Constitutional Liberty and Marijuana

     I have recently been pondering the obstacles in the path to legalization of marijuana, and in particular the fact that Canada and the United States are both signatories to international treaties such as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 which oblige them to treat cannabis as proscribed substances. In other words, it's not simply a matter of repealing national laws; countries are also bound by international law, which isn't subject to a simple vote in Parliament or Congress.

     An argument occurred to me the other day, though: what if it turns out that the laws criminalizing marijuana are themselves unconstitutional? Can international treaties override national constitutions? I reflected for only a moment before realizing: no, of course they can't. The authority of Canada's government derives entirely from the Constitution Act; the government cannot be obliged by treaty to exercise a power it does not have.
     (But the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs predates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by 21 years; at the time of the Convention, did Parliament have the authority to enact these laws, you may ask? Well, sure. But plenty of laws which were perfectly constitutional when they were passed have been struck down or modified by the appearance of the Charter, so that's not necessarily an issue. It might be a bit more of a problem internationally, if it is felt that any time a country wants out of a treaty it can just amend its constitution, but not all countries can easily do that; both Canada and the U.S. have enormous political and procedural obstacles to any amendment.)

     So I went to look it up. Not surprisingly, the constitutionality of marijuana laws has been addressed by Canadian courts, most directly in a pair of related Supreme Court cases called R. v. Malmo-Levine; R. v. Caine. And I have to say, I'm actually rather disappointed in the court's discussion of the s.7 Charter right to liberty, because they come so very close to getting it right.
     They talk about the sort of thing that s.7 is meant to protect, and end up speaking of "the right to an irreduceable sphere of personal autonomy wherein individuals may make inherently private choices free from state interference." And I think this is a fine way to speak of liberty, except that they then go on to say "the Constitution cannot be stretched to afford protection to whatever activity an individual chooses to defined as central to his or her lifestyle".

     But I suggest that this is exactly what liberty is all about: the autonomy to define for oneself what  activities or choices matter. The precise minutiae of what one chooses are not the subject of liberty; liberty exists when one is free to choose. In concluding that "[t]here is no free-standing constitutional right to smoke pot for recreational purposes", the court echoes the American case of Bowers v. Hardwick in which Justice Byron White infamously denied "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy".
     Of course there is no such specific right. There is also no constitutional right to eat ice cream or mow your lawn or pick your nose or to wear a sombrero while taking a shower. Very, very few of the specific ways we can exercise our liberty are articulated as specific rights, and those usually show up elsewhere in the Charter or the U.S. Bill of Rights: Freedom of speech, the press, religion, assembly, etc. But this is just what liberty means: that you are the one who decides how you spend your limited time on this planet.
     I often say that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an improvement over the U.S. Bill of Rights in some ways, which it ought to be since we've had a couple of centuries to watch how the latter gets into trouble. In particular, I think that the unambiguous and absolutist text of the Bill of Rights creates unnecessary conflict. The 1st Amendment states that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, which sounds terrific until you realize that Congress kind of has to be able to abridge some freedom of speech. But in the U.S. they tend to get around this by pretending that some forms of speech aren't really speech. Fighting words, for example, or obscenity, are excluded by a kind of fiction that real speech says something "worthwhile". In Canada, however, we have s.1 of the Charter, which guarantees the rights of the Charter "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." So, instead of pretending that, for example, a law against uttering death threats doesn't violate "real" speech, we just admit it: Yeah, you bet we're going to violate your freedom of speech, but we have to if we're going to maintain a free and democratic society. And we have the Oakes test, a four-part inquiry that courts use to decide whether or not a violation of a Charter right is in fact justified in a free and democratic society. (This is why I was disappointed with the Court's finding that there is no charter right to recreational marijuana; such an answer might have been appropriate in the U.S., where they don't have an equivalent to our s.1, but here there's really no excuse.)
   
     Perhaps the court fears that if it were to recognize that every law infringes on liberty, every law anyone found inconvenient would suddenly be challenged as unconstitutional.  I do not believe this is likely, because there already exist legal principles to exclude most such litigation. Most statutes and regulations, after all, are not the wholesale imposition of limits on our freedom generally, but rather policy choices on which way our freedom (which would be unavoidably limited in any event) is to be limited. For example, in practice, even in the absence of official state regulation, a convention would almost certainly emerge as to which side of the road people would habitually drive, so as to avoid collisions; passing a law that formalizes a standard and makes it universal is not so much The Man telling us what we can and can't do, but Parliament codifying what is essentially a private tort right. Along similar lines, the Crown is obliged to make rules governing the effective stewardship of our collectively owned and managed assets; it is clear that our individual liberty to manage some of these things would be impractical to the point of impossibility if we were to try to subdivide them, so any complaints about an infringement of liberty by such laws can be dismissed by pointing to the fact that one still has a democratic (and arguably more effective) way to exercise the liberty that is putatively infringed.

     But yes, there will be some laws that actually are challenged on precisely this liberty basis, laws like the prohibition on recreational marijuana, or indeed on homosexual acts. And to that I say, that is exactly the sort of case in which infringements on liberty ought to be justified under s.1 and stuck down if they cannot. If you pass a law that infringes someone's liberty to engage in some activity or other for no apparent reason other than that a majority of the population disapproves of it, well, then, yes you do need to provide your s.1 justification! That's kind of the whole point.
     Now, in Malmo-Levine, the court only went so far as to establish that, since some people are harmed by the use of marijuana, it is open to Parliament to decide how to deal with that harm, and prohibiting its possession for recreational use is a valid option. That's not necessarily wrong, so far as it goes. But I do rather wish that, instead of simply concluding that there is no s.7 liberty interest at stake, they recognized that yeah, the law actually does violate liberty, and proceeded to the s.1 analysis.

     I'm not going to do a full application of the Oakes test here, just a cursory run-through to give you the idea of how it works. If it were actually before a real court, they might well weight factors differently and have different evidence, so this is not an actual legal opinion on whether or not the Canadian prohibition on recreational marijuana is unconstitutional. Disclaimers apply.

     The Oakes test asks first: Is the impugned law aimed at a pressing and substantial objective? That is, if you're going to violate a Charter right, you'd better have a pretty good reason, and not just any reason will do. Remember that s.1 requires that an infringment be justified in the context of a free and democratic society, so that pressing and substantial objective should be understood in that context. In Malmo-Levine, the court assumed that the purpose of marijuana laws was to prevent harm to both users of marijuana and innocent passers-by who might be put at risk by stoners losing control. Admittedly, our perceptions of what marijuana does to people have changed a lot since Reefer Madness, but arguably protecting people from dangerous drugs would qualify as a pressing and substantial objective.
     The next step is to ask if there is a rational connection between the impugned law and the objective. It's not enough to scream "Dear God, won't someone think of the children!" if you can't establish that your law might somehow plausibly actually protect the children. On the face of it, banning a dangerous drug does seem rationally connected to the goal of protecting people from it, so the law might well pass this step, too. Except, of course, that our perceptions of the effects of marijuana have changed considerably, to the point where we might meaningfully ask "Yeah, I agree we need to protect people from dangerous drugs, but how does banning a non-dangerous drug like marijuana actually help with this?"
     The third step of the Oakes test is mimimal intrusiveness: Okay, given that we may actually need to violate a Charter right to achieve the pressing and substantial objective, does the law here violate that right more than it has to? Is there an obvious way we could reduce the infringement and still achieve the objective? In the case of marijuana, we might notice that the people at greatest risk of harm from the drug are adolescents and young adults, whose brains are still developing, and argue that we could protect such people just as effectively by putting age limits on the prohibition, rather than just banning it wholesale. We do this with alcohol already. So perhaps the current law might not actually pass the minimal intrusiveness test.
     Finally, the last step is the proportionality test: Even if we're rationally trying to address a pressing and substantial objective by the least intrusive means possible, are we still doing more harm than good? That is, is the amount of harm we're preventing by the impugned law worth the sacrifice in liberty? And here, I think, is where not just marijuana laws but the entire War on Drugs runs into profound difficulty, because the harm done there is staggering, in part because it suffers from its own addictive feedback loop.

     Still, my purpose in this post isn't really to argue that marijuana should be decriminalized. It's rather to suggest that the courts ought to take seriously this idea that s.7 protects liberty generally, and it is not for the courts to decide which exercise of personal autonomy counts as important enough to warrant protection; the mere fact that a law cuts off an option that a person would otherwise have been able to exercise should be enough to engage the Charter right to liberty. In most cases, the law will easily survive the s.1 analysis, but if it doesn't, shouldn't it actually be struck down anyway?

More Pseudolegal Nonsense that drives me insane

     I've received this image in my Facebook feed a few times now, so it's passed my unofficial threshhold for debunking it on my blog.

The text reads (for the benefit of the search engines):

     "DO YOU KNOW WHY I AM STOPPING YOU?"
"Well officer... a crime requires an injured party. Seeing as there isn't one, I can assume you're attempting to manufacture my consent to a contract with the state's corporate policy in order to generate revenue as part of a racketeering scam."

     There is just so, so much wrong in this to address, but the first thing I want to point out is the smug smarty-pants big words tactic, to make it sound like the author knows what she's talking about. Now, I have no problem with people using big words. But here's the key to effective, honest writing: only use words that help you to be understood by your reader. Big words can do that, if you're writing for an audience who actually understands those words and the big words are clearer or more precise than simple common words, but if they have to be used correctly. 

     Take, for example, the phrase "manufacture my consent". That will probably ring a few bells as people recognize the title of a book by Noam Chomsky. Oooh, how learned and erudite this person must be, citing Chomsky! Except that Chomsky's book was about the role of mass media as a propaganda institution; this is a traffic stop, a one-on-one interaction between a police officer and a driver that has nothing to do at all with mass media. Ironically, the meme itself is much closer to an instance of propaganda.

     This is a clear sign that the smartass driver in the meme really doesn't actually know what these words mean, and is using them more for their authoritative sound than for any actual attempt at explanation.

     So here's what some of the words actually do mean. 

     Crime: Actually, crime does not require "an injured party". You're thinking of a tort. Tort law is concerned with correcting private wrongs, where a defendant's misdeed causes some kind of harm to a plaintiff. Notably, the police will usually not pull you over for committing a tort; it's up to the injured party to sue you to recover damages. And in tort, it's all about compensation, not punishment; the plaintiff shouldn't be the one to pay the price for the defendant's actions. 

     Crime doesn't actually require an injured party, at least not in the way we usually think of a plaintiff. This is pretty obvious when you consider the crime of murder: a dead person cannot sue, because, well, dead. At law, a dead person is not a person at all, and has no interests. (Their family can sue in tort for loss of their loved one, but that's separate from the crime of murder.) When someone commits a crime, they offend against the Sovereign, the King's Peace, the law of the land. That's why criminal cases are prosecuted by the Crown in Canada and the U.K. as Regina vs. Allegedbadguy ("Regina" being Latin for "Queen"), or by The People in the U.S. And the purpose of prosecuting crime is not to compensate Her Majesty for the loss to her sovereign dignity, but to punish you, to deter you and others from disregarding your duty to obey the law. 

     Now, traffic regulations are what we call quasi-criminal law. That is, you don't usually get a criminal record for just going over the speed limit or failing to signal a lane change, and they tend to be punished with fines instead of jail terms, but they are based on the same legal principle: the state can pass laws regulating what you can and can't do, and can punish you if you break those rules. I've written before about traffic regulations and why they're justified, so I'll not rehash that here. But the point here is this: yes they absolutely can and indeed should enforce the law even if there is no "victim".

     Consent/Contract: To consent is to agree, which is vital for a contract to have any legal effect; that's why it's traditional to sign contracts, to signify that one agreed to be bound by the exchange of promises. In the present context it's not clear what consent has to do with anything, because traffic laws are not based on consent. (Well, they sort of are, insofar as democratic governments pass laws on the authority given them by the people in elections, which means that collectively we have consented to those laws, but unlike a contract, laws passed by the legislature do not require your individual consent for you to be legally bound by them. Another reason why you should vote; those laws are going to bind you whether you like it or not, so you might as well try to have some influence over how they're made.)

     In fact, the term "consent" is here being used as part of the pseudo-legal nonsense spouted by Sovereign Citizen types, in which all government power boils down to semi-magical contracts that can be dispelled with the right incantation of disbelief. They're just ridiculously wrong about that.
     And how the hell can you have "a contract with the state's corporate policy"? I mean, a contract is a legally binding agreement between two or more parties based on an exchange of promises; the state can be a party to a contract, but not the state's "corporate policy". Could you enter into a contract with my fear of mushrooms, or the Coca Cola Company's annual report? These things are the preferences or desires of persons, but not persons. Talk about "consenting to" such things is just incoherent nonsense.
     In any event, the issue of consent is irrelevant. Your duty to obey the speed limit, or any other law of general application, does not depend on your agreeing to do so.

     Racketeering Scam: This part, actually, is sometimes true, but in a way that undermines the whole argument. You see, a racket is when you use an otherwise legitimate transaction as a cover for extortion or embezzlement. For example, in a protection racket, you might record on your books expenses for "security" or "consulting" or "friendship association dues", but what you're really paying for is the privilege of not having your business burned down. What's key is that the cover transaction is prima facie legitimate.

     There is no question that traffic enforcement is sometimes the basis for a racket. Cities like Ferguson, Missouri, have infamously become dependent upon fines instead of taxes for revenue, which creates perverse incentives for law enforcement. (Hint: A perfectly successful enforcement program results in nobody being arrested at all, because nobody breaks the law. Every arrest is, at best, a partial failure. When you measure your success by the raw number of arrests, you're doing it wrong.) These situations are often the result of an attempt to lower taxes, which is popular among property owners and the wealthy because it shifts the burden onto other people, usually people with less green in their wallets and more brown in their complexions. 

     But as bogus as these schemes are, it's important to note that the cover transaction, a fine, is in principle a perfectly legitimate arrangement. Although the enforcement regime may be corrupt and fraudulent, they are still trying to pass it off under a legitimate cover, because while there may be a fairer and more effective way to calculate fines for traffic violations, traffic regulations are valid, and fines are a valid way to enforce them.

     Look. Nobody likes to get a speeding ticket. I get that. And it's entirely natural to be angry when you get one. But just because you find rules inconvenient doesn't mean they're unfair, and just because some pseudolegal babbling makes you feel vindicated doesn't mean you are.

Tactics and Tactfulness: Some Thoughts about Tone Policing

     Okay, I take it back.

     A couple of years ago, I wrote in this post that the argument-from-anger fallacy doesn’t seem to be used outside of the capital punishment debate. Yesterday, however, it was used on me in a discussion about effective rhetorical technique.

     A friend of mine had been involved in a nasty online squabble, and we were talking about how it came to this. When I identified what I thought were some rhetorical missteps, the topic turned to “tone policing”. Tone policing, if you've not heard of it, is an argumentative tactic in which you object to the tone of your opponent and refuse to listen until she calms down or speaks more politely or otherwise complies with your standards of civility.
     Actually, I'm probably being generous with the word "argument"; it's really more of a bickering move. Bickering differs from argument in that the objective is essentially personal: bickering is about being the "winner", while proper argument is more generally concerned with establishing which proposition is more likely to be true. I suppose you could say that bickering is a specialized form of argument for resolving propositions about who's the better bickerer, which is about the only situation in which ad hominem is the whole point and thus not a fallacy.
      One of the things that makes tone-policing such an attractive ploy is that it seems to turn your opponent's own passion against them: if they feel strongly about a matter, you can impeach their credibility by claiming they're "emotional", while simultaneously scoring points portraying yourself as the more calmly rational one. And, it has the added benefit that few things are more infuriating than being told to calm down; not only do you get to disparage their objectivity on the offensive, but they will often lend support to your claim by reacting more angrily. So it can be an effective trap, especially against someone who is prone to anger in the first place

     Of course, I fancy myself a bit of a rhetorician, and so I tend to look down my nose at the techniques of bickering. Outside of that specialized arena, they're really bad habits, and even in that arena, a skilled rhetorician can easily counter them ("Why yes, I am passionate about this issue, as a matter of fact. Aren't you? Why not?"). And so I'll confess to having been just a wee bit hurt when, in identifying the tactical error that led to the harassment, it was suggested that I was engaging in tone policing and victim-blaming.
     And yet, I can see where the confusion arises, because my critique had been, in part, about how anger was the cause of the tactical error. As my friend put it, it's easy to step back and be rational when you have no skin in the game.
     Yes, it is. Conversely, though, it can be hard to stay rational when you do have skin in the game. And that's why tone policing is such an effective bickering technique. But it's also why it's so important, in rhetoric as in martial arts, to learn how to channel your anger effectively, not to be channeled by it.
     My friend seemed to think I was criticizing the angry escalation as unjustified, as if I was urging politeness and patience, and condemning too forceful a counterattack. To quote the analogy offered: "He had his foot on my neck, your honour, so I stabbed his leg."
     But that wasn't my criticism at all, because it''s not what my friend actually did. Stabbing the leg of the person standing on your neck is a perfectly valid move, and not an overreaction at all, but it takes a certain presence of mind to reach down to your belt, draw your knife, and strike effectively. No, what my friend did was essentially to scream with rage and flail around with much sound and fury but doing virtually no real damage, while leaving the foot firmly in place.

     Or not, actually, because the opponent had not actually succeeded in placing foot to neck, either. Yes, it might have been an infuriatingly offensive racist or sexist claim that, because it is widely accepted, does great harm and should not go unchallenged, but it was a straw on the back, not a boot on the neck. And while a ton of straws can immobilize you just as brutally as a well-placed boot, in the context of an online argument, they might as well be on someone else's back; your freedom of movement to respond however you like is not compromised at all.
     This is the other way in which bickering and disciplined rhetoric differ.  In bickering, the victor is usually the one who goes away smugly triumphant, while the loser is left angry and humiliated. If I fling an insult at you, and it makes you angry, that's actually a way of scoring points in bickering, and the angrier I make you, the more it's worth. And so in a bickering contest, an additional straw on the back can be a tremendously efficient attack, because it can draw on the weight of all the other straws already there to make you so much angrier.
     But in disciplined rhetoric, you're trying to present ideas that your audience (ideally including your opponent) will feel obliged to accept. This requires tact. It's not about being polite as such, but about deftly maneuvering the point of your argument past your opponent's defences so that it can strike the conscience effectively. And chief among the defences you want to get past is anger: you must avoid using arguments that directly draw the anger of your opponent (except perhaps as a feint).
     That sounds paradoxical, so think about it from the other side. When your opponent says something that makes you angry, think about why that is. Almost always, it's because something about it is wrong in some way. Perhaps it makes you angry because what he says is unfair, or untrue, or unsound. (If it makes you angry because it is true, then you should probably concede defeat, or at least retreat to reconsider your position.) And when your opponent says something unfair, untrue, or unsound, that is where to strike. And you strike not by emphasizing how angry it makes you (remember, nobody cares what you think), but by laying bare exactly how it is wrong, so that your audience and even your opponent are forced by their own faculties to reject it. Angrily, even.

     The point, then, is not that you shouldn't be angry in argument; on the contrary, anger is a vital part of the rhetorician's instincts and skills. Moreover, if it's not something that gets you angry on some level, it's not worth arguing about. Rather, the point is to learn to cultivate and refine your sense of anger, so that you may use it effectively. To the extent that rudeness offers an excuse not to listen, yes, tact is necessary, but do not mistake this for meek politeness; it is not about asking them nicely to agree with you because you said please, but about maneuvering past their defences with ruthless precision so that the full force of your logical argument will strike home.
     This is not tone policing. In fact, it's the key to defeat someone who attempts to tone-police you. Why does it make us angry when someone tells us to calm down and be polite? Because it's all kinds of hypocritical. Focus in on that hypocrisy, and bring it out for all to see just how ridiculous or infuriating or contemptible it really is. ("Really? You're so upset by my being upset that you can't listen to what I'm upset about?") By all means, let your anger show enough to give context and to make your argument relatable, but do not let your anger be the argument.
     When you do that, you're likely to fall into the trap of thinking greater anger makes for greater argument, but the very angriest people are often the most wrong.

Seeing Ought from Is

     The other day I found myself in an argument with a religious person who claimed that atheists cannot support any concept of morality, because you can't derive an ought from an is. I was familiar, of course, with the history of this idea, first articulated by the famous Scottish philosopher David Hume, and sometimes smooshed together with G.E. Moore's naturalistic fallacy. But I'd not encountered it quite so plainly adopted as an argument against atheism, and it rather surprised me, because I should have thought that anyone familiar with the ought-is problem should also have known that philosophers have developed quite a few different ethical theories that do not depend on the God postulate.
     Now, the is-ought problem does seem to me to be insurmountable, at least formally, but that doesn't particularly bother me. We know, since Gödel, that in any sufficiently robust logical system there will exist unprovable truths. (If you cannot prove "This statement cannot be proved", then it's true. But if you can prove it, then your system allows you to prove a falsehood, and you have bigger problems.)  So it may well be that values can be true but unprovable.
     Besides, there are lots of reasonable things we can infer about morality, even if we cannot prove that it objectively exists. By definition, morality is concerned with choice, more specifically the business of approving one choice as preferable to another. The very idea that we might prefer one alternative over another implies a host of pragmatic considerations. For example, if we posit that there exists a moral distinction between two alternatives, that it matters which one we choose, and we do not know which one we should choose, then it seems extremely likely that finding out what we ought to do is at the very least an instrumental good. (It is conceivable, of course, that some mysterious absolute morality places the highest value on ignorance of morality, in which case we ought not make such inquiries, but morality's just not playing fair with us in that case.)
     Similarly, a pragmatic approach to uncertain morality leads to several other prudent rules of thumb. Generally speaking, a good functional strategy in almost any game is to make the move that leaves you the greatest range of options for the next turn. In day-to-day life, this means you'll want to avoid choices that can't be undone later, unless you're pretty sure you won't want to undo them.
     As well, recognizing that other minds exist and are themselves engaged in the business of trying to figure out what to do, we might do well to take their perspectives into account, and there is some empirical evidence to suggest that that cooperation gives us a wider range of options than conflict does. So even if it turns out that this mysterious absolute morality really just wants us to hate and kill each other, we're likelier to figure that out by putting our heads together than by going at it alone.

     So, without knowing for certain any particular value is absolute, we can derive some pretty useful moral principles just from the presupposition that some sort of moral value exists. But we cannot establish with any certainty that there is any such thing, and that was the core of this person's argument.

     However, as it turns out, there is an argument frequently used in apologetics for why one ought to believe, even in the absence of evidence, and surprisingly, while it's invalid for the purpose Pascal intended (showing that it's prudent to believe in the Biblical God just in case), it turns out to be quite valid for acting as if there is such a thing as morality in the absence of evidence that there is.

     Consider the two possibilities: Either there exists some kind of moral value, or there does not. To put it another way, either there is a objective standard in the universe by which choices may be said to matter, or nothing matters at all. You can choose to behave in accordance with either belief. If you behave as if something matters, and you're wrong, well, it doesn't matter. It only matters if something matters, so prudence would dictate that we should act as if something matters, even if we aren't sure it does matter.

     That does not actually tell us what matters with any certainty, and I guess that makes some people pretty uncomfortable. But morality isn't supposed to be comfortable.

The Terrorist's Paradox

     A while ago, I wrote a bit about the security risks of Canada taking in Syrian refugees, in which I argued that the risk that some refugees might turn out to be dangerous was only relevant if it made them on average more dangerous than the crazies we already have as part of our population. But I also expressed an expectation that DAESh would actively try to carry out terrorist attacks specifically to deter us from taking in refugees. I didn't think it likely that they'd succeed, but I fully expected them to at least try. Well, it's just occurred to me how unlikely that is, and it has to do with something I want to call the "terrorist's paradox".

     The paradox doesn't apply to all terrorists, of course. Those who just want to coerce people into doing what they want by taking hostages or threatening some other sort of violence if their ransom demands aren't met don't count. The terrorists I'm talking about here, though, are the ones who see themselves as part of a political struggle in which they hope to inspire the masses to rise up and join them against the enemy. This describes al Qaeda's objective, and to a large extent it's what DAESh is all about, too.
     So the paradox comes about like this. On the one hand, they see themselves and want to be seen as The Good Guys. They view their cause as morally righteous, and their enemy as irredeemably evil, though perhaps not yet recognized as evil by the decent ordinary people they hope to rally to their cause. If only the evil could be unmasked! If only people could see just how vicious and oppressive and cruel the enemy is!
     Well, the terrorist's way to unmask the evil brutality of the enemy is by provoking the enemy into  acting in obviously evil and brutal ways. Blow up a school bus, shoot up a shopping mall, do something to make them really angry, and then everyone will see how viciously they overreact.
     But here's the paradox. In order to really provoke the kind of overreaction you want, you need to make your provocative attack really get a lot of attention. A spectacularly damaging act, like hijacking passenger planes and flying them into iconic national landmarks, is just the sort of thing to send everyone into a panic and start lashing out like the evil brutal monsters you know they are. Except, the more spectacularly awful your act of provocation, the more you look like the bad guy and the more sympathy you create for your enemy, undermining your attempt to rally people to your cause.
     I suspect, in fact, that al Qaeda's attack on 9/11 might have actually prevented the worldwide Islamic uprising against the United States it was meant to inspire. We know, after all, that the Bush Administration was intent on invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. It's also a fairly safe bet that American diplomatic capital was already a limited resource under Bush, and likely to be quickly depleted through Bush's tact-free handing of matters like the collision between a Chinese jet and an American reconnaissance plane. 9/11 gave Bush an instant and huge windfall of goodwill. I wonder what sort of international reaction the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have received, if not for that goodwill.

     That's how the paradox played out on al Qaeda. Now, DAESh is much more media-savvy, but they too are subject to the paradox. See, while al Qaeda organized teams of jihadists to carry out carefully coordinated missions, DAESh seems to focus, at least for its overseas mayhem, on radicalizing locals through the internet and encouraging them to carry out their own lone-wolf projects. This has the obvious advantage of stealth, in that less operational communications means less opportunity for security agencies to detect and disrupt attempts. But it also means that the guys carrying out these lone-wolf attacks aren't going to be subject to the kind of strategic discipline you can get when you're assembling a team and planning. Jihadi Joe in his parents' basement is being fired up with hatred and anger at the evil oppressive West; he wants to strike a blow against the Great Satan, and what's more, he wants to be gloriously remembered as a martyr for the cause. He's not thinking in terms of the strategic goal of making Canadians hate and distrust Muslims; if anything, it's the fact that many of us are already a bit hateful and distrustful that makes him so angry at us. And even if he did think that many moves ahead, he'd recognize that it's awfully hard for a local boy martyr to put together a convincing refugee disguise that stand up to even a cursory investigation.
     So the homegrown lone wolf attacks that DAESh likes to take credit for, then, are extremely unlikely to be willing, much less able to pull off a "false flag" aimed at tricking us into thinking that Syrian refugees are responsible. I mean, sure, there's always going to be a bunch of people who are terrified that we're letting them into the country, and will point at any old act of violence as confirming their suspicions, but for most of us, a transparent attempt to frame Syrian refugees for some terrorist act will backfire, convincing us only that some bad people really don't want us to be so nice to them.
     And, reverse psychology being what it is, if DAESh really wants us not to take in refugees, that's be a pretty good way to strengthen our resolve to do so.

December 9: V-S Day

     I think December 9 is a day we should celebrate with every bit as much solemnity and pride as November 11. On this day in 1979, a United Nations commission declared smallpox extinct. The official endorsement from the World Health Organization wouldn't come for another five months, but neither did the Treaty of Versaille, which formalized the end of World War One almost a whole year after the Armistice. We celebrate when the shooting stopped, not when the diplomats finally shook on it.

     Of course, it's a little harder to be clear when the war on smallpox was really won. The last patient was diagnosed in 1977 (he survived), and it's by no means certain that the last wild specimens of the virus were in him; possibly some unidentified infected person was hit by a bus in 1978 or even 1987 and took the last ones with her. We only know we won because enough time went by without any new infections to give us some confidence that it's over. There were no parades or fireworks.

     But even so, it was a truly stunning accomplishment. I mean, we've driven countless species extinct before, but mostly unintentionally and to our detriment. Smallpox was a vicious virus whose only role in the ecosystem, so far as anybody can tell, was to hitch a ride from human to human, killing lots of us in the process. The defeat of smallpox was one of the best things that has ever happened for our species.

     And defeating it took enormous organization, resourcefulness, skill and courage. The last person to be infected? He was a hospital cook who worked with the WHO team working to eradicate smallpox. And the last person to die of smallpox was a medical photographer. So fighting diseases is not without its risks.

     Yet it wasn't only the medical professionals going out and vaccinating people who won this war. There wasn't always enough vaccine to go around, and so it had to be applied strategically. That meant getting good intelligence on where the virus was. New cases anywhere in the world were reported quickly to the team, who would isolate the patient and vaccinate all her contacts. The last natural infection of the deadliest strain (the hospital cook got a somewhat less deadly but still dangerous version) was reported to the authorities by an 8 year old girl, so there were important contributions made by everyone. And that includes everyone who received a vaccination (which can be a scary thing, especially for children).

     So we should all be grateful and celebrate this anniversary, but not just because ending smallpox was a good thing. Deadly infectious diseases like smallpox are kind of like war in that most of us, living in the developed world, haven't directly experienced one, and can scarcely imagine the epidemics of even the recent past. Influenza killed more people in the years of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versaille than the four years of war they ended. Lest we forget.

     We should remember these things so we don't repeat them. When we debate whether or not to get vaccinated against the diseases we're still fighting, we should remember what we're up against, and bravely, proudly, patriotically roll up our sleeve and take that shot. Even if you believe that vaccines can cause autism (they really don't), even if you're afraid of all the (very rare) complications from vaccines, remember that you live free of smallpox because of people who were willing to be vaccinated despite their fear of these strange foreign doctors and their needles. And generations yet unborn may have reason to be grateful to us for a life free of polio, measles, the Guinea worm and other pestilences we might yet defeat.

Fear and Anger

     I sat down to try to write something about the terrorism at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. I wanted to talk about how "terrorism" isn't (or shouldn't be seen as) violence-by-Muslims, but that it's a specific kind of violence, strategically aimed more at provoking a terrified response than at inflicting decisive damage. Terrorism is about the emotional reaction to the violence more than the violence itself, and violence used to intimidate people to change their behaviour (such as deterring them from attending health care services) clearly fits the bill.

     But I also wanted to talk about how maybe the word "terrorism" is itself a bit misleading, because the emotional overreaction that it provokes isn't always purely a terrified one. A natural reaction to fear is anger, and displays of escalating rage are a very common defence: if I can make you more afraid of me than I am of you, maybe you'll leave me alone. I like to call this phenomenon "badass bravado", and you see it all over the place, from politicians boasting about how they're going to get "tough on" criminals or terrorists or foreigners, to Second Amendment crazies fantasizing about how would-be government despots quiver in fear from their mighty home arsenals of small arms. 

      What's especially dangerous about this bravado is that, in believing that one is driven by anger and not fear, one can think that one is immune to the strategy of terrorism. "They want us to be afraid, but I'm not afraid. I'm angry, and I'm gonna kick their asses, not cower in fear!" Yet the objective, at least in the case of DAESh's use of terrorism, is to provoke exactly this kind of response. To be fair, there certainly are uses of terrorism that are intended to intimidate, as well, as the Planned Parenthood example illustrates. But in all cases, terrorism is aimed at getting you to react emotionally instead of rationally.

     There are very good evolutionary reasons for why we have emotions that make us stupid. In a suddenly dangerous situation, being able to react quickly without stopping to ponder if maybe there's a better way to avoid the charging angry bear is important: fight or flight, but whichever you choose it's better if you don't linger over the decision.

     But anger in particular is meant to make us irrational, especially in the badass bravado scenario. We have a strong need not to appear weak before our rivals or enemies, to pose a credible deterrent to any slight or insult they might offer. It wouldn't be, in the immediate situation, rational to escalate to a costly retaliation when the cost of just turning the other cheek is so low, but little insults add up, and in the long run it can be costly to be seen as willing to tolerate little wrongs. And so, being seen as easily angered to irrationally costly vengeance is often worth it. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. made the rationally calculated choice to assure each other not just that they would be able to retaliate to any nuclear attack, but unable to stop themselves from retaliating. Thus was WWIII deterred: by the awareness on both sides that the other side would become irrationally dangerous if provoked.

     So this is what I was trying to organize into yet another blog post about violence, when yesterday I heard about the mass shooting in San Bernardino and threw up my hands in frustration. And anger. So much anger. And maybe a bit of fear, too, but I'll get to that.

     See, the thing that sends me into a seething ultraviolet-hot fury is not the shooters. I'm mad at them, a bit, of course, but they're dead and unworthy of further attention except as data points in trying to understand and prevent future incidents. No, what enrages me is when the Gun Lobby people start blaming the victims, saying that if only they'd been armed, they could have defended themselves and saved lives. 

     That is just plain offensive, but it's something the Gun Lobby does a lot, and if you apply the tiniest fraction of the paranoid creativity that goes into dreaming up false flag explanations for Sandy Hook or ... or... jeez, I can't even remember which of the many other shootings they've tried to claim was a hoax as a pretext to confiscate guns. If you consider the motives of the Gun Lobby with the slightest hint of the skepticism they have for Teh Gubmint and the "liberal" media, it might occur to you that an industry that makes all of its money from the sale of guns and ammo might not be completely free of ulterior motives in their enthusiastic promotion of guns as the solution to gun violence.

     I am reminded of the obscene hypocrisy of tobacco company executives asserting before Congress that they believed tobacco was not addictive, and spending vast sums to challenge the claim that maybe cigarettes weren't very good for you. No, it's not the mere fact that they were lying that was obscene. It's that the lie was so transparently a self-serving lie, because at the very same time they were claiming there was no health risk from smoking, they were also insisting that their advertising wasn't aimed at children or indeed at convincing anyone other than established smokers to switch to their brand. Really? If you believe tobacco is harmless and non-addictive, then what kind of an incompetent moron are you not to be trying to encourage everyone to try your wonderful product?

     The Gun Lobby argument is not quite as inherently self-refuting, but it's close. It's certainly more profoundly immoral, though, because at least with tobacco, dying of emphysema was at worst an unfortunate side-effect of tobacco use that had to be downplayed. With guns, mass-shootings and the fear they inspire actually create more profits for gun manufacturers, because terrified people rush out to buy guns to defend themselves against other terrified people with guns, or to stockpile them before a reactionary government bans them. In other words, it's actually in the Gun Lobby's interests for there to be fairly regular mass shootings.

     So if I'm angry, what's the fear behind it? Well, apart from just being morally outraged that people are dying unnecessarily to keep the money rolling in for the gun industry, there's another pretty terrifying aspect to their rhetoric. A common variation on their blaming-the-unarmed-victim argument is the claim that Hitler disarmed the Jews, as if they could have defended themselves effectively against the state if only they'd had guns. And this offends and frightens me, because the lesson of the Holocaust was not "Don't be like the Jews"; it was "Don't be like the Nazis". There is a guy running for President of the United States, a prime example of badass bravado, who has openly advocated making Muslims wear badges. 

     Sure, I'm not a Muslim. Heck, I don't even live in the U.S. Why should I be afraid?