Jackalope Pursuivant

First as tragedy, then as farce

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been a rogues gallery of international-level confidence men. It was a tragedy when they gave it to Arafat. It was a joke when Carter and Gore won. President Obama, 9 months into his presidency, with precisely no accomplishments except tripling the deficit to no effect? It leads one to pity the poor, pathetic Norwegians who can't seem to help being conned.

Hoplophobia on 5 Dollars a Day

Now this just straddles the line between goofy and sad, from the AP via Fox News:

PHOENIX — Travel icon Arthur Frommer says he won't be spending his tourism dollars at the Grand Canyon, or anywhere else in Arizona, because the state's laws allow people he described as "thugs" and "extremists" to openly carry firearms.

The author of budget-travel guides said on his blog Wednesday that he was "shocked beyond measure" by reports that protesters openly carried guns and rifles outside a Phoenix building where President Barack Obama spoke on Monday.

Frommer says he won't personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons as a means of political protest.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says he spoke with Frommer Thursday and invited him to visit the city to clear up any possible misconceptions about safety.

There are a whopping six states which don't allow some degree of open carry. Even California and Illinois allow it in rural areas. Obviously Frommer, like a lot of people, didn't know about this. And yet, remarkably, it never affected him before now. No doubt, he has been to Arizona in the past, when open carry was perfectly legal, and yet he never objected before. Only now, at this moment, did Mr. Frommer become concerned that people, somewhere, might have guns hanging outside their waistbands, rather than inside.

Perhaps we should pay closer to the operative part of Mr. Frommer's statement:

I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest. I not only believe such practices are a threat to the future of our democracy, but I am firmly convinced that they would also endanger my own personal safety there.

The AP clipped that quote. It's clear from the whole quote that Mr. Frommer's objection isn't just to civilians carrying "loaded weapons as a means of political protest," but to open carry of any sort.

Then there is Mr. Frommer's misinterpretation of the nature of the protest. I can't speak for the intentions of any individual, but I know something about the mindset of these kinds of protesters. They were wearing and carrying guns for two reasons:

First, because they could, and because they believe that a right, unexercised for fear of reprisal, is an illusion. There is a growing, and very grass roots, movement towards normalizing firearms possession in public. I sympathize.;

Second, and I think more relevant in this case, because carrying weapons openly is a mark of free, responsible Americans. Free, in the sense that their actions are not limited according to their rulers' caprice, or indeed by another man's prejudices (like those of Arthur Frommer). Responsible in its literal sense, meaning that they are subject to the consequences of their actions. It's a way of saying, "Here I am, a free adult American citizen, who is perfectly capable of contracting for my own medical care, and living or dying by the result."

In ancient Rome, magistrates were preceded by fasces, physical symbols of their authority. In much the same way, an American citizen carrying a firearm is carrying a physical symbol of his inherent liberty. This, I think, was the symbolism intended by the chaps at the Arizona event.

Mr. Frommer misses this interpretation, and I'm not surprised. He is experiencing a condition called hoplophobia--an irrational fear of arms. He specifically raised the question of his own safety, and the safety of other travelers, in places where firearms can be worn openly. (In my entire life, 25 years of which were spent in Arizona, I've seen it done no more than twice.) And this is how we know his fear is irrational. Can anyone think of a scenario where one of the vanishingly small number of Arizonans openly carrying a firearm might take it upon himself or herself to open fire on an 80-year-old travel editor? Can anyone tally the rate, preferably expressed in incidents-per-million, at which innocent tourists were gunned down by open-carrying Arizonans?

Writes Frommer:

According to the Phoenix, Arizona, police, people with guns including assault rifles do not need permits in Arizona, but can simply carry such weapons with them, openly and brazenly, when they gather to protest a speaker at a public event. The police also acknowledge that about a dozen people carrying guns, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle, milled about outside the event at which President Obama spoke.

I won't dwell on the distinction between "in a public event," "at a public event," and where the protesters in question were. The protesters weren't inside the security cordon, or threatening the president or any attendees, which is reasonable. (Wise is another question.) I don't think any reasonable person has an objection to security restrictions around the president. (That is, so long as the president goes places where such restrictions are fairly justifiable. If the president were to attend a gun show, on the other hand, I think such restrictions would suddenly become very hard to justify.)

But I must say, I'm amused by Mr. Frommer's rhetorical flourishes. "Openly and brazenly"? I don't suppose it would be possible to open carry secretly and meekly. Really, though, it's the "milling about" outside the event. It really brings to mind union thugs "milling about" outside a factory, ready to beat up scabs, doesn't it? If you're "milling about" outside an event like this, surely you're intent on violence; the milling proves it! The lack of actual violence at the event is a mere technicality. The mere visibility of the guns is more violent any actual violence could really be, isn't it?

--

It's worth saying, from reading Frommer's blog post, that he's a cautious guy. He didn't come out of the dock blaring for a boycott, and he said he wanted to learn more about Arizona's gun laws. That's a more measured statement than I would expect from a lot of people, and I salute him for it.

Fun with alternative headlines:

It is sadly common to find that news articles cannot substantiate their own headlines. Here is an example from the AP: "Gun law complaints trail Obama during park tours"

More accurate alternatives:

"Associated Press publishes Brady Campaign press release"

"Editor-in-Chief of Backpacker magazine calls act of Congress 'political'; Nation stunned at accusation of politics in the legislature"

"Natl. Parks Conservation Assn. executive declares Obama friend to parks based on no concrete evidence at all"

(10-gallon hat tip to The Westerner.)

Rats

A chance to yell at Saddam Hussein's useful fool Mike Thompson and I missed it...

Why Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law is arguably the First Law of the Internet. Dating back to 1990, it actually (barely) predates the World Wide Web itself. Godwin's Law goes like this:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Usenet, if you aren't familiar with it, is a system of more-or-less comprehensive Internet discussion groups that predates the World Wide Web. Discussions in these groups are threaded, so that conversations on a given topic maintain a certain amount of cohesion; they may branch off onto other subjects according to their own bizarre logic, but the process by which a conversation ranged from 16th-century orthography to the No Child Left Behind Act, can usually be discerned by working backwards through the thread.

Godwin's Law has applicability to any other forum of human discourse that follows a progressive (in its adjectival, lower-case sense), threaded pattern. Typically, it only appears when a subject is controversial, but to fully grasp the impact of Godwin's Law, one must recognize how willingly people will divert a conversation into a controversial subject for the fun of it. For example, I can think of a few readers of this blog who, no doubt, can speak with authority on the application of Godwin's Law to discussions of Disney.

In theory, controversial subjects are best resolved through a dialectical process of argument and counterargument, arriving at a conclusion. Threaded discussions are the perfect medium for this kind of debate, because they allow a topic to be broken up into component parts, and each part to be addressed individually. This should serve to simplify and clarify complicated debates.

In practice, few people (anywhere) have the discipline, patience, or intellectual honesty to carry such a debate to its conclusion. Fewer still combine these traits with sufficient subject-matter expertise to be useful in such a debate. (Kevin at The Smallest Minority keeps coming to mind. He combines an extraordinary knowledge of gun control case law, with Sisyphean patience.) Given the incredibly rare chance that you will manage to find one, it is vanishingly unlikely that you will ever be able to range that person in debate against an equal opponent who can also carry the debate to its conclusion. This is why we don't settle the grand controversies of our time through rational debate--because it never works.

But we try. Oh, how we try. And in the end, as Godwin showed, the Nazis keep coming up.

Why?

I propose that there are two factors at work here:

1. The general public possesses a limited knowledge of history. World War II is one of the most widely-recognized historical reference points. On the whole, I expect more Americans to know something about World War II than they do about almost any other political, diplomatic, intellectual, economic, cultural, or legal history topic. No doubt, this observation could be measured through testing, though I would doubt the validity of almost any such test.
2. The one thing that everyone knows about Germany in WWII is that the Nazis were the bad guys, and thoroughly evil. This is agreed and accepted everywhere. There is no other wartime country so thoroughly vilified so long after the fact. Even the Empire of Japan has been partially rehabilitated through reference to European colonialism and racism, and the "victimization" of having been nuked twice. But it is hard to rehabilitate the reputation of Nazi Germany, what with the whole Holocaust. And this is what makes the Nazis a unique tool for debate--our civilization cannot agree on any other unmitigated bad guys.

Most people lack the tools to argue something on the basis of moral philosophy. But arguing by historical comparison is relatively easy. (If you want it done really thoroughly, it helps to be a bona fide historian. I'm available for historical consulting at reasonable rates!) This is why Godwin's Law holds true. Argument by historical comparison is easy, but World War II is one of the few historical reference points common to most debaters and audience members in the modern Anglosphere. Moreover, Nazi Germany is the only political movement/nation-state/society that is commonly agreed to be evil.

There is a corollary to Godwin's Law, that holds that any party invoking Nazis or Hitler in an argument loses automatically, and thereby ends the argument. This is not because comparisons to the Nazis are necessarily invalid (though some certainly are), but because the tactic is so ubiquitous that it has grown noxious and lost all impact.

When we take the whole of American political discourse as a single unit, it has some of the characteristics of an especially chaotic threaded Usenet discussion. Godwin's Law, naturally, applies.

Throughout Bush the Younger's presidency, we were treated to the lesser form of Godwin's Law--the Reductio ad Hitlerum. This is not so much a historical analogy as an attempt at guilt by association. Bush was breezily associated with Hitler, most commonly through Bush=Hitler protest signs, and the formulation "Bushitler." This is a manifestation of Godwin's Law, but a lesser one.

What we are seeing now is a greater manifestation of Godwin's Law. In particular, the Speaker of the House of Representative suggested that protesters at town hall meetings were themselves Nazis. In fact, there had been a swastika in evidence at an early town hall meeting protest, but it had been crossed out--that is, the sign carrier was suggesting that the proposed medical industry reforms in Congress were analogous to Nazi programs. This amounted to a rhetorical error on the sign-carrier's part, although not a substantive one, as I will discuss later. The Speaker of the House's response was both a rhetorical and a substantive error.

The protester was making the argument that government rationing of medical treatments inevitably trends towards eugenics. By putting a crossed-out swastika on a sign, she was indicating that she opposed this. I agree with her. Government rationing of medical treatments does inevitably trend towards eugenics, and I am likewise opposed to it.

When a government panel sits down to write the formulas and rules by which therapies are distributed, they have limited options. They can randomize availability. In the United Kingdom this is called the Postcode Lottery. (The availability of certain therapies sometimes depends on your address.) Or they can ration according to some more rational system. The United Kingdom, trying to move away from the Postcode Lottery, created an organization dubbed the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (acronymed NICE), to make cost-benefit decisions based on quality of life, life expectancy, and cost. Someone has to lose out, and under this system it is generally the elderly.

But in practice, being a vast self-reinforcing bureaucracy, care is often distributed according to a system that is random by virtue of being ineffective. Mark Steyn offers a good example in an NRO article today:

I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly and so we took her to the emergency room. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the last decade in Britain — even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable resources. So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment — and on the latter America is the best in the world.

In Britain, nobody was denying Mr. Steyn's guest care based on her post code, age, or condition. They simply weren't testing, diagnosing, and treating the problem.

I believe, because I know something about how the American polity works, that under such a system we would see resources diverted according to all manner of political influences. We would find raging debates about whether one interest group was more deserving of better care; whether one race, owing to past neglect, deserved superior care now. And inevitably, over time as the public clamors for improved service (or even marginally fairer service) without increased cost, the government starts to look at places to save money, like the long-term expense of caring for the disabled. Sarah Palin was widely called selfish for not aborting a baby with Down Syndrome. (I searched to confirm that this wasn't just a right-wing meme. It's not. Here's a particularly nasty example from an Objectivist, and another one from a Salon.com blogger. There are thousands more. I don't recommend actually reading them if you have blood pressure problems, but they're there for evidence's sake.)

There is evidently a strong and vocal contingent in our society that considers it grossly immoral to not abort a baby with a disability. Being realistic, there is 0% chance that the United States would impose forced abortions in the case of fetally-identified Down Syndrome. But I could believe that the state might declare that if you do not abort a baby as recommended by government formula, the child is cut off from some or all government-funded medical care, and perhaps other government entitlements, like education. (Of course, the family doesn't exactly get a refund on all the taxes paid for health care to which they are no longer entitled.) It's only fair, right? Why should we let your selfish decision burden everybody else? Whether through hard coercion or soft, the end-result is eugenicist.

I said that the protester's anti-swastika sign was a rhetorical mistake. It was not necessary for her to carry the argument all the way to its natural conclusion, in the most comprehensive eugenics program ever carried out--there are strong arguments against Obamacare short of reference to the Nazis, and the subject cannot be effectively broached in sign form.

But the point remains that there is a eugenicist impulse out there. We breed domesticated animals for desired traits, like loyalty in a golden retriever or mass on a cow. The same system can be applied to humans. It is both perfectly logical, and perfectly inhuman. It is a monstrous disease common to progressives who realize that their plans for a perfect society are fatally flawed because humans are imperfect. When you give government complete control over medicine, you forge a powerful tool. It may take a decade, or a century, before the wrong people get a grip on the handle. But eventually, it will be used to a terrible end.

Without the Nazi example, that argument might seem terribly overblown. Who could believe that government might use its powers over medicine to murder the disabled, if we didn't have the example of a 20th-century nation doing precisely that to 200,000 victims?

If we forge that tool, if we wed political power and control over medicine, I think that soft eugenics are inevitable. They make too much logical sense to the kind of people who will end up with that power.

Godwin's Law exists because the Nazis are familiar to everyone, and because they are universally agreed to be evil. But it does not give us license to ignore the lessons of National Socialism where they are most relevant.

See also: Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee.

UPDATE: Oh yes, mustn't forget carbon impact...

This explains a lot about our neighborhood

California has 12% of the U.S. population, but fully 32% of its welfare cases. How stark is the imbalance? This chart says all:

Chuck DeVore, running for Senate against the execrable Barbara "Ma'am" Boxer in 2010, has four more ways of looking at this incredible statistic on his campaign website, here. (Via Coyote Blog)

The constitutional dilemma of Obamacare

AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry, raising the specter of a showdown with the Obama administration, suggested Thursday that he would consider invoking states’ rights protections under the 10th Amendment to resist the president’s healthcare plan, which he said would be "disastrous" for Texas.

It's surprising to me that more opponents of Obamacare don't even mention the obvious Constitutional problem with nationalized healthcare. The United States government simply has no authority to mandate that its citizens obtain health insurance or face a fine.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

As we all know, this is the forgotten amendment. The courts have long allowed Congresses and presidents to twist the meaning of the constitution (particularly through the Commerce Clause and the 14th Amendment) so that all manner of unconstitutionalities are deeply enshrined in American law.

The forum for resistance is on the state level. If individuals refuse to obey federal law or regulation on the grounds that it violates the 10th amendment, they invariably get nowhere. For some reason, where the amendment reserves rights to "the people," the courts are not interested in guaranteeing them to people, much less individual persons.

States could well be a different story. When the feds imposed a national speed limit or a national drinking age (both clearly outside their constitutional mandate), they could only do it by threatening to withhold huge chunks of federal highway funding. Some states resisted, but not for long. The voters of a state, collectively disinterested in the particulars of constitutional verbiage and the niceties of states rights under American federalism, would not hesitate to punish their state legislators and governors for the kind of highway construction and maintenance trouble that would result from a principled stand against unconstitutional coercion.

I think this may be different. With highway funding, the feds established guidelines for engineering, etc., and allowed the states a lot of leeway on how, where, and when highways would be built. Not so with Obamacare, which would immediately begin placing huge proscriptive burdens on businesses, individuals, physicians, and states. If a state like Texas were to take a principled stand and refuse to participate, develop an alternative plan for improving health care through free markets and tort reform, and most importantly stick with it, they could make a real statement. Doctors who do not care to be employees of the federal government will move their practices to Texas, where they and their patients can make decisions without the input of some office in Washington. Liberty-minded citizens, sick at the prospect of socialized medicine, can escape to Texas. I would seriously consider the prospect.

The key is sticking with it. The full burden of Obamacare would not be felt for a few years. After all, the plan has to seem like it's working for the first few years, while its Congressional backers get firmly entrenched. Like refusing highways dollars, there would be initial pain while the feds take more money from free Americans who, because of their principled stand, get nothing in return. This is the current status quo, but is concealed by smoke & mirrors. The effect of a genuine states' rebellion against unconstitutional federal mandates would be to whisk away the smoke and reveal the mirrors. At the same time, it should reveal to the citizens of the various states, and especially their legislators, how much power is meant to be vested in them.

Why can't professional journalists get it through their heads that the word 'corps' ends in an S, and is nevertheless singular? I keep seeing references both to Americorp and the Army Corp of Engineers. In both cases, the writers would be better served by deploying a sinuous S.

An observation on regionalism in fast food franchising

The eastern states have a startling dearth of fast food restaurants. There is no question that McDonald's is ubiquitous everywhere. Burger King has a toehold. With effort, one could locate the occasional Hardee's, but I have no interest in ersatz Carl's Jrs. Taco Bells are as rare as wheat pennies, and Jack in the Box is a wholly western creature. There may be some other regional players, like the near-legendary White Castle. I did not get into the upper midwest, where they are said to roam, but in a 29-state trek across the United States I saw only one, next to a highway offramp, like a penned buffalo at a roadside "trading post."

Why do easterners put up with this deprivation?

Open road

I'm kinda-sorta sorry for the extended posting absence. I used to travelblog, but I used to be single, too. Now, rather than share my photos and experiences with the world at large, I share them with my wife. This is, on the whole, a far more satisfying experience.

I made the legendary California-Maine-California drive. Not exactly corner-to-corner, but corner state-to-corner state. It was a 29-state, 9,200 mile drive, accompanied on the outbound leg by my dad, and the return leg by my wife.

Somewhere in the middle, roundabout Vermont, I get a master's degree. It's fancy, has gold leaf on it, and is the size of my two previous college diplomas combined. Highly perceptive readers (if I have any readers left) will have noticed the subtle change in my banner graphic.

The trip itself was great. On the way out we hit Carlsbad Caverns, San Antonio's Riverwalk, smelly & humid New Orleans, a Mound Builder site in Mississippi, a cracking great thunderstorm atop the Great Smoky Mountains, a Virginia village named Meadows of Dan, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. On the return trip, we were disdained at Vermont's Cabot Creamery for daring to ask for cheese curds, put the business of an entire maple syrup outlet on hold while the staff tried to figure out what a baby loon is called, climbed Mount Washington, had ice cream on Cape Cod, saw a Cardinals (baseball) game from 630 feet up, discovered that Dodge City is no Tombstone, clumb Pike's Peak, got 4th of July sunburns, and slogged (hopefully for the second-to-last time) across northern Nevada again.

Now that's a road trip.

CORRECTION: 30 states. I keep forgetting Kentucky.