Update! Tickets on sale now!

If you'll be in the Los Angeles area this June, and if you enjoy Golden Age detective stories, then the Hollywood Fringe Festival will be offering a special treat just for you: Kill A Better Mousetrap. This one-act comedy (with a legal twist!) by actor/writer Scott Ratner will be playing every Saturday that month.

multiple print/radio/visual/digital sources 4/13 malreported ricin postal attack rectify

references perpetrator malidentified malreported rectify

malreporting "Paul Kevin Curtis" remove all references nonperson

replace correctreport "Everett Dutschke" alwaystrue rewrite

goodreport emphasize "martial arts instructor" eliminate malreport nonemphasize "Elvis impersonator"

federal law enforcement goodquote newreport emphasize words "discover" "investigation" "uncover" "reveal" "determine" "analysis" "dogged" "intensive"

doubleplusungood malreport avoid words "blunder" "mistaken" "innocent" "frame" "incorrect" "incompetent" "polyestered over-armed fuckwits" "put the 'special' in 'special agent'" "indifferent thugs"

media subsidiaries/partners emphasize goodquote "exclusive" "determined" "discovered" "revealed" "explain" "report to you"

doubleplusungood malreport avoid words "gullible" "credulous" "vapid" "coke-snorting upjumped typists" "amoral bootlicking sternographers" "jaded badgehumpers"

rectify correctreport "Everett Dutschke" has always been perpetrator "Paul Kevin Curtis" nonperson has never been perpetrator

INSTRUCTIONS END

Let's start with the tweet and get it right out there. Last night, The Onion tweeted this:

That, needless to say, was not a good idea. It was not a good idea for a lot of reasons. The simplistic version is "you don't call a 9 year old a cunt." That's pretty close to my more nuanced version too, but it helps to show your work to get to that conclusion because it is unfair to The Onion – to their intent and real target – to reduce the tweet to "The Onion called an amazing young girl a horrible word."

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As Patterico celebrates his tenth blogging anniversary, and Scott Greenfield celebrates his sixth, I am moved to think again about how bloggers are regarded by what is called the "mainstream media."

Despite how mainstream bloggers have become, and despite the fact that almost all "mainstream media" outlets have their own bloggers, the prevailing attitude seems unchanged in more than a decade: bloggers, we're told, are unreliable, biased, wild-eyed pajama-clad basement-dwellers.

Apart from the pajamas and basement part, I think this is irrefutably true. Bloggers are biased and unreliable.

Here's the key question: compared to what?

We've been told to think that people who went to journalism school, who write or talk for established media outlets, who are clad in the garb of media-officialdom, represent some sort of neutral-and-reliable baseline, and that bloggers are somewhere below that. But it's fallible humans all the way down, my friends. The notion that someone is trustworthy or honest because they landed a job with an old-school media outlet is, to be blunt, laughable.

Are bloggers wild-eyed? Sure. Some of us are nuts. But check out the sort of people that "mainstream media" hires. This week's example — local news writer Kathleen O'Brein Wilhelm, who as far as I can tell thinks deer can't read because Obama kills babies, and offers deathless lines like this: "Words are fun and worth clearly stating, in English if in America, and with an opinion that is yours because it’s good to have an opinion." Too obscure a media outlet, an exception that proves the rule? Well, you could go with the crazy Suzi Parker of the Washington Post, whose crazitude led her breathlessly to report satire about Sarah Palin as fact.

Are bloggers biased, uninterested in facts that don't support their biases, eager to push stories that promote their narratives, throwing out red meat like chum to sharts? Of course. But again, compared to what? Consider this Platonic ideal of mastubatory senile-dementia-agitating drivel from Fox News pearl-clutching about a university recognizing pagan and Wiccan holidays. Quoth Tucker Carlson on a Fox program "Every Wiccan I've known is either a compulsive Dungeons & Dragons player or is a middle-aged twice divorced older woman living in a rural area who works as a midwife." Gosh, Tucker. That's pretty strong language from someone who puts on a bow tie to seem tougher.

"Mainstream" journalists, like bloggers, can be statist-apologists and amusingly arrogant louts and gullible twerps and con-men on the make and straight-up bigots.

This is not to say you should trust bloggers. You should exercise skepticism about what you read on blogs. You should use your independent judgment about their work product.

But why, exactly, shouldn't we do the same with "mainstream" journalism outlets? By what stretch of the imagination are they reliable just because they have the big name?

There was a time when I was confident that I knew exactly what "bully" meant.

That time was the early 1980s. Mr. T offered wisdom regarding fools and jibber-jabber. People wore their Izod collars popped, never dreaming they would rear a generation of children too dull-witted to learn from their mistake. Vice President Mondale concluded that he had a chance. Teachers gamely trained us to duck under our desks in the event of a nuclear strike like we had seen in The Day After, politely ignoring that my school was two miles from Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Nuclear war seemed like a real possibility those days, what with the Russians shooting down jetliners and Matthew Broderick being kind of a jerk and thus-and-such.

I — sartorially challenged, but not wearing any popped collars, thank you — knew plenty about bullies. I was a pudgy, clumsy, nerdy kid with — and I know this will shock you — a smart mouth. So bigger, stronger, more athletic, more popular, more socially adept kids bullied me. By that I mean, despite my best attempts to ignore and avoid them, they sought me out, singled me out, and variously pushed, tripped, punched, or slapped me, or put nacho cheese in my bookbag (you'd think you could scoop it up with chips and eat it if your books are reasonably clean, but you can't), or let the air out of the tires of the bike I rode to school, or called me derisive names for no particular reason, or snickered and hooted and mocked my reedy voice when I answered a question in class.

I was fairly comfortable with the definition of bullying including that behavior. I was resigned to the fact that there wasn't much I could do about it. At that point, at least, bullying existed on a seemingly ethereal plane imperceptible to adults. I was suspicious of cinematic training montages and didn't think that working out would turn me into a victorious bully-puncher. Nowadays some people recommend that kids offer clever comebacks; I was capable but learned that quickly that the sort of verbal salvos that satisfied me either led to more punching or sailed without apparent impact over the bullies' head like an algebra problem. So: I worked, I played with friends, I tried to be true to myself, I tried not to bully the few weaker than I, and I endured, believing that in the long run things would get better. I was right, at least in my case, as it turned out.

I knew then what bullying was. I'm not so sure I know now. I know what I think the word means, and has always meant, and ought to continue meaning. But other people seem to be trying their best to make it mean something else. People seem to want "bullying" to mean "criticizing" or "making fun of" or sometimes "disagreeing with" or "condemning" or "uttering unacceptable opinions about" or "challenging and examining."

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When I was a kid I had a family member who – with out realizing what he was doing – lived like Merlin.

Except that where Merlin lived backwards in time, this family member just lived backwards in logic.

Instead of starting with the facts on the ground and then reasoning forward towards conclusions, he would start with conclusions and then reason backwards to what the facts on the ground must be.

The older I've gotten, the more I realize that there's a lot of that going on.

I find that when standing up for general principles it's often best to pick examples that cut against your normal tribal loyalty (this is why the Good Samaritan from Luke is a good parable; if a filthy, glue-huffing Samaritan is willing to …well, you take my point).

With that in mind, I will now defend Jared Diamond, who I do not have cultural or political affinity with. The topic is this recent dust-up:

It’s happening again, another issue of Jared Diamond vs. the anthropologists. Part of this is surely personal. Diamond has been trading in glib and gloss for years, and profitably so, in both financial and fame terms. There is also a deep scholarly divide. Diamond’s way of viewing historical development is reminiscent of, if not equivalent to, materialism. That is, external material forces (geography) and broad macro-historical dynamics (the transition across modes of production) loom large in his thinking. In contrast, many cultural anthropologists disagree with this paradigm, and see it as outmoded, old fashioned, and false. Not that I can decrypt what they believe, because clarity is not something that seems to be valued by cultural anthropologists in most domains.

I say most, because there is one area where many of them are quite clear: they are the beacons of toleration and justice. And they get to define what toleration and justice is. For all cultural anthropology’s epistemological muddle, its political priors are crisp and dinstict, and strangely insulated from the critique and deconstruction so valued by the discipline in all matters. From The Guardian piece above:

“It’s a profoundly damaging argument that tribal peoples are more violent than us,” said Survival’s Jonathan Mazower. “It simply isn’t true. If allowed to go unchallenged … it would do tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people’s rights. Diamond has constructed his argument using a small minority of anthropologists and using statistics in a way that is misleading and manipulative.”

In a lengthy and angry rebuttal on Saturday, Diamond confirmed his finding that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace”. He accused Survival of falling into the thinking that views tribal people either as “primitive brutish barbarians” or as “noble savages, peaceful paragons of virtue living in harmony with their environment, and admirable compared to us, who are the real brutes”.

…

But Survival remains adamant. “The clear thrust of his argument is that there is a natural evolutionary path along which human society progresses and we are simply further along it,” said Mazower. “That’s extremely dangerous, because it is the notion that they’re backward and need to be ‘developed’. That thinking – and not that their way of living might be just as modern as any other way of living – is the same thinking that underpins governments that persecute tribal people.”

The thinking in the Guardian piece is a perfect example of the "X → Y ; I don't like Y; therefore ! X" logical failure.

The first syllogism (from the first paragraph) goes like this:

1. If Diamond is right that tribal people are more violent → it would do tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people’s rights.
2. I don't want tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people’s rights.
3. THEREFORE Diamond is wrong

…and the second (from the third paragraph) goes like this:

1. If Diamond is right that human societies progress along a natural path → governments will persecute tribal people
2. I don't want governments will persecute tribal people
3. THEREFORE Diamond is wrong

Now, I am not entirely with out sympathy to this sort of thinking. If the situation is dire enough and imminent enough¹, I'd let my thinking (or at least my words) be modified in service to the greater good. "Are there any Jews hiding in your basement?" Hmmm. "No, there absolutely couldn't be! [ because if I admit the truth you'll kill them ]".

Maybe Mazower knows that the words he's spouting are not even wrong, and he's bravely making a mockery of his own reputation as someone with an IQ above that of yeast in order to save some primitive tribes.

…but maybe not. Maybe Mazower really has been seduced by the ends that he envisions and has compromised the means of logic and honest debate.

Whether tribal societies are more violent than western societies is a question of fact that can be settled with censuses, direct observation, and archeology. My sense as an outsider is that Mazower is absolutely wrong that violence levels are the same across societies, and that Diamond has not yet proved his point that there is one progressive path forward.

The fact, though, that Mazower is not arguing "X is wrong because we have facts that prove X wrong", but is instead arguing "X is wrong because I dislike the political implications of X" has the stink of pseudoscience, the intellectual lynchings of James Watson and Larry Summers, and – in general – operations of Minitrue.

It shouldn't be necessary to clarify, but I imagine it is, so I'll clarify: I do not assert that I know whether Diamond, Watson, or Summers are right or wrong. I merely know that debate and science proceeds by arguing the facts on the ground, not by declaring that certain facts are impossible because of the political environment.

Facts are facts (and unknowns are unknowns) regardless of whether they hurt feelings or lead to certain undesirable results.

You've been down there, Neo. You already know that road.

For roughly a year, I've noticed a troubling tendency amongst some political and social commentators I follow: a trend towards zookeeper-like troll-feeding.

I'm not talking about ongoing commentary on an active evildoer — like, say, Craig Brittain, con-man and involuntary-porn sociopath. I'm not talking about toying with the occasional troll who traipses into the comments section.

Rather, I'm talking about people turning an unacceptable percentage of their attention not to the issues that concern them — issues like criminal justice, or war, or budgets, or whatever — but to fights with people who attack them because of their positions on their topics. Fights with trolls, in other words. Soon they have much less time to talk about substance, because they're spending so much time on process — the process of fighting critics. This often devolves into fighting not about disagreements over substance, but fighting about fighting — endless tit-for-tat over who said what about whom and who did what horrible thing to whom, and whether that horrible thing was fair response to what the other guy did, and so forth.

Now, some trolls are simply awful people. Some trolls do truly despicable things. It's entirely reasonable to be repulsed and offended and outraged by some troll behavior.

But nobody ever killed a troll by overfeeding it.

That's why some folks need new strategies. I like a recent one author and blogger John Scalzi has adopted, because it reminds me of my favorite method of dealing with real-world trolls like Westboro Baptist Church. Scalzi, dealing with a trolling critic, has announced that he'll donate to favored charities every time the troll mentions him in 2013. The charities are for causes that Scalzi likes and the troll doesn't. This has led to matching pledges currently totaling $50,000, and to widespread publicity that might lead to more pledges.

I probably agree with Scalzi on political and social issues less than 50% of the time. I agree with the troll's politics considerably less. (The troll is one of those types interested in dividing men into "Alpha" and "Beta" males. My views on that are paradoxical and recursive; I think that being concerned with dividing people into Alpha and Beta males, and certainly being concerned with whether one is viewed as an Alpha or Beta male, sounds like a very Beta way to think.) But whatever my disagreements with Scalzi, the solution is an elegant one.

Some of my friends and acquaintances out there — and you know who you are, I think — have you ever considered not being the zookeeper any more? It's not easy, I know.

You might recall that popular social media site Reddit doesn't like doxxing — that is, the public identification of online speakers and revelation of their personal information. Gawker's public identification of vile Reddit creeper and troll Violentacrez was controversial to many Redditors, condemned by Reddit administrators, and has led to some Reddit mods engaging in a long-term ban of links to Gawker media sites.

So — Reddit's culture is strongly against doxxing. Right?

Well — sort of.

Last week, the online community briefly thrilled to the outing of a bad actor — a St. Louis pastor named Alois Bell who wrote a snide and obnoxious message on a receipt to a server at Applebee's. Another server posted the rude receipt — including Bell's legible signature — to Reddit, and the game was afoot — Redditors promptly identified Bell, her tiny storefront church, and her congregation. When Bell doubled down and successfully demanded that Applebee's terminate the waitress, she made herself more famous; Reddit was flooded with threads about her.

So, I have a question for the Reddit community:

Why is identifying Bell acceptable to your community, but identifying Violentacrez unacceptable to your community?

Both engaged in vile behavior. Bell was entitled and nasty to a server (remember what Dave Barry says — someone who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person), and later vengeful to someone less powerful when called publicly on her behavior. Violentacrez was a purveyor of creepshots, racism, and gleeful trolling. Why is it right for Reddit users to identify Bell by name — inflicting real-world consequences on her — but wrong for Gawker to identify Violentacrez, inflicting real-world consequences on him?

Is the idea that Violentacrez' behavior was "only online," and thus somehow qualitatively different? That strikes me as an archaic viewpoint. A startling percentage of modern life is conducted "online," and the view that things that happen "online" are somehow consequence-free or morally neutral strikes me as difficult to defend.

Is the idea that Bell — who acted in public and signed her receipt — had no expectation of privacy, but Violentacres did? Again, I find this unconvincing. Bell probably didn't expect that her credit card receipt would be published — but she acted in a way that allowed it to be. Violentacrez might have hoped that nobody would identify him — but he left the clues and crumbs that led Gawker to him. Both must contend with the truism that people have an urge to identify and shame bad actors.

Is this a mere crass "one of us, one of us" thing? Do Redditors merely feel that members of their community deserve protection, but outsiders do not? Is there an element of contempt for the religious in the mix?

I don't know that there are any easy answers. I don't know that Reddit admins, or the diverse Reddit community, could justify the difference. I've been writing for a long time about how the internet makes a big world like a small town — how the internet can counteract the anonymizing tendencies of a vast, complex society by subjecting the occasional notable miscreant to village-square shaming. It's like getting struck by lightning — there are too many miscreants and too few hours in the day — and we're still grappling with whether it is "fair" or "proportional" or "right." Colorable arguments can be made for or against the phenomenon. But I'm skeptical that Reddit can make colorable arguments that "it's cool when we do this to outsiders, but not cool when outsiders do this to us."

Addicted to good music?

Here's a link to the schedule of upcoming performances by Ana Vidovic. I've written of her persuasive charms before.

Do yourself and/or a loved one the favor. Seriously.

My post yesterday about the dispute over Gawker outing a Reddit moderator generated a lot of interest and discussion. I'd like to revisit the issue in light of a statement by Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. Gawker published that statement here.

Wong's core statement of Reddit's support for free speech is this:

We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States – because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it – but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).

These are admirable goals. It's a good thing for sites like Reddit to create free-speech platforms, particularly in light of the sort of pervasive threats to free speech we like to discuss here at Popehat.

Wong follows up with the exceptions:

Our rules today include the following two exceptions:

1. We will ban illegal content, and in addition sexualized pictures of minors, immediately upon any reports to us. We gave our rationale for that back when that issue was resolved, and we will maintain that policy for the same reasons.
2. We will ban the posting of personal information (doxxing), because it incites violence and harassment against specific individuals.

It's important to emphasize as a starting point that as a private actor, Reddit is free to restrict whatever speech it likes. In fact, Reddit is free to call itself a free speech platform and then still restrict any speech it likes. The only consequences are social ones, barring breach of contract or fraud (if, for instance, Reddit were in the business of selling membership based on a promise of free speech, then restricted it, you might have a cause of action).

However, observers of Reddit have free speech rights as well. Reddit's stance is fair game for criticism and inquiry.

Take a look at Wong's explanation of the anti-doxxing policy:

The current events have made it clear that the implementation of #2 requires some development. Those of us who've been around are familiar with the reasons behind that rule, the destructive witchhunts in reddit's past against both users and mods – even people who had no idea what ‘reddit' was – prompted by suspicion and ire, and often ending with undeserved harassment, death threats, job loss, or worse for the affected individual. Even reddit's favorite journalist Adrian Chen once wrote an article decrying the practice and mob mentality behind it (see: http://gawker.com/5751581/misguided-internet-vigilantes-attack-college-students-cancer-fundraiser).

But our ability to enforce policy ends at the edges of our platform. And one of the key functions of our platform is the sharing of content on the internet. I'm sure you see the problem.

So we must draw a line, and we've chosen to do the following:
1. We will ban doxxing posted to reddit.
2. We will ban links to pages elsewhere which are trivially or primarily intended for the purposes of doxxing (e.g. wikis or blogs primarily including dox).

Wong follows up later:

We do believe that doxxing is a form of violence, rather unique to the internet. Even innocent individuals can be accidentally targeted due to mistaken identities – a key difference between online mobs versus with journalists who have a system of professional accountability. And we believe that while we can prohibit it on our platform, we can only affect the opinion of others outside of reddit via moral suasion and setting an example. From the time when reddit first banned doxxing on its platform, I feel that there has been a change in the general attitude towards doxxing on the internet. It's still widespread, but we made a clear statement that it was a bad thing, worth exercising restraint over.

This leaves me with some questions.

To whom does the anti-doxxing policy apply? I think it's clear that Reddit means its anti-doxxing policy to prohibit Redditors from posting the "personal information" of Reddit users — that is, it prohibits "outing" Redditors.

But does it prohibit "outing" non-Redditors?

For instance, this week Anonymous outed someone they accused of driving Canadian teen Amanda Todd to suicide through vile conduct. Can a Redditor do that on Reddit, if the person outed is not a Redditor, or didn't bully the teen on Reddit? Can a Redditor link to an Anonymous site that is primarily intended to out the bad guy?

Does the policy only apply to online conduct? Does the anti-doxxing rule only apply to pseudo-anonymous or anonymous online conduct, or to real life conduct as well? Assuming these two louts aren't Redditors, would a Redditor be allowed to post on Reddit something like this piece at Above the Law, identifying two law students who killed an exotic bird at a Vegas casino? What about someone like, say, Jennifer Petkov, the woman who mocked and harassed a dying seven-year-old neighbor — would the doxxing ban prohibit someone from releasing personal information on Reddit about her, perhaps by digging up court records of arrests or child custody disputes?

Let me give you another example. After yesterday's "Town Hall" debate, some people researched whether a purported undecided questioner was actually a political operative from an interest group. Would that sort of analysis — which involved inquiry into the name and suspected work contact information of the individual — be banned on Reddit under the anti-doxxing rule?

Or, in another example, let's say someone is accused of a terrible crime and their name is published in a local paper. Would the anti-doxxing policy prohibit Redditors from, say, researching and then linking on Reddit to his Facebook page, or the web page for his employer? What about pulling the person's criminal records and posting them?

Why I Care

I ask these things because I'm trying to get at the heart of what Reddit is actually doing. Are they trying to prevent real-world harm — or are they trying to create a space where the expression of their own members is insulated from real-world consequences, including social consequences? I ask these things because, though I think anonymity should enjoy protections from the government, I don't think that it's clear that insulating anonymity from private inquiry is a free-speech value. Can the prospect of being outed "chill" speech? Of course. But anonymous harassment and abuse can "chill" speech as well. I tend to argue that the remedy for the chilling effect of anonymous harassment and abuse — if it doesn't break the law — is more speech. I think that more speech is the right remedy for the chilling impact of outing as well. It's not clear to me why it is principled to give anonymity preferential status.

If Reddit's anti-doxxing policy would not prevent the outing of Amanda Todd's tormentor, or the outing of the accused bird-killers, or finding and posting the Facebook pages or company web sites of people in the news, then I have to ask how sincere they are about their concerns regarding "undeserved harassment, death threats, job loss, or worse." If the position is "Redditors will be protected from outing here, but non-Redditors will not," then, well, that's an ethos, but I'm not sure it's one worthy of any respect.

Again, Reddit can run their show any way they like, and can set up any rules they like and put the label "free speech" on it. But the accuracy of the label, and the credibility of their justifications for exceptions to it, are fair game for discussion.

We like black and white, we do. We don't like shades of gray. We don't like nuance. We don't like tension between competing ideas. Even when we pretend to embrace complexity, we scornfully reject it when it intrudes into areas we care about.

We believe in the zero-sum game — the proposition that something is all one thing or all the other, that you can't blame one person for a bad event without diminishing the blame of another.

But that's not the way the world actually works.

As an example, take the revolting attacks on the United States Embassies in Cairo and Benghazi yesterday.

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It is now a cliche that writing "sorry I haven't been blogging" is a grotesque party foul akin to dropping trou and taking a dump in the punchbowl, so I shan't do that. Besides, there's no reason to be sorry, because nobody is entitled to my writings. (Or perhaps it would be better to say more ambiguously that nobody deserves my writings.)

Suffice it to say that I'm on a hiatus. At least one very major component of this is a surge of work: new cases, some on short fuses, with huge volumes of all-day tasks, leaving very little time or energy to write insightful things and/or punchbowl-crapping jokes.

That's not the only component, of course. It varies from day to day. Suffice it to say that there are days when a blank page is an unspeakably forebidding gulf. I can dive into that gulf out of duty — like for clients — but I don't have a duty to you, gentle reader, as it turns out.

I could talk more about that. Certainly other people do, and have, and I admire them for it. But recently I feel less inclined to talk about personal things. I've always been more of a life-details slut than my co-bloggers, which very arguably represents good judgment on their part. I'm pretty sure Patrick and David and Clark haven't had web pages put up accusing them of being probable child molesters and trash-talking about their families. Yes, my inclination to write about some things is impaired by the fact that through my writing here, and related pro bono activites, I've accumulated a small but noisy number of vile and bad-crazy stalker-trolls. Even when I am moved to write about something personal, I pause and think — how might these trolls use this against me? Even if I write only metaphorically —

– will the troll-stalkers be incorporating it into their deranged and threatening faxes to my managing partner, or sending it to the California State Bar, or writing odd web pages about it linked to my name? My preferred response is "screw you, I'm writing it anyway." But that's not where I am just at the moment. Not today.

I'll be back. My hiatus will end — in part when this surge of work ebbs. Other things, too, have their natural ebb and flow.

For now, tell me this: are there things that you won't write about now because of your online experiences? Have things happened to you online that have made you more circumspect in what you blog or otherwise write about?

Edit: By the way, I am way, way behind on responding to correspondence. I like correspondence. I appreciate it. I hope to do better with it. Please feel free to re-send if you did not get an answer.

Ryoanji garden. Photo by japan-guide.com.

In the northwest of Kyoto, in the Temple of the Dragon at Peace (Ryōan-ji), stands a garden where only the viewer grows. It is a rock garden— the greatest rock garden in the world. Since the late 1400s it has been tended daily by Zen monks in the service of those who go there to see what is or is not to be seen.

Ryoan-ji, concentric circles and lines, Blogodisea.com

The monks rake the rocks into straight lines where the large stones are absent, and they rake them into concentric circles where the large stones are present. The net effect is of an ocean's regular waves lapping gently against every shore in a tiny archipelago, except that nothing is moving.

A rock garden such as this is an example of the art of karesansui, which is often translated "dry landscape" but which etymoliterally means "dry mountain water"; the evocation of land and sea is explicit.

There are many ways to interpret this garden and its elements.

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Free-Range Kids offers a story of a man briefly detained by a police officer because (allegedly) somebody reported him as a potential kidnapper of his own daughter, who was pulling at his hand as they walked:

The cop gets out of his car, says “Sir, please step away from the child,” then proceeds to crouch down and ask her if “everything is okay.”

After re-asking a few times, getting a more and more nervous “yes” each time, he stands up and informs me that someone had called 911 reporting what looked like a young girl being abducted. My daughter and I both explained what was really happening, and not only did he not even apologize, he chastised ME for not being, and I quote verbatim here, “More thankful someone was watching out for my daughter.”

As numerous commenters at Free-Range Kids and at Reason point out, a competent officer could have handled that encounter in a far less intrusive manner. But the problem is not merely that the officer used authority and the threat of force where friendliness would have done the trick: it's the officer's entitled parting shot, the suggestion that we mere civilians should be thankful for the irrational fears of our fellows and the willingness of police to overreact to them. We should be happy that people will call the cops on us because our children yank at our hands as we walk, and grateful that police will detain us as a result.

I've been lucky on this one so far: though my kids don't look like me, nobody's called the cops on me yet. I've gotten odd looks and suspicious stares in public, but no police interventions. Other people with multiracial families are not so lucky, and, like the man in the Free Range Kids story, have encountered law enforcement entitlement and resentment of criticism.

There's a few problematical trends going on here. The first is the sick culture of fear, encouraged by the media (because fear is lucrative, and accurate contextual reporting is hard) and by law enforcement and politicians (because fear leads to more power for them). That culture has led us to accept, uncritically, the existence of an ever-growing level of danger to ourselves and our children, even if actual evidence supports the opposite. The second problematical trend is the culture of self-esteem and self-congratulation — the notion that our feelings (including feelings of irrational fear and suspicion) are to be coddled and celebrated and treated as legitimate whether or not they are premised on fact. Law enforcement and politicians deliberately harness this phenomenon through the "if you see something, say something" campaign, which explicitly encourages people to indulge in flights of fancy about how innocent and innocuous events might be sinister. The third problematical trend is the "Think of the Children!" mentality, the regrettably widely accepted premise that things done to protect children ought not be questioned, even if the things are utterly irrational and have no actual salutary effect on the well-being of children. Finally, the fourth problematical trend is the culture of entitlement among cops — the feeling that mere civilians ought to take what they dish out, shut up, and like it.

Anyone who has ever walked with a young child knows that young children struggle, tug against your hand, yank your arm, and generally behave in a deranged fashion. The cops, hysterics, and Mrs. Grundys of the world want us to accept the premise better safe than sorry — the premise that it's a good thing that some person saw a little girl tugging at a man's arm and vaulted to the conclusion "kidnapper!", and a good thing that a police officer followed up with a show of authority and force. Too many people agree. But I dissent. I don't think it's a good thing. I think it promotes dependence on government, increased law enforcement power, and the normalization of irrationality. I think that the facts do not support the supposition that hordes of kids will be abducted if Mrs. Grundy exercises self-control and critical thinking, or if the cops do. I think that we have been terrified into a lamentably cringing and servile condition. I am not "thankful that someone is looking out" for my kids; I am disgusted that someone wants my kids to be as irrationally fearful and dependent as they are.