Walter In Denver

Cordoba

Dan Scheltema:

They dream of going back to the 1400s, not because those were better times, per se, but because those were the years when Islam and Arabic culture were, in their eyes at least, dominant.

But it's interesting that they do not project this dream forward into the future. They dream of going back to Cordoba. They don't, at least obviously, dream of going forward into a better future where Islam and Arabs are dominant. They seek to undo, to revert to, to somehow recover, not to make new, not to build upon the foundations of or improve upon the reality that exists.

RTWT.

NYC Goings On

Michael Badnarik is there:

"Selling people on a libertarian alternative is like selling ice water in hell."

Via Julian Sanchez's Reason Magazine coverage.

Fun

What's that smell? Is it these people? Ugh. Soap, anyone?

Wait 'til my agent hears from me.

Theory Testing

Republicans were quite happy to see a minimal, if any, bounce in the polls for the Kerry ticket after the Dem convention. Historically the first party to hold a convention comes away with a sizable lead in the polls. Repubs seized on that as evidence that Kerry isn't an able campaigner, and Bush has an advantage when it comes to delivering the rhetoric.

I have a theory, that this is an abnormal year, with the wars and terrorism and such. I suspect that voters didn't wait for the conventions to start paying attention to politics, and there just aren't as many swing voters available this late in the campaign.

I'll be able to test my theory when we see the poll results from the Republican convention. If Bush sees a good bounce it would prove me wrong.

Radio

Darren lost his job a few weeks ago, as his talk radio station turned into a music station. Indy music, heavy on 80's vintage stuff, but they've been slowly rotating more current material into the mix. According to their website, the last hour's playlist included Folk Implosion, Wilco, The Ramones, Supergrass, and Sparklehorse.

Sparklehorse? On the radio?

God bless them.

Is Voting a Right, Priviledge, Or Other?

I did not realize that in Australia it is illegal to not vote.

To steal a line, the state is not your friend. If I were an Aussie, I would probably not vote. It makes a nice statement.

I'd Rather Read a Blog

Jeralyn of talkleft is blogging from the RNC in NY. Today she has a piece in the Denver Post on the subject of bloggers covering conventions.

Talkleft is my favorite lefty blogger, so Walter says check it out.

Free Advice

A few days ago I wrote about the problem with the American Left, namely, it's too conservative, and in that vein I'll give John Kerry some foolproof advice on how to win the election. In a nutshell, my advice is do something liberal.

Liberals are always reformers. We want to reform society's great institutions, if not eliminate them entirely. When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat offer to reform anything? All they propose is to increase what we already have, give us more government education, more government funded healthcare, and more unemployment benefits.

While I think of it, those are all things George W. has given us, but I digress.

Offering the same, but more of it, isn't reform. It's just electoral pandering. What Kerry should do to win the election is to steal the Republicans' liberal ideas and adopt them as his own liberal programs. There is some precedent for this. Clinton fought welfare reform until he figured the Republicans couldn't be beat on the issue, and then he adopted a welfare reform program of his own. He later claimed it as a great accomplishment of his administration.

Here are a few candidates for adoption by an open-minded Democrat:

Social Security liberalization. Just go ahead and create some sort of beneficiary controlled plan. The traditional (as opposed to modern) liberal position on governmental issues is to give individuals more freedom. Everyone knows SS won't survive in its current form, so go with it.

Government school reform. It hardly matters what kind of reform, whether it be charter schools, vouchers, or some other invention. At some point you have to make the somewhat painful decision to break away from the ultra-conservative teachers unions and side with the students and parents instead. It's becoming increasingly obvious to swing voters that those are two opposing factions.

Liberalize business regulation and the tax code. By now it should be plain that big business can buy its way around burdensome red tape. They can afford lawyers and accountants and pass the expenses to consumers. It's the small businesses that suffer. More and more Americans are in business for themselves, and the liberal thing to do would be to give the little guy a break. Trust me on this one, I have some experience.

I'm sure you could think of some other liberal ideas the Democrats could steal from Republicans, and the beauty of it is there's no risk for Democratic candidates to do so. The anybody-but-Bush crowd isn't going to care, and there's a wealth of swing voters out there who do care about these issues, and who are looking for a reason to go to the polls this November.

N.B. None those of things are pro-freedom enough to be called libertarian, and they don't go nearly far enough for my taste. It's just crass (but effective) election year strategy.

Venezuelan Election Analysis

James Surowiecki posting at Marginal Revolution, on apparant statistical anomalies in the Venezuelan election results:

...it was inevitable that some would end up with matching scores. (It's similar to the fact that if there are 23 people in a room, the chances are 50-50 that two of them have the same birthday.) Not surprisingly, then, when international observers audited a sample of the results, they found that while there were 402 tables with matching anti-Chavez votes, there were 311 tables with matching pro-Chavez votes, too. What seemed to be proof of fraud was most likely just a statistical artifact.

This is a classic example of what Nassim Taleb calls being "fooled by randomness," in his intriguing book of the same name. We think that randomness means there will be no clusters or sequences of similar behavior, and therefore when we see them we assume they're evidence of some hidden pattern. (You can see this in the way people interpret everything from clusters of cancer cases to hitting streaks in baseball.) But they're really just evidence of the numbers working themselves out.

Has anyone any hard evidence of voter fraud there? I could easily believe Chavez is capable of it, I just haven't seen the evidence.

Coming Soon To A Milk Carton

Have you seen me?

What's Wrong With the Left

Longtime readers here will remember one of my pet peeves, that the words conservative and liberal have lost their meanings in terms of contemporary American politics. Perhaps my background in linguistics is what makes me sensitive to this issue, but here's something that nicely encapsulates the problem and why these meanings are relevant.

Via Rebecca Blood,

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It, an essay by Phillip Agre, a professor of information studies at UCLA. Let's get right to it:

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

He's right about which questions to ask, but his first answer is only half right. His next answer -

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

- is so loaded with vague and hateful judgements that it's useless. What's suprising about this is that he gives us a much more useful answer to the first question later in his essay, in terms of institutions:

According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke, social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny. Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges, systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones, something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where the word "conservative" comes from: the supposed importance of conserving established institutions.

There's my preference for linguistic definitions again. I tend to think words mean what they mean, and conservatives want to conserve. When I say Agre's first answer is half right, I mean that societies with strong institutions tend to have entrenched aristocracies. It's a by-product of institutions but not necessarily intentional, and Agre quickly shows us why this distinction is important:

And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.

His attempt to classify institutions is strictly arbitrary, and reflects what appears to be the author's leftist bias. Social Security stultifies society, it makes it difficult for lower wage earners to accumulate wealth and change their place in the economy. From that standpoint Social Security is the single most aristocratic institution in the U.S., although you could credibly argue that spot belongs to the public education system. The American Left is the most conservative political force in the country, because of its support of such institutions.

The War on Drugs Sick People

Reason Mag:

On February 1, 2002, Cecil Knox was seeing patients in his Roanoke, Virginia, clinic when more than a dozen federal agents burst through the doors with guns drawn. Helmeted, shielded, and wearing bullet-proof vests, they terrified waiting patients and employees. One worker later told the Pain Relief Network, a patient advocacy group, she thought she and her husband, who was helping her in the office that day, would be shot. She looked on in horror as an agent put a gun to his head and ordered, "Get off the phone! Now!"

Knox, a pain management specialist who had been practicing medicine in Roanoke for seven years, was dragged out in handcuffs and leg irons.

It's not an isolated incident, and as the Feds try to intimidate doctors, it becomes harder and harder for patients to get the most effective pain medications. This affects everyone.

There's a very real chance that during your lifetime you or someone close to you will have a severe illness, and require strong pain medication. It's in your best interest to get our drug warriors out of doctors' offices, and quickly.

Here's another Reason article on the subject from April of '03.

Denver Cops Can't Win

The Denver police department has been under fire for a while now for what appears to be an unusually high rate of officer shootings, three just this year. A group called Denver Copwatch was organized in 2001 to monitor the department and push for a series of reforms.
Use of force is a hot topic in the District Attorney race. Local activists have been calling for less frequent use of deadly force:

"There's too much use of lethal force in Denver and too many people getting killed by Denver police officers," said Mark Silverstein, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. "I'm sure many of those people were shot in situations where lethal force could be avoided."

So, naturally, when a fellow ran amuck last night, frothing at the mouth, beating on parked cars, and threatening bystanders, police used non-lethal force to contain him. They used a Taser gun.

He died anyway.

I can scarcely blame the police, and from initial accounts there appears to be nothing they could have reasonably done to avoid the incident. I do have some ideas about how people should expect police to act.

1. Force, and violent force, is the policeman's ace in the hole. Most police calls don't involve violent action, but almost all involve the threat of force. That includes everything from traffic stops to 'shots fired' calls.

2. Any violent confrontation can turn lethal, in spite of the best intentions of the police officer.

3. Much of the criminal code consists of laws concerning the private action of citizens. Non-violent actions can bring violent responses from the cops. That's the way the law is written, and cops are hired to enforce the law. If you want to decrease the amount of police violence, change the law. Take the laws against victimless crime off the books and police will have far fewer instances when they might feel the need to use force.

Useful Weblog

See What You Share on P2P is an informative blog, in a cautionary way. It's enormously popular, and features a nice, short, tastefully selected blogroll. Walter says check it out.

Word of the Day

Today's word is macrocephalic.

Searching

Just read this post on Andrew Olmsted's blog, and wondered, - Are there any prominent leftist bloggers out there who aren't big Kerry supporters? I can think of a number of right leaning bloggers who aren't fond of Bush, Andrew is one.

Anyone?

That Old, Tired Argument

I might have written something about the silliness of the anti-gouging laws that Florida and other states have to keep prices down during emergencies, but Doug Allen at Catallarchy already did it well. Be sure to take a look at some of the comments there.

Unintended Consequences

For several years a suburban Metro area church has staged a Halloween "Hell House," a sort of morality play presented as a haunted house. Hell House has attracted a lot of attention, so creator Rev. Keenan Roberts has turned into a budding entrepreneur, selling the script for $200. He's had about 550 (!!) takers so far, which makes for a pretty good little cottage industry.

He was surprised to find out who one of the purchasers was, though:

Hell House, the controversial morality play first staged at a suburban church for Halloween, is set to be spoofed in a new stage production in Los Angeles starting Aug. 28.

With Bill Maher playing Satan and Andy Richter as Jesus, the play will use the original play's script and special effects "to lampoon (Christian) fundamentalist beliefs about hell", producer Maggie Rowe said Monday.

That's casting? Maher, sure, but Richter? I'd be mad if I were Roberts.

More.

Did Chavez Steal the Referendum?

Daniel thinks so.

Shady Dealings

It appears that Republicans in Illinois are cutting legal corners to get Alan Keyes on the ballot for US Senate there. They have their work cut out, as Keyes has been as much an Illinois resident as I am.

So Jeff Trigg and his merry band of Libertarians may challenge Keyes' spot on the ballot. Good luck, folks.

Bush administration vs the Ill

Randy Barnett:

Yesterday, the government filed its brief in Ashcroft v. Raich, the medical cannabis case I have been litigating, which is now before the Supreme Court. It contained no surprises but it continues to be disappointing to witness a Republican administration so completely uninterested in federalism (just as it was disappointing when the Clinton Justice Department brought suit in equity to shut down the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, another pro bono client of mine). I realize that disappointment is only an appropriate response if one expects something better or different, and I do know better.

Follow the link to read the details.

Grand Gal

Julia Child passed away today, just shy of her 92nd birthday. I always liked the way she cooked and enjoyed her food, with a breezy attitude that hinted she might have been a bit tipsy - so much more fun than the Martha Stewart types.

Update: Jeff A. Taylor: And to think that without the decades of cream sauces, duck, butter, and booze Julia might've made it to 92.

Why Ethics Matter, Again

You may have heard about the overtly racist fellow who will represent Republicans in a Tennessee congressional race. He was the only one on their primary ballot. When the Repubs belatedly realized who he is they made an effort to help a write-in candidate win instead.

The racist, James L. Hart, won in a landslide with 83% of the vote. I doubt that many voters sympathized with his views, they were just woefully uninformed, like voters everywhere.

Via Zomby, this article from Newsday:

An unabashed racist will represent the Republican party in the November election for a congressional seat after a write-in candidate failed to derail his effort.

Hart, 60, vows if elected to work toward keeping "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to the United States. In campaign literature, Hart contends that "poverty genes" threaten to turn the United States into "one big Detroit."

Emphasis mine. What difference does it make if eugenics is valid science or not? The problem isn't that it doesn't work, I don't care if it does or not. The problem is that implementing eugenics as public policy results in horiffic human rights abuses.

The reason you would care about the validity of eugenics as a science is if you think human rights should be sacrificed for the good of society. We do this as a matter of public policy in many ways, such as income redistribution programs or drug prohibitions, both of which are abusive to the rights of individuals.

The only clear case against eugenics is made in terms of ethics. If your ethics are muddled so much that you believe people should be forced to sacrifice for the good of society, then you have to care whether eugenics is phony science or not. I don't care.

No More Super Freak

Rick James made it 56 years, which is a few more than some might have thought.

Here Ya Go

Baby pics!

Wyatt

Abigail

They're even cuter in person, and, yes, they like to sleep.