Category Archives: Justice

Most of the posts appearing here will involve that special kind of outrage that comes from knowing someone who didn’t deserve it got really screwed.

Triggers

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

The first time I recall reading a trigger warning it was in the off-topic sub-forum on a gaming discussion board. If I remember correctly, it was in the title for a thread about sexual abuse. That usage struck me then, as it does now, as a perfectly appropriate warning to some that the ensuing discussion was going to cover issues which some might find intensely stressful. I also understood the likely reason for this to be that some people might have had direct personal experience with the realities of such abuse. It has ever since struck me as a reasonable and positive thing to provide that warning in advance. It also serves as a good reminder to the rest of us that something we may regard as grist for the mill could have serious personal significance for others. I know that reminder has helped me to appreciate the weight of some issues. I can’t say that I’m always happy with my performance in dealing with these things, but I do think I handle these issues with more care now than I did in earlier days, and I credit that first encounter with a trigger warning with producing the difference.

Within a couple years on that same discussion the trigger warnings in the off-topic forum had multiplied beyond my wildest imagination. Countless variations of trigger warnings could be found in the title of one thread after another. I found it increasingly difficult to take them seriously, not because I couldn’t imagine someone getting upset at this or that topic, but because there comes a point where the likelihood that someone will become upset ceases to be a function of the topic and becomes an abstract possibility that is simply always there. People get upset, but it isn’t always because the discussion at hand is intrinsically dangerous subject matter. As I read the increasingly common little warning symbols, placed conveniently in square brackets, I couldn’t help but think the point was far more likely to be a statement about the values of the person employing the hashtag. Right wingers like to call this ‘virtue signaling’, and I don’t necessarily dispute the appropriateness of the label, though I do suspect the convenience of that buzz-term is a vice of its own. Whatever the purpose of the growing trigger-warning craze, I couldn’t help thinking then, as I do now, that the concept is subject to inflationary pressures.

As in, increased usage leads to decreased significance.

Where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but somewhere between a trigger warning fr sexual abuse and the many seemingly trivial uses I have seen over the years, the significance of these warnings does seem to change. Moreover, the expectation that someone ought to use trigger warnings, or that they must use them introduces a level of coercive authority into the equation. It wasn’t that long ago that a Dean at the University of Chicago denounced trigger warnings. In so doing, he clearly took them to be a mechanism for silencing those with whom one disagrees. But what about those who choose to use such warnings, some argued. Is that not permitted? And thus the renunciation of authority came  itself to be viewed as an assertion of authority, one itself worthy of denial. Who is oppressing whom and how is, it turns out, a bit more complicated than some would have it.

I guess I’m enough of an old fashioned liberal to want to have my free speech and use it too. I don’t like seeing efforts to silence speakers at public universities in the name of safe spaces, and that isn’t because I’m a fan of people like Milo Yiannopoulos. What I really don’t like is watching the careers people like that flourish as a direct result of the explosive outrage they specialize in …triggering. People like that have nothing to say, and they need the spectacle of outrage to provide the illusion of substance. I’d rather answer them. I would rather make the case against them, at least when that case can be made without fear and intimidation coming from the other side. I have seen right wingers drown out their critics, and I wouldn’t tolerate it. Lately though, a number of right wing sources have come to relish moments in which the left appears to be doing the same thing.

…is doing the same thing.

That too should not be tolerated, not the least of reasons being that it’s exactly what some of these hacks want from us.

This brings me back to the whole inflationary pressures thing. If the left wing over-uses trigger warnings, I think the same can be said of the right.

…well the ‘trigger’ part anyway, not so much the ‘warning’ part.

Time and again, I see folks respond to an argument for social justice by claiming its proponent has been triggered. Hell, I’ve gotten the response myself a time or ten, sometimes when I am more amused than agry. It’s fascinating to me, to see this cry of victory. As often as not, the signs of stress just aren’t there, or if they are, they are present to exactly the degree that one might expect from anyone else upon expressing disagreement. Yet, those proclaiming their opponents have been ‘triggered’ seem to hope those opponents are wallowing in distress, or at least they seem to enjoy pretending that is the case.

This is of course the hope of a troll, and it isn’t much worthy of anyone who claims to be advancing a serious point of view on any subject. But I suppose it does help to confound the issues, to ensure that no-one ever does take a trigger warning seriously. Still, I can’t help thinking for some it appears to be an end in itself, the prospect of making someone else feel bad.

If the notion of a trigger has lost some of its value in overuse by those on the left, it’s losing even more value as playground conservatives transform the term into a trophy of sorts. If they have their way, the public will be incapable of distinguishing between the psychological traumas experienced by some when dealing with sensitive issues and the irritation others feel upon realizing someone is wrong on the internet. This isn’t really conservatism, of course. There is nothing conservative about mocking women over their looks, disabled persons, victims of crime, or even minorities for pleading their own case in the public eye. Conservative politics may be resistant to a number of efforts at correcting social harms, but the growing orgy of right wing schadenfreude is an altogether different animal. Some people really do hope to inflict suffering on others.

To them a trigger warning is a symbol of hope.

It’s a hope I would see them denied.

A Troubled Tale of Two Racisms and the Floundering Efforts to Oppose Them

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Justice, Native American Issues

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

lThis wasn’t the first time I felt unwelcome at the mutton stand. In fact, it was the second time this server had ignored me while serving other customers. Just like the first instance, I initially assumed it was an accident, or at least that she had some other reasons for avoiding me, but slowly I started to wonder if it was my color. White people were not entirely foreign to these markets, but the vast majority of folks frequenting these stands were certainly Navajo. And it was beginning to look increasingly like this particular woman had no intention of doing business with me at all.

…which really sucked, because these guys made the best roast mutton in Window Rock!

What to do about it? In my younger days, my social tool kit was long on hammers and short on other options. I had enough sense to realize vocal complaints about unfair treatment of a bilagáana might go down poorly, but not enough subtlety to think of alternative ways to address the matter. As it happens, I didn’t need to think of anything to say. The other customers did it for me. A chorus of “He’s next!” greeted the woman’s next efforts to pass me by, some of their voices tinged with a sense of real irritation. I got my roast mutton that day. More than that, I felt a sense of reassurance. Although resentment of whites could be found in many varieties out on the Navajo Nation, so could a certain sense of fairness. On this day that sense of fairness won out and I got my mutton.

***

Let me start by admitting up front that I could have been wrong about the motivations of the woman who didn’t seem to want to serve me. Perhaps I read the whole thing wrong, and maybe my own behavior had somehow triggered her actions. Hell, maybe I really shouldn’t have been eating there in the first place. All this is quite possible, but I am going to ask you, dear reader, to accept for purposes of argument, that this was an instance of a Navajo woman treating me different (a little bit badly) because of my ethnicity. I think it is also an instance in which the members of her own community found this to be unacceptable behavior.

So here is the question, did I experience racism?

No, that’s not the question.

My real question is how do you go about answering that first question?

It seems to me that at least two radically different approaches to answering that question have become rather common these days, and it is getting more and more difficult for people using these different approaches to talk to each other about the matter. One way of going about it, which I will call the conventional approach (perhaps for no better reason than that it is the approach I grew up with) would be to raise questions about the motives and attitude of the woman who didn’t seem to want to serve me. Granting a certain range of answers about what she had in mind, someone taking this approach would say ‘yes’ I had been subject to racism. Another approach (let’s call it the social constructivist approach) is more common these days in academia and left wing politics in general. From this standpoint, it is best to inquire into the social power of the parties involved and then see how they use that power in respect of one another. Those adopting this approach might also want to expand consideration beyond the mutton stand to the larger patterns of history and contemporary politics. In most cases this approach would lead to an answer of ‘no’ to my first question, or even a ‘hell no’, perhaps with an additional lecture on the privilege of living in a world where slow service at a mutton stand is a moral outrage worthy of remembering nearly two decades later.

***

Okay, so let’s do this…

In the conventional approach, racism is a question of personal judgement and motivation. Racism consists in treating someone different on account of their race, and since all manner of people can do this, anyone can clearly be racist. The possibility of ‘reverse racism’ as it is commonly called is obvious enough with the only real questions being about whether or not this or that particular event illustrates some variety of reverse discrimination. Using this approach (and assuming I wasn’t missing something important), it is quite possible to affirm that I was subjected to racism on that day.

On it’s face, the conventional approach seems a perfectly reasonable take on the subject. People often use it to advance a genuine sense of moral obligation regarding how one ought to treat others, and by people here I do mean all kinds of people. Folks from all sorts of different backgrounds can and do frequently advance the notion that one ought not to treat people differently (or at least badly) on account of their race. This does strike me as a good thing, but the question is whether or not this is an adequate response to the problem of racism.

First and I think foremost, the problem with this approach is that it flattens the significance of discriminatory behavior, putting the denial of a mutton sandwich in much the same boat with minstrel shows, segregated schools, legacy contracts, Japanese internment, involuntary sterilization, lynching. and even the Holocaust. Hell, I  felt a little nausea myself putting my mutton-stand story in the same sentence with all those things, but the absurdity of that comparison is precisely my point. Addressing racism as an issue of personal motivation doesn’t do much to help us understand the difference between petty gestures and genuine atrocities. It isn’t that people can’t understand that there is a difference, but this approach to countering racism creates a fashion of speaking about them which tends to put them all on equal footing, at least for a moment. If we then want to talk about the differences between a simple affront and something that genuinely oppresses whole groups of people, then that talk falls somewhere over and above the problem of racism.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that large numbers of people never get out of that fashion of speaking about racism, that large numbers of people never really get the difference between a lynching and an expression of petty personal bias. Indeed, some folks seem prepared to recognize racism only if it is first prefaced with ‘reverse’. Time and again, advocates of social justice find their concerns drowned out by talk of reverse racism and stories in which the under-privileged prove themselves ironically capable of being the bad guys too.

…and in the ultimate poetic injustice, being discriminated against too, becomes the exclusive cultural capital of the privileged.

Don’t laugh. A few pundits have become filthy rich working that very angle.

It is no wonder that persons of color and their political allies often want to do away with this fashion of speaking about racism altogether. The conventional approach to racism is, as many seem to suggest, a well far too poisoned with all this talk of reverse discrimination to be of any real use for understanding the larger issues of oppression and injustice  in the world today. So, many of those interested in such issues have chosen to define racism as something that requires not merely prejudice but the social capital to put that prejudice into play with real and devastating consequences. Racism is from this point of view an expression of power, not merely an individual act, whatever its motivation. This is what I mean by a Social Constructivist approach. It’s a clunky phrase, and a grad-school cliché, but what the hell!?! It works.

It isn’t that people advocating the social constructivist approach don’t think minorities can be jerks; but they don’t see the myriad stories minority jerkitry as a meaningful part of the story of racism. From this standpoint, my mutton-stand story is simple a non-starter. The problem isn’t just the scale of harm (or the lack thereof); such stories are from this point of view a genuine distraction from the central issues of oppression that should be the focus of concerns about racism. It’s easy enough to get the problem with such stories in this kind of loose narrative; the problem comes in when people start trying to explain why such stories are as a matter of principle unimportant to the issue of racism.

Often folks taking the constructivist approach will say something to the effect that racism is about power and since minorities don’t have the power, they can’t be racist. This has always struck me as a terrible oversimplification, and I could only wish it were a straw man, or that its use were limited to less educated circles. But it isn’t.

To me, the core problem here is that the argument uses an awfully ham-handed sense of social power. We can talk of people having more or less power, but the notion that whites have all the power and minorities absolutely none of it is bordering caricature. For one thing, it doesn’t take a lot of power to hurt someone, and it is one of the perversities of racism that it may from time to time offer those whom it keeps from real opportunity the consolation of petty revenge against some unlucky fellow. Whether it is a personal punch in the mouth, a petty decision by a  boss, or a politician playing to his own base, there are plenty of persons of color quite capable of harming those of another ethnicity. One must also consider the possibilities of scape-goating other minorities, or even minority groups within their own community. And finally, there is no reason to expect that racism must always mean hurting those belonging to the race that someone hates. Often as not resentments directed at whole groups of other people precedes a shot to one’s own foot, so to speak. The kind of social power which makes racism a problem simply doesn’t rest only at one end of the spectrum, even if acknowledging that fact let’s an unwelcome foot in the door. Acknowledging the possibility that someone other than a white person might have the means to hurt people on the basis of race should not be difficult, but in short-hand politics, it seems many are happy to simply discount that possibility.

…which is definitely taking liberties with the facts.

It isn’t that an emphasis on social power means abrogation of minority responsibility to others, and I don’t think many people mean to suggest that; it’s that one of the aims of an emphasis on the social construction of power is to put harm to the underprivileged back in the center-spot of opposition to racism.

***

All of this leaves us with one very big problem as I see it. Speaking of racism as something that is by definition an expression of the privileged cuts so far against conventional approaches to the subject that it amounts to quitting the field in a sense, abandoning the larger public discourse. Unless I am underestimating the extent to which social construction has reached the popular consciousness, that approach (with its complete disclaimer of the possibilities of minority racism) is a bit too foreign for most people to comprehend. The reasons for such an approach are well known in academia, and in many circles of left-wing politics, but they aren’t sufficiently well known to guide public perceptions. So while those adopting a social constructivist approach can talk in limited circles as though only the ignorant or malicious would even think of describing racism as something a minority could do, large parts of the public take it for granted that it most certainly is, and that lunacy or at least dishonesty are the only reasons anyone would deny it.

The notion that minorities simply cannot be racist leaves a silence in the space where one would normally raise questions about rude, cruel, or even genuinely harmful actions by minorities. Often, advocates of the social constructivist approach will concede that sundry examples of such behavior are terrible; they might even suggest alternative words to describe them. I hear it time and again, the notion that racism just isn’t the right word for it, but what that word would be isn’t so clear. So, the more reasonable folks taking the social constructivist approach are not really trying to insulate minorities from criticism, but they are working hard to ensure that criticism is divorced from an important source of moral value, opposition to racism. Arguably, what is lost in this approach is simply too valuable, and like it or not, there are legitimate reasons for addressing questions about racially motivated behavior by minorities, reasons that cannot be reduced to the effort to drown pro-minority politics in a deluge of petty complaints by the well privileged.

In the end, denying the possibility of minority racism does not just silence those milking the reverse-racism angle for more than its worth, it also silences people with real concerns and sincere questions about ethnic relations. All too often, the right wing pundits are happy to fill that silence with the suggestion that lefties are just bigots in their on right and that this whole fashion of speaking is just another attack on white people. That may seem a cop-out to many advocates of the constructivist approach, but unfortunately the cop-out is mutual. An awful lot of folks are finding more and more ways to avoid talk to each other about this subject, and even to find ways of speaking really loudly while not really talking to each other about it.

It is extremely important to make a strong case for the significance of social power in the history and politics of racism, but that case poorly served by word games. As certain voices work very hard to ensure the public can’t tell the difference between affirmative action and Jim Crow, a large part of the public is unsure what to make of the issues. The difference must be explained, and yes, perhaps explained again, because those working reverse-racism molehills into great mountains will go right on doing so. They aren’t the  least bit phased to find that lefty scholars have adopted a way of speaking about the issue that side-steps their own gambit.

Far from it.

***

So, was I exposed to racism on that day so many years ago? Meh, …who cares? My real point is that I hear and read people talking about such questions in two very different ways, and more and more I meet people who seem completely incapable of bridging the gap between those ways of speaking.

It’s a problem.

***

Roast Mutton provided by a review of Sacred Hogan.

 

Won’t Someone Please Think of the Dan Snyders?

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Justice, Native American Issues

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

DanSnyderSomeone really ought to take donations for the Washington Redskins. I hear they are in desperate need of team gear that isn’t racist or demeaning to Native Americans. Mind you, I say ‘Native Americans’ because I think that’s what Redskins owner Dan Snyder would want me to say. Dan clearly doesn’t think it prudent to go around calling real people ‘Redskins‘, but he does seem to think it’s appropriate to use that label for his football team. So, why on earth would Snyder continue using the name? I mean he cares, right? He cares enough to visit 26 tribes and start a charity for Native Americans, and he certainly cares enough not to call anyone this term to their face. So, why would he continue using the name for his team? I can only conclude that he and his organization can’t afford the costs incurred by the change of gear.

The conclusion is inescapable.

I know, I know, a lot of people might think rather poorly of Snyder at this point, but perhaps we are getting it all wrong. We don’t understand the scale of the problem Snyder faces. As Ross Tucker points out, the term ‘Redskins’ is so very divisive that the team name really must be kept. Hell, Tucker assures us that a lot of people would criticize Dan Snyder now regardless of any other consideration, just because he is Dan Snyder. Cause apparently there aren’t any real reasons to be concerned about Snyder’s team name or any of his efforts to defend that name in the public eye. People are just after Dan.

Man, that poor guy!

If Tucker’s point doesn’t show you just what a crazy pickle our poor man Dan has got himself into, then just consider the stories of Chief Dodson, Peter MacDonald, and now Gary Edwards, all figures Dan Snyder has promoted or honored through his organization. I mean Dan’s whole effort to establish relations with indigenous leaders seems to suffer from a bad case of fractal wrongness, because error raises its ugly head at every scale of the project. A more cynical person might suggest that Snyder has been cherry picking cooperative indigenous leaders for the purpose of misleading the public about indigenous support for his team. A more cynical person might suggest that Snyder’s charity was a straight forward bribe, and that he wasn’t all that serious about helping anyone. A really cynical person might even suggest that this kind of thing was part of a time-dishonored tradition of manipulating native leadership, and that such stunts could add real injury to the insult of the team name. A more cynical person might see in Dan Snyder’s efforts to sell his team name a message that he knows and cares even less about Native Americans than the simple racism of his actual team name would seem to suggest. But, well, that’s what a cynical person might think.

Bad cynical person!

For myself, I say the pattern here is obvious. Dan Snyder and his tiny understaffed organization are clearly struggling to keep up with events. Hell, they can hardly vet their people, and frankly, I think a few indigenous folks have taken advantage of Dan’s big heart. If that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, then focus on the fact that struggling as they are Snyder has taken it upon himself to form a charity to help Native American communities. He and his charity even assisted with the purchase of a backhoe for Pete’s sake! A whole backh…, well part of a backhoe anyway! It’s a giving man that gives part of a backhoe when he can’t even properly vet a PR stunt.

Think about that and try not to get a great big old lump in your throat!

BYtx3CdIcAE8tVTWe know one thing for sure, and that’s that Dan Snyder understands just how insulting the term ‘Redskins’ really is. I think it’s safe to say that he would do something about this if he could. I did a whole fact finding mission about this sometime ago, or maybe I just thought about doing it, but anyway I’m pretty sure I know at least 26 Redskins fans that can live with a change of names. Hell, I’m quite certain I bought a burger for one of them, or at least assisted in its purchase. I’ll send Dan a postcard about all this and we’ll call the whole matter confirmed. It’s definitely time to change the name folks. But the Redskins need your help. They just can’t do this on their own. They can’t afford to change their stationary.

So, please folks, won’t you help Dan Snyder and his unfortunately named football franchise? Send them sports gear that doesn’t suck. Send them helmets, jerseys, shoes, and used mouthpieces. Hell, send them a hockey stick if that’s what you have. After all, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? I mean Dan has obviously put a lot of thought into his efforts to help others so it’s only fair that the rest of us ought to help him. So, seriously folks, just dig into that old closet or rifle through the boxes in your garage and see what’s left from your high school days. Somewhere in that dusty attic, you know you have what Dan Snyder and his people need. Send them pair of sensible socks if that’s what you have. Every little bit counts.

Please help Dan!

Please!

 

 

Mansplaining Hobby Lobby At the Silly Girls: Ain’t Free Exercise Fun!?!

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Justice, Politics, Religion

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Bjk4aOWIEAABqBXI understand the compulsion to wish that people would separate religion from politics, but you might as well tell the wind to stand in a corner and think about all the tall grass it pushes around. Religion IS politics. It always has been and it always will be. So, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the GOP has found Jesus again. The Prince of Peace showed them a little leg by means of Citizens United, and the good political Christians have been composing love poems ever since. Today it’s working on rhyme scheme full of obby, gobby, and a great big bibilo-bobby.

It’s moments like these when the distinction between religion and politics simply vanishes. Both embrace visions of a moral order; both anchor that order in some vision of the world at large, and both impose that order on real people. So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise when Jesus turns out to want the same things Uncle Sam does (especially when he’s talking out the right side of his mouth). Does it really make a difference whether the government controls your body or a church? …or for that matter a hobby store?

For practical purposes the word ‘your’ today excludes anything claimed by those of us with a y chromosome, but take heart mens’ rights activists! I’m sure someone is oppressing a man somewhere; y’all can still howl!

This notion that corporations are persons for purposes of the Bill of Rights really has opened up new ground in the frontiers of collectivism, and all manner of good commie-bashing Republicans have jumped the gun to homestead this new turf without the slightest trace of irony. So, today we face the perverse prospect that the religious views of a corporate entity may trump the personal liberties of a woman (along with the good judgement of her doctor).

Pardon me, I have to vomit.

If there was ever any doubt that religious exemptions to the terms of the Affordable Care Act are about controlling the bodies of women, that should have been dispelled long ago. It should have been dispelled the day Rush Limbaugh reacted to a critic of these exemptions by calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’ and spreading lies about her sex life. It should certainly have been dispelled when good respectable conservatives all across the land shouted ‘yea verily’ at the grand bigot-pontiff of hack radio and promptly drafted themselves up a rash of laws restricting the health options of any women unfortunate enough to live in the wrong state or county. For all the rhetoric of rights, one doesn’t have to look hard to see the naked power politics of the right wing’s current approach to women’s health. Control over women’s bodies is an end in itself, and the Republicans want it now.

On this topic, they can count on the support of half-baked misogynists everywhere.

Today the great masculine hope lies with Hobby Lobby and misogynists are lining up to buy a kitchy piece of cloth, or perhaps a nice candle. Others are happy to simply tweet their support. Their keyboards say ‘Religious freedom’, but so often their texts read sexism, and they read it loud and clear. Take for example this little gem from the Matt Walsh Blog. Matt’s thoughts on individual rights aren’t particularly interesting; one is hard-pressed actually to call them thoughts, at least insofar as they appear on the pages of this post, but what’s really fascinating to me is the social posture he takes in this post, the footing as it were. You see Matt isn’t content to frame a basic argument about religious freedom or the rights of supposedly Christian corporations, he wants to set his post up as a direct response to those women who may want birth control. The result is epic mansplaining.

I’ve poured through mounds of research, read pages and pages of court precedent; I’ve reflected on it, meditated, retreated into the mountains to ponder this mystery in peace; I’ve even Googled it, and all of these measures have brought me to one incredible solution for women who want birth control:

Pay for it yourselves.

Or find an employer that chooses to provide it.

Or have sex and don’t use it.

Or don’t have sex.

Basically, take responsibility for your sex life, one way or another.

By ‘epic’ I suppose I mean childish and petty, but what do you expect. Anyway, there you have it folks; at bottom this issue is basic childishness. Apparently, women need to take more responsibility for their own sex lives. So, Matt is going to give them all a good lecture and be done with it.

Can you just hear the guy saying “I won’t cum inside you baby?” No really just the tip? If it comes to that, he no doubt promises to do the honorable thing.  …You get the idea. I’m almost sorry if this is too graphic, but I’ll be damned if the issue of personal responsibility for sexual matters doesn’t play out in just such moments all over the world. Seriously the notion that women need to take more responsibility for their sex lives is perversely ironic and that is precisely what Walsh’s framing of the issue sets up. His blog post isn’t a polemic on a tricky political problem, it is a lecture given to an errant little girl, one whose rights certainly don’t extend to questions about her own medical care. Why not? Well, let’s let Matt tell you…

It used to be that your rights were infringed upon if the government punished or threatened you for expressing your sincerest beliefs.

Now, your rights are infringed upon if you want something but someone refuses to buy it for you.

It used to be that the vision of tyranny was a man or woman bound, gagged, and shoved in a cage for speaking his or her mind.

Now, tyranny is the tragic image of man or woman forced to spend their own money on something because nobody would give it to them for free.

We used to fight and die for free speech.

Now we sit around and whine for free birth control.

Here Matt’s language echoes that of Limbaugh’s old attack on Sandra Fluke. This is a simple case of someone wanting something for free (which isn’t true, but don’t tell these hacks). Gone is any consideration of larger medical issues or questions about how one decides to deal with his or her own body. I say ‘his’ because I think most of us can relate to those moments when an insurance company turns out to be the reason your doc is doing this as opposed to that, and I sincerely doubt that Matt and his fawning fans are any less likely to grumble about such things when faced with them. But when Hobby Lobby turns out to be the reason why a woman can’t get birth control, well that’s just the facts of life, dontchaknow! Oh yes, of course she can pay for the birth control herself, just like you can pay for any number of medical procedures and prescriptions yourself. The fact is that in THIS world, and I by THIS world (I mean the crappy world of health-care we have here in the U.S.A.) what insurance will and won’t pay for is often the difference between what we get and what we don’t. In the real world Hobby Lobby’s policies will make a difference in the care some women get. Some of us think that difference ought to be up to her and her doctor, but apparently that is the view of tyrants.

…and of silly girls who whine.

Of course this is the tip of the Obamacare iceberg here, and many of those telling women to go fly a kite for contraception are the same folks who fought tooth and nail to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their solution for women is the same solution they offered all of us in the years leading up to the ACA, let the market run its course. Pay for your own insurance or pay for your own medical care; that’s what apple pies and supply curves are all about! That folks would say this knowing that medical bills in the U.S. have long since become prohibitive for large sections of the working public is irresponsible in the extreme. It isn’t just governments that skew the market; corporations (and particularly insurance corporations) do that too, but don’t tell the free market fundamentalists. They’ll call you un-American, …or maybe a slut or something.

In any event, the ACA is law now, warts and all, and the present battle is a classic exercise in scapegoating. It turns out that health-care for women is more complicated than it is for men, and when it comes to sex and its consequences, women are more vulnerable than men. So, Hobby Lobby and its pious supporters have risen to the occasion, leading the right wing to its scape-goat. We may have to accept this abortion of a law, they seem to be suggesting, but at least we can leave the sluts out in the cold.

And if they don’t like it?

Well then there are always mansplaining culture warriors to put them in their place. You can’t help but notice the pleasure some of these folks take in explaining the issue. For some, it’s a kind of theatrical moment, a chance to play the role of the stern father or maybe the soup Nazi.

No sex for you!

Ah well! Let’s give Matt the last word here:

And, seriously, in case I forgot to mention it: pay for your own birth control.

The end.

Next issue?

 

An Uncommon Harbor and a Stolen Victory

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Alaska, Justice

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Point Hope from the Air

Point Hope from the Air

Have you heard about the big harbor at Cape Thompson in Alaska? Oh it doesn’t exist, of course, no thanks to the Atomic Energy Commission. they were going to make a harbor at Cape Thompson, just south of Point Hope. They were going to build it in a jiffy, so to speak.

I did mention this was the Atomic Energy Commission, didn’t I?

Project Chariot would have set off a series of atomic bombs at Cape Thompson in an effort to provide the proof of concept for operation Plowshare, a program to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. In 1958, the prospect of geological engineering stood high on the agenda for the folks behind Operation Plowshare, and the Iñupiat people of the North Slope stood to become human guinea pigs in the process. Already showing signs of increased radiation due to above ground tests, the native population of the North Slope would have seen still more radiation flowing into the lichen to caribou highway to their own bodies. Luckily the natives of Point Hope understood radiation enough to fight back. It took an extensive public relations campaign and several years of struggle to stop Project Chariot. A lot of people fought damned hard to keep that harbor from happening and thankfully, they won, but that was hardly the end of the story.

.

When the Atomic Energy Commission finally gave up its plan to bomb the North Slope of Alaska for the purpose of building a useless harbor, it then proceeded to conduct a study of the radiation would have on Ogotoruk creek in Cape Thompson. Toward this end, they planted radioactive material in the creek and studied the effects.

…without telling anyone in the area.

Are you mad yet? I know I was when I first learned about this story. Bastard that I am, I just had to share the outrage, but I’m not going to tell that full story here, partly because I really am a bastard, and partly because others have already told that story better than I could. A thorough account of the controversy can be found in Dan O’Neill’s book, The Firecracker Boys. More recently, Iñupiat movie-maker Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson  released a documentary on Project Chariot. Edwardson’s work raises a number of questions about the lingering effects of the tracer study and health problems in the Point Hope community (including concerns that something may still be buried at Ogotoruk Creek). Her film is available through the North Slope Borough School District.

It’s the Sub-Deduction Stupid: Scalia’s Thoughts on Absurdity and Gay Rights

30 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Justice Scalia testifies on Capitol Hill in WashingtonTime was when Antonin Scalia seemed fairly dedicated to the pretense of Judicial restraint. These days he appears content to be known as a political lobbyist for the right wing echo chamber. We can see this in the increasing number of public statements he has made on a range of political issues, effectively tipping his hand to those weighing their prospects in the legal arena.

…all of which makes Scalia’s role in the gay rights cases recently argued before the Supreme Court (Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor) that much more disturbing. Not surprisingly, the subject has come up in his extra-judicial engagements. Asked to defend his equation between homosexuality and sundry horribles such as incest, bestiality, and child pornography (among other things) in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia made the following remarks at Princeton University:

It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,'” Scalia told [freshman Duncan] Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?

Condescension aside, what Scalia is saying is basically Freshman Logic material. In his Dissenting opinion for Lawrence, Scalia had indeed used the standard argument form of a reductio ad absurdum against the position taken by the majority (holding that a Texas law banning sodomy was in violation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment). A reductio ad absurdum essentially consists of an attempt to derive an absurd conclusion from a given claim as a means of refuting it. If a given assertion can be shown to lead to absurd implications, so the logic goes, then one ought to reject it. In this case, the claim at stake would be something along the lines of a restriction on judgements (or laws) against homosexual activity. Scalia hopes to show that this holding will lead to an intolerable list of absurdities.

I sincerely doubt that Hosie failed to recognize the argument form, and Scalia’s response does little to shed light on the logic of his argument. The question in this case is more properly, whether or not Scalia’s had successfully shown that the claim made by the majority in Lawrence was actually absurd. In essence, the question is whether or not Scalia had successfully negotiated the transition from the claim he wished to refute to the absurdity he wished to assert in his argument. That transition is sometimes described as the ‘Sub-deduction’ of the argument. That is, in this instance, where the real argument lies.

And here is where the story gets interesting.

The sub-deduction of Scalia’s argument comes in a weak and a ‘strong’ version. By ‘weak’, I mean ‘truly shitty’ and by ‘strong’ I mean rather heartless’, but allow me to demonstrate…

Sub-Deductions in Need of a Workout: Sundry net warriors will be familiar with the weak version, because we’ve heard it from conservative Christians for years. It is essentially an argument against moral relativism, or at least a certain straw rendering thereof. We heard it a little more in the wake of Lawrence, and frankly, Scalia’s remarks in this instance tended toward the weak version, if only because their brevity does little to shed light on the logic of his original argument on the subject. Rick Santorum gifted us with one of the best examples of this tripe in an interview with USA Today back in 2003:

You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it’s in the privacy of your own home, this “right to privacy,” then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual, then don’t be surprised what you get. You’re going to get a lot of things that you’re sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don’t really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don’t be surprised that you get more of it.

Here, Santorum treats the right to privacy as an abandonment of moral principles altogether, arguing that if we can’t condemn homosexuality, then we can’t condemn anything. We can’t stop people from molesting children; we can’t stop polygamy; we can’t stop any number of horribles from happening. It’s worth noting that in this instance Santorum was arguing that the sex abuse scandals of the catholic Church were essentially a problem of homosexuality, which is in itself a pathetically ignorant position to have taken. But I suppose it’s fitting that someone facing what he takes to be the obliteration of moral judgement would respond to that by abandoning any honest effort to address the actual claims at stake in the issue.

Yes, Rick Santorum lives in a special place where ignorance and dishonesty come together and start a family, but sadly, he has a lot of neighbors in the land of ignorance which is the weak version of this argument. A large number of conservative Christians have approached the notion of a right to privacy in precisely these terms.

Setting aside the folk-demon of relativism, the problem with this take on right to privacy is it ignores the essential balancing tests by means of which that right enters into the American legal system. The point of a right to privacy has never been that you actually get to do anything you want so long as it’s in the privacy of your bed-room, but rather that government interest in stopping you must be weighed against the right to privacy. In simple terms, if the government has a legitimate interest in doing so (say if you are hurting a child), then the right to privacy folds and the government wins. If no such government interest is present, or if that interest pales in significance to the cost to others, then the right to privacy wins.

Here the sub-deduction fails for precisely the same reason that moral opportunists find it attractive in the first place. They hope to refute the notion of a right to privacy by connecting it to a range of genuinely harmful activities. Faced with a choice between condemning homosexuality and allowing child abuse, practitioners of this stratagem hope that most of us will throw the gay folks under the bus. But when real harms can be shown, the right to privacy would not prevail, and the sub-deduction fails.

The courts have never presented the right ti privacy as an absolute boundary to government regulation; it is if anything a sort of raising of the ante, a provision that requires government officials to show they have a good reason for what they are doing. Rick Santorum and Christian net-warriors all over the land don’t seem to understand this.

Scalia does, at least when he needs to.

Mach-Macho-Subdeductions: Now we come to the strong version of Scalia’s argument which is a rejection of the balancing tests themselves, at least as applied in Lawrence. In this case, Scalia isn’t making a broad point about the value of moral judgements. His point isn’t that granting a right to privacy leads to the destruction of western civilization, or that it will lead us to turn our children over to the nearest sexual predator. No, in Lawrence, Scalia was saying that the courts should not be the ones to weigh the benefits of legislation against the costs to people’s privacy, or at least that the court had failed to articulate a principle in that case which would enable it to make a sound distinction between issues like homosexuality and those likely to be regarded as more abhorrent, even to those in favor of gay rights. Absent a clear and coherent principle on which to make a decision, Scalia suggested that the court was making just the sort of judgement call that legislators ought to be doing, not judges. Such judgement calls are intrinsically political, and ought in Scalia’s view to be left to those branches of government best suited to making political judgements. It is in other words a variant of his oft-repeated call to Judicial restraint. Hence, the following remarks from Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence (at 603-4):

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts-or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them-than I would forbid it to do so. What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new “constitutional right” by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that “later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” ante, at 579; and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best.

There is in the strong version of Scalia’s argument a logical consistency which is entirely lacking in the pop-Christian variants of this same position as articulated by Santorum and legions of faith-bigots happy to explain why homosexuality is wrong. Where Scalia was actually making a point about the nature of Judicial reasoning, various cultural conservatives have carried forward that argument in the form of a simplistic claim that if we can’t condemn homosexuality, then we can’t condemn anything.

In the babblerized version of the reductio ad absurdum, the sub-deduction simply does not follow. In scalia’s, it is at least plausible.

Balancing the Unbalanced: But where does that leave us? Scalia would say that that it leaves us with a better balance of powers and a stronger system of checks and balances. Yet, one can see in Scalia’s own writing and comments hints at the costs of such an approach. Regarding the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, Scalia offers the following:

Many States would unquestionably have declined to prohibit abortion, and others would not have prohibited it within six months (after which the most significant reliance interests would have expired). Even for persons in States other than these, the choice would not have been between abortion and childbirth, but between abortion nearby and abortion in a neighboring State.

Here Scalia makes an interesting point, that removing the precedent of Roe v. Wade would not necessarily have meant an immediate ban on abortions everywhere, but rather the creation of legislative options which some states would take and others would not. The actual choices presented to women with unwanted pregnancies would then be a question of travel (at least for those in geographically unfortunate circumstances). It’s an interesting scenario, and one in which the right to have an abortion does not die with Roe v. Wade, but that scenario would of course be cold comfort for those women unable to travel. The right to an abortion now enjoyed under Roe would translate through this scenario into an option more or less available, depending on one’s finances and/or family obligations.

The right thus becomes a privilege, and that privilege then falls beyond the reach of many that need it most.

One imagines that the right to engage in homosexual acts (or any number of proscribed sexual practices) would translate into a similar choice under Scalia’s approach, and residence might soon become a function of sexual proclivities. Do you want the right to have sex with your own gender? Better then to move out of a red state under this approach. And we can only imagine just how much more heartache this will cause in some instances, and how many lives lived through deception in others.

Apparently, this is an acceptable outcome in Scalia’s view.

It may well be that the right to vote as a minority could also become a function of where one lives if we are to give up the ‘racial entitlements‘ included in the present voting rights act, as Scalia terms them. Granted the issue there is a technical one, pre-clearance of voting procedures for selected states, but the language of Scalia’s recent questions in reference to the Voting Rights Act is more than a little disconcerting.

Or consider Scalia’s remarks in Oregon v. Smith, 1990. In the majority opinion for that case he argued that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment did not provide members of the Native American Church with a valid reason for exemption from generally applicable state laws banning use of peyote.  Scalia then moved on to suggest that while states might allow for such an exemption, it was not required of them, hence leaving the rights of religious freedom for the Native American Church open to the political process. What Scalia wrote next has always struck me as one of the most telling features of his approach to jurisprudence.

It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

Here Scalia has essentially conceded to the tenuous status of minority rights under his approach (though perhaps he would say that they are not rights, as such). Those with less leverage over the political process must simply accept a reduced set of options? What are the benefits? The court will behaving as it ought to under Scalia’s view, showing proper restraint and deference to the legislative branch of government.

The problem in this instance is not as simple as the utter foolishness seen in remarks like those of Santorum, or even that of Scalia’s answer to Hosie; Scalia’s argument in Lawrence seems plausible to me, at least on the face of it.  The problem is that the value which is central to Scalia’s argument in this instance (the strong version of the sub-deduction) is awfully hollow in comparison to the conceded costs of its adoption. What Scalia offers us is a narrative in which every part of government rests in its proper place. What he is willing to sacrifice in order to get that value is the actual liberty of countless minorities seeking only the enjoyment of options fully available to the rest of us. The absurdity to which Scalia points us is one in which judges behave a little less like judges, and quite frankly some of us find that a little less absurd than the notion that liberty is best preserved by leaving this and so many other issues central to the happiness of many at the mercy of a political process which has proven time and again that it is inadequate to ensure.

Irony of Ironies: It is worth noting that the strong version of Scalia’s argument empowers the weak version. Whatever else he is saying, Scalia is also saying that if enough people seem to think that the only way to save our children from a list of horribles too awful to bear is to deny those of homosexual orientation the liberty to conduct themselves as they see fit, then they are within their rights to pass all manner of laws restricting gay rights. No effort to show that homosexual conduct really will hurt anybody would be needed in Scalia’s approach, at least not i the courtroom.

And in the legislatures and the court of political opinion, flippant remarks like those Scalia gave to Hosie, and patently offensive rhetoric like that of Santorum will be all that is needed to consign some people to lives lived without the benefit of meaningful liberty.

Absurd, indeed.

Irritation Meditation Number 2: The Second Amendment and Japanese Internment

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Justice, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

580694_475788705791155_2127648074_nI suppose it is too much to ask that folks distinguish the varieties of gun control from an outright ban. The way the gun rights crowd raises the specter of a completely disarmed populace when speaking about any variety lesser measures smacks of dishonesty.

It would hardly give away the farm to distinguish such things from one another. There are plenty of legitimate questions about the efficacy of lesser gun control measures, especially when applied to a population already so well armed as we are here in the U.S. But that is an interesting and well focused discussion some folks don’t seem to want to risk.

But what is really fascinating about memes like this is the slippage between a right to bear arms and a prescription for doing so. The second Amendment was alive and well when the internment of Japanese occurred in the first place. So, that right and that right alone simply is not a cure for the evil that this pic wants us to think about. The meme only works if we are to imagine a population which is not merely in possession of the right to bear arms, but which actively uses that right even to the point of preparing for war against its own government.

And can anyone really imagine Japanese immigrant population of the west coast doing this in the years leading up to World War II? Can anyone imagine the response from their neighbors?

This is not merely a defense of the Second Amendment, it is an argument for the expansion of private gun ownership well beyond anything previously imagined in American history. To make this argument work, we need more than just the right to bear arms, we all need to have the arms, the training to use them, and enough firepower to make them an effective counter to the powers of the United States Government.

Is the author suggesting that gun owners could stop such a thing as internment? Perhaps, but would they?

It’s a pretty common claim from the gun rights crowd, the notion that the Second Amendment puts the teeth in the rest of our civil rights. It is through gun ownership, so the argument goes, that people are protected from abuse by government officials. It is the most important means by which our rights are protected.

Pardon me, …from ‘thuh government.’

But gun owners did not stop the internment of Japanese.

Or of Aleuts during the same war.

Neither did they stop lynching of blacks.

Nor did gun owners secure the right to vote for African Americans.

…or for women.

…or Native Americans.

Gun owners did not stop the Federal Government from kidnapping Native American children to be taken to schools far from their families.

They didn’t stop police harassment of homosexuals.

They didn’t improve treatment of the mentally ill.

They didn’t stop the Zoot Suit Riots.

…or legacy provisions precluding Jews from owning homes in some neighborhoods.

Gun Ownership didn’t stop Jim Crow laws.

It was not gun owners that secured for any number of minorities the right to an education or any other protections by states or the federal government.

In each of these instances, the rights in question were won by protestors, and lawyers, and people who talked a hell of a lot, even if their main opponents didn’t. In many of these instances gun owners were actively involved in the very repression suffered by those in question. Since the founding of the country, Gun violence has played a far greater role in the repression of civil rights than it has in protecting them. There are exceptions to be sure, but this narrative is not built on the exceptions. It is built on a fantasy that skips any active consideration of how these things actually work.

Herein lies the biggest problem with this fantasy scenario; it presents us with the image of a government acting on its own, independent of the public will. That could happen, I suppose, but is far less likely than the countless times in which government policies actually have facilitated repressive measures popular with the American people, or at least a large segment of it. And in such moments, the victims of repression have rarely been sufficiently well armed to make an effective stand against those who wanted a piece of their liberty.

In real world history, those who have suffered the greatest deprivations did not merely face the threat of Federal Authority; they also have had to contend with the prejudice of an American population content to have them suffer.

…one that sometimes even demanded it.

We can imagine the victims of repression better armed, yes, but only if we also imagine the majority better armed as well. This is hardly a story which leads to a successful defense of liberty. I would call the scenario anarchy, but I don’t wish to sully the term ‘anarchy’ with such a vision of violence and destruction.

It’s damned hard to read these self-indulgent fantsies when considering the actual history of people struggling for their rights. It’s hard to give credence to this juvenile narrative, knowing what it took for the people in these camps to survive, what it took the Freedom Riders to earn rights enjoyed by gun-toting whites in the South. And it is especially hard to hear such arguments from those with so little to say about such things as Guantanamo Bay or the countless encroachments on Fourth Amendment Rights we’ve seen over the last few decades.

What pisses me off about this argument isn’t the defense of gun ownership, or even opposition to gun control. Frankly I don’t think this kind of crap even touches either one of those issues. It sheds no light on those issues whatsoever, and leave us with a whole different discussion to have if we can ever get clear of noise like this. What bothers me about this stuff is the scorched-earth tactics; the vision of politics as warfare and questions about rights as an invitation to shoot at one another. It’s a vision of government as a faceless evil empire in opposition to private citizens, and begging for opposition from heroic gun-owners everywhere. Folks telling this yarn have no sense of how such things actually happen. But they are happy to tell stories of gun-toting heroes squaring off against a government turned inexplicably on its own population. How that will work is a Hell we can only hope we will never see.

And it’s a Hell as likely to be brought about by gun-owners defending their own rights (as they define them) as anything done by a corrupt and tyrannical government.

While others have struggled and died for some of the most basic human rights imaginable, so many in the gun crowd openly fantasize about acts of violence over basic policy disagreements and the possibility of restricted access to a commodity. The pretense that this commodity is the key to civil rights plays a big role in these fantasies. The end result is a tantrum born of paranoia and privilege and a gun culture increasingly dangerous to the rest of us.

No. I’m not talking about the weapons. I am talking about the mindset of people who produce memes like the one above. People who make such arguments are not interested in protecting anyone under serious threat of government repression. The gun rights crowd did not protect the Japanese during World War II, and I for one don’t believe they will be there the next time someone decides to create camps like this.

…unless of course it is to close and lock the gates.

Mitt and McCain On Gay Marriage, Or Hell No, We Can’t Just Get Along!

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

What does it take to make the words “agreement to disagree” work? I’d say at minimum, it requires a certain understanding of each others’ position, but perhaps that is a point for a different discussion. At present I am wondering just how much such an agreement can cost one of the parties before that respectful disagreement turns to shit.

Case in point, this conversation between John McCain and Ellen Degeneres:

I hear McCain frame this issue as respectful disagreement all the while diminishing a woman’s love to her very face, and I just can’t find the words or how I feel about it. You can see how uncomfortable he is about it, but that doesn’t stop him. I wonder if his words sick to the bottom of his own stomach the way they do mine? Or if he has words to explain the painful look on his own face?

But of course, history repeats himself.

See how respectfully Mitt Romney denies this man the same rights that he himself enjoys. He looks almost pained as he says this. Luckily he respects the mans right to disagree with him over the issue.

…and once again, I am at a loss for words.

And then of course we have the controversy over today’s Twitter comments on Sally Ride. It seems rude to throw it back in Romney’s face that her partner of 27 years will not now be entitled to spousal benefits, an option his stance on gay marriage would deny her as a point of principle.

That really does seem,  …No, wait a minute, what’s rude is the part about denying  someone the right to marry the love of her life on principle. What’s rude is the fact that someone surviving a 27-year relationship is denied the dignity as well as the benefits available to the rest of us.

That’s rude!

No, “rude” doesn’t even come close.

If the folks who so carefully frame this as respectful disagreement would drop their own sense of entitlement and show some decency for a change, then maybe, we wouldn’t have to bring up such issues AT THE END OF SOMEONE’S LIFE.

Anyway, I think I just found the words I was looking for. They come from Greta Christina  at the Freethought Blogs. She wants to send Mitt a memo; it simply says “Fuck You.”

In Reno With a Camera – Trouble Ensues!

21 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in Bad Photography, Justice, Street Art

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

So, I have this brand new camera, and I have been busy confirming my lack of photographic skills whenever I get a chance. Alone for a day in Reno, NV, I decided to go check out some of the artwork around town.

So, I figured these pics might go up on Facebook, but this isn’t a photo-blog, so I really didn’t think my trip to Reno would end up here at the northy place.

That was before I got to the Bruce R. Thompson, United States Courthouse & Federal Building. It had kind of an interesting sculpture in front of it, so I tried a few times to get a decent pic; zoomed in and out, turned the camera 90 degrees, tried it again, …you know the drill.

Enter the security guard.

He walked up rather briskly and asked me if I was doing this for commercial purposes? I answered ‘no’, and he proceeded to explain to me that if I had been doing it for commercial purposes, then I would need to get a permit. As long as I was just doing it, because I thought it was an interesting building I was okay, but taking a picture for commercial purposes required a permit. Asked why this was the case, the guard simply shrugged and said the politicians always have their regulations. What they were, he didn’t seem to know.

I had my pictures, so I walked off.

…but this has been eating me. Oh, the guard was perfectly nice about the whole thing, but still it’s eating me. I’ve studied enough legal conflicts to know just how complicated and counter-intuitive these matters can get, and normally I like to sort through the particulars before saying anything. Still! Somewhere in the scope of the First Amendment, I just can’t help thinking there ought to be room for taking a picture of a perfectly public building from a perfectly public sidewalk.

…and it shouldn’t require a damned permit to do it.

At this point I have no idea what the regulation is, or how broad its scope happens to be, much less how its framers envision its relationship to the rights of citizens. Nor do I know how much may have been lost in the translation from the particulars to what that guard said to me at that particular moment. But this is one case where I just can’t help thinking that no matter how the particulars shake out, it shouldn’t lead to exchanges like the one I had there with that guard.

Perhaps I am being unreasonable; I just don’t think so.

Since I’m thinking about it (airports and free time, you know how it goes), and since I now have story (however brief) to go with my bad photography, I am now going to inflict my pictures on those of you unfortunate enough to stumble across my blog today.

What did you expect? I’m a bad man!

Old Pranks Don’t Matter, …Unless They Do.

11 Friday May 2012

Posted by in Justice, Politics, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Picture Courtesy of The New Civil Rights Movement

Until today, I haven’t thought of Mitt Romney as a cruel person.

Insensitive? Perhaps. Completely out of touch with the vast majority of working Americans? Definitely. Willing to serve the interests of malicious parties if that’s what it takes to get elected? Absolutely. I’ve thought all these things about the presumptive Republican candidate. But I have never really thought of the man as overtly cruel.

Until today.

Today, I have a new perspective on Mitt Romney, and it is not a flattering one. Perhaps you might think it was a recent story in the Washington Post that led me to rethink the issue of his character? According to the Post, Romney led a bullying incident in his youth. Apparently, Mitt Romney found the young man’s hair unacceptable. So, he took it upon himself to rally a number of classmates, tracked down the younger student, tackled him, and cut his hair while the young boy screamed for help.

That’s pretty cruel, isn’t it? You might think it was this story that has me rethinking the character of the presumptive Republican candidate.

Well not quite. See, I’m not in the habit of holding what middle-aged people did back in high school against them. Short of a dead body or a crashed car at least, I am generally willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt for their youthful conduct. …Hell, I can even forgive a crashed car. There is just too much ground between this incident and today’s politics to make this story a clear case against voting for Mitt Romney. I would normally have been willing to believe that Romney was no longer the sort of person to attack and humiliate an individual just because that person was gay, …or that he had weird hair.

Until, that is, the Romney camp opened their mouths and weighed in on the issue. In an interview with Fox News, Romney has said he doesn’t remember the incident. He and his wife have also taken to playing up the story that Romney was a bit of a prankster in his youth, all part of an obvious attempt to minimize the issue. Romney tells us he didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but if he has he is certainly sorry.

Great!

Mitt is hypothetically sorry for anyone he might have inadvertently hurt, but he assured us he didn’t mean to.

Which is utterly pathetic.

This response isn’t simply minimizing the damage to Romney’s campaign, it is minimizing the damage done by such incidents. I understand Romney’s desire to do the one, but the other is completely unacceptable. Hell, there are genuine questions about the accuracy of the Post article. Romney could reasonably quibble with a number of the specifics. I’m not entirely sold on some of the details in the Post article (the exact role of sexual orientation in this incident is certainly questionable). Instead, he seems to suggest that this sort of thing just doesn’t matter.

In this response, Mitt Romney has shown us the heartless little bastard who once attacked and humiliated a classmate over his hair is still with us. Is that too strong? Well then, he has certainly shown that such incidents don’t warrant a place in his memory, and that they count as little more than practical jokes in his book. But (you may ask) what if he really doesn’t remember? Well then I should think a little more surprise might be in order. He could at least acknowledge the gravity of the charge.

In likening this event to a harmless prank, Mitt Romney has shown us what such a thing would mean to him now, and that is not much. He hasn’t been accused of an overly raucous joke; he has been accused of an action clearly intended to leave a lasting, miserable, impression. He has lots of room to maneuver on this, at least he had, but what he came up with was as dismissive a response as any bully has ever given to the suffering of his victims.

Mitt Romney will be the spokesman for homophobia in the coming election, among other things to be sure, but that will clearly be part of his job. It is expected of Republican Presidential Candidates. Until today I had no idea just how well qualified Mitt Romney will be for this aspect of his coming task.

What Romney is accused of doing may have happened long ago, but we should all be able to address the question of whether or not it is acceptable in a straight-forward manner. As the accused party in this instance, Romney has a responsibility to own up to what he did, defend his actions, or apologize for them in clear terms. Whether or not you personally care about such things, well that is a decision we will all have to make for ourselves.

Mitt clearly doesn’t.