I run into various laws on the Internet. Sometimes I have a hard time finding them again later. In this post, I will collect some of them, chiefly for my own reference but also because several of them are funny. The list may grow over time.

Hofstadter’s Law

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Johnson‘s First Law of Episcopal Thermodynamics

Every joke you make about the Episcopal Church eventually comes true.

Poe’s Law

In writing, it is impossible to tell a parody of extremism apart from actual extremism.

(The original formulation was narrower.)

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (The Bicycle-Shed Effect)

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.

“Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.” –wiki

Jones’s Bicycle-Shed Corollary

The more people understand something, the more willing they are to argue about it, and the more vigorously they will do so.

Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility

It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of LGBTQ rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.

Cargill’s Law (The 90-90 Rule)

In any software development project, the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

Campbell’s Law (aka the Law of Teaching to the Test)

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Neuhaus’s Law

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

However, one Charles Porterfield Krauth may be better credited with this law, as he wrote in 1872:

Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated, and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points.

Doctorow’s Law

Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.”

Hodes’ Law

Gentlemen avoid the excluded middle.

Thane’s Law

Permanent majorities aren’t; emerging majorities don’t.

(Possibly derived from Osborn’s Law.)

Heal’s Law

The standard is not perfection. The standard is the alternative.

Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

(Conquest’s Second Law is probably not Conquest’s. It is also accurately attributed as O’Sullivan’s First Law. Apocryphal or not, however, this ordering has become canonical.)

Cunningham’s Law

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.

Levine’s Law

You never see prosecutors announce a murder conviction by saying “this murderer violated the very important law against murder.” Any time a regulator has to say explicitly that a rule is “very important,” that’s because he has some doubts.

Occam’s Broom

In the heat of battle, even serious scientists sometimes cannot resist “overlooking” some data that seriously undermine their pet theory.

(attributed to Sydney Brenner; this formulation by Daniel Dennett)

Stein’s Law

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

…which seems like a good one to end this post on.

***

UPDATE 20 July 2020: Added some laws.

UPDATE 22 August 2020: Added some laws.

UPDATE 15 September 2020: Added Occam’s Broom.

UPDATE 9 March 2022: Added Hodes’ Law. (h/t Rachel Lu)

UPDATE 26 Sepetember 2022: Added Thane’s Law and Heal’s Law (h/t master-thief)

UPDATE 1 October 2022: Added Levine’s Law.

UPDATE 17 November 2022: Clarification about Conquest’s Laws.

Hollywood agrees. For example, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there’s a really good scene where Lieutenant Dax, who is considering killing someone, asks Major Kira about what it’s like. It runs like this:

DAX: How many people did you kill?
KIRA: What?
DAX: While you were in the underground.
KIRA: Too many.
DAX: Were they all faceless Cardassians or did you know who you were killing?
KIRA: Why are we talking about this?
DAX: If it bothers you, we can stop.
KIRA: It bothers me.
DAX: I’m sorry.
KIRA: Why, are you thinking about killing somebody?
DAX: Me?
(Kira realizes)
[…] 
KIRA: Jadzia. Your questions about my experience with killing. If you’re wondering what it’s like. When you take someone’s life, you lose a part of your own as well.

You’ve probably never seen this one scene from a particularly obscure episode of Star Trek, but you’ve probably seen a hundred others like it. This exchange is everywhere in our media, from MacGyver‘s speeches to Harry Potter’s Horcruxes. There’s a deep, deep belief in our culture that most of us are incapable of committing murder, because we would just feel too guilty about it. Murder is supposed to feel different from other crimes. We are therefore shocked when we see unrepentant murderers in courtrooms, and we have never, as a culture, been able to come to grips with the way murderous governments can rise to power and enlist their own citizens in committing atrocities. “How could anyone do such a thing?!” we ask.

But, actually (with rare exceptions, like Major Kira) there’s nothing very special about murder, from the murderer’s point of view. It’s the same old story as any other act of cruelty: I want something, I have to do something wrong to get it, and so I’m going to convince myself it’s not really wrong. Human beings are incredible rationalizers. Murder isn’t different; it’s just a little bigger.

Murder is easy.

With all this in mind, I call your attention to new footage released today by the anti-abortion investigative outfit Center for Medical Progress. The footage is of an interview between CMP investigators (undercover as fetal tissue buyers) and an abortionist named Dr. DeShawn Taylor, currently in independent practice but, until recently, medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona.

I didn’t watch the edited “highlights reel” CMP put together. I watched the full, unedited, 27-minute conversation–so you don’t have to!–and then I wrote a transcript.

In this passage, which begins at 14min 46sec in the video below, Dr. Taylor obliquely refers to the killing of babies. I don’t mean fetuses here. I mean 100% born babies. See, every once in a while, a fetus survives an abortion, and is delivered while still showing “signs of life.” According to Arizona law, since it is unquestionably a baby at that point, doctors must take all possible measures to save the baby, including transporting the baby to the hospital.

Instead, Dr. Taylor talks about doing “maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise,” and how one gets away with that. She strongly implies (though never outright admits), that she has done this. If her conscience is troubled in any way about it, she makes no sign of it.

Again, these are born babies, which even the Supreme Court agrees have a right to live.

Murder is easy.

As a note before you watch/read, both people in the conversation refer several times to “didge” or “didging.” This refers to the use of digoxin poisoning to kill a fetus. (Digoxin is a poison fatal to all humans.) Digoxin is often injected prior to the start of a late-term abortion to ensure that the child dies in the womb. It is a more humane method of killing than dismemberment, and also (as we see here) can help avoid failed abortions and/or violating murder laws.

Here is my transcript of the relevant portion:

Center for Medical Progress [CMP]: Do you didge?
Dr. DeShawn Taylor [DT]: Yeah.
CMP: Starting when?
DT: Ah, 20 weeks.
CMP: Starting at 20 weeks.
DT: Mm-hm.
CMP: Okay.
DT: Yeah.
CMP: ‘cause that’s the other thing, ‘cause, y’know, didge kinda rules out–
CMP2: It ruins the integrity of the specimen.
DT: Oh, yeah.
CMP: And it kills the stem cells. (chuckles)
DT: I mean, so the thing is, it’s really–it’s really tricky, ‘cause in Arizona, if the fetus is—if it comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it to the hospital.
CMP: Uh-huh. At any gestational age?
DT: Annnny gestational age. Yeah, yeah.
CMP: Mm-hm. Is there any standard procedure for verifying signs of life?
DT: Well, the thing is…
CMP: That doesn’t go on a chart!
DT: I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise. So, so, it’s really tricky, um…
CMP2: Yeah, sounds like it’s real hard to navigate that bad boy.
DT: Yeah, it’s really tricky so we do— most of the time we do didge, and it usually works. And then we don’t have to worry about that, because Arizona state law says if any, if there’s signs of life, then we’re supposed to transport them to the hospital.
CMP: Yeah.
DT: (chuckles) Yeah, it’s a mess. It’s a mess.

Now, to be clear, you can’t prosecute this. It’s not, legally, an admission of murder… even though it really obviously is an admission of murder. She killed some babies, but she’s wink-winking about it, so Arizona law can’t reach her. It’s like when O.J. Simpson authored a book called If I Did It. Yeah, he did it, but we can’t prove it in court, even as he winks at us about it. Dr. Taylor will (like O.J.) get away with murder, because that’s how our justice system works–and it’s good that our system requires hard proof for a murder conviction.

Also, I’d be remiss not to mention that CMP has faced both legal and moral problems of its own in the way it obtained these videos, which relied on deception and recording conversations without consent. Further, many have alleged that CMP’s edited videos remove vital context. That is why I watched the raw, unedited footage. If you do keep watching to make sure I didn’t miss any context (feel free to add anything relevant you think I missed!), you’ll be treated–a couple minutes after this exchange–to a rather horrifying discussion of how much easier it is to complete an abortion when the fetus is already dead… and thus, apparently, not able to fight for her life.

But what context in the world could change this?

“I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise.”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?… the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers… to try to cause demise”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?”

Jesus Christ.

As Dr. Taylor shows, it’s easy to commit murder. It’s even easier to rationalize your terrible deeds. Perhaps easiest of all is surrounding yourself with like-minded people who agree with you, many of whom do the same awful things.

This is the same defense mechanism that allows Wall Street bankers to defraud the nation without shame, the same trick sex-abusing priests use to assure themselves that they haven’t done anything wrong–that they’ve actually done something good! It’s natural, and it works. Murder is easy.

There’s a lesson here for all of us: don’t count on your feelings preventing you from becoming a bad person, don’t trust them to alert you once you have, and especially don’t tell yourself that it can’t have been so bad because you feel fine about it. Most bad people feel fine.

(Credit to the indispensable Chrissie’s Transcripts Site for the DS9 excerpt.)

Chaput repeatedly refers to the Supreme Court’s lawless decision in Obergefell v. Hodges as a watershed moment, but it seems clear from his litany of evils that the walls have been closing on American Catholics in for years. Obergefell was thus not a radical transformation of the American order, but the culmination of a culture that has been transforming for a long time now. After all, as Chaput writes, “Culture precedes and informs politics. And American culture has moved miles from the assumptions of the Founders.”

What Obergefell seems to have provided is clarity. “It can’t be like it was” anymore, Chaput laments. At one point, he favorably quotes Rod Dreher’s writing on the so-called “Benedict Option,” which sees Christians as besieged resistance cells in America. Chaput insists, like Chesterton’s Adam Wayne, that natural patriotism—love of the land that raised you—is a virtue. The love he still bears for his country, even as he mourns it, is obvious, and cuts a sharp contrast with anti-liberals like Ferrara. Yet Chaput’s anticipation of a “Dark Age” in America is a far cry from Archbishop Ireland calling America “liberty’s native home” and “the highest billow in humanity’s evolution.” Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, since the book is literally titled Strangers in a Strange Land, but the Archbishop of Philadelphia losing his faith in the American project seems like a watershed of its own.

It’s not as dark as all that, but it made for a good excerpt. It’s a pretty good book on the whole!  Read the whole review at The Federalist, or you can grab the book itself on Amazon.

Longtime readers of this blog will notice a little “easter egg”: in this review, I mention Christopher Ferrara’s Liberty: The God That Failed… which I also reviewed, on this blog, back in 2012 or something.  My review of Liberty: TGTF is here.

Type of Show: In the 21st Century, there are two kinds of shows: dark (think Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies) and bright (think Guardians of the Galaxy).  Some straddle the middle, or vacillate between the two.  Utopia is unlike all of them: its plot and characters are pitch-black, darker than anything I’ve seen recently.  But its tone — everything from its color palate to its music to its dialogue — is brighter than anything since Pushing Daisies.  It’s a drama, but often feels like something else.

What It’s About: A powerful conspiracy is determined to get its hands on a manuscript: the second volume of Utopia, a cult-classic comic book.  They’ll kill anyone even tangentially connected to it.  This is bad news for a small group of online Utopia fans, who have managed to get their hands on the manuscript… and they now have to flee for their lives.

Where People Watch: BBC4, DVD, The Pirate Bay (illegally)

What James Watched: The entire first season — six episodes.  There was a second season, also six episode, which aired in 2014.  This short run, though unthinkable in mainstream American television, is perfectly normal for a British show.

Best Part: Watching four completely innocent people from completely different walks of life fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of conspiracies (and conspiracies-within-conspiracies) is fun in any universe, but Utopia‘s bright approach upends the entire conspiracy genre.  I know that’s like saying “the best part of the show is the show,” but that’s kinda true here.

Worst Part: Utopia is incredibly violent, and shockingly graphic about nearly all of it. It gets one or two points back for refusing to show children being graphically murdered… but promptly loses them anyway because it’s perfectly willing to kill children just off-screen, and does so more than twice. If you simply aren’t up for a lot of violence (and a bit of sex), nobody will judge you for skipping Utopia.

Representative Excerpt:

DUGDALE: How did you… get involved in all this?

DONALDSON: Remember SARS? I worked for the Martarla Foundation who discovered it. One of their top scientists, rising star, six figure salary, used their private jet. Ever been on a private jet? It’s nice. I was in Hong Kong when SARS hit. They kept it locked down, but I thought, ‘Fuck that, I’m special’. So I went in, had a look, found out it didn’t exist.

DUGDALE: What? SARS didn’t exist?

DONALDSON: No. Whole thing was just a series of unconnected respiratory problems. Took me under an hour to discover there was no cause or link. So, I filed my report and within a week, I was discredited, research destroyed… fired. I tried speaking out, but everyone thought I’d just gone a bit David Icke.

DUGDALE: But people died. SARS was–

DONALDSON: Started in November 2002, it lasted precisely seven months, by summer 2003 it no longer existed; the ‘pandemic’ affected just eight thousand, four hundred and twenty-two people and killed nine hundred and sixteen. Do you know how many people die each year from random respiratory problems? SARS did not exist. Next question. Why did they do it? Answer? I don’t fucking know. All I know is that in the next few weeks I was embroiled in a sex scandal. Professor Pervert, addicted to coke and prostitutes.

DUGDALE: So, d-did they just set you up?

DONALDSON: Yeah! Well… No, I do like cocaine and prostitutes, but they didn’t have to tell everyone.

Theme Music:

(You learn a lot about any show from its theme music.)

Should I Watch?: 

YES.

Another review put it like this: “Utopia is like Lost without all the irritating parts of Lost.” That’s barely even kind of true, but it’s still the most accurate one-sentence summary of Utopia I’ve found, so I’m reprinting it anyway.  I enjoyed Utopia a great deal, and it told a story that has only occasionally been told before in an entirely fresh way.  And, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say Utopia has clear heroes, it does definitely have people you can cheer for — and who are still worth cheering for by the time the first season ends.

Type of Show: It is unfair to call The Man in the High Castle a heavily-serialized drama. Like many other shows written for the “binge-watching” audience (House of Cards &c.), it is way more serialized than that.  As a series of episodes, it is unintelligible; it can only be understood as a full, season-long story.

What It’s About: In 1947, the Nazi Reich and Japanese Empire conquered America.  Now, in 1963, Juliana Crane and Joe Blake are helping the Resistance smuggle films that depict an impossible world where the Allies won.

Where People Watch: Amazon Prime (subscription only), The Pirate Bay (illegally)

What James Watched: The entire 10-episode first season, which is all that has been released so far.

Best Part: Mad Men won a bunch of awards for its powerful, faithful evocation of the 1960s. The Man in the High Castle goes much further: it powerfully, faithfully evokes a 1960s that never happened: a 1960s America that has been quietly perverted by anti-Semitic propaganda and seppuku.  The world it creates feel real in every detail, from production design to tiny quirks of dialogue, and that world-building is entrancing. Obergruppenführer John Smith (really? that’s the name of a main character?) is singled out in most reviews as a standout, and I must agree: every regime will has its collaborators, and some of them will be true believers. Smith is fascinating.

Worst Part: The Man in the High Castle is, even at this early date, obviously joining Lost’s tradition of asking questions that it has no intention of answering.  The refusal to commit to and advance the broad story drains the show — and apparently its writers — of any sense of urgency.  The story is ten hours long, but has less character development and change in all that time than your average 90-minute B-movie. What’s there is good, but it is soooo slow in coming and involves soooo many long silent shots of people frowning that you start wishing you were watching Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, which were somehow less overextended than The Man in the High Castle.

Should I Watch?: 

NO.

The Man in the High Castle could work very well, if its first and (probable) second season were smashed together into a tightly-paced six-episode miniseries.  Watch the pilot episode for its gorgeous production values and world-building (the pilot is free on Amazon even to non-subscribers, so, bonus).  The rest of the series just isn’t worth the time it asks for, so bail out and go watch the original Red Dawn, which has far less verisimilitude but a hell of a lot more entertainment value.

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.

One day, while making dinner and thinking alternately about these things, it occurred to me that rising rape rates are in many ways related to rising fornication rates, because the lack of a wedding vow prior to sexual intercourse makes consent much cloudier, and, in a culture where non-marital sex is widely embraced and even supported, it become much easier for a rape case to degenerate into “he said/she said” reasonable doubt.  So I started to consider them together, and, within a few minutes, I had come up with an amazing idea which (I was pretty sure) nobody had ever heard before:

I have an idea that could make it easier to apprehend rapists without short-circuiting their due process rights, while simultaneously forcing people to think more carefully about fornication, reducing the number of abortions and increasing the rate of births that take place in wedlock — or at least within a truly committed relationship.

I propose that we add the following language to all sexual assault statutes:

“There shall be a rebuttable presumption that sexual contact between the actor and the complainant was non-consensual, if the actor is not married to the complainant.”

Here is what this says, in plain language: if you report to the police that you were raped, and the person you accused says, in defense, that you did have sex, but it was consensual, then it is no longer your responsibility to prove that you were violated against your will.  It is the other person’s responsibility to prove that you did agree to have sex.  The court would not presume that you gave consent, as it does today.  Instead, it would presume that you are telling the truth — that you were raped.  The only cases where the law would continue to presume that the sex was consensual are cases where the accused and the accuser are married to one another.  There is a very good reason to make that exception: a married couple has publicly given sexual consent to one another, and has specifically requested that their sexual relationship be formally recognized under the law.  Although marital rape can and does occur, it is right for a court to give the benefit of the doubt to the marriage.

Much of the rest of my post was dedicated to explaining what a rebuttable presumption was, and defending the fact that rebuttable presumptions (in a sense) invert the “innocent until proven guilty” standard of Anglo-American justice.  (They do this for good reason, and they’re really quite common: example 1, example 2.)

My ultimate vision was that young people, in order to protect themselves from rape allegations under the new law, would start using what I called a “consent contract” before fornicating with anyone.  This would establish consent and be sufficient to rebut the presumption of non-consent.  (A contract would not be the only way to establish consent; they could also film themselves on their phones just before sex, verbally agreeing to it for the record.)

My first hope was that this new law would make it much easier to convict rapists.  Rapists would not have signed a consent contract with their victims, and any cell phone footage would clearly establish rape, so they would have no way of rebutting the presumption of non-consent.  Rape conviction rates would skyrocket — an obvious blow for justice

My second hope was that this new culture would turn fornication into such a social and legal minefield that it would effectively deter it in many cases.  It is not easy to interrupt sex to sign a quick contract, and — don’t forget — you would have to sign one of these every single time you hooked up, even if it was with your steady girlfriend or live-in partner of five years.  And you’d have to keep the records — written contracts and cell phone videos documenting every single sexual act you perform with any other person — for approximately ten years (the statute of limitations on rape in Minnesota is nine years).  Until you married, sex would never be presumptively consensual.  Those who refused to get and keep documentation would find themselves vulnerable to a rape allegation if their relationship ever went south.  If some fornicators ended up unjustly convicted of rape, I wasn’t too concerned about it, since I already wanted them prosecuted and convicted under the old fornication laws.  Affirmative consent would have effectively brought fornication laws back through the back door.  Bwahahahaha!  My evil plan to ruin and criminalize the campus hook-up scene would finally be complete!  No doubt my shadowy overlords at the National Organization for Marriage would reward me richly for my guile!

I had two major problems with my proposal, though, and it languished in drafts and re-drafts for years and years as I tried to fix them.

The first big problem was selling it.  Fornication, as we’ve established, is super-popular, and the Left — which simultaneously opposes marriage and supports people of any sort having sex at any time for any reason with no possible consequences — seemed particularly unlikely to support a proposal whose second prong would turn the hook-up paradise they’ve established on college campuses into a wasteland.  The anti-rape provisions were nice, but would they be enough to make an ally of the cartoonishly villainous Erin Gloria Ryan?  But this is just politics, and, deep down, I think most people know that fornication is bad, so I was confident that, in the long run, this proposal could make it over the finish line if packaged well.

The second big problem was far more fundamental.  In the end, it was fatal.  This legal standard makes it so that the best defense to a rape accusation is not “it was consensual”.  It makes it so the best defense to a rape accusation is a counter-accusation: “I didn’t rape her; she raped me.”  Assuming there’s no documentation — which there wouldn’t be, because it was a rape! — the situation would still be a he-said/she-said, much like it is today… with the important difference that the loser of the he-said/she-said would end up in prison for 25 to life.  Think of how hard it is to come forward with a rape allegation today, and then imagine how hard it would be if you knew that coming forward carried a real risk that you’d be the one sent to prison instead of your rapist!

I tried to pooh-pooh this to myself, but, the more I thought about it, the worse it seemed.  Serial rapists, knowing that creating simple doubt is no longer be enough to get them off the hook, would start trying to frame their victims for rape, Gone Girl-style.  In order to get the drop, rapists could even start accusing their victims first, reaping the benefits of making the first accusation.

And the new affirmative consent regime would incentivize all this.

It seemed to me that the new rape regime would become, if anything, even worse than it is today, both for victims and for the falsely accused.  The only people who wouldn’t be negatively impacted by the new rape laws would be the rapists.  My proposal would still have the desired effect of completely ruining (and partially criminalizing) the consensual non-marital sex scene, which was great, but, if it meant worse outcomes for rape victims — who have a hard enough row to hoe as it is — I didn’t think it was worth it, so I put the whole thing on the shelf.  I intermittently pulled it off the shelf and played with ways to fix it, but the only idea I ever had was, “Believe the woman is telling the truth and the man is lying.”  Unfortunately, aside from being an obviously sexist and unjust rule of construction, it is simply a fact that men can be both raped and falsely accused, and both happen at low but non-trivial rates, so it wouldn’t be remotely effective.  The proposal remained on the shelf.  My post, quoted above, was never published.

This was 2012.  Fast-forward to today.

As it turns out, I was not the first person to think of this.  Tiny Antioch College tried something similar (only without the marital exceptions) in 1991.  Everyone made fun of it, but, twenty-odd years later, about two years after I started working on this idea, California suddenly came out of nowhere and passed an affirmative consent law that applies to all college codes of conduct.  California.  Home of the Left.  And the Left… cheered?  Seriously, that link is Ezra Klein celebrating the fact that “men [will] feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”  I’m happy about ruining fornication for everyone, but why are you?   This link is Erin Gloria Ryan, whom I expected to be the foremost opponent of these laws, angrily denouncing the law’s detractors in her trademark, savagely ad hominem, style.

Libertarians freaked out, correctly pointing out that this law would not help stop rapes, but would only hurt casual fornicators.  Conor Friedersdorf, a proud Leftie who nevertheless frequently engages in thinking, mentioned the counter-accusation problem I had foreseen.  The mainstream Right noted the same things, but spent most of its energy mocking the law.  (However, Heather MacDonald had a must-read piece dissecting the “neo-Victorianism” that this law represents, to which David Brooks had a must-read response.)  The Right also continued arguing (correctly) that campus rape tribunals are kangaroo courts, farces of justice injuring both accusers and accused more or less at random (though they are increasingly stacked against the accused).  These tribunals — mandatory under Title IX and dramatically expanded by the Obama Administration — have no business existing in the first place, because the proper venue to try a rape charge is in court, and affirmative consent policies only empower them to ever greater injustices.

(On that note, I thought it instructive that California applied the “affirmative consent” standard only to college codes of conduct, not to the California criminal code.  Perhaps they recognize what a catastrophe it would be for all concerned if the affirmative consent standard weren’t just a tool to help college administrators persecute accused rapists, and were applied in a system that actually has due process of law.)

This all happened last year, and I figured the affirmative consent was doomed, so I made no comment.  California passes all sorts of weird bills, and presumably the Left — given a little time — would realize that “affirmative consent” standards hurt rape victims and (worse!) undermine the Left’s pièce de résistance, the Sexual Revolution, leading them to withdraw support for the idea.  I mean, once Jonathan Chait gives up on your feminist crusade, it’s all over.  (I’m pretty sure that’s a Rule of Acquisition.)

But I was wrong.  This has not happened.  Affirmative consent has only grown more prevalent, although, even now, nobody has legislated it into criminal law.  This week, I learned that my own local state university, the University of Minnesota, is on the verge of imposing an affirmative consent policy of its own.

What actually prompted me to finally post about this, though, after so many years thinking about it, was a tidbit I picked up on social media today: a group styling itself the “affirmative consent project” has started actually circulating a sexual consent contract.  I laughed very hard.  All my predictions are coming true!  They are actually going to make kids sign a contract before they have sex, and save it for years!  Every time they do it! My only mistake was in thinking that the Left would need some prompting from the Right to so radically violate their “stay out of other people’s bedrooms” principle they’ve spent so many years pretending to care about.

This is certainly amusing, and, in some ways, the first wave of affirmative consent is useful.  But my next round of predictions suggests that increasingly savvy rapists will (easily) exploit the new rules, leading to an unraveling of justice for both rape victims and falsely accused rape perpetrators.  I don’t want that.  Even the destruction of the college hook-up scene isn’t worth causing more harm to rape survivors… and the lack of a marital exception to these policies means the damage could eventually extend far beyond fornication, harming all sexual relationships of any kind.   We should repeal these policies before we get anywhere close to that.

I recognized these problems after only a couple hours thinking about the idea, and my concerns led me to shelve the idea for more than two years.  But the State of California, and now the U of M board of regents, have now gone ahead and passed actual laws, affecting millions of people, apparently without bothering to think about it as much as I did for a blog post.  Once these policies are repealed, everyone in California and on the U of M board of regents needs to sit down for a very long think about passing real, very powerful laws without bothering to consider their unintended consequences.

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.

Liberty: The God That Failed is an imposing tome, clocking in at over 600 pages of small-print, heavily footnoted text.  Christopher Ferrara had a great deal to say, and spared no effort in saying it – although he promises to find material for a sequel!  Unfortunately, because of its density, it took me quite a number of months to read my review copy all the way through. I certainly won’t be having much impact on initial sales!  Nevertheless, I agreed to write a review, so I have written a review.

At the center of Liberty is a compelling dissection of certain internal contradictions in the political philosophy of John Locke and the English Enlightenment, which Ferrara examines through the lens of American history – a history marked (or, in Ferrara’s telling, defined) by those shortcomings.  The greatest of the “Hobbeslockean” errors Ferrara recounts are (first) the belief in majority rule, for which Locke sets forth an argument that is incoherent in several respects, and (second) the belief in religious toleration, which leads inevitably to the evisceration of all religious dogma and the final replacement of public morality with mob sentimentality.  These two political dogmas are the basis of the “liberty” which has always been at the heart of the American project.  As a result, Ferrara hates America nearly as much as he hates John Locke.

“Hate” is a strong word, yet it is quite adequate here.  Ferrara does not seem to be out to win converts.  The number of people who might conceivably be persuaded by this study is already fairly small: anyone who comes into this book without a fairly solid understanding of – and sympathy for – the government of pre-Enlightenment Christendom (already very rare in a West dominated by the Black Legend of the English Reformation) will come away impressed that Ferrara wants to put the pope on the throne, burn the heretics, and replace Ben Bernanke with Johann Tetzel.  Frankly, this is not all that far from the truth, and Ferrara makes no particular pretense of trying to persuade anyone who isn’t already a faithful Catholic with certain natural sympathies toward the ancien regime.  Nevertheless, there was an opportunity here: much of the “Ron Paul Republican” camp is made up of hardnosed Catholic social conservatives who think Paul’s “Campaign for Liberty” and its successors hold great promise for the future prosperity of the United States under God.  (I count myself among that number.)  A critique of Liberty from Christian conservative premises is sorely needed, even if only to expose and ultimately shore up weaknesses in the Christian libertarian viewpoint.  In the right hands, with the right tone, persuasion was possible.

Yet Ferrara spares no effort alienating even this narrow audience.  Much of the study is not particularly connected to its anti-Lockean premise, but to exposing and itemizing every hypocrisy the author can discover about the pantheon of American heroes, from Washington to Madison to Lincoln and back.  (About 200 pages could have been cut without impact.)  The rest of the prose drips with unconcealed contempt and caustic sarcasm.  Ferrara has no kind word for the Constitution, for the Founding Fathers, for any part of our system of government, for our history, for any of our heroes, or anything whatsoever about the American nation.  Any American reader even slightly tainted by patriotic virtue – even the magnanimous, un-ideological patriotism of Chesterton’s Adam Wayne – will find Liberty: The God that Failed alternately depressing and infuriating, and is unlikely to feel warmly toward Mr. Ferrara after finishing.  On the off chance that you still do, Mr. Ferrara will take care of it with a few snide comments about American Catholicism’s beloved Fr. Neuhaus (who is, in the author’s mind, an accessory to the Americanist heresy), ensuring once and for all that the only people who will enjoy this work are the handful of sedevacantist and ultra-trad monarchists who wanted a polemic to make them feel affirmed.

However, despite the author’s best efforts to give us an excuse to ignore his arguments, his arguments are still in there, between the digs and digressions, and they have merit.  Conservatives have spent so long defending the rule of law (and therefore the text of the Constitution) against the imprecations of anti-Catholic, anti-human progressives who would prefer rule by dictat that we have failed to scrutinize the Constitution ourselves – and conveniently failed to notice the radical elements of the political philosophy there enshrined that have given rise to modern progressivism.  It is incontrovertible that a strong strain of Founding thought not only resisted established religion, but actively worked to have recognizably dogmatic (Christian) religion annihilated from the public square, as it largely has been today; not only lacked conservatives’ loyalty to the rule of law, but in fact led a bloody rebellion against the rule of law, using heavy taxes as a thin justification to rally the people behind their abstract cause of self-governing Liberty – then turned around and imposed vastly higher taxes, which the Founders demanded the People pay in the name of Liberty.

For his part, Locke’s confused argument for individual “self-determination” that somehow co-exists with an absolute dictatorship of majority rule (both authorities he more or less pulls out of thin air) undoubtedly contributed greatly to the confusion out of which the Civil War erupted.  Locke’s contradictions on this point continue to cloud questions of great consequence even today, such as President Obama’s “individual mandate,” which (originally) required all citizens to purchase medical insurance under penalty of law.  And Locke’s intolerant version of religious tolerance – in which all religions are subjects to the sovereign and can be coerced if their beliefs become “dangerous” – has led us directly into the maw of the modern progressive’s assault on conscience protections in every theater of Western life.  Ferrara does his reader a service by exposing these constitutional shortcomings, and there is nothing unreasonable in his demand that they be redressed; indeed, much in Catholic political theory suggests that some constitutional reform is vital.  Mr. Ferrara strongly favors the general approach of the National Reform Association.  For my part, I am unpersuaded that the U.S.A. needs to become a confessional state in order to fix natural law (rather than our self-contradicting majoritarian individualism) as the cornerstone of our political order.

Ferrara is a lawyer, not (at least by profession) a philosopher or a historian, but he clearly has chops in both fields.  He puts both to good use, at any rate.  My area of particular (if amateur) historical interest is the Secession Crisis and the Civil War (particularly the constitutional law of the period), and, throughout the hundred-fifty-odd pages devoted to the War and its surrounds, I was generally familiar with many of the sources he drew on.  Rarely did he mislead the reader with an unfairly edited quotation; never (that I noticed) did he mis-state a matter of fact.  Indeed, Ferrara offers a valuable (if not particularly relevant) service in his long and devastating critique of the antebellum South, the slave power generally, and secession specifically – which was plainly an act of immoral, illiberal, and illegal rebellion, under both Church teaching and the Constitution, and yet is often defended by libertarians today.

Surprisingly (given his credentials), his grasp on the American legal and political system is not so strong.  In one memorable passage near the end of the book, Ferrara calls upon the Catholic members of the Supreme Court to rule against abortion rights, and to justify this not merely on the basis that unborn humans are persons protected by the 14^th Amendment, but on the explicit basis of Catholic teaching on the natural law and morality.  He asks: “What Senator would dare impeach any of the justices” for proclaiming a Christian religion the majority of the population still retains? I answer: between 60 and 90 of them – as he must realize, if he has even a passing familiarity with the current makeup of the Senate.  The American electorate is (nominally) Christian, but polling is unambiguous: they do not believe Christian thought should serve as the basis of law in this country or any other.  They may be mistaken about this, but to simply deny they believe it, as Ferrara does, is absurd.

The ideas in Liberty: The God That Failed are worth accessing and engaging.  For a Ron Paul Republican like me, it is not necessary to agree with Ferrara’s conclusions to be helped by them.  My outlook on American politics has certainly been affected by this book, because it forced me to examine some of my hitherto unchallenged premises.  Even when I did not abandon those premises, I was helped, because Liberty forced me to develop stronger arguments for them.  Unfortunately, the book is hampered by its unnecessary length and its profound disdain for its subject matter.  Liberty would (and will) make a great resource for Catholic monarchists trying to develop arguments for their critiques of liberal governance – in other words, the choir to which Mr. Ferrara is emphatically preaching – but I do not plan to recommend it to anyone who does not already agree with its conclusions.  3/5 stars

To this point, Ranke-Heinemann’s work is all I’d hoped for. The entire chapter on masturbation, for example, is spent expounding the horrors of Dr. Tissot, Onanania, infibulation, and the whole insane anti-fapping medical panic of the 18th and 19th centuries. The James J. Heaney Institute is second to none in condemning the medical groupthink and willful cultural blindness that allowed parents and authorities to carry out all manner of tortures on their children lest they fall into the habit of self-pollution. But it has not one whit to do with the Church’s practices or teachings on the subject — except insofar as priests and the faithful allowed themselves to be enticed by bad medicine and bad science into acting against the best interests of those entrusted to them. (The James J. Heaney Institute also condemns the medical groupthink and willful cultural blindness that’s created the most radical, destructive pro-porn, pro-fap society in history. We look forward to the day when Dr. Kinsey joins Dr. Tissot on the ash heap of sexology. Let’s see Heinemann join us in that!) The worst you can say of the Church in the 19th century is that it did not do enough to combat the era’s corrosive culture.

However, as I was partway through, I was struck by a depressing realization: in two centuries, when the Culture of Death has fallen and sexual ethics restored to something resembling a healthy and virtuous mean for the first time in half a millennium, the enemies of the Church are going to write prim little theology tracts condemning the Catholic Church for being pro-abortion and pro-masturbation and pro-divorce in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sure, these future polemicists will acknowledge, the Church “officially” condemned those things as sin, but huge parts of the priesthood and the faithful ignored the teachings outright, and much of the episcopate was complicit or even cooperative in the effort to get around the official line. They’ll cite quotes and homilies and annulments and bishops’ conferences and statistics and thus “prove” that the Church never meant what she said, and was really a part of the culture of death all along. The culture of the future, always eager to hurt Catholicism, will latch onto this, and it will become conventional wisdom: the libertine, licentious Church hated babies and families, and secretly still does. All our pro-life efforts are going to win the war on abortion eventually, but they will earn us exactly nil in the history books of the future.

Don’t believe me? Just look how conventional wisdom attacks the Church for being pro-slavery… when the Church was, in fact, on the front lines in combating the chattel slavery of the 19th century. And look how Uta Reinke-Heinemann attacks the Church for being anti-sex… when she was, in fact, the only major institution still possessed of its wits about the goodness of human sexuality.

It’s late, and I have an fellowship application to write. Good night.

This week, I finally found De Civitate‘s first important cultural commentary, and it is even more erudite than I hoped.

That’s right, audience: this week, you will learn the correct order in which to watch the six Star Wars films.

It’s the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI.

For the rest, I’ll turn you over to Mr. Machete himself, at his blog.