Serial Killer on the loose

Putin: KGB Gang$ta for Life

by Alexander Boot 

When I was a youngster in Brezhnev’s Russia, I was taught that wealth was relative. Though most people in the West were comfortable, they were poor by comparison to the rich, a problem we didn’t have. That’s why, on balance, we considered ourselves better off.

We knew the party elite were wealthy. They lived in large flats. Had country houses. Owned decent furniture and electronic equipment. Ate good food. Wore good clothes. Though we didn’t know this at the time, they lived—at best—as well as middle-class Westerners.

Glasnost and perestroika changed that lamentable situation. A giant transfer of capital abroad ensued, with the elite using “appointed” oligarchs as the conduit. But all those Abramoviches and Berezovskys acquired use of the capital, not its ownership. They were the leaseholders, with the freehold in the hands of a new elite made up of party functionaries, KGB officers, and underworld types. Overnight the new elite’s language acquired a new noun (dollars) and a new numeral (1,000,000,000). Gorbachev, immediately after leaving office in 1991, started a foundation said to be initially capitalized at $8 billion—not bad for a man whose monthly salary had been around $2,500.

In a 2007 interview to the German paper Die Welt, the political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky estimated Putin’s wealth at $40 billion. Belkovsky provided a quick rundown of Putin’s business interests: a 4.5% holding in the world’s largest gas producer Gazprom, along with 37% of Russian oil and gas giant Surgutneftegaz, and “at least 75%” of the oil trader Gunvor. (Putin vehemently denied this one.)

I have reviewed the Russian-language facsimile of a Federal Security Service dossier on Putin first published in the Russian papers Moskovsky Komsomolets and Versia and now reappearing on the website Compromat.ru. The dossier is in the standard format used by the FSB to collate embarrassing material on high government officials. In this instance it chronicles Putin’s activities in St. Petersburg where, before his transfer to Moscow, he was second in command to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

The dossier states that Putin’s “quest for personal enrichment and absence of any moral barriers became obvious at the very onset of his career.” As early as 1990 a group of Municipal Council deputies “conducted an investigation of Putin’s activities in issuing licenses for the export of raw materials.” In particular, the investigation dealt with export licenses to exchange raw materials for food. Such materials dutifully left Russia. No food came back.

“Can we in good conscience do business with Col. Putin?”

According to documents cited by Russia’s then-Deputy General Prosecutor Mikhail Katyshev, Putin also used the children’s home of Petersburg’s Central Borough to “export” children abroad, a practice outlawed in Britain since 1807.

Costs are prices too

Problems with the Cost Theory of Value

by Robert P. Murphy 

One of the most important developments in the history of economic thought was the so-called Marginal Revolution of the early 1870s, in which the older cost (and more specifically, labor) theory of value was overturned by subjective value theory. This was an unambiguous advance in the science of economics, analogous to the superiority of Einsteinian relativity over Newtonian mechanics. The revolution is of special importance for Austrian economists, since Carl Menger — founder of the Austrian School — is credited as one of the three pioneers of the new approach.

In the present article, I'll explain a generic cost theory approach and point out some of its major shortcomings. In a future article, I'll show how the modern, subjectivist approach has more explanatory power and avoids all of these pitfalls.

A Generic Cost Theory of Value

In a short online essay, I don't want to get bogged down with quotations from specific economists from the past. Instead, I will try to present a generic version of the cost theory of value in order to summarize the viewpoint. The classical economists — including such giants as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Frederic Bastiat — had nuanced treatments of the subject in their writings, but all generally adhered to some form of the cost theory (and more specifically, a labor theory of value, which Karl Marx adopted from the other classical economists). Those who want a more academic treatment, dealing with arguments from proponentsof the cost theory, should consult this article.

The Purpose of Economic Value Theory

The purpose of economic value theory — whether a cost, labor, or subjective approach — is to explain the prices of various goods and services in a market economy, i.e., to explain their "market value." For example, why is it that gold bars and automobiles are so valuable, while tinfoil and tube socks are not?

Explaining the formation and magnitudes of various market prices is not the sole task of economic theory, but it is a crucial component of it. The cost theory of value is a legitimate approach, and it did shed some light on the subject. But in light of the flaws we will discuss, the cost theory was ultimately displaced by a more satisfactory explanation.

Public schools and civic decline

The Candy-Cane Cops 
by Hans von Spakovsky

People who are supposed to be teaching our children civics want to deny them the protection of the Constitution.

It’s known as the candy-cane case. And it’s all about religious discrimination.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments today in Morgan v. Swanson. The case demonstrates just how badly political correctness has corrupted our public schools and illustrates the extremes to which radical school administrators will go to impose their ideological, anti-religious views on our children.

The lawsuit was filed by the families of several elementary-school students in Plano, Texas. The suit states that, although the schools hold birthday and “winter break” parties, no Christmas parties are allowed. Moreover, the schools ban all “references to and symbols of the Christian religion and the celebration of the Christian religious holiday, Christmas,” at the winter-break parties. Even “red and green Christmas colors” are banned. And students were explicitly instructed “not to write ‘Merry Christmas’ on greeting cards sent to United States soldiers [or to retirement homes] because that phrase might be offensive.”

Apparently the schools never considered that such rigorous censorship might be offensive. Indeed, they went further. Students were allowed to exchange gift bags at the winter-break parties. However, the suit alleges, “students and parents [were] interrogated by school officials . . . as to whether or not the contents of their gift or ‘goodie’ bags . . . contain any religious viewpoint, religious references or religious message.” If they did, the bags were confiscated by school officials.

One student’s bags were seized because they contained pencils inscribed with the phrase “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” Another student was banned from giving his friends candy-cane-shaped pens with a laminated card entitled the “Legend of the Candy Cane,” which explained the Christian origin of candy canes. Another student, “during noncurriculum times and with no material and substantial disruption to the operations of the school,” was giving her friends tickets to a free Christian drama production at her church. Principal Jackie Bomchill ordered the tickets confiscated and destroyed because they “expressed a ‘religious’ viewpoint.”

One student’s mother asked for a meeting with Bomchill to get prior approval for her daughter to give her friends two pencils at her own birthday party during lunch recess, one inscribed with the word “moon” and the other with the phrase “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Instead of engaging in a calm discussion, the principal handed the mother a letter threatening that “law enforcement officials” would be called to arrest her and told her that the Jesus pencils could only be distributed “outside of the school building.” However, when the daughter attempted to do just that, outside of the school building, Bomchill grabbed her, took the pencils, and berated her. Bomchill told the mother her daughter would be “kicked out of school” if she made any further attempts to distribute religious items. School officials even called the police, who pulled over the mother on her way home.

Since these events, the school district and the principals have only compounded their errors. Rather than acknowledge that they made a mistake, apologize, and change their discriminatory policies, they have spent over a million taxpayer dollars fighting this lawsuit all the way up to the federal appeals court. In fact, they claim that they did nothing wrong and should be granted “qualified immunity” because “the First Amendment does not apply to elementary school students” and the “Constitution does not prohibit viewpoint discrimination against religious speech in elementary schools.” And these are the people teaching civics to our children!

Fifty years ago, the Holocaust was suspended

A suspension of barbarity

by Jeff Jacoby

FIFTY YEARS AGO, they keep saying. Fifty years ago, Auschwitz was liberated. Fifty years ago, the Nazis were defeated. Fifty years ago, the survivors emerged from the ash and bones and hell of the death camps. Fifty years ago, the world, sickened to discover how unspeakably deep and black was the abyss into which one of the most cultured nations on earth had systematically ground up 6 million Jews, swore: Never again. Fifty years ago, the Holocaust ended.

Fifty years ago.

Ended?

In the Cleveland synagogue I grew up in, there was a woman named Esther, a survivor of the camps. Over the years I watched her mind slowly disassemble, pulled apart by memories too violent to endure. She would burst into shouts during the rabbi's sermon and madly rush to kiss the Torah scroll as it was carried to the ark. When charity appeals were made from the pulpit, she would wave in the air, of all things, Czechoslovak stamps, crying out that she had something of great value to donate. I got hold of one of those stamps once and looked it up in a catalog. It was worthless.

When, exactly, did the Holocaust end for Esther?

In the same synagogue was a man called B--, an envelope maker who had no children and who we all somehow knew never would. What B-- lost in the camps wasn't his life, but something even more precious: all hope of giving life. During the war, he had been sterilized in one of Dr. Mengele's sadistic experiments.

When did his Holocaust end?

When did my father's?

On May 7, 1945, the concentration camp at Ebensee, an Austrian town between Linz and Salzburg, was abandoned by its Nazi guards. Among the Jews not yet dead in that place was my father. He was 19 years old, he weighed 65 pounds, and he was nearly gone with starvation and typhoid fever. Thirteen months and three camps earlier, on his first day in Auschwitz, he had seen his parents sent to the gas chamber, along with his 10-year-old brother Yrvin and his little sister Alice, who was 8. My father's teen-age brother Zoltan was murdered a few days later; his older sister Franceska by the following spring.

When the Nazis fled Ebensee on that May morning 50 years ago, my father was left with nothing but the rags he was wearing and a greenish-blue tattoo on his arm: A-10502.

And feelings of guilt that have lasted for decades.

"I had dreams and nightmares about what happened," he said to me once. "I always feel sort of guilty, even until now, about not protecting my younger brother. I was with him together for a just a few hours; then we were separated. I wonder -- could I have insisted that he stay with me? I don't know. Coming from a farm, I was naive. I was not sophisticated."

Between 1940 and 1945, it was a central aim of the German Reich to exterminate every Jew in Europe -- to bring about, once and for all, a "Final Solution" to the Jewish "problem." To carry out this policy, which was given a higher priority than even the war effort, the Nazis constructed a vast and elaborate machinery, employing tens of thousands of people and requiring the most detailed and complicated logistics. It was an industry whose raw material was Jews, which it imported from lands as far-flung as Greece and Norway, and whose final product was Jewish corpses, or the greasy smoke of Jewish corpses. To ensure its success, the Nazis drew on all the resources of wealth, science, engineering, transportation and manpower at their command.

And my father has felt guilty for 50 years because he didn't know how to save his brother.

Has his Holocaust ended?

I mistrust this number, this 50. It seems too definitive a milestone, too complete, too over-and-done-with. When I hear the words "ended 50 years ago," it seems to me I also hear: "Enough already." "Let it go." "It's history."

Is it?

On an NPR broadcast two weeks ago, an articulate skinhead named Tracy Gilson was asked why he has Hitler's face tattooed on his neck.

"The Holocaust," replied the young man, who became a skinhead at 13. "You know what? If it did happen, good. I don't care. I'm glad. I really -- that's good. That's great. Swell, good. Kill 6 million more, somebody, please. . . . I wish somebody would do that here, freakin' decide that they need to get rid of all the trash and start building death camps. That would be fine with me."

The Holocaust didn't end 50 years ago; it was only suspended. What separates us from 8-year-old girls gulping death in gas chambers is nothing more than a thin veneer of civilization, stretched like a bandage over a bleeding wound, capable of being stripped away in a twinkling. Germany is the land of Bach and Durer and Goethe, after all. Yet how readily it became the land of Buchenwald and crematoria and pits filled with naked, machine-gunned Jews.

There is nothing so evil, so demonic, that people cannot be induced to do it, or to look the other way while it is being done. Not only storm troops and skinheads. Nice people. Cultured people. People like us.

Fifty years ago, the Holocaust was suspended. How long it stays suspended depends on how long we remember to never forget. Fifty years after the spring of 1945, when even those who survived are almost all gone and wildflowers grow where dead parents and dead children were once piled high, we need to remember more urgently than ever.

Tyranny at work

Would you like to forfeit your house?

Imagine a guest with a marijuana cigarette secretly tucked in his pocket visits your house. The police storm in, seize the cigarette, and arrest your guest for drug possession. The police then announce that the government now owns your house.  “What?!” you wail, “I did nothing wrong. How can you take my house?”

You are told that civil-forfeiture law allows government to take property that harbored an “abatable nuisance” – illegal drugs, in this case. An officer explains that “Your house, not you, committed a wrong. To help stem drug trafficking, it must be seized. Your doubts about our ability to confiscate your property will be dispelled by reading the Supreme Court’s March 4th decision in Bennis vs. Michigan.”

Certain that such tyranny is impossible in America, you rush to readBennis. Your heart sinks. Chief Justice Rehnquist explains that the Constitution permits Michigan to use civil forfeiture to strip Tina Bennis of her ownership of an automobile in which her husband John had a tryst with a prostitute. Civil forfeiture allows government to take property from someone without convicting that someone of a crime.

Everyone concedes that Mrs. Bennis was unaware that John used the car for illegal sex – for which he was convicted and fined $250. Still, according to the Court, Michigan violated neither the Due Process nor the Takings clauses of the Constitution by taking the innocent Mrs. Bennis’ property without as much as a “thankee, ma’am.” The court reasoned that the state’s confiscation and forfeiture of Mrs. Bennis’ car is constitutional because courts have long upheld civil-forfeiture seizures of some properties.  But these were historically confined to properties whose owners could not be tried in domestic courts. Not until Prohibition – long after the Constitution was adopted – did government generally wield civil forfeiture against people who could easily be criminally prosecuted.

Traditionally, no one can be punished unless first convicted. And government cannot convict someone – nor forfeit his property – who is denied an opportunity to defend himself before an impartial jury. But what to do about criminals outside of a domestic court’s jurisdiction? This was a pressing question for courts in cases involving smuggled goods as well as ships used for smuggling or piracy on the high seas. Owners of these properties were typically outside of domestic jurisdiction. Unless the law found a practical way to punish these foreign owners, smuggling and piracy would continue unabated.

The root of all evils (medical evil that is)

Mummy Says John Horgan Is Wrong about Fat andCarbs in Food

By Karen Schrock  | Thursday, May 19, 2011 | 

I was struck today by the juxtaposition of two recent articles here at ScientificAmerican.com. In “Thin Body of Evidence,” John Horgan expresses his skepticism about journalist Gary Taubes’s claims that carbohydrates, not fat, are the cause of obesity, heart disease and other health problems faced by many Americans. In “Mummy Says Princess Had Coronary Disease,” scientists who performed a CT scan on a 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummy express their puzzlement that this ancient princess had advanced atherosclerosis (hardened arteries) despite her civilization’s “healthy” diet that included wheat, barley, bread and beer—and only small amounts of meat.

Atherosclerosis is linked to high blood levels of triglycerides (a type of fat molecule) and low levels of HDL cholesterol, the “good” cholesterol. Eating a lot of carbohydrates (such as wheat, barley, bread and beer) is well known to raise triglycerides and lower HDL. Eating fat (such as found in meat) counteracts these effects, raising HDL and lowering triglyceride levels. The Egyptian princess’s diet, therefore, is the perfect recipe for high triglycerides and low HDL—and for atherosclerosis.

These facts about diet and blood lipid levels are not controversial—they have been known for decades and verified repeatedly by scores of studies. So why were the anthropologists surprised by the mummy’s atherosclerosis? And why is Horgan resistant to the idea that carbohydrates cause obesity and desease? The answer lies in two all-too-human tendencies: over-reliance on personal experience and resistance to information that contradicts our beliefs.

Horgan and the anthropologists who studied the mummy are falling victim to their preconceived notions about nutrition—that whole grains are healthy and animal fats are dangerous. They can hardly be blamed; those ideas have been trumpeted as truths for three decades in this country. But those notions were never based on good science, and now evidence is mounting that they are just plain wrong. Taubes details that evidence masterfully in Good Calories, Bad Calories (Knopf, 2007) and Why We Get Fat (Knopf, 2010).

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Truth, Freedom, and Falsehood in Economic Analysis and Policy Making

 Big Government and Truth

by Robert Higgs

For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

In regard to goodness and beauty, I have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion. For guidance in seeking goodness, we may look to saints, theologians, moral philosophers, and moral exemplars of our own acquaintance. For demonstrations of beauty, we may turn to nature and to artists, great and small, who have adorned our lives with the grace of music, poetry, and the visual arts. My own professional qualifications, as an economist and an economic historian, do not equip me to contribute anything of value in these areas.

I do feel qualified, however, to speak with regard to truth, because the search for truth has always served as the foundation of my intellectual endeavors. Moreover, my study, research, and reflection within my own professional domains have brought home to me a relationship that others might do well to ponder and respect—a relationship, indeed, an array of relationships, between truth and freedom, such that anyone who seeks the triumph of truth must also seek to establish freedom in human affairs.

When I began my academic career in 1968, my research specialty was the economic history of the United States. I was expected to publish the findings of my research in reputable professional journals. For a young man just beginning to master his field, carrying out publishable research was a daunting task. Thousands of other writers had already contributed to building up the literature in my field, so adding something of enough importance to merit its publication in a good journal was hardly an easy task.

I discovered, however, that one way to proceed was by identifying significant mistakes in the existing literature and correcting them. Moreover, I soon found that many such mistakes had been made. To put this statement in another way, I found that the existing sources often failed to tell the truth about one thing or another, and in some cases the falsehoods propounded by one writer led later writers, who relied on those false statements, to make errors of their own.

Liberation by the numbers

Some Metrics Regarding the Volume of Online Activity

by ADAM THIERER 

One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions about just how effective any info control regime can be. [See our recent essays on the topic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]  As we continue our research, we’ve been attempting to unearth some good metrics / factoids to help tell this story.  It’s challenging because there aren’t many consistent data sets depicting online data growth over time and some of the best anecdotes from key digital companies are only released sporadically. Anyway, I’d love to hear from others about good metrics and data sets that we should be examining.  In the meantime, here are a few fun facts I’ve unearthed in my research so far. Please let me know if more recent data is available:

§  Facebook: users submit around 650,000 comments on the 100 million pieces of content served up every minute on its site.^[1]

§  YouTube: every minute, over 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site.^[2]

§  eBay is now the world’s largest online marketplace with more than 90 million active users globally and $60 billion in transactions annually, or $2,000 every second.^[3]

§  Google: 34,000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month)^[4]

§  Twitter already has 300 million users producing 140 million Tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days^[5] (@ 1,600 Tweets per second)

§  Apple: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by customers in over 77 countries.^[6]

§  Yelp: as of March 2011 the site hosted over 17 million user reviews.

§  “Humankind shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world sending out the contents of six newspapers every day.”^[7]

§  Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that, in 2008, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.  This is “the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.” The study also estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, “which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.”[8]

[1] Ken Deeter, “Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes,” Facebook.com, February 7, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919. Also see:http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

[2] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

[3] eBay, “Who We Are,” http://www.ebayinc.com/who

[4] Matt McGee, “By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz,” SearchEngineLand, February 23, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709

[5] http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/happy-birthday-twitter.html Also see:http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html

[6] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[7] Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, February 10, 2011,http://annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/110210Hilbert.aspx.

[8] Rex Graham, “Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year,” UC San Diego News Center, April 6, 2011, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/04-05BusinessInformation.asp.

Advantages of the separation of supermarkets and state

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

A thought-provoking analogy from Donald Boudreaux:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

Paganism in action

"Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape."

Matt Ridley

Yet another quote of the month

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

Ronald Reagan

History as "community organizing"

One of these young men grew up to be a great world leader, presenting the face of Western Civilization to its barbaric enemies.
The other never did grow up

History or "Herstory"

The Scourge of the Feminist Word Police

By Jacob Laksin 

If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died ^[1] last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.
Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”
Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing ^[2]. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.
Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”
Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”
Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.
Not the least of the problems with the feminist theories of language popularized by Swift is that they were based on a fallacy. Contrary to feminist claims, there was nothing sexist about generic nouns like “man,” which had been used for centuries to describe humans collectively. Nor did pronouns like “he” exclude women, a point author E.B. White made in his classic style guide for good writing, the Elements of Style ^[3]:

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.

Now it was. History may have been on White’s side, but the culturally ascendant “herstory” was not, and it was feminist pseudo-linguists like Swift who won out in the end. The result was a steady decline in clarity and a surge in the kind of reader-proof, politically correct verbiage that today defines academic jargon — a writing style “somewhere to the left of gibberish,” ^[4] as an exasperated graduate student once put it.