Almost everybody thinks elections are events of immense importance. I think this is evidence that almost nobody understands how we are in fact governed (or ruled). The distinction between the government and the state is simple enough, but it seems that nobody really really gets it.

The point is that if Kerry wins, just suppose, then we’ll get a new slate of political appointees in the agencies of the executive branch. But the overall turnover will be negligible. Now, political appointees matter, but not THAT much. The lifers rule.

When Congress passes a law, it’s out of their hands. It’s up to the bureacracy to interpret it, which they can do faithfully or perversely, and to enforce it, which they may choose not to do at all.

I once went on a date with an EPA lawyer. (Yay Nerve.com!) I said to her, more or less, this is my guess about what you do. . . A new environmental law is passed. The EPA people decide whether they like it or not. If they like it, they enforce it. If they don’t like it, they think, “What would we like the law to mean?” They then try to find a way of interpreting the language to reflect their, rather than congress’s preferences. The lawyers then think about who will sue them if they interpret the law this way, and whether they would win the suit. If they can’t win, they reinterpret it in a way that maybe doesn’t reflect their preferences as much, but which is more likely to stand up in court. Once they’ve got a winner, they implement, and prepare for the likey suit.

She said, “That’s almost exactly what I do.”

I wanted to know whether she, a good liberal, considered this anti-democratic. She didn’t. Not at all. Democracy is beautiful! It’s just that the representatives of the people tend not to know their elbows from their assholes, are subject to all sorts of distorting electoral pressures, and so pass laws contrary to what they would pass if they knew more and were directly motivated by a desire to promote the commonweal. So democracy is great, except when it’s not, due to ignorance and bad motivation, which is almost always, in which case the bureaucracy, who really do know what they’re doing, has to fix things.

Now, I found this to be an astonishing . . . tension. (No, we never went out again.) In any case, I’m quite glad things work this way. You may never hear another libertarian say this, so listen up: I think the United States of America has an absolutely wonderful bureaucracy! That is, wonderful relative to most actually existing bureacracies in the world, which should be the relevant comparison class, not the Meinongian bureacracies of our dreams.

Anyway, we elect the government, not the state. Governments comes and go. The state persists. We should count ourselves lucky to have a decent state that is pretty much competent, and does a fairly good job of undermining democracy in a generally salutary fashion.

That said, when a President tells the Army to go invade a country, they go. A president that didn’t do this might be nice.

Can someone please explain to me what ‘geechy’ means? Thank you.

Does the DEA know that oxytocin is addictive?

934 Westminster is so having a cuddle party! The rules:

1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2. No SEX. (Yep, you read that right.)

3. Ask for permission to kiss or nuzzle anyone. Make sure you can handle getting a no before you invite or request anyone to cuddle or kiss.

4. If you’re a yes, say yes. If you’re a no, say no.

5. If you’re a maybe, say NO.

6. You are encouraged to change your mind from a yes to a no, no to a yes anytime you want.

7. NO DRY HUMPING!

8. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

9. If you’re in a relationship, communicate and set your boundaries and agreements BEFORE you go to the Cuddle Party. Don’t re-negotiate those agreements/boundaries during the Cuddle Party. (Trust us on this one.)

10. Get your Cuddle Life Guard On Duty or Cuddle Caddy if there’s a concern, problem, or question or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

11. Crying and giggling are both welcomed and encouraged.

12. Outside of your personal relationships, it’s nobody’s business who you cuddle, so please be respectful of other people’s privacy when sharing with the outside world about Cuddle Parties.

13. Arrive on time.

14. Be hygienically savvy.

15. Clean up after yourself.

16. Always say thank you and practice good Cuddle Manners.

My guess is that any party where you have to emphatically proscribe dry humping is a party in which there will be some dry humping.

Objectivist bonus: CuddleParty.com is apparently the copyright of an entity named “Atlas Spooned.” Which makes me think: If Rearden would have just taken some of his seeting psychosexual frustration and just cuddled with Dagny . . . I mean, jammies stay on, and they just spoon. I think our Promethean giants of industry might have been a lot less stressed out about all the parasites, moochers, and whim-worhsipping second handers, and everything would have turned out a lot nicer for everybody. Rural Colorado gets pretty boring after awhile.

Want to know some words I learned from Ayn Rand: bromide; instransigent.

[Link from Gene, who I think could use a good cuddle.]

Has anyone considered that this may be an inclusive disjunction?

Meanwhile, P. Diddy is attempting to stir the nation’s youth to action with his “Vote or Die” campaign. Now, Diddy, being a master logician, has had the foresight to pick a disjunction that is certainly true, if only contingently so. Everyone will eventually die, while it is perfectly possible (because actual) to neither choose nor lose.

Now it may be that Diddy intends an exclusive disjunction. (Either one or the other, but not both.) But I don’t think he really wants to say that people who die didn’t vote. He only wants to say that if you don’t vote, then you’ll die. Right? Well, we do know that only about half of the registered voters, to say nothing of eligible voters, failed to exercise their rights of citizenship in the last election. But Diddy’s conditional entails that the non-dead voted, yet many non-dead non-voters are among us. So that can’t be right. So he must be saying that if you don’t vote, the probability of dying will increase. How about that? Well, we can check the death rates among voters and non-voters from the last election. My hunch is that the rate of death among voters is probably higher than among non-voters, since the elderly vote more reliably than the young, and the elderly tend to die more. So what is Mr. Combs trying to say?

Wonkette, takes it as a threat, “Vote or I’ll wave a gun in your face in a midtown nightclub,” which is frightening, but can’t quite capture it, because waving a gun in someone’s face doesn’t entail their death. So it needs to be a bit stronger: Vote or I’ll make you dead (whether with a pistol, a machete, a tank of water and a cinder block, a mortally frightening clown, whatever). I don’t think this is the intended message, however.

Perhaps it is something like “There is someone such that if you don’t vote, they will make you dead.” This is a good possibility. But who could “someone” be? An avenging Democracy Fairy who slays non-voters? Well, the Democracy Fairy would have to be new, since we guessed that voters are in fact more likely to die than non-voters. Maybe the intention instead is “In a contest between A and B, if you don’t vote, then A or B will make you dead.” I think we’re getting very close, and that this is entailed by the correct interpretation. I think it’s more like, “In a contest between A and B, if A wins, then A will not make you dead, and if B wins, then B will make you dead, and if you vote, then you vote for A, and A wins, and if you don’t vote, then B wins.”

I wonder if Puffy knows something we don’t. For my part, I suspect that B is . . . Michael Badnarik!

Or that the Diddy is subversively highlighting the majoritarian coercion implicit in democracy.

Koch Fellow Rachel Balsham has a smart post over at Obernews on the adaptation of the market to the prevalent distaste for the market. After a number of interesting examples, she predicts that

given the prevalence of vague anti-market preferences among bobos, the rise of bobo culture will bring about more creative ways to be capitalist without the aftertaste of oppression. And eventually, maybe private enterprise won’t taste so bad to the cultural elite.

I think this raises all sorts of interesting questions, few of which I will raise here.

I will say that Balsham’s Conjecture strikes me as containing a deep tension between the expression of preference in the market and in the voting booth. If enough people have anti-market preferences, then the market will, soon enough, begin providing goods and services packaged in a manner that appeals to those preferences. And if enough people have anti-market preferences, they will vote for anti-market policy. They are in effect buying the same thing in both cases: self-narrative coherence.

Rachel seems to think that once the market starts giving anti-market folks products that flatter their ideological self-conceptions, the edges will begin to rub off the classic anti-market tropes, and anti-market commitments will soften. But this might be backwards. The market may gratify anti-market preferences by selling products that affirm and entrench classic anti-market tropes, thus cementing or even sharpening anti-market preferences. These preferences, expressed electorally, are bad for the market.

As the Marxists were fond of saying, “The capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him.” Or something like that. What we have, then, if we turn Balsham’s Conjecture on its head, is a sort of ideological tragedy of the commons, where entrepreneurs race to profit from products that undermine the cultural conditions of entrepreneurship.

Oh, the contradictions of capitalism!

Check out the newish blog from the Drug Policy Alliance (Reason! Compassion!! Justice!!!) written by Baylen Linnekin. Baylen was at an IHS seminar I stage-managed a few years ago, and I had the good fortune of running into him a couple months ago after some AFF thing. Baylen’s a good guy. The blog is a very useful compendium of drug-related stories and entertainingly written. Go look.

Wonkette is disappointed at her pathetically failed attempt at libertarian-baiting. She complains:

We’re sort of befuddled that our jab at the prospects for Libertarian sex-for-votes trading didn’t generate more indignant email from outraged Reason subscribers. These are people who can get a lively debate going about Schumpeter versus von Mises, but accuse them of not getting any and they’re suspiciously silent. Sure, they talk a good free love game, but where are the swinging Chicago school devotees when push comes to, uhm, shove? We’re not the only ones wondering. Noting that a special on A&E this week blares that “There may be as many as 50,000 people involved in polygamous relationships in Utah,” a libertarian livejournaler responds, “And you poly Objectivists think you’re all kinky and shit! Ha! You guys are being outfucked by MORMONS!”

Now, I’m not about to concede that little Ludwig and I don’t see much action, but I can gladly admit to being outfucked by Mormons without losing face. For Ana Marie and her livejournaler seem not to know that Mormonism, if about nothing is else, is about fucking!

Our “souls” are “spirit children,” which are the consequence of a good celestial rodgering. The aim of life is to become a god and fuck away the afterlife with one’s eternal spouse(s). A sexier theology is hardly imaginable.

According to some randomly Googled website (and I stand behind this account with the full weight of my experience as “Historic Interpreter” at the Joseph Smith Historic Center):

In Mormon theology, there are three levels of heaven, terrestial, tellestial, and celestial. It teaches that almost everyone will make it to the first level, terrestrial, but Mormons seek entrance to celestial heaven, because there they are exalted to godhood. Once a man is exalted to godhood, he and his wife will reproduce offspring for eternity. These spirit children will in turn inhabit physical bodies and have the opportunity to become gods as well. This privilege is reserved for those who go through the sacred marriage ceremony in the Temple and live in obedience to Mormon teachings.

The point is, there is no shame in being outfucked by Mormons. Fucking is what they do!

[Bonus! Click here for the words to "If I Could Hie to Kolob". Note: Kolob here is NOT a canyon in Utah!]

If you, or someone you know, is looking for a place to live in Washington, DC starting in September, there is a yet-unfilled vacancy at the Westminnie House. 934 Westminster is ONE (convoluted) block’s distance from the U St/Cardozo/African American Civil War Memorial metro stop. We’re within a leisurely five minute stroll of some of DC’s best music venues: 9:30, Black Cat, Velvet Lounge, DC9, Bohemian Caverns, and more. The restaurants and bars of a rapidly gentrifying U St are RIGHT THERE. Walk to DuPont: 15 minutes. Walk to Adams Morgan: 15 minutes. Walk Downtown: 15-20 minutes. Giant (ugh) and Whole Foods supermarkets are nearby.

Preferred roomates are 20-to-early-30-something young professional intellectual types (e.g., lettered in debate or quiz bowl). Your roommates would include two researchers at the Urban Institute and a UMD philosophy grad student.

Query in the comments, or to flybottle [[at]] willwilkinson [[dot]] net.

[Update: The vacancy has been filled. Thanks for your interest.]

I agree with almost the whole of Alina Stefanescu’s articulate and angry “apology.” Read it.

Alina’s essay reminds me of something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Consider Alina’s quote from Michnik:

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens, there can be no free and independent nations… a state that ignores the will and rights of its citizens can offer no guarantee that it will respect the will and rights of other peoples, nations, and states.

Do we have “free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens”? I think: no.

The traditional Marxish theory of consumer culture is that the dark arts of marketing and advertising germinate within us “false” desires. A false desire is one whose satisfaction serves not one’s own “interests,” but the interests of those in the business of servicing (for a pretty penny!) the psychic “needs” that they themselves have planted. So we are supposed to be wary of Nike, Starbucks, etc. lest we surrender our autonomy to the cigar-chomping moneybags. No Logo!

This idea has never done much for me. I’m impressed with my own tendency to want only a surpassingly slim fraction of the things marketed to me, and my want seems best explained by its relation to longstanding projects and plans. The thing about the market is that it is SO fragmented, there are so many choices, and there are so many counterbalancing sales-pitches competing over my very small budget that it is most likely that my choices in the end reflect fairly “authentic” preferences. (Let’s say those are preferences that emerge more or less organically from my practical identity.) I’ve never seen the yogurt or cereal I eat advertised. I chose New Balance running shoes over Nike because I tried both and New Balance fit my feet better. I chose to start running again because I don’t want to be fat. (And I don’t want to be fat because, well, yes, the HHS’s wildly successful VERB: It’s what you do! campaign.)

However, I am beginning to find the Marxist critique quite pertinent to America’s duopolistic political system. Both libertarians and Greens insistently point out that the differences between the policies of the Ds and the Rs are mostly cosmetic, with a few substantive exceptions. The logic of the median voter theorem pushes politicians toward the middle with rhetorical concessions to the flanks.

What we end up with is a choice between policy-bundles as different from the other as Colgate from Crest. But in politics we have only Colgate and Crest. Some people will have a genuine preference for better whitening action, while others will genuinely prefer enhanced cavity protection. But mostly there is a riot of indifference.

Since the policy bundles we’re offered represent only a tiny slice of the possible range, they will only very improbably reflect most “authentic” combinations of political preferences. Most people would be unsatisfied with the choices, and ill-motivated to vote. So the parties must implant false desire. The parties and their stooges in the media mount massive marketing and advertising assaults to make you think that a certain kind of attractive person votes for their side, a certain kind of awful person votes for the other side, and that you, no doubt, are an attractive person.

It is said that red and blue is a state of mind. A “psychographic” in the marketer’s lingo. But I posit that these states of mind are ideological constructions, in the good old-fashioned Marxist sense. There is nothing deep in your identity that leads you organically to accept abortion, denounce the death penalty, oppose school vouchers, want to save the spotted titmouse, etc. (Or the counterparts to these views.) Yes, there is a story you tell yourself and others about how all this hangs together. Your sense of identity is bound up in it. But, ultimately, it’s a story that only passingly serves your own true interests. For the most part your muddle of preferences, your political identity, your political desire, is a tool for the satisfaction of the interests of one set of power-seeking narcissists over the interests of a mostly indistinguisable set of others.

I’ve got to say that it’s just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. The whole industry of pop leftism–Michael Moore, Al Franken, Thomas Frank, Move On, etc.–, turns out to be a device, among other things, for getting earnest kids superficially worried about autonomy and alienation to hit the sidewalk and maximize taps on the Diebold flatscreen for the greater glory of a self-infatuated millionaire blowhard whose policies suspiciously resemble the bumbling, Jesus-spouting halfwit they’ve learned to hate with a delicious half-mad zeal. They labor happily, bent to the will of the political class, animated by a comically absurd set of beliefs and desires that could not truly be their own.

I speak of the left, but do not think I lack pity for the poor souls fully convinced that a Democratic White House will lead to compulsory abortion, mandatory sodomy, and total capitulation to the Arab terror.

Living in DC, the “pick a team” ethos is almost overwhelming. People want to know whose side you’re on. Well, I say, be on the side of the free, self-respecting, and autonomous. The side of the angels. The hope of freedom. Alina said that the only worthwile wars of liberation are those you fight on your own. Yes. So reject the manufactured political identity. Resist the terms of the debate. Refuse to be used.

You do need to brush your teeth, but you don’t need to vote.

Nicholas Kristof highlights the latest of the “Left Behind” series, Glorious Appearing, in which the Son of God kicks serious ass. An excerpt from the book:

Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.

Kristof rightly notes that this Jesus-as-genocidal-angel- of-vengeance theme is fairly disturbing. “In Glorious Appearing,” Kristof writes,

Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid ‘hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.’

Jesus is knocking on your door. If you don’t let him in, he will. . . fillet you! Kristof makes the point that this vulgar, brutal, and vindictive crypto-Christianity, in which non-believers are splayed and sucked into “yawning chasms”, doesn’t look a whole lot better than the vulgar, brutal, and vindictive form of Islam that has us so terrified. This is, I believe, a very fair point.

However, Kristof worries about offending the delicate sensibility of sadistic Christians who thrill to “Left Behind”-style eschatological porn.

I had reservations about writing this column because I don’t want to mock anyone’s religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think “Glorious Appearing” describes God’s will. Yet ultimately I think it’s a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.

That’s nice, I suppose, that he had reservations. And it’s true: religion is not a taboo subject. He concludes:

People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don’t think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.

That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.

The “right” of which Kristof speaks is ambiguous. People have a political right to think or express anything they want. No books shall be burned. Yet people have no intellectual or moral right to think or express whatever they like. “Left Behind” Christians deserve to be criticized, chastised, and mocked for their wanton violation of the demands of reason and basic decency. Reasonable people may believe false doctrine, but reasonable people may not believe savage doctrines, and those who do are owed no moral quarter.

Kristof is right: we should be embarrassed by the fact that we live in a culture where this kind of odious filth, posing as piety between covers, shoots to the top of the best-seller list. But embarrassment is not enough. Decent people should be outraged. People reading Glorious Appearing on the bus ought to be treated with the regard we reserve for the happily nodding public reader of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is not all right, and people have no right whatsoever to feel that it is.

From the Left Behind website:

I’m 12 years old, and my mom got me hooked on the Left Behind series. I’ve read most of the kids books and all of the adult books. I think Glorious Appearing is the best one yet. It conveys the feelings of the characters so well. I just want to say thank you for starting this series, it’s brought me so much closer to God. So thanks.
—Nicole, posted 5/14

That’s really not all right.

It’s a sad, sad day when the Republicans move me to link approvingly to a Move On fundraiser. This one’s to support Democrat opponents of vulnerable Republicans who voted for the FMA. To my mind, voting to write narrowly illiberal convictions into a liberal constitution is sufficient grounds for losing office. I know nothing about the candidates Move On is fighting against other than that they deserve to lose, but that’s enough.

From Bill Bradford’s entertaining account of the weird weird world that is the Libertarian Party Convention:

The nomination process was over. LP delegates had chosen as their standard-bearer a man who had willfully refused to file his federal tax return for years, refused to get a driver’s license but continued to drive his car despite having been ticketed so many times that he couldn’t recall the exact number, proposed to blow up the United Nations building, wanted to force criminals in prisons to stay in bed until their muscles atrophied, and planned to force Congress to take a “special version” of his class on the Constitution. And the overwhelming majority of delegates didn’t know any of this about their nominee.

This is, I believe, all the reason I could possibly need to enthusiastically support Badnarik in November. Go LP!

Comrade Sanchez has posted the announcement. It’s next Thursday, July 29th at the Rendezvouz Lounge. Pass it on.

[Update: Note that the date is now the 29th. For some reason that has not been revealed to me, but which is apparently Lane's fault, Blogorama has been pushed back a week. Sorry for any inconvenience.]

I encourage everyone not to patronize the Giant Foods at 9th and O St NW. It is a horrible establishment.

I don’t believe I’ve ever waited less than five minutes in line. I have waited more than twenty on several occasions. The ratio of surly to pleasant among the cashiers is about 15 to 1. And they labor with the swiftness of the heavily sedated. Sure, it’s cheaper than my other local grocery, Whole Foods (libertarian-owned, I’m told), but I think I may be willing to add $10 to each bill in order to save myself the aggravation of standing in line while the check-out lady makes yet another historic attempt to break all known records in lethargy (while the manager, a creature rarely seen, camps in the fetid back room listening to “The Rest of the Story” on Paul Harvey News and Comment.) Whole Foods is often packed, yet I rarely wait more than five minutes. Did I mention that Giant is ugly, and that the produce is bad.

You know, Giant has been petitioning Montgomery County against allowing the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Wegman’s, pathetically citing concern for the “environmental impact” of these stores. Well, I suppose the impact on Giant’s environment is that they will be unable to compete with well-managed businesses that offer better value to their customers. May the big boxes crush the complacent, mediocre, rent-seeking incumbent!