Comments Elsewhere

Here is a story of yet another couple standing up for workers/citizens rights in this country. There exists no law in the United States requiring an individual to pay a tax on his/her labor, also know as “income tax.”

The laws on the books can always be changed. For example, if a critical mass of people came to accept Russo’s or the Browns’ arguments that there is no legal obligation to pay income tax, the Congress could pass a new law or even a new constitutional amendment, in a matter of days, that would unambiguously authorize a tax on individual income and demand that each individual worker pay it.

Supposing that they did pass such a law, would you then support the Feds’ efforts to extract the tax by force, and to fine, besiege, jail, and/or kill those who refuse to pay it, since there would then be a law that “required” workers to pay up? Or would you continue to view income taxes as an injustice?

abb1:

But of course he has a defensible record – considering the time, place and circumstances. Certainly not less defensible than, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill.

Excuses are not the same thing as defenses, and if Lenin’s human rights record comes out “not less defensible” compared to that of two slavemasters and an imperialist terror-bomber, that does not strike me as a particularly high standard to hold him to.

abb1:

Why are you comparing Brezhnev’s Russia with Guantanamo Bay? It doesn’t make sense. Are you saying that under Brezhnev the Soviets were held in prison cells and tortured? Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is a plain lie. I do not know whether you are repeating it out of ignorance, or callousness, or deliberate dishonesty, but whatever the case, this assault on memory and truth is perfectly contemptible. Here is a bit about one of the most notorious programs of Comrade Brezhnev’s security forces:

Anne Applebaum:

Thanks to [Vladimir] Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad. It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead. The era of the psikhushka—the special mental hospital—had begun.

… In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of sluggish schizophrenia or creeping schizophrenia. This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure, wrote two Soviet professors, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas in the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled rights, and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to explit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.

… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol —R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.

… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.

— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.

Robert Whitaker:

The first rumblings that the Soviets were using neuroleptics to punish dissidents surfaced in 1969 and burst into public consciousness a year later. Dissidents would be diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia,” their reformist ideas seen as evidence of their “delusions” and poor adjustment to Soviet society, and then sent to one of twelve special psychiatric hospitals. …

What the senators heard chilled them. One expert witness, Canadian psychiatrist Norman Hirt, told of a mélange of treatments used to torment the dissidents. Wet pack, insulin coma, metrazol–all familiar to students of American psychiatry–were three such methods. “The fearfulness of these experiences cannot be described adequately by any words,” Hirt said. However, written appeals from Soviet dissidents, which had been smuggled out and given to the Senate, described neuroleptics as the worst torture of all. A person who is given aminazine (a neuroleptic similar to Thorazine), wrote Vassily Chernishov,

loses his individuality, his mind is dulled, his emotions destroyed, his memory lost … as a result of the treatment, all the subtle distinctiveness of a person is wiped away. It is death for creativeness. Those who take aminazine cannot even read after taking it. Intellectually they become more and more uncouth and primitive. Although I am afraid of death, let them shoot me rather than this. How loathsome, how sickening is the very thought that they will defile and crush my soul.

Comparisons were drawn between such forced drug treatment and the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, all of which led Florida senator Edward Gurney to conclude: “Most horrifying of all in this psychiatric chamber of horrors were the many accounts of the forcible administration by KGB psychiatrists of chemicals which convert human beings into vegetables.”

Over the next few years, Soviet dissidents published further details of this “chamber of horrors.” Aminazine and haloperidol were the two neuroleptics most commonly used to torment them. In a samizdat manuscript titled Punitive Medicine, dissidents described the incredible pain that haloperidol could inflict:

The symptoms of extrapyramidal derangement brought on by haloperidol include muscular rigidity, paucity and slowness of body movement, physical restlessness, and constant desire to change the body’s position. In connection with the latter, there is a song among inmates of special psychiatric hospitals which begins with the words, “You can’t sit, you can’t lie, you can’t walk” … many complain of unimaginable anxiety, groundless fear, sleeplessness.

Doctors used neuroleptics, the Soviet dissidents stated, “to inflict suffering on them and thus obtain their complete subjugation. Some political prisoners do recant their beliefs, acknowledge that they are mentally ill, and promise not to repeat their ‘crimes’ in return for an end to this treatment. American psychiatrists also heard usch testimony firsthand. On March 26, 1976, Leonid Plyushch, a thirty-nine-year-old mathematician who had spent several years in the psychoprisons before being freed, spoke at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. That produced this memorable exchange:

Q: What was the most horrifying aspect of your treatment?

A: I don’t know if there are irreversible effects of psychiatric treatment, but all the inmates at Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital lived in the fear that there would be such effects. They had heard stories of those driven by the treatment into permanent insanity. My treatment, in chronological order, began with haloperidol in big dosages without “correctives” that avoid side effects, essentially as a torture. The purpose was to force the patient to change his convictions. Along with me there were common criminals who simulated [mental] illness to get away from labor camps, but when they saw the side effects–twisted muscles, a disfigured face, a thrust-out tongue–they admitted what they had done and were returned to the camps.

Such descriptions stirred newspapers and television networks in the United States to condemn, with great fervor, the Soviets’ actions. Not long after Plyushch’s testimony, the New York Times ran an extensive feature on “Russia’s psychiatric jails,” in which it likened the administration of neuroleptics to people who weren’t ill to “spiritual murder” and “a variation of the gas chamber.” Dissidents, the paper explained, had been forcibly injected with Thorazine,”which makes a normal person feel sleepy and groggy, practically turning him into a human vegetable.” Neuroleptics were a form of torture that could “break your will.”

–Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002), pp. 215-217. Emphasis mine.

“What is overlooked by liberal critics of this action is how the corporate media is used as an arm of the state, or where the state is controlled by folks the ruling class dislikes, as an agent of counter-revolution.”

Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t a matter of “the ruling class” attacking the anti-ruling-class government. The government is a ruling class: that is what governments do. This is a competition between two would-be ruling classes over which one is going to be dominant. I don’t know about you, but I am an anarchist, and I don’t give a good god damn about which gang of thugs wins, or about whether “revolutionary” or “counter-revolutionary” jackboots end up on the people’s necks.

On the other hand, I do care a lot about how far a government can get away with using the force of arms to silence its critics. Which seems to be what’s happening here. That’s a big deal, even if the critics are real creeps. After all, they always come after the soft targets first.

“One can imagine how a TV station that helped organize a coup against the American Government would be treated. …”

There’s an awesome standard. If the U.S. government might have done even worse, then it’s O.K.?

“The media should reflect the views of 95% of the population, not the interests of the wealthy and powerful 5% of exploiters and oppressors. The only way we can have genuine freedom of expression and freedom of the press, is for the people to own and control the mass media.”

I agree that that would be a good thing. But there is a question as to how ordinary people can come to own and control media operations. By any means necessary? I sure hope not.

“This cannot happen via state ownership, one merely substitutes one giant corporation for several big corporations.”

So why are you cheering this gang of thugs on, since the proprietary control of airwaves by the State apparatus is exactly what they are asserting as the basis for closing RCTV’s broadcasts down?

You seem to be blowing a lot of hot air at the anticipated reactions of “liberal critics.” But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course liberals are a pack of hypocritical blowhards. What else is new? That doesn’t eliminate the obvious danger of a State–any State, not just the ones you or I especially dislike and spend most of our time protesting–becoming increasingly brazen about its rough handling of dissidents, nor does it eliminate the obvious injustice of the government using its usurped control over the airwaves to safeguard its hold on power.

Perhaps the Newspaper of Record’s partial retraction was too hasty…

Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.

There’s a little-known and rarely-observed rule of English grammar to the effect that “like” excludes and “such as” includes. So, for example, if I were to say “university towns such as Auburn have good used bookstores,” I am thereby stating that Auburn (inter alia) has a good used bookstore. But if I were to say “university towns like Auburn usually have Indian restaurants,” I am not saying anything about Auburn, but rather saying something about other university towns, which resemble Auburn in some salient respect.

So if the Times had a good grammar-stickler on hand, they could insist that when they say that “Victorian-era Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer” supported imperialism, opposed labor unions, etc., they have not said anything at all about what Herbert Spencer believed; they only said something about what other Victorian-era Social Darwinists, Herbert Spencer not included, believed. After all, they didn’t say that “Victorian-era Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer” did those nasty things.

On the other hand, “can” does not always imply “ought.”

Seriously, though, good work, and congratulations.

bfp: “maybe i should speak spanish instead?”

No, no, you don’t understand! She’s not bigoted against Spanish-speaking immigrants. She’s actually objecting to the influx of undocumented immigrants in her neighborhood speaking Classical Nahuatl.

Now that that’s all been cleared up, I’m off to march openly and defiantly against the continents of North and South America.

I notice that several videos of Ron Paul’s answers have been uploaded to YouTube. (Cf. for example [1].) I also note that none of the edits I’ve seen so far include Paul’s support for forced pregnancy. I wonder why that is, and what that tells us about the Paul apparatchiks.

HoldOn: “The zip code 07675 covers three different towns in NJ: Westwood, River Vale and Old Tappan. So there’s not always a 1:1 mapping between zip and city/town. More info is required…”

Well, so why not take the ZIP code alone, and then present a menu of options only when the ZIP code actually does map to more than one city name? The existence of ambiguous cases isn’t a good reason to require unneeded input in the unambiguous cases.

Kevin,

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this is a wonderful post. Kudos. I just wish that I had more to add.

Iaian: If a government did that, you would hope the right-“libertarian” would oppose it (unlike, say, von Mises and his support for fascism in the 1920s).

This is a libel against Mises. Ludwig von Mises had plenty of problems, but “support for fascism in the 1920s” was not among them, unless you consider explicit attacks on fascism to count as “support” for it. If you are (as I suspect) referring to his remarks in Ch. 1, § 10 of Liberalism (1927), then you had better note that the chapter explicitly condemns the assault on freedom of speech and association by the fascists, as well as the policy of jailing and murdering political opponents: “The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus; it considers itself in no way bound by the terms of any compact that it may conclude with opponents, and it deems any crime, any lie, and any calumny permissible in carrying on its struggle. The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions. . . . . Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect—better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. . . . So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.”

In the same section, Mises made a couple of embarrassing mistakes about fascism. First, he suggested that fascism would likely moderate with time and become less rapacious as it settled into power; that first error led him into the second error of supposing that fascism was a lesser evil than Stalinism. But in a chapter that directly and unequivocally condemns the Fascists’ repressive policies, states that Fascist anti-Communism (the only “merit” he can find in Fascism at all) is ultimately doomed to failure, and closes by saying that Fascist militarism “cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization,” the claim that Ludwig von Mises — whose apartment, library, and papers in Vienna were targeted and seized by the Gestapo ten years later while he sought refuge in Switzerland — “supported” fascism, is both unfounded and irresponsible.

Better yet, how about:

0. Go to the SF Food Bank’s website and donating, say, $15.85 to the Food Bank, or better yet starting a monthly giving program (say, $10/month). Encourage your friends to do the same.

That’s what I did. Then I skipped steps 1-3 entirely.

Because now, no matter what the pols in Congress end up agreeing on, the Food Bank will still have my part of that money in the bank. If everyone puts their time into begging for busy Congress types to remember the line item for one city’s food bank in a massive annual budget that’s perpetually running huge deficits, then you’re going to hear about this same funding crisis every year when the Feds once again consider cutting funding. On the other hand, if the people themselves are funding these programs, instead of trying to finagle the government into doing it for them, the base of support will be much more stable, and much more resilient, since it won’t depend on the ever-shifting whims of a very small group of powerful people.

Here’s the quotation, as promised. It’s from letter # 294, on 8 February 1967 to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had interviewed Tolkien for the Daily Telegraph Magazine and sent him a draft of their article in advance of publication. He commented on their quotation of him as saying, “I don’t read much now, except for fairy-stories,” by saying:

“For ‘except,’ read ‘not even.’ I read quite a lot–or more truly, try to read many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy). But I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention.”

Tolkien adds a footnote to this:

“There are exceptions. I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L.R. was given the Fantasy Award: Death of Grass [by John Christopher]. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Azimov [sic]. Above these, I was recently deeply engaged in the books of Mary Renault; especially the two about Theseus, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. A few days ago I actually received a card of appreciation from her; perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me the most pleasure.”

As far as the Letters go, unfortunately I can’t find any reference in the index to Verne. The index entry for H.G. Wells turns up only a passing reference to Eloi and Morlocks (#109, 31 July 1947) in a letter about the prospects for publishing The Lord of the Rings.