Quick notes on the football

1) Seattle and New England look like the most impressive teams coming in statistically. If I had to bet on it, Seattle repeating wouldn't surprise me. But they're about as good of odds statistically as a typical dominating NCAA title favorite in basketball. So it's not that sure of a thing.

2) Denver has slacked off and Green Bay has a typically mediocre defense to go with their ridiculous offense. Dallas has an even worse defense than Green Bay. Pittsburgh's D is worse than both. I'm not sure I'd go with any of these teams. Don't sleep on Baltimore would be my gut reaction to looking at the rest of the top tier of the field.

3) Arizona and Carolina are the two worst teams in the field. Both are in the bottom third of the league. Arizona at least has a decent D. Actually other than Seattle and Green Bay, nobody looks that great in the NFC. Detroit has a good defense, but not much offense.

4) AFC wise, Cincinnati has the same mediocre offense but also has a mediocre defense to go with it. Indy is in the same boat. This is unlikely to be a good playoff combination.

Why I am a political weirdo

Recent discussions have indicated that lots of people expend a lot of time describing how awful and terrible other people's political beliefs are, and if only more people were like themselves how wonderful the world would be. Or let me rephrase that: ALL people expend their political opinions bloviating about how wonderful their views are and how terrible their opponents are. Or at least how wonderful they imagine their views to be and how terrible they have imagined their opponents to be.

Sometimes, as with the torture debate, it seems fairly clear that there are some awful people on one side. We can imagine, charitably, that they believed they had a good sound motive (protect the nation! national security!) for allowing the programme to go forward, while putting in place incompetent management and poor oversight or safeguards... Actually no. I can't imagine that wasn't on purpose.

In the case of libertarians and expressions therein I very often hear reactions, usually from progressives, as something like one of the following:
1) I can get behind abolishing the drug war/war on terror/police militarization and I'm not fond of all these bombs we are dropping on other countries, but your economic views are horrible.
2) Your economic views are horrible, therefore everything else you say is horrible (and I will disagree with it even if it ordinarily fits my worldview). Also you're probably a racist or some kind of Christian homeschooling nutjob or you have a shrine to Ayn Rand. This is also known as the straw man approach.

There are several possible reactions to this I have found.
1) Continue to pragmatically stress the positions that progressives do find palatable and hope they will work to further legislation diminishing the power of the state in these areas.
2) Bring up economics anyway to annoy people who probably never studied economics.
3) Bash Ayn Rand to demonstrate that you're not "one of those libertarians", whatever that means. Sometimes I get lucky and someone has actually read Adam Smith (rather than claimed to have read it) or heard of JS Mill.
4) Demonstrate that the "Tea Party" factually has almost nothing in common with libertarian philosophy. Also true of most Republicans.

One of the major problems I find is that economics, being a relative soft science is rather more malleable than physics or biology. People mold it to fit their views very often or accept and read studies that reinforce those views. Minimum wage studies are all over the place, both in methodology and conclusion. So it becomes a case of find your own oyster pearls. Economists tend to have much more "libertarian" perspectives than the average Joe/Jane over a variety of issues (they also tend to have much more "liberal" perspectives too), and this is also true of fairly well educated people, people with professional or graduate degrees of almost any type, so while there isn't a universal consensus, the purported experts seem to point in a general direction at least.

Still there isn't actually very strong evidence that markets "work" in all of these cases. There is sometimes good evidence that particular solutions attempted by governments do not work, or that markets will tend to work better than those solutions. But they don't always and inevitably work better than anything a government could try to do. Many libertarians seem to operate from an a priori conclusion that the government will fail, or will screw it up worse than a potential market failure. This is a central insight of the philosophy and psychology of a libertarian that allows us/them to be skeptical of proposed solutions coming from a centrally planned authority or regulator. But "skepticism" isn't the same thing as "denialism". If it works, or it works well enough that it isn't causing a huge fuss and mess of things, there's plenty of low hanging fruit of governments doing incredibly destructive or harmful things to large numbers of human beings for which our attention can be pointed in the meantime before coming back to these more marginal improvements to human freedom and autonomy.

This then brings to the central reasons I think libertarians are unpopular.
1) We spend a lot of time pointing out that something, usually something the state is doing, doesn't work. People don't like naysayers very much rather than more constructive criticisms. There often isn't a good story that can be told about how an open market operates to provide opportunities to people versus "this public official helped me in some way because of this program". Usually instead people have a story about an evil villain CEO working for some (often heavily government backed) corporation taking away their job and sending it overseas, or something in that vein as a basis for how the market has failed.

2) Very often public policies, constructed and conceived by both conservatives or progressives, are based around the assumptions that appearing to do something is important. Appearing to care about something means "we should do something, this is something, let's do it". Without much concern to the question of "hey, does that something actually do anything about your purported concerns for which you proposed doing something in the first place?" Or as a libertarian would object: "is that something actually a problem for which we need a public policy solution, or can we expect that people will eventually figure it out with solutions on their own?" Someone who runs around pointing out not only that some policy doesn't work very well, but also that it's a policy which is designed mostly to make it look like something was done, papering over that something possibly cannot be done, is going to be really, really unpopular.

An an example: I am extremely sensitive to the problems of racial disparities and injustices from studying the criminal justice system and I can go down a list of things that I'd rather see us up end and abolish because of the massive negative impacts they have for the lived experiences and opportunities of minorities or immigrants. But I'm also skeptical that say, affirmative action in college acceptances or job promotions is a good way to help us resolve racial disparities in opportunities. I don't think it's impossible it could be helping, but I'd rather abolish or at least severely limit the drug war or return many economic and political rights to ex-felons, or abolish many occupational licensing requirements, or improve our K-12 inner city educational experiences (including our disciplinary structure), and on and on down the line. Most of those are things I can conceive immediate benefits. They are low-hanging fruit that would probably benefit minorities most of all and they are things for which I've had a long history of supporting us as a country or state or town putting forward some legislative and legal action on suppressing our currently destructive habits of governance. Affirmative action meanwhile has a mixed economic record, doesn't seem to have done much about racial disparity in this country as a whole, and seems to concentrate its benefits among people who are, if not in need of some assistance to overcome a substantial social problem like racism, also may not be that poor or under served in education and other public and private resources. Maybe this is because of poor design, which is a common problem in many social welfare programmes in this country and others. Maybe there's a lot of economic noise that makes it harder to see large scale benefits. Or maybe it's just not that helpful. It isn't an enormous cost to society to try to promote people of a distinct ethnic background, and one can readily understand there may be potential benefits for people to try to do so anyway through intellectual and creative diversity that accrues from the likely diverse life experiences (and the same applies to having women promoted into higher positions of employment). But there's still those other things we are doing which have enormous costs and preclude enormous benefits and it should seem strange to people that we can do this more or less symbolic thing to help and not those things.

Something that should occur to anyone reading though is that actually the questions involved about how best to help the poor or the suffering, the sick, the elderly, how to provide public goods and solve questions of externalities are not generally rejected by libertarians (some do). There's a wide disagreement even amongst libertarians on how to resolve these, or whether they are within the scope of a small state to do, and a wide gulf between that and how the typical person finds it appropriate to do so via the usually larger and more robust state they envision. There are some cartoon libertarians who put forward the "screw the poor" foot. There are people who do not have a firm grasp upon what the term means and apply it because maybe they think it sounds cool. There are people are libertarian-ish (which is probably where I come in), there are left-leaning libertarians (again, also me, where I could describe myself as "a liberal who likes markets"), civil libertarians (again, me) and so on through the litany of woe available for ideological selections.

Generally what divides "libertarians" from "everyone else" is two things:

1) A very strong and often narrow moral preference for providing liberty and autonomy to individuals and thus for removing the state as an oppressive agent (this used to be defined as "liberalism"). This preference is present at turns for other people but isn't as intense, and many people provide exemptions for their pet causes to reduce autonomy or liberty in others (narcotics, abortion, large sodas, tobacco, etc).

In general the libertarian is likely to be libertine about using the power of the state to police our objections in the behavior of others that is not obviously harmful to others in a live and let live manner. So don't pollute your neighbour's property, or kill your neighbour, or steal his things or commit some manner of fraud in your dealings with him, or sexually assault anyone, or we the public will be compelled to act and respond with criminal sanctions via the instrument of the state. But if you want to complain about your neighbour's musical choices or offensive and bigoted statements or dietary habits or sexual promiscuity go right ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to be compelled to act upon it.

2) A much stronger skepticism that a particular intervention by the state is either needed at all or a means of improving the plight of some particular set of individuals. This is to say, among other varieties of objections: that we are skeptical that either the state can resolve an issue via a proposed and particular means of action, or more generally that the state will contain itself to those proposed means or use those proposed powers only for this approved upon issue. Or as a specific objection, to say that whether or not the state could do something, it's unlikely to work out better and sooner than letting things run their course through the normal operation of markets and thus unnecessary for the state to intercede. This is usually described as "having faith in markets" and often people point to specific instances where markets have failed, but often not engaging that in many of those cases, we were not dealing with free and open markets but strictly controlled and tightly regulated markets where the exercise of state power favored and protected the abusive firms seen as at fault. One way this manifests is to say that libertarians are skeptical that complex and extensive regulatory states will not be captured and used by the entities they mean to control and that they differ widely on the proposed solution to this as a problem being "more regulation" or "more regulators" to be more like simpler and smoother and more transparent regulatory states.

The division is not "we hate poor people" or "we worship rich people". This is an amusing straw man. The division is also not "we'd like there to be total anarchy so that the powerful could establish their own versions of oppression" as is often implied in the "you're a libertarian, why don't you go move to Somalia" idiocy. These divisions are common probably because libertarians aren't very good at story telling in part, relying on a somewhat impersonal process of millions of market based decisions to result in positive outcomes. But they're also common because it's preferable to try to publicly dismiss ideological opponents by providing them the worst possible motives. "They're trying to destroy the country" or "they are bigots". And so on. This preference is mostly lazy thinking. It doesn't require engagement or skepticism about politics. And most of us don't want to put in the engagement or skepticism required to understand carefully complicated issues at hand in most political policy questions anyway. We're much better at taking out our privately held stock of strawmen.

More important things I've written about before, torture version

So there was a report that came out. Not much new was actually learned. I think I could summarize my information from skimming through it and various stories thusly in the following three points.

1) Hummus is for eating, not for anal insertion. I may have to cut back on hummus consumption for a time as I'm actually mildly grossed out by that particular detail. That does not happen easily. The story in Training Day where a suspected thief gets off with a lighter sentence by licking peanut butter off his fingers from a stash of it inside his buttocks was funny (also because there's no way that would happen). This however was depraved. I cannot bring myself to marvel at our capacity of creativity when applied to destructive arts.

2) CIA lied to itself and high public officials. I'm not sure I find this a plausible truth really to accept at face value.

What seems more likely is one of two things happened:
a) the high public officials of both parties and up to and including the President/Vice President and Department of Justice all authorized it and then said "I don't want you to tell me exactly what's going on, so if asked, I don't have to lie". They were then only informed of what was going on around the time the Abu Ghraib story broke, probably because they were mildly alarmed and disgusted about what was going on there and were concerned about what else might come out later when the press got onto the the actual torture story.

b) Another possibility is that high public officials of both parties were informed and are now covering up when they knew what was going on in a sort of "we'll get you for this" treatment, trying to burn the idiots at the CIA who ran the thing without getting caught on fire themselves. Since the Bush team was in office administering the programme, they would get more blame as an added bonus for Democrats to release the story. They can also claim some variety of "bi-partisanship" because John McCain has been an avid anti-torture figure from the right and because several of now President Obama's current officials, including the CIA director, are implicated in the scandal. It's a win-win for them.

3) The main revelation was how the programme was administered and started in practical terms (legal terms we already knew years ago because of the release of the DoJ's and White House memos from Yoo and Bybee). What appears to have happened is the crack team selected to run it was paid a large sum of money and had no previous interrogation experience. Then didn't run any kind of background checks on their guards and interrogators, leading to a number of problems of depraved and sometimes sexual behavior well outside the grounds that were supposedly approved by the legal team. This was in conjunction with a sweep for "terrorists" that not only incarcerated hundreds of totally innocent people but apparently allowed dozens of them to be tortured, one of which to death.

That fact is hardly surprising, but given that again, we were told the use was restricted to high value targets with actionable intelligence (a dubious and questionable choice already), it should be very alarming that there doesn't appear to have been much work done to confirm the identities of the persons held in custody, and their status as potential terrorists with hazardous information. What that suggests, foremost, is that no attempt was even made to conduct regular interrogations on many of these individuals. They went straight to the torture chamber. And this happened without any clear and confirmed association that these might have been persons in possession of immediate information, of the classic 24-style "ticking time bomb" scenario so often depicted in Hollywood films. It is hardly surprising that it should not resemble in the slightest the actual practice. Script writers take pains to define our evil foes, their prospective acts of wanton destruction and to provide moral certainty of our actions by having them succeed in saving the day (there are exceptions). Actual intelligence is messy and uncertain and typically involves a lot of errors and educated guesses.

What most of these facts in #3 align with is not that torture as an approved and sanctioned program was a necessary and proper process with strict controls. But rather that torture was a systematic concept that easily ran amok once allowed into the system of intelligence and national defence at all (as one would predict, and as a reason why it is banned by international treaties to which we are signatories as Americans). It was haphazardly run and overseen. There were complaints from within the infrastructure about the value of information produced and toward the effect of these types of interrogations upon morale and sanity of interrogators themselves. The conduct of such practices quickly and extensively warped beyond the supposedly strict confines of manoeuvres designed to give the veneer of legality, as would be expected once the door was opened to allow it.

It is not relevant in legal terms that we either sought to justify these actions or even that should they have produced anything of value at all. They are strictly banned under any circumstances and for any reason, whether a country was directly assaulted, at war, or not. Which is why for many years public officials involved or defending the practice have taken pains to describe them with the Orwellian (and originally German) descriptor of "enhanced interrogation" rather than applying the title of torture to them as we have done in the past when conducted by others. Presumably less noble others than anointed Americans charged with the defence of freedom and decency (eg, our enemies the Chinese or Vietnamese or Soviets or Nazis, etc). The charge that they produced effective results should be weighted against the costs; which we are seeing now in the charges of international condemnation and public opinion upon the disclosure of these secrets. They can also be weighted against the alternatives of regular and approved forms of interrogation and manipulation of prisoners and suspects. Many of which appear to have been all but ignored in the haste to "break" these captive men.

Torture's primary historical utility is in getting people to tell you what you wanted to hear (ie, propaganda), such that the torture may cease, and not things that you do not already know and wished to learn (ie, intelligence gathering). Thus in any strategic sense, torture has historically offered little or no value to provide information and presents considerable risks and harms to torturers should it be discovered that captives were tortured and abused for intelligence purposes. Particularly when undertaken in a systematic way, under orders or instructions from commanders and leaders, rather than as some kind of one-off scenario that could be "excused" and dealt with (as was done with Abu Ghraib officers and personnel). It is also providing risk and harm when it is not condemned, when people are accepting of the offering of retributive violence against unarmed captives, including innocents who posed us no threat of harm in the first place and all on the pretext of acquiring information. And a risk where the officials involved face no repercussions and indeed are welcomed to offer their opinion freely. Not only to dissemble on this issue of what they had done and for which we might expect them to wish to try to defend themselves but on all manner of other topics as to our foreign relations they are granted respectability and gravitas rather than greeted with deafening silence and indifference where they wish to express themselves; to be shunned and stripped of social rank and titles rather than welcomed. These harms should have been much more carefully considered, in spite of any imagined or perceived threats to the security and serenity of the citizens of the nation, and the whatever propriety hard-earned over the history of the nation as it conducted itself abroad should not have been tossed aside in the need for vengeful assaults on human decency. That our enemies are brutal and presumed to be savage in the destruction of innocent lives is not an excuse for depravity, nor a call to conduct ourselves as savages. Standing back up taller in a moment of weakness should be seen as discouraging attack, by making us appear stronger and more formidable to our allies and enemies alike. Slinking lower to a moral standard makes us appear weaker and desperate, capable of abandoning our standards at the slightest push. Such an approach may win battles, but will lose many wars.

The reason it offers risk and harm for our public and political class to react so to these stories is that it presents the firm possibility that we would do it again, and continue our depraved status as a nation of torturers at risk to any moral standing we have as an ally and friend of those nations in search of establishing justice and peace. If but there were no restraints cast on us by our current leaders, we would do it again is the implicit promise of our reaction. Or that we would cooperate with allies who might do so at our behest rather than condemn such practices universally and unequivocally. It is not enough to place words upon paper and sign them. We have to practice the ideals behind those words. Those ideals carry meaning and value only so long as we wish to uphold them, and they lose value and credibility when we stray grievously from our established acceptable practices. They are not reinforced by pointing to lesser exemplars for their own brutality and abdication of human rights or decency. They are only reinforced by making ourselves strive to be ever stronger examples of such things.

Minor things I've written about before

Daily Show came around to the story about the diner in North Carolina. 

I was unpersuaded by the take of many atheists that this a serious problem, or that the type of problem it presented was in somewhat analogous to much more serious forms of discrimination (such as genocidal practices, or really even hiring and firing decisions of companies based on religious non-belief). One can readily acknowledge that it is discriminatory legally. But given that restaurants practice many types of price discrimination already (for the elderly, for college students, for military or police/fire departments and so on), it is not a particularly egregious outrage that they might effectively overcharge everyone for food and then decide to offer a discount for something religious like praying over the meal. It also appears the diner amended its practices slightly in the wake of criticism to allow for non-religious expressions, whatever that implies.

I do think the Daily Show's piece was unfair in its depiction of FFRF and Barker specifically, but my impression has been that the expressions of the FFRF and Barker aren't always all that flattering anyway. They can do enough work digging the holes without help. What struck me first and foremost about the story when I first was presented with it months ago was that it didn't make sound business sense to offer the discount at all. And not that it demanded a very public and in-your-face response for it to be abolished. There was a cheap and simple and much more private way to handle this, such as a personal phone call or meeting with the owner/manager to determine the contours of the discount, accepted practices for receiving it, training or discretion offered to the crew to provide it, and so on. Such a meeting or call probably would have sufficed to show the owner this was a foolish idea, and at least that it came from a highly privileged Christian majority position and that a more generally inclusive or respectful attitude to the population of potential diners and customers might be wiser. Indeed, my impression and understanding of religious practices was that public displays of religious faith by other Christians might have been frowned upon as discriminatory even before atheists as exclusionary, and that other Christians are commonly allies in pointing out these forms of religious exclusion. The piece and previous reporting did not illuminate if this more subtle and personal approach was tried and failed, and a more public and direct response was then used instead to achieve a more desirable result. The Daily Show piece and previous stories on this issue strongly implies that it was not attempted to mediate and explain, so I would submit this is unlikely.

What seems to have been more important was to attract attention to it as an example of discriminatory practices excluding atheists. Of which there are many and many of which can have considerable impact upon the lives of atheists in this country and others and for which the resources of atheists can be leveled and concentrated upon improving and reducing the barriers and boundaries that a still distrustful modern Western society like that of the United States places upon us. But for something like this, effectively burning the bridge in order to draw attention to it struck me less as a well-calculated solution which educated the local diner operator and more as a Streisand effect, demonstrating to the Christian majority the lengths to which atheists may go to exclude religion from public life and resulting in a portrayal of atheists as "dicks" even by fellow secularists such as the Daily Show writers and correspondents for cheap laughs.

That portrayal, which is sometimes accurate and deserved as it is for any group of humans, is hardly the necessary means to make an approach of acceptance and tolerance in broad society which includes a vast quantity of religious adherents. We atheists don't need to be dicks and neither do we need to be nice and lay down all the time. But we should be pragmatic. We are outnumbered and should pick our fury where it is actually raised and a the thing should not stand without resistance. We should also be willing to say, yes, that behavior on the part of another atheist was inappropriate or ineffective as a means of achieving a general goal of acceptance and promotion of tolerance toward atheists and secularists in society. This happens often with Dawkins and remarks on sexism or feminism as an example. Whether or not he intends them as such, they are often offensive and counterproductive to a cause of atheism and secularism that is too easily and frequently depicted as an all-white-male boys only club which is ill-attuned to the social problems of others owing to race or gender.

As such. It does not offend me deeply as an atheist that I would not receive a modest discount for my breakfast at this location because I could go somewhere else that I might find a more accommodating business practice or better eggs and bacon. It would offend me deeply if I were refused service entirely were I to refuse to pray over my meal. Or if to work at such a location, I were required to adorn myself with some religious symbols of the owner's choice and practice of faith. This distinction of the scale and scope of the offense should be factored into our reply. Discrimination is discrimination, but discrimination of this type, economic discrimination through prices, is not like genocide or racial exclusion laws. It scales. It would be entirely appropriate to boisterously and immediately and publicly complain and to demand restitution if an atheist is not given a raise on that basis of non-religious affiliation, or denied employment or service from a company or public official.

I do not even say it is necessary that we pick our battles and that a scorched earth approach to any and all forms of discrimination by businesses cannot be deployed. And thus that this should have been ignored as a "nice old lady" doing something weird. Rather, I am saying that the way the battle is fought sometimes matters to the outcome of the war. Winning ugly is still winning yes, but it often costs later on. We are in the middle of a very long road still with a large portion of the public expressing views of hate or intolerance, and many more expressing indifference to the problems of atheists in America. Atheists will require allies and compassion from others as a minority status in a Christian dominated society, allies who will help fight on issues of church and state separation and forms of discrimination that afflict atheists, or on science education policy and other matters which interest atheists in particular at times. Potentially alienating such allies is foolish. That should be considered when picking out the weapons of choice and against who they are wielded.

Into the valley

A river divided grains of sand
Hour upon hour, slipping through veins
Upon a beach the sunset crumbled
Moons rising in the eddy and tide
Water gurgles drinking in the shadow

Each day is pulled deeper at sea
Each night drowned by company
A legion of waves passed over
Bobbing up and over
The drain wrenched free and the water runs red
every morning.

Washed upon a strange new land
The discovery, a world fossilized
Between a great mountain and the drowning sea
Darkened by endless trees
On fire, the pyre a pillar
Provider of ticklish rages
Reminders from choking gasps of air gusting by
Burning. Escape on foot. Alone.

Climbers slip, falling back
upon the riverbed, desperately thirsty
refreshment from the desert valley
Cruel tricks, illusions. Oasis
Never make it there
Carried back in circles among the dunes

A Shadow that chases shadows
Casting longer to the canyon
Trapping light and screams, echos
every shriek and laugh ignored

The bones escaped long ago
chattering against the wind
Guardians of the peak
Restless rocks flung down
Relentless for the barren slope
Watchful No rescue

Sheepish grin of confusion
exasperating tides whisper
through wind and star lights
Only this mountain will remain
if only the valley can tremble no more

The peak of snow exploded
a gruesome spire approaches
falling blackness, pitch
blind and dizzy
The up is down, down up
Now is soon, then is not

fall upon the riverbed
Hidden in the valley
Everything burns, documented
Calmly nothing to see here.
nothing but this. Looking up
a world on fire tugs and stretches
over the screen, forever

Looking back and the page disappears
Gone, never touched or seen again
Lost in the valley. Forgotten
when the river runs again
Buried by the wave

Crime pays

For many of my gripes with Kleiman, he wrote a book on this topic a few years ago (When Brute Force Fails). Some of the same conclusions are involved. Example. For minor infractions like parole or probation violations instead of sending people to prison to serve out a lengthy term, they might go to jail immediately for some smaller period of time (a few days to a month), and then are released.

A crucial element that wasn't mentioned in the piece is that one of the major aspects of "successful" punishment is that it usually is not the length or severity that matters for people to get the point that they did something wrong and deter others from doing the same. Rather it is having available swift and sure possibilities for penalties to occur in the first place. In many cases prison sentences are increased because we don't have very sure or swift penalties for the criminal acts involved and it is assumed that the only way to provide deterrence is a stiffer penalty. People can commit these kinds of crimes with relative impunity. As a result we might also want to look at which crimes we could better deter with different police patrol patterns, more community involvement, a better focus on the use of our investigative resources to solve these crimes doing the most damage, etc.

People don't tend to randomly kidnap children in the US versus other many countries because it's extremely hard to pull off without getting caught (or at least this is the belief among many criminals, it's also pretty low on the totem pole of prison hierarchies to do pretty much anything to kids, which adds another wrinkle). It's almost always a family member in this country for that reason that abducts a child. Someone who probably doesn't care if they get caught because they're not rational involving their own children. This attitude of deterrence through the surety of penalties could be applied to any number of criminal acts (murder, robbery, fraud, etc) and should provide much more deterrent value than longer sentences. There will still be murders, but they'd be more and more acts of "passion"; sudden events that escalate to violence and less and less random acts of violence committed against strangers.

I think there's also a large sum of currently designated criminal behavior that isn't described or studied here that doesn't cost as much in the form of social damage (drug use/possession and distribution being one source), or where there is damage, using the prison system to deal with it probably isn't appropriate and is wasteful and costly versus the alternatives. This would also apply to many mental health problems. It sounds like this was a study or set of them that looked too linearly at the costs of prison itself rather than also including the costs of policing or the costs of basic health care, and the benefits of same, and so on. I find that many of our policy approaches are not "3-D", taking into account alternatives from outside the context of a narrow policy view. For instance, drug addiction (actual drug or alcohol addiction, not mere use of drugs that we find are socially disapproved) or mental health disorders could be treated as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. The narrow focus on the costs of these in criminal activity often precludes people from assessing how they might be dealt with more efficiently elsewhere. It is useful to know that X criminal act potentially costs us this much in social damage, and imprisoning a person for doing so costs Y dollars, but it is useful to know that because we can then evaluate it against other alternatives and also see if we will come away with fewer of X criminal acts in the first place using those alternatives, or if those alternatives have other positive benefits (better mental health for instance allows people to hold down regular employment easier, narrow policing focus allows police to push criminal activity into smaller and smaller spaces, thus making any remaining criminal activity less likely).

List of standard disclaimers that probably should not be used

1) "Support the troops" - This is typically used when someone opposes a military deployment (a war). When someone opposes a war, that person should say that no, they don't support the troops. Because the troops are doing something they oppose. They mostly, and more properly oppose the political and policy decisions that resulted in someone demanding the troops do something they felt was inappropriate, destructive, or generally foolish and not helpful to American interests and security. But basically we should not say blandly "I support the troops". Because that implies we support the mission they are deployed for.

2) "I regret offending people" style non-apology apologies. If what you said or did was what you wanted to say or do, you don't actually regret that someone was pissed off by it. What you regret if it offended people and that reaction upset you was that you said or did something stupid (and were caught doing so). In most cases, this is not actually a regret people are experiencing that others were offended. They just want people to shut up about it and move on. I appreciate that these public displays of passive aggression in response to accumulated grievances are sometimes amusing and even warranted as a way of getting back at such complaints, but if you didn't want to apologize, it may be better to just not acknowledge it at all than to make an insincere attempt to mollify some people. If you really do want to apologize, then find a way to say it that acknowledges you may have actually been striving to learn and understand the complaints of others rather than stating the mere existence that there are complaints and grievances against some statement or action. Which you apparently either don't care about or understand.

3) "If you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all" - Almost nobody actually follows this. Our primary form of moral reinforcement as a species is dishing dirt on other people or complaining about other people. This is far, far more common than hearing about something awesome someone else did as an exemplar. We should admit this hypocrisy and instead of telling people what not to do in as far as not saying bad things, we should strive to pay more compliments to balance out our tendency to try to do violence to other people's reputations in the trading of gossip and information on the flaws and peccadilloes of others. (Our own flaws are a different variety of currency).

Addendum point to 3: This also infects superhero movies. Where it is far more common for such movies to tell us "this person is a hero" than to actually attempt to demonstrate it as an example to hold up toward. Batman in some respects may be the exception and GotG also had elements of this. Superman movies have not (at least not for a while). The most "heroic" character was typically Jor-El, and not Superman. One reason for this is that movies that involve self-sacrifice, or acts of devotion to and protection of others, probably won't involve as many explosions. Science fiction movies have struggled with this also since probably Empire Strikes Back and some of the earlier Star Trek films (since the Borg, it's been lackluster there too). What's typically portrayed instead of acts of heroism is acts of recklessness that because of the deus ex machina and plot armor effects, are pulled off. Showing exemplars in media is apparently very hard to do, and I would bet this is because we don't spend very much of our time and energy talking about and holding up exemplary behavior in others.

4) "Some of my best friends are.." First. They're not some of your best friends. Everyone knows that in most cases except the person saying it who is holding them up as a token talisman that somehow excuses something else (using another person to protect yourself is not typically viewed an act of friendship). Second, it's irrelevant as the topic is typically either some nonsensical statement Person A has made that doesn't involve or impact their "good friend" Person B or the topic is some variety of public policy position which is informed not by a random sampling of people potentially impacted by the policy but by Person B style friends who have become so by not saying anything inoffensive to which you would disagree (in your presence). Most of us do not select diverse grouping of friends so that we can say "some of my best friends are". We select actually fairly homogeneous groups of friends who affirm our pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them. What happens when we befriend people who are often of different and distinct beliefs and views is we may adopt portions of their views or moderate some of our own more extreme views (this is typical of people who suddenly realize they have an atheist or gay friend). Most people do not however set out to meet people for the purpose of having a set of friends that includes "person from stereotypical group B", and "person from stereotypical group X, which is very different from our group C", this is an accident of our lives and is not a defence of having said anything about any other group of people.

5) "Police have a difficult job, etc". This might be partially true in the same way the "support the troops" mantra has a grain of truth to it, but there are several problems with it. First it obscures that one of the reasons police have a "difficult job" is that current laws are often expansive, covering a great deal of human activity, and as such allow a great deal of leeway for police to detain and arrest people, where if laws were not as expansive police would have less latitude in who they arrest and detain. But police also have a great deal of discretion not to arrest and detain people by that same token and are therefore choosing to arrest and detain people, or choosing which people they wish to arrest and detain and which they will ignore. Some of that exercise in prejudice will be fueled by actual biases and animus toward others. Second some of the same laws should protect police already if they do things which are appropriate in the context of their duties. Self-defence law for instance should allow for an officer to have killed someone in certain contexts, which are mostly the same contexts that would permit any ordinary citizen to do so. Police are also often further insulated by law and by contracts and training in the language of the law from penalties for making inappropriate arrests or a variety of citizen complaints about their work on top of the disturbing lack of penalties for acts of violence and brutality. Third police themselves have made their jobs much harder by accommodating some of the poor incentives to enforce some laws (vice crimes and a variety of discretionary crimes that typically issue fines) by tending to come off as an occupying force in many neighbourhoods and towns across the country in the methods and tactics they use to enforce the law. "Good officers" deserve little public sympathy if they typically try to not only protect these other officers for indecent behaviors but reward it.

Garner

Honestly at this point I don't care if half the country gets burned to the ground and we have to start over. Nobody seems inclined to take seriously suggestions of how we get from here to there, where there is somewhere a decent people should want to go.

The Brown-Wilson case was mishandled at crucial points but there's little chance that would have gone to a conviction. The end result would have been the same; Wilson resigning. That entire case basically turns on what witnesses you believe or don't believe concerning what happened after Brown had moved away from the car and those last several shots being justified or not. All of which is enough for reasonable doubt in a court room. Of course, whether police usually receive reasonable doubt from juries when normal citizens often do not could be discussed at that point. How all of it was handled from there was an outrage, but that's a different sort of outrage than the actual death itself (leaving the body in the street for hours, running over memorials to the deceased, mistreatment of protesters and media in the aftermath, total lack of communication between protesters and security forces, deployment of military equipment for which police were not trained for use against a non-military grade threat to officer safety, PR battles which often had limited value, calling anyone who opposed police action "thugs" or furthering a "pro-thug" agenda, with all the attending racial-loaded implications of that language in the modern era, etc).

This case.... there was all kinds of evidence involved however. Police procedures were not followed. The arrest had no such import as a prospective assault/robbery suspect (however unjustified killing such a suspect was, the criminal acts for which the deceased were being accosted were miles apart in the importance of effecting arrests). The man clearly had medical issues induced from police action, and still they persisted. Heads should have rolled. Excuses piled up instead and nothing happens. The Crawford case was in the same boat, and one expects that the Rice case in Cleveland will fall under the same hand at this point.

This has to stop, but it won't.

The only way that happens, the only way we can begin to examine this corpse of our society and its presentation of justice and what may ultimately destroy us, is if we start to acknowledge we have a police problem. We have an institutional problem with the way we police, and how we look the other way when violence is meted out to those we deem unworthy of basic decent legal and moral protection. And the main reason we have such people upon which to permit, if not demand, such institutional violence is we have a race problem. Still.

It isn't just a race problem. Poverty, the drug war, media coverage of crime and criminal justice, military-grade hardware distributed like candy to police forces large and small, and the expansion of police powers and broad and vague legal codes all contribute. And it isn't just a police problem; a media climate of fear is perpetuating the feeling of a society under attack from what are largely mythical criminal acts and as a result the general public carries many of the same biases and prejudices in private and public encounters with people who do not look like us. Many of these situations would not have happened at all if someone with suspicion formed (primarily) on the basis of skin colour did not call the authorities to alert them of something that could have been handled with a simple question or conversation at the scene. The animus doesn't require the police. The fault is not in any stars. It is from ourselves.

When we put these problems together though, the explosives are made more deadly and more corrosive to the nature required of us in forming a functional and prosperous society. Where all people feel reasonably safe in their homes and neighbourhoods not just from criminals, but from the authorities as well. Where all people feel that the provision of law is not a means or tool for oppression of basic dignity, but rather a weapon for preventing that oppression of dignity. These should be our aspirations in crafting the laws, and the methods of enforcing and arbitrating violations of laws. We may never perfect the methods and means of obtaining these lofty goals. But we should at least act like we care that these are our preferences. Or we should admit that they are not our aspirations at all.

When we have one law for those who enforce and craft laws, and another set of laws for others, we cannot present a place for basic dignity. We enable those who would hide behind their position to inflict injustice where they should be in the service of justice. We can have room in our society for difficult decisions, for actions taken in self-defence or in defence of others, and we have legal codes which allow for this. Nor should we want police officers to fear for their safety anymore than we should ourselves live in fear. But this impunity before the law must end.

A few narrow points

The conclusions don't necessarily create the idea that conservatives have figured out how to address the concerns of women (or single mothers in particular). But there were a few morsels of ideas and concessions in here (of course, Frum isn't widely considered a conservative by other conservatives). 

"the pro-life movement really does seem to have changed American minds about the morality of abortion. Only about one-fifth of Americans wish to see abortion outlawed—a proportion that has remained steady since the mid-1970s. But the proportion that thinks abortion is wrong has edged up over the past 15 years: Only 38 percent of Americans now describe abortion as “morally acceptable.”"

- This trend explains much of the strategy behind most abortion restrictions as if most people seem to think what is being done is wrong, but aren't willing to ban it outright, the restrictions will sound like sensible methods of "getting people to think again" while ignoring the actual impact of the restrictions. It's also why I think that if Roe were ever overturned, pro-lifers are screwed as they have to defend the idea that not only is it "wrong", but it should be illegal. A prospect which is not a clear line for crafting jurisprudence, as evidenced by our fraught history waging the drug war, or Prohibition before that, among other examples. It seems even less likely to lend itself to clear jurisprudence where metaphysical assessments of the origins and meaning of human life are concerned, and these become intertwined in a variety of scientific or natural phenomenon (such as miscarriages).

The major problem with the trend is that it does two things.

1) Confuses the population's terminology and labels. "Pro-life" is more broadly interpreted than "someone who wants to ban abortion". "Pro-choice" is mostly becoming limited to people who don't want to describe themselves as "pro-life". The popularity of both labels gives the basic impression that the ardent pro-life position, or the ardent pro-choice position, are more popular than they really are. The vast majority of people are instead in a fuzzy zone and have few strong opinions other than that "it seems wrong", or something to that effect (the famous Clinton formulation of "safe and legal but rare"). Neither position should have much dominance if popular will is sufficient to argue the legal merits of abortion (I do not believe it should, and possibly even pro-life persons would agree with me on that point when they recognize that they do not stand before the majority).

2) In truth, both labels are functionally meaningless. By acknowledging that neither position does hold sway, we should be able to acknowledge properly that most other people are not in some carefully thought out and fervently advocated position on this issue and will hold neither "pro-life" or "pro-choice" politics as a result. If most people seem on simple reflection to agree that we should have fewer abortions because they are "wrong", then the actual disagreement is over what methods would best produce that outcome of fewer abortions, and not so much over the labels we use to argue to that result.

Frum's piece points out, without actually refuting, the standard pro-choice liberal narratives. Access to birth control and various restrictions on abortion account for example for why Europeans have fewer abortions than Americans (often much fewer), or for why the teen pregnancy rate has been falling as a source of decreased demand.

In addition, regardless of whether these factors decrease abortions significantly or not they may have positive effects on these concerns about the "traditional family", such as by allowing women (or potential husbands brought on by "shotgun weddings") to attend college or university and get a degree or decent job instead of attempting to raise a child on a lower-income education and salary. And increased use of birth control has beneficial effects within families, as indicated large numbers of abortions are to women who already have children, indicating unplanned or undesirable pregnancies possibly from inadequate birth control or lack of use, or by decreasing the spread of sexually transmitted disease. We might say those are positive externalities brought on by the use and accessibility of both birth control and to a lesser extent abortion.

Frum's basic argument seems to be that the problem is that in the narrow focus on abortion, social conservatives have confused away the arguments for marriage (and in a related story, also did so by trying to argue against same-sex marriage, and have mostly lost or conceded that fight). In theory such an argument does not actively offend anything. It seems unnecessary in theory to press an active social case for women to be married, whether to men or women, in order to raise children versus the legal and political arguments. In practice there may be merits to it as the "marriage" crisis, such as it is, is largely a problem of the lower socio-economic class who either do not get married or may marry younger and get divorced sooner, and is also less likely to use birth control (but not abortion), and as a result, creates a significant population of mostly poorer and poorly educated single mothers. The upper-socio-economic class gets married later, typically after educations and careers are well-in-hand, and tends to not have children prior to that point. We are also likely to see these as cyclical effects for single-parent homes to produce children who receive poorer educations and thus poorer economic opportunities (among other possible difficulties in childhood).

Having diagnosed this as a potential social ill worthy of attention however, Frum's solutions are more to fret over how we may encourage marriage or to experiment with incentive structures rather than regard the economic and educational choices of people within these single-parenting problems as problems worthy of solution in their own right prior to advancing the agenda of "get more people married" as a second order problem that may help resolve these struggles but which may be considerably more difficult without addressing these structural problems underlying the decisions not to marry for many. These problems can be innumerated thusly:

1) Social welfare safety nets often scale poorly, providing bad incentives to improve the economic state at the marginal position of poverty. Foremost among these with a poor structure is typically state subsidies for day care. Food stamps typically phase out more smoothly. Housing and childhood assistance does not. This can impact household structure by limiting the total household size. This can have the effect of preventing marriages because the marginal assistance from the state declines much more than the amount of additional income provided from a second parent, or failing that, it can have the effect of preventing one or both parents from working at various points during a year to avoid a loss of subsidies.

2) Time management in parenting is a tremendous problem with the attending demands of raising small people into adults. This was previously resolved by two-parent households where one parent (almost always the mother) stayed home to handle most of the home and parenting duties. This is neither as straightforward an option as it was in the 1950s imagination land of conservatives (because often women may have better educational or employment options than the fathers of children), nor something that is always possible even in two parent households today (requiring both incomes for sustainable lifestyles). The solutions here are fairly well known; access to day care (many ways to achieve this), access to flexible scheduling in more occupations (so that parents can take time to deal with home concerns), and some variety of parental or family leave time (whether paid for by employers or the government). With other possible assistance measures like moving back the start of the school day added in for good measure.

3) Because of poor time management flexibility, attaining an education or license for a better occupation can itself be a considerable stretch of this valuable resource (time). We have attempted to resolve this by subsidizing college education costs, but this typically has resulted in ballooning education costs and more student loans rather than more practical outcomes; like well-trained professional skills accruing to graduates. Additionally, since the focal problem is dealing with under-educated poorer people with limited time, such a focus on providing access to college educations is ridiculous as a solution. Most such people, whether from ignorance or time constraints, will not succeed in obtaining a degree no matter how much money is thrown at the problem (within reason). The fix for that requires addressing disparities in K-12 education, not in trying to repair the damage much later, after the fact.

Instead of this focus on college education, fewer jobs or professions should require occupational licenses, along with any accompanying educational requirements, from the state. If they do require licensing from an employer, or there is a potential market benefit to advertise having achieved special training in the craft or art involved, that should be a separate matter. But with the state providing a clear hurdle to entry of various professions, this prevents many people from starting competing or side businesses that they could in fact do things like time management (by largely working from home for example) or to use the profits to fund an education for themselves or their children.

Fallout. New Tactics.

So. That was fun. A few buildings burned. A couple of cop cars. And not much was resolved or changed.

Here's what I think we know in the Brown-Wilson case.

There was some form of altercation. This resulted in Brown's death (eventually).
Wilson's story has some corroboration here there there was a form of disturbance.

Stuff that remains undetermined:
I think the causes of that disturbance are less clear. It's possible Wilson's account is accurate. I remain dubious largely because Wilson's account relies heavily on his subjective interpretations rather than other witnesses. Some of the details are not as clearly corroborated or seem outright wrong (for instance, how and why Brown turned around, the "reaching for his waistband", and the distances involved from Wilson's car). Some of those are fishy narratives that are often used by police in describing a violent episode involving deadly force. Whether they actually happened in all cases they are used to me is an unfounded assumption. To me this narrative is mostly superfluous. The crucial question isn't so much whether there was a scuffle and a shot or two fired at Brown, possibly hitting him. But whether Wilson's second batch of shots at Brown was justified after Brown retreated. Wilson uses a rather dehumanizing and scary account of dealing with an impending assault and firing at an onrushing attacker, and it is certainly possible that many elements of that account are true to the best of his knowledge. There appeared to be more conflicting accounts however over that set of details. I think it very likely that such conflicting accounts would make it virtually impossible for him to be convicted of anything. But I do think that there may be some open questions over the justification for those shots, in particular the fatal shots to the head. Or to the training involved that lead to it if nothing else.

Things that don't make sense in his narrative:

The tie-ins to the robbery suspect story feel like they were tacked in to make a revision to his story and add some form of justification. But. If an officer felt he was approaching or saw someone who might be a suspect in a robbery/assault, it seems strange that he might merely ask such a person to get out of the street and walk on the sidewalk. That entire set of facts he presented centering around a package of cigarillos feels tacked on as a result. That there was some kind of disturbance and scuffle ought to be enough that there might be a justification for force. If Brown's assaulting someone (and an officer of the law at that), that should be plenty without adding in anything else (like "this man was a wanted criminal, for basically petty theft, maybe assault). And indeed, whether or not he was involved in such an incident still does not justify being shot at by police. The justification for that turns on whether or not the scuffle provoked a considerable fear.

Things that also happened as a result of the grand jury.

Lots of people (mostly white people) complain about rioting. I agree it does not help the cause of justice here, or reform. I agree it isn't justified. I don't see why it was a surprise. Most people expected both the lack of an indictment and the possibility of riots as a result. Police spent most of the time leading up to the result talking up the level of preparations. And then didn't seem all that prepared when violence broke out, like they were surprised in particular where violence broke out (nearby where Brown was shot and where there was some violence before during the summer) rather than where people and many police were assembled (near the courthouse and police station).

Prosecutor spends a lot of his air time complaining about the media and social media narratives. I'd say that given that a lot of both of their use of narratives haven't done much to establish something about this particular case, and have done a great deal (but not nearly as much as they could have) to show the lack of merits in militarized police forces putting down protests with disproportionate force to the level of threat, or to cover the methods of police oppression used on a daily basis in communities like and including Ferguson, Missouri (largely through the collection of petty fines and warrants, asset forfeiture seizures, occasional violence against citizens, etc), that complaining about those things would be perhaps something he feels compelled to do, but has little ground on which to stand. As it is his office that helps run through the system of abuse through fines and criminal justice which isn't properly adjudicated (eg, with appropriate defense counsel), and is likely deliberate.

Complaining about media narratives framing and prejudging the case, perhaps is a more sensible complaint. I paid much less attention to details about the actual shooting because I was aware that was more like a matchstick than the kindling on which things might burn and that details would be scarce. Also it was pretty clear from the prosecutor's demeanor, history, and close ties to the police that there would be any prosecution anyway, and what leaks of information came out ahead of time only suggested it would remain unlikely and would almost certainly fail to provide a guilty verdict even if the case proceeded to trial.

The crucial elements were that there are deep-seated reasons why these communities do not trust the authorities to handle cases of police shootings fairly, believe those shootings to be unjustified, or otherwise are more skeptical than are the people observing from the safe confines of American suburbia (where encounters with police are rare outside of speeding tickets for teens and college students, or the occasional break-in being investigated). Policing is experienced very differently based on skin colour alone, much less the cultural and socio-economic gaps between poorer communities and upper middle class neighbourhoods. This is evident when looking at polling suggesting many are seeing these events as isolated and the apparent mystery experienced by the general public in associating why there might still be riots or protests months later. When the problems are systemic to the way the community is policed and how both police and the community see one another.

Police seem to have made a hobby of developing excuses for deaths that do not require them to examine their training and use of force methods. This is one of the reasons these kinds of stories continue to persist. Some police forces have dealt with very questionable shootings by officers by dismissing officers, or pressing charges (in one bizarre case in Connecticut, officers wanted to press charges against another officer for a beating in a "resisting arrest" case, but the DA refused. The officer was at least fired).

There was a lot of attention paid to whether there were drugs in Brown's blood stream. (Well after the John Crawford shooting in Ohio, this also came up there). Marijuana on its own from observing people who use it does not strike me as heavily correlated with erratic and aggressive behavior of the sort police or 911 callers, etc, are claiming in these cases. Maybe poor judgment. But it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that this was drug addled crazy behavior when the drug in question doesn't tend to cause such behavior. If they were claiming these men were stone cold drunk, yes. I could see that. Stoned, not so much.

So where do we try to go from here. I would propose several things

1) For the St Louis area in particular (and there are other metropolitan areas with similar problems, Atlanta, Detroit, or even San Francisco/Oakland would be examples), we may want to look at consolidating some of the tiny legal jurisdictions that have cropped up as city populations have expanded and sprawled outward. These are often carved out deliberately for race related reasons and result in a lack of a sustainable tax base to support the level of civic government required (because too many people are poor and jobs are scarce). Instead, the town's government will levy considerable fines and minor legal fees upon an impoverished community. It may even account for planned increases in those fines in year-to-year budgeting. Suggesting that the fines are arbitrary rather than necessary quality of life and safety legal structures. We may not be able to abolish this variety of policing entirely, but avoiding the problem of unsustainable local governance by eliminating or at least reducing the level of civic separations in an area may be of use.

2) Continue to work to abolish the war on drugs. At this point the number one thing that can be done to improve civic relations between minorities and the police is to reduce the amount of contact and the amount of invasive police tactics that are being used. A huge portion of that comes back to the penalties (arrests, felony convictions, loss of economic and legal rights making re-integration difficult) and incentives for police (asset seizures, frequent arrests for stat games) involved in the war on drugs. The flow of militarized equipment into local police departments, of the sort used in putting down demonstrations, is also closely tied to this ridiculous project of trying to use the law and police to deal with medical problems (for some, addiction or overdose) or to avoid dealing with medical problems for others (mental health ailments being self-medicated with drugs or alcohol in a non-addictive way). A violent crime, such as assault or murder or arson or rape, should attract a significant bulk of our police attention and resources. Followed by varieties of property crime (theft, fraud, etc). We are expending inordinate amounts of attention and resources for policing what are effectively consensual acts (vice crimes, like the trade and use of narcotics). If people are getting high and going off to commit acts of violence, that is still worthy of our time and attention. But far more people are getting drunk and doing so. We do not or should not say that this is not worth our time and attention simply because the drug of choice was legally sanctioned.

3) Continue to reduce or reform the penalties for many non-violent crimes. If we can't get rid of the laws, we should at least reduce the amount of harm that punishment for a petty crime does.

4) Try to channel public anger in these directions. Talk about the harm that is done when police become an oppositional and occupational force in a community, and try to have more communities actually deploy community policing, where cops walk beats (getting out of the squad car), know the communities in which they work and are known in them, talk with leaders and representatives, and respond to complaints rather than feel like an invading army. With the appropriate funding for that rather than the funding for "community policing", where police departments have gathered large amounts of military hardware (without much training but plenty of intent to use it) and have strong incentives to make arrests rather than investigate crimes. There are communities and police departments that behave in this way. Even in areas with violence, poverty, or minority populations. The outcome of friction between police and the community should not simply be angry and violent demonstrations or police deploying in SWAT gear and firing off tear gas or pepper spraying peaceful demonstrators. Both sides have reasonable demands (both want crime to go down in a community for example and by association, their lives to be easier and safer). What we're mostly arguing over is what works to actually accommodate those demands. It is not, generally speaking, what police are doing.

To take a separate example. In Utah over the past half-decade the largest cause of homicide is the police. They're technically in a rough tie with a domestic dispute leading to death, but the ordinary things driving crime elsewhere like gangs are almost non-existent as a cause of violence by comparison. There are two ways to approach that fact of life. One might be that this might mean that the public is quite safe and there are few murders, which may indicate the police are doing an effective job helping do so. In the entire state there were just over 300 in a 5 year period. There were at least that many every year in Chicago alone in that same time frame. But another way to look at is that the public could be even more safe if the police weren't busy killing some of them. Police shooting of citizens caused 45 of those deaths. There's a middle point in there somewhere where there are perhaps some cases where police have to kill someone to protect the community, but that the use of force is a last resort and rarely if ever used and rarely if ever needed versus other methods of policing (de-escalation for instance).

Corollary to controversy

There's a flipside of course to how atheists, secularists, scientists and science educators should proceed on the question of how to teach evolution to a population of creationists.

How creationists should interact when confronted or how they carry and present themselves is equally important to a civil discourse than how others push back against them.

As a hint. Having your beliefs criticized or questioned is not censorship or oppression. 

Don't react as though you are being silenced when a ton of people come into a social media forum and say "eh, no, that's wrong/stupid". That may or may not be an appropriate way to try to reach someone who is factually wrong about what the facts actually are, but it also isn't the same thing as being oppressed for your beliefs. You stood up and said something. Other people disagreed with it and decided to stand up and say something back. Criticism is how we (Americans at least) avoid the need for censorship, by making our ideas fight in the open for supremacy and social dominion rather than pressing them into the darker corners and demanding they stay hidden away. Some of our ideas are bad or inconsistent with available evidence, and those ideas will find many people ready to push back upon them. Each of us tends to have some of these wrongful beliefs and ideas in what we think of as carefully crafted assumptions core to our being and gets defensive when they are pushed back upon.

That doesn't mean that being pushed back upon is the same thing as being censored.

The entire reason this topic of evolution came up again in my radar is a famous former baseball pitcher (Curt Schilling) and now baseball analyst decided, unwisely, to use his twitter feed to try to debate evolutionary theory, as I guess one does when one doesn't think very much about what they will say on social media forums and expects that it will be a good forum for changing people's minds. Toward the end of this digression, he decided to make a parting shot that supposedly if say, Muslims, had brought it up, they wouldn't be attacked for it because we're all liberals who just hate Christians. This proceeds from a false assumption that somehow these other religions are okay or correct on these issues because they're not Christianity. Atheists, who are mostly liberal in their politics, actually spend a lot of time running down Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and even Buddhism, on creationist beliefs and other issues. There just aren't very many non-Christians in America that the attacks aren't very pressing and aren't seen very often by the majority dominant Christian seeking to claim persecution for his beliefs. There aren't very many Muslims running around in the US trying to say that god created the Earth in 7 days, or that the Earth is only 10000 years old or some other such absurdity, not because there aren't Muslims who believe such things, but because there aren't very many American Muslims. There are very many Christians doing so, in part because there are very many American Christians. So it is they who get pushed back upon. That has nothing to do with whether the underlying beliefs are more sheltered or presented because these other people hold religions that supposedly aren't as annoying to secularists. They do. Sometimes more so. But on that topic, they don't. Because there aren't many people to talk to and ask around these parts.

What was more amazing in raising this statement was that Schilling was not censored by anyone for attempting to bring up something that many people think is wrong (even if many people agree with him on some levels). In fact he wasn't even censured by his employer. He was still busily posting vaguely racist right wing interpretations of the impending problems in Ferguson, Missouri concerning a criminal justice matter over the weekend. But guess who was censured? His co-worker, Keith Law, who began posting counter-tweets and arguments to Schilling and others as the argument swirled around for the evening and into the next day. ESPN has claimed this was not the basis for a suspension from twitter but did not offer any counter-narrative explanation that there can be another interpretation that one can follow as plausible. Law posts fairly often about all manner of topics, as one does when one is actively using social media and was silent about the basis for the suspension himself when posting on other forums. What that leaves is an atmosphere where ESPN appears to have punished someone because they defended scientific theories publicly and not punished someone who expressed religious beliefs that apparently demand they doubt those theories publicly, but who also expressed the position that he was being punished for expressing those beliefs. When his opponent was the only one who was.

Something is deeply wrong with that impression that we have a society that concludes, very commonly, that its dominant population group by religious affiliation is somehow living in a systematically oppressed world. And quite simply: "you people" need to shut the fuck up about oppression on that point. Being told you are wrong about something is disagreement. It is unpleasant, yes. The fact that someone can disagree with you, and others may rush to defend that person, is not the same as being in a position of persecution and oppressiveness. People sometimes should disagree or attempt to in a more civil manner (this of course, goes both ways), or learn to try to have constructive debates where their core and essential beliefs and priors are more easily examined by casual and interested observers. But that we disagree, and that we sometimes disagree vehemently over positions as diametrically opposed as basic worldviews, is a consequence of living in a pluralistic and liberal democratic state of the sort that the basic rights of the US Constitution grant to the individuals to practice and the state to protect. It is not at all the same as living in a society that say, demands state fealty to a religion, or a lack of one, and punishes with criminal and civil penalties even including the death of those who refuse to comply. Nor is the same to claim this is the variety of persecution when one is told that because they work in a public position (a teacher for example) they cannot use that position to advance their religious beliefs upon others. They are still welcome to do this privately. They just can't do it in their official capacity. And quite simply it is absurd to claim that someone is being held accountable and persecuted for their beliefs if they aren't punished but someone who defends a position which appears contrary to those beliefs is punished. Atheists are much more likely to encounter public discrimination and censure than any Christian sect. They're much more likely to be fired or dismissed, or not hired or held up for a promotion on that basis. There are nearly zero elected officials with an open expression of atheism in the country at any level of government. And so on. I do not know Mr Law's religious views or lack thereof, and won't presume to speak for them, but he expressed a pro-science view, with the same level of politeness and openness to inquiry (if not more so) than his interlocutors. He was the one punished. So yeah. Shut the fuck up about being stepped on and persecuted. I see shades of this in the Gamergate and shirtgate backlashes, where threats are issued toward people for expressing an opinion, and it is this group issuing threats toward other people proclaiming that it is the oppressed. Both groups claim oppression, but if one side issues direct threats of physical violence as a means of depressing the turnout of their opposition, I'm inclined to say that's the side committing the oppression. I didn't see any threats issued here. But I did see discipline hammers fall down on people. They were not the people Mr Schilling assumes are likely to be punished (eg, himself).

There are reasonable presentations of religious persecution or oppression of religious belief. I am for instance more sympathetic to an argument that using the legal system to require privately owned businesses to provide certain wedding or marriage related services (usually for homosexual couples) seems a stretch. That does not mean that I wouldn't consider that behavior a form of bigotry or at least discrimination or that I would not consider encouraging boycotting such businesses to use social coercion rather than legal sanctions to overcome the practice or drive that any business practice like this out of the industry. But I'm not certain that the government needs to step in in these ways if we have an environment that is increasingly open and welcoming to homosexual couples for marriage and equal protection of the rights granted by marriage contract laws and that there may be competitors who will be happy to serve such couples and take their business. It is in this general realm of social coercion that I think people should be pushing back against wrongful or harmful beliefs perpetuated by some religious people, such as creationism or anti-homosexual views. People should criticize. They should argue. They should debate, persuade, cajole, annoy, organize, and persist. If this atmosphere of debate reaches a point where people do not feel they can air these views publicly, for fear of the social ostracization and consequences of holding and airing unpopular views, that still is not oppression. That may or may not reflect an unpleasant atmosphere for productive and constructive debate, where the best defenses of these now unpopular ideas are not being made or sought out. But it also may reflect that those ideas are held in social disdain for very good reasons. And that people who want to hold to them should have to confront those very good reasons and try to resolve whether or why they want to continue holding these unpopular views. Maybe they will come up with better arguments in response. Chances are they will not (Mr Schilling presented nothing that hasn't been a standard creationist or ID argument for decades for his part). In the case of religion, even it evolves in what it accepts and proclaims to its followers and interested observers, one could readily find and hear arguments made either for or against slavery from the perspective of religion. One rarely sees a direct claim that slavery is morally acceptable today. Similarly various religions or their derivations have adopted ways to incorporate scientific discoveries and interpretations like the orbits of planets, the big bang theory, and evolution without much conflict and violence done to the scientific consensus on these issues.

As a final point to all of this. One of the most annoying processes of public debate and discourse is the shifting goalpost method of argument. As an example. People demand evidence for X. Other people subsequently present evidence for X. Evidence of X now becomes a non-important factor to be dismissed (even though it was just requested), or the source of evidence comes under dispute. Almost no one is reacting by saying "huh, I didn't know that, I will now investigate what you have presented to me". Schilling did this several times (transitional fossils, "problems" with the fossil record, etc) before tossing off people attempting to present him this evidence as people attempting to persecute Christians.

Evolutionary theory is one of the arenas of social discourse for which there is abundant evidence because the biological field of scientific inquiry includes hard empirical sciences with lots of data points from which to draw reliable conclusions (genetics for example). On other matters, say, economic theories regarding minimum wage law, there is much less hard empirical data and a lot of speculative conclusions. Sometimes none of those may be shown as correct in a predictable and testable way. For these subjects, arguments regarding sources of data can be more valid concerns over ideological bias. One would expect that political matters could often inspire difficult and nonconstructive debates as a result as people retreat to the corners of expertise for which their priors hold to their stated outcomes and beliefs. For public concerns over science, this is less useful. Scientists can be individually biased, and many fields, particularly in difficult to research matters like social sciences or medicine can have complicated problems with the manner of research and verification or replication of results. Skepticism can be a useful tool in digging through results that do not smell right to us for that very reason. Lots of pharmaceutical studies are flawed because they are produced or paid for by the companies attempting to market a new drug, for example, and the results were cherry picked to make the drug look more effective or to have a broad array of possible benefits, and so on. Skepticism of that variety is very useful. But that skepticism neither requires us to go in the direction that creationists insist nor does it automatically mean that data is false because it conflicts with their priors. Even if they were able to disprove evolutionary theory or some other cosmological theory, this creationist explanation does not stand on its own merits as a central truth that should replace it, if one is being openly skeptical and examining the merits of each idea. Even standing within metaphysics and dismissing empirical observations altogether, what of some other religious faith's interpretation of the story of creation? Why is this one the one? It isn't, there isn't anyway to demonstrate that. It just is the one that you want it to be because it affirms many other things you would also like to believe about yourself, your identity, and the world and how you interact with it.

This may all be a fascinating argument in an introductory level course on comparative religions or something amusing to contemplate as one studies Greek mythology as a child, but it isn't a constructive way to talk about science and debate its merits. I would agree it doesn't seem very constructive to try to bludgeon Christians over the head with data, as that's been going on for decades. Or that there are institutional problems with the way science is being conducted, or that there aren't very many conservatives in some fields of study which may offer distinct perspectives, such as in moral psychology, and so on. But if Christian creationists aren't willing to observe what scientific study and the field is doing or what it has produced as evidence in support of its conclusions then why even bother having the argument? One possible interpretation for this is to not bother to engage or dignify this position with debate. If "they" want to go believe that, whatever. Our concern would be this large body of people who aren't sure what to believe. And maybe look at why that is and what we can offer. People tend to demand rigid uncertainties. Science doesn't tend to offer rigid uncertainties. But it can offer quite a lot in the way of taking some uncertainties and finding ways to make them predictable, testable, and empirical, taking the misunderstood or unknown and making it understood and known as best we are able.

Having a flashlight in a dark room doesn't always illuminate the whole room. But it makes it a lot easier to see than fumbling around in the dark.

How to teach to "controversy"?

"Hill found that 58 percent of respondents said this topic is only "somewhat, not very, or not at all important" to them. People who held creationist views were the most emphatic about their beliefs; 64 percent of that group said they care about being "right," presumably in the metaphysical sense of rightness. " 

I tend not to worry very much about whether generally the population accepts evolutionary theory on its own, excepting as it is a harbinger for otherwise poor quality scientific backgrounds. It does not have very much to do with almost anyone's daily lives. Antibiotic resistance and viral mutations would be the average person's limit of visible experience for which they are having adverse effects (by not getting vaccines for their children and by overusing antibiotics for viral infections for which they have no impact or farmers using them prolifically on animals we consume). These are fields for which the limited education of the average person on germ theory and the types and causes of illness, or even just the ability to critically examine ailments and their causes in others (eg, people get colds not because it is cold, but because they stay inside more often with other people when it is cold), is probably a bigger concern than evolutionary theory. Meanwhile the average person is not likely to work in a biochemistry lab or a genetic engineering research firm or as a naturalist studying animals and animal behavior or biodiversity. The specific influence upon their lives is pretty small as a result and so it is not something I worry a great deal about in particular.

What is concerning on this subject is that my "opposites", the creationists, seem to care an awful lot about it, much more than the much smaller cohort of people who are, like me, atheistic and accepting of evolutionary theory. And then this was also a concern: "An estimated 28 percent teach evolutionary biology according to the recommendations of the National Research Council; the rest don't advocate either view" Science teachers apparently don't care very much about whether the general population learns about science either. It's one thing if I don't care, because I have no children and little interest in teaching such creatures. But if the teachers at large don't care (or are afraid to, a plausible explanation in many cases), that's a deeper concern. If there's a large percentage of people who care a great deal, but who disagree with established scientific concerns, there needs to be a way to raise it for everyone else, the people who are unsure or don't care very much one way or the other or who otherwise want their children to learn the proper scientific ways of thinking and analysis as part of their upbringing and education.

Some thoughts

1) Let the most adamant creationist people go and teach what they want through home schooling (they're often already doing this).

2) Let the most adamant creationists set up their own private institutions to send their own children, with the possible result, if this is a significant problem that people do not learn adequate science in primary education, that they could risk being shut out of certain professional fields as adults (unless they address this later on by attending colleges that aren't conservative Christian in nature).

This is also already happening. I often think it may be acceptable to let them use tax credits to fund the institutions simply because #3 below looks so bad as a long-term prospect to me. We've had decades since Scopes and the needles haven't moved very much in the general population, and I think there's not very good reasons to think this will change in the near term for sure. My general thinking for #1 and #2 is that creationists aren't very easy to argue with logically, so they're better off not impacting everyone else as much or not being as concerned about everyone else because they've segregated their children off. I think it likely that if they are left alone to do their thing, there's a possible gain in them generally leaving everyone else's kids alone and we can focus on educating those children instead.

As a hopeful note, I don't know that this self-segregated education style has a lasting effect that the creationist might hope for. It's very possible that their children may not care as much about their religious identity as they do (often for other unrelated reasons) and this may allow for openings of doubt in any factual basis behind creationist mythology.

3) Continue the curriculum and courtroom fights and leaving teachers and school administrations to fight it out with parents who don't pursue those two above options out of inertia or marginal interest. I'm not very enthusiastic about this as a result because school boards are often democratically selected. As we should see from the link, not only are there a ton of creationists in America; roughly four times as many as the atheistic population which is largely on its own fighting back as the theistic evolutionist is not very concerned about the issue one way or the other, for reasons that should be obvious. They're also much more motivated about the issue. Meaning they will go vote for school boards that advance creationist views as much as they can get away with and they will win those elections in most states, with adverse effects upon the overall quality of education available to everyone. Not just what is available to creationists and not just impacting upon science curriculum and evolution in particular.

The optimistic view is that religious dogma on other issues, such as birth control or homosexuality, is driving away many young people from organised religion as young people have broken from their elders and parents on these questions, and they may also break on this question once broken away on others. This suggests that in 20-30 years time, fewer people may care a great deal about this as a question of evolutionary theory in education. I'm not sure this is a good calculated risk given what creationists or millennial revisionists can do to science and history education in the meantime. That damage is still considerable.

4) A different approach would be to let students try to bash each other's heads in by debating or bringing up these issues. I don't think this is an effective method of teaching "controversial" issues until perhaps high school and my preference would be that it be in the form of a comparative religion or philosophy course. Creationism is not science and doesn't belong in a biology class.

5) Address the question of meaning. Teleology has a long use as part of religious doctrine for providing people easy answers (if I think badly misleading ones) about the nature of the universe and one's purpose in it. As the poll should also show, there's a large cohort of people who are theistic but accept evolutionary theory or place their deity as having a specific involvement. To explain this view (or one possible interpretation of that view). Let's say god created evolution as a biological process, and upon its long and winding paths, came a result of the creation of man. This purported god was pleased by that development and endowed human beings with some special significance (often the "soul"). Or something to that effect. That's an opening for which acceptance of scientific conclusions about the nature of existence has walked through Christian theology for centuries ("god did it, and this is how", or other similar interpretations). Evolution for whatever reason is not typically pushed in the door this way and in fact is presented precisely as the vehicle for atheism that many anti-science creationists fear it to be. That may have to change tactics.

I don't think that's going to provide a very satisfying answer for meaning and purpose at all to address the question of "meaning" for which many people reject evolutionary theory to present it in the "god did it this way" variety of explanation. But apparently a lot of people do. I see this example of "meaning" frequently used in movies with an alternative to gods in the form of super-advanced aliens seeding humanity into the genetic code of the planet and sometimes teaching humans basic skills of agriculture or warfare, or in some cases various "advanced" technologies (a position which makes even less sense than the soul concept advanced by Catholics given that there's actually very strong observable evidence against it, while the soul is a metaphysical concept devoid of evidence or empirical debate). This path provides some presentation of meaning that is to me just as hollow and useless as those provided by religious scripture and organised religions. But given the popularity of the plot points, it is not surprising that the problem of meaning dominates the need to cling to creationist myths, whether science fiction-based or religious, to avoid the difficulty of addressing personal or species level meaning. I sympathize that those are difficult questions for which simple and emotionally driven responses may provide comfort and ease (but not actually answering the question). I don't think the average person wants to contemplate these issues very deeply, or at least very often, in favor of actually living their lives.

Which is probably why many people are fairly blah about whether evolution is a thing.

To put a quick flip on this science fiction-y thinking. There's also been a strain in Star Trek type shows that the future will be better tomorrow because there won't be religions because presumably the aliens we would encounter won't have them either or will find our myths absurd and have their own better ones or some such. While I find the humanist ethos running through Star Trek amusing and sometimes appealing (and sometimes not so much, since it glosses over economics on the basis of "we have matter replicators"), there doesn't seem to me to be a basis point for saying that human beings on discovering other sentient beings from other worlds would suddenly and inevitably accept that this means that there is no god and their religious beliefs are pointless. What it might (optimistically) suggest to many people is that evolutionary theory is generally correct. But that acceptance of theoretical knowledge already doesn't come into conflict with the questions of purpose and meaning that most people are using religious beliefs and practices, and the affirmation of congregations of like-minded others, to try to wrestle with. Those questions aren't going to be diminished by the discovery of and communication with other beings.

Series of social-cultural things

Upon which I have comments.

1) Serial. I am rather annoyed that most people seem to either think this has a firm conclusion or are annoyed that it seems like the interviewer running the podcast seems to have a firm conclusion/bias in mind.

What is actually happening on the podcast is we are seeing what the criminal justice system can look like. We are seeing that eyeball witnesses often aren't very reliable, but people and police think they are anyway. We are seeing that resources for defense teams to investigate a case and otherwise effective defense counsel are hard to come by. We are seeing that juries tend to be very deferential to police and prosecutors. We are seeing that police don't follow every lead, but that even when they don't, that can be considered "good" police work. We are seeing that once the justice system has concluded guilt, it will be very hard to un-conclude it (usually one has to prove someone else's guilt).

None of that establishes that Adnan is innocent of the murder he was convicted of many years ago. Some of it probably could have established reasonable doubt in a jury trial, which is a different question. Whether someone should be convicted of a crime based on available evidence is distinct from whether this person is guilty or probably did it. Which may be the most important manifestation from the broadcasts is that the system we use, despite our fervent belief to the contrary, doesn't always work the way the airy words we described and imbued it with in our popular narratives of crime and its foes.

2) Shirt-gate. And gamer-gate for that matter.

Seeing what seem like fairly tepid complaints like "hey why's that scientist/engineer wearing that shirt with all the half naked women on it?" or "hey, why's every woman in an average video game look like a porn star?" These aren't that disturbing of issues taken on their own, but they're part of a general problem relating to sexism in society. Probably more disturbing than the shirt itself was the Kardashian shot heard round the world that eclipsed the news we landed a probe on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away.

The shirt is more about the general biases and prejudices experienced by women in science fields or wanting to go into them than the shirt itself. Presumably if men are comfortable enough going to work wearing shirts with erotically depicted female characters on them, then they may be comfortable enough with other sexist or misogynist forms of expression.

Games, I think we're stuck with "attractive" forms to a degree in video games and pop culture media (music, art, photography, movies/TV, print ads, etc). I can see that it can be toned down. The burning question mark is not just the physiques and physical depictions, but also the development of characters within the mediums. One of the simpler tests for film character arcs has been "are there two women as characters who manage to have a conversation not about a man in it". Video games in some sense have an advantage already simply because any female characters involved are often extremely powerful at destroying demons or zombies or Nazis or whatever else the game's foe is (not always, but this comes up enough, and enough games allow for a female protagonist or party member, etc, that one would think it would have an influence on the thinking of women as capable, independent, or something along those lines).

Each of these are themselves problematic, worthy of input as to the varieties of offenses that come up. But what's really disturbing isn't these things as cultural notes themselves. It's that people reacted to anyone bringing them up as though the act of pointing it out or taking any offense to it, requires not merely an argument, but a denigration of the women (it's usually women pointing these out) who are involved in making these points or a defense of men and the apparent demanded and inherited right to ogle or sexualize women as a variety of free speech. This actually isn't under attack that I can tell. I suppose there are people who don't want these movies, T-shirts, or video games to be made and distributed. But the initial reaction wasn't that. It's calling attention to the type of character traits one possesses when one does present as a person wishing to ogle women or sexualize them as characters or "artistic" presentations and whether these are desirable traits for men to possess. The fact that this is reacted to with an often out-sized level of scorn or annoyance then makes itself into a more clear example that it probably is not a set of desirable traits.

For men to try to understand this. Ogling women isn't going away. I find women attractive. I enjoy that about humanity that there are other persons who are attractive to me, and thus find speaking in the company of women I find attractive, spending time around such persons, and so on, engaging and energizing (such as I find spending time around almost any persons engaging and energizing). What I also find though is that women will tend to make for more interesting company when this is not the central attribute of any form of relationship with them. In the same way that if one is a heterosexual male, the attractiveness of your male co-workers, companions, and friends is generally not a major concern (at least this is my experience).

If that's the only attribute of a relationship is that one party spends a lot of time being looked at for looking good, it's going to be really boring or frustrating for one or both parties fairly quickly, and it will also quickly be learned that this is all one wants to contribute to any form of relationship is to look upon another person because they're deemed attractive. One has to spend an often considerable portion of the time recognizing and exercising those other qualities of interaction with other human beings than superficial appearances and one should find that that time is enjoyable. It can be frivolous, rude, polite, funny, intellectual, whatever. But if all anyone sees when they look at another person is a good view, and nothing else, that's more a potentially disturbing character trait about you than a suggestion that more people should provide those good views for you in the form of popular media presentations. And that if these demands as expressed through the exercise of design of games or T-Shirts marketed to people like you are offensive to others, that actually should not be surprising, shocking, or alarming to discover that other people find this a character defect. Beauty and the admiration of it as a concept seen in others isn't going away, and isn't even likely to be challenged as a human evolution. But it's a more complicated venue to navigate and appreciate properly than demanding nude photos of every woman who shows up in an online forum or multiplayer video game as it appears some men are wont to do from the reactions and abrasive attitudes that have taken up arms in the wake of these fairly modest complaints.

If one really wants to see and experience beauty, it doesn't appear by issuing forward to the world the opinion that you deserve it from others, you will have to contribute to it first at a minimum. Or more pragmatically, the idea that beauty as a commodity one appreciates and seeks to find also includes the women who one finds beautiful as a commodity that one can effectively buy or sell as well through those demands isn't a pathway to find oneself suddenly appreciated as an enlightened and kind being. It forms rather very different impressions in the minds of others instead.

I suppose it should not be surprising that people would react with vitriol to discover that other people think them pigs or sexist or even someone that actively hates women. That would be a rather unpleasant discovery to be made aware of (for most of us). The really curious part is how one intends to define away these undesirable traits by demonstrating them against anyone who points them out.

3) I've entertained some conversations with other secularists, agnostics, and atheists over the years. I find I have a set of policy disagreements or disaffection with some issue or other that aren't always shared. I don't hold that against these "fellow-travelers" and continue to argue for whatever it is I'd prefer and sometimes shrug at whatever it is they might prefer (and sometimes not, as above). I rather expect from years of holding sometimes radical views that other people don't agree with me for any number of reasons. What is not always abundantly clear is why.

What I'm finding in spending more time around or among other atheists as a group of other individuals is that they are sometimes angry. Christians sometimes think or say this is because they're angry at god. They're not. They're angry with you (Christians, since this is America and most of you are of that flock). For what you put them through or for what you still put them through. Entertaining as those diversions on policy are, there are actual people suffering for the upbringing they experienced, the isolation of it, and the lack of options presented, the lack of pragmatic experiences to draw upon. I did not experience these things because of faith or lack thereof or organized religion and my lack of interest in it (I still experienced them but for very different reasons). I did not experience the isolation from family in the way that I could never see them or wouldn't hear from them. Or did not experience a loss of friendships because I changed my belief structure (I may have from becoming somewhat more expressive of my ideas, but my underlying "beliefs" haven't changed very much in decades).

Something I've long thought about religion is that it operates principally with the need for social reinforcement. It evolved in large part as a way to keep a social unit cohesive as it became larger and more unwieldy to operate without chaos and it performs this role very well in fact. "Belief" and beliefs that people hold are largely enforced through the shared affirmation of a social unit (family, church, friends, etc) and not because there are any effective and good reasons for those beliefs to be regarded as truthful and honest interpretations of the world around us. One of the usual selling points people may use is to claim that X number or X% of others agree with them about their preferred method of deity worship. Sometimes, perhaps often, this number or percentage is erroneous anyway, but the idea that this should be persuasive is not a statement that they are holding true and correct beliefs apportioned to evidence. What it is is a statement of social conformity and social penetration. It is saying that we have a strong and cohesive social unit and wouldn't you like to be a part of it?

The flip side to this conformity is rarely appreciated by someone like me though. Because I never had to leave it behind. I've always been a bit of a non-conformist or non-conventional thinker. In part I've developed an instinctive discomfort with people who let me fit in too easily and without disagreements, so belonging to a "strong" group doesn't appeal to me anyway. The flip side for others is that when one rejects those beliefs, and the associated community and its rituals and practices, that community often rejects you for doing so. It does not neatly help people transition to a new set of beliefs or a new worldview in ease and comfort with former relations and associates. Not only does it not assist (which one assumes it shouldn't have to), it often kicks such people to the curb and announces they are horrible people to everyone involved as a means of speeding along that departure. For someone like me, being rejected by people I don't agree with on a fundamental question of worldview and any associated practices isn't inherently annoying or isolating. But I didn't have to agree with them or pretend to for some portion of my lifetime. One assumes this method of penalty is primarily there as a means of discouragement. People inside the bubble may see that the exit is an anguishing affliction of suffering and despair by being deliberately separated from the social networks of support one builds up through a lifetime of shared associations and they decide that their doubts can be a little quieter. Because the US offers easy access to a smorgasbord of religious devotions and their assorted beliefs however (even for those wishing to stay within the rubric of "Christendom"), this method is of diminishing return and effectiveness upon the litany of people who might wish to transition out. What it does not do and not offer in that transition is an easy way out. The exit strategy still sucks. It still inflicts damage for many.

I have some sympathy for that. I'm not sure how one gets from there to "religions should all be abolished", and then operating as though that is a plausible social goal. But I am sure why many people of a variety of atheist thought might be angry at the religions, other adherents, and their institutions.