A Curious Little Blog

I've always been a little ambivalent about the push to convince Americans to vote in every election.  In principle, I agree that having more people vote is good; on the other hand, it seems kind of overbearing, in the way that the anti-smoking campaign seemed well-intentioned but became overbearing.  I will not wear the "I voted" stickers, for instance, because it seems infantile.  Then again, maybe it's just because I'm so contrary. In either case, I thought it would be a good idea to consider the other side of getting more people to vote.  Thinking of it in economic terms, we can consider the marginal voters -- the ones who don't vote now but will be the next ones to be convinced to do so.  It seems logical that people who are motivated to vote are also the ones who are motivated to research the issues, and that people who haven't thought much about the issues will be the ones who care the least and are least likely to vote.  Therefore, by convincing m...

(This is inspired by an article by James Taranto called "What Went Wrong With Human Rights?"   The original Wall Street Journal article is paywalled, but it isn't too hard to find the full text of the article elsewhere.) Conservatives generally are big believers in natural law.  It was a given for most of the founders, and it serves to underpin the fact that people have rights ("natural rights") that are prior to government.  These rights aren't granted by government, and therefore can't be taken away from them.  All the government can do is to secure the rights, or, as the case sometimes is, not secure them. The idea of natural law is a very old one and is based on the principle that reason dictates certain rules -- for example, that one person may not harm another without cause.  On the other side is "positive law," which consists of agreements made by people, such as laws passed by a legislature or a treaty agreed between nations.  Most ...

I am strangely attracted to the concept of Taoism.  I say "strangely," because I normally have no interest in mystical thought.  I was nearly an adult when "The Tao of Pooh" became a bestseller, and I was not impressed at all.  Somewhere along the line, however, I found myself attracted to Taoist thought, in particular the concept of wu-wei.  When I recently read the Tao Te Ching, therefore, it was not the first time I had done so.  It is a challenging work, deliberately so, and one can read it repeatedly without fully comprehending it.  Fortunately, it is also very short and therefore easy to re-read.  The real question is whether there is something to understand at all, or whether it is a lot of nonsense. I have not devoted myself to understanding Tao the way I have to Christianity, but I have been curious about it for a long time and so I was happy that recently I could read some excerpts from the work of Zhuangzi, a Taoist thinker who lived about...

The political part of this book is much smaller and less convincing than the theological part.  Spinoza tries to outline an entire theory of politics in far too little space.  He begins with a Hobbesian state of nature in which everyone has a "right" to do anything: every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; in other words, the rights of an individual extend to the utmost limits of his power as it has been conditioned. (16:8) Now it is the sovereign law and right of nature that each individual should endeavour to preserve itself as it is, without regard to anything but itself. It seems odd to assign everyone a "right" to do whatever they want.  What is the point of such a right?  If I have a right to shoot you, and you have a right to shoot me, then it seems to me that rights are pointless.  Of course, this is a pre-social setting, so there is no judge to decide rights in any case; but it seems like a more sensible starting point w...