Gun Control: Failure of the state

Gun control is the most obvious failure of the state in modern America, right?

From the 1960s to the 1990s, America, especially in its cities, experienced a dramatic rise in violent crime. The violent and deadly nature of this crime was accompanied by the wide availability of firearms.

The best response to this sort of thing is to stop people from engaging in crime; it's possible that the rise was driven by lead, or many other factors, but finding and identifying those sort of origin aspects of this are difficult.

Another thing to do, and what most other countries did, would have been to get rid of all the guns -- even if people were going to be crazy, if you take away the ability, the desire doesn't matter.

But we couldn't do that either. The American political system was so broken that individuals didn't trust the government enough to deal with the problem. Instead, it created a backlash that created a desire to increase the availability of firearms.

It's a pretty clear example of a failure of state legitimacy. And now, even though the crime crisis has passed, I still have to deal with a bunch of crazy people who now use the issue of gun control to validate their "fear" of the state.

(I know that they don't have a real fear of the state, because they don't care about other "Civil Liberties" at all.)

Origins of Political Order: Mistaken About Evolution

I just finished Part 1 of Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. First off, I like the book. He’s an evolutionist, and a Hobbesian, which is to say that he understands human nature, and he bases his theory of the state upon that foundation.

Now, a mistake: Fukuyama’s description of human evolution is wrong. It’s only a little bit wrong, but it’s totally wrong. Fukuyama tells the familiar “one tribe out of Africa” story. We now know this is wrong, because we have genetic evidence of interbreeding with Neandertals, not to mention Denisovians, and presumably dozens of biologically modern Homo Sapien tribes that left Africa at different times.

Of course, Fukuyama’s book was published a month before that paper came out, and presumably written a while before.

On the other hand…

For a genetic example of what happens when one people conquers another, we need look no further than the high frequency of European Y chromosomes in the Americas. I would expect most pre-historic genetic exchanges to follow similar models. When an anthropologist says “population displacement,” we should interpret that to mean “they killed all the men and raped and married the women.” This means that conquerors not only take their enemies’ land, they also absorb genetic information, which is then selected for.

Fukuyama is exactly the sort of person who ought to have doubted the old story. Rome claimed to have founded itself upon a crime of mass rape. And the old testament doesn’t shy away from what to do with conquered people. Fukuyama actually quotes Genghis Khan and notes his massive offspring.

So, while one can hardly blame Fukuyama for making this error, since it was the conventional scientific view, if he had been following his own method of science+anthropology+historical analysis more rigorously, he might not have.

Of Kellys and Kellys

So I grew up with a gal named Kelly and I have a friend named Kelly and I was thinking about what would happen to various Kellys.

My friend Kelly recently gave up the teevee because he doesn’t think it’s good for his kids. But it’s great for me because he gave me a bunch of DVDs. These exist in a legal gray area which I describe as “these are mine until Kelly wants them back.” I’ve even lent out a couple of these DVDs to a dude named Spencer. Spence watches DVDs quickly and will have them back soon. But anyway, there are a bunch of Kelly DVDs at my house right now and I basically treat them as my own property.

What would happen if Kelly were to, for some reason, contact the police and tell them that I stole his DVDs (probably worth hundreds of dollars)? The DVDs are his, he’s got the receipts. All I’ve got is an explanation that he said I could have them. I’m pretty sure the law would side with him.

What if Kelly was a girl and I had sex with her? Even though the harm to the victim is much worse (rape being worse than theft), the rules change! If you’re taking sex from someone instead of property, the law presumes consent, and it’s up to the victim to prove they said no.

Now I say the fact that the victim is complaining to the police is pretty good proof that they were not on board with the whole thing. But this is where most “liberal” men I know get off the progressive train. And I’d like to know why.

Isn't there a soul in there?

When a person suffers some sort of total and permanent brain damage, a la Terri Schiavo, people divide up into familiar pro-life/pro-choice groups.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Notionally, religious people claim to be committed to the views of soul-independence and soul-having-ness. That is to say, that the soul is independent of the body, and that humans have souls while they're alive. It also appears that religious folks think the soul is connected to the experiences of the body (i.e. you get to see your loved ones in heaven) in a way that requires the soul to be aware of bodily experiences, even if the mind isn't directly aware of the soul.

So if you believe all that, isn't keeping a vegetative person alive for decades a kind of torture to the soul? The usual sort of Natural Law arguments that are used to justify this bizarre beliefset don't seem to make any sort of sense here, because a vegetative person is undoubtedly being kept alive through the magic of modern science — god's will is clearly to let the person die. Alternatively, if the soul leaves the body when the mind does, then all this energy is being spent to keep unresponsive meat "alive", and that doesn't seem to make sense either.

Other sorts of "No You They Really Think This" theories are well-established, such as the notion that many pro-life activists are really anti-sex or anti-woman activists, or that the most virulent anti-gay bigots are closet cases. Clutching on to a dead person's body after it's clear that their mind is gone, seems to just be a sort of naive unwillingness to deal with reality. This mentality doesn't seem to spring forth from any sort of religious thinking, but it may be the same sort of instinct that also compels religious thinking.

Is being gay a choice?

This question seems to matter to a lot of people, but I can't really see why it does.

That's not true. I know why it matters to some people.

This seems like a clear example of the Deontological/Consequentialist divide in ethics, in a popular ethical discussion.

My position is, obviously, that I don't care why. If being gay is a choice, then choosing to be gay is making someone happy, so they should go for it. Laws should arrange themselves around persons for the maximum amount of happiness possible.

But some people really seem to care if it's a choice.

Of course, I really don't believe in "choices" at all. So there's that.

Religion and Racism

These results:

The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.

Should only surprise people who've never met Christians, or never met racists, or both. The primary function of religion in society is to serve as a social community. Morality is at best a fourth-order level of concern, behind social community, metaphysics, and aesthetic appreciation.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Humans are social creatures, and it's nice to have a place to gather once a week with your neighbors. It's nice to know that you've got a place to get married, someone who will be with you when you die, and a place to be buried once you're gone. I suspect many closeted atheists remain that way because the positive benefits of community are so obvious and tangible.

But because so much of the appeal of religion is wrapped up in the in-group/out-group distinction, we shouldn't be surprised that this drive's uglier aspects, like racism, are found in higher proportion as well.

Porn and "Common Sense" Philosophy

Ross Douthat has an absurdist piece up at the Atlantic that appears to take seriously the idea that Pornography is a form of Adultery. The basic argument:

Start with the near-universal assumption that what Spitzer did in his hotel room constituted adultery, and then ponder whether Silda Spitzer would have had cause to feel betrayed if the FBI probe had revealed that her husband had paid merely to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts while he folded himself into a hotel armchair to masturbate. My suspicion is that an awful lot of people would say yes—not because there isn’t some distinction between the two acts, but because the distinction isn’t morally significant enough to prevent both from belonging to the zone, broadly defined, of cheating on your wife.

You can see where I’m going with this. If it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn’t the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse?

To which Brian Beutler tries to respond in characteristic philosopher fashion, by analyzing things:

sleeping with a prostitute may be like masturbating in front of a prostitute because both involve sexual acts with a prostitute, and masturbating in front of a prostitute may be like masturbating to porn because both involve masturbating, but that doesn't mean sleeping with a prostitute is anything at all like masturbating to porn.

This might be the case, but it doesn't actually matter.

What Douthat does to open up the argument is a thought experiment meant to appeal to our common sense intuitions about adultery, and then makes an argument based upon those intuitions. That's fine, as far as it goes, but this sort of argumentation ought to be reserved for things that we don't already have opinions about. My thoughts on pornography and adultery are already fairly well-formed — as are virtually everyone else's, I'd wager. This is not to say that looking at porn is or isn't adultery (although it isn't), but that a "Common Sense" argument like this is just a non-starter since we already have separate "Common Sense" thoughts on the issue at hand.

Why Bristol Matters

I understand the tradition of respect and distance given to children of high profile politicians, on both sides of the aisle. I think most people probably assume that it exists because "they didn't ask to be thrust into the spotlight" or some other rationale, but I'm pretty sure it's just the case that most politicians have kids and are terrified of their kids embarrassing them — so you've got a mutually assured destruction sort of scenario that enforces the truce. Fair enough.

But Bristol Palin is different. Not because she was fucking around while a teenager — frankly, I think teenagers probably ought to be having more sex, not less. And not because she's having a baby, although a discussion about whether or not she "chose" to keep the kid or her parents exercised the same sort of control over her that McCain/Palin would like to exercise over all American Uteri might be interesting for the country to have.

The reason Bristol matters is because she reveals the lie that is social conservativism. The Culture War is fundamentally about values. Liberals believe in education and empowerment; Conservatives believe in tradition and restraint. Sex education is a perfect microcosm of the differences between the two. Generally speaking, Conservatives say that traditional values work just fine and anything other than abstinence-only sex education just encourages pre-marital sexual activity (and they, unlike me, are opposed to that). Liberals say that every study conducted on Planet Earth shows that abstinence-only doesn't work and just results in more unprotected sex, which results in more pregnancies and the spread of disease. Conservatives, however, don't trust science, statistics, studies, or really anything that doesn't come out of their magic book, so the argument continues.

But now there's Bristol Palin. Everyone agrees that Sarah Palin is virtually the Platonic ideal* of a Good Christian Conservative Mother, and if she couldn't raise abstentious daughter, then who else can reasonably expect to? In other words, the conservative position is total bullshit, revealed before you as a five months pregnant seventeen year old.

America, your daughters and sons are fucking like wild animals. Teach them to use protection. Vote Democrat.

*Yes, this usage relies on a common misconception regarding Plato's actual theory of the forms. It's ok though, as I'm appealing to the common understanding of the term, rather than the Platonic one.

My General Theory of Pacificism

Generally speaking, I'm a pragmatic pacifist. I'm not sure if everybody's noticed it or not, but the United States has started every war that it's been involved in since 1945. Were any of those wars worth it?

A realistic assessment of the monetary costs of those wars seems to indicate that more good could've been accomplished if we'd spent the money on things like malaria nets and vaccines and blankets and bags of rice and hand pumps for wells and mules and stuff. And that's not counting the U.S. soldiers who've died (and we generally count those) or the foreign civilians we kill (and we generally don't count those). War is rarely beneficial. But even in those instances where the outcomes are good, better outcomes could be had for cheaper if we didn't use violence as our principle form of foreign involvement.

For example, the Kosovo war cost about $45 Billion in 1999 dollars. Feeding the world would cost about $30 Billion this year. And, of course, the United States recently hit the $500 Billion mark for spending in Iraq.

Or, my foreign policy in brief: Rice Meal > Cluster Bombs

Political Philosophy

Chris Bertram writes:

I’ve recently had to advise some students who wanted to write papers on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Not for the first time, it brought home to me how strong the disciplinary pressures towards a particular perspective can be. Political philosophy (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) isn’t an entirely fact-free zone, but the way we often discuss matters of principle tends to push us towards favouring policies independently of the way things actually are. So we might ask, what should be the foreign policy of a just liberal state and what attitude should such a state have to “outlaw regimes” which are engaged in systematic human rights violations. And, in the light of such thinking, what would the laws of a just international order look like? What rights against interference would states have? When would there be a duty to intervene? And so on.

Straightforward answers come easily and slickly along: states don’t have any immunity to intervention as such, since they only exist for the protection and benefit of their citizens. If they are actively harming their citizens and we can act to stop this, then we, the just liberal state, should do so. And maybe there should be special permissions granted to bona fide democracies, giving them more extensive rights of intervention than other states. Etc etc. (I rather agree with some of this in the abstract, but it is not hard to see how one might thereby build up enthusiasm for the Iraq war—to pick an example at random—without ever troubling to acquire further information about the country, its history, people, society etc.)

Ahem. This seems to me to be more of a flaw of Political philosophy (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) rather than Political Philosophy in and of itself. Utilitarians like myself don't have any problem at all engaging with, you know, actual facts.

See also: Hobbes, Machiavelli, Madison, Marx, Popper, etc.

Political Philosophers don't have a problem engaging with reality. But Kantians do.