Zombie Jesus

There's no such thing as the "radical right"

2010-10-27T10:14:00.000-05:00

This is a pedantic semantic post. But words mean things, and this is a case where in particular it is important not to confuse and equate two very different versions of the extreme.

It has become increasingly common to refer to crazy, xenophobic, homophobic, authoritarian, market-fundamentalist right-wing assholes as "radical." Nothing could be further from the truth.

For what does radical mean? At its core, radical politics has always been about a fundamental change in the basic assumptions underlying society and its functioning. Anarchists looking to demolish both capitalism and the state were radicals. Communists, looking to demolish capitalism by seizing the state were radicals. Even liberals and social democrats, in calling for fundamental changes to certain parts of the functioning of capitalism and government, could bleed into radicalism if given a push.

But there is nothing about right-wing objectives (of either the blatant fascist state-authoritarian or the closeted libertarian capital-authoritarian varieties) that challenges the current system. Rather, right-wing assholes want to magnify the basic assumptions of our presently-broken society. Don't challenge racism -- expand it! Don't temper capitalism -- strenghtn it! Don't liberate the gays from homophobia -- destroy them! Don't reduce imperialistic militarism -- send it to more places!

There are two general poles in politics, the democratic left and the authoritarian right. Nobody could claim that even the most radical leftist wants to invent a new society out of whole cloth. But the radical left really is radical, "striking at the root" of the problems of society, as the word originally meant. The "radical" right is deeply conservative and reactionary, built around change only insofar as it is more of the same. The left wants a change in quality, not quantity.

I'm Breaking Up With Apple

2010-05-01T08:32:00.001-05:00

For the last month or so I've had iPad Fever. It's a fairly common ailment from what I hear. I've long been a lover of Apple products, and the iPad exemplifies why. It's a masterpiece of industrial and user interface design. It does exactly what it needs to do and does it well. But I'm probably never going to buy an iPad.

That sound you hear is my wife sighing with relief.

Every relationship has to be judged, at some point, for its long-term potential. My growing problems with the iPhone and iPad are not the physical products, but the company and future. I don't really have any hesitation telling people they would love a MacBook. But the iPhone and iPad are not MacBooks, and the differences in this case make a difference. Let me illustrate with a small example.

One of the reasons for my iPad Fever was the idea of iBooks. I love books, but when I say that I mean I love the content of books. I am fairly indifferent to the form factor books come in. The idea of having my entire library with me at all times, with the ability to expand it instantly on demand, is terribly, terribly enticing. I would love to switch almost exclusively to digital books at this point.

But suppose I bought my iPad and started buying my books through the iBookstore and reading them in the iBooks app. A few years from now, I might have 500 books. Now suppose that I no longer want to use an iPad. Maybe Steve Jobs left Apple and the new CEO drove it into the ground. Maybe some hot new company becomes the "new Apple" and their line of tablets and smartphones is just plain better. So I buy my new device and want to read my books on it.

I can't.

Well, that's not strictly true. It's more accurate to say that I can't legally. I am forced to either continue using Apple products forever or break the law to read my books that I purchased. It would be like (and thanks to Cory Doctorow for this analogy) if I bought a special Barnes and Noble bookcase, and it was illegal to shelve any books bought from Barnes and Noble on an Ikea bookcase. Also, I have to read them in a Barnes and Noble recliner.

DRM is practically useless. If put in this position, I would almost certainly crack the DRM on my books and transfer them illegally, but I shouldn't have to make that choice. Sadly, this applies not only to books, but to movies and some music as well (and other devices, such as the Kindle or Nook, are just as guilty). The iPad is a great media consumption device, but committing any significant amount of media-buying effort to using the iPad makes you either an Apple user for life or a criminal.

Note that this is not at all the case if I were to do the reverse. That is, I could use any number of non-Apple products with DRM-free media and then, if I decide that I want to plug back into the Appleverse for good I can bring my books and movies and music with me without too much trouble.

Some might be comfortable with committing to Apple for life. They do, after all, make fantastic products. But we just don't know what the future holds. And for me, there is also just something fundamentally, philosophically wrong in not getting full control of what I buy. Apple's lockdown doesn't only include media. They also act as strict gatekeepers to what software they will allow users to install on their iPhones and iPads. You are, more literally than ever, a user of Apple products, not an owner -- despite paying for them.

This wasn't always the case. While Apple has always bundled Mac OS exclusively with Mac hardware, once the computer was yours there were no substantial limitations on what you could and couldn't do with it. Nobody was stopping you from running any program you wanted, legally, nor was anybody stopping you from playing or viewing any media -- aside from that which was already DRM'ed, which wasn't really Apple's fault. But in the last few years there has been a steady and clear progression towards a closed ecosystem in which Apple products are no longer the user's, free to do with as she pleases. Apple products are increasingly focused on making an admittedly smooth and enjoyable experience at the expense of genuine ownership, freedom, and in many cases, creativity.

Equally troubling is the lockdown on development. What we get offered in the iPhone/iPad App Store is only an Apple-approved subset of the apps actually written. But we have no way to install any non-Apple programs without jailbreaking our devices, which is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with Apple's official OS updates and, they claim, illegal as well. But worse still is the fact that Apple doesn't merely reject apps that are unstable or inferior, they also prohibit competition with their own apps and impose their particular moral vision on the selection. Apple can and does reject apps for any reason it wants, and in doing so, they restrict my choices in ways I'm not comfortable with.

Don't misread me. Apple is entitled to be a competitive, secretive company. Their vertical hardware-software integration strategy is one of the key reasons for the stability and sheer delightfulness of Apple products. Exercising full control of the experience virtually ensures that for the average user the experience is a great one. I don't think Apple is "evil," nor do I think anyone who wants an iPad or a MacBook is wrong for getting one.

As for me, I've decided that the Apple ecosystem is one I'm no longer going to be a part of. I will happily let my friends and family continue to use them unaccosted for as long as they are happy to use them. I'm not really going to evangelize on this point unless things get very, very bad. But when it comes time for me to buy a new personal computer just for myself, it's probably going to be a notebook running Linux. And when it comes time for me to buy a new phone (almost 2 years from now, thanks to AT&T's contract) it's probably going to run Android. And when it comes time to buy books, music, and movies online, I'm only going to if when I buy them they're really mine. That's just me.

So I'm sorry, Apple, I still love you dearly but we can no longer be together. If you get over your DRM addiction and open up a little, give me a call sometime. If I'm computationally single then, I'd love to take you back.

Skeptical Veganism

2010-04-10T23:09:00.007-05:00

There are many schisms in the vegan/animal rights movement. Perhaps the one that gains the most attention these days is that between the self-styled "abolitionists" and, well, everyone else. However, there is a more fundamental split among the vegan ranks that doesn't seem to be acknowledged often at all.

Vegans can be divided into two groups: a priori vegans and skeptical vegans. A priori vegans take veganism as the starting point of any decision involving animals; a priori is the Latin for "prior to," a term routinely used in philosophy to describe knowledge one "just has" before observation and experience. One striking example of a priori veganism comes from Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights. Regan, attempting to dismantle the utilitarianism of Peter Singer, cites the fact that, depending on the actual consequences, utilitarianism might not provide a strong case for vegetarianism as one of several reasons to reject it as a moral theory. Regan has decided a priori that vegetarianism (which he uses to mean veganism as well) is correct. Veganism isn't merely the logical outcome of his moral theory; the theory is constructed to justify veganism.

Building a belief system out of one's conviction that veganism is right isn't the only manifestation of a priori veganism. More commonly, vegans will use the definition of veganism as sufficient reason to do or not do some particular thing. Take the anti-consumerist activity known as freeganism. So-called freegans never buy animal products, but will use them if they would otherwise go to waste. A lot of freegans will, for example, go dumpster diving and might eat edible food containing animal products that has been thrown out. An a priori vegan will state without equivocation that this is wrong because vegans don't eat animal products period. Something being "not vegan" is automatically enough to make it wrong. Perhaps it is wrong. But if it is, there is something that makes it so other than not conforming to a particular word's definition.

We can contrast a priori veganism with skeptical veganism. The word skeptical here refers not to skepticism about the goodness of being vegan, but to the traditional skeptical position of requiring evidence to support one's views. The skeptical vegan is a vegan because veganism is consistent with her considered moral beliefs; if, somehow, it became clear that non-vegan activity was consistent with those considered moral beliefs, the veganism would go, not the beliefs. Some a priori vegans may say this makes the skeptical vegan no vegan at all.

Another way of distinguishing these positions is to say that a priori vegans see veganism as an end itself, while skeptical vegans use veganism as a means to some other end. Skeptical veganism can arise very simply from common moral judgments: we ought not cause avoidable harm, animal products harm animals, we can avoid animal products, therefore we ought to be vegan and avoid animal products. Veganism is here the means to the end of not harming animals.

A priori vegans are naturally concerned with not harming animals as well, but they extend veganism to cover cases in which no harm could possibly result. Suppose a vegan comes across a recently dead animal in the deep country. This vegan decides on a whim to eat the animal then and there, and never tells anyone about it. He is clearly not directly causing harm, nor is he contributing to the pervasive belief that animals are property which allows others to cause harm. The skeptical vegan quite probably calls this harmless hypocrite disgusting and may hope he gets diarrhea for his trouble. The a priori vegan, in contrast, calls him immoral. The a priori vegan is perfectly right to say that the hypocrite is not a vegan, at least so long as he keeps such things up. The question is whether being vegan or not actually matters, morally, in cases such as these.

One suspects there are two reasons for the difference between a priori and skeptical veganisms. First is simply commitment. Anyone who devotes any significant time to a cause is subject to a consolidation and solidification of her beliefs. Most vegans begin from a position of compassion for animals, and likely take the simply steps outlined above to arrive at a position resembling skeptical veganism. But over time, veganism becomes so engrained in their behavior and psychology that it becomes easier to simply use whether or not something is vegan as a proxy for whether or not it actually harms animals, and from there it is a short leap to a priori veganism.

The other reason for this division applies more to the theories and theoreticians. The difference between a priori and skeptical vegans mirrors, but is not identical to, the difference between duty-based and consequentialist ethics. Duty-based, or deontological ethics proposes that there are specific moral rules that should constrain our behavior. Consequentialist ethics suggests that whether an act is right or wrong depends on how good or bad the outcome is. Consequentialist vegans are pretty much skeptical vegans by default. But duty-based vegans may or may not be a priori vegans. Those that believe that we simply have a duty not to cause unnecessary harm to animals could be skeptical vegans; there could be fringe cases involving animals that do not cause them harm. But those who believe we have a firm duty not to use animals as means to our ends are likely a priori vegans; even an utterly unharmed animal could thus be wronged if it is being used in some way.

It is probably clear by now that I am a skeptical vegan. I think there are plenty of non-harm-based reasons not to use animal products in most of the hypotheticals above, but "they aren't vegan" isn't one of those reasons. And I would never argue that people should do non-vegan things, merely that they are not always morally wrong if they do. I think taken to logical conclusions, a priori veganism has many silly implications. If using animal products is just wrong, no matter what, the a priori vegan can't use convenience or difficulty of avoidance or even self-defense as an excuse for using, for example, medicine that has been tested on animals. The a priori vegan who avoids certain product brands because they test on animals has no justification for ever shopping at stores that sell meat or leather, or eating at restaurants that serve meat. If the a priori vegan catches household pests and releases them, he can't consistently drive a car faster than five miles per hour for fear of killing insects. For that matter, if we cannot use animals as means to our ends, regardless of if it harms them, even nature photography is forbidden….

But these are absurd. Scratch an a priori vegan, and no matter her conviction, a subconsciously skeptical vegan lies below the surface. A priori veganism is a conscious belief, but rarely one that extends to its furthest implications. A priori vegans can respond by shifting the goalposts: the original definition of vegan, after all, included an "as far as is possible and practical" clause that can be used to justify essentially whatever the a priori vegan wants it to. But note that "as far as is possible and practical" presents a paradox; it's not practical to never take animal-tested medicine or buy from stores that sell animal products or travel in a bug-killing vehicle, but its certainly possible.

But more importantly, a priori veganism is intellectually lazy. Perhaps that's part of its appeal, but it requires no thought and there is no context to consider. Skeptical veganism requires consideration and context. Skeptical vegans avoid animal products where it will probably avoid harming animals or contribute to a reduction in harming animals. Skeptical vegans could go on doing so even if a priori vegans decided to kick them out of the vegan club. And a priori vegans can go on claiming the moral high ground even when it matters not at all.

At least where it does matter, in actual fact, both sides agree.

Switching to Free Software (Sometimes)

2010-01-03T19:00:00.000-06:00

It's no secret that I'm an Apple fanboy. I bought the iPhone when it was brand new and silly expensive; still sporting that first-generation now. The last two computers I bought were Macs, a final-generation and now defunct iBook and an iMac. We have three iPods in the house. Hell, I lined up for Leopard. That's right: I stood in line for an operating system.

But lately I've been playing with Linux (dual-booting on the iMac) and other free and open source software. See, as much as I love Mac build quality and user interface design, there's still a nagging problem, and it's not one limited to Macs: most of the software simply isn't mine.

Proprietary software (including DRMed media like music and movies) isn't owned by you at all, it is licensed to you, with terms and conditions. Technically, when you spend money on proprietary software you're buying a license to use something someone else owns.

Imagine if you went to the hardware store to buy a hammer. The guy behind the counter rings you up. "This hammer is licensed to you and may be used on five projects. You may not loan it to anybody, nor may you disassemble it. If you violate the terms if this license, we'll sue you for $25,000."

Unlike any other form of sale in the world, software companies decided that even when you buy stuff from them, they still own it. They call it "intellectual property," but unlike actual property it can't be transferred. Every form of publishing that converts to digital distribution seems to get this same bright idea. First music, then movies, now books and even fonts! They all tell the buyer: "Give us money for our product, but then only use it how we say you can."

There are alternatives. The term "free software" means free as in speech, not free as in beer. Free software can be bought and sold, but once it's yours it's yours, to do with as you please, down to the source code itself. A lot of high-quality free software is free as in beer, too, from whole operating systems (like the flavors of GNU/Linux) to word processors and web browsers.

Nobody would claim most free software is always as polished and friendly as Mac software, and Apple still makes some of the best-built hardware around. But when you get free software it's all yours, and that's worth more than all the eye-candy in the world.

Blogging Is Dead

2010-01-02T16:25:00.002-06:00

Blogging is dead. In a lot of ways, it really is. Yet, at the same time, more people are blogging then ever, in both the traditional sense and with the rise of microblogging platforms like Twitter and Facebook status updates.

But the old-fashioned blogging died the instant blogging became profitable, or at least helped make other things profitable. In the ancient era prior to 2007 or so, blogs had something special that no other media had. Nobodies were somebody. Blogging was a hobby, not a career, and you were paid in respect, admiration, and influence.

The problem, if it is a problem, is not that nobody does the good old-fashioned blogging anymore. The problem is that nobody cares. I'm being slightly facetious here; of course some people care. Even the lowliest blog with semi-regular updates has a few dozen followers. But this is all lost beneath the influence of the blogging industry. If Technorati still means anything, look at the top ten blogs: all are professional, and most are corporate, with the sole exception of Boing Boing at the time of this post. Boing Boing remains one of my favorite blogs, but even it isn't quite good old-fashioned anymore. It's a business that makes a substantial revenue for its bloggers through advertising. It's still good old-fashioned in spirit, but certainly not in operation.

All is far from lost, however. I am certain that in terms of actual numbers, far more people blog today than ever did in the good old days, especially outside the US and Europe. I confess freely to reading and enjoying large numbers of professional and/or corporate blogs, and I follow celebrities of Twitter (of both "real" famous and "net" famous varieties). But I also go out of my way to read the obscure stuff, and it's all still there. People are still plugging away, sharing new ideas and viewpoints, if you dig past the first page of Google results or down the Twitter lists past the top hits.

We had a taste, from about 2000-07, of a world where the average person's opinion could be as important and disseminated as any news anchor, columnist, or author. The only way to keep that magic alive is to do it. Maybe its harder to rise above the corporate money today, but if you keep saying what needs to be said, someone will hear it. At least I hope so.

My Digital Life

2010-01-02T15:02:00.003-06:00

I started blogging in 2004. In internet years, that dates back to prehistory. When I started blogging I wanted it to be easy to find me. My blog was eponymous. I blogged about whatever was on my mind. Things that happened to me, movies I saw, news, politics. It was fun to blog.

Then I got a job in a traditionally conservative field in a traditionally conservative state and I came to realize that I couldn't say what I wanted anymore. It was just too risky. For all my ideological views that I wouldn't want to work for someone who would fire me for being an atheist, or a socialist, or whatever else objectionable I am, the fact is that I needed that job more than I needed to stick it to them.

Enthusiasm waned. Eventually, I started a new blog with a new name, so that I could feel free to say whatever I wanted. Two things killed that blog. First, I found that anonymity is hard. It didn't take terribly long before googling my real name brought up my allegedly anonymous blog. Second, I didn't feel free to write whatever I wanted about certain topics, I felt compelled to write about certain topics. I felt like having a blog with a political reference as the title meant I had to be a political blogger.

This is my third blog. When I set it up a few months ago, I imported all the old entries from my old blogs, and posting has been sporadic at best since then. It's the same old story. I felt like since I was anonymous it wasn't personal, but I didn't feel like I had anything fresh, or even clever, to say about the subjects I'm interested in talking about.

Well, fuck it.

It's a new year, and I've decided that anonymity makes this blog more personal. I'm as free as I've ever been to write about whatever I want. My Twitter and Facebook are all locked to maximum privacy, so even if I link to posts here it stays there. If you google me this blog doesn't come up. If you know me personally you can read this and get a look at what I'm thinking. If you're an employer, there's no way to connect it to my name. I am going to use this blog, damn it, and often. I have thoughts, opinions, things to say, and if you've read six paragraphs of me bitching you might be interested enough to read them, too.

My problem before was that I not only wrote like I had an audience, I wrote like I had to entertain that audience. I'd love an audience, but I want them to be reading what I write because they want to read it, not because I tailored it to get them. Not that I lied or anything; it's more that I didn't say things I was thinking because I didn't want to alienate readers, or because I felt like I was just repeating what they could read, better said, elsewhere.

So my 2010 resolution to you, whoever you are, why ever you are reading this, is that you will actually have something to read here again. Resubscribe to my RSS feed. Comment on what I have to say, and often. I'm back.

Until I get bored.

Just some shit I made up

2009-11-07T08:14:00.003-06:00

Rights. I love rights. Civil rights, human rights, animal rights. Gay rights, women's rights, patients' rights, consumers' rights. Rights are useful tools. But let's be honest: rights are just some shit we made up. Rights are an easy, deliberation-free way to trump potentially disastrous decisions, like, say, enslaving people. We made them up because they're useful to achieve something good.

But a lot of us think rights are real. People (and sometimes animals) have natural dignity, or inherent value, or some other shit we make up, just by being people (or animals) and we have to respect that magical feature of their existence. But the Universe doesn't care. Absent sentient beings to value themselves and other sentient beings there is no value, and absent people to take offense there is no dignity. Saying a person has inherent value just means we really don't like to hurt people. It isn't a metaphysical fact, a biological fact, another statistic like mass or density. The only measure of value is how valuable it is for someone.

Rights aren't the only shit we made up. Just about any exceptionless rule is a good candidate for made-up magical shit. "Lying is wrong." Sure, I can get behind that. You shouldn't usually lie. But why? Did we make that shit up? Either lying is just plain wrong and you'd better be honest when the Nazi asks you where the Jews are, or lying is only wrong for some reason. A reason like: because it usually hurts people. And if that's the case, it is the hurting people part that's bad — the lying is just how it happens sometimes. Which means that if lying, in a given case, actually helps people (like, say, those being targeted for genocide) it isn't, in fact, bad.

In the end, just about any moral rule boils down to if you do this, people usually get hurt. And that's great, we don't like to hurt people, so we should avoid it. But dogmatic adherence to these rules, this shit we make up to remind ourselves not to do the hurting thing that's actually bad, sometimes causes more bad stuff to happen. Personally, I think it is more important not to hurt people (or animals) than to let them get hurt because we thought the rules were more important than their reason.

But maybe I just made that shit up, too.

Reasonable disagreement

2009-10-31T09:05:00.002-05:00

One of the hard parts about holding strong opinions is dodging dogma. You have to admit that there is room in any value-based viewpoint for reasonable disagreement. That doesn't mean anything goes, and it certainly doesn't mean that every opinion is equally justifiable. But there can be people who believe in broadly the same things but come to different conclusions.

For example, I think that a democratic socialist economy is the best way to secure my values of liberty, equality, and solidarity and to give everyone the best chance at a good life. More moderate social democrats and liberals have the same values, but they disagree on what those values need to look like in practice. It is a reasonable disagreement. We're on the same team, even if I think some things they advocate are misguided or even harmful.

Conservatives and libertarians, however, either have different values entirely or mean different things when they use the same words. From the point of view of a socialist, conservatives and libertarians are unreasonable. Their goals are different, their beliefs are different. I don't feel compelled to compromise with them; I want them to change their minds!

Of course this only applies in situations where the outcome of these issues affects all involved. Sports fans are as alien to my way of thinking as conservatives are, but their enjoyment of watching other people running around for hours doesn't affect me, so who am I to complain?

Beyond right and wrong

2009-10-17T17:34:00.004-05:00

There is a serious problem that moral philosophy faces, and until it is properly confronted the work of ethicists, no matter how interesting and illuminating, is doomed to ultimate failure. This problem goes by the unassuming name of moral realism.

Moral realism is the idea, which most of us hold by default, that there are moral facts that are true in the same way that, say, 2 + 2 = 5 is true. It means that saying "murder is wrong" is capable of being literally true or false (and obviously, it is usually said to be true). Most, though by no means all, moral philosophers are moral realists. They believe that while individuals may be mistaken about moral truths, these truths do exist waiting to be discovered through the philosophical endeavor and are glimpsed through our intuitions.

Even though I know it is the default, I am frankly astounded this is still considered to be a reasonable position by the bulk of active philosophers, whose collective intellect is admittedly vast. It only takes a moment's thought for anyone who understands evolution to see that moral realism must be an illusion — though disproving it using the methods of philosophy is a challenge.

If we evolved our moral intuitions over time from prosocial instincts that proved useful to our primate ancestors, how and when, exactly, did moral facts become real? It seems there are three possibilities.

1. God did it. Any serious philosopher has already rejected this joke of an answer.

2. Moral facts are features of the universe and always existed. Really? Before there were humans thinking about these things and acting morally, before moral choices were even an option, there were already concepts of right and wrong floating in the ether, waiting for humans to evolve and find them? This is as absurd as god's decree.

3. At some point, humans evolved morality and then these facts became real. This at least admits that humans are the genesis of morality. But it still seems rather silly that, if human minds create morality, it could be anything other than whatever human minds create — which means that moral truths can't be "out there" waiting to be discovered, because they can't exist until they are invented.

As it turns out, neuroscience shows where "moral truths" come from. When people are placed in an MRI machine and asked moral questions, they give two kinds of answers. First are intuitive answers about things that are "just plain wrong." These are quick emotional responses or gut feelings, and they are remarkably consistent among various people and light up emotional regions of the brain. Second, for complicated or unfamiliar situations, there are cognitive responses based on thinking through the problem that light up the general thinking parts of the brain. What's interesting, however, is that when people's answers to questions go against the typical moral intuition, they do so by cognitive reasoning, not by having different intuitions.

Through what is no doubt an astounding coincidence, the emotional gut feeling responses magically map onto the rules, rights, and duties that the various systems of deontological (that is, duty-based) ethics require, regardless of the convoluted logical reasons those systems contain. It's almost as if these moral philosophers just decided that their gut reactions are moral facts and invented a justification for them. My tongue is firmly in cheek, of course: it is obvious that this is precisely what they did. Some plainly admit it, others genuinely believe they derived these facts independently.

Equally unsurprising is that when people use their cognitive reasoning to find answers to moral dilemmas, they tend to be consequentialist answers. They override the "rules" and look at the consequences of the acts in question, then choose the act with the best outcome. Nearly everyone agrees with consequentialism to an extent, or in certain cases. We all want to do what's best for people, we just restrain that impulse when our intuition tells us otherwise.

Deontologists have to account for the fact that our intuitions are inconsistent. They evolved as convenient mental shortcuts to problems faced by our ancestors over millions of years, and they aren't necessarily suited to the situations we find ourselves in today. As a result, deontologists find themselves invented ever more complicated addenda to their rules, so we get things like "Do not kill, unless a greater good would result from the killing, you do not intend the death of the victim even if it is a foreseeable consequence, and the killing is the result of merely redirecting an already existing threat onto a person previously unthreatened." All this because our ancestors had no indirect ways of killing each other, so we have a evolutionarily useful intuition against "personal" killing, even for a good reason like saving more lives, but not against "impersonal" killing for the same reason. Our mind knows five deaths are worse than one death, but the rightness or wrongness of that depends on how the deaths happen. An arbitrary accident of evolution is promoted to a moral fact by deontological philosophers.

Saying something is "wrong" is not saying that there is a fact that this something is wrong, no matter how much we feel like it is the case. Our feeling, even our overwhelming "it just plain is" kind of feeling, is nothing more than an instinct, and that it applies to some situations in the modern world and not to others is arbitrary, except for in the sense that we can pretty well see the non-arbitrary reason it arose in the first place.

Following Joshua Greene, I think in recognizing this we should do away with "right" and "wrong" in their moral senses. I also agree that we should do away with being for and against things without having reasons beyond gut feelings and prehistoric intuitions. Instead of saying "torture is wrong," we should say "I am opposed to torture because..." and give our reasons. Different people will find different reasons compelling, but only by airing them can we hope for at least some consensus. Saying various things are just plain wrong, when we disagree about those things, gets us nowhere.

It's obvious why philosophers are hesitant to do away with moral realism. Aside from the air of authority moral truths bring, they fear that without real moral truths we would descend into nihilism or moral relativism.

I don't think this is the case. I think that morality is both subjective (as opposed to objective as the realists have it) and universal (as opposed to relative). That is, while it is true that making a moral judgment is in a sense just giving my opinion, it doesn't follow that I should then accept other people's opinions as valid and shrug my shoulders when we disagree. It is my opinion that everyone should agree with me, after all. What antirealist morality leads to is not relativism but a world in which moral disputes are settled through argument and evidence rather than claiming to have all the answers.

And now comes another part that a great number of moral realists also fear: I tend to further agree with Greene that when you strip away prehistoric gut feelings and start basing your moral judgments on evidence, you are naturally led to utilitarianism, or at least some form of consequentialism. I have fairly recently stated opposition to consequentialism because this is a conclusion that I've tried to fight intellectually for some time (literally years, at this point). After all, consequentialism occasionally leads to counterintuitively wrong outcomes. Nobody wants to be thought a monster. But if we accept as we must that there is no real "right" and "wrong," if we accept that intuitively correct outcomes are often arbitrary, all without rejecting our empathy with beings living lives that fare well or ill for them, we find ourselves simply wanting to make those lives go as well as we can.

That doesn't mean consequentialism is right (because, objectively, nothing is), but it does mean that consequentialism is almost certainly the inevitable remainder of morality once we are freed from our evolutionary baggage. Consequentialism should be seen then as a goal, but we needn't beat ourselves up if we fail to adhere to bringing about the best consequences in absolutely all cases. It isn't "right." It isn't our "duty." We are animals and will often find our instincts guiding our choices. But consequentialism is making everyone as well as they can be, and that's surely something we can strive for.

A minimum utopia

2009-10-12T08:28:00.004-05:00

1. Election reform. All single-seat elections should be held by instant-runoff vote. All multi-seat elections should be held by single-transferrable vote. Consider multi-seat elections for the House and Senate.

2. Referendum, initiative, and recall. Any legislative body should be able to put proposed legislation to the people for direct vote. The people should be able to propose legislation directly. Any elected official should be able to be removed from office. Each of these must, obviously, have some procedural system in place as far as quotas needed to achieve them.

3. Modify the Senate. Reorganize the Senate proportionally by state populations. Rather than have Senators serve indefinitely in six-year terms, have them serve only a single twelve-year term. The Senate can remain the "upper" house where more experienced legislators are able to temper the relative madness of the House, but it should not be a place where a few dozen men rule for life. The Senate should be thought of as a politician's final duty, where they go when they are ready for serious service without worry of reelection.

4. Depersonalize the presidency. Celebrity presidents are exciting but polarizing. The presidency should not be a glamorous job, it should be an administrative job. Replace the single president with a seven-person Executive Council, such that there may be divergent views held and voiced in the executive branch, but with the ability to settle them easily by vote.

5. Single-payer health care. This is so obvious that anyone who disagrees is plainly insane. And stupid. And an asshole.

6. Workplace democracy. End the concept of working for another person, and replace it with the mandate that we work with each other. All non-family businesses must be run democratically, one person, one vote. This doesn't need to apply to day to day management, but it certainly applies to hiring and firing the people who will do that management. Replace boards of directors chosen by stockholders with those elected by employees. Make all decisions regarding the fate of profit (which rightfully belongs to the people who earned it) democratically decided, such that if there is inequality in income among different employees it exists for reasons acceptable to a majority of those people, whatever they might be.

7. Social control of investment. This one is by far the one least likely to ever come to pass, even above reorganizing the Senate and presidency. Abolish Wall Street. Use David Schweickart's model of Economic Democracy instead: public banks give firms grants rather than loans, and the firms' capital assets are taxed to replenish the supply of investment money which is distributed back to the banks on a regional per capita basis. The public banks can have criteria for giving grants other than mere profitability, such as job-creation and environmental security. While private investment may (or may not) still exist, require that privately-held companies can only be sold to the government, who then convert them into democratic firms with public funding.

8. Government as employer of last resort. Establish a right to a job, and if the private sector can't find one for you, the public sector will. There are roads that need maintaining, parks that need cleaning, and a never-ending stream of other projects that could certainly use a few million presently-unemployed people.

9. Strong climate protection. Short term losses are worth it. The GDP won't matter when you're underwater or in famine. Commit to 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Forget cap-and-trade, levy a straight-up carbon tax and redistribute the proceeds to everyone.

Enjoy.

Apologies

2009-10-12T08:05:00.001-05:00

Look, I know I don't have a billion readers, so apologizing for not posting in a month and a half is almost unnecessary. But there are people who like to hear what I have to say, and if some small fraction of you have missed me, I'm sorry.

American mercy

2009-08-24T08:20:00.002-05:00

While I know he and I share a relatively similar viewpoint, I don't generally turn to Charlie Stross's blog for political insight. He's a science fiction writer — and one of the best, if you ask me. I had the pleasure of sitting at the far end of a table of more than twenty for lunch with him when he was in Austin in 2005. So by "lunch with him" I mean essentially that I was in the same room.

In any case, he has written one of the finest blog posts on both the release of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and, believe it or not, American health care reform I've read. Seriously, read it.

Abolitionists against health care reform

2009-08-20T16:53:00.005-05:00

Pretend I am still an abolitionist …

***

All people should have a right to adequate health care.

Respecting this right, morally or legally, demands that we abolish the commodity status of health care. Health care is not something that should be bought and sold on the market, but a right afforded all people, free at the point of delivery, simply out of respect for their dignity as people.

Because health care should be a right, I cannot support any measure that doesn't treat it as such. Supporting any mere health care reform is to reinforce the commodity status of health care so long as that reform continues to allow health care services to be sold on even the most highly regulated market. We can't focus on how people are treated by the health care industry. It's not how people are treated that is wrong, but that their right isn't being respected.

I am totally against the so-called "public option" in health care reform. I know that it will allow a lot of people to gain access to health insurance, but it does not respect people's right to health care. I would be reinforcing the commodity status of health care by supporting a measure that doesn't respect that right. Furthermore, instituting a public insurance option would allow those who have health insurance to feel better about denying a right to health care because it will give the illusion of consideration for the uninsured by allowing some of them to purchase relatively inexpensive government insurance. This will just prolong the struggle to achieve the right to health care. I'm not against individuals helping to pay for uninsured folks' health services if they wish, but I can't support any institutionalized aid to these people. Because that's different.

I am also entirely against "single-payer" health insurance provided by the government. Even though this would provide universal coverage to all American citizens, it still wouldn't recognize a fundamental right to heath care. Providers of health services would still be selling those services on a market. We must only focus on the commodity status of care, not merely how people are treated while their rights are denied. I oppose any kind of "happy insurance."

As painful as it may be, it would be better for those without insurance to continue to suffer exorbitant health care expenses and to lack access to certain services because this will force those who have insurance to see the horrific cost of not respecting the right to health care. I oppose all consequentialist appeals to the suffering of those people, because a true commitment to rights demands that I not support anything that doesn't respect those rights. Call it "being divisive" if you want, but anybody supporting the so-called "public option" is not an ally but an opponent of the real health care movement in which demanding a right to health care is the moral baseline. The only acceptable solution is to build a movement that can grow to a majority demanding the right to health care.

Nevertheless, there may be some incremental reforms that I could support. Perhaps we could start by nationalizing dentistry.

***

For the uninitiated, abolitionists are a faction of the animal liberation movement that believes that the abolition of the property status of animals is the only goal that should be sought by that movement. Abolitionists oppose all reforms aimed at improving the welfare of animals, because they won't lead to abolition, they will reinforce the property status of animals, and they will encourage expanded exploitation because they clear people's consciences.

I suspect there are abolitionists who can agree with my satirical argument as if it were straight. If so, they live in a world where personal moral purity takes priority over doing the best you can with what you've got. That's not my world.

Euthanasia

2009-08-14T15:16:00.005-05:00

Forget all the other deather nonsense for a second. It's hard, I know. But do it.

Withholding health care from old people is not euthanasia. Nazis killing Jews in concentration camps is not euthanasia. For that matter, killing unwanted but healthy dogs and cats is not euthanasia.

Euthanasia is killing in the deceased's actual best interests. A dog that has been hit by a car, suffers unimaginable pain, and faces a few days of agony before dying can be euthanized if she is killed to relieve her suffering. The soldier on the battlefield, shot in the liver and bleeding out, can be euthanized with an extra shot of morphine. And yes, terminal patients who ask for it can be euthanized through so-called "assisted suicide."

Grandma dying from not getting dialysis because it isn't economical isn't euthanasia, it's just plain murder.

So if Republicans and other various assholes want to accuse Democrats of wanting to straight-up murder people, go for it. Good luck with that. But don't call it euthanasia. Next time real euthanasia is called for to legitimately relieve suffering, the concept will be tainted beyond recognition.

Obama and the socialists

2009-08-12T15:55:00.003-05:00

Let's ignore for a moment that, for his entire presidential run, opponents of Barack Obama called him a socialist and now they call him a Nazi, two ideological positions that are literally on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Since such people are still also claiming "Obamacare" will turn the United States into "Russia" or "a socialized state," I think we ought to take a moment and think about the relationship between Obama (and other Democrats) and socialism.

I will here refute the claim that any Democrats are socialists. I also make the claim that Democrats (and indeed, everyone else) should become socialists, because socialism is good.

First, it's important to be clear: socialism does not mean "state run." The police are entirely state run, but nobody is complaining about "socialized police." The military is totally state run; no sane conservatives want to privatize the Marine Corps. Socialism is an economic concept that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with government at all.

Socialism has been many things over the years, but in all of its modern forms it stems from the basic observation that under capitalism, workers do not get the product of their labor. The product is owned by someone else, who then pays some fraction of the money made off of it back to the people who actually made (or did, in the case of services) it.

The one thing all serious forms of socialism have in common is the idea that people ought not to work "for" someone else, but may work "with" them. An absolute minimal socialist position would require worker, community, or state ownership of productive enterprises. In modern democratic countries, that is typically expressed as nationalizing the major industries and monopolies for the benefit of all, and switching smaller companies to worker-owned co-ops for the benefit of the workers. Again, this is pretty much a minimal requirement for socialism. It has nothing to do directly with universal health care or social welfare programs, or anything but workers controlling the product of their work rather than absent owners or stockholders who contribute nothing but permission to use their property. Socialist businesses may operate in a market, but the profit goes to the workers or to the public (depending on the system). It does not go to private investors or CEOs.

So we can see that no Democrat has ever proposed anything resembling a socialist proposal in Congress, on the topic of health care or anything else. There are no bills calling for the abolition of private capital investment banks, no opposition to the stock market. I have never heard the words "surplus value" uttered on the Senate floor. There are actually Democrats who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, but they've never proposed anything exclusively socialist so it matters little.

"Socialist" health care would be more than a public option. "Socialist" health care would be more even than a single-payer system. "Socialist" health care would require that all hospitals, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, and other medical enterprises be owned by the state, the community they reside in, or even the very doctors, nurses, and other staff who work at them. Such enterprises would distribute all "profits" to the people who earned them, rather than to stockholders and executives. It would be a fully public system provided to all residents free at the point of delivery, not public insurance, and certainly not optional public insurance.

Even in a "best case" outcome of the current health care debate we are left with a system in which private insurance corporations inject themselves as parasites. Think about it for a second: private insurance doesn't actually do anything to earn its profit. Just as investors in corporations don't do anything to earn interest, nor do landlords do anything to earn their rents. Capitalism allows a class of people to earn money simply by making money available — it gives people money for nothing more than the privilege of already having enough money to spare. We don't need insurance. We need medical care, and there is no reason we can't collectively provide it for ourselves without middlemen. That's socialism.

The burden of proof

2009-08-03T08:48:00.000-05:00

It is uncontroversial that nonhuman animals can suffer. Anyone who has ever stepped on a pet's tail knows that animals can be hurt. It should be equally uncontroversial that we ought not cause unnecessary suffering to any animal, human or otherwise.

We can all admit this, carnivore and herbivore alike, without specifying what constitutes necessary suffering. Even many committed vegans will say that there are necessary forms of suffering, such as that caused through self-defense. But the default position must obviously be not to cause suffering unless it is necessary.

The burden of proof clearly falls on those who are causing suffering. If you eat eggs, the burden of proof falls on you to justify the necessity of eating eggs that outweighs the suffering inflicted on egg-laying chickens. If you enjoy horse racing, the burden of proof falls on you to justify the necessity of horse racing that outweighs the suffering inflicted on racing horses.

Note that this argument is utterly independent of any claims for animal rights, though it is certainly compatible with them. This is merely a basic consequence of the commonsense notion that animals have a welfare that ought not be ignored for any but the most necessary reasons. Those reasons may exist, but they certainly do not in the case of any customary use of animals for food, clothing, or entertainment.

Godless

2009-08-02T08:14:00.004-05:00

I am an atheist. Atheist, from a- "without" and theos "a god." Without a god. I am godless.

I am not merely agnostic. I think the nonexistence of gods can be known to the same degree of certainty as the nonexistence of centaurs or fairies or any other creatures of fable and myth. In each case, no matter the fervent desire of believers, the evidence is nil. We needn't honor the belief in things without (and against) evidence by labelling it with the comforting word faith; the more accurate word is gullibility.

I am not merely nonreligious. It is true I think religion strips the rich meaning people can give to their lives and replaces it with hours of wasted praise and prayer and devotion to injustice. It is certainly true I think immersion in religion ruins young minds and leads to embrace of the irrational, from creationism to global warming denial to the belief that people who believe differently deserve damnation. But my opposition to religion is the result, not the cause, of my godlessness.

I am not merely spiritual. I reject all supernatural explanations of reality and all beliefs in magic. I have no soul, and neither do you. There is no life-force. There is no qi. The universe is not god. There are no spiritual beings, no out-of-body-experiences, and the bright tunnel of light is what the misfiring of an oxygen-starved brain feels like. Nobody can read minds. Nobody can see the future. Nobody can bend spoons with thought. Nobody can heal with their hands. Nobody can cast spells.

There are no such things as ghosts.

This is it. Look around you. Clench your fists. There is matter and energy embedded in the quantum foam of spacetime, there is blood pumping through your veins, a sloppy biological primate brain shooting electrochemical signals through synapses flooded with neurotransmitters.

This is it.

A world without god is not hypothetical: we're in it now. Only we can make it a good one.

I love this

2009-07-30T09:13:00.003-05:00

Barack Obama says that police "acted stupidly" and gets raked over the coals for calling the Boston police department stupid. Boston police officer Justin Barrett says Henry Gates acted like a "banana-eating jungle monkey" and that in acting like a banana-eating jungle monkey he should have been pepper-sprayed. His lawyer's defense? Barrett didn't say Gates was a banana-eating jungle monkey, only that he acted like a banana-eating jungle monkey.

Look, everyone, if you say someone acted in some way, unless you append that with a disclaimer, people are going to assume you mean that's how they are. If what is probably an otherwise smart person acted stupidly, throw in an "I'm not saying the Boston police are stupid, but in this case they seem to have acted that way."

Of course, that doesn't really work for Barrett. Saying "While I know he is fact a well-respected professor, in this single instance Gates acted like a banana-eating jungle monkey" doesn't make it any less racist.

Two insanities

2009-07-26T09:41:00.005-05:00

First, in "post-racial America," a doctor thought a picture of Barack Obama as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor would be an amusing and uncontroversial satire because, see, he had worked with black Boy Scouts this one time:

Then a proud Medicare recipient writes a letter to the editor vehemently opposing public health care:

I really don't have anything to add to these. Enjoy.

Peephole tapes and tribal society

2009-07-24T08:56:00.002-05:00

Erin Andrews, a reporter for ESPN, was filmed without her permission through some sort of hotel room peephole and the footage inevitably appeared on the Web. The peephole tape obviously raises all sorts of issues about privacy and sex, and most of the attention has been focused on the widespread objectification of Andrews among sports fans and others.

I wonder if part of the problem with these sorts of sexual privacy breeches is not our over-sexed media culture, but our prudishness? I'm not speaking individually here — without question individuals have a right to privacy that extends to their bodies. But as a culture, we can barely accept the likes of breastfeeding in public because female nipples are so secreted away that the mere thought of them is sexualized by enough people to make it an issue.

At this point, it is fairly incontrovertible among the sane that prohibition fails. When you make something illegal (or inaccessible) you increase the desire to get it, and increase the thrill of trying. If nudity were just a part of public life — not in the service of advertising or for porn, just something one sees regularly — wouldn't the reward for "catching" someone naked diminish? Put another way: do you think that members of tribal society who wear little clothing find the mere sight of a naked person shocking and arousing? Are they constantly in a state of sexual frustration because of all the bodies on display? I suspect not. But the example of these mostly-nude societies demonstrates that attitudes towards the display of the body are malleable.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any feasible way to demystify nudity. It's something that just has to happen naturally, I suppose. But if it did, not only would it reduce the demand for privacy invasion, it would reduce the damage done by whatever tom-peepery still occurred.

Public system, private option

2009-07-22T07:31:00.003-05:00

When I have CNN on for background noise, as I've been known to do, I always find myself catching those anti-public option health care commercials. You know the ones I'm talking about. They are usually paid for by Conservatives for Patients Rights and talk about "government bureaucrats" coming between you and your doctor. Yet, strangely, they don't mention the health insurance companies coming between you and your doctor. It's almost like these conservatives are a proxy for those companies or something. I would have never guessed such a thing was poss — bwahaha! OK, I couldn't keep a straight face anymore.

I still find myself in shock when conservative pundits talk about how a public option for health care is going to hurt people because these beneficent health insurance companies (operating in the magical free market that is supposed to optimize prices) won't be able to compete with the federal government. These are the same conservatives who say the government can't even find a cheap way out of a wet paper bag, but somehow, for health care, they will be lean and efficient.

I am against a public option. What I want is a public system with a private option. I want everyone (even them darned illegals) to have free health care automatically, with the option to get super-duper insurance if you want it — but since "health care" includes everything required for health, there wouldn't be anything left to super-duper insure.

Practical ethics

2009-07-18T08:01:00.003-05:00

I read philosophy and political philosophy for at least an hour a day. I'm not kidding. In addition to books and the invaluable Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I often run Google searches for terms or people of interest with "filetype:pdf" so I can read all of the papers, articles, and dissertations available online. One day it'll be "responsibility-catering prioritarianism." The next it'll be "Philippa Foot." I read a lot.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that most ethical models make a lot of sense, while simultaneously being subject to compromising flaws. Utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism capture something that almost everyone intuitively agrees with: you should do what's best. Kant and other deontological theorists capture another something almost everyone agrees with: we have duties to one another beyond the "greatest good." Contractualism, be it Rawlsian or Scanlonian, is built on the insight that we are social beings and must justify our actions to one another. The various species of virtue ethics confront the question that we've all asked ourselves: how do I be a good person? Even so-called "ethical" egoism arises from an innocuous premise that we seek our own well-being.

But none of these theories is compatible with each other absent tremendous mental acrobatics. For that matter, various varieties within each theory aren't compatible with each other. Peter Singer and Brad Hooker are both consequentialists, but their accounts of what we ought to do are incredibly different.

On top of all that, biologists and psychologists are uncovering the evolutionary history of morality. There really seems to be a moral instinct, derived from the psychological needs of social great apes such as humans. We have instinctive urges to, say, not harm each other under normal circumstances, to reciprocate when someone helps us, to help others, and so on.

It seems to me that the major moral theories are constructed by instinctively feeling one of these urges and running with it to the exclusion of all the others. Utilitarians feel the instinct to promote the general welfare and declare the general welfare is the supreme good — all the other instincts either service this good or are mistaken. Contractualists feel the instinct to reciprocate and declare mutual agreement the basis for morality — the general welfare is merely a side effect.

The reason most people don't give philosophy much thought is precisely because most people just go with their gut. We all have a commonsense morality already, and while it can be led astray by experience and culture (see also: the evil of religion), it's good enough most of the time without resorting the lexical rules and utilitarian calculus and so on. Obviously, I wouldn't spend so much of my free time reading about this stuff if I didn't find it both interesting and important, but it must be put into perspective.

As it turns out, there is already a moral theory that does a fairly credible job of capturing all of our instincts and even our decision-making process. Unfortunately, it is general enough that, while influential, it is largely rejected by professionals in ethics. This is the pluralistic intuitionism of WD Ross.

Ross holds that there are prima facie duties that we have towards others. If there is only one duty in a situation, it is our duty proper and we ought to do it. If there are more than one duty in a situation, the more stringent becomes our duty proper that we ought to do. What makes Ross's duties different from, say, Kantian duties, is that Ross makes no claim to an overarching principle from which duties can be derived and identified. Ross says that prima facie duties are just self-evident, and deciding between them is done simply through the application of moral judgment. Duties are reasons that inform our actions; they are the justifications we might use to explain why we think what we did was right. To Ross, a moral theory should fit the facts as they are, even if it isn't a tidy little package. He compares ignoring our (fully-considered, reflective) intuitions because they conflict with a specific moral theory to refusing to enjoy something beautiful because it conflicts with some theory of aesthetics.

You can see why philosophers aren't happy to embrace this idea.

But one has to see the parallel between prima facie duties and moral instincts. Ross's canonical list of duties (he says there may be more) includes: fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-maleficence, justice, beneficence, and self-improvement. These are, remarkably, pretty much the sorts of things one would expect to evolve as aids to group cohesion among a young species of big-headed apes.

I think that Ross, ultimately, is right. I disagree with him that morality is part of the "fundamental nature of the universe" in the way that geometry is, but in terms of what morality is on the ground, I think that the idea of potentially conflicting prima facie duties that are resolved by making a judgment call is correct.

That doesn't mean I think utilitarians and deontologists and the rest are wasting their time. To the contrary! I think what they do is crucial in unpacking our moral judgments, and I think studying them is part of the duty to self-improvement — the instinct the virtue ethicists latched onto and ran with. It is only by understanding how and why we make choices that we can make them well.

Scientists and animals

2009-07-11T08:20:00.005-05:00

The Pew Research Center has a report on the public's view of science, which includes comparisons between the public's and scientists' views on various issues such as politics, religion, climate change, and evolution. It's fascinating reading, and it's interesting to me that when asked which groups contribute "a lot" to society's well-being, scientists are rated above doctors, engineers, and clergy, below only teachers and members of the military.

Examining my own beliefs, I find myself, in cases where opinion differs significantly between the public and scientists, agreeing with the scientists in every single case but one: nonhuman animal experimentation. While only 52% of the public supports the use of animals in scientific research, a whopping 93% of scientists support this use. Why?

I've got a few ideas.

First, some proportion of scientists are obviously the ones doing the research, so it would be rather unlikely they oppose it. But even among those who aren't, I've noticed a certain camaraderie among scientists, and a general sense that each discipline tends to trust the other disciplines to know what they're doing. So while not every scientist experiments on animals by a long shot, they assume that those biologists and others who do are doing so for a good reason.

Second, and this is pure guesswork, I would imagine scientists tend towards a vague utilitarianism as a moral philosophy to a greater extent than the general public. This makes sense, as utilitarianism is a very logical and attractive stance on the surface. Scientists tend to avoid the religion-based morality that a large portion of the public follows. In seeking to maximize the aggregate good, utilitarianism removes hard rules that might seem arbitrary or even based in religious-thinking. If scientists are convinced of the import of animal research, then it makes a certain utilitarian sense to sacrifice these animals for the greater good.

Ironically, it is science that leads me to oppose the use of animals in scientific research. Science has consistently demonstrated the capacity of many animals to suffer. That animals are similar to us is in fact the essential basis of most biomedical research. The only question is: can causing suffering be justified?

Without applying my own moral reasoning to the question, I want to point out that there is good reason to reject the use of animals in research following from two simple axioms that I would think most people share:

We ought not to cause preventable suffering.
We ought to treat like cases alike.

Animal researchers claim that animal experimentation is necessary because it allows important, often lifesaving medical progress. I am not the sort of animal rightist who is going to deny that animal research achieves these goals. Scientists know better than I do the implications and results of their research. But I will deny that this fact alone makes the research justifiable.

Suppose that, for some reason, animals were unavailable for research. Would any animal researcher then support using orphaned, severely mentally-disabled children for necessary medical research? I am not trying to be ridiculous here, my example is very specific — the children are orphaned, so there is nobody else affected by any decision; they are mentally-disabled and so will not ever be autonomous and capable of consent in the sense that adult humans are. Given that humans are animals, these children are similar to animals used in research in every way that could be morally significant.

I think using these children in research would still be wrong, because they are still due respectful treatment which, at the very least, entails not causing them suffering and not killing them. I am certain that most scientists would agree that we should not use these children, no matter how necessary the research in question. So how do they justify using animals? If we treat like cases alike, and there is no morally significant sense in which these children and animals are not alike, then we must treat them equally.

The only difference between animals and humans of comparable mental development is species membership. And drawing moral lines based on a classification scheme, rather than on the actual characteristics of the things being compared, is arbitrary and irrational. Parsimony suggests that if two animals are similar in mental capacity and ability to suffer, we ought to treat them similarly, and the fact that one is a member of Homo sapiens is irrelevant. The good that might come from harming any of these animals cannot be used to justify their suffering.

One more bit on libertarianism

2009-07-08T16:33:00.004-05:00

An often overlooked feature of libtertarianism, stemming from the principles of self-ownership, absolute property rights, and a free-market, is that people in Libertopia can legally sell themselves into slavery. Robert Nozick, super-libertarian philosopher, thinks this is as it should be. One of my favorite illustrations of the idiocy of libertarianism comes from Thomas Pogge:

The following trialogue is then a realistic scenario within Nozick's libertarian society. A police officer comes upon a couple struggling with each other, the man [a doctor] evidently trying to rape the woman.

Woman: Please, sir, please help me.

Officer (to Man): Hey, you, let her go at once!

Man: Don't get involved.

Officer: I must. You are violating this woman's right not to be assaulted.

Man: No, I'm not. She is my slave. Here are the papers, signed by herself.

Woman: But I was coerced into signing. He said he would not treat my father [for a deadly medical condition] if I refused to sign.

Officer: That's not coercion but at most duress. He was at liberty not to treat your father or to ask compensation for treating him.

Woman: But my father is dead!

Man: The contract says only that I would try to save him, and I did.

Officer (to Woman): I'm sorry, ma'am, but I cannot help you.

Man: But you could help me in forcing her to fulfill her contractual obligations. She has already scratched me. See if you can tie her hands.

(Officer ties Woman's hands, she screams for help as she is being raped. ...)

Man (to Officer): I'm glad the police are protecting citizens' rights. Isn't she great? My sons will have lots of fun with her when I bring her home.

I'm not saying this would happen in a libertarian society, of course. Maybe people would be more reluctant to sell themselves into slavery, even if they were destitute and desperate. Maybe slaveowners wouldn't be particularly cruel to their human property. All I'm saying is, from the point of view of libertarianism, this is the fair and deserved result of self-ownership and free-market transactions. This is libertarian justice.

Calling bullshit on Bullshit!

2009-07-07T09:23:00.004-05:00

I was watching some Penn & Teller: Bullshit! yesterday. I like Penn and Teller. I liked their show in Las Vegas. I enjoy Bullshit! But there's always that point in nearly every episode (and in some cases, for whole episodes) where Penn starts blathering on about some insane libertarian nonsense. So I'm calling bullshit on Bullshit! — at least the libertarian parts.

The problem with libertarianism is in its impoverished and wholly inconsistent definition of liberty. Liberty is one of my personal key values. I understand liberty as substantive freedom to do what one wants to do. Liberty is, in other words, the ability to live the kind of life one wants to live.

But libertarians have a much narrower definition of liberty: freedom from coercion. This manifests itself most commonly in their frothy-mouthed hatred of laws, taxes, and government. But only sometimes.

Libertarians absolutely love for the government to coerce people with laws and force them into not touching their property. And that brings us to the first great heap of libertarian bullshit: property itself is the greatest infringement upon liberty in the world. If a book is my property, I am restricting the liberty of a full 6.7 billion people to read it. Even if I'm not reading it myself. Even if it's just sitting in a closet. No other person has any liberty to read my book, period.

I don't think property is bad or wrong, but I also don't fetishize it. Property is a social norm, something we invented and that only exists because we collectively continue to agree to recognize it. But libertarians can't admit that, because that opens up the possibility that we could invent and collectively agree to recognize all sort of other ideas they hate, like egalitarian access to wealth or (shudder) socialized medicine! So libertarians have invented their own property mythology, involving a magical empty planet where rugged individualists carve up everything among themselves which magically gives them the right to whatever they grabbed and all redistributions that follow happen through the magic of fair and mutually beneficial exchanges. So if you're poor, it's because you're weak and/or stupid — and that's OK. It's a whole lot of magic, even for magicians.

This brings us to the second great heap of libertarian bullshit: they only recognize increasing or decreasing liberty when it's their own. This was evident in Penn and Teller's episode on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which horribly, horribly coerces commercial property owners to give access to disabled people. This mandate leaves no room for compassion, they say.

Libertarians pretend to want to maximize liberty, but they don't. They are willing to accept the idea that governments coercing the recognition of property rights (and therefore reducing liberty) increases liberty, but unable to accept that governments coercing things like accessibility also increases liberty — the liberty of disabled people to live the lives they want to live. "Waaah, wahhh," whines Penn, "it'll cost a bunch of taxpayers' money!" But he also says the state should stick to courts, police, defense, and corruption. These are things that cost the taxpayers, so he isn't opposed to taxation (that is, coercion) for things he believes in. He's just opposed to taxation for things he doesn't believe in.

Penn also breaks out the tired old chestnut that if a store, say, doesn't provide disabled access it will lose customers to those that do. Which brings us to great libertarian bullshit-heap number three: they think free markets just work on their own. Note that he talks about this market correction shortly after mentioning that the number of people who really need disabled access is around 5 million out of the 300 million people in the country. The idea that any reasonable proportion of store owners is going to voluntarily retrofit their property at any expense to attract the 1.6% of potential customers who might need it is absurd.

And indeed, if the market truly catered to disabled people, we wouldn't have needed the Americans with Disabilities Act in the first place. We had centuries to let market forces work their invisible hand magic. But libertarians don't care about that. It is more important for a libertarian to not infringe upon property rights than to allow everyone fair access (or liberty) to the basic privileges of life, such as mobility and community. It doesn't matter than the government and society as a whole establishes the rules for the marketplace and therefore is perfectly justified in making requirements for participating in it. Property is sacred and markets always work.

Penn and Teller's dumbfuck market fundamentalism also came into full effect in their episode on Wal-Mart. They had plenty of valid criticisms of the anti-Wal-Mart movement, most notably when they pointed out the disgusting elitism and classism of some supporters. But then they pulled the wool over our eyes.

They discussed Penn's home town, which fought off a Wal-Mart but found itself sucked dry as people commuted to nearby towns to patronize their Wal-Marts. The Penn and Teller solution: build the Wal-Mart, since people obviously want it. My solution: don't let Wal-Mart artificially lower prices so that any competition is fair. They interview a Wal-Mart employee who is thankful for the store and her wage. And of course she is. As she revealingly says, she needed the money and it was the only job she could find. Libertarians love to pretend that employment is free and fair. Nobody is coerced into taking any given job and everyone involved benefits.

But coercion doesn't only come from people or laws. Necessity coerces countless people into doing all sorts of things they wouldn't otherwise. The idea that an employer like Wal-Mart (2009 revenue: $404 billion) and an unemployed person facing the potential for homelessness and starvation come to the bargaining table on fair terms is bullshit. Yes, the employee will accept very low wages. That doesn't mean they weren't coerced. They lacked the liberty to choose their employment and even to negotiate their wage. Fucking idiot libertarians complain when the government takes 25% of their paycheck, but didn't complain when their company's owner took 60% of the money they made the company before even writing the check — because markets always work, the company is the owner's property, and they made a fair contract.

Libertarians just don't seem to get why society exists: mutual advantage. People are better off working together, in both the evolutionary sense and in the modern world. To a libertarian, the mutual part of mutual advantage is utterly lost. By privileging a narrow and wildly inconsistent form of liberty and property above all other values, they skew the idea of society into something that doesn't operate for mutual advantage, but for the wealth of the strong, smart, or lucky. And wealth is just a token for liberty to do the things it buys, so the result of libertarianism is the reduction of liberty for the masses and the ability for the few to do virtually anything they want. Wealth inequality is liberty inequality — a true libertarian would be, wait for it, a socialist.

So libertarianism is bullshit. Penn and Teller should stick to Jesus and colonics. I'll be watching, anyway.

Reclaiming "vegetarian"

2009-07-01T08:45:00.004-05:00

Why did vegans need to invent a new word when we already had vegetarian?

Elise Shrigley and Donald Watson coined the word vegan in 1944 as "the beginning and end of vegetarian." They had grown frustrated with the fact that vegetarians consumed milk, and founded the Vegan Society to promote "true" vegetarianism, or veganism. A much-loved vegan t-shirt has the word veg(etari)an with the center letters blocked off and a pair of scissors. It reads: cut the crap.

But a funny thing has happened since that time. It is now commonplace to see consumers of milk and eggs to refer to themselves as lacto-, ovo-, or lacto-ovo vegetarians. Implicit in this labeling is the idea that milk and eggs are additions to vegetarianism, which should by default exclude them.

Now it is true that most vegetarians are equally comfortable leaving off such modifiers, confident that the general public knows that vegetarians consume milk and eggs. I do not wish to imply that in contemporary usage vegetarian and vegan are synonyms. My point is the fact these modifiers exist suggests something about the intuition we have concerning the word vegetarian — it ought to mean one who consumes, if not only vegetables, than vegetation broadly construed.

This intuition is why, I suspect, lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegans tend to see each other as being broadly "on the same side" opposed to meat-eaters, sometimes even applying the all-inclusive veg*n label to themselves. But why should this be the case? Lacto-ovo vegetarians are allied with meat-eaters in a way that vegans aren't. Vegans, in rejecting all consumption of animal products, are fundamentally rejecting the use of animals, not merely their suffering (or if done on grounds of eliminating suffering, vegans are at least suggesting there is no practical way to use an animal without causing some level of avoidable suffering). Lacto-ovo vegetarians and meat-eaters, by using animals for food, are in full agreement that animals are resources that can be exploited. Where they differ is in which exploitations are acceptable.

Milk and egg production is often the most cruel use of animals. Meat animals, at least, are generally put out of their misery fairly early in their lives. Milk and egg animals are confined to a much greater extent for extraction, repeatedly impregnated, have their offspring taken away, and ultimately most end up being killed prematurely when they are spent. This is on top of their male offspring being killed as useless to the milk and egg production line.

It is ironic that, if one accepts using animals for food but merely wants to choose the least suffering-inducing use, it might make more sense to eat the meat and cut out the milk and eggs. I dare say "ethical" lacto-ovo vegetarians have it backward.

But of course no use of animals is actually without suffering, and there is fundamentally no moral right to exploit animals for our purposes anyway, given their own basic interests in pursing lives of their own. At least we can say lacto-ovo vegetarians are thinking about these issues and doing what they believe is sufficient, even if they are mistaken.

The title of this post refers to the idea that veganism was meant to be a sort of "back to basics" vegetarianism, and ultimately the "lacto-ovo" phenomenon proves that people unconsciously recognize the contradiction in a vegetarian using animals for food, whether meat or not. So I was wondering what sort of traction a veg*n movement might get in actually trying to promote vegetarianism as veganism, and suggesting that lacto-ovo vegetarians are more like so-called "pesco-vegetarians:" a contradiction in terms.

After I thought about these things, I happened to spot one of PETA's Vegetarian Starter Kits at Spiral Diner. Having never actually looked at one, I picked one up and checked it out. One of my most persistent problems with PETA has been their use of "go vegetarian" or "go veg" as slogans when a group that calls itself the animal rights organization ought to be saying "go vegan." "Go vegetarian" tells people it is acceptable to consume milk and eggs, which entails violating animal rights. I attributed this to a pathological aversion to the word vegan as being too extreme for their target audience, which I argued makes little sense given most of PETA's positions are considered wildly extreme in the first place.

After looking at the Vegetarian Starter Kit, I think I might have to revise my assessment of their use of "go vegetarian" and "go veg" as slogans. Here's why: they're not actually telling people to go vegetarian, they're telling people to go vegan while calling it vegetarian, and they're doing it pretty blatantly. While I already knew that PETA materials only promote vegan foods, however labeled, I did not know that they make it a point to use vegetarian and vegan as synonyms, sometimes in the same paragraph or even sentence. For example, "If you're stuck at a behind-the-times restaurant without much vegan variety, ask if the chef can whip up a vegetarian entree."

While I can see how that might instinctively frustrate vegans, who already have to deal with people not understanding that no animal products actually means no animal products, I think once you think of PETA's target audience with these kits you must admit they're doing something clever. This is not the same as just using the word vegetarian to attract people who are afraid of scary vegans, as I originally thought. PETA knows (to the chagrin of vegans everywhere) it is one of the first stops a great many people make on the road to animal rights and veganism. Whether we agree it ought to be or not, PETA is considered by non-animal rightists an authoritative source on animal rights issues, and it is using that institutional power to redefine the word vegetarian in the minds of visitors to their website and interested parties who obtain Vegetarian Starter Kits. Anyone who wants to try vegetarianism and turns to PETA as an authoritative resource turns vegan without knowing it.

I have to think that combined with the fact that vegetarian is a much more widespread word than vegan (and, yes, much less extreme-sounding), by reclaiming the word PETA just might produce more vegans-in-practice than they would by promoting veganism as veganism. That's not to say that specifically vegan outreach groups would automatically have the same success, or that they should necessarily try. Someone who has an interest in going vegan can just plain go vegan via these groups. But the great mass of people, for good or ill, are afraid of seeming too radical. They might be willing to go vegan in ethical and dietary terms, but not in associational terms. And maybe that's OK. Vegetarianism is mainstream now and, frankly, people not consuming animal products is far more important to me than whether or not they do it while calling themselves vegans.

Vegans have a lot of pride in our veganism, and what we want is to make our movement grow. We like our word. We want vegan to not be the scary and mysterious word that it is to a lot of people. We want veganism to be the new vegetarianism, and ultimately the new way of life. But ultimately veganism is also the old vegetarianism, and as a movement that has only existed for six decades, it remains to be seen what form it takes in the future.

In any case, I think there is little harm that could come from successfully reclaiming vegetarian, and using vegan as a popular shorthand for it. The already-common modifiers lacto- and ovo- make it potentially easy to do so. Real vegetarians don't consume milk and eggs. Real vegetarians are vegans. Remember that.

Welcome

2009-06-27T16:16:00.003-05:00

This is my new blog. I know what you're thinking: "If this is a new blog, why are there posts dating back to 2005?" Well, not too long ago Blogger added the ability to export and import blog posts; you can see posts from two previous blogs integrated seamlessly below.

For those who aren't following me from elsewhere, the gist: I will blog, if my schedule manages to permit me, about radical democratic liberal socialist politics, veganism and animal rights, atheism, science, gadgets, and pop culture. So, not that different from a quarter-billion other blogs, except this one is me.

For the record, the new blog is called "Zombie Jesus" just because I like the name. I doubt Jesus even existed, much less as an awesome zombie.

Anti-Abortion and Animal Rights Terrorists

2009-06-01T15:30:00.000-05:00

The tragic murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion zealot raises a comparison between the anti-abortion movement and the animal rights movement. It's perhaps no surprise that, despite the fact that anti-abortion activists have murdered several doctors and animal rights activists have yet to murder anyone, animal rights activists are considered the greatest domestic terrorist threat in the United States by the FBI. Animal industry is big business, after all, and abortion not so much. But the question remains: are we animal rightists just as batshit zealous as the anti-abortion nutjobs?

I think a case can be made that we are not, even from the standpoint of the animal-using public. The most obvious difference between anti-abortion and animal rights advocacy is that the former is almost entirely based on religion while the latter is not. The idea that animals feel pain, and that we ought to minimize their suffering, is one that virtually everyone agrees with -- the animal rights position merely draws a more strict line at what suffering is justifiable. In contrast, there is no particularly coherent argument as to why the life of a fetus always takes precedence over the right of a woman not to have her body used without her consent; it's just "God says so." Which is particularly funny since the Christian god kills plenty of pregnant women, fetuses, and babies himself and never actually addresses abortion in the bible. In other words, even if one disagrees with the conclusions drawn, there is something fundamentally rational about the animal rights position that the anti-abortion position lacks in all but its weakest variants.

There is also the fact that the animal rights position, in defense of animals, does not call for violating the rights of humans. The anti-abortion position, however, does call for violating the bodily-autonomy rights of women. People may have a right to earn a living, and to eat, but they don't have a right to any particular occupation or specific choice of food. There are already many moral, legal, and economic restrictions that force people to avoid certain careers and cuisine, and the acceptance of animal rights merely adds to those restrictions. But there is no anti-abortion position that allows women autonomous control of their bodies.

Finally, the mere fact that both the anti-abortion and animal rights movements have elements that believe in the use of violence to achieve their aims doesn't particularly unify them. All movements have elements that believe in the use of violence, and the existence of such elements doesn't validate or invalidate the larger movement. Violence is not a particularly unique characteristic of anti-abortion or animal rights advocacy.

So why are anti-abortion and animal rights activists often described as being similar in terms of both zealotry and dangerousness? I think the comparison is intentional. In my experience, most animal rightists are pro-choice and not particularly religious. Furthermore, most animal rightists are, if not pacifists, prone to nonviolence as a part of their political philosophy. Animal rights violence is exceedingly rare and generally not harmful to people, though property damage is more common. So for supporters of animal industries, the best way to discredit animal rightists is to portray them as equivalent to a movement they share virtually nothing with. This not only paints a certain image in the minds of observers, but it is sure to put animal rightists on the defensive and leave them angry -- which the supporters of animal exploitation can then point to as evidence of their zealotry and instability.

My Moral Philosophy

2009-03-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

I was asked if my veganism comes out of my overall philosophy. It does, and this is that philosophy. Obviously, when I say "my" philosophy, I mean only that I ascribe to it -- few, if any, of the ideas are original to me.

Introduction

Humans are animals. Several million years ago our cognitive abilities expanded rapidly in response to changing conditions. Along the way what were simple, effective rules for group dynamics in ape societies such as tit-for-tat reciprocal altruism took on new forms and were fraught with new significance to handle the more complex forms of interpersonal relationships that our oversized brains made possible. Humans are animals, and we have moral instincts.

But instincts cannot tell us what is right. It is a fallacy to derive ought from is. Our moral instincts -- expressed in myriad different ways through the lenses of different cultures -- only give us brute urges toward ideas like desert and purity. They can be misapplied to circumstances beyond their native purview. They can be magnified and distorted, consciously and unconsciously. More importantly, they conflict. Murder for revenge is a perfectly natural impulse, but so is the belief that one ought not kill.

It is the job of moral philosophy to use reason to analyze, clarify, and make consistent our disparate and conflicting instincts, more often here called intuitions. But this is not my goal here. Fully deriving and explaining schemes of moral philosophy takes book length to do properly so this post is more like the concluding chapter of such a work that has been written and rewritten in my mind over the last decade; this post is the part where I share the result, not where I find it. Reading Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Tom Regan, Alan Gewirth, Peter Singer, Amartya Sen, and John Rawls will give you most of the raw material my philosophy is molded from. Animal rightists will note a particular affinity with Regan's respect principle, though I do not derive my similar version from any postulate of inherent value.

The Golden Rule

Virtually every moral system has found some way to systemize the moral outgrowth of our instinct to reciprocal altruism known as the Golden Rule, most commonly expressed as "do unto others what you would have others do unto you." Indeed, most moral philosophy could be seen as determining who counts as an other and just what we ought to want them to do unto us. The major exception is ethical egoism, which, frankly, doesn't strike me as being properly ethics at all.

So the place to start is with what we want others to do unto us. An easy first reaction is to say "leave us alone," but few of us really want this. What if we are in need of aid? What we want is for others to treat us fairly and with respect. We want them to recognize us as individuals, not automatons and not just one part of a mass. We want them not to use us, and not to do things to us, but with us and for us. At the core of this inescapable demand for fair treatment is the fact that we have interests of our own that we wish to fulfill, alone or in concert with others.

And this demand for respect is indeed a demand, even if it is never uttered. We see attempts to restrict our capability to fulfill our interests as an affront to our dignity. When we are imprisoned, we try to escape. When we feel we are wronged, we seek revenge -- even if only in our minds before squelching the notion. Respectful treatment from others is vital to our own self-respect. We cannot fulfill our interests, and therefore find contentment, without it.

But if we demand respect from others, we must recognize that others are making exactly the same demand of us. More importantly, their demands are just as valid as we believe ours to be. Everyone with interests is making a valid claim against every person who can respond: recognize my interests; indeed, aid me in fulfilling them if doing so will not prevent you from fulfilling your own. This is the basis of respectful treatment.

Disability, the Unborn, and Animals

While the details may vary among readers, I do not think the above will be a controversial position as it relates to typical adult humans. Most people, when asked, can simply tell you they want to be treated with respect. If you try to use them merely as means to your ends, they will resist. But what of non-typical and non-adult humans?

Remember that the valid claim, which we can properly call a right, to respectful treatment does not have to be spoken. It doesn't even have to be consciously made. It stems directly from the existence of interests. But what qualifies as an interest, and who has them? If I lose important parts of my brain, and am no longer capable of typical adult functioning but I still feel pain, I can be rightfully said to have an interest in avoiding pain. If I do not even have the ability to feel pain or anything else, I cannot be said to have interests at all. Interests require the ability to feel in the experiential sense. Interests require sentience.

There are always marginal cases, but drawing the line for respectful consideration of interests at sentience is fairly easy to do in the majority of cases, even those that many people find controversial. People with severe mental disabilities are entitled to the right to respectful treatment. People with no cognitive function at all -- such as those in a persistent vegetative state -- have no interests and have no rights. Very late term fetuses with functioning brains are entitled to the right to respectful treatment, though it doesn't follow that they cannot be aborted in self-defense if the mother is endangered. Second- and first-trimester fetuses with no cognitive function at all have no interests and no rights.

And in the case of animals, the argument is equally clear. Those animals who are obviously sentient, such as mammals, have a right to respectful treatment -- which means they cannot be used merely as means to our ends. This has logical but dramatic consequences: animals ought not be used for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, or any other purpose. Given the complex and ill-understood nature of ecosystems, the best way to treat most animals with respect is to leave them to their natural lives, free from our interference. In the case of domesticated animals that we have spent millennia adapting to live with us, respectful treatment entails taking care of them to the best of our ability.

There is evidence that many other types of animals beyond mammals are sentient, quite probably including all vertebrates. For invertebrates, the line begins to blur in direct proportion to the simplicity of their nervous systems. Unfortunately, experience is not something that can be easily ascertained without experiencing. So, morally, I only suggest we give those who may be suffering the benefit of the doubt; at the very least, doing so will ensure we are in the habit with those for whom there is no doubt.

Politics

All sentient beings share an interest in avoiding suffering. All humans share other, more complex interests, but there are also a wide variety of interests that individuals pursue which may not be of any concern to anyone else. Politics (and by extension, economics) ought to be seen as the means for allowing people to pursue their interests, and for resolving conflicts between those interests.

Recall that we all demand respectful treatment. By this we meant that we all demand that others act in our interests where their choices affect us. Since there are many interests that all people share -- food, water, health, education, security, political participation, economic participation, etc. -- any society ought to protect all people's access to these basic goods and the capabilities they enable as unalienable rights.

But what of those interests not shared by all? We must not act to frustrate the pursuit of those interests except where they would prevent others from their own pursuits. Intelligence, ambition, strength, and all other factors that determine the occupation one is suited for are the result of variables almost entirely outside our control at the time we are pursuing work -- genetics, early childhood, quality of education, and others. It is therefore unfair, and disrespectful, to reward or punish us materially on the basis of the work that we do or which work we are capable of doing. There may be need for inequalities in material reward for incentives, but these should be as small as possible and only obtain if not offering them would make everyone worse off.

Moreover, because we ought not use others merely as means to our ends, democracy must extend beyond politics into economics. The economy is a machine for the benefit of all, and we must all have a say in how it is used. At a minimum, this requires public control of investment and regulation, and more significantly it requires the end of wage labor -- no person ought to work for another, only with another. Employees must become partners.

Conclusion

I have not by any means exhausted the depths of my moral philosophy but only provided an overview. This post should lay out the basis for and make clear the reasoning behind all of my other opinions.

Why Gary Francione Is Right

2009-03-11T19:20:00.000-05:00

Since my last post is getting some modest traction from people who tend to agree with Gary Francione, I wanted to clarify two significant places where we agree.

First, and most importantly, nonhuman animals have an unequivocal right not to be property -- that is, not to be used merely as a means to human ends. Abolition and veganism are the only moral positions consistent with that right. Anyone who favors even the most so-called "humane" use of animals, be it for experimentation or for food, is not acting in accordance with animal rights.

Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, to the extent that they exist I actually think Francione is correct in his critique of what he calls "new welfarists." However, it is important to distinguish those that meet the criteria of Francione's "new welfarists" from the broader category that, borrowing from David Sztybel, I am calling animal rights pragmatists. Francione lists five distinguishing features of "new welfarists," which he uses to contrast with classical welfarists but work equally well in comparison with pragmatists.

They generally support abolitionism, or at least oppose speciesism
They think animal rights theory doesn't provide any practical gradual path to abolition
They pursue welfare campaigns identical to those of classical welfarists, and consider them "rights"
They see welfare reforms as necessary as steps to abolition
They believe there is nothing inconsistent about animal advocates reinforcing the use of animals

I should hope it would be clear from reading my previous post that I do not meet the last four of these criteria, with the arguable exception of number 3, and I come out on the right side of number 1. I may be, in Francione's estimation, some form of welfarist since I support some "welfare" reforms, but I would seem to fail the "new welfarist" test. I do think animal rights theory (and by extension, vegan activism and the incremental quasi-rights Francione endorses) is enough to achieve abolition; in fact, I think it is the only way to do it. I do not support all "welfare" campaigns a classical welfarist might, but I might support some. I do not see "welfare" reforms as necessary steps to abolition -- I think "welfare" reforms and abolition are essentially unrelated, except in that they both deal with the treatment of animals. Finally, I absolutely think there is something inconsistent about animal advocates reinforcing the use of animals; where I disagree with Francione here is that all "welfare" reforms do so.

But there are people who do meet these criteria. You especially find a lot of PETA supporters who think every "welfare" reform is a "victory" on the road to liberation, as if there is some sort of causal link between exploiting gently and not exploiting at all. So I think that Francione's critique of "new welfarists" is accurate -- but I don't think everyone who supports some form of "welfare" campaign is a "new welfarist" according to these criteria by a long shot.

Why Gary Francione Is Wrong

2009-03-09T11:16:00.000-05:00

Some time ago I wrote a post explaining why I felt that animal rights advocates ought to support some animal "welfare" reforms, despite the fact that these reforms won't bring us any closer to animal rights. This isn't a particularly controversial position in the movement as a whole; in fact, it is the default position of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as well as most smaller or regional animal rights groups.

However, among a vocal but growing segment of the animal rights movement, any concession to animal "welfare" is seen as complicity with violating animal rights, or even as collaboration. In fact, this segment considers those who do not agree with the specific plan of action they endorse to be opponents in the struggle for animal rights. They call themselves abolitionists, and the rest of the movement new welfarists, two terms that are fraught with problems that will be examined later.

The most prominent proponent of this brand of abolitionism is Gary Francione. It was Francione's book Rain Without Thunder that essentially launched the so-called "abolitionist movement" upon its publication in 1996. In the book, Francione describes the many failures of the animal rights movement, which he attributes primarily to a willingness on the part of many advocates to compromise their position by seeking short-term "welfare" reforms.

The problem is that Francione is wrong.

I was once a Francione acolyte myself. You can find posts to my various blogs, comments on others, and messages on forums defending that position. But times change, opinions grow. I posted a rather basic reason to support some "welfare" reforms in my post referenced above, and David Sztybel essentially demolishes the so-called "abolitionist approach" in a paper called "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism" (PDF link). I don't necessarily agree with the specific moral formulation of animal rights that Sztybel works from, called "best caring ethics," but I agree with most of his conclusions.

First a note on terminology: Francione and his supporters have self-styled themselves as the abolitionists, the implication being that all other animal rights advocates do not support abolition. This is, of course, patently false. Virtually everyone who supports animal rights supports abolition, they merely disagree on the efficacy of certain tactics in bringing abolition about. Because most animal rights advocates support at least some "welfare" reforms, Francione pejoratively labels them new welfarists. I am going to follow Sztybel in referring to the majority as animal rights pragmatists and those who agree with Francione as animal rights fundamentalists. This is not meant to be insulting, but clarifying -- they believe that the right not to be property is so fundamental as to outweigh all other advocacy concerns.

The problem, to me, seems to be that Francione treats the right not to be property as the end to seek, rather than seeking the actual welfare (in the broadest sense) of actual animals. But rights are abstractions. As Francione correctly states, rights are protections of interests. A right is a tool to protect an interest of an actual sentient being. That is, rights only exist to promote the welfare of rights holders. Promoting the right not to be property is absolutely in the interests of beings currently held as property. But it is not the only thing in their interests, and it is not necessary to ignore all of these other interests in the single-minded pursuit of that one.

In addition to the interest in not being property, animals have an interest in not suffering. And animals continue to suffer now. Francione accuses pragmatists of sacrificing animal rights for short-term "welfare" gains. But there is no sacrifice if the thing allegedly sacrificed is impossible at the time in question. One can actively and loudly promote a full suite of animal rights while always striving for the best of what is actually possible now. If what is actually possible is less than full animal rights it is the fault of those who oppose them, not those who support them.

Let me reiterate: seeking to reduce suffering in exploitation is not the same as exploiting, no matter how many times you say it. If exploitation continues, that is the fault of the exploiters.

Of course, Francione's argument is also that "welfare" reforms do not actually help animals, and that they increase animal exploitation. The former is fairly easy to determine on a case by case basis, and I would certainly never support a welfare reform that was purely cosmetic. The second, however, is really difficult to determine. I have never seen Francione or any other fundamentalist provide any statistical data to support that conclusion (though perhaps I haven't looked hard enough), except for the general observation that despite three decades of animal "welfare" and pragmatist animal rights advocacy, meat eating has increased in that period.

There are two problems with using this as evidence. First, and most obviously, there is no way of knowing if the increase would have been lesser or greater in the absence of that advocacy, or had fundamentalist-style activism been in full swing. Second, the use of that trend as evidence seems to operates under the faulty assumption that "welfare" reform should be sought as a means of reducing the number of animals exploited, rather than as a means of reducing the suffering of them. Pragmatists agree with the fundamentalists that vegan outreach is the way to reduce the numbers of animals suffering, and if meat eating has increased, it is a demonstration of the failure of vegan outreach thus far, not of "welfare" reforms.

Fundamentalists say that by negotiating improvements in animal welfare without abolishing animal exploitation, pragmatists are complicit in that exploitation and even endorsing it. But if improving welfare by 20% is being complicit in exploitation by "accepting" the 80% of suffering still remaining, how complicit is improving welfare by 0% and therefore "accepting" 100% suffering, as the fundamentalists advocate? The word for not seeking improvements that are actually possible is complacency. Pragmatists at their best are actively engaged in doing what is best for actual animals now and in the future, while fundamentalists are the ones truly sacrificing animal interests today in the hope of one day satisfying those of other, luckier animals.

The best example of this thinking in action is Francione's one-time support of the Great Ape Project. The Great Ape Project would recognize the right of great apes to be free from exploitation, but Francione has since rejected it because it is based on these apes' cognitive similarities to humans rather than their ability to suffer as he founds his rights theory upon. In other words, it is more important to Francione that a specific human concept (basing rights on sentience) be realized than actually granting substantive benefits to a whole class of largely endangered animals. Francione would sacrifice all living great apes for a specific language of rights that may or may not be ever realized.

This becomes simple to understand when viewed through the lens I described above: fundamentalists see rights (or even a single right) as the end itself, and therefore anything other than those rights is an obstacle. In their hopefully subconscious refusal to consider the animals themselves as the end to be promoted, they overlook ways of doing the best thing actually possible for actually existing animals. They want only to do the best thing possible for an abstraction that may or may not ever become a reality, and the actually possible is nothing more than a distraction from that presently impossible goal. There are valid ends other than a right not to be property, but Francione and fundamentalists ignore them.

Animal rights fundamentalists fall into the same trap as the radical core of most social and political movements: they mistake the present impossibility of their full program as license to opt-out of achieving the achievable. They would rather remain "pure," and purity is a compelling siren in activism. In the case of animal rights, they mistake grabbing the low-hanging fruit first for refusing to climb the tree.

Justice and Sustainability

2009-03-05T12:33:00.000-06:00

I just mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson a few weeks ago, and now Bruce Sterling points us to a Robinson post up at What Matters about climate chance and social justice. Here's his simple list of suggestions for a better future:

Believe in science.

Believe in government, remembering always that it is of the people, by the people, and for the people, and crucial in the current situation.

Support a really strong follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol.

Institute carbon cap-and-trade systems.

Impose a carbon tax designed to charge for the real costs of burning carbon.

Follow the full “Green New Deal” program now coming together in discussions by the Obama administration.

Structure global economic policy to reward rapid transitions from carbon-burning to carbon-neutral technologies.

Support the full slate of human rights everywhere, even in countries that claim such justice is not part of their tradition.

Support global universal education as part of human-rights advocacy.

Dispense with all magical, talismanic phrases such as “free markets” and promote a larger systems analysis that is more empirical, without fundamentalist biases.

Encourage all business schools to include foundational classes in ecology, environmental economics, biology, and history.

Start programs at these same schools in postcapitalist studies.

Read the whole thing, it's short and nice.

Has Anything Changed?

2009-03-01T08:54:00.000-06:00

Who would have thought that Rush Limbaugh would still be the biggest name in conservative politics after all these years? Among the choice gems from his "first national address" at the sagging heap of batshittery known as the Conservative Political Action Conference:

He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day, because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated.

That a conservative could possibly imply that their opponents are the ones that want people instilled with fear, after the previous administration's reign of—I'm sorry, war on terror is mind-numbingly vacuous. And then to ignore the utter demolition of our economy through the last thirty years of conservative policies and imply that the meager assistance that the Obama administration might provide to those suffering from Republican success will be an abject failure makes one's already-rotted brain seep out one's ears. If the Democratic recovery plans fail, it will be for being too meek.

Rush continued:

They see these inequalities, these inequities that capitalism produces. How do they try to fix it? Do they try to elevate those at the bottom? No, they try to tear down the people at the top.

Let me see if I understand this logic. Capitalism produces inequalities that need to be fixed... so naturally conservatives are all about the invisible hand of the free market magically making everything right. Those at the bottom need to be elevated... so naturally conservatives want to keep magnifying these inequalities and let the rich get richer while pretending to elevate those at the bottom without spending any money through, I don't know, moral support.

Rush, let me fill you in on a little secret: those at the top are at the top because those at the bottom did all of the real, actual work that put them there, but those at the top took the profit. It takes more than gumption and moxie to "elevate" those at the bottom. It also takes their, you know, continued survival and health. Those at the bottom will never be elevated as long as we rely on the magic market fairies to give everyone a fair and livable wage (because it never, ever has), and to provide access to affordable health care (because it never, ever has).

I will only oppose the welfare state if we are no longer relying on capitalism to do our economic work for us. In a sane and liberal socialist society, there would be no need for all of the Democratic proposals that Rush and his simple, sad, backward-looking, race-baiting, money-grubbing, gay-bashing, woman-hating, war-mongering, jeebus-loving, jingoistic, gun-toting, downward-spiraling ilk so vociferously oppose. But we do not live in a sane and liberal socialist society, we live in a deeply flawed capitalist one, and capitalism skews the rules of the game to favor incumbent interests. Until such time that we address those flaws directly and restructure our systems, there will be a need for the only force powerful enough to check capitalism—government—to compensate for its insufficiencies.

And so naturally I am more than pleased to have Rush Limbaugh spout off as the public face of conservatism and the Republican Party at this precise moment when their credibility plummets. Maybe he can put the last nail in the coffin for them.

Liberal Socialism

2009-02-27T13:12:00.000-06:00

For a number of years I have told people that I'm not a liberal. This is mostly for amusement, as I can follow it up with the zinger that liberals are too conservative for me. And this is true: self-identified liberals are more often than not to the right of me.

But if we're speaking precisely, in terms of just what political liberalism means, then I am as much a liberal as I am a socialist. I am a political liberal and an economic socialist, and I think it is perfectly possible to be both at the same time.

My liberalism is much like that of John Rawls; this ought not be surprising since Rawls thought that his liberalism was compatible with democratic socialism as well. I don't necessarily agree with the full sweep of Rawls's constractualist justification for liberalism, but I agree with the practical outcome of it. Among the Rawlsian liberal tenets I agree with:

All citizens should be free and equal and live in a society that is a fair system of cooperation.
All citizens should have the familiar rights and liberties, which should be given priority over the general good.
All citizens should have access to the basic goods that allow them to make use of their liberties. In practical terms this means equality of opportunity (in education and training, as well as in running for political office), fair distribution of income and wealth (little income inequality and a guaranteed minimum income), full employment, universal health care, and publicly financed elections.
Political power ought to only be used if it is derived from basic laws that all citizens would generally agree on.
Laws should be justified only by reasonable argument, not by appeal to any "comprehensive doctrine" such as a religion or worldview.

Additionally, I am comfortable with Rawls's two-part conception of justice-as-fairness:

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all.
Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society.

The socialism I favor is fully compatible with Rawlsian liberalism and justice-as-fairness. Rawls himself says that liberalism requires either a "property owning democracy" in which the government ensures widespread ownership of the means of production and broad access to education and training, or democratic socialism which is essentially the same but with worker-managed firms. This sounds a lot like David Schweickart's economic democracy, a rather congenial market socialism that features public ownership and control of investment through public banks and a capital assets tax, worker-managed cooperative firms, and a market for distribution of goods and services.

I do not think that a Rawlsian liberal state combined with democratic market socialism are utopia. However, I also don't think that my utopia is the same as everyone else's. There are over 6 billion conceptions of utopia in the world. A liberal socialism something like that described above is as close as I think we can come to allowing all people to pursue their own conception of the good without preventing others from doing the same.

Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read

2009-02-21T10:24:00.000-06:00

This is a list from 2002 by China Miéville, but I happened to stumble across it once again and was struck by how few of these books I've read. Given that I am a socialist and a science fiction nut, one would think I'd have devoured quite a few, even accounting for my general dislike of fantasy. Of the fifty, I've only read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Ken Macleod's The Star Fraction, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, though I've at least read other books by some of the authors listed.

In any case, I think I've got some books to hunt down.

The Executive Council

2009-02-20T11:22:00.000-06:00

What say we end the cult of presidentialism? Take a page from the Swiss and elect not a unitary president but an Executive Council to make executive decisions that ought not be placed in one person's hands. Here's my proposal:

The Executive Council would consist of seven equal voting members. These members would be directly elected by the people through single transferable vote. However, there will also be a provision that no more than three council members can be from the same political party. This will ensure that there are always at least three parties represented in the council, even if only by one member. Additionally, and probably most controversially, I would mandate that no more than four members may be from the same sex or ethnic group. So (even assuming present electoral prejudices) the council would always have at least three female and three non-white members. The candidate with the most total votes will serve as Council President to preside over meetings and represent the US for ceremonial and diplomatic purposes, but this president would not have any real additional powers.

As best as I can tell, with an executive council as described above and based on the trends in the primaries and the ultimate votes, the 2008 election would have resulted in an executive council consisting of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Cynthia McKinney, and Gloria La Riva. The latter two get in under both the sex and ethnic group clauses, and one is covered by the third-party clause. Obama would serve as Council President.

Late Feudalism

2009-02-15T09:08:00.000-06:00

Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson likes to call capitalism "late feudalism" to remind us of its historical origins. And feudalism it remains, with a small group of economic lords doling out a comparative pittance to the rest of us. It is the ultimate confirmation of this comparison that those most responsible for generating the current economic crisis can have the privileged audacity to complain about hypothetical $500,000 a year salary caps when they ought to be fired. If there is any doubt that those with the money continue to rule, let it be dashed apart by the face that consultation continues with "leaders" in the financial sector to help resolve this crisis: the very leaders whose overwelcomed input into the arrangement and operation of our economy that led to the crisis to begin with.

We do not need the "wisdom" of these sorts of alleged leaders. We need to break the mold of late feudalism entirely, and even as we work with the skeleton of our economic system, we need to fill it with entirely new organs and cover it with new skin. There must be a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions behind how our economy is meant to function. It cannot be simply a tool for increasing profit. It must be engaged in serving the people that make it run. It has been centuries since we decided that people ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them, and now political democracy and political participation are the standard to which we continually strive. It is time we realized that the same arguments that were once leveled against kings ought to be turned on those that command our economy as well. The time has come for economic democracy.

The Wrong Kind of Change

2009-02-03T10:10:00.000-06:00

Look, I've given President Obama the benefit of the doubt. He is still unarguably better than President McCain would have been. He has managed to enact some genuinely progressive and welcome policies in his brief time in office. But he has also made some catastrophically bad choices, and his appointment of right-wing nutjob Senator Judd Gregg to head the Commerce Department is quite possibly the worst. The Commerce Department is supposed to enforce fair trade practices that Gregg opposes. It is also supposed to exist, of course, which is surprisingly something Gregg also opposes. And now a Republican governor gets to select a new Republican senator to replace Gregg as well.

Gaza

2009-01-10T08:34:00.000-06:00

The two things I hear people most often say to defend Israel's assault on the civilian population of Gaza are:

1. But it's in response to rocket attacks.
2. If Canada/Mexico was firing rockets into the US, we'd attack them, too.

The first is just plain silly. A man kidnaps a woman, keeps her locked in a room for years, and beats her daily. Every now and then she manages to grab a fork and tries to stab him. One day she gets the fork again so the man pulls out his gun and shoots her seven times. When the police arrive, he points to the body and the fork and says it was self defense.

The second is even more absurd. The idea that we should look to what "we" would do as evidence of some other country's right to do the same thing is laughable given that "we" invaded a country that posed no threat to us and killed the better part of a million people, and "we" operate torture prisons holding people indefinitely without charges, and "we" have a history of supporting dictatorships and military forces that kill civilians, and "we" do all sorts of other horrible things all the time. So what if the US would retaliate to rocket attacks across our borders with a wildly disproportionate response that will make our enemies more determined to kill us? That doesn't make Israel right, it makes us wrong, too.

Crush porn and eating animals

2009-01-08T13:27:00.000-06:00

Jill at Feministe had a post recently about crush porn, illegal videos of women crushing and killing small animals with their feet that gets some sick fucks off. While the post was primarily about free speech, she expressed dismay at the cruelty to the animals involved.

It is hypocritical in the extreme for any non-vegan to honestly complain about the treatment of animals. Of course I agree with the complaint, and Jill and anyone else has as much of a right to complain as I do. But I cannot understand why anyone can think it is abhorrent to torture and kill an animal for a trivial bit of pornography but think it is perfectly acceptable to torture and kill animals for something as trivial as flavor. Why does the sympathy not translate?

There is no particularly significant moral difference between crush porn and using animals for food. Both involve the infliction of tremendous suffering on innocent beings for entirely superfluous and uneccessary reasons. The only intelligable difference is that the use of animals for food makes the occasional pretense of caring about animal well-being, but we can be fairly sure pretense matters little to the animals in question.

All omnivores are as complicit in cruelty to animals as consumers of crush porn are, and given the scale, far more suffering results from omnivores eating animals than from women crushing them on camera. The vegetarians are accomplices as well, since the production of dairy and eggs is no less cruel to the animals involved than the production of meat, and the animals are often used for meat in the end anyway (or, in the case of male chicks and calves, killed outright). That the animal products vegetarians consume aren't the proximate result of animal killing is rather irrelevant, ethically speaking, as the suffering and death is there all the same. But at least vegetarians have a shot at supporting numerically fewer acts of suffering, and at least they're thinking about it.

It goes without saying that it is impossible to completely eliminate complicity in animal cruelty in a world that considers animals to be no more than resources, but it is not impossible to try. The only ethical position compatible with the recognition of animals as beings capable of suffering (to say nothing of them as posessors of rights) is veganism.

Attn. PETA

2008-12-20T21:02:00.000-06:00

New rule: An animal rights organization's "Person of the Year" can't be someone who gratuitously violates animal rights by eating animals. Even if they took a break for a gee-golly whole three weeks.

Animal rights, welfare, and abolition

2008-12-17T07:04:00.000-06:00

This is going to be another long one, folks. Blogging 101 says keep posts brief, because nobody wants to read long ranty diatribes and you'll get more readers with short, focused material. Or lists; readers love lists. But I scarcely have any readers, so what do I care?

Before the late 1970s, "animal rights" as a coherent concept didn't exist. All animal advocacy groups were merely concerned with the treatment of animals as they were being used, with animal welfare, and didn't really question whether animal should be used in the first place. Animal welfare groups such as the various Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of course, still exist today, and generally speaking the animal welfare movement has widespread support.

But some people did question whether animals should be used in the first place, and the answer was negative. The animal rights movement, often termed "animal liberation" after Peter Singer's influential book of that title (which ironically did not argue for animal rights), claims that animals have an inherent right not be used as means to ultimately trivial human ends. The most popular animal rights group then and now remains People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, perhaps best known for producing controversial campaigns featuring naked people.

It wasn't until the late 1980s and early 1990s that something broke in the movement. Some animal rights advocates began to question PETA's general strategy of fighting for essentially any and all reform and regulation of animal treatment in the belief that such welfare reform would eventually raise public awareness and lower corporate profitability enough that real rights would become feasible. Gary Francione's excellent book Rain Without Thunder describes the trouble with what he calls "new welfarism." Francione and others are now known as "abolitionists." The abolitionists believe that vegan education is the primary or only form animal rights advocacy should take because veganism is the only stance consistent with respecting animal rights. More importantly, abolitionists believe that animal right advocates should not support welfare reforms of the sort championed by PETA because these do not respect animal rights and will never be able to lead to their establishment. While abolitionists may support some limited incremental changes (outright bans on certain practices, for example), they oppose all so-called "humane" animal regulations.

Abolitionism is the stance that I most closely identify with, but it should be recognized that this is still a fringe element in the animal rights movement. Some abolitionists, as radicals of all stripes are often wont to do, go so far as to declare the millions of people who believe animals should have basic rights but support groups like PETA are not simply mistaken about methods, but are enemies of the "true" animal rights movement: the abolition movement. However, despite my abolitionist leanings I think a case can be made for some welfare reforms and I want to make it here by analogy.

The Prison Book Program and other similar organizations are popular among many typically social-minded animal rights advocates. The group collects donated reading materials and provides them for free to prisoners. Prisons often have limited libraries and other educational opportunities. Prisoners' access to books serves their well-being while in prison, provides education and entertainment, and hopefully allows personal growth that might help prevent a return to prison upon release. It doesn't challenge the notion that many and perhaps most prisoners are only incarcerated due to a malformed and malfunctioning criminal justice system serving the interests of what amounts to a prison-industrial complex.

Interestingly, the abolitionist Francione digressed from animal rights and covered the topic of the Prison Book Program:

On balance, it is my view that advocates of criminal justice system reform should not donate books to the Prison Book Program. I base my view on three reasons:

First, the Prison Book Program will do nothing to actually improve prisoner well-being in the short term. The Program doesn't deliver books to all prisons, not all prisoners have full access to all books, and even if it works as planned it will result in no meaningful reduction in prisoner suffering. They will still be locked behind bars with limited access to the basics of human dignity.

Second, the Prison Book Program will only make the public feel better about the state of the criminal justice system and will result in increased incarceration levels. People, particularly African American men, will continue to be imprisoned for minor offenses; the only difference will be that the imprisonment will carry the stamp of approval from the donors to the Prison Book Program. It is telling that the corporations involved in the prison-industrial complex don't oppose the Prison Book Program. Why do you think that is? The answer is plain. These prison corporations believe that the Prison Book Program will do nothing to prevent increased incarceration rates. And it won't.

Third, it is important for advocates of criminal justice system reform to send a clear message to the Prison Book Program and other groups to stop promoting mere improvements in prisoner welfare. If the Prison Book Program is really concerned about prisoner well-being, then it should perhaps spend a chunk of its resources on educating the public about the abuse and injustice in the prison system. Exposing the racism and absurdity of the criminal justice system helps to shift social attitudes away from the notion that it is morally acceptable to incarcerate millions of black men as long as we give them books to read. Giving them books to read results in nothing but continued incarceration for all but a few. It is time that advocates just said "no" to it.

OK, if that was a bit silly, I admit that Francione did not write the above. Or rather, he didn't write it about improving the welfare of prisoners. He did, however, write it about improving the welfare of animals through California's recently approved Proposition 2. I just changed the references.

But the analogy holds. Despite genuinely caring about the suffering of animals, Francione and other abolitionists believe that it is not merely more important to work towards abolishing the property status of animals than to reduce that suffering in the short term (with which I agree), but that it is so much more important that we shouldn't act to reduce that suffering at all, at least not institutionally.

Abolitionist animal rights advocates accuse groups like PETA, in addition to a multitude of ideological sins, of wasting time and resources that could be spent making more vegans—and more vegans are the only way to salvation for animals. Abolitionists state, correctly, that animals have interests other than their welfare, most significantly the interest in not being used as property. But in focusing entirely on this single interest, abolitionists utterly ignore the other frustrated interests that animals do still have.

I am arguing not that abolitionists should support any and all welfare reforms as a means to abolition. I am arguing that abolitionists should support some welfare reforms in spite of the fact that it will do nothing toward abolition. Abolitionists should support some welfare reforms just because they care about the welfare of presently-suffering animals in addition to caring about the rights of all animals more broadly. Put simply, I don't think animal welfare should be confused as part of the "animal rights movement" at all, but I think it should be independently pursued in some cases.

There are still many animal welfare reforms that I would oppose on principle: any that will most likely increase the use of animals as a result. Trading better welfare for more exploitation is even worse than trading present welfare for far-future rights. This actually cuts the number of supportable welfare reforms down quite a bit. The reforms that get the most attention and support are often those that the animal exploitation industries have signed off on, knowing that it will be beneficial to their bottom line to not be perceived as cruel. So welfare reforms that offer little or no actual benefit to the animals but improve "production" of animal products are immediately off the table. However, regulation that prevents certain egregious acts of cruelty and reforms that show some tangible benefit to animals ought to be on the table even if they aren't causally linked to a future in which animal rights are respected.

I suspect that despite their public stance, many abolitionists already agree with this assessment. Their numbers are vanishingly small and thus hard to account for, but I would imagine quite a few self-described Californian abolitionists voted for the welfare reforms of Proposition 2. Now the hardliners can claim that these were never abolitionists to begin with, but then the pursuit of purity is an all too common defect among animal advocates. No matter the claims to the contrary, anyone who believes that animals should not be used as property by humans is ultimately an abolitionist, even if they have short-term goals that they see to in the meantime.

Abolition and welfare are distinct and not mutually exclusive. Blame has to be placed on Francione's "new welfarists" for implying that welfare reforms are stepping stones towards animal rights when they clearly aren't. Blame has to also be placed on the likes of PETA for so often marketing reform as positive to exploitative industries, as with the push for controlled-atmosphere killing. But blame ought not to be placed on anyone for acting on the desire to reduce suffering simply because that reduction won't proximately lead to our shared optimal future. The ability to work towards more than one goal at a time is a positive feature of the human mind, not a flaw.

Center-right or center-left?

2008-12-04T14:01:00.000-06:00

There are two competing trends in the political blogsophere these days following the dramatic victory of Barack Obama over John McCain.

The right wing claims that the United States remains a center-right nation, and that Obama's election by so many center-right people is a signal that he ought to govern from the right. The left wing, in contrast, claims that Obama's election majority is proof that the tides have turned, that the US is now a center-left nation, and that Obama should feel free to pursue a liberal agenda.

Obama will pursue whatever agenda he will pursue, and I am not concerned with that here. I want to deal with this idea that the majority of Americans are either center-right or center-left in overall ideology. Put simply, I think the answer to this question turns on whether one uses the words right and left in their historical and global sense, or in the anomalous sense of American politics today.

If we define, as many Americans today might, left as "liberal" and right as "conservative," then polls clearly show that on most issues the US leans somewhat left. As of 2007, 84% of Americans favor raising the minimum wage, 52% support unions over corporations in labor disputes, 69% believe the government should provide welfare services, 59% favor bigger government to solve bigger problems, and 67% favor stronger government to handle complex problems. Only one in three Americans wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and two in three want more than abstinence-only sex education. Seventy-six percent of Americans would repeal Bush's tax cuts for universal health care.

The problem here is that, by historical and global standards, these aren't particularly left-wing positions. They are positions of the center that even many conservatives from other countries would agree on. I'm currently reading The Right Nation, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge; their opening overview of the conservatism of other developed nations is amusing, as you see how what other countries consider radically conservative is by our standards daily business. American-style conservatism is virtually unprecedented in the modern world.

So the difficulty with using the liberal-conservative standard of right and left is that while American liberals aren't near the radical left, conservatives are extremely close to the right end. How much farther right could you go than the right wing of the Republicans? Depending on which aspect of right-wingness you're talking about, they're just a stone's throw from alternately imperial fascism, anarcho-capitalism, or Dominionist theocracy. Even the Republican mainstream is a little scared of these guys.

But on the left, the Democrats are nowhere near radical left positions by any standard. There are actual socialist parties that get reasonably large percentages of the vote in most developed nations—France's longest-serving president, in office during Reagan and Bush's abhorrent leadership of our country, was a socialist. We can argue over just how leftist these socialist parties truly are, but they're far more leftist than even the most liberal American Democrats. The idea that America's "left wing" is (still!) calling for a privatized, market-based approach to universal health insurance is laughable by the standards of any true left. It was the "center-left" Bill Clinton that signed the right-wing dream NAFTA treaty, approved the Defense of Marriage Act, and gutted the welfare system.

American readers must take the use by politicians and pundits of terms like "left" and "right" with a tremendous grain of salt, because the range of mainstream political opinion is extremely narrow. America is still very much a center-right nation. We just call the center the left and make believe the moderate conservatives are really in the middle.

A real progressive solution to the economic crisis

2008-11-30T12:04:00.000-06:00

David Schweickart's Economic Democracy is one of the few speculative socialist economies that actually seems as though it could plausibly arise from our present society, though it would still be a long shot—just not as long a shot as something like parecon. Here Schweickart describes how we could get there out of the current financial clusterfuck:

The first thing would be to assure everyone, à la Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that there's nothing to fear but fear itself. I mean, we are not talking about a meteor crashing into the earth, or an incurable plague, or a nuclear war. Pieces of paper have suddenly lost their value. Our resources are still intact. Our skill base is still intact. There's no reason for ordinary people to lose their jobs or see their incomes plummet-no material reason, that is.

What next? Well, since the stock market has tanked, let the government step in and buy up those now near-worthless shares of the publicly-traded non-financial corporations. (The price tag may well be less than Paulson's $700b. The government can print the money, if need be. In a depression it's essential to stimulate the economy by pumping money into it.) Suddenly our government has controlling interest in all the major corporations. (Notice, these assets are not "expropriated" by the government. They are paid for at full market value.)

Since we (the people) now own these enterprises, let's democratize them. Let's now turn these enterprises over to the employees, to be run democratically. The employees (now voting members of their enterprise) can keep the existing management-indeed, for six months or so, let's insist that they do, while worker councils are set up to replace the boards of directors that used to represent the shareholders and oversee management. After six months, they can keep their managers or replace them as they see fit. Thus the "commanding heights" of the economy are democratized. (A democratic corporation is not one in which workers decide policy on a daily basis. Sound management is important. But ultimate authority now rests, not with shareholders-who have been bought out-but with the workforce itself, one person, one vote.) These firms will compete with one another, and with the remaining capitalist firms in the economy-small businesses and privately held companies. (Not much has changed—yet everything has changed.)

There have been a lot of studies indicating that worker-owned firms are viable, that they tend to be at least as efficient as comparable capitalist firms. Indeed, a lot of existing capitalist firms have set up Employee Stock Ownership Plans to take advantage of the efficiency gains these programs often bring. In our case, the workers won't own the firm. As taxpayers, we'll keep title to the firm. But the employees, not government officials, will control it. The firm won't pay dividends to shareholders anymore, for there aren't any. Instead the workers will lease the firm from the government.

What about the financial sector? To begin with, let's nationalize all those financial institutions that are "too big to fail." (Indeed, that is what is happening now-with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with AIG.) Let's go further. Let's nationalize all our banks and other financial institutions. As William Butier has recently pointed out:

"There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist without a deposit guarantee and/or deposit of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer. . . . The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-market-based forms of financial capitalism. The risk of a sudden vanishing of both market liquidity for systematically important classes of financial assets and funding liquidity for systematically important firms may be too serious to allow private enterprises to play. [opendemocracy.net, 9/17/08]"

It should be noted that Buiter is no socialist, but a professor of European political economy at the London School of Economics, the former head of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, and-get this!-the author of a blog (Maverecon) on the Financial Times website, which is where this posting first appeared. The fact of the matter is, banks can be nationalized. Indeed the Economist proposed a few years back that Japan follow precisely this road to resolve its crisis.

Let's restructure our banking system, making into something that more closely resembles the system we had in place before deregulation set in some three decades ago. Let's have a network of Savings and Loan associations that will handle home mortgages and other consumer loans. Funds will be deposited by private savers, and loaned out to creditworthy customers.

Let's also have a system of investment banks. These are the institutions responsible for providing credit to the business sector. This is the economically crucial sector. Since businesses typically buy their raw materials and pay their workers before their products are sold, businesses must have access to credit. They also need credit to retool or to expand production. (It's this credit freeze that is so worrying about the present crisis. "The real shock after the feds failed to bail out Lehman Brothers wasn't the plunge in the Dow, it was the reaction of the credit markets. Basically, lenders went on strike . . . ." [Krugman, "Crisis End Game," NYT 9/19/08].)

Let's have a system of investment banks, but let's not generate the funds for these banks by trying to entice private individuals to save. Let's not rely on the "animal spirits" of the wealthy for the liquidity necessary to keep our economy going. There's an easier, more transparent way to raise those funds. Let's raise them the way we now raise funds for infrastructure, for basic research, for all our military hardware, for NASA, etc., i.e. via taxation. Let's have a special tax, all proceeds to be made available as loans to the market sector of the economy (our newly democratic and remaining capitalist enterprises). Let's abolish the corporate income tax. Let's have a simple, flat-rate capital assets tax. Democratic enterprises can consider this their leasing fee for use of public property, capitalist firms a replacement for the tax on profits. (Profit taxes used to comprise a significant portion of our national income tax receipts, but they no longer do. Corporations have figured out how to avoid those taxes. A capital assets tax is much simpler to administer-and impossible to avoid.)

Suddenly we don't need to worry about those financial markets anymore, which had become so complex, and opaque that no one really understood how they worked. Paul Krugman reports that when Ben Bernanke became Federal Reserve Chairman, he required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers to explain the system to him. "How did things get so opaque? The answer is ‘financial innovation'-two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors' hearts" ["Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis," New York Times, 12/3/07]. Of course some people understood it well enough to make very big bucks at the game. Hedge fund manager John Paulson (no relation to the Treasury Secretary) took home $3.7 billion for his hard work in 2006. (No, that's not a typo. It was $3.7 billion, not $3.7 million.)

There's one more thing we should do. A lot of people have seen their pensions disappear. Let's restore those pensions. We'll pick a date before the crash. Whatever value a person's holdings in a pension fund was at that date will be transferred to that person's social security account, to be paid out as an annuity supplement to that person's basic social security income, when s/he retires. (Please don't say we can't afford this. Whatever the formal source of one's retirement income, whether entirely from the government or from the government plus one's "investments," the goods and services one purchases with that income must be provided by human beings currently working. If there were enough working people and resources to provide these goods and services before the crash, there will be enough after the crash. As I've already noted, we're talking about pieces of paper losing their value, not a plague that has decimated the workforce.)

That's it. The basic structure of our new, democratic socialist economy is in place. Notice what we've done. A capitalist economy is a market economy. In fact it's an amalgam of three distinct sorts of markets-markets for goods and services, labor markets and capital markets. Our new democratic socialism is also a market economy. Our enterprises still compete. We've learned from the mistakes of the past that complex modern economies cannot be centrally planned. We embrace the healthy competition that keeps producers efficient and innovative. That is to say, we've kept those markets for goods and services. But we've replaced those labor and capital markets with more democratic institutions.

There's more, including some less utopian suggestions, in the original article. Compare any of it to what we actually get and weep.

If there was any doubt...

2008-11-26T09:28:00.000-06:00

Anyone still clinging to the silly belief that Barack Obama is the Great Progressive Savior need look no further than the fact that he is keeping George Bush's Secretary of Defense to rather swiftly dispel the notion. He appoints centrist after centrist after centrist and on top of that keeps, of all positions, Bush's military advisor.

So I pretty much called this one, I guess. Still glad we have a black president. Still glad we can dodge the veto on some important legislation a Bush or McCain would make difficult. Still not expecting any major "change," simply a rerun of the Bill Clinton years -- hell, half of Obama's people are Clinton's people.

Could be worse.

Thoughts on President Obama

2008-11-08T16:07:00.000-06:00

As I anticipated it would, Obama's election gives me very mixed feelings. I am, without a doubt, ecstatic that 1. the reign of terror that comes with a Republican president is finally over, and 2. the nation was finally able to elect a black man to its highest office. Both of these events are reasons to be incredibly happy, particularly the latter. Presidents come and go from both parties, but the first of anything by definition only happens once, and it's exciting to be around to see it.

What makes the victory especially gratifying is that it was by a large margin and accompanied by Democratic pickups in the Congress as well. The American people indisputably rejected conservatism, especially the neocon variety, as a governing ideology for the country. Despite the right-wing nuts claiming that the landslide election of a man they portrayed as a radical Marxist mandates that he govern from the center, it is clear that America is ready for change. For progress, even.

However, I've always had mixed feelings about Barack Obama the man, rather than Barack Obama the symbol. This is already being borne out in his early selections for his cabinet. Rahm Emanuel is acknowledged by virtually all as an asshole, and the fact that Larry "I love deregulation, women are stupid, export pollution to Africa where they die young anyway" Summers and Robert F. "vaccines cause autism" Kennedy Jr were even on the shortlists for Treasury and EPA do not inspire confidence in the bold, progressive changes promised by Obama. In fact, they portend more of the same things we've been dealing with for decades.

But this is not a surprise. Obama was never the progressive dream candidate his supporters thought he was. That he will surround himself with ex-Clintonites and centrists will shock only the ignorant. It is our job, as those who are interested in change and progress, to not stand by and watch idly, but to continuously criticize these moves and put as much pressure as we can bring to bear on Obama and the Democratic Congress to make the moves we want.

One thing I do think Obama is capable of is responding to public pressure. He has never been an ideologue, and while he will also never be the savior his fevered followers believed him to be, we can use these two, four, eight years to demand some of the things we've always hoped for with an actual chance of some of them coming to pass. But this will never happen if, in our shock and delight at the genuine accomplishment of the first black president, we sit back and assume he will do the right thing.

Breaking: Obama uses bad words

2008-11-06T08:13:00.000-06:00

I have much more to say about the election soon. Blogging time has really been an issue for me lately. In the meantime, I offer you this quote from Barack Obama in Newsweek.

I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, "You know, this is a stupid question, but let me . . . answer it." So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, "Well, I planted a bunch of trees." And he says, "I'm talking about personal." What I'm thinking in my head is, "Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective."

Maybe I like this guy more after all.

Obama is not progressive; vote for him anyway

2008-11-03T13:52:00.000-06:00

Dale Carrico nails it, as usual:

The reason [Obama's centrism] should not be devastating to progressives is that I think we should expect truly progressive initiatives to issue not from the White House but from the House of Representatives. For example, I think it should matter far less to progressives that Obama has not offered up a universal single-payer health care plan than that we know he has said healthcare is a right, and so will almost certainly not veto such a plan when it finds its way through Congress to his desk.

Anyone who is expecting Obama to actually deliver on radical change is a deluded fool. The advantage of President Obama over President McCain is not that he is a socialist dream candidate (ironically of the sort McCain's campaign has made efforts to portray him as). Obama's positions are not substantially superior to McCain's, aside from a handful of hot-button issues. Obama needs to be elected for only two simple reasons: to avoid driving what is truly a remarkable movement demanding change into cynicism and apathy, and to rubber-stamp any actually progressive legislation that gets passed.

Voting for Obama

2008-10-21T11:05:00.000-05:00

This may come as a bit of a surprise to some people who know me, but I've decided to vote for Barack Obama in November. I'd like to talk about why.

I have maintained and will continue to maintain that electoral politics are not where true change happens. If there are going to be large-scale systemic changes to the way American (and global) political society works, it isn't going to come by electing a savior to make it happen through divine will alone. But that doesn't mean that who is president is therefore irrelevant. On the contrary, a world with President McCain and a world with President Obama are markedly different in actual, meaningful ways to a whole lot of people.

Barack Obama is part of, as Dale Carrico recently put it, "the left wing of the actually possible." I'd rephrase this as "the left wing of the currently possible." It is sad but true that a centrist Democrat like Obama is about as far to the left as America will tolerate today. While I would clearly prefer the policies of, for example, Green candidate Cynthia McKinney were she to be elected, she won't be, and whether or not I vote for her won't change that. My instinct is to say, "Yeah, but if everybody stopped thinking that way and voted for her, maybe she could win." But this simply isn't true at this point in time. Democracy requires compromise, and we do not live in a country where a substantial number of people agree with policies to the left of the Democratic Party. The country leans liberal, but it is still primarily centrist or even undecided. Until we have some true election reform allowing for third (and fourth, and fifth) party candidates to compete for legislative offices and build momentum, it is impossible to elect one as president -- and clinging to impossibility is foolish, no matter how badly we wish things could be different.

A more ideal and representative election system would be instant-runoff voting. People could vote for the candidate who represents them, but if that candidate fails to be elected, have their vote transferred to their second choice, or even third choice if it comes to that. Since we do not have that system, however, I think the strategic and logical thing for anyone concerned about the next four years to do is simple: do the transfer in your head first. We have an (over)abundance of polls. We can see who will and won't reach the hypothetical threshold. If you prefer McKinney, fine. In your head, vote for her first, then transfer your vote to the next candidate. In other words, think of the actual election as the runoff stage of the instant runoff voting. The outcome is exactly the same. And when we do get that election reform and have the choice, the other parties will still be there waiting. Nearly a century of irrelevancy hasn't killed the Socialists yet.

The persuasive rebuttal is that voting for what is, in many ways, the lesser of two evils is not voting one's conscience. I myself have held this view, which holds that the only intellectually honest thing to do is to vote (or not vote) for the candidate you actually agree with. This is confusing moralism for politics. Nobody gets exactly what they want. The fact, unavoidable, is that either John McCain or Barack Obama will be president in January. No amount of moralist handwringing about how much we'd rather someone else is going to change that. Abstaining from voting isn't going to change that. Voting for a candidate who we know is going to lose isn't going to change that. That's life. That's politics. You play the hand you're dealt. Your feelings of personal moral integrity will not matter much to those around the world whose lives are being destroyed by the tyranny of Republican policies.

Even if we had a fair and representative election system that admitted other choices, Obama or McCain would still win in the real live world we live in today. But as I said, the means of true change will never be elections. Aside from those few areas where the president really does make a difference, there is another reason to vote for Obama: as a symbol. We have had eight years of the worst possible government, and frankly, we could do with a little hope. Even if Obama himself doesn't bring about the changes that are needed -- and there is no indication that he will -- the aforementioned vaguely liberal centrist majority needs to see that we won't always be mired in right-wing reactionary bullshit. Obama has been successful at inspiring a great number of people who haven't been inspired by politics before. These are people who, if given options for true change in the future, might take them. These are people who think Obama is better than he is, and when given choices that actually are better, they may well be the new base. But if Obama loses, they lose their personal political momentum, and they cynically resign themselves to the inefficacy of political action altogether. Obama symbolizes change even if he never himself brings it, and right now a symbol might be more important than the reality.

I would not (and did not) vote for John Kerry in 2004, because I did not see any particular advantage in doing so over voting for someone like Nader or Cobb. But Kerry did not come bundled with a movement bent on changing things for the better, and Obama does. The country rather desperately needs to believe that progress is possible, and if the cost of instilling that belief is voting for Obama, well, that's a price I'm willing to pay. But after he and other Democrats are elected, those who truly care about progress must absolutely crank up the pressure to levels unseen. We shouldn't campaign and protest less under a "friendly" Democratic regime, we should campaign and protest more, because unlike the Republicans, some of the Democrats just might actually listen. I'm not thinking of Obama as the pendelum swung to the left, I'm thinking of him as the pendelum finally stopped, and it's up to us to set it in motion again across a new centerline. By the end of his term, I want Obama to mark the right wing of the actually possible.

There are a great many things I want to happen in this country and around the world. No matter how much I try, I can't have them today. What I can have is a flawed and wounded country with a growing number of people who are realizing things can be different and beginning to demand progress, under the solidifying leadership of people who are not entirely batshit insane. And for right now, after the last eight horrific years, that's good enough to get my vote.

The Asymmetry of Bailouts

2008-09-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

Why is it that we socialize failure but privatize success?

Oh, I know the reason given: these failures are so significant that they would destroy our economy if we didn't collectively take on the burden. But I say that if we're responsible when they go down, we ought to benefit when they go up. This should be an either-or proposition. Either the corporations are socialized as public goods, or they are not but we let them die. And if they are so significant that we can't live with out them, and therefore can't let them die, then they ought to not be privately owned and operated in the first place. Only market fundamentalist nutjobs would think privatizing other essential services such as fire and police is a good idea. Health care and financial services are just as essential, and ought to therefore be matters of mutual aid rather than left to the fickle hand and invisible jackboot of the market.

Market Fundamentalism

2008-09-18T13:15:00.000-05:00

Can we all just admit now that the libertarians and fiscal conservatives and other market fundamentalists are just plain wrong about the magical hand of the "free" market? Have the failed and flailing deregulation experiments of the "Washington Consensus" given us enough data to say, collectively, "The market isn't always the answer?"

I am a socialist, but I am also a market agnostic and a pragmatist. I don't think that we need to automagically abolish all market activity in favor of strict central planning -- my socialism is based primarily on a moral argument for extending democracy to economics, not on any particular system. When we're subject to totalitarian politics we fight it and call it a dictatorship; when we're subject to totalitarian workplaces we acquiesce, do as we're told, and call our rulers "management." Whether economic democracy entails a decentralized planning scheme or merely democratic control of investment and workplaces embedded in a market for goods and services is an empirical question: which will be the best for those involved?

What is clear, however, is that the "free" market strips from most people the freedom to live the kinds of lives they want to live by denying them a voice as well as denying them their fair share of the wealth they create. When you create a system designed for cutthroat brutality in the pursuit of profit, you can't be surprised when the results are brutal.

Disqus commenting

2008-09-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

I installed Disqus commenting here. I realize, of course, that my readership has dropped to essentially nil, but I hope to be more active soon and it would be nice to have some social aspect to the ol' blog.

Social Justice Quiz 2008

2008-09-11T11:05:00.000-05:00

From Bill Quigley at Dissident Voice:

1. How many deaths are there world-wide each year due to acts of terrorism?

Answer (highlight): 22,000. The U.S. State Department reported there were more than 22,000 deaths from terrorism last year. Over half of those killed or injured were Muslims. Source: Voice of America, May 2, 2008. “Terrorism Deaths Rose in 2007.”

2. How many deaths are there world-wide each day due to poverty and malnutrition?

Answer: About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. Poverty.com – Hunger and World Poverty. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes – one child every five seconds. Bread for the World. Hunger Facts: International.

3. 1n 1965, CEOs in major companies made 24 times more than the average worker. In 1980, CEOs made 40 times more than the average worker. In 2007, CEOs earned how many times more than the average worker?

Answer: Today’s average CEO from a Fortune 500 company makes 364 times an average worker’s pay and over 70 times the pay of a four-star Army general. Executive Excess 2007, page 7, jointly published by Institute for Policy Studies and United for Fair Economy, August 29, 2007. 1965 numbers from State of Working America 2004-2005, Economic Policy Institute.

4. In how many of the over 3000 cities and counties in the US can a full-time worker who earns minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment?

Answer: In no city or county in the entire USA can a full-time worker who earns minimum wage afford even a one bedroom rental. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) urges renters not to pay more than 30% of their income in rent. HUD also reports the fair market rent for each of the counties and cities in the US. Nationally, in order to rent a 2 bedroom apartment, one full-time worker in 2008 must earn $17.32 per hour. In fact, 81% of renters live in cities where the Fair Market Rent for a two bedroom rental is not even affordable with two minimum wage jobs. Source: Out of Reach 2007-2008, April 7, 2008, National Low-Income Housing Coalition.

5. In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.65 per hour. How much would the minimum wage be today if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968?

Answer: Calculated in real (inflation adjusted) dollars, the 1968 minimum wage would have been worth $9.83 in 2007 dollars. Andrew Tobias, January 16, 2008. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008 and $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.

6. True or false? People in the United States spend nearly twice as much on pet food as the US government spends on aid to help foreign countries.

Answer: True. The USA spends $43.4 billion on pet food annually. Source: American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, Inc. The USA spent $23.5 billion in official foreign aid in 2006. The government of the USA gave the most of any country in the world in actual dollars. As a percentage of gross national income, the USA came in second to last among OECD donor countries and ranked number 20 at 0.18 percent behind Sweden at 1.02 percent and other countries such as Norway, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Austria, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and others. This does not count private donations which, if included, may move the USA up as high as 6th. The Index of Global Philanthropy 2008, page 15, 19.

7. How many people in the world live on $2 a day or less?

Answer: The World Bank reported in August 2008 that 2.6 billion people consume less than $2 a day.

8. How many people in the world do not have electricity?

Answer: World-wide, 1.6 billion people do not have electricity. 2.5 billion people use wood, charcoal or animal dung for cooking. United Nations Human Development Report 2007/2008, pages 44-45.

9. People in the US consume 42 kilograms of meat per person per year. How much meat and grain do people in India and China eat?

Answer: People in the US lead the world in meat consumption at 42 kg per person per year compared to 1.6 kg in India and 5.9 kg in China. People in the US consume five times the grain (wheat, rice, rye, barley, etc.) as people in India, three times as much as people in China, and twice as much as people in Europe. “THE BLAME GAME: Who is behind the world food price crisis,” Oakland Institute, July 2008.

10. How many cars does China have for every 1000 drivers? India? The U.S.?

Answer: China has 9 cars for every 1000 drivers. India has 11 cars for every 1000 drivers. The US has 1114 cars for every 1000 drivers. Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future (2007).

11. How much grain is needed to fill a SUV tank with ethanol?

Answer: The grain needed to fill up a SUV tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year. Lester Brown, CNN.Money.com, August 16, 2006

12. According to the Wall Street Journal, the richest 1% of Americans earns what percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income? 5%? 10%? 15%? 20%?

Answer: “According to the figures, the richest 1% reported 22% of the nation’s total adjusted gross income in 2006. That is up from 21.2% a year earlier, and is the highest in the 19 years that the IRS has kept strictly comparable figures. The 1988 level was 15.2%. Earlier IRS data show the last year the share of income belonging to the top 1% was at such a high level as it was in 2006 was in 1929, but changes in measuring income make a precise comparison difficult.” Jesse Drucker, “Richest Americans See Their Income Share Grow,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2008, page A3.

13. How many people does our government say are homeless in the US on any given day?

Answer: 754,000 are homeless. About 338,000 homeless people are not in shelters (live on the streets, in cars, or in abandoned buildings) and 415,000 are in shelters on any given night. 2007 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Annual Homeless Report to Congress, page iii and 23. The population of San Francisco is about 739,000.

14. What percentage of people in homeless shelters are children?

Answer: HUD reports nearly 1 in 4 people in homeless shelters are children 17 or younger. Page iv – 2007 HUD Annual Homeless Report to Congress.

15. How many veterans are homeless on any given night?

Answer: Over 100,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. About 18 percent of the adult homeless population is veterans. Page 32, 2007 HUD Homeless Report. This is about the same population as Green Bay Wisconsin.

16. The military budget of the United States in 2008 is the largest in the world at $623 billion per year. How much larger is the US military budget than that of China, the second largest in the world?

Answer: Ten times. China’s military budget is $65 billion. The US military budget is nearly 10 times larger than the second leading military spender. GlobalSecurity.org

17. The US military budget is larger than how many of the countries of the rest of the world combined?

Answer: The US military budget of $623 billion is larger than the budgets of all the countries in the rest of the world put together. The total global military budget of the rest of the world is $500 billion. Russia’s military budget is $50 billion, South Korea’s is $21 billion, and Iran’s is $4.3 billion. GlobalSecurity.org

18. Over the 28 year history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. How many people have died in the last 4 years trying to cross the border between Arizona and Mexico?

Answer: 1268. At least 1268 people have died along the border of Arizona and Mexico since 2004. The Arizona Daily Star keeps track of the reported deaths along the state border and reports 214 died in 2004, 241 in 2005, 216 in 2006, 237 in 2007, and 116 as of July 31, 2008. These numbers do not include the deaths along the California or Texas border. The Border Patrol reported that 400 people died in fiscal 2206-2007, 453 died in 2004-2005, and 494 died in 2004-2005. Source Associated Press, November 8, 2007.

19. India is ranked second in the world in gun ownership with 4 guns per 100 people. China is third with 3 firearms per 100 people. Which country is first and how many guns do they own?

Answer: The US is first in gun ownership world-wide with 90 guns for every 100 citizens. Laura MacInnis, “US most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people.” Reuters, August 28, 2007.

20. What country leads the world in the incarceration of its citizens?

Answer: The US jails 751 inmates per 100,000 people, the highest rate in the world. Russia is second with 627 per 100,000. England’s rate is 151, Germany is 88, and Japan is 63. The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any country in the world. Adam Liptak, “Inmate Count in US Dwarfs Other Nations,” NYT, April 23, 2008.

How many did you get?

Fat

2008-09-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

Among people whose weight is considered "normal," only 1 in 4 people have unhealthy levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose, and other risks for heart disease. While possible in anyone, these risk factors are correlated with older age, low levels of physical activity, and proportionately larger waist circumference.

Among those considered "overweight," the incidence of cardiovascular risk factors doubles to 1 in 2. Among those considered "obese," the risk factor increases even more dramatically to 7 in 10.

These are the results of a study hailed by the fat acceptance movement, which traditionally dismisses such research. The reason? Unlike similar papers, the study's results were worded the opposite way, emphasizing the number of "normal" people who are unhealthy, and the number of "overweight" and "obese" people who are healthy. But if the fat acceptance advocates who praise this study do the math, the numbers are clear: being "overweight" makes you twice as likely to be unhealthy, and being "obese" makes you almost three times as likely to be unhealthy. In fact, the study clearly shows that an "obese" person is very likely to have risk factors for heart disease.

Fat acceptance is a difficult subject to deal with, because it is truly one of those situations where both sides are right in some sense. The fat advocates are absolutely correct when they say that the often-used body mass index (BMI) is a rather ridiculous measure of whether or not one is "overweight" or "obese." BMI tells people virtually nothing about their actual physical health. People have different proportions of fat and muscle, which weigh different amounts, and so to use a simple formula to calculate any sort of consistent "weight class" is absurd, except in the extremes. Kate Harding's BMI Project makes this abundantly clear.

Fat advocates (and feminists more broadly) are also absolutely correct in their critique of body image as it is promoted in Western culture, and through mass media. As the ongoing Human Variation Project shows, average people almost never resemble the ideals thrust upon them through advertising and celebrity culture. The size and shape considered "normal" varies throughout time and across cultures, with very few universals. Fat advocates certainly take the right course in their suggestion that people love their bodies, regardless of any perceived flaws. Size, shape, and even health do not make one who one is, they are simply attributes that are as positive or negative as we make them. There are a wide-range of aspects outside one's volitional control (from heredity to opportunity) that influence one's size.

Finally, as we can see from the study cited above, fat advocates are also absolutely correct that it is possible to be classified as overweight and even obese without suffering from cardiovascular risk factors and other health problems.

But the most important thing the fat acceptance movement has correct is that one's size ought never be cause for discrimination or hatred. Fat people, regardless of why they are fat and regardless of whether or not they are healthy, are still people. Even if being fat were the direct result of people's choices and made them extremely ill, it would be no cause for discrimination or hatred. It would be (again, at worst) a medical condition like any other. That being fat is often not entirely in one's control, and it does not mean that one is automatically unhealthy, is even more reason not to engage in fat-shaming and discrimination.

On the other hand, the fat acceptance movement is like any other movement in that it resists holding its ideology up to scrutiny. From the valid premise that we should love the bodies we have combined with the accurate evidence that one can be "fat but fit," the fat acceptance movement has unfortunately built an uncritical belief that there is a vast diet-industry conspiracy controlling scientific research to promote an obesity epidemic. Some books written by people outside medicine, such as The Obesity Myth, go so far as to say there is little or no evidence that obesity is associated with health risks at all by cherry-picking a handful out of the tens of thousands of studies carried out on the topic, or, as exemplified in the beginning of this post, rephrasing others to accentuate the positive while ignoring the negative. The overwhelming tide of evidence points to obesity indeed being associated with many health problems.

The line that must be tread is clear enough: variation in size is a part of the human condition, and should be celebrated rather than suppressed. Nevertheless, all people should be aware of the factual information regarding weight and health, for better or worse, and should be empowered to make their own choices regarding diet, exercise, or medical treatment, choices that ought to be respected. Size is not a character flaw.

Apropos

2008-08-31T11:24:00.000-05:00

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time

REALLY Computing in the Cloud

2008-08-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

This is actually what inspired me to try my little experiment. Needless to say, it's not quite this slick in real life...

Aurora (complete video without commentary) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Computing in the Cloud

2008-08-14T13:01:00.000-05:00

I am going to try an experiment. I'm already most of the way there, so it's really just a matter of taking the last step. The mission: do everything I do on the computer in Firefox, using only web apps and extensions.

Gmail has my email. Google Reader has my RSS feeds. Google Calendar can handle scheduling and reminders. Word processing through Google Docs. Meebo (and, to some extent, Twitter) will do messaging. I've come to listen to Pandora more than my own music in iTunes, anyway. Photos are on Flickr.

There's very little I absolutely need to do outside of Firefox, really. My personal needs and job don't require much in the way of "power using." So let's see how this goes. Dock set to autohide; Firefox zoomed to fill the screen.

How animal rights advocates should handle PETA

2008-07-24T16:49:00.000-05:00

Following up on my post about the PETA situation (namely, that they're an ambiguous ally, at best, to supporters of animal rights):

I'd like to make a few suggestions on how those who don't like a lot of what that organization does (but also don't want to write off 2 million potential AR supporters merely because they're mistaken about PETA's efficacy at achieving their goals) ought to engage the situation. I've just read Saul Alinsky's infamous Rules for Radicals, so naturally I'm quite inspired with ideas. It occurs to me that the same sorts of practices that an advocacy group must use to engage and change systems they oppose can be used by members of a movement to engage and change advocacy groups within that movement. I don't expect this post will be met with adulation from all AR advocates opposed to PETA, but, hey, it's my blog.

PETA's major strategy for large-scale efforts has been to gather as much media attention as possible about specific topics. They choose specific targets and hit them repeatedly until they agree to negotiate some gains—typically not entirely significant ones. The point is that PETA works, as any advocacy group should, through pressure. What AR advocates ought to do with PETA is to also pick a specific target and apply continuous pressure until the group either admits their error or halts the practice.

This is the real world we live in. We can't shut our eyes and pretend that PETA, if vegans just ignore it, will stop being "the" animal rights organization. We can't pretend that they aren't the largest, most well-known group out there and that they are what the average person associates with animal rights. We cannot imagine that, magically, PETA's members are going to stop supporting them. Some vegans and AR advocates suggest we ought to simply write them off, start a new grassroots vegan abolitionist movement that is diametrically opposed to PETA's "new welfarism." I am highly sympathetic to this position, but I'm afraid it reeks of the factionalism that historically tears every broad-based leftist movement apart. We should not all go join PETA, to be sure, and we need not support them either, but our position toward them should be one of constant and positive criticism. We can, through the same pressuring efforts that this abolitionist movement would use to end the exploitation of animals, simultaneously pressure PETA to drift ever abolition-ward. Even if they are never "our" organization, they can become ever less an impediment to true animal rights, and in many cases, an actual expedient.

Here's how:

Assume good intentions from individuals associated with PETA unless they prove otherwise. If we are to convince anyone that they are mistaken, we must assume that they want the right thing in the end, even if they're wrong about how to get there. And in my experience, this is almost always the case. I can't speak for everyone, but all PETA members and supporters I've ever talked to about this issue have fully agreed with me on what the ultimate goal is. They even fully agree that the strategies and methods I support (extensive vegan activism and campaigning for the actual halting of exploitative practices rather than modifications to them) will achieve it. The only thing they disagree on is whether or not PETA ought to also be doing the sorts of things it has become infamous for in the meantime. I have met PETA members who are highly critical of PETA's national tactics. PETA is not a monolith.
Apply continuous pressure to specific issues. I read (and often even enjoy) the PETA Files blog. I also leave comments every occasion I see them congratulating animal exploiters or calling for vegetarianism rather than veganism and I have a minute to write one. To me, these are the two biggest mistakes PETA makes, and so I make an effort to call them out every time I can. I don't know what the blog's readership is, and it doesn't matter—this isn't an attempt to convince outsiders, but an attempt to engage people at, in, or sympathetic to PETA already. I want PETA members who read the blog to also read, every time their group gives an award to someone for their choice of veal or their method of slaughter, a criticism of the practice. I want the bloggers themselves to feel the need to justify every misuse of the word vegetarian and every "victory." This isn't because I'm a pedantic ass, it's because blogs are a discursive medium that ask for two-way interaction.
When discussing PETA with people entirely unsympathetic to animal rights (or already hostile to PETA) only highlight the problems if you can explain the solution. Since the mainstream views PETA as "the" animal rights organization, and PETA members as the prototypical AR activists, there is something of a fine line to tread here. We must make it clear that PETA has problems. We don't want to make it seem as if we're bickering over trivial issues, or that PETA's sizable (and largely agreeable to our ends) membership are all fools, or that (god forbid) we're just jealous of their success, such as it is. I encourage AR people to frame PETA's difficulties as regrettable and avoidable, as though we really wish we could be on the same page with these things, and that maybe PETA can come around. Now, for me, this is the honest truth. I do feel a certain pang of regret that I can't approve of everything the group does. I want to be able to like PETA, because they have such potential and such support. For others, this may be putting things far more diplomatically than they would otherwise, but I think it is the smart strategic move to make. If, as I suggest, we want to use pressure to shift PETA's policies in line with our own, we have to leave that door open in the minds of both PETA supporters and critics—and ourselves.
Don't lie. This is not entryism. This is not covert action. Those of us in the abolitionist core of the animal rights movement are overtly attempting to make more and more people see things our way. One element of this is vegan outreach. One element of this is pressure on PETA. This is the direct corollary of 3 above: we can leave the door open to future alliance with reformed PETA members without stepping through it before we're ready.

In summary, true AR advocates who hope to grow our ranks should see a flawed PETA as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Some PETA members may "convert" and leave. We may get the attention of those in positions of power within the organization. We can't know the future. But we can rest assured that PETA will be around for a long time, and we have to find a way of dealing with them that goes beyond ignoring them and hoping to be heard in their shadow, because the people we're trying to reach will always hear PETA's voice first.

The PETA situation

2008-07-16T14:01:00.000-05:00

I've got a bit of a problem. See, I can't help but pay attention to PETA. As the most recognizable and infamous animal advocacy group, PETA has an obligation to advocate for animals, one would think. And as someone who is very concerned about animal rights—concerned enough to be vegan—I feel it is my duty to keep up on such things. So I've posted about PETA here and on The Red Scare many times before, but I wanted to make a post where I fully laid out my case, both for and against them.

Good

I am generally impressed with actual PETA members, employees, and volunteers on a personal level. I mean, it is clear that, as individuals, the majority of PETA supporters do genuinely care about animals and want to see the best case scenario play out in the end. They're committed enough that I've never really come across a "closeted" PETA member—they're generally out and proud, and visibility never hurt a cause. It takes some fortitude to stand up for animals in the social climate of the world today, and to declare oneself a member of a group that many laypersons actually think sponsors radical animal-rights terrorists (!) is at least a measure of one's devotion.

PETA's web presence is comprehensive and fairly useful content-wise. They have pages and pages of information about animal cruelty, and the sites are updated frequently. I've heard anecdotally that PETA's website alone has greatly influenced several people to become interested in animal issues, along with their video collection. I even enjoy reading the PETA Files blog, even though I don't always agree with everything they post there.

PETA's core message is a good one. Their stated motto, that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way" is absolutely correct. PETA has notoriety and occasionally highlights issues of importance, and even runs many campaigns that directly target the use of animals and call for the abolition thereof.

Bad

PETA can't bring itself to say vegan. OK, fine, if you poke around for long enough on their site, you'll find the word here and there. But go to a food-related PETA demonstration and what will you see? "Go vegetarian." "Go veg." "Get a free vegetarian starter kit." Look at their main site pages, where you'll see stories about vegans with headlines referring to vegetarianism instead. A blog post about vegan athlete Carl Lewis refers to him as vegetarian. The example of Oprah's very public vegan experiment encourages readers to "go vegetarian." Even the vegetarian starter kit mentioned above is actually a vegan starter kit, deliberately mislabeled.

But isn't veganism just a type of vegetarianism? Well, no. The words have lives of their own, and it is an unavoidable fact that "vegetarian" means "eats eggs and dairy (and to some idiots, fish)." It is logically incoherent to say that you believe in animal rights, such as the basic right not to be property, while consuming animal products that require animals to be property. Combined with the fact that even free-range, cage-free, organic eggs and dairy are complicit in the torture and slaughter of animals for meat (a fact PETA's own sites proclaim), it is simply absurd to claim to be opposed to the abuse of animals while encouraging vegetarianism. Vegetarianism directly contributes to the use and abuse of animals. Veganism does not, except in unavoidable ways. An animal rights organization need not require its members be vegan, but veganism has to be the official position of the organization if it claims to be in favor of substantive animal rights at all.

Right now, PETA Files has a post about a "Vegetarianism in a Nutshell" podcast episode, with a link to "the impact of vegetarianism"...on a "GoVeg.com" site, the actual name of which is "veganism.asp." It's total doublethink. Veganism is not vegetarianism.

Related to PETA's avoidance of actually asking people to stop exploiting animals is their routine celebration, promotion, and award-giving to animal exploiters. PETA proclaims victory when KFC Canada starts only using chickens that were gassed to death after their shortened, tortured lives. PETA gives awards to Wolfgang Puck for choosing less cruelly raised veal. They make animal exploiters feel better about getting signed off on by "the animal rights organization." PETA runs Sexiest Vegetarian contests when, as we see above, vegetarians exploit animals.

PETA's campaigns are often narrowly-focused and advance trivial issues of welfare improvement at the expense of the actual exploitation involved. While their "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign clearly targets the use of fur animals entirely, they then go on to protest the treatment of chickens in fast food chains that must use chickens even to exist. It's not that the treatment of these chickens is not abhorrent, it is. But the real problem is the use of chickens in the first place. There is no practical "endgame" to a protest at a KFC short of a multibillion-dollar corporation actually shutting down entirely. "Winning" cages an inch wider is not a meaningful victory for animal rights any more than convincing a wife-beater to use an open palm rather than a closed fist is a great victory against domestic violence. It is a PR boon for the exploiting corporations, however, who can now sell PETA-approved slaughter to their customers and increase profit.

Finally, PETA undeniably uses sexist imagery in some of its campaigns. I've waffled on this, and ultimately I come down on the side that I don't mind their naked activities. I don't mind using the body as an attention-grabber and a form of protest. I think the World Naked Bike Ride is groovy. I think Spencer Tunick's glacier photos for Greenpeace are rad. So it's not that PETA "uses" naked women (and men) that is sexist. I don't even think some of the most commonly cited examples—the women with beef cut diagrams drawn on them, the women in cellophane as meat, and the pregnant woman in a cage like a sow—are actually sexist. They are satire; we're meant to think, "Ugh, treating a woman that way is sick." That's the whole point. Whether they effectively carry over to thoughts of animal treatment is another story.

But PETA does have sexist undertones to several campaigns. For one thing, they don't shy away from not using mere nudity, but specifically female sexuality as their hook. They encourage people to think of their female models as "bikini babes" and "hot chicks," in contexts that have nothing to do with comparisons to animals. There is a big difference between saying, "Hey, we're naked because animal rights are important enough for us to throw caution and shame to the wind," and saying, "Hey, come ogle some sexy broads! (also, go 'veg')." Their notorious "Fur trim. Unattractive." ad didn't exactly promote a positive female body image, either.

Conclusion

So PETA is a mixed bag for me. I have no real hope that they will ever embrace genuine vegan outreach and abolitionist campaigning, but they are—for better or worse—the face of animal rights activism to the general public. I can't help but think of many individuals involved with PETA as allies, even as their organization uses its platform to indirectly aid those who we mutually oppose. But such is the inevitable result when a radical group achieves some level of mainstream success. Once you start to taste victory, victory soon becomes more important than values. PETA is willing to ask for things it doesn't want simply because it can win them, and that's unfortunate. So I'll continue to think of the PETA folks as misguided comrades, and keep asking for the things I actually want... even if I never get them.

Big Brother is watching

2008-07-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

[via WWdN]

Daniel Dennett on religion

2008-07-05T10:07:00.000-05:00

I happened to come across this brief interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett, and I found his answer to a question on the relationship between science and religion to be so exactly congruent with my own beliefs that I am compelled to quote it here.

The problem with any proposed detente in which science and religion are ceded separate bailiwicks or "magisteria" is that, as some wag has put it, this amounts to rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which Caesar says God can have. The most recent attempt, by Gould, has not found much favor among the religious precisely because he proposes to leave them so little. Of course, I’m certainly not suggesting that he should have left them more.

There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim as its own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have not considered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are no factual assertions about the origin of the universe or its future trajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas, burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about the existence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science. After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lack of purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertions about the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance, poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview of science; so are the parallel assertions that strike closer to the traditionally exempt dogmas of long-established religions. You can’t consistently accept that expert scientific testimony can convict a charlatan of faking miracle cures and then deny that the same testimony counts just as conclusively—"beyond a reasonable doubt"—against any factual claims of violations of physical law to be found in the Bible or other religious texts or traditions.

What does that leave for religion to talk about? Moral injunctions and declarations of love (and hate, unfortunately), and other ceremonial speech acts. The moral codes of all the major religions are a treasury of ethical wisdom, agreeing on core precepts, and disagreeing on others that are intuitively less compelling, both to those who honor them and those who don’t. The very fact that we agree that there are moral limits that trump any claim of religious freedom—we wouldn’t accept a religion that engaged in human sacrifice or slavery, for instance—shows that we do not cede to religion, to any religion, the final authority on moral injunctions.

Centuries of ethical research and reflection, by philosophers, political theorists, economists, and other secular thinkers have not yet achieved a consensus on any Grand Unified Theory of ethics, but there is a broad, stable consensus on how to conduct such an inquiry, how to resolve ethical quandaries, and how to deal with as-yet unresolved differences. Religion plays a major role as a source of possible injunctions and precepts, and as a rallying point for public appeal and organization, but it does not set the ground rules of ethical agreement and disagreement, and hence cannot claim ethics or morality as its particular province.

That leaves ceremonial speech acts as religion’s surviving domain. These play a huge role in stabilizing the attitudes and policies of those who participate in them, but the trouble is that ceremony without power does not appear to be a stable arrangement—and appearances here are all important. Once a monarch is stripped of all political power, as in Great Britain, the traditions and trappings tend to lose some of their psychological force, so that their sole surviving function—focusing the solidarity of the citizenry—is somewhat undercut. Whether or not to abolish the monarchy becomes an ever less momentous decision, rather like whether or not to celebrate a national holiday always on a Monday, instead of on its traditional calendar date. Recognizing this threat of erosion, religious people will seldom acknowledge in public that their God has been reduced to something like a figurehead, a mere constitutional monarch, even while their practices and decisions presuppose that this is so.

It is seldom remarked (though often observed in private, I daresay) that many, many people who profess belief in God do not really act the way people who believed in God would act; they act the way people would act who believed in believing in God. That is, they manifestly think that believing in God is—would be—a good thing, a state of mind to be encouraged, by example if possible, so they defend belief-in-God with whatever rhetorical and political tools they can muster. They ask for God’s help, but do not risk anything on receiving it, for instance. They thank God for their blessings, but, following the principle that God helps those who help themselves, they proceed with the major decisions of their lives as if they were going it alone.

Those few individuals who clearly do act as if they believed in God, really believed in God, are in striking contrast: the Christian Scientists who opt for divine intervention over medical attention, for instance, or those who give all their goods to one church or another in expectation of the Apocalypse, or those who eagerly seek martyrdom.

Not wanting the contrast to be so stark, the believers in belief-in-God respond with the doctrine that it is a sin (or at least a doctrinal error) to count on God’s existence to have any particular effect. This has the nice effect of making the behavior of a believer in belief-in-God and the behavior of a believer in God so similar as to be all but indistinguishable.

Once nothing follows from a belief in God that doesn’t equally follow from the presumably weaker creed that it would be good if I believed in God—a doctrine that is readily available to the atheist, after all—religion has been so laundered of content that it is quite possibly consistent with science. Peter de Vries, a genuine believer in God and probably the funniest writer on religion ever, has his hyper-liberal Reverend Mackerel (in his book The Mackerel Plaza) preach the following line: "It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."

The Reverend Mackerel’s God can co-exist peacefully with science. So can Santa Claus, who need not exist in order to make our yuletide season more jolly.

America's holiday

2008-07-04T08:49:00.000-05:00

Today is Independence Day, a day that celebrates our declaration of freedom from the King of Great Britain's authority.

In 1776, the United States began to take the first steps towards liberal democracy, a political system in which (it is claimed) decisions that affect the citizens are made by representatives held accountable to the citizens themselves. The experiment was never intended to actually give power to the people, of course. Most of the framers of the Constitution had such great contempt for the decision-making competency of the common man that they did everything they could to concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy landowners without just coming out and saying so. This isn't even mentioning the issue of slavery, both the chattel slavery of black men and women and the social slavery of white women.

Even with these significant caveats, the liberal democracy established by the revolutionaries of that time has grown and matured. It is far from perfect. The process of electing our leaders has evolved into an independent being, dependent far more on corporate money than on the consent of the governed. Our business-minded masters are free to do as they please for as many years as they can get away with it, before they must spend some months pandering to the people that might reelect them. But the idea of our democracy is still a good one, one worth strengthening and defending in ways well beyond the narrow focus of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

The first tentative step in expanding the scope of the democratic experiment was taken through the New Deal, which essentially established for the first time in the United States a system of social democracy. To the Declaration's liberty the New Deal added some measure of solidarity. We began to recognize that it is not enough to be free from arbitrary rule, that if we are a society bound together by geography and history, each of us owes our lives and well being to the actions of every other. We owe it to them, and they to us, the opportunity to make it through hard times that none should have to endure alone.

As with the political freedom of the liberal democracy, the social democratic experiment has both grown and eroded since it was established. The basic provisions of universal education, health care, and pensions are in the modern United States a farce, beholden as our elections are to the interests of businesses in lowering costs and raising prices. And as with the liberal democracy, the social democracy must be strengthened to live up to the idea behind it, rather than to the practice it has become.

The only way to build upon our liberal and social democracies is to add equality to the values of liberty and solidarity we stand for. We must have economic democracy as well. Most everyone believes that we are competent to elect our political leaders... but we demure away from the idea that we ought to elect our bosses. We think that decisions that affect a town, or a state, or the nation as a whole should be made by that town, that state, or the nation as a whole... except when those decisions involve our economy. We believe that all people should be equal in the eyes of the law, but we allow a fraction of the population to claim the bulk of our resources, and have far greater access to the pursuit of happiness our Declaration of Independene proclaimed. Their claim is justified not by their having done more to earn their share, but because they had access to the means of producing that great wealth, and were able to buy the effort of others to make it. Rather than owning the product of their labor, these others have to turn it over to their economic betters to dole out as they see fit: which is always as little as possible.

It should come as no surprise that this class of parasites and their great ideology of capitalism, this class who claim great wealth and prosperity by taking from the effort of others, is precisely the same group that prohibits our liberal and social democracies from meeting their promise. Private ownership of capital insures that profits make the rich far richer while making the poor only slightly less poor, if at all. A labor market that relies on the threat of unemployment as a stick to keep the exploited from simply leaving to find better opportunities ensures that the cycle continues. These same forces are also behind the need to continuously expand our markets, which requires global presence, interference, and often warfare to "spread democracy," which merely means "areas we can do business in."

Capitalism must end for true democracy—liberal, social, and economic—to have any hope of being more than a footnote in the histories of our future. The United States, and indeed the world, deserves better than this.

From the "How People Find Me" files

2008-07-02T08:46:00.000-05:00

Some Google searches that have led people to my blogs lately:

nude women on harleys
prostitution in little
proper way to eat chicken
r rated ninja turtles
gay hairstyles
first response commercial woman
who is commercial woman

I think those last two must be from the same person...

How to democratize the UN

2008-06-30T17:29:00.000-05:00

The United Nations is fundamentally flawed. It is unresponsive to the views and opinions of people around the world. The Security Council, with its permanent membership and veto powers, privileges the policies of some countries while allowing vested interests to completely block legitimate action. The General Assembly, rather than serving as a global legislature, is merely a place for appointed ambassadors to mechanically regurgitate their home government's current policies.

If the UN has any hope of being of service to humanity, it must be democratized. This obviously involves ending the permanent membership and veto powers of the Security Council, but it also means transforming the General Assembly into a World Parliament.

The first component of this transformation is variable delegation sizes based on population. As much respect as I have for the fine people of Nauru, the fact that they have the same number of votes (one) as China, a country with over 100,000 times the population, is profoundly undemocratic. Now, we have to strike a balance when choosing delegation sizes. We don't want the World Parliament to grow to monstrous proportions, of course. We can't have Nauru with one Member of the World Parliament and therefore China gets 100,000.

We might arbitrarily state that each nation gets one MWP, and any nation with more than 25 million citizens gets additional members for each 25-million person bracket they fit into. So Chile with 16 million people gets one MWP. Iraq with 29 million people gets 2 MWPs. The United States has 304 million people and gets 13 MWPs.

China, at 1.3 billion people, gets 53 MWPs. Wait, so China, a single-party authoritarian state with a sketchy human rights record gets to dominate the United Nations? Isn't the point of democratizing the General Assembly to make a fair and democratic Parliament? I propose two mechanisms to deal with this.

First, we want the members of the World Parliament to be chosen by the people. I submit that any nation that does not elect its MWPs through some democratic means (national or regional elections) gets only half votes. If China appoints 53 loyal MWPs by decree, they can only get 26.5 votes rather than 53.

Second, we want the World Parliament to be a democracy of democracies. We might assign different vote weights to the level of democratic freedom in different countries. For the purposes of illustration, if we chose to use the Freedom in the World survey, we might give full votes to all nations that qualify as Free, half votes to those who qualify as Partly Free, and quarter-votes to those that qualify as not Free. China is rated Not Free, and if it appointed its 53 MWPs, they would only get 6.625 votes in the Parliament, 0.125 votes for each MWP. In contrast, India gets 45 MWPs; it is ranked as Free and if its MWPs are chosen through elections, it gets 45 full votes.

These are just examples of ways in which the size of some countries can be counterbalanced with democratic policies. In actual practice, the World Parliament might use entirely different criteria and vote weights. However it is done, a democratic, responsive World Parliament could be a positive force to counterbalance the capitalist globalization, militarization, and imperialism of the United States and other powers.

Democrats : humans :: vegetarians : animals

2008-06-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

Democrats are to humans what vegetarians are to animals.

I'm a socialist and a vegan, so naturally I think of Democrats and vegetarians as being well-intentioned but, well, wrong. But it wasn't until today that I realized that both groups are wrong for essentially the same reasons. Vegetarianism and liberalism do seem to go hand in hand to some extent, while vegans are typically on the left fringe of liberalism shading into different sorts of radicalism. I wonder if I might be onto something.

The Democrat looks at society today and sees many problems. There is a widening gap between rich and poor in this country. Millions of people have no health insurance, and many who do have it still pay too much for the care they receive. Economic power is centralized in multinational corporations. Jobs are being outsourced. There is an unpopular war in Iraq that is costing American and Iraqi lives. Democrats see these things and think they are real problems to be solved.

The vegetarian looks at the treatment of animals today and sees many problems, too. Factory farms result in horrible cruelty to animals, from cramped quarters to mutilation to pumping them full of drugs and hormones. Agricultural animals produce an enormous amount of waste, to say nothing of greenhouse gasses. Vegetarians see these tings and think they are real problems to be solved.

The Democrat seeks to solve the problems of the country by stricter regulation and reform. Raise the minimum wage and increase taxes on the rich to bring incomes closer to parity. Offer single-payer health care to cover those who lack it. Enforce strict monopoly laws and protect American jobs. Bring the troops home! The vegetarian seeks to reduce the suffering of animals by refusing to eat them. Vegetarians are often involved with animal welfare charities such as the SPCA and local animal shelters. They are not opposed to the use of animals, provided it is done humanely, so they typically try to eat only cage-free eggs and free-range organic milk.

Democrats and vegetarians are the liberals of their respective domains. Liberals see the problems of society and think they are the irrational outcomes of a rational system, so they try to correct the outcomes. Radicals see that the system itself is irrational, and that the outcomes that flow from it are only to be expected. It is the system that must be changed.

The problems with society that the Democrat seeks to regulate away are inherent in capitalism itself. They will not go away until capitalism goes away. By the same token, simply not eating animals doesn't end animal cruelty because animals are still property. They cannot consent to be used at all, ever, and so they ought not be used any more than humans should be used without their consent.

The only solution to these problems is a radical solution, one that strikes at the root causes of them. Capitalism is the root cause of most of the ills of society, and thus socialism -- not well-regulated liberal capitalism -- is the abolition of capitalism and the solution to those ills. The property status of animals is the root cause of most animal cruelty, and thus veganism and animal rights -- not animal welfare reform and vegetarianism -- is the abolition of the property status of animals and the solution to animal cruelty.

However, Democrats and vegetarians both believe they are part of the solution, and so they can be. The way to achieving the shared goals of Democrats/socialists and vegetarians/vegans is not to say "Fuck you guys, we have all the answers and you're morons." The solution is to work together on those things we agree on and use the good old-fashioned art of healthy debate, persuasion, and evidence to bring people further and further towards the solution. Revolutionary socialists must participate in the everyday fights for rights and social justice that liberals are involved in, but constantly draw attention not only to symptoms but to illnesses. Protest the Iraq war, and while doing so draw the inherent connection between capitalism and imperialism. Campaign for universal health care, and use it to highlight the way the market fails to provide even the minimum welfare for the people who make it work.

Vegans and animal rights activists can support certain reforms in animal use while consistently maintaining that all use is always wrong, no matter how humane. Go naked rather than wear fur if you like, but point out that you can't be opposed to fur and not be opposed to eggs and milk. Turn people's compassionate decision to become vegetarian into an opportunity to explain the inherent cruelty involved in more than only meat.

Democrats and vegetarians can be part of the solution, but not without changing their views in the process.

Quote of the Week

2008-06-24T17:13:00.000-05:00

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on lack of more rapid progress in the transition to renewable energy.

Marxism vs. anarchism

2008-06-22T11:04:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make. I change my mind on political affairs quite often.

This isn't a confession that I am now going to endorse John McCain for president or anything so insane as that. It's just that when I get into a topic, I tend to immerse myself in that topic and form opinions before I've emerged from my immersion. It's very easy for me to read, as I had for the last few months, nothing but anarchist material with regards to politics, and more or less ignore alternative views in the meantime.

Really, for the last year I'd been considering myself essentially "converted" to anarchism, if that's an appropriate word for it. Many of my blog posts are written from an anarchist perspective. But as I think back over that time, I've always been an "anarchist but..." I am not sure I've ever been entirely anarchist in my thinking, as reflected by how I described my anarchism as a critique of authority rather than a political ideology. I've freely admitted that I think there is a place for representative democracy, even while posting screeds against representation. I've been of dual minds about many fundamental components of anarchism, and I've come in the last few weeks to realize that I was only on the edge of anarchism at all.

In essence, as the title of my blog implies, I've continued to be a revolutionary socialist -- a Marxist. I've certainly taken a great deal away from my foray into anarchist thought, and I still consider it to be a valid and useful critique of authority, as I said. But the more I think about it, the less I think that it (and by it I mean of course the myriad interrelated strands of thought that go by the word) is actually an effective means to the sort of world I want to live in.

Here's the thing: anarchism, even in its most socialist forms, is an individualist political philosophy. If we take (as the Left has traditionally done) liberty, equality, and solidarity as our core values, anarchism doesn't strike the balance that I do between them, because anarchism privileges liberty over the others. Certainly, many anarchists would dispute this, and I grant that the situation isn't nearly as dire as other leftists might try to imply. But the fact remains that anarchists are generally in favor of radical decentralization, of small communities (even if they're near each other in what is presently a city) being independent of one another and confederated horizontally on an ad hoc basis for, among other things, trade, distribution of raw materials, and defense.

This doesn't sound so bad. The problem for me is in the anarchist conception of humanity's future. They see these small communities as being, for lack of a better word, sovereign. Autonomous. If a community doesn't want to be a part of a given project undertaken by the confederation as a whole, it is generally allowed to not do so, or even to dissociate from the confederation. And this applies not only to specific communities, but even to individuals within the community. Many, if not most, anarchist groups even favor consensus decision-making -- a laudable goal, but one that gives a single individual veto power over the wishes of as many members as make up the group by that individual simply refusing to consent. But even without such a decision-making process, anarchism allows individuals to just plain opt-out of whatever the disagree with. Individuals must always win over groups, because as soon as they don't, "authority" is introduced and the system is no longer anarchist.

Now, some may like this. I don't at all disagree that individual liberty is an important component of the ideal political system -- but it is only one component, not the system as a whole. Part of this revelation for me came about when I was reflecting on my last post, and I quoted anarchist anthropologist David Graeber about the hypothetical victory of the anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish Revolution. His conclusion, and the one that I supported at the time that I made the post, was that we can't, and shouldn't, win through a revolution by a minority, because it would be impossible to force our beliefs on the majority without resorting to authoritarian methods that sacrifice our anarchist ideals.

I agree with that conclusion. An anarchist revolution (in the traditional sense) is destined to fail for precisely that reason. I also agree that a revolution needs at least some basic support of a majority to have any chance of success. But think of the American Civil War. Before the war, chattel slavery was legal in the South. A person could legally own slaves. After the war, it was illegal to own slaves. If most of the wealthy South had simple ignored this edict (as the hypothetical Spain of Graeber's thought experiment would ignore the disintegration of capitalism and the state) would it then be wrong to "impose" freedom of slaves on those slave-owners?

The anarchists say they wish to abolish the state as well as capitalism in one fell swoop, though most are reasonable to admit that this swoop might take some time. But I have to agree with the Marxists, who argue that the state is the only entity powerful enough to impose economic democracy on the capitalists. And yes, it would be an imposition. No capitalist is going to say, "Gee whiz, you guys win, here, take my multibillion-dollar company and I'll go dig ditches from now on."

Most anarchists seem to agree with this necessity in principle. They will freely say that it might take violence to wrest control of capital from the hands of capitalists. They want to do this without a state, which is a fine goal. But the Marxist definition of a state is simply "coercive force to maintain class rule." It says nothing of the composition, development, and functioning of this state. The only example Marx and Engles ever gave for how the "dictatorship* of the proletariat" was to function was the Paris Commune of 1871 -- one of the very institutions anarchists hold up as an example for their own purposes as well. If a democratically-organized confederation of workers and community councils was in place that prevented capitalists from hiring wage slaves through the threat of force, it would still be a state by the Marxist definition -- even while not being one by the anarchist.

Both Marxists and anarchists have the same goal: a stateless, communist society. The difference between them is in the role authority will play in getting there, and by extension, the order in which the twin demons will have to be exorcised. I am with the Marxists. We must, through revolution if necessary, democratize the state and use it to democratize the economy. When the class of exploiter no longer exists, and all are socially equal, the state will no longer be a state and its more objectionable functions will cease to be necessary. In the meantime, socialist ideas must be disseminated as widely as possible, which includes through the use of electoral politics as propaganda (if not as an end in themselves). But any political movement must retain democracy and for its own functioning operate with liberty, equality, and solidarity as paramount values.

* For the less seasoned readers, it is important to remember that in the 19th century, "dictator" didn't have its present connotations. A Roman dictator was in place for a temporary term. The idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" had no particular negative implication at the time, and could be entirely democratic. It was only a dictatorship in the sense that the proletariat now "dictated" that they could no longer be exploited by the bourgeoisie.

Why We Can't (and Shouldn't) "Win"

2008-06-10T20:54:00.000-05:00

My views on the subject of this post have changed since the post was written. I am leaving the post up, but please note that it is no longer consistent with my opinion.

No, I'm not talking about the possible meaningless shift from rule under a Republican to a Democrat come November. As they say, "No matter who wins, we lose."

I am talking about the big picture, the struggle against authoritarian government and capitalism that can broadly be termed "anarchism." Many of the people fighting this fight wouldn't think of themselves as anarchists, of course, so it's not quite proper to term the amorphous mass of civil unrest and resistance to neoliberal globalization and war an anarchist movement per se. But the ideals of the movement as a whole -- self-determination, participatory democracy, opposition to capitalism -- are fundamentally anarchist.

There are still many anarchists and other leftists of the traditional varieties who believe there will be a capital-R Revolution at some point in the future, near or far. They believe, and the idea isn't entirely without merit, that once the exploited class of workers gets some political motivation, they will overthrow the present system in a most-likely violent revolution of the sorts that have periodically occurred throughout history. And after the capitalists have had their riches expropriated and the government has been overthrown, the left will rebuild society along the lines of whatever vision the holder holds -- most often, something like directly democratic workers and community councils confederated at the regional, national, and global levels.

I freely indulge in utopian visions of what the ideal society would look like. I've posted pieces before, and I will post pieces again. But this is not my point.

To illustrate the problem with the traditional view of revolution in the modern world, allow me to quote David Graeber:

In way of illustration, consider this: what would it have actually meant for the Spanish anarchists to have actually “won” 1937? It’s amazing how rarely we ask ourselves such questions. We just imagine it would have been something like the Russian Revolution, which began in a similar way, with the melting away of the old army, the spontaneous creation of workers’ soviets. But that was in the major cities. The Russian Revolution was followed by years of civil war in which the Red Army gradually imposed the new state’s control on every part of the old Russian Empire, whether the communities in question wanted it or not. Let us imagine that anarchist militias in Spain had routed the fascist army, which then completely dissolved, and kicked the socialist Republican Government out of its offices in Barcelona and Madrid. That would certainly have been victory by anybody’s standards. But what would have happened next? Would they have established Spain as a non-Republic, an anti-state existing within the exact same international borders? Would they have imposed a regime of popular councils in every singe village and municipality in the territory of what had formerly been Spain? How exactly? We have to bear in mind here that were there many villages towns, even regions of Spain where anarchists were almost non-existent. In some just about the entire population was made up of conservative Catholics or monarchists; in others (say, the Basque country) there was a militant and well-organized working class, but one that was overwhelmingly socialist or communist. Even at the height of revolutionary fervor, most of these would stay true to their old values and ideas. If the victorious FAI attempted to exterminate them all—a task which would have required killing millions of people—or chase them out of the country, or forcibly relocate them into anarchist communities, or send them off to reeducation camps—they would not only have been guilty of world-class atrocities, they would have had to give up on being anarchists. Democratic organizations simply cannot commit atrocities on that systematic scale: for that, you’d need Communist or Fascist-style top-down organization, since you can’t actually get thousands of human beings to systematically massacre helpless women and children and old people, destroy communities, or chase families from their ancestral homes unless they can at least say they were only following orders.

You don't have to be incredibly familiar with the Spanish Revolution to see the point here. In a movement committed to anti-authoritarianism, you can't force people to change. Previous revolutions have relied on authority to work. Traitors were killed, governments imposed on people, and so on. An anti-authoritarian revolution cannot do those things and remain opposed to authority. You would have to have a truly vast majority that is not just sympathetic to the aims of the revolutionaries, but that is completely on board with the outcome. You would have to either become authoritarians and command respect for your values, or allow others to reorganize as they see fit and reestablish the very systems of domination you fought so hard to overthrow.

The anti-authoritarian revolution must be a different kind. This is not something would-be insurrectionists want to hear. They decry it as nothing more than reformism or, with a bit more bile, lifestylism. But this is a genuine battle for hearts and minds, and the way forward is to simply build the future as we can, bit by bit, challenging authority and expanding democracy wherever and however we can. This ranges from direct action and protest and civil disobedience to starting coops and collectives and unions to educating ourselves and our children. Any changes we demand from the government are not means to repair the system, but to take what we need in spite of it.

Rudolf Rocker said, "I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal." This is the spirit of the revolution we face today.

A Note on Class

2008-06-06T15:33:00.000-05:00

I don't really know how the social classes work in the rest of the world, but in the United States we suffer under the curious delusion that there is a "middle class" of happy folks who are living the American dream. I'd like to dispute that.

The idea of a middle class is a corruption of the idea of class itself. Now that we've done away with silliness like divinely-sanctioned royalty, we're left with only two essential classes in capitalist society: capitalists and workers. Good ol' Marx's bourgeoisie and proletariat. These classes are formally based on the members' relationship to the means of production, but the easiest way to think about it is to ask, "Where does their money come from?"

Capitalists make their money and living off of others. They hire people. They own businesses and equipment. They rent out land and loan out money. They could, if they chose, not lift so much as a finger in actual work themselves and they would continue to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and all the necessities of life. They don't have to work.

Workers, on the other hand, make their money by seeking employment from capitalists. They sell their labor. It may be industrial labor, it may be mental labor, but it is labor all the same. Unlike the capitalists, if the workers chose not to lift so much as a finger in actual work, they would starve to death. They have to work.

You'll immediately note that these categories are not cleanly cut and easy to see. There are small business owners who are capitalists but barely scrape by, and there are extremely well-paid engineers and the like who, nonetheless, couldn't quit their jobs and make a living off investments. When it comes to class, money is not the issue. That money is unfairly distributed is true, but it is only a symptom of the problem of class-based society.

Ultimately, the class distinction is nothing more than a reflection of our respect for authority. Rather than a just system of possession, we have a society based on private ownership of everything. Capitalists own businesses, and profit from businesses, but they do not make the profit themselves. If the capitalist disappeared, the business could continue and the workers could keep the profit they earned. If the workers disappeared, the capitalist would be out of luck, as no profit would be made. What keeps the workers from taking the profit they earn is nothing more complex than words (a claim of ownership) backed up by force (police).

So what about the middle class? Well, clearly most middle class people are still workers. The idea of the middle class has one purpose: to make middle class folks think they're superior to the working class people who might be poor enough to get upset and demand changes. Middle class people are supposed to be content, and not want to rock the boat. The invention of the middle class is a means of dividing the workers, by allowing one segment of the group to have a few more crumbs than the rest, driving a wedge of jealousy on one hand and apathy on the other between people that should be united against their common foe. The invention of the middle class is designed to convince its members that capitalism is OK, simply because it is apparently OK for them at the time.

The artificial line between the working class and middle class, often trotted out during election season, is one that should be forgotten. It is not the fault of the middle class that the capitalists chose their positions as those that would earn more, and it is not the fault of the working class that the capitalists didn't choose theirs. All people who must sell themselves for the benefit of another, for fear of death, ought to be united against those who would force that choice upon them.

KFC discovers magical way to eat chicken without keeping and killing chickens

2008-06-03T10:52:00.000-05:00

Yes, it must be true! PETA — who claims to be "the" animal rights organization, who declares that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way" — says that it has won an "enormous victory" and calls for an end to its boycott of KFC Canada, though the cruelty in other nations continues. If PETA says its OK to eat at KFC in Canada, it can only mean that KFC Canada no longer uses animals for food, right? It must mean that KFC Canada now recognizes the rights of chickens not to be eaten, right? After all, it is a "historic victory!"

Not so fast.

The enormous victory that PETA is celebrating consists of "increasing product quality and yield" and producing "more tender breast meat" by gassing chickens to death. "All we want is for KFC worldwide to do what KFC Canada has done," says a PETA spokesperson.

That's right, folks. All PETA wants is for people to eat chickens that were gassed to death. Killing chickens doesn't count as abusing them in any way, according to PETA. And apparently, eating chickens doesn't count as eating them, either. Why else would PETA call for ending a boycott of a corporation that does these things?

Needless to say, it is no surprise that PETA also encourages people concerned with animal rights to give money to chicken-killing KFC by ordering their new mock chicken wrap, served with mayonnaise. It's "totally cruelty-free" according to PETA, who apparently forgot their own subsite declaring eggs — the primary ingredient in mayonnaise — cruel.

God, PETA, I want to like you. You make it impossible.

EcoGeek on Wired's Environment Issue

2008-05-29T10:28:00.000-05:00

Wired's latest issue is kind of sad, really. While I generally enjoy the magazine, sometimes they try just a little too hard. Their cover story is "Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What it Means to Be Green", which shocks "environmentalists" by claiming you can keep your SUV and run your A/C while eating non-organic food and you'll do more for the environment. It's not just that I disagree with the premise, it's that they are aiming to seem edgy and heretical when they're really just being boring and contrary. There isn't a single original idea in the article.

Anyway, I was planning to write my own rebuttal, but EcoGeek already did the job pretty well, if briefly. Check it out.

[via WorldChanging]

Vegetarian is not vegan

2008-05-28T12:41:00.000-05:00

PETA: Be Like Oprah, try a Vegetarian Diet Today!

Oprah Winfrey is trying a vegetarian diet, and we challenge you to do the same for at least seven days! After signing our Pledge to Be Veg for Seven Days, we'll send you all the resources that you'll need to get started.

What's wrong with this? PETA claims to be an animal rights organization. Why are they claiming Oprah, who is very publicly going vegan for 21 days, is trying a "vegetarian diet?" Why doesn't that headline read "try a vegan diet today?"

Because PETA's leadership are a bunch of hypocritical cowards, is why.

It's obvious, of course. PETA is afraid that if they ask people to go vegan, people will think that's too radical and shy away. It's why nearly all of their handouts, sites, and other promotional materials ask people to "Go Vegetarian" or, even more slyly, "Go Veg." Now with Oprah, they won't even say the word vegan on the front page of their site. They offer a free "Vegetarian Starter Kit" full of vegan information.

The people at PETA aren't (always) stupid. When you dig down into the guts of their site or listen to some of them speak, they'll plainly and correctly state that veganism is the only ethical way to eat and live. But as with most of their campaigns, they intentionally blur the line between what is ethical and what is merely less unethical. What they don't seem to realize is that veganism, which they quietly claim to promote, will continue to be seen as "too radical" and will continue to be seen as difficult as long as they avoid using the word and act like cutting out meat is enough. If "the" animal rights organization can't bring itself to ask people not to hurt animals by going vegan, that's a problem.

Now, the obvious retort is that as long as they secretly promote veganism, who cares if they call it vegetarianism for convenience or efficacy? And the obvious response is that everybody knows vegetarians eat dairy and eggs. Hell, a lot of people think vegetarians eat fish! When PETA tells people to go vegetarian, they may stop eating most meat, but they will feel free to continue to eat other animal products, resulting in immeasurable suffering and death for the animals involved. It's akin to convinvcing a serial killer to start beating people up instead of killing them because, one day, he just might stop altogether. And then giving him an award.

Take PETA's various Sexiest Vegetarian contests, among other things: when PETA conflates vegetarians and vegans, the result is rewarding, celebrating, and congratulating animal exploiters. Vegetarians are animal exploiters. I'm not saying they are "bad people." I'm not saying they aren't more ethical on this issue than meat eaters. But it is a simple fact that eating dairy and eggs harms animals. And that doesn't even touch on the awards PETA routinely gives to corporations that harm and kill animals such as Whole Foods. Wolfgang Puck is given the 2008 Most Progressive Chef award because he gets his veal (!) from free-roaming calves! Burger King is awarded for promising that a portion of their dead animals are gassed!

If PETA is an animal rights organization, what business do they have giving awards to people that harm and kill animals?

PETA, the public already thinks you're radical and extreme and a little bit nuts. Get some courage and say what you mean. Then do as you say.

Targeting the DNC

2008-05-27T11:48:00.000-05:00

Something I forgot to mention in my post on the FBI infiltrating vegan potlucks to root out anti-RNC terrorists: any vegan radical enough to blow up the Republicans ought to be a threat to the Democrats as well. Maybe even more so.

ProtestRNC2008.org's banner proclaims:

U.S. Out of Iraq Now! Money for human needs, not for war! Say no to the Republican Agenda! Demand peace, justice and equality.

All laudable goals, of course. And with "Democratic" subbed in for "Republican," all apply equally well to the DNC in Denver. Anyone who would protest the RNC had better protest the DNC as well, because they're just as poor at securing peace, justice, and equality. The Democrats are not the solution to the problems of a Republican presidency. The Democrats, and any presidency they win, are in many ways worse than the Republicans because they should know better.

Luckily, those of us on the radical left know this. There are already groups organizing to protest the DNC as well, and it isn't the conservatives doing the organizing. The Democrats will always be part of the problem until we make them part of a solution.

FBI Thinks Sociable Vegans Are Terrorists

2008-05-27T10:41:00.000-05:00

Warning: vegan food makes you kill!

Moles Wanted - City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul)

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Granted, there is likely some small level of overlap between vegan potluckers and people who think Republicans are evil. But let me say as someone with some experience with the whole vegan potluck thing: vegans usually talk about food when they're eating. Vegan food, even. And even if they're talking about how stupid, inept, or cruel Republicans are, they certainly aren't spending their social time organizing political protests or terrorist activities. They came together to eat food without animal products in it. If they wanted to protest the RNC, they'd have gone to, I dunno, one of the actual ProtestRNC2008.org events, perhaps?

This raises many issues, of course. On a personal level, there is the continued conflation of veganism with "animal rights terrorism." The vast majority of vegans I've known oppose violence as a whole, which is kinda why they oppose the violence done to billions of animals each year in the first place. Vegans are the last people who would be plotting some sort of terrorist action against a convention. You may be surprised to learn that the bulk of radical animal activists are not vegan. They're hypocrites, of course, but it's true. A commitment to veganism almost by definition repudiates harming human animals as much as harming non-humans.

Additionally, there is the continued conflation of protester with terrorist. Let's pretend for a moment that the FBI found RNC protesters at, of all places, vegan potlucks. What crucial information might they glean from them? Who's making signs, where to meet, stuff to yell? Protests that turn violent, and they are rare, are pretty much never planned to be violent. Civil disobedience is not terrorism. Stupid kids at protests bashing up a Starbucks is not terrorism.

Finally, there is the issue of covert infiltration as a socially acceptable means of intelligence gathering. For my part, I strongly oppose covert activities of all kinds, be they police, FBI, CIA, or military. I advocate transparent, open governance, including in the prevention of crime or terrorism. I think that privacy trumps security every single time, and I would much rather live in a world in which people could meet and discuss whatever they pleased without fear of obvservation, even if what they pleased was illegal, than one in which the probability of terroist activity was diminished by some miniscule percent through covert infiltration. I have no reservations about this point.

Vegan potlucks "fall within the definition of terrorist groups?" Really?

[via Majikthise]

Disqus Commenting

2008-05-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

I don't get a whole lot of comments. But nonetheless, after hearing about Disqus on net@night, I have added it here as a comment system. On the surface level, this adds threaded commenting, which is nice. But on a larger level, there is now a cross-blog community of commenting. Socialization of blog comments. It's something you have to use to really understand, and I'm hoping more blogs I like will start using it.

Political Agnosticism

2008-05-26T13:29:00.000-05:00

It probably comes as no surprise that I've been thinking about politics.

I've written before about why I think that radical democracy ought to be the central focus of any political system that claims to care about justice. I think that, contrary to popular belief, very little about our present political system in the United States is actually democratic (demos "people" kratos "power"). We live in an oligarchy (oligos "few" archos "ruler"), and the fact that we get to ratify the decisions our few rulers make through elections every two, four, or six years doesn't magically make "rule by the few" into "power of the people."

I have advocated anarchism on this blog before, but almost any discussion of anarchism is bound to end in disaster. For one thing, the vast majority of people still associate anarchy with chaos. Anarchy can mean "chaos," which doesn't help, but the fact that there is actually a rich history of political philosophy that also happens to carry that title is entirely foreign to most Americans, and many elsewhere. For another, a fringe sect of the so-called "libertarians" (e.g., capitalist market fundamentalists) have latched onto the word as well. Googling anarchism, particularly if you focus on material from the United States, will often get you websites promoting stateless capitalism. This, of course, is utter bullshit as anarchism (an- "no" archos "ruler") is entirely incompatible with capitalism since the latter requires the few (owners) to rule the many (employees). That this rule is economic rather than political is irrelevant. There is no such thing as "anarcho"-capitalism, nor "libertarian" capitalism.

Furthermore, even within the actual political philosophy of anarchism, there are a multitude of tendencies and beliefs. These range from labor-union syndicalism to gift economy communism to technology-shunning primitivism. The anarchisms of Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, Leo Tolstory, Emma Goldman, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky may share many features, but they are not identical. Then you've got a lot of young kids running around who just want to "smash the state" because they don't like obeying rules. Some anarchists are against representation, some anarchists are against voting, some anarchists are against rules at all. Anarchism as a singular coherent movement is essentially dead.

For this reason, my anarchism is best thought of as a critique of power rather than a plan of action or a blueprint for the future. Anarchism, to me, simply asks of all authority: is this justified? Anarchism is in many respects, political agnosticism.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in any gods, or anything supernatural at all. I can state "there is no god" with just as much confidence as I state "there is no Santa Claus." But at the same time, I am ultimately agnostic. I cannot know there is no god, just as I cannot know that gravity will continue working. But in both cases, the odds are so astronomically slim and the evidence so overwhelmingly against that there is no reason to suspect otherwise. Agnosticism does not mean that one can't take a stand once the evidence comes in, it merely means one accepts that they may be wrong before it does, and they may be proven wrong later.

In politics, the case is never quite so clear. We can rather simply rule out many things that fail to lead to a just outcome, one that maximizes people's ability to influence decisions that affect tham. Authoritarianism and capitalism are immediately discarded as horrific. But what exact combination of direct democracy, delegation, representation, laws, norms, and the interplay of personal versus collective power and rights will optimize outcomes for all involved is impossible to say.

But we can nonetheless make our best predictions on the basis of the evidence available. I think the modern "democratic" state as we know it is not that answer. But I suspect that the answer is not as simple as direct democratic communities as most anarchists seem to prefer. I suspect that there is a place for representation in decision making, but representation subject to far more constraints than exist in any state that exists today, and representation that doesn't ever take the place of direct democracy when such is preferred by those who are affected. I suspect that there is a place for codified laws and a constitution, and indeed a "government," but one which is entirely voluntary to submit to, in which dissenters may personally seceed at any time (though they will obviously lose any benefits participation grants, such as access to the society's economy). I suspect that the best economy is not a market, but is not centrally planned. I suspect that people will compromise on some issues, but fight tooth and nail for others. I suspect that people don't mind delegating authority over things that they simply don't care about, but want the ability to take it back when they do care.

Yet I don't know any of these things. I do know that we will never find out as long as we simply obey the rules that are handed down to us, and pretend that choosing between a handful of rotating rulers will ever give us the opportunity.

The Authority Party

2008-05-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

It is often said that the United States has a two-party system of government. The Democrats and the Republicans (and their predecessor parties throughout history) are diametrically opposed and, thanks to this opposition, ensure that no one set of interests can rule indefinitely. There will always be a powerful opposition party waiting to challenge those in power.

This has never been true, and is even less true now.

There is only one political party with only one party platform. This party is duplicated in full, with minor variations, and alleged to be two. This party is the Authority Party, of which the Democrats and the Republicans are twin wings.

The existence of the Democratic and Republican Parties is the primary strategy authority uses to limit dissent. The fierce competition between Democrats and Republicans during elections, and on the floor of the Congress, is akin to the competition between Old Navy, the Gap, and Banana Republic for customers: they're all owned by the same people, and the illusion of choice ensures that the owner always wins.

There are token differences between the Democrats and the Republicans that have real consequences for voters. This is necessary, because it forces people to choose the side they support in fear of those consequences being realized. For example, nonconsensual-pregnancy advocates must vote Republican in the hope that women lose control over their bodies. Pro-choice people must vote Democrat to ensure that women don't lose more control over their bodies. Neither side can afford to waste a vote on anybody else for fear of the consequences.

The most surprising aspect of authority is that there are no members of this party, no leaders. The system is self-perpetuating. Democrats truly believe they are distinct from Republicans. There is not one big conspiracy in a smoky room to divide up the United States between the two ruling powers. There are two big conspiracies in two smoky rooms, each conspiring to do the same thing as they other, convinced that they are doing big, important work. Protecting private capitalism and maintaining hegemony is hard.

The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. This is true, and as long as we, the governed, consent to authority it will continue to rule us. Unfortunately, authority is strong and we, as individuals, are weak. Even a thousand people refusing to vote, or to pay taxes, does essentially nothing to challenge authority. Until and unless there is a mass anti-authoritarian movement, authority will inevitably use its power to invoke fear and extract consent from the majority to further drive down dissent.

Don't fear. Don't consent. Dissent.

Around the Web

2008-05-08T10:43:00.000-05:00

Some random bits:

American Leftist » Wow!
An Animal-Friendly Life » Abolitionists: Fringe or Core?
Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach » Vegan Education Made Easy — Part 2 (don't worry if you haven't read part 1)
Elaine Vigneault » We, Feminists, Should Let Go of Marriage
Left I on the News » Phony of the Day: Condoleezza Rice
Science-Based Medicine » Near Death Experiences and the Medical Literature
Socialist Unity » Democracy Transformed

Clementine

2008-05-06T18:36:00.000-05:00

Please excuse my absence, I've been a little bit busy.

One thing younger people with radical political and religious positions hear sometimes is, "When you're older, you'll change." My parents were fond of saying, "When you have children of your own, you'll understand." I think the idea is that stability is more important once you're invested in the system. When you have more to lose, you might want to lose it less. I don't think I got the message.

I'm only a week and a half into fatherhood, but if anything it has solidified my political and (anti-)religious beliefs. I now have an actual person in my arms that will inherit the future we give her, and I want desperately for it to be a good one. So far from making me settle down to accept the status quo as inevitable and try to fit her into it, I am more driven than ever to be politically active.

I want my daughter to grow up seeing her parents working to change things that are wrong. I want her to know from the beginning that you don't just have to settle for how the world is. Despite my views, I have been slow to get involved in many local protests and actions. Now I want not only to be more involved, I want my daughter to be right there with me holding the signs, listening to the speeches, passing out the leaflets, being educated and educating and living the revolution in the present.

I don't mind if my daughter wants tattoos and piercings and listens to music I find intolerable. Maybe her way of rebelling one day will be to believe in god, to eat meat, to scold an aborting mother, to buy a Hummer. Who knows? They're her choices to make. But my daughter will not grow up learning from her parents that those things are right and good or even acceptable. My daughter will be able to make those choices informed that there is another way if she wants it.

At the very least, she'll know more about government and economics than her social studies teachers ever will.

Pennsylvania, blah, blah

2008-04-23T08:48:00.000-05:00

This post isn't about the Pennsylvania primary. This post is about before the primary, when progressive folks like Amanda Marcotte said things like this:

For obvious reasons, a lot is riding on the primary today, though I wouldn’t say it’s all over after today, because god knows Clinton and Obama could come out neck and neck, and this could all continue on.

Emphasis mine.

On the contrary, though. Absolutely nothing was riding on that primary, or on any of the primaries. Some small but non-trivial amount is riding on the presidential election in November, sure. But there is absolutely no amount riding on the decision between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The competition between the two is utterly, entirely meaningless.

Quick! Pop quiz: name the candidate!

Which candidate proposes a health care plan that gives "consumers" a choice of which for-profit corporation you want to give money to, as well as a government-run program?
Which candidate wants to remove troops from Iraq while "strengthening" the military's ability to kill people in the name of "security?"
Which candidate will "secure our borders" from the brown immigrant hordes of Mexico?
Which candidate wants to reduce carbon emissions through a market-based cap-and-trade system?
Which candidate supports global capitalism and American hegemony?
Which candidate is sponsored and approved of by corporate interests such as health insurance providers, oil and gas companies, drug companies, and weapon manufacturers?

If you answered "both, because they're fucking identical" to any of the above, you get an A for not being a sucker for pretty words and pictures.

There is no compelling reason to prefer Barack Obama (or John Edwards, or any other former candidate) over Hillary Clinton, or the reverse. Their few good points are the same, and their many bad points are as well. All that matters is not having a Republican president again, and even that really doesn't matter enough to care for any more time than it takes to cast a vote. Change happens elsewhere.

Clinton on Iran

2008-04-22T07:34:00.000-05:00

Via Lenin's Tomb: 11th Hour Clinton Ad Features Bin Laden

ABC News' Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Transparency in animal agriculture

2008-04-21T21:35:00.000-05:00

Elaine Vigneault has started calling for the installation of video cameras in slaughterhouses in response to recent revelations of animal cruelty — revelations that are only news to those who haven't been paying attention. Elaine being an ethical vegan committed to animal rights, I have no doubt that she is sincere in her advocacy of this measure, and that she believes it would lead to good outcomes for the animals killed for meat.

I think she is wrong.

First, I need to go out of my way to emphasize that I think that transparency in animal slaughter would result in some, perhaps even most, animals suffering less before being killed. That is to say, I think that video cameras in slaughterhouses would indeed lead to enforcement of animal welfare laws. This is, of course, exactly what Elaine says in her sample letter to congress to get the ball rolling.

Transparency is a really good step to improving farm animals’ lives and preventing egregious cruelty like that shown in the HSUS video. It’s also a great idea to improve accordance with labor laws, public health laws, and environmental protection laws.

I agree that transparency has a good chance of achieving those goals.

The question I have is: are those goals worth achieving? Certainly, all animal rights advocates (and all decent human beings) would rather animals suffer less than more, all things being equal. Nobody would argue that, say, a chicken with room to flap its wings (unlike virtually every chicken used for food today) would not be better off than a chicken that cannot. The issue is not whether some measure will achieve some welfare goal, but wether it will achieve that goal to the exclusion of the ultimate goal that I, Elaine, and other advocates of animal rights wish to achieve: the abolition of animal use entirely.

The argument is that, after drawing attention to the most egregious cruelty and ending it, people will choose to continue paying attention to the not so egregious killing part, and eventually start objecting to that as well. The problem here is that it is no surprise to people that animals are killed for meat. Everyone knows this. They only object, to the extent that they do at all, to it being done in an inhumane manner. Once they are assured by all of this transparency that the animals aren't being mistreated while being killed, they will stop paying attention. In fact, if history is any indication, they will consume more meat, secure in their knowledge that the meat came from cruelty-free slaughter.

I know this seems counterintuitive to some vegans, most of whom weren't born believing in animal rights. We think, "If only they can see what happens, they'll stop." And in some sense, this is true. Seeing how awful slaughterhouses are, through Meet Your Meat or Earthlings or anywhere else, has made many a vegan. But those videos do not come with the promise of fixing the problem. Transparency in slaughterhouses doesn't say to the public, "Look at how cruel animals are treated, let's stop eating them." Transparency in slaughterhouses accepts slaughterhouses! Transparency in slaughterhouses says, "Slaughter, but slaughter gently!"

Can we see the difference here? We can work to end cruelty in a way that also works to abolish animal exploitation. It can be done. This isn't how to do it. We only have so much energy to spend on advocating for animals, and we ought to focus that energy only where it will best achieve our goals.

2 + 2 = 5

2008-04-19T09:05:00.000-05:00

Food security

2008-04-18T09:19:00.000-05:00

George Monbiot wrote an article about food security in which he plainly stated that the best thing we could do to ensure that everyone has food to eat is all go vegan. He then promptly said it's impossible and that he won't do it, so we should just give up on that idea right now.

If only Martin Luther King had learned from the Monbiot school of activism: "I have a dream, but it's not really feasible. I guess racism isn't so bad, as long as you cut it out with the lynching."

Or Abraham Lincoln: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. But we can't realistically expect anyone to give up their slaves, so let's just keep fewer of them around and call it even."

Or John F. Kennedy: "We choose to go to the moon. But we may as well give up now, because getting to the moon is really hard."

Give me a fucking break. Not only is being vegan morally right for the animals, not only does it dramatically improve our ability to feed humans, not only does it help the environment, but it isn't actually hard at all. It's trivially easy, especially for anyone in a modern society, to eat an abundance of healthy and delicious vegan food without any more or less effort than it takes to eat an abundance of healthy and delicious non-vegan food.

Stop making excuses.

Urban living

2008-04-16T08:34:00.000-05:00

Some people I've talked with who are into environmentalism and anarchism expect the future to be decentralized not just in politics, but in geography as well. They want to essentially undo urbanization and let people live in small towns and communities, in harmony with nature, and so on. I think this is absolutely the wrong way to go, both for ourselves and for the environment.

Here's an example of why:

This is a map showing carbon dioxide emissions per capita. Red is bad, pale green is good. Notice anything surprising about that map? The urbanized East is far greener per capita than the spread-out West. It takes a certain minimum amount of infrastructure to support people, and there are efficiency gains to be had by putting more people in less space.

High-density urban living, supported by technologically-mediated organic vegan farming and renewable energy, could maintain populations as high or higher than we have now while reducing our environmental impact.

Fixing the country in 4 easy steps

2008-04-14T20:54:00.000-05:00

This is true pie-in-the-sky fantasy, here, folks.

Form community assemblies. This is a pretty common request from the Left, and I should hope it is pretty self-explanatory. They're called communes, councils, assemblies, but they're all the same: direct democracy on the local level. There is absolutely no reason why a neighborhood can't be self-determining, making decisions that affect nobody but themselves. These assemblies need not be miniscule; based on every time direct democracy has been implemented in the past, the majority of citizens won't care to attend every meeting, and some may not really care at all. Somewhere in the vicinity of 400-600 adults members would probably work out well. In the modern world, of course, many decisions affect more than one community. At the very least, it would be necessary to confederate with other communities for economic reasons, as resources are not magically divided such that all communities can be self-sufficient.
Dissolve the states. As it turns out, we have a fairly well-divided system of confederal government in place, but we really only use it every two years: congressional districts. Correcting some of the more egregious acts of gerrymandering, we note that there are between 400-600 congressional districts in the country, arranged by geographic proximity and population, proportionate to the scale of the assemblies that make them up. If each community in a district elected a delegate to a district council, we'd have confederated democracy for regional policy and administration ready to go. At that point, there would be no need for state governments as we know them now. Each district council would be composed of delegates who are themselves members of community assemblies, recallable by these assemblies, and the right to initiative and referendum by the members of the community assemblies would be universal. Policy decisions would be made directly, face-to-face, at the community level and passed upward to district councils for coordination, not made at the state or national level and orders sent down.
Abolish the Senate.Without states crying for "state's rights," and rejecting the idea of hierarchy on principle, the idea of an upper house becomes redundant. A unicameral national council would take its place -- essentially, the House of Representatives. Of course, these delegates would be integrally tied to the district council whose policy directives they carry to the national level for coordination, and to their own 500-member community assembly whose interests they still represent. Recall, initiative, and referendum would again be universal and easy to call for, making the delegates accountable.
Eliminate the presidency. That's right. We need an administrative branch of the political system to enact policy democratically decided in community assemblies and coordinated through district and national councils. We do not need a king. The idea of a singular chief executive is a throwback to an era in which state was vested in a person.

And "poof," all is well.

Tim Wise on White Privilege

2008-04-10T19:14:00.000-05:00

Via Alas, A Blog. Someone I know recently wondered aloud why hip white anti-racists love Tim Wise so much. It's a good question; after all, he's not saying anything black people haven't been saying for longer. I think it really just comes down to not being able to dismiss him as self-serving. Not that any hip white anti-racists would intentionally or consciously do such a thing to a black speaker, but having someone with privilege speak against it to others who have it is meaningful in its own way. Black people are expected to know that white people have social power. And just as no serious critic can fault black people gathering and speaking to these issues, it's hard not to find value in seeing white people gathering to speak against white privilege for a change, rather than simply gathering to wield it.

In any case, you can't say the man doesn't know what he's talking about.

The role of reform

2008-04-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

There is a difference between "wanting reforms" and "reformism." Liberals are reformists by definition, not revolutionaries. The liberal position holds that the basic structures and institutions of our society, representative government and capitalism, are flawed and we must alter them to make them more just and equitable. Reform is the goal, and this is the defining feature of reformism.

For those radical leftists who ultimately want something more, reform cannot be the goal. That doesn't mean, however, that we can't seek reforms in the short term. Ending the Iraq War, for example, is only a reform. It doesn't challenge war and militarism itself, but it is something that radical leftists desire. There is a long history of a "minimum program" that leftists have sought, which is on the surface not all that different from what the more progressive liberal seek. The difference is that leftists see this program as a stopgap measure to be sought concurrently with a "maximum program" of revolutionary change.

This difference between reformist liberals and revolutionary radicals is why leftists should avoid participating directly in electoral party politics by forming parties and running candidates. Working within the system accepts the limitations of that system. That isn't to say that radicals should not vote for candidates who support their vision of a minimum program, but they should never run candidates or form parties built around that program. Every time such a tactic has been tried, most catastrophically with the German Greens, it inevitably results in the "radical party" becoming indistinguishable from the reformist liberal parties already in existence. When you are focusing on winning campaigns rather than making changes, you have to appeal to broad audiences. Your focus is on taking power rather than dismantling it. This is no strong criticism of the individuals involved, it is just the price of participating in the system.

The solution to the paradox of achieving reforms without becoming a reformist is to achieve them not from inside, but from outside. Putting political pressure on those who are already or will be in power (indeed, threatening them in nonviolent but meaningful ways) to reform is the revolutionary method of achieving them. This ranges from mass demonstrations to civil disobedience to, yes, participating in elections. Doing all of these extra-systemic activities allows the revolutionary to build solidarity and movement cohesion, to improve people's lives in the present, while agitating for meaningful change in the future.

Ultimately, the goals of reform to a revolutionary are threefold.

First, reforms should help people who need help now. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic inequality are real and present, and to ignore them now while hoping to solve them after the revolution tells the people who are suffering their effects in the present that the Left doesn't give a shit about them. If we want a movement to grow, we have to offer those who would benefit most from the movement a chance to improve their lives without mere promises of utopia.

Second, reforms should be educational. This is especially relevant during an election cycle, when people are paying slightly more than their usual zero attention to politics. There are many people who do not even recognize that there is a problem, much less think anything can be done about it. Calling for a minimum living wage (while being explicit that it is necessary because capitalism is unjust), for example, keeps attention on issues that we face, rather than on the soma of comfortable consumerist middle class life. Reforms must always aim to increase tension between the people and their rulers.

Finally, reforms have a value simply by giving people hope. If our only goals require mass consciousness, and mass insurrection, and we face the prospect of spending our entire lives never seeing those goals realize, it is no surprise that many radical youth simply grow up and give up. Winning small changes in the system that are aligned with the values we support gives a sense of progress to a movement that faces enormous obstacles. Yes, the sense of progress is illusory, but it is a functional placebo, keeping spirits high and reminding us that change is possible.

Ultimately, we need mass involvement of people in the struggle for liberation. Until we have a majority of people on our side, though, we need to put as much pressure on those in control of our collective destiny as possible, through all the means at our disposal.

Bush sucks

2008-04-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

Don't take it from me, take it from 109 professional historians. A mere 98.2 percent of historians surveyed called Bush's presidency a failure. More than 61 percent of those surveyed rated Bush the worst president in history, and an additional 35 percent put him in the bottom third of presidents.

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

Unbelievable, I know. Can you believe a whole 1.8 percent of historians actually think Bush is a success? Jeez.

We got no beef with milkshakes

2008-04-06T09:34:00.000-05:00

We were out of coffee beans, so I had to go out into the wilderness of a local shopping center at the wee hour of 8:30 this morning. I found myself having to drive through a Chick-Fil-A parking lot, and I saw an advertisement for "hand-spun" milkshakes. It featured one of Chick-Fil-A's iconic gramatically impaired cows with a sign that read, "We got no beef with milkshakes." The implication, of course, is that milk isn't fatal to cows and therefore they don't object.

Were a cow to actually be capable of such a statement, the sign would more likely read, "Stop raping us, kidnapping and murdering our boys, enslaving us to steal our milk, and selling us to murderers when we're no longer useful as slaves. Thanks."

One of the many parts of the "vegetarian" paradox is that the dairy cows that vegetarians accept being used for milk and cheese suffer as much or more than the beef cattle that the same vegetarian will vociferously protest. This is not a matter of factory farming, it is inherent in the production of milk, even on the most hippie-friendly, free-range, organic, grass-fed dairy farm in the world.

First, cows don't just magically produce milk on command. They produce milk for a very specific purpose: to feed baby cows. Before the milk production process can even begin, they have to get pregnant immediately, so farmers must artificially inseminate the cows rather than let nature take its course. That's something that, were it to happen to a human, we'd call "sexual assault" at best.

Once the cow gives birth to a calf, in the natural world the calf would then drink the milk the cow is producing. But if we're going to steal the milk from the cow, we can't have some calf drinking it all. So farmers have to get rid of the calves. Where do you suppose they end up?

Veal or beef.

Yes, the dairy industry is also the veal industry. Every time the animal-loving vegetarian eats a cheese pizza, she is supporting a practice that is notoriously barbaric and certainly not consistent with love of animals. And once the cow is incapable of producing more milk, well, she gets slaughtered, too.

I think it's fair to say that cows do indeed "got beef" with Chick-Fil-A's milkshakes.

I must assume

2008-04-04T20:17:00.000-05:00

From "The Unity of Ideals and Practice" by Murray Bookchin.

Certain basic concepts are fundamental to traditional leftists, especially to social anarchists, and when I encounter people who call themselves social anarchists, I must assume that, if their politics is to have any meaning, they still uphold these concepts. I must assume that social anarchists, like other leftists, understand that capitalism is a competitive market system in which rivalry compels bourgeois enterprises to continually grow and expand. I must assume they understand that this process of growth is absolutely inexorable, driven by the "competitive market forces" of production and consumption—as the bourgeoisie itself acknowledges. Nor can these "forces" be eliminated as long as capitalism exists, any more than a class-dominated economy could ever put an end to the exploitation of labor. Social anarchists, I must assume, understand that if capitalism continues to exist, it will yield catastrophic results for society and the ecological integrity of the natural world. So inherent are these features to capitalism that to expect the capitalist system not to have them is to expect it to be something other than capitalist.

Further, I must assume that social anarchists, like other leftists, believe that if humanity is ever to attain a free and rational society, capitalism must be completely destroyed. Social anarchists are distinctive among leftists, however, in maintaining that the social order that must replace it must be a collectivist, indeed a libertarian communist society, in which production and distribution are organized according to the maxim "From each according to ability, to each according to need" (to the extent, to be sure, that such needs can be satisfied given the existing resources of the society). Social anarchists agree, I must assume, that such a libertarian communist society cannot be achieved without the prior abolition not only of capitalism but of the state, with its professional bureaucracy, its monopoly over the means of violence, and its inherent commitment to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Social anarchists agree, I must further assume, that the state must be replaced by a democratic political realm, one that comprises "communes" or municipalities of some kind that are in confederation with one another. Anarchosyndicalists believe that it is essentially workplace committees and libertarian unions that will structure these confederations. Anarchocommunists advance a variety of other forms, and my own will be summarized later. But when I meet a social anarchist, I assume that he or she shares these minimal, underlying common principles: the basic analysis of capitalism and its trajectory that I have described, as well as the imperative to replace competitive market-oriented social relations with libertarian institutions.

Didactic as my presentation may seem, I contend that to abandon any of these principles is to abandon the defining features of social anarchism, or of any revolutionary libertarian Left. To be sure, it is not easy to advance such ideas today. Former leftists who have themselves surrendered some of these principles in order to accommodate themselves to the existing society incessantly sneer at revolutionary leftists who still maintain them, accusing them of being "dogmatic," dismissing the coherence they prize as "totalitarian," and impugning their resolute social commitment as "sectarian." Moreover, in a time when social and political ideas are being blurred beyond recognition, principled leftists are advised repeatedly to relinquish their militancy—and presumably succumb to the mindless incoherence and pluralism that is commonly hallowed in the name of "diversity." Most of all, they are subjected to pressures to renounce the Left and blend in with the accommodation that is prevalent today, as so many of their former comrades have done.

Posted simply because it's about as concise an explanation of the basic assumptions of social anarchism as I've seen. Bookchin's view both of what is wrong with the system, how to address it, and what to replace it with is quite similar to my own.

Vegan interactions

2008-04-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

I have a couple of coworkers who like to tease me about being vegan. This is something that bothers a lot of vegans, sometimes to the point of not wanting to even befriend omnivores at all. But it doesn't bother me one bit, and not only because I get to zing them back about being animal exploiters.

See, veganism isn't a boycott, it's a protest. My role as a vegan in an omnivorous world is to stand in for those beings that don't have a voice: the animals people use and consume. So every time they make a joke about me not being able to eat whatever animal-based food is served at whatever function we're attending, I know that I am forcing them to realize that they are eating animals, and not just anonymous "meat." No omnivore can have a meal around a vegan, or a conversation regarding food with a vegan, and not have that moment of cognitive dissonance in their minds.

Humor is a defense mechanism, and I'm glad they turn to it. It means my veganism is working.

I am also heartened by a very brief conversation I had with one of those coworkers shortly after we met. She may not even remember it. She asked me if I consider my pets to be my property. Of course I said I didn't. Then she said that she hates it when people treat their animals as property. This encourages me because I know the seed is already planted. I am a vegan not because of the tremendous suffering inflicted on animals, though that would be reason enough, but because I simply do not think animals are our property to use as we see fit. My coworker agrees, she just hasn't taken the step that extends that belief to animals other than pets. The seed is already planted.

And that is what veganism is about. The abolition of animal exploitation cannot happen overnight, if it ever does. My abstaining from participation in that exploitation doesn't really do anything to prevent it directly. But the seeds are being planted every time a meal is had and a joke is told, and with time, the culture will change. What was accepted yesterday is abhorred tomorrow. That's how it goes.

Group sanctions imprisonment, theft, and murder

2008-04-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

An animal-exploiting company called Eggology was recently certified "humane" by Humane Farm Animal Care, the first "liquid egg product" producer to be so labeled. Humane Farm Animal Care is a group, allied with hypocritical animal welfare advocates, that believes that is is acceptable to imprison, steal, and kill without your consent if you are unlucky enough to be a species other than homo sapiens. This is, of course, a boon to the multibillion dollar industry devoted to the imprisonment of, theft from, and murder of other species: the meat, dairy, and egg producers.

The level of absurd hypocrisy is visible from the very first criterion that an animal exploiter must meet to be "certified humane."

Allow animals to engage in their natural behaviors

Last time I checked, living was an animal's natural behavior. By the group's own standard, no meat can be certified "humane." If I'm not mistaken, the production of milk for calves, and the suckling thereof, is an animal's natural behavior; therefore, dairy production can't be certified "humane."

But of course both of these things are certified, along with the "liquid egg product," because "humane" certification, like all animal welfare reforms, are not meant to benefit the animals, but to benefit the exploiters of animals by making the exploitation more palatable to consumers. The certification of Eggology eggs as "humane" is a great victory for Eggology's profit-making potential, not for the chickens who the company exploits. But try telling that to "radical animal rights groups" like PETA who routinely give awards to companies for their efforts to more efficiently kill and sell animals.

Incidentally, this is made overt in the second criterion for "humane" certification:

Raising animals with sufficient space, shelter and gentle handling to limit stress

You know what would really limit the stress put on animals? Not fucking using them in the first place!

Empire

2008-03-31T14:37:00.000-05:00

History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890

This guide does not include:
mobilizations of the National Guard
offshore shows of naval strength
reinforcements of embassy personnel
the use of non-Defense Department personnel (such as the Drug Enforcement Administration)
military exercises
non-combat mobilizations (such as replacing postal strikers)
the permanent stationing of armed forces
covert actions where the U.S. did not play a command and control role
the use of small hostage rescue units
most uses of proxy troops
U.S. piloting of foreign warplanes
foreign or domestic disaster assistance
military training and advisory programs not involving direct combat
civic action programs
and many other military activities.

And yet it is still 134 entries long...

Reasons to vote, or not

2008-03-30T09:38:00.000-05:00

I have said many times that I don't think that elections (and mainstream politics in general) are the way to get meaningful change. There are reasons to vote for one candidate over another, but I maintain that even the most progressive public policy proposed by the most progressive candidate in a capitalist state cannot solve the problems that are inherent in a capitalist state, but only prevent some of the worst effects of those problems.

But like I said, there are some reasons to vote for one candidate over another, and I'd like to discuss them here. First we have the standard liberal causes:

Minimum Wage. If the market could simply enslave workers, it would. Since it cannot, it will instead pay them as little as it can (while extracting as much profit as it can from their work) without them leaving. A capitalist market will never pay people fairly for their labor. It will always underpay those who are employed and overpay those who employ. Minimum wage laws cannot eliminate this imbalance, but if the minimum is set high enough they can ensure basic living conditions are met for workers.

Social Welfare. Capitalism relies on unemployment, and underemployment, to keep a competitive job market and maintain low wages so that the owners can make larger profits. The only force comparable in power to the market economy is the state, and having profit redistributed through taxation to prevent homelessness and starvation is one of he few antagonisms between those entities that we can exploit. Normally the state and the economy are in lockstep; despite their taxation complaints, the wealthy rely on the state to protect their "right" to their wealth. Any wedge that can be driven between them weakens both, and in this case also prevents real suffering for those harmed by both.

Abortion. The government does not recognize all of our rights, but we do not need them to take away those that they presently do. Whether legally justified on grounds of medical privacy or not, women have a right not to have their bodies used as incubators for fetuses without their consent. The right to abortion is not a special right, but the same right to liberty and personal security that freed the slaves. It is a right worth fighting for.

Affirmative Action. To reject affirmative action is to reject basic equality. We live in a society still deeply scarred by racism and sexism, and until those scars heal it takes systemic measures to cancel out the privilege white male people continue to enjoy in educational and occupational opportunities.

Anti-This-War. I have been critical of this position, and I do think that it is one often taken for selfish reasons. All major party candidates believe in the desireability of a strong military and periodic interventions (perhaps labeled "humanitarian") to make sure the world knows that if they don't go our way we can destroy them. Bill Clinton did it in Bosnia while ignoring East Timor. George W. Bush did it in Iraq while ignoring Darfur. But the opposition party must oppose something, and to the extent that at this particular moment the primary show of force the United States is involved in concerns Iraq, a candidate who would take soldiers out of Iraq is preferable to one who would not.

Then we have the handful of things that are unlikely to be rallying cries for a major party, but that if they were on the table, would be worth supporting:

Recall, Initiative, and Referendum. If we must live in an ostensibly representative oligarchy, the best we can hope for is to have more oversight on what the decision-makers decide. As it stands, there is very little pressure for elected officials to act in their constituency's interest, except to the extent that they can be elected. Because elections are relatively infrequent, the people have no means of putting pressure on an official over any given issue save letter-writing. But if elected officials at all levels of government could be recalled at any time by their constituents, it would go a long way toward shifting power into the hands of the people. By the same token, any measures which increase participation by the people in the actual decision-making process, such as initiative and referendum, are beneficial to strengthening the popular voice and weakening that of the ruling class.

Maximum Wage. Having a legal maximum wage tied to the lowest paid at a company acts to mitigate the injustice of capitalism in one major way. Because those in decision-making positions have no choice but to raise the wages for their employees any time they themselves wanted a raise, it prevents pay gaps from increasing any further than legal ratio. Every time the CEO gets a raise, the janitor gets one, too.

Beyond those issues, and perhaps a few others, there is no compelling reason to spend more than a moment organizing and supporting mainstream political figures. It's a simple matter of opportunity cost. Every minute (and dollar) spent supporting a status quo centrist like Barack Obama is a minute (and dollar!) not spent actually building a better world through democratic organizing and education, cooperative businesses, unions, and direct action.

Not something you see everyday

2008-03-30T09:35:00.000-05:00

I don't know what it is, or where it came from:

http://cubo.cc/

Give it a second to load.

Spectator sport

2008-03-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

As I watch what is described by various pundits as one of the most fiercely fought presidential election campaigns in memory, I can't help but be reminded of something Noam Chomsky wrote:

In totalitarian societies where there's a Ministry of Truth, propaganda doesn't really try to control your thoughts. It just gives you the party line. It says, "Here's the official doctrine; don't disobey and you won't get in trouble. What you think is not of great importance to anyone. If you get out of line we'll do something to you because we have force." Democratic societies can't work like that, because the state is much more limited in its capacity to control behavior by force. Since the voice of the people is allowed to speak out, those in power better control what that voice says — in other words, control what people think. One of the ways to do this is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but actually stays within very narrow margins. You have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions — and that those assumptions are the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, the debate is permissible.

How anyone can look at the candidates from the major parties and honestly pretend there are heavily contested issues in play here is something I am incapable of understanding. The permitted debate is over things that are ultimately rather superficial, but they all accept the limits imposed by the system. None says war is bad, they say, "War is bad, but..." and vow to strengthen America's killing power. They don't even get that far in criticizing the economic system that is presently causing financial strife for millions of people — within the propaganda system, it is only the failure of "firms" or "businesses" or "executives," never the failure of the market itself.

To be sure, I am free to make these arguments here. But then I am not running for office. If I were, I would be treated like Dennis Kucinich, or Raplph Nader, or (heaven forbid) a candidate from the Green, Libertarian, or Socialist Parties. I, and anyone else who strays too far from the conservative corporate core of American politics, could never hope to play in the game, we must be content to yell in the stands.

Liberalism: treating the symptoms, ignoring the disease

2008-03-26T10:02:00.000-05:00

Imagine you break your leg. You go to the emergency room and the doctor gives you an examination. "Well, you're clearly in pain," she says, "so let me take care of that for you." She gives you a couple Vicodin and goes off to treat the next patient. Do you take the drugs and happily limp home, pleased that your condition has been treated? Or do you yell after the departing doctor, "Hey, I'm glad it doesn't hurt anymore, but what about that broken bone in my leg?"

Liberal democrats (a group that is largely synonymous with capital-d Democrats of the party) are doctors that prescribe Vicodin but ignore fractures. They look at the country, or the world, and they clearly see there are problems. The liberals want to do something about them.

So what do they do? Well, consider war. There is a war going on in Iraq, if you hadn't noticed, that has killed more than a million people. Most liberals oppose the war, and rightfully. They want the troops brought home. But then the liberal Barack Obama's platform says this:

Barack Obama will work to solve the military's recruitment and retention crisis by asking Americans to serve in the military, increasing the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops, and properly training and equipping our troops to face the battles of the 21st Century.

Obama, and the liberals in general, are not anti-war, they are anti-this war. He actually wants to increase the killing power of the military. Liberals proudly oppose the Iraq War without recognizing that it is only a symptom of the militarized warfare disease. To treat the disease would mean not just bringing home combat troops from Iraq, but closing all of the nearly one thousand military bases we have in over a hundred countries worldwide. It would mean reducing the size of the Army and Marines. But liberals are only concerned with the symptoms, not the disease.

Or look at the ongoing economic crisis. Following the Federal Reserve's support of corporations, Hillary Clinton quipped:

If the Fed can extend $30 billion to help Bear Stearns address their financial crisis, the federal government should provide at least that much emergency help to families and communities to address theirs.

Families and communities are suffering under profit-driven investment capitalism and the liberal solution is, of course, to help them get through it. And we all want for people who are being hurt to get better. But once again, Clinton wants to treat the symptom of the the disease that is capitalism. Families and communities have a financial crisis because the system worked as it is supposed to: people with money using any means possible to try to make as much more money as they can. Profit motive, the driving force of capitalism, caused the crisis. But there will never be a word spoken about, say, the entire concepts of profit, interest, and rent being nothing more than means of the already rich getting richer by exploiting poor people without actually doing any work. This is because liberals aren't interested in curing the disease, if they even know it exists, because they are busy relieving the symptoms.

The dichotomy between liberals (who treat symptoms) and radicals (who treat diseases) is stark, but it is not too stark. There would be no problem if the doctor set the broken bone and gave you Vicodin for your pain. But we can't confuse the latter for the former, or pretend that somehow treating the pain over and over again will eventually heal the bone.

The Business of Being Born

2008-03-25T21:47:00.000-05:00

I've never mentioned it on this blog since I don't often use it for personal posting, so for those who are unaware: my wife is pregnant and I'll be a father on April 25. We're both terribly excited — me foolishly confident, her nervously thrilled — and it is particularly fun because we don't know the baby's sex, so there will be a bit of a surprise at the end. Or should I say the beginning? Or something. In any case, the entire experience so far has been awesome, though I'm not the one with a creature in my belly.

I'm obviously paying some above-average level of attention to pregnancy and childbirth-related material when I come across it, and in particular I noticed a post on Science-Based Medicine by Harriet Hall reviewing the documentary The Business of Being Born. If you haven't heard of this film, it is critical of the alleged medicalization of childbirth, and promotes unmedicated home birthing rather than what is at this point the traditional hospital birth.

I don't have a horse in the "natural" versus "medical" race. What my wife is doing or not doing is her own business for her own reasons, and I honestly support anyone in any choice they make regarding that topic. I neither think anesthesia and c-sections are destroying lives and families, nor that doing it the old-fashioned way is stupid and reckless. Your body, your choice. There are benefits and risks all around, and one person may place a higher premium on one benefit than another places on the risk associated with it.

First, I saw this:

They kept harping on empowerment, and made it seem like a woman had to endure great pain so she could feel she’d accomplished something so wonderful that now she knew she could do anything. This is unnecessary. We can provide good pain relief during labor with minimal risk to the baby, and I see no reason to have women screaming “I can’t stand this!” with a midwife telling her she has to tough it out. Despite their protestations, I wasn’t convinced that the midwives’ attitude was kinder to their patients than my obstetricians who made my labors and deliveries almost pain-free.

Again, whether or not some women find pain empowering is their own business. What struck me was the comparison between midwife and doctor being made not as one of natural versus medical, but of kindness. One area that I find myself disagreeing with the pro-natural faction on is the idea that giving unnecessary anesthetic, with admittedly minimal risks, is somehow inherently bad. While I am generally sympathetic to the spirit of the homebirth cause, it is never because of any perceived superiority of the "natural" way. Fetishization of nature just doesn't appeal to me. The impulse to "medicalize" birth, for good or ill, is based on the perfectly reasonable goal of reducing suffering. If that impulse is too often acted on, well, that is the unfortunate result of a capitalist economy that treats healthcare (and adjudication) like a business. Any business, including that of being born, must have insurance, and lawsuits drive insurance rates so high that, as Hall puts it, "No doctor wants to be on that witness stand explaining why he didn’t do an ultrasound or use a fetal monitor."

Ultimately, though, I wanted to point to this:

The movie dealt more with feelings and opinions, and didn’t talk much about evidence from controlled studies. There are many unanswered questions about how to achieve the best outcomes for babies and mothers. If you don’t think doctors are constantly trying to reassess and improve their methods, just read any obstetric journal. When I was an intern, episiotomies were standard practice. I was chastised for not doing an episiotomy on one patient, a multigravida who begged me not to do one and who really didn’t need one. Now routine episiotomies are no longer recommended. Not because women complained, but because controlled scientific studies re-examined the outcomes. We stopped shaving the perineum and giving enemas a long time ago. Maybe we will stop delivering our patients in a supine position – but only when evidence clearly shows a safer option.

What's important here is not the frequency of medical intervention, which Hall admits is inflated. What this paragraph exemplifies is the importance of science doing what science does best. When literally dealing with matters of life and death, the default course of action must be based on what will most likely result in the best outcome for those involved. People are autonomous, and may surely reject the default course of action. But any critique of that course of action itself, rather than one's personal decision to follow it, has to be mounted on the basis that there is a flaw in the reasoning that led to it. Even if it were the case that most women choose to reject them, if the evidence suggests certain procedures be followed, those should be the procedures that are recommended. Research can be wrong, but that is how science works: by continuously challenging theories and seeking to disprove them. Ironically, in the New York Times review of the film (I haven't seen it myself) it mentions that a history of now-abandoned medical interventions that proved harmful is described, presented as an argument against them in general. But that is in fact an argument for how science is self-correcting: when things don't work, they are discarded or replace by things that work better. The chief difference between "natural" and "medical" is that "medical" has the potential to improve with time as new things are learned.

The opposition to medical birth is like most oppositions to technological developments in that there are legitimate causes for concern and education (if not necessarily for full-blown opposition), but the majority of the opposition that I've been exposed to don't challenge the developments on those terms. If there are statistically significant reasons to suppose that routine medical interventions are dangerous enough for them to be made non-routine, present those reasons. But arguments based on subjective emotions like empowerment, or even on the attitude of the professionals involved, are ones that by nature can only appeal to individuals. They cannot be the basis for altering systems in a field that must seek first to maximize health rather than happiness. Ideally the two would go hand in hand, but those are decisions that people must make for themselves.

Radical democracy

2008-03-24T08:27:00.000-05:00

Anyone who knows me knows I spend a lot of time thinking about words and labels. I'm not one for pigeonholing — I certainly don't think that what I call myself defines me — but I do think that it is important to say what we mean and mean what we say. And so while I am comfortable referring to myself as an anarchist or a socialist, depending on the company I'm in, I wouldn't necessarily say that either of those labels is a perfect fit. They all give someone an idea of what I stand for, but not much more than that.

The chief problem, of course, is that those labels are terribly broad. I'm an anarchist, fine. Am I a mutualist, individualist, syndicalist, anarchist-communist, libertarian municipalist, parecon advocate, Platformist, what? I'm a socialist. Communist, social democrat, Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, reformist, revolutionary, what?

I think, though, that the essence of my political and economic beliefs can be pretty well summed up with two words: radical democracy.

Radical means two things, both equally apt. First, something radical deals with the root or basic cause. Second, radical has come to mean "extreme." I believe that the problems with the modern political and economic systems are fundamental to the systems themselves. They are not caused because the system isn't working the way it should. They are caused because they are the inevitable result of the system working precisely as it is meant to. For example, unemployment and drastic disparities of wealth are not malfunctions of capitalism, they are inherent and necessary for capitalism to function.

Democracy is a word that has come to be corrupted almost out of recognition. But democracy is like a light switch, either on or off, either you have it or you don't. In a democracy, people make the decisions that affect them in proportion to how affected they are. Democracy requires participation, not alienation through pulling a lever or pressing a button every few years. We do not live in a democracy, we live in a liberal oligarchy, in which the power that rightfully belongs to every one of us is instead vested in a minority who exercise it, ideally, in our interests. They need only actually act in our interest to the extent that they can stay in office. Given the rampant political apathy that pervades society, that means for the majority of their time they can act in their own interest, or that of whomever they are indebted to.

Radical democracy affirms the revolutionary motto, "Liberty, equality, solidarity!"

Radical democracy requires liberty. All participants in a democratic society must be free to make their own choices, without coercion or compulsion from another party. Associations must be voluntary, and governments must derive any power they are given from the explicit consent of the people.

Radical democracy requires equality. Not only must all have equal opportunity to affect the decisions that affect themselves, people cannot be divided economically by unequal bargaining power concerning work and consumption. A commitment to equality is a commitment to letting people work with other people, but never for them.

Finally, radical democracy requires solidarity. Humans are social animals not just formally, but in every aspect of our lives. We all live together, and we must all get along together. We can best achieve this through cooperation and mutual aid, not through segregation, isolation, and competition.

A society based around liberty, equality, and solidarity — a radically democratic society — is not something that will come about through voting for Obama instead of Clinton, or Obama instead of McCain. There are no political parties that stand for these things, and in fact there cannot be, because radical democracy is incompatible with that form of government known as the state. Radical democracy can only be built as an alternative through local action.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore the modern political system. Not at all. We can, and should, continue to agitate for those minimal reforms that maximize the potential for a radically democratic alternative to grow. Spreading democracy in the workplace, for example, is certainly easier in a world in which unions are legal than one in which they are not. It is hard to imagine people being concerned about changing the system when they are too busy worrying about their basic human rights. But we must retain a sense of proportion about these things. These are prerequisites for action, but they are not the action themselves.