Posts
1)L'affaire Frum. Painful moments of irony. But it's still sad if this is true.
2)Religions exemptions in the health care bill?
3)Iqbal, Twombly, and strange bedfellows on civil rights litigation.
4)I have some interest in the subject of this debate between Randal O'Toole of Cato and Matt Yglesias. I hate sprawl, like walkable urban neighborhoods, and also am generally not a friend of regulation. So it would be convenient if bad government policies produced the kind of sprawling suburbs I love to hate. O'Toole suggests things are not so simple. I'm not blown away by his Maricopa County code example -- if I'm understanding him correctly, ONLY developers with at least 160 acres of land can build things as densely as they want, which of course restricts lots of smaller scale developments. That said, I don't actually know anything about this subject, not having studied municipal laws across the country as closely as O'Toole has, so it's possible I'm entirely mistaken. In any case, I certainly don't want to use regulation to make other people live in neighborhoods of the kind that I like.
5)Quotable: "He cited the case of a painter whose stock in trade had been portraits of Lenin. The man was now earning his living churning out religious subjects. But, my friend added, so ingrained were his earlier habits that every time he painted the face of Jesus, he wound up with a likeness of Lenin."
6)My libertarian purity test score is 77. What's yours?
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Anxiety About Influence
Julian Sanchez has an interesting post up on the ten books meme and the types of influence that books commonly have. See also Prettier Than Napoleon for more related thoughts. For what it's worth, my own list appears to be balanced evenly between the formal and substantive, but definitely tilted more theoretical than practical. Not sure what that says.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Ten Books List
Every blogger and their mother is doing it. In chronological order:
1)Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. The first chapter book I ever read at age five. I broke down crying at the final chapter when Charlotte died. My mother tells me that I explained to her first that I was sad about Charlotte's death, but also because the book was over. I suppose you could say that this book clinched me as a lifelong reader; Barnes & Noble and Amazon have it to thank for all the business I've since sent their way.
"It is not often that someone comes along who is both a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both" also remain two of my favorite sentences in the English language.
2)Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: I found this in the school library in March of the year when I was in fifth grade. It really wasn't supposed to be shelved with the books for fourth or sixth graders, but the librarian let it slip. It was harder going than anything I'd yet encountered, but I was electrified. I'd probably find it unbearably melodramatic if I had to go back and read it now, but I haven't yet been able to shake myself of a weakness for the Victorians.
3) Atlas Shrugged/The Fountainhead/We The Living -- As the libertarian in joke goes, it usually begins with Ayn Rand. As it did in my case. I read all three of the novels in a mad race in seventh grade. I'm no longer a hard Randian, but I got the basics of my political and economic views from her. I also became an agnostic and then an atheist because of Rand, which brings me to...
4)Elmer Gantryby Sinclair Lewis -- Other than Rand, the work that sealed the deal on my early teenage atheism. Also, Sinclair Lewis first brought to the surface my disdain for small town America, which hasn't really faded away. Pnin thinks it strange that my views on the place where I grew up were largely shaped by novels written in the 1920s, but I maintain that there were a lot of parallels between the Midwest of Lewis's novels and the Allentown of the 1990s.
5)1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell: Orwell made me a hard-line anti-totalitarian. Not a libertarian per se -- Orwell was hardly one himself -- but certainly anti-totalitarian. Also, this is an early influence -- I read both in middle school.
6)Paul Fussell's Class/David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise -- The two books, both of which I read in college and then again a few times afterwards, which helped me best understand the peculiarities of the social class I'd come to inhabit. I also find myself channeling Fusell and Brooks stylistically -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not -- whenever I write fluff. I realize both can be unbelievably pretentious. I'm trying to get over that. Please bear with me, friends.
7)The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe -- Yes, there's much to hate about Wolfe. But he showed me that contemporary fiction could involve more than the art of writing exquisitely about nothing at all.*
Tyler Cowen asked me once what kind of book I would really like to read that isn't being sold in bookstores. I responded, "A Tom Wolfe novel that doesn't have the flaws of Tom Wolfe's novels." What I meant was roughly "more doorstop sized novels that are panoramic in scope and that tackle big social and political questions."
8)On Liberty by John Stuart Mill -- My favorite free speech absolutist. I still quote him all too frequently here on the blog. He's also wonderful on why we ought to be broad-minded in tolerating eccentricity. I quote him on that point too probably all too often.
9)Democracy in America/The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville -- Read both in college. They profoundly influenced how I think about social change and the nature of revolutions. Also, the former on American exceptionalism.
10) Richard Pipes's work on Russia -- I read Russian Under the Old Regime for a college course and followed up soon with Pipes's books on the Russian Revolution and Russia under the Bolshevik regime. First, I found Pipes's explanation of why Russia went Communist more compelling than anything I'd read on the subject yet. He also sold me on the value of rock guys in understanding how liberal democracies take root.
*I'm paraphrasing a famous quote, but Google's not turning up the source. Anyone?
**The outtakes that I know some of you will ask about: yes, I know, Hayek. If I could go up to #11, he'd be there. As it is, there's actually not much I get from Hayek that I didn't get from Rand or others on this list. #12 would be Middlemarch by George Eliot for shaping my sense of what a good novel ought to do.
1)Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. The first chapter book I ever read at age five. I broke down crying at the final chapter when Charlotte died. My mother tells me that I explained to her first that I was sad about Charlotte's death, but also because the book was over. I suppose you could say that this book clinched me as a lifelong reader; Barnes & Noble and Amazon have it to thank for all the business I've since sent their way.
"It is not often that someone comes along who is both a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both" also remain two of my favorite sentences in the English language.
2)Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: I found this in the school library in March of the year when I was in fifth grade. It really wasn't supposed to be shelved with the books for fourth or sixth graders, but the librarian let it slip. It was harder going than anything I'd yet encountered, but I was electrified. I'd probably find it unbearably melodramatic if I had to go back and read it now, but I haven't yet been able to shake myself of a weakness for the Victorians.
3) Atlas Shrugged/The Fountainhead/We The Living -- As the libertarian in joke goes, it usually begins with Ayn Rand. As it did in my case. I read all three of the novels in a mad race in seventh grade. I'm no longer a hard Randian, but I got the basics of my political and economic views from her. I also became an agnostic and then an atheist because of Rand, which brings me to...
4)Elmer Gantryby Sinclair Lewis -- Other than Rand, the work that sealed the deal on my early teenage atheism. Also, Sinclair Lewis first brought to the surface my disdain for small town America, which hasn't really faded away. Pnin thinks it strange that my views on the place where I grew up were largely shaped by novels written in the 1920s, but I maintain that there were a lot of parallels between the Midwest of Lewis's novels and the Allentown of the 1990s.
5)1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell: Orwell made me a hard-line anti-totalitarian. Not a libertarian per se -- Orwell was hardly one himself -- but certainly anti-totalitarian. Also, this is an early influence -- I read both in middle school.
6)Paul Fussell's Class/David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise -- The two books, both of which I read in college and then again a few times afterwards, which helped me best understand the peculiarities of the social class I'd come to inhabit. I also find myself channeling Fusell and Brooks stylistically -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not -- whenever I write fluff. I realize both can be unbelievably pretentious. I'm trying to get over that. Please bear with me, friends.
7)The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe -- Yes, there's much to hate about Wolfe. But he showed me that contemporary fiction could involve more than the art of writing exquisitely about nothing at all.*
Tyler Cowen asked me once what kind of book I would really like to read that isn't being sold in bookstores. I responded, "A Tom Wolfe novel that doesn't have the flaws of Tom Wolfe's novels." What I meant was roughly "more doorstop sized novels that are panoramic in scope and that tackle big social and political questions."
8)On Liberty by John Stuart Mill -- My favorite free speech absolutist. I still quote him all too frequently here on the blog. He's also wonderful on why we ought to be broad-minded in tolerating eccentricity. I quote him on that point too probably all too often.
9)Democracy in America/The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville -- Read both in college. They profoundly influenced how I think about social change and the nature of revolutions. Also, the former on American exceptionalism.
10) Richard Pipes's work on Russia -- I read Russian Under the Old Regime for a college course and followed up soon with Pipes's books on the Russian Revolution and Russia under the Bolshevik regime. First, I found Pipes's explanation of why Russia went Communist more compelling than anything I'd read on the subject yet. He also sold me on the value of rock guys in understanding how liberal democracies take root.
*I'm paraphrasing a famous quote, but Google's not turning up the source. Anyone?
**The outtakes that I know some of you will ask about: yes, I know, Hayek. If I could go up to #11, he'd be there. As it is, there's actually not much I get from Hayek that I didn't get from Rand or others on this list. #12 would be Middlemarch by George Eliot for shaping my sense of what a good novel ought to do.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Apology for my absence, and l'affaire Stupak
Dear blog --
Has it really been a week? I'm terribly sorry for neglecting you. First, there was three hours of Russian on Monday. And then yoga class on Tuesday night. Wednesday night, there was the horrible affair of the prospective wedding photographer in Bethesda. Long story short: he cracked a few too many lawyer jokes, and after Pnin asked too many pointed questions about price, he told us that he didn't want our business and showed us the door. Classy.
Then Thursday night, there was Pnin's law school alumni lecture event. Adam Liptak was good! He's the sort of old-fashioned, pro-free-speech liberal who actually thinks that Citizens United was rightly decided, and is also in favor of upholding the Fourth Circuit in the funeral protesters case. I know much less about the latter, but tentatively, cool. And Friday: drinks with the libertariat. Am still trying to figure out why the bartender at Passenger charged me $8 for two martini-ish specialty drinks that he made up, but if I am what passes for an attractive girl for whom people will do favors, so much the better.
Saturday: lovely weather and mostly productive furniture shopping. And a St. Patrick's day party hosted by one of Pnin's ex-RAs. I ran into one of my friends from Koch, who's been working on an anti-health care campaign for the last ten months. He didn't know where I was currently working or that I was engaged to Pnin, which suggests how hard these people have been toiling away. Nor did he appear to be in good shape by the time we ran into each other, also signaling that things were headed south.
Speaking of which, what is there to say? I didn't think they'd get the votes. Yet they did.
Re: l'affaire Stupak -- I have a close friend who likes to say that abortion is the biggest non-issue in American politics. I wouldn't go quite that far. First simply on rhetorical grounds: it seems unnecessarily rude to put the issue that way around my various conservative legal movement friends. Yet... there's a kernel of truth in there. It's deeply frustrating to see a mammoth increase in the size of government turn on such a peripheral issue.
L'affaire Stupak reminds me of Hayek. The connection came into my mind first
when reading this op-ed in the Post on Friday. Hayek understood, better than anyone else, how limited government eases the temperature of the culture wars. In a society in which the central government has little or no role in funding health care, the question of state support to abortion is moot. Women either pay for their abortions -- or choose not to seek abortions-- in accordance with their own consciences. As government grows, abortion and related difficult questions -- questions on which reasonable people hold passionately opposed views* -- increasingly come into relief. * Thus what George Will calls the "museum of hoary artifacts from liberalism's attic," including racial preferences and extravagant "green" grant programs, littering the bill. The presence of such museum is no coincidence. It's precisely the effect that Hayek described so beautifully in The Road to Serfdom.
Would that the cultural warriors -- of both the liberal and conservative varieties -- recognized what we passionate limited government types have to give them. We're perhaps the people best able to give their communities maximum breathing room to live in accordance with their consciences.
*This is another post, perhaps even a series of academic books, but no, I don't think the abortion issue is simple. If it were, it would have been resolved long ago.
Has it really been a week? I'm terribly sorry for neglecting you. First, there was three hours of Russian on Monday. And then yoga class on Tuesday night. Wednesday night, there was the horrible affair of the prospective wedding photographer in Bethesda. Long story short: he cracked a few too many lawyer jokes, and after Pnin asked too many pointed questions about price, he told us that he didn't want our business and showed us the door. Classy.
Then Thursday night, there was Pnin's law school alumni lecture event. Adam Liptak was good! He's the sort of old-fashioned, pro-free-speech liberal who actually thinks that Citizens United was rightly decided, and is also in favor of upholding the Fourth Circuit in the funeral protesters case. I know much less about the latter, but tentatively, cool. And Friday: drinks with the libertariat. Am still trying to figure out why the bartender at Passenger charged me $8 for two martini-ish specialty drinks that he made up, but if I am what passes for an attractive girl for whom people will do favors, so much the better.
Saturday: lovely weather and mostly productive furniture shopping. And a St. Patrick's day party hosted by one of Pnin's ex-RAs. I ran into one of my friends from Koch, who's been working on an anti-health care campaign for the last ten months. He didn't know where I was currently working or that I was engaged to Pnin, which suggests how hard these people have been toiling away. Nor did he appear to be in good shape by the time we ran into each other, also signaling that things were headed south.
Speaking of which, what is there to say? I didn't think they'd get the votes. Yet they did.
Re: l'affaire Stupak -- I have a close friend who likes to say that abortion is the biggest non-issue in American politics. I wouldn't go quite that far. First simply on rhetorical grounds: it seems unnecessarily rude to put the issue that way around my various conservative legal movement friends. Yet... there's a kernel of truth in there. It's deeply frustrating to see a mammoth increase in the size of government turn on such a peripheral issue.
L'affaire Stupak reminds me of Hayek. The connection came into my mind first
when reading this op-ed in the Post on Friday. Hayek understood, better than anyone else, how limited government eases the temperature of the culture wars. In a society in which the central government has little or no role in funding health care, the question of state support to abortion is moot. Women either pay for their abortions -- or choose not to seek abortions-- in accordance with their own consciences. As government grows, abortion and related difficult questions -- questions on which reasonable people hold passionately opposed views* -- increasingly come into relief. * Thus what George Will calls the "museum of hoary artifacts from liberalism's attic," including racial preferences and extravagant "green" grant programs, littering the bill. The presence of such museum is no coincidence. It's precisely the effect that Hayek described so beautifully in The Road to Serfdom.
Would that the cultural warriors -- of both the liberal and conservative varieties -- recognized what we passionate limited government types have to give them. We're perhaps the people best able to give their communities maximum breathing room to live in accordance with their consciences.
*This is another post, perhaps even a series of academic books, but no, I don't think the abortion issue is simple. If it were, it would have been resolved long ago.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
In search of libertarian atheist puritanism
On second thought, perhaps I do have purity/sanctity moral intuitions. It's not actually the same purity reflex that liberals have regarding the environment or healthy food. (My writing a post yesterday about a French fry and cupcake eatery should have made the latter point clear, at least.)
I do have intuitions of purity/sanctity regarding language and grammar, though. I'm not sure that my soul ever knew how to shudder, in Leon Kass's sense of the term, regarding biomedical technology. But it does shudder when I see the phrase "an alumni of X university." Of course, there are no questions about this point anywhere on Haidt's tests. Maybe Bryan is right; maybe liberals and libertarians do have purity/sanctity intuitions, just different ones than Haidt's current tests measure.
The William James quote is also interesting. Like any good Hayekian, I believe that there are unseen orders everywhere. Language is one such unseen order. So, of course, is the marketplace. But I don't see any "supreme good" that comes from harmoniously adjusting oneself to the economic market. I agree that it's practical to adjust one's behavior to the marketplace -- in the sense that it's probably a bad idea, in 2010, to take up candle-making or artisanal carriage manufacturing as a trade instead of, say, computer engineering. But the issue there isn't moral, at least not for me.
With language, however, it is. I can't quite express this well, but language has such potential for beauty. And only by learning how to master the rules of language can humans come to realize language's full potential for beauty. As an atheist, I'm basically stuck thinking that humans' supreme good lies in learning how to do beautiful things well. See generally W.H Auden:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
I do have intuitions of purity/sanctity regarding language and grammar, though. I'm not sure that my soul ever knew how to shudder, in Leon Kass's sense of the term, regarding biomedical technology. But it does shudder when I see the phrase "an alumni of X university." Of course, there are no questions about this point anywhere on Haidt's tests. Maybe Bryan is right; maybe liberals and libertarians do have purity/sanctity intuitions, just different ones than Haidt's current tests measure.
The William James quote is also interesting. Like any good Hayekian, I believe that there are unseen orders everywhere. Language is one such unseen order. So, of course, is the marketplace. But I don't see any "supreme good" that comes from harmoniously adjusting oneself to the economic market. I agree that it's practical to adjust one's behavior to the marketplace -- in the sense that it's probably a bad idea, in 2010, to take up candle-making or artisanal carriage manufacturing as a trade instead of, say, computer engineering. But the issue there isn't moral, at least not for me.
With language, however, it is. I can't quite express this well, but language has such potential for beauty. And only by learning how to master the rules of language can humans come to realize language's full potential for beauty. As an atheist, I'm basically stuck thinking that humans' supreme good lies in learning how to do beautiful things well. See generally W.H Auden:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Notes on wandering around Georgetown
1. Found in a wedding magazine: a recommendation to play Cake's "Love You Madly" during the cake cutting part of one's ceremony. Note that the first lines are "I don't want to wonder/If this is a blunder/I don't want to worry if we're going to stay together 'til we die. It's a decent song about ambivalence in relationships. But it's no play territory, not cake cutting music.
I immediately e-mailed Clarissa Dalloway to share. "That's like playing "Born To Run" at political rallies," she said.
"No, 'Love You Madly' is worse. With 'Born to Run,' the chorus sounds patriotic, and the tempo is actually upbeat. It's only from the verses that you know that the chorus is supposed to be ironic. And Springsteen mutters, so it's hard to make out all of the verses."
Still, opinions welcome.
2. I don't understand the "Real Weddings" article sub-genre that many wedding magazines have. The subtext seems to be, "Look! Real people actually have weddings! There are people who do not throw up their hands in despair and elope!" I am happy about these people's not succumbing to despair, but, like, pulling off having a nice wedding seems like not that remarkable an achievement.
The sub-genre is often heavy on annoying political correctness. The selection of real couples must be racially balanced. Apparently no area of American life -- not even bridal magazines -- can remain untouched by quota mania. There are also sometimes SWPL anecdotes -- "It was really important to Emily and Jacob that all of their invitations and programs be printed on recycled paper" or "DeShawn and Tomoko seamlessly blended African-American and Japanese culinary traditions with an innovative, unique catering menu." The whole exercise seems designed to guilt trip me into feeling badly that I am not sitting at my laptop doing work.
Often as not, I just get distracted and start judging the couple based on their resumes. I should try to focus and just focus on whether or not I'm getting any useful ideas about flowers.
3. While on the same Barnes and Noble excursion, I took a look at a certain much maligned book on the case for settling. It's more insipid than I expected. I might say more about that in a separate post, except for the little matter of the private right of action I created that's enforceable against me.
4. I'm surprisingly unmoved by everything that's in clothing stores. This is the problem with the ridiculousness of the retail calendar; I just can't get excited about trying on sundresses when it's forty-two degrees and raining. Except for cheap ballet flats which are excellent.
5. I wanted to think that trendy cupcakes were overrated, merely another annoying affectation of the Uggs and North-Face clad undergrad masses. I was wrong. My Irish Creme cupcake was as fresh and delicious as the best cupcakes I've made myself. Maybe this experience will be enough to convince me to stop being so darn judgmental, though I doubt it.
Related wild idea: start a business that would sell nothing but specialty cupcakes, fancy French fries, and beverages (mostly hot chocolate and coffee.) Fancy French fries = involving sweet potatoes. another version involving garlic, and also others involving customized blends of spices. Perhaps these things do not go together, some will say, and this whole idea is deeply wrong. Perhaps. But if it's wrong, I don't want to be right.
I immediately e-mailed Clarissa Dalloway to share. "That's like playing "Born To Run" at political rallies," she said.
"No, 'Love You Madly' is worse. With 'Born to Run,' the chorus sounds patriotic, and the tempo is actually upbeat. It's only from the verses that you know that the chorus is supposed to be ironic. And Springsteen mutters, so it's hard to make out all of the verses."
Still, opinions welcome.
2. I don't understand the "Real Weddings" article sub-genre that many wedding magazines have. The subtext seems to be, "Look! Real people actually have weddings! There are people who do not throw up their hands in despair and elope!" I am happy about these people's not succumbing to despair, but, like, pulling off having a nice wedding seems like not that remarkable an achievement.
The sub-genre is often heavy on annoying political correctness. The selection of real couples must be racially balanced. Apparently no area of American life -- not even bridal magazines -- can remain untouched by quota mania. There are also sometimes SWPL anecdotes -- "It was really important to Emily and Jacob that all of their invitations and programs be printed on recycled paper" or "DeShawn and Tomoko seamlessly blended African-American and Japanese culinary traditions with an innovative, unique catering menu." The whole exercise seems designed to guilt trip me into feeling badly that I am not sitting at my laptop doing work.
Often as not, I just get distracted and start judging the couple based on their resumes. I should try to focus and just focus on whether or not I'm getting any useful ideas about flowers.
3. While on the same Barnes and Noble excursion, I took a look at a certain much maligned book on the case for settling. It's more insipid than I expected. I might say more about that in a separate post, except for the little matter of the private right of action I created that's enforceable against me.
4. I'm surprisingly unmoved by everything that's in clothing stores. This is the problem with the ridiculousness of the retail calendar; I just can't get excited about trying on sundresses when it's forty-two degrees and raining. Except for cheap ballet flats which are excellent.
5. I wanted to think that trendy cupcakes were overrated, merely another annoying affectation of the Uggs and North-Face clad undergrad masses. I was wrong. My Irish Creme cupcake was as fresh and delicious as the best cupcakes I've made myself. Maybe this experience will be enough to convince me to stop being so darn judgmental, though I doubt it.
Related wild idea: start a business that would sell nothing but specialty cupcakes, fancy French fries, and beverages (mostly hot chocolate and coffee.) Fancy French fries = involving sweet potatoes. another version involving garlic, and also others involving customized blends of spices. Perhaps these things do not go together, some will say, and this whole idea is deeply wrong. Perhaps. But if it's wrong, I don't want to be right.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Very good sentences
How do you know if your advice is “unwanted”?
A blunt but wise rule of thumb: If a person wants your advice, he will ask for it.
-- Bryan Caplan
A blunt but wise rule of thumb: If a person wants your advice, he will ask for it.
-- Bryan Caplan
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)