The Totalitarian Moment

Well ain’t that a kick in the head?

Going into the Iowa caucus, it was starting to look like Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s libertarian moment was going to happen in a big way. Ron Paul was actually leading in some polls. But now that the results are in, I’m starting to lose all hope.

It’s not just that Mitt Romney beat Ron Paul. That’s really not so bad. Romney is a big-time professional politician who is, shall we say, adept at molding his image to the voters’ desires. He’s been the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination for months. If he wins the Presidency, I fully expect him to be an Obama-of-the-right whose single overriding goal as President is to win another term as President. I won’t be voting for him, but I can understand that he appeals to voters.

No, what really hurts is that Ron Paul came in third behind that freedom-hating fuck Rick Santorum. I mean, watch this video, where he spends three minutes pretty much denouncing all human freedom. Near the end, he literally says the “pursuit of happiness” is harming America.

Santorum’s nephew John Garver explains it pretty well:

If you want another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle, Rick Santorum. America is based on a strong belief in individual liberty. My uncle’s interventionist policies, both domestic and foreign, stem from his irrational fear of freedom not working.

It is not the government’s job to dictate to individuals how they must live. The Constitution was designed to protect individual liberty. My Uncle Rick cannot fathom a society in which people cooperate and work with each other freely.

Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who spends any time talking about making us more free. Given his baggage, I can understand why people might not vote for him, but it makes me a little insane that so many people voted for a guy like Rick Santorum who hates and fears our freedom.

GOP candidates’ big swinging dicks trump their small-government “ideals”

‘Limited government’ is just an empty buzzword for these people. They believe that government is too powerful, too big, and too fallible — right up to the moment they reach the Oval Office and get to play with the launch buttons. From today’s New York Times:

Even as they advocate for limited government, many of the Republican presidential candidates hold expansive views about the scope of the executive powers they would wield if elected — including the ability to authorize the targeted killing of United States citizens they deem threats and to launch military attacks without Congressional permission. …

[M]ost of them see the commander in chief as having the authority to lawfully take extraordinary actions if he decides doing so is necessary to protect national security. Only Mr. Paul, the libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas, argued for a more limited view of presidential power.

Just what we needed: More laws!

State legislatures have had a busy year.

In 2011, all 50 states and territories met in regular session and enacted close to 40,000 new laws on issues across the board.

Forty. Thousand. Laws. In one year.

One that caught my eye: Washington state approved special license plates expressing appreciation for music teachers. Not gym teachers, or janitors. Maybe those occupations can be honored with their very own license plates in 2012 and 2013. It’s not like the Washington legislature has anything better to do with its time, from the looks of it — unless it is designating the official state vegetable (the Walla Walla sweet onion), the official state endemic mammal (the Olympic marmot), and the official state tartan (stripes of blue, white, yellow, red, and black on a green background).

Even richer:

[A new] California law prohibits the production, distribution or sale of beer to which caffeine has been directly added as a separate ingredient.

Because while it’s currently not illegal to drink a White Russian or an Irish Coffee, lawmakers must — apparently — draw the line somewhere. I mean, where would we be without law books warning us we’ll find the constabulary at our door if we’re so wicked as to mix beer and caffeine? In a handbasket headed to hell, that’s where.

One law that I would actually like to see is one stipulating that no new law may be enacted unless another, older one is taken off the books first. Here are some good candidates for repeal.

The Economist shares the sentiment (I think), in an article saying that criminal-justice-wise, America has three problems: Laws targeting behavior that shouldn’t be illegal;  vague, ambiguous verbiage in all manner of legislation; and draconian prison sentences.

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

We’ve gotten to the point where ignorance of the law is most certainly a good excuse for breaking it, because no longer can we be seriously expected to know and follow the myriad byzantine rules and regulations that slowly choke our entrepreneurial spirit and erode our respect for the law.

That’s some fine personnel screening there, TSA

Deborah Newell Tornello says of the TSA,

one would not expect an organization whose job it is to “keep us safe” to be hiring child porn enthusiasts, child molesters, and child rapists.

No, one would not. But in fact, the TSA does it all the time. Tornello cites just the 2011 cases (correction — just the 2011 cases that have come to light), and mighty disturbing they are.

Bastion of Liberal Media Elites embraces Ron Paul

I said something critical of the crop of current GOP contenders yesterday (OK, I called them crooks, panderers, and liars), and someone immediately commented that I sounded like an “Obama fan.”

Such has long been the knee-jerk reflex of most Americans: Someone who says unkind things about a Republican must be a hardcore liberal, and someone who badmouths a Democrat must be an incorrigible rightwinger. The unalterable binary nature of our political system is presupposed by either side.

I see no real evidence that that’s changing, but if an article on the blog of The New Yorker is to be believed, I could be wrong. And for once, I’d be plenty happy about donning the dunce cap.

As both a fan of The New Yorker and someone who likes most of Ron Paul’s economic and political ideas (if not his complicity in this vileness), I suppose I imagined the two icons in separate spheres. The New Yorker is part of the politely-liberal East Coast intelligentsia. For all its brainy bona fides, the magazine rarely gives any indication that it understands the most fundamental ideas from the right or even the center of the political spectrum. Paul, of course, is the GOP candidate who wants to take away many of the playthings that liberals treasure, and who seeks to torch the overriding liberal notion that in matters of government, bigger is better.

It’s quite a jolt to the system to see that, inexplicably, the twain have met.

Writer John Cassidy argues (admittedly with a backhanded compliment) that Paul “isn’t just another right-wing nut,” and likens the man’s candidacy to Barack Obama’s, four years ago:

At this point in 2007, the young senator from Illinois seemed to many Democrats to be something thrillingly fresh: an independent-minded figure who would challenge a stale and corrupted politics. Paul doesn’t have Obama’s youth or his charisma, which was partly based on the anticipation of seeing a whip-smart black man in the White House. But a surprising number of disillusioned Americans find in Paul, for all his impractical proposals and extremist baggage, a similar hope for a new type of politics: one that isn’t beholden to the two major parties.

That is why Paul is important. Even a big victory for him next week [in Iowa] won’t necessarily tell us much about the ultimate outcome of the Republican race: the pundits are right about that. It is virtually impossible to see Paul emerging as the nominee. But his popularity tells us something deeper about American politics and the popular alienation that now attends it — on the left and the right.

May this tremor of discontent be the harbinger of a political earthquake.

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On the topic of false left/right binary thinking, my friend Nicolas Eyle, years ago, gifted me this wonderfully exact description of something I had been struggling to express:

I’ve often thought the description of political thought is less of a line going from left to right than a circle. The farther you go to the left or right you tend to come back to the same place. There isn’t much difference between big government on the right that we call fascist and big government on the left we call communist. Both are totalitarian systems subjecting the individual to the whims of those in power. Somewhere in the circumference of that circle, at the opposite point from totalitarianism, is where, I believe, most readers of Nobody’s Business are.

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The Washington Post may also be shedding some of its on-autopilot liberal leanings in favor of a post-partisan world view. Witness today’s article entitled, cleanly and clearly, “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.” Here’s the gist:

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest, and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force. …

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

By the way, remember when Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, his nomination having arrived not even two weeks after he took office? Given how good and how very proficient the president has turned out to be at blowing people to smithereens, I bet the Nobel Committee now sees the award as wishful thinking at best, and as an embarrassing bit of blinkered idiocy at worst.

Long live TV

A colleague of mine, upon hearing that I am about to give up satellite TV in favor of a Hulu/Netflix solution, congratulated me, but not on my future $90-a-month savings. “Watching less TV is probably a good thing,” he opined, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I had expressed no intention of watching less TV. I’d simply said I’ll be getting my programming elsewhere.

“Less TV is good for you” is one of the more annoying truisms I know. Compare the reflexive anti-TV sentiment to “Reading fewer books is good for you.” You’ll never hear that. But why not?

I like books. There are books in piles and on shelves in every room of my house. But I’m puzzled by the automatic virtue that our culture bestows upon them (even books that are shite, or books that aren’t half as intellectually stimulating as Jersey Shore. OK, maybe that’s the same thing).

The casual disdain for TV watching is also evidenced by the term “couch potato,” which never refers to book readers, even though I suspect that they and their reading material tend to get cozy on a well-stuffed piece of furniture. Instead, the phrase exclusively targets the pitiable, grease-streaked slobs who watch “too much” TV.

An aside: I grew up in the Netherlands (both my parents were Dutch and of course only Dutch was spoken at home), and yet by the time I emigrated to the United States I spoke English fluently. That useful skill came mostly from watching subtitled-in-Dutch TV shows produced in the U.S. and the U.K., and ditto movies. (Yes, high school helped.)

Come to think of it, I learned German the same way. Fabelhaft, oder?

My kids have a pretty impressive vocabulary in large part thanks to TV. We were playing Scrabble a few months back and the oldest (9) put AGLET on the board. I told her gently that’s not a word. She begged to differ, and she was right. They’ve arguably learned as much from Phineas & Ferb and Dinosaur Train as they have from conversing with me and my wife, or from working with their teachers. We also watch PBS and the National Geographic channel and other educational fare, but I’m a little loath to bring that up because I’m not trying to grant legitimacy to TV-watching (that’s like buying Playboy purely for the great articles). TV-watching is a plenty legitimate pastime as is.

For instance, if you want to learn more about the inner workings of the U.S. banking system and the government’s role in it, you’d be better off watching South Park‘s brilliant Margaritaville episode than boring yourself to tears with a couple of Thomas Friedman’s tomes. You’ll probably learn more about American politics from twenty minutes of watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart than from a day spent viewing C-SPAN.

Even schlocky, pulpy TV fare — let’s say, the average “reality” show — can be remarkably illuminating, in an almost anthropological kind of way, considering how much it conveys about the state of our culture. ‘Good’ TV isn’t necessarily Masterpiece Theater or a nine-part Ken Burns documentary about the history of the textile industry.

And I’ll add this: For my money, in terms of character development, rich plotlines, and story-telling skills, shows like Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, and the new cable hit Homeland, are more or less the equal of novels by Jonathan Frantzen, Gary Shteyngart, or Jonathan Lethem.

My fondness of TV is strengthened by a few people I know who’ve ditched their sets on principle. To each his own, but they tend to prattle on about their bold stance against barbarism in ways that are roughly as enjoyable as listening to the piffle at a Prius Owners Club meeting.

Like literature, TV is a conduit for information and entertainment. Thankfully, those two often go hand in hand. Both media are roughly each other’s equivalent. A book enthusiast who reads only slop surely has nothing on a TV aficionado who watches slop-that-moves, let alone on a TV fan who watches something a little more filling and nutritious.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

In Defense of Wolf Dogs

Poor dog:

An illegal wolf-dog hybrid was found roaming wild in a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, authorities said Thursday. Police found the approximately 3-year-old, 53-pound female wearing a collar and chain near Elton Street and Vandalia Avenue in East New York on Tuesday evening, according to Richard Gentles, spokesperson for New York Animal Care and Control. “She’s not a wild animal,” Gentles told the New York Post. “Nobody’s come forward to claim her,” he added, noting that it is illegal to possess a wolf-dog hybrid in New York City.

My wife and I had a hybrid dog exactly like that, from puppyhood in 1993 until the dog passed away from acute kidney failure in 2001. Her name was Laska (that’s her in the photo, caught in a common moment of affection with my wife). We adored her. Laska was incredibly smart and didn’t have an aggressive bone in her body despite her half-wild nature.

No offense to any of the other dogs who were or are part of our family, but Laska was maybe the best canine we’ve ever had. I still love picturing her when she heard a siren: She’d slowly raise her head heavenwards and produce a gorgeous, content-sounding, soul-piercing howl.

Laska came to us from a Maryland pound, where the employees were almost as smitten with the three-month-old pup as we were. They knew she was a hybrid, which should have led to a death sentence, but they couldn’t bring themselves to schedule the dog for execution. I am still grateful to the pound workers who not only let the dog live, but agreed to give her to us. They broke state law. So did we. I can’t say I’ve been wracked with guilt about it.

We trained Laska, and she thrived, and she spent eight trouble-free, happiness-filled years with us. Well, OK — trouble-free if you don’t count the fact that we had to always bungee-cord our fridge because she would otherwise raid it. There was also the time she found a bucket of lard and wolfed down all of it. Just picture the digestive consequences of eating a bucket of lard. On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.

Hybrid dogs are very high-maintenance. That means, they’re not for everyone. Although we had no major issues with Laska, I defer to the experts, who for the most part agree that wolf dogs have a high prey drive and are more likely than ‘regular’ dogs to challenge higher-ranking members of the pack. That can have tragic consequences, although it doesn’t tell me much that, according to Wikipedia, 13 people were killed by wolf dogs in an 18-year period. That’s 13 absolute tragedies for sure, but given that the wolf dog population in the United States is estimated to be as high as two million, wolf dogs who kill appear to represent about 0.001% of their kind.

This report (pdf) looks at fatal dog attacks over a twenty-year period. The crux of the issue can be gleaned from the following table:

Note that across all breeds and crossbreeds, wolf dogs included, there are multiple two-year periods in which not a single dog in that category killed a person.

The only exception is the “pitbull-type” dog. The vagueness of that suffix is a bit troubling. No doubt some of the dogs implicated in “pitbull” attacks are actual pitbulls, and no doubt some other attacks are attributed to pitbulls almost by default. What I mean is that most people, including dog lovers like myself, can’t reliably identify a pitbull. And most likely, you can’t either. If you don’t believe me, take the test.

The authors of the above report conclude:

Although fatal attacks on humans appear to be a breed-specific problem (pit bull-type dogs and Rottweilers), other breeds may bite and cause fatalities at higher rates. Because of difficulties inherent in determining a dog’s breed with certainty, enforcement of breed-specific ordinances raises constitutional and practical issues. Fatal attacks represent a small proportion of dog bite injuries to humans and, therefore, should not be the primary factor driving public policy concerning dangerous dogs.

That means that maybe it shouldn’t be against the law to own a hybrid dog, or a “pitbull-type” dog. Maybe it shouldn’t be against government regulations for service members to live on a military base and own a Doberman, a Rottweiler, or a Chow. (It’s interesting that if Theodore Roosevelt or General Patton were alive today, they’d be banned from bringing their dogs to a military base.)

Dog maulings are beyond upsetting. An out-of-control dog can cause horrible trauma and even death, and the suffering of the human victims should never be minimized or swept under the rug. But I do take exception to the lazy vilification of certain breeds. It can be said that regardless of breed, ninety percent of dog bites are one hundred percent the owner’s fault. Cooler heads should prevail when it comes to targeting certain breeds for persecution.

Fatal dog attacks are rare, but due to their horrific nature, they loom large in the public imagination. The fact is that about 350 Americans die of falls in the bathtub or shower every year, and a similar number die from accidental suffocation or strangulation in their own beds. Such cases rarely make it onto the evening news. By contrast, the yearly number of fatal U.S. dog attacks hovers around 30, and every single one of them ricochets across hundreds if not thousands of local and national news outlets.

By the way, I hope that if you love animals, you’ll join me in condemning not only the absolute shits who aggressively train their dogs to be cocked weapons, macho instruments of intimidation; but also the absolute shits on the so-called animal-welfare side who believe that in order to save the dog, they have to destroy it.

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P.S.: When it comes to banning dangerous dogs, U.K. authorities don’t even pretend to be equitable or fair anymore. The government’s website states unabashedly that “Whether your dog is a banned type depends on what it looks like, rather than its breed or name.” Emphasis mine.

P.P.S.: Mimicry for targeted breeds. Turn your Doberman into a poodle! Conversion kits now available!

How not to count the costs of drug prohibition

One of my regular web surfing stops is Ethics Alarms, a thought-provoking blog where ethicist Jack Marshall writes about the ethical dimensions of various events in the news. I often disagree with what he has to say, but the discussion is usually interesting. Recently, I had an argument with Jack in the comments to this post, and I thought I would share some of it, since it illustrate some differences in how he and I think about the ethics of various social policies.

His post covers a range of subjects raised by a debate held by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. In response to George Will’s objections to a national “distracted driving” law, he wrote this:

One of the good uses of absolutist reasoning is that it raises a very high bar before breaching a valid principle can even be considered, since it has to be considered as an exception if it is to be contemplated at all. Barring unsafe conduct that increases the likelihood of automobile accidents, however, is not the place for absolutism, but for utilitarianism — rational balancing.

Note his emphasis of utilitarianism. Keep that in mind while I go over his response to Congressman Barney Frank’s idea:

Barney Frank’s cause was, predictably, legalizing marijuana… Pot advocates like Frank, and I have been listening to them most of my life, pretend that recreational marijuana use consists of single, unencumbered, financially secure and mature individuals with no obligations and no responsibilities to others sitting in their homes or dorm rooms toking away and being blissfully and harmlessly stupid for an hour or three. If pot use was restricted to this, I would agree with him. But it is not, and cannot be.

Why not? I mean, if he believes that effective pot prohibition is possible at all, why would laws against it not be effective if applied only in situations where it’s dangerous?

In society we are all bound to each other by bonds of mutual dependence and trust. A bus driver who smokes pot is risking the lives of young children. A student who smokes pot is sabotaging his education, and making it likely that you and I will have to pay the costs of his progressively unsuccessful life as a result.

So lets prohibit driving a bus while stoned, and lets put an age limit on smoking pot, as we have on smoking tobacco. I don’t think anybody in the marijuana legalization movement seriously wants to make it available to children, or wants to allow people to get high while doing dangerous jobs. This was a straw man.

A husband who smokes pot and makes mistakes at work is jeopardizing the welfare of his children and family.

I responded to this in a comment:

Whereas your plan to throw him in jail will be wonderful for his family.

It’s one thing to say that something is unethical on utilitarian grounds, and quite another to say it should be treated as a crime. Your utilitarian calculations should include the harm caused by enforcement, otherwise you can make any policy sound great if you don’t count the cost.

To which Jack responded with a strange accusation:

I just don’t buy this — it’s a “think of the children!” rationalization. Sure, families suffer when parents break the law. The responsibility for the consequences, however, are 100% on the lawbreaker. And as you know, I apply this to immigration enforcement as well.

And he’s just as wrong about that too, and for the same reason, which is that he’s not doing his utilitarian calculations right, as I explained in my response:

Huh? You’re the one who brought the children into this. I’m just trying to be consistent in counting the costs. You say “There is no social utility for getting stoned whatsoever,” so the fact that dad enjoys getting high doesn’t count. But dad gets high at some cost to his family, so that counts. But when the police arrest him and lock him up, thus hurting his family even more, that doesn’t count. It seems like you’re just picking and choosing whatever benefits and costs support your intuition that pot smoking is wrong.

Jack’s response:

No, Mark, that’s not right. I brought the children in as individuals that the parent has an absolute duty to care for and that society has an interest in seeing that he doesn’t make it impossible for him to do so.

By jailing him? Thus making it impossible for him to do so? The stated purpose of this law is being undermined by the enforcement of this law.

The legal system considers family impact as a secondary factor in sentencing, but it should never be a factor in making a law and enforcing it.

Remember, Jack started this discussion by advocating for a utilitarian analysis.  That means adding up the benefits and the costs, and you have to include all of the benefits and costs. It’s cheating to pretend that that you can analyze a criminal law without including the enforcement mechanism in your analysis. The enforcement process does not stand outside of society. Its effects on society have to be counted like everything else.

The presumption, first and foremost, when a law is made is that responsible, ethical, law-abiding citizens will obey it, thus greatly reducing the conduct the law seeks to prevent.

This is a fair criticism of my point. The laws against marijuana use have a deterrent effect, and if you believe that pot smoking is bad for families, then it’s possible that the benefits to families of deterring drug use will make up for the harm caused by jailing family members. I don’t believe it, because I believe the harm of drug prohibition is immense, but it’s a logical argument.

Those who choose not to obey the law can’t blame either the law or the government for the consequences of their actions, and neither should we.

(I didn’t respond to Jack’s last comment, because by that time lots of other people were posting comments arguing with him, and it seemed pointless to continue as part of the hoard. However, he stayed in and continued to argue with them in the comments, which speaks well of him as a blogger.)

This is where Jack is going badly wrong. Utilitarian analysis is not about blame. It’s about benefits and costs. I’m all for letting people suffer the natural consequences of of their actions. That’s only fair. But imprisonment is not a natural consequence of smoking pot. It’s a consequence of the policy of pot prohibition, and the harm from imprisonment has to be included in the analysis of that policy. I’ve hit on this theme in my blogging elsewhere, and I’m going to say it again here: When we harm people, the suffering they experience is the same, regardless of who we are, why we harm them, or who they are.

It’s just as bad to imprison a murderer as it is to imprison an innocent person from the point of view of the imprisoned person. I know of no reason to think a murderer suffers less in prison than an innocent person. The difference is that the suffering of the murderer is justified because of the enormous benefits to everyone else of having him in prison. The suffering of the innocent produces no benefits whatsoever, and thus it’s a terrible loss to society.

Which brings us to the suffering of the pot smoker in prison, which is of course the same as anyone else in prison. Under a benefit-cost analysis, whether it’s justified depends on the benefits to society of imprisoning pot smokers. An intellectually sound response would be to claim there are offsetting benefits. But to pretend that the cost doesn’t exist is baseless.

Every hour stoned on a recreational drug is one less hour spent on productive activity that could benefit one’s dependents, colleagues, community and society. Every dollar spent on getting stoned is one less dollar that could be used to start a business, feed a child, pay a debt, or save. It is purely selfish behavior with real social costs and minimal benefits.

The same could be said of all other recreational expenses — movies, television, sports, music, fine dining — if you believe that those have no benefits. For example, I get no benefit from many sports –hockey, football, skiing — and if they vanished from the face of the earth, I wouldn’t miss them, and the dollars spent on them could be better spend feeding children, paying debt, or saving for the future. Therefore, using Jack’s logic, and mistaking my personal preferences for the laws of the universe, I could propose outlawing all of them.

I don’t advocate that, however, because I prefer to let people make their own choices about their lives. They know more about their lives than I do, and are more motivated to make correct decisions, since they pay the consequences. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone else, why would I care? How could I justify hurting people for making their own decisions about their own lives?

Like getting drunk, using marijuana may be relaxing or fun, but there are many, many ways to have fun and relax in America that don’t undermine the rest of society.

Smoking pot in a responsible manner doesn’t undermine society. Just because someone isn’t 100% on top of their game every minute of the day doesn’t make them a criminal. They don’t owe the rest of us every bit of their time and effort.

Once again, the ethical trade-off is an easy one — a society without people wasting their time and money making themselves periodically slow-witted, inarticulate and stupid is undeniably a better society to live in than one that encourages such conduct, and making the conduct legal does encourage it.

I kind of agree, which is why I don’t use pot and rarely drink alcohol. And frankly, I think you shouldn’t either. If we could just all agree not to do drugs, that would be a great thing. But that’s not how drug prohibition works. Drug prohibition involves sending armed agents of the governments to invade people’s homes, waylay them on the street, lock them in a cage, and take all their stuff, while occasionally shooting people or their dogs in the process.

That’s not a better society.

Barney likes his weed; it poses no danger to him, he can handle it, and he’s annoyed that he has to break the law to get high. And all the less intelligent, less responsible, younger, vulnerable Americans — and those who support or depend on them — whose lives will be diminished by free access to pot? Barney just doesn’t care, so he talks as if they don’t exist.

And obviously, Jack doesn’t care about people like Barney, who can handle their weed. Jack wants to throw them in prison too, and he doesn’t care they they are not part of the problem. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since Jack also thinks it’s okay to kill innocent civilians in war because he doesn’t believe they’re really innocent.

Drug prohibition isn’t just about stopping people from using drugs. It’s about empowering government employees to use intrusive and violent methods to stop people from using drugs. I don’t think it’s worth it, and I don’t think this is a cost you can ignore.

Curtains for Ron Paul?

I have two quotes to present to you. They consist of outright swinery, so make sure you’re sitting down.

Number one:

If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months. In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob. What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.

Number two:

Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel. These are the descendants of Cain. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the rest of mankind from the beginning. … Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

The first quote, a vile and appalling piece of race-baiting, is from a Ron Paul newsletter of a little over 2o years ago, which Paul claims he didn’t write. (I’m not sure that excuse passes the smell test. And even if it’s true: Jonathan Chait pointed out, correctly it seems to me, that “If Larry Flynt were running for president, I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t care that much that he did not personally take the photographs that appeared in Hustler.”)

The second quote represents some of the current or former beliefs of Mitt Romney, I’m not sure which. It’s a hybrid passage; the part before the ellipsis is from former Mormon President Joseph Fielding; the part after it is from Brigham Young, the founder of Romney’s faith. During his missionary years, from 1969 to ’71, Romney eagerly spread all manner of church literature containing exactly this poison. Luis Granados notes that “Not only has [Romney] never apologized for any of this, he is still bursting with pride over the entire missionary episode.”

My prediction: In the coming days, we’re going to hear a lot about Ron Paul’s alleged racism, and not a word about Romney’s.

The two things that bother me most about the Paul newsletter quote are that the language veers close to being an endorsement of racist murder; and that these putrid views were expressed just a couple of decades ago, by a man in his late forties or early fifties, long after the heat and turmoil of the Civil Rights era had dissipated. By contrast, perhaps Mitt Romney can claim that his brand of racism was youthful foolishness.

I don’t think either man is, today, a racist, but I’m just guessing. Both would do well to address the issue with clarity and forthrightness — and I’d welcome a soupçon of atonement if they’ve rid themselves of these beliefs. I hope the media, and maybe even the Iowa contenders, also won’t forget to hold Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann accountable for the open discrimination they’d like to mete out to gays and Muslims. Surveying the field of Republican candidates means seeing rather a lot of prejudice and bigotry.

Mostly, I sense, it’s Paul who will have to face the fire — and rightly if painfully so. He’s ahead in the polls and that changes things. The subject of the newsletters may be old news, as the Paulites keep insisting, but given that Paul has been playing coy about their authorship for years, it’s fair game. Frankly, I wouldn’t respect any political journalist who didn’t press him on the matter during the next half-dozen-or-so news cycles.

The Paul campaign should have cauterized this wound in 2008 at the latest. Letting it fester now will almost certainly mean curtains for his candidacy. Unlike Andrew Sullivan, I’m not really sure that it’s worth saving, and at this point I’m too dismayed and disillusioned to give Paul the benefit of the doubt. Doubt is what the libertarian frontrunner must now remove. If he mans up and clears that hurdle — not for my benefit, but for that of the movement he inspired — I can still see myself throwing my support behind him. The odds are getting longer by the day.