I Supported Affirmative Consent Before It Was Cool (and Then I Gave Up On It)

by James J Heaney Posted on 10 July 2015

A couple years ago, I was trying to figure out how best to deal with rape cases.  Rape is simultaneously one of the worst crimes that can be perpetrated against an individual and one of the hardest to punish or prevent.  As I wrote at the time:

Our legal system, like every legal system, struggles with the problem of proving non-consent in rape cases.  A rapist will often admit that sexual activity occurred, but will insist that it was consensual.  The burden of proof falls on the victim.  That is as it must be, since the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, but, under current law, it is very, very difficult to obtain that level of proof.  If it turns into a case of “he-said/she-said”, the rapist gets away with it.  Few rape cases that lead to an arrest end in conviction and prison time.  Partly because of how difficult they are to prosecute, few rape reports lead to an arrest in the first place.  And, given the high costs and low chance of success offered by the justice system, relatively few rapes are reported at all.  RAINN estimates that only 3% of bona fide rapists are sent to prison for their crime.  This is a tragic injustice.

At the same time, I was thinking about premarital and non-marital sex, which are bigger social problems than most people realize.  While fornication used to against the law in all 50 states, those laws are now considered unconstitutional (because — one of this blog’s main themes — Anthony Kennedy is both a moron and a tyrant), and fornication has become socially acceptable:

The results have been predictable: premarital sex is more prevalent than it has been in millennia — perhaps in all history — while solitary motherhood has become both the curse of the poor and the luxury of the very rich.  41% of American children are born out of wedlock, and the number rises to an astounding 73% for black American children.  Social pathology follows, as night follows day.  I will not bother enumerating the harms inflicted on children by mass unmarried parenthood, because I no longer believe this is novel or controversial information, but here are a couple links to recent op-eds and research discussing the threat non-marital parenting poses to the next generation, from larger disciplinary issues to less successful careers.  As it stands, there’s not much we can do about this.  Even if there isn’t a constitutional right to sleep around, do we really have the desire or police resources to do anything about it?

At the time, I failed to note that fornication is also a key driver of the abortion rate (more than half of American reproductive-aged women are married, yet 85% of abortions are performed on the unmarried).  I really want to discourage fornication.

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Posted in Culture, Law, Mere Opinion | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

The President Should Be Impeached For Suspending the Employer Mandate

by James J Heaney Posted on 5 July 2015

I wrote a version of this post on reddit about nearly two years ago.  I finally got sick of digging out the link, so I am finally getting it up on De Civ.

BACKGROUND

On July 2, 2013, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Mark Mazur announced that the Treasury Department is suspending two related provisions of the Affordable Care Act (popularly known as “Obamacare”) for a period of one year. (Chief-of-Staff Valerie Jarrett elaborated slightly in a post that same day.)

The first suspended provision, Section 6055 /6056, requires employers and insurance providers to periodically report health insurance coverage information to the Treasury Department. It is being suspended in order to allow more time to “consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements” and for employers to “adapt health coverage and reporting systems.” This is reportedly legalese for “we’re not ready with the regulations, and you’re not ready with the reporting technology, so let’s try again next year.”

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Civil Marriage Is Dead (& It Deserved To Die)

by James J Heaney Posted on 26 June 2015

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.  This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

—G.K. Chesterton

A couple of years ago, I published a long piece for De Civitate in support of civil marriage.  The “purpose of civil marriage,” I wrote, “is to promote positive procreation, which includes bearing and raising children, insofar as possible, within their intact families, so that they become productive, responsible, adult members of society… [I]t is a wise and prudent public policy.”  I also argued against redefining civil marriage to include other loving, consensual, adult sexual relationships, on the grounds that doing so would undermine its public policy objectives while (paradoxically) opening the institution to charges of indefensible discrimination.  I concluded, “A vote to redefine civil marriage is, in the final analysis, a vote to end civil marriage.”

Having said all that, I added in a postscript: “It is not unreasonable to want to abolish civil marriage entirely, on the basis that government interference in marriage does far more harm for children and the culture than it does good.  I don’t think that’s true, but I’ve heard some good arguments (or at least starts-of-arguments) that make me suspect I could be wrong.”

In the years since I wrote that, those “starts-of-arguments” have blossomed, and I’ve come around to their position: civil marriage should cease to exist.

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Posted in Declarations, Marriage | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

5 Hacks for Identifying Legit (or not) News Sources

by James J Heaney Posted on 20 April 2015

A friend asks, “How do I know what news sources are legit?  Like, ThinkProgress, for example?  Do they suck?  I know many sites, but I have no idea which ones are regarded as actually having good information.”

This is a good question, and I wish more people would ask it.  The growing ideological segregation of Americans is shutting down the immune system of the body politic, driving us further and further apart, and sending us (slowly) down the path that led (in the 19th century) to civil war.  One of the biggest contributors to ideological segregation is the fact that many of us – especially the most politically passionate – get all or most of our news from sources which are strongly aligned with our own ideology.  Progressives do not get news from FOX.  Conservatives do not get news from Salon.  (We even have competing, parallel entities, Media Matters and NewsBusters, dedicated to categorically discrediting the other sides’ sources.  The mind-virus now has its own antibodies.)

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Posted in Mere Opinion, Politics | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Net Neutrality: A Sorta-Technical Overview

by James J Heaney Posted on 4 February 2015

This is the text of a talk I recently gave at the monthly meeting of Twin Cities Catholic I.T. Professionals, Inc..  It is aimed at computer professionals who want to get a deeper understanding of net neutrality, and goes into much more technical detail than a general audience would want. Also, there are no helpful pictures or links in this one. For a less technical overview, aimed at my fellow political conservatives, see my original blog post, Why Free Marketeers Want To Regulate The Internet.  Otherwise, please enjoy!

Thanks everyone for coming.  I am James Heaney, and my talk is on network neutrality.  I can’t claim any particular credentials on this topic, the way our past speakers have been able to.  I did write a blog post about the economics of net neutrality that got picked up by TechDirt and retweeted by Vint Cerf, which was maybe the coolest thing that ever happened to me, but my interest in it is amateur: net neutrality sits at the crossroads between technology, economics, law, and public policy, which rings pretty much all my chimes.  My presentation will start with tech, where you’ll probably know most of what I’m talking about, and move toward policy, which hopefully is a little more educational. Net neutrality a hugely complicated issue, and – while I do have an opinion – I think this is one of the few policy issues where this is no single right answer.

That said, let’s see how the room shakes out.  Based on whatever it is you know – no matter how vague –  do you think the FCC’s proposed regulations on network neutrality go too far, don’t go far enough, or are just right?  And, yes, you have to decide, no matter how irresponsible your opinion.  Don’t worry: I won’t tell the FCC.

Cool.  And, just out of curiosity, do you think your opinion is fairly well-informed, or not?

So, let’s start with the basics.  Net neutrality is about how data traffic is handled on the internet. What’s the internet?

(TED STEVENS IMPRESSION) “It’s… it’s… it’s a series of tubes!”

Heh heh.  I love that one.

But, seriously, Senator Ted Stevens was basically right.  The Internet is a bunch of computers stuck together with tubes.  All of them want to send data over the tubes to everybody else.

When a home user connects to the Internet, he typically connects to an Internet Service Provider, or ISP.  This ISP – let’s say Comcast – owns what is called a Tier-2 network.  You give them money, they let you connect to every other computer in their network.  Right now, Comcast will sell you “unlimited” access, which is actually 250 gigabytes per month, with 20 megabit-per-second-service, for around $80.

But Comcast isn’t connected to everyone on the Internet.  In fact, it’s not really connected to very many people at all besides other Comcast customers, which is just a subset of other people in the United States.  And they call it the Internet, not ComcastAmericaNet, so they must be doing something to get their users connected to the rest of the world.

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Posted in Analysis, Law, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Translations of Some Church Documents, #1

by James J Heaney Posted on 11 January 2015

I am Catholic, and I care a lot about the intricacies of Catholic teaching, so, from time to time, I am forced to look up very old, not very prominent Church documents, from papal allocutions to Decrees of the Holy Office. These documents are almost always found somewhere in the great compilation Enchiridion Symbolorum, by Denzinger, but, as the Vatican Printing Office continues its near-criminal profit-mongering with the Deposit of Faith, large chunks of Denzinger’s great work are not actually online — at least, not in English.  (If you are a wealthy person, feel free to send Ignatius Press $65 for their up-to-date translation of Denzinger.)

So, not infrequently, I find myself reading a Vatican document, encountering a citation that records nothing but a Denzinger number, and then spending an hour searching the internet for an English translation of that number.  When that fails (and it usually does), I have to go to the Latin text (which is online, albeit illegally) and translate it for myself.  This can take hours.

From now on, as my contribution to the Internet, whenever I translate one of these obscure documents, I am going to post the Latin text and the translation to this blog.  Those of you who are regular readers will find these posts disjointed and deadly dull.  But those of you who are finding this blog because you’ve been wandering around Google for an hour trying to find a reliable translation of Denzinger 2795… you’ve come to the right place!  The translations are not literal, and I can make no guarantee that my Latin is accurate; I only studied it for five years, and never became fluent.  (I would welcome corrections.)

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The Average American Wants BOTH Gay Marriage AND Extreme Abortion Restrictions

by James J Heaney Posted on 20 October 2014

One of my occasional themes here at De Civ has been the fact that one of the most common, most influential tropes in American politics is completely wrong.  Most commentators think that abortion and marriage are politically linked: if abortion restriction gets the upper hand, then say good-bye to same-sex marriage, and vice versa. Major Republican politicians regularly complain that, because Republicans have lost on the definition of marriage, therefore Republicans should surrender on all social issues, or they will lose all elections forever.

This is an analysis of the political landscape, not an endorsement of it. Feel free to read this entire post in Frank Underwood’s voice.

At the extreme ends of the spectrum, there’s a certain truth to the trope: the Christian Churches that generally make up the backbone of the anti-abortion movement also make up the backbone of the anti-marriage-redefinition movement. And the Supreme Court justices who claim that abortion — at any time, for any reason — is a constitutional right are exactly the same justices who claim the same for same-sex civil marriage.  And so on, throughout the extreme bases of both movements.  Pundits spend most of their time talking to extremists, because extremists are the people who get engaged, get involved, and get important.  It would not be unreasonable to argue that every single person who lives on the inside of Interstate 495 is, compared to the average American voter, a radical extremist.  And so extremists set all political narratives, including this one.

But elections aren’t decided by extremists.  They’re decided by the average voter.  And the average voter is a strange duck.  A new set of thorough, state-level polling data jointly released last month by YouGov, CBS News, and the New York Times makes this clear in a way that most pundits haven’t come to appreciate yet. (Here is the corresponding national data.)

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Posted in Abolitionism, Analysis, Politics | Comments Off on The Average American Wants BOTH Gay Marriage AND Extreme Abortion Restrictions

A Quick Note of Agreement with Mike Masnick

by James J Heaney Posted on 24 September 2014

I don’t check my pingbacks very often, because I know everyone who reads this blog (all seven of you!) and so pingbacks don’t usually tell me much.  So I quite failed to notice that my recent piece on net neutrality attracted a little attention outside the usual septet, and only saw Mike Masnick’s piece on Techdirt tonight, while I was up late working on a new post (working title: “S.2876: Making the War on Women Work for You!”).

Overall, Mr. Masnick agrees with me (and I with him).  He has one quibble with my presentation: its title (“Why Free Marketeers Want To Regulate the Internet”).  He writes:

…[T]he underlying claim about all of this [is] that Title II is somehow “regulating the internet.” It’s not. It’s never been about that at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s about choosing which form of regulation internet infrastructure will be ruled by. The anti-net neutrality crew like to make this mistake (and they make it often), trying to pretend that internet infrastructure is the internet. It’s not.

This is a good point.  Internet infrastructure is just a “series of tubes“, and it tends toward natural monopoly.  The actual Internet — perhaps, more properly, the World Wide Web — is an infinite space where any entrepreneur can hang out his shingle to sell any good or service, with no permits, no regulation, and no limits except his imagination.  It is closer to the fabled “perfectly competitive free market” than anything else mankind has ever seen… probably ever will see.

Despite the title of my piece, free marketeers don’t want to regulate the Internet.  We want to regulate the infrastructure that undergirds the Internet precisely in order to preserve the freedom of markets and peoples who are actually on the Internet.  The distinction is important, it is too often forgotten, and it has recently been exploited by ISPs making the specious argument that invoking Title II against Internet infrastructure providers (say, Comcast) would force the FCC to also invoke it against World Wide Web content providers (say, Google), destroying the freedom and innovation of the online marketplace.  The reality is just the opposite: if we don’t regulate internet infrastructure, the infrastructure monopolists will attack the online free market… and win.

Mr. Masnick goes on to observe that internet infrastructure has always been both regulated and heavily subsidized by governments at all levels.  As free marketeers know, government subsidies are just another form of regulation, no less disruptive to markets than price controls.  The big ISPs are only discovering the beauty of markets now that regulation might hurt their bottom line. I don’t know that that adds anything to our economic case — I doubt it — but it sure does make me feel less guilty about throwing the book at them.

The only other thing I’d like to mention from the pingbacks is that, contra the good folks at Engine.is, I am not Cleveland State University Lecturer Dr. James J. Heaney — although, looking at his publications list, I’m certain we’d get along famously.  I am the mere Mr. James J. Heaney, Minnesota software developer, founder and director of the James J. Heaney Institute for the Inquiry into Natural Philosophy and Science-y Things, and Star Trek audio drama producer (and, yes, that site is long overdue for an upgrade).

Posted in In Conversation, Reads & Reactions | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Why Free Marketeers Want To Regulate the Internet

by James J Heaney Posted on 15 September 2014

[UPDATE: This post is now endorsed by Vint Cerf. I can die happy.]

[NOTE: If you are more technical-minded, you may prefer my recent presentation to a group of local I.T. professionals, Net Neutrality: A Sorta-Technical Overview.]

[UPDATE: In 2021, this post drew the attention of Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, and we had a lovely chat about it.]

Like most Americans, conservatives do not know very much about Net Neutrality.

…just like every public utility.
(Image credit: DaddyChief.com)

What they do know about it makes it sound like a terrible idea: a bunch of Silicon Valley elites, backed by the Google panopticon and the Mozilla jerks who publicly executed Brendan Eich over his quiet support for traditional marriage, are demanding that the FCC impose sweeping regulations on the companies who bring the Internet to your door.  With help from their close ally President Obama, these shysters have made tremendous forward progress against the so-called “evil” corporations who (in reality) own, develop, and generally manage the series of tubes that make up the Internet – corporations who have, in short, ushered in the entire Internet Age and all the good it entails.  The only people in this drama who are holding off the regulators are the valiant heroes at the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, who are not afraid to stand athwart the regulatory agenda yelling “stop!,” demanding free markets and free peoples and not an iota less.

Given that narrative, it seems odd for a conservative – whether an old-guard big-business Bush-era conservative or a new-guard Paulite libertarian conservative – to support Net Neutrality.

Except I do Internet for a living, and I am one of the lucky ones who actually knows what Net Neutrality means and what it’s responding to.  And, folks, I’m afraid that, while L. Gordon Crovitz and Rich Lowry are great pundits with a clear understanding of how Washington and the economy work, they don’t seem to understand how the Internet works, which has led them to some wrong conclusions. Continue reading →

Posted in Analysis, Law | 1 Comment

Re: Your Ire Is Misdirected

by James J Heaney Posted on 8 April 2014

Hi, Gerv,

I’m sure you’re inundated, and you sure as heck don’t know me, so there’s no need to respond to this.  But I really appreciated your post the other day, and wanted to share my reaction with you.  Perhaps it will be of some use in figuring out Mozilla recovers from this catastrophe.

As I see it, there are still two big reasons why I and people like me — broadly speaking — are going to have to withhold support Mozilla for the foreseeable future, even after our current anger subsides:

(1) In your post, you give the public your assurance that Brendan really did leave of his own accord; that he really wasn’t forced out; that the Board actually fought to retain him as CEO.  The problem is that your assurance is not a very strong authority outside Mozilla’s walls, and it has to be weighed against the evidence.  This certainly looked, from the outside, like a standard corporate decapitation, where the Board decided to fire the CEO and allowed the CEO to “resign” only to retain his own dignity.

We saw Brendan promising never to resign just a couple days before he did.  We watched Robert George predict — to all appearances accurately — how this was going to play out. We heard the dead silence from the principal players.  (Why hasn’t Brendan said a word in defense of Mozilla since he left?) We noticed that all other accounts of his resignation say the Board tried to retain Brendan as CTO — but pointedly not as CEO. Above all, we read Mitchell’s (very unfortunate) blog post on Resignation Day.  In that post, she seemed to concede that Brendan never should have been hired, that “equality” trumps free speech in this case, and that Mozilla’s biggest takeaway from all this is that, given the chance to do it all again, they’d have fired Brendan even faster.

In this light, your anonymous sources are just not very convincing, even given your bona fides as Mozilla’s last public marriage traditionalist.  (Perhaps especially given those bona fides: what happened to you two years ago would seem to support the suggestion that Mozilla’s commitment to inclusion is skin-deep at best.)

(2) Even if you are absolutely right, and leaving was entirely Brendan’s idea, it still sends a terrible message to the world: “Mozilla can be bullied.  We cannot protect our leader from a bunch of petty thought police on the internet.  We will leave him on the front line, alone, to take 100% of the incoming fire, and then we’ll thrust the blame on ‘outsiders’ when the wounds take him out.”  If that’s the case, then perhaps Mozillans really do still believe in the radical inclusion the project was founded on — but it hardly matters, because Mozilla is no longer calling the shots.  The bullies have taken control, and Mozilla is impotent to resist their imperious will.

In either case, Mozilla is not something many of us feel we can be a part of — or should be — right now.

You mention forgiveness.  If Mozilla wants forgiveness (and I am not even convinced that it wants to be forgiven as forgotten right now), I think it will have to demonstrate some level of repentance and some level of autonomy.

First, repentance: Mozilla must recognize that what happened was not a causeless tragedy that mysteriously destroyed the co-founder like a bolt of lightning.  This happened because the entire community failed.  It wasn’t just the few who raised their voices in protest against Brendan.  It was also those who were publicly ambivalent and conflicted (there were so many!), and even those who supported Brendan but refused to put their foot down and demand that he be retained.  The community either openly attacked or (more often) simply failed to defend either the principles of the project or the concrete policies that give those principles life.  The community’s reluctance to close ranks around the project — not the CEO or his particular beliefs, but the whole concept of an open-source browser that everyone can be part of — was the key fact that made the subsequent media bonfire successful.  It was a sin by the entire community, and it needs to be acknowledged and addressed by the whole community, not just in individual “I feel sad we lost Brendan” posts on Planet Mozilla.

Second, autonomy: social conservatives need to know that Mozilla not only regrets what happened to Brendan, but that it has the desire and ability to make sure that nothing like it will ever happen again.  That people who have “offensive” political opinions still have a place at Mozilla, that our contributions are valued, and that we can even become leaders within the organization.  That Mozilla has not been conquered by ideological interests at Slate and Salon and OKCupid, but remains a genuinely global project that embraces literally anyone who is willing to work toward the (crucial!) goal of a free and open web.

I don’t know how Mozilla might go about doing this, and (unlike those who waged war last week) I don’t presume to dictate terms.  I only know that Mozilla has done absolutely nothing whatsoever since the resignation to restore our sense that it is a “safe space,” and I know that it cannot ever do that without positive action of some kind.  When a university administration is accused of discriminating against racial minorities, they will often establish programs and endowments to ensure that members of those minorities are hired and are able to contribute to the university project without fear of reprisal or undue discomfort.  Perhaps (perhaps) something along the same lines for ideological minorities would help restore the public trust.

For now, however, I’m afraid I won’t be on my favorite browser, and neither will my clients.  This is written from Chrome, which is gross… but at least I know I could go to Google and have a productive career there despite my private beliefs… even if they harvest all the data about my private beliefs and sell it to the NSA.

I don’t know where the open web goes from here, but, fundamentally, a web controlled by the same forces that led to Brendan’s resignation is not an open web at all — except for those privileged to have the “right” opinions.  That means Mozilla, as it currently looks from out here, as it currently operates, cannot carry forward the open-web ideal — not until this is addressed and corrected.

Maybe this all looks completely different from within the Mozilla community. I don’t know; I’m pretty much just a longtime fan and user and promoter, not a contributor.  And there are my two cents.

Posted in Culture, In Conversation | 39 Comments