Some of this blog’s readers may be old enough to recall what used to happen in brutal Latin American dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century, when opponents of the government were picked up by the secret police and never heard from again, except when their mutilated dead bodies occasionally turned up. A whole network of state-sponsored secret prisons, systematic torture, and murder was put into place and paramilitary groups and so-called ‘death squads’, operating under the auspices and protection of the governments and usually consisting of security forces in plain clothes, used to carry out all manner of atrocities, leaving the public in a state of permanent fear.
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The previous post on this topic resulted in such interesting discussions that I want to expand on this topic in a new post.

I actually agree with some of the criticisms that were made about a camera-based system to enforce traffic laws on speeding and running red lights. But my point is that while the police-based system is fundamentally flawed and cannot be made fair and consistent and widespread because of the enormous costs that would need be incurred, the camera-based system as currently implemented is only technically flawed. It should be easy to improve it by purely technical fixes that can also be easily monitored to ensure that the devices work accurately and provide reasonable opportunities for compliance.
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Needless to say, I was very pleased with the ruling last week by US District Court judge Vaughn Walker in California overturning the ban on same sex marriage. The case arose because of a challenge to Proposition 8 that was passed by referendum in November 2008 and required the state constitution to add a clause that stated, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

The judge said that Proposition 8 violated the ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ clauses of the 14th amendment to the federal constitution. The due process clause states that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” while the equal protection clause states that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (The 14th amendment is getting quite a workout these days, with some talking about amending it to prevent children born in the US of illegal immigrants from getting automatic citizenship under the opening sentence that states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”)
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I am often taken by surprise at the kinds of things that people get really upset about. For example, many cities and states have recently taken to placing cameras strategically at various points to catch speeders and people who run red lights. The camera takes a photo of an offender and you get the citation in the mail. I didn’t think too much about this innovation and when I did it seemed to me to make a lot of sense. At the very least, it releases police to do more important work like catching criminals. It seems like such a waste to have police spend huge amounts of time lurking just to catch the occasional speeder.

Furthermore, the camera system seems to have the advantage of complete impartiality. It does not care what kind of car committed the offense, whether it is a dull old minivan or a flashy red sports car. More importantly, it does not discriminate among drivers either. The camera does not know or care if you are old or young, rich or poor, black or white, attractive or homely, well-spoken or inarticulate. It does not care if you are a person of influence or a nobody. Cameras do not profile people.

In other words, these cameras allow us to actually practice the ideals of justice, completely blind to everything except whether one has committed the offense or not. And yet, these cameras are generating huge amounts of controversy with citizen petitions and referenda demanding their removal and state legislature passing laws banning them. And since the people leading this charge tend to be those who belong to the middle and upper classes, their voices are, of course, heeded. What explains this fervor against something so reasonable?

Some people object to the red light cameras by claiming that they are designed to trap people, because the duration of the yellow lights is made too short to allow one to stop safely without being rear-ended. But this seems to me to be a technical issue that can be resolved easily with proper guidelines and standards. Also, drivers are supposed to keep a safe distance behind the car in front to allow for such sudden stops.

Others argue against the cameras on the grounds that they were installed as revenue generators rather than to encourage safer driving. So what if they are? I do not understand this objection. After all, the laws and fines were already there. No one seemed to have any problem with them being enacted. It is strange that what people are objecting to is them being enforced more vigorously and efficiently. The fact is that these camera are catching people who are violating the law. If people want to defy their municipality’s cunning plan to increase revenues, all they have to do is obey existing traffic laws.

And the laws that are being violated are hardly unreasonable laws. No one will deny that people who speed and run red lights are placing other people at risk. Nor are the laws so secret and subtle that one does not know one is violating them. All drivers know what they should do when approaching a traffic light. In the US especially, speed limit signs are ubiquitous and one has little excuse for not knowing what it is on any given stretch of road.

I was really puzzled by this opposition to traffic cameras until I read an article by George Monbiot in the London Guardian discussing similar puzzling opposition in England.

In every other sector, Conservatives insist that it is daft for human beings to do the work machines could do. In every other instance they demand that police officers be freed from mindless tasks to spend more time preventing serious crime. In all other cases they urge more rigorous enforcement of the law. On every other occasion they insist that local authorities should raise revenue and make their schemes pay for themselves. But it all goes into reverse when they are exposed to the beams of a fiendish instrument of mind control.

The moment they pass through its rays, Conservatives turn from penny-pinching authoritarians into spendthrift hoodie-huggers. They demand that a job now performed consistently and cheaply by machines should be handed back to human beings, who will do it patchily and at great expense. They urge that police officers be diverted from preventing serious crime to stand in for lumps of metal. They insist that those who break the law should not be punished or even caught. They clamour for councils to abandon a scheme that almost pays for itself, and replace it with one that requires constant subsidies.

Monbiot has a convincing theory as to why traffic cameras cause people to reverse almost every principle they claim to uphold, despite the fact that such cameras lead to reductions in traffic accidents and mortality rates. Monbiot argues that it is the very impartiality of the cameras that, rather than being seen as the good thing it undoubtedly is, is causing the opposition. Most people think that they somehow have an edge that they can use to escape paying the fine if they are caught by real live traffic police. They think they are important enough or look respectable or influential or attractive enough, or that they can manufacture some plausible excuse, that will get them off the hook. It is just the young and poor and people of color who tend to be out of luck when it comes to finding ways to escape.

In other words, traffic cameras commit the worst offense: they do not respect class privilege. I have to agree with Monbiot’s conclusion, though in the US I would expand his group from ‘conservatives’ to all members of the better-off classes: “The real reason why Conservatives hate the enforcement of speed limits is that this is one of the few laws which is as likely to catch the rich as the poor: newspaper editors and council leaders are as vulnerable as anyone else. The Conservative reaction to speed cameras suggests that they love laws, except those which apply to them.”

POST SCRIPT: Threatening the 14th amendment

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Born in the U.S.A.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

(See part 1 here.)

Opponents of personal gun ownership worry that easy access to guns may cause needless death and injury in situations which otherwise might end peacefully. We have all heard horror stories where children have accidentally killed people because they stumbled upon firearms left unattended. We worry that people in drunken states or people prone to violent rages may use guns in deadly ways. We also fear that this would increase the risk of armed crimes.

People also fear that carrying guns around might cause people to respond more aggressively than otherwise to the minor slights and annoyances of everyday life, like the person who cuts you off in traffic, or gives you the finger, or for any of the many minor aggravations that are a part of life. We fear that having a gun might cause people to channel their inner Travis Bickle, saying, “You talkin’ to me?” before unleashing a fusillade of shots, or that a fender-bender might escalate into the gunfight at the OK Corral.
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In American politics, strangely enough what gets people really fired up are not the major issues of the economy or wars but the three g’s: guns, god, and gays. (Also abortion, but it ruins the alliteration.) The split on this issue is pretty much along ideological lines. Self-described conservatives tend to oppose almost any restrictions on the ownership and carrying of firearms while self-described liberals see unrestricted ownership as an invitation to increased crime and violence.

The latest issue of Harper’s magazine had an interesting article (subscription required) titled Happiness is a worn gun by Dan Baum about the recent trends around the country that allow people to more easily own and carry handguns, either openly or concealed. Baum has owned and used guns a long time but just recently tried out what it was like to carry a gun around on his person, either concealed or openly, in those places where it was legal to do so. He estimates that around 6 million American routinely carry guns on their person.

I agree with Baum when he says:

To the unfamiliar, guns are noisy and intimidating. They represent the supremacy of force over reason, of ferocity over refinement, and probably a whole set of principles that rub some people the wrong way. But a free society doesn’t make people give a reason for doing the things they want to do; the burden of proof falls on those who would forbid. I started out thinking widespread concealed-carry was a bad idea. But in the absence of evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns is harmful, I come down on the side of letting people do what they want.

I am not fearful of people owning guns. I am not a supporter of an outright bans on guns and support the Second Amendment. I can see where having an armed public can be beneficial in some situations and can also be a deterrence against a tyrannical government. This stance puts me at odds with almost all of my family, friends, and the people I move around with in the normal course of my life, who are shocked at my views whenever the topic comes up.

Where I disagree with the extreme pro-gun groups like the NRA is in their desire to view even reasonable restrictions on gun possession as evil. I can see the need to make sure that people who buy guns are screened in some way to weed out criminals and the mentally ill and that they be required to undergo firearms training to show that they know how to handle them. The right to own a gun should be treated like the right to drive a car. Just as we are willing to give ordinary people the right to drive vehicles (which can be lethal weapons) provided that have shown that they have had training in how to use it and handle it responsibly, so it should be with guns.

As Baum says,

We may all benefit from having a lot of licensed people carrying guns, if only because of the heightened state of awareness in which they live. It’s a scandal, though, that people can get a license to carry on the basis of a three-hour “course” given at a gun show. State requirements vary, but some don’t even ask students to fire a weapon before getting a carry permit. We should enforce high standards for instruction, including extensive live firing, role playing, and serious examination of the legal issues.

Baum lists five reasons that people give for opposing handgun ownership: “you think it so unlikely you’ll be attacked it’s not worth the trouble or the sacrifice of Condition White; you expect the police to come to your aid in the event of trouble; wearing a gun makes you feel less safe instead of more; you’ve decided you couldn’t take a life under any circumstance; or you don’t want to contribute to a coarsening of society by preparing to kill at a moment’s notice.”

(Baum says that the gun advocates have a color-coded system for the level of alertness. “Condition White is total oblivion to one’s surroundings—sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation while walking on city streets, texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow is being aware of, and taking an interest in, one’s surroundings—essentially, the mental state we are encouraged to achieve when we are driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us. Condition Orange is being aware of a possible threat. Condition Red is responding to danger.” Baum said that whenever he carried a gun, he always found himself in Condition Yellow. He ultimately gave up carrying a gun because he found that he enjoyed being in Condition White, where you can get lost in your own thoughts.)

I personally will not choose to carry a gun myself, mainly because I am not sure that I have what it takes to actually kill another human being, though one never knows what one might do in extreme situations where one’s own life or the life of a loved one is threatened. Carrying a gun and not being able or willing to use it lethally seems worse than not carrying one at all. Another reason is that I hate carrying unnecessary stuff around on my person. After being nagged by my family, I now carry a cell phone for them to contact me in an emergency but only they know the number and so I never get any calls on it (since I can usually be reached by them at home or at work) nor do I make any since I hate talking on the phone anyway. Carrying in my pocket every day something I never use irritates me but I do it to accommodate the family. A gun would be bulkier and the chances are almost zero that it would be ever used so why carry one around all the time?

(To be concluded tomorrw.)

POST STRONG: If only Eve had had a sassy gay friend…

A comedy cliché is the sassy but sensible gay friend who saves the heroine from doing something foolish. Actor Brian Gallivan has made it into his signature character.

The sassy gay friend rescues other famous fictional characters like Desdemona, Ophelia, and Juliet.

You can read an interview with Gallivan here about how he arrived at this series.

On this holiday on the day after independence day, I am posting again a reflection on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as a fundamental right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who created that document.

But the problem has always been with how happiness is attained. And in one serious respect, the suggestion that we should actively seek happiness, while laudable, may also be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don’t realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Good advice.

POST SCRIPT: More on flag fetishes

There were some interesting and informative comments on my post on flag fetishes.

One rule about the proper treatment of the US flag that is routinely violated is the use of the flag design on clothes. You can see this photo album of celebrities wearing the flag design on bikinis and underwear.

As we approach the independence day holiday with its orgy of patriotic fervor, I want to remark on one of the things that I find curious about America, and that is its flag fetish. People seem to treat the country’s flag with a level of veneration that I find somewhat bizarre. There even exist statutes that spell out in incredible detail how the flag should be treated such as how and when the flag should be raised and lowered, how it should be carried or folded, how old flags should be destroyed, and so on. All the rules of etiquette surrounding the flag are incredibly complex and June 14 has even been designated as Flag Day. Most people, I suspect, are not aware of many of these rules such as, for example, that the flag should never be used as wearing apparel, should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, or water, should never be carried flat or horizontally, and so on. Even the Bible does not get this level of special treatment.
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I recently read the book The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. This is a story of Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II, told through the eyes of Antonina, the wife of the Jan Zabinski, the head of the Warsaw zoo. They both worked for the Polish underground and over several years sheltered in their villa over three hundred Jews as they tried to escape from the ghetto and get to freedom. The book is based on the diary of Antonina and recounts the tales of the refugees and of the animals under their care. It gives some first person insights into what life was like under Nazi occupation and during the Warsaw uprising.

One thing that I learned from the book that I did not know before was that “the Nazis were ardent animal lovers and environmentalists who promoted calisthenics and healthy living, regular trips into the countryside, and far-reaching animal rights policies as they rose to power. Goring took pride in sponsoring wildlife sanctuaries (“green lungs”) as both recreation and conservation areas, and carving out great highways flanked by scenic vistas.” (p. 86)

The well-known obsession of the Nazis about racial purity also extended to the animal kingdom and they had a particular interest in exotic species that generated some weird ideas, such as trying to bring back to life ‘pure-blooded’ species that were now extinct. In pursuit of this goal, they raided zoos in the countries they occupied, in search of animals that most closely resembled extinct animals so that they could do breeding experiments with animals that showed specific desirable traits. Lutz Heck, the director of the Berlin Zoo, was a key advocate of this idea.

Heck’s reasoning went like this: an animal inherits 50% of its genes from each parent, and even an extinct animal’s genes remain in the living gene pool, so if he concentrated the genes by breeding together animals that most resembled an extinct one, in time he would arrive at their purebred ancestor. The war gave him the excuse to loot east European zoos and wilds for the best specimens. (p. 80)

During the occupation, the people in Warsaw received rations of bread that were carefully calculated: Germans got 2,613 calories per day, Poles 669 calories per day, and Jews 184 calories per day (p. 104). No doubt German scientists had calculated precisely the minimum calories needed to maintain life. The Nazis also believed in the abominable practice of collective punishment, where in response to an act by a single individual, retribution was immediately meted out to the members of their family and even the extended community. “[I]n Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed “Collective responsibility”.” (p. 116)

In reading this I was struck by how Israel now practices collective punishment in the occupied territories by imposing a policy of restricting food supplies to the people of Gaza and also committing such acts as bulldozing the homes of the extended families of anyone suspected of any terrorist action.

In response to my series of posts denouncing the Israeli siege on Gaza and the attack on the relief flotilla, one commenter defended Israel’s actions and produced data suggesting that the physical health of Gazans was not that bad compared to people in some other developing countries. I did not respond to that comment, thinking that most readers here would recognize that you cannot justify a policy of deliberately restricting food reaching people merely by saying that other people are worse off. The point is that willfully brutalizing people, deliberately keeping them hungry and miserable, and denying them basic due process is wrong, whether or not the targets of such actions look emaciated as a result. Deliberately denying entire populations of people equal access to food and medicine and other staples of life based on their ethnicity, religion, or nationality is simply monstrous, whether done by Germans to Poles and Jews or by Israelis to Gazans, and also irrespective of whether any single groups receives minimal amounts.

Reflexive Israel supporters like Senator Chuck Schumer said, to enthusiastic applause from other Israel supporters: “And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense.” He should be roundly condemned for these disgusting remarks. He seems to think that collectively punishing an entire population because he does not like who they elected is just fine as long as the people of Gaza have just enough food so as not to starve to death. And this man is a US senator. Why are there no widespread calls for him to resign?

You would think that any people who have suffered harsh injustices at the hands of others and know what it feels like would resolve to prevent such acts anywhere to anyone in the future. But the sad truth is that not only do they not oppose such actions, they even inflict them on others, perpetuating the cycle of injustice and oppression. We find on a collective scale the cycle we see in individuals, where the victims of abuse often become abusers themselves.

The US was born of anti-imperialist sentiment but that has not prevented it from becoming an imperialist power now, applying brute force on country after country. When I see the hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions that are being used against Hispanic people, I often wonder if this does not originate in fear. Some whites may think that when white people in America become a minority, as they are projected to do sometime in the not-too-distant future, they may be treated as badly as they treated minorities.

The cycle of abuse and injustice must be broken. The only way to do that is to break free of the sense that allegiance to our particular tribe (whether ethnic, religious, or nation) is more important than our allegiance to human rights and justice.

POST SCRIPT: Brilliant Marcus Brigstocke rant on the three Abrahamic faiths

It is hard to disagree with anything he says.