On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries. …Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat. When she rose, it was not with a blush, but she seemed rather to glory in the performance. For she was not only impudent herself, but endeavored to make everybody else as audacious. Often when she was alone with other actors she would undress in their midst and arch her back provocatively, advertising like a peacock both to those who had experience of her and to those who had not yet had that privilege her trained suppleness.

- Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Procopius’ The Secret History, “How Theodora, Most Depraved Of All Courtesans, Won His Love.”

Sigh.

(Back in the day, there were various attempts to compare Hilary Clinton to the Empress Theodora. That’s just crap, as far as I’m concerned. Byzantium is cool. Arkansas is not.)

If you get your wish and all the conservatives discard their “hypocrisy”, then nobody would speak for any degree of freedom at all (essentially, except for a few) Why is that a good thing?

My thought was that maybe they could use the ensuing quiet time to ponder the contradiction between their rhetoric and reality and find another resolution to that conflict. They’d only shut up in the first place if they took my point.

Few things offend my delicate sensibilities more than hearing something good and decent said by someone who doesn’t mean it.

“It’s Your Money!”

Rush Limbaugh can’t say it enough when he’s going after the democrats. The democrats want to take your money, but Rush will help you keep it. Because it’s yours. Ask Sean Hannity. Ask George W. Bush. It’s your money.

It’s a good and decent thing to say. But they don’t mean it.

If it’s your money then you can just keep it all, right? Obviously these guys who recognize that it’s your money will have your philosophical and political back, won’t they? They wouldn’t throw you in jail for simply keeping your money, would they?

Well..

…that could be a problem.

What put me on this tonight was a good and decent Bleat from James Lileks:

�Well, it�s a philosophical difference,� she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clicking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. �I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.� Those last two words were said with an edge.

�But then I wouldn�t have hired them,� I said. �I wouldn�t have new steps. And they wouldn�t have done anything to get the money.�

�Well, what did you do?� she snapped.

�What do you mean?�

�Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?�

�They didn�t give it to me. They just took less of my money.�

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:

�Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.�

It’s very nice. The only problem is he doesn’t mean it. Glenn Reynolds calls this an exploration of the heart of darkness. That’s right, but these guys need to explore their own hearts because they don’t mean it.

You see there’s an aspect of the heart of darkness here that’s more troubling than the young airhead going door to door for Kerry. What’s far more troubling is that Lileks and Reynolds think there is a difference of principle between their own politics and the politics of Kerry and his airheaded minion. But they really don’t mean it when they say it’s your money. All they are really arguing about with the democrats is how much to steal from you and what to spend it on. The nitwit is being more honest about her politics than they are.

The full implications of the assertion “It’s your money” are profound. If it’s yours then nobody has a right to take it from you. It means that no level of taxation is morally defensible. It means government and states are immoral in principle.

They don’t mean it and they ought to shut up because they soil those good and decent words when they use them.

“It’s your money to begin with, by the way.” - George W. Bush in Maryland as his flunkies sold off Peabo Bryson’s piano on Ebay. He didn’t mean it.

I like Radley Balko and I like his blog. That’s why I feel obliged to take him to task for stuff like this:

Matthew Yglesias says that coercion “has a vital role to play in building a better tomorrow.”

Okay, so Yglesias isn’t a libertarian. But statements like this one from otherwise smart people continue to confound me. Even tossing out the quaint notion that a man ought to have ownership of his own body, his own labor, and what he creates with it, Yglesias still has to assume that those doing the coercing will be coercing in a way Yglesias approves, that they’ll be coercing goods and labor Yglesias is okay with, and that the coercer’s definition of “better” more or less jibes with Yglesias’s.

How often is he going to get that? And how is he going to get it? Through rule by democracy? Philosopher kings? The editorial board of The American Prospect?

How can Balko, a minarchist, a statist libertarian, imagine that he disagrees with what Yglesias wrote there? I’ve pointed this out before. In a comment on No Treason he wrote:

To answer your question, I personally subscribe to Lockean natural rights theory. So I think some form of state is necessary to preserve those rights, from forces both internal and external. So yes, I do believe in a minimalist state, and in the taxes we’d need to impose for a criminal court system, prisons, and a national defense.

How do you get that without the very coercion that Yglesias is talking about?

Now I’ll grant that Balko is not Yglesias. Balko doesn’t want to wield government for everything Yglesias does. But what’s the difference in principle? All they really have to argue about is which projects should be imposed by force.

If Balko really doesn’t agree that such coercion has a vital role to play in building a better tomorrow then he ought to recognize that he’s an anarchist.

To the J. Lo and Mike S. not-so-massive massive:

Let’s start with a simple basic principle.

It’s wrong to kill people merely for publicly expressing a political opinion.

Even Nazis.

Even Yglesias.

Do you understand that? You have no right to fucking kill somebody for saying something - even something you don’t goddamned like- on their own goddamned blog or newspaper or privately-engraved-and-embossed-toilet-paper.

Because it’s theirs - not yours. Theirs. Do you understand that?

Now, I will say also that you will never have that right, no matter how many guns or pictures of guns or big-character-signs (provided courtesy of the late unlamented Red Guards) you wave around on the web or even in person.

Even if nobody else in the world agreed with me I would still say you had no right. And even if everyone else thought it was a wonderfully heroic and necessary deed,I would still say that you were nothing but a common murderer and thug because you had no right.

And don’t give me that “initiation of force” crap. Because if what Ygleisias did was an “initiation of force” then the term “initiation of force” means everything and therefore means nothing, and we should throw that phrase away like a dangerous booby-trapped toy that’s good for nothing but to kill and maim. A shadowy ever-expanding intepretation of language is exactly what totalitarianism runs on. So let’s not use that phrase anymore, if that what you propose to warp it into.

And if freedom can only be built on a foundation of terror and violent intimidation, on a foundation of ignoring the rights of some to build a kind of simalucrum of freedom for yourself - if your freedom requires that you do nothing but sit around waiting and for all I fucking know, hoping for some long-predicted catastrophe that will bring death and misery to innocent millions but might, maybe bring freedom to you - then I don’t want your freedom, I would be ashamed of such liberty and curse every single day that such a “free land” endured.

And I would not only be right to do so but prudent as well, because the blood of the innocent cries to Heaven for vengeance, (If you feel more comfortable substituting “reality” for “the vengeance of Heaven” go right ahead.)

Now, perhaps, having gotten all that straight, maybe you and Lopez can actually read what you write instead of playing “More-Radical/Cynical/Tough-Minded-Than-Thou” stupid-ass games, dropping childish and absurd dark hints of secret assasination, instead of waving around ballistic fucking clip art like a know-nothing talisman, instead of, to put it very plainly, acting like a couple of melodramatic, pseudo-bloodthirsty politically posturing fools.

In a nutshell, playing in electoral politics encourages you to make a raging asshole of yourself, like most of the other participants do. Like this guy here:

So, Gore has decided to call me a Digital Brown Shirt because I’m a blogger who looks for the truth, eh? Well, fine then! Here’s an icon for all my fellow bloggers. Display it proudly on your site! Claim the title of Digital Brown Shirt!

Here’s an even less tasteful take. Look quick, though, ’cause the memory hole appears to be getting used full-time on this one. Also look over the links there at the bottom: those are the sorts of folks who hate the Democrats more than they do their own self-imposed association with this:

Above: An old-school analog brown shirt valiantly battles “Idiotarians“.

An odd illustration of macroeconomics can be found in the world of online currencies for MMORPGS, as described here. As a commenter mentions there, I don’t think the EverQuest valuations are correct, but its still quite an interesting phenomenon. Especially things like the market for trading between virtual currencies.

Jonathan Wilde drops a dime on this savage-with-a-keyboard:

I’d be happy, however, to pay a bit more in taxes as part of a campaign to raise several million additional dollars to spend on the program, provided we could fine a well-designed program (I’ve read recently in The Atlantic that the Bush administration’s point man on the issue is doing good, and unfortunately neglected, work in this area) to spend the money on. I’m willing, in other words, to sacrifice my share in order to really change things, but I’m not going to sacrifice to make a purely symbolic gesture.

I suppose to the libertarian mind all this business of “I’ll do x if and only if I can force everyone to do x” sounds rather dodgy and immoral, but fortunately enough we live in the real world, where people understand the vital role coercion has to play in building a better tomorrow.

That’s this Matthew Yglesias creep, just up on my radar now. Look at how he offhandedly endorses the idea that other human lives are bricks for him to build “a better tomorrow” with. Unbefrickinlieveable.

But fortunately, a quick refutation for the arguments of the sorts of folks who understand “the vital role coercion has to play in building a better tomorrow” is at hand:

This article about regulation of the used panty trade in Tokyo is a nice example of the perils of government regulation. The chance to make money makes everyone think like a capitalist, and these schoolgirls are no exception. Some might find their ingenuity depraved, but I think its charming to see such cleverness at using ones current comparative advantage.

Note some typical elements: Hyperbole from officials about the problem, numerous ways around the regulation, and the trade being pushed more underground.

Wow; that’s a pretty boring lookin’ blog over there at my place. I am definitely not crazy about what I’m seeing, but I can’t really do anything about it here from my old laptop in San Francisco. I’ll be here until Saturday, anyway. (Scott Jordan — call me.)

It was great to meet John Sabotta in Seattle: we had a good time in a neat old theater, and then zoomed around town in somebody’s car to some Irish pub where I tied one on. Crept out of town like a dog.

More later, here or there.

WASHINGTON - Stung by suggestions that top U.S. officials encouraged mistreatment of prisoners from the war on terrorism, the Justice Department disavowed a memo that appeared to justify the use of torture Tuesday.

The memo, signed by former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, included long sections that appeared to defend the use of torture and contended that U.S. personnel could be immune from prosecution. The memo also argued that the president’s powers as commander in chief allowed him to override U.S. laws and international treaties banning torture.

…

The decision became known as the White House launched a wide-ranging public relations campaign to counter suggestions that the administration had condoned torture. Late Tuesday afternoon, it released hundreds of pages of documents concerning the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, the infamous torture memo has been repudiated after a quick two years. Of course, it isn’t because anyone was revolted by the prospects of systematically torturing other human beings, nor was it even because the subjects of the torture were almost all nobodies.

No, it’s simply part of “a wide-ranging public relations campaign”, along the lines of the usual election nonsense. “Pessimism never created a job”, says the Prez, and people weren’t meant to be beaten to death, either. Honestly. Mistakes were made, procedures are being reviewed, and it’s time to put the past behind us so we can heal. Again.

A “public relations campaign”. That’s the concrete manifestation of the ethics of the government of the United States of America.

Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers — for noon of day or noon of night — for ebbing or for bowing tide — maybe read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides.

Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum– Our Lady of Darkness.
- Suspiria de Profundis by Thomas DeQuincey

Come infernal, terrestrial, and heavenly Hecate, goddess of the broad roadways, of the crossroad, thou who goest to and fro at night, torch in hand, enemy of the day. Friend and lover of darkness, thou who doest rejoice when the bitches are howling and warm blood is spilled, thou who art walking amid the phantom and the place of the tombs, thou whose thirst is blood, thou who doest strike chill and fear in mortal hearts, Gorgo, Mormo, Moon of a thousand forms, cast a propitious eye on our sacrifice.
- Philosphumena Hippolytus