politics | The Casual Blog

November 15, 2009

Privacy and exposure

How important is privacy? I ask this question at a moment when I feel more than usually publicly exposed and vulnerable. In recent times, I’ve come to think that for most of us the concern with privacy is exaggerated. But exposure to the full glare of modern social media raises the question for me in a new way.

For most of us, or at least for me, the privacy question is usually more theoretical than real. Most of the time, we’re private by default. At least for non-celebrities, generally no one cares one way or the other about our (to us) valuable personal views and secrets. Getting serious attention from one person, never mind the mass audience, doesn’t happen by accident. It takes effort.

My operating assumption in recent years is that, for an individual, too much seclusion is more detrimental than too much society. We are social animals; we wither and die without others of our kind. And socializing means discarding some of our shell of privacy. I’ve made it a rule to try sharing, rather than hoarding, when I have information or experience that could be helpful and of interest to others.

The possible benefits are: helping someone, forming a human bond, making the world a little better. The possible risks are: risk of being wrong, of seeming ridiculous, of offending or upsetting someone. And I do an informal cost-benefit analysis before I venture into the public arena on something controversial. But I try not to let fear be determinative, and to give weight to the possible benefits even when they are somewhat speculative.

Some months back I, along with others, appeared in a video on open source software and intellectual property, where I took a position that challenged granting patents for software. Last week the video was posted on Patently-O, a prominent patent web site. It generated dozens, if not hundreds of comments. The vast majority of them were critical of my position, and some were critical in terms that were, shall we say, less than kind. I was left with the firm impression that there are a lot of people who felt angry at me.

Being a target of a large amount of focused dislike is a new sensation for me. It’s different from being disliked by an identifiable individual, when there is sometimes an understandable reason, and at any rate a finite problem. It’s funny that it should matter, since I do not know these individuals, and I have never before relied on their respect and goodwill. It may well be I would not care for their good opinion if I actually knew them. Even so, it’s surprisingly bothersome. It caused an uncomfortable feeling in my gut. There’s nothing to be done. It might be that with more experience one builds up defenses. I’m hoping.

October 25, 2009

Human beings in our prisons

The Raleigh News & Observer’s headlines for the past few days have blared the news that several dangerous persons in the state’s prison system are about to be released. I ignored the story initially, on the theory that this surely happens every day without devastating consequences. Prisoners serve their time, and they get out. It’s very common.

Thinking about prisons and prisoners is painful, and it’s easy not to think about them. They’re usually well out of sight. I drive past Central Prison on the way to work every day, but I barely see it, because it’s unsightly and I’ve gotten in the habit of looking the other way. But the N&O stories reminded me that we need to deal with a terrible situation.

Imprisonment as we in the U.S. now practice it is in many cases horrific for the prisoners and it’s hard to say if it makes us any safer. It locks away some dangerous people, but it also creates more dangerous people. We lock people up for years in dehumanizing conditions, which has a tendency to make people angry and violent, then let them out. Many then commit more crimes, so we send them back to prison, and repeat the cycle. Multiply this by millions.

Depressing as it is, it’s even worse that our governor and our newspaper are seeking to whip people into a frenzy about particular convicted criminals getting out. The particular circumstances relate to a new case interpreting the meaning of a “life sentence.” For a lot of years in many places, it didn’t mean “till the prisoner died.” The North Carolina courts found it didn’t mean that for these prisoners, but rather meant 80 years minus good behavior time. So a group of felons who’ve served at least 40 years are due to get out.

The problem is similar to Guantanamo, where even after we admitted what we did was wrong, we’ve got a problem with outplacement of the prisoners. They may not have been dangerous when they went in, but in whatever case, they’re likely to be more dangerous having spent years with fellow prisoners who are violent jihadists for their only friends.

In terms of human misery, the U.S. prison system is enormous. We’re at or near the top in per capita rates of imprisonment. We have no concept of what we’re trying to accomplish other than punishment.

We need to reserve our prisons for the truly dangerous. And we need to treat those people humanely to see if we can help them become less violent. It doesn’t matter whether you argue the point in terms of human rights or pure self interest — the result is the same. But we’d feel more like decent human beings if we got rolled up our sleeves and got to work on this.

August 15, 2009

Legitimate healthcare debate, big lies, and lunacy

There’s plenty of room for legitimate disagreement over health care policy. There’s really no single, objective right answer, and whenever that is the case (which it is on most policy questions), it’s predictable that people will disagree. It’s even healthy for people to disagree and argue for their positions. Those arguments may result in better policy.

But in recent weeks, the public discourse on health care has taken a disturbing turn. Opponents of the President’s plan have taken to shouting down proponents in public meetings across the land. Opposition leaders, instead of addressing the merits, have propounded preposterous lies. Among other thing, opponents falsely accuse the plan of including provisions on euthanasia and involving a government takeover of all health care. The leaders (Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich, etc.) surely know this is nonsense, but their repetition of big lies is fanning anger on the street to the point of danger. It is ironic that these folks are dropping the rhetorical H-bomb of Nazism on the proponents of health care change. The angry shouting at the town hall meetings looks uncomfortably close to the populist politics of Germany in the early thirties.

Is there any hope of a civil, rational discourse with the passionate believers? I hate to say it, but I see little. It appears that these folks will discard any evidence, no matter how clear and settled, that does not fit with their beliefs. For example, the opponents of the President include a remarkable number of so-called “birthers” — citizens who have decided to believe that the President is not a natural born American. The evidence disproving this notion is overwhelming, but the number of birthers remains amazingly high.

How can such crazy thinking propagate beyond a few obvious lunatics and become a movement? Is there any cure for this form of mass derangement? Again, I doubt that rational argument will help, because these people have no apparent interest in rationality. For the moment, they are clearly a minority, but they have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, and those numbers could increase. There’s just no way for sensible, thoughtful people to match the believers’ level of passionate intensity. Thoughtful people realize there’s never complete information, always another point of view, and always a possibility their understanding might be wrong. These people, at least while in the grip of their viral lunacy, have no such constraints. I hope the fever breaks soon.

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