FedEx has cancelled the bizarre customs charge for a book that I purchased. I’ve updated my earlier post.
The Sanity Project
The special nastiness of the left 1
There’s no shortage of nastiness from either the left or the right these days, but it’s always seemed to me that the flavor coming from the left has something special, which is especially good at driving people away. This is separate from whether their aims are a greater threat. What I see a kind of elitism. What I’m saying here is based on my own impressions, not systematic study. Although the attitudes I’m discussing are elitist, I’m talking about ordinary people, not ones in high positions.
A lot of people on the left can be pleasant to deal with. The points I’m making here don’t apply to them all, by any means. It just doesn’t take a lot to make a lasting bad impression. I grant that if I were Mexican, Arabic, or trans, I’d experience vastly more hostility from the right.
Elitism, like populism, is tricky to identify. We all think we’re better than other people. Elitism is more than that; it’s an attitude of inherent superiority. It divides the world into the virtuous few and the despicable outsiders, and it polices its own members.
This attitude is the opposite of the populism I discussed last time. It’s manifested in attitudes of superiority to the masses. When people act this way, they’re effectively saying no one else is worthy to talk with them. However, both take a static view of people; everyone is a certain way and can’t (or had better not) change. People on the left often boast that “everyone is welcome” among them, yet in practice they have little tolerance for deviant ideas. The left and right can both come down hard on full-blown opposition, but people on the right are less likely to denounce people for limited disagreement.
Many throw accusations of “racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi” around as freely as Joe McCarthy issued accusations of Communism. Some use the threat to keep people in line. One person threatened that people would start calling me racist if I disagreed with a proposal of hers, and she admitted the accusation would be false. Others have skipped that step and gone straight to the accusation.
People of this type like to build accusations out of nothing. The word “Gypsy” used to be commonly applied to the ethnic group now generally called Roma. It may not have been the best choice, but most people who used the term didn’t intend it as an insult any more than “Mexican” or “Chinese” is an insult. However, the notion that it was a nasty slur caught on. I recall a singer who used to have a song in her repertoire about “gypsies.” One day she came out and apologized in the most abject terms for having ever sung it. I know enough about both her and the song to know she meant nothing derogatory about it. She must have been threatened with ferocious denunciation if she didn’t get down on her knees.
I wrote a few years ago about how SFWA smeared a prominent writer by claiming she used an unspecified “racial slur.” The word she used, it eventually came out, was “colored.” Does SFWA claim that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) engages in racial smears on all its letterheads?
Giving people the benefit of the doubt and letting others defend them against accusations are basic principles of fairness. Sometimes, though, they’re unpopular ideas. A Mastodon site still bans defending people against accusations, even if they’re just “devil’s advocate” arguments. In that respect, the site is less tolerant than the medieval Catholic Church. Access to what others are saying isn’t always popular; a popular Mastodon client “rickrolls” attempts to access servers that the developers disapprove of.
Conservatives have sometimes reached out to libertarians, while the left has more often been fiercely hostile. This helps to explain why so many self-proclaimed “libertarians” have taken Trump’s side. Supporting Trump is dumb, but was it really necessary to drive us away?
In a sane society, the MAGA movement would be denounced almost everywhere, and the politicians who have pinned their careers to it wouldn’t be comfortable showing their faces in public. But that would require people who disagree on many things to agree that the current situation is so bad we need to put our differences aside for a while. Instead, there’s often a sense on the left that their purity comes above all else and anyone who isn’t fully with them deserves denunciation. That goes a long way to account for where we are.
Flavors of populism
Nailing down populism is difficult. Merriam-Webster says it’s “a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment.” The idea that “the people” should rule sounds left-wing, but we tend to think of populism as right-wing. It sounds like another way of saying “pro-democracy,” but that doesn’t get to its core.
Cas Mudde’s idea hits the target better. It’s as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps, the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite.” The elite isn’t necessarily the party in control of the government. The MAGA movement is populist, even though Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. What it sees as the corrupt elite is the academic institutions, the news media, the entertainment industry, all those who deal with information on a large scale. The “purity” of the people also plays an important role; immigrants and children of immigrants don’t count, at least until they’ve undergone a purification process of many years.
Another form of populism in the US comes from the left. It emphasizes “the people” above all else, stressing the first three words of the Constitution rather than the “inalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence. It sees the elite establishment as one of wealth, often claiming an “oligarchy” runs the country while the president and Congress are just their pawns.
Populism is opposed to liberalism because it takes the Will of the People (or what it claims is their will) as the highest standard. People have no rights that the People can’t legitimately take away. When populists succeed, they establish their own ruling elite, directing the economy, and above all controlling information. It’s called “socialism” or “fascism” depending on which side runs it, but there’s little difference. It’s almost always illiberal because it places the popular will ahead of individual rights. Liberal democracy regards the democratic process as a tool for keeping any single faction from dominating the government and suppressing minorities; populist democracy treats the will of the “pure people” as an end in itself, entitled to stomp on outsiders and minorities.
In principle, populists should yield if they think the majority opposes them. In practice, they think the majority always supports what they want. We’re all inclined to overestimate the number of people who agree with us, because we talk to such people so often. Populist leaders, though, need to shape the popular will to match their own. This means using their power to promote their views and suppress opposing ones. Populists are rarely big on free expression for anyone but themselves.
Today we’re caught in a battle between the left populists and right populists, and the liberal alternative often has a hard time getting heard. This doesn’t bode well if either side ultimately gains full power.
A customs surprise 1
Update, July 30, 2026: I just got a past due notice from FedEx, so I may not be out of the woods yet. Hopefully it’s just notifications lagging behind resolutions.
Update, July 28, 2026: Happy ending! FedEx cancelled the charge without requiring me to agree to an outrageous processing fee.
Back in June, a friend mentioned interest in a limited-edition book called 8 Missions in Ukraine but said she wasn’t planning to order it. Ukraine is an interest of hers, so I decided to order the book for her from Rehi. It arrived in a few days, and she got the book. Then, just last week, I got an invoice from FedEx for $18.50 in customs fees. I couldn’t figure out what I was being billed for, so I wrote to their dispute address. I got a response a couple of days later with more documents, letting me figure out it was that book purchase.
Just a few problems. Rehi hadn’t told me I was ordering from outside the US or would be subject to customs charges. According to the documentation, it was shipped from Estonia. Second, I thought books weren’t subject to customs. Not long before that, I ordered Walter Moers’ novel Qwert from the UK, and so far no one’s charged me customs for that. Third, $18.50 is over 50% of the price of the book! Are customs fees really that high? That seems exorbitant even for Trump.
I’m trying to get this straightened out. An Internet search shows I’m far from the only person being billed for surprise customs fees, and some of the reports predate last year’s tariff blitz.
Update, July 20:
Just this morning, I got a followup reply from Fedex.
Dear Valued FedEx Customer,
Thank you for contacting FedEx Disputes.
Our records show that the duty amount in question is less than $20.00.
If you wish to proceed with an entry correction, please note this may be subject to a $90-$150 processing fee for correction US Customs & Border Protection if deemed customer caused (No additional fee may apply if it a FedEx/customs cause)
Kindly confirm whether you would like to continue with the correction process under these terms.
Seriously. It could cost me $150 to get a charge of $18.50 removed. I’m better off just refusing to pay.
The shifting meaning of “enslave”
If you’ve done much reading on the Internet about slavery and abolitionism, you must have noticed that a lot of writers and websites avoid the word “slave.” They prefer expressions like “enslaved person.” The idea seems to be to remind people that slavery is an externally imposed condition and, at least in principle, is always subject to change. That’s understandable, even if it seems clumsy. Are there other nouns of status that people are replacing with phrases for similar reasons? We still speak of “prisoners,” “servants,” and “refugees” without circumlocution. Maybe there’s less of a tendency to treat those conditions as permanent.
The phrasing has had an unfortunate side effect, though. The word “enslave,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “to force into or as if into slavery.” It’s now widely used to mean “to hold in slavery.” Dictionary.com gives the additional meaning of “to hold (someone) in slavery or bondage.” Bringing a person into slavery is a more active evil than holding someone in slavery, and the distinction is worth keeping. When a change in usage becomes widespread, there’s no stopping it, but sometimes the language is poorer for it. This is shaping up to be one of those cases. I expect that Merriam-Webster will soon add the new definition, and the watering down of the word will be official.
Nitpick on top of the nitpick: You can argue that when slaves had children and their masters registered the children as property, that was “enslaving” in the proper sense. It hasn’t been automatic through US history that children of slaves were slaves. If we accept that people are born with the right to be free, then treating a newborn as a new slave is an act of enslavement.
Tangentially related: I don’t say that people “own” slaves. The basis of all property is that people own themselves. People can force others to do things, but they can’t have ownership rights to them, and any law that claims otherwise is based on a falsehood.