Larry Craig

 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?)

Good Times With Peter Leeson

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.)

A Teenager To Be Circumcised, Maybe

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.

Different Rules For Different People

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.

Golf Is Stupid (Putting)

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.

More Thoughts On Libertarians

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?)

Town Bans Saggy Pants

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

Me, My Daughter, And Not Being A Stupid Parent

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.

A Week Away

Judging from my site’s statistics, you’re reading this for the first time. I’m going to the beach, and then a conference, for a week. I doubt that I’ll post. Why mention that you’re reading this for the first time? Because I’d say to expect an update again in a week, but you’re probably not coming back.

I will be photographing my journey, which will hopefully lead to some excellent locations. But a week away might be good. This is disjointed.

Pushing My Buttons

Writing about politics is stupid. Either you’ll agree with me, or you won’t. Either we’ll see eye to eye, or we won’t. That said, Ann Coulter called John Edward a “faggot.” This occurred during a speech before the biggest annual gathering of conservatives in America.

It is impossible for anyone to believe that this happened by accident, because to believe that is to ignore the recent history of the Republican party concerning homosexuality. That Coulter was cheered immediately after making her comment says even more.

Specifically, Coulter said, “I’d say something about John Edwards, but if you use the word ‘faggot’, you have to go to rehab.”

One of the reasons that she was cheered is that there are some Americans, some of whom apparently sitting in that room, that believe that the politically correct have prevented them from honestly expressing opinions. In Coulter’s defiance of this, they see a hero, a woman willing to triumph over those demanding tolerance.

I’m no fan of political correctness. Requiring anybody to believe anything is problematic. But this isn’t about political correctness. This is about being a decent human being, and decent human beings don’t go around calling one another faggots. Coulter wasn’t kidding around when she suggested that Edwards might be gay; Coulter was dead set on undercutting her opposition in a crass way that she knew would fire up her rabid base. It isn’t bad enough that Edwards is a liberal, she’d say, but he’s gay too. And not just gay, but a “faggot.”

Decent people don’t do this sort of thing. Decent people argue with one another, disagree, and fight, but they don’t resort to throwing epithets around. They don’t resort to this sort of penny-ante bullshit.

One of the reasons that debate in this country is so toxic is Ann Coulter. She has equals on the other side, of course. The fact that we can no longer disagree without calling or being called faggots is absurd, and the reason that I stopped writing posts like this. There are more interesting things out there, more places that need to be explored, more places that need to be seen. Coulter only reminds me of that.