A time for gibbering panic

Back in June, the nation was rocked by the murder of abortionist George Tiller by a radical anti-abortionist and the murder of museum security guard Stephen Johns by an elderly Neo-Nazi. The result was a tremendous frenzy in the media, with much exultation about how this proved the grave menace posed by right-wing terrorists and the need for everyone to shut up and do what our newly enthroned Dear Leader says. I talked about that a bit here.

It has now been confirmed that the fatal shooting of anti-abortion protester Jim Poullion in Owosso, Michigan was because of Poullion’s politics; the shooter was apparently outraged by Poullion’s protest signs. When combined with such events as the murder of Private Andrew Long by an opponent of the war in Iraq, I'm sure the establishment media, always evenhanded, will recognize the menace left-wing extremism poses and address it in the same way that they have addressed right-wing crimes, providing us with plenty of:

Grave warnings about the threat of left wing-violence

Pious hand-wringing over how left-wing politicians and pundits share the blame for these deaths by creating an atmosphere of terror and hatred against conservatives and other critics of the ruling party- e.g. The hysteria and vitriol with which any expression of dissent against the Democrats has been greeted since the beginning of Obama's administration

Angry condemnations of liberals who whip up violent hatred by attacking conservatives with hateful "code words" such as "fascist," "theocrat," "warmonger," "neocon," or "racist"

Calls for government suppression of the sort of "hate speech" that incited Poullion's murder

Frequent comparisons of pro-choice advocates, antiwar demonstrators, and other people who disagree with the Republican Party to murderous left-wing political movements such as the Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge, Shining Path, and the Red Army Faction

And so on. If recent history is any guide, I'm sure there all sorts of creative ways to declare any meaningful opposition to the Republican Party inherently illegitimate, now that we've seen the horrible results of just letting people disagree with them in such an irresponsible fashion.

Caring about the war is so 2008

The end of August marked the close of what is now the bloodiest month for the United States forces in Afghanistan since its presence began there in 2001, with 45 confirmed deaths. I haven’t seen any numbers for Afghan deaths, but given the escalation in violence it seems likely that they were high as well. As you may recall, Afghanistan is where President Obama wants to increase American troop numbers.

I wouldn’t blame the average person all that much if they didn’t recall it, though. It’s not given much attention, compared to the former President Bush’s military decisions. Nor is it criticized very much, since the bulk of the antiwar movement apparently slipped into a coma during Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony and is now descending into a permanent vegetative state.

The rapid drop-off in interest really is remarkable. Principled exceptions exist, but often only throw the rest into sharper relief. For instance, Cindy Sheehan has continued her antiwar campaign into the new administration, calling on Obama to end the war just as she did George W. Bush and protesting at Martha’s Vineyard during Obama’s presence there.

And yet, the woman that so much of the press couldn’t get enough of now barely warrants a mention from either the press or many her former comrades and supporters, something she herself has commented on. I suppose some of the media indifference can be attributed to the fact that the novelty element is gone now that she’s been known for a few years, but the very fact that she is continuing her crusade against the war even with Bush gone seems like something I would expect to draw interest- one of the things that originally made her famous was her utter relentlessness, and so her willingness to go after Democrats as fiercely she did Republicans is a dramatic illustration of the very trait that made her noteworthy to begin with. Apparently, though, the heartbroken mothers of dead soldiers just aren’t very interesting without a Republican in the White House.

I expected most of the American Left to lose interest in the war issue once Obama was in office, and especially once Obama started to escalate American military efforts in Afghanistan. Similarly, I expected them to start finding torture, attacks on civil liberties, and unrestrained executive power much less bothersome once they were wielding those weapons themselves. Perhaps above all else, I expected their whole “dissent is patriotic” shtick to fade away as well. However, I really didn’t expect the change to be quite so abrupt. It's a demonstration of an important lesson libertarians need to keep in mind- neither liberals nor conservatives are actually very good on the issues they're supposedly on the right side of.

This phenomenon- and especially the hysterical liberal reaction to the supposed menace of right-wing extremists with the temerity to use their outdoor voices at protests- reminds me of a scene in the novel 1984. At the height of a Hate Week rally, an Ingsoc Party official is whipping the crowd into a frenzy against Oceania’s hated enemy, Eurasia. Mid-speech, he is quietly handed a document by one of the other officials and instantly starts railing against Oceania’s hated enemy Eastasia, with whom Oceania has always been locked in a deadly struggle alongside Oceania’s steadfast ally Eurasia. The crowd, noticing that all the Hate Week posters still say that Eurasia is the enemy and has always been the enemy, conclude that traitors are trying to sabotage Hate Week by spreading confusion and lies, and in their righteous outrage begin tearing down and destroying posters bearing slogans they had been shouting themselves only moments before. (I don't have the book in front of me, so I may have mixed up Eurasia and Eastasia. Which would be quite fitting, of course.)

I think a lot of it is sincere, in the sense that many of the people acting this way are not motivated by cynical partisan point-scoring and really do feel that things that were outrages crying to Heaven for justice when done by the Bush administration suddenly stop mattering when Obama is in charge. People can have tremendous power to believe things they weant to believe, and too many people have too much emotional energy invested in loving Obama and hating Bush as the definitive evil in American history to start wondering how different they actually are. Much the same can be said of many conservatives.

I wish that weren’t the case- in some ways I find the idea of people behaving that way, and the power of the human mind to warp itself to escape reality, more disturbing than the idea that they are simply amoral hypocrites. Tribalism is a powerful thing, and the drive to believe- not just say, but truly, genuinely believe- what you want to believe is probably even stronger.

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Making violence easier

The taser has become almost omnipresent in stories of police misconduct and brutality. (Rad Geek and The Agitator are good sources on this and related issues.) Despite the fact that it was largely sold to the public as a less-lethal alternative in situations that might otherwise result in a suspect being shot dead or pummeled into submission, I suspect the taser encourages violence and tolerance for violence by looking less violent than conventional instruments of brutality.

Conscience is not a purely intellectual affair. Feelings like compassion, indignation, and revulsion don’t come only from being aware of an act or situation that we regard as bad according to the moral principles we hold; they also come from gut-level reactions to sensory stimuli that are in turn shaped by our attitudes, psychology, culture, and biology. This is well-known, of course, but I don’t think the implications of it are discussed enough.

While being tasered is painful, and potentially dangerous or lethal, I suspect that for a lot of people, seeing it done to an innocent person doesn’t cause the same horror as seeing someone being beaten with a nightstick or pummeled with bare fists. A beating looks brutal; prodding someone with an electronic gadget doesn’t look as bad, even though it may still be terribly painful and dangerous. Thus, less horror and less public outrage. Perhaps it’s an instinctive response; humans and their forerunners evolved facing the threat of blunt force trauma, but not anything like an electroshock weapon.

They may make it easier for the perpetrators as well. It makes me think of the Milgram experiment, in which a significant number of average people were willing to torture another person with increasingly painful electric shocks, even after their “victim” (actually an actor in cahoots with the researcher) started screaming for mercy, and in some cases even when they were given reason to seriously believe that their victim was dying.

How many of the people who were willing to inflict what they believed was agonizing pain with electrical shocks would have been willing to inflict the same amount of suffering if, instead of a button to trigger an electronic device, they had been given a club and told to beat a helpless victim with it, and go on beating them even as they screamed and pleaded for mercy? My guess is very few. Because, in the same vein as before, poking someone with an electric doohickey is unlikely to feel as viscerally violent as brutally beating someone, and so a conscience that would recoil from the latter might be able to live with the former.

This isn’t to say that removing the tasers would be a panacea; there are deeper cultural problems behind police brutality, in both the cops who do it and the citizens who tolerate and excuse it, and there’s plenty of police brutality carried out with lower-tech methods. However, I think it does have an effect on the margins. Equipping those who wield coercive authority with a means to inflict suffering that partially bypasses the usual mental mechanisms that restrain violent aggression is a recipe for trouble.

Race and police misconduct

I’ve been following the case of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates with some interest. (Here's a quick bit of background, in case you've spent the last few weeks living in a sensory deprivation tank or on some sort of eremitic desert religious retreat.) On the one hand, I’m glad to see a police abuse of power get some serious attention. On the other hand, it’s saddening (though not unexpected) to see how much attention is paid to a Harvard professor being wrongly arrested and briefly detained when cases like the cold-blooded murder of Kathryn Johnston by Atlanta police and their subsequent attempt at a cover-up barely seem to warrant mention at all.

It’s interesting and unfortunate how mainstream opinion on the issue has split into the following two camps:

1. The police officer who arrested Gates, James Crowley, was motivated by racism, and therefore the arrest was not justified.

2. The police officer who arrested Gates was not motivated by racism, and therefore the arrest was justified.

This conspicuously leaves out the possibility that the arrest of Gates was not motivated by racism, but was nevertheless unjustified. I don’t doubt that black men are more likely to suffer mistreatment from law enforcement, but there’s ample evidence that there are plenty of police willing to abuse anyone who irritates them on an equal-opportunity basis, and thus far there does not seem to be any evidence that the arrest was racially motivated.

So, why the focus on the supposed racial angle to the almost total exclusion of everything else? I think part of the answer actually ties partially into my recent post contrasting the far left with mainstream left-liberals. Remember, one of the defining traits of the mainstream Left is that government-related unpleasantness is never the product of systemic flaws in the nature of the government itself.

If this is your worldview, the idea that the police are racist is paradoxically comforting.
Suppose it were the case that the unjust arrest of Henry Louis Gates, as well as the more extreme and gruesome examples of police misconduct that ironically get much less attention, were all motivated by racism. That means that the problem can be fixed with just a modest tweak to the system: all you need to do is get rid of the racists in the police department and replace them with non-racists, and things will be fine. There are no deeper issues with the underlying system, just some individual bad apples. There is no need to worry about the possibility that there are problems with law enforcement that might be inextricably tied to other aspects of American statism, aspects that many people like.

(As an added bonus, this also redirects the blame to voluntary society. If the behavior of the police is not the product of something inherent in the system they work for or the position they hold in it, then presumably it must be the result of the society they came from- their families, communities, churches, popular entertainment, or just the culture in general. The more dysfunctional voluntary society is perceived to be, the more pressing the need for the government’s help will seem.)

For those who reflexively defend the police, focusing on race also has benefits. People frequently treat a refutation of the most commonly heard argument for a proposition as a conclusive disproof of the proposition itself. If the case of alleged misconduct against Gates (or anyone else) turns out to have no racist motivations, and racism is the only imaginable cause of police misconduct, then the police are vindicated.

This is not to say that racism is not a genuine factor in police misconduct; there are ample cases where it clearly is. However, I think the focus on it here actually serves to shield police misconduct rather than expose it. The public is presented with two possibilities, both of which absolve the system itself. This tendency is reinforced by the dominant ideology of journalists and other opinion-makers themselves. The good-government progressivism that dominates the mainstream media rules out the possibility that statism is inherently damaging or corrupting, whereas the idea that everyone outside a small clique of enlightened liberal thinkers is a bigoted neanderthal seems almost omnipresent.

Potential factors coming deriving from the nature of the government and laws themselves- an environment where so many peaceful and largely invisible acts are illegal that the police are encouraged to treat everyone like criminal suspects or hostile foreigners under military occupation, the invasiveness and brutality needed to effectively enforce such laws, attitudes among both police and the general public that turn law enforcement officials into an elite quasi-military class that is largely unaccountable to civilians, the sort of personality that is disproportionately likely to be drawn to a job with broad coercive authority- do not come up. This is an outcome congenial to both sides of the mainstream political spectrum, since neither side is eager for the public to seriously question the near-infinite reach of the modern state into daily life.