Positive Liberty

I’ve returned from a marvelous quick vacation to Virginia, my favorite state, where I had the pleasure of horseback riding at Mountaintop Ranch near Elkton. Unfortunately, word is that the Ranch is being sold and that it will soon not be offering horseback riding. But I can say that I had a wonderful time riding in the Blue Ridge forest and I would encourage anyone who can to take the opportunity. Thirty bucks per person is all, and it was an excellent ride on some very nice horses.

I also had the opportunity to stay the night at the lovely Inn At Monticello, in the Jefferson Room. The Inn was once a farmhouse on a 1200 acre plantation (constructed in the 1850s), and it offers the next best thing to actually staying at Monticello. It’s such a wonderful change from California, with the wildlife (the cardinals, especially, which I really love) and the sumptuous scenery. It’s really no wonder that Jefferson loved the area so much.

Then it was up to Orange, the little town I’ve often daydreamed of retiring to someday, to visit Montpelier, James Madison’s home. Montpelier is being restored, and although it’s open to tours, it’s definitely a construction site at present. Still, I was really delighted by how much progress has been made. They’ve scraped off the awful pink stucco that was put up by the DuPont family in the 20th century, and restored the exterior largely to the original look. If you’re planning on taking a trip to the area, it’s definitely worth a stop. And if you are, like myself, an admirer of the Father of the Constitution, I hope you’ll consider joining me in supporting the worthy cause of restoring his home.

Coming hard on the news that the state is likely to increase the minimum wage again—thus making it harder for unskilled workers to find jobs—is news that the Iron Pyrite State is heading toward socialized medicine and shutting down industries that emit so-called “greenhouse gases.” No doubt Directive 10-289 is shortly to follow.

It’s amazing how the left continues to wrap themselves in the mantle of Helping The Little Guy while simultaneously making it harder and harder for businesses to invest, increase prosperity, or create jobs. Even more breathtaking is the pathetic failure of the Republican Party in this state to do anything, or even say much, about the whole affair.

Blog neighbor Josh Claybourn (of In The Agora) has returned from his trip to Africa. He has some fantastic pictures and commentary.

I agree with Ed Brayton’s sentiments entirely. California has just added the category of “sexual orientation” to its pre-existing list of protected civil rights categories.

A few comments. First, keep in mind these antidiscrimination codes almost always come from statutes, not judicial decisions. And the California code is a democratically enacted statute signed into law by an executive. This demonstrates what a canard is the antigay right’s oft-repeated notion that the judiciary, not legislatures reflecting “the will of the people,” primarily advances “the gay agenda.” Continue Reading »

(As an aside, are people getting tired of the science fiction blogging? I’m thinking of starting a side project for this material if the main readership isn’t interested.)

I recently finished reading Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

Executive summary: I have to say I was disappointed. I would give it two stars out of five; it had its moments, but it took itself far too seriously and seemed much more concerned with being an “important” novel than with being a good one. Vinge takes on some very big ideas here. But I think he forgets about writing an interesting plot along the way, and I think his treatment of the singularity — or rather the idea of the singularity in general — represents a kind of presentism, a form of sloppy thinking about the nature of human societies that can be discerned in fiction as clearly as it can be in history. Rather than making assertions about the peculiar specialness of this or that era, literature should try to speak to all eras so far as it can. And to do this, abandoning strict technological verisimilitude may often be a wise choice.

More, with some major spoilers, below the fold.

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Yes, yes, I know, the kid from Kansas, of rainbow flag bed and breakfast fame, is just away with his relatives.

But the big news is that Fred Phelps showed up. (By the way, we recently got linked from godhatesfags.com; this would be big news except that 1. Phelps hates everyone, so it’s not like we’re special and 2. It’s best not to encourage them.)

The counter-protest was apparently much larger. Good for them.

I will dignify Positive Liberty by not embedding these four clips of Tom Snyder interviewing Howard Stern. But I’ve embedded this fascinating train wreck of an interview on my personal website. As I noted over there, I saw this when first broadcast in 1991, and didn’t think I would see it again. YouTube rules.

The conversation winds down. Here is Jim Babka’s reply to Dr. Frazer’s latest remarks:

Gregg, I’m going to wind this down because you have classes to prepare for, and I a business to run. Continue Reading »

You’ve probably heard about this story already, but here’s the shortform for those who haven’t:

Get ready for a segregated “Survivor.” Race will matter on the upcoming season of the CBS show as contestants will be divided into four tribes by ethnicity. That means blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians in separate groups.

The announcement was made on CBS’ Early Show. Host Jeff Probst says the idea “actually came from the criticism that ‘Survivor’ was not ethnically diverse enough.” He says the twist fits in perfectly with what “Survivor” does, saying the show is “a social experiment. And this is adding another layer to that experiment.” Probst says contestants had mixed reactions to the racial divisions.

I’ve been thinking it over. And fuming. More below the fold.

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Here is Frazer’s response to Babka’s latest remarks:

Jim, I appreciate the kind words about my dissertation.

I won’t argue with you about which of us knows the Bible better, but methinks you think God is a libertarian because you’re a libertarian and you, therefore, read the Bible through libertarian glasses. Without going into great detail, one significant problem with such a view is that libertarianism is essentially self-centered and self-interested. The Bible, however, teaches believers to be self-sacrificing and self-effacing – to prefer others to self. Continue Reading »

A few days ago Dale Carpenter and others noted gay rights legend, Frank Kameny’s papers are archived online. You can find them here.

I must confess I’ve gotten to know Frank, somewhat personally, through a private listserv to which we both belong, and while I don’t always agree with his politics (which are further to the left than mine) or his religion (he’s a fervent atheist along the lines of Dawkins and Dennett) he’s one of the most spirited men I’ve ever run into.

And, with a Ph.D. from Harvard in Astronomy, he’s a brilliant dude.

But more importantly, his papers are useful. Granting “sexual orientation” some official status as a civil rights category is a controversial issue. Some on the right fault gays for even “asking” for such, noting that you can’t compare race with sexuality. And while many gay rights advocates often invoke the racial analogy, it has become, in my eyes, more of a thoughtless platitude of the anti-gay right to claim “you can’t compare sexual orientation with race, therefore no civil protection for you.” If we lived in a world where race and only race was the only protected anti-discrimination category, the point might be apt. But that’s not the world we live in. Instead, it’s race, color, gender, religion, ethnic origin, age, disability, pregnancy at the federal level and many others, including “sexual orientation” at the state level.

And while many of these groups have been mistreated by society (though none worse than blacks), Frank Kameny’s papers document the sometimes terrible mistreatment gays suffered at the hands of the law. Kameny himself was disqualified for work in the federal government and had a prospective career as an astronaut ruined simply for being gay. If you want it spelled out more clearly, “[r]ead this 1960 Letter from the U.S. State Department (John W. Hanes, Administrator) to Dr. Kameny confirming that the Department ‘does not hire homosexuals and does not permit their employment.’”

Jim Babka has emailed me a response to Frazer’s post, which I’ve reproduced below. I’m trying to independently research these issues further by reading and re-reading in detail, Bernard Bailyn’s work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn’s work argues that our Founders were pro-liberty radicals who drew from a variety of sources, including the Bible and the Enlightenment — from wherever they could — to support their notion of political liberty and revolution. Whether such uses of the Bible to support political liberty and revolution involved sound interpretations…I’ll continue to let Babka and Frazer fight it out. And I’ll have a word later. Anyway, here is Babka’s reply: Continue Reading »

Jim Babka was one of the folks who criticized my post Was the American Revolution Consistent with Calvinism? which drew largely from Dr. Gregg Frazer’s thesis. Frazer has replied to Babka in an email to me which I’ve reproduced below, and he left a comment at Positive Liberty’s website. Continue Reading »

Heather MacDonald has been brilliantly raising some serious questions about “religious Truth” on National Review’s website. See her latest remarks here.

I’ve long pondered these questions — questions about the moral claims of religion, whether the Bible is compatible with the ideas of liberal democracy, how the Bible scores on the big moral issues of the modern era like slavery and genocide. Continue Reading »

NPR ran a story today about the drug forfeiture case that Brayton blogged yesterday. Even while I know full well who calls the tune at National, ahem, Public Radio, the piece treated the seizure of assets from an innocent man as a mere curiosity, a legal quirk that we should all try to understand — rather than the outrage that it is. If you plan to carry large amounts of cash, “use new bills,” said the legal expert that they interviewed.

“Gee, isn’t that interesting?” — rather than — “How can we return this country to sanity?”

Because, in the neverending war on drugs, old bills are no longer fully your property. Once there is a whiff of cocaine about them — and studies show that a majority of bills have detectable cocaine on them — well, those bills can be forfeited under rules far looser than the ones used for ordinary criminal evidence. Especially, it seems, if you happen to be a Latino man traveling through Nebraska.

Reader Richard Knapton has posted a lengthy reply to my series of posts on academic history. Below the fold are some highlights, though interested readers will want to see the full post, which is quite thorough.

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Thanks to Mike Horn for sending me a link to this story about a guy convicted of a drug crime for nothing more than carring a lot of cash. Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez was pulled over while driving a rental car. He had a cooler with almost $125,000 in cash in it, which the police claimed was connected to drug trafficking and seized. The 8th circuit court of appeals upheld that seizure last week in an absolutely stunning decision. See the full ruling here.

The government’s case here is laughable. When they found the money, they took Gonzolez and the rental car to the police station and had a drug dog sniff it over. The dog indicated that there was drug residue on the money. But studies have shown that over 75% of the bills in circulation have drug residue on them. The cops tested this by having the dog sniff the money found in the car and then sniff a total of 7 bills from police officers, and the dog reacted to the cash found in the car, not to the cash from the police. And that’s it, folks. That is the sum total of the evidence against him.
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I’ve deactivated the HashCash spam filter plugin, as it just deleted a long and substantive comment from an approved commenter. This isn’t acceptable, and I am now looking for a different plugin (Akismet is first on the list to try, though I don’t have time for it at the moment). Ideally, it would auto-approve (ie, leave alone) anything from a commenter who had previously gotten a comment approved. I know that this is possible in WordPress, since the fairly simple filtering system built into WordPress can do just that.

Any suggestions? I’m just hoping we don’t revisit the Great Spam Deluge we had a couple of months ago.

Update: It seems to be fixed. Akismet is even easier to use than I imagined, and I highly recommend it to anyone else using a WordPress blog. For a real test, let’s discuss gambling in the comments, shall we?

In a word, no. This is one of the points made in Gregg Frazer’s Ph.D. thesis on The Political Theology of the American Founding. Calvinism actually better fits with the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. Frazer cites George Willis Cooke, who, in 1902, wrote:

The doctrine of degrees, as taught by the Calvinists, was the spiritual side of the assertion of the divine right of kings. On the other hand, when the people claim the right to rule, they modify their theology into Arminianism. From an age of the absolute rule of the king comes the doctrine of human depravity; and with the establishment of democracy appears the doctrine of man’s moral capacity.

Frazer goes so far as to assert that “Each of the so-called five points of Calvinism offended liberal democratic sensibilities.” Continue Reading »