Alan Bock, RIP

I was saddened to learn late last night that libertarian author Alan Bock has just passed away at the age of 67. He was the author of several books, including Ambush at Ruby Ridge and Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana, and a regular columnist at the Orange County Register and Antiwar.com. There's a very nice article about him at the Register that you can read here. It's been at least a decade since I first started reading his work, and when I was a young man starting to delve deeper into libertarianism he was an enormously positive influence - it feels hard to imagine him being gone.

Thank you for everything. Rest in peace.

A Partial List of Things the Government of the State of Oklahoma Considers Preferable to the Peaceful Production of Concentrated Psychoactive Plant Resin

The State of Oklahoma recently passed a law increasing the sentence for producing hashish, a concentrated derivative of the cannabis plant, to a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of life imprisonment. On a first offense, no less.

The purpose of this legislation was to "send a message" about illegal drugs, according to the bill's original supporters in the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and Governor Mary Fallin and Oklahoma's legislature have certainly done that. This left me wondering: How are other crimes treated in Oklahoma? What messages are they the subject of?

More specifically, what crimes are punished less harshly- and, it can thus be reasonably inferred, are considered less objectionable?  After a bit of research into the minimum and maximum sentences allowed for various crimes under Oklahoma law, I've compiled an incomplete list of things that, while not smiled upon by Oklahoma's rulers, are more acceptable to them than the prospect of Oklahoma residents being able to smoke hashish. Maximum sentences for other crimes in Oklahoma include:

Using threats or violence to force a child into prostitution- 25 years

Forcible sodomy- 20 years

Assault or battery with a knife, firearm, or other deadly weapon- 10 years

Battery causing bone fracture, protracted and obvious disfigurement, protracted loss or impairment of the function of a body part, organ or mental faculty, or substantial risk of death- 5 years

Abandonment of a child under the age of 10 by his or her parent or legal guardian- 10 years

Culpable negligence resulting in the death of a human being- 4 years

Urinating, defecating, or ejaculating on a child for sexual gratification- 20 years

Forcible restraint of a woman in a house of prostitution- 20 years

Using letters or other printed materials to threaten someone with death or bodily harm- 1 year

Premeditated infliction of a disfiguring or disabling injury- 7 years

Procuring a child for the production of child pornography- 20 years

So, there you have it. Message read and received.

I don't endorse breaking the law, and needless to say the governor and legislature of Oklahoma don't either. But if you do, then for the sake of both the common weal and your own conscience at least restrain yourself to less heinous crimes that are less destructive to the rights and well-being of your fellow citizens. Sell a child into sexual slavery. Show your next-door neighbor that you don't appreciate his critical remarks about the state of your front lawn by shooting him in the face with a nail gun. Cut off the pinky finger of an annoying coworker with a meat cleaver and wear it on a necklace as a warning to the others. Mail your former spouse or significant other a series of packages containing recently killed and dismembered animals, each one larger than the last and accompanied by a crudely handwritten note that says THIS IS YOU.

But while you do so, for the love of God please don't sink so low as to make hash. The  government of Oklahoma will thank you.

Just like Club Med, but with more frequent shiv attacks

There's a blog post at This Ain't Livin' called The Myth of Cushy Prisons that is well-worth reading.  It focuses on the material conditions of the prisons themselves, but the way prisons are run is worth bringing up as well, because in that area the myth goes from being merely mistaken to downright nonsensical.

The popularity of the belief that prisons are some sort of swanky resort or the like- "country club" seems to be the most common term- involves some very weird doublethink, because the fact that prisoners are often subjected to horrendous violence and degradation while in prison is hardly some sort of secret. It's not even something people generally know but avoid talking about.

On the contrary, open acknowledgments of it are pervasive.  Prison rape is not an official part of the legal system, but it's so common and so tolerated that it might as well be. References to it, both serious and comedic, are ubiquitous in pop culture; referencing it is risque, but hardly shocking or taboo. Protagonists on prime time network cop shows threaten uncooperative men with it, and this is generally not considered shocking or unheroic because everyone understands- even if they do not say- that being raped in prison is a de facto component of many prison sentences.

Now, it's true that this sort of incoherence is not unique in political matters. As Roderick Long has pointed out, modern statism in general  depends on people's belief that the state is a peaceful, consensual institution and their knowledge that it actually isn't, existing side-by-side. But while the reality of the nature of the state is obscured by a veil of ideological obfuscations, that's not the case here. People may try to rationalize or justify or condone the prevalence of violence in prisons, but rarely if ever try to claim it's not violent, or isn't horrible for the victim.

It's also true that people trying to deny an intolerable reality can develop irrational, absurd, or blatantly and obviously self-contradictory beliefs to keep themselves going. But this isn't about denial- most people know about it and will acknowledge it if the subject comes up, and some outright revel in it. The subject is not taboo. People may not know the precise details of how prevalent it is, but it's widely understood that it is not a rare, unusual occurrence happening in a generally peaceful and safe environment.

If anything, there seems to be a positive correlation between openly acknowledging what prisons are like and the stated belief that prisons are "country clubs"; my own experience is that people who lament the overly luxurious conditions of the American prison system are more likely than average to openly chortle at the prospect of someone they dislike being raped in prison. Somehow, they're able to reconcile the two. Country clubs are less genteel than popular stereotypes have led me to believe, apparently.

When seconds count, the police are just years away

Fantastic post at Popehat about the attitude of far too many educators and "experts" towards bullied children who have the temerity to actually defend themselves from the aggression of their tormentors. Money quote:

Don’t you see, fat kid? When that little monster threw a jab at your chin, you were supposed to explore alternative paths of conflict resolution. You should have dialogued with him, as seasoned bullying experts would say, and tried to understand what made him punch you in the face:


In other words, that he’s a bully, and you’re a fat nerd. And that’s what bullies do to fat nerds. Because our teachers, and seasoned experts, have more important things to do with their time than to stop bullies who know just where to step, close to, but not quite over, the line.


Or you can take your chances with the invisible line yourself, but if you step over it, you’ll be the one who’s “snapped.” And you’ll be the one who goes to jail.

The incident referenced in the Popehat post- kid finally retaliates against repeated bullying at school, it's caught on film, alleged educational experts are horrified at the prospect of children actually protecting themselves when their teachers can't be bothered to do so- took place in Australia, but it's quite applicable to the United States as well. We lock children in close quarters with people who systematically harass, abuse, beat, terrorize, or humiliate them, force them into close contact day after day for years on end, do nothing or worse than nothing to protect them from their tormentors, and then punish them if they dare to try to stand up for themselves.

There are few things more contemptible than telling a victim of ongoing aggression and abuse that they are morally obliged to sit and take it, especially when the victim is someone particularly impressionable and emotionally vulnerable,or who has been taught to look to you as an authority, or whose safety and well-being is supposedly your responsibility, or all three. And make no mistake, that is exactly what telling children "Just walk away" or "violence is never the answer" or "try to talk to him" or "ignore it" boils down to.

This is the sort of essential "socialization" children would miss out on without modern schools. If the losers and weirdos in the lower reaches of the great chain of being got it into their heads that their own lives, rights, and well-being actually mattered enough to be worth standing up for, where would that leave us? Just meekly soak up the abuse and beg for help that will never come.

People quite literally wouldn't treat a fucking dog the way they routinely treat millions of children in this country.

In practice "violence isn't the answer" isn't being said to everyone, at least not equally. It's being said to kids who get bullied a lot- in other words, the kids who are unpopular, different, weird, nerdy,  ugly, shy, socially awkward, or otherwise deviant in ways that put them among the lower echelons of the status hierarchy. An actual fight, in which the bully actually encounters effective resistance, is much more likely to result in actual adult intervention than than one-sided abuse- it's louder, more likely to draw a crowd, more likely to result in some sort of property damage, and more likely to disrupt the school's smooth operation. In practice, a policy of punishing both sides of a fight regardless of its cause often boils down to a policy of tolerating violence as long as it is directed solely at low-status kids.

Of course, it is adults who dispense and enforce these platitudes, and these adults are almost invariably well-educated middle class professionals. In other words, it is people who live secure in the knowledge  that they live in a world where violently assaulting them without provocation is a crime, that they are recognized as having every right to defend themselves against attackers, that they will not be forcibly compelled to attend if they refuse to spend their day in a setting where they are subjected to relentless humiliation and psychological abuse, and that anything even remotely approaching the sort of crap tolerated in schools would be met with police and prosecutions and lawsuits if they, God forbid, were the victims. Their safety and well-being matter enough to receive actual protection.

For all its defects, the macho "don't come crying to me about it, you sissy" attitude towards bullied children was still far more humane and decent than this. It was merely pitilessly indifferent to the victims, not actively allied with the bully. If nothing else, it at least recognized the right of the bullied child to at least try to defend himself instead of declaring him so utterly worthless and irrelevant that he isn't even worthy of his own protection.

Change you can... well, you know the rest

Over at the website for National Review, Robert VerBruggen has an article criticizing the treatment of  Bradley Manning, accusing the government of  “inflicting arbitrary and pointless miseries “ on him. It's not exactly revolutionary stuff, and VerBruggen does not speak for the magazine as a whole, but it was a pleasant surprise because National Review has long been the flagship publication of American conservatism and has often demonstrated the failings all too typical of that movement. It was nice to see something like this article getting published there, even if the comments section quickly crushed whatever feelings of hope and goodwill VerBruggen himself had engendered by reminding me of why his example was so heartening in the first place. (The clinical term for this is “Greenwald Effect.")

Nevertheless, this means that if measured according to the conventional political spectrum, on the issue of due process and humane treatment of prisoners the country's foremost journal of mainstream national security state conservatism is now to the Left of Barack Obama.