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.

Opiate of the Red States

A few weeks back, the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom denounced Congressman Ron Paul and expelled him from their National Advisory Board, on which he had served for twenty years. This, despite the fact that Paul was the recipient of the group's greatest honor, the Guardian of Freedom award, and despite the fact that Paul is by far the most thoroughgoing opponent of big government and supporter of free enterprise in Congress country and has done an enormous amount to popularize those ideas- ideas that are ostensibly among the YAF's core principles. (Young American's for Freedom should not be confused with the Young Americans for Liberty, another student-based group. You can tell them apart by the fact that YAL's leaders don't don't snicker when they say the last word of their group's name.)

This, in microcosm, is an excellent reenactment of the story of the American conservative movement since the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

The reason for his expulsion action was simple- Paul is anti-war. He thinks that “limited government” is incompatible with spending hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year to perpetually garrison the entire planet and billions more for armed social engineering projects on the other side of the world. He's argued that foreigners become upset when their friends, relatives, countrymen, or coreligionists are maimed or killed, and that this displeasure has more to do with why some of them are willing to hurl themselves to certain death for a chance to kill Americans than hatred of push-up bras or BLTs or the works of Montesquieu does.  His preferred response to terrorism does not involve unending “nation-building” military occupations or the unprovoked flattening of whatever foreign country he happens to be annoyed with at the time.

Let's take a look at YAF's core statement of principles, the Sharon Statement. The Sharon Statement endorses strict constitutionalism and federalism limiting the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, the free  market, the view that the proper role of government is to preserve individual freedom through law enforcement and national defense, that national sovereignty must not be ceded to foreign or international bodies, and that the standard by which a foreign policy should be judged is “the just interests of the United States.”

Not bad. If anyone within spitting distance of importance in mainstream American right-of-center politics had actually demonstrated principles like these within my lifetime, I'd hold modern conservatism in much higher esteem. Remove the now-outdated references to international communism (the statement was written in 1960) and it sounds like something Ron Paul could easily have written himself- and, unlike most Republican who hold public office or enjoy any media prominence, actually believe. Even if you accept the claim that Paul's non-interventionism does not “serve the just interests of the United States,”  Ron Paul is still by far the national political figure who best exemplifies the ideals of what is supposed to be YAF's creed.

And yet Paul is still utterly beyond the pale in the eyes of YAF's leadership ; not merely unfit for participation in their organization, but a moral monster. The YAF's leadership didn't merely say that they thought Paul was too far out of step with the YAF's ideals for them to continue working with him. In the statement issued about Paul's expulsion, YAF Senior National Director Jordan Marks said that Paul's actions “border on treason.” (Emphasis added.)

YAF is just one group, and there's clearly a strong element of opportunism here. The official statement against Paul- who has long been quite vocal about his foreign policy views- says they're only taking action against him now because he's started leading "left-wing subversives" into the movement. If we give Mr. Marks the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would not publicly state that someone is on the border of being guilty of something that is punishable by death under the laws of the United States and has traditionally been considered to be among the most despicable of all crimes unless he actually meant it, it would follow that YAF has been willingly associating itself with a known borderline-traitor for years. Apparently, YAF's leadership cannot abide an influx of young anti-interventionists inspired by Paul's example, but is "big tent" enough to accept years of behavior that borders on “levying war” against the United States and/or “adhering to their Enemies.” That seems sort of odd for a group that expresses so much concern about defending America, though perhaps the various left-wing anti-Americans I was exposed to in my formative years have clouded my judgment.

Nevertheless, its example is depressingly illustrative; either Marks et al. sincerely believe what the say about Paul, or they're playing to an audience that they expect to be well-disposed towards what they said. In either case, once YAF's leaders decided to abandon their convenient hypocrisy (or emerged from cryogenic hibernation, or whatever was stopping them from driving History's Greatest Monster from their ranks before now), their condemnation and excommunication of Paul had a well-established template to follow.

Support for militarism and foreign adventurism is not merely the dominant or most strongly held position in post 9/11 mainstream conservatism, but its defining principle as a political movement. This level of condemnation comes in different degrees but the fundamental principle is pretty consistent: being conspicuously antiwar is qualitatively worse than deviating from other principles conservatives claim to hold dear. Almost unlimited disdain for supposed conservative principles like free markets, limited government, constitutionalism, and federalism is excusable as long as you're pro-war enough, and no amount of support for them matters if you aren't.

(Mainstream liberalism follows a similar principle in regards to abridging civil liberties, giving giant piles of government money to the rich and privileged, compelling members of the middle and working classes to give piles of their own money and/or their homes to same, blasting hapless foreigners to pulp in ill-conceived military ventures, powerful white guys doing horrendous things to vulnerable females, and the like.)

It's possible to be pro-war and yet so unacceptably deviant in others ways that you're consigned to the outer darkness with folks like Paul, but it's damned hard. Being a vehemently anti-religious Marxist isn't enough. Instituting a state-level prototype of Obamacare while serving as a governor isn't enough. Being a Democratic Party candidate for the vice-presidency with F ratings from the National Taxpayers Union and the National Rifle Association isn't enough. This phenomenon isn't new, of course, since mainstream Cold War conservatism spurned vocal antimilitarists like Murray Rothbard and John T. Flynn but was glad to embrace New Dealers and social democrats who were sufficiently interventionist, but it's more rigid and far more hysterical.

Now, this is not universal, though the intense hostility many conservatives display towards conservative dissenters (such as paleoconservatives) on this issue only serves to emphasize the general rule. The popularity of Ron Paul in the last few years further shows that there are people who identify as conservative who don't share these priorities, and my hope is that things like the Tea Party movement will spur some conservatives to take a more serious interest in the idea of limiting government power that won't fade into oblivion once the Democrats are out of the White House. The resurgence of antistatist-sounding rhetoric among so many politicians and other prominent figures on the Right is to a great extent a pose, to be sure, but part of the reason the pose is so useful is because it brings in people who actually do take ideas like that seriously, at least some of the time, but have enough blind spots or gaps in their understanding and awareness to be taken in by Republican lip service to them.

(The other principal reason the pose is useful is that there is a significant- probably more significant- strain within modern conservatism that places great value and emphasis on the word "freedom", but has little or no regard for the freedom of individuals in even a limited or confused sense. It's not that they're lying- except to themselves, I suppose- it's just that they have a conception of freedom devoid of actual content. “Freedom” in this context simply means what America is and does, regardless of what America is and does; You could swap in “goodness” or “American” or “fahrvergnugen“ with little or no loss of meaning. They're the exemplars of the “shut up and enjoy your freedom of speech” philosophy.)

A political movement mimicking the rhetoric of ideals its biggest players and many of the rank-and-file don't actually respect very much- either as a deliberate deception or due to self-delusion-  is playing a dangerous game. The people who aren't in on the joke may eventually notice the disparity between your words and deeds, or realize that what you claim to believe has implications- perhaps radical implications- you haven't acknowledged. That's why the all-consuming primacy of the “War on Terror,”or some other foreign menace, is so helpful: it eternally excuses conservatism's failure to be what it claims to be.

It allows you to assert hostility  to “big government” as a general principle while supporting so many deviations from it- because the war on terrorism is so important, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, etc.- that the exceptions devour the supposed rule. It means that someone like Ron Paul should be rejected in favor of people who make professed Republican hostility to domestic big government, collectivism, welfare statism, and meddling Washington bureaucrats and political elites seem like an obscene joke, because the War on Terror is so important that all other principles are secondary. But hang in there, and someday we'll have the luxury of making an effort to act on the ideals we're always talking about. Just not today, or the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

American conservatism is remarkably similar to communism in this respect, now that I think about it.

David Horowitz. 'Nuff said.

David Horowitz had a recent post at NewsRealBlog, "Ron Paul Is A Vicious Anti-Semite and Anti-American and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him." In it, Horowitz argues that Ron Paul is... well, a vicious anti-Semite, and supports this by saying that:

Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel  — the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States.

He then approvingly posts a message sent out by Gary Bauer on the subject, which includes the following in it's criticism of Paul:

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) has just introduced an amendment to end all U.S. aid to Israel ... The U.S. gives billions of dollars a year to foreign countries that hate us and regularly vote against us at the United Nations.  But, Israel votes with the U.S. 97% of the time.  They are a loyal ally that shares our values.  The aid they receive is used to buy military equipment from U.S. companies so the money comes back to us. Ron Paul’s proposal makes no sense.

This demonstrates one of the cardinal rules of deception: Keep explicit falsehoods to a minimum. Whatever your subject, say things about that subject that are true- but only some things that are true, isolated from their actual context and arranged in a pattern that points towards the desired conclusion.

Did Ron Paul propose ending U.S. aid to Israel? He did. More precisely, he proposed ending all foreign aid, and since Israel is not a state, territory, possession, dependency, or federally administered district of the United States of America it falls under the "foreign" category.

So yes, it's true that Ron Paul supports "withdrawing aid for Israel," just as it's true that I try to avoid large, raucous parties and gatherings where Jews are present, would feel extremely uncomfortable if I discovered that a Jewish voyeur had installed tiny hidden cameras in my bathroom, and refuse to wear miniskirts or ballroom gowns or "World's Greatest Grandma" T-shirts that have been worn by Jews. Some fanatical Markley apologists would no doubt make excuses for this blatant anti-Semitism by attributing these things to the fact that John Markley is not particularly social or outgoing, or values his privacy and personal space, or isn't a woman, but Horowitz has sniffed me out.

Breathing is also a privilege, not a right

Whenever the subject of the health insurance mandate comes up, one of the most common- perhaps the most common-  rejoinders directed at people who oppose forcing everyone in the country to give money to the insurance companies whether they want their product or not is to cite the precedent of mandatory automobile liability insurance.

Now, like virtually all statist arguments that take the form of, "If it's OK for the government to do X, it's OK for it to do Y," the desirability of X is simply assumed without argument. (New Hampshire has no mandatory insurance laws for drivers, and has somehow avoided becoming an apocalyptic Mad Max-esque hellhole.) Leave that aside for the now. There are a number of important dissimilarities between the two types of insurances and the mandate laws concerning them that make the analogy dubious, but put that aside for the moment as well.

Suppose they are analogous, such that if mandatory automobile insurance for drivers is unobjectionable then insurance mandate is likewise unobjectionable. For that to be the case, the argument that justifies one must also work as a justification for the other. What is the argument for mandatory automobile insurance?

The stated purpose of mandatory insurance is to prevent people from potentially imposing costs on others by incurring debts to others- lawsuit damages from a collision, in this case-  that they cannot pay. The reason it's generally considered unobjectionable to fulfill this objective by requiring drivers to buy insurance is that operating a vehicle on a government-owned road is, we are told at great length, a privilege and not a right. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it is reasonable for the government to impose conditions that a citizen must fulfill or "agree" to before he or she may exercise that privilege.

This can include things that would be considered unreasonable, unconstitutional, or outright tyrannical if applied to legally recognized rights. No one seriously advocates requiring insurance for possible defamation suits or unpaid child support for anyone who speaks in public or has sex, or making people apply for a government permit and pass a test before choosing what religion to practice, for instance, whereas landatory automobile insurance for drivers inspires little criticism or controversy.

This allows various moral and constitutional inconveniences to go by the wayside when mere privileges are involved. It's why constitutional rights concerning search and seizure and self-incrimination are a dead letter if the police decide, as they have the legal power to do in some states, to hold you down and forcibly stick you with a needle to draw your blood for a blood alcohol level test- you gave your "implied consent" in return for the privilege of driving. It's why, as we've been shown recently, you can be required to submit to having your genitals groped by government agents before boarding an airplane. It's why the federal Terrorist Screening Center can forbid you from traveling by air with the stroke of a pen, legal niceties about due process and bills of attainder notwithstanding.

A privilege, by its nature, is not something you are owed by others, or have a right to demand, or are entitled to possess and keep . It is something someone else has the right to grant or withhold at their pleasure. Privileges are something you must prove yourself worthy of, by the standards of whoever has the power to grant them. They exist so long as they are compatible with the interests and desires of the one dispensing them, and no longer.

So goes the standard justification for mandatory automobile insurance, our supposed precedent for mandatory health insurance. The commonality between the two pointed out by people drawing an analogy between them is that a person without health insurance can also impose a financial burden on others. This aspect of the analogy has its weaknesses. Leaving that aside, however, that's only part of the argument for mandatory driving insurance, and not the most important part. If the precedent of mandatory driving insurance justifies mandatory health insurance, then the activities for which people are required to buy health insurance must likewise be a privilege rather than a right. Otherwise, the analogy falls apart and the argument with it.

You fall under the scope of state automobile insurance mandates by driving an automobile on government roads. You fall under the scope of federal health insurance mandate by being alive. You don't have to actually do anything, beyond metabolizing enough oxygen in your nervous system to not be declared legally dead. The auto insurance mandate is only a relevant precedent for the health insurance mandate if being allowed to live at all is not a right, but a privilege that the government can impose conditions on, revoke, or make conditional on whatever factors those in power deem relevant to their goals for public policy.

I certainly don't think the average person using the auto insurance analogy intends that implication. On the contrary, he'd probably recoil from it if he understood it. Nevertheless, it says something when so many people so readily take something that is the quintessential example of an activity that is not regarded as a right, only a privilege that the government can grant, revoke, or set almost unlimited conditions on, and blithely treat it as analogous to being able to live at all. Though I suppose "being allowed to live at all" would be more accurate.