A Curious Little Blog

When I was growing up, swimming pools typically had a high diving board and a low diving board.  Swimming pools today only have a low diving board and a lower diving board -- lawsuits have made high dives too costly to insure .  I lived in a neighbourhood where we had a pool and a very popular waterslide.  The neighbourhood association had to increase the number of lifeguards to run the waterslide to three:  one at the top of the slide to tell kids when to go, one at the bottom, and one at the bottom of the stairs to check that kids met the minimum height restriction.  Obviously, this was expensive, because these lifeguards were unable to keep an eye on the rest of the pool while the slide was open, so there had to be at least 5 lifeguards on duty to operate the slide.  Even with all that, there was discussion every year about shutting down the slide, because it was basically uninsurable. What does this have to do with laws?  It relates to the idea, ...

Thomas Aquinas asked:  what is the point of laws?  We know bad people will ignore them, and good people won't want to do those things anyway, so what good do laws do?  His answer was that laws help in the marginal cases -- people who might do bad things, but who are deterred by laws. It is important to keep in mind that laws do not work perfectly, as Aquinas noted.  While some will change their behaviour to obey the law, others will never have wanted to do what the law forbids in the first place, and still others will continue their behaviour even if it violates a new law.  Another group of people will attempt to continue their behaviour within the bounds of the law by looking for loopholes, exceptions, and work-arounds.  That will lead to calls for more laws to close the loopholes. More laws come at a cost.  There is an administrative cost, of course, but there is an equally important civic cost:  we expect people to obey the law, and to obey...

Let's suppose for a moment that you believe, as I argued in my last post, that we have too many laws.  The obvious question is, why?  One reason is what a friend of mine calls "government by anecdote":  something dramatic happens, and everyone says, "the government should do something about that!" I agree with him that this is a terrible way to govern.  Sometimes tragedies require immediate action, but usually they do not; often, there is nothing obvious that the government can do.  As a result, lawmakers resort to symbolic laws that have little or nothing to do with the tragedy itself.  There is a school shooting; Congress calls for banning "assault weapons," even though the definition of assault weapons is irrelevant to the shooting in question.  Maybe people would feel better if there were no guns with bayonet sockets or grenade launchers, but is anyone going to be any safer?  How many shootings have occurred using grenade launchers? The ...

Both conservatives and liberals spend a lot of time complaining about oppressive government, so you might think they would agree more often.  I think there are some issues where they do agree, and where they should co-operate because they can do something useful to reign in a government that sometimes get out of control. I found such an issue when I was reading the DailyKos website.  I visit the DailyKos because the people who comment there can be counted on never to say anything nice about a Republican or a conservative.  In that sense, they are much like mainstream news media, but are less restrained about their views and therefore give me a sense of the motives that underlie liberals' arguments.  On this occasion , I was surprised to find an article that I agreed with almost 100%.  The subject:  the state of Wisconsin was alerted to an animal shelter that held a deer, which is apparently against some state law or regulation.  They raided the shelt...

The current argument in favour of homosexual marriage is that, without it, the institution of marriage is discriminatory, just as laws against miscegenation were 50 years ago.  It is a violation of civil rights to keep homosexuals from enjoying the same benefits as heterosexual couples. One can make this case, but it has two serious problems, one ontological and one practical. First, the definition of marriage is and always has been a union of a man and a woman.  Some counter that marriage has previously been defined as the marriage of a man and woman of the same race, and since that definition was overturned, why not this one?  But marriage has only sometimes included laws restricting the race, religion, or class of the married couple; it has always and everywhere meant a union of a man and a woman. (In the case of polygamy, it is a man and a woman, and that man and another woman, etc.; in each case, one man and one woman celebrate a marriage ceremony.  One man...

The fact that the nation is stuck with Obamacare is the least problem with the Supreme Court's ruling today, because health care is -- thankfully -- still not a Constitutional right, and the law can be reversed.  The best thing that is likely to come out of the ruling is a Republican-controlled White House and Congress, which will have a mandate to repeal Obamacare as their first order of business.  I was hoping for a different ruling (more on that in a moment), but I can't deny that today's ruling is probably the best boost a Republican campaign could have. (It's probably pretty obvious that the reason for this is that Republicans are more likely to be fired up during this election.  For a more detailed discussion of the phenomenon of voting, see Satoshi Kanazawa's articles here , here , and here .  In brief:  people don't like to lose.  If that effect carries over from one presidential election to another, over four years, it seems likely to have an eve...

Is anyone else concerned that such a thing as "hate crimes" even exists in our law?  I was reminded of their existence because of the decision handed down today against a Rutgers student who videotaped his roommate engaged in a homosexual act ( here and here ).  Admittedly, the law uses the term "bias intimidation" instead of "hate crime," but it is widely reported as a hate crime law, and those words probably came up during the debate in the legislature. The concept of a hate crime seems disturbingly Orwellian to me.  I realize the law considers the mindset of the defendant, whether the act is premeditated, whether he feels remorse, and so forth, but that seems quite a bit different than debating whether he did it out of hate or some other motive.  The end result is the same, and whether the person feels indifferent or antipathy to the victim does not seem to matter much in practice.  Either way, he is sociopathic.  Even if the crime is committed out o...

Serving in the military is dangerous enough, you would think, without having to worry about your fellow soldiers raping you.  Killing you is bad enough; we know that there are deaths to friendly fire, and almost certainly always will be.  Getting raped by the other side is also a danger that, I would imagine, the laws of war will never completely eliminate.  But there is increasing news coverage of people getting raped by members of their own side. A Democratic Congressman has introduced a bill that would take military rape cases out of the military chain of command.  If the Defense Department is to be believed, there is a veritable contagion of rape among soldiers:  19,000 sexual assaults in 2010 alone.  Even granted that not every sexual assault would qualify as a rape, that's still a staggering figure.  A new documentary called The Invisible War delves into the problem up close and, from what I have read, in a heart-rending fashion. I don't kn...

I have been following the case of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing over 700,000 classified documents to Wikileaks, with some interest.  I am curious how so many people seem to be defending him.  Since a preliminary investigation led an officer to recommend his prosecution on all 22 counts, we now get to see how his lawyers are going to defend him.  According to the Huffington Post , "defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there from late 2009 to mid-2010."  Also, "others had access to Manning's workplace computers. They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces." In other words, he didn't do it, and they shouldn't have let him near classified information anyway, and, besides, it didn'...