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Ward Lucas, Neighbors at War: The Creepy Case Against Your Homeowners Association: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Homeowners associations, also known as common interest communities, regulate the homes and therefore the lives of millions of Americans. They can go very bad indeed, imposing arbitrary restrictions and large fines on hapless violators. Lucas has written a book almost, though not quite, capable of making me sympathetic to them. It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of conservative/libertarian incoherence; Lucas likes private property, except that he doesn’t like that people often make very bad contractual agreements about what they can do with their property. For example, they buy into common interest communities, in theory explicitly agreeing to all sorts of existing and future restrictions, the same way we explicitly “agree” to the terms of the iTunes store and how they may be changed on us without real notice or further consent. One could have a theory of when government should step in and override such “agreements,” but that would require seeing government as another way people collectively order their affairs and not as an evil overlord. (An appendix does offer a proposed “bill of rights” at a useless level of generality; it does of course specifically protect the right to bear arms.)
This incoherence helps explain why the book doesn’t have much in the way of solutions. To get an idea of how confused the book is, early on a chapter has this epigraph from Sitting Bull: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.” Only problem: the chapter is supposedly in defense of private property, which he somehow doesn’t notice that Sitting Bull was attacking. Lucas argues that CICs are essentially private governments, overriding true individual property rights—but don’t expect him to resolve the tension between “private” and “government,” or offer a theory of when consent to be bound is actually valid.
Not unrelatedly, since property law in America is often about race, the book is also incoherent on the subject of race. Lucas can’t decide whether legally invalid racially restrictive covenants barring occupation by nonwhite owners are exclusionary signals that preserve de facto segregation or important reminders of our squalid racial history that should remain in land records. Lucas is right that discrimination cases are hard to win, though he presents that as a fixed fact rather than the deliberate result of conservative judicial interpretations, and he never makes clear what kinds of constraints he wants on private property owners to prevent them from discriminating. It’s as if he thinks that racism is confined to homeowners associations.
This is particularly notable when he, hilariously, maintains that his home state of Colorado was long a nondiscriminatory paradise of welcome for African-Americans: “With a history rich in examples of races generally working in harmony, the old west is possibly one of the last areas of the country where racism or separatism would be tolerated.” Yeah, okay. See, in the past, African-Americans worked as cowboys, which means that they never experienced discrimination, obviously. Then, somehow, discriminatory homeowners associations took root, as if the existence of a homeowners association converted previously egalitarian Coloradoans into bigots; also the KKK dominance in 1920s Colorado was an “anomaly.” This denialism also shows up when he suggests that a specific instance of racism at his homeowners’ association wasn’t really racism but rather simple excess of power, even though he himself says he heard a racist comment directed at the same target at a meeting. He’s perfectly happy to use accusations of racism as a weapon against his targets, including the "Democrat party," but doesn’t much like acknowledging that discriminatory acts really happen. (Also, slurs are just part of what you have to expect from life, except when directed against his wife, whose multiple sclerosis diagnosis led him to discover that disability discrimination exists.)
Lucas’s overstatements and outright misstatements make him hard to take seriously. Everyone and everything in America is heavily regulated except for homeowners associations! In the financial crisis (which he falsely blames on lending to minorities), no one was foreclosed on because of race! Only a government job kept you safe from the resulting economic downturn! (I initially thought all these screeds, plus some I haven’t mentioned, were padding to fill out the book, but later decided that they were not exactly padding—somehow eminent domain, adverse possession, and the regulatory state are all tangled up in Lucas’s mind, which is why he can’t bring himself to suggest much in the way of actual regulation.)
Paula Franzese has written useful articles (and a book, but you can read these and other articles for free) on common-interest communities as “government for the nice” with not-so-nice effects and on how CICs change focus from “How is my neighbor doing?” to “What is my neighbor doing?” to the detriment of healthy community. Lee Anne Fennell has also written on the “tension between the homeowner’s desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control everything that could affect the home’s value” and in particular why CIC rules are often unduly restrictive despite what homeowners would actually prefer. These would be much better reads for anyone interested in the subject, with powerful condemnation of private abuses but intellectual coherence and some actual solutions.
It is amusing but not surprising that one of the credentials listed for the author of one of the appendices, Gary Solomon, is “Ph.D.(abd),” which is like saying “started a marathon (but hasn’t finished).”
John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda: Keegan has written several fantastic books on war. This isn’t one of them, and it’s not aided by the attempt at timeliness which leads him to mention Al-Qaeda briefly at the end (nor the anti-Islamic posture he takes, which is that Muslims are sneakier and more committed to evil than non-Muslims); written before the second invasion of Iraq, he also denotes the failure of inspectors to find WMDs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a failure of intelligence rather than what it was, the absence of WMDs. So basically he has a string of stories from the age of sail up to the Falklands war, where he recounts particular episodes and then discusses whether “intelligence” mattered. He occasionally stops to distinguish human intelligence from signals analysis, imaging, etc., but doesn’t rigorously define “intelligence,” which helps his conclusions become even more mushy (though he does condemn the uniting of covert operations with intelligence-gathering). Takeaway: intelligence can help in a shooting war; it can decrease losses or improve gains. But force is force, and that’s what determines the ultimate outcome, whether you’re surprised by Pearl Harbor or not, especially since the military is made of people and therefore tends to misread, overread, or underread intelligence compared to the objective truth.
Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy: The end of WWII, inexorable and at the same time of a piece with what came before; Churchill is deep in the details of figuring out what should happen to Poland as he invents the phrase “the Iron Curtain,” which appears several times here. Churchill is as always bloody-minded; of one particular ploy, he says, “The carriers were short of both planes and pilots, but no matter. They were only bait, and bait is made to be eaten.”
This incoherence helps explain why the book doesn’t have much in the way of solutions. To get an idea of how confused the book is, early on a chapter has this epigraph from Sitting Bull: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.” Only problem: the chapter is supposedly in defense of private property, which he somehow doesn’t notice that Sitting Bull was attacking. Lucas argues that CICs are essentially private governments, overriding true individual property rights—but don’t expect him to resolve the tension between “private” and “government,” or offer a theory of when consent to be bound is actually valid.
Not unrelatedly, since property law in America is often about race, the book is also incoherent on the subject of race. Lucas can’t decide whether legally invalid racially restrictive covenants barring occupation by nonwhite owners are exclusionary signals that preserve de facto segregation or important reminders of our squalid racial history that should remain in land records. Lucas is right that discrimination cases are hard to win, though he presents that as a fixed fact rather than the deliberate result of conservative judicial interpretations, and he never makes clear what kinds of constraints he wants on private property owners to prevent them from discriminating. It’s as if he thinks that racism is confined to homeowners associations.
This is particularly notable when he, hilariously, maintains that his home state of Colorado was long a nondiscriminatory paradise of welcome for African-Americans: “With a history rich in examples of races generally working in harmony, the old west is possibly one of the last areas of the country where racism or separatism would be tolerated.” Yeah, okay. See, in the past, African-Americans worked as cowboys, which means that they never experienced discrimination, obviously. Then, somehow, discriminatory homeowners associations took root, as if the existence of a homeowners association converted previously egalitarian Coloradoans into bigots; also the KKK dominance in 1920s Colorado was an “anomaly.” This denialism also shows up when he suggests that a specific instance of racism at his homeowners’ association wasn’t really racism but rather simple excess of power, even though he himself says he heard a racist comment directed at the same target at a meeting. He’s perfectly happy to use accusations of racism as a weapon against his targets, including the "Democrat party," but doesn’t much like acknowledging that discriminatory acts really happen. (Also, slurs are just part of what you have to expect from life, except when directed against his wife, whose multiple sclerosis diagnosis led him to discover that disability discrimination exists.)
Lucas’s overstatements and outright misstatements make him hard to take seriously. Everyone and everything in America is heavily regulated except for homeowners associations! In the financial crisis (which he falsely blames on lending to minorities), no one was foreclosed on because of race! Only a government job kept you safe from the resulting economic downturn! (I initially thought all these screeds, plus some I haven’t mentioned, were padding to fill out the book, but later decided that they were not exactly padding—somehow eminent domain, adverse possession, and the regulatory state are all tangled up in Lucas’s mind, which is why he can’t bring himself to suggest much in the way of actual regulation.)
Paula Franzese has written useful articles (and a book, but you can read these and other articles for free) on common-interest communities as “government for the nice” with not-so-nice effects and on how CICs change focus from “How is my neighbor doing?” to “What is my neighbor doing?” to the detriment of healthy community. Lee Anne Fennell has also written on the “tension between the homeowner’s desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control everything that could affect the home’s value” and in particular why CIC rules are often unduly restrictive despite what homeowners would actually prefer. These would be much better reads for anyone interested in the subject, with powerful condemnation of private abuses but intellectual coherence and some actual solutions.
It is amusing but not surprising that one of the credentials listed for the author of one of the appendices, Gary Solomon, is “Ph.D.(abd),” which is like saying “started a marathon (but hasn’t finished).”
John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda: Keegan has written several fantastic books on war. This isn’t one of them, and it’s not aided by the attempt at timeliness which leads him to mention Al-Qaeda briefly at the end (nor the anti-Islamic posture he takes, which is that Muslims are sneakier and more committed to evil than non-Muslims); written before the second invasion of Iraq, he also denotes the failure of inspectors to find WMDs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a failure of intelligence rather than what it was, the absence of WMDs. So basically he has a string of stories from the age of sail up to the Falklands war, where he recounts particular episodes and then discusses whether “intelligence” mattered. He occasionally stops to distinguish human intelligence from signals analysis, imaging, etc., but doesn’t rigorously define “intelligence,” which helps his conclusions become even more mushy (though he does condemn the uniting of covert operations with intelligence-gathering). Takeaway: intelligence can help in a shooting war; it can decrease losses or improve gains. But force is force, and that’s what determines the ultimate outcome, whether you’re surprised by Pearl Harbor or not, especially since the military is made of people and therefore tends to misread, overread, or underread intelligence compared to the objective truth.
Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy: The end of WWII, inexorable and at the same time of a piece with what came before; Churchill is deep in the details of figuring out what should happen to Poland as he invents the phrase “the Iron Curtain,” which appears several times here. Churchill is as always bloody-minded; of one particular ploy, he says, “The carriers were short of both planes and pilots, but no matter. They were only bait, and bait is made to be eaten.”
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