Positive Liberty

In keeping with the meme, and with the season, here are a few of my favorite things.

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I hesitate to write a “my favorite things” post for the Positive Liberty blog, given that some of my personal interests are to some folks a little odd and “an acquired taste.” But here goes anyway. Continue Reading »

Since Robert Knight has seen fit to reproduce an article on America’s religious heritage that features phony, debunked quotes, let me direct you to this past post of mine fisking it.

Sandefur has the idea that the Positive Liberty writers should lighten things up a bit and write an essay on our favorite things. Not a bad idea, I’m up for that. And let me start by wholeheartedly endorsing his choice of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King as a favorite book. Florence King is an often overlooked American treasure, one of our most brilliant writers and most unique personalities, and if you have not read any of her books I suggest you run, not walk, to the library or bookstore to get them.

While Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is her best work (it is also her autobiography), also very much worth reading are Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye and With Charity Toward None. The latter is about misanthrophy, which is fitting since she is herself a misanthrope. It contains thoughts like these (and I am going from memory here because the book is buried in a box somewhere):

Misanthropes make excellent citizens. We rarely break laws because prison is a communal experience. We never molest children because in order to molest them you have to be in the same room with them and I don’t know how the perverts can stand it.

Her wit is searing, her prose is perfect and her vision is thrillingly unique. I strongly urge you all to read all the Florence King you can find. But I should also offer my own favorite book to recommend. Not my sole favorite book, of course, but a favorite that I think it’s likely my readers haven’t read and would enjoy. In the past I have written enthusiastically about A Mencken Chrestomathy, HL Mencken’s handpicked collection of his best writing. This is probably my single favorite book of all time and if you haven’t read it, you should. But since I’ve already picked that one, I’ll choose another for this post.
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It’s the fifth day of Christmas, and time for one of those posts about just…stuff I like. Perhaps my enthusiasm about some of these things will rub off on some readers and I’ll be the cause of them discovering a new joy in 2006. Note that these are not all my super-duper top number one favorites in their categories—just, a few things I really like.

1) A favorite book: Confessions of A Failed Southern Lady by Florence King. I think Florence King was the best writer in America before she retired. Her columns for National Review were easily the best thing about that magazine, and books such as With Charity Toward None, Southern Ladies And Gentlemen, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, show a true master writer demonstrating the excellence of her craft. (And check out The Florence King Reader, in which she revises sections from many of these works and only makes them better.)

But Confessions transcends the category of “excellent book” in which all the others are placed, and reaches the level of Great, at least in my opinion. Here, King is, as always, marvelously funny—combining wacky situation comedy with brilliant, burning wit—but more: the book has tragedy at perfect pitch, self-discovery, insight, quirkiness—it’s indescribable. And it’s all delivered in the prose of an absolute master, whose word choice and syntactical rhythm are lessons for all aspiring writers. To take one brief example, King describes how, after the death of her lover, she drowns herself in meaningless one-night stands to overcome her grief; lying in bed next to a drunk redneck one night she looks at him and thinks “…but he said ma’am, and he said grace, and he loved his countries—both of them.” I could write all my life and never make a sentence that perfect. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

2) A favorite album: Some Day My Pince Will Come by Miles Davis. An often overlooked masterpiece. The title track, particularly, is brilliant. This was the last album to feature Miles and John Coltrane collaborating, and Coltrane only appears in the title track and on “Teo,” a brilliant fast little number that takes some getting used to. Best of all, though, is Wynton Kelly’s piano solo in the title track. Magnificent. This is a jazz album for people who don’t like jazz albums—quiet, smoky, intimate music perfect for grey, overcast winter days. In fact, it falls right in the middle between Davis’ two great periods: the early balladeering of cool jazz and the flamboyant wildness of such late ’60s albums as Miles Smiles. Lots of Miles Davis albums are great, and some are better than this one, but this album is usually overlooked by critics, and it shouldn’t be.

3) A favorite blog: Sunny Side Up. Most blogs that focus on families are boring recitations, like looking at someone else’s wallet photos. But dgm’s blog is clever, strange, and enormously charming. Check out her Festivus Airing of the Grievances.

4) Favorite coffee-dunking cookie: No question here—Mother’s toffee cookies. There’s lots of cookies, and even some doughnuts, that are good for coffee dunking, but far and away the best is Mother’s toffee cookies. They really soak up the coffee, and add a sweet—but not too sweet!—element that leaves the whole experience soggerific!

5) A favorite bookstore: Hein & Co. in Jackson, California, or, as I call it, the crooked cat bookstore. (Crooked, so help me—the cat is crooked. His whiskers, his tail, the way he walks; it’s all at an angle.) The prices aren’t great (except in the $1 section) but they always have something really unusual. Like a miniature Powell’s, and far less crowded. Worth the long, pleasant drive up the 49.

The following image is deeply offensive and may not be safe for work.

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Ed Brayton and a few other sources have brought up Mel Gibson’s Playboy interview which includes among other things a dumb quote on evolution and some conspiratorial rants. The quotes were cited by someone who didn’t have the issue in his hands (and the interview is not online); thus, it was cautioned to make sure the quotes were accurate before further disseminating them.

Well I do have the issue in my hands (long story short, my older brother’s Playboy collection is archived at my house) and those quotes are 100% accurate.

I’ll do a longer post on this. In skimming the article, those quotes just scratch the surface. It’s ironic that the religious right lauds Gibson and thinks of him as a “good Christian family man.” Well in reading the interview, his mouth is more like Howard Stern’s than Billy Graham’s. Now, Mel’s potty mouth doesn’t bother me. But I like Howard Stern type humor. The excerpt from the Lippard blog reproduces Gibson using phrases like, “you might have a bigger dick” and “She was a cunt.” But there’s much more….

If you are in the area, be sure to attend the rally for private property rights when the Ohio Supreme Court hears oral argument in the Norwood eminent domain case! (There is a typo in the post; it means Jan 11, 2006, not 2005).

I don’t have time to enter into a serious legal analysis of the FISA/wiretapping issue. But I did see that the Volokh Conspiracy pointed to this discussion of the legality of warrantless wiretapping under FISA. Robert Levy, an unusually good libertarian legal thinker, points out something that I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else: FISA has a provision that covers war-time wiretapping:

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Scott and I keep an informal collection of anti-gay literature, mostly because we’re convinced that this stuff is on the fast track to extinction — and because we want something with which to amaze the grandkids. Here’s one that really revolted me — and from a so-called liberal, too (Via Steve Miller’s Culture Watch at Independent Gay Forum).

The Positive Liberty contributors have been discussing the question of NSA wiretapping off-blog, where, presumably, only the NSA is aware of our conversations. Several of us are not lawyers, so it is difficult for us to comment authoritatively. Still, we can’t exactly surrender our concerns merely because others know better. What follows is a product of these discussions, giving my own perspective on the issues as well as those of others that I consider most relevant.

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I’ll be speaking about eminent domain at the Independent Institute in Oakland on January 31st at 6:30 p.m. More details here.

The death of Charles Socarides has brought to mind a regrettable tendency (one that often borders on tyranny) of the mental health profession. Socarides, if you don’t know, was one of the godfathers of the “homosexuality is a mental illness” school of thought. And (Providentially, in my opinion) one of his sons turned out to be not just gay but one of the leading gay rights activists of the 90s.

The “regrettable tendency” to which I refer is the (mis)use of the concept of “mental illness” to enforce moral or social norms. Continue Reading »

First, James Q. Wilson on ID. Bottom line: Continue Reading »

Until now, one of the difficulties that made Monopoly such a hard game to win was that you had to get your competitors to sell you their properties. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, Monopoly games have been made that much shorter!

Daniel Dennett has an excellent brief reaction to the Kitzmiller decision over at Butterflies And Wheels. And more here!

I was sorry to learn that Robert Sheckley, the unusually creative science fiction author, whose brilliant novel Immortality Inc. is a particular favorite of mine, died on December 9th. (HT: John Varley).

This is a post for fans of the new Battlestar Galactica; if that doesn’t apply to you, go get the DVDs and watch them and then come back and read this.

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The Bush administration genuinely appears to think that as long as it claims it needs the authority to do something in order to fight terrorism, there are no limits whatsoever on its power. This has reached the point where even the administration’s defenders are having a difficult time finding a rationale for their increasingly imperial behavior. Some of us saw this coming 3 years ago when they began to assert the authority to suspend habeas corpus in specific situations and hold US citizens indefinitely without charging them or giving them an opportunity to challenge their imprisonment, but the recent revelations of NSA wiretapping without even following the extremely lax procedures of the FISA statute have made even folks like David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, say that he has gone too far.

It’s worth tracing some of the history of this. It began with the arrests of two American citizens, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. But rather than charging them with a crime, they tried to designate them as “enemy combatants” and therefore without any rights under the Constitutional. Naturally, suits against the government were filed on their behalf and the administration asserted that it had unbridled authority to hold anyone it deemed to be a sufficent threat without charging them with anything or given them any opportunity to contest their imprisonment.
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I cannot more strongly recommend Kurt Busiek’s Astro City series for comic book readers. Busiek takes already existing themes and characters, deconstructs and reconstructs them while adding his own originality to the mix such that the final superhero product is his own unique creation.

Most of these heroes, loosely (very) based on both Marvel and DC characters (for instance Superman is Samaritan, Batman is the Confessor, the Fantastic Four are the Furst Family, and so on and so forth), operate in one mythical city — Astro City. The series has been compared to Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” as a comic book with sophisticated, real world themes. But as Busiek has explained, Astro City differs from Watchmen in this sense: Watchmen explored what if heroes existed in the “real” world, with “real world” logical implications and asked “how would the world be different?” Astro City, on the other hand, takes real world like characters and puts them in a world where unrealistic comic book logic applies, and the world miraculously stays the same (check out this character who reads like a cross between Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, Joe Camel, and Fatty Arbuckle). As Busiek noted, “We’ve got trolls living underground in Astro City. We’ve got time travelers reweaving the future. We’ve got fantastic technology, mystical creatures, alien contact and powerful, violent destructive beings by the double handful….One of the most charming elements of the superhero story, for me, lies in the fact that the world it all happens in is our world — that this fantastic, furious, cosmic stuff happens in what could be the skies over our heads — and sure, it should transform the world into something unrecognizable, but it doesn’t….” Busiek, Anderson, and Ross, Astro City, Life in the Big City, p. 9.

Pictured above is “Silver Agent” loosely based on Captain America. He is a hero of the “Silver Age” of comic books, and operated from “1956 to 1973. A statue was erected to him after his death.” The statute has been long featured in the Astro City series and engraved on it was “To Our Eternal Shame.” Fans long wondered what that meant and Busiek finally revealed in the latest issue that the Silver Agent was framed for a murder, tried by the US government, and executed (he declined all appeals). It reads like executing Captain America. Read more about it here.