Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

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  • Jewsday Tuesday: News of the Weird

    I’ve been avoiding the weekly torah stories recently because Devarim (Deuteronomy) is, as the name suggests, mostly redundant. Almost all of it is Moses-as-Castro, giving an endless rambling speech. Difference is that everything Moses is saying has smiting behind it, so you gotta listen up if you’re a Hebrew. But I thought that this week’s sedra, Ki Tietze (“When you go”) was a delightfully diverse collection of laws which cover everything from rape to haberdashery, and illustrate why the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian is totally wack. Disclaimer: there’s 74 laws laid out in this sedra, so no way I’m going through all of them. I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version, but it’s still going to be a halacha mash-up.

    Moses begins this section of rattling on with a discourse on how to treat lovely women who are captured in the endless inter-tribal battles. Now those heathen tribes, they just went ahead and raped anything with a vagina who rated over a 5. But Jews have to do it better. The law here is that you have to pen her up for a month first, shave her head, let her grow her nails, and only then, once she’s been humiliated, uglified, and left to ruminate for a month about the upcoming horror and remembering the vision of you eviscerating her parents in front of her, you can give her that good raping she’s been waiting for. Much more civilized, dontcha think?

    And being the kind and generous folk that (((we))) are, when you get tired of her shit, you have to let her go rather than sell her into slavery. Well, let’s be honest, once you drive them off the lot, they lose about half of their resale value anyway, and chances are that by then, there’s dents and scratches, further reducing the value. So no big loss.

    Moving on, as someone who loves cultural fusion and who cheerfully married a shiksa (OK, well, three different shiksas), I am completely damned under the law of kilayim. Kliayim is the prohibition of various sorts of fusion- the called out examples are donkeys and oxen in the field, wool and linen in clothing, and co-planting in vineyards (Moses was unclear about whether having grenache and mourvedre grapes together is forbidden, but very clear that you don’t plant wheat or rosebushes among the grapevines). Rabbinical interpretation has used this as a metaphor for mixed marriages (as if the Phineas story weren’t explicit enough) and I’m sure there’s some Jew redneck out there who has used it to justify keeping separate from the coloreds. But basically, if your shirt is a cotton-polyester blend, be prepared for the stoning.

    Now here’s something parents will love. Have a rebellious or otherwise shitty son? (((We))) have a solution for you! If mom and dad agree, the son is brought to the village elders. Once the parents declare that he’s an asshole, then… you guessed it, stoning! Think of it as retroactive abortion, and a precursor to modern Jewish thought that life begins when the child gets an MD or LLD.

    There’s fun and games for the (((girls))) as well, but this one has to wait until marriage. Let’s say her hubby gets sick of her shit and decides he wants a divorce. In these pre-no-fault times, a common excuse was, “Slut wasn’t a virgin when we got married.” So, she’s ripe for the stoning. But wait. If her parents show up with the sheets off the marital bed having bloodstains (don’t even ask how they got them, it was probably a Linda Tripp “save that dress” deal), the guy gets a good flogging and has to pay her parents 100 shekels. That’s not the worst part- he also is forbidden from ever divorcing her. I may bitch about my alimony, but at least I don’t have to live with my ex.

    Here’s one of the truly weird ones. Suppose you’re a married Jewess and your hubby gets into a fight with some other guy. Regardless of who started it, be careful about helping him out. If you help your hubby by grabbing the other guy by the nuts, guess what? Your hand gets amputated. They didn’t teach you about this in Sunday School? They should have.

    I bet the Sunday School teacher didn’t tell you about this one, either: if your nuts get crushed or cut off, you aren’t allowed to enter the synagogue or the Temple. Nor can you be part of a minyan (the required ten (((men))) needed to have a prayer service). So remember to always wear your cup when you do sports, and give up that lifelong dream of being a harem eunuch.

    Speaking of testicles, let’s say you have a wet dream. This does not make Yahweh happy, so if you want to avoid the stoning, you have to immediately get the hell out of the encampment (they were in the desert at the time), wait until late afternoon, take a ritual bath, then wait until sundown before you can return. Obviously, when one saw teenage boys running out of camp in the morning, the jeering would begin. And if one of the poor kids broke out in acne, he had to go to the priest for some folk remedy or other. Left untreated, this would lead to… stoning.

    By the way, if you divorce some bitch and she remarries, if the new hubby gets just as sick of her shit as you were and tosses her out, don’t even think about trying to remarry her. If you do, yep, stoning.

    OK, I saved the weirdest for last. Your brother gets married and they either have no kids or just daughters. He dies. Your duty, then, is to fuck the widow and knock her up. And keep doing so until she extrudes a boy-child. OK, nothing weird about that, it’s fairly common in tribal societies. But let’s suppose she’s an uggo, I’m talking a two-bagger, and you can’t imagine sticking your dick in it, much less be able to get it up in the first place. What then? This was desert tribes in like 1000 BCE, so turkey basters hadn’t been invented yet. Well, as you might expect, there’s ritual. The uggo pulls off one of your shoes, whacks you across the face with it, spits on you, and declares, “Thus be it to he who will not bang his brother’s widow and put sons in her belly.” And after that, the guy is referred to as “The guy who lost his shoe.”

    Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

  • Tuesday Afternoon Links

    Harvey’s relentless rain sends water spilling over local levee and two dams protecting downtown Houston

    A fifth day of relentless rain sent water spewing over a suburban levee and two dams protecting downtown Houston as Tropical Storm Harvey continued its lethal assault.

    Brazoria County authorities tweeted a frantic message Tuesday when the rising water proved too much for a local levee to handle, threatening residents in low-lying areas about 50 miles outside Houston.

    “The levee at Columbia Lakes has been breached!!” the tweet read. “GET OUT NOW!!”

     

    I hope they got a Cherry Mash at every gift shop. These things are crazy delicious.

    80-year-old Indiana couple accomplishes goal of visiting every Cracker Barrel

    TUALATIN, Oregon – They finally did it! An Indiana couple has finally accomplished their goal of visiting every Cracker Barrel location.

    Ray and Wilma Yoder, 80, of Goshen, Indiana, flew out west over the weekend so the couple could visit their 645th Cracker Barrel on Monday morning at the grand opening of the new Tualatin, Oregon location. The monumental occasion also happened to be Ray’s 81st birthday, and the restaurant even put up a sign to welcome them.

    Ray celebrated with blueberry pancakes, and Wilma had eggs and sausage. All expenses were paid by Cracker Barrel, according to KOIN6.

     

    Disaster Socialist capitalizes on disaster: HARVEY DIDN’T COME OUT OF THE BLUE. NOW IS THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. -Naomi Klein (Hysterical ALLCAPS in original.)

    NOW IS EXACTLY the time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices — from racial profiling to economic austerity — that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes.

    Turn on the coverage of the Hurricane Harvey and the Houston flooding and you’ll hear lots of talk about how unprecedented this kind of rainfall is. How no one saw it coming, so no one could adequately prepare.

    What you will hear very little about is why these kind of unprecedented, record-breaking weather events are happening with such regularity that “record-breaking” has become a meteorological cliche. In other words, you won’t hear much, if any, talk about climate change.

    The Federal government spends around $100,000 a second. What economic austerity? It’s really difficult to think of a worse Naomi.

    Anyway… Let’s have two songs, the obvious one and the one that just makes me happy.

  • What are Rights? An Encore

    People seemed to enjoy the discussion in the original article, so I’m going to expand on it based on some of the conversation we had in the comments. As noted in the comments, August is employing the Socratic method. In real life, August is a Being your own Socrates | sHR.classmate from law school who was a philosophy major. He and I enjoy sipping bourbon, smoking pipes, and talking politics, philosophy, and theology.

    In the original article, I made the assertion that rights are meaningless outside of a relationship. I also asserted that rights are definitions of the boundaries of authority between co-equal entities (man to man; man to human institution). In this article, I will address some of the points brought up in the comments: conflicting rights, objective v. subjective rights, negative v. positive rights, how rights flow from self-ownership.

    The conversation picks up at the end of the prior article:

    AUGUST: So if rights are based on authority and the equality of man, are you saying that rights are attempts to prevent inequity between men and between man and institutions created by man?

    OSCAR: Yes! As with any co-equal relationship, there are certain things solely in the domain of the first, other things that are solely in the domain of the second, and some things that are in an overlapping domain between the two. For example, parenting.

    AUGUST: So, in this Venn Diagram description, your domain is your rights with respect to me, my domain is my rights with respect to you, and the shared domain is collective rights between us and conflicting rights between us. How can rights conflict if they are natural?

    OSCAR: Well, this is more of a semantic difference. Either you can paint with broad strokes (“right to life; right to play loud music; right to swing your arms”) and deal with conflicts of the rights (“my right to swing my arm ends at your nose”), or you can paint more carefully (“right to swing your arms in open portions of your personal space”) and not have to deal with conflicts. Either way, there is a limit to the extent of your rights where you begin to infringe somebody else’s rights.

    AUGUST: This still seems fuzzy. How do you know when you’re infringing somebody else’s rights?

    OSCAR: Well, we need to know how to identify a right in order to be able to tell if we’re infringing on rights. There are two things called “rights” these days. One is negative rights, and the other is positive rights. Positive rights are largely a misnomer in the context of strangers (including the government). The only relationship in which positive rights make sense is the dependent/caretaker relationship. This is why people refer to the “Nanny State” when government enshrines positive rights in law. Negative rights, however, are natural rights. They derive from self-ownership. Negative rights are things whose direct, tangible consequences are felt only by the rights owner and consenting others. In essence, you are the sovereign of your own vintage seminude woman reading by MementoMori-stock on DeviantArtdomain; only you have the authority to make decisions that result in consequences to only you. Thus, you are infringing on somebody else’s rights when you do something that keeps them from exercising sovereignty over themselves and their property.

    AUGUST: Direct, tangible consequences? Like economic externalities, emotional effects, and social consequences?

    OSCAR: No, usually rights violations are one of three categories: force, fraud, and coercion. Nobody forces you to feel a certain way. Nobody coerces the market to ripple when you make a transaction. Nobody forces society to react to your actions. All of these consequences to the exercise of rights may be of concern to people and to society at large, but they are outside of the authority of strangers and the government to resolve by infringing on the free exercise of rights.

    AUGUST: But we discussed before that there are times when you can use force, like in self-defense. It seems like you can’t use force until you can.. it’s all very arbitrary sounding.

    OSCAR: Not at all. There is a basic principle that you can respond to immoral force with force of your own, but you cannot initiate immoral force: the non-aggression principle.

    AUGUST: Ah, so when my neighbor accidentally steps on my side of the property line, I get to kill him?

    OSCAR: No, the NAP is better seen as a negative limitation than a positive one. The NAP tells you when you CAN’T use force, but doesn’t dictate HOW you can use force when it is not immoral to do so. There are rules of proportionality that are outside the scope of rights.

    AUGUST: That is all well and good, but I’m still not convinced that negative rights are a necessary consequence of self-ownership.

    OSCAR: Ownership implies control. If you own yourself, you have control over your actions. Ownership also implies exclusivity as to strangers. There can be co-owners of something, but co-ownership implies a consenting relationship. You cannot be a co-owner with a complete stranger. Therefore, absent consensual abdication of your self-ownership, your claim to your own body and to your actions is exclusive. As previously discussed, the only time this changes is when your actions cause direct, tangible consequences to non-consenting others.

    Part of your actions include your labor. You are the owner of your labor, including the economic value of your labor. Economic value of your labor can be traded for physical property, which makes you exclusive owner of capital. Throughout this entire chain, your exclusive ownership and control has not been severed unless consensually negotiated for. Therefore, self-ownership implies control over your actions, your labor, and your property, up to the point where you cause direct, tangible consequences to non-consenting others. It is important to note here that the direct, tangible consequences need to be caused against a legitimate claim of the non-consenting other. If I buy the Mona Lisa, I deprive you of being able to see it. However, you have no legitimate claim to the Mona Lisa because you have no grounds to claim ownership of the Mona Lisa.

    AUGUST: What’s the point of all of this if a “might makes right” government comes in and imposes its will on you?

    OSCAR: Rights are not subjective. Negative rights are natural outcroppings from the physical reality of self-ownership. Positive rights are natural outcroppings of the duties that are inherent in a caretaker role. Practical infringements of rights do not affect the ethical reality of rights.

    AUGUST: Do you have the right to do something that is wrong?

    OSCAR: In my definition of rights as authority boundaries between co-equal entities, the question is somewhat irrelevant. If your “wrong” thing does not involve using force, fraud, or coercion on a non-consenting other, then government has no rightful authority to stop you. However, this says nothing of the inherent morality of your actions. You could perpetrate a horrible evil against yourself (or against God, for those who believe), and it would no more be within the government’s rightful authority than if you did a great good for yourself (or for God, for those who believe).

     

    For a detailed treatment of this question and other related topics, I turn it over to Milton Friedman (1 hr youtube vid).

  • Tuesday Morning Links

    Morning all, last we heard from Sloopy he was fine, but wiped out from voluntarily helping his neighbors deal with a natural disaster that has now reached biblical proportions. There’s some dude in eastern Harris County that thinks he should have listened to that voice in his head last time he went off his meds saying he should build a big-ass boat… and sleep with his daughter.

    Sportzball — The Detroit Lions will pay Matthew Stafford a bunch of money to continue to put up huge numbers but never buy him the support to win the big games. Cubbies and Orioles won, Yankees lost. LA and Houston did not play. JJ Watt continues to be a good face for the NFL, and the Rockets and Astros ownership put up some money. Also, some doper is back in women’s tennis and all over the news. And now …the links!

    “saves…you…money!” And turns his furniture stores into shelters for people and pets.

    Trump gets a qualified okay on hurricane response from a major daily. Meanwhile, Time joins the list of journalistic publications pretending like there’s a city in America that can absorb 30-50 inches of rain in 3-4 days. It must be sprawl and glubal warmink! Dear Houston, you’ve been the fastest growing major city in America in the 21st century for a reason. Don’t listen to the haters.

    In much, much lighter news, every punk eventually grows old. (Yes, I saw the date, but I needed the chuckle)

    Russkies and Chinese joint naval maneuvers? Don’t they have 1 functional carrier between them? I’m sure the pearl clutching will commence apace for 3-5 more aircraft carriers.

    Everyone will be surprised that Marines whose tattoos were fine in Afghanistan and Iraq are being barred from re-enlistment coincidental with a 10% active duty force reduction.

    Woman uses experimental method to determine if pistol her son found is real, no one injured. Please teach your children gun safety, if only so they can tell mom what a really bad idea that is.

     

    This one’s for Sloopy.

    I keep hearing, “I’ve got Ocean Front property in Western Houston”. So inapropes.

  • Monday Afternoon Links

    Its a rare day when I’m don’t miss living in Houston at least a little bit. Today is one of them. If Noah had come from Texas, a hell of a lot more people than just his family would have survived. The good news is, very few lives are lost. The bad news is, probably a million people will be economically destroyed. I’ll start looking into emerging voluntarism opportunities to help or fund. Maybe at the end of the week, when we (hopefully) know what it all is going to look like.

    UPDATE: Texas Monthly has a starter list here. I did a preliminary vetting of the charity Global Giving mentioned and it appears to be quite reputable.

    Onto the links!

    Photo Credit: Banjos. Taken from their back window

    Good news, everyone, I’m going to live forever! Actually, I’m probably down to 2-3 from 6+. So maybe I need to raise my game.

    Expect gas prices to go up at least 10% until Houston gets back to work. Maybe, just maybe, enviroweenies, we should move some of our eggs out of that basket.

    Mr. Lizard’s Texas cousin seeking shelter

    Headlines that surprise no one: California considers taxing _____ .

    Uber picks a Persian CEO. No racist jokes about knowing the taxi industry!

    More evidence that when the robot uprising occurs, it’ll be because some disaffected 16-year old with no friends decides to hack all robots to kill all humans.

    A Houston boy covering an appropriate song. Serious question, how do I get the job as the background trombone player?

  • THE CONTINUING AWESOME ADVENTURES OF SECRET NAZI PRESIDENT!!11!1! – Vol. 25: DNC Debt and Barca Barbarity

  • A small comparison from the weekend

    Superdeathstormfrom Hell = 2 deaths being blamed on it.  People helping (including our own sloopy) out.

     

    Just another weekend in Chicago = 6 dead (amongst 27 shot).  Hard to find anyone who cares, and the cops are busy trying to keep Uncle Fed off their butts.

    smh

  • Apres le deluge: Wet Monday Morning Links

    And seriously, no shit, sloopy has been busy doing what libertarians do- actually putting his ass on the line helping instead of passively waiting for Big Brother to do something; in his case, doing flood rescue. He managed to extract 40 people from a flooded apartment complex in about three hours. The official fire and rescue people showed up several hours later and yelled at him for running his boat too fast. No word on whether there was a police beatdown.

    SP and I watched football.

    Since sloop isn’t here to talk about his little league whatevers, I’ll mention that the Orioles came to Fenway, destroyed the Red Sox, and then wisely got out of town. Mike Glennon started and likely saved his job with a not-terrible performance. Brian Hoyer looked sharp and didn’t attention-whore during the Star Spangled Banner. The Ravens first team defense allowed exactly zero points through the preseason- we’ll see how that holds up when shit gets real.

    OK, news items:

    Every time I think that people are stupid, they demonstrate to me that I had no idea of HOW stupid.

    At some point, even WaPo has to say something true. I was startled.

    Those of you trying to convince libertarians that Trump isn’t the same kind of authoritarian as his predecessors have one more piece of evidence to try to talk around. As much as I enjoy the TDS spectacle, and as much as I hate being on the same side as the NAACP, the guy really is going out of his way to convince me that he’s a total piece of shit.

    Israeli protesters, unlike their American counterparts, have their priorities in order. (Confession: never actually watched that, no regrets)

    DO NOT MENTION LUCY!

    And finally, some decent music. There could only be one Monk, and America is the only place that could produce him.

  • ZARDOZ SUNDAY EVENING LINKS

    ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. ZARDOZ THANKS HIS FRIEND, STEVE SMITH, FOR FILLING IN WHILE ZARDOZ CONTEMPLATED RECENT EVENTS. WHILE ZARDOZ IS RELIEVED THAT NONE OF HIS CHOSEN ONES WERE HARMED BY THE CATEGORY 4 KILLSTORM THAT LIFTED TEXAS OFF OF THE EARTH AND FLUNG IT INTO OUTER SPACE (ZARDOZ ONLY SKIMMED HEADLINES) – ZARDOZ IS A BIT DISAPPOINTED SO FEW BRUTALS WERE CLEANSED BY THIS STORM. IN AN EFFORT TO GET BACK TO BASICS, ZARDOZ GIVES YOU LINKS OF BRUTAL CLEANSING.

    • ZARDOZ WONDERS HOW ENFORCERS WITH BLUE HELMETS CAN DO SO LITTLE KILLING? HAVE THEY NOT BEEN GIVEN THE GIFT OF THE GUN?
    • ZARDOZ APPROVES OF THIS TOWN. IT HAS SEEN MUCH CLEANSING OVER THE YEARS. NO, IT IS NOT CHICAGO!
    • VERY WELL, LET US SPEAK OF CHICAGO THEN.
    • ZARDOZ THINKS THESE BRUTALS ARE CAUGHT BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE.

    SPECIAL SPORTSBALL LINK FOR THE CHOSEN ONES.

     

    ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN!

  • Sunday Midday Sharing Thread

    So a bunch of the Founders were sitting around the campfire in Sloopy ‘n’ Banjo’s waterlogged garage drinking, swapping stories, singing campfire hurricane party songs late last night, and the drunken conversation eventually turned philosophical, as it will, and we began to ponder the larger questions…

    Does OMWC have any of the cool retro confections like Candy Cigarettes, Bit-O-Honey, Wax Lips or Atomic Fire Balls, and, if so, what are the odds he’s been hoarding it since his own misspent childhood?

    Is SugarFree’s Pit of Depravity truly bottomless?

    Will jesse.in.mb ever post another Manly Monday or are there no Real Men left out there?

    You get the idea.

    But I’m a bit more practical, myself. I want to know Things That Are Useful. And given that I am a realist, I believe that you, Dear Glibertariat, have been cheating on us. And I want answers.

    Yeah, yeah, you love us best, those other sites and social media accounts mean nothing to you, you’ll always come back to us in the end, yada yada. Come on. I know the guilt is eating you alive.

    This is your chance to come clean, to clear the air, to finally just put it all out there for everyone to see. (Not you, OMWC. Just put that thing away already.)

    We invite you to share your other website loves, the social media accounts and news sites you always check out, the YouTube channels –um, maybe not your faves Heroic Mulatto– where you spend entirely too much time mesmerized. Fun stuff, serious and reflective commentary, your own blog, social media accounts or photo sharing sites. It’s all fair game in this judgment-free thread.

    Come on, open up. Let us in and you’ll never have to tell a new website that we just don’t understand you.