Socialism will be the death of us all.
It's easy to forget this, in a world in which armed religious fanatics pose a much more literal and more immediate threat. But there's still a lot of catastrophe that can be wrought by just a few demogogues and incompetent control freaks.

I'm looking at you, South America. Argentina is now officially a basket case and even Venezuela is back under tyranny.

This is all very simple. All you want, all you need, are laws that people will respect, easy access to information that tells you exactly what your rights are and aren't. Once people feel secure in their right to contract, they'll make deals with each other. They'll build things. They'll produce things. They'll make money, more than enough to feed themselves and their family, right about enough to live in some sort of modest comfort.

I can't find my copy of The Future and Its Enemies, which I was just reading on the plane a week ago. Excellent book. Go out and get it and read it. In fact, I'm so convinced of this that if you're one of my friends reading this and you want to take me up on this, I'll buy you a copy (first couple of people to respond) and have it shipped right to you. Seriously. I'm that strong a proponent of this book.

In any case, there's an extended quote in there about two adjacent Peruvian villages. The mayor of one spent a lot of time clearing up murky title claims so that squatters would either actually own their property or find out sooner rather than later that they were SOL. That was the town where when property rights were finally settled, people started building things. Houses, painted, old Toyota cars in driveways, flicker of TV from just inside the living room window. In the other village the mayor did no such thing. People still live in shanties, walls made out of cardboard, all this stuff because nobody's going to make improvements if they fear that they'll lose their stuff. In a land without unambiguous title, nobody will rent out for fear that the new tenant will claim to be the rightful owner.

Relevance here: People can prosper, just not when governments are run by incompetents and revolutionaries. In those circumstances, what happens instead is that industry goes south. People starve. People die. People kill.

It's been awhile since I loathed and scathed a living, breathing, dorm room bull session socialist. You'd think, living in San Francisco and working in Berkeley, that there'd be plenty of opportunities. Fortunately for all involved, nobody really talks politics any more.

What the hell does this one have to do with homosexuality?
Arab-looking people feel sting of Sept. 11. I'm willing to bet that the straight ones didn't have it any easier.

Oh wait, I forgot. If you're gay then that changes everything.

Teenaged Boys or Teenaged Girls?
Somebody who knows clothing better than I do, what's the target demographic of the company that I'm in the act of railing against?

This came up in conversation once, having to do with all the homoerotica they use in their ads and promotions. Either way, I think it skews way young, where my point is that they're pandering to people who will patronize an offensive seller just for the sake of being offensive, feeling like they're pushing the envelope, rebelling against parents and so on.

This same phenomenon is the only reason why Eminem still has a career.

(For what it's worth I do like "Stan" -- hilarious song -- but I had Eminem pegged as a one-hit wonder back when "My Name Is" first came out.)

The other possibility of course is that, with all the homoerotica, they really are marketing to gay men. Then everything makes a whole lot less sense, because if there's one group of people that seem to be relatively easy to offend en masse...

Who am I kidding? I don't know retail. I just like a free society and also a polite one.

Boycotts are overrated, but...
There's a certain clothing retailer that I go out of my way to avoid.

This goes well beyond the product itself being offensive, which in this case it clearly is. People can buy whatever idiotic crap they want, and for the most part retailers can make whatever idiotic crap they think will sell. I'll be deeply relieved, and my sense of taste validated, if this is as big a marketing flop as it appears.

But things are never what they appear. Based on its history, this looks to me like a company that relies on controversy to get cheap publicity. I really hate companies like that. Usually I hate the people who bitch and moan about it even more, since they're the reason why the scheme ends up working. Also since usually when people are offended, they probably shouldn't have been offended.

In this case, though -- I have a hard time seeing how anyone couldn't be offended. Also, the attempt-to-shock-people motivation is pretty transparent. Don't buy it. There's no good way to urge other people not to buy it without giving this company unwanted publicity. Still, if you can somehow finesse it, I urge you to buy your designer clothing from other sources.

Full disclosure: I own a very modest amount of Tommy Hilfiger stock. What's odd is I don't even wear Tommy, I just speculated last October that demand for patriotically-colored clothing would spike. If you care, I'm a GAP/Banana Republic shopper, despite my antipathy towards their ads. Back when my Mom dressed me funny, I was an Eddie Bauer kid.

Could my friends and I have saved our breaths?
Good resource here, though Postrel introduces it pretty snidely: "For those who didn't wear out all their patience with the subject in dorm bull sessions," she puts it.

Here's the problem: If you believe what I believe, what Lee and George believe, then by extension there are an awful lot of human beings being killed, whether by abortion or cloning techniques or what-have-you. I suppose you learn to choose your battles. Right now a lot of people are dying in the Middle East and Zimbabwe and other hot spots. It's unclear what to do about it. But you never ever let go of the fact that, whatever the options or the signifance of it, people are in fact dying.

I've lost enough friends by pointing this out that it's not something I go around pointing out to my friends and co-workers. But it's still something I believe, something that's arguably true. Nor should you get caught up in the overtones of word believe. Lots of people would dismiss me as some sort of religious freak, when in fact my take on the human species and the beginning of life has nothing to do with my religion.

(True, the ELCA is officially both pro-life and anti-death penalty, and true I also hold those positions, though one far more strongly than the other.)

So if you're reading this, thanks for listening. If this particular blog serves no other purpose (and it doesn't exactly look promising: I'm not going to join the elite blogs or even be linked from them, because I'm too shy to write to the big guys and also have surprisingly little to say), then maybe at least I could influence someone on an issue like this, or maybe someone even has a better idea than me about what to do about it.

Giving money to pregnancy crisis centers seems like a good start, I suppose.

Is a blastocyst a person?
In the red corner, Ramesh Ponnuru. In the blue corner, Virginia Postrel (entry titled "EMBRYO POLITICS").

I have yet to engage in a down-and-dirty cloning debate because I'm not sure what to think. By and large I support Postrel as opposed to Kass et al. Her harping on it gets old after awhile but I suppose that's what you have to do when you're really truly firmly dead convinced that something is just so wrong.

But as for what to do with embryos: The exchange between Postrel and Ponnuru is a greatly oversimplified version of one prong of a flamewar that I got into countless times with various Harvard folk. The Ponnuru post that I link to puts it better than I ever did, yet there are all sorts of ways to respond to it that I'd love to see Ramesh address.

What it all came down to was that I think I was arguing a point that I didn't even need to make. I may or may not have been right about what the ethical situation was a day or two after conception, though based on where we went with these discussions I'd claim that even one or two months later it's a no-brainer. (Especially once you hit the point that the being itself isn't a "no-brainer," pardon the pun.)

We got into all sorts of hair-splitting that led to questions about what happens in the event of cloning. Lo and behold that's where the discussion comes up again.

Supreme Court stuff
Lot of interesting things here. The journalist who spent several months in jail intrigues me. I'm a little bit offended that the Justice Department thinks it makes a difference whether she's a "real" journalist. But see what InstaPundit says about it.

By the way, since it's the New York Times, you need a username/password combo. You could always ask me for mine. Amusingly enough the username is irastollisacunt. There's a silly story behind this. It's a Harvard thing.

Speaking of Ira Stoll, the New York Sun makes its debut this week but, alas, is not yet web-linkable.

So nudity is okay but capitalism isn't?
I don't see why people object to this.