The Serpent's Wisdom

Look, I have to say something about the 'Ground Zero Mosque,' because frankly, what I'm seeing disgusts me to no end.

First of all, I'm appalled by the very fact that anyone opposes it. I am not personally a huge fan of Islam, any more than I'm a fan of Christianity, generally speaking; the two religions are about 97% identical and mainstream versions of both think I am hellbound. But I do think that Muslims, like Christians, as members of our society have the right to practice their religion openly, in peace.

Muslims were among the Americans killed on 9/11. Muslims are among the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslims pay taxes (or avoid them, hehehe) just like everyone else in the US. To say that a mosque near Ground Zero is an 'affront' to survivors' families (1) overlooks the families of Muslims killed there and (2) papers over the distinction between peaceful Muslims and Islamist terrorists. It is thus a position rooted in sheer prejudice. Opposing the mosque near Ground Zero is like opposing a church near the spot where the Murrah building once stood in Oklahoma City.

Second of all, the ADL can take a flying leap into the Hudson River. They showed their true colors with their self-serving opposition to the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, and they show their true colors again by adding their voice to those of the haters on this issue.

This week alone, the Obama Administration has:

Actively fought efforts to undo telecom immunity and hold the government accountable for past and present spying on private citizens. This is of course the opposite of what Obama promised when he campaigned: he vowed to make government more transparent, more accountable, and more respecting of civil liberties, and as time passes, this is turning out to have been an out-and-out lie.

Actively sought to forever immunize the government from ever being held accountable for wrongdoing, whether for torture or domestic surveillance. On these issues the Obama administration has so far been to the right of Dick Cheney.

Extended Wall Street's plunder of the American people to the FDIC. The FDIC is a relatively small fund (capped by law at $30B) which is now tasked by the PPIP (the federal program buying up toxic assets from flailing banks) with insuring over $1T in toxic asset purchases. If they lose money, they plan to assess fees from the banks they're insuring... unless those banks are bankrupt, in which case they'll simply ask the Treasury Department to print them the money. Put another way, the Treasury is holding its door wide open for bankers to take as much money as they want, keeping whatever profits they make and not having to worry about any losses they incur. Said bankers will also never have to worry about sleeping under a bridge or living in a tent or applying for food stamps. Meanwhile, if the FDIC becomes defunct because of this latest bizarre development, who's going to cover our measly little bank accounts in the event of a sector-wide banking breakdown?

The cynic in me is this morning thinking that 22 Democrats voted to confirm John Roberts as Chief Justice, and 4 Democrats (enough to kill Kerry's filibuster) voted to confirm Samuel Alito as Associate Justice, mainly so that they'd be able to argue now, in 2008, that "ZOMG we need to elect a Democrat as President or there will soon be another judge just like these two on the Supreme Court! (And no we totally didn't help them get there.) You know what will happen then - women, kiss your right to choose goodbye!"

I can't help thinking this while wondering how the vote essentially legalizing the President's illegal wiretapping program from 2002-2006 is going in Congress right now, as i type.

Like i said to cowgrrl the other night, history is not going to look kindly on this period of American history. All along there have been people documenting the wrongs - the lies, the maneuvering, the approval of torture, the violation of civil liberties, the secret prisons, the gulag, the media's collusion, the congressional coverups, the profiteering. Unless there are going to be a lot of bookburnings in the near future, historians will have a clear and solid record of just how aware the American people were and are of what was going on. This means it won't just be Bush and his cronies whose legacy will be sullied; it won't just be the Democratic collaborators; it won't just be NewsMax and Fox and Halliburton and KBR; it will be the entire American society.

ETA: HR 6304 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 passed with more Democrats voting YEA than NAY. You can see the roll call here. If it passes the Senate, it will grant the President the ability to basically write his own rules for wiretapping, and will instruct judges to dismiss any lawsuit brought against any telecommunications company for participating in an illegal wiretap if they can prove the President asked them to do it claiming he was looking for terrorists.

As a sort of counterpoint to my last post, about how the government does not exist to tell us how to run our lives, i think it is worthwhile to comment also on personal responsibility to the public good.

My thoughts on this come down to what i've written before about the ethics of taking. Ethically, we each have a responsibility to other people, to society, and to the ecology. "How we live our lives" must be tempered by an ethical awareness.

Our answer, to date, is to push this off onto the state. The state becomes the regulator of business, the protector of the environment, the keeper of the peace, the caretaker of the elderly and disabled. Then we act as though anything we do without the state's intervention must be ethically okay. Money and laws and property deeds free us of the burden of pondering the ethical rightness of poverty, wage serfdom, and perpetual debt.

The state does not share our interests or reflect our needs, so ultimately we cannot go on letting the state pretend to be our conscience. The best answer is for each of us, individually and collectively via mutual aid socities, to regulate our own business, protect our own environment, keep our own peace, take care of the elderly and disabled. Each of us plays a role in that and we must ethically own that.

This is nothing other than what just about every religion has ever taught... so this is nothing new. What keeps it from happening?

I just wrote to my representative and senator in the state government, to urge them to look into what the state can do to resist cooperating with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. For those who missed it, this is the bill -- now law -- which legalizes many forms of torture and allows the President to designate anyone as an "unlawful enemy combatant" and detain them without due process or trial.

If you read this and live in the US, please do the same.

FEMA a Disaster for Freedom of the Press: Katrina victims “not allowed” to talk to media, reporter told (thanks to mlfoley for the link)

Dekotha Devall, whose New Orleans home was destroyed by the storm, was in her FEMA-provided trailer telling the [Baton Rouge] Advocate reporter of the hardships of life in the camp when a security guard knocked on the door.

"You are not allowed to be here," the guard is quoted as telling the reporter. "Get out right now." The guard reportedly called police to force the journalist to leave the camp, and even prevented the reporter from giving the interview subject a business card. "You will not give her a business card," the guard said. "She’s not allowed to have that."

Later, at another FEMA camp in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, the reporter attempted to talk to camp resident Pansy Ardeneaux through a chain link fence when the same guard halted the interview. "You are not allowed to talk to these people," the guard told Ardeneaux. "Return to your trailer now." The reporter said she and an accompanying photographer were "ordered...not to talk to anyone or take pictures."

Argh, i don't trust 'em as far as i can throw 'em, neither Democrats nor Republicans. On matters of domestic spying and privacy and governmental war powers, there's barely any difference between them at all.

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a "signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

"The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach "will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

... David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

"The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,'" he said. "They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

from Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban

Two Republicans and a Democrat are responsible for this piece of work:

The Bush administration notified federal trial judges in Washington that it would soon ask them to dismiss all lawsuits brought by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenging their detentions, Justice Department officials said Tuesday.

The action means that the administration is moving swiftly to take advantage of an amendment to the military bill that President Bush signed into law last Friday. The amendment strips federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from Guantánamo detainees.

... Although the courts and Congress are co-equal branches of government, the Constitution allows Congress to define the scope of jurisdiction for all federal courts below the Supreme Court.

from U.S. to Seek Dismissal of Guantánamo Suits

Hmm, somehow a few people took my reposting of Moby's blog entry about misogyny in music to mean i support censorship.

When did i ever promote censorship? I don't support it, and neither, apparently, does Moby.

How is it that people hear someone saying, "People should own up to the ramifications of their words," and translate this into calling for censorship?

A few months ago i wrote about a phenomenon i've noticed, in that people speaking outside of the established viewpoint of public discourse are automatically presumed to have an agenda. This is one of the many hidden ways in which language is used against egalitarian radicals -- you are programmed to make all kinds of assumptions when you hear certain things that sometimes have nothing to do with what is actually being said.

A locked post on my friend's list this morning has me thinking about the role and nature of personal conduct as a topic of public interest.

The very thought of public intrusion into certain aspects of private behavior makes Americans go nuts. Americans do not want the government to tell us to wear helmets when we ride a motorcycle (this has been an extremely contentious issue), we don't want restaurants to tell us we can't smoke in here, and in general as a culture we have very mixed feelings about things like drug laws, alcohol restrictions, firearm registration, and so on. We don't want people to tell us to lose weight, to watch less TV, to drive within the speed limit, to restrict our sex lives, and so on.

On the other hand, it is entirely accepted that our behavior is restricted in other ways: we accept punishment for things like murder, rape, robbery; even for insider trading, espionage, embezzling, and so on.

One distinction suggested is that in the second class of behaviors there are clear victims, whereas in the first class, there are no clear victims.

From a particular point of view, though, one could say that society is collectively impacted by poor personal choices. A principle of economic thought is that any cost ripples throughout the whole economy. So the medical costs of tobacco or alcohol, for example, affect everyone. The economic effect of a distant individual's choice to drink alcohol has a negligable effect on you or me, but the combined costs of millions of drinkers has a noticable effect. These costs have been known for thousands of years and this offers, in my not-so-humble opinion, a prime motivation behind moral codes.

But the real distinction between vice (so-called here not to make a value judgment but to use a handy term we all know) and crime isn't the lack of tangible victimization; after all, many crimes and ethical violations like insider trading or pollution similarly have no clear direct impact on specific individuals. The key is that vice is enjoyable and often does not have directly negative individual consequences.

The other dimension to this is the psychological effect of having your access to pleasure controlled by people in authority. I've argued before that controlling access to pleasure has the effect of making people more placid and malleable. It is our implicit understanding of this that makes complex the politics of pleasure control, and marks the reason why so many of us have instinctive objections to attempts to restrict our personal behavior. Maybe some of you feared that above i was gearing up for a rationalistic assault on vice and therefore on your liberty. (Or, alternately, maybe you thought i was being eminently more sensible than usual.) This effect, a kind of pleasure-control principle, has also been known for thousands of years and offers, in my not-so-humble opinion, another prime motivation behind moral codes.

No one can deny the economic costs of vice. But here, finally, we encounter the price we are willing to pay in exchange for pleasure-liberty.

One way to express this in a very general way is with the use of an equation:



Now, this should not be seen as an "equation" but as a description of an equilibrium-state society constantly seeks. The terms of this statement are constantly changing in value and are not entirely independent. Since the values of these variables are changing and are interdependent on a wide variety of things there is no one best answer to this equation for all time; each society collectively moves the dial like the pointer on a Ouija board in search of equilibrium.

Here we have, in a nutshell, the essence of our long history of struggles between authoritarianism and libertarianism, and an indicator of why social attitudes about things like sex, alcohol, drug use, and gambling vary so much from place to place and from time to time.

"K" is a term representing the varying social mood with regard to authority and liberty. The higher K goes, the more permissible a society is; but with more permissiveness comes an increase in the economic cost of vice -- or at least the perception thereof, very important -- throwing society away from the equilibrium and in favor of reactionary authoritarianism. Blue laws, helmet laws, the War on (Some) Drugs, and so on, or the repeal thereof, represent tokens in the seeking of this equilibrium.

This equation actually shows one way in which authoritarians have a hand-up, because most people, including most hedonists, want to be economically responsible. And so when a new reactionary vice-restriction law is being discussed -- like, for example, the reduction of the federal speed limit to 55 miles per hour in the 1970's -- the economic cost angle can be deployed to sway some of the fence-sitters. All the libertines have in their corner is the age-old argument against the abuse of power, and a keen awareness of how very difficult it is to restore a freedom once it has been ceded to the authorities.

It dawned on me this morning the magnitude of suffering that has been caused by the simple assertion, "I have a piece of paper that says the land you're on is mine."

This was brought home again for the Starfish Menagerie last night as we met with our landlady to discuss the lease renewal. Dealing with her is not onerous, but there was some tension a month or so ago and that hangs over our heads now every time we deal with her. Underneath it all, though, by accidents of our individual histories, we are in debt to her. Fair or not, the five of us (my three partners and I, and the landlady) buy into a number of concepts underlying our interaction, including the commodification of land.

To draw from the aphorisms attributed to Proudhon, property can be theft, or property can be freedom. This depends, really, on the way society defines property.

Property might represent the freedom to determine your own future, since it means having unfettered access to a piece of land, whether that be land which you farm, where you house your craft equipment, where your store is based, or where you eat and sleep when not working for an employer. For this to be possible, any institution which governs the area must have fundamental respect for each person's right to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." This right has to be a concern that comes before others.

Or, property might represent the way in which the future is taken from you. When there's no open land left to settle, the concept of land ownership creates a sharp divide between those who own land and those who don't. The people in the latter class are kept in a state of debt to the former.

Claims of land ownership can be traced back to people who said, "This land is mine," and who were willing or able to enforce this by violence. The violence of the land ownership claim was sublimated into a meme which I call "the tyranny of the written word." The owners of property in an area came together to establish an authority which would track people's ownership claims on tablets of clay. The concept of legitimacy was developed to defend their agenda. A "legitimate" claim is one that can be tracked to bits of writing recognized as "valid" by the governing authority.

The agenda of land ownership can be a route to social happiness, or it can be a highway to injustice. Land ownership in itself is not necessarily the evil here; the problem is the commodification of land. Virtually all injustice can be tracked back to commodification.

Throw "intellectual property" into the mix, and you get a whole new dimension for potential happiness or injustice.

The only way to rectify the injustice of commodification is to prioritize "the right of pursuit of happiness" before "the tyranny of the written word." That means that people's freedom to self-determination has to come before the legitimacy of contracts and deeds. People can own the land they need to determine their own future; but the government should not assist when people take land.