Bob Barr has big balls! While most Republicans stand mute as the President cedes new powers to himself and the state and conducts the war like a benevolent despot, Rep. Barr tells it like it is on civil liberties issues.

Barr, unlike many in Congress, at least knows what his job isn’t:

Most people up here, Republicans especially, don’t like to make waves. They prefer to sit back and go with the flow, or they might not speak out because it might be contrary to what the Republican president wants. But I was not elected to represent the president.

In Praise of Bad Habits — Text of fascinating lecture by Peter Marsh, a learned and even moving defense of hedonism and full living against the self-righteous ascetics and the health police. Highly recommended! I’m going outside to smoke a Marlboro!

Instapundit, with the lowdown on therapuetic cloning. And more from the always reliable Ron Bailey.

Philosopher John Kekes attacks the egalitarian tendencies of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.

Since the name of this blog is taken from a Wittgenstein quote, I feel obliged to pass along good Wittgensteiniana. Try this fun excerpt from Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. The title refers to a celebrated, and much disputed, confrontation between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper involving a fire poker.

Although I doubt he is taking up my challenge to present a non-fluff argument against cloning, Dawson of dawson.com teases us with this:

Until I have time to expound, expatiate and yes, eviscerate, on the very real evils of cloning, I leave you this quotation from one of my favorite authors:
“A person is a person no matter how small.” ~Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess’s point is tautological. What does it have to do with the morality of cloning?

James Taranto of Best of the Web demonstrates mocking disregard for civil rights when he gladly cites poll data to show that people who care about liberty are out of touch with most Americans. The data show most Americans approving of such things as indefinite, secret state imprisonment for trivial offenses and the ability of the state to legally eavesdrop on conversations between the accused and their defenders. Taranto seems quite pleased that the populace’s “overriding priority is to win the war.” However, there is no clear indication that these policies are helping to win the war. And it is disturbing that an emergency can so easily cause so many Americans to disregard the importance of other people’s rights.

From mensactivism.org:

The YWCA of Middle Tennessee recently ran an ad in both the Nashville Scene and Nashville’s City Paper depicting the blurred image of a young boy walking up to his front door. The caption: “One day he’ll own his own house…raise his own kids…beat his own wife.”

It’s part of an anti-domestic abuse campaign. Apparently the small print at the bottom of the ad explains “the cycle of abuse” and the ad is supposed to be about that. Sucks to be a boy these days. Saw an elementary school girl with this shirt on a while back: “Girls Rule, Boys Drool!” Yeah… that and they’re destined to beat the living shit out of you.

Wendy McElroy discusses ceramic penises in Boulder and anti-male hate speech at I-Feminists.com.

I’ve been looking…. Is there an argument against cloning other than (1) We shouldn’t be playing God, (2) It makes me feel really funny, or (3) It’s not safe yet?

(1) and (2) are ridiculous, because there is no God (and if there were she’d want us to do it) and feeling funny isn’t an objection to anything. (3) is a perfectly good argument, but without staying power; it’ll be safe soon enough.

I’m interested in having a good debate about this, but there seems to be too little intellectual substance on the “neg” side to have one.

Okay, let me put out some argument bait. I’ll even put it in terms prejudiced against my side (no parents desperate for children/organ transplant or die stuff). So… Suppose I want a clone of myself, just for kicks (I’d be a good dad and all), and I find a willing egg-womb donor. Why shouldn’t I be able to do it?

Fire away.

Good article by Reason’s Ron Bailey on Tech Central Station (thanks to Instapundit) about the smear campaign on Bjorn Lomberg. Lomberg is a ex-Greenpeacer statistician from Aarhus University who set out to show that there was something wrong with Julian Simon’s anti-enviro-gloom research, only to find that most of it was right.

I went to see Lomberg speak on Capitol Hill a couple months back (it started late because the caterers were caught in post 9/11 security). It’s clear why he’s perceived by the enviro-left as a threat. He’s a charming, articulate, attractive, liberal, gay, environmentally concerned, Scandanavian intellectual. By all indications, he should be on their side. But he’s not. Instead, he’s curious and intellectually honest.

For a long-time fan of Simon (God bless him), there was very little news in Lomberg’s lecture. But messengers matter, and Lomberg is great messenger for those who don’t think the world is falling apart. Simon was iconoclastic and could be dismissed as a crank (the left loved to mention that he wrote books on running mail a mail order business, as though grass roots capitalism is tantamount to Satan worship). But Lomberg, in his jeans and too-small black t-shirt, making a Simon-like case with mathematical competence, a young winning smile and charming Euro-cadences… that’s just too much to take. The delight of the largely conservative and libertarian crowd is a sure indicator of left consternation.

The first U.S. combat death, Johnny “Mike Spann, a CIA agent, has been officially reported. First, it’s just amazing that it took this long for an American death. Second, it’s really amazing that your chances of dying appear to be higher if you’re a journalist than if you’re a U.S. combat troop.

In a comment on my blurb for Will Thomas’s cipro article, my revered colleague, Damon Chetson, replies that intellectual property rights are a myth.

One of the interesting divisions among libertarians is the split between IP communists, like Damon, and pro-IP rights people, like myself. Some IP commies claim that the point of property rights is to create a system of efficient allocation for things that can’t be used by everyone at once. There’s no point in having a car, say, if you don’t have a right to exclude others from using it whenever they want, because if they’re using it, you can’t. And if you don’t divide up common areas into parcels of property, everyone will race to plunder whatever they can from the limited stock of resources. However, the molecular structure of cipro (or the sequence of words in a novel, etc.) is costlessly replicable. Thus allowing everyone to use it doesn’t keep the inventor from using it. Therefore, there’s no point in attributing a right to use that structure of molecules (or sequence of words, etc).

My reply is that property rights aren’t based solely on the necessity of assigning entitlements of use to things that everybody can’t use at once. We need to distinguish the moral basis of rights from the reasons we have for respecting other’s rights. The basis for my right in my car is that I bought it from someone who had a right in the car. Your reason for respecting my right to my car is that we’re all better off in a system that efficiently allocates entitlements of use for rivalrous goods. With IP, the basis of my right to a certain molecule is that I discovered it. Now, here’s where the IP commie comes in… “But do we really have a reason to respect that right? Wouldn’t we all be better off if we didn’t?”

This, I think, is the hard question. John Locke, the ur-rights theorist, argued that you have a right of original acquisition if you “mixed your labor” with the thing, and if you “leave enough and as good” for others. The tragedy of the commons problems that show that property rights are required for leaving enough and as good (required, because if no one has rights to the commons, it disappears due to abuse and plunder), apply equally to IP, but in a different way.

Think of the land of ideas as an abstract commons — everyone can wander in and explore. The problem here is that the commons is such a vast wasteland that it is incredibly difficult to find the oases of value in it. The tragedy of the intellectual commons isn’t due to everyone racing to take what they can before others get to it, but due to no one bothering to go into it to discover its amazing treasures. If there are no IP rights, some people will go into the commons for fun (open source-like folks), and will be happy to share what they find. However, most people will be discouraged if they know that they won’t have rights over what they find there. And so many amazing, life-enhancing things will be left unfound.

The question is: Under IP communism, will the value that comes from the public diffusion of the things that are found make up for the value that is lost from the things that are not found, due to disincentive? And would this be a good enough reason to override the basic moral rights of discoverers and creators? Not easy questions.

The IP commie argument that in an open source world people will simply respond to different incentives, and therefore gladly contribute their intellectual effort for the commonweal, smacks too much of the regular commie argument that the abolition of property altogether will only bring out the best in all of us, which will bring forth utopia. We all know how that worked out.

First the smoking idiocy, now this! These freaks in Montgomery County are making me glad to live in rather less chi chi Prince Georges County (for a change). If you can set the cops on your neighbor because you don’t like the odor coming from their place, can’t we in PG County do something about the odious smells coming from MoCo?

If you’re so smart… why don’t you write an encyclopedia entry! Go to Wikipedia, which is, naturally enough, a wiki and an encyclopedia. A wiki is a web page that can be edited by anyone who can view it. At Wikipedia, you can jump right into entries and improve them (although if it’s not an improvement, someone else will soon change it back), or use your commanding knowledge of East Siberian hunting beavers to author the definitive article on the topic. The cool thing about Wikipedia is its anarchic, but stable and cooperative, open-source ethic.