Libertarianism doesn’t have a lot to say about the good life. It doesn’t tell me whether I should give to charity, whether I should save a drowning child, whether I should be a loving husband, or whether I should devote myself to uplifting intellectual pursuits instead of squandering my life watching TV and eating bonbons. Is an unexamined life still worth living? Libertarianism doesn’t say.

At least not much. I’m referring to libertarianism as one thing, but there are a lot of libertarianisms. I’ve never read Ayn Rand but those who claim to, and are critical of her, say that she advocates a life of selfishness or self-centeredness. Maybe that means, for her, the good life is looking our for number one? (Maybe this more charitable and better-informed account serves her better. I don’t know, but I trust its author.)

Rand’s not the only libertarian. As with Rand, I’ve never read Rawls, either. But my understanding is that his libertarianism rests on a notion of fairness: what would we have the world look like if we didn’t know beforehand what privileges we’d be born into? Others (Murali, if you’re reading, I’m thinking of you) can clarify how I misunderstand Rawls, but it seems to me he advocates something like a golden rule. In that sense, the good life is doing–or advocating for, or building society along the lines of–how you would be done by.

A better example, because I’ve actually read some of his stuff, is Jason Kuznicki. He has urged us, for instance, “to refuse to be ruled–and refuse to rule.” By that standard, maybe the good life is a studied and reflective humility. Even if I’m misrepresenting him, I think it’s a good lesson at any rate. A thousand flowers can bloom, as the cliché says. Or to paraphrase James Hanley (I forget the cite), a strongly libertarians society has more room for traditionalist Hutterites than a strongly Hutterite society would have for just about anyone else.

Still, libertarianism does its best work as a naysayer. It has a lot to say against the excessive uses of state power and about the costs of even the best intended programs. Liberals and conservatives and anyone else who wishes to use the state for any purpose had better heed libertarians’ critique against coercion and for expanding choices. Some fringe elements notwithstanding, most members of team liberal or team conservative value individual autonomy.

Even as a naysayer, libertarianism offers a clue to the good life. Its advocates seem to have a faith in human resilience if only the fetters of coercion be removed. Along the lines of what James Willard Hurst argued 50 years ago in a different context, many people await the “release of energy” that can move them to ever expanding choices, opportunities, and prosperity. There’s a good here, and the good is in removing impediments to finding the good.

But nagging questions remain. Prosperity and abundance count for a lot, but can there be too much? We’ll all die eventually anyway. The fear of death disturbs me even now.

And while still alive, how to deal with all the complexity life offers? Local communities and autonomous agents have a way of forming their own complex and sometimes restricting rules and obligations. While these can be chalked to the outcomes of market exchanges or daily micro-compromises and while a strongly libertarian society widens the opportunities for exit, they still impose ought’s and should’s on those who don’t choose exit or for whom exit is still too costly or who choose exit and find only other obligations or (maybe worse) themselves.

Liberty, by itself and however you define it, doesn’t have the answer.

Not sure what else to add:

Contexts some really interesting data on sexuality and sexual fluidity of women. Here is one of the more interesting sections:

How Common Is It for Lesbians to Have Sex with Men?

As the graph below (drawing from Tables 1 and 2) shows, depending on the measure used, between two-thirds and four-fifths of lesbians have had sex with a man sometime in their lives. Eighty one percent report having had either oral sex, vaginal intercourse, or anal sex with a man, while 67% report having had a male intercourse partner sometime in their life. By either measure, the proportion of lesbians who have ever had sex with a man is drastically larger that the proportion of heterosexual women who have ever had sex with a woman.

However, if, we restrict our focus to the year before the survey, we get a very different picture. Only 22% of women who identify as lesbian have had sex with a man last year. If these are all women whose behavior is inconsistent with their identity, then it seems a sizable share—over a fifth; it is very different than the under 2% of heterosexual women who had sex with a woman in the last year. However, it is also possible that some sizable share of the 22% may be cases where women changed their identity and behavior in the last year, but identity was consistent with behavior at most all times. The data don’t allow us to tell which it is.

This is less than entirely surprising. Straight is the social default, both due to raw numbers and social norms. It makes a lot of sense that most lesbians would at least start off with guys before determining that it isn’t right for them. Even the 22% makes sense, and not just for people whose sexuality was determined in the past year. Given the low numbers of practicing homosexuals and practicing bisexuals, I would imagine that their “dry spells” can often be longer, and more lonely, and that while sex with a man may be unsatisfying it’s better than nothing. And while finding another lesbian may be difficult for those who live outside liberal hubs and large cities, finding a guy willing to have sex is probably less difficult.

The stats for bisexuals is also interesting, though less so to regular Hit Coffee readers who remember my rants about Goth-Pagan-Bisexuals. Essentially, bisexual women are considerably more likely to have sex with men than women. This makes sense in the context of the above – men being more available, generally speaking – as well as the GPB phenomenon. In a large number of social circles, claiming to be bisexual is a relatively costless affair. Lesbians, on the other hand, are at least ostensibly signalling a lack of interest in sex not only with half of the population, but the half of the population that is more likely to be available and interested.

So, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I would be interested in seeing the results for men.

Cities are trying to figure out what to do about the prospect of snake people moving to the suburbs when they have kids.

GM didn’t kill streetcars. At least, not all by itself.

Raj Chetty’s “income mobility map” is really quite flawed. I pointed in out last year, and Uncle Steve is pointing it out now.

Hospitals are looking for slightly less unfriendly ways to get paid.

I wonder if we’ll have meticulously detailed digital replicas of all the cities, at some point in the future.

You can go too solar, it turns out.

I’d never heard of the MOVE bombing. Had you?

Romania may end bribery by legalizing bribery for physicians. Which is apparently sort of a thing in Hungary.

A sort of real life version of Wyatt’s Torch in Pennsylvania, albeit without the ideological symbolism.

This is definitely true for me: Once a superior product is available, I stop worrying about breaking what I have.

How mustard gas lead to chemotherapy.

According to math, aliens are likely to be about the size of bears.

Half of Democrats, and over a third of Republicans and independents, believe that hate speech should be a criminal offense.

Ramez Naam writes of the disruptive power of renewables.

A snake person quest, in cartoon form.

Immigration officials have a checklist of what to look for when trying to detect their equivalent of green card marriages. Some are saying it’s problematic.

Over There a while back, Jon Rowe posted about his experience selling his car to a tow driver {followup} {followup} {followup}. The basic order of events was:

1. In Pennsylvania, Rowe’s car broke down and he sold it to the towing company for a nominal sum.
2. The towing company did not properly transfer ownership of the car to them. They instead put some New Jersey plates on it and left it for sale on the side of a road in the Garden State.
3. New Jersey authorities considered the car abandoned. They tracked down the title to Rowe through Pennsylvania. They contacted Rowe about paying a fine.
4. Rowe talked to the authorities in New Jersey, explained the situation, offered the bill of sale, and was told that was the end of it.
5. Months later, is contacted by the New Jersey courts with a summons to appear and the threat of arrest for a failure to do so.

Through this, Rowe railed against the immutable bureaucracy. While he was able to navigate the system, this is exactly the sort of penny-ante thing that snowballs and lands people who aren’t lawyers in jail.

The response was, overwhelmingly, “Screw you, Jon.” Well, that’s not quite right. The criticisms fell into three categories:

• Rowe is the villain here who got what he deserved. Rowe sold his car to someone he shouldn’t have and any and all negative consequences of doing so belong to him because he didn’t do due diligence.
• Rowe is the villain here who got what he deserved. There were rules and he didn’t follow them. At first it was the assumption that Rowe himself was supposed to transfer the title and didn’t. That turned out not to be quite true, so then it was a fixation on the license plate. Rowe was supposed to turn it in and didn’t. There is reason to believe that the course of events would not have changed even if he had turned in license plate – because he would have been turning it in to the same people who failed to transfer the title – but that didn’t matter because Rowe had Failed The Bureaucracy and because he sold to the wrong person.
• There is literally no way that this could have turned out differently than it did, given the previous two items. No way at all. There were repeated demands that Rowe outline precisely how it could have gone differently and saying that he couldn’t because this is how it had to happen. Even the part where New Jersey had told him not to worry about it, Rowe was talking to the wrong person and therefore was to blame and the bureaucracy cannot be expected to deal with that. You cannot possibly expect the bureaucracy to be able to accommodate user error.

All of which actually made Rowe’s points, and other points, more forcefully than Rowe did. Truth be told, I thought that some of Rowe’s criticisms of the bureaucracy were off-base. he criticized Pennsylvania for not cancelling the title of his car, but in all honesty I think that such cavalier canceling of title would do more harm than good. I think the system did work, as well as can be expected, right up until he was told by New Jersey officials that it had been taken care of and it had not been taken care of. I can even give them a pass for the whole “Respond or go to jail” thing because I do think that particular stick is probably necessary.

However, because that’s the stick, I do believe that it is incumbent on the system to make avoiding that as easy as possible. While various critics of Rowe did agree that the system could be streamlined and made easier, but treated doing so as an act of benevolence on the part of the state rather than an imperative to keep people from needlessly going to jail. And the assumption that because it is that way that it has to be, which simply isn’t the case. Several people reported having been in a similar circumstances but with bureaucracies that handled the situation differently. My father had a title-non-transfer issue and it was taken care of easily and without fuss. It’s not some tangential that such alternatives are possible, or something that the state might want to do because wouldn’t it be nice, but rather it’s something extremely important.

But at the end of the day, Do Not Fail The Bureaucracy was the order of the day. And though Jaybird was criticized for making the comparison, it really did seem to me to be the equivalent of “Don’t talk back to the officer or you own the consequences.”

Leaving aside the fact that the same consequences would have occurred whether he had turned in the license plate or not, that’s a somewhat disturbing attitude. As was the pouring over the record finding a way to make sure that it was Rowe’s fault. And especially the bit about Rowe demonstrating classism by believing he’s too good for a Trenton jail.

And so Rowe’s point was made, emphatically, by his critics. So, too, was a stronger and more important point that Rowe wasn’t especially trying to make: People lose their minds when it comes to anything political.

The truth is that I probably could have posted complaints about the DMV Over There instead of over here and even though certain aspects of my recent difficulties were my fault, a good chunk of the response would have been sympathy for the inconvenience instead of blame for Failing The Bureaucracy. However, since Rowe approached it as a political matter, it was responded to as a political matter. And advocates took on the role of prosecutor. No holds barred. Though it’s less true than it used to be, you can still complain about the DMV, or Comcast, without people assuming that you’re being political and not responding politically. For now, anyway.

But once it does, everything does change. Perhaps the most recent example of that is Ahmed the Clock King. There are multiple angles from which to view the story

1. The Ahmed story is indicative of anti-Muslim prejudice.
2. The Ahmed story is indicative of how out of control zero tolerance policies and excessively anxious administrators have become.
3. While it turned out to be unnecessary, the actions of officials were completely justified behind the veil of what was unknown.
4. Ahmed is a bad kid who wanted to freak everyone out and therefore the response was entirely justified even knowing what we know now

At the outset large segment of the left (and not just the left) went straight to #1, and a smaller segment on the right went to #4. A lot of people initially landed on #2… only to graduate to #3 and #4. It was interesting to watch, and very much reminded me of the Rowe row, because it seemed to be an immediate response to the political implications of the whole thing. It’s hard to separate #2 from #1, and if #1 scores points for the left, then those talking from #3 and #4 are suddenly making more attractive arguments.

The end result of which is that a lot of people start latching on to some pretty flimsy arguments. As if it matters that Ahmed was using a very liberal definition of “made” when he said he made the clock. As if it matters that his family has a bit of an activist streak. It seems to me that even if it was a deliberate prank, it was kind of a lame prank and that the school and police were not only successfully baited but responded the way that they did remains the focal point of the story.

Unless you’re committed to ceding no political ground whatsoever unless you absolutely have to. In which case, all of that becomes important – like Rowe’s failure to turn in the license plate in a manner that almost certainly didn’t matter – because it’s all you have. Ahmed is the villain here. He has to be. He has to be.

Conor Williams writes that liberal opposition to inequality ends where their schools begin.

If the NFL is dissatisfied with the training that quarterbacks are receiving in college, there is a rather straightforward solution to this.

Sometimes, TV shows have to either temporarily replace cast members or cute things up.

I had a dream about a particular ex-girlfriend after reading this Onion article.

Russell Saunders reports that science is getting closer to figuring out why some people just don’t die from smoking.

According to a new-ish Rand study, food deserts are not the cause of the obesity epidemic. Relatedly, poor people don’t eat more fast food than the rest of us.

This leaves me torn. On the one hand, aggressive copyright enforcement. On the other hand, memes. How do you pick a side in that one?

TNR explains how patent law is jacking up the costs of car repairs.

The state of Georgia cannot copyright its own laws.

The Microsoft Zune is no longer in production, and the subscription services are no longer available. So if you have one… now what?

Sunny Hundal argues that excessive British secularism is isolating British Muslims and feeding Daesh.

Whether you get formally married or not, the decision to long-haul it really ought to be made actively and not passively.

Shannon Chamberlain lost some serious weight, but don’t compliment her on it.

If we want to help minorities, maybe we should buy them a car.

The combination of automatic birthright citizenship and the requirements of expatriates to pay taxes makes for a troubling combination for young Americans born abroad.

A little while ago, I put up a post Over There about the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the UK Labour* Party. The post is little more than a bunch of links and blockquotes. I made the decision to play it relatively straight, even including a couple of things that I like about Corbyn. Had I gone another route, I would have used the title of this post.

Labour didn’t have a “primary” per se, but it had the closest thing to which the UK has ever seen. Instead of leadership being determined by active party members, it was determined by more or less anyone who wanted to participate. Or at least anyone willing to drop a modicum of coin to do so.

Combine this with Trumpmania, and it starts to fill in a pretty strong case against primaries. Now, my criticism of Trumpmania is not based (solely) on my disagreements with him and the direction he would take the party… but because he is a tourist. He has little invested in the party. There don’t seem to be very many issues that he has particularly thought about or cares about. He’s found The Issue, and most of the rest is just attitude. If it were Jeff Sessions or Tom Tancredo running on the immigration issue and/or economic populism, I’d be worried about now. I’d be worried that “Wow, this is what the other party is going to be.”

But Trump is Trump, and I still can’t think of him as a potential president. What mostly concerns me about him is the extent to which he has taken an already flawed process and runs a non-negligible risk or distorting the entire thing. He could hand it to Jeb Bush, or hand it to Ted Cruz, depending on how the chips fall. The result is entirely the point. The sticking point is what primaries are supposed to be doing, and what they are doing.

We seem to have fallen into this notion that primaries are supposed to be expressions of democracy at work. Except they’re not, really. The parties aren’t governments that owe particular rights to its people. Parties are organizations with a more sectarian purpose. It is just as legitimate for a political party to choose its nominees by lottery, or people smoking cigars in the back room, than it is with an open vote. People can like, or dislike, the result of these selections (or the process), but that’s not some grand Civil Rights Violation, as it would be if people were being prevented from voting at all, but rather an objection that should be registered by voting for the party with the candidate you prefer. Theoretically, that alone prevents parties from nominating too stupidly.

Of course, the parties (or at least one of them) is pretty stupid when it comes to selection process. Jeb Bush is a terrible candidate. But even before he was a terrible candidate, he was still a terrible candidate. He was practically inviting a revolt by the rank and file. He was inviting 2016 to be the first election in at least 35 years (more accurately 50) where the challengers actually won. I had the outline of a post about what was shaping up to maybe be a huge Bush/Walker battle, but it could have been any number of people (a field that widened as Jeb demonstrated himself a worse and worse candidate). But the challengers went with Trump. Because of course they did because they haven’t a tactical bone in their body, Trump is what happens when you decide to vote with your viscerals, and because primaries are terrible and stupid.

Except… here’s the thing.

In parliamentary systems, which usually don’t have primaries, there are correctives to prevent a party from getting too complacent about its relationship with its rank-and-file. If the Progressive Conservatives of Canada become too complacent, a Canadian Reform Party can pop up, challenge it, and either overtake it as the “party of the right” or (more likely, and what actually happened after a few mutations) force a merger in which it plays the lead role. If the Liberal Party of Canada becomes too complacent, the same thing can happen with the NDP. Which may be what we’re seeing now, or maybe the Liberals will rebound, but either way it’s fighting for its political life right now and that’s a good thing. They can’t just keep on keeping on arguing to the stalwarts “Hey, we’re better than the other guys.”

We don’t have a parliamentary system here. We don’t have a multi-party system with mixed-member districts, but we don’t even have a parliamentary system without that, like Canada does. We have a more complex system with the two parties virtually hard-coded in there. The barriers to entry are exceedingly high. A new party outside the duopoly would not just need to get more votes than the other two parties to win the presidency, but would need a majority of electoral votes or (likely) need to have a majority of the congressional delegations in a lot of states. That’s why we haven’t seen a durable new party in over 100 years and it’s entirely possible that we won’t again for another 100.

We have a two party system and while there is no telling what the parties will stand for in 100 years, there is little doubt that they will either be called the Republican and Democratic Parties or will be a direct rebranding of one or the other. And if there is a revolution within the party, it’s as likely as not to occur through the primaries. While the populist impulse of primaries can lead parties towards more populist candidates, the lack of any primary system can lead to an unaccountable stagnation and if the parties are immutable that’s a real problem.

So I am not yet at the point where I am ready to completely disregard primaries. I would gladly take it as part of a suite of other reforms (getting rid of the electoral college, IRV, fusion tickets, etc), but I’m not there yet on its own. Labour has time to self-correct, Trump is stagnating, and maybe all is a bit closer to being right with the world.