Tag: The Self-Defeating Victory of Violence
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When we finally start talking about gun control, what should we say?
I love policy discussions, but the demands for policy discussion on gun control after the shootings in Newtown today are terribly wrong-headed. The problem is that demanding a policy discussion is not the same thing as having a policy discussion. At this point, we’re just talking about talking about gun control. It’s all “mention” and…
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“The purpose of law enforcement, with respect to transactional crimes, is to make sure that they have ‘good’ criminals.”
Keith Humphreys shares this interview with Vanda Felbab-Brown. There are no dull moments, but here’s one I think should give us lefties pause: what will replace the underground marijuana economy? Felbab-Brown explains: Most of the time governments tend to fight illicit economies and not think about what will replace them. Policies are often premised on the…
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Reflections on my Crime and Punishment Seminar
This semester I taught a course on crime and punishment, and in part out of competition with my colleague Seth Vannatta, I set out to give a final presentation on the dimensions of the course. This is the presentation I wrote. Introduction Our task was to explore the role of ethics in the law,…
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Anarchy, the Black Bloc, and Gandhian “Non-Violence”
Let me start with a correction. Anarchy isn’t really as interesting as you think it is. In fact, Anarchy is Boring: Figuring out how to run a sustainable anarchist household (that values time spent washing the dishes and time spent making money as a computer programmer equally) isn’t as headline-grabbing as a downtown smashup. But Seattle…
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Lin-Manuel Miranda Previews The Hamilton Mixtape
I tried to get tickets after I saw this New York Times piece, but no luck. “I am not throwing away my shot” is just an awesomely perfect refrain: it refers to ‘reserving and throwing away’ the shot in a pistol duel: deliberately firing into the ground in order to make a merely symbolic gesture of courage. It…
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Caplan’s Pacifism
Bryan Caplan echoes my own pragmatic/consequentialist arguments for pacifism : P1: The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. P2: The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. P3: For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs. C: [B]efore you kill innocent people, you should be reasonably sure that your…
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More War: The Intervention in Libya
The war in Libya happened so fast that most of the commentariat seemed to be caught flat-footed. The international community had apparently decided to go to war without properly vetting their decisions with bloggers! As a result, we got more than our fair share of bad arguments. I’ve been trying to formulate a position of…
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Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution
It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful protesters, whose only defense is the military standing by. To ask for the…
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Three Thoughts on the Tuscon Shootings
The immediate response to tragedy ought to be a cautious silence and a quiet search for understanding. Yet when I attended a vigil on Sunday at the US Capitol building, a reporter from WAMU spent a half hour gathering quotes (none of which he used, thankfully) and in the process goaded a few vocal participants into…
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Wikileaks and War
Is this the argument? 1. (Our) wars are unjust. 2. Stopping (our) wars will prevent further injustice. combined with: 3. (Our) wars depend on secrecy in inception and in daily practice. 4. Thus, (our) wars can be prevented by eliminating the secrecy in inception. 5. Moreover, (our) wars can be stopped by eliminating the secrecy…