Nudity in Feminism

I recently read an article that posed the question of whether it is appropriate for a feminist to appear nude in public media.  Some argue that public female nudity is inconsistent with feminist thought.  Even among feminists, however, this is not a settled question.  Feminists more closely aligned with male patriarchal oppression theory often argue that female nudity caters to male desire, therefore public female nudity is in complete opposition to the ideals of feminism.  Others, typically more aligned with female sexual liberation and female freedom in general, argue that social taboos against female nudity are oppressive to women, and they make tolerance of public female nudity one of their goals.  There are also more practical ideals, including the fairly conservative idea that women should be allowed to breastfeed in public freely, without any obligation to cover or otherwise obscure the sight of bare breasts from public view.  Who is right though?  Are those who put down feminists who appear nude in public media right that they are hypocrites?  Are social mores against public nudity truly oppressive and harmful to women?  Should public female nudity have exceptions for breastfeeding but nothing else?

For full disclosure, outside of certain kinds of recreation, I personally think that men and women should be held to the same standards of modesty.  I don't mean that women should be allowed to go topless.  I mean that men shouldn't.  The one exception is public breastfeeding.  If it would be unreasonable to forbid an adult from consuming food or drink in a location, it is equally unreasonable to forbid a child or infant from consuming food or drink, even if that may require a woman to expose her breasts.  Beyond that though, if heat is a problem, one can buy better clothes.  If women can get by in hot conditions without having to go around topless, so can men.  I don't want to see men's bare chests any more than a woman wants to see another woman's bare breasts.  With that out of the way, let's continue.

Why is there any association between public female nudity and feminism?  Personally, I have never been able to understand why or how public nudity has anything to do with feminism, aside from the breastfeeding issue.  Feminism is, at its core, about women's rights.  Does forbidding public female nudity really support women's rights?  If not, then no, it isn't hypocritical for a feminist to get naked for a camera.  Morally wrong?  Perhaps, but not hypocritical.  Does allowing public female nudity support women's rights?  I guess if you consider public nudity an important right, maybe, but not really.  I mean, if equal rights is your only concern, then forbidding men from going topless in public would accomplish the same goal, without offending the moral sensibilities of the majority of the population.  Here is what is hypocritical though: Being feminist and putting trivial things like the right to wear less clothing in public ahead of real issues women face, like wage inequality and other workplace discrimination.  It is also hypocritical to be anti-feminist and focus on trivial issues like public nudity to avoid talking about the real issues.  If you have no argument for the real issues, you have no argument at all.  Even feminists don't agree on the public nudity issue, but they all agree on fair treatment in the workplace, even if some may not prioritize that.  The fact is, public nudity is not a real feminist issue, and using a feminist's position on public nudity is not a valid strategy for undermining the feminist's character or dedication to feminism.

Thus far, I have stuck mostly to trivial public nudity, like baring one's chest in public, but this isn't what most arguments on nudity in feminist are about.  What they are about is posing nude for media publications.  This spans the range from underwear model to porn star.  Surely a feminist cannot be a porn star without being a hypocrite.  Why not?  Yes, there is a brand of feminism that is straight up anti-male, but this brand is neither common nor very prominent, and even when it was prominent, it still was not common.  Now days it is not even popular among otherwise zealous feminists.  Anti-male isn't true feminism though.  Feminism is about women's rights.  It is not about denying men rights, privileges, or pleasure.  It is true that porn encourages men to objectify women.  In fact, it is well established fact that the human brain interprets images of nude women as objects where it would interpret images of fully clothed women as people.  (This is generally true for men, and it is also true for a majority of women.  Note, however, that this applies only to a Western audience.  The same kind of studies have not been done on people from cultures where general public nudity is normal and acceptable.)  What does this have to do with feminism though?  Not much, it turns out.  Objectification of women in general is a lot less of a problem than we tend to believe.  Most men and women don't objectify women that are not deliberately presented in a sexual context.  This is not to say that objectification of women isn't wrong or isn't a problem.  It certainly is, and we definitely do it too much in the U.S., though it's worth noting that while it is less of a problem because it is less common we still objectify men too much as well.  The fact is, objectification isn't a women's rights issue.  It is an issue of generally dehumanizing people.  It doesn't just dehumanize the women who are objectified, it also dehumanizes the men and women objectifying them.  Both sides are victims.  Both sides have a responsibility for stopping it.  And as such, it is not a feminist issue; it is a human issue.  A feminist who acts in porn isn't hypocritical to feminism.  She is supporting an industry built around the dehumanization of people, and to be totally honest, men in porn are actually dehumanized far more than women, because they are nothing more than objects for the viewers to imagine themselves in the place of.  Porn might be all sorts of immoral, damaging, and disgusting, but the one thing it isn't is opposed to feminism.

So what about nude art?  First, we need to draw the line between art and pornography.  This line is primarily in the head of viewer.  Porn is any media that is used for the purpose of causing sexual arousal.  Artistic nudity is any other media containing nudity which isn't intended to arouse.  (One might argue a third type of nudity, technical nudity, that is used for the purpose of learning, but this could reasonably be considered artistic nudity as non-nude educational photographs and drawings are generally considered to be a form of art.)  This means that the distinction is with the viewer.  An underwear ad used by a person for the purpose of becoming aroused is pornography for that person, in that instance.  Media created with the intent to arouse may reasonably be considered pornography in general, even if a particular individual is consuming it artistically and not for the purpose of sexual arousal.  Media created with the intent to be artistic and not arousing may reasonably be considered art in general, even if a particular individual uses it to become aroused.  Ultimately though, the distinction between art and porn is in how a person chooses to use it.  When it comes down to it though, none of this is relevant to feminism.  Even nude art is portraying the person as an object.  Nude art is actually more objectifying than porn, which is at least interpersonal.  An artistic image of a nude person is like an image of a beautiful landscape.  The intent is to present the body as an object of beauty, not as a person.  Again though, this is not relevant to feminism.  This is not an issue of women's rights.

In short, feminism and public nudity really are not connected.  The exception is breastfeeding in public, but even that is more about the rights of the babies than the rights of women.  Claiming that feminism promotes the legalization of public female nudity is no more correct than saying a feminist is hypocritical for posing nude for art or porn.  This is all orthogonal to feminism.  Maybe someday women will have workplace equality and workplace discrimination of women will be eliminated.  And when that day comes, maybe the most important thing left for feminism to fight for will be equal rights with men in public dress.  Maybe public female toplessness will be legalized as a result, but maybe instead, public male toplessness will return to being illegal, because it turns out public male toplessness was fairly widely illegal in the U.S. until the 1930s, when a series of cases end up striking down laws and rules banning public male toplessness.  Ironically, we are now having a series of similar cases striking down public female toplessness prohibitions, which some claim is reducing harm to women done by unequal laws.  The reality, however, is that this is all just a distraction from real issues that actually cause women harm.  In short, the association of public female nudity and feminism is doing more harm than good, by distracting from the real issues of feminism that are actually harming women.  The answer to the question of public female nudity and feminism is that they are not related, and trying to relate them is harmful to the goals of feminism.  There is no point even trying to argue with those who cry hypocrisy when a feminist participates in nude or even pornographic media, because that is nothing more than a deliberate distraction.  I am not saying it is morally right for anyone to participate in pornographic media, but whether a person does or not has nothing to do with feminism.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

A landlord sues a tenant for not paying rent four months in a row.  The tenant says the rent was paid on time each of those months.  The landlord's lawyer asks the tenant for some proof that the rent was paid.  The tenant, who is representing herself, says she was not given receipts when she paid the rent, and it was paid in cash, so there are no bank records of the transaction aside from withdrawals for amounts that represent rent as well as some bills.  Because there is no proof the rent was paid, the judge rules that the tenant has to pay the landlord the value of four months rent.

An employee blows the whistle on an OSHA violation where he works.  A week later, he is fired without cause.  He knows that there are anti-retribution laws specifically intended to protect whistle blowers, but he cannot afford a lawyer, so he walks away.  He ends up unemployed for over 6 months, because his previous employer lies about his character when called for references.  He knows he could sue for slander, but again, he cannot afford legal representation, so he just deals with it.

A small video game company comes up with an awesome new game idea.  Partway through public beta testing, a major game company files a lawsuit against them for patent infringement.  The lead designer knows the element in question has been used before, and that it was in a game much older than the large company's patent, but he cannot recall what that game was.  Settling out of court would destroy the company, essentially turning it into a slave of the larger company, so they opt to hire a lawyer.  When the lead designer still cannot remember the name of the game that used the element in question, the judge rules that the small company infringed on the larger company's patent.  Ultimately, the legal costs cause the small company to go bankrupt.


These three stories have several things in common.  The first is that the rich prey on the poor.  In the first story, the landlord uses the legal system to rob the tenant.  In the second, the employer sends a message to its employees, that retribution will be served for reporting labor law violations.  In the third, the big company destroys potential competition using a patent that is not technically valid.  The second thing they have in common is that none of the defending parties have adequate legal representation.  The first two have no representation, and the third does not have sufficient legal representation to do the necessary research to find the prior art that would invalidate the patent.  The third thing they have in common is that the defending parties are all assumed to be guilty unless they can prove their own innocence.  In short, justice is not met, fair legal representation is not available, and the principle of innocence until guilt is proven is violated.

In criminal trials, the U.S. Constitution mandates a legal right to legal council for the defendant.  U.S. criminal courts provide court appointed lawyers for defendants that cannot afford to pay for their own.  This is protected as a legal right.  This right is not extended to civil law though.  This is a problem.  In the above three situations, sufficient legal council was a necessary part of a just outcome, and without that, justice was not served.  In the first, a lawyer might have been able to gain access to the landlords financial records to search for evidence that the rent was paid.  In the second, the lack of legal council was the pivotal factor that ultimately prevented the victim from even pursuing the issue.  In the third, better legal council might have been able to find the prior art that the lead designer could not.  Even in civil cases, fair legal representation is necessary to ensure justice, but in the U.S., only criminal defendants are provided with legal representation.

U.S. law does not actually mandate the idea of innocence until guilt is proven.  Taken together, several Constitutional amendments are interpreted to mean that this principle should be followed, but this really comes down to ambiguous phrases like "fair trial."  Further, these amendments apply only to criminal cases, not to civil cases.  This is also a problem.  Many civil cases place the burden of proof on the defendant.  In other words, the defendant is assumed guilty unless she can prove innocence.  Typically this is a matter of convenience, and it has nothing to do with justice.  It is more convenient for a defendant to produce proof of payment than it is for a prosecutor to prove that payment was not rendered.  It is more convenient to ask the defendant to provide proof of prior art or proof that an idea is common knowledge or otherwise not novel or unique than it is for the prosecutor to prove that no one has ever had the idea before or that the idea is particularly ingenious.  The fact, however, is that doing these things places the burden of proof on the defendant, making the defendant legally guilty unless she can provide proof that she is not.  Not only is this common in civil cases, it is a problem in a majority of civil cases involving wealthy prosecutors suing poor defendants, who cannot afford legal representation.

In the recent past, these two things have been established all over the world as fundamental human rights.  It is widely recognized that trying someone without adequate representation is unfair and morally wrong.  Likewise, it is also widely recognized that the accuser bears the burden of proof, not the accused.  In fact, this was well understood even in some ancient cultures, where an accuser could be put to death, if proof of the accusation could not be established.


The fact is that there is little difference between criminal and civil law.  Both are intended to prevent or mitigate harm.  The only difference is classification and penalty.  In criminal law, the state acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a jury based on codified legal standards.  If the suspect is found guilty, a penalty is selected based on a set of codified standards.  The punishments all restrict the freedom of the convict.  In civil law, an individual or organization acts against the suspect.  The suspect is judged by a judge based on personal opinion and legal precedent.  If the suspect is found guilty, the judge determines a penalty based on the request of the prosecutor and the cost of the damage.  The penalties typically take the form of fines paid to the state and remunerations given to the prosecutor.  The actions prompting a lawsuit can be nearly identical in many cases, with only minor differences.  For example, if you accuse me of stealing money from your pocket, I will go to criminal court.  If I live in your apartment building, and you accuse me of not paying my rent, I will go to civil court, despite the fact that the harm caused may be identical.  Both cases amount to theft.  The circumstances of the theft are different, and this is used as justification to provide counsel for one and not the other and to assume initial innocence in one and initial guilt in the other.  The differences between criminal and civil cases do not justify refusing to provide fair counsel or assuming initial guilt.

Civil law needs two things desperately: Fair representation and innocence until guilt is proven.  These two things are essential parts of a fair justice system, and without them, justice cannot be served, regardless of whether it is criminal or civil court.

Mass Destruction

Long ago, there was a small country consisting primarily of a few large islands.  It sometimes had wars with nearby countries.  During some periods of time, it owned small parts of a large nearby continent.  During other periods, it was limited entirely to its islands.  As time passed and the world changed, larger countries started to assert authority over smaller ones.  Several countries began to work together to maintain the status quo.  These countries eventually decided that this small country of the large islands should not have any territory outside of the islands.  Even when this country did manage to regain territory outside of the islands, the other countries intervened and gave that land to its enemies.  This small country began to feel mistreated.  On the world stage, it was marginalized.  It was treated as a vassal, not as a sovereign nation.  Its leaders began to feel frustrated.

Eventually, an opportunity arose for this small country to assert dominance over its neighbors.  Too long had the land that once belonged to it been controlled by others.  A war of epic proportions was brewing.  There were other countries that had grown tired of the iron fist of the alliance that was attempting to rule the world.  The small country recognized that the timing was perfect for it to show the world that it was a sovereign nation, not some submissive vassal.  While the war proceeded on other fronts, it could retake the lands it had lost so many times before.  The leaders of this country made one fatal mistake though.  They decided that a show of force against their most prominent oppressor would be appropriate.

A devastating attack was planned and carried out against an important military establishment.  The attack had two intents.  The first was revenge for decades of oppression.  The second was the strategic destruction of forces that might be used to intervene in the recapture of their territory.  Unfortunately, they underestimated the power, determination, and brutality of their oppressor.  Full scale war was launched against them.  The naval fleets of the oppressor far outmatched those of the small country.  Because the war did not have strong support from the civilians of the small country, and even its soldiers were beginning to loose morale, the government felt it necessary to force many of its soldiers to fight.  The only way they could successfully destroy the enemy ships was by flying air planes directly into them.  In desperation, pilots were welded into the cockpits of planes and ordered to crash into enemy ships or be executed.  In reaction to this, the oppressor used advanced weapons to destroy two major cities.  Over 100,000 civilians were brutally killed in these attacks.  Only around 20,000 military personnel died in the attacks.  The small country was ultimately not allowed to retain any recaptured territory.  The oppressor maintained a military presence in the country for many years afterwards.

Before or after this time, there has never been a country so brutal as the oppressor.  When the Romans attacked their enemies, they gave civilians the opportunity to swear allegiance to Rome, instead of killing them.  There have been countries that have murdered their own civilians for various reasons, but no other country has caused so much death and destruction, so callously, in such a short amount of time.  Even the oppressor in this story has condemned the wanton murder of civilians in wartime.

Now, the oppressor lives in fear of others who have developed the advanced technology used to cause this mass murder of innocent civilians.  Other countries have discovered and developed this technology, many out of fear of the oppressor.  The oppressor, more than ever, still believes that it has the right to dictate how other countries should use this technology.  It has persuaded or manipulated other countries into destroying their technology for this weapon.  Those countries that refuse are punished with embargoes and other economic sanctions.  And, this is all despite the fact that the only country that has ever used this technology to cause harm is the oppressor.  Many have developed it, but only one has ever been brutal enough to actually use it.


In case it is not obvious, the oppressor is the United States, and the small country is Japan.  The advanced technology is nuclear explosives.  To be clear, I am not trying to justify anyone here, and I am not trying to demonize anyone.  I am trying to provide some perspective to what happened between the US and Japan during World War II.  Most Americans do not fully understand the situation.  They believe that Japan attacked without provocation, and they do not understand the massive civilian toll of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were not attacks against military targets.  The US deliberately killed over 100,000 innocent civilians as a show of force.  Support for the war among the Japanese civilian population was weak enough that the government felt it necessary to spread propaganda to its own people to increase support.  Killing the civilians had no strategic military value.  It was entirely a show of force.

Japan did not attack us unprovoked.   Bad feelings had been building between our countries for a long time, and it was almost exclusively our fault.  Russia, China, Korea, and Japan had been fighting over land for centuries.  Japan had, at multiple times in the past, held territory currently owned by all of these countries.  Starting in the early 1900s (maybe earlier), the US and European nations began to intervene in disputes over these territories, consistently awarding control to everyone except Japan.  Japan was treated as an invader, despite the fact that they had a legitimate, though not exclusive, claim to these territories.  Japan's sovereignty was regularly subsumed by US mandate.  They were our enemy before the war started, because we treated them like a vassal.  We made Japan our enemy, and that is why they chose to attack us.

To date, the US is the only country in the world to actually use a full scale nuclear weapon against an enemy target.  Further, these were not tests.  We had already extensively tested them, and we were fully aware of the damage they would cause.  The reason Pakistan, China, India, Korea, Iran, and many other countries want nuclear weapon technology is because they fear that we will use it again.  Of all of these, only Iran's motives are significantly suspect.  Pakistan, China, India, and Korea have all had nuclear weapon technology for some time, and if they had wanted to use it against us, they could have already done so.  There is some fear that terrorists in Pakistan will manage to steal or capture the country's nuclear weapons, but that fear seems to be subsiding, as we are making progress against the terrorists.

The point here is that outside of the US and the European Union, the world has good reason to fear the US.  We go around telling sovereign nations what to do, and if they seek reprisal, we murder their civilians in massive numbers (from their perspective).  We try to control sovereign nations by imposing economic sanctions against them when they don't obey our commands.  We try to keep them weak by preventing them from developing weapons as powerful as our own.  From our perspective, we just think we are protecting ourselves.  We justify murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians by pointing out that we might have lost a few thousand more soldiers if we had not done it.  From their perspective, we brutally murdered many of their peaceful and innocent civilians to prove a point that could have been proven better by destroying a military base or two.  We used a weapon on their civilian living spaces that left fallout that is worse than even salting the earth to prevent crops from growing (admittedly, we did not know the full effects of this when we did it).  We did billions of dollars worth of damage to non-military structures.  To them, what we did amounts to mass murder and mass vandalism.  When other countries develop nuclear weapons, they are not doing it so they can nuke us.  They are doing it so that we know that they are powerful enough to do equal damage to anything we do to them.  They are setting up a mutually assured destruction, because they know that if we value our own lives and they have nukes, then we won't nuke them.  The only defense against nuclear weapons is to have your own, and since we have them, they know that they must have them as well, if they want to be able to defend themselves against us.  And, they cannot trust us, because we have used them before.

Again, the point here is to provide perspective.  It is easy to say that what we did was an absolutely horrible war crime, and by today's standards, that is totally true.  We also need to keep in mind, however, that most of the people who made that decision are no longer alive, and it is easy to make bad decisions when you feel desperate.  Further, I was not there, so I cannot judge the thought processes that went into the decision.  I personally think targeting military establishments would have been a much better decision, but I am not going to condemn those that thought otherwise.  I still think that those who do condemn us are not being unreasonable though.  Regardless of the justification, what we did was abominable.

Not a Free Country

Disclaimer: This is a rant.  It will probably be long, and it will definitely cover multiple subjects.  They will all have a common theme: Why the US is no longer a free country.


First let's talk about children.  Specifically, let's discuss "free range children."  Evidently some parents let their children roam further without supervision than other parents are comfortable with.  And, those other parents take offense at this!  Now, I totally understand throwing people in jail and taking their kids away, when they are starving their kids, beating them, or otherwise actively abusing or neglecting them.  There are some things all children are entitled to.  One of them is learning to do things on their own.  No one has any business criticizing a parent for how they choose to do this, unless there is a very high probability of serious harm.  Here is a news flash for anyone reading this who just said, "But without supervision, the child could be kidnapped."  This happens only extremely rarely!  For comparison, 22% of children in the US live in poverty.  Poverty has repeatedly proven to cause serious harm to children.  Letting your kids go a mile to park and back several times a week has an extremely low incident of harm (fractions of a percent), and most of the time, the harm done is very far from serious.  All laws and social media attacks on these parents do is take away their freedom to teach their children responsibility in the best way they know how.

So, here is all of my advice to all of those entitled idiots who get involved in Twitter and Facebook attacks of any parent who let's their kid stray more than a few feet from the house without constant supervision: If you really care about the well being of kids that much, get off of Twitter and Facebook, and spend some of your time and money helping the 22% that are definitely being harmed by being in poverty.  If you cannot bother to do that much, then please, shut up!


Now let's talk about putting kids in jail.  In fact, let's talk about putting kids in jail for breaking school rules and some non-criminal legal violations.  Evidently (I did not know this), while it is a crime for a non-minor to provide a minor with alcohol, it is not a crime for a minor to drink alcohol.  It is illegal, but it is not a criminal offense.  Naturally, this explains why so many minors in the US end up getting put in jail with actual criminals for drinking.  Recently, a Virginia youth who happens to be autistic was charged with assaulting a police officer.  What was the officer doing?  He was detaining the boy illegally, for breaking a school rule.  Further, the rule broken was an unofficial rule that applied only to the boy.  The school made a rule that this boy was not allowed to leave his classroom until all other students had exited.  When he chose not to follow this rule, the school administrators asked the police officer to step in.  The police officer did so (despite the fact that no laws had been broken and there was no reasonable suspicion that a law had or would be broken) by attempting to force the boy to go to the principal's office.  The boy attempted to escape, and the officer tackled him (wait, who is getting charged with assault here) and arrested him.  By all counts, the officer was illegally detaining the boy, and then the officer assaulted the boy when he attempted to escape the illegal detention.  Now, let me ask you one question: Since when do schools get to legislate laws?  Is this how it works in a free country?  We put people in jail for doing things that are not strictly crimes, and we allow schools to legislate highly specific laws without even documenting them.  Right, and then we protect the police officers that enforce these "laws" and press charges against the victims.  This does not sound like a free country to me!


Now I want to discuss one that is not related to children (at least, not directly).  Did you know that if a well dressed man in a business suit decides to take a quick nap on a bench in the park during his lunch break, nobody cares!  If that one does not surprise you, maybe this one will: If a man wearing dirty clothing that is not quite his size tries to do the same thing, he will be fined or even arrested!  Since when do police in a free country treat people differently based on how they are dressed?  I mean, think about it.  The guy with the nice suit is doing the exact same thing, but because he has nicer clothing, he does not get in trouble.  The fact is that in most cities where this happens, taking a nap on a park bench is not illegal.  Homeless people don't get charged with "sleeping on a park bench illegally."  They get charged with "disorderly conduct," which happens to be disorderly only because they are homeless and cannot afford clean, well fitted clothing.

Now, I understand the concern.  No one wants their beautiful park to be tainted with a bunch of dirty, poorly dressed bums (if you just nodded your head to that sentence, shame on you, you horrible unfeeling bigot).  If that is the case, then fix it.  No, I don't mean fix it by discriminating even more against American citizens with the same legal rights as you that happen to have fallen upon hard times.  I mean, buy them nicer clothes, help them find jobs, help them rent an apartment, or at least write your appropriate government representative a letter explaining how they have a moral responsibility to make sure that poor American citizens are not starving on the streets.  If you want your park and your city streets to be beautiful, without people wearing old, dirty clothes, do something real about it.  If all of the bums have nice clothes (which are not that expensive, you miserly scrooge), then you won't have to look at old, dirty clothes every time you walk by them.  If all of the homeless people have homes, then you won't have to see them sleeping on the park benches.  If everyone has sufficient food, then you won't have to see the lines outside the soup kitchens or the people handing out food to all of the bums in the park.  You can fix it!  Even if you don't have much money (who am kidding: if you have the time to complain and worry about this, you have enough money to help), you can still write letters to your mayor, your city council (heck, attend the meetings in person), you state legislature, your state governor, your Congressmen, and even the President.  Instead of trying to push all of the homeless people out of your city (which, just for the record, will make you a murderer in my eyes, because they will probably starve or die of exposure out there), doing something real about it.  Freedom is not just for the rich.  The US is supposed to be a free country for everyone.  As long as we are discriminating against the poor, the US is not a free country.


Alright, that is about it for now.  I could discuss a lot more topics, but I am tired, and I have run out of steam.  Maybe another day I will read a bunch of articles that remind me of how entitled and deliberately blind the middle and upper classes in the US are, and then maybe I will rant again.  Thanks for listening, and please take my advice.  Instead of buying that new yacht, think about all of the homeless people making your city ugly, and go out and buy them all a new set of clothes (and, it will be way cheaper than the yacht).

Hobby Lobby and Mandatory Benefits

The Hobby Lobby case was an extravagant law suit.  Of course religious freedom should have won.  There should never have been any question.  The problem was not with Hobby Lobby, and it was certainly not about human rights.  The problem is with who carries the obligation to enforce those rights.

Consider how this would play out: The government decides to enforce the right to own property by putting businesses in charge of it.  Now, businesses are legally required to handle things like evictions and property deeds for their employees.  If an employee is robbed, the employer is required to investigate and bring the thief to justice.  Oh yeah, and this only applies to full time employees.

Now, considering the following: The government and the majority of Americans establish that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right.  The government comes up with a list of medical care related things that every person should have free access to.  Now, to enforce this the government does two things.  First, it puts enforcement in the charge of for-profit businesses.  Businesses are now required to provide their employees with the list of things that every person should have free access to.  Now, we cannot forget though, this only applies to full time employees.  The second thing the government does is to mandate that anyone who is not a full time employee must pay, out of their own pockets, for insurance.  This is great.  Now, the government says that adequate medical care is a fundamental human right, so we are forced to enforce this right ourselves on an individual basis.  That makes perfect sense.  Imagine if this was applied to freedom of speech.  If the government tries to shut us up, our only recourse is to fight the government as an individual.  Appealing to the law would not be an option, because it is our own problem, not the government's.  This applies equally to medical care.  The government is pretending to provide what has been established as a fundamental human right by saying that for-profit businesses and individuals have to enforce this right.

The Hobby Lobby case should not have been about religious freedom.  That should have been a given.  The Hobby Lobby case should have been about responsibility.  If the government is not responsible for enforcing human rights, then no one is.  Enforcing rights is the purpose of the government.  The reason health care has become a problem in the first place is that the existing system, including mandatory benefits and health insurance, is entirely inadequate.  Forcing people to subscribe to the current system can hardly be considered enforcing a fundamental human right to adequate medical care.  In fact, it is little more than another way for the government to control us and subject us.

The big problem with requiring businesses to enforce human rights is that it forces people to work for them.  This is a rather foul case of discrimination against freelancers and business owners.  Human rights do not just apply to those who work for someone else.  If something is a right, then, by definition, it applies to everybody.  Further, allowing businesses to get out of this obligation for part time employees is even worse discrimination against the poor.  Clearly, the American lower class does not have the right to adequate health care, based on the precedents set by the law.  This also gives businesses far too much power.  A business can decide who has the right to adequate medical care merely by setting schedules and employee classification.  If my employer does not like my religion, my political ideology, my race, or even my hair color, a simple reduction in hours can change my classification to part time, exempting me from the right to adequate medical care.  Even worse, now I am legally required to go buy insurance (which, just for the record, does not provide adequate medical care), even though my pay check just got substantially reduced.  Choosing who human rights apply to is not the responsibility of for-profit businesses.  In fact, even governments have no business discriminating in this area. 

Enforcement of human rights is the job of the government.  It is not the job of businesses, and it certainly is not the job of the individual.  If individuals have to enforce their own fundamental rights, then the government is obsolete.  A government that puts the burden of enforcing human rights on businesses and individuals is lazy and corrupt.  If adequate health care is truly a fundamental human right, the government needs to get off of its lazy butt and take care of the problem.  This is the government's job.  It is not the job of businesses or individuals.  Further, if adequate heath care is a human right, it should apply to everyone, not just those who work full time and not just those who are willing and can afford to buy into the system.

Hobby Lobby should never have needed to defend its religious rights.  The government never had any business placing the burden of providing a fundamental human right on the business in the first place.  There are certainly cases where religious freedom must be balanced with other human rights, but it was entirely wrong of the government to place Hobby Lobby, or any other business, in this position in the first place.  Not only could this pitting of religious freedom against the right to adequate health care have easily been avoided, it should have.  If the government had done the right thing in the first place, this issue would never have arisen.

Account Proliferation

Now days, when you get a job in an industry that pays half decent wages, they typically require you to setup an account with some web services.  Maybe it's Dropbox.  Perhaps it is Google.  One is probably a project or schedule management tool.  There are also plenty of job specific services you might need.  For software development, you will probably need an account with Github or some other software subversion repository.  Just to get a decent job, you typically need at least a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account.  If you change jobs, your new job will probably use a slightly different set of services, requiring you to setup several more accounts.  During your lifetime, you may go through 5 or 6 jobs (and that number seems to be increasing).  If each job requires you to sign up for 3 different web services, you will have 15 to 18 of them by you retire.  You will probably forget about at least half of them.  Most of the other half will be useless to a retiree

If you decide to get a college degree, you will also see this problem.  Your English teacher will probably expect you to sign up for an account with an anti-plagiarism service.  Your math teacher might encourage you to sign up for a free tutoring service, and advanced math teachers will want you to get an account with some company so you can get the student edition of their math software for cheap or free (and then you will be stuck only knowing how to use an extremely expensive piece of proprietary software; that's another discussion).  Many teachers like file repository software like Dropbox, but every teacher likes something different, so expect to be required to sign up for 2 to 4 of these services (or more, depending on the major).  There are also major specific services you may need.  For Computer Science, you will probably be expected to get a Github account and maybe an Amazon Web Services account.  For any kind of art related major, you can expect to sign up for an account with at least one website that serves as an art repository and gallery, like Deviant Art or Flickr.  You may also be expected to get an account with some popular art forum (though, again, different teachers will prefer different options).  In Electric Engineering, you will probably be expected to sign up for an account with at least one company that produces complex components like micro-controllers, for access to programming libraries, tutorials, and datasheets.  In Physical Education or any other health related discipline, you will probably need accounts for various medical sites, maybe a few forums, and possibly some nutritional data repositories.  Communications majors will likely be required to sign up for at least 20 accounts, including social media services, web forums, and even advertising services.  Depending on your major, you could end up with 5 or 10 more accounts.  Now, admittedly, some of them will be necessary for your jobs when you graduate, but again, while there is some overlap, it is very common for different employers to use different services.  As before, probably at least half of them will be useless once you graduate.


Now, this might seem like a trivial and benign problem.  Unfortunately, it is not.  There are many problems this causes.  The least harmful is the extra space taken up by unused accounts.  Every account for a web service uses some amount of storage space.  There are already a huge number of unused accounts spread over the internet, wasting a lot of space.  This is fairly easily mitigated though.  Service providers can delete accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time.  If they want to keep the accounts open, just in case, they can buy more storage space, and when the cost is spread out among a large number of services, it can seem pretty small.  This is a problem, but it is not a critical one.

A worse problem is privacy.  If you have 20 accounts with different web services, you have probably already forgotten about half of them, unless you use them all very regularly.  All of those accounts hold some amount of your private information.  I'll discuss the security related things later, but for now, let us look at information that could be misused, but which is not a critical security risk.  The first, and most obvious one is credit card information.  Skirting around the subject of security (you did willingly give this information to these services), credit card data can be used in many ways.  It could be used to run credit checks.  It could be used to track you and your purchasing behavior.  Some of this is easy, some is more difficult, but a lot of this is possible and legal if you willingly gave the company your information.  Your physical address, phone numbers, and email address are all private information that could be misused without breaking the law, if you provided them willingly.  Some of these services might suddenly decide to start sending you ads a few years down the road, when their business is struggling.  You might get junk mail and telemarketing calls as well.  If one of these services is bought out, the buyer might decide to sell your personal information (not necessarily legal, if the original company agreed not to, but it happens anyway).  This is not necessarily a critical problem, but it could definitely cause a lot of inconvenience.

The worst problem is security.  We have discussed legitimate abuse of private information and some illegitimate abuse that is only indirectly related to security.  Security itself is not just about abuse by the service provider though.  The more accounts you have, the higher the odds are that at least one provider has poor security.  In fact, a majority of web services use security that is well below the accepted security standards for web.  Even something as simple as how your password is stored on their server can make a huge difference.  It is a well known fact that a vast majority of people use the same password or small set of passwords for all of their accounts.  If a hacker can get your password from the most trivial site, he can probably use it to hack into all of your other accounts.  If you have 10 or 20 different accounts, the odds that one of them has fairly weak security is very high.  All it takes is one.  The more accounts you have, the worse your odds are for getting hacked on all of your accounts.  This can give an attacker access to all of the private information you have on all of your accounts.  And, hackers do not have business ethics, high legal liability, and high profiles like the service providers do, so they are far less likely to avoid abuses of your data.  In fact, this is one of the most common techniques used by identity thieves to get your private information.  They don't have to hack into your bank.  They just have to hack into that Sony account to get your password, which they can then use to log into your bank account with ease, regardless of your bank's security.

There are ways to mitigate all of these.  The first is up to the service providers, and it only affects end users by increasing the prices of paid services.  The second can be mitigated by researching service providers before signing up for accounts (though, your employer or professor may still insist) and by asking for service providers to cancel your accounts and delete your information when you are done using them.  There is no law stating that they have to comply (this may be in the works though), and in some cases, the law may even require them to retain records, but many providers will comply when they can legally do so.  The third can be mitigated by always using different usernames and passwords for every account.  Good luck with this though.  Password managers can help, but they just shift the point of weakness.  Remembering 20 passwords is extremely difficult, so you may be tempted to write them all down, but that is often worse than a password manager.  Using one really good password can also help a little, but if someone hacks the service provider's database, it will not matter how good your password is.  The only fool proof solution is to have 20 highly secure and totally different passwords, and then to memorize them all.  Like I said, good luck.

This is actually a pretty big problem.  A lot of people in positions of authority think it is appropriate to impose security risks on other people, without any accountability.  If an employer or professor requires you to use an insecure service, there is no responsibility for harm caused if your information is misused.  If you do your research and find that a certain service is a high risk, typically your only option will be to quit your job or drop the class.  If the class is required for your major, you might have to switch majors to avoid the security risk.  If you are lucky, you might find sympathy, but often people are so set in their ways that they will risk the safety of everyone else to avoid change.  This is a very serious problem, and anyone involved in perpetuating it should seriously consider the consequences.

I understand that many times, the use of web services is valuable and even necessary.  This does not justify putting others at risk though.  Those choosing what services to use, and those approving such decisions, have a moral responsibility to make sure that those services meet accepted security standards.  Those being required to use such services should also make sure they meet accepted standards, and when they do not, those people should band together in protest.  Frankly, I think colleges should regulate what services professors are allowed to make mandatory.  If a professor needs a file repository service, the school should provide an option that it has verified as compliant with accepted security standards.  The school does not need to run the service (in fact, in my experience colleges are often poor at running such services internally).  It just needs to have a standard in place.  If a professor chooses to use a service that is outside of school policy, there should a policy specifically exempting students from being required to use that service as a condition of their grade (and the professor should be required to notify students of this policy wherever such a service is used).  In other words, use of such a service should be optional, and students should not be expected to have any knowledge or understanding of course material that is offered only through unapproved services (note that this article is about services that require accounts, not free services that do not require accounts).  (Obviously, colleges doing this should also have an approval procedure to add services to the list.)  Businesses would do well to also adopt policies requiring security assessments of any service that is required as part of the job, and no service which has not passed such an assessment should be allowed to be used as a mandatory part of the work.  In short, people in positions of authority over others should have some sort of regulations set in place to avoid putting their subordinates at risk.  Sometimes such regulations will fail (even following accepted security standards does not make a site immune to hacking, just much more resistant), but this is not an excuse to avoid them altogether.  No one should be allowed to put someone else at undue risk as a condition of their education or employment without any accountability.

Unions

I have a problem with unions.  It comes down to two things: Unions are too powerful and too easy to abuse.  Unions are currently absolutely necessary to take care of problems that the government refuses to treat fairly.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on a dispute between an Amazon contractor and its warehouse employees (which I have discussed in more detail in a previous post) illustrates the second part of my problem.  Without unions, many workers are just plain not treated fairly.  In the Amazon case, workers were being forced to go through excessively long security checks daily without pay for the time spent.  Our Supreme Court justices (whom I must assume are idiots, because the only other option is that they are deliberately helping to enslave and oppress innocent Americans, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt) declared that businesses do not have to pay workers for time spent doing anything that is not, in essence, part of the job description.  At this point, this declaration now counts as an infallible part of U.S. law.  The government offers no protection for what amounts to blatant wage theft.  There is only one solution: unions.

Unions were originally created in response to government inability to enforce fair labor practices.  In the early U.S., it was common for employers to underpay workers and to require far more hours of work than is healthy or fair.  Unsafe work conditions were more common than safe ones by a very wide margin.  People were regularly inured or killed in workplace accidents that could have easily been prevented, because owners were too cheap to spend even small sums to ensure safety.  Children were treated as slaves, working 16 hours days in these conditions, for so little money that entire families had to work, and that was still not enough to get by.  The government was not powerful enough to do anything to stop these unfair practices, and in many cases, the government did not have enough reach to even be aware of them.  The solution was labor unions.

Workers in these conditions eventually banded together, demanding fair treatment.  Their employers refused the the demands and threatened to fire anyone who continued to dissent.  Eventually the workers realized that if all of them dissented at once, their employers would be unable to replace them all fast enough to avoid financial catastrophe.  The worker strike was born (it was actually born in France, but it was quickly adopted by oppressed U.S. workers).  Nearly all of the workers in one or more factories refused to continue work until conditions, hours, and wages were improved.  Employers were powerless against the unions because they were dependent on the employees.  Firing them all would result in financial ruin for the company.  Initially the government panicked: Worker's unions threatened the U.S. economy.  If workers had so much power, they could easily force businesses to pay so much that it would cause rampant inflation.  Besides that, even short strikes resulted in production halts, and in factories that produced necessities, those halts could result in serious harm.  This did something else very important though: It put the problem of workers right in the face of the government, where it could no longer be overlooked or ignored.

The government realized that treatment of workers was a major problem.  It also recognized its responsibility in doing something about it.  The government still did not have the power or reach to handle the problem on its own.  It did have the power to protect the workers in their own attempts to deal with the problem.  Business owners lobbied the government to make unions and worker strikes illegal.  Their claim was that these things caused economic instability.  Their claims seemed reasonable, however, the government eventually recognized that the underlying problem was not the strikes, but the unsustainable hours and pay, as well as the often deadly work conditions provided by employers.  Laws were passed to protect unions and striking workers from retaliation.  Currently, workers cannot be fired for discussing unionization, actually unionizing, or for striking.  Workers who are striking on economic grounds (wages, other compensation, or work hours) can be "permanently replaced" (they cannot be fired, but if a willing replacement can be found, the strikers hours can be reduced to 0 indefinitely, which is approximately the same as being laid off).  The government also created a set of safety and treatment requirements and guidelines for how employees may be treated.  Strikes related to these issues are further protected, prohibiting even permanent replacement.  When it comes to safety and other government protected employee rights, replacements hired during a strike must be fired to make room for striking employees returning to work once the dispute has been resolved.

The potential for abuse of unions was still clear, so some restrictions have been added.  Closed shops, where the company may only hire union members, was strictly prohibited.  Closed shops allow the union to control all hiring decisions by restricting admittance into the union.  This gives the union veto power over any hiring action.  In the U.S., closed shops are illegal.  Union shops, where new hires are required to join the union after being hired, are legal, as well as agency shops, where non-union members must still pay union dues, and open shops, where employees may choose but are not required to pay dues if they are not union members, are all legal in the U.S..  Prohibition of closed shops prevented the most obvious abuses of unions, but it still left some loopholes, most of which still exist.


When unions were originally created, they were necessary.  They were very useful, and they did a great deal of good.  Since then, many things have changed.  The biggest change is power and reach of the government.  Workplace safety is no longer a serious union issue, because OSHA, a government agency, defines and enforced workplace safety.  If a workplace is unsafe, it is faster and easier for an employee to report the violation to OSHA than it is for a union to try to resolve the issue, and the penalties for those violations are enforced by the government, making workplace safety violations fairly rare.  Wages are still a problem, but not because the government is not powerful enough to do anything about it.  They are a problem because the government refuses to do anything about it.  Worse, the most common places for wage issues are not well suited to unions, because employee turnover is too high.  In the past several decades, most union wage issues were not problems of employers paying unfair wages.  Most of the issues were greedy employees who were already being paid far higher than the U.S. average wanting more than their fair share (and, in the case of the U.S. steel industry, this was one of the blows that ultimately killed it).  Unions are no longer useful tools for enforcing fair wages.  Instead they are tools for overpaid employees to rip off their employers even more.

Work hours were another major thing that unions were good for.  Twelve to sixteen hour work days were common.  Unions pulled the U.S. work week down to 40 hours and the work day to 8, requiring extra pay for any time worked beyond that.  Of course, the goal was actually closer to 35 or 30 hours a week (20 according to some), but unions lost sight of that goal almost a century ago.  Unions are no longer necessary to enforce this though, because the government has enacted laws prohibiting employers from giving employees more than 8 hours of work in a day and 40 in a week, with an additional requirement that when this is violated, employees are paid extra for time beyond those limits.  This is no longer a union problem; it is now a government problem.  Worse, despite unions and government, the average American voluntarily works an average of 50 hours a week and often the overtime goes entirely unpaid.  When the workers don't care, there is little unions can do to fix the problem.

Overall, unions have lost most of their usefulness.  They still have potential for abuse though.  Unions have a great deal of lobbying power.  In Alaska, in the mid '90s I believe, the workers at some of the power plants went on strike.  I don't know all of the details, but I do know that the labor union exercised power that belongs only to government and individual citizens, by manipulating the state government in making some very harmful laws.  The power plants hired electrical workers from Washington state, as temporary workers until the strike was resolved.  In retaliation, the union lobbied the state government to change certification laws to require electrical workers in Alaska state to have gone through their training in-state.  In other words, a journeyman or master electrical worker in Washington state could only be hired as an apprentice in Alaska, without going through all of the time required for certification within the state of Alaska.  The union did this to put more pressure on the power company by denying them well qualified temporary workers (the law specifically prohibited hiring them into positions that normally required journeyman certification).  Besides being a low and very unethical blow, this has some severe economic implications.  I am certain the argument given to the legislature and governor was that hiring out-of-state workers would drain money from the state economy.  I don't think this justifies using the law to lie about a person's job qualifications, but besides that, this economic justification was incomplete.  The end result was that the workers got most of their demands.  The economic consequences of that was increased cost for power, which resulted in economically damaging inflation in a state where the cost of living is already quite high.  There may have been short term economic costs of hiring out-of-state workers, but the long term costs of not doing so were far worse.  There is also another long term economic cost: The electrical workers union in Alaska now has a legally enforced monopoly on electrical labor.  The political power held by unions has not just been harmful in Alaska.  In other places in the U.S., unions have used the law or other political influence to merge with other unions against their will (by "merge," I mean "hostile takeover").

Unions have largely become for-profit institutions in the U.S..  Their primary goal is no longer doing what it best for the workers or even representing the workers.  Their goal now is to do whatever gets the union the most money.  This frequently means demanding higher pay even when it is not needed or fair.  It also preempts any requests for reduced hours, because reduced hours means lower gross pay, which means lower dues.  By allowing union and agency shops, the government has allowed unions to force employees to become union members and to pay union dues against their will.  Unions in the U.S. typically have a number of permanent employees who are not actually members of the union.  In many unions, this includes a CEO and other administrative positions, who make decisions about what the employees want, without actually having any experience of being one of those employees.  Some of these positions, like lawyer and accountant, are justified, but full-time administrative positions in a union are absurd.  Unions are now run primarily by people who are totally disconnected from the union members and their work environment.  Frankly, a union that is a for-profit business should not have any degree of legal protection beyond what is normal for any other for-profit business.  Otherwise, it is even more prone to abuse.

So, now we come down to the problem: The government now has the reach and power to make unions entirely obsolete, and it has already made them mostly obsolete.  Instead of doing that though, it is actually making unions more necessary.  Unions should no longer exist, because they should no longer be needed.  When they were created, the potential for good outweighed the potential for abuse.  This is no longer true...except, when the government fails to do its primary job of representing the will and best interest of the people.

The Amazon case is prime example of where unions are useful.  The employees are being robbed by their employer.  They could unionize and strike, demanding pay for their time worked, demanding that the security check be listed in the job description (making it an essential part of the job, and thus legally part of paid work time), or demanding that the security checks be discontinued.  They could even unionize and heavily lobby Congress to repeal the highly constitutionally questionable law the Supreme Court used to justify its appallingly oppressive decision (even abuses of power can have legitimate non-abusive uses).  The problem I have with this is that they should not need to unionize to get paid for all of the time they spend doing work required by their employer.

An employer should have the right to require employees to do worthless work (plenty already do it anyhow), but employees should have the right to get paid regardless of whether the work required is profitable or not.  This should be legally protected.  What free society has a law that explicitly permits employers to blatantly and openly require work time from an employee that does not need to be compensated?

Upper Class Blindness

In America, we do not like to see poor people.  We do not want to see homeless people.  We do not want to see people living in poorly maintained low income housing.  We would prefer not to see the hungry.  So, what do we do about it?  Evidently, we try to hide it.  Within the last year, at least 21 U.S. cities have passed laws forbidding the feeding of homeless people in public.  Some cities have replaced park benches with new models that include separators designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them.  Businesses have placed obstacles on sidewalks to make sitting on them painful, to deter the homeless from loitering near their stores.  In many cities, construction projects have been approved that destroy or renovate low income apartments to become classy higher income housing.  In some cases, low income housing has been replaced in response to higher income residents that live nearby, who feel that the nearby low income housing damages their property values and forces them to see things they would rather not.  In the U.S., our solution to our discomfort at seeing poor people is to create laws to drive them away.

This is a major ethical problem.  We have plenty of poor in the U.S., and the number is only increasing.  Hiding the problem is not fixing it.  All of these laws and other solutions are actually making the problem worse.  Now, hungry homeless people are being forced to starve, because they cannot be fed where they are, and they have nowhere else to go.  Tearing down low income housing is putting more people on the streets.  Perhaps the worst part, though, is that all of these efforts to hide the problem are making it less obvious, which makes it easier to ignore the suffering.

There is a solution.  It is a painful one, and the upper class will certainly be opposed to it.  It needs to be done though.  The problem has been ignored for so long that there seems to be no other reasonable way.  First, I think we need an amendment to the Constitution offering Federal protection for the poor.  No law should be allowed to persist which is designed specifically to discriminate against the poor.  When a city tries to enact a law designed to hide the fact that the city is tolerating the pain and suffering of its poor, Federal courts should have the legal backing to come down hard on that city.  Building projects designed specifically to relieve the rich from the burden of seeing the suffering of the poor should also be shut down.  In fact, the truly ethical city would deliberately zone such that every large, expensive house looked out at cheap low income housing.  The homeless shelter should be right next to the highest income mansion.  The soup kitchens should be right across from the country clubs.  Not only should it be legal to feed the homeless right out on the streets where they live, it should be encouraged to feed them in prominent locations where the rich can observe, and the right to feed them in those places should be legally protected.  The point of all of this is that the people with the greatest capacity to improve the situation should be the people who have the greatest exposure to the problem.  Yes, this will be very emotionally painful.  It should be.  Imagine the pain and suffering of those poor people.  If we think we cannot bear to feel at least a part of their suffering, we deserve to feel the full impact of their fate for ourselves.

Upper class blindness needs to be cured.  If this requires the poor to be shoved in the faces of the rich, then this is what needs to be done.  Perhaps if the rich were forced to realize what their money games are doing to our nation's poor, they would think twice about how their business deals and profit strategies might be causing harm to others.

Discrimination Against the Poor - Part 1

I want to share a little bit of back story before I start the actual article.  We just had our 5th child.  It was a natural birth at a local hospital.  Our first birth was a water birth in a birthing center, and we went home three hours after the birth.  Our other three were all natural in-hospital births, where the hospital required us to stay for 24 hours for observation after the birth, and my wife was sick of this.  We made a birth plan specifying that we wanted to leave 12 hours after the birth, and while we forgot it at home, we made our plans very clear to the hospital staff.  Our nurse, our midwife, and the pediatrician all accepted our decision, though some of them did not agree with it.  The nurse, however, informed the billing person for the hospital, who came in and informed my wife that if we left against medical advice (the hospital's 24 hour policy required the pediatrician to write the discharge for the baby as "against medical advice" if we left before 24 hours), Medicaid would not pay for the services provided for the baby, and we would have to pay out of pocket.  The midwife had told us something different, so I went home and did some research, while my wife tried to contact Medicaid by phone.  Eventually, she reached Medicaid who told her that they had no such policy and could only find a reference stating that if we brought the baby back before the 24 hours were up, we might be charged for services for the new visit that did not qualify as medically necessary.  Before that, however, my research at home revealed a rats nests around the billing lady's claim.  First, her claim was completely and absolutely false.  Second, most hospitals tell their patients this lie (though, hospital staff rarely knows the truth to begin with) and not just those insured through Medicaid.  I found three research papers from three different studies about this problem.  None of them found any insurers in the US with such a policy.  Anyhow, we left about 13 hours after the birth, and we informed the nurse that the claims were false and asked her to forward that on to the billing lady (the baby had no issues within those last 11 hours, though, the hospital staff had already determined she was perfectly healthy and the probability of problems was extremely low).


It should be obvious that poor people in the US face regular discrimination.  It is awfully hard to get hired for a job, even a really poor job, without nice clothing to wear to the interview (in fact, at least one US charity loans suits to poor job applicants to wear to interviews).  Many Medicaid, Food Stamp, and WIC office employees treat clients as inferiors.  Often, schools in poorer areas of towns and cities get sub-par teachers, while the other schools get the more skilled ones.  Middle and upper class people often look down on poor people and treat them as inferiors, and sometimes poor people even treat each other more poorly than those with more wealth.  Many Americans assume poor people are lazy.  This problem is so prevalent that comments from the few people that really are freeloading on government welfare often reflect badly on anyone who is receiving government welfare for any reason.  There is one place where this discrimination against the poor is especially repugnant, not to mention of questionable legality.

Most hospital employees in the US will tell patients that if they leave before their treatment is complete (known as leaving "against medical advice" or AMA), their insurance will not pay for it.  Because most patients leaving AMA are Medicaid patients, and because more wealthy patients can afford the costs better, this affects poor people far more than anyone else.  At least three studies have been done on this subject in the last three years, and none of these studies have found any insurance provider in the US with such a policy (some insurers actually laughed at the researchers for even asking).  Medicaid also has no such policy.  Now, in most cases, the hospital employees are not deliberately lying (though, hospitals do stand to benefit from patients staying "for observation" longer than is strictly necessary).  This is a common misconception among hospital employees, and it is presumably perpetuated as interns are taught this lie by regular employees.  This problem is not just bad for patients, it is also bad for insurers and potentially very bad for hospitals.

Because this problem affects primarily the poor, it is a clear case of discrimination against the poor.  As such, it is rather appalling.  It is also dangerous and perhaps even illegal.  This may be one reason that medical costs in the US are so high.  The biggest reasons people leave a hospital AMA are poor treatment or lack of additional time after treatment is complete.  Often, Medicaid patients have long waits to see a doctor, when their conditions are not critical.  Eventually, they get fed up with waiting, and they sometimes leave against medical advice.  The second, and more nefarious problem is when a patient has completed treatment, but the hospital either wants to observe the patient for an extra day or more, or the patient has to wait a long time for the doctor to do a final review and sign discharge papers.  In both cases, the hospital may charge more money to Medicaid, another insurer, or the patient, for the longer stay.  In the second case, however, it is possible that the long waits are actually deliberate abuse of the system, designed to allow the hospital to charge more for the visit by keeping the patient there longer.  Either way, forcing patients to wait so long that they consider leaving without getting full treatment is dangerous to the health of the patient.  Telling the patient that insurance will not pay if they leave early, however, may be more dangerous to the hospital than the patient.

Most hospitals require patients to sign a release before leaving AMA, to reduce liability for any problems that might have been prevented had the patient received full treatment.  Patients leaving AMA is considered a big problem in the US right now, especially among Medicaid patients (males patients are also more likely to do this).  Concerned hospital workers may be tempted to lie to patients to convince them to stay and complete treatment.  This carries two very dangerous consequences.  If found out, these lies will cause patients to distrust doctors, and this is already a big enough problem in the US; we really do not need to add to it.  Lying to patients may cause them to look for alternatives to normal medical treatment that might be dangerous or at least allow serious conditions to go untreated.  This is not in the best interest of the patients, and as such, it qualifies as a violation of the oath taken by nearly all medical practitioners in the US to avoid harming patients.  The second consequence is worse, at least for the hospital.  Medical patients have legally protected rights in the US, and one of those rights is to refuse treatment.  Any medical patient in the US may choose to leave a hospital at any time, without legal penalty, and if the hospital attempts to hold them against their will, the hospital is breaking the law.  This is a very serious offense.  Lying to a patient to manipulate them into forgoing this right, when they would otherwise have chosen to exercise it is a violation of this right.  Telling a patient that there will be severe financial penalties (for people on Medicaid, nearly any hospital bill is severe) is essentially forcing the patient to make a choice under duress.  Decisions made under duress are not legally binding.  If the patient has informed a hospital employee of an intent to leave AMA, and the hospital uses this lie to convince the patient to stay, the patient's original decision is still in force (because the overriding decision was made under duress), and by keeping the patient, the hospital is both holding the patient against his or her will (this is illegal by itself) as well as violating the rights of the patient.

There are several better ways to treat this kind of situation.  First, financial employees in hospitals should determine policy for specific insurance providers before any employee is allowed to suggest to a patient that penalties might exist.  Since most insurance companies have no such penalties, there is no point discussing them without asking the companies first.  Second, instead of trying to scare patients to stay by lying to them, it should be far more effective to inform them of the actual medical consequences of leaving AMA.  Even Medicaid patients are not stupid.  If they still want to leave, fully informed of the potential consequences, then it is their legal right to do so.  At that point, they have chosen to own the consequences, and nobody has any right to force them to stay.

This problem is dangerous to both patients and hospitals.  Employees need to be educated properly so that they do not inadvertently do or say things that could get the hospital in trouble.  Violations of patient rights can incur heavy fines, and multiple instances can get hospitals shut down.  Given how prevalent this problem is in the US, there have probably been enough of this kind of patient rights violations at most US hospitals to get them shut down.  Further, this kind of discrimination against the poor needs to stop.  Most poor people may not have the research skills to ever discover the lie they have been fed, but this does not absolve hospital employees of their responsibility to treat patients well and honestly.  If nothing else, more care should be taken to treat the poor fairly and legally, because they have a disadvantage.


Following are the studies on this problem:

The University of Chicago Medicine
http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2012/20120203-billing.html

PubMed.gov, Journal of General Internal Medicine
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331399

Annals of Emergency Medicine, An International Journal
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644%2809%2901798-3/fulltext

Vaccine and Vitamin K Refusal

I just read this article from Scientific American.  While I have great respect for the magazine, I find the author somewhat lacking.  In fact, I have found a great deal lacking in nearly every author promoting the medical industry and attacking skeptics of modern medicine.  Now, I am not saying that the medical industry is wrong, but it is at fault in a large degree for the various movements opposing vaccination and other things like vitamin K shots or eye drops for newborns.

The primary problem is not the media and movements encouraging parents to avoid potentially life saving treatments for their children.  The problem is general mistrust of doctors, which has been caused by their own poor behavior.  My wife is a doula (a professional labor coach and educator).  We have chosen to forgo both the vitamin K shots and the eye drops that hospitals typically give all newborns.  Our first child was born in a birthing center, where we were educated on all of the risks involved with both sides.  Further, we did some research of our own.  We found that the risk of complications is extremely low without the treatments.  Contrary to the article, both treatments do indeed carry risks, however they are also extremely low.  Based on our knowledge, we chose not to allow the midwives to administer either of the treatments.  Similarly, we have been very selective about vaccinations.  Now, let me first assure you that we do not believe the claims (which have been proven false) that vaccines cause autism.  This is a bunch of crock spread by celebrities that have no medical education.  Our first reason to limit vaccination is that many vaccines contain small amounts of latex, and my wife and at least one of our children has shown a sensitivity to latex.  Latex allergies can quickly become life threatening with repeated exposure, so we chose to limit vaccinations to limit latex exposure.  We have had our children vaccinated for a few things.  These are diseases that either have a high probability of fatality or permanent injury or that cannot be cured once contracted.  While I have seen no empirical data on this, I have observed that people who get every single vaccine and thus rarely get sick tend to fare less well when they do get sick, while people who avoid common vaccines that are mostly just for convenience (the flu vaccine for most people) tend to get over nearly anything fairly quickly.  So, why would anyone choose to forgo even vaccines for higher risk diseases?

As a doula, by wife is present when her patients give birth.  This typically occurs in a hospital.  Additionally, we have had several of our children born in hospitals.  My wife has had multiple experiences where doctors or nurses administer treatments without informing or consulting the patient.  In many cases, these treatments have not been strictly necessary and were administered either for the convenience of the patient or for the convenience of the medical professional.  I am also aware of instances where a doctor has recommended an unnecessary, high risk treatment to a patient for personal convenience.  In one case, the doctor used scare tactics to convince the patient to agree to a cesearan section because the birth was taking too long and was going to cut into a birthday party the doctor wanted to attend.  In one case where my wife was present, the doctor and nurses completely ignored a list of documented requests from the patient without any medical reason for doing so.  In this last case, the patient is now showing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder related to pregnancy and hospitals.  This is why people refuse vaccinations and other treatments for their children.  After an experience where your human rights are blatantly violated by medical professionals, it becomes very natural to distrust the medical industry in general.

The problem is not those who spread lies about potential side effects of vaccinations or other treatments.  The problem is the doctors that mistreat patients and breed mistrust.  Sadly, the most common place this occurs is in hospitals.  Private practices and family doctors tend to be much better at informing patients about treatments, with one small exception (I'll get to this).  In hospitals, it is very common for nurses and doctors to treat patients without ever discussing the treatment with the patient.  With births, doctors will frequently tell the patient a treatment will be administered without any concern for the desires of the patient (unnecessary C-sections and inductions are a very major problem in the US, and typically the mother is never even offered a choice).  This is wrong, and to most people it is clearly a violation of human rights.  It really should come as no surprise that many parents are willing to trust unknowns over the people who have violated them and lied to them.

Now I want to look at the one exception.  Vaccinations always carry risks.  In fact, any time the skin is pierced with something, there is a risk of infection.  Modern sanitation practices have reduced this risk to almost nothing, but it does exist.  There is also a risk that any given patient is allergic to something in a vaccine.  Again, this is typically very small.  Most pre-drawn vaccines contain latex, and the rubber stopper on vaccine containers that are not pre-drawn frequently contain latex.  For those with a threshold allergy to latex (this is the kind of allergy that becomes more severe with each exposure), even this small exposure to latex can be life threatening.  Even if it is not, it can cause the next reaction to be more severe.  Overall though, for most people the risk of complications from vaccination is extremely small.  In fact, the risks are so small that beyond asking about allergies first, I do not see any reason why doctors should be forced to discuss them in detail.

On the other hand though, there is the risk of serious complications from catching the disease that the vaccination would have prevented.  For instance, the flu almost never kills.  When it does, it is almost exclusively very young children and extremely old people.  On occasion, it kills someone else who has a severely compromised immune system.  Outside of these easily identifiable groups, the flu is merely a brief and slightly painful inconvenience.  Chicken pox is even less severe than the flu (though it does carry the risk of getting shingles later in life, which rarely kills but is extremely painful).  Getting these trivial diseases does little more than cause inconvenience, but they can ultimately strengthen the immune system (something like exercise strengthens muscles).  Now, these two diseases are trivial, but fairly common.  That is not true of the rest of the diseases that we typically vaccinate against.  Most vaccines provide immunity for diseases that less than a percent of a percent of the population will ever be exposed to.  Further, many of these diseases, while they can be severe, are no longer as deadly as they were when we did not know how to treat them.  The chance of serious complications, when combined with the extremely low chance of exposure, may even start to approach the potential risk caused just by getting the vaccine in the first place.  This is what doctors do not tell you.  Most vaccinations will never even matter and may even increase the overall risk of harm.

How can we deal with this? First, I think that doctors should be required by law to discuss both potential negative and positive consequences of any treatment with the patient or guardian before administering any treatment (except in serious emergency cases where there is not time, in which case the discussion should take place after the emergency situation is over).  Until this happens though, parents and patients will have to figure out how to deal with these things on their own.  I would suggest asking you doctor a lot of questions.  You can legally refuse any treatment (the doctor may ask you to sign a wavier though).  This means that you can tell the doctor that you will not permit treatment until you are fully informed of all potential risks involved.  You can also search the internet, but make sure you find sources from both sides of any debate, otherwise you will only get half of the knowledge you need to make an informed decision (also, learn to distinguish reputable sources from random people running their mouths; in medicine, celebrities are not reputable sources).  Look for numbers.  If you find something saying that some treatment increases the chances of some horrible outcome by 50%, try to find what it is 50% of.  If the chances are 1 in 1 million, that means they are only 1.5 in one million with the treatment.  Relatively, that 50% increase seems large, but the actual probability is still extremely low.

There is one other thing doctors will rarely tell you.  Most vaccinations now are given to improve "herd immunity."  What this means is, the chance that your child will get the measles, even without the vaccination, is almost non-existent.  Your child will probably not benefit at all from it, in fact.  Many vaccines target diseases that are almost extinct (at least in the 1st world).  The goal of the vaccinations is to keep the disease isolated or even to eliminate it, not to benefit the individual getting the vaccine.  This is called herd immunity, because it benefits the group (or "herd") as a whole, but it almost never benefits the individual.  In other words, there is almost no individual risk of getting the disease to balance the negative risks associated with getting the vaccine.  Now, in case you are feeling disgust that doctors would value the well being of the abstract herd over the well being of your child, you should know that this herd immunity gained from widespread vaccination is what eliminated small pox.  It was so effective that we no longer vaccinate for small pox because the risk is almost literally zero.  Now, with that in mind, feel free to form your own opinions.

Here is our solution to the problem.  My wife and I avoid vaccinations for trivial diseases like chicken pox or the flu.  If there was an extremely severe strain of the flu going around (and a vaccine was made available quickly enough; for the flu, they usually are not), then we might consider getting our children vaccinated.  Otherwise, we do not consider the risk, though small, worth the minor convenience.  We also opted out of many of the vaccinations for extremely uncommon diseases with very low risk of permanent harm.  We did, however, get our children vaccinated for one of the hepatitis versions that is difficult or impossible to cure once contracted.  One reason is that we are occasionally exposed to people who have recently come from a country where that disease is more common; the other is that a serious disease that cannot be cured is probably worth getting vaccinated for, even if it is pretty rare in the US.  The hepatitis vaccination happens to be commonly administered in combination with a few other vaccinations, so we decided to get the combo, because the difference in risk between the single and the combo is negligible (if existent at all).

Our solution to the vitamin K and eye drops was to opt out.  Our reasoning is this: Most complications requiring vitamin K occur in the hospital.  Other complications are extremely rare (and at least one is genetic, and neither of us has any family history of it).  The eye drops are designed to more or less sanitize the eyes after birth, in case some dangerous bacteria got into the eyes.  This is also extremely rare.  At the time, the eye drops were made of some silver compound that happens to be toxic to humans as well.  There has been no research showing the silver drops to be safe for humans, so we decided the risk was higher than the benefits and opted out.  (Note that most hospitals are now using a different compound for this.  I do not know anything about the safety record of the new compound.)  Anyhow, we have opted out of these two things with all four of our children, without any issues.

Now, all of this is personal choice.  I do not want to convince you to vaccinate or to avoid vaccination.  Similarly, I am not trying to encourage or discourage trusting doctors.  Not all doctors are as negligent as those you frequently hear about.  I want two things to come out of this article.  First, I want regular people to know that they do not have to let doctors bully them.  You never have to accept treatment you do not want.  You can ask about the risks of a treatment, and you can refuse it if you are not willing to take the risk (this is even true of "mandatory" things, like the IV our local hospital requires for birthing mothers).  You also have the ability to learn for yourself and to keep yourself well informed (most hospitals offer free WiFi; bring your tablet, smart phone, or laptop, but make sure you find reputable sources of information).  Second, I really would like to see doctors be held more accountable.  An honest mistake or impossible situation can happen where the doctor may not be entirely responsible, but cases where the doctor makes a judgment call without any concern for the desire or well being of the patient should never be permitted.  No person should be practicing medicine who is willing to subject a patient to unnecessary surgery to get to a party on time, and a patient who comes away from the hospital with post traumatic stress disorder due to poor treatment from the nurses and doctors should be compensated very well for the suffering (not to mention be compensated for treatment for the PTSD).  If accountability were higher, fewer doctors would mistreat patients, people would trust doctors more, and scare tactics and lies designed to trick people into avoiding beneficial treatments would be far less effective.

Peace vs Prosecution

I would like to share an LDS scripture with you, but first I want to give some background.

All around, I see people breaking laws or otherwise causing harm to others.  I am not talking about things like theft or speeding (ok, I see tons of speeding, but that is a different matter).  I am talking about things like doctors forcing or cajoling their patients into accepting treatments that are not in their best interest.  I am talking about housing providers ignoring laws requiring them to keep housing suitable for their tenants.  I am also talking about businesses cheating their employees deliberately or due to ignorance.  These things bother me.  I have a policy of social intolerance of bad behavior, but most LDS people seem to think that it is better to sacrifice their freedoms than to do something that could be construed as uncivil or otherwise not getting along with others.  The LDS religion teaches tolerance of the beliefs of others, but many act as if they believe this means they should tolerate harmful or illegal actions against them by others.  If you are LDS, let me correct your thoughts on this.  If you are not, feel free to consider what I am about to present anyway.

The LDS book of scripture called The Doctrine and Covenants (often abbreviated D&C) contains the following verse (D&C 134:11):

We believe that men should appeal to the civil law for redress of all wrongs and grievances, where personal abuse is inflicted or the right of property or character infringed, where such laws exist as will protect the same; but we believe that all men are justified in defending themselves, their friends, and property, and the government, from the unlawful assaults and encroachments of all persons in times of exigency, where immediate appeal cannot be made to the laws, and relief afforded.

Note that the first part says "We believe that men should..."  It does not say "can," "may," or even "are justified in."  It says "should."  This is Church doctrine.  While it is not explicitly worded as a commandment ("thou shalt"), it does use very similar wording ("shalt" and "should" are conjugations of the same root).  Now, I want to be clear here.  This is not just about getting what you are legally entitled to.  It goes much further than this.  If you read the rest of section 134, you will find more Church doctrine stating that members of the LDS Church (well, and everyone else) have a responsibility to uphold the just laws of the land in part by turning in people who break it.  Again, this is not just about getting what you are legally entitled to.  This is about enforcement of the law in general.  If you are mistreated by a doctor, and you choose not to take legal action against that doctor, you are allowing that doctor to mistreat others by your inaction.  If you choose not enforce laws requiring your landlord to keep your home or apartment rental in livable conditions, you are potentially allowing others to come to harm by your inaction.  If you do not report an employer who is cheating you out of overtime pay or who is otherwise cheating or harming you, you are allowing that employer to cheat or harm other employees.  Some of these people who are coming to harm because of your inaction may not even realize that they are being treated in a way that is prohibited by the law.

While I have found no LDS scripture stating this, in my personal opinion, when a person deliberately chooses to allow illegal or harmful behavior to continue, that person becomes complicit in that illegal behavior.  While the law is unlikely to prosecute if the behavior is ever reported by someone else, I believe that God will hold you accountable for harm that happens because you are too lazy or fearful to do your civil duty as stated in the above mentioned scripture.

Here I would like to admit that I am not perfect.  I have been in a few circumstances where I chose not to press charges against a doctor or a landlord, where, according to this scripture, I should have.  In both cases, I did not want to cause contention.  In hindsight, I should have.  That doctor has probably caused emotional harm to multiple patients since then, which I could have prevented.  I feel bad, and justifiably so, that I did nothing to prevent that harm.  Since then, however, I have made some better choices.  Long ago I mentioned this, but I will mention it again.  I once gained knowledge of a labor law violation involving a minor.  Even though I was not directly impacted by the violation, I chose to report it.  The employer was raided by the labor department, and evidence of the violation was found.  Fines were given (I do not know how much, but fines for minor violations can get into the tens of thousands, and the violation occurred multiple times).  That employer will likely never make that mistake again.  I am almost certain the employee who was harmed will never have that happen again with that employer either.  My action may have hurt one employer (who earned the harm), but it saved a lot of innocent employees from harm.  Also, by reporting the violation, I strengthened the law.  If violations of the law are never reported, it is almost as if the law does not exist.  By reporting a violation, I made it clear to those violating the law that they cannot get away with breaking the law without consequences.  A law that is not enforced is worth very little and does almost nothing to protect anyone, but a law that is enforced justly serves its purpose well.  My actions helped a law to be enforced that otherwise would have been useless (in that particular case).


Anyhow, any LDS person who believes that convenience and peace are more valuable than enforcing the law is a hypocrite.  Besides the above scripture, there are many LDS scriptures stating that even killing is justified when it is in defense of yourself, your family, your friends, your property, or your rights and freedoms.  Maybe the U.S. is a sue-happy nation where too many frivolous lawsuits occur.  Choosing not to press charges when lawsuits are justified will not improve the situation, and in fact, this act of giving up your legal rights and protections will actually make it worse for everyone.