eye of the storm

that france bans the headscarf, or britain the burqa etc, shows they are secular societies, universal and tolerant societies that have overcome religious divisions. that switzerland bans the minaret is "the latest sign of a backlash against muslim immigrants." the fact that secularism and universal tolerance is indistinguishable on the ground from bigotry and intolerance might give one pause, if one paused. one thing that the forces of progress and the forces of reaction have massively in common: they assert that they themselves can legitimately tell people what to wear or how to build. that is, they are statists. that is, they are embroiled in massive impostures, delusions, fallacies, fantasies, and contradictions that they are incapable actually of seeing or thinking through, god bless their little hearts.

as my old fiend (i kid you not) metro truly would say: y'all are off your feeble tree.

the european left wants to ban headscarves, while the right wants to ban minarets. this indicates that in the long run we may need to ban europe, given that a ban on vicious idiots would be difficult to enforce.

me on texting and driving in today's phily inquirer.

scary stuff from the obama admin with regard to indymedia (to which i've just added a permanent link, at left). apparently the justice department wanted, and demanded by subpoena, a list of all their visitors, backing it up with various threats, etc. oddly (since indymedia is far left), i caught this story on glenn beck (being guesthosted by "judge napolitano"), but i guess it's useful as a stick to whap the democratic administration. well, sometimes a thorough whapping is called for.

just to repeat: really both parties are more-or-less avowed opponents of freedom in any comprehensible form, and they are complementary in that the one wants to increase state power by expanding half the government and the other the other half, while they actually agree on many particular abrogations of autonomy, such as those embodied in standardizing and federalizing education, or in surveillance powers.

According to the EFF, Indymedia received a request (PDF) in January for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the Indymedia site on June 25, 2008. But the request went further than simply asking for the computer addresses of visitors -- the subpoena ordered Indymedia to turn over all identifying information it may have about visitors, including their addresses, email addresses, bank account numbers and social security numbers.

EFF reports that, when they challenged the subpoena, the Justice Department backed down, and responded with a one-sentence letter (PDF) that rescinded the subpoena. But at the same time, Justice Department officials threatened an Indymedia web administrator with charges of obstruction of justice if she revealed the subpoena's existence. Officials told the administrator, Kristina Clair of Philadelphia, that publicizing the request "may endanger someone's health" and would have a "human cost."

400,000 names are on the fbi's terrorism watch list. i like this a lot. it shows a nice heart of paranoid totalitarianism: a half-cracked stalin freakiness. it is entirely incompatible with the notion that we live in a free society or a democracy. on the other hand, it is completely unmanageable, utterly useless. what can the fbi do in a population that is just crawling with terrorists, where everyone is a suicide bomber, although no suicide bombings have actually taken place?

they add...1,600 people a day, based, you know, on anonymous denunciations. i insist that we think about what this says about the american stasi, and the american people. but i really also insist that we giggle about it: really, the fbi is a gang of evil fuckheads, and an insurgency is obviously more than warranted. but the evil fuckheadedness is mitigated profoundly by the intense stupidity and slapstick comedy.

so i'm assuming i'm already on the list, but if not i hope this entry gets me an audition.

a few weeks ago, i set up a google alert for the term "anti-government." each day brings me (a) scary stories of anti-government extremists in the u.s.; people, even, that oppose multi-trillion dollar deficits because...they must be racists, and (b) admiring stories about dissidents in iran, china, yemen, and so on. with regard to domestic politics "anti-government" is self-evidently evil and incomprehensible. with regard to everywhere else it is the outbrak or democracy and freedom, a georgewashingtonesque excellence. people seem...confused.

i'm sorta back to work on nathaniel rogers , and just posted a very substantive essay from 1838: constitutionality of slavery. if you're into that bizarre prodigy, lysander spooner, you'll recognize the basic arguments from his book on the unconstitutionality of slavery - including the basic account of constitutional interpretation - though rogers' essay came seven years earlier.

here's the basic problem with...all political positions, more or less. let's say that you have some really good ideas about how the future should be. and let's leave out of consideration your fallibility, and just stipulate that these are, really, good ideas. it's a further assertion, and does not follow trivially, that you should seize and wield political power sufficient to realize these goals. and whether the idea with all the mechanisms needed to enforce it is still a good idea is an open question. education is good and important, and is basically to be articulated in a no child left behind kind of way. this is wrong. but say it was obviously right. now would it follow that you should not allow high school dropouts to drive? or that you should triple taxes and invest them in schools? or that you should remove truants from their families? well, no. not at all: a thousand other considerations, policies, values, budgets are engaged.

now partly this is a matter of figuring out what the priorities are among competing agendas, or the effectiveness or cost/benefit or unforeseen consequences, of a particular policy. but it also raises  fundamental matters of value: to what extent does implementing this idea compromise freedom or whatever else you might value? what does it imply about power relations in the culture? if you thought that essentially no policy passes this test - that the power required to implement an idea was never sufficiently justified by the outcome, then you'd be an anarchist. for example, since every implementation of every policy legitimates power inequalities and expands them, you might think no political program could be justified.

but it's also a basic problem within mainstream politics: you just nod along going: health care, energy independence, environment, education. but what resources are necessary and to what extent are these in competition? and what powers are you consituting and what might be done with them in...the palin administration?

the casual totalitarianism of the technocrat:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

let me briefly enumerate some of the ways this is wrong. first of all, it does not follow from the fact that you didn't finish high school that you can barely add. friedman appears to believe that the only way to find out anything is in an institution. and of course it doesn't follow from the fact that you can barely add that you don't drive well.  second, driving is an embodied skill, not measurable by the sats, though the idea that anything of human value might not be standardized testable is of course profoundly alien to an intelligence of friedman's caliber. but that's of course not the point: the point for friedman is how, by hedging people's lives around with police power, we can manufacture the sort of people he thinks ought to exist. third, this is a flat redoubling of class divisions, a way to make poverty or family/neighborhood problems ever more endemic, to just literally stick people where they are like a roach motel. just consider the way a regulation like that would differentially effect black people, or poor people, or latinos, etc. fourth, it just casually assumes that extreme limitations on basic freedoms - such as mobility - can legitimately be imposed unilaterally by state authorities. in other words, it gives you a perfect view of a certain kind of american liberalism, a mind-numbing totalitarian rational standardization of the species. we'd be far better served by...i don't know, a shiite theocracy.

notice that this little brownshirt moment is followed by a series of cliches to which it is entirely irrelevant; it's just there to establish the forward-looking totalitarian bona fides, so that when we go on to say "innovate!" no one can misunderstand what the mechanism of innovation is going to be.

let's take an emerson/thoreau american political position, which antedates the left-right taxonomy. it's easy to see why, if you were an extreme individualist and advocate of liberty, you would, for example, favor the abolition of slavery. but the paternalism of an obama - where we're transforming you and constraining you for your own good, providing you with health care or childcare or whatever else we in our wisdom see that you need - is closer to calhoun's argument for slavery: we're seizing control of you for your own good. in other words, the progressives of today employ the arguments of the reactionaries of yesterday. thoreau's position is perfectly coherent and consistent. for just that reason, it cannot fit into the political spectrum now at all.

there is a story about how left and right politics became incoherent. or actually, the left-right spectrum is simply a way to mark out the contest between incoherent positions, and has no purchase much before the twentieth century. but at any rate, the left and the right both develop out of a republican tradition: the left out of rousseau, for example, or the right out of...i don't know, schiller or john c. calhoun (who is, actually, an amazing political philosopher). alright, so both have this element of liberatory rhetoric, rights, and so on. but as we segue into the twentieth century, technological innovations - communications, transportation, weaponry - make possible the idea of totalitarianism, and both left and right totalitarianisms arise, of course. and in ideology, you have the admixture of hegel to rousseau, marx to hegel on one side, the development of romantic nationalism, race theory, and so on on the other. and also a teleological view of history. where the republican tradition looks backward to the greeks and romans, the totalitarian left and right ditch that and push ahead toward a transformed species, a utopian endstate, which can of course only be achieved by the force of the state. that's what the state is for, what it is.: a machine for species-transformation.

suddenly, everyone is going: we can make this happen. whatever your vision of how things should be, there is a machine adequate to imposing that vision on history. and that is what totalitarianism is, becuase to make your vision real, people must be constrained to realize it.

so both of these views retain a little hangover of republicanism, and a rhetoric of freedom, and even an origin in liberatory revolutions, in resistance to tyranny. and both graft onto that a massive totalitarian nation-state (or in the left vision, a world-state), a species transformation machine. both are going to seize control of history: definitely not how let's say john adams saw the function of the state. so both left and right both push forward the liberatory rhetoric of their origins, and both betray that origin in every moment, every policy and program. this reached its hysterical height in the conetst between nazism and communism in the 1930s, but muddles on yet.

the left accuses the right of being nazis; the right accuses the left of being communists. and this would be basically right, except that the actual left and right are incoherent, not actually bold enough to take a position, and still not able simply to jettison the idea of freedom (and also not able to endorse it in any meaningful way).

there wil be another political spectrum after left/right. it will still emerge historically. but let's hope it makes some kind of rudimentary sense.

one thing to point out is that neither extreme american leftism nor extreme american rightism is a coherent position, and both break down on the rhetoric of freedom. this is also true of mainstream american leftism and rightism: they are chimeras: monsters that combine two bizarrely different creatures. but the herbert piece connects the libertarian impulse with white suprematism or neo-nazism, or as i quoted an msnbc anchor, "these neo-nazi and anti-government groups." so the notion that people have the right to bear arms is connected to anti-semitism or white suprematism: or, ron paul is a nazi. but obviously, you can't be a nazi and a libertarian! the danger that lurks in these identifications is that if you perform them, then attacking white suprematism entails attacking freedom, which i must say is exactly what herbert does in his piece. or in other words, in characterizing your opponents incoherently you not only eliminate what in their position you could endorse on your own principles, you introduce a mirror-image incoherence into your own position. you're a huge advocate of, you know, civil rights or freedom of the press, etc. but you are basically expressing your opposition to liberty as an extreme right-wing fascist plot.

you can't tell me that sarah palin has a coherent position: minimal government, and state supervision of your bedroom. and you can't tell me that obama can double the size and power of the state in twenty minutes and be a consistent advocate of human rights. the left-right way of understanding the political spectrum makes the whole thing a conflict of incoherences. american conservatism and american progressivism are silly or pathetic intellectually, even if they seem to monopolize the practical possibilities. they demand that you stop trying to understand, and just nod along with a blank look in your eyes. you must stop thinking. and you have.

you can't be a nazi and a libertarian if you can think these things through, can you be? well you also can't endorse massive pervasion of state power and be in favor of equal rights - or any rights - i would think. in a way, the function of liberty is primarily rhetorical for both most of the left and most of the right: they nod in that direction as a kind of tribute to the american vocabulary, but neither of them approach the actual liberty of actual persons with any enthusiasm. both want to free you, where freeing you means imposing their values on you by force, made possible by an unlimited power to tax and borrow, exclusive access to weaponry, etc.

perhaps coherence is overrated, and let's say ron paul's coherence might just amount to a rigid ideology that would have disastrous results on the ground. on the other hand, you might want, in the still of the night, to become aware of the fact that your actual position is senseless or the merest paradox. there's one drawback to an incoherent position: it simply cannot be true.

at any rate, you can see the general strategy, of course: use the acts of violence as a way to discredit more and more of the right spectrum. one moves, supposedly indetectably, from the murderer to the nra to limbaugh to, i don't know, susan collins. the bad thing about this is that you're also discrediting things like resistance to tyranny, once you move from the act to the rhetoric, and start drawing lines between the words. obviously this leaves you vulnerable to the same thing. i kind of dig the weather underground, but no doubt you could generate some rhetorical connections between them and...joe biden. one could start tracing words from marx or mao to barack, etc. marx said, for example, that the first phase of the communist consolidation will involve state control of the banking system. this is easy when you're preaching to the choir, but it also will slowly foreclose the possibility of dissent, or of a meaningful public debate about fundamental questions like the scope of government power.

bob herbert today, decrying "right-wing wackos" such as the abortion-doc and holocaust-museum shooters:

A new book by Dennis Henigan, a vice president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, goes into detail on this point. In “Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy,” Mr. Henigan refers to a Harvard Law Journal article written by an N.R.A. lawyer titled, “The Second Amendment Ain’t About Hunting.” In the article, the lawyer makes it clear that for the N.R.A., the right to bear arms is “directed at maintaining an armed citizenry. ... to protect against the tyranny of our own government.”

well, that idea certainly was central to the constitutional right to bear arms. now herbert just leaves us to ponder the insanity of the idea that our own government could ever be tyrannical, a delusion of right-wing wack-jobs. it's amazing how quickly the obama admin has settled over the left as a permanent condition of life. but perhaps it would help them to recall that a few months ago there was an administration that was enthusing about universal surveillance, imprisonment without even the semblance of due process, instituting a world system of secret torture facilities,extreme manipulation of public opinion by disinformation toward the goal of killing people, etc. already, they seem to need a lesson from sarah palin on how to criminalize gay marriage, launch a crusade against islam, illegalize abortion, require christian prayer in schools, or throw you in prison for a decade for smoking pot.

herbert is certainly right, however, that only insane right-wing killers seem to worry at all about tyranny, and that all reasonable people have long ago resigned even the hint of independent thought and autonomous action to the beautiful bureaucracy. that, my friends, is what it means to be rational and progressive person. that is what it means to be an american: to suckle at the teat of the state from the womb to the grave: to give over your brain chemistry, your children, your intellection, into the hands of...whomever.

at any rate, i think you can tell from the herbert-style schtick that a progressive administration presents more or less the same threat of tyranny as a reactionary administration. this is evident precisely from the fact that herbert regards the very notion of tyranny as an absurd anachronism, an obvious impossibility, pretty much the stance of ayatollah khamenei, let's say. and you can definitely tell by that how far the american republic has come since the founding. indeed, american history is a kind of slowmo u-turn.

one thing we should agree on, i suppose: your .22 rifle is not going to help you to resist. there can be no resistance, a fact more evident with every passing hour.

this is a pretty interesting little thing. the constitution party took the approach of posting a "travel advisory" for missouri, as one might for the sudan.

i'm teaching the debate over the ratification of the constitution right now. a few observations. the federalist papers, by madison and hamilton, are probably the greatest bits of advocacy journalism ever printed: it's unimaginable that these were, like, newspaper op-ed pieces. the writing is beautifully clear but also subtle, the arguments extremely convincing. it is to be regretted that the anti-federalists had no one comparable. reading the speeches of patrick henry, or luther martin etc is reading disorganized blowhards, though there were important points. regrettable too is that the objections were not more fundamental, and that they were above all concerned with preservation of state sovereignty, partly for various nefarious purposes such as preservation of the slave trade and dominance of westward expansion/speculation. henry gets up in front of the virginia legislature and declares that the thing should begin "we the states" instead of "we the people." this was an amazing opportunity to make a world, as it were, and had there been intellects and pens of the caliber of madison and hamilton on the other side, it might have had a better, a freer, outcome (though the antis must be credited with the bill of rights, and deserve much gratitude for that).

probably the best anti-federalist material is from "centinel" (samuel bryan of pennsylvania) and, especially, "brutus" (robert yates? of new york). the library of america two-volume set the debate on the constitution is quite something.

the volume i'm actually teaching has an extremely solid intro, excellent selection from the federalist. i feel the anti-fed selection could be sharper. much more doable than the sprawling volumes above.

don't set yourself on fire, or we'll shoot you.

needless to say, i have argued many times in favor of the sort of conscience clauses that obama is rescinding. one measure of the decency of any institution is the extent to which it does not require the people embedded in it to violate their own religious and ethical commitments. it's worth acknowledging that he wants to tighten and not eliminate such regulations, and that's better than ditching them. but one suspects they'll basically be ditched. if the argument really is that this will prevent people from getting blood transfusions or something, or even that it presents serious barriers to care of various kinds, then i want to see the evidence. and i want to weigh actual barriers to care against actual conscience rights of practitioners. it's easy to invent a case where you have a christian science emt and a hemophiliac, a lot harder to find the actual problems actual people are actually having.

if you want to see the gist or force of my argument: imagine that your own job assigns you a task you find deeply morally repugnant. don't let your pro-choice position govern the general question. imagine that your boss tells you to torture, or censor, or lie your ass off: whatever it is you actually object to. opting out is not only important to your self-respect: it is important feedback to the institution.

just to keep you apprised of the monstrous texas state kidnappings, a few washpost pieces. here's my favoite:
the initial complaint was entirely fabricated
but also
mothers separated from small children
and
raises constitutional questions
and
mothers plead to see small children