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Proposed 40:1 CEO:employee pay ratio lawFebruary 1, 2016 – 12:57 pm by John
Before people support business regulations, they should listen to business owners and other people who will suffer the everyday effects of those regulations. Workers and business owners in the private sector who oppose certain regulations aren't just blowing smoke and spouting ideology; they know from experience what kinds of unintended consequences and bureaucratic waste will result from intrusions into the everyday workings of businesses.
These thoughts were inspired by these tweets from Alice Maz on January 30:
so is "40:1 maximum wage" the new "I don't understand economics" rallying cry
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
like ceo pay didn't get where it is via magic or evil conspiracy, it's just market forces
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
so Alice Inc. needs to compete for the pool of ceos under the new 40x law, what do we do. first thing is fire all the laborers
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
sorry guys we'd love to keep you on but you're dragging down the salary window, blame the regulators
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
perhaps you'd like a job at Alice Services Ltd. the new company we formed for the express purpose of adjusting to this new law
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
but now we get into *real* zero-sum territory because we need to pay more manager-types to deal with the extra organizational complexity
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
more resources must be thrown down the bottomless pit of adapting our firm to government meddling soo someone's gonna take a haircut
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
but all this is a pain in the ass so maybe we'll just farm the unskilled labor out to 1099s. gj killing jobs and introducing more precarity
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
besides that the other obvious solution is non-cash compensation and intangibles and then all the mad men tropes come back in full force
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
there is much talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, bifurcation of society into the knowledge-worker elite and the precariat
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
or more optimistically a shift from bell curves to power laws on the way to automation that will free the long tail from drudgery
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
but whatever you call that, capping compensation at 40:1 is not the magic fix to inequality, and if anything can only exacerbate it
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
it doesn't incentivize paying the top less and the bottom more. it incentivizes casting the bottom off
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) January 30, 2016
"Rights activists"August 16, 2015 – 12:45 pm by John
Those of us who defend and extol the free market (and even dare to call it "capitalism" sometimes) know all too well how derisive and disdainful the left can be toward the term "free market" and all that it entails. If we ever invoke the "free market" as a proposal to solve any material, structural, or organizational problem humanity faces, we know beforehand how they will scoff, "Oh, yeah, let's just leave it to the free market and let everyone starve or freeze to death." In any debate with such a person, we either avoid using the F-word or wince and cringe while using it because we know how pathetic it sounds to them.
I predict the same thing will happen to the term "rights" in general and the rights of free speech and due process specifically. Sometime this century probably, among the descendants of the current illiberal leftists who trade in identity politics and outrage/shame signaling, the term "rights activist" will become a pejorative—an insult levied at insufficiently social-justice-minded conservatives and libertarians, especially white heterosexual American ones, to stigmatize them for putting some people's rights above some (less advantaged) people's well-being, or for caring about abstract principles more than real people's "safety" or "oppression" (two words that now seem to need scare quotes a lot more often than they used to).
It's not hard to see why this might come about. Mainly, defending free speech and due process rights usually entails defending bad or at least shady people—sometimes obviously guilty ones. In an age when some of the popular leaders of the wider leftist movement claim that to be objective is to take their side, and when many Millennials seem to think their duty is to shut down debate rather than expose themselves to something unpleasant, they will become more and more entrenched and invested in their bubble of progressive-left thought. It will become more and more crucial to defend the idea that they are objectively, demonstrably correct and that anyone who opposes them must be stopped, silenced, ridiculed, and marginalized. They will see defenders of rights for all as opponents of justice for the oppressed.
Already, their goal is not increased liberty or the defense of rights but the promotion of economic and social justice and equality for historically disadvantaged groups. And already it can be seen that (negative) rights and the cultural values underpinning them are not only absent from their advocacy program but are directly anathema to it. It is only a matter of time until they come out into the open about it. It is only a matter of time until they go from scoffing at specific, narrow defenses of free speech or due process to attacking the entire free speech/due process philosophy and its proponents.
And, I must admit, my prediction might not be all that forward-thinking or insightful, because the illiberal leftists who seem to dominate college campuses and social media, if not in numbers then at least in notoriety, already do everything I'm predicting except disdainfully refer to us as "rights activists". If we point out that "hate speech" is free speech and that no such sub-category exists nor ought to exist, we get accused of promoting hate, threats, racism, misogyny, etc. If we point out that words are not, in fact, capable of harming anyone or threatening their safety (much less oppressing them, JFC...), we get accused of being blinded by privilege and refusing to see the world from a less privileged perspective. If we demand evidence, formal investigations, fair hearings, and all the other aspects of due process before shaming someone into unemployment or convicting them of a crime, we get branded racists, sexists, rape apologists, etc., as the case may be. The only thing that's left is for them to make it explicit how much they disdain both the culture and the laws supporting free speech and due process, and how obstructive both are to their social goals.
Oh, but in a libertarian society, the rich and powerful would take advantage of the poor and weak, denying them a decent life through arbitrary rules, cronyism, and corruptionApril 19, 2015 – 4:11 pm by John
The Washington Post reports that the FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000:
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far....
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict's guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.
The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country's largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation's courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. ...
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, "The FBI's three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster."
"We need an exhaustive investigation that looks at how the FBI, state governments that relied on examiners trained by the FBI and the courts allowed this to happen and why it wasn't stopped much sooner," Neufeld said.
Warnings about the problem have been mounting. In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time. In the District, the only jurisdiction where defenders and prosecutors have re-investigated all FBI hair convictions, three of seven defendants whose trials included flawed FBI testimony have been exonerated through DNA testing since 2009, and courts have exonerated two more men. All five served 20 to 30 years in prison for rape or murder.
University of Virginia law professor Brandon L. Garrett said the results reveal a "mass disaster" inside the criminal justice system, one that it has been unable to self-correct because courts rely on outdated precedents admitting scientifically invalid testimony at trial and, under the legal doctrine of finality, make it difficult for convicts to challenge old evidence.
"The tools don't exist to handle systematic errors in our criminal justice system," Garrett said. "The FBI deserves every recognition for doing something really remarkable here. The problem is there may be few judges, prosecutors or defense lawyers who are able or willing to do anything about it."
If it ain't broke, fix it till it isMarch 24, 2015 – 1:13 pm by John
That saying doesn't perfectly apply to the broadband internet and telecommunications industry in the U.S., because I think there's plenty wrong with that industry now, but I feel completely certain that the FCC's new net neutrality rules will fail to fix or prevent whatever the advocates of such rules imagined (might) exist and will in fact create new, worse problems.
One of the FCC's commissioners, Ajit Pai, sees it the same way:
The plan saddles small, independent businesses and entrepreneurs with heavy-handed regulations that will push them out of the market. As a result, Americans will have fewer broadband choices. This is no accident. Title II was designed to regulate a monopoly. If we impose that model on a vibrant broadband marketplace, a highly regulated monopoly is what we'll get.
(I would hardly call our broadband marketplace vibrant, given that most consumers have either one or two ISPs to choose from and the competing ISPs offer similar options, but his main point stands.)
Elsewhere, Pai has called net neutrality "a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist."
The problem, as supporters imagine it, is that internet service providers could slow down content that the ISP either competes with or disapproves of, or could deny its customers access to that content altogether. But this hasn't been a problem yet, and it's bad policy to write rules and regulations, much less reclassify the regulatory scheme of an entire industry, because of something that might happen.
I've heard of two actions by an ISP, both Comcast, that net neutrality advocates cite in support of these new regulations. The first is when Comcast slowed bittorrent traffic specifically, instead of, say, slowing all traffic of its heaviest users equally. This discrimination was resolved and never repeated without re-classifying the regulatory framework of the entire broadband industry.
It should be noted that there is nothing per se wrong with an ISP limiting the speed of certain types of traffic (or instituting a monthly or yearly data cap), as some people might prefer to pay less (or more) for slower (or faster) bittorrent traffic. What was wrong with Comcast's throttling of bittorrent traffic is that it was done in secret, without any type of notification or agreement with its customers, and therefore violated both the letter and spirit of their contracts with customers.
Net neutrality advocates are completely right to point out that Comcast throttled bittorrent speeds not only to prevent some super-torrent-downloaders from hogging all the bandwidth (at the expense of other paying customers) but also because everyone knows those users are mainly downloading copyrighted movies, music, and TV shows, and large ISPs typically have a strong interest in protecting the profits of their friends and partners in the entertainment industry. This is more true than ever for Comcast, which now owns NBC/Universal and several cable channels.
At this point it is salutary to note that net neutrality advocates want the federal government to prevent ISPs from hindering access to intellectual property...property that is an artificial monopoly created by the federal government and that is protected by laws enforced by the federal government. Good luck with that.
The second incident was when Comcast slowed Netflix service because Netflix and Comcast stalled in reaching a financial agreement under which Netflix would enjoy heavy use of a large part of Comcast's bandwidth. In the Cato daily podcast for November 12, 2014, Berin Szoka of TechFreedom.org dispelled the myths that (a) this happened the way it has been represented and (b) that what happened is even bad:
Caleb Brown: [The Oatmeal author Matthew Inman] writes, "Last year Comcast demanded that Netflix pay them millions of dollars or they were going to slow down the internet speeds of customers who were trying to stream Netflix movies. During negotiations, Comcast throttled the bandwidth of Netflix users in order to bully Netflix into paying massive fines."
Berin Szoka: Completely untrue. Dan Rayburn, independent industry analyst here, has explained this very well. What really happened is that Netflix is trying to pass on things that it's always had to pay for to people who don't use Netflix service. Netflix made a mistake last year when they started offering higher speeds: they didn't buy enough bandwidth in their deal with Cogent. And they were able to get a better deal from Comcast, one that allowed them to stream more cheaply than what they would have been able to get from Cogent. And they turned around and have suggested that broadband companies are holding them for ransom when in fact they're offering a more efficient, cheaper solution, which means lower bills for consumers. It's a cynical manipulation on Netflix's part, and it has nothing to do with net neutrality.
That market for interconnection is thriving. Prices for interconnection have fallen 1000-fold in the last—I believe it's 14 years. And it's highly competitive. There's no problem there except that Netflix would prefer to pay zero than to have to pay anything at all.
(Here's a good blag post by the aforementioned Dan Rayburn on Netflix, Comcast, and peering. In the first paragraph, he links to another, very informative post on Netflix/Comcast peering.)
Elsewhere, Szoka has written:
Title II means the very opposite of net neutrality. Even under Title II, the FCC can't legally ban all paid prioritization — only regulate it to make sure that prices are just and reasonable. In fact, Title II would authorize broadband providers to charge some price to content and service providers for carrying their traffic to users — and there's no precedent for the FCC from "forbearing" from this requirement in a market that it claims is a "terminating access monopoly." Title II would raise a host of other problems, including choking broadband competition, inviting regulation of the rest of the Internet and validating Russia and China's push to have the International Telecommunications Union regulate the Internet as a telecom service.
Yet elsewhere, Szoka has explained that
Title II also wouldn't help Netflix get free interconnection. What Netlix calls "Strong Net Neutrality" has nothing to do with Net neutrality. Someone's got to pay for Netflix's streaming infrastructure, and Netflix is trying to pass that cost on (through broadband companies) to people who don't even use Netflix (in higher broadband bills). Contrary to what Netflix claims, it (like every other large content company) has always had to pay for interconnection...."
Szoka also quotes Fred Campbell, who wrote:
Even if the FCC were to reclassify broadband Internet access as a Title II service while leaving Netflix unregulated, the FCC would lack legal authority to require Internet service providers to interconnect with Netflix at no charge.
Unlike net neutrality, interconnection has been expressly addressed by the Communications Act since its inception in 1934, and in the past 80 years, the FCC and the courts have developed an enormous body of precedent governing interconnection. That precedent indicates that Netflix would not be entitled to the type of interconnection it seeks even if ISPs were subject to regulation under Title II.
To summarize, the FCC's reclassification of broadband internet service under its Title II regulations will most likely do nothing to prevent ISPs from charging Netflix (or other content providers) for access to its bandwidth.
And why shouldn't they? Why should ISPs and content providers be prevented, or even discouraged, from reaching such agreements? I am aware of no principle or convention of business or economics that would suggest that Business B can't or shouldn't charge both Business A and Customer C for its service as middleman connecting A to C. Grocery stores charge food and drink companies for access to the store's shelves, even charging more for the right to place their products at the front of the store, at eye level, or in other highly desired spots. (These are called slotting fees or slotting allowances.) Restaurants negotiate deals with, say, Coca-Cola or PepsiCo to sell one company's drinks and not the other's. Landlords or property managers often pay rent to the real estate company that owns the land while in turn charging rent (or other fees) to tenants (or customers). There are probably better analogies to internet service and peering agreements that I'm not aware of.
The pay-to-play or paid-prioritization aspect of our supposedly non-neutral internet would seem to encourage investment in and expansion of broadband infrastructure. An even more important function of the price system than allocating present resources efficiently is to direct future production most efficiently. If content providers are willing to pay high prices for certain peering or interconnection deals, then that tells ISPs and infrastructure operators to invest in more infrastructure so that more customers will have more, faster, better internet service in the future.
Given the reality of Title II regulation and its irrelevance to what many advocates consider net neutrality, it was disappointing to see Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com approvingly repost a bunch of pro–net neutrality cartoons. In each of them, a Tumblr user replaced some words with "the cartoonist has no idea how net neutrality works." I know that Masnick has been a vocal net neutrality convert, but the reason that particular post was disappointing is that those cartoons' refrain smugly implies that supporters know how net neutrality will work, when in fact the main point is that we don't know how the "net neutrality" regulations will work. We don't know how the federal government will use its new Title II powers and we don't know how those regulations will hamper the broadband industry. The government-skeptic position holds that the law of unintended consequences is called a "law" for a reason and that the way to improve customer choice, purchasing power, and freedom is to remove regulations, not add them. Mike Masnick, you don't know how "net neutrality" will work, because what we've gotten is an expansion of the FCC's authority in the form of Title II powers over the broadband internet industry, not "net neutrality" per se, and a good reason to oppose this expansion of power is that everything the government touches turns to crap. The form that crap will take, contrary to your smug admonitions, is something we definitely don't know.
Weren't you tipped off by the seemingly sudden about-face of the supposedly cable industry–beholden FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler? When this former staunch net neutrality opponent became the very person to lead the march toward net neutrality, didn't that seem a little fishy to you? Of course the big cable companies and other ISPs will benefit from this, and the small companies and regular customers will lose. This is always how federal regulation works.
The other main argument in favor of net neutrality, that "internet fast lanes" are unfair or anti-democratic or otherwise undesirable, is obviously nonsense. Some data is more important and sensitive than other data, and some services should be prioritized over others. If there is any bandwidth-related conflict, I want my Netflix traffic to be prioritized over whatever other generic traffic is passing into and out of my modem. So do many others, while many disagree, so let as many ISPs and network policies as possible bloom.
An important issue that Ryan McMaken of the Ludwig von Mises Institute brings up is regulatory capture:
All goods need not be allocated in response to the human-choice-driven price mechanism of the marketplace. Goods and services can also be allocated by political means. That is, states, employing coercive means can seize goods and services and allocate them according to certain political goals and the goals of people in positions of political power. There is nothing "neutral" about this method of allocating resources.
In the net neutrality debate, it's almost risible that some are suggesting that the FCC will somehow necessarily work in the "public" interest. First of all, we can already see how the FCC regards the public with its refusal to make its own proposals public. Second, who will define who the "public" is? And finally, after identifying who the "public" is, how will the governing bodies of the FCC determine what the "public" wants?
It's a safe bet there will be no plebiscitary process, so what mechanism will be used? In practice, bureaucratic agencies respond to lobbying and political pressure like any other political institution. Those who can most afford to lobby and provide information to the FCC, however, will not be ordinary people who have the constraints of household budgets and lives to live in places other than Washington, DC office buildings. No, the general public will be essentially powerless because regulatory regimes diminish the market power of customers.
Most of the interaction that FCC policymakers will have with the "public" will be through lobbyists working for the internet service providers, so what net neutrality does is turn the attention of the ISPs away from the consumers themselves and toward the regulatory agency. In the marketplace, a firm's customers are the most important decision makers. But the more regulated an industry becomes, the more important the regulating agency becomes to the firm's owners and managers.
The natural outcome will be more "regulatory capture," in which the institutions with the most at stake in a regulatory agency's decisions end up controlling the agencies themselves. We see this all the time in the revolving door between legislators, regulators, and lobbyists. And you can also be sure that once this happens, the industry will close itself off to new innovative firms seeking to enter the marketplace. The regulatory agencies will ensure the health of the status quo providers at the cost of new entrepreneurs and new competitors.
In the end, the opinions that I and others put forward and our reasons for having them don't matter a whole lot. Sure, it matters that we have convincing, logical, fact-based explanations for why certain things happen or don't happen, so that others can see why we were right or wrong after the fact, or so that we can possibly sway people to our side and affect policy. But what really matters regarding my predictions is whether they turn out to be right. They will. Regardless of what you think of my opinions about net neutrality, my aversion to government regulations, or my explanations for why things will go wrong, they will. The only really good argument for or against a prediction is the future course of events, and I have little doubt that events will prove my predictions right. The government will interfere into the functioning of the internet in unjustified ways, possibly adversely affecting consumers, and the new regulations will prove anti-competitive. Innovation and investment will be hampered by the new rules, the weaker competition, and the diminished importance of consumers in the new regime. The FCC's powers will only expand, and will be much harder to dissolve than they were to establish.
The only real question is whether one-time net neutrality advocates will admit that these (and other) problems have occurred, or ignore them and whitewash them as something good and desirable.
Leftists on the modern illiberal leftJanuary 5, 2015 – 5:32 pm by John
The word "liberal" used to mean, more or less, libertarian. Obviously both words are derived from the Latin word for "free". We now have to resort to the phrase "classical liberal" if we want to use that word to describe a freedom-minded person, especially one from the 19th or early 20th century. But now the modern left, especially the Millennial generation and older 3rd-wave feminists, often refer to themselves as progressives instead of liberals. And the word "illiberal", having had none of its meaning tainted or twisted by party politics over the years, is more useful than ever to describe the very group that at the end of the 20th century would have called themselves liberals. These linguistic/cultural/political developments have resulted in a reclaiming of sorts of the word "liberal" by those who espouse Enlightenment principles and a laissez-faire attitude toward both culture and economics.
I count myself among them. We aren't going to start calling ourselves liberals anytime soon, but we can without much confusion refer to specific attitudes, actions, and ideals that we embrace as "liberal" and certain ones that we oppose as "illiberal". Interestingly, so can many hard leftists who are equally disgusted by the modern illiberal, anti-Enlightenment, progressive social justice movement. It has been refreshing to read their indictments of modern mainstream leftism, not only because I agree with their diagnosis but also because it takes a fair amount of fortitude and candor to tear into one's own (presumptive) allies. I think it's admirable. They put their principles, their conception of right and wrong, over partisanship and labels and the potential advantages of belonging to the largest possible alliance of "leftists". I liken these disillusioned leftists to the true small-government conservatives who started disavowing neoconservatism a decade ago.
Here is Jamie Palmer, a self-described Jacobin, in a wonderful post-mortem of mainstream liberal leftism titled Stigmatise, Shame, and Silence:
Having fought for and (mostly) won parity under the law, progressive activism found itself faced with an existential dilemma. What was it now for? It was, after all, not simply a vehicle for social change; it was also a productive receptacle for anti-authoritarianism and a valuable crucible of radical thought. Where was all this energy to be directed next?
In response to this challenge, progressivism took a dismaying and thoroughly retrogressive turn. Since inequity in society indubitably persisted, often disproportionately affecting minorities and women, it became increasingly fashionable to question whether universalist struggles had actually achieved anything of consequence at all.
The arrogance of Western cultural supremacism, it was argued, was the status quo now in need of vigorous radical assault. A commitment to universalism was replaced by the fetishisation of difference and specificity; a belief in egalitarianism gave way to demands for exceptionalism and double-standards (only this time favouring the 'oppressed'); and the language of emancipation and liberty was replaced by a cult of victimhood, self-pity, and a brooding, masochistic solipsism. "We have nothing to lose but our chains" was drowned out by the resentful injunction "Listen to my suffering".
In academia, the humanities began a process of decline as the demands of rigorous and fair-minded scholarship gave way to the requirements of a stultifying and increasingly censorious political correctness. The pursuit of objective truth and knowledge fell before endlessly competing claims from subjective 'lived experiences' and 'narratives', and international solidarity fell before a grotesque cultural relativism, itself informed by a neurotic culture of self-lacerating guilt. The lexicon of political activism - originally developed to identify irrational judgements made about people based on their unalterable characteristics - assumed a metaphysical dimension. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia were no longer alterable matters of law, belief, and practice - they became immovable structural toxins, against which not even the most broad-minded liberal could be reliably immunised, and to which well-intentioned people were often subject without their knowledge.
As the Left's progressive movements splintered into a kaleidoscope of bitter, competing interests, sectarianism was transformed from a by-product of radical squabbles into an ideological imperative, and a divisive grievance hierarchy was constructed, based upon the intersection of privileged characteristics. The jargon of -phobias and -isms proliferated as every group sought to weaponise language to its own advantage, and arguments from remote etymology were deployed to police the expression of views and ideas. Over time, invective replaced argument and persuasion, and those committed to identity politics lost their ability to engage in constructive debate, to disagree, and - most damaging of all - to think critically about their own ideas and suppositions. Why bother when it is less effort to simply accuse your opponent of bigotry of one stripe or another, or of ignorance and bad faith?
When taken together, these individual cases - niggling and petty in and of themselves - speak to the flowering of a deeply sinister and censorious tendency amongst self-identifying progressives, invariably justified in the name of protecting the weak, the vulnerable, and the voiceless. In their righteous zeal to place certain people, views, and ideas beyond the pale, and secure in the complacent belief that their own opinions are beyond reproach, not one of these well-meaning men and women appears to have considered that their own liberty will, in the end, fall victim to the very same arguments they advance to silence others.
Even as they thoughtlessly stigmatise those who defend free expression as "right wing", these activists, writers, and campaigners have succumbed to the right's most regressive autocratic tendencies. Dogmatic and unbending in their misanthropic view of human sexuality and race relations; unapologetic in their advocacy of an infantilising, separatist agenda of 'safe spaces'; ferocious in their intolerance of views they deem unacceptable.
British left-feminist Helen Pluckrose wrote specifically about feminism but her admonitions apply about equally well to wider progressivism:
I have noticed a very worrying tendency within feminism to assume that men cannot be attracted to women and respect them at the same time. Any depiction of women as sexually attractive beings created by a man or watched or played (or worn) by a man is considered to demean, objectify, ostracise or harass women and the responses are vitriolic in the extreme. This has happened even when the women are cartoon characters on a shirt or characters in a video game and those female characters are armed and powerful and wearing more clothes than feminists wear when protesting (quite rightly) 'slut-shaming.'
It undermines feminism if we are seen to be inconsistent in the views we have about the right not to be judged by our clothes or by our sexuality, particularly if we consider the rules to be different for men and women.
If it is not demeaning for women to be dressed scantily (and there is no reason it should be,) and we make this point repeatedly and aim it at men, we cannot reasonably then say that men should 'know' that it's demeaning to depict women dressed scantily.
It seems that men are required to accept that such clothes do not demean women unless they enjoy seeing women wearing them in which case they do. The man's attraction is the point at which objectification occurs because he could not possibly be attracted to women and see them as people at the same time. That it is feminists discouraging men from seeing women as whole human beings with bodies and brains is truly worrying.
Even more alarming is the vitriol, the name calling, the closing down of all discussion and the defamation of many male (and female) allies that result from any man's failure to successfully navigate his way through these contradictions. Having spent so long attempting to dispel the stereotype of women as irrational, illogical and hysterical, it is very disappointing to now have to point out to my fellow feminists that:
We cannot read insult into clothes & games & lighthearted articles about annoying words and then respond by calling everyone who challenges this, ' insecure, misogynist douchebag dudebros' and consider this a perfectly acceptable way to speak to people.
We cannot accuse men of 'mansplaining' feminism when they remind us its meant to be about equality and then tell them what masculinity is, how they're doing it wrong and how they've been damaged by 'patriarchy'
We cannot take an example of a woman being presented negatively on TV or in a game, complain that this reinforces harmful gender stereotypes and then use 'men' as shorthand for 'misogynistic, murderous sex offenders' before accusing critics of being oversensitive because it should have been obvious we didn't mean all men.
We cannot take violent and sexual crimes, point out that they are committed, in the majority of cases, by men and decide that this defines masculinity, ignoring the fact that the majority of heroic and defensive acts are also done by men, and that the vast, vast majority of men are neither violent criminals nor heroic saviours but people trying to live, love, thrive and succeed and do some good along the way, just like women.
Well, obviously, we can do all these things because many of us are doing just that.
What we can't do is expect to be recognised as a movement for gender equality whilst this continues.
Julie Bindel, another British feminist writer and activist, wrote about the misguided focus on "offensive" individuals instead of real oppression and inequality:
Feminism, a great social movement, is in danger of becoming toxic and repressive. The focus on individuals, however vile they may be, signifies a shift away from the more difficult, long-term work of making institutions such as the Crown Prosecution Service and other governmental departments accountable.
The current climate of McCarthyism within some segments of feminism and the left is so ingrained and toxic that there are active attempts to outlaw some views because they cause offence. Petitions against individuals appear to be a recent substitute for political action towards the root causes of misogyny and other social ills. Petitions have taken over politics.
The "ban this sick filth" approach is starting to look more like censorship than progressive politics. Political protest and heated debate has been replaced with a witch-hunt mentality.
It would appear we have forgotten how to target institutions. The tactic du jour is to wind up a crowd and shut down any nuanced discussion or debate. Patriarchy is being left to its own devices while bad and unpalatable men are being taken to task one by one.
Last year more than 20 student unions in the UK banned Robin Thicke's song Blurred Lines, which was widely thought to glamorise rape, forbidding the playing of the song at functions within union spaces. But when the Islamic Education and Research Academy hosted an event on University College London premises at which seating was segregated by gender, a National Union of Students delegate at King's College London said that "gender segregation should be respected, if not tolerated, in institutions of higher education".
Identity politics and the emergence of feminist preciousness – the tendency towards putting trigger warnings on everything and wrapping each other in cotton wool – has translated into a disproportionate focus on individuals who offend, rather than the culture that allows them to do so. That lyrics could be a more legitimate feminist target than universities that support gender apartheid is depressing.
Moral superiority and "call out" culture has trumped political activism. Feminists have a proud history of taking state institutions and corporations to task. It would seem this is being lost in a sea of vitriol. We built this movement on a desire and willingness to question and challenge old assumptions and truisms. We are in danger of becoming autocrats who would rather organise a pile-on than try to change systems. The life blood of feminism is in danger of becoming bile.
In a very personal, soul-baring essay titled "Everything is problematic", a McGill University student reflected on her descent into, and near-consumption by, radical Marxist crusader-activism:
Something has been nagging at me for a long time. There's something I need to say out loud, to everyone before I leave. It's something that I've wanted to say for a long time, but I've struggled to find the right words. I need to tell people what was wrong with the activism I was engaged in, and why I bailed out. I have many fond memories from that time, but all in all, it was the darkest chapter of my life.
I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that is prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely. It is a fusion of a certain kind of anti-oppressive politics and a certain kind of radical leftist politics. This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes into a nightmare. In general, the activists involved are the nicest, most conscientious people you could hope to know. But at some point, they took a wrong turn, and their devotion to social justice led them down a dark path. Having been on both sides of the glass, I think I can bring some painful but necessary truth to light.
There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I've thought a lot about what exactly that is. I've pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. ...
First, dogmatism. One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they're not just being stupid or even depraved, they're actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren't just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. ...
Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup — believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous. "I hate being around un-rad people," a friend once texted me, infuriated with their liberal roommates. Members of the ingroup are held to the same stringent standards. Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. People are reluctant to say that anything is too radical for fear of being been seen as too un-radical. Conversely, showing your devotion to the cause earns you respect. Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. ...
Anti-intellectualism also comes out in full force on the anti-oppressive side of things. It manifests itself in the view that knowledge not just about what oppression, is like, but also knowledge about all the ethical questions pertaining to oppression is accessible only through personal experience. The answers to these ethical questions are treated as a matter of private revelation. In the academic field of ethics, ethical claims are judged on the strength of their arguments, a form of public revelation. Some activists find this approach intolerable.
Perhaps the most deeply held tenet of a certain version of anti-oppressive politics – which is by no means the only version – is that members of an oppressed group are infallible in what they say about the oppression faced by that group. This tenet stems from the wise rule of thumb that marginalized groups must be allowed to speak for themselves. But it takes that rule of thumb to an unwieldy extreme.
If I said the same thing about another context that isn't so simple — when the correct opinion isn't so obvious — I would be roundly condemned. But the example's simplicity isn't what makes it valid. People who belong to oppressed groups are just people, with thoughts ultimately as fallible as anyone else's. They aren't oracles who dispense eternal wisdom. Ironically, this principle of infallibility, designed to combat oppression, has allowed essentialism to creep in.
It is an ominous sign whenever a political movement dispenses with methods and approaches of gaining knowledge that are anchored to public revelation and, moreover, becomes openly hostile to them. Anti-intellectualism and a corresponding reliance on innate knowledge is one of the hallmarks of a cult or a totalitarian ideology.
Anti-intellectualism was the one facet of this worldview I could never fully stomach. I was dogmatic, I fell prey to groupthink, and I had a crusader mentality, but I was never completely anti-intellectual. Ever since I was a child, the pursuit of knowledge has felt like my calling. It's part of who I am. I could never turn my back on it. At least not completely. And that was the crack through which the light came in. My love for deep reflection and systematic thinking never ceased. Almost by accident, I took time off from being an activist. I spent time just trying to be happy and at peace, far away from Montreal. It had been a long while since I had the time and the freedom to just think. At first, I pulled on a few threads, and then with that eventually the whole thing unravelled. Slowly, my political worldview collapsed in on itself.
The aftermath was wonderful. A world that seemed grey and hopeless filled with colour. I can't convey to you how bleak my worldview was. An activist friend once said to me, with complete sincerity, "Everything is problematic." That was the general consensus. Far bleaker was something I said during a phone call to an old friend who lived in another city, far outside my political world. I, like a disproportionate number of radical leftists, was depressed, and spent a lot of time sighing into the receiver. "I'm not worried about you killing yourself," he said. "I know you want to live forever." I let out a weak, sad laugh. "When I said that," I replied, "I was a lot happier than I am now." Losing my political ideology was extremely liberating. I became a happier person. I also believe that I became a better person.
The conservative obsession with "narrative"December 22, 2014 – 12:14 pm by John
In response to the execution-style murder of two New York City police officers by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, many conservatives blamed the media "narrative" for inspiring the murders. Brinsley supposedly said his targeting of NYPD cops was motivated by the unjustified killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and the subsequent exoneration of the police officers who killed them. Given that much of the media's attention on these cases (and others, such as that of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio) has been on the race of the victims and officers—black and white, respectively—I'm not sure how Brinsley's killing of a Hispanic and an Asian officer was directly inspired by newsmedia, but a lot of conservatives are sure that it was:
I think it's shameful that cops are now being targeted because of a racial narrative that was completely invented by the media.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 20, 2014
Media painted cops as bad guys that go around killing innocent black kids. They also championed the protestors that promoted this narrative.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 21, 2014
Kind of hilarious to watch the same journalists that inflamed tension with a false narrative accuse others of pouring fuel on the fire.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 21, 2014
I wouldn't have a problem if the media narrative was true, but it wasn't. It was completely made up. There was no racial angle to this.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 21, 2014
There was apparently no "racial angle" to Brinsley's murders, either, so it would seem that he was not influenced by the media's "racial" "narrative" at all. But not to worry, conservatives have another narrative to blame: the anti-cop mentality:
Two police officers are dead due, in part, to your biased reporting. SIT DOWN AND SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A FEW DAYS. @WesleyLowery
— RB (@RBPundit) December 21, 2014
2 NYC cops shot in ambush of patrol car. Anti-police hatred promoted by community organizers and media hacks has taken its first victims.
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) December 20, 2014
Two police officers are dead because the media glorified a myth.
— S.M (@redsteeze) December 21, 2014
This assassination of two cops is the end result of months of the #HandsUpDontShoot LIE.
— RB (@RBPundit) December 21, 2014
This is why you don't base a movement on SOMETHING THAT DIDNT HAPPEN. -> #HandsUpDontShoot DID NOT HAPPEN.
— RB (@RBPundit) December 21, 2014
If you are in the media and you didn't correct the #HandsUpDontShoot LIE, these two police officers are dead because of you.
— RB (@RBPundit) December 21, 2014
If the media actually reported on cases instead of trying to create martyrs for their pet causes, we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 21, 2014
As is, our media is a serious problem. We see it w/ Ferguson, UVA, every mass shooting etc. The media has stopped caring about the truth.
— AG (@AG_Conservative) December 21, 2014
I'm sorry i these tweets turned your stomach. I get it. But the anti-cop sentiment is real. It's sick. And most importantly it's dangerous.
— #BlueLivesMatter (@LilMissRightie) December 20, 2014
This is brought on by the media advocating and playing an active role in #ICantBreathe #BlackLivesMatter #Ferguson
— #BlueLivesMatter (@LilMissRightie) December 20, 2014
I wonder: is Radley Balko part of this anti-police narrative that's to blame for Brinsley's murders? Is his denunciation of the excess militarization of police to blame for Brinsley's murders? I also wonder: was it the anti-cop mentality that also motivated Brinsley to shoot his ex-girlfriend?
Since these conservative commentators are not stupid or oblivious, they know that their claims of "media narrative" can easily be compared with the left's claims that so many rapes occur (and go unpunished) because of a "rape culture" or that so many mass murders are committed because of a "gun culture" in the United States. And despite their rebuttal that their finger-pointing is accurate while that of others is not, I think it's just as truthful to dismiss their claims as it is to dismiss the latter two. The individual is to blame for all crimes.
The term "narrative" as many on the right use it, especially when referring to the (aspects of) stories that print and broadcast journalists focus on, has a specific meaning: that the media are presenting only partial truths or outright falsehoods in order to sway their audience toward believing an untruthful or highly skewed version of reality. The accusation of promoting a narrative does not distinguish between deliberate lies and mere lapses or distortions caused by journalists' bias, incuriosity, and ignorance.
There is no doubt that different journalists and media outlets have their biases and their narratives, and no doubt that the media influence people's behavior and opinions. I'll even grant that some members of the media shamed themselves by trying to provoke conflict at the Ferguson protests. But there is also no denying that the vast majority of the reporting on Michael Brown's death, Eric Garner's death, and the ensuing grand jury proceedings has been truthful. Was Michael Brown unarmed or not? Was Eric Garner choked to death or not? Did he repeatedly say "I can't breathe" or not? Was his murderer's exoneration a laughable travesty of justice or not? Did the Ferguson and St. Louis police throw tear gas on the protestors and set up snipers on tanks or not? The media "narrative" is one of unjustified killings, excessive insulation of police from punishment, growing antagonism between police and (especially, poor) citizens, and non-indictment of officers for actions that would clearly get any private citizen indicted—if the prosecutor didn't skip straight to murder charges to begin with. That isn't a narrative at all—it's the truth.
In fact, the conservatives' claim of "media narrative" is even weaker than that: I submit that police brutality, police militarization, unjustified shootings, cronyist insulation/protection of police officers, the complete failure of the Drug War, the ruination that the Drug War has inflicted on poor communities, and the deplorably high U.S. imprisonment rate are under-reported by newsmedia. It can't be overstated how central the War on Drugs is to the antagonistic relationship that exists between citizens, especially blacks, and cops these days, and how much the War on Drugs is to blame for the oppression and victimization that poor Americans feel is directed at them by police.
How many Americans who regularly watch and read the news are aware that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, even higher than China and Russia? How many know that over half of inmates in federal prisons are in for drug-related offenses (and that this proportion used to be 63%)? How many know that Eric Garner was not actually selling illegal cigarettes at the time of his murder and that that's not what he was arrested for? How many know that the NYPD banned chokeholds outright in 1993, which did nothing to decrease the use of chokeholds by its officers (they received over 200 complaints about chokeholds per year from 2006 to 2010)? How many appreciate how an excess of laws and overzealous policing trap people in a cycle of poverty while enriching local governments? How many know that federally mandated minimum sentences, in addition to being an objectively terrible idea that unjustly ruins thousands of people's lives, are disproportionately given to blacks (who are 21% more likely to receive a mandatory minimum sentence than white defendants facing an eligible charge)? (I mean, seriously, how often do mainstream news outlets run stories about mandatory minimum sentences? I bet it's rare.) How many know that blacks tend to receive 10% longer prison sentences than whites for the same crimes? How many know that more Americans are imprisoned for drug-related offenses now than were imprisoned for all offenses in 1980? How often do the media highlight the plain fact that the War on Drugs is destroying black America? How many Americans support the War on Drugs, for God's sake? Those people obviously haven't been paying attention, and the media haven't been doing much to dispel their biases about it.
The facts that the War on Drugs continues, that state and local governments (including police departments) continue to benefit from the War on Drugs, and that millions upon millions of people reflexively side with police in controversial cases, saying "Don't break the law or resist arrest and you'll have nothing to fear"—these facts demonstrate that the media haven't been pushing much of an anti-police narrative nor a racial narrative. If the poor and minorities side with the media's "narrative", it is because they have lived it.
In fact, as Conor Friedersdorf has documented, numerous recent examples of unjustified police abuses make the case for police reform much better than Michael Brown's death does. The evidence Friedersdorf cites is limited to videos available on YouTube; who knows how many atrocities we've missed over the decades? I don't even know the names of the victims or the shooters in those incidents, and neither does hardly anybody else, because they were swept under the rug by the police departments and not investigated by journalists, much less were they distorted into a "narrative". How many people know the name Tamir Rice? Not as many as know the names Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and not nearly as many as should know it.
It's also important to realize how widespread and deep-seated the pro-police mentality is in the U.S., as exemplified by the myriad people who believe that breaking the law is inherently wrong and that Eric Garner and Michael Brown deserved to receive deadly force because they both broke the law and resisted arrest (which is blatantly false in Eric Garner's case). The intuition to side with police and hold them above regular citizens is plenty common in the mainstream media, not unlike the ubiquitous reverence of the military. For example, when a news or opinion piece mentions the danger that police officers face in the line of duty, how often do the journalists point out that a large part of that danger comes directly from the unnecessary outlawing of drugs and the increasingly adversarial relationship between police and citizens that exists because too many things are illegal, not to mention the quotas and expectations that police place on themselves?
One problem in trying to make conservative law-and-order types realize and admit the faults of the Drug War, and more generally overzealous policing and an excess of laws, is that some of them interpret the citing of trends and statistics about the poor and minorities as an accusation that white people and relatively wealthy people are to blame. But they are not to blame. The blame belongs to politicians for passing unjust laws, police departments for overzealously (and often violently) enforcing the unjust laws as well as shielding their officers from punishment, and both federal and local governments for clamoring for ever more laws and funding to enforce them. Conservatives are so used to baseless claims of racism and calls for wealth redistribution from the left that they reflexively reject legitimate arguments that our institutions and laws disproportionately victimize the poor and minorities.
The War on Drugs, the punishment of poverty, and the immunity given to criminal police officers are injustices themselves, even if they affected all races and classes equally; the fact that they do not is only a further injustice upon a mountain of injustices.
So no, the backlash against police officers is not the media's doing, and the villification of cops, especially by black Americans, is not some new thing that started in the social media age or even the 24-hour news channel age. It has been 40+ years in the making, since at least the start of the War on Drugs, and every bit of it is justified. What isn't justified is killing in situations other than self-defense or the defense of another person against imminent threat, which is why the killing of those two NYPD officers was cold-blooded murder by a disturbed, violent degenerate.
A third common claim by conservatives is that all those Ferguson and New York protestors shouting "Kill the cops!" and the like were inciting people to violence and were bound to inspire some nut to act on that impulse. Therefore, the protestors are partially to blame, and their anti-cop movement is part and parcel with the inevitable cop-killing backlash.
Further cementing himself as a respectable, honest, consistent conservative (or conservatarian, as he calls himself) who is an ally to the libertarian movement, Charles C.W. Cooke was having none of that:
Words don't pull triggers.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 21, 2014
I'm skeptical of blaming movements or political philosophies for the actions of individuals, and I see no reason to buck that trend here.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 21, 2014
If we see this all over the country, with the same justification, then we can start looking at the movement. Until then, color me skeptical.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 21, 2014
(I expect we will see a little more of it, because people who commit murders out in public are usually pretty deranged and sick, and because there is a lot of hatred of cops out there.)
@jneeley78 Not in my view it's not. "Go and shoot that cop at 6pm" is, maybe.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 21, 2014
@RBPundit No.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 22, 2014
In conclusion, the police reform (or even police-hating) movement is not to blame for Ismaaiyl Brinsley's crimes any more than the NRA is to blame for mass shootings. If the media truly had a racial narrative, we would hear a lot more about actual, concrete, statistically proven inequalities in our criminal justice system, and several more black victims of police violence would be household names. Contrary to the stock conservative complaint about the media vis-à-vis crime, race, and police, the deficiency of our newsmedia is in its reluctance to highlight the full extent and depravity of the War on Drugs, the ubiquity of excessive use of force by police, and the effective outlawing of poverty in many jurisdictions. The War on Drugs and the associated American prison state is the West's human rights atrocity of the 21st century. The protesters are absolutely right to hate the police, and the media are absolutely right to focus on it.
Will Wilkinson on UberDecember 20, 2014 – 12:46 pm by John
I liked this piece by Will Wilkinson at the Daily Dish on the taxi company Uber, the ignorant reactions to its "surge" pricing, and the calls for it to be dissolved into a worker collective:
There's something about Uber, the popular ride-sharing service, that brings out the nutty in people. During the awful hostage situation yesterday in downtown Sydney, the volume of people trying to get out of Dodge by beckoning an Uber car kicked the app's surge pricing into effect. This is most sensible. You see, the increase in demand (and no doubt the dangerous conditions) had reduced the supply of available drivers, leaving many of those desiring a car without one. Surge pricing sweetens the deal for drivers, drawing idle supply into action, helping to ensure that those who want service can get it. This does not amount to the exploitation of a dire situation. It is the best way to ameliorate it. The alternative to temporarily higher prices is a total lack of cars, not a bunch of open cars at normal non-surge pricing.
[emphasis mine]
In response to Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert's suggestion to socialize Uber by dissolving its corporate structure and giving ownership to the workers (drivers), Wilkinson writes,
There's perhaps a problem or two with this proposal. "It takes an entrepreneur to start up ride-sharing," Konczal and Covert write, "but not to run it as a firm. A worker collective is the obvious transition." A system in which entrepreneurship is routinely rewarded with a forced "transition" to a worker collective is a system that is unlikely to continue to producing a valuable of entrepreneurial innovation.
But I really do like the idea of the drivers getting a bigger share of the profits. If it's true, as they say, that "Newer ride-share ventures can piggyback on Uber's success and take advantage of these new terms," then it seems that Uber and Lyft drivers ought to be able to organize, finance the creation of a new app (no big deal, it would seem), and then dominate the market by charging less than those awful, useless, Silicon Valley tech-bro rentiers, all the while getting paid more. Why go through the tumult of trying to socialize Uber when a worker collective would so clearly out-compete Uber? Or maybe it's not so clear that it would. Maybe organizing drivers, developing, maintaining, and continuously improving an app, doing all the necessary marketing, and managing the whole system isn't really such a breeze, and by the time you take into account all those costs, which worker-collective drivers would have to cover, they'd end up keeping something in the neighborhood of 80% of their fares, just like Uber drivers. That's my hunch.
There's nothing wrong with a worker-owned collective, nor with the corporate structure of Uber as it actually exists. I agree with Wilkinson's conclusion that "a more worker-centric Uber seems like a neat idea, and the prospect of developing one from the ground up, no matter how unlikely it may be, seems a lot less unlikely than simply stealing Uber." I wonder: if the worker-collective structure is so much more desirable, efficient, or otherwise better, why didn't a sort of free-agent taxi company arise with such a structure to begin with instead of Uber and Lyft, or why won't one yet arise to compete with or replace them? I don't doubt there are myriad laws making the formation and success of either type of company extremely difficult. We've all heard about Uber's legal battles in its effort to be allowed to compete with "medallion" taxi companies. Maybe a well-funded corporate core with a strong legal team was necessary for Uber to get a foothold in the market to begin with, thanks to the cronyist laws protecting traditional taxi companies. But I fail to see how eliminating all of those laws would put Uber at a disadvantage compared to a hypothetical worker-collective taxi service. It would only be disadvantaged if the drivers could earn more money and/or have more job security in a worker collective...which is already either true or not true, so why doesn't one form? Or maybe those two conditions will become easier to meet as time goes on?
Great for George ClooneyDecember 19, 2014 – 1:34 pm by John
It's easy for me to say from my computer chair, but the response of Sony and the rest of Hollywood to the terrorist hack and to the demand that Sony cancel the release of The Interview was weak and cowardly. Giving in to thuggish, censorious demands, even when backed by threats, is sad whether it's Muslims complaining about depictions of Mohammed or hackers threatening "another 9/11" (scarcely credible) or students demanding a speaker be disinvited or anything else. Sometimes it's understandable, but it's still sad. Movie theaters and their lawyers didn't want to be held responsible, in a court of law or the court of public opinion, for a shooting spree or other terrorist attack, so they played it safe. That's the story of this decade, it seems: everyone wants to avoid challenges, avoid risks, avoid controversy, avoid standing up for anything unpopular, sacrifice liberal Enlightenment principles to people's feelings, and accord a heckler's veto to any group that speaks loudly, threateningly, or sanctimoniously enough.
George Clooney stands against this trend, and he deserves heaps of praise for it. I knew there was good reason to like him outside of his characters and movies. Until now, I just had some vague sense that he was cool and likable in an old-fashioned Sean Connery/Gregory Peck kind of way. In an interview with Deadline.com, Clooney has given us much more substantive reason to admire him:
A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn't just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians Oof Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we're talking about an actual country deciding what content we're going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That's the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don't like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. ...
This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. With the First Amendment, you're never protecting Jefferson; it's usually protecting some guy who's burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this. That's not just Sony, but all of us, including my good friends in the press who have the responsibility to be asking themselves: What was important? What was the important story to be covering here? The hacking is terrible because of the damage they did to all those people. Their medical records, that is a horrible thing, their Social Security numbers. Then, to turn around and threaten to blow people up and kill people, and just by that threat alone we change what we do for a living, that's the actual definition of terrorism.
Here's the brilliant thing they did. You embarrass them first, so that no one gets on your side. After the Obama joke, no one was going to get on the side of Amy, and so suddenly, everyone ran for the hills. Look, I can't make an excuse for that joke, it is what it is, a terrible mistake. Having said that, it was used as a weapon of fear, not only for everyone to disassociate themselves from Amy but also to feel the fear themselves. They know what they themselves have written in their emails, and they're afraid.
Quite honestly, this would happen in any industry. I don't know what the answer is, but what happened here is part of a much larger deal. A huge deal. And people are still talking about dumb emails. Understand what is going on right now, because the world just changed on your watch, and you weren't even paying attention.
But to distribute, you've got to go to a studio, because they're the ones that distribute movies. The truth is, you're going to have a much harder time finding distribution now. And that's a chilling effect. We should be in the position right now of going on offense with this. ... Stick it [The Interview] online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I'm not going to be told we can't see the movie. That's the most important part. We cannot be told we can't see something by Kim Jong-un, of all fucking people.
Everybody is looking at this from self interest and they are right in this sense. I'm a movie theater and I say, "OK, there's been a threat. Not really a credible threat, but there's a threat, and my lawyers call and tell me, "Well, you run the movie and you could be liable." And all the other movies around it are going to have their business hurt. I understand that, and it makes complete sense. But that's where we really need to figure what the real response should be. I don't know what that is yet. We should be talking about that and not pointing fingers at people right now. Right now, it's not just our community but a lot of communities. We need to figure out, what are we going to do now—when we know the cyberattacks are real, and they're state-sponsored.
Dogmatic mysticism in the intolerant leftDecember 18, 2014 – 11:51 am by John
Somewhere around the interwebs, I once read an analogy to the radical-left social justice movement that went something like this: Imagine you have a child of, say, pre-school or elementary-school age. He is playing in your living room as usual, doing nothing out of the ordinary, until he steps across a certain patch of carpet that you have suddenly and secretly deemed off-limits. You admonish the child, grab him, put him in time-out, take away his toys, tell him why he is being punished, make him apologize, make him feel terrible for his mistake, tell him it was his fault, make him promise never to do it again, and tell him his intentions and his ignorance of the rule are irrelevant. You also emphasize that his failure to realize he was making a mistake is also his fault and is further proof of his wickedness.
The child will apologize to avoid further admonishment and to regain the approval of his parents. If the child experiences this first-hand or sees it happening to others often enough, he will come to perceive all living rooms as fraught with unseen dangers, whose invisibility is his own fault, and will come to believe it is his own responsibility not only to avoid further such transgressions but also to admonish others who transgress, despite his vague memory that at some point there was nothing wrong with playing in all parts of the living room. Finally, the child will come to respect—or at least submit to—the capricious and obscure nature of these rules, which can have the effect of either accustoming the child to respecting and obeying capricious and obscure rules or leading the child to disrespect rules both good and bad.
Nowhere have I seen a more apt real-world example of this allegory than in the travails of Smith College President Kathleen McCartney. Her transgression? Writing in an email to the university community,
Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:
As members of the Smith community we are struggling, and we are hurting. The failure of grand juries in Missouri and New York to indict two police officers for their use of excessive force, resulting in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, has led to a shared fury – and a deep sorrow. The videotape of Eric Garner spoke for itself – or should have done. In my conversations with you, I hear discouragement as you share how your lives have been disrupted, how you have lost faith in the quest for racial equality, and how you fear for people of color. How you fear especially for children like Tamir Rice, 12 years old, who was shot November 22nd in Cleveland for holding a toy gun in a park.
We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest; yet we wake again to news of violence that reminds us, painfully, of the stark reality of racial injustice.
It can be easy to lose hope, but Marian Wright Edelman, who founded the Children's Defense Fund more than 40 years ago, teaches us to remain willing to work for social justice, even amidst our discouragement. She said recently, "I care, and I am willing to serve and stand with others to build a movement." Like Marian, I believe our only choice is to serve and to build, especially in times like this, as the civil rights of our fellow citizens continue to be in jeopardy.
We will do some of this work on our own and some in community. Thanks to the Concerned Students of Color Committee, we have already begun a series of programs that will continue as long as I am president. Thanks to the faculty, we have already begun a series of conversations about how to address institutional barriers to equality. Soon we will have a new Chief Diversity Officer to support this work.
Most immediately, we will:
- Focus the readings and prayers of this Sunday's Christmas Vespers services at 4 and 7:30 p.m. in John M. Greene on renewing our commitment to social justice, and include a period of silent reflection during each service.
- Come together in vigil at 4:30 p.m. Monday, December 8th, on Chapin Lawn, to remember Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others who have fallen; and to recommit ourselves to working toward justice and non-violence in their honor.
- Organize a panel discussion on police treatment of people of color, particularly Black males.
- Solicit ideas from all members of our community. I welcome your suggestions.
It is my fervent hope that the lives of Michael, Eric, Tamir and others will inspire a new civil rights movement. There are early signs that this is the case, as demonstrations across the country have illustrated.
What an insensitive, insulated, oblivious, dismissive, callous person, amirite? Any reasonable, halfway-civilized person would realize how offensive her remarks are, especially to people of color.
What's that? Oh, it was actually the last sentence of her email that riled people up:
We are united in our insistence that all lives matter.
Apparently the subject line of her email was also "All Lives Matter". You see, President McCartney didn't realize that "all lives matter" was a dismissive phrase used by some to counter the slogan "black lives matter" in an attempt to divert discussion away from the ill treatment that blacks disproportionately receive from police officers and all other facets of the American criminal justice system. She didn't realize this probably because she is not a hyper-politicized person who is in tune with every fad and fashion of the social-mediasphere.
In an entirely depressing but entirely expected development, she apologized and admitted her "mistakes":
I am committed to working as a white ally, to learning from the lived experiences of people of color, and to acknowledging mistakes, despite my best intentions.
The two student emails she quoted in her apology were thoughtful and respectful, but some comments quoted by the linked article were more accusatory and judgmental:
Two students who attended the vigil, sophomores Cecelia Lim and Maureen Leonard, agreed that McCartney was right to apologize after her original email.
"It felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives," Lim said.
A third student at the vigil, sophomore math major Maria Lopez, said McCartney's first email was poorly received on campus.
"A lot of my news feed was negative remarks about her as a person," she said, referring to students' reaction on social media. Lopez added that McCartney, whom she called "President Kathy," is generally well-liked among students.
"She acknowledged her mistake," Lopez said.
To review, an eminently concerned, fair-minded, inclusive university president was driven to apologize for failing to repeat a slogan she was unaware existed; her innocent over-inclusivity was "poorly received" for "invalidating the experience of black lives" despite the fact that her entire email was about the injustice experienced by black lives and actions that she would be personally involved in to rectify those injustices; and some students concluded that this ignorance of a Twitter hashtag reflected negatively on her as a person.
This is dogmatic, illiberal, hyper-judgmental group-think. It borders on religious mysticism: you can't know what is right and wrong, so rely on the social-justice clergy to inform you—and absolve you—of your sins. It is the complaining students who are insular, ignorant, and entitled. They can't suffer any deviation from their talking points, and they interpret any such deviation as an insult to an entire class of humans collectively as well as themselves personally. They seek and therefore find slights everywhere, and they think that every transgression against their movement, whether real or imagined, and no matter how small, represents malice on the part of the transgressor and entitles them to an apology.
It would be refreshing to see the target of one of these non-controversies refuse to apologize for doing nothing wrong, just once in a while.
The default position you take reveals everythingAugust 14, 2014 – 12:14 pm by John
Since I surely have nothing new to say about the events on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri, I wanted to comment on the attitudes and opinions of a certain type of commentator on this matter: those who pretend to be fair and balanced, who rush to mention that both looters and police can be in the wrong at the same time, who bend over backwards to come to the defense of the poor endangered police officers who just want to maintain law and order.
Some of them may think they are avoiding taking any default position, that their withholding of judgment constitutes carefulness, fairness, and objectivity. But I think that this evasion is itself a default position—a side taken on a substantive matter—and that this overly sensitive faux-objectivity reveals a lot about those commentators. It reveals that deep down, they really side with the (powerful) State against the (relatively powerless) citizen. Deep down, they think that peace, safety, and order come from the State. They idealize our society as one of laws, not of men, so they take a default position in defense of those who enforce the law.
As with the NSA spying scandal, the people whose default position all along has been against police militarization, against expansion of State power, have been vindicated in Ferguson, Missouri. A police state can exist in an American city. Right now Ferguson is by all accounts a police state! If these developments lead you to say, "The police might be overreacting, but the looters are definitely in the wrong too," or, "I'm not comfortable with the shutdown of media, but some type of response to rioting and looting was necessary," or, "Crowds violently attacking cops and rioting and people are surprised cops are responding accordingly? I must be missing something...", then you reveal yourself as an apologist for police militarization, as one of the tough-on-crime law-and-order types who have pushed us in this direction for 30 years. If such hedging and wishy-washiness are your default reaction to the war zone that is Ferguson, Missouri, then you are part of the problem.
Of course looting is wrong, for the same types of reasons that shooting an unarmed Michael Brown in the back, multiple times, is wrong. Of course the private property owners whose stores are being looted and whose convenience stores are being burned down are being severely, disgustingly wronged by the looters, and they must rely on the police to protect them.
But anyone who's been paying attention to the eyewitness accounts, the Twitter feeds, and the livestreams knows that the police (1) created this issue by shooting a defenseless man in the back multiple times ("more than just a couple"); (2) they exacerbated it by being secretive, refusing to release the shooter's name, and not conducting any investigation at all; (3) they made their unconstitutional/martial-law intentions obvious to everyone by blockading media from entering the city, trying to prevent anyone from photographing or filming them, even going to so far as to tear-gas reporters and dismantle their recording equipment; and (4) they exacerbated it further and created a war zone in the Midwest by pointing sniper rifles and assault rifles at protesters and even at non-protesting people just walking in their own city.
Considering such egregious police overreach on the backdrop of a city that has, at least subjectively but also by objective measures, felt wronged by a long history of racially inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system, it is easy to see how the entire town felt wronged by the shooting and abandoned—no, antagonized—by its government, and it saw the murder of Michael Brown as the last straw. A stance that glosses over everything leading up to the looting and even outright excuses the hyper-militarized weaponry and tactics of the local police is antithetical to the protection of individual rights, and is, most importantly, opposed to the protection of the citizen against the State.
The default position I take is to distrust and despise the police, especially given their terroristic and militarized weapons and responses. My default position is to focus on the militarized police forces who drive (who even want) MRAPs and point military-style weapons at unarmed protesters and bar journalists from the city and order everyone to turn their cameras off, rather than focus on the opportunistic criminals who loot and burn down stores. The latter should be mentioned and condemned, but they are not the national story. They are not turning our cities into militarized zones. They are not eating away at our constitutional rights and putting a death-grip on entire cities. They are not locking world-leading numbers of nonviolent criminals in cages for years. They are not the cause of lost rights and growing fear and an increasingly adversarial relationship between citizen and State that has been about 40 years in the making (since the beginning of the War on Drugs).
The void will be filledJuly 20, 2014 – 4:02 pm by John
Gracy Olmstead writes the most perfect and succinct summary I've yet seen of my over-arching socio-culturo-political worldview. If I could distill it into a single sentence, it would be something like: The more a society seeks to—or is forced to—delegate its affairs to the State and rely on the State to protect/manage/take care of it, the more civil society breaks down, the more community is replaced with brutality, and the more cooperation is replaced with politicization. Libertarianism has been slandered as overly individualist and selfish, but Statism is downright divisive and adversarial. True cooperation, community, and civilization are impossible without self-responsibility, self-sufficiency, voluntary associations, and the all-encompassing liberation that individual freedom would allow.
Referring to the rash of news stories about parents who have been arrested for doing absolutely nothing harmful, negligent, or even inappropriate, Olmstead writes,
As Radley Balko notes at the Washington Post, these incidents seem to signal the "increasing criminalization of just about everything and the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that were once (and better) handled by families, friends, communities and other institutions."
This latter point hearkens back to Robert Nisbet's excellent book The Quest for Community: Nisbet predicted that, in a society without strong private associations, the State would take their place—assuming the role of the church, the schoolroom, and the family, asserting a "primacy of claim" upon our children. "It is hard to overlook the fact," he wrote, "that the State and politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church." In this world, the term "nanny state" takes on a very literal meaning.
There's also the question of the three "good samaritans" in these situations—the people who noticed a child unaccompanied, without a parent, and decided to call the police. In the first instance, perhaps, calling the police made sense: the girl was a complete stranger, by herself at the park. In Brooks' case, however, a person recorded the whole incident and watched Brooks get into her car before calling the police. They could easily have talked to her, reprimanded her, warned her that they could report such activity. Williamson's child was seen in the dollar store by a customer who recognized him—thus implying that the person had at least some knowledge of the child's family. Why didn't they talk to Justin, or call Justin's parents?
In each case, the citizen jumped first to the State to care for the situation, rather than exercising any sort of personal involvement. This hardly seems to fit the definition "good samaritan"—these actions reveal a more passive, isolated attitude. But here, again, we see the result of breakdown in modern American community—without a sense of communal closeness or responsibility, we act as bystanders rather than as stewards. As Brooks puts it in her article,
We're told to warn our children not to talk to strangers. We walk them to school and hover over them as they play and some of us even put GPS systems on them, confident, I guess, that should they get lost, no one will help them. Gone are the days of letting kids roam the neighborhood, assuming that at least one responsible adult will be nearby to keep an eye out. I'm told there are still things like carpools and babysitting co-ops, but I've never found one. In place of "It takes a village," our parenting mantra seems to be "every man for himself."
This is the unfortunate result of living in a world where parenting is no longer supported and bolstered by private association and community. If only there had been a family member, friend, or church member who had volunteered to watch Harrell's little girl. If only the "good samaritan" at the dollar store had considered calling Justin's father, or offered to take the boys home. We live in a society that neglects the sort of private stewardship that could foster truly safe environments for our children—and unfortunately, when parents are thrown into prison, it hardly seems to create more safe surroundings for these kids.
Many thinkers of the past two centuries have noted that the Marxists and other atheists of the left simply replaced a supernatural God with a political one of their own creation. They stopped believing in the gods of religion, and they submitted instead to the almighty State. Maybe their deep-seated desire to do the former caused them to do the latter, or vice versa—the void was filled one way or the other. Many humans seem to need an idol to submit to, whether it be an enlightened caretaker to help the helpless and protect the weak, a brutal weapon to wield against detractors, a banner to fight under against any and all heathens, or a creator and soul-giver who will assuage our existential fears and judge all of mankind. They have a void that must be filled, and the invisible hand of market and community doesn't cut it for them. No one can be put in control of such an inscrutable force; it's too democratic, too chaotic. It permits no leaders, no idols, no imposed order.
Until the late 19th or even mid-20th century in most of the Western world, there was a vast space between the private life of the home and the realm of law and government. That space was called civil society, and within it stood communities, charities, businesses, trade, education, cooperation, clubs, the arts, and virtually everything else outside of family and romance that made life worth living. That civil space has vastly shrunk over the last century or so as government has encroached in myriad ways. The functions that friends, families, and acquaintances and strangers in the community used to fill have now been delegated to the State. It is important to note that this transformation has proceeded largely at the behest of the populace of each respective nation—a damning indictment of democracy if there ever was one. If any proof were needed that this rotten politicization originates not from aloof, tyrannical rulers but from the voting populace, observe that the parents Olmstead mentions were turned in by their fellow private citizens.
The people of the United States and, indeed, every developed country have demanded that once-private matters become matters of official governmental concern, and our professional criminal classes have been only too happy to oblige—and to encourage this sentiment every chance they get. What is left where civil society used to be is not a void but an ever-growing adversarial State, ever more brutal, ever more unaccountable. You've heard the saying that if "charitable" donations are taken by force, then that's not charity at all. Well, the same applies to cooperation: when the State is given charge of functions that used to be performed cooperatively, spontaneously, by helpful neighbors, what results is the opposite of cooperation and helpfulness. When functions that used to be performed voluntarily, peacefully, by friends, family, or even strangers, are taken over by the police and Child Protective [sic] Services, the result is the further destruction of families, of communities, of the interpersonal trust and reliance that used to connect free, peaceable people. The dissolution of these bonds has already progressed quite far, or else the reflex to call the police on every minor matter, and the impulse to create criminals where there clearly are none, wouldn't exist. Why has it? Why does it? Statism is a human disease. It is the uniquely human disease. Only a momentous change in our attitudes about government, family, and community, which hopefully can be spurred along by something far less destructive than centuries more of war and impoverishment, can cure it.
Thirteen miscellaneous thoughts on the Hobby Lobby case and the reactions to itJuly 8, 2014 – 11:26 pm by John
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
—Thomas Jefferson
Other than the absurd necessity (and apparent futility) of explaining that a government's failure to mandate something doesn't equate to outlawing it, nor does it enable other people or entities to bar anyone's "access" to it, I had a few more thoughts in response to specific things I've read about the recent Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties cases, in which the Supreme Court decided in those companies' favor.
1. "Paying twice"
Some commentators on the left object to women now being forced to "pay twice" for certain contraceptives that religious objectors can now opt out of covering in company benefit packages. Their reasoning is that those female employees must pay full price for their monthly insurance premium, a full price that covers every legal contraceptive for some Americans but only covers, say, 16 out of 20 for employees of closely held religious corporations. They pay full price for their insurance and should be covered for everything, but now thanks to the religion of their employers and the Supreme Court's ruling, they have to pay out of pocket for any of the other four contraceptives without getting a discount on their insurance.
I haven't heard this objection very widely or frequently, but we can safely assume it is valid for the sake of argument because it is simple to answer: First, get the government out of the business of mandating insurance benefits, and the market will take care of the supply, demand, and pricing of every insurance plan. Second, uncouple employment from health insurance, and a third party's (your boss's) opinion will never matter again. If a consumer and a supplier can't reach an agreement on the nature and price of an insurance policy, then no transaction will take place. If the two do agree on benefits and price, then the transaction will take place. This happens with all other goods and services where it's allowed to; car insurance is a good example of the ease with which certain types of coverage can be added and subtracted, and car insurance is even heavily regulated—but not nearly as heavily regulated as health insurance, especially now!
If it is illegal or more difficult for an employer to contract with multiple insurance companies to make sure all of the employees are offered all the benefit and pricing options that they want, then the solution is to get rid of those laws, as libertarians have been saying for over half a century. If the coupling of employment to health insurance puts an undue burden on Hobby Lobby's female employees (as it must, because it puts an undue burden on everyone), then the solution is to abolish the tax laws that have made this coupling financially beneficial, as libertarians have been saying for over half a century.
What is sadly ironic about this "now some women must pay twice" objection is that the left-feminists who have made it are among the staunchest cheerleaders for Obamacare, the very legislation that has forced this conflict onto previously peaceable parties. Since they are constitutionally incapable of admitting that Obamacare with its politically decided minimum benefits is the entire cause of the problem, they have no option but to resort to their old standby of using the police power of government to force conscientious objectors to comply. The solution to the contraception conflict is not to use ever-more police power to enforce ever-more laws on everyone; the solution is to let people buy and sell what they want at mutually agreed upon prices, like the free human beings that they are.
It is also relevant that the text of the Affordable Care Act does not mandate any minimum coverage; the bureaucrats and lawyers at the Department of Health and Human Services made those decisions. Since the left-liberal feminist cheerleaders of Obamacare were fine with that, they should be fine with a future Republican president and Christian-conservative secretary of HHS who mandate that no supposed abortifacients be covered under the federally mandated benefit packages (or some other right-wing type of mandate). But they won't be. Because they're hypocrites.
Speaking of hypocrites, one of the main purveyors of the "paying twice" objection is Amanda Marcotte, who had no objection and actually celebrated hundreds of thousands of Americans' insurance premiums going up because of Obamacare:
@nonsequiteuse In some cases, people's insurance is getting cancelled for not being up to code. But it's usually crap insurance.
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 23, 2013
@wtspaugh You know that you misrepresented what's going on, right? Their plans weren't up to code and they need plans that are.
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 23, 2013
So to review:
Paying hundreds more per year for an individual or family health insurance plan because the government outlawed your plan: Great! You should thank them!
Paying a few dozen extra dollars here and there for emergency contraception because the very same law supposedly makes you pay twice: WAR ON WOMEN.
UPDATE: Now I learn that not only was my instinct right that women aren't actually paying twice for contraceptives, they might not even be paying once. The provisions of the ACA that went into effect on September 23, 2010 mandate that all new insurance plans cover certain preventive care, including women's contraceptives, without charging a co-payment, co-insurance, deductible, or other out-of-pocket expense. (E.g., see here, here, and here.) So instead of paying for contraceptives through insurance premiums and some type of out-of-pocket payment, the women affected by ACA now pay for them only through their insurance premiums. The pharmaceutical companies and the pharmacies themselves will be paid in full for their products and services, so the employer and/or insurance company is required to cover the rest of that cost. This results in higher costs for everyone except the contraception users, in direct contradiction (surprise) to Marcotte et al.'s claim. Either everyone's insurance premium goes up to cover those formerly out-of-pocket expenses, the employer covers them somehow, or the insurance company covers them somehow. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some taxes are used to subsidize the insurance companies' losses on these items in some way or another.
So while it is still theoretically possible for some women (e.g., Hobby Lobby employees) to be charged full price for an insurance premium while not receiving all the benefits that employees of other companies get, the facts remain that (1) if this even does occur, it would be the fault of the inflexible, over-regulated health insurance market and the politically entrenched insurance companies, the solution to which is freeing up the market; and (2) millions of other people are over-paying for millions of other women's contraceptives thanks to the ACA, and I don't hear any left-feminists crying "foul" at that.
2. The Hobby Lobby decision doesn't go far enough
This is Sheldon Richman's spot-on interpretation of the ruling and the circumstances surrounding it. His reasoning explains why the solution to problem #1 above isn't more government and more police but rather more markets and more freedom.
I wish the court could have said this instead: (1) No one has a natural right to force other people to pay for her (or his) contraception or anything else (with or without the government's help), and by logical extension, (2) everyone has a right to refuse to pay if asked.
A group of politicians cannot legitimately have the power to compel one group of people—employers, taxpayers, or insurers—to pay for things that another group wants. That's immoral, and it violates inalienable rights. Moreover, when government has the power to issue such commands—always backed by force, let us never forget—it sets off a mad interest-group scramble for control of the government machinery—because control is a license to steal. Is it any wonder that people are willing to spend billions of dollars to influence who makes government policy? If people face the alternative of controlling the government or being controlled by it, those who have resources will buy power and influence, even if only in self-defense.
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) say the court decision permits the favored employers to make health-care decisions for women. No it doesn't. It only prohibits, unfortunately in only a narrow set of cases, women from being able to use government to force their employers to pay for those decisions. When did we start equating the right to buy contraceptives—which hardly anyone disputes—with the power to compel others to pay? It is demagogic to insist that prohibiting the latter violates the former.
Equally ridiculous is the claim that if employers choose not to pay for their employees' birth control, employers are forcing their religious beliefs on employees. If that were true, it would also have to be true that a non-Christian's refusal to pay for a Christian's transportation to church on Sundays would be equivalent to forcing the non-Christian's religious beliefs on the Christian. That's ridiculous.
A lot of people on the left have sort of snarkily or sarcastically said, "So now I can just opt out of paying taxes for anything I don't want to pay for?" They thought they were making a devastating point against conservatives by reductio ad absurdum. I don't know or really care how conservatives answer that question, but libertarians say, "Of course you should!" as Sheldon Richman does above. It is incoherent and barbaric to suggest that any person should be forced to pay for or otherwise support an action he considers immoral.
3. Corporations have more rights than individuals
Many people misunderstood the Supreme Court's ruling as giving corporations more rights than individuals, seein's how a corporation's objection to supposed abortifacients now trumps a woman's need to buy them. Well, that's simply not true. First of all, corporations in the U.S. had this right until 2012, when the mandate went into effect and religious employers started objecting to it. Progressives might respond, "Ah, see, that's another of the myriad patriarchal, misogynist insults that women had to endure for centuries, and we didn't even know about it until an enlightened law was passed that these religious troglodytes had to formally respond to." Either way, the Supreme Court doesn't give corporations any new power or right, unless your sense of history only goes back two years.
Second, people have the right to refuse to pay for anything, for any reason or no reason. And corporations are groups of people, who can decide on their policies and actions in whatever way they want (simple majority, plurality, two-thirds majority, etc.). I am not well versed in all the problems that corporate personhood has cause in practice or could cause in theory, but the right of a group to refuse to do something that each individual also refuses is pretty basic, whatever the group is called and whatever its status in other matters of law and business. (I do appreciate the points Jacob Levy makes here, and I wish I had the time and expertise to respond to them. My response would probably boil down to "It's not right to force any group to pay for something it objects to" anyway, regardless of the intricacies of the law and the implications the Hobby Lobby decision has.)
Third, observe what "right" the progressives are claiming by supporting the Obamacare mandates and lamenting the Hobby Lobby decision: the right to force others to pay for something they abhor. It is hard to imagine a more illiberal, thuggish, childish, primitive response to an ethical disagreement than, "Well, we passed a law, so you should be forced to pay for what I want!"
4. Make all birth control available over the counter
As usual, libertarians have been on the right side of this one forever. Birth control, like all medications, should be available over the counter at any store that wants to sell it, at whatever price it wants to ask. The reason it isn't is because politicians and lobbyists have kept its access limited for a century. As usual, a free market would have solved this problem—would have prevented this problem from even existing in the first place. Don't expect many politicians to jump at the opportunity to pass such a thoroughly sensible law. Oh, look, three of them have already proposed exactly that, and they're all male Republicans.
Then the problem for the left-feminists becomes this: Once contraceptives are available over the counter, they won't be covered by insurance plans, so then they'll have to pay for all of them out of pocket. Insurance almost certainly won't cover OTC contraceptives. They won't be able to use the law to force other people to subsidze their costs. Will they still support OTC contraceptives, then?
5. Christian conservatives got the law AND the science wrong!
Some people understandably object that Ella and Plan B and other supposed abortifacients aren't really abortifacients at all. They even provided helpful links to articles explaining for the layman how those contraceptives work, assuring us that they cannot cause abortions, so the entire pretense of Hobby Lobby's objection crumbles.
The science is irrelevant. It is irrelevant whether the contraceptives cause abortions. It might not be irrelevant to you, it might not be irrelevant even to Hobby Lobby's owners (who have no problem subsidizing 16 of 20 legal contraceptives), but it is irrelevant to the rightness of a coverage mandate. It is wrong to force anyone to pay for anything they don't want to pay for, regardless of whether the cited reason holds water. Some lawyers and judges might think the science is relevant, since if it isn't, then any old religious employer can conjure up any old religious belief against paying for any old thing, and as long as he convinces the judges he's sincere, he doesn't have to pay for X, Y, or Z. That could be a relevant legal question, but luckily I am not interested in the law. I am interested in what is right and wrong. It is wrong to force anyone to pay for anything they don't want to pay for. They can refuse for any reason or no reason. This is a simple matter or justice, of fairness.
6. White Catholic men ruled against women
The job of those white Catholic men is to interpret the law, and they did so. They ruled against the Department of Health and Human Services. I think rightly, by my understanding of the Religious Freedom Resoration Act and the excerpts I read of Justice Alito's opinion. True, my interpretation of the law and Alito's opinion (and the brief snippets of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent that I read) might be colored by my notion of right and wrong, which again is not based in any laws, but the parts about sincere religious beliefs and "least restrictive means" seem to leave no room for any other decision.
What does it say about the American left that so many of its members have no qualms about bashing the scholarly judgment and intellectual honesty of certain people based mainly on their class identity? The justices have had privileged lives, so the threshold for attributing their judgment to their class identity is lower than it is for other classes? They are part of a privileged group, so you don't have to be as rigorous or thorough in refuting their opinions as you do for others? Just say, "White? Check. Christian? Check. Male? Check. They're biased woman-haters, then." Why weren't the women who ruled against Hobby Lobby biased because they perceived their class as being threatened? Someone's class identity only invalidates their judgment when they side against left-feminists? How convenient: praise their wisdom and objectivity when they side with you, and bash their white, Catholic maleness when they side against you. The same people who object to the Hobby Lobby decision on the basis of the majority's white, Catholic maleness don't object to the decision in Roe v. Wade on the basis of the Protestant and Catholic maleness of the justices who were on the majority opinion.
The function of the Supreme Court is not to decide what is best for certain disadvantaged groups, or even to decide what is right or fair, but rather to interpret the law. If you don't like that fact, then maybe you're on your way to becoming an anarchist. Or maybe you just want the Supreme Court to be another legislature, making law to promote social justice. Whichever it is, it is invalid to use their class identity to question their judgment, just as it would be invalid to use the dissenting justices' class identity to question theirs.
7. Birth control is a public health issue
No, it isn't. Jonathan Cohn claims it is in this piece for The New Republic. Unsurprisingly, he uses that claim as a justification for national government-provided health insurance. But you could make the same claim for myriad private goods to justify nationalizing them, and they would all be as terrible an idea as nationalizing health insurance (or healthcare...shudder).
If people are starving, then they'll become desperate and resort to violence to get food. Therefore, the State should provide food to everyone! If people can't get to work, then the entire economy collapses. Therefore, the State should nationalize all modes of transportation! In this internet age, everyone is made better off the more people there are to trade and communicate with. Therefore, the State should provide everyone a computer and a free internet connection! It is in the public's interest for everyone to be sheltered and protected from the elements, lest hypothermia, heat stroke, and disease kill off half the population. Therefore, the State should provide everyone with housing! Everyone is made better off by a more educated populace. Therefore, the State should educate children for free ("free")! Oh wait, it does, and it's terrible at it.
8. Progressives have strengthened my commitment to grammatical prescriptivism
I am far from a pure grammatical (or usage, style, whatever) prescriptivist, and much less so than I used to be. The way in which I remain a pretty strong prescriptivist most of the time is in word meanings. I want for people separated by time and space to be able to understand each other clearly and precisely, and to mean the same thing when they use the same words. When words such as "literally" lose their meaning and even come to mean their exact opposite, the expressivity of the English language is reduced, and nothing is gained in exchange for that lost expressivity.
Socialist and socially progressive though he was, George Orwell would have many things to say about modern progressives' contortions of the English language, none of them good. When progressives say that women's "access" to birth control is now lessened, we should not let them get away with it. When progressives say Hobby Lobby and/or the Supreme Court has "banned" certain contraceptives for some women, we should not let them get away with it. When progressives say that their reproductive healthcare is not their bosses' business and then clamor for the power to force their bosses to pay for it, we should not let them get away with it. When progressive pass (and cheer for) a law that ropes their employers further and deeper into their reproductive healthcare than they already were, causing some employers to object, and the progressive say, "Stay out of our reproductive systems," we should not let them get away with it.
9. When they misuse words, they know exactly what they are doing
Sure, some of the more childish members of the American left refuse to listen to any logic or facts, and they genuinely don't understand the difference between banning something and not mandating it. But I think a high percentage of well-known commentators, writers, politicians, and the like, who were all over their blags and social media sites blasting Christian conservatives for "banning" "access" to contraceptives and other such nonsense, knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly what the Religious Freedom Restoration Act said (more or less) and exactly what the conflict was with HHS's contraceptive mandate, and they were well aware that they were misusing the English language for their partisan political ends. They just didn't care. Their goal is not truth or justice; their goal is partisan political victories, and they will do anything to stir up fervor and indignation at powerful people who aren't on their side.
10. Those semi-informed writers and commentators genuinely think their followers are stupid
And they're right. I'm not going to pretend to take the high road by not offending the modern leftist hoi polloi and saying, "Those progressive writers whom you follow and adore are insulting you, but I give you more credit than that." No I don't. They're morons.
But the leftist TV personalities and writers and politicians who misuse the words mentioned above, who know they are misusing them but don't care, also think the average left-feminist is a moron. Their progressive readers and Twitter followers eat up the garbage about "banning" "access" to contraceptives, and how conservative Christians want to control their sex lives, and how the Supreme Court just imposed its morals on half the population, and how it's not their bosses' business even though they just made it their bosses' business. They eat it up because they are unintelligent, incurious, uninformed, highly emotional, biased, government-educated idiots. And the prominent progressive feminists take advantage of that fact by stirring up outrage with scare tactics and buzzwords and emotionally charged polemics, leaving out all the facts of the case and avoiding any mention of the issue of forcing someone to pay for something they object to.
11. "Fascism cloaked in the flag and carrying a cross"
The progressives loved quoting this Sinclair Lewis line to criticize the right's victory in the Hobby Lobby case. "Fascism" has a basic, more literal meaning and a commonly used, more expansive and emotional meaning. The word comes from the Latin fascis, "bundle", referring to the concentration of power in a centralized state, as opposed to being spread among and originating from the people. Its basic, more restrictive meaning is nominally private ownership of businesses but State control and direction of their activities. The latter meaning includes extreme nationalism, militarism, and social oppression (especially of those who aren't patriotic enough). Let's review the relevant facts and see what we can make of this "fascism" claim.
From the country's founding until 2012, no individual, group, or business was required to subsidize or in any other way provide contraceptives for any other individual or group, though many chose to do so, especially from the 1940s on.
A law was passed in 2010, becoming effective in 2012, under which the Department of Health and Human Services (not Congress and not the text of the Affordable Care Act itself) required most businesses to subsidize all legal contraceptives under its mandated health insurance benefits.
Some religious employers want to continue not paying for a small subset of these newly mandated contraceptives.
Progressives demand that the employers pay for them against their objections.
A literate and honest reading of history and of the relevant facts exposes the progressive left as the fascists in this case. (It also shows that whatever "fascism" Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court are supposedly inflicting has been going on since at least the 1700s, so it's certainly not being brought to America just now.) Fascism means concentration of power, suppression of dissent, enforcement of conformity, and central direction of business activity. The nature of Obamacare and the reaction of the left to the Hobby Lobby case (and, indeed, to all objections to Obamacare) fit the mold of fascism perfectly, minus the nationalist, militant, racist aspect of it. (Some people consider the latter the defining characteristics of fascism. I don't. It might explain why they think anything that doesn't actively advance their version of feminism is fascist, but as I've tried to explain here and elsewhere, this isn't a matter of feminism or women's rights but rather freedom of choice and of association.)
12. A new age of Christianity-flavored Sharia law
The law that Hobby Lobby challenged became effective in 2012. For the entire history of the United States, companies were not required by law (federal law, at least) to cover any health benefits, contraceptive or otherwise. There was no stoning in the streets or executions for being raped. All that is needed to refute this incredibly ignorant claim is not to make reasonable predictions, not to invoke well-supported theories, but to cite actual history.
13. Kevin Carson is torn because a large, hypocritical corporation won the case
In his column Hobby Lobby - A Question of Agency, Kevin Carson writes,
In libertarian Internet communities, the decision was met for the most part with unalloyed joy that the good guys had won this time. It's not at all that clear cut for me. I have at least as many online friends in social justice circles as I do among libertarians, and I don't blame them at all for their outrage.
There he seems to suggest that libertarianism conlficts with social justice. I doubt he really thinks that. Maybe he means some people's definition of social justice conflicts with some people's definition of libertarianism. Either way, it's not a ringing endorsement of the wider social justice movement as is.
All the contending narratives about the Hobby Lobby case seem to involve personal agency. That's definitely true on the mainstream libertarian side, which presents this as a straightforward question of whether Hobby Lobby's owners (the Green family, which hold it as a close corporation) can be forced by the state to provide employee benefits that conflict with their personal religious beliefs. But there are a lot more people's agency at stake here than the Green family's. And frankly, the Green family billionaires are pretty low on my list of "underdogs" whose moral agency my heart bleeds for (especially considering they invest in contraceptive manufacturers, and most of the "Christian" knick-knacks they sell are produced by near-slave labor in Chinese sweatshops).
To repeat, there were a lot of people whose agency was at stake here besides the Green family's — in particular, the 70% majority of Hobby Lobby's workers who are women. who may have been having a hard time finding work and accepted employment at Hobby Lobby because they really needed a job, who were glad to get health coverage — and who may someday desperately need "morning after" contraception. I felt sick about these people in a way after Monday's ruling that I never would have about the Green family.
And questions of free association aside, an economic system in which a small wealthy family can wind up in the one-sided position of exercising their own agency at the expense of 13,000 others is a system that's broken, sick and rotten.
Even though I, like Carson, don't base my sense of justice on what is legal, and even though I was happy about the Hobby Lobby decision for reasons other than that it upheld the letter of the law faithfully, I feel like Carson goes too far in wanting the Supreme Court to make decisions whose wide-ranging implications are the most agreeable to him and that redress power imbalances between various subsets of the population, rather than wanting the Supreme Court to make the most just decision in this case.
His heart doesn't bleed for billionaires, especially supposedly hypocritical ones. But our sense of justice should not depend on who has more. And especially, our judiciary should not make decisions based on who has more or who has been hypocritical in the past, nor should we want it to. I liken his reaction to the public's reaction after an acquittal in a sensationalized murder trial. After George Zimmerman was acquited of murdering Trayvon Martin, I echoed those who asked, "If every criminal trial followed the same standards that you wanted for the George Zimmerman trial, how would that affect the number of incarcerated Americans?" If the function of the judiciary were to weigh each party's relative power and privilege in the world, taking their likely future prospects and their past crimes and hypocrisies into account, and endeavor to rule in the way that would mitigate those imbalances, then we wouldn't have a judiciary at all, and very rarely would any actual justice come from it. If a past criminal is tried for new crimes and is judged not only on the available evidence and the merits of the defense and prosecution but also on his criminal (or merely shady) history, then we would have a sorry criminal justice system indeed. (Well, sorrier.)
Carson says Hobby Lobby's owners are hypocritical because they have invested in contraceptive manufacturers and engage in the very uncharitable, un-Christian practice of selling knick-knacks that are produced in slave-like Chinese sweatshops. First, Hobby Lobby has covered and still covers 16 of 20 mandated contraceptives in its insurance plans, so I don't see any hypocrisy there unless those contraceptive manufacturers it invests in actually make the supposedly objectionable abortifacients. Second, I'm sure Carson is aware of the work of Ben Powell on sweatshops and either disagrees with or doesn't care about Powell's conclusions. I'm not going to make any new points about sweatshops or be the one to change his mind about them, but I will point out that they're irrelevant to the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case. And they're irrelevant to our non-lawyerly assessment of whether it's right or wrong for employees (or their agent, the State) to force Hobby Lobby to subsidize their birth control.
Another reason we shouldn't base our sense of justice on who is and isn't an "underdog" is because the next time, the underdog might be the one who is in the same position that the powerful billionaires were in this time. Such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. Hobby Lobby's sort of co-challenger, Conestoga Wood Specialties, is far from an international corporate behemoth, at 1200 employees spread over three states. How would Carson have reacted to a ruling in favor of a 50-person corporation owned by a religious family who considers abortifacients immoral? Even though a foolish adherence to precedent can cause previous bad decisions to become entrenched, precedent can also protect future complainants who would otherwise be at the mercy of the State. The Hobby Lobby decision establishes precedent that could protect many "underdogs" without the resources or wherewithal to challenge the federal government. In fact, it will almost certainly protect more such underdogs than corporate behemoths in the long run.
If he objected that the next underdog is actually more likely to be a minimum-wage employee who now has even less power against his employer, then I would say that I simply think he has his priorities mixed up. The State is far more powerful and dangerous than a huge corporation, and the State is the source of most of the power that these corporations have. Since we share the goal of reducing the State's expansiveness and intrusiveness into such areas as healthcare, we should both recognize that any new encroachment of the State into private affairs will further perturb the free interactions of peaceable parties, will further entrench this corporatist-Statist system in our lives, and will only invite more powers and more intrusions in the future. As Carson well knows, increased State power tends to increase the power of all the elite classes. It is a defining feature of the pathological system that he has written so much about. Why should we expect this increase in State power (and, importantly, future ones like it) to turn back that tide?
As Carson and all libertarian-leaning people recognize, this entire conflict over contraceptive (and other) mandates was caused by the federal government's overreach, by its expansion of power and intrusion into previously private matters. He and I both know that the optimal solution would be to repeal the ACA and, indeed, every single law that has ever been written about healthcare and health insurance. So why does he allow that a further expansion of State power—an additional way in which the State can be used as a weapon against conscientious objectors—could serve justice in this matter?
He also writes,
And questions of free association aside, an economic system in which a small wealthy family can wind up in the one-sided position of exercising their own agency at the expense of 13,000 others is a system that's broken, sick and rotten.
In the case of healthcare, the underlying legal regime that made the Hobby Lobby case possible was a vast, interlocking constellation of power that included the regulatory state, insurance corporations, the professional licensing cartels (including the requirement that some medications be prescribed only by licensed physicians), the patent-based pharmaceutical cartel, and utterly corrupt bureaucratic corporate hospital chains.
Obamacare itself merely touches the finance side of healthcare — basically guaranteeing revenues and profits to the existing institutional healthcare delivery monopolies through a combination of mandates and subsidies — while leaving the institutional economic power and price markups on the delivery side untouched. It cements the control of these interlocking, bureaucratic, authoritarian — and in many cases evil — institutions over our lives, and legally compels us to consume their services on whatever terms they see fit to offer. But it uses tax money to help us feed the corporate coffers if we can't afford to pay for the monopoly services on our own.
If all these forms of monopoly and privilege were abolished, no one would be dependent on corporate employers for opportunities to engage in productive labor and transform their skills and effort into access to the necessities of life. And no one would depend on an unholy alliance of the state, insurance corporations, drug companies and professional licensing cartels for contraception or any other form of healthcare.
I get his point here: If we're debating whether it's right for one group (for the sake of argument, simplify it to Hobby Lobby's female employees) to force another group (the Hobby Lobby corporation) to pay for the former's emergency contraceptions (or whatever), then it matters what wrongs have been committed by the latter against the former, and what burdens have been placed by the latter on the former, and how the system is rigged in favor of the latter. Those things matter not because the relatively powerful should be forced to give money or things to the relatively powerless as a matter of principle, but because the relatively powerless are in that position and must rely on the powerful for those things precisely because of the perverseness of the system that created this power imbalance.
But the justice of the entire system wasn't at issue in this case. Well, what was really at issue was a conflict between two laws, the ACA and Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and not morality or justice. But Kevin Carson and I can look at this individual case as an issue of morality or justice and ignore the details of the laws. Two considerations make me think that a ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby was better for both my and Carson's senses of justice. First, what I mentioned above: a person or group's past actions, their supposed inconsistencies or hypocrisies, and their position of power and privilege should not carry any weight in the present case, unless they clearly and directly affect the specific details of the present case. I don't think they did, because for all that Hobby Lobby benefits from corporate-state socialism, its owners are decidedly opposed to the contraception mandate. (Hell, probably all of Obamacare, given the politics of your average rich American Christian.) Second, each dent we make in the State's edifice, even when it is nominally on behalf of a powerful, wealthy corporation, advances the cause of freedom just a little. Each invalidation of its decrees, each rejection of its overreach, each embarrassment we deal it, each time civil society maintains a foothold where government tried to supplant it, is a victory for freedom and should be celebrated as such. A billion-dollar international corporation was the direct beneficiary this time, but when a basic freedom is protected against the State, we all win, because next time an "underdog" might need the freedom that was established by that struggle.