Take it like a man, again

So! Been a while. Busy year. Actually do have stuff still in progress for this blog, believe it or not.

For now, a quick message, since gender politics has become a recurring feature on this blog. I often see feminists lament that men don't understand that feminism is not about despising men, or treating men as inferior, or hypocritically defending traditional female privileges, or denying or condoning or endorsing harms suffered by men. So, in the spirit of amity and cooperation in this festive season, let me offer a suggestion as to how progress might be made on this front:

When Meghan Murphy is at least as marginalized, reviled, and rejected within the feminist movement as Cathy Young, I will listen to claims that actual existing feminism is not a bigoted anti-male movement without bursting into loud, utterly mirthless laughter. If it happens at least partly as a direct result of her revolting, repeated statements about rape, and not solely because of other issues like her attitudes towards sex workers or her coziness with the "trans women are the infiltrating T-800s of the Patriarchy" school of radical feminism, that would be a plus.

This can be via Murphy and her publication Feminist Current becoming much less acceptable among feminists, Young becoming much more acceptable, or some of both. Nudge that Overton Window so feminism is no longer a movement where "it isn't 'rape-rape' when the victim is male" is part of the respectable range of opinion but "the wage gap isn't caused by misogyny" can get you cast into outer darkness.and "I think suicide among boys and young men is worth actually addressing seriously" summons a screaming mob.

I may or may not find the claim convincing, at that point. But it might at least become a claim worth considering, and no longer so brutally, self-evidently false that it doesn't even deserve a respectful hearing any longer.

Let's you and him fight, Part 2

This is a direct continuation of my previous post, "Let's you and him fight," which I strongly recommend reading before this one if you haven't. 

The subject at hand is the strange argument often seen, mostly but not exclusively on the political Left, that a military draft is desirable because it would encourage a less bellicose American foreign policy. I talked about some reasons to believe that this is wrong last time, but such arguments are unavoidably speculative. 

So let's get more empirical. Proponents of the idea that conscription will strengthen antiwar opinion and encourage peace frequently claim to have the evidence of history on their side, comparing the relatively flaccid antiwar movement of conscriptionless present-day America to larger antiwar movements of the past. History does not allow controlled experiments. It does, however, provide us with a series of wars the United States has fought with conscript troops over the past century and a half.  Let's have a look, shall we?

Vietnam War 

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 8 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Withdrawal and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to turn responsibility for the war over to local allyAmerican Deaths: 58,220

Korean War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Successful prevention of communist takeover of South Korea and expulsion of invading North Korean forces, establishment of permanent US military presence.American Deaths: 33, 686

Second World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 3 years, 8 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with:  Total victory, unconditional surrender of Japan, conquest of Germany and complete destruction of German state. (Fun fact: The war between the United States and Germany did not legally end until 1951, since there was no one left in Germany with the recognized authority to surrender.)American Deaths: 405, 000 (Does not include merchant marine)

First World War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 1 year, 7 monthsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total victory, unconditional surrender of hostile powersAmerican Deaths: 116,000

The Civil War

Duration of Direct American Military Involvement: 4 yearsInvolvement in hostilities ended with: Total Union victory, dissolution of Confederate government, forcible reincorporation of all Confederate territory into United StatesAmerican Deaths: 620,000; 360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate (possibly underestimates)
(Due to the much smaller population of the era, these casualties represent over two percent of the entire combined Union and Confederate population at the time, equivalent to the death of over six million Americans today.)

Of five wars fought with conscripts, US involvement ended for reasons other than the successful filament of the war's objectives in only one of them, Vietnam. The only other example of an American government with a conscript army giving up the fight was the Confederate States of America, which resorted to conscription sooner and much more extensively than the Union but only capitulated after its economic infrastructure had been systematically wrecked by invading armies, its territories overrun, and over 10% of its male citizens- not “military-age,”, 10% of all of them- killed. Comparing the losses of other countries in detail is beyond our scope here, so I will merely point out that each the four wars above fought against foreign states also had higher total non-American deaths than even the most extreme excess mortality estimates for Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

So, as one can clearly once one remembers that American history did not begin during the Kennedy administration, the idea that the country loses its stomach for war when conscription is in effect is not merely unsupported by the evidence, it is overwhelmingly contradicted by it. The usual result when America fields conscripted soldiers is that the war continues until the original objective is fully achieved, even if it requires hundreds of thousands of dead Americans.

The supposed value of the draft as a means of encouraging peace becomes even weaker when one considers something the idea's supporters invariably leave out when they compare Vietnam to post-draft conflicts: Scale. At the time I write this, about 7,000 Americans have been killed in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks out of a population of (as of the 2010 Census) over 308,000,000 people. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam- out of a population that was smaller by about 100,000,000.

So the fact that Vietnam eventually spawned a much more vigorous antiwar movement than the War on Terror is hardly surprising or noteworthy. Even if the beliefs of conscription advocates about conscription's effects weren't historical nonsense, claiming that the absence of conscription is the explanation for the relative lack of an antiwar movement now is highly dubious simply because it presupposes that some further explanation is actually needed in the first place. It's like looking for some deep, subconscious reason rooted in my relationship with my mother to explain why being punched in the stomach would bother me less than being doused with molten steel. If you can do basic arithmetic, you already have a quite solid explanation of why the antiwar movement of the 21st century has fallen short of the Vietnam era.

If anything, the discrepancy calling for explanation is how strong antiwar sentiment been at times in this century, when American casualties have been a small fraction of what they were in Vietnam and the justification offered for today's wars is so much more viscerally appealing. The Vietnam-era antiwar movement also benefited from the fact that a not-insignificant portion of the American intelligentsia was to at least some degree sympathetic to the Vietnamese Communists, or Communism more generally, while the number of Americans who feel any affinity for Ba'athism or the Taliban- even in a vague “They're noble ideals that haven't worked in practice” sort of way- is effectively nil. If we're going to leap wildly from correlation to causation, it would be more reasonable to conclude that the draft makes the country more supportive of war, not less.

Nevertheless, let us briefly imagine that conscription really does have the pacifying effects some of its advocates claim for it, taking Vietnam as our model. Granting all that there's still no reason to believe that a draft would have made any difference to American foreign policy as of yet.

As previously mentioned, around 7,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to date. The 7,000th American soldier killed in action in Vietnam died sometime in 1966; the American military presence in Vietnam would grow for several years thereafter, peaking at over half a million troops. More Americans soldiers were killed in Vietnam in 1967 alone than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 12 years. In 1968, American deaths were more than twice those of the entire War on Terror. American deaths in 1969 were also higher in a single year than they've been in the entire past 12. By 1970, the American military presence in Vietnam was diminishing (though still larger than in 1966), and “only” 6,000 Americans were killed in a single year. In 1971, with Vietnamization of the war effort well under way, there were still over 2,000 American deaths, far more than any single year in the War on Terror. The US was still involved enough for the number of Americans killed to reach triple digits in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, when American involvement was finally forced to a complete halt by the lack of a South Vietnam to continue defending.

If we're to take Vietnam as our model, as conscription advocates suggest, the draft still needs another 51,000 American corpses to fully work it's peacemaking magic. And that's assuming we're being generous and not adjusting for population growth.

So again, the mystery: Why does the idea that the draft would have prevented or more rapidly hastened the end of American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or prevent American military intervention in Syria (which the American public opposed by a substantial margin, the fact that the risks would be borne by volunteers notwithstanding) have such currency?

It's not just baseless. It's stupidly, embarrassingly, obviously baseless. Basic historical facts demonstrate that it's nonsense. It doesn't even have the thin superficial plausibility that most widely believed nonsense has. The idea that you can help the poor by making it illegal to pay low wages or minimize the harm caused by cocaine by making it illegal makes sense if you don't think beyond the most obvious, immediate effects, whereas “politicians will fight fewer wars if they're guaranteed an unlimited supply of the young men needed to fight them whether those men are willing or not” doesn't even rise to that level.

More to come.

Let's you and him fight, Part 1

(Note: This article turned out a lot longer than I planned, so I'm breaking it into multiple parts.)

There's a question I've long been interested by, and with talk of possible American military intervention in Syria over the past few months it's taken greater prominence again: Where the hell did so many ostensibly anti-war people left of political center- from garden-variety liberals/progressives to more radical sorts to “anarchists”- get the idea that the draft is a good idea as an anti-war measure?

You certainly don't have to look far for examples. Renowned scholar, activist, and alleged anarchist Noam Chomsky has endorsed the draft on that basis. It's the perennial obsession of Congressmen Charles Rangel (lifetimes ratings of 4% from the American Conservative Union, 95% from the AFL-CIO, 92% from the Brady Campaign, 91% lifetime yearly average from American for Democratic Action) of New York. MSNBC talking head and self-described "practical European socialist" Lawrence O'Donnell is a fan. And it's easy enough to find it supported in publications like In These Times, Mother Jones, or London Progressive Journal. You can hardly take a metaphorical step in the comments sections of most major "progressive" sites without tripping over a horde of boosters for the idea when the military and foreign policy are the issue at hand. It may not be a majority opinion, but it's certainly not a rare one

Now, I wouldn't be surprised by folks like that liking the draft as a matter of general principle, as indeed many openly are. If you're a big fan of forcing people to do things in groups, fetishize things like "shared" sacrifice for the state, and/or want to decisively repudiate the idea that a man's life belongs to him and not the rulers of some collective, it doesn't get much better than conscription. But the idea that it would encourage a more peaceful foreign policy as well is still pretty common.

The argument is usually that conscription gives more Americans a direct stake in decisions to use military force by raising the threat that they or someone they love will be drafted and possibly killed, and so will prevent the public from supporting war without good reason. The volunteer military, on the other hand, is said to insulate much of the public from the costs of war by drawing a disproportionate amount of its personnel from particular subsets of society,  typically said to be racial minorities and the poor, who join for lack of other options.

Now, one problem with this is that it's not actually accurate in the modern United States. The poorest fifth of Americans are actually underrepresented in the US military; enlistment rules concerning education and criminal records make a disproportionately large percentage of them ineligible. The military is disproportionately black, but- due to relatively lower Hispanic and Asians enlistment- not disproportionately nonwhite. The actual disparity most worth noting (other than sex, which a draft wouldn't change*) is regional, with a disproportionate number of military personnel coming from the South or the states around the Rocky Mountains. Inconveniently, these are also the parts of the country that are most pro-war, so the supposed mechanism by which the draft would discourage support for war is questionable.

(If any American military draft included women, I'd be very surprised. If that draft were continued into a war of any significant size and length and didn't offer females enough exemptions to make their inclusion a dead letter, I'd be even more surprised. If it actually put female conscripts into the line of fire in any significant numbers, I'd be absolutely shocked. If someone invented some sort of superdrug that gave the average woman the upper body strength and bone density of the average man, those predictions would not change. American conservatives are antsy enough about women's current degree of involvement in the military when they're all volunteers and there's nearly 49 dead men for every dead woman. Actually existing American feminism has a habit of recoiling in horror upon contact with anything resembling equality with non-elite men and retreating into leftish-sounding justifications for traditional protections and privileges. Women currently aren't even required to register for a draft that hasn't actually been used in decades; the idea that any restoration of conscription in the United States would be done in anything resembling a gender-neutral fashion is laughable, and the claims of some conscription advocates that it would or should be are empty showboating.)

And, more generally, the popular cliché about how the wealthy and powerful would lose their taste for war if it were their sons in harm's way doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny very well. Young men of the upper and upper-middle classes have suffered disproportionately in many wars, and not just in pre-industrial societies where the nobility was also the warrior class or where the army was composed of those who could afford to provide their own arms. It's typically been more dangerous in modern armies to be a junior officer then an enlisted man, which historically didn't prevent the ranks of freshly commissioned lieutenants from being filled with the sons of aristocrats or the upper bourgeoisie, and even in the enlisted ranks front-line combatants have often disproportionately been men from comfortable backgrounds simply because they were healthier. Casualties were disproportionately high among men from upper and upper-middle class families in First World War Britain, to cite one conspicuous example; those in power still thought the conflict was worth the lives of well over 800,000 British men.

Joe Biden's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Sarah Palin's son spent a year on active duty in Iraq. John McCain's son served in Iraq. The period of all three deployments partially overlapped with the 2008 Presidential race. If any of them experienced some sort of epiphany about the horrors of war as a result, they kept it to themselves. 

A less commonly heard argument, generally limited to more radical circles, is the idea that a conscript (Noam Chomsky slips the euphemism “citizen” in here) army will be less willing than a volunteer (often dysphemized as “mercenary,” as if in unconscious tribute to the modern Left's reactionary Prussian roots) army to fight in imperialistic wars or commit atrocities.

This is historically dubious, to put it mildly. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had “citizen” armies. The Japanese Empire conquered and brutalized much of Asia with a “citizen” army that- just to recap, since some people seem to forget that Asians are not indeterminate clouds of quantum fuzz that only have definite characteristics and histories when white people are fucking with them- slaughtered millions, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by dousing Chinese cities in cholera and bubonic plague, and torturously killed thousands more researching medical mysteries like "What happens if you saw a still-conscious infant's torso open and start yanking stuff out?"  Every major belligerent in World War I had a “citizen” army. Napoleon conquered much of Europe with a “citizen” army. The first modern “citizen” army in Europe carried out the first modern ideological genocide in Europe on tens of thousand of civilians in the Vendée before it was even half a decade old.

For a bit of irony, that link up above leads to a transcript of a talk Noam Chomsky gave on the occasion of Yasser Arafat's death, condemning the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory... by the State of Israel, which is so enthusiastic about the idea of “citizen armies” that it has mandatory military service for all men 18-21 and is one of the only countries on Earth that conscripts women as well.

For bonus irony, in light of the fact it's radical leftists making this argument, consider the implications of simultaneously agreeing- as Chomsky does- with the statements that:

1.Volunteer armies are full of the sort of brutal, amoral “mercenaries” well-suited to murderous campaigns of aggression and imperialism, while a conscript army would be full of much more humane, thoughtful “citizens” who wouldn't be able to stomach such depravity.
2. Volunteer armies are dark-skinned and poor, while a conscript army would have a greatly increased proportion of whites and the rich.

I don't want to wander too far afield of my main subject, so I leave the question of what a naturally concomitant 3 might be to others.

There's another problem when we look at the American historical record. Proponents of these pro-draft arguments often cite the size of the antiwar movement and the eventual shift in public opinion against the war during America's involvement in Vietnam as an example of the draft having the effect they claim, and the relative lack of a noisy antiwar movement during America's even longer military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demonstration of how the lack of a draft makes the public tolerant of unjustified military adventurism.

How well does this claim hold up? We'll examine that next time.

(Spoiler alert: Poorly.)

This must be that "common-sense regulation" I hear such good things about

The state of Virginia's Board of Health recently enacted new regulations on abortion clinics. Ostensibly enacted to protect women's health, in practice they serve as an interesting example of how the regulatory state can be, and often is, used by governments to chip away at rights that are impractical to simply abolish wholesale. (Found via Reason.)

Last year, the state's General Assembly passed, and Governor Bob McDonnell signed, legislation requiring the state's Board of Health to institute new regulations requiring all existing abortion facilities performing five or more first-trimester abortions per month to comply with regulations similar to those that apply to new hospital construction (but not preexisting hospitals) in the state. The Board did so, creating an extensive list of new regulations last year, covering all existing and future facilities in the state, and finally voted to approve them this September. They will go permanently into effect next year, contingent on approval from Gov. Bob McDonnell. The board had voted back in June to include a grandfather clause exempting existing facilities, but reversed itself under pressure from Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli.

(For a more in-depth history see this article at Mother Jones. Detailed and refreshingly light on the conflation of forcing women to carry a pregnancy to term and failing to force some third party to subsidize recreational sex when a woman demands it that now infests left-of-center commentary on the subject.)

The new requirements (see this PDF file, starting on page 27) imposed on existing buildings are taken mostly from the 2010 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities published by the Facility Guidelines Institute. These include things things a minimum size of 80 feet for exam rooms for exam rooms, corridors at least 5 feet wide and seven feet ten inches tall, hands-free sink faucets, water fountains in waiting rooms, and new ventilation systems. Many of these are not trivial modifications to make to an existing building, and some existing facilities in the state will have to undergo costly renovations in order to continue legally operating.

Now, it's fairly obvious that the real point of this measure is to make it harder for abortion clinics to operate in Virginia, with the supposed public health justification serving as a fig leaf. The naked opportunism of the new regulations is made plain by the fact that they require existing abortion facilities to comply with building codes that apply only to new hospitals, which makes very little sense if protecting the health of patients at these facilities is really what this is about. Surely protecting the health and safety of people with heart problems or inflamed appendixes or stab wounds is no less important than protecting that of women undergoing abortions, after all. The improbability of the regulations' conservative supporters being driven by the genuine belief that women getting abortions ought to have more government-mandated protection for their health than everyone else should be obvious.

(Adding to the absurdity, the reason the regulations specify five or more first-trimester abortions is that abortions later in the pregnancy are required by law to be performed at a hospital, which may or may not be obliged to follow the same rules- so late-term abortions entail less potential risk to patients and so warrant less oversight than early ones, I guess.)

Indeed, calling the public health justification for these regulations a cynical ruse is actually a more charitable interpretation of their supporters' motives then taking them at face value. If these regulations are really such a good idea, so good that they should be imposed on existing facilities at considerable cost, their supporters in the legislature are guilty of an unconscionable betrayal of their constituents by wasting time and energy imposing them on only a very small niche of healthcare in the state when they should be fighting tooth and nail to get them in place everywhere, in old and new hospitals alike. While they dither, countless Virginians are apparently being imperiled every year in hospitals that were built before the current hospital construction regulations and exempted from current building standards, allowing their irresponsible owners and administrators to wantonly gamble with human life in miasmic corridors only 7'9” in height.

The vast scope of modern government power gives it tremendous latitude to attack freedoms that it supposedly still respects, either because they are supposed to be legally guaranteed rights the government cannot take away or because public opinion wouldn't tolerate their overt elimination. For instance, if it can't simply announce that no one can own a gun, it can still impose “reasonable regulations” to make it more burdensome, possibly to the point of a de facto ban. For instance, contrary to what is often thought, the city of Chicago has never actually banned owning handguns- you're just required to register them. Which you can't do without a time machine, because the city stopped accepting new registrations in 1982. It can't deny people the right to travel, but it can put all sorts of strings on any means of travel other than your own likes. You want to fly, you jump through whatever intrusive or degrading hoops the government demands- movement may be a right, but flying is only privilege. You want to drive- a driver's license is a privilege, not a right, and the government owns the roads, so you've “agreed” to give up some of your protections regarding search and seizure.

And it can't make abortion illegal, but it can do quite a bit to make legally getting one as burdensome as possible. The government of Virginia is no stranger to that, being one of the states requiring women to undergo a medically pointless abdominal ultrasound before receiving an abortion, supposedly to ensure that women can make an “informed choice” about the procedure. And that was the compromise solution, of course, enacted after supporters of the notorious original version of the law requiring transvaginal ultrasound compromised.

(Again, the limits of the measure's scope betrays the actual intent. The version of the ultrasound bill eventually passed in Virginia exempts women whose pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. That makes sense if the real purpose of the bill is to make getting an abortion a more burdensome and unpleasant experience- many people might like that idea in general but draw the line at doing it to a rape victim. It makes much less sense if the mandatory ultrasound really is supposed to be for the benefit of the woman. If you genuinely think it helps women considering abortion, and in fact helps them so much that it should be mandatory, why in God's name would you single out victims of rape and incest as the only women who aren't guaranteed this help?)

This is one of the problems with so many governmental powers that the great majority of people support. Like the power to tax, the power to regulate is the power to destroy, or at least the power to cripple, and when a governments' powers and activities intertwine with virtually every area of life in one way or another- as they inevitably do in any regulatory/interventionist state- very little if anything is out of reach.

The right to have an abortion is particularly vulnerable to this. It's an invasive medical procedure, making it part of one of the most regulated sectors of the economy- strict government regulation and licensing in the field of healthcare ranks high among those things everybody within spitting distance of the political mainstream mainstream “knows” is obviously necessary. It requires a permanent facility for both production and (for lack of a better word) consumption, and it's frequently done- as is the case here- in specialized facilities, which makes it highly vulnerable to attacks via zoning regulations. All of this makes it vulnerable in a way many things large numbers of people would like to restrict aren't. (There are certainly ways to interfere with or discriminate against homosexuals while still nominally respecting their right to sexual freedom, but making homosexuality de facto illegal by driving all of the gay sex factories in your state out of business with burdensome regulations is not one of them.) Given how intensely controversial abortion is, it's unsurprising that there are plenty of people ready to use the tools available to them.

It's a perverse irony that there's so much overlap between people who support abortion rights and people who wants to make the government's power to assail those rights even stronger. If you think there are powerful forces arrayed against women's ability to have an abortion now, what do you suppose it would be like in a single-payer system where every abortion is funded by the taxpayers, where people who want it restricted or outlawed are outraged at not merely having to tolerate something they consider murder but being forced to pay for it themselves every single time it happens, where people who think abortion should be legal but recoil at the notion of having any part of it themselves are told that simple tolerance is no longer an option, where the only source of money for a legal abortion is a perpetual political battlefield and comes with whatever strings Congress chooses to attach? As things stand now, making abortion inaccessible through legal channels nationwide would require a Supreme Court decision overturning a maor past decision or a constitutional amendment. Turn medicine into what many "progressives" want it to be, an arm of the state, and it gets a lot simpler.

"For you, the day the Supreme Court graced your health care was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

While I'm far from happy about the Supreme Court's decision affirming the federal government's right to force people to buy the products of insurance companies, I can't say I agree with the emphasis so many people unhappy with the decision have placed on it. Not because the insurance mandate isn't awful- it certainly is- but because I just don't see the Supreme Court's decision upholding the mandate as constitutional as anything more than business as usual.

Yes, it's true that giving the federal government the power to force people to engage in a particular business transaction is a new usurpation of unconstitutional authority that makes a mockery of the idea of a government with limited powers restrained to the modest role defined for it in the Constitution. Which is bad, but at this point but it's sort of like a single bullet from an entire magazine that someone just emptied into you- it's always better to have fewer 5.56mm holes in your chest rather than more, certainly, but if there's already 29 of them it's a bit silly to curse the 30th as the one that killed you.

Thus, while I certainly don't think the mandate is constitutional- if we're defining “constitutional” according to that document's text- I find the arguments of its more mainstream opponents against its constitutionality uncompelling. Much was made by some critics of the mandate of the fact that the mandate compels a person to actively engage in commerce, rather than regulating or forbidding commerce that already exist. As much as I oppose their premises, I actually agree with liberal defenders of the mandate that this distinction is meaningless hairsplitting.

Yeah, forcing people to buy the products of private firms is not a power the federal government has previously had, or one the Constitution suggests that it has. So what?

Think about the state of constitutional government prior to this. The United States was already a country where the power to take private property “for public use” encompasses taking people's homes and giving them to private developers, where growing food on your own land to eat in your own home on that land can be regulated as “interstate commerce,” where forcing men from their and homes against their will and making them serve in the military at gunpoint is not “involuntary servitude,”where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in the presence of an internal combustion engine, and where neither seizing someone's property because the police suspect them of a crime and requiring them to prove their innocence to get it back nor imprisoning thousands of people not convicted or even suspected of any crime because their ancestors were born in the wrong country are incompatible with the Constitution's guarantee of the right to trial by jury and due process of law.

The idea that the federal government is limited to doing the things the Constitution says it can do has been a joke since my grandfather's time. Even the much weaker claim that the government can't do things the Constitution explicitly says it can't do is shaky under even the best circumstances, and things are seldom at their best.

I don't think a strictly limited state with powers narrowly constrained by a constitution that actually stays that way is plausible; that's one of the major reasons I'm an anarchocapitalist. (The monopoly state is necessarily the judge of its own cases, and so is bound by it's constitution largely to the extent that those who wield its power want it to be bound, and the people most motivated to pursue that power are those who want to use it.. Things like separation of powers can ameliorate the problem, but don't come close to eliminating it; the only thing that could would be a governing class free of the self-interest and hunger for power over others endemic in the human race that supposedly makes the state an indispensable protector for society in the first place.) You needn't share that general perspective to accept my point in this post, however; even if I had more confidence in the general idea of constitutional limits as a way to hold governments in check, however, I'd still have very little in the ability of the Constitution we actually have to serve as a restraint on the government we actually have.

It's a mistake to think of all the ways that the US government violates the Constitution as merely a concatenation of individual usurpations, because once they're as numerous as they now are the whole becomes something more than the sum of its parts. They cease to be exceptions to the general rule and become examples of it. The fact that the government has claimed yet another power it's not supposed to have does little damage to the Constitution at this point, because periodically claiming new powers it's not supposed to have is itself well-established as an accepted, normal government power. Whether it uses that power to pretend that the Constitution authorizes it to compel the purchase of a product or forbid it is an administrative detail. Whether the ostensible justification is the power to regulate commerce between the states or the power to tax, likewise.

Now, I can understand why the decision to uphold the mandate might be a breaking point for some libertarians or strict constitutionalist conservatives who already abhorred the extent to which the government has expanded, but who had previously retained greater hope than I for a return to significant constitutional restraints on state power. Precisely which straw turns out to be the one that breaks the camel's back will vary from person to person, and given the noxiousness of the mandate as a policy I can understand why it would be worth at least two or three straws for many.

You can- and some people, mostly libertarians, have- make a much sounder argument that the mandate is unconstitutional by arguing that the federal government is supposed to be constrained to a set of very limited powers specifically assigned to it in the Constitution that does not include making people buy insurance. You'd be right, for whatever that's worth.

However, the most numerous and prominent critics of Obamacare, mainline conservatives, can't make that argument without attacking the things they themselves dear. That's likely a big part of the reason so much argument hinged on whether the power to compel commercial activity fell within the power to ”regulate” it- opponents of the mandate could argue that it doesn't without calling the scope of the government's power in general into question.

(There's a purely practical reason to make such an argument, to be sure- it might convince people for whom a more radical one would be a nonstarter- but for the most part I've seen no reason to believe that the average person treating the distinction as important is merely pretending to do so. Hypocritical in some cases, perhaps, but that doesn't necessarily mean being insincere.)

The typical conservative cannot strike wholeheartedly at Obamacare for fear of wounding himself in the process. Conservatives have to insist that acceptance of the mandate is a significant new leap in the unconstitutional powers of the federal government because if it isn't they're left with two possibilities, both unpalatable. Either the mandate and Obamacare more generally are constitutionally legitimate, or a huge part of the existing government isn't. The latter is something most conservatives, whatever their rhetorical pretensions, recoil from.

The Constitution that denies the federal government the power to control or mandate health insurance also contains no warrant for that government to hand out Social Security and Medicare, or impose the vast interventionist regulatory state that conservatives in actual practice typically support no less than liberals, or give welfare to farmers, or control lewd content on TV or the Internet, or throw drug users in prison. Someone who endorses at least some of those things has little standing to declare that THIS is the moment that the federal government's disdain for the Constitution has finally gone too far, when he accepts or outright endorses all sorts of equally dubious laws. If the Constitution authorizes the federal government to pull new powers out of its ass to deal with alleged threats to the nation's welfare, it's no encroachment on the Constitution when the federal government does just that- regardless of whether the “threat” is people without insurance or drug users or people cussing on network television. Many conservatives like to quote Gerald Ford's remark that “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have,” but very few of them take it very seriously because they want so very much.

The Supreme Court's upholding of the insurance mandate is worth lamenting for the attack on liberty and human well-being that it represents, but as a blow against the idea of limited government constrained by the Constitution it means very little. You can't hurt what's already dead.

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.

When soothing lies go wrong

Radley Balko has been writing quite a bit lately about incidents of people being harassed, arrested, or having their property confiscated by law enforcement for recording video or audio of their encounters with police in public places, frequently involving police who cite completely imaginary state laws against the practice. From Ohio- where videotaping police is quite legal- Balko brings this story. Melissa Greenfield and her boyfriend Colton Dorich had pulled into a truck stop after running out of gas. Dorich made a sign asking passing drivers for gas money, which apparently caused someone to call the police, resulting in the arrival of Sgt. Jonathon Burke of the Delaware County Sheriff's Department, who questioned the couple.

What I find especially worth noting about the story is that it provides a very vivid example of one of the dismaying aspects of modern law enforcement: The supposed justifications given for objectionable behavior by police are, if actually true, frequently just as damning as the criticism they're supposed to ward off.

From the article:

"I'm a 115-pound, 20-year-old girl wearing a cervical collar with nothing but a cell phone. I was not going to harm any officer," Greenfield said today. However, a sheriff's sergeant saw the situation differently after Greenfield announced she was recording video "for legal purposes and our own safety."

Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the "unknown" object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.

Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a "cell-phone gun." However, neither the sheriff's office nor the Columbus office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has ever come across one of the black-market devices that apparently are made in Eastern Europe...

The woman from Poway, Calif., pleaded no contest to obstructing official business. She was fined $20 and released with time served - three days in jail. The resisting-arrest charge was dropped. Greenfield said her plea was one of convenience to allow her to return home to receive treatment for her neck, which had been injured in a car wreck a few days earlier.

Greenfield said that, while driving her to the jail, Burke said that it was "unacceptable for me to be filming his activities."

Delaware County Sheriff Walter L. Davis III backed up Burke's actions. And, needless to say:

After Greenfield got her phone back, she said the video she took of the deputies at the Flying J truck stop at I-71 and Rt. 37 on July 9 had been deleted, along with a couple of vacation videos. Deputies did not delete any video, Davis said. A warrant would have been required to search the phone, and one was not obtained, he said.

Well, yes, but the fact that doing something would be corrupt and illegal is only a reason to think someone didn't do it if one is already assuming that their trustworthiness and integrity is unimpeachable, and going out of your way to prevent the creation of records of what you're doing on-duty while on the public payroll sort of works against that. The sad thing is that law enforcement enjoys enough reflexive deference among enough people for this to actually be a viable defense. (Think of how useful that would be in day-to-day life. "No, dear, of course I didn't lie about having a flat tire so that I could weasel out of my promise to see Cats with you for our anniversary and play Street Fighter IV on my friend's new HDTV instead. That would have been dishonest!")

People have been picking on Burke's bizarre "cell phone gun" claim, but that's not what makes his claims about his motives transparently ridiculous. It's his response to this supposed threat. If police officers genuinely believe that a person they are confronting may be pointing a gun at them, their response is not to repeatedly ask the possible gunman to put the suspected firearm back into their pocket. Neither "repeatedly ask" nor "back into their pocket" have any real-world referent in such a scenario. Even if police in this country were a lot more forbearing and restrained than I've come to expect, Burke's account would not be plausible, and in the "officer safety at any price" atmosphere that pervades so much of modern law enforcement it's utterly ludicrous.

(Also, cell phone guns do not function as electronic devices, since the original insides are removed to conceal the gun. If Burke knows how cell phone guns work and was willing to take enough time to repeatedly ask the woman to put her phone away, he could have easily confirmed that it was a real phone.)

But let's entertain his justification for a moment, and see what it implies. Suppose Burke is telling the truth, and he really did act the way he did because he was worried about a "cell phone gun."

There actually have been cases of people concealing firearms in cell phones. That, however, is merely a single example of the fact that weapons can be, and at some point or another probably have been, concealed in almost anything. Firearms have been hidden in flashlights, lipstick holders, beepers, pens, canes, and belt buckles. Virtually any bag, box, or container could contain explosives or incendiaries. The Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was murdered by a KGB assassin who stabbed him with a poison-injecting umbrella. A seemingly blind man with a white walking stick might actually be wielding a sword cane or a concealed single-shot gun. (And wearing darkened glasses that contain some sort of Predator-esque infrared targeting system, perhaps.) Any bulging pocket or billowing sleeve can contain a weapon. Any seemingly innocuous word or gesture could be a covert signal to a hidden accomplice or sniper or hit squad.

The point is this. Whenever you are among other humans, there are an innumerable number of possible means by which one of the people around you might injure or kill you, and there is always a chance, however small, that one of them possesses such a means and is about to attack you with it. Many of these are more likely than the the threat Burke was supposedly reacting to, often much more, and still not nearly likely enough to justify commanding or forcing people to preemptively "disarm" in the absence of any concrete reason to suspect a threat.

And here we see a phenomenon that is remarkably common when police are trying to explain or justify questionable behavior: The justification is as damning as the criticism it was meant to dispel. Greenfield accuses a police officer of abusing his authority, and the excuse given by the police is that what seemed like a police officer abusing his power to forcibly prevent a citizen from exercising her rights was actually just a police officer forcibly preventing a citizen from exercising her rights because he was lashing out at phantom threats while in the grip of some paranoid madness.

If I went around demanding that my fellow patrons at my local bar drink only from glasses if sitting in my vicinity (people are impuslve when they drink, and I could be shanked with a broken bottle), that anyone walking behind me on the sidewalk stay at least 15 feet back (might get thumped from behind), or that everyone turn out their pockets when I enter the room to show they contain no weapons, nobody would consider that reasonable behavior. My friends and family would fear that I had developed some terrible psychological or psychiatric problem. If I went beyond verbal demands and resorted to force, I'd be considered a menace to society.

And yet, the risks I'd be heading off are still more likely than the theoretically possible but wildly improbable risk Burke claims he feared. If Sergeant Burke really arrested Greenfield because he was worried about the possibility that a woman in a neck brace he had met while responding to a call about panhandling loiterers at a truck stop who said she was recording her encounter with him on a cell phone camera for legal reasons- which she had every right to do- was actually just pretending to record him so that she could murder him with a rare black market Eastern European gangland assassination weapon, then he is out of his mind.

If that's really true then Burke is a pitiable figure rather than a blameworthy one, but if anything the sheriff's department actually comes off looking worse. Even reasonable men can make tragic mistakes when watching for potential threats in stressful situations. Giving a gun and the task of enforcing the law to anyone as paranoid, fearful, and on-edge as Burke would need to be to truly think that his behavior was a reasonable response to danger is a disaster waiting to happen, and his superiors would be obscenely irresponsible to create such a risk. In turn, if Burke's superiors are being sincere when they back him up and say that his actions were a reasonable and proper response to a reasonable fear, that's even more ominous still, because that implies that the whole department is run by raving paranoiacs.

As I said above, I don't believe for a moment that Burke was actually motivated by fear of secret weapons, or that his own superiors really think he was. What troubles me more than the dishonesty is the fact that many people, I'm sure, will accept the excuses given by Burke and by Sheriff Davis. In other words, they will accept the idea that it's actually appropriate for the police to view all the rest of us with the sort of hysterical paranoia that Burke's "justification" implies, and treat us accordingly.

Thank God we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House now

June 2010 was the bloodiest month for NATO troops in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war nine years ago. There were either 101 or 81 fatalities, depending on whether you use the figures from iCasualties or official military statements, but each figure is the highest reported by its respective source since operations began in 2001. I don't have any figures in front of me for Afghan casualties, military or civilian, but given that the jump in NATO deaths is being attributed to the intensification of offensive operations in Taliban-controlled areas I'd imagine they're up as well.

I've found depressingly little comment on this news online. My memories of antiwar sentiment during the Bush era are starting to seem almost like a dream from which I've just awakened: I can vividly remember it, so vividly I could swear it was real, but there's nothing concrete I can grasp to prove it ever actually happened.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

Paul Craig Roberts has a nice article at Counterpunch on the Left and gun control. This is something that has had me shaking my head for years. I find myself baffled by the mentality of someone who believes that:

1. The government is controlled by a malevolent cabal of greedy corporate plutocrats who seek to exploit and oppress us, and

2. Only police and the military should have guns. Police and military personnel who work for the government. The one that's controlled by a malevolent cabal of greedy corporate plutocrats who seek to exploit and oppress us.

Then again, these are largely the same people who think that the only thing that can save us us from the malevolent cabal of etc. etc. is giving greater power over society in general to the government. It truly is bizarre, when you think about it- there's generally a strong positive correlation in America between the belief that the government is controlled by some despicable cabal that has pulled the wool over most of the country's eyes and the belief that that same government should have more power than it currently does, because that will somehow solve the problem.

My guess is that this is what happens when the standard-issue public school civics textbook view of politics- we are the government, modern managerial liberalism is the best of all possible worlds, powerful government is inherently antithetical to powerful moneyed interests who would otherwise eat us all alive, and so on- collides with reality hard enough to be bent, but not hard enough to be broken. The evidence that the government is not what good-government liberalism advertises it to be becomes too much to deny. Too much happens that, according to this worldview, doesn't or can't happen, and it's too pervasive to write off as minor glitches and imperfections in a good system.

And yet at the same time, the belief that interventionism and the institutions of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and so on protect people from rapacious businessmen is too deeply rooted to challenge; it is the core of almost all mainstream politic. "Hostile to big business" is implicitly treated as part of the definition of economic interventionism. Thus, the idea that the government institutions beloved of progressives actually help rather than hinder the wealthy and powerful, or that owners and managers of big corporations could actually want more regulation rather than less, seems to strike many people as not merely untrue or unbelievable but nonsensical, if they're exposed to it at all.

Put the two together, and the result is an incoherent worldview in which the existing government can change from good to evil and back again in an instant. My favorite example is probably campaign finance "reform": Things are bad because the government is controlled by evil, greedy special interests, so we should solve the problem by passing laws giving the government greater power to control who can contribute money to political efforts and what can be said during elections, thereby driving out the special interests... and this will work because the government that enacts, enforces, and interprets those laws is controlled by We the People and exists to promote the common good. It only makes sense if America has two effectively indistinguishable federal governments that somehow exist side by side simultaneously, one good and one evil.

(Or if reform is so powerful that its effects can actually travel back in time, and thereby prevent the special interests pulling the government's strings from using campaign reform's powers for evil by destroying them in the past, before the reform's own creation. Our current understanding of physics does not rule out the theoretical possibility of time travel, so this arguably has a better chance of success than most liberal projects.)

It's quite a testament to how powerful the myth of the democratic interventionist state as defender of the common man has become. How many kings, oligarchs, and despots of past ages could boast that even most of the people who hated them were passionately dedicated to pushing more power into their hands?

Not actual opposition to plutocracy, but an incredible simulation

America's political culture and national self-image romanticizes the underdog, the rebel, the Common Man, the Little Guy, the bold voice speaking against the powerful. Thus, in any endeavor to use the force of government in the pursuit of wealth, privilege, and power, it helps to have some sympathetic people who fit or at least resemble that description in the vicinity. It always makes me chuckle when some earnest statist claims that libertarians are the dupes or tools of greedy businessmen, and part of the reason for that is nicely illustrated by this story from my home state of Illinois.

MUNDELEIN, Ill.—Robert Brownson long believed that his proposed development here, with its 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, was being held hostage by nearby homeowners.

He had seen them protesting at city hall, and they had filed a lawsuit to stop the project. What he didn't know was that the locals were getting a lot of help. A grocery chain with nine stores in the area had hired Saint Consulting Group to secretly run the antidevelopment campaign...

P. Michael Saint... is founder of Saint Consulting Group, which specializes in using political-campaign tactics to build support for or against developments. Many of its efforts to block projects are clandestine.

As Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has grown into the largest grocery seller in the U.S., similar battles have played out in hundreds of towns like Mundelein. Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway Inc. and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart...

Supermarkets that have funded campaigns to stop Wal-Mart are concerned about having to match the retailing giant's low prices lest they lose market share...
In Mundelein, a town of 35,000 about 20 miles northwest of Chicago, it was Supervalu, a national grocer based in Eden Prairie, Minn., that hired Saint to work behind the scenes, according to Saint documents. Supervalu's objective was to block Wal-Mart from competing with its nine Jewel-Osco supermarkets located within three to ten miles of the proposed shopping center...

Mr. Saint... founded his firm 26 years ago. It specializes in using political-campaign tactics—petition drives, phone banks, websites—to build support for or against controversial projects...

For the typical anti-Wal-Mart assignment, a Saint manager will drop into town using an assumed name to create or take control of local opposition, according to former Saint employees...

Safeway, a national chain based in Pleasanton, Calif., retained Saint to thwart Wal-Mart Supercenters in more than 30 towns in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in recent years...

The article goes on to discuss the methods used by Saint's company to delay or block the construction of stores that would compete with the company's clients, frequently revolving around the creation, funding, and control of ostensibly grassroots organizations whose rank-and-file members are ignorant of where their leadership and funding is actually coming from. It also describes some specific examples, including a darkly humorous, Peter Sellers-esque account of Saint's company creating a front group of local citizens in Pennsylvania to block a proposed Wal-Mart on behalf of competitor Giant Food Stores, and then having to suddenly destroy it's own creation when Giant's parent company decided to build its own enormous store on a site directly opposite the lot where the Wal-Mart would have gone.

Arguing ad hominem is a logical fallacy, and the fact that a political cause is supported by and serves the financial interests of a national retail giant with over $40 billion in yearly revenue that wants to use government power to block competition doesn't prove that the cause is wrong. This stiory does, however, nicely illustrate the nature of the lie on which so much of modern politics is built.

One of our great cultural myths in America is that of heroic, public-spirited struggle waged by plucky grassroots bands of We the People against the depredations and greed of some Heartless Corporation. The reality is much less romantic: The heroic struggles between Concerned Citizens and Greedy Plutocrats lionized in our civic mythology and in mainstream accounts of history are in fact usually, at best, battles between Greedy Plutocrat A and Greedy Plutocrat B, in which one side or the other is just better at finding frontmen and dupes. Frequently it doesn't even rise to that level, where the Concerned Citizens are at least actually hurting the target of their ire, and instead serves the purpose of aiding the very companies or industry being righteously railed against at the expense of the general public. (Kevin Carson's work is a valuable resource on this sort of thing.)

My favorite recent example of this principle at work is the controversy over net neutrality, and the way that controversy is usually framed. Opposed to net neutrality, we are told, are the big, greedy telecommunications companies like Comcast, who will choke off the free flow of information unless the government saves us from them. They are opposed by a plucky band of grassroots freedom fighters... Well, a plucky band of grassroots freedom fighters and various multibillion dollar corporations that stand to benefit financially from net neutrality, like Google (revenue of $23.6 billion in 2009), Amazon.com ($24.5 billion in 2009), eBay ($8.7 billion) and Sony ($78 billion). Again, the fact that various business interests are on your side for their own self-interested reasons doesn't mean that you're wrong, but it does mean that the story is more complicated than what many people like to believe.

There are good criticisms to be made of internet service providers, which are frequently the beneficiaries of government-granted monopolies or other governmental barriers to competition. If ISPs really are in a position to harm consumers by controlling what their customers can access online and are likely to take advantage of that, as neutrality advocates claim, freeing the market for internet services would break these monopolies and deal with the problem.

But the fact that current ISPs are the creatures of state intervention is seldom discussed, and it's not hard to see why. Government-enforced uniformity of bandwidth pricing would benefit big players like Google and Amazon.com, who would be natural targets if ISPs started to engage in price discrimination and don't want to see telecommunications companies taking a slice of their pie. Deregulation of ISPs, on the other hand, would benefit (aside from consumers) small internet firms currently being blocked from trying to compete with the big monopolies in many markets, and companies that do not currently exist but would if regulations were not hostile to entrepreneurs entering the market- in other words, it would benefit people who don't have deep pockets or political muscle or executives who get invited to Presidential galas in return for big donations.

Combine that with many people's kneejerk "The government must fix it" response to any potential problems and the prejudices and self-interest pervasive among politicians, intellectuals, and the media, and it's not surprising that few if any of the people and organizations oh-so-concerned about the possible depredations of companies like Comcast show interest in actually going after the source of their power, and that only "solutions" that increase government power are proposed and agitated for.

Similarly, there are certainly good criticisms to be made of Wal-Mart, such as the company's use of eminent domain and the fact that it's market share has probably been inflated by the way many government regulations disproportionately hurt smaller firms, but the vast majority of the store's critics never use arguments like that. They can't, since their ideology is based around the belief that the interventionist state is a good thing and simply can't process the idea that it might be the problem and not the solution, or that it could be the ally of powerful business interests and not their enemy. Instead we get a relentless torrent of economic ignorance, elitism, xenophobia, and class snobbery.

The story of "progressive" and populist politics in the United States is, at its core, a story of fake rebellion, dressing up the strengthening and enrichment of privileged interests as a battle to protect the weak and vulnerable from the strong. The central delusion of modern statism- that the concentrated coercive power of the state can be trusted to protect the weak and restrain the strong- ensures that it will remain so.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

One of the things one becomes aware of as a libertarian is that most messages from politicians and government agencies are definitely not made with you in mind, because they are created to be appealing and persuasive to a public that, for the most part, is operating on ideological premises very different from your own. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that I'm so out of touch that I'm unusual in being creeped out by this:



No, that's not a parody. To give credit where it's due, the production values are far superior to anything the government puts out here in Illinois.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

Did anyone explain to these people that the whole “omnipresent government surveillance watching your every move through its pitiless electronic eyes” motif doesn't really work when you want to portray something as, y'know, not horrifying? The fact that the voice-over is done in a creepy, soulless computerized monotone that sounds like HAL 9000's little sister makes it even better. Short of having the announcer add "AND BY 'BACK TAXES,' TOM, WE MEAN YOUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM, WHICH WE WILL HARVEST TO CONTINUE OUR HORRIFYING EXPERIMENTS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS SO THAT WE MIGHT FURTHER EXPAND OUR GODLIKE TRANSHUMAN INTELLECTS," I'm hard-pressed to think of how this ad could be made even less likely to endear the government of Pennsylvania to me than it is already.

(An earlier draft of this post said "endear the government of Pennsylvania to anyone," but then I read the comments section of this article at Huffington Post.)

Here's what stuns me about this, even taking the frequent ineptitude of government into account: Mass media public relations material for an organization as large and bureaucratic as the government of a major U.S. state has to go past a lot of eyes before it ends up on TV. You'd think that at some point in the chain of people from the ad's creators to their superiors at the advertising agency to the people in the government who had to sign off on it that someone, somewhere, at some point would have suggested that an ad that looks like it comes from a dystopian future where mankind has been enslaved under the suffocating Orwellian rule of sinister, tax-hungry artificial intelligences might not play well.

Ve belive in NOTHING, Olberman! Nothing!

Here's something interesting I've noticed about left-liberal political rhetoric of the past year or so: The increasing use of the word "nihilist" to describe opponents. Keith Olberman is the example I've seen most recently, but it's been popping up more and more lately, in reference to people who oppose the Democrats and especially people who oppose the currently debated health care "reforms."

I'm accustomed to liberals bombarding anyone who opposes them with accusations of racism, misogyny, greed, religious fanaticism, heartless indifference to human suffering, sadistic hatred of the disadvantaged, and a general sort of Saturday morning cartoon villainish love of wickedness. (This is why I've always found most of the liberal complaints about the increasingly ferocious turn right-wing rhetoric took after 9/11 to be laughably hypocritical, like a man who goes around attacking people with an ax becoming indignant when someone violates the Queensbury rules by kicking him in the shin.) This use of "nihilist is new to me, though.

It may seem like overanalyzing to look at this as anything other than a case of political hacks tossing around smart-sounding terms to create the illusion that they have more to say than "You suck," but I think the way people choose to say "You suck" can be revealing about people's attitudes.

This use of "nihilist" seems less weird if you consider the implicit assumptions of many people. Liberals often take the attitude that only things done by the government really "count," so that they consistently conflate "Nothing should be done" with "Nothing should be done by the government." From that perspective, someone who persistently says "The government should not be used to address this problem" is indistinguishable from someone who says "This problem should not be addressed." Since most liberals are so heavily invested in the myth that Republicans are die-hard free market advocates who don't want the government doing much of anything, it would follow naturally that they don't really think anything matters.

Further, as I've said before, liberals are often in the habit of taking all their assumptions for granted to such an extent that they have trouble remembering that other possible sets of assumptions even exist. Liberal responses to opposition often have a bewildered, hysterical edge absent in their conservative counterparts; conservatives usually just get mad at you for opposing them, but liberals often seem shocked and panicked to discover that something so alien and unnatural as someone who disagrees with them is possible.

From within a worldview influenced by these assumptions, accusations of "nihilism" make sense. Liberal ideas about what's right and wrong are the only possible ideas about what's right and wrong; if you reject them, it follows that you have no moral beliefs at all. Hence the endless claims that opponents of the Left must be motivated by greed, or hatred, or mindless fear of change, or whatever; people who claim to be motivated by a set of moral beliefs opposed to those of liberals must be lying (or perhaps crazy), because they're claiming an impossibility.

This is not an exclusively leftist phenomenon. Consider some common traits of conservative rhetoric.

Liberals aren't the only people prone to thinking that only government action really "counts." Among conservatives, one of the more common arguments in favor of government prohibition of things like drug use, prostitution, pornography, and so on is that it would "send the wrong message" to make them legal, even if prohibition is ineffectual for actually preventing them. It's through the government that meaningful moral disapproval is expressed, not through society. Conservatives do frequently have more appreciation for voluntary social institutions than liberals, but they still often treat them as secondary: It's great if parent's and churches and the innumerable unspoken norms of society chip in by telling people that using drugs is bad, but unless we punish drug use by government force we don't really mean it.

Similarly, though I think that conservatives are much less prone than liberals to forgetting that their belief system is not universally agreed upon, many of them do fall into the trap of speaking as if it is the only set of beliefs possible, especially on matters of personal freedom.

For instance, I've often seen it used by social conservatives to describe people who reject conservative beliefs about sexuality. But most such people are no more "relativists" than conservatives. For instance, most advocates of equality for gays, if asked various moral questions relating to homosexuality, would say that statements like "It is not immoral to be gay" and "It is wrong to persecute someone because of their sexual orientation" are true, and that they are true beyond his particular time and place. They certainly wouldn't say that "Is shouting homophobic insults at a gay couple wrong?" is a question with no objective answer, or that "Hating gays is wrong for me, but right for Fred Phelps."

Some conservatives don't seem to get this, and treat rejecting their views as if it were the same thing as denying the legitimacy of any moral judgment at all. Hence, I think, the frequency with which people argue that acceptance of homosexuality will lead us inevitably to acceptance of sex with children or animals. The idea that people who reject their moral beliefs have their own sincerely held set of beliefs about right and wrong (e.g., "Voluntary sex between two adults is acceptable, sex with someone unable to give meaningful consent is wrong") just doesn't compute with some people.

From my perspective, ideas like "If it's OK for a grown man to have sex with another grown man, then it must also be OK for a grown man to have sex with a little boy" and "If you don't want to seize someone's money at gunpoint and spend it on medicine for poor people, you must hate poor people"are so bizarre as to seem almost literally insane, but if you start with the premise that a particular set of beliefs are the only beliefs possible it makes perfect sense.

Even people who are generally understanding of the fact that people can sincerely have beliefs significantly different from theirs often fall into this if the difference grows sufficiently extreme. Think of how often people will insist that people with outrageously repugnant moral beliefs, like the Nazis, simply must have been either crazy or insincere. Often, however, people don't get as far as that. Indeed, as the venom between the major parties in the US often demonstrates, the difference doesn't have to be very wide before the "How could anyone believe that?" response kicks in, especially when those differences are tied to tribal groups like political parties.

This is one of the upsides of growing up as a weirdo, by the way- you have it drilled into your being, from an early age, that "How would I feel in his place?" and "How does he feel in his place?" are not the same question. Understanding someone who's beliefs, feelings, or desires are significantly different from your own is far harder, and far rarer,than most people realize, and the problems caused by that deficiency are greatly magnified by the fact that most people are ignorant of it.