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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, April 10, 2004
How Do You Forget Your Gun In A Restroom? Especially when you are an air marshal? A gun was found in a bathroom at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport Thursday night, reported NewsChannel5.When I carry a gun, I am always aware of it. I could no more "forget" my gun in a restroom than I could "forget" my pants. If you carry in a shoulder holster, there's no reason to remove it. If you carry in a hip holster, the temptation to pull the gun while your pants are down is pretty strong--but you put the gun into the crotch of your pants, to make sure that you don't forget it! How hard is this? Friday, April 09, 2004
Is The ACLU Asleep At The Wheel? Let me emphasize that I do not want them trying to suppress this event in a public school. Yes, it is a cultural event. It is also a religious event. But because it isn't a Christian religious event, it seems to be allowed without ACLU filing suit: Thailand native and assistant kindergarten teacher Warunee Koonrajaksebonde, known by the students as Mrs. Doi, led the school in a Thai new years celebration — complete with dancing and water blessings.This is a religious event in about the same way that a creche on public property is a religious event--one with strong cultural components as well. Yet the ACLU wouldn't think of suing to prevent "diversity" as long as the event isn't Christian. Thanks for the pointer to Silflay Hraka, who, being an intelligent person, came to similar conclusions. Need A Reader Or Two For An Article Aimed At Amateur Astronomers I need two readers to look over an article that I am hoping to submit to a couple of astronomy magazines. It's a product comparison, and I want to make sure that it is clear enough, since this isn't an area in which I normally write. Yes, I'm beginning to branch out a bit, since, aside from my Shotgun News column, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to get anything published in gun magazines anymore. This is about 1 MB of article because of the pictures, so you might not want to volunteer if you have a slow connection. UPDATE: Thanks, I have two readers! Do Laws Affect Behavior? Professor Volokh's defense of why obscenity prosecutions won't really change anything without an extraordinary level of government intrusiveness, and Michael Williams' comments about the struggle over Partial Birth Abortion, suddenly cause me ask: do libertarians believe that laws do not change behavior? I would agree that a law that is overwhelmingly opposed by the population will require extraordinary efforts to enforce it--and that enforcement will usually not change attitudes. But what about a law that does enjoy general support? In particular, the civil rights laws passed by Congress in the early 1960s. They enjoyed broad, although perhaps shallow support. Would anyone argue that these laws did not change behavior, and eventually, attitudes? Did they require an intrusive federal government? Sure. It didn't turn out to be quite as intrusive as some of the principled opponents worried, but it was real, nonetheless. Now, perhaps Professor Volokh really means that laws that discourage pornography are a bad thing. That's a question of public policy on which reasonable people can disagree. That's not the same as his claim that such laws will have little or no impact without Big Brother efforts to enforce it. Labels: abortion Racism Is In The Eye of the Beholder? I was reading through the British government's report on "Racist Incident Monitoring"--what we would call a hate crime. The total number of crimes motivated by religion isn't huge: 18 cases in a bit more than a year, with 10 of them involving Muslims. While the number of cases isn't huge, the victims are disproportionately Muslim--no surprise after 9/11. Or are they? First of all, in at least 6 of those crimes, both defendant and victim were Muslim. (See pages 35-36.) More important is the definition used by the Crown Prosecution Service: 1.2 For the purposes of this report, the police and CPS have used the Macpherson definition of a racist incident, which states that:Think about this for a second. The victim might well be right about the racist intent of the attacker. The victim might well be wrong, paranoid, or intentionally lying to get more sympathy, or to increase the seriousness with which the crime is treated--which would not be at all surprising, considering that there are more than a few al-Qaeda sympathizers among the Muslims of Britain.‘a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. If two people of the same race get into a fight, no one assumes that it is driven by race. If two people of different races get into a fight, it is surprisingly easy for the victim to honestly (and still wrongly) suspect racist intent. The Crown Prosecution Service needs a more rational definition. Israel's Pig Brigade A friend tells me that Joseph Farah's "G2 Bulletin" (a subscription online service) is reporting the following. I report it as much for your amusement as news: A special Israeli security group, known as "Gdud Ivri," or Jewish Legion, is enlisting pigs in its life-and-death fight with Islamic terror, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.I'm told that while Islam has similar exceptions to Judaism regarding pigs, that at least in some Muslim countries, the cultural baggage associated with pig contact is vastly more powerful than any religious objections--or exceptions. BBC Taken Over By Fundamentalists Well, Instapundit will doubtless think that, after reading this article: Promiscuity 'fuelling HIV spread'Oh surprise, surprise! Here's another part of the article, designed to infuriate the ACLU's campaign for "sexual autonomy" for 14 year olds: In another article, researchers in Canada said abstaining from sex is the best way of protecting against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.There's a whiner in every bunch: The UK charity Terrence Higgins Trust expressed doubts about the ABC strategy.I'm trying hard to make sense of this statement. He seems to be saying that unlike Uganda, women in London don't have any "control over their sexual encounters." What? Or does he mean that monogamy is unrealistic for his constitutency? More On Volokh's Argument About The Ineffectiveness of Laws Professor Volokh is still trying to defend his position that laws do not change behavior: A bit more about the federal government and obscenity: The chief defense that I've seen of the federal government's obscenity crackdown (for instance, see Clayton Cramer's post, though several other correspondents made the same point) is that it may decrease the availability of porn through non-Internet commercial channels: cable, for instance, or hotel pay-per-view.The fact is that in hotels, most consumers of porn do not have Internet access, or a computer with them. Many consumers (especially the casual consumers) aren't going to go out and get a broadband connection just to watch porn. The notion that removing porn from cable TV and hotel pay-per-view is going to produce a "tiny decrease" in availability is laughable--unless pornography is similar to an addictive drugs in how much effort consumers are willing to expend to get it. The bigger problem, of course, is that prosecuting most of the current "mainstream" pornography under the constraints of Miller v. California (1973) is not going to work. The successful prosecutions are going to be of porn that depicts rape, sex with minors, bestiality, and similar materials. UPDATE: When I say "depicts... sex with minors" I mean movies that while using adult actresses, intend them to be seen as being underage. Volokh now says that his argument, however, was about what the next step would be for the government: Rather, I was asking what the government's likely next steps would be. One possibility is that the government prosecutes some U.S. pornographers, sees some apparent success as hotels and cable channels stop running porn, notices that people are still using lots of Internet foreign-distributed porn, and decides "OK, we've done all we really can. Sure, all our prosecutions aren't really changing people's consumption, but that's fine. We'll either keep going with the futile prosecutions, or close up shop."But this is based on Volokh's assumption that nearly every current consumer of porn, if it isn't available with a click of the TV remote, at home, or in a hotel, is going to get a broadband connection at home, or start taking a laptop with them, only checking into hotels with broadband service. This is clearly incorrect, and so this won't be "apparent" success, but actual success. Sure, there will be those who start downloading stuff on the Internet, and paying for it--but unless Volokh knows something that I don't, paying for downloaded porn isn't going to be as cheap as pay-per-view cable porn--and more than a few consumers are going to be reluctant to give their credit card number to a web site, for fear of its abuse. (I understand that more than a few people who have charged porn downloads have spent months trying to get unauthorized charges to stop.) The other possibility, though, is that the government isn't going to be happy just with the limited effects that Cramer and the others describe. Remember that the planned prosecutions are of the producers, not of the cable companies and hotels, which after all are also distributing porn and thus potentially legally liable -- this makes me doubt that the government's ambitions are limited to blocking the hotel and cable distribution. Rather, people will say: "Look at this foreign cyberporn loophole -- we've got to close it." And what will they need to do to close it? Well, either my option #2 (mandated nationwide Internet filtering by service providers, with a blacklist of sites maintained in real-time by a federal agency) or option #3, locking up porn consumers.Option #2, however, would require a new federal law--one that will be vigorously opposed by ISPs for technical and liablity reasons, and might well run afoul of Constitutional questions, unless the blacklist is very, very narrowly defined to satisfy Miller v. California (1973). A blacklist that met this requirement would exclude relatively little porn--indeed, the Miller test would likely have the effect of removing only a small percentage of the current porn. To the extent that it imposed any changes on how porn is produced, it would likely be to make it more like regular movies--with something recognizable as a plot. Option #3, unless it is targeted only at clear and knowing violations, is going to be politically unpopular, and again runs into not only the question of defining obscenity, but also runs afoul of Stanley v. Georgia (1969). Thursday, April 08, 2004
Makes You Proud To Be An American... From the Dallas Morning News (registration required), a column by Steve Blow. Warning: the language is pretty explicit, and not suitable for children or too innocent adults. But then again, it's quoting from an album whose song won the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards: Warning to readers: The following column contains vulgar and sexually explicit language. It is about a children's award. More Evidence That Guns Aren't Magic---and Criminals Are Sometimes Hopelessly Stupid From Kokomo, Indiana: KOKOMO, Ind. -- A Kokomo bar owner says he just did what he had to do when a man armed with a shotgun walked into his bar around closing time early Wednesday morning. Exporting Not Just Jobs, But The Machinery As Well I've been of mixed feelings on the outsourcing issue. I have also been concerned that at least part of why China is getting so many jobs is the Chinese government's manipulation of exchange rates. I don't know how to react to this story, except with some serious misgivings: America's sunset industries are rising in the East. Literally. Gun Controlled Britain Make sure you visit the Guardian's page here. Keep telling yourself: restrictive gun control works in Britain! Safe Handgun Storage A reader recommends this product for those who can't justify a big gun safe, but still need to adequately secure a handgun. What Parents Expose Their Kids To I mentioned a couple of days ago that I am always amazed at the stuff that parents expose their kids to--usually violence, but sometimes sex. A reader sent me this story: You might be interested in something I saw in the movie theater one afternoon. A Reminder Of The Sort of People With Whom We Are Fighting I have had way too many leftists tell me, "Well, wouldn't you do the same thing if someone invaded the U.S.?" Not if the invaders knocked over torturocracy like Saddam Hussein's government--and I wouldn't make threats like these: Iraqi militants are today threatening to burn three foreign hostages to death unless their country quits the US-led coalition.These are monsters that must be exterminated. There's no two ways about it. If you negotiate with savages like this, it had better be in the category of saying, "Nice doggy" while looking for a rock. There is nothing heroic about these monsters; there is nothing courageous about them. Anyone that makes excuses for this sort of behavior is a savage also. Another Publisher Says No University of North Carolina Press rejected this as well. It is rather unfortunate that are no scholarly conservative or libertarian publishing houses. The Mechanics of Cracking Down on Obscenity Professor Volokh presents a standard libertarian argument: even if the Justice Department's campaign to shut down obscenity is constitutional, and good public policy, how are you going to implement it? Let me start out by saying that while there is a lot of material that is clearly obscene under Miller v. California (1973), there is an awful lot of erotica that would probably survive the Miller test--and it would not be difficult to find ways to rework many of the hardcore porn movies into something that could survive such a test. Softcore porn on cable TV is pretty well safe under the Miller test, since much of it seems to be of about the same artistic and literary merit of your average teen slasher movie. (Yes, this is not a high bar to clear.) Whether the Justice Department's apparently broad brush approach is good public policy is another matter. You can make an argument that some of the obscene material involving young looking "actors" or violence might be a good use of resources to suppress, simply because of the corrosive effects that it has on the society, especially to the extent that its availability makes certain creeps feel "normal." I am not so sure that the resources are well-spent trying to suppress most of the obscene materials currently on the market. However, Professor Volokh's argument that suppressing U.S. manufacture will simply drive the marketing of this stuff off-shore misses one rather fundamental point: the mere fact that something is illegal to produce will tend to reduce the supply of it in most commercial channels. Yes, if someone really wants to download obscene materials, they will go ahead and purchase it online, and download it. You won't find it available as a "premium" channel when you check into a hotel, however, nor will it be offered by your cable provider. We can argue about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is that when you make something illegal, it removes it from "respectable" distribution channels. You always have to ask the question: will removing a commodity from "respectable" channels make much of a difference with respect to the social problems that you seek to solve? Drug addicts will still seek out their drug, even if it is illegal. Most people will not seek it out, even if the drug is legal. The people that are likely to be removed from the market for the drug are those who were not addicted, but were using it occasionally--and they aren't usually the problem. The real gain may be the people that do not even start to use the drug because of its illegality, and who wish to avoid the stigma or the risk of purchasing through black market channels. I am not sure that the analogy of obscenity to drugs works very well. While there are people who are addicted to obscenity (in a psychological sense), I do not get the impression that they are the mass market for it. Making obscenity illegal means that a lot of people who occasionally watch the clearly illegal materials will find it more difficult to obtain. For many, this will be enough of a barrier to switch them to erotica that do not violate the Miller test, or find some other source of entertainment. For those who want to draw the analogy to gun laws, the argument is equally valid. My disagreement with the gun prohibitionists is that they assume that guns are intrinsically bad or evil. I do not. I would agree on one point, however: complete laissez faire with respect to guns would not be a good thing. I support laws that discourage convicted felons from possessing firearms by threatening them with prison. (I would be more supportive of such laws if they applied only to convicted violent felons.) I like the idea of laws that require background checks for criminal history or mental illness as a condition of receiving a firearm. If the gun prohibitionists weren't using the so-called "gun show loophole" argument as a cynical way to shut down gun shows--if they were willing to apply the same law to all transfers, everywhere--we might be able to find some common ground. Background checks don't work perfectly; if they can made to work in a manner that disproportionately disarms felons and mental patients, while having minimal (not necessarily zero) impact on others, I could live with this, and would even regard it as a law worth having. Gun prohibitionists, however, don't support background checks for that purpose; they support such laws to disarm everyone, because they refuse to acknowledge that there is a difference between a convicted felon and a law-abiding adult. Professor Volokh has fallen into the traditional libertarian trap: the assumption that a law must be 100% effective to be worthwhile. It only has to influence people at the margin to change their behavior in a positive direction, without introducing counterproductive behaviors. I am not convinced that the Justice Department's current efforts (assuming that they are accurately portrayed) are necessarily the best way to do this--but I am also not convinced that they are intrinsically doomed to failure. Good News For The Unemployed--And Those Employed As President From Reuters: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of Americans filing initial claims for jobless aid dropped sharply last week to the lowest in more than three years, the government said on Thursday in a further sign of a reviving employment market. Ten Commandments Case Going To En Banc Hearing in 8th Circuit The Omaha World-Herald reports that the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated a three judge panel's order to remove the Ten Commandments from a city park, and called for an en banc hearing instead. The Fritz Feds blog reports that under 8th Circuit rules, this means that a majority of the active judges had to have voted for an en banc hearing--and that of the eleven judges that could be on this panel, eight were put there by Republicans, and three by Democrats. Fritz thinks this is likely to be a ruling in favor of the Ten Commandments monument staying there. Of course, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is a reminder that being appointed by a Republican doesn't guarantee anything--but it seems likely that a majority of the judges would vote for an en banc hearing because they don't agree with the decision of the three judge panel. Thanks to How Appealing! for the links. Sexual Orientation and Smoking Michael Williams points me to an interesting article in New Scientist that finds that lesbians smoke at very disproportionate levels: Teenage lesbian or bisexual girls are many times more likely to smoke regularly than straight girls their age. They are the worst hit by tobacco among all groups of young people, according to a new US study.The real sign of the inability of the researchers to get around the PC assumptions is in the next paragraph: "We were surprised," says lead researcher, S Bryn Austin at Children's Hospital Boston, Massachusetts. "Antigay stigma and harassment, rejection from family and friends, and sometimes even physical violence can create a hostile environment for many young people coming to terms with their sexual orientation. This, combined with the tobacco industry's targeted marketing to lesbian and gay communities, is putting lesbian and bisexual girls in harm's way."Gee, do you suppose that you could imagine another reason for this? I've posted before about studies that show homosexual and bisexual women are disproportionately IV drug abusers. "Women who have sex with women," to use PC terminology, are about 1-2% of the U.S. population--but 20-30% of IV drug abusers in this study. I've mentioned the San Francisco Department of Public Health study that found that 28% of homosexual men and 48% of homosexual women reported having been sexually abused as children [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, p. 24.] Some were just beginning to recover memories of these events [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, 55-56]. That child sexual abuse victims end up disproportionately substance abusers is also well-established--and yet these curious coincidences of high rates of sexual abuse victimization, of substance abuse, and a plausible causal relationship between sexual abuse as children and adult sexual orientation--it's treated as a form of flat-Earthism. Labels: child sexual abuse Teaching As Therapy The experience of my wife and I attending Sonoma State University was that there seemed to be a number of professors for whom class was a form of therapy--a way for them to deal with their demons. Not surprisingly, these were among the more wasteful classes (at least for the students). I had an ethnic studies class where the professor insisted quite frequently that attitudes about race in America hadn't changed since the 1950s--and here he was, a black guy who was a tenured professor and an elected member of the school board in an overwhelmingly white city. He told us that in the 1950s, he and a white girl that he knew would respond to apartment rental ads just for the reaction of the landlord. (He told us that they stopped doing this when one landlord's response was to have a heart attack.) My wife had a professor for a Women's Studies class whose notion of scholarship could be deduced from the fact that much of the reading for the class was 10-15 year old articles from Time and Newsweek. She handed out a fairly silly paper written by some overprivileged undergraduate about how white privilege and male privilege are very similar institutions, and then asked students to critically analyze the paper. My wife's paper pointed out the many flaws in this analogy, not just the obvious one that females aren't disproportionately raised in impoverished homes. I sat outside the professor's office while this "professor" ranted and raved at my wife for writing such a negative paper; it was pretty obvious that my wife had made a serious mistake: she actually analyzed the paper's flaws, instead of gushing over it. From then on in class, whenever my wife would raise her hand, the professor would look around, look right at her, and say, "No questions? Okay, we'll move on." You will notice that the examples that I have given are from two of the joke departments: American Multi-Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. I don't think that either of these has to be a joke--but in practice, ethnic studies departments at many schools came into existence as a way of getting the Administration Building back in one piece, and Women's Studies were started because, "Well, blacks have an ethnic studies department...." A few weeks back, I mentioned the professor at Claremont-McKenna College whose car was vandalized in a "hate crime"--and then, it turned out, that witnesses reported that she had vandalized the car herself. Her own statement's inconsistencies soon demonstrated that she was lying. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that she has a previous criminal history--and one that reminds me of our experiences at Sonoma State, where the line between emotional problems and teaching was often invisible: Police and court records show Dunn's other side. Labels: fake hate crimes Spirit Of America At Work in Iraq Unsurprisingly, the recent dramatic increase in violence is making it more difficult for U.S. forces to do their secondary jobs of winning hearts and minds. I recently received this note from Jim Hake at Spirit of America (one of my blog advertisers): With the recent violence Iraq it's been more difficult for the 1st Marine Division to conduct the rebuilding projects and engage with local Iraqis as they had wished. Nonetheless, progress is being made and we're beginning to see distribution of the flying disks ("Frisbees"), school supplies and medical supplies donated by Spirit of America.I appreciate the money that some of you have been kicking into the PayPal jar--but that's not a charitable contribution. Helping out Spirit of America will help you on next year's taxes, help ordinary Iraqis (most of whom aren't trying to hurt anyone), and perhaps create some goodwill towards the U.S.--which can only make things safer for our soldiers and Marines over there. Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Authoritarian vs. Totalitarian The distinction that U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick used to make between totalitarian and authoritarian states was that authoritarian states didn't much care what you thought, but they did care what you did. You could think "bad thoughts"--and even say them, quietly, to your friends. Totalitarian states, on the other hand, weren't content with your behavior--they wanted a uniformity of thought as well. Some would argue that this reflects the fundamentally pseudo-religious nature of political orthodoxy in totalitarian societies. Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai observed that during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards would use Chinese words to describe Mao and Maoism that had been formerly used in a religious meaning. Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil also conveys, although less directly, the essentially religious nature of Soviet Marxism (at least for the true believers). National Socialism, while not ideologically atheistic in the same way as Communism, suffered this same problem of transplanting a religious fanaticism into a political ideology--with disastrous results. What the National Socialists of Germany did with a pre-World War I slogan is quite instructive. Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Gott! emphasized that Germany (only unified in 1870) was one nation, one people, with one God (because Protestants, Catholics, and Jews all worshipped the same God). The National Socialists replaced "Ein Gott" with "Ein Fuehrer." This was idolatry every bit as much as calling Mao Zedong "The Great Helmsman." Not surprisingly, this fanaticism dressed up in twentieth century political clothing produced the same sort of barbarism that we associate with the worst of the the medieval Church's heresy trials and tortures. Burning people at the stake? Ripping a man's genitals off with hot tongs? Thumb screws? Pouring molten lead into a boot in which your foot was held? The worst abuses of medieval and Renaissance Europe were quite comparable to the actions of the collectivist political orthodoxies of the twentieth century. If there is a big difference, it is that the Century of Genocide had both technology and will to murder in the tens of millions. The Inquisition seems positively small potatoes next to that. The desire to control not mere actions, but inner beliefs shows up now in the insistence that employees not merely behave a certain way, but believe a certain way: DENVER, April 7 (UPI) -- A federal court in Denver has upheld the rights of a fundamentalist Christian who was fired for disapproving of homosexuality.This is not like the recent case in which a Hewlett-Pakard employee was fired for putting up Bible verses outside his cube condemning homosexuality. Mr. Buonanno was not accused of taking an action to make homosexuals uncomfortable. He was fired because he refused to lie and say that he "value[d]" homosexuality. If the goal of the company is to prevent harrassment or discrimination, it really does not matter what an employee thinks; what matters is his actions. That AT&T felt it necessary to cross the line from action to thoughts really says a lot about the fundamentally totalitarian nature of where "diversity" seems to be taking us: you will not even think incorrectly. What does it say about a religion--or a political ideology--when you are intent on controlling what people think? To me, it says that you don't have much confidence in the rightness of your position, that you feel the need to control what goes on inside someone else's brain. Humor My friend Don Kates sent this to me. I don't normally retell ethnic jokes, but this could almost work if the names were Jones and Smith: Six retired Floridians were playing poker in the condo clubhouse when Meyerwitz loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest and drops dead at the table.And the other joke Don sent me: why do they call it PMS? A Rather Bizarre Argument in a Ten Commandments Case Perhaps the newspaper is quoting this as a statement of belief when it is merely a statement of what his opponents believe, but at first glance, the guy arguing for removal of the Ten Commandments seems to be taking a rather odd position: While apparently thinking aloud from the bench, the judge questioned civil-rights attorney Brian Barnard, representing the Society of Separationists, on his assertion in the lawsuit that the commandments were personally delivered by God to Moses.Hmmm. If this quote is correct (and I'm real skeptical), Barnard's argument is that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses, and for that reason, should be removed! I find myself bemusedly thinking of James 2:19: You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder.Link via How Appealing! Make Sure You Show This Article To Your Spouse I'm a bit too polite to quote this article from MSNBC, but let's just say that there is something that the two of you can do together that appears to reduce the risk of the husband getting prostate cancer. For Those Who Kick In Money Via PayPal: Thanks! Even the little chunks that roll in keep me in telescope accessories, or move me closer to the day when I can write for a living. I will assume that the rest of you are either family members, friends, or starving students. The rest of you may continue to read, but you are no longer allowed to enjoy yourself as you do so! (This, of course, assumes that you are enjoying yourself now. For all I know, you are being forced to read this as part of an Abnormal Psychology class assignment.) Try Not To Go Into Shock: I'm Quoting A Gender Studies Professor And one who calls himself a progressive. He explains that Victorian attitudes about women and their bodies created shame around sexuality, and today is just different, not better: But all too frequently, my students loathe their bodies with the same puritanical intensity as their forebears. They may not be as ashamed of their sexuality as their great-grandmothers were (though some are still understandably shy), but they are still ruthlessly critical of their own flesh. The negative judgments however, are now rooted in aesthetics. Fat has replaced desire as the primary enemy to be contained and controlled. If self-control and exercise fail, there is always the surgical removal of the offender (fat) through liposuction and body sculpting.Exactly. It is very difficult for me to see a big difference between the epidemic of cutting, and the epidemic of body piercings. Both are attempts to conform to a model of "what's cool"--with the body piercings in some ways even more exploitive, because of the amount of money that young people are spending to have someone inflict pain on them--and sometimes scarring, and some health risks as well. (There's a reason you can't give blood for a year after a tattoo or a piercing, and it isn't because a bunch of spoilsports disapprove of your esthetic choices.) It does not surprise me that this ugly and bizarre habit of facial and genital piercing came out of the homosexual community--a subculture built around "Look at me!" Link via Candied Ginger. The 1960s Muscle Car: A Good Investment? From Tech Central Station: The original muscle cars were scorchingly fast and imposingly noisy mid-size cars with big engines. And now their prices are being driven skyward at car auctions where they are the hottest things past the gavel. Many of the bidders are boomers who have made it and can now afford to buy a prime piece of nostalgia from their lost youth.Hey, these were cool cars back then--but automotive technology has moved on--and improved. Yes, these were impressive automobiles--but a 1996 Chevrolet Impala SS will outperform nearly all the muscle cars of that era, in acceleration, in top speed, in braking, and in cornering. The Big Block Corvettes were all the rage in the 1960s--but at least in factory tune, none of them would out-accelerate my 2000 Corvette. The horsepower numbers that everyone focuses on from those years--the numbers that the car companies advertised--were gross horsepower figures, and did not reflect actual output in a functioning car with all the smog equipment installed. Starting in 1972, the car companies started advertising SAE net horsepower numbers. It is no surprise that the best muscle cars of today will match or sometimes beat the best muscle cars of that era. Of course, with those sort of auction prices, the temptation to buy a 1971 Malibu SS396, spend $20,000 having it rebuilt and restored in the hopes of making a killing on it is very strong--but by then, the nostalgia craze will have moved to something else. It Almost Reads Like Parody Michael Williams reports that a number of environmentalists are expressing concern about the ethics of terraforming Mars. If there were life there, this would be worthy of concern from the standpoint of lost information--but that would be the extent of the problem. (I am very skeptical that we are going to find life of any sort on Mars.) I think the bigger issue is the cost of terraforming Mars. We are talking about a major investment with a payoff measured in (at best) tens of thousands of years--and this is assuming that whatever photosynthesizing life we introduce can produce water vapor faster than it leaves. You need a lot of oxygen to produce an ozone layer, to prevent photodisassociation of water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen--and the hydrogen is moving fast enough to leave in a hurry. (There's a detailed treatment of exospheric temperature, escape velocity, and root mean square law in Dole and Asimov's Planets for Man.) Right now, governments and corporations float 30 year bonds to pay for capital improvements worth billions and even tens of billions of dollars. Imagine the cost of terraforming Mars--and then imagine the number of centuries those bonds will take to pay off. Now imagine the interest rate such speculative bonds are going to have to carry to be attractive. I think that some projects are so massive that only a totalitarian state would have a sufficiently long-term view to start them. Thanks, I'll be happy to live in a relatively free society on one planet instead. That Horrible Three Strikes Law in California If you can handle reading a pretty graphic description of this one monstrous child rapist's crimes (who would be released immediately if Three Strikes were repealed or struck down by the courts), go here. I've long been troubled by the Supreme Court's decision in Coker v. Georgia (1977) that: Rape is without doubt deserving of serious punishment; but in terms of moral depravity and of the injury to the person and to the public, it does not compare with murder, which does involve the unjustified taking of human life.Reading the account of the rapes committed by Joseph Noble tells me that Coker was wrongly decided. Alanis Morisette "Protests" Censorship Protests is in scare quotes because she actually didn't strip naked on TV to protest, but to a body suit designed to make her look naked. Michael Williams has some pretty scathing criticism of her: It may be hard to believe, but we're not afraid of you, we just don't like you. We find your nakedness and superfluous cursing to be aesthetically unpleasing. We don't want our kids to grow up to be like you, because absent the publicity machine of the fading music industry you're a pathetic, angst-ridden loser. You've written some music some people like, and that's a nice accomplishment, but it gives you about as much moral authority to pontificate on war, censorship, and politics as Humpty (pronounced with an "umpty").Williams also makes the case for file sharing violations of copyright, just to reduce the enormously outsized political influence of twits like Morisette, by cutting off their supply of money. Chernobyl Today Here's a really sobering tour of the dead zone around Chernobyl. Thanks to Jennifer's History and Stuff for the link. What Does Jupiter Look Like Through the Photon Instruments 127mm Refractor? This photograph (taken with a Celestron CGE-1400 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain) approximates it pretty well. 
Labels: telescopes Ashcroft's Campaign Against Pornography Instapundit, of course, is upset, and quotes another blogger to the effect that: The Baltimore Sun article quotes Attorney General John Ashcroft saying that porn "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet." No, Mr. Ashcroft, that's incorrect; Americans persistently invite porn into our homes through the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet.Sorry, but there is a lot of uninvited porn that comes through the Internet. I get hundreds of pieces of spam a day; my wife gets dozens; my kids get dozens to hundreds. A big chunk of this is not even solicitations to purchase porn, but pictures that pop up (at least under Microsoft Outlook) that are actual, legally obscene material, as defined by Miller v. California (1973): "Barnyard Fun," "young teens," and various forms of excretory fetishes. I've had to install spam blocking software on my computer because of the sheer volume of spam (both obscene and non-obscene)--and I don't like to do that, because it makes mistakes, sometimes throwing away stuff from friends. I've reconfigured Microsoft Outlook on my wife's computer so that it doesn't automatically show the beginning of each email, which was a nice feature--until this garbage started showing up. Do I think the government should be running around pursuing softcore pornography that people purchase in hotel rooms and on their cable TV service? No. But the Justice Department does have an obligation to enforce existing obscenity laws. Perhaps those laws don't make sense as written, but if there is this vast sea of support for pornography that Instapundit thinks there is, Ashcroft's enforcement of the laws currently on the books should cause a groundswell of public opposition, right? A few weeks back, I pointed out that Gregg Easterbrook had attacked Ashcroft for prosecuting obscene movies--and actually misrepresented that the Justice Department was pursuing all pornographic movie makers, when the article that Easterbrook linked to as his source was very clear that Justice was only prosecuting Extreme Associates, makers of movies that portray rape and murder. At the time, I pointed out this misrepresentation by Easterbrook, I let lots of influential bloggers know about this, including Instapundit, who had linked to Easterbrook's incorrect claims. Instapundit chose not point out Easterbrook's statements were simply false. My respect for Instapundit has fallen immensely because of this. I have no idea whether the original Baltimore Sun article is correct or not. It might well be that Justice is actually pursuing all forms of pornography with this new policy, in which case they are going to certainly run into serious problems in the courts. Even Miller v. California (1973), while more restrictive than Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), still leaves a lot of opportunity for sexually explicit materials: Sex and nudity may not be exploited without limit by films or pictures exhibited or sold in places of public accommodation any more than live sex and nudity can be exhibited or sold without limit in such public places. At a minimum, prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct must have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to merit First Amendment protection.The example that I gave to my Constitutional History class was Bob Guccione's Caligula, which relied on its portrayal of historical facts as an excuse for portrayal of all sorts of graphic and perverse sex. (I didn't see it; a very liberal friend--as I was at the time--went to see it, and walked out.) In some circles, it is very fashionable to be unconcerned about the coarsening effects of pornography on our society, especially on young people, whose concepts of male-female relations are still developing. A steady exposure to any idea will certainly have some influence on the viewer; that's the whole point of political propaganda and commercial advertising. This is even more true when the viewers are young people. Most adults can correctly identify the world of pornography--where women are available for sex with strangers at the drop of a hat, all sex is spectacular, and there are no STDs, unexpected pregnancies, or emotional damage from being manipulated into sex--as fantasy. The same is not true for 12 and 13 year olds, who are increasingly being soaked in pornography through email solicitations, and through its omnipresence on unsecured cable TV. (I'm just amazed at the movies that many adults consider appropriate for 5 year olds--not pornographic, but so violent that it is certainly going to create problems.) Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Sneezing Students: There's Some Truth To It After All I mentioned a couple of days ago about a bunch of students getting around a ban on prayer at a graduation ceremony. It turns out to be a bit garbled version of a real event: The Truth The Importance of Safe Storage of a Gun I'm not even quite sure that I believe this one--at least the way the newspaper tells it. Nonetheless, this is not the way to keep a gun handy: A man in Granite Falls, Wash., who slept with a pistol beneath his pillow woke up one morning last week to find the gun had gone off and shot him.Other than in bad action movies (in particular, Ice Station Zebra), there are |
