We Should Live - Ben Bateman

I must apologize, dear readers, for the short and infrequent posts in the past few weeks. A massive writing project is eating my very soul. But it should be done in two weeks—at least, that’s what I told my editor—and then I’ll return to form.

But I can’t resist pointing to this: an Associated Press report on more rioting and burning of cars in the Paris suburbs. It’s old news by now, and no one should be surprised that it hasn’t stopped yet. What’s fascinating is how badly the article had to be written to conform with political pressure on language.

“Youths torched a dozen cars and hurled stones at police . . . ”

“. . . bands of young people hurled gasoline bombs at public buildings and took to the streets with baseball bats.”

“One of the young men briefly detained Tuesday night for throwing stones at police was also involved in the incident that sparked last year’s riots.”

“About 15 young people hurled projectiles at police in Clichy-sous-Bois . . .”

“Many of those who rioted then were of immigrant origin . . .”

One of the basic rules of storytelling—and of journalism in particular—is to anticipate and answer the questions that your reader will naturally ask. It’s expressed in the cliche: “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?”, which is unsurprisingly the title of a book on journalism. The point of the cliche is not merely to categorize the different questions that a reader might ask, but also to put them in order of importance. Note that the first is: Who?

But the AP writer, Pierre-Yves Roger, doesn’t answer the question. I doubt that this is unintentional. He knows that we want the answer; he just won’t give it to us. If we knew who these rioters were, then we might arrive at non-PC conclusions. So he tries to keep us in the dark as much as possible, for our own good.

Let’s piece together the informational crumbs that the AP writer considered us capable of handling responsibly:

• The rioters were young. This is very informative. If the writer hadn’t given some indication of the age of the people who were throwing gasoline bombs and wielding baseball bats, then we might have imagined that the people involved were pensioners in their sixties and seventies. But that extra-informative adjective really clears things up.
• One of the rioters was a man. Here again, the reader was in grave danger of imagining that this might have been an all-female group of rioters. But don’t worry! The AP hires professional writers whose job is to keep you well-informed.
• Many of those who rioted were of immigrant origin. This suggests that some of the rioters were not ethnically French. It doesn’t give any real idea of how many. Twenty percent? Ninety percent? The AP does not deign to tell us. It also neglects to mention which immigrant origins these rioters came from. Were they immigrant Scots? Germans? Spaniards? Russians? Chinese? The AP writer knows, but he’s not telling.

In conclusion:

First, If organizations like the AP are your sole source of news, then you know very little about what’s going on in the world, and you’re using your news-gathering time inefficiently. If you learn to use the blogosphere for news, then you can get the real story in about a fifth the time:

“France is surrounded by lawless suburbs inhabited almost exclusively by the descendants of unassimilated Moroccan and Algerian immigrants. The young men suffer nearly 50% unemployment due to racial discrimination and economic stagnation born of high taxes and suffocating economic regulation. And they don’t need to work, because the French government offers extensive welfare benefits.

“But living as wards of the state with nothing to do all day makes them unhappy, and it discourages them further from considering themselves Frenchmen. So they have constructed within these suburbs their own version of an Islamic society. They don’t know much about Islam, nor do they really want to—though they like the part about treating women like slaves. They’re mostly just unhappy, as young men always are if they aren’t challenged. So they burn cars, throw rocks, swing baseball bats, and desperately try to be taken seriously. And they should be taken seriously, because eventually they will organize to the point of changing French society, or even threatening the French government itself. But the French government and its voters are too deep in the opium dreams of comprehensive socialism to seriously consider opening France ethnically or economically.”

Is that so hard?

Second, in your own writing always choose the specific word over the general one. Your goal in writing is to convey information, whether about events in the world or the contents of your own mind. Specific words convey more information than generalities. They waste less of the reader’s time. A writer like Mr. Roger insults his readers by using generalities when he obviously knows enough to use more specific words.

Some commenters here wanted some harder facts on the big business interests pushing for more immigration. This press release from the US Chamber of Commerce is a start. That organization, which claim to represent three million businesses, is very happy with the immigration bill that the Senate just passed.

I share Michael Williams’ sputtering rage at the open betrayal by many Republican moderates of the party’s conservative base. The Senate bill reforms the problem of widespread lawbreaking by effectively repealing the underlying crime. Thomas Sowell details some ways in which the current legislation puts illegal immigrants not only ahead of legal immigrants, but in front of citizens. Reports are that the Senate bill is full of subtle features that ensure that enforcement will fail, just as it did in 1986. Michelle Malkin reports on the feature that most openly laughs at conservative hopes for serious border enforcement: The bill now says that we can’t build a fence on our border until we consult with Mexican authorities at the federal, state, and local levels. In the legal world, ‘consultation’ means stalling. The Senate hopes for a repeat of 1986: No enforcement or border security, lots of cheap labor for big business, lots of fresh poverty to serve as an excuse for more welfare programs, and lots of new voters likely to vote for Democrats.
Now all eyes turn to the House, whose members are significantly more sensitive to the public’s will. Let’s hope that the House can kill this abomination.

Economics is one of the few topics on which I’m a complete snob. I don’t claim to know much about economics, but a few basic economic truths strike me as so blindingly obvious that I have little patience when people in positions of power don’t understand them. John Stossel reports:

John Sheperson is a hero. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he turned on the news and learned that people in Mississippi had lost electric power. They desperately needed generators. He decided to help them, while helping himself.

He borrowed money, bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul and drove it 600 miles to Mississippi, where he offered to sell the generators for twice what he paid for them. Eager buyers surrounded his truck. “People were excited,” he said.

So did the generators go to hospitals? To nursing homes? Did they save lives? Did Mississippi officials give Sheperson a medal?

Nope. Instead, they locked him up — and his generators, too.

“Nobody got any use out of them,” said Sheperson.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood apparently prosecuted Mr. Sheperson for the crime of price-gouging, which he says in this .pdf press release carries a punishment of up to five years and $5,000. Mr. Stossel quotes Mr. Hood as saying: “For people to take advantage of those in need violates every biblical standard of morals that I’m aware of.” His press release states: “Taking advantage of people during a disaster is a horrible act. Any person or business attempting to unfairly profit from the suffering of hurricane victims will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Violators will go to jail.”

I picture the scene theatrically: At stage right are Katrina’s bedraggled victims, yearning for electric power with which they can light their homes, cook their food, and sanitize their water. At stage left is the greedy entrepreneur, cruelly trying to sell to these victims the generators that they desperately need. His price is very high; the potential purchasers balk. He points out that others nearby might be willing to pay even more. The disaster victims realize that they need electricity more than they need dollars, and the two sides strike a deal.

But before the deal can be consummated, our hero Jim Hood appears center stage and stops the transaction. He announces that the entrepreneur is a criminal, and will go to jail for his heinous deed. The hurricane victims gaze hungrily at the generators as the entrepreneur tries to defend himself: He didn’t create the disaster; he’s trying to mitigate its effects. He undertook extraordinary cost, trouble and risk to transport the generators through clogged and dangerous terrain on the hunch that people might need them. Both sides have agreed to the deal.

But our hero Jim Hood will have none of it. With a shake of his head he dismisses the entrepreneur’s artful sophistry and repeats that charging high prices during a natural disaster is both immoral and criminal.

In a last-ditch attempt to save himself, the entrepreneur points out that the harm of his prosecution will extend well beyond this particular transaction. Other entrepreneurs across the country may be contemplating going to similarly extraordinary lengths to deliver generators to the disaster area. They will surely cancel their plans once they learn that they will face criminal prosecution if they attempt to recover their costs.

So the entrepreneur is led away in chains, stage left, as Mr. Hood preens. One of them asks timidly what will happen to the generators. Mr. Hood explains that the generators are evidence of the crime, effectively contraband, and must be impounded for the forthcoming trial.

“Fear not,” Mr. Hood announces manfully. “Your state government is hard at work protecting you from monsters such as these.” As he exits stage left, the hurricane victims wave and smile, grateful but confused. Then they look down at the squalor in which they’re still living.

“Don’t worry, mother,” one says. “We may not have any electricity, but at least we’re safe from price-gouging.”

Fade to black.

A conversation today with a pair of idealistic young libertarians inspired this thought:

Communism ensured the state’s political coherence and long-term survival by brutally severing each citizen’s relationships to family, religion, region, etc., and trying to replace those relationships with fanatic loyalty to the state.

Communism’s fatal flaw was in overestimating national economic productivity when individuals had few incentives to work.

Libertarianism ensures excellent economic productivity by providing individuals with near-perfect individual incentives to work.

Libertarianism’s fatal flaw is in wildly overestimating the state’s political coherence and chances for long-term survival when its citizens have no incentives to feel any sense of loyalty or obligation towards the state beyond narrow self-interest.

HotAir.com says that she will work for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.  Now she should be safe.

Europe’s best and brightest flee danger to live in the United States.  It’s the 1930s all over again.

Thomas Sowell is outraged that the District Attorney in the Duke rape case has postponed trial until the spring of 2007. This indicates that the DA doesn’t have any proof, but doesn’t want the embarrassment of dropping the case. So the plan is wait to drop the case until the public has forgotten about it, which Sowell calls “cooling out the mark.”

What an interesting phrase! Google led me to this 1952 article by social scientist Erving Goffman. He starts with the perspective of professional con artists. In their jargon, “cooling the mark” out refers to techniques designed to prevent the mark, or victim, from calling the police or otherwise making his loss public. The cooler (the con man assigned to this task) can use various approaches: He can emphasize the embarrassment involved, he can emphasize the hopelessness of trying to recover the lost money, he can encourage the mark to see the con as a learning experience, and so forth.

From there, Goffman moves to a much broader view of how people deal with their losses, which Goffman sees as primarily a problem of helping people reconcile their internally held identities with inconsistent facts. He sees the same basic dynamics in handling an angry customer, in rejecting a suitor, or in firing an employee.

I majored in psychology, but somehow never heard of Goffman. He must have been out of favor at the time. But he is one of the best analysts and observers of human nature that I’ve read, and a pretty good writer. It’s a long article, but I recommend it.

Pres. Bush will give a major immigration speech tonight. Its text hasn’t been released yet, but the rumors about it aren’t encouraging. He will propose sending a couple thousand National Guardsmen to the border. The president of Mexico has already complained about it, and Bush has assured him that this is just temporary. The WaPo article’s last sentence summarizes perfectly the political thinking behind this:

If the House contingent feels action is being taken, White House officials hope they may yet sign off on some version of Bush’s guest-worker proposal, which would provide a way for undocumented immigrants to stay here legally if they pay back taxes and penalties.

Translation: Let’s generate some footage of soldiers marching around in the desert to placate the base, and maybe keep that up through the 2006 election. And let’s have a little section in the bill about citizenship with enough wiggle room in it so that the bureaucrats can later grow it into the de facto amnesty that the big Republican donors want.

If the buzz is correct, this will be a colossal mistake. Maybe the Republicans really are in trouble with the 2006 elections. The blogosphere is already angry:

Michelle Malkin also sees the parallels between what tonight’s speech and Bush Sr’s infamous “Read My Lips” pledge against raising taxes. She also has a nice video post about it on HotAir.com. She has been videoblogging there for a couple of weeks now, and she’s getting better.

Allahpundit has a better title—Hoy Blogamos, Manana No Votamos—and a link to a drinking game to play during the speech.

The usually levelheaded Hugh Hewitt is speculating about the potential for a Republican schism on immigration. I think that’s premature. There are still six months before the election. Individual congressmen still have time to start moving to the President’s right on this. Wait until the post-speech polls come out. If it’s the money versus the votes, then the votes will win. Ask George Soros about that.

John Derbyshire summarizes the President’s speech as “boob bait for the yahoos.”

And the usually gentle Peggy Noonan has this to say about the Republicans:

One gets the impression party leaders, deep in their hearts, believe the base is . . . base. Unsophisticated. Primitive. Obsessed with its little issues. They’re trying to educate the base. But if history is a guide, the base is about to teach them a lesson instead.

I agree with Malkin’s comparison to Bush Sr. One of George W’s strengths is his total sincerity. The corresponding weakness is that he can’t lie well. (He’s the opposite of Bill Clinton that way.) And the trouble with being a politician with such deep beliefs is that your beliefs will eventually diverge from the public’s on some crucial point.

That’s where George W is stuck. He obviously doesn’t believe in border security, and yet tonight he’s going to try to convince us otherwise, which will be both pathetic and insulting. Bill Clinton could pull this off, but not George W. He just doesn’t have it in him.

Commenting on this post of mine, Chairm and Mike S were both skeptical that there is another reasonable side to this debate—mostly because nobody is making any arguments for it. I’m moving in their direction. Like most of the conservative base, I’m becoming increasingly irritated with the Republican leadership’s condescension on immigration. Not only do they think we’re wrong, but they won’t even deign to tell us why they think we’re wrong.

After several years of law practice, I’ve learned that nearly everyone who enters an argument holds a position that is reasonable from some perspective. Very few people will enter a debate with a perspective so selfish and twisted that they must flatly refuse to explain their own thought processes. Maybe this is one of those rare debates, or maybe they have a legitimate position but they think that we’re all too dumb to understand it. Either way, the time to make a reasonable argument will end soon.

UPDATE: The President’s speech is here.  It was pretty much what everyone expected: Symbolic gestures towards enforcement with an enormous amnesty.  Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector runs some numbers here on the current Senate bill.  He estimates that the current bill would add 103 million legal immigrants over the next 20 years.  To put that in perspective, there are only about 300 million people in the country right now.

Can anyone out there explain the other side on this?  Is the argument that the perception of an open border is mistaken, and we are in fact controlling our borders?  That’s the view that seems to come through in this interview with a high-level immigration bureaucrat.   Is the argument that an open border is a net gain to the country?  That argument never seems to come together on the numbers.  We know what the protestors who made so much noise a few weeks ago want: They agree that open borders hurt the country—and that’s why they want them!

The only coherent argument I’ve heard is the pure libertarian approach: no borders, no tariffs, no drug laws, etc.  And those arguments would be great if we didn’t have a massive welfare state.  But we do.  It’s a very pretty theory, but it doesn’t apply to reality.

But the push for massive immigration obviously isn’t coming from idealistic libertarians.  I assume that it’s coming from businesses that benefit from cheap labor, but I can’t substantiate it.  Dear readers: Please!  If you can solve this puzzle, post a link.

The MSM is in a tizzy over this story about the government collecting phone records for national security purposes. They’re hoping that this will be the story that catches fire and wakes the American public to the impending Dark Night of Fascism.

They’re hoping, but they know that it won’t happen. Actual Americans approve of this by a wide margin, according to at least one recent poll. The lefties, believing themselves to be modern-day Cassandras, will go on raving and ranting about the police state that is surely only a few days away—just it has been for the past six years.

Still, a significant and more reasonable minority of our citizenry is intensely interested in draconian privacy laws and policies. It’s one of a growing list of issues that don’t follow the usual party lines: The far lefties want extreme privacy because they fear the government and want it as weak as possible, while the more moderate liberals have traditionally wanted less privacy as a prerequisite for an all-encompassing nanny state.

On the right, the libertarians usually favor extreme privacy as a step toward freedom from social constraints. Reactionaries often join them in pursuit of a mythical past in which people supposedly enjoyed supreme privacy. The broader conservative base supports privacy in general as a way to constrain government, but opposes it to the extent that it interferes with national security.

Back in the Good Old Days
The reactionary view on privacy, like reactionary views on most topics, is based on bad history. There never was a time when most Americans had anything like the kind of privacy that today’s privacy zealots want. Some Americans had near-total privacy—if they lived out on the frontier. But most Americans of a century ago or two centuries ago had far less privacy than we have today, because they lived in small communities. Not too long ago, extended families lived in the same town or general area for generations. People knew each others’ business. There was gossip. Even today, living in a small town means that everyone recognizes you immediately. They know your family, they know your biography, they know where you work. And if anyone in that small town notices you doing or saying anything peculiar, the news is likely top spread across town within day.

That’s the historical standard for privacy. And it’s not unique to Americans. Pick any time and any place in human history, and I bet that people will have about the same level of privacy, which is nearly none. We’re social primates; we naturally observe each other and gossip about each other. And before the past few decades, the state of technology virtually required that people interact with each other every day, face to face.

It has always been possible to live as a hermit in the wilderness, but it was also very difficult. In fact, living as a hermit would be easier today than ever before. If you really want absolute privacy, then buy some land out in the middle of nowhere and go live there. It’ll be expensive, of course, and your standard of living will plunge. You won’t have the cheap amenities that you probably enjoy right now: grocery stores, hospitals, water, sewer, electricity. But no one enjoys extreme privacy without paying a high price.

No Free Lunch
And price is the core problem with privacy rights and other negative rights. On the surface, they seem to have no costs, which leads to the view that we should have as many of them as possible. But negative rights are never really without costs.

Suppose that you want to exercise your freedom of speech by handing out pamphlets at the park. People take your pamphlets, look at them, then drop them. Now someone must clean them up. Or suppose that you put up signs and use a bullhorn. Now people have to see your signs and hear your noise, when they would rather enjoy the park.

Or consider HIPAA, the new medical privacy regulations that the federal government has imposed. Every doctor’s office in the country has spent many dollars and hours trying to comply with the new rules. And many people struggle to escape the privacy rights that the law has given them. HIPAA has made everyone’s health care less efficient in many situations because the privacy rules restrict information flow among health-care providers, and between doctors and family members.

I think that people understand this intuitively, which is why they aren’t impressed by current attempts at generating hysteria over NSA data-collection programs. If the government were blinded and made deaf in the name of privacy rights, then the potential cost (another terrorist attack) would be very high, while the benefit (fending off some theoretical government coup) would be minimal. The left perceives the costs and benefits differently, and that’s where the debate should focus. But it doesn’t help to frame the issue in terms of absolutes. That’s why the Fourth Amendment itself protects from unreasonable searches and seizures, not all of them. Declaring something to be “a right” does not end the debate. Every right has its limits.

Most people are happy to give up some of their privacy for other advantages. We already understand that the digital age does not guarantee privacy. Companies try to put cookies and spyware on our computers. Many of them compile and sell our information to third parties, who target us with ads. Some big-box stores won’t even sell to you unless you give your address, so that they can track your purchases and mail you ads. People give personal information to businesses all the time for convenience. What’s the harm in one more database?

In fact, of all the data-mining organizations in the world, I say that the US government is the most benign: They’re trying to protect you from terrorists. And they won’t spam you!

A basic principle of good writing is to convey as much meaning as possible in as few words as possible. A corollary is to prefer precise words over general words, as precise words convey more meaning per word.

So I grit my teeth and choke back caustic comments when I see ‘that’ used to describe a person, as in: “Dr. Jones is the scientist that discovered Compound X.” Substituting ‘who’ will nearly always improve the sentence: “Dr. Jones is the scientist who discovered Compound X.”

You could argue that the shift from the person-specific ‘who’ to the more general ‘that’ is part of a broader philosophical and linguistic trend (discussed here) away from the idea that humanity is special. But more likely the problem is much simpler: If you use ‘who’ then you may ask yourself if you should have used ‘whom’ instead, and few English speakers today can answer that question with confidence. But if you use ‘that’, then the whole subject/object distinction is no longer a problem.

In describing people, ‘that’ is the easier word, but ‘who’ is the more elegant word, if you know how to use it. More on ‘who’ versus ‘whom’ later.

(Updated 5-10-06.  Scroll down for more on Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

Mark Steyn pulls no punches in his most recent article about Europe’s apparently irreversible decline:

To those on the American left who find Europe more “sophisticated”, you’re right: it’s sophisticated in the sense that a belle époque Parisian boulevardier is sophisticated – outwardly dapper and worldly, inwardly eaten away by syphilis and gonorrhea. It’s only a question of how many others the clapped-out bon vivant infects before his final collapse.

If you’re familiar with Steyn’s writing, then you know that this is no mere fit of pique. Steyn has put considerable time and energy into studying Europe’s future, and he knows what he’s talking about. You can dismiss his conclusions as overly pessimistic, but the basic facts are undisputable on population decline, unemployment rates, economic growth rates, and nearly unstoppable trends in the age and ethnic makeup of Europe’s population. Add to this the political atmosphere that opposes any type of change, and it’s difficult to disagree with Steyn’s pithy verdict:

Europe is dying, and it’s only a question of whether it goes peacefully or through convulsions of violence.

Steyn is also pessimistic on the future of Europe’s relationship with America. He doesn’t dislike the Europeans, nor does he wish them ill. But he recognizes, as do most conservatives familiar with the topic, that we can’t save Europe from the natural consequences of its own beliefs. Not only do the Europeans not yet understand that their deep love of government control is killing them, but they still want to lecture us Americans on our moral and political inferiority.

America dealing with Europe is like an adult dealing with an elderly parent who can no longer drive safely. Not only does the crotchity oldster refuse to give up his car keys, but he rewards your attempt to help with a scathing review of your own personal shortcomings: “No, I won’t let you save me from myself, and if you try I’ll (verbally) kick you in the teeth again.”

You can’t reason with Europe on this any more than you can reason with an aging parent. You can point out, as Steyn does, that Europe’s statism is a mystical belief mostly rooted in blind faith. Everyone has a religion, or a substitute for a religion. These religions are usually beyond the scope of rational discussion and become more difficult to change with the passage of time. Europe’s statist religion goes back at least as far as the French Revolution. As the religion ossifies, the believer warps reality to his belief system, rather than adapting his belief system to reality.

Steyn gives the example of Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and supporter of the EU Constitution that Europe’s voters decisively rejected a year ago:

As [Juncker] put it in his now famous dismissal of the will of the people: “If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’.”

These people still rule Europe, and their resolve to stay the course is as firm as any religious fanatic’s. The media are still under firm government control, and the latest round of French riots in response to a very modest nudge in the right direction proved that a change of course is simply impossible right now from the professional politician’s perspective.

It’s an interesting mental exercise to imagine what Europe’s fall will look like. I predict a slow, gentle slide into dhimmitude. We get little hints of that every month:

• When Sweden announced this month that it would not allow sharia to apply to its Muslim population, the story was considered worth reporting.
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• Today there is a story about Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has sharply criticized Islam, and who has gone into hiding for her own safety after Theo Van Gogh was ritually murdered in broad daylight. Her neighbors are complaining. You might think that Ms. Ali would be something of a heroine in her neighborhood for standing up to the Islamic menace. And if you thought that, you would be naive. Her neighbors sued to have her evicted because her presence endangers them. When the Muslim thugs come to kill Ms. Ali for her independence of thought, the neighbors would prefer not to suffer any collateral damage. An appeals court ruled in favor of the neighbors, and ordered Ms. Ali to leave. Ms. Ali can have her crazy ideas about freedom of speech and conscience, but her neighbors would prefer peace, which means doing what the thugs want. In a few years, I’m sure that the surviving Dutch will be telling us that sharia isn’t so bad, once you get used to it.
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• And let’s not even start about the cartoons.

We can’t save Europe. We can’t even make it stop criticizing us long enough to hear our warnings and think about changing course. Like a great ship at sea, Europe is headed straight into an iceberg, and any chance to avoid it slipped away years ago. The forces at work—especially the demographic forces—carry too much momentum for anyone to reverse at this point.

And given that inevitability, maybe it’s for the best that Europe continues to bathe in its arrogance for a few more years. Since they’re already doomed, they might as well enjoy themselves right up until the ship sinks. They should ignore the warning signs: a bombing here, a throat slit there, the occasional riots and burning cars. Again, it’s like an aging parent, but this time terminally ill: If petulantly announcing its moral superiority is so much fun, then maybe Europe should enjoy what few pleasures remain to it. Let the old coot have its fun. Today, Europe’s message to America is arrogance and condescension. In 20 or 30 years it may be “Allahu Akbar.” And then we’ll miss the old days.

Update: (5/10/06) Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke at Harvard yesterday to a polite but hostile audience. The MSM ignored it, but you can read about it here, here, and here. Christopher Hitchens tells an abbreviated version of her story here.

In brief, Ms. Ali was born in Somalia to a Muslim family, and moved to Europe hoping to escape forced marriage and the other indignities to which Muslims expect women to submit. But sharia had proceeded her. Working as a social worker in Holland, she saw that Muslim girls and women were still subject to beatings, honor killings, mutilation, and forced marriages. The European governments ignored the problem and left the Muslim neighborhoods alone.

She entered politics to right this wrong, and collaborated with Theo van Gogh to produce the film Submission, which is a short documentary dramatizing the plight of Muslim women, with special focus on how the Koran validates and even encourages violence towards women. Van Gogh was brutally and dramatically murdered in public, in broad daylight. The murderer used a long knife to attach to the corpse a note promising that Ms. Ali would be next.

Since then she has lived in hiding and under constant armed guard, but has not backed down. Her book, The Caged Virgin, was published last month. (Excerpt here.) The book is about her own physical and mental escape from Islam, her political efforts to warn Europe about the Islamic threat, and the complete lack of interest that many secular liberals have in helping these women who are held in near-slavery on European soil.

My wife and I are netflixing our way through the Columbo TV shows. Columbo is a lieutenant in the LAPD, and hearing that word ‘lieutenant’ over and over got me to wondering how our language could have absorbed such a monstrously difficult word to spell.

‘Lieutenant‘ is easy to spell, once you get the etymology. It literally means “place holder.” Both are French, of course. ‘Lieu’ is the same word that we use in “in lieu of.” ‘Tenant’ we have directly in English; the tenant is the person who possesses or holds the land, as opposed to the landlord, who owns it but doesn’t have possession. Put ‘lieu’ and ‘tenant’ together, and you have ‘place holder’. I assumed that the place he holds is a metaphorical station within the army or police force, or perhaps a literal place within an army’s marching formation. But two of my sources say that the metaphor is that a lieutenant is someone who can take the place of a higher-ranking officer, such as a captain. No one seems to know why the British pronounce it as lef-tenant.

‘Captain‘ comes from the Latin root for head, just like decapitate, per capita, etc. This is probably mostly a physical metaphor: The captain marches at the front of his group of men. It’s tempting to say that he also gives commands to his men as the head commands the body, but I don’t think that they knew that much anatomy back when the word acquired its meaning.

‘Major‘ just means big or superior. There’s no big mystery on how it acquired its military meaning.

‘Colonel‘ is possibly even harder to spell than ‘lieutenant’. The history helps a little: Soldiers generally travel in columns. The Latin word for ‘column’ is ‘columna’, but in Italian it’s ‘colonna’, and in the diminutive ‘colonello’. The commander of a little column, or colonello, was a colonel. No one seems to know how the pronunciation became the same as ‘kernel’.

‘General‘ is straightforward: A general is in general command of the army, that is, his authority is not limited to any particular sub-group.

‘Officer‘ is another that’s obvious once you hear it. An officer is someone who holds an office, and an office is any post or job that carries specific duties. Corporations have officers, as do police departments and armies. The title by itself doesn’t mean much without further information. An officer holds an office, but which one?

Finally, ‘commissioner‘ has always perplexed me. A ‘commission’ is a grant of authority or power, usually corresponding with a duty or obligation. A police commissioner has been granted the authority to command the police force along with an obligation to prevent crime and catch criminals. Military officers receive commissions granting them authority over certain men; in this setting the term also refers to an actual piece of paper, such as this one. And Christianity has The Great Commission, which is a similar authority/obligation combination:

“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Mt. 28:18-20 ASV).

Here’s what bugs me: Why does ‘commissioner’ end with ‘-er’? Why isn’t it ‘commissionee’?

In law, we use these suffixes all the time: The grantor gives away title to the land; the grantee receives title. A trustor gives away trust property; a trustee receives it. The lessor gives possession of the property; the lessee receives possession. A bailor gives away temporary possession or personal property; the bailee receives temporary possession.
Maybe the problem is that ordinary English speakers rarely see the ‘-ee’ suffix that corresponds to ‘-or’ and ‘-er’. So when faced with someone who has received a commission, they reach for the only suffix they know, and call him a commissioner.

The pro-life blogosphere is in an uproar over a Planned Parenthood (PP) tactic in pushing for another little piece of federal pro-abortion legislation. The proposed bill, text here, would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create and enforce regulations punishing businesses that “deceptively create the impression that [the business] is a provider of abortion services if such person does not provide abortion services.” The obvious goal is to put government pressure on the crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) that compete with PP for the attention of pregnant young women. PP pushes the young women into having abortions. CPCs urge them not to. It’s a bitter struggle going on all around us.

The blogosphere uproar wasn’t upset about the legislation itself, but instead about a story told by PP to as part of an email generation campaign. The story is that a 17-year-old Indiana girl tried to go to a PP clinic, but instead went into a nearby CPC that shared the same parking lot because the CPC “was designed expressly to lure Planned Parenthood patients and deceive them.”

Horrors ensue. The CPC pretended to be a PP clinic and tells her to come back for a later appointment at the real PP clinic. The CPC then began “a campaign of intimidation and harassment.” They call the police, harass the girl’s father at work, and urge her classmates to pressure her not to have an abortion.

It’s a tale right out of every militant pro-choicer’s nightmares. And it would be horrible, if it were true. But, like any good urban myth, it’s difficult if not impossible to verify. Medical privacy laws prevent both sides from discussing it, and the story omits most of the details that would help verify it.

But this is the Internet Age. As Dan Rather discovered, lies can’t survive for long. This blogger found the three PP facilities in Indiana that actually offer abortions, and found that only one shared a parking lot with a CPC. He then checked with the local police to see if any police reports had been filed, and found none.

Other bloggers and readers are circling the story. One commenter here wonders about the story’s claim that the CPC sent the girl to a PP clinic, as persuading girls to avoid abortion is their primary function.

This blogger found some photos of the parking lot in question, which are here. The first photo shows the sign in question, which reads: “Considering Abortion?” Is that deceptive? Intentionally deceptive? I doubt it, though I can see how some PP fanatics would see it as deceptive. But I doubt that it’s a serious nationwide problem demanding congressional action.

I see a different angle: If PP is worried about pregnant young women being misled, then maybe the pro-lifers should join them. Consider photo 11, which shows the sign for the PP clinic. It reads: “A Woman’s Choice Planned Parenthood.”

If PP is worried about its potential clients being confused by these two signs, then there’s an easy solution: Just put up a big sign right under the current PP sign, saying: “Abortions Performed Here.” Let’s skip the dainty euphemisms and make everything clear. If PP is worried about the cost of the new sign, then I bet that the CPCs and their contributors would be more than happy to pitch in. I’m sure that they would be eager to help the public understand exactly what goes on in a PP abortion clinic.

And as for this federal law, I think that informing the public is a great idea. So let’s keep the proposed law as it is, but add a few amendments. Maybe every clinic that performs abortions should be required to include the word ‘abortion’ in its name. If we’re going to discuss deceptive advertising, wouldn’t ‘Abortion Inc.’ be a better name than ‘Planned Parenthood’? Or maybe instead of changing their names, abortion providers could get some of those big “Abortions Provided Here” signs, prominently displayed.

And PP shouldn’t complain about this, because we’re going to protect them from the scourge of misleadingly named CPCs. It’ll be against the law to provide abortions without showing your “Abortions Provided Here” sign, and it’ll also be against the law to display an “Abortions Provided Here” sign if you don’t actually provide abortions there.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

(HT: Raving Atheist at The Dawn Patrol.)

Insults tend to grow over time. My theory is that each word starts with a specific meaning, then expands to a general expression of hatred. And then we drop the word, because it has become too broad to be useful.

‘Bigot‘ is probably going to fade soon, because people today use it so indiscriminately. Its proper meaning involves intolerance, originally either religious or regional. But it’s so misued today—even used as an expression of intolerance rather than a condemnation of it—that I suggest staying away from it.

‘Chauvinist‘ was once like ‘bigot’. First it had a specific meaning: It referred to extreme political loyalty. It came from Nicholas Chauvin, a French soldier known for his fanatic loyalty to Napoleon. (Sources disagree on whether he was real or a character in a play.) The feminists latched onto this word in the fifties or sixties as part of the once-effective insult ‘male chauvinist pig’, which never made any sense. But now ‘chauvinist’ is burned out. Nobody uses it today, which is fine because most of the people who think that they know what it means are wrong.

‘Hack‘ hasn’t spread out too far yet. As an insulting noun it’s mostly limited to writers, though I don’t know why. It started as ‘Hackney’, which was a pastoral village near London. It then became associated with the horses raised in the nearby pastureland, and perhaps got a boost from ‘haquenee’, a French word for an ambling nag. ‘Hack’ then referred to horses, especially broken-down nags. And these low-quality horses were apparently the type that you could rent, so ‘hack’ came to refer to a horse for hire, and then to a horse and carriage for hire, and then apparently to the carriage itself apart from the horse. I base that last conclusion on a line from the song “Soliloquy” from the obscure Rogers and Hammerstein 1945 musical Carousel:

He can ferry a boat on a river
Or peddle a pack on his back
Or work up and down
The streets of a town
With a whip and a horse and a hack.

The common misuse for ‘hack’ is to denigrate the quality of a writer’s writing, or by extension the quality of anyone’s work. The better use, consisten with etymology, is to question someone’s loyalty. A hack is like a mercenary, but without the military connotation. He does whatever he’s hired to do. I think the word fits better in politics than in writing. Today there’s little shame if any in a writer writing whatever someone pays him to write, but we still believe that politicians and pundits should not be “for hire”.

A few people are obsessed with the idea of a national popular vote for President. As Michael Williams argues, amending the constitution to accomplish that would be politically impossible, because the small states that benefit from the current system would have the power to block changes to it.

But this group has a plan to achieve the same result by bypassing a constitutional amendment: A group of states holding a majority of electoral votes could all agree to cast their electoral votes according to the nationwide popular vote. The Colorado senate has already approved the plan, while Illinois and California are considering it.  The group claims to be acting on high principle, but the claim doesn’t ring true.  I think that it’s small-minded politics.
My theory on the politics behind this is that the states whose votes are predetermined don’t get to play belle of the ball. The big states don’t get a chance to auction off their votes to the higher presidential bidder. Only the battleground states receive the political pork that’s handed out to help win the presidential race. In that sense it’s a bipartisan issue: Both parties ignore Texas just as much as they ignore California. But that’s an awfully shortsighted basis on which to alter our system of government.

On a longer view, I see some big problems with eliminating the electoral college:

First, it would be inconsistent with the rest of our system of government. If you want to abolish the Electoral College, then why not abolish the Senate, too? Granting two votes per states regardless of population recognizes that the states are sovereign entities rather than mere regional administrative arms of the federal government.

Second, it would amplify our widespread problems with voting fraud. The last two presidential elections should have demonstrated the extent of the problem to everyone. Right now the problem is compartmentalized, because the margin is lopsided in so many states. If the election is close, then the losing side only has to complain about Florida, Ohio, or wherever else the vote was closest. But under national presidential voting, close elections would demand nationwide investigation. Realistically, that means that the election will be decided by massive vote fraud in the country’s most partisan areas, where the officials are willing to look the other way.

And in cases of vote fraud, nothing in the proposed law explains how the states would check on each other. Suppose that California claims that the Democratic candidate won by a billion votes. There’s no mechanism in the proposed law for the other states to question it.

Third, the Electoral College allows voting law to be state law, which makes sense because most voting occurs at the state level and below. But nationalizing the presidential election would inevitably lead to a race to the bottom in state voting law, followed by imposition of national voting law.

For example, suppose that Colorado changes its law to allow felons to vote. With a stroke of the pen, Colorado has increased its significance and pork-pulling ability on the national stage. Other states would feel pressure to follow suit by relaxing voting requirements to meaninglessness, because more voters means more political power for the state. The race to the bottom would have to end at some point, probably when graveyards and household pets start voting en masse. Then the federal government would step in and impose national rules for the presidential election. Then the states would be unable to function with inconsistent state and federal rules for voting, and the federal law would take over. Or maybe states would start pulling back out of the whole system, and we would go back to the Electoral College. But one way or another, a system in which a state puts itself at the mercy of the voting laws of forty-nine other states will not last for long.