Everything In Its Right Place

Hello from the greater Burlington area! I'd like to let everyone know that Boudicca and I have both made it safely to our apartment, and we have embarked on something new to us both : the no-distance relationship. Fancy that!

Sadly, our digs are without the Internet for at least a few more days. This means that our shocking absence from Optimates will continue for a bit longer. I've actually spent this brief time on a UVM department computer catching up on some recent posts and getting back in touch with the world outside our immediate area.

Once we're fully squared away and our apartment is modernized, we'd be more than happy to make social calls in nearby states (!) or entertain guests. We've cherished everyone's support during the last month and look forward to seeing all of you.

Until then.

...In which I shamelessly endorse a hopeless third-party candidate none of us can vote for

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the political tide is shifting in our great nation. Now, I'm not one for foreign policy, as Cato could surely attest, but I can feel my way around the domestic sphere without too much difficulty. What I'm sensing, above all, is not a swing from the right to the left, though that will almost certainly occur in the partisan sense. No, what I'm seeing is a divergence away from the structures of the left-right spectrum and into true Libertarianism.

I believe that the Libertarian party could truly emerge as a third party, at this point in history like none other, because it doesn't really fall onto the spectrum itself as the spectrum exists today (in practice.) For instance, I'm one of the most liberal of all Optimates, but I also think of myself, more every day, as a Libertarian. Ten years ago this would have made next-to-no sense at all, but it becomes clearer with each passing moon. That was before the right started pushing for an increasingly fascist power-grab at the expense of our freedoms, and before the leftist nanny-state exanded to include media and other forms of "disagreeable" speech. Freedom no longer exists on this line of thinking, where the question is only about which freedoms should be curtailed, and the moderation tends to compromise by appeasing both sides.

Liberty is just that: liberty. It allows for us to make mistakes, and it trusts in citizens to live their own lives, make their own mistakes, and learn whatever lessons they will along the way. If my liberty encroaches on yours, then laws should come into play. But if my liberty only endangers myself, well, I've made my choice in a free society, and have no one to blame but myself if it plays out badly. Liberty isn't safe, at least by nature. If it should mean anything, than it should be the boldest staement that we as a people can make. It should be steadfast, honest, unwavering, and unimpeachable. If Christian fundamentalists say, "That's not the way you should live," liberty says, "then say so, but we are under no obligation to agree." If Islamic fundamentalists say, "Death to the Great Satan," liberty says, "Come here and worship as you please, but the moment that you harm another citizen, expect to be treated equally under to force of a law which protects the lot of us." If secular liberals (myself included) say, "Keep prayer out of the schools!" liberty says, "Religion must not be enforced or coerced, but neither may it be denied."

Liberty is hard. Liberty invoves accepting that which you yourself detest and taking a stand for rights wich you yourself would never deign to take advantage of. I will remain a registered Democrat, but I fear that my party understands these principles no better than their opposition. To join the Libertarian party is to lessen my personally interest over the primaries, where one's vote matters most. Still, I remain a Democrat because I believe that a well managed government can do good things with the taxes it levees. I badly want the system to be less wasteful, but I think that by helping the least among us to support themselves and their families, our society is healthier, and our economy as well. And it's simply the right thing to do. The Libertarian party tends not to support that view, and so I cannot join, much as I'd like it to become a legitimate third option to be reckoned with.

Then, today, Frithonthehills directed me to a website that she found via Sullivan (or whoever is doing his work for him while he's on vacation.) Sullivan's boy made a joke about him and dismissed him as a crackpot, but I read through the whole thing, and I've never in my life come across a more reasoned, sincere, incorruptable, and noble candidate in my life. From now 'til November, I'm going to do whatever I have to from Brooklyn to get him elected.

His name is James Hill. He's running for congress in the Iowa first district. And he describes himself as a pirate.

In case you were wondering...

I've lost all faith in baseball.

I'm ready for football season, now.

 

That is all.

Alternate History

Sullivan posits a world in which 9/11 never happened - but 10/23 did.

The Devil's Water It Ain't So Sweet

My bold, swing-for-the-fences prediction: The Killers, and not Coldplay, will be the true successors to U2.

Check as many as apply

Today, while working diligently on a great many matters of public importance, xkcd led me to this site on approval voting. While I had of course heard of approval voting before, I'd never given it much thought. Now that I have, I have only one question (albeit in three parts):

Why don't we do this nationally? What disadvantage would there be? Is our current ballot system in place purely to ensure higher party donation rates?

I'm honestly curious as to anything that I might not have thought of.

C.H.U.D. Roundtable is Back!

And as my entire readership of old consisted of people from Optimates, I thought I'd let y'all know. Go here.

The future will be arriving shortly... sort of.

As posted on TechCrunch, yesterday:

Google, parent organization of Blogger, announced features that will appear in the new version, out in beta now at beta.blogger.com.

Among the features listed were:

• Tagging posts—something others have been doing for some time. This will aid in searchability of blogs.
• Individual posts will be able to be published to the Blogspot servers, instead of republishing the entire blog after each post. Hallelujah.
• Privacy settings will be enabled. Blogs can be public, private or read only by invitation. I'm not sure this is pertinient to us, but it's still a new feature.
• Drag and drop layout. I guess I'm out of yet another job.
• Feeds. Feeds for all comments and individual feeds for comments on each post. RSS and Atom will be supported.

I'm assuming the drag-and-drop interface will be similar to Google's personalized homepage (http://www.google.com/ig).

We're not using feeds, that I know of, at this time. But, it's something that I've been thinking about lately, and this latest news just makes it that much more of a good idea. I think Google is making some good moves, here, to bring Blogger back to the forefront of Blogging sites and technology.

I'll check it out, soon. I wouldn't recommend making the jump too soon, as some say it's still unstable. But others may feel free to go over there, and play around with it. Then, we can share thoughts on the upgrade, if we so desire.

Sexual Healing Through Monogamy

In light of my two recent posts, I think it's obvious that I favor monogamy for heterosexual men for the purposes of societal stability.

We've had a similar discussion here before, namely whether monogamy is our natural inclination as humans and whether so-called 'polygamous marriage' should be a social and civil rights issue in the same vein as gay marriage (for my commentary on polygamous marriage, see here). Let me set aside the legal questions and narrow the scope to male behavior.

Genetically, it is clear that the human male is physically well-equipped for polygamy in a way that the human female is not. A man (through some exertion!) can reasonably impregnate a half-dozen or so women in the course of a single day. Women, on the other hand, can only bear the child of one man, and that over a period of nine months.

But this physical predisposition also assumes intense and violent competition between men for available women. Competition which is individually unhealthy - save for those who win - and unhealthy for social organization between men. That is, monogamy may not be the inherent preference of all unrestricted men, but it is socially preferable to the alternative and less risky for the individual male.

Interestingly enough, a recent study has shown this is no mere sophistry on my part: marriage also leads to an improved mental attitude (Let me modestly second this conclusion from my own brief experience - thus far - with the institution!). Combined with my own recent posts about terrorism and sexuality, it makes all the sense in the world to encourage strict monogamous behavior among men. So how do we do that?

While We're on the Subject...

Lithwick, meanwhile, draws our eyes back to the States and the Columbine killers. It seems that they too had a strange relationship with their desires:

As was recently reported in Newsweek, Klebold, 17 at the time, lamented, "I don't know what I do wrong with people (mainly women) it's like they set out to hate & ignore me." Later he mourned, "Want TRUE love ... I hate everything, why can't I die..."

While this isn't as far-gone as demanding goat diapers, it's still on the same road. Alienation from women has led to fear of their power and self-hatred.

In fact, I think the demographic and social state of Columbine and the several Arab states is similar. In both cases, a powerful elite controls the resources, and in both cases that elite is notoriously not monogamous. Saudi princes have multiple wives, which has the result of skewing the male-female ratio for the rest of the population. So you've got more unmarried men than you would otherwise have, and a corrupt system that cries out for reform but cannot be changed. This is a recipe for disaster!

High schools such as Columbine are similar. There's an elite group of males - commonly but not necessarily jocks - who generally monopolize the most desireable women. While not strictly polygamous, it's serial monogamy limited to a small group of men. It should be no surprise that the same alienation results. I would love to see a study of high schools where Columbine-like violence has occured: what percentage of desireable women exclusively date the elite males of the school? How clique-ish is the school, besides? How does this compare with other schools without a history of violence?

The Fundamentalist Mystique

While Boudicca continues to recover, the task has been put to me to carry on in her blogging stead. This means blogging about sex.

Sullivan has intervened on my behalf, serving up some delicious goodies. The post is on - and I'm serious - Iraqi Islamists and their demands that goats submit to a form of hijab. You see, immodestly attired goats will tempt men. Money quote:

Iraqi Islamists are threatening shepherds with violence if they don't clothe their goats with diapers to avoid tempting lonely shepherds. Another facet of the "new Middle East"...

Sullivan cannot escape the conclusion:

The goat diapers are funny. But they are a function of a sexual pathology, maintained by religious norms, and all for sustaining the immunity of heterosexual males from the consequences of their sex drives - and the subjugation of women into near-slavery throughout many enclaves in the Muslim world.

Fear of the sexual power of women is chief in the fundamentalist, and therefore terrorist, mind. The key distinction between a conservative (using myself as an example) and reactionaries such as these, I think, is the following: the conservative may object to the encroachment of sexuality into the public sphere, but the reactionary would suppress to natural and individual differences in sexuality, afraid any temptations will reveal his own sinful deviance. How revealing is it, then, that the objects of such violence are gays and now goats?

Home

This morning at about 2 a.m., I returned home to New England after three wonderfully exhausting weeks in Georgia.

Although I wasn't necessarily homesick at any point during that timespan, I felt revitalized by the more familiar sights and sounds of the rural North Country.

It was nice, for instance, to hear the Yankee accent and idioms ("Wicked Smaht") after nearly a month of y'alls. It was also nice to see the fields, forests, and rivers right where I'd left them, too.

Love and Marriage

As a celebration of our first two weeks together, I decided to post this delightful little picture from the Boudicca-Tacitean wedding! Careful observers will note two things:

1. My wife is gorgeous, despite being in considerable pain
   
2. I am not photogenic, despite being in no pain whatsoever
   

If this picture is well received by the citizenry, I may consider putting up more photos from that afternoon and evening. If I can find one of the much-heralded "wheelchair waltz" - that is, one that does it justice - I will post it without hesitation.

Gloomy Hawks

Via Sullivan (a common refrain of mine, I know), we learn of the 'gloomy hawk,' a figure of speech coined by Stanley Kurtz to describe his sentiments on war and peace:

Meanwhile, short of a preemptive war, Iran is bound to get the bomb. No grand bargain or set of economic sanctions can deter it — especially now that Iran is convinced of its success in creating havoc for the West, and in consolidating popular support through its proxy attacks on Western interests. As Ian Bremmer reports in “What the Israeli-Hezbollah War Means for Iran,” Iran is convinced it’s winning, while America and Europe are increasingly convinced that a nuclear-armed Iran would be an intolerable danger to their interests.“Imagine...how much more dangerous the war in Lebanon would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon.”

At the same time, we were reminded this morning how a handful of terrorists have the potential to bring down airplanes and, barring that, cause economic difficulties and massive inconveniences for the West. Even if a mere 100 people world-wide harbor these ambitions, the force-multiplying ability of common household items as explosives makes them as deadly as an air force - and undeterrable, to boot.

Perhaps 'gloomy hawkdom' is all we have to look forward to after five-and-a-half years of (sad to say) fairly inconclusive fighting from our perspective. The regimes we've created and supported as bulwarks against Islamist terror are unable to prevent the spread of violence in and from their own countries. The number and ability of undeterrable terrorists has not shrunk. Our own resolve, meanwhile, has predictably weakened in the face of incompetent and disorganized (to say nothing of immoral) leadership and a long fight.

Is the West becoming one giant Israel?

Still... In... Atlanta

I'm pleased to report that the recovery of fair Boudicca is proceeding very nicely - her spirits are as elevated as her right leg! So the stage is set for me to return north and lay the groundwork for our new life together in the Burlington area.

... or is it? Yes, friends, our favorite group of theofascist thugs is at it again, setting their sights on blowing up planes in the UK bound for America. As a result, the lines to get into security at the ATL were about two-three hours long this morning. Let's say, for the sake of argument, I only arrived 1 1/2 hours before my flight. You see the obvious problem!

I'm actually glad I abandoned my quest to fly out today - I forgot I had some shampoo in my carry-on bag, and that kind of thing gets you in trouble now:

In the Atlanta airport, Brenda Lee was annoyed with the lines and having to remove items from her luggage. The 52-year-old commercial real estate appraiser from Snellville, Ga., had to throw away her shampoo, but she said she was keeping her contact lens solution in her carry-on luggage.

The English-Speaking World and Slavery

As is so common, there's a really interesting post over at Albion's Seedlings about the history of slavery in the Anglosphere. Worth the time if you have it.

Menage a Blah

Beaten but not accepting defeat, Lieberman vows he will run as an Independent. Will a three-way race guarantee a minority Republican U.S. Senator in Connecticut? I ask, you decide.

He is all that he can be (Or is he?)

Even though he may not see it, everyone wish a fond farewell to our dear, newly departed Baker Carr. He'll be in basic training at Fort Benning, GA until November, and won't have internet access for quite some time. We wish you the best, and I'd send you copies of The New Republic if the army would only let me.

Lieberman and McKinney

Anyone want to hazard a guess what will happen in this race? Or this one? Or, better yet, tell me what you'd like to happen and why.

Representative Democracy and Caesarism

Our dear friend Andrew Sullivan has once again pitched it right into the Optimate wheelhouse with his post on Caesarism. It just so happens I know a thing or two about the subject.

Sullivan traces the modern rise of 'Caesarism' to the 19th century, with the result being National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy. This dovetails nicely with his ongoing battle against 'Christianism,' which - he asserts - in America has installed George W. Bush as its ideal 'Caesar.'

As a classicist and a political theorist (albeit amateur on both counts), I think this over-simplifies the picture. It wasn't as though otherwise well-meaning people suddenly woke up one day and decided to throw democracy overboard for totalitarianism on a whim. The key lies in the particular mode of republic.

The rise of Caesar was based on his opposition to the aristocratic Senate and his support of the people. The people - however construed - felt the Senate was no longer responsive to their wishes. Into the breach stepped Caesar, with enough legions to enforce his 'popular' decrees. Caesar's laws were not overtly tyrannical (many made good sense) and he himself exercised a great deal of clemency once in charge. But at the same time, we have to agree that crucial to his power was the notion of a special, extra-constitutional mandate.

In my view, this all happened because the actual constitution of the Roman Republic wasn't functioning. There was no such things as 'representative democracy' and the Senate had become an oligarchy of privilege. So the only means of remedying the situation was indeed extra-constitutional. A true "people's champion" was needed, who held personal authority and vast prestige.

Through the course of this decade, we've seen similar 'populist' manifestations in American politics. Isn't the cause the same? Our Republic's legislature is no longer in any way 'representative' of its constituency. How? Much as the Roman Senate rigged the game through graft and intimidation of the other magistracies, our own federal legislature has gerry-mandered and bought its way to perpetuity. The American people are not stupid - despite what we may think - and they can see what's happened. And, just like clockwork, the strong executive has emerged to serve as the "people's champion" against the un-representative legislature.

The question is, will we do anything about it, or will we continue to attack the symptoms? Bush's reach for power is extreme in scope, but in form simply an extension of Clinton's. To attack 'Bush-ism' is to miss the point, as is to seek only a judicial solution to executive over-reach. The legislature must be made more representative of the people's will, to funnel their desires through the rule of law and a constitutional mandate.

Gerrymanders must be stopped and term limits must be passed. Before a competent Caesar makes his way to the presidency with imperial objectives - and the popular wind at his back.

We're Back!

Fans of Optimates will notice the blog has been down for the past few days. Well, we're back. It was a slight technical problem that has since been rectified. Thank you for your patience.

Okay, so we were drunk, which is important...

As I was inspired by a comment thread on the Alien Loves Predator forums (one of my favorite webcomics, along with xkcd, toothpaste for dinner, Spamusement, and Dinosaur Comics) I must ask, what are the best of all pranks you have pulled on friends/roommates/enemies/professors/R.A.'s/anyone else who deserves it?

I'll start off the comments with one of mine, but I expect to be topped pretty quickly.

Boudicca Update

Another short update for everyone interested.

Our dear Boudicca - whom many of you know to have been afflicted with a blood clot last week - is recuperating very nicely in Peachtree City. The particular symptoms of the clot have slowly begun to recede and her spirits are very high (in all fairness, if I had a Tacitean waiting on me hand and foot, my spirits would be high, too!). I know for a fact she's getting better because her smart-aleck comments have returned!

A lot of what happens from now depends on doctors' recommendations and the like, so I can't give anyone any timeline as to when you'll see us north of the Mason-Daxon line again. But you will see us! Thank you for all the support.