Author: The FAR Platform

A person is free to be racially prejudiced towards black people as long as that prejudice remains an idea only and is practiced privately. A white person can think and usually say what he wants to about black people. Of course, he has no right to be free of criticism for what he thinks or says. He has no right not to be called a bigot. But he has the right to express his opinions and views about black people without official negative sanction. If he wants to believe black and white people should not get married, then he can think and say this and only marry white women. If he doesn’t want to eat around black people, then he can sit in his kitchen with his white family and eat with them. This is his right. If he wants to use offensive language, he should be able to do so. Those who are offended by this utterance, have the right to criticize him for saying it. They, too, have free speech.

However, this racially prejudiced man does not have the right to expect to eat at a restaurant where he is guaranteed the absence of black people or where the restaurant creates an atmosphere where black people will be deterred from eating or working at his establishment. This man does not have the right to set up a business which is a place of public accommodation, such as a fast food restaurant, based on the white supremacist principles. A place of public accommodations must be free of racism, which is defined as racial prejudice in practice or effect. This is a matter of federal law.

The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees all people the right to “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Full and equal enjoyment covers both the customer and the employee. If a white business owner where to utter white supremacist slogans in his place of public accommodations or compel his employees to listen to white supremacist propaganda, he would be in violation of federal law. He cannot create a racially hostile environment in a place of public accommodations.

You will notice that race and color are not the only items mentioned in the list of protected categories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Religion is also listed. Business owners cannot operate places of public accommodations that exclude customers or bar workers on the basis of religion. A business owner cannot terminate the employment of a mother on the grounds that, according to his religious beliefs, she should be at home with her children. A business owner cannot terminate the employment of a man on the grounds that, in her religion, it is wrong for him to be in a romantic relationship with another man. A business owner cannot tell a gay couple that they cannot have a private booth on account of the religious beliefs of the business owner. A business owner cannot stop expression of affection among gay couples but allow these for straight couples. A business owner cannot deny to an employee birth control in the health insurance provision of the benefits package of an employee because the business owner opposes birth control. A place of public accommodation cannot have any religious policies whatsoever, it cannot be a projection of the business owners religious values, and this includes the articulation of a religious policy, let alone an explicit admission that the business is organized upon biblical principles. Businesses of public accommodations cannot be based on Christian, Muslim, or Jewish principles any more than they can be based on white supremacist principles (and by extension male supremacist principles, for sex is a protected category, as well).

This is the part of the Chick-fil-A controversy that many liberals in the corporate news media—and of course all the conservative and self-styled “libertarian” voices we encounter—have missed. And this is the issue. The issue is not freedom of religion for the Christians running Chick-fil-A. It is a religion freedom issue for the customer and worker at Chick-fil-A. And it is not freedom speech issue. Those who defend Chick-fil-A, whether they know it or not, are buying into the pre-1964 logic of the American legal system, i.e., the logic of segregation based on suspect classifications, namely that policy based on principles of exclusivity are equivalent to principles based on inclusivity in the public sphere. This idea no longer underpins public law in America, at least it isn’t supposed to, because we as a people (at least we used to) recognize that this is discrimination and that discrimination is wrong. Denying a license of privilege to a place of public accommodations based on white supremacist principles is not discrimination. Nobody’s rights are violated when the government denies a license to such a business. On the contrary, it is permitting the existence of a business operating as a place of public accommodations explicitly based on white supremacist principles that is discriminatory, since such an establishment harms the rights of black customers and workers to be free of racial discrimination.

In the post-1964 world, if a business owner wishes to operate a business based on biblical principles, then he must convert his business into a private religious institution. His business can no longer be a place of public accommodations. Only in the sanctuary of a church is a group of the religiously devoted allowed to practice exclusivity based on their belief system. A Christian church doesn’t have to allow Muslims or create a welcoming environment for them. The same is true for a racially exclusive group, such as the Ku Klux Klan. A klavern doesn’t have to allow black members. It is not a place of public accommodations. It’s an exclusive club based on white supremacist principles. But if the KKK wants to open a place of public accommodations, it cannot be based on white supremacist principles. And, frankly, a community would be perfectly justified in denying the KKK a business license for a place of public accommodations in which the business owner stated that his business was going to based on white supremacist principles. And you know as well as I do that they would be able to do so without controversy. I can’t imagine any of the liberals presently defending Chick-fil-A defending a business owner who was a member of the KKK declaring that his business was operating on white supremacist principles. And with respect to religion, it’s not simply the demand of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The right to be free from the religious prejudices of another in the context of the public sphere is enshrined in the First Amendment. 

Here is what the right to religion entails: a Christian man is free to be religiously prejudiced towards non-Christian people as long as that prejudice remains an idea only and is practiced privately. A Christian can think and usually say what he wants to about non-Christians. Of course, he has no right to be free of criticism for what he thinks or says. He has no right not to be called a bigot. But he has the right to express his opinions and views about non-Christians without official negative sanction. If he wants to believe that Christians should not marry Jews, then he can think and say this and only marry Christian women. If he doesn’t want to eat around Muslims, then he can sit in his kitchen with his Christian family and eat with them. This is his right. If he wants to use offensive language to describe a Muslim person, he should be able to. I will defend his right to say this. But, again, those who are offended by this utterance, have the right to criticize him for saying it. They, too, have free speech. I will defend their right, as well.

In our society, a person is allowed to be religiously prejudiced in this way, but he is not allowed to operate a business that puts his prejudice into practice. Business owners are explicitly forbidden to run their businesses in a way that discriminates on the basis of race and religion. Nothing could state more clearly the republican and secular principle that underpins our representative democracy that businesses serve the interests of the community and that communities have no obligation to be subjected to harmful business actions than the existence of a law forbidding a business from discriminating against black people.

If you are a white business owner who doesn’t want to serve black people in his place of accommodations, you are not allowed to run such a business. It’s that simple. There is no suppression of your rights occurring when the state denies you a business license on the grounds that you explicitly operate your business based upon racial exclusion. It is no different for religion. You are not being punished for your views. You are being prevented from imposing your views on others. 

It took this nation well more than a hundred and fifty years to realize in the law what has always been true in principle. We must not now go backwards to claim as a right what was really always a privilege.

Scalia can be an obnoxious clown, But is he also a shallow thinker? After listening to his interview on Fox News just now, I confess that I am unimpressed with his intellect. To be blunt about it, he seems kind of dimwitted. Yeah, I know, I’m not a Supreme Court justice, so what do I know. I’m just a criminology professor. 

I do know this: Anybody who doesn’t see the fundamental right to privacy underpinning the Bill of Rights is pretending to be blind. Why would we have a right to be secure in our papers and effects if we have no right to privacy? Why are the police required to have a search warrant to search our homes if there is no right to privacy? This is one of those rare truly authentic self-evident truths. 

It’s not just that the Fourth Amendment makes no sense if there is no right to privacy; it’s that the Fourth Amendment articulates the right to privacy and if you can’t see what is plainly before you, then you should be doing something else other than interpreting the Constitution. Here’s the text of the Fourth Amendment. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” 

The language here is not ambiguous. Privacy is generally defined the condition or state of freedom from being disturbed or observed by other people. It’s the state of being free from public attention. Since all rights are limited only by rational secular reason and due process…. You get the point. You aren’t knucklehead like Scalia. 

Or, maybe Scalia isn’t a knucklehead but an opponent of the Fourth Amendment. Maybe he believes that our homes and effects should be open to any public scrutiny without limitation. We know he doesn’t believe in personal sovereignty, since his claim that we have no right to privacy occurred in the context of expressing a desire that the state force women to have babies. So he’s not stupid. He’s an authoritarian. Okay, maybe a stupid authoritarian. 

Why don’t we have confirmation hearings in which the nominees either lay out their judicial philosophy in full or be excused from consideration? Why do we put up with this wish-washy bullshit of “I can’t answer that question because there are cases pending before the court of that nature.” 

For the record, Scalia’s nomination met with no opposition from the Senate Judicial Committee. The full Senate only briefly debated Scalia’s nomination, then confirmed him 98–0. There were 46 Democratic senators in the Senate at the time. We’re told that the reason why we have to vote Democrat is the composition of the Supreme Court. So what happened there? Why not a single vote against Scalia?

“Family planning is absolutely fundamental to any hope of tackling poverty in our world,” UK’s prime minister David Cameron said.

What’s absolutely fundamental to tackling poverty in the world is the abolition of a global economic system, namely capitalism, that is rooted in the exploitation of human labor and the rape of the natural environment, and that results in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of families.

The cause of poverty is not poor people or poor people having babies. The cause is capitalism. Capitalism systematically generates poor people. Ghettos, prisons, genocides, and wars are either designed or function to warehouse and eliminate poor people. This is population control. White western policymakers and their nonwhite colonial collaborators believe – and Cameron is not the only one who openly admits this – that they can reduce the problem of poverty, which disproportionately affects nonwhites, by reducing the number of poor nonwhites through aggressive population control policy.

I am committed to the right of women controlling their reproductive capacity. Indeed, some of my progressive friends see my position on a woman’s right to an abortion as radical (I believe in no term limitations). I am so steadfast in this advocacy because I see the right of women to control their bodies as fundamental to human freedom. This includes both the choice to not have children and the choice to have children. If the government can force women to either have a child or not have a child, then the government has the power to use a human body for its own ends.

The same logic that underpins my support for women’s right to choose how their reproductive capacity shall be used is the same logic that underpins my criticism of the motive behind the aggressive population control advocated by western authorities. The motive should be made clear: it is a desire to reduce the victims of capitalism not by eliminating capitalism (or humanizing it) but by reducing the people capitalism victimizes. Peoples of the third world – as are nonwhite subpopulations in the capitalist core – are surplus labor pools that have become too large to be effectively managed, at least from a public relations perspective. Moreover, their labor will never be utilized. So they have become surplus population. With a certain proportion of the population held redundant and in reserve in order to keep downward pressure on wages, if the labor was needed, population control is not an issue.

What I want to see is women controlling their reproductive capacity in a free democratic system where this decision is made based on their interests, not based on the interests of white western elites. This can only happen under conditions of socialism. If we care about the welfare of families, this is where we will put our energies.

What I am about to tell you, I did not know about until today. My mind is blown. I thought I knew all there was to know about the horrors of religion. I was wrong. 

Cultural relativism is one thing, but we have to draw the line somewhere. How about at the Orthodox Jewish practice of the mohel’s orally sucking the blood from the freshly mutilated genitals of male infants? Have you seen this scandal yet? It’s called “ritual circumcision with oral suction,” or in Hebrew, metzitzah b’peh.  New York authorities are recommending that rabbis use a different technique after they discovered that several infants contracted neonatal herpes from the practice. Some babies were brain damaged. Two have died. 

Turns out the government has known about this ritual for several years and has not moved to stop it. Public health authorities are responding by distributing pamphlets to educate the community. That’s nice. How about we criminalize the practice? Meanwhile, leaders in the Orthodox community have already said the practice is an important tradition, that it is healthy for the infants (I just watched a rabbi claim that saliva is an antiseptic), and that they will continue the ritual. They appeal to religious freedom.

Why are the authorities playing nice here? If we are going to have laws against adults performing fellatio on minors, then we ought not allow these laws to become muddled by religious exemption. Are we really going to say that it is wrong to suck an infant’s penis unless it is in the context of a religious ritual? Folks are okay with that? I don’t think so. At least they shouldn’t be. We need a clear and simple law: an adult man is not allowed to put his mouth on the genitals of an infant. 

And while we’re at it, let’s once and for all outlaw the practice of mutilating the genitals of children, female and male. The sucking part just adds a layer of horror to the horror of genital mutilation. It’s 2012. It’s time for humanity to grow up and get serious about the problem of religion. You can believe anything you want in your head, but when you include children in your rituals, you have crossed the line. The state of New York needs to move now and ban this practice forever. Charges of anti-Semitism be damned. Do the right thing. Save these children from this perversion.

UPDATE: On September 13, 2012, the New York City Board of Health voted unanimously to require that parents sign an informed consent before metzitzah b’peh is performed. What about the infant’s right to informed consent?

I haven’t worked out the math in great detail, but the Prometheus (the starship in Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus) does not need to travel faster than light to reach its destination in a few years. This is satisfying because we can remain in the realm of conventional physics. In fact, it only works out if we do.

The planet LV-223 is in the Zeta 2 Reticuli star system, which is approximately 12 parsecs from Earth or 39 light years. (This is a real place, in case you were wondering.) The movie gives a different distance: 34.5 light years. Perhaps this could be accounted for by distances between the stars in Zeta 2 Reticuli, with LV-223 on the near side of the system relative to us (I am not an astronomer, I don’t know the distances, so I’m speculating). At any rate, given our frame of reference here on Earth, the Prometheus would reach LV-223 in 34.5 years at light speed, a little bit longer at near-light speed. 

According to David, the humans were in cryonic sleep for 2.4 years. This is what is referred to as “ship years.” We can explain this using the concept of time dilation (theory of relativity), which has the Prometheus traveling somewhere in the neighborhood of .99 percent light speed. At this speed, the Prometheus could do a round trip in 4.8 ship years, which would be experienced by the crew as a normal 4.8 years.

Time elapsed on Earth would be 69 years, which is the current average lifespan of a person. I suspect life has been extended by 2089, the year Shaw and Holloway discover the ancient star map, but not by that much.

The Prometheus arrives at LV-223 in the year 2093 relative to their frame of reference. From the relative frame of a person on Earth, supposing the Prometheus left in 2090, the ship would arrive at LV-223 in the year 2114. If the crew had survived and returned to Earth, they would arrive home in 2159. By then everybody they had known would be deceased. 

This means that the Engineers’ Juggernaut, assuming it couldn’t defy the known laws of physics, would have reached the Earth in 34.5 years. It is possible for the Prometheus to have sent a message on a beam of light to that would have arrived a few weeks or months before the juggernaut arrived warning Earth of its arrival. That might have been enough time to prepare, especially given the level of technological prowess; they should have the technology to deal with the alien vessel.

The Prometheus could also have taken off and raced the Juggernaut back to Earth sending warnings the whole way. But it was hectic and all, and the Juggernaut did get the jump on them. Moreover, it might have been armed and whacked the Prometheus.

(As an aside, had the ship left when it was supposed to, and safely arrived on schedule, the apocalypse promised by the Juggernaut’s cargo would have hit Earth 2000 years ago and the history of our planet would likely have been radically altered.)

I think that some folks are trying to calculate the matter in the following way: Assume two positions in space separated by 35 light years: location A and location B. Assume, for the sake of the illustration, equivalent gravitational pulls, etc., at these locations. Time is thus roughly equivalent. Now launch a ship from location A to location B. The ship will travel at multiple times the speed of light in order to reach its destination in two years. The speed of light is 670,615,200 miles per hour. A light year (the distance light travels in a vacuum in a year) is 5,865,696,000,000 miles. So the distance from location A to location B is 205,299,360,000,000. That’s a bit more than 205 trillion miles. How fast would you have to be traveling to make that journey in two years (ignorant of time dilation)? I can make it there in 2.1875 years at a speed of 10,729,843,200 miles per hour. That is five times the speed of light.

Now, throwing time dilation into the mix, and working through the Lorentz transformations (which I haven’t used since I was a teenager, so I’m not even going to try it), the time experienced by the crew of the Prometheus will be less than two years. How much less, I don’t know for sure, but considerably less. However, this is impossible, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

To clarify some things…

The DNA can’t be an exact match of the Engineers/Titans or else they would look like the humans, not alabaster-skinned humanoids standing 12-15 feet tall with the other obvious anatomical differences. What they mean is that the Engineer’s DNA contains matching human DNA, i.e. the humans were engineered from Titan DNA. And of course, that is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t know why this is even a point of debate.

The substance the titan is drinking is the new DNA engineered/synthesized from Titan DNA. The DNA product, manufactured in Titan laboratories, needs to mix with preexisting organic material to assume its dispersant protein form. Then, through the destruction of the Engineer, the viable DNA is spread through the water (this occurring on an experimental planet , not Earth. The effects specialist explaining what they are doing in the new video clip is describing things precisely according to the way Scott sees the process. This is the way Scott explained it to him. 

At the deep spiritual level, it’s the metaphor of the dying/life-giver god that one finds throughout ancient mythology. Gods create life through self-sacrifice. Standard life-from-death theme (Osiris, Kephri, etc.). This is how gods pass onto immortality. For example, Osiris was disintegrated by the Seti and cast into the sea. His parts were collected by Isis to germinate the Tree of Life. All the while Osiris became transcendent—liberated from corporeal form—to guide the sun through the sky. 

At the concrete technical level, just as we humans have to grow life in definite media, all the technology the Titans have developed requires incubation in some preexisting organic materials. If the reality were otherwise, there would be no point is using bodies as vessels, which is the gruesome vibe of the Alien universe. So humans (or some other unlucky organism) are synthesized into eggs via xenomorphic slime (see the Director’s Cut of Alien to see the actual life cycle and fuck Cameron and his simplistic ant/bee treatment), eggs that produce facehuggers, facehuggers that produce xenomorphs, xenomorphs that produce eggs. All of these stages use a host. Not to beat you over the head with this, but these are parasites. Another process is DNA infusions producing Holloway monsters, producing trilobites, trilobites producing deacons, etc. A cycle of life engineered by the “gods.”

Third, the Titans aren’t going to destroy the human race simply to destroy them. Humans were bred for a purpose: the production of bioweapons. Either that or the Titans have a newfound purpose for humans, either for use in an inter-Titan war or a war between Titans and some other alien race, perhaps an alien race they themselves created, a Frankenstein’s monster (which seems to be suggested by the dead spacejockeys/engineers/titans against the wall).

The catalyst for this new purpose is likely the murder of Jesus 2000 years before. Jesus was really an Engineer misunderstood and killed—or sacrificed inappropriately or inopportunely—by the Romans. Whatever the specific case, the vials aboard the Juggernaut destined for Earth self-evidently contain the same substance that David plants in Holloway to create the Holloway monster and, therefore, into Shaw to create the trilobite (some of the trilobite larva are even seen coming from Holloway’s eyes). The substance is transforming Holloway into a bioweapon or at least into an incubator for other larval trilobites, which are collectively through Holloway desperately seeking to stay alive for further implantation. Implanted in Shaw’s womb, the trilobite matures, intending to give rise to the Deacon. Shaw stops the process temporarily by performing autoabortion (continuing Scott’s feminist theme established in Alien).

(By the way, the trilobite grows fat on the blood and blood plasma that exists in the well-stocked surgical unit. So you can ignore the haters who sarcastically wonder how it got so big. It is clear that the females are to be used a wombs for trilobites, whereas the men are to become vessels—once transformed into Holloway monsters —for the Deacons.)

It’s an extremely well thought out movie, yet we have all these people walking around talking about how disappointed they are because the movie doesn’t make sense. Really? I guess they would have preferred a flat and awkward tour guide speech about unobtanium; otherwise they wouldn’t get the whole earthlings-exploiting-third-world-primitives thing. Cameron holds hands. Scott doesn’t. He depends on the intelligence of his audience. On that score, I think he’s too optimistic.

This whole thing about Obama not doing what it seemed he said he was going to do in order to get reelected to another term, what does this really mean to say?

It means to say that the president has to be something that he really isn’t, which assumes he really is something, because if he were who he really is, then he wouldn’t be reelected. So his supporters encourage him to deceive the public so he can during his first four years in office make law and policy that is contrary to the interests of his supporters all for the sake of seeing him for eight years.

“Please screw me for four years, Mr. President, so that you can get re-elected,” the progressive says. “It’s no problem you screwing me for four years, because what I really want is for you to be president for eight years. And, really, if you screw me for four more years, that’s okay, too. Because it’s really all about you being president, not about what you do as president. I just love you, Mr. President. That is all.”

It means to say that what progressives really want the president to do is not what most Americans want him to do, hence why they wouldn’t reelect him if he did those things. You’re right; this makes no sense. Had the president governed like Franklin Roosevelt during these first four years, the economy would be going gangbusters right now and he would be immensely popular. Progressives would not only see your guy reelected, but you would have your guy doing what you said he couldn’t do in order to get reelected—which, if you’ve looked at the polls, looks like a difficult proposition at this point. In other words, by supporting his decision to not do what progressives really wanted him to do—in fact they wanted him not to do what they really wanted him to do so he could get re-elected—progressives have likely fated him to the status of a one-term president. 

It means to assume that the president really wants to do the things progressives really want him to do after he is re-elected. Progressives assume that he is not doing the things they really want him to do because he knows that he cannot because he would not get reelected if he did. And, since he’s so super smart, being a Harvard Law School graduate and all, progressives support him on that by not wanting the things they really want.

Obama and his followers are winking at each other. But his wink is disingenuous. He’s smart enough to know that their interpretation of the relationship flows from their gullibility and that he can use them at will to do things entirely opposite of their interests and professed values. He must keep them believing that he would love to do those things but can’t because he must first get reelected, which is why he “accidentally” says those sorts of things while pretending not to know there are live microphones in the room.

Obama is the master of the bamboozle. He knows, like any good carnival barker, that people will line up to be bamboozled if it makes them feel good. 

The people we need to provide the bodies for a mass movement against corporate capitalism are in thrall of an irrational form thinking that accompanies personality cults, for cognitive style where everything can be rationalized. The “Pied Piper syndrome” accompanies the personality cult. The escape from freedom impulse is writ large on the very people who were supposed to lead the rebellion against corporate power.

All this reminds me of when I was a kid and telling myself that I wanted the toy at the bottom of the cereal box that I really didn’t want because I knew that if I wanted the toy I really wanted I would get the one I didn’t want. I figured I would trick the Toy God into giving me the toy I really wanted by saying I wanted the one I didn’t want. Why I assumed the Toy God was a trickster god who wanted to give me toys I didn’t want I don’t know. I was a little kid. I suppose it was something like, “With Andy’s luck, he’ll get the toy he doesn’t want.” The last time I used magical thinking like that to shape opportunities for obtaining the things I wanted was elementary school. Progressives, what’s your excuse? 

I don’t accept the two-party dilemma. It is based on the lesser of two evils fallacy, or LOTE—a false choice that carries with it a serious consequence: enlarging the scope of evil. Democrats will continue down the neoliberal path if labor does not hold them accountable for their anti-working class policies. Democrats will never be held accountable if labor votes out of fear rather than collective long-term interests. Believing that they can take labor’s vote for granted, Democrats only have to do the bidding of the ruling class, since they could easily lose big business to the Republicans. When labor votes Democrat it legitimizes the Democrat’s pro-business agenda. It’s self-destructive behavior, and the proof of this is what has happened over the last several decades.

Why should we continue on for several more decades being drawn into the downward spiral into greater evil? Surely it is obvious to everybody that Democrats can always be portrayed as a little less evil than Republicans, who can always be portrayed as more evil than Democrats. But voting to make greater evil is clearly a less desirable outcome than Mitt Romney living in the White House for a few years. Better to work from a long-term class interested perspective than to continue with that losing proposition called the Democratic Party.

If we are going to use the ballot box for something, perhaps it should be to hold our elected representatives responsible for their failure to represent us. Otherwise, the two-party system remains what it has become: the dictatorship of the capitalist class. And we will keep losing. After all, Obama’s victory in 2008 was clearly a loss for labor. If he wins re-election, labor will suffer yet another loss.

Libertarianism (and variants, such as communist-anarchism and libertarian socialism) is a long-standing economic, legal, and moral philosophy of continental origins that puts personal sovereignty and the full development of human potential at the center of the system of civil liberties and rights. Here, rights are not defined strictly in the negative sense, as they are under classical liberalism (of which the so-called right-wing libertarianism is an unfortunate subspecies), but rather they are defined in a positive sense, that is, not simply “freedom from” (state and religious control), but “freedom to,” that is effectively realizing one’s purpose in the world together with those whom your actions will likely affect. This complete view of personal freedom means that the well-being of people comes before, say, the interests of capital. 

To illustrate, whereas under the liberal conception of freedom Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, private business, wielding contract law, can and do make rules sharply restricting speech, which the state machinery upholds in the interests of capital over against the interests of the individual. In contrast, in societies operating on the basis of libertarian principle, one has free speech in both public and private spheres and, moreover, access to fora in which to make her speech potentially effective. That means an effective right to the means of communication. This arrangement is not free press in the private media sense, but free press in the sense that all individuals have access to it. Media corporations go away under these arrangements and the means of communication becomes a public resource (like the free internet). There is no copyright or trademark. Individuals are free to access the social product together through democratically-negotiated processes (democratic, not majoritarian). Individuals are free to combine the ideas found in society in any way they wish to advance the interests of the community, not some subset of it. 

Clearly this is the diametric opposite of the libertarianism advocated by the political far right. For the latter, property rights are the most important rights. They trump our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For example, Ron Paul argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is bad law because it forces white property owners to serve and hire African Americans in establishments of public accommodations. He contends that capital should be able to determine who it serves and hires free of popular or community interests, and especially of social justice concerns. From the original libertarian position, Paul’s argument represents a desire for tyranny of capital over persons, here a type of tyranny specifically designed to exclude individuals from public accommodations on the basis of race. There is another word for this: segregation. How could a real libertarian argue for tyranny? Clearly this paradox exposes something very wrong with their use of the term. 

In fact, “libertarianism” as used by Ron Paul (and Murray Rothbard, Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman, the Cato Institute, etc.) is a propaganda term introduced in the 1950s, becoming deployed in a widespread manner in the late-1960s and early-1970s, to differentiate those liberals who advocated neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal public policy (manifest in the push for privatization) from the social welfare liberals of the New Deal tradition, who, advocating some form of Keynesian political economy, called their own brand of liberalism “New Liberalism” to distinguish themselves from classical liberalism.

The webpage, Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation, is a State Department project.* The Obama Administration rolled out the webpage in 2010. Likely University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein’s work, or inspired by it, the webpage is an example of state-organized subterfuge.

Why do I suspect Sunstein is behind the project? In a working paper written in 2007, “Conspiracy Theories” (see Harvard University Law School Public Law & Legal Research Paper Series, No. 08-03, January 15), Sunstein, now administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, pondered the government response to “problem” of conspiracy theories. 

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).**

A conspiracy theory is an explanation of events harmful to persons and societies attributable to plots hatched in secret. The phrase is unremarkable. At least it should be. The fact that conspiracies exist and that they are seen as bad by most people might explain why there is a category in the criminal law covering them. A theory is an explanation of a set of facts in terms of their interrelations. Every police officer and prosecutor who pursues a conspiracy has a theory about it. The prosecutor’s goal is to convince judge and jury that her theory is the best explanation for the facts.

From Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation:

Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas.

When persons claim that “conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored,” they mean to short-circuit theories about historical events and social trends where conspiracy is an important element. This is about conditioning the public to engage in thought-stopping. If the author of the web site were objective, he would distinguish between, on the one hand, conspiracy theories, which are legitimate, and, on the other hand, conspiracy fantasies, which aren’t. How do you know the difference? You have to look into them. But propagandists like Sunstein don’t want you looking into them. He believes the government should tell you how to think and what to think about.

Conspiracies can be big or small. Because they are perpetrated by those with moneyed and institutional power, the big ones are far more damaging and harder to control and punish. The big ones are also the more interesting and—obviously, because they are so damaging—the more important ones to consider. It is to these conspiracies that Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation is dedicated to denying, namely the explanation of historical and social events by exposing clandestine operations by persons and organizations with money and institutional power.

Moreover, many of the conspiracies identified on Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation are not conspiracies at all, as those involved in planning, as well as their plans, unfolded overtly. Characterizing these as conspiracy theories asks the public to deny what it occurring out in the open. The fact that the United States government is the major villain in world affairs today and had been for decades is hardly a conspiracy. For a comprehensive account of its villainous ways, read Killing Hope by William Blum. Or read Chomsky and Herman’s Political Economy of Human Rights series The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, After the Cataclysm, and Manufacturing Consent.

From Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation: 

Economic conspiracy theories are often based on the false, but popular, idea that powerful individuals are motivated overwhelmingly by their desire for wealth, rather than the wide variety of human motivations we all experience. (This one-dimensional, cartoonish view of human nature is at the heart of Marxist ideology, which once held hundreds of millions under its sway.)

Marxism understands that these other motives are irrelevant because they are necessarily secondary. The capitalist is a personification of the system imperative to accumulate capital. Arguably, Marxism doesn’t have a view of human nature. Marx saw human beings as personifications of social relations. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx argues that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” For this reason, the wealthy are motivated by their desire for wealth because it is their social role in the capitalist mode of production to possess this desire and continually act upon it. This fact does not preclude “the wide variety of human motivations we all experience.” There is nothing cartoonish about Marxism. Judged in terms of relevant forms of validity (construct, convergent, content, and criterion-related), it is the most complete, dynamic, and successful method for explaining history and social change. 

One fantasy, reflecting this simplistic, unimaginative way of interpreting human events, falsely claims that U.S. national security agencies employ “economic hit men” to entrap countries with huge amounts of debt.

This isn’t a conspiracy but a basic fact of US foreign policy, which serves the interests of the global corporate class. The United States is the main imperialist power providing the intelligence and physical might that secures global domination by the international banking cartel and transnational corporate powers that benefit from the prevailing economic arrangements. The reason the US spends almost 60 percent of its discretionary budget on the military-industrial complex (the US share of global military spending exceeds 40 percent of the total) is to provide muscle for the ruling elite. These functions and the arrangements they serve are in plain sight. To be sure, various conspiracies help maintain the status quo, but the central premise of the quote provided above—that the powers-that-be use debt to entrap countries—is not a conspiracy. This is the way international political economy works. Study the situation in Europe to see for yourself. Look at the situations of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal. The quote attempts to take a self-evident truth and transform it into a conspiracy so it can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Notes

* As of 7.26.2021, the day I am migrating this entry from Blogger, the Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation webpage appears to have been removed. Was it removed by the Trump administration?

** How can legal scholar seriously write that (1) and (2) “will have a place under imaginable conditions” without also implying that a totalitarian state would be necessary for such “instruments” to be imaginable? As for (3), (4), and (5), “counterspeech”? That’s not Orwellian at all.