Twain, the N-word and all that kerfuffle.

There is something of a kerfuffle going on over an edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. As I hope you know, the novel is set in pre-Civil War America and Huck’s friend, Jim is a slave. The novel uses dialects and language common to the era and the place. And that means a rather offensive word, nigger, is used.

With the book in public domain a publisher released an edition of the book where this word was removed. And that got the Right wing in a tizzy—though to be fair that is a perpetual state for them. Howls of “political correctness” were heard and the move was denounced.

I think much of the outrage was misplaced, some of it was just dumb, and some of it was, perhaps, motivated by people who actually like the N word. Others are people who want the “pure” novel to shine through. There is a range of reasons that people are upset. My view is that all of them should just calm down a bit.

First, the man behind the book, Alan Gribben, is NOT motivated by political correctness. Before people should start screaming about him being PC they ought to check out the facts. I know the Right doesn’t believe in innocent until proven guilty, but a little fact checking is a good thing.

While Gribben was not motivated by PC, the matter does arise. Gribben is a Twain scholar and fan. He is a professor of literature and wrote a biography of Twain and his wife, as well as other works about Twain and his writings. Gribben teaches in Alabama and during a speaking tour on Twain numerous teachers came to him and lamented how Huckleberry Finn had been removed from the classroom. Yes, schools removed the book because people found the N word offensive.

Now, let us consider many of the Right-wing critics of this move, who are crying “censorship.” First, give me a break, you dumb-ass hypocrites! You people have been burning books, sometimes authors, for centuries and now you howl! These are the same sorts of people who demand the removal of all sorts of literature. They don’t only want to clean out the schools, but public libraries, and even private libraries. They march around demanding prosecutions for “obscenity” and lead entire movements pushing censorship. This is not to say that the Left is any better. Both sides want government restrictions on speech, just not their speech!

We also need to define censorship, as the word is used too loosely. Censorship is the coercive prevention of the expression of an idea by an individual using their own resources, or resources made freely available to them. If I don’t use the N word, it is my choice, not censorship. If I use force to prevent you from using it, it is censorship. Nor is it censorship when this publisher does this. The publisher is not coercively preventing you from buying a different edition of the book, with all the language intact.

The publisher is NOT censoring the book. She is editing it. Like it or not, this editing is not coercive. Censorship always violates the rights of someone. This publication violates the rights of no one. And, we often edit literature when we present it to children.

Gribben wanted to see more kids reading Twain. The publisher, Suzanne La Rosa, said she was aware the edition would be provocative but “We were very persuaded by Dr. Gribben’s point of view of what he called the amount of ‘preemptive censorship’ going on at the school level It pained him personally to see… the way that Twain’s novels were being de-listed from curricula across the nation. It became difficult for teachers to engage in discussion about the text when the kids were so uncomfortable with the n-word.”

In other words, Gribben’s edition was an attempt to get the book back into classrooms for kids to read. He was responding to censorship that already existed and trying to rescue as much of Twain as he could. Gribben’s own introduction to the book explains:

Far more controversial than this reuniting of Twain’s boy books will be the editor’s decision to eliminate two racial slurs that have increasingly formed a barrier to these works for teachers, students, and general readers. The editor thus hopes to introduce both books to a wider readership than they can currently enjoy. Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s by repeatedly employing in both novels a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves, and by tagging the villain in Tom Sawyer with a deprecating racial label for Native Americans. Although Twain’s adult narrator of Tom Sawyer is himself careful to use the then-respectful terms “colored” and “negro” in Chapter 1, the boys refer to slaves four times with the pejorative n-word. In Twain’s later book, Huckleberry Finn, these barely educated boys and the uneducated adult characters in Missouri and Arkansas casually toss about this same racial insult a total of 218 times (with the novel’s table of contents adding another instance)

The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact. Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative. In the 1870s and 1880s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of African American or Native American readers. These population groups were too occupied with trying, in the one case, to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of Jim Crow segregation policies, and, in the other case, to survive the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters who had decimated their ways of life, than to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in two popular books.

Gribben says that a “succession of firsthand experiences” lead him to conclude, “an epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is necessary today.”

Certainly neither Gribben nor the publisher deserve the attacks they are enduring. They are simply trying to get kids to read the book. And since Gribben has written a clear introduction saying he removed the word, students will rather easily be able to re-insert it if they wish. Gribben replace “nigger” with “slave” and any reader knowing this would be able to reconstruct the novel. But teachers wishing to read passages in class would no longer have to face the drama that will inevitably result from the use of a very offensive word.

I don’t know how I’d feel were I a black man who had experience racial slurs over a lifetime. I am not in that position. But I suspect I would be deeply troubled every time I heard the word. When Twain wrote his novel the word was in common usage. Thankfully that is no longer the case. It was a term meant to dehumanize a class of people. It reflects the legal status of African-Americans at the time. These were people held in bondage and the use of such demeaning words was a tool of that bondage. That victims of racism, and others, are sensitive to that fact today is NOT a bad thing, quite the contrary in fact.

If I were teaching a class on Twain I would find this word troubling. I would want the students to understand the context of Twain’s novel but neither would I want to inflict unnecessary pain on black students. The incentives would be to avoid Twain entirely. And that was what Gribben realized was happening, something he wanted to stop. And, I should note, that this problem exists whether the school is politically controlled or privately controlled.

There are few epithets as riddled with hate as “nigger,” very few. Even other offensive terms for blacks don’t carry the same baggage. Terms of derision used for Jews, Italians, Mexicans, etc., just don’t seem to have as much vitriol behind them. The only such word that I can think of, which is in this category, is perhaps, “faggot.” And, while gay people have been oppressed by American culture, their experiences are quantitatively different. Sodomy laws were awful but never nearly as pervasively enforced and destructive as slavery, segregation and racism. And it was always possible for most people to hide the fact that they were gay, hiding that one is black is a very different thing.

This is something my fellow Americans seem to never fully realize. I find it easy to view life as a white man. But I have lived in Africa where I was the racial minority. So I know something of what it feels like to be black in America, but only a vague something. Nothing in my life comes sufficiently close to the black experience. I have lived in countries where I couldn’t speak the language. So I know something of what it is like to an immigrant.

To the degree that “political correctness” means that people are voluntarily refraining from saying things that are hurtful to others, then I’m all for it. To the extent that law mandates it, I’m against it. I would like to live in a world where the N-word has lost its power; where kids are not taunted as “faggots” and then go home and kill themselves; where everyone is horrified when someone is derided because of their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

Ideally students should be able to understand that Twain’s use of the N-word was within a cultural/time context. But we don’t live in an ideal word. We still live in a world where the Klan exists, where the N-word is thrown about with the INTENT of inflicting pain, where racism still rears its very ugly head. It is hard for us to hear these offensive words without relating them to our own experiences.

I do not condemn Mr. Gribben or the publisher for this edition. I understand why they felt it was needed. I understand why many people are offended when they read the N-word in literature. And I understand why others want to preserve the book. I certainly understand the dilemma for teachers. That’s the problem with this controversy. Everyone has valid points. So, let a thousand flowers bloom. There may be places and times when the original edition of the book can be used, let it be used. And there may be places and times when the original would not be used; in that case I rather see this new edition used, than it not be used at all. And, all things considered, I would rather live in a world where hateful words are criticized and vigorously debated than in one where their usage is common and acceptable.

Scoundrels and Cops: Liberty Sides with the Former

Phillip Greaves II got some infamy a few weeks ago when his book advocating pedophilia was "outed" on Amazon, forcing the book giant to take contradictory views in a few short days. First, Amazon defended freedom of speech and then caved on the issue. I said nothing because Amazon has the right to make any decision it wanted there.

But now the real scum of society are getting involved, by that I mean low-life, publicity-seeking, red-neck sheriffs from some backwater county in Florida. The sheriff of Polk County, one Grady Judd, had Greaves arrested on obscenity charges because of the text in the book—there were no photos.

Spitting out some "tabaca," the doughnut muncher said: "You're not going to write a book where you violate the obscenity laws of Florida. Clearly, this violated the obscenity laws."

You might think about this for one second. Mr. Greaves was arrested in Colorado because this descendant of a long line of cousins, thousands of miles away, found the book obscene. No doubt this sheriff finds any book with words of more than three syllables to be obscene.

Sheriff Barney Fife asked Greaves for an autographed copy of the book and offered him $50 for it. This was clearly entrapment. Judd sent a book to this bastion of imbecility and now will face trial in a county that I doubt he has ever visited in his life.

The "book" was only in e-format before and Greaves told the sheriff that he had only one copy in print format and that he couldn't get any more. So clearly Greaves was not intending to distribute copies in Florida, or in this hell hole of a swamp where the Sheriff and his deputies lurk. This was the ONLY copy of the book around.

The book was inscribed, "For all of your encouragement," which shows that the Sheriff intentionally "groomed" Greaves into sending the only copy of the book in existence. And when the controversy erupted about this work, the local Colorado police investigated and did nothing because the book is NOT obscene and Greaves had not broken the law.

Judd said he is a crusader for children—which means he wants massive destruction of the Constitutional rights of adults—that seems to come with the territory. He said he was personally offended that Greaves was allowed to write his "book" and wasn't arrested for it, so he decided to do something about it personally.

Hey folks, do we really want backwater Southern Sheriffs determining the limits of free speech for the entire country?

This has nothing to do with Greaves, or his book. The First Amendment, which applies to the states and has since the 14th amendment, clearly says that there should be "no laws" regulating free speech. This was pure speech, written words alone. That some hick Sheriff got a bug up his ass over it shouldn't give him the right to impose his view of the First Amendment on the entire country. Whether the book is "obscene" is impossible to say as the word has absolutely no rational, objective meaning. Obscenity is anything that offends some tightass somewhere. And, of all the tightasses in the world, the worst are Southern sheriffs with messianic complexes, who think they are out defending morality. They are the tightest asses of the lot.

As Oscar Wilde would say, the real crime of the book was that it was badly written. And excerpts the media mentioned previously, were just that, extremely badly written. But bad writing is not a crime, if it were the authors of most federal legislation would be serving life sentences. It seemed apparent to me that Greaves, by his demeanor in interviews, has limited mental abilities and simply wasn't all there. He couldn't string together a coherent sentence yet write a book that threatened children.

The Constitution of the United States should not be held hostage by Southern swamp rats in a Sheriff's uniform.

The Supreme Court ruled that what makes child pornography illegal, is not the content or the ideas being conveyed, but the use of children to produce the images. But there were no images here, just ink on paper, a combination of letters conveying ideas that the Sheriff, and most of the rest of us, would find problematic. But, even if it conveyed an idea that we all find offensive, it is protected. Rights are not determined by majority support. You do not need community approval before speaking. Rights should never be determined by the most ignorant, bigoted elements of some backwater community, even if the individual in question is wearing a uniform—especially if wearing a uniform. The only legitimate function of a sheriff is to protect rights, not to violate them. And given that Mr. Greaves had never been in Polk County this Sheriff is acting against the Constitution, a document he has sworn to uphold.

You don't have to like Mr. Greaves. You don't have to like the "book" he wrote. He is immaterial. What counts is the First Amendment and individual rights. Trust me, the rights of all of us are in danger when ignorant cretins from some rural southern county can impose their sense of "morality" on the rest of us.

In closing, I give the last words here, to H.L. Mencken: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

Taking on the moral crusaders.

Here is Judge Napolitano taking on a pro-censorship crusader. In this debate he is joined by a friend, Prof. Steven Horwitz. I have to admit that I was originally skeptical of the Judge simply because his Fox New affiliation worried me. That news network is pretty odious and has more than one individual there who pretends to be libertarian but isn't. Yes, John Stossel is there, but he established his libertarian credentials before the move.

But everything I see from the Judge is pretty much libertarian. He has some theological inclinations but that doesn't disqualify him from being a libertarian. But this is one of those issues where Napolitano makes his libertarian leanings clear. The Barr/Root/Paul types would normally retreat to the conservative view of state's rights on this matter. Not Napolitano. I only meet him for the first time recently and then listened very carefully to a speech he gave. Again, no major flaws could be detected.

So watch it first, then come back for a few comments.


I agree with the Judge, as you might expect. However, I wish that someone had addressed the bogus claims of the moralistic censor. This loud-mouth keeps harping about the toxic effects of adult entertainment. But let's be realistic, the toxic effects are the result of censors like him. This is not to say there are no possible negatives but they are not inherent in the adult business.

Let us look at how politicians deal with the demand for censorship by their voters. Knowing they are restricted by the First Amendment from blanket bans what they do is precisely what this moron suggests: zoning all adult businesses into one area.

So they create zones where adult-oriented businesses are restricted. This concentrates the business and turns into a lucrative area for prostitutes to hang out. Of course prostitution is illegal so the sex workers tend to have to resort to street walking as it makes them less vulnerable to police stings. As the prostitutes hang out in this zoned location their pimps join them, and along with them come drug dealers. Drugs are illegal and the war on drugs forces relatively decent people out of the business, attracting people who are more prone to violence. Worse yet these violent types will fight it out for turf, something that may happen with the pimps as well.

When the industry is diffused throughout the city, much the way most shops are diffused, there is no such "toxic" effect. I have seen places where porn shops were not regulated and naturally located all over the city, without concentration. The hookers avoided hanging out around any shop as it was useless to do so, there wasn't a sufficient number of potential customers to make it worthwhile. The end result is no hookers, no pimps, no drug-dealers, no violence, no toxic effects.

The toxicity of adult-oriented businesses is the result of government regulations forcing an artificial concentration of the businesses into a confined area. This is a prime example of the solution being far worse than the problem. As has been said, there is no problem so bad that political intervention can't make it worse.

Motes, beams and whinging Christians

Here is the story that has caught the attention of Christians around the world, especially the right-wing types. As usual there is more than meets the eye and their accounts are not entirely truthful.

A fundamentalist Baptist was standing on the street in England yelling out one of his typical sermons to people who found themselves within earshot of the man. Among his content was the usual rant that fundamentalists have against those demonic homosexuals, their favorite scapegoat for all that is wrong in the world today. He was then arrested under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for causing "harassment, alarm, or distress." He was told that he couldn't do this in public again. Keep the words "harassment, alarm, or distress" in mind.

Right-wing websites are in an uproar. One site falsely claimed that the same sort of arrest could happen in America because of hate crime legislation. There is no truth to that claim. The right-wing Melanie Phillips claimed that the minister was arrested merely for "preaching Christian principles," and that this is proof that "the attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain appears to be gathering pace." According, to Phillips this is being done "under the rubric of promoting tolerance and equality—but only towards approved groups" and "some people are more equal than others." Phillips seems quite clear that while gays are protected Christians are not.


Phillips tried to tie this into unrelated cases to prove her claim that poor Christians are being oppressed in England. She lies about the actions of one "poor pensioner" who she says merely complained to her council about a gay parade. I covered this case and the "poor pensioner" was an antigay campaigner who went to a gay event and intentionally insulted people and then demanded they be censored by the law when they were rude to her in return. That, as we shall see, is fairly typical for Christian conservatives.

Phillips also wrote of government employees who were fired for being Christians. In fact they were fired for refusing to do the job they were hired to do. These were civil servants who refused to give services to gay people that are routine for others. If a Christian won't do their job they should be fired just as any employee who refuses to do their job should be fired. Religion is not an excuse for failure to perform according to the job contract. Phillips apparently thinks it is. In another case she laments how someone could lose a job for wearing a cross. Again that is the typical distortion of the Religious Right. In that case the employer had a rule against all employees wearing any jewelry, regardless of the content. Christians weren't being singled out.

The Christian Institute, in the UK, which always get involved in these cases, has come to the Baptist's defense claiming his rights as a Christian are being violated. Catholic conservative Cristina Odone made reference to "inquisitors" fuelled by "a vicious secularism that allows no tolerance for views based on Christian values." I guess as a Catholic she would be an expert on the Inquisition, after all, they invented it.

Make no mistake about it, I don't condone the arrest. It was wrong. But it is not an example of Christians being singled out for persecution, as they would have you believe.

The law is question is bad. Unlike all the Christians who have whinged about this case I actually support freedom of speech for everyone. None of them do. They are merely a special interest group wanting to protect their turf. They want the right to criticize and condemn others but equally wish to deny others the right to criticize or condemn Christianity.

Here is some evidence. While we all have read about the Baptist bigot who got arrested, how many heard about the atheist arrested on the exact same charge? His crime, however, was insulting Christians. According to the BBC, Harry Taylor, was "found guilty of causing religious aggravate intentional harassment, alarm or distress" because he left anti-religious leaflets in the Liverpool airport "prayer room." (Why do airports need prayer rooms but bus stations don't?)

These two incidents were only a few weeks apart. Yet the one got hardly any notice while the Christian Right has been bleating about the other endlessly.

Taylor had leaflets with cartoons. One showed Jesus on the cross smiling as he advertised "no nails" glue. Another showed Islamists at heaven's gate being told: "Stop, stop, we've run out of virgins." According to the BBC the chaplain at the airport was "severely distressed" by the cartoons. Really? What a wimp! Taylor was banned "from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place," and given a suspended six month jail term, 100 hours of unpaid work and a £250 fine.

Notice that Taylor was charged with precisely the same offense. But his punishment was far more severe than that inflicted on the Baptist. The Baptist stood on a step-ladder shouting at people. Taylor left leaflets sitting around. But I can't find any prominent right-wing columnist lamenting the death of free speech in Taylor's case. These right-wing hypocrites are selective advocates of freedom of speech. Their view is: "Free speech for me, censorship for thee."

What these cases show is the totalitarian nature of England's laws on speech. I've argued that before. It is not merely an attack on Christian values, as the Right wants to pretend. It is an attack on the most fundamental secular right of all—the right to express an opinion, even an offensive one. This is an assault on classical liberal values, not on Christian values. Christians don't value freedom of speech.

What is especially irksome in these hypocritical rants is that some of the same groups lobbied for legislation to prevent criticism of religion. The Vatican lobbied for laws restricting the right to criticize religion. When the controversy over the cartoons of the alleged Prophet Mohammad started in Denmark, Vatican officials were out in public demanding censorship and special laws restricting freedom of speech. Cardinal Ersilio Tonini said "Freedom of the press, including satire, must stop where religious belief begins." Cardinal Achille Silvestrini said: "Western culture must find a limit to its goal of making freedom an absolute. We too, here in Europe, should rebel against the idea of mocking religious symbols."

According to one Catholic site Cardinal Silestrini "said Christianity has similar sensitivities." Aldoo Giordano, general secretary of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences, said on Vatican radio that the satire used regarding Mohammad "goes against human rights" and that "the entire Christian world is very saddened and pained by satire of this type, aimed at the brothers of another religion."

Cristina Odone didn't utter a peep about that, but then it was the actual source of the Inquisition demanding the censorship, so she was fine.

The Vatican itself issued a statement regarding the cartoons that expressly said that censorship ought to be the law. "The right to freedom of thought and expression... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers."

On the one hand we have Christians weeping and wailing when the law is used to silence their anti-gay sentiments. When the same law is used to silence an atheist not a single one of these Christians uttered a peep. And when the cartoons "insulted" the alleged prophet of Islam we saw religious leaders demanding censorship. They said the law should not allow people to cause distress to others. Unless, of course, those others are gay, then the law should support unlimited bigotry because that's what Jesus would do.

Once again we see the Religious Right refusing to support freedom as a principle. To them freedom of speech is a special privilege bestowed on them, but denied to others. Equality of rights, in their mind, is "special rights."

As a classical liberal or modern libertarian, I argue that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The Baptist bigot should be allowed to shout until horse, if he wants. But the offensive atheist shouldn't be banned from handing out "offensive" leaflets either. These Christians need to be a little more honest and a little more rational—I know the latter request goes against everything they believe.

When they lobby for laws that ban speech for causing "distress," as they did during the Danish cartoon controversy, they have no right to complain when those laws bit them in the ass when they cause distress to gay people.

This is what really irks me about the Religious Right, they are totally Orwellian in the use of language. When the law censors critics of religion that is "respecting religious values." When the laws censors critics of homosexuality [which is as sensible as criticizing blue eyes] that is an assault on Western values. When gay people have the same rights as Christians that is "special rights" but when Christians have rights that gay people don't have, that is just peachy keen.

Rights are the same for everyone. So yes, the Baptist should be free to say all the silly things that Baptists are prone to say. They can't help it, it's in their nature. And critics of Islam or atheists with offensive leaflets, have the same rights as well. Gays can be called sinners and the Vatican can be ridiculed for all the various atrocities it has been involved with. Free speech is for everyone.

The same law in England was used against a Christian last week, and against an atheist a few weeks ago. The law was wrong both times. And while I condemn both applications of the law, the Christians who are now weeping about persecution, were silent when an atheist was the victim of the law. And just a couple of years ago these Christians were demanding legislation to protect people from the sorts of free speech they are now demanding.

Many years ago a minor figure in Christianity—after all he never became Pope or even a bishop—named Jesus said: "You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother's eye." Of course, as a libertarian I'd reply: "Hey dude, keep you damn fingers out of my eyes unless I ask you to help." But he was much closer to a reasonable view than these whinging Christians today.

Knife weilding fanatical Muslims attack church property or not?

Exactly how would the Religious Right respond to the following story? A church puts up a billboard which questions some aspect of Islam. Within days the billboard is attacked three times. The church is inundated with unpleasant and threatening phone calls and emails from Muslims around the world. One fanatic shows up with a knife in hand and the church caves in and removes the billboard. What do you think conservatives would have to say about that?

Plenty I suspect. They would be outraged by the use of force to silence a religious institution. And they would be right to be outraged. All the above is true with the exception that the attacks were not carried out by Muslims but Christians. That may explain the relative silence from conservatives about this outrage.

St. Matthew-in-the-City is small Anglican church in Auckland, New Zealand. And it posted the following billboard on church property. Their purpose was the challenge the concept of a male God sending sperm to earth to impregnate a virgin. They don't buy that line at all and argue that the true meaning of Christmas is lost in all this mythology. It really doesn't matter whether or not what they say is right. The issue is their right to say it. I don't buy the mythology either but I suspect that their idea of the "true meaning of Christmas" is probably wrong as well. They said all they wanted was people to think about the story and it's meaning. Fair enough.
In less than a day the sign was attacked by a Christian who drove up to, then stood on the roof of the car and covered the sign with paint. A spokesman for the church commented after the first attack: "They are driven to give threats and abuse — and they say 'we love Jesus and he loves us'. I'm sorry, but they don't get the irony of their beahviour." Once news of the billboard got out "the church had spent yester answering hundreds of abusive emails and phone calls from around New Zealand and overseas." The billboard was replaced. Someone stole that billboard and it was then replaced.

Then yesterday the Vicar of the church, Glynn Cardy, said the billboard was "attacked by a knife-wielding Christian fanatic who was then apprehended by a group of homeless people who care about our church. Later in the evening another group of fanatics ripped it down.

I can't imagine the outcry if Muslims had done a similar thing to church property. I am sure it would be very loud, very vocal, very hysterical. Glen Beck would have fits for days about the actions of the fanatics. But it wasn't Muslims, it was Christians who acted this way. That explains the silence. And only that explains the silence. The outcry from the Right over the Islamic response to the cartoon controversy was phony from the get-go. The Right doesn't believe in free speech at all. What it came down to was that the Right hates Muslims more than it hates free speech. There are no principles involved just competing hates. And sinces they dislike Muslims more than free speech they used the free speech issue to beat up on Muslims (not that the Muslims didn't deserve it).

But now the controversy was over Christians attacking a cartoon image they found offensive. So all the moral posturing from the Right about freedom of thought and the sanctity of open debate has disappeared and they react to this attack with silence. You figure out why that is.

Whose dirty tactics?

The most disgusting thing about the leaked emails and data from the Climate Research Unit (see our previous posts here and here) is how these politicized scientists have responded to be caught acting in a very unacademic way. The emails clearly show that these men acted in concert to try to get dissenting scientific papers suppressed. They wanted to get editors of scientific journals fired because they dared published papers disagreeing with aspects of their theories.

These men plotted to undermine academic freedom and their emails show them acting like self-appointed censors who would decide what the scientific community should, or should not, be allowed to read. I suspect as the data that was discovered is analyzed other problems will emerge as well. But for the time being their campaign to silence and suppress other scientists is enough to warrant the condemnation of their behavior.

So have they admitted that acted like intellectual Gestapo sent out to control the scientific media? Of course not! Instead they are crying that they are victims.

The first replies concerns the leaked information was that there was nothing there of interest and that no one really need bother reading it. The second reply was that the emails were just harmless banter that didn’t mean anything. Reading the emails themselves proves both those first replies simply are not true. A third reply has been to satirize the emails themselves hoping that by making fun of the emails they can divert attention. A fourth reply has been to trumpet what the emails didn’t say, while ignoring completely what they did say.’’

Kevin Trenberth, one of the men caught red-handed in these emails, sees a nefarious conspiracy working behind the scenes to undermine him. “One has to wonder,” he says, “if it is a coincidence that this email correspondence has been stolen [it may have been leaked from within the Unit as well] and published at this time.” Trenberth calls it “a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change…”

A “concerted attempt”? But wasn’t that precisely what these emails exposed? Trenberth and his fellow warmers acted in concert in the hopes of suppressing scientific papers. They plotted on how to get editors fired by organizing a mass protest to a journal’s publisher concerning one editor and they made it clear that the accusations made didn’t even have to be true to be effective.

Consider what Andrew Revkin, of the New York Times, had to say regarding the material that has been published on-line. Revkin writes that the “documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.” Wasn’t it the New York Times that is famous for publishing the Pentagon papers that also were acquired illegally and never intended for the public eye?

Consider what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose a treasure trove of emails from skeptics turned up. Imagine those emails outlining how skeptics would conspire to deny warmers access to various journals. Just imagine that all the strategies the CRU emails show the warmers engaging in, were exposed as tactics for the so-called deniers. Do you honestly believe that Mr. Revkin would avoid publishing the actual content of those emails?


Revkin got some flack for that remark and he has responded. He says his remarks are interpreted as saying his paper is “laying off looking into these documents” but claims, “we’re actively reporting on and citing these documents” and cites his original story as evidence. But the original story is actually woefully deficient of quotes from the emails themselves. Most of it is letting apologists for the emails defend them, there is some vague comments about what they contain and he quotes one sentence of one email from a second-hand source.

Revkin actually never cites the documents themselves. What he entirely ignored was that the documents show these scientists to be actively engaged in a political campaign to silence dissent through various maneuvers. The entire issue of academic freedom was swept under the rug, as were the actual content of the emails. Yet Revkin pretends his original article “actively” reported on, and cited, the documents in question. Neither is true.

Revkin, who is openly and explicitly biased on this matter, writes that he prefers to focus on “running down tips and assertions related to the theft and hackings.” He wants to get the person who released the documents; he’s not very interested in what the documents actually say. Focusing on content makes his allies look bad and he hopes to cause problems for the presumed political opponents who released the material instead.

At the British left-wing Guardian, George Marshall dismisses the emails since they don’t prove any conspiracy such as taking “’marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.” Sure that was the criticism all along! This is a subtle form of the Argument from Intimidation, misstate what the opponents say, make it satirical in nature and don’t address what they do say. Marhsall saw no conspiracy, but he ignores the open planning of how to end the careers of skeptics, as well as stifle debate by stopping journals from publishing papers that have passed the peer-review process. These conspirators went so far as saying that they might have to redefine peer-review in order to stifle dissent.

While Marshall conveniently ignores planned assault on academic freedom by his friends he does find a plot however: “This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context.” What proves the “orchestrated smear campaign?” According to Marshall the proof is: “The speed with which the emails have been cut apart and fed into existing storylines is remarkable.” Remarkable? Clearly Mr. Marshall doesn’t understand how the Internet works. Speed is easy when information is of interest to hundreds of millions of people. And thousands and thousands of those individuals start looking at the material what is contained in the documents is published very fast indeed. That is merely proof of the scale of the debate on this issue, not proof of some conspiracy.

Marhsall complains that this is “an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning.” Let me see if I get this. Someone exposes that climate scientists of the warming bent conspire together to suppress papers, get editors fired, and discredit scientific journals because they don’t like what they publish. That is not a dirty political tactic. However, exposing that this was being done is a dirty political tactic. The plot to deny academic freedom is not a conspiracy but someone exposing the plot with source documents is a conspiracy because lots of people reported on it.

Marshall wants the scientists exposed in these emails to go on the offensive and says that Phil Jones, who is at the center of the scandal, needs to fight for his colleagues who are “defamed and slandered by the kinds of people who illegally hack into computers. This is a desperate, last-ditch tactic by fanatics who have lost the rational debate.” Please note we have no proof of a hack as of yet. It still could have been an internal leak. Without knowing the sources of the material to call it an illegal hack is merely biasing the debate, quite intentionally I might add.

But again, while Marshall whines about the defamation of the scientists exposed of using dirty tricks to suppress opposition papers he says nothing about their efforts to defame and slander their opponents. Remember these were people who said that an effort to unseat one editor should revolve around telling the publishers that their journal is now “perceived as being a medium of disseminating misinformation” and that “whether it is true or not” doesn’t really matter since it will have the same impact in removing the editor in question. But that is not a dirty trick, or defaming or slandering someone.

But consider the question of how do these emails that were released slander and defame? They only make people look bad because of what they actually say. There has been no evidence that the emails were tampered with. They were not accompanied by essays explaining them. They were simply documents released to the public and the only reason these scientists look bad is because they behaved badly. It is their own actions, which slander them, not the revelation that they acted like an intellectual Gestapo. This story is still in the early stages and more will come out.

Notice: I was asked by my colleagues at the Institut für Unternehmerische Freiheit to mention their conference on the climate change debate. It is scheduled for December 4th in Berlin. More information available here. All presentations will be in German or English with simultaneous translations available. Speakers include: Prof. Dr. Markus Kerber; Dr. Jewgeni Volkl; Prof. Nils Axel Mörner; Prof. Henrik Svensmark; Dr. Lubos Motl; Prof. Dr. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke; Viscount Christopher Monckton; and Dr. Fred Singer.

Silencing the heretics: the Holy Inquisition of the Warmers

The presumed hacking of emails and records from the Climate Research United at the University of East Anglia has drawn a great deal of attention. And there is even some speculation that the hacking wasn’t a hacking a leak.

Some of the coverage, especially from fellow travellers with the warming advocates, repeats the party line that “there’s nothing here to see folks, just keep moving.” But there is enough meat in the documents to attract the attention of some press outlets usually known for their uncritical acceptance of anything the warming advocates say.

The Washington Post is as “establishment” media as you can get, only bested by the New York Times. It tends to be a reliable ally for the warming advocates. Yet, even the Post found the emails worthy of a news story that was less than flattering. It described the emails as providing a “rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.” I would have hoped it was a battle over the facts of science myself. But it is what it is.

The Post says that the emails revealed the defenders of the consensus as a circle of intellectuals “eager to punish its enemies.” And it describes them actively campaigning to stop studies from being published, if those studies do not correspond with their “consensus.” In one email, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to prominent warming advocate Michael Mann, concerning some studies that contradict aspects of his own theories. Jones tells Mann: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

The Post reveals:

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes. "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

As warming skeptic, Patrick Michaels notes in the Post article, this sort of attempt to intimidate editors into refusing to publish papers contrary to the “consensus” is very troubling. Michaels said “these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers.” On the one hand the number of published papers are used against critics while the warming advocates are simultaneously working behind-the-scenes to make sure that they don’t get papers published.

In one email to Jones, Mann complains about a paper published by Climate Research. He complains that the paper “couldn’t have cleared a ‘legitimate peer review process anywhere.” But since the paper was published, in spite of Mann’s opposition to it: “That leaves only one possibility—that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board.” Mann says that the hijackers presumably include “a member of my own department.”

Mann is upset that the skeptics “achieved what they wanted—the claim of a peer-reviewed paper.” He laments that once published, “there is nothing we can do about” it now. Instead he suggests pretending that the paper was never published saying it “will be ignored by the community on the whole.”

Mann refers to the strategy of attacking skeptics on the basis of peer-reviewed papers and says that the paper in question reveals of the “danger” of that tactic. He says that the skeptics responded by a “take-over” of the journal. It strikes me as a bit paranoid to assume that the only way ones critics pass peer-review is by a plot to take over a journal.

Mann then suggests that the journal in question must be punished. He says: “So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”

Jones writes back: “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” He notes that his own organization has “a person… on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.” Jones says he tried to get von Storch to stop publishing critics: “I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere.”

In another set of emails Tom Wigley writes Jones, Mike Hulme (who we have covered in our previous post on this issue) and Timothy Carter. It appears to be about the journal edited by von Storch. Wigley says he is unsure of the “best way” way to handle the problem of critical papers getting published. He says: “Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate.’” Well, they can’t have that, can they?

Wigley says that perhaps the best method of making sure skeptics are not published “is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium of disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work.” Wigley goes further noting that it doesn’t actually matter if this is true or not. “I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about—it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.” Wigley says he get a “large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter — 50+ people.”

Wigley says he added Hulme to the discussion because Hulme previously suggested they “get board members to resign,” but Wigley said that wouldn’t work. The board members they would get to walkout would be the ones on their side and they might get replaced with skeptics. Instead, he says they “must get rid of von Storch” and says that a mass protest to the publishers, aimed at von Storch “might remove that hurdle too.”

In another exchange, Wigley writes to Mann about the Geophysical Research Letters journal, another journal that deem too unreliable for their agenda. Mann says: “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” This was over a paper the journal wanted to publish. Mann says they need to investigate and if “there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels.”

Wigley responds that “GRL had gone downhill rapidly in recent years” but says “proving bad behavior here is very difficult.” But, says that if “you think that [the editor] is in the greenhouse skeptics camps, then, if we can find documentary evidence for this, we could go through official AGU (American Geophysical Union) channels to get him ousted.”

In another exchange Graham Haughton speaks of another climate journal that Jones considered unreliable. Haughton also feels it necessary to remind Jones that academic freedom includes critics. He says that when he next sees the editor he will try to “have a quiet word with her about the way the affiliation to us is used, but the moment she is entitled to use it in the way she does.” H tells Jones, “I want to protect another academic’s freedom to be contrary and critical, even if I personally believe she is probably wrong.” (Good for Haughton.)

While some are still trying to pretend that the leaked documents mean nothing, or only that one has to be intellectually challenged to take them seriously, one of the most reliable advocates for the warming crowd realizes the evidence is very damning indeed. Left-wing columnist George Monbiot has been a staunch advocate of the warming scare and he says he and his allies have a problem.

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Monbiot’s response after this is to note that these emails alone, don’t prove the anthropogenic theory of warming as false, but then no one said they did. He then concocts absurd satirical emails that would prove that. However, he does recognize that the real emails that have been released are a major blow to the political agenda that he, and the email authors, shared. It is no longer sufficient for the apologists to claim this was merely harmless banter. It is clear that these men were trying to figure out how to apply political pressure to silence critics of their own theories and shut down debate. I repeat my claim from my previous post: this is not science at work, this is politics.

One problem with the hack/leak is the massive volume of material that has been released. More and more eyes are going through the material every day. As more and more material is exposed concerns about the leak itself will diminish with most people and concerns about the content of the material will increase.

I will try to cover more angles of this story, including emails which show that data sets, used to calculate current global temperature trends, were hidden from skeptics. In the emails they discussed that the best strategy to avoid a Freedom of Information request was to claim that they lost the data. Coincidentally, when a request for such data was made, the CRU claimed that they didn’t keep the “original raw data” and couldn’t supply it, precisely the strategy planned in the emails. I suggest this story is just beginning.

Addendum: When this was posted I did not read the comments to Monbiot's piece at the Guardian. However, it was brought to my attention that Monbiot actually posted an additional comment there which is pretty shocking. One reader commented: "By now I suggest you review your file of correspondence and articles, and figure out who you need to apologize to." What was truly shocking was Monbiot's response: "I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely."

Carrie Prejean is a child pornographer.

I am shocked. I just realized that Carrie Prejean, the pin-up girl (literally) of the Religious Righ,t is a self-confessed child pornographer!

By now it is well known that this moralistic, preachy busybody not only did raunchy pin-up photos but she also made a pornographic video tape of herself, all while she was a born-again Christian who wants to deny gay people rights because of "God's morality." Anyone know how to spell hypocrite? I doubt Carrie does.

I didn't follow the Prejean porn tape matter that closely. But, in one of the sites I read daily, there was a video of her being interviewed. She gave her typical weepy, "I'm a victim" speech and then she tried to justify her porn tape by "taking full responsibility for it" and mentioning she was 17-years-old when she made the tape for her boyfriend.

Let's ignore the fact that God's law, according to her, wouldn't allow her to be naked with a boyfriend at any age (only a husband) but what about the government's law? Under U.S. law any erotic video. of the nature that Prejean admits she made. is considered child pornography unless the performer is over the age of 18. By her own admission Prejean was under 18 years of age when she made the video.

This blog has covered the cases of numerous teens who have been arrested and convicted for child pornography for doing precisely what Prejean did. Those teens are forced to become registered sex offenders and face punishment for the rest of their lives. So, exactly why is Prejean exempt from the law that is imposed on all these other teens?

Common sense says she was not a child and the tape is not child porn. But the law doesn't rely on common sense, it relies on what politicians think they need to get reelected, not on rationality. Is Carrie Prejean exempt from the law? She admits she made the video. She admits she was under age when she did so. She admits it is pornographic. Legally she is an admitted child pornographer and, by law, ought to be on the sex offender registry as well.

But there are double standards. If she were just some oversexed high school boy taking a 3 second video of his girlfriend's breast, the prosecutors would be all over the case. She's a darling of the Religious Right. But, if the prosecutor did take her confession of being a child pornographer seriously, and did prosecute her according to the law would the Religious Right defend her? I would. But would they?

So far it appears no one, except this blogger, has noticed the fact that Prejean violated laws on child pornography. The women at The View, who were speaking to her when she made her confession, didn't seem shocked or horrifed and didn't think she was a child pornographer. The reason that no is noticing is because people are using common sense to consider the matter, not the legislation. Yet, others are selectively prosecuted under this law for doing things far less graphic than what Prejean admits doing. That Prejean's status as a sex offender is being ignored so far is an indication of exactly how out of sync our sex laws are with what the average person thinks. And it is the laws which need changing.

Photo: Carrie Prejean with her Bible, looking for a loophole.

A little more comes out about the old bigot.

In my previous post I mentioned how Pauline Howe, of England, was demanding that the city council strip gays of the right to have a rally because she found them offensive. According to the news story that ran she wrote an anti-gay letter to the city council and was visited by the police, who filed no charges. They were investigating whether a hate crime had been committed by her letter, or so we were told.

But it seems Howe intentionally tries to agitate people. She didn't merely write a letter to the council while spending her days sitting at home, sipping tea and watching the telly. The gay rally she wanted banned was one she attended. She went with the express purpose of handing antigay tirades to gay people. This sweet old lady was not so sweet after all.

Howe said she went with other "Christians" to protest "the public display of such indecency on the streets of Norwich which is so offensive to God and to many Norwich residents." She handed out anti-gay leaflets to people at the rally. So she was intentionally offensive to them. And people responded, as you might predict. But no one violated her rights. She says that the people she attacked "were in our faces with aggressive verbal abuse." In other words, the people at the rally responded to her speech with their own speech.

And this old cow then sends a letter to the city council demanding that the speech of others be restricted while her own speech be allowed to flourish. But, she entertains the delusion that she is speaking for some god.

The Christian Institute is, as expected, defending Howe's demands that others be censored because apparently Howe's "rights to free speech and religious liberty under the Human Rights Act" were being transgressed.

I would say that is the case. But I still have no sympathy for this old woman. She believes in censorship. She demands it for others while claiming free speech for herself. By her own values there are no rights to free speech. Or, does she really want to admit that she believes only Christians like herself have rights and that other people do not.

She had the right to go hand out her narrow-minded, religiously-induced hate leaflets. And the recipients of those leaflets had the right to tell her off verbally. That is freedom and that is what happened. But it was then Howe who demanded that the State step in and ban one side of the debate, and only one side.

Yet, as predicted, the fundamentalist Christian Institute is making out that Howe was the victim. And, I can assure you that other fundamentalist groups will pick up on that distortion, probably magnify it several times over, and spread the falsehood around. Keep watching the web to see if that happens.

No fool like an old fool.

Earlier today I was sitting with a couple of business associates and we were discussing a bit of everything, including the role of religion in bigotry. I asked if there were any specific group of people who had not been subjected to hatred in the name of God. It occurred to me that “God hates everyone” if those who purport to speak on behalf of this being, are correct.

There are large numbers of Muslims who say God hates Christians. Fundamentalist Christians think God is pissed off at Catholics, Jew, Mormons, gays, secularists, liberals, and an almost endless list of people. The Religious Left, which does exist, is convinced God hates capitalists, businessmen, landlords, SUV owners and countless other groups. Since there is no evidence that anyone actually speaks for this being, or that such a being even exists, this is the cheapest, easiest, most convenient way for any bigot to assert his hatred and give it respectability.

The comments earlier today started off in jest but as we discussed the matter it became clear that it would be difficult to find any identifiable collective of people that isn’t identified as deserving of God’s wrath by at least some believer, somewhere; usually large groups of believers, not just a few.

I return home this evening to read the London Telegraph and the story of a sweet-looking, tea-sipping, bigoted old fart named Pauline Howe. No doubt Howe will be portrayed by the Christianists as a victim, though I’m sure they will misreport the events completely.
Howe wrote the Norwich city council filing a complaint about “its decision to allow a gay rally in city centre.” Was the complaint something justifiable; like litter left around, noise, congestion, etc? Of course not. Howe complained before there was anything to complain about and her complaint was basically a “God-hates-fags” letter to the council. Remember she was demanding that a public rally be forbidden. She wanted to censor speech she didn’t like and wished to use state power to do so.

Her complaint was it was “shameful that this small, but vociferous lobby should be allowed such a display unwarranted by the minimal number of homosexuals.” Get that. She was upset that gays were free to have a rally. Apparently in her world minorities don’t have rights because these rights are “unwarranted” by the “minimal number.” As a libertarian, I would say a minority of one has rights and that if one person wanted to hold a “rally” that they should be allowed to do so. So, please, don’t forget that Howe was the one who first demanded the suppression of free speech.

Howe felt that gay people didn’t deserve free speech rights because of “their perverted sexual practice” which spread sexually transmitted diseases. Okay, but what sexual practice can’t spread a sexually transmitted disease? And, to whom would such diseases be spread, but to other homosexuals? Even if this were something for to worry about, how was she endangered, unless she had a tendency to fornicate with gay men?

And, according to the sweet-looking hate merchant, gays are responsible for “the downfall of every Empire.” What a sweeping, silly claim. I know some unread and ignorant Christians have tried to attribute the fall of Rome to gays, but truth be told, Rome fell after it converted to Christianity and became suppressing homosexuals. While Gibbon is often claimed to have said this, he did not do so, but he did place a considerable amount of blame on the conversion to Christianity. (See chapters 15 and 16 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Rome was tolerant of gays during its height of power but became intolerant, slipped into totalitarianism and eventually collapsed, after it converted and started trying to repress homosexuality.

And now we get back to the beginning of my comments. According to the Telegraph, Howe “argues that she is not homophobic, but was expressing her deeply held religious beliefs.” There it is, the trump card that religionists think they ought to be allowed to play to exempt themselves from any and all criticism, scrutiny or ration investigation. The truth is that many religious people believe that they can assert any claim, no matter how cruel, offensive, or vicious, and be allowed to get away with it by claiming that it comes from God.

I once sat in a church that preached the “Identity” gospel. According to the Identity movement the white race is the true nation of Israel, Jews are the sons of Satan, and blacks are the biblical “beasts of the field,” without any rights except to be slaves. Identity teachings are widespread in the Nazi, Klan and other white supremacist movements. It is a combination of the absurd “British Israelism” mixed with Nazism and racism. They claim that God hates Jews and blacks, that a race war is coming, that “white Christians” have to destroy the Jews and enslave the blacks. They do so in the name of God.

There is no exemption to scrutiny because a belief is based on a religious fantasy. The burden of proof for Miss Howe is the same as for everyone. Religion doesn’t give her a free pass to pretend that the facts are on her side. She is still required to present real evidence, not just doctrines imagined by some divine, mystic, witchdoctor or theologian. A religious assertion has no more right to a presumption of truth than any other assertion. No one gets a free pass.

Unfortunately some silly bureaucrat who read the letter reported it to the police. The police visited Howe and decided no crime had been committed. That is important to remember. Now, in my opinion, she should not have been reported or visited. Even the chief executive of a local gay organization said the report to the police was “disproportionate” and said he was “glad Norfolk police didn’t take it any further.” I have little doubt that if I Google this story in a few days some US Christian sites will be using this as an example of how gay people repress freedom of speech —although no gay person filed a complaint and the only gays involved said the police shouldn’t have done what they did. And, along the way, they will conveniently forget that Ms Howe was the one demanding state action to suppress the freedom of speech of gay people.

I personally think Howe is an old fool who lacks decency and common sense. She has not justified her positions, nor tried to do so. She attempted to initiate the suppression of freedom of speech against others and they whined loudly when it backfired and she found her own freedom of speech under potential threat. I sympathize with anyone who faces government action to prevent them from expressing an opinion but I find it hard to have very much sympathy, perhaps just a smidgen, when the person is question was openly demanding the suppression of others. Why, exactly, should Howe whine that State power threatened her freedom of speech when she clearly wants to the State to use its powers for just that purpose? If you lobby for taxes then you have no right to complain when you pay them.

To me, the lesson of Howe is not just that every hateful belief in human history has been justified by some imaginary friend in the sky. While that does seem true, there is a second lesson. Suppression of the freedom of speech of anyone can backfire and lead to the suppression of your own freedom of speech as well. Like every would-be censor Howe was demanding the censorship of others and free speech for herself.

And, if you want some humor about bigotry, try this hilarious clip. It is one of the funniest skits I've seen in a long time.

The state of Republican thinking.

I am convinced that the religious right is nuts, quite literally nuts. I don't mean mentally ill. They are not ill, they are just crazy. Here is a top add to Republican Senator Tom Coburn. This is the sort of wacky theorizing that religious lunatics use. Here is Coburn's chief of staff, Michael Schwartz, explaining to the Values Voters Summit how all erotica is inherently homosexual. Add together a heaping cup of antigay bigotry, along with a lot of big government censorship, mix in a little bit of Jesus, and this is what comes out.



For some idea of the kooky ideas of Schwartz, and his boss, read this.

Free Speech Under Assault

The scary future of Amazon.

I used to like Amazon, not love them, but at least like them. As my regular readers know, I now loathe them. I won’t go into all the reasons that I do, just accept it, I do.

Amazon is intent on controlling the book market. I still trust markets; I don’t trust Amazon. And one way they are hoping to do this is by pushing their Kindle book reader. This is sold to readers as an easy way to carry around multiple books. You download the volumes you want and pay a fee for them. You get an electronic version, but no hard copies. Sounds wonderful, unless you really do love books.

I love the power of books. They are like landmines that explode, one mind at a time. They may lie dormant for decades and suddenly it changes a life. Thinking is inherently subversive to authority and books encourage thinking. Throughout the old communist block nations people smuggled books, books helped bring down the tyranny of Marxism.

When the brave students of the White Rose penned their tracts against the evils of Nazism they disseminated printed copies of their works. The Nazis could arrest these young people, and they did. They could even kill them, and they did. What they couldn’t do was prevent the printed word from spreading. And it did.

Imagine how thrilled the Nazis would have been if they could destroy “subversive” literature with the push of a few buttons. This is the reality that we will have if Amazon’s vision of book reading in the future comes to be.

The New York Times blog mentions how this is precisely what happened. Readers had paid for, and downloaded a book. But one morning they awoke to find that all copies of the book had vanished from their Kindles. Amazon, in its typically high-handed fashion, merely said there was a problem and refunded customers their money for the book. What I understand is that there was a copyright issue with the book in question. Laudable perhaps, but still illustrative of the dangers of electronic readers.

Amazon has the power to remove books from Kindle machines remotely. You may buy the machine, you may buy the books but Amazon controls it—not you. Amazon can remove the books you think you own.

What if a book, at some time in the future, is deemed dangerous by the government? Would Amazon cave and remove that book by pushing their buttons? You bet your sweet ass they would. This is the censors dream. With just a few seconds of time, a few buttons in hand, the censors would be able to delete all the electronic versions of the book that exist. In a world of paperless books the censors could wipe out millions of books in seconds.

One thing I love about all those subversive pro-freedom books out there is that they are in physical format, that they are sitting in hundreds of thousands of homes. No one knows where they all are. No one knows who are the owners. A book might be banned but it would still circulate. Copies would be made; they would be smuggled. Regimes would still cringe in fear of the printing press. But, if Amazon wins, and the world is filled with Kindles, where all books are electronic, and where Amazon controls the Kindle, not the individual customers, then those wonderful, dangerous, magnificent, frighten books could all disappear in seconds. That ought to worry everyone.

Oh, and the book that was deleted by Amazon, George Orwell’s 1984. I kid you not.

Is porn good for America? Seems so.

Porn is good for America, good for women and a lot more fun than church. Okay, I overstate my case, but just slightly.

The Internet has brought about an explosion of porn. It has reduced the costs significantly—actually for most people they can access all the porn they want for a few cents per day.

The would-be censors, religious nutters and radical feminists, all decried porn as the incubator for sex crimes. Alas, more rational people saw porn, not as a tool for incubation, but for masturbation. The net result would be the diminution of desire not its inflammation.
There are two different sets of assumptions used in analyzing the impact of erotica on people. The censorship side claimed that porn got men “sexed up” and thus encouraged them to rape women, children, vulnerable poodles and random chipmunks. In their view individuals who viewed porn did not have their sexual desires inflamed until them watched Debbie Does Dallas or Danny Does Dallas, depending on one’s tastes in such matters. Once inflamed the porn-addict would then lurk in the dark until a victim came along.

Normally this censorship crowd would assume that man (that is all humans, not just men) was morally corrupt and inclined toward sin. This, they said, was the natural state of humanity even absent the presence of any porn. A turned ankle, or bulging crotch, was all that was needed to turn the most innocent of people into a raving sex maniac.

What these people didn’t want to do was actually appraise human sexuality accurately. Few people watch porn to get inflamed. The opposite is far more likely. Humans have sexual desires that are largely driven by biology. Pornography is used as substitute for the real thing. Instead of going out hunting for a sexual partner the horny viewer can take matters in hand.

Men, more so than women, tend to find visual depictions of sex exciting. And men, more so than women, tend to be involved with real sex crimes—by which I mean the violation of the rights of another person, not merely violating some piece of Puritanical legislation. If pornography acts as a substitute then wide access to porn should reduce the number of sex crimes over what they would have been in a regime of censorship.

Some years ago the studies I read on sex crimes indicated that men guilty of serious sex crimes had less exposure to pornography than other men, saw the porn much later in life, and tended to have very conservative values in regards to sex. I joked at the time that the government, instead of banning pornography, should be disseminating it for free. Well, as usual, the market beat the government to the task.

The Internet has made porn virtually free of charge. Whatever you want you can find and you can indulge until your blow-up sheep explodes. The net also meant that individuals, who previously could not afford or access pornography, now had it at hand instantly. This includes some of the horniest members of our society, who politicians had previously banned from the material, adolescent males. The randy teen at home, who couldn’t quite hide his magazines where mother wouldn’t find them, discovered that the Internet meant he didn’t have to store anything in view. And, with encryption protecting his stash of erotica from mother, his solitary vice could remain undiscovered.

We do know that since the rise of Internet pornography the level of sexual violence has declined significantly. This would seem to indicate that the masturbation theory was more correct than the incubation theory. But that need not be the case. There could be other factors involved. Prof. Todd Kendall, at Clemson University, has authored a paper exploring the role of the Internet in regards to rape rates. He says, of his study, “this paper considers a major decline in the price of such materials, brought about by the growth of the world wide web, and of the graphical browsers used to access it. Using state-level panel data on the rise of the Internet, I find that Internet access appears to be a substitute for rape. Specifically, the results suggest that a 10
percentage point increase in Internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape
victimization of around 7.3%.”

Kendall says that his study showed:

• States that adopted Internet usage quicker saw greater reductions in rape rates than states that didn’t.

• This reduction is heaviest in states “with a higher ratio of male to female population, suggesting that men are substituting pornography for rape when potential mates are in low supply.”

• The reduction remains even when “controlling for a wide variety of other factors.”

• The impact of the net on other crimes is non-existent. That is net usage doesn’t reduce property crimes or violence but it does reduce sex crimes.

• He found “a significant negative effect of internet access on rape arrest rates among men ages 15-19—a group for whom pornography was most restricted before the Internet. “

• He found evidence “between internet adoption and several other measures of sexuality, including teen birth rates, prostitution arrests, marriage and divorce rates, and HIV transmission.”

We have to understand that the Internet led to a sexual explosion—so to speak. Kendall writes:

By many accounts, pornography was crucial in the development of the Internet,
fueling demand for streaming video and credit card acceptance applications. Due to the decentralized nature of the internet, definitive statistics on internet content are necessarily error-prone. However, there is no doubt that the rise of the internet has led to significant increases in the consumption of pornography in the U.S. By October, 2003, Nielsen Net Ratings surveys indicated that one in four internet users admitted to accessing an adult web site within the month, spending an average of 74 minutes on such sites, and these figures do not include time spent on “amateur” porn sites nor downloads from peer-to-peer services, such as Kazaa, on which 73% of all movie searches in a recent survey were for porno films. According to Ropelato (2006), 12% of all internet websites, 25% of all search engine requests, and 35% of all peer-to-peer downloads are pornographic.

This explosion is most clearly seen among teens. Prior to the Internet it was far more difficult for teens to view sexually explicit material. Adults had no such problems. They could purchase the material rather easily. But teens could not. Kendall explains:

While the fall in the pecuniary price of pornography due to the internet may have been constant across all groups of users, the fall in the non-pecuniary price has likely been highest among the young, who typically live with their parents. Before the arrival of the internet, these consumers’ access to, and ability to discreetly store, sexually explicit materials was thus highly restricted. The privacy in consumption and storage allowed by electronic distribution increased the availability of pornography to younger age groups significantly. According to the internet traffic measuring service comScore, 70% of 18 to 24 year-old men visit adult sites each month. Statistics from Ropelato (2006) find that the 12-17 age group is the largest demographic consumer of internet pornography, and that 80% of 15-17 year olds admit to multiple exposures to hard-core pornography on the internet. By comparison, in most states, children under age 18 are prohibited from entering adult film houses or renting pornographic videos.

This is the nightmare scenario of the prudes and puritans. They predicted that widespread porn access by adolescents would lead to an explosion in teen pregnancy, increased abortion rates, higher VD rates, etc. In truth, as teens have become more adept at accessing pornography the reverse has happened. Teen pregnancy is down, abortion is down and VD rates are down. Teens today are more sexually active when it comes to porn and masturbation and less active when it comes to sex with others. Pornography did not increase teen sex, at least not sex with other people. It delayed sexual experimentation.

The Internet has changed sexual attitudes and sexual behavior. I suggest that young people today are more liberal (in all senses of the word) in regards to sex. But they are more conservative in their physical expression of sexuality. They may send each other nude photos or masturbation videos but they are less likely to actually have sex. They are using virtual sexuality as a substitute for real life sexual encounters. And that means lower rape rates, lower pregnancy rates, and lower VD rates.
Popular website for teens with webcams are well known as places where teens put on “private” sex shows for others. Sites that cater to adults are forced to constantly police their web services because adolescents are frequently sneaking onto the site and putting on sex shows for the entire world to see. As shocking as that might be for many adults they should consider that these teens are often using this as a substitute for actual sex. There is a trade off involved. Even teen males have limits to the number of orgasms they can seek in a day. And an orgasm achieved one-way means they are less likely to seek the same thing another way.

Kendall’s study backs up what numerous other studies have shown. Access to erotica reduces sexual crimes. The presence of pornography means that rape is less likely, not more likely. While Kendall doesn’t discuss “sexting” per se I have to note that the same theory, applied to “sexting,” would indicate that the practice makes teens less likely to have sex with another person not more. Sexting is where teens send each other erotic photos or videos of themselves.

The impact of the new technology on sexuality is interesting, especially for teens who grew up with it. I would argue that the following appears to be true:

1. Teens are more liberal in attitudes about sex today than before.
2. Teens are less likely to have physical sex with another person today than before.
3. But teens are also more likely to engage in technologically induced masturbation. Less sex doesn’t mean fewer orgasms.

The evidence calls into question the idea that censorship helps reduce sex crimes. Erotica, if it were a substitute for actual sex, would actually reduce sex crimes. Censorship, by removing the substitute, would thus encourage the very crimes that it was meant to prevent. Think about it.