The Protect America Act

The Senate has passed a reauthorization of PAA that makes virtually everything about the famous illegal wiretapping program by NSA (the one Congress was screaming about not so long ago) legal and closes all options for prosecuting anyone over the past illegalities. The House has hung up the Act in Congress for now because of the telecom immunity provision but there is no real question that the other provisions of the Protect America Act will become law in the near future.

The PAA makes it legal for the government to listen in to any conversation without a warrant as long as one of the participants is physically outside the Unites States.

Anything that deals with the power of the government over civilians is an exercise of balancing opposing needs and considerations, it should also be about caution and narrow tailoring.

There are two discussions that should be going on when we are discussing the expansion of government powers and I am furious that only one of them is happening.

The first discussion is the balancing of the competing interests of security and civil rights. This is very much a subjective decision. It depends on how severe you think the threat to our safety is and how severe the threat to our privacy. It depends on how much you value security when compared to privacy. There is definitely room for debate and argument and analysis in this question but eventually it pretty much comes down to a gut decision. I don’t mind people debating or screaming at each other about whether they value safety or privacy and whether the other side is advocating the destruction of our lives or our society. However, this debate is not the only debate we should be having!

The second question, in many ways the more important question, is, once you accept that the balance between security and privacy is X (fill in your own preferred position here, or your enemies) the question is how to go about satisfying to the desired maximum the safety consideration while safeguarding our rights as much as possible. Once we decide we need to do Y to be safe by all means lets set about accomplishing the objective of Y. (Ex: NSA needs to be able to place a wiretap on people they think might be working for Al Queda within 24 hours, lets figure out a process that lets them do that legally.) However, what reason is there not to go about doing Y in such a way as to minimize any damage to our rights? (Ex: Warrants after the fact. Notification after the fact. Briefing of Congress at certain intervals, etc.) Why is the question presented by the Bush administration and the Republicans the binary one of not valuing or accomplishing Y and writing a blank check? No matter what Y is (unless it is unfettered absolute power) there is room for oversight and checks.

There can be reasonable disagreement on the first question. I can see how people might have different preferences on the balance between security and civil rights and I can acknowledge these people as well intentioned reasonable individuals without frothing at the mouth. People who are unwilling to discuss and work on the second question and shut down all discussion of it by yelling “We’re all going to die! Y is important! Don’t you understand!” make me froth at the mouth.

I can think of no justifiable reason to not work on including oversight and safeguards into any new rights we want to give the government. I cannot think of any motivation for the people who oppose such except a naked desire to seize and abuse power.

No one is interested in us not being safe. But blank checks are not the best ways of achieving that. There is even reason to believe that blank checks make for less effective law enforcement/intelligence gathering.

And that’s why the PAA is a lousy law, not only because it allows wiretapping of a certain kind but because it gives us no way to make sure the NSA is complying with PAA.

There is also a distinct possibility that the PAA is unconstitutional on the merits, but that’s a subject for another post.

Gold diggers and Manipulators; Power, Gender Roles and Equality

It is undisputed that study after study (if one’s own observations aren’t enough) tell us that women do the vast majority of child rearing and house work. However there is another sort of work that women do overwhelming more then men. Emotional work. The emotional maintenance of a relationship. Monitoring the mood of the parties, monitoring the relationships with family, smoothing over problems and preventing problems, articulating feelings and resolving problems.

Emotional maintenance is hard to quantify and there is a lot of disagreement on the subject. Is it real? Is it necessary? Do men really not do it? Do men really need it?

I think it is both real and necessary and that women are trained for it and men aren’t. A side effect or accompaniment of this is that there is in fact a certain subtle power that this gives women.

One part of emotional maintenance is being aware of when your partner or family member is angry or sad and what to do to change it. It’s logical that if a woman knows how to do this then she can also not do it, or acerbate the situation. This sounds like a lot of power and it is, but unlike any other oppressed group women always have power in a patriarchal society. A functioning society has to have paths to happiness for women, spheres of influence. Feminists often deny that women have any real power in patriarchy but that’s not necessarily accurate. What is accurate is that the power patriarchies give women are always subtle powers and when they come into conflict blunt power beats subtle power every time, sometimes literally so.

This is perfectly illustrated by an article about Jamaica, Females To Blame for Male Suicides via Feministing.

Jamaica of course isn't the United States and one article isn't proof of a culture wide trend, but it is a good example.

The basic point of the article is that men don’t know how to deal with their strong emotions and so lash out in anger and kill their partners before killing themselves. The anthropologist in the article explicitly says that it is women’s fault that men are killing them.

"Women have grown up without restrictions on expressing their emotions and so they are more emotionally developed than most men and pretty much manipulate men and make them feel incompetent and inferior," McGill said.

This is a fascinating point view, women are more emotionally developed then men and manipulate men and then men kill them so obviously the solution is to change women.

?

The point that stands out for me is that even taking for granted that women do have this power to manipulate and use it against men (which I don’t necessarily believe) men have more power, it is the woman who is dead, the man who killed her. However, this isn't pointed out. We are all so very used to men having the superior power that it is not even worth noting.

Not all power is equal. Violence and money as power will always (as a group and at least for the foreseeable future) triumph over any other type.

Men, as a group, have all the self-focused blindness of a privileged group. They see that there is a certain power wielded by women as a group and complain, often and loudly, that it isn’t fair for women to ask or demand equality while they have these powers. When analyzed this position is ridiculous. Women shouldn’t expect to have the same ability to control their own lives by having equal earning power till they pay half for all their dinners and change their own tires? How can anyone expect an oppressed group to give up the advantages that they do have when there is no guarantee and every indication that it won’t help them get anything in exchange? Privileged groups have a lousy track record of giving up their power if only the people they are oppressing are nice enough.

Today, in the real world, when it comes to power, women are fucked. So till women earn as much as men do in the same jobs, till women aren’t expected to be the primary care takers of children, till women aren’t expected to manage the household, I’m not going to be recommending that women stop batting their eyelashes and capitalizing on any manipulative advantage they might have.

Let men who are so very scandalized by gold diggers give up all of their advantages and then we’ll think of being scandalized too.

The average guy needs to realize that just because a woman made him feel like shit and as if he is powerless doesn't mean he isn't privileged by society.

hello

I am naturally inclined to be a lurker. I like to read and often read obsessively. I like to think that I like to write but often write much less then I'd like to. I like to express my opinion. I have a lot of opinions. We'll see how these traits interact on here and if this blog ends up with any posts (let alone comments). If nothing else perhaps a stable pseudonym will encourage me to emerge from lurkitude at my favorite blogs. It is my resolution to become less passive in my consumption of the internet. Haha.