Monday, July 14, 2008

I’m Not a White Guy, but I Play One in Real Life… Or Do I?

StuffWhitePeopleLike.com is one of my guilty pleasures… ok, that’s a lie. I rarely feel guilty about anything and this is not the exception. I like the site. I think it’s funny. I think it’s spot on. And I wonder if it makes me a great big hypocrite.

As everyone familiar with the site already knows, it’s really less ‘stuff white people like’ and more ‘things yuppies/hipsters like’. As an aside, it’s interesting how hipsters and yuppies have basically become the same thing.

The fact is, I own a few t-shirts that make people on the street chuckle; I really care about grammar; and I think The Wire is the best show… ever! It hit me last week; maybe this is shit that I like as well.

Never being one to settle for mere appearances (it’s one of the reasons that I find yuppies and hipsters so annoying), I decided to do a little back-of-the-envelope calculating.

There are currently one hundred and three things on the site, and this is where I stand:

Things that I don’t mind: 30 out of 103 or 29.1%
Things that I actually like: 19 out of 103 or 18.4%
Things that I can’t stand: 39 out of 103 or 37.8%

I’m happy with the results.

Here’s the real question: when did yuppies and hipsters merge into one giant, smug, annoying demographic?

This is from EJ Dionne's Column in the Washington Post

…they were writing about the conservative Supreme Court that struck down so much of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program and the effort by FDR to be given the power to name additional liberal justices to break the court's conservative majority. Roosevelt's reach for expanded executive authority was unwise because he made it easy for his opponents to compare him to Hitler and Stalin.


I thought that Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme was unwise because it represented a gross overstepping of executive authority and a complete disregard for our system of checks and balances.

I want to like E.J. Dionne. He teaches at my school, and he has seemed completely reasonable every time I’ve heard him speak. I cannot, however, help but see his column as the sort of polemical, red team vs. blue team thinking that we really need to get beyond. Here’s more:

In knocking down the District's 32-year-old ban on handgun possession, the conservatives on the Supreme Court have again shown their willingness to abandon precedent in order to do whatever is necessary to further the agenda of the contemporary political right.

The court's five most conservative members have demonstrated that for all of Justice Antonin Scalia's talk about "originalism" as a coherent constitutional doctrine, those on the judicial right regularly succumb to the temptation to legislate from the bench. They fall in line behind whatever fashions political conservatism is promoting.


Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for bashing on your political/ideological opponents, but not when you’re bashing on straw men. This assertion that Scalia and the other conservative justices are just the tools of some larger right-wing “agenda” does not go very far towards making a valid legal or political point. It seems much more likely that they actually believe, both as justices and as citizens, that the Second Amendment grants an individual right and not a collective one.

It’s one thing to criticize people for having opinions that you disagree with, but shouldn’t that criticism be based on finding actual fault with the argument and not just on the fact that you disagree. In other words, it’s fairly ridiculous to criticize conservatives just for being conservative.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Why I Self-Identify As a Libertarian

This is taken from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Boumediene v. Bush:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.


And this is from the NY Times editorial on Heller vs. DC:

Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year — on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly with its wrongheaded and dangerous ruling striking down key parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law.


It seems to me that either you uphold that individual freedoms have value in-and-of-themselves, value apart from their social utility, or you believe that it is perfectly fine to constrict individual behavior in the pursuit of social aims. You cannot, however, have your cake and eat it as well.