Rick Warren, Obama, and the Center in American Politics

For more or less every person vaguely in the US political blogosphere, and especially for those people who care about social issues, the big looming discontent this week has focused on Barack Obama's selection of Rick Warren as the minister to give the inaugural invocation. And this is good - in our participatory democracy where personal views matter as much as stated policy aims, we as the public, as the pale apparition of new journalism, and even alongside the white elephant of old journalism (a term of endearment, that) have a right and a duty to examine in as much detail the little signifiers which could become the big signifiers.

There's some real grounds for fear here. In the wake of prop 8, and with the side note that the Obama campaign had both "Obama/Yes on 8" and "Obama/No on 8" voters, it seems like the president is not so beholden to the LGBT community as many had hoped. This perceived abandonment is cemented in the minds of many by Rick Warren. After all, he has likened gay marriage to incest and pedophilia. That's more or less an unforgivable offense, right?

Well, yes and no. Which I guess really means no. For many, any nuanced qualifiers (which, if you know me, you know are coming) are not enough. The far left, the progessive left, the left-left, the bleeding-hear-left, social libertarians, and a good many in the moderate left all view this as completely unacceptable. There are almost certainly political scientists right now formulating Obama's political obituary, examining the breakup of the new new deal coalition. First it was the social issues, they'll say. And indeed, I cannot begrudge those who feel betrayed right now, who feel that Obama himself has crossed a line of no return. This is not the first thing to exhaust serious political capital among the left, but it is one of the biggest. And for many, the mere act of the appointment overrides two very important things Obama is doing.

Firstly, Obama himself has a statement of very, very importantly phrased qualifiers. Secondly, Obama is appointing people with far more accepting views to actual meaningful positions.

Here's what I think are Obama's two key points:

• The President-elect disagrees with Pastor Warren on issues that affect the LGBT community. They disagree on other issues as well. But what's important is that they agree on many issues vital to the pursuit of social justice, including poverty relief and moving toward a sustainable planet; and they share a commitment to renewing America's promise by expanding opportunity at home and restoring our moral leadership abroad.

• As he's said again and again, the President-elect is committed to bringing together all sides of the faith discussion in search of common ground. That's the only way we'll be able to unite this country with the resolve and common purpose necessary to solve the challenges we face.

(emphasis mine). Barack Obama's selection of Rev. Rick Warren is not a blanket endorsement of Warren's views and attitudes. It is not even an endorsement of a majority of Rick Warren's views. It is, instead, an endorsement of a few very specific areas of Rick Warren's ministry - Obama says of Rick Warren that "He's devoted his life to performing good works for the poor and leads the evangelical movement in addressing the global HIV/AIDS crisis" (emphasis, again, mine). This is that evangelical movement which, to an outsider like myself, appears to have repeatedly placed itself in opposition to all the issues of social justice I've cared about. No doubt many are attributing the differences in the success of McCain and Bush's presidential campaigns to the evangelical fervor that swung behind Bush, and was more lacking in support of McCain. This is a group I'd more or less written off as "the opposition". Fortunately for me, the political Left, and the United States on the whole, Obama does not see evangelicals that way.

Rick Warren's presence at the inauguration is not the selling out to the religious right that many fear it is. It is instead an acknowledgment of the religious center, which has been missing from our political discourse. Yes, Rick Warren has views which are antithetical to many progressives. But Rick Warren is not alone in that, and while he did speak in favor of proposition 8, and we can disagree with him on that, he does care about global poverty, and he cares about the fight against AIDS. Obama agrees with Rick Warren on those latter terms, and disagrees on the former. This is not a matter of selling out - this is a matter of acknowledging the diversity of our nation. A messy, sometimes frustrating diversity of opinion, but this is a rather vital one. Obama's inauguration will have another minister, a "giant of the civil rights movement" give the benediction. And Obama has made other, more meaningful actions to show support of LGBT people. That list of meaningful actions includes some hesitancy, and it includes some cautious opinions on his part. It also lacks the neat, doctrinaire uniformity that progressives want from their messiah, and we are foolish for wanting this.

This is a nation of diversity, and any leader who adheres so strongly to just one faction is a leader that betrays the core principles of democracy. It does not meant that our voices aren't valid - they are, now, more than ever. But it does mean that the nation isn't monolithic, that the president has to acknowledge that, and that sometimes a nation has to change underneath it's leader to move him in the right direction.

Obama's inclusion of Rick Warren in his inauguration is a sign that being on the left, or holding even center-left views (like an obligation to fight poverty) does not mean one can't express religion. It's a shame and unfortunate that religion in US politics is presently tied to the Religious Right; Rick Warren himself, while an evangelical, can be found much more awkwardly in the center, where his views do not easily align himself to one party - it's an awkward nation where religiously justified condemnation of poverty and religiously explained condemnation of sexual orientation do not share the same ticket, but it's the nation we have been living in. Obama, by including Rick Warren, seeks to bring religion into the discussion on social justice; it's been isolated in issues of social norms for so long that it's hard to remember the more broader applications of Jesus's teachings, the ones that apply out of the bedroom. By including Rick Warren, Obama does not endorse Warren's views on homosexuality - what Obama does do is endorse evangelicals taking an active role in social justice. This is not a move that could be made in a US where a whole side of the spectrum can hold "unforgivable" views. We, as the left, were excited to see on election day that cries of "socialism" and "spread the wealth around", topics for decades off-limits to US politicians, were not run into the ground. Not to say that we should be accepting of Warren's intolerances, but we should open up a dialog where our sound reason can win the day - excluding one side from every discussion because we don't like where they stand on one of them is tragic, and hurts our nation as a collective whole.

If you've made is this far, you've noticed my tip-toeing around the other big issue that upsets the left with Rick Warren's selection. Rick Warren not only actively campaigned against gay marriage, but he is fairly active against a Women's Right to Choose. I've buried this issue, not because I don't think it's relevant, but because it is harder and harder to see the right-to-life (or, if you prefer, anti-choice) side being an overwhelming national movement. The pro-choice fight is more and more of a quiet one -I'm willing to bet that the silent majority is pretty much entrenched on the side of choice in this one. Perhaps they want more qualifiers, refinement in the right, but this is a right that seems to be guaranteed. Not that we shouldn't fight - we kind of have to. But the fight can be won, and noticeable in this election the pro-choice fight had three significant victories - unsurprising in California, welcome in Colorado, and perhaps most profound in South Dakota. Christine over at iMinister made an important note of this in her post-election sermon. Rick Warren is not on the side of history for this one, and while I'm unwilling to say that progress here is irreversible, it is instead in the enviable position of being well defended when even the movement defending it seems to, at times, be on the margin. It's one of the few times I like how effective the silent majority is, and when the silent majority is winnign the battles in the ballot booth, it means the issue is close to safe. Rick Warren's anti-choice actions and opinions do not undermine this progress

There is one last point I have to make here, on this issue. The picture below these words is one of the most heartening signs that progressives will not be lost in this election. That, right there, is New Mexico's congressional delegation for 2009. On the far right (ha ha) is Senior Senator Jeff Bingaman, who has been protecting the interests of progressives nationally and in New Mexico for twenty five years. The remaining men in the picture (L to R, Ben Ray Lujan, Martin Heinrich, Tom Udall, and Harry Teague) are New Mexico's three congressional representatives, with the exception of Tom Udall, New Mexico's new Junior Senator. For all the symbolic angst that may arise about Rick Warren's stands on social issues, these are five reliable votes against those initiatives. For all the doubts about Obama's sincerity to his supporters on the left, these are five votes that will pull him further to where he should be. And for every move made to combat AIDS, and for every move aimed at fighting poverty, these are five votes that will reliably side with progress.


And that dichotomy mentioned above, where people work together on some but not all issues? That's more or less exactly what the Obama administration is about. It isn't an exclusion of hated opponents, a condemnation of outsiders by those in power, or even a takeover of government by the left. It is one of the ironies of this campaign that the Senate's greatest moderate in recent memory campaigned against a candidate identified with a fringe, only to have the roles reversed on the campaign trail. Obama won the election by a majority of voters not because this nation has become the ideological equivalent of San Fransisco, but because Obama's appeals, which endeared him to the left, are fundamentally centrist.

Leftist doctrine has, for the past century and a half, focused on competing interests within a society. Marxism, Labour, and the general confusion of class and nationality have played out over the past century to constitute a left that, while it has some popular appeal, cannot decide what to do when in power. In France in the 1930s, the Left achieved an electoral victory at the exact smae time all of Europe was afraid of both fascism and Stalin, and the left was too divided to let itself act as a party of rule. These divisions, inherent in notions of "class warfare" and echoed in such modern times by John Edwards' "Two Americas" speech, give the left its fighting words, but they also drive it away from being acceptable as a party of rule. Obama, from his very first appearance in the media spotlight, has focused on "One America". His notion of hope comes across as leftist because it involves reconciliation - such strange events have driven our nation to see diplomacy, talking to people we disagree with, and earnest attempts at working together for the benefit of all as leftist fantasies, left over from the 1960s. This misrepresents the left of the sixties and it misrepresents the left of now - both have widely differing views on what government should or shouldn't do, and I'm pleased to say that, 38 years after that decade ended, the left in the United States is able to position itself as a party of rule.

It's taken a long time for this, and it's required that most fundamental of compromises - ideals as a driving impulse, instead of being the straightforward rule of government. This is realism, this is pragmatism, and this is inching towards the Center. The center-left became popularized under Clinton and Tony Blair, but they are not so much leftists as real-mild-rightists. They made being identified with the left acceptable, but for all their strengths they lived scared of being seen as weak, as compromising, and as unfit to rule. Clinton, especially, faced the controversy of moral weakness, and his actions almost certainly added a decade to the lifespan of the religious right in US politics. But he did prove that a democrat, a person on the left, could both have that party and govern from the center.

Obama, as outlined wonderfully by fivethirtyeight, has a progressive agenda, with many items that are near and dear to the left and the far left. "But Kelsey," you thousands of readers clamor, "haven't you been saying Obama is a centrist?" Well, yes, yes I have, and you are all astute observers. So here's the big qualifier - the United States, as is, doesn't have a center. We have two points (or parties), both off center, around which voters tend to congregate. The battle for undecideds is so fierce because there is no party permanently camped out in the center - candidates aiming towards the middle have to moderate their views or open the appeal of their candidate beyond sticking on a certain pole. The battle for the loyal, on the other hand, is about convincing polarized voters that their guy this time is really much closer to the far side of the spectrum than they are to the center. This works, to some extent, for the winner-take-all system that is US politics. In other countries with parliaments and governments of coalitions, however, we see something very different. We see a center party, or center-left and center-right parties, or a center-christian party, and these will almost always be part of the ruling coalitions. Not entirely ideologically pure, but they get the job done, and they have, at their very core, a willingness to incorporate some ideas of others with their broad schemes. McCain, as a Senator, represented a clear example of the "across the aisle" spirit that pervades parties of or around the center.

Obama, alternatively, has made his rhetoric his centrist appeal. And he's done more than that - by inviting Rick Warren to the inauguration, he not only clearly sets himself apart from the left (or at least, those parts of the left that find this unforgivable), he also shows the United States where the center is. It's vague right now, and while it disagrees hugely on some issues (again LGBT and Choice), Obama is trying very clearly to connect the center in US politics to social justice. It's a bold move, and one that Obama has certainly taken flak for, but it has done something almost unthinkable - the evangelicals, the ones that elected W twice, the ones that gave Palin her moment and momentum, have found something to agree on with the President. It's allowed the intersection of religion and politics to not be dominated by the Religious Right, and its made the way possible for more openness in dialog. There are consequences for being in the center - every side gets to take pot-shots, and gets to pick more ideologically pure successors. But the center holds because it is where the voters are, and if Obama can use this almost-unprecedented opportunity for reconciliation (unlike that squandered, post-Civil War attempt), he can create a reliable center in US politics, longer-lived than the New Deal coalition, and he can place that center firmly on the left. It will take skill and careful manuevering. And it will take the inclusion of religious moderates and religious liberals. And it will come dangerously close to betraying that ideological purity we're all so fond of. But its doable, and it is a necessity for this nation.

Godspeed.

Rule of Law

This post is inspired by three separate occurrences, two of them fairly recent. They are: 1, the riots in Greece following the shooting of a 15 year old. 2, the questionable value of a life sentence for Texas inmate Son Tran. 3, the 11th hour move by the Bush Administration to allow doctors and other healthcare service providers the right to refuse health services (meaning birth control and abortion). These all strike me as diverse symptoms of a situation in which the rule of law is seen less as a desirable practice and more as a totalitarian imposition. To clarify for naysayers: I'm not in any way opposed to the rule of law; I take issue with laws that are unjust, and laws that work against the interest of most everyone involved. I think these are all examples of law falling into the later two categories.


1. I'll start with the latter. Bush's action will be debated constantly in the coming week (with bonus Baby-Jesus-themed comments), and will most likely be opposed and somewhat overturned by the incoming Obama administration. The move represents several things: a "thank you" to longstanding Bush supporters, another play in decades-old culture wars, and a decision made by an unaccountable elected official. For all of these reasons, despite public sentiment, it strikes me as a profoundly undemocratic move. My intellectual-sparring-partner JR will side with me on the specific issue of rights concerning access to birth control and abortion services, but he will argue against the constitutionality of Roe v Wade. Ignoring the actual impact of changing that decision as it concerns personal rights, there's a democratic sentiment behind it that is worth examining. The case of Roe v Wade is implicitly about abortion rights, but it is explicitly about privacy, and states rights. If there is no constitutional right to privacy, than abortion is an issue left to the states. States, when making the decision, varied much more widely than a simple "legal or illegal", and the decision was localized to small constituencies. Say what you will about the potential for denial of rights that this entails (and don't get me wrong - there is some serious loss of rights going on), it does allow for a more democratic decision to be made, and such decisions have a legitimacy that feels undermined by judicial fiat. The reaction we'll be seeing in the media, the blogosphere, and political action listservs is a very real sense of powerlessness, of an invalidity of the decision made, and a general disagreement with the new ordering of the law. And that's because this is not a change made with political legitimacy. It's worth noting, however, that the whole of the national abortion debate feels that way to many folk, and has produced an incredible wariness in the American public to accept such top-down detached legal rulings. Esteemed legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, when faced with the passage of similar culture-warsy Prop 8, says this

But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.

It's worth noting that a legal scholar, a man whose life has revolved around various interesting and new arenas for legal battles (code and other laws of cyberspace, copyright), is arguing against a straightforward legal solution and is instead pushing for a solution that has democratic legitimacy.

2. Charles Platt's piece on Son Tran is one I'm going to examine in more depth elsewhere (it is part of an in-process post about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). It's a fascinating story (in that weird, bleak way more common in dystopic fiction), and what stands out from all of it is that, no matter the actual crimes committed by the individual (or, indeed, if they were committed), the punishment seems to be something profoundly useless to society. Confounding this situation is the nature of the person who committed the crime - at the time he was sentenced, Son Tran was 17 years old. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling concerning minors sentenced to death, he was moved from death row to life imprisonment. Depending on where you fall with your perspective of redemption, rehabilitation, and the changeable nature of humans, the 40 years he is now serving will make perfect sense, seem too short, or strike you as a gross waste of a human life, to say nothing of human potential. Charles Platt is upset by both this individual waste, and by the intended value of deterrence that sentences like this are supposed to have. He writes:

Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. I’ll ignore the death penalty, since the Supreme Court has already eliminated it for people under 18. Thus, we are left with incarceration. Has any study ever proved that the prospect of forty years without parole is a better deterrent than, say, thirty years, or even twenty years? It seems utterly implausible to me that the actions of a teenager in an inner-city gang will be affected by such a distinction. In fact I don’t believe that deterrence is either the effect or the purpose of the long, mandatory sentences that have become endemic in the United States during the past two decades.

The facts laid out are very few in the favor of Son Tran: gang member, confessed to murder, received a reprieve because of a supreme court ruling, not new evidence in his trial. But the gross failure and abuse of the criminal justice system (especially in Texas) are enough to make one doubt the whole validity of criminal justice in the United States. Platt's post at this point descends into a fairly typical "Reagan + Fear + Power + Money + Scared White People = Gross Human Rights Abuses that Shame America" argument, and it says something that this argument can have a standard form. It also poses a very real challenge to the acceptance of the rule of law in America, and it hits upon it from an entirely different angle that the Bush decision. The Bush decision is very much another move in decisions removed from democratic consensus - Platt's argument is that Son Tran's imprisonment is no social good (as imprisonment weirdly is supposed to be) but is instead the result of a poorly-framed democratic consensus. People have been pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime for at least 20-30 years now; what people haven't realized is that as a consequence of this:

Among the adult population of the United States, 1 person out of every 100 is now behind bars. Thus the unweighted odds of going to jail are greater than the odds of being a crime victim.

One could write a separate essay on how the people pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime are different than the people who are more likely to be persecuted by vigilant police forces (white & wealthy versus the poor, nonwhite, and disenfranchised) - I'm not going to comment on it anymore here than to say that, for a worryingly large percentage of the US population, law is seen either as "something to protect myself imposed on other people" or "illegitimate decisions made beyond my own personal control that will get me anyway, and so have no bearing on how I act." That's a breakdown in the very purpose of the rule of law, and of a democratic construction of society - laws have to apply equally, and laws have to be understood as threatening not just "those people", but everyone - especially the people who advocate for the law to be passed.

3. Lastly, we come to the Greek Riots. Others more skilled and/or better paid than I will make their conclusions about such serious anti-police riots in the birthplace of the World's first great democracy. The riots started as anti-police, but as they have continued they have done what all great riots do - become chaotic, divisive attempts to reinvent a status quo. The rioters are unemployed, upset with corruption, and think that the police forces have gotten out of hand - to express this discontent, they have attacked police and alienated their countrymen by destroying the property and threatening the livelihood of many small shopkeepers and business owners. It has all the hints of simmering class war, and rather than doing the democratic thing and siding with small owners as an upset middle class, the rioters are very much in the classical (or is it archaic?) mode of students, working class, and the unemployed so upset with the higher-ups that they willingly endanger and alienate those less outraged than themselves. This is not so much an issue of the nature of the rule of law as an example of a remarkable collapse. And yet, law itself hasn't entirely collapsed - the police exist, are a visible presence in Greece, and the government still stands. But the police are hesitant to act - one of their own is being tried for murder while on duty (the counterclaim is that he was provoked and responded appropriately), and so we have the potential for the rule of law, the semblance of a rule of law, and either a government or a police force unwilling to impose that law on the citizens it exists to protect. As law collapses on the national level, it re-imposes itself interestingly.

The shooting prompted parents all over the country to examine the liberties they have been permitting their children.

“My 12-year-old daughter has been getting text messages inviting her to join demonstrations,” said Constantine Michalos, president of the Greek chamber of commerce. “One of the messages said, ‘Don’t go to school today. We need to show our power on the street.’ I had to lay down the law.”

The riots will not, as many fear, have the effect of the French riots two centuries prior or the Russian riots all of 90 years ago. What they will do, however, is allow for a reforming of society around the rule of law - laws to protect against some of what inspired the riots (police carelessness and political corruption; it's hard to get laws passed against the economy), as well as against the actions taken by the rioters. Chaos like this is curious for it's ability to reforge society - France's Fifth Republic arose as a center-right forced the imposition of the rule of law over both the military and striking students and workers. And violence like this polarizes - while prior to the riots, many were discontent with the status quo in Greece, the value of the rule of law comes to the fore as people gravitate away from the dangers of the chaos and back towards the assurances of stability, becoming increasingly more willing to overlook injustices inherent in that stability as long as it means they have property, livelihood, and are guaranteed some freedom from molotov cocktails. The trick with any society structured around the rule of law, and especially that of democracies, is to balance freedoms with controls.

Stratis Stratigis, former chairman of the Athens Olympics organising committee, suggested he might have an answer. “Our democracy is destroying itself because it misrepresented the right to liberty and equality,” says an e-mail circulating his friends. “It taught the citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.”

This is a quote from Socrates, the ancient philosopher who ended up being sentenced to death for voicing truths that nobody wanted to hear.

“It’s funny,” said Stratigis. “Those words have a ring about them today.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The UDHR is 60 years old today. Here's my previous post about them, with an awesome video that is worth watching again.

Also, here's the full text of the declaration. Enjoy! (I'll have a more elaborate post about the rights themselves at a time that isn't finals week. For now, enjoy some history of justice. Also, bonus points for UUs who can find all 7 principles hidden in these)

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Economics Question

Today in microeconomics, my teacher said "economics can be extraordinarily unfair, but it is remarkably efficient." She followed this by saying that many government programs "aimed at creating fairness, by necessity, create inefficiency".

So, my readers, all twelve of you - Are economic efficiency and fairness necessarily opposed? Are they opposite ends of the same spectrum?

Your thoughts in the comments section, please. I'm intrigued to get other minds looking at this.

Progeny or Progidy

I'll be back blogging more regularly when I'm in New Orleans again (don't worry, I will be soon). In the meanwhile, I am proud to offer to you a brand-spanking new blog. This blog is in the great tradition of Albuquerque-snark (a la Burque Babble), and with the same love of current events (though not the love of journalistic standards) that fuels AHS Foliage.

I present to you, Kittens for Jesus. The author is young, smart, and disagrees with me interestingly while still being firmly on the left. Start at the beginning, and you shouldn't be disappointed.

Guilt and the Flaw of Anti-Racism

Anti-racism is work that I believe to be incredibly important and almost vital for our society. That said, it's a confusing pile of uncomfortable, guilt, accusations, blame, and competing political philosophies. And the biggest flaw of all is uncertainty in action, which leads to "awareness-raising" and very, very little else.

Awareness by itself does nothing, and awareness that self-propagates is a vicious little thing. And that's how AR work functions when used among those who clearly benefit from privilege. Telling a white person who makes 100k or greater a year that they benefit from an unfair privilege because of their race doesn't go over well, and it only gets harder the more distant a person becomes from obvious signs of wealth and privilege. The resistance that has built around Affirmative Action for decades has a lot to do with those on the low socio-economic end being really upset that another group of low socio-economic folk get an advantage they don't. As they see it, poor's poor, and race doesn't appear to be a big enough factor to warrant special treatment. (As an aside, this is part of why the individualistic and self-made impulses are so strong among the people who would most benefit from welfare state policies - aid has historically been seen as unfair, so it makes more sense to do away with unfair aid instead of expanding aid to everyone).

So awareness by itself is flawed, and leaves either guilt or resistance. Awareness is supposed to be uncomfortable, and guilt/resistance are both reactions to uncomfortableness that cannot be processed. But there's a point to awareness, or it wouldn't be a consistent agent of change. Awareness, if done properly, changes behavior. So then awareness has done a good job changing language, changing some behaviors, and getting rid of the most overt signs of racism. But Anti-Racist activism focuses a lot on institutional racism, which isn't something that can be changed except by either institutional reform or widespread changes public opinion. Institutions are incredibly hard to change by guilting individual members, and structural factors that hinge on race are easily dismissed because they are obscured by the many factors that correlate with race (wealth, education level) and which can be explained as a lack of drive or initiative. Racism, without overt signs, is really hard to change on an individual basis, and almost impossible on an institutional basis.

AR work is incredibly tricky, and when it fails, it fails big. "Whiteness" is not a comfortable topic, not a casual state, and it is such a weird mixing of legacy (early New Englanders, slave importers) and assimilation (Swedes, Irish, Italians et al becoming white after a generation of immigrant experience) that "whiteness" has a wide range of internal interpretations. The "assimilated into privilege" makes the formula much more complicated than "our ancestors are guilt for your suffering", and it's the assimilation that makes all races in the US White versus (racename).

So what's to be done? This dichotomy of white vs other leads to notions like colorblindness, where everyone just doesn't have race be a part of their identity, or at least not an obvious huge defining part of their identity, like it has for many white Americans. Sure, when asked I'll say my race is Welsh, British, and Scottish, but those terms are almost meaningless for me in the US because the unstated "white" identity is so overriding. The classic line goes "much like fish in water, white people in American society are oblivious to the privilege they exist in all the time". The problem with the colorblind solution is that it assumes everyone else will assimilate into that same privilege, and that the only thing stopping them is a race that is part of their identity. Here Anti-Racism doesn't offer a solution so much as destroy a flawed one.

Another common approach is to look at the flawed socio-economics in this nation, and assume that, given the strong correlation of race to class, the problems can all be dealt with by programs that ignore race and just look at economic status. I'm somewhat partial to this plan, and it's informed my attitudes towards changing affirmative action (go meritocracy! don't make the law vulnerable to angry white men!), but that's not a perfect solution. This, too, ignores race and legacies of racial injustice for a classist slant - it would rob affirmative action of the notion that it corrects past wrongs and make it about more equal distribution of wealth, which changes the whole thing. And it treats race as class, which it isn't; it correlates, but that is all. Dynamics of race are different than dynamics of wealth, and while both are unjust and need to be changed, it ignores race to treat it as class, and it confounds things because in the US notions of class are linked to personal performance, and poverty is often seen as an individual failing. While it may address similar ends, race as class isn't the way to go.

Now we're back at square zero, it seems. To affect change in people, AR work has to make them uncomfortable enough to want to radically change their behavior for good. When that fails, people become reactionaries and resistant and are less open to notions of racism as endemic of systems; they'll abstain from meaningful work against organizations with flawed practices because they don't want to confront the guilt of being racist, or of being blind to a system that is racist. But that's if being made uncomfortable fails; should being uncomfortable work, people will now find themselves with a drive to change things (I know I did!), and with very few means of driving that change. If you spread awareness, you risk making a whole bunch of people guilty and resistant or guilty and agitated by how little there is that they can do. Or people could try and engineer individual ways out like colorblindness, which doesn't work and is offensive (in that whole "denying an aspect of humanity" sort of way). People may turn to class politics and understandings, but that is only part of the racial dynamic. When it fails, Anti-Racism work leaves a lot of people bitter and uncomfortable. When it succeeds, it can turn people into agents of change but it doesn't provide many valuable outlets for that energy, and it may burn people out before critical mass to change institutions (by having anti-racists in sufficient number running them) can work. The picture, as it can undoubtedly be painted, is bleak.

There's hope and there's some solace in all of this, though. Firstly, Anti-Racism is a young discipline and movement, which traces its origins back to the early 1990s (as far as I can tell). One of the benefits of spreading awareness rapidly since then is that, while total numbers are small, there are plenty of anti-racist activists working to figure out what to do with the knowledge that anti-racism has given them. This allows anti-racism to be a tool used in other debates, adding it to the side of human dignity. An example: knowledge of drug usage trends + knowledge of disparity in drug sentencing (500x the penalty for black drug crack versus the penalty for white drug cocaine) allows one to look at a flawed system and say, in addition to previous flaws, that it is racist in execution and should be changed. That's a powerful asset. The solace in all of this is that anti-racist work is moral work, it's valuable work, and it wouldn't be done if there weren't a pressing need for it. It's a flawed system currently, but as a moral imperative it is solid. It's why I keep up with AR work despite the criticisms. We'll hit upon the right solution eventually, and until then we can be gadflies who add minds to the collective brainpower trying to engineer a solution. To those skeptical, you have every right to be so, but take solace in the fact that we'll get their. The drive is too strong and the stakes are too high for us to not make it work.

Knoxville

While I was out of town at UU Church Camp, I had a few quick thoughts about a few things.

There was a shooting at a UU church. I'm late to the blogosphere for this, so I'll leave the guttural reaction to webcomicer Jeffry Rowland. Also, he provides this handy link. There's a lot to read through (and in a dark humor sort of way, the "fanny pack around his waist that contained extra shells for his shotgun" is kind of priceless), but the major point is that violence is unacceptable. Just last week I said that all ideas and opinions should be allowed on the table, and I stand by that. But that only goes so far as ideas - murder because of ideological disagreement is always the step too far. Disagreement polarizes, but the fastest way to lose support for a cause is to make your own side appear crazy, disconnected, unreasonable, and dangerous.

Assuming the man had just been discontent, unemployed, and angry at liberalism (and not violent) the appropriate response would be to try and find what is so threatening about the church, and why he felt it was so dangerous. The church's affirming stance towards homosexuality was known, and the article quotes a gem of a phrase from the church website:

The church's Web site states that it has worked for "desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women's rights and gay rights" since the 1950s. Current ministries involve emergency aid for the needy, school tutoring and support for the homeless, as well as a cafe that provides a gathering place for gay and lesbian high-schoolers.

In affirming the diversity and the strength of the churches mission, they hit upon an interesting conundrum. They speak to the disenfranchised, the multitude of those who are not historically well-off or empowered in this nation. There is nothing there which reads as sympathetic to the unemployed, angry, down-and-out white male, and that's a shame, because he needs (or needed, before his actions invalidated all hopes of sympathy) a chance at some human dignity, like everyone else the church is adamant about advocating for and helping. The fundamental role of a UU church is, as I see it, to work for human dignity, and we are really good about the historically disenfranchised. We've just got a bit of a problem where it comes to the poor white male, who is angry because talk of privilege is meaningless for him, and there is no way for him to understand how power in his favor could leave him in the state he's in. It's a confusing thing, a frustrating thing, and it is a serious issue that needs re-examination.

But not because the church did anything wrong. We do not need to scour our souls with victims guilt, and we do not need to stumble about deadened by the unfairness of it all. The positive action that can be taken is to see where we can better serve the cause of human dignity. After all, the shooter went after the church not because we had done anything to demean him, but because we have such a strong and visible legacy of advocacy for others. I think we, as a denomination, have the power to take this on as well.

I'll end the blog post unusually, with a reading from a worship at camp:

"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow."
-Dorothy Thompson

The General Good

BoingBoing has a fantastic excerpt of a fantastic article. The article addresses the old saw that

"corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value."

This is a particularly troubling maxim for a person who loves the functionality of economics but hates the way it sees self interest as separate from general interest. Go read at least the excerpt if not the whole thing. It's a very well-reasoned post, and while it does come close to a Godwin's at the very end, we are in interesting times. As an example, telecom immunity and FISA both brought up relevant and valuable analogies to "acting under orders" and "best interest of the company versus best interest of citizens". I think these are times that will call for a rethinking of the purpose of economics, and a rethinking that diverges from "how shall government best affect the economy for the public good" to "how shall companies themselves act in a way that best serves the public good".

I've a hunch that a year down the line I'll be referencing this piece an awful lot.

The Exclusionary Principle

One of the fault lines of "the culture wars" that feed so much into the red/blue right/left state divisions has to do entirely with the fundamental understanding of debates. It's a division on who has a right to speak, on how the debate can happen, and what boundaries separate individual rights/opinions from universal values.

The extreme division goes like this:

• The left believes all points of view should be heard in a debate
• The right believes that acknowledging views they believe to be wrong undermines the very quality of the debate

While this is bleak, it explains the tendency towards repeated mantras and a shouting match. If the people having the debate cannot agree on what positions should be allowed in the debate, progress is impossible.

A few years ago, I would have argued that this is proof of the need for moderation, of a larger center in US politics. The reasonable statement I would have offered would have been a fitting compromise: the left realizes some positions are absurd and is okay excluding the "insane fringe", and the right realizes that some (but not all) positions besides those on the right are worth debating. That's what I would have said.

But I can't say that now. The compromise plan feels hollow. Either side concedes anything, and their whole position is compromised. Both sides agree that a limited set of multiple views are valid, and the debate is limited in ways that are unfriendly to all.

So where do I stand?

I believe in the validity of all points of views, at least so far as they are expressed. That's a personal preference, and there was a time where I would have argued to just be left alone with my views as they affect my person, and let others have their views affect their respective selves. That's the standard position of the left, and if the world had no right it would work out okay. Again, it's a doable enough world view - each to their own is one of the strong American impulses, and its a key part of the self sufficient and independent folk.

But then I heard one of the installments from this series. In the NPR series, we have several pairs of people active in the Boston abortion debate. The pairs are all groupings of people from opposing sides, and the focus is to understand opposing sides as human beings who are decent people, despite the oppositional points of view. It's noble, and it's admirable, and on the whole it works. The pairs do discuss abortion, of course, and that provides the interesting crux of the dialog. With even an "agree to disagree" resolution, both sides would leave with the hope of reconciliation. That doesn't happen, though it is (unsurprisingly) urged by the pro-choice leftists. Instead, one of the women in dialog (I believe Frances Hogan, though I'm not sure) says that (and I'm paraphrasing, as the transcripts aren't free) "I cannot except your view for yourself and my view for myself any more than I could accept you owning slaves while I do not."

It's a hard statement, to have one's notion of liberty approximated to an act that is, at least present-day, synonymous with evil and the very denial of human dignity. And, well, yes, freedom. It's a brilliant statement, the kind that rolls around in ones head for months as an appropriate reply is soused out.

The parallel of "Freedom to abort" and "Freedom to own people" equates the aborted fetus with a born, living human. Slaves are independent entities, while conceived but not born embryos/fetuses/infants are solely dependent on the person in whom they reside for sustenance and exists. Slave/master is a very different dynamic than pregnant woman/child. In the first scenario, we have the rights of two adults in opposition, while in the second we have the rights of one adult and one not-alive-but-potentially-alive being. While I will never stop advocating the rights of youth, I think the most valid legal distinction of personhood can be made between an adult and a fetus.

That's splitting hairs - the idea of that construction is to give one person unfair power over another, and to portray that power as being fundamentally, morally wrong. This is perhaps why so much of the abortion debate lately has spun around defining the legal status of a the conceived but not born - if the law says it's a person when unborn, then the law says abortion is ending a life. No polite way around it, and that's the point of the phrasing (clarification: this is my understanding of how the law would act, and it's something with which I disagree wholeheartedly; the law and moral standards, as can be inferred, often differ wildly). The people who are opposed to this view it as an issue that transcends personal rights, in much the same way that people keeping slaves transcends individual property rights. And here's the trick to dogmatic argument: if you acknowledged the validity of this argument and hold a different view, you admit you are wrong.

Let's move on to this clip. Here we have a Mormon woman who lived with a gay couple (who are parents), and after a month of living with them, her views about homosexuality are unchanged - she can acknowledge them as decent people, but she has to exclude a part of their life from that analysis. It is, in her eyes, a crime against God. The couple asks her to let them be, an "agree to disagree/each to their own" argument, and she finds it unacceptable. She has a belief that overrides the value she places on individual freedom. And then it hits me, as I see people make the reasonable argument and have it fall flat.

Some values are impossible to reconcile.

Not that reconciliation isn't an admirable goal. And not that it's impossible to have intelligent and reasonable dialog with people who are actively opposed to the views one holds dear; the NPR piece is an incredible example of that. But in order to have the debate we want, in order to understand why we're stuck at a shouting match, we have to re-examine the values that go into the debate. "Universal Values" is a particularly tricky term - one definition is for values held by everybody, and one definition is for the actions and values an individual believes should be applied universally. Individual rights are a particular universal value that leads to a lot of controversy, because the left asserts individuals should be free to act as individuals, that many choices (like the right to choose) or personal traits (sexual orientation) are so linked to other accepted values (freedom of religion, rights on consent and marriage) that no sane person can oppose them.

It is wrong-headed to assume insanity on the part of those we disagree with.

Leftists, especially leftist intellectuals *cough*, assume that their values are the correct ones. When you value reason, and you then thoroughly examine beliefs and reason yourself to a conclusion, the inclination is to assume that the position settled upon is right, and anyone else making a reasonable deduction will arrive at that position. This glosses over personal values
that go into the decision, and it fools us into thinking that we're unbiased. People are generally reasonable beings: we differ not because of inferior reason, but because of different emphasis placed on different values. This needs to be understood, because debate cannot exist in a world where we don't know why people are arguing what they are. The repeated fall-backs to scripture or scientific study are moves that say "Look at what I find meaningful. How can you not find it meaningful also?", and moves that are met with "I place little to no value on what you are showing me; therefore, what you say must be invalid."

So where am I going with this? The militant in me wants to adopt the rightist stand that some views are invalid, and that the left will lose the culture wars until it agrees this is the case. But that is, of course, unreasonable. That stance further cements division, hurts understanding, and just leads to better armed camps.

I want to do away with armed camps.

The divisions will remain. It's the nature of assuming someone is inherently wrong - nothing they can do will make them right. But the inherent nature of that wrong should be understood, and the values motivating their action, moreso than anything else, need to be understood. "Agree to Disagree" is a flawed statement, not because of the good intentions behind it, but because of how lightly it treats the division. We can assume people are wrong on an issue and talk about other things, but that doesn't put us in right relationship with that person. It means we are refusing to acknowledge part of their being, and they are doing the same to us, and that is no way to live. Instead, we need to understand our differences, realize that this are reasonable people we are dealing with. Reasonable people with different, sometimes threatening and sometimes terrifying, values, and that those values have worth for the people themselves. To do any less, to gloss over such a key part of a person, is to do a disservice to them, the debate, and any good-faith efforts at reconciliation.

We can have separate camps, but let's not keep them armed.

Humanitarian War

Blogger's Note: This is a rather long post, and for such a long post it is rather dry. The key point I'm making is in the last paragraph; the intervening 1700 words are all framing and support, so feel free to skip them (or go back to them).

Wikipedia, that stalwart of internet reliability, lists 60+ wars that started since 1991. As an added bonus, they have an ongoing wars page, which includes some conflicts that are carryovers from the previous century. It's interesting, and a way bigger list than I was intending to write about. So I'll just point you in that direction and move on.

The big thing I was looking for was wars authorized by the Security Council since the end of the cold war. Reading "Chasing the Flame", four big wars stand out, to my American/Anglo biased perspective. These are the Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo War, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II. Appropriate big omissions of foreign military intervention are Rwanda and Darfur.

The last 20 years was bigger than this, with more going on, but these 6 conflicts give us an interesting opportunity to examine war's legality, legitimacy, and underlying motive. Each of these conflicts can have a case made for or against Humanitarian War. Each conflict, case-by case:

1. Persian Gulf War
Legal? Yes, authorized by the UN Security Council
Legitimate? Yes. A coalition expels an invading/occupying force from a sovereign nation.
Humanitarian? Debatable. The crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, the huge, morally reprehensible ones, were against populations living with Iraq, were committed in the late 80s, and were largely unrelated to the invasion of Kuwait. Likewise, the victorious coalition hurt the regime and ended the occupation, but they stood by while purges were enacted against populations within Iraq; the Shi'a were most hurt, while the US managed to intervene to help the Kurds later in Northern Iraq. All this distracts from the point; the war had the chance to be humanitarian, chose not to be, and instead operated in defense of sovereignty.

2. Kosovo
Legal? While earlier NATO bombing had been supported by the UN, the actual move to defend and liberate Kosovo was taken without either the permission or the explicit opposition of the Security Council. This is a grey area, but the war probably falls on the side of illegal.
Legitimate? Many within the UN tended to view it as such, and it was a war against a previously-proven genocidal government.
Humanitarian? Most would agree that it was, but the nature of the war (bombing campaigns) hurts the image of NATO as concerned for the best interests of civilians. That the ethnic Albanians were oppressed, being exterminated, and then saved by the war is more certain.

3. Afghanistan
Legal? Since it was not an officially declared war, it was not illegal, but it had no immediate legality. The UN Security Council later authorized an "international security assistance force", which can be assumed that the post-Taliban occupation is more legal.
Legitimate? Unclear. That the Taliban Regime* oppressed it's people is a well-documented historical fact, and that the Taliban regime engaged in both ethnic and religious conflcit isn't disputed. It was, in the eyes of the international community, an illegitimate regime, reocgnized prior to 9/11 by only 3 nations, and shortly afterwards by only 1. But no war has had legitimacy simply by saying "this government oppresses it's own people, let us overthrow them". The war's stated reason was that the Taliban gave support to Osama bin Laden and al Qadea (which the Taliban, in fact, did), and that Osama bin Laden was the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks (still not proven). The war is almost legitimate, and by almost all still probably considered a good thing.
Humanitarian? As mentioned above, the Taliban was an oppressive regime, and very few mourned it's overthrow. Afghanistan, as a country that has suffered war more or less continuously since 1979, had a brief period of stability when the Taliban assumed control of msot of the nation in 1996. The Northern Alliance and the Taliban still fought, however, which means that the risk of ending a cruel but peaceful era was not a big one. The war is plausibly humanitarian, and what would tilt the balance either way is the nation-building undertaken afterward. The humanitarian objectives that are pursued are several levels below military ones, so I'm going to have to rule this a no.

*Regime has become such an ugly word, but it still seems to be the most appropriate one

4. Iraq
Legal? No, war undertaken after a UN veto of the war
Legitimate? Not on the grounds of preventative war, as Saddam's threats were empty, and if it was a war explicitly against a decades-old ethnic cleansing, then it is unprecedented and failed as well.
Humanitarian? Saddam Hussein was a vicious leader, but replacing a tightly-controlled, stable and oppressive state with the world's number one breeding ground for terrorism and a civil war both count against the humanitarian virtues of the war.

5. Rwanda**
Legal? Was a civil war; saw no UN military intervention/authorization
Legitimate? Was a genocidal civil war; the UN abandonment of it's duty there has been decried as a horrific failure, and itself eroded the UN's legitimacy.
Humanitarian? Not going to war saved the UN from a difficult task of intervening in a civil war. Involvement in such a civil war would have meant placing UN peacekeepers in such a fashion so as to stand between two hostile groups and hope they can hold, or to choose a side and risk the death of innocents. Failure to intervene with armed force, it can be argued, is what made Rwanda Rwanda, as the ultimate example of inaction and atrocity in the face of inaction.

6. Darfur**
Legal? The civil war is seen as having an element of ethnic cleansing, making it illegal even by the standards of a civil war. An African Union peacekeeping force has been present for a while. Recently, a joint UN-AU peacekeeping force
Legitimate? The involvement by the African Union is widely acknowledged as a good thing; the UN itself formed a joint mission with the African Union. Sudan views it as illegitimate, but in places where sovereignty has collapsed the international community has a vested interest, and Darfur certainly qualifies as a collapse of sovereignty.
Humanitarian? The protection of humanitarian operations is an explicit objective of the UN/AU mission, and the usage of both military and police forces entails a strong Humanitarian objective.

** Rwanda and Darfur get big qualifiers because they are not wars engaged in for humanitarian purposes; they are humanitarian crises involving war in which it is hypothesized that armed intervention by an international force may have had humanitarian benefits, and brought about a humanitarian resolution of the crisis. In Darfur, we may be able to witness this happen.

The conflicts of this era are especially important as they more closely resemble the conditions in which the League of Nations was formed and failed. While the UN grew up in the Cold War, it's changed role from mediator between two bitterly opposed worldviews (a mediator that happens to intervene in crises from time to time). Post Cold War, the UN has become the sole source of international legitimacy, and has to deal with a myriad of unbalanced partners in conflict. To better understand these humanitarian wars in conflict, lets look at a pair of wars, from the League of Nations era, where humanitarian concerns were relevant.

7. The Spanish Civil War
Legal? As a civil war, the assumed protocol was to keep out of it, and many nations refused to sell arms to either group of belligerents. This was ignored by the three major nations that interfered in Spain; Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia.
Legitimate? Intervention and arms-selling was viewed as illegal and immoral by most Western Democracies, so if we are using their standard of legitimacy foreign intervention was illegitimate. However, the Soviets, and the Fascists/Nazis, both felt involvement in such a conflict was an ideological imperative, and felt their involvement was justified. Several foreign nationals felt that serving in Spain (esp. on the side of the Republic) was a personal moral imperative, and volunteered; this alone the League of Nations enacted a formal ban against.
Humanitarian? The League's abstention from involvement in this conflict was one of many instances of the League's failure to prevent war, and the ban on foreign nationals was viewed by many as a guarantee of Franco's victory. The volunteers felt a humanitarian and a moral imperative, so armed intervention could have been viewed as humanitarian had it been undertaken solely by altruistic individuals. The history of armed intervention in Spain involves far-reaching concerns, but very few of them altruistic or humanitarian.

8. World War II
Legal? The belligerents in WWII simply left the League, removing any authority it may have had over their actions.
Legitimate? Certain sides can not be counted as legitimate; Lebensraum is not an acceptable political justification for war. The Allies, as glorified in history, fought for the freedom of Europe (and other parts of the world), and so they have that whole moral justification back story. Since they were attacked, and since the Nazis committed massive crimes against humanity, it's easy to gloss over as legitimate. Excepting that the Holocaust was barely known, much less a justification for war. And excepting the history of the USSR, which attacked non-belligerent nations, and whose people often tried to openly join Germany until they found out German had a program of death or servitude for Slavs. So the war is mostly legitimate, but it's a messy legitimacy, made more so by the effective collapse of the League of Nations upon the outbreak of hostilities.
Humanitarian? Keeping in mind that few urging the allied nations to war knew of the Holocaust, the humanitarian objectives of the war have to be seen in the context of what horrors were known to be committed at the outset of war. This also ignores the crimes committed in occupied nations, because by that time the war was underway. Liberation is a humanitarian objective, and it's powerful enough to give the Allied decision to enter WWII a small bit of humanitarian objective. Self-interest, so as to prevent the west (or East, in the case of Russian and China) from ceasing to exist, counts as the primary motive, and means that WWII was not a humanitarian war; it just had a humanitarian component.

All this dry analysis was building to a point, and that is this: Humanitarian War is a new phenomenon, a potentially legal and legitimate one, provided it is undertaken/overseen by the United Nations, and that it has the best interest of the international community, the global commons, and the innocent civilians within a nation at heart. The Persian Gulf War, though a legitimate war, was not humanitarian in much the same way that WWII wasn't humanitarian. NATO bombings in Kosovo/Serbia were humanitarian in objective, but the means and the lack of authorization both detract from that noble purpose. And lastly, the UN/AU mission in Darfur has the potential to be a great humanitarian boon coming from armed force, but it isn't quite a war. This is a new era we have entered, and Humanitarian War has yet to enter as a real thing with form and substance. Currently, it exists as an objective, a justification, and a potential new role for modern militaries. But it is not yet an existing thing.

Hypocrisy 2

Last time I blogged, I was talking about the hypocrisy of an education program. The program struck me as painfully familiar, which it turns out it was. A good friend of mine from our La Amikoj days was out at a youth conference the day they tried this program at his school. As he says:

They made sure to recruit the kids who the administration knew. Most of them were in the same classes though. So there were a bunch of classrooms that had 3 of them, and a lot more that had none. Lots of people crying. I don't think they even told all the teachers. It got really bad because people started text messaging parents who knew them.
It was perhaps one of the most twisted things I have ever heard of perpetrated on our school campus. I know lots of people complained. But they never publicly apologized for anything (that I know of).
According to my girlfriend, it was set up (at least in part) by our student senate. And it was the principal who delivered the message. I don't think the police had much (if anything) to do with it at our school.

This is disempowerment, and it's a little sick and a little funny that the student government had a major hand in setting it up. It is particularly bad when youth appointed to protect youth betray that trust.

Hypocrisy 1

I'm going to start off this post with a link from boingboing. It's a story about how some authority figures (police, a school administration, and some teachers) stage a traumatic event (several students died this weekend in drunk driving accidents) to teach kids a lesson (don't drink; don't drink and drive). It's absolutely horrifying, undermines the people's worth, treats them as pavlovian dogs, is heavy handed and disempowering in every sense possible. It is all the failings of the nanny state in one - a "we know better than you, which gives us freedom to act in horrible ways" attitude met with teenagers inherent understanding that every part of the scenario is wrong, that this authority does not in fact know what is best, that the authority has lost all legitimacy through its ham-handed conduct, and that authority as a rule can no longer be thought to be acting in anyone's best interest. It's a perfect storm of what not to do, and why not to do it.

The Last Civil Rights Movement

Recently in an interview in a local weekly, one of the members of the Indigo Girls said that gay rights was "the last civil rights movement". This is also the subtitle over at the National Youth Rights Association's website. Doing a quick googling, I also found that this moniker has been adopted for disabled rights, and it shows up in connection to immigrant rights. What does this preponderance of last movements mean?

I'll hazard a guess and say there is no last civil rights movement. I'll go further, saying there will never be one. The thing about civil rights movements is that they aim at conferring rights granted some people onto a segment of the population previously denied those rights. As long as humans find a way to have unequal rights enshrined in law, people will protest it, and as long as law is decided by messy legislative interpretation of majority whim, society will have rights they want to deny people.

While I support GLBTQI people, am hugely in favor of youth rights, am all for disabled people's rights, and think immigration law needs a re-thinking, there are aspects of humanity currently discriminated against by law that I'm not all that much in favor of. NAMBLA, for example, is a group that feel oppressed but whose perceived oppression I can stand by. While I hate the "let gays marry and you legitimize bigamy, polygamy, and bestiality" line of thinking, the matter remains that agitation for change will never end, and the new majority will either have to accept the dissidents with new recognition, or it will have to understand that it contains some hypocrisy. Some of this is easy - NAMBLA's stated objective is legalizing sex between minors and adults, in a way that is hard to intrepret as anything but exploitative. Other times it's tricky - if people are allowed to marry who they want, should a marriage contract consensually entered into by all parties be illegal just because the marriage is between more than two people?

And as an aside before moving on, the previous civil rights movements still haven't worked themselves out - women still earn less than men, and people of color suffer a string of abuses that would be much harder for the general public to take if their weren't success stories as well. The latter part is what made the Jena Six so fascinating - it was a movement for the civil rights of known wrongdoers (degree of wrong and deserving-ness of punishment variable according to the observer, but wrongdoing is still a more or less accepted fact of the case). And the Jena Six ran into trouble when people realized it wasn't exemplar pillars of society being kept down, but that it was everyday flawed mortals who were suffering for a crime they committed. They were suffering unfairly, certainly, but they were still being punished for something wrong. Criminal rights as a subsection of civil rights still have a long way to go in this country, and we need to treat those who err the same, and not just make it easier for everyone to succeed but with two sets of failure available.

Really, the point of this is not to knock any civil rights movement, but to knock the notion of a "last" civil rights movement. "Next" would maybe be appropriate, but never last. And certainly neither term is valid until the previous civil rights movements are done.

Iran and Russian and Film Adaptations of Graphic Novels

A few quick thoughts, partially inspired by seeing Persepolis, partly by Russian history, and partly by having not had tiem during the semester to put this all down:

1. Revolutions are really good at making loyal yet less competent people into winners. This is a flaw, but it makes sense: a degree of competence in running a system is put in place only after the system has been around for a while and fixed.

2. Revolution can be way, way less sexy than punk makes it seem.

3. Nihilism parallels reactionaries/conservatives in a crude breakdown of outlook: both want to go back to the beginning. Nihilists just think we need a fresh start because any system is better than what exists, while Reactionaries (Khomeini or the slavophiles) want to go back to the beginning when everything was perfect. These attitudes work great together for destroying, but they are a terrible combination in figuring out a solution. This is another pairing that I see fitting in with Cory Doctorow's progressive/regressive apocalypse bit, which is increasingly my favorite frame of reference.

4. The horrors of a revolution only legitimize a revolutionary government for one generation, which is often exhausted and unwilling to live through another bitter struggle with the potential for things to get worse. In any period of stability, no matter how repressive, later generations will become discontent, and appeals to the sacrifice of a revolution will fall flat.

5. Repression can pay for itself through bribery or fines. If it doesn't do that, it has to actually be carried out consistently, which makes it much harder to sustain.

6. Marxism is appealing because it is about social justice and hard work being justly rewarded. It's persistent because it addresses the economics affecting injustice, and economics can be a huge, impersonal, and terrifying thing. It is flawed because economic systems and arrangements have to be entered into willing, or they will be subverted by what people are more willing to do. For all its praise of social justice, the very nature of forcing this concept on people invalidates all its moral backing, and for all its talk of sane economics, it is both time-limited and often wrong.


7. That said, it makes sense that young Marjane Satrapi has God and Marx as her moral basis, but only as a rare backdrop to the much more relevant and situationally appropriate advice of mortals.

8. Eye of the Tiger will always be the best montage song:

Guilt (again)

Last Saturday I went to the lower ninth ward to do some social action/justice work with several of Tulane's political science professors and their classes. It was optional, so turnout was rather low, but we still had around twenty or so people and a good half a day of work to put in. This, in and off itself, is a problem with social justice, and the trade-off that must be made in all social justice work: do you want it to be easy to do and so short it is trivial, or do you want it to be meaningful and staggering in cost in both time and effort. We were squarely within the bounds of that first pattern, and our work consisted of grounds keeping. Some of us planted sunflowers, ostensibly to remove toxins from the soil. The rest of us, with lawnmowers, weed whackers, and machetes, cleared foliage, trying to level the growth of the swamp reclaiming a neighborhood. We were chopping through growth in the foundations of houses. The 9th ward is surreal. That's almost a side note - the major point is that we didn't accomplish much good. The cynical professor pointed out that our work would be done in a day by a developer, and with much less labor. I responded, saying that while this is true, the work we were doing wasn't the point.

We were there to be made aware of the scope of work that needs to be done. Minor social action work is constituency building. Those people who go through projects like this, who visit the 9th ward and who take part in Common Grounds meetings, are made aware of the plight, and they leave not so much with the place changed, but with a commitment to the place, and to making it better. This social action takes volunteered hours gives people a vested commitment. It isn't the best way to do things, and the organization doesn't really have it all together with making the volunteers feel their work is valuable, but this is a newer technique, and it has a better feel than most of the social action I have done.

The work contrasted interestingly with the lecture. As we ate our meal of red beans and crawfish (at least, the non-vegetarians had crawfish), I sat in a circle with many people visiting Common Grounds from elsewhere. They told interesting tales of involvement with social justice, of moral callings, and of fears about the failure of government in their personal communities. This bit was great. Following that, the coordinator of our group, who had led the discussion, gave a long, angry spiel, filled with accusations and vitriol and conspiracy theories. It was among the most uncomfortable things I have ever listened to. It was filled with a righteous anger, and that anger was powerful. The guilt thrown at everyone at every thing was less justified, and it had an "us or them" feel to it. If you did work, you were an us, and if you weren't in this circle, the unjust world is against you. (The place has a sign that says "Shame on you Tourist. You pay to see our shame. Stay and lend a hand". While we were in the field with machetes, a tour van drove by, and I couldn't help feel that part of our role was to just make them uncomfortable by being confronted with white people doing hard labor while they would later go on to spend a night of debauchery on Bourbon Street.) The man giving the speech powered his exhortations on guilt, and he tried to shock and shame people into giving a shit.

I've a huge disagreement with this as a tactic, and I think the emphasis on guilt is the biggest failing of social justice activism. Guilt, and more specifically white guilt, force a negative on a person that can be alleviated in two ways: stop falling short of the expectations of the guilting person, or stop knowing and adhering to the same ideals of the guilting person. Guilting carries a risk, and it relies on the strength of personal relationships in combination with shared moral world view. This works with close friends and/or with universal standards. It doesn't work with groups, with casual acquaintances, and with people intended to be new converts. Plus, it's negativistic. The reward is to not feel guilty any more. That is a crappy reward.

Edit: No part 2 coming. Thoughts on duty have led me elsewhere.

Social Goods and Individual Exceptionalism

From Stuff White People Like:

"Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone have equal access to the resources that will keep them alive, that is until they have to wait in line for an MRI.

This is very similar to the way that white people express their support for public schools when they don’t have children."

From The Straight Dope:

"Which gets us to the heart of the issue. Ban small cars? Don't be ridiculous, CAFE advocates say. We'd all be safer and use less gas to boot if we banned SUVs. A 2002 study of 84 cars, trucks, SUVs, and minivans conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that SUVs and pickup trucks had the highest combined risk of any vehicles — that is, risk to both their occupants and occupants of other cars. True, the average SUV protected its occupants better than the average small car. However, some midsize cars protected their occupants just as well as SUVs without unduly endangering the occupants of other vehicles. The study also found that the safest compact and subcompact cars were as safe for their drivers as the average SUV, and safer from a combined-risk standpoint."

~

This is a nation where the right of the individual is prized. We are "rugged individualists" and personal responsibility is listed as a defining characteristic of the American Identity. It fits this pattern that we only want the best for ourselves - the best health care, the best schools, the safest car. Certainly, we're worth it, right?

Some of us are. The best, the quantifiable and marketable best, is available to some Americans. Good healthcare insurance requires a substantial investment of wealth, or a competitive job that attracts the highly qualified and the highly educated. Good education goes to the children of those with the wealth for private school or those who have the clout to select a home based on school quality, often in detached communities far removed from the problems of urban poverty, where property taxes can be low in percentage but huge in the money they collect, and where municipal integrity against the neighboring beast of a city is a right fought-for and maintained by the diligence of neighboring lawyers on their off hours. The safest car is a fortress for the individual, with clear lines of sight, an insulating and expertly-designed body, and the latest and best-rated safety equipment; it may get into a crash, but it will come out on top, protecting the precious insides like the skillfully crafted "mars lander" egg drop contraption sitting on Timmy's lap. This is what the best is, and the crude summary of its worth can be listed as "available to those making at least six figures a year, as a bare minimum".

Income and benefits are a primitive assessment of personal worth, but in the context of entitlement to the best that can be offered, its an appropriate one. The problem with using wealth to allocate benefits is that it is impersonal and it assumes that "more wealth=more deserving". The benefit of using wealth to allocate benefits is that its a system that works, and produces immediate results. It's not a system that can easily be changed, and I'm not really going to decry wealth here. But I'll say the system is flawed for another reason: it's self-centered.

Not "self-centered" in the Ayn Rand way. Well, yes, in the Ayn Rand way, but not for the normal reasons. A focus on the individual to the exclusion of all else provides the best possible for the capable individual. This is the goal of microeconomics, of the single player in a game of scarcity. What it fails to do is the best total for everyone.

Economics is, at its core, about calculating how to use scare resources to meet the greatest number of wants. Wants range from "food so I don't die" to "an Island in the pacific". The logic that equates these wants is that the wealthy have more to spend, and so have more wants to satisfy. In arguing for this simplified system, we ignore harms caused by individual actions.

This leads to the second of the above examples. The modern SUV is a remarkably safe vehicle for the people on the inside, but the combined risk of SUV + non-SUV in a crash is greater than the risk of a non-SUV crashing into a non-SUV. The SUV driver has, in the name of individual safety, protected themself at the expense of others. The total danger of crashes involving SUVs has made driving more dangerous for everyone. This is a social negative, and it is caused something that leads to two uncomfortable solutions - the individual can buy an SUV, exacerbating a process begun in the name of the self, or government can step in and say "Cars that make driving more dangerous for everyone should be banned." Neither of these is a good proposition for people who drive or government, and so the option chosen has just been to step back, at least somewhat. The person writing in to Straight Dope was specifically asking about the safety of small cars after a federal fuel efficiency standard was imposed, and why they just haven't been banned for being unsafe. The federal government has gone on to impose other standards, requiring such infringements on the freedom of business such as requiring cars to come with quality seatbelts, and infringements on individual freedom as mandatory seatbelt wearing. Bur the furthest step has not been taken, which would be the banning of vehicles which cause greater combined risk to occupants and other drivers. There are some universal standards, but wealth and choice can still give a person more safety at the expense of the safety of others. The individuals want is satisfied, but damage is done to the community as a whole.

This leads me back to the first quote. There is an ideal and a holier-than-thou aspect to the promotion of the wonderful idea of universal healthcare, and while I am an ardent advocate, I can't say I share the same belief about the perfections of "the European way". Universal healthcare means waiting, it means delays and slowdowns, and it means an incredible step down for those have the wealth that allows them the best. This would not (will not?) be a pleasant change for the people who have the clout and the resources to make their discontent the subject of national policy. It will hopefully, however, be a step up for the people who are going without, or who are only just getting by. In terms of total wants satisfied, the number goes down, but in terms of people with wants satisfied, the number goes up. This is a social good.

Stuff White People Like draws a parallel to public education, and this is a worthy point. There was a time, not long ago, in American public education where a system that functioned for a limited class of people was opened up, and the system broke. The event in question? Desegregation.

This is not to say that desegregation made schools worse. White people were afraid that it would, but those who had been attending the second class schools finally had a chance up, into the effective system that existed alongside the dysfunctional one. The opportunity existed for more peoples wants to be satisfied, even if it meant a change in the number of wants satisfied for the individuals. So, a shot at college for every student, instead of the segregated schools more rigid delineation between the group who were more guaranteed spots, and between those who had little option. This was a social good, but it came at the cost of individual entitlement.

People reacted to this in an unsurprising but disappointing manner. Suburban schools, which were accessed by moving out from the city (expensive), commuting to work in the city (expensive), and being part of a separate municipality (not expensive, but required work to prevent incorporation) to avoid national education mandates. A multiple-tier system re-emerged, with private schools the pinnacle, and then suburban schools the standard bet for those who could afford it. The individuals certainly acted in their best interests, and it is hard to fault people for that.

It is easier to fault people for that when one looks at the harm caused by the white flight. They took incomes with them, and with those incomes they took away the tax base that had made schools once highly functioning. I am not putting the whole public education crisis on this, but certainly this is responsible for some of the harm. Vouchers have gained popularity as a way to provide the option of flight to more people, and this will directly hurt the public education system, thereby greatly increasing the incentive for those still in it to leave, and hurting the education of those who cannot, even with vouchers, hope to go elsewhere.

A friend of mine said to me yesterday that he thinks public education is dead, that it is in its last days and that, because it is so messed up, people won't stand for it much longer. He's a lifelong Louisianan, who grew up across the lake from New Orleans and who went, like most white Louisianans I've met at college here, to a private school. This state is consistently one of the worst in education, trading places withMississippi and New Mexico regularly. Private schools, in the form of Catholic schools, have a long tradition of providing education in this state. The education is generally quality and reasonably priced. It's not the exception of the uber-wealthy, as I've stated most exceptions are. But it is an exception borne of some wealth, and it is an exception that allows for money that would go into public education to go elsewhere.

I think of universal healthcare and public education especially as social goods. I think of safe driving conditions as a social good. I'm generally a big fan of that which incurs a universal fee for a universal benefit, and feelings will not change when I'm on a long waiting list for vital surgery, or when my children have to compete with a larger group of brilliant youths for college applications, or when I buy a car that isn't the safest individually but that does little to increase the risk and danger to others. It's selfish, in both the affirming "I Matter!" way and in antisocial the "I think I Matter more than everyone else!" way to do otherwise, and while it is an easy sentiment to sympathize with, I still cannot justify it as rational, beneficial action.

Social goods are those which benefit the whole of society, and they do so at a cost applied universally, so that no segment of the population feels an undue burden or is entitled to an undue benefit. Highways are awesome, and I'm perfectly happy with the ones paid for by taxes being a bit worse than the one's with tollbooths that I am inclined to avoid. Yeah, the product is inferior than one that would be produced by a free market, but this allows those without the means to derive the same benefit from those with means. This reduces individual exceptionalism, which is fine for houses and for luxuries but is harmful for education or healthcare or a myriad of number of factors which are unified by a simple fact: they help society be a meritocracy.

A given individual will want all the benefits in society that then can accrue for themself, and a parent will want all the benefits they have accrued in their life to be transferable to their children. This is understandable, but it combines poorly with a society where wealth is commonly accepted as a standard of ones character. The children of the poor are responsible for their poverty only so much as the children of the wealthy are responsible for their wealth. Social goods aim at providing the same benefits to all citizens, and so in a world where public school was the only option, rich children and poor children would have the same quality of education at school. At home, things would be different, as this is outside the sane reach of law, but in the educational system each child would be given more or less a fair shot at the same goal. When in need of medical attention, each person would have the same chance as anyone else at that needed kidney, or at an MRI. When on the road, everyone would be about as safe as everyone else, and no one would endanger anyone else unduly at the expense of personal safety. The social goods would be a leveler, an attempt to acknowledge that everyone is created equal in the eyes of the law and the state, if not with regards to economic status.

I'm a big fan of inherent worth and dignity. I think that alone should be what entitles people to the benefits of society, and that wealth shouldn't allow one to assume and act as though they are more valuable than anyone else. It violates every notion I have of social justice.

~

Qualifier - I am not opposed to wealth per se. I think wealth is wonderful, and I am fully aware of the benefits that being in a free market society affords me. For a defense of the free market I have written, see the comment thread here (hint: I'm "the boy"). But I feel that the affect of wealth should be limited in some areas of society, and the big one omitted here is on the votes and actions of politicians. Lawrence Lessig is using this as the focus of his latest initiative, and it looks to be pretty effective. I support democracy, and I support the free market, but there is the potential to cause significant harm that most cost calculations ignore. John Fleck has a good bit about the social costs of fossil fuel here, and the potential harm caused by global warming is a big example of something left out of the supply/demand cost-benefit determination that is in place (or hypothetically could be - oil is a commodity that often has a value determined by factors other than the invisible hand of the market).
So, wealth - I think that capital and the further investment of capital into the economic system is good, and I think that some of the wealth that goes to individual exceptionalism should instead go into improving the quality of social goods. Yes, this means that those who were benefiting from exceptionalism now have to settle for inferior goods at a similar cost, but it means the quality of the good goes up for those who didn't have the option of paying more anyways, and this is why its a great leveler, and I think a benefit on the whole to society. The rest of the wealth that would be spent on things like healthcare and private school is freed up for plenty of other things, so long as the other things don't cause undue additional harm to the rest of society. This "undue additional harm" is the other half of my justification for universal healthcare and public schooling - taking monopolizing healthcare resources and taking money out of public schools (in cities, I should add) both cause harm to many at the expense of the few.

~

Disclaimer - I'm a straight white male benefiting from a middle (probably upper-middle) class upbrining, and I'm attending a private college. And yet somehow I am saying these things and probably mean them. The cynical explanation is that I don't have the greatest opinion of my peers. The optimistic explanation is that I believe everyone is as worthy as fine individuals such as myself, and that I am no more worthy than they are, for the benefits I have received. I am not, as I have hopefully established, a selfish jerk. (Not that you are if you think or act otherwise.)//for those not sarcastically inclined, this last section, and this last section only, has a dash of sarcasm.