X-Men: First Class

by John Holbo on June 14, 2011

Like everyone else, I’m glad Ta-Nehisi Coates got a NYT op-ed. Unlike everyone else, I haven’t seen X-Men: First Class yet. (Hey, I like comic books.) But I get the general idea, so I’d like to weigh in on the whole Magneto Was Right issue (part ii).

Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X.

The Mutant Registration Act is regrettable but clearly necessary, for public safety, and the loathsome Senator Kelly makes much more cogent arguments than earnest Jean Grey, in that scene from the first film. After all, if you have a critical mass of people shooting lasers out of their eyes – to say nothing of exhibitions of powerful mind-control, shape-shifting, teleporting – most of what we think we think we know about the optimality, even viability, of liberal/republican forms of government falls by the wayside, or needs to be re-thought from the ground up in pretty fundamental ways. Go back to Leviathan (not exactly liberal or republican, but you know what I mean). As the SEP puts it, Hobbes “assumes that people are sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others.” If you assume the contrary, you might need to adjust a few other pieces as well. Stands to reason.

A related point. Everyone is saying, and I agree, X-Men – the film franchise – has been ‘about difference’. (The third film and Wolverine were a bit weak, but let it pass.) It’s flexible enough, as allegory, that you can plug in your favored value of X, Born This Way-wise. Race, sexual orientation. But there’s something screwy about this. Because the main moral lesson we – as good liberals – always want people to learn about race and sexual orientation is that folks are folks. People are pretty much the same, and the differences people are fixating on (skin color, who people want to sleep with) shouldn’t make a difference. If gayness were, literally, a red laser that shot out of gay people’s eyes, it would make sense to be homophobic. Homophobia and racism drape themselves, publicly, in prudential, civic-minded concern. X-Men-style mutation ought to be equal-opportunity allegory for homophobia and racism, as well as for liberal values of tolerance. They aren’t called the Virtually Normal Men, after all.

Maybe the conclusion should be that Charles Burns’ Black Hole did the whole thing better. But no one would film that as a summer blockbuster, so – hey – take what we can get and it’s all in good clean fun.

But there is something more philosophically authentic about the ethical contradiction at the heart of the X-Men franchise. A similar contradiction is found in Mill’s On Liberty. Everyone gets a private sphere of negative liberty because, within that sphere, we are properly concerned with ‘our own stuff’, and aren’t harming anyone else. The no-harm principle. But you could also call it the ‘no big effect’ or ‘no big deal’ principle. What I do, privately, really oughtn’t to be a big deal, in other people’s eyes. It isn’t their business. But, ultimately, the argument for this no-harm principle assumes the opposite. It’s a consequentialist calculation “grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” – homo superior, anyone? Major positive changes are to be expected from letting people be Born This Way, however that may fall out, evolutionarily. No sense pretending this isn’t a big deal, even if Mill didn’t have adamantium claws in mind. He did have something a bit like Professor X in mind. Philosophy as psychic power. “Speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.”

Mill argues that difference should be tolerated because it’s not likely to make a big difference. (Since I can’t control anyone’s mind, just by thinking, I can think what I like.) And that difference should be tolerated because it is likely to make a big difference. (A few people can powerfully influence everyone else’s minds, just by thinking, if we let them.) So X-Men is maybe not such bad allegory after all.

{ 108 comments }

1

McSmack 06.14.11 at 4:47 am

You forget something from this most recent film, which is that the issue now becomes the clear superiority of mutants. How are the puny humans going to outlaw the laser eyed deviants? How you gonna keep a mutant down? What’s Mill say when society decides something’s foolish, perverse and wrong but will suffer a category 5 storm or a mind-melting screech if it decides to do something about it?

2

Myles 06.14.11 at 5:04 am

Like everyone else, I’m glad Ta-Nehisi Coates got a NYT op-ed.

I think Paulie Carbone, commenting at Matt Yglesias’s blog, deserves quotation (rough paraphrase): Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog is a Shakesville where grad students sycophants hang out.

(Hey, not my words, and Paulie is a solid left-winger.)

3

F 06.14.11 at 5:06 am

In keeping with this analysis, race and sexual orientation are the obvious allegories, but don’t seem to match up, because of the differential in ability. It seems like there might be two other allegories that are more fitting. In one, the highly intelligent take the place of the mutants. In the other, the highly influential/rich take that position. In the first, Magneto’s group represents the mid-century Eugenicists and the X-men are the “technocrats/meritocrats” of the late-century. In the second, Magneto’s group are the traditional self-interested oligarchs, and the X-men represent the old “noblesse oblige” aristocracy. In both of those interpretations, the X-men are arguably in a better moral position than Magneto’s posse.

4

John Holbo 06.14.11 at 6:20 am

“You forget something from this most recent film”

Naw, I just haven’t seen it. I’m a philosopher, after all, not a pure fanboy. But I do know what the plot is. Your point is basically consistent with mine: namely, there is a problem analogizing being gay to being able to conquer the world.

Obviously I’m not fully serious that the film(s) are Millian either. But there is a weak analogy, in that Mill believes that, if people are free, certain changes will come about that (conservative) society will be unable to stand against. Because if people are free they will do philosophy, among other things. (Not because they will mind screech anyone.)

“Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog is a Shakesville where grad students sycophants hang out.”

Damn, I don’t even know where Shakesville is. How uncool am I?

5

zamfir 06.14.11 at 6:23 am

I am not sold on the idea of philosophy as telepathy. Abstract ideas in books only become powerful if they become widespread and accepted, and that spread is a long series of filters. Which ideas eventually become powerful is really as much or more a function of the filters than of the power of the originating mind.

It’s Hobbes again, basically. King aren’t kings because their eyes shoot the most powerful lasers, and Mill isn’t influential because his balding forehead is the highest. They are only where they are because enough people let them, because a social structure was formed around them.

6

McSmack 06.14.11 at 6:33 am

I wasn’t raising a serious objection and I knew you weren’t fully serious–but you’ve made it tempting to argue that we need a new political theory to deal with mutants. (I think this is raised by your argument, in fact.)

They have the same state-of-nature problems with respect to one another as ordinary humans. It’s when we imagine them as a group of some kind and us as a group of some kind that the question becomes really pressing. Classical political theory doesn’t spend much time thinking about the significance of groups.

It’s very funny to think about an objection to liberalism that starts ‘suppose there was a woman who could control the weather…who formed a loose affiliation with a telepath and a self-teleporter…’

7

ndg 06.14.11 at 6:48 am

It’s quite funny since the film is clearly structured to give Erik an “Anakin Skywalker moment” where he literally and figuratively adopts the mantle of genocidal supervillain. The fact that he still comes out as sympathetic, contra Xavier’s ridiculous posturing, just highlights that it isn’t a very good script.

It is perhaps unreasonable to call the registration act “clearly necessary” — I personally know several scientists of various sorts with the access and expertise to subvert their research to create horrible weapons (to speak to a viral epidemiologist is to be scared out of your mind), but they’re not registered or policed by giant robot sentinels. Besides, registration seems neither necessary nor sufficient: being on a watch-list wouldn’t stop Nightcrawler teleporting into the Oval Office; and enforcement by mutant-detecting killer robots would be possible without any registration at all.

8

John Holbo 06.14.11 at 7:02 am

“enforcement by mutant-detecting killer robots would be possible without any registration at all.”

For the record, I am opposed to mutant-detecting killer robots.

“It’s Hobbes again, basically. King aren’t kings because their eyes shoot the most powerful lasers, and Mill isn’t influential because his balding forehead is the highest. They are only where they are because enough people let them, because a social structure was formed around them.”

Yes, but Mill has the idea that a certain sort of conservative traditionalist simply won’t be able to hold on, in practice. It’s true, and morally important, that Mill isn’t going to coerce anyone, and he opposes coercion. Whereas Prof. X can coerce people with his mind. But from the point of view of the conservative traditionalist – the anti-Millian – the prospect of an ever-expanding sea of Millians is not made less daunting by the fact that they weren’t coerced.

“we need a new political theory to deal with mutants.”

Yes, I think so. We want everyone to be equal, and to some degree that is a normative commitment that is neutral with regard to individual powers and endowments. But I don’t think it could be fully neutral, in practice.

9

Josh G. 06.14.11 at 7:34 am

Although race and sexual orientation seem to be the analogies most often brought up with regards to the X-Men franchise, I agree with F @ #3 that this doesn’t quite fit.

F @ #3, if I’m reading him correctly, suggested high intelligence as the closest analogue to a real-life superpower. Well, which ethnic group has (A) been traditionally noted for their high intelligence, and (B) has historically been the subject of terrible persecution? Answer: the Ashkenazi Jews. Considering that both Stan Lee, who created the X-Men franchise, and Chris Claremont, who revitalized and modernized it, are Jewish, I think this was likely a conscious or subconscious inspiration for the X-Men.

It is interesting to note that the short-lived Lee/Kirby X-Men series of the late 1960s played down the persecution of mutants. It occasionally appeared on-panel, but was generally shown as being the work of low-rent mobs and street bullies, not those in the corridors of power. And the X-Men had cordial relations with the federal government, including their own FBI liaison (Fred Duncan). But when the series was revitalized under Chris Claremont, things got much worse for mutants; Magneto got his backstory as a Holocaust survivor (never alluded to under Lee/Kirby) and the position of mutants stopped looking like that of Jews in 1960s America and more like that of Jews in Nazi Germany.

It’s likely that these changes were due to broad-based changes in Jewish and American culture over that time frame, as described by Peter Novick (The Holocaust in American Life). The emphasis on the Holocaust and the belief that Jews are eternally persecuted throughout all time and space are essential to post-1967 American Jewish culture, and the modern X-Men are inexplicable without understanding these beliefs.

10

BenK 06.14.11 at 11:43 am

The question of whether a minority has the power to destroy society by mere existance is still a live one in many peoples’ minds.

11

alpha 06.14.11 at 12:24 pm

Playing along with this thread for a bit, what if some of these new technologies do pan out? What about cognition enhancing drugs, brain/machine interfaces, or Gattaca style genetic engineering? These are far from scifi and need only an iPhone like breakout app to make the world realize how far the relevant fields have come. What then, when the wealthy/high IQ can translate their wealth into even higher IQ for themselves and their descendants?

12

Henri Vieuxtemps 06.14.11 at 1:00 pm

we need a new political theory to deal with mutants

What about Animal Liberation, anti-speciesism, all that; isn’t it the same sort of thing?

13

AcademicLurker 06.14.11 at 1:23 pm

What about Animal Liberation, anti-speciesism, all that; isn’t it the same sort of thing?

I don’t know of any animals that shoot lasers out of their eyes. Which is to say, it’s pretty well established at this point that animals do not pose the sort of potential threat to humans the X-Men style mutants could.

14

StevenAttewell 06.14.11 at 2:10 pm

Doesn’t one’s perspective on human evolution factor into this? In other words, depending on whether we believe that homo sapiens genocided/outcompeted neanderthalis or interbred with neanderthalis, or whether we think that homo sapiens is experiencing a speciation event or “the next stage in human evolution” to use the first film’s terminology (don’t know if there’s a scientific term for when an entire population undergoes a specific genetic shift in commmon), our opinion about Magneto, Xavier, and human authorities should shift. It really matters, for example, what the dynamics of the human/mutant birthrate is over time.

For example, let’s say that the correct model of human evolution is the interbred one – then Xavier makes sense, and Magneto and human authorities are actively hindering a necessary evolutionary process. There’s no inherent human/mutant conflict, because humans can join the winning team and everyone can shoot lasers from their eyes – which doesn’t change the Millsian/Hobbesian paradigm (just shifts it up a notch of intensity).

Likewise, if the wildly different phenotypes of mutants indicates not the emergence of one species but many or if all of humanity is experiencing a “next stage of evolution” such that mutant births are becoming an increasingly large part of the overall homo genus birth rate – then no one makes sense. Magneto’s separatism and humanity’s registration model and Xavier’s coexistence model all assume that the human/mutant divide is a long-term thing, but there’s no need to separate, regulate, or register if within a few generations, we’re all going to be mutants – and we’re back to Millsian liberalism with laser eyes.

On the larger issue of Mills – I actually think ramping up the power levels of the individuals calls even more for “your rights end an inch away from everyone else’s skin” liberal philosophy. If your rights include laser eyes, the consequences of an unwise extension of force are fatal – and if many people have laser eyes, you’re looking at a situation where the consequences of illiberal action is potential Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all but with M.A.D thrown in. Likewise, given that at least for some interstitial period it’s unclear who has laser eyes and who doesn’t, wouldn’t that suggest the need for everyone to base their actions on a Millsian philosophy all the time to avoid the potential for death-by-laser?

15

StevenAttewell 06.14.11 at 2:14 pm

Btw, Josh G. and BenK hit it on the head – in fact, when Kitty Pryde (one of the tribe, despite a very shikseh name) runs for Mayor of Chicago, she explicitly references Nazi theories about the Jewish threat as a counter-argument against “mutants aren’t like other minorities – they’re dangerous!”

16

Ken S 06.14.11 at 2:38 pm

I noticed Yglesias’s disclaimer of ” limiting yourself to the text of “First Class,””. I’ve only seen the Fox cartoons as a kid and parts of the first two films, but needing disclaimers like that certainly means the films aren’t doing the franchise much justice. In the cartoon is not hard to make the interpretation that Xavier and Magneto’s approaches complement one another, but Xavier is clearly destined to win since he is The Good Guy. F and Josh G’s interpretations certainly make more sense when you look at the sort of power struggles that are going on in the cartoon. If we are going to compare mutants of different skin color or morphology to minorities like Yglesias does (which is dubious) we just have to look at The Beast, he was certainly one of the most prominent ‘token minorities’ of the franchise, who may have not seen much character development in the films (he was the most brilliant person on the team overall, and I have no idea if the films made a point of this).

17

Matt McIrvin 06.14.11 at 3:09 pm

There’s no scientific term for what goes on in X-Men because it makes no sense in terms of real biology. So I’m not sure the details of actual human evolution have any bearing on it.

It’s also clear that in that world, mutants have vastly varying power levels. So even if everyone is a mutant, there will be some who are near-omnipotent and others who can do a parlor trick, or just look funny.

18

Henri Vieuxtemps 06.14.11 at 3:32 pm

Which is to say, it’s pretty well established at this point that animals do not pose the sort of potential threat to humans the X-Men style mutants could.

Well, a tiger escaped from San Francisco Zoo a couple of years ago and ate some people. No lasers, but if tigers lived among us, that would’ve been quite dangerous, I imagine. Nevertheless, political theories of animal rights do exist, and I’m sure the dangers are accounted for somehow.

19

Patrick D 06.14.11 at 4:45 pm

I’m pretty sure we’re the mutants and the animals (think of dodos, passenger pigeons, and, yes, tigers) are homo sapiens in this allegory. I’m pretty sure there’s a whale out there thinking, “Damn, if we had only known what they’d do.”

20

ScentOfViolets 06.14.11 at 4:57 pm

How big are the minorities? A cadre of laser-eyed X-men aren’t much of a threat if they number only a hundred in a population of hundreds of millions.

I think what you might be looking for is something much earlier (though it might have had an influence on the original series): A. E. van Vogt’s “Slan”. For those not familiar, Slans were stronger, faster and smarter than mark one humans, and they were telepathic and they were being born in greater and greater numbers while the fertility of the normals declined.

The man in the street in that novel feared the new guys – and rightly so.

21

Henri Vieuxtemps 06.14.11 at 5:35 pm

I’m pretty sure there’s a whale out there thinking, “Damn, if we had only known what they’d do.”

Hey, remember: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

22

Gotchaye 06.14.11 at 5:52 pm

The part that never made sense to me was that there was such a big divide between normal humans and mutants in the first place. If you have a nation of mutants and a nation of humans, you’ve got lots of trouble, but most mutants seem to have human family members. Powers don’t seem to manifest until around puberty, and we don’t have a history of thinking that the use of mutant powers is wrong and shameful (suffer not a witch to live?). Say I’m a parent, and my thirteen year old son starts shooting lasers from his eyes. I’m going to disown him?

There are political philosophy issues here, but I don’t think there’s much reason to fear humans vs mutants. Mutants are not a monolithic group and are going to have strong loyalties and identities that predate even their awareness of themselves as mutants.

One effect of mutation that seems like it’d be good for humans too is that it’s an awful lot harder to be a tyrant. Magneto’s not the only kid who’s going to be out for revenge. That goes for mutant tyrants too; control of the media and the military matters a whole lot less when it’s realistically possible for you to be deposed by one citizen without the need for organization or weapons or manpower.

23

Gotchaye 06.14.11 at 5:58 pm

Basically, I have a very hard time believing that American mutants wouldn’t be lionized in the same way that our military is. The prospect of terrorist mutants is going to convince the people who would otherwise want the government to crack down on mutants that we need to make sure our mutants will want to work for us.

24

Norwegian Guy 06.14.11 at 6:45 pm

“On the larger issue of Mills – I actually think ramping up the power levels of the individuals calls even more for “your rights end an inch away from everyone else’s skin” liberal philosophy. If your rights include laser eyes, the consequences of an unwise extension of force are fatal – and if many people have laser eyes, you’re looking at a situation where the consequences of illiberal action is potential Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all but with M.A.D thrown in. Likewise, given that at least for some interstitial period it’s unclear who has laser eyes and who doesn’t, wouldn’t that suggest the need for everyone to base their actions on a Millsian philosophy all the time to avoid the potential for death-by-laser?”

Isn’t this the same argument that is sometimes used by proponents of a more or less unlimited right to keep and bear arms? That society, from their point of view, would be so much better (i.e. more libertarian) if everyone carried laser eyes concealed weapons.

25

Neel Krishnaswami 06.14.11 at 6:52 pm

But there is something more philosophically authentic about the ethical contradiction at the heart of the X-Men franchise. A similar contradiction is found in Mill’s On Liberty. […] Mill argues that difference should be tolerated because it’s not likely to make a big difference. […] And that difference should be tolerated because it is likely to make a big difference.

This seems like an unfair reading of Mill to me. IIRC, Mill does not argue that all hedons are equivalent, the way that Bentham might have — Mill is explicit that there are better and worse pleasures, and that only the better ones count in the utilitarian social calculus. So if he argues that difference is not likely to cause significant harm in significant dimensions, and is likely to open the door to great value in significant dimensions, then his argument is perfectly consistent, because he’s open to the possibility of morally-irrelevant disutility. Sure, Archie Bunker might be totally freaked out by the Civil Rights Act, but as far as Mill is concerned he can go screw himself.

26

Norwegian Guy 06.14.11 at 6:54 pm

“but if tigers lived among us, that would’ve been quite dangerous, I imagine.”

If us includes South Asians, tigers do live among us, and at least in Bengal, it is not without its dangers. But more tigers are killed by humans than the other way around.

27

bianca steele 06.14.11 at 7:09 pm

I was going to say, “Isn’t this where Rich Puchalsky usually chimes in,” and then I saw the Ur-OP. I’ve only seen the first movie, and read a bunch of the first issues of the comic 25 or 30 years ago when my brother was collecting them. But I think the problem is earlier than where John Holbo identifies it. The books, at least, as I remember them, appeal largely to teenagers who feel different [1], who feel they have gifts that aren’t appreciated, and are put under pressure by adults in their community to conform better. We don’t actually have institutions in our society that outlaw statistical outliers. That’s an exaggerated projection of the way a lot of young people feel. This part of the story doesn’t have direct applicability to our actual society. The film, however, did seem to turn this around, and take much more seriously, to the point of (let’s call it) reification, whatever caused those adults to put these teens under pressure: the sense that exceptionally gifted young people, who conclude from their exceptional gifts that they are exceptional, that the rules don’t apply to them, put themselves outside society, and almost necessarily will become its enemies, and will harm it. (I can only think of one, relatively poor, literary example, at the moment.) This has to do more with Hollywood than with the real world.

Once the story’s up there, of course it can appeal to gay teens, too. But the laser eyes and so forth make the X-Men qualitatively different from the primary audience almost as much as from gay and lesbian teens.

[1] (The after-school special about the white graffiti writer saved by true love and old movies came to mind, before I remembered his name was Erik.)

28

bianca steele 06.14.11 at 7:51 pm

@9: I think you have to consider the possibility, even in that case, of a neoconservative (or something) argument that the X-Men are little Ahmadinejads who are trying to destroy the world because of their self-hatred (on the premise that Ahmadinejad was a Jew who became a self-hating Jew when he studied in the liberal American universities and thus destroyed his country and the Middle East and tried to get a bomb and so on). Unfortunately.

The authors’ heritage suggests this, but little else actually does, unless you’re either Jewish or anti-semitic, though, and hence a little paranoid. Rowlings’ wizards are the paradigm example of a good-guy super-gifted minority that cannot, in an English context, possibly be Jewish.

29

Martin Bento 06.14.11 at 8:00 pm

#22, This is the one respect in which mutants are like gays – coming from within families and so forth. And all that certainly didn’t stop rather severe antipathy towards gays for a good long time and sometimes still.

30

chris 06.14.11 at 8:37 pm

If you have a nation of mutants and a nation of humans, you’ve got lots of trouble, but most mutants seem to have human family members.

But not vice versa, so there’s still plenty of room for an antimutant hate group to start up. Still, I think you’re right — there would be lots of reason for a substantial accommodationist faction among nonmutants, which AFAIK we don’t really see in any of the X-Men continuities (perhaps because nonmutants themselves are mostly pushed into the background). Nonmutants are going to split on the question of how to relate to mutants because they’re human and humans split on practically every question.

P.S. Using the term “human” in a way that implies that mutants aren’t included in it would likely be seen as a form of antimutant bigotry.

31

Jim Harrison 06.14.11 at 8:54 pm

What would be a reasonable response to a human speciation event in which a growing proportion of the population were genuinely superior to the rest? On the plain of the real that may not be a very pressing question since it’s a bit hard to imagine a scenario in which such a thing occurred, but it is a serious issue in imagination-driven politics. A fair number of anti-Semites, for example, believe in the intellectual superiority of the Jews and argue that they are fighting for the continued existence of the unevolved part of the human race. I guess they think of themselves as the Neanderthal self-defense movement.

32

Henri Vieuxtemps 06.14.11 at 9:11 pm

How’s being able to shoot lasers out of your eyes (or, for that matter, being any sort of savant, a la Tammet) is “genuinely superior”?

33

Stark 06.14.11 at 9:13 pm

@ Jim Harrison: Really? Tell them I’m flattered.

34

chris 06.14.11 at 9:31 pm

@32: For example, unless he breaks the laws of physics along with biology, he must need to eat a lot extra to supply all the energy he keeps spilling out his eyes, which doesn’t sound terribly superior to me (and in fact could be a decided liability in lots of conditions). But maybe it’s better not to overthink X-Men mutant powers, which are less well thought through than some explicitly magical universes I could name.

35

John Holbo 06.15.11 at 12:42 am

Neel: “This seems like an unfair reading of Mill to me. IIRC, Mill does not argue that all hedons are equivalent, the way that Bentham might have—Mill is explicit that there are better and worse pleasures”

I don’t see how I have implied the contrary. To my mind, the phrase in Mill that most clearly encapsulates his difference from Bentham in this way is that classic “interests of man as a progressive being” bit. And I quoted that in the post. So how have I been unfair to Mill?

36

John Holbo 06.15.11 at 12:45 am

“unless he breaks the laws of physics along with biology, he must need to eat a lot extra to supply all the energy he keeps spilling out his eyes”

Almost no superheroes eat enough to avoid violating the first law of thermodynamics.

37

Mrs Tilton 06.15.11 at 10:33 am

Almost no superheroes eat enough to avoid violating the first law of thermodynamics

I never saw it, but was there not a short-lived television adaptation of The Flash in which the eponymous hero did in fact need to mompf down, say, a dozen roasted turkeys, 50 lbs. of mashed potatoes and a gallon of gravy after doing one of his sprints?

As for that guy who shoots lasers out of his eyes, IIRC the energy comes from Another Dimension; his retinas are some sort of gateway to that dimension. So, no 2d Law violation! In our world you might call it hand-waving, but in the comic-book world, Another Dimension is nearly as important a scientific explanation for stuff as are Unstable Molecules.

38

hellblazer 06.15.11 at 10:41 am

Mrs Tilton’s explanation sounds about right from what I’ve heard (I think sorting out Newton’s 3rd Law may have been a more pressing issue than the 2nd law of TD). I can’t remember what explanation there was for the beams being stopped by the stuff in his visor, though.

39

ajay 06.15.11 at 11:46 am

Rowlings’ wizards are the paradigm example of a good-guy super-gifted minority that cannot, in an English context, possibly be Jewish.

Why not? We do have Jewish people in England, you know. (Also in Scotland which is where Rowling is actually from and where most of the Harry Potter books are actually set.)

40

Mrs Tilton 06.15.11 at 12:06 pm

sorting out Newton’s 3rd Law may have been a more pressing issue

Newton’s 3d law is obeyed. The recoil passes into Another Dimension.

I can’t remember what explanation there was for the beams being stopped by the stuff in his visor

But the stuff in his visor is Ruby Crystal; a material very nearly as useful as Unstable Molecules.

41

EWI 06.15.11 at 12:46 pm

I never saw it, but was there not a short-lived television adaptation of The Flash in which the eponymous hero did in fact need to mompf down, say, a dozen roasted turkeys, 50 lbs. of mashed potatoes and a gallon of gravy after doing one of his sprints?

It was the Flash movie in the Eighties, if I remember correctly. What this thread needs now is a diversion into discussing the impending complete DC Universe reboot.

42

J. Otto Pohl 06.15.11 at 1:00 pm

Ajay:

Not everything is about the Jews. Although a lot of American comic books were about the Jews. Josh G is right about that. He is also right about the obsession of American popular culture with the Holocaust arising after 1967 as documented by Peter Novick. One of the things I have greatly enjoyed living outside the US for most of the last decade is that the emphasis on the accomplishments and persecution of the Jews does not dominate popular culture the way it often does in America. There even comic books are often about the Jews. There are other ethnic groups in the world. Some of them can even read and write now.

43

ajay 06.15.11 at 1:09 pm

42: granted; I’m just wondering why it’s so obvious that Rowling’s wizards “cannot, in an English context, possibly be Jewish”.

44

Phil 06.15.11 at 3:21 pm

Keeping an eye out for the ecological fallacy and treading very warily, I think it’s arguable that “Jewish American” is a visible and asserted identity in a way that “English Jew” isn’t. (This doesn’t mean that “English Jews are less assertive”, or anything else about what actual English Jews are, think or do.)

Putting it another way, allegations of anti-semitism here are still sometimes answered with a weary – or genuinely baffled – shrug: “no, we don’t hate Jews, we hate you“. And I think that’s very often valid – but then, I’m English. I get the impression that anti-semitism and allegations of anti-semitism are taken much more seriously over there, possibly because of the greater salience of the possibility of identifying as Jewish (and possibly because the US is just a more civilised place).

Rowling’s nice wizards could just about be diaspora Jews, but the dark wizards would be a very odd fit – wealth, hierarchy, cruelty, obsession with ancestry, contempt for Muggles, ostracism of anyone who marries out…

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StevenAttewell 06.15.11 at 5:07 pm

Isn’t this the same argument that is sometimes used by proponents of a more or less unlimited right to keep and bear arms? That society, from their point of view, would be so much better (i.e. more libertarian) if everyone carried laser eyes concealed weapons.

Not really. They argue it would be better. I’m arguing it would in fact be fraught with new peril, requiring higher levels of liberal training so people tolerate people instead of lasering them. Whether that’s possible…

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chris 06.15.11 at 5:33 pm

I think there may be some confusion here between “wizards as a group can’t be intended to represent Jews as a group” and “no individual can be both a wizard and a Jew”; indeed, I’m not aware of any reason to believe the latter is implied by HP canon (although I don’t recall any examples of wizards that *are* identified as Jewish, either).

P.S. Although as Phil tiptoes around pointing out, the dark wizards do have rather a lot in common with anti-Semitic conspiracy theory portrayals of Jews, I think that’s likely because both are imagined sinister conspiracies — they have the traits their imaginers think a sinister conspiracy ought to have, such as secrecy and considering themselves superior to ordinary people, and the practices that logically follow from them.

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MyName 06.15.11 at 5:36 pm

I don’t think you can claim these kinds of radical mutations really are a threat to Hobbes view of liberalism. While I agree that his theory “assumes that people are sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others,” that is only if you assume that mutants would be able to find a place in that society at all. If the mutants are all pushed out, then the society is still just as liberal towards all of its members as before, but with a much have a higher level of intolerance towards outsiders than before.

I know this may seem a semantic difference when you look at racism or sexism in society and the denial of political power towards women or blacks, but these groups, at least after abolition, were always a part of society, they were just not treated as well as they should have been. They eventually found a way to mobilize and got a more equal position for themselves.

Mutants, however, are a different species and the power difference between mutants and humans is enough that they could put themselves above the law if they wanted to. This makes it impossible for them to be a part of society under Hobbes, so they aren’t.

And Magneto’s point, that you should start to question the social contract that puts you in as a member of that society once they consider registering you as an outsider and/or start getting giant killer robots to follow you around, is completely valid. His mistake is to assume that not being part of that society automatically means you are at war with it. Professor X’s response is to form a separate shadow group that is not at war (though not exactly at peace) with the larger society that mutants can no longer be a part of openly.

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Mrs Tilton 06.15.11 at 8:08 pm

Chris @46,

the dark wizards do have rather a lot in common with anti-Semitic conspiracy theory portrayals of Jews

What, you mean…

the dark wizards would be a very odd fit – wealth, hierarchy, cruelty, obsession with ancestry, contempt for Muggles, ostracism of anyone who marries out

… wasn’t referring to Tories?

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chris 06.15.11 at 9:21 pm

@Mrs Tilton 48: Like I said, one sinister conspiracy resembles another.

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Phil 06.15.11 at 10:52 pm

as Phil tiptoes around pointing out

Wha? Seriously, that never crossed my mind. I really do think that wizard/Muggle is a lousy fit to Jew/Gentile – even paranoically-imagined-Jew/Gentile. If there’s an elephant in the room it’s the word ‘diaspora’ – I didn’t even want to look at how wizard/Muggle might (or might not) map on to Israeli/Arab.

While the monolithic portrayal of Slytherin is a huge missed opportunity, particularly in the last book, Rowling does open up some contradictions. I see Lucius Malfoy basically as Hindenburg to Voldemort’s Hitler, with Greyback as Hans Frank and Bellatrix Lestrange as Himmler. (OK, that last one needs some work.)

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ajay 06.16.11 at 10:19 am

What, you mean…
the dark wizards would be a very odd fit – wealth, hierarchy, cruelty, obsession with ancestry, contempt for Muggles, ostracism of anyone who marries out
… wasn’t referring to Tories?

I would be shocked – shocked! – if a single mother living on social security in Scotland in the early 1990s ended up writing a novel in which the villains were thinly-disguised Tories.

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ajay 06.16.11 at 10:20 am

I think it’s arguable that “Jewish American” is a visible and asserted identity in a way that “English Jew” isn’t.

Hmmph. Not if you live in North London it’s not, trust me.

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Pyre 06.16.11 at 1:45 pm

By “Shakesville” I presume shakespearessister.blogspot.com is meant.

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chris 06.16.11 at 1:56 pm

Wha? Seriously, that never crossed my mind.

Hmm, maybe I was overly influenced by the fact that the first item on your list was wealth, which is like the #1 ingredient in every stereotype of Jews for the last several centuries.

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rm 06.16.11 at 2:20 pm

For the record, Rowling is careful to mention a variety of ethnic last names among minor characters to show that magic abilities are not the property of any one population. She includes Jewish last names. It’s tokenism, but it’s meant to forestall any unpleasantly racist parallels readers might be tempted to draw. In the comics, mutants likewise are not really a new species because they get born into random non-mutant families from all over the world. They are not the product of an isolated population.

I think Rowling’s Dark Wizards are Tories, but more generally they are any oligarchic, self-congratulatory, exclusive aristocracy.

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bianca steele 06.16.11 at 10:15 pm

ajay @ 39
The world of Harry Potter has a centuries-old elite, almost entirely hereditary, into which fresh blood can be adopted, through a process of culling the genetically compatible members of the other classes. These are integrated through a similarly old school that seems modeled on Oxbridge and the English public schools–which schools are in reality affiliated with the established state church (which is not Judaism), with non-Anglican students nevertheless required to attend compulsory chapel, for example. Members of the other classes who feel uncomfortable or even miserable in their up-to-then allotted place have little to hope for until they hear about Hogwarts and wizardry.

In the X-Men, the mutants are new and have no established place in society (or any history for outsiders to rely on). Professor X’s place seems like a fantasy of what they would have if they were left to themselves. They aren’t setting themselves up to be society’s elite or even to develop any new knowledge. They just want to exercise their personal abilities and socialize with people like themselves, free from harassment.

I don’t think either is a good match for the social position of Jewish Americans or (I suppose) Jewish Englishmen (the memory of the first of those still includes growing up in working-class neighborhood where they legendarily got beat up a lot, whether for being Jewish or from the wrong neighborhood or carrying a violin case), or the mythical anti-semitic version. But you can substitute “Jews” for “mutants” in the second paragraph and not get nonsense as you would if you substituted “Jews” for “centuries-old societal elite” in the first paragraph.

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Phil 06.16.11 at 10:46 pm

which schools are in reality affiliated with the established state church (which is not Judaism), with non-Anglican students nevertheless required to attend compulsory chapel, for example

I think your information’s out of date. Certainly this is not the case at the independent school my son attends. (No compulsory team games, either.)

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bianca steele 06.16.11 at 10:50 pm

Phil: Regarding the UK, you know better than me. At the most famous US prep schools there is still compulsory chapel.

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Martin Bento 06.17.11 at 7:32 am

Chris, Holbo’s right, if you want physical plausibility, don’t bother with superheroes. Hasn’t been on offer since the original model, Superman. What’s more interesting is that the genre doesn’t even have the consistency of most fantasy. The Marvel Universe is not like the Tolkien one. It was never thought out, but consists of a bunch of improvisations conceived independently that people have tried to stitch together after the fact. That to me is part of its delight. Norse gods and androids side by side, despite implying contradictory world views. In fact, I noticed the Thor movie went out of its way to make clear that Thor was not actually a god, but a sort of alien. Is this something that the Marvel Universe stitchers decided on to try to make the whole thing more consistent, or was it a pander to pre-empt Christian objections? I suspect the latter. If so, I guess we’ll never get a Dr. Strange movie.

The result is that Marvel is like a city in the “city is not a tree” sense. Rather than being the work of one mind, it is a site where many minds creatively clash to create an inconsistent world. IRL, we don’t in the city get Norse gods alongside androids, but we do get extropians alongside biblical literalists. The contradictory world views are there, just not actualized. Marvel literalizes these contradictions.

The collage element also goes into the stories. One writer writes Black Bolt as doing certain things, and another takes over and doesn’t like those choices: hence that Black Bolt was actually a Skrull. Fiction and drama, especially melodrama and comedy, are full of imposters, of course, but the authors know they are imposters when they write (regardless of whether the reader/audience does). In a comic, a writer can write something intended to be the genuine expression of a character, or a conclusive event (like a death), only to have another writer change the meaning retrospectively. There is an exquisite cadaver flavor to the thing, though sometimes more cadaverous than exquisite (bletch!).

On the post specifically, I would say that superheroes are an elitist concept, so it’s pretty strange to expect them to further the message “we – as good liberals” would want them to regarding equality. In fact, maybe this is why the classic Marvel comics, written during the Cold War, have so few major Soviet villains AFAIK. The Red Guardian, but he kind of flopped. Black Widow, but she turned. Instead, it was madmen bent on world conquest, common criminals with uncommon abilities, or conspiracies like Hydra of opaque ideology – largely goons, Nazis, and aliens, tarted up. I guess the interesting case is Dr. Doom, because he ruled over a country with a name suspiciously like Latvia, without being overtly communist beyond the dictatorial bit. Perhaps, the anti-individualism of Communist ideology made it an incongruous breeding ground for superheroes or villains. If anything a communist villain might be something like Borg from Star Trek, but maybe that didn’t occur to them at Marvel or didn’t escalate to the majors.

As for the elitism of superheroes, their unreality is their saving grace. Sure if people were as grossly unequal in abilities as the more powerful mutants are from the rest of us, this would pose a real problem for egalitarianism. But showing a grossly unrealistic situation where egalitarianism is seriously problematic tends to undermine the notion that egalitarianism is problematic in the world in which we actually live. To make it seriously problematic, we stipulate characters like Cyclops and Magneto whom we are extremely unlikely to actually encounter. This suggests (though it does not, of course, prove) that reaching a serious problem with equality requires taking a serious departure from reality.

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Joe 06.17.11 at 1:38 pm

I haven’t seen this new X-Men film, but an interesting analog to the X-Men movies is Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel). In X-Men you have an ultra powerful group of homo-superior with lasers shooting out their foreheads and so on; you get to see mankind’s predictable bumbling attempts at fighting and exploiting them. But what happens when mankind has to deal with a group of, say, homo-inferiors – human beings just like you and me but who have been cloned solely for their organs.

In superhero movies we see the struggle between normal society and their super-powered counterparts, the conflict and eventual triumph of decency versus adversity. But in a film like Never Let Me Go there is no conflict or overcoming – you are simply presented with the nightmarish vision of how human civilization, with all our modern values and morals intact, realistically deals with a permanent underclass whose sole reason for existence is to provide us with transplant organs. Kind of like what is happening right now in terms of the global rich-poor divide, except in Never Let Me Go’s dystopian future they have done away with the pretense of caring for the underclass.

It’s one thing when the alienated ‘other’ has superpowers and fights back against the oppressor, but what’s really fascinating is to see mankind’s reaction to this alienated ‘other’ when they are weak and without superpowers.

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ScentOfViolets 06.17.11 at 1:55 pm

I haven’t seen this new X-Men film, but an interesting analog to the X-Men movies is Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel). In X-Men you have an ultra powerful group of homo-superior with lasers shooting out their foreheads and so on; you get to see mankind’s predictable bumbling attempts at fighting and exploiting them.

Well, that’s just it – they aren’t all that ultra powerful. Unlike, say, a certain Kryptonian in the DC universe :-) When you combine that with very few numbers, you just don’t get Rule by Homo Sup. Yeah, sure, having laser eyes makes you more formidable than the average citizen. But by the same token, you’re not that much more formidable – you’re at about the level of a company at best. A platoon would be more like it.

But what happens when mankind has to deal with a group of, say, homo-inferiors – human beings just like you and me but who have been cloned solely for their organs.

Some would say that in the U.S. at least, we already live in that society. This isn’t a new problem; it’s a very old one, dating back almost to the discovery of agriculture according to some.

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ScentOfViolets 06.17.11 at 1:58 pm

Oops. That last was brought to you by Lap Dog in collusion with Keyboard Cat while drinking my morning coffee. Try again:

I haven’t seen this new X-Men film, but an interesting analog to the X-Men movies is Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel). In X-Men you have an ultra powerful group of homo-superior with lasers shooting out their foreheads and so on; you get to see mankind’s predictable bumbling attempts at fighting and exploiting them.

Well, that’s just it – they aren’t all that ultra powerful. Unlike, say, a certain Kryptonian in the DC universe :-) When you combine that with very few numbers, you just don’t get Rule by Homo Sup. Yeah, sure, having laser eyes makes you more formidable than the average citizen. But by the same token, you’re not that much more formidable – you’re at about the level of a company at best. A platoon would be more like it.

But what happens when mankind has to deal with a group of, say, homo-inferiors – human beings just like you and me but who have been cloned solely for their organs.

Some would say that in the U.S. at least, we already live in that society. This isn’t a new problem; it’s a very old one, dating back almost to the discovery of agriculture according to accepted wisdom.

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 12:18 am

This suggests (though it does not, of course, prove) that reaching a serious problem with equality requires taking a serious departure from reality.

One need not regard himself as a superhuman Overman to reject egalitarianism. One could simply look to the consequences of accepting or rejecting egalitarianism. If you reject egalitarianism, then a mass of egalitarians will attempt to coerce you into accepting it, by subjecting you to hell. They will render you an unequal and then remake their offer of equality. Certainly equality is better than being tyrannized by egalitarians. If you accept egalitarianism, then you forsake whatever dreams you had your sights on that might have accrued in an unequal world. Of course, the egalitarians will tell you that you never would have realized those dreams, but they may in fact be wrong. Their egalitarian vision is just as utopian and ridiculous as your dreams of individualized success. So, the problem with egalitarianism is egalitarians: the choice they give to non-egalitarians is (1) renounce your dreams of individual success or (2) be tyrannized by us. Egalitarianism never spreads by rational discourse and deliberation; it spreads by coercion, in particular, by singling out exceptional individuals and subjecting them to psychological torture.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 9:44 am

Egalitarianism never spreads by rational discourse and deliberation; it spreads by coercion, in particular, by singling out exceptional individuals and subjecting them to psychological torture.

“psychological torture” – Examples please
Also, I am curious what your defenition of egalitarianism is.
Thanks in advance.

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 4:07 pm

“psychological torture” – Examples please
Also, I am curious what your defenition of egalitarianism is.

Egalitarianism: everyone must be rendered equal in all relevant terms. Any natural difference in talent, ability, or luck must be rectified by balancing through the mechanism of the state or social organization promoting justice. This formulation is not so different than the Wikipedia entry: “Its general premise is that people should be treated as equals on certain dimensions such as race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and cultural heritage. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status.

Psychological torture: Consciousness-raising, incessant protests, critical distortion of utterances, and other control of the social environment that amounts to “thought reform”. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1806208/

In other words, egalitarians harass you, seek to change your thoughts, seek to make you quiet, and expose you to pain until you throw up your hands and agree with them. That is the same way secret police in regimes led by totalitarian dictators coerce citizens to confess to crimes they did not commit.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 06.18.11 at 4:39 pm

Gordon, what you’re describing is probably true for any process of re-indoctrination. Someone raised in, say, a kibbutz would probably feel just as uncomfortable in a highly hierarchical and unequal society, one that you find perfectly natural.

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John Holbo 06.18.11 at 4:43 pm

Gordon, why should treating people as equal in some respects – i.e. egalitarianism, per the Wikipedia entry – entail ‘rendering them equal in all relevant terms’? (HINT: it doesn’t.) Also, one of the greatest positive effects of freedom is, precisely, that people are able to ‘seek to change each others’ minds about stuff’. If that sort of thing bothers you, you are going to have to fight a two front war against both liberty and tyranny. And for what?

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 5:02 pm

Gordon, your definition of egalitarianism is different than everyone else’s. “This formulation is not so different than the Wikipedia entry.” Sadly, No! The common definition, the one being used in this discussion as well as the Wikipedia entry, refers to equality under the law and equality of opportunity. Your definition goes much much further. “Everyone must be rendered equal in all relevant terms” implies that basketball hoops must be lowered so as to not give an unfair advantage to tall people; smart people must wear a dumbing down device so as not to have an unfair advantage over stupid people; and ballarinas must wear heavy weights when they dance to render them no more graceful than anyone else. I think you have read “Harrison Bergeron” one to many times.

Psychological torture: Consciousness-raising, incessant protests, critical distortion of utterances, and other control of the social environment that amounts to “thought reform”.

I was afraid that that is what you meant. So let me get this straight, if someone criticizes you, disagrees with you, perhaps merely rolls their eyes at you, you are being oppressed. Ironically, your solution seems to be that society should lower its standard of allowable debate to the level of its most thin skinned citizens. Whose the ‘egalitarian’ now Beyotch?!

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 5:19 pm

Gordon, why should treating people as equal in some respects – i.e. egalitarianism, per the Wikipedia entry – entail ‘rendering them equal in all relevant terms’? (HINT: it doesn’t.) Also, one of the greatest positive effects of freedom is, precisely, that people are able to ‘seek to change each others’ minds about stuff’. If that sort of thing bothers you, you are going to have to fight a two front war against both liberty and tyranny. And for what?

John,

The Wikipedia entry does not say “treating people as equal in some respects”. Certainly, the respects to which the Wikipedia entry suggests people ought to be treated as equals are those that are relevant to a theory of equality — so stating that “rendering them equal in all relevant respects” is not a distortion. “All relevant respects” and “some respects” refer to the same class of attributes. If your problem is with the distinction between “treating” and “rendering,” my problem is that one would think I should describe in pleasant terms unwelcome “treatment” that is foisted upon me. “Equal treatment” sounds nice; “re-indoctrination,” as Henri puts it, does not.

Opposition to egalitarianism does not imply a hatred of liberty. There are plenty of libertarians who would consider themselves staunch defenders of liberty, but reject egalitarianism. In fact, many political theorists have noticed a trade off between liberty and equality. It is liberty and equality that have traditionally been at odds — with the right favoring liberty and the left favoring equality. Part of my point is that some of the methods the left uses to advance its vision are tyrannical. As for my aversion to someone seeking to change my mind, I provided a link to a respectable psychiatric study on Communist methods of “thought reform” for a reason. There is a difference between respectful discussion and an attempt at actual coercion. My objection is not to liberty, but to egalitarians who use unethical methods to force others to agree with them. Not because they are exercising liberty, but because they are tyrants.

Also, more relevant to X-Men: First Class, there is a question what equal treatment even means. If equal treatment means treating groups as of equivalent value, that requires a judgment about what constitutes a group. But you have multiple groups of mutants with different sets of powers and divergent viewpoints. There is no collective mutant identity to set apart and treat as equal. (You could create one, but that would be coercive.) There is also the problem of ignoring that some mutants simply do not want to be considered “mutants,” which is part of the problem of the Registration Act. If your mutant power is simply speed-reading and perfect memory, why should you be forcibly associated with other mutants, the ones who can blow up buildings with laser eye-blasts or telepathically enter other people’s dreams? Why can’t you just be a human being who has a slight advantage over other humans, without having to take on “mutant identity” and all that means? Rooting equality in group identity itself is oppressive, because the benefits of egalitarianism are a property of the relation of the socially constructed groups to each other, rather than tangible properties that individuals own and control. Why can’t the non-dangerous mutant simply be left alone, unidentified and unmolested, to live life as he sees fit? There is no justification for bothering this person, let alone re-indoctrinating him, no matter how carefully crafted are your paeans to equality.

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Substance McGravitas 06.18.11 at 5:26 pm

As for my aversion to someone seeking to change my mind, I provided a link to a respectable psychiatric study on Communist methods of “thought reform” for a reason.

Entertainment for me?

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 5:32 pm

“Everyone must be rendered equal in all relevant terms” implies that basketball hoops must be lowered so as to not give an unfair advantage to tall people; smart people must wear a dumbing down device so as not to have an unfair advantage over stupid people; and ballarinas must wear heavy weights when they dance to render them no more graceful than anyone else. I think you have read “Harrison Bergeron” one to many times.

There are in fact many people who think smart people have an unfair advantage and the United States is a deeply anti-intellectual country. (Maybe you don’t remember the charges of elitism and sexism used to defend the Harriet Miers nomination.) There are also plenty of people who resent athletes for their physical prowess and ability to enrich themselves with it and they carp about athletes all the time. (And plenty of people want to raise taxes on the rich precisely because of their antipathy toward athletes, Hollywood stars, and celebrity socialites.) It’s not as if the public policy impact of these views is fictional.

I was afraid that that is what you meant. So let me get this straight, if someone criticizes you, disagrees with you, perhaps merely rolls their eyes at you, you are being oppressed. Ironically, your solution seems to be that society should lower its standard of allowable debate to the level of its most thin skinned citizens. Whose the ‘egalitarian’ now Beyotch?!

No. Criticism is not the same as critical distortion. Disagreement is not the same as thought reform. Rolling of eyes is not the same as control of social environment. I cited to a respectable psychiatric study on Communist thought reform for a reason, and the content of that study is not about “the rolling of eyes”. Is that what equal treatment means to you: casually disrespecting other people?

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 5:35 pm

Part of my point is that some of the methods the left uses to advance its vision are tyrannical.

Examples please or should I assume this is the Palin/Bachmann theory of First Ammendment jurisprudence i.e. criticism of ME violates my rights.

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Jim Harrison 06.18.11 at 5:39 pm

Mr. Henderson,

When I read boilerplate denunciations of egalitarianism like yours I always wonder if their venders actually think that the world is full of people proposing some of radical philosophy of arithmetical equality. The people I encounter who are concerned about inequality are obviously on the defense: the division of society between haves and have nots, after all, has been increasing since the 60s with consequences that are worrying from a Madisonian point of view since enormous wealth buys legislators, regulators, and judges. No need to be excessively theoretical about an evident evil, granted that depending on your point of view, what is a bug to a small r republican is a feature to a big R Republican.

The whole rhetoric deployed against the purported menace of egalitarianism is pretty funny and not just because of the hint that so much of it is based on repeated viewings of Red Dawn. Yours is a comic performance, rather on a par with a very fat man claiming that he only eats two buckets of KFC a night as a preventative measure against the prospect of anorexia nervosa. “It’s a mild case,” he explains, “I’m fortunate it can be controlled by diet.”

The hugely ironic thing here is that right wingers routinely denounce the elitism of their ideological opponents. They sound like high school kids denouncing the smart kids they resent—the campaign against Gore in 2000 was a perfect illustration of Nietzsche’s remark: “It isn’t the presumption of merit that is resented, but merit itself.” And has there ever been an intellectual or political movement prouder of the ignorance and human mediocrity of its members than the Tea Party?

It would doubtlessly require a relentless campaign of force and intimidation to genuinely level the condition of all people, which is a large part of the reason so very few people outside of Conservative educational philosophers propose such a thing. Thing is, however, it also requires force and intimidation to artificially increase the difference between the situation of people and there are lots of people eager to do that. It’s not just that this sort of thing has a long history. At a first approximation, history just is keeping the niggers down. As you may or may not be aware, for example, the governor seldom sends in the troops to shoot the mine owners.

Speaking of rhetoric: Thomas Jefferson was a much better propagandist than a philosopher in announcing that all them are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, not only because the probable non existence of a Creator but because whatever rights we all enjoy are constructed and maintained by agreement among ourselves. Political and legal equality and measures to avoid the drastic material inequality that would make political and legal equality impossible are contrivances by which intelligent men and women establish a humane sphere in which we can live better lives than we could under previous institutions of violence. The wager is that this approach leads to a world with less force and fraud in it than less egalitarian systems. You’d really rather live in Mississippi than Denmark?

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 5:41 pm

Examples please or should I assume this is the Palin/Bachmann theory of First Ammendment jurisprudence i.e. criticism of ME violates my rights.

I take it you did not read the study that I cited to.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 5:41 pm

Is that what equal treatment means to you: casually disrespecting other people?

I believe in egalitarianism (not your definition) and I reserve the right to casually disrespect anyone I damn well please even (shudder) you.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 5:42 pm

I take it you did not read the study that I cited to.

No I did not.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 5:47 pm

I am still waiting for an example of liberal “psychological torture”, real or imagined.

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 5:57 pm

The hugely ironic thing here is that right wingers routinely denounce the elitism of their ideological opponents. They sound like high school kids denouncing the smart kids they resent—the campaign against Gore in 2000 was a perfect illustration of Nietzsche’s remark: “It isn’t the presumption of merit that is resented, but merit itself.” And has there ever been an intellectual or political movement prouder of the ignorance and human mediocrity of its members than the Tea Party?

Jim,

I am neither a conservative nor a libertarian. I live in New York City. I eat sushi. I tend to vote for Democrats. I understand what “getting to Denmark” means. I agree with your Nietzsche quote concerning merit, that the merit itself is hated. But, much as you see hatred of merit in the Tea Party (unsure what the Tea Party has to do with Al Gore) I see many on the Left who hate merit. It is typically, in my experience, a person on the Left claiming that if we had a true meritocracy, it would be awful, because then all the stupid people would be on bottom and know it. Or that “the best and the brightest” is awful because it leads to arrogant group-think. Or that all science should be democratized and separated from the personalities of the scientists to avoid technocracy (which sounds empowering until you realize that it means politicizing science and bullying scientists — if you want to criticize the Right for anti-intellectualism, just look to the climate change debate).

But, back to X-Men: First Class…the argument that mutants should be treated unequally relates to public safety. But this ignores that mutant identity is more complex than the danger they present to humans. Some mutants are not dangerous and do not need to assimilate. No one even knows they are mutants. Why must all mutants be treated equally, by treating every individual mutant as if he is as dangerous as the group as a whole? Why must a harmless mutant even be registered as a mutant? He isn’t dangerous! (And, I don’t mean he is closeted, or that he is self-loathing. I mean he just isn’t dangerous, and isn’t all that different, either! Why can’t he speed-read and have a perfect memory in peace?)

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 5:58 pm

I am still waiting for an example of liberal “psychological torture”, real or imagined.

There are many in the study that I cited to and you did not read.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 6:06 pm

I see many on the Left who hate merit. It is typically, in my experience, a person on the Left claiming that if we had a true meritocracy, it would be awful, because then all the stupid people would be on bottom and know it. Or that “the best and the brightest” is awful because it leads to arrogant group-think. Or that all science should be democratized and separated from the personalities of the scientists to avoid technocracy

I have never met this particular species of liberal in all my life and I have met many. Funny that.

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 6:09 pm

I have never met this particular species of liberal in all my life and I have met many. Funny that.

You’re right. There are no extant people on the planet that you have not met. You have met everyone in the world who exists.

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Gordon Henderson 06.18.11 at 6:14 pm

I believe in egalitarianism (not your definition) and I reserve the right to casually disrespect anyone I damn well please even (shudder) you.

No wonder you haven’t persuaded me.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 6:40 pm

Gordon, I have now read your linked article. I repeat, can you provided one example of thought reform (not Chinese style “more commonly referred to in the west as brainwashing” to quote the article) practiced by liberals here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.? Just one.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 6:41 pm

“No wonder you haven’t persuaded me.”

I don’t follow. Please clarify.

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gocart mozart 06.18.11 at 6:43 pm

Correction: Some of the linked article. Life is short.

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hellblazer 06.18.11 at 11:49 pm

from comment 65 In other words, egalitarians harass you, seek to change your thoughts, seek to make you quiet, and expose you to pain until you throw up your hands and agree with them.

Say what? Where? (looks over shoulder, examines own life in case of repressed memories of harassment by the Forces of Egalitarianism) Try living under governments which actively scorn egalitarian impulses, chum, and see how you like it.

That is the same way secret police in regimes led by totalitarian dictators coerce citizens to confess to crimes they did not commit.

s someone with two colleagues and friends who have first-hand experience of a totalitarian regime, I find this kind of specious analogy risible and mildly offensive. You seem to be claiming that egalitarians behave in a totalitarian/fascist way, and then saying “that’s what totalitarian regimes did!”

(If your next response is going to be along the lines of “now we see the violence inherent in the system”, I suggest you refrain from it.)

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hellblazer 06.18.11 at 11:54 pm

Other responses to GH: your experiences of USA != other people’s experience of the world. “Egalitarianism” as a concept is surely not just limited to Things In Your Life Which Annoy You.

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bianca steele 06.19.11 at 12:26 am

I move that all further comments on this topic be required to attain Gordon Henderson’s standard of vagueness. It would be just like Usenet.

Who would respond when he’s told us in advance he’ll regard “critical distortion of utterances” as a clear expression of the attempt to exercise tyranny over him?

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Gordon Henderson 06.19.11 at 1:25 am

“Egalitarianism” as a concept is surely not just limited to Things In Your Life Which Annoy You.

If I were referring to mere annoyance, I would not have cited to a reputable psychiatric article in a respectable journal on Communist “Thought Reform”. Here is that link, again: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1806208/

Also, you have no idea how much first-hand experience I have with totalitarian regimes.

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Gordon Henderson 06.19.11 at 1:32 am

Who would respond when he’s told us in advance he’ll regard “critical distortion of utterances” as a clear expression of the attempt to exercise tyranny over him?

What do you mean, “you like to eat jagged rocks and strangle goat babies”? I don’t see how your love of consuming jagged rocks and strangling goat babies is relevant to this discussion.

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hellblazer 06.19.11 at 1:34 am

Also, you have no idea how much first-hand experience I have with totalitarian regimes.

True, but my comments did not presume to such knowledge. I just said that given my conversations with my friends, I found your choice of words or analogy risible. I didn’t say they would find it risible; I’d have to ask them.

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hellblazer 06.19.11 at 1:36 am

Re comment 90: sarcasm/parody is more effective when one bothers to properly parse the object of sarcasm/parody. It also helps, I’m told, to be funny.

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Gordon Henderson 06.19.11 at 1:42 am

It also helps, I’m told, to be funny.

Sorry, this is too vague for me to understand. And it offends my friends who live in Rwanda.

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John Holbo 06.19.11 at 3:03 am

Gordon, to judge from the title of the thing you link, it concerns ‘thought reform’ conducted by the communist Chinese. If you tell me that it is the single worst named document in the history of scholarship, and actually the thing is about liberalism, or something liberals have done, or would seek to do, then I will consider that it is potentially relevant to liberalism. Barring some such revelation of catastrophic titular misfire, I fail to see the relevance.

I suspect you are going to say that there is no real difference between Chinese-style communism under Mao and liberalism, but I really don’t see that the US Constitution is as disreputable and totalitarian as all that. Or Hayek, for that matter. If you want to push this liberalism equals totalitarianism line, let’s start with Hayek. He is an egalitarian, by your standard. Does it follow that there is no difference between, say, “The Road to Serfdom” and Mao’s Little Red Book? It seems to me that I can spy daylight between the two positions.

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John Holbo 06.19.11 at 3:33 am

Let me sharpen that a bit. The first line of Hayek’s chapter on “Equality, Value and Merit”, from “The Constitution of Liberty” is: “The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality befo­re the law.”

If egalitarianism, in Gordon’s sense, should fail as a worthy object, then the great aim of the struggle for liberty, in Hayek’s sense, will be exposed as worthless as well.

And don’t say that you, too, are in favor of equality before the law, Gordon. That just turns you into a liberal, hence a hypocrite, when you make blanket critiques of liberalism. The problem comes in here in your analysis: “There are plenty of libertarians who would consider themselves staunch defenders of liberty, but reject egalitarianism. In fact, many political theorists have noticed a trade off between liberty and equality. It is liberty and equality that have traditionally been at odds—with the right favoring liberty and the left favoring equality.”

Hayek certainly rejected egalitarianism in many senses but, crucially, not in YOUR senss. He was very much an egalitarian in YOUR sense, as you have elucidated it. Namely, commitment to equality in any respect equates to commitment to equality in all respects. Hayek would have rejected that proposition, and rightly so.

In short, it isn’t just libertarians who have noticed that liberty and equality not only may but really must involve trade-offs. Everyone has noticed it. (Except you, Gordon. And Mao before you, perhaps.)

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shah8 06.19.11 at 4:33 am

You know, all these Magneto threads are kinda pointless–tho’ I think that is the attraction. Magneto is a character, that for all intents and purposes, which is structured like an electron orbital or bond. You can’t actually extract any sort of information, or accept any postulations about Magneto without destroying other information. You have to make a defined thrust of Magnetotude–genocidal ethnic warrior, Malcolm X, Realpolitik practictioner, balance of power/terror, or just, you know, a family dad…If you try to make judgements off of any specific actions of Magneto, you can’t really creditably describe that action as belonging to any greater Magneto qua Magneto because the character does what is needed to flow the plot within the comic. Any number of Magneto could have done it, without you needing to know a specific motivation.

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Gordon Henderson 06.19.11 at 6:47 pm

John,

My criticism of Egalitarianism, up above, makes clear that my problem with egalitarianism is egalitarians, and some of their methods. You could quote Mill, saying that coercion is a no-no, but my precise issue is that, in reality, egalitarians deviate from this and in fact coerce by various means.

I also did not criticize Western liberals or American liberals or Think Progress. I criticized the Left. Egalitarianism is a movement on the political Left; Communists are both on the Left and also egalitarians. So, when asked to provide an example of those on the political Left who are egalitarians and use methods that are coercive, I gave an example of egalitarians on the Left who use coercive methods. The citation I gave could not be more probative. I’m not sure why it matters that the egalitarians I cited to are Chinese; I would hope that you would agree that humans from China are humans.

Though many conservatives and libertarians are Hayekians, I am neither a conservative nor a libertarian. Hayek was in favor of universal healthcare of a sort; many modern conservatives and libertarians oppose Obamacare. So, even if I were a conservative or a libertarian, which I am not, it would not follow that I must be a Hayekian. And even if I were a modern conservative or libertarian who cited to Hayek with approval, that still would not mean I agreed with Hayek on all things. I’m not really sure why you’re citing to Hayek, because, in reality, Hayek has absolutely nothing to do with any of my arguments.

Egalitarians can be tyrants. In reality, many egalitarians are.

As to you calling me Mao, if I agreed with Mao in all things, I never would have seen X-Men: First Class, because it is not state-approved art that serves only political purposes. It is far more likely that if I were an adherent of Mao, I would have avoided seeing X-Men: First Class, but then discussed it for propagandistic purposes on my blog.

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Jeff K 06.19.11 at 8:20 pm

@Martin Bento no Soviet villains? Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, the Gargoyle, Abomination, Red Ghost (and his Super-Apes!) …

Keep in mind, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner are explicitly U.S. weapons researchers, and the FF are tied into the early space-race.

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gocart mozart 06.19.11 at 8:59 pm

I’m not really sure why you’re citing to Hayek, because, in reality, Hayek has absolutely nothing to do with any of my arguments.

You are a human and Hayek was a human Q.E.D.

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John Holbo 06.19.11 at 9:46 pm

“As to you calling me Mao, if I agreed with Mao in all things, I never would have seen X-Men”

I’m sorry for the confusion, Gordon. The problem is that there isn’t a standard term for the sort of position you hold. You are anti-Maoist, clearly, but your position is also implicitly anti-liberal and anti-libertarian. Pardon me changing super-universes, but it might be best to term your particular philosophy ‘Bizarro Maoism’. Just as Bizarro is the opposite of Superman, without really providing a coherent alternative to Superman’s basic outlook, so your philosophy seems to me the opposite of Maoism, without providing a coherent alternative to it. What makes you similar to Mao is not that you and he are alike unwilling to watch X-Men movies. (Honestly, I have no idea whether Mao would have been willing to.) What makes you similar to Mao is that, through a failure of one value of the liberty/equality duo, the other fails as well. Mao wanted equality, and gave up liberty – thereby losing equality as well. You want liberty and are willing to give up equality for its sake. But you are giving it up to such an extent that liberty fails as well. So you manage to be anti-equality without managing to be pro-liberty.

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John Holbo 06.19.11 at 9:55 pm

Again, a bit of clarification: “I also did not criticize Western liberals or American liberals or Think Progress. I criticized the Left.”

Actually, you did. Because they are ‘egalitarians’ by your standard. And you equated that with coercive Maoism.

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bianca steele 06.19.11 at 10:49 pm

It’s been a while since I read about this, and I had trouble downloading the file, but my recollection is that Lifton was writing about coercive techniques used against Western soldiers in China and North Korea, at a time at which it was not considered possible for torture to “break” a person who was psychologically normal to begin with, much less for persuasion to be a form of torture, and prisoners who made anti-Western statements were considered to have done it voluntarily. So I don’t see the relevance either–whether of the article or of egalitarianism–surely they did not consider their prisoners “equal.” This is hypocrisy, not consistent egalitarianism.

Or maybe I understand perfectly and don’t like the name Gordon.

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bianca steele 06.19.11 at 10:52 pm

And another thing: Egalitarianism is not a movement on the political left. That is about the worst choice of two words you could put together. In the US, at least, egalitarianism as a sentiment is decidedly shared by most right-wing and conservative leaning people. That’s how you get Sarah Palin! It may be felt by some on the left too, including liberals, but it’s not exactly the same thing. Don’t make us responsible for her please!

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J— 06.20.11 at 1:40 am

my blog

Link, please.

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Dragon-King Wangchuck 06.20.11 at 1:55 pm

I read Gordon’s link. It’s about Communist China and was published in 1961. It talks about methods used by interrogators on prisoners – keeping them off guard, good-cop-bad-cop-&c. Just for context there – Gordon’s problem with egalitarian Leftsists and their coercive coercion is backed up by a study of Western prisoners who were interrogated by the Communist Chinese in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Because they are exactly the same, or at least similar enough for a nineteen page link to be “relevant”.

Anyways, since it is a beautiful Monday morning and I am in a great mood – let’s take Gordon’s allegation seriously. That the current “lie-beral biased media enabling egalitarian leftsist conspiracy to coercively force bigots into teh closet” or wev he is warning against is somehow similar to 50’s Communist China, something his link describes as probably the most thoroughly controlled and manipulated
group environment that has ever existed
. What do we get? I bet Gordon’s WRNOG,,,

Is penal “thought reform” foolproof? Fortunately, it is not. Milieu
control, although thorough, can never be absolute; and the operations do not always proceed as smoothly as my composite data and schematic analysis might suggest. The process is limited both by its ovcr-amibitious goals and by the remarkable adaptations and rcsistances which human beings can call forth under scvere stress. It does almost invariably succeed in one of its two major aims-the extraction of a luridly incriminating
confession of guilt. But it falls far short of its second, the “reform” of the Western prisoner.

IOW, “thought reform” doesn’t work. According to Gordon’s link. Awesome cite there Gordon! What was your point again?

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Dragon-King Wangchuck 06.20.11 at 1:59 pm

Anywho, for someone placing such a great emphasis on Lifton that he links it twice and references it something like half a dozen times, you would imagine that he’d be all for equality under the law and egalitarianism. That sort of thing serves as a primary defense against “penal reform” (i.e. due process and no locking up folks for arbitrary reasons). IOW, the coercively coercive coercion that he’s so afeared of – applied to prisoners.

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Dragon-King Wangchuck 06.20.11 at 2:22 pm

But all of that, I suppose, is besides Gordon’s “point”. Here it is, I suppose:

You could quote Mill, saying that coercion is a no-no, but my precise issue is that, in reality, egalitarians deviate from this and in fact coerce by various means,,,Egalitarians can be tyrants. In reality, many egalitarians are.

Firstly [citation needed]. SRSLY dood, your contention that many egalitarians are tyrants is based on 50’s Communist China. I suppose that numerically speaking there were a lot of people in 50’s Communist China, but I don’t think even that supports your contention that many egalitarians are tyrants as the overwhelming majority of those Chinese weren’t the tyrants. Anyways, reaching for a totalitarian regime and saying, aha this one’s Leftsist therefore Leftsists are coercive – is a neat trick. It’s like saying this Gordon is a self-important ass therefore Gordon Henderson is a self-important ass.

It’d be pretty easy to come out with counter-examples of non-Leftsist authoritarian regimes – I’m going to hope that you’d concede that there are plenty of coercive and tyrranical systems that could not be even remotely considered “egalitarian”. Thus the correlation between “egalitarianism” and “love of coercion” is not one-to-one. So we get back to the original question – can you provide evidence showing that “egalitarianism” leads to coercion, authoritarianism and tyrrany or even suggest possible methodologies by which this would occur.

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gocart mozart 06.20.11 at 7:23 pm

[I will take the easy Godwin layup for you DKW]

Gordon is not an egalitarian
Hitler was not an egalitarian
therefore,
Gordon is just like Hitler

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