I am not Pro-Slavery. Are you?

Senator David Vitter (R-LA), in Senate debate today, said in support of denying abortion coverage to women, “This should not be of any great controversy. abortion is a deeply divisive issue in this country, but taxpayer dollars being used to pay for abortion is not.”

He is simply wrong on this point.

“There are no political answers,
   only political questions.”

  —Kent Pitman
(in a technical forum, 2001,
    and Open Salon post “Rule of Law”)

It cannot be the case that a question exists such that one possible answer to the question is political and another possible answer is not political. If one answer to a question is political, then all are. And if all are, then the question is.

And so if it's political to spend money, it's political to withhold money.

Not divisive? We are divided regardless of how you frame the question. That's a fact.

Senators were sounding hot under the collar this morning about their tax dollars going to abortion. Well, I've written already explaining how this slicing up of the pie is wrong. It is not their tax dollars going to this, it is mine. I'm not getting pregnant, but my tax dollars still go willingly to the support of women who get pregnant. Many of us want that. The Republican Party already brought us an immoral war in Iraq, so let's have no further indignant talk about people's tax dollars being spent unfairly.

But beyond that, I want to make one more point of substance:

Opposition to abortion goes far beyond the mere issue of who pays for it. This issue of tax dollars is a tactic, not an end. Even if there were no tax dollars involved, these same people—people who allege to be all about personal liberty and small non-invasive government—are all about expansive government and removal of individual liberty in this case.

If they had their way, they would deny all access to abortion. And they think they have the moral high ground.

But to deny access to abortion is to force pregnancy.

Having sex is not consent to have a baby any more than driving is consent to be killed in a car accident. Whatever fiction the Religious Right may want to spin, there is more sex being had in the world than for the purpose of procreating—even by Christians.

Nor is getting pregant proof of lack of birth control. Even if it were, to suggest that the penalty for such a simple mistake should be months or years of servitude is disproportionate.

Birth control methods fail. Abstenance would avoid birth control, but again it's out of the bounds of appropriateness to be telling people they should abstain just because other birth control methods are not perfect. The Pope's proscription of the use of “artificial” birth control notwithstanding, it is essential that people be allowed and even encouraged use birth control. There's a population explosion ongoing, if you didn't know. Even married people need birth control to keep from having babies at a time they're not prepared for, to keep from bankrupting their families, and to keep our finite world from being overpopulated. But birth control fails and the penalty must not be slavery.

So let's sum up, shall we? Sex is a human need. Having sex, even with birth control, risks pregnancy but is not consent to have a child. And yet some would insist women carry even unwanted pregnancies againt their will.

Well, we can talk until the cows come home about whether a fetus is “a life” or “a person.” It is to some, it isn't to others. The fundamental morality underlying this differs person to person. To me, an abortion is not murder because a fetus is not a person. But while we're wasting our breath pretending it's worth debating that issue, another argument goes overlooked:

Forced pregnancy is enslavement. We often speak of it in the polite terminology of “choice” but that apparently doesn't help the pro-Life community to understand the passion in reverse. They seem only to be able to imagine some bloodthirsty passion for killing little babies and so they see the argument as one-sided. But there is another side, a side involving a very personal choice that is simply not the business of lawmakers to do anything other than unconditionally support in the name of personal liberty.

We speak sometimes in shorthand, referring to the time of back alley abortions, using coat hangers. We say we don't want to go back to that. Perhaps that possibility seems abstract and unlikely to some people. Perhaps they think not everyone will be driven to that. But so what? Does that make it ok? A woman was forced to consider whether to find a guy in a back alley and risk her life to stop a pregnancy, but she decided no, she'd rather be enslaved against her will. Is that really what we're saying is ok? No muss no fuss? As long as the coat hanger remains on the rack, there was no trauma involved?

Or are we saying maybe, like Patty Hearst, she'll get used to it—perhaps come to like it? Does that make it any less enslavement? That given time she comes to accept the choice that was made for her, the fate that was scripted out for her?

Forced pregnancy is brutal whether one goes along with it or not, just as sure as rape is brutal whether one goes along with it or not. And let's be frank: If you support removing the right of a woman to make this decision for herself, then you should understand that you support a policy that is nothing less than brutal to women. Forced pregnancy is not a kind loving act that you're thrusting upon a woman with an unwanted pregnancy. It is enslavement, nothing less. And to many women this choice has been seen to be so horrendous that they will risk their very life to get out of it. What right is it of yours to make such a decision for her?

I'll say it again: Forced pregnancy is enslavement.

Forced pregnancy co-opts a woman's body against her will. Forced pregnancy subjugates a woman to a term of imprisonment within her own body, forced to do the bidding of others, creating a child she has not elected, in order to satisfy the morality of another. Forced pregnancy insists that a woman yield her basic right of self-determination to powers beyond her control.

Forced pregnancy means risk of medical harm with no input from the woman. There are conflicting claims as to whether a woman is safer having a baby or having an abortion. Naturally I have a belief about that, but let's not get side-tracked by that because it doesn't matter. Forced pregnancy means she doesn't get to make that decision, so she has no choice of how to navigate that risk.

Forced pregnancy reduces the status of a pregnant woman “autonomous adult citizen” to “lesser person.” It says she is not worthy of the full rights of an ordinary citizen.

Forced pregnancy is a verdict or judgment, but without due process of law. The crime is sex—it was done in a manner not authorized by some Church, in many cases not the Church that the woman herself attends. The judgment is automatically one of “guilty” Individual circumstances are not considered. Matters of personal individual faith are not considered. The lack of due process, on its face, is immoral.

Self-determination is about the woman electing her fate, and if she's forced to carry a pregnancy, her fate has not been elected.

Held to a fate against her will. Deprived of the right to get out of the situation. Unable to refuse the work involved. Receiving no compensation. That's the very essence of slavery.

Call it involuntary servitude if you prefer a more sanitized phrase. It makes no difference. It's still wrong. And it's not just wrong—it's unconstitutional and violates the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (to which the United States has signed).

I'll close by casting Senator Vitter's remarks quoted above into a point of view that reflects my own feelings on the matter: This should not be of any great controversy. We are indeed divided over how we would handle the very personal choice of abortion in this country, but withholding taxpayer dollars that might free women from slavery or involuntary servitude should not be something we are divided over. No one is requiring any given woman to to get an abortion, but denying those who choose one the means to make a difficult but responsible choice is not a morally neutral position. Denying access to safe and legal abortions amounts to leaving a woman trapped by circumstance into a life not of her own choosing—in short, in favor of slavery.

Stop asking your Senators if they are pro-choice. Ask if they are anti-slavery instead, and insist they vote that way.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  —The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution

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Originally published December 8, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): clash of absolutes, divisive, political answers, political questions, anti-slavery, anti-enslavement, pro-slavery, pro-enslavement, pro-abortion, pro-life, pro-choice, choice, risk, health, medical, service, servitude, involuntary, voluntary, enslavement, slavery, abortion, politics

Seeing Roe v. Wade as a Political Compromise

It seems to be the case that much of the pro-Life camp regards Roe v. Wade as a kind of left liberal “pro-abortion” plot of some sort. It is not.

Although I can see how if you live at the extreme end of the spectrum, anything toward the center might be regarded as a plot, or perhaps a capitulation, I don't think it's politically useful to think this way.

Let me begin by identifying that my personal position is pro-choice. That is, I think the question of whether to have an abortion or not must be chosen by the woman who is pregnant. That isn't to say that I think one should always have abortions or always not have abortions. I think these are things anyone can hold individual opinions on, and yet I also think the ultimate choice at any time during pregnancy in the sense of legally authorizing an action and in the sense of being immune from legal prosecution should be with the woman who is pregnant. That's what I think is right and just. But it's not a position I will argue for here as an outcome.

My analysis here is not for the purpose of advocating my personal preference. If it were, other people would just express their personal preference and there would be a lot of “Oh, yeah, so who put you in charge?” or “What makes your position any more valid than mine?” While I don't agree with the positions others take on this, I think that in a pluralistic society, one has to regard the positions of others, especially large numbers of others, with a degree of respect at least to the extent of hearing them out and seeing if they can be accommodated. I expect the same of those on the other side, of course.

I begin with the assumption that this debate will not be won by everyone on one side changing the mind of everyone on the other side. Therefore, I think that, absent genocide (which I'm going to assume most rational people do not want), the right answer will not be at one end of the spectrum or the other. So we can line out “no abortion” and we can line out “unconditional abortion any time for any reason.” I can see the pro-Life camp wincing because already it's as if their mission has failed. But what you should understand is that I may have already pissed off a great many pro-choice women by this remark. Even people I agree with on principle.

I don't make this first observation out of some desire for a particular outcome, however. I am merely observing that these are not legitimate hopes for anyone with any understanding of politics. They will not, as a practical reality, happen. Or, if they do, it will be a period of time in American history that is as unstable as Prohibition was. Whatever your feeling about alcohol, there's simply no question that outlawing it was not a good plan. The same will be true with either a law that allows no abortion or a law that allows utterly unfettered abortions.

It's hard to summarize a whole movement in concise form, so I won't attempt to. I'll assume anyone reading this has read and discussed the matter extensively before and I will appeal to shorthand descriptions that others have used before me. For simplicity of discussion, let's assume this comes down to a question of whether personhood begins at conception or at birth. The entire argument seems to revolve around this. If you believe that a group of a few cells is “a person” that's going to lead you to a certain line of thinking whereas if you think it's not, it will lead you to a different line of thinking. And that's how the discussion ends up breaking down. So where is the middle ground?

Well, speaking in my role as neutral arbitrator, and leaving my personal preference aside, it's pretty clear that there's a continuum between these points of view. The pro-Life group is quick to point out that if something is a person at the moment of birth, then it's hard to argue that it's a not a person just a moment before. But let's be careful. This implies a certain transitivity that may apply locally in a kind of ad hoc way, but that clearly doesn't apply as you get farther away in time, away from birth and toward conception.

For example, by the same fuzzy argument, Boston is close to San Francisco. How do I know this? Well, ten feet away from anything is close to something. And so if I'm only ten feet away from something that's close to something, surely I must be close. And if ten feet away from Boston is close, then so is ten feet away from ten feet away. And so on. Until ten feet turns into three thousand miles. Clearly, at some point I'm far away. But where? Does the fact that I cannot articulate that precise point at which I am far rather than close mean that I am never far away? Or is the precise point simply elusive? There may not even be a single point in the sense of working for all purposes. Philadelphia may be close to Boston for some purposes and far for others. In fact, western Massachusetts may be close to Boston for some purposes and far for others.

And so one possible analysis (not my personal way of analyzing this, incidentally—I'll write about that another day) is to say that at one end of the pregnancy, there is personhood, and at the other end there is not, and so presumably in the middle it gets a little fuzzy, with properties of each.

And so along comes Roe v. Wade, which I will argue reached the most politically optimal and correct conclusion, even if for the wrong reasons. The rationale offered in Roe was based on viability, which seems to me an objective quality that is irrelevant. Moreover, it is a messy quantity because viability clearly has no uniquely determined sense. Relying on such a definition puts the debate into the hands of those in control of dictionaries rather than leaving it in the control of public discourse between aggrieved parties. So I don't like the rationale for the reasons that the terminology has been possible to co-opt and manipulate. What I do like, not in my personal point of view but in my role as neutral arbitrator, is structure of the decision. That is, it's a good decision for reasons independent of its stated rationale.

I think what saves Roe is that it creates a staged transition between opposing communities unlikely to agree. A trimester in which those who claim that a fetus is not a lot like a person have a strong case to make, a trimester at the other end in which those who claim a fetus is a lot like a person have a strong case to make, and a trimester in between when there are interests on both sides, and where some negotiation seems possible.

Structurally, as a political compromise, this is not ideal for either side. And this is what makes it a good political compromise.

I think the pro-Choice community already sees Roe v. Wade, as a compromise, and there are those who seek for greater autonomy. I personally think they are right. What they say is compatible with my personal theory of how the world operates. But they ask for anything beyond this compromise at some peril in a world where the opposing side seems committed to pushing back.

By contrast, I think the pro-Life community mostly does not see Roe v. Wade as a compromise. I think they view it as a victory for what they call the “pro-abortion” side. I think this is a political mistake because I think they can't do better than this middle point without risking backlash.

The two sides should recognize this impasse and agree to terms. I think pushing this forward risks eternal strife and to no good end.

I also doubt the pro-Life camp will take my advice. They will continue to push, and so this notion of compromise will have no purpose. In that world, expect me to simply champion the pro-Choice position right up to birth. Adopting this middle ground is only useful in exchange for a promise of cessation of conflict, and I think would be well worth that price.

Then again, in the coming years, as population increases further on a crowded planet of finite size, this issue may become moot.

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Originally published Nov 15, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. Click that link to see some interesting discussion that ensued at Open Salon.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, right, pro-life, pro-choice, anti-choice, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, absolute, clash of absolutes, legal, fair, unfair, safe and legal, coat hanger, coathanger, roe, roe v. wade, roe vs. wade, law, personal, choice, compromise, neutral, middle ground, acceptable, unacceptable, political, philosophy, health, medical, abortion

My Slice of the Pie (Again)

I thought I had written this already, but apparently it was stem cell research I'd written about back in March, not abortion. Since the observation I have to make applies identically to both issues, I just copied the old article and changed the nouns in two places.

Ever pooled money with a group of people for pizza? Five bucks a head and someone calls out a big order. It can be a little tricky since not everyone likes the same toppings, but with a little effort, it can be made to work. A veggie pizza here, a pepperoni there, maybe the chicken pizza has olives only on one half of it. Pretty soon everyone who's pitched in their five dollars is satisfied.

Of course, the guy who wants the veggie might be irritated that someone in the group was eating meat. But what's he going to do? Force his ethics on others? No matter how morally sure he is of his beliefs, it wouldn't fly for him to try to control what others are doing. His $5 hardly buys him the right to tell everyone else what they can or can't eat. Chipping in buys him the right to ask that a little bit of the pizza is something he'd enjoy, but it doesn't give him the right to veto what others might like.

So now let's talk about another kind of pie: The national budget.

Why do people say silly things like “I don't want my tax dollars going toward abortion”? Why aren't they laughed out of town for such a ridiculous statement? It's fine for them to say something like “I want a few of my tax dollars to go to funding something I do like,” but unless they're paying a lot more than I'm sure they are in taxes, they just haven't bought the right to control what others are chipping in for.

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Originally published September 30, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): taking responsibility, overpopulation, pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, pro-choice, pro-life, anti-choice, anti-abortion, pro-abortion, short-sighted, selfish, separately coded, separate account, federal funds, state funds, tax deduction, tax credit, my tax dollars, single payer, health care, public option, abortion rights, abortion, sharing, pizza, economics, funding, pluralism, politics, family planning, planned parenthood

Erik Naggum, R.I.P.

A friend of mine died recently. His name was Erik Naggum. He lived in Norway. I knew him primarily via the net, through his professional reputation, his posts to internet newsgroups, and through occasional personal email on matters technical and philosophical. And we met once at a conference in person.

His death was probably of complications due to ulcerative colitis¹. But I want not to speak of his death, but his life.

He was a controversial soul because he was technically brilliant, and to put it much too mildly, he was not graceful in his handling of people he perceived as dumb or foolish. In point of fact, he would decide in a moment that he was talking to such a person and would become instantly excruciatingly intolerant of them, using harsh language that was at best colorful and at worst really outright mean. His posts online were a mix of cordial, thoughtful, and actively insightful prose with pointed barbs, laced with expletives and accusations that someone was insane or deserved to die. His tendancy to shift gears and go negative was not my favorite trait in him.

At the one conference where I spent time with him in person, by the way, he was pleasant, polite, and soft-spoken, and nothing like his online persona. I have read accounts by others that say the same.

In researching this, I ran across the following attempt to lighten the mood:

On Sat, 05 Jan 2002 00:29:41 GMT, Erik Naggum wrote:

> ... fucks like that frog-eating vermin ...
> ...Fuck you....
> ... Shit-for-brains ...
> ...that French fuck ...
> ...scumbags...
> ... the fucking retards...
> ...just go die...
> ...reeking French moron ...
> ...Get the fuck out of here...
> ...you pricks ...
> ...pussballs...
> ...sick fucks ...
> ...stenching filth ...

You are becoming repetitive.
How about some nice norwegian swear words ?

But I hope to make the case that he was worth the trouble.

The posts about him since the announcement of his death have been a mix of warm remembrances and shrugs of good riddance. It's not often you see discussion of someone's death accompanied by so much bitterness. I remember many such send-offs for Jerry Falwell, for example. But in defense of his detractors, Falwell had quite an army of disciples primed to carry out political missions that many considered hateful. By contrast, while Naggum was a difficult person to talk to sometimes, he didn't enlist armies of people to go out and be mean to others. He just spoke his mind.

On a reddit discussion forum after Erik's death, one person wrote, “He flamed me for my spelling, suggesting that there should be a spellchecker in the NNTP server (or client, not sure) that rejected postings with so many mistakes. But it helped - I learned to use a spell checker. His form was sometimes crass, but his intentions were good.”

He was frequently called upon to defend himself as to his personal style. Once, for example, he wrote, “Why so many of you fucking losers have to read what I post and work yourself up like cats in heat, and then ask me not to post as opposed to they not reading what they do not like, I have not figured out.”

And, indeed, the forum from which this text was taken, the primary forum in which I came to know Erik, was an unmoderated forum that was part of USENET, a distributed discussion technology that dates back to the ARPANET, the net that predated the Internet. An important aspect of unmoderated USENET forums was their free speech aspect, and there really was no recourse in such forums if you didn't like what you read other than to stop reading. So he had a certain point, which I came to believe and defend.

He was well-respected for the pioneering nature, the meticulous quality, and the beauty of the code he wrote. In addition to his technical accomplishments, he was a deep thinker on many issues, well-read in traditional philosophy but with his own very definite opinions.

He sent mail to the New York Times, condemning George W. Bush's actions subsequent to 9/11. I don't know if it was published; the copy I have was sent me directly by Erik at the same time he wrote to them. The letter he wrote was long and made many points highly critical of both Bush and the citizenry of the US for having tolerated Bush. However, one small aspect caught my eye and stuck with me, so I went back to that old email to retrieve the exact text. He had written, “But there is still one thing that America has taught the world. You have taught us all that giving second chances is not just generosity, but the wisdom that even the best of us sometimes make stupid mistakes that it would be grossly unfair to believe were one's true nature.”

This stuck with me in part because Erik's detractors are so quick to be unforgiving of his faults, and yet he could see clearly the need for people to be allowed to mend. And I often sometimes wondered when he was in his more abusive modes, condemning others for a suspected insanity, whether he was really talking to someone else, or talking to himself. He seemed to be plagued somewhat by demons of his own, and to project them onto others. But looking back on it, it seems so harmless, and his intent so good, in spite of all.

Perhaps I see in him a bit of me. I try not to do the verbal lashing out thing, or not as harshly certainly. But I certainly understand the frustration with people who don't see my point. And I've been known to be abrupt with people. Yet I'm always just trying to improve things, and forever surprised at how hard it can be for people to see that. So perhaps it's easier for me to look for good intention in someone like Erik.

I learned a lot from talking to Erik on matters technical and non-technical. But one thing I learned, not from what he said, but from the meta-discussion which was always there about whether to tolerate him, is that I think we as people are not all the same. We make rules of manners and good ways to be that are for typical people. But the really exceptional people among us are not typical. Often the people who achieve things in fact do so because of some idiosyncracy of them, some failing they have turned to a strength.

In a discussion on reddit, someone had suggested that we should say: “Erik Naggum was a contributor to the HyTime standard who had a nasty habit of flaming people and driving them away from great technologies.” My reply was that, no, we should say “The great endeavors of mankind are often done by people with this or that weakness.”

For example, the Republican Party in the United States has consistently suggested that somehow the US would be better if it were run by someone with flawless moral character. Jimmy Carter fit that bill and yet when inflation went into double digits, Republicans hated him just the same. Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, was a more effective president.

So I liked Erik. Does that make him a role model? I think the answer is “in some ways, not in others.” But isn't that true for all people? Telling our youth that they must be perfect and pointing them to people who we offer as examples of perfection seems like rigging the game for everyone to lose. Eventually it will be found that the models of perfection are not perfect. And the people we're pointing to these models will either be disillusioned or will have protected themselves with cynicism. We want neither. Better to identify people as people, and to say “there's a trait [or achievement] to emulate.” Or even, “there's a person from whom you can learn a great deal.” No need to say, “Be everything that person is” nor “Be do everything that person does.”

Michael Phelps is a perfect illustration of this. People of great accomplishment, being human, do have flaws. Even after the bong incident, he can still be a role model for swimming, and the hard work it takes to succeed.

Growing up, and starting out in the world, one's flaws can keep one from getting noticed, and it's well to teach our youth to work on minimizing them. But at some point we must not rewrite history and pretend that we had the choice to do all the great deeds that have been done by only encouraging and revering people for whom there is nothing bad to be said.

A great many people practicing Computer Science in particular are great as a consequence of their obsessive nature of one kind or another. The ability to be focused, meticulous, intolerant of deviation from spec are all qualities we programmers need, and sometimes the personality types that are attracted to the field of computer science are going to show effects in other areas.

In Erik there was at least a person who died having dared to speak his mind. I so admire that. But more than that, he had things to say. And they were things that made the effort worthwhile. I'd rather that than endless blathering of no consequence delivered in oh-so-polite tones.

I will miss him greatly. But I am thankful I had a chance to get to know him.

I had to laugh when someone anonymous wrote:

Erik Naggum
1965-2009
He hated stupid people

I don't even know that he hated stupid people, though. It seemed to me he just didn't like wasting time with them.

But either way, it is perhaps more appropriate to allow Erik to write his own epitaph. On his own web page, Erik offers his explanation of the meaning of life. It's not long. I recommend reading it. But I quote here a single sentence, which I offer as evidence that he accomplished what seems like a reasonably stated mission:

“The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life.” —Erik Naggum

¹ Kjetilho posted to reddit, “the autopsy concluded that the cause of death was a massively hemorrhaging stomach ulcer. my take is that it was probably caused by the large amounts of NSAIDs he took for his bad back, which he in turn got from too little physical activity. so in a way, the root cause could be said to be UC.”

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Originally published June 24, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Photo cropped from a photo by Kevin Layer,
licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Other Remembrances of Erik
Tobias Rittweiler's Blog
Ruben on VoIP
Arve's Post (and Discussion) on Reddit
Kjetil's Post on The Subclass Explosion
Zach's Journal Entry

Vintage Erik
Defending his occasional outbursts: [1] [2] [3]
Discussing Common Lisp: [1] [2] [3]
Discussing abstract concepts: Asking for references

Erik, Posthumously
Erik Naggum on Atlas Shrugged

Tags (from Open Salon): personal, erik naggum, erik naggum eulogy, death, erik naggum death, r.i.p., erik naggum r.i.p., friend, politics, personal style, manners, controversy, controversial, role model, personal flaw, character flaw, legacy, epitaph, philosophy, meaning of life, commentary, abuse, abusive, foul language, common lisp, sgml, contribution, fools, foolish, intolerance, abruptness, free speech, excellence, insight, michael phelps, jimmy carter, bill clinton, jerry falwell

My Secret Shame: Confessions of a Republican Wannabe

On a site like Open Salon, it's often assumed one is a Democrat. I'm not. I'm an Independent. I do admit it's hard to tell the difference sometimes, but is that my fault? The Republicans seem never to offer me a credible alternative.

Of course, you could make the claim I should be checking out the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. Nice try, but no dice. There are a couple reasons for this. First, I'm old enough to have thrown away my vote on third-party candidates before; been there, done that. Voting on principle is nice, and I'm all for changing our voting system to use preference-order voting, but absent that, I'll vote where my vote can make a difference, thank you.

And, frankly, I think the thing that holds these third parties back is their stubborn insistence on principle. Principles are great, but as I discussed in The “Two Unprincipled Parties” System, it's the unprincipled nature of the Democratic and the Republican parties that keep them in active contention. That nature allows the parties to dynamically adjust their platform in order to respond to changes in public sentiment. Contrast this with the Green Party or Libertarian Party which are wedded to ideas and hence incapable of changing in order to acquire more votes.

There are occasions where I've gone so far as to call myself a “Republican Wannabe,” not because the Republican Party of late (by which I'm afraid I mostly mean “within my lifetime”) offers much of anything I'd ever “want to be” but because the words the Republicans often say they are about don't sound bad. I wish there really were a Republican Party that was about small, fiscally responsible government that cares about personal liberty and privacy. They sometimes spout such words, but their actions don't match, and I just can't bear it.

I did actually vote for Bill Weld, a Republican, to be Governor of Massachusetts. He was socially liberal, compassionate, strong on crime, and fiscally responsible. A good mix, I thought. But, alas, not typical of what the Republican is selling these days.

Also, my desire for small government is not dogmatic in nature. So while I liked how Jesse Ventura borrowed from Lincoln in saying that government should only do for people what they can't do for themselves, I find it's not always so easy to say exactly what people can and cannot do for themselves.

For example, it might seem that health care is something people can arrange for themselves. But I've watched health care play out over a lifetime, and it's clear to me that health insurance has gone from a well-meaning pool that protected people from unknown health risks to a cynically and scientifically run system that tries to most efficiently separate people from their money, maximizing profits while minimizing its own responsibilities. Saying health care is something people can do for themselves depends on whether you just mean that there are insurance policies for sale or whether you mean that people have a legitimate and compassionate set of choices. So just because I favor small government over large doesn't mean I favor it for arbitrary reasons; there are a lot of reasons to suppose that the smallest workable and fair government really does need to address health care, and to believe that this cannot be left to the individual.

So please don't assume when I say I'm for small government that I mean to say I oppose some particular set of issues. What I mean, rather, is that if all other things are equal, I prefer small to large. But sometimes small doesn't work, and I'm open to discussion on some matters that others might not be.

What I want from the various parties is to provide me a different perspective about how to think about problems. I want options I can evaluate freely without regard to where they came from. I assume that the very different perspectives of each party will provide me with a rich variety of options. What I care about is workability to really solve the stated problem, not some idealized notion of a problem. And there are two things that really catch my eye a lot with Republican options: First, they seem to go out of their way to be mean-spirited and to make life miserable for people who are just trying to get by—they're forever trying to sell their policies by demonizing someone, and in the process they often don't actually solve the problems they set out to solve. And second, their solutions are often very fragile. They work really well if you make the right assumptions about the people involved, the order in which things happen, etc., but they leave people helpless if they deviate even a little from the norm (often, but not always, a norm characterized by being economically well-off, healthy, white, straight, male, and Christian).

The Republicans say they're about family values, but that turns out to be code for something much more sinister. To me, family values means something that promotes the notion of people helping people, of people treating each other kindly, of people within a family loving one another, of people wanting children to grow up happy and healthy. But many gay families pass this requirement and yet are shunned by the so-called party of family values.

The Republicans say they're about fiscal responsibility, yet they orchestrated the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the world. And why? Because they effectively enshrined the notion that “greed is good,” a claim that is so obviously ridiculous it's a wonder it wasn't laughed out of the room the moment it was first said. But, of course, people who desperately want to believe a selfish thing will find themselves highly motivated to stretch in what they are willing to believe.

The Republicans say they're about the Constitution, but when attempts are made to enforce privacy rights or free speech rights, we find them making exceptions. In fact, I honestly think that before the neocons took over the party, the Republican Party really was about this one. And there are a few lonely voices even now within the Republican Party that pay lip service to this issue. But when push comes to shove we see party line votes on matters that do not uphold free speech and privacy rights.

I really just don't like the idea of aligning with a party; I fear the notion of “toeing someone's party line.” I like independently evaluating issues on their merits. When I voted for Weld in the Massachusetts primary, I was going to be out of town and had to vote absentee. To do that, I had to declare a party and was temporarily a Republican for a few weeks near the election. I recall worrying that I would die in an accident and that my tombstone would read “he died a Republican.” So maybe it's not fair to say I actually want to be a Republican. But I do covet the issue space that the Republicans allegedly care about, and I do think they're falling down in their duty to offer me options that fit in that space.

I refuse to give in and simply call myself a Democrat. I continue to hold out the hope that the Republican Party will surprise me one day with good ideas that will give my preferred status as an Independent a legitimate sense of identity distinct from being a member of the Democratic Party. But some days keeping that hope alive is like trying to keep a candle burning in the winds of a hurricane.

Here I sit, trying to decide what I think of Judge Sotomayor. In spite of her being the clear choice of Obama and the Democrats, I'm really quite annoyed by that controversial ruling Judge Sotomayor has written about controversial free speech rights of school children, the one Paul Levinson has written extensively about. The details of that ruling trouble me a great deal. I'd like to ask her a great many questions about it.

But even as I'd like to consider the ruling, and the candidate, with an independent eye, I have my television tuned in to all kinds of ridiculousness from the sitting Republicans that once again threatens to embarrass me if I go that way. I am incensed about the petty set of things the Republican Party has chosen to make into talking points, stupid issues that are not at all good reasons not to make this woman a Supreme Court Justice.

Quiet down, Republicans. I can't figure out if this candidate is a good choice for the Court, but if you don't stop saying completely idiotic things in opposition, I'm going to feel driven to side with her merely because you have once again made it utterly unpalatable to ever even consider the possibility of an opposing point of view. For once, please don't be your own worst enemy. Just once, I'd like to feel I had a choice.

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Originally published June 1, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, republican, independent, democrat, republican wannabe, own worst enemy, shooting itself in the foot, republican party, sonia sotomayor, sotomayor, supreme court, court, justice, appointment, supreme court justice, candidate, bill weld, jesse ventura

Over the Edge

In 1990, I visited Marriott's Great America and rode on the ride called The Edge. It's a thrill ride designed around the notion of free fall.

The basic idea is that you get into a steel cage and they drop you on a track. Initially you just fall but the track is curved so it gradually takes your weight back and slides you down to where you end up landed on your back. The ride accelerates from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 1.8 seconds, hitting 3.5G, and then decelerating in 5 seconds back to a stop.

I'm not really a roller coaster person, so I'm not sure what was in me to do this. I'd usually be the one getting up to the door and then taking that conveniently placed exit for people who chicken out at the last minute. But that day I got in. And the door clanged shut.

Now the thing to note is that just about as soon as I was in, I was thinking “No, maybe not.” But the problem is that by that time you're locked into a steel cage and there really just isn't any backing out. At that point, there's just physics and destiny waiting. No more control. The cage was going down whether I liked it or not, and there was no more time to think.

It came out fine, as it happens. Since then I've had other chances to repeat the experience, but I don't do it any more. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, as they say.

Still, I'm glad I once did. Sometimes other things happen in my life, or in the lives of others, where there's very little control. It gives me a framework to understand the sensation I'm feeling, or to empathize with the feelings of others.

There are times where in an instant, life changes and there's no looking back.

Some years later I was sitting with a friend at her house when her dog decided, pretty much out of nowhere, to jump up and sink his teeth into my face. One moment we were just sitting there amiably chatting, the next I had a dog—a Jack Russell terrier, if you're curious—hanging off the front of my face, teeth sunk into my upper cheek. It was really kind of bizarre and disconcerting. I think it disconcerted the dog, too. He seemed kind of embarrassed about the incident after the fact. I remember thinking to myself that I was probably going to be disfigured for life, like the clanging of that door.

As it happened, we went to the ER and they didn't even want to do anything with it—they said it would heal on its own. It had by some amazing quirk of fate missed all the nerves he could have injured. One or two people have noticed there are some tiny scars but there really hasn't been any observed problem. Just lucky. Like the ride coming to a smooth glide at the end. That time, anyway.

Still, one never quite knows. Life always has new challenges waiting. And always the sound of that clanging door. One way only, please, just forward.

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Originally published May 28, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

A postscript, ten years later (May 24, 2019)...

I can explain now that I wrote this on the eve of a major surgery. At the time, I didn't want to worry friends about the surgery, so I wrote in metaphor and figured if something happened and the surgery didn't go well, at least people could figure out after-the-fact what I was thinking going in. Fortunately, it went well, and I'm a lucky cancer survivor, so I realized today I should add an annotation to connect the dots on the history of this.

I also wasn't sure at the time whether it was safe to talk publicly about my cancer. I talk more about that in my article The Big C. Health, privacy, and politics come together in complex ways. I might have wished that such an important and personal thing could stay private, but political change often demands the sacrifice of intimate information to sway minds. See that article for more detail.

Tags (from Open Salon): belief and religion, philosophy, belief, religion, health, family, deep breath, taking the plunge, diving in, head first, out of control, milestones, autopilot, cruise control, lack of control, loss of control, free fall, thrill ride, roller coaster, locked in

The Freedom to Hear

I have come to believe that the Founding Fathers blew it when they wrote The First Amendment. They shouldn't have spoken of “free speech” but instead should have spoken of unfettered access to information—that is, “the freedom to hear.” The two are similar rights, but the right to hear is the more important one.

As I see it, the right to stand on a soap box in the park is not a right to stop others who might pass by and hold them hostage, forcing them to listen to one's message. It is not a right of coercion. Rather, the power of the right is the opportunity to place oneself passively in a place where others, if they so choose, might elect to listen.

Democratic Need: The Fuel of Change

It's critically important in a democracy that the majority is able to hear about things that are not popular with that majority. That is how open-minded people change their minds. They take in information about less-popular ideas and consider whether to change their mind and admit new ideas.

In a well-functioning democracy, the status quo will represent the majority viewpoint. As a result, any possible change will occur due to a minority viewpoint taking hold. For that to happen, it's critical that the populace have access to unpopular views. On the other hand, forcing them to receive unpopular views would be tyranny by some minority. So the process must be voluntary, and must involve a conscious decision by enlightened members of the populace to hear what might change their mind.

Tie-Breaking the Golden Rule: Spam and Telemarketing

In some ways, one might think the matter symmetric and the choice of how to express it merely a variation of wording. Communication involves a speaker and a listener, so to say conversation is about speech is to say it's about listening. What's the big deal?

Well, for one thing, if the speaker and listener are not in agreement, there becomes the question of who should win. Those of us who believe that the Golden Rule is the dominant meta-rule that drives all politics find ourselves in an uncomfortable position when one person wants to, even has an articulated right to, speak while another has no desire to listen, and has no corresponding articulated right to assert. Something feels unbalanced about that. Tour right to speak pushes out at me and I need a corresponding force I can balance with. Saying my only right is to speak back, and not merely to assert a right of silence, seems unfairly coercive to me. At minimum there must be a balance of power between speaker and listener.

And yet even then, ties will still occur. In matters of telemarketing and spam, the answer seems clear to me, even before the imposition of rights and laws, just on the basis of common sense. In fact, I was first alerted to this issue at all by receiving email spam that contained a patriotic-sounding passage about free speech which seemed to have the purpose of saying “I have the right to send this and you don't have the right to complain about that.” I don't think that's so. I think the rights of the listener must dominate over the rights of the speaker. In the case of a conflict, the term “free speech” appears to give dominant power to the speaker, while an alternate phrase like “freedom to hear” shifts control to the listener.

Publishing and Censorship

There is also the matter of speaking generally, passively, to no particular person—the matter of publishing, if you will. Publishing speaks out, but with no identified listener.

But publishing does not intrude. Published material can sit patiently and wait, in a library or repository. This process is voluntary, and while it might seem an act of “pushing” information out, that's mistaking advertising for inventory. Inventory is the passive receipt of information to a waystation, awaiting a consumer who will tune in.

Publishing is curious, too, because it actually speaks not only to everyone now existing but to people who might not yet be born. It would be unrealistically difficult to poll everyone who now exists, but when you add those who might exist in the future, it's a definite impossibility. No one can know who might be interested and who might not. And yet publishing speaks to all such people.

And so when it comes to the possibility of censorship we find someone intervening in the wending, passive, voluntary path from speaker to would-be end-listener. But whose rights are denied? The speaker's? I would allege not. The speaker has spoken and even if the speaker's words might reach the intended audience, I've argued he has no right to impose them. It's the listener who has the ultimate right to receive the information. If the chain is broken, it is the listener who is infringed.

In fact, in the impossible situation that it could be shown in advance that there could not possibly be any person interested to hear, one might theoretically argue it was not only rightful but merciful to ask that the speaker desist. But given that no such argument could reasonably be constructed, because there is no science capable of predicting what future people will or won't want to hear, organized censorship has no place because it denies the ultimate rights of listeners, not the rights of speakers.

The Complexities of Public Speech

Recently in the news is the question of whether Obama should be permitted to speak at Notre Dame, given his position on abortion. Under my formulation, I claim it should be clear that this is the wrong question. The right question is not Obama's right to speak, it's whether there is any person at Notre Dame who wants to hear what he has to say, because it is the need of those who might be open to his message that is at issue.

Of course, Public Speech poses a particular difficulty if you assume that any possible reader should have a right to deny speech. Here there are two ways to break things down. One is to say that this argues that Free Speech is the core right and that in order to argue Obama's right to speak I have to go back to that. But I'm not trying to argue based on an ideology. I don't begin with the notion that he must have a right to speak and then bend all law to suit my Machiavellian end goal. Rather, I begin with the simple question: How will that one person in the audience who would hear Obama get the information if Obama is not allowed to speak?

Certainly, if Obama is invited he must be allowed to speak because that's in the nature of the contract. Let someone who doesn't want him to speak not invite him. So this beef by certain would-be audience-members and onlookers is not with Obama, it's with the conference organizers.

And, further, it seems clear that if someone trying to enlighten themselves at a university wants the information, they should have access to it. This goes back to the censorship issue. It seems clear that it serves the rights of the audience to permit controversial speakers. Such speakers' goals may be served by speaking, but in my view they ought enjoy no right to speak if there are no listeners who would hear.

What makes the issue of Obama a problem is not that he might attend and speak but that an audience who wants to be there for other reasons is put in an awkward position. Their choice becomes to attend an event where they would not voluntarily listen, or not to attend. But to not attend means missing an event that is significant for other reasons. This bundling of two unrelated events is the real cause of the difficulty. A structuring of the event to allow those who would do so to attend the main body of the event and then to leave, perhaps in protest, would probably have resolved this. So much the better if their leaving provided seats for others who would like to hear the lecture because I suspect there were not seats enough for all who had wanted to attend and that if those who don't want to hear the lecture were to leave, the gathering place would quickly refill with people who did want to hear.

Avoiding the “Least Common Denominator”

The problem of public speech is also tricky for another reason. There is a temptation by some to manipulate the system in order to say that all public discourse must be a kind of “least common denominator”—permitting only the most conservative of speech, that speech which is acceptable to all. Or, at least, that speech alleged to be acceptable to all. Who even knows if there is any such speech.

The freedom to hear must not be confused with a right of the individual to control what others may say in a public venue by asserting their right against others' rights to publish. The recourse in that case must be a right of individuals to opt out of situations that will thrust arbitrary messages at them in unwanted fashion. I have some sympathy for someone not wanting to see offensive billboards in a public square, for example, since opting out of using certain public areas may be difficult. But the notion that a speech or an internet page must not exist because there is someone somewhere not interested in it misses the entire point of what it is for information to be passively conveyed.

As long as there is a simple, cost-free, rational way to opt out, that should be the final recourse of the party who wants to use their freedom to hear as a mechanism for stopping speech they do not like. Causing the speaker not to speak means potentially infringing another's right to hear. Better to just avoid the venue where the unwanted speech is ocurring.

Just Plain Noise

It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: At the point where you're playing your music too loud or blocking my path to a building or any of a variety of other so-called speech acts, you're not exercising what I see as free speech, since you're not entertaining my need to hear, you're just a force trying to invade my space. Making your message available to me is fine, but making it impossible for me to ignore your message is not fine, and certainly ought not be your right.

Sometimes in a society when there are injustices, one takes actions to get attention that are beyond the scope of their rights; but civil disobedience is not a right, it is a calculated sacrifice.

Information from Foul Sources

A particular case of interest is the question of whether murderers should be allowed to write books. Some would say these people have lost their rights and must not be allowed to speak. Perhaps. But I claim that the interesting question is whether the would-be readers of such things have lost their right to hear from a murderer. Do law enforcement officials, psychologists, and even just ordinary citizens sitting at home have no right to know what makes a murderer tick? I think not.

If necessary, cut off the convicted felon's right to the money or even to media notice or fan mail or other benefits of he publication. But if the murderer will offer useful information to those whose enjoy full rights in our society, I see no reason to keep a murderer from writing. The real victim will be a free society who will not be able to prepare for the next such murder.

In September 1997, Salon's Table Talk forum hosted an interesting extended discussion on one of its threads about the question of whether the reader of literary works should make a decision about what to read or not based on the moral character of the author. I was proud to participate. It was entitled “She boiled squirrel nutkin, he diddled girls -- does it spoil the message?” Alas, Salon has retired those pages and the discussion is no longer available as a cross-reference.

Summary

There are two parties involved in a communication. If both are willing, the communication should proceed. But when there's a dispute, who wins? Using terms like “free speech” appears to give the favor to the speaker, which I think is wrong. I prefer the term “freedom to hear” because it gives final say back to the person who would be receiving the information. In my view, the right to free speech ought not be a right to impose one's message on another, only about making messages passively available to others who would hear them.

Free speech is a way of guaranteeing that we in a democracy and in a free society have access to a free flow of ideas. It isn't supposed to be a way of forcing us to endure a free flow of noise or indoctrination. That's not freedom, it's slavery.

I'm not suggesting a Constitutional amendment, although if I were doing the Constitution over, I would ask for a balancing “freedom to hear.” However, even within our present society, with the Constitution as it presently is, I often find that reformulating problems of free speech as problems involving a freedom to hear yields important insights in how to think about those problems in fresh and empowering ways.

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Originally published May 21, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, rights, Constitution, freedom to hear, right to hear, freedom to listen, right to listen, speech, free speech, freedom of speech, spam, censor, censorship, telemarketing, protest, civil disobedience, democracy, democratic society, information exchange, golden rule, publishing, speech, obama, notre dame, infringed, murderer, rights of felons, right to publish, publication rights, right to write, right to author, rights of felons, dumbing down, least common denominator, coercion, oppression, oppressive, controlling, noise

George

When I was around the age of five, my parents gave me a little stuffed bear, who I named George.

He was no ordinary bear, of course. He had eyes that seemed very deep and knowing, and for a while he had a felt red mouth, though that fell away at some point.

Inside, he had a music box. There was a metallic key extending from his chest—the kind that's probably unsafe and illegal in the modern world where doubtless they must be made of fireproof, non-toxic, biodegradable, nerf-like sponge foam. But this old-fashioned key just jutted out harshly with a piece of metal like a penny that attached to the pole allowing you something flat to hold while you twisted it to wind him up. Thus armed, he would play a bit of the song Around the World in Eighty Days, which I came to like quite a lot.

One day the music box broke, though. I must have been in first or second grade and wasn't sure what to do. Twisting it didn't manage to catch something it needed to catch, and when you let go after twisting it would just play all the notes really fast in a kind of single quick metallic zing sound that took only a second or two to complete. It was quite disappointing.

So I did what kids do. I threw George against the wall. To my surprise, that fixed him, and the music box played again. I was thrilled.

Sometime not too long after, though, he broke again. But fortunately, I was now a skilled bear repairman. Or so I thought. Sadly, no matter how many times I threw George against the wall, and I tried it quite a lot before giving up, it just didn't seem to help and mostly seemed to be scratching up the wall with that bit of metal that stuck out.

Later in life, I'd had more school and learned that there were “best practices” for fixing broken things, and that bashing them against the wall mindlessly was not among them.

And yet, sometimes I look at the way certain people approach the world and think it sad that they never had a George to teach them this lesson. Failing to understand science and causality, they resort to mysticism and a belief that if something once worked, even by accident, it will somehow find a way to work again, even without knowing why it ever worked or whether that reason is still in play.

Periodically I hear people referring to Climate Change as a natural process, as if that implies it will fix itself. They say the climate has corrected itself before, and so they seem comfortable that it will happen again. They don't say how or why or even when this will happen, so I must infer they are expecting it to happen by magic—and just in time to avoid any inconvenience to mankind.

Maybe it's just my personal experience that leads me to say this, but ... I'm just not so sure we can rely on either repeated good luck or outright magic.

It's time for some serious science.

Footnote

I still have George. He's threadbare here and there, but still loved. My parents tried to get me to throw him away when they thought me too old for him, but I refused. I'm glad I still have him. His music box still doesn't work on its own, but if you help him by holding the key just right and refusing to let the key unwind faster than it should, you can still get him to play his tinny tune. It still makes me smile.

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Originally published May 16, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, climate change, global warming, science, mysticism, engineering, best practices, mindlessly, koan, lesson, childhood memories, lessons learned, bear, teddy bear, george, teddy bear named george, hypothesis, test, growth, experience, trust

Haiku: Mom Watched Over Me

If you enjoyed this haiku, please “rate” it.

This is a response to Just Cathy's post on Mother's Day Haiku.
She notes the original open call came from Texas Bubba.
The effects we have on one another are both direct and indirect.

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Originally published May 8, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): celebration, family, greeting card, greetings, haiku, i love you, mom, mom haiku, mother's day, open call, personal, social, thoughts, too cheap to send flowers, tribute, wishes

The Nature of a Hero

With the luxury of time to look back on the value that resulted, we endow our heroes with all manner of mystic qualities, such that our heroes, hearing themselves described as such, often don't recognize themselves.

Heroism is often not something you can plan or save up for. The need for it may come upon you suddenly. It must be done in the moment, which is often part of the sacrifice. If you knew the need was coming, you might have scheduled other events differently. The event may be something they were prepared to do, but the timing of the event may not have been.

A firefighter may be prepared to lose his life in a fire for another, but he doesn't get to choose a good day for it to happen. Every day could be that day, and yet the day it happens is never a good one. It may be the day he's had a fight with someone and wishes he hadn't, or it may be the week before that big trip he was going to take with a loved one.

It is rarely something where you get a second chance. Usually what you do is what you do. It is therefore messy, unfinished, not particularly artistic, “done in a single take.” And in the time just afterward, while everyone is singing their praises, our hero, if lucky enough to have survived at all, is probably lost in self-critical thoughts of “I should have somehow done it differently, better,” as if that were really an option.

The messiness of heroism is illustrated in the brilliant movie 1776, where the spotlight falls at one point on the awful dilemma of patriots committed to opposing slavery being told in a high-stakes game of intellectual poker that the new nation would have slavery at its core or there would be no new nation to later rise above slavery. Who would want to be the kind of hero who said yes to that deal? Bad enough you had risked your life daily just for the right to participate in a process you'd hoped would free all men, but in the end you realize your opposition to slavery will likely be forgotten by history and you'll be remembered instead for having enshrined it. For some of those men, signing their names to the Declaration of Independence on those terms must have been the kind of awful compromise faced by a doctor who saws off a man's leg to save him from death. Messy, but something one sometimes has as one's only choice. Our heroes sometimes make these choices just so we won't have to, accepting a shame upon themselves so that others will not have to.

George Bush was not able to muster what it took to be the messy kind of hero. In the final days of his Presidency, when the economy was a mess, due in part to a war that should never have been fought, he could have made a useful sacrifice and drawn fire upon himself by taking responsibility and admitting it was his fault. Even if he didn't believe it, he could have said he did. That would have freed his whole party to move forward without pointing fingers at one another. But he couldn't do it, and so he condemned many to endure continued finger-pointing. The kind of heroism he wanted was the clean, pretty, photo-op kind of heroism of a scheduled landing in a pristine jumpsuit on a military-looking set that sat well out of harm's way.

Barack Obama, by contrast, was a hero when he apologized on behalf of the US for the economic mess that we as a nation pulled the world into. He didn't cause the problem, but he didn't make a big point of that. He had no reason to expect the world to applaud him for what he said. It wasn't completely true, but it was enough true, and saying it was just the right thing to do. He must surely have known that the Republicans would say he had somehow sold us out. But he took with grace the slings and arrows that followed.

Some heroism is big and public, while some is small and private. Some happens in an instant, perhaps under active gunfire, while some is the product of relentless small acts over time, like the aforementioned founding of our nation or the unheralded endurance of a parent raising a child.

My wife is such a private hero. I won't detail why here. The details probably matter, but saying them out loud will only arm her with ways to dismiss the accolade. Like the enigmatic referent in Carly Simon's famous song, but without all the unattractive vanity, she'll have to just know that if she can think up something about which she wants to say “but that was nothing,” the very fact that she knows what to disclaim is proof that she knows she did something worthy. And, anyway, I'll always know.

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Public domain graphic obtained from
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Author's Note: Originally published April 30, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): barack obama, bush, firefighters, firemen, first responders, founding fathers, george bush, george w bush, heroism, mothers, obama, police, policemen, politics, sacrifice, slavery, social, society, thank you, thankless, thanks, wives

Fresh Thoughts on Kissing ... and Beyond

I was pretty nerdy in my youth—unlike now, of course—and so my parents confronted the issue of sexuality with me by doing the obviously right thing: They handed me a four-volume encyclopedia on the subject and told me to read up.

I wish I could remember the name of the thing, but alas I don't. A lot of it was stuff that was boring to me at the time, like the details of reproduction. I skimmed it but didn't really care a lot about the details. I never really resonated to biology—it always seemed messy and imprecise.

There was a section on dating, though, and I read through that pretty thoroughly in case it had any useful tips. It did. It's funny the kinds of things that stick with you over the years, but this did because of the practical and specific nature of it. It defined the confusing term “fresh” (a sort of interjection that was supposed to get uttered just before you got slapped in some mysterious circumstances) in the only detailed, serious way I've ever seen anyone try to define it. I checked the dictionary just now and it merely says very vague things like these:

15. informal forward or presumptuous
Random House Dictionary

15. Informal Bold and saucy; impudent
The American Heritage ® Dictionary

12. improperly forward or bold; “don't be fresh with me”;
WordNet® 3.0

This encyclopedia, instead of offering just a word or two, offered a full description of how things were supposed to work and why the word was significant. It was highly specific in a way that I doubt people will readily agree with—many will quibble that the numbers are arbitrary, and I suppose they are. But I was able to read past that and to get the essence of what it was getting at.

The article just came straight out and said that it was permissible for a boy to try to kiss a girl on the second date and to try “petting” on the eighth date. I have no idea where they got these numbers. They seemed arbitrary and unmotivated to me, and I knew even at the age of 11 or 12 when I read this that they were probably not universally agreed upon. But the point was that there was some such number. What was interesting was that the article was very clear on the notion that you had no entitlement to succeed in these things. It did not encourage you to be pushy. It didn't say that someone must submit. What it seemed to imply was that there was a time at which it was not out of bounds to think it might be proper.

So, as the article explained, it might be that a girl will kiss a boy on the first date, but he ought not try. The relationship is too fresh. After the first date, he may try, but she may still decline. Likewise, it might be that the girl would engage in petting on the eighth date, but maybe not. The relationship was too fresh before that to really consider the matter.

By the way, I'm recalling all of this from memory, but I don't recall it talking about discussing, only trying. It might be I was just reading selectively, but more likely they were just acknowledging the obvious truth that it's enough trouble having to be a bumbling adolescent without having to be articulate about what you're bumbling about.

And that was a lot of dates out—I don't think I ever got to that many dates. I did count, though, even knowing that my date probably didn't have access to my encyclopedia and that all my counting was probably for nothing. I wasn't going to feel emboldened after that time, more likely just like I was timidly missing out. Being a kid is rough. It's a wonder any of us survives to adulthood.

Anyway, I think my encyclopedia's definition of this obscure word highlights an important detail that is often lost in a lot of dialog between the sexes at any age. Lessons in interpersonal communication rarely distinguish between the correctness of a bid for doing something and the entitlement to do something. This leads to the magical and unrealistic notion that people will “just know” when it's right, and that if either party tries something when it isn't “just known,” that's wrong.

Great emphasis is placed in our society on how important it is for men to respect a “no” answer from a woman. And I agree. But equally great emphasis should be placed on giving respect to the fact that there will be questions that, in due course, need asking, even if the answer will ultimately be “no.” Whether by word or by wordless bumbling deed, the mere asking of those questions at the proper time and without attempt to pressure is not disrespectful, and the need to ask them must be respected in the same way that the answer must. Respect between caring individuals goes in both ways.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published April 26, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): language, linguistics, vocabulary word, usage, word usage, meaning, semantics, definition, terminology, fresh, dating, kissing, petting, caress, touch, felt up, feel up, felt out, feel out, getting to first base, get to first base, getting to second base, get to second base, encyclopedia, dating, social, advice, manners, etiquette, polite, politeness, impudent, bold, saucy, sex education, sex ed, first kiss, first time, sexuality, kissing on the first date, kiss on the first date, first date, eighth date, appropriate, inappropriate

Disobedience, Civil and Not-So-Civil

Disobedience of the Civil Kind

I have a beef with certain people who enagage in civil disobedience and then expect to be treated as if they did nothing wrong. Should they be treated with human decency and respect? Of course. But should they be treated as if they did nothing at all? No, I don't think so. I want to say why.

It's not the idea that people should be allowed to walk free that bothers me. There are reasonable arguments made about why we might sometimes not want to punish someone who commits an act of civil disobedience. We all know that's true. We tell people not to kill one another, but there are times when we all agree that it's legitimate to do so—certain cases of self-defense, for example. So my gripe here isn't about that.

“Non-violence, publicity and a willingness to accept punishment are often regarded as marks of disobedients’ fidelity to the legal system in which they carry out their protest.”

  —Civil Disobedience

(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

My gripe is that people who commit acts of civil disobedience seem to have come to expect to be let off. It's almost as if they see civil disobedience as a right, and they are morally indignant (not to mention surprised and terrified) if they are arrested.

When I was in college at MIT, I attended a meeting in which activists who were concerned about the Seabrook nuclear plant trained others on how to protest. (I think I was there as a reporter covering the event, by the way. I wasn't especially political back then.) Among the things they explained was how to behave if people wanted to be arrested. That wasn't the main thrust of the protest, it was like an extra credit aspect they said some might want to do. In fact, it was pretty carefully explained that not everyone should do this, that only people who really understood the consequences of being arrested and were willing to pay that price should do. They weren't planning anything violent, but they did think it was a legitimate choice to be more-than-average obstructionist if the person was willing to pay that price of being arrested and having a mark on their record. In fact, it was the price they would pay that made the action noteworthy.

Refusing to move when instructed by the police was not seriously going to keep the nuclear plant from being built. But their willingness to spend time in jail peacefully might get them time on the news, since it would arouse sympathy in the population, who might think it awful they'd had to make such a sacrifice just to be heard. But once such a penalty is removed, or routinely waived, why is it be noteworthy? Sacrifice is only sacrifice if you lose something, and if you're assured you won't, you're not making one.

Disobedience of the Not-So-Civil Kind

I want to turn now to another issue that I will ultimately tie in with the above, and that's the issue of ticking time bombs. And no, in case you're worried, I am not going to suggest that these are some good form of civil disobedience. But the discussion of their existence at all will set up something else that I want to talk about.

As you probably know, the ticking time bomb scenario involves the notion that there will be imminent harm to many people very soon, that you are the one who must interrogate a suspect, and that everyone is depending on you to avert a catastrophe. “What would you do to get the needed information?”

And, indeed, here on Open Salon, DJohn posted such a question just the other day in a thread to which I responded. I've lifted my response to him into this post here (with very light editing) to make sure my thoughts on the matter didn't get lost in the shuffle.

The fallacy here is that you think this problem is unique to torture. It is not. Consider any law we have. There are laws against driving fast on highways, against breaking into buildings, and against killing people. We know, for example, that there are sometimes extraordinary reasons why good decent people need to drive beyond the speed limit, break into buildings, and even kill other people. And we do not say, therefore, that there must not be laws against driving beyond the speed limit, against breaking into buildings, and against killing one another. Rather, we expect brave souls to do in extraordinary times what needs to be done, consequences be damned. In some cases, we will exonerate them afterward for breaking a rule because we agree that circumstances warranted it. In some cases, we will not, and we will hold them accountable and they will console themselves knowing that they sacrificed themselves for something they believed was more important.

The situation of national security is no different. Were there really a case where millions could die and there was a chance torture might work, I expect someone would try the torture. If it worked, I imagine he'd be found a hero and forgiven. If it failed, I imagine he'd be court-martialed for his foolish notion. That's not much reassurance, but it ought not be. That's what it is to be illegal, to say that the risk of doing the thing is entirely to be engaged at a personal level. It's what we heard every week in Mission Impossible growing up: Should you or any of the IM Force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge.

It's an uncomfortable truth but an honest one. It doesn't just give a wink to someone saying “it's ok, we know you'll need to do this and we'll forgive you later” it says “if you think this is your only option, you'd damn well better have examined every other one and it better really be because this is not one we'll forgive lightly.” For things that are truly (rather than merely rhetorically) one's only option, who asks for permission?

Anyone who tortures should never do it as a matter of process. He should do it as a last resort knowing that he is potentially sacrificing his life or freedom. That's a nice high bar that I'm comfortable won't get misused. Anything less, I'm not so sure.

Kent Pitman
April 19, 2009 01:22 AM

Checks and Balances

The traditional argument goes that “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Fair enough. That's a theory that goes quite a ways back in history, well before its recent formulation in words. But it was always about “above board” (pardon the unfortunate waterboarding pun) action. The problem isn't that the Bush administration wanted to change the policy, the policy is that they did so without informing the public and without subjecting themselves to trial. Having seen the need to do it, they should have done what they needed to and then marched straight to court demanding a trial. In the worst case, they should have told the public what they were doing so that the public could decide.

The claim by Bush echoed claims made by Nixon, who in turn quoted Lincoln when he was interviewed by David Frost: “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation.” I don't even propose to debate that here; it might well be right. Let's assume it is. The critical difference between Lincoln and Nixon on this point is that Lincoln's actions were public and subject to scrutiny by the electorate. Nixon was secretive, and so was Bush.

Secrecy matters a great deal because the Constitutional foundation of allowing the Executive this much power is not that we like trusting the Executive with this much power, but rather we understand that some decisions must be made quickly, before the populace or perhaps even Congress could offer advice. And some decisions must be made coherently to avert the effect of Congress tearing our nation limb from limb by each Congressperson going in a different direction. A President must know when he acts on his own that he is still doing so at some risk of being judged harshly, and if he does it in secret, that risk is averted. The essential check on Presidential power is the option to impeach or at least not to re-elect. And even for those who will not be re-elected, we have the option to publicly discuss with new candidates for the office whether they subscribe to such doctrine. We are robbed of all of that when such actions are taken in secret, and we end up making decisions about the Presidency without critical information that would allow us to make good decisions.

Summary

And so I'll close with the point I opened with, that there is a relationship between civil disobedience as it has become and this kind of not-so-civil disobedience. In both cases, the actions have become so comfortable that the high bar of sacrifice has been removed. With that bar removed, the acts in question are too easy to do and too hard to later judge. We must repair that.

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “share” it.

Originally published April 26, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): recourse, impeachment, impeach, informed electorate, re-election, election, democracy, we the people, democratic rule, checks and balances, dick cheney, cheney, george w bush, george bush, bush, frost/nixon, frost, nixon, lincoln, abraham lincoln, 24, time bomb, ticking, torture, ticking time bomb scenario, war, co, conscientious objector, unjust law, civil disobedience, politics