More on the advance by nickels and dimes

I've often had some strange opinions. Or what must seem like strange opinions to most people.

So. This one is kind of out there too. I don't think the problem for pro-choice people is defending Roe v Wade in the Supreme Court. That's not going to be overturned for one. And if it ever is, the problem is then on pro-life voters to defend a minority position in almost every state (the complete ban of abortion) by making that their intended legal framework. My thought has long been that if Roe were ever overturned, the pro-life movement shrivels and dies because it can't win that way and Roe is a rallying cry that it doesn't get any other way. 

The real problem has been, especially over the last few years, a system of nickel and diming the effective options of what it means for pro-choice to be actually exercised. To restrict; primarily with tedious, invasive, expensive, and mostly unnecessary legal frameworks to run a clinic conducting abortions and to obtain access to it from within a state (waiting periods, ultrasounds, descriptions, parental notification, restrictions on IUDs, etc). Most of that is controversial and well-known to be useless and arbitrary rather than meaningful restraints among pro-choice advocates, but such advocates are also not very common (ardent pro-life voters are roughly as common). Most people are squishy and uncomfortable with the topic and without much contemplation will feel these are reasonable restraints. Even though they're not useful to protect anyone except to waste more time or money for those who want or need access.

But it's also starting to punish. And this is more where it gets scary and strange. 

"Based on the belief that he had an obligation to give a fetus a chance for life, a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a critically ill 27-year-old woman who was 26 weeks pregnant to undergo a cesarean section, which he understood might kill her. Neither the woman nor her baby survived."

"documenting 413 arrests or equivalent actions depriving pregnant women of their physical liberty during the 32 years between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005. In a majority of these cases, women who had no intention of ending a pregnancy went to term and gave birth to a healthy baby. This includes the many cases where the pregnant woman was alleged to have used some amount of alcohol or a criminalized drug. 

Since 2005, we have identified an additional 380 cases, with more arrests occurring every week." [Bold mine]

This is in combination with cases like that in Texas earlier in the year where the state was attempting to keep a pregnant but brain-dead woman "alive" long enough to deliver a baby against the family's wishes and before the legal statutes required it (which is grotesque and macabe enough that there are legal statutes requiring it rather than allowing families to decide this). 

The problem with these legal changes isn't just that it presents these arbitrary distinctions over the access of women to abortion. It's that it now potentially criminalizes basic medical decisions, places judges in positions of authority over the health risks or even the lack of life rather than doctors and patients making these decisions, and in some cases, criminalizes terrible things happening to women naturally. Miscarriages. Which are much more abundant than people realize. Or severe health problems placing both her and a probably very much wanted pregnancy at risk. These demands and realities are placed at odds with legal codes that are not as accommodating. Even if women are eventually cleared of any "wrong-doing" and even if one agrees with the fundamental "personhood" legal basis behind many anti-abortion legal codes, that we should be demanding the intrusion of the state onto personal liberties of women who have suffered a considerable loss, or been through considerable trauma and risk to their own lives suggests that we have accorded the state far too much power over this. And far too much power primarily for the purpose of punishment rather than power for the purpose of protecting the life and safety of citizens. 

As a corollary to all of this. I'm still extremely baffled by the Democrats election strategy being premised largely on fear based positions relating to abortion politics. As noted above, there is not actually a grand divide of people for whom this is a single-issue vote that they will always turn out to vote for or against. There are some people for whom this is an issue, but there were not many. The electorate seemed mostly concerned about their economic prospects, with maybe IR (ISIS) and other assorted issues mixed in. And what's more, this has never actually been a "women's issue" in the sense that it motivates women to vote uniformly or as a bloc of voters. It is a women's issue in the sense that it is women getting abortions or in need of them; men obviously don't need them as we can't have one. It is not a women's issue in the sense that there are more women in favor of abortion (men are usually slightly higher in support in polls, especially later term) and that thus running such ads or campaigns based upon the (legitimately) terrible things Republicans could do in office on these issues would turn out women FOR Democrats. It doesn't break that way. It was just as likely to either: 
a) get women to go vote FOR Republicans, because there are numerous women who actually favor such policies and want to see them enacted. Women break evenly here rather than "for" choice (although most women still have a "abortion for me and not for thee" style convention to this "choice").

b) get women annoyed at the men in these campaigns for thinking this is the only issue on which they are concerned and annoyed enough to stay home and not vote or annoyed enough to vote for the other guy. 

That was a textbook stupid campaign in other words. 

Quick thoughts on the election

1) The most interesting thing that happened was how well marijuana did at the ballot (2 states and DC legalizing it entirely and Florida's medical marijuana vote going extremely well, 58%, but not passing). And how poorly anti-abortion or how well minimum wages did as issues. I'm not a fan of minimum wage laws, in that I don't think they're an effective way to address income inequality. Nor do I care if people work at companies full-time and yet still qualify for various social welfare programmes. I think that's actually a net good even though I think the social welfare programmes are inefficiently scaled (and can cause heavy disincentives at the margin), simply because it is more tolerable to almost everyone that we provide social welfare to people who are working (or can't work) but aren't making ends meet at the margins. However, those complicated economic objections aside. The fact that many people do seem to think min wage is somehow effective at helping poor people suggests that many people voting for increases in it were concerned about income distribution or the general economy. Mostly what happened is a lot of liberal-ish sounding things passed but a lot of conservatives won elections. I thought that was very odd.

2) Conservatives did not score as many own goals as they have the last few cycles. Democrats did. The one case that eludes me is how a Congressman with 20 indictments for various forms of corruption can win re-election. That seems like it ought to be a pretty damning own goal problem. Apparently saying dumb things about female anatomy is (and it ought to be pretty damning), as is sending photographs of your own anatomy (if male, this is stupid but doesn't strike me as potentially damning politically), but potentially violating the law is not. Good to know.

3) It is not enough to tell people what your opponent might do that is terrible. You need to have something to sell yourself on. In Colorado, Udall's campaign was running a ton of negative ads relating to an opponent's prior support for strong anti-abortion laws. These apparently turned voters off rather than working as a scare tactic. Meanwhile, Udall's actual record included being a staunch anti-NSA reformer by rhetoric and voting and even opposing expansive foreign policy conduct (by his own party's President). Those may not be broadly popular everywhere, but I'd have to think they could have been popular in Colorado. Various media outlets subsequently endorsed his rival simply because they were so annoyed with the negative portrayals instead of the salesmanship of what he could offer.

This strategy is especially poor at working on liberals and motivating them to vote in large numbers. Fear is a conservative weapon, and they're very good at using it. Liberals also need something to escape their fear with, which they're not as good at using lately. It's possible that Republicans will spend a lot of time trying to kill judicial appointments, overturn or at least sabotage Obamacare, or trying to bring up impeachment and investigations of the Obama administration. But. I think if they want to win in 2016, they won't be able to do that. They need to try to govern in order to not be punished by the general disdain for Republicans (both parties really, but they're especially unpopular) and their best option is to try to pass laws to show what their agenda is and then have Obama veto them or the Senate filibustering them if they're particularly egregious. So talking about these things as fears isn't really that practical because they're more vague and unlikely to be realized as actual problems. Specific policies like anti-abortion laws or attacks on birth control accessibility might be more plausible, but it would still be better still to actually defend birth control accessibility as a thing, or access to abortion rather than simply oppose those who don't want them. They can stand on their own with or without pointing out that someone hates it.

4) Lots of people who voted clearly do not pay attention to politics. While I found the photo bomb on McConnell in Kentucky hilarious, it was pretty obvious a couple months ago he was going to win that race and win it comfortably. It was called almost immediately because it was clearly won months ago. The question mark was the margin, which was higher than polls suggested. That was an ominous sign that portended several other defeats, including some unexpected governorships. Kasich as governor was in a similar boat as that race was settled months ago (and won by an even more comfortable margin as Fitzgerald was one of the "own goal" Democrats). People who don't pay attention to these horse races and just show up to vote don't really have valid complaints to make and their surprise is particularly off-putting as pathetic. What people should be doing is spending some of the time ahead of the elections trying to make the argument against McConnell or Kasich or for their candidate of preference in some conversation with other human beings. This rather quickly establishes how strong a candidacy is even without referencing polling data as you'd know immediately there's a ton of people around who don't share your views and may need to be talked to or argued with or that you live in a bubble of people who agree with you and need to talk to a few strangers for sampling purposes. Instead of showing up on election day and suddenly being surprised there's legions of people who voted for the other guy and calling it a day. There is no actual prohibition against talking about politics and policy matters. Most people just don't like fighting over it because they're usually ill-informed and think they aren't.

5) Something I think liberals don't often realize, and this goes back to the fear element: Politics is not about policy. It's about tribalism. Getting your tribe to stand up and shout down the other one. Sometimes it's about finding some other tribe (in another land) to unify against and shout down. Sometimes it's about picking fights within your own tribe. Mostly it's about shouting at other tribes though. It is not about ideology. It is not about political policy positions. Almost no one pays that much attention to know what those even are. Liberals, or to some extent moderates, and that rare band of independents, do care about those things. Some conservatives care about a few particular policies. But people, and especially conservatives, mostly care whether they are in charge of setting those policies and getting to lord that over their foes. As do many "liberal" political figures (Obama included). It isn't a contest about who has better arguments, who can debate the particulars of policy concerns and constraints, or even who looks better on TV. It's a contest about who gets to do things and try to brag about it and who gets to not do things and complain about what is being done.

A quick word on voting posts

I say this about every year. It gets old.

Telling people they can't complain if they don't vote doesn't make any sense. Don't do it. You look like an arrogant prick who isn't paying attention. Basically you come off like one of those door-to-door missionaries who isn't aware that most everyone in the area is a Christian already but with a sales pitch that sounds like there's a lot of people like me out there. People who are voting, people we "want" voting, are already doing so in pretty hefty amounts and the types of people complaining about politics are especially.

Chances are excellent that the only people paying attention enough to complain in a cogent way did vote. And the reason they're now complaining is that stupid things are going on anyway in spite of their participation in elections. Their awareness of stupid things implies they are paying attention and likely voters. You don't need to sell them on the prospect by talking it up. Voting offers a very small chance of changing the stupidity to a different format with very minimal effort on the individual's part. All you technically have to do is register and show up and cast a ballot, no attention is required to matters political to vote. People who pay no attention to it probably aren't the kinds of people we want showing up, because they're more prone to systemic biases that are harmful, like racism/sexism/anti-immigrant bias and misinformation on basic facts. But chances are, someone who complains about politics, that person did vote. Even if they were ill-informed or under-informed about the basic issues.

Second, even if they don't vote, the chances their votes are the best method of changing that stupid thing from going on is still extremely small. In fact it is likely that someone complaining about it on Facebook (and doing nothing else, itself a troubling prospect) has an equal or greater chance of influencing public policy than their vote by influencing public discourse in some small way. There are dozens of ways to execute your civic duties to fellow citizens, and voting is a very, very small one. It's probably one of the least effective in fact because it has only a limited impact upon what policies are enacted and what laws will govern us compared to the alternatives. The assumption of "not voting" canceling out these other active alternatives in a person's routine engagement with matters civic and political is extremely arrogant and dismissive. People can care a great deal about their fellow citizens and express it in often very meaningful ways without bothering in partisan political discourse decided in a ballot box.

Telling people they can't complain if they don't vote is basically a stealth way of exhorting people to go vote through some variety of shame, as if in a bizarre secular ritual. As implied above, voting is a minimal standard of civic engagement. What you should be exhorting people to do is pay attention and maybe get involved in some issue or other that they/you believe requires reform. And then do so yourself. Telling people just to go vote, with no other recourse to civic involvement, is like saying "I know you can't be bothered to give a shit about other people, so at least pretend like you did in this very small but publicly celebrated way." We are rewarding ourselves for paying attention at a point which has very little impact and allowing ourselves permission through that social congratulation to ignore it the rest of the time. It's the rest of the time that stuff is going down people. That's when you pay attention and get involved if you wanted something to happen (or not to). Not one day in November. Some random day in March or July is when a bill gets into public discussion or a judge decides an important case.

If you want to vote, great. Fine. I'm not complaining that people do this in the slightest. You're welcome to do it. I think it should be easy to do and that people aren't prevented or restricted from doing so. For instance, I think states that prevent ex-cons from voting should not do so, and that voter ID laws are extremely dumb ways of addressing any probable causes of voter fraud and basically clumsy racism dressed up as something else. I don't advocate things like civic knowledge tests or basic political or demographic knowledge tests either (there's no chance those could be administered fairly for one). What I'm concerned about is how people go about talking about voting as though it's the greatest thing ever and that people who don't do it are losers or something. Sliced bread sucks too. I'm tired of hearing about how great it is (supposedly). But at least most people don't go around saying that unsliced bread is something awful and pitiful. They instead talk about the virtues of sliced bread in comparison to other supposedly great things. Politics is a lot bigger than our yearly elections and there are many, many more productive ways to plug yourself into it than entering a ballot box once in a while. Don't try to tell us this way is the most awesomest one ever. Just go do it.

And then complain about all the people who you voted against winning like the rest of us do.

Update:

There are two corollaries to this line of argument I think are worth suggesting as well.

1) Other countries with highly corrupt and illiberal governance have elections, they can even have "free and fair" elections in order to elect what amount to dictators or theocratic parties (Iraq, Iran, Palestine/Gaza, Egypt, Russia, etc). This is evidence that "voting" is a pretty minimal standard of civic involvement for a modern liberal democracy to practice. Voting is probably one of the least important institutions to maintain and participate in order to exercise one's liberty as a citizen in a (relatively) free state. Majoritarian rule through election contests is a pretty minimal standard for western liberalism to be practiced and isn't the central feature of those nation-states that ascribe and aspire to it. It's a feature, but it's primarily about the protection of minority (and individual) rights that one could say a defining character of a liberal democratic state is found.

2) Voting often results in people we don't like winning elections and instituting or attempting to institute bad policies. It could be as simple as our "red vs blue" fixation, but in other countries the results could be something like "Hamas". One of the problems with American coverage of the Iranian election protests was the assumption being that the liberal student protests were evidence of a broader support for revolution of the Iranian system of theocratic and illiberal democratic elections. They weren't. But we were willing to go along with that assumption because the people we didn't like had won the elections and it was assumed the people who lost supported our agenda (as a hint: they didn't).

This isn't evidence that voting is inherently awful, a complaint I've seen some libertarians make (which is a problem among libertarians). But if the general public tends to actually support things that are reprehensibly bad, and for whatever reason they often do on a lot of public policy questions, the way to change that isn't going to be through counting the ballots up every year, because those ballots will just continue to document the awful preferences of the majority. It's going to require a lot of hard work and engagement with many, many people. Legalization of marijuana or the acceptance of gay marriage equality have taken decades of agitation, and the battle was waged in newspapers and press editorials, street canvasing and petitioning, marches or demonstrations, even expressions in popular culture. And of course fought in courtrooms to overturn bad laws. Ballots are only a fairly recent addition to these campaigns. This suggests that voting is a low priority civic subject compared to all the groundwork that goes into getting something as even an option to vote on, where the candidates consider the issue worth legislating or popular referendums are introduced, and so on.

Atheists untie

Or whatever that call would be.

A conversation that has emerged in some prominence over the last few years, and which I see favorably questioned and discussed in circles of secularists is something like "how do we get along with religious people?". Not just "person who believes in some deity or other and occasionally quotes a sacred text", but like "those religious people". The ones who think we all ought to be of their chosen variety of faith, praying in schools, and so on. And not just "get along with to get by" but things like "date, or have or sustain fulfilling relationships with". These are more common questions because the volume of interfaith and non-faith relationships have accelerated over the last couple of decades.

This variety of question has baffled me. I don't think it makes sense to try to sustain a close intimate relationship with someone where a worldview is diametrically opposed. You can have long-lasting friendships which are formed around other elements besides your worldview shaping concepts of existence. Things like "we both like pizza and football, let's watch football games and eat pizza", and that kind of relationship can co-exist with the bizarre confluence of other interests that you never share or never need to share. Supposing out of a hypothetical couple that one person is a vegetarian for moralistic reasons (animals shouldn't be bred and slaughtered for consuming them would be their stance, so not just they shouldn't eat meat, but no one else should be doing so either), and one person has a high regard for the taste and consumption of bacon, such that they will want to consume bacon and other meats with some frequency and delight. That isn't going to go very well if they're going to try to live together or even occasionally have breakfast. Maybe there's ways to make that work. But why is it necessary to bother? Isn't it potentially simplified for the moralising vegetarian to find someone who is willing to eat much less meat (if at all), and the bacon-lover to find a fellow traveler who desires the consumption of meats and shares their joy in doing so? This would make somewhat more sense if atheists or atheist tolerant persons were rarer than they are for pair-bonding purposes. They're not as rare or difficult to find as one thinks. If you know 20 people, you will know at least 1 or 2 and if one is an atheist, chances are good that of the 20 people you know at random, more than that will fall into the category. Maybe that's not enough of a sample size to select interesting partnerships and friends, but it is a bigger starting sample than many people get (devout Muslims in America for instance).

Even expanding the pool, supposing that one person doesn't eat meat for health reasons (they prefer a vegetable based diet, but may or may not be 100% scrupulous about whether they avoid animal fats in their diet) and the other person doesn't really care that much if they have bacon all the time. That combination should be able get along famously, or at least figure out how to get along reasonably well without much guidance at resolving this "worldview disparity". This describes what many people's interfaith (or non-faith) relationships are like. Religion rarely comes up because neither person takes it that seriously in assessing the other person and their identity, and when they do, it is possible to find ways to work around it.

I suppose one explanation is my experience as an atheist is distinct from the norm. I was never around a heavy religious treatment as a child or teenager. Because I found it absurd from an early age, it wasn't forced to me or compelled upon me. What religion was around from family appears to have been Catholics, but fairly non-compulsory and non-invasive in acting upon me as a disinterested observer of their practices. When I came up on these "questions", of existence, etc, as a matter of course, investigating the texts themselves (as one does when one is an atheist who enjoys philosophy and is willing to consider that maybe other people have figured these things out), generally leads toward a rejection of those texts as sensible guides for life and happiness. They are absurd when read as a critical outsider, and at best offer metaphorical guidance in some passages that is sensible but surround it with a lot of nonsense as with any fiction.

This outsider perspective wasn't also very often a well-known or regarded element of my persona. I wasn't interested in expressing it widely not because I found it shameful but because it wasn't an interesting characteristic (to me at any rate). It also wasn't an obvious characteristic in the persons I chose to associate that they either were or were not overtly religious or "nones". I made my associations for fairly practical reasons; we liked playing basketball or video games or discussing history and politics. Religion doesn't come up much in these venues (necessarily at any rate, it comes up more noticeably as I've gotten older). It wasn't a feature of my identity nor one that I placed much interest in the identity of others. This allowed for at least casual relationships with other people to form, which for both of us are likely enlightening as to the outlook of secularists and religious worldviews alike even as we often have staunch disagreements.

What appears to be the experience of many atheists is that they were raised in an environment of often "extreme" faith, where that faith was a feature of their identity and interaction and presentation to the outside world. In such environments, the pressure of conforming socially is very high, the pressure of adopting certain worldviews is also, and that abandonment of those views and behaviors carries significant costs. If it carries risks and costs, it is assumed that people will want to maintain those relationships that came before this change in their own worldview to reject belief in some deity (or to adopt a strong belief in the absence of previous belief) in order to minimize the damage. Family, lovers/spouses, friends, all being at risk at once can be a daunting position to find one's self on top of reconciling questions over your own identity and the epistemological and empirical questions of existences and ethics that inevitably circle overhead.

In my view, it is probably better not to bother in many cases. If I had had these kinds of troubles with family for example growing up, I wouldn't bother associating with family now, nor have much interest in reconciling those affairs later on. But I carry a degree of comfort with anti-social behavior that many are not comfortable with. Rather than fight with people with whom I share little or nothing in common, and rather than expend a lot of energy building or searching for common ground if none is apparent, I find it usually better to disappear and go to try my own thing. There are ways to communicate or reach many people across these divides, just as there are ways to explain evolutionary theory or global warming to creationists. But I don't have that much patience with human beings generally to be very concerned about trying.

So perhaps what forms the largest portion of bafflement is why people would spend that much time and energy trying to get along with people who have deemed it important to hate or fear you when there are a lot more people who don't care that much one way or the other about us, or who are open and tolerant of a wide variety of views in their associations, or who enjoy the same outlooks as you already and can readily get along without much adjustment at all (maybe someone snores, or has a higher sex drive, or doesn't like a variety of music someone enjoys, but these are more practical problems than diametrically opposed systems of considering the world). Clearly being hated bothers us more than I'd considered. If we're hated or enjoy the threat of hate from someone we had considered with love and affection, I could see how that would be difficult and require some variety of resolution to move on. Indifference is a far more common course of action though than hatred. In general, in America, other people are not concerned with what you are and what you believe and won't spend that much time trying to change it. There will be random missionaries show up at your door whilst you try to piece together a sandwich, and political causes that pop up now and again with a clearly religiously motivated position. These are more sideshows and amusements for the atheist than the introduction of this volatile mixture into a personal space and the amount of energy invested into the latter rather than the former suggests that people want to care a great deal more than I do about these problems. For reasons that do not make much sense to me.

John Oliver has this show

And on it he seems to talk about all the things I wish people would talk about and be aware of and mad as hell about as I am. And meanwhile is doing so in a sensible and well-informed manner. With some jokes.

1) Prison reform (or at least why we need it)
2) Local and state office elections (the ones nobody pays attention to)
3) Civil asset forfeiture seizures
4) Capital punishment
5) Immigration (couple different ways)
6) Police militarization
7) Drone strikes
8) The stupidity of the Olympics (Winter especially)
9) Global warming
10) Dogs acting out Supreme Court cases. (Okay, that's not really something I wish people would talk about, but it made re-reading the case arguments a little more entertaining).

I wish he had mentioned that the US sugar market not only protects itself from labeling, but also from competition (through exorbitant sugar tariffs and barriers to entry from foreign producers).

The main appeal of the show, for me at least, is that he seems to be conducting long-form journalism pieces disguised as comedic segments. This is something that the format of the Daily Show ordinarily doesn't allow, as it too easily gets bogged down in the same daily grinds that plague the networks it routinely pillories on air. Oh and it is on HBO so they can do an entire segment mocking campaign attack ads by depicting an old man's penis as one of the candidates. So there's that also.

Filed under situation normal

all fucked up

Most of these are questions that people who have studied voter habits and biases/prejudices have known about for years. They are systematic biases (against foreigners, against the economy having grown, etc). Most of them make no sense except in the light of some variety of prejudicial thinking (the probable population of immigrants or Muslims being absurdly high in most countries). The most interesting part for most people would be the absurdly high numbers of some of the actual statistics (Spain's unemployment rate, South Korea's life expectancy).

Still I found a couple of these interesting because they're not part of typical voter bias statistics versus just a general knowledge of demographic data. The voter bias research shows that usually people can estimate general knowledge data closer than understanding expert fields like economics or international trade. But these sorts of particular knowledge upset even that comfortable bias toward random and meaningless errors because they are fueled by additional bias concerns.

The teen pregnancy rate. 
I suspect people don't actually understand what the birth rate is and how to calculate it as one problem with asking people to calculate this figure. Such a figure is typically very low. Most women are not giving birth in a given year of life, and fewer still are doing so as teenagers. If people but reflected back on it for a moment, what's the probable number of girls they went to high school with who were pregnant while they were in a given school year. That figure, per year, could be very high at some high schools, and very low at others. But it wouldn't be a quarter of each year's class. Or a fifth. Or maybe even a tenth at the very "worst" cases. It would be amazing if it were more than one or two girls per classroom (say a "room" of 30). So it would be maybe 5% at most, and most probably less. That's how people should estimate it. They don't have this heuristic ready at hand to think about it. Further, since
a) people believe this figure is going up (it's not, it's going down) and
b) people hear about this as a problem or as parents worry about this as a problem, they imagine it must be very common in the way that we inflate all things we worry about as likely risks.
c) We're also bad with estimating low probability events generally. We like to tack on to those with media attention and fear (school shootings, terrorists, etc).
It's likely that the number gets inflated in the minds of those guesstimating it.

Parents should be taking some precautions that their teenage children should take some precautions against these unplanned events, but parents should also know it isn't very common that every 4th daughter out there is getting knocked up. Actually getting and staying pregnant is not that simple, on top of that teenagers (while they certainly talk a game otherwise), are probably not having sex all the time. Many aren't having sex at all, or not until their late teens. Birth control itself moving forward will be easier to use (IUDs) or easier to come by (condoms and access through health insurance, or perhaps OTC).

Religion percentages.

This is well known by people who aren't religious apparently how many people are of some religious sect or that, or not at all. But yes, the US is no danger of becoming a secular-atheist-Muslim-satanist country anytime soon. Most all of you Americans are Christian or some derivation there of (including that "spiritual but not religious" component, which is mostly "Christians who don't like going to their church" as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I blame them).

A big percentage of you apparently don't know that and apparently many of those confused souls think they are Muslims instead. Or perhaps secret Muslims are a thing after all. I realize that whole Jesus-Mohammed worship must be awfully confusing, but I think they're distinct enough for most people to tell the difference and know which one they might be trying to pretend they are following some of what they said with some seriousness.

No other religious group makes up more than 1-2% of the American population. Jews are common in a few cities. Muslims are common in a few cities. Buddhists are common in a few cities. Mormons are in Utah. Atheists or nones are kind of all over, but they're not anywhere near as common as people like to think. Either atheist/nones or Christians. Still, 15-20% isn't bad.

I draw attention to these two because Americans are particularly bad at estimating both. Canada is a little worse on the Muslim question (same with France and Belgium).

I would also draw attention to the immigration question. This is pretty predictable as an expressed bias of voters. Voters have an anti-foreigner bias built into to their ideological narratives. Either as "immigrants are dirty, noisy, lazy, criminals", with maybe an exception for certain Asian or European countries depending. Or as "people in those other countries are stealing our jobs", either through outsourcing/trade or as coming here to work dirt cheap. To be honest 13% seemed actually pretty high to me. That's almost 40 million American residents. For a country that doesn't make it easy to come and live here if you aren't born here. It seems possible, but seemed very high given the obstacles. Witness Australia or Canada's much higher percentages, countries with somewhat more sensible and lessened obstacles.

The net effect of this kind of research is that politicians and people covering or writing for politicians probably cannot go broke if they keep betting against the American public being well educated and informed on a given subject. And they all know this. The question mark is who these people are and whether they vote. Many of the ill-informed do not. But on questions like these, there are fewer and fewer people who are not ill-informed, indeed, the plebs could be said to express views which are not only wrong, but support ideological holdings and demand policies opposite to those fueled by an informed reality. All getting and encouraging more people to vote does in those circumstances is further deepen the divide between reality and imagination. The crisis isn't participation (again, roughly 2/3s of us are showing up to vote). It's information.

People think there are legions of immigrants, and that they hold some "foreign" and "dangerous" faiths.
People think crime is going up, by leaps and bounds in some cases.
People think the economy isn't growing, or that inflation or unemployment are absurdly high.
People think foreign aid makes up an absurd portion of our government spending (or, worse, that Medicare and Social Security do not).

In some cases they think these things because they are actively misinformed by others. The media runs a lot of crime stories, or covers immigration or the economy a lot, and perhaps on these issues it is to blame for misleading the public. In most cases though the public think these things because that's what they want to think. One of the misinterpretations of a lot of "Faux News viewers are more poorly informed than others" is that the problem is necessarily Faux News. The problem is probably in large part the type of person who wants to consume Faux News as a legitimate news organisation in the first place as their primary source of information. That type of person believes a certain set of things, and doesn't want to hear that their comfortable assumptions about the doom of our time coming from non-existent Muslim immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, having sex with their daughters, and shooting at our schools. The problem with that type of person isn't that someone feeds them their demands. The news have always done this service for the body public.

The problem is how we dissuade them of those demands in the first place.

list of things I do not care about

That I heard a lot about this week.

1) Monica Lewinsky. If I am even hearing about this at all that is bullshit. That was almost 20 years ago. I do not need to be reminded I am getting older. At least not in this way.
2) Ebola in the US (and purported risk of epidemic). As distinguished from Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which is actually kind of a big deal.
3) Sarah Palin's family. If I am even hearing about this at all one year later (from 2008), that is bullshit.
4) Michael Brown shooting reports that do not alter general systemic problems of policing (for which the protests were largely spawned), or do not substantially alter what was already known or disputed (the shooting and circumstances leading up to it, or the circumstances of the fatal shots).

I've written mostly about the former problem and avoided pontificating on the latter (the circumstances of his death), in part because my general understanding is that it is quite likely the "shooting" itself may be deemed justified or legal in the same way that Zimmerman's shooting of Treyvon Martin was justifiable. Where the ethical/legal problem likely is residing isn't the procedures of "some sort of fight has broken out and I must defend myself". The actual ethical problem is that there was (possibly) a fight in the first place and that a series of events were escalated into a fatal scenario by an aggressor or agitator who is now rendered blameless despite (deliberately) creating a threatening scenario that another person may have felt obligated to react to with force. Police have established a pattern of other fatal incidents involving young black men (including not far from my residence) and escalating procedures of threats and force for what amounts to horribly trivial behavior (that should not rise to the level of criminality at all in most cases).

The preferred method should be de-escalation. Which is potentially less dangerous for the cops, less dangerous to bystanders, and less dangerous to ordinary citizens who may be shot at and killed deliberately by police.

A complaint about secular strategy

I have a number of complaints about Reza, but this seems to me an essential point that both secularists AND religious apologists often miss. 

"...that they believe that people derive their values, their morals, from their religion. That, as every scholar of religion in the world will tell you, is false.

People don’t derive their values from their religion — they bring their values to their religion. Which is why religions like Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, [and] Islam, are experienced in such profound, wide diversity. Two individuals can look at the exact same text and come away with radically different interpretations. Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text, which is, after all, just words on a page, and everything to do with the cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, political prejudices and preconceived notions that the individual brings to the text. That is the most basic, logical idea that you could possibly imagine, and yet for some reason, it seems to get lost in the incredibly simplistic rhetoric around religion and the lived experience of religion."

People in effect are picking and choosing values to fit their experience and preferences. This at least has long been my experience in talking with religious persons and observing their behavior. Religion influences those values around the margin from there and can certainly impact the values that children might start with as "priors" that they can either accept or abandon throughout their lives. But its primary influence is to reinforce what people already want to think and believe. Whether that is charitable or hateful in its orientation toward other people.

If "we" spend a lot of time arguing over the text, we may be hitting something that some people are "clinging to" as a basis for their beliefs, but it isn't necessarily where those beliefs came from. Nor something most practicing religious people take seriously. One should always be keeping in mind most people who are religious do not read their canonical texts regularly or completely with an eye toward the contradiction rather than seeking verification and affirmation, much less study theology. This has the effect of making arguments over the text relatively pointless and the influence of religious dogma on their behavior and existing beliefs relatively small. Sometimes those logical "gotcha's" will amount to something. Most of the time they will not relate to the experience of religious persons, or religious persons can explain away such complaints as the beliefs of "other people" (a common problem when dealing with the metaphysics of their deity of choice).

This doesn't explain away the societal problems of religious interpretation, particularly religious literalism and fundamentalist mindsets (not necessarily the same). All of these have potentially harmful effects, and all of them are much larger in impact than I think Reza or other theological scholars tend to be aware of. For instance the large volumes of people in the United States who express belief in a "personal god" or in young earth creationism suggest a large body of the public that either prefers literal canon or wishes to be seen expressing support for literal canon, as they imagine it, rather than expressing skepticism over the validity of metaphor upon actual human and global history and the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences as tools for investigating those processes. That is still a serious setback to contend with as a society. It is not insurmountable, but it is significant.

But it does suggest that many of the approaches of argumentation designed to marginalize such people who do practice a "literal interpretation" are potentially ineffective. Such arguments can casually lump together in the attempt to divide away "moderate" co-religionists and can backfire by sloppily describing "all Christians" or "all Muslims" in broad strokes, with the caveat attempted, or excluded depending on which religion and which commentary, that "only these kinds of people are true X". The no true Scotsman argument never works but it is especially flawed if the attempt to use it is to say "these other people I am describing and am not a part of can be sub-divided like this". Given the volume of contradiction and interpretations required to make religions still have value and meaning in the modern environment, we should expect that arguments over "religious" or theological validity as applied to the general religious public are functionally useless. People will be able to easily evade such arguments internally without making fundamental shifts in their worldview that distinguish or even touch upon any doubts in their faith claims and associated dogma and purported wisdom.

A central point to respond to instead is not arguments over what makes a "good" or "moderate" religious practice, but rather how much bigotry and hostility to "other" (be they non-co-religionists, women, homosexuals, atheists, etc) a population of people already has, already prefers in their personal lives, and which their choice of religious practices can serve to amplify and accelerate in its effectiveness. The main upshot of such thinking is that it provides a more functional mission to secularists. Dismantling religion, and the religious beliefs, faiths, and practices of billions of human beings is an impossible, daunting and perhaps fruitless task. Dismantling and reducing the impact of racism, of religious strife and exclusion, of sexism or misogyny, are likewise difficult Sisyphean tasks, but they are tasks for which there is demonstrable progress and for which religions themselves can be contorted to become useful allies in those causes. As examples, those religious entities which opposed slavery or supported the causes of civil rights or which oppose the prosecution of US immigration law upon otherwise innocent, hardworking and decent individuals. These are also much more practical goals than arguments over metaphysics and dense treatises on canonical laws. Where they arrive at obstacles from canonical law or metaphysics, the religions themselves can become isolated through obstinate, dogmatic resistance to change (see: the volume of people fleeing from the Catholic church, or from Southern Baptist communities), and this then serves the associated goal of decreasing social reliance upon religion in the formation of public law (I have less interest in the association of private beliefs upon personal behavior so long as it doesn't violate the law or compel legal environments upon all people that do not have some Kantian or utilitarian logic behind them, your mileage may vary). The religions that have endured for hundreds or thousands of years have done so because they are flexible and adaptable, much as any other social institution can do. They can be slower to adapt and may have been dragged kicking and screaming to a change. But change they will if they must to survive and flourish.


As a secondary point, I would draw attention to the distinctions between ISIS and Hamas being made later in the interview. One of the major points which leads to the effectiveness of many terrorist groups is the ability of those groups to service the demands of the public they control (sometimes through fear and violence rather than ideological coherence). Those demands and grievances are real and they are often legitimate demands and problems even under a liberal Western convention of human rights and needs (jobs, education, medicine, food for example). Much of what people saw in the "Arab Spring" as a "yearning for democracy" was more a recognition by broad and otherwise non-unified bodies of the public in those countries demanding basic things like jobs, or food, or better public services. We might recognize those things as effects of a democratic society, or think of them in those terms, but in practice, so long as those needs are met, people may otherwise put up with quite tyrannical states. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or much of Iran works in this way where Egypt could not, and we accordingly see less internal strife in those countries than we do in Jordan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Turkey, etc. If a group emerges promoting itself as capable of instituting reforms that will provide those basic needs and it appears well-organised or has a track record of provision of some of those reforms for its members and allies, whether that group has terrorist affiliations or not, it will be able to assume some level of power and authority in any government that is subsequently re-organised. The reason we have seen less cohesion in Libya or Syria than was initially the case in Egypt (under the Muslim Brotherhood) is that there are fewer organisations that have such track records, and greater internal factionalism. The reason those groups like Hamas attract some level of popular support isn't necessarily that people approve of their violence or even oppressive social goals (they quite often are repelled by it, though not nearly enough), but that they have proven somewhat effective at managing basic survival and economic needs. This is not a feature of "Islamism". It is a feature of virtually any insurgent group which deems itself as providing a front against an oppressor. Religion becomes a weapon in that war, a selected belief and set of practices, and the selection of harsh and oppressive forms of religious practice has its own purposes in providing internal cohesion or the appearance of purpose to potential members. But it isn't necessarily the agent behind the war.

There are agents globally for whom that is true, that religion is a principal motivation for which they are committed to violent action. But most people are fighting or agitating or committing acts of heinous violence over something more basic. When we do not recognize this, and proceed to acts of violent retaliation ourselves, without concern or consideration (as say, the drone war appears to be waged), this itself does damage to our cause by providing more fuel to those who say we are nothing but oppressors and glory to those who wish to be seen as fighting that oppression. Sometimes the best thing to do with someone who wants attention for their misdeeds is ignore them and treat them with disdain rather than viciousness. This though still leaves the underlying mission of basic humanity, resolving those basic questions of meaning and purpose through the provision of a functional economy and basic human needs of health and safety. That is difficult to instill and install from afar. I would not recommend that we do so in many cases (Iraq and Afghanistan being but two examples that were ill-advised, Syria or Egypt or Libya being others). But I would also not recommend that we be seen or allow ourselves to be seen as preventing it either.

Yes doesn't mean no either

California passes a law. Various sectors choose to comment on what it means. So I guess that means me too.

Let's go ahead and make a few important stipulations to get them out of the way of the conversation.

1) Rape is rape. Regardless of its cause it is an act of aggression. "Rape rape" is perhaps distinct in circumstances but certainly not in the type of violation against another from say "date rape". They are the same animal.
2) Rape is a criminal act, depriving another person of agency and autonomy for personal gratification without consent is a serious criminal act even and should be treated as such. I would place very few criminal actions as more serious in the form of moral and legal violations involved (basically murder or torture would be on par, but that's about it).
3) Attaining consent is not that complicated (for most of us it really isn't that complicated to have sex when we want to, with a partner we want to). Which should make violations of consent and autonomy less sympathetic. Yet there is still some social and rhetorical baggage relating to victims of sexual crimes that suggests that we do not take them necessarily as innocent victims of aggression.
4) Thus things which we can do to prosecute violations of consent, protect those who are violated or potentially violated, and make such violations less likely are an important public and social good benefiting the individuals who can instead form mutually beneficial relationships.

All that said. I don't think California's law falls into that last category (as a common issue with many laws, it looks like a "we must do something, this is something, let's do it" logic, rather than well-thought out as an approach to the problem). I have a number of complaints.

Firstly. The bill is limited to college universities. It does not apply outside of colleges. It governs the procedures of investigation and authority and evidence involved in acts committed on universities by their students (or faculty). While there may be some mysterious process by which rape is more common among students of colleges and the inhabitants of dorm rooms than among the general public which accords these matters with greater importance to the legislative process, I am doubtful there was any evidence presented that the vulnerability was greater among those bodies of the public than among any other. If our interest in governing is in protecting the welfare of the general public, it should be for protecting all of that public, and not merely those fortunate and educated enough to attend universities. General legislative bodies should not make it their business to make distinct legal environments for certain groups of the public without some compelling reason that it should be necessary. This fails to do so. Either there are victims or there are not, and it should matter very little whether they were attending a school or not. If it was to be an experiment to try to reduce sexual assaults and rapes at universities, in the form of attempting to accelerate a discourse over sexual advances, equality of genders, and the importance of clear communication of consent, let the universities do the testing rather than a government. A law has the quality of being difficult to abandon as an experiment if/when it is shown that it does not work and thus we should be cautious of making laws where other bodies may act. And to boot, this law has the quality of accelerating and continuing the arbitrary nature of enforcement by that same lesser body of justice than the courts that could very easily have appointed it upon itself to make these changes internally already.

As a related problem within sexual assault cases, there are states where rape victims must pay for the medical treatment that they must undergo to treat injuries and examinations of their bodies after a crime has been committed against them. The state may pay for portions, such as the collection of evidence of a rape (usually sexual secretions like semen), but large quantities of the bill could go on the members of the public who were victimized, or the bill may be only paid after any criminal charges are pressed and a case goes to prosecution and a victim is paying up front. California may not have this problem, but lots of other states do. That seems like a pressing matter for a legislature to attend to to help protect the citizens they represent. All of them.

Second. The bill does not treat rape and sexual assault necessarily as criminal acts. Both for the victim and the accused, this is a poor attempt at justice. An accused deserves more than preponderance of evidence for significant penalties to emerge, but rather clear evidence of guilt should be involved and adjudicated. Even if those penalties relate to their academic life, at one particular university, the attainment of a college degree at a particular university, or post-graduate degree, still has significant impact upon lifetime earnings, career paths, etc. It is not the same as imprisoning someone in the deprivations that are involved. But we are talking about a person's life here. Our system should presume a strong level of innocence until we provide proof otherwise of guilt in the destruction of others. This is also true of victims of assault, it is a person's life, and a strong level of innocence should be provided. Such cases deserve the prospect of severe penalties (like that of depriving the liberty of others to do as they see fit). They should be arbitrated, but the arbitration of justice should include the possibilities of using police powers and courts of law to do so. Colleges are not necessarily trained to deal with these matters, and have just as many incentives as police to be arbitrary and capricious toward both accused and victim, but they have a further incentive in that they are dealing with their own students, with powerful donors/boosters, star athletes or students, and so on. There were already a number of complaints relating to the handling of some high profile rape cases, or the matter of how some conservative Christian colleges were handling the entire concept of rape that suggest that the treatment by the university of complaints and grievances of a serious nature may not be to the incentive of the university to take to task. Police have their own bad incentives in investigation or prosecution of crimes, but they also have no direct financial and PR incentive to make rapes go away if they might reflect poorly on the institution of the university (they have also incentives to protect their students, but creating a system that allows them to arbitrarily punish some students and ignore others is the best way for them to do so, by their standards). A law which entrenches this poor incentive rather than removes it ought to be treated with some level of suspicion rather than cheered.

Thirdly. To me the general problems of college campuses and rape or sexual assault stem from two things
a) People (mostly men) who are predatory, and who commit acts of sexual aggression in a serial way, taking what they want from others. Generally such people do not care much about what consent laws might be changed to mean in the first place, and for whom these kinds of legal changes are irrelevant (if not protective). There is not, by and large, an ambiguous nature of consent for sex and sexual acts, nor some grey zone of uncertainty to navigate that there are large quantities of rapes committed because someone didn't understand the body language and intentions of a potential sexual partner. Nobody really has to tell anyone verbally that sex is on the table (one of the more common complaints I'm hearing is the ad reductio argument that now sexual partners will have to ask each other at each step of a sexual event what they're doing next. You don't really have to ask in words, so that's a rather silly complaint). It helps to come right out and say so of course, but it isn't that hard to read both the when it is and when it isn't from just body language and physical reactions.

There might be some nebulous zone where there is reluctance, from either party or both, for some action or another. But this is unlikely to stray into a denial of consent either and usually only requires that both parties are communicating and listening. If there's something that might be helpful there and there are numerous complaints about these kinds of incidents being registered as sexual assaults by colleges or police, or some other authoritative body, what would probably be necessary isn't a new legal environment. It's a sex ed course that teaches and discusses issues of consent and communication with sexual partners. Acts that crossed the line over into assault or rape, we already have laws for without needing a new standard necessarily. If this was the problem, which I'm dubious, then the need for a standard is cultural in change and nature. More people need to be willing to communicate and listen to any intended sexual partners about sexual acts. Before, during, and after. As embarrassing or complimentary as that can be, and as awkward as many people find it. It's a far healthier environment on the other side of that fence.

b) The second causal agent is alcohol (and to an extent other mind altering substances too). Younger people at college have a rather easy relationship with alcohol. They are away from supervisory agents (parents usually) who could also attend to their relative safety. They are often away from long-time childhood or teenage years friends who have a strong investment in their well-being and safety who will look out for them at a party or friend's room/home and assure they won't do something that could place them in danger. Many college students come in with some level of "expertise" in the use of any of these substances, but they don't have a clear delineation that says "I can consume this much and still make cogent and responsible decisions in a moment of crisis, but if I consume this much, I cannot". The compression of available recreational time between studying and normal behavior and the possibilities of penalties for underage drinking further press for higher pressure consumption habits. Which results in a lot of binge drinking, and also a lot of drunken occasions that can involve sex. Consensual or not (some of it while intoxicated is consensual, some of it is perhaps unwise, and some of it is sexual assault).

None of this suggests that it is the fault of the students who consumed too much if something awful and terrifying happens to them later. It is incumbent on others to treat someone who is in a state of vulnerability from a chemical "impairment" with a level of dignity and security for their person rather than to press the advantage and violate that person. It is hardly our fault if there are a few who seek a more predatory relationship with our vulnerabilities and we fail to adequately protect ourselves against any possible, however unlikely, threat from coming to pass. If someone is robbed, it is not our fault that we didn't have a security system installed, or proper locks. Such precautions may reduce our risks, but they are not deemed as blameworthy. Someone still had to decide to walk into our home or property and take something from it. The same applies here.

I cannot say there would be a point of alcoholic consumption where I would find that individuals would cross that line that didn't require alcohol to violate it in the first place. That is: the people who are initiating assaults don't need to be drunk, don't need to be warned not to get drunk or to be careful who they are drunk around, because they'd be the same assholes with or without it and the alcohol is not their problem. The alcohol is a grease for them to use their problem more easily. There does need to be a strong social message at work here. Not to say "don't get drunk", but "look out for one another". Hold up as praiseworthy those who object or stand up rather than look the other way and claim the victim deserved it and should have known better not to get that drunk. In the long run there's a strong need again for that honest conversation about sexuality and consent to be undertaken by scores of many young people, and that aggression against others without obtaining consent is a serious concern that should be treated seriously, perhaps even criminally.

Our ultimate goal here in dealing with this as an issue should be in part to assure that people who are committing acts of aggression are adequately punished for having done so in accordance with the severity and frequency of those violations. In some cases, the number may be dozens and the severity will be utterly banal in its details. "She said no and I did it anyway" versus "she said nothing and I did it anyway" is not really a different legal and moral environment to me, both are a species of aggression and sexual assault or rape. This is not that complex when boiled down to its specific elements that we should need a standard that is very different from "no means no". Non-consent is non-consent. Resistance or verbal objection should not be necessary to tell someone to stop trying to fuck someone if they don't want "you" to do it. In the sense that this establishes a "yes means yes" standard, that's great for slogans, but it doesn't actually shift the goalpost in moral terms toward stopping anything.

More importantly, the main goal should be to reduce the likelihood that anyone in particular is violated and becomes a victim of such people. There might be a path where these kinds of changes help make that the case. There are other universities around the country who have installed these kinds of rules relating to sexuality among students. Perhaps there have been studies on the effects those changes have on the frequency of sexual assaults, complaints of assaults, and the penalties doled out for those assaults as there may be for this to suggest that it does have a strong impact on the social conversation and the likelihood of sexual misconduct versus a sexual equality. But if there are any looking into the impact of such concepts, I'm not seeing them trotted out in defence of the legislature making a change instead of the universities doing so ahead of them, and I'm not clear on how the college can make the system less arbitrary and reasonably fair to all parties to a complaint (especially victims) with or without the intervention of the state on their behalf. I'm concerned we have allowed victims to be ignored, accused to be punished without due process, and for no one to learn much of anything about how to prevent it from happening again, or to others.

Given the seriousness of the issue, I am willing to allow for some leeway in experimenting to see what will work and what will not to reduce its severity and impact further. I'm not convinced that it won't ultimately have some positive effect that these kinds of changes should happen somewhere. Perhaps it will help. But I am not sure that it properly targets the problems, provides a clear and transparent method of adjudicating claims and concerns for all involved, and places a stronger incentive for colleges to treat this as a serious matter for their attention (than should already have been the case).

Another tedious notion

Guilty by associations.

In politics and much of life, what seems the quickest way to a problem, other than sending photos of your genitals to other people, is to carry along some baggage in the form of people who say or do some "shameful shit". And then to have one's opponents, anyone looking to point and laugh, people who appear willing to endorse a world of pain upon others quickly, spend most of their time running about talking about how terrible it is that you (not they) carry that baggage in the form of things you must think or want done in your name.

This is hardly limited as a phenomenon. Atheists deal with this in the association and sometimes espousal by some of their number with all manner of far-left ideological positions (communism for example), and the historical assumption by the public that secularists must all be godless communists or some such.

Christians have the Westboro Baptist Church. The Tea Party has Sarah Palin. Muslims had Osama bin Laden, and so on down the line.

Libertarians deal with it all the time with some of the ideological travelers it carries and brings along for the ride (Randians, Austrians, gold standard folks, paleoconservatives, secessionists, anarchists, and outright racists at times). "States' rights" in libertarian circles (usually) means something about decentralized power and an attempt, misguided in practice but perhaps sound in theory, that a more localized government be used. The theory is that this would be more adaptive and responsive to the local knowledge and wisdom of local institutions and public and in that way provide a "freer" society under which to live than one ruled by a distant and central authority with only a vague need to respond to local demands and concerns. (In practice, public choice and regulatory capture issues demonstrate that local governance is often ignored by the public and more easily swayed by "special interests", where funds and policy can be diverted to benefit the few at the expense of the many, and a decreasing quantity of cities and towns have a local beat that provides some added scrutiny to these forms of governing behaviors.) "States' rights" in normal conversation means Jim Crow and segregationists, and the legacy of slavery that came before it. That gap of language and communication exists. Libertarians do themselves little credit to pretend it does not. It thus does little good to run around talking about a complex philosophical theory of politics when what the public hears is "we would like to be race supremacists and hang around with other racists!". And then to have a variety of public figures of vaguely libertarian dispositions who have done little to disassociate or disabuse the public of that impression.

When one is of a commonly known, accepted pluralist institution, say the Catholic Church or Christianity in general in the United States, it is quite easy to cast aside the notion that something ridiculous and offensive, if not outright awful and terrifying, that someone is doing, has done in the past, etc, doesn't involve "you", as a person of similar faith and practices. Almost no one puts out a demand for denouncing such people in order to accept as decent and respectable those people of similar dispositions. No one demands anyone stand up and do so. No one looks around to see that it is done. Denunciations come anyway of course, because what is said or done may well have been terribly reprehensible on its own grounds (the priest abuse scandals say). But no one is checking the work to hold it against them later.

Suppose one is of a maligned, oppressed, misunderstood, or relatively unknown minority instead. And now the equation flips. Denunciations come anyway for reprehensible actions by people of similar dispositions (for calling out racist sentiments, acts of terrorism, etc), just as before. But now they go largely ignored by the horde of people who are demanding such denunciations in the process of declaring that whichever disfavored minority group must tacitly support such activities if it doesn't issue such things. A minority group, particularly when composed of somewhat radical persons, has a strong duty imposed upon it to police its own members, its own fringes, and its own fellow travelers to avoid baggage.

If racism and terrorism make up a fairly low probability effect in the average person's interests, it doesn't occur to most of us that we need to denounce the behavior of "other people", even if they look like us, or attend the same civil and religious institutions. I suspect part of the reason school shootings attract so much attention is that there's a growing disposition to park young men in this category of dangerous and hostile, despite it being a fairly rare quality that most young men partake of violence of any kind. If it does not occur to most of us in some minority population that these shared characteristics require us to acknowledge the offending or heinous actions of (supposed) fellow travelers that we may or may not feel any special kinship toward, it should not be surprising that most such people do not speak up against them in some special way, just as it is not surprising that most people in a larger and more entrenched plurality for some society might not. It also should not be surprising that attempts to denounce such groups in this way can have the counterproductive effects of a) not demonstrating to the group a specific problem caused by perceived or actual members of it as they are already feeling disassociated from these aggrieved members and see no need to disassociate further, or b) conforming the group around to defend the activities, up to a point, of these aggrieved members rather than condemning and reforming any actual bad behaviors by supporting the emotional reaction that the group is under attack.

So what to do? Or, rather more pressing, what purpose does this all serve? Primarily the arguments of this kind take the form of "these silly people ALL must be like this crazy mofo", in the seeking of dismissal of their kind for partisan gains (be that party political, religious, or some other division). This is effectively why people argue, not to discern what is true or false about a thing or person or their associates, loose or otherwise, but to win arguments in a social context, and to drive people to or away from goals being sought by others. Sometimes these arguments are of convenience, seeking allies without. Sometimes they are of purity, seeking to restrict and annihilate heresies from within. But always, the goal is to advance one's interests. Not to find and to do what is "right".

To deal with this, minority groups should have twin goals. First. To police their own of the most radical and offensive notions, in particular those of harmful intention toward others, and to declare these notions as out-of-bounds, marginal, or otherwise unjustifiable (in most instances). And second to declare their own positions more fiercely and publicly so that the public can not easily use heuristic positions to simplify their thinking into something more offensive. For something like say, suicide bombing, it is common to declare that Muslims are "fine" with such things. In fact, outside of the Palestinian territory, most Muslims are not. The vast majority even in most countries (including the United States). Where they are accepted as "sometimes justified", it is possible to see such attacks as a form of asymmetric warfare, where there might be particular forms of attacks (upon soldiers or supplies of soldiers, and civilians working on a military base of a perceived foe, for instance), that might indeed be seen as "justifiable" in the context of military conflicts, and others which are clearly reprehensible. There does not appear to be much work done to determine if this is the thinking being used of course when answering questions (that these are somehow "legitimate targets"). It probably is not in many cases and that there is a vibrant minority which expresses support for what would legitimately be a horrifying position morally.

That there is any substantial population expressing favor for such thinking should be viewed as a problematic development that should require some response internally. And if we look around, we find that it can be treated as such. It has been decreasing in popularity already over the last decade. There are various clerics writing and declaring that it is harmful and wrong. Various strategic leaders within some extremist/fundamentalist groups understand that it does little to advance their purported cause, particularly when civilians may be killed. The violence of extremist groups is overwhelmingly listed as one of the biggest problems with such organisations (not their extreme ideological or fundamentalist views, but deprivation of life and the retaliations that brings). The abhorrent views of such groups might be still problematic for their own reasons, but it is the violence that foremost attracts the ire and attention of both the outside world and the internal Muslim communities. This should demonstrate that it may be possible to both clearly identify the worst offenses of some group, and to work to condemn, constrain, and as much as possible eliminate such offenses from the constellation of activities that a group of persons is to engage in.

There's another flipside to all of this. How is it that the majority or large pluralities can be favored so well that their "sins" are forgiven and ignored, or at least declared the acts of lunacy and depravity that they often are, without some grander accounting. Put into practical terms, does this serve us some good in reducing such activities of offense or harm to declare it the acts of insane minorities, themselves sub-groupings that are clearly delineated from the whole by some arbitrary measure? If the affront is committed by some members of a more popular, and thus socially favored group, say police or the military, how does a community respond? Why does it not respond in the same way? Why are we quick to declare that "of course not all cops are bad", as a caveat when some legitimate grievance does emerge, but we may more easily saddle up to the notion that certain religions declare and command violence (but not other religions, certainly not "our's") or certain political ideologies command and worship greed and selfishness (but certainly not "our" political affiliations). What service does this perform for us in attending to any institutional reform needs of these more popular places to be able to hang one's hat as a member? Or to the expulsion or if possible the rehabilitation of its most heinous members?