Positive Liberty

A New Zealand woman drove over her husband.

Twice.

I hate Facebook. Facebook gives me Friends, but all I really want are friends.

I feel like I have to have Facebook because everyone expects me to have it. Going without Facebook is sort of like going without a phone back in the 1980s. You just barely can’t do it. Facebook is much worse than a phone, though, because you’ve always been free to ignore your phone with no guilt whatsoever. Back in the 80’s you wouldn’t even necessarily have an answering machine, and that was some serious freedom. Facebook doesn’t run on freedom. It runs on guilt.

My mother-in-law has this habit of starting conversations with all the things she assumes I’ve seen on Facebook. “I guess you probably saw that L—– is getting over her car accident,” she says. “You should visit her sometime.”

“I didn’t know she’d had an accident. Was it bad?”

My mother-in-law is appalled. “How do you not know about it?” Continue Reading »

Friend and blogbrother Ed Brayton appeared on the Rachel Maddow show to discuss the Rep. Stupak & “The Family” controversy.

Would you believe a student who, among his five citations, cites his own FaceBook page twice?

The more I think about the eternal recurrence, the less I’m sold on it. Let’s all agree to bracket the question of God’s existence for the moment and reconsider the original claim about the nature of time. I suspect there’s an area of strong agreement to be had among theists and at least some non-theists. (And personally, I was hoping we could move away from the tiresome question of God’s existence altogether.) Here’s the quote once again:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

But this really, really doesn’t follow, does it? Say I have a perfectly functioning CD player (yes, I’m an old fart). Say that it has a limitless supply of energy and that it will never wear out. I use it to play my favorite piece by J.S. Bach (currently it’s the Ciacona from Partita No. 2).

Then I take out the disc and put in Led Zeppelin II. (Before you ask: Yes, it’s an infinitely durable disc.)

How long do I need to play Led Zeppelin before it turns into Bach? A long time? A very long time? Forever?

Would it help if I put it on shuffle?

Is there any reason to believe that every part of the long, long track of the universe recurs? Can’t it be that only some parts do, and others do not? Clearly it can be so — there’s nothing about a very, very long time that will turn Led Zeppelin into Bach, and thus there’s no saying that I won’t have to listen to Led Zeppelin forever.

The problem here is that the analogy to rolls of the dice is fundamentally flawed. Some parts of the universe might as well be random, for all we can tell, but that “for all we can tell” speaks more to human ignorance than it does to the true inner workings of things. Analogies to dice probably don’t do the universe justice, because it appears that not everything is random. Add even a little constraint, and some things just aren’t going to repeat.

I just agreed to review Joseph Priestley and the Invention of Air for a national publication, available at most (though not all) Borders and Barnes & Nobles. I’ll let you know more when the time of publication approaches.

In leafing through the book, I noted a great quotation of Franklin’s on Priestley, one I had seen before but forgotten. It was to Benjamin Vaughan, October 24, 1788, the relevant part of which reads:

Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend’s heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, ’tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic. …

Franklin admired men honest enough in theology to come to terms with their heresy. Continue Reading »

Later today I will be taking my younger son to see the Tim Burton / Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland. It may be a good movie or a bad movie or an in-between movie, but I won’t subsequently criticize it for not being true to the source material. Doing so would be criticizing a dog for being an unsatisfactory cat. Besides, one does not hire Johnny Depp for what would then be little more than a cameo role.

Carroll’s masterpieces are surely the most celebrated works of children’s literature among the philosophically inclined, for their author (nee Charles Dodgson) was both a mathematician with an interest in logic and, more importantly, a man with a gift for elegant and eloquent absurdities. It is, I suspect, the combination of the two that made Carroll such a rara avis. Continue Reading »

Scott Lincicome does it here, vigorously rebutting the myth that America’s manufacturing sector has declined.

Leitmotif: The power exerted by a legal regime consists less in the force that it can bring to bear against violators of its rules than in its capacity to persuade that the world described in its image and categories is the only attainable world. — Robert W. Gordon

Surveillance Has Its Reasons: “For the majority of Americans alive today, the function of school has always been to break you for a workplace where you will meet obstruction and indignity every day, be subject to every type of invasive surveillance, and generally, as even that greatest of working stiffs Jerry Langford put it, ‘have idiots plaguing your life.’”

This surveillance includes everything from having your Internet connection monitored, to video surveillance, to pissing in a cup on demand, simply, unassumingly, and as a matter of course. The three most depressing words in the world for a libertarian may just be “Foucault was right.”

Get Your Own Magic Crackers: Want to give Maggie Gallagher more proof that homosexuals really just want to squash religious liberty? Here’s how:

Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

On this occasion, the church, in ’s-Hertogenbosch, had already decided not to serve communion, so the protesters left, shouting and singing.

The dispute began earlier this month when a priest in a nearby town refused communion to an openly gay man.

Not only is this tactically very stupid, it’s also without any argumentative purchase: In a free society, the Catholic Church may give communion wafers to whomever it pleases. It may also refuse them — again according to whatever rules it dreams up.

These rules can be fair or unfair, reasonable or unreasonable. Given that we’re talking about bread that’s been mystically converted into God-flesh, a certain degree of unreasonableness may not be out of place.

If you’re not a Catholic, this isn’t a matter that concerns you. If you want to be a Catholic, then you have to play by the Church’s rules. If you can’t play by these rules, then you don’t get to call yourself a Catholic, you don’t get to hang out in their clubhouse, and you don’t get to do anything more than complain — from the outside.

This isn’t so much a matter of free speech as it is one of trespassing, and frankly I’m embarrassed for “my” side in this debate.

Filibusters: Ezra Klein hates ‘em, and finds inconsistency on the right. My understanding is that filibusters have grown partly owing to lax enforcement of the rules declaring that those conducting a filibuster must be physically present and speaking for the duration. Want fewer filibusters? Make them a contest of physical endurance, and physical indignity, the way they used to be. If nothing else, it would make for some great reality television.

Hmm. Perhaps “Foucault was right” isn’t so depressing after all.

Despite the U.S.A.’s record haul of 37 medals (about which we are busy congratulating ourselves, as befits the “greatest country the world has ever known”). But, as always, the media is reporting the numbers badly. I’m no great shakes as a mathematician, but I did learn in elementary school that you don’t directly compare numbers with different denominators. That is, a gold medal for the U.S. is not statistically equal to a gold medal for Belarus, which has 1/30th of the U.S.’s population.

So below is a chart detailing the predicted number of gold medals and total medals per country, based solely on the number of medals available as a proportion of the total population of the countries participating in the 2010 Winter Olympics.* Continue Reading »

An old friend found these puppies abandoned on the side of the road in the suburban Philadelphia area. If you want to adopt one, give me an email and I will forward it on to him.

Even polished writers screw up who v. whom, so much so that the prescriptive rules on it may change.

I found a good illustration of proper usage of who v. whom from MMAFighting.com of all places:

Frank Mir’s longstanding grudge with Brock Lesnar shows no signs of dissipating, and in a radio interview last week, Mir raised the stakes by saying that if he gets a third fight with Lesnar, he’ll be motivated by a desire to break Lesnar’s neck and see him die in the Octagon.

“A lot of individuals are so worried about being politically correct,” Mir said in an interview with Mark Madden on WXDX radio. “I’d rather go ahead and say what’s on my mind than to sit there and come up with some PC ‘Oh, the guy is a great fighter and I have a lot of respect for him.’ If I don’t mean it, why is it even coming out of my mouth? … I want to fight Lesnar. I hate who he is as a person. I want to break his neck in the ring. I want him to be the first person that dies due to Octagon-related injuries. That’s what’s going through my mind.”

Those comments are unfortunate, and they don’t reflect the good sportsmanship that Mir usually espouses. Perhaps Mir is just trying to play up his rivalry with Lesnar, but he says he truly hates Lesnar, whom he beat in 2008 and who beat him in 2009.

In response to new federal rules, airlines are canceling flights instead of delaying them.

Regulatory policy is most appropriately modeled as a complex adaptive system.*** The parts of the system are interconnected and affect each other, but there is adaptation and learning going on, and the outcomes aren’t always predictable–at least not readily so. (Of course sometimes they’re fairly predictable, yet hope triumphs over experience, to give the most generous explanation.)

That doesn’t mean all regulation is bad. It just means that the potential ways for something to go wrong are vastly greater than the potential ways for something to go right, and so it should be no surprise that so many regulatory policies fail to achieve their objectives. You don’t even have to believe in the efficiency of free markets to understand that.

*Delays are also often caused by maintenance needs. When a problem is found during the pre-flight check, we want the airline to take the time to fix the problem, not make a decision that the fine for fixing it before taking off is too high.

**In contrast to very unenthusiastic occasional advocates, like me.

***Full disclosure: I made this argument at a professional conference, only to have a leading policy scholar shoot it down as a semi-useful analogy, but not really like the real thing at all. However I’m not wholly alone in applying this model.

Michigan State Representative Paul Scott, a first-term Republican, has announced his candidacy to become the state’s Attorney General. He has big plans–his top priorities include “ensur[ing] transgender individuals will not be allowed to change the sex on their driver’s license in any circumstance.” Yes, really.

Once again we see why the generalized Republican claim of liking small government and supporting personal liberty is such a blatant fraud.

I’ll join in the mockery of everyone who says the massive snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern states are evidence against global warming, if those I’m joining will promise to refrain from saying that next summer’s inevitable heat waves and hurricanes are evidence for global warming.

Actually, this year (my fifth year teaching full time). It kicks in Fall 2010. At community colleges, we tend to get less “respect” than four year or graduate colleges. We also teach more (and I’d argue better). Because that’s what we are paid to do. 15 credits is minimum semester load and many, like yours truly, teach overloads.

As it were, we have less time to publish and publishing is not a job requirement. Yet, many of us do publish because, perhaps, we thought we’d end up at a four year college (I didn’t think I would, btw) and/or otherwise have the interest and ability to publish. Again, no job pressure to do so.

As far as I know, we get paid/benefits on par with four year schools (in many cases, we get a better deal). Continue Reading »

This easy:

[T]he 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a Wisconsin prison’s rule forbidding inmates to play Dungeons & Dragons or possess D&D publications and materials…

The prison’s rationale for the ban is that playing D&D might stimulate “gang activity” by inmates.

Both Russian sources and US military have confirmed a huge military tunnel beneath the BERING STRAIT, linking SIBERIA with ALASK

This comes from the heretofore unknown Roy Taylor Ministries.  (And, no, I didn’t cut off the last letter of Alaska–Roy’s apparently not in the business of ministering to copy editors.)

Anyway, this here tunnel “was not DUG out, but BORED OUT using nuclear power that melted it’s way through solid rock, six miles a day.“  Wicked cool, eh?  Since there’d only be one direction for the debris to go, I can only hop the miners (bombers?) got all the way back out the other end of the tunnel before the bombs went off.  At 6 miles a day, though, the tunnel would only take about 10 days to dig nuke blow construct.

Continue Reading »

Samuel W. Calhoun writes a spirited response to Geoff Stone’s “The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?” A taste:

Professor Stone’s evidence for deism’s surpassing significance is flawed. By his own description of their beliefs, some of which were indisputably deis?tic, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson do not belong in the “flat-out” deist category to which Professor Stone assigns them.[17] Deists thought that God does not “intervene[ ] in human history,”[18] yet Franklin believed that God “‘governs the World by his Providence.’”[19] Jefferson was “the primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence.”[20] Professor Stone characterizes this document as “a statement . . . of American deism,”[21] but its language shows the opposite to be true. If God does not interact with mankind, why did the signatories appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the World” to vindicate their honorable intentions, and also express confidence in “the Protection of divine Providence”?[22] Continue Reading »