The Serpent's Wisdom

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

... Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

... The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

"We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents," Horn said. "It's a reminder."

from Abstinence message goes beyond teens

Let that sink in for a moment. The government is paying people to tell adults they shouldn't have sex out of wedlock. Anyone want to guess who is going to be particularly targeted here? Here's a hint: have you ever been to a government assistance office?

The government does not exist to tell you how to live your life. The government exists to facilitate the decisions you, as a free person, make.

The government does not exist to tell you what language you may or may not speak, the government does not exist to tell you what religion you may or may not practice, the government does not exist to tell you what chemicals to put in your body or not put in your body, the government does not exist to tell you to have children or not have children, and the government sure as hell does not exist to tell you who to have sex with or who not to have sex with.

Some of these choices might not be as economically efficient as others, but economic efficiency is not the end-all-be-all of human existence, not even close.

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.

I say this not because i think drugs are great, but because an examination of it reveals the prejudicial attitudes on which it is predicated, and because i am sickened to see the many lives that have been sacrificed on its altar.

The War on Drugs is predicated on the idea that drug use is indication of a "moral failing." Person X lives a somehow "degraded" life (and we can therefore pity or despise her) and "turns to drugs" to "escape the harshness of her life." Or, alternately, person Y is a bored suburbanite teenager "lured" to drug use, like sailors drawn to the rocks by the siren song, pressured into trying it by his peers ("if it weren't for that kid with funny hair and ex-hippie parents, my child would never have tried them").

This is the way drug use is portrayed by the malestream media, projecting this moralistic analysis from the safety of gated communities far from the 'iniquity' of urban life, and thus, presumably, far from anywhere drugs are commonly used or sold.

It is but one brick in a wall built to disguise an authoritarian kyriarchal agenda, a power grab by the elites of this society predicated on racism, classism and sexism. It is a bandage covering a festering wound and soaking up the pus without allowing efforts to heal it by addressing its cause: oppression and exploitation. The "Drug War" is a way of pretending that oligarchical collectivism and cronyism can exist in a civilized society, by othering the victims and labelling them immoral.

This becomes obvious when we see that the addictions that are tolerated are precisely those that mask people's feelings and thus make people more pliant and/or hard-working. Caffeine and nicotine are more dangerous than THC or opium and are more habit-forming, but they are the "socially acceptable" addictions. Other "acceptable" addictions include several SSRIs and other prescription medications, which can also have more dangerous side effects than THC or opium.

The previous paragraph is not meant to promote pot or heroin, but just to point out that the "Drug War" rationale of protecting people from harmful substances is utter hogwash. Where was this rationale for the 38,000 people killed by Vioxx in four years? Other myriad dangers of drug use are the direct result of efforts to ban them.

Some therapists refer to drug use as "self-medicating," because the main reason people form drug habits is to feel normal. There are exceptions, of course, people seeking pleasure or thrills. But lots of people try many different drugs and don't form addictions because, nice as it may make them feel, they don't need it to correct dopamine-receptor imbalances caused by long-term physical abuse, or to mask emotions they feel required to hide from friends and partners, or to get through long hours of dehumanizing work.

It's long been noted that drug war punishments are disporportionately directed at people of racial minorities. This is a typical "one-two punch" pattern of cannibalistic oppression: to treat the often necessarily drastic and long-term-self-destructive survival tactics of people in oppressed minorities as though they are moral failings, and then punish them.

I touched on this issue a few weeks ago with my post on "options and empowerment." If you have an imbalance of this kind in your life, the solution is not court-mandated therapy, but actual changes to your life and environment. Drug users cannot make the real changes that they need in their lives, because decisions about how we are going to live and survive are not up for democratic discussion. Those decisions are hoarded by those with the power to decide where jobs will be located, with the power to hire and fire.

On another dimension, the "Drug War" is an attempt by authoritarians to control what substances people put into their bodies. Historically, psychoactive substances have sometimes played a role in revolutionary awareness (recognizing this is somewhat of a shift from my previous thoughts on this matter), and guiltless pleasure has the potential to undermine the militaristic tone of an authoritarian culture.

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to kyriarchy

I am becoming anti-capitalist, but I don't know yet what would better replace it. Here's the process by which my thought is evolving.

1. What seems to me the most reasonable system is a free market, regulated to the extent that this is necessary to ensure competition and level access to all buyers and sellers. A democratic government would provide public goods like infrastructure, civil defence, and public order.

2. The problem is that any public solution that is put in place by honest people becomes a system that is, within a couple of generations, entirely corrupted. Industry convinces politicians to put its yes-men on regulatory boards, so that over time the wolves are watching the hen-house. This leaves us with the illusion of a regulatory system that claims it watches out for the public interest while increasing the opportunity for exploitation. See, for example, how the FDA and big pharma collude to mass-market poisons to the public as "medicine." Merck has, with one substance, killed over 38,000 people and hid the evidence for years while continuing to profit madly from Vioxx. There has been no public outcry whatsoever, because people trust the FDA to protect them. But also, I think there's a sense of fatalism; a sense that if we can't trust the FDA, what can we do instead that won't be similarly corrupted by cronyism?

2a. The only hope for counter-cronyism seems to be the fact that for many industries, there is a complementary industry whose profit depends on keeping the others honest. For example, the insurance industry stepped in and started doing its own auto crash testing when it became clear that the government wasn't setting safety standards high enough. The problem, though, is that while this does help keep the auto industry somewhat more honest, it doesn't always benefit the consumers, because the insurance industry makes its money by doing what it can to avoid making payouts, and there is no real market balance to help, because in an important sense there is no competition: once an accident has occurred, you can't shop around to find the insurance company that will pay you the most. Sure, if your insurance company doesn't pay out when you have an accident you can switch insurance companies, but that does you're current situation no good. Officially there is recourse to the attorney general, but if this is an elected official, chances are his biggest campaign contributions came from insurance companies -- see point 2, "cronyism," above.

3. The profit motive itself seems a unversal corruptor. Far from encouraging "rational market behavior," it inspires people to look for ways to flout the rules in order to increase those profits. The more competitors there are in the marketplace, the more scarcity there is, and the more greed is favored. Game theory demonstrates that people will cheat when they can expect to get away with it. There is no economic arena where in general this has been false. So long as people are able to convince themselves that real people "out there" are not affected adversely by their market decisions, they need feel no remorse at the likelihood that their gain comes at someone else's loss. In theory, the open-information, profit-driven free market helps everyone; in practice, there is no way around the effect of greed.

4. Greed and cronyism find considerable opportunity in the vulnerabilities of those who come to the market at a social disadvantage. Members of all disparaged groups -- whether they are categorized by gender, race, religion, class, size, disability, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, or gender identity, find themselves coming up short in the labor market. To begin with they do not have equal access, which creates opportunity for exploitation for those not thusly disadvantaged. It is not an accident that in the U.S. the captains of industry, the heads of the bureaucracies, and the elected officials are disproportionately white, male, Protestant, upper-class, slender, "sane," straight, and cis-gendered. Exceptions are rare enough that they are newsworthy. Even to the extent that there is a meritocratic system, access to education and valuation of one's merit is biased in favor of those who have social advantages -- those who can "dress for success" and speak "WASPishly" enough. What with people taking any advantage they can find, and the privileged operating the level-making frameworks (such as judges or arbiters who preside over discrimination or labor-fairness lawsuits) with cronies, the slant is so strongly in favor of those with privilege that even initiatives like affirmative action and collective bargaining have done little, across society, to counter it.

4a. This combination of factors has already given us patterns like "the war on (some) drugs," in which common behavior has been criminalized in the name of "public protection." There is quite a bit of violent crime involved with the drug trade, but not driven so much by the use of it, as by the self-interested behavior that occurs in a completely unregulated system. Competing vendors feel entitled to whatever means will ensure them greater market access; and addicts, scrambling for survival in a politcal and economic system that ostrasizes them, become increasingly desperate (whether they are junkies who live in squats or tweakers who live in Manhattan penthouses). This pattern has seen the growth of a "prison-industrial complex" that actually has incentive to incarcerate people, especially for drug offenses where current federal rules allow police to confiscate and sell all kinds of personal possessions, and companies who now can have products made cheaply by effective slaves thanks to entities like UNICOR. (At least such products are "Made in America" -- which by the way has the most highly incarcerated population in the world.)

5. Advertisement has become a system whereby the consumer's brain is colonized with a consumerist mentality that puts "blinders" on us, and causes us to treat our consumer obligations as if they were integral aspects of our survival. How else would people go along with the drudgery of factory or menial office work, if they were not convinced that they needed "money" in order to survive (and by survive, I mean buy clothing in the latest fashions, the cool new CDs and DVDs and the cool new gadgets to play them on, etc.)? People facing the inability to pay their debts panic as if they were facing a predator -- people talk about their credit rating in anxious tones as if a dip would create a life-threatening emergency. Cigarette companies don't just sell cancer-sticks, they sell "masculinity in a box," wearing a poncho and riding a horse across the plains. The diet industry doesn't just sell starchy low-fat food, it sells a promise of salvation.

Since these seem to be problems that are rooted in human nature, I don't think that lasting solutions can be developed in the framework of a capitalist republic. I'm not sure, though, what to advocate as a solution. Should we fight the present battles within the current system against greed, cronyism, and class exploitation, knowing that our solutions will eventually become our children's problems? Would stronger ethical instruction during childhood produce a generation that is more compassionate and generous?

Or is the solution a truly radical overhaul that tears down not just institutional edifice, but what I've come to call "the tyranny of the written word," the use of contract and law as tools of dehumanization and exploitation? I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though; between honest people, a contract can be an instrument of mutual benefit.

Is the current system the best we can do? Without it, how could we see to things like environmental protection, defense of equal opportunity, and caretaking of the ill and disabled, which are best handled as public issues?

A couple of election results from Nov. 2 are actually worth cheering about (for those of us who, uh, otherwise found little to cheer about). First this, which I read in the Boston Globe:

In the immediate aftermath of enacting civil unions, an antigay campaign called "Take Back Vermont" swept the state. ... And in the 2000 elections, it worked, sending 17 pro-civil union incumbents back home. But Democrats ... worked to recruit strong candidates. And on Tuesday, 17 legislative seats were picked up, all of them supporting civil unions, with three of them openly gay.

...In East Haven, Conn., the antigay Family Institute of Connecticut focused on running a candidate to oust Representative Mike Lawlor, the Assembly's strongest supporter of marriage equality. ... Lawlor won by a 5-to-1 margin. Additionally, two vitriolic antigay incumbents were defeated, proving that voters had lost patience with a message of discrimination.

In Massachusetts, Senator Marian Walsh won reelection despite being targeted for opposing a constitutional amendment to deny marriage rights. In another marriage-dominated race, Representative Kathy Teahan easily beat back a challenge by former representative Ned Kirby, who is best remembered for his constant antigay attacks. ... In short, all 50 pro-equality incumbents won reelection, and of the eight open seats, six were won by those who oppose a discriminatory constitutional amendment.

from Gay marriage is not to blame

Secondly, on the friend's list the other day, I saw this (I can't recall who posted it, anyone want to fess up?):

Proposals to reform marijuana laws racked up record-setting vote totals across the country Tuesday, leaving reformers cheering despite a few setbacks.

Montana voters approved a medical marijuana measure, Initiative 148, by an overwhelming 62% to 38...

In Alaska, Measure 2 scored the highest vote percentage ever achieved by a statewide proposal to abolish marijuana prohibition entirely and replace it with a system of regulation.

... Efforts to replace prohibition with regulation got a huge boost from Oakland voters, who approved Measure Z by 64% to 36%.

... In Ann Arbor, Michigan, voters overwhelmingly passed a local medical marijuana initiative, Measure C, 74% to 26%. In August, Detroit voters passed a similar measure by a 60% to 40% margin.

Voters in Columbia, Missouri, gave big wins to two separate reforms: A medical marijuana proposal, Proposition 1, passed by 69% to 31%; and Proposition 2, which replaces jail time with a maximum $250 fine for marijuana possession, also received a solid endorsement with 61% of the vote.

With advocates gearing up to lobby for medical marijuana bills in legislatures around the country next year, Vermont voters showed officeholders the danger of opposing such reforms. Vermonters handed stunning defeats to three leading opponents of that state's medical marijuana law-passed by the legislature earlier this year after a contentious, three-year battle.

... Massachusetts voters passed 12 of 12 advisory referenda on marijuana policy reform: five in support of medical marijuana, six in support of making marijuana a civil offense similar to a traffic ticket, and one in support of taxing and regulating marijuana.

from At Least 17 of 20 Marijuana Initiatives Pass; Montana Becomes 10th Medical Marijuana State

Lastly, the courts are starting to make the United States look like a democracy again, at least a little, with their rulings opposing the Bush Administration's attempts to imprison people in a hole without access to due process. (This, even though Darth Sideous John Ashcroft is going to be replaced by Darth Vader the man who wrote a 2002 Justice Department memo calling the Geneva Convention "quaint" and suggesting ways around it.)

Never fear, Rush! It's your dreaded enemies the ACLU to the rescue! (thanks, chuckdarwin)

The ACLU contends that state law enforcement officers violated Limbaugh's privacy rights by taking possession of his medical records as part of their criminal investigation into the commentator's alleged "doctor-shopping" to feed his prescription-drug addiction.

"While this case involves the right of Rush Limbaugh to maintain the privacy of his medical records, the precedent set in this case will impact the security of medical records and the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship of every person in Florida," Simon said in his statement.

from ACLU Comes to Rush Limbaugh's Defense