There’s Somethin’ Happenin’ Here

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.

In addition to the hundreds of banners with slogans such as ‘Against Hatred, Violence, and the Quran’, ‘Against Religious Fanaticism’, and ‘No Sharia in Europe’, the thousands attending brought song sheets which had been distributed online and sang favourite Christmas carols.

Despite the essentially ordinary character of many of the people taking to the streets for the peaceful strolls, and the admission by senior government and police figures that a great many of those joining in are families bringing their children, the organisation has come in for stiff criticism and rejection by the heights of the German elite.

I think it’s time we stop.
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

There’s battle lines bein’ drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds
A-gettin’ so much resistance from behind.

Chancellor Merkel has suggested the leadership of PEGIDA have an ulterior motive, despite their focus on non-violent protest and apolitical principles. She even went as far to warn people thinking of going on the weekly stroll to “watch out that they are not instrumentalised by the organisers”. The SPD, Germany’s Labour-party equivalent have gone as far as calling PEGIDA “Nazis in pinstripes”.

This is despite a report by the German police that there are significantly more known troublemakers in the counter-protest movements, than in PEGIDA itself.

It is not only German politics which is putting its weight behind the counter-PEGIDA movement. Apparently dismayed that 17,500 people had turned out in bad weather to sing Christian carols, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden said PEGIDA were trying “to exploit a Christian symbol and a Christian tradition” for political ends.

Germany’s art elite also showed their disapproval last night. The directors of Dresden’s Bavarian State Opera house, outside which the protests take place turned off the lights on the building, cloaking it in darkness during the stroll. Colossal 50-foot banners were draped in front of the building reading “humanity, respect, and diversity”.

The irony of it all. The people peeping outside their office windows, cursing the people in the streets used to be the people in the streets. Now they are pigs on two legs.

The Foolishness of Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen has a post up arguing that Cuba could be the next Singapore. I used to be a regular at his site, but then I made Alex Tabarrok cry and he asked me not to post there anymore. My pointing out that he has arranged his life in such a way that he avoid all contact with minorities was a bridge too far. I still read the site once a week, looking for material, but that’s it. Libertarian economics are a bit silly for an adult my age.

I’m not one of those who thinks Cuba is the next Singapore or even the next Puerto Rico.  Why not?

I’m willing to assume that the end of the American embargo will mean some kind of economic liberalization over the next ten years.  But how much good will that bring?

We could start by looking for relevant comparisons.  We could ask how well have non-British-ruled, non-Dutch-ruled, non-American-ruled Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands done?  There is a fairly clear example of such a country with some ethnic, cultural, historic, and linguistic similarities to Cuba, namely the Dominican Republic.  For non-PPP-adjusted gdp per capita, the D.R. clocks in at about $5800 per year.  And that is about where I think Cuba will end up, after a good bit of turmoil.

He goes on to list a bunch of things that probably have nothing to do with what comes next for Cuba. I like how he skirts around the biological aspects and simply makes a rosy comparison to nearby Dominican Republic. The reason a guy like Steve Sailer is not allowed out in public is he would simply say Cuba is not going to do well because it is full of Cubans.

I’ll go further and and say it is full of the worst Cubans. The best Cubans got the hell out of Cuba when Castro took power. Those who hung around hoping the terror would pass found a raft eventually and took their chances with the sharks, on their way to Miami. All the smart, industrious Cubans are in Miami now, living the middle-class American dream. The same thing happened in Lebanon, which is why that country never got off the mat.
That’s the central defect of liberals and libertarians. They never bother to stop and wonder why things are the way they are now. They just seem to assume the facts of life were placed around so they can change them. In this case, Cuba has been a totalitarian police state for fifty years for no particular reason. The fact that there are no riots in the streets or populist protests against the status quo does not turn on any lights for these folks. Nope, Cuba is now a blank slate on which they can draw their utopian future.
Cuba is the way it is because the Cubans living there prefer it that way. Not all Cubans everywhere, but a majority of the ones living in Cuba. Most of the dissenters now live abroad. Those remaining are small in number and are easily suppressed. The idea that they will create a Singapore is so laughably ridiculous you have to wonder if Tyler is not sniffing glue in his office.
That’s another thing libertarians have in common with liberals. No, not glue sniffing, although that is a problem. No, both cults look at people as things, in the same way a socio-path looks at people. People are just bits of machinery to be arranged in whatever way suits the ruler. Culture and biology are looked upon as obstacles that can be yanked from the garden like weeds. Of course, if that means yanking out a few people along the way, so be it.
I think if Cuba joins the rest of the world they will probably continue to be Cubans. That means a country somewhere between Haiti and Puerto Rico. The things that will change are the cars. American collectors will swoop in and buy the old relics on the Cuban roads and sell them our old jalopies. Global tourism will snap up the prime real estate for the global ruling class. Otherwise, Cuba will continue to be Cuba.

The Future is Null

For as long as any of us have been alive, the default assumption is that humans are not the only self-aware beings in the universe. Everyone just knows that out in space, there are intelligent life forms that have evolved on some planet somewhere. Libraries of books and countless movies and TV shows have been created around the belief in life beyond earth. Not just bugs and plants either. Intelligent life along with all the stuff that comes with it.

Alien life is almost always imagined to be more intelligent than earthlings. Everyone just knows that the aliens are our intellectual superiors. Most assume that means they have evolved to be our moral superiors. That lets our scolds project onto the aliens features and attributes they wish we possessed. Others go the other way and the aliens are an out-sized version of our worst features. That means the aliens roam the universe consuming natural resources like locusts or enslaving minorities.

I’m not sure where I saw this, but it fits the pattern.

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

The fact that all of this was thought up by science fiction writers a long time ago is lost on all of these folks. I guess when you have letters after your name, dreaming up crazy nonsense is grant worthy, even when it is someone else’s crazy nonsense. Regardless, the Borg was thought up when they rebooted the Star Trek series for TV. That was ripped off from the first Star Trek movie when Voyager returns after having acquired all knowledge in the universe.

People who take a new spin on this bit are always heralded as futurists, people with grand imaginations that think up out-of-the-box scenarios. The reality is it takes little to no imagination or intelligence. What’s tough is imagining a world where we are are the dominant life form. That’s what pushes the envelope of imagination. It’s what made Asimov’s Foundation series so great. Asimov had an uncanny grip on religion and science, without have strong emotions for or against either of them.

It’s why I find the singularity stuff so dull and stupid. It is just a blend of mysticism and science fiction, without a lot creativity. Instead of reaching a higher consciousness, we end up on a hard drive somewhere on a core Internet server. Great. Living out eternity as CPU cycles would cause a truly intelligent being to unplug one’s self from the grid.

That’s the error in the singularity argument. Life is not driven by survival. It is driven by reproduction. Reproduction, even amongst the lower species, is driven by hope. When times are good and the future is bright, we get lots of reproduction. When the opposite is true, we get the opposite. Put another way, if there’s no tomorrow, there’s no need to reproduce. If there’s no need to reproduce, there’s no need to live. The singularity, therefore, is the nullification of life.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a Clown

I must admit I have zero interest in Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s a magical ornament for the Left and the fake nerds. He bills himself as a scientist, but he makes his living as an amusement park manager. That and doing the trained monkey bit on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it. Lots of people enjoy planetariums. Everyone loves TV and you can’t have TV without trained monkeys. But, he guy is a complete clown.

I get that his audience wants validation so they come to hear the magical black guy tell them they are the bestest. My guess is there’s not a single person in the audience that could count their balls twice and come up with the same number so that means he can’t actually talk about real science. It’s all theater, a morality play, of sorts. He mocks the bad people in the familiar way and they arf like seals at the right time. It’s the Jon Stewart routine, but with high school science as the straight man instead of politics.

The thing that surprises me about this video is just how buffoonish he is during his act. The time or two I’ve caught him on TV he was pretending to be a serious scientist, but in that video he one step from dropping his pants and spraying his junk with seltzer. It’s rather embarrassing to watch, particularly since the premise is so absurd. If I did not know better, I’d think he was cleverly mocking the rubes in the audience.

Black versus White

When Barry Soetoro was elevated to Primate of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, many people outside the faith thought it was a good sign. Maybe putting a black guy in the White House would close the books on America’s race history. After all, how could guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson get any traction when the leader of the free world was a living rebuke to their agitations? Jacksons discomfort with Obama winning election seemed like proof of the concept.

I was always skeptical of it. I remembered the last Chocolate Jesus to come along and that guy was brighter and more sensible than Obama. If Kurt Schmoke could not resist the call of the past, this jug-eared clodhopper from the academy was not going to do it. I know too many black people to think that most do not harbor a fair number of revenge fantasies. I also know a fair bit about post-colonial African history. If blacks can think that the CIA invented crack, they can certainly believe there is a conspiracy to kill black people.

My hope for Obama was that he would be a dreary scold that largely followed the policies set in place by his predecessors. While not a big fan of the Bush-Clinton policy, I could live with it for another decade. Letting a nitwit like Obama try his hand at public policy sounded like a bad idea, but Obama seemed like a guy perfectly willing to do nothing but give speeches. That and I was sure the Cult knew it was insane to try and start a race war. That failed in the 60’s and nearly ended their cult, making “liberal” an epithet for two decades.

But, here we are. The Cult has black mobs harassing white people at suburban malls. They have members of the Black Guerilla Family “executing pigs” on the streets. The Black Guerilla Family, by the way, is a creation of the New Left forty years ago. Fay Stender, a radial lawyer, helped create the BGF while she was working for the Black Panthers. The BGF rewarded her efforts by shooting her five times in front of her son. That should have been the lesson all of them learned from the last liberal awakening. Radicalizing blacks leads to death and the monster will always destroy its creator.

It’s natural, of course, to look the other way and just hope this is a temporary fit of madness. I suspect that’s why bright guys like Ross Douthat put so much effort into looking away from the truth that is staring them in the face – even while they are writing about it. There’s fear of losing a way to earn a living, but there’s also the hope that things are not what they appear to be, even when the facts are so clear.

For a while the media has assumed that this kind of identity-based politics inevitably favors the left, because 21st-century America is getting less white every day.

But that’s too simplistic, in part because the definitions of “white” and “minority” are historically elastic. If a “white party” seems sufficiently clueless and reactionary, it will lose ground to a multicultural coalition. But as African-Americans know from bitter experience, “whiteness” has sustained itself by the inclusion of immigrants as well as by the exclusion and oppression of blacks. That history suggests that a “multicultural party” may always be at risk of being redefined as a grievance-based “party of minorities” that many minorities would prefer to leave behind. (And leadership matters, too: A protean figure like Barack Obama can put together a genuine rainbow coalition, but it’s not clear how many other politicians can do the same.)

The fact is you can’t built a political party around black identity. Everywhere it has been tried the result has been a bloodbath. If you’re going to build a party out of the dispossessed and disaffected, that party has to preach revolution and it has to promise vengeance. You can pretend otherwise, but the servants will never forgive their masters and the master will never trust their former servants. One side has to win completely, which is why violence is the logical end of what Obama and Democrats are doing.

The fact that the party of opposition, the White Party in Douthat’s parlance, is unwilling to face this reality just guarantees the result. The Black Party may hold delusions about a peaceful revolution of the fringe, but they seem perfectly willing to accept a violent result. The White Party just refuses to accept those choices. To the Black Party, it is a sign of weakness and that’s what guarantees the violent conclusion.

We need someone willing to speak to and for the silent majority or we will end up in the same place we landed the last time this lunacy was allowed to play out.

Uber Rape

I’m old and I hate change so naturally I think the kids, with their smartphones and sharing economy, are just a bunch of addled-minded commies, high on stupid. After all, what was wrong with hailing a cab and paying the fare? Now I’m supposed to hop in with some weirdo who drives strangers around town because he finds livery work self-actualizing? Fiddlesticks to that!

In all seriousness, I’ve been skeptical of Uber from the start. It has that slippery con-man vibe to it. Like everything else about the “sharing economy” it is real good at sharing the costs, but even better at privatizing the profits. Apparently, they are not very good at screening their drivers.

A man who works as a driver for the ride-sharing service Uber is accused of raping a woman he picked up in Boston.

The suspect, 46-year-old Alejandro Done of Boston, was arraigned Wednesday on charges of rape, assault to rape and assault and battery.

Authorities say on December 6, the victim was waiting for a ride-sharing driver at a residence on Tremont Street in Boston.

When the victim got into the car, the driver told her that he would need a cash payment for the ride, so he brought her to an ATM.

The driver then allegedly drove to a location the passenger was not familiar with, pulled over in a secluded area and jumped in the backseat where she was sitting.

“He allegedly struck her with his hands, strangled her, locked the car doors so that she could not escape and covered her mouth so she could not scream,” according to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office. “During an ensuing physical struggle, the defendant allegedly sexually assaulted the woman.”

Uber says Done was not the driver the victim contacted to pick her up.

“This is a despicable crime and our thoughts and prayers are with the victim during her recovery,” Uber spokesperson Kaitlin Durkosh said. “Uber has been working closely with law enforcement and will continue to do everything we can to assist their investigation.”

Uber says Done passed a background check prior to becoming an independent contractor with the company. He is being held pending a dangerousness hearing scheduled for December 24 in Cambridge District Court.

Uber strikes me as one of the pet rock businesses of post-reality America. By that, I mean it is is a fun fad that people get rich from, but otherwise is not a real business with staying power. The reason is they are basically making money by deception. Part of that deception is cost shifting. They shift the operating costs of a taxi company onto the drivers, cell phone carriers and general society.

Let me explain that last part. On their site they say you don’t need extra insurance to be one of their drivers. That’s not exactly true. My insurance policy explicitly says I am not covered as a for-hire driver and my car will not be covered as a commercial vehicle. Uber says they cover you while you are on a trip, but the limits are the bare minimum and it is unclear if they are the primary or secondary carrier.

That’s just one piece of the cost shifted to the driver. If your fare spills their coffee, tears a seat of some other common occurrence, Uber is not paying for it. Uber is not getting your oil changed or your tires rotated. Basically, Uber is dodging the costs taxi companies face in fleet expenses, by suckering people into working for them under the table, in effect. What Uber is doing is no different than what landscapers do with illegal alien labor.

The old school taxi company they are “disrupting” is required to comply with a long list of laws, regulation, and insurance requirements. Those have costs which show up in the fare. No one is getting rich driving a taxi. Uber either shirks those costs or shifts them to the rest of us. That let’s them undercut the taxi companies and make money.

The argument from libertarians is that Uber is forcing changes to those regulation, taxes and so forth, by functioning as an above ground black market. We’ll see. It may be easier just to put Uber out of business. Either way, Uber is not magically making taxis cheaper. They are just hiding the costs. When you factor back in the cost of being raped by the Uber driver, a taxi starts looking pretty good again.

Small Oil

Over at National Review, where I occasionally post in the comment sections, I’ve taken some flak for pointing out that falling oil prices are not due to market forces and they are not necessarily a good thing. The people who post there tend to be running dog Republicans, worshipping at the alter of capitalism. They think suddenly cheap oil is vindication of their “drill baby, drill” chants from a decade ago.  This post from the Beeb explains one of the down-side effects of an oil glut.

Oil companies and service providers are cutting staff and investment to save money.

Robin Allan, chairman of the independent explorers’ association Brindex, told the BBC that the industry was “close to collapse”.

Almost no new projects in the North Sea are profitable with oil below $60 a barrel, he claims.

“It’s almost impossible to make money at these oil prices”, Mr Allan, who is a director of Premier Oil in addition to chairing Brindex, told the BBC. “It’s a huge crisis.”

“This has happened before, and the industry adapts, but the adaptation is one of slashing people, slashing projects and reducing costs wherever possible, and that’s painful for our staff, painful for companies and painful for the country.

“It’s close to collapse. In terms of new investments – there will be none, everyone is retreating, people are being laid off at most companies this week and in the coming weeks. Budgets for 2015 are being cut by everyone.”

The thing that people don’t understand about the business of digging stuff up and selling it is there are costs. It cost money to set-up an oil well – lots of money. If you can get a million barrels from a well and the cost of extraction is fifty million dollars over the life of the well, you need to sell that oil for $50 a barrel to break even. If you started your project assuming $100 prices and now the prices are $40, your business collapses and the well closes.

Almost all of the new oil sources coming on-line were planned and executed in a world of $60-$70 oil. That was the assumption of the investors. That’s an important piece of the puzzle that no one considers. Every BTU of energy is backed by a debt instrument these days. In fact, those debt instruments are backed by debt instruments.

The debt pyramid in the energy business probably looks like every other asset market. That means bankruptcies in the energy markets ripple through the financial world in the same way that foreclosures in Nevada brought down the housing market.

There’s that and there is the fact the oil glut is about things other than supply and demand. Demand is slightly down of late as the world economy has slowed. That has driven up relative supply. There’s also more supply due to speculators jumping into a hot market the last decade. But, there’s also the financial war with Russia lead by the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis, of course, see this as manna from heaven. They can knock out the Russians who have been a source of mischief to them in the Middle East. A collapsing Russia would take Syria and Iran down, plus open the door for the Saudi pipeline projects.

An oil glut also knocks out North American producers who suddenly face margin calls. No one pumps at a loss so the high cost producers will have to shut down. An extended price slump means they go bankrupt. It also means credit flees the market, making even profitable operations less profitable. The Saudis can weather even $30 oil so this is good for them in the long run.

Cheap energy is always a good thing, but it is not without trade-offs. It’s why our next currency arrangement will probably be pegged to energy. If everything is priced in joules, price stability in the energy markets becomes the default state. Until then, energy is a tool of war and even cheap gas has negative consequences.

The End of the Left

Steve Sailer argues that American politics is a battle of the fringe against the core with the Democrats as the party of the fringe. They have built a coalition of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, single white women and weirdos. That’s their base of support. The math says they get to about 40% support with that collection of voters. The fact that Obama’s support has never dropped far below 40% supports the argument, at least the maths of the argument. Sailer’s latest stab at this is here.

This is not exactly new.  The first flowering of the Progressive faith was in the 19th century following the Civil War and Reconstruction. As the nation industrialized, Progressive ideas gained steam. Labor unions, temperance movements, efficiency movements and, of course, European socialism crept into the minds of those in charge, as well as those who wanted to be in charge. By the 20th century, we had guys like Teddy Roosevelt running around babbling about the “Square Deal” and sounding a lot like Elizabeth Warren.

The First Progressive Era “ended” with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. If you look at the coalition that supported the Progressives a century ago, you see the same fringe versus core dynamic. It was more explicitly populist because the country was mono-cultural. Blacks had few voting rights and women had limited voting rights. The fringe, therefore, was immigrants, Catholics and the newly emerging working class, versus the WASP core. Whipping up votes amongst the Irish in Boston was easier if you took aim at the Brahman in charge.

I put “ended” in quotes in the previous paragraph because it is simply false to say the Progressive Era ended with Wilson. The Return to Normalcy certainly put an end to Wilson’s reign of terror, but the ruling class was still firmly in the grip of the Progressive faith. Harding and Coolidge were restrained in their politics, but Hoover was a Progressive and FDR was obviously a true believer. The One True Faith never really dies. It just goes into hibernation after periods of activity and  dis-confirmation. The atrocities of the Wilson era made “Progressive” a dirty word, but the crisis of 1929 opened the door for a newly minted version of the old time religion.

The New Deal coalition was built on the Wilson coalition of fringe groups, but those fringes were quickly becoming the majority. In the northeast, Catholics were dominating city politics and beginning to control state politics. The New Deal was also a vehicle for Jews to rise to power in politics and finance. Henry Morgenthau made it to ambassador under Wilson, his son was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR. During the Depression, that was the second most important job in America. This iteration of the Progressive coalition was the most stable owing to the fact it was based on stable, sensible people. It’s why it hung together for so long.

Sailer, I suspect, is looking at current events and thinking back to events of his youth. Steve is 55, so he was a kid when the Civil Right movement exploded into riots in the late 60’s. He was a teenager when the LAPD raided a house in his neighborhood looking for Patty Hearst. By the time he was noticing events, the weirdos, lunatics and insane had taken over the New Left and taken over the news coverage. To a man his age, the Ferguson riots and the explosion of crazy in the culture probably looks like a replay of forty years ago.

That’s not unreasonable, but I’m not entirely on-board with it. The New Deal coalition largely collapsed as a result of a resurgence of liberalism in the 1960’s. If you read any of the books by David Horowitz, the thing that’s important is the New Left explicitly rejected the Old Left as well as the New Deal. They thought the old commies from the previous generation were hopelessly lost, with their focus on organizing whites into a universal proletarian state. Similarly, they looked at the New Deal as a bourgeois compromise with the capitalists. The New Left that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s was about identity and culture, not money and property.

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The Business of America

Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba and Conservative Inc is pretending to be flipping out about it. The usual suspects on the Right are focusing on the fact Obama is an Socialist, sympathetic to unrepentant radicals like the Castro brothers. The line of attack is about Obama’s anti-American impulses, which are real, but not really what’s at work here. Many on the Right are anti-citizen, which makes them anti-American, by definition, so their yelping now is a bit hollow.

In reality, Obama is just doing the bidding of American business. The tourism rackets, gambling rackets and, of course, the bankers see big profits in Cuba. This news story from the spring lays out the case for normalizing relations so big business can cash in on Cuba. It is easy to forget that Cuba was a food exporter before Castro. They can also be a source of cheap labor for American business. Our rulers will also enjoy vacationing there as well.

This NYTimes story from 2010 reports on the machinations behind the long running drive to open up Cuba to American business. There are 11 million Cubans ready to buy Big Macs, Coke and whatever other crap we can sell them. How they will pay for it is a mystery, but presumably Cuba will quickly become a slightly better version of Puerto Rico. Cubans are better educated than Puerto Ricans so they should adapt quickly to American tourism.

Of course, the Democrats are reading the polls and seeing a shift in Cuban-American politics. Young Cubans don’t care about Castro. They care about getting on the victimization train. They look around at the free stuff other Hispanics are getting and they want in on the scam too. You can’t blame them for it. In a balkanized, post-national society, group rights count for everything. It will be a tribal spoils system so why not join the winning team?

I doubt Obama and the Democrats have thought it through on that end. This is just a money grab at this stage. 2016 is looking like a toss-up, with The Stupid Party probably nominating Jeb Bush. The Democrats don’t have to concede the election so giving the Chamber of Commerce a big fat gift will pay off down the road.

When Madness Stops Being Notable

The following news story is an example historians will use in the future to note the general madness that has afflicted our age.

A divided federal appeals court in Boston on Tuesday overturned a lower court’s ruling that a transgender Massachusetts prison inmate, convicted of committing a domestic murder, was entitled to taxpayer-funded sex change surgery.

The ruling by the First US Circuit Court of Appeals came after a 2012 ruling by US District Judge Mark Wolf, who ordered the surgery after finding that the state’s failure to provide it violated the inmate’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In January, a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld Wolf’s 2012 decision, but the state of Massachusetts then asked for an en banc, or full bench, review, which led to Tuesday’s ruling.

The ruling came in the case of Michelle Kosilek, who was born Robert Kosilek. Kosilek is serving a life sentence for killing her wife, Cheryl Kosilek, in 1990.

The court ruled 3-2, with Judges O. Rogeriee Thompson and William J. Kayatta Jr. filing separate dissenting opinions.

“We are faced with the question whether the [state Department of Correction’s] choice of a particular medical treatment is constitutionally inadequate,” the court said in the majority opinion.

“After carefully considering the community standard of medical care, the adequacy of the provided treatment, and the valid security concerns articulated by the DOC, we conclude that the district court erred and that the care provided to Kosilek by the DOC does not violate the Eighth Amendment,” said the opinion, which was written by Judge Juan R. Torruella.

Kosilek and the DOC — under successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican — have battled in the courts for decades over what medical treatment, clothing, makeup should be provided to deal with Kosilek’s gender identity disorder.

Wolf ruled in 2012 that the only medically appropriate treatment for Kosiliek’s condition was the surgery, which would be paid for by the state since Kosilek is a state prison inmate.

But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that Wolf had wrongly substituted his own judgment for the medical professionals, who did not unanimously endorse the surgery as the only appropriate solution for the condition that all sides acknowledged contributed to a depressed mental state and suicide attempts by Kosilek.

Wolf also went too far by “circumvent[ing] the deference owed to prison administrators’’ under federal laws when the issue is the safety of prison inmates, Torruella wrote.

“The prison administrators in this case have decades of combined experience in the management of penological institutions, and it is they, not the court, who are best situated to determine what security concerns will arise,’’ Torruella wrote.

The ruling said the DOC made a valid argument when it expressed concern about the safety of Kosilek and women prisoners he potentially could be housed with once the surgery was done.

“The DOC’s security report reflected that significant concerns would also arise from housing a formerly male inmate — with a criminal history of extreme violence against a female domestic partner — within a female prison population containing high numbers of domestic violence survivors,’’ Torruella wrote.

In a statement, Public Safety Secretary Andrea Cabral said the DOC accepts as true that Kosilek suffers from gender identity disorder diagnosis, and added that was not the issue that the latest round of Kosilek litigation was resolved by the courts on Tuesday.

“The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the medical and mental health care provided to Kosilek by the DOC did not violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constituion,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

“While we acknowledge the legitimacy of a gender identity disorder diagnosis, DOC’s appeal was based on the lower court’s significant expansion of the standard for what constitutes adequate care under the Eighth Amendment, and on substantial safety and security concerns regarding Ms. Kosilek’s post-surgery needs,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

In a statement, the Transgender Rights Project of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) noted that it had joined the legal battle on Kosilek’s behalf.

“I am appalled by this decision, which means that Michelle Kosilek will continue to be denied the life-saving medical care she needs and has been seeking for years,’’ Jennifer Levi of GLAD said. “This decision is a testament to how much work remains to be done to get transgender people’s health care needs on par with others in the general public.”

In a passionate dissent, Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson compared the majority’s conclusions to those drawn by the judges who upheld the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine for African-Americans in the late 19th century and the judges who approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Like the rulings in those cases, Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States, the Kosilek ruling will not stand the test of time, she wrote.

The majority, Thompson wrote, ruled the way they did, in part, because the surgery Kosilek seeks is considered “strange or immoral. Prejudice and fear of the unfamiliar have undoubtedly played a role in this matter’s protraction.’’

“The precedent the majority creates is damaging,” she added. “It paves the way for unprincipled grants of en banc relief, decimates the deference paid to a trial judge following a bench trial, aggrieves an already marginalized community, and enables correctional systems to further postpone their adjustment to the crumbling gender binary.’’

Kayatta, writing separately, said, “Scientific knowledge advances quickly and without regard to settled norms and arrangements. It sometimes draws in its wake a reluctant community, unnerved by notions that challenge our views of who we are and how we fit in the universe.”

“The notion that hard-wired aspects of gender may not unerringly and inexorably correspond to physical anatomy is especially unnerving for many,” Kayatta said.