Positive Liberty

Speaking of promising political careers, I give you 13 year old Ralph Hardy who ordered a duplicate credit card on his father’s account and used it for a $30,000 spree with friends that ended in a Texas hotel room with $1000 hookers playing Halo on XBox.

What separates Ralph and his friends from your run-of-the-mill juvenile thieves, you ask? When the prostitutes balked because he and his friends seemed so young, they told the women they were “people of restricted growth” and that refusing them would be illegal discrimination against the disabled!

I am in awe.

Recently, a friend lent me a book and said, “Here. When I read this book, I thought, ‘Oh, Jim will really like this.’” The book was “Blue Like Jazz: Non-religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.”

I’d been encouraged to read this book back in 2006, while staying at a friend’s house. I started the book, but didn’t really care for it. Since then I’d heard positive things about Blue Like Jazz, and it was a valued friend who recommended it, so I gave it a second try.

Here’s what I learned: It’s often the case that the last thing you’ll find at church is God. “Religion” is a turn-off and a drag.

That might sound strange, coming from a Christian. But the author, Donald Miller, is strange, in a normal kind of way. His writing is Continue Reading »

Bravo to Chardon Township, Ohio for turning down $10,000 in disaster aid from FEMA following a March snowstorm. Township Trustee Chuck Strazinsky explained it was a typical snowstorm unworthy of federal aid and that the money should be reserved for true emergencies, whereas Township Trustee Steve Borowski disagreed, saying help from the federal government shouldn’t be turned down. Alas, Mr. Borowski probably has the far more promising political career.

One of the talking points of the wingnuts is America is a republic not a democracy. Although a few folks I respect have said such (notably Walter Williams), most folks who parrot this line don’t know what they are talking about. America is and was founded to be a democracy, a liberal democracy in fact. “Democracy” simply means “voting” — if there are legitimate elections, then there is “democracy.” (If the elections are a sham, then it’s a “banana republic” so to speak.) America’s Constitution provides for elections, ergo America is a democracy. The term small l “liberal” simply means there are individual rights that majorities cannot abridge. So that’s liberal democracy in a nutshell. Elections by the majority with individual rights that the majority cannot abridge. Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of discussion about the California same-sex marriage decision, including questioning whether the state belongs in marriage at all — as well as the old canard that if gays want to marry one another, we are now legally helpless against all those who are eager to marry their pets. (And if Jews are recognized as citizens, pretty soon we’ll have to recognize toads, too!)

Along the way there was also this comment, which strikes me as one of the stronger arguments against same-sex marriage:

It is wrong to equilibrate a generative relationship that provides children both a mother and a father with a NON generative (by design) relationship that provides a mother and guardian or a father and a guardian.

Children are the only reason for marriage, thus gays should not have access to the institution. I thought I’d repost this in reply, since it says everything I think needs to be said about all of these arguments: Marriage is unique to adult human beings, and cannot apply to animals. It is ideally a partnership of two. It is not, however, contingent on the possibility of children. And yes, the government does have a role to play. Here’s why…

Continue Reading »

I’ll have to read the decision to see if I agree with the reasoning, but this was definitely the right outcome.

For the moment….

No, not really.
For now, just file under Stories That Wouldn’t Surprise Us:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today in a surprise announcement just hours before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin, former President William Jefferson Clinton declared his total and enthusiastic support for Barack Obama to become the Democratic Party nominee for president, effectively becoming the last significant member of the Democratic Party aside from Hillary herself to endorse Obama.

“You know I love Hillary,” Clinton explained, “and short of remaining faithful to her sexually I’d do just about anything for her; but politics is the art of the possible and, quite frankly, that bitch just won’t hunt, if you know what I mean.”

In a brief question and answer period following his announcement, Clinton said he thought poor white voters would vote for Obama over McCain in November. “After all, they voted for me twice, so this time all they have to do is vote for a black president who’s, you know, actually black.”

Clinton also said the chances of Hillary being offered or accepting the Vice Presidential nomination were “about as likely as me giving Kenneth Starr ‘a Monica,’” and he flatly denied rumors that his endorsement came at the price of Obama naming him for the first Supreme Court vacancy. When asked as he was leaving the stage why then there were numerous recent reports of him interviewing female law students “for possible clerkship openings,” Clinton simply smiled and declined comment.

Via the Washington Post food section:

A lunch of found food includes sauteed morels on toast, steamed garlic mustard greens and fiddlehead ferns. Katie Letcher Lyle is a regular and enthusiastic forager in her home territory of Lexington, Va.

You find that toast in an alley somewhere, dust it off, it’s as good as new…

I’m reading some issues of Libertarian Forum from the late 70s and early 80s. In my defense, it’s work-related.

But I’m finding that it’s just sad, ugly reading — lots of infighting about issues that seem tangential or irrelevant, with little to offer an outsider about the value of having a Libertarian Party at all. Sometimes the articles don’t even explain why these people are fighting each other in the first place, leaving me rather mystified. And that’s saying quite a lot, coming from a guy who has just spent the last year of his life helping to edit the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.

I look at the great philosophy of liberty, and the promise it offers mankind. And then I look at this stuff, and I want to weep.

It occurs to me that if you’re a Democratic or a Republican political insider and you’re trying to milk the system for personal gain, the best way to do this is to work hard for electoral victory. You can expect to win fairly often, whereupon your loyalty will be rewarded by an appointment to the bureaucracy, to a legislator’s staff, or to a cushy ambassadorship (Ned L. Siegel, our ambassador to the Bahamas, was a plaintiff in George W. Bush’s lawsuit to stop the Florida recount. He also donated tens of thousands of dollars in Republican campaign money. I won’t say he’s in it only for himself, but the appeal to someone who is should be obvious).

But if you’re an insider to the Libertarian Party, and if you’re wanting to advance, you can’t look forward to many election victories, and these few won’t carry too many appointed posts for party stalwarts, either. In a minor party, the way to use politics selfishly is to take over the organization, and that’s going to mean stepping on some toes.

Thesis: Bureaucracy does a lot of bad things, but it does domesticate the insiders of the major parties. Minor parties are beset by infighting in part because the electoral stakes are so low for them, while the pre-electoral fights — against fellow party members — are the only decisive ones in terms of advancement.

Second data point: The Green party of the United States. The political principles could hardly be more removed, but the social dynamics seem about the same, no? Rojas, you’re watching the LP convention a lot more closely than I will be. What do you think?

Longtime blog friend Joshua Claybourn has a fantastic post about the Mexican-American War, one of the most unjust and unnecessary conflicts our nation has ever entered. An excerpt:

One aspect of this oft-forgotten war is that it was quite divisive in its day. Whigs, particularly those in the north, opposed the war. Yet southern Democrats, smitten with the notion of Manifest Destiny and our perceived God given right to own “sea to shining sea,” enthusiastically supported it. Such disagreements should not be glossed over. Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman, remained forcefully skeptical about Mexico’s alleged instigation of armed hostilities. Others, such as former President John Quincy Adams, felt the whole affair was simply an effort to expand slavery.

I share John Quincy Adams’ opinion on the matter. Northerners came to speak of the “Slave Power” then running the country in part because they found that the South seemed able to make decisions as massive as going to war even when the rest of the country did not agree. (Likewise with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.) The Mexican-American War was also the reason why in 1846 Henry David Thoreau declined to pay his poll tax, instead spent a night in jail, and went on to write “Civil Disobedience,” one of the great American essays of all time.

And lastly, it is a remarkable testimony to the undemocratic nature of the antebellum South that the first president who was neither from the South nor a northerner willing to concede everything that the South demanded was Abraham Lincoln, and that the South immediately left the Union upon his election.

I suppose I could just walk over to his office and tell him this, but then… it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this is a bit of a teachable moment, so… Will Wilkinson writes,

I hate [haggling]. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus.

Inefficient? Of course it is, if all you consider are the utility of the goods purchased and the sums of money involved. But I suspect that these markets still exist because people — tourists — want to haggle. It’s recreation to many of us who would otherwise shop at Wal-Mart.

Maybe knowing a little economics takes the fun out of it, since those of us in the know will realize that to one degree or another we’re getting a less than efficient price (or are we simply valuing the entertainment less, in a quest — misguided? — for sophistication?). But I don’t imagine that we’re the majority. Hagglers find it fascinating to be able to manipulate prices themselves, when usually this activity is done for them in a market. Meanwhile, the markets back home work even when most people don’t realize how or even that they are doing so.

“I’m still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life.” – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.

The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.

Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like rehabilitation institutions, prematurely sexualizing them, encouraging them to engage in sexual intercourse and then branding thousands of them sex offenders when we catch them on the wrong side of the statutory rape laws.

But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)

Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)

I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.

As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”

Google has digitized the entire volume of Bird Wilson’s “Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend William White.” White was an Episcopal Bishop and presided over the church in Philadelphia George Washington attended as President. He gives key eyewitness testimony that Washington systematically avoided communion in his church. He also testifies that Washington didn’t kneel when praying and kept his mouth shut on his religious specifics. His assessment is fair and balanced; he doesn’t as did the minister in that church, Dr. James Abercrombie, claim this meant Washington was a Deist or not a “real Christian.” But he doesn’t make excuses for Washington either. Pages 188-200 reveal a number of his letters on the matter.

Either Constant Viewer just saw Speed Racer or those LSD flashbacks he was promised in the 60s have finally arrived. Quite possibly the most visually stunning motion picture in decades and certainly the benchmark for special effects for the foreseeable future, Speed Racer is a movie which must either be seen at the biggest screen theater in your city or, at minimum, used as the excuse to run out and finally buy that big screen HDTV set. The only serious question here is, “But is it a good movie?”

Yes. Within the limitations discussed below, Speed Racer is a good movie, though not perhaps advisable for anyone with epilepsy or prone to motion sickness. The story is hardly nuanced and most of the characters are three dimensional only in the visual sense, but there are legitimate good guys fighting legitimate bad guys for legitimate reasons, plot-wise, and you might well just find yourself cheering on the good guys as the thrilling conclusion thrillingly concludes. True, the good guys are Speed and his family’s family business while the bad guys are, wait for it, evil corporations; but has anyone successfully switched that shopworn trope in anything actually literary (hence, Ayn Rand doesn’t count) since Major Barbara? Besides, there’s a funny monkey here, people!

Constant Viewer freely if abashedly admits he had every intention of hating Speed Racer. Why? In the first place, he hated the 1960s crappy cartoons — CV wasn’t hip enough to use words like “anime” back then — both because the animation was on a par with Clutch Cargo and because CV finds watching other people (including cartoon characters) driving fast cars either boring or frustrating. In the second place, Constant Viewer considers the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix sequels among the greatest artistic frauds ever perpetrated on the movie going public.

But fair’s fair. CV could start throwing out adjectives like dazzling, spectacular, mind boggling and so forth, or he could wend his way through a catalog of Speed Racer’s influences such as the color palette of Dick Tracy, the phantasmagorical animation of Fantasia, the mixed media of Tron and, of course, the entire history of Japanese manga and anime. That might, might, mind you, make CV sound like a more knowledgeable film reviewer – then again, it might make him sound like a kid reaching to pad a term paper in a film appreciation course – but it wouldn’t help convey the gape-mouthed reaction most viewers will probably have while watching Speed Racer.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the film is that, while it starts off with dazzling special effects, it manages to continue to build and outdo itself like a grand fireworks display. Frankly, Speed Racer is a good 20 minutes too long and (reminiscent of just about every Lucas film ever made) a bit too impressed by its own technical brilliance to pay adequate attention to the minimum dramatic requirements any genuinely good movie must have. CV knows he said roughly the same thing about Iron Man recently; but Speed Racer is a borderline experimental film and cannot be judged by mere summer blockbuster standards. By those standards and those standards alone, CV understands that many people will likely judge Speed Racer as an extravagant failure. Judged as a cinematic work of art, however, it’s sure to get serious critical attention long after the summer has come and gone. See it.