Are you still beating your wife?

In the recent conundrum between Breitbart and the NAACP, everyone seems to be marking their scorecard differently. First is Shirley Sherrod, though I think most people are fairly well in agreement here. She was not actually the racist that she was painted as being based on the short video clip, and it was absolutely wrong for her superior to demand her resignation. The full video has been released, and it clearly shows that her anecdote was a point of revelation, wherein her thoughts on race distinction did her a disservice, and she came to realize the importance of looking past race. Assertions at the beginning of the clip that suggest her story pertains to her current work at the USDA are shown to be patently false. Fortunately, she managed to find herself in the midst of a controversy sufficiently volatile that the previous wrongs were largely righted, and though she suffered a horribly stressful week, it would seem that she has found her ultimate redemption and is now very secure in her position. She has been offered her job back, and hopefully she will resume her position soon.

Next is Andrew Breitbart, who stirred up the matter by posting the incomplete video. Those who hate him have their excuse to call his work deception, and those who favor his position can freely see the point he says was his aim, that prior to the conclusion of Sherrod's story, the audience is receptive and amused by this idea of her abusing her power to play a game of "now the shoe is on the other foot." Seeing as how he's a pop advocate pundit rather than a journalist, this manner of publicity only works in his favor. The left is using the opportunity to revisit the matter of ACORN (who was pretty much single handedly destroyed by hidden video footage that Breitbart released), now pointing to the fact that no criminal charges were ever successfully prosecuted against the organization or its members as "proof" that the whole debacle was unfounded (as though the idea that there was no criminal wrong-doing ought to now lead us to ignore the simple truth that we've already seen in the videos). Regardless of whatever people like Maddow and Olbermann may hope, this entire circus only makes Breitbart more relevant—though I doubt there will be any midnight resignations the next time he unveils his next big controversy. I think we should all be grateful for that.

The Obama administration comes out of this exchange looking decidedly bad. Having to reverse a rapidly made decision to demand resignation is one of the greatest feats of political floundering in the eye of the media I've seen in my adult life, by far. Obama will not be directly touched, as this moved so quickly and stayed so far below him that he cannot be tied directly to the panicked reactions of Vilsack, who forced Sherrod to resign. My suspicions are that Obama emerged unscathed likely more due to good luck than good planning.

But the big question is, what of the Tea Party movement? This controversy emerged as Breitbart responded to the NAACP publicly calling for the leaders of the Tea Party movement to denounce racists in their ranks. Breitbart has long denied many of the accusations of racism in the Tea Party movement. When André Carson of the congressional black caucus accused a crowd of chanting the "N" word 15 times, Breitbart responded with a $10,000 reward for any evidence that the word was uttered at all by that crowd. Breitbart gave an ominous warning that he would release evidence of racism in the NAACP if they did not withdraw the challenge to the Tea Party to denounce racist members of the movement. Ultimately, he responded with the short video of Shirley Sherrod.

I find the challenge posed by the NAACP to this leaderless rabble of Tea Party activists to be an absurd ploy. Much as my title to this entry suggests, this is a classic loaded challenge: if any Tea Party "leaders" (and I use the term very loosely) take the bait and seek to denounce racism in their ranks, then the NAACP and its associated race-baiters can take that as a victory in the form of a tacit admission that racism is truly a part of the movement, and one significant enough to require explicit condemnation. Conversely, any failure to resoundingly denounce categorically racist elements of the Tea Party movement may be interpreted as an approval of racist sentiment. The challenge posed to the Tea Party is innately under-handed and dishonest; it's a ploy designed to undermine one's political enemies rather than an honest attempt to root out racist sentiment. As such, I'm left thinking that the absurd hand-grenade that Breitbart threw into the mix was largely deserved by those who seek to polarize the debate and to foment paranoia for personal gain.

The challenge to denounce racism is, in my belief, unfounded. I can't really call myself a "Tea Partier," and I certainly have spent no time nor money contributing to the cause. I have, however, gone to one of the Town Hall meetings that I could attend. I did not get there early enough to get in the door, so I instead spent time walking through the large crowd of the excluded protesters from both sides. At the time, the big challenge to the movement was that it was Astroturf. This was the main challenge for which I sought evidence.

To that end, I'd say that all evidence pointed to the movement being truly grassroots. I think that this is largely conceded by the left these days, as the new term I've heard applied repeatedly over the course of the last week is "populist;" opponents have found a spin to make sure that the genuine nature of the movement is still regarded as a weakness. But I saw no racism whatsoever, and yes, I saw members of every race standing to oppose the passage of the health care overhaul (which was the center of the debate at that time). I saw one pack of fire-breathing evangelical Christians, but they belonged to neither side, and they were debating both sides. They seemed hell-bent on convincing the Tea Partiers that they were all going to go to hell for caring so much about fiscal policy while gays were running free and abortion remained safe and legal.

I did see depictions of Obama with a Hitler mustache. In fact, I saw the same picture that seems to have popped up across the country at Tea Parties everywhere. It is the one produced by the Lyndon LaRouche campaign. LaRouche is a perennial democratic candidate for president, and generally a conspiracy theorist from the coot fringe of the left. My first introduction to him came when at Berkeley I saw a debate between Mark Danner and William Kristol regarding the 2004 election. LaRouche's people decided to heckle both sides, and were ultimately removed by the police, to the applause of both the democrats and the republicans in the audience.

Even still, I'm at a total loss to understand why everyone would be having a fit about Obama/Hitler comparisons. I have attended protests for two events in my adult life. Apart from the aforementioned Tea Parties to protest the health care overhaul, I also took part in two massive marches in San Francisco prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What I can assure you is that the streets were full of Hitler/Nazi comparisons. "Bushitler" was a common contraction, and everywhere swastikas were used for the "S" in Bush. I never imagined that the idea could in any way be construed as racist then, no matter the race of the person holding the sign, and I certainly see no reason to regard such a comparison for Obama today as racist. And in point of fact, the two people I saw supporting LaRouche with their depictions of Obama as Hitler were both black.

But at the anti-war protests in 2003, I must say I saw far worse than mere violations of Godwin's Law. I saw many anarchists, many communists, and many Jihadi-supporters—all three groups tended to have many members with their faces covered by bandannas. They were not the majority, but there were many of them. There was also a popular pretzel meme going through the crowd, owing to the fact that Bush had recently come close to fatally choking on a pretzel. There were "Pretzel = Peace" signs, "Have another pretzel, Mr. President" signs, and my personal favorite, a huge peace sign made out of dough, baked and salted like a pretzel, held at the end of a stick as a sign. While I imagine those with such signs ranged from those who truly would have believed Bush deserved to die to those who simply thought it was a funny way to mock a widely-hated president, I cannot imagine that if any similar joke had been made regarding Obama by the Tea Party, the leftist press would have left it alone.

And that day, when Barbara Boxer, Barbara Lee, Martin Sheen, and Danny Glover took to the stage in front of San Francisco's city hall, none paused in the denunciation of the Bush administration to denounce the communists, anarchists, or Jihadi-sympathizers in the crowd. Nor should they have—it was a popular protest, not a uniform organization. It's absurd to expect that any such grassroots movement can possibly screen its membership. It gets worse when, as with the Tea Party movement, you have disinformation campaigns with leftist bloggers plotting to have leftists plant themselves in the Tea Party crowd to undermine the movement (Zomblog has some good coverage of this phenomenon, for those interested to question the matter).

Ultimately, I think that someone needs to stick a fork in the Tea Party movement—it's done. It made sense when it stood with a singular purpose of preventing the health care overhaul. but like the anti-war movement, it failed, and the damage is done. The lingering movement only makes itself available to hijacking by opportunists. MoveOn was initially created as a response to the impeachment of Clinton, with the idea being that a slap on the wrist should be given, but then congress should "move on" to more important matters than perjury in an investigation that never went to trial as the plaintiff could prove no damages. But it lingered, and subsequently became hijacked by any number of causes that were not even on the radar when the impeachment hearings were occurring. And nearly a decade after the impeachment failed and ended, MoveOn decided its mandate included accusing Gen. Patraeus of treason (of course, the fact that Patraeus was the best thing to happen to Iraq policy and that he was wisely retained by Obama has done nothing to drive MoveOn to admits its fault). Now, the Tea Party just serves to give clueless loudmouths that do not belong in the political dialogue (like Sarah Palin) more attention than they deserve.

But the Tea Party is not the only body that needs to be dissolved. The final vote for winners and losers in the Sherrod charade goes to the NAACP, and it is decidedly a vote against them. They have managed to simultaneously make themselves look bad by hosting racist sentiments (as the video does show approbation to discrimination against a white farmer well before the moral to the story becomes clear) as well as making themselves look bad by panicking and denouncing Sherrod when the full video was undoubtedly in their own archives, and the fact checking should have been a simple matter for them.

Let me make one thing abundantly clear: I am not in any way suggesting that racism no longer exists, or even that institutional racism no longer exists. Both are still a very big problem in this day and age. But the NAACP has lost sight of its founding vision, and it seems today the organization is far more devoted to creating controversy than addressing racism. The truth is that I first decided the NAACP should disband about a month ago, when I first saw a controversy over a greeting card. A greeting card for recent graduates featured a recording of two cartoon voices saying how the card recipient would take over the universe. At one point, it says: "And you black holes—you're so ominous! And you planets: watch your back!" This was misheard and believed to be saying something about "black whores" needing to watch their back. In the linked video, you can see that there are nine people standing behind a press conference to denounce Hallmark for releasing this completely innocuous—but misunderstood—greeting card. Rather than seek clarification first, in this matter which could be so easily cleared up (and for which Hallmark was more than happy to comply in pulling the card, despite no wrong-doing of any sort), we instead see nine people with apparently nothing better to do than start a tempest in a teacup and make a completely unfounded accusation.

This brings us to the question of what the NAACP is doing and what it seems to regard its mandate as being these days. Is there really no greater racism to which the NAACP can be turning its attention than a misheard greeting card?

Of course, the NAACP as an organization deserves a great deal of credit for the lack of true matters justifying its attention. I'm reminded of Mickey's Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is approached by those collecting for charity in the beginning. He responds that if you give money to the poor, they will not be poor anymore, and that will put the collectors out of a job. So Scrooge, refusing to put the two out of work on Christmas Eve gives them a wreath and tells them to be on their way. Of course, charity does not actually end poverty, and the reasoning employed in that scene is facetious. But the NAACP has the distinction of truly being an effective institution with true accomplishments to boast. Founded in 1909, the NAACP came about in a world with Jim Crow laws, and with lynchings continuing unprosecuted, where racist mobs literally killed people and the law did nothing to stop it. It was a horrendous time, and the need for the NAACP was great. It is to the NAACPs credit that so much of the scope of its mandate has been obliterated until misheard greeting cards could become top priority.

I'm reminded of the old saying (for which I cannot find an author): "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." This is the problem in today's NAACP: its devoted more to the perpetuation of the organization at this point than it is to addressing a known and identified problem worthy of its scope. It's hard to imagine any chair or CEO with a six-figure salary and commanding a multi-million dollar budget concluding that its mission was so thoroughly accomplished that the remaining vestiges of its mandate were all too small in scope and too scattered to be effectively addressed by the organization, and choosing to therefore disband said organization. It seems to me that the NAACP is now more devoted to creating the illusion that the problem it seeks to address is bigger than it actually is. Thus do we instead get false alarms like the greeting card or people thinking that the word niggardly has any etymological relation to the "N" word (it doesn't), hoaxes like Tawana Brawley or the Duke Lacrosse case, or empty and meaningless accusations with no foundation and no avenues of pursuit like the open challenge for the Tea Party to denounce racist members.

It seems to me like the best thing would be for us all to learn the lesson that Sherrod sought to convey in her speech, now heard across the country: it's no longer about black and white, it's about those who have money, power, and influence versus those who do not, and are subject to exploitation or injustice for their political irrelevance. If this is the bigger mandate, then perhaps this is an issue that should be pursued by organizations focusing on poverty and social justice, and the NAACP can just step aside.

However, if the NAACP seeks to continue to pursue the injustice that persists against American blacks, I might recommend a few instances of blatant racism left largely unaddressed. No one knows racially-charged hostilities these days so much as an American black conservative.

Keyser Soze meets Godwin

In all my time spent trying to figure out how one begins a blog, I’ve decided first to address some of the issues that I see in the nature of debate itself.

I love debate. I love it more than is good for me. It’s probably my main pastime, and I love it because I can learn so much through it. As such, it is important that I work to have meaningful contributors that care enough to read and respond—especially to disagree with me. As such, I address this first post, I would respond to something I read recently on a friend’s blog. He had made a list of views so far-out, and so wrong, that any time he should encounter such a view, that was the sign for discussion with that person to come to an immediate end.

My problem with that is the idea that any subject of debate is taboo.

Of course, I’ve definitely pissed away enough time arguing with some hard-headed idiotic time-burglars, but in my view, the times when debate are futile are denoted more by process than by content.

I see mainly two major things that are required: agreement on the approach to debate and the nature of rational discourse, and an understood degree of common ground in values. If you have those two things, then no idea that can be debated within that framework is, in my view, off limits.

Agreement on the approach to debate requires only a few things. You need to have a shared respect for logic, you need to agree that valid points deserve a response, that certain logical fallacies are useless, and that threats, shouting, etc. have no place.

Most illustrative of this idea to me was a former coworker over a decade back. I had said something about how my legs ached from the lunges I had been required to do in my weight training class. Raul responded, “You hurt, you lose.” I replied very simply that it was a good sort of ache, because it meant I knew I had done a good work out, and that pain was necessary for building muscle. Before I could finish this sentiment, he increased his volume to repeat, “YOU HURT, YOU LOSE! YOU HURT, YOU LOSE! Can’t change the rules—God makes the rules!” This fairly well exemplifies everything I hate about irrational discourse.

I hear the words “You hurt, you lose!” whenever I find myself with a person that is dedicated to hearing absolutely nothing of what the other person has to say.

To this, I’d add a few things. Appeals to authority are a common pitfall. Two devoted Jews/Christians/Muslims might agree with one another that the words of the Talmud/New Testament/Quran were valid as an argument. None of these would be able to make such an appeal between groups, and none of these approaches will pass with an agnostic or other person that subscribes to no Abrahamic faith. If you both agree, then more power to you. If you don’t, then there’s hardly any point in arguing with one another and using any such appeals. As such, I agree with most Americans that engage with people on generally secular grounds; my approach is one of logical positivism, loosely defined.

As for the second, we need to have common values. It’s one thing to argue an issue like living wills or abortion with a general understanding that both sides value life, happiness, quality of life, autonomy, dignity, and security. But if you think that we need to start putting old people on ice floes or you think that abortion should be legal until several years after birth because there are too many people, then there is a fundamental disconnect that makes any useful discourse impossible. If two people who believe in freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and prosperity want to debate whether Operation Iraqi Freedom was a good idea or a bad idea, they can. The person who approaches the question from the perspective of one who thinks America is an evil empire and needs to die, and that the death of all Americans would be a good thing, however, lacks any common ground upon which I can discuss ideas.

Tying these two issues together, I’d have to make a final point about Godwin’s Law. Common perception of Godwin’s law is that given enough time, someone will call someone a Nazi or make a comparison to Hitler, and thereby lose the argument, because such comparisons are such a lame thing to do. This has even been relabeled as the “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy.

I have a serious problem with this perspective. And here, I must invoke the great line delivered by Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) in The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

I get to feel at times as though people think that Hitler and that entire epoch was some fluke, like flipping a quarter and landing heads a million times in a row. That people think that the odds of something like that ever happening again—certainly in the Western Industrialized nations—is so negligibly low as to be essentially impossible.

This idea is a very dangerous idea. It is as dangerous as ideas come.

The truth is that the Nazis were not the exception to the rule. Liberal constitutional democratic republics are the true exceptions. They are very young as a general rule, fairly rare, and most tend to slide continually back into centralization and consolidation of power that destroys liberty and subverts self-determination. As the ashes of World War II settled and the light fell upon the atrocities of the Holocaust, we swore, “never again!” And then convinced of the idea that our resolve was as useful as action, we sat by as slaughters appeared again and again throughout the last half of the 20th century, from the Balkans, to Rwanda, to Cambodia.

And these abuses exist everywhere for the bulk of all history: the Mongol Horde to the Maori, Tasmania to South Africa, Ireland to the Caribbean, Armenia to Nanking. It is far, far easier to find examples of mass slaughter of innocents and systemic destruction of entire peoples than it is to pull forward examples of truly free constitutional republics.

As we tend to slap the label of Godwin’s Law on everything that touches the European theater of WWII, we come to diminish our ability to discuss things among the most important. I, for one, feel that we must be vigilant, and that this will ever require us to see the signs of oppression before they take root. How can we do this if we can’t talk about it? Why censor this end of debate?

As it happens, I imagine that many will regard such enforcement against violators of Godwin’s Law as a necessary response to the completely over-blown invocation of Nazi Germany. Why do we invoke it so much?

My own sense is that such overdone comparisons stem from the combination of the need to meet my second criteria—agreed upon values—and the plague of moral relativism that undermines our abilities to find common ground. Maybe America is the blight of the earth, and to use Adil Hoxha’s phrase, “the machinery of capitalism is oiled with the blood of the workers.” Maybe the Czar was so horrendous that Lenin and Stalin’s ends justified their means. Maybe human sacrifice among the Aztecs and Maya was an honor and people wanted to be slaughtered to appease their thirsty gods. Maybe it’s all just our imperialistic Eurocentric Christian dogmatism that leads us to fail to understand the perspectives of these different cultures.

When you hit that wall, what can you do? How can you find the common ground needed to discuss a matter as trivial as tariffs or traffic laws with a person whose values are so disconnected from your own that they would justify such senseless slaughters? The answer, of course is the Holocaust. In the US, you can try to take any side you want in any war in history or today. You can hate on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Reagan, and any other American you want. You can justify the decisions of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hirohito, Pol Pot, Castro, or Ho Chi Minh all you want. But Hitler is off-limits. He’s a bad man, and everyone in this country has to appreciate the enormity of the Holocaust. If you want the quick route to common ground, then Hitler is the fastest and surest road to get there.

In the end, I think it’s best to avoid excessive comparisons to Hitler if for no other reason than the dangers of trivializing such a matter. But I will not avoid it wholesale or decide that any comparisons to Nazi Germany are off limits. Instead, I’ll articulate my values so that trivial invocations become unnecessary.

I believe in liberty. Not “freedom,” with all of FDR’s “freedom froms” which serve as a justification for further encroachments on liberty. I believe in family, hard work, discipline, and integrity (though I do not claim to be a model in exercising all such virtues). I believe in distributed control and freedom on conscience. I believe in the sanctity of human life and human dignity alike.