Thomas Sowell's Redneck Culture Meme Won't Go Away

Here http://culturalleadership.blogspot.com/2005/08/black-rednecks-and-white-liberals.html is someone else taken in by Thomas Sowell's "Redneck Culture is What is Wrong with Black People" argument. This guy apparently hates folks with Scots-Irish heritage. Perhaps one of my ancestors stole his ancestor's sheep, and the family carries a grudge. He also appears to dislike black people other than Thomas Sowell. He denigrates two ethnicities at once by characterizing "redneck culture" as lazy, violent and ignorant and then stating that black people have adopted this culture.

This kind of bigotry is saddening especially on a Christian blog.

Figures of Speech

Mrs Vache Folle and I collect and enjoy instances in which our conspecifics screw up figures of speech or sayings. This started with her own use of the phrase "made out like a banshee" when she got lots of presents one Christmas. It sounded almost right but wasn't. The images of a banshee and a bandit are quite different. Some of the our favorite examples of fractured figures of speech/sayings we have overheard are as follows:

• It spread like wildflowers.
• My husband wears the shoes in our family.
• The worm is on the other foot.
• It's 6 1/2 of one and a dozen of the other.
• He painted himself into a corner and threw away the key.
• Absence makes the heart go farther.

When I was staying in Barbados, I enjoyed the colorful sayings that the people used. Some of my favorites (I hope I am not fracturing them) were:

• The watchman is as good as the thief.
• If s***t had wings, dog would buy a gun.
• Monkey don't know how big he ass is til he swallow a plum seed.
• Crow fly high, but when he die, ant eat he eye.

I am fascinated by these kinds of sayings. They don't always make sense and can sometimes be countered with an opposite idea. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder", but "out of sight is out of mind". Moreover, if "God is love" and "love is blind", is God blind? If "time is money" and "money is power" and "power corrupts", does time corrupt?

Lessons of Matewan

Last night, I caught part of a PBS series on Appalachia. The segment dealt with the coal wars in southern West Virginia in 1912-1925 or so. I did extensive research on this for a graduate seminar in anthropological theory and was taken aback at how little I had ever learned about this episode in American history. At one point, over 10,000 armed union miners, many of them veterans of the recent World War, marched on Mingo County from Charleston and vicinity to rescue their fellow miners from the iron grip of the Mingo County mine operators and their detective agency thugs. There was a battle at Blair Mountain, and peace was restored through the intervention of federal troops. The federals broke the union in Mingo.

This episode would never be taught in the schools in my hometown of Dalton, GA, carpet capital of the known universe. The chamber of commerce was very much involved in curriculum, and the only thing we were ever taught about unions was that they were bad. Every year, the chamber would bring a mobile classroom to the schools with exhibits and information about how horrible unions were. Unions were equated with Communism and the Soviet Union where you had to work ten times as long to afford a loaf of bread. Also, unions were equated with organized crime. We were encouraged to report suspicious union activity to the chamber.

Back to Mingo County. There, the mine operators owned the miners' homes, owned the mines, owned the churches and hired/fired the pastors, controlled the sheriff, controlled the judges, and controlled the legislators from their area. They colluded to blacklist any troublesome worker or any worker who advocated unionization. And if this was not bad enough, they attempted to control miners' access to publications, miners' freedom to assemble, and other aspects of the miners' lives outside the mines. This chafed, but what really got the miners riled up was when the operators began to cheat them with false weights (miners were paid by the ton) and to charge excessive amounts for tools and timber to shore up the shafts and for goods at the company stores. The collusion among operators also made it difficult for miners to vote with their feet and move to another mine if the operator got out of line, and this freedom was important to them and an important check on operator excesses. The miners had no recourse or remedy as the operators held almost all the cards. At length, the miners went to war and tried to shut down the mines. They attacked trains, besieged mines, harassed "replacement workers" and defectors, and otherwise did what was necessary to bring the operators to the bargaining table. The striking miners' families were evicted from their homes, and they passed miserable months living in the open.

The operators controlled the local sheriff and his deputies and had hired a private army of detective agency thugs to keep the miners in line. One law officer the operators did not own was Chief Hatfield of the Matewan police. He was involved in the shooting of several "detectives" in Matewan. The men who killed the thugs were tried but no jury could be found to convict them. The operators had tried to get the state legislature to limit the right to trial by jury, but the northern districts would not go along with this idea. All of the state apparatus that the miners had left was the jury, and the operators had not yet found a way to pack the juries with mine owners. Time and again, juries declined to convict miners and their sympathizers charged with crimes against miner operators or their thugs. The mine operators had to assassinate Chief Hatfield on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse to get revenge.

One of the lessons of Matewan is that the right to trial by jury, including the willingness and ability of the jury to act as trier of both fact and the law, is one of the most important protections that the ordinary man has against the excesses of power.

Another lesson is that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is private and what is the state. In Mingo County, the mine operators and the state were one and the same. It might be easy in a vulgar and cavalier way to declare that the miners were free to look for work elsewhere and that the operators were entitled to control their property as they saw fit, but the complex situation on the ground belies this kind of analysis. The operators' control and collusion rendered the miners' freedom of choice almost illusory. In theory, they might have taken their possessions and families and hiked to another more comfortable venue. In fact, they would have to leave their homes, their friends and kinsmen, and with considerable hardship go out in search of other situations that might well be just as unbearable. And they would do this with little or no money, as mining rarely afforded anyone an opportunity for savings.

A third lesson is that federal intervention in local conflict can be on the side of the powers that be.

Hummingbird Wars

The last two years we have been graced with visits by a male ruby throated hummingbird (we assume that it is the same bird because of his habits). He visited our wildflower patch, and we put up a hummingbird feeder (Mrs Vache Folle refers to it as the "nectar silo") to keep him coming. This is a glass cylinder about 12 inches high that works a little like a water cooler. Red colored "nectar" flows on demand (using the earth's gravitational pull) into a base with fake flowers into which the bird inserts his long beak. We hung this right off our deck so we could get a good view of Swifty, the name we gave the hummingbird based on the rapidity of his movements. (I know it is not creative, but we name a lot of things and were out of interesting names). He is not disturbed by our presence on the deck at all and visits the feeder throughout the day. He also spends time perched on the tip top branch of an apple tree about 40 feet to the north where he is king of all he surveys. We don't know where his nest is, but we suspect that it is in one of the tall maple trees in the side yard.

Recently, I have begun to see a female hummingbird at the feeder from time to time. She is all business, unlike Swifty who always makes a grand entrance and shows off before feeding. She perches at the feeder and takes long draughts and is then on her way. Last week, I began to see another male and Swifty getting into it around the feeder. Swifty would chase the intruder away, and they would engage in aerial combat around the apple tree. Swifty always held the field and sometimes engaged in a post-combat display of flying in a wide arc about 5 times around the feeder.

Last evening, we saw three hummingbirds at once at the feeder, Swifty, the female (I call her Christine), and the interloper male. The intruder male drew Swifty away while Christine had a good long draught. When Swifty returned, instead of going to his highly visible perch in the apple tree, he stationed himself in a maple overlooking the feeder. We could swear that he was lying in wait, guarding the feeder, and each time that another hummingbird came to the feeder, he would swoop down and drive it away. He maintained his vigil for a good hour, but, as the other birds seem to realize, he cannot watch the feeder all the time.

The nectar silo contains nectar enough for a batallion of hummingbirds, about a quart, and we change the nectar and refill it as needed. Mrs Vache Folle thinks Swifty is a greedy bastard and likens his actions to a person guarding a supermarket with a rifle and driving away all the other customers. I suggested that we install another feeder, but Mrs Vache Folle fears that this will just mean that Swifty will be doubly anxious and spend his time guarding them both, so convinced is she of Swifty's avaricious nature. Swifty seems to believe that he owns the silo, and it may be that he thinks he owns the whole yard. I wonder if the interlopers would be regarded as trespassers in a hummingbird court or if Swifty's claims would be considered excessive.

Misapplication of Evolutionary Theory

What are the moral implications of evolutionary theory? None, nada, zilch. There is no real way to predicate any moral reasoning on evolutionary propositions about the origins or development of life. Evolutionary science rightly ignores any supernatural or moral premise and cannot legitimately make moral arguments. All evolutionary science can do is to make propositions about what is or has been, not what ought to be or why the world is as it is.

You are free, of course, in your moral judgment, to adopt the scientific stance as your moral stance and to declare that the universe is devoid of any objective morality and anything supernatural (leaving aside that science is simply agnostic as to these issues). Keep in mind, however, that once you have done this, you cannot then lay claim to the weight of science as authority for your position. You have merely coopted the underlying metaphysical assumptions of science. You cannot prove that your assumptions are correct in the moral sphere any more than anyone else can.

Likewise, you may believe in the supernatural and an absolute morality, but this has no bearing on the validity of evolutionary theory as a scientific theory. Moreover, evolutionary theory should not have any implications for your moral system. It may, however, have implications on the subjective believability for you of your religion and morality if it is predicated on an uncritical acceptance of the literal truth of some ancient creation myth. Your moral system is revealed by your deity in your holy book, and if any part of the holy book is factually or historically suspect or metaphorical, your faith may be shaken. This is a personal problem and not a reflection on the consistency of evolutionary theory and the supernatural premise. You cannot prove that your deity exists or that your holy book is really holy or correct or that your revealed moral system is correct. You take these propositions on faith, and you cannot call upon the authority of science or pseudoscience to validate them.

For my part, I have never viewed the Bible as a biology textbook. The creation myths in Genesis do not have to be factual or historically true to be true mythically. The stories still have meaning, worth and validity even if they relate to events that never really happened. It is mythically and symbolically irrelevant whether a single word of Genesis is historically true. If your faith rests on premises that are falsifiable, you take your chances that they will be falsified, and you either lose your faith, deny the evidence or adapt. My faith is not shaken by evolutionary science, and I find a universe where evolution occurs over eons wondrous and awe inspiring. That any among us is smart enough to grasp it is wondrous to me as well.

Is Christopher Hitchens Mental, or What?

That drunken gasbag Christopher Hitchens has a piece at Slate where he questions the sincerity of folks who did not support the aggression against Iraq.

http://www.slate.com/id/2124157/fr/nl/

He asks:

“Question: Why have several large American cities not already announced that they are going to become sister cities with Baghdad and help raise money and awareness to aid Dr. Tamimi? When I put this question to a number of serious anti-war friends, their answer was to the effect that it's the job of the administration to allocate the money, so that there's little room or need for civic action. I find this difficult to credit: For day after day last month I could not escape the news of the gigantic "Live 8" enterprise, which urged governments to do more along existing lines by way of debt relief and aid for Africa. Isn't there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet? Unless someone gives me a persuasive reason to think otherwise, my provisional conclusion is that the human rights and charitable "communities" have taken a pass on Iraq for political reasons that are not very creditable. And so we watch with detached curiosity, from dry land, to see whether the Iraqis will sink or swim. For shame.”

Christopher Hitchens is a waste of space. I doubt that he has any friends, let alone anti-war friends.

Last time I looked, no large American city or charitable organization invaded Iraq or lobbed any bombs on Baghdad. It is not the responsibility on any level for American cities or private charities to bail out the warmongering neo-con death cult and mitigate the damage they have done and are doing in Baghdad. In a better world, the warmongers would forfeit their goods and labor to rebuild Iraq and compensate their victims. Hitchens, for example, might benefit from a little honest labor like rubble removal. In our world, all Americans will have to pay and will be forced to do so at the point of a gun courtesy of the IRS even though we are not in any way responsible.

Secondly, sending money or aid to Iraq at present would be like flushing it down the toilet. I would rather flush my money down a toilet than have it go into the hands of the kleptomaniacs the USG has put in charge of things over there or the war profiteers for whom the whole thing has evidently been staged. Nine billion bucks and more have gone missing and nobody is held to account. And who knows if the rest of the money has done anyone any good other than the aforementioned kleptocrats and the profiteers? Hundreds of billions have gone down the drain and hundreds of billions more are going to be wasted, and Hitchens thinks it would be a good idea for folks to throw a few more bucks into the robbers' sack just so we can show we care.

The only intelligent thing in the whole piece would be if Hitchens meant the Bush regime when he said “the vilest movement on the face of the planet”. “We” are not watching Iraq with detached curiosity. Maybe Hitchens can do this, being a nihilist bastard, but I am praying fervently every day for the neo-con death cult to get the hell out of the way.

Frozen Embryos Revolt in California

This story http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jun/05061607.html is intriguing. (Note that the story includes a blurb about a couple who visited GWB at the presidential palace with their "23 month old adopted frozen embryo, Mary Elizabeth". Did they have her on dry ice or something? Do they get a tax exemption for the embryo, and can they write off their freezer as a medical expense? If you get an exemption, sign me up for a thousand embryos to call me Pa.)

Some Californians are suing on behalf of an unspecified frozen embryo to stop the stem cell initiative in California on the basis that it violates the rights of frozen embryos. As I have stated before, let's be sure a guardian is appointed for the frozen little blob of cells since the plaintiffs probably have little real interest in her well being. They probably want to stuff her into a womb or something with the huge risk that comes from being thawed, from failing to implant, and from miscarrying. Keep her frozen, and by no means put her in a womb if she happens to get thawed out and survives the process. Rather, put her in culture and let her develop to her full potential as an unsentient blob of cells.

What's next? Polyp rights?

Profiling Arabs in NYC

Over the objections of the mayor and the NYPD, some publicity hound on the NY City Council wants to enact legislation to require the NYPD to profile Arabs in its anti-terrorism efforts. Presumably, the councilman would have the cops search only Arabs entering the subway rather than the pointless random, "voluntary" searches they are now doing.

I don't know if this kind of profiling would do any good anywhere, and I doubt it, but it is idiotic to think that it could work in NYC. There are people from so many ethnic categories in NYC that it is difficult to tell who might be an Arab. How many folks, particularly if they are trying to avoid suspicion, are going to run around looking like Yassir Arafat? It is going to be difficult for an American observer to distinguish an Arab from a Syrian Jew, an Iranian, a Pakistani, an Indian, a Turk or even a Puerto Rican. Some Italians and Greeks have features that resemble some Arabs. What putative features of Arabs are the police supposed to look for? Swarthy complexions, facial hair? Arabs manifest quite a bit of variation. Should Arabs be required to wear armbands, assuming that a terrorist would comply with the armband rule?

Once word gets out, and it will, that profiling is employed, it is fairly simple to remove yourself from the profile. Dye your hair, shave your beard, dress like some other ethnicity might dress. Use someone who does not fit the profile to do your dirty work.

If you have to search or surveill or harass every Arab even though only a couple of them might be terrorists, won't that take away resources from pursuing actual leads and doing real police work?

As a final objection, I fear that the profiling program will come to entail harsher measures as it fails and as it becomes clear that it is unworkable. Arabs may be required to register and check in just like parolees, or perhaps they will be interned. Another monstrous state apparatus will have to be put in place to administer the "Arab problem". This will then expand its portfolio to encompass the "South Asian problem" and any other category that is deemed a menace.

Groups or Categories?

David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction writers, has a post on, among other things, how the left tends to view "nurture" as predominant and the right tends to view "nature" as predominant in the old "nature/nurture" debate http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/08/emotional-roots-for-hypocricies-of.html. The left sees mankind as infinitely malleable, and the right sees mankind as hard wired for success or failure, a rationalization for prejudice against the poor or members of other ethnic categories or creeds. For Brin, the modernist recognizes that nature AND nurture are at work on mankind in a complex dynamic. We are born with certain dispositions, but we are also highly adaptable, and neither an appeal to nature or to nurture can justify oppression, either from the left or the right.

Part of the post touched on one of my interests, the tendency to lump other people into "groups" and to treat them other than as individuals. I reckon that this is an innate disposition, this lumping behavior, and it makes some sense as an algorithm for dealing with strangers. We can't really know everyone we encounter, and it may make sense to extrapolate from experience with similar people. (If the people with the curly hair attacked you last time, it is prudent to give any curly haired people a wide berth.) It is amazing to me how readily we group people on the basis of relatively superficial characteristics: tattoos, hairstyles, clothing styles, skin pigmentation, apparent age, musical tastes, consumption patterns, etc. And we not only group them, we attribute to them a complete set of values, attitudes, beliefs and dispositions. We remember the times we seemed to be right, and we conveniently forget any of the evidence that our stereotypes were wrong. It is really idiotic when such stereotyping becomes the basis for legislation and public policy decisions.

In anthropology, the word "group" connotes an organization with members. "Category" denotes an aggregation of individuals possessing one or more common characteristics but having no real organization. The "Knights of Columbus" is a group; "Catholic men" is a category. "NOW" is a group; "women" is a category. "NAACP" is a group; "Americans of African descent" is a category. "US Government" is a group; "subjects of the USG" is a category. Where we frequently go wrong in social interaction is when we take a category and treat it as a group. This allows us to talk about "black/white people", "the French", "rich/poor people", "upper/lower/middle class" and any category along any dimension as if they represented a collective body and as if they shared characteristics and interests beyond the dimensions on which the purported "group" is predicated. It makes as much sense to speak of "thousand island dressing eaters" as a meaningful aggregate. If we talk about the "1000 island eaters" enough, we will start to "reify" the category as a real world social phenomenon. It makes sense to talk about categories when these have significance, eg if I sell 1000 island dressing and want to market my product, if I want to study disparate effects of drugs on racial categories, or if I am working on a "class theory". Otherwise, the generalizations are not all that useful and, in fact, may be harmful.

One of the good points of libertarianism is that it explicitly recognizes each of us as an individual rather than as a member of a collective. Group membership is necessarily a voluntary act, and this stance should make it somewhat more difficult for a libertarian to fall into the cognitive "lumping" trap than it is for folks with some other ideology. Libertarianism also entails peaceful coexistence with and a high degree of tolerance of folks who differ from us in a variety of ways. Accordingly, even if we irrationally lump people into groups when we are really dealing with categories, we can't do as much harm as statists who would not hesitate to use coercion to promote or outlaw the "group" or some of its putative characteristics. Statists have used racial categories as a basis for enslavement and disenfranchisement and slaughter. They have used nationality as a basis for killing or deporting or interning people. They have used ethnic categories for preferential treatment, and they have used them to profile for criminality. In the hands of statists, the lumping tendency is a dangerous cognitive disorder that can be used to get people to tolerate almost any invasion of freedom in the name of security against the malevolent "other" or in the name of protecting the shiftless and improvident "other" from themselves.

Fight the cognitive disorder. Try not to think of me as a Honda driving, bleu cheese dressing eating, churchgoing, early middle-aged, caucasian/Amerindian, married, straight, male, southern born, dog loving, libertarian, history buff with asthma and a hiatal hernia. Think of me as your unique conspecific who might just surprise you by stepping out of my "demographic". I will try to do the same for you.

Curriculum for Intelligent Design

The discussion about teaching Intelligent Design in addition to Evolutionary Theory has me puzzled. What would an ID curriculum look like? It seems to me that you could teach the whole idea in one paragraph: "Some biological structures appear to some observers to be irreducibly complex such that they are led to infer that they were designed by an intelligent entity. It is presently not possible to infer anything about the posited designer or to formulate any meaningful research design based on this notion."

On the other hand, it is possible that ID could be used as a pedagogical tool to instruct students in the nature of science, the meaning and uses of scientific theory, research design, and the disconnect between science and religion. ID is a perfect foil. Challenge students to devise a program of research based on ID and to compare ID and ET side by side for usefulness, evidence, consistency with scientific canons, and the like. Also, include brief instruction in various origin myths and discuss whether a program of scientific research might be predicated on any of them. Discuss openly the politics behind teaching ID and ET.

Some students will inevitably buy into ID or an origin narrative based on a supernatural premise, but we need not worry that we have lost a potential Einstein or an evolutionary scientist. Rather, we will probably have a misinformed carnival worker whose lack of biological insight will be irrelevant. Meanwhile, the parents of said future carnival worker will have their religious concerns addressed. Besides, we can probably expect a steady supply of well educated scientists from abroad for years to come.

War of the Worlds

Mrs Vache Folle and I saw War of the Worlds last weekend. We wanted to see Star Wars, but it wasn't playing in the mall where we were loitering while my eyeglasses were being made.

In the main, the story was true to the book. Aliens invade, they attack people and property from killer tripods, they are unstoppable and ruthlessly homicidal, the situation is hopeless for mankind, then the aliens catch a terrestrial disease and die through no effort of ours. We get to live through these horrors through Ray Farrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced father of two who works as a crane operator in New York City. He is a self absorbed jackass who has a poor relationship with his teenaged son and young (8ish?) daughter (Dakota Fanning). He has weekend visitation with these kids when the alien invasion begins, and one of the alien tripods emerges right in his own grubby neighborhood.

The whole movie involves Ray trying to get to Boston where the children's mother and stepfather are so he can drop them off and deal with the alien invasion headache without the inconvenience of his surly son and neurotic, kvetching daughter. Along the way, they witness one horrific scene after another and narrowly escape being killed by aliens themselves on numerous occasions. The aliens are simply unstoppable and ubiquitous, and nothing avails against them. Luckily, they sicken and die. Luckily, the experience is not completely pointless, because Ray grows as a father and a human being and repairs his relationships with his children. His son becomes a man, and his daughter overcomes her neuroses and finds the courage to survive (that, or she develops severe PTSD or multiple personality disorder). At first, you don't really care if Ray and his kids get annihilated, in the middle of the film you are rooting for the aliens to get them, and by the end you are back to not caring.

The effects were seamless, and we were spared no horror. That the preferred mode of killing humans was a disintegrating death ray that left clothes unaffected meant that we saw little bloodshed or gore. Clothes raining from the sky stood as proxy for mass murder in some scenes.

I have a few quibbles with the plausibility of the story unrelated to the science fiction aspect. Firstly, the aliens have more or less simultaneously stopped all motor vehicles and other appliances and machines with an electromagnetic pulse. Ray, a motorhead (he has an engine on his kitchen table), immediately perceives that solenoids want replacing and tells his mechanic friend. After he becomes aware of the danger, he steals the mini-van that his friend has repaired, the only working car in the vicinity and decides to drive the kids to New England. Miraculously, all the stalled vehicles in New York City have pulled aside to give the Farriers a clear road out of the city and up the thruway to the Hudson Valley. Aliens might well come and attack, but such a clear roadway COULD NEVER HAPPEN!

On the way, the Farriers stop at the kids' colonial in what seems to be Westchester County in order to rest and gather themselves. Although there is power, they never even try to turn on the TV or radio to find out what is happening. They don't check in with any neighbors, either. Also, Ray insists on making peanut butter sandwiches with peanut butter from his house and does not even look in the refrigerator or cabinets of his ex-wife's house to see if there is anything better.

That night, a jet crashes in the neighborhood. Conveniently, there is a TV crew there to explain that the tripods are everywhere (Ray thought there was just one). Ray decides to go up the west side of the Hudson and cross at a ferry to Stanfordville to get to Boston. Who does that? Why would he think the ferries would be running during the alien emergency? I suppose he wanted to avoid contact with other people by staying on back roads, but it turned out that the ferry was a bottleneck that led to the theft of his van. All this made for an exciting mob scene and the chance to have the ferry attacked by aliens.

Finally, Ray and his daughter (the son ran off to help the National Guard fight the aliens) hole up in a basement with another refugee (Tim Robbins) who wants to start a resistance movement. Ray just wants to hide and ends up murdering the other refugee to keep him quiet after he learns that the aliens are harvesting humans to use their blood for fertilizer. The tripods have cages full of live humans whom they take one at a time and turn into fertilizer. It is plain that these aliens would simply process the humans en masse into a slurry rather than bleeding them singly.

Despite these shortcomings, I was mildly entertained.

UPDATE: I have been informed that Ray lived in Newark, NJ. It makes sense that he would be West of the Hudson.

Arbeit Macht Frei?

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I would work temp jobs during breaks from school, some of them in blue collar positions. In one job, I worked at a bindery near my home in Seattle for a couple of months. One of my tasks was to assist the operator of an elaborate folding machine and to box up finished product. The bindery had gotten a major contract to print up and package materials for the launch of a new iteration of software, and temp workers were needed to augment the permanent cadre. The folder operator was a twenty-something slacker type, the kind of guy you might see at an anti-globalization rally or in a grunge band. His work at the bindery supported his real vocation, independent film, and he ran a web magazine that contained reviews and such.

On occasion he would show up at work in a tee shirt that contained the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” imposed over a pile of human skulls. I interpreted this as his way of saying that he realized that the message was a lie just as it had been at the concentration camps in Europe a half century earlier. His work at the bindery did not make him free, although it paid the bills. In fact, it interfered with his real work, and it was mindless and repetitive. He approached it, I think, in a kind of Zen fashion, embracing the boredom and routine and performing the work to perfection. Everyone in the bindery was a cog in a machine, doing the same repetitive task day in and day out. We temps had it somewhat better in that we got moved around from task to task on an ad hoc basis. Lunch and other breaks were timed to the minute and regulated much as I recall being regulated in grammar school.

I also worked at a factory that assembled truck parts. Each work unit was set up to build a repertoire of about 10 parts. The unit had a quota of parts to get out in a day, and the optimal movements for accomplishing the quota had all been worked out. You had to use these movements even if they were uncomfortable for you, and the quotas were so high that it took almost all your energy and attention to meet them. Again, every break was timed and regulated. And workers made little more than minimum wage and had to exceed quota by a considerable margin for the chance to earn an extra $1.00 per hour. I left at the end of each day exhausted and with considerable pain in my back and hands. I worked there about a month and considered myself lucky that I had other options.

In each of these places (less so at the bindery) and in others I have worked, a sick child could cost you your job. You could not readily take time off for medical care or to go to a meeting with your child’s teachers. You would never make much money no matter how hard you worked, and management was always looking for ways to automate your job and to make sure that each task could be performed by a completely unskilled worker such that you could be easily replaced. The company owned you and your time while you were at work, and you traded these for a pittance.

Work did not make my fellow laborers free under the circumstances in the plants. As a temp, I was somewhat freer than my fellows because it was understood that I might be signed up with several agencies and that I could easily walk away from any position that I could not tolerate. Whenever I have been self-employed in my life, although I was much less secure financially, I always felt more freedom. Even if I was doing the same work as an employee, I always preferred to work as an independent contractor or consultant and found much more satisfaction when I owned my own time. Now I am a wage slave again, but as an executive and a professional in a company with little accountability, I have quite a bit of freedom and can tolerate my situation. I am not entirely sure why it matters to me, but I reckon that it has to do with power and personal sovereignty.

What if the bindery and assembly workers were organized differently with more freedom to control the pace and method of their work? I would rather be paid by the piece and have control over how I got the job done. I suspect that workers would, under such circumstances, come up with ways to increase their productivity while allowing for greater comfort and individual autonomy. If the plant housed groups of independent contractors rather than employees, the company should be able to rationalize labor costs without exercising so much dictatorial control over the workers. In the business I am currently in, we see quite a bit of contracting in which formerly internal functions of companies are now performed by independent contractors, eg all of distribution is handled by a separate company. In some cases, sales, maintenance, security, distribution, packaging, accounting and assembly are all done by contractors with the principal business limited almost entirely to coordination and administration. Each of these contractors works through employees, however, they work for much smaller entities.

I used to work in the commercial construction industry (as a lawyer, not a skilled worker), and I saw that huge and complex projects were built, not by a single company with lots of employees, but by tiers of independent contractors. My company did electrical work and depended on skilled electricians, most of whom preferred to be subcontractors and to be paid based on work done rather than by the hour. This helped us rationalize labor costs and helped the workers retain considerable control over their own lives. This practice was not uncommon in other building trades. Huge projects were built in this manner, and I find it hard to believe that simple assembly or bindery work could not be similarly organized to good effect.

Conspiracy Theorist

My car pool conspecific gets to hear a lot of my anti-state rants during our 45 minute commute. He sometimes refers to me as a "conspiracy theorist". Originally, this was dismissive, but the seeds of mistrust I have sown have begun to sprout, and he now calls himself a "conspiracy theorist".

James Leroy Wilson had a great post last month on conspiracy theories and their plausibility http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2005/07/what-makes-conspiracy-theories.html, and I have been trying to keep more of an open mind about seemingly crackpot claims. One of the usual ways conspiracy theories are dismissed is to cite their implausibility --- "That many people could not keep a secret." James points out that most of the actors executing a plot probably do not even know about it; they are just doing their jobs, and each person plays only a small role in the affair. It is necessary only for a small inner circle to know what is really going on.

I have heard some folks claim that George Bush was aware of the attack on the World Trade Center before it occurred, and I always dismissed this out of hand. I do not want to believe that someone that evil occupies the presidency, and I did not think a massive conspiracy could be hidden. Over time, however, I have become somewhat more open minded because of a number of things:

1. George Bush has demonstrated that he has no qualms or uneasiness about spending other people's lives, whether US servicemembers or Iragi or Afghan civilans to advance his agenda.
2. The attack on the WTC was to George Bush's benefit in that it rallied Americans behind him and served, thanks to predictable American stupidity, as a casus belli for the aggression against Iraq that he wanted all along. George Bush wanted to be a "war president", because being at war would provide him with a lot of political wiggle room and allow him to expand his power. If the US were not at war, he would probably have been thrown out of office due to the ineptitude and corruption of the regime. As it was, he won or stole re-election in a squeaker.
3. George Bush is cozy with the Saudi regime and never holds the Saudis to account for anything, and there are some indications that Saudi agents may have been involved in funding some of the WTC attackers (or so said author Posner this morning on Morning Sedition). It is plausible that Saudi complicity may run even deeper.
4. A scheme cooked up between George Bush and the Saudis would benefit both Bush and the House of Saud. Bush gets his global struggle, partial immunity from criticism in wartime, and expanded power. The Saudis get rid of Saddam Hussein, get the unconditional support of the US regime, and the discrediting of potentially violent Islamist extremists who share power with the House of Saud.
5. Only a handful of people in the Saudi and US regimes would need to know about the scheme, and they have no incentive to talk.
6. The press would never explore any Saudi or administration complicity because this is out of the mainstream and would involve actual work.

Don't get me wrong. I do not claim that the scenario I described actually happened. I claim only that it is plausible. I can't rely on the president not to be evil, and I can't dismiss the charges as implausible; therefore, I am more likely to examine the evidence and to consider the charges than I once was.

NRA Hypocrisy

Tbogg http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2005/08/what-if-i-have-to-file-grievance-if.html points out that the NRA is calling for a boycott of ConocoPhillips. It seems that CP opposes a proposed Oklahoma law that would compel business owners to permit employees to keep firearms in their vehicles on company property. CP has a general rule against firearms in the workplace. The NRA claims that CP is taking away its employees' Second Amendment rights.

Last time I looked, the Second Amendment limited the actions of the government with respect to keeping and bearing arms, not private individuals or companies. I don't let armed strangers in my house. I am not, however, violating anyone's Second Amendment rights; rather, I am exercising my own rights as a property owner. Unless I hold you in slavery (13th Amendment), I cannot otherwise violate your Constitutional Rights. Only government can do that.

Although Tbogg cites workplace gun violence as a good rationale for CP's policy, I would argue that CP's property rights include the right to exclude firearms from the premises and that no rationale is wanted. What the NRA is doing in Oklahoma is attacking private property rights by supporting a law to force property owners to allow firearms on their property against their will.

What hypocrites to cry about Second Amendment Rights while trying to get the state to reduce the rights of property owners.

CORRECTION: CP is challenging an existing Oklahoma law in court. The NRA is calling for a boycott of CP for challenging the law.

Pitfalls in Libertarian Argumentation

I sometimes like to read long comment threads on Reason Hit & Run or other ostensibly libertarian sites and analyze the arguments. I frequently see arguments fall into the same fruitless pattern, to wit:

1) There is a post about how the state overreaches in drug enforcement, sexual vices, public education or other matter.
2) Libertarians comment that the state should stay out of the matter.
3) Someone else comments that the drug in question is harmful, the vice is deplorable and hurtful, and the education is beneficial.
4) Someone else disputes #3.
5) Finally, if you are lucky, after about a hundred comments someone else will point out that libertarians do not necessarily dispute that the drug is harmful, the vice deplorable, or the education beneficial; rather, libertarians dispute that the appropriate solution is coercive state action.

It would be better if libertarians could get right to #5 and spend their energy debating the efficacy or morality of state action in the matter at issue. The non-libertarians with whom I speak almost always assume that my libertarianism means that I am pro-drug, pro-vice, and anti-education. The idea that the state is the solution to every perceived problem is not even regarded as problematic; rather, it is a given. Libertarians, if they want to address the arguments of non-libertarians, need to do a better job of framing the issues and problematizing the state.

Take the matter of crank, for example. I am not in favor of crank use, and I think it is appropriate to use moral persuasion and non-coercive means to discourage others from using crank. It is not appropriate, however, to use violence to prevent the production, trade or consumption of crank, and I view the societal costs associated with a program of violence and coercion as greatly outweighing any benefits. We have crank users in our midst, and that may be a problem. The solution is not to empower a gang of thugs to keep us all under surveillance, imprison people and otherwise terrorize us in the name of protecting us from the possibility that we might be foolish enough to ingest crank. That just means we have crank users and a gang of thugs in our midst, and we have compounded the problem manifold.

Take the matter of public education. I think education is a good thing, but I differ with many of my conspecifics on how this should be delivered and funded. I don't think that I should be able to force my neighbors to pay for the education of their own children, let alone the children of others. I believe that parents will find ways to educate their children and that poor children will benefit from private giving by people who care about their education. Moreover, I believe that this will result in better education than the current system founded on coercion and a near monopoly by the state. The argument should not be about whether education is desirable; rather, it should be about the best way to deliver it without theft or threats of violence.

Another line of argumentation is sometimes interjected into the above described debate. A self described libertarian will argue that libertarians should avoid commenting on drugs, vice, public education, etc. because this will turn non-libertarians off. The critic usually assumes that the libertarians are in favor of drug abuse, sexual license and ignorance. This criticism does nothing to advance the cause of libertarianism and plays into the notion that libertarians are selfish, licentious and anti-social nutcases. It would be better to jump into the comments and try to bring the discussion around to why the state is not the solution to the perceived problem at hand. Of course, a number of libertarians probably are selfish, licentious and anti-social nutcases, as they have every right to be, but their aims would likely be better served by hammering at the very idea of the state rather than defending drug abuse or cockfighting. Attacking the perceived problem leaves open the idea that the state is the solution. Hit the state first, then fall back on how the problem may not be as bad as perceived and can be handled non-coercively.

Disclaimer: I have never succeeded in converting anyone to libertarianism, but I have sown many seeds of doubt about the state.

Out of Touch, Arrogant Supreme Court

The Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509/taylor has a couple of insightful articles this issue on the Supreme Court. One writer contends that the members of the Supreme Court lack any kind of meaningful real world experience and rule from an ivory tower. I was appalled to learn that none of the justices, except Souter, ever served as a trial judge. None of them, except Souter who was briefly a prosecutor, ever held high executive office or served in a legislature. They have never even argued a case of any complexity. Accordingly, they have no appreciation for the real world consequences of their decisions. The selection process is such that nominees with real world experience may have too much of a record and may be targets of the opposition. Only law professors and Circuit Court of Appeals judges can pass scrutiny.

Another writer argues that the justices are, in addition, arrogant and ideologically inconsistent and lazy. He points out that a number of Circuit Court of Appeals judges have begun to express outright public contempt for the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court does not appear to confine itself to deciding the cases before it; rather, the Supreme Court appears to believe that its role is to establish overarching principles that often go beyond the parameters of the cases before them. This, the writer contends, is a function of the lack of accountability.

What steps might be taken to increase accountability and acquaintance with reality? One idea discussed is term limits. Justices might be limited to terms of 18 years such that turnover would be more frequent and selection less fraught with political peril. Nominees with a wider variety of backgrounds might be put forward, and justices would have to interact with a relatively more constant infusion of new blood and new ideas.

Another possibility might be to select justices at random from among current and former Circuit Court of Appeals and state supreme court judges with terms of 6 years followed by a return to the courts from which the justices were recruited. Let them live with their rulings for a little while after their time in Washington.

In any event, these articles are worth the time.

Why New Yorkers Cannot Drive

The denizens of New York City and vicinity, in general, do not know how to drive. I am not talking about those urban dwellers who don’t own cars and some of whom don’t even have driving licenses. Nor am I talking about immigrants who drive the way people do back in the third world. I mean native born New Yorkers with driving licenses, many of whom have been “driving” for decades. They drive very badly and create traffic jams unnecessarily. The further one gets from NYC, the better the people drive. By the time you get to Dutchess County where I live, you have some pretty decent drivers, the exception being folks who moved here from closer to NYC.

NYC drivers, as I will call them, are egregious tailgaters. This means an increased likelihood of otherwise avoidable accidents and delays and the phenomenon whereby traffic slows and speeds accordion fashion due to excessive braking. The latter can cause extensive delays for miles down the road for no reason other than the sheer incompetence of the drivers in front of you.

NYC drivers are incapable of merging appropriately onto a highway from an on ramp. In most places, a spontaneous order emerges in which traffic already on the road coordinates with merging traffic and leaves an appropriate space. Not so with NYC drivers. If I did not know that they were simply incapable of thinking beyond themselves, suffering as they do from a kind of vehicular autism, I would suspect that they were perversely interfering with the cars on the on ramp. This is the result of a lack of the kind of coordination found elsewhere in the country. And the drivers on the ramp are just as problematic. The driver in front of you on the ramp is likely to stop rather than adjusting speed and finding a way into traffic, in which case everyone on the ramp is screwed. This is probably because these drivers do not have any reason to trust that the drivers already in traffic will not interfere with them. This causes incredible delays on the highways and parkways wherever there is an on ramp.

In the same way, NYC drivers cannot efficiently handle a reduction in the number of lanes. The simple coordination required for this is entirely beyond their capabilities; therefore, any lane closure inevitably results in a traffic jam.

NYC drivers cannot efficiently get through a toll plaza. They will bunch up chaotically, not in any line or file, and block one another. Again, they cannot coordinate.

I have a theory to explain this. I used to attribute it to the overall relative bad manners of New Yorkers, but I have come to believe that their bad driving is an artifact of learning to drive and developing driving habits within the city. In the city, every movement is ostensibly controlled by road markers, traffic lights, barricades, cops out the wazoo, the need to avoid being hit by maniacal cab drivers, the need to avoid hitting suicidal delivery men and messengers on bikes, and the need to work around masses of pedestrians and jaywalkers. There is little opportunity for coordination within this complex environment, and any hesitation will be exploited by other drivers in a quest to keep moving. You can barely move in the city at all, and your movements are so highly regulated and constrained that there is little opportunity for any kind of collaborative effort among drivers. On the contrary, driving in the city is competitive, a jockeying for position constrained only by the inconvenience that ramming another vehicle or human being or being rammed would entail. NYC drivers simply do not learn the coordination skills necessary to drive on highways outside the city.

Contrast this to a place like Seattle where most of the intersections out of downtown are not even controlled. Traffic jams occur, due to roadwork and sheer volume of cars, but Seattleites are by and large well able to merge and coordinate among themselves on the roads. They have a well-developed awareness of what other cars and pedestrians are doing and an ability to anticipate. They yield to pedestrians, and they generally do not tailgate. There is a lot more freedom of movement for drivers in Seattle even downtown; therefore, they have the chance to learn to coordinate those movements. I suspect that they will lose these skills as the area becomes more congested.

Contrast this also to Los Angeles where the highways are full of cars all the time and yet, for much of the time traffic is moving at high speed. This can be a little scary for a country boy like myself, but I am always amazed at how easy it is to merge onto the highway compared to NY. Again, more freedom of movement translates to better skills at coordinating those movements.

The moral of the story is that if you give people freedom, they will work out how to exercise it just fine. If you are inexperienced with freedom, you may be retarded in its exercise.

Moralizing for Power

James Leroy Wilson had a post several weeks ago (http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2005/06/individualism-and-idealism.html) that I have been thinking about ever since. In it, he compared people who impose top down rules based on ideological principles (level 5 reasoning) with individualists who follow rules of thumb informed by actual social interaction (level 1 reasoning) from the bottom up. The latter moral reasoning process is generally more consistent with liberty than the former.

It sometimes seems to me that just about every so-called moral rule that anyone claims to be acting under is really a thinly veiled rationalization for a power grab by someone. When you bring a moral problem down to the level of actual human interaction, it looks very different than it does from the lofty tower of principle.

Take abortion, for example. When someone says that a fertilized egg is a moral person that the state must protect, he is really saying that women should be subject to being compelled to bring pregnancies to term and that women are not entitled to control their own bodies or to decide what health risks to run. He is saying that the government should interfere in and second guess the most intimate and private decisions about pregnancy and health care. He is saying that he would, in effect, hold a gun to a woman's head and force her to carry a pregnancy to term. This says a lot about where he or she thinks a woman belongs in the social pecking order. The ostensible concern for the egg, blastocyst, embryo, fetus is just a smokescreen. Who could really look someone in the face, someone they loved, and tell them that while you know that they are unwilling to run the health risks of a pregnancy you are more concerned with the abstract principle that an unsentient blob of protoplasm has "civil rights"? Who could seriously tell someone that they loved that their self ownership, their sovereignty as a person takes a back seat to some arbitrarily contrived principle applied to something no more human in any meaningful sense than a tumor?

Take the recent case of the Nebraska man charged with statutory rape of the young woman to whom he is now married and who is carrying his child. I don't know the facts of the case, but the individual circumstances don't seem to matter to the state of Nebraska. All that matters to the state is that the man had sex with a woman who was not yet of an arbitrary age of consent. The principles of "childhood" and capacity to consent trump the actual circumstances of this family. A man will be taken from his wife and child and imprisoned just for the sake of these abstract principles. A family will be destroyed just so the state can demonstrate its power.

Take just about everything that government does. The government itself is an abstraction that deploys legitimizing abstractions by the truckload, all to get, keep and expand power. What loving person would throw a child into an incinerator on the basis that it might promote democracy in Iraq? The US has incinerated lots of Iraqi children on that lofty principle. Would you drive your neighbor from his home by force and steal his property to pay for your child's education on the basis that society benefits from educated children? That's precisely the threat that homeowners live under, that if they do not pay property and school taxes their homes will be taken from them and the proceeds used to pay for their neighbors' children's schooling and other "public" purposes. You can't honestly plead "social contract" while looking someone in the eye.

Every time someone pontificates about some universal moral principle, we should subject it to reality testing. Could you act on the principle with a straight face to the detriment of someone you love?

Skunk Adventure

Last night about 10, Jesse Lou Baggett, our Ruthenian Shepherd, took on a skunk. His head and face were pretty much covered with noisome skunk oil. Meanwhile, his sidekick, William Jasper Stone the pit bull, got a dab of skunk oil on his face and, as Mrs Vache Folle put it, became the "drama queen" with fits of crying and rolling around on the rugs. I dabbed the spot with vinegar and pretty much removed his skunkiness.

Mrs Vache Folle kept Jesse off the furniture and immediately applied the "Welcome Home Pet Sitting De-skunkification Formula". Baking soda, hydrogen peroxide and liquid laundry detergent are mixed up and used to wash off the skunk oil. Darned if it did not work fairly well. Jesse still stinks, but it is bearable. Usually, a good skunking takes about 3 months to wear off completely, and even then a little skunk stench comes out if the dog gets wet.

Jesse, along with other dogs we have had, has been skunked at least four times. It is clearly an unpleasant experience for him, so I keep thinking that he will learn to avoid skunks. Mrs Vache Folle says that his skunk hatred overwhelms his reason and all he can think of is killing the varmint that sprayed him with that stinky stuff.

We have tried de-skunking products from the pet store and found them wanting. Tomato juice does nothing except make your dog smell like a skunk that spilled tomato juice on itself. Douche, due to its vinegar content, works a little bit, and diswashing liquid with grease cutting properties is also helpful since the skunk spray is oily and not water soluble. But our dog walker's remedy as described above has worked the best of anything we have tried. Hat tip to Steve Spiegel the Hundmeister.

I wish that there was some reasonably easy way to deter the skunk from entering the fenced area. That way there would be no need for him to deploy his chemical weapons.

God is not a Republican

There is a bumper sticker on some of the cars in the church parking lot that reads "God is not a Republican..... or a Democrat." I've never had a bumper sticker on my car, but I would proudly stick this one on my bumper if I can get my hands on one. (I also wanted "Jesus is Coming- Look busy" and "Earth First-We'll log the other planets later.")

To me, God is a libertarian. My conversion to libertarianism came with the evolution of my Christianity and my conviction that violence other than in self defense is antiChristian. It is patently antiChristian to use force against another human being, and the hallmark of being a Christian is a commitment to peace, to loving one's neighbor. The first thing I did when I came to this realization was to resign my commission in the Army Reserve. I could not participate in the military in good conscience even if my service as a judge advocate meant that I would never have to take up arms.

It began to dawn on me, however, that my profession as a lawyer involved the use of force. I was, after all, asking the state to make people, under pain of punishment, do what my clients wanted. I had to quit lawyering, and I went back to graduate school to study anthropology, about as harmless (and useless) an occupation as there is. I have since found a way to ply my trade as a lawyer without violating my conscience, since I work exclusively in defending my employer from the application of force by the state. Wherever possible, I work to negotiate outcomes outside of court. My goal is to keep my employer and the state as far from one another as possible. (Meanwhile, it is doubtful that I will ever write that dissertation in anthropology since I have come to the conclusion that being an anthropologist would necessarily entail being an utter parasite on society.)

Later, I began to realize that the state itself is all about coercion. Therefore, I asked myself, how can a Christian in good conscience regard the state as legitimate and lend any voluntary support to it? He cannot. He cannot serve the state in any manner that involves even indirect coercion. He cannot support laws and institutions that entail coercion, even to enforce righteousness. (How righteous are you really if your actions are coerced and not truly inspired by an inner transformation through the workings of the Holy Ghost?)

The idea that Christians should take over the state and rule over others is appalling to me. This is the message of false prophets, and their devotion to the state and lust for power are among the rotten fruits that make them known as such. The Christians of the so called religious right are dupes of false prophets, and I wish that some right thinking clergymen would speak out in a high profile way about just how antiChristian the agenda of the religious right is. Christians should be sickened that Christ's name is invoked in connection with coercion and murder.