Too long to be a reply

I was going to make a reply to the posters in the comments section for my last blog entry regarding what I view as the astonishing treatment of Mr. Raed Jarrar by an airline representative and federal agents. I wrote out my reply to the valid points they made concerning this entry, but felt the entry itself is large enough to warrant its own place as a post, rather than as a series of several serial replies.

The comments left regarding my previous post are both valid and common viewpoints regarding the situation I previously described regarding Mr. Jarrar and the JetBlue airline. The only problem is that once you go down the road their reasoning sets before you, there is no non-arbitrary place to bring that reasoning to a halt. I’ll agree that a company has a right to see that the people inside its facilities (be it an airplane, a restaurant, a movie theater, or a department store) are treated courteously and given no particular reasons to walk away dissatisfied from an experience with the organization. However, society has to place some limits on the exercise of the company’s power to do so in order to keep a check on the use of that corporate instinct to engage in discrimination.

Let’s alter the facts of the instant case just a little bit to see how far that line of reasoning can take us. Let us suppose that you are the airline company and Mr. Jarrar is scheduled to be on your flight leaving J.F.K. airport. Mr. Jarrar did not wear his anti-Iraq war shirt, but instead is wearing simply a white, button-up Oxford shirt and jeans. Let us also suppose that people on the plane, seeing that he looks Arabic, complain to the company regarding their feeling of safety on the flight and demand that he be removed from the plane.

Should the company again seek to ease the fears and prejudices of its patrons by making Mr. Jarrar leave the plane? Should they just cancel his ticket? Should they rearrange his seat so as to place him at the opposite end of the plane from the people who are complaining about him based on a stereotyped view they hold regarding the tendency of his race to engage in violent acts? Or, in fact, is it wrong for them to make him do anything differently than any other patrons so long as he is not endangering himself or other patrons in the normal, everyday use of the facilities of the airline?

What if Mr. Jarrar (again, not wearing his anti-Iraq war t-shirt) chose to fly with three other individuals of Arabic descent. Should the airline split them up onto different flights to make people less nervous about a group of Arabs traveling together on a plane? Should they be treated differently simply on the basis of their racial background?

If you think this scenario is unlikely, you’d be wrong. Earlier this month, a Canadian radiology medical student of Arabic descent, and an East Indian colleague, were forced off of a plane in Denver after another passenger complained that he thought they were terrorists after witnessing the Canadian medical student discreetly saying his evening prayers (as his religion commands).

Earlier this year, a flight leaving from Los Angeles had an incident where a father and son of the Islamic faith dressed in their traditional South Asian tunic and skullcaps were forced off of an airplane because their presence made a flight attendant uncomfortable.

These are not isolated examples. A single ‘google’ search netted me a few dozen examples from this year alone, and that was without me taking the time to go to the second page of results. Acts like what happened to Mr. Jarrar reflect a widespread, and growing, wave of animus toward anything having to do with the Middle Eastern peoples.

Racial and ethnic animus coming from intolerant and bigoted people is not an excuse for companies to be engaged in discrimination. It is precisely because companies were exercising their right to serve customers based on racial animus that pushed some of the best reforms of the civil rights legislation from the 1950’s.

If Mr. Jarrar posed a threat to the flight, this wouldn’t be an issue. In the end, though, Mr. Jarrar had passed through security several times, been searched, and had his identification checked several times. To have the airline threaten that he couldn’t take a flight because he wore a t-shirt with a political slogan written in a Middle Eastern script is not based on security concerns stemming from Mr. Jarrar. It can only stem from the animus of other passengers or the airline itself regarding one of the world’s most widely spoken languages as a symbol of a perceived threat based upon a prejudice based upon an inaccurate stereotype based upon a single terrorist attack. It should be pretty clear that if that were a legitimate reason to keep someone off of a plane, then why not keep every white man off of a plane on the assumption that he might be a Klansman who will pick a fight with black passengers?

Such an analysis can be carried to any number of other scenarios. What if an individual books a ticket (unknowingly) on a plane that is taking the full membership of an atheist organization to a national conference in D.C., but the person wants to read silently from their bible during the trip? Ought the atheists on board to have a valid complaint to the airline (to have the Christian treated differently) simply because they do not like the fact that he is reading from his bible?

I think that there is a strong case to be made that, unless the individual is doing something dangerous or obscene, a company is engaged in an active campaign of discrimination to differentiate among its patrons in this way.

What is worse is that federal officials seem to have gotten involved in such a discrimination. This is problematic for severa large reasons, each of which I feel individually makes the case that the government should have acted differently in this case.

First, it should be troubling to any American to have a wide array of the U.S. population live under a separate legal system from the rest of us simply on the basis of their differing racial or religious backgrounds. Such allowances have universally led to abuses like the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, laws governing education or literacy requirements for voting in the South following the passage of the Civil War amendments to the Constitution, and laws favoring white business owners at the expense of their Chinese-immigrant competitors in California in the operation of commercial laundries. This very debate still rages over the practice of racial profiling for African-Americans in most metropolitan areas. Suggesting that it was wrong of Mr. Jarrar to wear his political shirt is analogous to suggesting that an African-American is at fault for his discriminatory stop simply because he chose to drive in a Lexus automobile. This very idea was rejected when the framers of the Constitution created a clause forbidding bills of attainder in the United States. In Britain, if someone in your family committed a serious enough crime, not only their property, freedom, and life were on the line, but yours as well. Their evil had 'attainted' you by association, and the crown could seize your land, lock you up, or hang you. The United States explicitly rejected the idea of guilt by association, and rejected the idea so thoroughly as to enshrine it in our most cherished legal document.

Simply put, having a separate legal framework for people based solely on arbitrary characteristics or association has never been a tool of freedom. It has only ever been used to create a favored class and a disfavored class, or to maintain such an already created division. We have seen this time and time again in American and foreign jurisdictions, and it seems abundantly clear that a similar set of consequences is at work here. It is not the type of thing our government should be involved in, and it should raise the hackles of any freedom-loving and egalitarian American.

Secondly, our Constitution gives all Americans the right to free speech (which has been interpreted to include written articles and symbolic artwork) which should encompass Mr. Jarrar’s t-shirt. The content of speech is only permissibly regulated by government action if the content itself is dangerous (the old ‘yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater’ example) or obscene. Mr. Jarrar’s shirt fit within neither of these categories. Furthermore, Mr. Jarrar’s t-shirt falls directly within the ambit of the most heavily protected form of speech – a form of speech which many Constitutional scholars believe was the impetus for the protections of the First Amendment – in our Constitution: political speech. Your right to criticize the government or its policies is the most inviolable form of expression available to an American citizen, and to lightly toss this aside is tantamount to declaring war on the Constitution and the principles which underlie it.

A third reason why having the federal government get involved in this situation in the manner in which they apparently did, is that it passes the imprimatur of the federal government over the actions of the company. Companies in the future will feel justified in discriminating among their customers based on the expressed religious, racial, or ethnic prejudices of the majority of their customers. While a dangerous path for a corporate entity to take on its own, with the federal government’s ‘go-ahead’ stamped on the policy, the slope becomes doubly as slippery.

The end analysis must be that companies cannot rightly give ground to the animosity and bigotry of their customers in a race to make money. Doing so violates their moral imperative, promotes or exacerbates animosity between favored and disfavored classes, and violates the principles enshrined in the civil rights legislation of the 1950’s. Having our government help a company do this violates principles of equality, egalitarianism, justice, freedom, and the legal frameworks which support these principles, while simultaneously turning our backs on our Constitution’s requirements and the greatest advances in racial equality made during the 20th century.

He’d better get one hell of an apology, and it had better have a lot of dollar signs

For a while now, I have been slowly fuming about the lack of customer service in the corporate world when legitimate inconveniences arise for consumers. About a year and a half ago, I purchased a fantastic game (and the expansion for said game) called “Attack!” The game is a conquer-the-world type of game in which you move your little military pieces around the globe, engage in diplomacy, economics, politics, and war, and try to end up the champion who bests all other nations. It was, and still is, a fantastic game, but mine came with a small defect.

The little plastic military pieces which represent airplanes, tanks, artillery, infantry, and various types of ships come in 6 different colors (to represent 6 different players), and on three sheets of molded plastic per color. All in all, there should be 18 molded sheets of plastic pieces, with three from each color. I received 18 sheets of plastic pieces, but one color had 4 sheets and another color had 2. I have written four times to the company regarding this mix-up in their product’s contents, and have yet to get a response. I know customer service is sometimes slow, but 9 months is a long time to wait for a letter back.

This past summer, I went on a vacation to visit my brother and see him safely married to a wonderful girl. My trip out was filled will all manner of inconvenience and unpleasantness, and despite having been promised a phone call to apologize and make amends for the failure of the company to satisfy their obligations, I never received such a call. I have written the company to request the promised call, but have yet to receive a response. Again, current wait time is almost 3 months on a reply.

Well, if I thought I had it bad, sit down and take a listen to the story of Raed Jarrar, an American architect of Arabic descent who simply wanted to fly from Washington to California, yesterday.

The following is the account of the incident, in Mr. Jarrar’s own words (which can be found on his own blog, here). All content as in original except where indicated by brackets:

[Mr. Jarrar details part of his recent trip to the Middle East on a
humanitarian/political mission, before returning to the United
States.]

[…]

The next day, I went to JFK in the
morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to California. I reached Terminal 6 at around
7:15 am, issued a boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to
the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was taken to a
secondary search . My shoes were searched, and I was asked for my boarding pass
and ID. After passing the security, I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I
went to get something to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange
juice and I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying my
breakfast and some sunshine.

At around 8:30, two men approached me while I was checking my phone. One of
them asked me if I had a minute and he showed me his badge, I said: "sure". We
walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter where I found
out that they were accompanied by another person, a woman from Jet Blue.

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my
id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver's license. He
said "people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt". I looked at my
t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English "we will
not be silent". You can take a look at it in this picture
taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said "I am very sorry if I
offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive". He asked me
if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all
of my bags and I asked him "why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn't it
my constitutional right to express myself in this way?" The second man in a
greenish suit interfered and said "people here in the US don't understand these
things about constitutional rights". So I answered him "I live in the US, and I
understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt".

Then I once again asked the three of them : "How come you are asking me to
change my t-shirt? Isn't this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to
change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic
t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?" so inspector Harris
answered "you can't wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It
is like wearing a t-shirt that reads "I am a robber" and going to a bank". I
said "but the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says "we will not
be silent". I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000
t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at
wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com . It is printed in many other languages: Arabic,
Farsi, Spanish, English, etc." Inspector Harris said: "We cant make sure that
your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don't have a translator. Maybe it
means something else". I said: "But as you can see, the statement is in both
Arabic and English". He said "maybe it is not the same message". So based on the
fact that Jet Blue doesn't have a translator, anything in Arabic is suspicious
because maybe it'll mean something bad!

Meanwhile, a third man walked in our direction. He stood with us without
introducing himself, and he looked at inspector Harris's notes and asks him: "is
that his information?", inspector Harris answered "yes". The third man, Mr.
Harmon, asks inspector Harris : "can I copy this information?", and inspector
Harris says "yes, sure".

inspector Harris said: "You don't have to take of your t-shirt, just put it
on inside-out". I refused to put on my shirt inside-out. So the woman interfered
and said "let's reach a compromise. I will buy you a new t-shirt and you can put
it on on top of this one". I said "I want to keep this t-shirt on". Both
inspector Harris and Mr. Harmon said "No, we can't let you get on that airplane
with your t-shirt". I said "I am ready to put on another t-shirt if you tell me
what is the law that requires such a thing. I want to talk to your supervisor".
Inspector Harris said "You don't have to talk to anyone. Many people called and
complained about your t-shirt. Jetblue customers were calling before you reached
the checkpoint, and costumers called when you were waiting here in the boarding
area". it was then that I realized that my t-shirt was the reason why I had been
taken to the secondary checking.

I asked the four people again to let me talk to any supervisor, and they
refused.

The Jet Blue woman was asking me again to end this problem by just putting
on a new t-shirt, and I felt threatened by Mr. Harmon's remarks as in "Let's end
this the nice way". Taking in consideration what happens to other Arabs and
Muslims in US airports, and realizing that I will miss my flight unless I
covered the Arabic script on my t-shirt as I was told by the four agents, I
asked the Jet Blue woman to buy me a t-shirt and I said "I don't want to miss my
flight."

She asked, what kind of t-shirts do you like. Should I get you an "I heart
new york t-shirt?". So Mr. Harmon said "No, we shouldn't ask him to go from one
extreme to another". I asked mr. harmon why does he assume I hate new york if I
had some Arabic script on my t-shirt, but he didn't answer.

The woman went away for 3 minutes, and she came back with a gray t-shirt
reading "new york". I put the t-shirt on and removed the price tag. I told the
four people who were involved in the conversation: "I feel very sad that my
personal freedom was taken away like this. I grew up under authoritarian
governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US
was that I don't want an officer to make me change my t-shirt. I will pursue
this incident today through a Constitutional rights organization, and I am sure
we will meet soon". Everyone said okay and left, and I went back to my seat.

At 8:50 I was called again by a fourth young man, standing with the same
jetblue woman. He asked for my boarding pass, so I gave it to him, and stood in
front of the boarding counter. I asked the woman: "is everything okay?", she
responded: "Yes, sure. We just have to change your seat". I said: "but I want
this seat, that's why I chose it online 4 weeks ago", the fourth man said "
there is a lady with a toddler sitting there. We need the seat."

Then they re-issued me a small boarding pass for seat 24a, instead of seat
3a. They said that I can go to the airplane now. I was the first person who
entered the airplane, and I was really annoyed about being assigned this seat in
the back of the airplane too. It smelled like the bathrooms, which is why I had
originally chosen a seat which would be far from that area.

It sucks to be an Arab/Muslim living in the US these days. When you go to
the middle east, you are a US tax-payer destroying people's houses with your
money, and when you come back to the US, you are a suspected terrorist and plane
hijacker.

Bad customer service is one thing when it comes from a company. When it comes from a company and the federal government at the same time, it's enough to almost make you wonder whether it is time to start reminding those in power that their grant of authority does not extend to discrimination on the basis of arbitrary characteristics, and most certainly does not extend to protecting people from their own ignorance-based fears of Arabic language T-shirts.

Some people watch basketball games. Some people follow the careers of celebrities. I worry about things like this:

Today, in my class on Jurisprudence, we were arguing about moral realism, and whether natural law fails as a theory of law due to the inherent difficulty or impossibility of arriving at some certain truth through moral reasoning. Finally! At last a class in which my field of study comes to be directly applicable.

I got to give the class a brief lesson on what is known as Agrippa’s Trilemma. Agrippa’s Trilemma states that when seeking the origins of any conclusion through the reasoning process, a reasoner will run into the difficulty of expressing his conclusion as truth. The trilemma issue says that there are three ways to try to get around the problem of expressing a conclusion as truth, and that all three ways suffer from a flaw that renders the ultimate conclusion uncertain.

The first horn of the trilemma is that a claim will rest upon an infinite regression of other claims. For instance, suppose that I say that “The sky is currently blue over Topeka, Kansas.” A skeptic could ask me how it is that I am so certain that my statement comports with truth. I might reply that I know that my statement is true because I can directly observe the sky right now above Topeka, Kansas, and that I see its color to be blue. The skeptic could again ask how I could be sure of each of those claims (that I can observe the sky right now, and that I observe it to be blue). I might engage in a discourse about the nature of biology, optical color, space-time, or any other number of topics, but in every single case, the skeptic could simply repeat his question for the new set of statements and have a valid case for doing so at every single juncture. Thus, there could be an infinite regress through the argument’s structure to attempt to find the Archimedean lever on which the whole structure is founded, and such an attempt would ultimately fail to find that foundation because it would never reach the end.

The second attempt to escape the horn involves finding a way to stop the infinite regression of evidences by finding some truths to be based upon themselves. A tautology (circular reasoning) is always true, logically, but may have absolutely no basis in reality. A circular argument in one in which the conclusion assumes the truth of the conclusion in the attempt to prove the conclusion itself. Hence, while a circular argument might very well be internally valid, there would be no way to escape from the circular nature of the argument, which again leaves the skeptic without a foundation upon which to rest his foe’s claims.

The final horn of the trilemma is one that establishes a firm foundation for the reasoning, but which is ultimately unsatisfying. At some point in the infinite regress of requests for evidences, the reasoner simply pulls a ‘this far and no further’ argument, cutting off discussion. Ex cathedra reasoning provides firm foundations, but their firmness is placed beyond question by the reasoner and he resists all attempts to question that base for his further reasoning.

I have wrestled with this issue and decided that all epistemological systems appear to rely on the third horn of the trilemma. At some point, there are simply claims which are made for which no evidences are provided. This is the nature of my reliance on rules of cause and effect. Any attempt to provide an evidence for rules of cause and effect itself would presuppose the truth of the law of cause and effect, so the law of cause and effect must be placed beyond the scope of valid questioning, ex cathedra.

Curiously, Agrippa’s Trilemma is self-defeating since it relies on laws of logic whose certainty is defeated by the Trilemma.

Foundationalists, like myself, can’t really definitively judge any other moral or reasoning system – even religious faith – based upon the infirmities of their foundations, since the foundations of someone who follows a different epistemological system (like empiricism) rest upon equally unproved grounds. Indeed, one cannot even validly make a claim that the views of others are internally inconsistent, since the very nature of doing so involves assuming the truth of the laws of logic (namely the truth of the law of the excluded middle, which would divide the world into things that are X or not-X, thus meaning that a an internally inconsistent statement is not true).

I am yet unsure how to deal with this epistemological problem, since it ultimately amounts to a critique of the reasoning process itself. Such a critique would render unintelligible the universe around us, since language, perception, reason, science, and every other human endeavor rely on the truth of the very principles whose truth we are unable to actually show.

It seems apparent to me that we must be able to rely on reason in order to function. Any attempt to negate that last statement seems to me to run into the difficulty of living (and not living at the same time) in an existence (and not existence at the same time) that contains (and doesn’t contain at the same time) a person (who is also not a person) who is in front of you (and also not in front of you at the same time). Quickly one gets the idea that functioning in such a universe becomes impossible. On a practical level, then, the only potential solution to this problem (although not from a theoretical level) is to ensure homogeneity of ‘first principles’ from which reasoners may begin. How to achieve that result, though, is not yet clear to me.

It is way too early for me to have senior-itis...

...And yet, I already have it. This weekend, my plans were to read 3 cases for my Indian Gaming Law class, read an article for my Legal Malpractice seminar, prepare for Jurisprudence class, and prepare for my Tax Policy seminar by reading 2 articles. I accomplished absolutely none of these things. Instead, I spent all day on Saturday out shopping for some window treatments, and wasted all day on Sunday in front of the television watching HGTV's marathon of DesignStar. Is it so wrong to wonder why you are attending law school when all you really want is to do is be a house husband? There needs to be a job where you can be an amateur interior decorator, flower arranger, chef, baker, writer, and singer.