::Freespace::

Sexual immorality: You see? You see what gay marriage is doing to this country? Destroying sexual morality and bringing about the end of the family!

Libertarianism and animals: First, the Clerk fails, despite repeated urging, to give us any coherent explanation of how animals can have rights or how such alleged rights are logically consistent either with the way animals live, or the way they interact with humans. Then he calls the libertarian argument “poorly thought out” because “even if one takes for granted the libertarian premise about the source of rights (viz. elevated mental capacity as opposed to mere sentience), it does not follow that animals should have no rights but rather varying degrees of lesser rights.” But libertarians do not deny this; I myself have repeatedly said that certain animals may indeed have rights, if it can be demonstrated that they have something like human reason—higher apes, for example, may indeed have something approaching human rights. Again, remember how John Quincy Adams responded when he was chided by Southern Congressmen for trying to introduce in Congress a petition signed by slaves. “A gentleman had said on yesterday that he would as soon receive a petition from a horse or a dog as from slaves,” Adams said. “Sir...if a horse or a dog had the power of speech and of writing, and he should send [me] a petition, [I] would present it to the House; ay, if it were from a famished horse or dog, [I] would present it.” I for one would hesitate to describe John Quincy Adams’ understanding of natural rights as “poorly thought out,” at the very least until I had explained my own position on the matter.

Bork, the Straussians, and our Enlightenment Founding: Bork’s constitutionalism is strikingly similar to that of many of the followers of Leo Strauss. (This includes just about all prominent thinkers who studied under Strauss, save Harry Jaffa. The non-Jaffaite Straussians are collectively known as the East Coast Straussians. Jaffa and his followers are sometimes referred to as the West Coast Straussians). Bork, in many of his works, has often cited men like Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and Walter Berns. (He has heavily relied on Kristol’s arguments.) These men, like Bork, reject the Declaration. I think it’s fair to say that Bork has been significantly influenced by this crowd of thinkers.

(If you want an example of a parallel between Bork and a Straussian, see Walter Berns’s, “Government by Lawyers & Judges,” Commentary, June 1987, p. 17. Berns posits a version of “strict constructionism” that is virtually identical to Bork’s.)

Why do I bring this up? It’s well known to anyone who has carefully studied the writings of the Straussians that they believe that the American Founding itself—the original principles of Enlightenment liberalism that this nation was founded on—those enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—are the cause of what they see as the modern decay of society. In short, these principles are the natural rights of liberty and equality, wholly ascertainable by Man’s Reason, unaided by Biblical Revelation. One of these rights is liberty of conscience, which can only be secured by a state that, in James Madison’s words, enacts “a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters,” thus demanding a separation of Church and State.

Here is Thomas West describing Allan Bloom’s thoughts on America: “America was founded on modern principles of liberty and equality that we got from Hobbes and Locke. Liberty turned out to mean freedom from all self-restraint, and equality turned out to mean the destruction of all differences of rank and even of nature.”

This could have been taken verbatim from chapters 3 & 4 of Slouching Towards Gomorrah. (Indeed, West notes that Bork had made a very similar argument to Bloom’s back in 1984 in Tradition and Morality in American Constitutional Law.) In Slouching, Bork labels Jefferson as “a man of the Enlightenment” and the Declaration as “an Enlightenment document,” and uses this as grounds for rejecting the Declaration. He goes on to say that “Liberalism does not vary; it is always the twin thrust of liberty and equality, and these never change.” pp. 57-58. And that the classical liberalism of the founding has transmogrified into the modern liberalism of today. “Liberty” has come to mean “radical individualism,” “equality,” “radical egalitarianism.”

Bork spends a great deal of time telling us what is wrong with Enlightenment liberalism, and the Declaration, how these principles are “hardly useful, indeed may be pernicious, if taken, as they commonly are, as a guide to action, governmental or private.” But this begs the question: Are these original principles? He lets the cat out of the bag: “Equality and liberty are of course, what America said it was about from the beginning.” p. 56. He further notes that the sixties (which he LOATHES) represented, in some respect, “an expansion of certain American (and Western) ideals…” and that this “deserves to be stressed because if modern developments are in the American grain, if they grow from our roots, as there is reason to believe they do, they will be much harder to reverse than it is comfortable to think.” Id.

So there you have it: This seems to be a clear admission that Bork (like the East Coast Straussians) is against the principles of the American founding. That his (their) position is in reality, anti-originalist.

I tend to agree with these thinkers that what they call radical individualism—(for instance what we saw in the recently decided Lawrence v. Texas case) is consistent with, indeed demanded by, our founding principles of the rights of liberty and to pursue happiness. I just don’t see it as a bad thing, as they do.

But what about radical egalitarianism? Not the classical view of equality, but the post-Marxist version of it that posits “equality of condition,” that everyone should get an equal slice of the pie. Did classical equality turn into this? Bork notes that although the Framers might not have had this theory in mind, the passion that our nation had for equality demanded that the meaning be expanded beyond its original conception. Bloom puts it this way: “More serious for us are the arguments of the revolutionaries who accepted our principles of freedom and equality. Many believed we had not thought through these cherished ideals. Can equality really only mean equal opportunity for unequal talents to acquire private property?” The Closing of the American Mind, p. 161.

The problem with accepting the modern version of equality is that it directly contradicts classical principles of both liberty and property. Indeed, to accept the modern version of equality, one must throw out Locke’s theory of property, which the Founders clearly thought to be a vital natural right. No true originalist can do this. Bloom notes that the “modern” notion of equality has old roots too. It was evident in Rousseau’s critique of Locke, and goes back even further to Ancient Greece: “Can private property and equality sit so easily together when even Plato required communism among equals?” Id.

To answer Bloom, in a word, yes. Classical liberalism (in its present form called libertarianism) posits a perfectly consistent set of rights of liberty, equality, and property, that are in line with our Founding. Modern liberalism sets equality and liberty up against one another and wants to practically throw out property entirely. Thus, this form of liberalism is no more consistent with our original principles as is Bork’s originalism.

Libertarian Bookworm: This week, check out one of my favorites, The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow. This book falls into the category of Not A Libertarian Book, But A Book Libertarians Will Enjoy.

The Two Cultures originated as lectures which Snow delivered in 1959. His theme is that the academic world can be roughly divided into the Literary Culture and the Scientific Culture, and that these two cultures, by failing to interact with each other as they should, are paralyzing intellectual progress. The book probably would not have gained as much notice as it did were it not for the increased concern for America’s scientific progress brought on by Sputnik, and were it not that F.R. Leavis, a Cambridge literary scholar, responded to Snow’s work with a vituperative essay of his own, and a controversy erupted. That controversy—the “Two Cultures debate” or the “Snow-Leavis controversy”—continues to this day, as these books reveal.

The Literary Culture, argues Snow, has never really come to grips with the Industrial Revolution. Instead, it has embraced an extremely romanticized image of the days before industrialization (which I take to be synonymous with capitalism). The Literary Culture is populated by what Virginia Postrel has since called “stasists”: people who prize social stratification, and oppose the disruptive, disquieting influence that science has on society. The Scientific Culture, on the other hand, seeing how it is rejected by the Literary types, tends to isolate itself from the humanities, and reject their importance as scholarly endeavors. Whether they’re right or wrong to do so, the effect is that the Scientific Culture fails to reach a large audience, and that leaves the people to being swayed by the Literary Culture’s romanticism. That can be very dangerous, as we’re seeing with the dispute over somatic cell nuclear transfer. Defenders of science are having a hard time explaining to people the importance of their studies; instead, people are falling for the mysticism preached by Leon Kass and others, and the consequence is bans on scientific study.

Members of the Literary Culture “like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture,’ as though the natural order did not exist…. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work in the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.”

The Two Cultures is short and extraordinarily readable. Snow quite pleasantly dispatches the pretenses of communitarianism, Luddism, or those comfortable residents of industrialized nations who would tell the people of the Third World how to run their lives. I particularly enjoy his attacks on the romantic communitarianism of folks like T.S. Eliot, who “have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition,” and have a bizarre fondness even for the most horrifying of human experiences. When I was in college, my political theory professor taught us that Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis was an evil book because Bacon was teaching a doctrine destructive to society—namely, (in my teacher’s words) that science could “eliminate the signposts by which humans have always lived their lives.” Of course, the fact that those “signposts” are things like smallpox and childbed fever should suggest to us the real cruelty of such romanticized nonsense. Yet folks like Leon Kass—who has actually argued that scientific dissection is demeaning—who has even argued that eating ice-cream is an evil of modernity—spout that nonsense as if it were the profoundest wisdom. Ever year the Literary Culture produces more and more Frankenstein stories, blaming technology for eradicating the beauties of the Old Social Order. Snow strikingly illustrates this in a reference to a passage from D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence is describing a passage in Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast, in which the captain flogs a sailor for disobeying orders; Lawrence writes that “it is good for Sam to be flogged,” because now “there is a new equilibrium,” in which the sailor remembers his place. The social strata are restored. “This reflection,” Snow concludes, “is the exact opposite of that which would occur to anyone who had never held or expected to hold the right end of the whip…. He is not romantic at all about the beauties of the master-and-man relation: that illusion is open only to those who have climbed one step up and are hanging by their fingernails.”

This romanticism about the glories of primitivism and social stratification has some horrifying consequences. Glorifying the brutal aspects of human life (or praising death) as somehow Fundamentally Important has already led us into banning modernizing technologies and preaching to other countries against the capital investment necessary to raise their standard of living. Snow doesn’t fall for it. Industrialization is the only hope of the poor,” he writes.

It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialization—do a modern Walden, if you like; and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what they choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.

Luddite conservatism—but I repeat myself—is rooted in deeply inhumane values, and it is the source of a great many of the restrictions on freedom of inquiry and experiment that libertarians embrace. The conservatives claim we embrace these things out of immorality, but of course this is nonsense. The reason we embrace the free market and free experimentation is because it is only in this way that we can alleviate the suffering and the strain of human life; we seek the “relief of man’s estate,” in Bacon’s words. And the moral vision of those who see such a thing as evil ought to be deeply suspect, in my view. It’s certainly not the vision of the person on the wrong end of that whip. As Snow concludes,

I have restricted myself to primal things. It seems to me better that people should live rather than die: that they shouldn’t be hungry: that they shouldn’t have to watch their children die. Here, if anywhere, we are members of one another. If we are not members of one another, if we have no sympathy at this elemental level, then we have no human concern at all, and any pretence of a higher kind of sympathy is a mockery. Fortunately, most of us are not so affectless as that.

The Two Cultures was reprinted not long ago with an excellent foreword by Stefan Collini, by Canto Press. For more on the Two Cultures controversy, check out the works of Jacob Bronowski.

Previous Libertarian Bookworm entries are here.

Varieties of originalism: Mr. Rowe is right about the split between the two groups calling themselves originalists. Scott Gerber, who has written some excellent things in defense of using the Declaration of Independence to understand the Constitution, describes these groups as “liberal originalists” and “conservative originalists.” I like these terms because the liberal originalism which Prof. Barnett (and I) embraces is, of course, rooted in “classical liberalism.” It emphasizes individual freedom as the foundation of American constitutionalism. Conservative originalism, by contrast, emphasizes the “rights” of society. (And hence the fondness of conservative originalists for the so-called “classical republicanism” school of historiography.) That this is conservative can’t be denied, but that it is originalism—that sure can be!

Barnett, Bork, and Originalism: First, I want to thank Tim for the kind introduction and for giving me the opportunity to have the ear (or eyes) of this very distinguished "audience." But onward to business...

I recently visited my alma matter, Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, to see Randy Barnett present a lecture to Temple’s Federalist society. Basically Barnett gave an overview of his new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution. The lecture was excellent. I ordered the book and am waiting for it to come by mail—can’t wait to read it.

Barnett is an important figure because he represents what I think to be “true” constitutional originalism—not the Robert Bork kind. And someone—a heavyweight like Barnett—needs to take concept of “originalism” back from the Borks of the world.

Barnett drafted a brief on behalf of the Institute for Justice for the winning side in the Lawrence v. Texas case. That alone is information enough to help us appreciate the difference between Barnett’s and Bork’s originalism.

Barnett’s originalism, as opposed to Bork’s, is far more in line with the ideals—that is, the original principles—that this nation was founded on. As Tim and others have reminded us at great length, this nation was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In other words, on “natural right.” Yet, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork explicitly rejects the Declaration and in fact reacts to it as Dracula does to a cross. An originalist rejecting the original principles of natural right that this nation was founded on. Huh? Some originalist.

Bork is actually part of a school of “originalists” who believe in using the formalism of the Constitution not necessarily to secure the Declaration’s natural rights, but often to subvert them. As Thomas West describes this ideology, this form of “constitutionalism requires fidelity to the Constitution, to the institutions and mores created by the Constitution, and a willingness to turn away from the principles of the Declaration, so that they can be kept in check.”

These “originalists” reject that the “natural law” encapsulated in the Declaration is part and parcel of the “organic law” of this nation and that federal courts may properly apply or invoke it.

Did our Founders reject natural rights?

Guest blogger: This week’s guest blogger is Jonathan Rowe, a lawyer and teacher in Pennsylvania. Mr. Rowe holds degrees in music, plus an MBA, a JD, and an LLM all from Temple University. He teaches business law and education law at Mercer County Community College, Bucks County Community College, and Philadelphia University. I have no idea how he manages that commute and still shows such patience in the comments sections of the Claremont Institute’s blog. Please welcome Jonathan Rowe.

The purposes of science fiction: I really liked this Samizdata post about the purposes of science fiction. I think the libertarian science fiction fans do enjoy SF because they reject “the intellectual stasis of the mind that modern political structures are trying to impose on civil society. It is nothing less than a willingness to think in other terms, based upon other axioms.” No person who enjoys the stories of John Varley as I do can possibly fall for the idea that gay marriage is going to bring about the End of the World. Or, to put it more accurately, no such person is going to think that the End of the World as we have known it is necessarily a bad thing. In our caveman days, we drew the hunt on the wall so that we could put ourselves in the mindset before the event happened. Today, we draw the future in science fiction stories, and those of us who have seen futures such as Varley predicts, with interchangeable sexes, weird (by today’s standards) family structures, and so on, tend not to imagine that the future is fragile, because we have put ourselves temporarily in a possible alternative. We don’t think the future is something given and fixed, but as something open to discovery and experiment. So we tend to be freer people both in our selves and in our political views.

Mvoies: Glad to see they mentioned Ghostbusters, which I think is the greatest movie of the 80s. The lesson of Ghostbusters is: entrepreneurial capitalism will overcome the Apocalypse itself.

“Recrudescence of the general warrant”: The Indiana Court of Appeals has held that officers stopping people for seat-belt violations may not search the cars even with the permission of the driver (!) unless they see evidence of other crimes in plain view. Refreshing after Atwater and McKay.

Fame!: Thanks to Prof. Marston for the link.

Diploma mills: The deputy director of the DMV bought his degree fair and square.

Don’t forget your hat: Or your trade restrictions!

Blues blogging: Just in case you don’t have it yet, you really must get the Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King CD titled In Session. It’s probably my favorite blues album. If it can’t sing away the pain, nothing can.

P.S.: Nothing can.

The New Holocaust Deniers: The April Reason arrived yesterday, and I just finished reading Glenn Garvin’s review of the new book In Denial. The book is about how so many well-respected historians are ignoring or even lying about Soviet atrocities, and continuing to spread the contemptible lie that McCarthy was a worse threat to America than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It’s a really excellent article—one of the best things I’ve read in Reason in a long time—and you should keep an eye out for it. (Incidentally, I discuss the same subject at length in my review of Bruce Herschensohn’s novel Passport, which appears in the current issue of Liberty magazine, available at fine bookstores everywhere.) I’ll be sure to link to Garvin’s article when it’s posted on Reason’s website. Here is a taste:

When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin’s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?” Conquest suggested…. In Denial…details the intellectual sleight of hand to which many American historians of communism and the Soviet Union have resorted as newly revealed archives in Moscow and Washington suggest that they were, well, fucking fools…. Miami University’s Robert W. Thurston, in his 1996 book Life And Terror in Stalin’s Russia, rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin’s purges took the lives of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and 1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day. Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no “mass terror…extensive fear did not exist…[and] Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder….” Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay…: “Though [Stalin’s] achievements were at the cost of exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country, still highly vulnerable, with a terrotiroal security absent in all history.”

That quote from Von Laue reminded me of the passage from Orwell’s famous essay on Politics And The English Language, wherein he writes

[S]ome comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism…cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

17200 post: I added an update to an earlier post about 17200 abuses, because I had left out an important detail. More on 17200 here.

Church and state: An unusually good point at the Claremont blog.

Make a cat go woof!: A while back I asked if people ever really did set cats on fire. I guess they do. If only Pennsylvania would adopt animal cruelty laws so it wouldn’t happen. Oh...wait....

References: When an employee applies for a job at a new place, the new place will sometimes call the folks at the employer’s former place of business to ask what sort of employee he was. Unfortunately, the answers that the former place gives might open them up to a lawsuit. So many businesses have taken to giving no other answer than to confirm that the employee did once work there. And the consequences of that can be pretty bad.

Of course, former employers have a qualified immunity for making appropriate negative comments about former employees. But as with all tort liability, the question is less about what you really can be sued for than about what you’re afraid you can be sued for.

“Anti-dumping” outrage of the week: Are you paying enough for shrimp? No, you’re not. But the government is here to help you pay more. “American shrimpers accuse Vietnam of dumping shrimp in U.S. markets at unfairly low prices...[and] say[ ] American fishermen are being pushed out of business because cheap shrimp imports are undercutting their market....” And heaven forbid they be required to compete fairly. No, they should just make it illegal for Americans to buy cheap shrimp. “‘[America] needs to face the fact that some countries will do some things better, and if the Vietnamese do good shrimp, let them do it,’ [Vietnamese businessman Huu] Dinh said.” Sad, I think, when a businessman in a communist country has to lecture American businessmen on that point.

Blogging: Yay! A new blog by (get this) a libertarian economist! At last!

Sad news: IJ loses its Connecticut eminent domain case.

Cost of doing business: A few days ago I pointed out that tort litigation against businesses under California’s atrocious Unfair Competition Law (Bus. & Prof. Code §17200) was costing California’s economy severely. Well, the Manufacturing Institute of the National Association of Manufacturers released a report in December which says that “[e]xternal overhead costs from taxes, health and pension benefits, tort litigation, regulation and rising energy prices add approximately 22 percent to U.S. manufacturers’ unit labor costs (nearly $5 per hour worked) relative to their major foreign competitors. The absolute value of the excess cost burden on U.S. manufacturers (nearly $5 per hour) is almost as large as the total raw cost index for China. Taken together, external overhead costs offset a large part of the 54 percent increase in productivity wrought since 1990.” More info here.

You know, we’re often told that we ought to “buy union” even though it is more expensive and less efficient, because, out of the goodness of our hearts, we should be willing to pay these helpless union workers more. Well, if it’s compassion we’re talking about, why don’t we have some compassion on the laborers in the Chinese laogai—and do something to decrease our labor costs here so that people aren’t buying the products of slave labor? As Charles Murray writes, we don’t have to abolish the regulations and laws that benefit American labor unions—just make them voluntary. Give businesses the option to not abide by government regulation, so long as they stamp on all their products the word “UNREGULATED.” Then American businesses could hire immigrants as cheap labor, pay them less than American workers are paid now—but more than the residents of the laogai are paid—and shift some of these jobs here. Not a panacea, but surely better than using laws and regulations to chase jobs out of the United States and into foreign slave labor camps, and then sitting around complaining about evil capitalists fleeing the country.

In history: On this day, in 1789, the United States Congress first met.

Impressive: Tom G. Palmer is the man. I mean, really. He’s the man. The Man!

Conrad: Unlearned Hand has thoughts on one of my very favorite writers, Joseph Conrad. People often tend to overlook the degree to which Conrad was influenced by his own personal experiences and by his didactic purpose. Heart of Darkness surely is full of symbolism and deep meaning, but it is also in very large part a polemic against colonialism, as Hand suggests. Oh, and I agree that Conrad is totally wasted on high school students. There ought to be a law forbidding anyone to read Lord Jim before having gone through college—and losing a love you thought was immortal.

Dickens, however, is not ruined by school. He is ruined by the fact that he totally sucks.

Required reading for law students: I just finished William Letwin’s essay “Economic Due Process in The American Constitution And The Rule of Law,” which appears in Robert L. Cunningham, ed., Liberty And The Rule of Law (Texas A&M University Press, 1979). It’s a brief, readable, and even-handed analysis of the history of economic substantive due process. I would very strongly recommend it to all law students—and if you can’t find it in your library, drop me a line and I’d be happy to send you a complimentary photocopy.

Support Girl Scouts!: Normally I don’t buy Girl Scout cookies (because if I did, I would eat them), but I think I will, now.

Fame!: Thanks to de minimis minutiae for the links.

At last!: I’m glad to say that Liberty Fund has finally published its three-volume collection of the writings of Sir Edward Coke. And at Liberty Fund’s usual unbeatable prices. I just ordered mine, and you should, too. “The common law is like a well out of which every man draweth according to his understanding. He that reacheth deepest, he seeth the amiable and the admirable secrets of the law.” (Little Lord Coke quote there.) And for the real nerds, there’s the poster.

Kass Watch: Ron Bailey proves again that he is the best Reason writer. Our side needs at the very least to appoint its own commission (under the auspices of the Franklin Society? Virginia Postrel made a list of nominees a while back....)

Autism: A very interesting article on autism (which I saw on Arts & Letters Daily ). It again evokes my suspicion that I am ever so slightly autistic myself.

No two young autists are the same. Some will manage to lead relatively ordinary, even intellectually exceptional, lives, while others may need to be institutionalized. But what such youngsters share, both men saw, is an iron-walled detachment from the physical environment and an indifference to other people.... Among the behaviors most linked to the disorder are poor...social skills, and a propensity for repetitive, frequently obsessional behavior, including hand-flapping, toe-walking, and self-injury. Autistic kids will often repeat the same words or phrases over and over, or immerse themselves in weirdly narrow interests.... [Simon Baron-Cohen] has argued that a number of great scholars—both men and women—may themselves have possessed such a highly intelligent, “extreme” brain. One of the latest book’s case studies involves an award-winning Cambridge scholar who, in a typical autistic touch, is terrified of talking on the telephone.

And since it is consistent with a theory I find attractive, it must therefore be correct.

The mystery of capital: A really good article on immigrant entrepreneurs, here.

“For a large segment of the Latino population that lived or were raised in Latin America, entrepreneurship is a way of life—a way of surviving as individuals and as families,” said Banuelos, who’s seen a strong response to MATC’s small-business classes in Spanish.

As employers, Hispanics have a modest but rapidly growing presence in the local and state economy.

In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 14,387 Latinos in Dane County, up 150 percent from the 1990 count of 5,744. As far back as 1997, the U.S. Small Business Administration reported 3,020 Latino-owned businesses in Wisconsin with $816.8 million in sales and 5,358 employees....

The Arteagas...began renting Mexican video tapes out of their home and eventually opened their first storefront, working 10-hour days at Mundo Latino and then doing the books until 11 or midnight.

“You’re enslaved to your business—it’s not easy. It takes a lot of effort and drive,” said Arteaga, who with his wife has just one full-time and two part-time workers to staff three stores.

Still, Arteaga and Graciela Rojas, who opens her bakery at 6 a.m. and closes it at 9 p.m., find fulfillment in their work. Sacramento’s Bakery is on an isolated side street, but it keeps a largely Latino clientele cycling through its door and several bakers busy in its kitchen.

Now, I have several white acquaintances who, frankly, believe that Hispanics are lazy people, who lack the fortitude for business. This article—as well as extensive personal experience—shows just how silly that notion is. Trade is a natural trait of all human beings. Where there’s a shortcoming in trade, it’s not due to inherent laziness, but some obstacles that must be overcome. As this article notes, those obstacles are frequently imposed by government. For more, see my newly published article Can You Get There from Here? How The Law Still Threaten’s King’s Dream, 22 Law & Ineq. 1 (2004).

Bootleggers, Baptists: And businesses that don’t want to compete fairly.

Guinn update: Prof. Eastman has filed his reply brief in support of his petition for cert. in the Guinn case. You can read it here. His first brief in support of his petition is here. My amicus brief supporting that petition is here. (Other amicus briefs are here and here.) And the opposition to the petition is here.

Oops: What’s worse than a bridge to nowhere?

The Canyanero F-series: I have often made the point that real conservatives—by which I mean to exclude the many libertarians who erroneously call themselves conservatives—that real conservatives actually hate capitalism because it disrupts the social stratification and stability that they prize as the ultimate political goal. In particular, capitalism has liberated women from what conservatives see as their “proper” sphere. The following (long but interesting) passage from Michael McGerr’s history of Progressivism, A Fierce Discontent (2003), makes this point wonderfully:

Like the airplane, the [automobile] promised liberation, integration, and harmony. According to some observers, cars would free the middle class and even the poor from cities…. Sometimes the automobile seemed therapeutic: car rides would preserve the elderly and soothe all ages. “Trade your doctor bills for an automobile,” urged an advertisement. But more often the car had a powerful, unsettling impact. “The motor car brought a disturbance of all values, subtle or obvious,” Frank Lloyd Wright reported, “and it brought disturbance to me….” That very unsettling, disruptive quality fostered resistance to the automobile…. “Of all the menaces of today, the worst,” thundered Woodrow Wilson, then the president of Princeton University, in 1906, “is the reckless driving of automobiles….”

For many a “countryman,” the automobile represented the arrogance of the city, as well. Rural residents resented the urban folk who drove their cars into farm country. In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, counties banned cars from country roads. Outside Sacramento, California, farmers blocked traffic by digging ditches across roads. Elsewhere, rural Americans tried to stop drivers and automobiles with broken glass, tacks, logs, chains, cables, barbed wire, horsewhips, and gunfire. Up in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a farmer shot a chauffeur in the back…. [But d]espite their initial resistance, rural Americans began to recognize the liberating possibilities of the car. There were already about 85,000 autos on farms by 1911; by 1920 there would be more than two million….

The automobile also offered liberation to another confined group, American women. Many of them wanted very much to take the wheel. “There is a wonderful difference between sitting calmly by while another is driving and actually handling a car herself,” wrote a Mrs. A. Sherman Hitchcock in 1904. “There is a feeling of power, of exhilaration, and fascination that nothing else gives in equal measure.” That “feeling of power” could have a forbidden, erotic quality. In a short story published in 1905, Lady Dorothy Beeston experiences a powerful passion for her automobile, her “Wonderful Monster”: “She wanted to feel the throb of its quickening pulses; to lay her hand on lever and handle and thrill with the sense of mastery; to claim its power as her own—and feel its sullen-yielded obedience answer her will.” Intoxicated by her speed, this married woman lets herself become attracted to her chauffeur. The car had another special appeal for American women: it promised to break down the gender segregation of modern life. Driving took women out of the home and let them move around, safely and respectably, in public….

All this was troubling for many Americans. Some women condemned female drivers as “mannish.” Men, particularly middle-class men, were even more bothered. As one man put it, “[T]he automobile has given women too much confidence.” Another man insisted that “auto riding has a sad effect on motherhood.” Many males wanted the car for themselves’ they wanted to make it an instrument of masculinity—the means for a man to speed, smoke, and swear by himself or to impress a lady with his prowess as a driver and mechanic.

Not surprisingly, then, men tried to keep women out of the driver’s seat. The female race driver Joan Newton Cuneo was banned from racing in 1909 after defeating a well-known male driver, Ralph DePalma. The year before, Cincinnati, Ohio, had considered outlawing women drivers. “The only proper machine for a woman to run is a sewing machine,” declared the mayor. But the city, confronted with the opposition of auto manufacturers, never imposed the ban. Men would have to use personal and cultural pressure to deny women the liberation of driving. There were already sneering remarks about “women drivers,” who were supposedly “unfitted mentally and physically to operate motor cars safely under varying conditions of traffic.” Naturally, the story of the “Wonderful Monster” had to have a suitably instructive ending. Lady Dorothy goes on a fateful drive with her chauffeur one Christmas night: he is killed; she is thrown safely but ignominiously into the cold dampness of a snowbank. Forgiven by her husband, she learns her lesson about “the madness of a passion untamed, the infidelity of her secret pleasure….”

Nevertheless, the logic of capitalism would make the car increasingly available to women. Eager to sell automobiles, manufactueres wanted female buyers and drivers…. Appealing to the woman who “reaches for an ever wider sphere of action,” a Ford ad celebrated the automobile’s revolutionary impact: “It has broadened her horizon—increased her pleasures—given new vigor to her body—made neighbors of faraway friends—and multiplied tremendously her range of activity. It is a real weapon in the changing order.” This was all, the ad declared, a “happy change.”

Id. at 228-232.

More eminent domain abuse in China: 300,000 people’s homes condemned and torn down to make way for the Beijing Olympic games. Sure glad that would never happen in, oh, say, Atlanta…. (More here.)

17200: Well, here’s your 17200 abuse of the day:

Appellant Tall Club of Silicon Valley initiated this litigation against a dozen domestic air carriers in February 2000. As currently pled, appellant alleges unlawful and unfair business practices in the airlines’ failure to provide seats with extra legroom to tall people. (Bus. & Prof.Code, § 17200; Civ.Code, §§ 51, 54.1, 2102, 2103.) Appellant seeks an injunction ordering the airlines to provide preferential seating accommodations to any individual “who self-identifies to a carrier as being either six feet two inches tall or having a buttock to knee measurement greater than 95% of the U.S. population.”

Tall Club of Silicon Valley v. Alaska Airlines, 2004 WL 363529, *1 (Cal. App. 1 Dist. 2004).

Dismissed, I’m glad to say. More 17200 stuff here and here and here.

Gay marriage: Another outstanding post from Prof. Volokh, and I agree almost entirely. The only “almost,” really, is that I think the analogy to Loving is a little bit stronger than he gives it credit for. To me, Loving stands for the proposition that restrictions on marriage must be justified by something other than mere tradition—that is to say, any such restrictions must be consonant to the fact that a marriage belongs to the parties involved, and not to “society as a whole.” And that, to me, makes Loving very instructive. Obviously the distinction between the races isn’t the same as that between the sexes, and there may very well be good, rational reasons for prohibiting gay marriage. The sad thing is, though, that Prof. Volokh, who defends gay marriage, has done a far better job of giving us rational arguments against it than have the conservatives who actually oppose it!

Humbling: A touching post from Virginia Postrel on αγαπε in San Francisco. These are the people whose marriages are said to be “a redundancy…an exercise in narcissism…laziness or cynicism.”

The Passion: A long and thorough critique of The Passion from annika.

(Giggling): Sorry, but this is hilarious.

Homo-eroticism: I said below that conservatives believe that homosexuals are incapable of αγαπε, but think that they can experience only ερος. Here’s more proof of it. “A husband and wife are not just roommates. They are a microcosm of what society can be.” But homosexuals, you see, aren’t like that. Homosexuals are just two men, so they can’t possibly mesh psychologically or spiritually. “[H]omosexual marriage…is a redundancy…an exercise in narcissism…laziness or cynicism.” They can’t have a spiritual bond—only sex. Cause, well, you know, they’re homos!

Ponzi writes “These are harsh words. I know that. In ordinary times one would not dream of uttering them in a public way…. The hand of decent Americans [as opposed to homosexuals] is forced and we must come to the debate with an equally strident approach.” But it’s not a question of decency, Ms. Ponzi. It’s a question of what evidence you have that homosexuals are incapable of experiencing αγαπε. Further, it’s a question of how any of that connects to what you call “the reciprocal benefit to society” from marriages. If marriage is about αγαπε, as I say it is, then you would need to prove that that is beyond the reach of homosexuals because of some defect of theirs, in order to prove that they ought not be allowed to marry. If marriage is about “benefits to society,” then you would need to explain why heterosexuals whose marriages do not confer these benefits are today allowed to marry—infertile couples, for instance, or the elderly—while homosexuals are not.

The left has long asserted that the conservatives simply have a deep-seated hatred of gays. I have resisted this conclusion because I know so many conservatives who are really genuinely good people, and don’t seem to be the sort who would embrace senseless, baseless, crude prejudices. And yet, when I see an article like this…it’s hard to resist that conclusion.

Problems at TOC: An interesting item critiquing The Objectivist Center. I don’t know if all of these criticisms are justified, but they do echo some of my own concerns about the place. It really seems to need, at the very least, more vigorous leadership and sense of direction.

Mormon Inquiry: Thanks to Dave’s Mormon Inquiry Weblog for the link—that’s a really great blog you should all check out. (For instance, this post on consciousness. Those interested really must read Daniel Dennett’s great book Consciousness Explained.) As far as Locke v. Davey is concerned, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that it “establish[es] something like a ‘permissible de minimus infringement’ exception.” Although I think that there probably ought to be such an exception in both free exercise and establishment clause jurisprudence (heresy, yes, I know), Locke simply means that most members of the court do not think that a failure-to-fund is the same as an attempt-to-curtail. That’s consistent with a lot of recent decisions: the government can pretty much fund what it wants to, except when it creates a public forum.

Incidentally, I’ve been asked what differentiates Locke from Witters v. Dept. of Servs. for Blind, 474 U.S. 481 (1986). The answer is that Locke is a Free Exercise case, while Witters was an Establishment Clause case. Witters says the government can fund theological education; Locke says it does not have to. The reason I think Locke is probably wrong is because I find Scalia’s comment about the baseline correct—in the Regulatory Welfare State, the amount of government aid given out creates a baseline from which deviations must be realistically understood as possible Free Exercise violations. Suppose that a city’s fire department says that it will put out fires everywhere except at the town’s church. Now, the Locke Court would approach that issue this way: is the fire department’s decision based on hostility to that particular religion, as in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993)? No, because in Lukumi, the state was punishing exercise, and here it’s just refusing to aid—it “imposes neither criminal nor civil sanctions on any type of religious service or rite. It does not deny to ministers the right to participate in the political affairs of the community. And it does not require students to choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit. The city has merely chosen not to put out a distinct category of fires.” Does that make sense? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, Dr. West makes a good point that the baseline argument “is the kind of reasoning that leads liberals to argue that government violates our constitutional rights when it refuses to give us money to exercise those rights.”

Claremont for FDR: I was going to attack this post on the gay marriage issue by Dr. Masugi, but…why bother? Once they start invoking FDR and urging similar tactics—as I’ve said before—they’re just confessing that they have no real argument, and just have to bully the court into submission. That’s proof that we’ve won, and that the rational explanation which Tom Krannawitter promised us long ago (and never delivered) simply doesn’t exist.

Incidentaly, the prejudice that the conservative argument embodies is revealed subtly by Masugi’s reference to “erotic love.” The conservatives believe that gays are simply incapable of φιλια and certainly incapable of αγαπε. No, gay people can only experience ερος. What proof have conservatives of this, besides their bald and lamentable prejudice? None, at least, has been suggested.

A plug: I just thought I would give a plug to Rational Review News Digest, on which I regularly rely for lesser-noticed news tidbits interesting to libertarians. Go on over and subscribe.

Good news: About eminent domain in Colorado.

To —
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdain’d
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother;
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love:
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Junk and junk: Ed Brayton shares my love for genetics, and has a dandy comment on Junk DNA and creationism here—which reminds me of my favorite question for “intelligent design”ers—why do men have nipples?

The attack on judicial review: For a long time now, conservatives have been attacking the concept of judicial review. This is because—as I’ve pointed out before—they believe that they have the right to govern others, and they don’t like it when a court stands in the way and says “no, these people have a right to be free from regulation in such-and-such a case.” Lincoln once said “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.... Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty....” Conservatives adopt the wolf’s definition. Of course, back in the 1930s, when the liberals were in the same position as the conservatives are now, it was they who denounced judicial review, and argued that the legislature should have carte blanche.

Judicial review will always be a target against which the majority will levy its attacks. Why? Hamilton tells us that “ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves” can cause “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.” Thus the “courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” It is the job of judges to stop the majority when it wants to harm the minority—not an easy job, Hamilton notes: “it would require an uncommon portion of fortitude in the judges to do their duty as faithful guardians of the Constitution, where legislative invasions of it had been instigated by the major voice of the community.”

That’s why you ought to feel chills down your spine when you seen an argument like this. Larry Kramer writes that “supporters of judicial supremacy [a term he uses interchangeably with judicial review] are today’s aristocrats.” Well, if by that he means that those of us who believe in judicial review think that the majority is not always right, then I plead guilty. The will of the majority is a deeply dangerous thing. As Madison wrote,

there is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore more needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “Ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in the popular sense, as referring to immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false. In the latter sense it would be the interest of the majority in every community to despoil & enslave the minority of individuals; and in a federal community to make a similar sacrifice of the minority of the component States. In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right.

Letter to James Monroe (Oct 5, 1786) in The Complete Madison 45 (Saul Padover ed., 1953). Judicial review, in Madison’s eyes, was not antagonistic to proper majority rule. Prof. Kramer believes it is, however, because he fails to acknowledge that the interest of the majority must be qualified with every necessary moral ingredient. He writes “we must first lay claim to the Constitution ourselves. That means publicly repudiating justices who say that they, not we, possess the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution.” But judicial review is not incompatible with that, and no judicial decision to my memory has ever held that the people lack this authority. Judicial review means that we, the people, have vested the judicial officers with our power to interpret the Constitution, because they are, presumably, experts in that field. We are, by principle of representation, engaged in interpreting the Constitution. And where has the Court ever said we cannot reverse their decision by amendment? We do not have absolute power to amend the Constitution—again, that power, too, must be qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, so that we have no legitimate authority to, for instance, repeal the 13th Amendment—but the Court has never said this. Not even in City of Boerne.

“In reclaiming the Constitution we reclaim the Constitution’s legacy as, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, ‘a layman’s instrument of government’ and not ‘a lawyer’s contract.’” But contracts are written by lawyers for people, to protect their rights. The precise and (to laymen) often confusing language of contracts is—like scientific notation—a tool lawyers use to protect their clients. It’s great populist rhetoric to denounce lawyers for making things tough to understand, but that does not establish that the people ought to ignore the complexities of the Constitution. You would not say of stereo instructions, or a car owner’s manual, that these things were made for laymen, and therefore laymen should go in and mess with their stereos or cars even if they are ignorant of everything about electronics and auto repair. Yes, it is your Constitution. But it is a delicate, complicated, deeply thought-out machine of government that must not be tampered with carelessly. That is why we have lawyers.

“Above all,” concludes Kramer, “it means insisting that the Supreme Court is our servant and not our master: a servant whose seriousness and knowledge deserves much deference but who is ultimately supposed to yield to our judgments about what the Constitution means and not the reverse.” Again, this is great populist rhetoric, but we have much, much more to fear from the legislature’s insistence that it is our master. Unlike our legislatures, the judiciary does not lay claim to a boundless, undefined field of power—especially not the federal judiciary. As Hamilton writes, “The judiciary...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever.... [I]t can never attack with success either of the other two [branches of government]; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks.” The Supreme Court is frequently ignored—the Congress ignored Lopez, and the Beck decision, for instance. Simply put, the Court is not the spook that Kramer and others want us to think. The legislature, on the other hand, claims that it has undefined power to control everything which is not specifically forbidden to it. It claims a presumption of constitutionality for its acts. It claims the power to redistribute property from one person to another, and it routinely ignores—or is made up of people absolutely ignorant of—the constitutions.

What are we to think of a man who tries to scare us with ghost stories of the nasty, mean old judiciary, in order to draw our attention away from the near absolutism claimed by the legislature—and who appears to put no boundaries whatsoever on the power of the majority? As H.L. Mencken said, “the whole business of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Demagogues get a great deal of mileage out of spooking folks with tales of “unelected judges” “legislating from the bench,” and so on and so forth. In reality, they are asking for the freedom to govern without having to answer to any higher authority.

The majority is not superior to law. It is subordinate to every necessary moral qualification. That’s why the Constitution can rightfully put limits on the people’s ability to govern. And that’s why the people create a judiciary. Like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, the people create a judiciary and then say to it, “We know that we are liable sometimes to be misled by demagogues like Larry Kramer. So now, while we are sober, we give you this charge: protect us from our own legislature.” Then, years later, intoxicated by their hatred for homosexuals, their wish to sterilize the mentally retarded, or merely their eagerness to live at the expense of their neighbors, or any other improper and wicked project, they grow infuriated when the judiciary steps in and performs its office.

Hence Prof. Kramer’s (and Dr. Masugi’s) invocation of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt knew that his programs were unconstitutional—blatantly so—so he simply tried to overawe the Court with his Court-packing scheme. His forthright assault on the Court, in the name of populism—what the people want they should get, and who cares about the Constitution?—was lawless. A majority can be lawless. The recognition of that fact was what led our founders to create judicial review. And if we abandon judicial review, then the will of the majority will be our law—fickle and senseless and oppressive as that can be.

ACS Watch: I stopped watching the ACS blog a while back because it is so very bad. I checked in today, and no, it isn’t any better. But this post was amusing. “As Senator Clinton said at the ACS Convention, ‘my only regret was using the word conspiracy, because there’s absolutely nothing secret about it.’” Um, and what do we call a conspiracy that isn’t secret? We call it a movement.

Speaking of my former schools: This is hilarious.

R.I.P. Daniel Boorstin: I was sorry to learn of the death of former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. I have a funny Boorstin story, actually.

When I was at Hillsdale College, I was the opinion page editor of The Collegian, the school newspaper. I had agreed to do the job only when Dan Bielefeld, the editor, told me that the Dean of Women, Carol Ann Barker, had promised him that she would not censor the paper. “I do not censor The Collegian,” she told him, and then repeated, “I do not censor The Collegian.” Of course the truth was otherwise. A couple months later, a student who lived in my dormitory got drunk or high or something and started running through the dorm screaming and throwing chairs and bashing his head against the shower wall—real trouble. The police came, and had to pepper-spray him before dragging him off in handcuffs. I wrote up a news story about it, and the paper was going to print it—but then Barker announced that this would not be allowed in The Collegian.

I was infuriated, and I immediately resigned, publishing an angry letter about censorship in the paper (including a reference to the facts concerned, which Bielefeld replaced with [CENSORED] before publishing), and sending copies to the major figures in the administration. This accomplished nothing, of course.

Shortly afterward, Daniel Boorstin came to the campus to participate in one of the seminars that the school puts on four times every year. His talk was about the importance of artistic expression. When he was done, nobody raised a hand to ask a question. In a panic, the late Lissa Roche, who organized the seminars, ran up to me with the microphone. “Tim, you always have questions,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a question.” I took the microphone. “Dr. Boorstin,” I said, “what do you think about censorship? Just recently, a university in Utah removed Rodin’s The Kiss from its exhibit because it was giving students ‘impure thoughts.’ Do you think it’s the role of a college to censor the things students see or read?”

He grew a bit riled. “Of course not,” he said. He then gave a two-minute talk about the evils of censorship that was so well put, it sounded rehearsed.

When he was done, Lissa Roche snatched the microphone from my hand. “But Dr. Boorstin,” she said, “wouldn’t you say it’s a college’s job to ensure that students only see the true things, and don’t get misled by other things they might read?”

He looked straight at her, genuinely shocked, and just said, “No!”

The Hillsdale Libertarians still owe me dinner for that one.

Oh, and you’ll notice that the Collegian website says “Michigan’s oldest college newspaper,” not “Michigan’s oldest student newspaper.” Bielefeld made that change after the censorship made it clear that it is not a student newspaper. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but in that place, that’s major rebellion

Bloggery byes: Thanks to Dr. Dunn for holding the fort during my absence.

The side with the most cannons: This is supposed to be a serious political question? Has our political discourse really fallen to that level?

Charlize: I can’t believe that my girlfriend, Charlize Theron, did not thank me during her acceptance speech. After all the support I’ve given her all these years? We’re going to have a long talk when she gets home tonight….

Quantum Leap: Okay, I’ve got it—my theory of the final episode of Quantum Leap.

Thermodynamics teaches us that things proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder. The uninformed tend to think this precludes the possibility of evolution, but in fact, it does not, because it allows for an increase in order in one place so long as there is a corresponding decrease in order elsewhere. For instance, you can cool down the inside of a refrigerator, but only because the heat coils in the back give off a greater amount of heat.

Now, suppose time is the same way. If you’re going to go leaping a guy around “putting things right that once went wrong,” you’re going to create a lot of paradoxes. For instance, in the last episode, Sam visits Al’s wife and tells her that Al is really alive, and she shouldn’t give up on him. Evidently this means that she doesn’t remarry, and that would mean that Al and his wife stay together, presumably up to the 1990s, when the Quantum Leap program gets underway. This would be a major paradox, however, since it would mean a major change in Al’s character. He wouldn’t become the immature, womanizing sort that we know from the rest of the show. And of course, there are many other paradoxes. In one early episode, Sam causes the chairman of a Senate committee to change into another person, for instance, because he helps her with her bar exam thirty years in the past.

But we know that paradoxes are bad, because they cause havoc in the space-time continuum, or whatever. So if you’re God, and you’re responsible for making Sam leap around in time, you’re going to have to create an entropy-sink; a sort of refrigerator coil that will let off all the paradoxes. What if that is what the bar in the last episode of Quantum Leap is? It’s the Paradox Sink. That would explain why the characters from all the earlier episodes are in there, and the weird, incomprehensible coincidences of names and so forth. Sam can never return because as he goes around changing the future that produced him, his own existence becomes increasingly unlikely; he fades away into percentages of potentiality, until he is finally nothing at all, which would mean that he would have to end up in the Paradox Sink himself.

Incidentally, if you’re also a Quantum Leap fan, you’ll be happy to know that the DVDs are coming this summer, at last. (Thanks to Jason for the pointer.)

Back from Oz: As with practically every conservative who has ever taken on Darwin, Dr. Dunn’s comments are long on eloquent sound, and very, very, very short on substance. He says “it's surprisingly easy to punch holes in Darwin and Dawkins, once you burrow in a little.” Yet he has not demonstrated this or even come close to it, since the one, singularly unfortunate, example he provided, I totally demolished, and he has not replied to it. Instead he asserts with the usual conservative smugness (well, a conservative wouldn’t say smug. He would say “hubris” or “vangloriousness” or something) that Darwin’s wrong, and then moves on. What are these “several” shortcomings? No answer.

As for Dawkins, it is singularly odd that he could be simultaneously accused of believing that man is inescapably in the grip of his genes—and of popularizing memetics, which is an attempt to rationally explain why we are so obviously not trapped by our genes. These straw man arguments are clearly the products of—and can be adopted only by—those who have not even really attempted to understand what Dawkins is all about. Have you read The Selfish Gene, Dr. Dunn?

Dawkins' Pelagian Blow-Out. Indeed, Dawkins does not contend we're strictly slaves to our genes. Rather ingeniously, he found an escape hatch. Hallelujah! Back to David Stove: "In this inevitable and tiresomely familiar way, Dawkins contradicts his puppetry theory... he knows as well as the rest of us do, that there are often other causes at work, in us or around us, which are perfectly capable of counteracting genetic influences. In fact, he sometimes says so himself, and he even says that 'we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth.' As you see, he is just like those writers of serial stories in boys' magazines, who used to say, in order to extricate their hero from some impossible situation, 'With one bound, Jack was free!' Well, it just goes to show that even the most rigid theologian of the Calvinist-Augustinian school has got to have a Pelagian blow-out occasionally, and deviate towards commonsense for a while."

Debating Dawkins and Darwin. If Sandefur accuses me of a holy alliance with William Jennings Bryan, he misses my humble intention. I merely point out it's surprisingly easy to punch holes in Darwin and Dawkins, once you burrow in a little. I rate the smugness of the average Evolutionist on a par with that of the brimstone Creationists. Though the educated classes in America take their Darwin for granted and chortle at the school board yahoos in Kansas—our elites harbor scant awareness of Darwin's shortcomings. Which are several.

The Future of Name-Calling in Politics. In times past, when a Leftist ended up on the ropes in a dispute and needed a quick way out, salvation was often found in recourse to one of the Left's standby showstoppers—to wit, the labelling of the opponent as a racist, sexist, homophobe, or McCarthyite. Or some combination thereof.

Once launched, the insults were sure to send the victim running for cover, deflated, leaving the Leftist behind to declare victory.

And so it went, for about three decades.

But the era of such name-calling could be coming to an end. Thanks to endemic overuse, overextension and misapplication, the aforementioned perjoratives no longer contain the same old sting. The arrows no longer bear so much poison. And the former victims are exhibiting an alarming tendency to stand their ground.

Once the Left begins to grasp this dynamic, it will be faced with a real dilemma. How to argue without calling people names? How to debate without the trusty old standbys?

A period of soul-searching will ensue. The Left could respond by resorting to rational argument—but that would entail distinct risks, such as the risk of losing. Or, it could respond by devising newer and fresher terms of abuse. But there may not be enough good ones to go around, and the mediocrities may fail to acheive the desired effects.

At such a point, the impulse towards censorship may finally become irresistable. And what then? How strong is the First Amendment in America?

More on Flamingo Industries. After reading Sandefur's expert blogging on the disappointing Flamingo decision, I've resolved to take all of them out of my front yard.

Sandefur Observeth Lent. What's this? No more French fries? Nietzsche has rotated in his grave. If God is dead, Lent must also be dead. Alas, as the sage well understood, the fumes of Christianity shall take some centuries to dissipate. But I don't think this is a real chink in our host's atheistic armor. The real motive? I suspect latent Francophobia.