Category Archive

“Marijuana use does appear to foster alientation, towards both the family and society in general. In school and college settings, the tendency of users to form subcultures hostile to prevailing social customs and activities is well known. … It remains to be seen what sort of society will emerge as a generation so heavily associated with marijuana attains the position of leadership.”

— From The Marjuana Epidemic, a 1981 Heritage Foundation report by Stuart Butler, PhD.

Yesterday I posted briefly about George Orwell’s well-known 1942 claim that pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist,” and his later repudiation of that argument. Here’s the whole passage in which he disavowed the idea — it’s from his column, “As I Please,” in the December 8, 1944 edition of the left-wing London weekly Tribune.

Later this week I’ll have another post up discussing this column, and its applicability to contemporary political debates, in more detail.

“For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. The thing that strikes me more and more — and it strikes a lot of other people, too  —is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. When I look through my collection of pamphlets — Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you — it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them. The same propaganda tricks are to be found almost everywhere. It would take many pages of this paper merely to classify them, but here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit — disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is ‘objectively.’

“We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the “objectively” line of talk is brought forward again. To criticise the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore “Trotskyism is Fascism.” And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.

“This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

“In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.”

More soon.

So the motion to bring the defense spending bill to the Senate floor failed this afternoon. All 41 of the Senate’s Republicans — and two conservative Democrats from Arkansas — voted no.

So why did this happen, and where does it leave the reforms?

The why it happened part is easy. With liberals across the country depressed by the economy and frustrated by the Obama administration’s lack of progress on major legislation, the last thing the GOP wanted to do was give the Democrats a victory on two huge issues just six weeks before election day. Senate majority leader Harry Reid knew this, but he also knew that trying and failing would be better politics than not trying at all, so he made the push, fingers crossed.

As for where it leaves the reforms, that’s a bit harder to say. The Democrats are promising to bring the bill forward again after the elections, with DADT repeal and the DREAM Act intact. It’s possible that they may have more luck then in bringing moderate Republicans on board — there’s no question, for instance, that Senators Collins and Snowe of Maine would like to vote for these bills. (They’ve done it before, for starters.) There’s also no question about whether such votes would play well for them at home with Maine voters. (They would.)

The only reason they — and several other Republicans — voted no today was party discipline. It’s possible that they’ll get a bit more leeway after November 2. Several Senators, including John McCain, also expressed a desire to hold off on the DADT vote until after a Pentagon study of the issue is released on December 1.

On the other hand, the Republicans are likely to pick up about half a dozen seats in the Senate this year, and there will be lots of ways — and reasons — for the GOP to stall Democrat-supported legislation until the new Senators are seated in January.

It’s not over, in other words, but things don’t look all that great.

Update | There’s a rumor going around on Twitter that Republican senator Mitch McConnell offered to bring the defense bill to the floor with all other provisions (including Don’t Act Don’t Tell repeal) intact if Reid agreed to drop the DREAM Act. This story is false — McConnell’s proposal was a poison pill, and rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with the DREAM Act. It appears to be nothing more than an attempt to encourage gay supporters of DADT repeal to blame Latinos for its failure. Disgusting.

Second Update | Another rumor spreading on Twitter is that Harry Reid “killed” the bill by voting against it. The reality is that when he saw it was going to fail, he voted against it as a parliamentary maneuver, so that he could later introduce a motion to reconsider it. It’s standard Robert’s Rules of Order stuff, nothing nefarious.

As an update to yesterday’s post on opposition at Harvard to honoring New Republic owner-editor Martin Peretz, who has made bigoted comments about Muslims, blacks, and Latinos…

The Harvard Crimson reports this morning that Peretz’s name has been taken off the speaker’s list for this Saturday’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies gala. The director of the program now says that Peretz “will be recognized in some fashion at the celebration,” but declined to say whether he will speak.

The committee was supposed to release a statement on the controversy yesterday, but did not.

Today’s the day.

Early this afternoon, the United States Senate will hold a procedural vote with huge implications for two measures that student and youth activists have been organizing around for a decade — the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

In order to overcome a planned filibuster, the bills will need the support of sixty Senators. With only fifty-nine Democrats in the Senate, supporters will need at least one — and possibly more — Republican to break ranks and vote yea.

Both measures have received Republican support before, but party pressure to vote no is extraordinarily high — Democratic voters are frustrated and demoralized heading into this November’s midterm elections, but victories on DADT and DREAM would galvanize the liberal base in a way that could prove devastating to the GOP.

And so, one by one, past Republican supporters of the measures have lined up to announce that they will be voting no this time. Some have indicated that they may be willing to cut a deal, though, and others have so far kept quiet about their plans.

The New York Times today called the DREAM Act’s chances “slim,” but it did so in an article that noted that student mobilization around the bill has already rocked Washington DC. As for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the website Politico says that many wrote it off as a “lost cause” last week, but that its momentum seems to be building now.

You can get up-to-the-minute organizing news about the two bills on Twitter at #DREAMact and #DADT. I’ll be updating this post with new news as the day goes on.

11:15 am | Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key Republican moderate, has said she will vote against allowing DADT repeal to come to the Senate floor under the current rules for debate and amendment.

11:55 am | Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts is on the floor of the Senate now saying that he will vote no. With Collins and her Maine colleague Olympia Snowe on record in opposition as the rules now stand, it appears that the Republicans will be standing united. Barring a last-minute deal with the Democratic leadership, it looks like the effort to bring DADT and the DREAM Act to the floor this afternoon will fail.

12:35 pm | The Senate just went into recess. They’ll return for the vote at 2:15 pm.

3:45 pm | The motion to bring the bill to the floor failed in a 56-43 vote. I’ve got a new post up here explaining what happened and why.