American Cynic Article Feed

I Just Watched a Presidential Debate (Stein and Johnson)

2012-11-06T04:29:50Z

I just watched my first presidential debate of this election season: the third debate between Jill Stein (Green Party) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) streamed live on RT.com (video below).

Overall I was much more impressed with Stein. They both said some good things, and some not so brilliant things, but Johnson said most of the outright dumb things. At one point he asked, in the typical vulgar-libertarian reductionist manner, “Do I understand that you would like to see the government take over the Internet?” (beginning at 54:00) Stein quickly rephrased the question for him, “I hear you asking the question, Do I support net neutrality,” and then went on to give a reasonable-sounding defense of net neutrality as necessary for keeping the Internet open and accessible.

Stein also spoke highly of the Occupy Movement and briefly about one of her arrests: “I was handcuffed, taken to a secret location, and cuffed tightly to a chair for eight hours” (1:04:26). She may be my favorite presidential candidate ever. But I’m still not going to vote for her.

Video: Final US Presidential Third Party Debate (Gary Johnson & Jill Stein)

http://youtu.be/iGqHeDxRD1k

'Kung Fu Panda', 'South Park', and Cynicism

2012-11-04T15:21:19Z

I ran across this mini-interview with Slavoj Žižek (from 2008) where he gives his opinion of a couple of movies and a video game:

“If you ask me for really dangerous ideological films, for ideology at its purest, I’d say Kung Fu Panda. I saw it five times because my son likes it. The movie is extremely cynical in that you know they make fun of all this ideology, of Buddhism and these things, but the message is even though we know it is not true and we make fun, you have to believe in it. It’s this split of you know it’s not true but just make like you believe in it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

I agree with Zizek that an acceptance of beliefs because they’re beliefs is a frustrating attitude. It’s one thing I dislike about so many South Park episodes. For example, throughout the episode titled “All About Mormons?” the show mocks the dubious history of the Book of Mormon. But then at the very end of the episode, Gary, one of the Mormon boys, delivers a monologue in which it is suggested, essentially, that because Mormonism is a religion its members should make like they believe in it:

“Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it.”

That attitude, however, is not Cynical. While I see many congruences between the Cynic school of philosophy and the colloquial term cynic, in this case, in Zizek’s use of the term, they are opposites. The Cynics mock ideologies which derive their authority simply from being ideologies, even if those ideologies are the very foundation of the society they are living in.

Of course with South Park I’m never really sure if it’s just being cynical or is actually being Cynical.

Why I Don't Vote

2012-11-01T15:00:26Z

First Some Reasons I Don’t Not Vote

Many libertarians consider voting in political elections to be either a waste of time, a breach of their anti-authoritarian principles, or an act of aggression and otherwise morally unjustifiable. While I personally have never cast a ballot in a civil election, and I don’t intend to in the future, my abstention is not primarily motivated by any of those considerations.

It is not that I think there is anything inherently immoral about voting or elections. Voting is merely a form of communication, a formal (or not-so-formal) registration of an opinion serving to help individuals choose as a group between mutually exclusive options. Whether deciding where to eat or electing a chief executive for your favorite democratic republic, voting is useful. There are reasons democracy works so well in so many settings, and they go beyond simple fairness. To name a few, voting — especially in large, heterogeneous groups — is effective at both processing localized information which would have escaped a central decision-maker and at minimizing partiality toward specific individuals or factions. Decentralized decision-making also diffuses authority and its abuses.

Political races for high-profile offices seem to almost always produce candidates to nobody’s liking, forcing voters to adopt the lesser evil principle: voting for whichever candidate they think will be the least unfit or do the least damage. (This seems most likely in a two-party winner-take-all system, but I suspect there are enough politicians in the world that the lesser evil principle would easily generalize to a system with a large number of candidates and winners.) Some purists use this phenomena as an argument against voting. “The lesser of evils is still evil,” they say, and then absolutely refuse all options. But, assuming the office in question should exist in the first place, the “evil” rhetoric is simply an expression of the relatively strong disfavor voters hold even for the “best,” or better, viable candidate. The ranking is ordinal. Supposing, again, the office in question is necessary, we could shift the rhetorical scales and speak of “the best of two goods.” We’d have lost the expression of strong disfavour for both candidates, but the phrase would still be accurate in that it unambiguously refers to the same candidate. In other words, the “evil” in the lesser evil principle is more rhetorical than moral, and so it does not justify purists' moral abstention. It does not follow that because no option is ideal, no choice should be made.

I do not think the widespread frustration with the choice of viable candidates at election time is simply an unfortunate coincidence which happens every election cycle. One hope for democracy in the classical liberal tradition was that it would do away with favoritism and replace the selective edicts of absolute sovereigns with the rule of law. The limited democracy of republicanism goes even further by attempting to constrain the tyranny of majorities. That is, one goal of republicanism is to have a government made up of representatives who are favored by the many generally but not the few (including local majorities) specifically. Given a sufficiently large discrepancy in preferences of voters, then, an electoral process which produces candidates viewed almost universally as “evil” is a feature of liberal republicanism, not a bug. In fact, Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 10 (for example) is that republics should be large (and unlike democracies, can be large) to make it less likely that any local majority should be able to “execute their plans of oppression.” Large republics are also likely to have larger discrepancies in preferences among its electorate.

So I don’t accept the “there are no good choices” complaint as a strong argument against voting. In fact, although Madison obviously imagined more parties existing than the current duopoly which dominates American politics, viable candidates that nobody likes may be a sign that the system is working as expected.

From a libertarian perspective, which rejects the necessity of far-removed representatives holding inherently-authoritarian positions in the first place, on the other hand, the office itself and therefore almost any candidate seeking it would be viewed as actually evil. A strong libertarian argument against supporting (even merely with a vote) any candidate for such an office could be made. Elections thus present most libertarians with at least a moral hesitation: By voting am I consenting to or endorsing an authoritarian political system? Does it make sense to select a ruler for myself? for my neighbors?

But also: If I don’t vote, will I be complicit in allowing an even worse outcome than was possible? This dilemma can and has been answered from libertarian perspective in favour of voting when faced with two competing but unequal evil options. For example, leading up to the 2008 US presidential elections Noam Chomsky argued that “There is nothing immoral about voting for the lesser of two evils. In a powerful system like ours, small changes can lead to big consequences.”
[Wars, Bailouts, and Elections: Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian]

The practical motivation behind Chomsky’s chaos-theoretic defense of voting is similar to arguments that the use of the ballot, like the weapons placed in the hands of gladiators forced to battle each other, is a form of self defense.
[An analogy first put forward by Lysander Spooner in No Treason II.1.12. I’ve read many similar hypotheticals meant to justify voting for the lesser evil as a defensive measure, usually involving unlikely choices presented to slaves or some poor individual who is given the choice of abstention or the cataclysmic death of millions.]
These defenses of voting admit there is a level of implied coercion in the ballot, but seek to justify that force.

It’s Ghosts All the Way Down

The flaw in all of the above arguments in favour of voting, and in most of those against it, is that they assume the efficacy of voting reaches further than it does. That’s not to say that voting is ineffectual in the sense of Emma Goldman’s famous aphorism, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
[I haven’t found when or where Goldman said/wrote that, but it is universally attributed to her.]
Electoral politics will never bring about the sort of revolutionary changes Goldman wanted to see, granted, but as Chomsky pointed out, the outcome of an election can still have a consequential effect which may be worth caring about.
[I also don’t mean that voting is a waste of time, even though it is (from a decision-theoretic perspective). Since the chance of any single vote being pivotal in the election is nearly zero, and there are non-zero costs (like the time it takes to register and fill out and mail in a ballot) involved, it is necessary to posit some kind of consumption benefit beyond choosing a winner to explain why so many people turnout to vote. As I explain in this section, I believe at least a large part of that consumption benefit for many people can be explained as the religious-like duties they satisfy by voting. In their article “Why Vote?,” Dubner and Levitt (the Freakonomics authors) interpret a Swiss study to suggest that one consumption benefit of voting is the social recognition received just by being seen fulfilling the civic duty of voting. This is reminiscent of the vainly religious who attend church or otherwise flaunt their religiosity for the sake of being seen acting piously. Two good reviews of the academic literature on this “paradox of (non) voting” are Feddersen, Timothy J. 2004. “Rational Choice Theory and the Paradox of Not Voting.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(1): 99–112, and Geys, B. (2006), ‘Rational’ Theories of Voter Turnout: A Review. Political Studies Review, 4: 16–35.]

What I mean is the more obvious, that voting literally, in a mechanical sense, accomplishes very little: registering a preference with a ballot doesn’t actually effect much beyond leaving a mark on a piece of paper (or whatever method is used to record the vote). Even if the process of collecting, interpreting, and counting the ballots is so reliable that voting can be considered to directly determine the outcome of the election, there is still a leap of faith required to get from the announced election results to the acceptance of those results in the minds of the electorate (and the entire body politic). A candidate doesn’t receive political power and responsibility from a vote count but from the public behaving as if the winning candidate, instead of somebody else or nobody, has those powers and responsibilities.

Beyond the initial leap of faith required to accept a new (or first, I suppose) representative, political power only continues to exists as long as it is recognized as legitimate in the minds of the faithful. Such reified ideas which an individual encounters as something alien and set above herself as a cause or duty are what Max Stirner calls “spooks” haunting the mind. The entire electoral process depends on an electorate haunted by such spooks as Civic Duty, Patriotism and allegiance to parties, sacrosanct Democracy, and the like. Politicians do not wield any actual, physical power over the political body. The phantasmal machinery of politics only becomes real through the violence of its possessed subjects which are bound against each other with ghoulish chains-of-command.

The observation that political power comes not from votes but from belief suggests a corollary: that there is no fundamental difference between a democratic government and any other government; to turn Jonathan Swift’s normative phrase into a tautology, all governments rule by the consent of the governed. Of course not everybody is possessed by the morality of the state to recognize its legitimacy or the authority of its agents. While most politicians enjoy the support of a haunted majority, they certainly don’t need more than a very small portion of the public to believe in the state to maintain power, and they always need a way to control those whose own morality hasn’t been displaced by that of the state.
[Stirner, and most people, use the words moral and morality to denote living according to a haunted conscience, according to the dictates of an external code given by parents, religion, law, etc. In fact that is the exact opposite of morality; it is a counterfeit morality consisting of an alien concept acting as if it were an individual’s autonomous conscience. See also my essay, “Authority or Autonomy”]
They need only enough “moral” individuals to act as soldiers and police and prison guards. Of course the chains-of-command which hold the whole state together are designed to effectively funnel commands from executives and magistrates to police and soldiers, who are so possessed by morality, by duty, that they have convinced (or frightened) themselves to always obey, while dissipating the responsibility of that obedience to nowhere, to the nonexistent conscience of a ghost.

That’s what government is: a shared delusion, a ghostlike hierarchy and a whole tangled hiearchy of ghosts in the minds of its subjects. It is a religion, and voting is one of its sacred rites. Those who attribute magic to that ritual, whether they believe it be for good or evil, have bought into the superstition of the state.

Why I Don’t Vote

On its own, such a Stirnerist deconstruction of voting doesn’t decide the question, Should I vote? An egoist might acknowledge the spooks, then, owning her ability to vote rather than being owned by any sense of duty, proceed to vote (or not) to further her own interests.

In his essay, “The Apostasy of the Anarchist Vote,” the left libertarian writer, Jeremy Weiland, uses a similar egoist analysis of voting to argue that it is okay and possibly at times preferable for anarchists to vote. In that essay (directed towards anarchists) Weiland asks a good question:

In the end, it is the behavior, not the myths and abstractions, that matter. So if by voting, you can engage with your neighbors to influence them within this mixed society, or possibly influence state actors to behave more peaceably, why would you insist on abstaining?

So why do I insist on abstaining? I don’t vote because external authorities are less dangerous than the spooks which rule our minds. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Political rulers (or at least those who believe in them) kill the body; the religion of Civic Duty kills the soul. I’m not satisfied with a naive or cowardly egoism which allows me to seek my own interest (whatever that is, as if I could ever know such a thing) and leave those around me to their demons.

I don’t vote for exactly the reason Weiland suggests that anarchists might vote: as pedagogical engagement with my neighbors. Weiland concludes that:

The vote is a meaningless, superstitious ritual that masks deeper social issues and sanctions nothing. It does not bolster our argument to agree with statists that elections matter. Instead, we should treat them as what they are: the trivial rites of a false religion.

With which I completely agree, although I hold that the way to engage with a false religion is not to join in its meaningless rituals, but to blaspheme those sacred rites in plain view of its adherents. That, at least, has a chance of capturing their attention and bringing the spooks, the alienated parts of themselves, into the purview of their conscious minds where they can be devoured.

This individualism with an emphasis on pedagogical outreach is a very Cynical endeavor, and I know of no better place to seek guidance in confronting the ghost of Civic Duty than those ancient philosophers. The Cynics went out of their way to blaspheme with anti-political lifestyles, satire, and theatrical spectacle the sacred rites of the polis for the benefit of their audience. As Diogenes said, “Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.”
[As reported by Stobaeus, and quoted by Wikiquote.]

Voting is held so sacred by some that mere abstention is enough to scandalize them (and maybe jolt them back to conscious thought). But what might a proper Cynic response to election day myths look like? Here’s an anecdote about Diogenes, as recalled by Lucian of Samosata, which might provide some inspiration:

A report that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all Corinth into a bustle; one was furbishing his arms, another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having nothing to do—of course no one thought of giving him a job—was moved by the sight to gird up his philosopher’s cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: ‘I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like the rest.’
[From The Way to Write History. Lucian puts Diogenes with his tub in Corinth rather than Athens, which seems unlikely, but the anecdote still works.]

Instead of quiet abstention or the usual protest vote campaigns, I’d like to see something similar to Diogenes' take on the civic duty of war preparation: a satirization of the hustle and bustle of the voting ritual. A useless activity to point out the uselessness of the activity everybody else is taking so seriously. Two ideas: stand earnestly in line at polling places only to return to the back of the line just before taking a turn at casting a ballot; and when engaged in political discussions, act like a vote for anyone but a satirical candidate (à la Vermin Supreme) is a waste of a vote. What else?

I'm Hiking the Appalachian Trail Again

2012-09-03T15:00:43Z

I’m beginning to hobble, my right shin is sore and swollen, I’m developing callouses on my feet… I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail again! Last summer I hiked from Harpers Ferry, WV, to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. I am now finishing the trail by heading south from Harpers Ferry to Springer Mountain in Georgia. I’ve posted my first trail report from Waynesboro, VA, about 160 miles in.

You can read about my hike last year, and follow along this year, at Diode’s Appalachian Trail Hikes (2011/2012). If you’d like to be notified when I post updates, subscribe to the atom feed or subscribe via email.

I’ll still hopefully get a few essays up here while I’m on the trail.

Chick-fil-A and the Biblical Definition of the Family Unit

2012-07-30T20:01:22Z

Almost a month ago the editor of the Biblical Recorder, which is the news journal for North Carolina Baptists, interviewed Dan Cathy, the president and CEO of the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain. Early in the article Cathy is quoted as saying, “We don’t claim to be a Christian business… But as an organization we can operate on biblical principles.” At the very end of the article he gives an equally vague response to a question about family, which has caused quite a stir in recent weeks on Internet news and discussion sites:

Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said Cathy when asked about this opposition.

"We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We operate as a family business … our restaurants are typically led by families — some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy emphasized.

The controversy is that the “guilty as charged” statement by Cathy could be, and has been, interpreted as a remorseless expression of bigotry in the ongoing same-sex marriage debate. Such interpretations are not without context. For example, Equality Matters reported that in 2010 Chick-fil-A donated nearly $2 million to organizations which oppose same-sex marriage.

In my view, using wage labour to fund campaigns for marriage restriction puts Chick-fil-A squarely on the wrong side of the struggle for liberty and equality on at least two counts. However, what I find most intriguing is that Cathy thinks there is a “biblical definition of the family unit.”

It seems unlikely to me that Cathy finds his definition of family elucidated in the Old Testament. Despite being a somewhat eclectic collection of writings — drawn from various genres, times, places, and agendas — the Old Testament does present something of a narrative with Israel as the protagonist in which family is nation. But the families Cathy refers to, the kind who run his fast-food restaurants, seem a far cry from the ancient Hebrew tribes who at times defined and established themselves through genocidal slaughter (see for example Joshua’s conquest of Canaan after the exodus) and strict adherence to dietary and sacrificial codes.

Marriage in the Old Testament is not always consensual, allows for polygyny, and consistently treats women from within a framework of property rights (even when prescribing laws aimed at protecting them from abandonment [e.g. Exodus 21:7]). At one point in Deuteronomy, while enumerating a few limitations the Israelites must place on their king, “wives” is listed between the capital goods of “horses” and “silver and gold” as things which the king must not acquire too many of (Deuteronomy 17:14-17). I don’t think these sort of archaic treatments of marriage are what Cathy has in mind as defining properties of a biblical family.

What about the Gospels? Jesus (himself famously conceived out of wedlock) does in fact have a few things to say about family. There is that time his mother and brothers came looking for him while he was preaching, and he completely de-emphasized the importance of biological relation:

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

— Mark 3:31-35

And then there is his teaching on divorce (Matthew 19:1-12). I’ve argued elsewhere that when Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24 (“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh”) he intentionally disregards the etiological story about Woman being made from Adam’s rib and substitutes the much more naturalistic explanation of Genesis 1:27 (“male and female He created them”) which, in my opinion, works just as well as an explanation for same-sex marriage and non-binary conceptions of gender attraction.

His disciples complained that a total rejection of divorce was also a rejection of marriage as anything worth bothering with. Jesus didn’t disagree, but replied that those who could accept the teaching should (Jesus himself never married):

The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

— Matthew 19:10-12

Later in the same chapter Jesus indicates the low importance he places on family:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

— Matthew 19:29

And this even stronger version of the teaching as reported by Luke:

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”

— Luke 14:25-26

I think we can safely conclude that those, like Cathy, who set out to “strengthen families” have not been influenced much by the teachings of Jesus on the topic.

What about Paul’s epistles? Like Jesus, Paul was unmarried. He viewed marriage as simply a mechanism for containing sexual desire:

Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

— 1 Corinthians 7:8-9

Although he does make it clear that marriage isn’t a sin; it is merely a bad time:

But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.

— 1 Corinthians 7:28

In Ephesians 5:21-33 Paul gives some marital advice. It starts off simple enough, even if it’s rather patriarchal (“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands…”), but then gets tangled in a metaphor in which the husband represents Christ and the wife represents the church body. When he realizes his metaphor has gotten away from the realm of practical advice, he brings it back down to the mundane (you know, just in case the married couples of Ephesus hadn’t yet considered love and respect):

This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

— Ephesians 5:32-33

In the next chapter he goes on to urge children and fathers, and slaves and masters, to get along with each other. Cathy doesn’t completely share Paul’s view of family, that marriage is at best a necessary evil and that slavery is okay — although in the cases of same-sex marriage and wage slavery it appears that he does. (For the same advice from Paul without the metaphor, see Colossians 3:18-24.)

But on the whole, between the hyper-nationalism of the old testament and Jesus’s Cynical rejection of family in the New Testament, I fail to see any specifically biblical foundation for the sort of Western bourgeois “traditional” family unit Cathy and other Christians are so keen to support.

My Sentence

2012-07-06T17:17:44Z

I was sentenced last Friday for my crimes against the People of the State of Colorado:

$249.50 in fines and fees
32 hours of useful community service to be completed by October
12 months of unsupervised probation

The fine for being convicted of “unlawful conduct on public property” was only $50 (there was no fine or penalty associated with the “criminal trespassing” conviction). The fee to perform useful public service was $75. The rest is standard fees which I think go along with any misdemeanor conviction.

The probation officer who conducted my pre-sentencing investigation interview recommended first fines/fees alone, like he said he would, and secondly a whole variety of probation options (luckily the court saw fit to select only one of them). He also snuck a line in there about how I’m determined to be a public nuisance.

Mr. Wenig, Denver’s Chief Deputy District Attorney who tried my case, wanted supervised probation (expensive) and argued that my case demanded some form of rehabilitation since I showed no remorse for my actions. He explained to the judge that obeying (or enforcing, I presume) laws, even when they contradict one’s own conscience, is necessary to prevent people from justifying crimes and acts of violence by arbitrarily appealing to their own conscience. I believe his exact phrase was, “conscience is not sufficient.” This is the same argument he delivered to prospective jurors during voire dire.

Accepting as moral exactly those things as are legal is not only a surrender of reason and personal responsibility but leads, at least historically, to a support of atrocity. It was this legalistic thinking, the rejection of the possibility of autonomy for the false promise of authority, by Mr. Wenig’s 18th and 19th century counterparts which enforced for so long the devastating (legal) institution of chattel slavery in this country. Now I don’t know if the DA personally lives by such a simplistic moral philosophy, but I am convinced that he would professionally argue for and enforce any deplorable law with the same wasteful vigor as he prosecuted me for being a nonviolent resister to the criminalization of homelessness.

Rhode Island's Homeless Bill of Rights

2012-07-03T15:11:59Z

Late last month, Rhode Island’s governor signed into law a bill which establishes a “Homeless Bill of Rights” in that state. In addition to enumerating seven rights guaranteed to homeless persons, the bill amends Rhode Island’s Fair Housing Practices Act to include ‘housing status’ as a trait which cannot serve as a basis of discrimination.

The first right protected by the bill is the “right to use and move freely in public spaces … public sidewalks, public parks, public transportation and public buildings…” In light of the national and global trend of implementing curfews and ‘sit/lie’ ordinances aimed directly at excluding homeless from publics spaces, this is almost revolutionary! The bill also guarantees “the right to equal treatment by all state and municipal agencies” and “the right to a reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her personal property…” So police in Rhode Island will not as easily be able to harass homeless people and throw away their property, which is a routine part of police work in so many other places.

How did a bill like this ever become law? Doesn’t Rhode Island have business improvement districts which are supposed to make sure these sorts of human rights don’t interfere with the comfort of consumers as they shop? And how will the courts interpret the ‘without discrimination due to his or her housing status’ clause which qualifies each right? Will it be more “equality” in the sense of Anatole France’s formulation (“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”), or will this bill actually allow homeless people to use public spaces, protect them from police harassment, and give them security in their possessions?

Here are all of the enumerated rights from the senate version of the bill:

(1) Has the right to use and move freely in public spaces, including, but not limited to, public sidewalks, public parks, public transportation and public buildings, in the same manner as any other person, and without discrimination on the basis of his or her housing status;

(2) Has the right to equal treatment by all state and municipal agencies, without discrimination on the basis of housing status;

(3) Has the right not to face discrimination while seeking or maintaining employment due to his or her lack of permanent mailing address, or his or her mailing address being that of a shelter or social service provider;

(4) Has the right to emergency medical care free from discrimination based on his or her housing status;

(5) Has the right to vote, register to vote, and receive documentation necessary to prove identity for voting without discrimination due to his or her housing status;

(6) Has the right to protection from disclosure of his or her records and information provided to homeless shelters and service providers to state, municipal and private entities without appropriate legal authority; and the right to confidentiality of personal records and information in accordance with all limitations on disclosure established by the Federal Homeless Management Information Systems, the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and the Federal Violence Against Women Act; and

(7) Has the right to a reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her personal property to the same extent as personal property in a permanent residence.

— S2052 Substitute B

Preserving Dateline's Exposé on Gabriel of Sedona

2012-06-21T15:31:08Z

Q: (John Larson) You were Francis of Assisi?

A: (Gabriel) Yes.

Q: Martin Luther?

A: Yes.

Q: King Arthur?

A: Yes.

Q: You were also George Washington?

A: Yes.

Q: Father of the United States?

A: Well --

Q: Led the troops?

A: Yes, yes. I’m either insane or egotistically mad, or I am who I say I am.

— the transcript

Two weeks ago I wrote an article on Gabriel of Urantia and Spiritualution. While researching that article I came across several references to a 1998 episode of Dateline NBC which featured Gabriel and his Aquarian Concepts Community. After following several broken links, I finally found a low-resolution copy of the video in a public Dropbox account. It was probably the last copy of the video available on the internet in wake of an effort by Global Family Legal Services (the legal branch of Gabriel’s group) lawyer, Celinas Ruth, to suppress the video based on unconvincing copyright claims. I downloaded it and made it available as an embedded movie in my article.

A few days after publishing my article, Dropbox received a DMCA takedown notice from Gabriel’s lawyer and disabled sharing on the account hosting the video file. The owner of that account, who is also the operator of New Heaven New Earth, has filed a DMCA counter notice, so if we’re optimistic we can expect that file to be restored in the future.
[July 11, 2012: that file has been restored!]
In the mean time, though, the only accessible copy of the video was the one hosted here on AmericanCynic.net. Since there is no guarantee that I’ll be able to keep it available if faced with similar legal tactics, I will be maintaining this list of locations from which the video (and audio and transcript) may be downloaded. If you can help by hosting the file or seeding the torrent, it would be much appreciated.

All of the download links are below, but first a few notes on the video to keep in mind:

I do not know who the current copyright holder is (NBCUniversal?). In any case, they don’t seem interested in the video any longer, and the file here is a low-resolution copy of the original. If the rightful copyright owner finds this page and has any concerns, please contact me at <chris@mretc.net>.
As far as I can tell, the copyright claims made by Global Family Legal Services refer to a photograph of Gabriel and a mostly unreadable image of a page from one of Gabriel’s books which appear in the video. In my opinion, the reproduction of those images are clearly protected under the fair use doctrine.
Gabriel’s teachings, especially those espoused by his Spiritualution movement, call for resistance including civil disobedience to corporate greed. Corporations use intellectual property as a means of generating counterfeit wealth. Adopting the same tool to disingenuously suppress embarrassing information is incongruous to the values claimed by his movement.
If, instead of legal action, a representative of GCCAlliance or Spiritualution would like to offer a reasoned response to the Dateline video, I would be happy to publish/link to it.
While I think it will be to clear to anyone who watches the video or reads the transcript that Gabriel’s position as a community leader is based on lies and unsubstantiated claims (though he may mean well despite exhibiting something of a prophet complex), that doesn’t imply there is no value in any of his projects. For example I mentioned in my first post that I appreciate the livestreaming services of the Spiritualution folks, and I like the idea of EcoVillages such as the Avalon Gardens the group operates in Arizona.
The video was produced in 1998 when the Heaven’s Gate incident recalled to the public’s imagination Jonestown and the phenomenon of self-destructive cults (especially with the approaching millennium). As such (and simply by virtue of being a TV show competing for viewers) it is probably somewhat sensationalistic or capitalizes on the sensation of those earlier headlines.
The show relies heavily on the negative testimony of two ex-members of the group (the Spragues). Every community has its discontents, and it would not be fair to judge the entire community on that testimony alone. In particular, Regina’s fears that Gabriel is dangerous and on his way to creating a doomsday cult have apparently not been born out by history.

Downloads

If you copy and host the video, audio, and/or text files anywhere, please send me a link to add to the list.

Audio and Text

Since the copyright claims used to suppress the video have been based on images in the video, these files should be safe to host:

Video on the Web

The video is a 216MB .mp4 file.

Here on The American Cynic (also embedded below)
A copy on Dropbox (currently down during DMCA dispute)

Several copies are available on the anonymous Tor network, and can be downloaded from a regular web browser using these links through in-proxies (note that these will be much slower downloads than the links above):

On Tor Upload Service: via onion.to | via tor2web
On Anonymous Cynic: via onion.to | via tor2web
On sTORage: via onion.to

BitTorrent

To download the video using these links, you’ll need a BitTorrent client.

Tor Hidden Services

These copies of the video are hosted on anonymous servers and are impervious to legal action. They are, however, quite susceptible to being slow and unreliable.

You’ll need Tor installed to download these links. The easiest way to get up and running with Tor is to download the Tor Browser Bundle.

Dateline NBC on Gabriel of Sedona (1998)

If you seek ahead beyond the buffered video, you may have to wait several seconds for it to load and begin playing again.

A Victory for DREAMers

2012-06-15T16:32:27Z

This morning, a few days after a pair of undocumented students called off their hunger strike at the Obama for America campaign headquarters in Denver, their demand was met: The Department of Homeland Security will no longer deport some young people who qualify under conditions similar to the DREAM Act. The New York Times reports that an estimated 800,000 immigrants will be covered by the new policy.

I think it is a good thing that those immigrants will no longer face deportation. I don’t know if it’s such a good thing that the policy has been effected by executive order. It feels like the executive branch is doing the legislating and the enforcing. But mostly I find it rather sad that an executive order was required to stop deporting kids from their homes, and that it took so much pressure from the president’s constituency before that was even done.

I also of course don’t think the DREAM Act goes far enough towards equality. As I wrote about it in 2010:

People illegally brought to live here as children should not be forced by threat of deportation to adhere to arbitrary standards of education or behavior which are not required of children who happened to be born to parents who are citizens. Conditional nonimmigrants [as defined by the DREAM Act] will pay the same Federal taxes, contribute equally or more to society and the state, and enjoy fewer freedoms than citizens.

My sentiment on borders hasn’t changed, either. Abolish them all.

My Religion - What I Believe

2012-06-13T16:07:06Z

Because creeds are fun:

With Diogenes of Sinope in ancient Athens I believe the Good Life is not found in the institutes of the polis. With Jesus of Nazareth at the rise of the Roman Empire — who did not merely deface the currency, but disregarded it based on the face that it bore (Caesar’s) — I believe not only the Good Life, but True Life, is found apart from the kingdoms of earth. With Bakunin (and an entire chorus of voices) at the rise of industrial capitalism I cry that the Good Life of the individual does not exist apart from a Good Society free from authoritarian rule.

The Cynics were returned their mockery, the Christians executed on stakes, the Socialists and Anarchists imprisoned and demonized. Yet this is what I believe - I am a Cynic, a Christian, and an Anarchist.