I Don't Hesitate To Say Of The Dead What I Would Say About Them In Life

In my first blog post I took a swipe at Nat Hentoff who died the day before yesterday.  I don't regret that now, more than ten years later that he has, as all 91-year-olds eventually do, died.  Many die far younger, and sometimes with his help, as I'll point out below.   I didn't much like Hentoff who I thought was obnoxious and self-promoting whether writing about jazz or writing about politics or civil liberties.  I thought he was a man who enjoyed his straight-male privilege as he posed as a liberal and also enjoyed other things unavailable to other people whose equal rights were certainly not his first priority.

I held him to be a pseudo-liberal for much of his life.  It didn't surprise me much when, after the Village Voice discontinued his regular employment, he went to work at the corporate-fascist false front of the Cato Institute.  It didn't surprise me when he endorsed the idiot-Republican Rand Paul for president or the illegal, disastrous invasion of Iraq.  In the taunting notice I got of his death daring me to diss him now that, as we all must, he's died, I didn't see any mention of the hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent lives taken, not by natural death but by avoidable violence in that invasion which he supported, sold with lies .  I always assumed that it was on behalf of Israel, for which he had no problem with lying, distorting, twisting words and ideas and even violating his patented civil libertarian pose.

Rather tellingly, I thought, for a guy whose side did so much to enable the most repressive of pornographers, the atheist, Hentoff, was an opponent of women being able to obtain legal abortions. And I will put the emphasis on the GUY in that sentence.  According to what I've read he claimed he never thought much about the issue until 1984, which would have made him 59 before he thought about it.

And with typical Hentoffian fact twisting, he claimed the case that got him on an anti-choice tare wasn't even, in his telling, about abortion but infanticide.    Reading that brings up one of the things that I found most obnoxious about him, his twisting things to suit his own ends.   No matter whether or not he is honestly characterizing what people HE KNEW were saying about the case in question, it was not and was never a case of abortion.

"They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't youconsider it a late abortion and go on to something else?'

"Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

And before someone snarks about me linking to something written in the repulsive Washington Times, he wrote for them as well as the Village Voice.

The central issue in the debate about legalized abortion is whether or not the state has the right to compel a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, a legitimate interest to regulate what a woman does with her own body.   I hold that the state's legitimate right to make that decision for an individual ends at the skin if not considerably before that.  

You can argue whether or not that is the case, but if you give the state the right to compel a woman to be pregnant but, then, reject far, far less intrusive restrictions on aspects of personal integrity, ownership of your own body and regulation of your conduct you give yourself a huge problem of hypocrisy.  Especially if you make such arguments while entirely safe from ever being pregant.

It makes little sense to then say a democratic government has a legitimate interest in forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term but no legitimate interest in keeping someone from lying or promoting discrimination and the inequality of people.  To deny that egalitarian democratic government  has an interest in protecting the blessings of egalitarian democracy from its enemies but then claim that it does have an interest in whether or not a woman remains pregnant is grotesquely hypocritical.

A woman having control of her own body is of far less impact on other people or society at large or the nation as a whole as compared to fascists, Nazis, Klansmen or others with a history of mass murder and violence being allowed to promote and advocate their programs of inequality, discrimination and murder.  The body count of those groups runs into the tens of millions.  Even the limited obnoxiousness of the funeral disruption stunts of the Phelps cult has far more of an impact on other people , denying rights of privacy and a right to be unharassed and unwillingly being roped into being the center of the publicity stunts of hate groups, than a woman deciding what to do with her own body.

I think his positions on those things were a key to the hypocrisy of, not only Nat Hentoff but his entire theory of civil liberty.  I think, in the end, the results of it is the empowerment of the already privileged, the entrenched privileged, the majority race, etc.  It has certainly empowered the billionaires and the racists and enemies of democracy.

And that was only one aspect of Nat Hentoff's act as The Greatest Civil Libertarian In The World which I found repulsive.

I think even before that it was his eternal repetition of his role in producing that TV show with Billie Holiday that first put me off him.  I remember about the fourth time I read him repeating it I asked if he wanted people to figure he'd put every note she sang in her mouth.  I never could stand critics much and he could be one of the most annoying of them.

Update:  I have no problem with people opposed to abortion advocating to women, in general or those who seek their opinion, that they not have an abortion.  That is if they honestly represent that as their intention from the start.   I have no problem with people arguing that in general.  I have a huge problem with people advocating that abortion be made illegal and unavailable.  Not least because it is an absolutely guaranteed result of making a safe abortion illegal, unsafe illegal abortions in large numbers with many injured, traumatized and dead women will be one result.  Making abortion illegal does not end abortions, it merely makes them dangerous in the black market that will develop or in the equally dangerous attempts to self-induce or, perhaps most dangerous of all, involuntary boy-friend-husband induced miscarriage, which is, as well, a violation of womens' ownership of their bodies.

That is an entirely different thing from infanticide of a child who is not contained in the mother's body.  Once born, the issue of a mother's ownership of her own body is not part of the decision.

Update 2:  Someone has objected to my criticism of Peter Singer in the comments.  Peter Singer is not a liberal, he's a philosophy prof on the make who knows he can get big appointments on the basis of being hot and someone like him gets hot by making outlandish and offensive statements, especially those that promote the objectification of powerless and relatively powerless people in a way pleasing to such people as publish his stuff.  The kind of people who choose who to publish in the New York Times.

NO ONE WHO CALLS FOR KILLING PEOPLE ON THE BASIS OF HIS PREFERRED SCHEME OF VALUATION OF THEIR LIVES IS A LIBERAL.   His preferred scheme of valuation is whatever cult of utilitarianism he's pushing at the time.  From what I understand what is called "preference utilitarianism" gave him his preferred scheme for most of his career, now in the last couple of years, he's declared that it's now "hedonistic utilitarianism".  I will leave it to you to go see if you can tease out the differences between them.    My question would be if he can change something like that, what's the consequence for the reliability of his work up to that point?  What's the implication of it for what he's written after that change?  And why should actual lives be put into question on the basis of anything he says?

I would ask Singer if someone who came up with a scheme of utilitarian valuation of lives that resulted in them figuring that more people would be happy if they offed Peter Singer and his loved ones if he thought that would be a good idea.  I'm sure someone might be able to come up with some contorted figure of pseudo-algebraic stuff that could be made to come out that way, it's what he does.  Then he insists that his preferred scheme is to be the way that the problem is looked at. At academic departments of philosophy at major universities, I believe his is still Princeton these days, that is what will get you the big bucks and the attention and buzz.  Which is one of the reasons I agree with whoever it was who said that these days it's a lot more interesting to read theology.  Academic philosophy has pretty much gone down a rabbit hole into wonderland.  It's sad but that's their choice. Fields do go through their decadent phases.

It's kind of interesting that a guy famous for being a vegetarian serves up the amount of tripe Singer does.  Hitler was a vegetarian, I point out as someone who's been one for longer than Singer has been. I think it's really weird how he gets points for being a vegetarian as he blithly advocates killing people and it's completely OK and even swell with the academic establishment because he does so while being an academic.  It's like the mass slaughter of the 20th century, especially the enormous numbers killed with excuses of social and economic efficiency - though though they were  often designated as benevolence, taking advantage of the prejudices in matters such as disability - but in academia, it's as if those never happened.

I don't see Peter Singers' schemes of determining who isn't fit to live on the basis of his current sect of utilitarianism is much better than any other one that comes up with their list of people who are candidates for being offed.  I think that it's done in English at American and other English speaking universities doesn't put it in a different category than if it's done in North Korea in Korean today or in Germany in German in the 1940s or in Tasmania in English in the 19th century.    Though, when I have tried to read through Peter Singer going through his pseudo-mathematical means of coming up with who can be killed and why, I don't really see much of a difference from how Rudolph Hoess talked about his methods of doing the same.  From what I read, Singer aspires to come up with some kind of Darwinian based ethical system, which, after my long study of Darwinism and its actual relationship with eugenics, English and German, doesn't surprise me.  Scratch a Darwinist and you'll often find someone who wants to rank people in terms of valuation and, at times, propose killing them or sterilizing them.  Though the one can turn into the other with the change of a law or two.

Perhaps I don't see eye to eye with him because my father was severely disabled.  If he'd been born with his disability, Singer would say it was OK to kill him before he was old enough to object.