Rad Geek People's Daily

(I owe the link to Alina Stefanescu’s commentary at Totalitarianism Today 2004/12/05.)

For the past couple decades or so, the mainstream of the gay rights movement has been insisting, as emphatically as they can and in every forum that they can find, that sexuality is determined by a more-or-less fixed sexual orientation and that sexual orientations are something innate–that is, either determined by genetics or by developmental factors during pregnancy. I understand how the tendency came about, in the face of bigoted bluster about the Evil Gay Agenda’s plans to recruit children, the deceptiveness and brutality of ex-gay aversion therapy programs, and more. But it’s an understandabe error, on any number of fronts. The cluster of ideas involved has any number of problems; one of the most fundamental is that it just bypasses the real argument. Let’s suppose, for example, that it turns out to be true that chemical effects on brain development in early pregnancy do have a major effect on adult sexuality, and that diet pills and thyroid medications really do make children much more likely to be gay if mothers take them during the first three months of pregnancy. What should we say about the discovery?

If you haven’t already got good grounds for saying that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or lesbian, then this discovery might make you less inclined to say that gay people can choose to be straight, or that the cultural environment you encounter in childhood can decide whether you’ll be gay or straight. But it won’t keep you from saying idiot things such as this (emphasis added):

These analyses support the conclusion that female offspring are more vulnerable to alterations in sexual orientation via exposure to a variety of prescription drugs, and suggest that this vulnerability is greatest during the first trimester.

Or this:

The finding adds to mounting concern over the use of slimming pills by women trying to lose weight. Prof Dornan said: All drugs can cross the placental barrier and, looking back, we weren’t so aware of what was going on inside the womb. Nowadays, the Royal College’s view is that women should not take drugs unless there is a clinical need.

Look, there are good medical reasons to be concerned about how medications taken during pregnancy affect children’s health at birth or later in life. But making your baby vulnerable to catching gay is not one of them. It’s not a birth defect, dummy. If there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then the increased likelihood of having a gay child ought to have no effect whatever on whether or not you decide to take pills in early pregnancy. (If it were discovered that diet pills made your child more vulnerable to having green eyes, would any researcher make comments like these?)

But it’s vital to notice that, even if the inntatist line on sexuality turns out to be true in every single respect, it does nothing to rule out either subtly (and perhaps unwittingly) homophobic comments like these, or stridently bigoted appeals from explicit homophobes. (Imagine Pat Robertson on television urging Christian mothers that taking thyroid medication during pregnancy makes the baby Jesus cry.) The fact is that there is nothing wrong with being gay–if it’s a choice, it’s not a wicked choice; if it’s a culturally cultivated taste, it’s not a pervse taste; and if it’s innate it’s not a congenital disease. But you can only say that if you have independent reasons for saying that there’s nothing wrong with gay romance or gay sexuality, aside from We can’t help it!

Gay liberation is a demand for the justice and respect that are due to rational human beings, whatever might happen to be under our loved ones’ underwear. Quibbling over whether our sexuality is ultimately up to us or not is an interesting scientific question, but it’s a political diversion. We shouldn’t waste our time on peripheral arguments to get homophobes to think of us as tragic accidents instead of depraved sinners; if we want to win, we need to head straight for the real argument, and we have to go all the way.

A new advice column–sure to be syndicated in a newspaper near you soon. Because everything is simpler when you reject the State as such.

Dear Dr. Anarchy: How could a dangerous provision be signed into law without anyone in Congress actually having read it?

Sincerely,
Worried in Washington

Worried: To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

Politicians are never going to stop being irresponsible. That is their job. I suggest that you dump them.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: My pharmacist is refusing to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception because he’s a sexist prick. What can I do?

Truly,
Bristling in Britain

Bristling: Your pharmacist only has the power to be a slimy control freak because a bunch of politicians–most of them men–have given him exclusive control over whether or not you and your neighbors can get needed medicine–by banning you from buying it over the counter. I suggest that you dump them immediately.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: We have reached the point where serious lawyers are being paid serious fees by a big company to shut down the PB&J operation of a grocery store. How can we fix a broken patent system?

Sincerely,
Flummoxed in Florida

Flummoxed: Abolish it.

Sincerely,
Dr. Anarchy

Dear Dr. Anarchy: Can this marriage be saved?

Yours,
Hopeful at the Home Journal

Hopeful: No. Marriage can’t be saved. Abolish it.

Yours,
Dr. Anarchy

Next week: Dr. Anarchy answers your tax questions!

I’ve been putting most things on the back burner for the past few days while I get together graduate school applications and polish off a few other tasks that have been on the to-do list for a bit too long. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure…

• Now that you’ve already liberated your Office software (thanks, OpenOffice.org!) and your web browser (thanks, Mozilla Firefox!), you can also reclaim your inbox with the public release of Mozilla Thunderbird, a top-notch open source, standalone e-mail client. It features (inter alia) adaptive spam filters, nice RSS / Atom newsfeed support, and extra-useful Saved Search folders. Migrating from AOL? Outlook? Outlook Express? Eudora? No problem! That’s the thing about open source software: they keep making software that works. Score another one for the free world.

• Patent protectionists show once again how they make our lives better and reward innovation. Another threat to technological civilization will no doubt soon be averted by further intellectual enclosure. (Thanks, Copyfight.)

• Fred Vincy has a thorough take-down of editorial hand-wringing over boys’ supposedly declining educational prospects. In fact, the whole thing is a huge sham (for some tangentially related points, see GT 2002-02-06: The Weird, Wild World of Anti-feminism), and as Fred points out, several steps of the argument apparently require you to presume that the money men make is more important than the money women make. It also includes, among other chicanery, this marvelous explanation of the problem: The small group of experts who research the problem only now is beginning to trace its outlines. It isn’t so much that schools have changed in ways that hurt boys. It’s that society has changed in ways that help girls. Helping girls? O tempora! O mores! (Perhaps someone at USA Today does need help with their verbal skills, after all…)

• George Bush really did tell Tony Blair The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur. You can test your knowledge of our Prince President’s gnomic wisdom at the BBC.

• Now that Fallujah had to be destroyed in order to save it, military commissars now have a free hand to build their model city in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Bright ideas for liberated Fallujah include apartheid-style passbooks for all Fallujans and possibly industrial conscription in which all work for Fallujan men is organized under military-style batallions and directed by Army commanders. (For those keeping score, that’s one of Leon Trotsky’s theses about the possible uses of the Red Army after the Civil War drew to a close. It managed to horrify even his fellow Bolsheviks–no small feat, that. Freedom is, indeed, on the march.)

So it goes in this possible world. There should be some more in the way of non-lazy posting coming soon.

On 6 December 1989, fifteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; Lepine told men to leave and shot at women as he screamed I hate feminists.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. And, as Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

(Links thanks to the lovely folks at No Treason.)

From the paleo-deviationists to the neo-deviationists, let’s now consider the recent fuss over the latest incisive moral theorizing from Humane Studies wunderkind Vlad Dracula:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.

Since Vlad has since complained that the infidel are distorting what he said (and playing dirty pool, too!), let’s make sure we have it all in its proper context. Vlad has argued at length in several places that the notion of universal human rights is ultimately nonsensical: rights are, on his account, political artifacts, not natural facts, and so claims of rights only make sense within the context of a constitutional order. He argues, further, that because rights are not natural facts, the citizens of one country have no objectively binding obligations to respect the lives, dignity, or autonomy of people in other countries. He cavils that gratuitous cruelty might not be justified; but that this is merely a matter of a sentimental, not a normative should. One of his infidel challengers had the temerity to point out:

His position on the moral significance of foreigners is also incoherent. If they do not have rights, why should we treat them with decency? Can’t we just smash their heads in with hammers, or nuke them, or boil them alive? What is a sentimental should and where does it come from?

To which Vlad replied:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral. It would just be grotesque, or indecent, or harsh. But since it doesn’t have any strategic value, we don’t boil people or nuke them. A sentimental should means that most of us find such behavior unsavory, even barbaric–but it doesn’t match up against any grand moral standard etched into a Libertarian Rosetta Stone. To momentarily digress into pop-philosophical obscurantism, it’s intersubjectively wrong, not objectively wrong (i.e. politically circumscribed).

Prince Dracula is well within his prerogatives to demand some direct approach to addressing this more nuanced perspective. So let’s see what we can do by way of a logical response to the argument.

1. If you can’t make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order, then there is nothing wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, as long as you don’t mind it.

2. But there is something wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, even if you don’t mind it.

3. Therefore, you can make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order. (M.T. 1, 2)

Thus, Prince Dracula is wrong, and Bargainer and Logan are right. Q.E.D.

You might claim that I have dealt with the Impaler’s (subtle! nuanced!) position in far too short a space; you might even go so far as to claim that I have begged the question against him. No, I haven’t. In fact, he has begged the question. Just as there are no non-question-begging arguments for terrorism, there are no non-question-begging arguments for the permissibility of boiling innocent foreigners alive in order to further Wallachian interests. If Vlad’s argument is valid, the most that he has shown is that his premises are, in fact, incompatible with points of human decency far more clear than any murky Hobbesian musing about the contextuality of rights claims or an alleged state of nature–and having shown that the Hobbesian argument is incompatible with such a plainly obvious point of human decency is as good a reason as any to deny at least one of the Hobbesian premises. It’s certainly not any reason whatever to dismiss human decency. (For more on the nature of proof and the issue of question-begging, see footnote 2 on my argument against Honderich.)

That it is wrong to boil innocent foreigners alive, and that it is wrong because you are doing something wrong to them is blindingly obvious. In fact, it’s so blindingly obvious that even Dracul admits that it is true; his problem is that he cannot live up to his own moral decency intellectually, and so he invents the weasel category of a sentimental should in order to sidestep the dilemma. (It’s worth pausing to note that this is exactly the same move that is made by some who claim that we have no direct moral obligations towards animals–in order to weasel around the fact that they know perfectly well that it’s wrong to inflict gratuitous cruelty on animals. That Vlad’s argument uses the same tactic towards human beings from outside of your own state is telling. And not in a good way.)

The problem here is trying to make sense of the notion of a sentimental should—why is it that we feel horror at contemplating pitching innocent foreigners into the cauldron and boiling them alive? It seems that the sentiment of horror is either a rational or an irrational reaction to the situation. If it’s an irrational response to the situation, then clearly there are no grounds at all to pay the sentiment any heed in making decisions about what we ought or ought not to do; an irrational feeling as such cannot weigh against a course of action. If it’s a rational response to the situation, on the other hand, what would it be that makes it an apt response to the situation? That the deed being done is in fact a ghastly thing to do to another human being no matter what his or her nationality? But Vlad cannot take this stance and still hold onto his Hobbesian argument.

Is the feeling of gut-wrenching horror justified by something else? If so, what? Rule-utilitarians might claim that it’s justified by the fact that cultivating feelings of horror at such human suffering is conducive to respecting the rights of those who Vlad would allow to have legitimate rights-claims (fellow citizens and parties to relevant treaties). But that would make the feeling of horror at boiling foreigners alive into nothing more than a projective error–useful, perhaps, for people who can’t compartmentalize their feelings for foreigners from their feelings for fellow citizens; but the emotional constitution that would be most reflective of the actual state of affairs would be one that sharply distinguishes between the real obligations not to torture fellow citizens and the free-for-all that is (according to Vlad’s argument) permitted against aliens.

Or you might, instead, claim that, because we’re talking about sentimental attachments here, questions of justification by some state of affairs outside of the sentiment don’t even make sense–it’s just part of being a human being that a horror at torturing other human beings is part of your emotional frame. But this won’t do, either: the sentimental should that Vlad wants to invoke is supposed to be something that enters into our reasons for action; that is, it is something that forms a part of why we do or do not act in a particular way. Emotions are not bludgeons that blindly knock us in one direction or another; they express reasons for or against actions, and as such have to stand or fall as reasons for action, justified or unjustified by how accurately they express the real fact of the matter.

The fact of the matter is that when you throw someone into the cauldron and fill it with boiling water while they scream in agony until they die, you have done something wrong–even if they are not subject to the same state as you are, and even if the state you are subject to is in a state of war with the state that they are subject to. You have done something wrong because you did something wrong to the poor fellow you just boiled alive. If Vlad thinks he has an argument against that, let him bring it out–but he shouldn’t be surprised when it receives nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

Update 2004-12-05: Sorry, I got things mixed up a bit. Turns out this was actually about Max Borders writing about the interests of the American people, not about Vlad the Impaler and the Wallachian people. My bad.