According to Brian Kurcaba, a Republican delegate in West Virginia, we can now add “beautiful rape” to the various species of rape, along with legitimate rape, forcible rape, honest rape, and the various other kinds of rape that lawmakers love to delineate:

According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child is that could come from this.”

What I’m going to say about this has nothing at all to do with Mr. Kurcaba. He is parroting a line that many others would parrot: namely that a child produced from rape justifies the rape itself. I have no beef with him specifically. I do, however, find this line of reasoning odious for many reasons.

I was raped as a child. I don’t fit the profile of what most people envision when they talk about rape, but it happened. I got off easy for the most part. I suppressed the memory for many years, and I’ve never felt especially traumatized about it, although the shame and sadness will never really go away. I also have an aversion to the thought of any kind of bathroom-related sexual activity. However, it’s also made me much more aware of the issues of control and consent, and much more cognizant of the realities of what rape victims experience. It’s given me a greater sense of solidarity with my feminist friends, and on the whole, it has made me a better person.

If there were a switch I could throw somewhere that could magically make it so that I were never raped, so that I never had to experience that, so that my very first sexual encounter hadn’t happened far too soon and against my will, I would throw that switch without a second thought. Every bit of positivity that stemmed from the constellation of shit surrounding that experience would be gone. I would be a less compassionate person than I am. And I would do it in a heartbeat.

I know there are other rape victims who would not make the same decision I would. And that is their right. They have a different frame, a different lived experience. I cannot fathom the thought process that would cause someone to prefer being raped to not being raped, but that doesn’t make that thought process any less valid.

My mind travels to other places now. A friend, perhaps. Someone possessing a uterus. Someone who has recently been raped, and has just found out that they are pregnant. Someone who has experienced some combination of trauma, terror, shame, and sadness. And who is now carrying around inside them a potential person. A potential person that carries bits and pieces of the rapist who already tore the victim to bits and pieces.

(Please note that I use the phrase “potential person” very deliberately. “Fetus” is too clinical for my tastes, and “child” or “baby” isn’t really a great word to use for a blastocyst. There is some moment at which a potential person becomes an actual person. I’ve no idea what that point is, but that’s also irrelevant for the purpose of my arguments here.)

And I on the outside cannot tell the victim how they should view that potential person. Some victims embrace the potential person and nurture it until it becomes an actual person. Other victims view that potential person as they would view a nightmare, some sadistic trick of nature to ensure that the rape lasts not for minutes or hours, but for months and years.

I have no opinion of the victims who would carry their fetus to term. I don’t understand their thought process, but that is likely a failing on my part – a lack of imagination, perhaps. Just as it is a lack of imagination for a lawmaker to blithely declare that any child (well, they say “child”, but we’ll stick with “potential person”) that results from rape is “beautiful”. And it goes from being a lack of imagination to being an actual crime against the victim when that lawmaker attempts to make policy to protect this “beautiful” product of rape.

The chain of causality here is not so simple, you see. A person is not raped, and then magically a child happens. That’s what this particular lawmaker seemed to have in mind, but the reality is a little less straightforward and clean:

• A person is raped.
• The victim becomes pregnant, carrying around and feeding a potential person, experiencing possible sickness, loss of employment, etc.
• The victim gives birth to an actual person, which means hospital bills and such
• The victim is now responsible for raising this actual person regardless of the victim’s financial situation.

So by declaring that this potential person is “beautiful”, we are saying one of two things:

1. The potential person is a beautiful thing, but its existence does not negate the possible damage done to the life of the victim, who is an actual person, and therefore the actual person should be able to decide what to do with the potential person; or,
2. The potential person is so beautiful that its existence negates any conceivable damage that may be done to the life of the victim, and therefore the victim should not have a choice in what they do with the potential person, despite the fact that the victim is an actual person.

Conclusion 1 is trivial to the point of irrelevance. Conclusion 2 elevates the right of a potential person to become an actual person over the right of an already-existent actual person to determine what to do with their body.

My mind returns to my pregnant rape victim friend. I want to live in a society where my friend, who for the sake of argument does not see this potential person inside of her as “beautiful”, is not consigned to at least nine months of state-sanctioned slavery, forced to grow the product of her rape inside of her, feeding more of herself to her rapist’s child than her rapist already stole from her, all because someone who she’d never even met declared that potential person “beautiful”.

Matt Walsh has never been one of my favorite people. He’s arrogant, unapologetically misogynist, and speaks from his rear end on many issues. Yet, for some odd reason that still confounds me, I actually read through his piece on Brittany Maynard and euthanasia on the Blaze. It’s the typical deal one expects when it comes to Walsh: A complete misrepresentation of the views that he is criticizing, lies so visible that a 5th grader could see through them, and a hackneyed view that naively simplifies all that has to do with the issue.

So, if you have yet to hear, Brittany Maynard is a 29-year old woman who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer on January 1st, 2014. She doesn’t have much time left, and wanted to die on her own terms. After carefully weighing her options, she decided she didn’t want to suffer through hospice care or full brain radiation therapy when at best they would just delay the inevitable while increasing her suffering. So she moved to Oregon, one of the five U.S. States that permit human euthanasia, with her husband. She elected November 1st, 2014 to mark the final day she breathes, which falls two days after her husband’s birthday. She wrote a very moving blog post about it that’s hosted over at CNN.

So, let’s dig through Matt’s take on this. One of his first nuggets of wisdom plainly wears his emotional dismay with euthanasia on his sleeve

He writes:

Across national media and social media, I’ve been sickened to see that suicide is now most commonly described with words like ‘dignity,’ ‘bravery,’ ‘courage,’ and ‘strength.’ Popular refrains apparently only ever used to justify some form of murder and destruction have been trotted out once again: ‘it’s her body,’ ‘it’s her choice,’ ‘it’s her life.’

It’s pretty interesting that that trifecta he slams without really addressing, ‘her body, her choice, her life’, is actually a pretty solid argument for both euthanasia rights and the abortion issue that he’s passively aggressively referring to. If I were him I would also watch my wording. That trifecta isn’t exclusive to what he views as murder and destruction; they would most certainly be some of the first words out of my mouth towards a rapist. More interestly, however, and frankly a bit more fun, is the fact that those three words can be used to address every single argument he makes in his entire post. There’s a reason he emotionally slung them to the side without actually addressing them.

If you are saying that it is dignified and brave for a cancer patient to kill themselves, what are you saying about cancer patients who don’t? What about a woman who fights to the end, survives for as long as she can, and withers away slowly, in agony, until her very last breath escapes her lungs?

Is that person not brave? Is that person not dignified? I thought we applaud that kind of person. I thought we admire her courage and tenacity. Sorry, you can’t advance two contradictory narratives at once. If fighting cancer is brave then it is brave PRECISELY BECAUSE she is fighting it rather than giving up and choosing death.

Can you spot where he changes the premise? Someone is brave for fighting cancer because she braves that storm, of course. No one would disagree with that. What I would disagree with is that qualifier, that hanging little “rather than giving up and choosing death”. Someone is brave for their fight against cancer precisely because they have chosen to brave that storm and take cancer head on. Someone is also brave for choosing euthanasia, because they have chosen, frankly, a very scary and controversial option. These are not mutually exclusive, they are not ‘contradictory’. Either one is brave because it is the individual’s choice about her own body and her own life that she is fully empowered to make. The trifecta he brushes off handles it perfectly. Put yourself in the shoes of Brittany Maynard. Actually imagine the dread of weighing these possibilities. Think about the fear of realizing the cons of each option, and actually evaluating whether or not you want to go through this. Think about weighing the opportunity costs and trying to decide, and then think about actually realizing the route that you are going to go. Think about telling your significant other what your plan is. You’re telling me that’s cowardly? You actually genuinely think that?

After that, Matt chooses to start re-iterating himself for the next two paragraphs.

In other words, if struggling against cancer until the bitter end is an act of courage, then it can’t also be an act of courage to opt out and ‘leave on your own terms.’ What makes one courageous is that it is not the other. What makes one commendable is that the other choice exists, yet the heroic individual takes the more admirable route.

Don’t you understand what you are saying? She is dying with dignity, which means dying of cancer is not dignified. You are accusing people who die of cancer of having no dignity. That is what you are saying. Own it. Confront it. Take responsibility for the words you use.

It’s almost as though he’s aware that his logic is crap. I feel like he just wants to keep repeating himself because if he can’t argue his position into your mind, he can always try hammering it. He seems utterly confused and I have trouble taking his argument for why cancer is brave seriously. Because you didn’t commit suicide instead? Really? There’s any number of things I do on a daily basis instead of committing suicide. For example, I’m sitting here sipping on a pumpkin mocha being as much of a cliche as I can instead of committing suicide. Is that brave of me? No, the bravery of fighting cancer comes from the fact that you are battling cancer, not that you are not doing something else.

But alas, let’s press forward. Let’s see just how many nuggets of Matt’s wisdom that our little trifecta can rebut.

And what does it mean, anyway, to say that euthanasia is ‘leaving on your own terms’? Do we somehow achieve a victory over death by using it to escape the pain of life? ‘Your own terms’? The terms of the drug maker who concocted the poison pill, perhaps, but your own? Hardly. None of us get to die on our own terms, because if we did then I’m sure our terms would be a perfect, happy, and healthy life, where pain and death never enter into the picture at all.

If your terms happen to be, “If I have a terminal illness that I have an extremely slim possibility of recovering from, then I would like to pass away through the means of a ‘poison pill'” then you’re in luck! No one has argued or claimed that ‘leaving on your own terms’ means that you get to die anyway your imagination can think of. Obviously, that is logistically impossible. What we are capable of is doing what we can to influence our deaths based on our terms, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Wanna know why we should be able to choose how we die? Because it’s our body, our choice, and our life!

Now, I admit, if we are nothing and we came from nothing and will return to nothing, then I suppose suicide makes some sort of sense. It returns the body to our natural state of nothingness. It brings us home into the abyss, where there is no self, no reason, no existence. But most people don’t think that. Most of us are not radical nihilists. Even Brittany Maynard is not, which is why she says she will die and go on to ‘whatever is next.’ She knows, deep down, that there is another dimension to this reality of ours, a deeper significance beneath the surface of everything. She knows, like I believe we all know, that we’re woven into the tapestry of creation — we play a role that we don’t fully understand, our decisions have ramifications that we can’t comprehend, and our lives have a meaning beyond whatever we find in it.

Ha, funny. How convenient is it that when you shotgun off some ad hoc’d hypothesis about everything about there being something beyond death, instead of bringing forth any evidence of any kind you choose to simply boldly claim “that I believe we all know this”. The epitome of convenience, really. The funny thing is is that I personally believe there’s nothing after we die, and none of those other modifiers describe me. I’m not a nihilist, and I fully have a purpose in everything I do. For example, my purpose in writing this blog is to correct the strawmen that Matt set up for himself.

But if you want to go on and assert that there’s something beyond this life where our present decisions have these ramifications, that is your burden and no one else’s. And I can only hope that once you present that this ‘something’ exists, you will patiently await scientific testing to see what the ramifications of our decisions are instead of assuming that the ramifications would correspond to your personal feelings on the issue. I’m not holding my breath, though.

All that said, until you can show how euthanasia has some negative consequence for other people, then her body, her choice, her life.

LIFE HAS VALUE.

This isn’t just a Christian concept. It is the concept on which western civilization rests. Every noble ideal — justice, fairness, equity, compassion, charity — all of it, all of it, is grounded in the notion that life, human life, has intrinsic value.<

You are such a liar, Matt. It’s quite appalling. These actually stem from social contract theory. Whether or not you find social contract theory to provide an adequate basis for the value of justice, fairness, equity, compassion, and charity, it is objectively true that this is how Western civilization obtains these values.

After all, euthanasia happens not when the individual decides that her life has no value, but when the medical and governmental authorities decide it.

Does Matt not get that it is just his assertion that one is declaring that life has no value if euthanasia occurs? Do you actually think that Brittany Maynard thinks that she is missing out on nothing? If she actually thought that life has no value, then why is she waiting until after her husband’s birthday to do the deed?

And the medical and governemntal authorities don’t decide that, they enable someone to make that decision for themselves. That’s why you’re calling it ‘suicide’ and not ‘homicide’. Though, to be fair, you’re actually calling it suicide to drum up emotional support, even in full knowledge that euthanasia is a small subset of suicide and the arguments of euthanasia advocates are only intended to argue for that specific subset.

The funniest bit of Matt’s post had to be this guy right here.

Where do you think this leads? If euthanasia is legal, and if it is only legal under certain strict circumstances, then we are saying that life, under those circumstances, is objectively undesirable. And if we say that life, under those circumstances, is objectively undesirable, then it is undesirable regardless of whether the patient desires it. The bridge from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia is obvious. I suspect when the time comes that patients are put down whether they wish to be or not, many in our society will hardly object

No, euthanasia advocates are not saying life is objectively undesirable under those circumstances. We’re saying you should be able to have a decision. No one is telling you what to desire. I literally laughed out loud when I read the sentence about the bridge from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary. Yeah, so obvious. That’s why all the people who are advocates for the right to die are advocates for being told the circumstances in which you are allowed to die. That’s why Oregon’s 17 year old “Oregon Death With Dignity Act” has seen counts of abuse. This is the slippery slope fallacy, clear as day.

A key quote from the original essay by Brittany Maynard:

I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family.

Notice that qualifier ‘me and my family’. Not ‘everyone’ or ‘anyone’ or ‘objectively’. ‘me and my family’. It is preceded by an analysis of the other OPTIONS laid out to her. As in, you could also do this or this or this, not ‘Objectively, you should be euthanized’.

Brittany is now promoting a euthanasia campaign with a group called Compassion and Choices.Compassion and Choices is an organization that advocates not just for doctor assisted suicide for the terminally ill, but also for people who have no physical ailments at all. So what I’m talking about here isn’t a slippery slope, but an explicit objective of the pro-euthanasia side. “

Misrepresentation. C&C advocates for assisted suicide for the terminally ill and for those who are mentally ill if expressedly outlined in a living will prior to being diagnosed with their mental illness (For example, C&C believes in the right for someone to decidde that if they are to ever be diagnosed with dementia in the future at a moment where they are currently considered mentally healthy. That and situations where someone is facing terminal illness are the only circumstances supported by C&C)

This guy could at least try to accurately represent the position of the people he disagrees with. If you have to just make crap up sentence after sentence then maybe you should reconsider your own position.

Rape is a violation – an entry without consent. In this way, perhaps an analogy to breaking and entering might be somewhat relevant, although similarly imperfect. So why do so many people talking about this go to theft? Not only does theft involve a violation, something has been taken.

For those of us who have experienced rape, something has indeed been taken – innocence, perhaps, or a sense of self-control/self-determination. But I don’t think that’s what people who talk about rape-as-robbery have in mind.

These tend to be the same people who think in terms of ideal rape victims – of pretty young women who are drugged and attacked by lust-filled men who need a sexual outlet. It’s not too far of a stretch, then, to imagine that what they imagine has been taken is the victim’s virginity.

I feel this is why so much of the discourse about rape in our society is centered around the idea of taking, and why so many people view it as something that makes someone impure. And what’s frustrating is that rape does involve taking – but it’s never the thing that people imagine has been taken. Virginity is a meaningless concept. A man who is anally raped by another man imagines that his “manhood” has been taken from him or harmed in some way. Rape doesn’t take any of these things away in a meaningful sense.

Rape takes away self-determination, peace of mind, and in sadly too many cases, innocence. But these aren’t the things our society values. These are the things that rape steals from its victims. Which is essentially why the rape-as-robbery analogy falls flat for many of us. How does one protect against their self-determination or innocence being stolen from them? By definition, the very protection against that act means we are already robbed of our self-determination.

Put another way: the existence of rape in and of itself is part of the robbery that rape is supposed to represent. Theft, robbery, or whatever other property crime one might want to substitute does not, to my mind, invoke a similar threat to one’s personhood. Thus why I say that rape is not robbery. It is far, far worse.

Elaine Stritch died today. This hurt me at my core: she represents the epitome of a particular kind of woman I have always held as a role model: brassy, bawdy, outspoken, talented, and fabulous. In her time she might have even been called “ballsy”. When I was a little closeted gay kid in the 90’s who had to keep silent for fear of getting beaten up, I sought comfort in women like her, especially the female leads of rock groups like Garbage, Veruca Salt, and Hole. For me, these women who subverted society’s expectations of them were role models for me. They were loud, abrasive, and in-your-face. After I left high school and started becoming more confident in my identity, I felt a similar affinity for drag queens: transgressive and loud, these gender illusionists gave me life. Knowing that it was possible to say “fuck you!” to society and still come out okay on the other side… that was powerful stuff.

Realizing that women like Elaine are one of the reasons why I am so outspoken today got me thinking about cultural appropriation. Well, that’s not quite accurate. What got me thinking about it was this article a few days ago by a black woman telling white gay men to stop pretending they’re black women, and then this monumentally idiotic response from a white gay man telling black women to get over themselves and let gay white men do what they will, lest gay white men run home crying because they got their feelings hurt. (In case you can’t tell, I think the latter argument is so monumentally stupid that I didn’t even link to the original article, but to a rebuttal of it.)

But really, even *that* isn’t what got me thinking about cultural appropriation. What planted that seed firmly in my head was a conversation I had with my friend Ashton nearly a month ago, when she asked me what I thought about Iggy Azalea. I honestly wasn’t certain; I had heard just enough to know I wasn’t interested, but I hadn’t really paid attention. Ashton proceeded to play me a little bit of “Fancy“, and I admitted that it was catchy as hell. Ashton said “yeah, but I really have a problem that she’s white.” And all of a sudden, I did too. I mean, it just sounded wrong – a white girl from rural Australia sounding like she had lived her entire life in College Park… it seemed wrong. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it beyond a simple “cultural appropriation is bad, mmmkay?”

But today, reflecting on the conversation going on surrounding what is and isn’t okay to appropriate and who’s allowed to do what, and reflecting on the things I have appropriated from my female/trans/POC friends, it hit me.

It’s not the simple act of appropriation that makes this stuff offensive. It’s the fact that it’s fake as fuck.

Iggy Azalea is putting on a character. She doesn’t write her own shit, she doesn’t come up with her own beats, and that voice she raps with was taught to her by her producers. If she had been a white girl growing up in College Park within that culture, and that were natural to her, I guarantee nobody would be hating on her the way they do. But as it is, she’s basically doing a blackface routine, making music that resembles music made by black people. And she’s gotten really successful doing so, which has the added effect of crowding out legitimate black talent. (Oh, and then there was that time she dissed Eve in the most tone-deaf way possible, and basically she just needs to go away.)

Mister Whitey McICanPretendToBeBlackIfIWantTo is in the same boat here. He’s playacting. Rather than taking inspiration from the struggles of oppressed people and using it to find his own voice, he simply imitates someone else’s voice, and poorly at that. And I feel that ultimately, that’s what makes it so offensive. When Vampire Weekend first came on to the indie scene back in the mid 00’s, they faced some criticism for appropriating West African rhythms into their music. However, they were upfront about where it came from, and ultimately the music they created was clearly not an imitation of African music – nobody would ever think a song like “Oxford Comma” came from anything other than a bunch of rich white kids, for example. They are inspired by someone else and used that inspiration to find their own voice. More troubling might be Major Lazer, who are also highly original, but appropriate in ways that seem more like imitation. (Plus there’s this downright racist and misogynistic and hella problematic bullshit that nevertheless has a beat that won’t leave your brain for days.)

The bottom line to me is this: expose yourself to other cultures. If another culture does something you like, learn more about it. Know what it’s all about. If it’s relevant to your experience, pay respect to it and maybe even use it yourself. But if you just like it and you feel like you want to imitate it even though it has nothing to do with you, don’t be surprised when you get accused of cultural appropriation. The truth hurts. Deal with it.

It’s a war that we will never win, of course: there will always be those people who slip through the cracks of society for any number of reasons, whether through personal fault, societal oppression, or happenstance.

But it would be ludicrous to say that because we can’t eradicate it entirely, we shouldn’t try. Poverty is a horrible thing. It’s endemic to our society. It’s often invisible – how many of you, honestly, spend any amount of time in neighborhoods where every other house is boarded up, falling apart, condemned, or some combination of the above?

In the decade following LBJ’s declaration, the percentage of people in poverty fell from over 1/4 of the American population to less than 1/8. And it has been on the uptick ever since.

Our standard of living has improved since then. It is true that many people who live in poverty have color televisions and cars (that old canard that Republicans love to trot out). But these people are also often not food-secure, and they use their cars to get to jobs that don’t quite make ends meet. Color televisions are cheap these days. Food is not. And it is the height of intellectual dishonesty to claim that our standard of living is higher across the board when more people live in poverty now than did during the recession of the 1970s. Sure it’s true on paper. It’s most assuredly not true in the eyes of the elderly woman who gets her one meal a day from a charity and eats that meal in front of the color television she bought 20 years ago.

The War On Poverty can never be won. Not ever. But we can win battle after battle after battle in an effort to make life just a little bit better for our fellow humans.

The subject of rape has been in the news again recently, specifically in regard to Serena Williams’s recent remarks about the Steubenville victim.

Of course, any time the subject of rape appears in the news, there is invariably a chorus of people talking about how victim X shouldn’t have been doing such and such, and if the wanton trollop had just covered up her tits and not drunk to abandon, she wouldn’t have been raped.

Every time I see someone saying this, I counter with the standard litany that we can’t blame the victim, that it’s the rapist’s fault and theirs alone, that women already know they need to be safe and they don’t need to be informed of it again by someone who wasn’t there.

I’m tired of it. I’m tired of repeating myself over and over only to be told that it’s okay to say the victim’s behavior was incorrect even if it’s ultimately the rapist’s fault. Rape is not about some woman wearing something too revealing and getting some guy so aroused that he just can’t help himself. Rape is about power. If you have been raped, you know this. If you haven’t been raped, you only know this if you’ve listened to people who have been.

I’m going to tell you a story. I was eight years old. It was a typical school day. There was a break between classes and I stopped in the bathroom to relieve myself. I finished, and as I was turning around, an older boy entered the room. I didn’t know him; I think he was in sixth grade. I just know he was a lot bigger than me. He grabbed me, and I thought I was in for another round of bullying. But this was different. He pushed me into a stall. He came in with me and shut the stall door behind him. He was blocking it with his body.

He told me to kneel. I still had no idea what was going on, but I had started to cry by this point. And then he pulled it out. I looked up at him and he said “suck it.”

“What?”

“Put it in your mouth.”

And I did. I don’t remember the next few moments at all. I do remember him eventually pulling out and laughing at me. “If you tell anyone, I will kick your ass.” Then I remember him hauling ass from the bathroom as he finished zipping himself back up.

It was my first sexual experience of any kind. I was lucky that my father had already explained what my sex organs were, and I wasn’t ashamed of them. I still felt shamed by the assault I had just faced, however. It wasn’t because I had put another boy’s cock in my mouth, either. I actually didn’t mind that part, and maybe part of me even liked that part. But I was ashamed because had been degraded and abused. My dignity had been completely taken away from me in that moment. I didn’t really know the words for what happened, but I knew how it made me feel. I got up off my knees, still crying, wiped my face, washed my hands, and left the bathroom to go on to class.

I really have no idea what made him do it. I never will. But having experienced it, I understand one thing. Rape is not about sex. It is not about arousal. It is not about being horny. It is about dominance and power. Any sexual component of the rape is entirely separated from the shame and humiliation that results. By extension, any arousal that leads a rapist to initiate a rape is entirely separated from the rapist’s desire to control and dominate the victim. And someone who rapes is not doing so because the victim was too enticing. They do it because they can, and they know they can, and something in them makes them think it’s okay, and society validates that feeling that it’s okay by pretending the victim’s behavior was somehow the cause.

I was raped in an elementary school bathroom because I happened to be in the presence of a predator. The girl in Steubenville was raped because she happened to be in the presence of multiple predators. Maybe if she hadn’t gone to that party, she wouldn’t have been raped. By that logic, maybe if I’d held it in until I got home that day, I wouldn’t have been raped.

Don’t talk to me about rape unless you’ve been raped. If you haven’t gone through it, I guarantee I know more about it than you do.

So anyway, here is a link to the first draft of the first thing I’ve written in years that is not destined for the circular file:

Face To Face – V1

Comments are welcome.

I’m doing so because he deserves it. He’s said plenty of stupid things in the past, but his recent remarks about Keynes were not just stupid and uninformed (as he himself has pointed out), but also rather bigoted.

Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.

That’s not the part that’s upsetting to me, though, because Niall Ferguson is an asshole, and most of us already knew that. The upsetting part is how few people are even mentioning what a bigoted statement Mr. Ferguson made, and instead treating it as if it were a serious intellectual argument. People all over the world of economics, even when saying Mr. Ferguson was wrong, don’t seem to realize (or care) how incredibly offensive his remarks truly were.

I am a gay man. I am childfree. I am polyamorous. My legacy is mostly going to be my ideas, and any savings I manage to accumulate over my lifetime will not pass to the children I don’t have, but rather to various nonprofit foundations or schools or the like when I die.

Does this make me incapable of thinking about the long run? Of course not. Does this mean that I am predisposed to think only of the here and now? No. Does my relatively hedonistic lifestyle mean that I’m a carefree libertine, living only for today without a thought for tomorrow, incapable of designing policies for the long run? Not in the slightest.

And that’s because I’m a fucking economist. I’m an economist who thinks about the short run, the long run, and everything between. I’m a member of the Long Now Foundation who thinks that space exploration is a great idea for the future of mankind, despite its lack of direct benefit to humans right now. One of the fields I plan to specialize in is economic development, and you really can’t get much more long-run than that. It doesn’t matter that I’m white, overweight, gay, atheist, polyamorous, or, yes, even childfree.

So we can talk about how sodomy and usury were seen as sinful because of Aristotle, or about how Keynes’s quote was taken out of context, or about how maybe Mr. Ferguson wasn’t entirely wrong (and seriously? Fuck that guy). But the point everyone is missing here is that Mr. Ferguson has impugned the abilities of every bright, motivated gay kid who might want to go into economics. And this is not the first time someone has made this argument, and nobody seems to be stepping up and saying “that argument is bullshit – being gay doesn’t make someone a totally shortsighted hedonist, and saying so is offensive“.

That failure to call him out is going to discourage entry of gay students into the field. It’s going to keep economics a club mostly for straight white males, and as a result the field will rot and die as it loses relevance to anyone else. How’s that for considering long-run outcomes?

So allow me to say it. What Mr. Ferguson said is offensive, it is bigoted, and it needs to be seen for what it is. It is like saying that women can’t make good short-run models because all they know how to do is cook and clean and care for children, or saying that black people can’t make good financial economists because they aren’t as good at saving as white people. It is that offensive and devoid of merit. Excusing it or analyzing it or trying to extract a kernel of truth from it does nothing but minimize what truly is a bigoted statement.

Mr. Ferguson has apologized. Here’s my favorite part:

If I really were a “gay-basher”, as some headline writers so crassly suggested, why would I have asked Andrew Sullivan, of all people, to be the godfather of one of my sons, or to give one of the readings at my wedding?

Wow, Mr. Ferguson. Some of my best friends are black, too. Fuck. You.

Some background

About a week ago, Daniel Kuehn made this remark almost as an aside in a post about scientific research:

I take a long-term perspective on growth too. I’m not just thinking of the next Apple… I like to think about the next planet we settle too.

It’s a fair point – essentially, Daniel’s saying that he’s not just looking at specific technological innovations that will help people right now – he’s also looking down the road at a more amorphous set of potential innovations that will help people in the future.

Ryan Murphy replied with a rather in-depth response to Daniel’s statement by pointing out that the perceived benefits of space exploration far outstrip their actual usefulness:

Ultimately, I believe that space exploration is just the most preeminent example of a white elephant in developed countries. It is a project chosen because it is big and flashy, not because it will pass a cost-benefit test under a reasonable parameterization.

I would highly encourage anyone who reads this to read Ryan Murphy’s entire response. He goes into a lot of depth, and his argument is well put together, although I think he’s ultimately wrong.

Daniel replied to Ryan’s response by mostly agreeing with him (as do I) but then pointing out the major fallacy in Ryan’s logic:

The point is that in one hundred years humans are living on Mars and the moon and we are thinking about how to get to the stars. As an added bonus, the human species is more robust to catastrophes on Earth. It will be an inflection point in the history of the human species that will be remembered for millennia. The industrial revolution will be considered a minor antecedent to the point when we “slipped the surly bonds of Earth”. When I think of what science can do, more gadgets that we enjoy today are always nice, but I think of the millennia of humans to come and how they will live as well. Think of what a big difference it makes that you’re alive in 2013 rather than 1913 or (God forbid) 1813. The idea of living in 1013 is unthinkable. The point isn’t an Apple product, although that’s obviously great (I’m told – I have no Apple products – my wife has one). The point is a new level of human existence and mastery of its surroundings. This, of course, is not necessarily going to motivate a welfare maximizing individual on Earth today, even with relatively low discount rates. That, of course, is part of the problem. Human flourishing is both a product of optimizing behavior and a hostage to optimizing behavior.

The long now

Daniel’s absolutely right here. He’s talked in the past about a concept called “temporal autarky“, and I think his analysis is spot on. (And really, I could not love that term any more if I tried. I will be using it to talk about this concept from now on.) We can’t interact with people from the future, so we’re certainly not going to be concerned with trading with them or improving their welfare. For all intents and purposes, we as primarily selfish economic agents are concerned only with things that will affect us within our lifetimes. We spend money now to purchase things for ourselves now. We invest money now so we’ll have more money in the future. Occasionally we invest in education or other things that don’t directly give us benefit, but we’re still concerned with our legacies and how it will affect us and others’ memories of us. We are optimizing our behavior for us and possibly for our direct descendants.

I am a member of an organization called the Long Now Foundation. I mention this only to explain a little bit of my perspective here. The Long Now Foundation is based around the idea that our human perspective is quite limited, and that we should be at least partially focused on the far-off future, not just what we normally think of as the future. As an example, one of our quirks is that we number years beginning with 0 (so for example, we are currently in the year 02013, not 2013) – we do this so that we get in the habit of thinking of the implications of the Year 10,000 switchover.

Yes, I know it’s silly. But I have a point here. It’s actually tied up with the name of my blog: Extraordinary Insignificance. I am one of the more than 7 billion humans on earth. I am one of the more than 100 billion humans who have ever lived. I am one of the unfathomably large number of humans who ever will live. Essentially, I am utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe.

Except that I’m not insignificant. I have significance to my loved ones. I have significance to my employers. I will have significance one day to the people I hope to one day teach. I will have significance to the academic community… and so will my ideas. In fact, my ideas, if they are of any value, will hopefully have significance long after I’m dead to people who are not yet born. Let’s expand it further into the realm of the improbable and say that my ideas touch off some new area of research of which I can’t even conceive right now.

Clearly, the value of my ideas to me would be less than the value of my ideas to people in the future. But take a look again at the normal language of present value and future value. The entire framework that we use for investing and depreciation works only over the lives of those making the assessment. In this situation, the PV of my ideas and FV of my ideas are absolutely dwarfed by future value to future humans (FVFH) of my ideas.

The FVFH of space exploration

The PV of space exploration is rather low. We got some cool stuff out of the Space Race, and ongoing research is giving us a steady trickle of things that make our lives better. I agree with Daniel and Ryan that this trickle is not worth its cost. The FV of space exploration is also rather low. We might be able to get some better satellite orientations and find out how we can more effectively live and work in zero-G situations within our lifetimes. Daniel and Ryan both talk about the psychic benefits of space exploration: Daniel is somewhat positive toward them, Ryan is downright dismissive of them. I probably side with Ryan more on this – the psychic benefit of space exploration was probably a lot higher during the 80’s when most people still cared about this stuff. These days, probably not so much.

But the FVFH of space exploration… I don’t want to gush, but just think about it for a second! If there were a colony on Mars, and we had found some way to terraform it and set up a stable, liberal government free from all of earth’s baggage? Come on. The FVFH of that scenario is astronomical (pun intended). Daniel brings up the point that humanity is better protected from disasters in that scenario. All that’s going through my mind is the trade and innovation that would spur. And think about it – if there’s a mechanism to have a permanent colony on another planet, what’s to stop future humans from building a colony ship and going even further out? Again, the trade and innovation possibilities alone are astounding in this situation.

The problem, of course, is that none of that future value accumulates to any of the people making investment decisions now. And just like in so many other problems with disconnected incentives, there is a conflict between the people making a decision and some of the people that decision affects. And in this case, the people who are adversely affected by the decision can’t even give their input or register their discontent, since most of them won’t be born for a very long time.

So along comes this guy…

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

I can’t even begin to describe how misguided this is. Aside from the typical issues wherein a relatively privileged person in power is making life difficult for people whose lives he has no concept of, this idea would drive a wedge between children and their parents, as demonstrated by another state senator during the debate that ultimately tabled the bill:

Senator Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) concurred, somewhat earthily. “I agree with Senator Finney . You can’t legislate parent responsibility. I don’t care what you do.” He foresaw “unintended consequences” for the student. “The parent will beat the dog doo out of him for taking that $20 away from them, that’s what’s going to happen.”

He’s absolutely correct. But then I started thinking… there has to be a way to model this. I’ll do a narrative description of a model in this post. In my next post (coming eventually) I’ll do a formal model with charts and equations and everything. But for now, here’s what I’m thinking.

Let’s say there’s a family. This family receives a certain benefit B. This family receives no additional income. If their child underperforms in school, the benefit will be cut by 10%. The reduced benefit is .9B, which we will call RB.

Let’s assume that their child is currently underperforming, and that they are at risk of a reduced benefit. There is way that the family could make a lifestyle change to improve their child’s progress, but this requires expending a certain amount of work W. Their current benefit gives them utility U(B) and their reduced benefit gives them utility U(RB). However, performing the work to change their lifestyle around will cost them W units of utility. This would imply that the only time that it is worth the family’s effort to make a change is when W is less than U(B)-U(RB). Essentially, for this policy to work, they would have to lose more in terms of their comfort from the benefit cuts than they would from doing the work to change.

This implies that the only time a policy like this could have any hope of working is when the benefit cut is so large that it justifies the work needed to make the change. However, one of the aspects of this particular story is that TANF benefits in Tennessee are already extremely small, and the benefit cut would in most cases apparently be somewhere around $20 a month. That kind of a cut would not really induce most parents to upend the way they’ve been doing things. Even cutting the entire benefit in this case would probably not make that much of a difference given how small the benefit is.

Then there are also the “unintended consequences” Mr. Gardenhire alluded to. It is very hard to make real change to a lifestyle that is not conducive to learning. It is not very hard to lash out violently at a child.

I think this would make an interesting model to develop further.