by John Holbo on April 4, 2009
Jonah Goldberg responding to a paragraph by Will Wilkinson:
As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.
I’m not casting doubt on the statistics they cite or the sincerity of the arguments (I’ve argued with too many liberatarians and legalizers about drugs to doubt their sincerity on the issue, statistics are another matter). But something has always bothered me about the drug war is racist argument which, in fairness, Will only suggests above.
It seems so, well, unlibertarian — at least in one respect. Sure, as an argument against the unintended consequences of what they consider to be a bad policy, the disproportionate affect on blacks works just fine.
But as an argument from proud individualists it seems a bit off. It seems to me that the classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups.
[click to continue…]
by John Holbo on April 2, 2009
An excerpt from my daughter’s math homework:
Discuss. (Her answer is, after all, perfectly true.)
by John Holbo on April 2, 2009
Steve Benen complains about the filibuster. Yes, very true.
it’s hard to fix problems like this because objections to procedural stupidities are weak compared to perceptions of present partisan advantage. No one is going to fight for filibuster reform while in the minority. And fighting for filibuster reform while in the majority is always going to look partisan. How, then, do you get what ought to be a non-partisan no-brainer reform?
Would this work? Pass sensible procedural reform, but significantly post-date it? Abolish or significantly de-claw the filibuster, starting in, say, 2012? Presumably the Republicans aren’t planning on being in the minority forever. You could do the same for other procedural problems, like clogged confirmation pipes. Fixing problems several years from now is better than not fixing them ever, if that’s the only way you can do it (Then again, it may be that Republicans are planning on being in the minority forever.)
by John Holbo on March 29, 2009
Suppose Obama came out and said, roughly:
My fellow Americans, the thing about the Geithner plan is this. Experts disagree about the nature of the crisis. Either it is a liquidity problem or an insolvency problem. That means: either the market values of these so-called toxic assets are depressed because of a kind of market failure; or the market has priced these assets more or less correctly and many institutions holding these assets are, as a result, insolvent. If we are indeed in a liquidity crisis, the Geithner plan should solve it as well as any alternative plan could. If it is an insolvency crisis, however, as many experts believe, the Geithner plan will do nothing – or not nearly enough.
If the Geithner plan fails, we will confront another either/or: either nationalize these too-big-to-fail institutions, at great cost, or allow them to fail, collapsing the global financial system and, very likely, the world economy. This is no true choice, however. Hard as nationalization will be, if it comes to that, the alternative would be far, far worse.
We do not need to take this daunting step of nationalization yet because, first, we’re trying the Geithner plan. What you should know about the Geithner plan is that, if it fails, it will still have been worth trying. We will have determined that the problem is indeed insolvency. We will have clarified the path to be taken, laid to rest any reasonable skepticism about the strict need for nationalization. And we will have paid no more for this knowledge than we would have had to pay in any case. If the government effectively transfers money to distressed financial institutions, under the Geithner plan, and later those institutions have to be nationalized for a time, there is no need to ‘pay twice’. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on March 27, 2009
Brad DeLong links to Matthew Yglesias linking to Damon Linker linking to my old Dead Right post. How gratifying! I was thinking of writing it all out again, in response to Charles Murray’s rather odd AEI dinner talk. But they’ve saved me the trouble. (I would like to say, however, that I prefer the term ‘Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism’ for what Linker calls ‘Donner Party Conservatism’.)
Let me make a few somewhat fresh points about stuff in the general vicinity of the Murray speech (which was well received by conservatives. Goldberg loved it, and Douthat thought it was pretty good.)
As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.
Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following: [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on March 21, 2009
The South By Southwest music festival is underway. Wouldn’t it be fun to be there? I guess the rest of us will have to make-do with this free mix, courtesy of NPR’s All Songs Considered. “Furr”, by Blitzentrapper, is a great song. And Amazon has a different free mix
. I like “You’ll Disappear”, by The Phenomenal Hand-Clap Band.
You could also download 6 gigs of free music (perfectly legally!) via BitTorrent.
by John Holbo on March 20, 2009
When the Bush administration advocated abstinence and the like on the international stage, it was seen as an example of Bush pushing a parochial agenda. But when Western cosmopolitanism is championed on the world stage, it’s progress. What am I missing? (link)
Goldberg is missing the possibility that liberals might believe that Bush was pushing a parochial agenda while at the same time believing that their own proposals would constitute progress. In short, liberals believe Bush was heading in the wrong direction, whereas a liberal proposal would head us in a better direction. In shorter: liberals think Bush was wrong, they are right. In shortest: liberals believe their beliefs. This is what Goldberg is missing.
To put it another way, when he says “it just seems to me that there’s no real standard here,” he’s missing the possibility of classical liberalism, broadly speaking. (Given that Goldberg claims to believe in classical liberalism, his failure to consider that any standard could possibly occupy the intellectual space occupied by the standards of classical liberalism is … an impressive feat of doxastic auto-evacuation. It doesn’t occur to him to believe what he believes, apparently.)
Goldberg is missing that it is possible to believe things without necessarily wanting to impose those beliefs on others (for reasons of prudence, or principle, or a bit of both). He also misses that one can take tolerance (non-coercion) to be a virtue (in principle, and as pragmatically warranted by circumstances) without believing that, in fact, no beliefs are better, more warranted than others. Finally, he seems to be missing the possibility that one might believe that coercion is warranted in some cases, but impermissible (or imprudent) in other sorts of cases.
If Goldberg is not missing absolutely all of this, then I fail to see what other thing he could be missing, leading to his sincere puzzlement. I am at a total and complete loss. Really. I’m drawing a blank.
by John Holbo on March 14, 2009
by John Holbo on March 13, 2009
by John Holbo on March 13, 2009
It’s time to discuss chapter 5 of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality. This is the chapter in which Lewd and Prude make their walk-on appearance on the stage of the main argument. Let me start with a few afterthought about that. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on March 8, 2009
[Note to readers: We are having a caching problem which we are trying to fix. If you see this as the top post on the front page (it shouldn’t be) try https://crookedtimber.org rather than https://www.crookedtimber.org .]
I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on March 4, 2009
I held out for the new iMac and now it’s here! (Unfortunately, Belle’s cute little white Macbook just up and died. Poor thing was only 16 months old. Motherboard dead. Battery toast, too. Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)
by John Holbo on February 27, 2009
I’m back from a week on Bali, where we felt as relaxed and removed from the cares of life as a Japanese Batman. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on February 17, 2009
I have acquired a copy of R. Wilmott’s English Sacred Poetry of The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1861) for the Dalziel brothers engravings. Which I am moderately pleased with. The book itself is fantastic looking. Comically heavy-bound and smoky-dark object. Zoë (age 7) got to see the thing before I did and her reaction shows she understands me well: ‘Daddy is going to love this. It even has water damage.’
And now I would like to report that the book contains the single worst argument against atheism yet devised. I present “The Atheist and the Acorn”, by Anne, the Duchess of Winchelsea. Complete with an engraving of the young PZ Myers by H.S. Marks: [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on February 15, 2009
Link.
It needs a comment box.
