August 11, 2004

Real Wages/Income

Thanks to those few who replied to my request for stuff on calculating real wages. Here's what I've got so far:

Paul Krugman, "Viagra and the Wealth of Nations,"

Arnold Kling, "How Much Worse Off Are We?," TCS, July 2004

Amartya Sen, "The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons", Journal of Economic Literature,1979 (available through JSTOR)

Jack Triplett, "Hedonic Indexes and Statistical Agencies, Revisted," paper presented to the BLS, June 2000. [PDF]

And a bunch of other possibly relevant stuff from Triplett here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics FAQ about the Consumer Price Index.

Krugman gets very close to what I'm thinking about, but the end of his piece skirts the real issue about the extent to which economics relies on implicit psychological and moral theories. I'm still looking for something that's more deeply reflective about the philosophical dimensions of this issue. I'll let you know if I find anything, and please let me know if you know of anything.

[Update: More Citations]

William D. Nordhous, "Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not"

The Boskin Commission Report, "Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living," Report to the Senate Finance Committee, 1996.

Robert Gordon, "The Boskin Commission Report and Its Aftermath," NBER Working Paper 7759

Thanks so far to Tyler Cowen, Ryan Seals, Erin Shellman and Alex Taborrok.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Meritocracy: The Appalling Ideal?

Over at TCS I try to parry the thrust of this Matt Yglesias blog post. I argue that it is in fact possible to deserve what once has worked for, and that there are in fact self-made men who deserve credit for their achievements. I don't believe these are controversial propositions, aside from a few sholastic dissenters. But I think this is a case where it's worthwhile bolstering common sense.

[NB: I have nothing to do whatsoever with the red donkey illustration.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Speak the Truth, as Long as You Don't Think It's Persuasive

Three groups are filing an FEC complaint against the folks putting out the SwiftVets ad. I think the ad is extremely effective. I have no way of independently verifying any of the claims therein, but it hits the right buttons and made me pretty willing to believe that Kerry plays with his war record to suit his political aspirations.

So, naturally, the ad, and the "soft" money that paid for it, is being interpreted as an attempt to influence the presidential election. This is, I understand, illegal. However, Mike Rusell from Swift Boat veterans for truth maintains:

The ads are not meant to influence the presidential election. The ads are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry's service record so people can make their own decisions.

Now, surely this is a lie. The ads ARE meant to influence the election. The point is, Mike Russell shouldn't have to lie about this, but McCain/Feingold makes him a liar.

No doubt the ads "are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry's war record." Suppose you are one of the men making a claim in the ad and you speak truly. The difference between what you know and what Kerry claims may be sufficient ground for thinking Kerry disqualified for office, and, suppose, on this basis, you wish for him to lose the election. You believe that if others had your information, then voters might wish to alter their estimation of Kerry's fitness for the presidency. The people with whom you have shared your knowledge about Kerry's record and who have financially supported the ad campaign share your desire that your knowledge of the matter be made available to broader public.

Isn't it just disturbing that this may in fact be illegal? If I publish a scientific article that cites empirical data in order to refute a competing theory, I also intend this to have some impact on the opinion of the scientifc community. I intend to influence their beliefs about what theory to support. This may in fact be my main motivation for gathering data in the first place: I want to persuade. This is, of course, OK.

But, strangely, in the political arena, which relies on argument and the free play of claims and counter-claims for its proper function, publicly airing what one believes to be true can under certain circumstances be illegal. Doesn't it seem that if one want to tell what one believes to be true, it shouldn't matter where the money comes from?

I want to see the counter-ads. I want to see other vets saying that Van O'Dell and Jack Chenoweth are liars, and telling me why. I want to hear eyewitness reports about the time John Kerry saved the life of a dying child with one hand while fending off VC with a machine gun in other, all while shouting brilliantly improvised orders despite the blood running into his eyes. Even if it takes soft money to do it.

Anyway, was it really Kerry's best idea to push his stint in Viet Nam (or Cambodia, or wherever he was) to the front? Sadly, I think it was.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:09 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

McCain/Feingold as Argument Against Democracy

Let me follow up on the above with a couple thoughts. Isn't the dim, manipulable nature of the voter a premise of McCain/Feingold-like legislation? It strikes me that it must be. One can only "buy" an election by running a ton of ads if the ads really work. But is this a problem that can really be allayed by banning certain means of manipulation? If people are dim and manipulable, then their opinions already likely reflect their dimness and history as victims of manipulation. How is it, then, that an opinion changed by an advertisement financed by "soft" money is somehow less authentic than an opinion changed because of social pressure or a sophistical argument from the mouth of one's sister at a family reunion? How do restrictions on well-financed mass speech do anything to change the picture about the legitimacy or democratic character of outcome?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 10, 2004

Question for Economists: Calculating Real Wages

Can someone point me to the state of the art on methods for calculating real wages, especially how changes in technology are accounted for in changes in purchasing power. How, for example, is the availability of a drug or labor-saving appliance or new source of entertainment that was not available 20 years ago included in the estimate of the real wage? I know of several sources of information on this problem, largely in the semi-popular press, but am largely interested in discovering if there is a definitive academic article or book (or several) that deals seriously with this issue, and is recognized as the latest and most definitive word. Thanks.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 09, 2004

The Avant Garde: Kiling Themselves, so You Don't Have To

Grant McCracken's interesting post on "Cultural Innovation: The Benefits and Costs" reminds me a great deal of this post of mine from a couple years ago. Grant links to the weird and disturbing Memorial List of alumae of Franconia College, an experimental college from the 60s & 70s. But check out Grant's post first to get the context.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Trade not Aid

M'Town homegirl Melinda Ammann has a good piece in the Washington Times on the benefits to Africa of ending agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 06, 2004

Partay

I'm absolutely terrible at remembering to invite people to parties. If you should have been invited to our shindig Saturday, then you're invited. You know who you are.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Rational Ignorance

Canadian young adults show signs of having their priorities straight.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 05, 2004

Too Rich for Our Own Good

There's lots of good stuff today on the extremely pressing problem of being too rich. Julian notes the lousy Barry Schwartz essay at TNR. Arnold Kling takes on Robert Frank at TCS.

The arguments basically come down to something like, "The value of the marginal dollar declines, but people irrationally keep working to get dollars, which they really want less than lots of stuff they could have, therefore. . . a single-payer national heatlh care system (or whatever one would like to see the government do.) Now, I take the premises seriously, and really don't think there is any good reason to believe that people always know what is in our interest, or always behave rationally. However, the conclusions to Schwartz/Frank-style arguments remain shining examples of the bowel-loosening non sequitur.

The first response to the S/F arguments ought to be that they've really missed the hard nugget of wisdom at the heart of the theory of public choice. The nugget is not that people are rational utility maximizers, which is certainly false, or that politicians are vote maximizers, or that bureacrats are budget maximizers, or whatever. The hard nugget is that the nature of human behavior is general, and that a theory that applies to market behavior is going to apply to political behavior, too. I call this, pithily enough, the principle of behavioral uniformity. The blatently ideological and sub-scientific character of this kind of research is manifest in the failure to apply a general theory generally and to question the ability of voters to know what is in their interests and to make rational and not self-defeating choices in the voting booth. Why don't Frank and Schwartz discuss the likelihood that politicians and policymakers will stay apprised of psychological research about well-being, or will be motivated to act in accordance with their compendious understanding of the mainsprings of happiness?

Nothing follows about policy from the fact that people make sub-optimal choices, and it's an intellectual fraud to pretend that it does.

In his NRO essay, Schwartz writes:

The point is simply that we now know there is some significant subset of people likely to be made better off through heavier taxation, and that these people reside at the top end of the wealth distribution. Given that a concern for people's welfare has traditionally been one of the chief moral objections to taxing wealth (at least among those sympathetic to redistribution in principle), a policy of heavier taxation for the very wealthy may be the only moral course of action.

The point is simply that we don't know this. To say that people would be happier if they had fewer choices is not to say that they will be happier if they are stripped of choices. We know that people are very very loss averse, and so increased taxation may well be a deep source of grievance, anxiety, and agitation, even if things would have gone better for the poor rich sods if they'd never gotten that rich in the first place. If people are in general happier with fewer than four children, you do not make them better off by stripping them of excess offspring and shipping Jan, Bobby, and Marcia off to the homes of sad, childless couples.

The flailing Kierkegaardian leap to state solutions when faced with problems of choice in a culture of plenitude is evidence of not only sloppy thinking (for there is no reason to think state action will improve upon private action) but of badly retarded imagination. The future belongs to those who seize what is in effect a huge entrepreneurial opportunity.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:34 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

August 04, 2004

Snippet Contra Feser 1

I don't have the time right now to reply to all of Feser's reply all at once. So I'll post snippets about various points as I get to them. Let's start here:

But there are two problems with this characterization that reflect Wilkinson's failure seriously to address my argument. First, his definition doesn't say anything that an egalitarian liberal or non-libertarian conservative couldn't agree with; indeed, many egalitarian liberals and non-libertarian conservatives do in fact endorse "a relatively small state governed by a rule of law that protects rights to personal autonomy, contract, and private property from within the context of a robust and free market economy." So Wilkinson's definition fails to capture anything distinctively libertarian. The second, related, problem is that what counts as e.g. "rights to personal autonomy, contract, and private property" and a "relatively small state" -- something Wilkinson would have to elaborate upon in order to make his definition informative -- is itself extremely controversial, and controversial not only between libertarians and non-libertarians, but even among libertarians themselves. It is therefore no good to point to a commitment to "rights," "the rule of law," and the like either as the common core of all libertarian theories or as the one thing that all members of a pluralistic modern society can agree on, because the content of these ideas is precisely what everyone disagrees about. Wilkinson might as well argue that libertarianism, egalitarian liberalism, socialism, and communism are all really varieties of the same doctrine, because they "overlap" in their commitment to "freedom." Finding some terminology that adherents of various positions all use hardly suffices to demonstrate that there is some substantive view they all have in common; what needs to be shown is that they use that terminology in more or less the same way.

Feser is sort of right; I wasn't putting a great deal of weight on the distinctively libertarian notion of liberal order. I intend to be talking about liberal order, to which I take egalitarian liberals and classical liberal conservatives all to be committed. Political liberalism, of which political libertarianism is a specific instance, is intended precisely to provide a common intellectual framework from within which egalitarians, conservatives, and libertarians can constructively debate and deliberate together in public.

Feser is worried that this or that -- rights, rule of law -- have no non-controversial specification. I thik he's still missing the point, and wants to argue against political libertarianism as if it's something that it's not. Political libertarianism just isn't a substantive, highly specified doctrine; it's an abtract framework for liberal order. Last night at dinnner Julian suggested that political liberalism is to a particular substantive comprehensive conception something like the scientific method is to a particular scientific theory. Feser's argument has something of the flavor of the claim that the scientific method is a failure (or there is no scientific method at all) because there remains heated, recalcitrant controversy over the possibility of integrating relativity with quantum mechanics.

The libertarian conception of liberal order differs from the welfare liberal version and the conservative versions in exactly the way you would imagine, and in exactly the way I mentioned near the end of my TCS piece. The welfare liberal believes fairly extensive and deep-reaching redistributive and regulatory mechanisms are a necessary condition for stable liberal order. The conservative believes that a considerable number of restrictions on personal choice are required to maintain the conditions for the flourishing of the family, which is a necessary condition for stable liberal order. The libertarian thinks we need neither extensive and deep-reaching regulation and redistribution, nor considerable restriction on personal choice in order for liberal order to hum along quite nicely. Various views about the nature of rights and the rule of law are consistent with the libertarian view.

Feser in general seems to be obsessed with borderline cases, and how exactly to mark out the boundaries of categories. He should relax and acquiesce to the wisdom of ordinary use. While I don't insist on self-identifying as a libertarian, other people identify me as a libertarian because I have a set of views that are characteristically shared by libertarians. That said, I believe in the possibility of a legitimate state. I believe in the desirability of some small-scale redistribution. I am not opposed to all paternalistic restrictions on behavior. I'm no purist. But people have no problem identifying me as a kind of libertarian. If my views shifted along one or another dimension, I might become more like a welfare liberal or a classical liberal conservative than a libertarian. The point on the continua where I would be best classified as something else, like the point of hair-loss at which I man is best classified as "bald", is obscure. Nevertheless, I don't imagine Feser has a problem identifying the bald. And I don't suppose that people who identify me as a libertarian are confused.

More to come.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:45 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

August 03, 2004

Yet More Political Libertarianism

For TCS readers arriving from Ed Feser's rejoinder to my rejoinder, you can find further discussion of political libertarianism here and in the comments, here.

I expect to have a reply to Feser's latest up later today or tomorrow.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

July 31, 2004

Human Nature and Guassian Morality

I am anxiously awaiting the publication of David Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychlogy and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature(link to PDF table of contents). I took Buller's evolutionary psychology course in 1997, and I think it was the best course I've ever had. David's amazing crisp clarity enabled him to convey huge amounts of empirical information while simultaneously framing the philosophical debates surrounding philosophy of biology and evolutionary psychology in vivid and compelling terms. David's been working on this book since then, at least, and I expect it to be outstanding.

It's because of this course that I gave up on my facile Randian views about "human nature." If I'm not misremembering, I think an earlier iteration of the book's tite was . . . the Persistent Myth of Human Nature. I'm not sure if this is David's own view, but I was eventually persuaded, despite very strong initial resistence, by the Hull/Ghiselen argument that species are not really natural kinds at all, but are rather a special kind of individual, like a very old club.

The members of a species are not members of a kind bound together by a shared essence. Members of a species are more like members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, bound together by a geneological fact. You and I are both part of the club of humanity because we have a shared ancestor: the first human. This, however, implies nothing about our having a metaphysically deep shared natured. Evolution works on selection over natural variation. That is, evolution works because members of a species are not homogenous. So at any time, there is simply a distribution of traits throughout a population. Maybe the distribution is a normal curve. Maybe it isn't. In any case, the distribution changes over time, and thus so do the traits of the "typical" member (if there is one). There simply is no non-contingent common core of traits that ties us together other than our shared lineage and consequent genetic similarity.

This is why I find the idea that there is a right way to live according to nature extremely dubious. (This is all me, from here on out, and not Buller, or anyone else.) We have no "deep" nature. Right now, in this neighborhood of our evolutionary history, there is a distribution of traits that one might call "typical" in a statistical sense. But this has no more deeply normative significance than would the fact that 90% of us prefer almonds over pistacchios. It makes no sense to argue that we thus ought to prefer pistacchios. People with statistically "deviant" behavioral dispositions are by definition not "normal," but their behavior is not a scintilla less "natural" than that of the normals.

This is not to say that our contingent, temporary statistical "nature" is normatively irrelevant. Far from it. Our intuitions about morality, justice, and so forth, and our behavioral dispositions arise from within this "nature." Our understanding of what we have reason to do isn't seperable from what we happen to be like. The ends we take ourselves to have reason to pursue depends on what we happen to be like, and what we happen to be like tells us a great deal about the necessary means to those ends. Given the ends that most of have, and take ourselves to have reason to realize, together with what most of us are like, it is possible to get fairly stable general principles about what we ought to do.

But we mustn't kid ourselves. These principles simply aren't universal, or universally binding, because there is no unviversal human nature. Some "deviants" will find a society hospitable to the lives of "normals" incompatible with their needs. And this is simply tragic, no more, no less. The deviant will either be unhappy or will act contrary to the principles of normals. If the latter is threatening to the order required by the normals, then they will lock up, institutionalize, or otherwise rid themselves of the deviant menace. But it is important to see that although the deviant is acting wrongly from the perspective of "morality," construed as the system of rules that facilitates decent life among the normals, from a broader perspective they are just very unlucky. Foreign cells rejected from a host body have done nothing wrong; they are just incompatible with the principles governing the local order.

There's a lot more to say about this, but that's all for now.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:48 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (1)

July 29, 2004

Shindiggedy

If you're reading this, then you already know, or can't go, but Blogorama is tonight. Rendevous Lounge. 18th & Kalorama. Starting in about 20 minutes. Hugs.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 07:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

More Political Libertarianism

I'm happy and flattered to see that Randy Barnett of The Volokh Conspiracy has linked to and quoted approvingly from my TCS piece.

Judging from the comments thread at TCS, it seems that I failed to adequately convey that political libertarianism is by no means an amoral theory. Political libertarianism assumes that a peaceful, stable, fair, extended social network of mutually advantageous cooperation -- liberal order -- is, if not morally good in itself, at least good as a means to other moral ends. The point, however, is that people with different commitments can support a liberal order, and can account for the moral value of the order in different ways. When you live in a large, incredibly pluralistic society like ours, the problem of how we all can live together, despite our differences, is a serious problem no matter what you happen to believe. A minimal set of social principles that accomodates the broadest array of commitments and worldviews can be seen by all sorts of people as the best solution to that problem.

This also does not imply that comprehensive justificatory strategies are false. Suppose, say, Ayn Rand is right. Then Ayn Rand is right. But the probability that everyone comes to agree with Ayn Rand is, well, zero, give or take. (The probability that the people who claim to agree with Ayn Rand will come to agree with each other is probably no better.) Whatever the correct comprehensive theory is, it's probably never going to be the case that everyone believes it. An authoritarian order can probably coerce agreement, to an extent, by restricting freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry. But that's not the kind of society we want. And a small, homogenous community, a group of Hutterhites, for example, might share a common conception of the good. But we're talking about a huge, diverse society.

So, one might arrive at the one true theory of the good, and even do a bang up job of spreading the word, but still be swamped by Babelian pluralism. The problem simply isn't how to get everyone to agree on fundamentals, because it's a problem that won't get solved in a big, free society. What we're left with is a sort of engineering problem. What terms of association, what social principles, can accomodate all these people, and all these diverse commitments, in a manner (almost) everyone has reason to affirm. The hypothesis is that political libertarianism is the best solution to the engineering problem.

Now, I'm by no means sure that this hypothesis is correct, or even exactly what political libertarianism entails (and thus what the hypothesis really is). I think I'd just want to call my own view liberal minimalism. I'm receptive to the idea that some small-scale redistribution might be a condition for stable liberal order, putting me in the company of Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Loren Lomasky. While people tend to identify these thinkers as libertarian, people also tend to think libertarianism by nature rules out redistribution. So I'm not quite sure what to call myself, not that it matters much.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:29 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

It seems that I'm constantly getting into arguments--arguments that don't even interest me that much--about whether moral behavior is even possible if people don't believe in God, or Aristotelian natural ends, or natural rights, or whatever. It's boring because, well, it's just plain as an Amish girl that you don't need to believe in anything special to do the right thing. Nevertheless, I often hear arguments that go something like this:

"If people don't believe in God, then we won't be afraid to do terrible things, and won't have any motivation to do good things, and then there'll just be CHAOS, which would be horrifying."

To which I usually sit with a stunned and expectant look on my face. Because the next step seems perfectly obvious to me. If chaos is so terrible, isn't that reason enough for people to, you know, avoid it. No one much wants to step over corpses on the way to Starbucks, or hose the blood off the sidewalks each morning. We'll all be much better off if we constrain ourselves in certain ways, and if we exert a little extra effort in certain cases.

So isn't this all we need to believe: that being good is a net winner over baby-raping anarchy? God, natural rights, or whatever, don't seem to get you anything extra. The horribleness of immorality does a pretty good job of making morality look pretty good without any special help. So why all the insistence on overdetermination? Insurance?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:45 AM | Comments (35) | TrackBack (1)

July 28, 2004

Marx against the Marxists

I found Brian Leiter's explanation of the intellectual relationship of Marx to the Critical Legal Studies movement pretty interesting.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 04:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I Sold my Bicycle for Democracy

Matt Welch's convention rant had me literally pumping my fists in the air and yelling "Yeah!!!"

I'll stop linking to little Reason pieces as soon as they stop being so choice.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Surreal Awesomness of Gmail

When there aren't many good ads to show you, Gmail instead serves up helpful links to "Related Pages" - that is, related to the text of the email thread you currently have open. Well, in a set of emails to the editor of TCS regarding my piece in TCS, Google gives me this related page:

How freakin' cool is that?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Political Libertarianism

Check out my rejoinder to Ed Feser's trainwreck of an anti-libertarian essay at Tech Central Station, which Julian so ably thrashed last week.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:12 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Don't Just Vote, Do Something!

The convention provides a welcome occasion to reflect on the ways in which politics distorts our identity, sours our relations to others, and makes our lives generally lousier. Brian Doherty's lovely essay sounds a lot of themes I've been harping on. I especially like the point of the opportunity costs of political activism. Since electoral political activity has almost zero impact, why not spend that time just trying to live the way you think everyone ought to? The point of thinking you know how you ought to live is that you live that way, not that you waste your life trying to get other people to live that way, since wasting your time telling other people how to live probably isn't part of what it is you think you know about how to live.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:28 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

July 27, 2004

Uffdah

Peter Northrup at Crescat makes the important point about the fact that Norwegians don't go to work a lot.

(Couldn't find a picture of a viking in a hammock.)

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

More Mansfieldiana

Rob Light, who I guess likes to sends me stuff he knows will aggravate me, sent me a little sermon Harvey Mansfield delivered at Harvard and published in the Summer 2004 Claremont Review of Books. It's reproduced after the jump, for those who want to get a bit clearer on what Mansfield is really saying about science: it should be religion's bitch.

Continue reading "More Mansfieldiana"

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

July 26, 2004

Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo . . .

Nick Gillespie drops mad Star Trek scientifics in his argument for the essential similarity of Bush and Kerry. On other "The Election Matters Not So Much" fronts, Anton Sherwood in the comments delivers this link to a lovely first-person account of bureaucratic autonomy.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Attention National Press!

I will not be blogging the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. I will be denigrating Harvey Mansfield, in addition to tackling sundry other non-convention topics. I am a fount of information about what it is like to have nothing whatsoever to do with the convention. Please direct press inquiries to the comments section.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

What Kind of Seriousness is This?

The Big Trunk from Power Line posts an excerpt from Harvey Mansfield's Weekly Standard review of Stephen Rhoad's Taking Sex Differences Seriously. Let me tell you what I think of this bit:

What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it is not close enough. For evolution sees everything as organized for survival and cannot recognize our better, higher nature. Thus it sees no difference in rank between the male desire for an active sex life and the male interest in being married, or between the promptings of desire and the instruction of reason. What kind of seriousness is this?

Right back atcha Mansfield. What kind of seriousness is this? You know, I've heard this stuff about "seriousness" before from Strausseans. It's really got to be said that Mansfield and his posse are masters of "seriousness," which is a kind of painfully earnest self-congratulating pose. But he apparently cares very little about seriousness, which is involved in things like finding out what nature is like, as opposed to jacking off over Machiavelli.

Anyway, get this: "What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it's not close enough." Wow. I think I just shit my pants. Seriously (not "seriously"), who does this guy think he is? Sure, sure: William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard University. But where does the Kenan Professor of Government get off announcing that what evolutionists, people who study nature in a systematic and methodical way for a living, aren't close enough, to the "notion of nature?"

Apparently Mansfield, master of the classics, knows nature. Mansfield knows, a priori from the well-appointed comfort of his study, that a sufficient approximation to the "notion of nature" includes a satisfactory account of our "better, higher nature." What is this exactly?, you may find yourself asking. Better than what? Higher than what? Well, whatever it is, I guess an account of it is a constraint on any theory of nature. Somebody call the biology department! Call MIT! Does Steven Pinker know?

If by "better, higher nature," Mansfield means our capacity for benevolence, sacrifice, sense of honor, dignity, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, love, friendship, longing for transcendence, etc., then the evolutionist has exactly zero problem recognizing our better, higher nature. It's data. It is something to be explained.

Mansfield's beef is this: actual factual mind-independent nature, the thing that people who specialize in studying nature, like evolutionists, specialize in studying, that thing, out there, is not normative just all by itself, and thus lacks "ranks" and differences thereof.

Disappointingly, an evolutionary (or any naturalistic) explanation of our longing for transcendence, for example, will not be an account of the existence of a transcendent reality in which we as beings are finally made whole through reunification with our creator. An explanation of love is going to say something about pair bonding, babymaking, oxytocin, vasopressin, credible commitment in a high stakes cooperative game, and so forth, and NOT, that we were all once roly-polys ripped asunder by Zeus's lightning bolts and left longing for our lost halves. Or whatever. That is, an account of our nature that has something to do with truth, i.e., correspondence with the world, and not "Truth," i.e., a certain profound feeling of affirmation and enlightenment, will be an explanation that is not built from within the first-personal moral-psychological conceptual scheme.

Now, most of us understand the difference in rank between a desire for an active sex life, which is clearly sensible, moral and good, and the desire to become married, which tends to be a disastrous mypopic choice stemming from a desperate desire to avoid confronting one's own panicked emptiness. And we all know about the promptings of the desire to heed the insructions of reason and the instruction of reason to heed the promptings of desire, and which is better than which. So the problem isn't that we don't perfectly well know how to rank things.

The point is that ranking things is something that we do, not something that nature does. We have hopes and dreams and all sorts of "higher" emotions that play into the way we represent and engage with the world. If we were built differently, and we held the rest of nature constant,--if we had other needs, a different kind of psychology,a different set of emotions--then we'd ranks things differently, and we'd be right to do it.

In any case, Mansfield, like most Straussians, is a rhetorician, not a philosopher. So he is not, strictly speaking, arguing. He is exhorting us to imagine his moral opinions as lines in the book of nature. I decline. It's a good book as it is. Take a look Harvey!

[Note: Thanks to Robert Light for the link. The picture is Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:08 AM | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

July 25, 2004

Grant McCracken

I love his blog. He make me want to be an anthropologist!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

State Autonomy and Electoral Triviality

Almost everybody thinks elections are events of immense importance. I think this is evidence that almost nobody understands how we are in fact governed (or ruled). The distinction between the government and the state is simple enough, but it seems that nobody really really gets it.

The point is that if Kerry wins, just suppose, then we'll get a new slate of political appointees in the agencies of the executive branch. But the overall turnover will be negligible. Now, political appointees matter, but not THAT much. The lifers rule.

When Congress passes a law, it's out of their hands. It's up to the bureacracy to interpret it, which they can do faithfully or perversely, and to enforce it, which they may choose not to do at all.

I once went on a date with an EPA lawyer. (Yay Nerve.com!) I said to her, more or less, this is my guess about what you do. . . A new environmental law is passed. The EPA people decide whether they like it or not. If they like it, they enforce it. If they don't like it, they think, "What would we like the law to mean?" They then try to find a way of interpreting the language to reflect their, rather than congress's preferences. The lawyers then think about who will sue them if they interpret the law this way, and whether they would win the suit. If they can't win, they reinterpret it in a way that maybe doesn't reflect their preferences as much, but which is more likely to stand up in court. Once they've got a winner, they implement, and prepare for the likey suit.

She said, "That's almost exactly what I do."

I wanted to know whether she, a good liberal, considered this anti-democratic. She didn't. Not at all. Democracy is beautiful! It's just that the representatives of the people tend not to know their elbows from their assholes, are subject to all sorts of distorting electoral pressures, and so pass laws contrary to what they would pass if they knew more and were directly motivated by a desire to promote the commonweal. So democracy is great, except when it's not, due to ignorance and bad motivation, which is almost always, in which case the bureaucracy, who really do know what they're doing, has to fix things.

Now, I found this to be an astonishing . . . tension. (No, we never went out again.) In any case, I'm quite glad things work this way. You may never hear another libertarian say this, so listen up: I think the United States of America has an absolutely wonderful bureaucracy! That is, wonderful relative to most actually existing bureacracies in the world, which should be the relevant comparison class, not the Meinongian bureacracies of our dreams.

Anyway, we elect the government, not the state. Governments comes and go. The state persists. We should count ourselves lucky to have a decent state that is pretty much competent, and does a fairly good job of undermining democracy in a generally salutary fashion.

That said, when a President tells the Army to go invade a country, they go. A president that didn't do this might be nice.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

July 24, 2004

Geechy

Can someone please explain to me what 'geechy' means? Thank you.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

July 22, 2004

Cuddle Party!

Does the DEA know that oxytocin is addictive?

934 Westminster is so having a cuddle party! The rules:

1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2. No SEX. (Yep, you read that right.)

3. Ask for permission to kiss or nuzzle anyone. Make sure you can handle getting a no before you invite or request anyone to cuddle or kiss.

4. If you're a yes, say yes. If you're a no, say no.

5. If you're a maybe, say NO.

6. You are encouraged to change your mind from a yes to a no, no to a yes anytime you want.

7. NO DRY HUMPING!

8. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

9. If you're in a relationship, communicate and set your boundaries and agreements BEFORE you go to the Cuddle Party. Don't re-negotiate those agreements/boundaries during the Cuddle Party. (Trust us on this one.)

10. Get your Cuddle Life Guard On Duty or Cuddle Caddy if there's a concern, problem, or question or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

11. Crying and giggling are both welcomed and encouraged.

12. Outside of your personal relationships, it's nobody's business who you cuddle, so please be respectful of other people's privacy when sharing with the outside world about Cuddle Parties.

13. Arrive on time.

14. Be hygienically savvy.

15. Clean up after yourself.

16. Always say thank you and practice good Cuddle Manners.

My guess is that any party where you have to emphatically proscribe dry humping is a party in which there will be some dry humping.

Objectivist bonus: CuddleParty.com is apparently the copyright of an entity named "Atlas Spooned." Which makes me think: If Rearden would have just taken some of his seeting psychosexual frustration and just cuddled with Dagny . . . I mean, jammies stay on, and they just spoon. I think our Promethean giants of industry might have been a lot less stressed out about all the parasites, moochers, and whim-worhsipping second handers, and everything would have turned out a lot nicer for everybody. Rural Colorado gets pretty boring after awhile.

Want to know some words I learned from Ayn Rand: bromide; instransigent.

[Link from Gene, who I think could use a good cuddle.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

July 21, 2004

Rich in Love

A friend (who may or may not want to be named) points to this WebMD article summarizing the economic value of sexual activity. It turns out that extra money doesn't make us that much happier, but sex makes us quite a lot happier, so if we're putting a money value on units of happiness, sex is worth a lot of money.

After analyzing data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people, Dartmouth College economist David Blachflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England report that sex "enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations" that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.

My first reaction to this is that prostitutes are undercharging. My second reaction is pretty much the same as my correspondent, who writes:

There should be a tax on all that undeclared income! -- after all, all those people are getting the benefit of that money, isn't that the same as actually having the money? How can that $50,000-equivalent benefit be redistributed so that everyone can benefit 'equally'?

It seems like a good joke, but it really is more than a joke from the perspective of distributive justice. Take a similar case. Those of us who prefer leisure over money, once we've passed a fairly low threshold of money, gain all the benefits of society without paying much in through taxes.

Suppose that after $15,000 annual, the marginal value of a dollar for me plummets sharply, while the value of an hour of leisure remains very high. If I could be working 40 hours a week, and making sixty big a year, but I'd rather have the leisure after working only 10 a week, then those extra hours are worth at least forty five grand to me. So I buy a lot of leisure for the price of my opporunity cost. But, unlike the guy who likes owning a Cris Craft and a high-end stereo more than reading library books, taking long walks, and writing poetry, the value of my leisure can't be taxed. But this seems patently unfair. People who happen to have leisurely preferences just luck out.

How to rectify this? Well, we could just force people who like leisure to work and give the proceeds to the state, but that makes us sort of uncomfortable, as we're then caused to think a little too hard about what taxes really amount to.

Well, I guess it turns out that getting a weekly rather than a monthly is worth about $50G. And it also turns out that having more money doesn't get you more laid. So, suppose I like leisure, as above, AND I like sex as much as most people do. (Suppose.) If I manage to fit a weekly into my fairly relaxed schedule, then I'm looking at the equivalent of close to $100G in non-taxable income. This is clearly the way to go! People who work sixty hours a week to make $100G taxable, and as a consequence of all that time working and all that stress, only manage a monthly... well, those people are suckas! They're paying like 30-ish% of their income, and while I'm not literally rollin' in the Benjamins, I'm rolling in the endorphins, which is just as good.

This isn't fair! Maybe I have some control over my preference for leisure. Maybe I cultivated it by reading Marcus Aurelius or something. But my ability to swing a weekly? Well. Suppose (counterfactually, of course) that I'm ruddy and good looking, and the ladies are just irresistably drawn to my animal charisma. Well, I didn't do anything to deserve my mojo. By babe magneticity turns out simply to be an unredistributable resource. Nice for me! But hardly fair.

Maybe because I won't be so depressed, which we also find (also, that ladies ought to consider that OrthoTri-cyclen is cheaper than Prozac and condoms), it'll turn out that I contribute to the surplus of social cooperation by means of my sunny attitude. Everyone likes a guy with a spring in his step. But really, the folks paying for all those public goods, which I happily enjoy, with their labor and their lousy sex lives are certainly getting a raw deal. Notice that if they state provides things like health insurance, and so forth, then I'm really kicking it, and things have gotten even more unfair.

Seriously though, what do egalitarians think about this? Should we legalize prostitution and give people vouchers? Should we have mandatory national sexual service? Or can we just ignore certain deep kinds of inequality if the detection and enforcement costs are too high? That would be interesting.

I'm sure I've gotten ahead of myself here, but, you know, good times.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:30 AM | Comments (40) | TrackBack (1)

July 20, 2004

Choose or Lose

Has anyone considered that this may be an inclusive disjunction?

Meanwhile, P. Diddy is attempting to stir the nation's youth to action with his "Vote or Die" campaign. Now, Diddy, being a master logician, has had the foresight to pick a disjunction that is certainly true, if only contingently so. Everyone will eventually die, while it is perfectly possible (because actual) to neither choose nor lose.

Now it may be that Diddy intends an exclusive disjunction. (Either one or the other, but not both.) But I don't think he really wants to say that people who die didn't vote. He only wants to say that if you don't vote, then you'll die. Right? Well, we do know that only about half of the registered voters, to say nothing of eligible voters, failed to exercise their rights of citizenship in the last election. But Diddy's conditional entails that the non-dead voted, yet many non-dead non-voters are among us. So that can't be right. So he must be saying that if you don't vote, the probability of dying will increase. How about that? Well, we can check the death rates among voters and non-voters from the last election. My hunch is that the rate of death among voters is probably higher than among non-voters, since the elderly vote more reliably than the young, and the elderly tend to die more. So what is Mr. Combs trying to say?

Wonkette, takes it as a threat, "Vote or I'll wave a gun in your face in a midtown nightclub," which is frightening, but can't quite capture it, because waving a gun in someone's face doesn't entail their death. So it needs to be a bit stronger: Vote or I'll make you dead (whether with a pistol, a machete, a tank of water and a cinder block, a mortally frightening clown, whatever). I don't think this is the intended message, however.

Perhaps it is something like "There is someone such that if you don't vote, they will make you dead." This is a good possibility. But who could "someone" be? An avenging Democracy Fairy who slays non-voters? Well, the Democracy Fairy would have to be new, since we guessed that voters are in fact more likely to die than non-voters. Maybe the intention instead is "In a contest between A and B, if you don't vote, then A or B will make you dead." I think we're getting very close, and that this is entailed by the correct interpretation. I think it's more like, "In a contest between A and B, if A wins, then A will not make you dead, and if B wins, then B will make you dead, and if you vote, then you vote for A, and A wins, and if you don't vote, then B wins."

I wonder if Puffy knows something we don't. For my part, I suspect that B is . . . Michael Badnarik!

Or that the Diddy is subversively highlighting the majoritarian coercion implicit in democracy.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:58 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Rope Merchants

Koch Fellow Rachel Balsham has a smart post over at Obernews on the adaptation of the market to the prevalent distaste for the market. After a number of interesting examples, she predicts that

given the prevalence of vague anti-market preferences among bobos, the rise of bobo culture will bring about more creative ways to be capitalist without the aftertaste of oppression. And eventually, maybe private enterprise won't taste so bad to the cultural elite.

I think this raises all sorts of interesting questions, few of which I will raise here.

I will say that Balsham's Conjecture strikes me as containing a deep tension between the expression of preference in the market and in the voting booth. If enough people have anti-market preferences, then the market will, soon enough, begin providing goods and services packaged in a manner that appeals to those preferences. And if enough people have anti-market preferences, they will vote for anti-market policy. They are in effect buying the same thing in both cases: self-narrative coherence.

Rachel seems to think that once the market starts giving anti-market folks products that flatter their ideological self-conceptions, the edges will begin to rub off the classic anti-market tropes, and anti-market commitments will soften. But this might be backwards. The market may gratify anti-market preferences by selling products that affirm and entrench classic anti-market tropes, thus cementing or even sharpening anti-market preferences. These preferences, expressed electorally, are bad for the market.

As the Marxists were fond of saying, "The capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him." Or something like that. What we have, then, if we turn Balsham's Conjecture on its head, is a sort of ideological tragedy of the commons, where entrepreneurs race to profit from products that undermine the cultural conditions of entrepreneurship.

Oh, the contradictions of capitalism!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

D'Alliance

Check out the newish blog from the Drug Policy Alliance (Reason! Compassion!! Justice!!!) written by Baylen Linnekin. Baylen was at an IHS seminar I stage-managed a few years ago, and I had the good fortune of running into him a couple months ago after some AFF thing. Baylen's a good guy. The blog is a very useful compendium of drug-related stories and entertainingly written. Go look.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 19, 2004

Fucking Mormons

Wonkette is disappointed at her pathetically failed attempt at libertarian-baiting. She complains:

We're sort of befuddled that our jab at the prospects for Libertarian sex-for-votes trading didn't generate more indignant email from outraged Reason subscribers. These are people who can get a lively debate going about Schumpeter versus von Mises, but accuse them of not getting any and they're suspiciously silent. Sure, they talk a good free love game, but where are the swinging Chicago school devotees when push comes to, uhm, shove? We're not the only ones wondering. Noting that a special on A&E; this week blares that "There may be as many as 50,000 people involved in polygamous relationships in Utah," a libertarian livejournaler responds, "And you poly Objectivists think you're all kinky and shit! Ha! You guys are being outfucked by MORMONS!"

Now, I'm not about to concede that little Ludwig and I don't see much action, but I can gladly admit to being outfucked by Mormons without losing face. For Ana Marie and her livejournaler seem not to know that Mormonism, if about nothing is else, is about fucking!

Our "souls" are "spirit children," which are the consequence of a good celestial rodgering. The aim of life is to become a god and fuck away the afterlife with one's eternal spouse(s). A sexier theology is hardly imaginable.

According to some randomly Googled website (and I stand behind this account with the full weight of my experience as "Historic Interpreter" at the Joseph Smith Historic Center):

In Mormon theology, there are three levels of heaven, terrestial, tellestial, and celestial. It teaches that almost everyone will make it to the first level, terrestrial, but Mormons seek entrance to celestial heaven, because there they are exalted to godhood. Once a man is exalted to godhood, he and his wife will reproduce offspring for eternity. These spirit children will in turn inhabit physical bodies and have the opportunity to become gods as well. This privilege is reserved for those who go through the sacred marriage ceremony in the Temple and live in obedience to Mormon teachings.

The point is, there is no shame in being outfucked by Mormons. Fucking is what they do!

[Bonus! Click here for the words to "If I Could Hie to Kolob". Note: Kolob here is NOT a canyon in Utah!]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:32 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

July 18, 2004

Vacancy

If you, or someone you know, is looking for a place to live in Washington, DC starting in September, there is a yet-unfilled vacancy at the Westminnie House. 934 Westminster is ONE (convoluted) block's distance from the U St/Cardozo/African American Civil War Memorial metro stop. We're within a leisurely five minute stroll of some of DC's best music venues: 9:30, Black Cat, Velvet Lounge, DC9, Bohemian Caverns, and more. The restaurants and bars of a rapidly gentrifying U St are RIGHT THERE. Walk to DuPont: 15 minutes. Walk to Adams Morgan: 15 minutes. Walk Downtown: 15-20 minutes. Giant (ugh) and Whole Foods supermarkets are nearby.

Preferred roomates are 20-to-early-30-something young professional intellectual types (e.g., lettered in debate or quiz bowl). Your roommates would include two researchers at the Urban Institute and a UMD philosophy grad student.

Query in the comments, or to flybottle [[at]] willwilkinson [[dot]] net.

[Update: The vacancy has been filled. Thanks for your interest.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:19 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

July 17, 2004

Crest, Colgate, Autonomy, Alienation, Not Voting, Etc.

I agree with almost the whole of Alina Stefanescu's articulate and angry "apology." Read it.

Alina's essay reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Consider Alina's quote from Michnik:

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens, there can be no free and independent nations… a state that ignores the will and rights of its citizens can offer no guarantee that it will respect the will and rights of other peoples, nations, and states.

Do we have "free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens"? I think: no.

The traditional Marxish theory of consumer culture is that the dark arts of marketing and advertising germinate within us "false" desires. A false desire is one whose satisfaction serves not one's own "interests," but the interests of those in the business of servicing (for a pretty penny!) the psychic "needs" that they themselves have planted. So we are supposed to be wary of Nike, Starbucks, etc. lest we surrender our autonomy to the cigar-chomping moneybags. No Logo!

This idea has never done much for me. I'm impressed with my own tendency to want only a surpassingly slim fraction of the things marketed to me, and my want seems best explained by its relation to longstanding projects and plans. The thing about the market is that it is SO fragmented, there are so many choices, and there are so many counterbalancing sales-pitches competing over my very small budget that it is most likely that my choices in the end reflect fairly "authentic" preferences. (Let's say those are preferences that emerge more or less organically from my practical identity.) I've never seen the yogurt or cereal I eat advertised. I chose New Balance running shoes over Nike because I tried both and New Balance fit my feet better. I chose to start running again because I don't want to be fat. (And I don't want to be fat because, well, yes, the HHS's wildly successful VERB: It's what you do! campaign.)

However, I am beginning to find the Marxist critique quite pertinent to America's duopolistic political system. Both libertarians and Greens insistently point out that the differences between the policies of the Ds and the Rs are mostly cosmetic, with a few substantive exceptions. The logic of the median voter theorem pushes politicians toward the middle with rhetorical concessions to the flanks.

What we end up with is a choice between policy-bundles as different from the other as Colgate from Crest. But in politics we have only Colgate and Crest. Some people will have a genuine preference for better whitening action, while others will genuinely prefer enhanced cavity protection. But mostly there is a riot of indifference.

Since the policy bundles we're offered represent only a tiny slice of the possible range, they will only very improbably reflect most "authentic" combinations of political preferences. Most people would be unsatisfied with the choices, and ill-motivated to vote. So the parties must implant false desire. The parties and their stooges in the media mount massive marketing and advertising assaults to make you think that a certain kind of attractive person votes for their side, a certain kind of awful person votes for the other side, and that you, no doubt, are an attractive person.

It is said that red and blue is a state of mind. A "psychographic" in the marketer's lingo. But I posit that these states of mind are ideological constructions, in the good old-fashioned Marxist sense. There is nothing deep in your identity that leads you organically to accept abortion, denounce the death penalty, oppose school vouchers, want to save the spotted titmouse, etc. (Or the counterparts to these views.) Yes, there is a story you tell yourself and others about how all this hangs together. Your sense of identity is bound up in it. But, ultimately, it's a story that only passingly serves your own true interests. For the most part your muddle of preferences, your political identity, your political desire, is a tool for the satisfaction of the interests of one set of power-seeking narcissists over the interests of a mostly indistinguisable set of others.

I've got to say that it's just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. The whole industry of pop leftism--Michael Moore, Al Franken, Thomas Frank, Move On, etc.--, turns out to be a device, among other things, for getting earnest kids superficially worried about autonomy and alienation to hit the sidewalk and maximize taps on the Diebold flatscreen for the greater glory of a self-infatuated millionaire blowhard whose policies suspiciously resemble the bumbling, Jesus-spouting halfwit they've learned to hate with a delicious half-mad zeal. They labor happily, bent to the will of the political class, animated by a comically absurd set of beliefs and desires that could not truly be their own.

I speak of the left, but do not think I lack pity for the poor souls fully convinced that a Democratic White House will lead to compulsory abortion, mandatory sodomy, and total capitulation to the Arab terror.

Living in DC, the "pick a team" ethos is almost overwhelming. People want to know whose side you're on. Well, I say, be on the side of the free, self-respecting, and autonomous. The side of the angels. The hope of freedom. Alina said that the only worthwile wars of liberation are those you fight on your own. Yes. So reject the manufactured political identity. Resist the terms of the debate. Refuse to be used.

You do need to brush your teeth, but you don't need to vote.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:32 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

Intolerance for the Intolerable

Nicholas Kristof highlights the latest of the "Left Behind" series, Glorious Appearing, in which the Son of God kicks serious ass. An excerpt from the book:

Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.

Kristof rightly notes that this Jesus-as-genocidal-angel- of-vengeance theme is fairly disturbing. "In Glorious Appearing," Kristof writes,

Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid 'hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.'

Jesus is knocking on your door. If you don't let him in, he will. . . fillet you! Kristof makes the point that this vulgar, brutal, and vindictive crypto-Christianity, in which non-believers are splayed and sucked into "yawning chasms", doesn't look a whole lot better than the vulgar, brutal, and vindictive form of Islam that has us so terrified. This is, I believe, a very fair point.

However, Kristof worries about offending the delicate sensibility of sadistic Christians who thrill to "Left Behind"-style eschatological porn.

I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think "Glorious Appearing" describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.

That's nice, I suppose, that he had reservations. And it's true: religion is not a taboo subject. He concludes:

People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.

That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.

The "right" of which Kristof speaks is ambiguous. People have a political right to think or express anything they want. No books shall be burned. Yet people have no intellectual or moral right to think or express whatever they like. "Left Behind" Christians deserve to be criticized, chastised, and mocked for their wanton violation of the demands of reason and basic decency. Reasonable people may believe false doctrine, but reasonable people may not believe savage doctrines, and those who do are owed no moral quarter.

Kristof is right: we should be embarrassed by the fact that we live in a culture where this kind of odious filth, posing as piety between covers, shoots to the top of the best-seller list. But embarrassment is not enough. Decent people should be outraged. People reading Glorious Appearing on the bus ought to be treated with the regard we reserve for the happily nodding public reader of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is not all right, and people have no right whatsoever to feel that it is.

From the Left Behind website:

I'm 12 years old, and my mom got me hooked on the Left Behind series. I've read most of the kids books and all of the adult books. I think Glorious Appearing is the best one yet. It conveys the feelings of the characters so well. I just want to say thank you for starting this series, it's brought me so much closer to God. So thanks. —Nicole, posted 5/14

That's really not all right.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:57 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

July 16, 2004

A Vote for the FMA is a Vote for Your Demise

It's a sad, sad day when the Republicans move me to link approvingly to a Move On fundraiser. This one's to support Democrat opponents of vulnerable Republicans who voted for the FMA. To my mind, voting to write narrowly illiberal convictions into a liberal constitution is sufficient grounds for losing office. I know nothing about the candidates Move On is fighting against other than that they deserve to lose, but that's enough.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

July 15, 2004

Libertarians for Crippled Prisoners!

From Bill Bradford's entertaining account of the weird weird world that is the Libertarian Party Convention:

The nomination process was over. LP delegates had chosen as their standard-bearer a man who had willfully refused to file his federal tax return for years, refused to get a driver's license but continued to drive his car despite having been ticketed so many times that he couldn't recall the exact number, proposed to blow up the United Nations building, wanted to force criminals in prisons to stay in bed until their muscles atrophied, and planned to force Congress to take a "special version" of his class on the Constitution. And the overwhelming majority of delegates didn't know any of this about their nominee.

This is, I believe, all the reason I could possibly need to enthusiastically support Badnarik in November. Go LP!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Blogorama Next

Comrade Sanchez has posted the announcement. It's next Thursday, July 29th at the Rendezvouz Lounge. Pass it on.

[Update: Note that the date is now the 29th. For some reason that has not been revealed to me, but which is apparently Lane's fault, Blogorama has been pushed back a week. Sorry for any inconvenience.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 14, 2004

I Hate Giant

I encourage everyone not to patronize the Giant Foods at 9th and O St NW. It is a horrible establishment.

I don't believe I've ever waited less than five minutes in line. I have waited more than twenty on several occasions. The ratio of surly to pleasant among the cashiers is about 15 to 1. And they labor with the swiftness of the heavily sedated. Sure, it's cheaper than my other local grocery, Whole Foods (libertarian-owned, I'm told), but I think I may be willing to add $10 to each bill in order to save myself the aggravation of standing in line while the check-out lady makes yet another historic attempt to break all known records in lethargy (while the manager, a creature rarely seen, camps in the fetid back room listening to "The Rest of the Story" on Paul Harvey News and Comment.) Whole Foods is often packed, yet I rarely wait more than five minutes. Did I mention that Giant is ugly, and that the produce is bad.

You know, Giant has been petitioning Montgomery County against allowing the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Wegman's, pathetically citing concern for the "environmental impact" of these stores. Well, I suppose the impact on Giant's environment is that they will be unable to compete with well-managed businesses that offer better value to their customers. May the big boxes crush the complacent, mediocre, rent-seeking incumbent!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:03 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack (1)

July 13, 2004

"Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism . . ."

Crispin Sartwell's LA Times op-ed in praise of political nihilism is simply wonderful. I have seen nothing that so aptly captures my feelings about the contemporary political scene. Here excerpted are my favorite pithy planks of the nihilist platform:

Abortion — We are the only party that dares to oppose both life and choice. Life is an infestation, choice an illusion.

Drugs — A great nihilist heroine, Nancy Reagan, once said "Just Say No." No.

And one more link for you, just because.

[Link via Justin Logan.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Fashion Forward Future Farmers

Where do you suppose I can get one of these jackets?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:55 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)