A set of hypotheticals for all the married folk out there. Each is intended to stand alone. They don’t escalate from one to the next, and I’m not fishing for any particular conclusions here.

1. The United States government, at both the state and federal levels, peacefully dissolves into anarchy. The functionaries all read David Friedman, agree with him, and close up shop. Are you still married? Or not?
2. Your church, if you have one, decides that your marriage was never valid, owing to a technical error in the ceremony, a mistake no one noticed at the time. Are you still married? Or not?
3. Your entire family, on both sides, and any children if you have them, all reach a consensus: You and your wife are all wrong for each other. They’re not going to recognize your marriage, no matter how happy you are, and regardless of how you conduct yourselves. Still married? Or not?

I’m genuinely curious how people will respond. How much of what makes a marriage is individual? And how much of it belongs to the community? How are the communal aspects of marriage allocated among state, church, and family?

The Oresteia is a monument to the advent of law and order over primitive cycles of vengeance. The three-play cycle (the only complete Greek trilogy we have) was first performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BCE and won first prize. It was understandably a crowd pleaser, as it celebrates the recently established democratic institutions of Athens and the development of civilized order out of ferocious chthonic nature, represented here as the younger generation killing the older, but also as the formation of a patriarchal society and the divine sanctioning of an act of matricide. It remains a work of uncanny power and terrifying intensity.

Agamemnon

After the Trojan War, the victorious king Agamemnon returns home to Argos. He and his men have been through hell, but among the victory celebrations he is apprehensive about giving in to the thrill of victory, fearing hubris, that paramount Greek flaw. Aeschylus reminds us repeatedly that this war turned the world upside down and destroyed many lives simply to reclaim unfaithful Helen; there would be something inappropriate about crowing over an abattoir. In contrast to the Iliad, where Agamemnon’s pissing contest with Achilles nearly destroys the Greek army, here he is subdued and even timid, reluctant to enter his own palace with his loving wife Clytemnestra.

His humility is, no doubt, caused in part by the public knowledge that Agamemnon took the life of his own daughter Iphigenia. Caught in a storm that threatened to wreck the fleet, he took the advice of religious prophets and sacrificed his daughter to appease the gods. Facing an impossible choice, he picked poorly and now bears the guilt; Voltaire, memorably, saw Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as a model example of the damage caused by religious superstition. [Read more →]

I think I’m going to start blogging weekly on the final season of Lost.  I wish I’d started this with the season premiere, but it’s too late for that.

As a primer – I become very disgruntled with the show around season 3.  It was a combination of burn-out (too much Lost in rapid succession) and the show’s own struggles which had me doubting whether I’d keep watching.  Suffice to say, I’m glad I did.  Season 4 was much better, and Season 5 was excellent.

So far, the final season looks to be shaping up to be just as good or even better than the last one.

So – some thoughts and spoilers on the season so far, and especially the latest episode, “Lighthouse”, after the leap…

A reader writes:

Erik, as someone who lives in the Mighty Whitey Elite NY-DC Corridor, but who comes from Tea Party America, and who has lots of friends and relatives highly sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, I want to say that I think you and Freddie are both right, though your point in defense of the Tea Partiers is a more difficult one for people who live in your (our) social and professional milieu to grasp.

Like Freddie, and I think also like you, I don’t have much time for the Tea Partiers. Their protests are incoherent. Whether they realize it or not, they are setting themselves up as tools of the Republican Party (I’m a registered Republican, by the way, though a deeply disaffected one). In conversations with these people, I am impressed, and not in a good way, by how totally unrealistic they are about the problems facing our country, and the possible solutions. They think Sarah Palin is untouchable, and when you actually try to talk to them about what she stands for, they can’t do it. "Palin good, anti-Palins bad!" is the response I get. They hate "Washington" (and who could blame them for that?), and they hate "big government," but as far as I can tell, their rage is inchoate — which is to say, ultimately pointless, though it can do a lot of damage before it plays itself out. As a conservative who thinks the GOP is pathetic and bereft of ideas, I find the Tea Party movement frightening, when it’s not silly. Strange that a movement can be both ridiculous and unnerving, but that’s how I see them. I think Freddie is right to point out that there’s a lot of bad, crazy stuff going on with those people. To me, the worst thing I’ve seen and heard from them is flat-out racist commentary about President Obama.

But when I read or hear people like Freddie portray these people as nothing more than whiny babies who have lost their "privilege" and who can’t deal with it, I instantly sympathize with them, for reasons you’ve articulated. Look, I know these people. I grew up with them. I am related to them. For all their flaws, I can say confidently that they are in most respects the backbone of this country. They live their own lives, work hard, treat people fairly, and expect to be treated fairly in return. They’re patriotic and proud of what they have, which is too often not a hell of a lot (you don’t see many upper middle class or wealthy people identifying with this movement). It’s easy for people like Freddie to hate on them, not only because some of them make it easy with bigoted statements, but also because they are The Other, and are pleased to identify themselves in opposition to people like Freddie. We are constantly admonished by the media to be understanding and accepting of "diversity" among the various peoples of America, but these white working class and middle class people are the only ones it’s okay to define only by their flaws. I’ve struggled with the same thing many educated Southerners of the post-civil rights generation have: how is it that people who can be so good, so deeply kind and selfless and brave, can be so completely blind and ugly on the question of race? That is, thank God, less of an issue today than it was 20 years ago; times change, and so do people. But the fact is, there are few people, or peoples, who are all good or all bad, and learning to see the people I come from in Tea Party America as fundamentally good despite their (often nasty) biases has been for me a moral education. If you were stranded on the side of the road in rural Alabama, your best friend is likely to be a redneck churchgoing Tea Partier who would come out in the middle of the night to rescue you, and either put you up for the evening or buy you a hotel room. It might not make sense, but I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a thousand times.

The tragedy of these people — hell, my people — is that they don’t grasp how the Republican Party and Fox News exploit them. Did they benefit from the depredations of Wall Street? Hell no! The Republicans and the Democrats both allowed that to happen. In my view, the Republicans have made an art of appeasing the Tea Party types (before they were called that), while really pushing hard for the interests of Wall Street. And the Democrats, despite their pretenses otherwise, consider these white people to be an embarrassment at best, but more often than not a menace. Who is really for them? Nobody, not really. No wonder they’re angry, and confused. I dearly wish they had real leadership, and weren’t taken in by that clown Glenn Beck, that cynic Dick Armey, and that nitwit Sarah Palin. Their grievances are real, and legitimate. But, as Freddie understands, they have chosen whom they’ve chosen, and however sympathetic I am to their plight, I cannot entirely blame people for scorning them for the way they have chosen to express those grievances.

It’s a real mess. In my state’s Republican primary this year, I’ll probably have to choose between a party hack or a Tea Party loon. I don’t know how I’ll vote, if I vote at all. Choices on the Democratic side seem as bad or worse. We’re in a bad fix in this country.

I agree with pretty much all of this.  I still think that the tea party members are more diverse than we give them credit for, and not all of them are as Utopian in their vision of a small-government America as the most vocal ones, but I still see no political home there, any more than in the GOP (let alone the Democrats). 

I’m just going to go start my own political non-movement.  Let’s call it Beat Conservatism.  We’ll all be bums and rail against the centralization of power, against war, against modernity and all that jazz.  We won’t be pissed off all the time, we’ll write poetry.  We won’t rally or make signs or go on TV or run candidates – we’ll just embrace our ineffectualness.  The great irony of true conservatism, if I may call it that, is that at its heart is a distrust of power.  So to really embrace it you must give it up, let go of power, let go of political ambition.  Become political pacifists.  Embrace the culture and not the war.  That’s what my non-movement will be about.  (P.S. if anyone has any literature or references on the end-days of Jack Kerouac I’d appreciate  hearing about it.  He was a life-long Republican, and toward the end of his life re-embraced Catholicism.  Quite a fascinating, but terribly sad man and story.)

Marc Thiessen has been trading punches with liberal bloggers over the factual accuracy of his new book, Courting Disaster. My guess is that he’ll be vindicated on the facts — after all, he was there. But this argument is just a sideshow, because Thiessen is wrong on the ethics, and that’s the debate that really matters.

As many people have pointed out, a single act of waterboarding does not necessarily amount to torture. But this misses the point. Waterboarding would be useful only if it was done in a way that amounted to torture. Here’s what Christopher Tollefsen (a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and co-author with Robert P. George of the book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life) has to say today about Thiessen’s argument:

In any event, the upshot of my discussion is this: if, as the double effect defense presupposes, waterboarding or some other interrogation technique is done in a way that is expected to cause harm to the suspect, then that harm is most likely intended as a means by the interrogator and double effect will not justify it. And if such techniques are performed with the intention to cause pain, but not either direct physical harm, or psychological disintegration, then they are likely to be ineffective. Either way, it is, in my view, a good thing that United States’ policy has moved (as it did in the second Bush term) beyond the grim, if understandable, policies of the first few years after 9/11.

This is not a strident statement, but it’s implications are clear and important: the United States must not resume waterboarding detainees and Marc Thiessen should stop justifying his claims by misapplying the Catholic moral tradition.

Mark Shea recently denounced Patrick Lee, another leading Catholic thinker, for “making the usual excuses for the Bush administration.” Maybe Lee has been insufficiently polemical, but I hope Shea will acknowledge the fact that Lee has written clearly that the Bush administration did engage in torture. From Lee’s 2006 article in the American Journal of Jurisprudence (Vol. 51, pg. 206. Not available online.):

Pain by itself does not seem effective in the military situations envisaged in the current debate  about what should and should note be allowed in the interrogation of suspected committed terrorists. This is why prolonged beating and prolonged deprivation of sleep, together with other methods (hooding, forcing the detainee to stand or sit for hours or days in contorted positions), plus other activities have been resorted to. In such actions, however, it seems that there is a complex set of actions designed to reduce the detainee to a “dis-integrated” state [Lee's definition of torture -MS].”

Even Lee, who has been denounced by one torture opponent, thinks that what Thiessen defends is torture. How much room does that leave for Thiessen? He wants us to listen to his expert voice on the facts of the Bush interrogation program. Fair enough. But that means he needs to listen to the experts on the ethics.

I see that it’s time for all serious people to talk about sanctions against Iran.

Are you tough? Or are you a wuss? Because — again with the duality of politics — those are your choices, and they are the only choices you get. If you’re tough, you’ll support sanctions. If you’re a wuss, you’ll wuss out.

I often am struck that this is how most people, both left and right, frame virtually every question of foreign policy. Now, they’ll usually add, sometimes it’s okay to be a wuss. Sometimes it’s prudent. Sometimes wusses do good things, even. But none of that changes the basic framing.

This, however, will. Sanctions work — on the margin. That is to say that sanctions affect different people, at different times, and in different ways, depending on the internal conditions of the target country. Some people in that country will suffer immediately. Others will never suffer at all. Some will even grow rich. The law that creates an economic sanction may be uniform, but its effects never are.

This is how all economic interventions work, foreign or domestic. Uniform action, disparate response.

Consider that those who have very little in a country — the poor, the marginalized, the uneducated, the sick, the very young or old — will have few resources that they can put toward subverting a sanctions regime. The wealthy, who can arrange the smuggling and pay the bribes, take a lot longer to be hit. They may even benefit — thanks to their ability to game the system, they now monopolize some scarce and valuable goods.

The more of a dictatorship a country is, the more the little people suffer, and the less the elites feel anything. We can’t really imagine that the very highest leadership of Iran is going to bear the weight of sanctions all by themselves, out of magnanimous concern for their long-suffering people. Far from it! They’ll make sure, with their command of the economy, that the poor, the marginalized, the uneducated, the sick, and all the rest suffer the most. It costs them nothing, and it sure looks good on TV.

Nor would a selfless dictator do any good for his people anyway. In a dictatorship, the ruling class is small by definition, so even if the rulers renounced all their luxuries, it’s not like it would meaningfully enrich the population. A hundred million dollars, divided by a hundred million people, is a dollar. Besides, the dictator and his cronies are the best-situated of all people in a country to appropriate everything, and to take advantage of a sanctions regime for their personal enrichment and pleasure (see: North Korea).

This is the real reason that sanctions against dictatorships rarely work. The decisionmakers absolutely never feel them. Squeeze a little, and you hurt the poor. Squeeze harder, and you hurt the middle class. Rarely, and with extraordinary pressure, you may hurt a few rich people here and there. But you can’t ever squeeze hard enough to hurt the political leadership. If you do, they just take it out on everyone else.

Note that the great success story of sanctions, the end of apartheid in South Africa, occurred in a democracy. Yes, it was a reprehensible and racist democracy, but it was still far more of a democracy than the pure sham we see in Iran. The important factor here is not whether we think the government in question is a Good One or a Bad One. Obviously South Africa was the latter. But in it, many of the people who were hurt by sanctions — the poor and middle-class whites — still got a meaningful say in politics. In Iran, there is no similar constituency. The last election appears clearly to have been stolen, the candidates’ lists are rigged anyway, and everyone knows it.

Now, maybe some of this is elementary to some people. I know that as a piece of analysis, it’s not at all original. But if what I’m saying is true, then why are sanctions so popular? Why aren’t they described for what they are? Imagine if every sanctions proposal were retitled: “Proposal to Hurt the Poor in _______, and to Enrich the Dictator and His Cronies”!

If we can’t retitle these proposals, why can’t we at least talk clearly about them? I have a answer there too, but it’s not one I like. It’s not one I even like to think about.

Patrick Deneen has written a fascinating entry on friendship, politics and civic virtue. Excerpting doesn’t do the post justice, but here’s the crux of his thesis:

The real relationships of people in their localities is to be replaced by rationalized and approved “programs” – “justice” is to replace “friendship. Much of the domestic politics of the 20th-century has been precisely motivated by this ambition, to displace local loyalties, and with them, attendant limitations upon those loyalties, with an abstract loyalty to nation (and, now, to the “international community”) in which concrete relations are replaced by fungible arrangements based in utility and justice is ensured by government mandate and policy. Justice – the inferior standard of mistrustful individuals – liberates us to pursue our interests without concern for the loyalties to places and communities; it is a wan echo of friendship, aimed above all toward the goal of individual liberation from the “bondage” of care, and further, a narrowed view toward the world and fellow creatures to one based mainly upon utility. Fellow citizens become more often viewed as competitors and even enemies than friends: as Aristotle predicted, where civic friendship wanes, lawsuits fill the emptied public space. Accordingly, our general mistrust for the public grows, and our relationship to law becomes one in which we see it as an imposition from outside – by “foreign” elites – rather than as emanating from the interaction of fellow citizens with a shared and discernible concern for commonweal. Our “liberation” from the bonds and limitations imposed by friendship in politics leads to the rise of the felt sense of political tyranny.  This analysis, of course, echoed Tocqueville’s understanding that the rise of “soft tyranny” came not from “Statism” as such, but the isolation and weakness experienced by modern democratic “individuals.”

I’m certainly sympathetic to this diagnosis, but I think it’s pretty easy to see why friendship isn’t a suitable basis for political administration beyond the local level. The central objection is scalability: what looks like harmless familiarity at a town meeting is more like cronyism on the national stage. In an intimate setting, the logic of appointing people you know and trust is pretty straightforward: disinterested, scientific expertise is harder to come by at the local level; close working relationships often produce successful results, and friends and neighbors are less likely to assume cronyism or bribery played a part in personnel decisions if they can vouch for the character of the appointee.

Without the benefits of familiarity, however, political friendship veers dangerously close to outright corruption. Detached from localities, politicians are no longer subject to close supervision from their constituents, who can prevent practices like appointing friends from lapsing into outright cronyism. I don’t think it’s any accident that Ted Stevens, Alaska’s legendarily corrupt former Senator, was also celebrated for his political loyalties:

Many of Stevens’s colleagues afford a grudging respect for him. In part that’s because, in spite of his outbursts, Stevens has a certain old-fashioned integrity: He keeps his word and is fiercely loyal to his friends. According to one Senate aide, Stevens was constantly by the side of his dear friend Democrat Daniel Inouye when the Hawaii senator’s wife died last year. (Inouye reciprocated last month by touring Alaska with Stevens in his hour of distress, telling the local press that coverage of his ethics woes is “overkill” and saying that, if it weren’t for Stevens’s earmarking, “Alaska would be in the Stone Age.”)

Having read the Porch for some time, I think I can anticipate Deneen’s response to this objection: Don’t get rid of friendship in politics, get rid of politics at the national level! Whether this is feasible or not is another question entirely. Deneen favorably mentions the Articles of Confederation earlier in his post, so why not consider the Republic’s dire condition before the Constitution was ratified? Congress couldn’t collect enough revenue to pay off its wartime debts, and if you read City Journal’s excellent article on John Jay, you’ll learn that the government’s inability to force state citizens to pay off prewar British creditors allowed England to maintain garrisons on American soil even after the Treaty of Paris was signed. To take a more recent example, I’m not sure how the civil rights movement would have fared without the benefit of a disinterested, muscular national government. Friendship and civic virtue may go hand-in-hand at the local level, but on the national stage, some pretense of objectivity is worth preserving.

I have learned far more about healthcare reform than I ever thought I would in recent months.  In the end, what leaps out at me is that this issue – unresolved – will become a more and more of a thorn in conservative’s side.  If people think the Tea Party phenomenon is bad, just wait until a real populist movement rises up that is fundamentally opposed to free trade, that wants more rather than less government, that demands protectionist policies and entitlements.  The one thing which I can see spurring on something like this more than any other issue is a combination of poor employment and poor (and expensive) healthcare.  Is it so hard to imagine the Tea Partier who wants government to keep its hands off his Medicare, to be turned into an advocate of protectionist policies?

The current reform bill is not nearly liberal enough to avoid such a movement, nor is it conservative enough to really put into place any real chance at a market solution.  It keeps the lousy system we have in place now, and adds to it a tremendous cost to the middle class.  Furthermore, I see no future political will to actually implement any true market solution for healthcare.  So Republicans should think about ways to make national healthcare more sustainable via market mechanisms (choice, HSA’s, etc.) while still accepting the fact that an overall national/social model will be adopted eventually.  Otherwise healthcare will likely persist as an issue and Republicans will be increasingly on the losing side of that issue.

I think the best model would probably be something like single payer plus health savings accounts.  Make people of whatever income responsible for basic healthcare costs, but protect them from really damaging bills.  Free up businesses and entrepreneurs from the chains of healthcare uncertainty.  Somehow find a way to increase the supply of healthcare; and work toward means by which we can make cheaper, alternative healthcare solutions more available.  Alternatively we could adopt something like Wyden-Bennett.  My reluctance to support this bill, pure ideological concerns aside, is that I worry it will only help persist the status quo, and the status quo is no good.

Whether there is a reasonable alternative is harder to say.  Federalism is quickly going out of style – and the next real national movement may be a unity of tea partiers and union members, social conservatives and progressives – the sort of movement Mark has predicted, but one that is bereft of libertarian and free trade principles.  What would that do to our trade policies?  To our employment rate and productivity?

Suffice to say, for anyone with a libertarian economic outlook, or for anyone with concerns over civil liberties, this should be a concern.  Perhaps fending it off with a reasonable compromise on healthcare reform would actually make a great deal of sense.

In the comments to my tea party post, Freddie writes:

It would help, you know, if you didn’t caricature my argument, or insert terms I didn’t use. Indeed, the point isn’t that they are redneck or that they are racist, but rather that they are, like all people who have found themselves leaving a position of political privilege, scared and angry. That you can’t take that as anything other than racism reveals again that you are a poor student of history, Erik, and you act out against those who  call you on it.

At some point, there’s just got to be an acknowledgment of this bare fact: all of these soi disant dissident conservatives, bohemian libertarians and reform Republicans– they are not like the Tea Partiers. And you know they aren’t. What’s the biggest tell? They don’t live where the Tea Partiers live. How many of the self-styled defenders of the Tea Party movement live where the Tea Partiers live? How many conservatives writing for <i>The Atlantic</i> or libertarians at Cato live in rural Texas or the Mississippi Delta? When do you think the last time was that your average boho DC blogger had a real Tea Partier over to their home? How often does your average pomo conservative or libertarian go out for beers with a genuine Tea Partier? What percentage of the real Tea Party protests, do you think, are from New York and DC?

Ah, you say, that just goes to show how close minded you are! But it doesn’t, though. It shows how close minded <i>they</i> are. Because they have explicitly and consistently defined themselves culturally. <i>You can ask them</i>. It’s all over their signs and literature. What did they say about Sarah Palin in the proto-Tea Party moment? They said, "She’s just like us. She’s one of us." She wasn’t– she was always rich, and now she’s downright <i>wealthy</i>–but she plays the game by hating the right people and defining herself <i>against</i> the right people. You really think that all that talk of the "real America" didn’t mean anything? You think that doesn’t have anything to do with how this country is changing? Or did you just ignore that like you ignore everything they say, so that you can foist more and more virtues onto them that they don’t possess and <i>don’t want</i>. What do they have to do to convince you that they are serious when they say that they don’t like who they don’t like? How many signs does it take? How many slogans?

That’s the bottom line here: there are an awful lot of fantasy going on. You throw on so many wonderful virtues to people who are not like you, because you are using them. They are a symbol for you, a political mass to be exploited. <i>They are telling you they are not like you</i>. I assure you, when they constantly attack the "college elite" or whatever is their preferred euphemism at the time, they are saying, among other things, "we don’t like people who write thought provoking blog posts on the Theogony."  What planet do you live on where that is not the case? Ask yourself, Erik, really ask yourself, what percentage of Tea Partiers would slur Andrew Sullivan and his husband in a heartbeat if they had a chance? 50%? 60%? You’ll rush to deny that there’s any element of homophobia in the Tea Parties, but I’ve <i>read their signs</i>. I’ve read their literature. I go to their websites. I don’t have the time for pleasant fantasy.

I don’t have the time, and I won’t permit myself, because the beginning of respect, the precondition for respect, is listening to people and extending to them the right to self-define. That’s the laurel I’ll give them that you won’t. I’ll actually extend to them the courtesy of listening to them, rather than inventing some idealized version of them for my own ends. And it’s because I listen to them that I don’t respect them. I don’t respect their incoherent political platform. I don’t respect their fear mongering. I don’t respect their conspiracy theorizing. I don’t respect the hundreds– hundreds– of flat out offensive signs and images that you and I have both seen at their rallies. Me, personally, I’d rather be disrespected for who I actually am and what I actually say than respected as a symbol or a fantasy.

What the Tea Partiers tell me, in so many ways, is that they are my enemy. And so they are.

I’m not sure that it makes sense to respond to each of these points.  So let me first say that most of what Freddie is writing here is a straw man.  I have never been a loud defender of the tea parties, nor have I foisted virtues upon the tea party movement which don’t exist. Indeed, if anything I have spent a good deal more time and ink criticizing the tea parties than I have spent defending them.  Freddie is right – this isn’t my movement, nor do I think I would much fit in at the rallies or with the folk out there proclaiming that they are in fact the “true conservatives” or supporting someone like J.D. Hayworth who says things such as “Like the liberals, John McCain opposes water-boarding terrorists like the Christmas bomber.”  I may very well register as a Republican for the first time ever just to vote for McCain in the primaries!

Just the other day, I wrote in response to Mark,

Reading through the issues up for a vote in the Contract From America, it’s hard to take most of them terribly seriously, and while Mark is right that they are tightly focused on fiscal and economic issues, it’s hard to ascertain any coherent economic or political philosophy from the list.  The only consistent thread is reflexive anti-taxation which is neither new or unique.  And while some of the ideas are good ones, it’s hard to take the entire batch seriously.  Sooner or later, as certain groups develop more mature policy prescriptions the larger movement will splinter.  Some elements will be absorbed into the Mt. Vernon establishment which will gain some new faces but little else.  The remaining elements will be outsiders, and perhaps even morph into a third party.  But that group will be more extreme, more ideologically “pure” and thus even less relevant than the mainstream elites.

I have previously written that the Tea Party movement is similar to a glorified revolutionary war reenactment.  I have written against the reflexive anti-tax sentiment of the Tea Parties.  And while, on occasion, I have mused with optimism that the tea parties represent a new beginning, a move toward a better sort of conservatism in the future, I am largely cynical that this is the case (except that perhaps the more extreme elements on the right will end up self-destructing and will be resurrected as something wholly different and better…)  I am not starry-eyed about my relationship to the tea parties.  I may as well be an ‘elite’ and a RINO and all those other slurs and slings and arrows and talking points.

So who are you anyway?

I’m a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute. Here’s my professional page. I’m especially proud of Cato Unbound, the Institute’s monthly ideas journal, which I help to edit.

Ah, so you speak for the Cato Institute?

Nope. My opinions are my own, and they shouldn’t be taken to represent my employer. I write here purely as a private citizen.

Didn’t you used to write at positiveliberty.com?

I did.

So what happened?

Our web host’s quality of service declined dramatically in late 2009, culminating in the loss of our domain name to a squatter through no fault of our own. By that point we’d already lost about half of our readership owing to the repeated and extensive downtime. It pained me, but I determined that the domain name wasn’t worth fighting over.

The data, however, is safe, and there is some chance that the old site will return, headed up by one of the other PL bloggers. At the moment I am not actively working toward that goal. I blog so I can write, not so I can spend time talking to customer service.

(Update, March 4: The site has limped back to life, for now. I’ll be writing there as well, or at least trying to.)

Are you here for good, or just as a guest blogger?

I plan to be here for good.

What are your interests?

Libertarian political thought, futurism, science fiction, marriage and family policy, and religion.

How do you tie all that together?

I don’t.

So tell me all about your personal life!

I’m married. To a guy. He’s an aerospace engineer, and we’ve been together for going on twelve years now. We got hitched in 2003, which is earlier than nearly anyone else in a same-sex marriage. We went to Canada to do it, so we’ve really been the guinea pigs in the whole social experiment. Last year we adopted a newborn daughter. I try to respect my family’s privacy, so you won’t see too many baby pictures from me.

Would you be interested in writing for [insert other venue here]?

Perhaps. E-mail me and we’ll talk. It’s my first name dot my last name at gmail.com.

Judging by the freshmen at my university (hereafter “Mall U”), I’d guess that high schools now assign the Odyssey more often than the Iliad. I suppose the Odyssey is more a yarn, with daring do, exotic locations, high adventure and true love. It’s more accessible and the Iliad is, by contrast, intense, violent, and a bit dismal. Personally, however, I prefer the Iliad and find the Odyssey a bit too much like a boy’s adventure tale.

The tale begins ten years after the Trojan War. Achilles is dead, Menelaus and Helen have reconciled, and most of the warriors have returned home. All but one ill-fated ship. In Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope and her son Telemachus are awaiting his return. He’s been gone for nearly two decades and the natives are getting restless. The local swells are hanging around the royal house, drinking and trying to get in Penelope’s tunic. She is undecided: desperately awaiting his return, while letting the suitors hang about offering her gifts. She has promised to marry someone after weaving a burial shawl, and each night she unweaves it, perhaps the most creative example of cock-teasing in world literature! [Read more →]

There is a common narrative surrounding the Tea Parties which goes something like this: Obama was elected and now a bunch of angry, ignorant white folk afraid of the fact that they are being displaced by immigrants and liberal elites are making a whole lot of noise and calling it a Tea Party.

There may be some truth to this notion.  There are some angry white people in America, even a few very racist ones – but I think this particular narrative is mostly wrong and is based largely on a sort of trendy prejudice. I call it a “trendy” prejudice, because it’s exactly that – a prejudice that is very in vogue among critics of the Tea Parties or critics of those awful, no-good Republican obstructionists.  It’s also trendy in that nobody in the political-correctness crowd really sees it as a prejudice.  It’s just fine to think of the Tea Partiers as “teabaggers” and snicker at them because, well, look at them!  They are surely deserving of mockery and disdain….

It’s very much the sort of arrogant opinion you might find Bill Maher espousing as he derides Christians for their nonsensical faith or those stupid, ignorant rubes clinging to their guns when – if they were of the enlightened class – they could be wondering about the carbon footprint their assault rifles were leaving instead.

Naturally many of the more vocal components of the Tea Parties or the American right do themselves no favors in disabusing us of these notions.  The Michele Bachmanns of the world lend some hint of truth to accusations of paranoia.  Glenn Beck is a little wild-eyed at times. 

But I wonder, have rural whites (i.e. angry rednecks) really been in power for decades?  And what do we mean by “in power” anyways?  Is it possible that people in general have simply been more in control over their own destinies in the past, making most of their decisions at a local or state level? Then, as the federal government becomes increasingly stronger and more pervasive, that local and community control becomes more and more diminished?  This isn’t a question of power over others, then, but one of power over ourselves.