"American Spartan" Review

Aristotle defined "tragedy" as an arrangement of incidents simulating real-life. Based on a chain of cause-and-effect incidents, they culminate in a climax that purges the readers of emotions like pity, fear, and outrage by bringing those feelings to the fore through the story. Complex tragedies, he said, are not just simple changes of fortune brought on by a singular catastrophe, but a reversal of intention and the eventual recognition of this reversal. Sophocles captured this in Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Mike Rowe humorously captured these concepts out of narrative structure in his experience of lamb-castration, but Ann Scott Tyson found a real-life, Aristotelian tragedy in the heroic story of special forces Major Jim Gant.

The ethics of the book are complex and contentious on all fronts, not the least of which being the romantic relationship between the author and the subject, but the events are deeply informative, vivid, and heartbreaking. More important still, they are accurate. As the story moves forward, the official answer to Gant's question, "are we really trying to win?" becomes more clear, as does the price of being passionate and being right in a bureaucratic world like the United States military. The well-written story brings much needed self-knowledge to what's really going on in our wars abroad, and how our own government threatens to lose the war against Al Qaeda and its kind that has been fought so bravely and so selflessly by our Green Berets and the Afghans fighting with them.

Major Gant was deeply inspired by Steven Pressfield's novel Gates of Fire, the story of Thermopylae that moved Jim to take on the Spartan warrior as part of his identity. But Pressfield in turn was inspired by Tyson's account of Gant, saying "if you read only one book this year about war or politics, read American Spartan." Between the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq--with or without our presence--and the expanding bureaucratic government in the world of healthcare, economics and data-collection, such a poignant and prescient account could not be more important, and I agree wholeheartedly with Pressfield.

Why you should stop watching porn. Right now.

infidelityrecoveryinstitute.com

Since I am assuming the reader is male, I want you to imagine your girlfriend (or potential girlfriend) is in another room with a friend. Despite their quiet tone, and your lack of intent to eavesdrop, you happen to distinctly hear your girlfriend tell her friend that she thinks about other men while she masturbates... which she does, all the time, while you're away. Particularly one affluent, young, six-foot-three, former football captain-turned-hotshot lawyer with a nine-inch dick. He's so unbelievably irresistible...

If you are thinking to yourself "that wouldn't bother me at all, that's fine," I would suggest that you are almost certainly lying to yourself. It hurts when your partner even thinks about having sex with other people, and this is amplified by conscious repetition of the habit. Am I inadequate socially? Sexually? Am I not manly enough? Almost certainly not, but it damn sure feels that way. From this understanding, we're only one empathetic leap away from understanding the emotional reason why porn is toxic to relationships. This, if you are in a committed, monogomous relationship that you care about, is sufficient reason to stop watching porn, all by itself.

But it's nothing compared to the reasons Gary Wilson articulates in his TEDx talk from several years ago, which extend far beyond relationships to your individual mental health and capabilities. I'll leave the explaining to the speaker and his 16-minute talk, but if 16 minutes feels a bit too long, and you're tempted to pass it up, I'll try to keep your interest by mentioning that your sexual capabilities, physiologically, may be at stake. Yes, erectile dysfunction from too much internet porn. "How!" you may ask? Here's the video:

The Gun Debate

The raging gun-debate will no doubt escalate once more, now that the shock of the Fort Hood shooting has ebbed a little bit. This time, the conversation is reaching its point of reductio ad absurdum termination: should we disarm soldiers on military bases? If ever there was a place full of qualified individuals to safely and effectively use weapons to protect themselves, rather than wait for armed help to arrive in a not-so-timely fashion, surely a military base would at least make the list?

A good place to begin in exploring the subject of gun-control is Sam Harris' blog post on the subject. Harris himself is quite liberal on the matter of firearms, in modern political terms, and has stated that he believes people should need permits to own guns, permits that would be equivalent in difficulty to acquiring a pilot's license. But he isn't against gun-ownership at all. Au contraire, he points out that "a world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene." Harris himself is a gun-owner, as is Gabrielle Giffords, who survived the attack of a man who only managed to kill six people before being stopped by a motley crew of crowd members. One of those crowd members was Joseph Zamudio, who was carrying a weapon with him at the time, but had arrived at the scene after the initial (and only) burst of shooting had ceased. It is truly a pity he had not been there from the beginning, or that someone else in the crowd had not been armed.

It is natural for people to say "I'd rather no one had been armed in Arizona that day," but this is wishful thinking, not useful policy discussion. The guns are not the cause of the violence, but merely a means. People often talk about living in a "gun culture," but consider what the alternative might be if we address the means but not the cause. I would rather live in a gun culture than, for instance, a "bomb-culture," or a "biochemical-poisoning" culture. The worst mass-killing in an American school was not done with a gun, after all, but a bomb. Taking away guns won't merely disarm good people and, by extension, empower bad people, but could even encourage violent killers to find more creative and effective means, like poison or bombs.

What are the root causes? Some people adamantly believe that violent video games are the culprit. There's a lot to be said about video games, positive and negative, but the link between video games like Grand Theft Auto and violent action in children is somewhere between tenuous and purely speculative. Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman has contributed a lot of tremendous work on the subject of psychology and killing, and like Harris, is worth reading if you want to really educate yourself on the subject, but his assertion that video games are the only thing that's changed in tandem with the rise in mass-shootings is simply incorrect.

A much more believable and demonstrable root cause is the over-medication of children, particularly from selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI's, anti-depressants like Prozac. "It's been well known that adolescents and young people have an increased risk of suicide when they begin to take SSRI's," writes Lennard Davis in Psychology Today. "[S]uicide is an impulsive behavior turned against oneself. But impulses particularly violent ones, can be turned against others." As it happens, almost all of the perpetrators of recent mass shootings were either taking SSRIs or were experiencing withdrawal symptoms from them.

Clearly, any conversation about violence has to tackle the over-diagnosing and medicating of children and teenagers. Most of the time, the depression experienced by boys has nothing to do with some chemical imbalance in the brain, and everything to do with our decrepit and soul-crushing government schools. Still, living in the present demands policy founded in the conditions we have, not the one's we'd like to have. What's the most effective way to curb, counter, and preempt these mass-shootings, or even smaller shootings and incidents of violence involving guns?

In addition to the observed link between SSRIs and violence, another trend is worth mentioning: every single mass shooting in the last few years except one (the Arizona shooting, among the least lethal) occurred in a "gun free zone." It's an unfortunate tendency that people who are willing to break the law by killing large numbers of people seem, for whatever reason, disinclined to obey the signs saying "no weapons beyond this point." If we lived in a world where such logic was effective, there would be no need for razor-wire fences and guard towers in prisons: a simple "no escape" sign every few yards or so would suffice. There are actually good reasons to believe that gun free zones attract violence, rather than deter it, the Aurora shooting being the best example.

All of these are pragmatic arguments defending two points: first, that guns are a good and equalizing means of self-protection, and two, that the existence of guns has very little to do with the violence and, more importantly, the fear of gun related violence over the last few decades. I've scrupulously kept the second amendment out of the discussion so far because the second amendment has nothing to do with self-defense. As many have pointed out, the bill of rights doesn't give citizens a blank-check gun-ownership right for the sake of self-protection, hunting, etc, and restrictions on gun ownership to low-caliber pistols and Joe Biden's choice of shotguns would be reasonable and legal if the second amendment had anything to do with self-defense.

Many people feel that the second amendment is out of date. As Harris argues in his piece, "the Constitution was written by men who could not possibly have foreseen every change that would occur in American society in the ensuing centuries[...]We have since invented weapons that no civilian should be allowed to own [...] the idea that a few pistols and an AR 15 in every home constitutes a necessary bulwark against totalitarianism is fairly ridiculous."

If you look closely, you'll notice the semi-circular reasoning here: it would be silly to try to fight off a totalitarian state with a few small arms, and also, people shouldn't be allowed to carry anything other than small arms. The necessary premise that must be granted is that it would be inconceivable for the United States to gradually transform into a tyrannical state. I'll grant that it's unlikely, but given recent events--the IRS's political bullying, the ever-expanding NSA dragnet, the increasing power of police forces, schools, and government generally--is it really impossible? It would take nearly religious faith to accept that. Technology changes, it's true, but human nature doesn't, and we are, in many ways, fighting the same political battles today as we were 300 years ago in Europe, and 2,000 years ago in Rome. "It could never happen here," are the words of the unimaginative and those unversed in history.

You can think of the second amendment in the same way that anarchists often think of taxes. When you fill out your 1099 and mail it off, there is no force used, but you know that if you fail, forget, or refuse to pay your taxes, eventually you'll get notices. If you ignore the notices, you'll be visited by nice people to remind you. Eventually, they will attempt to repossess your property. If you try to kick them off your land for trespass or attempted theft, you will be arrested ("kidnapped") by men with guns. If you attempt to resist, the government has deadly force at its disposal as a last resort. For anarchists, it is from this threat of deadly force latent in that 1099 that we pay our taxes. So too is the second amendment a deeply buried but always lurking last resort that can keep a government from becoming tyrannical without requiring any exercise of force on the part of citizens. Is it really so certain that we can get rid of this right to own weapons, for the purpose of inhibiting government metastasis, with no negative consequences? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed that the life of the law is not logic, but experience, and experience has shown that the logical first step for a tyrannical government is to disarm its subjects. The recent Cliven Bundy standoff is not a complete vindication of this necessity, but a useful illustration of its concept. As a friend of mine recently put it:

"The only reason the federal government backed down and gave in to the protesters was the fact that they had firearms. That they formed an armed guard. that they made clear demands, that they wanted a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The feds saw reason, and backed down. What would happen if those protesters were not armed? I'm pretty convinced that they would have lost. They may even have been arrested. Let's be clear, this isn't some kind of crazy call to violence. This is an observation on the true reason why Americans own firearms."

Indeed, though I'd argue it wasn't reason that the feds saw before they backed down. Like signs telling people not to carry guns or telling prisoners to stay in place, reason only works on people who listen to reason.

Crimea Revisited: "We've Made it Clear"

ABC News

President Obama and his Secretary of State Kerry seem convinced of the efficacy of making grandiose pronouncements about consequences in the realm of international politics. They first made this policy clear in Syria, and are now reiterating their "speak loudly and carry a small stick" stance in the Russian annexation of Crimea.

In light of the best intelligence of the most sophisticated nation in the world, at least in regards to gathering intelligence, the separatist movement in Crimea (which is appearing to have likenesses in nearby regions) are the result of the rather obvious involvement of Russian special forces in those regions. Such actions violate the sovereignty of the state of Ukraine in the most blatant challenge to international borders since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

As laws only exist to the extent that they are enforceable, clearly something must be done. What bold and clear defense of international law will the United States take? After all, Barack Obama and Secretary Kerry "made it very clear" that there would be consequences, that there would be a very high price for Russia to pay. But what exactly does that mean? Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (what other state could he serve with a name like that) pressed Kerry on the subject of clarity in action. What are we going to do?

Secretary Kerry's definitive answer was that we would use "tools of the 21st century" to combat "behavior from the 19th century." He didn't elaborate on what those tools were, but I'm going to assume he wasn't going to use social pressure from Facebook and Twitter, unless of course, that's now national defense policy. It wouldn't be particularly surprising. Senator Johnson's admonition that Putin "only responds to action, and not to word" is only countered by Kerry's assertion that it has been made eminently clear that the United States will act. Just like Syria, it seems.

But this in itself would hardly constitute a crime, were it not for our president's tragic misreading of Russia's character. Both Hitler and Churchill were the successful statesmen they were (Churchill more so, thank goodness) for their ability to accurately read the will and sentiments of nations; it is what allowed Hitler to predict that France would succumb to a Nazi invasion, despite every single one of his general's protestations to the contrary. France--Hitler realized--was sick of war, and lacked to will to fight, even for its own preservation. Churchill, similarly understanding Germany and it's citizens' history, culture, and predicament in the 1920's, knew that Hitler was no laughable side-show, and posed a serious threat to Western civilization. This, before accurately predicting a similar threat from Soviet Russia on its heels. Obama seems to believe that Russia doesn't plan on continuing this expansion, first in Georgia in 2008, now into Crimea. Did he not hear Putin espouse the "Russian-ness" of Crimea, and Kiev (the capital of Ukraine, not in Crimea), and of Belaruss? Did he not hear the shock and hurt in Putin's description of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that "no one could have forseen"? If he did hear these implicit and insidious foreshadowing of Putin's plans for Russian dominance of Eastern Europe, he doesn't seem to think the problem is serious enough to warrant immediate and visible action. But the odds are high that he doesn't grasp this at all, given his public incredulity about Russia's desire for these expansions, as they are clearly "not in Russia's best interest." Unfortunately Mr. President, it isn't our job or area of expertise to dictate what is or isn't in Russia's best interest. We can only attempt to anticipate, form theories, and react accordingly.

The problem is with Obama's foreign-policy ideology and its evaluation of the character of nations and its leaders. Sometimes, people don't reciprocate kindness. Sometimes, generosity and giving the benefit of the doubt is--rightfully--thought by other heads of state as signs of weakness and permissiveness in matters of international law. Our current administration has tried its best to champion diplomacy as its primary tool, rather than violence, and it has already strained this in Iraq and Afghanistan. But here, words are empty. As Senator Johnson said, Putin doesn't respond to words, just as Bashar al Assad learned he need not worry about the big words of what was once the world's greatest superpower, since we don't have the will to follow up on our promises when they become politically inconvenient. We need action if we wish to avert a second Soviet empire with theocratic tendencies, casting a pallid shadow over Europe and Asia, but words are not real action, and "making it clear" that we're going to do "something" is not actually doing anything at all.

Against Circumcision

Edit: Based on recent revelations that the Norwegian study observed men who were circumcised in adulthood, rather than as children, and on a number of referred articles (1, 2, 3, 4), I've changed my stance to neutral on the subject of infant circumcision since originally writing this post.

Why is crystal meth so bad?

It isn't as though Walter White's product is the equivalent of pot or alcohol with more legal restrictions. Alcohol ups your brain's levels of the neurotransmitter and "pleasure chemical" dopamine by about 2.5 times (above normal), while THC, the active chemical of cannabis, increases it by around 3 times. This is less than sex, as a point of reference. But methamphetamine floods your brain with up to 20,000 times your baseline levels of dopamine. The saturation and marination of a thirty-something-year-old's brain in dopamine that high resets your body's dopamine baseline, and a healthy, sober level is suddenly far below the new norm. The result is a condition called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, even from highly pleasurable past-times like eating, sex, and old hobbies. Crystal meth semi-permanently rewires the brain for the worse.

There is another natural body chemical called cortisol that has a tremendous impact on our brains. Released in response to stress, cortisol changes the body's natural metabolism and suppresses the immune system, an ordinary and healthy response for an adult in a fight-or-flight situation, but otherwise detrimental to our overall health.

Our crystal meth example of the chemical rewiring of the brain is true even of people who are cognitively fully-developed. Imagine the effects of chemical saturation--even comparatively milder saturation--on the mind of an infant within the first days or even hours outside the womb. At some level, everybody understands this concept: we encourage pregnant mothers-to-be not to drink or smoke for precisely this reason. But cortisol is a powerful chemical as well. A family-member of mine severely broke their elbow in their early teens, and subsequently had seven surgeries and an extensive physical therapy program in order to regain some degree of movement. But more interestingly, and importantly for this discussion, their pain-tolerance shrank to near-oblivion. The sensation of touch on any part of their arm was excruciating, as were minor pains on other parts of the body; stubbed toes and the like.

Is it possible that subjecting newborn boys to lacerating the most sensitive part of their body and dousing their sponge-like, developing brains with a hefty dose of cortisol may produce permanent, adverse effects? The jury is still out, as the subject has (strangely) not been very well studied. But circumcision is excrutiating without proper anesthetic, which is usually not used, and the data that has come out [example 1, example 2], does strongly support this hypothesis. The more we learn about the brain, the more obviously important those developing years appear to be. From sociopathy in Romanian orphans from childhood neglect to language development, the early years, and especially the early months, of a child's mental development are crucial to their character later in life. Whether or not circumcision makes people more or less sensitive to pain than they should be--or otherwise affects their brain more generally--will have to be a subject for further investigation, as we simply don't have enough data to make conclusive pronouncements.

Whether or not circumcision negatively effects sensation in the penis, however, is already an academically agreed-upon fact. [Second study].

"But wait!" says the post-hoc apologist, "doesn't decreased sensitivity mean guys will last longer in bed? See, it was a good idea after all!"

Not only is this unwitting defense of barbaric religious prudery completely dismissive of men's pleasure and focusing oddly on women's, when the subject is the removal of half the nerves on the penis (a male organ, in case that wasn't clear before), but happens to be false as well. Actually, it isn't just false: it's backwards. A 2011 study found that circumcision was associated with premature ejaculation.

And speaking of sexual dysfunction, another 2011 study from Denmark found that "Circumcision was associated with frequent orgasm difficulties in Danish men and with a range of frequent sexual difficulties in women, notably orgasm difficulties, dyspareunia and a sense of incomplete sexual needs fulfilment[sic]." The following chart was created from their compiled results.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the benefits of destroying part of the penis, unless you happen to be a believer in the ancient and original purpose of the practice: to curb sexual desires and habits. In that regard, it is indeed a modestly but reliably effective operation.

In the face of all of these downsides, any petty health benefit like a slightly decreased chance of male UTIs--easily treated with antibiotics, which I would like to point out are slightly less invasive than partial removal of a body-part--shouldn't even be discussed, but nevertheless, circumcision still has its defenders. "It helps prevent AIDS," they say. Penile cancer too.

While the dangers of AIDS and penile cancer can be preemptively tackled without resorting to a knife, that misses the deeper psychological problem here. Do you think these people would suggest or support the idea that women, after having their last child, should have their breasts surgically removed? Breast cancer is FAR more common than penile cancer (the AIDS-deterring effect of circumcision is marginal), and yet no such suggestion has been seriously brought to the table. The difference in attitudes over the health question--regarding the efficacy of removing body-parts willie-nilly, so to speak--suggests that these justifications have less to do with the actual medical benefits, and more to do with how people want to think about themselves. This is especially true of two groups of people in particular: parents who have circumcised their children, and men who have themselves been circumcised, because it is painful and difficult to imagine yourself as a cause or a victim of senseless mutilation. The implications are uncomfortable to contemplate for both group. But comfort is a poor guide to truth (to put it mildly), and the validity of that discomfort that should be a stronger reason for solidarity in being done with this atavistic and barbaric carry-over from the bloody superstitions of the pre-scientific ages, rather than a tranquilizing excuse for the continuation of this ritual cut.

How the Crucifixion of Brendan Eich killed my support for the LGBTQ movement

In the last two years I've been writing, and in all of my life prior to that, I've been a staunch supporter of equality for gay couples. Not just for gay people, as some more religiously-inclined conservatives cleverly argue, as though one's sexual preference were merely a lifestyle choice, but for the affirmation that, as Hitchens so eloquently put it in his defense of homosexual relations before a jeering Catholic crowd, "it isn't just a form of sex, but a form of love." Not merely in culture, but in law.

But for all of that to matter, the law has to be respected, and culture, if it is to be changed, rather than simply destroyed, must be respected as well. While it began as a movement for that kind of humble, rational change, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer) bloc has found itself in a position of political power and influence, and has turned into the very oppressive bully it once fought so rightfully against.

The boycott of Mozilla Firefox led by OKCupid and subsequent firing of its new CEO, Brendan Eich--the inventor of JavaScript--for the crime of donating a measly $1,000 to the California campaign for proposition 8 is only the latest of these exertions of new-found might. The campaigns against Chic-Fil-A, Hobby-Lobby, and various other groups with different political opinions about the definition of marriage were prominent forerunners, but I myself had an experience with the intolerance of the community that expects it the most.

While at Bellevue College, I wrote a number of articles praising the college's rendition of the anti-Proposition 8 play "8," supporting Referendum 74, and was a participating though inactive member of our campus's LGBTQ resource-center. But when someone snuck in to the resource-center and wrote "fags and homos" across the calendar, I proposed that the incident, while reprehensible, was largely overblown, and certainty not a felony, as the school was purporting it to be. Little did I know that I was defending the bisexual head of the resource center, who school officials later revealed was the only person to have used the door-code to enter the offices between the last administrator checked and left the room (with a slur-free calendar), and its opening the next day, when the anti-gay epithets were found. It was a cut-and-dry case of false-flag offensiveness, and the school found itself in an awkward position.

When I questioned the director herself and the director (who had repeatedly requested I be fired from the Watchdog for my absolutist position on free expression) sent an email to the faculty adviser over the conversation. For that investigation of the subject, along with the editor-in-chief's attempt to interview the head of security, the paper was accused by security of interfering with an investigation-in-progress. Within the fray, I received an email informing me I was being formally reviewed for having possibly "detrimentally affected the Watchdog staff," thus "undermining the educational experience." When the meeting eventually did come around, none of the original charges were actually used, but a new set, in response to a written preview of what my defense to the original allegations was to be, resulted in my termination.

It was a long case, and many parties were at fault for the confusion and hard feelings (my own probably not being the least of them), but the censorial nature of leading members of the LGBTQ movement shine bright through the smog.

These are not one-off cases, nor are they small details curling the edges of a larger, more important, and still morally righteous issue. Suppressing and harassing dissidents is the issue being decided, and the LGBTQ movement has transformed itself from the victim to the victimizer. By destroying people's lives through bully-tactics and demonizing whole businesses over the politics of its executives, they are cutting down the scaffolding that supports not only their ideological opponents, but themselves as well. Needless to say, this by no means implies that all individual members of the LGBTQ community are little inquisitors looking to squelch opposition, but the effect of the movement as a whole is moving that way, as Jonathan Rauch predicted and alluded to in his appropriately titled 1993 book, "Kindly Inquisitors." Indeed, Rauch himself is gay--a gay Jew, no less--and more recently, the gay Andrew Sullivan has been the most prominent critic of the Eich affair.

The gay movement is perfectly within its legal rights to do what it is doing; no one, to my knowledge, is suggesting anything contrary. But for a movement based on broad public support, the threat that at any moment the gang may descend upon you with verbal acid over twitter, facebook, Salon.com, or the Huffington Post if one does not walk with sufficient caution upon the field of eggshells cast out before you, exerting its power like this has costs, and the lost support of people who don't like your bullying tactics is as perfectly legal--and probably more justified--than the illiberal hounding of the religious conservatives that have now found themselves in the minority. I will continue to vote for bills that give equal marriage rights to gay and trans citizens, but the LGBTQ movement has lost my vocal support. I won't show my solidarity with you on social media, and I will go out of my way to buy products from the companies you try to destroy for failing to conform to your ideology. Such a populist method of asserting your group's power is precisely the criticism of raw democracy and its' demagogic tendencies argued since ancient Greece and Rome, and it's nasty side is no less apparent now than it was then.

The Case for Intervening in Crimea

Business Insider

It is curious how, in all matters of international affairs, a reasonably large and influential portion of our population reflexively chooses to defend the position of America's enemies while ruthlessly criticizing America's own policies. They reach back in the the long-lost depths and annals of time to find historical ammunition with which to vindicate their default defiance with self-righteous certainty, or sometimes they know enough about current affairs to overgeneralize a more recent failure of our government, always infinitely more complex than the simplified theories of intentions imply, and thus prove that the war-hawks running our government are basically a group of psychopaths, gleefully lining their pockets as, with equal glee, they watch the havoc and carnage their plans affect.

The most irksome thing about this group is that I very recently would have counted myself among its number, a symbiotic combination of progressive, libertarian, anti-war sentiments enmeshed in the political psyche of some of our generation. No doubt, there is a romantic attraction to the position of the dissident and the rebel, but notions of civic aesthetics have little to do with the nature of the problem so impulsively opposed, let alone the rightness or wrongness of any proposed action. In this case, the problem is Crimea.

I say the vehement reaction is impulsive and reflexive because the first argument that comes up in casual conversation, without fail, has nothing specific to do with the issue itself. The argument has many names, but equivocation is the most generally accurate one. Sometimes it reaches back to Vietnam, or the Phillipines, or even as far back as the Native Americans. Sometimes the argument is made that Iraq or Afghanistan are essentially Imperialist wars (an untrue statement), which is bad (also untrue, were they correct on the nature of the war), and that therefore we're essentially no better than Russia (granting Russia's guilt on the allegations leveled at America, falsely), and that therefore, we have no right to throw the first stone (pure idealistic nonsense). A straw man this may be to the more sophisticated anti-war intellectuals, but this is roughly the level of dialogue making the rounds on social media in meme form, and actually making a substantial impact. Even if the fatuous premise of equivocation--that only the sinless may throw the first stones--were granted, I don't think America has much to compare with killing off 20 million citizens in a mere few decades, so the anti-war equivocator loses either way. I'm not sure when they stopped teaching the difference between bullying and self-defense to children, but they ought to start again.

The most astonishing argument is the notion that since Crimea voted on who their government ought to be, and 95.5% of the population voted they preferred Russia to be their sovereign owner, we would, in fact, be infringing on democracy in action by intervening on behalf of Ukraine.

Let us be clear here: we do not live in a classical democracy--little more than mob-rule--and we do not support raw democracy in the United States. We live in a particular kind of Republic, a blend of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, with the intent of maintaining as many of the benefits of these three different forms of government while minimizing the detriments. This is a very old concept, first put into practice by Lycurgus of Sparta and expounded upon by Cicero at greater length. Ukraine is a Republic too; specifically, a "unitary, semi-presidential Republic," and defending pure democracy as a stand-alone value against the most effective precedent for nations and their society--which happens to include sovereign maintenance of borders, beyond reach of the flimsy and susceptible whims of popular sentiment--is hogwash.

But there's a more telling side of the story: when Crimea voted for the change in leadership, Russia won by 95.5%. No one legitimately wins a 95.5% majority in politics. Sure, Crimea's government is imperfect, and suffers from corruption and mismanagement, but turning administration over to Russia hardly constitutes a step-up on those issues. Such an absurd landslide victory would hardly be more suspicious if the vote was absolutely unanimous.

In a private moment, Vladimir Putin once asked George W. Bush why he doesn't run for office a third time. Bush was, understandably, momentarily speechless at the abject disregard for political ethics and respect for precedent, but more importantly than Bush's lack of speaking (which we all probably wish we had experienced a bit more of in previous years) is the former KGB agent's revealed attitude towards notions of sovereignty, law, and national precedent.

A significant reason why the world is as peaceful as it is right now--arguably among the most peaceful times in history, according to Steven Pinker--is that the United States looms like... well, a hawk, over the world, willing to cut down aggressors who infringe on the sovereign rights of other nations. It would be wonderful if other countries helped us out in this because contrary to the oil-theft hype and speculative garbage half-articulated by some, it's really an enormous economic drain to maintain the largest, most advanced, and most deployed military in the world. But they don't, so we continue because it isn't in anybody's best interest to see a return to pre-Cold War methods of resolving international disputes. Deterrence works, because not everyone else out there has the same libertarian notions of love and peace that you and I do. In fact, many enemies (most recently Bin Laden) are all too happy to take advantage of our magnanimous inclinations and leverage it to attempt to destroy us.

In his writings, Bin Laden told his followers and the world that fighting the Russians had been hard. Fighting the Americans, he said, would be easy, because we didn't have the will to resist. Hitler made the same prediction of France in WWII and won an easy victory because he was correct, in spite of superior French numbers and the advise of all of his own generals not to engage on such a suicidal goal. Unlike France, however, we proved our own bearded Hitler wrong. But it's taken a toll, and our will to fight is diminishing. We have to remember that our security and the relatively peaceful state of the world is very much contingent on our willingness to fight, and when the time arises, we have to demonstrate our willingness by fighting. It is paradoxical, to be sure; to achieve peace by amassing arms. It's easy to see how hippies could conclude that it is roughly analogous to "fucking for virginity," however shortsighted their vision. And there are latent dangers if we do not sufficiently check the military itself. But these claims are not true because they "make sense," but because history has demonstrated that they work.

Vladimir Putin's assertion in the Crimea is not a particularly bold move, but neither is it timid. Imagine a child, carefully and watchfully putting a toe over the line he was told not to cross. Whether we should have gone into Syria or not, we failed to act when we claimed we would, and now our bluff is being called once more. Will we step in and protect little countries from big neighbors? If, in the future, we want our word to be taken seriously, and thus hold violent combat off at superior arm's length, we have to regain the credibility we've lost and reassert our willingness to fight. And our willingness to fight doesn't begin in Congress, but in the people. It's a hard-sell to convince enough of a nation that the willingness to go to war has a pacific effect on the international community, but the alternative is a lot more murderous and bold toe-crossing in the future, when it becomes more certain the the lesser parts of humanity that, no matter the illicit and murderous nature of their actions, no one will stop them because no country has the stomach any longer to do what is necessary to preserve peace.

A Theory on Liberals and Conservatives

In the American court of law, a criminal prosecution is conducted with both a prosecuting and defending lawyer. The reason both of these are guaranteed is that the guilt or innocence of the accused cannot be presumed by fiat, though we do hold people to be innocent until proven guilty as a measure against vindictive accusations and false imprisonment. An objective advocate taking the side of the client and throwing up the best possible legal defense, regardless of his guilt or innocence, is the basis for our ability to claim that the defendant is, in fact, guilty, as Alan Dershowitz acknowledges is almost always the case. Nevertheless, sometimes the defendant is innocent, and the defense attorney's importance is more obvious still.

So too in politics, we can roughly think of the Democratic and Republican parties as analogous to defense and prosecutorial attorneys, respectively. As the axiomatic proponents of change, it is almost always the progressives who have come up with the ideas and defend them in the name of the advancement of society and the human condition. Conservatives conversely defend the status quo, and generally look to the potential threats and dangers of the new ideas being proposed by liberals.

Now, it would seem from this perspective that conservatives are merely holding back the engines of progress, except that just as the vast majority of the accused are, in fact, guilty, the vast majority of liberal-progressive ideas are wrong. Some of them are dangerously wrong. This does not mean that liberals are evil, are stupid, or are obstinate beyond hope. Many of them are brilliant. They merely suffer from the same problem that afflicts inventors, theorists, and creative individuals of all kinds: limited knowledge. Our narrow scope of experience and understanding makes stumbling upon genuinely good ideas an extremely difficult undertaking, and one where success is more often a factor of luck and the best measure of success is not whether it "sounds like a good idea" or "makes sense," but by the test of trial and error.

But even in this allegation--that liberals are usually wrong--lies a latent praise for sometimes being right, and for throwing out all these ideas in the first place. Indeed, all of the principles and policies Conservatives defend today, most of them being or having been "good ideas," were the one-time product of liberal minds. The men who forged the United States were, by all accounts, among the most radical progressives of their day. The fact that they are now defended by conservatives against the ideological attacks of liberals like Howard Zinn is not a betrayal of ideology, but conformity to the important role of that mindset in our system.

It therefore makes perfect sense that freedom of speech was largely a creation of the left, and is now primarily under attack from the left. It makes sense that the conservative mindset historically defended monarchy and now defends limited government. Liberals create and destroy, while Conservatives block and defend. It was a good thing that Liberals succeeded in creating our modern understanding of freedom of speech in the United States (by conservative surrogate, Oliver Wendell Holmes) in 1919. It was also a good thing that liberals succeeded in destroying the institution of slavery. So too was it a good thing that Conservatives successfully blocked the spread of communism in the 20th century, and successfully defended the same policy of free speech when it has come under attack from the same liberal party that redefined it a century before.

There is much confusion about who was where and which party said what, when, but the foundational attitudes are timeless. Conservatives are skeptics, cautious and mindful of the lessons of history. Liberals are dreamers, the inventors of the future. As a conservative myself, I tend to be skeptical of new solutions, as most have a tendency to make the problem worse and often come with horrendous unexpected side-effects, but I simultaneously recognize that we have these same liberals and their ideological ancestors to thank for the principles and values that we hold now. Sometimes--more rarely than they like to admit, but sometimes--they are right.

But liberals need to understand that the role conservatives play is not merely a matter of something as petty as "social justice," (an as-yet undefined or definitionally flexible term), but can be as serious as life-and-death. Take a moment to imagine what America might be like today were Communism to have successfully spread as it was beginning to, and had not been shut down as it was. There's no reason to assume it would have been as lethal as Russia or China or North Korea, leaving tens of millions dead from starvation and secret prison camps, but the threat wasn't a historical hallucination. The sexual and religious minorities they defend so vigorously now could have easily been the targets of populist hatred, as they were in those parts of the world they most vocally admonished the West to emulate, including that subject of liberal adoration (of the time), the socialist nation of Germany in the 1930's. Talk about a bad idea with consequences.

Multiculturalism and deconstructive theories today are close relatives of communism. Both are philosophically Marxist and aim at setting fire to the traditional order. Communism was economic, while the new radical left theories are largely social and cultural, but both result in the rejection of the principles that made the west so successful: the notions of limited government, individual rather than collective sovereignty, property rights, and an understanding of human behavior that stresses personal responsibility. More specific to modern times, multicultural doctrines of tolerance also open the gates for a theocratic Trojan Horse from the middle east in the form of militant Islam. Muslims advocating war against the West have been guest-speakers at university since long-before 9/11, and left-leaning academics at these universities have since claimed that it was the despair of economic poverty, not Islamic Jihad (as explicitly stated by the bombers themselves), that was the root cause of these attacks. If you don't believe that there is a civilizational threat lurking here, than you probably do not understand the nature of this particular brand of Islam.

It isn't a bad thing when the left fails to acknowledge that they're wrong, or even a threat to civilization, because if they were to stop coming up with ideas to push civilization forward, it would stagnate. The suppression of bad and dangerous ideas--through argumentation and refutation--is what conservatives are there for, and a good thing they do it too. The real threat is in liberals bypassing conservatives in their ideas. Imagine, by comparison, the institution of trial by one-sided litigation. The search for truth is over.

It was with this threat in mind that I chose the picture for this particular post: Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the first and greatest orators and rhetoricians, and conservative defender of the Roman system (along with Cato the Younger, the indirect namesake of the Cato institute) from Julius Caesar. Their failure eventually culminated in failure to prevent the civic and subsequently more literal collapse of the entire civilization. Historians disagree over exactly how many centuries it took for Europe, North Africa, Western Asia and the Mediterranean to return to standards of living similar to those under Roman times, but 1,000 years is a reasonably conservative estimate. Some areas still haven't quite returned to their level of success attained under Roman rule, most notably in regions of what is now Tunisia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

These are the stakes, and while liberals pave the path towards a better and brighter future, they also carry the latent ability to completely destroy America (a country they themselves created in a previous life, to be fair). Their largely pure motives don't lessen that danger; destruction by malice or by ignorance are still both destruction. If conservatives can learn to understand that liberals created everything that they cherish, and that liberals will continue to give their children hope for an even better future, and if liberals can learn to appreciate that the vast majority of their ideas are wrong and that conservatives are often times the only thing between themselves and unintentional societal and cultural suicide, much more serious politics and discussions might be possible on the merits of policies, rather than on baseless allegations of evil intentions and narrow, one-sided definitions of what America is all about.

The Wild World of Truck Law

I was driving through the heart of southern Texas, traveling--over the course of two days--from El Paso, Texas to Mobile, Alabama. I had a family reunion to attend in Gulf Shores, and the traffic around San Antonio and Houston was jeopardizing my already tenuous time table. Ultimately, I realized I wouldn't make it all the way to Mobile by the coordinated evening, and I called my family to inform them and possibly come up with a solution as that reality become more apparent.

The personal problem for me here was hours. Professional commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers are only allowed to drive a maximum of 11 hours a day, out of a total of 14 consecutive hours maximum of work. This itself must be punctuated by a break of no less than 30 minutes before the 8th hour of that 14, and all of this is contingent on you having available hours in the first place. A CMV driver is not to exceed 70 hours of time on duty in an 8-day rolling week... unless your company closes on weekends or travels in Canada, where you're limited to 60 hours in a 7-day rolling week. Either of these periods can be reset to the full time by taking a 34-hour break, including at least two 1 am - 5 am periods. Welcome to the DOT's world.

One option that I had considered was using what's called personal conveyance, or "PC," to park my trailer, unhook, and drive the truck as a commuting vehicle to the gathering and back the following day. But even this was shrouded in hazy and ominous regulations. After calling my trainer, my uncle (a former driver), and briefly consulting Google, it appeared that I could, in fact, legally go over my hours through PC, but only if I was traveling a "short distance" to lodgings, restaurants, etc, or if I was using it to commute to or from my "home terminal." Neither of which seemed to be precisely true in my case; I needed to drive about 80 miles from a yard more than a thousand miles from my home terminal, and 80 miles is a "short distance" only by the most generous of comparative interpretations. And here too, a driver cannot operate a CMV period if they have been "placed out of service for exceeding the requirements of the hours of service  regulations." This strange and ambiguous phrase was not made any clearer when I asked about the specifics on PC rules from the safety officer at my company's yard in Texas, who essentially said "it's just a liability thing so that if you get in an accident, and you're over hours..."

Ultimately, my mom and uncle drove out the 80 miles to collect me.

What I've briefly summarized and described here is a problem related only to the hours of service regulations. I'm not expecting you, reader, to absorb and remember all of this, since most truck drivers only have a rudimentary and functional understanding of these laws, which seem to change yearly anyhow (for instance, the "two consecutive 1 am - 5 am periods" clause is currently being debated by congress; far more important than the national deficit). DOT has established specific and particular rules on inspection reports, the paper and e-logs, weight and bridge law, road restrictions and driving regulations, load securement, and the myriad of complications that arise from hauling hazardous material. They've even expanded into personal health, which must be maintained like any other piece of equipment on the rig. In 2010, the DOT created a scoring system for all of these codes and restrictions called the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program. Under the CSA program, drivers and their companies accrue points for various violations, from minor speeding and warnings to lethal collisions. The more points you have, the more of a liability you are to the company, and the less hireable of a driver you are.

Now, the point of these laws is to make trucks safer on the road. The premise, of course, is that semi trucks are the biggest safety hazard on the road. In reality, however, trucks are simply the most restrictable, giving the appearance of improved safety by government regulation policy. Both car and truck accidents have been in steady decline over the last several decades. What's more, trucks are, largely, safer than cars on the road. In 2009, for instance, the overall rate of police-reported crashes for trucks was one third that of "four-wheelers." While accidents involving CMV's are more likely to result in a fatality, CMV's are significantly underrepresented in the total number of accidents, and while they're usually held financially liable for accidents, collisions between CMV's and cars are the exclusive legal fault of the latter 71% of the time. This makes sense at a very basic economic level; companies lose a lot of money when they lose time, loads, and drivers in accidents.

But regardless, DOT has made it it's mission to make the roads safer from 18-wheelers and their kin. How have their policies performed? It's difficult to say, because "[i]n 2012, the Federal Highway Administration implemented an enhanced methodology for estimating registered vehicles and vehicle miles traveled by vehicle type[...]applied to data from 2007 through 2012." The suspiciously large decline in accident rates at that time looks more politically self-serving than reflective of real road-safety. Aside from that leap, the rate of declining collisions is more or less the same as we've had since the 1970's.

Henry Hazlitt described the problems of policy tunnel-vision in terms of economics. "While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also[...]interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently." It seems reasonable to hypothesize (I won't say "conclude" just yet) by the relationship between data and that law that it was public opinion and the appearance of increased safety, not safety itself, that lawmakers and the Department of Transportation have been after in the recent expansion of trucking law. The cost of this increased perception of road safety just so happens to be the increased stress and demands of following these laws by the drivers of these big rigs. "It's not the same anymore," said one old veteran trucker, describing how the job is more aggravating than it used to be. It lacks the freedom.

But stress and pressure to make economic use of the limited time drivers have during the day (one can easily imagine how this could encourage drivers to move when they might otherwise want to stay still?) is not the only danger of compliance. According to Mike Rowe, the hidden costs of compliance are "staggering," both in economic terms and in terms of safety. According to Rowe, the motto "safety first!"--a mainstay in the trucking world--is not only silly, but even a little counterproductive. "I value my safety on these dirty jobs as much as the people I'm working with," he told the audience at his TED talk. "But the ones who really get it done, they're not out there talking about 'safety first.' They know that other things come first." He went on to decry "the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own and vice versa."

These dubious policies that seem so straightforward and well-intentioned come with hidden costs. Whether those costs outweigh the benefit--which may or may not exist--is a calculation that could feasibly come out in favor of either side, but it's a question we can't address when those costs remain hidden. They could be as important as death statistics in the thousands, or as trivial as making it to a family reunion in time, but they exist and they matter. When the benefits of these policies are elusive or underwhelming, we should take the time to ask whether the costs are worth it, especially when those costs are hoisted onto the shoulders of others.

Thanks.

It's Just BC!: A Rebuttal

A number of my friends (who are my best critics) have variously suggested in my criticisms of higher education that my view is too narrow, that the complaints I have are really only about Bellevue College, and that things really aren't that bad in other schools. It's an argument that my points are only anecdotal, which, of course, their responses are as well, but it also misses the way in which I came to the conclusions about higher education that I did. Allow me to clarify that here.

My concern with freedom of speech, particularly on college campuses, began after hearing Christopher Hitchens' defense of hate speech at the University of Toronto in 2006--my closer friends will have probably gotten sick of hearing references to this by now--and it was at that point, at the beginning of a class on the techniques and technology of propaganda I was involved in, that I took the issue seriously and began to research the threats to freedom of speech in the United States and in higher education generally. It became clear to me, in researching, that this was not a problem of the past or a latent problem, but a problem in American schools, now, today, and this was primarily the result of my discovery of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). From that understanding, and from various books I read--by Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate, the co-founders of FIRE, by Greg Lukianoff, the current president of FIRE, by "Kindly Inquisitors" by Jonathan Rauch, and another book called "Let the Students Speak!," a legal history of the freedom of speech struggles in American schools--from this, I saw freedom of speech as something that was important to examine at Bellevue College, but it wasn't something I believed was a problem at the moment. My line of thinking was: "Look, here's something that's problematic in other schools. Let's try to preempt that so it doesn't become a problem at Bellevue College." I didn't think it was a problem at Bellevue College at the time. It was entirely because of the instances of the chilling effect and the fear of these inscrutable and often incoherent policies at other schools that I began to look into Bellevue College's own policies.

It was then that, after I had assumed that Bellevue College was actually doing okay because I hadn't noticed anything myself prior to this, that I began to notice that Bellevue College was, in fact, a very, very, very poor defender of freedom of speech, and was even a strong opponent of it. This, by the speech of the now president of the college itself, Dr. David Rule, in response to my question at his student forum discussion, and by my interviews with the Vice President of Equity and Pluralism, Yoshiko Harden, and by the school's policy itself, and the way that school rules and beuracratic systems were used systematically to keep quiet opinions that ran contrary to its own political agenda, and to simultaneously promote its own agenda, and claim to be a defender of free speech while oppressing it in a quiet, surreptitious manner. All of that came after the discovery of these effects going on in other schools, and it was this discovery in other schools that fueled my discovery of it in Bellevue College.

Now, because it's been widely acknowledged by these same critics that my criticisms are for the most part true, (though the opinion differs greatly on what we should do about it), I hope it won't be alleged post-hoc that I'm tilting at windmills here. This was a problem I first discovered at other schools, and it's not just a thing at BC. Whether it's true at this or that or the other particular school is, of course, open to discussion. I haven't been to every single school; I haven't experienced the college life at these other schools. But when people who haven't taken quite as active of an interest in the subject as me--for entirely understandable reasons--come to me and say, "but my school's not like that!," I have no way of knowing whether that's true or not because I would have said the same thing about Bellevue College to my current self, were I talking from two year's ago's experience.

In short, this isn't just a problem at Bellevue College. It's a problem all over the country, and in more schools than not. FIRE rates schools on a red, yellow and green light system. Green doesn't even mean the school is constitutionally sound, but it's close enough. It's "about right," it for the most part does a good job of protecting student's rights and you'll be safe holding a dissenting opinion about a major political subject. The yellow-light school's policies are problematic. These are not abiding by the constitution, and there's an issue that needs to be addressed in the name of the school's Amendment XIV section I obligation to uphold student's constitutional rights, perhaps to an even greater degree than those of other, non-student citizens. Red-light schools are "laughably unconstitutional," as Greg Lukianoff described them, and of the schools surveyed by FIRE's team of extremely competent first amendment law team, they found that of the hundreds of schools surveyed, nearly 60% of them fell into the red-light category.

This is not a Bellevue College-exclusive issue we have here.

Bellevue College is one of those red-light schools, or was last year; they've since been removed from that list even though their policies have gotten worse with time and not better. And these are only the schools surveyed, which are the major and larger schools in the United States. So with that in mind, I think the burden is on those who say this is a one-school, Bellevue College issue, and not a greater, larger trend, to investigate their schools before exonerating them off the cuff, and to show that the resources, time and experience organizations like FIRE that have spent to evaluate these schools in dedication to this sole cause are don't prove that these school policies are a threat to the classical liberal society and American values that FIRE believes them to be.