Guilt by Association

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that there was a big company dumping toxic, radioactive waste in your neighborhood--used fracking chemicals, maybe. Some of your neighbors work for the company. They've mostly bought into the company's reassurances that the chemicals are safe, and whatever fears they do still have are offset by their desire to remain employed. These people are either quiet about the dumping, or they're vocally supportive of it.

Most people in the neighborhood are simply unaware of what's happening, and would be upset if they knew.

There are, however, two houses on the end of the street occupied by people nobody else in the neighborhood talks to. And the reason nobody talks to them is because of the giant Nazi flags they have hanging on their front porches. One dude actually dresses up like Hitler. Nobody in the neighborhood talks to them, but their neo-Nazi friends from a ten-county region get together at those two houses to do whatever it is racists do when they get together in large groups.
 

The people who live in those two houses are well informed about the dumping, and they're quite upset. Being passionate, politically active sorts who have some experience with organizing groups, they decide to do something about it. They start going door to door, knocking on doors and talking with the neighbors about the dangers of the chemicals being dumped in their back yards. They say they're forming a community organization to get out the word and to put pressure on local government to stop the dumping. Individual voices, they argue, would have no effect, given the influence of this big, wealthy company and the support of their employees. If the other residents of the community want to get the government to stop the dumping, they're going to have to pull together.

But the people leading the effort are literally Nazis. Worse, they can't seem to compartmentalize their Nazism from their concerns about the chemicals. All the literature they're passing out to alert people about the dangers of the chemicals has swastikas on it, and messages about "preserving the health of our children, and thus the future of the white race." Disturbingly, there are a few people in the neighborhood who don't have a problem with this and think that maybe they had misjudged the Nazis. Many more aren't at all comfortable with the Nazi stuff, but they are very concerned about the chemicals. Some of them thought of starting their own, independent groups, but they were talked out of it with the argument that, "We need to present a united front. If we let petty differences divide us, the polluters win."

The company that's dumping the chemicals looks at this situation and decides to run a public relations campaign smearing the environmentalists as being a hate group. Like the extremist leaders of the community organization, the chemical company depicts opposition to pollution as being inherently racist. They lean into their image of being anti-fascist and contact the media. The media runs with the story. Now, outside of this neighborhood, the whole country has heard about this battle between polluters and the residents of the place where the chemicals are being dumped, but they've only heard it framed as "Diversity, Inc. versus the enviro-nazis." And of course, every time the media interview someone representing the environmentalists, they go to the leadership, who have a habit of taking that opportunity to rant about wanting to exterminate the other races and whatnot. 

Pretty soon, the whole nation is polarized into two camps. As far as most people are concerned--even people who've never been anywhere near your neighborhood--you either support dumping the chemicals in residential neighborhoods or you're a Nazi. Those are the two choices--cancer or genocide.

You live in the neighborhood, and you don't like either one of those options. You're opposed to the dumping, and you like seeing so many members of your community coming together to fight it, but you're not at all on board with the Nazi stuff, not one little bit. You can't just look past it or downplay it in the interests of advancing the environmental cause. You try to be independent and put out your own message on social media and whatnot, but people misjudge you. Every time you mention the chemicals, people decide you're a Nazi, and when you deny it, they just call you a lying Nazi. When you denounce the Nazis, everyone assumes you're on the company team and believe that the chemicals are safe and good for the community.

What do you do in this situation? Do you take on the role of "the weirdo nobody in the neighborhood talks to" that was formerly occupied by the leaders of the new community group? Do you isolate yourself like that? Do you organize your own, independent organization that, like those Nazis on the end of the street, is seen as a fringe group, only being able to increase its numbers by drawing on the support of people across a wide region? Or do you get louder trying to make yourself understood? Or do you get sneaky and try to infiltrate the enviro-nazi group with the intent of changing it from the inside? Or do you just try to be friendly to everybody on both sides and hope that things will work themselves out, never mind the fact that each side denounces you when they find out you're friendly with the other?

Let me know in the comments what you would do in this situation.

"May I Respectfully Ask How Many Times You've Been Shot at?"

In the course of a debate on gun control--if you can call it a "debate" when one person takes an informed position and a half-dozen others with no expertise on the topic pile on calling him an idiot--somebody asked me if he could respectfully ask me how many times I've been shot at. Following is my reply.

O Canada

 

Back when slavery was still legal in the United States, runaway slaves used to flee to Canada. Then in the 1920s, when alcohol was outlawed in the United States, people smuggled booze in from Canada or went there to drink. During the Vietnam war, some American men who wanted to avoid the draft sought amnesty in Canada. In 1985, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, a novel depicting a dystopian future in which an oppressive theocracy took over in America, and Americans defected to Canada. During the Bush II and Trump years, we often heard liberals saying they planned to run away to Canada, fearing that a Handmaid's Tale-style police state was soon to follow. In recent decades, since America has grown increasingly inhospitable towards the world's tired, poor, and huddled masses, Canada has stepped up to welcome them. If the United States is the Mother of Exiles, Canada is the exiles' cool aunt who they stay with when Mom is mad. I've heard that when savvy American backpackers are traveling abroad, they stick a Canadian flag patch on their backpacks, because so many people around the world hate Americans but feel warmly toward Canadians. Canada appeared to be the last bastion of liberty, the last place people could bug out to when even the Land of the Free was no longer free enough.

But things have changed.

 

 

Gun control in Canada has gotten increasingly restrictive, starting with handgun registration in 1934 and proceeding through to their banning AR-15s and many other types of guns in 2020. Jordan Peterson was an unknown Psychology professor from Toronto who became internationally famous in 2016 when he had the audacity to say that his government shouldn't mandate that people say certain words. And now, in response to protests from truckers and other "essential" workers who have survived COVID-19 while being required to work for the past two years (while their taxes supported everyone else staying home), the Canadian government is seizing the bank accounts of anyone connected to the protests. They're using laws intended for fighting terrorism to suppress political dissent. Police are reportedly going door to door among businesses in downtown Ottawa, the nation's capital, checking business licenses, driver's licenses, etc., and kicking people out--even people who aren't protesting--if the police don't feel that those people have a legitimate need to be there. The level of coercion that Canada is using to silence its people, to punish them for having spoken up in the first place, and to force them back to work is on a scale we typically associate with the likes of Vladimir Putin, not Justin Trudeau.

I once heard a story about a man who had come to the United States from Cuba, or perhaps from the Soviet Union. After he related how bad things had been in his home country, he said that Americans were in an even worse situation, because unlike the people in his country, Americans don't have anywhere to run to if tyranny rears its head here. But we did--Canada. I'm reminded of this story now, looking at how oppressive the Canadian government has become. It's true--we don't have any freer place to run away to anymore. The American people are backed into a corner. If our government tries to suppress us, our only options will be to comply or fight. Let's hope it never does anything so foolish.

Drop It Like It's Hot

 

I've noticed something that may be of interest to linguists or pop culture geeks. You know how there are some words that mean both one thing and its opposite? Like the word "sanction"--it can mean both to officially endorse, encourage, sponsor, etc., and to prohibit, discourage, or penalize. It can mean either officially allowing or officially disallowing. I don't know what these words are called, but if I were naming them, I might call them "autoantonyms."

Anyway, I've discovered a new one that's the result of evolving slang. I don't mean like how "bad" still retains its original definition in formal speech but means "good" in AAVE. This one has crept into usage among journalists. My wife suggested that perhaps it was just lingo peculiar to that field, but I'm seeing more widespread usage of it than just that.

The word is "dropped." It still retains its original definition of allowing something to physically fall (or causing it to fall). That hasn't changed. But in addition to that, we used to use "dropped" in a figurative way meaning "to abandon or discontinue," as in "The deadline for dropping classes without penalty is next Tuesday," or, "My boyfriend hit me, so I dropped him like a bad habit." (...which is kind of a weird expression itself, given that bad habits are not usually dropped suddenly or permanently.)

But the new figurative use means nearly the opposite. It means "to introduce, to present." I've heard pundits say, "The New York Times just dropped a headline..." which to me, means they retracted it, deleted it, refused to print it, or otherwise decided not to use it. But that's not the meaning the speaker intended. They meant, "The New York Times just published a headline," the idea being that "dropped" conveys a suddenness and powerful impact. This leads me to believe it may have come from "mic drop" or from a common origin with that expression.

Another example is one I just encountered in a magazine article. The author was telling a story about an online interaction with her friend. The friend sent her a link to a Substack, but she related this as "She dropped a link..."

I suppose in that sense, it might also come from video games. In many multiplayer games, you can't actually hand an item from your character to another player's character. To make such a transfer, you have to "drop" the item from your inventory, letting it fall on the ground, where it can then be picked up by someone else. So perhaps the author meant "dropped" in the sense of "She had this thing, but intentionally let it fall to the ground for me to find, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs."

Disputing Reality

 

I'm active on a Quora group about homelessness, and one of the most frequent and maddening statements I find myself arguing against on there is "Most homeless people choose to be homeless. It's a lifestyle thing." I tell these people they're wrong. Most people who are homeless are so because they don't have enough money for housing. The reason I fight back is because it seems they're denying that involuntary poverty even exists, and my rage trigger is people contradicting empirical reality.

"You can't see me!"

 

It's like that old Judge Judy line, "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." So many things coming from identetarians that I object to, and that cause other progressives to tag me as a conservative, are about this. Like when a black, multimillionaire politician says that they're oppressed and that a white welfare recipient living in a trailer park is oppressing them and has greater privilege. 

Patriarchy

 

Or when a criminal literally attempts to murder a police officer, they fight, the assailant loses, and then people say, "The police killed him for no reason but being black." 

 

"You're saying I did what now?"

 Or when a guy puts on a dress and people say, "He's an actual, biological woman now, he's always been a woman from the day he was born, and if you don't believe that, you're a bigot." There's this creepily Orwellian formula to it: 1) Make a false assertion that can be easily disproved, 2) Aggressively demand that others accept your assertion as reality, 3) Punish and ostracize anyone who refuses to accept it. 

 

"Right?"

 

It's like the Wokester version of the Spanish Inquisition. One of the big things the Inquisitors went after people for was blasphemy, and one of the articles of faith they insisted on was the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. For those who aren't theology geeks, that's the belief that the bread used in a Catholic mass to represent the body of Jesus during the sacrament of Communion (where they ritually re-enact the last meal Jesus had with his followers before his execution) literally, physically BECOMES the actual flesh of Jesus during the ritual, as opposed to just being a piece of bread that symbolizes his body. Another one was that they required everybody to believe that Mary was actually a virgin. 

 

 

Oh, hey, we were just talking about you.

 

 

These are pretty far-out things to expect a person who's not schizophrenic to believe, yet the Inquisitors were so insistent about it that they'd actually torture and kill anyone they didn't feel was sufficiently enthusiastic in the expression of their belief in these things. 

"This is your last chance--tell me I'm a pretty, blue pony and say it like you mean it!"

 

That's my top pet peeve. When a person (or worse, multiple people) who are completely unhinged from reality bully others into playing along with their self-serving delusions, I can't just ignore it. I paid attention to "The Emperor's New Clothes." You don't pretend to believe in bullshit just because powerful people insist on it.

So anyway...

LGBT folks are way overrepresented among the homeless. The explanation has always been that angry parents kick out their queer teenagers, leaving them homeless. I always accepted this narrative. I felt bad for the kids and felt resentment towards their parents.

But I'm seeing conversations among trans people on Twitter and there's this running theme of "My mom kept a picture of me from when I was a kid" or "My grandma deadnamed me" and so on--basically "My family regarded me as being the same person they've known my whole life"--followed by "...so I cut off my whole phobic family and haven't talked to any of them in years." This is met with much cheering and encouragement, and general disparagement of anyone who won't play along with their delusions.

I see a LOT of that. I've yet to run across a single account of "my parents kicked me out for not being what they wanted." I'm not saying that has never happened. I'm saying that, at least from what I'm seeing, the voluntary runaways vastly outnumber the ones who were put out of their parents' home onto the street against their will.

 

"Misery loves company. If you can't make peace with your own family, encourage other people to abandon theirs."

 

I recognize that my perception may be a bit skewed because of the possibility that the kids who are homeless might have less access to the internet. Maybe there's some hidden economic dynamic where the people who cut themselves off from their families voluntarily are more likely to have internet access, while the ones that were kicked out are less likely to. I'm not saying I think that's true or that I've seen any evidence of it--I'm just leaving the door open to the possibility of something I could be overlooking.

But it doesn't look that way. It seriously looks like they're the ones being jerks and making ultimatums, and then crying that they've been victimized when they haven't been. As I've told right-wingers for years, "No, not getting to force people to do what you say isn't a violation of your rights."

On one of these discussions, I saw trans people complaining about not being able to change their birth certificate in some states. Why on Earth would you change a birth certificate? The whole point of it is to make a permanent record of facts that actually happened. You were born in a certain place. Your parents were particular people. You were born at a definite time and date. In most cases, you were born with a clearly identifiable sex. None of these things change over time. Even if you get adopted, it doesn't change your genetics. History isn't to be erased and rewritten because we didn't like how it went. I'm 5'9". I can't just demand that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles change my driver's license to say I'm 6'4". I can't become a citizen of Canada just by changing my birth certificate to say that I was born in Ottawa. I'm 49 years old. I can't just have my vital records changed to say I'm 19. It doesn't matter how intensely I feel like a tall, young Canadian. I'm not one, and lying about it on official records is--and should be--a crime. 

" I identify as being 21. Gotta problem with that?"

So now I've got to reevaluate my position on whether most homelessness is really involuntary. I need actual data so I have numbers to crunch. Are most homeless people just really, really poor, or were they all kids who ran away from home because Grandpa called them by their birth name?

Tied to the Tracks

 

Edwardsville, IL  Photo credit: Reuters

If you hadn't heard, that wind we had last Friday was the remains of a tornado that ripped through several states. Dozens of people were killed, all ages. Yes, in December.

Last night I read that at an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, workers wanted to go home after they heard about the tornado headed their way. Warehouses aren't built to withstand tornadoes, and they don't have basements. One man texted his wife or girlfriend saying that management wouldn't let them leave. He was killed when the storm collapsed the warehouse. Six workers were killed there. Amazon blames the victims, saying they were not sheltering in the designated area. Who do you think told them not to? Surely not the micromanagers at Amazon who track employee's movements and time their bathroom breaks!

That we even have a text from him describing the situation is remarkable, because Amazon typically has a policy that warehouse workers aren't allowed to bring their cell phones into the building with them. They had temporarily relaxed that policy--I think something to do with COVID--and were getting ready to start banning phones again.

Mayfield, KY  Photo credit: The Guardian

This morning I heard that in Mayfield, Kentucky, the same thing happened at a candle factory. Workers heard the tornado sirens and wanted to go home, but management told them they'd be fired if they left. Eight of those workers have been confirmed dead. Another six are still missing in the rubble. The factory emphatically denies that they prohibited anyone from leaving, but the fact remains that they did not shut down and have everyone seek safe shelter.

This is the kind of thing that, when I write about it online, I'm often accosted by conservatives who first deny that it happened, then deny it again after I show them proof, then switch to blaming the victims and turning it into a culture war thing. I'm so weary of this dynamic. How do you argue with someone about the best way to waterproof a roof when they deny the existence of rain?

I told my wife--who hasn't worked for an employer in a very long time--about these warehouse tragedies...wait. Let me interrupt myself right there. Let's call these what they were: massacres. If a manager tied employees to a railroad track in front of an oncoming train, we'd have no problem calling that murder. A tornado sounds like a train, and it does even more damage when it rips through. These people were in the path of it, and their managers metaphorically tied them to the tracks. As such, I feel we should call these incidents massacres.

Mayfield, KY Photo credit: NY Post

This is where I'd expect to get some pushback from the aforementioned conservatives. "Nobody physically restrained these people. They're all adults. They made a choice to stay and make money instead of running for their lives."

We are conditioned from childhood to obey our taskmasters. When there's a school shooting, why don't all the kids head for the nearest door or window at the sound of the first shot and run home? Like 18th century army officers ordering their troops to stay in formation in the line of enemy fire, their teachers tell them to stay put, and they obey. Does that make it the victims' fault that they got shot, because they failed to flee? No. And why are the kids even there in the first place? Given the choice, most of them would stay home. They're there because they have to be.

Same deal with the workers. I assure you that not one person killed by the tornado in either of those workplaces was there fulfilling a lifelong dream of working for Amazon or Mayfield Consumer Products. Indeed, seven of the workers in the candle factory were actually inmates from the local jail (they all survived, though the deputy who was guarding them was not so lucky). No five-year-old says they want to be a picker when they grow up, and then eagerly looks forward to it all the way up to the day they're finally old enough. Those people--the "free" ones, anyway--were there because they needed the job to pay for the basics of survival. And had they left to seek safe shelter, and gotten fired, the unemployment office would have offered no help, because they would be classified as either having quit or having been "fired for cause." Then they have no income, no way to pay the rent or mortgage, no way to pay for groceries or utilities--a breath away from homelessness. A person shouldn't have to stare down an oncoming train just to earn a living. These were massacres.

As I was saying, I told my wife about these workers not being allowed to leave. Her response was, "Not allowed? Let's see them stop me! If I hear those sirens go off, I'm outta there and nobody's getting in my way!" As I said, she's self-employed. There's something about autonomy that allows common sense to rise up and displace obedience, perhaps because one gets into the habit of not having anyone to obey. We need more of that. If fewer people were pressed by necessity into obey-or-die (and maybe die even if you do obey) situations, we'd have more people acting sensibly. Until then, employees are caged hamsters running on a wheel, trying to earn their morsel of food, and the owner of the cage must be held entirely responsible for their well-being.

The Consequences of Prohibition (or "Not Everything Has to be Mandated")

(Written July 2, 2015, probably in response to some zealot wanting to criminalize plastic bags)

"I'm not one for unnecessary laws, but..."
...you are, though.

Let me illustrate how this would play out in a place like New York City.

A cop sees a young man wearing his pants so low that his butt is hanging out. The cop is irritated by the sight of this and wants to give the young man a hard time, so he stops him, hoping that in the course of a field interview, some kind of probable cause for an arrest will reveal itself. The young man is understandably irritated by the stop.

The young man is carrying a bag, so the cop says, "What's in that bag? What did you steal?"

"I didn't steal nothin'! Look, I got a receipt!" and the young man opens the bag to retrieve the paper. When he opens the bag, the cop sees a stryofoam take-out container inside. The cop tells him styrofoam is illegal and writes him a ticket. The young man says, "This is bullshit, I ain't done nothin' wrong. I didn't even buy this in the city."

The cop tells him to tell it to the judge. The young man, really irate at this point, says, "I ain't tellin' nothing'! I ain't payin' this damn ticket. All I did was buy lunch! You tellin' me it's illegal to buy lunch now? You gonna have to shut down ever restaurant in this whole goddam city!" The young man rips up the ticket.

The cop tells him that accepting the ticket isn't an admission of guilt, it's just an order to appear in court, and that if he's going to refuse, the cop will have to take him into custody. The young man starts to panic, gets louder and more belligerent, pushes the cop away, and it's on. The cop tries to wrestle him to the ground. In the course of their grappling, the young man puts a hand on the cop's holster and pulls, not even realizing what he's pulling on.

The cop has been conditioned through training to recognize this as an attempt on his life, so he breaks free, draws his weapon, and fires two shots. The young man gets up, facing the cop, and in a blind panic, reaches for the gun, hoping to make the cop stop shooting him. The cop, in turn, empties the rest of his magazine into the young man, killing him.

For the next six weeks, the media is awash with reports of "POLICE EXECUTE COLLEGE VALEDICTORIAN FOR POSSESSION OF STYROFOAM." Cultural leaders of whatever ethnic or religious group the young man was part of claim that the police are committing genocide against their community. Liberal academics take it seriously and jump on the bandwagon, bringing most other educated people with them. As a result, award-winning articles and best-selling books are published describing how the city has been secretly engaged in ethnic cleansing for decades.

Protests and riots happen nationwide, and pretty soon someone half a continent away who never even knew the guy with the saggy pants murders a couple police officers.

Every law written has to be enforced, and enforcement is both inflexible and extreme. So before you pass any new laws, decide how many lives it's worth.