fantasy, feminism, and a Song of Ice and Fire

I was halfway through E.D. Kain's post defending George RR Martin and his Song of Ice and Fire against charges of sexism, when I thought I should read the post where the charges were actually presented, by Sady Doyle on the Tiger Beatdown. I found most of the arguments wanting, and I was put off by the number of cheap shots from what I thought was a willful misreading of the books. Good points brought up were drowned out by bad points. (Minor spoilers throughout.)

For example, she blows off Danaerys as a potential strong female character because she represents western domination over brown people with funny names and customs. Good point: Dany takes on a White Savior role, and that's a racist cliche. But the point is muddied (though certainly not invalidated): Yes she is white, but she never even knew Westeros. And, while Westeros doesn't have slavery, it is not exactly presented as civilised itself. If Dany ever makes it to Westeros, she's going to heartily disapprove of what she finds there as well, and her bleeding heart that I love will compel her to try to reform Westerosi civilization, to which she is thus far a stranger. Another thing, she's not exactly successful in her savior role, which may or may not mitigate the criticism. And then I'm just befuddled as to what Doyle thinks is an appropriate ethical response to slavery:

Daenerys: Oh, here we fucking go. Daenerys, you see, has discovered that the mystical, barbaric cities of the Orient have one particularly barbaric custom of which she disapproves heartily. That custom? Is slavery. And so, Daenerys must save these other cultures from themselves, by going city to city and systematically destroying them, imposing her own standards upon them all. Here’s a problem, though: We, the European and/or American readers, also know slavery to be a bad thing. And here is how we know this: White people enslaved people of color. For generations. We brutalized people of color, we institutionalized the rape of people of color, we committed genocide against people of color, we devastated the cultures of people of color. And here is how we white people rationalized that: We told ourselves that these people of color were barbaric, that they were savages, that European standards should be universal, and that we were saving these people from themselves. So, for those keeping track: The rationale behind Daenerys’s campaign to abolish slavery? IS THE RATIONALE THAT CREATED SLAVERY. Daenerys: Mystic Dragon Land’s leading producer of UGH.

A couple more examples. Catelyn is also blown off as a strong female character despite her considerable agency because she is overwhelmingly concerned about protecting her children. Is it feminist to be unconcerned about the safety of your children? Ned was also concerned about his children, and forsook his valued and annoying honor to protect them.

Very good point: Cersei is the most explicitly feminist character in the books and she is portrayed as evil and entirely unsympathetic. Not so good point: Martin is sexist because Catelyn and Cersei, female characters with strong agency, continually fail in their endeavors. But this is in the context of a story where all the characters, males included, often catastrophically fail. Jon and Dany appear especially blessed in this regard through the end of book four, where Doyle stops her analysis. But in book five it's not clear at all that even they are winning the future.

Then there was this from Doyle in the comment section,

@Trolls, people explaining why George R.R. Martin isn’t sexist. Your names, thus far, have been:

John G. [deleted for rudeness]
John D.
Paul
E.D., who runs a blog on “Gentlemen” [deleted for blog spam]
Jake [deleted for starting off with "Sady=cunt"]
Alex

I’m noticing a theme here, but what can I say? I am but a young girl who knows little of blog war. And tends to think women are in a better position to explain What Is Sexist than men are.

This is undoubtedly true (she does after all write on a well-trafficked feminist blog and, as a woman, can grok  patriarchal biases better than I ever possibly could). But this is a shortcut that shuts down the conversation. I certainly didn't feel welcome commenting after that. If a male is intrinsically incapable of contributing valid criticism of a feminist critique, then what is the point of a male trying to understand the critique at all? And does this not also invalidate the contribution of males who concurred with the feminist critique? Yes, I recognize that I am inviting ridicule here. "Aw, the privileged white male feels invalidated!" And to be fair, I checked back later and there was a pretty reasonable discussion going on in the comment thread, with men and women on both sides of the issue. The fact that she has to deal with real trolls hurling epithets casts a dark cloud over this whole conversation.

This is all sad because I think a feminist critique of GRRM's books is perfectly warranted. Here are some thoughts after reading a couple other posts found by googling "feminist critique song of ice and fire".

As mentioned, I think Cersei is a really strong female character. But she's painted as completely unsympathetic. This would be fine, indeed it would count as a net plus to have a strong female villain, if there was another explicitly feminist character who was more sympathetic. She still appears to be evolving somewhat in the series, so maybe this will all change.

Martin missed an opportunity with Asha's sex scene in book five. SPOILER The scene is early on portrayed as rape, but it turns out he is her boyfriend, so it's "okay". My complaint is that if he wanted to write an attempted rape scene, why not allow her to fight off an actual and uncontroversial villain? Better yet, why not take the opportunity to show a strong female character engaging in and enjoying transparently consensual sex? She is a pretty strong female character over all, as a woman captain in a man's world, complete with men who seem to really respect her.

The lesbianism in the series is bullshit. First, Dany and her servant girl get in on occasionally, so she's bisexual, which is just fine. But she clearly is most attracted to men. This is all well and good, as bona fide bisexuals absolutely exist in the real world. But this falls flat if there is no example of bona fide lesbians in a story that spans several thousand pages. This is probably said better by Prickly Woman:

Two lesbian interactions. Dany and her handmaid...for Dany it was portrayed as happening because she needed a man but didn't have one. Lesbianism as temporary, not serious, to be replaced by heterosexual interactions. Cersei and Taena was all about Cersei wishing she were a man. Lesbianism again as poor substitute for someone who just really wants a penis, whether to possess it or to be penetrated by it. Not cool, my man.

The male homosexuality is at least apparent, though not as developed as it could be, between Renly and the Knight of Flowers. And of course, the Red Viper, my very favorite character, was a bisexual male.

That's all I've got for now, but I am very interested in reading more feminist (and other literary) critiques of Martin's books.

on the need for a cosmotarianism

Michael Clemens has reviewed the available literature and estimated the potential economic gains from removing barriers to international migration in a working paper titled "Economics and Emigration: Trillion Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" The money quote:

The gains from eliminating migration barriers dwarf—by an order of magnitude or two—the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of 50–150 percent of world GDP.

This is a stupendous amount of wealth generated merely for doing the right thing and removing coercive barriers to freedom of movement. If a technical invention had similar effects, it would be lauded as revolutionary and the inventors would earn a page in the history books.

But the world lacks an adequate framework for receiving this big effing idea. Simply put, who cares? Which ideological group will take this information and bear its message in large fonts on their banners while chanting an annoying but difficult to forget rhyming couplet? Now, there are organizations, including the Center for Global Development, which employs Dr. Clem, and proud we are of all of them. But there are no movements.

This comes to mind perhaps because I'm currently reading a history of Communism by Archie Brown. Communism got many things catastrophically wrong but also got one thing right. Brown describes the "existence of, and sense of belonging to, an international Communist movement" to be a defining feature of Communism. The familiar motto was "Workers of the world, unite!" Communist doctrine did not do away with tribalism altogether, but it reoriented tribalism from the usual ties of blood and race and nation to the abstract economic concept of class. Class transcended ethnicity and national identity. Communists thought a worldwide utopia was possible (inevitable, actually) and worked toward it in their own misguided way. Seeing how powerful feelings of national loyalty often are, that's quite something. Communism had people out in the streets for global justice.

I lie awake at night fantasizing about a popular movement that combines the universalism of Communism with actual good ideas. My biases as they are, I think most of the good ideas are liberaltarian ideas. I think it's really important to realize all the nice things we've got here in the democratic, developed world, including massive wealth and health (by historical standards), civil quiet (the occasional London riot is something I think we can live with) and an ever-expanding plenitude of enriching options for our private lives. I say liberaltarian because the developed world is one largely designed by modern liberals and progressives, one of social safety nets, democratic government, and equal rights for women and minorities (in principle if not yet in fact). Libertarianism can provide necessary tweaks in the form of market-savvy solutions, a greater awareness of the public choice limitations of democracy, and civil liberties absolutism.

But the good ideas of liberals and libertarians too often stop at the border. At present, most discussions of policy pay attention to the effects on our neighbors only insofar as there will be repercussions back on us. To be America-centric for a moment, consider the 34,000 Mexicans who have died in the drug war, much (not all) of which can be laid at the feet of America's illiberal drug laws. The number gets very little traction in public discourse because they are dead Mexicans and not dead Americans. But Mexicans are human beings with passions, hopes, hobbies, and families who grieve at the loss of loved ones just as much as we do; this number should evoke roughly ten times the shock and horror of the 9/11 tragedy. Something similar can be said for the fatality statistics of our current wars. One hears the number of American soldiers slain more often than the number of Iraqis or Afghans, despite the latter being at least an order of magnitude more gruesome. Most of the gains Michael Clem has estimated will accrue to the migrants themselves and all by itself that is a powerful reason to get out of the way of their migration and their gains.

We should extend our awareness, our ethical considerations, and our utilitarian calculations to the globe. We should be not just liberaltarians but cosmotarians, and ask not What is good for our country? but instead What is good for humanity? Unfortunately this doesn't lend itself to catchy slogans. People of the world, unite!

a disturbing Dance with Dragons

This is a post concerning George R.R. Martin's new addition to a Song of Ice and Fire, but I'm going to try to keep it vague and basically free of spoilers. Fair warning all the same.

Martin's series is well known for its gritty realism. I often point to the brutality as a selling point. It's refreshing to read a story where even central characters are vulnerable to death and disfigurement. Aside from grieving for the affected characters, I have been able to breezily read through the gruesomeness of Martin's earlier books. Dashing babies' heads against the wall, ubiquitous rape, dismemberment, plain-old wanton slaughter--all of these things are just par for the course in a Dark Age world, I guess.

But Martin has really kicked it up a notch with a Dance with Dragons, so much so that I was uncomfortable reading some chapters. These chapters are from the perspective of a character whose mind has been shattered by torture. He has been trained to think of himself as a pet of his master. He is not allowed to wash or change clothes from the rags he was given when first captured. He is forced to sleep with dogs and he shares their food. The fact that the reader sees the story unfold from this character's perspective drives home the depth of the psychic damage. He has been given a new name, and the character cannot bring himself to vocalize his birth name, even within his own brain. And of course there was a physical component as well. Part of his training involved the slow amputation of a number of fingers and toes. And he lives in constant fear of losing another finger or toe, as well as feeling once again the flensing knife of one of his master's torturers.

For the first couple chapters of this, I felt it was gratuitous. To follow the story, does the reader really need to be inside the head of this suffering shell of a human being? Do we need the paranoia and pain firsthand? Maybe, maybe not; I'm still not sure. But after my initial misgivings, I remembered that torture is still with us in the modern world, with a recent regime of the world's most powerful hegemon torturing captives and the subsequent regime countenancing that policy by refusing to uphold the rule of law by refusing to investigate war crimes. This may not be an isolated incident, as we are arguably moving backward in the court of public opinion. As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before, a relatively recent poll found a majority of young people think that torture is sometimes justified. This, when I imagine most of us fifteen years ago just assumed that torture was one of those human evils consigned long ago to the dust bin of history, something we would collectively feel embarrassed about, laughing at the ridiculous, transparent arguments that somehow beguiled our ethically slapstick forebears. Like slavery.

Now that the series is a big hit on HBO, I wonder about how different aspects of the story will play out on the screen. Will viewers be able to distinguish these scenes from the torture porn of movies like the Saw franchise? I think so. By the time a Dance with Dragons is beamed into homes everywhere, viewers will have followed the suddenly dehumanized character for four seasons, through highs and lows. The character is no Ned Stark. He has some nasty sins darkening his conscience, but he does have a conscience. The reader at least sees how he grapples with his misdeeds. There is a wealth of context and nuance in the character before he is tortured into his current state so the reader/viewer remembers his humanity even if the character himself does not.

Why not a primary challenge?

Conor Friedersdorf suggests that those on the left who are disappointed with Obama's presidency should mount a primary challenge.

President Obama won't face a serious primary challenge prior to Election 2012, but that isn't because he has governed as the left would've wanted. He is trying to keep American troops in Iraq beyond his own withdrawal deadline. His executive power claims are every bit as bad, and sometimes more extreme, than the excesses the left blasted when Bush was responsible for them. The prison at Guantanamo Bay remains open. Warantless surveillance on innocent Americans continues. Whistleblowers are in greater legal jeopardy than they were. The economy is terrible. Health-care reform was more corporatist than progressives would've preferred. We're now waging an illegal war in Libya that'll cost over a billion dollars, even as we prepare deep cuts to social welfare programs. Despite promises to the contrary, the FBI is still raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in jurisdictions where they're legal under state law. Promised advances in government transparency haven't materialized.

The left would be justified in lashing out, given the Grand-Canyon-sized chasm that separates the rhetoric of candidate Obama from the behavior of President Obama. By and large, however, they've kept quiet about the abuses and unlawful behavior of the man who occupies the White House, with a few notable exceptions, compared to their volume and passion during his predecessor's tenure. That's partly because they've focused their attacks on the tea party, and politicians like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. The truth of the matter is that even if a conservative like Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the soft spoken advocate of a truce on social issues, won the nomination, the vast majority of liberals would support President Obama's reelection anyway.

          [...]

What I'd like to see, apart from everything else, is a return to strong primary challenges against sitting presidents. It's easy to understand why they don't happen. But hard to argue that we wouldn't be better off if President Bush had been forced to worry a bit more about fiscal hawks, and President Obama was worried a bit more about anti-corporatists and the anti-war, civil libertarian left. 

I couldn't agree more. Since America's two-party political system is firmly entrenched by regulation, custom, and inertia, the primary challenge is just about the only possibility we have to avoid voting merely for either Bad or Worse, regardless of your political slant. I don't understand why this option isn't used more often.

Say what you want about the Tea Party (I'm not a fan), they have not been afraid to prop up their own homegrown candidates against those proffered by the Republican establishment. Sometimes they've won. And they've forced the Republican party to pay attention to their pet issues, regardless of what you may think of those issues. Now is a fine time for progressives and civil libertarians to do the same.

If no one from the left challenges Obama (and the Democratic establishment more generally), he will continue to abuse the progressives, the civil libertarians, the anti-war movement, gay rights advocates, anti-Prohibitionists, etc. He will continue to treat those groups with contempt because they simply have no where else to go. Even if a primary challenger lost, it would be a statement, maybe even a wake-up call for Democratic leaders in the future. Especially if a lefterly groundswell offered a host of primary challengers, not just a sacrificial lamb for the presidency.

The abused constituencies are held in bondage to the Democratic party because they are terrified of anti-choice, creationist Republicans who want to dismantle the welfare state (by passing legislation like Medicare Part D). This is clearly a dilemma. But what is the worst that could happen? If the progressive/civil libertarian champion loses, the disaffected can always come crawling back; Obama won't turn their votes away. Or is there fear that any challenger would necessarily be less electable than the sitting president? Well that's a risk. But I would rather lose with dignity and send a strong signal than wring my hands in limp despair.

A kernel for such a broad primary assault could be the War on Drugs, or at least the war on pot. A majority of Democrats support marijuana legalization, and yet few establishment Democrats do. (Although the recent bill cosponsored by Ron Paul and Barney Frank is a promising development). And amid the growing number of states legalizing marijuana for medicinal use, the Obama administration has continued to raid medical marijuana dispensaries compliant with state law. But of course there is no shortage of Obama administration failures to be outraged about as a liberal.

drugs: good and good for you

Since this month (especially yesterday) marks the fortieth anniversary of Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs, I would feel remiss if I didn't blog something about it. My inclination in attacking the War on Drugs is typically to focus on its most soul-crushing outrages, like the racism, the paramilitarization of the police, or the assault on the 4th amendment. For more information, the ACLU has been doing the Lord's work and blogging about drug war excesses all month.

With the corpses of prohibition piled so high, it's easy to lose track of the fact that many drugs don't even pose the social problems laid at their feet. I was reminded of this upon reading this Kevin Drum's piece on psychoactive mushrooms at Mother Jones.

But now for the most interesting result: psilocybin produces not only mystical experiences, but joy, happiness, and positive social effects. And it does it for a long time: in followup interviews 14 months after the study was completed, nearly all the subjects still reported positive changes in their lives, especially if they received their psilocybin in increasing dosages. (Half the study volunteers got the highest dose first and worked down, and half started with the lowest does and worked up. All volunteers also got a placebo tossed in at some point.)

There is a reason people throughout history and all over the world have sought out mind-altering substances. Like art, literature, or a good film, drugs entertain us, and can even change the way we think about the world. In many cases, such as 'shrooms, they're only about as dangerous as a good novel (maybe a hardback, to be fair). And they're fun, remember, which is the oft-forgotten but necessary consideration of any proper cost-benefit analysis. If ingestion of a particular drug induces good feelings then, all else being equal, that drug should be considered a good thing, like apple pie.

True, some drugs, like alcohol, are significantly more dangerous than others. But mushrooms and marijuana are virtually harmless. It's important to point this out, since the drug war propagandists have a bit of a communication advantage over the academics doing experiments and drearily tabulating data to ascertain the real-world effects of drug use.

So while it's not as enraging as reading about 30,000 Mexicans killed as a consequence of prohibition, we should remember that at its most fundamental, the War on Drugs is an effort to prevent regular folks from having a fun time in the way they choose.

scripture and early Christians

For the past couple weeks I've been reading Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch. It's a massive tome of a book, so I'm only a couple hundred pages in, and thus a couple hundred years into post-Jesus history. Two related topics have really struck me: the nature of scripture and the diversity of early Christian belief. I never really thought about these things back in the day when I was a believer, and so I assume your typical, theologically untutored believer also hasn't thought much about them.

Admittedly, I was a lazy Christian growing up,* but I expect my own experiences with scripture are fairly common, even among life-long believers. When I was a wee believer I more or less didn't read the Bible at all. I absorbed everything I knew about Christianity from the culture around me: my parents, Sunday school, television, other books, etc. These included vague ideas like the existence of Heaven and Hell, and the necessity of "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior" to enter the former and avoid the latter. God was all-knowing and all-powerful. And benevolent. Things like this. I just assumed all this was in the Bible, and the Bible was written by people inspired by God.

I had a more sustained exposure to scripture during my high school years. I must have read a lot of passages, especially from the New Testament, during the sermons and the young adult Sunday school sessions, but to be honest I don't remember much of which selections were covered. This was all just the Bible, mostly amorphous except for the distinction between the Old and New Testaments. I guess I knew that the OT was a history of the Jewish people. And the NT covered Jesus's time. And Revelation was a vision of the future. Even when I heard the full names of the NT books, like Paul's Letter to So-and-So, I didn't really stop to grok that this was a letter, like the kind one person writes to another. These books--letters or whatever--were the inspired word of God. I would ignore the broader context and mull over whatever point the pastor was trying to make.

Reading Robert Wright's book and now McCulloch's, you can't help but really grapple with what scripture is. Those NT works really are letters. They're letters from early Christian churches to one another. Why are they writing each other? Because they are trying to figure out what the hell it means to be Christian. No one knew at the time. They were letters written a few decades after Jesus' death. And the gospels, those recounts of the life and times of Jesus, were written after many of these letters (the whole Bible is completely out of order, turns out). As there were more gospels and letters written than are included in any one version of the Bible, different churches argued and ultimately disagreed on which ones should be deemed scripture.

This whole process took a couple centuries, and clearly there was no hard and fast reason for it to stop, but now there is a lock-in effect, whereby what is scripture is scripture, and everything else is literature written about scripture. It's interesting that there is no inherent difference between the scribblings of later theologians (like Augustine or Rowan Williams), the communications of modern church leaders like the Roman Catholic Pope (or the Pope of Alexandria), and what modern believers think of as scripture. Summary point: scripture is a lot more organic than the naive idea I had growing up, where I took it more or less as is.

The other big thing I got from reading about the early churches is just how incredibly diverse they were. These churches weren't just arguing things like whether Jesus had two natures or one nature (whatever that means). They were arguing about whether they were still Jews or not. Gnostics believe(d) that Jesus was sent by an entirely different god to save us from the flawed creation of the wicked Jewish god. Ethiopian Christians revere(d) Pontius Pilate, of all people, for their own peculiar reasons. One of my favorite theologians I've read about, Origen, thought that all mankind would be saved, and not just Christians (remember, this guy's writings could have been scripture). He viewed Christ as subordinate to God. And he also, like me, never could figure out the point of the Holy Spirit, ultimately leaving that as an exercise for the reader. Reading McCulloch, you appreciate how wildly different modern Christianities would be if history had taken a slightly different course at various times.

As I assume 95% of my readers are non-believers, I'm not really trying to convince anyone of anything here. I'm just getting a kick out of the history, and recommend the book as a good way to learn a little western history from the angle of Christianity. I blogged about Robert Wright's book here.

*Lazy only in some ways. I internalized hard the notion that people I cared about were destined to suffer for eternity, and that it was mighty unfair for people born in other parts of the world to suffer the same fate. And I had a fairly sophisticated argument for how free will and an omnipotent deity were mutually incompatible.

a line in the sand, Dude

With all of the celebratory spirit over the elimination of Osama bin Laden, it is worthwhile to take stock of the costs of America's response to the attacks bin Laden directed. And we should reflect on how America has changed over the last ten years. At Reason, Radley Balko offers a handy, quick-and-dirty list of the ways America has changed for the worse, at least from a civil libertarian perspective:

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
• The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are implicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
• The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
• Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
• The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
• The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
• Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
• American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
• Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
• The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

Well, those are some bullet points, but I have no idea if they matter. Perhaps one in ten thousand people stumbling across this blog (as if I had that kind of traffic!) would change his mind from defending the behavior of the American national security apparatus to a more skeptical posture. Moreover, for better or worse I recognize I am a bit far from the mainstream in my attitudes on civil liberties and military action, as is Mr. Balko. Maybe the bullet points above fall well within the range of appropriate responses to terrorism.

But there has to be a line at some point, right? So here is a question for those who think the policy responses of the American government to 9/11 have been well worth it: Where is the policy line which, upon its crossing, you will decide that the government has gone too far, and has become more fearsome than terrorists? Does that line exist? Is it, in principle, possible that America could become no longer a free country? If America is not just free by definition, what would cause you to decide the country (its people, its history, its culture, etc) you love has lost its way, and is no longer free, however you define the term?

Stretch your imagination. What if a close friend or neighbor, whose character you would vouch for without hesitation, was picked up by national security agents and detained indefinitely. And further, she was given no recourse to trial by her peers. By the way, this exercise works best if you conjure up the face of an actual person in your mind. Now, it's possible that your whole relationship with this person had been a sham. And it's possible that these national security people really know their business. They have information you'll never see. And maybe no one will be able to see their information, because an information leak would just be too dangerous.

Maybe this person you thought was your friend is summarily executed. Maybe she was just too dangerous to wait for proper procedure. The national security people must have good information, right? Torture? The national security people need good information, right? What if you know other people who know people who have been terminated by national security agents in a similar way? What if these numbers keep cropping up?

Hypothetically, what if an entire class of people is shown to be statistically more likely to produce terrorists, or at least to aid and abet terrorism. For national security, these people are removed to ... well, you don't really know where or what. The question: is America still a free country if this comes to pass? If this happens, are the brave men and women in uniform still fighting and dying for a good cause. Or does the fact that they're fighting and dying bravely prove that America is still a free country? What if your son or wife is one of those soldiers. Is it possible, in principle, that he or she could die, bravely, for a bad cause?

I don't mean to say these things are happening. I just want to highlight the notion that surely there is a line somewhere. Each individual's line will be different. I believe it is a valuable exercise for every citizen of every nation to ponder just where his own personal line is.