Hurting People's Feelings Online Has Been Illegal in Ohio since 2016

    In a recent conversation on Facebook, I was talking about how the values and policy positions of conservatives and liberals in the United States (as those terms are used in the United States) have gotten all jumbled up. In the 1970's and '80's, when I was a kid, it was the Republicans (more generally, "conservatives") who were perceived as being stuffy and authoritarian. They were bullies who demanded conformity with their Puritanical values of hard work and the vilification of everything pleasurable. They were associated with censorship and being tough on crime. The Democrats (more generally, "liberals") were the opposite. They were the hedonistic, drug-using, free-love hippies who would champion freedom of expression even for people they disagreed with. They were always sticking their necks out for idealistic causes, and usually getting cracked over the head for it by conservatives.

Starting around the 1990's during the Clinton administration, these roles started shifting. The conservatives still believed in what the conservatives had always believed in, but now they saw themselves as the plucky, persecuted underdog. The liberals still saw themselves as champions of the marginalized, but they abandoned their principle of equality, opting instead for a double-standard straight out of Animal Farm that said some people were more entitled to equality than others. Whereas the liberals of my youth would say that even neo-Nazis were entitled to free speech, the new ones are very selective about which people they see as worthy of having rights and legal protections. It used to be that the Republicans were racist and the Democrats promoted colorblindness. Now the Republicans preach colorblindness and Democrats favor doling out privileges by race and separating school children into "affinity groups."

Along with this jumbling of value, the two sides also adopted each other's tactics. The liberal "cancel culture" of everyone who doesn't toe their ideological line is nothing but their own rehash of earlier conservatives' "black listing" of suspected communists and others accused of "un-American" activities. Conservatives, on the other hand, have adopted the weaponization of victimhood, first promoted by liberals as "non-violence" and made famous by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It's not that today's conservatives are pacifists--they bring rifles to protests. But they understand the mechanics underlying victory through non-violence: you appeal to a mass audience and depict your opponent as a ruthless bully who has abused you mercilessly and unfairly. You appeal to their sympathies by exercising hypo-agency, making yourself seem helpless against the overwhelming power of your opponent, the Big Bad Meanie. That used to just be a liberal tactic. We know it from the Civil Rights Movement, where calm, very reasonable-sounding people would passively walk or sit while red-faced, enraged police would attack them in front of news cameras.

I saw a comic strip today where a conservative was employing this strategy. I won't share it here, but it presented itself as being helpful advice to flashers who want to expose themselves indecently. First it showed the "don't" method. A man in a trenchcoat opened it, exposing himself to a horrified woman and child. The woman called him a pervert. In the next frame, it showed a police mugshot of him holding a sign saying that he was charged with indecent exposure. Then it showed what it said was the proper way. The same man, now naked except for a Pride flag draped over his shoulders, exposed himself again to the same horrified woman and child. Once again, she called him a pervert. But this time, in the final frame, it showed her in the police mugshot, holding a sign saying she was charged with hate speech and homophobia. 

Conservatives find this a compelling narrative. It's red meat for people who feel unable to express their disgust and hatred without suffering consequences. But do those consequences actually include criminal prosecution? In the United States? I've heard about people getting (usually light) criminal sentences in the UK and Canada for what amounts to politically incorrect speech. To an American, it's alarming to see how frequently Britons are punished for things they share online that wouldn't even raise an eyebrow here. I thought, then, that this cartoon was a lot of pearl-clutching over nothing. 

And this is a topic I thought I knew something about. I used to be a university police officer, and when I went through the police academy in 1997, there was a newly added section about hate crimes. At the time (and my understanding was that that's still the case), all a "hate crime" consisted of was something that was already a normal crime, but the sentence was more severe if there was evidence that the victim was targeted for being a member of certain protected classes of people. So, for example, it was already illegal to beat up a person, but if you beat up that person because of their race or religion, you'd get additional penalties tacked on to the normal penalties. That's all a "hate crime" was in the United States, at least in Ohio in 1997. 

It's also worth noting that--again, at least in 1997--LGBT folks were not one of the protected classes in Ohio. When we each had to pick a research topic for this section and make a presentation to the class, I chose this exclusion and used my presentation to call out the homophobic insensitivity I had observed within the class from both students and instructors. My wife at that time was bisexual, and I had other friends and family members who were gay, bi, or trans, so I was keenly sensitive to the fact that the law offered them no special protection. Under state law, at least, they could even be fired from their jobs or denied rental housing on the basis of their sexual orientation. 

While working as a campus police officer, I kept up on intelligence on hate groups, relying largely on the ADL (the Jewish Anti-Defamation League) for information about white supremacist groups in the United States. If I saw posters around campus that were clearly meant to intimidate a group of people, I took it down and wrote an incident report. If I saw posters or other literature meant to incite hatred of a group based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, it wasn't a crime, so I didn't remove it, but I still made a note of it and built a body of evidence in the event that we needed to prosecute one of these hate groups for a crime in the future. And as far as I'm aware, I was the only cop in our department doing this. There might have been one or two others. Notably, both of those two were liberal, gay, and women. I was the only straight, white guy in the department who bothered taking any action against these hate groups. Even before I'd attended the police academy, I was involved in the struggle of neo-pagan religions to get proper acknowledgment from the government to be protected from persecution by police and legislators. 

But I know that things change, and the information I had might have become outdated, so after seeing that cartoon, I wondered what the Ohio Revised Code actually has to say today about hate crimes. Can a person be criminally charged just for saying something someone else doesn't like when the "victim" is a member of a protected group? I Googled "ORC hate speech" and was directed to Section 2927.12 Ethnic Intimidation. Per my earlier understanding, it just adds enhanced penalties to people who commit other crimes against people based on those people's race, color, religion, or national origin. It also applied specifically to only five other crimes--namely, Aggravated Menacing, Menacing, Telecommunications Harassment, Criminal Mischief, and certain subsections of Criminal Damaging or Endangering. 

I read these sections, and I was disturbed by something I saw there, which prompted me to write this. Section 2917.21 Telecommunications Harassment, subsection B, paragraph 2, says:  

"No person shall knowingly post a text or audio statement or an image on an internet web site or web page for the purpose of abusing, threatening, or harassing another person." 

They offer no definition of "abusing" or "harassing." That's wide open to interpretation. By my reading, that outlaws the posting on the internet of every political cartoon or any criticism--legitimate or not--of any individual who claims to feel "abused" by it. If so, that puts us into the realm of UK libel law. In the US, for an accusation of libel or slander to be sustained, it must be proved that the statement was both injurious and untrue. In the UK, it only has to be injurious, and they don't care that it was true. So if, for example, you're a daycare worker who's accused of molesting little kids, and I get on the internet and say, "Don't take your kids to this person's daycare. They're accused of molesting little kids," you could sue me for that in the UK and win. You could sue me for it in the US, too, but once I demonstrated that the statement was true--not that you actually molested anyone, but just that you've been accused of it--the case would be thrown out, regardless of how much money I had cost you. (There might be grounds there for "defamation of character," but let's not get too far afield with tangents.) 

My point here is that in the US, you traditionally don't get into trouble for saying things that are true, whereas the standard in the UK and commonwealth countries has been based on how much damage the statement causes, regardless of the truth. As far as I know, the US is uniquely dedicated to freedom of speech in saying that there's no legal penalty for speaking the truth, even if someone else doesn't like it. People like me who make a habit of saying true things that some people find upsetting have sanctified this freedom and clung to it desperately. But now, apparently, Ohio has done away with this freedom, effectively saying that it's illegal to post something online that hurts anyone else's feelings in any way. You can still say it to their face in person (at least as far as 2917.21 is concerned), but you can't post it online. They just made this change on August 16, 2016. Prior to that, it said no such thing. 

According to Ohio law, a violation of 2917.21(B)(2) is a first-degree misdemeanor on the first offense, and a fifth-degree felony on each subsequent offense. If I'm reading this correctly--and the only way I couldn't be is if there's a definition elsewhere in the ORC or a court precedence that defines "abuse" in some way that excludes shitposting on the internet--pretty much 80% of social media users (if not more) in Ohio are felons. We're way beyond someone calling for death to this-or-that ethnic group. If you write some true statement about your ex that they find hurtful, you're a felon. If you write that some politician is an idiot, and they feel it's "abusive," you're a felon. (Okay, a misdemeanant if it's your first and only time.) I find this troubling.

No, I don't know of a single case of anyone ever actually having been prosecuted for this, but the fact that any one of us could be is cause for concern. So is the fact that, rather than being some archaic law that just got forgotten, this is something our elected lawmakers purposely added to the law a little less than eight years ago. Why did this happen? And does it actually mean what it appears to mean? Is this simply a case that some bumble-mouthed legislator wrote something more expansive than he meant, and a bunch of inattentive legislators and the Governor signed on without reading it thoroughly? (That happens disturbingly often.) Has this come up in the courts at any point in the past eight years? What was the outcome? Maybe we have a reader better versed in the law who can comment and clear up these questions.

Kroger Tightens the Noose on Poor Columbusites

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

 ~ 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America 

In Columbus, Kroger grocery stores started a new policy of searching shoppers as they leave the stores. To my knowledge, they're not physically patting down people's bodies (yet), but they are inspecting receipts and carts, and, presumably, may be searching bags as well.

They're not doing this at all their stores, though--just six. Which six? I made a map. Never mind the heart with the pink-and-purple sunset thing (I live there) or the heart a bit to the west of that (a Chinese restaurant I frequent.) Interestingly, when I opened Google Maps and put in "Kroger", it showed many locations, indicated by red markers with shopping carts (and, oddly, one Aldi location--not even the closest one), but did not show two of the locations where the searches are being conducted--namely, the Hilltop location on the far west side near 270 and Broad, and the South Side location near High and 270. 

Notably, that South Side one is right next to a Wal-Mart that's being shut down, and very near to what had been a riverside encampment of indigent people until Columbus Police evicted them last year. Also last year at that same Kroger, a shopper was beaten to death by teens who'd been ejected from the store by security.

Perhaps the reason Google didn't show me those two locations is because they're farther away from my home than all these others. Anyway, I've market with black diamonds the locations where the searches are being conducted. As a sidebar, note the lack of Kroger stores close to my home, contrasted against their relative density elsewhere. There used to be another, that we visited frequently, near the yellow circle with a white start that's partially covered up by the sunset icon, just northwest of my home. That was the Northern Lights Kroger on Cleveland Avenue, near Innis, just a few blocks north of North Broadway. That one and the old one on Morse Road were both closed down and replaced by a new, larger store on Morse Road, roughly across the street from the old location.

 Readers familiar with Columbus will look at this map and immediately see a pattern. Many who see that pattern will tell you that this policy is racist, as the neighborhoods where the searches are being conducted are largely occupied by black residents, while the locations that aren't violating their customers' Constitutional rights are in predominantly white neighborhoods. They would look at this and claim that this is a racism problem. 

As with most such claims in 2024, this is close, but misdirected. The management of Kroger isn't targeting people over their skin color. They're not stopping blacks at the suburban stores. This isn't about race. It's about class. Yes, many of the residents in the neighborhoods with the searches are black, but nearly everyone in those neighborhoods is poor. Many of the shoppers in the unsearched neighborhoods are white, but nearly all of them are of a level of affluence that affords them the opportunity to live outside the poor neighborhoods.

You might (rightly) say, "Hey, wait--they're doing this at the Bexley Kroger! Bexley isn't poor!" That's right. Bexley isn't black, either. (It's about a quarter Jewish.) But that store exists on the edge of Bexley, at the border of the Near East Side (Old Town East/King-Lincoln District). It's across the bridge from Bexley, as though Alum Creek is a moat protecting the rich people on the hill from the rabble below to the west. As such, despite its proximity to Bexley, it's one of the locations serving poor, inner-city residents.

The other Kroger stores that those unfamiliar with Columbus might see as serving "the inner-city" that aren't conducting searches are the ones serving Upper Arlington, Grandview, and Clintonville. The annual median household income in Upper Arlington is $144,705. In Grandview, it's $100,833. In Clintonville, it's $94,850. In Linden, where I am, by contrast, it's only $36,498. That's per household, not per individual.

My point here is that the population being bullied by Kroger is especially vulnerable to such harassment. They're the least able to take their business elsewhere because they're less likely to own a car, and because "elsewhere" is so much farther away for them. They're more likely to be walking, riding a bike, or traveling by bus to do their grocery shopping, which means they're also more likely to be transporting their groceries in large, durable bags they bring with them--the very sort of bags these Kroger stores are prohibiting. 

It may be the case that Kroger is actually losing product being smuggled out the door in large bags. If that's the case, they could easily resolve that issue by offering a bag check service at the door. They're not going to do that, though, because it would require hiring a person. And that brings us to the real issue, here. Walk into any Kroger store in Columbus, and you'll see many checkout lanes, all closed. They typically might have one or two registers--if that--staffed by a cashier. The only other points of sale open will be self-checkouts. Even then, half the self-checkout registers may be closed, because they don't employ sufficient staff to babysit all the machines. Depending on the time of day, it's not unusual to see shoppers lined up halfway through the store waiting to check out.

Presumably, customers using the self-checkout are, whether intentionally or by accident, failing to scan some of the items in their carts, and so the stores lose money when those customers wheel their carts out the door without paying for everything they're taking. 

Is this only a problem at the six stores I marked with black diamonds? Are we to believe that the shoppers at these stores are uniquely incompetent at ringing up their purchases? Or uniquely dishonest? Or is it simply that Kroger would do this at all stores if they thought they could get away with it, but won't dare try it in the neighborhoods where lawyers live?

"So what," you may be saying, "Costco and Wal-Mart have been doing this for years. They're not violating anyone's rights. They have a right to keep their stuff from being stolen."

First off, Wal-Mart doesn't require a receipt for exit. They just want you to think they do, and hope that you don't know your rights. They place a "door greeter" by the exits and have them request to see your receipt, but they generally don't try to stop every single shopper, especially when it's busy. It's kind of random. But more importantly, though some of the receipt checkers can be quite assertive, they don't actually have a right to stop you. The things you purchased are your property every bit as much as the clothes you wore into the store are. You don't have to provide documentation to prove the ownership of the socks on your feet, and legally, you're no more obligated to provide documentation of ownership of the merchandise in your bags. 

Rather, if the store security ("Loss Prevention Officers") want to stop you on suspicion of shoplifting, they have to have probable cause. That is, someone has to have seen you stealing something, and you have to have actually taken it out the door for it to count as theft. Then they can stop you and detain you for the police. Until then, all they can do is watch and follow you. They have no right to accost you and demand that you submit to a search. 

The reason Costco and Sam's Club can get away with this is because they're private clubs. When you sign up for a membership, you sign a contract agreeing to allow them to search. You don't have to sign this, but they don't have to let you be a member, either. In a place that's open to the public--like a grocery store that's not a private, member's-only club--shoppers have the same 4th Amendment rights they could expect if they were walking down the street. Private companies don't get to act like police, stopping you and conducting non-consent searches, and all without a warrant. 

Kroger's way of getting around this is to put up a sign by the front door claiming that they "reserve the right" to search. You can't "reserve" a right you don't have in the first place, and Kroger appears to be relying on the people in these poorer neighborhoods to not know any better, or at least to be less willing to put up a fight. When this does inevitably wind up in court, I expect that Kroger's lawyers will argue that when customers entered, they were knowingly agreeing to the conditions set forth by Kroger when it placed a sign by the door. The sign might as well say, "By walking through this door, you agree to waive your Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure, unlawful detention, and self-incrimination."

I used to shop at the Morse Road Kroger regularly. It's close to my kids' schools, so it was convenient to stop there in the morning after dropping them off. But I won't be returning to this store while this policy remains in place. Furthermore, I don't think I'll be going to the bougie Krogers in the suburbs, either, because I don't want to financially support the company while they're treating my neighbors this way. I'll go to Sav-a-Lot and Costco.

"But Costco does this, too! What's the difference?"

The difference is that Costco actually offers me something in exchange for suffering this indignity. They give me steep discounts on gasoline and prescription medicines, discounts that I've calculated more than pay for the membership. We buy $4.99 rotisserie chickens there, seasoned and cooked, for less than it would cost me to raise a chicken. They're so cheap, we use them as cat food and keep a couple in the fridge as a staple to use when planning quick meals. They have big hot dogs and a refillable soda, together, for $1.50. (And you don't even have to be a member to buy them.) They sell huge slices of pizza for $1.99. You could sit there all day sipping your refillable soda for something like 69 cents without even being a member. And members can browse through the store grazing on samples of everything from lobster-stuffed pasta to veggie burger patties. You can have a light lunch just from Costco samples if you're open to trying a variety of new things.

But Kroger? Naw. Kroger's offering the same shitty service, the same do-it-yourself everything with long lines (now longer just to get out the building), and they want to treat me like a criminal? No thanks. Oh, I forgot to add--these aren't geriatric door greeters checking the receipts at Kroger like at Costco and Wal-Mart. They're armed, uniformed security guards, making the whole encounter feel even more like being stopped by the police. I'm not faulting Kroger for having armed security. In recent years, their rent-a-cops have been involved in a number of shootings fighting robbers and other violent people, usually in the parking lots. What I have a problem with is them using these guards to bully lawful shoppers who have no choice but to comply if they want to eat.

Equality within Inequality

 I recently saw on Quora that someone had shared this image (from Twitter, I guess):

 

 

 

 

 

The person sharing this on Quora remarked, "A little too passionate but he has a point."

I responded:

Too passionate? Society literally disposes of low-achieving men--on the battlefield in wartime and through homelessness during peacetime--and you think it's inappropriate for him to have feelings about that? Then you're the problem he's talking about.

For most of human history, we lived like all animals live. We made our homes and gathered food and other resources from our environment. Our only responsibilities were to our loved ones--our children, wives, parents, siblings and their children, maybe others whom we took in out of pity or relied on for mutual care. The only “achievement” was keeping everyone safe and fed.

The greatest advance in this was agriculture. Now instead of endlessly roaming to find food, we could make a cozy home and have the food grow right outside our door and produce a surplus. But that also meant people started getting possessive about land. Eventually, all the land was claimed, so now we had some wealthy people who owned land, and other people who had none. The landless people's only options for survival were to violate the claims of the landowners (stealing, poaching, squatting, war) or to go begging. The landowners exploited the desperation of the beggars and made them work to make the landowners richer.

From that point on, we've had an ethical double-standard. We see the wealthy as being entitled to idleness because they “earned” it somehow, even if that's just by being born or “chosen by God.” Everyone else--at least all the non-landowning men-- are seen as being born into debt, owing the world their best effort. “Pull your weight,” we're told. “Contribute to society.” We're assigned that role, and if we don't fill it, we're literally just garbage to be buried. Even then, the men tasked with burying us resent that we didn't arrange to have it done ourselves.

The reason “hitting the wall"--losing one's youthful, feminine beauty at around the age of 35–40--is such an existential crisis for a woman is because at that point, if she hasn't already claimed a role as a mother or won the attachment of a husband who will always love her and see her as being his to care for, all that's left for her is the life of a man. Up to a point, she could rely on neotony (the resemblance to a child) to cause people to involuntarily feel protective of her. And once she reached a certain age, she was also seen as having utility as a sex partner and a mother. But once she hits the wall and nobody wants to have sex with her anymore, if she hasn't cemented her position as wife or mother, all she has left is business, just like the men.

If, like the men, she spent her youth pursuing achievements at work, then she'll be able to support herself into old age just like a man, but will likely feel an instinctive yearning, a regret for never having had children. If, though, like so many women, she took her privilege for granted and failed to plan ahead--if she just partied and hopped from man to man through her 20's and 30's without ever having children or settling down into a committed relationship--she's going to be unprepared to support herself for the rest of her life.

This is why women used to be treated as property. Girls' parents felt a duty to ensure that their daughters would be provided for even after the parents had died. They'd arrange to marry her off to a man who would take good care of her so she wouldn't be fated to end up as a 60-year-old washer woman someday. It's why ancient Hebrew scriptures command a man to marry his deceased brother's widow and for a rapist to marry his victim. It was all about making sure that women and children were provided for in an age before the welfare state and child support enforcement.

-------------

First- and Second-Wave feminists felt that the height of achievement in the realm of sexual equality was to open all of men's jobs and spaces to women--to enable women to live as men. This is the goal of a spoiled girl who has no idea what it means to be a man, or the goal of a lonely, middle-aged woman who finds herself suddenly having to support herself in a system of restricted options. Now they're pushing affirmative action, trying to propel girls and women into STEM fields that most of them don't even want to work in, just because men still dominate those fields.

This is short-sighted. As the Twitter poster said, it only focuses on the winners among men. Trying to make the male experience the new default for women ignores what awaits men who don't succeed. These feminists see themselves as expanding opportunities for women, when what they're really doing is throwing them out of the frying pan and into the fire.

And really, there's a new milestone down that road that most women aren't interested in reaching--the equality of a woman fulfilling the role of family breadwinner and supporting her stay-at-home husband. Providing men with the privilege that women are tossing away isn't something most feminists show any interest in. It was thought, during feminism's Second Wave, that this would be the natural result--that there would be less class division because there'd be no reason for women to have to "marry up." They could marry purely for love, without regard to a man's level of achievement or wealth. It didn't happen, though. Instead, it appears that hypergamy is hardwired into women's instincts. A high-achieving woman sees her pool of eligible partners as consisting only of men more accomplished than herself. A woman who becomes an acclaimed neurosurgeon will look up the social hierarchy at the chief surgeon or a Surgeon General or some other person who "outranks" her. She won't consider the advances of someone she sees as her inferior. The higher up the ladder she climbs, the more people who get tossed into that bin labeled "inferior."

Rather than trying to hack our way through short-sighted attempts at sexual equality within a system of class inequality, it seems to me that it makes more sense to get to the root of the problem with the goal of getting back to the equality we enjoyed before people started owning land. If we determine that that's a genie that simply cannot be placed back in the bottle, and finite global wealth for which we all must compete is a reality that's here to stay with us forever, then we need to devise a system that eliminates inequalities among men, instead of just ushering women into that same cage match and calling it Utopia.

Babysitting ourselves

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

    ― Winston Churchill

 

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject." 

    ― Marcus Aurelius 

 

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

    ― Lord Acton

If it is true that power corrupts, then it follows that placing power in the hands of the entire populace will cause the entire populace to become corrupted.

    ― Me

 

Majorities can choose evil. They have done so, are doing so, and likely will continue to do so in the future. Humans, whether pursuing selfish interests of misguided notions of doing what's best for everyone, often choose actions that result in harm, whether by design or as an unintended consequence. That's true whether we're talking about one, lone dictator or a mob of millions of them. Political philosophers over the ages have argued over whether it's more moral to entrust power to the ignorant masses or to an elite few (or one) who are seen as being best qualified to rule. I contend that neither of these options addresses the fact that neither of them prevent whomever is eventually appointed from committing evil. If a government is engaged in ethnic cleansing, it makes little difference whether the public voted on it or whether it was the idea of a popular autocrat.

Once the capacity to commit evil is mitigated, then we can dissect the finer points of how power should be distributed, but I consider that question to be irrelevant until we first deal with the a government's capacity to do evil. That should be our priority. Whether we're to have an emperor or a senate or direct vote by every citizen, we must have a system for safeguarding the innocent. 

To that end, the founders of the United States wrote the Constitution, devising a system of checks and balances so that no one person or group of people would have an undue amount of power. And then, as an afterthought, they added the Bill of Rights, to drive home the point that the government was not to be in the business of molesting the people. It was a nobly conceived, but impossible task. A machine is only as good as its weakest part, and a machine meant to thwart evil is bound to fail if it's made entirely of people who are all free to choose evil. There's no point having multiple branches of government to keep each other in check if they're all in cahoots. That's just a good ol' boy system with extra steps. Telling a bunch of politicians to keep an eye on each other is like telling a bunch of nine-year olds to babysit each other. It doesn't work.

But of course we have to put people in these leadership roles. What alternative is there? Computers? Someone has to program the computer and tell it what the parameters are, what principles to hold sacrosanct and how priorities should be ranked. If we leave that to AI, there's no telling what sort of glitchy nonsense it might come up with. Without the capability for a human override, we're entrusting our fate to something that thinks people should have seven-fingered hands. With it, we're back to just trusting people to make the right choices. 

I'm sorry, I don't have a solution to this dilemma. I don't know that there is one. But if we're to govern wisely, we must at least be mindful that this dilemma exists. There is no form of government--not even democracy--that completely prevents the possibility of a government doing evil.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed

Unmasking the Tolerance Paradox

 If we accept the principle that intolerance is always wrong, then we find ourselves in a situation where we are expressing intolerant judgment of others who express views that we find to be insufficiently tolerant. Oddly, this can turn into such a witch hunt that the enforcers of absolute tolerance end up being every bit as authoritarian as the Nazis they're trying to root out. People who truly believe in absolute tolerance realize that their "live and let live" policy must be extended even to those whom they find to be intolerant.

Philosopher Karl Popper warned, though, that this exercise of absolute tolerance will, paradoxically, lead to a society in which intolerant people are given the freedom to spread intolerance.

 

...and thus we have the Social Justice Warriors, the self-appointed agents of the new Inquisition, who ferret out every trace of what they judge to be bigotry, and punish it with extreme prejudice. They make an exception for themselves because, as the radical adherents of most religions, they feel that their cause is inherently righteous, and therefore is afforded a special exemption.

I'm uncomfortable with the acceptance of this paradox, not just because it leads to a reign of terror, but because it's entirely unnecessary. A logical mind should not get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. When two mutually exclusive facts appear to be true at the same time, it's either because they're not actually mutually exclusive, or because at least one of them isn't as true as you thought it was. The tolerance paradox only appears to be paradoxical because it is misstated.

That is, the initial presumption--that tolerance is inherently virtuous--is wrong. Tolerance is not an absolute good. As with most things, too much is as bad as not enough.

The true virtue in what we've been calling "tolerance" was never tolerance in the first place. It's justice. Racism is wrong. Full stop. But the reason racism is wrong isn't because intolerance of any kind is evil. Racism is wrong because it judges the innocent to be guilty. It disregards the free will and agency of individuals and holds them collectively responsible for what others not under their control may have done. 

So if a man of a particular ethnicity robs and kills people, I'm not wrong to hate him for it. He's doing evil things and should be stopped and condemned. We needn't feel guilty about thinking that or saying it out loud. He's bad. But if we then hate everyone of his ethnicity--people who didn't rob anyone and who had nothing to do with his robberies--that's wrong. The reason it's wrong isn't that it's always wrong to condemn people, nor that it's always wrong to condemn people of that ethnicity. The reason it's wrong is that it's wrong to condemn the innocent. 

It's also not that it's inherently evil to make broad generalizations. Broad generalizations are fine, as long as they're accurate. If we agree that murdering children is wrong, for example, then we can confidently make the broad-brush statement that all murderers of children are evil. There aren't exceptions. I don't need to get to know each one of them personally and walk a mile in their shoes before I can claim that people who murder children are evil. I sure as hell don't need to be one of them before I can judge their actions to be evil. 

The reason it's okay to make a generalized judgment against this group is because the grouping is defined by their evil action and not anything else. Let's say there's a group of people called the Blobbersnots who hail from the mountains of Lower Upstanistan, and some of the Blobbersnots murdered children. It would be wrong for us to say, based on those murders, that all the Blobbersnots are evil, because not all Blobbersnots have murdered children. Only some of them have. Hate the murdering, not the being a Blobbersnot. The mistake people make is to think that murdering children is an inherent part of being a Blobbersnot. But unless their culture mandates that all Blobbersnots must murder children as a rite of passage or whatever, it's not true. If murdering children isn't a cultural tradition or a religious teaching among the Blobbersnots, then there's no reason to judge them all guilty. There's nothing in the Blobbersnot genes that predestines all Blobbersnots to murder children.

Most racial (ethnic, religious, etc.) hatred--call it "othering"--is rooted in this tendency to make judgments based on assumptions about things that aren't true of all individuals in the group. The teaching of colorblindness in the 1960s-1980s was all about uncoupling this mental association between a person's status of "other" and the assumption that they're bad. Society was engaged in the process of unlearning prejudice and to judge people as individuals based on their individual actions and ideas. Under this value system, it would have been okay, for example, for me to hate you for supporting apartheid in South Africa, but not okay for me to hate you just for being a white South African because I assume that you must support apartheid. It's the practice and support of apartheid that's detestable, not your skin pigment or your nationality. 

So you see, the thing we're hating is injustice, and people had to learn that just being born into a group doesn't automatically make you guilty of committing injustices. It's difficult to believe that an entire population could have been that simple-minded over something that seems so obvious today, but I saw it. I'm not old enough to have seen segregation (at least not in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where I grew up), but all the adults I knew when I was a child had lived through it, and I got to see their thought processes up close. I listened to their stories and consumed their media. The law had progressed, but the attitudes were still there. Stereotypes persisted. People openly (for a while) made jokes about this or that ethnic group based on the idea that certain characteristics could be assumed to be true of all members of that group. 

When we hear those today, we feel disgust. It's repugnant now to attribute unflattering behaviors to a group based on anything other than their behavior. That is, unless the target is one of the groups that the audience still considers to be deserving of scorn. So, straight, white, conservative, Christian males if you're a liberal. If you're a conservative, there are a whole lot more targets you find acceptable--liberals, vegans, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, immigrants, people with colorful hair or any other sort of unorthodox appearance, people in family or relationship structures other than monogamous, nuclear families, artists, academics, the poor, bicyclists, soccer fans, people who are afraid of guns, cat lovers, anyone who eats sushi, anyone who doesn't worship the U.S. flag or idolize the military, etc. (Incidentally, conservatives, that's why you have the reputation as being the bigoted ones, and why liberals laugh at you when you say that they're the real racists based solely on the fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery 160 years ago.)

Incidentally, if you'll allow me a brief aside, I often find these days that American conservatives hold the right position for the wrong reasons. This--the idea that American liberals (let's just say "Democrats" since that's who they're always targeting with these statements) are "the real racists"--is one such position. That is, they're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. I say this because, by and large, most American conservatives alive today have embraced colorblindness to at least some extent. Observe the prevalence of spokespeople for the right who don't fit the mold of straight, white, Christian male. They're valued, in part, because they don't fit the mold, because they're living proof that what conservatives value are ideas that can be held by people regardless of their ancestry, and because they put lie to the claim that conservatives are racists. 

Liberals, on the other hand, particularly of the "woke" variety, are very racially motivated. They draw lines between races and judge people to be good or bad based on the color of their skin, with white people being the devils and everyone else being the angels. They strenuously reject colorblindness and feel it's right to judge white people as all being undeserving oppressors. It's racist, but as with the tolerance paradox, they make an exception for what they feel is a righteous cause. They aren't truly against racism. They're against racism against people of color. They think it's virtuous to be prejudiced against whites. So while some conservatives still have some racial prejudices, they're actively trying to shed the image that they do, while liberals are fully embracing their own hatred of whites and making broad assumptions about the victimhood and powerlessness of whole races of people based solely on their race. It's ugly, and they need to own up to it before pointing any more fingers at conservatives.

End of digression. It wasn't all that much of a digression, really, as it brought me back around to the point I wanted to make anyway, which is that for all the Social Justice Warriors' posturing about how they won't tolerate intolerance, much of what they're labeling "intolerance" isn't any such thing. It's the opposite. It's accepting that people are self-governing individuals, responsible for their own choices and actions. It's the conviction that each individual ought to be held accountable for what they do as an individual, and not be given a pass or a condemnation because of their membership in some genetic group.

I've been avoiding specific, real-life examples because they tend to be triggering and divisive in such a way that they cause people's rational faculties to shut down, and they react with hostility, completely missing whatever point I was trying to make. So let's return to the Blobbersnots. In America, the Blobbersnots are a minority who carry the nasty reputation of being a culture that murders children. Predictably, the conservatives hate them for the simplistic old "othering" reasons. "They ain't like us! Kick 'em out!" But then the liberals react to that by acting as though the Blobbersnots are the good guys. And the part that I find infuriating is this thing they do today where, instead of making the argument that not all Blobbersnots murder children and that it's racist to assume that they do, the liberals instead are saying, "It's okay for Blobbersnots to murder children if they want to, and you're a bigot if you say they shouldn't!"

And that's a good example, albeit a hypothetical one, of what I mean by saying that liberals often hold the wrong positions, while conservatives often hold the right ones for the wrong reasons. 

Before I go any further, I want to make clear that the child-murdering allegory is no veiled reference to abortion. I just needed something extreme enough that everyone can agree that it's bad, and we live in a time of such evil that it's hard to come up with an evil that won't have a faction defending it, so I reached to human instinct ("preserve the species") for an atrocity that so deeply offends our core nature that people across the political spectrum would agree that it's bad. The fact that I have to clarify this, though, for fear that it will be mistaken for a wedge issue that many liberals strongly defend, is a good enough demonstration of what I'm getting at here: liberals often defend evil. They might rationalize that it's about some noble ideal like tolerance, but it really arises from an overdeveloped sense of compassion that seeks to extend unjust mercy--to fail to stop evil and to forgive it instead of smiting it.

One of the best artistic representations of this I've seen is an episode of The Walking Dead called "The Grove" (season 4, episode 14). If you're unfamiliar with the series, it's set in a fictional, present-day America (Georgia and Virginia, mostly) in which all dead people turn into flesh-eating zombies unless their brain is destroyed. In this episode, a young girl of about 12 named Lizzie has decided that the zombies have been misjudged, and that they really just want to be our friends. She likes playing with the zombies (having them chase her) and thinks we'd all be much happier being zombies ourselves. To this end, she murders her little sister so that the little sister can become a zombie and "prove" to the adults that zombies aren't really so bad. That kind of crazy can't be fixed and is a danger to everyone, and so the heroine of the episode, Carol, who had assumed responsibility for caring for these two girls, tearfully executes the oblivious Lizzie, saying, "Look at the flowers, Lizzie," before shooting her in the back of the head.

Lizzie is the embodiment of absolute tolerance. She illustrates the danger of tolerating evil. The zombies want to eat us. Being nice to the zombies by letting them isn't virtuous, it's evil. But the current iteration of American liberalism ("Wokeness") has decided that dedication to niceness is more virtuous than dedication to justice, and so they meet evil with kindness. "Jayjay got shot while stabbing a policeman? That's sad. We should get rid of the police, so people like Jayjay won't get shot anymore when they stab people. Randall twisted his ankle running out of a jewelry store that he robbed? Then we should make it legal to rob stores so Randall won't have to run in fear anymore and risk hurting himself." They protect the guilty at the expense of the innocent. They're so wedded to the idea that all strong and capable people are the villains that they root for many of the real villains.

Noblesse Oblige

 The following was originally posted as an answer to a question asked on Quora.com.

Original question: “Do homeless people deserve to have society provide basic shelter for them? Why or why not?”

The answer to this question is highly dependent upon what you mean by “society.”

Humans are animals. All animals on this planet that we know of—all living organisms, really, not just animals—subsist by consuming resources from their environments. Mostly, they consume other organisms. We do the same.

Except when caring for their own young, most animals display no sense of altruism in voluntarily feeding other animals. To the extent that it does happen, it’s usually done out of selfish motivations, such as when ants raise aphids for food. It’s only in social animals that we see exceptions to this. For example, female lions hunt and bring meat back for their whole lion community. Wolves hunt as a pack and eat as a pack, without any sense of private property. Likewise, a village of humans may all work collectively to plant and harvest a large field of grain, and then share it among the entire village, even those who were too weak or sick to work.

But for most of modern humankind’s existence—all but the last ten-thousand years of our 200,000 to 300,000 years of existence—our chief mode of procuring food was hunting and gathering. Our usual means of obtaining shelter was to make it ourselves from whatever local materials lent themselves best to the task. We made tents and huts and houses out of skins, sticks, logs, rocks, wool, mud, grass, leaves, and bark. Aside from social and familial obligations within one’s band/tribe/family/village, nobody owed anyone else food or shelter. If we offered it to an outsider, it was as an act of kindness, generosity, or perhaps a desire to flaunt one’s wealth. It wasn’t required.

So this is the natural state of things. If you are a mentally capable, able-bodied adult and are free and able to roam your environment to gather food and building materials to make your own house, and you don’t have a house, then that’s your own fault. Go make one. If a storm knocks it down, build another one, maybe in a more protected space this time.

But that doesn’t really describe the situation most homeless people today find themselves in, does it? For most, it’s simply that they can’t afford to rent an apartment. Afford? Where did “afford” ever factor into what I just described above? Money has nothing to do with slapping together mud and sticks. We’ve been doing that since before money was invented. So why should a lack of money keep someone from being sheltered?

There are a couple of things going on, but they’re all part of one system. The first thing that’s happening is that some people—people with armies protecting their interests by force—claim the land and its resources as their own private property. Even if they claim more than they have any personal need for, the system of laws that they set up among themselves says that all the land is property, and that nobody else is entitled to use of someone else’s property. Some of this property is held by the government rather than by private individuals or businesses or other organizations, but even that “public” land is not typically available for all members of the general public to freely gather resources from and live on.

In this system of artificially constructed restrictions, there are people born with no legal right to exist on any spot and no legal right to gather and use any resources but air and sunlight. This is how homelessness was invented.

Humans are clever, though, and these dispossessed people, motivated by the will to live, sometimes find loopholes. Maybe they find public land that the law prevents them from being ejected from, or they find an abandoned house, or the resources of the enforcers are simply spread too thin to be 100% effective in kicking out all squatters and settlers who don’t legally own the land they’re living on. Whatever the case, they sometimes find ways to skirt the law or actually comply with it in a way that the writers of the law never intended. That brings us to the other thing that’s happening.

The other thing that’s happening is that the property owners use the law to create more restrictions to try to curtail the innovative non-landowners who found ways around the property laws. Why do they bother? Is it just pure sadism?

There may be an element of that in some instances, but that’s not the primary motivator. I said above that people will claim more land than they can personally use. They often do this at great expense to themselves. Why? Because land is a finite resource, and once it’s all claimed, the people who don’t have any can be made to pay for permission to exist on any particular spot of owned land. We call this “rent.” Whereas 30,000 years ago, if you, a stranger, built your house closer to mine than I liked, my choices were to leave, risk my life trying to chase you off, or just learn to live with it, under our system today, if you want to live next to me on land that I legally own, I can say that you owe me money every month if you don’t want the police to remove you. We call this “being a landlord.”

If you own enough land, you can collect enough rents from enough people who just want to exist without being threatened with removal that you can live entirely off the money you collect. You won’t have to work anymore. In fact, you can become lavishly wealthy and live like a king. People tend to like living like kings, and once they’ve had a taste of it, they don’t want to go back to scraping in the dirt for roots and grubs to eat. So they set up laws to try to force all non-landowners to participate in this system of paying rent.

How are the landless people to pay, though? Where do they get the money? They have no land to rent out to others, so they must sell their labor. If they wish to be allowed to exist in a spot, they have no choice but to sell their labor. And because they aren’t allowed to hunt and gather food, and no land on which to grow it, they must buy their food, which also requires them to sell their labor. Every resource a person might want other than air and sunshine, he must pay for by selling his labor. In this way, the property owners force the landless people to work so that the property owners don’t have to. It’s a complex form of slavery that inserts just enough steps between the exploited and the beneficiaries to give the illusion that it’s all voluntary. But, of course, it’s not voluntary any more than handing over your wallet to a robber who says, “Your money or your life!” can be said to be an act of charity. “Obey your boss or die” whether by hanging or by hypothermia or starvation, is slavery no matter how you slice it, and I think that it’s high time that we stop kidding ourselves that it’s not.

If you capture a wild animal and put it in a cage so that it is not free to wander the land and gather food for itself, whose responsibility is it to provide it with food? Can the animal be said to be responsible for providing its own food when you’ve deprived it of the freedom to do so? No, if you stick it in a cage, you must feed it. You’ve assumed responsibility for providing for the animal by taking away its ability to provide for itself.

Now, what if you put a wheel in that cage for the animal to run on? Say the wheel turns a little generator to produce electricity, and you sell the electricity. If you pay the animal in morsels of food in exchange for so many turns of the wheel, have you truly restored the animal’s freedom to provide for itself, or have you simply enslaved it, so that its only options are to work for you or to starve itself to death?

When landless people have no income, and we pretend to be charitable by providing them work to do for us in exchange for the right to be present, and to eat food that we make them buy from us, have we actually given them something, or are we just enslaving them?

“But that’s not slavery! If they don’t want to work for me, they can just go…work…for someone else.” A slave is a slave. Their slavery doesn’t end just because ownership of them transfers from one master to another.

Let’s talk about the alternative. I’ve said that our current economic system turns the landless into slaves. What would it mean for those slaves to be freed?

Well, we could decide to divvy up all the public and abandoned land and distribute it to the landless people. But then new people would be born, and when parents kick their kids out of the nest, they’d be creating new landless people within a generation. Now, maybe, if we had a government that made a priority of scooping up abandoned properties to assign them to new landless people, and if we put a cap on how much land one person could own so that more could be freed up for redistribution, maybe that could work. I haven’t run the numbers to know whether it possibly could.

But another approach would be to simply undo the restrictions that make the enslavement possible. Make it illegal to charge rent, for example. It’s that simple. Suddenly, there would be no advantage to be had by hoarding more properties than you could use yourself. Maybe you have other uses, like housing your friends, and that would be okay. But as soon as you demand something more than prestige and goodwill in return—like labor, if you’re housing your employees—you’d be in violation of the prohibition against collecting rent. By removing most of the financial incentive to own surplus properties, people would shrink their real estate holdings to avoid the taxes and maintenance costs. Why pay for a house you don’t need and can’t use to make money? People would be giving them away just to get rid of the responsibility of having them. Real estate investment corporations would vanish, and housing prices would crash overnight. I expect you could probably get a little house in a poor neighborhood for about the price of a car.

Short of that, at least remove all the other restrictions to people supporting themselves. Let them start businesses without licenses and permits. Let them build whatever kind of shelter they want to live in without requiring adherence to codes. Let them grow food, even if that food grunts or squawks. Let them grow it to eat or to sell. Stop criminalizing self-sufficiency. That’s what it would look like to end this form of slavery.

But we haven’t done that, and we aren’t doing that, and we aren’t likely to do that anytime in the predictable future, because we don’t want to threaten our property values. Instead, we’re choosing to keep enforcing this system of slavery that requires the non-compliant—voluntarily or not—to be homeless. We effectively put people in a cage and tell them to run on the wheel if they want to eat. When you put an animal in a cage, whose responsibility is it to feed that animal and provide it the other resources it needs? You’ve taken away its ability to provide for itself, so you’re now the provider, like it or not.

So, yes, I would say that landowners who want to keep claiming their right of ownership have inherited, along with their property rights, the responsibility of providing—at a minimum—food, housing, water, and heat to all non-landowning citizens within their jurisdiction. Probably the way to do that with the least fuss is to simply use property tax revenue to fund public housing and food distribution programs. If we wish to acknowledge the injustice of the situation and ameliorate it, we could make access to public food and housing an inherent right of all non-landowning citizens, without tying it to any work requirement. A caged animal is no less deserving of food because it refuses to run on the wheel. If you want to make it responsible for feeding itself, let it out of the damned cage. If you want to maintain the system that creates the cage, this is the price of it.

If you don’t want public housing blighting your community, and you don’t want to put the landlords out of business, then the tax money collected could simply be distributed out to the landless as a guaranteed basic income. But even there, we’d have to put some kind of price controls in effect to prevent increases in rent and food prices from outpacing the landless people’s ability to pay for it. It might be more effective to issue non-monetary vouchers entitling the bearer to one month’s rent, ten pounds of rice, etc., with the vendor then turning to the government for compensation, and the government taxing landowners to make up any deficit. Under such a system, if the landowners start feeling sufficiently pinched, as long as some constitutional protections were in place to prevent the landowners from simply doing away with the landless people’s right to sustenance, the landowners may find themselves entertaining the idea that it’s simply cheaper to share the land, or to turn more landless people into landowners so that government spending is less and the tax burden is more widely shared.

10,000 Tuna Sandwiches

There's a logical fallacy I've discussed previously on Facebook, but I'm not sure I've ever talked about it here. It deserves revisiting, because not only is it growing, it's now deadly. I've looked, but I've never found it listed among named fallacies. Surely, it deserves a name, but I've not yet come up with a good one. 

Here's how it works. We have two people--let's call them Heather and Kristy. Heather and Kristy work at the same business, and there's a fridge in the break room where employees can store their lunches. One day, Heather stole Kristy's lunch. That was a Bad Thing.

Kristy now has the moral high ground. She has been victimized without provocation or justification. Heather had no defensible reason for depriving Kristy of Kristy's lunch, and she did it anyway. There's no equivocating about this. What Heather did to Kristy was wrong. If Kristy wants to make a big, dramatic display of publicly wailing about how mean Heather is, in a bid to get sympathy, she can do that. That's how victim culture works--you win by losing in the most public and pitiful way possible. You gain status and power by being beaten and pitied for it.

So Kristy does this. She wails and mourns her lost lunch and turns everyone against Heather. One might say that, in a sense, Kristy has received her compensation. She's gotten justice already--all the co-workers love her and hate Heather, and all it cost Kristy was a tuna sandwich and a fruit cup. 

Still, for some reason, we don't account it that way. Even though Kristy has been awarded social approval and Heather has been sentenced with social scorn, we don't acknowledge that as having any material value. We still say that Heather is just as fully indebted to Kristy as if nobody had raised an eyebrow about the stolen lunch. In our culture of English common law, social standing is not regarded as fungible, outside of defamation lawsuits. As far as we're concerned, Kristy has yet to be made whole. Kristy is still the aggrieved party, and Heather is the scoundrel. Popularity is just a perk, and being regarded as a pariah is just...nature, I guess.

I want to pause here and just examine that a moment. Once upon a time, public shaming was a sentence. People would get locked in the stocks in the public square. Yes, the stocks were physically uncomfortable, but the point of it wasn't pain. It was that you were being publicly humiliated. Everyone who walked past you during the day, in that busiest part of town, would see that you had been bad. They would sneer and harden their hearts, and you would cry. That was the point of it. When people were publicly lashed, yes, it hurt and left scars. But it happened publicly--not just to terrorize the audience into compliance, but also so that they might look upon you judgmentally. Even further back, we have tales of executions by public stoning, where everyone in town would throw rocks at the condemned. These punishments were as much about social rejection by the collective as they were about physical pain and injury. 

We mostly don't do that anymore, though. Liberals don't want it because they think it's cruel and unusual to make someone feel bad for being bad, and conservatives don't want it because they think that just making someone feel bad isn't cruel enough. But let's get back to Heather and Kristy.

The Bad Thing score is now Heather-1, Kristy-0. The next day, Kristy steals Heather's lunch. Just yesterday, she was getting all the co-workers to scorn Heather for being a lunch stealer, but now Kristy is a lunch stealer, too. The score is 1-1. 

The school of thought that says the social scorn doesn't count for anything would say that Kristy's theft was justified, because she was merely collecting compensation that Heather owed to her. They're even now, right? Heather stole from Kristy, and now Kristy stole an equal amount right back. 

Well, Kristy has been compensated for her loss, but has she been compensated for her feeling of being victimized? Has Heather been adequately punished for her act of unprovoked theft? If we look at her social standing among her co-workers, we could say that yes, she has been. But in this culture, that doesn't count. So on Day 3, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again. Surely, justice has now been served, hasn't it? If anything, it's been overkill. Heather took one sandwich and lost two. The old Biblical standard of "an eye for an eye" has been exceeded. 

On Day 4, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again, because Kristy is still angry, and her idea of justice is, "I get to punish you until I feel better." That's not justice, of course, which is why it is generally dispensed by dispassionate third parties. 

But here's the kicker--Kristy is still publicly denouncing Heather as being a lunch stealer. She's still publicly ranting about what a horrible person Heather is, and the whole foundation of that claim is that Heather is a Lunch Stealer. Someone needs to shake Kristy and say, "Bitch, you're three times the lunch stealer that Heather is! You have no room to talk." 

The fallacy I want to address is that arguably by Day 2 and certainly by Day 3, Kristy has lost the morally superior position of Lunch Stealing Victim Who Has Never Stolen A Lunch Herself. As such, she no longer has standing to point a finger at Heather and denounce her as a lunch stealer. You can play the victim, or you can engage in tit-for-tat, but you can't do both. Once you start using lunch-stealing as a weapon to punish your opponent, you have abdicated the claim that Lunch Stealing Is Wrong. You have now shifted away from the position that Lunch-Stealing-Is-Wrong in favor of the claim that I-Am-Entitled-To-Do-This, even if it also means Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified.

The thing about shifting to a position of Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified is that maybe Heather felt justified in her original act of theft. Maybe Kristy had wronged Heather in some way, and Heather decided she was going to get back at Kristy by stealing her lunch. As long as we hold to the principle that Stealing-Lunches-Is-Always-Wrong, then Kristy can claim the moral high ground and say that no matter how she might have wronged Heather previously, stealing a lunch was crossing a line, and that nothing justifies such a heinous act. But the moment Kristy starts stealing Heather's lunches, it's no longer logical for her to make that claim. It's hypocritical.

Maybe that's why I can't find it listed among named fallacies. It does already have a name: hypocrisy. I think maybe the logicians and rhetoricians just couldn't imagine anyone being that unashamedly illogical.

For much of this century, and increasingly in the last decade, I've seen this particular type of hypocrisy being used in petty online debates, and then in politics. Someone will simultaneously denounce their opponent for doing a thing and do the same thing they're denouncing the other side for doing. Pick a position and stick with it! Either your opponent is bad because the thing they did is A Bad Thing, or it's not A Bad Thing, so it's okay for you to do it, too. One or the other. You can't have it both ways.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked civilians in Israel. The position of Israel and the pretty much the whole rest of the world is that attacking civilians is A Very Bad Thing. Israel shouted from the rooftops about how evil Hamas is for doing this Very Bad Thing, and we all agreed. "Yes, Israel, you're right--attacking civilians is a Very Bad Thing." And for the 34 days since then, Israel has been doing the very same thing every single day, only bigger, with much deadlier and more sophisticated weapons. And their justification has been, "But Hamas did it to us first!"

Pick one. Either killing civilians is always wrong, or killing civilians is justifiable when it's done as punitive retaliation. If it's always wrong, Israel has no claim to the moral high ground, because they've done more of it. If it's okay to do as punitive retaliation, then they've gone waaay beyond "an eye for an eye." Israel's retribution has been excessive. 

Further, if you take the position that attacking civilians is fair game if it's done as retaliation for other crimes, then Hamas wasn't out of bounds in the first place, because they were retaliating against Israel for everything Israel has done to the Palestinians prior to October 7th. And if that's the case, then everything Israel has done since October 7th has been unjustified. If you don't like that position, go back to the original one that Attacking Civilians Is Always Wrong. There simply is no logically consistent standard under which Israel has the moral high ground while murdering 10,000 civilians.