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.

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.

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…

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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.

“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.”

I was at a Convention to elect the President. It was a tight race and apparently electors had to decide. Obama, Clinton, or McCain (I seem to remember a few others) were virtually tied and one super-delegate held enough votes to decide the election. And then he (I think it might have been Bill Clinton) gave the votes to me and said you decide. I walked up to John McCain and said, “Thank you for what you did for your country, Mr. President.” I expected to be interviewed on the media afterwards.

After that I remember hanging around Morrisville, PA (originally owned by Founder Robert Morris), next to where I live in Yardley, where the town all of a sudden had working class, Philadelphia like, row-homes (they don’t) which magically transformed into a long stretch for miles of an indoor like apartment building with hallways where the uniqueness and privacy of the row-home was still preserved. I can’t remember whether I was walking or driving through the hallways.

I’m still planning to vote Libertarian by the way. Rather, I see this as a prophecy.

There are three good reasons to check out The Weekly Standard every once in a while. The first is to see what American jingoistic nightmare the Neo-Conservative Journal of Record is, in both pejorative senses, hawking this season. The other two are Andrew Ferguson and Matt Labash. Herewith, Mr. Labash on close encounters of the celebrity kind at “Prom Night.”

As a fan of professional football and college basketball, I pay scant attention to the NBA even when my hometown Washington Wizards make it to the playoffs. I missed, therefore, a bit of good natured sports rivalry wherein some enterprising D.C. Papa John’s pizza franchisee made up some T shirts calling Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James a “crybaby.” Frankly, it would take more than a free T shirt to get me to eat a Papa John’s pizza (or any other franchise pizza, for that matter) but apparently Cleveland’s Papa John’s shops have responded, offering local fans a pie for a mere 23 cents in “homage to James’ jersey number.” A pretty good deal, huh?

Alas, those pesky laws of supply and demand and something about price elasticity struck with 90 minute or longer lines quickly forming. “In suburban Cleveland, people stood wrapped in blankets outside a store in Westlake and the line was two blocks long in University Heights.” But, hey, it isn’t like a person’s time is valuable, too, is it?

By any reasonable measure, my choice of what to eat on November 4, 2008 is going to have more of an effect on my life than my choice at the polls.

My vote will not be the decisive one for a variety of reasons: Maryland is solidly Democratic, it has few enough electoral votes that it may not matter anyway, I may vote Libertarian, and — my personal favorite reason — I suspect that even in almost totally fraud-free elections, the coveted marginal vote is often just swallowed up by the marginal frauds.

Why is it then that the one choice — the election — gets all this attention, even months in advance, and the other choice — my dinner on November 4 — does not? I should be arguing with myself about vegetables, no?

Read my interview at Fearful Symmetries. I spent quite a few hours working on this; but that was only because the questions were so outstanding.

A very interesting post on undergraduate moral relativism from a philosophy professor who has no doubt seen his share (h/t: Mark Olson). I was reminded of my favorite quote from Benito Mussolini (yes, I have one):

Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition… If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity… From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.

Moral relativism does not imply toleration. It doesn’t imply anything, actually, so fascism is just as much a non sequitur as the rest. I’m inclined to accept Pruss’s second theory of why undergrads are so drawn to relativism:

Consider first a relativism about an area of life that does not expressly involve ethics, say esthetic or gustatory relativism (what is beautiful or tasty to me may not be beautiful or tasty to you, and there is no objective, mind-independent beauty or tastiness). This kind of relativism does support quite a bit of tolerance. If Century Sundae is not tasty to you in the way it is to me, I should not impose it on you, and I should be tolerant of your desire to eat the mildly repellent (to me) Chunky Monkey. Here, the relativism is sufficiently limited that it does not undercut, but instead supports, tolerance.

As a result of this, one might conclude that relativism in general supports tolerance about the praxis that is relatively evaluated. However, in the special case where the relativism is moral relativism, this does not hold. The reason that esthetic or gustatory relativism supports tolerance is because of objective moral principles concerning respect for differing preferences and views. But once the relativism becomes moral relativism, these principles are undercut, a fact one might easily miss.

…but I’d note that this approach also begs the question. Why should we be indifferent toward aesthetic or gustatory choices? Because we should practice aesthetic and gustatory relativism. We should because we should. This form of relativism therefore doesn’t explain why such things should be indifferent to us. To do that, we’d need to elaborate a theory of moral sentiments in which neither transitory sense data nor aesthetics were morally salient, and this is (I think) rather difficult to do.

Writing for the Village Voice (!), reviewer J. Hoberman says Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay “is a largely mind-numbing experience.”

[Insert obvious and entirely unnecessary stoner joke here.]

Letting their freak flags fly in the most mainstream of Mainstream Media, Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (which one is Felix and which is Oscar?) grace the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with a paean to Dallas. No, not the next door neighbor of the NFL’s soon-to-be Arlington Cowboys, but the execrable prime time soap opera that premiered 30 years ago and, as Gillespie and Welch would have it, helped the West win the Cold War and, alas, abetted the political ascension of George W. Bush. Every silver lining must have its cloud, I suppose.

Dallas’s contribution to the decline of both communism and presidential “couthness” aside, one point Gillespie and Welch failed to mention was how much the Ewing’s iconic Southfork Ranch was and still is a Potemkin Village. The ‘Mansion’ at Southfork Ranch is in fact a 4800 sq. ft. house with a 960 sq. ft. enclosed garage. Hardly a hovel but frankly smallish by comparison with some nearby Plano, TX neighborhoods and positively snug compared to the actual Dallas’s ostentatious Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Southfork serves today as a conference center and tourist attraction. I admit to not having made the trek, myself; but my wife has been to several events there and, at the risk of putting words in her mouth, described the facility as surprisingly small and unimpressive. Then again, having been chauffeured through a part of rural Russia a few years ago where our driver pulled over to negotiate at length, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with a roadside truck stand selling cabbage, what impresses is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dallas may have been, as Texans are wont to say, all hat and no cattle, but at least it showed the rest of the world what it was like to live in America always having more than enough cabbage.