Some Thoughts Regarding The Repulsive Slaying of American Consular Officials in Benghazi

So this is  where "democratic" revolution in Libya has gotten us. Some nobody in the US makes a film months ago saying nasty things about Islam. Newly liberated Libyans decide that the anniversary of September 11th is a grand old time to respond by sending a mob to butcher US consular officials. Local authorities are either complicit in this, or powerless to stop it.

So we now have in Libya a society where the important decisions are being made by the terrorists - thuggish, humourless religious fanatics who are on hair-trigger alert for anyone, anywhere saying things that might hurt their delicate and precious feelings (or their supporters). Either the government supports this, or the government is unable to stop this. I loathe the old butcher as much as anybody, but I am at a loss to hear the explanation as to how this state of affairs is a clear improvement over Gaddaffi.

We've also got the same trend going on in Egypt, causing the US consulate to make cringeworthy statements attacking US free speech trying to defuse the mob on its doorstep. Another triumph for democracy! Things were so boring and predictable under Mubarak.

Look, I understand why US embassy officials might say cowardly things to try to save their skin when an angry mob is on their doorstep. The bigger question is, why did the Cairo embassy staff feel that they were on their own, and the only way out was appeasement?

It's somewhat a trick question. Embassies are always at the mercy of the locals, at least in the short term. What protects them is the threat of the sovereign might of the country. Sometimes this registers with the mob directly. More likely, it registers with the local country officials, who rein in their citizens instead of letting them murder foreign diplomats.

So the real question becomes this - why did the mob (and the local governments) feel that they could violate US sovereign territory and murder US citizens with impunity?

This is why. This is why.

Gary Brecher had some strong thoughts on what a real response to the Iranian hostage crisis might have looked like. I wouldn't want to take it as far as he suggests. But there's a whole range of possible options that would have sent a clear message of deterrence for future embassy looters. You can bet, however, that the appropriate response sure as s*** didn't involve sending in 8 helicopters in some hare-brained rescue scheme doomed to failure.

Beckwith had no choice but to scrub the mission right there in the desert. All because Carter only authorized eight lousy choppers.

When Nixon heard about it, he had a great comment: "Eight? Why not a thousand? It's not like we don't have them!"

Clinton, meanwhile, sent a firm and fearsome lesson by bombing a camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Yeah, they got that message loud and clear.

This time around, everyone, from the consular officials, to the mob, to the local government, predicted that the US certainly wouldn't do anything beforehand, and likely wouldn't do anything afterwards either.

So far, they've been right.

In the Iranian hostage crisis, at least, the US was under the moral blackmail that any strike on Tehran would likely cause the deaths of the US consular officials.

Well, that ship has already sailed this time. The question is what the US is going to do.

We've got a thousand choppers now, too. Are you holding your breath for a military response? In election season? I'm sure not.

If the US isn't willing to strongly punish countries that violate its embassies, it has no business putting consular officials in hellhole countries in the first place.

In the likely event that no serious military response is forthcoming, let me advance the following prediction:

Expect more fatal attacks on US embassies, and sooner, rather than later.

Ugh

So Obamacare is constitutional.

I'm going to swallow my own advice and refrain from commenting on the substance of the case until I've read the decision. But it's going to be a glum and melancholy task alright.

In the meantime, does anyone seriously doubt the wisdom of Mencius Moldbug on this matter:

In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be "King." Sorry, kid, you haven't violated the conservation of anything.

The Kings have spoken - Obamacare stands.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

Journalists go to play paintball with Hezbollah to see what happens.

Psychologically illuminating hilarity ensues:

We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.

The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.

As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed—even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).

Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.

Ha!

Scumbag terrorists demonstrate their worthiness for having a state by acting like scumbags - naive western reader expectations hardest hit.

(Via Kottke)

Caned!

Nigel Farage lays into the EU over the madness of having the Spanish bailout being funded by the same countries who are themselves on the brink of needing a bailout.



I love watching Nigel Farage in action. He's aware that he's never going to change anything at the EU, so he just acts like a professional troll for their dim-witted schemes, pointing out all the ridiculous fictions that EU boosters love to tell each other.

Good News, Bad News

The good news - the US and Israel created the Stuxnet virus to destroy the centrifuges in Iran being used to enrich uranium. I suspected this was probably true, but it's nice to have it "confirmed" (to the extent that national security secrets are ever really confirmed).

This is actually doubly good news, because it means that

a) Somebody in the administration is actually doing something active to try to prevent (delay is probably a better word) the Iranian nuclear program. I thought the unofficially stated policy was 'We'll keep holding talks about talks until they develop a bomb, then announce that there's nothing that can be done since they've already got the bomb'.

b) My earlier presumption that the US was clueless about using cyberwarfare and was just being schooled by the Chinese might be incorrect. I still imagine we're being schooled by the Chinese, but it looks like (thankfully) the margin may be less than I thought. The mitigating factor was always that Chinese attacks on the US were likely to be exposed (since the US has a free press), but US attacks on China would only be exposed if China felt that it was in their interests to expose it, which would be less common.

The bad news is that Stuxnet wasn't meant to spread in the wild, it was only meant to stay in the centrifuges. So it wasn't as good as planned. It also fits into a), in the sense that US attacks appear to be designed so that nobody ever finds out about them.

But I'm still definitely calling this as a net win, and my opinion of the NSA has gone up.

Gullibility and Lies

I am a bad liar. I don't like lying, and as a result, I don't do it very much. This creates a virtuous circle - because I don't lie, I don't get practice at it, and so I'm bad at it, so I don't have any incentive to lie, since I won't be believed. I'm happy with this, because I have ethical reasons to avoid lying that aren't worth detailing here.

But it also means that I am generally bad at detecting lies.

This isn't because I can't recognise the signs of someone being shifty, or analyse where a story appears unlikely. When I'm primed to detect lies (negotiations with people I don't know, excuses for bad behavior), I'm fairly good at it.

Instead, I'm bad because my default presumption is that people are telling the truth. This is the mind projection fallacy at work - I can envisage that people might lie when cornered, or for some material advantage, such as to gain a sale.

But the idea of just casually lying about something, when there aren't large incentives to do so, is rather baffling to me. I guess that's why I get taken by surprise by it.

It turns out that Barack Obama admitted to lying in his autobiography, 'Dreams From My Father'.  He describes a girlfriend, which it turns out is actually a 'composite of several girlfriends'.

[See update at end - apparently he acknowledged doing this at the start of the book. The rest of the post is as it was written without this in mind]

Huh?!? Exactly what kind of bull$*** is that? Is this an autobiography, or an embellished work of fiction roughly based on the life of Barack Obama, written by Barack Obama?

The claimed defence is the following:

“It is an incident that happened,” [Obama] said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression. I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”"

In other words, the classic 'fake but accurate' defense. It would be dishonest to not touch on the theme, so I just made stuff up. Which really is the higher truth, no?

I can understand not wanting to talk about girlfriends specifically. I can understand leaving it vague, or not mentioning who was who. I can understand leaving out names, or stories, or even the whole question of girlfriends altogether.

I cannot understand making up an entirely bogus composite character, and never mentioning that this is what you're doing.

I have only two modes with which I evaluate the truth of people's statements.

Initially, I give people the benefit of the doubt about their statements being true, unless I have a circumstantial reason to suspect that the person has a clear incentive to lie. I'll evaluate whether they might be mistaken, obfuscating or avoiding. But I generally assume  an absence of a level of bad faith sufficient to deliberately make statements that are known by the speaker to be false.

Each person, however, gets only one chance to lose that presumption. Once it's gone, every statement they make gets evaluated in the cold and cynical light of whether there is outside evidence to confirm its likelihood, and whether they might have any reason (however small) to lie.

Half Sigma notes that once you start evaluating the rest of the Obama biography in this light, there's plenty of other stuff that doesn't add up:

The story in Obama’s memoir about how he arrived in Manhattan with no money and no place to live seems rather weird. Wouldn’t Columbia make sure a promising affirmative action admit would have a dorm room? I’ve attended several colleges, and never was there not a place for me to live. I suspect that Obama just made that up to make the memoir more interesting. In reality, people’s lives are boring. I suspect that most of the best memoirs are works of fiction.

More fool me.

It's hard to express exactly why this story disgusts me so much. A politician lied? News at 11! A few paragraphs in a book you've never read are false - what's the difference?

And yet, I cannot shake the notion that for elected leaders to be so utterly shameless and unapologetic for lying over such a trivial benefit? It profits a man none to trade his soul for the whole world, but for a slightly more exciting memoir?

I cannot think this is a small thing.

The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn had something to say about living by lies:

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.
And from that day onward he:

• Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.

• Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role.

• Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music.

• Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.

• Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.

• Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.

• Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question.

• Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.

• Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.

...

But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude.


And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul- don't let him be proud of his ``progressive'' views, and don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general--let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm.
...


If we are too frightened, then we should stop complaining that someone is suffocating us. We ourselves are doing it. Let us then bow down even more, let us wail, and our brothers the biologists will help to bring nearer the day when they are able to read our thoughts are worthless and hopeless.


And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:


``Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?


``Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.''

Words to live by.

Update: VarianB in the comments points out the update to the article that noted that Obama apparently noted at the start of the book that some of the characters are composites. I still don't understand why you'd want to write a not-quite-autobiography, but it's not dishonest to do so if you let people know. The implications of dishonesty are thus unfair, and retracted. I still like the rest of the post, so perhaps take the point in the abstract.

Understatement of the Day

From Mencius Moldbug's 'Letter to Open-Minded Progressives'

Thus we see why progressivism is more fashionable than conservatism. Progressive celebrities, for example, are everywhere. Conservative ones are exceptions. This is cold calculation: Bono's PR people are happy that he's speaking out against AIDS. Mel Gibson's PR people are not happy that he's speaking out against the Jews.

Ha!

Voter, Heal Thyself

On April 4th, a Greek man named Dimitris Christoulas shot himself in a square in Athens, in part as protest for the government's austerity measures. The Exiled has a translation of the suicide note he left:

The collaborationist Tsolakoglou government has annihilated my ability for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone (without any state sponsoring) paid for 35 years.

Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamic reaction (although if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be the second after him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Piazza Loreto in Milan).

What a sad story.

Suicide rarely happens only because of one immediate cause - there's a ton of people suffering in Greece, but the vast majority of them aren't killing themselves. Taking suicide notes too literally can cause you to miss the bigger points about mental illness and depression that are likely contributing causes. If you go down that path, you wind up doing ridiculous things like convicting people of bullcrap charges like 'invasion of privacy' and 'bias intimidation' (whatever that is) because they did nasty things to someone who later killed themselves.

So you want to take all suicide notes with a grain of salt. But that said, the note above is interesting as an example of a particular mindset.

The note is full of rage at the Greece's leaders. Not only are they traitors for destroying the country, but likening them to Nazi collaborators in World War 2 suggests that the selling out of Greece to the Germans in the current crisis is something that rankles too. Of course, the reality measures (and the associated cuts in living standards for people like Christoulas who saw their pensions cut in recent budget measures) are the most proximate cause of misery. And fair enough too: pensioners end up thoroughly screwed, because they have the fewest options for replacing their lost income, as they're too old to go back to work. Not that the young and able-bodied have a ton of options for just 'going back to work' in modern Greece, but still.

But now we turn to what is not written.

You might note that there doesn't seem to be much rage at the earlier governments for running up the huge spending tabs that necessitated such dramatic cuts this time around. If you're only angry at the current government for cutting spending, but not angry at the previous governments for creating the whole mess, you've got a serious case of shooting the messenger.

But that's not even the most prominent of the dogs that didn't bark in the note above.

Q: Who is the single biggest group who contributed to the Greek crisis but who doesn't appear in the note above?

A: The Greek electorate.

The virtue of democracy is not that voters necessarily get better government, but merely that voters get the government they deserve. In the end, politicians respond to the incentives voters give them. If you keep voting for more spending, they'll keep spending. If you keep voting for so much spending that the country is now broke, and then vote to demand even more spending, don't be surprised when the politicians appear to act as if they're ignoring the public will. It's like the shareholders of General Motors firing the CEO because he hasn't made a flying car yet. You can keep firing CEO after CEO, but that ain't going to make the flying car magically appear.

The great Milton Friedman understood this well. In a democracy, we don't need to have 'non-traitorous politicians'. We need electorates to reward politicians who make the right choices.



Milt was too nice to point out the corollary to this argument - if the the current politicians keep doing the wrong thing over and over, this suggests that the electorate as a whole, through their opinion polls and their voting behaviour, has given them the incentives to do so. And thus, in the end, they have no one to blame but themselves.

An individual can be justifiably pissed off under a democracy - you vote for the guy who would put in good policies, but the guy with the bad policies gets elected. That's understandable - you did your part to support good policy, but what else can you do?

But the electorate as a whole cannot justifiably be pissed off at the outcomes the policies implemented by their leaders. As a whole, you get the politicians you deserve, whether that's George Washington, Lord Palmerston, Gerry Adams, or Hamas.

As Radiohead put it:

You do it to yourself, you do,
And that's why it really hurts.
You do it to yourself, just you,
You and no one else.
You do it to yourself.

(From a discussion with The Greek).

Pwned!

Andrew Breitbart may be gone, but Breitbart's legacy lives on. Investigative journalist and serial annoyance to the political left James O'Keefe has a classic new video up examining voter fraud. In it, he goes into a polling booth, gives the name and address of Attorney General Eric Holder, and is offered Holder's ballot. Naturally, they then intersperse this with interviews with Eric Holder where he claims that voter fraud isn't a problem.

Check it out - Comedy gold!

The Department of Justice is spinning like crazy on this one - the current line is the following:

“It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones."

You tested this new heart attack medication in a manufactured, controlled environment! That tells us nothing about how the drugs will work in the real world!

Which of course misses the point entirely - the video doesn't show the prevalence of voter fraud at all. It simply shows how trivially easy it is to implement. Whether it happens a lot or a little isn't clear from the video. Truthfully, it's probably not a huge effect. But it's not trivial either, and it might matter in close elections.

In terms of the dog that did not bark though, my initial thought was 'you mean they haven't charged O'Keefe with voter fraud based on the video?'. This would be exactly the kind of politically nasty 'shoot the messenger' approach I'd expect.

But then you watch the video carefully, and see that O'Keefe has learned his lesson from his earlier arrest - at no point does he actually make any misrepresentations about who he is. Listen to how he phrases his question:

O'Keefe: "Do you have an Eric Holder, Address [redacted in video]?

Poll Worker: "H-O-L-T-E-R or -D-E ?"

O'Keefe: "H-O-L-D-E-R . That's the name."

Clever. He deliberately avoids claiming at any point that he is Eric Holder, but they are willing to him the ballot anyway. He doesn't sign his name to anything, he doesn't take a ballot. I imagine a Big Government lawyer probably vetted the whole formulation quite carefully. He's not giving them anything to pin on him.

I remember Tim Blair pointing out back in 2008 that you didn't need ID to vote for Barack Obama, but you did need ID to attend the Barack Obama election night celebration party in Millennium Park. Seems like a funny ordering of priorities to me.

Budget Deficit Gold

Via Ace of Spades, @politicalmath has a classic graph describing the estimated fiscal impact of the Buffett Rule that President Obama proposed, which would increase taxes on those earning a $1 million a year or more. Surely that must bring in tons of revenue, right? It wouldn't just be cheap political demagoguery?



Oh. Oohhhhhh.

Against Compulsory Voting

Justin Wolfers likes the fact that Australia has compulsory voting.

I share Tom Friedman's view that the divisive nature of U.S. democracy is due to non-compulsory voting. But fixing that requires a mandate.

I respectfully disagree.

Less divisive it may be, but it offends me deeply as a statistician.

Why?

Well, who are the marginal people who vote under a mandatory system but not a compulsory system?

It's the people who didn't care enough to turn up of their own accord under a voluntary system.

Now, some of these people might actually have a firm view of the world, but just be feeling lazy or ambivalent. Maybe we really do want their opinions.

But a large number of the people who you're forcing to vote either

a) know virtually nothing about politics

b) genuinely don't give a flying fig

or both. If those people rationally decide to not vote, that's an entirely sensible decision.

How on earth does the decision-making system improve by forcing these people to pick a random answer? You're just intentionally adding noise to the process.

I remember my uncle had a mother who was senile and in a nursing home. He went in on election day to take her in to vote, only to be told that she'd already voted with the rest of the nursing home in the morning. Who did she vote for? Who the hell knows! She didn't know. Possibly someone told her who to vote for. Possibly she voted for the candidate suggested to her. Possibly not, too. But her completely random vote counted, just as much as the guy who read the paper every day. You can rest assured about that.

Lest you think that these people make up an insignificant number of votes, consider the following:

In the 1998 Australian federal election in the seat of Lindsay, there was an independent candidate who stood for office named 'Steve Grim-Reaper'.

Yes, really.

Without delving into the details of his policies, let's assume for the sake of the argument that people voting for a guy called 'Grim-Reaper' are essentially voting for a joke candidate. Let's further assume that the people voting for 'Grim-Reaper' might, if the 'Grim-Reaper' weren't running, vote for anyone at all. They are pure noise in the electoral process.

So how many people voted for the Grim Reaper in 1998?

1,043, or 1.36% of the electorate.

This isn't even counting the additional 4467, or 1.94% of the electorate, who voted informally (i.e. didn't bother to fill out the ballot properly).

Now, let's look at the seats that changed hands at the 1998 election. How many of these were cases where the margin of victory was less than the number of people in Lindsay who appeared to be voting as a joke?

In Bass, Tas, the margin was 0.06%.
In Dickson, Qld, the margin was 0.12%
In Kingston, SA, the margin was 0.46%
In the Northern Territory, the margin was 0.57%
In Stirling, WA, the margin was 1.04%
In Patteron, NSW, the margin was 1.22%

Six seats, where the victory was within the margin of joke voting. What a triumph!

In the most recent federal election, in 2010, the Labor Party ended up forming a coalition government with a majority of only one seat.

Meanwhile, the seat of Corangamite, Vic, was decided by 0.82% of the vote, and the seat of Hasluck, WA, was decided by 1.14% of the vote.

It is entirely possible that not only the outcome of a few seats, but in fact the outcome of the entire 2010 election, was decided by morons voting at random.

Justin Wolfers is a highly-trained economist, and a very competent statistician. It would amaze me if he weren't offended by this kind of forced noise in the voting process.

Even if it increases the civility of debate, it seems like a pretty steep price to pay.

On Andrew Breitbart and Living Boldly

Conservative/Libertarian blogger Andrew Breitbart has died, unexpectedly but of natural causes, at age 43.

Many disagreed with his politics, but the eulogies for him frequently cited one aspect of his personality - his 'utter fearlessness', as Charles Krauthammer put it. He went after issues that would make him a figure of hatred among the left, breaking the stories about corruption in ACORN and about Anthony Weiner. He was also a wonderful showman, which helped his media activities greatly.

Your views on his political contributions may differ, but rest assured that it takes some serious stones to make permanent enemies with the media and the left. I don't do it - I temper my excessive thoughts and write under a pseudonym, and I'm a nobody being read by nobody. Ace of Spades (who is a somebody read by lots of somebodies) does too, and Breitbart clearly impressed him. Of how many people can you say that they write and speak entirely without fear on any topic of discussion, let alone doing so while committing their words to permanence on the internet and TV, and doing so under their own name? TJIC comes to mind. Steve Sailer too. But there aren't many. Most of us in one form or another live our lives following the parody advice of the xkcd comic, "being careful what we write, because a future employer might read it", and dutifully avoiding anything too controversial being posted or tagged on facebook. xkcd had some great words about that too.

Greg Gutfeld wrote that Andrew Breitbart was 'the only person I know who operated without a safety net.'  What fine praise! What a worthy eulogy in an age of timidity and cowardice masquerading as prudence.

Ave Atque Vale, Mr Breitbart.

Outrageous Fact of the Day

From Steve Sailer:

JUST three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from appointment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that today seems not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and his wife had found their dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in that state: he was black and she was East Asian. Fortunately for the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in 1967 these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two years before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup poll found that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of Northern whites still wanted to ban interracial marriage.

You read that right - up until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in 18 US States. And it would have likely persisted longer until the Supreme Court stepped in. 1967! Flying men to the moon, banning interracial marriage.

 Dates of repeal of US anti-miscegenation laws by state

   No anti-miscegenation laws passed

   Before 1887

   1948 to 1967

   12 June 1967

And this being the early 20th Century, they weren't just trying to stop the symbolic recognition of interracial marriage, but instead stop the actual mixed race union, and mixed race sex in general:

Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes, the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead. All anti-miscegenation laws banned the marriage of whites and non-white groups, primarily blacks, but often also Native Americans and Asians.

In many states, anti-miscegenation laws also criminalized cohabitation and sex between whites and non-whites. ... While anti-miscegenation laws are often regarded as a Southern phenomenon, many northern states also had anti-miscegenation laws.

Steve Sailer is exactly right - 'not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible' is indeed the description.

I guess it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I simply cannot conceive of how the public justified these opinions to themselves. Even if you were racist to the core, and disgusted by interracial marriage. Was there no libertarian urge at all? Was there no sense that your own revulsion at two people having sex is not a public policy rationale for passing a law? John Stuart Mill wrote 'On Liberty' a full century earlier. Had nobody read it? Did they think it was all nonsense?

Conservatives would do well to not get too misty-eyed about America's glorious libertarian past that's being trampled on by modern liberals. In certain aspects (regulatory overreach, taxation levels, nanny-state condescension), this is definitely true.

But in other very important respects, today is a lot better than it used to be. The past is not only another country, but one that on closer inspection you may like less than you'd thought you would.

Everything Old is New Again!

Australia's former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was booted out as PM during his first term by Julia Gillard. Now that she got elected (by the three independents that chose Labor in this hung parliament), Rudd has been angling to return the favour to Gillard. She'd gotten sick of this, and was threatening to sack him. Rudd beat her to the punch, and resigned in Washington. Now Rudd is  former Foreign Affairs Minister, and leadership questions keep arising.

I guess we can at least enjoy this as farce - as long as the Chinese keep buying Australian resources, this makes it less likely that value-destroying legislation will be passed.

Tim Blair lays on the mockery, while Andrew Bolt rounds up the reactions of the commentariat.

As Henry Kissinger reputedly said about the Iran-Iraq war - it's a shame they can't both lose.

"Austerity Measures"

So Greece has been rioting again, as the parliament passed a set of "austerity measures" designed to combat their rampant budget deficit.

This headline from The Daily Beast is instructive, and typical of the way it gets written up:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Austerity?

This is why it has been such a marketing disaster to call these rounds of budget cuts "austerity measures".

Austerity implies that the relevant aspect of these cuts is a kind of severity, a harshness of measures designed to achieve a strong outcome. More tellingly, it implies a choice. Austerity describes an action you take to limit your intake of something to more humble, and less pleasant, levels.

And who wants that?! Nobody. I've had enough of this austerity! Let's go back to the days of plenty.

The message that needs to be gotten into the heads of the marginal Greek voter is the following: riot all you want, but those days ain't coming back. Not if Greece defaults. Not if Greece raises taxes. Not if Greece prints money.

If it were me, I'd call these 'The New Normal Cuts'. That ought to indicate the correct mindset. Get used to it, because this is how it's going to be. I'd also settle for the "There's No More Money, Because It's All Been Spent Cuts". It's been spent, and borrowed, and spent again. And now there's nothing left, and no private investor with two braincells to rub together is going to lend the Greek government money again any time soon.

Because this is the problem - you can default on the debt, but it doesn't make the deficit go away. And once you default, you've got very little chance of being able to finance that deficit with borrowing at any reasonable rate. So sooner or later, the pensions and the government wages will get cut, by hook or by crook. The only other option is printing money to close the budget deficit, which is the triumph of imbeciles who think that money illusion is a fast track to prosperity. Sadly, it doesn't take much experience of hyperinflation to realise that this isn't actually the case. Ask Zimbabwe how it's working out.

These aren't the austerity cuts. These are the reality cuts. Which is why the headline is so inane:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Reality?

You bet they have. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Tolstoy, you may not be interested in fiscal reality, but fiscal reality is interested in you.

It would be funny if I thought it were intended as a joke

Never let it be said that Britons don't appreciate irony.

Take That, Catholic Church!

The Obama Administration has decided to mandate that all employers have to provide birth control, including abortion-inducing drugs. This mandate now covers the Catholic Church. Which, understandably, they are not jolly pleased about.

“This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets,” [Catholic League head Bill ] Donohue said.

You don't say.

This law seems to be on dubious grounds to start with - the constitution protects freedom of religion, but the constitutional basis for healthcare mandates is unclear (and still awaiting a Supreme Court decision). This is only a concern for reactionaries like me that don't read the Commerce Clause as being the 'Do Absolutely Anything Clause'. But frankly that ship sailed many years ago. On the other hand, how this plays in with the First Amendment is not at all obvious.

The question is why the Obama administration would be so hell-bent on making the Catholic Church provide birth control to its employees. This would cover Catholic schools, hospitals and charities. But honestly, how many employees does this really affect in the overall economy? It seems more likely that this is the administration's decision to give the finger to the church in order to curry favour with women's groups. I presume their logic is that not many Catholics vote Democratic anyway, so screw 'em.

As a basic matter of liberty, if the Catholic Church doesn't want to provide birth control, then it's no business of the government to make them. Then again, if you take this kind of radical thinking too far, you might wonder why the government has any business demanding that other employees provide birth control, or why the government has any business mandating health insurance provision at all. This thinking would clearly make you as the worst kind of dangerous libertarian loonie.

You can rely on the National Abortion Rights Action League to dissemble and mislead on this kind of thing:

“The Catholic hierarchy seems to be playing a cynical game of chicken and they don’t seem to care that the health and well being of millions of American woman are what’s at stake here,”National Abortion Rights Action League President Andrea Miller said.

Ah yes, the old canard of deliberately obscuring the relationship between health insurance and health care. The people involved are already employed (or they wouldn't be affected by the bill). If contraception is really important to you, then either don't sign up to work for the Catholic Church, or pay for it yourself. In equilibrium, if the average person has a demand for birth control, then the Catholic Church will have to pay higher wages to compensate for the healthcare that they aren't providing. Use the higher wages to buy the pill on your own - you don't need the Catholic Church to hold your hand. It's not like this is a one-off $100K cancer treatment expense, where if it's not done through insurance you can't afford it. The pill is pretty cheap, and it's a regular ongoing expense, so budget for it yourself. It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference if my employer gives me a $40 pill, or the $40 in cash to buy it myself.

For obvious moral reasons, it does make a big difference to the Catholic Church. And for utterly opaque and wrong-headed reasons, it apparently makes a big difference to the government and the National Abortion Rights Action League, who think that buying the pill on your own would constitute a horrible travesty. So much so, that they're willing to risk a brawl with America's Catholics.

Way to contribute to the Republican Get Out the Vote effort, guys!

Raise Those Prices, Jean-Pierre - The French Government Demands It

The French are determined to continue their unofficial national motto of 'Le Ass, Le Gas or Le Grass - Nobody Can Provide Stuff For Free'.

Check out this classic decision - Google Maps was fined for providing maps for free to businesses.

In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses....

The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.

Trying to provide maps for free, eh? That'll cost you 500,000 euros!

It's true that Google has begun charging for corporations that make large use of their mapping service.

So what can developers do against this vicious, anti-competitive behaviour?

One option is to switch to free, open-source mapping services. Which some companies have indeed started doing.

Now, you may look at this as evidence that there's plenty of competition for Google's free service.

But that just shows that you don't understand French courts! No, instead it is the open source mapping service being equally, if not more, anti-competitive. Once their open source product has driven out the competition, think how much they'll be able to exploit consumers by jacking up their prices!

This is of course in line with the French government putting mandatory prices on books, both electronic and paper. That'll teach you to try to sell products more cheaply.

Never mind that the benefits of lower prices tend to flow the most to the poor.

The French Government - putting the liberté in liberté économique.

Thugs Unrepentant

Last Thursday was Australia Day. As is traditional on such days, various honours are given out - the Order of Australia (Australia's equivalent of the OBE, MBE, knighthoods etc. in Britain).

The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, were both in Canberra to present awards to members of the State Emergency Services.

Near to the awards ceremony there is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Wikipedia describes it thus.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is a controversial semi-permanent assemblage claiming to represent the political rights of Australian Aborigines. It is made of a group of activists, signs and tents that reside on the lawn of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital. It is not considered an official embassy by the Australian Government.

Love the sotto voce in the last line. It's not a real embassy, huh? No kidding?

Essentially it's a hovel where a bunch of Aboriginal activists engage in a permanent protest against a range of causes relating to Aboriginal rights in one form or another. It's also been there since 1972.

No, really.

Now, dear reader, you may be forgiven for thinking that such an institution is likely to represent the worst excesses of a permanent grievance culture that views racial politics as a zero-sum game. You may think that a permanent slum encampment has no place on the lawn of Old Parliament House, if only as a matter of aesthetics. You may think that any protest movement that has been around for nearly 40 years has probably outlived its social usefulness.

And these would all be thoroughly defensible views.

One person who did not espouse those views, however, was Tony Abbott. Earlier in the week he had given a radio interview where he was asked about it. His thoroughly reasonable reply was as follows.

“Look, I can understand why the tent embassy was established all those years ago. I think a lot has changed for the better since then. We had the historic apology just a few years ago, one of the genuine achievements of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. We had the proposal, which is currently for national consideration, to recognise indigenous people in the constitution. I think the indigenous people of Australia can be very proud of the respect in which they are held by every Australian, and, yes, I think a lot’s changed since then and I think it probably is time to move on from that.”

The tent embassy was set up originally to protest the lack of land rights. Australia now has native title, and more's the pity, but it has it nonetheless.

Overall, his statement seems jolly reasonable.

So what happened next?

One of the four press secretaries for the Prime Minister, Tony Hodges, decided that this was an excellent opportunity to stir up some racially motivated bad press. He called UnionsACT secretary Kim Sattler, who circulated among the protesters at the tent embassy that Tony Abbott had called for the embassy to be torn down.

He hadn't, of course.

But so what did these fine examples of civic society do?

When the protesters interrupted a medal ceremony for courageous emergency services personnel involved in the Queensland floods and Victorian bushfires, their behaviour was vile.

“Who f ... ing cares? They’re not our heroes,” yelled one of the first tent embassy people to arrive.

Then, spotting the Opposition Leader, she screamed: “Tony Abbott, you f ... ing big-eared Dumbo c. .t”.

This was followed by more obscenities directed at Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Things went downhill from there.

Originally Gillard got some sympathy for the affair, before it became known that her own press secretary had organised the whole thing.

He's now her ex-press secretary.

Meanwhile, Kim Sattler decided that valor was the better part of discretion:

She also posted on her now-deleted Facebook page that “Tony Abbott is like your typical bar-room brawler who starts a fight and then disappears like a coward when it is in full swing.”

Then she went into hiding

This ingenious strategy was clearly taken directly from the pages of military genius Sun Tzu:

To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy's numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence.

Indeed.

There's so much shame to go around in this sorry and sordid spectacle that it's hard to know where to start.

A lot of the blame has deservedly focused on Tony Hodges, the genius mastermind behind the plan to incite the tent embassy protesters by misrepresenting Abbott's words. There's a lot of questioning, as in all these cases, whether he acted alone, or whether other Labor Party figures were involved. Andrew Bolt has a number of questions for the PM, none of which I ( or likely he) expects to get an answer to.

Tim Blair nails the media, for repeating the false accusation that Tony Abbott had called for the embassy to be shut down, without bothering to even check the transcript of what he'd actually said. He focuses a lot on the fact that the protesters went off their trolley over statements that hadn't even been said, without bothering to investigate them first.

And while the actions of the Prime Minister's office are clearly despicable in terms of trying to ineptly foster racial antagonism in a weak attempt to embarrass the opposition, a subtler point seems to have gone less remarked on.  

A lot of people are focusing on the role of the Prime Minister in duping the tent embassy folks:

Territory Indigenous Affairs Minister Malarndirri McCarthy wants Prime Minister Julia Gillard to apologise for the Aboriginal tent embassy clashes in Canberra.

The former ABC journalist and newsreader says Julia Gillard should apologise to the nation, Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and the tent embassy organisers.

Let's suppose that Abbott had actually called for the tent embassy to be shut down. I would still be equally outraged that this bunch of rabble thought that this was cause to violently mob the Prime Minister such that she needed to be evacuated by the police.

Let's replay the tape once more:

“Who f ... ing cares? They’re not our heroes,” yelled one of the first tent embassy people to arrive.

Then, spotting the Opposition Leader, she screamed: “Tony Abbott, you f ... ing big-eared Dumbo c. .t”.

The whole assumption is that the tent embassy folks were so incensed by the alleged statements that they had no option but to act like a mob of violent scumbags, abusing heroic emergency services workers and physically attacking Australia's elected leaders.

The tent embassy folks aren't children. They aren't psychopaths on hair trigger alert. They're adults, and they're completely responsible for their disgusting actions. They aren't in a position to demand apologies from anyone. Their repulsive behavior is the absolute best evidence that the tent embassy should  be shut down, because it appears to be populated by dangerous and violent buffoons who think this kind of response is acceptable in a democracy.

Do you think the tent embassy folks appear to have realised the folly of their ways? Let's ask tent embassy founder Michael Anderson

Mr Anderson said he believed the protest incident outside the restaurant on Thursday was a set-up.

''Someone set us up. They set the prime minister up. They set Abbott up,'' he said.

''And they knew that feelings and emotions were running high here and I think they knew that reaction would occur.''

Mr Anderson said that person would face retribution under Aboriginal law.

''And whoever it was that really promoted that confrontation, we need to take them through the cleaners.

''And I'd like them to hand them back when they finish under White Man law, give him under our law so we can put him under our law as well.''

The 'someone set me up' line has been famously tried before as a defense for being a giant @$$hole, and it didn't work then either.  

Listen to this self-pitying fool. It's all a huge injustice against him and the rest of the tent embassy folks. Note the ridiculously self-serving obscuring of subject and object:

'And they knew that feelings and emotions were running high here and I think they knew that reaction would occur.

'That reaction would occur'. Not 'we acted like cretins and hooligans', but 'reactions would occur'. Another example of what Theodore Dalrymple aptly characterised as 'The Knife Went In'.

And whoever it was that really promoted that confrontation, we need to take them through the cleaners.

''And I'd like them to hand them back when they finish under White Man law, give him under our law so we can put him under our law as well.'

Screw off, Michael Anderson, you dishonest hack. The folks at the tent embassy are the ones that 'really promoted that confrontation'. I believe the words you're looking for are 'Tony Abbott, we're really sorry that we attacked you for no good reason.' Anything else you have to say without uttering that phrase is merely adding insult to injury.

If the only person who faces police scrutiny out of this whole mess is Tony Hodges, it will be a gross injustice. There was a whole media crew there. There's footage available. The laws for disorderly conduct are clear. Charge the lot of them.

The Value of Society

Take an average day in a first world city.

You go for a walk down to a coffee shop, or to the mall, or wherever your travels take you. In that time, you'll pass by hundreds of people. If you're like me, chances are that the vast majority of them are complete strangers - you don't know them, and you'll never see them again.

Think back to the people you passed today. How many of them can you remember? How many of them did you notice at the time, even fleetingly? Probably very few. Even the ones you interacted with, at the checkout line or in the lift, you probably did so without really thinking much about it.

Now imagine you're out on the savanna, or in some post-apocalyptic wilderness. You come across another person in the distance. What are you going to be thinking?

Probably some combination of: are they friendly? Are they going to try to rob me? Would I be able to defend myself in a fight if they try something? Is this a trap where they have other people ready to jump me?

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that running into other people that you don't know would probably be pretty damn stressful. It wouldn't be the kind of thing you'd do lightly.

Small early societies got around this through tribalism. You knew the people in your clan, and repeated interactions with them ensured that people treated each other reasonably. But interactions with other tribes were likely to be somewhat fraught, especially tribes you didn't know. Then you were back to the mutual suspicion and fear.

Now think back to modern society. It's remarkable how well norms of behaviour are not only common and widely accepted, but known be everyone to be common and widely accepted. In a modern city, I can interact with literally millions of strangers and have strong expectations about how they're going to behave. The norms of trust and respect have become strong enough that we don't need repeated interactions at the individual level to maintain them. People internalise the trust of strangers, and as long as most people reciprocate, it's a mutually beneficial trend. I can now engage in commerce and trade with millions of people, instead of just the small number in my own village. This allows institutions to develop that rely on crazy levels of trust for strangers, such as valet parking.

In America, you can travel thousands of miles and interact with complete strangers in such an innocuous fashion that most people don't pause to reflect on how remarkable that would seem to somebody born a few thousand years ago.