Operation Blackout: Learn more about SOPA/PIPA

http://sopablackout.org/learnmore/

Promethea.org and prometheanmovement.org will be striking in support on Jan. 18th.

Why Some Political Issues Must Come First

Glenn Greenwald writes:

If you don’t really care about these issues — war, empire, the denial of due process, suffocating secrecy, ongoing killing of foreign civilians, oligarchical manipulation of the Fed and other government policies, militarized foreign policy and police practices, etc. —  then it’s easy to blithely dismiss the need to find some way [that Ron Paul provides] to challenge the bipartisan consensus on those issues.
…
One final point that should be made: I do not believe that the issues on which I principally focus are objectively The Most Important Ones. There are many issues of vital importance that I write about rarely or almost never: climate change, tax policy, abortion, even the issue which affects me most personally: gay equality. None of us can write about every issue meaningfully. The issues on which I focus are ones where I believe I can contribute expertise, or express views and points not being heard elsewhere. But there are many other issues of genuine importance, and I have no objection to those who, when forced to choose, prioritize those concerns over the ones about which I write most frequently. That is why I wrote — and meant — that “there are all sorts of legitimate reasons for progressives to oppose Ron Paul’s candidacy on the whole” and “it’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate [Obama] are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else.”

As much as I admire this guru of civil liberties, I think he’s wrong here, in practical terms. Some issues must sensibly come first, if others are to be considered at all.

For example: I would be very surprised if—assuming that Paul is not elected and nothing is done about spending and debt—the national-and-international debt house of cards collapses, the dollar is massively devalued, people are struggling to feed and clothe their families, and the worst thing gay Americans have to worry about is whether the state will sanction their marriage.

At least, in the worst-hit, most desperate communities, gays will not only find themselves scrabbling along with everyone else, but potentially defending themselves along with other minorities (including dissidents like myself), who are so often demonized and blamed during difficult times.

Outsiders by nature or circumstance—all those of unusual and outspoken beliefs, lifestyles, and minority identities—will find ourselves on the fringe of whatever new ‘mainstream’ emerges in many communities, which will almost certainly be intolerant. Lynchings and other attacks will occur. It’s worth remembering that the major factor behind lynchings in the South wasn’t an aimless “racism” but resentment over postwar devastation, economic suffering, and occupation that rendered Southern white men powerless and poor and hungry for someone even less powerful to hurt.

Even worse, in such a scenario it becomes rather likely that scared, angry and desperate people will resort to supporting a system or competing systems of abject fascism —especially given the burgeoning police-state precedents which no major candidate but Ron Paul has opposed—and it will almost certainly not be a gay-friendly or minority-friendly fascism but a fundamentalist-friendly one.

Reproductive rights aren’t very often thought about either when governments are hounded by hungry people and desperate to control or placate them. Control will include intrusions into personal life far greater than the bogeyman of potentially having to argue a legal case about abortion at a state level (the specter raised against states’ rights); placation will include pandering to powerful fundamentalist Christian interests who are intolerant of abortion or even birth control.

It will be easier to rule by dividing, and set groups against each other than to solve severe economic problems.

It also makes little sense to debate the greater importance of a positive-rights social issue such as gay marriage over traditional negative-rights civil liberties when the entire principle of open debate is being challenged, along with the right to protest. The time for debates over other issues is once, first, the right to debate is itself secured against imminent threats.

At present, only one presidential candidate in the US race can credibly claim to be devoted to defending the right to speak out against the government, and that is Ron Paul. The freedom of political speech, most especially including the right to attack the powerful, comes first in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights for a reason. Whether you admire all of Paul’s policies and ideas—who can expect this from a politician?—or detest some of them, or whether you like him or hate him personally is all irrelevant compared to that. We can’t even have that conversation without the right to speak out and disagree together.

The remaining Republican field and the sitting president are all, more or less, for criminalizing free speech and setting precedents which will erode this right for the future. For example, effective reporting and dissent from Wikileaks led to open threats by the Obama administration and threats against Julian Assange by openly fascist candidates such as Newt Gingrich, who called him an “enemy combatant”; only Ron Paul defended Wikileaks and Bradley Manning. The Obama administration also believes the president has the right to detain and assassinate citizens on the basis of activities formerly protected under the First Amendment, and to the general agreement of the Republican field save Ron Paul.  Even public discourse on the internet is under attack. The entire social climate since 2001 has increasingly become intolerant of differing opinions, and only one major candidate opposes this direction entirely.

Once precedents are set, it will be irrelevant why the measures were first enacted—for IP or for “terrorism.” They will be used for anything and every case in which the government or connected corporations wish to suppress free speech and open debate, just as anti-terror surveillance measures and other extralegal procedures provided under the Patriot Act were primarily used against suspects in the drug war, not accused terrorists.

This is not a time when we have the luxury of having whatever political priorities we like. We are genuinely under threat of fascist control and economic collapse. First, we must secure a minimal right to dissent and free spaces for debate in public, in print, and online, and for that we—civil or fiscal libertarians, classical liberals or progressive liberals, anarchists, individualists or communitarians, independents, left/right/miscellaneous—must work together. Then we can all worry about debating what we really want.

And yes, a similar rationale of priorities trumping social issues for progressives would also indicate that anarchists, nonvoters, and all those who perhaps sensibly refuse to participate in politics normally would be well-advised to consider that their luxury of non-participation is not guaranteed. Those like myself who object to the system in which we find ourselves coerced would prefer not to sanction it with participation, because we do not agree with its very existence. And yet, it is patently absurd to suggest that a voluntarist or anarchist has no immediate interest at stake between a lone neo-Jeffersonian presidential candidate and a field of police-state fascists presiding over an economy drowning in debt.

Again: first, we must secure a minimal right to dissent, and opportunities to make alternate cases to people who will care about something besides fear-based survival and finding someone to blame.  Then we can argue the abolition of the state. We should also expect this to be far easier with sympathetic Jeffersonians or even semi-libertarians than with authoritarians.

Anti-psychiatry; an example of polarized debate between anti-science fringe and orthodoxy

Reading on the internet has probably already introduced you to the anti-psychiatric movement, which appeals to the dislike people have for the “disease model” and fear of medication for mental illness, which relates to their fears of being out of control of their own minds. Although they will have already experienced this as human beings, if not also as sufferers of particular disorders, they may not have accepted it any more than people can accept the fact of their future death.

In short, the anti-psychiatric movement, and specifically its anti-psychopharmacological message, appeals to the folk rejection of the mind or “soul” people think of as their unitary self being in some way integrated or derived—to some debatable degree—without conscious control, and being subject instead to the evolution, development, oddities and dysfunctions of a physical electrochemical brain, a compound, complex adaptive system. Despite mountains of scientific evidence, folk beliefs about the brain prefer to believe it is merely the seat of consciousness. This is just as true of secularists, who won’t use the word “soul,” but still believe in a metaphysical notion about the mind, falsely distinguishing the experience from the brain from which it emerges.

Figureheads of the movement like Thomas Szasz also portray psychiatry almost exclusively as a soulless industry abusing and controlling patients and selling destructive “medicine” they don’t need for imaginary ailments, rather than as a non-monolithic medical field which is generally less problematic now than some of its earlier history, but still muddling through, like its patients, not without problems, errors, and differences of opinion. The evil-psychiatry portrayal is mixed with a lot of disprovable medical ignorance and some brazen lies, but as is well known on the internet, most readers are not diligent in their fact-checking and not particularly critical about sources.

If any of them know, I have never seen one of the many people who reference the anti-psychiatry quack Thomas Szasz ever mention that his group, the so-called “Citizens Commission on Human Rights,” is a front for the Church of Scientology.

Scientologists have to be wise to their need for fronts like this to promote their views, which will otherwise be received as if they come from a science fiction cult—because they do. They have an agenda to disparage medical science, psychopharmacology, all psychiatric and psychological theories and treatment options—effective and ineffective, appropriate and inappropriate alike—to promote their own brand of quackery instead. This isn’t news, but I imagine that it will be useful for some readers on the internet, who have been taken in by some of the false arguments figureheads like Szasz have promoted, to learn about their associations with Scientology.

That was enough reason to make this post, but I would also like to briefly connect it to a larger pattern I have repeatedly noticed in dialogues about contentious science.

One unfortunate effect of anti-scientific criticism you will see is the gradual elimination of other positions with sensible criticisms of the establishment, in the fight between two absolutes.

One analogy to the environment created between the pro-medication (many would say, over-medication) psychiatry and anti-psychiatry camps (the latter essentially dismissing the science behind psychopharmacology, the former exaggerating its precision and utility) can be found in the environment created by vaccine critics attacking the vaccine establishment. Advocates like Paul Offit end up claiming vaccines can virtually never do any harm just to counter baseless claims that vaccines never did any good (polio, anyone?), or caused autism, or poison people, or spread HIV. Meanwhile, the fact that different vaccines vary widely in their effectiveness and safety, and evidence that both a great deal of industry money and centralized regulatory and public health information systems do distort both approval of vaccines and public perceptions of vaccines, are largely ignored.

Scientists become more shrill, dogmatic, and devotional, and adopt more politically-calculated positions, in response to bizarre anti-scientific positions attacking them which are shrill, dogmatic, and devotional from the beginning.

This also reminds me of what happened between the anti-Darwin positions (Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates) and the establishment academic positions on evolution. Prominent evolutionary scientists and advocates were increasingly pushed not only into a reactionary atheism but a reactionary neo-Darwinism, with some even intolerant or dismissive of valuable gadfly Steven Jay Gould.

The extremity of the debate sets the tone for a shallower discussion and understanding of science in which there is a temptation to underplay, distort, or ignore facts on *both* sides, to refuse to yield ground and to refuse ammunition to “the other side”—for there erroneously will appear to be only two, to the combatants.

One conclusion I would draw is that the partisan involvement of the public in a scientific field makes science less scientific. It’s not only the lure of public funding that can corrupt scientists, as in the Climategate IPCC scandal. It’s also that the rancorous mentalities of public debate with non-scientists frequently erode the essential scientific mentalities of openness and impartiality that require careful construction and maintenance. Scientists are humans too, and they become defensive about their turf just as readily as others. The public is understandably concerned about the effects of applied science, but interference with the aim of altering scientific conclusions to become more acceptable to preconceptions (the true bane of science) seems to corrupt scientists reacting to it more than they realize.

Even more so, public dialogue and understanding about contentious scientific subjects becomes corrupted, and polarized.

On growing away from a singular vision that can define perfection

I’ve come to appreciate an interesting lesson while combining creative and intellectual ambitions with perfectionism: pursuing perfection according to certain expansive goals actually leads away from any meaningful perception of “perfection.” If carried through, particularly ambitious, magnificent aims for creative projects can grow them into a scale and complexity more analogous to the design of a city or at least a neighborhood than a single, intentional work of art or design.

A single work can be circumscribed, defined, and evaluated. Sometimes they even give a sense of achieving perfection according to the intentions evident in them. Cities or neighborhoods are composed of many interconnected works and can never become perfect—not just due to the difficulty involved, although that is relevant to flaws creeping in—but because there is too much going on and there are too many simultaneous intentions to retain clarity about such overarching terms of evaluation. Likewise a single passage of an epic can retain a focus within itself similar to a short story, but the breadth of the thing is something else. Or rather, it takes on many qualities, perspectives and mantles.

Even given the sense in which one person can encompass many different facets at different times, it’s surprising to find that in practice a creative process primarily involving one person can open up in a similar way to a city or neighborhood designed by many, so that even one creator ends up populating as much as unifying. At some point, it’s difficult to judge, criticize or admire except by adopting a limited view. So I feel like perfection means less and becomes less applicable even as I feel like I do come closer to attaining expansive and ambitious goals, overall.

I suppose this sense of unfolding is something that few writers or single creators of creative works get a chance to experience, as opposed to filmmakers or others who work collaboratively. I particularly feel that relatively modest goals for single writing projects differ not only in degree but in kind from something like a philosophical epic novel few novelists would be crazy enough to attempt, or—as I have also perceived, through glimpses—an intricate body of nonfiction work such as few philosophers have written. I only know this from experience.

I think it’s unfortunate that few perfectionistic writers—and perfectionists make some of the best writers—will take the risks necessary to gain the valuable psychological experience of investing in work like this. It’s work that not only tests limits, but will redistribute creative attentions for less of a sense of tight, intentional control over a project, but a deeper sense of realization that one was nevertheless a facilitator of something ambitious and that it was realized.

Ego dissolution isn’t the right phrase, but it does have to do with opening up and letting go, even though—and this is important, I think—the way there requires a tremendous amount of struggling with tight, focused and laborious work to absurdly high standards. If you will, spiritual attainment of a less constrained view of a laborious creative process needs to go through it, first. Shortcuts do not work. (I believe I’ve heard this a few thousand times about esoteric spiritual practices?)

On the crushers of politically-correct bastards

Stunning news! No, it’s not war, lies, abuse of power. Nothing so small. Instead: unprofessional off-color expression used offhand on twitter! Possibly by some very tired person who is too busy saving the world to be polite.

I must be strange. I am not in favor of bigotry, and in a perfect world, no one would have preconceptions about types of people or express language that indicates such a legacy. However, I’ve never met anyone who was free of biased impulses. And, hearing breathless talk about presumed oppression by words, the philosopher in me thinks of the fallacy of essentialism evident in the notion that a word is intrinsically harmful and immoral regardless of its context or intent. Enforcing a mutually-inoffensive PC utopia seems to me a total waste of time and effort.

Deranged, even, when people are simultaneously being murdered, oppressed, deprived of property, life and liberty, sometimes by upright, respectable politicians who would never say anything offensive, because they’re rarely caught saying anything they mean.

Perhaps in a perfect world I would prefer a gentle, well-spoken hero who fights those “respectable” acts by “respectable” men. But I would damn sure prefer even a voluble bigot who fights them and saves people, to no one. Again, I must be strange; I don’t so much care how people talk compared to what they do, or don’t.

Maybe truth-tellers and exposers of lies offend people so often because that’s often the kind of asshole who does the job, from George “pansy left” Orwell to Julian “crushing bastards” Assange, from Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to Bill Hicks. Politically correct people tread too gingerly to do the work.

Not only that, they make decisions about political causes to support—life-and-death decisions—based on reading one… single… word. And they really ought to be ashamed.

Memetics, genetics, evolution and scientism

Chris Hedges is an intelligent man, but even an intelligent man must understand what he’s talking about. All very well to criticize scientism, but let’s get the science right. Example: he claims memetics is nonsense:

Ideas do not replicate like genes. Ideas are snuffed out or forgotten, often for centuries. Ideas that prevail are often not the best ideas but more often ideas backed by power.

If Hedges knew more about genetic evolution, he would know that genes are “snuffed out” (selected against, even to the point of elimination from the population) and “forgotten” (latent) in fairly direct analogies. And genes that prevail are not “best”; that is not what fitness properly means in modern evolutionary theory at all. He’s confusing it with assumptions behind eugenics and outdated evolutionary theory. “Fitness” actually means whatever is replicated and survives for any reason, and genes do not directly correspond to phenotypical expression, anyway. Genetic “success” is typically circumstantial based on environmental factors or chance and not in any overall sense “superior,” just like his point about power ‘cheating’ if you will to push ideas. That is remarkably analogous to natural selection.

Dawkins (inventor of the concept of “memes”) wins that one.

Hedges doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the fact that the smarter evolutionary-atheists, at least—like Dawkins and Dennett—understand that in science, evolution not only isn’t teleological, like Social Darwinism, the mechanisms aren’t deterministic (genetics isn’t, for one example). Thus, Hedges’ drawing a direct line from their supposed determinism in science to asserting false determinism in the complex social realm severely hampers what could have been a useful column on scientism. Many other criticisms are possible, but they certainly didn’t bring a habit of determinism from science into social thought, because they don’t believe in that kind of selection in the science.

Hedges’ understanding of the science is too primitive to do justice to the important points about scientism—that there are things for which science (or particular subsets of scientific methods or conceptualization) was not designed. These points have been more elegantly made by social scientists and social philosophers who believe in a different kind of science for complex, interconnected social realms. Hayek is one example, as is Mises, both Austrian economists.

Read more on faith and scientism in my essay Our Resource of Dreams and Deceits: Strategies for Practical Metaphysics in Past, Present, and Future:

Many have deceived themselves into vainly grasping for the perfection of science as a centrality in life. But in their scientism they subvert their own science — the process of learning which may yield more apparent facts, but will never provide values. Such dispositions must be held deep within our body-minds in conjunction with superficial semantics. The epistemology of scientific methods will never yield a reason to insist on atheism, for example, yet many rationalizers claim just that, unwilling to own up to their own hostility toward theism as the explanation for their assertion. Nor can logic argue against any physiologically predisposed tenet of hopelessness. If secular “rationalists” indeed feel some deep optimistic humanism, it rests on some faith of instinct within the body-mind, in strength, in health, in self-expression which attracts them to scientific means, subjects and aesthetics.

Even properly understood as a tool, science requires its own contexts of assumptions, and its own framework of faith for its practices (including tenets such as an understandable universe and experimental reproducibility). Throughout its past application as a tool (including the introduction of rigor into theology) science has called beliefs and values into question — which means it freed us from many primitive superstitions and misunderstandings incorporated within our consciousness, rendering them implausible. At the same time it left us stripped of many old moorings as well as tethers, to find we need new and more carefully considered ideas. For this enormity, it should have our respect, not our overestimation.

On the faults of arcane philosophy

When philosophical writing reads to an intelligent non-philosopher as circuitous or mired in jargon at the expense of meaning, it probably is. I take it for granted that philosophy should be intelligible though not simplistic or reductionist—which complicated language or jargon does not avoid, in any case—and that the effort required to understand it should be a necessary function of what it describes and creates for the reader, and not generated by the detours and cul-de-sacs of its own language. Clarity in writing and the precise composition of thoughts are essential steps toward understanding one’s own ideas, so without them, what business does a philosopher have writing for anyone else?

Moreover, the subjects to which the philosopher is led indicates whether he or she has any business writing for others instead of entertaining himself or herself with ideas of personal fascination or preoccupation. If the importance of matters of great concern to the philosopher is not equally clear to the reader as the argument unfolds, that philosophy is probably far less weighty than the philosopher imagines. The reader disagreeing with that philosophy indicates little, as he may have failed to understand it due to a lack of attention, or misattribution. But the reader should at least grasp why the subject was committed to words.

Philosophy is a creative task as well as a union of scientific knowledge; it is the poetical science, if it is the poets who compose the spirit of the future. Thus the faults of tedious writing are faults in a philosopher.

Dance, Puppets, Dance; or, Why it is Absolutely Foolish to React to the Media

On any given day, it is the job of the writers and producers, publishers and pundits, propagandists and activists of the political media to identify what will agitate the public and to push their buttons and pull their strings. It is part of the job of these professions to sensationalize, to induce sensation. The daily and ongoing goal of the political media, entertainment, and propaganda industries large and small is to manipulate the public using cheap tactics to infuriate, motivate, and divide them according to political parties, factions, labels, and contentious issues, either in order to sell media or show advertising to consumers, or to encourage irrational partisanship, to obtain the currency of votes or money.

On a deeper level, it is naive to believe that it will have escaped those in power and behind power that maintaining an agitated, divided public renders the challenge of social control far easier. In the midst of this distraction, the total conquest and regimentation of people herded and labelled into groups who are constantly, repeatedly divided and agitated against each other can be gradually achieved with little difficulty.

Major political parties and contentious issues such as abortion, like sensationalized media reports on outrages, effectively function as devices to distract the public. This is their primary purpose from the point of view of social control by those in a position sufficient to care little which party holds office as long as the effective status quo is maintained, and preferably never discussed or questioned. If the important trillion-dollar issues to those individuals are the likes of remaining powerful while maintaining the fiction of participatory popular government, keeping central banks and their influence over them, keeping war industry money flowing, and generally keeping tax money flowing to their privileged interests, et cetera, then their only concern about a hot-button social issue is that it never be resolved.

The “mainstream” political parties and labels like left-wing or right-wing (and nationalities) are useful  brands—on the level of soft-drink loyalties—to encourage hostility and bickering. Aggressive arguments over relatively pointless and relatively unimportant offenses, often based on overly-broad mischaracterization of groups adopted as enemies, are useful devices to monopolize conversation.

The reporting of the “mainstream” media—not coincidentally owned by some of the most powerful individuals in the world—exists first of all to hide all substantive interests of the powerful from attention and accurate analysis, as well as propagandizing in the midst of distraction. A second-rank media of self-appointed intellectuals and bloggers echoes similar talking points, and chiefly reacts to the mainstream media outlets. The “mainstream” consensus functions to exclude all real issues from discussion.

These are means to insulate all true roots of the system from notice and upheaval. It is typical and almost certain that no dialogue promoted in major media outlets or in the second rank of reactive intellectuals (or quasi- and anti-intellectuals) will get at the substance of how the world works, or identify “the real issues” which should concern people. All alternative models and ways of thinking sufficient to break this stranglehold are typically excluded from consideration.

Indeed, consideration itself is the enemy of the political system. Careful thought, patience, toleration, and open-mindedness are antidotes to the reactive politics of the easily-led. Puppets have no time to think, however. A constant state of passionate agitation over issues and divisions sufficient to arouse loyalties and hatreds is, as Orwell noted, the desirable state in which the public should be maintained, from the point of view of a one-party Elite.

Learning for yourself requires attention to disagreement, and suspension of judgment (epoché)

I wrote this tonight in response to someone equating the unmooring-from-reality of reptilian-conspiracist Icke-followers with sound money activists (End-the-Fed and Paul boosters), someone whose dismissal of the Austrian economists indicated he didn’t know a thing about them besides a number of falsehoods. But, I think it’s a point worth sharing more generally:

Certainly, it’s easier to think you have a clue about a subject when you only read a limited set of views, or people you already agree with, instead of some of the many others who disagree. It’s easier to presume they’re all clueless, crazy, weird, or poorly educated, instead, without actually finding out.

Reliable knowledge is obtained by admitting that disagreement is not indicative of stupidity. Learning is a process that occurs not when we absorb information like a sponge, but when we allow ourselves to consider other points of view by taking them seriously on a provisional basis, and attempt to sort out and reconcile contradictions and disconnects. Otherwise, everyone will continue to defend whatever points of view about a subject were first imparted to them, no matter how skewed, or incomplete.

DADT, Military “Service” and Obedience

The cheerfully militarist celebrations of the repeal of DADT for the US military—from the “just shoot straight” jokes to the perspective-free allegations that DADT was a horrifying injustice (on something like the level of a war crime!)—repelled and confounded me. Americans being Americans, inducing self-congratulation is usually an effective strategy to distract from other things—such as any of the reasons the chief executive has a deservedly low approval rating, and all the civilized campaign promises he has failed to keep, like restoring civil liberties and accountability, closing Guantanamo and ending torture, and ceasing an aggressive foreign policy.

But there is more to it. As others have said, militarism truly is the civil religion of the country, common to the secular and religious, right and left, Republican and Democrat. Chief among the implicit assumptions underlying this militarism is the concept of “service” to the country, and the principle that putting on a uniform for this “service” baptizes men and women to become intrinsically admirable. They should never be questioned by the public in their obedience to the chain of command, merely “supported.”

In general, the popular understanding of “service” seems to be minimally thought through, at best. “Public service” is just a phrase for politicians and bureaucrats to adopt as propaganda for self-interested careers in power and money. Likewise, we should question whether those who “serve” in the military “services” actually serve others, or any shared interests of the country they claim to defend.

Obedience should not be confused with service. In the present state of affairs, in fact, disobedience seems far more promising as a means to serve the country. Dissent seems far more necessary than mutely following the powers that be as they continue to bring the country to ruin through a doctrine of endless war, minimal liberty, unlimited profligacy and ever-accreting power—in short, policies converting the last vestiges of a republic into an unabashed empire.

The unpleasant reality that only dissidents want to discuss is that the US has a callous government supported by various callous interest groups. It prints and extorts money at the general expense of struggling consumers to enrich private financial interests and obtain loans for itself. It incarcerates roughly 1% of its population, mostly for consensual “crimes.” It spends fantastic sums to monitor, restrict and control its own citizens and billions of others around the globe. The largest employer in the world, the DoD, employs another 1% of the population. It spends the largest military budget in the world—by far—in order to pursue policies of attrition in multiple countries at once that have caused millions of casualties but ensured little besides short-term profits, mayhem, and making long-term enemies.

An abstract nicety like “equality” has little bearing in the real world for all those caught up and made victims of the state—American citizens or not—whether they are impoverished or bombed, jailed or otherwise persecuted. Certainly the luxury to be delusional about the importance of political correctness in an empire belongs only to those isolated from most imperial consequences. It is reminiscent of old Imperial British concerns over propriety in colonial armies, completely beside the point of their repressing the “wogs.”

Which brings me back to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the joy that soldiers can now openly express their homosexuality as they—frankly—fight wars for empire on the increasingly slim and tortured excuse that the Eternal War on Terror needs to be fought everywhere at tremendous cost, despite the fact that fewer Americans die from terrorism than dog bites. In the face of everything else, it is extraordinary that homosexuality is the controversy about “servicemen and women” versus all the more appropriate questions about this supposed service. We ought to wonder: how is being able to admit you’re gay while you occupy 70% of the world’s countries, consume trillions of dollars no one has, bomb innocents with drones at a ten-to-one ratio and radicalize foreigners admirable, and how is any of this “serving the nation”? Because the President says so?

While I’m aware of the standard excuses made for soldiers—military personnel simply go where they are deployed, aren’t political, don’t make the choices about wars but only fight them, have to do as they’re told, etc.—I disagree that grown men and women who have chosen to volunteer for armed conflicts at the open-ended option of politicians like Bush and Obama, and chosen to continue fighting throughout all revelations about those wars, can fail to be responsible for their own actions.

I think it is also well-established that “following orders” is no excuse. If a man voluntary kills another man (or woman, or child), it is at all times his doing. Call it anything else, make it as anonymous as possible, and yet that fact remains. He had better, therefore, make sure he needed to kill, and he had better make sure of the reasons why he was told to. A soldier is not just a tool; he is not a robot; he remains a man, and a man should always think for himself, and always retains that responsibility. To cede this point is to subordinate individuals to social control, and the purpose of this is less combat effectiveness than it is ensuring conformity and lockstep obedience behind politicized war agendas.

Volunteer soldiers also have chosen to join and to obey orders. They have chosen to become obedient combatants serving policies known to have been formulated by opportunistic political factions in league with corporate and military-industry interests. They have chosen to become cogs in gigantic, indifferent organizations which employ indiscriminate military tactics, such as missile and drone bombing with appalling “collateral damage” casualty rates (also causing much backlash) and night raids which typically kill or capture the wrong people. These are not incidental crimes; these are military policies. When recruits enlist, surely they cannot fail to be responsible for knowing they will be part of a military organization killing mostly innocents in foreign lands, often for entirely manufactured reasons on the basis of fake intelligence and distorted narratives. And if they have somehow managed and chosen to remain ignorant of salient information about their profession, disreputable means and professed casus belli, can this ignorance be taken as any real exemption from responsibility for participation?

Those who subordinate themselves to superiors and simply obey orders do not exercise their ability and responsibility to think for themselves, as human beings. In doing so, they fail to obey a higher duty and service than any bureaucratic organization can claim—except of course for those who correct this mistake, come to question their role, and admirably refuse to proceed further against their conscience, much to the chagrin of men at the Pentagon. In fact, even the military acknowledges this responsibility in the sense that, should soldiers be exposed publicly for committing “war crimes”—in addition to those the Pentagon sticks by— they are not personally excused.

Thus, I feel that politically-correct concern over military policies such as DADT is absurdly negligent of the elephant in the room about unjust, unconscionable wars. While soldiers are killing innocent people for disreputable agendas, who cares about their workplace sensitivity?

Surely, openly stating homosexuality is an infinitesimal part of the free speech they should be exercising in dissent against what leaders want to make them do. It is conscientious objectors who deserve our admiration and attention, not obedient janissaries simply because they have the “courage” to talk about their homosexuality. That is not much courage, and it is not heroism; standing against a mighty system to defend others from its predations is heroism requiring courage on a level that those who only follow celebrity causes, like DADT, will never appreciate.

We should finally note that the premise that indiscriminate obedience is the foundation of the armed forces, that the military should be segregated from political thought, should be lauded as heroes for their “difficult job” and their “service” as they follow deployment and operational orders without qualms, and should never be asked by the public to exercise discretion, is an incredibly dangerous one.

Precisely this compartmentalization between fighting wars and deciding on war was the factor inducing the Wehrmacht to turn a blind eye to the rise of the national socialists in Germany; officers like Rommel believed they should never be political. When fine military forces exist to be appropriated for the agenda of any political faction who rises to power, they will be used, because they can be.

Furthermore, any separation between the bureaucratic interests of the military and political agendas has always been false due to the massive common financial interests in ensuring budgets, opportunities for contracts, and missions to provide raisons d’être. Manufacturing wars has historically involved the complicity of military leadership. Military officers have historically supported militarist programs. Especially since Europe’s adoption of the regimental system, every separate military culture has sought its own welfare over welfare of others. Militaries form selfish interest groups of their own, even at the cost of lives. Today, the military-industrial complex is a juggernaut. War—and all its thousands of attached interests and businesses—is the world’s largest industry and most powerful lobby.

The American public has yet to appreciate the domestic risk of celebrating “heroes” for the “service” of blind obedience of authority. In Germany, the concept of Führerprinzip exempted individuals from responsibility for decision-making, aside from that necessary to obey higher-ups in the hierarchy. Americans, by and large, have likewise accepted the military hierarchy as independent from personal conscience and individuality. They have accepted that soldiers are simply tools who must obey orders and leave all decisions to the officers above them, all the way to the Commander-in-Chief. But once this principle is established—that leaders sit atop an obedient monolithic pyramid of governmental enforcers which the public MUST support, regardless of political policies—there is no reason whatsoever for leaders to pay any attention to citizens, any longer. Complaints have no teeth. The leaders have what they need to take anything, and they need not listen.

The rank and file, too, have their established loyalties, reinforced by the public’s own attitudes toward their common identity and obedience. Having been taught that they bear no direct responsibility to serve the public versus their superiors and comrades, or to discern whether their actions and obedience is in the public interest, they have little reason to respond to pleas. If, on some unfortunate day in the future, an even-more unscrupulous faction and President finds opportunity to order martial law in the United States, citizens should not be surprised to find that order obeyed. Sadly, I can also predict that a substantial portion of the population would still cheer.

It has been correctly said that if anyone can ever stop war, it will be due to soldiers refusing to come. Perhaps we can also presume that if anyone can ever halt the madness of empire before its downward spiral ensures an irrecoverable collapse of values underpinning civilization, it must be soldiers or other would-be enforcers who retain some thoughtfulness and dedication to the service of humanity, and refuse to be pawns.