Fear and Loathing

There’s a recurring question, raised by the late Robert Heinlein among others, that asks why people seem to be willing to legislate against things they don’t like – that is, why do people assume that anything they personally don’t like, don’t appreciate, fear or find disgusting must be against the law, or must be made illegal if it isn’t already? Heinlein argued that anything you enjoy that does not unnecessarily harm another human being can not be considered “wrong” or “evil” in an ethical sense (harming yourself isn’t evil – it’s just stupid); he also contended that attempting to impose legal restrictions on things simply because you do not approve of them IS evil. I would like to point out that in America, such legislation is frequently unconstitutional – and in the 21st Century, it’s generally also expensive…


Consider the case of Manassas, Virginia, which is attempting to legislate all “sexually-oriented businesses” out of their city limits. You can find the story here if you want to, but the basic issue is that there’s an “adult boutique” opening in the Old Town section of Manassas, and the local residents are up in arms about this business generating an entire red-light district, attracting perverts, corrupting innocent children, and all of the assorted uproar this sort of business always seems to touch off according to conservative commentators. Whether these fears have any grounding in reality is, as always, a matter of opinion, but in this case the cost of hiring an independent legal counsel to review the situation and the proposed ordinances is going to cost the town an estimated $71,000 – not counting potential lost revenue from sales taxes, business permits, and other effects of having a successful business operating nearby...


Now, no one is saying that local governments shouldn’t be able to legislate against business operations that will work against the needs of their community; that’s one of the things a local government is created to do in the first place. If the city council wants to pass an ordinance to keep a big-box retailer out of their 19th Century downtown area (I’m looking at you, Wal-Mart) or prevent a large pesticide factory from opening next door to the local grammar school, they should have the right to do that. But by the same token, it’s hard to imagine that a single retail store operated by a mother-daughter team will turn a small town in Virginia into another Las Vegas, and there’s no conclusive evidence that anything this store is going to sell would actually do anyone any harm in the first place. More to the point, if the good people of Manassas want to purchase questionable videos, explicit pictures or “marital aids” they can get them sent discretely from thousands (if not millions) of Internet sites anytime they want to. Thus, it’s hard to imagine what benefit this ordinance will do anyone except for those who regard anything to do with sex with fear, disgust, or loathing…


It seems ironic that in a time when people are living in fear of terrorists from extremist groups that oppose free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and gender equality, those same people would attempt to outlaw the construction of religious institutions, limit the publication of print and video media, and browbeat women into returning to a subservient role that has been inappropriate for centuries (assuming it was ever appropriate in the first place). As with the “defense of marriage” hysteria of the past few years, I have to say that if your moral fiber (or the alleged purity of your children) can be threatened by a small boutique opening downtown, then you need professional help, not legislation banning certain types of businesses. And if this sort of puritanical nonsense becomes commonplace in America, we will have hit the Bottom – and started to dig…

Lower Than Usual

Between the main blog and this newer space we’ve seen a lot of bad behavior over the past few years; the sort of knavery, chicanery and douchebaggery that would make you lose your faith in humanity if you still had any, as well as the sort of credulous idiocy that borders on arrogance (the “Oh, that sort of scam could never happen to ME!” kind of thing). Needless to say, they go together – there’s very little a scam artist likes better than people who (for whatever reason) believe themselves immune to a particular scam. But I personally can’t think of any class of people more subject to this type of self-delusion than the senior management groups of non-profit organizations, or any type of low-life more scummy than the ones who intentionally prey upon such groups. Unfortunately, I’ve just run across a story that illustrates both points all too well…


Some of you will remember that I spent a number of years doing consulting work with non-profit organizations, and a common trait of managers within that industry is that most of them are motivated more by their dedication to the cause they serve than by money, professionalism, or even satisfaction at a job well done. While this may be seen as praiseworthy, or even noble, it does give rise to a certain misplaced confidence in the importance of what they are doing – or, perhaps, that everyone else in our society is just as invested in the cause as they are. Thus, such people earnestly believe that no one would consider suing them for unpaid bills, arresting them for misappropriation of funds, or running a scam on them because what they are doing is all “for the greater good…”


Leaving aside for a moment that this is an end-means argument, and thus inherently ethically weak, this belief ignores the fact that people who are willing to steal from ordinary people without regard for relationships damaged, dreams crushed, or lives destroyed are not going to care if their actions will also have a larger negative effect on our society. A good case in point came up in an NPR story this week, which details an ongoing scam preying on non-profit groups. You can find the original story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that this company offered to produce a professional documentary about the targeted non-profits, generally using stock footage of some well-known newsreader as bait. The scammers claimed that the documentary would air on PBS stations, resulting in nation-wide public awareness of the agency and its mission, and leading to vast increases in street credibility, celebrity and philanthropic attention, and ultimately increased fund raising…


It would be tedious to enumerate all of the things about this dubious piece of business that should raise red flags in the mind of any reasonably sane person, but the one that stands out (at least to me) is the fact that these scammers are promising a host of benefits, but not actually guaranteeing anything. The fact that there are no such programs on PBS (and never have been) and that there are no references they can offer you could be explained away as factors of the firm just starting up – although we should question if any business, let alone a small non-profit group, should be throwing large sums of money at an untried new company with no evidence the investment will be worth anything – but in almost any other business enterprise, most people are savvy enough to realize that you get what you pay for, an offer that appears to be too good to be true usually ISN’T true, and even a signed contract won’t keep you from being cheated, let alone scammed outright…


So here we have the case of people who prey upon non-profit executives because they know such people are frequently unsophisticated (if not openly credulous or foolish) in a business sense, and people who foolishly squander charitable donations and philanthropic support which may be the only hope their constituent populations have because they can’t be bothered to learn how businesses actually work, hire a competent lawyer, check out suspicious offers with their state and local authorities, or even look up such offers on line. It’s very rare to encounter a crime where both the criminal and the victim are racing to the bottom, and taking our entire society along for the ride – but I think this story qualifies…

We apologize for the Inconvenience

I try not to rail against Political Correctness on these blogs – and in person – because it’s one of those topics that are easier to be smug about when you’re a male of European ancestry than it is for anyone else. As such, there are going to be things that I believe are cases of people being too sensitive – or too willing to jump on the PC bandwagon in order to get what they want – that are deadly serious to the people doing the jumping, and it’s really not my place to be telling them so. That said, I still think that the business of a newspaper having to print a public apology to readers for mentioning the end of Ramadan on the anniversary of 9/11 is a Race to the Bottom…

If your local news aggregation cite missed it, you can view the apology here, and the online version of the original article here. Basically, this was a weekend “slow news day” piece about the local observances of the end of Ramadan; something which should not be indicative of anything beyond a small local newspaper not having the budget to do anything really impressive to fill space in the front section over the weekend. But since last Saturday was the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – and since there was no corresponding story about the evil people who claim to be part of the same religion causing those attacks – apparently a whole bunch of people started calling, writing and flaming the paper in protest…

I can’t really fault the paper for taking this position; it’s a business operating in a relatively small town, and it can’t really afford to risk alienating people who buy papers or ad space in papers in the community it serves. Printing an editorial that says, in effect, “we’re sorry if we said anything that offended you” is not much of an issue in itself. What seems unfortunate (at the very least) is that a harmless piece of low-intensity writing (you can’t really call it reporting) would cause such an outcry in the first place. There have been Muslims living in the United States for well over a century now, and for the most part, no one paid any attention to them, any more than they did to the Buddhists, Hindus, or Zoroastrians, until the wave of militant fundamentalism that had been building in Central Asia resulted in the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even then, Americans in general would probably have ignored the whole thing if not for the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s, and the outrages of September 11th, 2001…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t still be furious about the attacks on American soil, or outraged at the deaths of over 3,000 innocent people who died on that day nine years ago. And it should probably be acknowledged that actions like publically calling for the execution (or outright murder) of cartoonists for exercising their civil rights is not a good way to get people to respect your right to exercise your own. But even if we do not wish to consider that some of those who died on 9/11/01 (on the ground and in the airplanes) were Muslims themselves, or that members of that faith have lived among us in peace for their and our entire lives, or even that a bunch of cave-dwelling idiots half a world away do not speak for the American Islamic community any more than a local nutcase preacher in Florida with fewer than 50 followers speaks for everyone else in the U.S., it’s still hard to imagine what would be wrong with a simple newspaper article about local residents, neighbors and taxpayers all, celebrating a holiday…

Folks, what made this country the greatest one in the world wasn’t some mindless devotion to a political ideal that no one should ever be offended by anything, any more than it was a fanatical adherence to any particular religion or a determination to only have people who look, act, sound and behave “like us” living here. What made us great was the willingness to take all of the best things that all of our thousands of immigrant groups brought from all over the world and combine them into something stronger and more powerful than any one people or nation could ever be. The “melting pot” we all learned about in civics class isn’t kettle, it’s a forge – and the alloy that has come out of it is why all Americans believe, without a trace of irony, that we really are the shining example for the rest of the world, and the hope for humanity’s future. “From Many, One” isn’t just a fancy slogan to print on money; it’s who we are and it’s how we came to be this way…

And if we’ve lost sight of that; if we have reached a time when it’s more important to shout angry slogans about the “other” and rage against innocent people for having the temerity to celebrate a holiday that was already a part of their culture a thousand years before we were even a sovereign nation, then it’s our entire society that is racing to the Bottom – and we’re not going to enjoy the ride…