Kerry Howley

Will and I are in Turkey for the week, and the above is a shot Will took from Pamukkale. It’s bizarre, other-wordly white rock that cascades down the side of a small mountain. It looks like ice, but it’s 70 degrees out and warm water from hots springs runs right down the incline. Tourists can jump in and splash around barefoot, which is odd, because it’s a bunch of slick, slippery rocks next to a cliff. As in Burma and South Africa, I find it impossible to travel here without noting all the terribly dangerous things you’re allowed to do.

The eminently reasonable Jason Kuznicki weighs in:

[B]eing troubled by both the state and the FLDS does not make one any less a radical for individualism. It’s perfectly conceivable that giving more control to either one means that individualism loses. Highly controlling environments like the FLDS may indeed approach the status of a government, Howley argues, and I’m certainly prepared to think of them this way. But then, there’s an actual government on the scene, too, and it’s worth worrying about that as well.

I’ve also long thought that libertarianism is the most humane way to view adults in society, but that it breaks down when applied to children. This need not be a problem with libertarianism in itself, but only an admission that all great explanatory models have their limits. One simply can’t presume that a child has the autonomy or independent decisionmaking skills necessary to act as an agent of her own self-interest. This is what libertarianism demands of adults, and I believe that virtually all adults can do it, even if many adults aren’t willing to, and even if many others are convinced that they can run other people’s lives just a little bit better. The adults who want to run things they shouldn’t are the more profound or radical challenges to libertarianism; for libertarians, deciding the status of children will always be at best a question of where to draw the borders, not a challenge to the fundamentals.

I don’t have much of a problem, then, in saying that children have a limited set of positive rights — that is, of social obligations that adults need to provide to them, for a limited time, until they reach adulthood. A newborn baby can’t feed itself, after all, and from that point forward children in some sense must have positive rights, otherwise we would simply be bringing them into the world to let them die — an absurdity.

Here’s an AP article on some discarded boys in Utah:

Former members describe a religion that thrives on domination. Every detail of their life was scripted—from plural marriages to what they could wear, who they could associate with and what job they could have. In the last 4 1/2 years, more than 400 teenage boys have been excommunicated, many for seemingly minor infractions such as watching a movie or talking to a girl.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

Many are highly skilled in construction, a main job in the creek. But all this support from outsiders is confusing. The boys say FLDS members and even their own families often turned on them, so it was easier to distrust everyone.

“In a way, it scares us,” said Raymond Hardy, 19. “I’m not used to it.” Ream wants to know what the catch is. “There’s always a catch. Why are they doing this?”

Robert R. Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in child trauma, said the boys likely would feel safe bonding with each other for a while, but would struggle with creating their own boundaries.

“Now they’re in a society where there are no controls at all,” he said. “They have to develop their own inner ability to say noÉ. In a sense, they’re handicapped.”

If a couple of parents raise a nutritionally deprived, stunted kid, we’re shocked, outraged, disgusted. Why does that sentiment not carry over to psychological development?

Tim Lee demands clarity!

There appears to be evidence of statutory rape. That’s a relatively easy-to-define and plainly problematic crime that the state can and should prosecute. If there’s evidence that some of the teenage or pre-teen girls have been raped, that would be reasonable grounds for holding all of the girls between the ages of about 10 and 18 for their own protection until the charges can be resolved. But that’s not necessarily sufficient grounds to hold 5-year-old girls, and it’s certainly not sufficient grounds to hold the boys.

If Will and Kerry think the state’s actions in this case are justified, I’d be curious to see them articulate the principle that would govern cases like this. Obviously, as private citizens, we can and should be concerned about tight-knit groups that limit the autonomy of their members. But the state should only act pursuant to objective and clearly articulated legal principles.

I think this is a bit misleading. Tim is comfortable with easily enforced bright lines, and statutory rape laws necessarily entail such lines. But consent laws are not a useful example here, because in the context of child abuse such satisfyingly clear cut moral judgments are the exception, not the rule. What’s the difference between discipline and physical abuse? Between laissez-faire parenting and neglect? Between not providing a child with an education and providing him or her with a rudimentary one? These are necessarily ambiguous, but we don’t throw our hands up and dismiss them just because the state might be overzealous in its interpretation. Children have the right to develop capacities for independent judgment. Determining whether that right has been violated also requires judgment. There’s no way around it.

Kim Kardashian reports:

My sisters and I recently did a public service announcement about the country of Burma’s struggle for freedom. Their Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is imprisoned right now and has endured torture.

It’s an incredible story and I’m honored to have helped raise awareness about Burma’s plight. Over all it was a really fun and eye-opening experience!

We filmed the commercial at our store Dash. They wanted to show us in our natural enviorment (sic) yet still learning and spreading the word!

The Moxley/Skakel saga continues:

Michael Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy and murderer of Martha Moxley, is now an artist.

Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, imprisoned for killing a teenage neighbor, is spending some of his time in prison creating art that depicts beauty, danger and the loss of innocence.

Skakel, convicted in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley in 1975, participates in a program that lets inmates show another side to their lives. His drawing of his 9-year-old son George will be among those on public display starting Thursday at Capital Community College in Hartford.

The drawing shows the boy wearing a T-shirt that reads “love” and surrounded by colorful animals. A nearby skeleton with sunglasses symbolizes death, but two doves overhead depict triumph over death, said Jeffrey Greene, manager of Community Partners in Action, the nonprofit group that runs the program.

An eyeball in the sky symbolizes God watching over the boy, but a lamb is shown next to a lion.

Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, is serving 20 years to life for bludgeoning Moxley to death with a golf club in wealthy Greenwich. He maintains that he is innocent.

In another piece, Skakel drew a comic strip about the loss of innocence. A young boy wants to play football, but his friends are not home. Then he runs into someone who gives him marijuana to smoke.

What to make of the bizarrely limited conversation surrounding the FLDS raids? A number of people have linked approvingly to this OpEd arguing that the men of FLDS are hapless victims of state-initiated force, guilty only of “teaching their kids that a woman’s highest calling is giving birth and raising children.” With the notable exception of Timothy Sandefur, much of the libertarian commentary seems reflexively protective of the FLDS community; “It’s not illegal to be creepy,” is the mantra of the Merril Jessop defender. Thus, if you wonder whether the rights of children within a patriarchal authoritarian cult are being violated, you’re just a kind of moral prude.

It’s a very narrow conception of freedom that can’t see beyond freedom from the state. But for those who don’t see fit to criticize anything other than explicitly political oppression, in what meaningful way is the authoritarian hierarchy of the FLDS not a government in itself? Yes, this is an issue of pluralism and freedom of religion and the autonomy of nonconformist groups, but surely it’s an issue of pluralism in conflict with other liberal values.

The question most relevant to the children’s autonomy is the possibility of exit, which in turn depends on the extent of their isolation and the quality of their education. How real is the choice to stay within this community as children approach adulthood? Carolyn Jessop reports that as a child, she was taught to be terrified of outsiders. The discarded boys seem to have a very tough time of it, which suggests that the adolescents have limited skills for coping with the outside world. According to people at Child Protective Services, the children in their care are significantly less mature than non-FLDS children of equivalent ages. And some of them will be married off at 16, perhaps bearing a few kids before gaining the emotional capacity to question this particular way of life. Jessop didn’t think she had a choice in marrying Merril and bearing his children–her sister had tried to escape and had been dragged back–and she didn’t acquire the courage to leave until she was a mother of eight. Walking away must take incredible courage of the kind no one in the compound is interested in fostering.

It was an allegation of rape that justified the raid, so it’s reasonable to argue that in the absence of evidence of prosecutable sexual misconduct, the compound should be left to go about its ugly business. Perhaps Krakauer was exaggerating, perhaps Carolyn Jessop is just cashing in on her salacious tell-all. But in listening to this conversation, I can’t help wondering whether our shared conception of the rights of children is far too constrained.

How big is the child-shaped hole in a childless woman’s heart ? Not too big, finds Bryan:

Controlling for real income, church attendance, age, and marital status, men take a bigger happiness hit from kids than women, just as I said. On a 1-3 scale, every child predicts a 0.021 reduction in male happiness, but only a 0.016 reduction in female happiness.

However, I later noticed that controling for gender reverses the result, because all else equal, the average women is a little happier than the average man. Adding a gender control to my previous specification, each child reduces male happiness by .014, and female happiness by .022. That’s still really small - by way of comparison, married people have score about .19 units higher than singles in both specifications. But qualitatively, the data support Will’s claim that on balance, being a parent is harder on women than men.

Pat Buchanan says DINKs herald the end of Western Civilization. But they don’t seem too bothered about it.

Kevin Drum quotes this K-Lo meditation on porn in the military, but misses the best part:

The last thing I’d ever want is a feminizing of our military. But military bases are family affairs and therefore this is worth a discussion.

I love men. I love men being men. I love military men. And I thank God they are military men. But I find it hard to believe that all military men are “drinking and whoring Saturday night,” and if they are in any kind of majority, yeah, that bears scrutiny.

Like I said yesterday, I don’t know that Broun’s legislation is a good idea. But I know what he’s thinking: Porn is bad. Why is the military peddling it? It’s a good question. Not the biggest question of our day; it’s not the hill to die on, as many readers have put it to me. But porn in our culture does need to be addressed and discussed. And if that indicates a feminization of anything, maybe that’s what women are here for — to, every once in awhile, stand athwart history and yell, “Stop. What are we doing to our men?”

Lord knows, the feminization of men has been a problem since the last Spartan warrior died. But it’s a huge relief to know that while my feminine existence effectively enervates half the human race, I have been put on this Earth for a reason: the moral guardianship of men. Consider my existential anomie cured.

Wow:

“If part of our problem is that the Chinese are going to eat meat and you’ve got to have corn and soybeans to feed the Chinese their meat, then why isn’t it just as legitimate for the Chinese to go back and eat rice as it is for us to change our policy on corn to ethanol?” [Sen. Charles] Grassley asked in a conference call with reporters.

Not that this makes any sense economically, but it’s good to know that in Grassley’s calculus billions of people going without protein = some Iowans letting go of their ethanol subsidies.

Gene Healy on John McCain’s “a cause greater” fetish:

In his speeches, McCain periodically sneers at American opulence and suggests that leaving Americans alone to pursue their own visions of happiness is a narrow and ignoble goal for government…Here he is in a recent speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, telling his audience that if you “sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, [you’ll] invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.” Here he is on his campaign webpage, insisting that “each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our own self-interest.”

Making the case for “a cause greater” in the Naval Academy speech, McCain declared that

when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.

Oh my, not “designer coffee”! The reflexive contempt for peace and prosperity McCain displays here is the essence of National Greatness Conservatism, and, as Matt Welch has pointed out in Myth of a Maverick, his devastating critique of the Arizona senator, John McCain is to National Greatness Conservatism as Barry Goldwater was to conservatism proper: the electoral standard bearer for the philosophy.

McCain’s sometime ideological guru and op-ed page cheerleader, David Brooks, expresses similar themes in his writings. Even in Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s foray into “comic sociology,” he warns darkly of “the temptations that accompany affluence.” “The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.” (As a young man, Brooks served abroad with the Wall Street Journal Europe.)

I find this all very confusing, because I’m sure that it was David Brooks who told us that “power is in the kitchen,” which would suggest that “oversized kitchens” contain still more power. And why would John McCain, in choosing a consumer good that best symbolizes apolitical self-absorption, settle on coffee? I have many qualms with the fair trade movement, but choosing between designer coffees has been a political statement for a very long time.

Can we just refer to “the cause greater?” It does seem like McCain knows exactly which cause he is talking about.

Bryan writes:

Kerry may be right that explicit advocacy of childlessness was higher in the ’70’s; I don’t know. But the Current Population Survey definitely shows a sharp rise in the fraction of women aged 40-44 who have zero children. That percentage was 10.2% in 1976, versus 19.3% in 2004. That doesn’t directly contradict Kerry’s 6% figure, but I’d say that my number is a better measure of the popularity of the “childless by choice” lifestyle. (In fact, since fertility treatments have made it a lot easier to get pregnant than it was in 1976, my figures understate the rise in the popularity of voluntary childlessness).

I think the discrepancy between the ever-married voluntary childless and the actual childless figures is important, but I don’t think Bryan’s number is obviously a better measure. (I’d like to see a number that includes both never-married and ever-married women who report being voluntarily childless.)

This study, though not ideal for various reasons, points out that the most commonly reported reason for childlessness among never married women is… never being married. I imagine (though I can’t be sure) that Bryan’s number captures a lot of women who would have liked to have children had they found a suitable partner while they were still of childbearing age, but did not. That will include women who married late, women in a series of unstable partnerships, etc.

Now Bryan might argue that those women are voluntarily childless, and were they aware of the benefits of breeding, they’d drop everything and sprint to the nearest sperm bank. Bryan doesn’t need to convince these women that children are worth having; he needs to convince them that children are worth having alone. I’m open to that, but it’s going to be a hard sell given that a lot of single women simply won’t be able to support themselves while taking months off of work. (I’d be the last person to criticize a single woman for having a child–I love sperm banks! But I do think we need to acknowledge that the calculus changes significantly when you subtract a partner.)

Two more quick points: Bryan remains convinced that women are hyper-cognizant of the arguments against having kids, but I’m skeptical that most women understand how severely having children will affect their future earnings. Everyone knows about the gender wage gap; how many people know that the gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater? Having children is such a strong default position that I suspect many of the arguments against pregnancy get short shrift.

My point about Shiloh and Suri (happy birthday, Suri!) was not simply that “some celebrities have children,” but that celebrity culture is positively dripping with pro-natalist messaging. E! News, which I obviously watch all the time, has a “baby boom” segment involving protracted fawning over celebrity issue. Pregnancy is glamorous! Baby bumps are sexy! We won’t need baby bonuses in this country for as long as we have Angelina Jolie.

I’ve been enjoying this back and forth over Bryan Caplan’s assertion that he’d rather his hypothetical daughter give birth at 16 than never give birth at all. I’m perplexed, though, by Bryan’s statement that “most people are hyper-aware of the important arguments against” raising kids, but ignorant of the good reasons. Bryan also implies that celebrity culture denigrates childbearing, which suggests that he really needs a Suri and Shiloh-filled subscription to… basically any tabloid.

Perhaps he has better data than I do, but last I checked the percentage of ever-married women who reported being voluntary childless was something like 6 percent. The 6 percent tend to be disproportionately educated, which suggests that they’re not forced into the decision by financial constraints and are at least as able as other women to weigh the drawbacks and benefits. And they endure a stigma; at least one study I’ve seen found that childless women were stereotyped in a manner identical to that of powerful women–they’re deemed competent, but not at all warm. (Housewives are deemed warm but incompetent).

The ‘childless by choice’ movement, as far as I can tell, is a paltry shadow of what it was in the 70’s. Pick up a copy of Redbook; today, we’re all about “work/life balance.” (Tim Cavanaugh, whose literary powers endure despite his ever-growing passel of offspring, had a great piece in the LA Times about the moribund childlessness movement.) The only significant social debates that involve childlessness center on how to eradicate it; as in, legalizing gay adoption and expanding access to fertility treatment. Despite the significant toll pregnancy takes on a woman’s lifetime earnings, forgoing pregnancy altogether remains a radically nonconformist thing to do. I’m not sure what is to be gained from further marginalizing a tiny, already unpopular outgroup.

I was baffled at what Kim Kardashian had done to merit her own reality TV show until I caught the transcendent E!Truly Hollywood Story on the Kardashian family, which informed me that Kim’s mother was good friends with Nicole Simpson before Kim’s father was on O.J.’s defense team, the guy in her sex tape is Brandy’s little brother, and she chooses Rob Lowe’s wardrobe. And she apparently merits a True Hollywood Story because she has a reality TV show. Now it all makes sense.

The following meditation on extreme poverty is brought to you from the Weekly Standard:

The day after the IOC made its historic announcement, former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski–who these days advises Barack Obama–took to the Times op-ed page to disavow any parallel between the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the 2008 Beijing games. Brzezinski had helped plan the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But “the situation with China” is “not only different,” he wrote in 2001. It is also “more complex.” Sure, Brzezinski continued, “grievous human rights abuses are being committed by the Chinese government.   .  .  . Tibet continues to be repressed.” The “regime as a whole is still committed to one-party dictatorship.” But don’t believe your lying eyes. “China is nonetheless becoming a much more open society,” because millions of Chinese “now have access to satellite television dishes” and “even to the Internet.”

Of course, hundreds of millions of Chinese have nothing but dirt. Internet access is policed by the ever-more-sophisticated sentinels of the Great Firewall. And prosperity, while a great public good, is a meager substitute for the greater public good of natural rights such as the freedom to publicly oppose one’s government, to legitimate state authority through elections, and to worship God as one sees fit.

The whole thing is nonresponsive to Brzezinski’s argument, but it’s the last sentence that strikes me as weirdly dismissive. In 1978, the majority of rural Chinese were living at subsistence, the way the majority of Burmese live now. A third of the rural population–260 million people– lived under the poverty line, meaning that they were not adequately fed or clothed even in a good year.

By 1997, the number of people living under the poverty line had been slashed by 200 million. A Chinese person born in 1960 could expect to live until 41, give or take. Kids born today will, on average, live 30 years longer. No other society has ever undergone such a dramatic transformation in two decades. The fact that we can even talk about restrictions on Chinese Internet access implies a massive improvement in wellbeing.

There is a serious lack of imaginative capacity among pundits who can, in a sentence, brush this kind of thing aside. Bangladeshis vote for their corrupt leaders and legally worship whatever God they wish. In what substantive sense is a kid born in Dhaka (GDP per capita: $2300) better off than a kid born in Beijing ($7700) or Singapore ($31,400)? Free to do what? Almost anywhere, prosperity brings with it the ability to educate your children, to enjoy a modicum of leisure, to leave. What’s freedom of exit worth if you can’t afford a plane ticket?

I get the sense, reading this kind of analysis, that China hawks have stopped conceptualizing the Chinese as people. They’re just political objects defined by a checklist of political freedoms they do and do not have. The ability to educate yourself, to pay a doctor to treat your sick children, to take in a film, to do the things people do — none of that is on the list. I’ve written before on how silly it is to act as if Internet access means nothing if political material is blocked, as if all the entertainment and connection communication affords is meaningless unless directed at political change. This is just that same mistake writ large–every Chinese person is an activist whose life is worthless without the right to participate in the political process. It just exposes an incredible ignorance about the way people live.

None of this is to excuse the Chinese government for its many ghastly crimes, or to suggest that it does not continue to stand in the way of prosperity in meaningful ways, or to argue that prosperity is the only good that matters. But you don’t need to denigrate the alleviation of hunger to criticize political tyranny. I’d feel a little less put off by all the self-congratulatory China-bashing if the punditocracy’s understanding of freedom were less romanticized, less dismissive of the more mundane liberties afforded by a full stomach and regular income.

In 2004, while I was still in Burma, floods in neighboring Bangladesh killed 1000 people and left 10,000 more without any possessions. The Western press treated the whole thing as an unfortunate natural disaster–sad, but no one’s fault, really. And yet floods are completely predictable in Bangladesh–there is a reason they call it Monsoon Season–and that kind of devastation is the result of poverty rooted in economic mismanagement. Price controls strike me as just as criminal as religious discrimination, and a country with the good sense to get rid of them doesn’t need to hear that preventing starvation is a “poor substitute” for anything.

This Wall Street Journal article on Hillary Clinton and the anti-feminist backlash feels truer to me than almost anything I’ve seen written about the gender politics of this election:

Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives “started talking about what an awful b—- Hillary was and how they’d never vote for her.” She says she kept quiet. “I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with them,” she says. “But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn’t positive.”

Jean Yarnal, who has worked in local government for 41 years, says she was unnerved recently when a man she knew came into her office and asked for help with a zoning issue. When talk turned to politics, she says, he denounced Sen. Clinton as a “lesbian” and used several slurs. Ms. Yarnal says she didn’t respond, but thought to herself, “That’s the last time I do you a favor.”

It’s a subtle, melancholy piece with a jackhammer-soft headline: “In the barricades of the gender wars.” What an embarrassingly inept use of cliche. Does this feel like a war? Putnam didn’t tear her bra off, throw water in her lunch date’s face and declare eternal sisterhood with Clinton. She is an adult enmeshed in a series of complex and advantageous relationships, and navigating those relationships involves absorbing some slights and repelling others. She continued eating. It’s not war, it’s diplomacy, except you’re the weaker state, and your hosts insist on denigrating your allies.

I understand both the disappointment at Hillary’s now-slight chances and the sense of relief that will come with her defeat. Clinton is uncomfortable to defend because she embodies, to a painful degree, the stereotypically female qualities that male executives will harp on at lunch. There is an earnest hall monitor-ness about her. She wears power awkwardly. I don’t like watching her any more than I like watching Blind Date; I just feel vaguely embarrassed for all of them. But I also understand that self-seriousness is a quality that emerges, in part, from a life spent struggling to be taken seriously. “Be more self-deprecating!” is a truly ridiculous thing to ask an ambitious 60-year-old woman who experienced childhood in the anti-feminist backslide of the 1950s. Or who spent her adult life being pilloried for, alternately, following her husband around like a housewife and being insufficiently vapid to occupy the position of First Lady. (Cough up a cookie recipe, Hillary! Now laugh at yourself.) But I don’t have to like listening to the president of the United States; I do well enough avoiding that experience now. Her apparent lack of charm is not a serious impediment to being an effective executive, though obviously an impediment to getting there.

But I get it. I understand feeling relieved every time I see comments like this one, because nothing is worth enduring this for four years:

Alexa Steinberg, 25, a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, says she recognizes “that women only make 78 cents for every male dollar, and there are still hurdles for women that I’ll face.” She says she thinks it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be supporting a female candidate for U.S. president — but it won’t be Sen. Clinton. “Politically and personally, she’s trying to take on the male persona, and isn’t a woman in the way I want a woman candidate to be,” she says.

This makes sense until you realize that it’s completely insane. If you tag all the qualities required for electoral approval “male,” and then criticize every woman who embodies them, you aren’t going to get very far. The benefit of having a female president–which this woman says she wants–is in widening the boundaries of female identity beyond “the female persona” (whatever that is). Demands that Clinton conform just reinforce the need for powerful women.