peekay wrote:
] Excerpt: "It’s ironic that some of the same people who
] deride the narrow moralism of the “values voters”—Jane Smiley
] in her now-infamous rant in Slate, for instance—also deplore
] the “greed” driving Bush’s re-election. Greed is to the
] moralists of the left what sex is to the moralists of the
] right."

Hrm. Some thoughts:

1. Everyone has some kind of morality. The fact that there are moralistic jerks on the left does not excuse the moralistic jerks on the right.

2. The core thrust of this article is obviously wrong. It is not a myth that traditionalists are concerned with controlling other people's behavior. The fact that they are also concerned about controls to their behavior isn't a counter point to that. What part of prison terms and $100,000 fines for people who say fuck on the internet involves protecting religious expression?

3. This essay seems to be an example of libertarians trying to come to terms with the fact that they voted for Bush. Its OK, they tell themselves, the Conservative Christians aren't that bad... Its in the interest of the Republicans to play both sides. Mind you, lately I've been less and less impressed that many so called libertarians are really libertarians. If you would never vote for a "liberal" then you're not a libertarian. Real libertarians sometimes sacrifice their fiscal conservatism for the benefit of social liberty.

Reason website looks a little questionable in this regard right now. Pissed off that there is a SeaWolf class submarine named after Jimmy Carter? Then you're not a libertarian. You're a hard liner.

4. The most interesting and insiteful thing in this article in my opinion is the quotation below. Also not a very libertarian observation, but I think a very practical one worthy of deep consideration. Do absolute rights create intractible contradictions that would be better servered by a more flexible system? How do you protect important freedoms without absolute rights? I think both sides of this question have problems, which means there is another answer in here that no one has found yet.

The American rights-based approach is obviously more respectful of individual choices, but it is also more likely to generate intense social and political conflict by pitting two sets of absolute rights against each other.

RE: The “Values” Panic

] "This is R Peed Robbert, McNicoll and Don Mills
] bus-shelter."
]
] "That's nice. This is Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg,
] three blocks east of you on Picola. Proceed to my
] location at once, priority urgent, no sirens."
]
] "Acknowledged. It is my pleasure to do you a service,
] Detective."
]
] "Shut up," he said, and hung up the phone. The R Peed
] - Robot, Police Department - robots were the
] worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they
] surveilled and snitched out every person who walked past
] their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical
] eyes and brains.
]
] The R Peeds could outrun a police car on open ground on
] highway. He'd barely had time to untwist his clenched
] hands from the steering wheel when R Peed Robbert was at
] his window, politely rapping on the smoked glass. He
] didn't want to roll down the window. Didn't want to smell
] the dry, machine-oil smell of a robot. He phoned it
] instead.

Finally bothered to read this. Its fun.

Cory Doctorow | I, Robot

Take a deep lesson from history. We must be willing to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense.

This isn't "just another book promo" pseudo op-ed. There's a political element to it.

The Ends of the World as We Know Them

It's that time of year again.

An annual compendium of ideas from A to Z.

This is a huge collection of short articles. I'll list a few that are particularly insightful. I've tried to cull as much as possible. Best get a star...

Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping
'Acting White' Myth, The
Augmented Bar Code, The
Do-It-Yourself Attack Ad, The
Feral Cities
Fertile Red States
Foolproof Death Penalty, The
*Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover
*Income-Variability Anxiety
Invitation-Only, Incentivized Campaign Rally, The
Kill Midlevel Terrorists
Land-Mine-Detecting Plants
*Lawfare
*Listening for Cancer
Making Vaccines Good Business
**Popular Constitutionalism (I'm going to separately meme this...)
*Professional Amateurs
Purple-State Country Music
Strategic Extremism
*Wal-Mart Sovereignty

The Year in Ideas

] Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder
] it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant
] nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of
] breeding children.
]
] Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and
] nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately
] designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things
] that could endanger children.
...
] Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are
] tormented. So why don't they do something about it?
] Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so
] unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new
] chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their
] bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing
] wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids
] will be miserable at that age.
]
] This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it,
] which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet
] naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the
] possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
]
] I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids
] are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it
] should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at
] thirteen?
. . .
] The mediocrity of American public schools has worse
] consequences than just making kids unhappy for six
] years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids
] away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

To a great extent, the sleeping American populace has woken up to the fact that there is a problem with the way that they operate their society. Littleton style mass murders are both new and unique enough to indicate that something has changed, but also common enough to indicate that this change is not an aberration. People want to do something about it. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the dialog even years later is wanting.

People seem to grasp onto oversimplified solutions. They blame access to firearms, violent video games, industrial music, etc... These things are easy to attack, but the people attacking them can never seem to explain why their presence doesn't consistently produce the problems they are concerned with, nor why the problems they are concerned with sometimes exist without the presence of the specific cause they cite. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scope of the issue.

I have always felt that these problems were systemic and structural rather then limited and specific, and that we are unlikely to be able to see them, understand them, or address them as a society because we do not want to change the things that we would need to change.

Part of the problem is that we see teenage suicides and mass mur... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why Nerds are Unpopular (Long, and worth it.)

It's a "Guns, Germs, & Steel"-informed retelling of the Thanksgiving story by the author of a forthcoming book on pre-Columbian America.

In Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's 1914 painting "The First Thanksgiving," as in other depictions of the first Thanksgiving meal, natives and newcomers share their feast on a field of bluegrass, dandelion and clover - three species that did not exist in the Americas before colonization.

Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves into biological Attilas in the Americas. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with such fervor that farmers feared the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach trees.

According to the Pilgrims' own accounts, natives outnumbered newcomers at the meal by almost two to one. But soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed 90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants.

The huge herds and flocks seen by Europeans were evidence not of American bounty but of Indian absence.

Unnatural Abundance

A government with the zeal to control both information and culture has received what it calls a mandate.

Bono's New Casualty

] The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has
] announced its proposed policy to provide all dot-ca
] domain name holders with increased privacy safeguards,
] bringing it in line with recently-enacted Canadian
] privacy laws.

I applaud this. This is the right way to do this. Its interesting to note that it is required by federal legislation in Canada. In any event, could the person with the clue here please take a trip to L.A. and give it to ICANN? Please!?

CIRA Proposes New Standard for Domain Name Whois Privacy

dmv wrote:
] Insight into where the tax system may actually go (rather than
] the wet dream of national sales tax replacing income tax)
]
] ] Pamela F. Olson, a former Bush Treasury official in close
] ] contact with administration tax planners, said the
] ] president will pursue a tax system where all income --
] ] whether from wages, dividends, capital gains or interest
] ] -- is taxed only once. That would mean eliminating taxes
] ] on dividends and capital gains paid out of fully taxed
] ] corporate profits. Most investment gains are currently
] ] taxed at 15 percent.
]
] From an idealistic standpoint, that's not necessarily bad...

Its a loophole you can drive a truck through. The corporate tax rate is low because you pay capital gains taxes on anything that comes out of there. If you no longer get those taxes then properly managed companies can simply issue stock to all their employees and pay out dividends instead of salaries. The people who get paid this way won't have to pay tax!

] ] The administration will also push hard for large savings
] ] accounts that could shelter thousands of dollars of
] ] deposits each year from taxation on investment gains,
] ] according to White House economic advisers who have been
] ] involved with the planning.
]
] And these are probably a Good Thing...

I agree.

] ] To pay for those large tax cuts, the administration is
] ] looking at eliminating both the deduction for state and
] ] local taxes,
]
] Uh oh...

OUCH.... There goes California.

] ] and the business tax deduction for employer-sponsored health
] ] insurance.
]
] Oh shit.

SWEET! As if the healthcare system wasn't fucked up enough as it is!

] Eliminating state and local deductions has a substantially
] disproportiate effect on the blue "United Cities of America",
] because the local and blue states provide a lot of services
] that cost money -- we pay more in Pittsburgh than rural PA,
] because Pittsburgh has to spend more (ok, bad example).

Bingo.

] Eliminating Health Care benefits means that all the talk of
] improving healthcare was bullshit, because now whatever
] government or private program is going to have to take on a
] great deal more customers; when business gets a tax break,
] they might have still had an incentive to provide private
] health care even in the presence of a public option; with no
] legislation and no break, only the elite employees and
] non-profits will bother.

I agree. Furthermore, the "uninsured" people in this country are people who have pre-existing conditions and aren't getting employer healthcare. Pushing more people out of employer healthcare will simply result in increasing numbers of uninsured people.

At AT&T in the 70's they deployed phones onto every desk in the company. They had long cords. They left the phones there for a week, and then went around and shortenned the cords by an inch. Left them there for another week, then went back an did it again. They kept shortening the cords until the complaint threshold reached an unsustainable level. Thats how they set the standard for phone cord lenght.

Guess what their doing with Healthcare?

RE: Bush Plans Tax Code Overhaul (washingtonpost.com)

] In a case that has spurred intense soul-searching in
] legal circles, a 25-year-old convicted drug dealer, who
] was arrested two years ago for selling small bags of
] marijuana to a police informant, was sentenced on Tuesday
] to 55 years in prison.

Is there no end to the idiocy!?

http://famm.org/
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-458es.html

Judge Questions Long Sentence in Drug Case