On Christopher Hitchens

Having read most of his Minority Report columns in The Nation, watching his devolution from a post-Trotskyite to a Thatcherite to a Bushite, with minimally plausible reasons for all of them, a dirty fighter at each stage, was important for my gradual abandonment of materialism and into a position that is much farther left than I started out being when I read his first column. He was a good example of a certain kind of tony, elite decadence and the bottom side of the would-be intelligentsia of the English Speaking Peoples.

There are reasons that the left as it generally appears today is entirely impotent. The praise of Christopher Hitchens this week provides lots of stuff for a diagnostic study. One that won't be done. Which is tragic.

Thinking of a Crime

The crime is that Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum is not in print and being read and its absolutely necessary warnings being taken seriously.   Re-reading it after a couple of decades, it is even more necessary than it was in the 1970s.   Its focus on some of the most dangerous habits of scientists and in the general culture,  habits so ingrained that mentioning them can lead to stupefied confusion and anger,  makes it necessary to, as Weizenbaum said:

I am acutely aware, for example, that there is nothing I say in this book that has not been said better, certainly more eloquently, by others.   But, as my friends continued to point out to me, it seemed important to say these things again and again. 

The solution to the failure of the publishing industry to provide a new edition, to type out the entire book, complete with illustrations, is beyond my ability and would be a crime.  Though, I don't think it would, actually, be immoral.   But I will type out many of its more important passages here for a while.

If any publisher does the right thing and issues a reprint I will promote it here.   Consider this as my campaign for the author, his book and the ideas contained in it.

Colin James 

Cha Shooky Doo 

Djavan

Oceano 

One of Those Things

Peggy Lee

"Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever." Saul Alinsky

I'm getting back to writing, let the gathered throngs cheer. Or, rather, jeer. Suspect I was doing something wrong if they started cheering.

Lies And Free Speech

Reality is real, a wise Rabbi once said. That which really happens is what our lives are made of. What really happens is the source of whatever benefit we can get from life as well as the source of all harm. It is the professed faith, at least, of most of us that the real is good, or at least unavoidable. And it is the real that has to be contended with in our actions and thoughts. What is asserted to be unreal is denigrated and the charge of believing in what is deemed to not be real constitutes one of the more serious contemporary sins among the relatively educated class of most western societies. At least that is the profession of faith which most of us would make if pressed. Which I won’t investigate further just now. The esteem that the real is given is based in hard won experience about the consequences of wishful thinking unconditioned by consideration of the predictable results that flow from our actions. Often the lessons are unwelcome. But experience keeps a hard school as compared to desire, until the final exam results are in. When bad results can’t be avoided, the least foolish thing to do is to forego that part of desire which leads to them. Oligarchies and other elite systems have rigged things, to insure that it’s others who pay the cost of actions and conditions not of their making. The history of non-democratic governments could be written in the measures which elites have taken to make other people pay for their privilege and the eventual collapse due to the accretions of those awful results from that. Democracy is dependent on The People making decisions about governing society and making the laws with which a society regulates itself and its members. The quality of those laws, the quality of the results, inescapably depend on the extent to which those laws are in accord with reality. The farther they are from reality, the worse results can be expected. Experience seems to confirm this idea, the seductions of self-interest being very powerful, only hard experience consciously considered could overcome that motive to be deluded. I’ll also note that democracy is also dependent on equality before those laws. Very crudely put, laws that result in inequality will inevitably lead to a similar situation to the one described in the last paragraph. We have an especially dramatic example of what happens when laws and actions are dangerously out of sync with what is real in the Gulf Oil disaster. A disaster which could destroy one of the most important eco-systems which life really and inescapably does depend on. Clearly the laws and regulations that allowed that well to be drilled were based on false information, much of it provided by people with degrees in science and engineering, some of whom certainly knew the possibility of something like this happening. It seems when large profits are in the mix, that these catastrophes repeatedly override experience, the lessons of past ones and the resultant destruction of the very basis of life. Yet those who repeatedly create them, are always able to profit from them. There is a reason for this situation. My question, stemming from this past week’s discussion and the spectacle of the Gulf oil disaster, is there a right to lie? I mean is there a real, and not just theoretical right to lie, which should be allowed to remain embedded in our laws and which has a real effect in real life. Most importantly, given the reality of how our country is ruled in 2010, what are the consequences of a legal system, a free press and a society which allows profitable and convenient lying to enjoy the functional status of a civil right*? Under the regime of free speech, free press, the champions of free speech apparently believe there is and the danger it imposes on all of us, isn't something they really care about. Is there a right to knowingly lie in a way that can result in a catastrophe like the one we are all fixed on in the Gulf of Mexico**? Is there a right to lie in a way that will put liars in control of our government and regulatory agencies, and our courts? Don’t forget the courts, which, often don’t seem to feel it is their job to punish the most massively consequential lies, so long as those aren’t told in court, under oath or in a context that can be construed as the equivalent of a contract. And quite often, even when those are. It is exactly that part of the government which is supposed to consider what is real and what isn’t that has allowed the corporations and the congress and administrations to ignore reality as hard experience shows will obviously lead to disaster. ------------ I’m sure that, as in the discussion of violent porn, this question will elicit an immediate response with the most extreme of hypothetical scenarios presented. It’s often the classic questions. What about lying to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are hidden? That kind of thing. And, of course, when those situations are real, they are all important. Of course, any moral person with a functioning brain would lie to the Nazis. But pretending that moral imperative to lie as an exculpatory factor in the official lies that gush like oil from the insanely drilled hole in the Gulf, is willfully and stunningly dishonest. The two situations are made definitively different by the illegitimacy of the Nazis’ genocide and their demented despotism. Naziism can, in no way, be equated with the aspirations and the goals of egalitarian democracy. To deny that difference is to lie, to assert those two situations are equivalent is a colossal lie. The imperative to lie to the Nazis is founded in the choices of Nazis. The requirement to tell the truth is an essential prerequisite for democracy to be possible. In my experience, the very people who would bring up this hypothetical in defense of lying are the same who will absolutely hold that any suppression of Nazi propaganda is a crime against civil liberties. Those European countries whose children were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis are often criticized for their outlawing of Naziism and Holocaust denial. This pseudo-ethical stand is an example of denying the hardest of reality in favor of the soft comfort of an abstract principle. The history of that genocide is as real a fact as exists. It is as real as anything in science or mathematics. It is more real than anything asserted in the entire history of philosophy. It is a definitive justification for the suppression of Naziism. Denial of a that lesson, consisting of the murders of millions of innocent people, discredits those who refuse to learn it. There comes a time when you have to acknowledge a lesson like that delegitimizes an abstract principle that airily accepts the possibility of its repetition. You just do. Eventually people have to stop pretending that is a serious point of view held by credible people. And the same thing can be said for other genocides, the extermination of the population of Tasmania by the British, the genocides on every continent that continue to today. Genocide didn’t end. It is a constant danger around the world today. The clear morality of lying to save innocent people doesn’t set aside the fatal effect of serious lying in a democratic society. In fact, one of the likely cumulative results of that kind of lie, is the supplanting of democracy with despotism, and despotisms always try to keep themselves in power by the kind of violence that comprises the extreme hypothetical of the “free speech” absolutist. ----------- The only legitimate reason for a government to exist is for the protection of The People and the promotion of their common good and other such benefits. Foremost, that requires protection of the biosphere that all rights depend on. To do that, we have found, a democratic government is indispensable. As an extension of our personal rights and the necessity of their protection, we also find it necessary to protect democratic government. Our laws have protections of our constitution built into them, laws that protect the government against attack. Even the Bill of Rights and the rest of the protections of individual liberties are held to allow anti-treason and similar laws. Clearly supporting the enemies of the United States is not expression that is without legal jeopardy for those who express it in an actionable manner, especially during times of war. But there is a far greater danger to a democratic society than the ones we are all told to fear, one that is allowed the freest of free reign today, and no where more freely than those in the mass media and government who are deflecting attention with fear of terrorism, often based on nothing in reality. Why should a democratic society allow lying about serious public issues? It shouldn’t. It certainly shouldn’t allow it in the mass media or by politicians or judges. The lies that fill the airwaves used to be mostly heard during political campaigns but are now a perpetual feast of toxic garbage on the airwaves and, even more so, on cable and the internet. I think that today those lies are a far greater danger to democracy and the Constitution of the United States than any foreign or domestic enemy. As an example, it is estimated that 40,000 Americans die every year as a result of our for-profit insurance system which denies them timely care, in many cases, it denies them any care. The well financed lies of the insurance and associated industries have perpetuated a protection racket that kills far more Americans that have been killed by any foreign or domestic enemy of the government and our society. And that’s only those who die from our terrible health insurance system. Corporations kill many more of us than that. Democracy that allows lying a free reign in its politics can't survive as a democracy. The evidence is that our system that is fueled on lies, freely told, freely broadcast, told by professional liars paid by the most filthy rich and larcenous crooks, is destroying our society and, indeed, the very basis of life. I don’t think there is any moral or political reason to allow that. Citing free speech in defense of liars isn’t just an irrational, one law fits all occasions, refusal to consult reality, it is dangerous to our democracy and our lives. Using the language of rights and freedom to hand over our minds to lies is criminal insanity. Using the excuse that sifting the lies from the truth is hard and takes an effort is inexcusable. If it’s too hard to do that, then it’s too hard for us to make informed political decisions. It is to pretend that responsible voting and participation in democracy is impossible. It is to assert that democracy isn’t possible. There is no royal road in reality. If it’s even very very hard to do what is essential, that’s just too bad. -------- Indulging in a bit of non-reality, just call it an extreme hypothetical, imagine a society where no one told lies, where no corporation interested in maximizing profit over the welfare of The People or the environment could misrepresent the reality of their intentions and proposed activities? Imagine if they had to be honest about what really happens. Imagine if they couldn’t hire scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other, assorted professions --- and in today’s reality, quite a sordid bunch they are — to lie to us and our government. Would we The People let them drill where they couldn’t fix an oil well blow out before it caused the death of a major ecosystem? Would we allow them to ration health care on the basis of what is most profitable to them, including the deaths of tens of thousands every year? And imagine if politicians and lawyers and judges didn’t lie. Let’s go wild and imagine if the broadcast and cabloid media couldn’t lie? Would there be any harm to our freedom, our liberties, our lives from this terrible regime of the truth? Would getting even half way there from the cesspool of lies we are in today hurt or enhance those benefits of democracy? * Of course, there are other lies that are not permitted, some have been noted in the discussions last week and I won’t go over those again here. Libel and slander among them. A good part of the Clinton administration was a lesson in what happens when media corporations and pseudo-religious corporations are given a free reign in slandering and libeling elected officials. It was the Supreme Court, in decisions some foolishly hail as a great bulwark of free speech that led to that crippling of democracy. ** In another recent discussion there was something of a scandalized reaction when it was proposed that scientists, engineers and others who, from positions gained through their academic credentials, lied or irresponsibly and catastrophically misjudged the situation that led to the oil gusher into the gulf, should lose their credentials. Including revoking their degrees. Universities are supposed to be institutions that place the highest value on truth in accord with reality. “Veritas,” the often ironic slogan is. “Lux et Veritas, ”... This is supposed to be especially true in academic departments in the sciences, engineering and schools of law. What are we supposed to think of the universities which trained corporate scientists and engineers who bend their work product in ways that are no different from lying about what is real? What are we supposed to think about those who have also proven, in the most horrible way, that their professional judgement is criminally negligent at worst, disastrously incompetent at best? Should people who have done those kinds of things retain their credentials? Shouldn’t universities which produce these people take their measure of blame in that? What is the real value of a university education if the people they tout in the alumnae propaganda are proven liars and incompetents? And that doesn’t even begin to ask about law school graduates. It also doesn’t go into the fact that the faculties of many of our most prestigious universities are well salted with corrupt corporate hacks, crooks and liars. Eventually, reality being real, the corruption behind the ivy and ersatz parchment becomes undeniable. I think we are rapidly reaching the crisis stage when our universities are adjuncts of a corrupt corporate oligarchy. The signs of rot are undeniably visible now.

The Reason for Liberalism to Exist At All and Why Violent Pornography Should Be Suppressed

Two people hearing the same piece of music won’t have the same reaction to it. One person will hate it and the next person will find that it compellingly speaks to their condition. And those aren’t the only two possibilities. The person who finds a piece to be irresistibly absorbing of their attention will have a half-ally in someone who likes to ignore the same piece as background music while they read a book. The first cousin to indifference. And what is true about different responses to a piece of music is true of books, movies, pictures, and just about anything else. It is also true of ideas. One person who finds an intellectual position to be totally convincing will be matched by many who think it is hogwash. And there are few passionate dislikes quite like colleagues who hold similar but competing positions on a subject within the world of scholarship. Clearly people react in significantly different, often significantly opposite ways to the same experience. Which will come as a surprise to no one. When it comes to the things above. A note I had from someone who read the exchange from last weekend provided the same old lines about pornography that can be abbreviated to “there isn’t any proof that pornography leads to violent behavior”, with the obligatory mention of statistics thrown in. While I’m not convinced that the statistical analyses, such as I’ve seen, are convincing, I ‘ve come to be even less convinced that they are relevant to the topic of the damaging effects of pornography. The statistics won’t show us what we need to know about this topic. For the purposes of thinking about the possible impact of pornography in the actual lives of people, it is the individual people that are important, not the artificial, nonexistent conglomeration that is the focus of statistical analysis. A person isn’t raped by a number, they aren’t strangled or slashed or bludgeoned by a tolerable confidence interval, mode, median or average, they are attacked by one person, or a group of actual, other associated people. I hold that it is a reasonable conclusion, that if those people who attack have been exposed to violent pornography, their actions have been motivated by that pornography. That another person – OK, let’s cut that even handed garbage now — if another man happened to view exactly the same pornography and was entirely unaffected by it, that does nothing to negate the motivating effect it had on the attacker. When it is a matter of a crime, the events of that crime are more important than a sociological generality. The life events and condition of the individual who commits a crime are more important in understanding that crime than the experience or condition of any or, even, all other individuals. Just as the crime of an unrelated person cannot be justly blamed on another accused person*, the non-response of another person to pornography can’t negate its likely effect on a person who acts in a way that is consistent with it and the ideas it promotes. An individual person's experience isn’t watered down by the experience of another person, our lives aren’t neutralized to a tolerable acidity by the introduction of an inert substance. When looking for the possible effects that violent pornography has on the victims of violence, the only relevant subjects for study are those who attacked them. Unfortunately, since we are talking about the internal conditions of peoples’ minds in this, you have no access to that except through their self-reporting. And in the case of the consumption of violent pornography and its effects on those who act violently, I don’t know how you are going to reach a reasonable level of confidence in their testimony about their consumption of it or its place in their motivations. I’d be rather disinclined to view violent rapists and sexual sadists as reliable in matters of self-knowledge and truth. As I’ve always been stunned to realize, in our society today, words and images are granted a higher level of respect than mere mortals, both human and animal. I strongly suspect that what began as an abstract Jeffersonian ideal that was supposed to allow the best ideas to incubate and naturally rise to prominence, in practice hasn’t worked out with anything like uniform success. I also strongly suspect some of the worst of it, flows from the fact that not all words and ideas are of equal attractiveness to people with the power to change things. The idea that women are inferior to men and so women were subjugated by natural law is an idea that we are still struggling against. It was such an accustomed idea to the late 18th century that women could be left out of the founding documents of this country, its expression isn’t sufficient to disqualify men from holding important public offices now. ** Jefferson’s actions show that he certainly didn’t see women as being the equals of men, certainly not women of color. Clearly, for most of the history of this country, the idea that women were inferior to men had greater appeal than the idea that women are equal to men and possessed the right to full personhood and equality. It was to the benefit of men to pretend they knew this, it was to their economic benefit and to the gratification of their self-concept to have women subservient to them, their chattels. The struggle of the idea that women had equal rights is an idea that has had a hard time winning out over the traditional viewpoint of patriarchal domination. That the factual case of women’s rights is solid and entirely more credible than the self–interested hunches and habits of patriarchy has not made it strong, politically, and even under the judiciary it is constantly endangered in 2010. Just think of that. In 2010 women are in danger of losing their right to control the most personal and intimate aspects of their personhood! Despite the centuries of reasoned discussion and proof, we are still struggling against the most primitive and obviously dishonest line of oppression that deprives more than half of the human population of their equal rights. The “more speech” of women’s rights has not yet effectively won over patriarchy despite what must be the daily experience of more than half of the species. And it is the freely spoken lies, the freely presented images and dramatic presentations and Madison Ave. style PR in favor of male domination that are what maintain the oppression. And in no part of the freely spoken, freely expressed discourse of patriarchal oppression is that as obvious as violent pornography. To grant pornography the legal status where it must be convicted at a standard beyond mere reasonable doubt is one of the absurdities of our times. A standard granted to pornography is well past a standard based on perfect certainty that it is innocent. If there was absolute proof convicting pornography in promoting violence, I would bet you anything that the absolutists would still claim it was the right thing to allow it to live. That is the essential stand that is unstated in free speech absolutism. It is the standard of those who oppose all libel and slander laws which are, obviously, a restriction on speech. That standard makes the most damned lie immune from suppression. The counter-argument that bad speech be answered by “more speech” is made false by the fact that a lie, even countered, generally has a damaging effect on those lied about. There isn’t enough of the distilled water of “more speech” to render the lie of no consequence. Of course, if you have a prominent position in the media or other realm and often according to where you live, those consequences are often of less impact. The effects of many of the worst lies varies by area and economic status. In Massachusetts on Thursday, a young man was convicted of the stabbing murder of James Alenson, a 15-year-old school mate. The jury didn’t find the psychological mitigation presented by the defense to be convincing. Among other things learned in the trial, the murderer, John Odgren, was obsessed with a series of Stephen King stories. The testimony in the case documented that what he read in those books influenced his behavior to the extent that he called himself by the name of the principle character in them. To assert that his behavior was unaffected by the book is, clearly, to lie. He was, clearly, impressed with the trench coat cult, which I associate with the killers at Columbine High School. He would have had to hear about that from someone, most likely through the media, perhaps through the sick online cult that sees the Columbine killers and their kind as heroes. I don’t know what it was in the mass of psychological jargon presented by either side of the court case that made him attack a randomly chosen student, one who apparently he didn’t know, who was small and gentle and not someone who would have been likely to taunt him. Someone who was probably seen as unlikely to put up an effective defense. I don’t know exactly why Odgren killed, I do know that to discount his media driven obsessions is willful detachment from reality. It is as delusional as the thinking asserted by his defense team as the motivation of the murder. Just as an observation, if I was the author of stories that played a role like this in a murder, I would at least cease from producing similar tales. My right to tell a story can hardly be equal to the right of a 15-year-old to live. The political impotence of the left is the result of the pseudo-judicial requirement imposed, by us and media coercion, on our public life by the free speech industry.**** That standard of extra-judicial impartiality has been absurdly inserted into our political speech and our lives as political animals. It is a standard of behavior that no other part of the political spectrum feels they must practice. It is seen clearly in the scrupulous observances maintained on the left about speech and expression. When someone can’t object to the word “cunt” or about the business practices of Hooters without being chastised as violating some bizarrely inverted concept of justice, it’s clear that we mere human beings are the vassals of words and images, so much more so when they are the products of commerce. It is time for women and the rest of those struggling for progress to declare we are going to throw off that mind forged manacle that is so notably a benefit to our opponents. The idea that all speech is equal and must be treated impartially will always benefit those with more power and fewer morals. When you add the mass media to violent words the results can be genocidal. As mentioned in last weeks argument, free speech in the form of lies is the basis of most of the loss of rights due to bigotry and discrimination. Misogyny, racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, hatred of LGBT folks, are, in almost every case today, founded on and fueled by freely expressed speech. Hate talk radio and cabloids are the most prevalent media informing the American People of what their government and others do. Our virtually unrestricted media, just about entirely freed of the obligation to serve the public interest is the product of the free speech industry and the corporate media it so often acts on behalf of***. There has hardly ever been a time in the history of speech, when hate speech by and in the interest of those with power wasn’t given complete freedom, no matter what other speech was suppressed. Of the many clear examples when speech has a homicidal impact on mere human beings, abridging every right those mere humans have, the Rwandan genocide is a relatively fresh and undeniable example. By the time the “more speech” had time to catch up with the hate speech and incitement to commit genocide that was uninhibitedly broadcast in a way that our shock jocks are quickly catching up to, hundreds of thousands of people were dead. If you think that can’t happen here, it does now. Women, the identifiable class most subject to hate speech, freely expressed, are murdered in the United States every single day because they are women. The slaughter of women is slow motion terrorism that has an inhibiting effect on the freedoms of women and girls. It is a lynching campaign that is the product of words that accumulate into attitudes and social norms. The same can be said to an extent of other groups which are regularly and irregularly the topic of hate speech. As is undeniable during this time of “open carry” rallies, our opponents are showing us that they are armed well past the teeth. Anyone who is willing to bet that they could not be incited to kill with them is an idiot. In thinking about this and other topics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we have been led to think of human behavior is basically wrong. People aren’t atoms and molecules, they don’t behave with reasonable uniformity, there aren’t just a few simple vectors to describe their motion and interaction with their environment. I think much if not all of this statistical activity concerning human behavior might be quite useless. I don’t believe anymore that human behavior is subject to any laws and rules that our science is able to discern with any reliability. It is in determining the actions of any individual. While it might be very desirable to be able to make predictions about future behavior, trying to determine that with statistics is of wildly variable success at the very best. The more complex the behavior, the less likely it is liable to be understood simply. With complexity, given the nature of behaviors and their possible source in unknowable motivations, the complexity of the network of those possible motivations expands very fast. I don’t think behavioral science works even as well as the observations of a good fiction writer. That conclusion is something I didn’t want to be true, I used to believe the opposite, but I think it is true. I would like there to be a reliable science to deal with dangerous mental illnesses, but I don’t believe that, other than administering drugs to prevent some of the adverse behavior, the results are reliable. We don’t have to like something for it to be true. Nature and science don’t have to conform to what would be most useful to us or most convenient for us. It would be extremely useful if we could predict who will have a bad reaction to violent pornography and use it as a how-to manual. But we can’t. To pretend that inability requires us to accept complete libertarianism, allowing pornography to throw off its chains and to flourish in its infinite depravity, is insane. To ignore that it is at least as effective as Viagra commercials in changing behavior or encouraging behavior that is latent in a potentially dangerous person, is also insane. * The results of the habit of generalization are on full display in the infamous law recently passed in Arizona. Allow sterotypes and group libel full reign and you get laws like that one. ** When you add the element of ownership, as in slavery, the interests of slave owners asserted themselves and the original Constitution included mention of slaves, conferring extra privileges to slave holders and the states they lived in. The importance of that distinction is seen in the fact that the constitution didn’t give extra weight to the representation of states based on giving unenslaved women a fractional value, the infamous 3/5ths person value. Of course, that added representation wasn’t given to slaves, it was given to their enslavers. *** If you want to know why our government doesn’t work, despite the majority that was elected with Barack Obama, our media is the foremost part of that. The impotence of Democrats in the congress and the administration is inflicted by the free media, exercising their unrestricted free speech in the absence of the onerous burden of risking an accurately informed electorate voting in an effectively beneficial way. **** It was exactly that media coercion that fueled my first blog post. Note: In the end, you have to stand for what you stand for. I would have risked making this post of even more unreadable length if I’d gone into the all important issue of what the values of liberalism are for, in the end. To hold that governments and societies should treat people equally, to allow them to practice the control of their bodies and lives, isn’t an isolated end in itself. It has a goal, that of allowing people to live peaceful, happy lives, to not be harmed by other people with the ability to suppress and harm them. I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that much of speech and expression is an attack on that goal, it isn’t of innocuous intent. The goal of many people is to hurt people and animals, some people are gratified by hurting other people, they want to steal the product of their work, up to and including the most basic sustenance. There are people who like to hurt and kill other people. To deny that is to deny the reasons that liberalism and democracy are necessary in the first place. To deny that it is necessary to prevent that harm is to deny the only legitimate reason that laws and government exist. There are also people who are so enamored of their self-righteousness that they will preen in a posture of scrupulosity in the matter of free speech even as they wash their hands of the results of the malignant speech they champion. “More speech” is the water that is held to clean up the blood. Only it doesn’t clean up the blood. It does, however, mask the indifference to it.

We Cannot Know About The Lost Past Without Evidence

For the past week I've been engaged in a long discussion at Greg Laden's blog about whether or not we could know anything about the origin of life, the way in which life first arose from non-living matter, what life was like and other aspects of that problem. Here is the link to that discussion for anyone who is interested in it. A long answer to Stephanie Z, one of my antagonists in that brawl has been caught up in moderation for a while now so I am posting it here and will attempt to notify her that it is here. Please note that, as in my argument with Sean Carroll last year, I've tried to get some questions answered by Greg Laden, so far he has been unwilling to respond to them. The last version of those were asked at comment #202 at the link, I will post them in a note after the comment

Stephanie Z. anything that creates a scenario and action and proposed organisms would be the creation of a narrative. Which isn't bad in itself, to some extent it is necessary to do that. But when you want to call your narrative science you have to be able to bring it farther, you have to compare it to the part of the actual universe you want it to represent. Science is all about making assertions about aspects of the actual universe, as it is or as it was. That is used, among other things, to make predictions that can be tested. Though, in this case, you can't go back and retrospectively make predictions about the origin of life and turn those into science because you can't compare what you might discover against the now lost evidence of what that was.

The famous Miller-Urey experiment succeeded in synthesizing amino acids in a laboratory. They were successful in showing that those would form under the conditions they set. That's what they proved could happen in the part of the actual universe they created in their vessels, with the chemical and physical conditions they created. Any narrative description of that experiment would be almost completely reliable as science.

If the assertion is that they recreated natural conditions on the early Earth, that is embroidering the narrative of the story with far less reliable content. No place on the early Earth was just like the conditions inside their vessel, I doubt there was anyplace like the inside of their vessels with exactly those contents and under the kind of electrical charges and temperatures, anywhere. However amino acids formed on the natural Earth, it wasn't under the same conditions they created in their experiment. The suggestions people took from their experiment that they had successfully shown how the synthesis of some building blocks of life had, in fact, happened, is the creation of a narrative about the natural world. One which can be told in a pretty far fetched manner.

Unfortunately, narratives created about that natural world need something more to become reliable enough to be considered science, they need to be able to be matched to observations of what they are purported to represent. And in this attempt, there is almost nothing to go on in that regard. So the narrative remains a narrative instead of a representation of the natural world and universe. Only a lot of people, some within science, most outside of it, mistake that narrative for a representation of the earliest glimmerings of life, as it happened on the early Earth when it isn't. If they want to believe that, that's their right, if they want to say they've nailed it down as it happened on the early Earth, they can do that but they really haven't.

Let me go farther. Just as the I.D. ("Intelligent Design") industry wants to use science to support their favored narrative of the origin of life, including divine intention, materialists have wanted to refute that idea with science, many of them within science, most of them merely sci-fans. Of course, science only being legitimately able to address physical evidence and what you can say about its physical properties, it can't clear up the question of divine intent in evolution or anything else. Trying to use science to put God in the picture or to take God out of the picture is not a scientific effort, science is incompetent to do either. It is an ideological abuse of science.

I contend that a lot of the less reliable science of the past century and a half have been attempts to nail down the proof of ideological materialism with science. Sometimes, as in Francis Crick's crusade to "put the nail in the coffin of vitalism" something like that is a stated goal. Things like that have been claimed for science from the beginning of science. Claims that science supports the presence of God are also made but not as often, at least not until the rise of pseudo-scientific creationism. With the possibilities of profits and financial backing, the ideological abuse of science will likely flourish. Look at what it did for some of the most blatantly absurd assertions in psychology.

All of those narratives about the universe, both the ones with God and the ones putting the nail in God's coffin are the creations of stories in the name of science and, in so far as they claim to be science, the people telling them are lying. There would be no way to know if the universally accepted triumph of the ideological materialists would have precluded the possibility that what they hadn't discovered had merely been the real way God created life on Earth, as opposed to the Genesis narrative. Being quite as naive about that as the creationists, materialists overlook that before God is said to have created life, that God created the material universe, all of it, at every scale of resolution, including molecules, atoms, subatomic particles and even whatever might fill it way, way, way down at the Planck scale. And God was said to have set it in motion. Which would include the motions of planets and stars and the combinations of atoms and molecules. Materialists, in the end, are stuck with the exact same tools to use to convert people to their point of view, they have to convince them. No matter how much they want to use science to do that, no matter how many ignorant people they might convince with their sciency narrative, that narrative is not reliable as science, it falls outside of what science can do.

Given the naivety of creationists and others unaware of science, they might be forgiven for believing the hype that it has powers which it doesn't. There isn't any excuse for highly educated scientists to believe that it does except that there are obvious holes in their educations.

You can't deal with God with science, it is outside of the only legitimate subject matter of science, it can't be done with its methods and tools which are not designed to look at or for anything but that part of the physical world that are susceptible to its methods and tools. Everything else falls outside of its competency, any claims made that extend outside of those are unreliable, they don't cut the mustard as science. Or, honest science, at any rate.

Whatever the scientists who think they are working on this problem do s that they can show that they could produce whatever results they have produced, in the way they did it. Lacking evidence of the real beginning of life, as it happened in the natural world, claims about the applicability of their work to that problem are speculations, they can't be known to be reliable, they can't even be tested for unreliability against the real thing. No more than claims which have, actually, been made about life in the distant reaches of the universe. Dawkins has claimed those farthest reaches of the universe for natural selection when there is absolutely no way to know if that is true. It's possible that natural selection has happened on only one planet in the entire universe. His claim is ideological it isn't scientific. It is no more legitimate than a claim that a six day creation happened on another planet. It's his preferred creation myth.

Note: These are the questions mentioned at the top of this post.

Greg Laden, I can't find that you've answered my questions about what you are asserting. Would you answer them now?
1. When you talk about "the origin of life" do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.
2. Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn't happen?

Clowns Are OK for a Chidren's Party But You Don't Want Them to be The Face of the Left

Barbara Jordan was a great legislator, her brilliance at doing the most she could with what she had at hand is well summed up in her obituary by Molly Ivins (1). She wasn’t just that great voice and commanding presence, those were only the tools wielded by a master politician. She was more than a show. She never lost an opportunity “ to make government work”. Superficial people will remember the voice, less superficial ones what she said, serious people also remember what she accomplished when she took those opportunities.

Another point from the obituary hands us one of the keys to political success. Barbara Jordan never wasted a minute on a hopeless cause. To look at the situation from the viewpoint of the possible, to leave aside the impossible and to never, ever lose sight of the goals that are achievable. No matter what transient personal satisfaction, no matter what issue of lesser importance, no matter what goal dearly wished for or even worthy but not achievable, never waste time or resources on the futile. Certainly don’t waste them on pointless, self-destructive, self-indulgence.

Barbara Jordan’s serious and absolute dedication to the goal of progress led her in at least one instance to make an attack on people allegedly within the movement. She warned against people using “kamikaze” tactics(2). You don’t forget the word “kamikaze” as pronounced by Barbara Jordan. She warned about words and actions that looked flashy, gained their user abundant attention but which would damage the movement for progress. Listening to her in the context of the times, as soon as I heard those words I had little doubt who they might apply to. I thought “ Flo Kennedy."

Flo was at the crest of her own personal wave back then. A 60 Minutes spot, all over TV, her act was the predominant picture of a black, lesbian, feminist as the corporate media were targeting all three movements for irrelevance. A black woman who could be counted on to declare her love for insane dictator and mass murderer, Idi Amin, because he was a powerful black man who was “bad”(3). I used to watch her amazed that she couldn’t see the indulgent smirk on the faces of the media hit men who were egging her on to say the next outrageous thing.

I must have wondered what happened to Flo Kennedy in the past twenty-five years but not enough to go look her up. Maybe she had done what she so melodramatically said she was going to do back then and commit suicide as soon as life had stopped being “a ball”(4). She largely disappeared from the TV screen, at any rate. Perhaps she had served her purpose and needing her no more, the corporate media dumped her on the same scrap pile as other media figures of the left fallen into desuetude.

Flo did do some important work in her earlier career as a lawyer. I won’t deny that. She said some memorable things too. As late as the early seventies she was associated with serious people such as Shirley Chisholm and Gloria Steinem but by the late seventies her primary function was to become a set character in the cartoon of the left that the media was producing. She loved that role (5). Like a number of other camera hogs of the left, she had become a tool to damage it. If Barbara Jordan didn’t mean Flo Kennedy, she certainly filled the role.

The left doesn’t have resources to waste on indulging the attention seeking, superficial and self-promoting characters for whom the lime light is more seductive than actually achieving power and working to change laws. If they want to get attention, make them earn it by producing something. If they want to keep it they should keep producing. We can’t indulge those who did something decades ago but who, by their own actions, become destructive to progressive change. It doesn’t matter who has fond memories of them or enjoys their company. You can keep them as friends, just keep them off camera.

The media will chose people to call leaders for the left, they will chose those people who they can use as a tool against us. We should be suspicious of anyone who is regularly featured in the corporate media, they don’t ask people back unless they say what they want to hear.

Anyone who the media asks to appear should be suspicious of their motives and keep their eyes open for being used. Insist on seeing the final edit before it goes on air or into print.

The left doesn’t have time or resources to waste on the superficial. You can be funny, Barbara Jordan certainly could be. And there are few people who are funnier than Molly Ivins. But for the left only funny isn’t nearly enough anymore, being only outrageous is less. The merely funny might waste time, merely outrageous is a gun in the hands of irresponsible children and that gun is always pointed left. We don’t have time or resources to spend on flash in the pan junk, we need to have the best. The left fully deserves it and should accept no other.

1. You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You ISBN: 0679754873

2. Does anyone know of a transcript?

3. Said during that 60 Minuted interview. If this doesn’t suffice as self-immolation of someone’s seriousness what would? Idi Amin had already murdered thousands of Ugandans and he was still very much in power but that apparently was less important than making a splash on TV.

4. According to Wikipedia Flo Kennedy died in 2000. The account of her activities stops abruptly in the period I’m talking about here. I don’t know of any illness or health problem that would account for that, if so then none of the sources I checked mentions it.

5. They had tried to fill a similar slot with Bella Abzug ( I so well remember that rotten Time cover story) who certainly had a disposition and a way of her own, but, a serious person more resistant to the lure of the camera, she would have none of it.

Note: Originally, when I posted this in 2006 I didn't identify Flo Kennedy as the person I was and am certain Barbara Jordan was referring to. If she didn't mean her, specifically, she certainly fit the bill.

While We Were Just Talking About It

Kip Tiernan, founder of the first homeless shelter for women, one of my all time heroes, died of cancer yesterday, she was 85.

Rosie's Place was what she was most known for but she was involved in so many other things. The Boston Globe, this morning, gives this list:

Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Boston Food Bank, Community Works, Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Finex House, Food for Free, John Leary House, My Sister’s Place, Transition House, the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

Kip Tiernan was a living embodiment of how at odds with fashion being a worker for justice and equality is going to be. She was a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous at a time that is unfashionable, an example of why it works for a number of the people who try it. She was an "angry daughter of Christ" who wore a cross around her neck while clearly taking up hers and following far better than most. Also from the Globe:

The cross she wore was more than a symbol.

“A rooted woman, Kip always wears that cross,’’ Globe op-ed columnist James Carroll wrote in 1996, “which marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, ‘an angry daughter of Christ. . . . I find that the cross of Jesus is the radical condemnation of an unjust world. You have to stay with the one crucified or stand with the crucifiers.’ ’’

In that she drew inspiration from Dorothy Day, another unfashionable person who had more important things to do than the more well remembered and generally far less accomplished leftists she'd been associated with.

Kip Tiernan's work led her to be arrested in protests and to generally make the too comfortable uncomfortable. In every way she is an example of someone who did it while others, me included, just talked about it.

The Dangerous Founders Fetish

The automatic, programmed, resort to citing “The Founding Fathers” as if the words, real and invented, were infallible writ, is ubiquitous in political culture these days. In just about every case the citation of “The Founders” is supposed to be taken as the authoritative settler of arguments, sort of like the Guinness Book of World Records was intended to be in an only slightly different context. Questioning the wisdom of worshiping the “founders” will be met, mostly, with confused bewilderment, of the kind that you meet whenever you question a socially received bit of common consensus. If you press the point, you will eventually get an angry reaction, the emotion that is the most handy replacement for a rational argument. Why a group of white, male, aristocrats of the late 18th century is supposed to govern our lives, in an entirely different world, more than two centuries later, is a question that isn’t raised nearly as often as it should be. Why should they govern us today? After all, the “founders” themselves, were revolutionaries, overturning established governments, cutting ties to previous foundations of government and law – as deemed desirable by themselves . Why that morality of that break with the past isn’t seen by today’s would-be Federalists as more potently instructive than the alleged teachings of those revolutionaries, is an issue that should be pressed. They changed things through violence, a war in which many people died, people were attacked and dispossessed. In contrast, just about every change to the, mostly mythic, Federalist order that has come about in the history of the United States, was done through non-violent change. The great exception was, of course, the Civil War, the origins of which were found in the glaring faults of the Constitution and the financial interests of the Founders, themselves. Anyone who has been a witness to the past fifty years, the years when the cult of the Founders has flourished in all its dishonest, hypocritical and inconsistent vigor, might well consider it to be an emotional campaign waged by those who want to overturn civil rights progress, first and foremost, but also to reassert the control of an aristocratic oligarchy, such as the one which wrote the constitution and which was only gradually, and unfortunately, temporarily suppressed by those favoring egalitarian democracy. The slogans, icons and catechism of the Founders cult, are not the tools of reasoned consideration, they are more George M. Cohan who said, "Many a bum show has been saved by the flag." Racism and other forms of bigotry are inseparable from the Founders Fetish, the contemporary assertion of “states rights” and a host of other Federalist bromides having gained their most ardent advocates among the neo-confederates. Another line feeding into it is the opposition to the Income Tax and regulatory agencies. As seen in a large number of instances, such as DOMA, when it is in their interest for the federal government to usurp powers granted to states, they’ve, mostly, not had any problem with violating the sacred writ of the Founders. It’s telling that the instances in which they are opposed to this have included the federal protection of individual liberties and their endorsement of federal encroachment has usually been in favor of quashing state protection of rights and liberties.* And it’s the rarest of right wingers who opposes taxes when it’s for the military or other things they support. The malignant, irrational and dangerous right has taken the Founders Fetish into ever more bizarre territory, connected to neither history nor reality, in ever more dangerous ways. The tea party cult, with its viciously bigoted and racist verbal eruptions is followed by ever descending, more bigoted, more violent manifestations of militias and the “sovereigns”. Much if not just about all of the armed right, with a history of murder and maiming, will make some appeal to “The founders” for their motivation and their justification. One of the more dangerous conglomeration of this are the “soverigns”, an al Qaeda type, loosely constituted bunch which are armed and murderous. At its core, the current sovereign belief system is relatively simple and is based on a decades-old conspiracy theory. At some point in history, sovereigns believe, the American government set up by the founding fathers - with a legal system the sovereigns refer to as "common law" - was secretly replaced by a new government system based on admiralty law, the law of the sea and international commerce. Some sovereigns believe this perfidious change occurred during the Civil War, while others blame the events of 1933, when America abandoned the gold standard. Either way, they stake their lives and livelihood on the idea that judges around the country know all about this hidden government takeover but are denying the sovereigns' motions and filings out of treasonous loyalty to hidden and malevolent government forces. Under common law, or so they believe, the sovereigns would be free men. Under admiralty law, they are slaves, and secret government forces have a vested interest in keeping them that way. As the piece by J.J. MacNab, from the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows, it’s far from innocuous. It is an irony that the victims of much of this kind of right wing violence are police officers, forest and park rangers, and others, the nurturing of the paranoia that fuels the far right by the side pretending to be for law and order is even more so. Why police unions and organizations aren’t more vocal in their opposition to the Federalist establishment which, through numerous campaigns and court rulings, have put them at even more risk, is something that their members should press. The history of the United States, the gradual expansion of rights for women and minorities, workers --hard fought and at great sacrifice, the construction of public education, public institutions, and a huge range of other events and thinking, has taught us things that the late 18th century never knew. Those have led to a far more democratic and just society than they seem to have imagined. But Americans are taught to ignore that history which has produced enormous good for the majority of people in this country. I don’t think that campaign of collective amnesia is unintended but if it is, it should be resisted. History is taught in the wrong direction, it should be taught from today back, the most relevant lessons for us to learn from being those which are closest to us, the events of recent history still being the ones with potency in our lives. But that recent history is the most dangerous to the status quo, the least likely to lead to quaint, distracting, antiquarianism. “The Founders” in the imagination of those most devoted to that cult seem to be about as real as celluloid cowboys are, the results share the dangerous fascination of macho violence. It’s time to take history out of the hands of the mass media and the federalist hacks. * I do not trust Ted Olsen’s motives in the case to overturn Prop 8. I don’t trust him but will be glad to acknowledge if there isn’t another shoe to drop in his case. First posted August 8, 2010

You Don't Have To Believe It But Ridicule Won't Win Their Support

Note: This is the first blog post I did addressing the new atheism, even as I didn't identify it by name,, in September of 2006. It was the first of my posts which was distorted by a prominent blog atheist in what, so far as I'm aware of, was the first of many such attacks. I repost it because it came up in a discussion in the past couple of weeks. You know it is one of the clearest realities of American life, so clear that it is beyond question; for the left’s agenda to be put into effect it will need the support of religious people. Some kind of religious belief is held by a very large majority of Americans, you don’t win elections without the support of the majority of the voters. If the left, by its own actions or by caricature, can be made the enemy of religion in general then the left can forget about holding power in the United States, ever again. Reading leftist blogs you have certainly seen comments hostile to religion. The sometimes witty slurs against people who believe in one or more gods are certainly well known to you. If not, just wait around, one more is on its way. While sometimes quite funny, they tend to be repetitive. They could be intended as a fairly harmless indulgence for those hostile to religion but it isn’t politically innocuous. I am bringing this up because I suspect there is an effort to stir up these questions just now. Articles in MSNBC-Newsweek and elsewhere might indicate an attempt to kick up a religious fight before the fall election. My interest in this is entirely in its effect on practical politics, I want the left to win this election, winning is the most important thing for the next two months. We can live with a certain level of atheist-religionist animosity, we cannot win an election with leftists falling for the bait the Republican right puts out for it. Leftists can be counted on to come to the defense of atheists who are targeted for discrimination. If atheists are in danger of life and limb, we must do that. But this all too timely row has nothing to do with life and limb. It is not pressing. Absurdly, this time the bait seems to feature the question of an atheist not being electable as president. Since it’s proving hard enough to get any moderate-liberal elected you wonder why the left needs to deal with that just now. Does an atheist have the right to be President? No. Let’s get that straight. No one has a right to be President. Holding an elected office is an assumed responsibility, assumed only with the permission of the voters, not a right. Our democracy would be a lot safer if everyone would remember this. Atheists have a right to run for President but no one has what is constantly mislabeled a right to assume the office except the legitimate winner of the election. Is it unfair that an atheist who is honest about it has no chance of being elected as President? Yes, unfair. It is as unfair as the fact that a vegetarian, a Buddhist, an Animist or a Zoroastrian has no realistic chance of winning a real party’s nomination or gaining enough votes to win a presidential election. If you point out that the Constitution says there will be no test of faith to hold office, that’s enforceable against the congress, executive or judiciary, how are you going to enforce it against voters? Will it remain so? Almost certainly it will remain so for the rest of our lives, there’s not much we do about it. Changing that situation cannot be done politically or by court ruling. It is a matter of cultural change, and, ironically, it will be a change that depends entirely on the acceptance of atheists by religious believers. Atheists who would like to change that might profitably ask themselves if insulting religious believers will hasten that day. They might consider if their, at times brilliant, mockery of religion* has perhaps played any role in their present day status with believers. When we talk about religion we are talking about people. Religion doesn’t exist outside of people who have feelings that inform their opinions and votes. Some religious people will never vote for us and we don’t have to worry about them. But there are many, I hope most, who we can convince to vote with the left. Those are the ones we need. Atheists on the left should cut out the blanket mocking of religious people. What do they hope to gain by it? Nothing that is worth the cost. Interestingly, it almost always lacks the objective observational acuity necessary for realism, usually the pride of atheists. “Religion” takes in an enormous range of beliefs**. It is safe to assume that the range of religious variation is at least as wide as that found in politics. To lump together Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics, Jains, Oomotists, etc. and to ridicule them over their religion as if it was any one thing is the sign of a lazy mind. The variation in these beliefs and the actions that come from them do make a huge difference. Pretending that they are all the same thing is just as unrealistic as conflating all political parties, ideologies, rump caucuses and majorities of one for characterization - based on the worst of the bunch- as “political people”. Attack away, as long as it is religious fascists who are the target, there is nothing to lose by doing so. But ask yourself if you really want to drive away people who might vote the same way you would. A lot of the most important success of the left was grounded in the religion of the activists who did the necessary work. We have that on the best possible authority, the activists themselves. What good is there in mocking liberal religion? Atheists have also done good work for the left but you don’t usually hear religious leftists slamming them because of their atheism just as a matter of course. That kind of injustice would be remarkably atypical of religious liberals. It is a matter of fact that religious liberals have been outspoken supporters of the rights of atheists and other religious non-adherents. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by phrasing it as a question. This conflict will be promoted by the supporters of the Republican Party during this election season. It is brought up now because they know it could provide them with the margin they need to win this election. Atheists and knee-jerk leftists who ignore that this is a well worn tactic of the Republican right are counted on to do most of their work for them. Remember this, these kinds of wedge issues don’t have to succeed with a majority of the voters to work. They just have to deliver the margin of victory. Leftists who choose to strike a pose should be asked if they really think their ephemeral self-satisfaction is worth remaining out of power. It isn’t a price that is worth it to any rational leftist. * Some of the mockery, when it has been against criminal behavior and moral hypocrisy by the religious establishment, has been well worth the cost. As the urgency of the problem addressed diminishes the benefit over cost ratio plummets. ** Including non-theistic forms of Buddhism

Cold Case: Crush Porn Has More Rights Than Mere Humans

First posted April 24, 2010

The 8-1 decision in the Supreme Court this week, striking down the prohibition against selling videos that show illegal dog fights and women in high heels crushing small rodents - one suspects both for the sexual gratification of an audience comprised of degenerate men - was a useful illustration of the irrationality of free speech absolutism. The judges on the Court, and a “justice” is, least anyone forget, actually a judge, seem to have a pathological fear of doing their job in this area. Which is to JUDGE. Throw in the words “speech” and “expression” and these folks who have no problem with judging cases ranging from petty theft up to capital murder, hold themselves and their colleagues as not to be trusted to JUDGE. The same folks who have no problem with throwing out the votes of tens of thousands of voters on a flimsy technicality, the ones who have held that it is legal for a local government to take property and hand it to developers, who have declared not only that innocence isn’t enough to override filing deadlines in the matter of merely executing someone, can’t be trusted with distinguishing speech important to our freedom from an industry that painfully kills hamsters with high heals so some pathetic losers can masturbate to climax. Someone who objected to one of my recent posts on the out of wack status of “speech” displayed the same refusal to think. They held that if someone recognizes the difference between advocating a living wage and the Phelps abuse of the survivors of service members in their sickest of publicity stunts, they are some mixture of a Nazi and Stalinist. Of course, this is absurd. We make judgments every single day about speech, judges do it continually and often on behalf of the exact same people who promote the speech libertarian wackiness that we live under. Judges enforce copyright laws, often having to decide if the one being accused of copying is a copycat or not. They enforce libel and slander laws, deciding if the words used fulfilled the legal definitions included in those laws. Since the 1970s the Supreme Court put judges and juries in the mind reading business, determining if the “intent” of the accused defamer was “malicious”. All of these and other laws that are adjudicated in the courts every week constitute a restriction by the laws enacted by congress and state legislatures regulating speech. I'll bet you that most of even the most ardent of "free speech champions" would see it differently if someone was freely copying their speech for profit, and without citation. The absurdity, no, insanity, that a large majority of the Supreme Court refuses to acknowledge that dog-fight and crush porn are “expression” which could be banned with absolutely no harm to The Peoples’ ability to govern ourselves and to enjoy the benefits of liberty, is a symptom of how insulated that least democratic branch of our government is from reality*. The Court’s complete willingness to steal elections for the candidates of their choice, their willingness to allow corporations to deceive The People for the purpose of destroying our ability to have an informed vote** and a myriad of other actions that end up in elections being stolen and people being killed, makes their scrupulous refusal to judge words and images grants corporations, words and videos more rights than mere humans. And among mere humans, it grants those with more money more power and more rights than those of us who don’t want to lord it over our fellow human beings and helpless, tiny, animals. In the process, elevating that one right over all others endangers all other rights. The legal fad of free speech absolutism, pretending that judges aren’t in the business of judging, that any discretion in this matter given to juries and judges will result in totalitarian suppression of speech is completely absurd and disproved by our history before smut and most classes of media lies were given a free hand. The far right, has obviously decided to de-emphasize the restriction of the very lucrative pornography industry, perhaps, at least in part, as a favor to their most powerful patron, the emperor of soft-porn, Rupert Murdoch. But it could be for it’s more obvious use to the far right. In giving up that traditional stand for sexual propriety, they have bought themselves a tool with which they can free the rest of the corporate elite to lie themselves into absolute control, as the line of decisions from Buckley v. Veleo to the recent “Citizens” decision show beyond a reasonable doubt. It is merely self-government which they are in the process of destroying with the slogan of “free speech”, with the acquiescence of the moderate right, what is called the “liberal” wing of the court. Liberals who choose to ignore all of this are fools. It’s been going on long enough right before our eyes so the intention of the right on the Court is as clear as could be. It turns out, you can have free speech absolutism or you can have self-government, you can’t have both That is what we face. A people who don’t know the truth can’t govern themselves. Judges who give up their chosen responsibility to exercise judgement in a rote and automatic response are leading the way, in association with other judges who have a clear malicious intent to institute one-corporate-party government under the slogan of “free speech”. It’s the results of a principle that govern its validity, despotism will be the result of free speech absolutism. * Rachel Maddow’s finger puppet demonstration of Supreme Court hearings is one of the most brilliant uses of free speech and free expression I’ve seen in a long time. The one I heard the other night about texting and e-mail ranks with George Bush I marveling over a supermarket scanner as revelations of our detached elites. ** If there is a clear cut of a “public interest” it is that for which the system of government set up in the Constitution to be possible. Self-government is the right that is most endangered by the recent string of “free speech” rulings. Without that right, all of the others are weakened, endangered and, when desired by the actual rulers, destroyed.

The Suicide of Liberalism

In the wake of the violent video game decision, the stupidest line that is being repeated by rote on the liberal blogs is the old chestnut that "parents should take responsibility for what their children watch". How difficult it seems to be for people to imagine that video-trained sociopaths might not only target other sociopaths should be a marker for how stupid a liberal is. The belief reaches its most clueless in the idea that parents aren't frequently depraved in ways depicted in the most violent and depraved video games and porn. Consider, dear libertarian-liberals, that the creators of propaganda for the torture and evisceration of women, children, pets, even, if they're feeling especially brave, grown men, are quite able to produce little bundles of joy, themselves and to bring them up with their, uh, "values". People are going to die at the hands of these entertainment industry created killers, unfortunately, it won't only be the libertarians who get to experience the results of their fashionable irrationality.

The stupidity of liberal libertarianism also is heard in the "there is no evidential that imbibing the message that women and other human beings are there to be used and killed doesn't have an effect on behavior". As has been pointed out, we know that the very people who produce that propaganda don't even believe that themselves BECAUSE THEY ADVERTISE. They produce ads to change the behavior of their target market, convincing them that they will have more gratifyingly depraved experiences if they buy their product instead of the alternative sociopath which is their competitor. It wouldn't be surprising if they didn't mention a right to compete commercially in restrictions, that competition inevitably being based in that desire to change commercial behavior in the form of purchasing choices.

The utter stupidity of the liberal libertarian position is seen in the "free speech" content of the latest attempt to destroy public financing of elections, countering the force of private money. The right to an uncorrupted government that is answerable only to The Voters is being dismantled using that most cherished of liberal mantras. The two being released the same day doesn't look coincidental to me. The depravity promotion is certainly issued in support of the election ruling.

The problems of speech have not caught up with the very different conditions of electronic speech with the potential to engage the marginally sane in a destructive way has not caught up with the superannuated view of the First Amendment that has held sway since Buckley vs. Valeo.

The suckering of old line liberalism in this way, having it support the most illiberal of commercial speech and it helping destroy the very foundation of democracy in the process is as clear evidence that liberalism has committed suicide as could be had. Liberals have abandoned the values which are the only reason for liberalism to exist on behalf of fascistic entertainment. The part that professional media figures have played in that is certainly worth considering. The free speech absolutists have a conflict of interest as well as a virtual monopoly on the means of discussing it.

The Reason for Liberalism to Exist At All and Why Violent Pornography Should Be Supressed

Two people hearing the same piece of music won’t have the same reaction to it. One person will hate it and the next person will find that it compellingly speaks to their condition. And those aren’t the only two possibilities. The person who finds a piece to be irresistibly absorbing of their attention will have a half-ally in someone who likes to ignore the same piece as background music while they read a book. The first cousin to indifference. And what is true about different responses to a piece of music is true of books, movies, pictures, and just about anything else. It is also true of ideas. One person who finds an intellectual position to be totally convincing will be matched by many who think it is hogwash. And there are few passionate dislikes quite like colleagues who hold similar but competing positions on a subject within the world of scholarship. Clearly people react in significantly different, often significantly opposite ways to the same experience. Which will come as a surprise to no one. When it comes to the things above. A note I had from someone who read the exchange from last weekend provided the same old lines about pornography that can be abbreviated to “there isn’t any proof that pornography leads to violent behavior”, with the obligatory mention of statistics thrown in. While I’m not convinced that the statistical analyses, such as I’ve seen, are convincing, I ‘ve come to be even less convinced that they are relevant to the topic of the damaging effects of pornography. The statistics won’t show us what we need to know about this topic. For the purposes of thinking about the possible impact of pornography in the actual lives of people, it is the individual people that are important, not the artificial, nonexistent conglomeration that is the focus of statistical analysis. A person isn’t raped by a number, they aren’t strangled or slashed or bludgeoned by a tolerable confidence interval, mode, median or average, they are attacked by one person, or a group of actual, other associated people. I hold that it is a reasonable conclusion, that if those people who attack have been exposed to violent pornography, their actions have been motivated by that pornography. That another person – OK, let’s cut that even handed garbage now — if another man happened to view exactly the same pornography and was entirely unaffected by it, that does nothing to negate the motivating effect it had on the attacker. When it is a matter of a crime, the events of that crime are more important than a sociological generality. The life events and condition of the individual who commits a crime are more important in understanding that crime than the experience or condition of any or, even, all other individuals. Just as the crime of an unrelated person cannot be justly blamed on another accused person*, the non-response of another person to pornography can’t negate its likely effect on a person who acts in a way that is consistent with it and the ideas it promotes. An individual person's experience isn’t watered down by the experience of another person, our lives aren’t neutralized to a tolerable acidity by the introduction of an inert substance. When looking for the possible effects that violent pornography has on the victims of violence, the only relevant subjects for study are those who attacked them. Unfortunately, since we are talking about the internal conditions of peoples’ minds in this, you have no access to that except through their self-reporting. And in the case of the consumption of violent pornography and its effects on those who act violently, I don’t know how you are going to reach a reasonable level of confidence in their testimony about their consumption of it or its place in their motivations. I’d be rather disinclined to view violent rapists and sexual sadists as reliable in matters of self-knowledge and truth. As I’ve always been stunned to realize, in our society today, words and images are granted a higher level of respect than mere mortals, both human and animal. I strongly suspect that what began as an abstract Jeffersonian ideal that was supposed to allow the best ideas to incubate and naturally rise to prominence, in practice hasn’t worked out with anything like uniform success. I also strongly suspect some of the worst of it, flows from the fact that not all words and ideas are of equal attractiveness to people with the power to change things. The idea that women are inferior to men and so women were subjugated by natural law is an idea that we are still struggling against. It was such an accustomed idea to the late 18th century that women could be left out of the founding documents of this country, its expression isn’t sufficient to disqualify men from holding important public offices now. ** Jefferson’s actions show that he certainly didn’t see women as being the equals of men, certainly not women of color. Clearly, for most of the history of this country, the idea that women were inferior to men had greater appeal than the idea that women are equal to men and possessed the right to full person hood and equality. It was to the benefit of men to pretend they knew this, it was to their economic benefit and to the gratification of their self-concept to have women subservient to them, their chattels. The struggle of the idea that women had equal rights is an idea that has had a hard time winning out over the traditional viewpoint of patriarchal domination. That the factual case of women’s rights is solid and entirely more credible than the self–interested hunches and habits of patriarchy has not made it strong, politically, and even under the judiciary it is constantly endangered in 2010. Just think of that. In 2011 women are in danger of losing their right to control the most personal and intimate aspects of their personhood! Despite the centuries of reasoned discussion and proof, we are still struggling against the most primitive and obviously dishonest line of oppression that deprives more than half of the human population of their equal rights. The “more speech” of women’s rights has not yet effectively won over patriarchy despite what must be the daily experience of more than half of the species. And it is the freely spoken lies, the freely presented images and dramatic presentations and Madison Ave. style PR in favor of male domination that are what maintain the oppression. And in no part of the freely spoken, freely expressed discourse of patriarchal oppression is that as obvious as violent pornography. To grant pornography the legal status where it must be convicted at a standard beyond mere reasonable doubt is one of the absurdities of our times. A standard granted to pornography is well past a standard based on perfect certainty that it is innocent. If there was absolute proof convicting pornography in promoting violence, I would bet you anything that the absolutists would still claim it was the right thing to allow it to live. That is the essential stand that is unstated in free speech absolutism. It is the standard of those who oppose all libel and slander laws which are, obviously, a restriction on speech. That standard makes the most damned lie immune from suppression. The counter-argument that bad speech be answered by “more speech” is made false by the fact that a lie, even countered, generally has a damaging effect on those lied about. There isn’t enough of the distilled water of “more speech” to render the lie of no consequence. Of course, if you have a prominent position in the media or other realm and often according to where you live, those consequences are often of less impact. The effects of many of the worst lies varies by area and economic status. In Massachusetts on Thursday, a young man was convicted of the stabbing murder of James Alenson, a 15-year-old school mate. The jury didn’t find the psychological mitigation presented by the defense to be convincing. Among other things learned in the trial, the murderer, John Odgren, was obsessed with a series of Stephen King stories. The testimony in the case documented that what he read in those books influenced his behavior to the extent that he called himself by the name of the principle character in them. To assert that his behavior was unaffected by the book is, clearly, to lie. He was, clearly, impressed with the trench coat cult, which I associate with the killers at Columbine High School. He would have had to hear about that from someone, most likely through the media, perhaps through the sick online cult that sees the Columbine killers and their kind as heroes. I don’t know what it was in the mass of psychological jargon presented by either side of the court case that made him attack a randomly chosen student, one who apparently he didn’t know, who was small and gentle and not someone who would have been likely to taunt him. Someone who was probably seen as unlikely to put up an effective defense. I don’t know exactly why Odgren killed, I do know that to discount his media driven obsessions is willful detachment from reality. It is as delusional as the thinking asserted by his defense team as the motivation of the murder. Just as an observation, if I was the author of stories that played a role like this in a murder, I would at least cease from producing similar tales. My right to tell a story can hardly be equal to the right of a 15-year-old to live. The political impotence of the left is the result of the pseudo-judicial requirement imposed, by us and media coercion, on our public life by the free speech industry.**** That standard of extra-judicial impartiality has been absurdly inserted into our political speech and our lives as political animals. It is a standard of behavior that no other part of the political spectrum feels they must practice. It is seen clearly in the scrupulous observances maintained on the left about speech and expression. When someone can’t object to the word “cunt” or about the business practices of Hooters without being chastised as violating some bizarrely inverted concept of justice, it’s clear that we mere human beings are the vassals of words and images, so much more so when they are the products of commerce. It is time for women and the rest of those struggling for progress to declare we are going to throw off that mind forged manacle that is so notably a benefit to our opponents. The idea that all speech is equal and must be treated impartially will always benefit those with more power and fewer morals. When you add the mass media to violent words the results can be genocidal. As mentioned in last weeks argument, free speech in the form of lies is the basis of most of the loss of rights due to bigotry and discrimination. Misogyny, racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, hatred of LGBT folks, are, in almost every case today, founded on and fueled by freely expressed speech. Hate talk radio and cabloids are the most prevalent media informing the American People of what their government and others do. Our virtually unrestricted media, just about entirely freed of the obligation to serve the public interest is the product of the free speech industry and the corporate media it so often acts on behalf of***. There has hardly ever been a time in the history of speech, when hate speech by and in the interest of those with power wasn’t given complete freedom, no matter what other speech was suppressed. Of the many clear examples when speech has a homicidal impact on mere human beings, abridging every right those mere humans have, the Rwandan genocide is a relatively fresh and undeniable example. By the time the “more speech” had time to catch up with the hate speech and incitement to commit genocide that was uninhibitedly broadcast in a way that our shock jocks are quickly catching up to, hundreds of thousands of people were dead. If you think that can’t happen here, it does now. Women, the identifiable class most subject to hate speech, freely expressed, are murdered in the United States every single day because they are women. The slaughter of women is slow motion terrorism that has an inhibiting effect on the freedoms of women and girls. It is a lynching campaign that is the product of words that accumulate into attitudes and social norms. The same can be said to an extent of other groups which are regularly and irregularly the topic of hate speech. As is undeniable during this time of “open carry” rallies, our opponents are showing us that they are armed well past the teeth. Anyone who is willing to bet that they could not be incited to kill with them is an idiot. In thinking about this and other topics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we have been led to think of human behavior is basically wrong. People aren’t atoms and molecules, they don’t behave with reasonable uniformity, there aren’t just a few simple vectors to describe their motion and interaction with their environment. I think much if not all of this statistical activity concerning human behavior might be quite useless. I don’t believe anymore that human behavior is subject to any laws and rules that our science is able to discern with any reliability. It is in determining the actions of any individual. While it might be very desirable to be able to make predictions about future behavior, trying to determine that with statistics is of wildly variable success at the very best. The more complex the behavior, the less likely it is liable to be understood simply. With complexity, given the nature of behaviors and their possible source in unknowable motivations, the complexity of the network of those possible motivations expands very fast. I don’t think behavioral science works even as well as the observations of a good fiction writer. That conclusion is something I didn’t want to be true, I used to believe the opposite, but I think it is true. I would like there to be a reliable science to deal with dangerous mental illnesses, but I don’t believe that, other than administering drugs to prevent some of the adverse behavior, the results are reliable. We don’t have to like something for it to be true. Nature and science don’t have to conform to what would be most useful to us or most convenient for us. It would be extremely useful if we could predict who will have a bad reaction to violent pornography and use it as a how-to manual. But we can’t. To pretend that inability requires us to accept complete libertarianism, allowing pornography to throw off its chains and to flourish in its infinite depravity, is insane. To ignore that it is at least as effective as Viagra commercials in changing behavior or encouraging behavior that is latent in a potentially dangerous person, is also insane. * The results of the habit of generalization are on full display in the infamous law recently passed in Arizona. Allow sterotypes and group libel full reign and you get laws like that one. ** When you add the element of ownership, as in slavery, the interests of slave owners asserted themselves and the original Constitution included mention of slaves, conferring extra privileges to slave holders and the states they lived in. The importance of that distinction is seen in the fact that the constitution didn’t give extra weight to the representation of states based on giving unenslaved women a fractional value, the infamous 3/5ths person value. Of course, that added representation wasn’t given to slaves, it was given to their enslavers. *** If you want to know why our government doesn’t work, despite the majority that was elected with Barack Obama, our media is the foremost part of that. The impotence of Democrats in the congress and the administration is inflicted by the free media, exercising their unrestricted free speech in the absence of the onerous burden of risking an accurately informed electorate voting in an effectively beneficial way. **** It was exactly that media coercion that fueled my first blog post. Note: In the end, you have to stand for what you stand for. I would have risked making this post of even more unreadable length if I’d gone into the all important issue of what the values of liberalism are for, in the end. To hold that governments and societies should treat people equally, to allow them to practice the control of their bodies and lives, isn’t an isolated end in itself. It has a goal, that of allowing people to live peaceful, happy lives, to not be harmed by other people with the ability to suppress and harm them. I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that much of speech and expression is an attack on that goal, it isn’t of innocuous intent. The goal of many people is to hurt people and animals, some people are gratified by hurting other people, they want to steal the product of their work, up to and including the most basic sustenance. There are people who like to hurt and kill other people. To deny that is to deny the reasons that liberalism and democracy are necessary in the first place. To deny that it is necessary to prevent that harm is to deny the only legitimate reason that laws and government exist. There are also people who are so enamored of their self-righteousness that they will preen in a posture of scrupulosity in the matter of free speech even as they wash their hands of the results of the malignant speech they champion. “More speech” is the water that is held to clean up the blood. Only it doesn’t clean up the blood. It does, however, mask the indifference to it. Note: This was written last year. This year the danger predicted, that women were in danger of losing the most basic legal acknowledgement of their full person-hood is even more obvious. And the same Supreme Court which will remove more of those rights are confirming that violence is being encouraged by the oligarchs. I will write about that more later.