The Binary Circumstance

We are twenty years into the AIDS epidemic and people still think that you can have unsafe sex and that it’s the responsiblity of others to protect them from HIV.

Thurston County prosecutors yesterday charged a 31-year-old Lacey man for allegedly having unprotected sex with several women while knowing he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

Anthony Whitfield is being held at the Thurston County Jail on four charges of first-degree assault. He was arrested Wednesday.

In the TV version of this story, it is apparent that the man is black. All of the "victims" that were shown on TV were white.

Did any of the women demand that he wear a condom? Apparently not. It was his responsibility to protect them by disclosing his HIV status.

It was amazing to listen to one woman rant and cry about how this man had infected them with HIV. One said that she hoped he would rot in jail, another said with a celebratory tone in her voide that he would rot in jail because he had HIV. Somebody else remarked that finding out that you are HIV positive is a death sentence.

HIV has never been a death sentence, even though the medical profession and AIDS activists, who make a lot of money from perpetuating that falsehood, have always wanted us to believe that.

This article seems to suggest that testing postive for HIV and testing positive for AIDS are the same thing. They are not the same thing.

I personally know of several people who were infected in the late 70’s and early 80’s with HIV who have never gotten AIDS and still have perfectly normal immune systems. They are genetically resistent to HIV, something that is to be expected given that genetic variation is the basis for evolution.

In addition, new drug therapies that became widely used in the mid-nineties often allow HIV positive individuals to live for many years.

People don’t die from HIV in this country in a year’s time anymore, as they did in the early 80’s.

You would think with all the money that has been spent on HIV/AIDS education in this country over the last twenty years that people would not still believe such stupid things about it.

There are two factors that come into play with all infectious diseases. There is the pathogen, in this case HIV, and there is the susceptibility to the pathogen. HIV is not a problem for those who are genetically resistant to it. Is the person who carries the pathogen responsible for another person’s lack of resistance to that pathogen?

Given that some people have a genetic resistence to HIV, and Anthony Whitfield has no way of knowing his partners’ genetic makeup or having any control over it, is it his responsibility to disclose his HIV status to people who are so ignorant of the subject? Should he have to endure their rejection and probable discrimination? Should he have that additional burden and suffer their rejection,

The laws are written to put the burden on the HIV positive person to not infect others. Would these women have been infected if the law was written to reflect their own personal responsibility in their infection? If the law didn’t have the effect of allowing these women to blame the man for their infection, would they have been more likely to insist on having safe sex?

The TV report also noted that this man has fathered two children by a couple of the women he was having sex with. Condoms would probably have prevented that also. But when you can force the taxpayers to pay for the children, why bother?

Who are the real victims here? The media and the law would have us believe that the black man is.

I don’t buy it. The fact that the women didn’t practice safe sex had as much to do with their infection and their pregnancies as his actions did. He is certainly not responsible for their ignorance about HIV, he is the victim of it.

I’m not suggesting that he or anybody else should go around purposely infecting peeople with HIV. What I’m saying is that if he’s going to be penalized for telling people that he’s HIV positive and he’s going to be penalized for not telling them, what is he supposed to do? When the law puts individuals in lose-lose situations, they’re going to do crazy things.

He is as much of victim of their ignorance and irresponsibility as they are of his. Taxpayers and people who pay health insurance premiums are victims of all of them. But in this case, only the black man will get the blame.

UPDATE 12/21/04:  It was reported on the news this evening that Anthony Whitfield was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail today.

The Seatte PI reports this morning that Ronald Harold Young who was charged last week with raping his foster children, is the son of a convicted child rapist, Harold Edgar Young.

The father of a man who now faces more than 30 counts of child rape involving foster sons in his care was himself a child rapist, according to court records.

Fifteen years ago, Harold Edgar Young pleaded guilty to second-degree child rape after two of his granddaughters accused him of sexual molestation, prompting residents of the mobile-home park he managed to draft a petition to keep him away. Court documents in the case also say Harold Young may have molested his own stepdaughters.

[…]

Ronald Young, a seemingly devout born-again Christian who was studying to be a minister, and his wife began caring for abused and neglected children in their rural Key Peninsula home in the summer of 2002.

The state expanded the family’s license from three to six children last year.

For more: Part I, Part II

If she didn’t believe in God, she couldn’t believe that God told her to kill her children. Right?

So if she didn’t believe in God, would the children still be alive? We’ll never know.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice, former Stanford University Provost and current National Security Advisor under George W. Bush appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes tonight. Interviewed by Ed Bradley, she once again, as she did on many TV programs this past week, tried to justify her refusal to testify under oath before the 911 Commission. She said:

Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle here, Ed, it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.

After the publication of Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, and his testimony before the 911 Commission where he presented a very negative picture of the Bush administration’s response to terrorism, Rice and other Bush administration officials have spent the past week attacking his character and his credibility. In the ongoing war of words, Clarke appeared on NBC News’ Meet the Press this morning where he was interviewed by Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: But to be clear, Mr. Clarke, you would urge Congress, the intelligence committees, to declassify your sworn testimony before the congressional inquiry two years ago as well as your testimony before the September 11th Commission?

MR. CLARKE: Yes, and those documents I just referred to and Dr. Rice’s testimony before the 9-11 Commission because the victims’ families have no idea what Dr. Rice has said. There weren’t in those closed hearings where she testified before the 9-11 Commission. They want to know. So let’s take her testimony before the 9-11 Commission and make it part of the package of what gets declassified along with the national security decision directive of September 4 and along with my memo of January 25.

In fact, Tim, let’s go further. The White House is selectively now finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed were covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press. Let’s take all of my e-mails and all of the memos that I’ve sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11 and let’s declassify all of it.

MR. RUSSERT: As well as her responses?

MR. CLARKE: As well as her responses.

Others are also putting pressure on Rice to testify under oath which she has steadfastly refused to do. Even Republican members of the committee are questioning her motives.

Commissioner John Lehman, another Republican, said Rice “has nothing to hide, and yet this is creating the impression for honest Americans all over the country and people all over the world that the White House has something to hide, that Condi Rice has something to hide.???

“And if they do, we sure haven’t found it. There are no smoking guns. That’s what makes this so absurd. It’s a political blunder of the first order,??? Lehman told ABC’s “This Week.???

This whole debate about the secrecy of national sercurity advisors reminded me of a passage in Murray Rothbard’s classic, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. Thanks to optical scanning technology, I’ve quoted the passage without having to retype the whole thing. While Rothbard calls them national security managers or national security intellectuals, he is clearly talking about the role of national security advisors like Condi Rice.

The historical context provided by this passage, helps to clarify what “principle” Dr. Rice is so determined to protect. The precedent she does not want to set is allowing the citizen taxpayers tp know what is happening at the highest level of the government. I think you’ll agree that Dr. Rice is playing her role very well.

[The passage is from Murray N. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 1985 Revised Edition, published by the Libertarian Review Foundation, pages 59-62. Rothbard’s footnotes are at the bottom.]

In recent years, we have seen the development in the United States of a profession of “national security managers,” of bureaucrats who never face electoral procedures, but who continue, through administration after administration, secretly using their supposed special expertise to plan wars, interventions, and military adventures. Only their egregious blunders in the Vietnam War have called their activities into any sort of public question; before that, they were able to ride high, wide, and handsome over the public they saw mostly as cannon fodder for their own purposes.

A public debate between “isolationist” Senator Robert A. Taft and one of the leading national security intellectuals, McGeorge Bundy, was instructive in demarking both the issues at stake and the attitude of the intellectual ruling elite. Bundy attacked Taft in early 1951 for opening a public debate on the waging of the Korean War. Bundy insisted that only the executive policy leaders were equipped to manipulate diplomatic and military force in a lengthy decades long period of limited war against the communist nations. It was important, Bundy maintained, that public opinion and public debate be excluded from promulgating any policy role in this area. For, he warned, the public was unfortunately not committed to the rigid national purposes discerned by the policy managers; it merely responded to the ad hoc realities of given situations. Bundy also maintained that there should be no recriminations or even examinations of the decisions of the policy managers, because it was important that the public accept their decisions without question. Taft, in contrast, denounced the secret decision making by military advisers and specialists in the executive branch, decisions effectively sealed off from public scrutiny. Furthermore, he complained, “If anyone dared to suggest criticism or even a thorough debate, he was at once branded as an isolationist and a saboteur of unity and the bipartisan foreign policy.12

Similarly, at a time when President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles were privately contemplating going to war in Indochina, another prominent national security manager, George F. Kennan, was advising the public that “There are times when, having elected a government, we will be best advised to let it govern and let it speak for us as it will in the councils of the nations.”13

We see clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is generally none too secure; for the intellectual, like everyone else on the market, must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is characteristic of these masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual concerns. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus, a secure income, and the panoply of prestige.

The eager alliance between the State and the intellectuals was symbolized by the avid desire of the professors at the University of Berlin, in the nineteenth century, to form themselves into what they themselves proclaimed as the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern.” From a superficially different ideological perspective, it can be seen in the revealingly outraged reaction of the eminent Marxist scholar of ancient China, Joseph Needham, to Karl Wittfogel’s acidulous critique of ancient Chinese despotism. Wittfogel had shown the importance for bolstering the system of the Confucian glorification of the gentleman scholar officials who manned the ruling bureaucracy of despotic China. Needham charged indignantly that the “civilization which Professor Wittfogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could make poets and scholars into officials.”14 What matter the totalitarianism so long as the ruling class is abundantly staffed by certified intellectuals!

The worshipful and fawning attitude of intellectuals toward their rulers has been illustrated many times throughout history. A contemporary American counterpart to the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern” is the attitude of so many liberal intellectuals toward the office and person of the President. Thus, to political scientist Professor Richard Neustadt, the President is the “sole crown like symbol of the Union.” And policy manager Townsend Hoopes, in the winter of 196o, wrote that “under our system the people can took only to the President to define the nature of our foreign policy problem and the national programs and sacrifices required to meet it with effectiveness.”15 After generations of such rhetoric, it is no wonder that Richard Nixon, on the eve of his election as President, should thus describe his role: He [the President] must articulate the nation’s values, define its goals and marshall its will.” Nixon’s conception of his role is hauntingly similar to Ernst Huber’s articulation, in the Germany of the 1930s, of the Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich. Huber wrote that the head of State “sets up the great ends which are to be attained and draws up the plans for the utilization of all national powers in the achievement of the common goals . . . he gives the national life its true purpose and value.”16

The attitude and motivation of the contemporary national security intellectual bodyguard of the State has been caustically described by Marcus Raskin, who was a staff member of the National Security Council during the Kennedy administration. Calling them “megadeath intellectuals,” Raskin writes that:

. . . their most important function is to justify and extend the existence of their employers. , . . In order to justify the continued large scale production of these [thermonuclear) bombs and missiles, military and industrial leaders needed some kind of theory to rationalize their use. . . . This became particularly urgent during the late 1950’s, when economy minded members of the Eisenhower Administration began to wonder why so much money, thought, and resources were being spent on weapons if their use could not be justified. And so began a series of rationalizations by the “defense intellectuals” in and out of the universities. . . . Military procurement will continue to flourish, and they will continue to demonstrate why it must. In this respect they are no different from the great majority of modern specialists who accept the assumptions of the organizations which employ them because of the rewards in money and power and prestige. . . . They know enough not to question their employers’ right to exist. 17

12See Leonard P. Liggio, Why the Futile Crusade? (New York: Center for Libertarian Studies, April 1978), PP. 41-43.
13George F. Kennan, Realities ofAmerican Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), PP. 95-96.

14Joseph Needham, “Review of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, ” Science and Society 1958), p. 65. For an attitude in contrast to Needham’s, see John Lukacs, “Intellectual Class or Intellectual Profession?,” in George B. deHuszar, ed., The Intellectuals (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, ig6o), p. 522.
15Richard Neustadt, “Presidency at Mid Century,” Law and Contemporary Problems (Au,umn, 1956), pp. 609 45; Townsend Hoopes, “The Persistence of Illusion: The Soviet Economic Drive and American National Interest,” Yale Review (March 196o), P. 336.
16Quoted in Thomas Reeves and Karl Hess, The End of the Draft (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp, 64-65.
17Marcus Raskin, “The Megadeath Intellectuals,” The New York Review of Books (November 14, t963), PP. 6 7, Also see Martin Nicolaus, “The Professor, the Policeman, and the Peasant,” Viet Report June-July 1966), pp. 15-19.