"Are we the baddies?"

So Trump's pick for CIA director is a veteran torturer. Feminism in the 21st century - now women too can be clear-cut villains.

               In Star Wars, how is it established that the Rebels are the “good guys” and the Empire are the “bad guys”? That is, what shortcuts are taken over the length of feature film that allow the audience to identify the morality of each side of the conflict? Oh, certainly we are inclined by mere familiarity to sympathize with Luke, a humble farmboy from a backwater planet dreaming of the stars. But Imagine if you will that you were watching the film de novo, (difficult I know). Luke casually remarks that he is thinking about becoming a pilot for the Empire! If the villainy of the Empire isn’t immediately obvious to Luke, our sympathetic protagonist, how is obvious to us?

                First is the style of the empire, meant to evoke the Third Reich. “Stormtroopers” and cleanly cut grey uniforms – the assumption being that the audience would make the association with fascism, and with fascism to plain evil. Another trick for managing our sympathies are the face-concealing masks of the stormtroopers, meant to dehumanize the antagonists.

                But it is in the conduct of the Empire that its essentially villainous nature is laid bare. The audience is expected to immediately and unambiguously look at the actions of the Empire and go: “They are the bad guys, only bad guys would do things like that”.

                So, what does the Empire do? In the pursuit of vital intelligence, the Empire kills innocent civilians, tramples on civilian authority, and tortures suspects. With the aim of intimidating its enemies it a weapon of mass destruction and demonstrates it on a target of limited military value. It tramples on democratic rights and institutions in the name of peace and order.

                But save the last, the United States has done all these things. The secrecy of the security state, warrantless wiretapping and mass-surveillance, the absurdly broad war-making powers in the post-9/11 AUMF altogether seem to constitute, if not trampling, then at least walking, on civilian authority. The drone war – in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and other places, may or may not keep America safe, but it certainly sheds a lot of innocent blood. And of course the United States used – perhaps is still using, for such things are kept secret – torture with the aim of obtaining vital intelligence. We developed nuclear weapons and used them on targets of limited military value (Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen precisely because for that reason they had been only lightly damaged in previous bombings). And after demonstrating our power, we used our to advance ourselves at the expense of others. And the American government has in the past, and continues in the present, to be much more talk than action on human rights – even the rights of its own citizens.

               

            Now, all of these things, it is argued, were done from necessity. Perhaps so. But I am somewhat concerned that the American people did not, do not, balk at these acts, that we do not turn our heads and go: “No that is not us, we’re the good guys, the good guys don’t do that”. It suggests that, at least for some, the reason why the Empire is the villain of Star Wars is not because the Empire is bad, but because the Empire opposes the protagonist. That because of the choices of the storyteller we do not sympathize with Luke because he is the “good guy”, but rather he is the “good guy” because we sympathize with him. That the same story could be told as a tragedy, with Empire doing everything it has to, yes, even unpleasant things, to protect itself, but despite its sacrifices is still overthrown. That you could easily make Vader the hero, and Luke the villain – and that people would believe it.

On Being Unafraid.

Fear is not a useless emotion. Fear can keep you alive. It is often rational to be afraid. But fear is not itself rational. It is a wild, unreasoning emotion, the enemy of reason. Fear wants to move your feet for you, wants to speak for you and act for you and deprive you of your will – in the moment fear can keep you alive, move you faster and further than wolves behind you, give you the strength to go on, to overcome, to survive the crisis. This a healthy fear.

But Americans (especially older Americans) seem to me a fearful people, though whether they are more or less fearful than any other I cannot say, and their fears seem much more the unhealthy sort. They are more afraid of terrorists than dogs, of strangers than intimates, of crime than of crossing the street. I my head understands this, that to most it is somehow much worse for a bad thing to be done to you than for a bad thing to simply happen, that malice terrifies while incompetence frustrates. My heart does not understand this though. When I think of the things that could ruin my life, that could harm me, that menagerie of misfortune is populated principally with the spawn of incompetence. Those creatures of malevolence are a sideshow compared to them.

And then there are the natural disasters that people fear, but to fear them is useless. After taking the precautions you think best, terror will not help you survive a tornado. If you let it though. it will gnaw at your guts before the storm and torment you – useless suffering which offends my sensibilities. The fear of incompetence may drive us to scrutinize the work of others, the fear of indifference may cause us to speak for ourselves, the fear of malice may push us to look to our protection, and live cautiously.

But the fear of the storm? We build our shelters, and weather what we must. All further concern is masochistic.

Now I am not a fearful sort, as a rule. I see the harm fear does, the madness and misrule it inspires, and whenever and know that courage is the first virtue – without it all the rest fall silent. So, I strive to overcome fear to master it, lest it master me.

But all of this is preamble, aside from my main point. Consider the phenomena of a gamma-ray burst. When a star dies and goes nova, a burst of high energy gamma rays shoots out from the star as a ray traveling at the speed of light. Such events are uncommon, even on an astronomical scale, and if it were to happen in our galaxy there is only a minute chance it would hit us.

But if did hit us, we would not see it coming, since the radiation travels at the speed of light, and it would be as if we microwaved the whole earth on high for half an hour. The atmosphere would burn off, the seas would boil, and on the whole surface of the earth and in the deepest depths there would not remain a single living thing or trace of our civilization. The entirety of the human race, all our works, the whole humanity’s history and our homeworld could vanish in instant, without and forewarning or chance of survival. What do you when there is no shelter from the storm? Take a moment to think on this.

When I first learned this , I was afraid. But I overcame that fear – it was the most useless of fears. I got on with my life, in doing so I learned a subtle truth: That safety is an illusion - there are only different levels of risk. The risk of a gamma-ray burst is small, and not my efforts or the efforts of the whole human race could reduce that risk one way or the other. It is simply there. Something to be endured.

And this comes back to the madness and misrule of fear – fear drives us to seek safety, but there is no safety. The politics of fear is that of promising safety (impossible!) or more accurately of promising to make people feel safe. And I don’t know what to do about that. I would like for voters to wise up, to overcome their fear, to accept that to live is to be at risk, to understand that safety is an illusion, and that the reduction of risk is never done without cost. But it is easier and more profitable to terrify than to reassure, so I expect nothing will change in this regard. We will frighten each other, and cook in our own fear until its softened our brains to the point where we’ll support anyone who promises to make us feel safe.

First Impressions

My earliest political memory is of the shitshow that was the aftermath of the 2000 election. I heard the words “Florida” and “Supreme Court” together so many times that 8-year-old me assumed that that was were the Supreme Court was located.  Growing older and looking back on the mess, on the miscarriage of democracy that was Bush’s victory in the Elector College, on the Supreme Court shutting down recounts of a razor thin margin on strictly partisan lines. I’ll say it plainly: I think the 2000 election was stolen by the Republicans. If democracy means anything it means that the people’s most preferred candidate wins. Not the candidate with 5 votes on the Supreme Court.That they were willing to steal it, and that having stole it defended their actions, and that American people didn’t hate them for this – all cements in my mind the conviction that even in America – perhaps especially in America – democracy isn't some fixed feature of our civilization, but a value system (an ideology!) that needs to be defended.

My second political memory is of 9/11. A teacher came in and said “there’s been an attack”, and everyone stopped and waited and watched. You could the tension with a knife, all the adults, and because of the adults, all the children were poised to flight, flee, or freeze. And I remember thinking: “An attack where in Bloomington?” and later: “We are in Bloomington, Indiana. New York and DC are far away. Why is everyone afraid?”. I’ve kept thinking that to this day – that the terrain of the terrorist is our psyche, the objective is to provoke stupid anger or paralyzing fear, and that overcoming them is as simple (and difficult!) as having courage and carrying on. But Americans were afraid, and vengeful, and foolishly they lashed out - invading Afghanistan, (and then Iraq). Children who were in that 2^nd grade class that day are now old enough to die in that graveyard of empire. I write this in 2018, and there is no prospect for withdrawal prior to 2019 – at which point someone born on 9/11 will be old enough to die in Afghanistan. All this – because vengeance drove us to war, and hubris keeps us fighting an unwinnable fight.

My third political memory is of a two-page spread in Newsweek. This was in the run up to the Iraq War, when Saddam let in UN inspectors to demonstrate that he didn’t have WMD’s, and the Bush Administration and the media weren’t willing to let a little thing like facts get in the way of war-fever. This was a two-page spread showing how Saddam could have hid is chemical weapons from UN inspectors using mobile labs and storage facilities. It was fascinating to a child. How intricate, how clever! But like many schematics that charm children, the notion falls apart at the slightest consideration of practicality. Why build mobile labs so far in advance when you didn’t anticipate inspectors? Wouldn’t transporting chemical weapons be very dangerous, and vulnerable to theft and attack? Why would and oil-rich dictator run his chemical weapons program out of facilities out of the equivalent of an RV meth lab?

Few at the time bothered with such questions. And those who did were derided and ignored. The Bush Administration lied – no not a lie, but rather fed us Frankfurtian bullshit with an utter disregard for the truth, and the media believed them, and people believed the media. And so, we piled up a trillion dollars in the desert along with tens of thousands of lives– and then set the whole heap on fire. How many among them apologized, or admitted their mistake – not just the politicians but the pundits and the rest of the chattering classes? How long has our endless war in the middle east gone on, without sign or hope of victory?

Especially among the right, those responsible, whether by negligence or malice, have lost little prestige, credibility, or readership and still linger in our national life. Time smooths rough edges and cools hot anger. But my first impressions of the Republican party, its policies and partisans, has given me an anger as cold and slick as ice.

The Fundamental Problem of Practical Ethics

When I think of the arguments for my political opinions (I’ll not aggrandize them by calling them beliefs), they often run like this: people have moral weight, therefore its not good to harm them, or through inaction allow them to come to harm (apologies to Asimov). So now we’re committed to helping others, and so we debate the best way to do that, the best way to for it, and so on.

For example: we aren’t OK with people dying in the streets because they can’t afford healthcare. So we (as a society) will guarantee that doesn’t happen by some mechanism. But somebody has to pay for that mechanism. I think the best (or perhaps it would be better to say, the best politically feasible and sustainable) way to do that is through single-payer healthcare. But it is more important to me that the problem is solved than that problem is solved in the best possible way. So while we might disagree about the appropriate mechanism, about how pays and how, but we recognize that there is a problem caused by our moral commitments to other human beings, and we desire to solve that problem in some way.

But when I interrogate this argument I notice a stumbling block, which has, as I have grown older, seemed less like the exotic cruelty of the sociopath and more the ordinary cruelty that Americans swim in. If I say “Its not right to just let people die in the streets of some ordinary illness, just because they haven’t got any money”, how many will say “Why not? I do not know these people, they are not me, or my kin, why should I care?”. That response chills me and leaves me dumbfounded. And perhaps after some flailing argumentation, I will retreat into a long silence.

Because I do not have a good answer to that question. “Why should I care about other people?”. I cannot explain it. Those with whom I have political disagreements who do not think, cannot think to ask that question, who do not see empathy and compassion as self-evident, I cannot disagree with them about ways and means of attaining goals. I disagree with them about beginnings and ends. To my mind, a person who simply does not care about other people, who cannot even muster up some feeble excuse for their cruel indifference, such a person is simply a bad person.

And all of this troubles me greatly, because it is hard to square the common (in certain influential circles) refrain for bipartisanship and compromise, that there are two (morally defensible) sides to every argument, the popular belief among the apolitical that the truth always lies between two extremes, and that political virtue involves giving all sides weight, with the belief, even the knowledge that some of my political opponents are simply bad people. This is difficult for the apolitical and those who participate in politics while disdaining it. Their minds rebel against the notion. This denial of the plain facts is as much a barrier to reform and progress, to the concrete improvement of the world, than the indifference of the cold-hearted to the suffering of others.

Edmund Burke, that famous conservative, one said “All that is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing”. I do not think the apolitical are bad people. I am sure that in their private lives they are by large as kind and decent as other folk, perhaps more so. But I think they are very inclined to do nothing.

Nationalism and Patriotism, Republicans and Democrats

What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? It is the difference between the love of nation and the love of country. In our modern age of nation-states that fine distinction is often lost, or deemed irrelevant, but in the context of American politics I think it explains much.

The etymology of "patriotism" and "patriot" is the Latin word patria, which might be best translated as "homeland" or "fatherland". Patriotism, therefore, is the love of a country, and often accompanied by a loyalty to the state that governs that country. In the American context, where our national origin story is one of the frontier, a new land conquered and settled to found an intentional community on some set of shared values. The "American people", to the patriot, are in classical Greek terms a demos, a political community of all the inhabitants of the same fatherland. 

But the nationalist does not love a country, per se, rather, the nationalist loves a nation, an ethnic group, and so only a nation-state, a state created by, or at least for, that group can command the loyalty of the nationalist. Nationalism isn't necessarily exclusive, and the nationalist doesn't inevitably desire a homogeneous ethno-state or support ethnic cleansing to obtain it. But the train of nationalist thought can lead to that conclusion without being derailed by contradiction. Thus to an American nationalist the "American people" are an ethnos, a single ethnic group.

Both nationalists and patriots "love their country". The patriot loves his country because it is his fatherland, and so his love is the unconditional filial devotion of children to their parents. Thus where the patria embodies his (and its) ideals he is filled with pride, and where it falls short of those ideals he aspires to lift it up and repair its mistakes.

But the nationalist, the nationalist loves his country because it is their country, because it belongs to his nation (which is of course a great nation), and thus is a great country. And so long as the country remains the possession of his nation he loves it, and so long as the state is commanded by his nation he obeys it. But if his country should change, if his nation should become less dominant within it, if nation should cease to command the state, he will cease to love his country or to obey its state. For the nationalists "love of country" is utterly conditional and transnational, a passing affection that exists only so as long as country and state serve his nation.

What does this mean for American politics? I advance this hypothesis: that today Democrats are patriots and Republicans are nationalists. Thus the Democrats seek to define and advance the values of their patria and serve the interests of the demos. To understand them we need only seek to understand their values. But Republicans are nationalists, (or at least the Trumpists) and the nation they love is white Anglophone Americans. Their political cause is protect and advance the power and interests of that nation, regardless of all other people.

The hazards that ideology, if left unchecked, poses to the American republic should  be obvious. 

The Value of Innocence.

Surprisingly often, the right thing to do is the smart thing to do.

Take public defenders. Or rather, don't. Because at present in the USA the de jure constitutional right to legal representation is de facto a cruel joke, with PD's working between 1.5 and 2 time the recommended caseload, and as a result about 90% of their clients plead guilty in a plea bargain. This ins't just a miscarriage of justice, its also very wasteful.

Public defenders with 11-15 years of experience earn on average about $76,000 dollars a year, rookies about $50,000. On average, the recommend number of felony cases for them to work is about 50, and the number they actually work is a bit over 100. So how many innocent people accused of felonies do they have to successfully defend each year to pay for themselves?

One.

See, putting people in prison isn't free. It costs about $30,000 dollars on average to keep people in prison, depending on the state. Since the average prison sentence for serious crimes is about 3 years (assuming a discount rate of 3%) the present cost to the government is about $84,000. That's ignoring the wages, and taxes on those wages, that are lost keeping an innocent person in prison. If we took that into account the social cost would be much higher.

Now the key variable in all this is how often innocent people are charged with felonies. So my question to you is this, how many times out of a hundred do you think an innocent person is charged with a felony?

Lets say that its 2%. That's a very good error rate. After all, the threshold for publication in the sciences is 95% confidence. But a three percent error rate means that if public defender worked 50 cases, on average 1 would be innocent. And if he successfully defended that one innocent person he's more than paid for himself. But a public defender can't mount successful defenses unless his caseload permits it. At fifty cases per PD he could successfully defend innocent clients. At the current level, where 90% enter plea bargains, that doesn't seem so likely.

Now this accounting doesn't fully measure all the other court costs, although those would generally be incurred regardless of whether or not a person is innocent, and so are a wash. But my estimates for false charges are very conservative, which I think more that balances it out.

tl;dr Public defenders more than pay for themselves. We could double the amount of money we spend on them, and more than make it up on the reduced prison spending. But we won't do that so long as cruelty and stupidity are governing principles.

Mel Gibson Should Have Been a Tory in "The Patriot"

Mel Gibson's character in The Patriot, Benjamin Martin, should have been a Tory fighting against the American Revolution. Gibson decided to airbrush away unpleasant facts and historical complexities around the Patriot cause and the historical figure (Francis Marion) that his character was based on. But those changes should have created entirely different narrative and put a strange subtext on the movie we actually got.

The most important difference between the fictional Martin and the historical Marion is that Marion was a slaveowner and a believer in slavery. Which made him like pretty much every other white guy of any means in South Carolina prior to 1865. Gibson's Martin doesn't own slaves. He employs literate free blacks on his farm. Not as sharecropping tenants either. In South Carolina, the beating heart of slave power in North America. His neighbors are plantations worked by slaves, and their neighbors are plantations worked by slaves. Every person of any wealth or power in South Carolina is involved, to one extent or another in slavery. Martin is probably the most progressive and just member of the planter class in the entirety of South Carolina, maybe even the whole American South.

And I bet his neighbors hate and fear him. South Carolina made it a crime to educate or manumit a slave well prior to 1776. Southern slaveowners, especially in South Carolina were terrified of anything that might threaten the slave system or make a slave revolt possible, with good reason. Paranoia is rational when they really are out to get you, and the 1790 census records about 40% of South Carolina's population were slaves. The category of "other free persons" (i.e. free blacks) numbered exactly 1,801, less than 1% of the population. To employ free blacks, especially in a rural area where they might most easily help slaves escape or organize a revolt, would have been barely tolerable to his neighbors. Our only conclusion then, is that Benjamin Martin is an anti-slavery radical. None of his peers would hold him in contempt for owning slaves while privately expressing reservations about the whole affair, and if he merely objected to his being a part of it he could have sold his farm and moved North. But he stayed in South Carolina, "to small to be a republic, to big to be an insane asylum", which was the center of white supremacy in America until the 1960s. But he stayed. Martin might have been done killing after the French and Indian War, but he wasn't done fighting. He was going to attack slavery at its strongest point by setting an example. It puts a whole new spin on his line (IMO the best line in the movie):

"I'd rather be ruled by one tyrant a thousand miles away than a thousand tyrants one mile away"

That sentiment, and his opposition to slavery, suggest that Martin would have sided with the British if he believed they were the stronger opponents of slavery. Which after the American Revolution they certainly were, abolitionism advancing from a fringe position in 1776 to the official policy of the British Empire by the 1830s, which they used as a justification for the expansion of their empire. But in 1776 whether the British or the American Revolutionaries were stronger opponents of slavery was unclear.  Britons were held in bondage by other Britons in Britain until 1799, and several major court cases around 1776, analogous to the Dredd Scott case, affirmed that, while slave-trading per-se wasn't practiced in Britian, slaves brought in from abroad remained slaves.

So why did Benjamin Martin fight for Americans? Because his son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), did, and provoked a retaliation by British forces that destroyed his family and livelihood. So why did Gabriel side with the Patriots? Presumably, raised in a radically anti-slavery household, he would share those beliefs. And so listening to the radical rhetoric coming out of Boston, he figured that now was the time to rise up in defense of liberty, and throw out the British and abolish slavery in a newly independent America. So he ran off to join the Continental army, and that's how we got the movie we did.

A movie in which the British are supposed to be the bad guys, perpetrating the infamously ahistorical atrocity of the church massacre. But watch that scene again. Where are the black people? South Carolina's population in 1770s is 40% slaves. In this rural area of the South is Tavington murdering all the civilians, or just the free civilians? Presumably all the slaves either ran away or were set free. Tavington, arragant brute though he is, appears to be adopting a divide and rule strategy in counterinsurgency, attempting to win over southern blacks to create a loyalist population to "garrison" a restive region. A strategy the British had used before in Ireland and would use again throughout the world. Presumably, if that's the long term plan of the British, abolition is the American colonies will have to follow a British victory sooner rather than later. And while both the Americans and British promised to free any slave who fought for them, the British actually kept their promise,

The movie ends after the siege of Yorktown and the military victory of the Americans. But the implications of this backstory and the unseen historical epilogue creates a darker, more cynical film than Gibson intended to make. He wanted a patriotic war movie and another venue to express his undying hatred of the British (seriously, why does he hate them so much?). But what he got was a film about a revolution betrayed. Because the causes and ideals the titular patriot fought for, arguably America's highest ideals, died after independence. All the suffering and tragedy he endured, the loss of his son, his family, his home, the people he killed and led to their deaths, the failure to overcome his blood-lust, was for nothing. Slavery became even more entrenched and persisted in the South until the Civil War, and the 1783 Constitution made such significant concessions to slave power that they damage American democracy to this day.