Kamala Harris wants to make absolutely sure that we know she’s an authoritarian. Fresh off announcing that as president she would override Congress to get her way on gun policy, the Democratic senator from California and 2020 presidential hopeful said she would use executive power to push for bans on state laws she opposes, too.
Speaking to a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) gathering on Saturday, Harris spoke of the need for “banning right-to-work laws” that nearly half of states have enacted and how, as president, she would use both her “bully pulpit” and “executive authority” to accomplish that.
Right-to-work laws are often framed by Democrats as anti-union or anti-worker policy. In fact, all they say is that employees can’t be told to join a union or pay union fees as a condition of employment. They’re still welcome to do so; they just have to make that choice for themselves.
In the topsy-turvy world of Harris and other Democrats, however, giving workers options is no good. If elite forces in Washington think workers would be better off joining unions, then they’re just going to override the will of individual employees and state governments across the country. Do as they say! Or else! For your own good.
Sure, some low-income workers might think their hard-earned dollars are better spent on securing immediate material well-being for them and their families. But Harris thinks their dollars would be better off with a massive and bloated international organization that can help her presidential campaign. I mean, have you seen SEIU’s massive mansion across the street from the White House? How could any group so swampy be wrong?
As The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted yesterday:
Right to work is a bugbear to union leaders because it crimps their finances for political spending, and Ms. Harris is eager to get the endorsement of the SEIU and other major unions. Her first big policy proposal, unveiled in March, would have the feds give teachers across the country an average pay raise of $13,500 a year. That payoff to the teachers unions would cost federal taxpayers some $315 billion over 10 years, not including what states would have to contribute to qualify for these Harris Grants.
The big story of the 2020 campaign so far is the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left, and Ms. Harris’s pitch against right to work is evidence that her goal is entrenching union power rather than assisting workers.
Several years ago, Reason ran a series of articles on whether libertarians should support right-to-work laws. Here’s Shikha Dalmia making that case that yes, “right to work laws are indeed libertarian.” Meanwhile, contributors Sheldon Richman and J.D. Tuccille make a libertarian case against right-to-work laws, arguing that they interfere with freedom of contract, here and here.
QUICK HITS
In the 1990s, life in Syria’s Remote Provinces “was generally simple and uneventful,” writes Hassan Hassan, a native of the area:
The state’s presence was minimal, and villagers sustained themselves through farming and remittances from relatives working in the Persian Gulf. Even in retrospect, nothing in those days indicated that my home province would become the main transit hub for jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq after the 2003 invasion, or the site of the Islamic State’s final battle as a caliphate.
Now Hassan struggles “to connect images from my past with the reality of today,” he writes in The Atlantic. Read the whole thing here.
In which the Associated Press pulls every linguistic trick possible to avoid saying who shot at and wounded three children—an Oklahoma cop. Thankfully, the kids are expected to be OK. [Link?]
Robert Crumb is the undisputed godfather of alternative comics. His work has appeared in museums across the world, from the Venice Biennale to New York’s Museum of Modern Art; he was the subject of Terry Zwigoff’s acclaimed documentary Crumb (Gene Siskel’s favorite film of 1994); his drawings are so coveted by collectors that a sale of some sketchbooks in the early 1990s bought him a centuries-old chateau in southeast France. The legendary art critic Robert Hughes has favorably compared his portrayals of the human grotesque to Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth, declaring Crumb “the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe.”
Nearly every milestone on the long road comics have crawled from derided trash to treasured American art form was inspired either directly or secondhand by Crumb’s choices and achievements. With his first issue of Zap in 1968, Crumb singlehandedly invented a format and sensibility, under the broad label of “underground comix,” that permanently changed how printed cartoon stories are perceived. Along the way, it opened the form to social criticism, history, outrageous satire, and the full range of deeply personal human experience, including the both lightly and darkly sexual.
Crumb’s occasional collaborator Harvey Pekar, one of the major innovators of quotidian comic autobiography, says his partner demonstrated that “comics were as good an art form as any that existed. You could write any kind of story in comics. It was as versatile a medium as film or television.” Similar praise from other creators for Crumb’s mind-blowing importance to them could go on for pages; anyone making noncorporate, nongenre, self-expressive comics occupies a space he created.
But events in the comics world last year served notice that the social-justice re-evaluation currently sweeping comedy, film, and literature has arrived at the doorstep of free-thinking comics. In September, at the Small Press Expo’s Ignatz Awards ceremony in Bethesda, Maryland, Crumb’s successor generation of alt artists let the 75-year-old have it with both barrels.
While presenting the award for Outstanding Artist, the cartoonist Ben Passmore, who is black, asserted that “comics is changing…and it’s not an accident.” He lamented the continued industry presence of “creeps” and “apologists,” then called out the godfather by name: “Shit’s not going to change on its own. You gotta keep on being annoying about it.…A while ago someone like R. Crumb would be ‘Outstanding.'”
The room erupted with both “ooohs” and booing. “A little while ago there’d be no boos,” Passmore responded. “I wouldn’t be up here, real talk, and yo—fuck that dude.” The crowd burst into applause.
The brief against Crumb is both specific to his famous idiosyncrasies and generally familiar to our modern culture of outrage archeology. His art has trafficked in crude racial and anti-Semitic stereotypes, expressed an open sense of misogyny, and included depictions of incest and rape. Crumb’s comics are “seriously problematic because of the pain and harm caused by perpetuating images of racial stereotypes and sexual violence,” the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) explained last year when removing Crumb’s name from one of its exhibit rooms.
Such talk alarms Gary Groth, co-founder of Fantagraphics, the premiere American publisher of quality adult comics, including a 17-volume series of The Complete Crumb Comics. “The spontaneity and vehemence” of the backlash, Groth says, “surprised me—and I guess what also disheartened me was, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people booing Crumb are not familiar with his work.…This visceral dislike of him has no basis in understanding who Crumb is, his place in comics history, his contribution to the form.”
Key to the misunderstanding is Crumb’s willingness to probe human darkness, including his own, and his sheer maniacal delight in transgression. (Crumb’s own explanation for one of his more notorious incest-related strips was, “I was just being a punk.”) The Ignatz Awards crowd, Groth worries, “will not tolerate that kind of expression, and I think that’s disturbing. Cartooning has a long history of being transgressive and controversial and pushing boundaries, and now we have a generation very much opposed to that, who want to censure fellow artists from doing work they don’t approve of—even though they are able to do what they are doing and want to do precisely because of trailblazing on the part of artists they now abominate.”
Crumb blew minds and inspired a generation with his eagerness to portray and explore “the stark reality at the bottom of life,” as he put it, delivering “a psychotic manifestation of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious.” In pursuit of that goal, he produced many comics, sometimes with reasonably clear comic grotesquerie, sometimes with undeniable—Crumb himself never denied it—truly dark personal expressions that would strike most people now (and many even then) as unacceptably hostile toward women.
Two of his most notorious stories were titled “When the Niggers Take Over America!” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!” His fans insist they were obvious pitch-black satires of bigoted madness. But they were so outrageous that they were reprinted in actual American Nazi papers. Crumb told TheNew Yorker in 1994, “I just had to expose all the myths people have of blacks and Jews in the rawest way possible to tilt the scale toward truth.”
Trina Robbins, the first female cartoonist in Crumb’s San Francisco coterie in the late 1960s and a co-founder of Wimmen’s Comix (the longest-running all-woman-made comic series), was the first prominent voice raising feminist objections to how he portrayed women and sex. She says she was written off as an annoying scold by the scene’s “little boys club” for noting the violent hostility toward women expressed in some of his work.
Defenses of Crumb, who is no longer producing new comics, read as anachronistic to many in our woke age. The Massachusetts Expo’s reasoning for shunning Crumb follows an all-too-recognizable one-two formula for casting problematic artists adrift: “We recognize Crumb’s singular importance to the development of independent and alternative comics, the influence that he has had on many of our most respected cartoonists, and the quality and brilliance of much of his work,” the organizers explained. But! “We also recognize the negative impact carried by some of the imagery and narratives that Crumb has produced, impact felt most acutely by those whose voices have not been historically respected or accommodated.”
Passmore did not respond to emailed attempts to interview him for this story. But MICE-like, he seemed to imply that respect for Crumb necessarily means disrespect for black cartoonists—that the racial and gender diversity flourishing in comics today is definitionally opposed to Crumb. As he said at the Ignatz Awards, “I wouldn’t be here.”
His comments elicited a wave of social media support from fellow artists and fans. A white male cartoonist named Derf Backderf, who belongs to the generation between Crumb and Passmore and is best known for a gripping memoir about being childhood friends with Jeffrey Dahmer, initially came to the master’s defense on Twitter. But Backderf soon deleted his pro-Crumb tweets, admitting on further contemplation that he was prepared to “box up Crumb and stick him in the attic.”
In Backderf’s final tweet on the episode, he said he was moved by a post from black female cartoonist and publisher C. Spike Trotman, who said, “Personally speaking, I’m pretty relieved I no longer live in a world where I walk into a comic shop and there are Angelfood McSpade chocolate bars by the register.”
Trina Robbins cartoon. Fantagraphics Books
Angelfood McSpade was Crumb’s absurdly exaggerated and sexed-up depiction of an African wild woman. It is very easy to understand why a black woman would feel uncomfortable viewing that character. And yet, as the comics historian and New Republic writer Jeet Heer commented in a post not directly responding to Trotman at The Hooded Utilitarian blog, “anyone who can’t see the satirical (indeed outlandishly satirical) element of Angelfood McSpade has no business being a comics critic.…I think it is to Crumb’s credit that he is willing to implicate himself in his satires on racism—that he doesn’t see racism as cultural phenomenon outside of himself that needs to be condemned but as cultural legacies that pervasively shape his own sensibility and need to be confronted internally.”
Today, many think that fine distinctions between racist art and art that satirizes or complicates American racism are a luxury for people who, because of color or status, don’t have to personally endure bigotry or its vestiges. Whatever the intent, they say, a racist caricature is a racist caricature, and it’s long past time for that sort of thing to disappear.
But those familiar with Crumb’s history have reasons to be suspicious of the idea that some art is so vile and offensive that its creators, distributors, and even consumers should not be tolerated. That attitude has led to bad places, in living memory.
‘Zap No. 4 Is an Exploiter’
Crumb made the first two issues of Zap by himself, but soon a murderer’s row of cartoon superstars formed a collective to produce the book. One of them was Robert Williams, now a founding father of a school of “lowbrow” figurative painting valorized in galleries from New York to Japan. At a 2018 San Diego Comic-Con panel discussion, Williams cheekily said that “me and Crumb appreciated that what we did, someone would have to pay for.” Meaning: “Someone at a newsstand had to sell the damn thing, and that poor clerk could be arrested.”
Indeed, many clerks were. On the panel, Ron Turner of the underground publisher Last Gasp told tales of his friends at stores and galleries being dragged downtown by vice squads. Joyce Farmer, founding co-editor of one of the first underground comix entirely by women, Tits & Clits, somberly revealed that she was scared off of creating anything potentially controversial for years after seeing a bookstore that had been run by her editing partner raided because of the comics she made and enjoyed. On a separate Comic-Con panel, Robbins said that the legal heat in the early 1970s around underground comix was so severe that Ms. magazine refused to print an ad for Wimmen’s Comix for fear that Ms. itself could wind up charged with marketing obscene material.
Even finding a printer was fraught; some might keep and destroy your negatives after deciding they didn’t approve of the comic you’d paid them to reproduce.
Most of the arrests from this era did not result in convictions, for various reasons. At Comic-Con, Turner and Williams tag-teamed a well-honed tale of an early ’70s prosecution coming a cropper after an offending comic was apparently purloined from the evidence room by a sleazy cop, leaving a judge to ask in open court, to no avail, “Where’s the Felch?”
An existing network of head shops and record stores, which had first centered around the market for psychedelic concert poster art, eventually took up the wave of underground comix being made by Crumb and his pals. Although Crumb himself cares for almost no American culture past 1930, Zap and a plethora of fellow travelers became a core part of the hip revolutionary counterculture of the time.
Thus, some suspect there was more than a concern with the moral fabric of Manhattan—something more like animus toward youth culture—that led a New York undercover agent from the Morals Squad to enter two different bookstores in August and September of 1969 to buy copies of Zap issue No. 4. On the second visit, he arrested several employees for selling an obscene publication.
East Side Bookstore manager Peter Dargis admitted to having stocked and sold around 200 copies of the comic, though he said he had not read it himself. He pointed out to the court that his business stocked more than 16,000 titles and that comics such as Zap amounted to less than 1 percent of the store’s gross. Charles Kirkpatrick, manager of the New Yorker Book Store, told a similar story of a huge stock, a tiny percentage of which was potentially naughty comics whose specific content he had not studied.
The case was presided over by Judge Joel Tyler, the same man who declared the movie Deep Throat to be legally obscene. The district attorney offered no evidence other than the copy of Zap 4, whose scurrilousness was supposed to speak for itself. The sellers pointed out that the material was marked “adults only” and that the undercover agent was indeed an adult.
Expert witnesses from the world of comics and art—including Whitney Museum curator Robert Doty, who had included some Crumb comics in an exhibit, “Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art”—tried to convince Tyler there was more to Crumb and Co.’s work than smut.
Sidney Jacobson, who worked for the children’s comic company Harvey, home of Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost, shook things up by insisting that Archie Comics, a rival, produced cartoons “purposely written and drawn to arouse sexualities in teenagers.” The publishers and creators of Archie, Jacobson maintained, “are trying within it to appeal to the sexual desires of their public,” while Zap‘s more grotesque representations of sex, including Crumb’s depiction of sex acts between family members, were designed to be less arousing than Betty and Veronica. (Jacobson offended Tyler by referring to his own company’s work as aimed at the lowest age group. The judge harrumphed that he himself read Harvey comics regularly.)
Dargis and Kirkpatrick were convicted in October 1970, with Tyler deciding that Zap was “utterly unredeemed and unredeemable, save, perhaps, only by the quality of the paper upon which it is printed. It is patently offensive.…It is a part of the underworld press—the growing world of deceit in sex—and it is not reality or honesty, as they often claim it to be. It represents an emotional incapacity to view sex as a basis for establishing genuine human relationships, or as a normal part of human condition.—Zap No. 4 is an exploiter; its effect is to purvey ‘filth for filth’s sake.’ It is hard-core pornography.…The material must fail by any legal test yet announced.”
Sellers of such filth, Tyler ruled, should have known it was impermissibly obscene (even though it did not become legally obscene for sure until the judge said so). As for those eggheaded claims to artistic value, he found “these witnesses failed to particularize in understandable lay terms their generalizations that the cartoonists were ‘original,’ or how they were ‘influencing a new generation of cartoonists,’ or how they showed ‘enormous vitality,’ or where was the satire or parody of the sexual experiences depicted…or how do these cartoons, dealing as they do in the main with perverted sexual experiences, attempt to ‘humorously outrage’ the reader and place in perspective human values.”
In lieu of a 90-day jail sentence, the store managers were fined $500, the equivalent of more than $3,200 today. Their appeals in the New York state system failed essentially on grounds that they couldn’t prove they didn’t know Zap 4 was obscene. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that outcome in October 1973, leaving in place a ruling that the then-chief of the American Booksellers Association called “frightening,” since “no one can possibly know in advance what a judge will consider obscene. The effect of this decision is to make every bookseller in the state a censor.”
In a blistering dissent, Justice William Brennan repeated his assertion from an earlier case that “the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit the state and federal governments from attempting wholly to suppress sexually oriented materials on the basis of their allegedly ‘obscene’ contents.” Yet the Court seemed to have it out for Crumb and his compatriots in 1973. Earlier that year, in Miller v. California, it had shifted obscenity law by giving localities the power to punish expression for being obscene if it violated local mores while lacking “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Many blame Miller for wrecking underground comics as a viable business, with hippie entrepreneurs in college towns across the nation deciding that the profit margins on these curious 50-cent pamphlets were not worth risking fines or jail time.
To Crumb’s Zap partner Williams, applying a square’s community standards to their transgressive work was an outrage. These comics “were not made for the general public,” he said at Comic-Con. “They were made for an audience that seeked them out…an intellectual group in favor of free thought and imagination.”
Censure, Not Censorship
No one of significance in the comics community today is calling for 1970s-style legal punishment for unwoke cartoonists. Charles Brownstein, who heads up the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, points out that “there’s a distinction between censorship in the courts vs. dissenting points of view in the public square.”
Trina Robbins cartoon. Fantagraphics Books
Brownstein’s organization was born of a 1986 arrest and conviction (later reversed) of a comic shop clerk for selling, among other things, an issue of a Crumb-founded comic called Weirdo. The cases he deals with these days are more likely to be about censoring comics in specific public places, such as public schools and libraries. Arrests of comic sellers aren’t much of a thing anymore.
Fantagraphics’ Groth, who keeps in print the very same comic that got Kirkpatrick and Dargis hauled into court, grants that he hasn’t once over the last two decades seriously feared any legal trouble for selling Crumb. Prosecutions of printed materials not clearly marketed as masturbatory aids are rarely pursued this century. And thanks to Crumb’s gallery cred and fame, most prosecutors probably assume that judges and juries will consider his work, if only because it is his, to have literary or artistic value.
But obscenity laws still exist, and that prosecutorial energy has been especially fierce in the past few decades when targeting sexual depictions involving children. One of Zap 4’s more offensive strips is an incest riff featuring kids having sex with their parents, so it isn’t completely insane to fear that Crumb’s work might once again come to be seen as not merely unwoke but illegal. The anti-Crumb sentiments are “still dangerous,” Groth says, “because laws can in fact change because of public attitudes.” Those attitudes now include mainstream consideration of legislation aimed at curtailing “hate speech.”
During the social media storm kicked off by Passmore’s comments, Jules Rivera, a black female cartoonist, tweeted out two panels of a Crumb comic in which an obvious cartoon version of him is having sex with a woman identified as being in “a drunken stupor,” with no signs of consent. “I’m keeping that rapist ass Crumb art on my phone,” she continued. “If anyone challenges me, I’ll bust out my phone and say ‘so you’re down with this?’ In person. To your face.”
But holding art and expression to the moral demands implicit in that tweet may actually hobble what art is for. Appreciating a creator isn’t—or needn’t be—a matter of being “down with” the actions portrayed in his every work. One of the many reasons humans have art is to understand, play with, portray, question, and explore the human condition. Which, as Crumb firmly believes, includes a lot of awful, unacceptable thoughts and behavior.
Portraying darkness and evil in art is not the same as celebrating darkness and evil, even when the depiction is not safely anchored to a clear statement of the artist’s anti-evil sympathies. Offense and transgression can be a vital part of how expression stays lively, fresh, startling, moving, and true to the human condition. That transgressive art is hard to defend in sober, sensible ways is precisely the point. As Simpsons creator Matt Groening wrote in an introduction to 1998’s The Life and Times of R. Crumb, “it sure is a relief to read someone’s beautiful Bad Thoughts and realize the world won’t come crashing down after all.”
The teen Crumb in his published letters saw himself as a good liberal condemning the racial ignorance and prejudice of the yokels surrounding him. The adult Crumb, in addition to his transgressions, did some excellent cartooning on the lives of black musicians who had made the old-time music he revered. Building a wall of exclusion around his art denies audiences the galvanizing work of an artist whose declared intent often aligns with that of his modern-day indicters, even if he’s willing to toy with imagery they recoil from.
In a world of free expression and diminishing legal speech controls, if you want to “cancel” Crumb, well, it’s your right to try. But Groth for one finds that attitude troubling. It “feels similar to trying to erase Ezra Pound or Yeats or Wyndham Lewis, any number of reactionaries in the history of art and literature,” he says. “It’s provincial and philistine and based on historical ignorance, and I don’t think that’s what art should be about.”
The Frustrating Tango of Liberal Tolerance
The American culture that R. Crumb and his contemporaries grew up in restricted the ways people could talk about sex, violence, race, and class. The first wave of underground comix artists reacted with metaphorical explosive violence, especially once they realized nothing was stopping them but the constraints of their own minds. That freedom, in all its messiness and ugliness, upset and unnerved and offended many. It also inspired massive amounts of interesting, strange, life-enhancing art, not just in the comics world but in such offshoots of Crumb’s aesthetic as National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons.
The attitudes Crumb satirized were real and, he thought, deserving of ridicule via crazed exaggeration. His feelings of hostility toward women are, as he has insisted in his comics and in interviews, true to him (and, he is certain, to many other men). What is to be gained by pretending they’re not? Crumb was honest about being the sort of resentful nebbish who in his pre-fame days saw women as controlling something he desperately wanted and couldn’t have—what would now be called a corrosive “incel” mentality, after the men who self-identify as involuntarily celibate.
In a 1991 interview with The Comics Journal, Crumb said art should be judged not on ideological purity but on whether it is “interesting or boring…honest and truthful and real…saying what’s really on [the artists’] minds.…If it’s really in there it ought to come out on paper.” At the same time, he reflected, “I don’t know, maybe we’re all just dragging society down. Maybe we should all be locked up.”
The paradox of liberal tolerance remains: Neither the transgressors nor the offended have a right to force the other side to just shut up about what its members think, feel, or imagine. The two are intimately linked in a mutually frustrating tango. The offended want certain expressions to go away or be universally recognized as unacceptable, and the transgressors want a social space to express themselves without feeling driven from society.
Liberal tolerance, as exemplified by the First Amendment—refusing to violently punish someone for his or her expression—offers a way for these battles to take place without anyone being physically hurt. The figurative game of expression, reaction, pushback, and constantly shifting mores can keep being played without either side mistaking the contest for mortal combat. Although cancel culture (without law enforcement involvement) stops short of violence, those who like to wield it should understand that human beings are social animals. To be told that you and anyone who doesn’t join enthusiastically in condemning you should be expelled from society can feel like war when you’re the target.
Many people understand that art is for expressing and exploring the human mind and soul—and the human mind and soul contain darkness, sexual mania, racism, hostility, and any number of awful truths. To force those things out of the conversation is to unreasonably limit the whole project, they say. Art is a treasured aspect of the healthy human condition, even if what the art says is unhealthy on various dimensions. Many others consider that tradeoff worth it in the name of protecting the status and feelings of previously excluded or oppressed groups.
Crumb’s attempt to open comics to a vast range of human expression was victorious: Whether they want to acknowledge it or not, those working in the field today are his descendants. Like all children and grandchildren, they can choose whether or not to understand their patriarch, whether to emulate him or tell him to fuck off. Their choices may not always be kind or wise, but such is human freedom.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2GORtN4
via IFTTT
An 80-year-old woman in Bootle, England, was handed a £50 fine ($65 U.S.) by code enforcement for walking her dog on a leash that was too long. The officers who cited her warned her the fine would increase to £2,500 ($3,200) if she did not pay it in two weeks. After local media picked up the story, the local council dropped the charge.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2VD7i1o
via IFTTT
In the third season finale of Game of Thrones, Melisandre stared into the flames and declared, “This war of five kings means nothing. The true war lies to the north.” As with many of the red priestess’s prophecies, this one contained a small truth and a bigger lie.
Understand this: Game of Thrones‘s primary conflict was not the battle against the Night King, which came to an abrupt conclusion at the climax of the final season’s third episode, “The Long Night.” It’s called Game of Thrones for a reason: This is a show about the ambitions of a slew of characters vying for supreme political power. Our heroes did not vanquish the true enemy last night, because the true enemy was never the Night King: It’s Cersei Lannister, sitting pretty on the Iron Throne in King’s Landing (a location she has never left since returning to it in the third episode of the series).
Frankly, I’m relieved. Unlike George R.R. Martin’s books, where the White Walkers and the Army of Dead are an alluring and mostly unseen threat, the show never did a particularly good job of turning ice zombies into compelling adversaries. While they were occasionally used effectively—particularly in “Hardhome” and “The Door”—their lack of discernible motivation made them uninteresting in larger doses. (Bran’s partial explanation that the Night King seeks to wipe out all memory was a bit too perfunctory for my tastes.)
Whatever they were trying to accomplish, the White Walkers made a serious mistake letting their commander—whose continued existence is apparently necessary to sustain the magic that keeps them intact—waltz right into harm’s way. Arya killed him with a Valyrian steal dagger, fulfilling Melisandre’s earlier prophecy that she would shut “blue eyes” forever. Indeed, Arya fulfilled a lot of prophecies. It would seem that everyone’s favorite Stark is “the prince or princess who was promised,” the Lord of Light’s chosen hero Azor Ahai, etc. This is a bit of a surprise, since it had seemed that either Jon or Daenerys—or both of them—were intended to fulfill such a role. But prophecies are tricky things, as Melisandre has come to understand. We will likely never understand exactly what the Lord of Light was doing, but perhaps his various interventions—the resurrections of Jon and Beric—were really just about getting Arya where she needed to be.
Her task completed, Melisandre allowed herself to succumb to her advanced age and wither away in the snow—an enthralling and graceful end for a fascinating character. Theon and Ser Jorah received fitting send-offs as well, though most of the core cast survived—including Brienne, Podrick, Tormund, and Grey Worm, who all seemed truly doomed at various moments. All named characters hiding in the crypts appeared to survive, as did both dragons and Jon’s direwolf, Ghost. All in all, it was much less death than expected.
No matter. The true war lies to the south, where Cersei is waiting. Various pundits and commentators seem mildly concerned about this development: By offing the Night King in the middle of the season and saving Cersei for later, Game of Thrones is choosing a less fantastical and more conventional endgame. But really, this is GOT playing to its strengths. The Mad Queen is a more fitting villain, and one audiences understand a bit better. We know what she wants, and why she feels she deserves it. We know what she is willing to do to get it. And of course, we know she has some tricks up her sleeves. The Night King is not the only one who can raise the dead to battle the living.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2L82BZD
via IFTTT
Every year, thousands of people in need of kidney transplants endure greatly suffering because there are not enough organs available to satisfy the demand. They can survive—for a time—only by going through the difficult and time-consuming process of kidney dialysis A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article effectively conveys the pain involved:
Blair Waldvogel wishes he didn’t have to spend so much time in his basement. But if he doesn’t, he’ll die.
The 52-year-old Winnipeg father has been on Manitoba’s kidney transplant list for the past eight years. His Type O blood means Blair can only receive a kidney from a Type O donor and he hasn’t been able to find a match.
So, four days a week, Blair Waldvogel goes downstairs to the guest bedroom, hooks himself up to his home dialysis machine, and sits there for four hours while the machine cleans his blood.
“I never imagined I’d get to eight years,” said Blair…..
If you include the time it takes to set up the machine and to clean up afterwards, Blair has spent the equivalent of 348 days in his basement on dialysis.
“There have been some scary, scary times along the way,” said [Blair’s wife] Irene. She has had to call paramedics more than once after Blair passed out in his dialysis room because his blood pressure dropped too low.
As the article describes, kidney dialysis makes it extremely difficult to continue to live a normal life. Blair Waldvogel, for example, has had to quit his job as the president of the North American recycling program for an international steel company. The article also correctly notes that many dialysis patients endure even greater suffering than the Waldvogel family. And, every year, thousands die because organs do not become available in time to save them. Indeed, Mr. Waldvogel is somewhat fortunate to have survived for eight years on kidney dialysis, because the average life expectancy of dialysis patients who cannot get a transplant is only 5-10 years. The case described in the CBC article is in Canada. But the situation in the United States is no better.
In addition to the pain endured by patients and their families, society loses as well, due to patients’ reduced productivity and the enormous expense of dialysis treatment (much of it subsidized by federal and state governments).
Nearly all of this death, suffering, and waste could be eliminated if only the US and Canadian governments would legalize organ markets, thereby increasing the supply of kidneys. For reasons I summarized here, laws banning organ markets are the moral equivalent of actively killing innocent people:
The injustice of status quo policy is more than just a matter of failing to help people in need. It is the equivalent of actively killing them. Consider a situation where Bob needs to buy food in order to keep from starving. Producers are willing to sell him what he needs at market prices, but the federal government passes a law saying that it is illegal to sell food for a profit. Bob is only allowed to acquire such food as producers are willing to give him for free. If Bob starves as a result, the government is actively culpable for his death. It cannot claim that it was merely an innocent bystander who refused to help him in his time of need. The same point applies if the government (or anyone else) uses coercion to prevent people from selling organs that ESRD patients need to live.
Unlike in the case of food, it is unlikely that ESRD patients would buy what they need directly from sellers. Most likely, the actual purchases would be done by hospitals, health insurance companies, and other specialized enterprises, which could screen them for quality and then offer them to patients (as is the case with many other types of transplants and complex medical supplies). But that does not change the morality of the situation.
By legalizing organ markets, we can save thousands of lives and greatly curtail the kind of suffering now needlessly endured by the Waldvogel family and thousands of others. As an extra bonus, we can also increase economic productivity and reduce health care costs in the process. Few if any other policy reforms can achieve such enormous gains at so little cost.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UN1o9I
via IFTTT
On Freedom, by Cass R. Sunstein, Princeton University Press, 136 pages, $12.95
Just as a building has a structure that allows the people within it to pursue their own happiness without obstructing the movements of others, a free society has a structure defined by the natural rights of first possession, private property, freedom of contract, restitution, and self-defense. These rights—all of which can be loosely characterized as “property rights”—distinguish liberty from license. License is the freedom to do whatever you desire. Liberty is the freedom to do whatever you desire with what, according to these principles, is rightfully yours.
In the Hobbesian state of nature, liberty is conceived as the liberty do anything at all, including the freedom to use other people’s bodies. So government is needed to limit this liberty to avoid life being solitary, nasty, and short. By contrast, the Lockean state of nature “has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Government, then, exists not to limit liberty but to protect it better than each of us can do on our own.
When speaking of freedom in the abstract, it is essential to know to which freedom one refers. The title of Cass Sunstein’s small and provocative new book, On Freedom, is therefore ambiguous. Does he mean unrestricted freedom that must be shaped or limited by government? Or does he mean a liberty bounded by rights that government is tasked to secure?
Sunstein is a progressive liberal. He genuinely cares about individual freedom. But like all progressives, he thinks “we” can do better than merely protecting the rights of individuals and letting the spontaneous order of human actions develop from there. The best and the brightest should intervene to improve outcomes.
Sunstein’s distinctive contribution concerns the nature of that intervention. Most progressives, like Hobbes, believe that freedom must be constrained by force to “make the world a better place.” Indeed, many seem to believe that anything that is not prohibited by the state should be mandated. Sunstein, instead, has long favored “nudging” over jailing and fining. OnFreedom is an accessible introduction to how he approaches social problems—and a constructive challenge for libertarians.
The book disclaims any effort to “explore the differences between ‘negative freedom’ and ‘positive freedom’;…make a final judgment about Mill’s Harm Principle; or investigate the claim that property rights, conferred by the state, can be essential to freedom, or an abridgment of freedom.” In short, Sunstein attempts to discuss “freedom” abstracted from the essential concepts that are necessary to govern its exercise. That’s a big problem, though it does not render the book without value.
Sunstein effectively challenges us to consider how individuals can be made better off, by their own lights, not by coercing them in ways that violate their rights but by structuring their environment in ways that lead them to make the choices that will end up pleasing them the most. His approach builds on the insight that most decisions are already structured by the ways that options are presented to us. From grocery store layouts with end-cap specials to websites featuring seductive links and advertisements, we are constantly and inevitably being nudged in a thousand different directions. We’re free to resist these nudges, but we usually do not. So, Sunstein proposes, we might as well think about how best to nudge people to make good choices.
One revealing example he offers is the “food pyramid” designed by the federal Department of Agriculture (USDA). The idea was to nudge people to exercise their freedom to make healthier dietary choices, with the assistance of (mandatory) nutritional information on all packaged foodstuffs. Here is the pyramid as it appears in the book:
U.S. Department of Agriculture
According to Sunstein, the problem with this pyramid is that it “is organized by five stripes. (Or is it seven?) What do they connote? At the bottom, you can see a lot of different foods. But it’s a mess. Some of the foods appear to fall into several categories. Are some grains or vegetables?” For Sunstein, the obvious problem is that people “are unlikely to change their behavior if they do not know what to do.” Thus, the government “consulted with a wide range of experts, with backgrounds in both nutrition and communication, to explore what kind of icon might be better.” In 2011, they came up with this:
U.S. Department of Agriculture
The plate “doesn’t require anyone to do anything,” Sunstein says. Instead, “it makes clear that if half your plate is fruits and vegetables, you’ll be doing well, and if the rest of your plate is divided between rice and meat (or some other protein), you’re likely to be having a healthy meal.” What could go wrong?
But Sunstein starts his story in the middle, with the “new” food pyramid that was introduced in 2005. He neglects the original, promulgated by the USDA in 1992:
U.S. Department of Agriculture
That pyramid recommended seven servings of good old carbs such as bread, pasta, and potatoes for every three servings of protein. It lumped fats, oils, and salts together with sugars. (The latter, we now know, is made by your body from all the bread and pasta you’re eating.) Unsurprisingly, because it was issued by a government agency, the content was heavily influenced by food industry groups. Many nutritionists now blame it for fattening Americans like cattle, leading to chronic obesity, diabetes, and possibly even an explosion of dementia. Oops.
Of course, the new high-protein, low-carb recommendations might be as wrong as the old low-fat, high-carb diets. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the new diet is right. (I’m now 30 pounds lighter because of it.) If so, generations of Americans—and the whole food industry—were “nudged” astray for decades to the detriment of their health.
What, Sunstein would respond, is the alternative? If choices are to be made, should they not be made with the best information currently at hand?
One obvious option is not to let a bigfoot like the Department of Agriculture do the nudging. Another would be to have more respect for spontaneous order, which in this case was the traditional American diet of meats, cheeses, and a side of veggies. Instead, we were urged toward a diet of partially hydrogenated fats as an alternative to supposedly unhealthy butter—”trans” fats that later were banned entirely.
“Let the market decide” is not necessarily a recipe for correct answers. But a decentralized order of freedom within the boundaries of our legally protected rights allows a diversity of choices from which better results can emerge “as if by an invisible hand.” Knowledge can evolve instead of being stipulated by a Leviathan. Labeling is fine; consumers cannot identify for themselves what’s put into processed food. But food recommendations—nudging—by enlightened experts empaneled by the government has been as likely to be wrong as to be right.
When I was a research fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, my office was next to Sunstein’s, who was then in his first year of teaching. We became good friends. During one of our many conversations, I recall him asking what I would say if one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century turned out to be Jürgen Habermas and not Friedrich Hayek.
Since then, Sunstein has become a bigger fan of Hayek. In this book, he quotes the Austrian economist as saying that “the awareness of our irremediable ignorance of most of what is known to somebody [who is the chooser] is the chief basis of the argument for liberty.” And yet, Sunstein asks, “Might people’s freedom of choice fail to promote their own well-being” from the perspective of their own desires? “Every member of the human species knows that the answer is sometimes yes.” So he proposes nudging people to make the choices that will better achieve their own goals.
I would like to see him seriously confront the problem of knowing how to nudge people to get what they want. He might then consider whether government experts, panels, and boards will always have the interests of the people, rather than those of powerful interest groups, in mind. On Freedom is a stimulating read that should nudge libertarians to stop and think harder about nudging. But it could use a little more Hayek and a little less Big Mother.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2DDoo5f
via IFTTT
The latest national injunction has landed. In Washington v. Azar, the court cites a few Ninth Circuit precedents about national injunctions (pp. 5-6). The court recognizes that circuit precedent allows national injunctions “if such broad relief is necessary to give prevailing parties the relief to which they are entitled.” At this point, one would expect the court to say why such relief is needed. Or one would expect the court to return to that question later in the opinion. But the court never does. Oddly, there is no analysis of the scope of the injunction.
Other parts of the court’s preliminary-injunction discussion, too, could be criticized. The court disclaims any conclusion that the plaintiffs “are more likely going to prevail,” yet still issues a preliminary injunction. When analyzing irreparable injury, the court should be using as the baseline a scenario in which the plaintiff prevails on the merits. And the court’s balancing of the equities doesn’t really include any balancing.
But the real surprise is the hole where the national injunction analysis is supposed to be. That is in contrast to some of the recent national injunction decisions that have shown a stronger sense of craft (e.g., the E.D. Pa. opinion discussed here).
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UYF0io
via IFTTT
Across much of America, spring heralds the arrival of flora, Cadbury Crème Eggs, baseball, halter tops, and the rotting carcasses of dead animals along the nation’s roadsides. Yes, folks, it’s roadkill season.
Colorado officials say thousands of deer were killed in vehicular accidents in the state last year. Missouri officials are busy stepping up their response to roadkill. And in Michigan, officials in sparsely populated Isabella County say they received nearly 900 calls to report dead deer along county roadsides last year.
These officials are concerned about roadkill because the millions of dead animals scattered across America’s highways every year pose a deadly hazard not just for drivers but also for scavenging animals that prowl roadways in search of an easy meal. Roadkill begets vehicular accidents and more roadkill.
But help is on the way. Oregon’s roadkill law, which I discussed in an earlier column, was adopted in 2017 and took effect this January. Subject to certain conditions, the law allows anyone who obtains a permit to harvest a deer or elk, which a person can eat, share, or give away. (Sorry, no skunk meat; though it’s fine to harvest stink steaks in Idaho.)
The Oregon law has proven popular but—contrary to the imaginative concerns of some critics—not too popular. So far, the state has issued more than 200cost-free roadkill-harvesting permits issued since the beginning of this year.
Roadkill is gaining acceptance in more and more legislatures. For example, a California billintroduced this session would legalize the harvesting of roadkill in that state.
So just who opposes efforts to harvest roadkill? An NBC News report last month on the loosening of roadkill laws cites folks who “worry that legalization efforts could lead to over-eager drivers striking down animals just to get a free steak.“
“Our concern really is where people might intentionally hit animals for trophy or food,” says John Griffin, senior director of urban wildlife programs with the Humane Society of the United States. “Like an elk or something large. It’s incredibly dangerous. For both species.”
Such fears are not exactly rational. Consider that hunting animals (e.g., with a firearm) is legal in some form or other in all fifty states. A hunting permit allowing you to shoot and kill Griffin’s hypothetical elk—an animal that could weigh 900 lbs.—might cost you a few hundred dollars, depending on the state. That’s a lot less than your funeral would cost, or—if you’re somehow both stupid enough and lucky enough to survive an intentional vehicular collision with a 900 lb. animal—the cost of replacing the car or truck you destroyed when you collided with said elk.
In short, legalizing the harvesting of roadkill is probably no more likely to encourage road-rage hunting thanmoving deer crossing signs to areas with crosswalks is likely to reduce deer vehicular deaths.
Legalizing roadkill salvage is a win for everyone and everything involved. As ItoldAtlas Obscura last year, it’s “a way to get people the protein they want and need and to cut down on food waste and dangerous highways.”
Oregon State Sen. Bill Hansell, a Republican who sponsored his state’s law, says support for legalizing roadkill harvesting transcends not just state borders but also the partisan divide gripping our nation.
“It stretched the political gamut,” Hansell told the Statesman Journal. “You had liberal Vermont to conservative Wyoming.” To Hansell’s point, both hunters and PETA are also keen on the policy.
If anything can unite a divided America, maybe it’s roadkill.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2GObO5d
via IFTTT
The years from 1815 to 1845 are usually called the Jacksonian Era, but no one person can define the lives of millions. If someone could, the better icon for that age might be Samuel Morse, who invented the most transformative, revolutionary device of the entire century. Even the railroads pale in comparison to Morse’s telegraph.
It was a time of decentralized and dispersed but consequential activities. Innumerable tinkerers worked in shops littered across the land, and every day some new machine hit the market—some contraption to repair clothing, protect your hats, heat your home, cook, clean. Undergirding it all was the revolutionary system of cheap and efficient communications: first the steam presses and cheap newspapers, then telegraphy.
It was America’s first singularity.
In geometry, a singularity is the point on a curve beyond which a fixed viewer can no longer see the curve. Imagine you’re on the street looking at a circular building. There will be points at either end where the shape of the curve prevents you from seeing around the bend.
In astrophysics, black holes are singularities. Their gravitational wells are so strong that literally nothing—not even light—can escape. Approach one closely enough and the singularity will never let go. Gradually, it will pull you into itself, distorting your body, breaking it apart into one long strand of atoms. The black hole turns you into a piece of human spaghetti, sucking you up into its own mass.
In modern computing, the singularity is sometimes spelled with a capital s and takes on the flavor of a religion. The believers think our singularity will be the point at which artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence. Machines could then improve themselves at dramatically increased rates, the costs of creating more intelligence would fall dramatically, and the explosion of intelligence would change everything.
For most people, the very prospect of a technological singularity is probably terrifying. But Americans have lived through one before, and they not only survived it but emerged to snatch global economic and political leadership from Great Britain. The Jacksonian singularity set the United States on track to become a superpower, the leading edge of global prosperity.
Decisions made during a time of singularity are perhaps the most important decisions human beings ever face, because they remake the world. Americans during the Jacksonian singularity both charted the nation’s course toward a brilliant future and made titanic mistakes along the way. We now find ourselves in a historical situation analogous to theirs, but we do not have the luxury of making their mistakes anymore.
As the pace of change quickened in the 1820s and ’30s, a great threat to entrenched power came from an unlikely source: the post office. Delivery of the mail was far and away the most significant single duty of the national government, and the postal service employed more people than all the other federal bureaucracies combined. Even the farthest-flung places in America had post offices, and access was considered a universal, equal right for all citizens.
Because the post was a government monopoly, it was also an early focal point of conflict over slavery. In the 1830s, abolition societies organized themselves into formal social networks and used the postal system and steam-driven presses to flood Southern mail with abolitionist literature. This activism helped spur the cheap postage movement championed by Lysander Spooner and Barnabas Bates; it also prompted a fierce Southern backlash, complete with mobs burning abolition mail. The more the price of communications fell, the more abolitionists reached out to their fellow beings, touched their hearts, opened their minds, and transformed society.
Yet as Spooner understood, slaveholders could easily co-opt the pliant state monopoly, bending it to serve their interests. President Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general, Amos Kendall, set the standard: When Charlestonians mobbed their post office to burn abolitionist literature in 1835, he ignored it and refused to protect equal rights to the mail. Rather than censuring Kendall and Jackson or reforming the postal service, Congress passed the infamous “Gag Rule” to prevent Northern members from considering abolitionist petitions. So Spooner and Bates attempted more radical methods of reform. Spooner established the American Letter Mail Company to directly compete with the postal monopoly, which it did with great success until the government shut it down. Bates diligently lobbied both Whigs and Democrats to lower postage rates in keeping with the British two-cent model. Both men now compete for philatelic recognition as the father of cheap postage in America.
Publishers benefited from privileged prices set by the postal service. Editors across the country exchanged free copies with one another and clipped the choicest articles from distant or significant places to share directly with their audiences. By 1822, more people read newspapers in the United States than anywhere else in the world, though no single paper circulated to more than 4,000 readers. Steam-driven presses and “penny papers” extended the drama even further. In New York City from 1832 to 1836, the circulation of daily papers shot from 18,200 to about 60,000.
Americans became the most literate people in world history. Information flowed across the land as never before and nowhere else on the planet—enough to send anyone reeling.
One randomly selected issue of the New York Daily Plebeian (July 11, 1843) contains advertisements for “marine and fire insurance,” British steamship lines, the Staten Island Ferry, the New York and Erie Railroad, the Housatonic Railroad, the express train to Pittsburgh, and the Daily Express train, which went upstate and then out to Chicago and “the Canadas.” There is an ad for luggage, for a new common school, and for cheap groceries “to suit the times” from Merritt’s Wholesale and Retail Grocery, which offered free delivery to any part of town. There is a very long testimonial praising Sand’s Sarsaparilla and its ability to “throw off…chronic constitutional diseases.” (The copywriter recognizes that “this is sometimes termed quackery” but insists that plenty of “medical profession[als], ministers of the Gospel, officers of justice, and numerous private citizens” swear by it.) If old-timey root beer–like products are not your thing, maybe you’d like to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Parr, “who lived to the unusual and patriarchal age of 182 years…solely attributable to his temperate habits, and…Parr’s Life Pills.” Or you could buy Dr. Hunter’s Red Drop, “warranted to cure in any and all cases of disease of a private nature” (possibly gonorrhea). For my part, I’d rather turn to the next ad and buy some Rock Spring Gin.
After flipping through the news (an uneasy peace between Mexico and Texas), you’ll find that French’s Hotel has expanded. You can follow the shifting values of European currency and then check in on prices to travel with the Northern and Western Emigrant Passage Office. In the “Amusements” section are 50-cent tickets to Niblo’s, which get you a peek at performances by “The astonishing ravel family” of pantomimes and tight rope walkers, including a burlesque show, contortion, and “the Comic Pantomime of Enchantment.” P.T. Barnum’s American Museum features Tom Thumb, “The Prince of all Dwarfs.” At Vauxhall Garden Saloon, you can witness “Chinese Divertisements, with golden balls, rings, plates, spears, &c.,” singing European and “Negro” songs alike, and the “Corpuscular Feats” of Mr. E.H. Conover. If you’re willing to trek across the river to Hoboken, New Jersey, you can visit the Elysian Fields and see more astounding tight rope walking and magic tricks. Perhaps horse racing is more your speed—try the Beacon Course.
There are lease notices for residential and commercial properties, including “a cotton factory of 1500 spindles…in complete working order.” There is an ad for someone named John Brown’s “New Hot Air Cooking Stove”; for a salesman willing to hawk engravings of General Jackson; for “a collection of Wax Figures, large as life, representing distinguished characters.” There is a long set of mortgage sale notices and a section full of legal notices, from the sale of a deceased client’s goods to declarations of debtor insolvency.
One single paper from one single city offers an absolutely bewildering array of information and material wealth. That’s how deeply interconnected New York City’s citizens were by 1843. And in almost every city of appreciable size, you’ll find similarly formatted papers bursting with advertising and news.
Even so, the real singularity was still ahead. Once the telegraph arrived—aided by the ever-growing network of rail lines and steamer companies—cities, states, and regions became connected to one another as if they were neighborhoods in and around Manhattan.
In March 1843, while the Daily Plebian was hawking Parr’s Life Pills, Congress finished mulling over an interesting proposition. Samuel F.B. Morse—a former art professor, failed painter, and amateur technologist—had petitioned it for funds to build a magnetic telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. Packed with development-hungry Whigs and backed by a slaveholding president who fully understood the value of centralized communications, Congress appropriated $30,000.
The first line failed: It went underground but was too poorly insulated. The next line went up on poles. Construction was not yet completed when Morse and his partner, Alfred Vail, sent their first proper message: After Henry Clay won the nomination at the Whig Party’s national convention in Baltimore, Vail sent word to Washington from the Annapolis Junction train station between the two cities. Even without a full connection, the telegraph helped spread the news to the capital an hour and 15 minutes before the usual methods of communication.
If the government had monopolized the telegraph, pro-slavery figures like Andrew Jackson would likely have stayed in command, continuing their policy of censoring abolitionist messages more effectively than ever.
That was May 1, 1844. By May 24, the full line was ready for its first official demonstration. Standing at his machine in the United States Supreme Court, Morse tapped out 21 characters from the Book of Numbers: “what hath god wrought.” About one second later, in Baltimore, Vail’s machine began moving. It recorded the message on paper tape, and the world was immediately and profoundly different. Just like that.
Editorial and news correspondents flocked to Washington and Baltimore to report on Morse’s amazing invention. Probably hoping to inspire as much as inform its audience, the Baltimore Patriot published a long technical description mixed with political warnings. Among the more interesting details is an explanation of how the mechanisms on either end convert the electrical signals into motion and, ultimately, into marks on a continuous paper tape that can be read by the operator or even cyphered for secret communications: “A merchant in New York may write to his correspondent in Philadelphia, without the possibility of its being intelligible to any one except the individual to whom it is addressed. Not even the writer upon the instrument in New York or the attendant in Philadelphia decipher it. With perfect ease the key can be changed every day, or at every 10 words of correspondence. This mode of secret correspondence is more sure and safe than that of ordinary ciphers used for that purpose.”
The Patriot concluded with a call for a state monopoly over the telegraph and government advancement of the new industry: “May this Government foster it with all her care, and give to the Union this bond of her perpetual stability.”
It wasn’t the only voice calling for government control. Just a few days before, the New York Herald had endorsed an open-ended amount of federal support for spreading Morse’s telegraph around the country. “Even amidst the effect of the negligence, bad passions, and folly of both Houses of Congress, we are after all not without some hopes, that such an important project as this will receive some attention,” it editorialized. “The erection of a line of such telegraphs from New York to Washington, [Boston, and New Orleans,] with all the intermediate points, would at once connect the whole of the chief cities of the Union in one magnetic embrace—make them one vast metropolis as it were, producing incalculable benefits in business, government movements, and popular results, and forming a bond of union which nothing could dissever. We do trust that Congress will pass [legislation] on this subject without any delay.”
Some voices warned that if such an important and revolutionary technology were monopolized by the already powerful few, they could control the flow of information and use it to master their fellow human beings. While Morse was still building his first line, the media began warning of a secret cabal of business elites who supposedly already had a working telegraph between Philadelphia and New York. The Philadelphia Gazette reported on this “startling discovery” on June 22, 1844: “No little excitement has just been created in the Stock Board and among the whole circle interested in the Stock business, by the discovery of a telegraphic communication between this city and New York. We remember that the New York correspondent of the North American, several months ago, put the public on its guard against this mode of immediate dispatch practiced by certain parties in both cities. The fact, then doubted, is proved now beyond any question. We need not say that a combination of this sort is entirely at variance with the safe transaction of business by parties not in the secret” (emphases added).
There was indeed an optical telegraph system combining semaphore and cryptography between New York and Philadelphia going back to 1840, and it was reserved for the exclusive use of its businessmen funders. But this was hardly a secret—these networks were the telegraph’s most immediate precursors. Morse’s genius was to replace a long string of semaphore interpreters with cables and electricity, but the skeptics recognized that the line’s owners and operators still functioned as gatekeepers. Many worried that unless the government monopolized the telegraph and built lines to each city as part of the postal service, private actors could usurp control of the nation’s communications for their own benefit and ruthlessly exploit markets or influence elections.
For slaveholders and their allies, of course, the most dangerous private actors were abolitionists, some of whom seemed rich and crazy enough to create a telegraphic version of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator or Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company. If the government monopolized the telegraph, then pro-slavery figures like Kendall and Jackson would likely stay in command, continuing their censorship policy more effectively than ever. The free flow of information is the greatest enemy a planter ever knew, and Southern laws routinely restricted intellectual and social life, protecting the slave system. It was only reasonable to extend the same practices to new technological frontiers as they opened.
To tame the flow of information, slaveholders would need a government monopoly over the medium, just like Washington’s monopoly over the mail. In the ironically named New Orleans Jeffersonian Republican, the editor warned portentously of “many of the disadvantages and even injuries which may be visited upon the mass of the community if the sole use and control of the Magnetic Telegraph communication be vested in individuals or private companies.” The exclusive right to own and operate a telegraph should “be transferred to the Government, which excludes any monopoly for improper or speculative purposes.” The Republican cited the New York Commercial, which argued that “responsible officials” should manage the industry “in such a manner as to secure the public against the danger of any monopoly of this channel of information.” Telegraphy “in private hands” was unlikely to produce profits or benefit anyone but stock speculators who “could afford to pay larger sums for the nominal monopoly of its use.” Once this happened, the public would surely rise in class revolt and “extinguish it.”
Northern readers of the Commercial saw this kind of class revolt in the 1837 New York City flour riots. Southerners saw it in Nat Turner’s rebellion and the abolition mail campaign of 1835.
The Jacksonian Era was, in fact, the United States’ greatest period of political violence, setting aside the Civil War. Historian David Grimsted studied over 1,200 riots from the 1830s to the 1850s and concluded that they were indeed “a piece of the ongoing process of democratic accommodation, compromise, and uncompromisable tension between groups with different interests.” In the pro-slavery South, this meant a political culture so insistent on protecting white supremacy that “it demanded the cessation of white freedom where it touched that issue: petition, speech, press, assemblage, religion, and—in the 1850s—democratic majoritarianism.”
Fortunately, Congress saw no way to profit from telegraphy and thus passed on the chance to monopolize the industry, to the great benefit of humanity.
As all this social and economic ferment was underway, the locofoco and Young America movements emerged. They developed in tandem in mid-1830s New York City, in the minds and lives of many of the same people, for many of the same purposes. Both movements were partially realized thanks to telegraphy, and they represent the era’s greatest lasting contributions to American life.
Public domain
Locofocoism was the libertarianism of its day. It began in the Workingman’s Party circles of the late 1820s and early 1830s, and it grew into its own when that Charleston mob burned the abolitionist mail in 1835. After one of New York’s leading young radical editors, William Leggett, began voraciously consuming anti-slavery literature and defending activists’ equal rights to the mail, he was “excommunicated” (his word) from the Democratic Party. Leggett’s work sparked a local rebellion against Tammany Hall and the powers that dominated the state Democratic Party. By taking over their city’s politics, the radicals hoped to force a reformation of the national party and a recommitment to the universal equal rights Leggett defended in the Evening Post. The history of locofocoism is far too detailed for adequate coverage here, but the locofocos did partially retake the Democratic Party, reshaping its policy positions and philosophy. They also inspired two generations of young activists and visionaries in the Young America movement.
Young America began in the private meetings of an informal club called the Tetractys Group led by New York City publisher Evert Duyckinck. The members were publishers, editors, artists, and critics who wanted to create and promote an authentic American national culture distinct from its European antecedents, especially Great Britain. From visual artists like Thomas Cole and Asher Durand to poets like Walt Whitman and novelists like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Young Americans had already been transforming American culture for a decade before Morse sent his famous messages. They were not all locofocos, but they did imbibe the locofocos’ romantic respect for republicanism, their emphasis on the class nature of U.S. politics and economics, and much of their sense that America’s national destiny depended on strict adherence to liberal moral principles.
Their most serious problem, from a libertarian point of view, was their romantic nationalism, which often reads like naive optimism. Committed locofocos such as Whitman believed politicians such as James K. Polk when he voiced support for free trade, free banking, and free government across the world. Polk was elected quite literally on the strength of about 5,000 locofoco Young American votes in New York, and as soon as he assumed office he betrayed them by rewarding that state’s conservatives and cooking up the slaveholders’ war on Mexico. The anti-slavery Whitman was horrified. He lashed out like Leggett before him, he was fired from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and he emerged from the Mexican War both humbled and radicalized.
The Mexican War divided Young America into two movements: one that supported liberal reform and one that was perfectly willing to make the United States into an empire to advance its political goals. In the 1830s, it was easy to see the groups as allies. When Morse invented the telegraph as part of his own Young American quest to unite the nation’s people into a single great culture, it was at once the opening act in the world’s peaceful new republican destiny and an essential precondition for continental, imperial expansion. Young Americans and locofocos of all stripes could see in the telegraph the fulfillment of their grandest, most astounding dreams, and they ran positively headlong into the unknown future—Mexican War, Civil War, and all.
In Pittsburgh, the radical editor of The Loco-Foco was typical of his peers. Clipping from the New York Herald, he fed his eager campaign-season audience on hearty helpings of jubilant futurism: “We are in the midst of a revolution in society and government on both continents, and one which will produce the most important changes…in the physical and moral world.…The possibility—nay, the practicability of uniting vast communities in one firmly united republic, and the rapid triumph of the social and political system of the United States over all others throughout Europe, are great truths which have for several years past been sinking deep into the minds of civilized man.”
The United States was already “neck and neck” with Great Britain, the Loco-Foco editor wrote, and destined soon to surpass its former overlord. The “extraordinary and wonderful” telegraph now presented the “wonderful spectacle…of a vast continent, as consolidated and united, and possessed as much, nay, in a greater degree, of the means of rapid communication, as the city of New York.” In true Young American language, he continued: “It will tend to bind together with electric force the whole Republic, and by its single agency do more to guard against disunion, and blend into one homogeneous mass, the whole population of the Republic, than all that the most experienced, the most sagacious, and the most patriotic government could accomplish.”
“Every doubt” that constitutional republics could also be continental empires “will now be removed,” the editor exulted. American imperialism now seemed “as natural, justifiable, and safe as the extension of New York to the Harlem river.” Thanks to Morse’s telegraph, “we are indeed on the dawn of a greater era in the history of human progress on this continent than, perhaps, even enthusiasm itself has dreamed.” With the tremendous strength of railroads, steam ships, and vast lands at our backs, “we may, indeed, bid defiance to all enemies.”
The grandest dreamers of all expected that telegraphy would help us conquer death itself. In the late 1840s, one of my favorite 19th century libertarians, a locofoco and Young American named Frances Whipple, was living in Pomfret, Connecticut, when she encountered a man named Samuel Brittan. Brittan was one of the founders of a religion that owed a significant debt to telegraphy: spiritualism, a broad set of mystical beliefs including contact with the dead, the material existence of spiritual beings, the connections between electricity and intelligent life, and other New Agey–sounding things. He quickly converted Whipple to the faith. Through her entire life, she was an advocate for working people’s interests, feminism, abolitionism, and revolutionary republicanism. Once introduced to the new faith, she fell in with the small, swiftly growing, and inordinately influential community of believers and mediums.
Spiritualists practiced séances with the aid of electric batteries and telegraph machines, charging the power of their auras to become “spirit batteries” and communicating with ghosts through “spiritual telegraphy.” For more than two decades, Whipple practiced as a private medium in Rhode Island and California, including at a famous channeling event where a Union colonel, E.D. Baker, purportedly dictated his own funeral oration, which she then delivered herself. (In this way, Baker—as interpreted by Whipple—became the first prominent West Coast politician to advocate emancipation.)
Whipple preached inward reform first and foremost: Technologies like the telegraph might enable us to do great and wonderful things, to aggrandize and exploit our powers like never before, but she felt we must hold ourselves to higher standards than those who have come before us. Rather than use the telegraph to unite a vast and violent empire, she and other feminist mediums argued that we should use the technology to “commune with the wise ones of the ages,” learn from their examples and their grave mistakes, and resolve simply to do whatever we can to be better to each other.
As we enter an age of spiritual machines, with the internet and social media as its substrate and a new Jacksonian populism to match, do we need our own tech-embracing spiritual reform movement? Could individualist libertarianism, with its sacrosanct respect for autonomy and voluntarism, be our answer to the singularity of our times?
Perhaps, but we all know that’s a minority position. Our Jacksonian forebears answered their own existential quandary with expansionist, nationalistic, and fundamentally naive bluster. Pro-slavery Jacksonians saw themselves leading the world into true modernity and used their new powers to expand the Cotton Kingdom to continental proportions. The largely anti-slavery Young Americans—convinced they could bend national power to their own dreams for global republican revolution—diluted their movement with every vote for a status quo politician.
In the end, battles over the mail monopoly translated into a far larger conflict about the national state’s powers and privileges over its component parts. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, Southerners knew what it meant for them: swarms of Republican officeholders invading their ports and taking command of the postal service; abolitionists once again flooding the mail with their messages (at newly reduced rates, thanks to Bates and Spooner); and no power on Earth able to effectively check them. In time, there would even be Republican parties in the Southern states themselves, and Southern newspapers would turn abolitionist. Vast networks of railroads, steam ships, and magnetic telegraphs would transform into the greatest liberating force the world had ever seen. The very thought was intolerable.
For the remnants of locofoco Young America (including Frances Whipple), the Civil War was no mere horror show: It was a grand historical moment for revolution and rebirth, the true fulfillment of our Manifest Destiny. The Jacksonians’ gravest mistake—and they made many—was burying the revolutionary republican tradition in a mountain of nationalistic naiveté. In so doing, they devolved the United States from a grand experiment in self-government into one of history’s more familiar tales: the rise-decline-fall cycle of empire.
Today, the same mistakes might mean the end of civilization itself. But spaghettification is hardly imminent, even if we’re moving dangerously close to that black hole’s gravity well. With as much preparation as we can muster, with serious study of the best examples of how to live freely in turbulent times, with a will to maintain our integrity and a stubborn refusal to make the same mistakes as our ancestors, we just might survive this ride through the historical wormhole without losing our lunch.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2L8wPM8
via IFTTT
Despite widespread controversy over other aspects of the Mueller Report, the one thing most commentators agree on is that the Russian government tried to influence the 2016 presidential election, and that its interference was morally wrong. The least controversial part of the Report is its detailed summary of Russia’s extensive efforts on this score. As Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein notes, “[t]he bottom line is, there was overwhelming evidence that Russian operatives hacked American computers and defrauded American citizens, and that is only the tip of the iceberg of a comprehensive Russian strategy to influence elections, promote social discord, and undermine America, just like they do in many other countries.”
I agree with the conventional wisdom that Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election was morally reprehensible. But the morality of electoral interference is not as straightforward as most people think. Not all efforts to influence electoral outcomes in countries other than one’s own are morally wrong. And when they are, it is generally for reasons other than the fact that the people attempting to exercise influence are foreigners.
Many discussions of electoral interference implicitly assume that elections should be decided by a nation’s voters without any influence from foreigners and their ideas. But such a position makes little sense. The origin of an idea says nothing about its validity. As the great libertarian economist F.A. Hayek put it, “The growth of ideas is an international process… It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.” If ideas developed or conveyed by foreigners influence American voters for the better, we should be happy to see that happen. Indeed, the United States was founded on Enlightenment ideals largely developed in Europe by French and British thinkers.
In some cases, attempts to influence foreign elections are not only morally permissible, but even praiseworthy. Imagine that the nation of Ruritania is holding a referendum on whether to institute slavery. The “yes” forces are better organized and have better messaging than the “no” side, and appear likely to win.
The government of neighboring Freedonia finances a public relations campaign aimed at Ruritanian voters in order to persuade them to vote “no.” The Freedonian PR campaign is better managed than the efforts of Ruritania’s indigenous antislavery movement, and it has a decisive impact on the outcome, enabling the antislavery side to prevail. It seems fairly obvious that Freedonia’s actions were laudable. Without them, large numbers of people would have suffered the horrific injustice of being enslaved.
This example is not entirely hypothetical. The abolitionist movement in the 19th century United States was significantly influenced by the antislavery movement in Britain, which worked to turn American (and European) public opinion against slavery.
As critics of the US like to point out, we have our own considerable history of trying to influence foreign elections. Not all of this activity was justified. But some of it surely was. For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US made extensive efforts to influence French and Italian voters to reject their nation’s respective Communist parties. There was good reason for this. Had the communists prevailed, they would have tried to use the power of government to impose brutal totalitarian regimes modeled on that of the Soviet Union under Stalin. They would also have backed Stalin on the international scene. Liberal democratic forces in the US and Europe were entirely justified in working to prevent this.
As a general rule, liberal democratic governments try to stay neutral in each others’ elections. But the best justification for this practrice is prudential. If, for example, the US tries to help the Canadian Conservative Party unseat Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudea in upcoming October 2019 Canadian election, the other parties and their supporters will be angry, and Canadian-American relations would be poisoned if Trudeau gets reelected (or another Liberal wins in the future).
In most situations, it makes sense to maintain good relations with all the major parties in other liberal democracies, especially since the differences between them are usually not so great that the cause of liberal democracy in the world will be severely undermined by one defeating the other. But in unusual cases where this is not true (as with the Communists in 1940s Europe), this pragmatic presumption against intervention might not apply.
Sometimes, the problem with electoral interference is not the intervention as such, but the tactics used. For example, the Russian government was likely behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Hacking private computer servers is a violation of property rights and privacy, and is certainly morally reprehensible. But the nature of the wrong does not depend on the identity of the perpetrator. If American citizens had done the same thing, it would have been equally reprehensible.
The Russians also relied heavily on deception and misinformation intended to exploit voter ignorance and bias. This too is wrong. At least as a general rule, there should be a moral presumption against deceiving voters. But, once again, it’s not clear that it’s worse when done by foreigners than by citizens of the country being influenced.
As a practical matter, deception, manipulation, and exploitation of voter ignorance by American politicians and interest groups has a far greater impact on our elections than anything done by foreign powers. President Trump uses deception on an epic scale, including with respect to many of the key themes of his 2016 campaign. More conventional politicians differ from Trump more in degree than kind. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was the proud winner of the 2013 Politifact Lie of the Year Award (Trump won the 2015 award) for his famous statement that, under Obamacare, “if you like your health care plan you can keep it.” That deception (and others like it) were crucial to passage of his most significant legislative initiative. It probably had a greater impact than any single deception of Trump’s—or any spread by Russian agents.
Sadly, lying and manipulation of public ignorance are not the sole province of Russian agents. They are standard political tactics of native politicians in both the US and many other countries. So long as most voters know little about public policy, are susceptible to a variety of biases, and do a poor job of sifting truth from falsehood, politicians will have strong incentives to lie.
The point of all this is not to excuse Russian deception by “whataboutist” references to lying by US poltiicians. Far from it. Rather, it is to highlight the fact that the nature of the wrong here does not depend on the nationality of the perpetrator.
In some cases, as political philosopher Jason Brennan points out, lying to voters might even be justified. If deception is the only way to prevent Ruritanian voters from backing a referendum instituting slavery, lying is surely a lesser evil than the alternative—if that is truly the only way to prevent the pro-slavery side from winning. Here too, the morality (or lack thereof) of the lies in question does not depend on whether they are spread by Ruritanians or by foreigners. It depends on the magnitude of the injustice they are trying to avert, the likelihood of success in that endeavor, and whether or not there is a more honest way to achieve the same result.
The use of manipulation and deception to influence elections is usefully analogized to espionage. The morality of spying is heavily dependent on the justice of the cause involved. While there should be some presumption against it, that presumption can be overcome if espionage is necessary to help avert a greater evil. Spying on the Nazis for the US was morally justified, while the reverse was very much not. The same goes for the use of deception to influence electoral outcomes.
This gets us to what may be the most reprehensible aspect of the Russian intervention. The hacking, trolling, and lying was in the service of a deeply unjust cause: promoting the interests of a brutal authoritarian regime and furthering Russian President Vladimir Putin’s global campaign against liberty and democracy—an agenda described in detail in this Reason article by Cathy Young. That motive makes the Russian effort particularly reprehensible. But, again, the reason why it deserves condemnation has little to do with the nationality of the people involved. Americans who did similar things in service of a similar agenda would also deserve condemnation.
In sum, there is nothing inherently wrong with people trying to influence electoral outcomes in nations other than their own. Americans can try to persuade Canadians to vote for or against Justin Trudeau’s government. Canadians can try to persuade us to vote for or against Trump. And so on. Right now, many in the United States and Europe are making arguments for or against Britain’s Brexit policies, often with a view to trying to influence British opinion. In the past, both Barack Obama (who opposed Brexit) and Donald Trump (who supports it), have stated their views on the subject in ways obviously calculated to try to affect British attitudes. There is nothing inherently wrong with that either, though it may well have been both ineffective and pragmatically unwise.
Electoral interference is often wrong if it involves activities like hacking and deception. But the reason why such activities are reprehensible has little to do with the nationalities of the people involved. And the moral presumption against deception can be overcome in cases where it is essential to averting a greater evil.
Americans are justified in condemning Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the reasons why are not as straightforward as many might think.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IM4LMm
via IFTTT
