Brief Essays With Pictures

-Strange but true: you can get homework done early. So far, I’ve now turned in three assignments for my classes early. This is truly a bizarre feeling. It’s like I’m being genuinely productive or something. And only 15 years after I should have started acting like this.

-Ate a huge MustGo dinner tonight from my fridge, right before Clay Erinn called, offering me ramps and potatoes. Who am I to turn down such a delicacy? You can see them photographed above. The recipe was as follows: potatoes fried in one pan, with chopped ramps, bacon, and eggs cooking in another pan. Combine in a single bowl, add hot sauce, and consume. Needless to say, I was awfully full, but ramps are damned delicious.

“If you have the means, I highly recommend that you try them. They’re choice.” Thanks Ferris Bueller.

-Congratulations Hillary Clinton. She won Pennsylvania while simultaneously reminding anybody who was actually paying attention what an awful person she is. Way to go! What with her attempts to run a campaign that looks like it has been managed by Karl Rove, she clearly represents nothing more than the empty pursuit of power and the desire to do whatever she can to get it. Even if that includes costing the Democrats the election in the fall.

Incidentally, I saw where Clinton overwhelmingly won PA’s women. My instinct is to stomp around my house cursing anybody who voted for Clinton just because she happens to be female; that would be wrong of me, so instead, I’ll assume that every vote cast for Clinton was done by people who had thoroughly evaluated her positions on the issues and found themselves in more agreement with her than Obama. Because, really, voting for a candidate just because they’re female is so ridiculously stupid that it isn’t worth discussing…for anymore than at least one more sentence, which is this: I’m not supporting Obama because he’s a man, but rather, because he’s a good candidate who has a chance to win nationally, which is what Clinton supporters should be evaluating, instead of concerning themselves with the fact that she has a vagina.

Needless to say, if somebody supports her because they agree with her political positions, fine. If the support is there only because she’s a female, then that’s as dumb as any man’s decision to support Reagan over Mondale simply because he was running with Geraldine Ferraro. Bigotry doesn’t depend upon the bigot’s demographics.

Yes, I’m aware that we can’t change how people vote. But dammit, we can get awfully angry about it, can’t we? Also, that was more than one more sentence…

-At some point, this website is going to change its look. Part of that will include me no longer posting a photograph with every single post. Sometimes, I just want to write something. Of course, none of you are regular readers, because my regular readers don’t exist. Still, I thought you should know.

-First things first - an art show I put together is going up in three weeks. The flyer is above. It will feature local and semi-local artists exploring the topic of love, although not necessarily in that Hallmarkian light. Think of the other things that go along with love - constant frustration, sadness, anger, lunacy - and figure that at least some of those will be included.

Be there! February 1, 8-11pm, Wild Zero Studios, 229 Pleasant Street, Morgantown, West Virginia.

-Sadly, we need to briefly discuss Barrack Obama’s loss in New Hampshire yesterday which would have been, until about a week ago, considered an enormous victory. Here was Hillary Clinton, the establishment’s candidate, who should have been romping and stomping through New Hampshire. Obama wasn’t an afterthought, but it was looking like he’d come in second place. Then he won Iowa, and people starting wondering if he could win New Hampshire. His polling numbers were great, the exit polling looked good…and then Hillary Clinton won the damned thing.

Which means that Democrats, faced with a choice between the old-guard representing everything that is wrong with the party and the fresh face who promised hope…still managed to go in the wrong direction. Again. How in the fuck can a political party be so god-damned stupid? How in the fuck can a party that has lost, and lost, and lost, and lost, continue to look at presidential candidates and pick the one least electable?

There is no way that I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. I’m not holding my nose for a third consecutive election and endorsing a candidate that I have no particular interest in. If the Democrats are so fucking stupid as to push Clinton through as a presidential candidate, then that’ll be one less vote their candidate is getting. This is a strategy that is stupid beyond words; frankly, it deserves to lose in the big election.

Meanwhile, hope springs eternal for Barrack Obama. South Carolina favors him, and potentially Nevada. And a run on Super Tuesday isn’t impossible, because he’s an appealing candidate to all kinds of people, not just the sort of Democrat loyalists who don’t know their heads from their asses. Here’s hoping for a great run from Obama, who predictably sounded better in defeat than Clinton did in victory.

Incidentally, I want everybody who is claiming that Hillary is being opposed because she’s a woman to stop - she’s being opposed because she’s a terrible candidate. Her gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. Or at least, it didn’t, until the media starting killing her for allegedly crying. Way to fuck that one up media punditry. As soon as it came down to something as small as a candidate crying, Hillary went from being a loathsome candidate who came to a state like West Virginia and demanded $1,000 from anybody wanting to be in the same room with her (true story!) and turned her into a victim. All the media had to do was let Hillary pull the rug out from under herself - in their rush to do it for her, they accomplished the exact opposite result, and now we’re stuck with the very real possibility that we’ll be enduring her throughout a prolonged presidential campaign.

My friend Mitch The Killer - check the Glossary of Characters - recently commented on a blog post that this blog has been busy sucking. In a way, I agree. Whereas I once swore regularly, and raged against the dying of the light, and charged foolishly into windmills, now I bore those few people who stop by with tattooing, rationality, and Libertarianism.

Somebody asked me about this obsession with Libertarians. “Why, what’s wrong with you? Why bother with them? They’re a few percent of the population, and they’re never going to win!” These are excellent points.

Once, I went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gay Meccas on the East Coast, and I remember thinking, “How on Earth can everybody here look so damned similar? These people are gay! They, if anybody, should be tolerant of difference! Where is the difference?!?” And then I walked down to the ocean, which was beautiful, and screamed at the high tide.

So why the newer focus on Libertarians? Because they claim to care about all of the same things that I do - specifically, individual liberty - and yet they propose solutions which will almost certainly reduce the aggregate amount of individual liberty. I cannot possibly square these two realities.

“Move on! Focus on something else! Jesus Christ already, the Libertarians see individual liberty differently than you do, and they’re not going to change that! Come on already.”

But I can’t. Just like I struggle to let go of most things: old breakups, the Mountaineers not stopping Tremaine Mack on the end in the loss to Miami, the lunacy of running John Kerry for president, four-putting the final green in a golf tournament that I won. “How can people be so fucking stupid,” I wonder about everyone, including myself.

Libertarians aren’t so fucking stupid, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just that they don’t seem to give a good god damn about anybody but themselves. That’s fine I guess. No law requires anybody to care about anybody else. But it seems like the right thing to do, and it certainly seems like there are some people who simply can’t take care of themselves. I know that Libertarians have no problem with innocent people being allowed to die - “Hey, nobody has a right to take my money to pay for that old woman’s selfish desire for medical attention!” - but I can’t take the same position myself.

Sometimes, I have this fantasy. There are people in my town who are crazy anti-abortion protestors. They carry around those signs with babies on them in an attempt to shock us into political submission, and they do it on major street corners, because God-for-fucking-bid that I be allowed to drive to work without being confronted with somebody else’s political crusade. I think it would be fun to make a sandwich board that says, “These people oppose contraception.” Nothing for me clarifies better the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement than the morons who believe that contraception is bad. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will lead to fewer abortions than the correct use of contraception. I imagine that my sign board would actually mean something, that people driving by would say, “God, these people are idiots.” I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to actually do such things. So it remains my little dream, a fun little fantasy.

And so it goes that I find myself standing outside of the Libertarian headquarters shaking my fist like an old man telling those damned kids to get off my lawn. It probably doesn’t make for radically interesting reading, but dammit, I’ve got to be me.

The above photograph is from my upcoming entry into Wild Zero’s Mustache Show. Want to know how this particular scene ends? Come to the show! Or…just go to my Flickr page. But come to the show anyway, and see tributes to the mustache.

A few days ago, I noticed a compatriot of mine on Facebook was attending some sort of function that advertised itself by trying to attract people who like to “think rationally.” The group - a free-market student magazine out of Arizona State University - is one of many such organizations under the absurd delusion that to think rationally means to agree with them. This is a problem that I’ve run into before with folks of this political persuasion. It is one of the reasons that they’ll never get themselves fully off the ground.

Wikipedia predictably as a good entry about rationality. Reading that, I again find myself struggling to believe that anybody makes irrational decisions. (Some) Economists limit the scope of the rationality that they explore, claiming that rational decisions are only the ones that maximize returns for the individual in pursuit of his or her stated goals.

The fun of philosophy is thinking backwards. Thus, the issue that I’ll claim to have isn’t with social scientific definition of rationality, but rather, the idea of an individual’s stated goals. I am taking this tactic from, amongst others, the (Some) Christians who claim that deeds matter far more than words, a position I’ll agree with. For the sake of this argument, let’s look at a heroin addict.

The social scientist looks at the heroin addict and says, “You’re making irrational decisions by using that heroin. Think of your goals, and dreams, and wishes! You’re not optimizing your life!” But of course, the problem with the heroin addict isn’t that he is making terribly irrational decisions; it’s that he’s making rational decisions toward what is obviously his actual goal: getting high out of his mind and appearing in the film Trainspotting.

Simply put, it seems likely impossible for a person to make irrational decisions toward their actual goals in life, as any decision made is the evidence of what goals are, and aren’t, actually important. For instance, I can say that this blog is of the utmost importance in my life, but I update it once, twice a week, tops? That ought to be evidence that perhaps my stated intentions aren’t my actual intentions. Social scientists don’t realize these sorts of things because they’re anxious to do what they can to predict the human experience, and having human beings incapable of even stating their simple goals completely undoes the work.

More to come, I suppose, but in summation: the notion that economists and free-marketeers are the only truly rational people is absurd folly.

As we’ve already established this week, I love when college kids are so self-righteous as to think that they’ve got something important to say. “It’s not that we object to criticism of the President,” uttered the College Republican, “It’s just that the word fuck is so foriegn to our precious ears. What’s that? Do a beer bong? Fuck yeah!” However, the protest at Colorado State was somewhat harmless, as nobody on campus cares anymore (two days later) assuming they ever cared at all.

But the students at Harvard who are whining about Jada Pinckett Smith’s alleged heteronormativity? Well they’re just fucking babies. It is shameful that college students made to feel “uncomfortable” according to the article are under the impression that their discomfort matters in the slightest. It doesn’t.

Then, to bury their discomfort in a fake word like heteronormativity? Grow up. Heteronormativity exists because the vast majority of the world is heterosexual. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with other forms of sexuality (outside of a few extreme examples). It just means that the vast majority of the world sees the world through a heterosexual filter. Reflecting that, even in such a way that alleged discomfort is visited upon some hyper aware trust fund babies, shouldn’t be the thought crime that some are insisting it become.

In case you think I’m making the above facts up, here’s the article itself:

“Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships.”

So Pinkett Smith didn’t stray into the sorts of homophobia that ought to give us pause; rather, she spoke from her own experience as a person who has sex with the opposite sex. For this it’s being suggested that speakers ought to be warned about being tolerant of other viewpoints? What, exactly, are these few offended whiners hoping will happen the next time? That somebody who doesn’t share their experience will speak to it anyway? I can guarantee that the first straight who goes rambling in an attempt to include every conceivable relationship will get into hotter water with these same morons.

At some point, there are people throughout this country who need to figure out that their own discomfort with something is not reason enough to stamp their feet and go whining to whomever will listen. According to the article, the vast majority of the not-heteronormative organization at Harvard really liked Pinkett Smith’s comments. That ought to be evidence that maybe, just maybe, those pitching a fit might, dare I say, be wrong. There are times when we have to be responsible enough to deal with our own discomfort, and that doesn’t mean asking everybody else to change.

College Republicans at Colorado State have decided to protest the school’s newspaper because it used the the word fuck Immediately after the use of the word Fuck came the word Bush, which might inform us of why exactly these students are protesting.

Politically active college students are a fantastically interesting breed - they’re routinely getting pissed about the least important occurences in the history of mankind, and they’re always doing it for the most absurd of reasons. Had the school newspaper written Fuck Ahmadinejad, for example, those Republicans wouldn’t be stamping their feet like the angry children that they are.

However, the College Republicans aren’t alone in this sort of indignant behavior. College Democrats are similarly stupid, and good lord, College Libertarians? “We’re part of a really small club and if you don’t join us, you’re stupid!” They’ll all show up and protest each other and pretend that these situations are incredibly important when in fact, they’re not. They’re not remotely important.

Oh well. You can find these examples all over the news regularly. I’m not entirely sure why I chose to write about this; I walked by a table manned by College Republicans today at WVU’s Student Union. They were smiley and nice looking and no doubt planning the apocalypse for the social freedoms that the rest of us enjoy…I felt like I needed to post. That’s the real reason.

Let’s suppose I came over to your house, tore off your clothing, and poured olive oil all over you before you were able to call the police. Suppose that when those officers arrived, you told them that I was trying to exorcise your demons. Do you think that the police would let me walk away, without being charged? Of course not.

Take almost exactly the same scenario, but instead, let’s assume that you were my child. I still tore off your clothing, and still poured olive oil all over you before could escape long enough to call the police. Upon arriving, do you think that the police would let me walk away, without being charged? Everybody who said of course not needs to think again.

I’m basing this off the scantest of available information in the above article. (Here’s a bit more.) Still, does it make even the slightest amount of sense that these parents would walk away from this apparent assault scot free, without ever having to go to trial?

The District Attorney claims that there isn’t enough available evidence to prosecute the parents; apparently, the daughter’s testimony just won’t do. Still, there is a troubling story here of children being treated very, very differently than adults would be, given similar circumstances. (Oddly, the “child” in this case was 18, which confuses things even more. She had to be taken into protective custody, which is unexpected given that 18-year-olds can usually just leave. I don’t think the state can force an 18-year-old into anything, although this is worth exploring. Was the child unable to care for herself?)

No matter. I have used my tiny little soapbox to protest the treatment of children before. In that case, I was protesting something that adults don’t think matters, because to the minds of many adults, children don’t matter. This case is obviously different. Here we’re not talking about a dresscode. We’re talking about the health and well-being of an individual and the refusal of the state to step in simply because her health and well-being was threatened by parents.

A judge once told me that I could anything I wanted to my child as, “long as she doesn’t end up bleeding.” I was completely taken aback by this. Imagine a judge telling another adult that, because his assailant didn’t make him bleed, no crime was committed. The outrage would be unbelievable. But when it comes to children, we mistakenly believe that parents have this sphere of invincibility that prevents intervention in anything except the most hideous of examples.

Why? Why would we ever set the standard that we’ll allow abuse to occur, but only to those most vulnerable to it? It as if we’ve got our logic and priorities exactly backwards.

Part of the answer is the insistence by parents that any attempt by the state to raise their kids is over the line, and as a parent, I completely agree. I’ll raise my daughter to be a godless, gay-loving heathen if I so choose (and I do). But surely there is a difference between the state raising our children, and the law intervening on behalf of those who simply cannot defend themselves. This sort of egregious double standard has been witnessed before, of course, in which the adult places his or her needs (rights!) ahead of the child’s for no reason other than vanity.

This attitude though, of children as property and not as people, is counter-productive for our society. Although there are obviously times when parents must intervene for the safety and well-being of their children, allowing them free-reign to do as they please has lead us to a place where the rights of children are conceived as only being those which don’t come into conflict with those of adults. Frankly, that is unnacceptable.

 I’m with The Agitator on this one: why is Larry Craig in trouble? (More here. And here.) Because he asked somebody in a bathroom for a blowjob? Tacky? Yes. Gross? Absolutely. A punishable offense? Seriously?

Balko rightly points out that people do exactly what Craig allegedly did in bars, restaurants, clubs and dancefloors across America. Nobody gets arrested. Porn producers absolutely do exactly this sort of thing making their movies. Nobody’s banging down their doors…yet. The point is that while Craig might have been a bit skeezy in his behavior, skeezy shouldn’t be illegal. Read that report from Yahoo News. It’s not like Craig even asked outright for a blowjob. He communicated in some sort alleged secret language known only by the gays that, according to the police, means, “Hey, a blowjob?” That he faced criminal sanction for such a thing is absolutely absurd.

I’ve argued this before, and I’ll argue it again, but we cannot criminalize that which weirds us out. Nobody was hurt by Larry Craig asking for a blowjob, even the person being asked. Suggesting otherwise is devaluing those times when people actually are hurt by particular behaviors.  

(As for the blatant hypocrisy of those demanding Craig’s immediate resignation? Well, what did we expect from the Republican Party? What did anybody seriously expect?)

To read Peter Leeson’s defense of anarchy, you’d come away from it thinking that anarchy was actually a good idea. And although I have numerous objections to his work, my friend Josh does a far better job of dissecting Leeson’s work. But I wanted to object to one particular argument that Leeson, and his other anarcho-capitalists, frequently make: that negative behaviors are no big deal in the long run.

 To illustrate this, Leeson makes the following argument -

Imagine you go to a restaurant and order a $30 filet mignon. When your food arrives you take a bite and realize the restaurant has served you a $10 flank steak instead. The restaurant has defrauded you. You could take the owner to court; but then you realize that the simple time cost this will entail is not worth what you will recover even if you win. Although in principle government exists to adjudicate this matter, in practice it does not.

Your dining experience is a little slice of anarchy. Knowing this, restaurant owners should perpetually serve $10 flank steaks to customers who order filet mignon. Of course restaurants don’t do this. And the reason they don’t is because they realize that if they do, you’ll stop eating there and tell everyone you know to boycott the restaurant as well. Even without government, Smith’s “invisible hand” leads the restaurant to do the right thing.

This is a common argument made by anarcho-capitalists like Leeson. In it, we see that the negative behavior - serving the incorrect food in an attempt to steal profit from the customer - will eventually end as the restaurant’s reputation is so badly damaged that it loses its customers. Sure, a few people have been defrauded out of their money, but over the long run, so what?

There are two very serious problems with this sort of argument. The first is that comparing steaks to the very serious suffering of Somalis is slightly offensive. “Oh, see how I got defrauded out of my $20 bucks for a steak? That’s like 300,000 Somalis dying in an anarchist state. Sure, it sucks in the immediate, but over the long term, so what?” Reading through Leeson’s work - and the work of some other anarcho-capitalists - you see very real human suffering compared to all sorts of pain-in-the-ass experiences, as if there is anything there worth comparing.

The second, and more objectionable, part of Leeson’s argument is that he affords himself and his beliefs an infinite amount of time to work themselves out. In other words, while he gives any form of government approximately no time whatsoever to work itself out, he maintains that places like Somalia will eventually be in tip-top shape. How convenient for his beliefs. It makes it remarkably easy to gloss over 300,000 dead Somalis if, in however long it takes for anarchy to actually work, things eventually get better.

But that’s just it; short term suffering, especially on the scale of the Somali experience, does matter. Glossing it over because, some day, things will be better? That seems cruel at best and downright ignorant at worst. And although Leeson, and other anarcho-capitalists can try, attrocities cannot be ignored simply because they undermine their own beliefs. What’s strange is that the Leesons of the world insist that those of us who believe in some sort of government owe everybody else the same honesty, that we must admit that governments have failed to lived up to expectations. I’ll be the first in line to do so. But ignoring the serious concerns that some of us have over human suffering in an anarchist state, or by simply comparing it to a flank staek, one wonders how seriously Leeson is actually taking things.

(For the record, I have met Peter Leeson, and he seems like a very decent man. He also looks an awful lot like the kid from Rushmore.)

There is a fight going on in Oregon between two parents over their 13-year-old’s penis. The father wants it circumcised; the mother does not. The details of the case are particularly distressing:

1. Dad recently converted, and decided that his son’s foreskin had to go as a result. Don’t ask me about the calculus involved in that decision, because I neither know it nor understand it.

2. Mom claims that the son is too afraid to say no to his father, even though he has privately explained that it is a procedure that he does not want.

3. Several religious organizations have stepped in on the behalf of the father to say that this is a circumcision that has to happen, because if it were prevented, the blow to individual religious liberty would be overwhelming.

4. These two parents have decided that the best place to have an argument over circumcision, and consequently, over their child’s penis, is in a courtroom in front of whoever walks in the court’s doors.

5. At no point in this case has the boy’s testimony been sought. Think about that.

Circumcision is bad enough when it is parents visiting the procedure upon their newborn infant. To insist that it occur to a 13-year-old boy in the throes of adolescence? The fact that the boy’s testimony hasn’t been sought is similarly mind-blowing. Is it being seriously suggested that his opinion simply doesn’t matter? That even if he does object to the procedure, his father’s desire to cut off his foreskin should win the day?

One of the stranger areas of individual liberty that rarely gets touched on are the rights of those under the age of 18. People tend to believe that children are the property of parents, and thus can be manipulated in almost any imaginable way. This is one of the reasons that so few abusive parents ever face anything bordering on legal retribution for their crimes. This case is another unfortunate illustration; some of the adults involved could obviously not care less about the child’s interest in this situation. This is a battle over “religious freedom” and not “individual liberty” in their eyes.

The problem of children is confusing in the extreme because there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer. We don’t want to allow children the right to run willy-nilly across the countryside, but at the same time, surely can’t believe that as parents we have the right to do almost whatever we want to them.

Obviously, I am against the father and his supporters on this case. He and they are so unbelievably wrong that it hurts the imagination. Yet, there is the very distinct possibility that he will win, and that his son’s penis will be circumcised without him ever getting a say-so in the procedure himself. And if that isn’t a blow to individual liberty, what in the hell is?

Update: This is exactly the sort of thing that I’m talking about. Although decades old, the assumption was that, because permission was given, the abuse of these children was acceptable. Children are not property.

I got into an argument with a vegan on Flickr. I had complimented the (beautiful) photo of a friend’s wife, saying that I wanted to be like her when I grew up, except for the veganism. I would love to be like her photographically; she takes beautiful photographs. The vegan in question stopped by to say that I wouldn’t be totally grown up until I was a vegan.

We went back and forth for a few posts until the friend’s wife took down our comments. Good for her. No reason her pictures should be our battleground. I went to look at the vegan’s photography and he had pictures of camels in a circus captioned, “animals aren’t property.” But what should he have a few photos later? A picture of his cat.

So I asked him the following question: if animals aren’t property, why does he own a cat (that, incidentally, he feeds a vegan diet)? Reasonable enough, right. His response was that it’s the other way around, that his cat owns him. I observed how remarkably convenient that fact was. He said I was being belligerent - I reminded him that he was still be a condescending vegan. That was the end of the debate.

Was I being belligerent? Perhaps…in fact, yes, I was. I was being belligerent. But at least I wasn’t insisting that my opponent play by a different set of rules than I was maintaining for myself. I suppose that there are more annoying argumentative tactics but I certainly can’t think of any.

In this case, the vegan in question clearly believed that he was free to say whatever he wanted because of his moral position of veganism. Because he is a vegan, his immature criticisms are thus acceptable. People who perceive themselves to be overwhelmingly right tend to afford themselves an awful lot of freedom that they won’t afford to those that they perceive to be wrong.

Peter Singer, a lightning rod for criticism, has made a career of advancing arguments that involve guilting and shaming his opposition into agreeing with him. “Oh, well, you wouldn’t kill a child would you? Then why are you spending your extra money on yourself instead of on children in Africa who need medicine to live? You’re the same as a child murderer.” (Singer, in case you’re wondering, is one of the ethicists who decided that humans and animals have equivalent value, and so killing animals is bad, bad, bad. Feeding them a vegan diet, making them miserable? Good, good, good! There I go again, being belligerent.)

But revisit this vegan with his pet cat. He hates the circus owners dragging their camels around the country for their own profit; meanwhile, he forces his cat to eat a vegan diet to satisfy his own beliefs about what is and is not appropriate in our world. In the circus example, the camels are taken out of their natural environment to benefit an owner. In the cat example, although the vegan maintains otherwise, exactly the same thing is happening. Exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the vegan is comfortable locking his cat up, forcing it to eat a vegan diet, and probably “fixing” it so that it wouldn’t reproduce, whereas he greatly objects to the camel owners locking up a camel, forcing it to eat a whatever diet, and probably “fixing” it so that it wouldn’t reproduce.

If the allegedly moral people of this Earth get to make arguments like this, so to does everybody else. If owning animals is wrong when a circus does it, then it probably is when everybody else does it too. Or, maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is a huge difference. I don’t know.

But declaring it off limits to discuss whether or not there are differences? Declaring that the only people allowed to ask questions are the moral, and the only people not allowed to ask questions are everybody else? That’s crazy. Absolutely positively crazy. Beyond being crazy, it’s damned offensive.

Here is the final part. I don’t care that the vegan is a raging hypocrite. I care that he won’t admit it, that the allegedly moral people who fill this world regularly refuse to admit the fact that they’ve decided that the rules governing their lives and actions should be totally different than those that exist for literally everybody else.

I might love to play the game, but what can I really say about it? It’s stupid. This is part of an ongoing series about the game’s lesser qualities.

My bugaboo, my entire golfing career, has been the putter. Whereas I know some absolutely fantastic putters, their considerable talents never wore off on me. I am constantly shooting good rounds in the foot whenever I get to the greens. Case in point, this past weekend I shot a 65, three putting the final green from eight feet for what would have technically been my course record. (My own I mean, not the course’s.) As it finished, I shot three over on the front (three putting the ninth) and six under on the back, and had been at seven before that final putting disaster.

By most accounts, I have a bad putting grip. I stole it from my friend Joe, who was/is an excellent putter, the kind of putter who leaves me surprised when he misses. Basically, my hands overlap one another, left hand over right. I have fought with this particular grip for going on four years now, trying desperately to control it, as it is a grip that allows me to stand a little straighter, and thus go easier on my bad lower back.

This must end though.

I decided this morning that I’m changing my putting grip, and have chosen one that I’ve toyed around with for a while. It involves interlocking fingers and the left hand being dominant and all sorts of things that might serve to…

…seriously? Am I seriously doing this? Am I seriously blogging about something as unbelievably unimportant as how I grip my putter? Yes, yes I am, because not only is it important (to me), it literally dominates my thoughts. I walk around my house with a spare putter constantly trying this new grip out. I worry about it, think about it, agonize about it, and for what? The unlikely possibility that this might actually help.

Speaking of help, I need some. Nobody should ever think about golf this much.

One of the many things that weirds me out about fundamentalists of all stripes is their lack of humor about whatever it is that they care so deeply about. Oh sure, a hardcore Christian might laugh for 24 hours straight about issues non-Christian, but crack one joke about Jesus Christ himself and watch the needle go scratching off the record. There must be dozens of explanations for this sort of seriousness, but the one that makes the most sense to me centers around the way in which the fundamentalist explains his beliefs.

Libertarians

One of the more absurd positions I heard during my week with the Libertarians involved the notion of taxation as a form of forced labor. To the mind of some of those in attendence and at least one of the lecturer’s, Michael Huemer, our current tax structure amounted to nothing more than a modern form of slavery.

Here’s how the math works. Let’s say you work 40 hours a week for $10 an hour, meaning that you earn $400 weekly. However, let’s also say that you pay a 20 percent tax rate, meaning that $80 of what you earn is going to the government. In the mind of those that I met with, the eight hours it took you to earn those $80 were worked as a slave of the government, because you cannot opt out of paying taxes (more on that in a second) and any attempt to do so will bring government agents with guns to your front door. Just like slaves, who received no compensation for their work, people paying taxes are working for however many hours per week it takes to pay off the government for free. Thus, slavery.

Predictably, I have a few objections to this sort of reasoning:

1. There are still actual slaves in the world, people bought and sold for money and made to work until they die. To suggest that paying $80 in taxes a week is somehow akin to this strikes me as absurdly offensive. Confronted with this, some of the Libertarians I met would say, “Yeah, okay, but aren’t you four percent a slave if 8 of your week’s 168 hours are spent in forced labor for a third party?” And the answer is no. Slavery is an absolute. Either you are, or you aren’t. I don’t see how anybody could reasonably believe that they are a four-percent slave. And I assure you that any slave, anywhere in the world, would happily trade you your four-percent slavery for their 100-percent slavery.

2. But forget the above for a moment. Calling something slavery is merely semantics; what of the example itself? If we can claim that those eight hours spent earning the $80 necessary to pay your taxes as slavery, couldn’t we just as easily claim that the individual in question makes eight dollars an hour? Couldn’t we, in fact, claim that the individual implicitly approved of the taxation by accepting the job in the first place? (I’ll credit Andrew Cullison with that particular observation.) Bang! No more slavery.

3. I don’t necessarily believe that any of the people maintaining that taxation is akin to slavery actually believe such a thing. Rather, I think it makes for an incredibly convincing position pitch. If you tell me that paying taxes is a pain in the ass, an annoyance, and that my money is generally wasted by the government, then I’ll agree. I may not do much else - because taxes are like the weather, ie: very difficult to avoid. But if you tell me that I’m a slave to the government, that the struggles of actual slaves closely mirror my own experiences, well I might just be fired up enough to do something about it. Hell, I might be interested in believing whatever it is that you’re pushing.

Christ? Senses of Humor? Slavery?

I suppose that all of this needs to be tied together. So what exactly does a sense of humor and believing that paying taxes are slavery have to do with one another? Simply, that if you’re dealing with someone who believes that the taxes he pays are akin to shackles and a life of involuntary servitude, chances are you’re not dealing with someone who is going to have a sense of humor about this particular belief.

And that’s part of the conundrum with Libertarians, at least some of the ones that I met. They’re dead-serious about their political beliefs, to the point that joking falls flat. The problem is that the ability of Libertarians to make their pitch to individuals who are casually interested (like me) or individuals who flat out disagree is thus hampered because having a sense of humor isn’t part of the equation. I’ve made this argument before, but it’s the responsibility of Libertarians to do the selling - it isn’t my responsibility to do the buying. Hampering your own ability to sell by refusing to have a sense of humor about things seems self-handicapping, a concept I just don’t understand.

(For the record, I was spending a week with mostly fundamentalist believers. It is possible that they were so pumped up to be among their own kind that they didn’t have time for joking. This is a reasonable enough explanation that I’ve heard, although I think I still object. For Christ’s sake, if you can’t sell it to a guy who was interested coming in, who can you sell it to?)

Dear Delcambre,

I understand that, despite your best efforts, you struggle to look as good as I do. Seriously, it isn’t easy rocking this face, this body, these tattoos, and this goatee. I do it because I can do it. Not everybody can. Sometimes, people have to walk their own road. That might mean an almost infinite number of possibilities, but amongst them is a look known as “sagging” in which a pair of pants or shorts are worn low on the ass. The older folks in your town don’t like this practice for whatever reason; probably because it looks stupid, but the Lord knows there are a numer of reasons not to like it.

But your response - banning sagging and punishing it with a $500 fine and potentially six months in jail - isn’t just silly, it’s draconian. Its sheer awfulness is almost impossible to fully comprehend, but just for fun, why don’t we try?

1. First, punishing people for wearing stupid looking clothing sets an awfully dangerous precedent. What, I wonder, will be the next to go? Hats? Pink socks? Hush Puppies? Once a government has given itself the ability to tell people what they can and cannot wear, what’s to prevent them from endlessly extending that authority?

2. Although I have never traveled to Delcambre, LA, I have to imagine that the police department there has more important things to be doing than measuring the distance between a man’s waist and his jeans’s waistband. Fark lives it up running headlines that read the following, “Having Solved All Other Problems, X Focuses On Y.” Congratulations Delcambre, you’re now a Fark headline.

3. If this law deserves derision for no other reason - and I pretty clearly believe that it does deserve derision for a multitude of reasons - then how about the sheer laziness of it? Telling somebody that they look like an asshole for how they dress takes guts, nerve, and some serious, as the Spanish might say, cajones. Legislating appearance from a distance? That doesn’t take cajones at all; it takes the sort of long-distance government intervention that socially conservative types all too fondly endorse when it comes to addressing whatever their concerns. It isn’t their responsibility as opponents of the practice to do any, y’know, work by trying to convince people into making other decisions. Rather, it becomes the government’s responsibility to legislate individual decisions about everything from sexuality to abortion to birth control to the way in which a pair of pants are worn.

You’ll excuse me if I’m not interested in that sort of nonsense.

Needless to say, here’s hoping that you reconsider your new law against sagged pants.

Sincerely,
Sam Wilkinson

This is me and my daughter. We’d hiked down to a waterfall. We were being “cute.” I take her on these sorts of trips because we both like them and they’re memorable. And because they’re fun. There is a bit of danger involved - we have to walk down a steep hill, and then climb down some rocks. I wouldn’t take her if I thought the danger outweighed the potential for fun, but it never does. That’s how parenting works I think.

Meanwhile, Billy Ford isn’t so sure about the concept. He’s pissed because a flight he took showed scenes of graphic sex and naughty violence…or is it naughty sex and graphic violence? He objected to the scenes, ostensibly because kids might have been hurt by these images. He also is furious because individuals can actually order these “pornographic” shows for viewing on videoscreens. And oh the children! They might be exposed to sex, or violence, or worst, both.

Ignoring the fact that Billy Ford wasn’t actually with any children on the flight in question, why can’t these moral crusaders calm down and, y’know, actually let me do the parenting? She’s my daughter, and I’ll decide what I do or don’t want her to watch. That’s part of being a parent, part of being a person responsible for a child. I think that the Billy Fords of the world aren’t comfortable with those of us who have different calculus for our children than he has for his. And again, I’m not comfortable with parents raising their children Christian, but you don’t see me proposing laws to prevent it, or organizing boycotts to influence the decision makers.