The dread menace of elderly altruists, thwarted at last!

From Rad Geek comes the bizarre story of an elderly man in Florida who was arrested and fined $2,000 for offering a woman who said she needed help getting home- who was actually an undercover agent of the Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Department- a ride home in his car. His offense? After the agent repeatedly demanded to know how much money he wanted for his aid, 78-year old Rosco O’Neil finally agreed to suggest a price, at which point he was set upon by a group of police who seized and impounded his van for providing an “illegal taxi service.”

This is incredibly perverse, but the fact that O’Neil is being punished by the government for trying to help someone in need isn’t the main aspect of this that interests me. The fact that the man in this incident was obviously not engaged in anything resembling any sane person’s idea of “taxi service” is not the most bothersome thing. The most bothersome thing is that there are undercover agents hunting unlicensed taxi drivers. My first thought was that the whole idea sounded like something out of Stalinist Russia, but that’s not quite right; it more like something out of a wacky, over-the-top parody of Stalinist Russia.

I’m sure it’s not easy working for the Miami-Dade County Consumer Services Department. Every morning as you put on your bullet-proof vest to go to work, you wonder if this is the last time you’ll say goodbye to your wife and kids, if this is the day some unlicensed taxi driver hopped up on pine-scented air freshener sticks a knife between your ribs or beats you to death with his beaded back cushion. At night you lie awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, as the faces of licensed taxi drivers whose monopoly profits you couldn’t save stare accusingly back. And yet, when you look into your youngest daughter’s eyes every morning, you don’t regret the sacrifices you’ve made, because by God you are not going to let her grow up in a world where kindly old men offer transportation to people in need on every street corner. Not in your town, not while you have anything to say about it!

A quick vocabulary lesson

Is a little respect for the English language too much to ask from one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers? The answer, of course, is yes. I found this in today’s online Wall Street Journal:

When Steven Barber turned in a short story this semester for his creative-writing class at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, his instructor was alarmed. The 23-year-old student had produced an imagined account of someone on the edge of a violent breakdown, touching on suicide and murder.

"It had to be acted on immediately," says Christopher Scalia, the instructor. He alerted administrators, who reacted swiftly, searching Mr. Barber's dorm room and car. Upon discovering three guns, they had him committed to a psychiatric institution for a weekend. Then they expelled him.

Yet the psychiatrists who evaluated Mr. Barber during his hospitalization determined he was no threat to himself or others…

When, at the doctor’s urging and for the sake of my own health and well-being, I chose to spend several days in the hospital last fall due to a severe infection that required IV antibiotics, that was “hospitalization.” When other people choose to have you confined for several days without your consent, that is what is known in English as “imprisonment.” The synonyms “incarceration,” “jailing,” and “going to the big house” are also acceptable.

Various immigration thoughts

At Hit and Run, Kerry Howley posted a quote from Paul Samuelson that got me thinking. Samuelson said:

Finally, let's discuss poverty. Everyone's against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration -- new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won't reduce poverty. Period… We need a pragmatic accommodation: assimilate most people now here; shift future immigration to the highly skilled.

As Howley points out, this is a bizarre reason to object to immigration. Samuelson isn’t even trying to claim that immigrants are making things worse for Americans, he’s just objecting to the fact that they’re bringing the average down. It’s like Bill Gates fleeing in terror when I enter the room, because our combined average of our incomes would be much lower than his alone. From the standpoint of human wellbeing- even a purely American nationalist one- this is bizarre, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve heard it. I wonder if part of the objection is simply that immigrants are upsetting to some people.

I’ve often suspected that the backlash against the Industrial Revolution among contemporary intellectuals and artists was caused not so much by the objective facts about worker conditions, but by the fact that unpleasant truths were now being shoved in the faces of upper-class city dwellers. Poor farmers lived wretched lives of disease and backbreaking toil, but the intelligentsia didn’t have to look at them. Then hordes of miserable, impoverished agricultural laborers in the country became hordes of miserable, impoverished industrial laborers in the city, and now the poor had the bad taste to suffer, sicken, and die where sensitive rich people could actually see it.

That’s an uncharitable explanation of why people make arguments like Samuelson’s, but the alternative hypothesis- that they are literally willing to worsen the lives of millions of innocent, desperate people for the purpose of making national poverty statistics look prettier- is even less flattering.

As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that, to the best of my knowledge, Samuelson is correct about the poverty statistics: most of the growth is poor people entering from elsewhere and having kids here, not middle-class Americans falling into poverty. This is important to keep in mind when you’re told about poverty rates, growing numbers of people without insurance, or the like. The problem is not, as the Democratic talking point goes, that hordes of middle-class Americans can longer make ends meet, but that millions of poor people are entering the country and being inhibited in rising out of poverty by economic controls that often fall harder on poor people, and especially on poor people trying to get work without the government’s blessing. In other words, the problem isn’t that the well-off are falling, but that the poor are being stopped from rising. Of course, the way to let the poor rise isn’t going to appeal to many liberals.

Meanwhile, at Rad Geek People’s Daily, Charles Johnson has several horrifying stories of people fleeing to America to escape persecution and brutality in their homelands, only to be deemed insufficiently victimized and forcibly returned to their tormentors by the United States government.

It’s an especially brutal reminder of how ridiculous all the pious rhetoric about how illegal immigrants are awful for not “waiting in line” for “their turn” really is. It’s silly enough when you’re living in horrendous poverty and you’re put on a waiting list that might get you in a decade later, if you’re lucky; it’s utterly ludicrous when you’re fleeing from the people who hacked off pieces of your genitals.

People often say that their own ancestors entered the country legally, and that modern would-be immigrants should do likewise. Of course, if your forerunners came to this country from Ireland or Germany or in the 19^th century, it was a hell of a lot easier for your ancestors to get in legally. Even if one were to accept the premise that the state has the right to control peaceful people’s movements as restrictionists demand, pontificating about how people should patiently “wait in line,” as people did centuries ago, is utterly divorced from reality.

Science fiction, politics, and horrible, horrible wordplay

Over at my other site, which has been gobbling a lot of my time lately, I've got some thoughts on Utopianism and politics in science fiction that may be of interest.

Man's Quest for Knowledge, Part V

It's been too long since I last did this. You know, the best part of blogging isn't the opportunity for self-expression or the millions of dollars I make through AdSense every week. No, the best part is tracking the bizarre Google searches that bring people to this site. According to SiteMeter, the past few months have brought me seekers of truth questing for such things as:

Musclemen being tortured

You'd be amazed at how many hits I get for some variation on this theme. Is there some vast muscleman-hating internet subculture I'm unaware of?

asperger or just a man?

Just a man, I assure you, though my degree of Poul Anderson knowledge may seem godlike to some.

"demon spiders"
“well am peaple man with a skoll fighting kids play free”

Some people like to use Google while really, really high.

Ipecac man

One of Steve Ditko's lesser-known creations. Sadly, 60's comic audiences just weren't ready for a superhero who gained his powers from exposure to radioactive vomit.

Nobody gives a damn anymore

I'm not sure if this was intended as an actual search, or if some poor guy was just venting his frustration with life at Google. Finally, my personal favorite:

how a scorpion man gets success?

It's disappointing to think that, with the thousands of self-help books out there, this topic hasn't been covered. Imagine it: You're on the brink of losing your job, your dozens of kids don't respect you, your wife is on the brink of walking out for good because your aging stinger just can't inject venom like it used to, and who can you turn to for help and advice? Nobody, that's who. This an area of psychological research that has been shamefully neglected.

Henceforth, Leavenworth Penitentiary will be called "Funville USA"

Over at Mises Blog, Jeffrey Tucker links to this revolting New York Times op-ed by Richard Coniff (registration and a strong stomach required) in which Coniff recommends replacing the word “taxes” with the word “dues,” on the grounds that “tax” has a negative connotation, whereas “dues” suggests community and obligation and general warm fuzziness.

Now, statist attempts to twist language are hardly new- indeed, it’s an age-old tradition, and one that is especially important in an age where it’s no longer socially acceptable to just come out and say that the lower orders need to shut up and do what they’re told. Still, this is one of the more brazen attempts in recent memory.

Dues are voluntary. When I chose to quit the Cub Scouts, I stopped paying dues to that organization, and I didn’t have to move to some other youth group’s jurisdiction in order to do so. Unless I decide I want to change careers and become a professional comedian, I don’t have to pay my dues by spending years telling jokes for hostile drunks in filthy dive bars. (My real life is close enough to that already, thank you.) I don’t pay dues to the local Garden Club or the Elks or the Knights of Columbus or the League of Women Voters because I have not chosen to join those groups.

And that’s the point, of course; give a violent, coercive activity the name of a peaceful, voluntary activity to make it easier to pretend that one is actually the other. There are few things more revolting than the spectacle of someone cheerfully proposing a clever knew way to dupe victims of abuse and exploitation into submitting to- and worse, into feeling good about, into loving- their oppressors. Statists like Coniff don’t just want your money, and they don’t just want your obedience- they want your soul.

In a way, though, Coniff speaks more wisely than he knows. He points out that the term “tax” has gained a punitive, coercive connotation. In his conclusion, as he talks about the need to use language that makes people feel good and patriotic about being robbed blind (I’m paraphrasing a bit), Coniff remarks:

“Taxation” is a throwback to the time when kings picked our pockets.

Yes, exactly.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, which is good if you're trying to lose weight

Now, speaking as someone who is gradually deblobbifying himself, I don’t dispute that it would be better, all other things being equal, if people in America were fitter. Nevertheless, an article at today’s msn.com about the financial benefits of eliminating obesity, which compiles figures from various fields and concludes that the U.S. would save $487 billion every year, had some glaring problems that jumped out at me.

The medical costs of obesity-related problems such as diabetes, stroke and heart disease run near $140 billion, or more than 6% of all health-care costs. That ballpark figure was calculated by Joel Cohen, an economic researcher for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, using data from a 1998 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

There’s a fairly obvious problem here- everyone, without exception, has to die of something. You can extend your life by avoiding one form of death, and that’s great, but eventually you’ll die of something else instead. Unless that something else unexpectedly kills you on the spot – car wreck, murder, aneurysm, meteor strike, whatever- the cause of your death will have monetary medical costs, even if it’s just making you comfortable in the hospital for a few days. More likely, it will cost a great deal more than that- spending years dying of cancer or Alzheimer’s isn’t cheap.

Added to this is the fact that most medical costs are incurred by the elderly. Causality being the stubborn jerk that he is, additional years of life are added to the end of your life, not the beginning or middle, which means more years to develop any number of costly health problems. Frankly, in a lot of specific cases, a healthier weight would probably raise total costs of care. It’s horrible when someone suddenly drops dead of a heart attack at 45, but his lifetime health care expenses will probably be much lower than a slender person who dies at 85.

Lest I seem like a callous monster lusting for Grandma’s blood, let me stress that I do not want people to have reduced lifespans; quite the contrary. But it’s foolish and misleading to present the issue in the way msn.com does. I don’t know how much money would really be saved, but there’s no way it’s even close to the full $140 billion.

"Jenny Craig would be very unhappy" if everyone were slim, says Rand's Sturm. And so she would, along with the rest of the $55 billion weight-loss industry. Trimmed-down citizens would be swapping their diet pills for bikinis and their gastric-banding for nose jobs.

This also has a fairly obvious problem- a lot of the money in the diet industry is in diet food. If you’ve been magically turned into a thin person and no longer need diet food, you don’t replace it with nothing, or start subsisting on manna; you replace it with regular food in healthy amounts. I’m sure that would cost less than getting the same daily calories from specialized diet products, but it’s not free.

Even without those extras, the $487 billion reshuffle of the economy would put us on the spot. Exactly how would we spend all this freed-up cash? Optimists sing about improving education or medical research. Others figure we'd fritter away the money.

This is a subtle thing that most people wouldn’t consciously notice, but note how the article simply assumes that if the economy had an extra $487 billion a year- most of it from money saved in the private sector, no less- it should, ideally, go to the government. Letting people keep their own savings to use according to their own preferences would be frittering it away.

Or, let’s make the outrageously improbable assumption that the author wasn’t talking about government spending when she talked about spending it all on “improving education or medical research.” Why would alternate uses constitute frittering away the money? There is an innumerable array of ways that money could improve human life. It’s always irritating to see this sort of implicit contempt for the idea of people using their own money according to their own desires, especially in what is nominally a purely informational column.

Great moments in American democracy

You know, there’s political stupidity, and then there’s… Well, this guy:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (April 23) - A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in northern Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

Now, let’s not be too hard on him. I know giving a speech at Hitler’s birthday party “simply because he was asked” looks bad, but it could happen to anyone. A good friend of mine back once attempted to run for vice-president of the college anime club, and ended up being tricked into attending cross burnings on three separate occasions.

Besides, maybe he has some sort of explanation or excuse.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Black people, the Nazi Party- pretty much the same thing, right?

You can view Mr. Zirkle’s official campaign site here. There's some profound political insight there. Did you know that Saint Augustine's insufficient hostility to prostitution led directly to the destruction of the Roman Empire? Neither did I until, until Tony Zirkle set me straight!

Ironically, Laplace's demon foresaw that I would post this

First caught wind of this at Roderick Long’s blog.

There’s been some discussion here and there about a recent study announced by the Max Planck Society on human consciousness. To quote from the press release I’ve linked:

In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding.

This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.

This is being heralded as a confirmation of the results of the famous experiments on people’s subjective experience of choice done by Benjamin Libet, which were widely claimed (though not by Libet) as proof that free will was illusory, due to the fact that electrical activity in the motor cortex of the brain (the “readiness potential”) appeared before the subject was conscious of choosing to act. I want to talk about Libet a little, because this study appears to have the same limitations, in terms of what conclusions we can draw about its implications.

First, however, there’s an elementary point of logic that needs to pointed out, which is this: Even accepting for the sake of argument that this research shows all actions are actually decided at the unconscious level and merely rationalized by the conscious mind afterwards, which I’m going to question in a minute, that would not prove determinism. As commenter Laura J. points out in the comments of Long’s post, the claim that this would prove determinism hinges on the unstated assumption that the unconscious processes running in the background of my conscious mind are not really “me,” that the self is only the fully conscious mind, and that unconscious influence on or control of it is an enslaving outside force, rather than an equally true part of my self. If you reject this assumption, the determinist would also need to prove that the unconscious mind is fully determined by something before he could claim to have shown that I- that is, the complete “I”- have no free will.

It should also be noted that, at best, this would refute only incompatiblist free will, and has nothing to say about compatibilism versus incompatibilist determinism. I don’t consider that distinction very meaningful, frankly- I’ve never heard an explanation of compatibilism that didn’t boil down to determinism with some of the terminology of free will thrown in- but many people would consider it important.

So, Libet. The first problem with a determinist interpretation of Libet’s work was, as Benjamin Libet pointed out, that his subjects would occasionally show the usual electrical activity in the motor center, the “readiness potential,” and then choose not to act. So it's a jump to assume that the electrical buildup demonstrates that the act is truly predetermined, and not merely an indication of a strong disposition to act. The press release for the new Planck study says that the accuracy of their predictions was imperfect but “clearly above chance,” with the precise percentage unspecified. The fact that modern scientists can make predictions of people’s movements seven seconds in advance with above-chance accuracy in this situation is extremely cool, but it’s pretty poor as a knockdown argument for determinism. A skilled bookie can predict the winner of a sporting event at a rate well above chance, but that hardly demonstrates that the competition is rigged. (Unless it’s boxing, of course.) It merely shows that the outcome of the game was affected by conditions in place before the game began. Unless, as some people do, you redefine “free will” to mean that choices are just random and completely unaffected by conditions in the physical world, such as electrical activity in the agent’s own brain, this doesn’t demonstrate much philosophically, however intriguing it might be as science.

There are some other problems, which wouldn’t go away even if the prediction in the experiment was never wrong. The actions taken by Libet's subjects were consciously preplanned. In Libet’s work, the subjects watched a timer, and were instructed to choose a random moment to hit a button, then report the time they perceived themselves willing to hit the button. The problem there is that the intention "hit the button" was, in an important sense, already consciously formed and chosen before the clock had even started. The subject had already decided to hit the button, already knew they were going to hit the button, and the only intention not yet consciously formed was the exact moment. In that sort of case, it's hardly surprising that the motor center was lighting up before the actual final decision, regardless of whether the subject actually had free will or not.

Another issue is that the action being taken- hitting the button- is completely random and meaningless, and the decision of what moment to hit the button is thus completely arbitrary. Thus, it is precisely the sort of thing that I would expect to be decided at an unconscious level, since there’s absolutely no reason for the conscious mind to care about the particular moment the button is hit, and thus no reason to deliberate about it at the conscious level, except perhaps to ratify a conclusion already reached unconsciously. We simply don’t know if the results are applicable to all experiences of choice, including those we have more reason to consciously deliberate on, and we have been given no reason to think that they are.

Based on the way the experiment is described, both problems seem to be present here as well. The press release says, “In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind.” So, again, the subject had already decided to hit the button, and he knew that, barring some sudden freak occurrence that forced him to flee the room, he would carry out that decision. So, once again, the brain gearing itself up to act before the final moment of decision is to be expected with or without free will. The only new wrinkle appears to be having a choice of two buttons. The fact that they could predict which would be chosen is neat, but not terribly decisive, since it's not at all hard to imagine a free-willed person starting with a strong predisposition for one button over another without consciously realizing it. As in the choice of timing, the choice of buttons is completely meaningless and thus gives the conscious mind no reason to bother to make the decision itself, though it might will the actual execution of the decision.

Theses sorts of experiments are limited by the limitations of human focus. Since the subject has to concentrate on precisely monitoring and reporting his own mental state, he can’t really engage in any acts that aren’t tainted by a lengthy gap between resolving to act and actually acting, since a situation where he had to make a quick decision in response to something unexpected would occupy too much of his attention. Likewise, he can’t make any decisions that he actually has a reason to care about and consciously think through, while simultaneously closely monitoring and reporting the precise moment he became aware of his choice. If genetic engineering really takes off, we should see if we can crank out some posthumans with huge heads and extra brain lobes who can maintain multiple trains of thought at once. Short of that, the philosophical implications of this are limited.

For maximum effect, you should now reread this post, but this time do so aloud by shrieking out the entire thing in your best Geddy Lee impression. Actually, henceforth, I want everybody to read everything I write that way.

And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for your meddling right to a trial!

Radley Balko never fails to disturb. He links to a story at Tennesseean.com, which informs us:

Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.

Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, successfully added the provision to a bill that would create an online registry of repeat DUI offenders in Tennessee

Kurita says officials have a hard enough time convicting drunken drivers without lawyers advertising their expertise in the field and offering discounts to DUI defendants.

It may not pass, or survive Court scrutiny, but the fact that a legislator even suggested it in public is a warning sign. Hysteria over drunk driving in this country has been a dangerous force for years, but this is a new wrinkle. It’s hard to see how the justification, “Officials have a hard enough time convicting drunken drivers without lawyers advertising their expertise in the field” can be read as anything but an explicit statement of Kurita’s desire to deny defendants due process by stopping them from hiring adequate counsel.

I’m especially interested by her hostility to “discounts.” Apparently, poor people with 6^th Amendment rights are especially menacing.

If this is a good idea, why limit it to drunk driving? Surely there many crimes- rape, murder, child molestation, armed robbery- that are worse. I can easily imagine the rhetoric used to defend this: “You think protecting the so-called ‘rights’ of drunk drivers matters more than protecting children? You monster!” Replace “drunk drivers” with “murderers” or “drug dealers” or “child molesters” as needed.

On the plus side, this gives us a useful way to measure a society’s political and moral health. If someone who has actually been elected to your legislature feels comfortable saying something like this in public, that’s a cause for concern. If a member of your legislature says something like this in public, and the result is anything other than a hellish gale-force shitstorm of public outrage, you’re in deep, deep trouble.

THIS is what people finally get outraged over?

This post is angrier and more profane than unusual. The loveably wacky John Markley who writes about hallucinatory spiders and defending a libertarian society from an invasion of malevolent scorpion men is on break for the night.

A few days ago, there was an incident where the Chicago police shot and killed a wild cougar that had wandered into an inhabited area and alarmed residents. Well, to observe the media, or talk to people, or read the reader letters in newspaper around here, you’d think this is the worst thing any police officer in Chicago has ever done. In all my life, I can not recall this much vocal and vociferous condemnation of the Chicago Police Department.

Now, I don’t know if the police did the right by shooting the cougar or not, and I’ve come to take any claim from a cop who claims he feared for his own safety when he used a weapon with several metric tons of salt. Nor do I blame any animals lovers who feel upset about what they believe to be the unnecessary killing of an animal. What rankles me is that it was this, the death of a goddamn animal, that actually got people upset with the behavior of the police.

(Warning: The optional video accompanying the article about Abbate that I’ve linked to in this paragraph has real footage of brutal violence against a woman. For a text-only alternative, try this article instead.) Last February, when Officer Anthony Abbate was caught on tape beating the shit out of an innocent woman, and the Police Department tried to have Abate charged with only a misdemeanor until prosecutors overruled them, people weren’t as worked up as they are now. An important study documenting a staggering amount of sexual extortion of prostitutes by Chicago police was barely even discussed.

And yet, when the police shoot an oversized cat, all hell breaks loose. This whole affair is rather like ignoring Stalin’s responsibility for the millions who died horribly in the Ukrainian Famine, then condemning him as iredemiably evil because you think his mustache is unattractive. I’m an animal lover, too; I adopted a cat from a shelter 8 years ago, and I prefer her company to that of the vast majority of human beings. But for God’s sake, let’s have some moral perspective here.

And this indifference is certainly not a Chicago thing. All over the country, time after time, law enforcement agents behave outrageously, and innocent people suffer, and sometimes die, in all sorts of way. This rarely provokes more than a few prominent complaints, usually in the form of meek suggestions that perhaps the police could do slightly better next time. Apparently murdering an old woman in her home is less offensive to the tender sensibilities of the American people than the possibly unneccary shooting of wildlife. Nothing in the endless parade of horrors, tragedies, outrages, and atrocities documented by Radley Balko, Charles Johnson, William Grigg, or anyone else seem to upset the general public this much.

When I was younger, a new libertarian reading Hayek and Rand and Rothbard for the first time, I remember believing that the basic instincts of Americans were sound; it was just that they had been cowed, their spirits weakened by the atmosphere of dread the government and its lackeys worked to create and maintain. I still like to tell myself that, from time to time. This sort of thing is a brutal reminder that many Americans have not lost their capacity for passion, outrage, and self-assertion; they’ve just been morally warped by statism to such a degree that those qualities no longer have value.

Loss is a curious thing. The pain of loss isn’t always about actually losing something or someone you cared about. Quite often, “loss” is actually gain- a gain of knowledge, when we learn the truth about a treacherous friend, a faithless spouse, a parent or role model who wasn’t who you thought they were, the girl of your dreams who will never love you back. The only thing being lost is delusion.

And it feels no less real for that.

Fred Reed column

No sooner have I put up a new article on the war, than someone comes along to casually blow me out of the water. I ran into Fred Reed’s newest column while perusing Strike the Root today. A lot of the writing Reed (who fought in Vietnam as a Marine, and later returned to it as a war correspondent) has done on war has been very powerful, but this one is… just read it.

Warning: Contains written imagery that may be disturbing or upsetting. It sure as Hell should be, at any rate.

New article at antiwar.com

I’m happy to say that my first article at Antiwar.com is now up. I’ve been reading the site since its inception, so this is quite satisfying for me. Hope you like it.

(I just looked it up and realized antiwar.com has been around for 12 years. God, do I suddenly feel old. And sleepy. And slightly gassy. But mostly old.)

For any antiwar.com readers visiting this blog, welcome! I’ve put together a collection of some of my favorite past posts for anyone who’s interested. I also maintain a blog about science fiction and related topics, if that interests you. Here are some previous posts about:

The Illinois public smoking ban and its proponents

Musings on the nature of neoconservatism

The depressing decline of Thomas Sowell, here and here

The failure of torture supporters to understand the meaning of basic ethical terms

The destructive nature of the “vital center”, here and here

The psychology of nations at war

The sheer pettiness of the modern statist

The complicity of the Left in the growth of plutocracy

The encroachments and apologists of the Nanny State, here and here

Or, you can just read about the bizarre minutiae of my life here, here, here, and here.

Hope you’ll stick around a while.

The mother of invention

Faced with an unending flood of nonsense and partisan hackery from Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb, Julian Sanchez has contrived an ingenious labor-saving device: Goldfarb’s hackiest post of the day will be henceforth recognized with a link in the form of a photo of a horse-drawn Hackney cab, sans commentary. I’m tempted to come up with some sort of similar visual shorthand for whenever I link to something involving Sean Hannity, but none of the images that came to mind had the nostalgic charm of the Hackney cab, and most of them would probably violate Blogger's terms of service.

The post Sanchez links to is primarily about Barrack Obama. In criticizing Obama’s domestic agenda, Goldfarb remarks:

Again, Obama believes government can do anything...except secure victory, stability, and democracy in Iraq.

It's amusing how Goldfarb (rightly) faults Obama for his faith in the state to solve all sorts of problems at home, in a peaceful and prosperous country- and then immediately expresses his own faith in that same state to solve all sorts of even bigger problems in an impoverished, violence-wracked foreign culture on the other side of the planet. A lot of ideologies require some degree of doublethink to accept, but it's not usually this blatant. It's a miracle that the cognitive dissonance hasn't caused some sort of Scanners-style cranial explosion yet.

Curse you, Gregory XIII!

I hate April Fool’s Day. I'm absent minded and often have only a vague idea of the current date, and so the same pattern repeats every year. I’ll be wandering the internet, and come across some sort of wonderful news. “Square-Enix announces Final Fantasy VII remake for Playsation 3," “Entire staff of The New Republic devoured by timber wolves,” “Mayo Clinic study proves 87% of foxy brunettes secretly long for introverted, bearded science fiction geeks; Degree of insatiable lust directly correlated with number of Poul Anderson books owned, researchers say,” or whatever. I’ll feel a moment of exhilaration, then confusion as I realize something’s not right here, and then realization dawns and I come crashing back to earth. You’d think I would have learned by now, but no.

Injustice and its non-celebrity victims

Over at Hit and Run, Michael Moynihan has a post about Mumia Abu-Jamal that got me thinking. Why did Mumia Abu-Jamal become such a prominent cause, as opposed to any of the myriad other people imprisoned in this country, many under circumstances far more questionable? I wish more people so interested in the inequities of the legal system would take some interest in some of its less prestigious victims.

Where’s the uproar over, say, Cory Maye? It ought to push a lot of the Left’s buttons- Maye is an African-American currently serving a horrendously unjust life sentence for shooting what turned out to be a (white) police officer in self-defense during what turned out to be a an unannounced nighttime no-knock police drug raid meant for the resident of the other half of Maye’s duplex. He was on death row until 2006. He’s still in prison. The police, as often happens when this sort of raid goes awry, repeatedly changed their story about whether or not they found marijuana in Maye’s home. If a fraction of the time and energy devoted to Abu-Jamal were to be directed at the terrible injustice against Cory Maye, what might have been accomplished?

For that matter, he seems like he could be a cause much of the Right would have an interest in– he was a gun owner who fought to protect his home and his child, and ends up serving life in prison because the armed, unidentified man forcing his way into the bedroom of Maye’s daughter at 9 o’clock at night turned out to be a police officer. It’s not hard to see how that sort of thing could have a chilling effect on people’s ability to bear arms for home defense, even if no actual laws are passed.

Unlike the tangled web of the Munima Abdul-Jamal case, the injustice of what happened to Maye is less ambiguous. Standing up for Maye seems like it could be an ideal cause Left and Right could agree on. And to be fair, many have spoken out for him. But it’s certainly nothing even close to the degree of attention given to Abu-Jamal.

I suppose some the things that could potentially give him appeal also hurt him. I suspect that what Cory Maye is in prison for- using a gun to defend himself during a home invasion- probably doesn’t endear him to a lot of the Left, a few genuine anarchists (as distinguished from social democrats who want to sound rebellious) aside. After all, keeping a gun in the house to protect yourself is for right-wing Neanderthals, anti-government nuts, and rural white trash.

And most conservatives, as has become more and more evident, only disapprove of jackbooted thuggery when a Clinton is in office. Now that he’s gone, agents of law enforcement are infallible gods, especially when they’re after drugs. If something like Waco or Ruby Ridge happened today, can you imagine most American conservatives today expressing even a tenth of the outrage they did when they happened in the 90’s? I sure as hell can’t.

I really shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed by this; I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that most of the good (from a libertarian viewpoint) aspects of most modern statist ideologies are just poses, covers, or, at best, the vestigial remnants of better days, the leftover rubble of a shattered classical liberal ideal that hasn’t been entirely swept into the trash yet. Too bad.

Good life is contradiction

I usually look to Roderick Long for this sort of thing, but today he is surpassed: David Weigel, Associate Editor of Reason magazine, has created the greatest blog post title in human history.

Kenneth R. Gregg passes away

Very sad news from the Liberty and Power Blog: Kenneth Gregg, intellectual historian and the creator of the libertarian blog CLASSical Liberalism, died of heart failure last Friday after a long illness. Sadly, he was only 57, and the last few years of his life were marked by a degree of tragedy most of us are mercifully unable to fathom. Kevin Carson has a very touching tribute him to at Mutualist Blog.

I’m sorry I never got to meet you, Mr. Gregg. I hope there’s a place out there somewhere where you will meet your children again. Rest in peace.

David Brooks, Master of Psychiatry

This is a subject I hadn’t planned on addressing on this blog, but now I feel I must. This sort of brain-dead bigotry and contempt is par for the course on, say, the Something Awful forums, but when it’s printed in The Newspaper of Record it merits a public response, however ineffectual that response is likely to be. Be warned that this post is long and has little or no direct relationship to libertarianism (except to the extent that “David Brooks sucks” is a sentiment every libertarian can come together on), though I hope that you’ll take an interest in it anyway.

First, a bit of background. I am diagnosed with a neurological disorder called Asperger’s Syndrome, which is an autistic spectrum disorder. It is distinguished from its fellows on the autistic spectrum by the fact that it does not cause mental retardation or delays in acquisition of speech, though the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, and it is a matter of some controversy how meaningful the distinction between the different types is. Thus, I do know a thing or two about the issue.

In a recent column in the New York Times entitled “The Rank-Link Imbalance,” columnist David Brooks describes what he sees as a class of people who are very common in politics and other high-status fields. They are, as he describes them, achievement-obsessed, arrogant, narcissistic, aggressive, masterfully skilled in manipulating and dominating others, and highly successful in their professions or in politics because of this. However, they are incapable of having meaningful emotional relationships with others, have no true friends, are unaccustomed to having limits placed on their activities, and lack any sensitivity to others. They appear to be sociopaths, or nearly so. Oh, and a lot of them employ the services of prostitutes, because they can’t understand non-mercenary relationships..

These loathsome people “have all of the social skills required to improve their social rank, but none of the social skills that lead to genuine bonding.” They have a “coating of arrogance.” They depend on social tricks like “the capacity to imply false intimacy.” In conversation, “They treat their conversational partners the way the Nazis treated Poland,” crushing others with an “onslaught of accumulated narcissism.

Then we get to the money quote, in which Brooks say, "These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels."

Mr. Brooks likes to use big words, much as five-year old boys sometimes try to use daddy’s power tools. This comment doesn’t merely betray a total ignorance of what Asperger's is like, it gives the impression that Brooks has been reading psychiatric diagnosis manuals from some sort of Star Trek-esque Mirror Universe, where rivers run uphill, Hitler won the Second World War, and autism makes people masters of the social dance. Had Brooks bothered to understand what Asperger’s Syndrome is like on this plane of existence, on the other hand, it would be obvious that people with Asperger's are among those least likely to fit the personality profile he describes; by the very nature of the condition, they are highly unlikely to be skilled at the sort of social dominance, leadership, and social cunning he describes. "Qualitative impairment in social interaction" is one of the diagnostic criteria for a reason. Had Brooks taken the time to actually learn something about the tens of thousands of Americans he so casually heaps contempt on, he would know that. If Brooks actually knows a lot of people with Asperger’s who “have all of the social skills required to improve their social rank,” are gifted with “the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole,” or “dominate every room they enter,” I’d certainly like to meet them.

People with autism spectrum conditions have enough difficulties to face in their lives- difficulties I can’t imagine Brooks being able to even comprehend- without major national commentators in America's biggest newspaper demonizing them and turning their very nature into a synonym for a lack of humanity. That a respectable newspaper like the Times would print this sort of open contempt for people with a disability is saddening.

This is the dark side of public awareness. As Asperger's has started to become known to the general public, I see more and more people using it as shorthand for lack of compassion, indifference to others, lack of emotions, and general wickedness. None of these traits are characteristics of Asperger's Syndrome, but they are becoming the public "face" of Asperger's for this nation because of people like Brooks, who encourage false, degrading, and hateful stereotypes. It’s growing more and more common, and it has consequences.

A friend of my family has a son in junior high school. He is an intelligent, kind boy who has Asperger's. His biggest problem isn't his shyness or his trouble with social cues. It certainly isn't some inherent inability to form meaningful human relationships. No, his biggest problem, by far, is that many people treat him like garbage because he's noticeably different from most kids. People are cruel enough to him as it is; I shudder to think what his life would be like if, on top of that, the other kids in his school were up-to-date on the malicious stereotypes people like Brooks propagates.

My own youth was unpleasant. But there was one small mercy- though I was certainly viewed with contempt by the people around me, I didn't have to grow up in a society that considered me some sort of monster, devoid of human feeling and incapable of love or meaningful emotional connections. The next generation of children with Asperger's, I fear, will grow up being told precisely that about themselves by the culture at large, on top of all the other difficulties associated with being different.

I was one of the lucky ones. I didn't kill myself, I didn't drop out of school, I didn't become addicted to drugs or alcohol, and I didn't end up in an institution. Not all kids with Asperger's were, or are, as fortunate as me. How many innocent young people have killed themselves, or otherwise had their lives shattered, because of the way they were treated? How many more in generations to come will suffer that fate, living in the society that people like Brooks are creating- a society that openly condemns and despises them for what they were born as?

My reaction to this may seem extreme, especially since Brooks was probably just using the term to sound smart. I’m not terribly interested in his intent; whether he’s viciously slandering hundreds of thousands of innocent people out of outright malice or merely depraved indifference is not terribly important. The reason I care so much is because Asperger’s is penetrating deeper and deeper into the public consciousness every year, and it can make a big difference to the way people are treated if the average person’s first encounter with it is being told by some jackass like Brooks that people who have it are soulless monsters devoid of human sentiment.

Frankly, I suspect that I am fighting for a lost cause. Brooks is merely one drop of water in an oncoming wave, albeit an unusually prominent one, and the deep-rooted assumptions of a culture that disparages introversion means that the cause of acceptance is at a deep disadvantage before the contest even begins. But, hell, I write a libertarian blog, so it’s not as if hopeless battles are a novel experience. Still, if someone you care about has an autistic spectrum disorder, and you don’t consider that person innately evil, please consider sending an e-mail to Brooks or the Times and letting them know.

Thoughts on William F. Buckley

Much has been said, both good and bad, about William F. Buckley since his death. While I don’t mean to minimize his very real and serious faults, I would like to talk about the positive effect he had on me, personally.

When I was a young conservative, my grandfather got me a subscription to National Review, which I eagerly read every two weeks. In 1996, they came out with an issue that announced, right on the front cover, “The War on Drugs is Lost.” Inside the issue were a series of articles cataloguing the evils caused by the Drug War: increases in crime, the erosion of Constitutional protections against warrantless search and seizure and punishment without trial (Remember when there were conservatives who actually thought destroying the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th amendments in the Bill of Rights was a bad thing?), the growth of street gangs, damage to public health, and so on. The editors, including Buckley, called for the legalization of drugs.

This utterly blew my mind. My whole generation was raised on a steady diet of hysterical propaganda about drugs and the need to crush drug use at any cost. The idea of anyone publicly saying that drugs should be legal was shocking, and the idea of conservatives saying it even more so. The necessity and righteousness of the war on drugs had been drilled into me by popular entertainment, government propaganda, and the educational system my entire life. Yet, as I read the issue, I became more and more convinced.

Part of it was because of all the information about the effects the war on drugs had had. (I remember being especially disgusted by the idea of property forfeiture without trial on mere suspicion of illegal activity. I was a typical conservative in that I believed strongly in law and order; I was an atypical conservative in that I thought some sort of law