(Story via Holly @ feministe 2008-02-17. Video thanks to GLAAD 2008-02-13.)

There are a couple of different points to make about conservative reactions to the recent story of a government elementary school in Douglas County, Colorado making some accommodations for a transgender girl in the second grade. Both are well illustrated by the ridiculous discussion of the story by professional blowhard Neil Cavuto on Fox News.

The first point to make is about the first-order issue — how to run an elementary school and what to do if a kid who has been living and attending school as a boy decides that she wants to live as a girl instead. As far as this goes, Cavuto’s reaction is based on a tissue of nastiness, nonsense, and a few plain lies. As far as I can tell, for example, the claim that any student other than this little girl will be using unisex bathrooms is simply false — the school will have its normal girls’ and boys’ bathrooms; the girl in question just won’t be forced to use them. The claim that it will cost millions of dollars also seems to be something that Cavuto just made up out of thin air; the school already has plenty of bathrooms, doesn’t need to build more, and is just reclassifying a couple of already-existing bathrooms — which from the sound of it are probably single-stall rooms in the teacher’s lounge, or something similar — for this girl’s use. More broadly, the entire discussion is premised on the positively bizarre notion that the school should be ragged on for bending over backwards to suit this girl’s delicate sensibilities, just so long as they don’t follow the Genital Correctness Busybody Blowhard Brigade in deliberately trying to make the kid’s life more unpleasant, e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by forcing her to use the boys’ bathroom when she doesn’t want to use it, or by refusing to intervene against bullies as they would with any other child being bullied for any other reason, or by harassing her, punishing her, or throwing her out of school for wearing the wrong set of clothes. Apparently it’s the acme of liberal hypersensitivity and authoritarian political correctness run amok, and indeed it’s robbing children everywhere of their childhood (!), if you should ever fail to go out of your way to be as obnoxious as possible toward an eight-year-old kid, who never did anything to you, all in the name of heteropatriarchal gender-role social engineering.

The second point to make is about a second-order issue — whether or not the local government in Douglas should be taking a role in promoting one way of running a school or interacting with transgender students over others. Cavuto tries to invoke the issue implicitly by repeatedly referring to tax dollars, and although his specific claims about millions of tax dollars are obvious bullshit, there is a legitimate point buried under it. It should not be the local government’s business to promote either a tolerant or a punitive school environment for this kid — because while I think it’s stupid for any school to harass this kid or try to force her into the right gender identity, I also think that it is tyrannical for any government to force local taxpayers to pay for projects that they personally find abhorrent (whether because they are being forced to pay for violations of their own religious beliefs, or for any other reason). Nor should local parents be forced to enroll their kids in a school that allows openly transgender students to participate in classes. Again, I think that’s a stupid policy to make, but is tyrannical for the government to force parents to put their children in environments that they deeply believe that their children shouldn’t be in.

If we had an argument to the effect that local taxpayers should be able to withhold funding from schools that establish policies they consider wrongheaded, or to the effect that anti-trans local parents should be free to withdraw their kids from this school and make other arrangements (homeschooling, parochial schooling, or whatever), without having to jump the government’s normal punitive bureaucratic hurdles, and without being forced to continue paying for a school that they no longer feel to be fit to educate children, then I would be perfectly willing to take their side on that one — I may disagree with everything that they want to teach kids, but I’ll defend to the death their right to teach it. But, of course, principled small-government conservatives that they are, Cavuto and the rest of the GCBBB are constitutionally incapable of making that kind of second-order argument. Instead, we find a lot of phony-concern hand-wringing from letter writers about local government and school authorities promoting gender confusion, deviance, professional help, a lifetime of pain, etc. (As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that the girl is at all confused; she seems to be pretty clear on what she wants. And there’s no reason to believe that her decision to live as a girl promises a lifetime of pain, unless and except to the extent that other people, i.e. these same busybody blowhards, go out of their way to make it painful. There’s no promise here; only a threat.) But it is no more the job of government authorities to promote conformity to traditional gender roles and their assignment based on biological sex, than it is their job to promote the opposite; it would be just as immoral as them to force me to pay for harassing and penalizing transgender children who would otherwise be happy as clams until they fit back into their proper gender, when I consider that abhorrent. Cavuto, meanwhile, shows his principled conservative bona fides by arguing that no matter how many transgender kids there may be in elementary schools, they are far from the majority. We live in a country where majority rules, which apparently, to his mind, means that when 99% of kids follow traditional gender norms for the sex they were assigned at birth, it must be the government’s job to direct school authorities to treat the remaining 1% like shit, so as to spare the 99% from the terrible confusion of possibly learning something. The majority rules, the minority drools, and if you don’t like it they’ll force you to pay for their Right-wing social engineering anyway. And, oh yes, you will pay.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-08: Lazy Linking on Liberatory Learning
• GT 2005-10-07: Small-government conservatives
• GT 2005-03-09: The Most Depressing Photograph in the World
• GT 2001-12-10: Gender terrorism in Nashville

Due to the United States government’s immigration and customs Securitate, a 14-day-old baby boy with a serious heart condition, whose life was supposed to have been saved by emergency medical care, is dead.

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa– American Samoa’s delegate to the U.S. Congress is calling for an investigation into the death of a baby at Honolulu International Airport.

Delegate Eni Faleomavaega has asked the Department of Homeland Security to begin an investigation into death of 14-day-old Michael Tony Futi last Friday.

The baby had been flown to Honolulu for emergency heart surgery. He died while detained inside a customs’ room at the Honolulu airport with his mother and a nurse.

— Associated Press (2008-02-15): Baby detained, dies in Honolulu airport; child had been flown in for emergency heart surgery, official says

The family plans to sue the federal government for compensation. They certainly deserve it. But if their case isn’t thrown out of court on the excuse of sovereign immunity–which is what will probably happen–then the unaccountable thugs who murdered this family’s baby boy still won’t pay a damned cent for what they did. What they’ll do, public servants that they are, is to help themselves to tax money to cover the pay-out, thus sticking the rest of us, who had nothing to do with their asinine security theater or their callous indifference to human life, with the bill.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-30: Oops. Our bad.
• GT 2004-04-07: Death and Taxes
• GT 2004-03-20: The War on Iraq One Year On: Countdown to Regime Change

• If you’ve decided that you’re not interested in helping limited-governmentalists make the trains run on time, one of the first replies you are always going to get from minarchists and minarcho-enablers is some snide remarks about how you must advocate doing nothing out of a prissy or sanctimonious concern for ideological purity. Of course, this reply is usually plain nonsense, since it depends on the completely unargued, and in fact easily refuted, principle that the only alternatives on the table are (1) partisan politicking in government elections, or else (2) doing nothing. Of course these are not the two options, and the only reasons that you would act as if they are is (a) if you are wearing the conceptual blinders of statist political analysis, or else (b) you don’t have a clear or concrete enough conception of what someone might put down for option (3). I tried to make my point clear about problem (a) in my follow-up post; but for a more straightforward approach to the problem, see also this great post tackling problem (b) from Francois Tremblay at Check Your Premises (2008-01-22): Eight ways you can personally help to smash the State: One of the problems with Anarchism is that, unlike other political ideologies which rely on the system, the courses of actions one can take are not obvious. People who are convinced by the arguments are discouraged by the notion that there's nothing I can do, and new Anarchists, not seeing any way out, turn to political means as the only solution. … So what can we do to resist? Not as a movement, but personally? There are a number of things that a single individual can do that brings concrete, if small, change. Read the whole thing, and note especially numbers 5–8.

• Thomas Knapp, a market anarchist and sometime Libertarian Party activist, who has used the freedom train metaphor often in the past (and who I quoted in Take the A-Train), has a lot of thoughtful remarks in reply to my criticism, in KN@PPSTER (2008-02-01): Train kept a-rollin’, part 1 of ???. There’s some good points here, both by way of objection and by way of agreement, which I should have linked some time ago, and which provide a lot of great discussion-fodder and deserve a reply when my brain is a bit less fried than it is right now. I’m not especially convinced by some of Knapp’s rejoinders — e.g. I think that the claim that it’s easier to get from Anarchotopia once the train has already pulled in at Minarchistan is refuted by, or at least faces an as-yet unanswered challenge from, precisely the points that I raised in my follow-up post. But while I unfry my brain enough to talk at more length, you should definitely read the whole thing.

• Mutualists and counter-economists alike may find something of interest in Michel Bauwens’s mention of the unMoney Convergence – a conference on money, liberation and systems change, to be held in Seattle April 14–16. The convergence will discuss the emergence of alternatives to government money (community currencies, Internet currencies, open currencies, etc.); the development of open, peer-to-peer infrastructures for gifting, sharing, and exchange; and efforts to move to open money systems over the next ten years. (The convergence will no doubt include plenty of crankery and rubbish along with plenty of genuinely good discussion and perhaps even mildly thrilling developments. But that’s par for the course. Again, more stuff that I’d be interested to talk about and hash out — e.g. the tensions between genuine mutual money and community exchanges, and progressive Monopoly-money deliberately obstructing non-local use — once back in a post-brain-fried state.) Anyway, read the whole thing and follow the links.

• Finally, for a change of speed, we have the latest Radical Healthcare Reform proposal from New York Times humor columnist Paul Krugman (2008-02-04): Clinton, Obama, Insurance, in which it is revealed that the most significant policy difference between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s scheme for massive government subsidies to third-party health insurance bureaucracies and Barack Obama’s scheme for massive government subsidies to third-party health insurance bureaucracies is that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plan would force everybody to buy health coverage from a big corporate insurer, whether it’s in their financial best interest or not; whereas Barack Obama’s plan, although forcing everyone to subsidize other people’s use of big corporate insurers through taxes, would at least give each individual person some choice over whether or not it’s in their own best interest to buy corporate health insurance for herself. Krugman then suggests that reveals a major defect in Obama’s plan and a major virtue of Clinton’s plan. Because, apparently, the purely statistical achievement of universal coverage is an obvious good, regardless of what that coverage amounts to or what the cost of achieving it is, whereas the notion that a bug-government-mandated captive market for big, bureaucratic insurance companies might not always be the best way for each and every one of 300,000,000 very different people with very different needs to get their healthcare costs covered, is an idea that could only be advanced by the dupes or hirelings of the same insurance firms that stand to massively profit from this subsidy program (!).

  This is, apparently, what passes for Leftist economics among the professional statist-blowhard class in America. Libertarian mutualists, i.e. the genuinely Leftist alternative to the corporate liberal managerialism and progressive statism fraudulently passed off as Leftism today, know that radical healthcare reform would mean something very different — the abolition of government obstacles in healthcare and the emergence of grassroots networks and institutions for mutual aid among the working class, not a massive effort by the policy elite to universalize and ossify the existing boss-and-bureaucrat model of third-party healthcare coverage.

(Thanks to Elinor 2008-02-01 for the link.)

Last year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a gang of three cops — Phillip MacKenzie, Tara Doiron and Brendan Harvey — showed up to intervene in a fight between a seventeen year old girl and her mother. The mother called them in when the girl threatened to damage some property in the house. By the time the police arrived, the girl was calm and it’s likely that the cops could just have left things be, or spent a little bit of time talking to everyone like civilized people in order to make sure that everything would be alright. But, of course, this is completely unacceptable from the standpoint of the police, when there are Bad Teens on the loose, so instead they escalated the confrontation and tried to force her out of the house, so they could proceed with whatever they imagined they needed to proceed with. She argued with them, which a fair number of cops seem to have been trained to treat as a criminal offense, and when the cops decided to arrest her for daring to talk back, there was what the papers call an altercation. When an altercation goes on between a 17 year old girl and three armed, professional cops, what that means is that she struggled briefly and the pigs responded by tackling her, and then, just for good measure, blasting her twice in a row with a 50,000-volt electric shock from their tasers while she was lying helpless in her own bed. After having three armed cops gang up on a teenaged girl to beat and shock her into submission, they then charged her with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer — the first charge a bogus non-crime when the arrest itself was completely arbitrary, and the second charge an apparent exercise in dreadful farce.

Of course, when The Matter Is Investigated by the police, they will either (a) act as if the cops did nothing wrong, fabricate some incredibly tortured military-necessity excuse without questioning whether the goal of arresting the girl ever needed to be accomplished in the first place, and cite some incredibly vague Official Procedures for the use of force, as if that unquestionably ended the argument; or else (b) failing that, issue some mild administrative sanctions against the cops and write the whole thing off as Yet Another Isolated Incident. In fact, the case is entirely typical — because a massive sense of entitlement; a habit of barging in where you’re not needed and refusing to leave until things are settled to your own satisfaction; a contemptuous indifference to the perceptions, interests, needs, or consent of those you are putatively there to serve and protect; a strategy of needlessly escalate confrontations; a habit of using belligerence to take control of situations that your own actions have made hostile; the casual use of techniques that inflict incredible pain on your victims in order to make them comply with arbitrary orders; a willingness to hurt or arrest your victim in order to end an argument; and an expectation of more or less complete administrative, civil, and criminal impunity, no matter how senseless your orders, no matter how needless your use of violence, and no matter how obviously helpless or harmless your victim may be — are part and parcel of the environment that cops do their dirty work in, from the first day of training to the buddy-thug culture of their departments to the cultural excuse-making and overt legal privileges that insulate them from the expectations that anyone else would be held to outside of the world of rampaging statist power-trips. We already know that cops have no problem electrifying prepubescent children and alleged salad-bar thieves; no problem serving and protecting the hell out of 82-year-old women as part of a care check or repeatedly shocking a young man sleeping in his own house; no problem beating the shit out of teenaged girls in order to arrest them for not cleaning up spilled cake well enough or being out too late at night, and then charging the girl that they violently confronted, and who they outweigh by a hundred pounds or more, with criminal assault. So, while this case is outrageous, why should it be surprising? The only thing that’s unusual is that, for once, somebody in the legal system — Anne Derrick, the youth court judge who took the girl’s resisting-arrest and assault case — actually drew back the veil of Law Enforcement, acquitted the girl of all charges, and called the police on their shit:

A Halifax Youth Court judge criticized three police officers Tuesday for their arrest of a teenage girl, who was tackled in her own bed and shocked twice with a stun gun last February.

The spectacle of a 17-year-old girl being Tasered in her bedroom is a very disturbing and disconcerting one, Halifax Youth Court Judge Anne Derrick said in her ruling on the charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

I find the police acted outside the scope of their authority in arresting [the girl] and that she was entitled to resist and committed no offence in doing so, and I acquit her of the charges before the court.

Derrick also found that the police escalated the situation leading to the arrest.

— CBC News (2008-01-30): Halifax judge slams police for using Taser on teen girl

Meanwhile, the young woman, now 18, having spent an entire year of her life trying to clear away this nonsense, plans to file a complaint with the police department, now that she has finally been vindicated in court. She is also considering a civil suit. I hope that she sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they've got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the police or the local government will settle the case out of court, and then, public servants that they are, they will send the bill straight to a bunch of perfectly innocent taxpayers, while the thugs MacKenzie, Doiron and Harvey go on terrorizing innocent people in the name of public safety, suffering some mild administrative sanction at the worst.

If you're baffled that cops would go on committing these kind of outrages, over and over again, in so many different cities in the U.S. and Canada, never exhibiting any interest at all in introspection or critical re-evaluation of their institutional culture beyond a bureaucratic review of whether cops should be carrying tasers (as if this were some kind of equipment failure!), and never addressing any issues that this might raise other than the P.R. problems that it causes for the police department, well, that’s pretty much why. Why would they ever try to act accountably or responsibly when the existing framework of immunities and legal privileges granted them by the State virtually guarantees that they will never personally be held responsible or called to account for what they do?

Here’s a weird passage from Lew Rockwell’s article in the next-to-last Mises Institute newsletter. Not because the basic point being argued is false, but because of how the argument leaves off at the end:

Now, Ron Paul stands in this tradition of thinkers in every way. Even on the campaign stump, he speaks about the evil of fiat money and Fed management of the nation’s money stock. In a true sense, he says, we’ve put a cartelized gang of central planners in charge of the good that constitutes half of every economic exchange, and we are paying the price in terms of declining purchasing power, exchange-rate chaos, rampant debt, and growing crises in sector after sector.

Is there a way out? Most certainly! It goes by the name of gold. Make the dollar as good as gold and you eliminate the inflation problem and the business cycles that go along with it. Here is the great secret of the gold standard. The problem is not that it is unviable from the perspective of economics; the problem is that there are many people allied against it: the big banks, the creditor class, and government. You see, gold would provide a hard-core anchor for liberty. Under the right form of the gold standard, government could no longer spend with impunity or run up debt without limit. The resources it spent would have to be raised the old fashioned way.

… By stealing it?