Recently, my sunny optimism has gotten a boost from Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s an excellent book, possibly topping Pinker’s previous book How the Mind Works, and marshals an incredible amount of evidence to show that violence–including violence by states against their own citizens–has been declining throughout history. When I first read it, my reaction was, “wow, now I feel pretty silly about my occasional flashes of pessimism.”

But Pinker’s defense of optimism comes with an important caveat: in the long run, things get better, but in the short run they sometimes get worse. And I now think that in the United States, there’s a significant chance that things will get much worse before they get better. Exhibit A is the fact that Congress is trying to pass a bill requiring indefinite detention for terror suspects, and the fact that Obama’s main objection to the bill appears to be that it would limit his power. Seriously, the debate is over whether the government should have to detain people forever without trial, or whether that should be up to the president. This is how fucking insane the political situation in the United States is right now.

Exhibit B is the rise of Newt Gingrich, who has labeled Wikileaks leader Julian Assange an “enemy combatant,” which in current parlance means “someone we should be able to imprison and kill without trial.” This is disturbing, because what Wikileaks’ actions were not a crime in the US, and are in fact an important part of investigative journalism. Let me say that again: in a couple years, the United States may have a president who thinks it is okay to imprison and kill someone without trial for doing investigative journalism.

Seriously, when Wikileaks was big in the news, I thought the people making the craziest statements about it had no shot at the presidency. This is no longer clear. Newt may stumble before making it to the Republican nomination, just as Bachmann, Perry, and Cain have, but Newt only has to hang on for a few more weeks before he can start winning states and build momentum that way. And while it’s true that polls say most people would currently vote for Obama over Gingrich, a bad economy could still sink Obama. (I stress that my fear is not that Obama will lose, but that he will lose to someone ever worse than himself.)

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“I am deeply concerned by the violence and discrimination targeting L.G.B.T. persons around the world,” Mr. Obama said in the memorandum, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, “whether it is passing laws that criminalize L.G.B.T. status, beating citizens simply for joining peaceful L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, or killing men, women and children for their perceived sexual orientation.”

Some people are unhappy about this:

The initiative also invites attacks from Republicans trying to appeal to a conservative base in the primary and caucus states.

One Republican candidate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, said: “President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.”

It could also irritate some American allies, including countries like Turkey, where there have been reports of harassment, and Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is banned and sex between people of the same sex is punishable by death or flogging.

I *almost* left this one to Ed Brayton, but a lot of what people are saying on Perry and gay rights fails to capture how loathsome his position is.

I’m starting to think the following is a law in American politics: no matter how bad the Democrats are, the Republicans will find a way to be worse. Given that, the Democrats may as well try to behave like decent people, political expediency be damned, because even if they lose they at least might drag the Republicans towards being halfway decent.

I’m not saying the Republican Party is all bad. Just mostly bad. I mean, Ron Paul’s strong anti-war and pro-civil liberties stances put most allegedly liberal Democrats to shame. (Ron Paul on wanting to abolish the Federal Reserve, on the other hand? Crazy.)

But for the most part, today’s Republican party stands for one thing: defending the interest of rich people. This has been true for a long time, and Democrats are no saints here, but the Republicans have gotten especially blatant about it in the past few years.

I credit Obama. Used to be, Republicans were the party of tax cuts, and the Democrats were the ones who wanted to tax and spend. (Wait a second, isn’t taxing and spending what governments have to do to function? Never mind, I’m on another point now.) Then Obama said, “Okay, I only want to raise taxes on the top few percent. In fact, I’ll cut taxes for the middle class.” Suddenly, the Republican Party goes from being the party of tax cuts to the party of tax cuts for the rich.

You know the “flat tax” that a number of Republican candidates, including Perry and Gingrich, keep talking about? It’s a scam. They’ll talk about simplifying the tax code, but having a small handful of tax brackets (so the rich pay proportionally more) isn’t really that much more complicated than having one tax bracket. If you want to simplify the tax code, get rid of deductions. Which Perry and Gingrich don’t do, entirely. In fact, analysts have realized that Perry’s plan would make the tax code more complicated (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/25/rick-perry-flat-tax-plan_n_1031705.html). The flat tax isn’t about simplifying the tax code, it’s about cutting taxes for rich people.

But the flat tax isn’t what’s really telling. What’s really telling is the number of Republicans who have explicitly embraced raising taxes on poor people. Bachmann, Perry, and Huntsman have all complained about the fact that under the current tax code, 47 percent of Americans don’t have to pay any federal income tax (though they still pay other taxes, including sales tax and the payroll tax that support Social Security). Of course, the reason for this involves the tax cuts, tax credits, and so on that Republicans used to support. Apparently they’ve changed their mind about that.

Most blatant of all, though, was Herman Cain’s tax plan. It included what amounted to a 18% sales tax, and sales taxes tend to be inherently regressive (meaning, they hit people who already don’t have much money the hardest). I seriously thought that as soon as word spread far enough about what Cain’s tax plan was really about, he’d be done for, but instead it took a sex scandal to sink Cain’s campaign.This is especially puzzling because all of the Republican candidates, to my knowledge, have continued to take a hard line on not raising taxes ever. In one of the debates, every single candidate insisted they would not even support a budget deal that had $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. How on earth does that fit with thinking poor people don’t pay enough taxes? Are we supposed to just know that when Republicans talk about low taxes, they really just mean “low taxes for rich people”?

Now combine this with the fact that the current Republican presidential candidates mostly don’t have plans to help people who’ve been hurt by the recession. Whenever I see them on TV, the soundbites are always about how they’ll fix the economy by cutting taxes repealing regulations. But this isn’t an economic plan, it’s what they—and the rich individuals and corporations who support them—would want to do even if the economy were doing great. (And yeah, some currently-existing regulations are probably bad ones, but some are necessary, and in any case “repeal regulations” still isn’t an economic plan.)

So in light of all this, why does anybody (who isn’t rich) vote Republican? Or rather, why have Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich managed to attain mass-followings, however temporary? Why do people tell pollsters they’re going to vote for one of these guys next November?

One theory is that Republicans have managed to use the culture wars—a.k.a. “God, guns, and gays”–to get working class whites to vote against their own economic interests. Once upon a time, back in 2004, I got the impression that this theory was only advocated by out-of-touch liberals like Howard Dean and Thomas Frank (author of the book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”), but nowadays I see it being almost taken for granted even on fairly conservative blogs (for example here: http://theamericanscene.com/2011/11/29/war-as-culture-war). So maybe there’s something to it.
I can’t quite wrap my head around this idea, though. Take the “gays” issue. Conservative rhetoric around gay marriage has always been about “defense of marriage,” but how does that make any sense? Even if you think homosexuality is an abomination before God, or whatever Leviticus says, how does the government recognizing gay marriages hurt your straight marriage? What are you being defended from? And even if we agree that homosexuality is an abomination and gay marriage hurts straight marriage in some nebulous way, will gay marriages really hurt you *more* than rewriting the tax code to benefit the rich would?

Similar points can be made about just about any “culture war” issue. So… I dunno. Maybe, it’s not about the issues, some people have been listening Rush Limbaugh call liberals evil for so many years that they’ve stopped paying attention to the issues, and decided to just vote against the evil liberals. From my occasional brushes with Limbaugh and his many imitators, I suspect some people really do think more or less that way, but I have too much faith in humanity to think that thinking this way is common.

I wonder how much of people’s willingness to support candidates who don’t support their economic interests comes from an unwillingness to see themselves as one of the “little guys.” I think of the people who posted “We are the 53%” messages (in reference to the 53% of Americans who pay federal income tax) in response to Occupy Wallstreet’s “We are the 99%” messages. Being part of the 53% is a very strange thing to brag about. “We manage to make an average amount of money! Well, maybe not quite, but at worst we’re very slightly below average!”

I’ve read some of the postings of the 53%ers, and what I find is that the logic is terrible, the stories are heartbreaking, and the attitude is pathetic. “Get a job”? Unemployment is at 8.6%, the lowest it’s been since March of ’09. The unemployed are, by definition, people who want jobs but can’t find them. “Stop blaming other people”? Again, whether you think the recession is the fault of Wallstreet, or bad government policy, or whether you think it’s all Obama’s fault, it’s ridiculous to think that the people who’ve been hurt most by the recession are to blame. This is a case where it really is someone else’s fault.
Still, it’s impossible not to sympathize with many of the stories: people working multiple jobs, people working ridiculously long hours, people without insurance, people struggling to pay their rent. What makes it pathetic, though, is the way the 53%ers seem desperate to say, “HEY I MIGHT HAVE IT ROUGH BUT AT LEAST I’M BETTER THAN THOSE OTHER LOSERS OVER THERE.” It’s a common human impulse—being on the bottom of the pile is always more bearable if you can reassure yourself that at least you’re not on the very bottom. Incidentally, I suspect some of the contributors to the 53% blogs are too poor to be actually paying federal income tax (they may be confused about the difference between income tax and payroll tax, terms which frankly don’t make any sense to me even though I know what they’re supposed to mean).

The desire to identify with people richer than you probably warps American politics in other ways. I’m told that Europeans are baffled by our politicians’ obsession with “the middle class.” Probably our politicians have this obsession because in America, everyone wants to believe that they’re middle class. We don’t even have a good word for “below middle class.” “Working class” is the preferred euphemism, and even though I’ve used it in this very essay, it’s a horrible term. Logically “working” ought to include people with high-paying jobs, but that’s not what we mean by it. “Poor” isn’t quite right, because you can be struggling to a degree—working absurdly long hours for too little pay, stuck without insurance—and still be above the poverty line. “Lower class” sounds too much like “low class,” which we use to mean “trashy” (an unfortunate example of the human tendency to associate wealth with virtue and poverty with vice). “Underclass” has its merits, but don’t expect a politician to use the phrase “underclass Americans” in a speech any time soon.

I am not going to tell you to vote Democrat in the next election. I’m not going to claim that Congressional Democrats aren’t also largely in the pockets of major corporations, nor will I pretend not to be appalled at the way Obama has broken many of his promises for “change.” What I will say is that whoever the Republican presidential nominee is for 2012, they are almost certainly *worse* than the Democrats when it comes to protecting the interests of the vast majority of Americans. Why would anyone want to vote for that?

PZ Myers posted a comic strip about science and religion A 300+ comment thread about whether or not the cartoon was sexist ensued. PZ closed the thread, and wrote a post explaining why he thought the reasons that had been given for thinking the cartoon sexist were bad ones:

I tried tracing down the source of the image, with no luck; it appeared on reddit, on a couple of discussion forums, but no one seems to give credit to the artist. If we found more examples of this person’s work, and there were a pattern of always making the girl bunny the dumb bunny, then you’d have a case — the artist is consciously or unconsciously expressing a sexist trope. Without more information, you cannot possibly judge this cartoon as a reflection of an underlying bias against women. You cannot see a pattern in a sample of one. It’s also simply not true that portraying women as stupid is a staple of cartoons — from Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, the trend goes the other way. Yes, it’s still sexism — but if the comic in question had swapped the pants and dress on the bunnies, someone could object just as strongly. Given only two characters, one representing reason and one irrationality, there is actually no combination of sexes that isn’t going to offend someone, if you choose to see it only as a parable of sexual relations.

It isn’t. The two characters are having a conversation about science and religion, they are not using gendered language, and they’ve both been made childlike by portraying them as little cute bunnies. It’s fair to note that there are sexist biases in our culture, and that many of them belittle women, but that’s not what the comic was about; note it and move on.

Four hundred and eighteen comments later, someone said, “here’s a link to where the guy who made the cartoon said something sexist.” PZ quickly responded by saying, “Now THAT’s a smoking gun. OK, point accepted: the cartoon was originally made with part of the point being perpetuation of a sexist stereotype gleaned from the internet. In light of the evidence, I change my mind.”

I didn’t initially read these threads. Like I said, I’m not a big reader of blog comment threads. But then Physioprof, one of PZ’s fellow Freethought bloggers, whose posts show up in my feed reader, wrote a post titled “Skeptic, Skepticize Yourself,” trashing PZ. It didn’t respond to any of PZ’s arguments, but instead skipped straight to declaring that he ought to “unpack the influence of patriarchy and misogyny” on his reaction and “apologize for getting this so wrong.” Then, Physioprof wrote a second post, “Skeptical Hypocrisy,” about how one of PZ’s commenters was a “butthurt dood” because he objected to being accused of sexism.

Then is when I went back and read some of the comments. I got 50-some comments in to the first one before getting sick of it and Ctrl+Fing my way to the important stuff. That’s when I found PZ’s “OK, point accepted” comment, found that Physioprof’s posts didn’t come until about a day after the “OK, point accepted” comment, and found that Physioprof had left a bunch of comment’s on PZ’s second post, but none of those addressed PZ’s arguments either.

Now to state the bloody obvious: skepticism* is not a body of dogma, where you can just point to someone saying something that goes against the dogma and conclude they are therefore not a skeptic (or that they’re hypocritical about their skepticism or whatever). It’s how you reach your views that counts. And no, you generally can’t assume someone has arrived at their views improperly because you think they have the “wrong view.” This is risky even when there’s a fairly clear scientific consensus.

PZ was being the reasonable skeptic every step of the way here. He looked at the looked at the arguments that were initially given, decided they weren’t very good, explained his reasons for thinking so, and then changed his mind when given what he thought was a better argument. That’s what someone who cares about reasoning and evidence does. It’s Physioprof who’s failing at skepticism by skipping over the arguments and going straight for the denunciations.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Physioprof thinks, as a matter of dogma, that men are never allowed object to accusations of sexism made by women. This is the kind of crazy view that I’d normally be very reluctant to attribute to anybody, but it was actually taken by one of PZ’s commenters. In fact, it’s one of the things the “butthurt dood” was objecting to.

To make further bloody obvious points: harsh criticism of individuals has its place. Philosophy blogger Richard Chapelle wrote a post on this years ago that’s still one of the best things I’ve read on it. However, if you can’t say something nice, at least back up the not-nice things you say with reason and evidence. I think this is actually a more important point than usual skeptical demands for backing up religious beliefs. Most people compartmentalize their religious beliefs, making those beliefs mostly harmless, but baseless attacks on people are more harmful.

If this craziness had been confined to PZ’s comment section, I’d be only dimly aware of it and probably wouldn’t care much even if someone made a point of making me more aware. The fact that it’s infected the circle of appointed Freethought bloggers is a bit more worrisome. And I’ve seen other whiffs of people treating “skepticism” like it ought to be a body of doctrine.

Yeah, there are a lot of issues where the evidence is pretty one-sided. But a lot of issues aren’t like that, and the chatter I’ve heard about making the skeptic movement about anything any everything ignores that fact. I’m thinking in particular of chatter about getting the skeptic movement involved in government policy debates like the war on drugs. The problem is that Policy debates generally aren’t one-sided, there are both costs and benefits to any proposed policy.

Take the war on drugs: I think it’s pretty clear marijuana should be legal. The evidence shows marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol, and any drug that can be shown to be no more harmful than alcohol should be legal, QED. However, the question “should marijuana be legal?” is still more complicated than questions about the physiological effects of THC. If I had to debate marijuana legalization, I’d have to be ready for the possibility that my opponent would point to a cost of legalization that I hadn’t thought of. Or that they’d argue public policy shouldn’t always be about cost-benefit analysis.

So in short: skepticism isn’t supposed to be a body of dogma, it’s supposed to be about how conclusions are reached, and we need to keep it that way. And part of keeping it that way means focusing on what arguments people give for their views. It also means not giving people a pass when they attack others without backing up their criticisms.

*Note: I’m talking about the Paul-Kurtz-and-James-Randi sense of “skepticism” here, not the much older Greek philosophy sense.

Greenwald makes the case in the United States today, rule of law is disappearing. Instead, we have what he calls “The Principle of Elite Immunity,”–the idea that political and business elites are never to be punished for their crimes, except perhaps if their crimes harm other elites. Greenwald blames the current mindset on Ford for pardoning Nixon and justifying the pardon on the grounds that prosecuting Nixon would be too divisive.

Now, personally, I don’t think the pardon of Nixon would have been such a bad thing if it had been a one-time thing and the country had gotten back on course afterwards. However, Greenwald convincingly argues that the Nixon pardon was the beginning of a pattern of bad excuses for forgiving any and all high-level wrong doing in this country. Thus, we get pardons for Iran-Contra criminals, Bill Clinton suppressing inquiry into Regan and Bush’s illegally providing of weapons to Iraq in spite of having promised investigations, and Obama’s failure to prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration.

It’s important to stress that the excuses really are ridiculous–read the book for the full recitation, but here’s one especially bad example, both in terms of the flimsiness of the rationale and the fact that it was given by a member of our government’s alleged watchdog, the media. When Bush pardoned Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for multiple felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with Iran-Contra, Richard Cohen, on the grounds that Cohen had run into Weinberger quite a few times at Safeway, and he seemed like an OK guy to Cohen.

One of the strongest sections of the book is the coverage of the NSA wiretapping scandal and the decision to grant telecoms immunity for breaking the law on behalf of the Bush administration. Previously, I had known about the scandal, but had simply filed it away in my brain as one of the lesser crimes of the Bush administration. However, Greenwald explains how by granting the telecoms retroactive immunity for breaking the law, Democrats (and Congress was controlled by Democrats at the time) passed on a rare opportunity to get an actual investigation into Bush’s crimes.

Several other things stick out about the telecom immunity story. First, Congress’ actions can’t be defended on the grounds that the telecoms thought what they were doing was legal, because under the original law that was a valid defense. Second, the telecom immunity bill was written with heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, a troubling example of how, in Greenwald’s words, “major corporations literally write our nation’s laws.” Third, as a senator Obama went back on an initial promise to help block telecom immunity. Had I known that fact when Obama was elected, his other lapses in office would have surprised me less.

By comparison, the discussion of lawbreaking in relation to the 2008 financial crisis was a bit weak. It includes quotes from a number of authorities, including Alan Greenspan saying that much of what happened was “just plain fraud,” and cites one case where a former CEO was found to have committed fraud but was allowed to settle his case with a fine of $67, a fraction of the half-billion dollars he made while the fraud was going on. However, unlike most parts of the book, the laws that were supposedly broken are never explained clearly.

In fairness to Greenwald, part of his point is that the financial crisis was never thoroughly investigated, making it hard to know what crimes were or were not committed. Still, given all the anger at Wall Street right now, the book could have benefited a lot from more clarity on that point. Also, Greenwald’s focus on lawbreaking means that his mention of how lobbyists managed to get important regulations repealed doesn’t have a clear place in his narrative, and I wonder if that wasn’t the bigger problem (though it would still be a sign of how corrupt our government is).

Anyway, With Liberty and Justice for Some is an excellent book in spite of this complaint, and telecom immunity and the financial crisis are only two examples of the problems Greenwald covers. So go buy the book, even if you think you know all about these problems. Looking at any one incident in isolation, it’s tempting to say, “Okay, that was bad, but I’m sure it won’t happen again.” Greenwald, however, makes clear that we suffer from a recurring pattern of elites committing serious crimes and getting de facto immunity for doing so, a pattern that will likely continue until we do something to stop it.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

To which the economist replies, “But you can’t always jump from a Nash equilibrium to a Pareto optimum,” meaning roughly, “Unless everyone else has that same idea at the same time, you’ll still be throwing your vote away,” or in other words, “You can make fun all you like, but if you don’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard really might get in.”

In which case, the lizards know they can rely on your vote going to one of them, and they have no incentive to treat you kindly. Most of the benefits of democracy may be from the lizards being scared enough of voters to not misbehave really really badly, rather than from the “right lizard” winning a voter-fight.

Besides, picking the better lizard is harder than it looks. In 2000, the comic Melonpool showed a character pondering, “Bush or Gore… Bush or Gore… it’s like flipping a two-headed coin.” Well, how were they supposed to know? In 2000, based on history, it seemed to me that the Republicans were generally less interventionist and therefore less harmful than the Democrats, so I pondered whether to vote for Bush to prevent Gore from getting in. Yet it seemed to me that the barriers to keep out third parties were a raw power grab, and that I was therefore obliged to vote for third parties wherever possible, to penalize the Republicrats for getting grabby. And so I voted Libertarian, though I don’t consider myself one (at least not with a big “L”). I’m glad I didn’t do the “sensible” thing. Less blood on my hands.

If we could go back in time and change our votes, and see alternate histories laid out side-by-side, it might make sense to vote for the less evil of two lizards. But in a state of ignorance – voting for candidates that abandon their stated principles like they discard used toilet paper – then it is harder to compare lizards than those enthusiastically cheering for team colors might think.

Eliezer’s first counter-argument is pretty clearly wrong: as much as I dislike the US’s current leadership, their behavior could be worse. They do have *some* incentive to behave well. They can count on voters to vote for one of the two major party candidates under normal circumstances, but those normal circumstances include things like “neither major party candidate is Hitler.”

The second argument is much more powerful. The fact that Eliezer almost–and many other people probably did–vote for Bush because they thought he was less likely to get us into foreign wars should make any sane person reconsider their voting behavior.

Indeed, after reading Eliezer’s post, I have to say that if the election were tomorrow, I would have to vote third party in a Romney vs. Obama contest. Among other things, Romney has the virtues that he hasn’t yet gotten us involved in any wars, or ordered an assassination attempt on a US citizen, but the depressing precedents of the current and previous administrations make me think there’s a very good chance that a President Romney would do that or worse. I just don’t know, don’t have any reason to pick one candidate over the other, or at least not any reason stronger than Eliezer’s reasons for liking Bush in 2000.

On the other hand, I think some times you do have good reason to think one candidate is the lesser of two evils. For example, Michelle Bachmann’s ties to religious crazies clearly go beyond cynical pandering, and she’s done things like spinning being pestered with questions into a lesbian abduction attempt. She seems to have an unusually shaky grasp on reality, enough so that I’d plead with people to vote for Obama to avoid electing her.

The hard one, for me, is Ron Paul. I have no doubt about Paul’s sincerity in his anti-war and pro-civil-liberties convictions. I’m confident he won’t mysteriously morph into a third Dubya upon taking office. Unfortunately, he also wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, which strikes me as pretty crazy. So while I think Paul is clearly superior to Obama on war and civil liberties, Obama is pretty clearly superior to Paul on questions like whether we should abolish the Federal Reserve.

In any case, I regret not having voted for Paul in the 2008 primary (Wisconsin has an open primary), and intend to vote for him in the 2012 primary assuming he’s still in the race by that time. (By the way, read Eliezer’s entire post, it does have many good points, including the importance of voting in primaries.) But the Ron Paul case shows that even when you want to vote for a non-mainstream candidate for the sake of sending a message, sometimes you still have to vote for a lizard.

I remember the day I first heard the word “feminism.” I was pretty old; maybe 13. I asked, “Mom, what does feminism mean?”

My mom said something like, “It’s the view that women should have the same rights as men do.”

I looked at her, perplexed.

“They have a word for that?”

Today in the US, it’s not clear that we do need a word for that. Most people are feminists in Luke’s mom’s sense, and those who aren’t are mostly afraid to say so in public. In fact, if you go with Luke’s mom’s definition, it makes calling yourself a feminist a bit like going around telling everyone you’re not a racist. It shouldn’t be necessary, and should make others wonder what you’re up to. (Yes, there are other definitions of “feminism”–hold that thought just a sec.)

I’m going to give two examples of the sort of trouble that I think is caused by the word “feminism,” the first mild, the second more serious. The mild: Greta Christina (who I’m a huge fan of) has been doing a series of blog posts about “how sexism hurts men.” Sample use of the word “feminism” (from the first link):

If you’re a feminist — and I’m going to assume that if you’re a regular reader of this Blog, you’re probably a feminist — you’re familiar with how social programming guilt-trips and fear-mongers women into rigid and sexist gender roles. It’s not like it’s hard to find examples of it. It’s freaking everywhere. But I think we’re less familiar with how social programming guilt-trips and fear-mongers men into rigid and sexist gender roles.

Later posts talk about “our society’s expectations of men” and what “the world is telling” people. And I happen to think that’s the wrong way to think about it. “Society” doesn’t expect anything of anyone. “The world” isn’t telling anyone anything. Rather, you have a bunch of individuals and groups putting out various messages, and learning who’s worth listening to and who isn’t is just something people have to learn. And it’s silly to notice that messages from different sources often conflict and conclude “society” is guilty of contradicting itself.

But that “feminist” quote–what is it saying? Plug in Luke’s mom’s definition, and the thought would begin, “if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably support equal rights for women.” So far so good. But then you have to continue it as “and if you support equal rights for women, surely you agree with me about ‘social programming.’” What? There’s no reason to think that. (Note that you can’t know something unless you think it, so “you know” implies “you agree.”)

What about other definitions of “feminism”? When thinking about this earlier this week, I put up a status update asking for suggestions about what people might really mean by the word. The first idea we came up with was that it means some kind of claim about how bad the problem of gender inequality is right now. Then a friend of mine who’s taught Introduction to Gender Studies chimed in:

I understand feminism as a practice, not a belief. Like other practices (cf. natural sciences) there’s internal disagreement about how best to characterize its aims and the dominant characterization changes over time. I’d suggest that the current dominant characterization of feminism is something like `the cultural and political struggle against gender inequality, especially but not exclusively as it harms women’. (The vagueness there is deliberate.)

Both of these suggestions are tempting, but they don’t much explain the quote from Greta (she doesn’t regularly blog about how bad gender inequality is or how we all need to be involved in fighting it, so there’s not much basis for her to make assumptions about her readers there). Rather, I suspect the quote is best read as “if you read my blog, you’re probably a good person, and if you’re a good person, you probably agree with me that…”

I’m not terribly upset about this. I’m being deliberately nitpicky because I wanted to give a mild example of the thing I’m criticizing. It’s just an example of where tossing around the word “feminism” made a blog post a little bit presumptuous for no good reason.

The more serious example comes from a recent dustup in the atheist blogosphere. Apparently, a relatively unknown atheist blogger named Stef McGraw wrote a blog post disagreeing with something Rebecca Watson (of Skepchick fame) had said, and Watson decided to toss in a response to McGraw during a speech she gave during CFI’s Student Leadership Conference, where McGraw was in the audience.

According to McGraw’s account, during the talk Watson accused her of “espousing anti-woman sentiment.” I can’t verify that directly, but I’m assuming it’s true because Watson has gone on to say similar things online, including showing up in McGraw’s comment section to accuse McGraw of dismissing “feminist thinking” and propagating misogyny. In the aftermath of the talk, Watson also allegedly said that she was “thrilled to make a bad impression upon those who would put down the women & minorities of our community.”

In McGraw’s account, her main complaint was about the power imbalance of keynote speaker vs. audience member, and the fact that this made it awkward for her to respond to Rebecca during the conference. If Watson had just responded in a blog post, McGraw said, that would’ve been fine. Similar criticisms have been made by a number of other atheist bloggers, including Hemant Mehta, who called Watson’s behavior “bad form,” and the blogger at ERV, who said the same thing along with some less charitable remarks:

Like all posts on ERV, I wrote this one the night before (Thurs) and scheduled it for the next day (Fri). But with this post, I wrote it, but then just saved it, intending to completely alter the tone of the post as I was eating breakfast. But then I woke up to an extremely cognizant, articulate post by Stef McGraw, complete with a shockingly arrogant, jackass comment by Rebecca Watson, and I was like “Ah, no. No ‘Full House’ heart-warming conversation with Watson. She wanna act a bitch, she gonna get a bitch.”

However, “bad form” isn’t the only issue here. The more important problem, to my mind, is that Watson’s claim that McGraw was being “anti-woman” and “misogynist” was ridiculous on its face, and she gave nothing resembling justification for it. And, relevantly for the larger point I’m making here, it isn’t just Watson saying stuff like that. Well-known blogger and self-described feminist Amanda Marcotte has chimed in to call Hemant a “sexist paternalist” for his original criticism of Watson.

I think I know what’s going on here. When you spend a lot of time telling people you’re a feminist and thinking about how the issues you care about are “feminist issues” and how your views are feminist views, it becomes easy to think of other views as not feminist. And if they’re not feminist, they must be misogynist. So any disagreement with your views can safely be dismissed as misogynist with little thought. It’s reminiscent of the left-wingers who believe all their opponents are racists (and the right-wingers who see all critics of the Israeli government as anti-Semites).

Not every self-described feminist behaves like Watson and Marcotte, but it happens often enough (see, for another example, this post by Mistress Matisse, a columnist for Dan Savage’s paper The Stranger, where she mentions getting called a “delusional tool of the patriarchy”). That alone doesn’t show “feminism” is a bad word, but it’s hard to think of a case where tossing around the word “feminism” did any good. It tends to be mildly presumptuous at best–see discussion of Greta’s post above. We could save ourselves a lot of trouble by avoiding it, if not abandoning it entirely.

The firs thing to notice about this is that what Obama is doing is obviously illegal. I recommend that anyone who really wants to read up on this spend some time browsing Glenn Greenwald’s archives, but the basic issue is pretty simple. The fifth amendment says that no person shall be deprived of life or limb without due process of law. Period. It doesn’t contain a “terrorism exception,” and it’s a safe bet that had the word “terrorism” existed in the 18th century, the founders would have been appalled by such a thought (given their concerns about trumped-up accusations of “treason” being used to punish whoever the rulers didn’t like.)

Second, it’s clear that this kind of thing should be illegal. It’s hard to think of a more readily abused power than “the power to label anyone a terrorist and have them killed.” Among other things, that kind of power renders many other limits on government power meaningless. Who cares if you can’t kill people for criticizing you when you can have critics killed on trumped-up charges of terrorism? Furthermore, if history is any guide (which, pace Hume, it is), such powers will be abused sooner or later. The best way to make sure these powers don’t end up in the hands of President Michele Bachmann is to not allow them to any president, no matter how much you like the current one.

Also note that in the case of Osama bin Laden, I know of no good reason to have killed him, rather than capture him and put him on trial (as we did with Saddam Hussein and countless Nazi war criminals). But at least in the case of bin Laden, he had made videos of himself talking about how he plotted the murder of thousands of people, leaving essentially zero chance that we killed an innocent man. I’ve said before that I’ve got no love for al-Awlaki, but in his case we’ve just got the government’s word that he was actually involved in planning attacks.

Because of all of the above, a part of me would be thrilled to see Obama impeached tomorrow over this. But another part of me sees a problem with that: Congress has spent the last decade enabling presidential abuses of power, and doesn’t really have any credibility to suddenly decide to punish a president for those abuses. So instead, lets hope that Congress passes a bill explicitly reigning in the president’s power. If he ignores the bill, then they can impeach him.

(More on this later, when I don’t have finals looming over me.)