TOTALITARIANISM TODAY
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
Anything for a diagnosis.
Diana Senecha's short story, "The Diagnosis", paints a sardonic picture of a life hounded by good intentions, a woman surrounded by therapists and well-wishers who can't seem to put their finger on what troubles her. My diagnois? That's life, baby. There's no technical term to save you.
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
American citizens, beware: Your rights to a fair trial depend on your flight patterns.
There is no solace in the knowledge that 5 American citizens are being held in jail under secret evidence.
Five months after his arrest for misdemeanors, including 26 counts of conspiracy and simulating identification documents to which he pleaded not guilty, Mohammed Attis, an Egyptian-born US citizen, the alleged proprietor of a small-time document mill, is at the center of what appears to be the only criminal case of its kind in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- one in which secret evidence has been presented against the defendant.
Atriss remains in jail, now on 0,000 bond -- an amount consistent with a murder charge -- but prosecutors will not say why he poses such a serious risk or give him a chance to respond.
As usual, there are many sides to this story. I encourage you to evaluate it for yourselves. The Fox News position, slightly tainted by suspicion, at least provides detailed information about Atriss' arrest. First Coast News suggests that Interpol provided information that might have led to Atriss' arrest. Postwatch explains why the whole thing "sounds fishy".
According to the Associated Press, officials continure to recieve "contradictory information" about the purposes of Atriss' flight to Egypt last year. CQ Services offers reasons for why Atriss has not yet been charged. Meanwhile, critics continue to question the keeping of evidence from an American citizen who, by law, should be informed of the charges against him and the reasons for those charges. Without such information, a defense is impossible.
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
No Child Left Behind: One year later.
"The only way to make sure no child is left behind is to make sure no child gets ahead."
These frightening words come from Marshall Fritz, the founder and President of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State. One year after President Bush signed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act into law, support is stronger than ever among the American public for the standardized-test approach to education reform. Thousands of Americans are leading by example in putting the high standards and accountability the new law calls for into action.
House Education committee chairman John Boehner (R-OH), one of the bill's authors, is quoted as saying:
"Across America, thousands of principals, teachers and parents have been working with quiet determination to put the new attitude and new resources of the President's initiative to work for our children....They're the ones who deserve the headlines."
A new national survey released by the nonpartisan Americans for Better Education shows overwhelming popular support for the President's education reforms. The survey, conducted December 29-30, 2002 by the Winston Group for Americans for Better Education (ABE), polled more than 1,100 registered voters, with an over-sampling of minority voters.
When asked which they believe is more important to improving education - increasing funding, or raising standards and accountability - 66 percent of Americans said raising standards and accountability, while a mere 26 percent said increasing funding. This study also showed that 91 percent of Americans support requiring public schools to set and meet goals each year to show that all children are learning.
The results of the study don't look so bright for teacher's unions, as 91 percent of Americans support requiring states to have a highly qualified teacher in every public classroom by 2005, even if it means some teachers may be forced to obtain additional training. Revealing a desire for greater teacher-parent accountability, 91 percent of Americans support requiring school districts to give parents annual report cards on overall academic performance of schools.
Perhaps most surprising is the clear support given by those polled in the study for programs involving school choice. 76 percent support allowing parents with children in underachieving schools to transfer their children to a better public school or charter school.
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
A small reminder from poet and author Adrienne Rich
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler-- for the liar-- than it really is, or ought to be.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
The Washington Post surveys the sex market in China.
Ahhh, there's nothing quite like it-- the freedom to self-flagellate. While I respect the decision of Chinese women to prostitute themselves, I find such articles funny precisely because they neglect to note that marriage itself is an enlightened form of long-term prostitution. The great thing about marriage nowadays is that both parties to the transaction absorb the financial and sexual benefits. You can count on the existence of such a clause in my marriage contract. In the game of love and loyalty, you rise and fall together.
"These prostitutes have solved the unemployment problem for themselves," said Pan Suiming, a sexology professor at People's University in Beijing. But not without grave cost to themselves and Chinese society in general.
The sex trade is an increasingly significant channel for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, according to health officials. Since 1995, cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia have increased more than 30 percent annually, according to government data. Experts say those numbers are surely low given that most patients seek treatment in private clinics that do not report data to central authorities. More than 120 million Chinese are already infected with hepatitis B, and at least 1 million have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the government.
In some countries -- notably Thailand and the Netherlands -- governments have acknowledged the scope of their local sex trade and targeted prostitutes with programs to encourage condom use to prevent the spread of infections. Not in China. Local governments are enmeshed in prostitution through their ownership of hotels that draw customers and profit from the trade, but for the Communist Party, whose legitimacy rests in part on having supposedly eradicated such social vices, the thriving industry is deeply embarrassing. That has stymied efforts to regulate it and limit its harm.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Getting frisky with airport security.
Penn of the infamous Penn and Teller comedy troupe recounts this little ditty about an airport security encounter gone awry. The beginning....
Last Thursday I was flying to LA on the Midnight flight. I went through security my usual sour stuff. I beeped, of course, and was shuttled to the "toss-em" line. A security guy came over. I assumed the position. I had a button up shirt on that was untucked. He reached around while he was behind me and grabbed around my front pocket. I guess he was going for my flashlight, but the area could have loosely been called "crotch." I said, "You have to ask me before you touch me or it's assault."
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Wise words.
In response to yesterday's post relaying a conversation with my mother, Norman Singleton sent a one-line email worth quoting in its entirety.
The reason we must speak out while we can is so future generations do not curse us for the cowardice that condemned them to silence.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
It's getting drafty in hear, so make your flight reservations to Canada.
According to this viewer poll, 60 percent of Americans do not support a return to military conscription. Yet, a new argument from the perspective of socioeconomic balancing recieved a fair amount of attention lately. Counterpunch's Krystal Kyer's short, sweet retort is convincing enough for me.
Rangel makes a noteworthy point when he acknowledges the fact that people from lower socio-economic status and minorities disproportionately make up our armed forces. Yet saying that a draft will bring better
representation isn?t necessarily true. After all, the rich can always buy their way out, one way or another. Just ask Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Delay, Armey, Hastert, Lott, and Perle (should I go on?) how they did it...[And] Since when is involuntary servitude on the list of American values? Is
enslavement patriotic?
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Tim O'Brien's wonderlust.
In a discussion of his latest novel, July, July, Tim O'Brien talks about Vietnam, life, and how things might have turned out differently. Having fought in Vietnam, O'Brien considers himself "a coward" because he served in the war only to avoid the rejection he would have faced from his neighbors, town, and country if he had made the choice to run away. Ultimately, it is the Vietnam war that turned O'Brien to writing. In his own words:
Well, I had a desire to write from the time I was a little kid and then something collided with that desire—namely Vietnam—and I had to write about it. It moved from desire to imperative. I couldn't not write. There were moral issues, like the terrible thing of even going to the war and not having the courage to say no, which makes you want to write about how hard it is to say no in this world to anything. Saying no makes you unpopular and hurts your reputation—so you say yes to everything. Whether it's your country or your girlfriend—it's hard to say no, right? So, Vietnam is a way of entering that, but the essential problem isn't geopolitical. The central problem is more human.
Upon returning from Vietnam with a Purple Heart, O'Brien went to graduate school at Harvard's School of Government. While he was studying, he published a collection of his personal Vietnam recollections titled If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.
O'Brien describes July, July as an "ensemble novel":
You make a choice and there are consequences. That moment of choice can shed light on what preceded it and what may well follow. Once I thought of that, it occurred to me that this is how I and most people live their lives—erasing it as we go along. You don't remember much of yesterday. Little scraps of memory are there, but after a week all of that goes. When you look back over the years, you're left with chunks of memory that have to do with choices you've made or moments of crisis, and the rest of it is gone. You forget doing the dishes and all of the things you do in your life. When you think about it, it's kind of sad that you tend to erase so much of your life.
The plot is a familiar one, revolving around the questions of a man who reaches middle-age only to discover his own unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the choices made over the course of his life. The leitmotif "What if...?" echoes throughout the story.
The story about Billy is not just about politics or about leaving the country. It has more to do with the general search for happiness. Sure he goes to Winnipeg and does what he thinks is the right thing, but he's not a happy man. Thirty years later he feels a sense of—well, the thought of Dorothy haunts him. What might have been haunts him. If only she had accompanied him. There's always that list of ifs. There are ifs in all of us. I mean, the President of the United States probably said, "Oh God, if only I'd been a good President." Those ifs are always going to be there, and they are a way of taking a look at our dreams and at how we measure our sense of self-esteem and our happiness against the things we dream.
What if the things we believe will make us happy ultimately fail to do so? What if we spend our entire lives painstakingly devoted to a particular vision of the future which we finally achieve, only to discover than the dreaming is more beautiful than the doing? These are individual questions with individual answers, invisible to the electric eye.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
Coming back.
The Economist's special feature on the increased influence of diasporas during the postcommunist period begins this year with the type of impeccable analysis one can expect from this journal. Diasporas and expat communities have provided the financial support for many of the last decade's civil wars and territorial realignments, including the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the KLA's aggression in the Balkans, the facile separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia, the IRA terrorism, the list goes on.
Governments court exiles in the hopes of recieving financial assistance for their policy plans. In return, these governments, which include the ruling regimes in Mexico, Ghana, Croatia, Albania, Hungary, Israel, Poland, and countless others, provide exiles with absentee voting rights, dual citizenship, and various versions of political power within the countries of the exiles' birth. While money can't buy you love, it can certainly buy invitations and respect for exiles in their native countries. We have not seen the end of this trend in exile rapprochement.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003
L. Ron Hubbard has competition.
If you're missing The Raelian Revolution, then the future has no room for you. Raelians believe that aliens came down in little sprockets and cloned themselves to populate the earth. In other words, they are among us. These extraterrestials defy stereotype; they have even set up extraterrestial embassies to prepare the world for the coming clutter.
A friend and I, tempted by the description of a Raelian seminar at the Jardins du Propehts, have considered learning more first-hand. Doesn't the "happy kind of craziness" at least allure you?
The organizing committee has been using its creative energy to give you a combination of games, sports, shows, dances, and training sessions, all offered within a context of self-discovery, love, joy and a happy kind of craziness.
If the party doesn't sound too tempting, then perhaps the mystery of the humans that Raelians claim to have successfully cloned might be more enticing. For some strange reason, Raelians refuse to offer evidence for the existence of these clones, one of which was "born" to a lesbian couple.
Maybe Raliens have recieved advice from Michael Jackson about how to protect children from the public eye. Or maybe the esoteric element of this religion is crucial to ritual practice. Why are the Raelians intent on cloning humans? The answer might be more disturbing than you think. Raelians say they have duplicated a human as part of their quest for "perpetual orgasms through cloning". Yikes.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Sex by statute.
For all its good intentions, the US federal government still hasn't managed to find a way to regulate sex. State governments, though ambitious, lose credibility over enforcement problems, so the passage of a sex law calls into question many other less frivolous laws passed by the same state legislature.
The easiest way for state governments to slip in anti-oral-sex laws is by placing oral sex under the category of "sodomy", which remains illegal in Maryland, Virginia and 22 other states. Lest those who support anti-sodomy legislation get too comfortable on those ugly little pedestals, I should mention that these laws do not just make sexual relationships difficult for homosexuals. In fact, the anti-sodomy laws impose high costs for heterosexual married couples who might engage in the unspeakable oral act.
J. Edgar Hoover once said, "I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce". In other words, if you want to regulate oral sex at the federal level, the only way to do so is by attaching it to anti-prostitution laws, which fall under the Interstate Commerce Clause. On the other hand, as most anti-prostitution laws cover only localities or regions, the ICC might not be a slick enough shoe-horne in enabling the federal government to over-ride local laws which decriminalize prostitution.
Localities and state citizen action groups have been opposing anti-sodomy laws for some time now. Add to that the Libertarian Party's tongue-in-cheek strike against sex laws and you have what might pass for a grassroots movement. The continuous intrusion of the US government into American bedrooms is ridiculous and annoying. Laws do not limit sex so much as they stigmatize it. As for me, I must agree with Rita Mae Brown's wise admonition-- "Lead me not into temptation....I can find my way there myself."
Monday, January 6, 2003
The mission-creep of corporate-speak.
Keith H. Hammonds asks about the "secret life of CEO's"; more specifically, "do they even know right from wrong"?
CEOs are flawed individuals who are operating in a complex, imperfect world. They are no more or less honest than the rest of us -- in fact, "honesty" almost misses the point. The point is, they negotiate a razor's edge between knowing one thing and having to say another.
They are intensely driven to achieve and they operate in a marketplace that measures achievement almost wholly in the short term. They confront a world that moves faster than ever before, and really, there is little about their unwieldy organizations that they easily control.
So, on the issue of lying, CEO's are not outright Pinnochios-- they don't lie as much as they selectively conceal. Steeped in "institutional corporate-speak", Hammonds believes CEOs "find a way to walk the line between saying just enough, not too much, and never the wrong thing". On the face of it, this doesn't seem so bad. However, when institutional corporate-speak begins to creep into accounting figures, the problems become much more serious. Just ask Anderson.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Where sex stops and gratitude begins.
Merci, Bacchus, pour le blog-roll, among other small attentions. It's certainly wonderful to have a god nodding his laurel-wreathed head in approval. With all the calls to arms and promises of empire, it becomes all too easy to forget that war is NOT the best use for testostorone.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Welcome to the future.
It's not hard to imagine the impassioned furor with which Gentleman X penned this little diatribe against dual citizenship (called "double citizenship" in his post). Precious. If I get enough emails from you guys, I'll write up my defense of dual citizenship. Otherwise, I won't bore anyone with the details.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Political quid pro quo.
According to The Economist, nine eastern states have filed a lawsuit against the Bush administration, challenging its decision to relax pollution rules laid down in the Clean Air Act of 1970. These nine states include Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont filed the lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.
Represented by state attorney generals including Eliot Spitzer, the lawsuit will allege that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is exceeding its authority by enacting rules that weaken the Clean Air Act. Congress adopted the Clean Air Act in 1970 with the intention of improving the environment and protecting public health by lowering levels of air pollution. Spitzer thinks the Bush administration's new rules will lead to the unwanted effect of creating higher levels of air pollution.
The Bush administration has not exactly been secretive about its desire to help coal-fired power plants and other industrial facilities avoid costly pollution controls. With the President announcing his economic plan tommorrow, gutting the CAA is no small fry. Will it be worth the political cost (the support of Congressional Democrats) as the war in Iraq approaches?
Monday, January 6, 2003
Asbestos gets the best of us.
The rise in the number of asbestos claims startles even the uninitiated, like myself. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Lester Brickman, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law, makes a strong case against the "asbestos swindle".
In 2002, 90,000 new asbestos claims were filed-- triple the number filed in 2001. The tort lawyer mafia, frightened by the dwindling number of claimants who are able to prove ill effects of alleged exposure to asbestos, are rounding up the usual class action suspects. Even though most asbestos cases today are being brought by healthy persons, lawyers' effective rates can run ,000 to ,000 an hour when settlements are in huge batches.
Critics want Congress to limit fraudulent claiming before more companies are destroyed, their investors defrauded and workers put out on the streets. The bulldozer question, however, remains-- At what point does an employer's legal liability end, and personal responsibility take over? The jury is still out on this one.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Bush should reconsider surrendering to political pressures to extend unemployment benefits.
With unemployment hovering at 6 percent, market skeptics are pressuring the Bush administration to "fix" the job market. Later this month, Congress is expected to reauthorize a temporary program which would extend unemployment benefits to workers whose benefits ran out in December 2002.
William B. Conerly, from the National Center for Policy Analysis, maintains that Bush needn't sacrifice his political integrity just yet, as there are still jobs available. It's all part of the cycle. Net new job creation is always the smallest source of jobs. A second source is "churn," as new businesses are formed and existing businesses expand while other companies cut staff or shut down. When net new job growth is two percent, we may experience a gross gain in new jobs of 12 percent, offset by a gross decline in existing jobs of 10 percent. The largest source of jobs is normal turnover as people leave jobs voluntarily. The turnover rate may average about 15 percent, with rates as high as 100 percent in sectors that hire entry level workers.
Studies show that unemployment benefits often prevent the unemployed from getting employed over the short-term and the medium-term. For example, the likelihood a person receiving UI compensation will find a job more than doubles just before benefit eligibility ends -- spiking in the last two weeks. Also, workers who are not eligible for UI find jobs more than twice as rapidly as those who are receiving UI. Certainly, the incentives to find a job increase over time spent unemployed and uncompensated. One might argue that the incentive structure for unemployment compensation resembles what I like to call the "self-flagellating AFDC incentive scheme".
Monday, January 6, 2003
Responses.
A comrade sent the following in response to my post on Stand Down:
Great! I'm confused as to why the one guy said he did not think of you as libertarian.... unless it is because you are critical of the corporate state,which many on both the left and right confuse with the free-market, and the cultural effects of capitalism since even many so-called libertarians (I'm thinking of the Postrel types --btw I'm not very impressed with either Postrel mind or her cleavage), think that defending people's right to make their own market choices implies approval of the results of market process. of course, that is nonsense, Murry Rothbard to take one example, as an arch-social conservative in his personal habits and life and he did not approve of much of modern culture.He just believed we should fight it with out minds, by convencing people to make other choices, not by forcing them to. in addition, the state is responsible for much of the cultural collapse we've seen around us.
A good 1998 speech by Congressman Ron Paul on this subject responding to the Columbine shootings.
Monday, January 6, 2003
For the boy who loves Schlitz.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Add a toast to the "good" with the most.
Given the finicky mood of markets lately, it's comforting to know that one product is still very much in demand. I still haven't heard if the Left has conclusively designated sex a "public good" a la Leninst utopia. Methinks it must be a private good before it can be a private best.
Monday, January 6, 2003
You say messy, I say magnifique.
Does this redeem my clutter?
Monday, January 6, 2003
Stevie Wonder might have been right about her.
Science tells us that superstitious behavior is ridiculous at worst and anti-evolutionary at best. However, rationalists might need to reevaluate their superstitious consideration of superstitions in light of new research, which shows it to be natural and maybe even cognitively-healthy to think superstitiously sometimes.
More recent studies by Professor Giora Keinan of Tel Aviv University have established that magical thinking is also more likely when people are under stress. During the 1994 Gulf war, he found that superstitious and magical beliefs were more prevalent in regions exposed to missile attacks than in regions where there were no attacks. And in an ingenious experiment in which students were sat at a wooden table and asked identical questions about their health, he found that individuals with a high desire for control were more likely to tap the table and say "touch wood" when interviewed just before sitting exams than students questioned on a normal study day.
Does this mean the time has come to stop making jokes about the CIA's hiring of fortune-tellers for guidance in decision-making? Absolutely not. CIA jokes are always kosher. But it does mean that we need to be more conscientious about the different guises of "superstition", which, stucturally, resembles much that we might consider civilized about human behavior. For example, religious practice also involves certain talismans or relics or rituals that might appear superstitious to the non-believer. Reaching for that rosary looks pretty strange to the removed, rational observer. And what makes knocking on wood more silly than crossing yourself with water when you step inside a church?
Although human thought is prodigious," says Stuart Vyse, "it is not without weaknesses and uncertainties. In a number of situations, we are prone to irrational rather than rational behaviour. We make erroneous conclusions, show biased judgment and ignore important information." At the heart of much superstition, he says, lie a number of common cognitive failings. "In particular, superstitious thinking springs from misunderstandings of probability and random processes, errors of logical reasoning, and cognitive short cuts that sacrifice accuracy."
Rational actor models have yet to adequately deal with human insecurity-- even though it is precisely such insecurity that leads to stock marker crashes and bank runs. Is the market fueled, to some extent, by superstitious assumptions about human behavior? Is the best businessman one who ignores those deeper feelings and keeps his eye on the figures? Economists have yet to offer a conclusive answer to such questions, but the recent accounting scandals should do a little to undermine the faith in numbers (at least, on Wall Street).
Monday, January 6, 2003
Will our bombs be "smart" enough to avoid destroying this?
It's so easy to believe that Iraq is not a country with its own monuments and historical buildings-- we prefer to relegate it to the mental category of "nasty desert Middle East". Yet historians believe that the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq. A bomb nullifies all such significance. Imagine how beautiful the future might be if human capacity for creation exceeded or trumped the insecurity and fear that makes human capacity for destruction so tremendous.
My mother is right-- "You can't change the world, Alina. You can only change yourself." Still, even granting my inability to effect change, I would like to think that I at least tried to influence the ideas and explanations circulating in the realm of knowledge.
So I cross my arms and stare back at my mother-- "Yes, mom, but that is not an argument for complacency. If everyone in communist Romania waged a constant battle against communist ideology, then it never would have lasted so long, or come at such high cost."
"You don't know what it was like to live there, Alina. People who opposes the regime died-- or just plain disappeared. I've raised you in this country where you can believe in freedom and liberty-- you have the freedom and liberty to even think about such things. Under communism, no one believed in anything anymore. We just believed that anything could happen. And nothing could protect us."
So the legacy continues, as I make efforts to temper my passionate opposition to this war with reasonable excuses as to why opportunists might support it. Honestly however, I am not "sure" or "convinced" of anything except the continuous need for self-examination and tempered reaction to catastrophic events. If I sound sometimes self-contradictory, it is because of this uncertainty, this acknowledgement that I do not hold the monopoly on truth or reality. I hope that I defer to the wisdom that is silence always over the certainty that is dogma.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Ronald Reagan on conscription.
From Human Events (Feb. 1979).
"...it [conscription] rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the
state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state -- not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers -- to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a
great idea."
Monday, January 6, 2003
Lies, more lies, and damned lies.
J. Victor Marshall hones in on "the lies we are told about Iraq". Discussing why the US government abandoned diplomacy in the first Gulf War, Marshall writes:
The administration realized that a peaceful solution to the crisis would undercut its grand ambitions. The White House torpedoed diplomatic initiatives to end the crisis, including a compromise, crafted by Arab leaders, to let Iraq annex a small slice of Kuwait and withdraw. To justify war with Hussein, the Bush administration condoned a propaganda campaign on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Americans were riveted by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti so-called refugee’s eyewitness accounts of Iraqi soldiers yanking newborn babies out of hospital incubators in Kuwait, leaving them on a cold floor to die.
The public didn’t know that the eyewitness was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and that her congressional testimony was reportedly arranged by public relations firm Hill & Knowlton and paid for by Kuwait as part of its campaign to bring the United States into war.
Only 8% of the bombs dropped on Iraq during the first Gulf War were of the "smart-bomb" variety. The rest were mostly dropped in carpet-bombing campaigns. While those of us in America might not have been aware of these distinctions, there are others for whom such distinctions mean the difference between life or death.
Monday, January 6, 2003
Russell Kirk on conscription.
From The South Atlantic Quarterly (XLV, 3 July 1946).
Some people are declaring that we need conscription to make young men the pure and lovely creatures their ancestors "are alleged to have been - to teach them, among other things, to brush their teeth, scrub their faces, and cook their suppers. Abstract humanitarianism has come to regard servitude – so long as it be to the state - as a privilege. Greater self-love has no government than this: that all men must wear khaki so that some men may be taught to brush their teeth. Apologists for Negro slavery claimed for their peculiar institution, the virtue which humanitarians now ascribe to the draft: that it instilled a healthful discipline. A humanitarianism which believes that boys can be filled with sweetness and light, strength and joy, through living communally under military force in training camps or work camps is very abstract indeed. Few will deny that the humanitarianism of Fascism was nothing if not abstract; such were the premises upon which Fascist youth organizations were established. Most interesting is the ignorance of the motives and desires of the common man displayed by academic psychologists, and William James was no exception. When a man can maintain that the basis of morality lies in the satisfaction of desire and remark, according to Hutchins Hapgood, "So long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world," it is not surprising that he can think the nation requires conscription to satisfy its soul. Only under a thoroughly muddled system of ethics could the drafting of young people be called a moral measure.
