Facta non verba

 

How much effort do you think society should put into detecting and punishing bad actions? And how much to detect and punish bad speech? And how much to detect and punish bad thoughts or beliefs?

Now how much attention do we give to thoughtcrime? Or bad words?

God, how easy it would be to do bad deeds if you had the self-restraint never to talk about it.

On socialism

 

The same people who were "liberals" 30 years ago, and "progressives" 10 years ago, have now started rebranding themselves "socialists." Why the constant rebranding? The right doesn't seem to do this. I think it's related to the shift leftwards of the Democratic party—each new generation of activists wants to prove it's more leftist than the last one. 

 

I'm probably fighting a losing battle, but it's disturbing that so many people want to affiliate themselves with socialism, an evil totalitarian system that has killed tens of millions of people. And when you ask, generally they don't actually endorse any socialist ideas. Generally they endorse garden-variety liberalism, with higher taxes, more regulations, and a welfare state. 

 

The conversation goes like this.

 

I'm a Nazi.

 

—What? That's terrible.

And by Nazi, I mean that I enjoy baking pies.

—Um, okay, I guess you CAN use the word 'Nazi' that way, but it's sure gonna confuse people. And why would you want to use a label associated with a bunch of evil murderers anyway?

Oh, the Nazis weren't TRUE Nazis. TRUE Nazism, as defined by me, is about baking delicious pies. You have some sort of problem with pies?

—No, but the dictionary—

Screw the dictionary. I can be a Nazi if I say I'm a Nazi!

But why do you want to?

Rating Ulysses

Do we rate Ulysses S Grant as a poor president, because he was incompetent, drunk and, if not corrupt, tolerated corruption, or as a good president, because he said the right things about race?

His early military career showed flashes of brilliance before he resigned from a post in California amid accusations, almost certainly justified, of drunkenness. He then failed at various business ventures, a lifelong tendency that accompanied a penchant for trusting swindlers. Not long before the civil war he was virtually broke, walking the streets of St Louis in shabby clothing selling firewood.

Ideologies are Teams

If an ideology is correct, everyone who believes in that ideology is a good person. Therefore, a feminist can never do bad things to women. And a conservative can never break the law.

If an ideology is correct, it must disagree with every incorrect ideology. If you believe in an incorrect ideology, you cannot simultaneously believe in a correct one, even on different topics.

The Victim/Villain Fallacy

There are two sides to every question: Red Team and Blue Team. You get to pick which side you're on, but you have to be on a side. You can't be neutral and you can't be for or against both sides.

What if I really, really hate them both? Response: If you were a right-thinking person, you'd be on the Red Team. Staying neutral means you must be Blue.

Can I be on Team Blue and still think their coach sucks? No. Picking a team means you are endorsing everything they currently do and everything they've done in the past, even before you were born.

One team is 100% innocent, the other team is 100% guilty. I say, "Red Team cheated!" This reveals I am on Team Blue. What if Red Team really did cheat? Doesn't matter. My saying something bad about Red is enough to establish I am Blue. The truth value of what I said, or whether I believe it to be true, doesn't matter.

Another way to play this game is the "How can you compare?" tack.

Me: "Red Team Player got arrested for beating up his girlfriend. They should fire him!" 


Response: "That's nothing! Blue Team Player murdered six women! How can you compare them?"


Me: "Murder is indeed worse than assault. Okay, fire Blue Team Player too."


Response: "Good. I'm glad we agree Red Team Player did nothing wrong."

What if I try to say something nuanced, like "Red Team has a great goalie but Blue Team has better offense"?

Two possible responses: you can choose not to remember part of this statement. "She said, AND I QUOTE, "Red Team has a great goalie." Therefore, she's on the Red side."

Or, you can assume bad faith. "She's trying to sound fair and balanced, but she can't really believe Blue has good offensive players; if she did, she'd be Blue, and we know she's not Blue, because she said something good about Red."

I don't know how to win this game. So far I just settle for pointing it out.

The Victim/Villain Fallacy

There are two sides to every question: Red Team and Blue Team. You get to pick which side you're on, but you have to be on a side. You can't be neutral and you can't be for or against both sides.

What if I really, really hate them both? Well, if you're not on the Red Team, all the Red Teamers will assume you're a dirty Blue Teamer. And, if you're not on the Blue Team, all the Blue Teamers will assume you're an ignorant Red Teamer.

He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

—Catch-22

Can I be on Team Blue and still think their coach sucks? No. Picking a team means you are endorsing everything they currently do and everything they've done in the past, even before you were born.

One team is 100% innocent, the other team is 100% guilty. I say, "Red Team cheated!" This reveals I am on Team Blue. What if Red Team really did cheat? Doesn't matter. My saying something bad about Red is enough to establish I am Blue. The truth value of what I said, or whether I believe it to be true, doesn't matter.

Another way to play this game is the "How can you compare?" tack.

Me: "Red Team Player got arrested for beating up his girlfriend. They should fire him!"
Response: "That's nothing! Blue Team Player murdered six women! How can you compare them?"
Me: "Murder is indeed worse than assault. Okay, fire Blue Team Player too."
Response: "Good. I'm glad we agree Red Team Player did nothing wrong."

What if I try to say something nuanced, like "Red Team has a great goalie but Blue Team has better offense"?

Two possible responses: you can choose not to remember part of this statement. "She said, AND I QUOTE, "Red Team has a great goalie." Therefore, she's on the Red side."
Or, you can assume bad faith. "She's trying to sound fair and balanced, but she can't really believe Blue has good offensive players; if she did, she'd be Blue, and we know she's not Blue, because she said something good about Red."

It's easy enough, for leftists, to imagine confronting a mob of racial bigots, McCarthyites, or religious fundamentalists. The harder test is resistance to public opinion in one's own camp.

--Hitchens

I don't know how to win this game. So far I just settle for pointing it out.

Matal v. Tam and offensive speech

This week's case of Matal v. Tam was a challenge to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rules brought by a California rock band known as The Slants.

• The US PTO will not register trademarks that are “disparaging” to “persons,” because of a rule in the 1946 Lanham Act. What this means is largely left to the discretion of the individual patent examiner. There is, however, a policy that it doesn't matter if the person seeking to register the trademark is a member of the disparaged group of persons. The Slants's schtick is “reclaiming” stereotypes about Asian-Americans; doesn't matter to the PTO, who denied their trademark application as disparaging.
• Simon Tam (frontman of the band) claimed this was a violation of his free speech rights. Conspicuously missing from this case, as with many such test cases, is an explanation for how a minor rock band can afford to go all the way to the Supreme Court. (Amicus brief by the Redskins.)
• I guess some people are just really passionate about protecting their rights, not that I would understand that.
• Query what “disparaging to persons” means. Tam attempted to argue that the regulation should be interpreted to prohibit only trademarks that disparage individual persons. Under this interpretation, you can disparage groups like Asian-Americans, but you can't name your hardware store “The Anti-Walmart,” or your bar “Trump Sucks.” The court found that there was no evidence either in the text or legislative history for this reading.
• Isn't this whole issue why defamation law exists? Should the government really be in the business of protecting people's hurt feelings? Several cases in this area about people who want to use religious trademarks for wine, such as Agnus Dei wine or Madonna wine. Is preventing blasphemy a legitimate function of our government? I of course think not.
• Anyway. The government's best argument is that trademark registration is not individual speech, but government speech, meaning that the First Amendment doesn't apply. No one is putting The Slants' members in prison for using that name; they just can't have a registered trademark.
• It sounds odd to say that the First Amendment doesn't apply at all to government speech, doesn't it? But if you think about it, it would make no sense otherwise. The government speech doctrine is why the government can fund anti-smoking messages without also funding pro-smoking messages, or why the National Endowment for the Arts can fund some artworks but not others. So far so good.
• More debatable cases of government speech: can the government allow certain monuments but not others in a public park? Can the government allow certain messages and not others on license plates? In both cases, yes.
• But the Court is concerned about “dangerous misuse” of this doctrine. License plates and public parks are under the control of the state and identified in the public mind with the state; not so trademarks.
• If trademark registration is government speech, it's incoherent. There are both pro- and anti-abortion trademarks, pro- and anti-capitalist trademarks. How can the government intend to send both messages? I think this is a weak argument. Why can't government speech be incoherent? Private individuals certainly speak incoherently at times.
• Does private speech become government speech just because the private speech benefits from a government program? Think of copyright law. Can the government refuse copyright protection to books it doesn't like on the grounds that copyright registration is mere government speech? Surely being unable to copyright books would be a still infringement of speech rights, even if writers retained the ability to publish uncopyrighted works.
• Another problem here is the amount of discretion given to the patent examiner. One reason The Slants's trademark application was denied was “ the fact that several bloggers and commenters to articles on the band have indicated that they find the term and the applied-for mark offensive.” Dear God, please let's not make free speech rights dependent on what people on the Internet find offensive. If this were the law, I'm pretty sure staging Othello would be a felony.
• Therefore, trademarks are private speech, and banning disparaging trademarks is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. “Giving offense is a viewpoint,” and--I say this at every opportunity--speech may not be prohibited merely because it is offensive.

Don't use the courts to force people to like you

Social approval! We all want it. And we're never going to get it--at least, not as much as we want. Whether the people around you approve of you is not within your control. Well, some of it is--you can take some voluntary actions to improve your chances of approval. Being nice and tipping and taking showers helps. But that will never guarantee you get the approval you want.

Why not? Part of it is pure luck--or “privilege,” grudgingly. Part of it is the “you can't please everyone” effect. Being upper-class is generally good, but not if you want to fit in in a lower-class environment. Some people resent immigrants; others think Americans are dumb. Some people will hate you for being black, and others for being white. You can be fat-shamed or skinny-shamed. So, fundamentally, we have to live in a world in which, no matter who you are, some people will hate you for no good reason. A woman has to navigate a world with misogynists and rapists in it. An atheist has to accept that many people think he's going to burn in hell. And gay people have to live with the knowledge that many of their neighbors disapprove of their sexual and romantic relationships. For the person who finds these facts upsetting, I recommend Agent Cooper's mantra.

FBI Agent Roger Hardy: They're liable to extradite you for murder and drug trafficking.

Special Agent Dale Cooper: These are things I cannot control.

This is my problem with the current gay rights movement. As a libertine and libertarian, I have of course been strongly in favor of gay rights as long as I can remember. When gay marriage was banned, and, earlier, when gay sex was illegal, there was a crying need to fight so that gay people can get what they deserve.

But now? Every time I read about a new gay rights case, it's, well, bullying. Suing the small business owner who refuses to sell flowers or cake or custom-printed T-shirts for gay weddings or gay causes. These are not cases about getting gay people what they deserve-- the same privileges and rights the rest of us enjoy. This is using the courts to force the illusion of social approval.

Not even the plaintiffs claim that any person has actually been damaged in these cases. One litigant in a right-to-wedding-flowers case claimed that his actual damages were some $17, or the cost of the gas he burned when he had to drive to a different florist. In another case involving a transgender high school student, the biologically male student wanted to use the girls' locker room; the school wanted him to use the boys' room, and offered the obvious compromise; a private changing room for this student. The offer was rejected--proving, beyond a doubt, that the transgender bathroom controversy is not about providing safe and decent bathroom facilities for transgender people. It's about forcing society to accept the transgender theory of gender. This is completely wrong. Partly, of course, I think it's wrong because my concept of gender is different. But it would be wrong to use the courts to force people to accept my gender theory too! I just have to live in a world in which most people are terribly, terribly, wrong, and, rather than being something the courts ought to correct, this seems like the human condition.

Litigating for social approval is not what the courts are there for. Social approval is not something gay or transgender people deserve, because desserts don't make sense in this context, because social approval is inherently arbitrary.

I wonder if the gay rights advocates agree with me on this point. Is it that they think of approval as something that you are entitled to, if you do x and y? In my life, I've gone from being one of the most stigmatized, powerless and low-status people in our society, to now being reasonably successful and respected. From having to ask dumb people for permission to go to the bathroom to having a job that largely consists of telling smart people what to do. And yet, I feel like the same person. It creates some cognitive dissonance that I've never really known how to communicate. But, other people have not had this experience. If you've always had people approve of you if you did the “right” thing, I imagine you might come to think of approval as something you “deserve.”

Another possibility is that gay rights advocates think of these cases not as means of redressing specific wrongs done to the plaintiffs, but rather as a means of shifting popular opinion. So it's not about fighting for what someone deserves, but rather conducting something of a morality play in which the state of the law is merely a public relations tool.

I would be interested in hearing your opinion, especially if you agree with these gay rights cases. Do you think social approval is something that people deserve? Or do you think these cases are a PR tool? Or do you think our disagreement resides somewhere else?

Gay conversion therapy

This is an interesting issue that I expect to neatly divide the liberals from the libertarians. Should "conversion therapy," a.k.a. therapy intended to make gay people straight, be banned?

Arguments against it:

• It's unpopular with the mob. "In two different national polls, more than 60 percent of Americans indicated that they believe conversion therapy doesn’t work." Who cares?
  
• The American Psychological Association says it's not backed by evidence. But this would support banning pretty much all psychotherapy, not to mention alternative medicine. Psychiatry is not a science, and it's common to see that any given treatment works for some and not others.
  
• Part of the reason there's no evidence base is that it's hard to verify whether someone who says he is straight is straight. I don't see a way around this, other than a longer follow-up period.
  
• Homosexuality isn't a "mental illness." But whether something counts as a mental illness or not is a political decision. People should be able to seek treatment for whatever is troubling them, regardless of whether it's in the DSM.
  
• Conversion therapy sometimes makes people feel worse. Again, no different from any other therapy.
  
• Children should not be given conversion therapy because they don't have the capacity to freely consent to it. I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument that children shouldn't be brainwashed. But why is brainwashing bad when applied to “correct” homosexuality, and not when applied to “correct” drug use, heterosexual sex, bad grades or any of the other sins for which children are sent to therapy?
  

Argument for:

• Boils down to the basic libertarian argument that people ought to be able to do what they want to with their own lives. Like it or not, some people don't want to be gay and are desperate for a way to avoid it. Cultural liberals may think it's laughable or sad for a gay man to marry a woman and call himself straight. But is it any more absurd than some of the weird sex liberals get up to?
  

North Korean epiphanies

What causes North Koreans to become disillusioned with the regime? Here are five examples of the little epiphanies which caused people to wonder whether after all, life might not be better across the border. They illustrate why strict control over its subjects’ movement and contact with the outside world are important for the regime.

“One North Korean soldier recalled a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: if North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?”

 For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line.

The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

Why it’s forbidden to listen to South Korean radio:

 A North  Korean maritime official accidentally picked up a South Korean radio broadcast--a situation comedy featuring two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex.

He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. He had never known anyone, certainly not young women, who owned a private car.

 During the famine, a young North Korean man found himself near enough to the border to see the Chinese countryside. He noticed that in China, the cornfields weren’t guarded by armed men, and the trees still had bark.

A North Korean pediatrician, still loyal to the regime but desperate for food, swam across the river to China. She went up to the first farmhouse she saw to ask for help finding a job. As she peeked through the gate, she saw a heaping bowl of rice on the floor of the courtyard. Back home, rice had long been unavailable at any price, and people were eating flour made from ground bark and corn stalks. Why would so much precious food be left out in the courtyard? Then she heard the barking. Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
   
Examples are taken from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

Graphic labels on cigarettes packages

Forcing cigarette companies to put graphic warning labels, including health warnings, pictures of diseased organs, and the 1-800-QUIT-NOW number, on cigarette packages, is a violation of the First Amendment, according to a recent and totally correct ruling by the DC Circuit (pdf).

You might wonder why this is so, since cigarette companies are already required to put warning labels on packs, while alcohol manufacturers have other warning labels, and all makers of packaged food are required to list ingredients, calories and so forth. The legal reasoning behind this regulation is that the government had a legitimate interest in making sure that consumers are accurately informed about the contents and risks of the food, beverages and cigarettes they consume.

Now, there is nothing in the Constitution restricting the ability of government agencies to campaign against smoking, taking the public stand that the risks of smoking outweigh its benefits. The libertarians among us might think that this is not a proper use of the power and money of the state, but the libertarians among us are often disappointed. However, the state still does not have the right to force any individual or company to express a certain opinion. The federal district court and DC Circuit agree that graphic labels and the QUIT NOW message go beyond informing consumers about health risks and amount to discouraging smoking. (In fact, the FDA made no secret of the fact that it hoped the labels would nudge people to quit.) This "ideological" message is one the government cannot force a company to send.

The Companies contend that, to the extent the graphic warnings go beyond the textual warnings to shame and repulse smokers and denigrate smoking as an antisocial act, the message is ideological and not informational. “[B]y effectively shouting well-understood information to consumers,” they explain, “FDA is communicating an ideological message, a point of view on how people should live their lives: that the risks from smoking outweigh the pleasure that smokers derive from it, and that smokers make bad personal decisions, and should stop smoking.”

No one doubts the government can promote smoking cessation programs; can use shock, shame, and moral opprobrium to discourage people from becoming smokers; and can use its taxing and regulatory authority to make smoking economically prohibitive and socially onerous. And the government can certainly require that consumers be fully informed about the dangers of hazardous products. But this case raises novel questions about the scope of the government’s authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest—in this case, by making “every single pack of cigarettes in the country [a] mini billboard” for the government’s anti-smoking message.

The so-called "warning labels" are not really warning at all, the Court held, but propaganda. Some convey no relevant facts, and others might be deceptive: an image of someone smoking through a tracheotomy hole might give the inaccurate impression that a tracheotomy is a common result of smoking.

Many of the images do not convey any warning information at all, much less make an “accurate statement” about cigarettes. For example, the images of a woman crying, a small child, and the man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I QUIT” do not offer any information about the health effects of smoking. And the “1-800-QUIT-NOW” number, when presented without any explanation about the services provided on the hotline, hardly sounds like an unbiased source of information. These inflammatory images and the provocatively-named hotline cannot rationally be viewed as pure attempts to convey information to consumers. They are unabashed attempts to evoke emotion (and perhaps embarrassment) and browbeat consumers into quitting.

I find myself saying, as often before, thank God for the First Amendment. Cigarette companies in other countries are already forced to use graphic "warning" labels. Now, if only we still had the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments...

Questioning the conservative explanation for poverty

Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, is planning a book on poverty. Working title: Poverty: Who to Blame. I’m excited, but judging from his blog, he has some big blind spots when talking about poverty.

The basic truth conservatives start with, when talking about poverty, is that people who finish high school, do not commit crimes, do not have children before marriage, and find and hold a full-time minimum-wage job are very unlikely to be poor. This is true. Charles Karelis makes this point in his book, The Persistence of Poverty:

One 2003 simulation estimates that if all nonelderly and nondisabled heads of families with children worked full-time at their present wages, or at the wages they could earn based on their education and other factors, the fraction of the US population living below the poverty line would fall from 13 percent to 7.5 percent.

 

Caplan’s advice for poor women in particular is to refrain from childbearing until they find an eligible (stably employed, marriage-minded, nonabusive) man to marry. It sounds very simple. So what's the problem?

Here are some complicating questions I would expect the book to address:

1) Is it true that having children out of marriage hurts women’s economic prospects? Evidence from Kathryn Edin for one suggests that women who start out in the same economic place end up in the same place whether they become single teenage mothers or not.

2) Is it true, as he asserts, that poor people drink more and use more drugs? Actually, no. The consensus seems to be that alcohol use and income are positively correlated; richer people are more likely to drink and to drink more. Use of illegal drugs is correlated with poverty, but if Caplan thinks that substance use is one of the causes of poverty, he needs to explain why drugs and alcohol are so different here. They both cost money, carry health risks, and increase the risk of getting in trouble with the law. If the poor have lower impulse control, why are they better at controlling the impulse to drink?

3) What if there aren’t enough eligible men?

For women like me, it’s a no-brainer to wait a decade or more after puberty before having children. We know that there will be eligible men out there for us. If anything, the supply of men increases and improves over time: a 25-year-old college graduate has access to a greater variety and higher quality of men than a 15-year-old high school student.

Is this true for poor women living in poor neighborhoods? Isn’t it possible that the opposite is true for them: that the number of 18-year-old men who are marriage-minded, childless, without a criminal record and out of jail  is actually greater than the number of 25- to 30-year-olds who meet those requirements?

This is something of a speculative tangent, though. But it is true that there is a very high ratio of marriage-age women to marriage-age men in poor neighborhoods. Factor in the very high unemployment rates for young black men with no college degree, and the number of eligible men goes down further. 

Caplan rightly thinks preaching abstinence is unrealistic for most, and suggests contraception instead. But suggesting that women delay childbearing until they find an eligible man, even when this might take decades and might mean giving up the possibility of motherhood altogether, is almost as unrealistic.

4) What about the dangers of marriage? Caplan says that marriage is a good economic decision: two people living together spend less than two living apart. But it's not just about the money: what about the risk that the seemingly eligible man might lose his job, become abusive, or steal the woman’s money? Not to speak of the loss of independence.

5) What if finding full-time employment is impossible? Many minimum-wage employers deliberately avoid hiring full-time staff, because after that 40-hour-a-week threshold, they will be forced to provide more benefits. Anyone can get a job at McDonald’s, but getting 40 hours a week is a lot harder.

The largest liberal objection, of course, is that it shouldn’t matter who we blame for poverty. No one denies that the poor exist and are generally worse off than the rich. That, to me, means that they are entitled to a few of my superfluous dollars (which I probably would have spent on liquor anyway.)

Why object to the execution of the stupid?

The latest liberal outrage is the execution of a murderer, Marvin Wilson, who, according to his lawyers and one IQ test but not others, has an IQ of 61, below the threshold of 70 which Texas law takes as the minimum IQ needed to take responsibility for one’s actions.

For a while I was baffled, since many people seemed outraged by this without
 really saying why.  After some thought, I’ve decided this is not really about the death penalty.

Rather, it seems to me like a difference of opinion between those who believe judicial punishments exist to punish “guilt” (whatever that means) and those who believe the purpose of the judicial system is to protect law-abiding citizens.

If you fall into the former camp, then, if the criminal is too stupid to know what he was doing, if he is young, if he is uneducated, if he is poor, and so forth, his guilt is less. He should be punished either not at all or else the bare minimum amount. We should favor more humane prisons to promote rehabilitation. The death penalty should either not be used at all, since it precludes rehabilitation, or it should only be used for older, richer, more educated, and higher-IQ criminals (of which there are very few).

If you fall into the second camp, you will be inclined to say a murderer is a murderer is a danger to society. This danger should be eliminated regardless of hard-to-ascertain metaphysical “guilt”. The seriousness of the crime matters, but not the personal characteristics of the victim. If you favor more humane prisons, you will do so to decrease recidivism. You might favor the death penalty on grounds of efficiency, or you might oppose it because you think it does not deter.

Note, of course, that these two broad schools of thought are not correlated with opposing or supporting the death penalty. That’s a whole ‘nother issue involved in the Wilson case. I suspect that most people who think a low-IQ man should not be executed also think that no one should be executed–they focus on Wilson because he’s the easy propaganda case. (Just as most medical marijuana advocates favor legalizing all marijuana, but they focus on medical uses for the easy propaganda.)       

NB: Difference between rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Preventing recidivism means ensuring that criminals do not reoffend–this might mean changing hearts and minds, or scaring criminals with the threat of more or worse punishment, or preventing their contact with other or worse criminals in prison, or keeping drugs off the streets, or improving economic opportunities for low-income men, and so forth. Rehabilitation focuses on changing the criminal’s personality, so that he will understand that crime is bad.

Too much freedom?

" Too much freedom and non-conformity can be just as stifling and miserable as conformity and repression."

The sentiment expressed in these words is one of our modern platitudes. It can be found in the most diverse contexts--just now I found this quote in an article on The Simpsons. Yet this thought comes from a place of pure ignorance. Which of us has ever had the chance to tire of freedom and non-conformity? Which of us has even come close to tiring of them? It's like saying "getting everything you want won't make you happy." Well, maybe not, but have you tried getting everything you want?

The Sixties

The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, has remarkably little to say about the Sixties as such. Most of the book is a personal meditation on the nature of youth--and one of the best such I’ve read, for instance this passage of realistic psychology:

I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.

Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip went the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate, necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer.

In the last two chapters, the author uses three of my favorite sixties and seventies theorists--Ivan Illich, R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz--to explore guiltily how “liberation got confused with libertarianism” and the Sixties became the Thatcher era.

The author describes radical teaching practices in the sixties, echoing some of the criticisms her political opponents make today:

We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged...The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we ddin’t really like it.

Diski’s work as a teacher was influenced by Illich’s ideas, which she now says were both more radical and more right-wing than she had realized. Here’s a sampling of Illich, the author of “Deschooling Society” and the man “too radical for the radical generation”:

The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect...In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...

Illich seemed like a leftist at the time, but in fact, when his sort of libertarianism is opposed to paternalistic statism, Diski and her generation are usually on the side of the state.

The majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all...

Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right...

I will refrain from comment on the supposed Thatcherite/Nazi connection. Perhaps if the author were American, she would realize the Right gets a lot more radical than Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, a less pejorative way of describing Sixties leftists is to say that they were concerned with caring for people rather than simply leaving them free to take care of themselves as best they can. Here’s where Szasz comes in--Diski, a former mental patient, rightly criticizes the author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” for being more concerned with the rights and freedoms of the so-called mentally ill than with their happiness and safety. (Although Szasz would probably point out that the nature of happiness and the value of safety are highly subjective.)

[Szasz believed that] the State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed...He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others...Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem.

Szasz also suggested that when the so-called mentally ill cause real social problems (by stealing, committing violent crimes, or just being a public nuisance) they should be prosecuted like other criminals. Diski takes this suggestion as a sign of Szasz’s lack of compassion for suffering. In fact, Szasz thought that the mentally ill would be protected by being treated like criminals, since those accused or convicted of a crime have many rights and privileges those accused or convicted of mental illness don’t have. (Tangent: an accused criminal has the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial (usually by jury). Most of those convicted of a crime are given a specific, limited sentence, one that cannot be extended indefinitely for the same offense and one that does not depend solely on the discretion of their jailors. From within a prison, prisoners can teach themselves the law, appeal their cases, sue, complain about their treatment. A person accused of mental illness or incarcerated in a mental asylum has none of these advantages.)

Despite this misreading, Diski, in characterizing Szasz and Illich as ‘radical’ ‘far right’ thinkers is pointing to a real and unresolved tension between the idea that people should be free and the idea that society should care for its members (whether they like it or not). The school versus the market, if you will. In the Sixties, the author thought that communitarianism and liberty were naturally joined in leftist political theory--after Thatcher, she knows better, and seems quite willing to abandon liberty along with libertarianism.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Marxist theories of human nature, why Asian people don't understand sidewalks, and, of course, Proust!

George W. Bush's Marxist heritage

Three lessons the Bush administration learned from Trotsky and Stalin:

1) Democracy is good (when the right people win)

Trotsky's amazing transformation from a supporter of Lenin and totalitarianism to a foe of Stalin and friend of democracy just happened to come at the same time he was thrown out of Russia and the Party. True socialist democracy, he believed, is shown to be such by the fact that the workers (read: Trotskyists) win elections. Similarly, the Western world regularly rejects free and fair elections when they don't lead to the right result. If the people the West supports don't win, the election's result can't be 'really' the will of the people, and the people in question can expect to see itself ostracized (like Austria in the 90s) or even denied food aid (like Palestine more recently).

2) The people are with us (they just don't know it yet)

We are giving the people what they want, since we are on the crest of the wave of history. Just a little longer, and they'll realize they want the form of government we choose to give them.

3) Whether a war is aggressive or defensive matters less than its class character

Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin believed that in any war, the side of the proletariat is the right side. Whether the proletariat started the war or not matters little--morality doesn't apply to a conflict between capitalist imperialists and the proletariat. Class is all we should notice. Hence Trotsky's prediction that World War II would end with all the capitalist countries allied against the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Bush doctrine of 'preemptive war' and the plausible-sounding theory that democracies don't fight each other.

(This theory is in fact deeply doubtful. Its most well-known exponent defines 'democracy' as a system in which two-thirds of adult men can vote. But this definition is invented solely to support the author's thesis--if any more than two-thirds of adult men were required to be enfranchised, ancient Athens wouldn't qualify as a democracy. Any less than two-thirds and the Confederacy would. 'Democracies never fight each other' only if we arbitrarily categorize some societies (like the Confederacy and Sparta) as oligarchies, and some not-very-different ones as democracies.)

The more I learn about Marxism, the more I realize that the troublesome thing about a government is not its specific policies but rather the structure and nature of governmental power. In other words, high taxes on the rich versus high taxes on the poor matters much less than totalitarianism versus liberalism.

Birth control

This article on the politics of abortion is pretty okay, but the interesting part is the statistics:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.

(And those women who said they did use birth control were probably often talking about nothing but a condom!)

I think we need to, as far as we can, dissociate birth control from sex. As it is, people think of the decision to go on birth control as a preparation for sex; which makes young women hesitant about starting birth control, or about admitting it. (That's probably why so many young women say they're on the pill for medical reasons.) Now, the average age of first sexual intercourse in the U.S. is sixteen. Not a few girls do it at 12 or 13. Every woman should go on birth control by the age of 14 at the latest. As a precautionary measure. I would advise a public relations campaign aimed at parents. Parents don't like to admit their daughters will have sex--well, frame it as a medical issue, as was done more or less successfully with the HPV vaccine. That way, the ones who want to have sex will do it without being so neurotic about it and without getting pregnant, and the ones who don't won't be harmed.

Politics in Utah

This Slate article suggests that politics in Utah are getting more moderate. As a former resident, I very much doubt it. Oh so they have bars now? Very progressive. As long as a religion has verve and vigor in it, it will be conservative; and the LDS Church, one of the fastest-growing religions in the WORLD, shows no sign of dying out.

In fact, I'm worried that people will come to think that this is a healthy and tolerant version of religion. Mormons, with their polished image, happy families and charitable ways, are more camera-friendly than the guy with the Southern accent shouting that God hates fags; but they are just as religious and, deep down, just as exclusive. In fact, Mormons, at least in Utah outside Salt Lake, get to live in their own isolated communities; where a 21-year-old single woman is considered an old maid; where a person can live his whole life without meeting anyone who believes in evolution--and for that reason, Mormonism is significantly more dangerous for the rest of us than traditional Evangelical Christianity, whose believers are less isolated and more likely to encounter people who disagree with them.

A church will tolerate dissent as much as is convenient for it; let's not think that constitutes real open-mindedness.

Why gay marriage is unpopular

The gay rights movement likes to frame the gay marriage question as a civil rights issue, by analogy with Loving v. Virginia . If we are to accept this, race is like sexual practice.The theory here goes, there are black people and there are white people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore members of those groups should be allowed to marry whomever they please. And similarly, there are straight people and there are gay people, and the two groups are morally equal, and therefore they should be allowed to marry whomever they please.

Now this argument makes sense to very many people, especially to those of us who are already sympathetic with gay rights. But it is not efficacious. It won’t convince anyone who isn’t already half convinced. In fact, I’m not sure it’s true. Race is immutable, short of plastic surgery. But the people you have sex with, or whether you have sex at all, are choices. (Being gay is generally thought to be innate; I’m not so sure; but actually fucking is a choice.) This is why opponents of gay marriage by and large reject the notion that gay people are morally equal with straights, and the notion that gay people can’t help it. So the civil rights analogy makes no sense to them. There must be another way to convince them. This is diplomacy, after all; meet the other side where they are, not where you wish they were.

It seems to me that a lot of gay rights supporters are simply willing to sit back and let time do their work for them; and time is probably on their side. But legalizing gay marriage through the courts will never create widespread tolerance of gay rights; did Roe v Wade make abortion popular? If gay marriage becomes legal against the wishes of a majority or large minority of the people, homosexuals will get symbolic recognition but not actual safety and protection from discrimination. Isolating the people who think homosexuality is wrong will just intensify them in their hatred.

What would be likely to reach them? Well, it might help, for instance, to read what people on the right actually say about gay marriage. It seems to me that gay rights advocates tend not to read these things, and to reject every argument their opponents make as motivated by unconscious hatred for gays. Or religion motivated by hatred. Is there unconscious hatred? Well, probably, sometimes. We can’t negotiate with hatred--that’s too bad-- but what we can address are the rational and plausible fears motivating most of the enemies of gay marriage. In order to do this we need to understand where the other side stands. No one ever engages in successful diplomacy without making some effort to figure out what the other guy is saying, what he’s thinking, what he wants and what he fears. We can also learn from the world of linguistics that when two people use the same word, it’s not always safe to assume they mean the same thing. Say “gay marriage” to one of its supporters, and he probably visualizes crowds of happy newlyweds. Say “gay marriage” to one of its opponents, and he thinks of much more than that. It’s not just married people to him--it’s one more step on the road towards the institutionalization of tolerance for homosexuality. If those are too many abstract nouns, it’s a step towards a world in which gays and liberals have power and people like us don’t.

Read the right wing and see what they fear. For example, Focus on the Family’s little dystopian fantasy about what they feared would happen if Obama won the election. It’s called “The World in 2016” or something like that. They imagine, for instance, that if we legalized gay marriage, public schools would start teaching children that homosexuality is okay. Christian teachers might be fired for refusing to teach this. Christian churches might be sued out of existence if they refused to marry gay people. Christian ministers or anyone else who said in public that homosexuality is a sin, or is a choice, might be sued or imprisoned.

If this seems farfetched, consider some of the anti-hate-speech laws which have been passed in the past few years in Britain and in the Netherlands. Religious people and MPs have been accused of slander and of hate speech for criticizing Islam. So it’s not so implausible to imagine that something similar might eventually happen here. For instance, the case in New Mexico in which a photographer refused to shoot a same-sex ceremony and was sued for it! Or this case in which a man who was found to have expressed 'hatred' was banned for life from expressing opinions critical of homosexuality in any medium, including private communications. How can people consider themselves liberals and yet do their best to use the legal system to batter people who disagree with them?

Gay rights advocates even strengthen this sort of fear by attributing all criticism of homosexuality to sheer hatred. In fact such criticism is usually based in religion, and calling a belief taken straight from the Bible “hate speech” is not likely to win over the Christians.

So what gay rights advocates should do is two things. First, de-emphasize the unconvincing analogy with civil rights. Instead, frame the argument as a libertarian issue. It is one, basically, and besides, many people on the right can sympathize with libertarian ideas. Second, reassure your enemies. Say for instance:

“We gay people just want to live our lives and hold our beliefs without being interfered with. In return, you can live your lives and hold your beliefs. That’s part of living in a democratic pluralistic society. We understand that you think homosexuality is a sin. --We disagree. But we are willing to preserve and to defend your Constitutional right to continue believing and saying what you do, and teaching your children whatever you think best. You leave us alone; we’ll leave you alone.”

Why can’t they say this?

I believe the gay rights movement is handicapped by its own moral fervor--the moral fervor, I suppose, of feeling like you have to defend your very essence as a gay person. Moral fervor is not conducive to a rational, effective and, above all, compassionate diplomacy. After all, very few people are capable of a compassionate understanding of their enemies when they believe those enemies are motivated by personal hatred for them as people. Maybe the straights would make better advocates.