Rad Geek People's Daily

As you probably know by now, mercy was denied, and Stanley Tookie Williams was murdered by the state of California at 12:35 am this morning. In other news, none of his alleged victims came back to life and there are no reports of murders having been deterred in the state of California.

Here are some things I don’t care about today.

I don’t care whether Tookie repented, deep down in his heart, or whether he was trying to put on a good face in order to save his skin.

I don’t care whether Tookie’s trial was fair or not.

I don’t care about whether Tookie was innocent or guilty of the crimes for which he was slaughtered.

I don’t care about whether Tookie was innocent or guilty of a bunch of other crimes that he has or hasn’t copped to.

I don’t give a damn about what kind of message mercy would have sent. Or what kind of message slaughtering him did send.

And if I hear one more goddamned professional blowhard cheerfully pontificating about the calculated electoral pandering that informed Governor Schwarzenegger’s deliberations over a man’s life, as if there were nothing unexpected or wrong with snuffing out a human life in order to make sure that your political base stays behind you, I am going to scream. And cry.

Regardless of the fickle electoral preferences of California Republicans, the messages that the State’s Harrow might inscribe into a man’s body for the edification of unnamed others, his guilt or innocence, the adequacy of his trial, or the inner state of his soul, Tookie would have posed no more credible threat to anyone alive in San Quentin without the possibility of parole than he does now that he has been poisoned to death. I wouldn’t presume to know whether he, or anyone in this vale of tears, deserved to live or deserved to die. What could give me the right to say? More to the point, what ever gave the hangmen and politicians of the state of California the right to say?

I do know that if he did deserve to die, we would have no right to give him what he deserves. Blood vengeance is not ours to dispense. Would you have sanctioned the premeditated murder if one of the other inmates managed to break out and slit Tookie’s throat in the middle of the night, just ’cause he deserved to die? If so, why? If not, what makes the relevant moral difference between the criminal and the State’s hangman?

The death penalty is the definitive expression of what the power of the imperium means. It means that the State claims a special right to control you, to beat you, to tie you down, and to kill you, at its own pleasure and discretion, a claim that would be universally met with indignation and horror if it came from anyone else, if it weren’t covered with the robes and the crown. The death penalty — an act of State-sanctioned murder whether the victim is good or evil, innocent or guilty, redeemed or sinful — shows the State in all of its power and all of its glory, in the mirror that flatters not.

The State is Death. That is its power. That is its justice. That is its law.

At 12:35 a.m., it claimed Tookie Williams. It must be stopped before it claims even one more life.

Further reading:

• Radley Balko 2005-12-07: Cory Maye
• [Echidne of the Snakes 2005-12-13: Stanley Tookie Williams](http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/20051201echidneofthesnakesarchive.html#113450395682378838](http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/20051201echidneofthesnakesarchive.html#113450395682378838)
• Jeanne d’Arc @ This Modern World 2005-12-13: Yes, we kill people.
• GT 2004-12-15: God damn it.
• GT 2002-06-24: Wallace Fugate is guilty as hell.
• Political Programme FAQ: Death Penalty

Some days you just wish that you had a GuerrillaSign, like a church bell or a big spotlight that you could shine up on the clouds to call for the Guerrilla Girls wherever they were needed.

A gallery has replaced a painting of a naked man with a female nude after it received dozens of complaints.

The Mark Jason Gallery, in Bell Street, Marylebone, removed the offending image by artist Edd Pearman after more than 30 men voiced their objection.

Some said the picture would upset women, others said it was pornographic.

Mark Jason said: We did not anticipate just how uncomfortable and angry London men would feel about Edd’s screenprint of the naked man.

— BBC 2005-12-10: Male nude a flop with men

Thank goodness that family-friendly female nudes were ready at hand to replace it with. And thank goodness that those selfless men were there to speak up. How else would Mr. Jason have ever found out that the picture would upset women?

Everyone’s got their own Friday afternoon game to play, and this one’s mine. I’m introducing a new recurring feature for the Rad Geek People’s Daily: Over My Shoulder, quotes (mostly without commentary) from something I’ve been reading this week. Irony to one side, this isn’t really intended as bragging about my reading list; the point is that what I’m reading is a way of getting at things I’ve been thinking about, even if I don’t yet have a confident position to stake out yet; and also that there are a lot of people out there who are smarter than I am, and not everything they write is something I can link to in online commentary or read the whole thing weblog posts. So here’s the rules.

1. The quote should be something that I have read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It has to be something I’ve actually read, and not something that I’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post my favorite quote.)

2. It should be a matter of one or a few paragraphs.

3. There’s no commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

4. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t. Whether I do or not isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

If you like this idea, feel free to repeat it or adapt it as you see fit on your own page or in the comments. (Just please don’t call it a meme: there’s no such thing. Thanks.)

And we’re off. The inaugural selection is a bit I read yesterday on the bus, from the first chapter of Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (all emphasis is in the original):

Fraina argued that what he called state capitalism, an expansive capitalist state embracing administrative centralization and militarization, had rendered the old socialist expectations irrelevant. Liberalism, as it had taken ideological form (Fraina found fault in the philosophy of pragmatism), now offered the intellectual counterpart to AFL unionism, narrowing the range of radical thought, aiding and assisting the upper classes and upper strata of labor against the threat of the irrational lower classes and of the world’s suffering peoples at large.

Fraina directed the sharpest of his polemics against William English Walling, a renowned socialist intellectual en route to becoming an AFL spokesman. Walling had observed shrewdly that socialists had been blind to the inner strengths of capitalism, the increased power and strength that it will gain through state capitalism and the increased wealth that will come through a beneficent and scientific policy of production. Being regulated, the system would be successively transformed by the mechanics of a complex struggle: a state capitalism under the hegemony of big and petty bourgeoisie would besupplanted by a state socialism under the petty bourgeoisie and the skilled workers. In the process, the allegedly messianic character of socialism would fall away entirely, and the social question would become no more than the struggle by those who have less, against those who have more in matters of income, hours, leisure, places of living, associations, and opportunity. Such a struggle could be properly ordered, guided by reform through existing institutions. The disorder implied by the ideas and very constituency of the IWW was, finally, a danger to the social détente which could make this benign process possible.

Even in AFL circles, confidence in such a benign outcome wavered. As the class conflicts of 1909-1913 took shape, skilled workers once again began to perceive that the emerging system often delivered fewer benefits for them than thinkers like Walling predicted. Solidarity campaigns of mutual support in strikes, like a dramatic one by railroad workers over several years, violated the AFL norm of workers with union contracts crossing picket lines and in effect scabbing on those still striking. The attempt at coordination by railroad brotherhoods, the appearance of metal trades councils, and (by the time of the war) the appeal for solidarity among the skilled and unskilled often bypassed the idea of political or electoral socialism altogether for a more popular American idea: workers’ control of production. Many local AFL members and even leaders unmoved by socialism mulled the idea, while Gompers’s circle rejected it out of hand as impossible and undesirable, an erasure of the line between labor’s prerogative and capital’s rights.

Conservative chiefs of AFL unions ranging from the hatters and pattern-makers to tailors, sheet metal workers, carpenters, and machinists, all lost their offices to socialist-backed candidates during 1911-1912 on grounds of solidarity versus conciliation with employers. A combination of administrative manipulation, political alliances with Democrats inside labor, and forceful support of labor conservatives by the Catholic Church was required to bring anti-socialist functionaries back into union office. The renewed victory of Gompers was sealed by the events of the First World War. As labor surged forward, anti-war ideas were in many parts of the country forbidden in published or spoken form, and those who voiced them faced deportation, arrest, beatings by vigilantes, and even lynching. The IWW, which carefully refrained from any political statements, was nevertheless suppressed in a fashion unknown hitherto in the United States, save perhaps for the attacks on Reconstructionist radicals in the post-Civil War South. This time, the modern version of the Ku Klux Klan had the presidential seal of approval and top labor leaders’ avid cooperation. Gompers demanded political acquiescence to the war, or at least silence, as the price of admission for newcomers to the AFL’s own swelling wartime bureaucracy. Upwardly mobile intellectuals around labor, like Walling, made their contribution by insisting that the U.S. economic empire that had expanded dramatically in wartime was benevolent, and that the leaders of the AFL, in their appeals for loyalty to government and indifference to those suppressed, accurately represented the interests of the working class.

Regulated state capitalism did indeed take shape, even by 1917, though it more resembled Fraina’s nightmares than Walling’s dreams. As newspapers were suppressed, Socialist Party offices destroyed, and local and national anti-war spokespeople, including Eugene Debs, sentenced to long terms in prison, Fraina acutely observed that the newly regulated system included the extension of the functions of the federal government, regulation equally of capital and labor, the Strong Man policy of administrative centralization, and the mobilization of everything by a national administrative control of industry. Having failed to organize an international system to regulate the transfer of profits among ruling groups, capitalism now rended the world, and (as Fraina correctly anticipated the worse horrors to come in the next world war and after) prepared the basis for future global conflicts. In that process, Fraina argued, leaders like Gompers could be depended upon to serve their true masters, while former socialists like Walling would tag along and rationalize the process–as perhaps termporarily dreadful but inevitable, and ultimately beneficial.

— Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, pp. 69-71.

Shorter Sabotta: Here’s two ways of thinking about what you are doing when you have a discussion with somebody else, and want to convince her or him of something.

1. I am trying to give you some reasons, which may not have occurred to you, to believe something that you don’t yet believe.

2. I am doing memetic engineering, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others.

Which way would you rather think about what you’re doing when you talk with other people? Which way would you rather other people thought about what they are doing when they talk with you?

Further reading

• GT 2005-01-25: Friday Anti-meme

[This originally appeared as a guest post that I wrote for Richard Chappell’s blog Philosophy, et cetera]

Here’s one of the few canonical philosophical puzzles that I had learned about by the age of five. What’s the truth-value of the following statement?

(L) This statement (L) is false.

The problem, of course, is that if (L) is true then it’s false, and if (L) is false then it’s true. Thus, any theory of truth that assigns a truth-value to (L) is internally contradictory, since the theory will (inter alia) include the contradictory truth-ascription:

(TL) L is true if and only if L is false.

Since there are no true contradictions, a theory of truth must not assign any truth-value to (L) at all. But how do you doing it? If a statement hasn’t got a truth-value, then the usual take is that they are, in some respect, nonsense; that is, they fail to make an assertion — just as “Cat mat on the sat the” fails to make an assertion. The canonical approach to (L) in the 20th century has been to try to come up with some principled means of ruling (L) out of the language by means of setting up the right structure of rules beforehand (just as you can point to the preexisting rules of syntax to show that “Cat mat on the sat the” doesn’t amount to a complete sentence). The most famous attempt, and the inspiration of many of the subsequent attempts, has been Tarski’s attempt to sidestep the Liar Paradox by means of segmenting language into object-language and meta-language layers. The idea being that, if you do this assiduously, you can avoid self-referential paradoxes because self-reference won’t be possible in languages whose sentences can be ascribed truth-values; because they can only be ascribed truth-values within a meta-language that contains the names of the object language’s sentences and truth-predicates for those sentences. I have a lot of problems with this approach; a full explanation of them is something that I ought to spell out (indeed, have spelled out) elsewhere. But here’s a quick gloss of one of the reasons: Tarski and the people inspired by him started setting up ex ante rules to try to rule out self-referential sentences because it’s self-reference that makes the Liar Paradox paradoxical (and that makes for similar paradoxes in similar sentences; exercise for the reader: show how “If this sentence is true, then God exists” is both necessarily true and strictly entails the existence of God). But there’s an obvious and general problem for the method: there are self-referential sentences which are unparadoxical, and indeed self-referential sentences which are true. Here’s an example which may or may not cause trouble for Tarskian theories, depending on the details:

(E) This sentence (E) is in English.

(E) is truth-valuable; and in fact it is true. (If, on the other hand, it had said “This sentence is in French,” it would have been false.) Now, this may cause trouble for the Tarskian method and it may not, depending on the details of a particular account. (Sometimes people want to ban all self-referential sentences; sometimes they are more careful and claim that object languages might be able to name their own sentences but only so long as they don’t contain the truth-predicates for their own language.) But even if (E) is allowed, you haven’t solved the problem. There are plenty of self-referential truth-ascribing sentences that aren’t paradoxical, too. Here’s one:

(EM) Either this sentence (EM) is true, or this sentence (EM) is false.

Unlike (L), this causes no logical paradoxes. If you suppose that it’s false, that means that it turns out to be true — since the second disjunct, “this sentence (EM) is false” turns out to be true; meaning that it cannot be false. But it can be true, without contradiction. So it has to be true, if it has any truth-value at all. That shouldn’t be surprising; it’s an instance of the law of the excluded middle, and all instances of the law of the excluded middle are true.

Now, you might think that (EM)’s relationship to ordinary talk is attenuated enough, and the reasons for thinking it unparadoxical are technical enough, that it might be an acceptable loss if some other technical stuff that saves us from (L) happens to rule out (EM) too. I’d be inclined to agree, except that (EM) isn’t the only example I had up my sleeve, either. Here’s another. In the Prologue to the Travels, Marco Polo wrote,

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.

Let M be the conjunction of all the assertions that Marco Polo makes in his book. The book contains nothing but the truth if and only if M is true, but that the book contains nothing but the truth is one of the many assertions in the book, so “M is true” is one of the conjuncts of M. Thus:

(M) This conjunction (M) is true, and Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road to Cathay, and served in the court of the Great Khan, and observed the barbarous customs of lesser Armenia, and … and … and ….

But it’s either true or false that Marco Polo’s book contains nothing but the truth; that assertion is a standard bit of understood language (passages just like it are a near-universal feature of traveler’s tales, or other extraordinary stories where the author feels the need to reassure you that she’s not making things up). If your theory of language throws it out as nonsense, then your “theory of language” needs to be thrown out, on the grounds that it’s not semantically serious. (Whatever it’s a theory of may be interesting, but it’s something other than language as it actually exists.)

Now, like Polo, I may have been fudging just a bit in what I said. I suggested that M isn’t paradoxical; I don’t think it is, but there is a way to make it seem paradoxical. Lots of readers have doubted that Polo was telling the truth; some of them, for example, were unimpressed by the evidence that he had ever served in the court of the Great Khan; others weren’t so sure about the tales of dog-headed men or giant birds that consumed elephants. Whatever the case, they believed that Marco Polo made at least two false assertions in his book: (1) the claim about his journeys that they doubted, and (2) the claim that his book contained nothing but the truth. Call these the normal skeptics. I’m sure there were also a few readers (however credulous they would have to have been), who believed that the Travels really did contain nothing but the truth; that is, that there were no false assertions in the book, including the assertion that the book contained no false assertions. Call these the normal believers. But now imagine a third kind of reader, a perverse skeptic — a philosopher, of course — who noticed that you could gloss the contents of the book as M, and who decided that she believed everything that Polo said in the book about his journeys, from the customs of lesser Armenia to the domains of the Great Khan to the giant birds. She believes everything in the book, except … there is one assertion that she thinks is false — that is, (1) the assertion that everything in the book is true, and nothing else.

There are a couple of different ways that you could approach the difficulty. One way is to point out that the perverse skeptic really is being perverse. That’s just not how you can sensibly read the book. Either you think that nothing in the book is false, or you think that at least two things are; the assurance of truthfulness just can’t be a candidate for falseness until something else has been shown false. But if you list the truth-conditions of M, then “M is true” is one among them, and it’s hard to see how you could stop the perverse skeptic from going down the list and picking that one as the only one to be false. Certainly Polo doesn’t say “The rest of the book besides this sentence contains nothing but the truth.” And given that he did say what he did, I’d be hard put to say that “this book contains nothing but the truth” isn’t one of the untruths denied by the sentence, if something else in the book is false.

Another way to approach it is this: you can imagine an argument between the normal skeptic and the normal believer; whether or not one ever managed to convince the other in the end, you can in principle identify the sorts of reasons that they might offer to try to determine whether Polo really did tell the truth about the birds, or about the Khan, or…, and you can say what things would be like if one or the other is true. But what kind of argument could the normal believer and the perverse skeptic have? How would one convince the other? Or, to take it beyond the merely psychological point to the epistemological point, what kind of reasons could the normal believer possibly give to the perverse skeptic to give up the belief that “this book contains nothing but the truth” is false? (She can’t point to all the true statements about his journey; the perverse skeptic already believes in those.) Or, to take it beyond the epistemological point to the ontological point: what sort of truth-makers could even in principle determine whether the normal believer or the perverse skeptic is in the right?

So there is a problem with M, to be sure. But the problem is not the same as the problem posed by L: there’s no logical contradiction involved, so its self-referentiality sets off no logical explosions. And the solution can’t be the same either: the radical move of abandoning the sentence as meaningless works with (L), where there’s just no right way to take it, but it doesn’t help us out with (M), where there obviously is a right way to take it (i.e., as the normal readers take it, and not as the perverse reader takes it).

So there has to be some right way to go about ascribing a truth-value to (M) (and also (E)). Whatever it is, it may very well also explain how we can ascribe a truth-value to (EM). But it certainly cannot also mean that we try to ascribe a truth-value to (L). What is it? Is there some kind of principled and motivated general rule that we can add to our logical grammar, so as to get M and E and maybe EM but no L? If so, what in the world would it be? If not, then what do we do?

(I have my own answers; for the details, you can look up Sentences That Can’t Be Said in the upcoming issue of Southwest Philosophy Review. Or contact me if you’re interested enough to want a copy of the essay. But I want to pose the puzzle and see what y’all think about it as it stands.)

Update 2005-12-08: I fixed a minor error in phrasing. Thanks to Blar for pointing it out in comments.