Tom and I have been discussing the future of this website, and we decided that we’re not going to be able to keep this up as a typical “blog”. Neither one of us has the time to do numerous posts on current events, especially since I devote a lot of that posting to Outside the Beltway. However, one thing that I think we do have on this web site are readers who are intelligent and reasonable, and who love to argue.

With that in mind, we’re tweaking the format at Heretical Ideas. Rather than try to keep up on current events, we’re going to focus on longer posts with some more thought behind them, in the hopes of promoting thinking and discussion, rather than the paragraph or so of commentary. To help guide us for awhile, we’ve set up a tentative schedule of days and themes, though of course this is going to vary based on what we want to write. Starting tomorrow, our tentative schedule of posting is going to be:

Tuesdays - Tom will have an essay about the law and/or the judicial system
Wednesdays - I will have an essay about the future of law and technology
Thursdays - I will have an extended essays working off of my “Once upon a time, we lived in a free country…” riff, focusing on egregious abuses of governmental authority
Fridays - Tom will have an essay about politics
Saturdays- A day of rest–nothing but silly stuff
Sundays - I will have an essay on religious and/or philosophic topics
Mondays - I will have an essay where I totally geek out and far, far too deeply analyze a bit of pop culture

Like I said, this is more of a tentative thing in terms of theme, but we hope to provide you with some more substantial commentary and food for thought. We hope you enjoy it.

“Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything just give him time to rationalize it. Forgive me for being blunt.”
– Robert Heinlein

Andrew Sullivan has described Ann Coulter as an absurd caricature of a neoconservative. Wonkette highlights the absurdity of her “character” with an interview in which she concludes Bill Clinton is a homosexual merely because he had narcissistic tendencies.

Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that.

DEUTSCH: But what is the homosexual — that’s — you could say somebody who maybe doesn’t celebrate women the way he should or just is that he’s a hound dog?

[...]

Ms. COULTER: It’s reminiscent of a bathhouse. It’s just this obsession with your own — with your own essence.

DEUTSCH: But why is that homosexual? You could say narcissistic.

Ms. COULTER: Well, there is something narcissistic about homosexuality. Right? Because you’re in love with someone who looks like you. I’m not breaking new territory here, why are you looking at me like that?

I’d be looking at her funny too if she’d just said something that stupid in front of me.

David Shraub over at The Debate Link has a rare gem of a blog post: a rational, level-headed discussion on racism and “White Privilege” that can’t possible be mistaken as racism.

One theme I constantly hear when talking to my White friends about race issues and anti-racism is this depressed, crushed hopelessness about their ability to do anything in the face of the critique. It isn’t anger. It’s sadness. They read these discussions and hear these arguments and find a huge list of things they can’t do, but nothing they can do. They’re told to “lose their privilege.” But they are given virtually no indicator of how to do it, and are given mixed signals (at best) as to the propriety of asking how to do it. So they don’t. It’s a sense of hopelessness which breeds political quiescence, which in turn feeds into minority anger that the majority doesn’t care about setting things right, and it creates a vicious cycle.

I should add that the whole “lose your privilege” rhetoric itself I find misleading. There was an old adage in the cold war about the difference between communists and capitalists: “The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: ‘No man should have so much.’ The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: ‘All men should have so much.’” This is, to say the least, a dumb quote, both because capitalists are not particularly interested in giving every one so much, and because communists are certainly not locked in to demanding nobody have so much. But it gains some saliency here, because the goal shouldn’t be for Whites to lose privilege, it should be for persons of color to gain it.

I agree with Schraub generally. However, I’ve met anti-oppression activists who don’t distinguish between racism and privilege, both in the abstract and in my specific case. Being equated to a bigot for simply being white can be an infuriating experience, especially for an ex-liberal-turned-libertarian. When anti-racist activists tell you on one hand “it’s our fight, not yours”, and on the other that you’re part of the problem, there are only so many conclusions you can draw. So I can very much sympathize with that sense of sadness and impotence Schraub describes. But I’m at a loss as to what I can do about either one.

Police officers arrested a 21-year old man for taking a picture of a police action with his cell phone.

A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.

The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone’s camera. They told their story to Harry Hairston and the NBC 10 Investigators.

[...]

Cruz said that when he heard a commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell phone to see what was happening. He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture of the scene.

“I opened (the phone) and took a shot,” Cruz said.

Moments later, Cruz said he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his back yard gate.

“He opened the gate and took me by my right hand,” Cruz said.

Cruz said the officer threw him onto a police car, cuffed him and took him to jail.

A neighbor said she witnessed the incident and could not believe what she saw.

“He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, ‘You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,’” said Gerrell Martin.

Of course, there’s no law against taking a picture of something happening in public. This is simple harassment and intimidation, nothing more. The officers who made the arrest should be fired, charged, and imprisoned Arresting someone on a phony charge is not only illegal, but a disgusting abuse of authority worthy only of condemnation.

(link via Instapundit)

“Hey, you try making love in a hostile, mutant environment and see how you like it!”
– Sam Hell (Roddy Piper) in Hell Comes to Frogtown

Normally I don’t make posts simply to promote other people’s blogs, but Jurisdynamics is shaping up to be a fantastic blog.

This blog openly embraces a dynamic model of legal change. Jurisdynamics describes the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law’s own endogenous capacity for adaptation. The world that law tries to govern has has become “so vast that fully to comprehend it would require an almost universal knowledge ranging from” economics and the natural sciences “to the niceties of the legislative, judicial and administrative processes of government.” Queensboro Farms Prods., Inc. v. Wickard, 137 F.2d 969, 975 (2d Cir. 1943). Within the realm of legal scholarship, this blog aspires to the goal that historian David Christian set out for his discipline: “that the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time.” David Christian, The Case for “Big History,” 2 J. World Hist. 223, 223 (1991). Jurisdynamics will present the case for “big law,” for the proposition that the substantive scale on which law should be studied, taught, and learned is the entirety of human experience.

The part I’m drooling over at the moment is J.B. Ruhl’s series on using the tools of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory to analyze law and legal systems.

The legal system (law for short) is a social organization comprised of a multitude of heterogenaeous, interacting agents (judges, lawyers, legislators, etc.) that respond to information inputs according to many rules. Law is focused on managing other social organizations (the economy, healthcare, crime, businesses). Frequently the intended effect of law is to influence how the target social organization treats a physical phenomenon (e.g., environmental law) or another social organization (e.g., employment law). Given that actors in the target and indirectly-influenced social organizations are likely to react to what law is doing to them, and that some of those actors are either actors in the legal system as well or can devise ways to influence actors in the legal system, law experiences feedback from its own behavior and co-evolution with other social (and physical) systems.

Now law is starting to look like a CAS.

Law geeks with an interest in math (or math geeks with an interest in law, or combined math/law geeks) should find this site’s fresh view on the field of law quite interesting.

A while back I posted a story referencing a Nature article by Dr. Ben Barres. Eugene Volokh noticed the article as well, but found something in it quite intriguing: until he found out it wasn’t true.

Here’s what I submitted as a letter to the editors of Nature:

Dear Editors:

I read with interest Ben Barres’ “Does gender matter?” (13 July 2006), and particularly the statement that “one-third of the winners of the elite Putnam Math Competition last year were women.” This struck me as a particularly telling piece of evidence: If indeed so many women performed so well in such a respected competition, this would indeed undermine assertions of substantial biological gender differences in the higher levels of mathematical ability.

Unfortunately, on further research, it seems that this statement is mistaken. Last year’s (2005’s) top 16 finishers seem to have included only one woman (UNL 2005). Prof. Barres was likely referring to 2004, but even in that year the top 15 included only four women (Hopkins 2005; UNL 2004). In 2003, two of the top 16 were women (UNL 2003; Princeton 2006). In 2002 and 2001, the number was one of 15. Perhaps I’m mistaken, despite my attempts to verify the ambiguous names; but this is the data as best I can determine it.

Prof. Barres’ other claims in the article may well be accurate; the data I cite above certainly don’t prove that the reason for the low numbers is even partly biological sex differences. On the other hand, I thought it might be helpful to let readers know that one particular piece of evidence mentioned in the article seems mistaken.

Eugene Volokh
Professor
UCLA School of Law

Nature’s response?

Dear Professor Volokh

Thank you for your letter. We have checked into the figures and it seems that in 2004 four of the fifteen top ranked Putnam winners were women (one other might have been, we can’t tell). Although we agree that it is unfortunate that we did not include the year in the relevant sentence in the commentary, we feel that 4 (probably, but maybe 5) out of 15 is sufficiently close to one-third not to publish a correction on this occasion.

Thank you again for writing to us.

with a data set that reads: 0.063, 0.066, 0.125, 0.266, 0.066, that it might be prudent to consider that 0.266 (which Barres actually called “a third”) an outlier. Especially given the sample sizes each year ranged from 15 to 16. Professor Volokh seems willing to assume it was an innocent mistake. But how often do “facts” like what Dr. Barres quoted become part of the common knowledge because someone didn’t bother to check his facts?

Several armed game wardens obtained a search warrant in Boston in order to stop a truly dangerous criminal. The man’s crime? he owned fish.

Armed game wardens seized 10 exotic fish from the tank of a popular Chinese restaurant, leaving its owner shaken and outraged.

“They treated me like a criminal,” said Cuong Ly, who escaped from Vietnam 25 years ago. “I lived under communism and I felt like I’m back there again.”

Ly, 45, said his pet koi were like family members and their confiscation in what he described as a heavy-handed raid made him “want to explode inside.”

After obtaining a search warrant, two uniformed wardens and a biologist, accompanied by Freeport police, visited China Rose on Wednesday, taking away the 10 fish that ranged in size from 12 to 14 inches.

The koi had been on display since Ly opened the restaurant nearly 15 years ago and he credited them for bringing good luck to the business in a way akin to the arrangement of articles in the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui.

A few years ago, however, Maine outlawed the importation and possession of koi, and Ly was charged with importing freshwater fish without a permit.

No grandfather clause, apparently. This is another one of those stupid laws where the government assumes that we’re all children. Yes, koi are an invasive species. If they cause damage to public or private waters, by all means, sanction the person responsible. But a guy who has fish in his fish tank, and has for 15 years, isn’t a threat, nor is there any proof that his fish would be.

I know I’ve said this before, but once upon a time, we lived in a free country…

(link via Radley Balko)

“I’m sure this goes against everything you’ve been taught, but right and wrong do exist. Just because you don’t know what the right answer is – maybe there’s even no way you could know what the right answer is – doesn’t make your answer right or even okay. It’s much simpler than that. It’s just plain wrong.”
– Dr. Gregory House