SanityProject

Speech limits on your property

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics SanityProject on by

The First Amendment applies only to governments. You are free to banish people from your property if you don’t like what they say, provided the law otherwise allows it. That doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea, though.

A few years ago, some stores posted announcements that they’d banish customers who expressed racist ideas. This was a bad idea, and it’s rare today. Untrained employees would have to eavesdrop on conversations, and they could easily misunderstand what they overheard. And once you start going down that road, is there any reason to stop with just one idea? Banning people for expressing socialist ideas would make as much (or little) sense. Best not to try to police people’s opinions. People can still be kicked out for being disruptive or harassing people, regardless of what opinions motivate them. It’s bad business to 86 customers for their ideas.

In your home, you have more leeway, but courtesy imposes some limits. If someone expressed ideas I strongly objected to, I might explain why I thought they were wrong, or I might say that I don’t want to have that discussion here. If the visitor persisted, I might have to say, “Drop it or take it outside,” and follow through if necessary. Be careful about debating such people. A well-prepared person with lots of memorized arguments can often out-debate a more reasonable person who doesn’t have a stock of comebacks and citations at hand.

I’d object less strongly to abstract ideas than to proposals for violence. Anyone who advocates direct violence except for defensive purposes will be lucky to get a warning from me. Supporting racial pseudo-science in the abstract would annoy me, but I’d be more polite about it.

On the Internet, I can block, mute, or ignore people who say disgusting things. I make frequent use of this option, though I try to remember that letting them see what I say may lead them to better thinking. My own peace of mind has to come first, though.

Sloppy rhetoric kills credibility 5

This entry was posted in Censorship and tagged books censorship liberty New Hampshire SanityProject on by

The ACLU of New Hampshire has taken a position against New Hampshire SB 434, which it characterizes as “a bill to create avenues to ban books in New Hampshire.” As the word “ban” is normally understood in the legal sense, it means to categorically prohibit. A banned book is one that it’s illegal to own or distribute. The bill may be a bad one, but that’s not what it would do.
Bluesky screenshot from ACLU of New Hampshire

Governor Ayotte has vetoed the bill, so the issue is effectively dead for now. An override is possible but unlikely. What I’m writing about here is how the NH ACLU framed the issue.

The bill would have created a mechanism by which parents or guardians can challenge a book that’s available in a public school as “obscene and harmful to minors.” Successfully challenged books would not be “banned in New Hampshire”; anyone could still get them through the usual markets. Arguably it makes it too easy to challenge books based on little or no knowledge of their content, but schools already can and do exclude books. In most cases, it’s just that they can’t get every book that’s in print, but sometimes it’s because the books are badly written garbage. If intentionally excluding a book is “banning,” then every school already “bans” books.

There’s legitimate concern that making challenges easier would lead to the exclusion of books that have real value. But the point is not that schools should indiscriminately carry any and all books, or that any policy that excludes some books “bans” them.

In her veto statement, Ayotte correctly framed the issue as one of policy: “As a parent, I understand and appreciate the concerns parents have about their children being exposed to age-inappropriate or objectionable materials in schools. At the same time, existing New Hampshire law already requires school districts to adopt a policy allowing an exception to specific course material based on a parent’s determination that the material is objectionable.”

In its call for action, the NH ACLU claimed, “The right to free expression includes the freedom to read whatever we choose. Yet our state government is attempting to make it easier to ban books right here in New Hampshire.” You have the right to read whatever you choose, but not the right to get it for free. It isn’t “banning” to say you have to pay for something out of your own pocket.

How schools select books is an important issue. A challenge procedure that encourages moral panics could be very bad, pushing schools into carrying only the safest books. But it’s a policy issue, not a rights issue. The real threats to free expression are growing: intimidation and even arrests of people who criticize officials, groundless lawsuits against news sources backed by threats of executive action, proposals for Internet censorship. If people who are already skeptical see library policies called “book bans,” they won’t pay as much attention to the real dangers to liberty.

There has been real book banning in the United States. The Comstock Act criminalized mailing “obscene” material, such as information on birth control. It’s never been repealed, though court rulings have greatly narrowed it. The owners of a bookstore in San Francisco were arrested and prosecuted for carrying Howl and Other Poems by Allan Ginsberg, eventually winning a landmark case. Such prosecution is rare today, but it could come back.

It’s especially bad when a chapter of the ACLU trivializes the concept. When individuals, even well-known ones, abuse the language, it mostly reflects on them personally. When a civil liberties organization does it, it damages the cause of civil liberties.

Tribalist thinking

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology racism SanityProject on by

Tribal psychology, the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” goes back to early human history. It gets its name because in earlier times, survival required loyalty to the tribe and suspicion of outsiders. In modern society, people of all kinds mix, but people still feel uncomfortable about those who are different from them. Sometimes they construct differences where there’s no real issue. Fan groups are a mostly harmless example. Red Sox fans hate the Yankees and Yankees fans hate the Red Sox, but it’s usually in fun. Science fiction fans disparage non-fans as “mundanes,” usually as a joke but sometimes with real disdain.

Problems arise when people use tribalist inclinations to treat outsiders as inferior or evil. That course can lead to violence, systemic discrimination, and legal persecution. It hurts members of the in-group as well, giving them fewer opportunities for valuable interactions and limiting them economically. It’s the antithesis of the liberal worldview, the idea that people should be regarded on their individual merits and have certain rights regardless of who they are.

People sometimes try to make sense of tribalism by reducing it to a single cause. Racism is an especially nasty form of it, but it’s only one of the foundations. Many on the left treat it as humanity’s Original Sin and ascribe all kinds of group hostility to racial attitudes, but it’s just one of the factors. Its influence has declined from past centuries. When it was acceptable, people used it to disparage groups that looked different. Today it’s less acceptable, so people define their groups in other ways.

Nationalism rose as a force in the nineteenth century, and it’s powerful today. Hostility based on foreignness is often considered acceptable, and many people have ferocious disdain for immigrants. People are often hostile to those with a different language or accent. Religion isn’t as powerful a factor as it was when you could be executed for heresy, but there’s a widespread view that (Evangelical) Christianity should get preferential legal status, and some countries still enforce state religions.

Irrational rage is useful for promoting hostility, the more irrational and enraged the better. This seems strange but makes historical sense. If an invading tribe posed a threat, the leaders had to stir the men up to fight. It isn’t easy to get calm, clear-headed people to march against people who want to kill them. The leaders of both sides needed fury to beat the other side. Today fury stirs people up even if they aren’t in combat. An enraged crowd is also good for electing candidates and forming mass protests.

It’s the “us vs. them” thinking which is at the core. The specifics of who’s “us” and who’s “them” vary with the fashions.

Alternate mental worlds 4

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

On Nextdoor I often run into MAGA thinking, which I need to look at occasionally in order to understand it. These people seem to inhabit an alternate reality in their minds. They think that the mainstream news coverage of Trump, ICE, immigration, and similar topics is fictional. The fantasy extends to their neighbors, claiming that all of us who attend protests against the government’s outrages are paid to go.

I find myself bouncing among different explanations for them. Are they brainwashed by podcasters? Has journalism gotten so bad that many people completely disbelieve the news? Do they lie to show off to their peer group? Is it to con everyone else? Have they surrendered their personal identity, and with it any concept of truth and falsehood?

There are other groups that show similar patterns. On the left side, there are the people who claim as established fact that Trump has sexually abused children. When Biden announced the novel economic theory that inflation is caused by greed rather than government policies, a lot of people quickly adopted it. Some groups, like flat Earthers, are weirder but less harmful. Some flat Earthers spin elaborate arguments that supposedly prove our world is pizza-shaped, even though hiding that “fact” would require a massive conspiracy. Other people believe that the position of stars in the sky when we’re born has a significant influence on our lives.

Most of these people seem to live otherwise normal lives, though I wonder if flat Earthers ever fly to other continents or use satellite-based devices. MAGAs, though, have a more thorough alternate reality. They believe that the election results and the reports of MAGA brutality are fictions delivered by a vast conspiracy. They think the tens of thousands of people across the country engaging in protests are all getting paid by George Soros. If they’re consistent, they’d have to think that whole court documents ruling against improper prosecution are being forged and posted. It’s a cult mindset, and the White Queen is a realist by comparison.

All of these groups have a worldview to which facts are required to conform. They’d rather throw out mountains of evidence than discard their belief. Maybe we can imagine what this is like by thinking what we’d do if something contrary to the normal, common-sense, scientific worldview happened. Suppose the events of Ghostbusters really occurred and a giant marshmallow man rampaged through the streets of New York while a hole opened in the sky. Most of us would brush it off as a hoax. Even reporting and videos by a major news outlet would leave me skeptical.

Having doubts would be reasonable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Members of these groups just have different ideas of what’s “extraordinary.” For flat Earthers, it’s extraordinary for the world to be round. For MAGAs, it’s extraordinary that immigrants who have fallen behind on their paperwork or have seen their status arbitrarily revoked might not be killers and rapists. How they got to that state of mind is the harder question.

I’d best leave that question for another post, or for someone else to answer.

Update: Aaron Ross Powell posted a piece on the same day as this article, on treating history as a kind of fannish lore. This part struck me: “They enjoy feeling like the worldbuilding they’ve done is coherent, and they hate the incoherence introduced by critical examination or diverse perspectives. It’s not about veracity.” An invented world can feel more consistent than reality, because people are often inconsistent. Myths often are simple and neat, the way we wish the truth would be.

The coming of the Long Night 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged liberty SanityProject on by

Things are getting worse in America, and there’s no reversal in sight. As the 2026 election gets closer, it’s increasingly clear that the Democratic Party has no interest in restoring Constitutional limits and checks and balances. They’ve entered a gerrymandering race with the Republicans. Hakeem Jeffries is reassuring the public that impeachment will not be his top priority if the Democrats gain a majority in the House. Democratic candidates are working to buy votes with promises to spend money and tax somebody else. The hope was always thin at best. The Republicans once claimed to favor limited government; the Democrats never have, and they don’t know how to start now.

There’s been a lot of anger at Trump from the general public, but it’s unfocused. There’s been strong and sustained outrage at ICE, but not as much at the illegal and unprovoked war against Iran or the murderous attacks on unarmed boats. It’s mixed with unproven accusations of pedophilia and repeated reminders that he was convicted for the relatively minor crime of disguising hush money as legal expenses. The “No Kings” protests make the news and then fade away. In spite of the big rallies, there isn’t a philosophically focused movement to rein in the executive branch and remove the Trump gang from power. Doing that would mean reversing a trend that started long before Trump’s presidency.

Freedom is always partial and unstable, but we’re heading into an age where corruption and intimidation are the norm. Power will be concentrated in the executive branch, and regardless of which party controls it, it will govern by decree. Congress has become increasingly helpless for decades, and it will get worse. The future looks like rule by unconstitutional monarchs, whether one party gets a stranglehold on the office or not.

Things have been this bad before, usually during wartime. The worst years for freedom came under Woodrow Wilson, when people got long prison sentences for opposing US participation in World War I or even for making a movie about the American Revolution. It could get that bad again.

It shouldn’t have been hard to build a coalition that a broad majority of Americans would support. Just say that we should forget our differences long enough to step away from the precipice. But for too many, Trump is just an opportunity for partisan politics. We’ve missed the chance.

It doesn’t mean we should give up. It means we have to focus on the long-term battle for restoring liberal ideals. (Once again, by “liberal” I mean the principles of a free and open society, not the political left.) It means convincing people that freedom is better than authoritarianism, reason is better than raving, principled action is better than pragmatism. It means keeping the high ground and encouraging the best we see in people.

I’m over 70, and I may not live long enough to see a resurgence of freedom and justice in the US, but I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life in despair. I can still work for that resurgence and try to mitigate some part of the descent. Mob thinking and rage are powerful in the short term, but in the longer view, reason is stronger than madness, freedom is stronger than tyranny, and truth is stronger than lies.