Sudden Increase in 'Gender Realism'

I have recently applied to a PhD program in religion, with a focus on gender and culture, and I used as my main selling point the fact that my upbringing gave me a front and center view of the way that religion was used both (1) to make people "American" and (2) to define and internalize gender norms, and (3) I have seen the way that religious constructions of "patriotism" and religious constructions of manliness go hand in hand.  I think many people with an upbringing similar to mine have had that experience.  But I have to admit, some times I'm surprised at how much norms similar to the ones under which I was raised have a reach that far surpasses the reach of the religion in which I was raised.  

I shouldn't be surprised, because I'm one of those former fundamentalists who lost their religion and then became a libertarian, and I have seen the type of masculinity that gets idealized in this corner of the political spectrum.  It's like the Baptist type of manliness, but with sin.  Not that I wasn't sinning when I was a Baptist - I was probably sinning more - but there's a brashness in libertarian-leaning conservatism that relishes looking mean and horny.  

According to Pew, Americans' views of gender became much more conservative in just the past few years.  The proportion of respondents who said that a person's gender can be different from the sex that they were assigned at birth dropped from 44% in September 2017 to 38% in May 2022, and the proportion of respondents who said that a person's gender can only correspond to the sex that they were assigned at birth rose from 54% in September 2017 to 60% in May 2022.  

As of 2014 only 25.4% of Americans were evangelical, my guess is that Americans did not suddenly start becoming evangelical or fundamentalist in these rates.  But, also according to Pew, evangelical Christianity gained a net 4% increase in adherents among White Americans during the Trump years, between 2016 and 2020.  

To me it looks like religion is a main player, but not the only player.  I think it's also important to point out that religious-like dynamics can be involved with religious belief-like norms in spaces where there is no formal religious structure present - for instance, the way my generation seems to pursue meaning through politics and astrology.  

But I think a deeper thing going on is a flight to a type of manliness where the idealized man represents strength, security, and safety.  In my view this is happening left of center just as much as it's happening on the right, and you see it not just in President Biden's vintage blue collar mannerisms but also in a younger political candidate's campaign video showing himself as a law enforcement agent against sex trafficking, as well as a loving father of White baby girls at home.  This desire for man the protector will be catered to by any venue that offers meaning, be they religious, political, or even economic.

Admissions

I am afraid I'm more of a paternalistic rice and beans state capitalist than a libertarian socialist or a champagne socialist - the latter of which is the best type of socialist to be if you're lucky.  I am afraid that we have price inflation to worry about, which is a matter of demand, and not just long term inflation, which is a matter of money supply.  Once we implement ubi, I'm afraid prices are going to shoot up just because sellers know that everyone has money to spend.  Taxing rich people to put downward pressure on the money supply might not be successful at controlling inflation when the prices are related to demand.  Of course, a lot of the noise could be political - people whose comfort depends on others being enthusiastic about putting their labor on the market have an interest in us not wanting everyone to be guaranteed some spending money.  But I'm also confident that our savviness about the self interest of rich people does not negate laws of economics.  

I want a spending policy of full employment and a higher minimum wage, and yes, I do want redistributionary taxes (aka taxes on rich people) to pay for it.  But if we want to mitigate gentrification and inflation then we need to moderate demand.  That could include what I call truth in pricing policies - policies prohibiting the display of any price other than the point of commerce price which includes sales taxes and all other fees including shipping.  I believe it should include a complete redesign of how government contracts with private business and of how private banks, which are protected by the government, should capitalize borrowers.  We like to talk about gentrification being a thing that evil real estate developers do, but we don't want to admit that the engineer at an aeronautical company browsing Zillow and the lab technician ordering ramen are among the main drivers of gentrification.  Money in your pocket is a weapon that gives you power.  (And when our state capitalist system uses the printing press - its fiat wealth-creating power - to give incredibly greater amounts of money to a shrinking group of people, it is giving a much greater amount of power to those people and those close to them than it gives to others, and it places those people in a position of patronage and everyone else in a position of servitude.  The neighborhood will look like how those people spend to make it look like.  And there will be increasing amounts of class resentment between the blue collar working class and the liberal and lucky white collar class.)

I am considering compulsory savings, for example increasing workers' payments into social security, as a way to put downward pressure on demand, and also to reduce volatility.  Supposedly middle class people in big metros are putting nothing away because of how high their cost of living is, and my guess is forcing people to save more money will force them to cut back in aesthetic spending.  Yes, it's paternalist.  Yes, most people would greatly dislike it.  But these are the choices that need to be made for these people to be economically safe and for the market system to be stable.

Untitled

The following is the first draft of an untitled short story that I started writing yesterday.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

        We were told that Moses commanded it, and since Moses is the one who talks to God, Moses' words are taken as God's.  And so we all have to line up and walk out of the camp and take turns throwing rocks at a convicted Sabbath breaker until he dies.  All you heard was he was gathering sticks for his mother.

        "Thank God he was caught before he got home," says a man in front of you.  "If she was caught lighting a fire, we would be stoning her too."

        People are singing hymns.  A lot of people are crying, especially women and girls.  A lot of people are shouting Amen or Hallelujah, especially men.

        A boy who looks eight, nine, or ten hands you a rock and says "May the Lord strengthen thy hand," and you quietly laugh because he used the archaic second person singular.

        Your hope is that the man will be dead by the time it's your turn to throw your rock.  There are so many people here, that so many people must already have thrown their rock.  The man must already be dead.

        The man in front of you throws his rock onto a large pile of rocks, turns around and whispers "Lord have mercy" and walks away.

        Now it's your turn, but all you see is a big pile of rocks.  The man must certainly be dead now.  No action from you could have been the cause of death or any harm to him.

        You pause and try to think of something good to say, like something a man in the crowd would say whenever Moses or Aaron talks -- "Praise the Lord," or "Bless God," or, like the man in front of you, "Lord have mercy" -- but none of those seem to be the right thing to say.

        You toss your rock underhanded.  It falls a cubit short of the pile.  You look around and everyone except for a woman sitting on the ground is looking at you.  You walk forward, stoop, and flick your rock with your hand.  This time it falls less than a pinky's width in front of the pile.

        You're pretty sure everyone is still looking at you.  You just don't want to turn around.

        "What do you say, Miss, should my last throw count?"  You turn to face the seated woman but she's still staring forward and completely silent.  She hasn't said a word since you got to the front, and now you're thinking she's the very last woman you should have asked that question.

        You pick your rock up again, hold it out over the pile, and drop it.  It claps when it hits the pile.

        You turn to see the boy who was handing out rocks try to give a rock to the lady sitting on the ground.  She wouldn't take it, so he sets it in her lap.  She shrieks, then wails, then falls over and lies motionless.

        It's strangely quiet back at camp this evening.  You'll grow used to the weird silence, just like you'll grow used to the heat, and to stoning other Hebrews to death.  You nibble on your ration of sweetcake and you sip your ration of water, and you look out at the red mountains around you, and you see that there is bread and water in the camp and none outside it, and you decide that, at least for now, life is less cruel with your people than without them.  And over the next forty years you will make that assessment again, and again, and again.

Corpus Hermeticum

I wanted to see what, if any, systematic theology there might be behind tarot reading. And I was struck that almost as soon as Europeans started using tarot decks for cartomancy, they attributed the practice to Egypt and the Hermetic tradition - and this was before they started putting Hebrew letters and Egyptian themes on the cards. Our scholarship of ancient and medieval religious texts has greatly developed since the 1700's, and now I am peering down into a deep, dusty rabbit hole.

Two kinds of eudaimonia

Just a quick update - I'm a eudaimonist now. And a damn statist to boot. My moral views are less Kantian than they have been in the past, and I now see "acting in accordance with our nature" as a big part of morality.

But what's "natural" for us? I agree with Mencius that the beginning of morality is the primordial compassionate urges you feel towards others. But as Steven Pinker mentions, it's more natural for us to sacrifice our self interest for family members than for a larger group - we have to socially train ourselves to include non-family into our circle.

I like the eudaimonia that's broader than merely the primordial. I generally see morality as a way to act that contributes to human enrichment, and a big part of that is an increase in human life expectancy and quality of life.

So the socialization that occurs to get people to include non-family into their circle, though not immediately natural, is "natural" enough for the purposes of my eudaimonism because it's necessary for states, which helps keep people from dying young.

When and in what order was the New Testament written?

It seems only seven books of the New Testament were written during the lives of the apostles, according to a consensus of Biblical scholars. These books are the "undisputed" letters of Paul - 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans. All or almost all of Jesus' contemporaries were dead by the time the other New Testament books, including the gospels, were penned.

This is a relatively new perspective for Christians; but as Christians come around to this view, should they give more weight to Paul's seven letters than to the other New Testament books? If they were to, then maybe the Free Grace theology of my fundamental Baptist upbringing wouldn't seem so overstated. There would still be funny phrases to wrestle with, like "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12), but at least James wouldn't be as big a problem.

But there could be other problems. Though these seven epistles go at length about salvation by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and though they call Jesus Lord, they don't call him God, they say nothing about a virgin birth, and they say nothing about an empty tomb (though that last one might not be such a problem for the orthodox when the risen Christ is mentioned). And they don't forbid women from speaking in church, or require them to ask doctrinal questions to their husbands rather than their pastors; but to the fundamentalists' comfort, Romans does start out sounding sufficiently homophobic.

The view that Paul's seven epistles are the only parts of the New Testament written during the lives of the apostles poses a serious challenge to what I call the "Ebionite myth" - the idea popular among modern Ebionites, Black Hebrew Israelites, some liberal Protestants, and Muslims, that there originally was a purely Jewish (if subversive) Christianity that centered around Jesus' teachings rather than his death, and then Paul came and messed it up. Given that the oldest records of Christian doctrine we have are written by Paul, it gets pretty hard to say that Paul's writings about salvation by grace and atonement through Jesus' death and resurrection are a perversion of Christianity.

I bet you could learn a lot about the development of very early Christianity by studying a chronological New Testament. The most famous one right now is by Marcus Borg. He dates various books differently than does Raymond Brown, who is one of Jericho Brisance's other sources. Borg sets James earlier in the sequence than Brown does, mostly because James looks like it might be closer to earlier Christianity. (Maybe it's the egalitarianism and the "faith without works is dead." I personally think "the Father of lights" makes the book sound a bit neo-Platonic or Gnostic, but anyway Jews had been in contact with Greek and Persian religion for centuries before the author of James was born.) Also, Borg sets John earlier than Luke, which I find strange because to me John looks like the biggest weirdo of the canonized gospels. I personally prefer Brown's dates over Borg's, but Borg's book looks worth the read.

Is Disbelief in Free Will Bad for Society?

The June issue of Scientific American contains an article by Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs about the social impact of skepticism about free will (if you can't pay $5.99 for the issue, you can read the full article for free at Learned Citizen). Based on some surveys and studies that have been done, it seems two things could happen to people when they doubt free will - they could want less prison time for criminals, but they could also put too much hot sauce in the food of people they don't like. In other words, they could get less vengeful in theory but more vengeful in action.

The authors write that as more people loose belief in free will, one of three social effects could result from this: we could get a more merciful justice system that emphasizes crime prevention over retribution; we could descend into anarchy; or, as Voltaire said about God, we might feel we have to re-invent belief in free will.

The third possibility sounds a little fascinating and reminds me of Kant's philosophy of religion during his critical period; but I question whether it's best to promote belief in an idea that the scientific community supports less and less.

I grant that ideas can rightly be weighed in part by their social effect. But I wonder if there are long-term costs, including opportunity costs, to keeping foundational beliefs that science increasingly puts into question. The social benefit of having lots of free will believers who are individual responsibility, law and order types might be outweighed by the social cost of not basing our justice system on an accurate view of human nature. These social costs could include higher rates of recidivism, the costs born by the victims of that recidivism, and the public costs of pursuing, trying, and imprisoning re-offenders.

Not-so-new News About the Northridge Mosque

There was a very bitter dispute in the Sunni Muslim community in Granada Hills recently. The dispute was mainly over how the mosque's finances should be handled, and who should be in charge of the mosque. Theology wasn't part of it. But the parties to the dispute were likening each other to the Taliban, protesters started demonstrating outside the mosque during services and called the imam a devil, the mosque leaders hired private security, allegations of battery were made, a death threat was allegedly made on the phone, lawsuits were filed, fun things like that. Sometimes it's harder to tell what's worse - fights about money or fights about God.

The judge ordered the mosque to hold an election for the board, and that election happened July 15 of this year. Since the imam, the incumbent board members, and almost all of their supporters boycotted the election, the challengers won by a landslide. Incumbents got between 2 and 5 votes each, while the challengers got between 992 and more than a thousand votes each.

One of the reasons many of the incumbents' supporters abstained was that they did not believe that a ruling from a secular court was valid in disputes between Muslims. So though this dispute was more about finance than religion, it was someone's religion that made their loss blatant.

Making San Jose the Capital of Silicon Valley

     "I'm convinced that we would have been better off rebuilding this city from a million small decisions made by tens of thousands of individual citizens and business owners than by a gang of bureaucrats with no stake in our success beyond their own resume padding.

     "We may have gained a couple of extra high rises and a few more public buildings...but the cost was too great. We sucked the soul and culture out of old downtown San Jose and replaced it with a comparatively sterile and empty metropolitan center that constantly has to dangle expensive bait to lure in young people and wealthy suburbanites.

     "It will take at least another generation to bring back the random juxtapositions of shops and businesses, the welcome and well-worn seediness and the population of hungry young urbanites that make up a healthy city center - and that were so thoughtlessly torn down or driven away back in the '80s and '90s...

     "Where was all of that Redevelopment money coming from?

     "The typical answer I got at the time was either a shrug or that it was a kind of magical 'free' money that would have absolutely no effect upon the overall finances of the city.

     "Well, we now know that was utter bullshit. A city is an ecosystem. You can't segment off one corner of it, rewrite its financial underpinnings and expect it to operate in a vacuum. No matter how you try to firewall it off, inevitably everyone is affected. And now we can see what that means - a shiny and empty downtown, the loss of numerous small downtown businesses (many of them a century old) that gave San Jose its character and culture - an aging infrastructure in the other, outlying districts, public buildings that have become financial sinkholes, a city budget too strained to pursue major new initiatives, a rising crime rate and a declining quality of life...

     "[I]f you are going to build a prosperous future, a city that will come roaring out of this recession into a new era of prosperity, then you don't try to pick winners - especially [in some] industry like clean tech - and you don't help mature, and likely doomed, tech companies build nice high-rise headquarters, and you don't burden struggling start-ups with endless regulations, taxes and fees, and the latest social engineering boondoggle.

     "And most of all, you don't leave it up to a committee of bureaucrats to guess which companies will succeed and which won't.

     "Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but the last 10 percent will change the world - and the fortunes of the city of San Jose...."

     - Malone, Michael S. "Dreams of Instant City/The Blue Sky Days." *Metro Silicon Valley* [San Jose] 5 September 2012: 16+ (http://issuu.com/metrosiliconvalley/docs/1236_mt).

A Conversation About Alawites Involving Alawites

Here's a link to a Christian webpage on the Alawite sect of Shia Islam.

http://www.30-days.net/muslims/muslims-in/mid-near-east/syria-alawites/

Though it's a Christian site dedicated to disseminating information that could help in Christian missionary efforts, this page has attracted Sunnis and Alawites who want to debate on whether Alawism is actually a Muslim denomination.

Two things to note:
(1) One non-Alawite Muslim here claimed that Alawites "were patronized by French colonialists just like the Qadiyanis were patronized by Britsh in India."
(2) All Alawites here claim to be just as Muslim as the guy next door, and deny any and all heresy they are alleged to flirt with. One thing none of them mention is that many of their teachings are secret. Maybe they don't know that. Maybe the majority of them honestly believe that they really are just a moderate sect of Shi'ites.

Probably the most you'll learn online about the heterodoxies of Alawites is at these two Sunni fundamentalist websites, here and here, and this evangelical Christian website.

You should be mindful of 3 things when you study a small, mysterious denomination like Alawite Shi'ism:
(1) Hostile sources could be flat-out lying about the denomination, or sincerely believing and propagating lies about the denomination.
(2) Sources who belong to the minority denomination could be overstating their commonality with the mainstream, and understating their differences with it, for practical and political reasons.
(3) The denomination actually could change over time. This can get really interesting when, as is alleged about Alawites, many of the group's beliefs and practices are secret.

The two biggest Alawite Facebook pages are I'm Alawite, with 1,858 likes, and Muslim-Alawite, with 985 likes. Muslim-Alawite is obviously very pro-Assad; I can't tell with the bigger group I'm Alawite, mostly because there aren't any Assad posters and pretty much all the posts are in Arabic. Below is a picture at I'm Alawite, which I found pretty interesting.

The American Religion

The following is a comment thread that formed on a post by the woman here known as Post-Bush Neocon's Mom. The post was a pic of four white schoolchildren with their hands over their hearts, facing a flag which was being held by a fifth white schoolchild. The bottom of the pic had a caption which read:

"We no longer do this for... fear... of offending someone !!! Let's see how many Americans re-post this ." (all sic)

The first comment posted was mine.

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Me: "From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as 'Jesus the Socialist.' Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's 'industrial army' at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state. Bellamy's novel was extremely popular, selling more copies than any other 19th century American novel except Uncle Tom's Cabin. Bellamy's book inspired a movement of 'Nationalist Clubs,' whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club...

"Why do so many conservatives who, by and large, exalt the individual and the family above the state, endorse this ceremony of subordination to the government? Why do Christian conservatives say it's important for schoolchildren to bow before a symbol of secular power? Indeed, why should conservatives support the Pledge at all, with or without 'under God'?"

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/whats-conservative-about-pledge-allegiance.

DS: Prior to going back to work I would walk the path of the local park a couple of times each morning. The park is located adjacent to a middle school. Much to my surprise I heard the Pledge Of the Allegiance over the loud speaker...under God is still a part of it. The pledge is still being said.

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: Isaiah Sage I'm not ignoring your post. Actually, I needed to do a little research to see if what you've posted is 100% accurate. And while it is, it doesn't address the "spirit" in which this pledge was composed. Now I cannot expect either of us to go back into time and into the minds of the people living during this age; but it is safe to say that "war" to protect the freedoms the country offered (more than any other) was ongoing.

I know for me when the pledge was taught and introduced to us as children (1963 - when I entered school); it was from the "spirit" of pledging to uphold, fight and protect freedoms granted us by God in the good ol' United States of America.

If anything during my time (1960's) of entering school; slavery was a hot topic. The pledge, the constitution and the Bible was a weapon against the inequality of man; black and white. When I looked around my class room ALL races were reciting the same pledge, praying or having a "moment of silence" to their own God, in thankfulness for this great country.

So with all of your research and accuracy, what you have no window into is the hearts or attitude of those who recite this pledge. You have only the biography of the author.

And may I remind you of Balaam, even a donkey was used to bend the Will of God.

Me: I disagree. The biographical details of the Bellamy cousins, and the language of the pledge, are evidence of "the spirit" in which Francis wrote the pledge. And that spirit is one of complete subservience to the nation state.

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: Yes, Isaiah Sage I agree with you to a point; but you still do not know if his heart changed coming to this country. When you get to be my age; you look back and you see that all is not what it seemed. Hence, my reference to Balaam and his donkey. :-)
[Editor's Note: Both Francis Bellamy and Edward Bellamy were born in the U.S., but I let go her mistake about Francis immigrating.]

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: P.S., what I am saying is Mr. Bellamy is the donkey.

Michael KS: http://oswego.patch.com/blog_posts/why-i-love-the-pledge-of-allegiance

[Michael KS's comment included only the above url. The meat of the blog post is:

"...The more important thing to worry about is how does one person come to power who can remove the rights and wishes of the larger community? Some might say, it's just the Pledge....not a big deal. What difference does it make if you stand and honor a flag with a few simple words? Well, pose that question to the thousands of individuals, parents, spouses, loved ones and friends of troops who have gone to fight to defend that very symbol and what it stands for? Ask that question of a Gold Star parent whose child died to uphold that red, white and blue symbol of freedom and democracy around the world? Ask a veteran who put his life on hold while he went to serve his country. Ask a child who misses their parent because they're serving in some distant land. And, by all means, go and ask that of a hero who is missing an arm, a leg, their sight, or their sanity for that "not so important" symbol!

"And so, the next time you think that saying the Pledge of Allegiance means nothing, try to remember the price that has been paid for that flag....over and over again. Freedom isn't locked in a box, or a stagnant thing, but instead is a living, breathing, evolving entity that is the heartbeat of this beautiful country. Remember that for many of us we've never had to pay anything. It's been given to us as a gift by those who have sacrificed so much, and the very least we can do to say I'm proud and grateful for that gift is to stand, put our hand over our heart and say the Pledge of Allegiance. I always have...and by God, I always will. No one person will ever take that right from me. Rights can only be stolen by those who allow it...."]

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: Profound article. In the same Spirit of that which I wrote. :-)

Me: That blog post is off point. I do not say that the pledge means nothing. It means something very big. It means "We perform this ritual in which we apotheosize a group of people who hold a monopoly of power over others."

Michael KS: I don't know what "apotheosize" means.

Me: http://www.google.com/search?q=apotheosize&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us%3AIE-Address&ie&oe&rlz=1I7ADFA_en#hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-Address&rlz=1I7ADFA_en&q=apotheosize&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=0igoUK6IC7DpiwKi3YG4CQ&ved=0CFEQkQ4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=2856fc618e8e7f94&biw=1000&bih=639.
Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: And how do you define Divinity, Isaiah Sage?

Me: A group of people who kills other people non-discriminately, and pretends to do so justly, pretends to have divinity or the stamp of it, regardless of what words they use.

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: So you are saying the Flag represents indiscriminate killing collectively justified through the misunderstanding that the pledge of allegiance is divine?

Me: What I am saying is that the pledge and the flag are aspects of a religion in which people prostrate themselves to the nation state, to the point that they are encouraged to willingly kill and die for "the country", where they uncritically embrace the mythic narrative of their nation state and describe it as if the history of their nation state is the history of Justice being made manifest among men, where they sing hymns ("Mine eyes have seen the glory..."), hear sermons ("There is nothing to fear but fear itself..."), read scripture ("Four score and seven years ago..."), and where they judge others by how enthusiastically they embrace the group narrative, get behind the group leaders or the leaders of their specific faction, and identify their leaders with the mythos of the group narrative.

Julie Altman: Sorry Isaiah, I think you're full of it. (respectfully).

Post-Bush Neocon's Mom: What I love about your thesis is the idea that you are attempting to find truth. Unfortunately, Isaiah, truth is relative based on the authority therein it lies. I find in your assessment a tremendous amount of shallow conclusions. While on the surface this appears to have been well thought out and articulate, in fact it lacks the benefit of the doubt or personal knowledge of the individuals motives that were involved.

Unfortunately, you have a book and I have an experience. The difference between us comes from the fact that I lived in an era where acts of patriotism were commonplace, saying the pledge was purehearted and people were and many still are ready to die for the country this flag represents.

Honestly, I find it most surprising that your assessment is most judgmental with no grace or room for error. I guess there are some things we learned where it is easier to switch gears and call it evolution.

Three Links on Happiness

Happiness and Freedom: http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/8859/2000a-full.pdf. According to this study, though freedom does not always contribute to happiness, there is a net positive correlation between freedom and happiness, with economic freedom having a greater correlation with happiness than do personal and political freedom.

Religion and Happiness: (1) http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-13/news/sns-201204131141usnewsusnwr201204120412religionapr13_1_religious-groups-health-benefits-social-networking, (2) http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/16/jubilant-jews-study-finds-jewish-people-are-the-happiest-religious-group/

According to the last article, which is from last year, Jews are the happiest religious group, followed by atheists and agnostics, then by Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims. Protestants are the unhappiest religious group of them all. It strikes me that of the five happiest religious groupings, all the actually religious ones have ethnic or "ethnic" dimensions to them in America. I'm also reminded of a book by Durkheim I had to read about in college. And, finally, I'm reminded of some stats on divorce rates by religion.

Revelation through Prophets vs. Revelation through Intuition

Today I celebrated Eid among Ahmadiyya men at the mosque in Milpitas, CA (they made vegetable biryani just for me!). The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was founded in the late 1800's in colonial India by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed that he was the Messiah promised by all the major world religions.

Ahmadis are derided as a few things by exclusivist non-Ahmadi muslim clerics, but this neat little video is the first interesting thing I've heard from non-Ahmadi muslims in their debate with Ahmadis.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad once prophesied that rival Messiah claimant John Hugh Piggot will not withdraw his Messiah claim and will die in the lifetime of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and that that death will demonstrate the truth of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's claim and the falsity of John Hugh Piggot's claim. This death prophecy was published in the Ahmadiyya newspaper the Ahmadiyya Gazette. Contrary to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's death prophecy, John Hugh Piggot died nineteen years after Mirza Ghulam Ahmad died - demonstrating, according to the maker of the video, that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's claim to be a prophet was wrong.

It's things like this that make me think religions should rely more on revelation through intuition ("Inner Light", etc.) and less on revelation through prophets. Death prophecies are too easy to falsify, and dangerously so.

Workfare, WPA, etc.

Online comments like this reinforce my impression that the rugged individualism and relative economic conservatism of the everyday American is not in the least bit laissez-faire. What Americans dislike is not gov't involvement; what they dislike is gov't benefits for free. The saying I learned in Christian elementary school was "A man who does not work shall not eat." The saying was not "Tax dollars shall not be used to guarantee a minimum standard of living to anyone willing to work."

I use the phrase "Roosevelt Republican" to describe the political beliefs I had during highschool and the first half of college. I think my gf at the time might have been a Roosevelt Republican too, because she expressed resentment that so many people get money without working for it, and said that a New Deal-style jobs program would be a better kind of gov't assistance. A couple years after I graduated from college, a Facebook friend expressed a similar sentiment about the idea of bringing back the W.P.A. If anyone is to get assistance, he said, it should be for doing socially-productive things like building infrastructure.

I remember that back in the early days of the Tea Party, the San Jose Mercury reported that some of the Tea Party activists were older folks who were distraught with the poor quality of services they were getting from gov't assistance programs. In March of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported: "Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security 'unacceptable.'"

Today's conservatives are confirming the charicature of a Reagan clone who cuts schools, public sector jobs, library hours, collective bargaining privileges - everything except the military. And yet, I imagine that if a known and popular conservative had demanded a jobs program, a whole lot of red-blooded American men and women might have more than heartily jumped onto the bandwagon. And demanded that it be restricted to native-born U.S. citizens.

From a FB thread on Banning Circumcision

Dustin Gray: Calling it "genital mutilation" is incorrect. I suggest you look up the word "mutilation."

Me: I would ... like to hear a definition of mutilation that excludes cutting away pieces of someone else's flesh with neither their express nor implied consent.

Dustin Gray: ‎@ Isaiah Sage; Sure, will you accept one from wordnet?
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=mutilation

(n) mutilation (an injury that causes disfigurement or that deprives you of a limb or other important body part); (n) defacement, disfigurement, disfiguration, mutilation (the act of damaging the appearance or surface of something) "the defacement of an Italian mosaic during the Turkish invasion"; "he objected to the dam's massive disfigurement of the landscape"

Again, I understand why the term "genital mutilation" better fits your narrative, but that does not make it an accurate or effective term. If you feel as though the facts of your argument are not persuasive enough, opting for more aggressive terminology does not strike me as a good way to go about improving it.

Instead of defending the use of an inaccurate (yet satisfying) term, why not approach it the problem reasonably: is it a beneficial medical procedure or is it pointless?

The consent issue confuses me and seems to be besides the point. Neonates are incapable of giving consent. Should we not perform and medical procedure that may result in the loss of some part of their body? What if the newborn REALLY wanted a lotus birth (where the umbillical cord is not cut off, and is allowed to fall off naturally)? By your own logic wouldn't that be belly button mutilation?

Me: The wordnet definition does not exclude removing the foreskin from a newborn boy. You're assuming that the foreskin is not an important part of the body, but it is. I treasure mine, and I empathize with men who resent having been deprived of theirs. http://www.youtube.com/user/TLCTugger#p/u/14/aZ2ZyxyZJrk.

Consent is very relevant here. Whether a procedure is a beneficial medical procedure is really only relevant when (as you point out about newborns) the patient is presently incapable of giving consent. If you are a libertarian, Dustin Gray (though I don't know if you are), you would oppose any medical treatment of an adult against his express denial of consent, even if it were beneficial to him. So (and again, this is assuming you're a libertarian) you wouldn't boil everything down to medical beneficience vs. pointlessness. The medical beneficience of a procedure on a baby is necessary because it establishes *implied* consent.

The benefit of a medical procedure has to be substantially high to form implied consent. It has to be necessary to address an immanent threat of death or serious bodily injury or disfigurment, or - if the threat is not immanent - it has to have serious numbers behind it, like the decreased infant mortality rates that result from the innoculation of infants. Claims about the medical benefits of circumcision are too dubious to establish implied consent.

Your example about belly button mutilation vs. lotus birth is clever and very worth considering, but cutting the umbelical cord is only a little analagous to infant male circumcision. When a baby boy is circumcized, he is more or less permanently deprived of something from which he could have derived much sensual pleasure as an older boy and as an adult. When a baby's umbelical cord is cut, he is deprived of something that would have fallen off two to three days after birth anyway. Yes, I do think a lotus birth is more in-line with libertarian principles; but "belly button mutilation", as you suggest I call it, is nowhere near as invasive and nowhere near as presumptuous as cutting off a baby boy's foreskin.

Independent Baptist Newspaper Reacts to ABC 20/20 Report

Shelton Smith, the editor of the independent fundamental baptist "Sword of the Lord" newspaper, has written an article in the May 13, 2011 issue of his paper in which he denounces the ABC 20/20 report on sexual abuse within some IFB churches as libelous and not representative of the broader IFB movement. I was unable to find the complete online text of Smith's article, so I am reproducing it below. One response to Smith's article can be found here. Another is here. I might eventually post my own response.

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"ABC 20/20 Report Slams Independent Baptists"
By the EDITOR

Independent Baptists are not perfect people, and our churches are not perfect churches; but when there is a cause for criticism, we would hope that, whatever the complaint, the critic would deal with it in a fair and honest way. It is especially important, when the media get involved, that the issues are dealt with factually. When a newspaper or a television network reports a story in such a way that they become the story, then you know that something has gone wrong.

When ABC Network aired their 20/20 report on April 8, they picked up a couple of isolated stories and proceeded to tear into all independent Baptists as though everyone so identified is a scoundrel and involved in a cult.

Elizabeth Vargas, the network reporter, seemed intent on smearing all independent, fundamental Baptists. Perhaps we misread her intentions, but I don't think so.

Thirteen years ago, while Dr. Chuck Phelps [no close relation to Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas] was pastor of a New Hampshire church, a man who was an active member of the church was accused of a sexual crime.

In a telephone interview with the SWORD OF THE LORD, Dr. Phelps, who is now a pastor in Indianapolis, Indiana, told us:

When this happened thirteen years ago, I called the police and notified other appropriate authorities. I was told to sit tight an dlet them handle it. The did not deal with it immediately. When there are unproven charges against someone, you had better be careful what you say and do, lest you get sued for slander and defamation.

Dr. Phelps has set up a web site (drchuckphelps.org) on which he has provided full disclosure of the matter. He said to us, "We did the best we could do; there was no cover-up."

He also indicated that he gave all this same documentation to the ABC reporter, but she chose to side with a few folks who are angry at him and at the church.

The Vargas report went so far as to accuse independent fundamental Baptist (IFB) churches of providing an authoritative climate that promotes the abuse of women and children.

She spoke in a demeaning way about dress standards, beliefs about loyalty to a church and a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible.

Apparently it is okay with the reporter and her network if they are authoritative in their reporting.

Apparently it is deemed just and fair to take some incidents of sexual abuse (which all of us would condemn loudly) and demonize every IFB church in the country.

In response to the bashing that the ABC report gave, Dr. Jeff Amsbaugh (pastor, Grace Baptist Church, Columbia, Georgia) wrote:

1. Independent Baptists by definition are "independent." There is no network, and many independent Baptist camps and colleges shy away from other independent Baptist camps and colleges. In the 20/20 episode, those of the Hyles camp of fundamentalism were linked with those in the Bob Jones network. Yet, these two streams of independent Baptists would rarely endorse each other. Therefore, to imply, as ABC did, that all camps of independent Baptists are in cahoots with one another and networked into some type of cultic structure is simply not true.

2. To the degree that ABC was accurate in its reporting any cover-up of sexual misconduct by Baptist ministers and churches, it should be applauded. Those who are guilty of sexual misconduct and those who cover up such deviancy should be exposed, even if they are members of our movement - indeed, especially because they are members of our movement. We should not allow the deviants within our movement to define us. The must be exposed in order that the reputation of the movement may remain above reproach.

3. To the degree that ABC was inaccurate in its reporting and blindly accepted the word of disgruntled church members without investigating the veracity of the accusations, it should be condemned. Proper journalism demands hearing both sides of the matter before rushing to meet a broadcast deadline. If ABC improperly slandered any godly minister or ministry, it should be held accountable.

Another definitive report has been written by Dr. Charles L. Surrett. Dr. Surrett is the academic dean of Ambassador Baptist College (Lattimore, North Carolina) and pastor of Emmanuel Independent Baptist Church (Kings Mountain, North Carolina).

On Friday, April 8, 2011, the ABC television network broadcast, on their weekly 20/20 program, a journalistic view of independent fundamental Baptist churches. The conclusion they were trying to reach is that the doctrines of IFB churches lead to physical and sexual abuse and that such churches should be considered to constitute a cult.

As a college-level teacher of logic, I noted several ways that the fundamental rules of Aristotelian logic were broken by the network and the hostess..., Elizabeth Vargas.

One such rule is that "evidence should be presented as failry and completely as possible." The fallacy which breaks that rule is called "special pleading," which is intentionally presenting favorable evidence to one's case, while at the same time purposely omitting unfavorable evidence. It is commonly practiced in courtrooms, where attorneys for one side of the argument present only that evidence which is favorable and attempt to suppress evidence that is unfavorable. This is acceptable in the courtroom, because the whole truth should come out, if both sides do their jobs properly.

However, when ABC's case was presented, it was totally one-sided, with a great deal of evidence that did not favor their argument being completely ignored. This may be sensational journalism, but it is not fair to present our nation with such a slanted view of those who call themselves independent fundamental Baptists. It is neither fair to the IFB churches and constituents nor fair to the general public....

[T]he current concept of the term "cult"...should be examined to see if IFB churches qualify. There is no "living leader," except for the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and IFB churches could hardly be blamed for following Him! Since these churches follow a Bible that is ancient, their doctrines cannot be called "new" or "strange and mysterious." They do not live in communes, nor do they require people to contribute all their possessions. Their "exclusive religious truth" is not of their own subjective invention but is extended to all who will accept the Bible as authoritative. Although there are some that demand more from their members than do others, it is not even close to the truth to assert that all IFB churches "command absolute obedience." Each individual local church should be judged upon its own merits. Therefore, since IFB churches do not have any of the characteristics of a cult, it is dishonest and unfair to label them as such.

ABC seemed content, rather than using any clear standards for defining a cult, to allow a small group of people in a room to verbalize that they think IFB churches constitute a cult. Without any real evidence, then, the assessment of an extremely small minority is taken as an indictment against hundreds of thousands of people. Merely stating that some think IFB is a cult does not make it so! But then, that is another fallacy, called "begging the question."

Dr. Surrett's essay is produced in full on the web site of Dr. Phelps.

Let's Set the Record Clear and Straight!
1. IFB churches are not given to the abuse of women and children. To the contrary, we preach and promote their full avalue and worth. We want them to be treated like royalty. If someone is being abused, no one in IFB circles would tolerate it.
2. IFB churches are full of law-abiding, God-fearing, patriotic citizens. We love our country. We salute our leaders, and we obey the law.
3. IFB churches are Bible-believing churches. Criticize us if you please, but, yes, we make a big place for the Bible and its teachings.
4. IFB churches do have a strong leadership structure, as does the ABC television network for whom Ms. Vargas works. Does she have people in charge of her department? I suspect she does.
5. IFB churches are not perfect! The pastors and the people are human (like TV reporters). Humans sometimes make mistakes or misjudgments. What may seem at the time to be good judgment may not look so sharp later on.
Our churches are not perfect, but we do not tolerate evil, even if someone in our leadership does it.
6. Accusations against others must always be handled with care. There are cases (lots of them), where accusations were falsely made by someone with a grievance or an agenda.
What may appear to be just accusation on the surface may prove to be totally false after an investigation has been done.
7. Legal counsel should be sought immediately when any such issues arise. Pastors and churches can turn to Christian legal groups for coaching. Groups like Lighthouse Legal Ministries, Christian Law Association, the Rutherford Institute, Liberty Counsel, the Alliance Defense Fund and others are available.
8. Preachers, including some IFB men, do sometimes make foolhardy statements. Some of the cutesy statements that are thought to be humorous in a friendly crowd may not seem so funny on YouTube or on a network expose.
Having a loose tongue when teaching or preaching can bring trouble to your doorstep.
If you are prone to pop off in the pulpit you may be setting yourself up for heartache and creating an embarrassment for the rest of us too.
But a preacher here or there who says something foolish does not constitute cause for a blanket indictment of the entire IFB movement.
9. IFB pastors and churches will report sexual abuse and other criminal matters. We do not claim special privilege when there is a crime or the accusation of a crime. We will call the local authorities when there is cause for concern.
We will not enable predators or perpetrators. We will neither shield them nor defend them.
A zero-tolerance policy is the mindset we have on such things.
10. IFB churches are not a new way of having church. We are Baptist in the historic sense of the word.
The fact that we do not have a headquarters and a hierarchy does not disenfranchise us and strip us of our legal rights.
11. IFB churches are given to fellowship that is characterized by loving, caring and compassionate interchange with each other. You'll not find any place on the planet where everybody is treated with more respect than at an IFB church.
12. IFB churches are not located in compounds behind high walls and locked gates. Everyone comes voluntarily, and everyone can leave voluntarily. There is no coercion of anybody.
Of course, we don't want you to leave. We love you, and we like having you with us. But should you decide to leave there are no bars on the windows.
Because we care about you, we will try to talk you into staying. But if you want to leave, the door is always ajar. You can leave if you choose to do so. Anyone who suggests anything to the contrary just doesn't have a grasp of reality!

Conclusions
We believe Dr. Phelps and the church in New Hampshire got a raw deal from ABC News.

We know for sure that the blanket condemnation of all IFB churches was a piece of very "yellow journalism."

We pray for any and all who may have had a crime or other abuse committed against them. People who commit such acts should be in jail. Churches should be especially supportive for victims or alleged victims.

We pray for the ABC network and its reporter, Elizabeth Vargas. They have erred on this, but we can pray they will yet tell the real story of IFB churches.

We understand that in these days we are apt to be thrown under the bus by media and others. It hurts, but we will not quit. We are saddened by such biased reporting, but we will not lose heart. We will press on!

I Re-took the Belief-O-Matic Quiz

I was not a little surprised that Reform Judaism got the top spot. My impression of Reform Jews is that they're a bunch of pantheist hip wannabes, and there is absolutely no room in my beliefs for pantheism. Maybe I just unfairly perceived them. Anyway, I coveted Jewishness when I was a kid, so maybe it isn't so outlandish that both Reform and Orthodox Judaism got the top spots. I was not surprised by Sikhism, Islam, and Liberal Quakerism being high on the list, and in fact I've been very interested in all three (but for conversion purposes, I was only interested in Liberal Quakerism). Baha'i does not merit a comment from me.

My scores are below. If you want to take the quiz to see what your best religious fit is, it's right here.

The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its
less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However,
even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith,
or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of
how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith
appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

1. Reform Judaism (100%)
2. Orthodox Judaism (87%)
3. Sikhism (86%)
4. Baha'i Faith (84%)
5. Islam (84%)
6. Liberal Quakers (81%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (74%)
8. Jainism (72%)
9. Unitarian Universalism (71%)
10. Orthodox Quaker (63%)
11. Mahayana Buddhism (60%)
12. Hinduism (58%)
13. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (54%)
14. Theravada Buddhism (54%)
15. Seventh Day Adventist (51%)
16. New Thought (51%)
17. Neo-Pagan (50%)
18. Scientology (49%)
19. Jehovah's Witness (47%)
20. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (47%)
21. New Age (46%)
22. Secular Humanism (42%)
23. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (41%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (39%)
25. Roman Catholic (39%)
26. Taoism (36%)
27. Nontheist (32%)

Hiatus

I should have done this in August. This will be my last post on this blog until May. I apologize for any inconvenience or displeasure this may cause any of the three or four of you.

But before I go, I must say Congratulations to the people of Egypt. Hopefully they can get the elections pushed forward. Seven months is a long time to wait under military rule.



I guess this is where I'm supposed to paste a powerful quote on continuous struggle, but I lack the time to find anything.

Market Anarchism, Judgment-Proof Defendants, and Heathianism

If we were to redraw the political spectrum, it would be useful to classify it according to political or social "efficacy" - the strength of the system's positive or negative incentives which confront the individual. The more the individual's actions may be manipulated by the institutionalized relations, the more "efficacy" there is. Post-structuralism and Primitivism would be on the far left, with the least efficacy, and tyrannical, draconian, totalitarian states would be on the far right, with maximum efficacy. ("Maximum efficacy", here, does not mean that the system "works" or is productive, but rather that the typical risk-averse individual cannot possibly refuse the offers that the system does make - we could also call this "total non-refusability", if we don't mind sounding ungraceful).

The ideal "state" would maximize both freedom and efficacy, and would probably be a bit left of the middle of this spectrum. People with my political persuasion believe that this perfect balance can be achieved with competing Private Defense Agencies or Dispute Resolution Organizations that people would voluntarily subscribe to and may choose to unsubscribe from. Competition between these agencies would theoretically lead towards the best services at the lowest prices, and would provide a minimally-violent form of law enforcement. All crimes can be treated like torts, and instead of arresting, jailing, and imprisoning offenders, we could charge them a lot of money.

Protecting the poor against the rich wouldn't bee too much of a problem, since tort claims can be sold to people or groups who have more resources to sue. The prospect of making bank off of rich defendants offers the incentive to compensate poor claimants in exchange for their cause of action.

One of the problems that market anarchists spend a lot of time addressing is the judgment-proof defendant. If your perpetrator is dirt poor, then your cause of action is not marketable. PDA's, DRO's, Anglo-Saxon-style "hundreds", or other kinds of liability insurance groups can cover the costs of their members' wrongdoing and increase their offending members' rates. If the costs of continuing to cover a member's wrongdoing greatly excedes the benefit of his payments, the insurance company can drop him. The prospect of living in an anarchist world without coverage is supposed to be the implicit offer you can't refuse that incentivizes you to live peacefully. Once you lose your coverage, you supposedly have a very powerful incentive to sign some kind of probation contract so that you can get coverage immediately on the condition that you stay in a supervised environment.

But being judgment-proof would be a very sticky situation. When you aren't covered it would probably be very hard to get a job with someone who is covered (DRO's would demand that their subscribers make their business partners get coverage too, or at least offer them lower rates if they do), and when you don't have a job you can't make your payments. Given that people who lost their coverage are a real liability, options for them to reintegrate into "respectable" society would be limited, and quite a few of them may find it easier to just scrape by without any formalized structure to incentivize them to acquiesce to the conventional rights notions ("When you ain't got nothin' you got nothin' to loose"). Add to that mix the immigrant and migrant populations who would be too poor to afford conventional coverage and who would be moving around alot, and you have what a capitalist would call an entrepreneurship opportunity.

(Sure, the greater economic freedom in anarchy would lead to increased economic opportunity for the underserved, but that's a two-sided coin. Greater economic opportunity attracts more people who could use it, and that means a lot of poor people. Were it not for this, we could speculate that the occasional tortfeasance from a judgment-proof defendant would be so rare that the victim's DRO could compensate the victim at no noticeable cost to the DRO. But that might be more of a religious hope than a market outcome.)

The success of market anarchism would depend very much on whether low-cost and effective security and dispute resolution options are extended to excluded and underserved communities. These options may take the form of ecclesiastical courts, the ever-present matriarchal Latina, or - yes - gangs. One of the difficulties is that since migrants and vagabonds aren't settled down in any one community, they wouldn't have much of a reputation for security and dispute resolution providers to work off of. (Impunity for killing blacklisted people would not be much of an option, since killing the wrong person can make things volatile, besides being a wrongfull killing.) If market anarchism cannot fill this coverage gap, then there would be less of an incentive structure for poor people, and market anarchism would be further left on the efficacy spectrum than the social justice types would prefer.

The options that fill the coverage gap would probably be "public options" in security, which would assume contractual privity whether or not the plaintiff or defendant signed any contract or consciously and deliberately gave any indication of assent. This is tacit consent based on territory, and if this reminds you of the presumptiousness of tacit consent used in social contract theory, then you're thinking on my level.

If security and compensation options for underserved communities are not self-sufficient (and they probably won't be), the resources to fund them would have to come from somewhere else - possibly another DRO. We could fantasize that in a world where there are numerous DRO's and PDA's, the DRO's and PDA's would constantly try to one-up each other to provide appropriate services to the underserved. But it would be more likely that the different security companies would try to one-up each other in providing the appearance of appropriate services to the underserved - if their paying members demand that kind of charity in the first place, which they probably won't since it would mean higher premiums for them and they would rather subscribe to the company that charges lower premiums and doesn't provide that charity. This could mean that there would be little incentive to provide the formal services that would incentivize people in low-to-no income areas to refrain from agressing, and that would mean lower efficacy.

I think this worry would be widely shared among the populace of a freshly-decentralized region. And because of this common worry, there may be a significant consumer demand for jurisdiction based not on contract, but on territory. I admit that this is ironic. But we see it all the time today. If people could, they would defer onto everyone else the cost of their goodwill. That's what welfare is. And if they think this goodwill can benefit them, as welfare could in a "veil of ignorance" sense, then they would probably approach security services under the presumption that a local monopoly on police would reduce crime in an entire area and make one's own neighborhood and city safer than would competing police who cannot be forced to provide free services. Prospective security company subscribers would place more demand on a more municipal system, even though the lower amount of competition may mean higher fees.

I have earlier speculated that the formation of the functional equivalent of states is totally possible and even "legitimate" under pure Rothbardian capitalist anarchism. Just think of the water - the dissolution of the state in California could (and likely would) result in privately-held aqueducts that run from the Delta all the way down into the Central Valley, and they would likely demand in their adhesion contracts that all water-users along those aqueducts subscribe to one single DRO (doesn't Hayek or someone have a word for the state's intrusions creating more need for the state?). In my knee-jerk love for all things small, I recently suggested that the anarchist legal community adopt a 20 square mile ceiling on both contiguous property and contiguous jurisdiction. But if the concerns I raise earlier in this post turn out to have real merit, then maybe land monopolies should be accepted not just as real world capitalist phenomena that non-capitalist free marketeers should always strive to break up, but as institutions that people should accept and try to work with. Maybe free market left-libertarians should propose a mutualist cooperative model of the Heathian estate (which would, honestly, just be a mini-republic).

I already have rebuttals and qualfications, but I should stop now and give those in a later post.

Life Expectancy of the Palestinians

The World Bank's 2008 estimate of life expectancy in Israel was 81 years from birth. The estimate for life expectancy in the Palestinian Territories was 73.5 years.

This really surprised me when I read it. The life expectancy of Egypt was 70.1 years, and the life expectancy of Jordan was 72.7 years. I'm not saying that Egypt and Jordan are especially free and prosperous countries - current events show that these societies have their discontents. But a people buckling under the weight of apartheid are expected to live longer than their neighbors?

It very well may be that these figures are like this because the World Bank got them before Israel's galavant into Gaza. I say new estimates are past due.

It would be really neat to learn the differences between the life expectancy of residents of the West Bank and those of Gaza. My guess is that Gazans' life expectancy would be noticeably lower than that of their compatirots in the West Bank. Anyone with more recent estimates is welcome to give me a link.