The Moral Necessity To Shout Fire

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a simple-minded fool who had no more business adjudicating on our nation's affairs than the blonde mannequins that populate our morning news programs. The only opinion of Holmes that anyone seems to be able to quote (done so with no knowledge of whom to attribute the quote to) is his noxious idea that the first amendment somehow does not protect a person from “shouting fire falsely in a crowded theater.” Ignoring for the moment that no one remembers to include the word “falsely” in their recitation, I intend to argue that all forms of speech are to be protected and allowed, and particularly those which are found offensive, against popular opinion, or otherwise uncomfortable for people to be exposed to.

Holmes' oft-cited ramblings about behavioral necessities while one is at the theater were, in fact, an attempt to backpedal on a previous opinion that leaflet distributors arguing against the conscription of men to fight as a violation of the thirteenth amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude. This primer on constitutional law was deemed by Holmes to be a “clear and present danger” to the country in wartime because of the possibility of “substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” The consequence of these leaflets would be a mindless trampling panic akin to people rushing out of Holmes' “crowded theater.” The education of our populace was seen as being in conflict with the military's ability to increase enlistment, and the effort to educate was punished with conviction under outmoded espionage laws in the name of national security.

The attempt to mitigate his colossally thoughtless judgment was set to paper in November of 1919, eight months after the Schenck trial's conclusion, in the United States' prosecution of Jacob Abrams and others for distributing leaflets written in Yiddish protesting American involvement in Russia's October Revolution through our obstruction of the Bolsheviks and supply of weapons to the Republic. It is said that in the intervening time friends of Holmes, including the spectacularly-named Learned Hand, worked through argument to persuade Holmes to a less reactionary position on the rights of free speech. Given how shortsighted and single-minded Holmes was, complete with a belief that the law should be based entirely in experience instead of logic, his friends were acting less as debate opponents and more as cattlemen: trying desperately to keep a brain-damaged runaway cow from trampling over any more people than it absolutely had to.

In the Abrams judgment, Holmes wrote that the defendants didn't have the means necessary to actually carry out their intended goals, and therefore did not fit under the C&PD umbrella. Their goals were to change public opinion about American engagement in foreign civil wars, which seems only slightly different to me than changing public opinion on involuntary conscription. Holmes argues that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” which flies in the face of his repeated decisions to crush free expression wherever it conflicted with national interest. Had he been at all consistent in his judgments, or treated the poor and insignificant as Americans with a voice instead of as the great unwashed, perhaps his judicial mark would not be so shallow and easily dismissed. As it is, however, using the opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as any kind of litmus test for modern judges – sitting on the Supreme Court or otherwise – is equivalent to judging your physical well-being against the healthiest leper.

All kinds of speech are worth the fight it might take to hear them, but none more so than the opinions which it is easy to identify as hateful and/or unpopular. Additionally, anyone who tries to suppress or eliminate the free expression of ideas should immediately be considered an enemy, if for no other reason than they think they know better than you do what is acceptable for you to hear or read. It is a sign of mental deficiency, if not outright disease, to be invested so fully in one perspective but so unstable and without confidence in it that any conflicting view which presents itself is a mortal threat to all one holds dear; it is equally a sign of a diseased mind when any individual feels it is appropriate for one group of people to control the expression of any other group. Neo-Nazi marches don't seem to be popular anywhere, but I take pride in the fact that we, as a culture, not only allow them to march but provide them with police protection to defend them against people like me who might seek to physically harm them.

This speaks to the aspect of free speech that I find the most straightforward, but also the trickiest. All speech should be allowed under all circumstances, but in order to exercise this freedom we need to re-examine our attitudes about personal responsibility and return to giving it the high regard it deserves. To be clear: say anything you want at any time, but be prepared for the consequences. Saying something particularly forward at a nightclub and getting a drink thrown in your face is no different than expressing your world view and suffering much more serious consequences such as loss of employment or social ostracization. The gallons of drinks I wore throughout my second decade never once suppressed my freedom of speech, they were a direct consequence of my exercising that freedom.

I smelled like Carmen Miranda's hat, with subtle notes of shame

To return to the childish and arrogant statement I began with, it is proper to draw a distinction between statements like holocaust denial or religious belief and the statement in question, which is – we are to imagine – standing up in a theater full of people and shouting fire without cause in an effort to spur evacuation. The tacit social contracts we operate under on a daily basis do not exclude saying offensive or ignorant things, but we have a wholly different and innate reaction when someone's utterance passes the realm of conversation and normal everyday speech into the territory of alarm-raising.

As social animals, it is of great benefit to us when people who are aware of something detrimental that is unknown to us extend a warning so that we may avoid it. This ranges from very minor things like flashing headlights to warn oncoming traffic of an obstruction they cannot see yet to very major things like alerting large groups of people that the building they are in is currently ablaze. In that worst-case scenario, hearing the shout of fire and seeing the mass of people heading in the opposite direction tells me everything I need to know about what to do. We rely on this stimulus response heavily, and react to it almost immediately and without hesitation, which is why raising an alarm falsely is such an easy thing to despise.

"Has shit gone pear-shaped? Then don't be a dick." - Famous British Guy

From childhood, we are taught that lying about crisis ruins your credibility, and when something bad inevitably happens your cries for help will be ignored and a wolf will eat your face. We understand, without having it explained, that we depend on one another for our safety and survival; exploitation of that dependence is therefore a threat to safety and survival. This is why invoking the “crowded theater” still has such a visceral response for us, but it is a misplaced and inaccurate argument because raising an alarm is not the same thing as expression of an idea. It would be inexcusable to falsely sound an air raid siren, but no one can raise a serious argument about Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast, no matter how many panicked idiots decided to lose their minds without listening past the ten minute mark.

"I'm a symbolic representation of an imagined external threat. Rarr!"

There will never be a deficit of people with offensive opinions who make them public, and it follows that we won't run out of people who are duly offended and publicly respond. This is the best possible thing for our culture, and one of the only things I expect we'll still be trying to protect a century from now. I argue that this defense is vital not strictly for me, so that I can read and watch and listen to whatever I may choose, but so that other people will say things that I had never thought of or things I disagree with, and so others still may respond. This idea seems astonishingly simple and obvious to me, but someone regarded as an exemplary Supreme Court Justice couldn't wrap his ridiculous mustache around it.

Seriously, fuck this guy.

Magisterial Extirpation

When Stephen Jay Gould wrote that science and religion were non-overlapping magisteria, in that they were uniquely capable of answering questions inside their individual spheres and had no bearing on each other, he was never more wrong. The argument that all forms of reasoning, the scientific process included, have to include some variation of faith is an ignorant and childish one. Deductive and inductive reasoning are not faith, nor is an unprovable statement made based on said reasoning.

My beloved Pluto, demoted to a footsoldier in a wide army of similar frozen gas and metal debris though it is, was not discovered through a direct observation. Instead, variations and disturbances in the observable orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune, and further calculations showed that another more distant body was also contributing to the detected variances. Men and women had to work for over thirty years to finally demonstrate the object photographically, and they did not do that work on faith any more than following freeway signs to reach a destination is such an act. In fact, any faith an individual might wish to have in the existence or non-existence of celestial bodies has no bearing on their actuality, any more than a fervent non-belief in the sun will cause it to fail to rise. Any argument saying faith plays any role in the scientific process is fatuous, and based on religion's historical repression of knowledge and discovery which threatened people's feelings of superiority it is obvious faith has only been and can only be a millstone around the neck of science.

The immediate argument against my proposition can be personified in Francis Collins, an openly and unapologetically religious Christian who headed the Human Genome Project, which should be reflected upon as one of the greatest achievements mankind is likely capable of. The monumental contributions to the sciences that have been achieved by those of a religious bent should not be minimalized or dismissed, but neither should they be elevated based on the beliefs of those involved or used as reinforcement for any kind of faith-based worldview. Collins' religious beliefs are, I argue, as incidental to his work as the color of his shirt or the number of letters composing his name. Furthermore, any attempt to unravel the information that we are composed of would have been viewed widely as heretical and blasphemous until very recently in the religious communities, and is still viewed as such by the more credulous and fundamentalist amongst them.

Another casuistic argument encountered is the equation of science with religion, as if a peer-reviewed and self-correcting reliable system of discovery could be reasonably compared to totalitarian pronouncements held over from flammable shrubbery. In this rebuttal, pro-religious beliefs are based in revealed truths (unfortunately referred to as facts in this argument) and scientific beliefs are based in a somehow separate-but-equal truth, and aside from the problems raised by keeping two sets of books, the conflicting truths have no problem co-existing. This is utter nonsense, and betrays on the part of the religious a rejection of how scientific method operates. The reason science is based in fact – the most important reason, in my opinion – is repeatable verifiability. Applying electrical current to water will separate it into hydrogen and oxygen in exactly the same way, no matter if the experiment is performed in America or Canada or Sweden. It is not accurate or honest or productive to say that religious revelations are equivalent, because individuals are affected differently by them and they are not reproducible in any sense of the word.

Not The News

And because of their ignorance and rejection of science, the states that are unfortunately saddled with backwards theocratic regimes pose the biggest current threat to our safety as a whole. The religious zealots who are doing their very best to erase all record of the fact that the cultures of Iran brought incredible insight on the sciences to the world cannot do the science required for modernity on their own. They have no capacity for it. Instead, they import their technology and learn what they can to work toward our collective nuclear demise, not our collective betterment. The attitudes of religion toward contraceptive technology and immunology has, at the very least in Africa, made the AIDS epidemic worse and allowed the maladies we thought gone forever to resurface, clawing up from the depths like Camus' Parisian sewer rats. How can anyone claim to be morally serious and support these backwards preachments?

Attn. plebe cannibals: This is not human flesh. This is a cracker.

Being a religious person would seem to be to be mutually exclusive with scientific inquiry, insofar as the most fundamental bits of religion are not compatible with what we know about energy and matter. Transubstantiation is nothing if not ridiculous, Abraham violates several laws of physics every time his Falcor-like flying friend is said to have ferried him between Syria and Mecca to aid him in the keeping of two families, and being a phenomenally poor judge of oil quantity is no basis for a holiday the post office won't even deign to recognize. Sadly, every significant improvement science has yielded has been, after the obligatory wailing and protestations of hurting their invisible friend's feelings, co-opted by fundamentalists and pronounced as proof of the majesty and intricacy of the celestial design. This indelicate bit of plagiarism, performed on the germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution, and the understanding of DNA to name but a few of the heavy-hitters, is the kind of whole-cloth intellectual robbery that religion is based on originally and reinforces its noxious self with currently.

I have some small familiarity with quietly forcing two conflicting ideas together, as I have smoked for more years than not, and by no means can I say that I didn't know full well what inhaling anything other than air would do to my lungs. With more education came more intricate detail of my sadomasochism, and vivid full-color images left nothing about it to the imagination. I possess all that knowledge, but still have no problem engaging in one of my most-beloved rituals many times in a day. It is a personal weakness, very similar to the weakness displayed in religious faith. I insist, however, that mine is different from theirs because I make no effort to legislate my habits to others, I pay tax on every pack, and stepping outside for a smoke will introduce you to far more interesting people than going to church on Sunday.
 

This is better for you and your fellow humans than any religion.

To return to my opening point, no thinking person can read the proposition of Gould's NOMA argument and see it as anything other than appeasement to the religious faction. There is not now and there never has been any intention from their side to peacefully coexist, and religion stands at every turn to obstruct and destroy scientific efforts to bring understanding of our existence. Begin with Copernican Heliocentrism and work your way through the whole sordid mess to stem cell research, genetics, and the twenty-first century oppression of women, and you will find vicious reprisal and ignorant arrogance is all any church has ever offered to scientific debate, inevitably followed by ferocious backpedaling and attribution to their prophet of choice when their juvenile protestations are proven false. It should be shameful for apologists to think of the centuries of progress lost in the name of childish superstition and fairy stories, and there are miles of essay written on that very subject, a kind of sad cry to lost opportunity that I commend anyone to read for themselves and consider. As written by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: “How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their course watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him! He, in less proportion to the universe than the all-but invisible insects that feed in myriads on a summer's leaf are to this great globe itself, fondly imagines that eternal worlds were chiefly created to prognosticate his fate.”
 

No matter which of the “equivalent windows into the untruth” one chooses, no realm of illusion and baseless explanations will aid us in our collective condition. Irreparable damage has been done by religion to our advancements as a culture and as a species, and I therefore call for this kind of obstructive arrogance and dangerous ignorance to be extirpated wherever it may be found.

On 50 Years Of Speculation

 

 

 

In my second decade, I discovered the depth of controversy surrounding the most public assassination of a political figure that we can collectively recall. At that point, thirty-one years had passed since the event and eighteen years since the official judgment on the probable cause, but still it was incredibly easy to poke the embers of conversation and get a healthy fire going. Today's unending remembrances and reflections and retrospectives should be enough to convince anyone that it is a favorite, though shallowly submerged, chew toy for debate. By comparison, we do not have the same present cultural memory of the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan by an errant mistake of genetics with a fixation for child prostitutes, which occurred in 1981.

 

I was exposed to the conspiracy arguments by my homeroom teacher in a spare moment, as the then-blisteringly-new Macintosh (I believe a Color Classic, specifically) could play videos off CDs provided by Encyclopedia Britannica. One of these videos was the Zapruder Film, and after a few exploratory questions to confirm my suspicions, I was off to read all about the fuss.

 

I was convinced, until this morning, that I had thoroughly investigated a broad enough swath of information to be as educated on the subject as a person should be without making a career of it. In fact, I was dreading the anticipated news day as being precisely what it was: soft-focus looks at a black day in American history, punctuated only by advertising for 41-hour shopping celebrations. But literally the very first thing I saw regarding the assassination this morning was an introduction to a previously-unseen gem from the past, a modestly-menacing figure who immediately fascinated me and satisfied the love of learning new things that is innate in us.

 



He is called The Umbrella Man, and I had seen him without seeing him a thousand times.

 



This is a wonderful example of an untrained mind recognizing multiple details as they are but not coalescing them into an observation. As you can see from the above photo, the sun is providing distinct, crisp shadows. People are dressed for a comfortable fall day, shirtsleeves and dresses. And in the middle of all this is one man dressed entirely in black and holding an open black umbrella. It had rained the previous evening, but cleared early in the morning. No one else is seen with an umbrella, open or otherwise.

He is seen circled here, standing next to a freeway directional sign. It is roughly in line with this sign that Kennedy was shot, and on the films the man can be seen moving the umbrella slightly up and down. It could be argued he was signaling to proceed shooting, another speculation was that this man carried out an unseen role in the plot, shooting the President in the neck with a poisoned dart to immobilize him so he would, presumably, make an easier target.

None of this was the case, obviously. The Umbrella Man is really called Louie Witt, and he was protesting in what I think was a very clever way. Thirty years prior to the day in question, President Kennedy's father politically supported the Nazi appeaser Neville Chamberlain, and Prime Minister Chamberlain was visually distinct for carrying an umbrella with him (although how that would distinguish him from anyone else walking on the street in London I cannot say). The political satirists of the time used the umbrella as a symbol of Chamberlain and his failed policies, and it was this historical Daily Show reference that Mr. Witt was delivering to the President in Dallas. Mr. Witt personally delivered his explanation of his actions at the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, and a good time was had by all.

All of this fascinating stuff was brought to my attention by The New York Times and a video interview with Errol Morris from 2011.

Medicine's Blond Enemy

Five minutes' search will provide all the rhetoric and actual data you can inhale regarding the sad controversy over vaccination of children started by semi-literate and reactionary non-doctors, so I cannot hope to bring to light anything not previously available. This topic is, like any nonsensical conspiracy-based explanation, fascinating regardless, if only for the tenacity with which people cling to it.

We begin with The Lancet. A peer-reviewed medical journal that, depending on whom you ask, displays a broad range of reliability and objectivity. The Lancet has been edited since 1995 by Richard Horton, a highly-educated and respected physician with the small exception of his disdain for the peer-review process as quoted in the Medical Journal of Australia #172 (link is behind paywall). Three years after taking the helm, Horton's Lancet published the now infamous and fully-discredited report by Andrew Wakefield, a twelve-time convicted child abuser, accusing vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella of directly causing children to develop autism. Outcry from serious medical professionals and researchers was deafening, as was the belligerent defense from people who seemed to be convinced that modern medicine was a long con.

 

 

 

To state it directly, autism is not fully understood. Many brilliant people are spending countless hours trying to piece together the myriad of data on what carries the diminutive title of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and it currently appears to be a form of genetic development problems in combination with environmental toxins affecting the brain with symptoms that do not present immediately or impact each affected individual in exactly the same way. What is understood by any serious person, however, is that a preservative called Thiomersal cannot be shown to be linked directly in any way with children diagnosed as having ASD, as was claimed by Wakefield.

The Lancet published this fraudulent report and stood by it for a full five years, providing a weapon for anti-vaccine nonsense that carried with it the pretense of accuracy – medical science (in the form of one journal) said that vaccinating your child would infect them with autism. When they finally did admit that the report was not fit for publication, they hedged their admission by praising the “new ideas” it had raised while giving no mention to the fact that none of these new ideas had been worth anything at all. Chief Editor Horton, in fact, was quoted by NPR as saying the link between vaccination and autism was never claimed by either the journal or the article itself.

 

 



But did the acceptance of medical science's proclamation of “Bullshit!” come quickly, or at all, to the people so proudly assured that they had seen through the con? Of course not. It should have been obvious to me, given their whole-hearted embrace of the cognitive dissonance implicit in trusting a medical professional to tell them medical professionals were lying to them. All part of the trick, they were assured, the grand design of pharmacology to produce a generation of people with a sometimes-crippling condition. Just trying to come up with an end game that would require disabling the development of children to varying degrees and en masse is beyond my capacity.

The easiest to identify of the child-endangering anti-vaccine mob is Jenny McCarthy, whom you can remember from her intellectually staggering turn on Singled Out. She became publicly very vocal regarding her medical opinions, which I hazard a guess is how most of us found out this was even a subject being discussed. Before, during, and after the article's denouncement McCarthy frightened countless parents into choosing to expose their children to unnecessary risk which we relegated to memory decades prior.

Now McCarthy is a member of a group of people on daytime television who have unfortunately gained a position of authority and influence in our culture, instead of our previous habit of correctly regarding them as laughingstocks. From this pulpit, interchangeable morons like “doctors” Oz, Phil, and McCarthy are allowed to blindly stumble their way into the public consciousness and peddle their crackpot ideas unchallenged, affecting all of us by suppressing the acceptance of real information and promoting superstitious fear in people seeking real answers. Compounding the damage is the danger presented by denialists like Mark Hyman, who publicly claim that autism is not genetic, and can be cured through diet and fluid supplementation. This kind of predatory abuse should be shunned by us, and those who offer it removed of anything resembling respectability, as the shameful liar Andrew Wakefield rightfully was.

The Gunpowder Misunderstanding

The passion inherent with discontent and anger at established order can be constructively channeled in many ways, but it can just as easily be wasted as gunpowder can be said to be wasted on fireworks.

I can think of nothing more virtuous and right than to stand in protest of injustice against your fellow man. Use of the Guy Fawkes mask in modern protest, especially among a particular subculture using a very specific definition of the word “anarchist,” is the most laughable and dismissible aspect of what should be a righteous march. Even with the most shallow grasp of the historical events involved, it should be obvious that using that icon as a face for the masses is a lamentable mistake. The Gunpowder Rebellion – or Gunpowder Plot, as it is more accurately described due to it being a resounding failure – was an effort by Catholics who felt marginalized and persecuted by the Protestants to kill the current leadership and put in its place a nine-year-old princess who might have been more sympathetic to the Catholic cause.

Pictured: A wedding cake topper approved by God

The means of this coup was to be several (perhaps 30, perhaps more) kegs of gunpowder piled beneath the House of Lords, to be detonated by one Guy Fawkes. Fawkes had been selected for this task by the actual leader of the rebellion, Robert Catesby, because of his decade of military experience presumably needed to light a bundle of sticks on fire. After being caught guarding the explosives, Fawkes actually succeeded in talking his way out of the situation by saying he was only guarding a stockpile of wood for his master. He then destroyed this small accomplishment by giving the guards the real name of a fellow conspirator, Thomas Percy, as his master, which aroused further suspicion since Percy was a known Catholic sympathizer. This blunder brought guards back to the same spot later that same evening, where they found Fawkes in his escape clothes with the means to set the firewood alight. Although several of his accomplices were eventually caught, tried, and hanged along with him, Fawkes' ineptitude at criminality is surely the only reason we speak his name today.

The selection of a failure for a figurehead is not my only problem with the use of these dime store masks during protest. I am fundamentally unable to understand the reasoning and logic I assume is behind the decision to hide one's face when speaking out. Hand in hand with this is my inability to comprehend when the fight leaves the protest. The decision to speak out against something is a wholly private and personal one. It is a conclusion reached, rightly or wrongly, by your individual thought processes and analysis of the evidence. It is an individual thing, carefully nurtured into some semblance of order internally, hopefully through logic and reason, until we decide we have an opinion that needs to be shared (again, rightly or wrongly). What purpose can it possibly serve to remove the fact that you are a distinct person? And why, then, is that hard-won opinion so easily cast aside – or momentarily forgotten, if you are more generous than I am – when the conflict comes? Surely no one thinks that they will march against the establishment and meet no opposition; why then do we consistently see them scatter when they meet it?

Add Very painful, but reversible with treatment

At what point does your physical discomfort outweigh your conviction? If you were really that outraged at Monsanto or the police, why did pepper spray so easily dissuade you? In Eugene, I watched a man get pummeled and sprayed by police in the middle of an intersection where, only moments before, dozens of his comrades had crowded. They were still nearby, watching like I was, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to help. I knew nothing of their cause, I also felt outrage watching the man get beaten and listening to his cries of protest, and I also did nothing to help. Why didn't the anger that had propelled these people to converge not also sustained them in their fight? Those out of uniform easily outnumbered those in them, aid for the officers if they met serious resistance might as well have been miles away, and the original complaint was still an issue needing attention, but at some point the sureness of the protest action – their fight – had left them.

This is very painful, and does not wash off [(c) David Hoffman]

If you don't want to show your face and you can't take a punch without running away, you don't deserve to protest anything. My armchair revolutionary contemporaries would be well served, I think, by watching video of the Poll Tax riots in London. It's worth seeing thousands of countrymen with locked arms speaking out without masks, without pretense. And when the police came, they fought brutally. It is unpleasant to watch a line of students get a eyeful of pepper spray, but it is gut-wrenching to watch a human get trampled by a dozen horses while other people try frantically to get the injured out of the way. The fight cannot stop once resistance is met, and it cannot truly start until we're willing to show our faces.