*Best Of*: October 2003 Archives

In response to this post about adults getting more involved in Halloween, my friend Craig passes on a Time Magazine article titled "Boo, Humbug! Call me a Scrooge, but why can't adults leave Halloween to the kids?" by Michael Elliott. Mr. Elliott writes a lot I disagree with (and some I don't), and I don't think he gets Halloween, any more than he gets the reasons behind the current wave of Francophobia sweeping the America. But anyway, let's take a look at what he says.

Still, if companies want to sell even more masks, lanterns, witch hats and the like, good luck to them. It's the gullible consumers who fall for the pitch whom I detest — the employees who insist on decorating sensible cubicles with orange and black streamers and littering the office with bowls of candy, the folk who dress up and throw pumpkin parties at country clubs, the hundreds of thousands who will come to work next week in costume. Chris Riddle is the Halloween trend spotter at card-and-decorations giant American Greetings, which estimates that 25% of the American work force will observe Halloween in some fashion this year. "It's a release," Riddle says of the way people deck out their suburban yards, "a way to say, 'I can still act like a kid.'"

That's my problem. Halloween, for me, is the gaudiest example of the infantilization of American culture. It's up there with other classics like McDonald's Happy Meals or Hollywood's post — Star Wars decision to concentrate on making kids' films for grownups. These aren't just the mutterings of an old curmudgeon. I like parties as much as the next guy (so would you if you'd grown up in a house where the Messiah was considered light entertainment), though I've never quite seen why you needed a specific date on the calendar as an excuse to let your hair down. There's a larger point. In time, infantile societies become degraded, unable to meet the realities that face them.

However, in the article I linked to in my previous post, York University history professor Nick Rogers points out that, "The notion that Halloween is simply for kids is a misconception based on the centrality of trick-or-treating in the 1950s, when there was an attempt to take the mischief out of Halloween and 'infantilize' it." So perhaps Mr. Elliott should be rejoicing that adults are de-infantilizing the holiday? After all, if his main objection is that the holiday is too childish, then one of the best things he can hope for is that Halloween will return to its more historical role as a community-wide harvest festival. Of course, most communities don't actually harvest anything anymore, so it's only reasonable that the holiday take on a different focus. I hate to break it to him, but adults have worn masks and dressed up in costumes for thousands of years, all around the world and in every culture, and such behavior is not generally seen as uniquely childish. That perception appears to be the product of late 20th-century America, more than anything else.

Further, I fail to see the connection between Happy Meals, "Star Wars", and the infantilization of culture. Happy Meals provide parents a cheap and easy way to feed their kids, and give the kids a fun toy; the food may not be healthy, but that has nothing to do with infantilization. Would he rather that kids be forced to eat gruel from a burlap sack with a shard of glass for a spoon?

"Star Wars" is a great movie, and nearly everyone in my generation loves it (even Europeans I talked to while traveling) -- so what's his point? Does he object to "Star Wars" and similar films because he thinks they cause his so-called infantilization, or because they cater to it by entertaining people without *gasp* literature?

How did cultural infantilization creep up on us? In The Disappearance of Childhood, a wonderful little book first published in 1982, Neil Postman, a New York University professor who died this month, identified a shift from a culture based on literature — on reading — to one based on the image. In a preliterate world, there's no distinction between children and adults. Look at a Bruegel painting, and you see adults eating, drinking, groping, necking, together with their children. Literacy changed all that. Reading has to be learned; it separates the world of the child from that of the adult. But children can absorb images — from TV, say — just as easily as their elders. Postman worried that a postliterate culture would be one in which barriers that protected children from the perils and temptations of the outside world would be torn down.

Oh brother. So, Halloween is connected to Happy Meals and "Star Wars", which in turn keep people from reading, which leads to illiteracy, and the infantilization of the culture. Ok, got it.

Halloween shows that the process works in reverse. We now have to be worried not just about children acting like adults but about adults behaving like children. That doesn't mean adults have to be serious all the time. It does mean that they should recognize when it's time — and what it means — to grow up and let the kids run their own holiday.

Sorry, in my world the kids don't get to run their own anything, because they're kids. I think it's important to separate the roles of children and adults, and I think that adults should be in charge of everything -- and I'm surprised that Mr. Elliott thinks otherwise. Even if adults don't dress up, who do you think is buying all the costumes and candy? Who's going to build the haunted houses for the kids to creep through? Who's going to walk the little ones door-to-door collecting treats?

Do I really need to expound on the bizarrely out-of-context Bible quote at the end of his article?

When it comes to the infantilization of culture and adults acting like children, I think there are far better targets than Halloween. Mr. Elliott briefly mentions TV, but doesn't mention the vast quantity of nonsense that inhabits most of our airwaves -- of course, New York intellectuals have railed against TV for years, so maybe he wanted to try something new. Or maybe that position is just wearing thin, considering that there are some truly great shows on TV these days. Similarly, there are a lot of terrible movies, but there are also some great ones. Oh yeah, there are some pretty awful books too, and some are even considered "classics".

If one wants to discuss the infantilization of culture, why not mention professional sports? Why not mention the sensationalism that runs rampant through our news organizations? Why not mention the grocery workers who are striking because they think putting boxes on shelves entitles them to $40,000 a year and free health care? Why not take the whiny, self-righteous Bush-haters aside and explain to them that there's more at stake right now than the next Presidential election? Why not condemn the welfare state that exists solely to create a childish constituency who will vote in favor of its own expansion?

Mr. Elliott may just not like Halloween -- and that's fine -- but he shouldn't try dress up his personal opinion as high moral virtue built on care and concern for our collapsing civilization.

SDB has a great essay up about the North Korea problem, and in it he gives a concise (!) explanation of America's Cold War nuclear deterrence policy (which I've commented on previously, slightly objecting to one of SDB's earlier positions; I either misunderstood what he was saying before, or he's rethought it and now agrees with me).

In that case, the Bush administration would have to publicly and formally renew a basic tenet of Cold War deterrence policy: any nuclear blackmail will be treated as if a nuke had actually been used, and the response to any such threat will be maximal.

During the Cold War, nuclear blackmail was one of the dangers. What would we do if the Hotline phone rang and the voice in the handset said, "Pull your forces out of Germany or we'll nuke Pittsburgh"? The strategists wrestled with that, and ultimately concluded that only deterrence could prevent such a thing. Thus it became American doctrine that if we received such a phone call, then the President would "push the button" (or at least consider doing so). Understand that I don't mean that it would happen ten seconds after hearing such a thing; there'd be time for diplomacy, and an attempt to deal with the situation via lesser means. But in the final resort, if we really faced such a demand, then it was publicly stated that American doctrine was to launch every nuke we had. No "proportional response", no city-trading-duel, no waiting to see if Pittsburgh really did get vaporized before launching. It was important that this be public because like any deterrent its real purpose was to make sure that the situation didn't arise at all. Since the Soviet leadership knew that was American doctrine, they couldn't be at all sure that we wouldn't really do it if they made that phone call, and it never happened. ...

We'd also have to establish a new doctrine, and this would be more controversial and politically risky. The doctrine would be that if anyone set off a nuke in our territory and no one claimed responsibility, or if a terrorist group claimed responsibility, in that case we'd also obliterate NK. No questions asked, no excuses listened to, no attempt to determine if the nuke had been sold by NK, no delays, no nothing. Under this doctrine put in place after an NK nuclear test, if any city of ours was destroyed, NK would be destroyed as soon thereafter as we could manage. That's the only way we can limit the danger that NK would surreptitiously sell one or more nukes to someone like al Qaeda.

That's the spirit of what I said before, although he says it more clearly and at greater length.

The only disagreement I have with what he's written is his characterization of evil.

Deterrence is a real moral problem. In some cases it's the only way to bring about the best possible case, but the only way you can have a deterrent is by being willing to commit tremendously evil acts. Is it immoral to be prepared to do evil things if through your willingness and preparation you avoid the need to do so and also prevent someone else from doing the same evil thing? Regardless of whether it's moral or not, that's what we'd have to do.

I don't think that nuclear deterrence is evil, even though we're threatening to obliterate the innocent people who live in a (presumably non-democratic) enemy country. In fact, even if we were put in a position such that we had to carry out the threat, our actions wouldn't be evil. Yes, millions of people who were not directly involved in the decision to threaten/attack us would be killed, but the morality of it seems very similar to the morality behind felony murder laws (which vary state-by-state, but are all pretty similar).

The felony murder rule is as old as this country. It's designed for instances where two people go to rob a bank. The getaway driver waits in the car-the robber goes in and shoots the teller-prosecutors can charge both with first-degree murder. ...

Under the state's felony murder rule, a person can be charged with murder if someone dies while the person is committing or attempting to commit a felony like arson-even if the death is accidental. Prosecutors don't have to prove intent, an element usually required for a first-degree murder conviction. ...

In Colorado, the felony murder law says the death of anyone during a serious crime or the "immediate flight" afterward makes everyone involved in the original crime guilty of murder -- no matter who did the actual killing or when.

Felony murder laws lay the responsibility for any deaths that occur during the commission of a felony at the feet of the criminal, even if he doesn't intend to kill anyone. An unarmed man tries to rob a bank, the security guard shoots at him, misses, and hits a customer, killing him -- the would-be bank robber is guilty of felony murder.

Similarly, if America is threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons, and we respond, the deaths that result are fully the responsibility of the people who provoked us to self-defense. Our policy of deterrence is not evil, any more than the bank guard in the above example was evil.

Samizdata gets the following email:

Dear Mr Micklethwait

I am writing a concise statement of ancient rights as part of a longer publication.

I want to include all the most important Common Law rights: life, liberty, property, family life, fair trial in open court, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury etc.

I cannot find a comprehensive list anywhere. Do you know of one please?

Regards,

Richard Marsden

I started writing a lengthy comment, but then realized that I've got my own blog! So, let me take a crack at it.

I think that most of our civil rights can be derived from the right to own property -- when you "own" something, you have the right to use it, and the right to exclude others from using it at will. Property rights (and the ownership of our own bodies) can cover almost everything we like as Americans:
- freedom of speech,
- freedom of thought,
- freedom of religion,
- freedom of self-defense,
- freedom to work,
- freedom to trade,
- freedom of association,
- and, in some ways, the right to privacy (though not as it is often believed).

Naturally, my exercise of my rights can interfere with your exercise of yours, and the details need to be worked out. How do we do that?

Criminal law is the system that society has at its disposal when it needs to curtail your civil rights because your exercise of freedom is impinging unacceptably on others. Under commonly recognized principles, the important aspects of criminal law revolve around the understanding that depriving someone of his civil rights is a serious matter, and should not be done lightly or easily. Taking away someone's rights should be be difficult, but civilization has recognized that such power is necessary in order for society to function.

So we've got:
- trial by jury (perhaps the most important),
- the right to be presented to the court (habeas corpus),
- the right to a speedy trial (and the duty to enjoy that right),
- the right to confront the accuser (even in rape cases),
- the right to the presumption of innocence,
- the right to commensurate punishment,
- the right to remain silent and not testify against yourself,
- &c.

Notice, there's no right to vote, although democracy is a good way to protect our rights. All that common law really comes down to is "leave me alone, and I'll return the favor."

Partial-birth abortions will be illegal, as soon as Bush signs the bill that the Senate passed 64-34 yesterday (the House passed it a month ago). In theory, this law will prevent up to 5,000 abortions of convenience each year (since, as Bill Hobbs notes, the AMA says the procedure is almost never medically necessary; Donald Sensing says that physicians have testified for years that the procedure is never medically necessary).

Considering that I view abortions of convenience as murder, I would have preferred if the federal government had stayed out of it and left it to the states (which generally prosecute murderers), but my affection for federalism is outweighed by the thousands of lives that will potentially be saved. Furthermore, many similar state laws have been struck down:

The measure is similar to, but somewhat more detailed than, a Nebraska state law that the Supreme Court struck down by a 5-4 vote three years ago. That ruling had the practical effect of nullifying 30 state laws. Up to that time, Congress had been trying unsuccessfully for five years to enact a similar proposal at the federal level.

My lamentable Senator, Barbara Boxer, has this to say:

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who helped lead opposition to the bill, called it "a very sad day for the women of America."

But, of course, she's only considering women who are already out of the womb, and has little concern for the women who will now not have their brains sucked out by vacuums and their bodies dismembered.

Along the same lines,

But an abortion rights supporter said the ban "will bring an end to providing the best and safest health care for women."

It will bring an end to the mass-murder of thousands of children. Physicians all seem to agree that this procedure was never medically necessary, so it certainly can't be required for the best and safest health care for anyone. Congress concurs:

In drafting the new national measure that has now passed, Congress wrote lengthy findings that contradict the Supreme Court's conclusion that abortions using the procedure banned by the bill are sometimes medically necessary to protect a woman's health. "Congress finds that partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother," the bill's preamble says.

The problem is that the abortion-rights people don't seem to understand that they're arguing a different point than most people are conerned with.

"This dangerous ban prevents women, in consultation with their families and trusted doctors, from making decisions about their own health," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Most Americans don't see abortion as a private issue that only affects the mother, no matter how much abortion-rights advocates want to spin it that way. They purposefully misstate the pro-life position, which is that an unborn baby is a human being, and that as such the medical privacy concerns of the mother are inconsequential compared to the right of that other human being to live. As I wrote in that earlier post:

2. Michelman states that the position of pro-life advocates is that the government should be involved in people's private medical decisions, when that isn't the crux of the matter at all. To an opponent of abortion, the critical issue is that a fetus is a human being, and as such should not be killed without a cause more substantial than mere convenience. It has nothing to do with a lack of respect for the privacy of the mother, or with a desire to interfere with her private medical decisions. To a pro-lifer, the decision to have an abortion isn't private, because it necessarily involves another person: the unborn baby.

For a really excellent scientific explanation of why unborn babies (from conception) are alive, and are "real" human beings (without any reference to religion), I highly recommend "Life: Defining the Beginning from the End".

And finally, "Who, after all, could consider a fetus as life unworthy of living, once they've held its hand?", asks Sydney Smith, a family physician, and author of MedPundit.

It took the FBI 5 weeks to find some box cutters that a man hid aboard two Southwest Airlines jets (link removed), despite an email he sent to federal authorities alerting them to his actions. Aside from the obvious security concerns, this brings to my mind the really nifty concept of attractors and strange attractors, and is an excellent example of an attractor in real life. What's an attractor?

The basic idea behind an attractor is that a dynamic system will tend toward certain states as time goes on. The simplest form of an attractor is the point attractor. Consider a normal pendulum, it doesn't matter where you release it from, it will always come to rest in the same position, perpindicular to the ground. This state is the attractor for the system.

From another story, it appears that the box cutters were simply hidden in a compartment in the airplane bathrooms. We've all seen the compartments, I imagine; there are several panels in those bathrooms that all look removable. But we've never opened them, and have probably not even wondered what they're for. The man told the authorities exactly which planes to search, but it still took them 5 weeks to find the knives because they were hidden outside the areas the searchers were attracted to, for whatever reason.

Strange attractors are like normal attractors, except that they're chaotic. Chaotic systems never revisit a point they've been to previously, so you may wonder how such a system could have an attractor at all -- well, it can't, but it can have a strange attractor. A chaotic system may never return to an exact previous position, but it can go to a position that's similar to a previous position (and much depends on how you define "similar", which in turn depends on the system in question).

Human behavior is (arguably) chaotic -- it's immensely dependent on initial conditions, and tiny changes in our inputs can yield drastically different outputs. If I happen to get a piece of dust in my eye, I may twitch, stub my toe, decide not to walk to lunch, and avoid getting hit by a car. Nevertheless, humans often behave in ways that are very similar to their past behavior, and we are often quite predictable. Our patterns, movements, thoughts, and life can be seen together as a giant strange attractor that represents the most likely state of our being and that describes our operational progression through time.

Consider your movement patterns through your house. There are probably several areas where you spend the vast majority of your time -- such as the bed, the couch, the bathroom, the computer -- and the rest of your house may be rather sparsely visited. How often do you peer into the crawlspace under the floor, or go up into the attic? How often does the crevice behind the fridge see the light of day? How often do you open that cabinet over the oven? Maybe once a year, or maybe less than that.

If you were to draw a map of your house and trace your movements over the course of a month, you'd probably see that 75% of the floorspace was completely untouched, and that 95% of the volume enclosed by your house did not ever contain a human being. We look at the corners of our rooms from time to time, but we never go up into them. You see the ceiling every day, but when was the last time you touched it? Even when we lose something and we say we've looked everywhere, we know that's just a turn of phrase. We haven't looked under the carpet, or behind the shelves, or inside the TV. But we shouldn't have to, because our car keys are not going to be inside the TV -- that location isn't a high-frequency part of the strange attractor that represents the movement of our keys.

Similarly, thousands of people rode the Southwest jets over the 5 weeks the box cutters were hidden in the bathrooms, but no one found them because no one ever opens those compartments. They're 6 inches from your head when you wash your hands, but a million miles away conceptually.

Similar strange attractors can be found in almost everything, if you want to search them out. Consider the various ideologies that divide humanity, and that 90% of people believe in one of maybe a half-dozen religious systems. There are all sorts of reasons, but the system is so complicated and chaotic that it's impossible to fully describe. In all likelihood, no two people hold exactly identical religious beliefs, but the vast majority are similar enough that they can be easily clustered into just a few buckets.

Strange attractors are everywhere, and by recognizing and studying the attractors that describe our own behavior we can get a better understanding of how we are, and why we are.

Bill Clinton has been raising funds and making campaign appearances for a lot of Democrats, but I'm not really sure why they're always so excited to have him come aboard. Here are a few pictures I collected off the web of Bill Clinton campaigning with various people who then went on to lose -- often spectacularly and surprisingly -- possibly due to the Clinton Kiss of Death.

Bill Clinton campaigns with doomed California Governor Grey Davis, 2003.

Bill Clinton campaigns with Vice President Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election.

Here's Bill Clinton with Walter Mondale, who spectacularly lost Paul Wellstone's Senate seat in 2002.

Bill Clinton in Florida with Democrat gubernatorial cadidate Bill McBride, who beat out former Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno [corrected] for the nomination, but then lost the election to Jeb Bush in 2002.

Bill Clinton campaigns with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as she runs for governor of Maryland, a heavily Democrat state, but she ends up losing the election to Republican Bob Ehrlich [corrected].

Bill Clinton and terrorist Yasser Arafat share a special moment. Ok, so Arafat hasn't lost any elections (you have to hold elections before you can lose them), but he sure has come down in the world over the past few years. He's now holed up in a mostly-destroyed office building, waiting to be exiled or assassinated. Update: Arafat has stomach cancer, so apparently Bill Clinton did have a positive effect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after all.

I've written about women at war previously; as I've said before, I don't think there are any good reasons for allowing women to serve in combat positions, and there are plenty of very compelling reasons not to.

I came across a post on a site called Equity Feminism that notes that when women recruits are held to the same physical requirements as men are, their injury rate increases by more than 100%.

Great Britain used to train men and women separately, with different requirements, but many women soldiers finished basic training without the abilities needed to perform their jobs. In 1998, the army began holding women to the same standards as men, and this change in policy resulted in the discharge rate due to training injury for women to rise from 4.5% to 11%, a jump of almost 150%. [Update: medical discharges for men were below 1.5%, according to the source BBC article.]

Regardless of anyone's opinions on the matter, women simply cannot attain and maintain the same physical abilities than men can, and as such they make inferior combatants. As I've written, in some circumstances (such as in Israel) every fighter is necessary -- perhaps because the population is small, or the war is particularly large. America is not in such a situation, and we have the luxury of keeping women out of combat roles in our armed forces. This policy improves the quality of our military in numerous ways (as I've outlined in my previous postings), and also serves a valuable social function.

Forgive me if this is just plain too geeky, but I started playing Temple of Elemental Evil last night and it gave me the urge to apply the D&D alignment system to world politics.

In D&D, moral alignment is described along two axes: the first includes "lawful", "neutral", and "chaotic"; the second is "good", "neutral", "evil". So a person or organization has an alignment with two components, one from each set, and there are 9 possible combinations. For example, "lawful good" or "chaotic neutral". If someone is neutral along both axes, they are "true neutral". Please refer to this post for more specific information on D&D alignments (I wrote it for reference).

With regard to "international law" and the interests of the United States, America can be seen as a neutral good actor. We tend to give lip-service to organizations such as the UN, but we really don't seem to care that much whether they go along with us or not. And from my perspective, our country is generally trying to do good.

Our diplomatic enemies, such as France and Germany, are lawful evil. They don't have the military or economic power to challenge us directly, so they fall back on international legal institutions such as the UN to thwart America and to further their own goals. Since they're willing to leave vicious tyrants in place for the sake of stability, I have no problem categorizing them as evil.

Saddam Hussein was pretty clearly chaotic evil. Sure, he used the legal system in his own country to control his people, but from everything I've read that system was pretty arbitrary. Saddam's laws were designed to keep people terrified; the populace could never be certain who would be the next to be dragged off to jail and tortured. And of course, Saddam had no respect for "international law" either.

Kim Jong Il does seem pretty insane, but I think that's by calculation, so I wouldn't categorize North Korea as chaotic neutral; it's more like neutral evil. They tend to use the UN and treaties when it suits their purposes, but they abandon them just as quickly when it doesn't. The concentration camps and threats of nuclear blackmail put them pretty firmly in the Axis of Evil.

As for Britain, they're more lawful good than we are. Tony Blair has to be concerned with respecting the UN because so much of his population does (and dislikes America). The UK is trying to do good, and it is trying to do so within the legal framework of the world, such as it is. Blair was willing to bend a little to help in Iraq even without (yet another) UN resolution -- because it was a good cause -- but it made him uncomfortable.

The terrorists and al Qaeda are, of course, practically the epitome of chaotic evil. Their whole purpose is to destroy the existing social structure of the world, and to bring about the end of America and the dominance of the "infidels".

Update:
Yes, I'm being mean to people in the comments here who say innane things. I know, I know -- I'm normally such a polite fellow, but it's kinda fun to indulge just this once.