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I’m reading the transcript in Sanford United School District v. Redding, oral argument of which took place today. I am also taking notes. They are, as usual, snarky and amusing. Says me.
Redding, in case you don’t recall, is the case in which the eighth-grader was strip-searched in search of ibuprofen she didn’t actually have.
Any oral argument is bound to be good when it starts with the following two paragraphs:
MR. WRIGHT: Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court: The search of Savana Redding in this case was constitutional because Mr. Wilson had reason to suspect that she possessed contraband which posed a health and safety risk. Therefore, searching any place where she might be reasonably hiding that contraband was constitutionally permissible.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Any place, even though he had perhaps no reasonable suspicion to suspect that she was hiding the contraband in her underwear?
Justice Scalia immediately points out that “places kids might hide stuff’ includes body cavities and so does not, according to the district, prevent body cavity searches of children. School District says this is okay because kids don’t actually hide stuff in body cavities. Tell that to all the fifth-graders with gum stuck behind their back molars.
Justice Souter thinks it’s skeevy that suddenly aspirin is “contraband.” The School District explains that, in administrator’s reasonable judgment, students need to be protected from teh scaree aspirinz. Especially when one almost died from taking a medication. That was not a scaree aspirin. Or a scaree ibuprofen.
Justice Ginsburg keeps asking things that are “not in the record, your Honor.” Well, maybe you should have done more homework, Mr. AttorneyPants.
Justice Ginsburg asks if the school ever asked the snitch when and how she got the ibuprofen from Redding. Mr. AttorneyPants says no, but that doesn’t matter ’cause they totally caught Redding red-handed, no pun intended. Justice Ginsburg thinks Mr. AttorneyPants is full of shit. Justice Souter agrees, asking if anyone actually knew what the pills everyone was so scared of were. Mr. AttorneyPants says he totally wrote that in the brief and Justice Souter should totally go, like, read it again because he knows it’s in there, man.
The School asks for a bright-line rule that “Once you had reason to suspect a student is possessing any contraband that poses a health and safety risk, then searching any place where that contraband may reasonably be found is constitutional-” and is cut off by Justice Scalia, who thinks this is “astonishing” bullshit because black markers are “contraband” in this particular student gulag, for fuck’s sake. Have I ever mentioned that Scalia is a total champion of the Fourth Amendment and I love him for it?
Justice Ginsburg points out that this case is vastly different from New Jersey v. TLO, and brings up again that nobody checked out the snitch’s story before strip-searching Redding. Mr. AttorneyPants reassures her that the reliability of tips is totally fine because school administrators rely on them. Justice Ginsburg does not buy this shit either, and says that they could at least have asked a follow-up question or seven. Mr. AttorneyPants says it wasn’t necessary because some other kid was also totally reliable, and besides liars get punished. Except they don’t, as he explains when Justice Stevens asks how the lying liar snitch got punished for ratting on Redding.
Justice Scalia still wants to know under what circumstances a school administrator would be allowed to crawl up a kid’s ass. Mr. AttorneyPants says the Court should not allow that ever, and instead send the kid to the hospital because administrators are not “clinically trained” to sexually assault students perform cavity searches. But don’t forget they are trained pharmacologists.
Justice Scalia points out that that’s a nice practical line, but a legally useless one. Mr. AttorneyPants says it’s cool because the “community” would never allow body cavity searches. Justice Souter wants to know in which body cavity Mr. AttorneyPants just stuffed the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Ginsburg also points out that, after the school failed to find any contraband in Redding’s underpants, she was forced to sit outside the vice principal’s office for over two hours, during which nobody bothered to call her parents. Justice Ginsburg wants to know what was up with that. Mr. AttorneyPants says the investigation was still ongoing. Justice Ginsburg doesn’t see how a girl sitting alone on a chair is being “investigated.” Justice Scalia thinks she should have been sent to study hall.
Justice Breyer, mostly to let the reporter know he’s still alive, asks why Redding had to be stripped at all, when she could have just shaken out her clothing to show there was nothing in it. Justice Scalia and Mr. AttorneyPants jump Justice Breyer and beat the reasonableness nonsense out of him.
ARGUMENT BY THE US AS AMICUS CURIAE
Mr. SolicitorPants (well, Mr. AssistantSolicitorPants) begins by insisting that intrusive searches in schools require more, not less, Fourth Amendment scrutiny, much to my surprise, but is interrupted by Chief Justice Roberts, who wants to know why the Court can’t just call it qualified immunity and go home. Mr. SolicitorPants says everyone thinks the Court should totally decide the Fourth Amendment question, but admits it doesn’t have to, which is so not the right thing to say to Chief Justice Roberts.
Justice Scalia attempts to save Mr. SolicitorPants’ hash by explaining that one of the defendants doesn’t have qualified immunity. Mr. SolicitorPants helpfully points out that, no, the Court could totally remand for that defendant.
Justice Kennedy, who is NOT DEAD EITHER, says that Mr. SolicitorPants doesn’t really want to remand to the Ninth Circuit because Mr. SolicitorPants doesn’t like their “sliding scale” theory, isn’t that right? Mr. SolicitorPants wants “greater specificity in the information.” Nobody knows what anybody is actually talking about, and Justice Thomas is either asleep or dead.
Justice Scalia asks if this is a “reasonable suspicion” standard, and when assured it is, he asks if, well, you’ve tried everywhere but the underwear, do you then have a “reasonable suspicion” the pills are in the underwear? I have just realized how exceptionally creepy a bench of eight old men talking about a thirteen-year-old’s underwear is. The presence of Justice Ginsburg does nothing to de-creep it, either. Mr. SolicitorPants says, well, no, you don’t have a reasonable suspicion of pantydrugs at that point. Justice Scalia is confused at the sudden non-discovery of pantydrugs.
Mr. SolicitorPants then says that, if you have a reasonable suspicion the drugs are in the panties, you go right for the panties. Chief Justice Roberts says, in a manner befitting a Southern belle, “Oh, surely not!” Mr. SolicitorPants tries to explain this is just like TLO because there the reasonable suspicion was that the cigarettes were in the purse. Justice Alito asks if the school has to have a tip that the drugs are specifically in the underwear. Mr. SolicitorPants tries to backpedal and FINALLY uses the phrase “totality of the circumstances,” which in this case apparently include a critical mass of students storing pills in their panties.
Mr. SolicitorPants, while backpedaling, begins to juggle puppies as well by saying that the teachers knowing that “these pills were going to be consumed at lunch as part of an event that obviously wasn’t simply intended to get rid of the students’ headaches” was reasonable suspicion. So if the event was simply intended to get rid of the students’ headaches, would that not give rise to reasonable suspicion? Mr. SolicitorPants is giving me a headache.
Justice Alito asks if this would be “a different case” if the snitch had been an even snitchier snitch. Mr. SolicitorPants says yes, but only if the teacher asked the snitch to snitchily elaborate. Justice Scalia thinks Mr. SolicitorPants is an idiot, which is not helped in the least by this exchange:
JUSTICE SCALIA: So there is a sliding scale for the dangerousness of what you’re looking for?
MR. O’NEIL: No. It simply means that it’s relevant to whether in the totality of the circumstances that school official could have reasonably suspected that the student was hiding it.
Don’t worry; that didn’t make any more sense to the Justices than it did to you. Or me. Apparently, it has something to do with the fact that thirteen-year-olds never hide ibuprofen in their underwear, but they totally hide crack there, like, all the time. Mr. SolicitorPants desperately tries to extricate himself from the impossible bullshit situation he has just created, while multiple Justices continue to beat him with it. Then they let him sit down. Mr. SolicitorPants wets himself in relief.
ARGUMENT BY RESPONDENT (REDDING. WELL, REDDING’S ATTORNEY)
Mr. RespondentPants begins, “We agree with the Federal Government that before conducting an intrusive strip search a school needs to have location-specific information. And while this case can begin and end with that well-accepted proposition, it’s also important to recognize that a school needs greater — a greater degree of suspicion to conduct a strip search than to conduct an ordinary backpack search.”
Chief Justice Roberts immediately goes back to the qualified immunity problem. Apparently, it has been on the table the whole time and he doesn’t like the way it’s looking at his lunch. The words “rummaging around on a 13-year-old girl’s naked body” are finally used. Justice Thomas wakes up.
Justice Kennedy wants to search for meth. Mr. RespondentPants doesn’t see a problem with that, except for the meth part. Except the meth part is cool, because there was no reasonable suspicion in this case so the school wasn’t allowed to find meth in Redding’s underpants. Which is great, because there was no meth in Redding’s underpants.
Justice Scalia asks if Mr. RespondentPants wants a “sliding scale.” Mr. RespondentPants says no, he wants a “two-tier framework,” which has something to do with searching students’ lockers but not their bras. The words “pelvic area” are used as a euphemism for ladybits.
Justice Breyer gets the difference between asking a kid to shake out her locker and asking her to shake out her underwear, but wants to know if making Redding change into her gym clothes would have been an “intrusive, traumatic search.” Justice Breyer doesn’t see the big deal about changing into gym clothes. Neither does Justice Ginsburg, who expects her clerks to do this on a regular basis.
Justice Souter wants to know if the reasonable suspicion test changes if a bunch of kids are going to eat meth and die instead of just pop NSAIDs for funsies. Justice Souter then manages to make everyone laugh, proving that he has been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a 98-pound clone.
Justice Ginsburg wants to know about the cocaine that everybody totally carries in their underwear. Mr. RespondentPants uses the phrase “crotching the drug” and says that you can totally de-pants a student known for carrying cocaine in their underpants. Nobody bothers to ask how you would find out a student has a habit of carrying cocaine in their underpants in the first place, or why, having been found out, the student would be stupid enough to continue to do so.
Justice Kennedy then asks what is probably the most lucid question of the morning: whether it would satisfy the Fourth Amendment for the school administrators to give the student the choice between stripping in front of same-sex teachers at school or being carted down to the police station by cops and strip-searched there. Justice Scalia says something about needing probable cause in that instance, saving Mr. RespondentPants from saying something else stupid.
Chief Justice Roberts uses the word “brassiere,” which Mr. RespondentPants mishears as “prisoner.” There is a discussion over whether being asked to shake out one’s bra is less traumatic than being asked to shake out one’s underwear, and of course everyone involved gets the answer wrong because they are all men. Then Justice Breyer asks why it’s not reasonable to expect a kid to stick contraband in his underwear, because people used to stick things in Justice Breyer’s underwear all the time. (No, really. That one’s on page 58.)
Justice Alito then asks if this standard is a question of fact. Mr. RespondentPants says it is and points out that no one filed summary judgment in this case, but if they had, his client would totally have won. Justice Scalia asks if standard probable cause analysis is a jury question too, which seems like a trick question to me. Then Justice Alito asks about probable cause in 1983 cases, which is just nonsense. Justice Scalia points out that his last question was a trick question, and by the way, Mr. RespondentPants totally got it wrong.
Justice Ginsburg asks if the Ninth Circuit treated this as a fact question, because they appear to have answered it themselves. Mr. RespondentPants says that yes, it was a question of fact, except that the facts were so obvious that no reasonable factfinder could find that this case was not a lot of horseshit shoved in a thirteen-year-old girl’s underpants.
REBUTTAL BY PETITIONER SCHOOL DISTRICT (MR. ATTORNEYPANTS)
The Justices let Mr. AttorneyPants ramble for almost two whole paragraphs before Justice Scalia says something about “the people” limiting strip searches in their personal school districts, which apparently a whopping 189 districts in the country already have. Mr. AttorneyPants says this “proves” the question will be settled at the “local level,” which is a bit like saying that one farmer who shoots nine pigeons “proves” that pigeons are a dangerous nuisance and should be nuked into oblivion.
Mr. AttorneyPants’ big finish is to request an affirmative ruling because it would “further judicial economy.” I do not think those words mean what he thinks they mean.
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David Gorski settles Jenny McCarthy’s hash. Or he would, if McCarthy’s hash wasn’t so tenaciously unsettleable.
I, however, am hung up on a related topic: the idea that McCarthy not only “cured” her son’s autism, but thinks that this is a good thing.
I’ve had a high-functioning autistic in my circle of best-beloveds for a long time, and much of what I love about this person directly results from the HFA. Without the autism, s/he would be a dramatically different person – perhaps someone I would not get along with at all.
So whenever I hear the insistence that we must “cure” autism, all I can think of are the many other “diseases” we’ve tried to “cure” in the past – and failed, every single time – that make the people we love who they are. “Diseases” like homosexual orientation, for example, or transgender-ness.
I wholeheartedly agree that families with autistic members, especially ones who can’t function on their own, need relief from the endless uphill that is helping their child/sibling/etc. But we can address that need now with the resources we have now, in a manner that isn’t aimed at the pipe dream of turning a person into something else because we don’t like the original programming.
Whether autism can be “cured” remains to be seen, but whether it SHOULD be cured is the much bigger question. Where do we draw the line between increasing an autistic person’s functionality and eliminating who they are?
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A few days ago, the fine individual behind Dream Manifesto, LLC Twitter-added me, giving me the unparalleled opportunity to download an astonishing new e-book for free. Which is about the right price given its contents.
The title page says “this information is copyrighted by Dream Manifesto, LLC 2008.” The U.S. Copyright Office says this copyright (or any copyright by this LLC) was never registered, which basically means I could reprint the entire thing here and they’d have no cause of action whatsoever. Also, if they’d registered, they’d know “copyright” is NOT A VERB.
So! We charge forth.
The full title of this action-packed e-volume is The Principles of Successful Manifesting (TM): How to Live your Life Dreams in Abundance and Prosperity. Or possibly it’s The Principles of Successful Manifesting: The Quantum Method for Manifesting Your Life Dreams. The e-cover and e-title page do not agree. I suppose that’s why this is only Revision 1.26?
The Introduction begins with a cheery “Welcome to the endless potential that is You!” Thanks, but I’ve been here a while.
Then we learn “Everything in your life is a result of what you know, what you experience and how you interact with your consciousness. These elements make up the ultimate source from which everything else evolves.” To make this clearer, here’s a handy diagram:
And to think I spent a week in sixth grade memorizing all the noble gases. Pah.
“However, with this report and with a positive attitude to learn, you can go as deeply down into the rabbit hole as you wish. The rabbit hole is an analogy for your willingness to explore the unknown.”
Or, possibly, the rabbit hole is an analogy from the nonsensical depths from which this e-book arose.
“Please read this e-book with an open mind. You don’t have to believe everything that is written here – just explore as a scientist would do.”
With e-measurements, e-observation, and e-repeatable experimentation under controlled conditions. E-fabulous! And that’s just the Introduction. What e-joys await us in the actual book?
According to the e-Table of Contents, we’re about to explore such wisdom as “Imagination – Your Magic Virtual Reality World,” (now with Turbo Button!), “What is the Law of Attraction?” (hint – its archenemy is the Dryer Sheet), and “10 Impeding Beliefs that Prevent You From Getting Rich” (for instance, “I need to eat and pay rent”).
What’s next? Oo, I can’t wait!
Chapter One, “Exploring the Source of Happiness,” starts out with the singular notion that people everywhere just want to be happy. I thought people everywhere just wanted to be free, or for me to buy them a Coke and keep them company. War, what is it good for?
Then a paragraph from Baby’s First Deism, a sentence or two of Baby’s First Social Darwinism, and then this:
“Take a good look at your life right now. Where do you live? What does your furniture look like? What kind of car do you drive? How much money is in your bank account? Look in the mirror – how do you look? Everything has been manifested one way or the other, by you.”
I do wish someone would tell Ford about this. Surely they can manifest a better car than the Escort I bought thirteen years ago…they just aren’t.
“Have My Thoughts Created All This?
Yes! Whatever you see in the physical universe has been created in one way or the other by your thoughts.”
Oops.
“If you worry about getting all those bills paid you will create more of the same thing, simply because you have thought about it. Your thoughts are nothing more than frequencies or vibrations that resonate with similar vibrations already existing. Place two guitars side by side and pluck a string on one. The string on the other guitar will start vibrating, even though you haven’t touched it. It is the principle of resonance. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
Listen, I realize Schrodinger more or less postulated living creatures as wave-functions, but this is taking it a bit far, don’t you think?
Coming next, “Baby’s First Skills in Goal-Setting.” And heaven knows, we can’t miss that.
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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part Six.
Chapter Whichever-It-Is, “Infiltrating Politics,” is the best set of Cliffs Notes I’ve yet seen on What All Is Supposed To Happen That’s Wrote Down In That “Revelations” Thingy. Only it’s all supposed to happen in The Year 2000.
- checks watch*
I certainly hope Lutzer and DeVries went to their pearly-gated reward before the Euro appeared on the scene. They’d probably have had a heart attack. (Just one. Shared between them.)
Then there’s some stuff about girding our loins with the peace of flaming swords, or something. I wasn’t really paying attention.
Coming next to this space, a much less disappointing review of The Principles of Successful Manifesting: The Quantum Method for Manifesting Your Life Dreams. Or maybe I’ll just rehash some old Eddie Izzard jokes.
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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Chapter Eight, “Infiltrating the Church,” begins with graphic descriptions of seeping, erosion, rushing, and crumbling, which makes one wonder if the real enemy is Satan or FEMA.
In the future, say our intrepid authors, Satan will take over the Church. He’ll start with the pansy-ass liberals who want us all to love and honor one another in clear violation of Scripture, then will turn to the true Scotsmen Christians and give them a delightful magic show! And ice cream! Yayyy!
Satan, then, is both FEMA and Penn and/or Teller. It’s hard to keep up around here.
Next come several pages of Cliffs Notes from Baby’s First Psychology Textbook, Baby’s First “The Secret”, and Baby’s First Course in Blaming the Patient, which are every bit as exciting and thoughtful as you’d expect. Then God is compared to a slot machine and Lutzer and DeVries remember at the very last second to plug their church, which apparently is delicious: “Those who taste of the true God do not imbibe the sweet potions of false Gods.” (p. 130) Remember that next time you’re buying cough syrup.
Because the church isn’t nearly as much fun as Satan thinks it is, Chapter Nine is called “Infiltrating the Home.” Lutzer and DeVries conveniently overlook that the Third Amendment prohibits this.
In addition to FEMA and Penn & Teller, the following things are now Satan:
Ghostbusters
Casper the Friendly Ghost
Willow
He-Man
Dungeons & Dragons (yes, still)
Hard rock
Soft rock
Pharmacies
John Denver
Stay tuned for Part Seven, “Infiltrating Politics.” Woo!
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Our health plan renews April 1, so today we were all made to sit in on a conference call in which the nice man who procures our health plan for us explained in excruciating detail how we were all costing the firm a fortune and to knock it off already.
That’s not hyperbole.
He framed it as a bunch of suggestions, but what it boiled down to was “watch your health costs.” Which bothers me a great deal, for a number of reasons.
1. Being “responsible” for my health costs, in the sense that I should feel badly about spending money on my health, feels way too much like blaming me for having chronic genetic conditions in the first place.
2. Being told to “watch costs” puts me and everyone else in the very dangerous position of making decisions about our health based on dollar amounts involved in any testing, diagnosis, or treatment. We’re not doctors to begin with. Expecting us to make educated decisions about our own health based on evidence we don’t yet have is nigh impossible; expecting us to make uneducated decisions about our own health based on someone else’s bottom line is madness.
Example: Last fall, my internist scheduled me for a full-spine MRI because I had within the past three months developed symptoms including widespread body pain, stumbling, involuntary twitching of major muscle groups, and an intolerance to heat. Said MRI cost well over a thousand dollars. Said internist was concerned I might have multiple sclerosis. Had I made my decision solely on cost, I would have postponed a diagnosis, perhaps until it was too late to save a significant portion of my useful life.
In case you’re wondering, I had the MRI. And I do not have MS.
3. Unlike, say, car insurance, where I can choose to buy the nice safe sedan instead of the deathtrap sportscar, I cannot choose to have a new body. I cannot choose to just suddenly stop having [insert condition here]. (I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.) Insurance therefore punishes me for posing “risks” over which I have no control, except to manage them to the best of my ability by going to all my doctor’s appointments, taking all my medications, and submitting to the testing my doctors want to do. But see #2.
4. I’m not a “person.” I’m not a “disabled person.” I’m an “uninsurable risk.” And my heathen uninsurable riskiness is boosting everyone else’s insurance costs. (I shouldn’t have to explain that this is because the insurance model is wrong for issues of human health, not because I am in fact “less-than” for being disabled.)
5. When asked to “think of ways you can reduce your costs,” my only available response was “quit taking all my meds and go on disability.” First, this is not any kind of productive solution. Second, the insurance company would not mind in the least if I started getting my health care out of taxpayers’ pockets (of which there would be one less, because I would not be working anymore) instead of their coffers. See #4.
6. We were specifically exhorted NOT to use the emergency room as our primary care. No mention was made of whether I was allowed to use the emergency room as an emergency room.
(Not that it mattered, as I have specifically avoided going to the emergency room on four separate occasions in the past six months despite desperately needing care, solely because I could not afford the out-of-pocket portion of the cost. So I guess the “real” answer to #5 is “stay in bed in excruciating pain, except for the parts where you can’t stop vomiting.”)
7. We were given a list of questions to ask and ways to haggle our doctors and pharmacists into cutting us better deals. Never mind that one of the benefits our premiums supposedly pay for is the insurer doing the haggling for us before we get there. (Also, haggling over price, which nine times out of ten the doctor/pharmacist cannot control anyway, introduces a tension into the doctor-pt relationship that just shouldn’t be there. Period.)
8. Near the end, we were advised to “save costs” on our medications by (a) obtaining free antibiotics and the like whenever possible, and/or (b) asking our doctors if we could cut all our pills in half. (A) bothers me because it’s obviously taking advantage of a charitable program designed to help people who genuinely cannot afford medications, not people like us who can afford them but just have insurers who want to save a buck. (B) gave me a barely-controllable urge to ask, “So will our long-term disability plan cover me when, after years of cutting my no-generic-available Maxalt in half, I succumb to brain lesions caused by insufficiently treated migraines and have to spend the last twenty years of my life on a ventilator?”
(Yes, I know the lesions don’t occur in the brain stem and so I would not wind up on a ventilator. But I’m betting the insurer didn’t know that, and in any case it would have made my point.)
9. Does he seriously think I’m out having MRIs and lumbar punctures and fluoroscopy for fun?
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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
In Chapter Seven, Lutzer and DeVries argue that, in the spiritual future, your allegiance will belong only to things of this world, your understanding of the religious obligations of man will wither, and your very soul will shrivel up within you. And that’s the happy ending.
Lutzer and DeVries are out to bash esotericism, embodied for them in the notion that a human being can have actual contact with the Divine. This, apparently, is the Gravest of All Sins. Eve tried it and look what happened to her! Silly women, trying to understand spiritual matters. This is why God invented the kitchen.
Some highlights:
(page 102) “Since a person cannot have a spiritual experience with himself, it follows that the New Agers must be making contact with some other spiritual beings.”
[Pause for insertion of relevant movie quote: "Any documented occasion when some yahoo claims God has spoken to them, they're speaking to me. Or they're talking to themselves."]
(continued) “Good angels are off-limits because they respond primarily to God and minister only to those who are children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.”
Abraham, Lot, Jacob, and all of the rest of them were not actually talking to “good angels,” because they had no faith in Jesus Christ, seeing as Jesus didn’t exist yet. They too were a bunch of esoteric heathens. Just so we’re clear.
(continued) “Nowhere does the Bible teach that we should make contact with these beings; rather, it forbids contacting any supernatural power except God.”
Or he’ll burn your offering to Baal and steal your girlfriend, just like he did in the books of Kings. Oh, and you are only allowed to contact God every third Tuesday between 8:12 and 8:17 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, by leaving a voicemail with his secretary, Jesus.
(page 103, apropos to nothing) “A channeler is contacted who purports to ‘call up’ the dead and establish communication. But in fact, the communication is not with the dead, but with demons who impersonate the dead.”
This, actually, makes a lot of sense. It explains why seances generate answers like “yes dear, I’m fine, and by the way the lemon meringue pie recipe requires six eggs, not four,” instead of “If I DID have a message for you, don’t you think I’d have gotten it to you myself?” or “EFF OFF, I’M TRYING TO SLEEP!”
Lutzer and DeVries wind this whole thing up by reminding us that we cannot believe anything we see, hear, touch, think, or experience, so we had better believe them instead. Which is exactly the plan they say Satan has been up to this whole time. Hm.
Coming soon to a blog near you: Chapter Eight, “Infiltrating the Church.”
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The title is a lie. (That Satan!) Chapter Six of Lutzer and DeVries’ Satan’s “Evangelistic” Strategy for This New Age (available on Amazon for just nineteen cents!) is actually about Moral Relativism.
I had hoped to set up a Battle of the Evangelical Wordmeisters between Lutzer and DeVries and Ryan Dobson, son of The One James Dobson and author of Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid, another rip-roaring adventure tale on the evils of moral relativism, but no go. Lutzer & DeVries and Dobson might use the same words, but they aren’t talking about the same thing.
This is Armageddon because Lutzer and DeVries and I…actually agree. *thunderclap*
Our intrepid authors argue that the New Age spew about how “you are your own God” and “your truth is not my truth” is utter nonsense and no basis for a civilized society. I don’t even need Jesus hanging out in my heart for this one: they’re right. At least, they’re right insofar as what they so strenuously oppose is the popular misunderstanding of “you are your own God,” which they have also adopted.
It works like this. Go to New Age seminar. Hear that you don’t have to go wandering around in the woods to find God, ’cause God is You. Decide that means your every selfish whim is Good Shit, and become a total shit as a result.
Too many people have bought the “you are your own God” line precisely because it allows them to succumb to the whims of their egos. What these people are the most likely of the entire lecture hall to miss, however, is that when the lecturer says “you are God,” s/he does NOT mean “your petty-ass individual ego is God.” S/he means “the deepest part of you that is beyond the vagaries of whim, want, emotion, or desire, the part of you that Will Not Be Moved…THAT is God. Go talk to it.”
And they won’t, because this is, of course, the one thing the full-egos won’t do. Face mySELF? OMFG HALP! This is what Lutzer and DeVries won’t do, either, as admitting that this is the intent of the message might require them to analyze whether “shut up and listen to the still small voice within” is good advice (hey, Jonah did it!), which might lead to a giant hole in their entire war on Hinduis- I mean, the New Age. We can’t have that. It won’t sell books.
But insofar as Lutzer and DeVries are against a world run by a bunch of egos, yes, I am wholeheartedly on their side.
What a letdown, eh? Stay tuned. Chapter Seven harangues esotericism, and since I own a T-shirt that says “FIGHT EXOTERICISM,” we all know where I stand on that. 
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Second Chances
Reposted from my LiveJournal, in response to today’s writer’s block question: “Do you think people deserve second chances?”
It depends on what you mean by “second chances.”
I am committed to the notion that we, as a collective human society, have no business throwing out another human being for what they have done (or, in the case of the poor, failed to do). No matter what heinous act a particular human being happens to perpetuate on another human being or on society as a whole, we have an obligation to recognize the actor’s basic humanity. When we fail in this obligation, we become the very scum we seek to “punish.” We abrogate our own humanity, and we set back any progress we may have made as sentient beings over the course of the past x-thousand years.
On the other hand, I am committed to the notion that actions have consequences, and that we as a society must ensure that people who act to the detriment of society (“criminals”) experience the consequences of that action. In other words, yes, murderers should absolutely be in prison – that is not only the consequence of their behavior (loss of liberty), but in many cases necessary to protect the rest of society (letting murderers run around free is simply saying “oh well, if you got in the murderer’s way your life must not be worth much, sucker”).
Our criminal justice system, then, has to strike a balance between ensuring that those who harm societal interests experience consequences sufficient to deter and/or rehabilitate them, and treating them as less-than. This is why I’m strongly committed to prisoners’ rights. There is no moral or social right to throw people away.
So yes, we can lock up murderers and rapists and what have you. But we still have an obligation to ensure their quarters are safe and sanitary and to give them the opportunity to better themselves while in confinement – decent prison libraries, for instance, or GED courses. Likewise, we can yank AIG’s bonuses and let the whole thing fall off a cliff, but if that causes any of its employees to become destitute, we have a moral obligation to ensure they have food, housing, and healthcare. (It does not have to be food or housing at the level at which they may have become accustomed. It just has to be safe and sanitary.)
The problem with punishment, as opposed to consequence-and-rehabilitation, is that the receiver remembers the punishment and forgets the crime. It breeds vengeance, which is exactly not the frame of mind we want a parolee in. Think about it – do you want a guy who just did a year for beating up his wife to get out thinking “y’know, that was fucking stupid. I think I’ll go be a mechanic,” or “you assholes treated me like shit in that hellhole for twelve whole months. I’m paying you back and I don’t fucking care who dies”?
(Note I said “act to the detriment of society.” Insofar as you act to the detriment of only yourself, I don’t think that should be a crime. Nature is not just, but She is exact. If you want to fill yourself with heroin, physics and biology are going to pay you back far better than prison ever could. If you fill yourself with heroin and then drive a car, however, that should be actionable, because you’re putting the lives of other drivers and pedestrians on the line as well as your own. Ditto if you start mugging people or embezzling to pay for your heroin habit. And so forth.)
(The poor, btw, are a special case, because we throw away the poor for having done nothing except be poor at us. We blame it on the moral failings of the poor individuals so we can maintain a sense of superiority, not because being poor actually is or evidences any kind of moral failing or intent to cause social damage. Society is therefore collectively to blame for our holier-than-thou attitude to the extent it exacerbates poorness – except the poor themselves, who have no power in this scenario to change it. As I keep saying, nothing gives us, individually or collectively, the right to throw another human being away. So I guess what I’m saying is that the poor don’t need a second chance, they just need the rest of us to quit denying them their first chance.)
To make a long story very, very short, then:
Yes, I think everyone deserves a second chance. But they deserve a second chance only within the context of the consequences of their first.
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A friend of a friend who recently held out for regulation-free hiring in said friend’s blog comments has got me thinking. No-regulations libertarian-ish-ism sounds great when you’re nineteen, but would it work in my world today?
The following example is taken from a case I’m currently working on. It’s a good vehicle for the discussion not only because it actually happens, but because it’s an utterly basic issue.
You are a steel fabricator. For twelve to sixteen hours a day, you engineer, measure, cut, and/or put together steel doowackies – shelves, buildings, cogs, whatever you like. In order to do this, of course, you need raw materials; namely, steel. You also need the means to move the steel around your plant – from off the trucks it arrives on, to storage, to the cutting tables, and so forth. Steel can be pretty dang heavy, so you decide you’re going to buy some nylon slings, so you can pick your steel up with a hoist and move it around the plant.
I am a nylon sling manufacturer. Since I want your business, I have sent you a catalog. Deciding that you want to buy my slings, you sit down and look at my catalog. Since my prices are the lowest around, you give me a call, and I send you a box of slings.
What you don’t know is that my prices are so low because I purposely manufacture and sell defective slings. The slings I send you look, sound, taste and feel just like any other manufacturer’s slings. The only difference is that, where other manufacturers have used webbing and sewing techniques that will actually stand up to repeated use, I have used defective webbing and sewing that will only take about a half-dozen lifts before snapping. The only way for you to know that I have used defective webbing and sewing is to take apart the sling, which you don’t do. Taking apart the sling will destroy it, and you want to use it to lift your steel. After all, that’s why you bought it.
So you start using your slings. For the first couple days, they work great. Then, one morning as you’re unloading a truck, the sling you’re using breaks, dropping several hundred pounds of steel onto you. You’re pinned to the floor. Other workers rush over and take the steel off you, but you’ve got a broken leg, a broken wrist, broken ribs, and a concussion.
Now that the sling is broken, it’s pretty easy for you to have a look at its insides, and when you do you realize right away that I’ve sold you a defective product. Thanks to that, you have no slings, so work in your plant slows to a crawl because it takes your workers so long to move the steel by hand. You have to refuse several large and very lucrative projects because you cannot move steel in the sizes those projects require. On a personal note, you have several thousand dollars’ worth of medical bills. You also have a permanent limp and chronic pain that has forced you to stop working, costing you and your company the money you would have made if you were still healthy. None of this would have happened if I had not sold you a defective sling. What are you going to do?
Like most Americans, you’re probably inclined to sue me blind at this point. And we’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that the prohibition on public regulation of private behavior has not put the courts out of business, so you actually can file that complaint. What are you going to allege?
The facts are pretty simple: “Plaintiff, Guy Who Makes Crappy Slings, sold me a sling. The sling broke, dropping steel on my head. Now I am permanently disabled and my business is operating at minimum capacity.” So is the prayer for relief: “Make the jerkwad who sold me the crap sling give me money.” No change from the thousands of products liability claims that are filed every day.
(Okay, we don’t typically use the words “jerkwad” or “crap” in court filings. But we could. And you get my point.)
Now comes the fun part. How are you going to prove you deserve my money?
Under our current private-behavior-regulating system, you can prove you deserve my money if you prove:
(1) that I owed you a duty to make and sell a sling that wouldn’t cause steel to fall on your head when you used it in the way it is supposed to be used (and we’ll assume you did use it correctly);
(2) that I somehow failed to do that, possibly by manufacturing a sling I knew wouldn’t do what I said it would;
(3) that but for my selling you a sling that didn’t do what it was supposed to, you would not
(4) be crippled for life.
Currently, the duty that typically pops up in negligence cases is “reasonable care,” or the duty, basically, to pay attention to what you’re doing and what other people will do, and not to be a total fumblefuck. Pretty much everybody has a duty of reasonable care to pretty much everybody else pretty much all the time, and we tend to agree, without really thinking about it, that it’s a good duty for people to have to one another.
In Regulation-Free World, however, there are no duties. Which means that, when I sold you that sling, I had absolutely NO responsibility to you when I did it. I could make my sling with crappy materials. I could sell it to you without telling you it would break in the first week. There’s no way for you to invoke the public power (say, through the courts) to make me behave myself, because there is no public regulation of private behavior. No one has the power to make me behave except my own self-interest.
But, you say, that’s crazy. Rational people wouldn’t assume they had no duty to one another!
I’m having a flashback to Rwanda as you speak, but let’s assume you’re right, and that even in Regulation-Free World everyone recognizes that you really shouldn’t fuck over your fellow man like that. So we agree that I have a duty not to make a defective sling. Score one for you.
Now I stand up in court. And I argue that, yes, we all know I have a duty to make a non-defective sling. But, I say, I did that: this sling is not defective. You wanted it to lift steel, and it did that.
That, as we all know, is complete bollocks. So what are you going to say to prove that I’m full of it?
To prove the sling is defective, you might compare it, say, to another company’s slings. But that doesn’t prove the sling I made is defective; it just proves that another company makes a better sling. Maybe you should have bought it from them instead. Caveat emptor.
You might compare my sling to the slings made by every other company on the market (assuming I have competition). Still, this doesn’t prove that my sling is defective; it just proves that everyone makes a better sling than I do. Maybe I should be out of business. Caveat venditor.
You might even argue that everyone knows slings should be made in X way to prevent them dropping their loads on people’s heads, and that my sling, which is made Y way, doesn’t do that. In a regulation-free world, this is as close as you can get to arguing what saves plaintiffs’ asses in products liability cases on a daily basis: that the product was defective because it failed to meet standards. “But everyone knows” is a close argument, but not close enough. “Everyone,” after all, isn’t an authority. Without some kind of uniform regulation, there is no authority on the defectiveness of slings. And without that baseline, you can’t prove I failed when I made you a crappy sling.
“But wait!” you say. “If the sling was supposed to hold up the steel, and it broke, then obviously something was wrong with it! Obviously someone screwed up!”
In law, we call this res ipsa loquitur, which is fancypants psuedo-Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.” It’s the common-sense idea that some things are just so completely “out there” that, for them to happen, someone MUST have screwed up.
But how are you going to establish that I screwed this one up? After all, even the best nylon sling on the market is not infinitely strong, and even in an ideal world I’m sure we agree that there is no duty to create an infinitely unbreakable sling. Every sling is going to break sometime. Without some kind of baseline, you’re never going to prove that it wasn’t this sling’s “time to go.”
“Well, then, fuckit,” you say. “I’ll just enjoy telling all my friends how much your product sucks and I’ll put you out of business. Viva la free market!”
Which isn’t a bad plan. Except that, without government regulation, I may very well have no competition – I may have bought or stomped them all and turned myself into Monopoly Sling Co., your one and only source of nylon slings.
Or perhaps I still have “competition,” but in order to keep costs down and profits high, we have agreed amongst ourselves to charge as much as we can get away with while manufacturing the least-durable product possible that will still make it to the end user in one piece.
Or perhaps I have actual competition – competition who watched this case with much interest, thinking that surely I, their low-priced competitor, would be eaten alive in court. When this didn’t happen, they learned, hey, we can save money by skimping on materials, and no one will hold us accountable! Suddenly, you can’t get a better sling anywhere. It’s a giant race to the bottom.
What are you going to do? You can’t not buy slings, because without them your business doesn’t move enough steel in a week to keep its doors open. You can’t make your own slings, because you don’t have the equipment or the expertise, and in any case if your guys spend all day sewing slings, they’re moving even less steel and are even less likely to make enough to keep your business afloat.
You consider switching to chains, but the landmark case of Your Neighbor v. Guy Who Makes Crappy Chains made it clear that you can’t prove a chain is defective any more than you can prove a sling is, and in any case, you can’t get chains from anyone other than Consolidated Amalgamated Chains Inc. Making your own is more feasible than making your own straps, but again, it might put you out of business.
Unless you went into business making superior-quality chains. Which could hold you up for a while, till the thugs from Consolidated throw a pipe bomb through your factory windows. Who’s going to stop them? There is no government regulation of private market behavior, remember. It’s not arson, it’s just good business!
“Oh, come ON,” you say. “This post is quite long enough without you stuffing it with hyperbole!”
Well, yeah. But here’s the short version. Public regulation of private behavior is necessary to the operation of any cohesive society. There is no such thing as a truly free-market system for a reason. Every time you advocate for a world free of regulation, just remember: you could be the guy who got squashed by the steel.
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