Henry’s post linking to Charlie Stross reminded me of one I was planning to do on the question – why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia? Most other utopian ideologies have inspired at least someone to attempt a practical implementation. On the face of it, libertarianism seems ideally suited to the belief in a fresh start, with no messy pre-existing claims. All sorts of ideas have been floated – island buyouts, sea-steading, co-ordinated moves to New Hampshire and so on, but none has gone anywhere. The only explanation I’ve seen, that libertarians are too independent and ornery to organise a utopia doesn’t convince me.

Thinking about the discussion we had though, it strikes me that there is a simple explanation: Actually Existing Libertarianism (see below) offers a better economic deal for nearly all libertarians than any feasible version of Galt’s Gulch. Once you do the math on going Galt, it’s not hard to see why no self-respecting libertarian would actually do it.

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From Vincent Scully’s introduction to Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: “This is not an easy book. It requires professional commitment and close visual attention, and is not for those architects who, lest they offend them, pluck out their eyes.” Two pronouns clash in too slight a clause, like two travelers crashing in too tight a doorway, who, lest they perchance have been switched by them, check whose piece of luggage is whose. Ahem. The Fascist octopus, lest it … aw, this is too hard.

What a world. You go and write a too-long post in which you raise the obviously impossible possibility that someone might argue that gay marriage is like cigarettes – i.e. you can get cancer second-hand – while apologizing for the sheer, silly disanalogousness of the analogy. And then Jonah Goldberg comes up with the brilliant idea that if you support gay marriage on libertarian grounds [as Glenn Greenwald does] … why then how can you support anti-smoking legislation? Riddle me that! [click to continue…]

Ok, now I’ve got that in your heads for the rest of the day, let me do a bit of blegging/moaning. I’m off to a conference in the Ruhrgebiet later this month and, feeling vaguely guilty about my carbon footprint, decided to go by train. It wasn’t all that easy to get a good deal online. The best way of planning a route and buying a ticket is from the “Deutsche Bahn”:http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/index.shtml website, but instead of getting a price and a ticket you have to purchase blind (having supplied your credit card details and agreed to pay!), only later getting a “er, here’s what it will cost, is that ok with you – phone us” email. DB have now mailed me a set of tickets (starting in Bristol) which I anticipate causing “interesting” conversations with the conductor between Temple Meads and Paddington. I now have to work out and pay for a route from Leuven to rural station in Normandy on a Sunday: SNCF, SNCB and DB all give me totally different accounts of which trains are running and when. So one national company might sell me a ticket for a service in another country which the domestic operator claims doens’t exist. So why, oh why ….

Why oh why isn’t there an integrated, user-friendly pan-European booking service for continental rail travel, selling tickets at prices that compete with the airlines? Until someone makes this happen, we’ll all be burning a lot more carbon than we need to.

Newt Gingrich, distinguished professor of history and reigning intellectual heavyweight of the Republican Party, explains how <a href=http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/professor-newts-distorted-history.html>crafty Muslims are trying to exploit the ignorance of liberal American elites</a>:

<blockquote>The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site — where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks — is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites.  For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term.  It refers to the <a href=http://www.tocmp.com/pix/images/1976ChryslerCordobaSportCoupe.jpg>Chrysler Cordoba</a>, a car made famous by a foreign kind of Mexican man who touted its un-American “soft Corinthian leather.” […I]n fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of soft Corinthian leather.  It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.</blockquote>

Well, at first I thought Newt had to be kidding, but then I did some historical research, and guess what?  He’s completely right!  Check out the Islamomexicanian accent and music that was used to sell “this small Chrysler” to an unsuspecting American market:

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You probably think I have a thing for boxers from the early 20th Century? I have a thing for the Library of Congress’ photo sets. Here’s another boxer, Charles “Little Apache” Ledoux:

I like the way the angle on the corner and extra high wainscoting makes it look like “Little” might indeed be only 24″ tall. He is awesome. I want Charles “Little Apache” Ledoux, ‘the two-foot terror on two feet!’ fanfic. I want serialized boys weekly tales to amaze and uplift!

Other photos of boxers in the same room. (You can click around.)

I have not seen any online obituary yet, and am about to get on a flight to Ireland (so will not be able to update this for 24 hours or so).

I just read the Walker decision. Let me pick on something Orin Kerr has written which seems to me confused, or at least problematic. I’m going to get all philosophy about ‘rational basis’, and Kerr will really just be an occasion for discussion … but first the law background. [click to continue…]

I took up guitar in my middle-age some months ago. I’m teaching myself. I think that’s working out ok. But I have a question for you lurking shredders and orthopaedic medical professionals in the CT commentariat. My fretting fingers work thusly. I can make a nice A-shape chord with my pinky, which has learned to bend back at the top joint in an accommodating sort of way. But my ring finger refuses to bend back. At all. I can’t even get it a few degree back past straight, so I can’t even cover two strings, let alone three. (That whole ‘just let the high E be deadened’ kludge doesn’t work for me. I can’t get the B. One lousy note isn’t going to cut it as an A-shape chord.) So my pinky is getting a lot more A-shape barring work than is, I think, standard for his sort of finger. Yes, some people have real problems. My question is whether there is any healthy and effective way to train my ring finger to ‘break at the joint’. Intuitively the way to do it would be like learning the splits. A bit more each day until you’ve got it. But maybe I’m just going to give myself arthritis for my troubles if I try to become double-jointed where I wasn’t born to be. I’ve asked a few guitarists who have offered variations on ‘you don’t need to be able to bend your joint back, dude, just figure out how to sort of do it with what you’ve got.’ But, with all due respect, I suspect most guitarists can get their top joint to bend back at least a few degrees past straight. All my other fingers do, just not the ring finger. Discuss.

Guitar players: how far back do the top joints of your barring fingers bend? How long did it take you to get it there, if you happen to remember?

Can someone _please_ persuade Airmiles to line up with evil and bigotry? Or maybe just to support a good cause and spare us his reasons.

One of the major arguments of the Hacker-Pierson “piece”:http://pas.sagepub.com/content/38/2/152.full.pdf (and, I presume, forthcoming book) that I’ve been blogging about is that weak unions are a key cause of US inequality. The argument goes that weak unions have little political presence in policy debates, which tend to be dominated by business. The result is that policy debates in the US are systematically skewed in favor of business (which tends to favor policies that advantage, or at least do not hurt) rich people, with little in the way of countervailing voice, let alone power. I’ve just read this report (powered in part by Jure Leskovec et al.’s spiffy “MemeTracker”:http://www.memetracker.org technology), which provides some significant supporting evidence. Looking at media coverage of the Great Recession, it finds that:

bq. If story triggers tell us who generated the economic news that the media covered, the sources cited in stories provide insight into the angles and perspectives journalists highlighted. President Obama may have been uniquely positioned to drive the narrative by proposing federal initiatives and implementing policy. But a far more diverse group of people could comment and react to the implications and wisdom of those actions. In analyzing sources in stories, however, the fundamental pattern is the same. Those in government, and especially Obama administration staffers, dominated the conversation. Representatives of business and industry came next, followed by academics and independent observers. … fully 61% of stories included a government representative of some kind, including those from state and local government. … Representatives of business, those identified as clearly speaking on behalf of the company or corporation, were the next most prominent sources, figuring in about 40% of the stories. … ordinary citizens and workers were well down the rung of sources. … One subset of the American workforce was virtually shut out of the coverage entirely. … Representatives of organized labor unions were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied.

This measure is not the only index of strength in policy debate, obviously, but it is an important one. And on it, business representatives were _twenty times_ as visible in public debate as union representatives. That’s a whopping disparity.

Last month, you may recall, the fascist octopus made a real-life appearance during the world cup. And this month, Ayatollah Ali Khameni says more or less directly that if you want to dance, you can’t be part of their revolution.

While “Mitch McConnell”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/08/mcconnell_makes_his_choice.php?ref=fpblg is trying to figure out whether the US can get rid of birthright citizenship, French rightwing politicians seem to be engaged in a “bidding war”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2010/08/irresponsibility.html to see who can come up with the most egregious proposal for stripping citizenship from criminals. As Art Goldhammer observes, this is a fairly transparent attempt to distract voters from the Sarkozy government’s embroilment with dodgy billionaires and tax advisers.

bq. Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal to strip certain criminals of French citizenship has brought the xenophobes out of the woodwork. Thierry Mariani, always a leader in this pack, has proposed extending the punishment to all who have been naturalized for less than ten years and convicted of crimes with sentences of greater than five years. The round numbers make short shrift of the constitutional problem, that any such law creates two classes of French citizens, those whose citizenship status is precarious and the rest–contrary to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, which states that “all French citizens are equal before the law.” …

bq. But these _dérapages_ were predictable once the cat was out of the bag. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that they were intended. Each _surenchère_ relaunches the polemic and distracts attention from other issues. And of course none of these measures–even in the exceedingly unlikely case that any of them are enacted, given the likely refusal of the _Conseil Constitutionnel_ to accept them–would have the slightest effect on the “security” of the French. What proportion of crimes is committed by recently naturalized citizens (or wandering gypsies)? … you seize on some trival _fait divers,_ invoke the inalienable human right of self-preservation, and direct anger and fear at some disliked and defenseless element of the population, accused without evidence of imperiling the “security” of authentic citizens.

An interesting Planet Money podcast (link goes to the associated post) about how much a pelican is worth. That is, how much should BP have to pay, per pelican, for wrongfully killing pelicans? How do you estimate dollar damages in cases where there aren’t markets that could give you a reasonable ‘market valuation’ of some degraded environmental condition, and in which laypeople are sort of torn between ‘infinitely valuable’ and ‘I’d pay a dollar’ responses to a survey question? It turns out that the answer is ‘a pelican for a pelican’, at least according to the federal agency responsible for solving this problem. If BP killed 500 pelicans, they have to pay whatever it costs to save 500 other pelicans, or pay for a pelican nursery that will raise 500 pelicans, or something of the sort.

I have a somewhat more than passing interest in the history of lex talionis, so I’m struck by this reversion to what is generally regarded as an intolerably primitive, retributivist formula. An eye for an eye, a pelican for a pelican. Of course, the first thing to note about it is that here it isn’t functioning in a retributivist spirit at all. Quite the contrary, it’s a utilitarian kludge for handling a case in which calculating a util seems too fraught.

Note the oddity of the fact that at no point in the podcast does anyone ask how much a pelican is worth to a pelican [to the pelican that happens to be that pelican]. Suppose someone proposed that it is impossible to value human life in a wrongful death suit, say, because we’ve outlawed slavery (just as we’ve outlawed traffic in migratory birds). That would be a funny sort of argument. But it does show up how our intuitions about environmental value are an odd mix of absolutism (nature is infinitely valuable) and instrumentalism (nature is valuable for us).

Maybe that means we are just monstrously inconsiderate of [better: conflicted about] animal rights in our typical thinking about environmental damage. I actually kinda think so [most days], but I don’t think there’s much chance of a serious paradigm shift that would go deep enough to alter that. So, setting aside that possibility, and moving back down the scale to more practical questions, it seems to me that there might be a way to tweak the ‘pelican for a pelican’ lex talionis principle, to make it more flexible – to make the currency of pelicans more fluidly exchangeable and money-like, in a way that the average American might find intuitive and, if not satisfying, then at least as not-unsatisfying as any formula is likely to be. [click to continue…]