Positive Liberty

I want to thank Jim Babka for hosting me on his show. I had a great time. And if interested, you can listen to my appearance here.

I guess the absurd headline should have been a warning: “Are You a Toxic Parent?”

Here are some true/false statements; you’re supposed to think yourself a bad person if you answer “true” to any of them. But tell me — isn’t one of these things rather not like the others?

·Kids are going to drink anyway, so they might as well do it at home, under adult supervision

·Restricting teenagers makes no sense when they’ll be on their own in college soon enough

·You’d rather be your child’s friend than an authority figure

Sure, serving alcohol to teenagers is against the law. But if your choices are 1) serving alcohol and removing car privileges for the night or 2) kids driving drunk, suddenly the law doesn’t make so much sense anymore. And maybe we ought to rethink that law. There is, after all, more than one way to restrict your teeangers so that they behave responsibly. And setting clear rules about alcohol that keep teenagers safe is exactly what a responsible authority figure should do.

Meanwhile, here’s how the article proves that you’re a bad parent if you serve alcohol to minors:

Silvia Johnson, the suburban Colorado mom who entertained high school kids at weekly parties with Jack Daniels, Bacardi rum and peppermint schnapps. Johnson provided the liquor, did shots with the 15- and 16-year-olds, supplied the methamphetamines and joined the kids in taking them. And she sexually serviced at least five of the boys, right there at her parties. She did this, she told police, to be the “cool mom.”

The lengths we’ll go to avoid sensible solutions in this country…

A while back after reading Jim Lindgren’s account of a meeting with Justice Burger, I noted that Burger reminded me Judge Smails (Ted Knight) of Caddyshack fame.

So now I read Judge Posner’s very interesting discussion of Justice Douglas where Posner writes:

Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a heavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible father to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible, and at times unethical Supreme Court justice who regularly left the Court for his summer vacation weeks before the term ended. Rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devoured by ambition, he was also financially reckless–at once a big spender, a tightwad, and a sponge–who, while he was serving as a justice, received a substantial salary from a foundation established and controlled by a shady Las Vegas businessman.

After reading that, I thought to myself, man, Douglas was Dan Fielding. (Except on Night Court, Fielding seem to be portrayed as a conservativish Republican Prosecutor, while Douglas was a liberal).

I’m going to be on Jim Babka’s show tomorrow (Sunday) at 5:00pm (tune in at 5:07) Eastern time discussing the Founders & Religion.

You can listen to the show on the Internet here. Listen on the first or second feeds.

Browsing Wikipedia the other day, I ran across the article for “knout,” a Russian flagellation device. The article reads in part,

The emperor Nicholas I abolished the earlier forms of knout in 1845, and substituted the pleti, a lash with three thongs which could end in lead balls. Ostensibly the knout has been abolished throughout Russia and reserved for the penal settlements, mainly in Siberia, adding another cruelty to the often fatal hardships of convict life there.

Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. Anachronistically.

A good friend of mine hails from Slovenia, and he has spent much time trying to impress upon me the peculiar way that his homeland struggles to be both modern and traditional, tolerant and socially conservative, all at once. Mostly it just ends up seeming culturally weird to outsiders. This story confirms it:

Slovenian same-sex couples may now get a limited form of domestic partnership. But there are a few… catches: “The law limits the number of those attending marriage ceremonies to two partners and a local community registration official. No friends, relatives or any third person are allowed to attend the ceremony, which can be held only in a state office.”

(H/t: Daddy, Papa, and Me) Still, Slovenia is a beautiful place, full of castles, skiing, surprisingly good wines (none of which are available elsewhere), and what Slovenians claim is the best honey in the world. I’m inclined to agree. Think of it as Switzerland without all the tourists. Just plan your same-sex marriage elsewhere.

Social science methodology from Crooked Timber: There really is nothing in the methodology of the paper that would give any grounds for rejecting it. The only grounds on which one would not want to publish this paper are that it is claiming that you can bring about world peace by sitting in a room going om.

I couldn’t imagine a better comeuppance: Florence King eviscerates Ann Coulter without raising her voice. Here’s my favorite bit, but the whole thing is just perfect, really:

You know who the real winner in the Ann Coulter controversy is, don’t you? The Geico insurance company. Whenever their ad comes on after I’ve been watching Coulter do her howling Boudicca number, their little gecko lizard seems so plangent and defenseless that I want to hold him close and protect him. I feel completely mischaracterized and it’s all her fault.

Finally, a twofer on Maoist themes, with a detour through the FDA: “The Joy of Bumper Harvest Overflows Amidst the Song of Mechanisation,” a great title from a North Korean propaganda song quoted in a thought-provoking piece from In the Agora.

And if you ever wanted your face on a Chinese propaganda poster, here’s your chance. Maybe I could get this one, relettered to say something like: “Communism? But the Americans have much cooler toys!”

This time by a 17-year-old highschool senior, homeschooled, Christian conservative, the exact audience which Barton targets for his propaganda (indeed, he’s been nicknamed their “lesson-planner”). And that’s a real shame. Some of those homeschooled Christians are real bright; they deserve better than Barton.

The myth in question is about the so called “Jefferson Bible.” Barton’s website claims:

The reader, as do many others, claimed that Jefferson omitted all miraculous events of Jesus from his “Bible.” Rarely do those who make this claim let Jefferson speak for himself. Jefferson’s own words explain that his intent for that book was not for it to be a “Bible,” but rather for it to be a primer for the Indians on the teachings of Christ (which is why Jefferson titled that work, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”). What Jefferson did was to take the “red letter” portions of the New Testament and publish these teachings in order to introduce the Indians to Christian morality.

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In response to Brayton’s question on libertarians and the Iraq war: I am — at long last — uninterested in the Great Iraq War Question.

My side lost the argument; the other side won. We went to war. All of it happened before this blog even began. By now I mostly just wish the troops and the innocent bystanders the best of luck, and I smile whenever a thug gets taken down. What’s left to say? Only a few things, and they’re below the fold.

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In three relatively brief paragraphs, Sebastian Holsclaw of Obsidian Wings explains a remarkable lot about the laws of war. He also sweeps away a number of pervasive misconceptions that have arisen in the Lebanon-Israel conflict:

The first error is in thinking that the rules of war are interested in the underlying justice claims of the combatants. In many respects the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions are very pragmatic as originally designed. If two sides are willing to go to war, it should be obvious that there is a serious disagreement between them about the underlying justice claims. This is not to say that it is impossible that one side may be objectively correct when analyzed from the outside. The rules of warfare don’t address that because they are intended to cover the people who are engaging in warfare against each other–people who are in disagreement about the just resolution to the underlying cause or causes of the war.

The rules of warfare are not about getting to the most just resolution. The fact that a more just but weaker force will often lose to an unjust but stronger force is a different philosophical problem entirely. The rules of warfare are meant to apply to both sides, with members on each side presumably believing that their own side is in the right. Given that, the question the rules of war tries to resolve is what kinds of tactics are permissible.

Since the Hague Conventions, the rules of warfare have tended to have two organizing principles: First that war should be conducted between combatants and second that war methods should be proportional to their aims. These two principles are sometimes called “non-combatant immunity” and “proportionality”. I will use these terms because they are the proper terms of art, but I want to take special note of the fact that they are specialized terms. Interpreting them as general terms–outside their special meaning–tends to confuse things. This confusion is especially great with respect to “proportionality”. In the laws of warfare context it should not conjure the idea of a tit-for-tat response structure, but rather whether or not the means is justly related to the ends. The term “non-combatant immunity” can also cause confusion. It does not mean that non-combatants can never be injured in war. It means that they are not to be targeted in war.

I think he is entirely right, and he has much more today that bears consideration, too.

I second Ed Brayton’s thoughts. I’m sure Moore’s columns will provide much future entertainment and fodder for us.

Seriously though, I think, in this past post, I answered the basics of what Moore writes in his introductory column. I’ll expand a little here.

First, Moore could argue that as a matter of constitutional technicality, he was in the right (although, the way our system works is that state courts must obey federal court commands, and if you think a lower federal court erred, you may appeal the case to higher federal courts, up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and make your case there). In fact, Moore does argue this: Continue Reading »

“Are you gay? No? Then f*** off! This is my culture! I’m not doing anything illegal. — Pop star George Michael, on being caught engaging in public sex. The second time.

Excuse me, sir, but I am gay. Does that mean I can have an opinion? Oh good…

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Regarding my post on the academic job market, a trusted source writes,

In the 19th c. in China, of course, one disaffected degree-holder launched the Taiping Rebellion, which killed a few million people. So there are always career options.

Options, options…

Brayton has asked for our thoughts on Ilya Somin’s comments regarding the division between libertarians regarding the Iraq War. I notice also that Brink Lindsey has some thoughts over at Cato’s blog that are worth reading.

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This may surprise some folks. It’s well known that Washington, Adams, and Madison issued Thanksgiving proclamations (to a generic God), while Jefferson refused. And Madison, in his Detached Memoranda seemed to indicate it’s improper for the federal government to do this (thus giving support to the notion that Founding-era practice is not dispositive, that indeed, it’s entirely possible to raise a constitutional ideal one minute, then break it the next).

Before seeing this quotation in James H. Hutson’s fine book, I didn’t know that Adams too regretted issuing the Thanksgiving Proclamation. His words are quite interesting:

The National Fast, recommended by me turned me out of office. It was connected with the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, which I had no concern in. That assembly has allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Swedenborgians, Methodists, Catholicks, protestant Episcopalians, Arians, Socinians, Armenians, & & &, Atheists and Deists might be added. A general Suspicon prevailed that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an Establishment of a National Church. I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical Project. The secret whisper ran through them “Let us have Jefferson, Madison, Burr, any body, whether they be Philosophers, Deists, or even Atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.” This principle is at the bottom of the unpopularity of national Fasts and Thanksgivings. Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion.

John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 12, 1812. Old Family Letters, 392-93; taken from Hutson’s The Founders on Religion, 101-02.

I thought Jason and Timothy would be interested in this post by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy. It’s about the split among libertarians regarding the Iraq war and some possible explanations for it. It got over 100 comments, so a lot of different ideas are offered up as to why the split exists. The prevailing notion seems to be that the divide is between those libertarians who are most dogmatic about libertarian theory, particularly the principle of non-aggression (who would tend not to support the war), and those who are more pragmatic in their approach (who would tend to support the war). I’m not sure I buy that. But I’d be curious to hear their thoughts on it, and those of our readers.

This is the third in my series of posts reconsidering various aspects of academic history. The first dealt with theory; the second looked at historiography. This one is about the so-called job market.

Some of you may be asking yourselves — with apologies to Tim Burke, who got it almost right –

Should I go to graduate school for history?

My short answer: No.

My long answer: No, and here’s why…

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