Instead of raising the victim back up — to balance the scales of Lady Justice, so to speak — it seeks to drag the criminal down to the victim’s diminished level.
~*~
Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.
An organization called 10:10, whose mission is to promote a global campaign to get everyone to (voluntarily) reduce their carbon emissions by 10% starting in the year 2010, has produced what is perhaps the most ill-advised publicity campaign ever.
Apparently they thought it would be funny to highlight the allegedly voluntary nature of this campaign by, um, alluding to the very justifiable fears that many environmentalists are willing to impose their values on others by (deadly) force. It would be wonderful if everyone would make some small sacrifice to reduce their carbon emissions by 10%, so the campaign goes, but if you don’t want to, that’s cool. It’s your choice. No pressure. Red button pressed. BOOM!!! SPLATTER!!! Such a pity you made the wrong choice. Tee hee!
I’m not kidding. Watch the video below. But be forewarned: it is graphic.
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10:10’s Decimate the Global Population Campaign Read Post »
In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies now will set a precedent that will lead to unreasonable policies down the road. Our worries are discounted as merely hypothetical possibilities. They are quite content to put off discussion of crossing that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it, as they see things. And, in any case, something needs to be done about the current problem now, dammit! The trouble is, by the time we reach that bridge of unreasonableness (wherever it happens to be for our interlocutor), we have already gathered so much momentum from sliding down the slope that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt, much less reverse, the slide. Along the way, with each new government intervention, people grow increasingly used to turning to government solutions for every little problem — they lose the ability to even imagine the possibility of private, market solutions — and what was once thought unreasonable no longer seems so.
We libertarians have more than merely consequentialist, slippery slope arguments against government policies, of course, but I still think it is useful to point out dangerous precedents, particularly when our worries are not just theoretical as we are already well on our way down the slide. The acceptance of professional licensing of “crucial” professions has over time been expanded into ever more areas, even to the licensing of florists in my home state of Louisiana and now to calls for the licensing of parents.
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Road Socialism Leads to Broadband Socialism Read Post »
We decided to switch to a 2-column layout with only 1 sidebar, and we added some new features in the process. I’ll highlight the major changes.
The main content column is now wider, making the text easier to read with less scrolling. The remaining sidebar is a bit wider than the old sidebars were individually as well. We’ve moved a lot of the sidebar widgets, so that you’ll have ready access to the most relevant features and content depending on what you’re doing.
You will only see the blog archive widgets (for posts by date, author, categories, and tags) in the sidebar on the various archive pages, for when you’re actually browsing or searching the archives. We’ve long had our Tag Cloud page, also with a tag index, but now we’ve added a Blog Archives page. On this page we’ve embedded the Collapsing Archives, List Authors, and Collapsing Categories sidebar widgets with the Widgets on Pages plugin (and some custom css). When you have a hankering to browse or search the archives, check out these two pages.
By the way, in case you didn’t know, you can subscribe to author-specific and category-specific rss feeds, if you are especially interested in a particular author or topic, by right-clicking on the rss icon beside the author’s or category name, copying the url, and adding it manually to your favorite rss reader.
On all other pages with sidebars, you will find the recent posts and recent comments sidebar widgets. The site visitors and FeedBurner subscribers widgets have been moved to the About page. We switched to the Collapsing Links plugin to minimize the footprint of our blogroll.1
We removed our old popular posts widget from the sidebar entirely and switched to the WordPress.com Popular Posts plugin. Instead of displaying a small sidebar list of the most popular posts for the last 30 days, we recently created the Popular page where you will find lists of our most popular posts and pages (ranked by page views) for the current day, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, and all time.
We hope you’ll find the new layout cleaner and more attractive, providing easier access to more relevant content and features.
It appears there is a strange bug that causes the Collapsing Links widget not to expand. It only seems to work when the Collapsing Archives or Collapsing Categories widget is in the sidebar with it. Hopefully the developer will have this bug fixed soon or we’ll revert to the default links widget. ↩
Major Site Redesign Read Post »
So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?
Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:
Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”
If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”
Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.
The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:
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Grading the Pledge to America Read Post »
