Circling the Wagons; or, All These People Who Aren't My Boss

I've been meaning to write about freedom of expression here for some time.  Several recent events pushed me - Trump claiming that Twitter or Facebook had censored him; my Twitter account locked for a few weeks; etc.  I'll try to return to these matters later, but today the Twitterverse is aflame over an open letter published by Harper's Magazine and signed by numerous celebrities, among them Noam Chomsky.

I probably shouldn't write about it, because I agree with those people who've declared the letter a distraction, like the Gravel Teens: "pretty incredible that amid mass joblessness and a deadly pandemic all our 'leading intellectuals' can talk about is the deadly threat of 'cancel culture'".  But one: this isn't entirely fair: many of the signatories, including Chomsky, are talking about joblessness, a deadly pandemic, climate change, war, and other important issues.  Many of us can multitask.  Two: it's clear that many of our random non-intellectuals are all too ready to be distracted by it.  Include me in that company if you wish.

Among the many issues raised by the responses I'm seeing to this rather vacuous and dishonest document is the anger, even fury, over it.  There's a lot of babble about "thought control" and "manufacturing consent" on the Internet, and whatever else you can say, this open letter doesn't do either.  The signatories are a motley bunch, with a variety of complaints and motives, but the letter represents an Establishment that is crumbling under the weight of its own incompetence, so it's lashing out at its critics.  I can point and giggle and make rude noises at them, or I can ignore them; I don't think they will make anything happen by attaching their names to this complaint.  I think that many of their left critics have been echoing their position: these people are trying to silence me!  Perhaps they are, but I don't think they will succeed.

In particular many left-identified persons are attacking Chomsky for setting himself up as some kind of shining example of the Left, or anarchism, whatever, and this old guy who doesn't know anything about the Internet is telling them what to think!!!  Before this particular kerfluffle, Chomsky was getting heat for arguing that people should vote strategically, as if anyone had to do what he said.  I've written about this before, about people who say that Chomsky treats his opponents with contempt (oh noes!), or that he demands unquestioning obedience to his authoritarian declarations (false), that you can't disagree with him (also false).  Interestingly, these claims come from individuals on the right, the center, and the left. Whatever influence Chomsky has, he can't make you do anything: you don't have to listen to him, you don't have to read him, you certainly don't have to agree with him.  Yes, if you're on the left, you'll probably encounter people who will cite him as Scripture. which is probably annoying, but that just gives you an opportunity to refute him -- if you can; rational debate is hard work.  But I don't see how it could be more annoying than encountering people who attack him inaccurately and irrationally, and I run into a lot of people like that, in person or online.

I respect Chomsky, I honor his dedication and persistence, but he's not my boss and I don't always agree with him.  If I feel strongly enough, I write a critique of him. Therefore I don't feel threatened when he says something I disagree with.  Funny that so many bold free-thinkers have such a different reaction.

Surely, Comrades, You Want Obama Back?

I didn't mean to return to this topic, but over the weekend some new light was shed on it.  Mehdi Hasan, a writer for the Intercept, stuck his foot into the Democratic rehabilitation of Bush a week or two ago, and now he answered a tweet by Glenn Greenwald on a related matter.

Greenwald posted a couple of video clips from 2013, in which Barack Obama debunked "the long-standing but central DC myth that the two parties are radically opposed on ideology & policy. Instead, he correctly explained, they're far more similar than different, & the US entails far less ideological dispute than most democracies."

Hasan replied: "Agree with this. But also agree with Noam Chomsky’s rider, to me, in 2016: 'Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.'"  And added: "I’m not disputing at all that he’s sadly right about the similarities, over the differences, just that the differences - while not enough for my liking! - can also result in millions of people getting healthcare or not, living or dying, getting asylum, not getting poisoned, etc."

As a matter of principle I agree with Chomsky's dictum, which is why I've mostly gritted my teeth, held my nose and voted for Democrats for the past few decades, though I did vote for Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000.  But Hasan inadvertently undermined the recommendation. Before he took office, Obama had spoken positively about single-payer, but once he was president he blocked discussion of single-payer, even a "public option," in favor of continuing America's harmful private-insurance-based healthcare system, with some significant but minor reforms; it's reasonable to suppose that he changed his stance in collaboration with his donors and supporters in the insurance and healthcare industry.  But by the time he left office, premiums were soaring again, and even if Trump hadn't become president, even if a devastating pandemic hadn't come along, it's arguable that the whole unwieldy edifice of "Obamacare" would have crumbled under its own weight by now.  The choices Obama made improved many people's condition, but they were always at best a stopgap.  John McCain and Mitt Romney would probably have done no better, though it's important not to forget that the Affordable Care Act was based on Romney's own program for Massachusetts.  Obama made a small difference, but I can't agree that it constituted "enormous consequences."

From there, Hasan is in even worse trouble.  Most Americans' health declined during the Obama years, as their income stagnated and the stress under which they lived and worked increased. Life expectancy in the US began to decline in 2014.  Economic inequality increased, in large part because of policies Obama chose to enact.  Meanwhile, corporate profits soared.  Obama sought ways to justify cuts in Social Security and Medicare, with the long view toward destroying them.  "Living or dying"?  I cannot see any enormous positive consequences in that area resulting from Obama's election, and we don't know what his opponents would have done.  Probably worse, but who knows?

Overseas, Obama made sure that vast numbers of people died: he tried to prolong the US occupation of Iraq, he did escalate the US war in Afghanistan, he continued or started little wars that got less attention, he turned Libya into a slave market, he supported the Saudi invasion of Yemen, he droned wedding parties and bombed hospitals, and he joked about it.  He supported dictatorships and military coups, he materially supported the right-wing opposition in Venezuela, he tut-tutted over Israeli atrocities but continued to support them -- need I go on?

"Not getting poisoned"?  Obama supported fossil fuels, turning the US into a major oil exporter; supported nuclear power; equivocated on destructive oil pipelines, and undermined world action against climate change.

"Getting asylum"?  Obama deported a record number of immigrants, scolded them that they had to "earn" American citizenship (as he had?), and sent thousands of young Central American refugees back to danger and death in their home countries, knowingly.  Again, it's quite possible that McCain and Romney would have been worse, but we don't know, and electing Barack Obama had terrible consequences for millions of people in the US and around the world.  The strange thing is that Mehdi Hasan knows Obama's record at least as well as I do, and probably criticized him for it while he was in office: he writes for the Intercept, which published a lot of Obama-critical material.  Noam Chomsky, of course, was harshly critical of Obama throughout his tenure, and I don't think his tactical-voting recommendation means that he has changed his mind, or that he's nostalgic for the George W. Bush era.

Obama began his presidency with with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, and it wasn't unrealistic to be optimistic about his administration then.  He promptly showed that he had no intention of fulfilling the hopes he'd raised in his campaign.  For me the most telling example is his offering tax cuts for the rich as part of his inadequate stimulus package even before the Republicans demanded them.  That can't be blamed on Republican obstructionism: it was his own initiative, and it was all too typical of his style.  The Democrats lost control of Congress in the midterms, and after that his cult could blame everything he failed to do on the evil Republicans.  Not only Congress but most state governorships and many Federal judgeships fell into the hands of the far right, partly because Obama and the Democratic National Committee didn't bother to support down-ticket candidates, saving their money and resources to re-elect him in 2012.  I think it's fair to say that this outcome was not what Democratic voters had voted for.  These and more are the "enormous consequences" the country (and the world) got from Barack Obama.  I rather wish someone would ask Chomsky about this point.

I have to temper this somewhat, because I don't get the impression that most voters are even aware of most of the consequences that bother me.  They did feel the sluggish economic recovery he engineered, the stagnant economy (except for the very richest) he presided over, and that was more than enough to sap their enthusiasm for him.  That Obama squandered his mandate is unquestionable, however much he and his apologists blame the voters.  (Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of The Hill are erratic commentators, but this clip is an accurate analysis.)

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that in a parallel universe Obama had run for the presidency as a Republican instead of a Democrat, defeated parallel Hillary Clinton, and once in office governed exactly as he did in our universe - the same policies, the same consequences.  Would Mehdi Hasan, and others like him, defend Obama in the same terms he did last weekend?  Would he say that Republican Obama was a disappointment, but other Republicans would have been worse, so we shouldn't come down on him too hard, because Trump is so awful?  I doubt it, but maybe they would, just as Hasan and others have defended George W. Bush as a lesser evil compared to Donald Trump: by determinedly forgetting and misrepresenting his record.  Obama is the Republican we were warned about.

If Joe Biden manages to defeat Trump in November, I expect Chomsky will attack him as he has attacked his predecessors, and I also expect Democratic loyalists will attack Chomsky for undermining President Biden and giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs.  I wonder where Mehdi Hasan will take his stand.  The function of their argument - probably not intentionally, they're not clever enough to think tactically - is to divert criticism of Democratic politicians by playing the ranking game.

To Be of Use

I'm surprised I haven't quoted this exchange from Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad before:

'A witch doesn't know the meaning of the word “failure”, Gytha.'

They shot up into the clear air again. The horizon was a line of golden light as the slow dawn of the Disc sped across the land, bulldozing the suburbs of the night.

'Esme?' said Nanny Ogg, after a while.

'What?'

'It means “lack of success”.'

They flew in chilly silence for several seconds.

'I was speaking wossname. Figuratively,' said Granny.

'Oh. Well. You should of said.'

It came irresistibly to my mind when I listened to some remarks by Noam Chomsky in conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:



Here's the relevant part:

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama - nothing very great, but at least not, uh, totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures. 

It's common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed  I think that's a mistake.  I think it was an extraordinary success, it completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion.  Issues that were unthinkable a couple of years ago are now right in the middle of attention.  The, uh, worst crime he committed in the eyes of the establishment is not the policies he's proposing, but the fact he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or many others, and turn them into an activist movement which doesn't just show up every couple of years to push a lever and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism, and so on.  That could affect a Biden Administration.

I love Chomsky, but once again I disagree with him.  He's moving the goalposts in a way that I don't think many progressives would accept from anyone else.  (Many on the left, of course, deride him as a collaborationist meliorist, which in many respects he is, but that's only surprising if you ever believed he was a revolutionary.)

Sanders's campaign in 2016 was even more of a long shot than it was this time, and it did succeed in pushing certain issues into mainstream debate that had been easy to dismiss before.  But this time the goal was to win the nomination and put Bernie Sanders into the White House, and this the campaign failed to do.  Claiming that winning the primaries and the general election was not the aim, that changing the acceptable realm of discussion is the important thing, is at best an attempt to rouse the troops with inspiring oratory - and Chomsky has never been good at doing that.  That's not an accusation, or even a criticism: he has always been proud of his lack of charisma, and mobilizing emotion has never been his role.  In this case, though, it just leaves the bareness of his claim naked to the critical eye.

I can sympathize with the desolation a lot of Sanders's supporters and volunteers, especially the younger ones, must be feeling as a result of his suspension of the campaign.  Maybe you can't invest so much energy into a movement without building up false hopes in yourself.  There have been a lot of recriminations, such as an accusation that Barack Obama somehow pressured Sanders into suspending his campaign, with the implication that Sanders sold out to the Man.  As far as I know, that's nuts, but who knows?  If not for the coronavirus pandemic, which blocked the on-the-ground door-to-door, face-to-face campaigning Sanders relied upon, I suppose he would have fought to the end.  But "if" and a dollar will get you on the bus.  As it is, I presume that he recognized that even if he could continue such campaigning, it would put his volunteers at risk, which he wasn't going to do; and it wasn't an option anyhow.  Biden, you'll recall, had no compunction about making voters line up to vote for him in Wisconsin, though he changed his mind three days after that debacle.

Yes, the campaign failed in its primary task, and I won't play with words to make it seem otherwise. (I think Chomsky indulged there in the kind of obfuscation he'd deride in mainstream thinkers.)  But Chomsky is correct that the movement isn't over, and to that extent he's right.  Sanders is keeping his name on the ballot in states whose primaries haven't happened yet, pushing for voting by mail.  The more delegates he wins, the more clout he'll have at the convention, and that matters. It might translate into influence within the party if by some miracle Biden wins in November, and that's important too.

Sanders's movement can also, as Chomsky says, put pressure on governments, especially if Biden wins, but possibly even if he doesn't.  It's certainly time to pay more attention to the down-ticket races Clinton and Obama neglected to use the money for their own narcissistic purposes.  The astroturf organization Obama built in 2008 and then downgraded largely defanged social movements that could have put more pressure on him.  He didn't succeed entirely, and he was very displeased when activists held his feet to the fire.  He also tried to crush, with considerable success, the movements that rose up anyway, independent of his control.  Sanders has always worked with his base to put pressure on the political process, and I expect he'll continue to do that.  I've already contributed happily to the donation process he set up for other organizations through his campaign structure.  If his followers drop him, they're the ones who are failing the people.  Again, I sympathize with them, but if they really believe the movement is about Us rather than Me, I hope they'll pull themselves together.

One thing I haven't seen among Sanders's fans is any consideration of what he must feel, and characteristically he doesn't seem to have made a big deal of his own disappointment, which must be very great.  Maybe I've just missed it, but I see a lot of Sanders people online, and I'm surprised that his fans haven't had much to say in sympathy for his loss or his courage in pushing forward.  He's still a Senator with work to do in one of the greatest crises this country has ever faced -- very possibly the greatest -- and he's still doing his work.  Which brings to mind another literary reference, by another left-wing Jew, Marge Piercy's poem "To Be of Use":

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

Have You Stopped Endorsing Genocide? or, One Wants One's BBC

I admire Chomsky, but I admit he didn't answer this dishonest question (excerpted from this video) very well.  That's partly because it's constructed like "Have you stopped beating your wife?", beginning with a false premise.  Chomsky doesn't say that America is a terrible country: he freely admits that the US is a free country, perhaps the freest in the world.  It is rich, and of course many people have wanted to come here.  What he says is that America has done terrible things.

Perhaps one way to answer the question would be to ask why, since America is such a great country, it has done and continues to do such terrible things.  One might also ask what should be done to a country that does such terrible things.  Most Americans and American apologists have no doubt what should be done to other countries that commit crimes: sanctions, invasions, bombing, missile strikes, "regime change."  They have trouble coming up with plausible reasons why such measures should not be inflicted on the US.

But then, they don't need plausible reasons.  Like any good team players, they think that a loss by their team is a disaster.  Sometimes I'm surprised that sports fans are able to tolerate another team's daring to try to take the victory from their  guys at all.  They cultivate an inability to imagine sport, let alone the world, from another person's point of view.  Apologists for sport are mostly as dishonest about this as apologists for their country's violence.

Maybe an analogy or two will help.  Germany is the most civilized nation in the world.  People everywhere look up to it for its intellectual, cultural, and political accomplishments.  How can you call it barbaric, brutal, murderous for a few little missteps that any nation might have made?

Or: For almost two hundred years, millions of people have been inspired by communism to fight for the oppressed and downtrodden.  Sure, it isn't perfect, but if it's so terrible, why do so many people still -- even after the fall of the Soviet Union -- look to communism as humanity's best hope for a better world?

There are plenty of reasons why poor people, people in danger of their lives from religious or ethnic terrorism, people wanting to avoid conscription into the army, would have wanted to move to the United States despite its flaws.  One might be that they were more concerned with saving their own lives than with the harm the US did to others, and indeed might have figured that they were not likely to be the targets of US violence once they had immigrated.  European whites were not likely to be enslaved, or driven onto reservations.  Maybe they didn't care what happened to other people as long as they and their families were relatively safe.

Or maybe they had unrealistic ideas about the US.  Moving here often meant a fall in earnings and status, as many Europeans and (later) East Asians found to their consternation.  They were doctors or lawyers or other professionals in their home countries, but ended up working in sweatshops, running convenience stores, or driving taxis because their credentials weren't valid in the US, and their English wasn't good enough to acquire new credentials here.  But they couldn't go back, either because there was nowhere to go back to, or because they didn't want to lose face.  They may have borrowed money from relatives to make the move, and had to pay it back.  (Some did go back anyway, but they seem to have been the minority.)  But none of this has any bearing on the bad things that America has done.

It's understandable that people would not want to believe anything bad about a country or a person in whom they've invested all their love and admiration.  If that person, or that country, is proven to have done terrible things, they don't give up their adoration and allegiance lightly.  They blame the messenger, often harshly and hatefully.  It's understandable, but it's wrong, and should not be tolerated.  In the case of Stephen Sackur, the BBC interviewer here, it's not entirely clear whether he had even that excuse.  He's English, so he should be capable of some critical distance from America.  Maybe he thought he was playing the devil's advocate, giving Chomsky a chance to answer a charge that is commonly made against him.

In all this, it's ironic that many of the people who hate and lie about Chomsky, and about all critics of US foreign policy, nevertheless hate the US government and lie about it.  Recently a right-wing Christian with whom I went to high school posted on Facebook one of those absurd stories that many people love: a convoluted tale of a smart-aleck farmer who meets what turns out to be a rich city slicker from the US Congress, and tells him off (eviscerates him, destroys him, bam boom burn!).  It's a familiar theme, going back to the Eloquent Peasant stories of ancient Egypt, and persisting in the Marine Todd and That Student Was Albert Einstein urban myths of today.  It's very popular among people who are basically ignorant about ideas and the world.  Yet this guy and those who share such stories generally love a rich city slicker like Donald Trump, and even right-wing political and cultural figures who have enriched themselves at the public trough, and they are indignant if some radical liberal criticizes them.

That indignation is reciprocated by liberals who don't like it if some Rethug mocks rich city-slickers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whom they work very hard to see as Just Folks.  An attack on their idols is an attack on Regular Americans like themselves.  Despite the popularity of the term in lefty circles, I don't think "tribalism" is the right word for this pattern of thought.  Until I come up with a better one, though, it's important to keep challenging and trying to refute those who justify American (or any other country's) atrocities by minimizing them.

Conspiracy Theories for Me ...

Guess who said this:

Much of this is being carried out stealthily, in closed sessions, with as little public notice as possible. Other Republican policies are more open, such as pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, thereby isolating the U.S. as a pariah state that refuses to participate in international efforts to confront looming environmental disaster. Even worse, they are intent on maximizing the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous; dismantling regulations; and sharply cutting back on research and development of alternative energy sources, which will soon be necessary for decent survival.

The reasons behind the policies are a mix. Some are simply service to the Constituency. 

Noam Chomsky, of course.  It's an excerpt from his next book of interviews with David Barsamian of Alternative Radio, due to be published in a couple of months.

I'm an admirer of Chomsky, I've read most of his books on politics, and I've learned a lot from him.  I also have some significant disagreements with him.  Like just about everybody, he's critical of conspiracy theories, but when I read this excerpt it occurred to me that if you took it out of context, you could easily accuse him of being a conspiracy theorist.  (He often has been accused of just that, particularly his discussions of the media.)  Especially the coy epithet "the Constituency," referring to "the Constituency of private power and wealth, 'the masters of mankind,' to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase," but also the dark references to the Republican agenda being pursued and enacted out of the public view.  This is, of course, exactly what is being done in Congress, as with the Obamacare repeal bill -- though also, as Chomsky knows, with Democratic initiatives like the Transpacific Partnership "free trade" pact: when legislators know that they are working on a highly unpopular bill, they will want the populace to remain safely ignorant of what they're doing.

As I've said before, conspiracies do happen, and dismissing theories about them out of hand is dishonest.  The question is the quality of the theories, which is often difficult to assess when you're dealing with secretive activity.  As Richard Seymour wrote (via) earlier this year, one sign of invalid conspiracy theories is their "assumption of omniscience": the conspirators know in advance how their opponents will respond, and have already prepared countermoves to exploit and defuse the efforts of the Resistance.  They are also, in Patricia Roberts-Miller's sense, demagogic: the theorist is the good Us, the conspirators are the wicked Them.

Chomsky isn't a conspiracy theorist, but I think that this interview shows how difficult it is for even a careful thinker like him to avoid adopting the tone and rhetorical tactics of a conspiracy theorist.

Endless War

According to the Associated Press, about a hundred self-identified anarchists entered an anti-racist rally in Berkeley, California, where they proceeded to beat up several people.

The group of more than 100 hooded protesters, with shields emblazoned with the words "no hate" and waving a flag identifying themselves as anarchists, busted through police lines, avoiding security checks by officers to take away possible weapons. Then the anarchists blended with a crowd of 2,000 largely peaceful protesters who turned up to demonstrate in a "Rally Against Hate" opposed to a much smaller gathering of right-wing protesters.

"No hate" -- don't you just love that?  The hypocritical piety is practically Christian.  Even better, these goons went after isolated individuals they could gang up on with minimal risk to themselves.  Better still: the first guy they attacked is Japanese-American, which makes their assault a racist attack -- a hate crime.  (Or a "no hate" crime, which makes a big difference, I suppose.)  Luckily, almost miraculously, the police didn't seize the opportunity to attack the rest of the crowd, which is the normal police response to such incidents.

It has been educational to watch liberal and left reactions to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.  As I've noticed before, many of them are blurring the already vexed line between speech and violence, and eager to give the Trump administration the authority to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't.  (I'm being slightly disingenuous there, since of course they fantasize that they themselves will make that decision; which shows that they're delusional, given existing historical and political realities in the US.)  They also exploit an ambiguity in the word "fighting," which can refer metaphorically to any kind of organized effort (including sports) against something, or to actual literal violence.

So, for example, I've often heard it said that Heather Heyer was fighting hate (or fascism or racism or Nazism, or fighting for what she believed in, whatever) in Charlottesville when she was killed by a white supremacist who drove his car into the crowd of people she was in.  Fighting (literal) doesn't seem to have been Heyer's style.  In any case, she was killed as she crossed a street at an intersection during (I think -- the chronology is muddled) the counter-protest.  I don't say this to minimize her death or its significance, only for clarity's sake.  That she wasn't clubbing down neo-Nazis makes her murderer even more cowardly and despicable.  While simply pepper-spraying and chasing a non-resisting individual isn't in the same class of evil (except perhaps metaphorically) as driving a car into an unarmed and nonviolent crowd, it's also cowardly and despicable.  Like this.

So when Ted Rall posted on Facebook last weekend that, "Considering the history of fascism, the debate over whether the antifa movement should resort to violence seems, well, quaint", I wasn't terribly surprised, though I was a bit disappointed.  I generally like his cartoons, and thought his book on Afghanistan, After We Kill You We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests (Hill & Wang, 2014), was excellent and important.  But he got things wrong this time, starting with the cartoon itself, which depicts a French couple at a cafe as Nazi troops march by in the street.  The Frenchman says, "Violence? But that would make us as bad as them!"

This is disingenous.  First of all, it's not as if the centrist liberals in Trump's America who call themselves The Resistance have renounced the use of violence in advance: the name they've chosen for themselves deliberately invokes those who fought against the Nazis in occupied France, though so far they haven't done anything much more strenuous than wear pink pussy hats and make memes mocking Trump.  Second, the situation in occupied France was not about whether or not to counter "free speech" with violence -- Germany didn't occupy France through free speech.  (Plus, the actual French Resistance was dominated by Communists, and if there's anyone liberal Democrats hate more than Trump, it's a leftist.  Unless it's a Jewish leftist.)

Second, debates in the US over the use of violence by minorities and dissidents have always been inadequate at best, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that things have changed.  The increasing boldness of white racists since Trump's ascendancy has been met with a lot of chest-thumping rhetoric about fighting Nazis in the streets.  I'm not objecting to the use of violence myself; I am, however, concerned with other questions, such as: Who's going to fight the Nazis?  When and where?  Who will lead?  Who will choose the leaders?  Who will determine strategy and tactics?  The neo-Nazis are organized and armed; how will "antifa" (a term I find about as annoying as The Resistance) violence be armed and organized?  These are not idle questions.

This weekend a video began to circulate online, which showed a white supremacist in Charlottesville trying to shoot a black counterprotester who'd made himself an impromptu flamethrower by igniting the spray from an aerosol can and aiming it at the racists.  By amazing luck, the kind of luck that convinces me there is no god, the would-be shooter had forgotten to disable the safety on his weapon, which slowed him down, and when he did fire, nobody was hurt.  The guy with the gun is being sought by the authorities, as they say.

What I find interesting about this scene is that ever since Trump made it clear he was appealing to a white-racist base -- hell, ever since Obama attracted racist hatred as a candidate and as President -- there has been a lot of agitation about how extremely dangerous white supremacists are, how they're the new Nazis and if we aren't ceaselessly vigilant there will be a replay of 1930s Germany here in the Homeland.  I don't dismiss these concerns, but I find it extremely interesting and significant that many of these same alarmists nevertheless seem to believe that white supremacists are not really dangerous at all, that because Antifa's heart is pure they need only to chant some slogans and the Fascists will collapse and surrender; the Fascists' bullets will either bounce off Antifa's Breastplate of Virtue, be repelled by Antifa's wristlets of power, or simply dissolve into the air.  There were many warnings about armed neo-Nazis, with heavy-duty weapons, gathering in Charlottesville, intent on mayhem.  It appears that even so, the Antifa mostly didn't consider them a real, serious threat, and those who did brought some homemade weaponry that would have been useless if the threat turned real.  Since we're not pacifists here, I can say that I wouldn't have been felt much sympathy if the guy with the aerosol can had gotten shot, because he was putting his unarmed anti-fascist comrades in danger, presumably without their consent or planning.

Or he was giving the police, who everyone assumed were on the racists' side, an excuse to stomp some hippies. (In a real Resistance situation, he'd likely have been court-martialed and shot by his own organization for such stupid criminal recklessness.)  Emptywheel pointed out last weekend that Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio was intended to send a message to his real base, the police, who supported him during his election campaign and support him still.

So while feeding his explicitly racist base with hateful rhetoric is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the cops remain with him, even as he fosters violence.

There is no better way to do that than to convey to police that they can target brown people, that they can ignore all federal checks on their power, with impunity (this is probably one key reason why Trump has given up his efforts to oust Sessions, because on policing they remain in perfect accord).
There is no better way to keep the support of cops who support Trump because he encourages their abuses then by pardoning Arpaio for the most spectacular case of such abuses.

The history Rall appealed to isn't reassuring.  There were street battles between Communists and Nazis in Germany during the 1930s; they didn't impede Hitler's rise to power.  Historians can probably explain why; I confess I haven't read enough about the period to have an opinion.  But whatever the reasons, street fighting didn't work for the Left; only for the Nazis.  In general, that has been true in the US as well.  In principle I fully endorse and support the right of African-Americans to defend themselves against police and government violence; but those who did, in the 1960s, seriously underestimated the power and ruthlessness of their adversaries.  And that leaves aside intra-movement violence, among the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, for example.  And yet many antifa sympathizers, in between attacking the police (sometimes justly), believe that when push comes to shove the police will protect them from that Bad Ol' Nazis.  They should, of course; but the historical precedents indicate that they won't.

As you can see, I don't mean to suggest that violence never works.  After its defeat in 1865, for example, the Confederacy used violence very successfully to establish white supremacy all over the South, and eventually managed to sell most white Americans on their Lost Cause myth of elegant Southern heritage violated by the brutish Union.  As with the successful use of violence by the Nazis, I don't know the history well enough to explain why with any certainty, but I feel sure it's at least partly because most white Americans in the North (including educated elites) were racist, and weren't at all uncomfortable with white supremacy as ideology or practice.  There was a brief blip of anti-racist action in the 1950s and 1960s, and though some gains were made, white-supremacist resistance, violent and nonviolent, never ceased, and many of those gains are in danger of being lost again.

But this reminds me of an anecdote in a book I read a week ago, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America by Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2017).  It's about the popularity of violence against children by African-American parents, and it's flawed but overall very valuable.  Many black parents, like many white parents, believe that beating children is the only way to keep them out of trouble and turn them into responsible adults.  There's an anecdote toward the end, told by an African-American woman, a single mother and a parent trainer:

Alvarez says she gets the "usual bullshit" from other parents who criticize her for not hitting her son.  "Spare the rod ... yada, yada, yada ... ain't nobody here for that.  My son, my rules.  As a parent trainer, when I hear parents swear by whupping kids, I ask, "How many here were whupped by parents?" Most will raise their hands.  Then I ask, "How many were whupped twice?" Most raise their hands.  Then I say, "So then maybe it's not that effective.  If it were, we'd only have to get beaten once to get the message" [214].

I feel the same way about violence aimed at stopping white racism: the most horrific war in history up to that point didn't stop it -- it barely slowed it down, and only briefly at that.  Maybe other avenues need to be considered.

I've also been thinking of something Noam Chomsky wrote about political violence about fifty years ago, and published in American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon, 1969, pp. 398-399):

It is quite easy to design tactics that will help to consolidate the latent forces of a potential American fascism.  To mention just one obvious example, verbal and physical abuse of the police, however great the provocation, can have only this effect.  Such tactics may seem "radical" and, in a narrow sense, justified by the magnitude of the infamy and evil that they seek to overcome.  They are not.

In fact, it is senseless to speak -- as many now do -- of tactics and actions are being "radical," "liberal," "conservative," or "reactionary."  In itself, an action cannot be placed on a political dimension at all.  It may be successful or unsuccessful in achieving an end that can be described in political terms.  But it is useful to remember that the same tactics that one man may propose with high conscience and deep commitment to radical social change may also be pressed by a well-placed police spy, bent on destroying such a movement and increasing popular support for the forces of repression. Consider the Reichstag fire, to return to a day that is less remote than one would wish. Or consider the act of a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee from Poland just thirty years ago -- of Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated a German official in Paris in November 1938.  It is difficult to condemn this desperate act, which set off violent pogroms throughout Germany and helped entrench more deeply the Nazi regime of terror; but the victims of Nazi terror would offer no thanks to Herschel Grynszpan.  We must not abandon the victims of American power, or play games with their fate.  We must not consent to have the same repression imposed on still further helpless victims or the same blind fury unleashed against them.

It seems to me that those who want to use violent tactics against the racist Right need to make very clear how they intend to use those tactics, why those tactics and not others.  So far I've seen a lot of grandstanding and posturing by people I wouldn't follow ... well, anywhere.  It's not as if there isn't a long history of political violence from which to learn, but I haven't seen any indication that the advocates of violence today have paid any attention to it.  Advocating violence, even or especially against fascists, without showing that you know what you're talking about doesn't establish your gravitas; it makes me suspect that you've played too many video games, or watched too many action movies, and mistaken them for reality.  I don't have the answers myself, and I'm not ruling out violence altogether; but I need better rationales for violent action than I've been hearing so far.  The burden of argument lies not on those oppose the use of violence, or starting a war, but on those who want to initiate it.  It's certainly interesting to hear nominal leftists using the rhetoric of the Bush administration when it insisted that we must invade the existential threat of Iraq now.  They are trifling with human lives, and if (or more likely when) it blows up their face, they won't accept responsibility, let alone accountability.

Hey, Kids -- Leave That Noam Alone!

This article turned up on the Noam Chomsky page on Facebook today (multiple ironies there), featuring a charming episode of "Ain't It Awful."

"I get a ton of correspondence, mostly email," Chomsky said. "I’ll often get questions from high school students saying, ‘I have to write a paper Thursday on the French Revolution,’ or whatever it may be. I tell them, ‘Well here’s somebody you could look up. And the next question routinely comes back, ‘How can I find it on the internet.’ And sometimes these come from prep schools - places with good libraries, educated students[,] privileged students, I say, ‘Well walk across the street to the school library and look it up.'"

I love Chomsky, but he must surely know that this isn't a product of the Internet.   Long before the Internet, writers I know were complaining about students who wrote to them asking them to do their research for them.  Writing in about 1981, for example, the science-fiction writer and professor of English Joanna Russ recalled:

Years ago a very young (junior-high-school age) woman asked me to send her copies of all my work and the answers to three pages of questions about it for a paper her teacher had suggested; I wrote her, explaining that writers hadn't the time to fill such requests and referred her to her teacher, who ought to be teaching her how to do research.  Her older sister then wrote me, stating that she was going to expose me in Ms., that because of my bad behavior her sister, who had hoped to be a writer, had given up all such ambitions. *

So such demands have nothing to do with the Internet, computers, or social media.  And to be fair, Chomsky admits:

But, as laughable as it is, who in America hasn't felt that way before?

“I’m not offering this as a critique of the internet, but there’s a lot of factors involved," Chomsky explained.

So why bring it up in the context of a discussion of social media and the Internet?  Alternet certainly packaged Chomsky's remarks as a "critique of the Internet" -- disseminated on the Internet, no less.

I think this kind of behavior has more to do with adolescence, and probably with the very privilege Chomsky refers to.  Of course privileged kids expect someone else to do their work for them!  What else are other people for?  But it also has something to do with a capability that language and human consciousness give us: to construct fantasies about people we've never met, so that we believe we know them and they know us.  It's also a product of writing and literacy.  If your encounter with stories and ideas takes place in face-to-face interactions, it's true that you are being addressed (though not individually) by the storyteller or the preacher.  People often feel that a written text speaks to them personally and individually, and may write to the author expressing that belief.  (Or they want a celebrity in sports or show business to grant them a wish.)  That's as much an illusion as thinking that a distant professor will do your homework for you.

* In Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Firebrand Books, 1985), p. 53.

Fair and Balanced

I was surprised to see a link on Facebook to a review of a new book by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books.  Chomsky used to write regularly for the NYRB in the Sixties and early Seventies, but at some point he faded from their pages, and even his most serious political writings are rarely reviewed there, so this review is a nice gesture. It's not even the kind of transparent hatchet job that's typical of liberal media like the Guardian, the New York Times, or the Nation (which, I admit, has improved somewhat). The reviewer catches Chomsky in a minor error or two but on the whole concedes the validity of his "case against America." Still, I had to chuckle at this passage:

Yet Who Rules the World? is also an infuriating book because it is so partisan that it leaves the reader convinced not of his insights but of the need to hear the other side.

I know, right? Where could most American readers possibly "hear the other side"? If only a newspaper, or perhaps a TV network, or a politician or two would take up the defense of America's supreme goodness, so citizens could get get a fair and balanced view!

There Is One Orwell, and Hitchens Was His Prophet

Recently I read The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (Pluto Press, 2004) by Scott Lucas.  Lucas shows how Christopher Hitchens anointed himself as George Orwell's spokeman for the twenty-first century.  It was a good read, and reminded me of a number of things I needed to be reminded of, such as this:

Hitchens charged that Chomsky, in The New Military Humanism, was guilty of 'double standards' in criticising NATO's bombing of Yugslavia while supporting intervention in the case of East Timor.  Chomsky replied, 'There is a double standard only if the intentions are humanitarian …. My book found no evidence of benign intent [over Kosovo] …. hence no double standard but rather the familiar single standard of power interests with little concern for human consequences'  Hitchens, after the cheap jibe, 'It is no disgrace to be condescended to by Noam Chomsky nor to be instructed in matters of formal logic and argumentative procedure', wrestled with double standards before settling on a simpler call, 'We appear to be in a new era, where old reflexes serve us less well.  However, this does not relieve us of our responsibility to take the side of the victims, as Chomsky once taught me and many others to do' [66-7].

Quite.  But who are the victims?  Hitchens lost sight of that question, except for thinking that he himself was the victim, of Left Orthodoxy.  Those who were killed or maimed or made into refugees by American (or NATO, which amounts to the same thing) bombs, missiles, and bullets were never on his radar, as Lucas points out:

At no point did Hitchens acknowledge that, his clearly defined 'war against Saddam', the Iraqi people rather than the leader were likely to be the first casualties and those dealing with the long-term consequences [85].

What I want to focus on, though, is Hitchens's accusation that Chomsky applied a double standard, allegedly opposing "intervention" in Kosovo but advocating it in East Timor.  This is a popular claim among liberal and progressive enthusiasts for US state violence.  I first encountered it, I think, when George H. W. Bush invaded Panama in 1989, and numerous times since then.  I haven't yet heard it in connection with US support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, but that's probably because most Americans, regardless of their location in the political rainbow, are doing their best to ignore that one.

As far as I know, Chomsky never called for the US to "intervene" in the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which lasted from 1975 to 1999 and killed hundreds of thousands of people -- roughly a third of the population.  This was largely because the US had already intervened in that action, by approving it in advance, by arming and training Indonesian forces, by Presidential evasion of Congressional prohibition of US support, and by blocking United Nations action.  Not until the East Timorese had courageously voted for independence in a referendum, did President Bill Clinton finally instruct Indonesia to withdraw.  In 2002 journalist Allan Nairn (who along with Amy Goodman was badly beaten by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1991) questioned Clinton about this, and Clinton bravely dodged the question.  He conceded that the US had "ignored" and been "insensitive" to the situation, which was false, since US presidents including Clinton had worked so hard to support Indonesia for a quarter of century. (There's no transcript for that clip, but a partial transcript is available here. It's worth listening to the clip, which includes not only Clinton but Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger lying wildly about their records.)

Hitchens and other apologists for state violence might claim that Clinton "intervened" by finally stopping US aid to the Indonesian invasion, but this ignores the ongoing intervention that preceded it.  They also hope to confuse the issue by equivocating.  Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy don't necessarily object to diplomatic "interventions," it's military interventions that we oppose.  President Obama could intervene in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, by withholding material and other support for the Saudis, and Chomsky would surely approve of that -- provided the aid wasn't merely continued by diverting it through other channels, as normally happens in such cases.  But what liberal and progressive supporters of state violence want is military intervention, marketed as "humanitarian," with enormous costs in human life and well-being for its supposed beneficiaries.  There's no double standard.

Even Noam Nods

As I began writing this post it occurred to me to see if there were any amusing cartoons about Noam Chomsky on the Internet.  I didn't find any; the one above was symptomatic.  I think it's a safe bet that the cartoonist has never seen Chomsky speak; if he had, he'd know that Chomsky encourages his audiences and readers to check the references in his writings.  That's his answer when he is asked the question in the cartoon, which has been known to happen.  Most don't, of course, but that says more about ordinary human inertia than it does about Chomsky. (There's also a recurring complaint from his mainstream critics that Chomsky's books contain all those endnotes, full of references to obscure Marxist publications that nobody's heard of, like The New York Times.) There is a cult of personality around him, which he dislikes and has tried to discourage -- he's proud of his uncharismatic speaking style -- but that too says more about the way most people's minds work than about Chomsky.  So it's also a safe bet that the cartoonist has never read any of Chomsky's work either.

Some of Chomsky's critics like to fantasize that they're taking a big risk by challenging him.  He treats his critics with "contempt," it's said, which I guess is much worse than being blinded or concussed by a tear gas canister, let alone shredded by a Hellfire missile.  But it's possible to disagree with Chomsky intelligently.  The Lebanese writer Gilbert Achcar did it in his dialogue with Chomsky, as did the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in a joint project, and both emerged unscathed.  If you come at him (or anyone, really) with prepackaged US or Israeli propaganda that has been refuted many times before, should you really expect to be taken seriously?

Where I fit into this picture isn't for me to say.  But I was poking through the table of contents of Understanding Power, the 2002 compilation of transcripts of Chomsky's interactions with audiences, and noticed a section on conspiracy theories.  Chomsky has often been accused of being a conspiracy theorist, so I decided to look at his discussion.  Though it was published after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the material in Understanding Power dates from years earlier, so I knew Chomsky wouldn't be addressing the numerous 9/11 conspiracy theories here.

I soon found myself quibbling.  It looked to me like Chomsky tried to solve the problem by definition, and I disagreed with his definition.

So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of the society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth?  And that's a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power?  [348]

The important words here are "acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power."  Chomsky concedes the case of "the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities" but claims that "that was sort of a fringe operation -- and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate very much of that stuff."

The 9/11 Truthers don't claim that the attacks were false-flag operations by "subgroups ... outside the main structures of institutional power"; they claim that that they were the work of the Bush-Cheney administration, who were inside the main structures of institutional power.  One reason I don't take this claim seriously is Bush's reaction on the day of attacks: he went into hiding.  If the attacks had been the work of his administration, I'd expect him to have given a vindictive press conference immediately to show his lack of fear and quick response to terrorism.  When I've mentioned this to Truthers, they usually say that maybe Bush wasn't in the loop, but Cheney was.  That should make no difference: if Bush was Cheney's pawn, as many people including liberals affect to believe, Bush would have played out his role.  If I recall correctly, Laura Bush was in Washington DC that day and no one seemed to be worrying about her safety.  But that's just proof that she was in on the plot, right?  Has anyone considered the powerful possibility that she was the mastermind?

Maybe the problem word is "secret."  Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy have pointed out that our government's supposedly secret actions, such as the "secret" bombing of Cambodia by Nixon in 1969-70, were secret only to most Americans, not to their victims or the rest of the world.  I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't change the fact that the US government and media conspired (in any reasonable sense of the word) to hide their discreditable and often illegal activities from the US public. Chomsky has also said, as I recall, that when Reagan's announcement of a US-backed terror campaign in Latin America met public criticism and resistance, the campaign simply went covert. The Johnson administration lied about the Tonkin Gulf in order to justify its escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam; that means that people inside "the main structures of power" conspired to mislead the public and the world.  Many criminal actions by the US government were secret until they were uncovered by the Church congressional committee investigations or journalists acquiring restricted documents through the Freedom of Information of Act.

I don't mean to make too much of this; I don't mean to imply that Chomsky is now irrelevant, or a paid agent of the CIA.  I think his working definition of "conspiracy" is too narrow, and doesn't reflect the way the people he's criticizing actually use the word.  They're talking about people in the main structures of power, not outside it.  Whether they're wrong is another matter.  I don't take the 9/11 Truthers seriously, because of their assumption that anyone who rejects their account must therefore support US foreign policy generally and the War on Terror in particular.  It takes some serious, willed tunnel vision and an Orwellian control of memory to say that of Chomsky.  But at the same time, I always get suspicious when anyone, including Chomsky, dismisses a claim as a "conspiracy theory."  Conspiracies do happen.  Because they are secret, it's hard to learn the truth about them.  It's as much a mistake to dismiss any talk of conspiracy as it is to jump to manufacture fantasies of conspiracy about an event.  This is one of those areas where the truth isn't Out There but somewhere in between.

Nothing Up My Sleeve; or, The Silence of the Genes

At first I thought I'd just add to yesterday's post, but decided to start a new one.  After I clicked on Publish and moved on to other matters for the evening, I kept wondering what valid a use a "genetic" test to detect homosexuality could have.  After all, LGBTQ folklore has it that we know from an early age that we're Different, so who needs a test?  I can imagine a confused and frightened young person wanting to take such a test to prove to himself or herself that she isn't gay, and then having to face positive results.  Maybe parents would drag offspring they aren't sure about to the doctor to settle the question one way or the other.  By analogy to similar tests, the only use I can think of for this one would be "diagnostic," and what valid diagnostic use would a test for homosexuality have?

One of the New Scientist articles I linked to yesterday acknowledged some of these concerns.

This concern may be premature. Marc Breedlove at Michigan State University in East Lansing points out that in its current form, the test is not accurate enough to be used to predict whether someone in a new population of individuals is gay with any certainty, since the 67 per cent accuracy of the test is only relevant for the test population, who are themselves not reflective of the general population, in which a much lower proportion of people are gay.

Nevertheless, some researchers contacted by New Scientist raised concerns over the ethical implications of such research. For example, if the test were developed further, could it one day be used to screen for sexuality at an early age?

“Eugenics is always a possibility, but governments that regressive would rarely have enough money to spend on something like this,” says Alice Dreger an ethicist and historian of sexuality. “More likely it would be used by parents.”

Dreger recalls an anecdote from a researcher who studies the fraternal birth order effect. The researcher received a phone call from a man in the US who was looking to hire a surrogate mother – but because of the effect did not want someone who had already had several sons. “That’s not really what I want…” the man had said, “especially if I’m paying for it.”

I wonder about Dreger's remarks.  Once science and commerce have done that voodoo that they do so well, the hypothetical test would soon be affordable, not just for parents (!) but for "governments that regressive."  Regressive governments (like the poverty-stricken Saudi Arabian regime, maybe?) don't have to develop the science themselves, they just need to find a way to pay for it from the aid they receive from the United States.  Even a "centrist" administration will probably go along with selling the test abroad -- finding overseas markets for American products is a bipartisan priority.  Regressive and repressive governments also aren't much concerned with accuracy; a few false positives leading to the execution of non-gay individuals would hardly bother them much.  Where do they find these people?

And yes, of course there are parents who'd be interested in such a test.  Since most antigay bigots reject biological-determinist explanations of homosexuality, one could mock them for using a test based on a biological-determinist explanation of homosexuality.  Bigots are quite comfortable with biological-determinist theories that support their bigotry, and besides, better to be safe than sorry.  In the hypothetical case I outlined above, of parents taking their child to the doctor to be tested for homosexuality, they could still follow up by trying to beat the Gay out of him or her.  I haven't noticed that inconsistency bothers many people.

Dean Hamer, in his New Scientist piece, claimed that "such work won’t worsen homophobia. People who understand the role of biology in sexuality are more likely to be accepting and inclusive." It's a bit odd, really, to find a scientist reassuring the public that there's nothing to worry about because the science doesn't work yet.  The usual line in scientific evangelism is that you can't stop the forward march of Knowledge, and if we can't detect gays with a saliva test today, we'll be able to do so Real Soon Now.

Even forgetting people like Günter Dörner, the German endocrinologist who "classified homosexuality as a 'central nervous pseudohermaphroditism'" resulting from low levels of male hormone in homosexual males, it isn't only "people who understand the role of biology in sexuality" that we have to worry about -- it's the people who don't understand the role of biology in sexuality.  But that group includes a lot of scientists working in the field.

For example, the NBC story that Queerty used as a source for their post included this significant passage:

Dr. Margaret McCarthy, who studies the developing brain at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said epigenetic changes could happen while a fetus is developing. 

"Developing male fetuses produce very high quantities of testosterone during the second trimester and this directs psychosexual development along masculine lines, a component of which is preference for females as sexual partners," McCarthy said in a statement.

"This study provides a major step forward in our understanding of how the brain can be affected by factors outside of the genome. It is also possible that the experience of being a homosexual or a heterosexual has itself impacted the epigenetic profile. But regardless of when, or even how, these epigenetic changes occur, their findings demonstrate a biological basis to partner preference."

It appears that Dr. McCarthy accepts the popular scientific notion that male homosexuals are in some way feminized, since we have a preference for males as sexual partners, instead of females as "masculine" psychosexual development would produce.  But she's wrong about the effects of hormones, which produce not partner preferences but, at most, roles in sexual behavior: lordotic males who present themselves to be mounted by partners of either sex (or a researcher's finger stroking their backs), female who mount partners of either sex.  They don't explain why a 'normal' male would mount a lordotic male, or a 'normal' female present to a masculinized female.  (This behavior has nothing to do with human homosexuality, but pointing that out would undermine their claims to explain human homosexuality.)  I can't see where McCarthy got the idea that Ngun's "findings demonstrate a biological basis to partner preference," because they demonstrate nothing of the kind.  It's certain that biology provides a "basis" for sexual behavior, as it provides a basis for language and other cultural phenomena; without bodies (biology) these phenomena wouldn't occur.  But the variations in language, culture, and sexuality have not been shown to be determined by biological differences.  But environment and culture also provide a basis for sexual behavior.  The bogus nature/nurture divide is still active in the scientific community.

Many scientists are naive, to put it nicely, about the motives of the people to whom they hand over the new toys they've invented.  Even a low-tech intervention like abortion can be used to bigoted ends, as when it's used to prevent the birth of daughters -- especially when it's combined with higher technology that allows the sex of the embryo to be known during gestation.  It might be acceptable to push for a saliva test that detects homosexuality if it had some positive use, but no one seems to have any idea what that would be, and there are plenty of negative consequences that are all too plausible and likely.

Hamer also brushed aside concerns about a test: "... Ngun’s work does not amount to a sexual orientation test. Even if it can be replicated in more twins with highly correlated methylation patterns, it is unlikely to work in unrelated members of the public."  Why is Hamer so negative?  Doesn't he have faith in scientific progress?  Just because we can't do something now doesn't mean we won't be able to do it later!

So what is the value of Ngun's work, even dismissing all the criticisms of its weaknesses (weaknesses that also characterized the research that made Hamer famous, as it happens)?  Hamer wrote, "My fear is that the furore stirred up will inhibit it. That would be a pity, because sexual orientation is one of the most fundamental and fascinating variations in humanity that we can study."  I disagree with him on both those counts.  I don't think that sexual orientation is particularly fascinating or fundamental, any more than differences in skin color are.  If, as various streams of the LBGT movement have argued, homosexuality is just not a big deal, not a difference that matters to individuals' value or capacity as human beings, then how is it "fundamental"?  One of the points of the Kinsey scale is that homosexuals and homosexuals can be thought of as different in degree, rather than in kind.  Is a Kinsey 2 fundamentally different from a Kinsey 3 or 4?  Where do you draw the line?  For that matter, why is a difference in sexual orientation more fundamental or fascinating than the fact that people are not equally attracted (or attracted at all) to all people of a given sex?  I'm not attracted to all men, and I'm often not attracted to men whom other men desire fiercely.  That looks to me like a more fundamental difference than sexual orientation, but scientists like Hamer don't seem to find it fascinating.  (It's a difference that they either try to overlook, or try to explain by claiming that some people are inherently more attractive, on evolutionary grounds.)

Is a difference in sexual orientation more "fundamental," say, than a difference in language or religion?  Such differences have been taken to be important, to be markers of fundamental human difference worth fighting and killing over, but they are not.  I think it needs to be argued, not postulated, that sexual orientation is fundamental.  Hamer assumes that differences in "sexual orientation" are both fundamental to the individual, and must (therefore?) be based in the genes in some carefully nonspecific way.  Even if he were right about this, decisions of funding need more than his dogmatic assurances, which seem to be motivated by PR aims to justify supporting the work.

Another notorious researcher takes the same tack:

“The scientific benefit to understanding [why people vary in sexual orientation] is obvious to anyone with an iota of curiosity,” says Michael Bailey at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “The predictive test needs replication on larger samples in order to know how good it is, but in theory it’s quite interesting.”

What I find interesting is that Bailey reads Ngun's study in a way diametrically opposed to Hamer: Hamer dismisses the possibility of a "predictive test," while Bailey sees it as feasible as well as "quite interesting" in theory.  He doesn't seem to have a valid use for it, though. And neither Bailey nor Hamer seems to have noticed the serious flaws in Ngun's study listed by Ed Yong at The Atlantic, which indicates a lack of important analytic skills on both their parts.  Other than that, Bailey can only handwave that it's obvious that understanding variation in sexual orientation has a scientific benefit.  Maybe it has a benefit, maybe not, but that's not obvious.  As Noam Chomsky wrote decades ago about American race-science bearing on intelligence:

A possible correlation between mean IQ and skin color is of no greater scientific interest than a correlation between any two other arbitrarily selected traits, say, mean height and color of eyes. The empirical results, whatever they might be, appear to have little bearing on any issue of scientific significance. In the present state of scientific understanding, there would appear to be little scientific interest in the discovery that one partly heritable trait correlates (or not) with another partly heritable trait. Such questions might be interesting if the results had some bearing, say, on some psychological theory, or on hypotheses about the physiological mechanisms involved, but this is not the case. Therefore the investigation seems of quite limited scientific interest, and the zeal and intensity with which some pursue or welcome it cannot reasonably be attributed to a dispassionate desire to advance science. It would, of course, be foolish to claim, in response, that “society should not be left in ignorance.” Society is happily “in ignorance” of insignificant matters of all sorts. And with the best of will, it is difficult to avoid questioning the good faith of those who deplore the alleged “anti-intellectualism” of the critics of scientifically trivial and socially malicious investigations. On the contrary, the investigator of race and intelligence might do well to explain the intellectual significance of the topic he is studying, and thus enlighten us as to the moral dilemma he perceives. If he perceives none, the conclusion is obvious, with no further discussion.

... The question of heritability of IQ might conceivably have some social importance, say, with regard to educational practice. However, even this seems dubious, and one would like to see an argument. It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society? [from For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 361-362]

Subtitute "sexual orientation" for "intelligence" here, and you have some very good reasons to be skeptical of Hamer's, Bailey's and others' enthusiasm for trying to find a biological basis of sexual orientation.  I can understand why laypeople want to know why we are the way we are, but I see no reason to fund scientific research to understand why people differ from each other.  (Why am I left-handed?  Why am I gay?  Why am I an atheist?  Why am I taller than both my parents and all of my younger brothers?  Why are some people darker-skinned than others?  Why am I attracted to this man, but not to that one?)

Hamer comes closest to offering a scientific rationale for such research: "... I am more intrigued by what the work tells us about the role of epigenetic imprinting – the silencing of genes by methylation. This imprint can pass from parent to child and has implications for a range of complex human traits."  Apparently, though, "epigenetic imprinting -- the silencing of genes by methylation" is relevant to "a range of complex human traits," not just sexual orientation.  There's no particular reason why it should apply to homosexuality (or to heterosexuality), except that traditional forms of biological determinism have failed and We've Got to Do Something.  If I recall correctly, Hamer is one of those gay scientists, like Simon LeVay, who try to justify their research by claiming that it would support gay equality in some obscure fashion.  But gay equality doesn't depend on our being born gay, and finding a role for epigenetic imprinting is not likely to persuade bigots.  What this research mainly shows is that scientists like Hamer don't really understand the role of biology in human behavior and culture -- that is, what it means, socially and ethically and politically, for some trait to be "biological" and "not a choice."

I suspect that Tuck Ngun had never thought about possible social consequences of his work until controversy erupted over his announcement.  If I'm right about that, then his scientific education failed him decisively.  (But then, if bioethicists like Alice Dreger were doing the teaching, it could hardly have done otherwise.)  Judging from the pronouncements of people like Dean Hamer, bioethics in practice largely means finding ways to ward off criticism and get more funding for badly designed research of little or no scientific value.  (Remember that Hamer also wrote a book called The God Gene, arguing for a genetic basis for religion; I don't know who was responsible for that title, but Hamer's in no position to complain that laypeople have inaccurate ideas about genetic determination when he's fostering them himself.)  But then there will always be gay people who will clamor for badly designed research of little or no scientific value that will make them feel less bad about being gay.  Where there's demand, there will be suppliers.

Because My Heart Is Pure

The most valuable lesson to be learned from Sam Harris's recent e-mail exchange with Noam Chomsky is that two atheists, both champions of science and of Enlightenment values and rationality, can disagree vehemently on issues they both consider to be of first importance.  This might seem obvious enough, but I noticed that some of the coverage failed to grasp it.  The first notice I saw of their exchange was this article from Salon, was subtitled "How the professor knocked out the atheist." That Chomsky is also an atheist is hardly obscure; whoever wrote that headline was trying to create an illusion of more space between the combatants.

I consider this more important than who "won."  Not too surprisingly, there was little agreement about that question, with Harris's fans sure that Harris won, or at least that Chomsky lost because he was mean and rude to Harris, and Chomsky's fans sure that Chomsky won, mopping up the floor with Harris.  Or "undressed" Harris, as one notably wacky headline put it.  (The headline stayed with the post as it was cross-posted to several sites.)  Elsewhere I learned that Chomsky bitchslapped Harris, that he owned him,  and so on.  PZ Myers provided a round-by-round, punch-by-punch commentary on the exchange.  So did Susan of Texas.  Those who haven't yet seen the exchange, and are interested, could begin there. I'd prefer not to link to Harris's original blog post, just because he doesn't deserve any more traffic; you can find it easily with a simple online search if you wish.

What interests me here is Harris's recent postmortem on the encounter, in which he lamented that "Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do":

Harris said he had hoped to learn what Chomsky actually believes about the ethics of intent, and he hoped his own arguments would steer leftists away from their “masochistic” tendencies.

He said Chomsky’s followers believe the U.S. was morally worse than ISIS because it had, through “selfishness and ineptitude,” created ISIS and victimized millions of people in other nations.

“This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left,” Harris said. “I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise.

... Harris complained that he encountered “contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language” throughout his exchange with Chomsky – and he now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly.

...“I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people that I’ve been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one.”

I agree that the conversation was instructive, though probably not for the reasons Harris thinks.  Harris initiated the exchange by telling Chomsky that "I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate."  (Harris was being disingenuous about that, since he'd announced on Twitter that he was "trying to arrange a debate with Noam Chomsky".) The ensuing conversation clarified Harris's misunderstandings very effectively, and his follow-up remarks are even more instructive.

When Harris first contacted Chomsky, he now reveals, he didn't really think he had anything to learn from him.  He was already certain that he had the True Gnosis, and if given access to what he regarded as Chomsky's cult of devotees, he could expose Chomsky's "misreadings" and free his cult from their "masochistic" view of US policy and conduct.  It's ironic that he should complain of "contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language" from Chomsky, because that describes his own contributions so very well.  Though Chomsky explained, with amazing patience really, why he disagreed with Harris, Harris simply brushed his explanations aside and repeated his original claims -- but repetition is not argument.

The accusation of masochism, which is very nearly content-free, is especially interesting.  No one, Harris believes, could have any good reasons for judging US policy as harshly as Chomsky does, so he and his followers must be suffering from some sort of mental dysfunction.  The tactic may be connected to Harris's interest in neuroscience, which is being used nowadays to explain away all human behavior as the result of conditions within the brain, not to any external (social, political, intellectual) factors.  Those who adopt this tactic (or other reductive pseudo-explanations) never pause to consider that, if this were true, it would apply as forcefully to themselves and to neuroscience itself as to everyone else.  It would mean, for example, that Harris's stance on Islam, as well as his politics generally and his atheism in particular, is also merely the product of some kink in his synapses, not because of his superior intellect.

It also has another consequence.  Suppose that all the Muslims in the world suddenly acknowledged that Harris is right that Islam is an inherently violent cult, renounced faith in favor of atheism, and blamed Islam for everything wrong in the Middle East and in the world.  Would that be "masochism" in Harris's eyes?  I don't see how it could be anything else.  But perhaps Harris believes that Muslims are Muslims due to some neurobiological defect, so they are incapable of change, and must (however regretfully -- we're all humane and well-intentioned here!) be exterminated.  Since Harris's view of Islam is so clearly irrational, perhaps it should be diagnosed as "sadism."

Clearly Harris hoped to leapfrog over Chomsky and speak directly to his followers, bringing them the Healing Light that he uniquely has to offer.  Now, I know that, like most well-known people (Harris included), Chomsky has some fans who are devotees, who parrot his opinions without understanding them.  But I don't see any reason to believe that this is true of all of them.  Many of them have ties to various traditions of political dissent: pacifism, antiwar, international solidarity, and so on.  I formed my views on the Vietnam war, for example, based on the evidence, long before I read Chomsky's writings.  I liked them because they fit with everything else I knew.  I disagree with him on some matters, and have written about some of those at length.  I've observed that despite the accusation, popular in certain circles, that Chomsky tolerates no disagreement, he can be disagreed with if you have some idea of what you're talking about; witness the disagreements between him and Gilbert Achcar in their lengthy conversations on the Middle East, for example.  So if Chomsky's fans don't immediately accept Sam Harris's Love Gift of Wisdom, they may well have reasons other than mere "masochism."

Harris's position on morality is often described as consequentialist, including (albeit ambivalently) by himself.  Like most such classifications, consequentialism isn't all that clear-cut, but it apparently boils down to "the view that an action is right if and only if its total outcome is the best possible. This is the basic form of consequentialism; there are, however, many varieties, a few of which will be noted below. What they all have in common is that consequences alone should be taken into account when making judgements about right and wrong."  If so, then Harris is an odd kind of consquentialist, because he insists to Chomsky that intent (American intent, anyway) is vitally important, and it seems to trump every other consideration for him.  No matter how horrible the outcome of US conduct, it's still better than anything anyone else does, because the United States *

are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and [Arundhati] Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

"The perfect weapon" is a totally imaginary concept, a weapon that can kill only bad guys without harming any good guys in the slightest.  Harris fantasizes that US officials would gladly use the Perfect Weapon if they could, thus avoiding any collateral damage whatever, and that bad guys (Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, whoever) would reject it even if they were offered it, because they are totally Evil and like hurting innocent people.  How he knows this is not clear.  But since the Perfect Weapon doesn't exist, this is a purely speculative exercise, which is revealing given Harris's professed disdain for metaphysics and other boring, airy-fairy logic-chopping.

In the real world, we must consider how people use the imperfect weapons they have.  And oddly, Harris is rhetorically ready to concede that the United States is less than perfect.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. ... The result [of our actions] should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Taken out of context, these remarks could be taken to accuse Harris of surrender-monkey American-self hating masochism.  But his concession has no consequences.  Like any exceptionalist (Rachel Maddow is another well-known example) Harris simply refuses to admit that "our misdeeds" might lead to anger and retaliation by our victims, especially since even if the US should atone and pay reparations for our crimes, in fact we never do.  We just keep killing and killing and killing.

Rather than a consequentialist, then, Harris appears to be quite the opposite.  America is good, not because of the consequences of our actions, which are in fact often quite bad, but because we mean well.  Our intentions not only need to be weighed along with the outcome, but they trump everything else. And we know this, not because of any evidence, but simply a priori, as a matter of faith.  Chomsky and others have rebutted Harris's claims about American good intentions, but the rebuttals bounce harmlessly off Harris's armor of true belief.  Evidence?  Reason?  Harris laughs your evidence and reason to scorn, because he knows.

To acknowledge that our actions might have consequences is not to justify any and all retaliation, as exceptionalists like to claim.  What it means is that we cannot make a great show of injured innocence when the chickens come home to roost.  I don't think that the 9/11 attacks were justified, any more than Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for the Vietnamese to invade and conquer the US when he called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967.  If Harris had any principles, it would be he and others like him who called for the destruction of America for its manifold crimes; but he has no principles. America, that "well-intentioned giant," can do whatever we like, because we're the good guys.

One other small matter.  Harris whined about the limitations of e-mail, the medium through which he Chomsky communicated.

I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.

I've been on the receiving end of this sort of passive-aggressive nonsense myself: people who clashed with me in a public forum "reached out" via e-mail, in the apparent belief that in public discussion I'm just putting on a show and in a private exchange I'll admit that I don't really believe anything I say in public.  I wonder if such people are projecting; in some cases it seems they are.  "Tedious" does describe Harris's conduct in his correspondence with Chomsky, but of course he projects onto the Other.  What, I wonder, did Harris prefer?  Does he think he'd have done any better face-to-face?  Maybe have a brewski with the Noamster and just be two regular guys together?  The trouble wasn't that e-mail inhibits communication, it was that Harris wasn't interested in communicating: he was going to preach, and Chomsky was supposed to listen, and marvel, and be saved along with all his household.  In my experience it's usually Christians who talk like this.

Notice also how in Harris's followup he "now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly."  That's one of the benefits of having this sort of exchange in writing, including e-mail: you can take your time, consider your next move in relative tranquility, and even delay your response until you've had time to think it over.  But Harris isn't, on the evidence, interested in thinking.

* I'm relying on Susan of Texas's quotations from Harris here, not from Harris's original post, but the quotations are accurate; you can follow the links to his blog if you want to check them.

** Here I'm copying PZ Myers' quotation from Harris, under "Round 8."