DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Discussion of "Radicals for Capitalism"

At Lolita Bar, Wednesday, March 7 (at 8pm):

Brian Doherty discusses his new book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (he is also the author of This Is Burning Man and an editor at Reason magazine), on the basement level of Lolita Bar, 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop). Free admission, cash bar.

Host: Todd Seavey. Moderator: Michel Evanchik. Ample audience Q&A.

Does radicalism work? Does pragmatism? Does anything? Bring all the libertarians, anti-libertarians, and Burners you know and find out at this event — and if you are a libertarian, learn how you came to be there.

In the meantime, since I haven’t quite gotten a chance to launch the ToddSeavey.com blog (very soon [UPDATE: Done!]), why not check out http://RadicalsforCapitalism.com — or http://CitizenJoe.org, which has been nice enough to plug our event on its calendar?

Here’s the first full-length chapter (the one about all the wild nineteenth-century anarchists) of the book, online:

http://www.reasontofreedom.com/radicals_for_capitalism_by_brian_doherty.html

Here’s a past Lolita Bar debater reviewing the book as a whole.

And here’s a review of it by the editor of Skeptic magazine — my two favorite intellectual movements in one column:

http://www.nysun.com/article/47255
(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007. Click here for other Debates at Lolita Bar. I review Doherty’s book here.)

Book Selection of the Month: "Radicals for Capitalism" by Brian Doherty

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (March 2007):

Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty

Brian Doherty, an editor at Reason magazine and author of This Is Burning Man (a look at the annual desert art festival the size of a temporary city), has now written the book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

While not every American — perhaps only 70% or so — should feel obliged to read a history of libertarianism over 600 pages long, those like me who have identified with the movement for years will enjoy it immensely, as will anyone who has wondered where these strange libertarians came from.

Indeed, the origins of libertarianism are complicated enough that people can still debate where the movement came from even after reading the book — and debate it we will, at the next meeting of the monthly debates I organize and host (moderated by Michel Evanchik) at Lolita Bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 8pm), where Doherty will be our speaker.

A Radical Pedigree?

Just as libertarians — who want the government kept as small and unobtrusive as possible, in both the economic and personal realms — often bicker among themselves, as other movements do, about how much to compromise with mainstream society and how much to remain radical and pure, people can legitimately disagree about which of libertarianism’s philosophical forebears are more important, the famous and widely-respected figures (such as economist Adam Smith, philosopher John Stuart Mill, and other European giants) or the obscure and vaguely nutty commune-founders and anarchists of the nineteenth-century United States (such as Lysander Spooner, who bravely created a popular black-market postal service a century and a half ago).

Doherty, for good or ill, and possibly to the eternal embarrassment of the movement, emphasizes the latter — and if this were a philosophy book, meant to make a strong argument for libertarianism, I might regret that. However, it’s a history book, and reading about weirdoes is often more fun than the alternative. It’s no surprise Doherty goes this route, I suppose: not only does Doherty tend to like radicals and dislike, for example, Bush, he’s also been the owner of a punk rock record label, a member of various punk bands, and, as noted above, an analyst of the Burning Man phenomenon.

In part, too, he can plead a need to focus (per his book’s subtitle) on the U.S. as a reason to downplay Smith and Mill in favor of America’s rich history of Emerson-reading yahoos, fiery abolitionists, back-to-the-land anarchists, prankster “discordians,” and conspiracy-theorist loons. (By a happy coincidence, I found myself mentally bridging the transatlantic divide for a moment, in way that Doherty would probably endorse, while {a} reading the paragraph of Radicals for Capitalism in which a pivotal nineteenth-century American anarchist was described as turning toward the even-more-radical amoralist philosophy of Max Stirner and {b} hearing the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” play on the online radio station I was listening to; I’d been planning to head off to a dance party full of leftists a few hours later but knew in that moment that their evil mind-rays wouldn’t be able to harm me, thoroughly fortified as I now was by 100%-pure liberty.)

Or Just a Bunch of Republicans Who, Like the Editors of National Review, Want to Legalize Drugs?

Despite all the, uh, radicalism in Radicals, it contains reminders of how important and old the “fusionist” alliance (as it would eventually be called) between libertarians and Republicans is. Doherty notes, for instance, that pivotal WWII-era libertarian authors Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane all worked on the Wendell Willkie (Republican) presidential campaign (and hated FDR) way the heck back in 1940, three years before they published Fountainhead, God of the Machine, and Discovery of Freedom, respectively. The conservative “big tent” that includes both ardent free-marketeers and ardent traditionalists wasn’t suddenly erected in ’94 (when Newt Gingrich vowed to shrink government and combat the post-60s counterculture), ’80 (when Reagan was elected), ’64 (when Goldwater wasn’t), or even ’55 (at the National Review offices) but had still earlier roots.

I don’t notice many sympathetic Democrats or modern-liberals cropping up in Radicals despite its implicit opposition to much of the conservative agenda (though I’m still only two-thirds of the way through the book as I write this, I confess — the creation of the Libertarian Party in the 1970s, the most prominent libertarian thinktanks circa the 1980s, and disenchantment with the Republican Congress and Bush still lie ahead).

If Democrats or Republicans ever find themselves feeling unduly criticized by libertarians, though, they should take some consolation from the fact that libertarians seem to be just as harsh in criticizing each other. Reading Radicals, I’m inclined to think there is no prominent libertarian who hasn’t at some point been threatened with excommunication for ideological impurity by some other prominent libertarian. Rand hated libertarian Nobelist Friedrich Hayek, for instance, and the chapter about the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) notes that Rand and others didn’t want these “two Reds” (libertarian Nobelists Milton Friedman and George Stigler) saying nice things about the ideal of equality in a FEE pamphlet on rent control.

By the way, in what I think is a subtle dig at Buckley and NR’s old snootiness on matters of writing style (though it may be sheer coincidence), on p. 124, Doherty quotes a letter from Buckley (the first time he’s quoted in the book, I believe) to Paterson, with Buckley saying he likes a piece she’s submitted but would like to “suggest a few minor changes aimed at dissapating [sic] the impression that you are pursuing a vendetta.”

Neither Right Nor Left But Certainly Odd

My favorite revelation from (the first two thirds of) the book concerns a famous libertarian essay called “I, Pencil” (about how even a single, seemingly simple object like a pencil is the product of a far-flung array of spontaneous market interactions, the price-coordinated trades of people ranging from rubber-makers to metallurgists, that no one bureaucrat’s mind could possibly plan). This brilliant description of the interlocking mechanisms of the market, cited by the aforementioned Friedman, may have been written by FEE’s Leonard Read under the influence of psychedelics or Eastern mysticism, which makes a lot of sense given Read’s apparent dabbling in these things and his non-economic writings about the value of meditatively concentrating on how any given object is tied to the rest of the cosmos. Given how deeply involved other 1950s libertarians became in psychedelics and mysticism, we may be lucky Read didn’t merely write an essay called “Oh, Man, My Hand Looks So Cool.”

We also learn that Kerry Thornley, co-founder of the pro-chaos philosophy of Discordianism (later popularized in the libertarian novels of Robert Anton Wilson), was questioned by the Warren commission and investigated as a possible conspirator with Lee Harvey Oswald because Thornley bore an uncanny resemblance to his old Marines buddy Oswald — and had actually written a semi-fictionalized book about Oswald’s communism and eccentricities before the assassination. Anyone who has read Wilson’s novels knows how much this sounds like one of his conspiracy subplots — yet it’s part of real-world history.

One other odd tidbit mixing the Establishment and the strange is the description of the band of libertarians, sometimes credited with launching the contemporary libertarian movement as a thing distinct from conservatism, who burned a copy of a draft card before the eyes of shocked traditionalist conservatives at the 1969 St. Louis convention of the Buckley-inspired fusionist organization called Young Americans for Freedom (which still exists). Libertarian Karl Hess recalls the libertarians fleeing afterwards from a mob of angry conservatives and, fearing for their physical safety, ducking into a showing of a movie that he does not name but which is recognizable from his description as Lindsay Anderson’s anti-authoritarian 1968 classic If…, about rebellious students at a British boys’ school who end up shooting at a graduation ceremony (a scene parodied on Monty Python’s Flying Circus with a machine-gunned trophy ceremony; the bizarre and picaresque quasi-sequel to If…, O Lucky Man!, bears the odd distinction of having inspired the Seinfeld subplot about Kramer trying to liberate a pig-man from a hospital, by the way).

History Sure Is Complicated, and So Is Politics

I am no subjectivist, but the tangled mess that is history often makes multiple interpretations possible, and politics, with its endless attempts to lump billions of individuals into a handful of ideological camps, creates strange bedfellows.

I was pleased to see the fathers of two friends of mine crop up in the Radicals narrative. Bretigne Shaffer’s father, law professor Butler Shaffer, is mentioned on p. 309 as an example (much like Karl Hess) of a young supporter of the 1964 Goldwater campaign who became disillusioned and turned away from the right toward radicalism. More surprisingly, left-leaning columnist Daniel Radosh’s anti-communist father, historian Ronald Radosh, shows up on p. 338, not because of his anti-communist writings of the 80s and 90s, but because, as a leftist in 1972, he co-edited a volume of anti-military, anti-imperialist essays with libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who was then doing outreach to the left but would spend his final years, in the late 80s and early 90s, forging an alliance with Pat Buchanan and the isolationist “paleoconservative” movement (the result being a small “paleolibertarian” coalition now represented by the popular sites Antiwar.com and LewRockwell.com).

So one can trace a left-seeming history, a right-seeming history, or a just plain fringey history for the movement, almost as if different aspects of the movement existed on different Earths. Earth-1, you might say, was the intellectually “respectable” timeline in which libertarianism traces its roots back to nineteenth-century “classical” liberalism as understood by defenders of liberty such as philosopher John Stuart Mill. Earth-2 was the relatively conservative version of our intellectual lineage, traced back through thinktanks and Reaganism to early National Review, Hayek, and eventually Edmund Burke. Somewhere off on a stranger Earth, call it Earth-X, was a band of lonely oddball freedom fighters who were all homegrown Americans. These are very different timelines all leading in their different ways to the current movement, almost as if the separate timelines were fused together into one new universe, sometime around, say, the triumphant start of Reagan’s second term in 1985. For a short time, it almost seemed as if the crisis of late communism and the optimism caused by Reagan’s reelection would make it possible to overlook the fissures on the right, between the right and libertarianism, and within libertarianism itself. I was lucky enough to come of age during that period, right around 1989, half-convinced that the collapse of communism would leave us all on the same page, admiring markets and learning to keep government small from now on.

But those interpretive timelines, seemingly fused for some twenty years, seem to have frayed apart again in 2006, the long-prophecied conservative crack-up arriving (with isolationists, militarists, social conservatives, and libertarians seeming reluctant to act as a united front in the face of the GOP’s loss of Congress and the ongoing crisis in Iraq). As a recent National Review cover article asked, “What Now?”

A Good Time to Retreat to Radicalism

This much I know: our first priority should always be shrinking government, not rescuing the GOP, conservatism, or even libertarianism per se. That is, if people would more readily accept a plan to downsize government coming from the mouth of a hypothetical Labour Party prime minister in the UK than from a doomed Libertarian Party presidential candidate in the U.S., I’d happily cheer on the government-downsizing p.m. even at the cost of paying less attention to LP activity here and appearing to gloss over deeper philosophical divisions. However, absent such a p.m. — or, so far, a GOP presidential candidate who sounds radically fiscally conservative — the pragmatic thing to do may well be just to spread the libertarian philosophy and keep that ideological flame alive until some later date when the intellectuals and politicians, perhaps faced with a new crisis, take a renewed interest in these ideas. Now is not a good time for radical free-market advocates to seek much of a foothold in the realm of practical, electoral politics, I fear. I wasn’t always this pessimistic about pragmatism, as many of my friends know.

From roughly 1980 through 2006, I would still argue, there was reason to think free-market philosophy and party politics could be productive partners. That time, I think, has passed. It could come again sooner than expected — perhaps even now, there are focus group results convincing John McCain to emphasize budget-cutting in his presidential agenda or advisors from the Manhattan Institute reminding Rudy Giuliani that a dash of fiscal conservatism helped revive New York City and could do the same for America. But it’s too late in the day for hope to precede evidence. We had enough time to run the Republican-coalition experiment, and it seems to have failed.

Maybe, then, what the world needs, over the very long haul, is some radical new ideas as strange as those nineteenth-century anarchists in Doherty’s book. I’m not going to start using psychedelics, but I may drink a mocha frappuccino and see what I come up with.

Vanilla Ice and Taxes

What’s more dismal than Valentine’s Day, you ask? By my standards, April 15. And one additional, unexpected downside of taxation: Vanilla Ice rapping about using TurboTax:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMudXTz4NuQ

(Pointed out to me by Prof. Chris Nugent of Williams.)

Lincoln and Darwin

It’s the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday (and Darwin’s, as I’ll discuss later), in the first year since the party he started imploded.

Lincoln is a good example of how tricky it can be trying to shoehorn history into current ideological formulas — not that that’s something one should strive to do. He was the first president from the then-new Republican Party, and then as now the party was accused of representing a capitalist elite against poor, populist Democrats. Then again, most modern liberals would probably say Lincoln, who arguably did more than anyone else who has ever lived to improve race relations, fits better into their egalitarian tradition than into the Republicans’ hybrid capitalist-traditionalist lineage. I was inclined to agree — especially given some of Lincoln’s own egalitarian and even socialist-sounding labor-emancipation rhetoric, which had implications broader than just the ending of slavery — until Bush’s Second Inaugural.

Ironically, our current Republican president, who many modern liberals would probably regard as the least Lincolnesque (he is somewhat less articulate) and most monstrous entity ever to hold the office, may have done the best job of any modern Republican president of making the case for an ongoing link between Lincoln and the philosophy of the Republican Party, in Bush’s second inaugural address. In much the same way that Gov. Schwarzenegger had made the case, in his speech at the 2004 Republican convention, for an ongoing battle for freedom against a succession of foes including the Nazis, communists, and Islamic totalitarians, Bush’s second inaugural framed his push for democracy in the Middle East as a continuation of the eternal fight for liberty with which his party had been born, under Lincoln’s abolitionist leadership. Of course, post-Saddam Iraq hasn’t been quite as peaceful as the post-Civil War South (Or has it? I haven’t checked the stats on this and should be careful not to assume), so Bush’s days of framing grand narratives for world history and the future of politics may be over, and perhaps justifiably so (Bush’s post-re-election turn toward liberationist rhetoric and a fiscally-conservative agenda had me rooting for him a mere two years ago, but like a lot of other Americans, I’ve largely given up on him and the Republican Party generally).

For libertarians, who still sound like unreconstructed nineteenth-century anarchist/abolitionist types most of the time (thank goodness), Lincoln is still something of a controversial figure. He freed the slaves, the thinking goes, but he also waged a war — producing the highest U.S. body count from any war, approximately 600,000 people, and at a time when the total U.S. population was only something like 30 million — a war that perhaps could have been prevented, that was based on the dubious idea that no one should be allowed to secede from a central government, and that was characterized by censorship and the suspension of habeas corpus. Still, at the end of the day, I’m willing to overlook a lot in exchange for ending slavery, as great a triumph for liberty as the world has ever known.

But if you’re inclined — like some Southern partisans and Gore Vidal — to dislike Lincoln, you can instead spend today celebrating the birthday of another controversial figure, and a contemporary of Lincoln at that: Charles Darwin. A century and a half after he made it pretty clear that we can come up with very good non-supernatural explanations for how life got to be the way it is, he stills gets attacked. Indeed, some vague but negative allusions to Darwin were made by one of my fellow more-or-less-right-leaning writer-types (all fellows of the Phillips Foundation) after a tour of the Fox News and New York Post headquarters I went on this past Friday.

Another member of the group praised a recent essay by Sam Schulman from American.com (for which I’ve written an article, luckily, perhaps, not one touching on Darwin or atheism) in which he argues that today’s atheists are simply not as charming as their more cautious, conflicted, almost ashamed nineteenth-century counterparts. I don’t know that lack of charm is much of a charge to throw at one’s foes in a philosophical argument, though. I’ll bet some of those abolitionists were mighty cantankerous, and understandably so.

Being feisty doesn’t make someone wrong, whether he’s an atheist or, say, a libertarian — like some of the crackpots and hotheads who populate Brian Doherty’s new book on the history of libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, which is both the March ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month and the topic of a reading by the author at our next Lolita Bar gathering, Wed., March 7 (at 8pm). We probably won’t get much of a chance to talk about Darwin that night, but I wouldn’t be surprised if abolitionists, Lincoln, slavery, Republicans, and Bush all get mentioned.

Blogging for the Eyes of the World, Soon

Are you ready? Then let’s begin.

If all goes smoothly, this blog will be a daily (or near-daily) thing starting on April Fool’s Day 2007, nearly three months later than planned, but still well before the end of the world.

Brief Statement of Principles

This blog won’t be an exercise in feverishly linking, with obligatory know-it-all comment, to every event in the news as it happens. There are (literally) about a million sites doing that already. This site, I expect, will be more likely to respond to books and other long-form, detailed arguments or ideas. The Web could use a little cautious reflection, maybe even some peace and quiet once in awhile.

That tone may allow some actual philosophizing to occur, so that maybe we’ll all learn something. One rarely philosophizes from a complete blank slate, though, so it’s worth briefly noting, in the interests of full disclosure, some of the beliefs — not mere prejudices, mind you, since they are the conclusions of years of prior logical analysis (nor mere assumptions or axioms, since I’d happily revise each or all in the face of new evidence) — that I already bring to bear and which are likely to be reflected in future posts:

•Claims should not be made without good empirical evidence, so it is intellectually irresponsible, indeed immoral, to claim that God or other supernatural phenomena (ghosts, psychic powers, astrology, etc.) exist.

•The only rational, non-mystical basis for ethics is rule utilitarianism (that is, behaving in accord with the rules most likely to foster the greatest long-term happiness among all morally-relevant agents — I avoid saying “people” to sidestep for now the question of the moral significance of animal welfare), and moral thinking should pervade all of our decisions, leaving no rooms for lying, cheating, cruelty, infidelity, taking credit for others’ work, or even the lackadaisical sort of callous irresponsibility (as on the dating scene) that seems to characterize much of the thinking of many young adults these days.

•Property rights are the most important manifestation of ethics and law and the often unappreciated basis of civilization, the alternative to which is violence and poverty, as socialist governments have made abundantly clear; capitalism, in short, is not only good but is humanity’s greatest accomplishment.

•Government should be abolished, or at least minimized (it is likely, though harder to demonstrate empirically, that law itself could be turned over to decentralized private courts somewhat in the fashion of old common law courts and modern arbitration firms, and that the military could be far more rationally directed on a subscription basis by capital-intense insurance firms, but at the very least all unbiased observers can agree that we should end most Cabinet agencies, government-run schools, regulation, public sector unions, and welfare/social security programs in favor of allowing an unfettered economy to make everyone far richer — and freer — faster); limiting government has been the key to America’s greatness, though it has strayed far from that founding ideal, one now largely forgotten by both left and right, though not, fortunately, by libertarians.

•Because science is easily distorted by the media and other forces, most health scares are overblown, as is the threat of global warming, for the purpose of attracting attention to research or to pro-regulation political causes (and a pro-regulation bias is likely to exist in government-funded or -directed research).

•Evolution is the best and most powerful explanation for the workings of life and, contrary to politically-motivated claims of intelligent design theorists and the like, is confirmed by mountains of evidence from the fossil records of the past to the continual arms race against bacterial development and adaptation in our own day.

•Feminism is bunk, based in virtually all its formulations on the irrational, radically anti-empirical, a priori assumption of equal mental or rational capacities (in essentially all areas of human endeavor) in the two demonstrably different sexes (as unwarranted as assuming that two similar species, say, elk and moose, must prove to be “equal” by some empirical or, failing that, metaphysical measure); while belief in God may be the most erroneous commonly held view and belief in government the most socially destructive, feminism is perhaps the most manifestly false commonly held view in our culture, refuted as it is by virtually every daily interaction experienced by virtually all people, sustained only by the kind of borderline-schizophrenic, compartmentalized thinking that enables someone to claim men and women are mentally the same one moment and then bicker over whether to see a “guy movie” or a “chick flick” the next, without noticing the contradiction.

•The masses are by and large cretins (keep in mind that the average IQ is roughly 100), and all political factions of which I am aware, from Marxism to fascism to libertarianism, are guilty of flattering the masses (appealing to the “good sense of the average person,” etc.) in the vain and demagogic hope of receiving popular affirmation for their own agendas, which most people will never grasp, let alone endorse; similarly, intellectuals must, despite the great temptation, beware taking too indulgent an “ironic” interest in the mind-rotting trash that generally passes for popular culture, tending as it does to contribute to the masses’ impulse-driven lack of self-discipline, forethought, or morals — and must instead pause from time to time to appreciate the storehouse of wisdom and aesthetic achievements we inherit from tradition, which tends to dwarf the accomplishments and sophistication of any one mind.

•Biotech and cybernetics offer the best long-term hope of improving the human race, particularly making humans more rational (anyone who complains that people are “too rational” already is likely insane or highly intellectually irresponsible) and sooner or later making us immortal.

•Until biotech and cybernetics make fundamental improvements in the human mind, voluntary (as opposed to government-run or otherwise coercive) eugenics is something all honest, sober-minded people should endorse — not in the irrational, crude, ethnicity-based form that the Nazis promulgated but in the common-sense form of politely discouraging stupid, violent people from passing on their ways or inclinations to any more offspring (or indeed non-relative members of their social circles) than necessary; people who claim to oppose eugenics in this milder, decentralized form unwittingly demonstrate their hypocrisy every time they engage in mate selection and pick better rather than worse mates.

Those are just a few simple ground rules that I think we can all agree upon for starters — the sort of nearly-self-evident things I can’t be bothered to go back and re-prove in every single entry but which, if kept in the back of your mind, will help smooth your reading experience and make more sense of the many other ideas to come.

The logical outcome of the ideals described above, should enough of you come to share them (perhaps as a result of regularly reading this blog), is a world of highly intelligent, anarchist-atheist yet property-respecting and moralistic, pro-American cyborgs (likely of multiple subspecies and possibly diversely transgendered) who are immortal, have an appreciation for high art, show an almost Amish respect for certain elements of tradition, and are kind to animals. I don’t expect to see this almost-perfect world within my lifetime, but all of us who work to bring it a bit closer to realization can at least sleep with clear consciences at night. Every little bit helps: registering Republican instead of Democrat (if the Republican Party returns to its limited-government principles), listening to synthesizer-based New Wave music, discouraging acquaintances from respecting the Bible, or discussing robotics in a frank and open way with your friends and family. Little by little, each of us can make a difference and set a good example — and remember, you are not alone.

UPDATE 1/15/08: I admit this list was dashed off quickly and that I may have erred by giving feminism such short shrift, for instance, or by lightly invoking the term “eugenics” when I might have said merely “biotech and picking a smart mate” — but this entry on utilitarianism may be a better way of explaining my underlying principles.

Rising Sea Levels Lift All Skeptics

This past Wednesday, our monthly Debate at Lolita Bar was about climate change, and it pitted Gore-trained Andrew McKeon against Chuck Blake, a friend of mine who has been a thoroughgoing skeptic on many topics — only recently adding catastrophic climate change to the list — since we were friends in high school back in Norwich, CT in the 1980s. We were fans of the magazine Skeptical Inquirer back then, and it was virtually the only magazine (since joined by Skeptic magazine) consistently arguing that one ought to have good scientific evidence before believing an extraordinary claim. That was what really set me on the road that eventually led me to work for skeptic/libertarian TV anchor John Stossel in the late 90s and, for the past five years, for the American Council on Science and Health — which, I should note, does not have a position on the issue of climate change, sticking to more bodily-health-type issues.

In an interesting bit of cross-pollination, the debate was written up on HuffingtonPost.com by Alan Miller, who is helping to organize a debate on similar eco-topics, run by www.NYSalon.org, taking place Tuesday night, February 13. NYSalon is essentially an offshoot of one of my favorite bunch of London-dwellers, the circle of post-Marxists centered on Spiked-Online.com, the Institute of Ideas, and the Centre for Science and the Media, who (while they may not share all my views on economics) argue for progress and Enlightenment/pro-science thinking — and promote fearless, un-p.c. debate — as a reaction against what they see as their fellow leftists’ (especially greens’) growing tendency toward pessimism, hatred of technology, and distrust of rationality.

If all Marxists eventually ended up thinking like these guys (and they really are from the left, remnants of the old Revolutionary Communist Party and the now-defunct Living Marxism magazine), intelligent dialogue across the right-left divide would be much, much easier.

Meanwhile, as it happens, the parent organization of Skeptical Inquirer has announced a change in its mission — promoting science in general instead of specifically debunking unscientific and paranormal claims — and is opening an office in Washington, DC, to lobby for more science-based policy. If this means, though, that SI will be promoting exaggerated climate change fears or jumping on the latest health-scare bandwagon, I may find myself in the odd position of feeling more sympathetic to quasi-Marxists from England than to my old skeptical allies.

P.S. This would mark four ways, incidentally, in which I feel as though an era has recently ended, and with it four of my main interests. I spent about two decades thinking about:

(1) alternative rock

(2) comic books and sci-fi

(3) conservative politics (in so far as it might be a vehicle for government-reducing libertarian policies)

(4) the skeptics movement

…and then within a period of about one month in late 2006, I found that:

(1) the founding punk club CBGB’s, here in Manhattan, closed

(2) I was finally compelled to stop collecting comics after DC Comics started repeating plots (about time-altering crises) from my teen years

(3) the Republicans lost Congress, having accomplished little in the last twelve years by libertarian standards — and almost simultaneously, an aged William F. Buckley (to my mind, the most important “fusionist” figure spanning the conservative and libertarian movements, though he is not fully libertarian and isn’t usually thought of that way) announced that a speech at Yale would be his last, and Milton Friedman, who I was lucky enough to meet while he was alive, passed away (he was one of about seven Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economists; and let me add the econ Nobel has only been awarded for the past thirty-eight years, so you do the math — not a bad showing by a political faction that only about 2% of the population explicitly identify with, not that this high achievement rate stops most people from calling libertarians crazy fringe figures).

(4) the best-known skeptics organization is moving to DC and giving up on merely debunking ghosts and Bigfoot over and over again, for good or ill.

I may need new hobbies, and you may have to read about them on this blog.

UPDATE 3/27/2007: Chuck Blake and another physics-trained attender of our February debate, Mitch Golden, debate climate change in a pro/con pair of articles on the site I edit at work, HealthFactsAndFears.com.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Do We Face Catastrophic Climate Change?" (plus Dawn Eden/Virginia Vitzthum footage)

This week brings not only Groundhog Day, when we ask whether we’ll see six more weeks of winter (get the facts: http://www.groundhog.org/faq/ ), but also the release of a major UN climate report suggesting we may face weather problems much harsher than that in the future — so we’re staging a live, no-holds-barred debate in one week about whether any of that’s true. Miss it at your peril.

But first (briefly), if you’re in the NYC area, you may have the chance to help keep a young Egyptian blogger out of prison for criticizing the Egyptian government. A rally outside the Egyptian embassy in Manhattan (2nd Ave. between 58th and 59th) at 3:30pm today (Wed., Jan. 31) is the sort of thing that has sometimes helped keep people like this man — Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman — from being imprisoned by Egypt simply for daring to write about the flaws of the regime there. If you don’t have to be at work, please think about showing up or forwarding this to others who might (or writing about it).

And if domestic politics is more your thing, there will be a dance Friday night (Feb. 9) in Madison Square Park (not Garden — the Park is just north of the Flatiron Building, between Madison and Fifth/Broadway near 25th St.) to protest NYC’s dance-venue-limiting cabaret laws.

But back to business as usual — and by business, I mean a debate, on perhaps the most important question of all:

“Do We Face Catastrophic Climate Change?”

Yes: Andrew McKeon, Columbia-educated engineer turned banking consultant and Gore-trained head of the Climate Change Foundation

No: Chuck Blake, CalTech/UCSD physics alum and former MIT computer research scientist/statistician turned quantitative analyst

Moderator: Michel Evanchik

Host: Todd Seavey

Wed., Feb. 7, promptly at 8pm at Lolita Bar (basement space, 266 Broome St. at Allen St. on the Lower East Side of NYC, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. subway stop); free admission, cash bar

P.S. Footage, such as it is, of our previous debate, on chastity, can be found on YouTube, in fourteen parts starting here (I don’t always look and sound quite this stunned, but the audience was huge that night):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuL0ZK5tlP0&mode=related&search=

And one of our debaters, Virginia Vitzthum, can now be found on YouTube at this URL, plugging her new book on online dating’s happiness and horrors, I Love You, Let’s Meet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAvrSiS1zBI

P.P.S. Let me know if you might be seriously interested in being — and seriously qualified to be — a full-time blogger about sci-fi, including manga and videogames.

(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007. Click here for other Debates at Lolita Bar.)

UPDATE 2/25/07: Alan Miller, himself a host of debates for NYSalon.org, was in the audience for the Lolita Debate described above and wrote a nice article for HuffingtonPost about it. On a related note, as I type this the world is probably mere hours away from hearing Al Gore give an Oscar acceptance speech for his climate-fear documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I wonder if he’ll aim for the trifecta of mentioning his Oscar, his win of the popular (not electoral) vote in 2000, and his recent nomination by one Scandinavian politician for the Nobel Peace Prize.

If he really gets carried away and wants to appeal to a gullible public, he might also consider mentioning the fact that at a press conference here in New York City tomorrow, director James Cameron plans to unveil three ancient coffins, subjects of his next documentary, that he claims contain the decidedly-unresurrected remains of Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene (as deduced, he’ll argue, from writings on the coffins and study of DNA from the remains). I’m skeptical, as always, but Gore could argue that this discovery leaves the world in need of a new savior, and he seems ready to try and fill the position (God, Gaia, whatever).

UPDATE later on 2/25/07: I read online that Gore won, but I was somewhat consoled to tune in briefly a few minutes later (with the broadcast still going on) and see Helen Mirren accepting for Best Actress — the first Oscar recipient to have played Ayn Rand (in The Passion of Ayn Rand) and, as far as I can recall, the first Oscar recipient I’ve actually met (at a party for the cast of a staged reading of a play by David Lodge circa 1993, when I was working for Glenn Young at Applause Books and with the late Jack Temchin from the Manhattan Theater Club [who once told me he saw 2001 stoned as a young man and thought he was the only one who couldn't follow the plot] — but I didn’t talk to Mirren for more than a moment because she and Lodge seemed to be enjoying each other’s company so much; I’m classy that way).

UPDATE 2/28/07: Apparently, Mirren is also the first Oscar winner I know of to admit that she wasn’t wearing underwear during the ceremony.

Conservatism for Punks: Round One

I have a piece on NationalReview.com today arguing that it is wrong for Hillary Clinton to use the anticommunist song “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones as one of her two campaign songs, since it’s one of the few anti-left rock songs we have and there are plenty she could pick that would suit her and her socialistic leanings far better.

I should note that I got a few e-mails complaining that by calling “Right Here, Right Now” the only prominent rock song to properly celebrate the collapse of communism, I was slighting the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change.” I probably should have mentioned it, though I think the case can be made that it was more of a German-reunification song than a collapse-of-communism song per se — but as my own article implies, beggars can’t be choosers in the search for anticommunist rock songs, so here’s to the Scorpions.

Welcoming them into the fold will compensate for Duran Duran’s tendency to rant against Bush and global warming in recent years, which may suggest — though it does not in itself prove — that they are less libertarian than I thought and more conventionally leftist. Alas.

My two real regrets concerning the article, though, are that the editor took out (a) the part where I noted my concern back in high school that the cute goth chick who loaned me the Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow might not like my political views and (b) the part where I suggested, perhaps a bit too crassly, that Hillary ought to heed the wisdom of track 8 on Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I.

P.S. In less than a week, as it happens, I will get to indulge in another important bit of Gen X rock nostalgia as the Police reunite to open at the Grammys.

As Bill Flanagan recounts in the sacred text/band bio, U2 at the End of the World, when the Police played together as an ongoing band for the final time, at an Amnesty International concert in 1986, they exited one performer at a time, handing off their instruments to the members of U2 during the Police song “Invisible Sun,” about the troubles in Northern Ireland. In effect, says Flanagan, the outgoing biggest band in the world literally handed its instruments over to the incoming biggest band in the world, and a song begun by Brits was finished by Irishmen.

P.P.S. Coincidentally, “Invisible Sun” also has the odd distinction of being the one alternative rock song that ever inspired my mom to poke her head into my room while I was listening to it and say, sounding unusually serious, “That’s a great song.” Mom’s right.

UPDATE 2/11/07: Less than an hour to go before the Police come on, and luckily the techno fan upstairs in Apt. 4A is not listening to techno and has stopped watching the deafening war movie or possibly documentary about avalanches and building demolition that he seems to have been enjoying.

Book Selection of the Month: "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (February 2007):

The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard

I was recently pleased to discover a book that, while far more focused on practical, unphilosophical matters, does as much to angry up the blood and make one want to burn Washington, DC to the ground as any radical philosophical screed: Philip K. Howard’s The Death of Common Sense, published in 1994 at the peak of Gingrich-era anti-government sentiment (and the start of the Republican Congress, replaced by the Democrats last month after twelve frustrating years). It’s a marvelous collection of infuriating anecdotes about the stupid results of government regulations, about one per page, starting off with the story of how New York City elevator regulations prevented Mother Teresa from opening a homeless shelter here (and still we leap to government regulations as the only imaginable solution for problems like climate change, to use the topic of this month’s Debate at Lolita Bar as an example).

Howard’s book reminds me very much (perhaps not coincidentally, though I haven’t yet asked him) of my former boss John Stossel’s one-hour specials for ABC News, which began around the same time (with me starting my six-year stint there in 1995): example after example of government doing things so outrageous that philosophical disagreements almost seem to become irrelevant, and anyone with a brain is forced to say “Enough!” [UPDATE: as is indeed the working title, I believe, of a Stossel special tentatively scheduled for the night of March 23].

I may sound radical sometimes, and I may have majored in philosophy, but at the end of the day I still think practical, utilitarian consequences matter most (the sort of social ramifications of everyday decision-making described in, to take two items from my current to-read pile, an issue of Manhattan Institute’s City Journal or the book Structures of Everyday Life, which surveys the empirical details and reconstructed stats, to the extent we know them, of ordinary people’s lives in the fifteenth to eighteenth century in Europe — a book that Michel Evanchik, moderator of our Debates at Lolita Bar, was kind enough to give me).

I can’t imagine too many people, of any ideological stripe, coming away from Howard’s book thinking regulation works — nor, more important, that it is workable.

After Virtue, After Virginia

This year saw the monthly debate society I host, which meets the first Wednesday of each month at Lolita Bar in Manhattan, confront a relatively timeless question: “Is Chastity a Good Idea for Singles?” Dawn Eden, who has become a gung-ho Catholic since I dated her five years ago, wrote a book arguing “yes” (a ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for December 2006) in answer to that question, while my friend Virginia Vitzthum wrote a book about the wild and libidinous world of online dating, so why not throw ’em in a room and have ’em sort it all out? (You can watch the debate on YouTube, in fact.) Not surprisingly, our twenty-first-century, New York City audience voted against chastity, though Dawn’s forces were not as thoroughly routed as one might have expected (and the whole thing was written up in the London Observer).

As for me, I was just pleased, especially so recently after the epochal mid-term elections, which may well spell the end for conservatism as we have known it for the past few decades, to see that people are still willing to take a step back from the urgency of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the latest politician misstep to talk about bigger, less partisan moral questions and to do so civilly even when confronted with views ostensibly diametrically opposed to their own. It’s almost enough to give one hope that Alasdair MacIntyre is wrong in his book After Virtue (the ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month for January 2007), when he argues that coherent moral debate is impossible in our era because people tend to start from incommensurable fundamental premises. We managed to have the Village Voice sex columnist and an editor from Pat Buchanan’s magazine sit in the same audience for over an hour without hurting each other, at least.

UPDATE 2/11/07: Virginia was scheduled to appear on ABC News to talk about her book just after its release and just before Valentine’s Day but was bumped by a report about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Sex sells, but not as well as sex + death + drugs + mystery + celebrity, apparently.

UPDATE 4/1/07: They rescheduled Virginia for 8am yesterday.

UPDATE 4/7/07: And here she is.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Is Chastity a Good Idea for Singles?"

Hear Thrill of the Chaste author Dawn Eden ( http://ThrilloftheChaste.com ) and I Love You, Let’s Meet author Virginia Vitzthum ( http://www.virginiavitzthum.com/ilylm ) debate the question “Is Chastity a Good Idea for Singles?” in the basement of Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St., one block south and three west of the Delancey St. subway stop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — free admission, cash bar) this Wed., Jan. 3 at 8pm, with moderator Michel Evanchik and host Todd Seavey (a.k.a. “Tom” the atheist from Chapter 18 of Thrill of the Chaste). If you know people who find the topics of love, sex, dating, computers, men, women, depravity, or religion interesting, this would be a good debate to bring them to.

P.S. I haven’t quite turned ToddSeavey.com into a blog yet but will very, very soon, I promise. So in the meantime, as compensation (and for those too far away to attend the debates), here is an anecdote of the sort I might put on the blog if it were up and running:

I once went to see economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman speak at the 92nd Street Y, and after he spent about an hour talking about wanting more regulations and taxes comparable to Canadian levels (and claimed, in response to a question from me, to think that government is already as lean as it can get and thus that no budget cuts are really possible), he confessed that his childhood ambition had been to be a “psychohistorian,” the fictional profession depicted in Isaac Asimov novels that entails planning the entire long-term future and political destiny of humanity with an engineer’s precision, based on detailed knowledge of statistics. As Krugman said, not without humor, there are no psychohistorians in real life, but being an economist and writing for the Times is the next best thing. I think this explains a great deal.

(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007. Click here for other Debates at Lolita Bar.)

Book Selection of the Month: "After Virtue" by Alasdair MacIntyre

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (January 2007):
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre’s a great philosopher and writer yet coy and elliptical enough to be a frickin’ Straussian (I notice he praises Straussian Harry Jaffa at one point, so perhaps he is — he’s a bit of everything else, so why not a Straussian, too?). Reading the book becomes a bit like reading a mystery novel. Normally, one doesn’t read an engaging philosophy book while wondering, with some tension, “Where the hell is this leading?!?” Which is not to say it’s scattered, it was just hard to predict what the practical legal/ethical/culture-critical upshot was going to be at the end. It turns out to be a defense of ancient, Greek-style virtues, concrete things like leadership and athleticism and friendship, as a more solid anchor for morals than modern theorizing and rationalism — though there are some surprising twists and turns along the way.

Only on page 199 (out of 260) do we get the first, out-of-the-blue indication that serious Marxism might lie ahead. There, after the preceding several chapters of Martha-Nussbaum-like, neo-Aristotelian talk of what sound to me like bourgeois, Republican-friendly virtues (even if he’s dissing Ben Franklin and utilitarianism), we suddenly get this odd, alarming sentence:

“Were I to choose exemplars of certain of the virtues as I understand them, there would of course be many names to name, those of St. Benedict and St. Francis of Assisi and St. Theresa and those of Frederick Engels and Eleanor Marx and Leon Trotsky among them.” That’s…interesting.

And, since I am an anticommunist and an atheist, a final chapter including the phrase “Trotsky and St. Benedict” in its title was the scariest reading-anticipation experience I’ve had since Grover warned There’s a Monster at the End of This Book (if I’m remembering that terrifying title from childhood correctly).

With only sixty-one pages left to go at that point, I still didn’t know if I was going to have join the Communist Party of the U.S.A. or a paleoconservative monastery when it was all over. I was pretty sure MacIntyre wasn’t going to tell me to spend all my time playing videogames and doing drugs, though if it were a multiplayer game based on The Odyssey played with true friends, I think he’d have to concede I could make a case for it.

Despite his aversion to capitalism, MacIntyre comes close to making a point central to my own thinking, which is that since loyalty to abstract orders is thin and flimsy, people (especially men) need to feel in a visceral way that there is heroism in, say, property-rights-adherence, not just a certain theoretical elegance (or worse, a certain shallow inevitability, which seems to be the dominant attitude among the yuppies these days). That is why we need something like conservatism or Rand (herself a Nietzschean-Aristotelian, which must blow MacIntyre’s mind if he’s aware of her) — something with emotional appeal — not just a dry appreciation for constitutionalism or whatever. This thought is why, roughly speaking, I put up with savages like Ann Coulter as long as they counsel hatred of commies — but I’m quite open to new strategy suggestions after the Republican electoral battering of ’06.

MacIntyre vs. Relativism and Emotivism

MacIntyre takes it to be a problem that so many people are relativists and an even bigger problem that so many people are emotivists, that is, that so many people in modern times hear talk of utterly contradictory moral foundations — equality versus individual liberty, for example, or rugged individualism versus mandatory compassion — and thus leap to the conclusion that all moral utterances are basically just someone spouting off, venting emotions, with no deeper, common truth to be discerned beneath our bickering (the relativist at least recognizes that to declare the incommensurability of different moral foundations is to stare, with Nietzsche, into an abyss, whereas the emotivists, in my experience, tend to think that as long as everyone’s gotten their feelings off their chests, we’re a-OK, and that trouble only starts when someone keeps insisting he’s right and others really are wrong, in a way that hurts others’ feelings and thus impedes their self-expression).

What makes MacIntyre interesting is that he doesn’t respond to this dilemma either by embracing some form of relativism or arguing for some objective moral foundation (such as utility, which is what I would still defend) but rather by arguing that moral pluralism and all its attendant confusion is an inevitable result of the vast, impersonal societies that modernity has created — societies in which so many strangers interact that there is no real chance of us all having a shared (traditional) vision of the good life and where each of us fits into it.

Interestingly, he actually thinks that many of our problems started precisely when Enlightenment philosophers began looking for some abstract basis for morals — whether rights-based, equality-based, utilitarian, or even traditional-on-principle in the Burkean fashion. Such dry, abstract stuff was bound to end up in moral apathy and Nietzscheanism and existentialism eventually (MacIntyre actually calls Nietzsche the wisest of the moderns because Nietzsche saw through the modern-morals scam more quickly than other thinkers).

MacIntyre praises the Homeric and Aristotelian concepts of the virtues, then, not exactly because he thinks they arrived more decisively at some clear, objective “metric” of what is moral but because the Greeks tended to attach virtue to very concrete, local, inarguably useful things like “being a good citizen of Athens” or “being a good warrior” or “having the discipline necessary to win in the games” (with what we’d now call morality just one part of the package deal of athletic, parental, scholarly, and civic skills). These more concrete ancient virtues were the sort of things that made people feel they could see excellence or lack of it in a very obvious way before their own eyes. Clear, everyday social purposes were attached to these forms of excellence, obviating a lot of the modern wandering about (wondering what to make of our blank-slate lives and abstract-as-math moral codes).

MacIntyre doesn’t suggest that we all go back to living in little city-states in order to foster moral consensus (at least not in this 1981 book), though I think that paleo/localist conclusion would be a logical implication of his position. Perhaps we can at least go to the local theatre and watch the Spartans stomp the Persians in a way we moderns dare not (despite Iranian nuclear provocation) in the movie of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 [UPDATE: which my friend Kyle Smith, movie critic at New York Post, calls the most fascist movie he's seen since Starship Troopers -- a reminder that Frank Miller's undergone some interesting political transformations over the years, almost as complex as MacIntyre's, from leftist in the days when he was writing the atrocious RoboCop II and RoboCop III, to a Rand-influenced individualist by the time of his third Martha Washington comic book miniseries, to ardent patriot in the wake of 9/11 -- and a lover of violence throughout it all, as Sin City made clear; of course, putting modern liberal sentiments in the mouths of ancient Spartans would be absurd, so perhaps we should be grateful the warriors in 300 don't toss off comments about the importance of believing in yourself and respecting everyone's differences].

Another Philosophical Hybrid

As someone who thinks political hybrids are always more interesting than the politically orthodox, I find it interesting how MacIntyre manages to sound so Catholic-Aristotelian, so Marxist, and in a way so anarchist (given his hatred, which feels a tad dated to me now, of managerial relationships) all at the same time. He seems like he’d be a good professor, in so far as his descriptions of other people’s philosophies are very engaging and insightful — even brilliant — but he’s always on shakier ground once he starts constructing his own. That’s probably true of most philosophers, though.

There’s something Mobius-strip-like about his syncretism, leading via a given philosophy to its apparent opposite and back again without being fickle about it. It reminds me that one of the things I want to try very hard to do on this blog is avoid simply pitting my single philosophy against all the enemy philosophies (I think that’s been done to death) and instead try to set a positive (and hopefully somewhat surprising) example of drawing on any and all philosophical and political influences that offer insight, without pausing to advertise the fact that I’m crossing a quasi-tribal boundary. G.K. Chesterton, for example, had some very valuable insights even though there is no God, so why not use them? (Indeed, one of our debaters at Lolita Bar this month is a big Chesterton fan, something we can agree on despite my atheism and her gung-ho Catholicism — and speaking of our debate on sexual mores at Lolita, I notice that MacIntyre has been married three times, though this isn’t necessarily at odds with his Greco-Roman conception of the virtues.)

For all his insights, though, I still think MacIntyre gives suspiciously short shrift to utilitarianism — essentially saying it can’t be true since it tells us to pursue happiness but does not tell us what happiness consists in. But then, as another student of Aristotle, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, argues in the pop-psych book Flow, we can agree that happiness is paramount while also acknowledging that it is too complex and individualized a phenomenon to turn into a short checklist of specific hobbies, possessions, or behaviors that all people should have. Those ancient virtues MacIntyre described may have been more concrete than the theories of Kant or the existentialists, but it is precisely their abstract characteristics that makes it possible to imagine importing them, or their analogues, to our own era.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "New Orleans and Ground Zero" (with 4 Seavey articles)

One last time before fissioning into two separate, mighty entities, Jinx and the Lolita Bar Debates I host summon you (and suggest those who receive these e-mails only via the Jinx Yahoo list, with “[jinxlist]” at the start of the subject header, e-mail me to be on the henceforth separate debate e-list), especially interested Louisianans and urban explorers:

Wed., Dec. 6 (8pm), join a discussion of ruination and rebuilding in New Orleans and at Ground Zero in Manhattan, moderated by Michel Evanchik and featuring:

–Science and medical writer Marilynn Larkin on the topic of evacuation and disaster preparedness

–New Orleans native, writer, and Epicurious editor Jolene Bouchon on Katrina vs. her family

–Proof Magazine editor Stephen Davis on his vision for making Ground Zero usable again

That’s 12/6 at 8pm, downstairs at Lolita Bar (free admission, cash bar), 266 Broome St. (at Allen St.) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. Subway stop.

Those who can’t join us might still enjoy an old piece I did for Proof about Rawhide Kid, by the way:

http://www.proofmagazine.com/e01_comics.html

And check out these new articles I wrote (three with the help of the Phillips Foundation) on (1) superheroes and eugenics (and kicking the comic-collecting habit at last), (2) crazed primates, (3) the real depth of the problem of trying to limit government, (4) and — in keeping with the theme of our 12/6 event — Ground Zero and architectural good taste:

http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=485_0_2_0_M

http://radaronline.com/features/2006/11/monkey_menace.php

“Does Anybody Really Know How to Limit Government?”

http://reason.com/news/show/116813.html

You may have seen some of these if you’ve checked out the still-skeletal http://ToddSeavey.com — which will be magically transformed into the real blog it always dreamt of being by New Year’s (when 2007 ushers in more debates, real blogging, and more monthly bar gatherings — separate from and unrelated to the ones described above — at McGee’s for any interested non-left media folk not already signed up for those). In the meantime, happy Festivus and happy Chrismukkah, and by all means check out Allen Salkin’s year-old book and Gersh Kuntzman’s brand-new book (respectively) on those quasi-real holidays.

P.S. If you’re a family of avid Star Wars collectors, you are wanted for participation in an ABC primetime reality series (with actual money), so e-mail tara.fogarty[at]rdfUSA.com if you’re interested.

(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007. Click here for other Debates at Lolita Bar.)

Book Selection of the Month: “Thrill of the Chaste” by Dawn Eden/“A Christmas Caroline” by Kyle Smith

ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (December 2006):

Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden

Science- and econ-loving guy that I am, I wouldn’t normally plug a book (aimed at Christian women) about how to avoid premarital sex while navigating the modern dating scene, but it just so happens an ex-girlfriend of mine wrote this and devoted a section to her failed attempt to sustain a relationship with an atheist boyfriend she calls “Tom” but who is actually called “Todd Seavey” (and indeed, I suggested that she use my real name so that I can get proper credit for my work, but at least some of you now know the truth, or at least that paltry portion of it given to the mind of mortal man to know, etc., etc.). [UPDATE: Dawn was one of our January debaters at Lolita Bar, up against former Salon.com sex columnist and author of I Love You, Let's Meet, Virginia Vitzthum.]

For a decidedly more cynical and materialistic take on New York-area singles life, though, the ladies might also want to buy:

A Christmas Caroline by Kyle Smith

As far as I know, I did not inspire any of the characters in this Manhattan-centered, fashion-crazed humorous retelling of the Dickens tale, but let the record show that the joke about childbirth being like something out of the movie Alien, from Kyle’s previous novel, Love Monkey (later turned into the short-lived sitcom by the same name), was my idea (and indeed was previously used by me in the campus comedy publication called the Brown Film Bulletin, back in my college days).