El Camino Del Rey

Not a walk I’d recommend to the faint of heart.

(Link via Andrew Sullivan)

Paul Gate

The goal of Paulville.org it to establish gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and/ or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty.

Link.

I am curious — will a Paulville resident have the freedom, for instance, to question the ideals of freedom and liberty? What if a resident has a change of heart after he is admitted to Paulville and decides he no longer believes in those truths. Will he be allowed to stay on?

Of course, any community that encourages libertarianism to flourish is a good idea. I just hope they do it the right way.

Junk food are like drugs

In that the addictions produced by both are similar.

I can see the health police salivating at the prospect of using this as a reason to regulate or ban junk food (though to me, it looks like yet another argument for drug legalization).

However, as the author of the linked article says:

Because if we really do crave junk food the way addicts crave drugs, good luck prying those cheeseburgers from our hands.

I am not so sure. The capacity of some people to enforce their standards of correctness on others never ceases to amaze me.

(Link via Andrew Sullivan)

Lest we forget

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam, killed herself last week. She was due to be sentenced soon for offences related to an elite prostitution ring she ran from 1993 to 2006. In her suicide note addressed to her mother, she wrote:

I cannot live the next 6-8 years behind bars for what both you and I have come to regard as this ‘modern day lynching,’ only to come out of prison in my late 50’s a broken, penniless, and very much alone woman.

At the top of the suicide note were the instructions:

Do not revive. Do not feed under any circumstances.

In the note to her younger sister, Bobbie, Palfrey expressed her love and told her to “be strong for mom.”

“Also, you must comprehend that there was no other way out, i.e., ‘exit strategy,’ other than the one I have chosen here,” she wrote. “Know I am at peace, with complete certainty, I believe Dad is standing watch - prepared to guide me into the light.”

It is worth noting that Deborah’s impending prison time — that drove her to suicide — were for offences related to nothing less, and nothing more, than helping consenting adults engage in consensual sexual activity for money.

The past, as saved on Gmail

Rummaging through my old emails, I found this passage, from an email I wrote to someone three years and six months ago.

There are so many things that are close to you at some point of time. People who were important in your life or just friends ; and then there are surroundings and places. They become part of your everyday existence — in a way sharing your joys and sorrows, and then when you move to a different place, or circumstances change, or maybe you stop loving someone, all of these people and things diminish in importance. You get new friends, new surroundings, and though you might keep in contact with your old friends, its not the same really, is it?

I suppose it is all very natural and obvious — to be happy one needs to do precisely this — move on when necessary. It is inevitable that things change and indeed I have never really bothered about that fact. But just now, as I was reading my French textbook, one of my office-mates started playing these old Hindi songs on the computer, and you know how associations are — they made me think about India and people I have left behind, people who were so important to me at one point of time, *****, *******, ********* … ISI, Bangalore, Calcutta, home; and then for a second it struck as something unbelievably monstrous that such things too can change!

Change is such a weird thing! It is beautiful, wonderful, exciting; and it is certainly irresistible and inevitable. But five minutes ago it seemed to me, for those fleeting seconds, as something tragic, something purely and unbelievably tragic.

Kindle

There has been a fair amount of hype lately about the Kindle, the electronic reader from Amazon.com. Here’s Megan McArdle’s review of it. She calls it the best thing since sliced bread.

Predictions for today

With all pollsters out with their own versions of what is going to happen in Indiana and North Carolina today, here’s my prediction:

Obama will win North Carolina by 12, Clinton will win Indiana by 7.

We will know the actual results in about ten hours.

Update: With about 99% of the votes counted, Obama is winning in North Carolina by 14, and Clinton is clinging on to a 2 point victory in Indiana. Yeah, I was a bit off. But I am not complaining!

Seal attempts to rape penguin

From the Telegraph report:

Dr de Bruyn and a colleague witnessed the seal, a young adult male in good physical condition and weighing around 100kg (220lb), subdue the 15kg (33lb) penguin by lying on it.

The penguin, of unknown sex, attempted to escape by flapping and trying to stand, but was unable to as the marine predator thrusted its pelvis in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to achieve congress. After giving up the seal wandered off, ignoring its victim altogether.

The report does not elaborate why the seal was unable to stick it in. However I suspect that this passage from the Kama Sutra holds the answer.

Liberty, tyranny and the majority

Damon Root has an excellent article at Reason where he discusses liberty and federalism in the context of a draconian South Dakota law that, if the voters decide so, would ban virtually all kinds of abortions.

Look at it like this. The United States Constitution guarantees a number of specific individual rights, including free speech and the right to keep and bear arms. But what about those rights that aren’t listed? Do we have the right to drink apple juice? How about the right to grow a mustache? More crucially, what about the right to be left alone? The Constitution mentions none of them. So if a majority of voters agree that we don’t possess these (or countless other) rights, what’s to stop the government from restricting our liberty?

–

Which brings us back to the voters of South Dakota. There’s nothing inherently noble about a majority of people agreeing on a particular issue. Indeed, bad ideas often prove more popular than good ones. It’s only when popular majorities are anchored to the idea of inalienable rights that they’re most entitled to our respect. Without that underlying commitment to individualism, majority rule can and frequently will degenerate into the loss of liberty for unpopular minorities. The racist policies of the Jim Crow South, after all, were often extremely popular among white voters.

So before we get too misty over the will of the people of South Dakota, let’s remember that James Madison warned us about the tyranny of the majority, not the tyranny of unfettered individual liberty.

Read the whole article.

Not disclosing affair + sex with girlfriend = rape?

It’s the classic pitfall. The law tries to prevent a reprehensible act of fraud (in this case, obtaining sex from one’s brother near-sleeping girlfriend by impersonating the brother). However it does so by passing a law whose language is much broader than it should. The result is yet another encroachment by the law into an area it has no business being in.

Read Eugene Volokh’s excellent discussion on a potentially chilling statute that is being pushed for passage in Massachusetts. Also the comments under Volokh’s post are interesting; below are some of my favourites.

Make-up is now to be illegal in Massachusetts, as are Wonderbras and those ass-padding panties.

Did they just outlaw the greater bulk of bar-room pick up lines?

OK, let’s take a hypothetical 25 yr old Tom and 16 year old Suzy. Suzy tells Tom she is 19, and they have sex. In both Texas and Mass, this is rape. In Texas, she’s the victim, in Mass, he is. Makes sense to me!

A hero is…

“A hero is one who knows how to make a friend out of an enemy”

-old Talmud saying.

A sign of the future?

Tesla rolls out its electric sports car.

Orange juice vs coffee

This sounds like a parody of the ’silly season’, but is real.  Abe Greenwald is actually disturbed by Obama’s preference of orange juice over coffee.

The switch from juice to coffee is a rite of adulthood. It’s not that Obama seemed to hold himself above the coffee drinkers. It’s that he seemed to lag behind them. He’s still on fruit juice while the adults are sipping bitter and bracing coffee.

(Link via Andrew Sullivan)

Keith Sampson round-up

A couple of months ago, I blogged about the Keith Sampson case. The Volokh Conspiracy has an update about the matter:

The matter seems to have been finally resolved, and resolved right (though the complaint should have been thrown out at the very beginning, rather than leading to a finding of racial harassment). Here’s the letter from the Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis Chancellor:

`I can candidly say that we regret this situation took place and that IUPUI takes this matter very seriously. IUPUI is committed to ensuring that its future approach to such matters is consistent with and affirms the long-standing commitment of this campus to the principles of freedom of expression, lifelong learning, and respect for the rights of all members of the IUPUI community. In the near future, IUPUI will be reexamining the campuswide affirmative action processes and procedures relating to internal complaints.’

Libertarianism and Objectivism

Libertarianism and objectivism have always shared a somewhat uneasy relationship. Most libertarians, while acknowledging the importance and influence of Ayn Rand’s ideas, nonetheless feel a certain degree of discomfort with the more simplistic or dogmatic aspects of her message. In the words of Nick Gillespie, former editor of Reason Magazine, Rand is “one of the most important figures in the libertarian movement” and she ”remains one of the best-selling and most widely influential figures in American thought and culture” in general and in libertarianism in particular. However he confessed that he is sometimes embarrassed by his magazine’s association with her ideas [1] .

On the other hand, Ayn Rand never cared to hide her disdain for libertarians, claiming that they used her ideas “with the teeth pulled out of them.” However, some of her ire may have been due to a misunderstanding of the term — according to Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s one time lover, she did not realize that libertarians were mostly advocates not of anarchism but of constitutionally limited government [2] . Many modern objectivists, meanwhile, continue to share Rand’s sentiments. In the words of popular blogger Gus Van Horn:

(The Libertarian) party is hardly a friend of liberty, given that their lack of a coherent philosophical approach makes them unable even to define the term… In essence, the Libertarians pretend that a concept as sophisticated and controversial as freedom is whatever anyone, no matter how mindless, wants it to be.

Elsewhere though, Van Horn describes himself as a (small-l) libertarian.

Van Horn’s dilemma is, I suspect, shared by most present-day objectivists. The heart of the matter is that libertarianism is a broad political ideology while objectivism is a closed philosophy. Objectivists value the basic tenet of individual freedom, but view it as a consequence of (in their view) more fundamental axioms. Thus, objectivism is a special kind of libertarianism, one that attempts to fit various libertarian principles as corollaries of a particular systematic philosophy.

In his very readable autobiographical essay, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan describes his shift away from objectivism.

I rejected Christianity because I determined that it was, to be blunt, idiotic. I rejected Objectivism and Austrianism, in contrast, as mixtures of deep truths and unfortunate mistakes.

…

During my undergraduate years, I spent far more time reading and thinking than writing. But two essays that appeared while I was in graduate school - “Why I Am Not an Objectivist” (by Michael Huemer), and “Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist” (by myself) - ultimately articulated the main objections I formed as an undergraduate.

Michael Huemer was a fellow Berkeley student, and the most powerful influence on my mature philosophical outlook; he is now a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado. You might say that Huemer provided a modern restatement of the Scottish philosophy of common sense, best represented by Thomas Reid, but this seriously understates the originality of Huemer’s contribution. In any case, like Reid, Huemer maintains that philosophers’ great error is to set up inherently unfulfillable standards for knowledge, and then turn to skepticism once they realize that their beliefs fall short of these standards. As Reid puts it:

[W]hen we attempt to prove, by direct argument, what is really self-evident, the reasoning will always be inconclusive; for it will either take for granted the thing to be proved, or something not more evident; and so, instead of giving strength to the conclusion, will rather tempt those to doubt of it who never did so before. (1872, p.637)

I do not think that Rand would have objected to Reid’s basic point. She maintained that there were three self-validating axioms - “Existence exists,” “Consciousness is conscious,” “A is A.” But for Reid and Huemer, the set of knowledge-not-in-need-of-proof is more expansive. In particular, it includes some moral truths. It is obvious, for example, that murder is wrong. If someone denied that it was obvious, what argument could convince him?

Rand of course thought she had an argument for the wrongness of murder (see “The Objectivist Ethics” in Rand (1964)). The more I reflected, though, the more I realized that her “man qua man” standard was question-begging. If Rand did not approve of an action that seemed plainly conducive to one’s self-interest, she declared it contrary to the life of “man qua man.” The Reid-Huemer route was to openly recognize the wrongness of murder as an independent moral fact. In the admittedly rare circumstances where murder serves one’s self-interest, it remains wrong.

Thus, the very systematic philosophy (’leading’ to freedom) that objectivists view as their strength, Caplan sees as unnecessary and dogmatic.

My position on the matter is similar to Caplan’s. If one has to deal with purely moral questions, individual freedom needs no justification more basic than itself. However, there is no uniform route, moral or otherwise, to a political ideology. Libertarianism distills the essence of Ayn Rand’s philosophy — yet, by not imposing any further axioms, it retains a breadth that objectivism lacks. Thus, libertarianism comes in many different flavors — rights libertarianism, green libertarianism, consequentalism, anarcho-capitalism — each with its own philosophical underpinnings but united by the common thread of liberty. Van Horn and others may regard this as a weakness; however, I see it as a strength.