Let’s celebrate our commonalities

A basic principle of leadership psychology is that the easiest way to get people to form an effective group is to get them to focus on a common opponent. That opponent can be a higher-level boss, another department, a rival company, a particular person, or whatever. What counts is that if the would-be group can envision themselves as “us” working to defeat or outwit “them”, then they will activate a natural ability to cooperate with and trust each other. Our colleagues in this informal tribe can be trusted because we have a common interest in opposing the other guy. Take away that rival and trust becomes difficult. We may have a common task assigned to us, but if we lack a common opponent then how do I know that the other people in the group won’t be chasing their own interests against me, trying to stick me with the burden? The flip side of this is that if people are forming a group that you’d prefer they didn’t form, the easiest way to break it up is to direct their attention to subgroups or differences. Are they trying to form a union? Give some workers privileges and raises and point out that you can’t maintain that if they listen to the slackers who are trying to get raises for themselves at the expense of the better workers. Those foreigners that last week you would have taken out for a drink and had a good time with? Label them as enemy soldiers, and now you will cheer to see them blown to bits for no particular reason that you can explain.

Let me walk through an historical aside to illustrate this. The Nazis had a couple of basic problems. They wanted to sell their party to the working people and former middle class of Germany, but their funding came from rich industrialists and landowners. Germany had just been through a great oppression of the middle class and workers by those landowners and industrialists. During Weimar, the elites took advantage of the severe allied sanctions against Germany in a couple of ways. First, when the trade unionists tried to take advantage of their new power in post-revolutionary Germany to reduce hours, improve working conditions and increase wages, the industrialists cooperated – but they raised prices faster, so that wages always fell behind. As workers suffered they also became desperate enough to agree to gradual efforts to roll back the advances they had made on working conditions. Second, in that environment the industrialists got together with the bankers to create the great theft. Banks agreed to pay only artificially low interest rates on deposits, way below inflation. Industrialists and landowners were allowed to borrow those deposits at artificially low interests rates and use the borrowings to buy property and middle-class businesses, paying the loans back later with devalued money. This resulted in the destruction of the savings of shopkeepers and tradespeople, essentially wiping them out, while their property shifted into the hands of the wealthy elite. (Sound familiar?) Convincing working people and the former middle class that a party funded by the rich elite was their friend was thus a problematic goal.

Initially, several of the Nazi leaders were sincere in wanting to elevate working people. Some of those early leaders were eliminated when the Nazis came into their own, but even Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1920 that

It is rotten and dismal that a world of so many hundred million people should be ruled by a single caste that has the power to lead millions to life or to death, indeed on a whim…This caste has spun its web over the entire earth; capitalism recognizes no national boundaries…Capitalism has learned nothing from recent events and wants to learn nothing, because it places its own interests ahead of those of the other millions. Can one blame those millions for standing up for their own interests, and only for those interests? Can one blame them for striving to forge an international community whose purpose is the struggle against corrupt capitalism? Can one condemn a large segment of the educated Stürmer youth for protesting against the greatest ability? Is it not an abomination that people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts should sink into poverty and disintegrate, while others dissipate, squander, and waste the money that could help them? … You say the old propertied class also worked hard for what it has. Granted, that may be true in many cases. But do you also know about the conditions under which workers were living during the period when capitalism “earned” its fortune?

Hitler, on the other hand, just wanted power. He assured his industrialist donors that they didn’t need to worry about all that socialist talk: it was just to fool the public. He needed a way to keep the workers and tradespeople from focusing on the industrialists and landowners as their common enemy. How to do it? He needed a different common enemy, one that could be stuck with the blame for what the common people had suffered. As it happened, there was a group that conveniently fit the bill. People were accustomed to thinking of Jews as the core of the banking establishment, and particularly of the international banking establishment. Factually, the Rothschilds got their start funding princely wars in Germany and expanded to an international clan that financed governments on both sides of every war, making lots of money from the misery. Since the banks facilitated the great theft, take the blame off of the industrialists and landowners that benefitted and put it on the bankers instead. But, don’t put it on all bankers; the industrialists needed their money men. Instead, put it specifically on Jewish internationalist bankers.

At the other end of the spectrum, as the trade unionists proved ineffective the main worker-based group that stood ready to benefit from worker loyalty were the communists. The communists were clearly opposed to the financial elites and one could predict that they would loudly point out the fact that the Nazis were funded by them. But communists were internationalist. Further, a number of prominent communists, including Marx himself, were ethnic Jews.  If the Nazis portrayed Jews as a people who set themselves above national boundaries and served their own global people, then it was easy to associate that image with the efforts of Jewish communists to found an internationalist movement. Germany was suffering at the hands of the international community, with France having invaded the German Rhineland and seized German factories and the other allies going back on their promises regarding allowing votes on self-determination in various German industrial territories. When it became apparent that the inhabitants would vote to stay in Germany, the elections were cancelled or the rules were changed to change the outcome. Germans were not feeling particularly friendly towards the international community, so selling all internationalist groups as being traitors to German interests was relatively easy, and associating communists with an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to exploit other people was an effective way to make communists appear as “them” rather than “us”. Using the Jews in this way was facilitated in largely-Lutheran Germany by the fact that Martin Luther had authored a treatise “On the Jews and Their Lies” calling upon Christians to burn Jewish homes, schools and synagogues and to destroy Jewish prayer books. The Jewish people, who otherwise tended to be segregated in who they married, what and where they ate, etc., were an easy vehicle for establishing an “other” that was not the wealthy industrialists and landowners. Hitler was thus able to keep people from realizing their common interest in controlling the rich elites and instead made them feel a common interest as Germans opposing other peoples inside and outside of their country.  So, by 1933 Goebbels shifted his message to

On this day the whole nation at all levels, in all its professions, occupations, and estates, acknowledges the dignity and blessedness of labour. On a day when in former times we heard the rattles of machine-guns and the hate-inspired songs of the class struggle and the Internationale, … the German people is assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future

The Nazis were experts in framing group divisions and group loyalties to serve their own purposes. But we don’t learn much from history, and today we still tend to accept all sorts of manipulations where politicians, preachers, bosses and elites attempt to sell us on the idea that the grouping they want us to focus on is “us” and stands in contrast to a “them”. Sometimes they do that in a hateful context, defining the “them” as an enemy to be despised. But they also do it in a more subtle way, defining a separate “us” that needs to be identified and celebrated. Any time someone says “look, he is different from you – accept him!” he is saying “you know, that person is not really one of us, but we should be nice to him anyway.” That is not the same as just not focusing on the difference in the first place. When I have traveled abroad with a group of Americans of different races and sexualities, I have always thought of the group as being fellow Americans, not as different kinds of people that I should accept. Labels govern focus which governs perception.

Today we see that sort of differentiating play out in politics and in the workplace. I should note at the outset here that the movement in the workplace to recognize and overthrow misguided uniformity is a good and important thing. Over time American industrial culture bought into the idea that the ideal employee fits a very narrow mold of white male type-A personality, trained in a college fraternity and dressing, speaking and acting in a particular way. HR organizations took up and reinforced this view of the ideal personality, trying to inflict it on everyone even as companies came under orders to add more women and minorities to the workforce and to the junior executive ranks. As we implement artificial intelligence based HR systems the machines reinforce those efforts, thinking in their little machine brains “this is what the guys who have moved to the top look like – that must be the best sort of employee”. All of that has been stupid. Diversity really is a great thing in the workplace. Different people with different backgrounds and approaches give you a much better chance of having the right skills, personality and experiences to do whatever needs to be done as effectively as possible. Further, imposing constraints and expectations on employees that don’t really relate to job performance leads to losing access to valuable talent, as well as making life worse for the employees (i.e, for us). Hiring, promotion and pay should be based simply on actual job performance, properly defined to factor out irrelevant nonsense. Morality aside, that’s a matter of basic self-interest for the enterprise. Tolerating people who impose non-job-related standards on employees is akin to tolerating embezzlement. You are letting someone waste or destroy a company resource just because of their personal preferences. So, let me start out with three cheers for those who are pushing for businesses to be conducted in a way that ignore any factor not inherently related to actual job performance.

But that is different from officially celebrating factors not inherently related to actual job performance, factors that properly are none of the organization’s business.

I am now going to discuss terms that have come into the common vocabulary largely in connection with people’s sexual identities. So, let me set the stage a bit. To be clear at the outset, I think it is both morally and practically unacceptable to hate anyone because they are homosexual or some variant thereof. As Pope Francis said, “homosexual people have a right to be in the family, people with homosexual orientation have a right to be in the family and parents have the right to recognize that son as homosexual, that daughter as homosexual. Nobody should be thrown out of the family, or be made miserable because of it.” I won’t say it is unacceptable to hate anyone due to their sexuality because I can accept hating child molesters or anyone else whose sexual preferences are based on the exercise of power or corruption over the weak or the innocent (though it is morally better to seek to control them effectively without hating them). Likewise, it is wrong to have a generalized problem with people getting sex reassignment surgery. Some 1.3 babies in 1,000 are born as “in betweens”, with the doctors commonly making a guess as to which gender they most resemble and taking steps to assign them, sometimes (and perhaps often – I haven’t seen a real study on the subject) incorrectly in terms of how their brains have developed. Contrary to what some people think, being raised as a male or female doesn’t cause you to feel that way (see, for example, the book As Nature Made Him, describing such an attempt on a baby born as an unambiguous boy), so if the doctor guesses wrong the poor kid will have a problem. We should all feel good about allowing such errors to be fixed. I would not call those people transsexuals. They are more fixing a medical malpractice injury in order to get a person to the sex they were really born as. That is different from pushing young people to get sex reassignment surgery or otherwise assume a standard gender identity just because they are showing non-gender-standard impulses, which I think should be opposed. Boys do “girly” stuff and girls do “tomboy” stuff and that is fine, and nobody should put them in a label box or make them feel weird or out of sorts just because they don’t fit a rigid stereotype. The child will figure out who they are in time if they are left to their own devices, and that may not be what their parents or some doctor or psychologist expects or wants to “affirm”.

Further, I don’t think anyone should have to hide what they are. If it comes up in the conversation that your spouse is the same gender that you are, fine. If you are getting married to someone who is the same gender and your coworkers treat that the same way as a heterosexual marriage, great. People should be nice and supportive and help each other to be happy. If a coworker with a female name who wears dresses has an Adam’s apple and looks kind of masculine, just don’t inquire into it. What difference does it make to you?

Where things start to become problematic, though, is when people insist on actively celebrating lifestyles and the flaunting of “authentic selves” in a workplace. What if a person’s authentic self is a sleazebag male predator or a floozy? Is it appropriate to show that in the workplace? The workplace is about work, not about sexuality, and things like sexuality that can get in the way of forming comfortable work teams are legitimately discouraged in the workplace. I don’t want to know anything about my coworkers’ sex lives, heterosexual or not, except perhaps whether they are married and have children. It’s not necessary to the job and it’s not necessary to coworker relationships. For some people work is a refuge from the need to worry about sexual competition, a place where all that counts is how well they do their work. I have seen both males and females try to use their sexuality at work to exercise influence and it is never a good thing, and sometimes it needs to be rigorously discouraged.

Further, commonly “authentic” selves are not really authentic; they are contrived. Back in the 1970s feminism was expressed in part by pointing out the artificiality of much of what was regarded as mainstream female behavior. Women didn’t have to wear dresses and put on makeup. They could wear jeans or slacks and comfortable shoes and could come to work with clean skin and natural hair. If little girls wanted to play with matchbox cars instead of Barbies that was fine. If little boys wanted to play with Barbies instead of GI Joes that was fine, too. People could do what they wanted to do and not have it criticized as gender inappropriate or as meaning that they were not gender standard. Granted, it didn’t go so far as to accept men wearing skirts and lipstick if they wanted to (in the 1970s they did get to wear platform shoes with high heels and frilly shirts and polyester pantsuits if they wanted), but that was partly because skirts and lipstick were regarded as artificial social constructs that were designed to carry a specific gender meaning. If a man wore women’s clothing it was not because he found it more comfortable or practical, but rather it was because he wanted to look like a woman. If a Scotsman wanted to wear a kilt that was fine, and males wearing long hair and various jewelry was fine in most circles.

As homosexuality became an accepted thing over the course of the 1970s and 1980s one saw a widespread emergence of stereotypical behavior. Homosexual men and women previously had been good at giving subtle cues visible to those who were similarly inclined, but that were not obvious to heterosexuals. That skill came from the unfortunate state of affairs that being spotted could lead to losing your job, getting arrested or being physically attacked, but in any event it was commonly exercised. With gay “liberation” the idea seemed to take root that to be a proper homosexual man you had to talk, move and act in strongly stereotypical ways; otherwise, you were seen as still being repressed. Females didn’t seem to be subject to the same degree of self-stereotyping, fortunately for them. To say that a homosexual male’s “authentic self” required speaking with a gay accent or affected gay mannerisms would be perverting the word “authentic”. In ancient Greece men who were attracted to other men didn’t act that way. It is not a natural phenomenon.

Just as homosexual males in the 1980s were pushed to adopt stereotypical mannerisms and lifestyles, today a 6-year old boy who likes pink things or playing with dolls will tend to either get strongly discouraged by a worried parent or else pushed into other supposedly feminine behavior by a parent who wants to be viewed as understanding. But a 6-year old boy or girl doing something that is not gender standard is just a kid doing kid things. They don’t need to be “understood”, “celebrated”, or “encouraged”. They need to be left alone to do their kid things. A pubescent teenager who feels non-heterosexual impulses or wonders about things does not need to be pushed to celebrate his or her ambiguous sexuality. Left alone (but with people willing to offer confidential advice and input if asked) in a society where they are not told that such an impulse or thought requires them to adopt a label and a lifestyle forever, most kids will work it out one way or another and be fine. But being pushed into a label and a stereotype will almost certainly mess them up. The very notion that a transsexual (not to mention a “transexual” male who is keeping his original equipment and still prefers women) would feel that it was vitally important to adopt stereotypical dress of the target gender and feel seriously uncomfortable in make-up-free unisex clothing is symptomatic of the basic intolerance of our society. Nobody should feel bound by gender stereotypes, even if they are quite comfortably heterosexual. It just shouldn’t be a big deal.

The current push to celebrate “authentic” selves builds on this form of intolerance for normal individuality. Celebrating something entails putting a label on it, filing it away in a defined category (which may include “other unusual status” or “non-binary”, but which does not include simply “human”). Why is that necessary? Why can’t we just leave people quietly in peace to be what they are and to think what they think without seeking to define them? Why do we seek to pull their personal lives into the public realm? I am happy with my coworker being my coworker, and perhaps being an interesting person to talk to. If they happen to become a close friend as well then perhaps we will mutually share personal details, but I certainly don’t hope to have that kind of relationship with most of my workmates. Work should be a safe space where the only label you need to wear is your job title, where personal dramas are left outside the door, and where people are judged only by the quality of their output and whether they treat other people well or badly. We should celebrate our work selves, which hopefully are honest, cooperative and supportive. That’s all we need.

Why is this important? For the same reason that the old, bad workplace sexuality of the 1950s has been heavily discouraged. Personal habits interfere with work comfort. Overtly sharing your sexual, political, religious, or other personal preferences or judgments at work puts people less powerful than you at a disadvantage, creates ill feelings and makes it difficult to develop the all-work sense of trust that makes the wheels spin efficiently. It isn’t necessary.

That means that anybody who, learning of a coworker’s sexual preferences, makes a thing out of it or treats that person unfairly should be disciplined. I once worked in an office with a female bodybuilder, who was a standard heterosexual. She did not come to work in a bodybuilding outfit, but people knew she had an unusual lifestyle. If anybody had treated her negatively because of that we would have disciplined that person. Sexual preferences are in the same class of work-irrelevant.

On the other hand, it means that people should not push their views or personal lives on others without being clearly invited to do so. Celebrate marriages of any sort and celebrate children because you want to support your colleagues and encourage their happy occasions, but otherwise leave them be.

Americans, in my experience, really are fundamentally tolerant people if you don’t force them to think in categories. Prejudice is a thing that thrives when presented with categories, but tends to shrivel when presented with individuals. People who express highly homophobic opinions will often get along fine with a homosexual in their workplace who they know to be homosexual but who doesn’t flaunt it. People who have racist views will nonetheless commonly be perfectly nice to people they work with and will treat them with respect. That’s not universally true, of course, and people who can’t be properly civil at work need to be disciplined, but it is commonly true if nobody forces the issue by making the categories relevant. I think many people with primitive views can even genuinely appreciate diversity when they witness its benefits. But stressing and celebrating differences that aren’t pertinent to the work at hand is not a winning strategy for encouraging acceptance.

Likewise, in political discourse stressing and celebrating differences in order to win the hearts of the minority populations in question is not helpful to society overall. If politicians resolutely spoke about, thought about and dealt with people as just people, people with economic, educational, medical, and environmental needs to be addressed, actual acceptance of differences would advance more rapidly. People define their mental tribes in terms of mutual support networks, defined by the issues they think about. Put the emphasis on reconfiguring the economy for the age of automation, and people will think in terms of workers like them. Put the emphasis on clean air, clean water and helping our parks and wild places and people will not be focused on race or gender. Define a good education in objective terms and people will be able to look past race or ethnicity and think about those objective issues. Place emphasis on fair pay and being evaluated on the quality of your work alone and people will agree. Let’s be less eager to emphasize our differences and focus more on emphasizing our common interests. Don’t get suckered into thinking that if someone singles out your group and panders to it that they are your friend, as opposed to just being someone who wants to exploit you. The people who seek to divide us are seeking to prevent us from realizing our power. The ones who emphasize our differences, even if they are saying “hey, look, that person is different than you – but you should accept him anyway”, are trying to keep us from identifying our common oppressors. Don’t fall for it. The workers of the world will only really unite if they see each other as the workers of the world, not if they get distracted into seeing and “celebrating” their differences.

Gun Control Extremism

Let’s start with a simple question. I assume that you, dear reader, are a good person, given that you are spending your time reading this rather than making meth or whatever. As a good person, if there are big bad people about engaging in muggings, rapes, home invasions and the like, you might like to have a firearm for the protection of yourself and your family, because the idea of being basically defenseless when a bad person breaks into your home is quite unattractive. But now think, honestly, do you want that bad person invader to also have a gun? That kind of interferes with the benefit of your gun, doesn’t it? The ideal is for you and the other reliably good people to be allowed to have guns, but to keep them out of the hands of the bad people. I like having a gun (even St. Peter carried a sword for protection). I don’t want bad guys to share that privilege.

Many Americans will say “but the bad guys will always have guns – make gun ownership criminal and only criminals will have guns.” But the first part of that statement is not factually correct, and the second part is childish gibberish. Other countries that have comprehensive, nationwide gun control have a few criminal violators, but they don’t have anywhere close to the number of armed thugs that America does. American gun control is spotty and fundamentally useless in a society where anyone can drive to a gun show a couple of hours away and load up. We COULD have gun control that was fairly effective if we wanted to. As to the “make gun control criminal …” line, that applies only to a complete gun ban, not to gun control. The objective is to ensure that the reliably well-behaved citizenry is consistently better armed than the bad guys. That is a sensible objective that only a fool,  a bad guy, or a gun seller would oppose.

We could do a much better job of that. The gun show and private sale loopholes for acquiring guns could be closed, and we could rigidly enforce standards that make gun ownership a reward for good behavior. Commit a crime and you lose the privilege for good – too bad for you, but refraining from crime is not really that much to ask. Engage in domestic violence and you lose the privilege for good – again, not that hard. The somewhat harder one is mental instability. If you are diagnosed schizophrenic or manic-depressive or with another condition that tends to result in uncontrolled behavior, then you shouldn’t be a gun owner. If you are an alcoholic who has not yet been arrested for assault or domestic violence but who has shown basic lack of self-control through repeated drunk driving offenses, you should not have a gun. If you are a meth addict or addicted to other things that lead to really poor judgment and violence, you should not have a gun. The line there between dangerous instability and just oddity or an isolated issue will be a bit blurry, but we could get it right at least 80% of the time, and losing the right to own a gun is not that huge of a deal in the cases where we are more strict than absolutely necessary. Many people lead absolutely happy lives without having a gun. We COULD make these distinctions, and we COULD put enough controls in the system to make them effective most of the time.

This is where gun control extremism comes in. There is a large group of Americans who are wedded to the idea that if the government can control who has guns, then a dictatorship will come in and take them all away and oppress everybody. This group is persuaded that if the government today refrains from using the tools and technology available to control gun ownership, then when the dictatorship comes in they won’t be able to get control of the guns then, and the armed populace will rebel and get rid of them. That is silly. With today’s technology and the power of the military behind them, any half-wit dictator would be able to disarm the populace in no time, and anybody trying to run a rebellion from his house in the age of Big Brother will be squashed like a bug. If you are the type of rebel who can fade into the woods or the urbanscape unseen, then you could fight successfully, but those people will take their guns and disappear on day 1 of the dictatorship anyway. The idea that we have to suffer from stupid policies now because it will save us when we put a dictator in power is just goofy. Do the right thing now, make our society more sane, and hopefully we can avoid the descent into chaos that would allow a dictator to rise in the first place. Dictators don’t happen in peaceful, safe, happy societies.

Along the same lines, the notion that we should permit free ownership of armor-piercing bullets and military style weapons needs to be sensibly questioned. Personally, I enjoy high-powered military-style guns. They are cool and fun to shoot. It would be fun to have a bazooka too, or to get to play with a tank or a howitzer. But just because they are fun it does not necessarily mean that I should have them. Again, the sensible policy answer is to create a situation where the good guys are better armed than the bad guys. I am all for a homeowner being allowed to have a shotgun that will be sure to hit and take out the invading bad guy, and I don’t have a problem with registered good people having a handgun on their persons, within reason. Recent incidents have shown, however, that if a bad guy or three decide to get in an SUV with some military-grade hardware and go shoot up a place, regular people or police with handguns will not do much to stop them. The idea that a police officer assigned to a school will save the day with his pistol if a couple of students with a selection of military hardware get started is overly optimistic. Regular people in America (unlike Pakistan) do not go about with  assault rifles on their shoulders, so pretty much by definition the people who have the assault rifles on the scene will be the bad guys who planned the attack. Take out that choice of weapon, leave the bad guys with at most a shotgun with 8 shells, and that armed citizenry with their pistols becomes a more credible response.

Again, the extremists say they need the heavy weaponry to fight some future dictator, but that battle is just a fantasy. The Taliban did not get our soldiers with their AK47s, they got them with roadside bombs. A modern soldier facing a civilian with an assault rifle will split him like a chicken. If you want to fight the future dictator, fight him now by restoring our civil society and creating a population and military that would not put up with a would-be tyrant. Don’t let society degenerate into a wild anarchy and then fantasize about opposing the tyrant who offers order by taking on the army with your assault rifle.

We have a media establishment that loves to worship psycho shooters. They will publish the names, pictures and life stories of the losers, tell the tale of everyone who ever wronged the person, and generally serve the fantasy of anyone who can’t figure out any more constructive way to feel important. The news should respond to these wretches the way they used to respond to the former Puerto Rican terrorists, by playing down the incidents and keeping them anonymous. The perpetrators should be referred to simply as “the Loser” or “the weirdo” to the extent that it is felt necessary to refer to them at all, such as “the loser who shot these innocent people has been killed.” If the papers must give any background details, stick to bedwetting at an advanced age or other things that one would not want in the papers. Publish all the reasons why the school bullies thought the kid was worth picking on. We really don’t need their backgrounds. We already know them. They are all sniveling losers who were pushed around by their peers and could never find any real way to win at anything.

Unfortunately, the media won’t do that. They love blood on the pavement. Therefore, the incidents will continue to escalate. That being the case, we need reasonable controls to minimize them. Don’t let persons under 25 have 16 guns. Keep down the power of civilian guns. Create a situation where the firepower advantage is most likely to be on the side of the good guys. Then the losers won’t have fatal fun any more. Extremist opposition to sensible controls will  not stop the rise of a dictatorship. The only way to do that is by bringing back a well-ordered society that does not make the citizenry long for a strongman to bring order. Impose sensible, civil, balanced  controls under a democratic government that give the advantage to the people who respect and live by the Social Contract, and dictators can’t gain a foothold. Insist on extremist positions that allow a state of affairs that alarms and dismays the average person, on the other hand, and the dictator will come, and civilian guns won’t stop him. We have seen how quickly the American people signed up for shredding our Constitution when a handful of thugs killed a small fraction of the number of people that criminals murder every year in America. Under the right circumstances, the citizens of the Land of the Free will sign up for dictatorship in a heartbeat, and they have proved it. We have to keep those circumstances from arising, and we can’t do it with assault rifles.

What the Second Amendment Really Means

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

It is unfortunate that the advocates of gun rights count it as a victory that the Supreme Court has decided that the first part of the Second Amendment, the conditioning statement regarding a well-regulated militia, should be ignored. For those who fantasize that in the event of the rise (or continued rise) of a tyrannical government, they will will take their assault rifles and defeat it Red Dawn style, merely having the unfettered right for every disreputable character in America to have and trade all the guns he wants without supervision seems like a wonderful thing. In practice, though, we have seen that Afghans armed with assault rifles facing even an army bound by rules of engage that forbade just slaughtering them was unable to do much with their guns; they killed and wounded our soldiers with explosives.  If a U.S. standing army was determined to take down rebels and did not feel compelled to be particularly scrupulous about avoiding “collateral damage”, they would squash any would-be Red Dawners like bugs. This is why the gun rights crowd has missed the point, and have allowed the Supreme Court to disembowel the truly effective protection that the Founders really intended to give us while making the would-be rebels cheer them for it.

Jefferson knew that in any society wealth will tend to concentrate in a few hands, and the owners of that wealth will then seek to exercise tyrannical control over everyone else. He sought to control the roots of that problem through broad education, promotion of a broad economy of yeoman farmers beholding to no one, and the restriction of bank power. At the other end, he was opposed to the idea of standing armies, which are an obvious temptation to tyranny. One of the complaints he stated in the Declaration of Independence was that the Crown  “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.” He would be truly horrified at our current state of militarization and perpetual warfare. He would also be horrified that our law provides for a federal military draft.

Madison explicitly viewed state militias as being a check on the danger of a federal army, and considered it important that in order to have a federal army under the constitution Congress would have to vote to raise one, and the President would then have to command it. This latter check, of course, has now been undermined by Congress funding a perpetual giant military force that is always available at the beck-and-call of the President, without need for a declaration of war. Madison’s views can be seen, for example, in the following statements:

“Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.” From The Federalist Papers.

Mr. MADISON. …did not see any such immediate prospect of a war as could induce the house to violate the Constitution. He thought that it was a wise principle in the Constitution to make one branch of the government raise an army, and another conduct it. If the legislature had the power to conduct an army, they might embody it for that end. On the other hand, if the President was empowered to raise an army, as he is to direct its motions when raised, he might wish to assemble it for the sake of the influence to be acquired by the command the Constitution had wisely guarded against the danger on either side.  From a House debate on giving the President the power to lay embargoes.

…to keep within the requisite limits a standing military force, always remembering that an armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics–that without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe. From his first inaugural address.

Likewise, it is clear that the early state governors believed that it was their right and duty to refuse to call up and subject state militias to federal power. See, for example, the refusal by the governor of Connecticut to provide the state militia during the War of 1812 where in his view the grounds for such a requisition under the Constitution had not been satisfied.

Against this background, then, it can be seen that the Second Amendment,  combined with the other checks in the Constitution, was intended to have a much broader and more significant scope than guaranteeing a right for individuals to play with firearms. It was intended to preserve the right of the states to maintain militias capable of providing real opposition to federal power, and to keep those militias under state control as a check on any would-be tyrant. The Founders envisioned that Congress would do its duty to disband standing federal armies and keep military power under the primary control of the states. It is this right that the Second Amendment was intended to protect. It is this structure that American citizens were expected to enforce by heavy and jealous pressure over their Congressional representatives, voting out anyone who dared to try to create a perpetual federal army of any size.  The gun-rights crowd don’t care about this, but every American citizen should. We have allowed our Constitutional structure to be undermined in a very disturbing way, we cheer the Supreme Court for treating the carefully chosen words of the Bill of Rights as mere fluff, and we revel in false-macho dreams of Red Dawn rather than following the truly effective structure that the Framers , having just overthrown an oppressive power, were wise enough to give us.

Relatedly, we have allowed the Supreme Court to ignore the clear words of another provision of the Constitution, the Thirteenth Amendment. That Amendment states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

When the federal government dictates to a young man that he shall, on pain of imprisonment, show up to serve at the whim of the government wherever on the planet the government chooses to send him, whether or not a war has been declared, to kill, be killed, serve under military law, and perform whatever task he is ordered to perform or be imprisoned or executed, what is that but involuntary servitude? Rather than answer this question, the Supreme Court merely blew it off in the Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366 (1918), stating in full:

“As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.”

Now that women serve in combat roles,  former President Obama wanted to extend registration for this involuntary servitude to them as well (while, incidentally, failing to do much about the rampant problem of rape in the military). There is  not yet a proposal to extend draft registration to older people, because that would be unpopular. We prefer to inflict the “opportunity” for involuntary service based purely on youth, not physical ability, family status, etc., because a given voter will never get younger, and so the Powers can rely on the general voting population not caring enough about the rights of the young to speak up. Of course the precedents exist for the draft to be applied to persons of any age on short notice when the President commands it, placing everyone under military rule. Under Obama’s version, every adult in the country could be conscripted and placed under military discipline.

If America is ever under serious threat, the nature of the American population is such that any honest President could persuade an adequate number of volunteers to step forward on short notice to do what needs to be done. Why, then, give him the power to instead force people into involuntary service in an undeclared war against an artificial enemy, or against our own civilian population, based on a dishonest or tyrannical President’s whim? What is wrong with us that we let this state of affairs persist when it is clearly dangerous and inconsistent with our Constitutional principles?

Americans talk a good game. Any time we feel threatened or insulted out come the flags and the macho declarations that we are the Grand Protectors of Freedom who will bravely do whatever needs to be done to make ourselves and the world free. In practice, we are not willing to do so much as to write an e-mail to our Congresspeople demanding that they restore the Constitutional balance that the Founders designed to protect our real freedom. After a terror incident, we allow huge military and security apparatus power grabs to undermine our freedom and shred the Constitution while  saying that we are doing it to “protect freedom”, when really we are staging a pathetic and cowardly retreat from freedom in favor of perceived safety. If Americans actually cared about freedom they would support what the Second and Thirteenth Amendments and the rest of the Constitution were intended to do.  We would demand respect for the intended framework. We would not sit on our lazy behinds or hang around gun shows talking about freedom while making no effort to push the government to maintain the structures that protect it. The evolution of American society and government is evidence that, when it comes down to it, we just don’t care.

Why Every American Should Read Hillbilly Elegy and Ghettoside

This country is rigged in favor of the wealthy. I don’t mean the 1%. That group includes hard-working professional couples who add value to society. I mean what we used to be allowed to call capitalists, the trust fund babies, hedge fund managers, speculators, market-riggers, and CEOs drowning in stock comp who siphon off the benefits produced by the labor and intellect of others.

The rigging does not mean that other people are not allowed to succeed, it just means that it is hard for the wealthy to fail, and that they are not required to earn their wealth and are not prevented from preying on the rest of us. Schools like Harvard and Yale have long had two groups. On the one hand, you have the offspring of the wealthy admitted as legacy candidates (what Detective Green of Law and Order calls “affirmative action for white folks”) after attending pricey elite schools. On the other, you have the really bright and talented middle-class students from public schools who are admitted in order to create the illusion that anyone holding a Harvard or Yale degree must have real merit – just look at the brilliant people that have come from those schools! The two groups may interact, but they don’t really blend. When they graduate, the children of the elite have an easy path to big money, while the children of the middle class work their butts off  to be the elite’s highly-paid servants.

Jefferson despised the concentration of wealth, and believed that democracy could not prosper in the face of it. He believed that banks and corporations would destroy the American experiment unless the wealth was kept in line and Americans made vigorous efforts to foster and preserve an educated, independent, self-reliant middle class. The recent elections, where capitalists and creatures of the capitalists controlled both of the major parties and the capitalist-owned media suppressed any thought of supporting third party or alternative candidates, showed once again that he was right.

So why don’t we, the 99.8%, do anything serious to enforce Jeffersonian democracy? Why do we retreat into “reality” television and internet puppies rather than combining to exercise People Power? The elites and their pet media have trained us to be divided by race, class, and belief so that we cannot see the depth of our common interests. We volunteer to be unfree by accepting the distorted identity-politics version of who we are. Our sons and daughters risk their lives to kill  foreigners in the name of “freedom” when those foreigners never threatened to enslave us. (Indeed, the only ones who have sought to harm us are the ones who have been trained through Saudi and (in Afghanistan) U.S. money to subscribe to the crazy Wahhabi sect, a violent religion that wrongly claims to be a version of Islam, where Islam is in fact a religion whose sole valid authority expressly calls for tolerance of Christians and Jews and frowns on killing.) Meanwhile, we are distracted from seeing the real threats to American freedom here at home.

There was a time when we were freeing ourselves of those shackles. LBJ taught the Dixiecrats that racism was just plain stupid, that it was a tool used by the elites to keep down all of the southerners, black and white. By the late 1960s mainstream white America had moved on. Martin Luther King shifted from focusing on black-white divisions to focusing on forging a common cross-racial alliance of the underclass for prosperity and peace, but (coincidentally?) he was then assassinated in a plot that a civil jury determined had government involvement. Malcolm X likewise turned from black politics to uniting all people in the underclass, and (coincidentally?) he was then assassinated.

By the 1970s white America loved black musicians, entertainers, and athletes. Nobody in the mainstream really thought of Sammy Davis Jr., Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, etc. as some kind of other species. White America was not concerned about their color, and while Richard Pryor could get laughs commenting on black-white differences it was funny precisely because that stuff now seemed silly. In the 1970s there was no “black music”, there was just music. White Americans watched TV shows with black families and white families and didn’t dwell on the differences. The world had transformed. That is not to say that white Americans were not aware and afraid when they entered into heavily black neighborhoods – see more on that below. The idea, however, that a black person who dressed well and acted “normal” should be shunned or repressed because of his skin color had become ridiculous in most of the country.

The things started to slip backwards. The “get whitey” version of gangster rap became popular, and music became segregated. We were told that “black entertainment” is a thing. Opportunity started to flatline for the middle class in the mid 1970s, hitting first the working class and then the broader middle class, and finally reached the professional class around 2000. Where America had always been the land where children would be more prosperous than their parents, the stagnation of real incomes broke that dream. Parents wanting the best for their children came to resent government policies that preferred people on the basis of race, promoting a black child of upper-middle-class parents over a white child of the working poor. People resented what the O.J. trial suggested about the state of equal justice in America. Underclass white Americans, who had plenty of experience with the police and who, statistically, were more likely to be shot and killed in a felony arrest than were their black equivalents, resented the notion that their lives apparently didn’t matter. Where most Americans had gotten over any serious issue with homosexuality (though they still preferred that it, like any form of active sexuality, be kept indoors) and they had no problem with hermaphrodites who had been gender-misclassified at birth getting surgically reassigned, they were challenged by a sudden and aggressive new movement that threatened to undermine their own privacy and freedom of choice, and it reawakened concern with sexual differences.  Where religious differences had faded in importance and the idea of a Mormon president became generally acceptable, we were now misled to believe that the Saudi-sponsored crazies were representative of all of Islam. The media loved all of these divisions and played them up. We gradually became more divided, not less.

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, is the story of one man’s family, part of the white underclass that moved north in search of opportunity and struggled with the culture that they brought with them. While the culture included many fine American qualities of family, of loyalty, and of independence, it also included many unfortunate features that often contradicted the good ones. Violent, socially unacceptable behavior, drug addiction and alcoholism,  and abuse of spouses and children were part of the norm. Unstable home lives, a belief by many that failure was thrust upon people by outside forces and had nothing to do with their own choices, and a lack of parental concern with children’s education all served to ruin the lives of people who could instead have grown up to be bright, productive, admirable members of society. Crime spread and towns and neighborhoods deteriorated. This underclass culture was extremely similar to that of the black underclass that either remained in southern poverty or made the same migration in search of northern opportunity, likewise bringing issues with them.

The refusal of American society to acknowledge these cultural problems as cultural problems helped them to persist. We blamed the school system, or we secretly regarded the members of the underclass as some sort of subhumans who could not be saved. We declared a “war on poverty” that consisted of giving money to those who did not work, funded by those who worked hard, instead of engaging in a cultural reformation to overcome the tyranny of low expectations and the acceptance of damaging lifestyles, to ensure that every American could live up to the potential they were born with. In this failure we displayed true prejudice, assuming that the members of the black and white underclasses were just incapable of being like the rest of us. J.D. Vance, with the help of his unconventional but loving grandparents, proved that this was wrong, just as thousands of other members of the underclass do every year. We fail to recognize our commonality. We fail to make a full-on assault upon the enablers of failure.

Ghettocide, by crime reporter Jill Leovy, tells the story of the residents of a black neighborhood and a white homicide detective who believes that every victim deserves justice. It is a sobering reminder that, in every neighborhood, people are people and want the same things – safety, opportunity, dignity, and someone who genuinely cares about them. There are some truly bad actors among us, and they should not be tolerated, but we do tolerate them in certain neighborhoods out of a fundamentally prejudiced belief that they somehow represent the neighborhood, as opposed to being predators who make the neighborhood miserable.  We allow underclass neighborhoods to be genuinely unsafe, places where criminals can prey on black or white citizens with relatively little fear of successful prosecution, a condition we would not tolerate in well-to-do white areas. We provide policing based on the tactics of an occupying power rather than  providing justice by finding and imprisoning all those who commit violence upon their neighbors and vigorously protecting witnesses and the justice system so that people can learn to rely upon state protection and break the cycle of blood-feud self-protection.

Read back to back, these insightful books are strong reminders of the fact that we must value every life, every innocent child born into this world, and ensure that they have a chance at success. That means, in part, not enabling excuses for irresponsible parents and broken lives. It means treating everyone as capable of, and responsible for, proper behavior. It means standing up for civility, order, and nice things. It means investing in opportunity, assuring everyone who wants to work that they can get honest employment that pays a living wage, and not enabling those who are not willing to work and who impose upon their neighbors. It means being willing to point out that certain habits are bad, and understanding that just because those habits are more common among the underclass – not coincidentally, since they are habits that drive failure – it does not mean that it is arrogant and prejudiced of us to point them out. Instead, it is prejudiced to assume that those habits of failure “belong” to people who have a certain skin color or who come from a certain region. We the People have to get away from false divisions and get our act together. Only then can we hope to do what is necessary to break the privilege of the new aristocracy and restore Jefferson’s vision of a truly free America.

How Black Lives Matter unintentionally promotes genuine racism

Let me say right away that this is not about how “black lives matter” implies that Hispanic, Native American, or white lives don’t. I believe that even supposedly enlightened white Americans commonly suffer from a genuine version of racism that America needs to address. However, by focusing on accusing police and The System of a form of racism that is, in reality, now very rare, the movement enables the media, The System, and the voting population to have a good time acting righteous while completely ignoring a real and extremely harmful – as well as extremely deadly – form of racism, and indeed encouraging behavior and beliefs that further entrench that form of racism. That form of racism, one that really does involve the belief that black lives essentially don’t matter, is the belief that black people in poor areas are fundamentally different from middle-class white people in terms of their desire for safety and effective law enforcement.

To set the stage for this discussion, one must consider a few statistical truths. Again, bear with me here – many people don’t like these statistics and think that anyone who raises them must have an evil motive. I really don’t. I think policing in minority neighborhoods suffers from major flaws that are special to those neighborhoods and which flow from systemic racism, and I think those flaws impose a tragic and unacceptable burden upon black Americans. I think that more enlightened policies really would create new and good life paths for black youths that would put them on a par with their white co-citizens. I think these statistics show that something in our SYSTEM is screwed up, not that black people are born screwed up, and that we have a moral obligation to fix it. I have a good theory as to what a big part of that something is. So, please view these statistics in light of that goal.

So, first, the number of black people killed by police is proportionate to the percentage of arrests for violent crime that involve black people, and in fact is a little lower than that percentage. I have written on that at more length elsewhere , but the percentage of victims of fatal police shootings who are black is 29.2%, while the percentage of persons arrested for violent crime who are black is 38.5%. (39.8% of the people who murder police officers are black.) That arrest percentage is consistent with the percentage of violent crimes that are committed by black people per the reports of the victims (36% of crimes against persons where the race of the offender is known and 55% of homicides are committed by black people), so the thing in our system that is screwed up results in a disproportionately high percentage of young black people committing violent crimes, which tends to get them (and their victims) killed.

Now, we also have a problem with police misconduct. The Cato Institute has a good website  that tracks that sort of thing. One recent incident, for example, involved a middle-aged white woman who was drunk, naked and asleep in her own home when police burst in with guns drawn and excitedly demanded that she get up (still naked) and show them a gun she was reported to have. She understandably first negotiated to be able to put something on, then in response to their repeated shouted demands, guns pointed, she (still drunk, sleepy, and now terrified) reached into the bed and said “here it is!” and held it out for them, at which point they shot her in the face and killed her. There are way too many such incidents involving people of all races, along with officer-perpetrated rapes, assaults, spouse abuse, and other inexcusable acts. All of that should be dealt with as a police problem. But it is not a race problem, it is a police problem. There are undoubtedly some cases even today where a police officer shoots a black person in part because the officer does not like black people, but the incidents that have hit the press are not cases where white officers thought to themselves “I want to go and shoot me a black kid.” The statistics don’t support the idea that any significant proportion of the police shootings are racially motivated. People’s perceptions are influenced by what the media, the preachers and their friends say, and when you have an encounter with a police officer despite being perfectly innocent (I have had several myself) and people tell you that that is because you are black that it must be true, but perceptions should always be checked against cold, hard numbers.

The second important set of statistics relate to the number of black people who are murdered overall, as compared with white people. For white males, about 90% will die of disease, 5.5% in accidents, 2% by suicide or homicide (mostly suicide) and the rest will still be alive at age 100. For black males, 90% will die of disease, 4.5% in accidents, 3.2% by suicide or homicide (mostly homicide), and the rest will survive to 100. White men are relatively likely to kill themselves and have accidents, while black men are relatively likely to be killed by other black men. About 2.4% of black male deaths are by homicide, compared to about 0.23% for white males – less than a tenth as much. More tellingly, homicide is the leading cause of death by far for black males age 21-35, accounting for a third of all deaths in that group, as contrasted to 3% of deaths for white males in the same age group.  In all, in 2012 1,940 black persons were murdered, some 92% of those by other black people, while 1,885 white people were murdered, some 84% by other white people. 2,232 murders were committed by black people, and 1,798 by white people. 12,569 black women were officially reported as victims of forcible rape (actual numbers were higher) as were 55,876 white women, with 17,745 of the reported rapists being black and 45,694 being white. Young black people suffer badly from violent crime, most of it committed by other black people, and most of that concentrated into predominantly black urban or rural neighborhoods where shootings are alarmingly common.

This is a bad thing. While white society tends to dismiss the black homicide rate as being “mere” violence among rival gangs, anyone who has looked into the human beings within gangs has seen that gangs and their affiliates are largely composed of people who would have been decent kids but who, due to living in a dangerous neighborhood, feel compelled to affiliate with a gang for protection. Further, because the young females in such neighborhoods tend to favor males who seem capable of offering protection (which seems to be a basic instinct), young males naturally are drawn to gang power as a means of impressing girls. In short, most gang affiliates are not inherently nasty people, they are people who get into a bad role because they live in a bad area. Of course, many of the other victims of black-on-black homicide are not affiliated with gangs at all, they are pure innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The book Ghettoside makes a good case for the proposition that black-on-black violence stems from a period in the south when the white law enforcement establishment refused to make any effort to prosecute black-on-black crimes, a situation that triggers a seemingly universal human mode of behavior that reverts to informal “law enforcement”, a system of revenge killings, violent posturing, and deadly focus on “honor” and respect that prevails where the state has failed to assert a monopoly on the use of violence. Once such a system starts, it tends to maintain itself until proper state-sponsored law enforcement steps in to stop it and replace it with a system of state-sponsored safety. When black people from the south migrated to northern and western cities, they brought the culture of violence with them, and the police in their new homes failed to stop it. Because American white society has been content to think of black people as somehow fundamentally different, our government has not seen fit to figure out how to break the cycle of violence in predominantly black areas. If similar homicide rates for some reason took hold in a middle-class white suburb, you can bet that there would be a major governmental response to stop the cycle. This lack of response is thus genuine racism.

What should the governmental response be? That is not a simple question, but the basic elements are reasonably obvious. First, we need to back off of a system of “crime prevention” patrolling that, especially linked with the ill-advised war on drugs, has led most urban police forces to adopt patterns of behavior more similar to those of an occupying foreign power than to the traditional policing methods of the English Bobbies. Frustrated by the Exclusionary Rule and eager to look concerned, police departments love “crime prevention”, an active process of interfering with people in which Constitutional restrictions have little practical significance, since the officers are not investigating a crime but are rather just trying to intimidate would-be criminals. Acting like an occupying power tends to encourage people to respond like an occupied population rather than like a cooperative citizenry. That is unhelpful. Perhaps more to the point, it does not in fact shut down crime and it encourages sloppy habits that lead to actual crimes not being properly investigated and solved. There is plenty of evidence in criminology for the proposition that the thing that stops crime is a high degree of certainty that the criminal will be caught and punished quickly. The severity of the punishment is not very relevant (although of course a person in prison cannot commit additional crimes, except against other prisoners), but swiftness and certainty are. Good detective work is far and away the most effective way to reduce crime in any neighborhood. Thus, we should have more foot patrols of the type that become properly acquainted with the people in the neighborhood. In occupying power mode, police tend to regard anyone who does not look like them as a potential threat, just as U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan have tended to become deeply suspicious of the native population overall. A beat patrol person would learn to see people on the beat as human beings, some good and some not so good. He could even learn to distinguish the degrees of bad. In any gang there is generally a nasty true psychopath who attracts to himself a secondary layer of poorly socialized people who are not inherently bad, but who are attracted to the power and status of the psychopath. If law enforcement could identify, target and remove those core players, far fewer other people would be corrupted. Further, if the beat patrol cop’s colleagues proved that they were just interested in catching the people in the neighborhood who had harmed other people in the neighborhood, and were willing to work hard to succeed at it, the police overall could build trust in the community, which leads to a higher degree of cooperation, which leads to more crimes solved and punished. I went to a heavily black inner city high school where we had a police officer on campus. None of us ever met the man, he did not intervene when students were being beaten bloody by other students, and generally he was a waste of the taxpayers’ money. If he had gotten to know students and had made a real effort to identify and punish the kids who preyed on other kids, he would have gotten the trust and cooperation of students of all races. Instead, even the white kids regarded him as a vaguely hostile object.

We also need to have better mechanisms for suppressing witness intimidation. Intimidation needs to be dealt with comprehensively and severely, and we need to have good, practical and sensitive mechanisms for protecting witnesses and their families without disrupting their lives more than necessary.

We also need to rethink the war on drugs. Urban black parents don’t like having a crack house or a heroin dealer on the block any more than anyone else does, and we need to improve efforts to shut down the drug supply lines (following the money and stopping CIA-affiliated international drug rings would help) and be intolerant of narcotics dealers, but giving people criminal records for possessing small amounts of drugs does not help anything. We need to isolate the violent criminals, which means not criminalizing a substantial swath of society for actions that are not particularly harmful to others. If a drug user gets robbed, he should not have to feel shy about explaining the circumstances of the robbery, so that he can be an ally of the police. If a drug user wants to seek help in breaking the habit, he should not have to be afraid of admitting his problem.

We need to make better use of mechanisms in the criminal justice system that divert young people from jail and focus on rehabilitation. Prostitutes should not be afraid to call the police to report an assault, and assaults on prostitutes should be investigated as vigorously as assaults on anyone else. Human trafficking should be dealt with harshly and prostitutes should be given a viable chance to escape that life with a clean record and real help shedding addictions and getting on their feet.

We need to take real steps to ensure that illegal activity is not the best economic option for young men in poor neighborhoods. Substantial efforts at targeted job training, targeted employment programs including neighborhood improvement programs, neighborhood patrol work armed with a cell phone, and suchlike are needed. We should be imaginative. For instance, it is a characteristic of our society today that a large percentage of home-improvement and landscaping work is done by Hispanic immigrants who lack adequate training in the crafts they are attempting to perform and lack adequate English to communicate with homeowners. What if poor black youths were given professional training in carpentry, tiling, landscaping, etc. and were taught Spanish, and then were made available to serve as crew bosses? Many a homeowner would be in favor of that improvement.  We also need to make real improvements in poor-neighborhood schools. As a society we have become way too fond of the expensive and time-wasting practice of busing for integration, rather than using money to make urban schools safe and superior and providing programs to make up for disinterested parenting, programs that are best done through neighborhood schools that can have real contact with the parents. (There are many good and involved parents in the inner city, but there are also many too-young and troubled parents.)

What could we get from such efforts? Ending the racist attitude that accepts such high rates of black-on-black violence in poor neighborhoods would be reward enough in itself, but we would get much more. In general, poor Americans today would not be considered poor by the people in many countries around the world. The worst thing about their situation is having to live amidst crime and fear. A place like the Bronx has good food, good music, good culture, and many nice and decent people, but it suffers from the fact that the people who should be visiting and spending money in its establishments are afraid to enter. Poor neighborhoods often have attractive housing that would be extremely valuable if it was located a mile or two away. End the crime, and many of the neighborhood’s citizens will find themselves with valuable property. New businesses would enter, providing new jobs. Better stores with better prices would enter. Taxis would start being willing to pick up black men at night even if they weren’t wearing suits. America would be better and greater.

If, on the other hand, we focus on treating what is a police problem as being a race problem, if we discourage police from engaging with black men who have in fact robbed convenience stores, if we encourage black youths to disobey and challenge police officers, if we encourage people to think that the police are out to hurt them out of racial hatred, if we cheer for riots that burn down black neighborhoods and wipe out black business owners, then we will just encourage the images, beliefs and behaviors that permit white liberals to think that they don’t need to pay any attention to helping solve black-on-black crime.  The media love this sort of thing, because it serves their agenda of distraction. Reading about the fact that white society has, in fact, let down our fellow citizens and that we can and should do something about it is complicated, takes a lot of reporter time, and is not entertaining. Reading about racial tension and shootings on video and riots sells papers and fills the hours on CNN. The media loves to listen to designated spokespeople for black Americans. Think about that one. If Fox News wanted to interview a self-proclaimed spokesman for white Americans, can you picture what that person would be like? Would that person be at all likely to represent the views of the average white American? I sure wouldn’t want a person who labelled himself as a spokesperson for white Americans to be viewed as speaking for me.

Black people, like all people, have a wide variety of interests. The only thing they have in common as black people is not wanting to be taken advantage of by non-black people, just as a “white spokesman” could only speak to a common interest in not being taken advantage of by non-whites. Let’s drop the racist categorization. Let’s think about people in high-crime neighborhoods and what they have a right to expect from our enlightened society. Then let’s act on that, interacting with the residents of such neighborhoods as a collection of individual people, most of whom are peaceful, honest and good and who want to raise their families in safety. All lives matter. Our Constitution is based on the notion that the best way to protect a minority is by refusing to allow classifications based on race, ethnicity, or religion, to require that everyone be treated as people with the same basic desires and the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Americans in certain neighborhoods are not experiencing those basic rights, and we need to fix that, no matter what color they are. That is what Americans are supposed to do.

Can liberals stop acting like criminality is an inherent racial trait?

It has become pervasive in our language. For example, an article discussing Futurecrimes-type software that makes bail recommendations through secret computer algorithms frets that the program may be “racially biased”. The computer program, of course, does not have skin color as one of its data feeds. The machine does not peer at the accused and react to his skin color. It considers data items that supposedly are correlated with likelihood to flee or commit a crime while on bail. Those data items may also be correlated with race, but they are not caused by race in the sense that a black person automatically has them. By saying that the computer program is racially biased, though, the writer drums it into us that black people are inherently criminal, and that we must overlook criminality because it is associated with being black or hispanic. Look beyond this single example – there are many instances where the writers or speakers are more unquestionably associating blackness as such with criminality, such as a recent example of complaining that employment screening based on criminal convictions is racist, as opposed to just factually affecting a higher proportion of black people than white people.

This type of speech is bad for two reasons. First, it tends to convince the type of people who do not normally have much contact with non-whites (think Trump’s former cabinet) that criminality really is an inherent racial characteristic. We got over that as a society a century ago. Liberals, of all people, should not be resurrecting it now.

More problematically, that phrasing leads to patterns of thought that make it easy to dismiss real problems experienced disproportionately by non-white people as being something that we should just ignore.  If one takes the correct view that nothing about dark skin makes a person inherently more likely to commit a felony, then we can see that a large subset of our supposedly enlightened and humane society is being subjected to influences that we should consider to be intolerable. The factors that the computer algorithm picks up that are associated with criminality are social problems to be addressed, not racial characteristics to be overlooked. Whatever causes those factors needs to be confronted. That process begins with admitting that subcultures that are common among poor whites and poor minorities alike tend to spawn criminality and defeat education. America in the 1800s and early 1900s specifically tried to address cultural issues through the forum of our universal public education system. That was a good thing, but due to segregated education or their time of arrival much of the black and Hispanic population missed out on it, and we should see that everyone gets the benefit of it now. A level of serious police protection, particularly  through vigorous suppression of witness intimidation, can cut off a tendency towards tit-for-tat violence and the uncontrolled violence against women and children that tends to go with it. Investing in rehabilitating housing and improving the environment in poor areas, thus creating local jobs, combined with teaching people to wish to and be able to maintain the property would help. Raising our urban transit systems to the cleanliness, reliability and safety of European systems would help. Providing real interventions to help the insane homeless that we have caringly dumped on our streets would help; the bad old days of abusive institutional care can be absolutely prevented with  modern camera surveillance of institutional activities.

The list of positive interventions we could make could go on for pages. So long as we maintain the language of problems being “racial” rather than “human”, however, nothing will really be done. Declaring a problem to be racial is code for “those people just want us to send them checks every month and leave them alone.” It is code for “only people who are not as good as my family have those problems, but I am so admirable that I won’t criticize them.” Let’s instead call out the people who say everything is racial for being racist. Let’s acknowledge that there is no reason why a black or Hispanic family, as such, should not have the same education, basic living conditions, and prospects as anyone else, as in fact many such families do (and many poor and violent white families don’t). In consequence, let’s acknowledge that the families that don’t have the same education, basic living conditions and prospects are suffering from something that could be fixed, with adequate honesty and effort. Then, let’s work to fix it.

The statistics don’t support the idea that police are out to shoot black people

First, a disclaimer. I fully support the notion that a disproportionate number of black people end up getting arrested, creating the opportunity for a tragic police encounter, and that this is a result of systemic societal problems that need to be addressed. Anyone saying “too many black people have dangerous encounters with the police and we need to care about that” is correct and I agree with them and I will be pleased if they loudly voice that view as such, leading to addressing all of the causes of that phenomenon. This post relates to a different, counterproductive view that tends to go under the Black Lives Matter banner, a view that police kill black people because police as a species are racists who kind of like killing black people. 

Sometimes simple numbers can help to counter media-fueled hysteria. The premise of the Black Lives Matter movement has been that American police officers are a bunch of racist thugs who target and kill black people. It is beyond question that the police shoot and kill people, sometimes without adequate justification, but the movement is not called Arrestees’ Lives Matter or The Coalition for Better Police Training and Supervision. So, if the organization’s premise is correct, what would you expect to see? I would expect that it would mean that the police kill black people in numbers that are disproportionate to the portion of intimate police encounters, i.e. arrests and especially arrests for violent crime, that involve black people.

According to the FBI statistics, 28.1% of all arrests and 38.5% of violent crime arrests are of black people. See https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/43tabledatadecoverviewpdf . A recent report by the Mapping Police Violence project states that 1,100 Americans were killed by police in 2015, of whom 321 were black. https://www.rt.com/usa/326724-police-killings-usa-report/  In other words,  29.2% of the persons killed by police were black, while 28.1% of total arrestees and 38.5% of violent arrestees were black.  That means that the percentage of black people killed by police officers is not higher than one would normally expect.

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. In a typical year, something over 50 police officers are murdered. On average, 39.8% of the people who murder the police officers are black. https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/tables/table_47_leos_fk_race_and_sex_of_known_offender_2005-2014.xls. Compared with the 38.5% of arrests of violent criminals where the arrestees are black, that average is slightly high, but about what you would expect. So, on average, police officers seem to kill  a disproportionately low number of black violent arrestees, while about the expected proportion of people who murder police officers are black.

Those are the numbers, folks. Remove the media and government filters and the desire by certain professional organizers to distort the picture, and we see what we would have expected – police officers are mostly decent professionals who are not disproportionately deadly towards black people, and who indeed seem to exercise special restraint when a black arrestee is involved, despite the black criminal population not showing an equal degree of restraint with regard to police officers. Sure, there are unjustified shootings by police officers and those should be taken seriously, but there is not a general race problem in this area, save in the minds of the protesters. So, can we all calm down a bit and examine police governance objectively, as a general community problem, and get away from the unhelpful and inflammatory efforts to racialize everything?

The real problem in our society is not white people or black people, it is rich people, the over-concentration of wealth that is hurting our economy and reducing opportunity for everyone. That class loves the new racial tension, because it distracts people from the real issue, the capture of our government by the wealthy and the destruction of the middle class by financial parasites. The sooner we can get past this nonsense and focus on the real issues the better it will be for all of us, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or whatever.

Focus on Skin Color is Stupid

It has become popular among the Democratic political elite to spread the line that everyone is a racist. In their world, modern American whites, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian heritage folks all see black skin and think bad thoughts. In their minds, that justifies a raft of race-conscious policies, including racial bias in hiring, lighter law enforcement in black neighborhoods, etc. etc., which can be proffered in exchange for the votes of black citizens.  That is disturbing in a nation whose Constitution states that race should not be a thing, that government should be race-blind.  Worse, perhaps, it perpetuates a fundamental misunderstanding perpetuated by those who profit from race-based politics. That myth is that non-blacks react negatively to black skin.

A simple thought experiment will show that this is error. Think of any of a variety of black TV characters – Burton Guster on Psych, Bill Cosby’s character (set aside his real-life issues), Robin Wood in Buffy,  or Jonathan Rollins in L.A. Law. Set them beside a tatted-up “white trash” type. Which one would 99% of the U.S. white population, and 99.999% of the U.S. middle-class white population, rather meet on a lonely street at night, or give a cab ride to, or have marry their sister? It’s not scary trash boy.  It is not about skin color. It is about culture and indicia of threat.  White people are nervous about people who look like the ones who preyed upon them in high school. In my 50/50 high school, there were plenty of perfectly nice black kids who got along fine with the white kids, but there were also thuggish black kids who assaulted and robbed the white kids. The white kids did not engage in collective self-help because then they would have been violent racists, and the black kids did not control each other, so the white kids learned to practice prudent avoidance. Adult white people likewise learn to avoid thuggish-looking black people who look like those who engage in predation, the same way that they learn to avoid white people who look like criminal predators. Likewise, adult middle class white people don’t keep company with druggy-looking people of any race, because they are not part of their target marriage group and they are a potential source of trouble. Really and truly, though, middle class white people see middle class black people as people, not black people, unless the individuals in question make race a thing. Skin color, as such, is not part of the modern middle-class mindset outside of the white-guilt types who are admittedly racialist. Normal people at work or in a social group just don’t think about it.

But the culture thing is real. Many readers may now say “what’s the difference? That is still racist!”  However, that is both literally wrong and extremely unhelpful in terms of addressing the problem. If you assume that white people just hate black skin, then there really isn’t a cure. Suppressing hatred just leads to the suppressed group looking for a leader that can liberate them. If you assume instead that anyone who adopts middle class culture can get beyond that sort of thing, then there is a plan that parents, schools, and law enforcement can work towards. Law enforcement, through correct community policing, can learn to distinguish between actual thugs and druggies and other people of the same skin color who happen to live in the same neighborhood, and they can work to catch and punish those in the former group who prey on the latter group, allowing the latter group to relax and prosper. Schools and preschools can enforce appropriate discipline and teach middle-class speech and communication skills – the same program that has resulted in a substantial reduction in regional accents over the past couple of generations and has allowed Asian immigrants to prosper. (For those who think pushing minority children to sound and dress like middle-class white people is cultural genocide, consider this example. Society has suppressed white regionalisms from Boston to Mississippi because they were indicators of underclass, under-educated backgrounds, and the resulting homogenization of accents hasn’t hurt anyone.) Parents can get away from self-defeating strategies and push their children towards successful middle-class role models without reference to race. White middle-class people are already primed to push for the control of anyone who abuses other middle-class people, regardless of their race. When any black family crosses that divide, they become part of the “club”. If reverse discrimination stops, the middle-class white folks will likewise drop the assumption that a black person in a given position is likely to be less qualified than a white person in the same position, an assumption that flows entirely from reverse discrimination – the same phenomenon that leads to an assumption that the owner’s son is probably less qualified than a regular person in the same position, or that a scholarship athlete is probably dumb.

The ancestors of the majority of America’s white population, as well as the current generations of white immigrants, went through the same process of assimilation. They may maintain ethnic holiday traditions, but they dropped their national costumes, they erased their home-country accents, and they stopped having full-on Munich-style Octoberfest celebrations and other traditions that were not consistent with the middle-class norm. Further, the white middle-class culture has continued to evolve. The three-martini lunch culture became obsolete. Much of bad old sexist culture has been obsoleted, though the culture is still inexplicably tolerant of things like fraternity rape. People follow rules and norms designed to make it easier to get along with and trust each other, to form spontaneous work groups where the members think of one another as “us” and the people impeding their progress as “them”. To be sure, mainstream society can be concerned about things they shouldn’t be. Anyone who has survived high school knows that there is a human tendency to try to form elites based on artificial distinctions that can be asserted by the school royalty as a reason to look down on everyone else, and that sort of nonsense should be rejected. Not wearing the latest expensive style or having the latest expensive technology should never be tolerated as a reason for looking down on someone. But there is a difference between rejecting would-be elitism and saying that people have to train themselves to ignore all social cues. We can all learn to adopt the basics that show that we are likely to be educated, safe, contributing and respectful individuals.

This is not to say that eliminating race issues in America is simple or would happen overnight, but the fact is that they can be solved, and that we can live up to our constitution and make race not a thing. We can stop having surveys where the first classification question is always “what race are you?”  We can stop having property values and businesses in certain neighborhoods suffer based on who lives there. We can stop having police be discouraged from solving crimes and punishing predators in black neighborhoods. We can stop having black children adopt life strategies that lead to social defeat or feel like there is something wrong with them if they seek to speak correctly and become accountants.  But we’re not going to get there just by issuing a general directive to white people (and, by the way, Asian and Pacific Islander people who also make up the mainstream) that the only issue is a deep-seated psychological problem on their part. We need to have a system in which everyone, black, white, or other, stops thinking that skin color represents anything other than skin color, and everyone starts thinking of people as people.

Why we can’t have nice things: liberty, rights, and wrongs

I am a big believer in liberty. I don’t like the application of the term “liberal” to the Pelosi types because they don’t really believe in liberty, but rather seek to suppress anyone who disagrees with them or seeks to point out inconvenient truths, going so far as to try to prosecute Snowdon and Julian Assange. But liberty, properly understood and as intended by Jefferson, is the ability to do that which does not harm others and the right to be left alone. It is not a license to impose on other people or to be obnoxious. Civilized society is founded on a combination of freedom and good manners, in which people do not seek to use their liberty in ways that make life worse for other people. In recent years, though, many millions of Americans have come to accept a view of liberty that is defined approximately as follows: “If you actually speak and act in a manner that you know will be unpleasant to others, and if nobody punishes you for it, then you are free, but if you exercise good manners and try to make life pleasant for those around you, then you are oppressed.” This is not freedom. It is a juvenile exercise of power. Nasty little bullies will be unpleasant to other children just to show that they have the power to do it. Men with Napoleonic complexes will act in obnoxious and abusive ways because they convince themselves that the fact that others politely refrain from squashing them like bugs means that they have the power to push people around and thus are somehow superior to their victims. Nonetheless, it is clear that a huge part of the population now feels compelled to behave badly – or to have some sort of tribal affiliation with other people who behave badly – in order to feel good about themselves.

This has been highlighted by the Covid mask wearing and social distancing issues. Not wearing a mask has been widely and loudly touted as a human right and a basic freedom. So, let’s think about that. The scientists tell us that wearing a proper N95 mask reduces the chances of infecting others and thus slows the spread of the virus to give time to deploy an effective vaccine. So, not wearing a mask in public increases the danger to others. Do I have a right to endanger other people? There shouldn’t be any debate about whether the government has the power to require me to wear a mask, because as a decent human being I should be wearing one without anyone making me do it. (Jesse Ventura noted that those who felt that wearing a mask was overly burdensome were wusses. One should suck it up and do the right thing.) That right – the right to behave properly – is one I clearly do have, and if anyone tries to take it away from me they should be suppressed. On the other hand, if I refuse to wear a mask and get in someone’s face breathing on them and thus threatening them, their parents and their children, then I am not exercising a right: I am exercising a wrong. If I use obnoxious language and overtly sexual behavior in a family area I am exercising a wrong. If I drive aggressively and cut other people off, I am exercising a wrong. If I go to a nice restaurant where some couples are having a treat they can afford maybe once a year and I get drunk and loud, I am exercising a wrong. If I show up at a protest and brandish a firearm to try to feel tough (as if possessing a weapon of violence somehow made me physically superior), then I am exercising a wrong. None of us should feel liberated by exercising a wrong.

This yahoo culture, the belief that it is necessary to abuse others in order to feel good about yourself, prevents us from having many nice things. The internet was supposed to open a forum for intelligent discussion in which useful information would be shared and different viewpoints would be explored so that we could be independent of the corporate media. Instead we have forums in which people jump on each other in mindless attacks in order to feel like a tough person that some fantasy admirer would ooh and ahh over, eliminating any chance for useful discussion. On TV we see people driving their Jeeps out to pristine wilderness areas, and then doing their best to track up and tear up the landscape in order to leave their mark. During Covid people have been taking advantage of the reduced supervision in our state and federal parks to go in and trash things. The same basic attitude prevails in business, with many “businesses” having crossed the line into criminal enterprises making largely fraudulent junk calls. Other supposedly legitimate businesses intentionally do their best to make everything high friction, cheating customers and then making it very time consuming to do anything about it. We can’t just make a contract and rely on the business to do the right thing. We need to be very careful and monitor them, and we still get cheated. The businesses, however, evidently feel good about themselves because they are making money and nobody arrests them, so they think they are just smarter, better business people than anyone who tries to act honestly. As a result of all this, our lives get worse.

What would society be like if, instead of seeking the freedom to exercise wrongs, we all tried to focus on exercising our right to do right? What would happen if we tried to conduct ourselves in a way where we didn’t impose on other people? We could exercise good manners and confine our overt sexuality, whatever variety it might be, to the privacy of our own homes. We could be honest in our business affairs and we could demand that the authorities stand up for consumers and require businesses to be fair as a matter of course. We could wear proper masks during a pandemic, at some inconvenience to ourselves, because we wanted to be extra careful to avoid doing anything that could harm others, without anyone having to tell us to, and we could have reasoned discussions so that people could learn that cloth masks are basically useless and so that we could figure out how best to address small children. (Remember, people, Covid is not the Big Bad. It is the mild warning pandemic. The Big Bad will come, likely in the foreseeable future, and if we are not ready for it then figure out where to dig the mass graves and who will do the digging.) We could try our best to ensure that the environment and our parks are kept at least as nice for the next person and for our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren as they were for us. We could keep our individuality and respect the individuality of others without defining our individuality as requiring us to be offensive or disrespectful. We could recognize that, just as Jesus did not show His power by oppressing others or His freedom by attacking others, the best way to show our strength is through generous kindness and the best way to exercise our freedom is by regulating our own behavior to improve society for everyone. Wouldn’t that be a happier world? If we reformed our own hearts to want to do right, wouldn’t we be more free to then all follow our hearts?

A bratty three-year-old’s vision of freedom, i.e. freedom to be selfish and demanding, is a flaw to be corrected; it is not a correct vision for society. Let’s all grow up and encourage everyone else to grow up, too. Let’s realize that responsible adults use their liberty for the benefit of all, and then do the right things to earn our freedom. If we can do that then we will have a society worth fighting for.

Shifting gears

I started this blog to give samples of my book designed to help normal parents explain to their children a version of Christianity that Christ would recognize. I was motivated to spend the time writing that book because I think that greedy, selfish people have pushed a version of Christianity on the American public that would have appalled Christ, telling them that they have to accept it based on unquestioning “faith” or they will be horribly punished. That warped version of Christianity cheers for war and for hatred of people who have been raised in other religions. It says that we are duty-bound to support politicians who are alarmingly immoral in their personal and political lives so long as they say that they favor jailing anyone who gets or provides an abortion (though of course doing nothing to avoid having girls and women get into a situation where they feel they need to get an abortion) and favor using taxpayer dollars to fund private religious schools at the expense of public schools; the fact that the same politicians launch illegal wars to slaughter foreign women and children, tolerate terrible conditions for children who have already been born, protect rapists and child molesters if they are rich and famous, and do their best to destroy God’s creation for profit has to be ignored. It says that Jesus, meeting Donald Trump, would have embraced him and admired his example of loving Christian behavior. It says that it is fine for preachers to get poor and struggling members of their flock to donate money so that the preacher can buy another palatial home and fund his sex life. I think we need to teach our children the real basics of Christianity (which, not coincidentally, are also the real basics of other religions as well, though I think they are generally better developed in Christianity) in order to immunize them against that sort of harmful nonsense.

But false and self-serving Christianity is just one of the things that the rich and powerful use to fool and distract the American public. Now I want to turn to addressing some of the others. Those include a misguided kind of patriotism centered on supporting useless foreign wars, a fake kind of “freedom” devoted to selfishly imposing on other people, a distracting and divisive focus on race, a belief in the nonsense that Wall-Street funded economists spout, and other distractions that are intended to keep us from realizing that a fraction of 1% of the population is accumulating wealth and power to a degree never before seen, while the rest of us stagnate or sink. The future posts in this blog will be aimed at addressing some of those things in the hope that I might be able to contribute to people seeing the ways in which they are being manipulated into supporting an elite that views them with contempt as foolish and expendable serfs. If I can play any part in helping people to see through that fog and find their common interests with each other, then my time will be well spent. Our proper mission in life is to learn to love and help one another. Jesus did not say “try to get a leg up on your neighbor and make that loser jealous!”, nor did He say “boy, you better earn all the cash you can by exploiting others, because that’s how to enter the Kingdom of God!” There is no commandment saying “Thou shalt not kill – unless you do it by drone and, you know, the kids are just collateral damage, and the war machine makes lots of money on the weapons, in which case go for it!” His message was clear and simple. The fact that society strays so far from that ideal of love, protection and support shows the power of these cleverly designed distractions. Exposing them for what they are is God’s work, and I hope that others will share in that effort so that we may all find our way back into the light.