Walter In Denver

Good Start

Matt Welch's new job at the LA Times is already paying off with this nice contrarian op-ed. First Line:

THE NEWSPAPER you are reading has been lovingly compiled by hundreds of humans who urinated into plastic measuring cups for the privilege of bringing it to you.

Now we just need to clone him and send him to newspapers around the country.

Anti-Totalitarianism

Gary Farber approvingly points out this interview of leftist author Paul Berman. Leaving aside the now decades-old linguistic error equating leftism with liberalism, there is much discuss ...

You could begin with this point of view that, morally speaking, it’s incumbent upon us to resist absolute oppression, but having made that decision, it might not help you at all in analyzing politically who are the true oppressors, what is the real oppression, what is the best way to resist it. What you see in the book is a picture of the left from the 1950s and 1960s, when serious people—and I take everybody in the book seriously—were floundering in their efforts to answer these questions, and coming up with answers that are really wrong unto insanity.

Some of them, in their effort to be resistors, end up the allies of oppression, even anti-Semitic murderers. In trying to oppose the kind of Nazism that existed in the past—because something like Nazism is an eternal possibility—some of them end up being Nazi-like, and there is a shocked realization on the part of other people that this is happening, that this can easily happen, that a left-wing resistance movement can turn into its opposite.

If you define opposition to totalitarianism as opposition to the Nazis you are left with an incomplete definition. As much as some on the left are committed primarily to opposition to the right they are not opposed to totalitarianism in any real sense. A quick tally of left-wing totalitarians of the last century leaves one wondering how the left could define themselves as anti-totalitarian in any sense. That isn't to say individual leftists aren't anti-totalitarian, but that idea only exists by coincidence, not via leftist ideology.

There’s a way today in which there’s nobody more conservative than a standard leftist. My argument is that a standard leftist is someone to be avoided at all costs. I’m in favor of unstandard leftism, or anti-standard leftism. That ought to mean asking oneself these very fundamental questions, which the people I write about in Power and the Idealists are asking themselves, that have to do with this question of resistance—“What is the real oppression of our time?” Not what some ism tells us is the oppression of our time, but what is actually happening, who are the people that are actually suffering, and can something actually be done to help them?

I'll agree, and add that the mainstream left is the most conservative bunch in American politics in nearly every way.

Berman and the left are doomed to flail about, trading one oppression for another, until they begin to work in favor of individual liberty instead of pitting one oppressed group against another. For more thoughts along this line here's Arnold Kling, discussing 'Folk Marxism:'

Folk Marxism looks at political economy as a struggle pitting the oppressors against the oppressed. Of course, for Marx, the oppressors were the owners of capital and the oppressed were the workers. But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed. Folk Marxists see Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed. They see white males as oppressors and minorities and females as oppressed. They see corporations as oppressors and individuals as oppressed. They see America as on oppressor and other countries as oppressed.

And Berman thinks that leftism can really work if we can just identify the proper oppressed classes. More from his interview:

I think some people have arrived at a lucid view, and above all they’ve done this by trying to strip away the delusions of ideology, the blindnesses that come from having an all-encompassing worldview. Some of it was conducted by philosophers like Glucksman, some by activists like Kouchner and some by politicians like Joschka Fischer. In the end, I think that the people I’m discussing all arrive at intelligent and admirable views, even though they’re not in agreement with each other. I can respect their differences; they all seem to be responsible, admirable people. Certainly a lesson of the book is that you can’t just take some ism for yourself and think that your problems are at an end. You can be pretty much guaranteed that if you’re following the dictates of an ism, sooner or later you are going to be disastrously wrong.

To which Gary Farber adds:

Somehow or other I figured this last out at some formatively young age -- like, age ten or so -- and never, ever, fell into making such a mistake. It's one of the various principles I've always since lived my life by.

So says the world's foremost proponent of Gary Farberism. We're all guided by a collection of ideas we believe to be true, and that collection is an ideology. It's unavoidable, save for refusing to think altogether. If it hasn't been formally named and given an -ism ending it makes no difference. At least we can recognize our ideologies and try to refine our personal ism and shed incorrect or harmful ideas.

The reason the Berman interview interested me is that he seems to be willing to consider that his ideas may be incorrect or at least harmful. That's rare enough that he's worth engaging in debate.

Snacking

Mmm...havarti.

Light Reading

From last April's edition of Liberty, Michael Acree's essay Who's Your Daddy? Authority, Asceticism, and the Spread of Liberty.

Not that I agre with everything, but many interesting observations are contained therein, including:

Start with the most famously transparent case of psychological motivation for political beliefs: the obsessive campaign of conservatives against pornography, which elicits a knowing smile from everyone else. [...] Look today at the amount of coverage given by WorldNetDaily, to pick on just one popular publication, to sex scandals, child prostitution, and other titillating topics. Without their diligent reporting, many pedophiles might never have considered the opportunities in contemporary Afghanistan. Leftist intellectuals smugly infer suppressed desires from this righteous crusade, but their own positions may be vulnerable to a similar analysis.

Consider the odd resistance of left-liberals to lowering even their own taxes. The very idea is as offensive to them as relaxing laws against prostitution is to conservatives. That doesn't mean they are indifferent to money, but it is important to them to appear indifferent to money. [...] But the insistent denial of concern for wealth, we may suspect, betrays an underlying obsession.

And:

Lakoff generously subtitles his book "What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't." He is referring to conservatives' "knowledge" that government is inherently about morality. Perhaps it is, for better or worse; but I would say the more relevant thing conservatives know that liberals don't is that government is inherently disciplinary. I wish Lakoff had been less modest and had acknowledged what liberals know that conservatives don't: that legislating morality doesn't work. Enforcing public morality — nurturance by compulsion — doesn't work any better than enforcing private morality. It furthermore ceases to be experienced as nurturant either by recipients, who come to take it for granted as an impersonal entitlement, or by donors, who come to resent it as a demand. If Lakoff understood what both liberals and conservatives know, he would have cut the ground entirely from under both.

There's much more. Recommended reading for those who don't understand the appeal of libertarianism, or lack thereof.

Erbe Meets Goose

Bonnie Erbe's latest column is so awful it makes me wonder if the folks down at the Rocky ran it to make her look foolish. Here are some bits and my reactions...

She (or he) sat bleeding profusely into the waters of South Creek, off the West River in Churchton, Md. She was clearly dying. A bullet had entered one side of her torso and exited the other. She held up her wing, broken in two. Her neck was elegantly arched and her black eyes looked against her black feathers as if she were trying not to cry.

She was a Canada Goose. She was sitting silently under a Weeping Willow (weeping for her, I believed) just off the beach of a marshy cove, when I walked by with my dog and two acquaintances. We didn't own the property, but we had the owners' permission to be there. The hunter did not.

A bullet? I haven't been a hunter since I was a kid, a couple of decades ago, but even I know a hunter would have used a shotgun. Erbe isn't talking about a hunter, but a poacher. A poacher is to a hunter as a graffiti sprayer is to a housepainter. But Erbe wants readers to think hunting is cruel, so here she goes...

One of my companions said, "I grew up on a farm and killed chickens. I'll break her neck to put her out of her misery." We fussed and cried and tried to write happier endings. We finally concurred it was the best we could do.

She picked up part of a tree limb. I and the other woman turned away. Bash, bash, we heard. "Is she breathing?" I asked. "I don't think so," the angel of mercy replied. We started walking away. We heard something. The goose, head down, was flapping its wings. The angel ran back. Again, bash, bash. This time it took.

As I recall, that's exactly how we did it on the farm. Hit them with a stick. Yup.

Some insensitive human viewed that bird as no more than target practice. We saw her as a courageous individual. On the way out, we spotted an illegal blind placed by trespassers. Fueled by our angst, we ripped it to shreds.

Hunting is a dying sport in America. No, a dying hobby, or occupation. There's little sport in the destruction of wildlife with high-tech weaponry. This bird was shot by a trespasser in a suburban cove in view of 15 houses. Hardly a rural marshland. No cover in which the bird could hide. Like skeet shooting with a bloodlust. About as manly as wearing diapers.

Let me try that last analogy again: Poachers are to hunters as Erbe is to writers.

The Christian Science Monitor reports, "A new US Fish and Wildlife survey shows ... the number of hunters has declined by 7 percent, to 13 million, in the past 5 years. While a few states like Alaska and Minnesota have seen slight increases ... officials in Georgia predict a 50 percent decline .... by 2026."

Hunting groups are so desperate for new blood they're lobbying some states to reduce the legal hunting age to 8. But urbanization and technology are doing what conscience never could: convincing more Americans not to hunt. Today's man is too busy, open land isn't easily accessible, and rural passions of a less educated America are giving way to urban and suburban sophistication.

You uneducated hicks. Good thing us urban sophisticates are here to give you guidance.

I suppose it might be useful to note that Denver and other urban areas are overrun with Canadian geese. The grass in many parks here is often unusable, as it's covered in goose dung. I guess shooting the geese would be out of the question.

Update: I notice Wadcutter commented on the same column, including -

Yeah, right. Some jackass who shoots geese with a rifle is going to bother building a blind in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. The bird was probably shot from someone’s deck. You just destroyed some neighborhood kid’s play fort.

Subterfuge

What to do had you to make the choice Google faced regarding business in China? Certainly they had to figure that if they declined China's conditions some competitor would accept. It's not as if the Chinese web surfers would lose anything if Google was available, even with restrictions.

Here's what I would do if I were in charge in Mountain View; I'd accept the restrictions the government put on searches in order to ensure Google remains available to people in China. But I'd do every subtle and sneaky thing I could to undermine the restrictions.

Of course, as king of Google there's no way I could reveal my scheme publicly, so I would have to endure the wrath of freedom loving netizens everywhere, and deal with some bad publicity.

Reconciling

Apologies to all - my home computer has thrown a shoe. The keyboard has grown an obstinate mind of its own and I'm reduced to mostly mouse-only operation. It sounds suspiciously like what plagued Jim Henley a month ago. (conspiracy theory - it's just The Man keepin' us down) Meanwhile I'm posting this from a dial-up connection on a second string 'puter.

News that couldn't wait; Matt Welch, one of my fav opinion writers, has scored. He's now an assistant opinion editor for the LA Times.

What t think of that? It's my least favorite newspaper on the continent. Guess I'll have to read anyway.

Another Drug War Victim?

Long story short; Steve Kubby uses marijuana to (says he) stay alive. He fled to Canada to avoid prosecution, and now he's being extradited back to the U.S. to face charges - and of course he'll lose use of his medicine. Here's his press release:

VANCOUVER — Canadian Federal Justice, Yvon Pinard, ruled today that Immigration Canada may now proceed with its attempt to send Steve Kubby, cancer patient and medical marijuana refugee, to die in an American jail. Immigration Canada is expected to issue a new removal date, presumably sometime next week.

Angry and distraught, Michelle Kubby said, “Justice Pinard simply ignored the statements by the Placer County Prosecutor that Steve would be jailed, if he is forced to return to the US. (Kubby was prosecuted by Placer County in 1999 after a six month surveillance of the Kubbys’ home based solely on an anonymous letter.)

“He also completely misrepresented California laws regarding medical marijuana. No jail in the US allows the use of medical marijuana. My husband’s life hangs in the balance, but Justice Pinard ignored blatant lying by Immigration officials.

“We attempted to file an appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals, but were denied. If Canadian judges ignore both the facts and the law, we can only count on the Canadian people to contact their politicians. Unfortunately, Canada is in the middle of an election campaign in which even the plight of Canadians who need medical cannabis does not seem to be an issue.

“Still, we can only plead with the people who hear about our situation to call those Ministers who can stop Immigration Canada from killing my husband. All we need is time in Canada to clear Steve’s name in the US. Please phone or fax the Ministers of Immigration, Health, Justice and Public Safety,” said Mrs. Kubby.

This seems like a rather drastic way to prove that it really is the pot keeping him alive.

You may recall the feds had no pity when they arrested Peter McWilliams, leading to his demise.

Via Hammer of Truth.

Anecdotally

I don't much mind that American news media has a pro-Democrat or moderate lefty bias, although I find it rather silly that some argue that it doesn't exist. I don't think I've written on the subject before.

David Boaz has found what looks to be a pretty good example:

In the past three months, the major media have repeatedly hammered away at the theme that Judge Samuel Alito Jr. would "shift the Supreme Court to the right" if he replaced retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

According to Lexis/Nexis, major newspapers have used the phrase "shift the court" 36 times in their Alito coverage. They have referred to the "balance of the court" 32 times and "the court's balance" another 15. "Shift to the right" accounted for another 18 mentions.

Major radio and television programs indexed by Lexis/Nexis have used those phrases 63 times. CNN told viewers that Alito would "tilt the balance of the court" twice on the day President Bush nominated him. NPR's first-day story on "Morning Edition" was headlined "Alito could move court dramatically to the right."
[...]
Not a single major newspaper used the phrases "shift the court," "shift to the left," or "balance of the court" in the six weeks between Clinton's nomination and the Senate's ratification of Ginsburg. Only one story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer mentioned the "court's balance," and that writer thought that Ginsburg would move a "far right" court "toward the center."

The only network broadcast to use any of those phrases was an NPR interview in which liberal law professor Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University said that Ginsburg might offer a "subtle change...a nuance" in "the balance of the court" because she would line up with Justice O'Connor in the center.

Yes, I realize one example doesn't prove much.

More Glory Road

Some critics are claiming the contemporary racial implications were minor in 1966:

As to whether the game had social implications for sports and American society, that may well be true, but only in retrospect.

"I did the game,'' Cawood Ledford, Kentucky's legendary radio broadcaster, told the Cincinnati Post, "and in all the press conferences and interviews, I never heard a word about the racial issue. Not a whisper. It wasn't until several years after the game was played that it dawned on somebody that this had been a game of significance.''

"It was supposed to be such a big moment for integration, but that's all just BS,'' Thompson told Einhorn. "The game was in College Park, Md., and I was here at the time and nobody was talking about it as a big deal. Sure, in the black community, we quietly said, 'Good,' but nobody was running around saying how great it was.''

All of which is probably true from their perspective. But Don Haskins received 40,000 pieces of hate mail after the game.

Roger Ebert review here.

Glory Road - I'm Taking It Personally

NB This may interest you even if you're not a sports fan

-Minor Spoilers-

If you live in the US you can't have missed the TV promos for the movie coming out today. It's called Glory Road, the story of Texas Western, the first all black basketball team to win the NCAA championship.

Texas Western is now known as the University of Texas- El Paso, (UTEP), and that's where I went to school. Basketball did indeed play a part in my decision to attend. During my senior year in high school I made my way down from Wisconsin to watch UTEP beat Arizona over the Christmas break, and I was impressed with the big school atmosphere and the enthusiasm of the fans. I enrolled. Looking back, it still seems like a good reason to pick a college.

UTEP basketball was blessed to have one Don Haskins as a coach. He started his tenure at UTEP way back in 1961 and was still there when I was there in the late Eighties. Haskins (to be blunt) is a redneck from Oklahoma who has lived and breathed basketball from his youth. When he got the UTEP job he was a young and relatively inexperienced coach, and Texas Western was a remote and obscure college. But he was committed to winning, and he adopted an unorthodox strategy to do so. He went to urban areas and recruited black players who received very little attention from major universities at the time. Most schools in the south didn't have black players at all.

It's important to note that culturally speaking, El Paso doesn't have much in common with the South. It's more closely tied to the American southwest, like New Mexico and Arizona. The town is mostly Hispanic, as are most of UTEP's students. The black players were warmly embraced by El Pasoans.

The 1966 national championship game, the subject of the movie, was against #1 ranked Kentucky, a team from the Southeast Conference. The entire conference didn't have a single black player. It was an all black team against an all white team.

Here's where my concerns about the movie start. Haskins is a basketball genius, and he taught his players to play a tactically astute game - tough defense, controlling the tempo of the game, and frustrating the opponent. He coached the thinking man's game of basketball. The ugly stereotype of black players, which persists to this day, is that they win by pure athletic ability, being faster, jumping higher, and such. That's not what Haskin's Texas Western team was about. Considering the context, that's not just a minor bit of trivia.

The film is a Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney production. My fear is they have little concern for such nuance. Of course, I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the movie. I should get to do so some time in the next week, and I'll post my reaction here. The reviews I've read so far have been very positive.

Trivial aside; I knew some of the basketball players when I was there. Tim Hardaway and I wrote a term paper together. I didn't know what a star he was to become.

Here's (already!) a list of historical inacuracies in the film.

A view of the campus. Quite lovely. The architecture is Bhutanese, which blends nicely with the barren desert mountains.

Go Miners!

Is This A Record?

This morning Atrios posted eight (8!) 'open threads.'

In a row.

Mind, I only bring this up out of jealousy. If I had zillions of readers I maybe could get away with that, too.

Denver DA Prosecuting A Self-Defense Shooting?

Denver nightclub owner Christakes Christou found himself face to face with an intruder around 3 AM last Tuesday. The intruder suffered a gunshot wound to the abdomen and earned a trip to the hospital, until he gets out to face burglary charges.

Colorado has a 'make my day' law, but it only covers homeowners at home. Business owners are out of luck. Christou has been charged with 1st degree assault.

Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi looks at the loopholes of the Colorado 'make my day' law here. Denver District Attorney office contact information is here. Their main phone number is 720-913-9000. It might come in handy, if they don't come to their senses.

Fodder For A Thousand Jokes

Ted Kennedy is writing a children's book describing the DC legislative process from the point of view of his dog, Splash. Yes, Splash.

Reading

A mildly antagonistic interview of Milton Friedman by Robert Kuttner. A few highlights:

RK: Do you think the greater degree of globalization and reliance on market forces has, on net, made the job of central bankers easier by allowing markets to self-correct more fluidly, or has it made their job more difficult by increasing the risk of systemic imbalances?

MF: I believe it has made their job easier by providing a larger and more liquid market.

RK: How do you reconcile that with the need to intervene very proactively after crashes.

MF: Well, there aren’t very many crashes.

RK: Right

MF: In 1929, in the immediate aftermath of the crash ,the Federal Reserve Bank of New York did very well providing liquidity. The System’s mistake came later when it allowed the money supply to decline by one –third by 1933.The Federal Reserve in 1987 did very well in intervening, in providing liquidity. That’s never been the problem.

RK: It’s the money supply?

MF: It’s recognizing that you are responsible for inflation, for the price level, that it isn’t something that comes from outside
[...]
RK: Another question: In my own work I have argued that in most sectors of the economy markets work as advertised, but there are some sectors such as healthcare where for a variety of structural reasons, if you let the free market operate you will have socially unpleasant consequences and maybe even inefficient consequences, in that epidemics will spread and that sort of thing, and ditto maybe in the regulation of the honesty of financial markets. You and I would probably set that bar in different places in terms of how many kinds of sectors of the economy are exceptions to the rule, and what you do about it.

MF: Wherever government is largely involved, inefficiencies result. Now let me ask you a question. Dentistry does not come under Medicare. Dentistry is operating well. You never had any of the problems in dentistry that you have in medicine. If markets work in dentistry why wouldn’t they work in medicine? They did work in medicine for many years. In 1945-46, total spending on medical care was about four of five percent. Now it’s gone up to 13 or 14. Something happened.

RK: Well, but part of that surely is because medicine has figured out more ways to treat people.

MF: Every other technological improvement lowers costs. What technological improvement raises costs? Government is now paying at least half the costs of medical care. Obviously, that’s why, whatever the technological improvement, it’s generating higher and higher costs.
[...]
RK: Well, let’s come back to the SEC. In general, well, what did you think of Sarbanes-Oxley? Was that overkill? Or was that a reasonable….

MF: I think Sarbanes-Oxley is a terrible law.

RK: Because…?

MF: Here you say to every CEO in the country: you’ve got to swear to the accuracy of things you can’t possibly know. You’re going to make a perjurer of him. And you say to him, for God sakes whatever you do, don’t take risks.

There's much more to the interview. RTWT if you have any interest in school vouchers and environmental regulation.

One other more trivial bit that struck me...

RK: Right. But one of the paradoxes here is that the law and economics movement seems to be in favor of restricting some rights of private remedy even as its in favor of reducing regulation.

MF: I’m not sure what you are referring to

RK: Well I’m referring to both the writings of some prominent law and economics people, but also the 1995 and 1998 amendments that made it harder for individual investors to bring suits claiming that they were defrauded by the representations of people selling securities and the accountants signing off on offerings, and that sort of thing.

MF: I’m not an expert on that area. I don’t know what those amendments were. You’ve got me out of my depth.

It's too rare that public figures are both humble and self-confident enough to say 'I don't know.'

Do You Really Mean It?

A common sentiment expressed in a LTE in today's Rocky:

I find it interesting that people who live in the boondocks and have nothing to fear from terrorists are so willing to give up their liberties in order to feel safe.
[...]
People who really have something to fear from terrorism, such as those who live in large urban centers like New York and Los Angeles, voted overwhelmingly against George Bush in 2004 because they recognized that lashing out like a frightened, tough-talking, 8-year-old and giving up your civil liberties (what are we fighting for again?) only makes us less safe. [snip]

Who isn't willing to give up liberty for security? Consider Social Security - Workers give up a big chunk (about 14%) of their pay for a small but guaranteed monthly check after retirement. I assume those NY and LA voters favor that program. Or take our national drug policy. (please!) Hundreds of thousands of citizens are prosecuted and imprisoned for voluntarily possessing or ingesting certain chemicals on the theory that doing so will make the public safer.

Both of those are examples of the government making huge incursions on the liberty of the citizenry in exchange for some security, and if you think that those and other similarly reasoned government policies are wrong then you are part of a tiny minority of the American voting public.

Compared to those popular government policies the domestic spying scandals are small beer. So whenever anyone on the left or right sides of American politics complains that we're giving up too much liberty for security in the war on terror, I have to ask... do you consistently apply that line of reasoning?

Sufficient For Thee, But Not For Me

LA's water department, while spending $1 million on a PR campaign to convince the public that their water is of adequate quality, also spent $31,160 of tax money on bottled water for themselves.