Year: 2013

Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to explain the Darwinian theory of evolution and a conservative says, “Evolution is just a theory”? I know I do. I say, “You say ‘just a theory’ as if it’s mere speculation, a whimsical guess about something. But a theory is the best explanation for a set of observations.” Of course, pointing this out rarely changes the mind of the person who is really only concerned with protecting the false beliefs in his noggin—and those of others.

The “just a theory” slogan means to stop you in your tracks by equalizing things. The utterer has an agenda. He doesn’t want the audience to think about whether evolution might be true. If the audience believes that your explanation is “just a theory,” and they share the definition of “theory” assumed by your opponent, then his ploy will succeed. And usually it is successful since your argument is, after all, a theory! So you object to the tactic and act with ferocity about the correct definition of the term and try to educate. It’s all you can do.

When I am presenting the Marxian theory of neoliberalism, in which powerful corporate and political actors are theorized to meet in private, even in secret, to plan global economic restructuring, their actions dictated by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, the progressive says, “The New World Order is just a conspiracy theory.” Same tactic at play. The goal is to stop the audience from listening to me by delegitimizing my method (and making me out to be paranoid).

The progressive thought-stopping exercise aligns with the corporate need to have the audience assume that changes in the world are not the result of human agency shaped by exploitative relations; the exercise would have the audience see neoliberalism as natural and inevitable and, moreover, a good thing. It’s not the sinister cabal that my “theory” suggests where there are actual people who have class power making decisions. Of course, the progressive is buried beneath layers of ideology that humanize corporate state power.

The implication the progressive makes is that theorizing about the private thoughts and actions that shape historical trajectories is an illegitimate and irrational methodology. That’s just not the way the world works, we are told. The progressive is preparing the audience for coming inconvenient facts; for he secretly worries that the audience will see the theory as correct, and thus see other conspiracy theories as likely, when official admissions or revealed documents prove the conspiracy theorist’s claims. Hopefully, if the rhetoric of “tin foil hats” and “black helicopters” is repeated often enough and sticks (and it often does), the public will already have it in mind that the conspiracy theory explaining those facts is illegitimate; there must be some other explanation for the massive NSA spying regime than the one the conspiracy theorist told them about, even if that explanation is misguided (for example, surveilling Islamic terrorism). This notion that the government is tracking our movements to prevent a popular democratic uprising against corporate power is just paranoia. It’s a conspiracy theory.

In both cases, those who use these thought-stopping devices are liberated from the rational demand to actually take on the argument, to show the audience where the argument is wrong, and to present an actual competing theory. After all, how could anybody seriously make the argument that a supernatural being created the universe or that neoliberal restructuring just happened or that the global surveillance machine is only a response to terrorism? They can’t. So they spend their time delegitimizing those who actually present rational argument. And when challenged on the definition assumed, those engaged in thought-stopping demand that the non-literal one is the definitive one, of course because it is functional to their agenda.

Transforming a critical method of institutional analysis—which involves theorizing about what powerful corporate and political actors have planned and are planning in pursuit of their material interests—into the seemingly self-debunking exercise of the paranoid is one more brilliant achievement by the corporatist propaganda machine (I suppose that claim is itself also a conspiracy theory, so I guess you will need to dismiss it). 

To provide a concrete example, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, black radicals complained about a high-level government counterintelligence program at work with the goal of neutralizing black leaders and derailing the black socialist movement. When black radicals made this complaint liberals accused of them of advocating a conspiracy theory, which of course they were! Later, liberals learned that there was in fact a high-level government conspiracy, namely the counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, that was doing exactly what black radicals theorized.*

Since it was a secret program—a conspiracy—those targeted by the government program couldn’t answer the absurd demand that they support their theory by sharing planning and operational documents with the media, since they weren’t privy to them. But, scientifically speaking, black radicals didn’t need have such things in their possession in order to theorize the conspiracy against them any more than physicists need to know what planets are thinking in order to explain their revolutions around the sun (good thing, too, since planets don’t intentionally do anything). Black radicals could observe the effects of the conspiracy—assassinations, imprisonment, etc.—and, understanding the imperatives of the system, like any good scientist, explain them theoretically on the basis of this.

Knowing that planning involves an intelligent force, and knowing that the intelligent force is a network of elites, and knowing the motives that corporate capitalism requires, one is compelled by the demands of reason to announce a conspiracy. Black radicals not only knew there was a conspiracy, but they correctly theorized the end the conspirators desired and the political economic forces underpinning the conspiracy. The black radical had it figured out because he had a scientific mind. But when the black movement protested, the audience was primed to reject the “theory” because it was about a “conspiracy.” And since that is what it was in fact, namely a theory, black leaders were guilty as charged.

That documents detailing the COINTELPRO program only came out later doesn’t mean that those the conspiracy targeted and victimized shouldn’t have recognized and theorized their situation. The time to recognize and theorize conspiracies is when they’re happening, not years later after the damage is done. And that is precisely why the concept of conspiracy theory has to be one of delegitimizing power rather than a politically-interested intellectual tool of the oppressed (see Conspiracy Theory and Misinformation). Since this non-literal concept of conspiracy theory needs to be widely held by the public to carry its delegitimizing effect, many of those who do not have the intention of delegitimizing radical interpretations of history and political action wind up participating in the delegitimizing operation by defending the propagandistic use of the word over its literal and scientific meaning. Indeed, it’s those who make the argument without ill intent who make it such an effective thought-stopping device.

It’s like when the targets of brainwashing in prisoner-of-war camp are allowed to meet with their comrades who have already been brainwashed. If they haven’t cracked by that point, they almost certainly will when their comrades confirm the righteousness of everything their torturers told them. This is why it is so important to change the way people think about this phrase. There are conspiracies and we can have theories about them, just as we can have theories about evolution or anything else. We have to explain what is happening to us and that takes theory. In order to do so we need to reassert our control over the way language is used by demanding literal and scientific definitions of concepts central to our practice.

I have been doing the same thing with words like “communism,” “liberalism,” and “racism” for years. When an audience hears the word “communism,” they’re supposed to picture a bleak black-and-white nightmare world of totalitarian government control ruled by a secretive inner circle of elites who privilege at the expense of the many (ironic, no?), not a classless, stateless, egalitarian social order where production is based on collective human need rather than on individual greed. When an audience hears the word “liberal” they’re supposed to think of somebody who represent the extreme edge of the left, thus erecting an ideational barrier to thinking beyond liberalism to actual left-wing philosophies (anarchism, communism, and socialism). Propagandistic meanings are unscientific and aimed at preventing critical thinking about societal past, present, and future. By controlling the language, elites shape thought, and by making their terms the accepted ones, they control politics. As Marx and Engels smartly observed: “the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.” 

We cannot have a conversation if we do not use words properly. George Orwell speaks to this point in this quote: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Freedom is the ability to say—and believe—that 2+2=4. And in stating the obvious, Orwell writes, since “chaos is connected with the decay of language,” we “can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

Notes

* Update (July 26, 2021): You can read more about this in my blog The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left.

Richard Dawkins, a champion of the “New Atheism,” is an atheist and a liberal. Dawkins’ framework is zealous expression of Cartesian reductionism and, as a result, his view of our species is that of lumbering robots directed by genes selected by nature (his words, not mine). Dawkins’ individual comes to the world with a certain set of traits, which explains his actions. These traits are variable across the population and nature selects those that solve the engineering problems nature sets before the organism (adaptationism). Either the organism has the traits to survive and thrives and transmits genes (which is the ultimate purpose of life Dawkins holds) or it doesn’t and dies before it can transmit its genes. 

Dawkins contends that this is true even of social behavior. Adaptationism applied to the social and cultural world—epitomized by Doug Jones: “Culture and cultural variation are possible only because of an evolved psychology”—becomes social Darwinism, recoded as sociobiology (or, more recently, as evolutionary psychology), and is the hallmark of neo-Darwinian dogma, an ideology which, as I noted, reflects the prevailing justification of capitalist markets by locating them in nature rather than history.

This isn’t a recent problem. The problem is found in Darwin’s work itself. Darwin got his idea of natural selection from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest,” and the work of Thomas Malthus, all social scientists. Darwinism in this narrow form, as evolutionary scientist Richard Lewontin has pointed out, is at odds with the way the biological (and the social) world actually operate. Dawkins is an ideologue, and his strident (obnoxious, really) commitment to an adaptationist explanation for everything carries a profoundly religious-like character. 

Thus, because of his hard liberalism, Dawkins’ thought is alienated from history, and hence his science becomes ideology (scientism). Lewontin is able to see farther than Dawkins because he is an atheist and a socialist, which permits him to escape the reductionism of liberalism and see the dialectical relationships between organisms and nature. Not only is atheism aligned with socialism consistent with the struggle for social justice, but it is also useful for objective scientific endeavor. Indeed, these objectives are linked, since a non-reductionist science exposes the use of science as an ideological justification for oppression and exploitation by showing how it is designed and functions to legitimate hierarchy by falsely naturalizing it. This is, after all, the function of Smith’s “invisible hand” thesis, namely to depoliticize political economy by treating it as something more of a natural phenomenon than a social one.

Advocates of genocentric models seek to supplant what Tooby and Cosmides derisively identified in the early 1990s as the Standard Social Science Model (or SSSM). Scholarly positions they attribute to the SSSM are cultural determinism and social constructionism. I hasten to add the materialist conception of history (that paradigm with which I associate my scientific outlook) to that list.

The basic premise of the SSSM, which they regard as false, is that human behavior and the mind are the result of cultural forces and social relations. In contrast, genocentric versions of behaviorism and cognition argue that human behavior and the mind are the result of unidentified behavioral genes, the product of adaptation, the variation under which is expressed by inherited and differential constitutions playing out epigenetically.  Since there is no evidence to support the speculation that human behavior is gene-driven or really even gene-influenced, and since the SSSM has for well more than one hundred and fifty years produced compelling theories that explain human behavior and the mind, there is no rational reason to supplant the SSSM with the sociobiology (or whatever cover it operates under). To do so would be to reject theories built on social scientific theories employing valid concepts and enjoying sound empirical observation in exchange for speculative assertions that have more of a theological character than a scientific one. Indeed, the “just so” stories of sociobiology are little different in spirit to those surrounding intelligent design, steeped in tautological reasoning and illegitimate teleology.

Why evolutionary psychology and why now? The SSSM is a threat to power because it demonstrates that the deprivations and social problems that human beings experience – poverty, racism, rape, genocide, domination and hierarchy – are the results not of natural history but of social-historical conditions imposed by men seeking to exploit and oppress other people for their own wealth and privilege. If our oppressors can root just some of the injustices of the world they created, sustain, and benefit from in our evolutionary history, in our biology, then they can claim that attempts to change our circumstances are folly. If we buy it, then they will have a powerful ideology with which to justify the status quo.

Sociobiology, and its neo-Darwinian manifestation evolutionary psychology, are central to the project to code social Darwinism in scientific jargon, so that the ruling class will have alongside the deception of religion a religious-like faith in scientism. One also sees this trick in economics, where markets are naturalized and thus placed beyond human agency. It is no accident that these reactionary pseudoscientific models are coming to dominate in the period of neoliberalism. In the previous social democratic period, that period associated with the emergence of the SSSM, such theories were seen for what they were. For the world experienced firsthand the aggressive application of Darwinian principles to human social life, the construction of technologies of eugenics and extermination.  Now in the shadows of dying democracy amid rising totalitarian capitalism, social Darwinism re-emerges in a new guise, well-funded, with academic programs and journals dedicated to legitimizing its “theories,” “methods,” and “findings.”

The popular and academic appeal of evolutionary psychology reveals the depth of authoritarian thinking that currently pervades mass consciousness. This also explains tolerance for drone murder, extrajudicial killing, and indefinite detention. Thus we are witnessing a greater degradation in rational sensibilities with the decay of late capitalism. Sociobiology is a reoccurring head on the reactionary hydra.

Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day and it was originally established to commemorate the soldiers who died on both sides of the Civil War. Now it commemorates all soldiers who die in any war or military action the United States conducts or in which it participates. 

War is tragic and a lot of good men and women die in war because politicians in Washington take liberties with their bodies to advance the interests of the ruling class.

This is not to say there are no just wars. Those who died on the Union side in the Civil War died for a just cause. Their cause was betrayed in the end; blacks did not achieve equality for a very long time and the working class never unified in a way that advanced the struggle for socialism. But their cause was noble. On the other side, Confederate troops died for a truly despicable cause: to preserve the system of chattel slavery. I recognize that many Confederate soldiers were young and stupid and didn’t grasp the deeper issues. They thought they looked sharp in uniform. But that doesn’t make their deaths noble. And their battle flag is an insult to all those who love liberty.

World War II was a just war because, of all capitalist formations, fascism is the most destructive to humanity. And, unlike the Civil War, the defeat of fascism allowed for the expansion of socialism which, while not perfect (nothing ever is) and continually harassed and retarded by the capitalist west, advanced the living conditions for hundreds of millions of human beings around the world.

But the other wars? WWI, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—these were and are capitalist and imperialist wars and every death in these wars represents a wasted life. 

This is why on Memorial Day (as well as Veteran’s Day) I call on young men and women to resist joining the military unless there is an existential crisis or a great injustice: let’s deprive the imperialist state bodies to carry out its global project of capitalist domination.

For me, Memorial Day is a high-profile day to remind people that soldiers who die in unjust wars do not die for our freedom. No person who died in Vietnam or Iraq died for my freedom. They died to advance the interests of the capitalist class. And the sooner we all recognize the true purpose of war the sooner we can stop glorifying it and sacrificing our brothers and sisters to it. 

I know my Memorial Day message offends many, but there is no greater wrong  (albeit there are many equal to it) than sending men and women to die in unjust wars. I would therefore be morally derelict in not making that point of view known.

This is how I choose to commemorate Memorial Day.

Virginia’s lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Bishop E.W. Jackson has made some claims about race and abortion and Margaret Sanger that have a lot of liberals painting the man crazy. Is there truth behind what he said about racism and family planning?

In 1990, the rate of black women having abortion was 63.9 per 100,000 compared to 21.5 per 100,000 for white women. And while it is true that the rate for black women had fallen to 48.2 per 100,000 by 2007, it fell even faster for white women (13.8 per 100,000) during this period. This means that the black rate of abortion three-and-a-half times the white rate. 

Margaret Sanger believed in black racial inferiority. She believed that poverty was the result of uncontrolled fertility. She was a eugenicist. The intersection of these commitments is reflected in aggressive efforts to lower fertility among those with darker skin. Her own words condemn her. To provide a sample, Sanger was concerned that the black community might become suspicious of her “Negro Project,” which was aimed at reducing fertility in the black community. She actively worked to recruit black ministers to her cause because, in her words, “we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” 

I support contraception and abortion. In fact, I don’t think there should be any age, trimester, or any other restrictions on abortion, including parental notification. Women of any age should be able to obtain contraception and have an abortion for any reason or no reason at all and the state ought to pay for it as it and it must be entirely voluntary. But my support for reproductive rights has nothing to do with Margaret Sanger’s beliefs and motives, and on this score, Jackson is more right than wrong.

I am so very tired of this condescending sidestepping of a question: “Why does God allow terrible things to happen?” “Andy that question requires an in-depth philosophical-theological treatment and anything short of that is a cheap shot at religion.” Actually, there is no deep philosophical-theological reason for why God allows terrible things to happen. This may well be the easiest question to answer.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose I am a Christian. As a Christian I am confronted with this problem: either God kills people with tornadoes or He stands by and watches tornadoes kill people, which, since he is an all-knowing and all-powerful god, is the same thing. God knows very well how terrible it is for seven children to drown in the basement of a school hit by a tornado. Yet he lets them drown. Or he sent a tornado to drown them. I know from my Bible that he caused a flood that killed nearly every living thing on the planet, so I can’t put it past him that he would drown seven children He’s done it before.

He say he loves us – so much so that he sacrificed his own son. Yet he kills some of us and leaves the rest of us with broken hearts. Is it reasonable for me to love a being who kills my children and breaks my heart? Is such a being really worthy of my devotion? Either God is a cruel and terrible god who hates children and breaks hearts and is therefore unworthy of my devotion or there is no god and tornadoes are a natural weather phenomenon and we should build stronger school buildings in the short term and reverse climate change in the long term.

God is like an abusive spouse who claims to love me yet hurts me. Either he must love me and protect me or he must hate me and hurt me. Fortunately, unlike an abusive spouse, God is not real. So His advocates may tell me that I always fall short of His glory, but he cannot really hurt me if I leave Him.

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: the ruling class created Alex Jones to discredit any serious questioning of its rule and to confuse the masses. In other words, he is part of an organized counterinsurgency operation. That would make a lot of sense. The production value of his programs is quite high for somebody who not only dwells on the lunatic fringe of political discourse, but who is rather unremarkable. The only things impressive about the man is that he is apparently incapable of suffering embarrassment and can blow a gasket without stroking out.

When I watch Jones, I feel that I am seeing the fruit of a significant investment made in manufacturing notorious a mediocre demagogue who can simultaneously (1) marginalize criticism of power by making it categorically appear conspiratorial—indeed, making conspiracy theorizing itself a suspect thing—and (2) keep alive the reactionary element in capitalist society and (3) never break much beyond the margins of his own small but committed audience (he presents no real danger). Hell, I run the risk of marginalizing myself by even suggesting that Jones and his programming is staged. That’s conspiratorial thinking! But think about it, if only as an exercise: Here is a phenomenon that functions to make all radical analyses of economic and political power look suspect. A little too convenient, right?

However he comes to us, Alex Jones gets in my way. The shadow of his project affects my teaching. I spend too much time in my office and in hallways after class explaining the difference between Jones and serious analysis of institutions and power. When I talk about corporate control and propaganda, government and business surveillance, CIA black sites and psychological operations, coups and assassinations, and the myriad of other things the powerful do to maintain and expand their grip over our minds and lives in order to stuff full their bank accounts, I draw more than an occasional look of bemusement.

Students come up to me after class and recommend Alex Jones and other so-called “conspiracists” to me as if I am part of the crowd. “Have you seen Loose Change?” “You should really check out the documentary Zeitgeist.” “What do you think about the way the Twin Towers collapsed? Do you think it was a false flag operation?” When I show legitimate documentaries in class, such as The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent, I have to preface the viewings by explaining that the company that produced the films, Zeitgeist, is not associated with the faux-documentary Zeitgeist. If I don’t, then some students openly assume the association, which has the effect of lumping me and the documentaries with the right wing lunatic faux-libertarian fringe.

All this endears me to some and alienates others, neither of which is a desirable outcome. It’s amazing how many of my students over the years have watched these faux-documentaries and, more frighteningly, how the “ truths” these projects reveal have “changed their lives.” Tragically, these students tend to tilt left. The other effect is to cause students to dismiss serious critical thinking, thinking it “conspiracism.” It’s the latter group that is most difficult to reach (I can usually show the former why Jones is a crackpot). Most students don’t have an opinion either way, but the tragedy here is that they are politically disinterested.

Democracy, or “rule of the people,” obviously cannot mean oligarchy, i.e., “rule of the few,” or majoritarianism, i.e., “tyranny of the majority.” A democracy is a system in which all of the people participate in making decisions concerning those things that affect them. Such an arrangement necessarily includes recognizing individual rights. Recognizing individual rights means that a decision that is made by the people cannot impose upon individuals undue burdens or substantial harm.

But it means more than this. There are two kinds of rights. The first is that class of rights that protects individuals from the arbitrary and manifestly harmful imposition of practices of others. For example, if a capitalist firm releases harmful toxins into the atmosphere, then that firm is violating my right to be free from exposure to harmful substances. The second class of rights guarantee individual access to those resources and institutions that permit the full development of the self. For example, in order to have an equal possibility of living life in the manner we choose, we must have free access to nutritious food, clean water, decent housing, safe neighborhoods, educational institutions, health care, and opportunities for leisure. 

Both kinds of rights are equally important. However, the kinds have been counterposed in history. The first has historically been associated with liberalism (of which modern conservatism is a subspecies). The second is historically associated with socialism. There is but one thing that keeps these rights in opposition (granting limited compromise): private control over capital. Crucially, there is no intrinsic reason why socialism excludes the first class of rights. Socialism permits recognition of the first class of rights as essential to any functioning democratic order. However, economic liberalism is incompatible with the second class of rights because it rests on the artificial “right” of private property, a supposed right with no anthropological necessity. Private property is in contradiction to the right for free full development of persons. Indeed, liberalism cannot realize its own class of rights because the “right” to private property makes materially impossible the full realization of the right to be free from the arbitrary and manifestly harmful imposition of practices of others, as illustrated in the example provided above. 

Realizing democratic ends, as well as the freedoms claimed by liberals, requires that the liberal class of rights by incorporated into socialism by abolishing private capital. This is the necessary foundation for real democracy in practice.

Listening to Tom Ashbrook’s program on abortion tonight was a truly frustrating experience. I was shaking my head the whole time. When it comes to the public abortion debate, the actual issue – and there is really is only one issue – never comes up. It’s as if there is a conspiracy of silence. Is all the bullshit engineered to keep this debate going for some political use?

First, Ashbrook wanted to keep after the anti-abortion speakers on the question of incest and rape. But how can the manner in which the child is conceived have anything to do with an argument that holds fast to the idea that the fetus is a life that should not be taken? The fetus is an innocent life. You can’t punish the fetus for the crimes of the father. The pro-abortion side needs to understand that anti-abortion activists hold a consistent position here and, while you can shame many of them into rhetorically allowing for exceptions, the real issue is whether there should be restrictions on abortion at all. The argument isn’t about the fetus. It’s about the freedom of women to choose how their bodies will be used (if used at all). The emotional impact or rape and incest is not a substitute for reason.

Second, these arguments about abortion causing a reduction in crime or demanding that conservatives pony up the money to feed, clothe, house, doctor all the unwanted children, and so forth, are all irrelevant points. The question of whether it is right or wrong for the state to force women to have babies (or not to have babies) is the only issue. It is a matter of fundamental individual right – the most important right of them all. You can’t determine whether we should or shouldn’t have rights on the grounds that we will have higher crime rates or too many people and so forth. These arguments shouldn’t be dignified in a debate on the question of reproductive freedom.

Third, there is no such thing as “states rights.” Goddammit can you finally get this through your skulls? States don’t have rights. Persons have rights (you know, persons like women?). It is a tyrannical notion to suppose that the state has rights over us. States have powers. And only when the state’s power rests on the consent of the government can state actors claim authority (as Max Weber defines it: legitimate power). Otherwise, we do not live in a free state. So it is to misspeak to say that a state has a right to determine what happens to a fetus. It may claim the power to do so, but it has no “right” to do so. 

Fourth, the viability standard is an impossible and ridiculous standard. In practice, viability can only be theoretical. The idea behind viability is that there is a point when the fetus can live outside the body. Does this mean that for the woman who no longer wants to be pregnant the state will remove the fetus from the womb at the moment of viability in order to incubate the fetus artificially (or maybe transplant it into another womb)? My god, such a situation wouldn’t be simply tyranny but a nightmare. How could anybody claim to live in a free and morally decent society where women were forced to submit to a surgical procedures they did not consent to. Either way, the state commandeers the woman’s body for its interests – or, more accurately, the interests of those who seek to control reproduction – over against the interests of the woman in preserving her right to personal autonomy. This is the most naked form of tyranny. It is wicked notion. The fetus is viable when it is expelled from the womb. At that point the state can intervene, but not before.

Fifth, the argument that the right to life is more important than the right to privacy doesn’t even pass the smell test. Hypocrites. Do any of you really believe that conservatives would allow you or me to come into their home and eat their food or use their toilet without permission unmolested? Really? They would shoot us in the face. But my right to life is more important than their right to be secure in their private castles, no? To shoot me would be to violate my right to life, the most important thing in all the world, no? Are you kidding? I’m with conservatives on this one: your right to life ends where my freedom to be secure in my house ends. If you live it is only because I believed there was a way to get you out of my house without killing you first.

The right to life is not absolute. Almost everybody agrees there is no absolute right to life. We take life in self defense. We take a life to throw off tyranny. Nobody has an obligation to be slave and the fact that the slave masters is a person gives him no absolute right to live. When all is said and done there is only one real motivation for advocating for the power of states to control the womb: the submission of women. It’s okay. You don’t actually have to be aware of the real motivation behind your desires, so you needn’t be defensive. Your motive is revealed by the nature of the intended target. This isn’t really a debate. It’s a self-evident truth. If a woman does not have the right to her own body, she is a slave.

The question of the permissibility of abortion is not about the status fetus but the right of a woman (or any person) to determine what purposes her body is used for, presuming she is not a slave (and if she it, she must be liberated). Once the fetus has been expelled from the body and becomes an infant, then the state can take control of the infant’s life. Taking care of the infant no longer involves commandeering the woman’s body by the state, so there is no moral objection. You can’t force a person who has given birth to take care of the infant, just as you can’t force a person who is pregnant to take care of the fetus. The difference is that only in the former can the state act to preserve the life without oppressing the woman. Personal autonomy is the first right – every person must be free from oppression. Life can be and often is sacrificed to preserve this right. If a woman cannot determine how her body is used, she is not free. It’s that basic.

I’m a criminologist with a bit of understanding of crime scene investigation, as well as what makes shooters tick. But, really, you don’t need to have these qualifications to put together a reasonably accurate account of the Sandy Hook massacre. You just need to listen to what the police, the medical examiner’s office, and other authorities are telling reporters. A knowledge of firearms helps, of course.

Adam Lanza pictured in a photograph from 2005 in Newtown, Connecticut

One of the ironies of this event is that right wingers would rather trust hasty reporting by the liberal media in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, in particular the December 15 Today show coverage (in which numerous claims were made that turned out to be completely wrong), than believe the experts and authorities investigating the event.

Sandy Hook is not part of a conspiracy to disarm the populace. Here’s what really happened: A troubled young man living in a climate of gun enthusiasm in a dysfunctional house full of high powered and assorted weaponry went to an elementary school with four of those weapons, took three inside with him, and proceeded to murder 26 children, teachers, and administrators.

The guns used in this crime were legally purchased. His mother taught him how to use a firearm and took him to the firing range to practice. He was trained and willing to kill.

The only way this particular tragedy could possibly have been prevented is if any household with the presence of one or more diagnosed mentally ill persons were barred from owning firearms (which, if you know anything about the prevalence of mental illness would disarm a lot of households).