Removing The Frame And Dropping The Context

In The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa wrote:

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

I was thinking about this quote in the context of "political correctness," "cancel culture," and other forms of rigtheous indignation. 

Let's take an old example. There are numerous instances of the n-word's being used throughout the books To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For this reason, both of these books have at times been subjected to bans. The n-word is considered too triggering and hurtful to be included in many libraries and school assignments in today's world. 

And yet, both of these books are not only about racism, they can indeed be considered treaties against racism. In fact, they are quite explicitly about racism against blacks, and in both books, the n-word is used to accurately depict racism while telling a story about how we all ought to overcome racism and treat blacks equally. Part of the message of both of these books is not to use the n-word. The books use the n-word in order to show how ghastly and racist it is to do so. Use of the n-word is presented as an example of people behaving badly, so that the authors can go on to show how people ought to be behaving instead.

It is only by removing The Frame from these books that we could ever consider their use of the n-word to be hurtful. We remove The Frame by interpreting the dialogue in the books as though it has been spoken today, right now, right in the same room as the reader, possibly directed at the reader. It is only by taking the books in this light that we could ever be offended by their use of the n-word. 

By maintaining The Frame, however, we maintain that these are fictional stories, we observe the behavior within those stories, we reach the end of the book, and we come away with an important moral message: to eschew racism, treat other people as equals, and not use the n-word.

In short, it's The Frame around "the picture" that enables us to do this. Without The Frame, it's just some old white people using the n-word at us. But with The Frame, they're good stories with important anti-racist messages.

There are plenty of other, more modern examples out there. Certain jokes told by comedians could be considered hurtful and "problematic," but only if we consciously remove The Frame; only if we deliberately refuse to allow the comedian to tell his or her joke as a work of art or an act of performance. If we instead allow the comedian to play his or her role and put on an act, then our sensibilities can remain intact. Jokes might be made at the expense of us and "our kind," but it's all in good fun. It's all an act. There is A Frame around the picture. It's only hurtful or problematic if we deliberately remove The Frame.

This is exactly what happens during heckling. When a comedian encounters a heckler, the heckler has decided to remove The Frame from the comedian's act. Every time the comedian tries to tell another joke, the heckler steps in with a comment that removes The Frame and forces the comedian to be a normal person again (rather than an actor). The comment might be something simple, like, "You're not funny!" Or, it might be a case of someone's taking offense at what the comedian has said, and arguing against it. It's then the comedian's task to attempt to best the heckler, reclaim the audience and The Frame, and continue his or her act.

Here's a really good example of this. Comedian Norm MacDonald tells a joke about teachers, and a teacher in the audience becomes offended. She tries to remove The Frame from MacDonald's act, but he deftly reclaims it:

What makes this so great is the fact that Norm MacDonald is an expert at using hecklers' own tactic against them. When hecklers try to be funny, or try to make a point, Norm MacDonald either refuses to acknowledge the joke or takes their statements very literally. In doing so, he removes the hecklers' own Frame, and takes back control of the situation.

In every-day interaction, human beings use humor to reach out to one another and let each other know that, despite any difficulties or miscommunications, "we're still friends." When it's properly received, that humor can mend almost any fence. But when the interlocutor refuses to acknowledge the humor - or, as the psychologists call it, the "repair attempt" - the interaction goes sour. The other person has to want to get along with you. If he or she refuses, there isn't much you can do. If they remove your Frame, you can't paint a picture. It's a power-play. They do it to gain the upper hand in the interaction. You can either give it to them, or walk away. 

Another person who wrote about this concept was Ayn Rand. She called it "context-dropping." If you "drop the context" in To Kill A Mockingbird, and instead just focus on the words printed on the page, then the n-word is the n-word, and that's despicable. If you maintain the context, then you see it as a story in which awful people said awful things, and the reader then learns an important message.

If you maintain the context of a comedy act, then you can hear all kinds of funny jokes. I've had stand-up comedians single me out in the audience before, and tell a few jokes at my expense. I could get really mad and feel insulted, and that would be dropping the context. It would be removing The Frame. Instead, I could appreciate the humor of the situation, laugh at myself a little bit, and have a good time. The choice is mine, but whatever I choose, the situation depends on The Frame, and whether it is allowed to separate the picture from the real world.

Why It's Important To Get The Diagnosis Correct

I have seen multiple people on social media and in the media attempting to make the She'carri Richardson marijuana issue into a racial matter. I think this is an incredibly bad idea, and will here attempt to explain why, being as brief as possible.

First let me state that, unlike many of the commentators on this issue, I have actually been involved in amateur athletics. I have known perhaps a dozen Olympic competitors and many dozens of NCAA athletes, including myself. That means that I have firsthand knowledge of the kinds of problems athletes face when it comes to the draconian rules foisted upon amateur athletes and the somewhat arbitrary enforcement of those rules.

Second, let me state in as emphatic terms as possible that many if not most of the rules governing amateur athletes are utterly preposterous and ought to be eliminated. This includes the rule against marijuana use. While my readers know that I am adamantly opposed to recreational drug use, I am also a fervent believer in both marijuana legalization and and end to the continued hounding of people who simply choose to live life differently than I do. But the laundry list of terrible rules that amateur athletes are subjected to is long and far more problematic than the rules surrounding marijuana. It is all of these rules that must be changed or eliminated, not merely this one rule about marijuana.

Finally, regarding the racial angle of this issue: By turning this matter into a question of racism, we allow the olympic committees and other amateur athletic governing bodies to continue to enforce these absurd rules while lazily promising to do something about racism. Racism, while terrible, is not the problem with amateur sports. The horrible list of preposterous rules athletes face is the real issue. We should not deflect from that issue with a sideshow about racism just because complaining about racism currently happens to be chic. If the olympic committees solved their race problems overnight, She'carri Richardson would still be in trouble for using marijuana. Is that what we want? No! We want - or should want - an end to the list of ridiculous rules we saddle innocent competitors with. 

So, please, I beg of you, stop making this a racial issue. The issue is not race or racism. The issue is that these oppressive athletic organizations and governing bodies heap unreasonable rules upon all athletes. The mere existence of these rules is bad enough, but allowing them to continue also allows the administrators to choose who they will punish, when, and how; which, in turn, allows them to subject athletes to the administrators' private biases as well.

We will never fix these problems if we continue to misdiagnose them. In this case, race is not the problem. Bad rules and bad governance are the problems.

When Does Something Become Racism?

I've been thinking a lot about so-called "Critical Race Theory" and its relationship to actual, run-of-the-mill racism. Truth be told, there's a lot to dislike about CRT, but it's been difficult for me to express exactly what is wrong about it. Meanwhile, I've read a lot of analyses from academics who are critical of CRT, and their explanations - while very valuable and compelling - seem to fall short of explaining why I think CRT is nothing more than a new form of racism.

Then, the other day, the issue clicked with me.

A Victim Narrative

Let us begin by considering plain, old racism. Let's take an example that everyone already agrees on: nazi-style white supremacy. We all agree that white supremacy is invidious racism, so this works as a viable starting point from which to build.

White supremacy has a fundamental contradiction, which is that it is not actually about the supremacy of the white race at all. Instead, white supremacy is a victim narrative. According to white supremacists, other races are to blame for all the problems that white people face. Other races, through immigration, interracial marriage, and cultural proliferation, are upending the traditional lifestyle of an "old-timey" white supremacist. That is, there was supposedly some set of halcyon days, way back when, and back then the white race was everything it was supposed to be. Then, the story goes, along came other races, which caused all sorts of problems. 

Obviously, a narrative like this does not describe a superior race, but an inferior one. A truly superior race would be able to easily counteract the influences of other races on national culture. A superior race would be so obviously superior that all other races would want to be more like it. But that's not what white supremacists think or claim. White supremacists claim to be victims of other races. 

Why Cultural Pride Is Not Racism

This inherent victim narrative also sheds light on why non-whites who have always been proud of their own unique cultures are not committing racism or cultural supremacy when they celebrate their own cultures. Namely, there is no victim narrative in celebrating one's own culture.

Take Black History Month, for example. Traditionally, "Black History Month" has been a celebration of black historical figures and the important contributions they've made. We learn about objectively great people like Harriet Tubman, who helped human beings escape from slavery; Duke Ellington, who elevated the intellectual rigor of jazz music to the same level as Western Classical music; and Alexandre Dumas, who became one of the most successful writers of his time, so successful in a white-dominated culture that many if not most people in that culture don't even realize that he's black at all.

What all of these stories have in common (aside from the obvious) is that they don't pander to a victim narrative. Tubman's story is about triumph over slavery, not about the plight of enslaved people. Ellington's story is about his magnificent creative mind, not about the biases that kept him from growing into the genius that he was. Dumas' story is simply about being a great author and a charismatic person. 

And so it is with any cultural heritage celebration. For the most part, people are celebrating the things that make their cultures unique: art, music, cuisine, history, a common story. They're not exalting in their status as oppressed people, they're just enjoying themselves. Without a victim narrative, there can be no objection. Loving one's own culture is no different than loving one's own family or appreciating the color of one's own hair.

But Then, Resentment Appears

Unfortunately, practitioners of Critical Race Theory, and those ordinary people who have become enamored of its teachings, do in fact promote a victim narrative. What began as a celebration of their own uniqueness veered into resentment. It is this resentment that I argue is racism.

During the Rwandan genocide, there existed a victim narrative similar to the white supremacist one. The Hutus blamed the Tutsis for their comparatively low station and exacted their revenge. It was this resentment that enabled a political dispute to fester into a genocide. We all have our differences with all kinds of people, but when we allow those disagreements to grow into pure resentment, and when we build that resentment into a victim narrative, then that's when we've become racists; and racism is never that far away from ethnic cleansing.

The defining feature of CRT, even beyond all the postmodernist academic mumbo-jumbo, is the resentment. CRT is primarily about advancing a victim narrative of "structural racism" that permeates all social interactions. As a self-contained system, it works. That is, it appears to me that CRT is at least internally consistent. I'll let the academics debate the truth value of CRT's fundamental claims, such as they are. 

But the real problem, the one thing that makes Critical Race Theory a kind of racism, is the fact that CRT's primary focus is resentment. Notice that this resentment is even fixated on a single group of people: whites, and primarily cisgendered white males. The entire world is the terrible place it is thanks mainly to cisgendered white males, so claims CRT. The problems that exist out there can ultimately traced back to them.

So we can see that Critical Race Theory is merely racism in a fancy hat. But I would even go one step further and suggest that CRT's fixation on a single, easily identifiable group of people as the villains of the whole story creates an incredibly dangerous situation.

Is There Racial Disparity In Coup Attempts?

There are a lot of Twitter screenshots floating around out there about how 52 people got arrested for yesterday's crazy quasi-coup attempt at the Capitol building, versus 14,000 arrests during the George Floyd protests. This disparity, according to those who point it out, proves "white privilege" and "structural racism."

Has the world gone mad? The US government was possibly attempted to have been taken over by a furry yesterday, and people want to argue about how bad it would have been if the furry had been black. 

For perspective, imagine that you're walking through Times Square, when suddenly a flying saucer descends from the skies, lands right in the middle, the door pops open, and out walk three greys and Jesus Christ, all wearing polka-dot space suits, and when the crowd falls silent, they all yell in unison, "Whassup, my n-words!!!" Then, the next day, everyone on Twitter starts arguing about whether it was racist for them to have used the n-word. Not a peep about proof of extraterrestrial life or the second coming of the Messiah, no, it's all about racism.

I am sensitive to the plight of the marginalized, but our present predicament desperately needs to remain fully contextualized. The outgoing president of the United States of America may or may not have committed incitement or treason or sedition or whatever, using a deranged army of furries. Maybe now is not the time to remark that black lives matter.

They do matter. But what the flying fish just happened yesterday???

An Idea For Improving Politics

Almost everyone agrees that the political situation in America today is dire. Very dire. Political polarization is at an all-time high, and neither of the major political parties seems equipped to reduce that polarization. The Republican Party has more or less traded in its old platform ideas for the sake of advancing a cult of personality, and not even a particularly attractive personality. (Seriously, have you ever heard anyone since before 2015 say that they want to be like Donald Trump or that they emulate him as a person?) Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is being held captive by an increasingly shrill and literally destructive mob of critical race theorists whose ultimate objective is to destroy, not racism, but capitalism. Both sides are becoming increasingly violent, where here "violent" means, "literally engaged in causing physical harm to members of the opposing political team."

It's scary out there, and there is very little hope for improvement. Granted, a vote for Joe Biden at least appears to be a vote for establishing the old status quo - not that that was a particularly attractive thing, but merely that it seems better than four years of a worsening political environment under Trump. That, of course, assumes that four years of the Biden-flavored status quo would improve the political environment at all. I'm hopeful that it will, but there's no guarantee, and a wide array of hypothetical scenarios in which things could get worse. 

If only someone had a good idea for improving America's political environment. Lucky you, faithful readers! I have given this issue a few moments of idle thought, and have unsurprisingly solved the whole puzzle over the course of a can of La Croix.

It came to me as I was reading a friend's Facebook status. He remarked that the federal US legislature had passed a particularly low number of bills this year: 158, compared to the usual 500 or so. His point was that the obstructionists in the legislature were preventing all the other well-intentioned legislators from doing their job, which is of course to create new laws and pass them.

The astute, libertarian reader will immediately note that my friend's assumption is that many of the problems we currently face as a country stem from there being too few laws. If the legislature could only pass more of them, more of our country's problems would be solved!

Not to give away the ending of this post too quickly here, but the astute, libertarian reader will have already guessed how this thing ends, anyway.

I thought to myself, ("Self," I thought), What if one of the underlying problems here is that we see the government's job as being "to create new laws and regulations, and to enforce those that already exist?" In such an environment, a "successful" politician will be the one that passes more new laws, and/or enforces the existing ones more stringently. Assuming all politicians have only the best of intentions (ha, ha), the most successful politician in a world like that will be the one that succeeds at creating and enforcing laws; over time, politicians will become more successful at doing so; ever-more laws will have to be created, and ever-more-stringent enforcement mechanisms will have to be devised to ensure the "success" of the political system, subject to its assumed purpose.

What if we instead defined the government's job to be something like, "to serve as the final arbiter of conflict?" In such an environment, a "successful" politician would be the one that most effectively arbitrates conflict. The goal of legislating would not be to simply create and enforce new laws, but to create laws that reduce conflict and eliminate conflicting laws. The goal of the executive would not be to merely enforce the law, but to reduce conflict with the law. The goal of the judiciary would be to literally arbitrate between two conflicted parties. The more conflict is reduced in such a system, the more "successful" politicians are deemed. 

That all sounds a bit idealistic, but I'm not really articulating a view about the mechanics of government. Rather, I'm articulating a view about how ordinary people can think about government, such that our political environment improves. 

Change the way we think about government, in other words, and we might just change our political system.

There is no room for cynics in this idea, though. Cynicism is a cancer that destroys everything it touches, and it's probably responsible for most of the terrible things you see out there, at least as far as politics goes. 

So, if you want to be hopeful, maybe it's time to try my idea on for size. How might your attitudes and opinions change if you thought of government as a conflict-resolution mechanism, rather than a law-enforcement mechanism?

Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 9

In Omnipotent Government, Ludwig von Mises describes how the foundation for a Nazi takeover of Germany was laid in part by large groups of unemployed men hanging around in militias. They say idle hands are the devil's playground, and that is probably true.

As of this writing, there are close to 40 million newly unemployed - or should I say disemployed? - people in the United States, thanks to "lockdown" or "quarantine" policies that we now know were far too draconian than they needed to be, given the severity of COVID-19. What have all those idle hands been up to lately?

*        *        *

No one knows what was going through Derek Chauvin's head when he knelt on top of George Floyd in broad daylight, with cameras rolling, as the latter man begged for mercy and finally died. Chauvin and the four other officers involved in the killing were fired. As protests erupted in Minneapolis over the systemic mistreatment of blacks in the US criminal justice system, charges of third-degree murder were ultimately brought against Chauvin; although it's fair to wonder if the killing really was third-degree murder, and not second-degree murder as most reasonable people have concluded.

What an odd name, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin, get it? Like chauvinism.

And so protests erupted. Soon video emerged of white men, dressed all in black, wearing gas masks, and carrying umbrellas in the sunshine, systematically breaking windows with hammers and lighting things on fire before quietly walking away. On the videos, the peaceful black protesters try to stop them, but they can't. It is suggested by the various publishers of these videos that these disguised white men are the ones who turned the protests into riots.

Who were these men? The mayor of Minneapolis suggested that they were white supremacists from out-of-state. They might also have been members of "Antifa," which is not really an "organization," per se, despite news that the White House wishes to label them as a terrorist organization. Antifa is an ideology more than an organization. Those aligned with Antifa often show up at left-leaning protests and cause trouble. They ostensibly wish to fight anything they view to be "fascism," but their ideological agenda is a Marxist-Leninist one. So were those who started the riots in Minneapolis "members" of Antifa? Who knows?

*        *        *

Within hours of the riots, the sympathetic left on social media took to their news feeds, their tweets, their status updates, and their stories to urge "people" not to condemn the riots, but to instead seek to understand why black victims of systemic racism in the United States would wish to riot in the first place.

I find this reaction to be odd.

It's odd because no amount of police brutality justifies a violent mob attacking innocent bystanders and looting private businesses. An argument could be made that Black America has a legitimate moral cause to destroy government buildings, court houses, police precincts, and the like. But stealing TVs? Such actions can only be morally justified on Marxist-Leninist grounds, i.e. according to the ideology of Antifa and its ilk. Private property is, according to this belief system, yet another tool of oppression, and it is fair and right, and perhaps even erogatory, to destroy it.

Of course, no one participating in a riot has spent any significant amount of time seeking epistemic moral justification for their actions. All they're really doing is seizing the opportunity. When "everyone else" is looting and destroying, you may as well get yours, too. Whoever started the riots knew this to be true of mobs, in fact they were counting on it. You only try to start a riot when you believe that the mob will follow-on with whatever destruction you've chosen to initiate. That's the whole point of inciting a mob.

It is for this reason that people should not seek to understand the rioters. Violent mobs don't have a cause. Violent mobs don't have a modus operandi. Violent mobs are breakdowns of social order, in which any terrible thing can happen. Looting and vandalism are comparatively modest outcomes here. The real dangers of a violent mob are murder and rape. Anyone who has any experience with a dangerous, teeming hoard knows this to be true.

Peaceful protests and violent mobs are in two entirely different categories. No, we should not seek to understand a mob. We should run for our lives, and then morally condemn them in the strongest ways available to us.

*        *        *

I'm a 40-year-old American man. Sadly, this is not my first race riot. I am old enough to quite vividly remember the LA riots that broke out in the wake of the verdict in the Rodney King beating. Then, members of the Los Angeles Police Department were acquitted of using excessive force on Mr. King, despite the beating having been captured on video. If you're young and you've never seen the video, or if it's been a while since you've seen it, I recommend you remind yourself what was on that video. Watch it again, and keep in mind that the courts found the police not guilty of using excessive force.

When you're done watching that video, watch Rodney King's public statement to the media on the riots. Rodney King himself, a well-spoke if not particularly eloquent man who was quite nearly beaten to death by the Los Angeles Police Department, observed the ensuing LA race riots and spoke out against rioting, famously imploring people: "Can we all get along?" Watch the video. You can see the horror, the confusion, and the sadness on his face.

Then, imagine being beaten nearly to death, imagine successfully bringing a trial against the monsters who almost took your life, imagine losing that trial, and then imagine watching all of your supposed "supporters" burn your home to the ground, taking many African-American-owned small businesses with it.

Finally, imagine seeing all that and sympathizing with the mob. That is what today's woke social media leftists want you to do.

*        *        *

Of course, it's impossible to sympathize with a mob. The mob will turn on you. You do not control a mob. All you can do is follow the mob wherever it goes, and if the mob chooses to drag you down, the mob will do so, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

On social media, a woman suggested that my decision to speak out against violent riots "speaks volumes" about my supposed racism. On the contrary, however, I think it speaks volumes about the far left in today's society that they endorse the mob. Their memories are too short to remember the LA riots, and certainly too short to remember the race riots of the early 1960s. It has been utterly fascinating to contrast the ideological responses to racial violence then and now.

Perhaps if George Floyd had lived, he would have served as a cooling voice during today's riots, as Rodney King did almost 30 years ago. I don't know, of course. I know nothing about George Floyd other than that he was an innocent man murdered in broad daylight in front of a camera, and that American society has grown so accustomed to seeing such videos that we no longer consider them to be shocking.

*        *        *

There were protests, which sadly turned violent, and there are think-pieces and social media updates. Everyone is navel-gazing about this, and while they do, they urge high-minded thoughts about the state of race relations in America today. Whites are urging each other to check their privilege and to learn about the black experience in America.

All such commentary is self-indulgent silliness.

While it's always a good idea to engage in self-improvement and to become a less bigoted person, white racism did not kill George Floyd. Police brutality killed George Floyd, systemic police brutality, fed with dollars from the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. A narcissistic, emboldened police force with near-immunity in the courts and one of the most politically powerful labor unions in the country killed George Floyd. A corrupt and unassailable criminal justice system that has financial incentives to murder and/or imprison blacks and latinos killed George Floyd.

You're not going to solve that problem by reading about Martin Luther King. You're not going to solve that problem by allowing more black voices a chance to be heard. You're only going to solve that problem by dismantling the police state.

It's natural for human beings, when confronted with an unsolvable problem, to assume instead that they are confronted with an easier problem, and to solve the easier problem instead.

Thus, and somewhat incredibly, we see that there is at least one problem in America that is a more unsolvable problem than racism: The police.

Are Their Legitimate Responses To "Culture Clash?"

Someone over at the Open Borders Action Group posed a question: Assuming that people who oppose immigration because they fear it will cause "culture clash" are arguing in good faith, what is the best way to respond to their concerns, without calling them racists?

This would be a good question if anyone who fears "culture clash" were arguing in good faith. No such person is. In order to see this, we simply have to attempt to steelman the culture clash argument. If this can be done, then we'll have a guideline for our rebuttals. If it can't be, then we'll know that such arguments are bad-faith arguments.

Let's consider the possibilities:

1. We can't let "them" into the country because "they" will clash with "our culture."
2. We can't let anyone into the country because it will disrupt the existing culture here.
3. We can't let "them" into the country because "their" ways will severely conflict with at least some of the other people who live here.
4. We can't let anyone into the country because at least some of the newcomers will severely conflict with at least some of the other people who live here.

Xenomisy

"Xenomisy" is my word for "hatred of foreign things and people." Some people call this "xenophobia," but I don't think fear drives this attitude; I think hatred does.

Argument 1, above, is clearly bigoted, for the following reasons: (a) The argument predicts with certainty the behavior of foreign people before they have a chance to demonstrate otherwise; (b) The argument assumes superiority of the natives' own culture; (c) The argument assumes that all clashes between foreigners and natives result in negative outcomes, rather than acknowledging the possibility that foreigners may be a positive influence on locals; (d) The argument refuses to hold natives' clashes to the same standard as those allegedly caused by foreigners.

Argument 2 is bigoted for the following reasons: (a) The argument predicts with certainty the behavior of foreign people before they have a chance to demonstrate otherwise; (b) The argument assumes superiority of the natives' own culture; (c) The argument assumes that all clashes between foreigners and natives result in negative outcomes, rather than acknowledging the possibility that foreigners may be a positive influence on locals.

Argument 3 is bigoted for the following reasons: (a) The argument predicts with certainty the behavior of foreign people before they have a chance to demonstrate otherwise; (d) The argument refuses to hold natives' clashes to the same standard as those allegedly caused by foreigners.

Argument 4 is the weakest of all of these arguments, but possibly the least-bigoted. It argues that foreigners should be barred from immigrating merely because some of them might have a conflict with some of the natives. It implicitly accepts that many, possibly even most, people will not have any conflicts. It relies on the assumption that any conflict, however rare it might be, will be so terrible as to outweigh all of the other benefits of immigration. For that reason, Argument 4 is bigoted because: (c) The argument assumes that all clashes between foreigners and natives result in negative outcomes, rather than acknowledging the possibility that foreigners may be a positive influence on locals.

In summary, the reasoning behind "culture clash" arguments are racist because:

• (a) The arguments predict with certainty the behavior of foreign people before they have a chance to demonstrate otherwise 
• (b) The arguments assume superiority of the natives' own culture 
• (c) The arguments assume that all clashes between foreigners and natives result in negative outcomes, rather than acknowledging the possibility that foreigners may be a positive influence on locals 
• (d) The arguments refuse to hold natives' clashes to the same standard as those allegedly caused by foreigners.

But People Make These Arguments -- Does That Mean People Are Bigots?

The presumption of good-faith argumentation holds that someone arguing in good faith is willing to consider countervailing evidence and be persuaded by it if it is a strong enough answer to his or her concerns.

In order to address any of the above arguments under the presumption of good faith, we would need to collect evidence demonstrating:

• (i) That the behavior of immigrants cannot be predicted en masse
• (ii) That local culture is not inherently superior
• (iii) That there are empirically demonstrable benefits to immigration
• (iv) That locals and natives can/should be held to the same standard when evaluating the costs and benefits of immigration in theory

Note that (i) is a description of stereotyping or racial profiling. There are no non-bigoted ways to hold this opinion. It is not a good-faith argument. It is also merely a belief.

Likewise, (ii) is a belief. It is a belief in national chauvinism. It's unlikely that anyone who holds that Italians are the greatest people in the world will ever be "convinced" by "evidence" that other people are just as good. It is merely a belief.

(iii) is something that has been done to death. Oceans of ink have been spilled articulating the many economic of free trade in the labor market. The notion that immigration advocates have failed to do so is simply false. Anyone who maintains this false belief has either never seriously evaluated immigration one way or another, or has chosen to ignore the mountains of evidence in front of them. Since presuming complete ignorance is uncharitable, the only viable explanation for (iii) is that it is an argument of bad faith.

Meanwhile, (iv) is a mere belief.

The reason I've taken the time to point out that (i), (ii), and (iv) are mere beliefs is because beliefs are not subject to empirical evidence and logical persuasion. If someone opposes immigration because he believes that all immigrants are Lizard-People, it simply doesn't matter what blood tests or autopsies you place in front of them. They will not respond to the evidence because there is always a "what-if" on which to hang a further objection. Sure, the Lizard-Man passed the blood test, but what if the blood test was designed the pro-Lizard-Man lobby? Sure, there are a few good immigrants out there, but in general, we can predict their nefarious behavior and contrast it to our saintly locals.

Illusions

One of the more startling things people discover when they begin to evaluate their own beliefs is that good people can believe nasty things. Aunt Nellie might be a perfectly sweet lady, but if she thinks "the Chinese are taking over the neighborhood with their laundromats and their doughnut shops," then she holds a bigoted belief. Aunt Nellie doesn't want to be convinced that her beliefs are bigoted, because that would suggest that she herself is a bigot, i.e. a bad person. She doesn't want to believe that about herself. You also probably do not want to believe that about your Aunt Nellie. But you've heard what she says about the Chinese when she gets going. How else would you describe those beliefs?

Similarly, people draw a conceptual difference in their minds between "hating Chinese people" and "being worried that Chinese immigrant culture will 'clash' with the prevailing local culture." They don't want to believe that they're bad people -- but how else can you describe the presumption that more Chinese = worse local life, if not by calling it "bigotry?"

This refusal to acknowledge our own, personal bad behavior (and bad beliefs) is the driving force behind all culture clash arguments against immigration. The reason immigration advocates cannot overcome these fears is because it would require the bigot to come to terms with her own bigotry through logical argumentation and the presentation of evidence.

People don't want to do that.

Arguments about culture clash are not made in good faith.

What Do You Expect?

I love sparkling water, but the first time I tried it, it disgusted me.

I remember it vividly. I was in third grade, and we were learning about caves in science class. We were learning about how dripping mineral water forms stalactites and stalagmites. My teacher, Miss Swenson, brought in sparkling mineral water and poured it in little paper cups for each of the students to drink, so that we could learn what the mineral water in caves tastes like. I can't confirm or deny that the water in caves is anything like sparkling mineral water. This is just what happened in my third-grade class.

There was a small amount of bubbling water in a tiny paper cup sitting on my desk. It looked just like Sprite, something I had tasted many times and loved. When Miss Swenson gave us permission, I lifted the cup to my lips and drank.

Instantly, I recoiled. It tasted nothing like Sprite! It wasn't sweet at all. It was just… just… Well, I didn't like it, and that was that.

Many years later, I had a very different experience with sparkling water. I met a cool guy who owned an Italian café. He was into bikes and coffee and he liked to drink San Pellegrino mineral water. A number of our mutual friends got into drinking San Pellegrino as a sort of status symbol. You know, we don't like regular water, we like San Pellegrino.

Under these new circumstances, I had the opportunity to try sparkling water again, and this time I discovered that I liked it quite a bit. One of the reasons I liked it was that after a long run in the desert, my mouth would be dry and sticky, and I found that sparkling water had a better way of cutting through that stickiness than tap water did. Soon I became a lifelong drinker of sparkling water, although these days I drink the generic brands and save a lot of money!

My purpose in writing this is to highlight how expectations impact the quality of an experience. If your expectation of sparkling water is that it will taste like Sprite, you'll probably hate sparkling water when you taste it. If your expectation is that it's cool and tastes delicious, then you might find you rather enjoy it.

This concept extends well beyond sparkling water. I've noticed, for instance, that when people spend too much time listening to just one kind of music, they quickly lose patience with any music style that diverges from their preferred genre. I've noticed that people who expect other cars in traffic to drive in roughly the same manner they themselves do are often the ones who get most frustrated when they encounter unexpected traffic patterns. I've noticed that people who come to expect a certain kind of cityscape in their neighborhood often get the most flustered when a large community of immigrants moves in.

In some of these instances, there is some taste or difference in perspective involved. In many of them, however, most of the dissatisfaction comes from the fact that expectation and reality diverges. People don't like it when they expect one thing and see another. People instead prefer consistency. When they don't get it, they can get quite angry, and this anger translates itself into things like anger at music genres, road rage, and racism.

I hasten to add that this is not a complete explanation of all human dissatisfaction. But it is an important aspect of human nature, and you may benefit from occasionally analyzing your anger through that lens. Are you frustrated with something that is genuinely dissatisfactory, or are you merely trying to map the present set of circumstances onto an ill-fitting set of expectations?

Indeed, I think a lot of interpersonal disagreement can be attributed to the difference between expectation and reality. Many couples break up under the reasoning that one of them "changed" or that they "grew apart," and both of these descriptions reflect a set of unmet expectations. Many arguments have been had between people who absolutely do not disagree on the issue, but who instead phrase the concepts a little differently: "I vehemently disagree with the way you reached the same conclusion I reached!"

With a little concentration, we can approach every situation and every conversation as though there are no preconceived expectations for other people. You might be black, but black doesn't have to "mean something" or imply anything about our interaction. I can simply listen to what you have to say and respond to it on its merits. You might be a rock-climber, but rock-climber doesn't have to "mean something" or imply anything about our interaction.

More challengingly: You might be saying something that sounds similar to something I heard before, but that doesn't have to mean that you are saying something I have heard before. It's incumbent upon me to pay attention to exactly what you say, how it differs from what I've heard in the past, and to approach it from the context of our current discussion, rather than from the context of an old discussion I had long ago, with someone else.

I don't claim that any of this is easy, by the way.

Nihilistic Accelerationism

The currently favored meme among "shitposting" alt-righters is "clown world." That sentence is packed with references that will be unknown to many, and obsolete in a year, so let's briefly unpack it.

"Shitposting" refers to the practice of making largely unserious and frequently irreverent social media posts that one wouldn't necessarily want one's family or professional colleagues to see. For example, if I wanted to inundate the world wide web with pictures of the "circle game," my family would quickly grow tired of the gag, and my colleagues would think I was puerile. But, if I create an alternate social media profile, calling myself "RyLo Ken" or something, then I can post as many lame "circle game" pictures as I want to. Voila. Shitposting. Some people post inflammatory political content on their "shitposting account," some post lots of dad jokes, some post other dumb things.

Alt-righters are an ambiguous lot of people. They are predominantly of a conservative or right-wing political bent, but where the traditional right-winger is pretty serious about traditional, conservative morality (e.g. religious-based morality and straight-laced social presentation), alt-righters are essentially reverse-accelerationists. They have come to embrace the worst aspects of fringe left-wing culture in hopes of exaggerating it and hastening its ultimate demise. The classic alt-right example of this is overt racism: alt-righters start by embracing left wing notions of identity politics and intersectionalism, and then apply those theories to white males, resulting in white supremacy. It's not clear to me whether the alt-right's point is to literally embrace white supremacy or to simply use white supremacy as a means of making identity politics so intolerable to the left that identity politics are ultimately defeated. If the alt-right were to openly state that their embrace of identity politics is all an accelerationist ruse, that would render the point moot. So the world must unfortunately wait to see whether the alt-right was ever serious about white supremacy.

This brings us to "clown world," a series of memes in which Pepe the Frog (and anyone else, really) is depicted wearing a red clown nose and a rainbow wig. I think the original clown world pictures were just intended as ambiguous jokes. I went down the rabbit hole on this a bit, and it seems like the original clown world picture was simply posted with an open-ended question, "How does this make you feel?" That makes "clown world" kind of funny. Unfortunately, since the picture involved both Pepe the Frog, which has been used in various racist ways, and rainbow colors, which are emblematic of the LGBTQ pride movement, you can guess where "clown world" eventually went.

All of this represents a sort of mean-spirited cynicism. It's one thing to troll the overly earnest, cause them to clutch a few pearls for some laughs, and then move on with your day. (I don't condone that, either, but it is at least somewhat forgivable in a merry-prankster sort of way.) It's quite another to burn the Overton Window to cinders.

To put it simply, in order to buy into the alt-right's nihilism, one pretty much has to let go of everything: not merely all of your respect for other people, but even the notion that respect for other people itself is a virtue worth pursuing. Why else would you present yourself as maybe-a-nazi? It goes beyond promoting a set of ideas and into the realm of destroying the integrity of the notion of ideas. In other words, the project is not to win arguments and defeat ideas, but to eliminate the need for having an argument at all.

For a long time, I've been wondering why this sort of thing bothers me so much, and I think I finally have the answer. Ideas are, essentially, the conceptual equivalent of civilization.  Ideas are to humanity as personal relationships are to society. They are the foundation of advanced civilization, and if we're ready to give them all up - all of them, not just the bad ones, but all of them - then we are essentially giving up on civilization itself.

And you can easily recognize this in the alt-right. Their preference is for might-makes-right, and "alpha" behavior. They don't make heroes of Einstein or Feynman, they make heroes of Patton and Caesar. Warlords, generals, chieftains… This is the kind of civilization the alt-right is aiming at, and how could it be otherwise? The end of the road to nihilism is death, destruction and abnegation. You can't build a civilization on chiefs and strongmen. No one is strong enough to build a society, in fact. We need ideas for that.

Human society existed for eons as mere tribes of chiefs and strongmen; it wasn't until we started exercising temperance, restraint of force and passion and violence that we were able to climb out of mud hovels long enough to build a thatched roof; and from there, shingles, and sideboards, and so on. The brute could never have conceived of planting seeds and caring for them for months so that the tribe could be fed for a year. The brute couldn't conceive of it because the brute deals in force, not ideas. It required temperance to reach that realization, and temperance itself is an idea. Then, just as Mises describes in his writings on higher-versus-lower-order goods, each new development cleared the path for another, greater development; one technology building on the last and enabling the next. The wheel-and-axle is not just a physical technology, it's a template for how to build a machine. It is an idea.

Ideas are what build societies, and a society without ideas is a failed state. Therefore, nihilism is, in a way, the belief in a failed state. It's the belief that none of the things we believe in long enough to make the world a better place really matters. So nihilism can only ever produce an inferior world, and the longer we cling to it, the worse the world gets, all the way to the nadir.

And, frankly, that's why the alt-right will never win.

On Reshma Saujani And Girls Who Code

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to hear a speech made by Reshma Saujani, founder of the organization Girls Who Code. The speech was, in effect, an explanation of why the Girls Who Code organization exists, according to its founder. The speech was quite polarizing to the audience - polarizing for both men and women in the audience, I must note - mostly because Saujani's mission is transparently partisan.

Saujani is, after all, a former politician and two-time failed congressional candidate for the Democratic party. She mentioned this throughout her speech. She mentioned the Democratic Party by name multiple times, and repeatedly referred to herself as a feminist. It's no surprise that a person like that would give a polarizing speech. We live in a polarized world, politically speaking, anyway.

During her speech, I learned a few more things about Saujani. One was that Saujani herself doesn't know how to code. I found this remarkably odd, for a couple of reasons. First, we've all heard that old phrase, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Saujani considers it very, very important that girls learn how to code; but apparently not important enough to warrant learning herself to code. I guess she thinks it's very, very important for other females to learn to code. Note: she never mentioned why she didn't learn to code.

The second reason I thought it was odd that Saujani doesn't know how to code relates to her reasons for founding her organization in the first place. The way she tells the story, she gained some familiarity with the tech community and started asking herself, "Where are the girls?" She then looked into the matter and discovered that girls don't often choose to study computer programming or become coders. Shen then reasoned, as feminists are wont to do, that girls choose other career paths for reasons of the Patriarchy; namely, the world of computer programming is supposedly "toxic," and "we" teach girls from a young age that they can't do things like code.

Saujani's point is that, if girls want to code, we should support them in that choice. To the extent that anyone ought to be supported in their choices, I agree. That is, if my daughter decided she wanted to learn to code, I'd help her learn and give her all the encouragement she deserves.

But it's important to note that Saujani chose to do something else with her life, other than code, because that's what she wanted. And, according to Saujani herself, girls are choosing careers other than coding, because that's what they want. It is not, however, what Saujani wants girls to choose. Saujani wants girls to make a different choice: to code. So Saujani started an organization whose mission is to steer girls away from what they would otherwise choose to do, toward coding instead.

That is, Saujani doesn't want girls to do as they choose. She wants them to do as Saujani chooses. That doesn't sound like any version of feminism that's appealing to me.

Of course, a straight-forward, albeit cynical, reading of the situation is this: Saujani wants to influence young women and nudge them toward her political ideology. Currently, coders and data analyst hold a lot of power within American society. We're the "cool" career (for now), we command high salaries, and the executives at our firms hold the ear of the Washington power brokers (again, for now). So what Saujani really wants is a piece of that power.

This makes the situation increasingly more odd, though. Saujani is obviously an intelligent woman; so intelligent that I'd wager she'd make a great coder. She is also a reasonably high-profile woman with a certain amount of fame, and that would be enough to get her a foot in the door at any top tech firm, if she had coding chops, too. It seems to me that she could have earned a seat at the same table with a lot less effort if she had done it "the old-fashioned way," by taking a good coding job and working her way up.

Hearing her speak, however, it's as though the thought never even occurred to her. The politician's mentality is something I will never fully understand.

P.S. - Throughout Saujani's presentation, she slung various insults at the stereotypical male coder, and the audience got a big kick out of it, judging by the laughs. I didn't think it was funny, though, and more importantly, I thought it weakened her case. Here's a woman ostensibly trying to, among other things, eliminate discrimination and harassment of women in the high-tech workplace while she herself is committing the same kind of harassment against the males in that environment. Again, that doesn't sound like any version of feminism that's appealing to me.

It's Been A Racist Week

I was reading a recent news story about a sweater Gucci recently stopped selling. The item was a turtleneck sweater that had a mouth-shaped hole in it, complete with red lips, such that when the wearer pulled the neck up over her mouth and nose, it looked like a funny face. Since this sweater was black, however, some shoppers thought the sweater evoked "blackface," and complained. Gucci pulled the sweater off its website and issued an apology.

I don't believe Gucci ever intended this sweater to be a "blackface" sweater. Still, out of deference to their customers and to avoid unnecessary controversy, they stopped selling the sweater, and I think this was the right decision. Better to avoid the appearance of offense than to stubbornly cling to one's innocence.

Beneath the news story, MSN was running a poll: Do you think it's OK for non-blacks to wear blackface costumes on Halloween? At the time of my participating in the survey, a plurality of respondents had answered "yes," meaning that they did think dressing up in blackface on Halloween was perfectly fine.

I'm stunned. Never in my whole life have I ever once considered the possibility that blackface might be "OK." The thought has never occurred to me, not even for a second. Blackface is obviously "not OK." Blackface is always and everywhere morally reprehensible. It's not that I don't think people can have good intentions, it's just that we live in a world in which blackface has a long and sordid history of being used to demean blacks. Unless you want to demean blacks, you should avoid blackface. Simple. And if you do want to demean blacks, you're a racist. Again, simple. This is cut-and-dry.

Recently, two Virginia politicians have had their past experiences with blackface revealed. This is unfortunate. They should step down. As civil servants in a position of influence and supposedly representing the interests of their constituents -- many of whom are black -- they ought to simply recognize that their past racism makes them poor stewards of the public interest. Even if they have changed their ways, they ought to do like Gucci did: Apologize, and step aside. This is the only reasonable way to proceed. Better to be decent than to finish out your term.

In the politicians' case, no one can argue that their blackface wasn't intended to be blackface. While Gucci probably did have a strong case for their innocence, they didn't make a point of minimizing the matter or defending themselves or claiming that it was a different time. They just owned up to the offense and apologized, exactly as people should do if they ever find themselves in a position where they have offended someone. Politicians, though, like to see how far they can push the envelope before yielding to pressure, and this ultimately shows them to have very poor character.

And then, there's the Liam Neeson controversy, in which Neeson admitted during an interview that he went a little nuts after he found out a friend or family member was raped by a black man, and spent a couple of weeks wandering the streets at night, looking for any random black man to appear so that he could beat him to death. Of course, Neeson didn't actually hurt anybody, thank heavens, and it's very likely that he really did go nuts. Learning that someone you love has been raped is a terrible traumatic experience; not one, I hasten to add, that is as bad as the rape itself, but certainly traumatic.

What makes Neeson's case a little different is that Neeson admitted this in order to make an example of himself. His point appears to have been that his actions were morally reprehensible and that he was coming to terms with his own culpable racist reaction to a very real trauma. Leeson, in my view, is to be lauded for having the courage to turn the magnifying glass on himself this way and admit that he had terrible and blameworthy thoughts. Part of reforming yourself means coming to terms with your past wrong thinking, taking responsibility for it, and trying to set it right. Neeson would be more of "a Gucci" in this context.

Contrast to this: Recently, Scott Sumner made the claim that, since Donald Trump polls surprisingly well among Latinos, this is evidence that Latinos simply prefer "strongman" politicians. When others, including myself, called him out on this, he doubled down. Maybe there is more nuance to Sumner's position than all of that. I certainly hope there is. But if there isn't, what could it mean?

It's sad, but it's true. Our biases are everywhere and infect our thinking when we expect it to or not. It's useful to bring them out into the open and to acknowledge them, then ask ourselves if we've been fair, or if we've let our biases incorrectly influence our thinking. David Henderson recently put it this way:

So the key is not whether we are prejudiced. We are. The relevant questions to ask yourself, given that fact, are threefold: (1) Do I recognize that I am prejudiced? (2) Do I seek new information when I can do so at low cost and when an immediate judgment is not necessary? (3) Do I adjust my judgments once I have found new information if such information would lead to different judgments?

My answers to those questions are yes, yes, and yes.

It's not perfect -- perfect would be no bias and no racism whatsoever -- but it's a pretty good start.

I don't know what's going on out there in the world lately, but it is startling and disappointing. The best we can do, I think, is practice David Henderson's strategy and hope that we don't make too many racist blunders along the way. And if we happen to offend or let our biases get in the way of better thinking? Apologize thoroughly and immediately! It's the decent thing to do.

Everyone, Everyone! I Am Not A Racist!

A man was waiting for his plane at an airport, with his two-year-old daughter. As they waited, a stranger waiting in the same place approached them and showed the toddler his tablet. He played kindly with the little girl for a while, and then they all went their separate ways.

This is a common occurrence. Anyone who has a young child can tell you that we occasionally meet kind strangers who enjoy interacting with young children, play with our children for a short while, and then we all go on with our day. To be sure, it is a nice thing when it happens, and meeting such people is one of the many great benefits of having children in the first place.

What's uncommon is this: The man in this story, the toddler's father, filmed the encounter, then posted it on Facebook. The video went viral, and then the press caught up with him. At that point, he said this:

"Watching them in that moment, I couldn’t help but think, different genders, different races, different generations and the best of friends. This is the world I want for her."

So a man stops in the airport to show his daughter some kindness, and what does the parent see? He sees a black man. He sees a black man. He sees an old black man. He films it like he's at the zoo, and then posts it on the internet for other people to see. See? Look, people. A kindly, old black man played with my daughter.

People who live in ethnically homogeneous bubbles always seem surprised when they encounter normal people from other cultures. They always pat themselves on the back for interacting with people of different cultures, proud of the fact that they could have positive interactions with "others."

It's hard for me to see this as being anything other than another form of racism.

Some Racists Are Just Losers With Low Self-Esteem

I once knew a racist. She probably doesn't think of herself as a racist, but that's what she is. She turns her nose up at things that are excessively foreign to her. She thinks Chinese restaurants are "sketchy." She considers every small exposure to someone else's life as exposure to their whole culture; for example, if she's talking to someone from Africa, she's talking to someone from Africa, not just talking to someone. So it becomes a conversation about their culture instead of a conversation about, you know, how are you, how's your day going? Instead of, how 'bout that cold snap we're having, it's "do you get snow where you're from?" Once in a while, fine, but when everything is like that, it's racist. Just talk sometimes, you know? But so it is with racists.

One day, this racist I knew went to an all-inclusive resort in Costa Rica and decided that her time in Costa Rica was demonstrative of great poverty and of how much better life is in the United States. I'm not a fool; it's plain enough to see that there is more wealth in the United States than there is in Costa Rica. But Costa Rica is not poor. Many of its sleepy farming remind me of the farming towns I see along the highways here in the States. It doesn't generally occur to me that people with indoor plumbing, nice homes, nice cars, modern conveniences, good health care, and so on, are poor. Like such farmers in the States, these Costa Rican farmers and the people who live with them in their small towns, are mostly middle class. Some are wealthy. Just like here.

It's easy to understand why a racist would come out of Costa Rica thinking that she had just seen great and terrible poverty. To someone who is biased against Central American Spanish speakers, any evidence of a lack of American-style wealth is proof of misery. This is nothing more than confirmation bias; she sees what she wants to see, and what she wants to see is the superiority of her own experience.

More difficult to understand is why the racist I knew was unwilling or unable to see the counterevidence in this particular case. The objective counterevidence is plain enough. Costa Rica is a visually and environmentally stunning country, and famous the world around for being so. Its green-patched rock cliffs falling off into crystal clear water full of fish are the stuff of legend. One can seemingly travel scarcely one hundred meters without seeing some kind of monkey, coati, parrot, or sloth. Indeed, Costa Rican fauna isn't just cute, it's the kind of fauna that makes people want to cuddle. Oh, there are snakes and spiders, too, but those aren't the animals that visitors tend to remember. The food is delicious, composed of fresh tropical fruits, seafood pulled straight out of the ocean, mild spices and tender herbs, and a few international finishing touches. The people are friendly, well-spoken, calm, amiable, and healthy. Every inch of its surface is touched by some form of outdoor sports, giving a visitor the impression that every Costa Rican is an expert sportsman. The weather is virtually perfect.

Confirmation bias would suggest that a racist would overlook such things and focus on the negative. But in this case, all of Costa Rica's many strengths comprise the very reason that the racist visited Costa Rica in the first place! If Costa Rica weren't the paradise that it is, the racist I know never would have visited it in the first place. There are more virginal ecologies, but their lack of safe civilization makes traveling there too hazardous for an American racist. There are better examples of great food and great outdoor fun, but none with that kind amazing weather and environmental landscape.

I've quoted The Last Psychiatrist on such matters many times before, and I'll do it again: Whenever a person entertains two opposing thoughts at the same time, alternating variously, we have evidence of a defense mechanism. Costa Rica makes me thankful to live in America. I want to spend thousands of dollars and weeks at a time experiencing Costa Rica. Which is it?

Sometimes racism is simple and bald hatred of a scapegoated out-group. Other times, though, racism is the last bastion of someone so insecure of her own superiority that anyone else's excellence is an internal threat to her own sense of self.

At least, that's what kind of racist she was.

My Resistance To Identity Politics

There is a lot of identity politics out there. It comes in various forms, and the liberal-tarians are all united on the fact that it is good to be an “ally” to victims of certain difficult lived experiences. But just as I have resisted the inclination to call myself a “feminist” despite believing in equal rights for women, I’m not ready to sign-on to the pleas of the likes of (most recently) Jacob T. Levy. The natural question is, “Why the heck not, Ryan?” and the answer is because the evidence and the philosophy just aren’t there to support the notion of identity politics.

But does it matter? The toothpaste is already out of the tube, as the saying goes. It’s only a matter of time before everyone in the LGBTQ community gets to enjoy the same kind of social respect that we pay to everyone else, and racism and sexism is always and everywhere deplored by everyone who counts for anything. No one takes a bigot seriously anymore, not in today’s world. Despite the lamentations over Trump’s allegedly white-supremacist agenda, society as a whole wants to move on from all this bigotry. In that environment, why shouldn’t I just be simpatico? I mean, why can’t I just be a nice guy and declare myself an ally of women, of LGBTQs, of racial minorities, of religious minorities, etc.? Why hold out? Do I want to make myself look like an asshole?

In other words, why don’t I just follow where the group leads me? What’s the harm in that?

Libertarianism – the belief that people by and large ought to be left alone to pursue their own slice of happiness – deserves a unified theory. It’s almost inevitable. Despite the attempts of many to divorce libertarianism from hardcore individualism, Aristotelianism, first principles, and unfettered market capitalism, libertarianism only makes sense as the fusion of those ideas. If you remove one of those things, then you are no longer left with a consistent, coherent political philosophy. Instead, what we end up with is a contradictory mess of personal whims and wishes; but you don’t need philosophy to just believe whatever the heck you feel like. Philosophy without consistent self-reconciliation is just word salad.

Thus, to wit, I don’t want to just go along with the crowd on identity politics because, doggone it, I’m an individualist. I’m not going to just accept any hackneyed idea just because a bunch of really nice people really really want me to go with it. That kind of blind susceptibility to situational influence is what produces the Lucifer Effect, and I’m not into that. While we’re busy pitting our various political identities against each other, we’re causing a real rift between and among groups. It’s not very hard to imagine the different ways the Lucifer Effect would take hold. It ought to be resisted.

I bring this up because it highlights the importance of individualism as an idea in general, but specifically with respect to libertarianism. Without the general principle that individuals ought to be left alone, we become a teeming mass of identity-factions, each more justifiably angry than the next. The function of individualism is to diffuse the claims of specific factions and to apply broad principles of freedom to all kinds of people, no matter what their demographics happen to be. In other words, the purpose of individualism is to prevent us from getting caught up in bigotry. Inventing a complex “intersectionality” of factious identities will only serve to pit factions against each other.

What we want is to treat all people equally. So long as we’re pounding pulpits over identity politics, we’ll never get there. Separate is inherently unequal. "All collectivist doctrines are harbingers of irreconcilable hatred and war to the death."

Psychological Rejection And The Election

This is a blog post for two of my friends.

The thinkpiece-writing world continues to struggle in vain for viable explanations of the Trump "phenomenon."

My preferred explanation that a popular television personality won an election by telling a lot of people what they wanted to hear. It's not even an American precedent. Remember Ronald Reagan? Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger? Al Frankin? We don't need a more complicated explanation for Trump "ism" than that. People got tired of voting for shysters in suits, even pantsuits, and decided to go for a TV personality instead. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.

But the explanations continue.

One of the more interesting explanations I've read about - from folks like Jeffrey Tucker, for example - is that the voting public rejected a Hillary Clinton presidency, along with everything that represents. The argument is that Clinton was the worst kind of Washington insider: secretive, cronyish, corrupt, and motivated more by her own private financial interests than by a desire to serve the public. She was said to have been cavalier about toppling Middle East dictators and plunging innocent people into failed states. She help the US government sell white phosphorus to Saudi Arabia, which it later weaponized and used in its campaign against Yemeni factions. She was, in short, the worst kind of Washington insider we could ever imagine electing. Or at least, that's how the argument goes.

For the record, given the small margins by which US presidential candidates typically win popular votes, I think this case is grossly over-stated. But it is a compelling story, at least.

In light of this concept, I started thinking about the reactions we've observed from people who worry about a Trump presidency. Yes, there are the protests and the occasional riot, but those are less significant to me than the tears, the candlelight vigils, the deep sorrow and pain that some feel at the prospect of a Trump presidency. There have been many credible reports of people in the transsexual community contemplating suicide. Children of racial minorities have reportedly been in tears, worried that the storm troopers will come for them, or for their parents.

One of the reasons I think we've seen this reaction is that, for many people on the left, rejecting a Trump presidency would have been the same kind of repudiation of a set of ideas that Tucker and others talk about when they say voters rejected Clintonism. Think about it: if your highest ideals involve racial and cultural inclusion, and kind and gentle speech, and a commitment to the idea that "rhetoric matters," then the 2016 election might have represented an important opportunity to reject the kind of racist thuggery that many of us believe has dominated American politics for a long time.

It's understandable, then, that such people would react as they have. Their opportunity for transcendence suffered a total defeat. And it was, make no mistake, a religious belief that they held, dressed up in all the same language and motives.

Well, they wanted a moment of transcendence, and they lost it. I don't think we should revel in their misery. I don't think we should dismiss their concerns or roll our eyes or turn it all into a meme, and the reason I think so is because tomorrow it will happen to us, whoever "us" is.

I'm an individualist, which means nobody agrees with me, and this sort of systemic moral failure happens to me literally every time there's an election. It's old hat to me. The faith some of these left-leaning people have in government has been lost to me for years, decades. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were all less collectivist, less enthralled by identity politics, less narcissistic, less unkind, more open to hearing new ideas, more receptive to criticism, less inclined to reach for a Big Stick when someone stands athwart of our objectives? Wouldn't the world be terrific if it were a completely different place?

This is the sort of false hope that arises when people lack a true religion, and probably explains why I get along better with social conservatives than I do with social liberals, even though I am more inclined to agree with social liberals. Religious people already accept that humans are sinners and that the only way we'll experience Paradise is if the big man upstairs decides to extend us an invitation. Another way of putting this, in Lacanian language, is that social conservatives are better equipped to deal with lack.

Social liberals, by contrast, tend to be secular people whose only hope of experiencing a better world is to make it happen in the here and now. I sympathize with them, but they're doomed to be disappointed for their whole lives because they've failed to absorb Lacan. They can't deal with lack. When a person like Trump wins an election, it's a terrifying and humiliating defeat, an interruption in the great course of Progress, which they hope will lead them to Paradise.

It is a silly vision. And if you're an atheist like me, you're inclined to disbelieve liberal transcendence for the same reason you disbelieve the Judeo-Christian world-view: It's a nice story, but it ain't gonna happen.

At least the conservatives have their faith, though, and that helps them through the rough times.

What Do We Tell The Children?

A number of people have asked me privately what we should tell our children about the fact that Donald Trump is now the president-elect. This question seems to presuppose that children are waiting for us to explain something. They’re not. As difficult as it might be for some of us to understand, children really care very little about politics. Any attempt you make to provide an “explanation” for the outcome of an election, beyond the mere fact that more people voted for X than for Y, is an attempt to indoctrinate your kids. Don’t do that.

In a recent article in The New York Post, Karol Markcowicz writes:

Dr. Jonathan Friedman, director of psychology with The COR Group, advises, “Parents should make every effort to shield their children from the vitriol and mudslinging of politics, particularly during a campaign as divisive, salacious and ugly as this one has been.”

Amazing that this has to be said.

It’s hard to totally shield our kids from politics’ ugly side, but we certainly shouldn’t be the one emphasizing it to them to make our own political point. Friedman says “rather than communicating harshly about those with whom they may vehemently disagree, they can instead emphasize the importance of everyone having a right to express their opinion through their vote, and how sacred this right is to us all.”

Children need to be reassured and protected. If you’re wondering what to say to reassure them and protect them from the current political climate, then maybe you need to ask yourself why your children are already so invested in politics in the first place.

This is a particularly important message for those friends of mine who are teachers as well as parents. As teachers, we are entrusting you to present school curricula to our children. That’s it. We don’t need you to be friends with them. We don’t need you to provide them with a moral framework (that’s our job as parents). We certainly don’t need you to arbitrate the outcome of an election. We don’t need you to go out of your way to explain something to them just because they asked. A mature person in an influential teaching role ought to be able to say, “Most of us adults struggle to find rationality in politics; it is understandable that you kids are having a hard time. The truth is, you may never figure it out for as long as you live. The best we can do is wait and see what happens. If you have more questions, I encourage you to talk this over with your parents.”

Children don’t think the way adults do. To us, an election is about competing ideologies. We think that people voted for Trump because those people are racist idiots. Or we think people voted for Trump because the liberal elites aren’t listening to them. Or we think that Wikileaks and the FBI engaged in a conspiracy to topple Clinton. This is nuts. Ask yourself: do you really want your child to think like that? They are living comparatively idyllic lives. True, many of them will have to face discrimination, and many of them are dealing with it now. Do you really think you’ll be able to explain the eons-old faults of the human condition to them in the context of a single US presidential election? Please…

I don’t think people are truly looking for an explanation to give to the children. I think they are looking for an explanation to give to themselves. That’s perfectly understandable, but it’s important to remember that, and to avoid drawing our children into our own personal existential crises. That causes harm to them. They deserve better from us. We have to think through the complexities of the world on our own time, away from our children. Anything less puts them at risk.

The existential considerations we ought to be thinking about are incredibly important. I encourage everyone to please think them through. But if you’re not there, if you’re still struggling to make sense of it all, what makes you qualified to deliver a message about world politics to impressionable young children?

What should we tell our children? We should tell them, “I love you. Please don’t worry too much about these things. Please treat other people with kindness and respect. Please go outside and have some fun.”

Some Links

• I may have lost the battle, but it looks like I won the war. (Less cryptically: Adam Gurri is now arguing for exactly the same position I outline in these 1, 2, 3, 4 posts which he previously argued against.)
• David Henderson made me aware of this wonderful piece by Justin Raimondo, at Antiwar.com.
• Speaking of David Henderson, here he is arguing against what I can only describe as Scott Sumner's unique take on politics. Scott Sumner says additional stuff I disagree with in the comments.
• And to sort of highlight Henderson's point, here's an example of how keeping pressure on bad politicians leads to the kind of outcomes that incentivize them against future bad behavior.

How Many Deaths Equals One Rape?

I’m compelled to write this post, even though it doesn’t represent much of a contribution to the existing material out there, including posts previously published on this website.

For me, the story of the election is how much mental gymnastics people are willing to do in order to justify voting for Hillary Clinton.

There is no question in my mind that Donald Trump is a bad man who would make a very bad president. But this fact implies nothing about Hillary Clinton’s comparative standing in that regard. Moreover, we have a mountain of historical records and evidence that suggest that Hillary, too, is a bad woman who would make a very bad president. (Nor does this fact imply anything about the quality of Donald Trump as a potential president.)

When I say “mental gymnastics,” what I’m talking about is this: We know that Hillary Clinton’s policies have led to war, destruction, and death across the globe. Her husband’s policies, too, were once derided at “globo-cop” policies that did more harm than good. The Clintons have a lot of international blood on their hands; they’ve dropped a lot of bombs. A lot of bombs.

Let’s take it for granted that Donald Trump is a racist, sexist pig who is possibly guilty of sexual assault. Here’s an ethical question I pose to my readers: How many bombs do I have to drop on innocent people before my behavior is deemed not only morally reprehensible, but as morally reprehensible as the behavior of a rapist? Think about it, I beg of you. How many people are you allowed to kill with flying robots before the nation decides that the death on your hands is on par with a hideous racist ideology or a single alleged sexual assault? Do I get to kill ten people before I’m as bad as a racist? Twenty people? Five hundred? How many thousands of deaths equal one sexual assault, from a moral standpoint?

As I just mentioned two paragraphs ago, making a case against the death-mongering policies of Hillary Clinton should not be misconstrued as an argument in favor of a Donald Trump presidency. My question is only how many atrocities politicians like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, et al have to commit before you as a human being start seeing them as the monsters that they are. A man who loudly proclaims his bigotry and brags about sexual misconduct is certainly a villain. Why do so many suppose that the others are not villains? Why do so many more suppose that dropping bombs on thousands is less morally reprehensible than a public declaration of bigotry?

Odd, isn’t it?

It is particularly odd in light of the many, many allegations of sexual misconduct – and even a few credible accusations of rape – against Bill Clinton and the fact that Hillary Clinton must naturally know how credible those accusations against her husband are; accusations despite which she chose to stay with her husband for reasons most Americans have assumed for decades purely reflect a professional ambition to rule over us.

Of course – of course – it’s difficult to know who to vote for in an election of monsters. Do you risk one monster, or the other? Do you risk voting for a third party candidate? Do you risk not voting at all? I don’t fault anyone in this election cycle for making any particular choice of candidates.

But I do fault people for handing in their principles to justify their choice. Hillary Clinton is a warmonger, a liar, and a panderer. You can certainly conclude that she is still preferable to other candidates, but you’re not (ethically) allowed to pretend that she is no longer any of those things, just because you view the other candidates less favorably. You are not (ethically) allowed to say one candidate is unequivocally worse than the other on moral grounds unless you are prepared to do the utility calculus and state in no uncertain terms that boasting of rape and racism is morally worse than killing thousands and covering up a rape.

At least, not according to my ethics.