Groups of white people sporting shaved heads and swastikas intimidate and harm people of color. But then when you get the leaders of those groups to talk about what they believe in, they'll tell you they don't believe in hurting anyone. They just want white people to be treated as equals and for whites to be able to preserve their culture rather than being taught to be ashamed of being white.
We see police officers beating and killing innocent people. We see them often held unaccountable for this, being protected from scrutiny by other officers. When an officer does try to blow the whistle on a colleague, we see other officers harass and intimidate the whistle blower. And yet, if you ask almost any cop about this brutality and the coverups, they'll say that they hate it as much as you do, that it's a handful of bad apples giving the whole profession a bad name. They'll tell you most cops get into the job because they want to protect people, not hurt them.
We've seen Muslim terrorists saying that Islam must dominate the world. We've heard them say that they are not bound by any law but sharia. We've even seen Shia and Sunnis killing each other. But go into almost any mosque in the world, and they'll tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the Quran says that when you kill one innocent person, you kill all of humanity. They say those violent people aren't "real" Muslims.
We see the Westboro Baptist protesters yelling that God hates fags. We see the cross-wearing protesters outside abortion clinics intimidating staff and patients, sometimes doing physical violence against them. It seems every bigot in American government who wants to oppress others identifies as a very religious Christian. Christianity was spread through the world by force, and entire wars have been fought at the order of the Vatican. Protestants and Catholics have killed each other for hundreds of years. And yet if you ask them, they'll tell you that their Bible tells them to love and not kill, and that they should turn the other cheek and be endlessly forgiving and merciful.
We hear high-profile feminists throughout history denouncing men, regarding men as redundant, disposable, inferior, and as a threat to be eliminated. Feminists have rallied for equal pay, but not for equal financial obligations. They want women to have the agency that is afforded to men, but freedom from the responsibilities that go with it. They protest female--but not male--genital mutilation. They'll raise a stink about Boko Haram kidnapping a bunch of girls, but not even mention the same group murdering a bunch of boys.They elevate the emotional and sexual concerns of women above the literal life-and-death concerns of men.
But then if you denounce feminism on these grounds, someone will claim that feminism is simply about equality, and that to be against feminism is to be against equality.
Being against racism does not make you anti-white. Being against police brutality does not make you against protecting people. Being against terrorism doesn't make you against religions of peace. Being against worldwide repression doesn't make you against love and forgiveness. And being against elevating women above men does not make you anti-equality. Quite the opposite.
Frankly, I'm sick of the double-talk from the lot of them.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Radical Implosion & Radical Distillation
After long observation, I've come to a conclusion about something. The problem with any social movement aimed at remedying a perceived problem is that the leaders will tend to be the people most passionate about the cause. And the reason they tend to be the most passionate is because they're the ones who have been most harmed by whatever it is they're trying to change. The more vocal and committed the leader, the more likely they are to have been seriously traumatized by whatever it is they're fighting.
The problem is that they're also the people least capable of maintaining a sense of perspective about the problem. They become radical extremists who see the issue as black-or-white. They're difficult to reason with. They're nearly impossible to negotiate with. They're prone to making abusive statements about those who disagree with them.
When you've got loud, brash, unreasonable people leading a group and being the personalities the public associates with it, the group and its message tend to lose credibility (unless their views are widely accepted enough to become mainstream). Moderate people who would otherwise support the cause therefore feel alienated from it and make a point of identifying as not being "one of those crazy people over there." Moreover, if there is an opposing group, it will cite quotes or actions by those leaders to discredit the entire movement and its goals. In this way, the people who care most about the cause end up being the chief reason for its failure.
A wisely managed group, then, should be one where the radicals are put to work as foot soldiers, willing to sacrifice their reputations to the cause, but never allowed to ascend to positions of leadership or where they become the public face of the movement. The leaders can then maintain both an agreeable public image AND plausible deniability about the actions of their radical operators.
The problem is that if these people don't feel appreciated by the movement, they're highly motivated to go off and form their own organization, drawing all the radicals away from the more socially accepted parent organization. Call it "radical distillation." An example that comes to mind is the Tea Party. The GOP recognized the necessity of maintaining control of radical splinters like this, and to do so, you have to absorb them and offer them a sense of being more appreciated and more in control. That sense can be an illusion, but it must be present, or the radicals will continue to go their own way rather than serving the leadership of the larger organization.
The problem is that they're also the people least capable of maintaining a sense of perspective about the problem. They become radical extremists who see the issue as black-or-white. They're difficult to reason with. They're nearly impossible to negotiate with. They're prone to making abusive statements about those who disagree with them.
When you've got loud, brash, unreasonable people leading a group and being the personalities the public associates with it, the group and its message tend to lose credibility (unless their views are widely accepted enough to become mainstream). Moderate people who would otherwise support the cause therefore feel alienated from it and make a point of identifying as not being "one of those crazy people over there." Moreover, if there is an opposing group, it will cite quotes or actions by those leaders to discredit the entire movement and its goals. In this way, the people who care most about the cause end up being the chief reason for its failure.
A wisely managed group, then, should be one where the radicals are put to work as foot soldiers, willing to sacrifice their reputations to the cause, but never allowed to ascend to positions of leadership or where they become the public face of the movement. The leaders can then maintain both an agreeable public image AND plausible deniability about the actions of their radical operators.
The problem is that if these people don't feel appreciated by the movement, they're highly motivated to go off and form their own organization, drawing all the radicals away from the more socially accepted parent organization. Call it "radical distillation." An example that comes to mind is the Tea Party. The GOP recognized the necessity of maintaining control of radical splinters like this, and to do so, you have to absorb them and offer them a sense of being more appreciated and more in control. That sense can be an illusion, but it must be present, or the radicals will continue to go their own way rather than serving the leadership of the larger organization.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Your Opinion Doesn't Negate My Experiences
Let's talk about a form of bullying that doesn't get much attention: dismissiveness. In the debate over gun policy in America, we generally see the antis taking a superior tone and assailing the sanity, maturity, or bravery of anyone who feels the need to be armed. Here's a recent example I encountered on Facebook:
I saw this image shared by someone who likened a fear of being the victim of violence to that of a child being afraid of monsters under the bed. When these folks fall into unison chanting the word "paranoid," the underlying message is that there is no threat. They're saying that you don't need to protect yourself from violence, because there is no such thing. It only exists in people's imaginations, or in Darfur or somewhere like that. Other than maybe a fist fight on the school yard, they've never seen one person harm another, so their normalcy bias tells them that physical safety is the norm. The violence they hear about on the news, they rationalize, is only news because it's so unusual--like a plane crash or someone getting hit by lightning.They think they're safe by default, and that if you think you're not, it's because you've got an anxiety disorder and an overactive imagination.
Allow me to illustrate how wrong they are.
When reading the following, remember, I'm not talking about events in East L.A. or the South Side of Chicago. This didn't take place in East St. Louis or any of the seedier neighborhoods in New York. It wasn't Detroit or Miami. It was Ohio, and not even Cleveland. Some of the events were in a little podunk town of about 22,000 people on the Kentucky border, and the others were in Columbus, a city known more for its college football team and corporate headquarters than for violent crime.
In 1991, I was out for a walk and saw a middle-aged man dragging his wife down the sidewalk by the hair. I mean this literally. The woman was on the ground, hands on her head, screaming, while the man, gripping her by her hair, walked down the sidewalk, dragging her along. I called the police, but otherwise felt helpless to do anything other than yell at him to stop. Why did I feel helpless? Because Ohio law at that time made self-defense (or defense of another) an "affirmative defense," meaning that if I had actually gone and put my hands on the guy, I not only risked being charged with attacking him, I'd also be guilty until I managed to prove myself innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The woman endured a few more minutes of this torture before an off-duty cop arrived. We had to stand around waiting for an official rescuer to show up to stop the violence.
Around 1992, my girlfriend and I were living on the second-floor of a two-story house that had been divided into two apartments. The man who lived downstairs liked to beat his wife, and we naively called the police when he did so. This got us on his bad side. As a result, he started making a habit of getting drunk and yelling for me to come down and fight him. Sometimes he'd do this from his own apartment. Other times, he'd stand in the street and do it. Typically, we ignored it. One morning, though, we awoke to find the frame of our door broken and big, muddy footprints on the outside of the door. He had very nearly succeeded in kicking in our door while we were asleep, and we didn't even hear it. Had he given it just one more kick, there's no telling how far he might have gotten before we woke up, or what he'd have managed to do to us, as we were unarmed.
We called the police, but they said we'd have to go talk to the prosecutor. I took pictures of the footprints and the broken door frame, and went to the prosecutor's office. He did nothing, saying we couldn't reasonably say who did it. We complained to the landlord. He fixed the door frame, but the people downstairs remained.
Maybe a year or so after that, my girlfriend's crazy uncle (one of them) parked up the street and waited for me to leave for school. After I left, he knocked on the door. She opened the door a bit, and he tried to force his way in. She tried to shut him out, but he got one foot in the door and stopped it from closing. She sat on the floor leaning against the door to keep him out, and he kept trying to force his way in, yelling threats and obscenities the whole time. Eventually, she was able to reach a hammer I'd left at the bottom of the stairs, and used it to pound his foot. He withdrew it in pain, and she slammed the door shut and locked it.
He was gone by the time police arrived. To my knowledge, no warrant was ever issued for his arrest.
A few years after that, we were living in another upstairs apartment. Our downstairs neighbor apparently had an unpaid gambling debt, and his creditor showed up late one night, angry and too drunk to tell which door went to which apartment. My wife and I were woken by the sound of this man yelling and trying to kick in our door. As luck would have it, I had a .22 rifle I had borrowed from my father-in-law for use on my trap line. I grabbed the gun, took a position at the top of the stairs, and yelled to the man trying to break in. He heard me, saw me through the window, and ran away. We called the police. They found him hiding in our back yard.
In 2003, I was working nights as a police officer, so I was sleeping during the day. Across the street from my apartment was a car wash. One afternoon, I was woken by a loud argument at the car wash. I looked out the window and saw one car ram into another one. It looked deliberate. The first car started backing up, and I thought I was witnessing a hit-and-run, so I put on my glasses and tried to read the license plate. But instead of fleeing, the car was just backing up to ram a second time. I pulled on my jeans and duty belt, grabbed my wallet, and ran barefoot across the street. By the time I reached the driver, she had turned the car around and was trying to run down a pedestrian (her husband). I managed to pull her out of the car before she could hit him.
When I showed up for her trial, charges were dropped and she was referred for a psychiatric assessment. I don't recall any mention of her driver's license being revoked.
In 2004, three weeks after my wife and I moved into our first house, one of our neighbors tried to shoot another neighbor. I was still a police officer (in another jurisdiction), and a first responder as well by that time, so I went out to see if anyone needed medical attention while my wife called the local police. The bystanders were more freaked out seeing a cop with body armor and a shotgun on scene than they were about the shooting itself. About 15-20 minutes later, a township police car rolled by and I ran down the street waving at them to get them to stop. It was the last time in that neighborhood I bothered to report hearing shots fired.
This neighborhood has some wooded lots that were apparently popular places for criminals to hide, so the police helicopter pretty regularly buzzed over our house, circling the area looking for fleeing suspects. I can remember at least two different times when officers came through our back yard there searching for someone. It got to the point that whenever we heard the helicopter circling, we just locked the doors and turned on the outside lights. It was routine to have fugitives running loose in our neighborhood looking for a place to hide.
Sometime after this, I saw in the news that in the parking lot of the first apartment building I had lived in in Columbus, one man had hit another man in the head with a hatchet.
In 2010, our next-door neighbor called and said she saw some young men stashing something in the wood lot across the street from her. I checked it out and found what appeared to be stolen property. I contacted the owner of the lot, who lived just a couple doors up the street from us. He loaded the loot into his car and then turned it over to the police. The young men my neighbor saw in the woods came back to retrieve their stash. I went out to confront them and get their license plate number. They sped away. After that, my son and I left to run an errand. While we were gone, the thieves came back with reinforcements, knocking on our door. By the time my wife hid our baby daughter behind cover and got a gun, the thugs had moved on up the street. When they knocked on the door of the man who had turned the stuff over to the police, he answered it. The man knocking pulled a gun on my neighbor and demanded the loot. My neighbor then pulled out his concealed handgun and pistol whipped the assailant. The other thugs, who had been standing in the street holding sticks and rocks, dropped their weapons and ran...or tried to, anyway. The neighbor's sons grabbed a couple of the guys and beat the stuffing out of them before they got away.
We spent the rest of that day and much of the next couple days holed up in the house, worrying that the thieves would return with more men and better weapons. We had two young children to protect, and nowhere else to go. We had to be ready to fend off an attack if it came.
In 2012, animal rights activists started stealing my chickens and damaging my fences and chicken coops, but they didn't stop there. At one point, they used a ladder to climb into our house through a second-story window, and stole a bow, an axe, and arrows with broadheads. These are not things you want in the hands of someone who regards you as an enemy.
A few weeks after that, I caught some trespassers on my land, and one of them had stolen a knife out of my greenhouse. My phone was dead, so with a sledge hammer in one hand, I marched them next door and had a neighbor call the police. (I was hoping I had caught the chicken thieves.) While we were waiting for the police to arrive, one of the men said, "I'm not going back to jail," and walked away. I placed my free hand on the other guy's shoulder and he stayed. He had been very cooperative, returned my knife (which was broken and only worth $3.50 when it was new) without my even asking, and seemed to have been dragged into this by the troublemaker who ran away. When the prosecutor interviewed me, I spoke as strongly as I could in favor of showing the young man leniency. She was happy to hear it, but later called back and said he was in other trouble, too, and they were sending him to prison on felony charges instead.
I don't imagine that fellow is too happy with me. After he gets hardened in prison, I can't be certain that he'll be quite so agreeable when he gets out.
Also in 2012, a burglar broke into our house three days in a row. The first two days, he stole most of my tools and I filed a police report. The third day, I was waiting for him with a gun. When the police arrived, the burglar claimed he was just looking for some water because his car was overheating, and the sergeant let him go. Let me repeat that. The burglar had prior convictions for Receiving Stolen Property. He had a record of domestic violence. I had a report on file from just two days earlier. He came in the same way as the thief who had stolen my tools, but the police let him go...when he was caught in the act of a felony.
I had to go to the prosecutor's office myself to file charges. I was told that since a police officer didn't file the charges, they could only pursue misdemeanor charges against the burglar. He appeared on both the trespassing charge and a domestic violence charge, and got a suspended sentence of 30 days, with a warning not to contact me. Weeks later, as I was walking my son home from school, the burglar accosted me on the sidewalk. He asked if I knew who he was, and when I said that I didn't, he replied, "You stuck a gun in my face?" He then went on to tell me there were "no hard feelings," as though I were the one who had done something wrong. My son and I continued home, and I called the man's probation officer to report this violation. Then I went to court to get a protection order.
Last year, a man I know a couple blocks away needed some money and went to a neighbor's house to try to sell him a knife. The neighbor wasn't home, so after knocking a while, the man returned home and went to sleep. When the neighbor returned home, another neighbor (who has a well-known habit of making up lies about people just to start trouble), said that my friend had threatened to kill the family and cut off their heads with that knife. Neighbor #1 looked at his security camera video and saw footage of my friend standing on the porch with a knife in his hand. Rather than call the police right away or even investigate the matter further on his own, this neighbor decided to dispense some hillbilly justice. He rounded up his entire family, they strapped on their guns, and they went banging on my friend's door. They ordered his girlfriend to go wake him up and tell him to come out so they could beat him up. She refused, and they told her that if she didn't, they'd kill her, him, their other housemate, and the two dogs. To her credit, she stood firm and yelled at them to go away. As they left, they told her that she'd better find another place to live, because they'd be coming back to kill her if she didn't.
THEN the neighbor called the police. When the officer came around to interview the girlfriend who'd been threatened, she wanted to file a report. The officer wouldn't take one, instead saying, "I'd have done the same thing if I were them!"
There are two lessons I want you to take away from these stories: 1) at least in southern and central Ohio, the danger of violent crime is very real, and 2) you can't rely on the police to protect you from it. You can't even count on them after the fact to put the assailant away to keep it from happening again. As on a battlefield, there are people who will try to harm you, and it's up to you to stop them from succeeding. They might sometimes have guns, legal or not. Given these facts, what is the best way to deal with such a threat? Maybe you want to stick your head in the sand and imagine that you'll talk your way out of any threat that comes along. You're free to take that risk. But for the love of all that is good, don't try to impose that risk on others, and stop insisting that people who take rational measures to keep themselves alive are paranoid or childish for doing so.
I saw this image shared by someone who likened a fear of being the victim of violence to that of a child being afraid of monsters under the bed. When these folks fall into unison chanting the word "paranoid," the underlying message is that there is no threat. They're saying that you don't need to protect yourself from violence, because there is no such thing. It only exists in people's imaginations, or in Darfur or somewhere like that. Other than maybe a fist fight on the school yard, they've never seen one person harm another, so their normalcy bias tells them that physical safety is the norm. The violence they hear about on the news, they rationalize, is only news because it's so unusual--like a plane crash or someone getting hit by lightning.They think they're safe by default, and that if you think you're not, it's because you've got an anxiety disorder and an overactive imagination.
Allow me to illustrate how wrong they are.
When reading the following, remember, I'm not talking about events in East L.A. or the South Side of Chicago. This didn't take place in East St. Louis or any of the seedier neighborhoods in New York. It wasn't Detroit or Miami. It was Ohio, and not even Cleveland. Some of the events were in a little podunk town of about 22,000 people on the Kentucky border, and the others were in Columbus, a city known more for its college football team and corporate headquarters than for violent crime.
In 1991, I was out for a walk and saw a middle-aged man dragging his wife down the sidewalk by the hair. I mean this literally. The woman was on the ground, hands on her head, screaming, while the man, gripping her by her hair, walked down the sidewalk, dragging her along. I called the police, but otherwise felt helpless to do anything other than yell at him to stop. Why did I feel helpless? Because Ohio law at that time made self-defense (or defense of another) an "affirmative defense," meaning that if I had actually gone and put my hands on the guy, I not only risked being charged with attacking him, I'd also be guilty until I managed to prove myself innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The woman endured a few more minutes of this torture before an off-duty cop arrived. We had to stand around waiting for an official rescuer to show up to stop the violence.
Around 1992, my girlfriend and I were living on the second-floor of a two-story house that had been divided into two apartments. The man who lived downstairs liked to beat his wife, and we naively called the police when he did so. This got us on his bad side. As a result, he started making a habit of getting drunk and yelling for me to come down and fight him. Sometimes he'd do this from his own apartment. Other times, he'd stand in the street and do it. Typically, we ignored it. One morning, though, we awoke to find the frame of our door broken and big, muddy footprints on the outside of the door. He had very nearly succeeded in kicking in our door while we were asleep, and we didn't even hear it. Had he given it just one more kick, there's no telling how far he might have gotten before we woke up, or what he'd have managed to do to us, as we were unarmed.
We called the police, but they said we'd have to go talk to the prosecutor. I took pictures of the footprints and the broken door frame, and went to the prosecutor's office. He did nothing, saying we couldn't reasonably say who did it. We complained to the landlord. He fixed the door frame, but the people downstairs remained.
Maybe a year or so after that, my girlfriend's crazy uncle (one of them) parked up the street and waited for me to leave for school. After I left, he knocked on the door. She opened the door a bit, and he tried to force his way in. She tried to shut him out, but he got one foot in the door and stopped it from closing. She sat on the floor leaning against the door to keep him out, and he kept trying to force his way in, yelling threats and obscenities the whole time. Eventually, she was able to reach a hammer I'd left at the bottom of the stairs, and used it to pound his foot. He withdrew it in pain, and she slammed the door shut and locked it.
He was gone by the time police arrived. To my knowledge, no warrant was ever issued for his arrest.
A few years after that, we were living in another upstairs apartment. Our downstairs neighbor apparently had an unpaid gambling debt, and his creditor showed up late one night, angry and too drunk to tell which door went to which apartment. My wife and I were woken by the sound of this man yelling and trying to kick in our door. As luck would have it, I had a .22 rifle I had borrowed from my father-in-law for use on my trap line. I grabbed the gun, took a position at the top of the stairs, and yelled to the man trying to break in. He heard me, saw me through the window, and ran away. We called the police. They found him hiding in our back yard.
In 2003, I was working nights as a police officer, so I was sleeping during the day. Across the street from my apartment was a car wash. One afternoon, I was woken by a loud argument at the car wash. I looked out the window and saw one car ram into another one. It looked deliberate. The first car started backing up, and I thought I was witnessing a hit-and-run, so I put on my glasses and tried to read the license plate. But instead of fleeing, the car was just backing up to ram a second time. I pulled on my jeans and duty belt, grabbed my wallet, and ran barefoot across the street. By the time I reached the driver, she had turned the car around and was trying to run down a pedestrian (her husband). I managed to pull her out of the car before she could hit him.
When I showed up for her trial, charges were dropped and she was referred for a psychiatric assessment. I don't recall any mention of her driver's license being revoked.
In 2004, three weeks after my wife and I moved into our first house, one of our neighbors tried to shoot another neighbor. I was still a police officer (in another jurisdiction), and a first responder as well by that time, so I went out to see if anyone needed medical attention while my wife called the local police. The bystanders were more freaked out seeing a cop with body armor and a shotgun on scene than they were about the shooting itself. About 15-20 minutes later, a township police car rolled by and I ran down the street waving at them to get them to stop. It was the last time in that neighborhood I bothered to report hearing shots fired.
This neighborhood has some wooded lots that were apparently popular places for criminals to hide, so the police helicopter pretty regularly buzzed over our house, circling the area looking for fleeing suspects. I can remember at least two different times when officers came through our back yard there searching for someone. It got to the point that whenever we heard the helicopter circling, we just locked the doors and turned on the outside lights. It was routine to have fugitives running loose in our neighborhood looking for a place to hide.
Sometime after this, I saw in the news that in the parking lot of the first apartment building I had lived in in Columbus, one man had hit another man in the head with a hatchet.
In 2010, our next-door neighbor called and said she saw some young men stashing something in the wood lot across the street from her. I checked it out and found what appeared to be stolen property. I contacted the owner of the lot, who lived just a couple doors up the street from us. He loaded the loot into his car and then turned it over to the police. The young men my neighbor saw in the woods came back to retrieve their stash. I went out to confront them and get their license plate number. They sped away. After that, my son and I left to run an errand. While we were gone, the thieves came back with reinforcements, knocking on our door. By the time my wife hid our baby daughter behind cover and got a gun, the thugs had moved on up the street. When they knocked on the door of the man who had turned the stuff over to the police, he answered it. The man knocking pulled a gun on my neighbor and demanded the loot. My neighbor then pulled out his concealed handgun and pistol whipped the assailant. The other thugs, who had been standing in the street holding sticks and rocks, dropped their weapons and ran...or tried to, anyway. The neighbor's sons grabbed a couple of the guys and beat the stuffing out of them before they got away.
We spent the rest of that day and much of the next couple days holed up in the house, worrying that the thieves would return with more men and better weapons. We had two young children to protect, and nowhere else to go. We had to be ready to fend off an attack if it came.
In 2012, animal rights activists started stealing my chickens and damaging my fences and chicken coops, but they didn't stop there. At one point, they used a ladder to climb into our house through a second-story window, and stole a bow, an axe, and arrows with broadheads. These are not things you want in the hands of someone who regards you as an enemy.
A few weeks after that, I caught some trespassers on my land, and one of them had stolen a knife out of my greenhouse. My phone was dead, so with a sledge hammer in one hand, I marched them next door and had a neighbor call the police. (I was hoping I had caught the chicken thieves.) While we were waiting for the police to arrive, one of the men said, "I'm not going back to jail," and walked away. I placed my free hand on the other guy's shoulder and he stayed. He had been very cooperative, returned my knife (which was broken and only worth $3.50 when it was new) without my even asking, and seemed to have been dragged into this by the troublemaker who ran away. When the prosecutor interviewed me, I spoke as strongly as I could in favor of showing the young man leniency. She was happy to hear it, but later called back and said he was in other trouble, too, and they were sending him to prison on felony charges instead.
I don't imagine that fellow is too happy with me. After he gets hardened in prison, I can't be certain that he'll be quite so agreeable when he gets out.
Also in 2012, a burglar broke into our house three days in a row. The first two days, he stole most of my tools and I filed a police report. The third day, I was waiting for him with a gun. When the police arrived, the burglar claimed he was just looking for some water because his car was overheating, and the sergeant let him go. Let me repeat that. The burglar had prior convictions for Receiving Stolen Property. He had a record of domestic violence. I had a report on file from just two days earlier. He came in the same way as the thief who had stolen my tools, but the police let him go...when he was caught in the act of a felony.
I had to go to the prosecutor's office myself to file charges. I was told that since a police officer didn't file the charges, they could only pursue misdemeanor charges against the burglar. He appeared on both the trespassing charge and a domestic violence charge, and got a suspended sentence of 30 days, with a warning not to contact me. Weeks later, as I was walking my son home from school, the burglar accosted me on the sidewalk. He asked if I knew who he was, and when I said that I didn't, he replied, "You stuck a gun in my face?" He then went on to tell me there were "no hard feelings," as though I were the one who had done something wrong. My son and I continued home, and I called the man's probation officer to report this violation. Then I went to court to get a protection order.
Last year, a man I know a couple blocks away needed some money and went to a neighbor's house to try to sell him a knife. The neighbor wasn't home, so after knocking a while, the man returned home and went to sleep. When the neighbor returned home, another neighbor (who has a well-known habit of making up lies about people just to start trouble), said that my friend had threatened to kill the family and cut off their heads with that knife. Neighbor #1 looked at his security camera video and saw footage of my friend standing on the porch with a knife in his hand. Rather than call the police right away or even investigate the matter further on his own, this neighbor decided to dispense some hillbilly justice. He rounded up his entire family, they strapped on their guns, and they went banging on my friend's door. They ordered his girlfriend to go wake him up and tell him to come out so they could beat him up. She refused, and they told her that if she didn't, they'd kill her, him, their other housemate, and the two dogs. To her credit, she stood firm and yelled at them to go away. As they left, they told her that she'd better find another place to live, because they'd be coming back to kill her if she didn't.
THEN the neighbor called the police. When the officer came around to interview the girlfriend who'd been threatened, she wanted to file a report. The officer wouldn't take one, instead saying, "I'd have done the same thing if I were them!"
There are two lessons I want you to take away from these stories: 1) at least in southern and central Ohio, the danger of violent crime is very real, and 2) you can't rely on the police to protect you from it. You can't even count on them after the fact to put the assailant away to keep it from happening again. As on a battlefield, there are people who will try to harm you, and it's up to you to stop them from succeeding. They might sometimes have guns, legal or not. Given these facts, what is the best way to deal with such a threat? Maybe you want to stick your head in the sand and imagine that you'll talk your way out of any threat that comes along. You're free to take that risk. But for the love of all that is good, don't try to impose that risk on others, and stop insisting that people who take rational measures to keep themselves alive are paranoid or childish for doing so.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
I Am Rubber, You Are Glue
Following is my reply to a left-wing blogger ranting about a right-wing author's claim that liberals are fascists:
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word "fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means "stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate "fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps, with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say, "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early 20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock. Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education, and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist, but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait. Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
I swear, it's like watching two teenaged boys, both straight, arguing about which one is gayer.
Both of you appear to be having a knee-jerk reaction against the word "fascist" because it's been reduced to a snarl word that generally means "stuff I oppose" rather than referring to an Italian political movement in the 1930s.
Being a 21st-century American leftist, you equate "fascism" principally with racism and also, to a lesser degree perhaps, with vigilantism. Your opponent, Goldberg, being a 21st-century American right-winger, equates the word with socialism and totalitarianism.
In that much, you're both right. The problem is that you each appear to think it means exclusively the definition you've assigned to it, so when he calls your ideological camp "fascist," meaning collectivist and favoring a domineering government, you hear "racist vigilante" and say, "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the fascist!" He hears that as "Nuh-uh! YOU'RE the radical, nanny-state socialist!" and denies it right back at you. This could go on forever, and neither of you would benefit.
Let's clear up a couple things that should move this debate forward. In early 20th-century European politics, the term "conservative" referred to aristocratic landowners who favored protectionist policies and an agrarian-based economy. "Liberal" referred to their political opponents--the wealthy urban factory owners, bankers, etc. who favored free trade, military growth, and imperialism, and a system in which power and status went to the rich rather than to the well-born.
These were the two political camps in power at the time. As we see in our bicameral system today, they were only able to work together on things they agreed on. Where they opposed each other, there was gridlock. Neither group represented the common people, though.
The people had their own political movements--socialism, distributism, and various other schemes for giving common workers a voice, and there was disagreement within these movements. One of the socialist sects was the Bolsheviks, which grew to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Centered in Moscow, they wanted all other European socialists to pledge fealty to the Communists. The Fascists (in Italy) and the German Workers' Party (later the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a.k.a. "Nazis") resisted Moscow.
It was this division, not anti-socialist sentiments, that led to the Nazis persecuting German Bolsheviks. The Nazis didn't rise to power telling people they were going to murder millions of Jews. They promised--and delivered--a slew of social welfare programs like government-paid health care, education, and retirement, all to be funded by heavily taxing the rich.
Who have we heard promoting that kind of policy lately? The Republicans? The Tea Party?
"But the Nazis were racist, and the Republicans are racist, therefore Republicans, not Democrats, are Nazis! And fascist is just another word for Nazi, so Republicans are fascists! Q.E.D."
In Weimar Germany, antisemitism was at least as commonplace as animosity toward Wall Street bankers and one-percenters in general is in America today--and for similar reasons. It wasn't considered a shameful or taboo topic the way racism is seen in America today. The popular view in Germany (among gentiles, anyway) was that Jewish financiers were largely responsible for destroying Germany's economy. The actual Fascists (in Italy) weren't really all that troubled by Jews. It was at the insistence of their larger, more powerful ally, Nazi Germany, that they started persecuting Jews.
In America, we on the left enjoy this tale of Nixon's "Southern strategy" whereby all the Southern bigots used to be Democrats (Dixiecrats) and then moved en masse to the Republican Party in the 1960s. But do we also claim that all the previously non-racist Republicans likewise left the GOP for the Democrats, to get away from the racist newcomers? In truth, both parties were full of racists up until the mid-20th century when attitudes started to change--not unlike attitudes toward LGBT folk have been changing in recent years. Like antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, white racism against blacks was accepted as normal and proper among whites of both parties for a very long time.
So while American racists today are pretty heavily concentrated among the party of the right-wing, that doesn't make racism an inherently and exclusively right-wing trait. Was Kennedy a right-winger when the racists were Dixiecrats? Was FDR? What I'm saying is that today's Republicans are both right-wing AND racist, but that fact alone doesn't make racism a necessarily right-wing trait. Whether one is racist or not has nothing to do with being left- or right-wing. One can be a racist socialist...as Hitler demonstrated.
At best, then, neither of you are fascists. At worst, you're both capable of becoming such. If a third-party candidate came along addressing exactly the issues that mattered to you, ones that both Republicans and Democrats routinely ignored, and that candidate had such massive support that it looked like he had a good chance at winning and delivering on his promises, it wouldn't be easy to say, "No, I can't vote for this guy because he might be unkind to the people I don't like."
Saturday, May 10, 2014
On Suppressing Dissent
It just occurred to me when reading about Sophie Scholl: governments that suppress dissenting speech are making a huge strategic error. I can see why they would have an interest in silencing people who want to publicize shameful things that the government prefers to keep secret, but making an example out of the person who says, "The Supreme Leader sucks! Down with the Supreme Leader!" is counterproductive.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Chilling everyone into silence isn't the same thing as gaining support. It just creates the illusion of a supportive populace, an illusion that fools no one but the leader himself. The people still resent the leader; they just do it silently. The leader doesn't really know who his true supporters are except by their deeds of valor and voluntary sacrifice, because they sound exactly the same as his opponents.
In a society that allows free (or mostly free) speech, the leader knows who his enemies are. The more overt you allow them to be, the easier they are to monitor and, if necessary, to locate. Also, by allowing people to speak their complaints freely (so long as the words don't lead to actions of consequence), you immediately dull the edge of those complaints. "The leader can't be as horrible a tyrant as that, or you wouldn't be allowed to speak those words. REAL tyrants kill people for saying stuff like you just said."
It's for this reason that a tyrant who wishes to be effective must maintain a distinction between the military and the police, unless the populace has long been accustomed to being policed by their army. Concentration camps and other military detention facilities are for enemies of the leader. But civilian prisons and jails are for bad people. Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person. Few are sympathetic to criminals. People will protest for the release of a political prisoner from a place like Guantanamo, but a person convicted in a court of law on charges of attempted murder and conspiring with terrorists will have few friends. In this way, a tyrant can dispose of huge numbers of people. Thousands die in American prisons and jails every year, but we don't call them death camps. Thinking of the American criminal justice system as a form of genocide is considered radical, despite the fact that the poor and minorities--African-American men, especially--are incarcerated at such a higher rate than everyone else. Does anyone doubt that when you're in prison, you're twice as likely to die as when you're free?
We can learn something from Milgram's experiment here. If an armored troop transport rolled down the street with loudspeakers blaring an announcement that all [choose a minority group] are being rounded up and should immediately surrender themselves for a merciful execution, there'd be a battle. Even people who aren't members of the group would be shooting from their windows. The soldiers or police would be regarded as invaders in that instance. But if it's done under the pretense that those people have done something wrong, it suddenly becomes more acceptable. That is, if a few police officers show up at the homes of all the members of a particular religion to arrest them on warrants of violating tax laws or some obscure ordinance about moral turpitude, nobody will interfere.
Likewise, if armed government agents went into a slum and ordered everyone to vacate their homes so the government could bulldoze them and build expensive homes for rich people who would pay more in taxes, there would be resistance. People would fight to keep from being removed. But if the government just raised the taxes on the slum properties enough, a lot of the residents would leave because they couldn't pay. Their homes would fail to sell, and eventually the government would seize the abandoned properties. Those who remained would fall behind in their tax payments. Nobody's going to bat an eye at a bunch of "tax protesters" or "deadbeats" or "slumlords" who were millions of dollars behind on their property taxes having their homes foreclosed on by the county. And then when those people are out on the street, nobody's going to bat an eye at them being arrested for vagrancy.
As such, the successful tyrant is one who can not only convince his people that they are free, but can convince his victims (or at least all witnesses to the victimization) that they got what they deserved. A successful tyrant convinces his people that tyranny is justice.
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Getting Money Out of Politics
In McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its opinion first stated in Citizens United v. FEC that campaign contributions are speech, and protected under the First Amendment. People call this "buying elections." Bernie Sanders called it "buying the political process."
I think we need to untangle this. I don't like the quid pro quo relationship established when politicians are allowed to accept money; that's bribery. That's purchasing policy. As long as that's allowed to continue, it doesn't matter who gets elected, so long as they have a price that some special interest will pay. Everyone who's elected will be for sale, and that's a problem.
Of course, doing that overtly IS illegal, so they get around it by taking advantage of the loophole that says you can make campaign donations. It's still bribery. It's still purchasing policy.
What bothers me in the discussion surrounding this is the oft-repeated claim that campaign contributors are "buying elections." And a lot of people--probably a lot of you reading this--believe it.
Can I point out the elephant in the room here? Commercials are not purchases. I've seen ads for LOTS of candidates I never voted for. There have been times that I was considering a candidate until I saw one of their ads, and it turned me against them. NEVER have I been persuaded to cast a vote for somebody based on how much they spend on commercials.
I'm not saying advertising doesn't influence people's opinions. Look at Coke and Pepsi. They're both fizzy brown sugar water and they cost about the same. They don't taste identical, but which one is better is entirely a matter of personal preference. There is no selling point for one over the other. It's not like one is more nutritious, or is manufactured in a more ecologically or socially responsible way. The only distinguishing factor is your own opinion about which one you like more. In that case, commercials that attempt to manipulate your emotional associations with the product are effective. If they can plant in your brain, even subconsciously, messages like, "All the cool people drink Coke, only dweebs and losers drink that lame other brand," then they can affect your behavior when you go to make a selection.
In the case of judges, specifically, I can see that working. A judge isn't supposed to have an agenda beyond interpreting the law correctly. They're not supposed to be pushing a political ideology in the courtroom. So what we're presented are these people in black robes who are supposed to be impartial and knowledgeable, but otherwise indistinct. The cola branding works in this case. Maybe the commercials make you think of one candidate as being more folksy and likeable, or tougher on crime, or more compassionate, or whatever it is that speaks to you.
But beyond that, when we get into the executive and legislative branches, it's a whole other ballgame. It's Coke vs. Orange Crush. Now, maybe you're in the mood for milk, or wine, or spring water, and you don't see a lot of difference between them because they're not speaking to your concerns. But the ways they distinguish themselves from each other are more tangible, less subjective.
Say the issue they're talking about is abortion. Jones says he wants to outlaw it. Smith says she wants it to be legal. If you think abortion should be illegal, no amount of money Smith spends to drive home her message that it should be legal is going to change your mind. To the contrary, each dollar she throws at the issue is just going to further entrench you in your decision to vote against her. And if you agree with her position, she's reached the point of diminishing returns as soon as she's made you aware of her position. You're not going to vote for her five more times if she spends five times as much money on ads.
And if you don't care about abortion one way or the other, all that noise is going to go in one ear and out the other. The more of it there is, the more bothersome it will become, and the more likely the ads are going to have the effect of making you irritable and causing you to associate that feeling with the candidates.
Republicans get this. They're masters at it. They have to be--they represent the interests of the fewest number of people, but generally have more money to throw at advertising. So how do they work around this dilemma? They don't push their issues. You have never once seen an ad by a Republican candidate saying, "Let's give away your hard-earned money to big businesses that already have billions of dollars in profits, and then let's take food away from starving children to give those big businesses even more." They'd never win that way. Instead, they do two things: 1) they sidestep the issues altogether and try cola branding to appeal to apathetic and low-information voters ("I'm the patriotic candidate"), and 2) they obfuscate issues to trick people into voting against their interests.
The first technique doesn't work on people who have an opinion, and the latter doesn't work on people who understand the issues.
That first one is just cola branding, and while it does have a measurable effect, its power is not limitless. While more people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests, more people buy Coke. But if Coke quit running all TV, radio, and print ads for two weeks, and Pepsi doubled spending on theirs, you wouldn't see all those Coke drinkers abandon Coke and start buying Pepsi. It doesn't work that way. Likewise, there are only so many votes a candidate can win with cola branding commercials--images of the candidate fishing, hanging out with grandchildren, shaking hands with disabled veterans, etc. You hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly on that. Once you spend enough to win over the kind of voters who can be won over that way, you don't gain anything by spending more on the same kind of ad.
The second kind works, but only if there's no counter-message at all. We saw that in Ohio over the creation of a humane livestock care standards board. The point was to create a board to rule over issues of humane livestock care instead of letting the voters decide such matters for themselves. For example, instead of the general electorate voting to ban the caging of laying hens, the governor would appoint a board (mostly consisting of industry professionals), and that board would decide whether it would be legal to put hens in cages. Not creating the board would have given voters more power. Creating the board took the power out of voters' hands and gave it to the very people who were being regulated. In the election where this was decided, the factory farms and their organizations funded a massive campaign, even drawing in contributions from out of state, to send the message that if you care about animals, you should vote for the creation of the board--that is, vote to allow the industry to do whatever it wants to animals. They made it sound like a vote for the board was a vote for humane treatment of animals, when the opposite was the case.
If the opposition had put out one ad countering that message, it would have created confusion, and that confusion would have started discussions. But there was no opposition in a lot of areas. In all the population centers across the state, the only message people got was, "If you care about animals, vote YES." In the rural areas, the only message people got was, "If you don't want animal rights organizations telling you how to run your farm, vote YES." Sustainable, humane farmers were mostly telling folks at the farmers markets to vote NO, but there was no money to spread that message, so no ads.
But that was over an issue, not a candidate. Both parties had been bought in that case. Races between candidates are rarely so one-sided. So if Jones, who wants to penalize polluters, says "Vote for me if you care about clean air," and Smith, who wants to allow pollution, also says, "Vote for me if you care about clean air," that's not going to sway voters one way or the other. The tactic doesn't work when there's opposition.
A lot of people say the answer is to get private money out of politics by requiring campaigns to be publicly financed. That alone doesn't fix it. If you prevent private entities from donating to a candidate, they'll just run their own ads. A private entity can run a political ad as long as they're transparent about who's funding it. "Hi, this is Bob from Bob's Used Cars. We care about saving you money, and that means tax money, too. I'm voting for Jones to lower our taxes, and I hope you will, too." Instead of sending Jones a check, Bob just sends him a letter of support informing him that spent X number of dollars on and ad encouraging people to vote for Jones. It creates the same quid pro quo relationship as a campaign contribution. It just cuts out the middle man. We still have the corruption, and it has little impact on the results of the election.
What I think would help keep the elections fair would be if, when people went to vote, they were briefed on the candidates' platforms. On issues and tax levies, the text is available to read at the polls. I think we should allow for something similar with candidates. Each candidate could summarize their positions and ambitions in a couple hundred words or so. There'd be no framing, as when the League of Women Voters selects questions to ask. It would basically be a free text ad each candidate gets to run at the polls. No images, all the same font. Candidates who may not have had enough money to campaign in every area would have just as much chance to reach voters as candidates who had plastered the whole state with billboards for the past year. Candidates who base their campaigns on misinformation would have their allegations challenged. It would really level the playing field, and it would do it when it counts most: the moment before the voter casts his vote. With voters getting this kind of information right there at the polls, and with it not costing the candidate anything, I think we could drastically diminish the power that money has in deciding who gets elected.
To look at the effect this would have, let's return to our race between Jones and Smith. Bob's Used Autos alienated a lot of Smith supporters by running the pro-Jones ad. If anyone other than Jones wins, Bob screwed himself. (For that matter, even if Jones wins, if Bob's gains under the Jones administration aren't greater than his losses from alienating Smith supporters, Bob still loses.) Jones ran an ad saying if you care about freedom, vote for him. Smith said if you care about freedom of choice, vote for her. Then our voter gets to the polls and finds out three other people he'd never heard of are running. He gets to read an outline of each candidate's platform, and decides he likes Brown the best. All Smith's, Jones', and Bob's money has been wasted. Brown wins. Who owns him? Nobody. And how can anyone legally corrupt him now that he's in office? By donating money to his campaign? He won without a dime last time, and having money did his competitors no good. There's no motivation to accept the money, and a good deal of motivation to refuse it, if he wants to present a clean image.
I think we need to untangle this. I don't like the quid pro quo relationship established when politicians are allowed to accept money; that's bribery. That's purchasing policy. As long as that's allowed to continue, it doesn't matter who gets elected, so long as they have a price that some special interest will pay. Everyone who's elected will be for sale, and that's a problem.
Of course, doing that overtly IS illegal, so they get around it by taking advantage of the loophole that says you can make campaign donations. It's still bribery. It's still purchasing policy.
What bothers me in the discussion surrounding this is the oft-repeated claim that campaign contributors are "buying elections." And a lot of people--probably a lot of you reading this--believe it.
Can I point out the elephant in the room here? Commercials are not purchases. I've seen ads for LOTS of candidates I never voted for. There have been times that I was considering a candidate until I saw one of their ads, and it turned me against them. NEVER have I been persuaded to cast a vote for somebody based on how much they spend on commercials.
I'm not saying advertising doesn't influence people's opinions. Look at Coke and Pepsi. They're both fizzy brown sugar water and they cost about the same. They don't taste identical, but which one is better is entirely a matter of personal preference. There is no selling point for one over the other. It's not like one is more nutritious, or is manufactured in a more ecologically or socially responsible way. The only distinguishing factor is your own opinion about which one you like more. In that case, commercials that attempt to manipulate your emotional associations with the product are effective. If they can plant in your brain, even subconsciously, messages like, "All the cool people drink Coke, only dweebs and losers drink that lame other brand," then they can affect your behavior when you go to make a selection.
In the case of judges, specifically, I can see that working. A judge isn't supposed to have an agenda beyond interpreting the law correctly. They're not supposed to be pushing a political ideology in the courtroom. So what we're presented are these people in black robes who are supposed to be impartial and knowledgeable, but otherwise indistinct. The cola branding works in this case. Maybe the commercials make you think of one candidate as being more folksy and likeable, or tougher on crime, or more compassionate, or whatever it is that speaks to you.
But beyond that, when we get into the executive and legislative branches, it's a whole other ballgame. It's Coke vs. Orange Crush. Now, maybe you're in the mood for milk, or wine, or spring water, and you don't see a lot of difference between them because they're not speaking to your concerns. But the ways they distinguish themselves from each other are more tangible, less subjective.
Say the issue they're talking about is abortion. Jones says he wants to outlaw it. Smith says she wants it to be legal. If you think abortion should be illegal, no amount of money Smith spends to drive home her message that it should be legal is going to change your mind. To the contrary, each dollar she throws at the issue is just going to further entrench you in your decision to vote against her. And if you agree with her position, she's reached the point of diminishing returns as soon as she's made you aware of her position. You're not going to vote for her five more times if she spends five times as much money on ads.
And if you don't care about abortion one way or the other, all that noise is going to go in one ear and out the other. The more of it there is, the more bothersome it will become, and the more likely the ads are going to have the effect of making you irritable and causing you to associate that feeling with the candidates.
Republicans get this. They're masters at it. They have to be--they represent the interests of the fewest number of people, but generally have more money to throw at advertising. So how do they work around this dilemma? They don't push their issues. You have never once seen an ad by a Republican candidate saying, "Let's give away your hard-earned money to big businesses that already have billions of dollars in profits, and then let's take food away from starving children to give those big businesses even more." They'd never win that way. Instead, they do two things: 1) they sidestep the issues altogether and try cola branding to appeal to apathetic and low-information voters ("I'm the patriotic candidate"), and 2) they obfuscate issues to trick people into voting against their interests.
The first technique doesn't work on people who have an opinion, and the latter doesn't work on people who understand the issues.
That first one is just cola branding, and while it does have a measurable effect, its power is not limitless. While more people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests, more people buy Coke. But if Coke quit running all TV, radio, and print ads for two weeks, and Pepsi doubled spending on theirs, you wouldn't see all those Coke drinkers abandon Coke and start buying Pepsi. It doesn't work that way. Likewise, there are only so many votes a candidate can win with cola branding commercials--images of the candidate fishing, hanging out with grandchildren, shaking hands with disabled veterans, etc. You hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly on that. Once you spend enough to win over the kind of voters who can be won over that way, you don't gain anything by spending more on the same kind of ad.
The second kind works, but only if there's no counter-message at all. We saw that in Ohio over the creation of a humane livestock care standards board. The point was to create a board to rule over issues of humane livestock care instead of letting the voters decide such matters for themselves. For example, instead of the general electorate voting to ban the caging of laying hens, the governor would appoint a board (mostly consisting of industry professionals), and that board would decide whether it would be legal to put hens in cages. Not creating the board would have given voters more power. Creating the board took the power out of voters' hands and gave it to the very people who were being regulated. In the election where this was decided, the factory farms and their organizations funded a massive campaign, even drawing in contributions from out of state, to send the message that if you care about animals, you should vote for the creation of the board--that is, vote to allow the industry to do whatever it wants to animals. They made it sound like a vote for the board was a vote for humane treatment of animals, when the opposite was the case.
If the opposition had put out one ad countering that message, it would have created confusion, and that confusion would have started discussions. But there was no opposition in a lot of areas. In all the population centers across the state, the only message people got was, "If you care about animals, vote YES." In the rural areas, the only message people got was, "If you don't want animal rights organizations telling you how to run your farm, vote YES." Sustainable, humane farmers were mostly telling folks at the farmers markets to vote NO, but there was no money to spread that message, so no ads.
But that was over an issue, not a candidate. Both parties had been bought in that case. Races between candidates are rarely so one-sided. So if Jones, who wants to penalize polluters, says "Vote for me if you care about clean air," and Smith, who wants to allow pollution, also says, "Vote for me if you care about clean air," that's not going to sway voters one way or the other. The tactic doesn't work when there's opposition.
A lot of people say the answer is to get private money out of politics by requiring campaigns to be publicly financed. That alone doesn't fix it. If you prevent private entities from donating to a candidate, they'll just run their own ads. A private entity can run a political ad as long as they're transparent about who's funding it. "Hi, this is Bob from Bob's Used Cars. We care about saving you money, and that means tax money, too. I'm voting for Jones to lower our taxes, and I hope you will, too." Instead of sending Jones a check, Bob just sends him a letter of support informing him that spent X number of dollars on and ad encouraging people to vote for Jones. It creates the same quid pro quo relationship as a campaign contribution. It just cuts out the middle man. We still have the corruption, and it has little impact on the results of the election.
What I think would help keep the elections fair would be if, when people went to vote, they were briefed on the candidates' platforms. On issues and tax levies, the text is available to read at the polls. I think we should allow for something similar with candidates. Each candidate could summarize their positions and ambitions in a couple hundred words or so. There'd be no framing, as when the League of Women Voters selects questions to ask. It would basically be a free text ad each candidate gets to run at the polls. No images, all the same font. Candidates who may not have had enough money to campaign in every area would have just as much chance to reach voters as candidates who had plastered the whole state with billboards for the past year. Candidates who base their campaigns on misinformation would have their allegations challenged. It would really level the playing field, and it would do it when it counts most: the moment before the voter casts his vote. With voters getting this kind of information right there at the polls, and with it not costing the candidate anything, I think we could drastically diminish the power that money has in deciding who gets elected.
To look at the effect this would have, let's return to our race between Jones and Smith. Bob's Used Autos alienated a lot of Smith supporters by running the pro-Jones ad. If anyone other than Jones wins, Bob screwed himself. (For that matter, even if Jones wins, if Bob's gains under the Jones administration aren't greater than his losses from alienating Smith supporters, Bob still loses.) Jones ran an ad saying if you care about freedom, vote for him. Smith said if you care about freedom of choice, vote for her. Then our voter gets to the polls and finds out three other people he'd never heard of are running. He gets to read an outline of each candidate's platform, and decides he likes Brown the best. All Smith's, Jones', and Bob's money has been wasted. Brown wins. Who owns him? Nobody. And how can anyone legally corrupt him now that he's in office? By donating money to his campaign? He won without a dime last time, and having money did his competitors no good. There's no motivation to accept the money, and a good deal of motivation to refuse it, if he wants to present a clean image.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
The Inherent Cultural Imperialism of Talking About What Poor People Eat
Wow, I was so hopeful reading "Chitlins, Tradition and Food Justice" by Carolyn Wysinger. When she started talking about tragedy-turned-tradition and how her aunt reacted to the news that she didn't like chitlins ("she informed me that 'I was a citified California kid who could eat
weird stuff like hummus but not chitlins.' Then she 'told' on me to the
rest of the family." ) I really thought I had finally found someone else who gets it...but she didn't.
The reason the Northern Lights Kroger has chitlins while the ones in richer, whiter neighborhoods have organic hummus isn't because "the man" is trying to keep us Northern Lights shoppers down and eating scraps. It's because the neighborhood is populated by people like her aunt. Stores want to make money, and you do that by selling the chitlins to people who demand chitlins, and organic hummus to people who demand organic hummus. You absolutely don't make money by trying to force food onto people that is so far removed from their cultural traditions and identity that they take offense. So Kroger isn't going to put goat meat or pig guts in Worthington or Bexley, and they're not gonna put any hoity-toity, zen yoga, California crap in the hood. There just aren't enough people who shop here regularly who want it--not because they're being forced, but because it's part of how they've come to see themselves.
You want to solve the obesity epidemic in food deserts? Then you need to change the very essence of the people who live there. Turn back the clock and make kale a comfort food for them instead of mac-and-cheese. Go back to the point in their childhood when a hamburger became an object of desire and replace it with steamed asparagus. Find the time when they learned to think of a cookie as a treat, and teach them instead to feel rewarded by a two-mile run.
We learn from older generations what to value, what feels good, what's worth pursuing and avoiding. Those communally-shared aspirations and aversions and the narrative we use to organize them into something coherent form our cultures. Culture is the matrix of our social bonding, and we are social creatures who need that bonding as much as we need anything. There's a reason people eat together when they gather for special occasions or to have fun. When you ask someone with a lifelong sweet tooth to stop liking sweets, you might as well be asking her to disown her family and change her name. It's not about "bad choices" so much as ranking other things like camaraderie and enjoyment as being more important than nutrition and fitness.
We can make apologies and say that the poor are obese because carbs are cheap--and we can point to a conspiracy between Big Ag and government to get us whipped up into a righteous indignation over this, with the likes of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver leading the charge--but you know what's even cheaper than high-calorie processed foods? Cabbage and dry beans. Nobody's going to get fat eating boiled beans and cabbage. But when's the last time anyone invited you to go watch the game and eat boiled cabbage at a sports bar? How many people are going to take a date out to eat beans? Who goes to a carnival looking forward to eating a cabbage leaf stuffed with lima beans unless it's also deep fried and covered with powdered sugar?
I like cabbage. I also like beans. And I can point to various cultures that value them as staples. I cannot, however, think of one culture that treats those two foods (without additional fats or carbs) as "fun" foods that serve as the center for social bonding. They're not. And if you tried to make cabbage and beans your mainstay because that's all you could afford, I bet you'd be miserable pretty quickly.
So what do we poor people, food desert or not, have to stave off the misery? Food stamps. We don't have vacations and concerts. We can't afford cruises and road trips. We don't go to music festivals or science fiction conventions. We don't hang out at gyms or craft shows or martial arts competitions. We don't do any of those spendy things middle-class people do outside of work that they think of as making their lives worth living.
What we do have--the only boon in our lives other than a once-a-year tax refund--is a balance at the beginning of every month saying we can buy several hundred dollars' worth of food. You can't pay your rent with food stamps. You can't use them to keep the electricity or gas turned on. You can't use them to get your car fixed or fueled or insured or registered. You can't use them to buy toothpaste or deodorant or toilet paper. You can't even use them to buy food if it's hot or served to eat on the spot. What you can do is buy groceries to take home and cook. Inevitably, you'll learn that cats will eat store-brand canned tuna and you can clean your house with vinegar or lemon juice. You might even fool around with trying to use baking soda as toothpaste and deodorant, or making Play-Doh and finger paint out of flour and food coloring. I remember one year for Christmas, I made ornaments out of dried apple slices and made braided breads to give people as gifts.
But most of that food is going to be eaten. You might not even have enough (with recent cuts, that's even more likely), but once a month, you can walk into a grocery store with the knowledge that you can have almost anything you want. You can fill an entire cart to overflowing, and as long as it's not all meat, you'll probably have enough to cover it all. You don't need to tally it in your head as you do with literally every single other expense in your life. For one day a month, you get to live and think and shop like a wealthy person. I mean, not really. It's still in the back of your mind that you've got to make this last all month, so you're going to be frugal, but if you want an apple or a pack of cookies, you can just grab it without thinking about how much it costs which is something you never get to do otherwise when you're poor. It's the only glut you know.
You've seen shoppers line up after Thanksgiving to get all those amazing discounts, right? The way they camp out and then battle each other for a half-price TV? Well, people on food stamps can't afford a new TV even at half-price, so that's an alien world. A sale means nothing when you're broke. But take that same sense of frenzy, that sense of being overwhelmed with rare, sudden, and momentary bounty, and you have some sense of what it's like to see your food stamp balance replenished at the beginning of the month.
When my family borrows a car to go on a big grocery shopping trip, the first thing we do when we get back to the car is start opening things up to eat them. The kids want a cookie or some candy. I want a soda. We might pass around some chips. It's a craving we've been feeling and unable to feed for maybe a week or two...or longer. For some people, it's heroine or weed or pills or alcohol that brings them relief. For us, it's a long-anticipated glucose rush. When the kids have a birthday party or we celebrate a holiday, there's nothing elegant about it. The meal isn't about exotic ingredients or preparation methods with French names. It's about whatever gets us that rush. (I prefer meat over sweets, myself, but price is a constraint, so you find work-arounds. I've eaten two packs of beef-flavored ramen noodles just while writing this.)
My point is that at the very root of it, we're dealing with strong, biological urges. Satisfying those urges feels good, so we make that satisfaction something we share with people we care about. It's something we do together. If you've ever gone out for sushi, think how you'd feel if a friend who came along with you brought a burger and fries along to eat while you have sushi. Or the other way--you and some friends grill burgers outside or go to a hamburger joint, but one of them packs a little bento box. By not joining in eating the same thing as the others, you're missing a major social aspect of the gathering. For this reason, when we eat with others as a form of social bonding, we eat what they're eating. When you buck the trend, you isolate yourself socially. This means we're talking about not just biological cravings, but psychological ones, too. We need acceptance.
What happens, then, when tragedy becomes tradition, as Carolyn Wysinger wrote about? What happens when the slave master throws the scraps of the pig carcass to his slaves, and the slaves' children grow up with that as their fond memory of childhood? What happens when that slop becomes a part of your cultural identity? I'll tell you: it becomes a source of pride, because it's part of your identity as a member of a community that has survived hardship. When someone outside that community tries to exert their supremacy by devaluing the things that define you, you either let them, or you fight back, as Wysinger's aunt did. You devalue whatever they're holding up as supreme and declare your own thing to be supreme. That's how you assert your equality. "I don't want your fruity ol' couscous anyway. I got venison!"
In that situation, what would happen if Wysinger got her way...if the grocery store where her aunt shops stopped carrying chitlins and replaced them with hummus? Would her aunt feel liberated and empowered, now that the man is no longer forcing those slave scraps on her? Or is she more apt, as I think she would, to feel like an outsider was imposing his culture on her against her wishes? If she couldn't get what she wanted because a grocery store executive or public official made the decision that she should give it up her tradition and adopt a way he deems to be better, why on Earth would anybody think she'd be eager to embrace that?
It's an insult. When affluent white people decide that their taste in food is superior to the that of the poor brown people on the other side of town, and task themselves with the "merciful" mission of making those poor brown people give up their wretched ways and eat the way the affluent white people say is proper, that's the very definition of cultural imperialism. There are bigger hurdles here than just diabetes.
The reason the Northern Lights Kroger has chitlins while the ones in richer, whiter neighborhoods have organic hummus isn't because "the man" is trying to keep us Northern Lights shoppers down and eating scraps. It's because the neighborhood is populated by people like her aunt. Stores want to make money, and you do that by selling the chitlins to people who demand chitlins, and organic hummus to people who demand organic hummus. You absolutely don't make money by trying to force food onto people that is so far removed from their cultural traditions and identity that they take offense. So Kroger isn't going to put goat meat or pig guts in Worthington or Bexley, and they're not gonna put any hoity-toity, zen yoga, California crap in the hood. There just aren't enough people who shop here regularly who want it--not because they're being forced, but because it's part of how they've come to see themselves.
You want to solve the obesity epidemic in food deserts? Then you need to change the very essence of the people who live there. Turn back the clock and make kale a comfort food for them instead of mac-and-cheese. Go back to the point in their childhood when a hamburger became an object of desire and replace it with steamed asparagus. Find the time when they learned to think of a cookie as a treat, and teach them instead to feel rewarded by a two-mile run.
We learn from older generations what to value, what feels good, what's worth pursuing and avoiding. Those communally-shared aspirations and aversions and the narrative we use to organize them into something coherent form our cultures. Culture is the matrix of our social bonding, and we are social creatures who need that bonding as much as we need anything. There's a reason people eat together when they gather for special occasions or to have fun. When you ask someone with a lifelong sweet tooth to stop liking sweets, you might as well be asking her to disown her family and change her name. It's not about "bad choices" so much as ranking other things like camaraderie and enjoyment as being more important than nutrition and fitness.
We can make apologies and say that the poor are obese because carbs are cheap--and we can point to a conspiracy between Big Ag and government to get us whipped up into a righteous indignation over this, with the likes of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver leading the charge--but you know what's even cheaper than high-calorie processed foods? Cabbage and dry beans. Nobody's going to get fat eating boiled beans and cabbage. But when's the last time anyone invited you to go watch the game and eat boiled cabbage at a sports bar? How many people are going to take a date out to eat beans? Who goes to a carnival looking forward to eating a cabbage leaf stuffed with lima beans unless it's also deep fried and covered with powdered sugar?
I like cabbage. I also like beans. And I can point to various cultures that value them as staples. I cannot, however, think of one culture that treats those two foods (without additional fats or carbs) as "fun" foods that serve as the center for social bonding. They're not. And if you tried to make cabbage and beans your mainstay because that's all you could afford, I bet you'd be miserable pretty quickly.
So what do we poor people, food desert or not, have to stave off the misery? Food stamps. We don't have vacations and concerts. We can't afford cruises and road trips. We don't go to music festivals or science fiction conventions. We don't hang out at gyms or craft shows or martial arts competitions. We don't do any of those spendy things middle-class people do outside of work that they think of as making their lives worth living.
What we do have--the only boon in our lives other than a once-a-year tax refund--is a balance at the beginning of every month saying we can buy several hundred dollars' worth of food. You can't pay your rent with food stamps. You can't use them to keep the electricity or gas turned on. You can't use them to get your car fixed or fueled or insured or registered. You can't use them to buy toothpaste or deodorant or toilet paper. You can't even use them to buy food if it's hot or served to eat on the spot. What you can do is buy groceries to take home and cook. Inevitably, you'll learn that cats will eat store-brand canned tuna and you can clean your house with vinegar or lemon juice. You might even fool around with trying to use baking soda as toothpaste and deodorant, or making Play-Doh and finger paint out of flour and food coloring. I remember one year for Christmas, I made ornaments out of dried apple slices and made braided breads to give people as gifts.
But most of that food is going to be eaten. You might not even have enough (with recent cuts, that's even more likely), but once a month, you can walk into a grocery store with the knowledge that you can have almost anything you want. You can fill an entire cart to overflowing, and as long as it's not all meat, you'll probably have enough to cover it all. You don't need to tally it in your head as you do with literally every single other expense in your life. For one day a month, you get to live and think and shop like a wealthy person. I mean, not really. It's still in the back of your mind that you've got to make this last all month, so you're going to be frugal, but if you want an apple or a pack of cookies, you can just grab it without thinking about how much it costs which is something you never get to do otherwise when you're poor. It's the only glut you know.
You've seen shoppers line up after Thanksgiving to get all those amazing discounts, right? The way they camp out and then battle each other for a half-price TV? Well, people on food stamps can't afford a new TV even at half-price, so that's an alien world. A sale means nothing when you're broke. But take that same sense of frenzy, that sense of being overwhelmed with rare, sudden, and momentary bounty, and you have some sense of what it's like to see your food stamp balance replenished at the beginning of the month.
When my family borrows a car to go on a big grocery shopping trip, the first thing we do when we get back to the car is start opening things up to eat them. The kids want a cookie or some candy. I want a soda. We might pass around some chips. It's a craving we've been feeling and unable to feed for maybe a week or two...or longer. For some people, it's heroine or weed or pills or alcohol that brings them relief. For us, it's a long-anticipated glucose rush. When the kids have a birthday party or we celebrate a holiday, there's nothing elegant about it. The meal isn't about exotic ingredients or preparation methods with French names. It's about whatever gets us that rush. (I prefer meat over sweets, myself, but price is a constraint, so you find work-arounds. I've eaten two packs of beef-flavored ramen noodles just while writing this.)
My point is that at the very root of it, we're dealing with strong, biological urges. Satisfying those urges feels good, so we make that satisfaction something we share with people we care about. It's something we do together. If you've ever gone out for sushi, think how you'd feel if a friend who came along with you brought a burger and fries along to eat while you have sushi. Or the other way--you and some friends grill burgers outside or go to a hamburger joint, but one of them packs a little bento box. By not joining in eating the same thing as the others, you're missing a major social aspect of the gathering. For this reason, when we eat with others as a form of social bonding, we eat what they're eating. When you buck the trend, you isolate yourself socially. This means we're talking about not just biological cravings, but psychological ones, too. We need acceptance.
What happens, then, when tragedy becomes tradition, as Carolyn Wysinger wrote about? What happens when the slave master throws the scraps of the pig carcass to his slaves, and the slaves' children grow up with that as their fond memory of childhood? What happens when that slop becomes a part of your cultural identity? I'll tell you: it becomes a source of pride, because it's part of your identity as a member of a community that has survived hardship. When someone outside that community tries to exert their supremacy by devaluing the things that define you, you either let them, or you fight back, as Wysinger's aunt did. You devalue whatever they're holding up as supreme and declare your own thing to be supreme. That's how you assert your equality. "I don't want your fruity ol' couscous anyway. I got venison!"
In that situation, what would happen if Wysinger got her way...if the grocery store where her aunt shops stopped carrying chitlins and replaced them with hummus? Would her aunt feel liberated and empowered, now that the man is no longer forcing those slave scraps on her? Or is she more apt, as I think she would, to feel like an outsider was imposing his culture on her against her wishes? If she couldn't get what she wanted because a grocery store executive or public official made the decision that she should give it up her tradition and adopt a way he deems to be better, why on Earth would anybody think she'd be eager to embrace that?
It's an insult. When affluent white people decide that their taste in food is superior to the that of the poor brown people on the other side of town, and task themselves with the "merciful" mission of making those poor brown people give up their wretched ways and eat the way the affluent white people say is proper, that's the very definition of cultural imperialism. There are bigger hurdles here than just diabetes.
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