Day: October 11, 2000

Joseph Sobran on Capital Punishment

For many years now I’ve been arguing that the only reasonable, consistent position for libertarians to take on capital punishment is to oppose it. If the state can’t be trusted to deliver mail on time or effectively manage public works projects, certainly it can’t be trusted to decide who should and should not be put to death. In a recent column, Joseph Sobran eloquently sums up this position.

My own view is that, other things being equal, a murderer richly deserves to die. But you can say that and still believe that the state shouldn’t execute him. The state has amply proved, over the centuries (and especially the twentieth century), that it can’t be trusted with life-and-death power over anyone. It can’t be trusted with other powers either: the power to draft soldiers, the power to tax, the power to control the currency. It has abused every power ever entrusted to it … The modern state itself is a criminal enterprise. And though the death penalty is intrinsically just and does deter, we don’t want justice enforced by criminals.

Well said.

Source:

The Death Penalty. Joseph Sobran, LewRockwell.Com, October 11, 2000.

Buchanan Is Cracking Under the Strain

Okay, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan doesn’t have even a slim chance of being elected president, but he does finally have $12 million in matching funds, and I expect him to make some bold move with that money. Instead, Buchanan seems intent on becoming a parody of a parody.

With some of that $12 million, Buchanan launched television commercials attacking the number one concern on voters minds — the continuing decline in the use of English within the borders of the United States. Buchanan must be out of his mind.

The ad, entitled “Meatball,” depicts a man who starts choking on a meatball after he hears about a government move away from English as the national language. The man tries to call 911 only to get a “Please select your language” voice menu, and the poor diner dies before the recording gives him the option of English.

As some critics immediately pointed out, if the man is choking, getting a 911 operator who speaks English isn’t exactly going to do him a lot of good. Apparently Buchanan’s upset that President Bill Clinton signed an executive order allowing more government documents to be printed in Spanish in areas where there is a heavy immigrant community. To leap from that to the claim that we’re headed to a nation where English is not the lingua franca is absurd.

In an interview cited by the Associated Press, Buchanan said, “Unrestricted immigration could make you a bilingual and a multilingual country. Those countries don’t seem to be staying together too well.”

While there have been some extremist attempts to avoid English, such as the failed bilingual education programs in California, hasn’t Buchanan noticed that English is the unofficial, default language of not only the United States but practically the entire world (I really notice this web surfing where web sites that are hosted and created by people in France, Singapore, Germany, or wherever, tend to be written in English or offer English translations, because of the language’s popularity).

The most hilarious part is that Buchanan can’t even keep his anti-immigrant ideology straight. Touring Colorado earlier in the week, Buchanan attacked Native American activists in Denver who tried to block a Columbus Day parade. There are many good arguments against such protests, but Buchanan’s doesn’t jibe with his anti-immigrant rhetoric,

I think what is going on here is an intolerant, militant left-wing group is attempting to deny Italian-Americans their right to march under a banner of their hero, who is also a hero of Western civilization. It’s all part of a political correctness, which is another name for cultural Marxism. It is anti-European and anti-Western civilization. We have a right to our heroes and they to theirs.

Earth to Buchanan: Italian-Americans were immigrants to this country who were derided by know-nothings like yourself because they stuck together in Italian-American communities and didn’t necessarily speak ENglish (or, like the immigrants Buchanan fears so much, preferred to stay multi-lingual, teaching their children both ENglish and Italian). Columbus Day, in fact, was organized around the turn of the century to counteract anti-Italian views and point up the key role that Italians played in the history of the Western hemisphere. If Buchanan really believes this anti-immigrant cant, he belongs out there with the Native American protesters rather than the Columbus Day parade.

Source:

Buchanan decries immigration levels. Scott Lindlow, Associated Press, October 9, 2000.

Give Me More Options

Okay, an email arrives in my mailbox a few minutes ago from Mark Morgan (one of the excellent things about Conversant is you can subscribe to these sites via e-mail) pointing out that Dave Winer’s Manila CMS has added a flat discussion view to its toolset.

This is one of the few things on the short list of things that I’d like to do on my sites but that Conversant can’t do yet … sort of. Morgan himself hacked a pretty good implementation of a flat view within Conversant that I plan on implementing soon, and Seth Dillingham did say that a flat discussion view is on the list of things to add to Conversant, though it was on schedule for a Q1 2001 date since there are other features that are being worked on.

One of the things I keep congratulating Seth on is the fact that when Conversant implements a feature, generally it has a pretty open structure so I can implement a feature the way I want. Personally I’m amazed that this isn’t the default attitude of software developers, but in discussing Manila’s implementation of the flat discussion group view, Winer illustrates the typical attitude of developers toward users.

Somebody asked Winer how he would handle letting people break long threads into multiple pages, which is a pretty standard feature in flat threaded discussion group software. Winer’s response,

First, there’s no limit to the size of a browser page.

Second, when the page gets “full”, start a new topic.

Yuck. First, although there is no limit to the size of the browser page, some of us have difficulty keeping thing straight when the page gets huge. Also, I don’t know about Winer but I have had people write me from remote locations — one person was accessing my site from a remote part of Alaska — where getting reliable 28.8k connections is iffy and huge pages would pretty much destroy the ability for them to participate in a meaningful way.

As for starting new topics when a page gets “full”, personally I’ve visited sites that did this, and I really hate that approach. Lots of people swear by it, but I think it’s self-defeating to have say 12 different thread pages going on about the same topic.

But beyond whether Winer or I are right about the “best” way to format a flat discussion group thread (and this is all a matter of personal preference), why not just write your software so that you support whatever option the administrator and/or user is most comfortable with? Since the page being served in this case is dynamic anyway, why not give administrators, and preferably users, control over how many messages they are served? It seems like such a small thing, why impose the “one true interface” on users?

The other thing I dislike about traditional flat discussion groups, which Winer’s uses, is they tend to order the messages in strict chronological order. This is helpful the first time you read the thread, but is a real pain in the butt, in my opinion, when you’re revisiting a thread. I much prefer ordering the messages in reverse chronological order so I always see the newest messages first. Others vehemently argue for the opposite. Again, let administrators, and preferably users, make that choice.

Mark refers to leaving out these sort of options as “only partway doing things.” Sometimes developers initially only partially implement a feature with the intent of adding on and fully implementing other features later, which is fine, but the goal to my mind should always be to make features as flexible as possible, especially in something like a CMS system.

Pro-Hunting Amendments Up for Vote in Arizona, Virginia

When people go to the polls in Arizona in a few weeks, along with deciding on a presidential candidate and other elected offices, voters will decide the fate of Proposition 102 which amends the state constitution there to read,

The state shall manage wildlife in public trust for the people, as provided by law, to assure continued existence of wildlife populations in the state. An initiative that permits, limits or prohibits the taking of wildlife, or the methods or seasons thereof, shall not become law unless approved by at least two-thirds of the votes cast on the proposition.

Meanwhile, Virginia voters will decide whether or not to add a new section to their state’s constitution that would read, “The people have a right to hunt, fish and harvest game, subject to such regulations and restrictions as the General Assembly may prescribe by general law,” although there is currently a lawsuit brought by The Fund for Animals and the Humane Society of the United States attempting to have that measure removed.

In 1998, Utah became the first state to enact such a change to its constitution. Is this a good way to go about protecting the rights of hunters and fisherman from animal rights activists and the more extreme parts of the environmental movement?

The thing that pops out about these ballot measures is how bizarre they might seem to the people who founded the United States and these individual states. The idea that there might come a time when people might try to outlaw hunting and fishing — activities, after all, which were occurring in North America long before the ancestors of most voters even realized there was a North American continent — would have sounded absurd. That some hunting and fishing groups sponsor such measures is testimony to how different attitudes about animals in contemporary America.

The Arizona Daily Star, for example, interviewed M. Dane Waters of the Initiative & Referendum Institute who said that Proposition 102 is a “blatant attempt to take away the fundamental rights of everyday Arizona citizens” by making a special exemption for certain referendums. Yet is it any more blatant an attack on rights than that carried forth by those who would outlaw or severely restrict fishing and hunting?

One of the interesting features of initiatives designed to limit fishing and hunting is their unintended consequences. Animal rights activists, for example, successfully pushed for a 1994 initiative in Arizona that banned leg-hold traps, which the activists claim are cruel. As biologist John Phelps of the Arizona Game and Fish Department told the Arizona Daily Star, however, the result is that an important tool was taken away with sometimes counterproductive results,

From our point of view we’ve been deprived of one response to damage and nuisance problems [from coyotes and other predators]… Now the response is more likely to be a lethal one.

Personally, though, I think the Virginia approach of putting the right to fish and hunt, with reasonable regulations, directly in the state constitution is a much better approach than trying to up the ante on initiatives which probably comes across as anti-democratic to many people.

Source:

Vote rights a side issue of wildlife measure. Maureen O’Connell, Arizona Daily Star, October 5, 2000.

Lawsuit filed over Virginia’s deceptive “right-to-hunt” amendment. Press release, The Fund for Animals, October 2, 2000.

Woman Suing Duke After Getting Cut by the Football Team

The Associated Press has a story about testimony in a lawsuit brought by Heather Sue Mercer against Duke University. It seems Ms. Mercer tried out for the football team as a walk-on kicker. She was given a 20-minute tryout by coach Fred Goldsmith who testified he cut her because she wasn’t good enough.

One of the kickers who made that team testified that in her tryout, Mercer’s field goal range was limited to about 35 yards. Such a limited range would prevent any kicker, male or female, from making a college football team at a decent university (Duke’s then-starting kicker hit several from 45+ yards, including one from 50 yards).

Goldsmith testified,

She was evaluated like a man would have been. I decided to judge her like a man who was not making a contribution to the team.

He also added that he admired her for trying out and offered her a manager position which she turned down.