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John Adams on the small screen

While waiting for HBO's John Adams to come out on DVD, I was reminded by David Mayer of the 1976 miniseries The Adams Chronicles, based on the brilliant multi-generational biography, The Adams Family by James Truslow Adams (no relation). It's available on DVD, and it's really good. It's a PBS production, and thirty years old, so it has its shortcomings--particularly an annoying (but only occasional) narration. But George Grizzard is a fantastic Adams, conveying the man's frailties without coming off as a neurotic buffoon. I recommend it--and I recommend the book even more; it is elegant and fair--far moreso than the sometimes hasty and deeply biased David McCullough book. Incidentally, Clay Jenkinson's Thomas Jefferson Hour has been doing a series of episodes on Jefferson's relationship with Adams.

Friday art

The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins

Thoughts on conscience and public interest law

There’s been a lot of hooting about a student note published by Phil Telfeyan in the Harvard Law Review, which discusses the poor, the conscience of lawyers, and related matters. Much of the criticism has focused on the fact that the article is self-righteous, unrelated to the law, and factually inaccurate. There’s a lot to these criticisms. But I thought perhaps I would try a different tactic and address the point Mr. Telfeyan was trying to make about conscience in the legal profession, in a direct letter.

Words of wisdom for Arnie

"The task of statesmanship, in part, is to clarify the alternatives that are before the country and to compel the people to a genuine and not a spurious or illusory choice."--Harry Jaffa, Crisis of The House Divided

What it is that's "none of our business"

Prominent libertarians have argued with indignation that the doings of the FLDS are nobody's business, and that they are victims of religious persecution and prejudice. Here is an example of what the FLDS is about. Now, if consenting adults want to create plural marriages, they have that right, and I even believe it should be protected by the Free Excercise Clause, something the courts have rejected. But if adult men think God wants them to sex up little girls, that's where they violate individual rights and go beyond the freedoms libertarians ought to defend.

Excessive CPS acts

Here are a couple pretty disturbing cases of overreaching by Child Protective Services.

Somalia as libertarian paradise?

Ed Brayton pointed out to me a particularly silly comment on his blog to the effect that Somalia is a “libertarian paradise” because it has “no government at all that functions, you can buy or sell anything or anyone you want, and can get any weapon you want to protect yourself—if you can afford it).”

Normally you just ignore belligerent ignorance like this, but I’ve heard this one more than once, so perhaps a brief response is in order. That response would, of course, be the one John Locke offered four centuries ago:

liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, “a liberty for every man to do what he lists.” For who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own. 

Libertarians believe in freedom—the freedom to act without the interference of others, whether it be the interference of government or of other individuals. Thus libertarians believe in a rule of law and in government, to protect our freedom from the interference of others. No libertarian at all believes that there should be no government or that you should be free to violate the rights of individuals.

There are anarchist libertarians, but they also believe in law and government—just in a very different kind of law and government. They believe that protection of individual rights can be more effectively and justly provided by private institutions, so that they would radically privatize the functions of government. But they would do so in order to protect the rights of individuals from the interference of others. They believe in anarchy, but not in chaos.

No libertarians believe that there should be roving gangs of warlords free to violate individual rights at will. That accusation is either profoundly ignorant of the most basic principles of libertarianism, or an outright lie perpetrated by people who want to convince us to fear freedom and to accept instead the violation of our rights by an overpowerful government. The latter is a very old ploy. That is why Algernon Sidney, responding to this same charge four centuries ago also, at roughly the same time as Locke, wrote that people like Brayton’s commenter

confine[] the subject’s choice to acting or suffering, that is, doing what is commanded, or lying down to have his throat cut, or to see his family and country made desolate. This he calls giving to Caesar that which is Caesar’s; whereas he ought to have considered that the question is not whether that which is Caesar’s should be rendered to him, for that is to be done to all men; but who is Caesar, and what doth of right belong to him, which he no way indicates to us: so that the question remains entire, as if he had never mentioned it….

Friday art

The End of The Trail by James Earl Fraser

This sculpture has become an icon, almost a generic American Indian symbol, but it was actually sculpted for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915, to symbolize the destruction of American Indian sovereignty and civilization. Fraser also made the Indian Head nickel.

Perhaps the looniest perfesser of all time?

Check out the latest insanity from the classroom: a "teacher" suing her students for disputing her crazy-ass postmodernist bull in class. The students evidently were vocal in their disdain for Prof. Priya Venkatesan's fashionable nonsense--but, of course, she says it was racism. In an interview, Venkatesan explains "the fact of the matter is that I have the PhD in literature, I make the assessment if someone has talent for philosophy, literary theory, and literary criticism." Oh, okay. You talk, we nod in silent agreement, eh?

Even better is this:

[Venkatesan]: One time [Venkatesan's supervisor] was sitting in the class, and [a student] asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and [the supervisor] pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

[Interviewer]: No. No, I don’t understand that.

[Venkatesan]: I have to tell you: it means tenure track. [Two "t"s, you see?--TMS]

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay.

[Venkatesan]: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

[Interviewer, no doubt rolling his eyes]: Oh, okay, yes.

[Venktaesan]: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

[Interviewer]: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

This story courtesy of NoodleFood, which adds, "Priya Venkatesan thinks that she's entitled to agreement from her students. As an interview with her makes clear, she's so completely immersed in postmodernism that she cannot even grasp the meaning of any criticism thereof. Sadly, from what I know of English Departments, she was likely encouraged in that attitude -- and shielded from any non-postmodernist views or anti-postmodernist criticism -- in graduate school."

FLDS decision

Eugene Volokh has the Texas Court of Appeals decision finding that Texas officials acted illegally in the raid on the FLDS complex in El Dorado. It looks pretty devastating, and correct. This is really the worst possible outcome. The clumsiness of the state's actions has already made many members of the public sympathize with the FLDS, and see them as a persecuted, if somewhat idiosyncratic group of harmless folk. They are in reality something much more sinister than that, but incidents like this make it harder to police their activities. It happened in the "Short Creek Raid" fifty years ago, and it's happened again here.

Update: Perhaps I should clarify. The court is clearly right that the government acted without sufficient evidence and acted far beyond its authority, thus violating the rights of the FLDS members. The reason this is such a bad outcome is that now state authorities, who are right to be suspicious of the FLDS, have damaged their credibility to such a degree that they will hesitate to act next time, when there might be good evidence and imminent danger to a child. (Not to mention that the FLDS will be less willing to cooperate next time.) By overreacting now, the state has made it all the more difficult to act responsibly the next time.