-ophobia

Idly cruising Twitter this morning, I kept seeing a thread about how legal experts on the right and the left are continuing and intensifying the polarization that has afflicted us increasingly since the election of 1980. The thread addresses the alignment of the legal profession into partisan wings, and the presentations of argument and information by each side.

Justice may be supposed to be impartial, but the law is consciously and purposely partial. Laws are written to define what is legal and what is not. Judicial interpretations declare a winner. Discussions of legal interpretation will have their basis in the philosophical position of the interpreter. Lawyers go into litigation knowing who they want to see as the winner. Even a negotiated settlement starts from the premise that there are sides -- two or more -- to the question.

Polarization in American politics has waxed and waned many times since the country's founding. The height of tension usually yields to a partial solution good enough to bring things down from a boil while not really fixing anything in the long term. One time, the boiling escalated to the actual Civil War, but even that only brought the partial solution that ended open warfare between white people, but left African Americans subject to racism and oppression.

Side note: No crisis ever addressed the treatment of Native Americans in a dramatic and significant way. The treatment of the indigenous people grew from fundamental principles of capitalist expansion even more so than did slavery. Slavery might seem like the capitalist dream of labor, but it is economically debatable. Displacement of the natives and seizure of their assets is only morally objectionable, and morals have no weight in capitalism. If there's more money to be made being cruel and heavy handed, guess what's going to happen.

Today, humans face many issues that have been presented in a binary fashion: it must be this way or that way. You're either with us -- in complete agreement -- or against us. This attitude closes the door to both compromise and synergy. Compromise is often worse than polarization, as elements of each side's plan are instituted in ways that guarantee that neither one will work. But synergy draws from actual good ideas that may have come from disparate sources, blended into a policy that actually helps. It's extremely rare, but possible. The resulting policy might be almost entirely as one side wants it, but with some rough edges or sharp points sanded off, or some curlicues and doodads simplified as a result of beneficial critical input.

The situation is rendered more difficult by the fact that the side we refer to as the left has had a better vision of the future than the right since at least the early middle of the 20th Century. But the broad divisions of left and right encompass fringe elements that represent unacceptable authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the lazy or desperate shortcut to enforcement of ideas that should be popular enough on their own to need no whip hand to keep them dominant. But the whip hand is attractive to some people. They may use social philosophy as a basis for their policy prescriptions, but they also just like whipping. "It's for your own good!"

The lawyer suggesting that inquiring minds delve deeper than the talking points and the exchange of clever snark between right and left stated that we would do better to listen to more voices on each side and find common ground. That sounds bravely intellectual, strong, and positive. And it can be. But it requires strength and courage to listen deeply and carefully to the intellectual proposals of someone speaking from a point of view opposite to your own. Common ground is very scary.

An argument against homophobia has long said, "What are you afraid of? That you might be attracted?" It calls upon the 'phobe to face up to their own inner self, to entertain the possibility that their own subconscious might entertain the possibility. Arguments for open consideration of sociopolitical solutions that incorporate elements from the conservative, racist side risk legitimizing it. Because both sides depend on basic principles that have to be accepted as absolute in order for the subsequent logic to hold up, following a logical path on the right inevitably leads back to their version of bedrock. Trickle down happens in porous limestone. "White supremacy is real, y'all, just look at how we have dominated every major trend in history for a couple of centuries." "You're just jealous of the wealthy and want to rob them of the fruits of their hard work and superior intelligence."

The most blatant straw-person arguments can be brushed aside. It gets harder when the opposition comes up with something that sounds okay, like figuring out that profit-driven health insurance is bad for small business and the self employed. I saw a thing on Breitbart once that I actually agreed with. It was very unnerving, because it was nested among tons of other stuff that I didn't agree with at all. So the brave intellectual sifting through for things on which to agree has to wonder how many poison pills will be thrown in with the little kibble of real nutrition that one might glean from sources more noted for their bigotry, and their hostility to inclusion and diversity.

By welcoming the input of opposition thinkers, each side complicates the chess game in which a benign move may conceal deeper strategy. Indeed, how could it not? We can't even really agree on the ultimate objective of society. Is it to provide necessary services cost effectively to the people within its boundaries, with a broader view of improving quality of life world wide? Or is it to facilitate the most ruthless and financially successful competitors in a winner-take-all world of endless conflict? Is it survival of the fittest? If so, fittest by what definition? Are the stakes life and death? Should the losers in capitalism be destroyed as quickly as possible to make way for the victors to prosper?

Should we throw open the town square and let every idea seek its popular following? The condition of the environment demonstrates how harmful pure democracy can be. Many people would say that they are in favor of a clean environment, but sales of fuel-guzzling vehicles remain robust, off-highway recreational vehicles (dirt bikes, ATVs and snow machines) are extremely popular toys, and motor boats far outnumber sailboats at most launching sites -- motor boats towed behind fuel-guzzling large vehicles capable of pulling them at highway speeds. People buy large houses of poor quality, built quickly, often on virgin land or former farm land. Most development chews up new land rather than redeveloping old sites, while developers continue to press for lenient environmental regulations so that they do not have to mitigate the effect of covering more and more ground with impervious surfaces. You might consciously vote every couple of years for lip service policies that restrain the destruction, but in day to day life the wallet votes add up strongly on the other side.

In a purely capitalist world, everything and everyone is for sale. If you're not for sale -- or at least for rent -- you deserve nothing from the marketplace of life. You might want to choose your clientele based on your personal principles, but this usually limits your income. Sometimes it limits it pretty severely.

In a collectivist world everyone has to kick in, too. Totalitarian collectivism might provide comfortable basic sustenance for everyone, but any human organization tends to develop some degree of hierarchy. "Some are more equal than others." Any synergy of free enterprise and collective sharing of responsibilities needs to take that into account.

A perfect example of how opposition input can destroy a collectively-based social policy is the so-called Affordable Care Act. As soon as the insurance industry had their operatives in Congress kill the public option, the ACA became just a herding mechanism for profit-driven insurance and health care providers. A lot of people believe that they benefitted by being able to get insurance when they could not get it before, but it's still a complicated bureaucratic mess designed around corporate income, not patient outcome.

Yes, we should listen to all intelligently composed input. But the answer still may be no, and perhaps even hell no.

Ruthlessness is bliss

A recent on line article in Texas Monthly reported how great it was that a man living off-grid in the Scottish highlands was rescued after a distress signal he sent out was received by a response center in Houston, Texas and relayed to Scottish authorities.

I pointed out that the man's happy tale of rescue and support owed a lot to Scotland's universal health care system. This observation received a lot of "likes," but also the predictable flamethrowers from people who take pride in their freedom to pay too much to a system that is designed to profit by denying them health care here in the United States.

"You certainly love to spend my money," one of them commented. Another one tried to say that universal care systems only work in smaller populations, which is the dead opposite of how risk pools work. Managing one database centered on patient care rather than profitability would have to be cheaper for the consumer than the current overlapping bureaucracies of care providers, drug companies, and insurance companies, all trying to protect as much as possible of their profit margin.

On another page, trying to combat the malignant growth that has already obliterated most of Annapolis, Maryland, I mentioned that transportation cycling could be very helpful to reduce traffic congestion. I no longer live in Annapolis, because of the malignant growth and the ridiculously high cost of housing, but I have friends who are still fighting the battle there. It used to be a nice place.

An angry commenter snapped that I must be in favor of the ridiculous waste of tax dollars on a bike lane that no one uses. I admit that my response was not the most level headed and charitable. When someone automatically equates support for alternative transportation with "a waste of tax dollars," it tells me a lot about their world view. So I said, "you sound pretty hot under the collar. You should either loosen your shirt or tighten it the rest of the way and end your suffering." He responded by calling me a libtard, thus confirming my first impression of him. I replied that he sounded like a typical money-obsessed conservative, to which he volleyed back that he wanted to keep the money he makes and leave a nice inheritance for his kids.

Here's the thing about a nice inheritance: unless you're bequeathing a billion, and sticking your kids in the right schools to meet the right people, they're going to have to go out and lick boots and grub for cash like most of the rest of us. The boots they lick might be more expensive and walk the halls of the executive suite, but the model of moneyed power is inescapably hierarchical. And a financial cushion might make them decadent, rather than provide them with a platform from which to reach higher.

As the argument escalated, his closing screed called me a cuck (a cherished pet insult of fascists and racists) and a beta male, and described in detail the kind of anal sex I should be subjected to.

A search on the guy's name disclosed very little. I found a Linkedin profile that seemed to match his name, location, and personality type, listing his occupation as "military professional." If he's active duty military, we all pay his salary through taxation. If he's a defense contractor/mercenary, we still pay his salary through our tax dollars, with less accountability. So of course his posturing about being a lone individual profiting from his own intelligence in a hostile world is a crock of shit. But he and people like him will never acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things, because they feel disconnected and oppressed. That religious tenet underlies all of their thinking. They're blissful in their unhappiness, because they're sure they know what's wrong and who is responsible. They take pride in their strength and ruthlessness. The ones with the most integrity really will accept death if they're unable to maintain life under the harsh terms they have endorsed. But most of your "live free or die" types have already agreed to be a little less free and live a bit longer. You will hardly ever get one to admit it, though.

Collectivists exhibit a similar religious devotion to the virtues of their view. The better future leans more to collective efforts that will improve the average for everyone. Yes, that will make the super-wealthy obsolete, but the super wealthy don't provide much value in return for our investment. The hell of it is that nearly every actual religion has some good principles along with their heavy component of destructive bullshit. You choose a way forward based on what you expect the future to look like.

The ruthless future is full of fire and blood, conflict and conquest, the rise and fall of empires. It unleashes the most ambitious passions, granting freedom to the strong and trampling the weak. For those who fancy themselves strong, it sounds like heaven. However you end up, if you gave it your absolute best shot, you ended up where you deserved to end up. It cannot be a peaceful future, because the super ambitious and greedy will take everything they can get, and hold it until someone more powerful blasts them out of the top spot. Armies will clash over and over across the trampled and scorched fields of endless battle. If too many people refuse to fight, the power structure will freeze in place, leaving most of the population to toil as underlings while a tiny minority controls the wealth and enjoys the leisure.

The United States Constitution accidentally provided a mechanism for citizen government that would make the actual bloody warfare unnecessary, if enough citizens could agree on what to demand from their government, and what limits to set on the private sector to keep it from becoming the de facto government. Just as our environmental neglect is at a crisis point, so is our civic neglect at the last intersection before the doors close against us and we have to accept slavery or bloody revolution.

I don't give the bloody revolution very good odds, because the environmental crisis will go all to hell while we're trying to hold off a professional military with our AR-15s and pipe bombs. We can die gloriously on principle, but that's about it. Meanwhile, if we'd gotten our shit together and been a bit more collective, we could have straightened out both the environmental issues and the governmental issues.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.

November 2014; a haiku

Flags of fall decay
foretell a brutal winter:
right-wing campaign signs.

Conservative conceit

It's been almost a year since a relative of mine used the conservative assertion that some person or persons we were discussing "isn't old enough to be conservative yet." It still bothers me coming from a family member, when I might have brushed it off from some idiot on the street, the television or in an opinion column.

I first ran across this snotty put-down back in the 1990s. I'm sure it's older than that, but that's how long I've had to be aware of it. It's one more subtle way to turn a discussion of issues into an exchange of insults. By all means, be patronizing.

As further proof that I'm living my life backwards, I have steadily grown less conservative as I have gained life experience and listened to the stories of more and more people. I have my limits, but anyone to my right would surely say I am and have been headed in the wrong direction.

Over the years I have steadily scoured out remnants of racism, sexism and homoanxiety I had acquired simply by growing up privileged and white in the 1960s and '70s. Sure, lots of white people were braver and more noble in support of the advancement of all the repressed and downtrodden, and others were far worse in continuing the oppression, but in the middle were doofuses like me who laughed at certain jokes without thinking hard about them, who treated women at least ever so slightly like a prey species and worried about whether we might be homosexual because male classmates were questioning our manhood. Even referring to heterosexual orientation as manhood, as if it was the only form of it, is a holdover from a more simple-minded past.

Fiscal conservatism can be sensible. I don't like to waste money, even if I do get along with all sorts of freaks and weirdos and believe that no one should make 700 times as much money as someone else who has a job and tries to be useful. I happen to believe that the government established by the US Constitution is basically a good model for addressing a bad situation, namely the need to have a government to take care of the routine details of running a society that allows for ample citizen input. The channels of input have been bought out by financially powerful interests masquerading as "the Private Sector." If they can be reclaimed, the big old rickety ship of state might actually start working for the benefit of all once again.

Conservatism in its worst form tends to reject ideas based on their source and to act on the basis of fear. While the conservative may brandish weapons and say warlike things, it is the emotional first line of defense against a world perceived as inherently hostile. If they are correct, and the human race is incorrigibly violent and duplicitous, I'm even happier not to join anyone's hate club and not to have subjected any offspring to the Planet of the Assholes.

I know my relative's fear springs from a time he was very small and still innocent, and had the very bad fortune to be thrust into the middle of desegregation in the schools in a city that was only just recovering from a period of racial violence. Oops. He's not a swastika-wearing skinhead, but he's one of those people who still keeps the N-word available in his vocabulary to describe dark persons who do things of which he does not approve.

Other influences have contributed to solidifying his position. I never argue about it. There's no point. Everyone has to try to find methods that get them successfully through one day and the next for as long as they keep getting more days. While I believe that many -- if not most - of the positions strongly held by today's conservatives are bad for the future of humanity, I know that no one can change this by acts of force. And if it can't be changed by persistent spread of knowledge and a gentle insistence on productive discussion and action, it won't be changed at all. So back we come to the self-fulfilling prophecy of conservative dystopia. They'll have been right because their intransigence brought about the culture of violence and distrust they feared existed all along. The only freedom comes through the skillful use of weapons against whoever tries to muscle in on you.

Bummer.