate a whopping 70% of crop fields. @guardian https://t.co/ebNbZ3wkfk

— Rodale Institute (@RodaleInstitute) November 28, 2020

Charles Hugh Smith and Gordon Long on Unfairness

Gordon Long and I do a deep dive into the frustrations with systemic unfairness in our new video, "The Frustrations of Unfairness Are Reaching a Boiling Point." https://t.co/X5AibZp17Q

— Charles Hugh Smith (@chsm1th) November 24, 2020

But the Land is for the People, a Community

Not for atomized individuals to claim based on the rights defined by liberal justice

"The idea that #land should be treated from an economic point of view as it if were a commodity that you buy and sell and make money on has to change. Land can’t be treated that way. It has to be treated as a form of #trust, and we have to be stewards of the land."

-Bob Swann

— Schumacher Center for a New Economics (@Center4NewEcon) November 12, 2020

Federal Land Policy

Why does the federal government own .5% of Kansas and almost 2% of Texas, but 80% of Nevada and 63% of Utah?

On November 17 at 2:00 p.m., Emmett McGroarty and former Utah State Representative Ken Ivory discuss the inequity of federal western land policy: https://t.co/3NbgcftMtM pic.twitter.com/G67EaqauKn

— IHE (@HumanEcologyCUA) November 9, 2020

"Traditional Christian Teaching"

I doubt it.

Just a reminder that according to justice & traditional Christian teaching, food is a human right to everyone (based on being human, not meeting some criteria for being "deserving") in a society like ours that can easily afford it. https://t.co/wp0erGUwAi https://t.co/VCwRY32Q2o

— Fr Matthew Schneider LC🙏 (@FrMatthewLC) October 24, 2020

Have prisoners grow their own food and pay back the taxpayer for the initial investment into farming supplies and materials. This should be feasible in minimum-security facilities, even if there are concerns about them stealing tools to make weapons. Or theys hould be doing some sort of labor to repay the taxpayer.

It is our duty to respect the humanity and dignity of incarcerated people, even those justly imprisoned for serious, even heinous, crimes. This is the teaching of our religions and it is sound morality. It is no insult to the victims of their crimes to treat them humanely. https://t.co/0ooHcJGjJ0

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) October 16, 2020

Carl F. Horowitz on Reparations

It was taken down? Not sure what's going on.

Join us tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. CT to hear Carl F. Horowitz discuss his article on slavery reparations in the September Chronicles and to take questions from the audience. On the Chronicles Magazine Facebook page and Charlemagne Institute YouTube channel: https://t.co/fk4VaYxvRl pic.twitter.com/eW8jQTu0EE

— Chronicles Magazine (@ChroniclesMag) September 22, 2020

Edit. Here it is:

Nozick on Reparations

Nozick was wrong about reparations, so wrong that he opens the door to the eradication of capitalism. https://t.co/NLy1wmkbFC

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) August 10, 2020

Grant Havers for Law & Liberty

Interpreting the Constitution

A lot of people tell us you "just need to read the Constitution" to understand its original, legal meaning. And nothing more.

But like most things about the #Constitution - a lot of people are totally wrong.https://t.co/zQlWavL1tj

— TenthAmendmentCenter (@TenthAmendment) July 8, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR22GpGEjf4

Jordan L. Perkins:

In some of my earlier academic writings, I attempted to lay out how this three-stage translation strikes me as in need of a great deal of explication, as there is an especially huge conceptual gap in how (2) becomes (3). But that is not my present point. My present point is that (2) itself seems to be a radically incomplete understanding of what ‘this Constitution’ means, even before we attempt to get to (3). This is because the words which were subject to negotiation in the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and then debate on the merits during the ratification process were interpreted in light of a specific intellectual tradition, that of the Anglo-American common law and constitution. ‘This Constitution’ makes sense only in light of that tradition, as interpreted by not only the Framers themselves (narrowly understood), but everyone directly involved in the ratification process. Constitutional texts are, as I would put it, enveloped within a shroud of implicature—they mean not only what they actually say, but also what they can be fairly understood to mean within the context of the social, economic, political, and legal tradition of the community to which they are addressed.

This is to say that ‘this Constitution’ cannot be merely the words on the page and/or what is specifically denoted by them. It must be something broader than this. The question is how far we must expand our net to capture the entirety of a plausible answer and if originalism, as a legal positivistic doctrine, can fully contain the answer which emerges. Again, I think not.

The strongest form of originalism for this debate, I think, is the original public meaning originalism which is largely dominant amongst contemporary adherents of the originalist doctrine. It holds that the Constitution (or any equivalent text) means, objectively, for all time, what it would have been understood to have meant by the community of speakers to which it was addressed. In other words, the Constitution means, basically, what the people who were engaged in the ratification debates thought it meant at the time.

Now, under this understanding of originalism, there’s a way of thinking that a legal positivistic doctrine might encompass the entire shroud of implicature (as I just put it) which imbues the constitutional text with its meaning. This is presumably because there is a fact of the matter as to what the political, legal, moral, and social conventions which provided the interpretive context in which the Constitution was initially understood, and these facts can presumably be unearthed, ideally through the law-office history which serves as the originalist jurisprudence's primary research tool.

and

Two things should here be noted. One is that we’ve drastically expanded the realm of meaning for ‘this Constitution’ to something which can be recovered, for the most part, through a within-the-four-corners interpretation of the text to one which requires a Quentin Skinner-esque full contextualization of the constitutional text within its complete intellectual habitat. To read the Constitution in this way properly would require fully getting inside the heads of those who wrote—reading what they read, understanding as they understood, thinking what they thought. As a conceptual matter, we might have identified a way originalism could meet the Vermeulean challenge. As a practical matter, it would be almost insane for anyone not experienced as a Cambridge School historian to try.

Or maybe a people would need a tradition with which they understood and interpreted the Constitution, and passed this tradition on to their descendants so that it would be understood and interpreted properly by them as well.
But if too many people are required to spread the tradition properly, is there any reasonable guarantee that the tradition will be kept?

If the meaning of a text could be lost so easily (and indeed even within the first generation appeals to the text alone could not suffice to prevent abuses), then maybe 1. many more things should have been explicitly written out by the ratifying conventions as addenda or the like, to be approved by all, or 2. the project of having a written constitution for a federal system should have been reconsidered. But those who ratified the Constitution were also hung up on their assumption that states were normative polities, so we should not expect them to have that much wisdom.

If the tradition no longer exists by which one can properly interpret the document, or there is no longer a shared consensus on its meaning, then is it still valid and binding as an agreement? If one cannot come to an agreement, is the compact automatically void, or does not still need to go through the motion of repealing it and replacing it with a different legal state of affairs?

Corporations

At @AmerCompass, @PatrickDeneen and @AndyPuzder kick off their debate on the nature of corporate obligations to workers, families, communities, and the nation.https://t.co/wqFps8B1uX

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) July 9, 2020

Edit.
See also:

Deneen's article is one of the best things I have read in a long time. https://t.co/tImfzTxXxJ

— 𝔓𝔢𝔡𝔯𝔬 𝔏. 𝔊𝔬𝔫𝔷𝔞𝔩𝔢𝔷 (@emeriticus) July 10, 2020

Freedom of Association

Freedom of association is important, but this essay strikes me as a typical libertarian/liberal exposition of that freedom. We can agree that there is a freedom of association, or a right of association, which cannot be infringed upon by some [higher] political authority.

Public Discourse: Reviving the Freedom of Association by Nathanael Blake

Blake builds upon this book from Kansas University Press: Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism by Luke C. Sheahan.

Dreher Talks about His Forthcoming Book

And he talks about the QAnon stuff in a Dreherian way... Going to skip over that.



QAnon & Living By Lies:

As you regular readers know, this book is about the creeping “soft totalitarianism” in our society, and what Christian dissidents who lived under Soviet bloc communism can tell us about how to recognize it and resist it. In its most simple definition, “totalitarianism” is a word used to describe a state in which all things are politicized. The key difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is in the first, the state only seeks a monopoly on political action, whereas in the latter, the state wants to command all aspects of life, and — this is key — to compel not only obedience, but internal assent. As Winston Smith was told, you must learn to love Big Brother.

The word was invented in fascist Italy, but has been applied both to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and its vassals. One consistent story that we have heard from anti-communist dissidents is that the entire system was built on lies — that is, on the willingness of people to assent to lies. Vaclav Havel (who was not a Christian) said that the only resistance available to people under communism, where it was impossible to build political opposition, was to seek to “live in truth” — that is, to refuse to participate in lies. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was even more emphatic on this point. The title of my book is taken from his final message to the Soviet people in 1974, on the eve of his expulsion from the country. That essay, “Live Not By Lies,” urged readers to engage in passive resistance to the regime of lies: that is, to refuse to say, or to appear to say, something that they believe is untrue, just to keep the peace.

How far does resistance go? In this respect perhaps Herbert McCabe was more daring -- I will get that post published soon.

Virtue Politics

HUP: Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy by James Hankins

Liberal democracy’s difficulties are always with us. But a reasonably just regime seems more prudent than claims for a non-partisan regime of truly virtuous rulers. https://t.co/9pStu0e77G

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 12, 2020

When James Hankins’ humanists promote virtue and humanist learning as solutions for tyranny they are being naïve. https://t.co/VCVTThNfyb

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) May 12, 2020

The Complicated Politics of Virtue by Mark Blitz

Mark Blitz is probably a Straussian. Still, it doesn't seem like the book is that helpful and one should probably read the primary sources themselves instead. As for a book detailing the influence these Renaissance thinkers had on actual statesmen... what book covers that?

Liberal Republicanism

A subversion of a good regime with bad assumptions about society. Yankee personal background? Or just his intellectual background?

Republican Liberty and the Failure of Substantive Due Process by James R. Rogers

Republican liberty means that people are not subjected to the arbitrary will of another, which is slavery. Hence, the repeated identification by the American colonists of the abuses of British rule with an intent to reduce Americans to the status of slaves. The argument wasn’t that Americans asserted the British designed to make chattel slaves of Americans. Rather, the Americans argued that if the principle be granted allowing for arbitrary governance, then they had conceded the critical principle distinguishing freemen from slaves, and there was no logical stopping point between their state and the state of abject slavery.

If citizens are subjected to the will of some who are not accountable to them, how is that republicanism? This is a very poor definition of liberty, if that is all there is to it. Liberty means not being ruled by another, first of all by a foreign power, and second, by a domestic power which has no just claim to authority. As for the will being the principle under consideration, rather than order or reason, I don't know if the author is being sloppy or deliberate in espousing some form of voluntarism. Slaves are subject to the rule of another, it may be just or it may be unjust, and whether it is to be judged arbitrary or not depends on whether the good of the one ruled is considered or not. (I am not going to explain here how the good of the slave is to be taken into account and what protections slaves should have from their masters, except to say that there are standards of justice prohibiting masters from harming their slaves unjustly.)