Norm,

I’m sure that there are some drug cartels paying off cops somewhere; that’s what underground business operations tend to do. But as far as the topic of discussion goes — that is, the increasing aggressiveness and militarization of local police forces — the really payoffs here are coming from none other than the United States federal government, which has spent the past few decades as the prime sponsor, trainer, and supplier for paramilitary SWAT squads, “elite” task forces, and local patrol cops, through the mechanism of tax-funded federal grants, special training seminars and collaboration initiatives with federal law enforcement agencies, surplus equipment sales, etc. And while counter-terrorism and other so-called “Homeland Security” projects are now a driving factor in this process, the chief driving factor, over the past 30-40 years, has been the War on Drugs itself. If you want an explanation of why small-town police are increasingly trained to be belligerent, have the equipment and the desire to conduct paramilitary SWAT raids at the drop of a hat, are taking on larger and more powerful assault weapons just for ordinary patrols, and generally act like a case study of collective roid rage, it’s precisely because the Federalis have been juicing them for the past 30-40 years in order to use them as foot soldiers in the enforcement of federal drug policy.

GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in Uniform #3: Six women have come forward in the past four months about being subjected to unnecessary and humiliating strip searches at the hands of the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department. The most recent, Elizabeth was coerced into removing her clothes even though she never said she was suicidal, and left locked in her cell, naked, for eight hours. She’s now afraid to give her last name or show her face in press interviews, because she’s afraid of retaliation against herself or her family for speaking out.

Sheriff Tim Swanson says it was all done By The Book, which is apparently supposed to mean that it was O.K. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Stark County sheriff’s deputies are repeatedly using strip searches as a form of retaliation, to control and punish women they find uppity, unruly, or otherwise troublesome, under color of the law, and then, to crown all, to insult their victims by saying they did it all For Her Own Good.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that part of the reason Mumia Abu Jamal personally got so much attention has to do with simple organizational dynamics.

Mumia was a Black Panther and then a well-known activist and radical journalist in Philadelphia. He was a member of a number of groups, and in contact with a number of other groups, which (out of necessity) already had well-developed mutual aid and support networks for imprisoned members. That gave him a number of pre-existing and pre-organized advocates, and, not coincidentally, he also got a good lawyer (Leonard Weinglass) with a history of making hay out of politically-charged court cases. All that, combined with his own gifts as a writer and a speaker, and his ongoing stream of writing and speaking from death row, kept his case on the radar long enough for it to be picked up and talked up at length by high-profile supporters like Rage Against the Machine. (Mumia’s history as a Black Panther also helped him out a lot here, since the anarchist revival in the late 1990s brought a lot of sympathetic attention to the Panthers and other radical New Left groups.)

As far as I know, Cory Maye had no real pre-existing support network other than his family, until Balko started writing about the case. Given the situation, frankly, the amount that Radley Balko has been able to accomplish single-handedly on this case, without any significant pre-existing network behind Cory Maye, is inspiring and nothing short of heroic.

This may not entirely explain why Mumia in particular got so much more attention than even other Leftist “political prisoners” in similar circumstances (e.g. Jamil Al-Amin, or Leonard Peltier). I expect that part of it is just that these cases come and go in popularity, and Mumia’s came in at a time when the radical and anarchist Left had (for other reasons) was making a momentary and unusual flash appearance in pop culture. Before Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, Leonard Peltier’s case had been The Big Thing, but the people supporting him didn’t have much media presence. After Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, other cases became The Big Thing in leftist activist circles, but by then the post-9/11 regimentation of popular culture was going on, and things in the media were settling back down to the old permanent war-footing pattern, which required erasing the radical Left.

As far as the “murkiness” of the case goes, personally, I’ve never made any serious attempt to find out whether or not Mumia Abu Jamal shot that cop. Reason being that I don’t care. I’m not Mumia’s priest and I’m not his lawyer either, so my only concerns in this case are (1) that the State shouldn’t murder him in retaliation, no matter what he may or may not have done; and (2) that if he did shoot a cop in an attempt to defend his brother from getting arrested, he was probably justified in doing so. Of course, that’s an argument that you can’t make in court these days, so understandably, but unfortunately, most of the people lined up behind him exhaust a lot of time and energy on arguments that are really, morally and politically speaking, irrelevant.

Micha:

Lots of intelligent redistributionist socialists argue along the same lines; it’s not that they don’t understand how markets and spontaneous orders work; they simply don’t care ….

Right, which is why they don’t provide a good example of someone who falls back on government causes of poverty by explanatory default, either. Their position is wrong, but not because they (like biological creationists) fail to understand the concept of spontaneous self-organizing systems.

Serious Marxist theory, for example, actually involves quite sophisticated use of the concept of spontaneous order in explaining the emergence, sustenance, internal conflicts, and ultimate collapse of the capitalist class structure. (The idea is certainly not that all the evil capitalists got together in a big meeting and made a big plan for taking over the world and exploiting the workers. Any serious Marxist theorist would very quickly trash a theory like that as a form of “utopian socialism” and a case study in “bourgeois individualism.”) Of course, most of serious Marxist theory (as well as Cohen’s egalitarianism) is wrong, but it’s wrong for reasons other than being somehow “creationist.”

There are lots of people who do fail to get the concept, but they’re mostly concentrated among the most vulgar of vulgar Marxists, and the usual lot of nativist pseudo-populists, economic conservatives, and Social Democrats who take up most of the space in mainstream American political debate. None of whom, as far as I can recall, have ever leaned much on the government as a supposed cause of poverty or socioeconomic inequality. (Conservatives who make the typical conservative arguments against AFDC/TANF and other forms of government welfare may be an exception; but they don’t claim that urban poverty is being caused by deliberate government efforts to create it. And they rarely say that poverty as such is caused by government action. They take urban poverty as we know it more or less for granted and then claim that government welfare programs make it worse.)

John:

We already did that and we ended up throwing people out on the streets who were completely unable to take care of themselves.

Allowing people to leave when they want to leave is not the same thing as “throwing people out on the streets.” If someone is completely unable to take care of herself, it’s fine in my book for you to try to help them out. What’s not fine is forcing your “help” on her against her will.

We also filled our prisons with the mentally ill.

Transferring people from one prison to another is not what I advocate.

Deinstitutionalization was one of the biggest crimes of the last 50 years.

Compared to camphor-shock therapy? Electroconvulsive therapy? The ice-pick lobotomy?

Bullshit.

Eric Hannekan:

Hm. It sounds like he’s suggesting “mental therapy vouchers,” dispensed by a judge to those he deems mentally ill.

No, I’m suggesting that involuntary commitment be abolished, and that judges and other government officials be removed from the psychotherapeutic process entirely.

If you want to get together a voluntarily-funded charity or mutual aid society that covers the costs of psychotherapy, possibly including hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, then you should be free to do so, but one of the chief points that I’m trying to stress is that government officials and political power need to be kept as far away from psychiatry as possible.

Tacos:

One of the issues that arises in treatment of the mentally ill is that many patients have little or no insight into their own illness. You can’t expect all mentally ill people to recognize that they are even ill, much less recognize that they need to seek help.

Many people with diabetes or human papilloma virus have little or no insight into their own illness, and many may not even recognize that they are ill. Yet very few people are willing to imprison diabetics or HPV carriers and force “treatment” on them without their consent.

This might be seen as an improvement on the surface, but in reality if the patient is convinced that pyschiatrists are trying to implant a transmitter in his brain, his ability to choose between facilities might be somewhat impaired.

Ah, paternalism.

I know of some cases of people with cancer who chose to go for quack “therapies” rather than submitting to the usual regimen of treatment. Sometimes at the cost of their own lives, and often on the basis of beliefs that are no less irrational than the delusions common among certain people labeled as “schizophrenic.” Yet people who believe stupid or crazy things about magic cancer cures are not forced to undergo chemotherapy or radiation therapy against their will. If they were it would be more or less universally considered an atrocity, even if putatively forced on them “for their own good.”

What, if anything, do you think explains this difference in treatment? What, if anything, do you think justifies it?

For example, if some have much more wealth than others, the socioeconomic creationist believes that this is the product of government policies specifically designed to transfer wealth from the many to the few, rather than the natural result of market transactions between people of disparate abilities and preferences.

Well. Isn’t it empirically true that there are specific government policies which, either through design or through unintended consequences, tend to profit the rich, hinder and impoverish the poor, or do both at the same time? If you doubt it, I can name some examples.

Can you think of any actual examples of people who fall back on the claim that poverty is substantially caused by government policies, rather than by voluntary market forces, who do so because they’re simply unable to understand how spontaneous orders work? Every proponent of such a claim that I can think of (Kevin Carson, Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Gabriel Kolko…) is relatively clear on the notion of spontaneous order; they get to the conclusion that government policies cause poverty not by explanatory default, but rather because they can point to a bunch of concrete examples of government policies that really do this.

In my experience, most of the real “socioeconomic creationists” with regard to wealth, tend to attribute poverty to tightly coordinated conspiracies (“international bankers” and the like), or else to the personal greed and vices of individual business people, not to structural factors like government policy.

If the average man makes more than the average woman, the socioeconomic creationist concludes that this must be due to the misogynistic oppression of women, rather than the natural outcome of men and women having different preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities.

You seem to be presupposing that “misogynistic oppression of women” and “spontaneous order” are two mutually exclusive explanations of the situation. But why make that claim? There’s nothing in the concept of a spontaneous order that requires that all spontaneous orders be benign. It may be that if certain kinds of ignorance, folly, or vice are widely distributed throughout the population, then lots of little individual acts of stupidity or evil will, without the design of the participants, add up to a large-scale, malign spontaneous order that goes beyond the intentions of the participants.

“Preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities” aren’t the only factors that can contribute to the individual decisions from which a spontaneous order emerges. And not all “preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities” are independent of prevalent prejudices and traditions, either.

In other words, “right but I want to quibble”.

“Right” about what? It’s true that Micha was using the term “naturalistic fallacy” in a sense other than the sense in which Moore used it. (Specifically, he used it to refer to arguments that infer something about the moral status of something from its naturalness.) But I don’t have any basic problem with that kind of loose usage as long as it doesn’t interfere with accurately understanding what Moore meant by the term when he used it. The “quibble,” such as it is, is aimed to clarify how Moore himself used the term. Which is not an issue that Micha raised, or one that’s particularly important to assessing his argument; it’s an issue that you raised in the course of a reply to him.

It’s certainly true that the issue of what Moore coined the term “naturalistic fallacy” to mean is tangential to this conversation. But misrepresentations of his view, especially those that are very common and very misleading, are worth correcting anyway, in the interest of accuracy.

I read him right without the benefit of seeing his later explanation

Well, no; what he said is that by “natural” he means those things which arise from a “spontaneous order.” But that explanation is itself ambiguous, depending on whether he means strictly a “voluntary order” (which may very well be designed), or instead an “undesigned order” (which may very well be involuntary), or both. Libertarian writers have often used the term “spontaneous order” to refer to either, or both, or have simply equivocated between the two different meanings from one use to the next.

If he means the former, you read him right; but then the claim is unresponsive to what it was supposed to respond to. And, since that interpretation is unresponsive, it made sense for Micha to suggest, out of motives of charity, a more responsive reading.

If he means the latter, you read him wrongly, and the claim is somewhat more responsive to Francois; but then it is underargued and almost surely false.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that your reading of him is “off the wall;” I’m not even claiming that it’s wrong. My point is that whether you read his claim rightly or read it wrongly, the claim doesn’t get Arthur very far either way vis-a-vis his interlocutors.

Constant:

So, is my preference for a female secretary (assuming I have one) sexist,

Probably, but as I said, I don’t know. What’s the reason for your preference? I can imagine sexist, anti-sexist, and sexism-neutral reasons for preferring hiring a woman (as such) rather than a man. Without knowing which one is hypothetically yours, I can’t answer the question.

and if it is, is that immoral?

Yes, if it is, it is (therefore) immoral.

Constant:

Is it sexist for a man to lust after women?

Depends on what you mean, I guess. If you’re asking whether it’s sexist when the particular people you’re sexually attracted to all turn out to be women, then no, I’m not claiming that. If you’re asking whether it’s sexist to lust, more or less indiscriminately, after “women,” due to some kind of attitude towards femininity in general, then that may well be sexist. In any case it’s immoderate and objectifying.

More to the point, while being male and heterosexual is not, as such, sexist, there are a lot of things commonly associated with heterosexual male “lust” for women, as it is actually felt and expressed in the society we live in, that are sexist. For example, preferring to surround yourself with women in subordinate positions to you so that you can ogle them or sexually harass them is fairly sexist, and, as I said, fairly sleazy.

If one’s preference for associating with women rather than with men in a particular context is based on different reasons, then who knows? It may well be neither sexist nor sleazy.

Left-anarchists can not realistically change the hierarchy in male / female relationships without some heavy social engineering requiring heavy coercion.

I don’t think that the empirical evidence points very strongly toward the conclusion that anti-sexism would require a continuous process of “heavy social engineering.” (It would take heavy social engineering to get from where we are to an anti-sexist society, but as I see it, that’s because it took heavy social engineering to get to where we are, not because there is some perennial in-born basis for structuring social relationships in terms of sex-class.)

But suppose you’re right. Suppose there is some in-born, perennial basis that will keep asserting itself in favor of hierarchical relationships structured by sex.

Does it follow that any attempt to combat that through “heavy social engineering” will require “heavy coercion?” Only if all forms of social engineering are coercive. But they’re not. For example, mass literacy is only possible through heavy and continuous “social engineering” aimed at teaching children how to do something quite difficult over a period of years. But does mass literacy require coercion? Not as far as I can see.

Does it follow that any attempt to combat that through “heavy social engineering” is necessarily foolish or wrong? Only if all forms of social engineering are foolish or wrong. But they’re not. Lots of forms of deliberate “social engineering” are extremely beneficial (for example, teaching children how to read), and become harmful only when they are accompanied by coercion. If there are independent reasons for thinking that sexual equality is a valuable goal, then even if it is true that social engineering would be required to achieve it, that provides a reason for practicing the social engineering, not a reason for abandoning sexual equality as a goal. If there is some independent reason for rejecting sexual equality as a valuable goal, or for concluding that the costs of the social engineering processes outweigh the benefit to be gained from it, then certainly that’s a reason either to reject anti-sexism in principle or to reject efforts to implement it on a structural level in contemporary life. But you first have to produce those independent reasons; just pointing to some discovery about what human beings may or may not be naturally inclined to do won’t cut the ice you’re trying to cut.