Oh, yes, let the people speak!

I have been feeling overwhelmed by the flaming pools of stupid around me. and the amazingly poor job, it seems, of the media and the blogosphere in keeping the whackadoodle nutters out of polite company.

Yeah, there's something of the "back when I was a boy" to all of this.

When I took Journalism 101, there was a hard limit on the amount of nonsense that could go into a publication. 

Speech was free, but printing that speech was expensive. Someone (not the writer, for the best one could hope for then was a basic comprehension of grammar and construction) had to proofread, edit and typeset the speech, and then someone had to decide which was more important, the fifth paragraph, or the paid ad from a neighbourhood sandwich shoppe. That paid ad is what made it all possible, so one did not run the risk of offending an advertiser - at least, not the important ones, and certainly not without cause.

I've done all of those. On a small community paper, I often did all of those on the same story - and all the time knowing that my work and my words were most likely to be consigned to line the bottom of a birdcage before reading.  

My job was to somehow fill the spaces between the ads in a way that seemed as if it were being informative, without in any way disturbing the fond prejudices and presumptions of the readership, in the sure and certain knowledge that if they thought they were being informed by my newspaper, there was no hope for them in any case. I tried to not simply retype press-releases too often, but if it was good, and it was free... Hell, anything that didn't make the typesetter weep was likely to make the final cut. And I mean this in general, across the board. It's amazing what school-board presidents and community association leaders will put on paper, thinking that it is English. 

It's rather touching to see how sincerely such people believe that anyone cares, when in fact, most people, most of the time, wish such people to do their damn job as silently as possible, as competently as can be managed, in a way that bears no expectation of them thinking difficult thoughts about complicated issues. But if anyone actually believed that such a bleak appreciation of human nature applied to them, personally - we'd all book a flight to Gyana and party like it was 1978.

So let me reprise - under ideal circumstances, when everything functions as it should, when commerce flows, leaders lead, followers follow and comedians have to make shit up rather than just opening a newspaper - well, that makes for uninteresting times. Trust me when I tell you - the best sort of news is a bold headline that says, "Life as Usual." Remember that "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse, and that an "Adventure" is someone else, far away, surviving circumstances you'd not wish on most enemies.  

So when a community newspaper has anything of genuine interest - that's not really a good thing. But interesting times tend to sweep away the complacent assumption that things are working well due to good faith and good design, when in fact, inertia has far more to do with it. 

This is when the role of the community newspaper (back in the day) and the Local Blogger (now) becomes important.

When I was wielding wax and knife, it was a given that when a story mattered enough for anyone to comment you would get a few sane responses and a raft of letters that ranged from the sincerely uninformed to outright lunacy. It was standard practice for the editor to pick the responses in this order:

1: The most articulate and informative response(s) to the story, pro and con.

2: The responses from whatever official or buisiness found themselves to be suddenly and unfortunately newsworthy. 

3: The comic relief.

 By "comic relief," I mean the capering, giggling morons that would type in all caps - and yes, they did it then, too. Single spaced. With quarter-inch margins.

They were terribly sure that they were expressing "common sense" and of course, we were more than happy to let them do so. Which ass-clown got the privileged of being a public example of stupidity was a function of editorial bias. There was, after all, little else to base a decision on, and there's only SO much room for the stupid.

Anyway, it struck me as I was wading through the conspicuous idiocy, trying to find a hook to hang a post upon, that nothing had really changed. What has changed was the price of public speech and the barriers to access.

These days, we make them type it themselves, and there's no serious costs associated with publication. 

And it occurred to me that I was speaking from a set of assumptions that don't apply at all, and indeed, didn't even then. Elites were the gatekeepers because, well, what other option was there? Gaining, sorting, indexing and maintaining information was breathtakingly expensive. Every trade, every profession, every course of study required some form of standard reference, and each of those was instantly obsolete when published - and the fair price for a good reference was in the hundreds of dollars.

Not any more. There is no practical barrier at the moment to anyone with Internet access learning anything they wish about anything that is on the net - and you'd have to be an idiot to bear the cost of publishing and distributing your information any other way.

Strangely, we are entering a time rather like the Enlightenment, when suddenly access to information explodes, with consequences that are unforeseen and indeed, unforeseeable. This fact alone is more than enough to make a certain portion of the population lose their water and cling to traditional approaches even when those approaches are clearly not working at all well. 

No doubt there were those such as myself at the time, bitching and whining aloud at the insults to enlightenment and assaults upon reason that Gutenberg's demonic tool had made possible, clearly making the downfall of all that is good and holy inevitable.

Indeed, that's pretty close to what happened, and looking back, it hasn't been such a bad thing as all of that.

Now, any fool can say whatever they wish and gain wide public exposure. And they do. 

They may even find a wide and willing claque for their species of wishful thinking, but with a rapidity that would amaze people back in my salad days, the idiocy is exposed and the stupidity addressed with a forthright contempt that would make my teachers of criticism blanch. A consensus is emerging that there is little point to treating the wilfully stupid with public respect, at least on the Internet, when the barrier to gaining an informed opinion on anything is so low.

And then there's another factor, not often said aloud, but one that no free-thinker can leave unconsidered; on the Internet, it's difficult to respond to an unwelcome truth with a Molotov Cocktail. And so we see a great difference between what people are willing to say in public, when an honest view, informed or otherwise, may put livelihood or life at risk, and what people really think,

It is at once inspiring and appalling, for it's dreadfully clear that mostly they don't.

But nobody is forced to undergo the indignity of recasting the words of some flaming moron into something that can be printed without getting the paper into legal difficulty - or worse yet, make the typesetter stomp out to explore a career in dental hygiene.

There have always been idiots and creeps among us. Mostly, they didn't find themselves in public office, because they were discreetly cut off at the knees as a matter of policy, a policy that was pervasive, smug, elitist and dismissive of the views of the uneducated, and unwashed. 

How do I know this? I'm an Episcopalian who spent some time in a Jesuit Prep School. I qualified for an Honours society in college. I was, to all appearances, well prepared to become another cultural gatekeeper, not unlike the bouncer at the door of a hot club, picking the pretty people from the mass of schlubs and losers.

The fact, I was told and accepted as uncritically as young people do, was that the "top ten" are destined to lead and the rest will benefit from following. Now, it's not quite such a cynical observation as it sounds, for it was articulated by Jesuits. Therefore it was presented as much as a duty and a fate as a ticket to hot chicks and fast cars. 

It was the classic, Burkian conservative view, that there were patterns in society that may arguably be unfair, but it would be far, far worse to pretend that these very real distinctions do not matter, particularly if one one is inclined to lift the poor from poverty or strive for a wider acceptance of Social Justice. Being Jesuits, they tended to think that a wider application of the principles of Christ might well be something worth contemplating, so long as it did not conflict with the authority of the Church.

These were the seventies, and it was not a time of innocence. There were airline hijackings, there were ecological catastrophes, terrorism was a fact of life for much of Europe and the situation in the Middle East was... much as it is now, save the excuses given for the reasons that it could be no other way still seemed somewhat original. There was widespread unemployment and everyone disagreed as to what should be done about it.

But the presentation of all these unpalatable, and horrifying things was the responsibility of people such as me, or rather, the me I would have become, had I been capable of living up to my promise.

"Fails to live up to potential" could well be my given name. Nor am I particularly embarrassed by that, for my "potential," and yours, is not judged in this culture by what you would be best at doing, and what would best fulfil your personal needs, but rather, what utility you might bring to your various cultural "owners;" your class, your family, the people who's calls you feel obligated to answer, regardless of your true feelings.

Did you know that the single best predictor of popularity (and therefore success) is the ability to conceal your reactions? That is to say, if someone says something horrifyingly racist, appallingly idiotic or simply, tragically, smugly ignorant, you never, ever contradict them in a way that they will notice.

This is still true. I suspect it's something that's wired into us at a very, very deep level. But at the same time, no leader making good, informed decisions can in fact believe the crap he pretends to accept as "common sense" for the sake of getting elected. There are unavoidable complexities that must be dealt with, in private, by people who ideally have both some sort of convictions, and at the same time, a pragmatic sense of what is possible today.

When someone appeals to "common sense" - well, I refer them to my own personal hero, and evidence that nothing happening today is much different than what happened nearly a century ago.

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." - H.L. Menken

We have seen the price paid when an ideologue is put in a position of leadership. It ain't pretty. An ideologue is a species of idealist, and an idealist is always ready to sacrifice the lives and fortunes of others to preserve the things they hold to be self evident, trusting in a Higher Providence to Ensure that Blessings will Trickle Down upon us all.

With that nitrogen-enhanced watering, how does your garden grow?

It's a Good News slash Bad News Graphictruth.

Study Sheds Light on Link Between Religion, Self-Control| Christianpost.com: "religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

'By thinking of religion as a social force that provides people with resources for controlling their impulses (including the impulse for self-preservation, in some cases) in the service of higher goals, religion can motivate people to do just about anything,' McCullough says."

Emphasis Mine.

Yep, that's your problem right there. Religion can be a positive force in people's lives. That is, pointedly, the point to it, and if that were not adequately nailed down for you already; how about "The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath."

I'm pretty sure Lau Tsu and The Buddha had some things to say on the subject as well, and no doubt it has been repeated many time and in many ways.

Because, you see, religion CAN motivate people to do just about anything, and because of that, positions of religious leadership command vast, personal power that tends to vastly corrupt the religion itself, assuming of course that it wasn't designed to fleece the marks in the first place.

Ironically enough, Christ Himself spoke a great deal about the corruption of religion - and due to the accreted revisions of Paul, Constantine, Augustine and our current crop of authoritarian scum, one could now manage to go through life thinking that Christ Himself was a life-long Pharasee who had somehow conspired to sacrifice himself for purely magical reasons.

Nope. They knocked him off because he threatened the existing racket. An astonishingly lucrative racket.

But since the teachings persisted anyway, Constantine co-opted the religion and in doing so, institutionalized many of the very things that made JC go ballistic. By this point in time, any correspondence between the teachings of Christ and the doctrines and teachings of any established and well-funded religion that refers to itself as "Christian" is spotty at best, and the more wealth and power a denomination has, the more strained the comparison becomes.

And yet, apparently, even a bad religion is better for many people than none at all. Our spiritual communities are that important to us, and we will tolerate far more than we should in order to preserve them. Hell, ask any Catholic.

Or, "See Illustration Above." Unfortunately, the human need for a spiritual context is great enough that you don't have to work particularly hard to get very, very rich, very powerful or both. And, as the Aztec empire illustrates, there's always some sonofabitch who seems perfectly sincere in preaching that it's ok to sacrifice someone else for "the greater good," as God Demands. Why, there's hardly been a social ill in the last two thousand years that someone didn't try to address with a cheerful auto-de-fe.

I could point fingers at various contemporary religious groups. Indeed, I started to. But I'd really have to list them all, and even sticking with those in the purely Christian tradition, that could take a while.

What I wish to point out instead is that people really need to expect more of their religious leadership. If the book of Leviticus is about anything relevant today, it is that those who are called or destined for a life of religious leadership MUST be held to a higher standard. After all, they are being paid to be experts in the matter, and like anything else worth doing, you have to actually do it well in order to have any understanding worth communicating.

At the VERY least, your actions must not be stark contradictions of the expectations of the membership the church actually DOES hold. There should certainly be greater consequences for those in positions of religious authority over others than there would be for ordinary members of the flock.

You would think. But as endless scandal within the Catholic Church and increasing cataclysms arising from the Evangelical types should prove, that proposition would be wrong, and that the leadership of the various churches have less accurate moral compasses than a teen-age convert dragooned into teaching Sunday school lessons to five year olds. I consciously refrain again from pointing fingers, but a few minutes with a search engine will definitely illustrate that it's not for lack of relevant citations.

There's a reason why many religious traditions refer to it as "the work," or "the craft." It's both. It's a life-long study, and there are objective, pragmatic standards that can be tested; scripture among them, but also the practical rewards of belonging to this church instead of that one, ascribing to this religious tradition instead of that one. In an ideal universe, there would be some visible correspondence between the quality of the product and the reward for providing it.

But then, that's really not up to me, OR the universe. It is, most pointedly, up to you. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out."

When people who claim to be your spiritual eyes prove to be visually challenged, you'd be better off being blind and knowing it than being deceived into thinking your worldview was accurate.

But what of your community of faith? For that, I refer you to a precept from the 12 step movement, as to what it takes to start a new 12 step group.

"Resentment and a pot of coffee."

I couldn't quite fit this into the above, but it's closely related to my point. Of late the Southern Baptists are deeply concerned that they are starting to LOSE membership - and more importantly to them, their conversion rates are dropping. It is a statistic that gives me some hope that the weekly Hour of Hate has begun to lose it's appeal.

At a news conference, Hunt said radical change and leadership was needed to "turn the tide in our denomination." After five decades of declining growth, the SBC reported an actual drop in membership — a decrease of about 40,000 people from 2006 to 2007. Seven out of the last eight years, baptisms have decreased, a more important statistic to many Southern Baptists than membership.

Hunt said he would try to unite Baptist around common causes and use his experience mentoring younger pastors to reach out to a younger generation.

"We come across almost only for what we're against when there's so many wonderful things we're for," Hunt said.

The context? The larger story concerns the debate over the necessity for and the implementation of a sex-offender database. So MANY wonderful things!

Including the wonderfully oblivious inattention to the fact that creating the database does not deal with the fact that it's church structure, customs and teachings about family and church authority that make abuse and sexual exploitation so gosh-darn easy to get away with.

The problem is not the lack of a database. The problem is that your denomination is seen as a happy hunting ground for perps. And who are perps attracted too? Children who come from abused, dysfunctional families, children who are perhaps already sexualized by abuse within the family.

That's what studies tell us. That's what the survivors tell us. But oddly, few if any churches tell us. One has to wonder aloud why that is.

That's it. That's all I got.

I'm REALLY having trouble blogging today - or yesterday, or the day before. Why? Because the news is SUCH crap.

And WHY is the news such crap?

SHOW THE FUCK UP!

STOP by webcarve Get this custom shirt at Zazzle

It's Let's Piss off Jesus Day Every Day in Orlando

clipped from www.reuters.com

MIAMI (Reuters) - Police in Florida have arrested an activist for feeding the homeless in downtown Orlando.

Montanez was filmed by undercover officers on Wednesday as he served "30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilizing a ladle," according to an arrest affidavit. The Orlando area is home to Disney World and Universal Studios Florida. [Emphasis Mine]

The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers but has been challenged in court by civil rights groups, allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within two miles of Orlando city hall only if they have a special permit. They can get two permits a year.

Compassionate Conservatism in action, eh, wot?

It's better tor be obscene than absurd.

Gateway Pundit: "Seven words you can never say on television"... but which are said on the Internet. A lot.

Talk about potty-mouths.

The Net's not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to "dirty" language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:

I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous '7 Dirty Words.' [Click this link for the list of expletives.]

And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. (Not counting this one. :)) I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Yowsers.

Ok, let me get this straight: while THIS was happening, rather than chasing the story down and doing something to really support the troops, you were constructing methodology to count naughty words?

Words fail me. And aside from that, what's your point, fuckwit?

All this very precious pearl-clutching is utterly pointless in a quest for "civil discourse" if you do not also consider the impact on civil discourse of statements such as these: (via Instaputz)

Ohhh-kay. Let's do a trial run.

Putz: What we really should be doing is killing Iranian civilians. Heh.
Malkin: Exactly. And the NY Times publishers should be locked up for treason.
Denny K: Yeah! Let's hunt them down and find out where their kids go to school.
Coulter: My only regret is that Tim McVeigh didn't blow up the NY Times.
Misha: Forget the Times, I want the Supremes. Five robes, five ropes, five trees.
Lefty Blogger: You're all fucking crazy.

InstaPunk: See? The lefty bloggers are more hateful.

…[W]hy not run a few chapters of Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries through your little Shrill Detector, and then compare those results with a Richard Pryor set from the '70s.

Idiots.

Now, I'm not a leftie - I'm just an uppity libertarian with not much respect for foolishness and a decent regard for semantics.

Therefore, I have something in common with Shakespeare's Sister The Rude Pundit and indeed The Ace of Spades.

A man-portable un-powered entrenching tool is a fucking spade.



More Vicious Left-Wing Mockery

tag: potty mouths, Hate Speech, pearlclutching, unintentional irony, , culture, morality, ethics

Supid is as stupid does...

The sort of people who star in this clip can be found here, at "liberalsmustdie.com".

If your entire premise is that "liberals must die," because your faith and beliefs cannot stand against a few pointed questions and a hard rain of facts - you are too damn stupid to breed, much less teach children.

Of course, us Libertarians may argue about Evolution, but we have great faith in Social Darwinism! A little too much, truth be told, and there's history behind us; there's any number of examples of wacky bible cults such as what infest our Body Politic at the moment that went down the toilet after the millennium-before-last.

Of course, if you really want to understand these folks - read their literature, and the folks that advertise in it, and who buy those sucker mailing lists.

Anyway, the hard core 6000 year creationist world view is depedant upon a literal - sort of - reading of the King James Bible - the most beautiful and least accurate translation there is. We have come a long way and found quite a few more original sources than King James's translators had.

Even IF I grant the "inerrency of God's Word" as presented in the King James - just for the sake of argument - I sure as hell do NOT grant the unspoken assumption of "inerrnency of comprehension" that's clearly being claimed. The folks depicted are clearly those who could not be trusted to assemble a bicycle from the instructions.

But let us go one step further. If you believe the Word of God is true, maybe you should actually take it at it's word. When it's silent on a topic, maybe YOU should be too. But these folks rely heavily on the Doctrine of Original sin - which is not explicitly in the bible. That was St. Augustine's bright idea. In fact, the various stories of Genesis have no conclusions to them, no explicit "moral." They are supposed to provoke questions, not supply definitive answers.

Further, if you are looking for condemnation of homosexual behavior, you will find the Bible a week reed. It's prohibited for "a man to lie with a man as a woman," which is in the Levitical code, and is apparently as tortured a phrase in Hebrew as it is in English. The law of Parsimony suggests that if God had wished to say that he disapproved of men having sex with men, he could have said so. Social context suggests that this was a prohibition of engaging in sex with Caananite temple prostitutes and priests - who apparently dressed as women. As for Lesbianism - the bible says not word one. Well, unless you read The Book of Ruth in a certain way, in which case it might be advocating committed same-sex relationships.

The "sin of Sodom" - google that for any number of perspectives - is most persuasively, from both text and culture, the abuse of strangers under the protection of Lot's household. At the time and even today, hospitality is sacred, an issue of importance beyond almost any other cultural imperative. hospitality and shelter were matters of survival.

I have immense respect for the Bible - and the Word in general. But I have far, far less faith in my fellow person's ability to read than I do in God's ability to write. Hell, that's a major theme with the Prophets. Where do these folks get the idea that their wackadoo world view, only vaguely connected to the Bible - is the result of any special understanding of God's Word? Because it's a truly "special" understanding, worthy of the "short bus." Don't take my word for it - ask any serious theologian. Or better yet, study a few dead ones; they aren't likely to be biased against these folks.

I commend to you St. Julian of Norwich. And I ain't even a Catholic. But then, more than a few of the catholic hierarchy of the day would have called her anything but "Catholic."

tag: creationism, ID, hate speech, patriarchy, Republican Values, clash of civilization, culture war

How do we save the earth, our freedom and our culture? With the stroke of a pen...

Note: I've revised and bumped this post rather than write a new post covering much of the same ground less well. I'd also like to put it into the context of "Framing the Unspoken Debate: Metaphor, Morality and Politics," which I wrote subsequently to this essay. Specifically, all the ills I address below can be accurately seen as Moral Pathologies of both Right and Left.

First - read this account of a very bad black man's life. Consider that his story is one of opportunities and context.

Second - The promise of a plant that is condemned, not because it is a drug, but because it's related to a drug. And why is it condemned? Because methanol would have competed with oil and chemical processes derived from oil and therefore it had to be demonized.

I can also point you to reasons why marijuana as a drug was outlawed, at least in part. It had little to do with it's actual effects, for good or ill and far more to do with attacks on cultures and subcultures that depended on it - in preference to ethanol brewed from wheat, oats, barley and corn, ironically enough.

Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out is a good starting point, illustrating the original agendas and the lies that hid them. But reason alone is a fair starting point. Consider this one statistic; that half of all prison beds are filled with non-violent drug offenders?

Consider that imprisonment itself has many of the same disruptive effects upon family and community as does drug-use itself, even when the drug use is undetected and untreated. We have little or no idea what the impact would be if we simply replaced punishment with treatment for those who needed it - but we do know that even if we replaced half of all jail beds with community-based treatment, we would be saving money, and employing a better class of people doing it.

Of course, there is a shadow-good in the current system; it keeps people inclined to be prison guards away from those who are not. However, I think treatment is a better option there - or perhaps, just perhaps, a mind-altering experience.

But there is more to the war on drugs than power, even more to it than social control, even more to it than the "opiate of the masses" attempting to eliminate shortcuts to and supposed replacements for approved forms of spiritual expression and experience. Indeed, the only traditionally sacred herb that remains legal for ordinary folks is tobacco - but only in it's most addictive and least psychoactive forms. The more sacredly effective forms of the herb are kept very expensive, or legally unobtainable within the United States. Dominican and Cuban tobaccos are some of the best remaining strains of the herb that originally swept Europe with it's manifold effects, both sacred and profane.

Note that in effect, the enjoyment of this "vice" is restricted by price and access to the elites that can "handle it" - ordinary tobacco addicts are kept pacified with denatured and adulterated nicotine delivery devices.

All of these concentrations of power, of wealth, of doctrinal property are expressions of a deep-seated terror that obsesses those who are called to power and control; a fear of what would happen if "The wrong people" were to be allowed to act as they pleased. It's not that they fear what they would do or not do, so much, as they fear the inability to be sure what any given individual should do. And sadly, if you look at the lives of those most obsessed with the behavior of other people, you will find little forgiveness for their own human failings, foibles or even harmless whims. They fear their own Liberty as much or more as that of any other - for they know all to well what they are capable of, if only they did not discipline themselves against it.

So really, they forbid all things that tempt them, and make mandatory all that comforts them in the rather childish assumption that these things are universal dangers and comforts, while allowing that other restrictions that really don't seem to apply to their own nature are nonetheless best conformed to in public, for the benefit of those who might otherwise be led into temptation and folly.

So by this, and many other small but telling examples that you may glean from examining the social standards for the "ruling classes" across time to themselves and the stricter standards applied to "ordinary people," we must conclude that there is some degree of apprehension as to what might happen if the common people were permitted to simply do as they pleased, to whatever reward or lack thereof that they might find.

The parallel argument is to examine the ethics of choosing on behalf of others what sort of expressions and behaviors they will be permitted or forbidden, and what they must or must not do in order to deserve such permissions in comparison it to the supposed evils and harms that may arise if these behaviors are not restricted.

There is no case where a rational, defensible examination of any restriction of truly personal liberty can be clearly demonstrated to have a greater benefit than the harm caused. Indeed, it's fairly easy to substantiate that exercises such as the Drug War create widespread, systemic, crippling harm on a level all out of proportion to any positive social gains. The same arguments apply to attacks on birth control - and the reasons why they are problematic were well-put in Grizwold(Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965))



Ignore the nonsense about "penumbras," thought they are true enough - go directly to the Great Unmentioned Amendment. It's existence renders absurd any argument that there is no "constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy." Of course not. The Constitution recognizes rights, and recognizes some that the founders thought required explicit protections.

Nonetheless, the Due Process Clause itself is foundation enough, as Justice Marshall famously noted in a widely cited dissent:

In Poe, Justice John Marshall Harlan II filed one of the most cited dissenting opinions in Supreme Court history. He argued, foremost, that the Supreme Court should have heard the case rather than dismissing it. Thereafter he indicated his support for a broad interpretation of the due process clause. He famously wrote, "the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints." On the basis of this interpretation of the due process clause, Harlan concluded that the Connecticut statute violated the Constitution.

Shortly after the Poe decision was handed down, Estelle Griswold (Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut) and Dr. C. Lee Buxton (a physician and professor at the Yale School of Medicine) opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, in order to test the contraception law once again. Shortly after the clinic was opened, Griswold and Buxton were arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined $100 each. The conviction was upheld by the Appellate Division of the Circuit Court, and by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Griswold then appealed her conviction to the Supreme Court of the United States.

There are situations where the overall social benefits of a minor restriction on personal liberty are persuasive to a person of conscience. But by making the conscientious choice, the arguably moral and considerate choice - indeed, the sane choice compulsory, we replace conscience with compliance and pretend they are the same thing.

I would use a properly-designed safety belt whether or not it were mandatory. I do it mindfully, every single time, even though the car I drive has a full set of airbags. It's part of the ritual that puts me in a responsible mindset for driving. And frankly, I do not care to include the "freedom" to exit my vehicle via the windshield as part of my personal portfolio of liberties!

Should we try and legislate responsible behavior? That is the liberal excuse for fiddling with people's freedom to make personal choices. In very rare cases, your more enlightened liberals see the idea of providing access to "better" choices to be acceptable; more often they try to enact laws they know will not be respected in private and certainly cannot be detected or prosecuted without some intrusion into constitutionally-protected rights.

In a trial balloon that could remove all metaphor from the phrase "nanny state," the assemblywoman announced plans last week to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for parents to spank their own children under the age of 4. Convicted fanny-slappers would face up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Conservatives prefer to artificially increase the consequences of choices they disapprove of, then point to the artificial consequences as justification for advising against "irresponsible behavior." I do not care to concede any duty to be "responsible" to even the most benificant tyranny; at most, I will comply when it's not convenient or personally profitable to evade the tyrant's rule.

But neither approach to coercion of "good behavior" is any more reasonable; both take responsibility OUT of the hands of the individual and place it into the hands of some form of self-perpetrating elite, who, by virtue of recognizing one another as being worthy by virtue of some intangible and largely irrelevant commonality, such as Yale or the Episcopal faith, are of course better qualified to assume the burden of being responsible for the "little people."

Neither better motives nor more competence than those I cynically allege change my objection to any degree. Indeed, I disqualify myself explicitly as being of sound enough judgment to be either right OR left "enough" to decide what other people "should" be doing when they are minding their own business and enforcing my will in that regard. (I am, of course, always willing to consult with responsible individuals on matters within my competent purview.)

Distorting the consequences of irresponsibility, either by overly padding the corners of life or by breeding werewolves to prowl outside the "designated safe areas," Liberty Herself is raped. There can be no effective liberty with out the ability to make a broad range of choices, be responsible for the consequences of those choices and have those choices and consequences bear some understandable relationship.

The rewards and the costs of living as you choose, based on your own understanding of your personal needs and individual desires should be in balance with the choices you make. That is true Liberty and actual Justice.

Until that very simple concept of fairness is re-established, honored and insisted upon by every free person in this society, we will not live in the free and open society we have been told exists in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."

That may be effected by the stroke of a pen. All we need do is choose - as a block of freedom loving people - to recognize that the Unenumerated Rights ARE the right to choose for one's own individual sake, according to one's own perception of individual benefit, and most importantly, the most important of all enumerated rights - the right to be wrong. Yes, we do have the right to bear responsibility for being wrong, to accept and pay the due and just consequences that always flow from a bad choice, whether or not there's any recognition of it in law - and learn from it.

A free people - a people who are raised to tend to their own and govern themselves - have no need for coercive government, or indeed, any shred of external government they do not actively subscribe to.

If government - as a social institution - were restricted to doing only those things that enough people wanted done and were willing to make an individual choice to support, it would still have more to do in theory than it could achieve in practice.

This comes to be from a simple precept. People who are willing and able to govern themselves in all respects that they are interested in acting need no external government. To the extent they wish to act outside of their competence or experience, they may wish to abate their risks, for the price of screwing up at the expense of other people is a considerable consequence. And ultimately, unavoidably and necessarily those who demonstrate the unwillingness or inability to govern themselves will have to accept some form of restricted covenant upon their liberty that will assure those affected by their poor choices that both justice and prudence are satisfied.

Nonetheless, the fact that some cannot or will not be responsible for the consequences of their actions is no argument against the majority of those who are responsible and do choose to cope with the consequences of their choices.

Many on the Right like to use the term "personal responsibility" in ways that have no relationship whatsoever to the concept above. They mean it in the sense that you are personally responsible for visibly conforming to some external standard of behavior and must accept what arbitrary consequences that may be imposed upon you for being caught acting in private against those precepts.

The general lack of predictable and just outcomes in our system of justice is due to a simple fact; our system of justice is not about you, either as victim nor perpetrator; it's about a form of social justice and social regulation. Any individual justice is at best an accidental side-effect to a process that is brutally indifferent to the harm it causes in the process of "sending the right message."

The alternative, we are told, would be Chaos. And most fear chaos, flux and uncertainty to the point where we are willing to tolerate nearly any restriction upon our rights to avoid that fear.

But fear of unalloyed chaos is universal that we can be assured that no great amount will ever exist; all we need do is re-examine our constitution, which is our primary social compact in the United States, a document that sprang in it's from the best and most influential minds of America and Europe. It's very much more than our own private compact; it illustrates principles that are rooted in the bones of history and every act of regulatory futility and governmental abuse that predates it. It is a document of vast hope and even greater cynicism.

It sets up a mechanism whereby people in manageable chunks may regulate themselves as they see fit in concordance, while permitting dissent within and, should that prove futile, explicitly permitting people to "vote with their feet," to find a State that offers a social compact more suited to them and their needs.

The Federal Government was created as a check on those states putting too many restrictions on individuals, and as a means of organizing matters that were in the common interest of all states - such as a common defense, or the critical issues of interstate commerce, which are not things you might think of - what can and cannot be transported due to it's effect upon the morals of the innocent, but practical matters such as the maximum draft of a barge, a common standard of time, of wagon-gauges (so that wagons and carriages will create standard ruts and therefore avoid perfectly predictable problems.)

In other words, when there must be a standard chosen in order for a market to exist at all, you need an authority on the standards to make an acceptable choice from a wide array of possible alternates in cases where competition between standards would be foolish - like railroads and electrical plugs.

These are all cases where my "liberty" to chose between a dozen competing standards may interfere with my effective ability to buy and use an appliance I need in the place where I live. Increasingly, the choice of a reasonable standard is outside the competence of specialists.

This is the sort of thing that the best sort of government does best has been proven to work rather well even in the effective absence of anything we'd think of as government.

alt.config is pretty much all the government that Usenet Alt.* hierarchy has, is comprised of anyone and everyone worldwide that has an interest in the Usenet Alt.* hierarchy and it operates largely by consensus and common sense. That is also true of Usenet in a larger sense; the only penalty that can be assessed against those who violate a Big 8 newsgroup charter is to lose one's ability to connect to the Internet, and that penalty is assessed on a case-by-case, peer-by-peer basis.

Those persons and ISP/Hosts/servers who are locked off part or all of the "backbone" have every right - and a fair amount of practical ability - to route around the backbone. Furthermore, if too many people are restricted from "the" backbone, they can and will build "the other" backbone.

This is a model for rational self-government that depends on actual, predicable human behavior based in individual self-interest balanced against other, competing self-interests. It works, and it works rather well. Not only that, it is not possible to sabotage and subvert it by speaking one way and acting in another; the system depends on the actual behavior of participants to regulate itself, and to determine where and when boundaries must be drawn.

On the Internet, there are no crimes of thought or of motive. The Internet cares only about traffic, and whether you are placing more of a load on the system than you are contributing. Nor does the fact that the calculation is sloppy, dynamic and designedly imprecise of any great bother to most. So long as the signal-to-noise ratio is acceptable, it works as well as it needs to.

It is a new world view and an intuitively obvious demonstration of what is possible. There is one great truth that history paints with relentless precision; when a general perception of a better and more useful way of seeing the world and interacting with each other becomes widespread, it will come to pass.

[Jan 24, 2007: Substantially revised and updated to correct errors and include reference to the California Anti-Spanking initiative.]

tag: Internet, alt.config, chaotic systems, free speech, ethics, social control, discipline, punishment, politics, sustainability, liberalism, radicalism, constitution, constitutional, choice, bill of rights, ethical realism, authoritarianism, anti authoritarianism, moralism, individualism, morality, pragmatism, spanking, responsiblity, consequences, justice Grizwold v Connecticut, Justice, 9th Amendment, Unenumerated Rights, anti-authoritarian, drug war, energy policy

Give a Clue this Christmas!

My Latest Autism Designs and what they mean.

People who are neurotypical tend to think in boxes. One problem with being on the Autistic Spectrum is that you tend to not think in boxes. As far as I can tell, our thought process is highly relational. We tend to not even SEE the boxes and we don't think in a binary way at all.

A great number of problems come from the inability to understand that different people can have starkly different ways of understanding the world around them.

We tend to assume that people who came up with a functional solution for a problem came to it in the same way; indeed, by way of the same initial perceptions. Autistics and Aspies are as guilty of this as anyone; indeed, it's been studied within the AS population. The reason it's not been studied within the NT population is simple; in the case of NT's, the assumption that another person has a thought process that works like yours does is statistically likely to be correct.

So, when an autistic person makes this unwarranted assumption, it's called "mind blindness" and the autistic is gently handed a clue in the form of "social stories." When an NT does it, it's in the form of an organization called "Cure Autism Now."

If "autistic thought" were not valuable, there would not be such a roster of famous thinkers, such as Einstein and Newton now thought to have been probably autistic to some degree. By the same token, it should be a profound clue that there are courses to teach neurotypicals to "think outside of the box," and almost all higher education is aimed at rooting out simplistic, either-or thinking and to over-ride fear and submission responses when you have to communicate about or defend your work.

The ability to think and function outside of the box is an asset of significant value; recognising that is especially important if you are planning to "do something for autistics." Their ability to function in 'in an appropriate way' is limited, but that does not imply their ability to function, given an appropriate context is as limited as it appears. The trick is to find that context; and in that context they will not have so much difficulty "being appropriate."

There's no area where this insight is more critical than in regards to the parents of autistics themselves.

Make no mistake; autism can be a crippling condition, and it's made worse by being a condition where you absolutely must depend upon others to accommodate your needs and accept limitations that those without the condition cannot easily see or understand. But even the most obviously disabled "autist" is as severely affected by presumptions of how their disability affects them and even more by refusal of others to accept our word for the accommodations we need.

This following paragraph is emblematic of the crippling parental fears that the 800-lb gorilla of the pro-cure movement exploits for funding and validation:

You are never prepared for a child with autism. You will gradually come to believe it, but never fully accept it, get used to it, or get over it. You put away the hopes and dreams you had for that child - the high school graduation, the June wedding. Small victories are cause for celebration - a word mastered, a dry bed, a hug given freely. - FAQs about Autism: Cure Autism Now

Those of us who object to such fear, panic and the pervasive bigotry that exists with in the pro-cure movement - as well as it's seemingly obvious ethical deficits are pretty soundly attacked, with all kinds of terrible motives assigned us. (Theory of Mind, eh?)

A great deal of the work on the support groups that accept AS persons as contributors - something of a rarity - is to get non-AS people to accept that our "inability to cultivate friendships" is not a crippling condition to us. Once we have our one or two friends - friends as geeky and weird as us, generally speaking, we are done. My personal limit is two, and what NT's call "friendships," I now interpret as "Acquaintances." Yes, of course that has profound effects in terms of my ability to sustain a social network, and that has cost me many opportunities; indeed even jobs. I try and work things so that one of my two has the social skills I lack and the willingness to use them on my behalf.


Unfortunately, there is a lot of very bad advice out there and some very bizarre ideas as to what will be helpful to people such as I, who are on the spectrum and who are nonetheless potentially articulate and intelligent beings. Mostly this revolves around the idea that a bad job of conforming to the expectations of others is superior to a good job of being me. Here's Lennie Schafer on the topic of "fake autistics" like me.

(What about "high functioning autism" and how does that fit in? Simply put, it doesn't fit in anywhere. High functioning autism is not clinically defined and is not in the DSM-IV, and for good reason. High functioning autism is an oxymoron. If one meets the criteria for a diagnosis of autism, by definition one cannot be high-functioning. It would be as silly as the term sharp-eyed blindness.) (1)

So why would a handful of people, amongst a few others, who apparently are for the most part Aspergers, if anything, want to identify themselves autistic? Perhaps because autism is a profound disability and Aspergers is a disorder that is mostly not. Autism thus carries more moral weight than Aspergers and therefore has more moral clout for self-esteem building political and social agendas. "We autistics don't want to be cured" carries much more punch than "We Aspergers don't want to be cured", especially given the reality that there is no movement anywhere that seeks to "cure" those with Aspergers into being anything else.(2)

Aspergers-labeled alone, they would be ignored by the press and would be denied the juicy sense of empowerment that would come with a high-profile "oppressed minority" movement article like the one in the liberal New York Times. (3) (4)

The New York Times reporter failed to do a journalist's most basic homework. She failed to check the credentials of those doing the complaining, despite my urging. Anyone can call themselves autistic and write cranky letters to the editor. So how does someone determine if a person is truly autistic,or is an autism imposter with Aspergers? Ask to see their diagnosis. If someone claims to have autism for purposes of making some political statement, ask them to prove it. In any of the correspondence I have had with the autism "imposters", not one has ever supplied such documentation. (5) Of course, it is highly unlikely to ever see it. The irony here is that if someone has enough language skills to effectively complain about the treatment of autistics, then they themselves cannot be autistic.(6) Apparently more than one big city newspaper has failed to see through this deception, so eager are they to get an unusual victim story into print. Can we afford to allow the interests of our autistic children and everyone else "on the spectrum" to be pushed out of the public eye and displaced by a handful of imposters crying a contrived victimhood? Who speaks for autism? Not this bunch.

Note that he, and those like him don't like being quoted, even under "fair use" constraints.

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Of course, if I committed so many foolish rhetorical errors in public, I'd prefer not to be used as a hideous example either.

1. Argument from Authority. Of course, the process of determining what goes into the DSM-IV is pure and objective science .
2. Aspergers is, in fact an autistic spectrum disorder and has quite a range of effects. As a step-parent of a diagnosed Aspie, I'm very aware of the fact that there are very significant issues involved. They are not so inconvenient to US, as parents. They are going to affect HIM quite significantly unless we find some adaptive strategies that work for him.
3. As opposed to the entirely legitimate empowerment that comes from suffering the hideous, horrendous burden that is Autism.
4. Of course, it's a liberal thing to be concerned about the civil rights of children being abused and neglected for the sake of the convenience and social comfort of their conservative parents. This is the root host for "Autism, A Debilitating Disease, not a Culture," a page that links to both Free Republic and Free Dominion, while telling Canadians they a vaccilating, unpatriotic fools for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing." Snark aside, the fact that this site, is associated with Authoritarian Right Wingers explains a lot about the entire, very authoritarian "curebie" movement.
5. For myself, I want to see Lennie's MENSA results, his HIV status and full financials proving he's not unduly profiting from his activism before I deign to speak with him. I suspect he's unworthy of my attention, but if he proves otherwise, I will of course listen.
   
6. Factually untrue.

Unpuzzled is my most militant anti-curebie design, with the slogan, "help find a clue."

I know, it's rude and confrontational, but I've found that sometimes you need to swat people with a clue-by-four in order to startle them enough so they actually listen.

Those "seeking a cure" tend to ignore everything from those of us who ARE on the spectrum because it doesn't fit into to their mindsets, just as they reject "inappropriate" responses to communications from their autie and aspie children.

This is especially true of issues about communication style, reasonable accommodation and most importantly, the concept that a difference need not be AS disabling as it seems from an "NT" perspective. And, speaking as someone who's gone round and round on this at various times and under various circumstances, those who most boldly wave the "puzzle ribbon" seem at times to be making a point of their puzzlement, and their inability to understand to be the issue of auties and aspies.

See point above about how many friends and relationships an autie or aspie needs in an emotional sense. We do not absolutely require a relationship with the biological parental units. It's a nice thing to have, but we cannot and some quantity of will not be as easily coerced by family emotional ties as neurotypicals can be. This is not just because we have a "faulty" connection between emotions and reasoning. Our reasoning is not emotional, and our emotional responses seem to be quite different - across the board. Put two aspies in the same room and they will communicate quite well indeed - but their body language, topic choices and intuitive negotiations of "status" will be starkly different - and one of the greatest differences is the relative lack of huge tooth-bearing grins with full eye-contact.

To an aspie, to most sensible primates and all cats I've ever met, bare teeth and a full-on gaze is, at the very least, a statement of territorial or situational dominance, inviting a ritual contest of wills to determine who will be in charge and who will submit. Your typical aspie doesn't wish to play that game, having no need or real desire to join your pack, so if you do see them bare their teeth - it's probably in the context of a genuine, non-ritualized warning that Bad Things Will Suddenly Occur If You Do Not Go Away NOW.

What part of "Agggh! [flap flap flap] [throw object] LEAVE ME ALONE" is unclear to you people?

The "Unsmily" design honors the "aspie smile," a neutral expression that essentially means "hailing frequencies open." That look of slightly blank attention is a sign that an aspie or autistic is willing to let you talk at them for a while. Indeed, oft-times we are listening so hard that we are not thinking about what we will say next.

No pointless social noises please! Talk about something that is both objectively important and something within the realm of my interest and ability to have an opinion on. Make a full statement, then shut up and let me talk at YOU for a while. Then it's your turn.

Appalling, isn't it?

Well, that is the way aspies and auties communicate best - asynchronously. The full give and take of an NT conversation is difficult for us, and those of us that can manage it are doing it because we realize that style of communication is important to our NT friends all out of proportion to anything actually communicated. Mostly we grunt and make what experience has taught us to be socially appropriate noises at the expected times.

We are quite unlikely to put up with attempts to get us to conform to your expectations of what people like you should be. We are not 'like you,' and while we do very clearly appreciate that you have social advantages we do not, and we all understand that any parent would wish their child to have every possible advantage - we also know that many of those "advantages" come with a price. Some of those prices are ones we cannot pay - and for many of us, compromising who we are or being less than honest about what we know to be true is a price we will not pay - no matter how politically incorrect it may be to point out that the emperor has no clue.

In case you'd forgotten, the President is a lying' bastard.

Bush admits it right to their faces because he's been rankly lying about anything and everything ever since he ran for president and never, not once, paid a penalty for it. Think about it carefully--for anyone else a public admission of lying would be absolutely devastating on a professional and personal level.

Sorry, dear, I lied about sleeping with that perky admin half your age. No big, right? Yeah, boss, I said I delivered all those parts when I actually drank beer for two hours. So?

But for George Bush implacable rules of life just vanish, so he doesn't care, admit it right out loud on the record, why not? This horrifying national psychosis--words chosen with great attention--was very carefully and deliberately enabled by The Washington Post as they scrubbed their stories to hide the lying.

(more}

Now, it's a Bad Thing to lie to the American People and to Congress. Particularly to members of Congress who's campaigns were damaged with all the "stay the course" rhetoric and public defense of Rummy right up to the "Heave Ho" moment.

But, hey, such trivial considerations of consequence are beneath our "decider." I can't complain about the outcome, of course. I merely point out that trusting a known and famous liar ain't the path of prudence, as many Republicans found to their cost this past election.

And meanwhile, the WaPo is trying to revise history - unaware of the Google Cache and The Memory Hole, apparently. These days, revising web history is merely an amusing spectacle of futility, rather like a cat covering up on linoleum.

I blogged you so!

"The profile of corruption in the exit polls was bigger than I'd expected," Rove tells TIME. "Abramoff, lobbying, Foley and Haggard [the disgraced evangelical leader] added to the general distaste that people have for all things Washington, and it just reached critical mass."

Compare and contrast

I forgive the folks of Elko and thousands of other deeply conservative towns across the nation for being in a state of shock and denial, for they cannot imagine how anyone who lives by their own virtues could screw up so badly. It is literally inconceivable; it should be a matter of practical impossibility due to bone-deep, value driven integrity that is the soul of small-town conservatism

Well, I'm sad to say this, but folks like George Bush and a thousand others took advantage of your preconceptions of how things ought to be. They said all the right words in public, and you figured that since you have integrity, they did too.

Sorry about that. I feel your pain. You see, I grew up in an area like that, where people had to rely upon one another, expected to be able to, and could. The closet volunteer fire department was a solid 15 miles away, the closet hospital was 45 minutes on dry roads in a fast car - and they were never dry. If you heard three shots in rapid succession, you grabbed a rifle and a first aid kid and ran toward the sound, because there was a broken leg or worse.

And when you grow up in such a place, it's really crushing to find out that people from the big city don't share those essential values. Well, not the rich ones, anyhow.

I'm going to be charging 15% more per post now. Just thought I'd let you know.