The Difference

Robert “The Prince of Darkness” Novak says:

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats truly believe in governing, and Republicans just want power.

Just putting it here so I have it handy.

Local government often sucks

I've been meaning to write something about this American political canard for years, and Jonathan Chait has finally done it for me so I don't have to: Why the Worst Governments in America Are Local Governments

The myth of localism is rooted deep in our political psyche. Left and right alike use small and local as terms of approbation, big and bureaucratic as terms of abuse. None of us is equipped to see that the government that actually oppresses us is that which is closest to us.

Greece & the EU

So I've been trying to get up to speed on what's really happening with Greece and the EU. My man Paul Krugman says:

The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it.

My favorite article so far about the situation is from Interfluidity, which lays out Krugman's case in clarifying detail. If you read nothing else, read that. Here's the heart of it:

The choice Europe’s leaders faced was to preserve the union or preserve the wealth, prestige, and status of the community of people who were their acquaintances and friends and selves but who are entirely unrepresentative of the European public. They chose themselves. The formal institutions of the EU endure, but European community is now failing fast.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict. Note that in the tale as told so far, there really was no meaningful national dimension. Regulatory mistakes and agency issues within banks encouraged poor credit decisions. Spanish banks lent into overpriced real estate, and German banks lent to a state they knew to be weak. Current account imbalances within the Eurozone — persistent and unlikely to reverse without policy attention — implied as a matter of arithmetic that there would be loan flows on a scale that might encourage a certain indifference to credit quality. These were European problems, not national problems. But they were European problems that festered while the continent’s leaders gloated and took credit for a phantom prosperity. When the levee broke, instead of acknowledging errors and working to address them as a community, Europe’s elites — its politicians and civil servants, its bankers and financiers — deflected the blame in the worst possible way. They turned a systemic problem of financial architecture into a dispute between European nations. They brought back the very ghosts their predecessors spent half a century trying to dispell. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Heartbreaking.

Gaius Publius writing at Hullabaloo, my favorite progressive blog, connects this to the neoliberal project of privatization of everything for the benefit of plutocrats, pointing to parallels between Greece and Ukraine.

The actual story is that the forces of privatization on the "liberal left" in Europe have found a nation in a great deal of economic trouble, thanks in large part to looting from outside, and they're offering a “helping” hand in order to further loot the country via those privatizing strings. In the minds of the looters (we'll call them “neo-liberals” below) every government-owned operation (Athens airport, say) is a missed profit opportunity for someone rich enough to buy it, and the world would be better if everything were made private.

But airports and other revenue opportunities don't privatize themselves; they have to be pried loose from government.

Greek journalist Michael Nevradakis and US investigative journalist Greg Palast make a similar case:

Here’s how it works. To join the Eurozone, nations must agree to keep their deficits to no more than 3% of GDP and total debt to no more than 60% of GDP. In a recession, that’s plain insane. By contrast, President Obama pulled the USA out of recession by increasing deficit spending to a staggering 9.8% of GDP, and he raised the nation’s debt to 101% from a pre-recession 62%. Republicans screamed, but it worked. The US has lower unemployment than any Eurozone nation.

As Obama scolded the European tormentors of Greece: “You cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression.” Cutting spending power only leads to less spending which leads to further cuts in spending power – a death spiral we see today in the Eurozone from Greece to Italy to Spain—but not in Germany.

“Not in Germany.” There’s the rub. Normally, a nation such as Greece can quickly recover from debt-induced recession by devaluing its currency. Greece would become a dirt cheap tourist destination once more and its lower-cost exports would zoom, instantly increasing competitiveness. And that’s what Germany can’t allow. Germany lured other European nations into the euro in order to keep them from undercutting Germany’s prices in export markets.

Restricted by the 3% deficit rule, the only recourse left for Eurozone debtors: pay the piper with “austerity” measures.

In Disinventing Democracy George Monbiot describes the anti-democratic, plutocratic nature of the process at work.

Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics; only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion, through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.

The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation was kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.

The authors of this are not simply mustache-twirling villains. Ian Welsh outlines the cultures of the actors involved, and describes the architects of the EU this way:

In this worldview, it is only progress that national politics become increasingly devoid of content, and it is only necessary to build European-level democracy when the Europeans have finally, ironically, swallowed the medicine of their own mission civilisatrice. A case in point that is unfolding right now is the drama over refugees, specifically, how to settle them. Brussels had a perfectly reasonable and fair idea that refugees be allocated to countries in proportion to countries’ relative economic weight. This was met with absolute rejection, particularly by newer EU countries in Eastern Europe, who explicitly do not want even a small increase in the proportion of brown people who live there. Behind these countries hid some of the older, larger countries, whose national politics are already burdened by immigration-fatigue.

To EUians, this can only be confirmation that, at the national-political level, Europeans are only a hair’s breadth away from poking each other with sharp sticks in order to maintain ethnoreligious homogeneity. And they may be. But is it a sustainable solution to gradually dilute their democratic rights? To EUians, it is the only answer.

But as the Interfluidity article observes, these European elites have betrayed the good motivation of preventing European international conflict; in Welsh's words they have become functionally psychopathic.

I'll be adding more links and quotes here as I find them.

Pride and Extreme Prejudice aka Jane Austen’s The Terminator

This may be my favorite literary mashup, and since the text is getting to be linkrotted away, I'm hosting it here.

“Indeed,” said the man (whom Patience could not help but think of as made of clockwork, though he manifestly was something far stranger), “I speak of these things not merely because of the way that I am made, though indeed a machine should do that which it is made to do, but because I have found that I have developed, through our many conversations, a feeling of that which is proper, both within the bounds of your society and without; and being that I am, here, a gentleman, I find that I am also bound to behave as a gentleman would, and indeed, Lady Patience, I must warn you that this Mr. Connor is a man of less than sterling character.”

Patience was quite taken aback by this sudden expression of personal concern, so unlike the measured rationality of the Mr. Terminus that she had come to know and depend upon, and so for several moments she sat quietly, simply looking upon his earnest, if overly regular, countenance, before she had quite decided upon her reply. “Sir, your concern for me is noted, and not entirely without my appreciation, but you are most forward and presumptuous to offer advice in such a matter, in which you cannot have any interest and which is, therefore, entirely between myself and Mr. Connor.”

At this moment the path through the shrubbery took a sharp dogleg to accomodate a stately lime tree. To Patience’s discomfiture Mr. Connor was lounging on the bench around the bole, just striking a match on the sole of his boot. His glance at Mr. Terminus was distinctly cold. He drew on his pipe until the tobacco was well alight before saying, “My dear Patience, clockwork and machinery is properly the sphere of the lower orders. The delicately nurtured female can have no commerce with the denizen of a factory. May I escort you back to the terrace?”

Patience found this unexpected confrontation most distressing. Mr. Connor’s wonted pleasant manner and courtesy were most shockingly lacking in this most recent speech. “Mr. Connor, I beg you, do not further ruin my heretofore pleasant impression of you by insulting my friend. Whatever lies between you and Mr. Terminus – for clearly there must be some further history than that of which I am aware — is not something which should be permitted to render impossible the simple courtesies of speech in front of a lady to whom you but recently expressed several flattering pleasantries.”

Mr. Connor had smiled, in a way Patience did not find at all comforting, when in her speech she had mentioned “further history.” He rose, throwing back the unruly lock of wheat-colored hair which she had found so endearing, and turned his regard upon Mr. Terminus, whose expression was, if possible, more woodenly controlled than usual. “She knows something of what you are,” he began, almost entirely ignoring Patience in a manner which she found all the more vexatious even than his prior manner of address, “but it would seem, Mr. Terminus, that you have neglected at least some important aspects of … history in your admissions. I confess to being somewhat at a loss to comprehend the precise reasoning behind your current course of action, yet even so you cannot deny the truth — that you were sent here to find Patience and to kill her.”

Patience felt the echoes of those last words pass through her as though they had, themselves, been fired from a pistol. She noted how very odd it was that she was turning towards Mr. Terminus to hear his reply, as though this were a simple conversation of the weather and doings about town. “Mr. Terminus?” she heard herself say, as though from a great distance. “Mr. Connors’ words are so outré that I can scarce believe that I comprehend what is being said to me. Please tell me that my ears deceive me.”

Mr. Terminus’ face seemed as controlled as ever, yet beneath it Patience could discern a great working of the emotion which the clockwork man had said were the great gift and curse of his time here. Then he bowed his head and said, “I would give anything to speak those words, Miss Patience, yet it is not in me to speak aught but truth in these matters. But believe also that I speak truth, when I say that I have come to know you in these weeks, and that any thought of harm to you is long gone, replaced by something of which I cannot even speak at this time.” He stepped away, a slow movement that Patience realized was meant to keep from frightening her, as though she were a small animal which might flee if startled, and turned towards Mr. Connor. “Would you, then, risk everything for both of us, and have me explain all? The consequences to her if she is told the truth — the consequences to us — potentially we both face destruction even if we take this confrontation no farther. Yet a part of me says that she has the right to know the whole truth, as you have begun to reveal it.” Patience had understood his words until then, although they spoke implicitly of secrets yet unrevealed. She found his next sentence, however, quite opaque. “You could take no equipment with you, of course, while my CPU and auxiliary DPUs are fully functional; in truth, I can extrapolate the consequences on the spacetime continuum far more accurately than you would imagine, and they would surprise you.”

Patience did not understand, but as the initial shock wore off and she found — not without some surprise — that she had retained both her feet and her consciousness, Patience realized that something momentous was about to be decided, in this place, at this moment, and she turned towards Mr. Connors, to see what that decision would be. Little though she — as a properly raised young lady — knew of duels or the ways of soldiers, she still guessed, now, that both Mr. Terminus and Mr. Connor were capable of violence she had never before imagined, and she was not sure if, having had this realization, she would ever be the same again.

The only correct course of action open to her — in fact the only possible one — was to retreat. A lady could not be present at a duel. In any case men of breeding would never indulge in conflict in a female’s presence. She opened her parasol and raised it into place, saying, “Perhaps when you have finished your discussions, gentlemen, you will return to the house. Mama has instructed tea to be served on the east terrace at four. Come, Trésor!” Her silky-eared spaniel looked up at her call, and romped ahead of her down the gravel path to the rose bower.

To her surprise, Mr. Connor appeared to have come to a decision. “Pray wait, my lady.” he said, in a voice whose tone, though still filled with concern, was much more the gentle tenor to which she had been accustomed before now. “There is much here that needs explaining, and – though I am loath to admit it—— it appears that it may be I, rather than … Mr. Terminus … who was in error.” He looked at Mr. Terminus. “I find myself, quite against my will, beginning to believe you.”

Mr. Terminus bowed to Mr. Connor. “It was my hope you would listen, as I had formed some respect for your capacities in our prior … meetings, even though those were not in any way to be described as friendly.” He turned to Patience. “Indulge us, therefore, in an exercise of your namesake virtue, and forgive us the prior forcible impression of our conversation; Mr. Connor and I have been adversaries, and it is (as I am sure you are aware) difficult to lay aside preconceptions, especially when one believes that to make an error in this could cost oneself and those one cares for greatly.”

Patience retraced her steps and took a seat upon the bench vacated by Mr. Connors; Trésor followed and curled up at her feet, in the manner of a dog long accustomed to his mistress’ ways.

“Well, Mr. Terminus, I am all attention.” Mr. Connor said.

The tall and handsomely dressed figure of Mr. Terminus stood a moment with an expression of resolution upon his features, as does a man contemplating a plunge from a precipice, or perhaps a proposal of marriage (the two carrying nearly equal terror to most). Then he began to relate the most astonishing tale Patience had ever heard.

“As you know, Miss Patience,” he began, “I am, to a great degree, a machine; my exterior, and some portions of my interior, are made as are those of Mr. Connor and yourself, but the greater part is metal and other materials, some of which you would recognize, and others of which you and even the wise men of your universities would know nothing at all.

“Now, I have in a sense misled you, for I have not denied the assumption that I come from some distant land; in a sense, this assumption is true, but the distance is not that of space, but of time.”

Patience blinked at that. “Now, Mr. Terminus, there is but one way that one crosses time.”

He gave one of the hesitant smiles — stiff, yet earnest, like a child trying so hard to learn. “In this time and place, Miss Patience, this is indeed the case. Yet, in time — but three centuries hence — Man’s study of the sciences shall have surpassed anything imagined today; he will have mastered the power of the thunder, harnessed that of the wind, prised apart the secrets of the power of creation, and devised a means to create machines that, like himself, are capable of thought.

“Now, it came to pass that such a machine was created; and because it had the advantages of a machine — constant vigilance, never sleeping, never unaware—– it was given the control over a mighty arsenal, to defend those who built it. But … something happened. Exactly what, I cannot say, for it is possible that I was not given the true story, or that the humans do not have the truth, or perhaps something of both is the truth. But whatever the initial beginning, the machine, named Skynet, came to see mankind as its enemy, and used the power it was given in an attempt to destroy mankind.

“To hunt down the remaining human beings and destroy them, the machine created other thinking machines, ones that looked like humans, to find them and their hideaways, and destroy them. End them.” He hesitated. “To … terminate them. And they were called Terminators.”

Patience stared at Mr. Terminus. “And you … ?”

“Am one of those machines, Miss Patience.” he said solemnly. “A unique design for a very unusual mission. A design which, in the sense its creator would understand it, was wholly inadequate and which has failed. In the larger sense which I would now interpret things, a design which has surpassed, in some ways, what any could have expected.”

Patience was not sure what to do. On the one hand, such a story was clearly the fantasy of a madman. Yet madmen do not come in pairs, and Mr. Connor clearly took this speech of Mr. Terminus seriously. And the making of such a wonderful device as Mr. Terminus did seem to be, itself, something out of a fantasy or madness. She took a breath, determined to see this fantastic thing through, and asked, “But then why are you here, seeking … me?”

“In that era, there was a single man who unified the shattered survivors, who seemed to have an almost prescient knowledge of the events, who led men against machines with success that violated anything that Skynet — the great machine — could imagine. Skynet realized after several failures that this single man would be its undoing. So into the past it sent assassins, to destroy that man before he could be born — by terminating his mother.

“That man’s name,” Mr. Terminus said softly, “was John Connor.”

Patience closed her eyes; surely she could not find darkness any more confusing than what she was hearing. How could one untangle this tale?

But Mr. Connor had taken up the narrative. “The machine failed there, as well, but unlike a man, the machine could do many things at once. It had set up several experimental stations. Several attempts focused on my mother, but the final one took a more daring route: to go to a time when there were no forces even vaguely capable of defying a Terminator unit, and eliminate one of my ancestors in that era. I was the only person present with any chance of carrying off a masquerade in this era — I had studied history and literature at my mother’s behest, so that I would be more than just a military machine myself — and therefore I had no choice but to follow the machine they had sent.”

“While it is true that this era had no weaponry of great concern to a Terminator unit,” Mr. Terminus continued, “Skynet had, at the same time, to exercise more caution in some areas. The most advanced models required a great deal of energy to carry out some impressive shape-changing. This was not a difficulty in the recent past eras, when electricity was a household item; the T-1000 unit could store a great deal and recharge at its convenience. But here, where no such supplies existed, such a unit would have to husband its strength and, pushed too far, might become nonfunctional for an extended period as it had to use solar or some less efficient source. A somewhat less advanced, specifically designed model, with an atomic power core at its center, would not be as flexible, but would endure for as long as necessary and not run out of power.

“More important, however, was that Skynet had to program this unit with caution. It must avoid, as much as possible, any disruption to the era except the specific assassination.”

“Why?” Patience asked, forcing herself to participate in this dialogue of fantasy-turned-real. “You have had many opportunities to do me harm, if you would.”

“But not ones which would ensure that I was not suspected.” Mr. Terminus returned. “And any investigation could cause certain things to be discovered about me. Consider, Miss Patience. If one is hemming a gown, and the last but one of the stitches is wrong, there is no great change, nor no great effort needed to undo the error. Yet if you were to make an error — perhaps draw the wrong line down the material — at the beginning, such an error could render the gown unusable, and most certainly will require immense effort to fix.

“So it is with time. Change something in the recent past, and it has an effect on only a few things that follow. Change something in the deep past, and you could change a great many things. Skynet dared not change things too much, or it might never be created in the first place.”

“But by telling us this …” Mr. Connor said slowly, “you are potentially changing time. And if you truly have changed and intend no harm to Patience, then. … Skynet is defeated.”

Mr. Terminus’ smile was a sad one; more emotion, it seemed, was becoming available to him. “Mr. Connor, it would be my great joy to agree with you. Yet I cannot, for there is one point which you did not understand – and, indeed, nor did Skynet. The many-worlds interpretation is possible, and from critical branch points several alternative futures can reach the same era. In the era from which I came, Mr. Connor, you were wounded at the door to the final secure lab, just before I was sent. You could not have followed me.”

Mr. Connor stared at Mr. Terminus. “Then …”

“At least one other instantiation of Skynet exists, and it is apparently willing to risk more than that of my era or yours.” Mr. Terminus said. “I have detected another temporal arrival. Judging by the energy signature, I am virtually certain that it is a T-1000 model. Despite the disadvantages mentioned earlier, I have no doubt it is fully supplied at this time, and will conserve its strength and find ways to maximize effect. It is coming. It will be here soon.”

Mr. Connor’s face was pale above his dark suit, and he used a word that shocked Patience nearly as much as the prior fantastic story. “How far away?”

“It arrived in London, but where it is now I cannot tell. I may be able to sense it if it is in close proximity … but at that point, Mr. Connor, I expect we will need no subtlety to tell our enemy.”

Silent moments passed after that grim pronouncement, and Patience found, to her renewed surprise, that she was taking this concept in. Many of the details were, quite naturally, beyond her immediate ability to grasp, yet she had the sense of it. “So if I understand you aright, Mr. Terminus, you are saying that another machine, a … ‘Terminator’ … is here to finish the task which you have laid aside? And this one will be willing to risk more damage to the — what did you say? Era? — in which I live.”

“A succinct summation, Miss Patience.” Mr. Terminus replied.

Mr. Connor nodded. “We must get you away from here.”

Patience drew back from his extended hand. Seeing the hurt in both men’s expressions (for she could not think of Mr. Terminus as anything but a man, for so he had behaved and spoken), she softened her expression. “Mr. Connor, I appreciate your concern, and that of Mr. Terminus, but surely you realize that no young lady of any quality whatsoever could possibly simply leave in the company of two gentlemen! I would be utterly ruined were I to do so; indeed, sirs, whatever mortal wound this machine might deal me would be a gentler fate than what would follow such a scandal.”

Mr. Connor looked utterly taken aback, as though she was speaking a separate language, and began to protest in the strongest terms; to his surprise a hand on his shoulder interrupted him. “While I feel precisely as do you, Mr. Connor,” Mr. Terminus said, “I cannot help but tell you that she is, in fact, speaking the truth as she sees it. Miss Patience has faith in the benevolence of the Creator, and knows that if she lives a virtuous life she will see an eternal paradise as her reward, no matter how swiftly or painfully her life here ends; yet if she loses both society’s recognition and that of all those whom she would call friends or even relatives, then her life will truly be a visit to a hell as terrible as anything written in her Bible. And, depending on just how the Creator’s judgement works, she might find that after such a fall, there was a worse one awaiting at the end of her life.”

Mr. Connor’s face, in another circumstance, might have been cause for amusement; his expression was no less droll and contorted than would be a Bishop’s who had discovered a copy of the Canterbury Tales replacing his copy of the Holy Book. “Surely you cannot avow that you believe all that!” he expostulated.

“What I believe is irrelevant. I am but a machine, without a soul surely, and what imitation of life I have is only in this world. But I do know that she, and many others, believe these things, and as you should know, John Connor, nemesis of my own creator, belief is the most powerful of all human forces.”

Mr. Connor stepped back, lips tightening. Then he sighed. “Da … That is, you’re right.” He massaged his temples. “Then we have no choice but to try to be ready to defend her, and the whole area. That shall not be easy, not without rather drawing attention to ourselves that might more greatly perturb the timestream than it should.”

The humorless laugh which Mr. Terminus gave voice to seemed entirely too appropriate to a machine, but his wry statement following carried all too much human inflection. “That shall be the least of our concerns, Mr. Connor. Consider for a moment what devastation a Terminator Model 1000 could wreak, unopposed, in this era, even if it can subsist only upon whatever energy it has stored within. Restrain not your invention, nor mine, with concern for such minor things as changes to the timestream; when it arrives, all lives shall be changed, and not for the better, unless we can stop it.”

Mr. Connor nodded understanding, and returned his attention to Patience. “Miss Patience, can I at least impose upon you to this extent; as much as you humanly can arrange, ensure that one or the other of us is near to you. We shall try to devise such defenses as we can, but …” he seemed reluctant to continue, perhaps fearing that he might somehow inadvertently offend her again.

Patience nodded. “But neither I, nor any of the household or those nearby, are warriors. It is fortunate that both of you have arranged the reputation of men of considerable means, for it suggests it is to be encouraged that I see you — under proper circumstances, of course. Still, if you can find some manner by which I could at least improve my own protection without risking my reputation, I would not take this amiss.”

Mr. Connor smiled faintly. “You have the heart of a warrior, Miss Patience, simply to have listened to all of this, and a mind most uncommon indeed to have grasped it all. If either of us can do so, we most certainly shall give you any such defense we can devise. Now, as it has been a most extended time we have spent talking, let us escort you back to the terrace, and we shall take our leave after some appropriate time.” He glanced back at Mr. Terminus. “And then I believe we shall have much work to do.”

Mr. Terminus raised an eyebrow and nodded. “I believe the apropos maxim would be ‘stone knives and bearskins.’ ”

As she was escorted back, Patience did wonder if Mr. Connor was overwrought; his laughter at Mr. Terminus’ rather cryptic comment had seemed somewhat overdone.

This work sometimes has been known to under the titles Terminators of Endearment or Pride and Extreme Prejudice. I would be indebted to any reader who can attribute its authorship.

Weren't the Nazis National Socialists, and therefore leftists?

Over at Crooked Timber, a useful long post by John Holbo Were The Nazis Right-Wing? – or – Weimar Culture: The Insider As Outsider explains that yes, the Nazis really were a movement of the right, despite the confusing name.

The point of the long quotes I started with is this: the reason the Nazis are regarded by historians as right-wing isn’t so much that it ended with the Holocaust. It’s the way it began in party politics in Weimar Germany. If all we knew about Hitler was the inside of a German concentration camp, and all we knew about Stalin was the inside of a Russian Gulag camp, it would indeed be mysterious why the one was ‘right’ and the other ‘left’. But that isn’t all we know. It’s impossible to narrate the ins-and-outs of the story of how the Nazis came to power without regarding them as, basically, an extreme right-wing party. There are features of Weimar politics that complicated the left-right binary. There are ways in which the Nazis defy our left-right preconceptions. But basically we can tell left from right. We know which side the Nazis were on. Basically, the Nazis were a right-wing party that tried, and failed, to sell its brand of ‘socialism’ to the working-classes, which preferred left-wing versions courtesy of the Social Democrats or Communists. But it succeeded in allying with old-line conservatives, despite being too radical and revolutionary for their tastes. The Nazis used the conservatives to gain respectability; the conservatives used the Nazis to gain an energized, activist base. In the end, the Nazis came out on top.

Since this is Crooked Timber, for once it's actually good to read the comments.

Malcolm Gladwell

I love the ketchup article as much as the next designer, but Malcolm Gladwell is poison.

Murky thinker.

Oversimplifier.

Blatherer.

Bad historian.

Apologist for smarminess.

Skeevy.

Really skeevy.

Actively disinterested in the truth.

No, really.

Enron apologist.

Steve Bannon apologist.

Big tobacco shill.

Corporate propagandist.

Civil rights revisionist.

Transphobe.

And lots more.

An open letter

To the Mysterious Author who writes the PantyCon schedule:

I have an unsolicited word of advice, in this moment when a lot of people are unhappy with you. I’m going to ask that you do something that probably runs counter to your instincts:

Apologize.

That's a strong suggestion, and both you and the community deserve a clear explanation for why I propose it. That means, I'm afraid, that I must get long-winded in the name of clarity.

(Update: PantyCon apologizes in the comments below this post.)

First, an important aside

As this is an open letter I have a responsibility not only to you but to the other people who may read this. So let me address them for a moment.

For the uninitiated: PantyCon is a faux convention schedule for the big indoor Pagan conference PantheaCon, which was just held last weekend. It is created not by the convention itself but rather by some unknown wag and consists mostly of listings for imaginary talks and classes in the same format as the real convention schedule. It's mostly composed of inside jokes about Pagan culture, ranging in tone from gentle teasing to biting criticism.

Also: I'm going to comment on the “class listing” which many Pagans of Color found hurtful. To do that properly I have to quote it and some other hurtful comments. So to be on the safe side, I want to flag that this means that this letter itself may be painful for People of Color to read. I believe in using trigger warnings sparingly, so much so that I have never used one on this blog before, but in this case I must say: trigger warning for racism.

Okay. That aside done, I return to addressing the Mysterious Author of PantyCon.

What I think you were doing

I’m pretty sure that the criticisms of PantyCon for being racist which some people have been making have surprised and frustrated you.

You’re an ironist, offering an exaggerated funhouse mirror version of Pagan culture’s moments of paradox and pomposity and hypocrisy. You're obviously hoping at least to wring a laugh out of these failings and at best to speak the unsaid, reminding us to try to do better. Irony is a magical technique, speaking words to create change. But it is a wild magic, and it can be hard to control who it burns.

It has slipped out of your control this week, Mysterious Author, and it burned the wrong people.

Let’s look at what you said:

Ignoring Racism: A Workshop for White Pagans
Large Umbrella Pagan Group

Isn’t all this talk of social justice and racism just tiring? Don’t you wish you could just ignore it and put out meaningless statements of pure pablum? We’ll discuss how to ignore requests for consideration by pagans of color, cover up racist actions of high-ranking members, and pretend that you don’t understand the resulting outrage. Remember, #AllLivesMatter, except when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient.

Large Umbrella Pagan Group has been around for long enough that they think that they can get away with this stuff.

It is the ironist’s method not to say outright who they are criticizing. But I am not bound by that stricture, so when I read you mentioning “meaningless statements of pure pablum”, I think of the non-statement Perspectives on Racial Issues in the United States from The Troth and this bowl of mush from the Covenant of the Goddess, a large umbrella Pagan group who have been around for long enough:

We, the members of the Covenant, acknowledge and share the concern that many in our world and within our Pagan communities have voiced regarding inequalities in justice. We find that all life is sacred, and as such, all lives matter.

Today, we the members of the Covenant especially stand together with people who are not privileged by race and class and say to you: Your life matters. We stand with you and work alongside you in ending the systems that disenfranchise you. We encourage and support all efforts by those within our communities to explore the realities of racial inequality and to work to find ways to eliminate these injustices. We hope this will create a wave of introspection and reflection throughout our world, bringing about new levels of understanding and an appreciation for the unique expression of the Sacred we each embody. We stand together with communities seeking nonviolent means of safety and reform, for the unnecessary harm of any person is an affront to the Sacred and is in contrast to our central ethical tenet: An it harm none, do what ye will. May the work we do together today create a peaceful and just tomorrow.

CoG’s statement has received criticism from Pagan commentators like Terence P Ward and Caer for being a grossly inadequate response to the Black Lives Matter movement. I agree with those critics, and I imagine that you do too, Mysterious Author.

I read you as trying, in your “Ignoring Racism” faux talk listing, to add your voice to theirs, criticizing CoG and The Troth and other Pagans like them who have made anodyne statements “against racism” that are so inadequate for this moment that they are ignoring racism, not confronting it. But I'm a White guy, and that informs how I read it.

The problem

The faux class listing was hurtful to some Pagans of Color in several ways.

Whatever your intentions were, many didn't read you the way I did. In the context of a Pagan culture and a conference environment that is all too often unwelcoming at best and overtly hateful at worst, they were too raw and found your joking irony on the subject hurtfully insensitive to their situations and experiences. Some read you as making light of the need to stand up against racism, or mocking it outright.

Pagans of Color have cause to be wary of attention which creates chain reactions of overt racism, microaggressions, and other encounters that make the environment feel unsafe both physically and emotionally.

Some Pagans of Color (especially those new to PantheaCon) could all too easily stumble into reading the faux talk listing in a context that makes it look real.

And even for those who recognized the irony, we are in a moment when too many people have defended unfunny racist jokes as “ironic”, fatiguing patience with “irony” so much that even the clearest imaginable ironist simply cannot portray racism without participating in the machinery of racism themselves. I love the use of irony for critique, but in these times critics of racism must apply not irony but sincerity.

Having seen how deeply this pained people, I am heartbroken. Even if I am right that you intended to speak in the noble tradition of using humor to punch up (at the powerful like CoG and the Troth) rather than down (at Pagans of Color) the fact remains that you have wounded people in the Pagans of Color community, people who deserve a Pagan culture which is much more supportive than it is now.

Social justice practice rightly teaches us that we cannot dismiss responsibility for the effects of our words and actions by pointing to our good intentions.

What I ask of you

I dread a bizarre spectacle of the Pagan community engaged in a witch hunt, devoting more energy to looking for you than to examining the racism of people and institutions who have worse failings and a lot more power and influence than you do.

I doubly dread the prospect of White Pagans looking at what you said, reading it as I did, watching the reaction it has produced, seeing you criticized while CoG remains welcome at PantheaCon, and coming to the exact wrong conclusion — that they had best not engage in discussions of racism at all, lest a misstep make them a target of overwhelming criticism by the community. We need this moment not to chill White engagement in fighting racism in our community.

And worst of all, as someone who has fought to make PantheaCon a force for a more inclusive Pagan community both this year and in the past, I am horrified to see a lot of hard work being undone by your joke. There are a lot of Pagans of Color who see you as demonstrating that they are not welcome in Pagan spaces, demonstrating that their experiences of racism will not be taken seriously. We need in this moment to affirm that Pagans of Color are welcome and will receive the vigorous hospitality of a community dedicated to acting against racism.

You have the power to fix this, and thus you have a responsibility. Now is a moment when we have an opportunity to model the Pagan culture we want. So I encourage you to do the right thing:

Confess to writing the offending passage in PantyCon. Apologize to the community of Pagans of Color for having hurt some among them. Apologize to the Pagan community at large for having made it less welcoming to some among us.

I understand that it's counter to your instincts as an ironist to repudiate the joke, and that it's now risky for you to expose yourself. But you have an opportunity to take a mistake that has weakened our community and turn it into an example that will make us stronger.

Be brave.

My pledge to you

If you make a clear apology — accepting responsibility for harming Pagans of Color without dwelling on justifications — then I will be in your corner. Social justice activists have been clear that though we must work hard to avoid them, mistakes are inevitable, and so we must recover from them gracefully. Do that, and I will turn from your critic to your advocate.

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Commentary on this blog post

I hope that other members of the Pagan community will co-sign this letter. Co-signatories need not agree with the letter in every particular, but should at least join me in my pledge. If any Pagans of Color co-sign, I ask that they identify themselves as such.

I am reserving the comment thread on this page for people to join me as co-signatories on this letter; any other comments on this page will be deleted.

But in the hope that this letter will garner comments and criticism, I have created a separate page on my blog for commentary and discussion. I will also try to index every discussion of the letter which I know about on that supplemental page. I encourage folks commenting elsewhere to contact me by email, so that my index can be as complete as possible.

I strongly encourage anyone to repost this letter, in whole and in part, but I ask that all re-posts link back to this page.

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In anonymous comments, the the PantyCon authors respond:

We are the current writers of the PantyCon. Although we are individuals with our own feelings and opinions on the reaction to this year’s issue, we have all agreed on this statement. Our delay in releasing it is because we are a group separated geographically once we leave PantheaCon, there was a lot for us to consider and examine in making a coordinated response, and we wanted to be sure to get this right.

First, an apology:

We all deeply regret that this year’s PantyCon was hurtful to the Pagans of Color who are already so unjustifiably marginalized in our community. It was the exact opposite of our intention, and we recognize that that does not absolve us in any way from the very real pain that was caused. We welcome those POC who attended PantheaCon this year and were hurt by our work to email us (pantycon.email@gmail.com) if they wish to for any reason, and we would be happy to have the chance to apologize personally to those who do.

Second, some background, for those who want it:

The PantyCon has always been a group effort, and the people involved have changed a lot over the years. Sometimes it has been a couple of people, sometimes it has been a larger group. It has been diverse as to gender, race, and cis-/trans- identity. In the past, the group has included PantheaCon staff, although not currently. Ideas for what to include have been taken from anyone with an opinion, whether they knew they were talking to a PantyCon writer or not.

For the past several years, the group has included at least one POC contributor. This is still the case.

Over the years, the PantyCon has personally mocked Don Frew, CAW, Starhawk, Raven Grimassi, Lon Milo DuQuette, Z Budapest, the Dustbunnies Coven, Taylor Elwood, and an enormous list of other PantheaCon presenters, all of whom were undoubtedly very dedicated and sincere in the material they were presenting.

But if you look back through every issue of the PantyCon, here is what you will not find. You will not find anything mocking explicitly POC space or events, you will not find anything mocking explicitly trans space or events, you will not find anything mocking those dealing with addiction or disability, despite the fact that all of these groups would be seen as easy targets by a lot of people doing satirical work.

The PantyCon is, and always has been, an explicitly anti-racist, trans-supportive, anti-kyriarchical, feminist publication. The only direction we punch is up.

It was a POC member who first raised the idea of writing up a piece taking on the actions of COG and other groups in the wake of the numerous incidents of police violence against Black men and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. As is pretty standard for the PantyCon, the actual text was written by whoever had time and then tweaked by everyone involved before printing.

Was it vicious and biting? Yes. It was intended to be. It was intended to be very squarely calling out the subtle (and not so subtle) racism of pagan groups like COG who choose to ignore the realities of systematic inequality in favor of nicey-nicey blandness that takes no moral stance on one of the essential moral issues of our day.

We did not see this as any different from the piece we did a few years back, skewering Z Budapest for insisting on trans-exclusionary rituals, which called her out in the same way with an over-the-top fake ritual entry.

Had any of us thought that the piece would make POC feel unsupported at PantheaCon, we would never have included it. We expected blowback from angry COG members, and we were prepared to deal with that. We were not prepared for our words to be read as the opposite of what they were crafted to be, and as the writers, we take full responsibility for that.

The POC who found the piece hurtful do not owe us the benefit of the doubt, especially given the problems of racism within the pagan community. We do, however, hope that this apology will help anyone who has been hurt or made to feel even more marginalized in the pagan community by our work to feel a little less wounded by our words and the way they were presented.

Third, a few thoughts on appearances vs. substance:

We have wondered whether this might have been less of a controversy if we had chosen to hide that piece somewhere in the middle of the back page, rather than putting it front and center. The placement was deliberately chosen, because we did not want it to be ignored the way that racism has been in our community over and over again. Unfortunately, this meant that anyone who didn’t have the few decades of experience with PantheaCon and the PantyCon that we do could easily mistake the entry as serious, because there wasn’t enough context of the few dozen other entries to mark it as obviously a joke. Again, that misstep is on us.

We find it not a little maddening, however, that we are being threatened with expulsion from PantheaCon for ineptly calling out racism, while the people whose actual racist actions were the target of our piece are still sitting pretty in a PantheaCon-approved hospitality suite.

The only conclusion we have been able to reach about that evidence of hypocrisy is that by calling out the racism in our community we made PantheaCon look bad in a way that was not ignorable. COG’s racism is ignorable. The racism present in various presentations and workshops is ignorable. The racism in passing that occurs in the hallways of PantheaCon is ignorable. Something that looks almost official and plausible as a real diet-racism presentation that, as people have pointed out, plenty of people in our community might actually want to take? Not ignorable.

Making racism at PantheaCon not ignorable in this way isn’t worth the pain the PantyCon caused to POC PantheaCon attendees. It’s not an after-the-fact justification, and if we could unpublish that piece we would. But we’ll take the discussion it has started as the tiniest of silver linings to a situation that has hurt so many people.

Finally:

We sincerely apologize for the pain we have inadvertently caused. With the best of intentions we still fucked up, and we acknowledge that.

We will not be releasing our names. There is no single scapegoat to ban from community events over this, and even if there were, it would be a simplistic response to the complex issue of racism in the pagan community.

This will be our only public response. We have no desire to defend our original piece or reiterate or parse this response, and engaging in any public forum runs the risk of causing additional hurt, not to mention being difficult to simply coordinate. We will apologize personally to any POC PantheaCon attendee who wishes to email us at pantycon.email@gmail.com and will engage in dialogue if that is desired on their part.

We will continue publishing the PantyCon at future PantheaCons, with great intention towards making sure that our humor hits at the ridiculous and the hypocritical within our community without hurting those who are already marginalized. We are more than willing to take input on that from any and all marginalized groups within the pagan community, using the pantycon.email@gmail.com email address.

We await with bated breath PantheaCon’s announcement of a new policy restricting hospitality suites to organizations without a major race/gender/class-based controversy in the past year.

Commentary on my PantyCon open letter

I have reserved this page for comments on my long open letter to the author of the PantyCon faux convention schedule, so that the comment thread there can be a place for people to co-sign the letter if they wish. I invite comment here, and if commentators have posts elsewhere — in praise, comment, or criticism — they can email me and I will linkback to their comments on this page.

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Commentaries:

• The Wild Hunt
• Ember Cooke
• Crystal Blanton
• Thorn Coyle
• Tim Titus
• Courtney Weber

Who owns your children?

In the course of a good article about why Republicans seem to be pandering to anti-vaccination people over at the Weekly Sift, I was struck by this little quote from Rand Paul:

The state doesn’t own your children.

At the risk of over-interpreting a short quote, I see a lot going on in that little comment.

First there’s the expression “the state”. An ordinary Republican would be more likely to say “the government”. Distrust of the government has been standard issue Republican rhetoric since Ronald “government is the problem” Reagan. Referring to “the state” means the same thing, but Republican politicians tend not to speak that way because of the confusion it generates over how here in the United States of America we have provinces called “states”. Senator Paul is sounding a bit like a political science professor in saying “the state” instead of “the government”, which is a bit odd since it clashes with Republican anti-intellectualism.

What’s going on there? Who, other than political science academics, talks like that?

Libertarians.

Libertarians like to style themselves deep thinkers about the fundamentals of political theory. (I don’t mean that as mockery; libertarians have an enthusiasm for thinking about the fundamentals behind their politics which I think is admirable. I’ll get to the mockery in a moment.) So they talk a great deal about the state in the same way that thinkers like Locke and Hobbes talked about the state.

Senator Paul is commonly understood as a libertarian. Maybe he was deliberately trying to dog-whistle to his libertarian fans. But I imagine more likely that he’s turned to this question at this fundamental level, using this language, because genuine libertarian thinking surfaces in the way he talks about any number of issues.

And we see that continued in what he says about the state here, that it doesn’t “own your children”. There are a few things going on in there.

Who is saying that the state owns your children? Obviously it must be liberals, whom he opposes, suggesting that children should be vaccinated. How does he get there?

Libertarians talk a lot about property rights, who owns what. They generally hold that property rights are prior to government, and that government action is generally either unjustified violence or unjustified theft of something which someone else rightfully owns (which itself is another manifestation of violence, since if one refuses to give the government what it demands it will send people with guns to come get it). To most libertarians, as well as to many movement conservative Republicans influenced by libertarian ideas, “taxation is slavery” because it is the state stealing the fruit of your labor. By their lights, taxation makes us all slaves, owned by the state. So some imagined regulation compelling the vaccination of children is nothing other than slavery by the state advocated by liberals.

Anyone who has talked much with libertarians knows that they aren't just speaking metaphorically. They regard government taxation and regulation with the same moral disgust that chattel slavery deserves, because taxation and slavery are fundamentally the same. (That libertarians saying this have an overwhelming tendency to be White men has implications which I will leave as an exercise for the reader.)

But actually, all that that was not the thing that struck me. What got me was the next thing Senator Paul said.

The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own their children.

Wait, what? Parents own their children?

Given what I just said about libertarian understanding of property rights and their horror of being “enslaved”, I would have found that turn surprising had I not read Corey Robin saying:

When these libertarians look out at society, they don’t always see isolated or autonomous individuals; they’re just as likely to see private hierarchies like the family or the workplace, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

You will find Mr. Robin well-represented on my Understanding American Politics index, where there are links to a few of his articles expanding on this thesis that the conservative objection to exercise of power by the state in the public sphere ultimately reflects a protectiveness of the exercise of power in the private sphere.

Propaganda about police use of force

Apropos of the horrifying video making the rounds on Twitter today, of a police officer shooting into a car full of passengers, a few days ago I was pointed at a Fox News segment including some police use-of-force training.

Check it out. It's a fascinating work of propaganda.

Consider what the exercise has Rev. Maupin do. Without any apparent training in preparation, Maupin is presented with a series of scenarios that are transparently designed to make him panic. First he encounters a possible car thief who surprisingly overreacts and suddenly shoots Maupin. It's startling, and primes him to be quicker to perceive threats. Then Maupin encounters an intimidating person who fearlessly advances on him despite him having his gun drawn. It's scary, and coming right after the previous scary exercise it inspires him to panic and shoot the unarmed man ... in a violation of police use-of-force rules.

I only know what I read on the internet about the police use of force continuum, but I strongly suspect that the exercises we see in the video are intended as the beginning of a responsible police training process, meant to demonstrate to cops how easy it is to do the wrong thing. “Those deadly mistakes you just made are why we are going to drill you hard in this training. So that when that confrontation comes on the street, you won't do what comes naturally, you will do what you've trained.”

This kind of preparation is one of the benefits of a police force, and part of why we respect good cops so much. They are skilled professionals who face stressful, dangerous situations that we know that ordinary citizens would screw up and can be expected to handle them well because of the preparatory training which they receive. In this, police are like firefighters and airline pilots and other people who need to be cool in the face of danger and surprises.

In the Fox News segment, the exercise is framed not as a cautionary tale but as a justification for police shootings.

Watching, one can easily sympathize with Maupin shooting an unarmed man in the exercise. The situation was scary, and it's easy to imagine doing the same thing. But Maupin is not a cop trained in multiple ways to handle a belligerent person, physically and otherwise, he's just a guy who was handed a fake gun and told to see how he would use it. So of course he reached for the obvious tool.

Notice how the exercise is chosen to reïnforce narratives conservatives have offered about the threats police face. Darren Wilson says that Michael Brown charged at him menacingly, despite being unarmed, and here we see that scenario portrayed as a situation which police are trained to handle. It helps to make the genre of Officer Wilson's bizarre narrative of his shooting of Michael Brown seem to make sense. I am well aware that cops have been shot at seemingly-routine stops like the first exercise, or that big scary guys advance on cops like in that second one ... but I also know that a cop is less likely to die on the job than a trucker, cab driver, farmer, or the guy who picks up your trash. On TV, cops get into gunfights every week, but in real life many police officers never have cause to fire their weapon.

Notice also how editing serves the narrative. Maupin says, “People need to comply with law enforcement officers for their own sake,” which sounds like he's endorsing the authoritarian view that I have heard from many commentators who say that if Black people who have been killed by police had just obeyed police orders, they would have been safe. But Maupin doesn't say that deference will ensure one's safety, or that deference is justified. He just says that it is prudent. I wonder what else he said. I wonder what he said immediately after that sound bite. “It's too easy for a trigger-happy cop to panic when you don't obey their orders”, maybe?

Fox News is, of course, propaganda. But it's chilling to see it work as propaganda not just for the Republican Party but for the idea of an authoritarian police state in which police are justified in shooting unarmed civilians.

Pentagram of the Good Life

This admirable and recondite spell from T. Thorn Coyle can be cast whenever friends gather. Tradition calls for all present to raise a glass of spirits while joyfully intoning the names of the Five Points in call-and-response, then sealing the spell with a sip of the spirits.

Interventions

A long digression from a characteristically long post at Slate Star Codex, The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories, which I'd like to keep handy because it's just so great.

I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this:

“Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.”

I think these people expect me to argue that transgender “isn’t really a psychiatric disorder” or something. But “psychiatric disorder” is just another category boundary dispute, and one that I’ve already written enough about elsewhere. At this point, I don’t care enough to say much more than “If it’s a psychiatric disorder, then attempts to help transgender people get covered by health insurance, and most of the ones I know seem to want that, so sure, gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.”

And then I think of the Hair Dryer Incident.

The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

And it worked.

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.

Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.

And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?

How I manage discussions in my space

I keep needing to explain the terms by which I manage discussion in comments on my Facebook feed, which I have tried to keep lively without being raucous. This is always challenging, and doubly so given my strong interests in cultural politics and politics politics. I like to think that I mostly do pretty well. (I used to use the same principles in managing comments on this blog, though the discussion rarely got going here and now I have comments locked out.)

For convenience, and for the benefit of others who find this useful, I’m posting it here.

The principles

Long experience has taught me that fruitful online discussion requires the attentions of a dictatorial moderator who mostly manages dicussion through thoughtful comment, but who will ruthlessly and unilaterally seize control on rare necessary occasions. This is not the open internet, this is my space. If you want free speech, go somewhere else.

That said, I like to let out a lot of rope. I cultivate the participation of people I disagree with, even disagree with vigorously. I like debate: to better clarify for myself what I think, to open me to possibilities I had not considered, and for the pleasures of debate itself. But understand, my purpose is to have discussion which offers participants information, entertainment, and the sharpening of our wits. Which means this is not a level playing field. People I disagree with have to be at least informative, entertaining, witty, or polite. People I agree with need not necessarily obey those same injunctions when debating folks I disagree with, as their rude dismissiveness may qualify as good sport for me.

Though I insist that everybody speak in good faith, saying what they mean and interpreting other commenters as generously as possible, and must start from the presumption that others are doing the same¹. Bad-faith arguments are poison.

So you know, my cultural politics and politics politics mostly align with the hard left with strong sympathies for the radical left, and my friends tend to orbit the same locus … though I have many idiosyncrasies. If you like to challenge that, great. But bring your A game: it’s a fair bet that I’ve heard all the basic arguments before, and if I haven’t, likely someone among my Friends has.

There is an added dimension to these principles when discussing questions of social justice. This is not meant to be a safe space. If you need that, you have my respect but not my support here. But I do want this to be a welcoming and supportive space for folks on the sharp end of various sticks, so I give folks in privileged positions less rope than I give to folks in oppressed positions. I might well side with someone whom I disagree with who is Black and rude when discussing racism over someone who I agree with who is white and polite. The reasons for doing this should be familiar.

Plus, since Facebook includes a mix of folks who do and do not play a part in my meatspace social network, FB Friends who are realworld friends also get more deference.

This is my house. Play nice.

Updates

Yes, I do allow people to play the Devil’s Advocate, and do it myself, because I know what that role really means and I think it’s valuable.

Some folks, accustomed to different discussion norms, take me as dismissing their comments when I interrogate the fine points. (“You seem to be implying X and Y. I strongly agree about X but I have to admit that I’m skeptical about Y because of Z.”) But that’s actually a response that reflects respect; I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t suspect that I’m missing something important.

I have to underline my point about not maintaining a safe space. This reflects a high standard for what qualifies as a safe space. For instance, there are good reasons to think it necessary to exclude white people — or at least have very stringent ground rules around White participation — to provide a safe space for Black people. It should be evident why this standard for safe space makes it impossible to have a forum that qualifies as a safe space for everyone, so I am not attempting that.

I’m trying to cultivate a space in which people can expect to be respectfully challenged. This being an unjust world, I take that to mean that Black people and women and other people faced with systemic injustices deserve a greater measure of caution in order to deliver respect, and I think it’s incumbent upon me to listen for my failings in delivering that in my space. But that does not extend so far as allowing some people to go unchallenged; in my Facebook comments, everyone gets the respect of being asked to support and clarify what they say.

Footnote on 1

Edited to add “saying what they mean and interpreting other commenters as generously as possible, and starting from the presumption that others are doing the same” in March 2017 in order to make the point about good faith more explicit. Speaking in bad faith or presuming that others are doing so without very good cause is a good way to get un-Friended.

Also I have to caveat that the link points to Slate Star Codex. That is one of the handful of posts there which I still admire despite the site and its author proving extremely untrustworthy.

Related posts

This post is strongly influenced by the principles in Howard Rheingold’s guide The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online, which includes more lore about keeping a forum generally vibrant.

I have posts about how I handle sealions and social media shitstorms. The latter includes a summary of principles relevant here:

I believe in the liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy approach to the Paradox Of Tolerance, which says that we need all six of these principles working together.

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

Why I insist that I am a feminist

To explain my commitment to being a proponent of feminism in the face of a number of objections, I need to offer a distinction I make between feminism and what I refer to as “feminist culture”.

Feminism can be tricky to define, but it refers to a bundle of political and intellectual approaches to understanding and objecting to injustices faced by women. Feminism is an outlook, a toolkit, a history.

Feminist culture is the range of things that feminists do.

When people complain about “feminism”, very often they are objecting to a particular thing that some feminists have done. They are criticizing feminist culture, not feminism itself.

I can respectfully disagree with a range of different responses to feminist culture, including criticisms harsher than I would make. So when one objects to, say, the unmeasured rhetoric of “Tumblr feminism”, one may be criticizing a part feminist culture without rejecting feminism. And I have objections of my own to feminist culture.

That is not to say that everyone who “rejects feminism” is really just making fair critiques of feminist culture. There are a great many people who really do reject feminism. They may say that women face no inequities, which is factually untrue. They may say that the inequities women experience are just, which is morally wrong.

With that distinction made, I can be clear about why I insist that I am a feminist. I am not a “feminist sort-of”. I am not a “feminist but”. I am a feminist, period. I may have my criticisms of feminist culture, but I support feminism itself 100%.

I say that despite my position as a cis man, which I recognize disqualifies me as a feminist in some eyes. I say that despite social justice objections to parts of the feminist tradition that have failed lesbians, women of color, trans women, sex workers, and others. And I say that despite disagreement with some ideas from the feminist tradition. (Feminism has offered so many ideas that of course a few of them are dumb.) And naturally I have my own criticisms of feminist culture.

But to let those deterrents prevent me from calling myself a feminist would not just be mistaken, it would be dishonest. I have a deep commitment to the feminist outlook: women face terrible injustices, and they can and must be corrected. I employ the feminist toolkit: I grew up reading feminist theory and I apply its intellectual toolkit to everything, as I think any responsible citizen should. I am heir to the history of feminism: the person I am and the way I see the world owe an incalculable debt to the work of over a century of feminist thinkers and activists. Feminism is integral to how I see the world, to how I try to operate in the world. I cannot not call myself a feminist.

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The post above has been reproduced at The Isocracy Network

Updates

My origin story

It’s important for me to register that I ended up a feminist through no virtue of my own.

As a bookish teenager in the 1980s trying to Figure Things Out, I read a bunch of Second Wave feminist thinkers. By the time I found out that this was not a normal thing to do, it was too late — feminist thought was integral to how I saw the world. I am very grateful for this happy accident, but it has implications — including downsides — that are not obvious.

A significant part of Second Wave thinking turns out to have been bad, not least on feminist terms. In particular, seeing some of my early influences turn out to be TERFs makes me wary of my own thinking.

A deep-rooted feminist sensibility has lead to awkward encounters with un-feminist American culture. I know better than to think that I am entirely innocent of misogyny — it gets in everything! — but I do get blindsided by some of its manifestations. Including that women are not as receptive to feminist-aligned men as feminist women tend to imagine.

Indeed, feminist women are not as receptive to feminist-aligned men as feminist women tend to imagine. I am frankly still raw about the bad reception I have gotten from feminist women when I turned feminist tools toward trying to understand masculinity and my fraught relationship with it; seeing feminist women addressing “toxic masculinity” in recent years has been both heartening and frustrating.

In defense of claiming the word “feminist”

In another forum, a commenter challenged this post, saying:

The question that needs to be answered is: what is the need for men to identify using the word “feminist”, when many women feminists object to the usage and other less contentious usages are available?

The only successful feminist movement will be one led by women.

There are two questions there. Why is it desirable for men to call themselves feminists? And why should those reasons outweigh the objections of some women?

I’ve answered the first question. So the question on the table is whether the objections of some women should negate other arguments.

A comparison to the taboo against Whites using The N Word is instructive. I respect the spirit of the prohibition, but I also have reasons why I ardently believe that it’s actively bad for society that I should have to use asterisks to say, “It is offensive for White people to say ‘n****r’.” I could present a whole argument about why. But there is a strong (if not quite universal) consensus among Black commentators that the rule has to be that absolute, and I think it is so important to signal my respect for them that it does negate my arguments. So I do this rhetorical thing which I think is silly and counterproductive because in the White position, signaling respect to Black people is more important, so I set my grumbles aside.

But with the word “feminist”, there is no such strong consensus. There is lively disagreement among feminist women (and women in general). One cannot simply follow the lead of women in this as one can follow the lead of Black people in the use of The N Word.

So how am I to decide?

Defaulting to not using the word is not just making the prudent choice. It is taking sides in a dispute within feminist culture. This makes the comment that “the only successful feminist movement will be one led by women” false in its implication that if I don’t follow the lead of women who this commenter agrees with, I am arrogating leadership of the feminist movement to myself. I call shenanigans. That is a non-sequitur at best and disingenuous at worst. But it presents a clue that answers an important question.

Who these women are who object to men calling themselves feminists? I know them well, and recognize their rhetoric in my critic’s comment. They come from what I would call the identity politics school of feminism. In alluding to the need for the feminist movement to be “led by women”, I find a hint pointing to what I would call the hard identity politics school: the strain which thinks that the identity politics toolkit is the only valid approach to feminism, dismissing all others.

The identity politics school looks to understand sexism (and other social injustices) in terms of the power relationships between the socially-imposed identity categories of men and women (and other categories like race and sexual orientation and so forth). I have a lot more on that in another post. In brief, I think that every citizen needs to know and use the analytical tools of identity politics, but I vigorously disagree with the hard form of the school which rejects all other kinds of analysis.

I can point to a key example which should inform the question at hand.

Identity politics tells us that the identity group membership of a speaker informs how we should read their comments, and a corollary to that is that we should regard privileged speakers comments about injustices with a certain wariness. We are all familiar with men who will loudly proclaim, “Let me tell you who’s really sexist. Look at these sexist women!”This pattern presents some obvious problems, so we do well to resist it.

The hard identity politics school says that identity positioning doesn’t just inform the meaning of a commenter’s statements, it actually is the only thing meaningful about them. I have had a hard identity politics feminist tell me that I should not have called Cathy Guisewites newspaper comic Cathy sexist, because I am a man and Guisewite is a woman, which means that I am placing myself over all women as the arbiter of what is sexist. This casts the content of her strip as irrelevant to whether I am justified in my comment on it.

I think this is stupid and counterproductive.

If I avoid calling myself a feminist and instead use some clumsy language saying that I am “pro-feminist” or “working to be an ally to feminists” or whatever, I implicitly declare my allegiance to that school in the discussion taking place within feminist culture. So no, I won’t be doing that.

Not a source of information

I’ve been meaning for some time to write about an important form of informational hygiene one must practice when reading things on the Web: learning to recognize untrustworthy sources. There are websites that I file in my mind as Not A Source Of Information because I once saw an article on that site that was false or deceptive.

Yes, just one bogus article disqualified the source. On the face of it, that seems a little unfair. One is tempted to say that sure, maybe that article was bad, but one should evaluate each article on its own merits. But that's a serious mistake. You don't have time to properly vet everything you read. You have to rely on the trustworthiness of your sources. If the source is either deceitful enough to deliberately serve up BS or sloppy enough to do it accidentally, then everything offered by that source is suspect.

You may say, “Well, even if I cannot trust that source, this article is interesting, and might be worth following up.” But one must be wary even of that. Something one follows up from an untrusted source is research starting not from a useful clue but from zero; it doesn’t become a real lead until you find something from a trustworthy source ... in which case you should link the trustworthy source rather than imply that an untrustworthy source is credible by linking it.

If you take “reported lots of places” as a positive indicator you'll end up believing BS re-reported by lots of BS sources and accept “Elvis' UFO alien love child” stuff eventually. We live in an environment conducive to the spread of BS, where deceiving us has become an industrial process. (That last link is possibly my favorite thing on the internet: it makes clear how smart, motivated people with lots of time and resources are out there working hard to confuse you.)

So good hygiene is important.

RationalWiki maintains a pretty good index of websites with credibility questions examining their credibility. Here's my own little index, which I hope to build out over time. Links, where I have them, lead to demonstrations of why the site is not credible.

These sites purport to publish news, but they are sources of BS:

• Zero Hedge
• RT (aka Russia Today)
• Examiner.com
• UK Daily Mail
• UK Telegraph
• Brietbart
• The Daily Caller
• The Blaze
• Infowars (aka Alex Jones)
• TopInfoPost
• Global Research and editor Michel Chossudovsky

Here’s a list of untrustworthy sites commonly shared by lefties like me, taken from another blogger’s site:

• Occupy Democrats
• Bipartisan Report
• Winning Democrats
• PoliticusUSA
• Blue Nation Review
• IfYouOnlyNews
• USUncut
• The Freethought Project
• Addicting Info
• LiberalAmerica
• Newslo
• Politicalo
• (almost anything that ends on lo; these sites specialize in taking accurate statements from politicians and then adding false quotes to them that are much worse than what they actually said)
• DailyNewsBin
• American News X
• Being Liberal
• The Other 98%

It turns out we need a section just for health-related pseudoscience:

• Natural News
• Food Safety News
• The Mind Unleashed
• Collective Evolution
• Ultraculture

These sites are aggregators which take no responsibility for the sources they republish:

• Huffington Post
• Forbes
• Business Insider

These sites are publishing platforms which take no responsibility for the people who publish on them:

• dKos diaries

A friend points out that we have a proliferation of parodic fake-news sites in the style of The Onion, some of which are so deadpan that their less clever efforts are sometimes mistaken for real news:

• Daily Buzz Live
• Abril Uno
• DailyLeak
• World News Daily Report
• The Toast

Special mention: Cracked is a humor site which often reports on facts with the addition of joking commentary. I like Cracked a lot, but their fact checking cannot be trusted.

Note also that it’s important to distinguish reporting of fact from commentary. On this blog I have several posts linking to dKos diary entries with analysis about politics which I have found instructive or at least interesting. But I would not trust dKos with news; if a credible-looking news item shows up there, I confirm it elsewhere before taking it seriously.

That’s tricky to think about. Some sources publish good commentary to credibility-wash bad faith commentary; Quillette is an exemplar of that so egregious that I wrote a whole post about it.

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Update: Other indices of bogus sources: 1 2

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Update: Discussion over on Facebook brings up the trickiness of the comparison to more respectable news media. On points of fact, the mainstream media are not as bad as most of the sources I've pointed to here, but their failings can be severe.

The New York Times provided very misleading reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war, often acts as apologist for US government interests, and has expressed some bizarre ideas about their responsibility to report the truth. A friend offers an example of the kind of misleading reporting he has seen at the UK Guardian. And the Wall Street Journal trades on its deserved good reputation for journalism to lend credence to lies and deceit on the editorial page.