Herere two stories that neatly capture much of whats wrong with contemporary liberalism. Both from this mornings L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, use laexaminer/laexaminer):
First, this story on the UN AIDS bureaucracy:
A U.N. special envoy on AIDS warned Wednesday that a war against Iraq would eclipse humanitarian efforts around the world, and 29.4 million Africans with the disease would be among those suffering the most.
“Wars divert attention, wars consume resources, wars ride roughshod over external calamities,” said Stephen Lewis, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s representative for AIDS issues in Africa. “People with HIV/AIDS are in a race against time. What they never imagined was that over and above the virus itself, there would be a new adversary, and that adversary would be war.”
Lewis said that perhaps only a month remained for the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a consortium of nations and nongovernmental organizations supported by the U.N., to raise the estimated $7 billion it needs for this year and 2004.
“The response to the fund has been abysmal,” he said. “It is inexplicable and terribly disappointing. We haven’t had a contribution to the fund since Germany gave $50 million last July.”
“What is required is a combination of political will and resources,” he said. “You will forgive me for the strong language. But … the time for polite, even agitated entreaties is over. This pandemic cannot be allowed to continue, and those who watch it unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity must be held to account.
“There may yet come a day,” Lewis said, “when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with this particular version of crimes against humanity.”
Listen carefully. If you dont support his efforts, you arent wrong, you arent misinformed, you arent even immorally callous. Youre guilty of crimes against humanity, just like those tried and convicted at Nuremberg.
And then this gem about anti-smoking activists who intend to use their leverage against poor people by denying them housing unless they ‘behave’:
The Los Angeles City Council, which pioneered smoking bans by prohibiting people from lighting up in restaurants, theaters and workplaces, was urged Wednesday by a group of health activists to ban smoking in half of the new affordable apartment buildings subsidized by the city.
With the city launching an effort to provide $100 million a year to subsidize the construction of affordable housing, council members assured representatives of the Task Force for Smoke Free Housing that they would hold a hearing on the proposal next month.
“A person who smokes can live in the building. It’s just that they don’t smoke in the building, in the same way we have smokers who eat in our restaurants. They just don’t smoke there,” said Esther Schiller, executive director of Smokefree Air For Everyone.
Under the proposal made by the activists, the city would award housing trust funds to affordable apartment projects based on the requirement that there be an equal number of units that allow smoking and that do not allow smoking.
The city already prohibits some substances in housing such as lead-based paint, said Marisol Romero, executive director of the Hispanic/Latino Tobacco Education Network.
“Smoke-free buildings are not about evicting people who are smokers,” Romero said. “Smoke-free buildings really are about giving people options, and letting people know in advance that if they plan to live in a certain building that this building is smoke-free.”
Look, I hate smoking. My father died of vascular disease doubtless made worse by the cigarettes he smoked for twenty years. After I was divorced, I convinced my sons to put on a campaign to pressure their mom to quit. Ive never smoked a cigarette in my life. But damn, this is offensive.
Liberalism doesn’t have to be this way, I’m positive. It is possible for government to help people without tribunals and pecksniffery.
I just haven’t managed to articulate how it would work yet…
How about by not letting it give in to its worst excesses?
That said, I’m not sure I’m entirely against the “Don’t smoke in the house rule,” for the simple fact that when smokers move out, it is more likely that the carpet and curtains will need to be replaced, along with who knows what else. Have you ever stayed in a non-smoking hotel room that really wasn’t?
Maybe they should be focusing their efforts on the *cost* of people smoking in the apartments, not on the morality of smoking.
The reason you haven’t worked it out yet is that it doesn’t fit liberalism to help people without forcing them to conform to an outsider’s view of how they should live their lives.
Helping people is not what liberalism is about. It’s an excuse for the real issue, forcing people to do what is (the liberals think) is right.
One major burr under the liberal saddle is all those Joe Lunchbuckets having a good time, living well and enjoying themselves without, or despite, the advice and permission of their betters.
Urban sprawl isn’t an environmental problem. It’s what happens when a lot of the lower orders can afford to do what they want, which is live in a single-family home with a good-sized lawn.
Can’t have that.
See Tom Wolfe on the subject.
Hey, I’m a long-time smoker. I essentially reside, work, eat, and travel in smoke-free environments, and you know what?
I like it that way. I haven’t smoked in my residence (or, indeed, anyone’s residence) in fifteen years. When I decide it’s time to chop another three minutes off my life-span, I go outside, away from doors and windows.
Smoking indoors leads, as pointed out, to the accumulation of foul-smelling residue in carpets, on furniture, on drapes, and on clothes. It’s disgusting.
Having said that, I think smoking indoors, or not, in a person’s home should be a personal decision.
If these buildings are so poorly constructed that someone smoking next door to me pollutes my residence, then that’s a whole new disgrace, but subsidized housing, like *any* “rental” housing should be smoke-free in public areas and units should be cleaned between tenants. Carpet and drapery can be cleaned and buckets of paint aren’t expensive, so walls should be repainted anyhow.
I agree that this is “activism gone mad” but I’m not sure I’d qualify this as “liberalism at fault.”
This is why I don’t like labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” My impression is that, in much of what is called the “liberal” platform today, there is a decidedly paternalistic, authoritarian, “we-know-best” bent. Hey, there’s no monopoly on that attitude (like John Ashcroft likes to remind us every month or so), but between unaccountable international tribunals, campus speech codes, intrusive regulatory agencies, etc, etc.
I’m sorry, I digress. The reason I dislike the labels is that, when one suggests to a self-identified “liberal” or “conservative” that they jettison a particularly retarded position, one occasionally hears the “but that’s not a liberal/conservative thing to do” ‘reason,’ which is really no reason at all. That’s a kind of irrational self-identification, and it has no place among people claiming to be reasonable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d understand perfectly if somebody said “that’s not a decent thing to do” or “that’s not a Christian thing to do,” because when somebody says that, they’re making reference to a whole set of concepts dealing with how one lives one’s life. So far as I can tell contemporary “liberalism” and “conservatism” are camps of like-minded people, not coherent philosophical approaches to government or life. I have yet to be convinced otherwise.
> Maybe they should be focusing their efforts on the *cost* of people smoking in the apartments, not on the morality of smoking.
Can’t do that.
CA has decided that mandatory cleaning fees for rental housing are wrong. Never mind that this policy is effectively a subsidy of short-term tenants by long-term tenants.
Also, subsidized housing is SOLD to the occupants in many cases. As a result, they already pay the actual costs (in reduced sales price when the sell).
Andy, affordable housing is something I have some substantive knowledge of; and very few of the ‘affordable’ units are for-sale.
Anne, I like the “activism gone mad” moniker; I’m going to think on that for a bit…
Ann, as a liberal who wants to win and to do good once we win, I’m trying to pry these people off my back…ignoring them won’t help.
A.L.
Huh, wha…? Ignoring who?
Amen…this is liberalism run amok. Or Berkeley.
I fully favour no smoking in public and work places, but private dwellings are private, whether purchased, rented, low-income or not.
> Andy, affordable housing is something I have some substantive knowledge of; and very few of the ‘affordable’ units are for-sale.
Things must be different up here in NoCal.
Whenever a local govt has to be greased, a few affordable units are part of the greasing. If the rest of the units are sold, which is most of the time, the affordable units are also sold. (I suspect that they’re sold to insiders, but that’s how greasing works.)
Note that this has nothing to do with Section 8.
How expensive is it to “smoke-proof” individual apartments? I know that the hotels I’ve stayed at tend to break smoking down by floors, which seems to work well. Would that be dis-allowed by the proposal?
If under this proposal, 50% of the subsidized housing units are available to people who wish to smoke in the home, and just under 20% of the population of Los Angeles smokes, how likely is it that any individual smoker will either be denied housing or be inconvenienced by the unavailability of smoking space?
How much effect does the presence of environmental smoke have on a smoker’s ability to quit smoking? Given that about 50% of smokers attempt to quit smoking in a given year, how many smokers may view the existence of smoke-free residences as a benefit?
(Statistics from LA County Health Dept. http://lapublichealth.org/ha/reports/habriefs/v3i5_smoke/smokeprev.pdf )
AL, I think that here you are perpetuating in the unfortunate slur, in conflating the liberal and the left. Liberals virtually overlap libertarians when it comes to issues of personal freedom. The further out you go from the liberal center, whether rightward towards conservatism and fascism or leftward towards socialism and a dictatorship of the proletariat, the more authoritarian your politics become. Presumably the anti-smoking folks are indulging in a “leftish” sort of authoritarianism, in contrast to the “rightish” authoritarianism of the drug warriers, but both are examples of illiberalism, not liberalism.
And just what is it that causes you to identify Stephen Lewis as a “liberal”? Are you sure he’s not a democratic socialist, or a socialist? I’m sure you’re aware that these are three quite different political stances. Of course liberals come in a range of flavors, from center-left to center-right, but they are not the inclusive set of everyone who is not a right-winger.
My point is that labels matter, like it or not, and this is a fairly significant definitional issue. Given that you label yourself a liberal, why do you blur the differences between liberals – who, as you must know, occupy the centrist, non-ideological political ground – vs. those clearly to their left? That there is no difference between liberals and leftists is a myth created by the right – mostly in the last twenty or thirty years – because it serves their purposes. In perpetuating it, you aid their cause.
My suggestion: instead of saying “liberal x did a bad thing”, try something like “x, who calls himself a liberal, did an illiberal thing”.
> If under this proposal, 50% of the subsidized housing units are available to people who wish to smoke in the home, and just under 20% of the population of Los Angeles smokes, how likely is it that any individual smoker will either be denied housing or be inconvenienced by the unavailability of smoking space?
Can we exclude other minorities from certain instances of public services using the same argument?
Can we exclude other minorities from certain instances of public services using the same argument?
We can exclude other activities that pose significant health risks to others in the near vicinity, yes.
Wow, no-one even mentoned the AIDS bit. Your priorities are right people.
And if you have the means to treat a fatal disease but don’t release it to the sufferers who can’t afford it-or don’t even let others produce their own copies of it, then is that moral, or right?
But of course, you have a sacred right to intellectual property. In which case, the law is on your side. Which proves once again that you definitely get a generous sized portion at this great table of life if you pay for a big chunk of the meal.
DC–
If you, at tremendous expense, create the means to treat a fatal disease, and are then expected, for moral reasons, to give it away for free, you won’t bother creating the next miracle cure.
So who’s more immoral? He who refuses to give his property away, or he who, by demanding that property be given away, thwarts the creation of still more and better property?
I don’t think that’s a trivial moral calculus at all.