I posted this comment in Dean’s article on Innumeracy, but I think it bears repeating with emphasis so…

I forget who said it- I know it was a British professor of mathematics speaking on an NPR show many years ago, and it has always stuck with me. To paraphrase:

A basic understanding of fundamental mathematics, up through the basic principals of Algebra, are the absolute most essential components of a fully functional bulls**t detector. When people try to bulls**t you they will almost always do so with numbers and if math is a foreign language to you, you are unarmed and helpless.

I’ve always believed he hit this one squarely on the head and I’ve driven that point home with all of my kids ever since I heard it.

Also, in an amusing twist, the comment thread of the cross-posting at The Moderate Voice contains a couple of sterling examples of this point.

Kevin Williamson at National Review online — the in-house newsletter of the U.S. conservative establishment (comments on columns may be made only during banking hours) – offers up this formulation, which I got to via Instapundit:

Some fellow at The Economist has taken me to task for my description of socialism and communism: “The difference between communism and socialism: Under communism, politics begins with a gun in your face; under socialism, politics ends with a gun in your face.” . . .

The resort to violence is what makes the question of what kind of things it is legitimate for states to do an important moral concern. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to stop him murdering, raping, or robbing. It seems to me entirely unreasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to extort from him money to fund a project to get monkeys high on cocaine. Those seem to me fairly reasonable distinctions. It is illegitimate for government to use force or the threat of force for projects that are not inherently public in character.

This is the fundamental libertarian fallacy:  Government operates by coercion, not a social contract or even anything less readily amenable to facile analogy.  Hence any policy must meet the test of whether coercion can be morally justified to be an appropriate exercise of government policy.  Next comes resort to the typical libertarian black-and-white formulation, which I’ll repeat:

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to stop him murdering, raping, or robbing. It seems to me entirely unreasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to extort from him money to fund a project to get monkeys high on cocaine.

Now of course a lot of premises and terms are unstated or undefined even in this seemingly unobjectionable proposed model.  Let’s consider some:

• “It seems to me” — Yes, it does.
  • But does it have to seem that way to everyone?
    • If so, why?
    • If not, why not
  • I am sure Kevin Williamson hates, hates, hates people who “legislate morality.”  So:  What is this “seem”?
    • Is it a “moral” principle?
    • Is it based “economics” or “social science”?
    • Am I free to disagree with the process by which these conclusions have been rendered so “self-evident”?  Or is it a legitimate form of coercion to forbid me from doing so?
• Everyone hates “murder, rape and robbery.”  But is it so obvious what comprises these categories?
  • Murder
    • Is refusing to care for someone you have “moral” responsibility for murder?
    • Is poisoning my drinking water with your industrial chemical murder?
    • Is killing an unborn fetus murder?
    • Is killing a kind of born fetus murder?
    • Is killing a severely disabled person murder?
    • Is letting me die on the floor of an emergency room because I have no money murder?
  • Rape
    • Has the charge of rape ever been misused socially for illegitimate means?
    • Can one rape one’s spouse?
    • Is one guilty of rape if he is impaired or intoxicated?
    • Is one guilty of rape if the complainant was impaired or intoxicated and did not or could not clearly communicate assent or a lack of assent?
    • Should a conviction for rape be possible based solely on the alleged victim’s testimony?
    • What is the appropriate punishment for rape?
      • Aren’t most released rapists subsequent recidivists?
      • How about castration?
      • How about execution?
  • Robbery:
    • Is securities fraud — manipulating markets — robbery?
    • Is consumer fraud robbery?
    • Is taxing estates robbery?
    • Is all taxation robbery?
    • Is my not paying tax, while you do, robbery?
    • Is selling my organs after I’m dead robbery?
    • Should the doctrine of felony murder be applied in cases of robbery?
    • What is the appropriate punishment for robbery?
      • How about robbery with a deadly weapon?
      • How about robbery at night?
      • How about robbery committed while under the influence?

Obviously there’s not end to this pedantic exercise.  But is there a point to it?

Yes, though that point could have been made a number of ways.  It is that answering these questions is probably every bit as “reasonable” a basis for spending taxpayer money as the “obvious” ones of rape, murder and robbery prevention. In fact it may be the case that notwithstanding the simple-minded implication to the contrary, none of these those crimes can be prevented, or punished in a just fashion, or both, without answering these questions.

So does that mean I need to get monkeys high on cocaine to answer them?  I doubt it, but it is hardly inconceivable.  Is the problem with my formulation that it is in theory every bet as open-ended as Williamson’s is simple-minded?  It may be.

But the moral here is that formulations such as his are no-nothing prescriptions for government.  They are meaningless, impractical, and mere posing.  Given any responsibility for governing, and actually taking the same seriously, no libertarian would last a week “governing” with such policies, or would even want to try.

They are, as I said, poses.  Few libertarians really even pretend they think “coercion” — i.e., the collection of taxes, and enforcement mechanisms to ensure they are paid — should be limited to cardinal crimes and national defense.  Glenn Reynolds, for example, is a huge space buff.

But repeating slogans such as these “It is illegitimate for government to use force or the threat of force for projects that are not inherently public in character” without, of course, defining ”projects,” “inherently” or “public” are an easy to avoid the hard work of developing, defending and executing complex policies for a complex society.  They appeal to a number of types:  Some lack the intellectually equipment to do the heavy lifting of real governing.  Others are contemptuous of those who have not “made it” as they have — and claim to believe they “made it” without the help of anyone else, any government program, any government-supported institution.  And another group is made up merely of nasty, little, selfish little people who themselves have little “success” to their credit but will be damned if anyone else gets some on any portion of their nickel.  Their heroes are fictional arrested adolescents such as Howard Roark and the bitter real arrested adolescent who created him.

They go nowhere and they will take us nowhere.  They talk about monkeys on cocaine and creeping socialism — popular, funny and easy targets — but enjoy the Internet “invented by Al Gore,” the interstates built by Ike, the relatively poison-free food brought to them by Teddy Roosevelt, and all the other aspects of modern society built by common effort, typically led by “coercive” government.

Government doesn’t always act efficiently.  Clearly it is frequently is the worst agency to get something done and should probably be the agency of last recourse in many endeavors.  Its efforts often harm better solutions that can come via free enterprise or merely benign neglect.  It is virtually impossible to roll the state back from areas in which it has taken an active involvement.   Its employees, as we see, will, given any chance at no one noticing, vastly overcompensate themselves, and are relatively immune from unemployment concerns related to economic cycles.  I’m for a lot less government in almost every area.

But these are policy problems.  Rants about “sticking a gun in your face” as the criterion for policymaking in a complex, interdependent world are not the answer.  But they’re a lot easier to get people excited about than trying to explain and implement policies that just might work to solve the problem of government overreaching, such as term limits, the line-item veto, the flat tax or another radical overhaul of the tax system.

We have seen repeatedly that that sort of radical conservatism isn’t coming from the GOP leadership in Congress or otherwise.  Columns such as this one, though, sure make it seem unlikely that we’re going to see it from the self-appointed right-wing punditocracy or its fans either, no matter how good an opening the left gives us.

Where do the rest of us conservatives go to wait out this awful nadir in right wing discourse and leadership?  Is there a bunker for the likes of us where we can stay, guns out of our faces, thank you, until it’s all over?

Cross-posted on Right Wing News.

Dean’s World contributor Celia Farber’s latest article for Media Magazine, which you can pick up at news stands or just read online through Media Post, is An Internet With No Walls. Ostensibly about Chat Roulette, it’s really a piece about privacy, intimacy, and the ongoing upheavals of the internet. Here was my favorite part:

Here’s what the money guys will try to do, and eventually succeed: Sell back intimacy to the isolated modern masses with a new, all-enveloping, everlasting, electronic condom. Try to control creativity and freedom. Try to keep people feeling that they are in a tank, and it has walls, and they’re inside those walls, and they will always be fed.

They will induce people to forget that intimacy, or sex, or “meeting people,” was ever something one did without electronic mediation. It’s an ancient formula: Take something crucial away from people and then sell it back to them. What’s valuable now is not privacy, like the cognoscenti believe, but rather, any and all means of being seen, heard, touched, and re-connected to others. He may not have known it, but that is what Ternovskiy understood, intuitively. He coded his way out of his own isolation, for his generation, who were being offered essentially nothing in the baby boomer media world. They were invisible and casteless. “I always believed that the computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he told The New Yorker. “It might replace everything.”

I’m not even sure I agree, exactly, but it’s great discussion fodder.

There’s more. Read the whole thing here.

(And yes, I’m quoted in it. Whee, I’m famous!)

This article provides details about many of the questions that have arisen here, about Peter Duesberg’s efforts to obtain funding to test his AIDS causation models, etc.

The Passion of Peter Duesberg–original (PDF form)

It was commissioned in 2004 by Harper’s, and slated for publication in 2005, but was later truncated and folded into a longer article published in 2006.

*Update by Dean*: Coda added by secondary author removed from PDF by original author’s request and approval. No further edits, above link is the original document.

Dave wrote in the earlier thread:

I worry that even liberal Muslims like yourself are more concerned with defending your faith than acknowledging its problems and reforming it.

Shouldn’t liberal Muslims be sympathetic, if not having these fantasies themselves (preferably distinguishing fantasy from reality a bit better than this guy)? We’re on the same side here, right?

Let’s be absolutely clear here.

Liberal muslims are sympathetic indeed to the very simple idea that there are illiberal muslims out there who do bad things, and they keep claiming that it’s in the name of the faith. But we are NOT concerned with defending our faith, Dave. We are concerned with defending the West, not Islam. Specifically, those ideals of the West which are the reason we came here and immigrated here. Those ideals are the ones under siege when a liar like Tedd Petruna can find such a willing and credulous audience.

You want liberal muslims to “reform” Islam. NO. Theres nothing – NOTHING – to reform. I follow my faith and I am as good a citizen as you or anyone else. over one BILLION muslims are like me. The number of muslims who kill other people in the name of faith is a tiny fraction, and about equal in numbers to the number of Christians who murder people every day in America. Those Christians might kill people for economic reasons instead of self-declared religious ones; fine, then will we now demand that “liberal capitalists’ reform capitalism? Nonsense, and irrelevant.

Ultimately what matters is what people DO – and when I tell you that I am a good citizen partly because that is part of what MY faith tells me to do – to be a good example, to live humbly, to be a source of succor and comfort to my community, regardless of their creed – why do you dismiss me? The life choices I make are informed by my interpretation of faith; the violent actions of the extremists are informed by their interpretations of faith. MY kind outnumber theirs by hundreds of thousands to one.

What you really mean by “reform your faith” is to be more Protestant – water it down, make it a culture instead of a creed, stop wearing funny hats and trims our beards and not be so serious about God all the time. Thats what you want. You want us to be salad bar muslims, but look at Switzerland where the muslims already are like that – and they get a minaret ban. Meanwhile, the hard core jihadi is going to look at my abandoning my principles (to appease your precious feelings) and conclude what, exactly? That he’s wrong, because so great a muslim as Aziz Poonawalla and his ilk have renounced prayer and now drink alcohol and eat pepperoni?

Islam is eternal. It will always be greater than what any one muslim or non-muslim makes it out to be in the narrow confines of their heart. To demand that I reform it is like asking me to change the course of the Nile. And yet, boats on the nile don’t just passively follow the river’s course – they can navigate it in any direction. So too with muslims. Most go along the current, but some go upstream.

If you demand that *I* change MY Islam, then you’re a fool. And a tool, playing right into Osama bin Laden’s hands.

I will never compromise my faith nor my identity as an American patriot. I’m sorry for you if these grand, noble concepts are so puny in your eyes as to conflict.

Obama isn’t Christian enough for some people, it seems.

I always knew he was a boy, from the heaviness of his sleep when I carried him, which used to drive me to tears, and his father, my husband, soon to be ex-husband, or maybe not, used to say: ‘He’s just sleeping.’ When he finally woke up and kicked me , I wouldn’t have minded if he broke my rib.

So began our dance of me worrying about him and he kicking me back, to give him some space. I forced myself to let him be a boy. A real boy. From the first time he got on a bike and just peddled away to the time he drove a car by himself at age 13 on an LA Boulevard with my sly Tennessee friend Mary-Ellen next to him. No grotesque amusement park ride ever too scary, no wave ever too daunting, always purple-lipped and shivering by the time he would be pulled from a frigid pool, swearing he’s not cold, not hungry, just having a blast and seeing no reason for the fun to stop. There were broken bones, ER visits, the usual stuff–and at each step I resisted my urge to place him inside a plastic bubble controlled by a hand held radio-steering device that never left my hand.

All through the 90s, the Upper West Side mothers had one battle cry that I always cringed at:

Sitting not on the edge of the sandbox but often inside it, negotiating every shovel and pail dispute, they would coo:

“Use your words, Dylan, use your words.”

Boys were absolutely not supposed to exhibit aggression. I found it perverse. I knew enough to know I had to let him go, and let him find the line between boldness and self protection, if he was to break free of me, which of course I would have preferred he didn’t, but I curtailed that beastly urge. I reminded myself that he is not a parcel, not “mine.”

He wanted life with all it had to offer, since he could talk. The only thing that scared him was spiders, and what he called ‘the funny feeling,’ he got when he thought about time having no end, and the choice between being “deleted” or existing forever, neither of which appealed.

Jesus.

“Mom,” he said, at age 4, out of the blue, when we were taking a walk, “I need to get some friends who know what they’re doing.” I laughed for an hour. All his life, he’s seen me get felled, my feet tangled, mud sprayed, opportunities dashed, humiliations delivered, and an over-arching sense of never having or keeping the football, like Charlie Brown. He, on the other hand, would not, by mutual agreement, identify with it. He was a born leader, impossibly popular, yet gentle and compassionate, aware that I had cursed him with a keen sense of pathos–the two of us suddenly weeping over a turkey in the oven and imagining its mother, or he making me dig in the sawdust at the end of hamster Dusty’s life to see if she was still alive. Every half hour.

When he and his friend Alexander were about 8, we were at a lake in northern Connecticut, and they wanted to jump off a water tower into the lake. Alexander’s mother, Gully, said no way, it’s too dangerous. They stood scowling, and soon a little stocky girl in a bathing suit came over, blithely climbed the tower, and dove into the lake. I turned to Gully: ‘Now we have no choice. A girl did it. We have to let them.”

So we did. And off they jumped, about 200 times over the next few days.

He is now 14. He is my sole reason for waking up each day and continuing to try to turn the grounded vessel of my life around, to continue to believe in vanishing notions of getting life right, carrying on, starting over. There are few mistakes I haven’t made, few moments I can recall where I am able to approve of or even understand what I did.

Except for him.

Last week, two mornings in a row, he was unusually silent in the morning. He showers for half an hour, earning him his Native American name, Longshower, and he didn’t reply to my shouts through the door telling him what time it was.

On Friday he slept over at his friend Jake’s house, like he usually does. When he came home on Saturday, we were scheduled to take a bus upstate to see my sister. He walked in with a black eye, a fat lip, and a swollen hand.

“I was in a fight,” he said. I looked him over. “I think that might be broken,” I said, examining his hand.

I sat him down and he told me the story: A bully had been harassing him and his friends near their old school yard where they still hang out, for weeks. He challenged the bully to hit him, finally, and when he did not, he whispered an epithet that means coward, and walked away. The bully sucker-punched him in the jaw, from the side, and he saw stars. He stewed for a day, then sent word out that the bully should meet him in the yard on Friday after school. All very West Side Story: My son’s gang accompanied him, instructed not to intervene, and eventually the kid showed up, with his crew. My son had inquired in advance whether the bully might have a knife or a gun and was told he did not. My head spun, hearing of all this going on totally unbeknownst to me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I howled.

“Because you would have told me not to fight him,” he said matter of factly.

They pummeled each other for what he thought was about three minutes, until somebody called the cops, and the sound of the sirens caused them all to scatter.

“Anyway, I feel better,” he said. “I was so angry, and now I’m not.”

We missed our bus. I started crying. Somehow all the pent up tension of 15 years of living with this heavy love, this helplessness, lack of control, spider-web faith that he would be protected and make sound choices out there, caught up with me.

We arrived upstate and my sister Bibi drove us to the nearest ER, where they told us he had two broken bones in his hand, and bandaged him up. As he lay there on the gurney, so skinny, with his big feet and his AC/DC T shirt, I remembered the very first time he stopped my heart. I was four months pregnant and was being attended to by an elderly MD who told me: “You are a healthy 27 year old pregnant woman, nothing is wrong with you,” as if addressing the ever increasing neurosis in our culture that pregnancy is an emergency.

“I know,” I said.

But on that second visit, the elderly doctor held a stethoscope to my stomach and went stiff.

Nurses were called in–they couldn’t find his heartbeat. I lay there praying, and tears trickled into my ears and time and space dissolved, until finally somebody shouted that they had found it again. I didn’t even know how much I wanted him–I had been somewhat angered to find myself pregnant, never thinking I was female, quite, escaping this condition by way of becoming a traveling journalist on the hunt, unencumbered, crossing Africa, covering world events, propelling myself with ideas and ideals I thought were incredibly important.

Where did the past 15 years go?

He shifted in the gurney and we talked about the new Kanye West record, and his hopes for it.

The doctor came in and gave my son a speech, about the importance of using language to de-escalate conflicts, not violence.

“I think he’s right, ” I said, when he left.

My son reminded me that years ago, I had told him that if you “have to punch a bully in the nose” if you want the problem dealt with. I did remember saying this–clearly an acting out of my own thwarted bully dreams, all the times I never got to hit back. “Since when do you listen to me?” I said.

How do you thank God enough, when you are able to walk out of a hospital with your son in bandages, and suddenly you are connected to all the mothers through all the ages who weren’t so fortunate? How do you take that gratitude, and promise God anything he wants so long as your one important prayer is always answered?

I know: It was just a fight in the school yard. But what if he wanted to go join the army and go fight a war? This to me, is the mystery, how the mothers survive the nights of war, not knowing. After all they have done to protect him and keep him safe. But part of the job is making him a “man” and instilling the notion of values, sacrifice, courage and valor, which all become a hopeless blur anywhere except in the movies.

I know there is some ancient Greek playwright who addressed all this.

The security guard said: “That guy is gonna come back. Did you mess him up? He’s gonna come back. You got to watch your back.”

I started reeling off prohibitions about where he could traverse between now and next Easter.

“I didn’t mess him up,” said my son. He said that for my sake. And it brought up an image of the other kid, in a bathroom, his own mother fumbling for bandages and peroxide.

My father had a good line, when I told him what happened. He drew a deep breath.

“Tell Jeremy we’re proud of him. But enough already.”

Last night I got a letter from a very deal old friend from Sweden, an old love who actually meant what that word says and stuck with me, and I with him, through the years– the kind of friendship that Marina Tsvetaeva compared to a mountain. Between friendship and passion, she said give me friendship any day. I walk in a cemetary of unmarked graves every single day. And let’s quote Neil Young: “How I lost my friends, I still don’t understand.”

Or Townshend:

How many Friends Have I really got? (You can count em all on one hand)

That love me, that want me, that will take me as I am?

My old friend Ake (‘awke’) Larsson was in St. Petersberg when he received my letter this week, as usual tinged with news about the curious desperation and isolation of Life in America.

He wrote about the boozy St. Petersberg tables where they were celebrating some colleague’s PhD, and it sounded like something out of Milan Kundera–just that, the idea of people at a table, the same table, for a long night in which an event is consecrated and celebrated, between people, friends, who went out of their way, in this case traveled from Sweden to Russia, to celebrate.

How often do any of us have that anymore?

These damn machines.

I fear the erosion and extinction of corporeal time, corporeal friendship, bodies together in time and space, more than I fear any other loss including the first amendment or polar ice caps. I sit at miserable piece of white plastic each night and I type forth, trying to connect and be less alone. The Internet. Soundless, it starves us very slowly. It is like a very tiny straw through which we are permitted survival breath. My father’s voice–I rarely hear it anymore. Friends voices, I never hear them. We email each other about getting together and then we cancel and send more email. Like ash flakes falling on a dying world, these emails.

I have a box of old cassette tapes from the days of audio tape answering machines and on them are all the messages I received for a period of about ten years. Some nights I listen to them. It took me seven years before I could listen to my mother’s voice on those tapes, after she died. And so many friends who are somehow ghosts now, literally or figuratively. I even have one from Hunter S. Thompson, who was still enough of a relic before he died to think that if you wanted to communicate with somebody you called them. Luckily I wasn’t home, and now I will always have his funny rambling message, which itself has a long story behind it. But I could only tell you if you were in the same place at the same time, maybe at a table, maybe in St. Petersberg. This way we could remember it.

The gadget men invented all the right crypto-demonic technology to make sure we were always in their domain, and never in our own. The medium is the message. Have you any idea how perfect a formula that is? It’s as good a E=Mc2, assuming one has no quarrel with Einstein. If I kiss you. If I email you. If I write you a letter. If I ignore you completely. If I sing to you.

What has become of the human traditions that use voice and body, dance and laughter, conversation, sound, fury and folly,to remind us where our bodies’ contours run, where we are, and are not? How can I remember you if I never see you and never hear you? How will we form memories? How will we know we were here?

How are we to know that we won’t die like those 15th century Austrian peasant’s babies who were taken from their mothers to an aristocrat’s tower, fed and clothed, but not touched? They died.

The most sensitive medium in the world is human skin.

I am thrown back to a reverie from adolescence, in Orebro, Sweden, circa 1978, before the age of computers, when even telephone calls were rarified. We were a gang–it was before we knew about isolation, adulthood. We congregated in our abandoned shoe factory/anarchist collective/rock club/vegan restaurant in the manner of a wolf pack. When we saw each other we jumped on top of each other, melded together, moshed, danced, like kids do, never realizing that adulthood would ask of them the end of all this bodily communion–all friends as one organism. Tribe.

I went home in November of 2001 and we were all ‘home,’ in town, and the rock club, center where it all happened was now a parking lot, which was a hard thing to lay eyes on, but what did we expect? We met at a pizza joint, drank and reminisced and laughed. When we walked out, I noticed that we were all walking as we did back then–in close pack formation, holding on to each other. That’s how close we were, but we got that way through our bodies, was my thought. Why the obsessive focus on “sex” when the human body is feeding itself all the time, from the handshake to the bear-hug. I don’t ever let anybody air-kiss me.

My father sometimes stretches out his hand, palms up, to my son, when he has said something funny, and says: ‘Touch me.’ It’s so basic. I wish I could do it.

My friend Ake seemed to be feeling like I was. He wrote to me… Celia, what we need to do is choose a city and choose a pub and sit there together for a long night, and the next day. It’s going to be either Istanbul, St. Petersberg, Stockholm, or Tommelilla. We’re going to meet and we’re going to talk.

I am going to book the ticket as a strike against this vast conspiracy of solitude. I know how I lost my friends. It was made so easy by the medium of email, the rash things I wrote, or didn’t write, though this spidery vein system that was carrying us away from all that we love, against our conscious will, as time itself conspired too. We forgot how much we love each other because we forgot to use our senses. Tomas Transtromer foresaw it in the lines from a late 70s poem about the welfare state: ‘We look almost happy in the sun, bleeding to death from wounds we know nothing about.”

Call your friends. See them. Hug them. Don’t email them. We reach the awareness, weirdly and gradually, that email is a subversion of time and space. If it doesn’t happen to you through your God given senses of touch, sound, smell, sight–it doesn’t really happen. It will not form a memory.

I am going to raise my son never to email a woman, only to call, if he really means something. “Real men don’t email,” I will shout, like a crazy old bat, like our grandmothers who insisted on wearing their finest clothes just to go to the bank.

Sit back and take a look. Stop clicking away and think for a second.

This whole new mode — of communication, of thinking, frankly for millions of us, of being — requires more thought if we are to avoid what could otherwise be the coming shocks. It is changing everything, but we may not really be properly anticipating how culturally destabilizing it can be, and probably already is.

“It” isn’t just blogs — mercy, how self-centered bloggers are! — but the blogs are the manifestation of the end of barriers to entry into the marketplace of expression. The marketplace of expression, of course, is larger than the marketplace of ideas; you don’t even have to have an idea to enter it. You merely have to have a platform, a soap box, and yes, the Internet provides this. But that does not mean “the medium is the message” — we are past that, Mr. McLuhan. The medium is by now, passé; it is so unbearably light — indeed it dances in the ether — that the medium is besides the point. Put differently, if the medium is the message, then the utter lack of real message, real content, pulsating across the vast majority of channels renders the matter itself moot. Or does it?

During the entire previous history of humanity until just a few minutes ago, elites — who usually had the stability of society, for good or for bad, as a central goal, as elites will — controlled the medium and the message. And the result was indeed a high degree of stability. You could not easily ruin a man’s life by communicating something false or scurrilous, though if you did it could hardly be undone. And little saw the light of day in print — be it by the hand of a scribe painstaking scratching out sacred writ, as the product of the crudest printing presses or over the air of the oligopoly broadcasters — without being weighed and vetted — no, not always, maybe not even mostly, for truth or neutrality, but at least for cost and usually for effect.

This sense of accountability flowed from the fact of accountability, often in its literal sense. Your quills could be blunted, your press smashed, and in a more enlightened era and place, your assets and good name put at risk through legal process. There was a high cost of entry to the market of expression, and that cost was, especially in unfree societies (as is still the case), often far greater than any true economic assessment; but once borne, this cost provided a counterweight — not a perfect one, but a real one — to the inclination to take no consideration of what costs others might bear as a result of your expression.

That world is largely gone. Libertarians rejoice. But are we quite sure we are as satisfied with the result as we constantly claim?

I am not overly sentimental about the old order. The vesting of the power of public or mass expression in the hands of a view, whether by genuine market forces or otherwise, led to corruption and changed history, sometimes for the worst.Walter Duranty‘s excercises on behalf of mass murder are only useful examples in the context that their harm is mitigated by the fact that the truth eventually came out, and by our appreciation of the fact that there were once other broadsheets in New York besides the Times. Who knows what accepted “facts” in our own mental worlds are pure inventions?

But today the world of expression is cracking up into an infinitely divisible collection of thought-worlds, a cultural Balkanization that may not foster the search for truth as effectively as we think. Yes, it is immensely easier, and a blessed thing, too, for bloggers to double-check the spin of the landed media, and to show half-, quarter- and non-truths for what they are. I have argued that this is what blogs do best and what makes them, really, indispensable. And of course it is damning that the media do not do this to each others’ work, but rather act as a pack, and with a clear political agenda.

But I am not talking about journalism, so much, as I am about entire communities of mentality that I see emerging. Of course, they’ve always been there. Let’s think of cranks: There were always, for example, people who bought Noam Chomsky books, and the sphere of influence of their like has probably not really changed. Their facts are as false as ever, and perhaps more easily disproved; their analysis is as faulty, too; and they couldn’t care less. Call it a wash to a plus.

But what troubles me, and motivated this long essay, is how easily it is to destroy lives, families and institutions today with no accountability. This is something the Internet has wrought, and back into the bottle that genie will not go.

Last night I was Googling the name of a person I do some business with, who is actually a friend. It led me to a link about an institution he supports, and positively scurrilous accusations against another supporter… and, in the same — anonymous — blog, of its leader… and its members… beyond innuendo; outright unsupported statements of purported fact about entire communities and their ways of life. The bloggers and most of those commenting, and heaping scorn on respected figures and leaders, were mostly anonymous — the true refuge of an Internet scoundrel, in most cases. But once pumped out there, the bilge does not retreat. The blog is on Blogspot, like many others, and will presumably be reachable, readable, linkable “forever.”

In the old days, cranks and complainers and scandalmongers of this ilk used to peddle such wares via stolen reams of photocopy paper or purple mimeograph printouts. Mailed anonymously or pinned up on storefronts they were easily enough recognized as the rantings of marginal people; once pulled down and crumpled up, they were gone forever, and usually rightfully so.

Now we know not to believe everything we read in a blog, of course. No one thinks any more that if it’s on the Internet, “there must be something to it.” But slander has a way of sticking, especially when it is directed to those whose stations or dignity do not make response appropriate or practical. And the virtual eternity of anonymous defamation makes it more insidious than anything that preceded it. Potential employers, spouses or in-laws, business partners — anyone who can work Google can forever gain access to and read the rankest falsehood on the Internet.

The cost to the anonymous hit-blogger, or commenter: Free. The effect on people, institutions, communities: Unfathomable.

They say that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I have argued that this is true of libertarianism, as well, which I consider the animating political spirit of the Internet. Traditional economists argue for government or collectivist intervention in economies where “externalities” — costs borne by others not a direct party to economic decision-making — are not “properly” incorporated into cost decisions made by the market. Libertarians reject this by insisting on a proper allocation of property rights and responsibilities.

How do you do this in the new world of asymmetrical cultural or information warfare? How can property rights and penalties for their violation be properly allocated and enforced in a world of anonymity and where there are zero costs to instantly uttering thoughts, accusations and claims that can be consumed by millions, capable of destroying lives? And is there no value to the virtues of civilized discourse, of accountability for what one says in all the senses of the word?

I propose no elite, no star chamber, no board of wise men to put atop the whole thing and answer these questions. But all I asked at the beginning was that we realize some of the implications of the trip we’re on, a trip I am enjoying and which benefits me. This is one of those implications, and while I am not a worrier, what I saw last night on the Internet — and what it portends, I think, beyond the narrow communal interests it implicated — is very troubling. This is the world we are making for ourselves. Will we be able to live in it?

After about an hour, it was my turn to board. I took a seat on the top deck. The sail across the Hudson was painfully slow because of the crush of boats awaiting docking permission on the other side, in Weehawken, New Jersey. We sat there, staring, of course, at the broad, thick plume of smoke as we floated and bobbed in the middle of the majestic Hudson. The sun was beginning to set over the cliffs that overlook the river from the Jersey side — the Palisades — and it was calm, mostly quiet, and, to say the least, somber. The ferry company did not charge us for the ride, which was certainly a grand gesture.

Finally we made it to shore. My car was just on the other side of the massive, elevated section of New Jersey Route 3. Unfortunately, however, I was not allowed to get it: Because of the potential for another attack, no one was allowed under that section of towering steel that held up ten or so lanes of highway. There was only one way to go: North, along the banks at the foot of the Palisades.

We walked, all of us, what must have been a mile — I don’t know exactly how long it was, until we reached here:

But I wasn’t driving a car. In fact, by now my neck and back were caught in their own miniature conflagration; the nerves around my bulging disk were creating, as my entire upper-right back spasmed, a pain no different from the sensation of a knife being repeatedly plunged in my right scapula, but this was war, and it was clearly every man for himself. So, in my two-piece Brooks Brothers suit and my horseleather wingtips, I traversed the steps up the side of the Palisades, taking terrorism very personally but, again, thanking God that I was alive, and walking, and not at the bottom of the steel and concrete shoeboxes that formerly had held up thousands of my neighbors in their daily exertions and that now was, in its compacted form, their shared grave.

And here I will end the story, almost, except to say two things.

One is that I got to the top, of course, and eventually made my way home. The normal one-hour commute took me seven hours, due to road closures, mass insanity, and attempted shortcuts around roadblocks that became endless tours of Bergen County, New Jersey. I walked the streets of West New York, Weehawken and Union City trying to figure out how to get to the park and ride in North Bergen — physically almost impossible for someone on foot — until a hasidic Jew in a van who lives in that last city saw an obviously out of place landsman and mercifuly gave him a ride to his Buick.

That was one thing.

The second thing was what happened before that, just when I got to the top of the stairs — winded, coated in sweat and grime, in agonzing nerve pain and, like a lot of other people, in no less spiritual pain over what had happened that day. I was at the top of the stairs but, I thought, at the nadir of almost everything else at that moment.

And when I rounded the bend onto the street, right behind a stone retaining wall, a young, well-built guy, about 25, I’d guess, was standing there with a huge tub full of bottles of water on ice. He gave one to everyone coming up the stairs, with a big smile. We exchanged words — something about thanks, something about us all being in this together — and yes, it was the most humane moment of the day for me. It gave me the strength, I think (not just for the hydration), to finish the rest of my quest to get home that day.

The next day New York was closed. The day after that, though, I was on the bus rolling into a ghost town. But those of us who had to be there streamed in as if it were any other day. But it wasn’t. The highways were empty; the tunnel, a hollow tube during the height of rush hour. Soldiers with weapons walked past my office in the Rolex Building. And for weeks after that we cruised into Manhattan at a pace that would have been familiar perhaps during the Depression, and it was as if we “serious New Yorkers” had the wounded city to ourselves for that time.

And as the buses lined up for tunnel, on the helix just to the west of the cliffs I climbed that day, we staired dumbly at the smoke rising from the Battery, from the huge empty hole in our guts where once our civic dreams, however drearily encapsulated by 1970′s municipal architecture, did indeed promise to raise us to the stars.