FDIV has the scoop on a programming language that is bound to be a hit with libertarian nerds.
Objectivist-C was invented by Russian-American programmer Ope Rand. Based on the principle of rational self-interest, Objectivist-C was influenced by Aristotle’s laws of logic and Smalltalk. In an unorthodox move, Rand first wrote about the principles of Objectivist-C in bestselling novels, and only later set them down in non-fiction. ...
In Objectivist-C, an object — every object — is an end in itself, not a means to the ends of others. It must live for its own sake, neither sacrificing itself to others nor sacrificing others to itself.
In Objectivist-C, there are not only properties, but also property rights. Consequently, all properties are @private; there is no @public property.
In Objectivist-C, each program is free to acquire as many resources as it can, without interference from the operating system. ...
Ross Douthat, in an argument with William Saletan, makes the point that Liberalism, aka Leftism, is merely the same Christianity we are all familiar with, modified into a materialist heresy with the scientific state at the center of the cosmos instead of Jehovah, no afterlife, and all the traditional teachings regarding celibacy and sex reversed.
[W]hen I look at your secular liberalism, I see a system of thought that looks rather like a Christian heresy, and not necessarily a particularly coherent one at that. In [his recent book] Bad Religion, I describe heresy as a form of belief that tends to emphasize certain elements of the Christian synthesis while downgrading or dismissing other aspects of that whole. And it isn’t surprising that liberalism, which after all developed in a Christian civilization, does exactly that, drawing implicitly on the Christian intellectual inheritance to ground its liberty-equality-fraternity ideals.
Indeed, it’s completely obvious that absent the Christian faith, there would be no liberalism at all. No ideal of universal human rights without Jesus’ radical upending of social hierarchies (including his death alongside common criminals on the cross). No separation of church and state without the gospels’ “render unto Caesar” and St. Augustine’s two cities. No liberal confidence about the march of historical progress without the Judeo-Christian interpretation of history as an unfolding story rather than an endlessly repeating wheel.
And what’s more, to me, contemporary liberals’ obsession with the supposed backwardness of Christian sexual ethics—an obsession that far outstrips sex’s actual role in the preaching and practice of Christian faith—reflects a subconscious liberal knowledge that Christianity is their theological mother, and they’re its half-rebellious child. You can see in it the child’s characteristic desire to finally overthrow the last bastion of parental authority, joined to a continued desire for the parent’s approval for their choices and beliefs. ...
[T]he more purely secular liberalism has become, the more it has spent down its Christian inheritance—the more its ideals seem to hang from what Christopher Hitchens’ Calvinist sparring partner Douglas Wilson has called intellectual “skyhooks,” suspended halfway between our earth and the heaven on which many liberals have long since given up. Say what you will about the prosperity gospel and the cult of the God Within and the other theologies I criticize in Bad Religion, but at least they have a metaphysically coherent picture of the universe to justify their claims. Whereas much of today’s liberalism expects me to respect its moral fervor even as it denies the revelation that once justified that fervor in the first place. It insists that it is a purely secular and scientific enterprise even as it grounds its politics in metaphysical claims. (You will not find the principle of absolute human equality in evolutionary theory, or universal human rights anywhere in physics.) It complains that Christian teachings on homosexuality do violence to gay people’s equal dignity—but if the world is just matter in motion, whence comes this dignity? What justifies and sustains it? Why should I grant it such intense, almost supernatural respect?
He’s perfectly right. What is modern environmentalism, after all, other than a particularly infuriating recrudescence of Dualism?
Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, who arrived with a reputation for being “too aggressive,” lived up to her reputation by announcing on Monday that she would not bring the matter of the shooting of Trayvon Martin before a Grand Jury at all, and would decide herself on whether to bring charges.
Corey surprised most observers yesterday by charging George Zimmerman with Second Degree Murder instead of Manslaughter.
The relevant Florida law definition reads:
The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree and constitutes a felony of the first degree, punishable by imprisonment for a term of years not exceeding life or as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
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A news agency report predicted that the prosecutor’s job would not be easy.
The prosecutors must prove Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin was rooted in hatred or ill will and counter his claims that he shot Martin to protect himself while patrolling his gated community in the Orlando suburb of Sanford. Zimmerman’s lawyers would only have to prove by a preponderance of evidence – a relatively low legal standard – that he acted in self-defense at a pretrial hearing to prevent the case from going to trial.
There’s a “high likelihood it could be dismissed by the judge even before the jury gets to hear the case,” Florida defense attorney Richard Hornsby said.
In attempting to create an attack ad, the Obama campaign has inadvertently produced an ad that the Romney campaign ought to be broadcasting all over America.
Ben Smith quotes an unnamed conservative lawyer who offers a simultaneously cynical and whimsical explanation of exactly why Obamacare is toast.
You have built an imaginary mansion, with thousands of rooms, on the foundation of Wickard v. Filburn — the 1942 ruling that broadened the understanding of how the Commerce Clause could be used to regulate economic activity.
We aren’t being asked to radically revise the Commerce Clause and throw out seven decades of law, and we won’t. But we know the founders never intended the Commerce Clause to allow the Federal Government to regulate everything on the planet. So we are going to accept Randy Barnett’s basically spurious exception to that basically spurious idea, and throw out the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the Commerce Clause regulates “activity” (which we don’t really believe), but not “inactivity” (because, why not draw the line somewhere?).
This is to say: You have built a fantasy mansion on the Commerce Clause. You can hardly blame us if, in one wing of this mansion, down a dusty corridor, we build a fantasy room called “inactivity,” lock the door, and don’t let you in.
Stuart Schneiderman mercilessly rubs in what has become increasingly obvious this week: the chosen representative of our nation’s establishment elite is really an ignoramus who’d flunk basic questions from a high school Civics course.
America’s thinking class saw Barack Obama as a light shining in the wilderness.
In deep despair over the coarsening of public discourse during the Dark Ages of the Bush administration, American intellectuals saw Barack Obama as one of their own, someone who could restore their exalted social status and raise the level of deliberative democratic debate.
Obama hadn’t accomplished anything of note; he wasn’t really qualified for the presidency; but he was superbly intelligent, had presided over the Harvard Law Review, had professed Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and had authored two brilliant books. ...
A few days ago the curtain was drawn and people could see that the Wizard of Oz was not what he claimed to be.
In an effort to get personally involved in Supreme Court deliberations over his signature piece of legislation—Obamacare—our president made it appear that he did not understand the most fundamental doctrine in American jurisprudence.
The former president of the Harvard Law Review, former professor at the University of Chicago Law review managed to mangle an explanation of “judicial review.” As every high school history student knows the doctrine was adumbrated in 1803 by Chief Justice John Jay in the case of Marbury v. Madison.
Obama asserted:
Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.
As everyone but Obama knows, Marbury v. Madison established the right of the Supreme Court to strike down Congressional legislation that it deemed unconstitutional.
The Court has done just that on hundreds of occasions.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, in the American Interest, argues that democracy has gotten far too democratic, and that over-extended democracy is inevitably going to prove to be democracy’s own worst enemy. He’s perfectly right.
It was therefore no coincidence that democracy developed in national contexts defined by, as noted already, a demos comfortable in its social skin. It is even the case, to take an obviously unsettling example, that American democracy might not have developed as it did had it not been for slavery and acute racial prejudice. Only by separating out of the democratic process those considered at the time not to be a part of the demos could American democracy unfold. That is the other side, so to speak, of the Jacksonian-era expansion of the franchise. ...
[E]ven universal secondary education can no longer reliably produce a responsible citizen. Liberal democracy born in the Republic of Letters has to survive in the Empire of Television, where information flows in one direction and need not involve direct response. The civic dialogue that was once the very foundation of democratic decision-making has become a one-way process of convincing voters. The political dialogue of liberal democracies is not just degraded, as is widely acknowledged; it is qualitatively different.
Moreover, as the capacity of citizens to grasp policy issues has eroded from one side, the percentage of citizens expected to grasp them has risen from the other. In Western countries today there is far more inequality within electorates than ever, simply because, as was not the case during the 19th century, everyone above age 18 can vote. ...
Democracy was the optimal form of government when voters were capable of making rational choices through an understanding of what was at stake, when they were ready to bear the responsibility for the consequences of their choices, and when the right to vote was understood to be a privilege, or the result of a struggle still remembered. Nowadays it is difficult to shake the impression that democratic societies are rapidly turning into ochlocracies, where the vast majority of citizens, seeing their rights as given and their responsibilities not at all, are easily addled by propaganda, distracted by spectacle and either unable or unwilling to invest the time and energy required to be a responsible democratic actor.
Lets assume your motive is constitutional and not because you are a drug user. I think then we can agree on a few things:
1) Most of the drugs that are now illegal are harmful and possibly fatal to use as prescribed. I doubt you believe crack is good for you so I’m going to assume you agree with this.
2)If someone forced my to take crack (or cocaine or heroin etc) they would be assaulting me perhaps even guilty of attempted murder. Again it is a no brainer so I will assume you agree.
3)A child under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to things an adult can consent to. If someone gives my child drugs and my child cannot consent legally then they are “forcing” my child into a harmful/deadly act. Again, a no brainer. About now you are beginning to see where I’m going with this and are looking left and right for a way out.
4)Anyone who tries to kill/assault/attack my child has stepped over a deadly line and I have a constitutional right to protect their life and use deadly force. I assume suddenly you aren’t agreeing with libertarian interpretations of the constitution and want to disagree with me even if it forces you to flip-flop on your beliefs. So that’s it! I will agree to accept that drugs should be legal and we have a constitutional right to put poison in our body if we choose AND you agree that I have a constitutional right to protect myself and my minor children and I can constitutionally use deadly force . Yes! I am saying legalize drugs and tell parents they can shoot anyone selling, sharing or giving their child drugs. All in all I think it is a good compromise, what do you think?
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Like most people who attended college when the Baby Boom generation was young, I did heaps and piles of all kinds of drugs. I’m now getting on in years and am long past all that. I have long since quit smoking, and am obliged to watch my diet fairly carefully. I wish I could do all the things I used to do at age 20 in exactly as carefree a fashion now as then, but there is no possibility of such a thing at all. I do get plenty of drugs, though. I have several prescriptions for regulating blood pressure and so on that I have to take every day.
I have enough experience of life to know perfectly well that some people will kill themselves using drugs recklessly and excessively. But I also know that actually an even larger number of people will inevitably proceed to ruin their lives and kill themselves with alcohol.
We recognized, long ago, that alcohol prohibition didn’t really stop people from drinking. It merely created a hugely profitable black market and caused a nationwide wave of crime and violence. Legal alcohol is associated with harm, but in fact produces much less harm.
The question of your children is a red herring. Has anyone recently forced any of your children to eat free pâté de foie gras or nefariously and at gun point made them consume Godiva chocolates?
If you raise your children properly and they do not inherit special weaknesses and neuroses, they ought to be able to drink alcohol and use drugs responsibly and without major untoward consequences at appropriate ages and occasions like most people.
If drugs were not especially forbidden, there would no drug dealers for you to shoot.
James Delingpole is not only sound on Anthropogenic Global Warming pseudo-scientific fraud, he is able to articulate the fundamental moral problem with drug prohibition quite succinctly.
VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul decried the “war on drugs” Thursday night, telling supporters in Washington state that people should be able to make their own decisions on such matters.
Voters in Washington are likely to decide this year whether to legalize the recreational use of marijuana
“If we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we’re allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?” Paul told more than 1,000 people at a rally in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Ore.
Yep. Go on… friends. Tell me: why not???
In a follow-up post, Peter Robinson quotes Milton Friedman in support of Delingpole.
I looked for photos of those scantily clad young conservative hussies. I really did.
Erick Erickson scolded some of the flaming youth attending CPAC 2012 for their inclination to party.
I am more than a bit shocked by the young men at CPAC this year who just seemingly refuse to grow up or act their age. More troubling, while in 2005 it seemed to be just college kids, as the years have passed it is not just the 18 to 21 year old set, but the twenty and thirty somethings who just can’t seem to grow up. It’s like they started out at CPAC this way in college and each year at their CPAC reunion descend back to their freshman year rush week.
This is more and more common in society and none of us should expect that a behavior increasingly common in society should not spill over into any event including CPAC, but just because something is common does not mean it is responsible or acceptable.
We can be thankful that CPAC is not like the communications war room at Media Matters. But it should be much more than that. The young men and women who go to CPAC are often present or future leaders on their college campuses and within the conservative movement. They go to CPAC and are often on near equal terms at CPAC with people much older than themselves. Unfortunately, too many treat CPAC like spring break.
More than a few of the twenty and thirty somethings who go to CPAC seem to treat it like an extension of their college days doing their best to hook up before passing out. It’s not the majority to be sure, but it is a noticeable minority.
———————————————— Dr. Melissa Clothier was even more censorious about the attire of some of the naughty young conservative girls.
Women will be future leaders, too, and I was dismayed to see how many of them either looked frumpish or like two-bit whores.
First, are these young people being taught anything by their parents? I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts (you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners?). They were sitting with their mothers. What is going on here?
Second, have women so internalized feminist dogma that they see themselves in only two ways? Butch, men-lite wannabes or 3rd wave sluts who empower themselves by screwing every available horndog man?
Neither path is a way to self-love and respect, mind you. Both tracks will inhibit future success.
Women, if you’re at a conference where you’re learning to be a future politician or wish to succeed in the business of politics, dress the part. No, you don’t have to be in a business suit with pearls. However, modesty is a minimum. So:
1. No cleavage. That’s right. Cover that up. I say “no” in absolutist terms because women will show a tiny bit and that’s okay, but really, in a business environment where ideas are the priority, a dude thinking about your ta-tas is counter-productive.
2. Skirts no more than three finger-widths above the knee. Why do I even have to write this? Well, because someone is allowing these girls out of the house with mini-skirts that reveal too much.
3. Save the stilettos for Saturday night on a date with your boyfriend.
4. Bend at the knee. No, I don’t want to see your butt.
Young women, you degrade your own value by dressing and then acting the ho.
But, really, no pictures?
How can you properly denounce the times and the morals without whipping out your cell phone and recording the goings on at the Fall of Rome for posterity?
You know what I always say? If you’re going to drink too much and scandalize the godly, come sit next to me.
———————————————— Jim Newell, at Wonkette, was appropriately derisive.
It is a true fact that there were a full dozen or two ladies at CPAC this year wearing sparkly cocktail dresses approximately ten million inches above the knee from nine in the morning ’til eleven at night, each being pursued by 10,000 sex-starved young conservative males. Why else would they all go to CPAC? To respectfully take notes on Richard Viguerie’s conservative movement stories from the mid-60s while sipping on a club soda? ...
Boys will be boys, ladies will be evil family-shamers. This is just the way of the world and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s conservative.
Someone bring that man another drink, and one of you young ladies ought to offer him a tour of the interior of that Marriott gift shop storage closet.
The Suicide Vest theory: let the GOP blow itself to smithereens with a Santorum nomination, then libertarians can come pick up the pieces.
Here’s my libertarian case for Rick Santorum’s nomination (though not his election). Since the early 1990s, Christian conservatives have formed an ever larger portion of the GOP. In Santorum, they would have what they have long sought: a candidate embodying their commitments to a politics of faith. Neoconservatives would also have a candidate committed to transforming the world through foreign policy and military action. The Obama-Santorum race would be more than just a struggle for power between two men. It would be a referendum on ideas and policies that have dominated the GOP for more than decade.
One recent poll has the former senator running even with Obama, but most polls have shown a decided gap of about eight points between the incumbent and Santorum. Right now the latter is not well-known to most voters. As Santorum becomes better known, he might close the gap with Obama. More likely, I think he would drive more secular and independent voters away from the GOP ticket. A ten-point Republican loss in a year when economic weakness suggested a close race would be a political disaster not just for the candidate and his party but also for the ideas they embody. Rick Santorum could be the George McGovern of his party.
Such a disaster might open the door for a different kind of GOP along lines indicated earlier, a party of free markets, moral pluralism, and realism in foreign affairs. Ron Paul has taken some steps this year toward creating such a party. He has attracted votes and inspired activism. His son or another candidate might take up the cause in 2016 and build on Paul’s achievements. Fanciful thinking? Perhaps, but it may take an electoral disaster to free the GOP from the ideas and forces that Rick Santorum represents.
Andrew McCarthy, in the New Criterion, reviews Conrad Black’s account of how he was financially ruined and jailed for more than two years: A Matter of Principle.
Increasingly [the] “rule of law” is just Big Government’s version of “social justice.” Heroes and villains are assigned their fates in accordance with the vanguard’s transgressive obsessions: income inequality, race, anti-Americanism, etc. The laws, rules and regulations proliferate until no one is invulnerable, reminiscent of Republican Rome’s death throes, when the emperor Nero (as Justice Antonin Scalia recounts in A Matter of Interpretation) posted his edicts high up on the pillars, rendering them impossible to read. Defendants are capriciously selected, made an example of, as much for what they represent as for what they’ve done. If you are a Democratic former National Security Adviser filching classified documents from the national archives or a Black Panther swinging a billy-club outside a polling station, you get our understanding. If you are Big Tobacco or Conrad Black, you’d better get counsel. Quaint notions of culpability are beside the point, because law is not about maintaining order but inculcating “our values.” Guilt and innocence are as irrelevant as the mordantly obvious question that rolled off my underwhelmed lips when the tobacco investigation was broached—How can there be fraud when the commercial activity is legal and everybody’s eyes are open to the risks?
Lord Black found out how, the hard way. He spent over thirty years building modest publishing enterprises into an international powerhouse that answered a market craving for professional reporting coupled with a right-of-center editorial voice. ...
Through grit and acumen, though, starting with a small paper he bought for $500, Black and his business partners put together a transcontinental dynamo that became a force in Anglo-American politics and created nearly $2 billion in value.
That delighted most of the shareholders, but not all of them. And here we come to this wrenching tale’s first wolf in sheep’s clothing: the “corporate governance” movement, waving the Orwellian banner of “shareholders’ rights.” In a free market, personal profit is not a sin but an objective, and notions of “value” vary widely—some seeking to maximize quick financial gain, others in a business for the long haul, prioritizing reasonable returns and growth. Economic liberty accommodates this diversity, and the small but salient role of law enforcement is to guard against theft and extortion, while the civil courts referee contractual disputes and tortious misbehavior.
Corporate governance, as the racket styles itself, is a euphemism for the imposition of one-size-fits-all ethics regulations on business practices. It coerces conformance with the vanguard’s professed ideals, subordinating the creation of wealth to trendy, expansive notions of “fairness” and a “good corporate citizenship.” It does this by worsening the metastasis of legal and administrative regimes, whose ominous presence engenders a climate wherein the mere suspicion of wrongdoing, let alone formal accusation, can be a profitable venture’s undoing. ...
Black… coins his own neologism to describe the dystopia he makes of modern America: a “prosecutocracy.”
When he finally got his day in court, Black and his co-defendants destroyed the foundation of the government’s case: There had been no fraud—much less tax fraud and racketeering, a charge the Justice Department usually reserves for hitmen. David Radler, the prosecution’s slippery star witness and Black’s estranged business partner, was ground to pulp in cross-examination. The self-serving amnesia of the independent directors proved incredible in the face of the countless times they were shown to have signed off on the purportedly secret management fees.
The jury acquitted the defendants on the fraud trumpeted by Breeden and echoed by the Justice Department. Yet the government had an escape hatch: the ever-elastic theory of denying “honest services.” ...
Black was convicted on three counts of this hopelessly vague offense.
Let’s hope that Lord Black’s comeback, when he is finally released this Spring, and revenge, will be as complete as those of Edmond Dantès.
, I describe heresy as a form of belief that tends to emphasize certain elements of the Christian synthesis while downgrading or dismissing other aspects of that whole. And it isn’t surprising that liberalism, which after all developed in a Christian civilization, does exactly that, drawing implicitly on the Christian intellectual inheritance to ground its liberty-equality-fraternity ideals.
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