Empty my God (un)to Thee

The only thing that surprised me about the verdict is that juries work on Saturdays.-@michaelianblack

This weekend started off well enough, with my own personal terror alert system elevated to orange, and a surprise visit from a fellow Tori room kid. When nothing happened on Friday, I assumed we'd hear on Monday, which was fine. So, when a sociology instructor whom I never quite managed to befriend in undergrad posted "fucking florida" to her feed, I didn't immediately identify to what she had referred. There are, after all, a lot of things about Florida that ought to be fucked.

The bestial nature of that metaphor aside, Florida's a strange place, and I doubt I'd have chosen to have been born and raised there had I been consulted beforehand. That said, you could do worse for a tutorial map. For those of you unfamiliar with America's wang, it can be kind of counterintuitive: the further north you go, the further south you are. South Florida is an odd amalgam of New York expatriates, Cuban-American families, tourists, relocated witnesses, snakes, and hideous half-human muttations produced in the labs beneath Disney World. North Florida is, for lack of a technical term, Georgia's muffin top, the southeastern border of Confederacy country. The two are bisected by the I-4 corridor, our perpetually sunny Valley of the Ashes, and where elections are won and lost. Along this winding stretch of demographic confusion lies the city of Sanford.

Like any American city, Sanford is a place where quiet, mild-mannered wonks and loud, racist loons live in such close proximity to one another that you'll occasionally be surprised at who is which. It is, perhaps, easier to see there than in less liminal locales. So when I heard about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I wasn't entirely surprised by the shooting, and I was even less surprised to hear that the police had essentially taken a pass on investigating it as a crime. Ta-Nehisi Coates explains it all for you:

For some reason there's this notion out there that Trayvon was killed on Monday, Al Sharpton showed up on Tuesday, and there were marches on Wednesday. There's an entire contingent of critics who are much more comfortable attacking Sharpton, or wondering why "black on black" crime doesn't attract any protests. 

As I have written, the contention is, itself, false. But more importantly the protests aren't merely about Trayvon Martin's killing, they are about the failure of a police department to rigorously investigate a crime. [...] At its root, Trayvon Martin's killing is a law and order case, and you would think conservatives would latch on to that. Instead, with few exceptions, we are being told that the true calamity here is the presence of Al Sharpton. 

I didn't have any predictions of which I was confident, largely because I hadn't bothered to follow the trial. I knew a conviction was hardly a fait accompli, but it struck me as immediately and obviously important that there be a trial. As it went on, I'd pick up little bits from arguments in FB threads and blog posts about the broader political issues at work. Consequently, I don't have a whole lot to say about the trial itself. The state's burden of proof necessitated that they essentially prove a negative, since the victim was conveniently dead, and the more distant witnesses ignored or persuaded in the hours after the shooting. And while Zimmerman is rather obviously a paranoid lunatic with a history of impulsive violence--and his explanation of events is so wildly improbable that it ought to have been accompanied by a laugh track--unless he was actively engaged in a crime before he pulled the trigger, Florida says there's no crime.

What I find most disconcerting about this scenario is that, applied fairly, both Zimmerman and Martin would have been within their legal rights to kill the other. Assault requires that the fear apprehended by the victim be well-founded; deadly force in self-defense only requires that the fear be legitimately felt. (Furthermore, immediately prior to the gunshot, neither party would have had the responsibility or the ability to retreat; running away from a man with a gun is a great way to get shot in the back, especially if he's a complete stranger who was threatening you, in the dark, for no apparent reason.) Knowing that being legitimately afraid entitles you to kill the object of your fear, one party can be plausibly afraid for their life simply because they believe the other party might be afraid for their life. In political theory, this is known as the Hobbesian trap, and it's the problem the Leviathan is designed to solve. The state takes sides. If it doesn't--if the state hedges its bets and says "whoever dies first is the criminal"--then it has abdicated its primary function. Wyrre, the late Old English word from which modern English's "war" derives, means "to bring into confusion." The state is, first and foremost, an epistemological construct.

Of course, the "war of all against all" scenario isn't actually going to happen, because laws like Florida's self-defense+ aren't intended to be applied fairly. This is what "empowering citizens" to do the job of law enforcement means. This is what it's for: creating a definition of self-defense so wide that it's impossible to convict anyone unless you have an a priori reason for wanting to imprison or kill them. It's jury nullification in reverse. The police's power to enforce laws encompasses not only the ability to deploy violence against citizens, but to choose not to deploy violence against some citizens. Legitimization of vigilantism makes the police more powerful, not less.

George Zimmerman stood trial for the death of Trayvon Martin, and that's a good thing. We almost didn't get that.

George Zimmerman is, for the moment, not going to face any legitimate penalty for having shot and killed Trayvon Martin. That sucks.

It sucks differently for different people, obviously, but for the people whose sons he hasn't shot, the most important is this: there's no legal disincentive for Zimmerman, or any of his adoring fans, to keep doing this sort of thing. Martin isn't the first, nor the hundredth, person to be killed in an extremely sketchy "defensive" shooting; Zimmerman's justification is far from the most ridiculous. And while there's some irony in noting that Zimmerman is now essentially an anthropomorphized security dilemma, I sincerely hope this is the last we hear of him, either as an aggressor or as a victim, because vigilantism is inherently a threat to all of us. Because the people for whom Zimmerman is a hero will avenge him a hundredfold. And because the outcome of this case doesn't actually mean that people are now legally allowed to hunt and kill each other in Florida. It only means that people are legally allowed to hunt and kill people whose deaths the police don't feel to be worthy of an investigation.

The police are a weapon. The legislature decides at whom it's pointed.

Now get out there and make them do their fucking job.

Lazy writer's block post that does not involve Black Claire

You know what videogames don't often deal with? Abortion.

Actually, videogames don't often deal with rape, labor rights, or tax law, but abortion's in my feed right now, because abortion's in the national feed right now. It has been for most of a century now, but we have to make room in our public discourse for wars and sporting events and Kardashians, so it drops out now and then.

Most notably, we're talking about a handful of big-name sound-bites on the issue, most notably Todd Akin's assertion that women's bodies will eject eggs fertilized during rape--I'm paraphrasing, because his actual words were so stupid it would hurt my fingers to type them--and Richard Mourdock's complementary assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape are part of God's plan.

These are stupid comments, and I'm not interested in spending much time arguing about their factual merits. They weren't meant for pro-choicers, liberals, feminists, or other sane and/or decent people. They were meant for a particular audience, to address a particular issue. Let's go around the back and see what's going on.

But first, some ground rules. Abortion is one of those issues where well-intentioned people can find themselves supporting barbarism, and it's helpful to keep an eye on our ideas about the basic functions of laws. To wit, for this post to make sense--for any political discussion to make sense, in my opinion--we have to remind ourselves that laws are not a psychic signifier of our culture's collective morals. There're lots of bad things we don't have laws against, because a law is not a stern talking-to. Breaking the law is about more than earning the collective disappointment of society. A law is an authorization of the state to use physical violence in particular situations, in order to prevent or retaliate against a particular course of action on the part of its citizens.

This is a useful metric for abortion. Forget how we feel imagining a stranger getting an abortion under circumstances X, Y, and Z. Think instead about how we feel about our employees, the police, a) extorting money from her under threat of kidnapping and imprisonment, b) kidnapping and imprisoning her under the threat of physical violence, or c) killing her should she resist b) with sufficient vigor.

So, in what circumstances should having an abortion result in a woman being extorted out of her property or beaten into submission before being forcibly placed in prison and forbidden to leave? If abortion is murder, as the placards say, all of them. Nobody ever seems to support this plan, though; even people who claim to oppose abortion rarely go on the record wanting to execute the women who get them. The doctors tend to bear the brunt of the imagined punishment, which is usually a fine of some sort: pretty light treatment for a hired assassin.

Regardless, if abortion is bad, it ought to be punished. Violence ought to be used against women who pay to have the procedure performed, medically or surgically. If abortion isn't bad, violence ought not to be used against women who have abortions. These two positions, though not equal, to my reckoning, are equally comprehensible. What's more problematic is what political scientists refer to as the Stupid Fucking Middle-Ground Horseshit.

The Stupid Fucking Middle-Ground Horseshit is where we get unambiguously awful ideas like the idea that abortion should be illegal (i.e. punishable by violence) except in cases or rape, incest, or endangerment. Because the law-as-psychic-projection idea comes into play here as well. We could treat abortions as homicides, I suppose, and acknowledge that certain kinds would be justifiable. But how would we actually know which ones those are? The law doesn't exist without a concordant punishment, and we can't punish people if we don't know who they are.

Given that rape is, y'know, a crime, it is rarely done in public. It is rarely particularly well-hidden, either, but we make a lot of excuses to help that process along. So let us now imagine that a woman is seeking an abortion, saying that she was raped. Does the state take her word for it? If so, the restriction is meaningless, and will have all the force and efficacy of the "Click here if you're 18" box. If not, what documentation would be required?

Would it be sufficient for the woman to report having been raped? Because we tend to work really hard not to believe women who say that.

Would it be necessary for criminal charges to be filed against an accused rapist? Because that's quite difficult to do. Prosecutors don't like cases they can't win, and cops don't like arrests that can't be prosecuted.

Would it be necessary for the accused rapist to be found guilty? Because a) that's almost fucking impossible, b) the goddamn kid will have been born by then.

There is simply no way to implement such a ridiculous restriction in a consistent manner. Criminalizing abortion would be immoral, but criminalizing abortion except under the aforementioned legal quagmire is both immoral and insane.

Which brings us back to Akin and Mourdock, whose comments, ridiculous as they may be, make some sense in this context. They were, in fact, arguing a point similar to the one I've put down here: that saying abortion is ok for rape survivors and murder for anyone else is really fucking stupid. It doesn't serve the interests of anybody, even the rapists and slavers of the right-wing id.

If there is anyone who ought to be allowed to get an abortion, under any circumstances, then there is no just reason to deny everyone that option under any every circumstance.

This I Believe, part I

Last night, I ended up staying up far too late, and found myself politics and philosophy on Facebook. Which in turn reminded me of just how confused my ideas about this stuff are. So, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, I figured I'd lay down some baselines.

My formative moral influences are Christian. Partially because I grew up in Western civilization, and partially because of more direct parental influence, and a great respect for non-violent resistance and pacifism. So I start with a basic idea that violence is bad, and ought to be avoided.

Ok, pretty simple here, and few people would disagree with that under most circumstances. Where I started getting into trouble was, if violence is so bad, why the hell do we have armies? Or, for that matter, cops?

Because law enforcement is, fundamentally, state-sanctioned violence. That's not an argument about the validity or morality of law enforcement, but that's what it is. Contrary to what I always enjoy reading from Dennis "Marx was right, marriage really IS prostitution!" Prager, laws are not a psychic expression of a citizens' collective moral values. A law is nothing more and nothing less than an authorization of the state to use violence against its citizens under certain, carefully delineated circumstances. Some people might quibble with this, stating that some (most) infractions are dealt with via alternative means such as fines. Well, ok, you have to pay a fine. And if you don't pay it, alternative means of acquiring it are employed. If that doesn't work, agents of the state are authorized to kidnap you for the length of your trial and, if applicable, subsequent incarceration. If you run, they are authorized to chase you down and subdue you by force. If you fight back, they're authorized to extend that force. If you fight back enough that the agents' lives are in danger, they're authorized to kill you.

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with any of this--well, I did as a kid, and will discuss that in a minute--but this is what law is. Right or wrong, it's serious business, and ought to be taken seriously.

As a kid, I had a fundamental problem with the idea that any freedom, even the freedom to do violence to others, would be so unevenly applied between the state and its citizenry. There are reasons for this, many of them good, but we're in flashback mode now. I grew to identify as an anarchist. As I got older, and got into gnosticism and deontological ethics, I made the connection to Christianity. How can one be morally ok with any form of government when said government depends on institutionalized violence for its very existence?

"Well, because otherwise you'd be dead," was the common answer. And that works out ok if we assume that life matters more than principle. It seemed/seems to me that the Christian, pacifistic reply to this claim, however, is some variant of "so the fuck what?" Doesn't this world belong to the sinners anyway? Isn't this entire enterprise founded on martyrdom? In this sense, a "Christian state" becomes something of a contradiction in terms. An army of pacifists? More to the point, even Christian leadership of a democratic state presents some issues: if a president believes that martyrdom is a higher good than "defensive" killing, it doesn't seem like something that'd be wise or moral to put into practice if the voters don't agree. Martyrdom is one thing; volunteering others for martyrdom is trickier.

But, leaving aside Christianity for the moment, even a baseline belief that violence is wrong on a basic and transcendent level makes it difficult to interpret law enforcement morally. The most commonly employed argument is a utilitarian one, the "necessary evil" referred to in Common Sense: violence directed towards a net reduction in the total violence of a system is moral. The death of a multiple murderer is an evil to be balanced against the good it creates, i.e. a less fearful populace and a few lucky individuals who avoid being murdered by that particular person. But utilitarianism has its own problems that I don't particularly feel like going into here; suffice to say that this argument always kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

So what's left? Pacifism, I suppose, would seem to be the conclusion, except I'm not sure it's possible to practice it. I can sit here and promise not to kill, even in self-defense, and it might sound moral or crazy or both. I can even make it more ambiguous and promise not to kill in defense of others. But the society of which I am a part--there's extensive documentation on this, no matter how much of a shut-in I might be on a given day--has already taken extensive action on my behalf to ensure that I don't have to. Armed, uniformed men and women walk the streets of the city in which I live, and when something happens, they check it out, fill out a great deal of paperwork to ensure a record of the event, and when possible, arrest people who are then tried and imprisoned. I benefit from the violence done on my behalf, funded by my taxes and moderated by representatives elected by people like me. And, short of finding an unclaimed patch of land somewhere in the Massachusetts area that has no legal jurisdiction, there is no way for me to opt out of this system. I cannot avoid benefitting from the violence of others. And thus, as a citizen, I must accept that the violence done in my name is, on a psychic level, my own.