Watada’s a Hero, Hoh’s a Tool

I learned of Watada’s release from the Army and Officer Hoh’s resignation the same day.  At first I was equally exhilarated by the stories, but then Hoh’s came to seem suspect.  As Arthur Silber more eloquently puts it, Watada is the genuine hero, while Hoh’s resignation lacks any underlying moral principles.

The main point of Hoh’s four-page resignation, which many commentators are fawning over, seems to be this:  that he is Not a Wussy.  (I’d put it in stronger terms, but I’m trying to keep this a family-friendly blog, for the 3-year-olds who might be reading.)  I’m surprised “Matthew Hoh – Totally Not a Wussy” wasn’t in the footer for each page.  As Silber did, I found the following passage the most indicative of this attitude:

“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the “second-best job I’ve ever had,” his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

Basically, Hoh is not against killing per se; he is thinking it unwise to continue in a “wasteful” war.  He is even willing to take a cut in pay and prestige to do it.  I haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this got the career blogs humming in disapproval.  It seems few can fathom turning down a promotion.

Perhaps because his resignation lacks principle, he is getting the bulk of the media coverage.  Watada’s resistance and release is getting less play.  Is it because his stance is the more genuinely liberating  and therefore threatening one?

“I believe the only real God-given right we have is the freedom to choose,” Watada says. “And when we take that away from ourselves, then we put ourselves in an invisible prison that nobody else imposes on us except for ourselves. When you tell yourself again that you do have a choice–I could go to prison for it, I could be tortured, I could die for it, but I have that choice and I can make it–then that invisible prison kind of lifts off, and you feel free. I felt so free when I told myself that I have a choice.”

It is good to be reminded of this.  When we complain that the government is oppressing us, we concede that our freedom comes from the government.  That leaves us even less free than before.

(Is it trivial to point out that Watada could have faced capture and “prison,” “torture” and “death” if he’d remained in the Army?  Had he followed his conscience or not, he would have been in danger.  I am not trying to imply that his decision was entirely self-serving, only to underscore that the government was offering him a choice between threats abroad and threats at home.)

Cultural Libertarianism: Howley and Seavey Both Get it Wrong

Well, this was frustrating.  Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy attempt to debate the importance of cultural values to libertarianism in November’s issue of reason:

Are Property Rights Enough? Should libertarians care about cultural values? A reason debate.

Howley writes:

It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his libertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as “cultural libertarians,” by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.

Well, how far off the mark is our hypothetical social conservative?  Isn’t sexual and consumer hedonism properly described as a kind of libertinism?  From Wikipedia:  ”A libertine is one devoid of any restraints, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals, and forms of behavior sanctioned by the larger society.”  The Oxford English Dictionary tell us that a libertine is “A man who is not restrained by moral law, esp. in his relations with the female sex,” or “Acknowledging no law in religion or morals; free-thinking; antinomian.”  I mean, why not call a spade a spade?  There are plenty of people who advocate sexual licentiousness, and only a fraction of them identify as libertarians.  If taking the Pill or channel surfing equated with libertarian activism, the movement wouldn’t be hurting so bad.

So I think Howley herself confuses liberty with libertarianism.  Also, I doubt that the conservative wants anyone to “stay mute on issues of culture.”  I mean, do they ever actually shut up about it?

In her introduction, I also think Howley is also overly optimistic about what development means for Chinese women:

“It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family,” Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents’ permission.

Of course, in a horrible twist, this boost in freedom has also enabled women to destroy even more of their less-favored girl children.  From “The Daughter Deficit” in the New York Times:

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 17.3 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in the family will direct her resources toward all her children’s health and education. She will fight for her girls.

Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas.

I haven’t read the book Howley cites, and so I can’t say if it covers this topic.  But suffice it to say that there are unintended consequences of even the most progressive, enlightened policies.  Cosmopolitanism alone won’t save us.

However, I think her example proves her point, albeit inadvertently.  Lifting the restrictions on commerce, seemingly the only goal of many libertarians, does not automatically equal liberation.  A cultural shift is also important.  Wealth without morals is exactly why we’re in the fix of spending billions to kill people who never harmed us, while the majority of Americans are too comfortable to care.

Seavey, as I just did, jumps on the sexual politics that Howley discusses, but he seems to be more interested in personally attacking her:

Howley is entitled to prefer whatever cultural norms she likes. We are in turn free to criticize, ridicule, and shun her.

Which he does, throughout the piece.  There’s more sarcasm than anything else:

Like countless young “Third Wave” feminists, Howley insists we see the specific, early-21st-century cultural agenda she’s pushing as a neutral blank slate, filled with endless possibilities and with no limitations on individuals and their boundless potential. By contrast, any conventions and cultural norms at odds with that vision are “walls,” like guard towers, seemingly backed by the threatening power of police truncheons.

The big question is why adherence to cultural norms is not itself an exercise of one’s freedom. Amish opponents of statism might think liberty grows more organically out of their highly traditional way of life than it does out of Howley’s just-do-it attitude. Meanwhile, fighting against social norms often includes opposition to such libertarian-approved bourgeois social norms as commerce and respect for property. Storefront-smashing anti-globalization activists are a good example of the dangerous paths that groovy cultural iconoclasm can take.

Hmm, I love the scare quotes around “Third Wave.”  I may be projecting, but I think you could sum up Seavey’s tone as “Hmm.  Pornography, eh?  Howley sounds like one of those dumb feminist sluts I’ve heard about.  Also, it sounds like she’s having more fun than I am.  I think I’ll take her down a peg.”  For one thing, Howley never calls herself a feminist in the piece; besides, the opinions of feminists, even “groovy” Third Wave ones,  on porn is highly divided.  Some of those feminists even have an uneasy alliance with the social conservatives that Howley derides and Seavey defends.

More importantly, it’s also extremely unfair that Seavey brings up “storefront-smashing anti-globalization activists” as an example of what happens when you take “cultural libertarianism” too far.  Obviously, if you’re smashing private property, you’ve already counted yourself out of the libertarian philosophy game.  But actually, I think this is where, among other places, Seavey concedes Howley’s main point.  And that point is not about sex, nor, as Seavey puts it, the coming of the “funky, libidinous, free-spirited, gender-neutral dance party,” (can I come?) but about the interrelationship between culture and liberty.

Does Seavey think our current situation of government oppression arose out of a vacuum?  Where did it come from, if not out of our culture?  Where would government get its authority if millions weren’t passively conceding to it?  The issues of consent and passivity are abundantly discussed in the libertarian literature:  the citizens outnumber their masters, so why on earth do they support the masters’ oppressive rule over them?  For God’s sake, yesterday I saw Kids’ Letters to Obama in a local lefty bookstore.  Like he’s freakin’ Santy Claus. (Actually, that would be preferable; Santa’s imaginary and therefore quite harmless, at least.)  The cultural indoctrination starts early, folks.  And we can see the results:  the adults are even less rational when it comes to seeing Obama as a magical year-long Christmas surprise.

Is all of this entirely irrelevant?  Or, since the culture wars are “endless” and therefore irrelevant, are we going to appeal to Science instead?  Is Seavey also going to defer to Science if it tells us that there are fundamental chemical differences between the brains of libertarians and adherents to the major political parties, or between pols and plebes?  How would he account for the fact that women once made up 5% of doctors and now represent closer to 50% of them, and that once there were none of them at all?  As he writes,

[Howley] mentions, for instance, that 5.5 percent of medical students, decades ago, “happened to have female bodies.” She concedes briefly that discrepancies in gender roles “may” result from psychological inclinations or voluntary behavior patterns rather than oppression, but she gives us no reason to believe that she has special skills enabling her to decide better than the rest of us when the sorting processes of society have yielded acceptably “free” results and when they have yielded unacceptably gendered ones. That’s why libertarians traditionally focus so much on the physical-coercion litmus test: Other tests are as hopelessly ambiguous as the bickering of democratic socialists.

True, neither Howley nor Seaver nor I can tell you when “society” has yielded us “acceptably free” results.  Does that mean we stop discussing it?

Tradeoffs

What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

The good thing about being a generally libertarian-minded skeptic is that I never stay awake at night worrying about global warming, or climate change, or whatever it is we’re on now.  Unfortunately that still leaves me to worry about being compared to a Nazi*, or, more importantly, that a coalition of activists and politicians will try to degrade my quality of life, or further destroy that of millions of others.  For instance, this report estimates the gruesome toll from the indoor combustion that the poor, mainly women and children, rely upon in the developing world (emphasis mine):

1.3 million premature deaths per year are directly attributable to indoor air pollution from the use of biomass.  This means that indoor air pollution associated with biomass use is directly responsible for more deaths than malaria. More than half of the deaths are among children under five years of age.

Gah!  First the West bans DDT, sentencing millions around the world to death by malaria.  Now we want to impose carbon caps, meaning caps on industrialization and development here and around the world, and sentence millions to death by poverty–specifically slow asphyxiation.  Goddamn it, and this is the kind of crap that happens when Americans mean well and want to protect the “environment” (never people, sadly).  We’re not even taking the downright malicious things, like sanctions and war on Iraq, into account.

*The blogger in question astutely observes that I am “shockingly devoid of compassion for humanity,” which is unsurprising as it is “a common characteristic of ‘libertarians’.”  Rad!

God ‘n Stuff

I know I’ll probably lose one of my 12 readers for even considering Lord Acton Institute blogger Anthony Bradley’s piece, “Less Religion Means More Government” (and misogyny, though that’s not in the title), but I’ll do so nonetheless:

Soviet communism adopted Karl Marx’s teaching that religion was the “opiate of the masses” and launched a campaign of bloody religious persecution. Marx was misguided about the role of religion but years later many communists became aware that turning people away from religious life increases dependence on government to address life’s problems. The history of government coercion that comes from turning from religion to government makes a new study suggesting a national decline in religious life particularly alarming to those concerned about individual freedom.

…The marketplace and society in general will both reap the consequences of high numbers of male Nones [those who claim no religious affiliation]. If more and more men are abandoning the religious communities that have provided solid moral formation for thousands of years, we should not be surprised by an increase in the explosion of demand for morally reprehensible products as well as the family breakdown that follows closely behind. With consciences formed by utility, pragmatism, and sensuality, instead of virtue, we should expect to find a culture with even more women subjected to the dehumanization of strip clubs, more misogynistic rap music, more adultery and divorce, more broken sexuality, more fatherlessness, more corruption in government and business, more individualism, and more loneliness.

Alexis de Tocqueville cautioned in his 1835 reflections on Democracy in America, that the pursuit of liberty without religion hurts society because it “tends to isolate [people] from one another, to concentrate every man’s attention upon himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.” In fact, Tocqueville says, “the main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.” Religion makes us other-regarding.

“Other-regarding” might make the libertarian, or more likely the Objectivist, shudder, but this blogger does not have a particular problem with voluntary altruism.  Besides, David Brooks’ research in “Who Really Cares?” backs up the proposition that Christians are the most charitable.

Here is where you may expect the line-by-line sarcastic breakdowns.  If you want those, consult Classically Liberal’s post, “Does religion lead to small government or stonings?”

If less religion means more government precisely why is the movement that most promotes liberty, libertarianism, also one of the least religious political groups in the country? If you were to randomly pick out major libertarian theorists in history you would be quite unlikely to find one that was anything more than superflouously religious. Most, in fact, were non-believers. Take the pantheon of libertarian thinkers like Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Mencken, Rothbard, and Spooner. Not a religious nut among the bunch.

I know Mencken, and especially Rand, were hostile to religion, but I don’t recall the others going out of their way to say that they weren’t “religious nuts.”  Also, that’s a pretty heterogeneous bunch to label “libertarian thinkers.”  Rand, for instance, would’ve puked if you’d called her a “libertarian nut.”

Well, this is where I will really lose readers.  I note that African-Americans are allegedly the most religious Americans, but they disproportionately author “misogynistic rap music” and are far more likely to endure adultery, divorce, fatherlessness, singlehood, and to end their unwanted pregnancies.  The scholar Orlando Patterson attributes this in part to the legacy of slavery in his book Rituals of blood: consequences of slavery in two American centuries, but black families were supposedly stronger under slavery, in spite of the horrendous obstacles.  From Joy Jones’s “Marriage is for White People”:

Although slavery was an atrocious social system, men and women back then nonetheless often succeeded in establishing working families. In his account of slave life and culture, “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” historian Eugene D. Genovese wrote: “A slave in Georgia prevailed on his master to sell him to Jamaica so that he could find his wife, despite warnings that his chances of finding her on so large an island were remote. . . . Another slave in Virginia chopped his left hand off with a hatchet to prevent being sold away from his son.” I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today, according to sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin.

Perhaps the question to be asked here is:  were African-Americans even more religious in times of slavery?  Or do we just blame the hippies?  Jones continues:

The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States.

Maybe all this means that religion is not enough to counter other overwhelming social forces.

Neither Bradley nor Classically Liberal distinguish between “casual” and “captive,” or very devout, believers.  You can read an unsatisfying description here:

Casual Christians are driven by a desire for a pleasant and peaceful existence. Captive Christians are focused on upholding the absolute moral and spiritual truths they glean from the Bible.

In my very, very limited, non-scientific assessment of my acquaintances, the casual Christians are barely distinguishable from their secular counterparts.  It’s difficult to use them as a yardstick for the sort of analysis that Bradley (and Classically Liberal) attempt; they are also incredibly numerous, which further complicates things.  In my, again, very limited, non-scientific assessment of my acquaintances, it has been the very devout Christians who were the most devoted to their wives and children, and who eschewed porn and anything else that might be construed as adultery.  But such men were a rarity then and especially now.  Also, it is difficult to figure out what the hell would actually be in the interests of women and feminists, since we hear that marriage is a patriarchal, woman-exploiting institution that would…somehow be a boon to gays.  Yeah, you got me.

If nothing else, I concede that Bradley is right that many merely switch from worshiping a god to worshiping the state.  And Classically Liberal seems to equate advocacy of private religious beliefs with the founding of a theocracy.  At no point did Bradley seem to advocate the use of state force to promote Christianity.

On Douchebags, Turd Sandwiches, and Nobel Prizes

Upon learning the news that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize, I, unlike many others,  did not come to the mistaken conclusion that it was merely an Onion story.  This meant that my internal spluttering of “What the fucking fuck?!” could start that much sooner.  It was also a little cheering, though not very, to find that even some of the Obama boosters I know were also upset.  (I know, I know, I shouldn’t be so startled to discover they have brains and independent thoughts too, but one grows cynical.)

Well, once the initial outrage wore off (see the previous post),  I was like, no big deal.  Whatevs.  Giving a war criminal the Nobel Prize and a million.4 is the least of our worries.  We hold elections between douchebags and turd sandwiches all the time, potential war criminals to the man (and woman), and the popular measure of a man’s humanity is whether he shoots wolves from planes or cultivates organic gardens.

So, yeah, now the douchebag gets a Nobel Prize.  (OMG, the irony; or, to put it more clearly, what amazingly different standards we apply to individuals vs. pols.  There was controversy over Günter Grass winning the Nobel Prize in literature because he had once been affiliated with the Nazis.  And the man presiding over more wars than I can keep track of…I digress.)  The spectacle of millions voting and cheering for Obama is a lot scarier than a cute little coterie of European intellectuals paying him tribute.  He was voted in simultaneously as the antiwar, moderate, and prowar candidate, for Christ’s sake.  The masses of American voters celebrated him as both a dove and a hawk.  People can project on him whatever they want, while in practice he will continue to warmonger.  What do we care about another medal–for peace, for military valor, whatever–hanging on a turd sandwich, when we’re being ruled by a fucking turd sandwich!  He’s got the crown, he’s got the scepter, and this is just another shiny button.

I generally try to keep the profanity out of this blog.  But we were screwed long before this; really, the problem is that the office of the presidency exists at all, not what some Swedish jackasses want to do with their little awards.

Wow. Just wow.

Between Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win and the widespread defense of Roman Polanski within Hollywood, I think I just completely give up the idea that people are basically good.

I kind of said this already

Pro-choice activist Jennie Bristow of spiked writes in Population reduction: a war on women’s bodies that

There is now great sensitivity surrounding explicit population-control programmes that have been used by governments in the developed world, and imposed on countries in the developing world. Today there is little sympathy within the West for continuing population control programmes such as China’s One-Child Policy, which is being relaxed in some districts of China. However, it would be naïve to assume from this that birth control today is always promoted positively, with the only considerations being women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Old arguments about why women’s personal reproductive decisions should be made to fit with broader social objectives can be recycled in new forms, and this requires continued vigilance from those working to promote the cause of genuine reproductive choice.

…[P]ro-choice advocates have fought their arguments on the basis that the woman should be absolutely at the centre of reproductive decision-making. It is a woman who must bear a child, and in our society it is usually she who will have the practical, emotional and financial responsibility for raising that child. To attempt to displace the woman from this decision by encouraging her to regulate her fertility in line with the abstract demands of ‘the environment’ implicitly pushes the woman to a more marginal, negotiable and ultimately vulnerable position in the decision-making process.

I have written previously that population control under the guise of environmentalism will be used to destroy women and children.  What is really naïve, though, is the notion that birth control was today or ever “promoted positively, with the only consideration being women’s rights and bodily autonomy.”  Many men have welcomed birth control because it has relieved them of responsibility, while mainstream feminists rarely think of “reproductive choice” as anything other than choosing to prevent or terminate pregnancies.  (This is why they are often deafeningly silent on the subject of maternal and infant health, for instance.)  Since the feminists have embraced collectivism, anything that might hold back the professional advancement of one woman is seen as damaging the “movement” as a whole.

Now, of course, fertile women will be seen as damaging not just to the feminist movement, but the environment as well.  I predict that women will be as sexualized as ever, if not more so, but the pressure to have fewer children will only ramp up.  From observing the mixed reactions to the 30-year-old Polanski case, for instance, it becomes apparent that even 13-year-old children don’t get to say no, especially to powerful older men.   So to save the environment, enable rapists, and boost the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line, we should probably just start all girls on mandatory birth control upon reaching adolescence.  (Hey, they did it with Gardasil!)  Everyone wins!

I’m sure the above sounds cynical, but I truly would not be surprised if mandatory birth control for girls is proposed within the next decade.  I’m sure there are people who want to propose it right now.  And, lo and behold, a Google search for “mandatory birth control” yields, among many other gems, the Facebook page awkwardly entitled “The Planet Being Saved By Mandatory Birth Control.  We’re doomed, y’all!

[UPDATE]:  As I mention in the comments, I think I was wrong to allege that feminists are “deafeningly silent” on maternal and infant health.  For instance, Pushed:  the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care, which challenges the rise of obstetric intervention,  was written by a feminist and former editor of Ms. magazine.  I think these texts are nonetheless relatively rare in the feminist/gender studies canon.

Oh, Lord.

The HuffPo tells us that the Conservative Bible Project Cuts Out Liberal Passages.  Thank God someone is getting on this.  Here is what the Conservative Bible Project tells us they are trying to address:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations.

As a tyke, I never thought to be suspicious of the New York Times version of the Bible that I was raised on.  Surely the good God-fearing Republicans in my family should have known to pick up the Rush Limbaugh translation as soon as it became available.

Anyway, the Conservative Bible Project has handily broken down what’s wrong with the King James Version of the Bible:

There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

The Bible is too liberal.  This would be news to some.  Oh, and it’s too vague!  Also news.  Let’s look at their ten commandments for what to cut out:

1.  Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

You hear that, Catholics?  Christianity isn’t macho enough.  It may be your fault.  Get those Madonna and child images out of here and replace them with pictures of Jesus looking appropriately ripped.  Thanks.

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level

Make the Bible less accessible!  Good idea.  Too many people are reading it, right?

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

“Volunteer” is a powerful conservative term?  Have they heard how Obama’s been using it?

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census

Don’t forget to change the soft Biblical euphemisms for “web addiction” and “Crackberries.”

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

Huh??

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Yeah, skip the MBA and go straight to seminary.  I’ve heard Biblical justifications for Christian anarchism and socialism alike; they can’t both be right.  Tax-collectors and prostitutes are lumped together, yet Jesus throws the moneylenders out of the temple, and we’re warned that rich men won’t get into heaven.  I think the Bible is pretty shaky as an econ textbook.

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

I like how the “adulteress story“–where Jesus tells the crowd that “He without sin may cast the first stone”–is particularly objectionable.  It is easy to see how it is threatening to conservatives of a certain stripe.  “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,” or “Judge not, that ye be not judged” aren’t anywhere near as troubling to the modern conservative.  However, a parable with essentially the same message, but which implies that sluts might be let off scot-free, is objectionable.  Got it.

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels

Elevate the contributions of the young, even while you rewrite the Bible so it can’t be comprehended by most children.

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Wait, what?  Is this how I’ll know I’m in a blue state:  people yell “Oh my Jehovah!” when surprised or hurt?

Well, I do hope this project takes off.  They really need to delete the passages where Jesus lobbies the Romans to raise taxes to care for the poor and sick, instead of serving them himself; I’ve grown tired of hearing them quoted by Christian liberals in the healthcare debates.  (Jesus’s story is a really good example of working within the system to achieve your goals, just as the Romans are a great example of the benevolent State.)  While they’re cutting passages, I hope they remember to bring back the good ones that the damned Kennedy-loving Bible scholars left out.  You know that one where Jesus interrupted his ministering to the poor (he was director of a great nonprofit set up for that) to beat the crap out of some local men suspected of having sexual relations with one another?  Oh, you haven’t?  Isn’t that all the evidence you need to suspect a homosexual, liberal agenda at work behind the KJV?

Women and Seasteading

I survived the Seasteading 2009 Conference and Ephemerisle, only to sustain a concussion in the Mission immediately afterward.  (All studies show that all accidents occur relatively close to home.)  Since most of the talk about women and seasteading seems to revolve around getting those emotional broads to stop worrying about their scarce eggs and love the libertarian hommes*, I’m just not going to engage it right now.  I’ll go straight to citing the advantages and disadvantages for the average female, conveniently summarized in an old article from The Onion:

Woman At Farscape Convention Has Dangerously Inflated Self-Image | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

BURBANK, CA—Paulette Osley, 24, a moderately attractive fan of the Sci-Fi Channel series Farscape, had her self-image inflated to dangerous levels during the three-day ScaperCon 2004, according to Pepperdine University professor of psychology Wes Martin.

“From the moment she walked in the door, Paulette was the object of admiring glances,” Martin said. “Everywhere she went, men were awkwardly trying to make conversation with her, flirting with her using Farscape dialogue, and inviting her to season-finale-watching parties in their hotel suites. Although she only came in 14th in the trivia contest, her adorable blush, her nervous giggle, and the fact that she was female earned her many admirers.”

“…A girl who can spout detailed specs of leviathan spaceships appeals to a very limited niche. After having a man in every merch booth tell her how great she’d look in a Farscape half-shirt, it’s got to be an enormous let-down to go back to having men bump into her because they didn’t even notice her standing there.”

*Did I mention the head injury?  I did, right?

Professional Embarrassment

I am pleased that Fr33 Agents picked up my blog post from Wednesday, “Uh Oh:  Or Why I, too, am Specifically a Voluntaryist.” It espoused the radical thesis that violence is bad, and it’s reassuring to learn that there’s still an audience for such sentiments.  Also, I’m sure that increasing the readership of this blog means that tyranny will crumble!!

So maybe the attentive reader will think it contradictory that I support Mutadhar al-Zaidi, more popularly known as the Iraqi who threw his shoes at former president Bush.  He has recently been released from prison, and reportedly torture.  He justifies his actions here:

Why I Threw My Shoes At Bush | | AlterNet.

What compelled me to confront is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

And how it wanted to crush the skulls of (the homeland’s) sons under its boots, whether sheikhs, women, children or men. And during the past few years, more than a million martyrs fell by the bullets of the occupation and the country is now filled with more than 5 million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. And many millions of homeless because of displacement inside and outside the country.

Some would just say to themselves, “Hrm.  A million dead.  Well, still, we’re talking about an assembly of men in suits.  In the company of a murderer in a suit, we’re supposed to act civilized.  Besides, in the U.S., we have more important things to worry about, like ramming a new healthcare plan down everyone’s throats, in spite of the objections of millions.  Millions who, by the looks of things, probably wouldn’t be above throwing a shoe or two, or speaking in a Southern accent. And if people start throwing shoes at one suit they don’t like, what will they do to the new suit in charge, who we happen to favor?”

In other words, most people who ridicule the shoe throwing, or perhaps Joe Wilson, are not acting on a principled objection to violence.  They’re appalled at the breach of professional etiquette; or, as I’ve written before, the greater sin is not to be a war criminal, but to be rough of speech. It just isn’t good form to throw footwear in a professional setting, when a Head of State is speaking and the assembled are expected to politely defer.

Though our reality shows might indicate otherwise, I think Americans on the whole are uncomfortable with the display of unbecoming emotions.  At root that was the substance of al-Zaidi’s attack, since it was mostly a symbolic resistance, not an armed one:  he was publicly mourning, and Americans are terribly uncomfortable with that.  As al-Zaidi says:

Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres that would turn the hair of a newborn white used to bring tears to my eyes and wound me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. In the past years, I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and hear with my own ears the screams of the bereaved and the orphans. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

I support al-Zaidi in part because I am a voluntaryist who supports the Non-Aggression Principle, but do not, at least as of this writing, subscribe to pacifism.  That is, Bush had clearly aggressed, and al-Zaidi made a gesture of self-defense:

After six years of humiliation, of indignity, of killing and violations of sanctity, and desecration of houses of worship, the killer comes, boasting, bragging about victory and democracy. He came to say goodbye to his victims and wanted flowers in response.

But mostly I support him because, as always, we are holding a private actor to unreasonably harsh standards of “professionalism” and etiquette, while giving whole institutions a free pass in criminality.  Al-Zaidi notes that compromised journalism is hardly without precedent:

I take this opportunity: If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I wish to apologize to you for any embarrassment I may have caused those establishments. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.

History mentions many stories where professionalism was also compromised at the hands of American policymakers, whether in the assassination attempt against Fidel Castro by booby-trapping a TV camera that CIA agents posing as journalists from Cuban TV were carrying, or what they did in the Iraqi war by deceiving the general public about what was happening. And there are many other examples that I won’t get into here.

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