Tape Delay

I haven't posted all week. For explanations

1) Bought Borderlands. Haven't played it much yet (got it in the mail yesterday). I expect to lose a few hours later.
2) Finishing Bill Simmons' tome on basketball. A few thoughts that I doubt most people will care about will be coming I'm sure. I tend to look at ranking lists for some reason.
3) World Series and updating my stat-head all-time league. That's tedious as it involves making and re-ordering ranking lists and picking averaged seasons to replace and to normalize the new data from park factors and league averages. Easier than it sounds.
4) NBA started. Some time lost to early season moves with fantasy basketball. As per usual, I skip fantasy football and baseball because they are less predictable or less fun than my alternative reality league, respectively. Basketball I haven't seen very many good statistical simulation games that would allow an alternate reality game (in part because the NBA didn't keep good statistics until the 70s and didn't have a three point line for a while either. Way to ignore blocks, steals and turnovers for the better part of two decades). So playing games with the modern players is quite good enough. So far I'm in 3-4th but one of the guys ahead is burning out the games played.
5) I have now a backlog of about 10-12 blog posts or news blurbs that I wanted to comment on but hadn't come up with a coherent statement of opinion or factual rebuttals that required a blog posting. Yet. Probably tomorrow.

A different theory

"Everything'll even out, see, I have two friends, you were up, he was down. Now he's up, you're down. You see how it all evens out for me?" - Jerry Seinfeld

There's sort of way in which things even out, revert back to a mean, or whatever you want to call it. It's sort of a recurring theme for people to make sense of underlying "change", or rather the moderate patterns of a daily life reflected in year after year of repeated actions, in the face of our more dramatic changes. They don't actually reflect dramatic change, but rather they just hit us in the face because they're like walking back to your car and discovering the volume on the car radio is really and uncomfortably high. Even though that's where you left it when you got out, the sudden shocks wake you up to the sensations of the daily rolls and pitch changes that you weren't likely to notice before.

I came to a realization sometime ago thanks to a dream (I have way too many weird insights to dream about apparently, they go along brilliantly with the various war dream plots or random alien-cowboy encounters) that I discovered something like "people don't change". Only the specifics of that plot of life we have do. Sometimes those circumstances give us something, a break, where we can do more than before. Where we were the "right person in the right place" sort of moments. You can say some of those are created by who we were before as well (effort creating luck). But the person doesn't change because they succeeded or failed to in that moment. If anything they're just amplified and put out for others to examine critically, from the positions off stage slightly in the audience where their criticisms matter not at all. Someone like me "changes" in the fact that I have roles I play in life. Interacting with people feels like acting more than anything else. But it doesn't represent "change" because the underlying behaviors are always the same. There's an order brought about by a demand for rationality, a voracious appetite for questions and answers, and a distance forged between people that remains unbridgeable.

Probably for good reasons. Maybe just because people are a different kind of question for me than the ones I can find answers to. And if there's one skill I know I have, it's to stray away from doing the things I know I can't do. There's a laundry list of these, from the practical/creative: drawing, singing, playing music, dancing, shopping for clothes/fashion, skating on ice, riding a bike (I ran everywhere as a kid) to the more important things. Listening in a concerned fashion to others, sharing stories, holding a "conversation" rather than being a source of the occasional wise/foolish remark while others carry on a conversation of give and take, acting or commenting upon subtle clues that I KNOW are happening in my interpersonal affairs. And figuring out people or understanding what their wants are seems to be one of these. I know I have simple tastes and wants. They're usually rational, with a few exceptions like my following of baseball or basketball (both of themselves which tend to be far more statistical and occasionally trend toward artistic appreciations like wandering into the Louvre to gaze at the beauty and majesty of some classic work of art rather than the sort of consumed fandom of others). Wants can be exceeded or improved upon, maybe even added to at times. What I don't do is figure out other people's wants very easily without their input and assistance. I don't follow along with their stories because I'm almost never a part of those stories. Without those stories, it's a lot harder to figure these things out. So I don't try. Actually there's probably a healthy reason for why. But I'm not interested in getting into that one.

Instead I have a story for once.

I had discovered that the one part of humanity I liked wasn't really that likable. That is to say, human beings aren't that good at demonstrating care or concern. We're more like a species of mutual indifference. Tolerance seems more like a hallmark (which is, in and of itself, a nice worthy accomplishment in nature to have. But it's nothing compared to what it could be). We have our moments, and they're powerful. I'd like to hope they'd be more inspiring. I wrote about one of them a few weeks ago (the post 9-11 days). That's not the average, revert back to mean sort of behavior I've seen and come to expect from human beings.

But animals, or in particular human pets, don't seem to have this problem. They're very much a "what you put in, comes back out" function. Human beings don't work that way. What you put in, sometimes comes back as garbage. Or maybe we're just not as good at expressing what we mean when we mean to say it. If on the other hand, you treat a dog well, it shows. If you treat it like crap, it shows. More on this later. I started out with a much simpler animal than a dog. Cats. They're still sort of half-breeds with some wilderness tendencies compared to dogs (which have a lot longer on the "man's best friend" chart owing to their utility as hunting animals to early human beings). So cats are a bit unpredictable, but their needs are actually really simple. Feed them, give them some water, make sure they get some shots, keep their latrines clean. You can actually go even simpler and just have an "outdoor cat", but I'm not built that way. And neither are apartment complexes. You don't really need to do much of anything else. There's no walks, no parks, no begging for treats or scraps (at least, cats are not as good at it as dogs in my experience, comes off as more like whining than begging). There's almost never a reason to be angry with one either in the way that a dog might chew up someone's shoes or dig into some dinner dish that you thought was safe from their interference. Usually if the cat "misbehaves" it's because you're not doing one of those basic needs requirements, making it your fault in the first place. It's a really even keeled relationship with a pet, with a bit fewer responsibilities than those required of a dog. They're also usually lazier than dogs (though they have moments like humans do here as well). Or at least, they're more consistently lazy even before they start taking on human owner characteristics (a dog with lazy owners for example). Which appeals to me considerably. Much as I miss the former dog, for he was a bundle of energy and I took considerable joy in his spring like hopping and running abilities, and that he killed a groundhog once, that little terrier was a major handful as well. He basically couldn't be left alone or he would find ways to make trouble that you hadn't thought possible. A cat pretty much requires you to leave them alone unless they want attention by contrast. Again, a perfect consideration for someone like me who has a hard time noticing and acting on these things from humans.

So. With all these considerations in mind, I have had two cats for a long time now. One of them got increasingly worse off over the past few months and finally I had run into option 1) try hero doctor methods with escalating bills and decreasing amounts of success to keep her alive for a few months or option 2) euthanize her now because there wasn't enough there to save where she would have a quality pet life remaining. Anybody who knows me even a little bit knows that I never even took option 1 seriously. Once the body reaches a certain point, there isn't really any going back, it's broken and unless it heals on its own to show some signs of support and recovery, it's a lost cause. She was getting worse, not better. Had I been more attentive 6 months ago, from the images I was seeing on x-rays and such, I might have had another year of life for an otherwise healthy cat that had bad lungs as she was getting older. Instead she had basically failed lungs and died in an oxygen cage as she was gasping for air even there. She was, relative to that state, pretty much okay two days ago. I was watching game 3 of the World Series on Saturday night and she was resting, as usual, on my lap. Breathing a bit harder or more rapidly than she should have been normally (and no different than earlier in the week), but certainly not struggling for every molecule of oxygen. By Sunday morning she wasn't getting any air at all. The sight of her sitting uncomfortably in a cage of oxygen was pretty much all the confirmation I needed to know that there wasn't any going back. I can spare the grisly details of the actual death. Except to say that's quick and painless by comparison.

I didn't say it would be a nice story. I don't have many of those anyway to recall to other people. Even when I think it's a nice story, it's probably not. I don't think the same way about evaluating stories before I share them. Nice stories to me are like the Stalin story about meeting his mother after ordering the execution of his census bureau. Because it tells me something about human nature, even if it is the horrible parts that are the exact opposite of "a nice story". But for the purposes of this story in particular, this was the same cat that would bat at the mouse light from my optical mouse. She wasn't exactly a genius cat (my other cat would bat the mouse itself when I tried this for example, she's the smart one. As I learn from people, the smart ones are the ones we need to watch. The dumb ones will make you watch them whether you want to or not. She wasn't the "dumb cat", but she wasn't the "smart one" is all I'm saying). She wasn't ever a "hunting" cat. In fact, she wasn't very active at all, preferring the comfortable edge or top of a reclining chair or a human lap at any angle imaginable, and some that one would never imagine at all were possible. Probably the most active I recall her being were moments where 1) my other cat had gotten herself into some trouble, such as wandering out on the neighbour's balcony by using the gutter and deciding to take a nap over there or 2) when nobody was home for prolonged periods at the old apartment (before I got a dog) and she would demand attention from the entering people as they hauled themselves in from the day by mewing insistently until being picked up. Most cats are uncomfortable being picked up and handled at all, or at best for more than a few seconds. This one was so pliable that you could hold her in any position you wanted and she seemed indifferent. I suppose in a way that was a great weakness in that she was so indifferent to her condition that she could make herself seem perfectly normal. When obviously, in retrospect of course these things are more obvious, she wasn't.

In any case, the entire episode provided me with yet one more example of the dramatic difference I find between human beings and our animals. Right as I had to make the call on whether to put my cat down or not (which, as I said earlier, wasn't really a choice at all. I could refer people to my complicated moral logic on chained events capturing decisions down to binary no-win scenarios, but I won't), there was a man who came into the clinic wanting to have a dog put down because of its temperament. This dog had sort of shaggy, unkempt look to it as I passed by on my way through the lobby. But it was quite happy to receive a brief rub on the head as I passed by as well. For some reason, perhaps since I had a rambunctious dog once, it has not occurred to me that a dog will try to attack me. Or that the thought would occur to a dog. I pretty much just pet them without concern for my safety. That didn't appear to be the case here either. I passed by, sat down, and received the news that this dog wasn't here because it was sick. But because the owner wanted to kill it (or rather, wanted someone else to do it because he probably didn't want to get his hands dirty even having to take care of this much of the dog's situation). To their credit, the receptionists/nurses refused on the grounds that that sort of euthanasia decision is made by their regular vet. And not as a whimsical, wander into the ER vet clinic door on a Sunday evening type decision.

It was to me yet another example that people are usually not worth it. I may be a calculating, uncaring person, and sometimes wacky proponent of intellectualized theories, and generally lovable only on the quirky side of humanity rather than out of some genuine concern for my future affairs and well-being (and in part because I keep it that way) but I at least know how to take care of a dog or a cat in a way that they "deserve". I guess in the long run this sort of thing balances out. I mean, we do at least have vet clinics who were open on a Sunday evening to give a cat, of all creatures, a final last gasp of air. Maybe human beings aren't so bad after all. We're just too bored most of the time to act like we give a shit.

I do for once have a photo here, but obviously it's not mine since I don't use cameras. Photography was never my interest either. It's gotten worse as the cameras became more "complex". The hiding attribute captured here wasn't exactly common behavior. The attention to the person behind the camera is. It's only missing a silent mew really.

Gould

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

I'm confused as to how people take this level of doubt or uncertainty, more or less the <1% variety, and turn it into "scientists don't know anything". Philosophically that's a valuable sort of doubt and inquisitiveness to have, but for all practical purposes it is useless for most any human being to follow to its logical conclusions. It's even worse when the public moves from a mathematical law with constants behind it into a scientific theory with repeatable and observable experimentation behind that. More or less, if you're not the expert studying and experimenting and attempting to disprove a positive theoretical assertion, don't pretend that your doubts should always be taken seriously or should determine policies, particularly for other people.

One other note. People use this 99.9% instead of 100% logic frequently with religious belief and understanding versus scientific knowledge and understanding. This is not a fair comparison. Religious belief is more like scientific hypothesis because it is not based upon empirical, repeatable, and observable truths (there are some incredibly advantageous social science understandings that religious beliefs have picked up on over the centuries, but these aren't exactly universal effects in the same way that gravity, thermodynamics, or evolution are). More to the point, a significant portion of it suffers from entirely subjective vantage points and becomes even loony and dangerous (especially where it is used to justify internalized preferences and prejudices). And without some sort of empirical truth on which to rest those loony beliefs and appeal to a more reasoned approach, there's no countering force to sort them back out of the mainstream positions. The danger of a central empirical version of truth, unassailed by testing and reasoned debate over the facts as we observe them (and ideally we can agree on these as a starting point, in practice disagreement over the facts is incredibly common), is frequently just as bad as the lack of such a central version to appeal to. Given the propensity of authorities, secular and religious, to abuse their positions and powers historically. I'm still working out how to resolve this ambiguity in such a way that we can have some trust in knowledge as it advances and still be able to appeal to it when it has some certainty behind it. Without turning it into a religion either for the people who live that way or the people who perceive it as an opposition to their current religious institutions.

Because those atheists who start writing hymns to godlessness I think are really missing the point.

Approaches on crime and punishment

But hosted by a different Russian guy.
Simple game theory modeling in this one (prisoner's dilemma type stuff)
Costs of crime are, more poverty Not really that surprising to consider, but usually people think the direction goes the other way (that hardship and poverty cause crime). I suspect it will take a while to process that crime can cause poverty, but all one really needs to consider is that there is a premium applied to development in a high crime area, for the purchase of security or additional police, that businesses and employers are not willing to pay when they can simply locate a few miles away at lower overall costs. That means: no jobs. Which means ultimately more time and incentives for crime.
Oh by the way, there's a racial component to the judicial inequality system.
Finally, some sensible ideas
I'll go through a few of those to explain them a bit.

"Emphasize swiftness and certainty of punishment rather than severity." - Obvious really. Crime tends to be pretty low when criminals are caught and punished. The severity issue may have been a deterrent at one time (particularly when the severity is very high or socially visible, such as cutting off hands for theft or death by public hanging). But the reason it is actually operating as a deterrent is that there's an obvious cause and effect to the rest of society, not that the penalty was so severe as to constitute brutality or torture in its own right. Criminal does A. Police or the public catch criminal. Penalty B, whatever B is (determined to be suitable based on the severity of the crime involved and the potential risks for future violations of any variety). A+B=C, less crime. The problem seems to be more the focus on locking people up and getting them off the street, which can help for certain types of criminals, but does nothing to actually prevent new ones from forming or to prevent old ones who are released from returning to their former pastime. Actually catching and penalizing people with certainty is not easy, but it's extremely effective when it is properly executed.

"Concentrate enforcement rather than dispersing it." - Came up in Tipping Point. Basically the idea was that they picked some crime and cracked down on it hard for a while. Worked for the subway system pretty well apparently to go through and detain people who were fare jumping. Sometimes using fairly elaborate schemes. Focusing on cleaning up one area or behavior later gives more attention elsewhere as a result.

"Add police to areas with high ratios of crimes to officers." - I recall other than the abortion legalization effect, Levitt projected that increasing the number of police was the other main thing to decrease crime rates. I imagine it would certainly decrease the amount of traffic tickets issued by some low violent crime neighbourhoods if the cops were moved to the "bad part of town." Which I personally have no problem with. Speeding is largely enforced by social and physical norms (how fast can one safely go on a crowded road) rather than police action anyway. Go drive through any major city and observe the speed limits relative to the actual rate of travel (Chicago is my personal favorite for this type of observation, there's a bit more room than NYC and more available mass transit than LA). Meanwhile, their police are often sort of busy doing actual police work.

"Identify and target high-rate serious offenders, with the goal of incapacitating them by incarceration. Don’t neglect domestic violence in this analysis." - Amazing how domestic violence has to even be singled out. Suggests that it isn't. What a country.

"Consider both the offender’s broader criminal history and the broader driving history – especially a history of accidents with personal injury – in sentencing drunken or reckless drivers." - I've long struggled to come up with some way to effectively deal with drunk driving (seeing as it suffers from a classic Pareto principle problem). I suspect simply jacking up the tax on alcohol would work pretty well though (which is, coincidentally, suggested as the alternative to the present drinking age of 21. Which has made the problems on college campuses worse rather than better). Seizure of property (the car used) or penalties that apply to enablers would also be helpful here. I'm somewhat skeptical of the constitutionality of either of those methods, but I'm pretty sure they would work.

"Prosecute felonies committed by parolees as new crimes, rather than allowing them to be treated as mere parole violations." - Yes. We don't do this already. We're fucking stupid.

"Since skills such as literacy are portable across the boundary between prison and the community, stress skill acquisition rather than attempts at behavior change such as drug treatment. Put a computer in each cell." - I'm sure this would go over well with the "more bars and more guards" crowd of wardens. A terminal to a central wireless server with some basic monitored/restricted access would suffice here. Probably smarter than parking a law library there in the long run. If they want to look up stuff for an appeal or some sort of civil rights violation that they feel entitled to, go right ahead. But the physical space is also flexible enough this way to allow them to also look up practical things that interest or delight the mind. To carry out correspondence with family (or legal counsel). To attend basic learning courses. And so on. There is a percentage of the population of prison inmates that seems capable of being "scared straight" or something like that. I suspect the percentage would be higher if we figured out why it exists and how to mobilize the forces that created it more constructively. Instead of the lock em up and throw away the key idea.

"Impose few rules on probationers and parolees, and enforce every rule consistently and swiftly." - I cite this sort of concept frequently in response to the "more regulation" catcalls. We don't really need new rules all the time. What would be more useful than new rules in many cases is to deter people from breaking some of the current ones and to properly enforce them when they are. Changing dumb rules into something more structurally useful would also be more helpful.

"Focus enforcement attention and sentencing on violence, disorder, and the use of juveniles, not on the mere volume of drugs sold." - I think his position is a half-measure of decriminalized drug possession and a grey market instead of a black market (sort of like many locations already have for marijuana, which he advocates complete legalisation). It's not quite where I come down on the issue, but it's probably more palatable to the average American. Though still not so palatable given the American's distaste for heroin being supplied to heroin addicts in Europe and treated as a medical problem to be managed or cured rather than a basis for arrest and detention. Sometimes I curse the Puritanical nature of our history (actually this happens a lot. Between sex, drugs, and rock and roll/hip-hop, you'd think we were burning churches and priests alive).

"Close the private-sale loophole." - In a related story, it is considered sufficient to merely ask potential buyers if they have committed felonies by some private sellers. Way to keep guns out of the hands of people we nearly all acknowledge shouldn't have them and fulfill a civic duty in the pursuit of a buck. It amazes me that the same market forces that have allowed me to build a powerful computer myself at a cut rate price and for whatever purpose I can imagine it to have, have also brought us baconnaisse, dog snuggies, and people who would sell guns to anyone without regard to whether they should or not.

"Start middle school and high school later in the day, and end them later." - Been asking why we don't do this simply on educational grounds for years. I don't recall being "awake" by 8 am. But I had to make it to school anyway. And then there's that whole 2-3 hours before the parents and adults in a neighbourhood return to their homes. In which to make mischief, if one where so inclined. I'm guessing this might also cut back on some teen pregnancy rates as well. Not a crime to have sex as a teenager, but not all that helpful either for the rest of us to get pregnant or to get someone else pregnant while one is still in the process of being indoctrinated and stripped of their individuality. Err, I mean educated.

zombie funding seeking head shot to the brain

Daily Show dealt with this a couple weeks ago with the Democratic majority busy passing, not the liberal agenda, but the conservative one. So we already were getting abstinence funding, even though the Obama team and almost any credible sociological studies find it wasteful and counterproductive. Good luck killing it off.

More interesting is the process of attaching these weird pet issues as amendments onto bills that will pass anyway. I may not find a requirement to "read the damn bill" that important. But I might agree that there are means of simplifying bills. One of which would be not to attach totally unrelated amendments to these omnibus type major reform packages. The "bill" to restrict and ban online gambling, passed as an air-dropped amendment on an anti-terrorism bill for example. Same thing appears to be at work here, tacking on an abstinence funding amendment to a bill that will almost certainly pass (eventually).

Tacking that on with no intention of then voting for it does nothing to improve the bills. So in my opinion, this sort of idea is even worse. At least Leach voted for entire bill that had the damn anti-poker provision ("SAFE port act", note also that there's more text there relating to the gambling provisions than the actual bill...). Of course, he promptly got booted out in the next election from the out-of-state funding of his opponent raised by poker players from all over the country, after having been in office for 30 years. Maybe that's a deterrent to people like Hatch now, but it seems like a sensible deterrent to require people to do their jobs responsibly. Killing a bill doesn't happen because you can push stupid things into it (that your ideological or political foes will disagree with). In fact, given the rate of passing stupid things to begin with, it would seem like it just enhances the stupidity. I don't think it a good ideal to be associated with something stupid. If you don't like the bills, don't put stuff in it that makes it worse. Just advocate against it and explain why.

more on oil and economic incentives

Looking at the various points brought up here.

1) This is known. This is great. This is not happening because it requires a massive number of people changing their behavior. Without incentives, that will not be happening. Even if the incentives are tangible long-term benefits in terms of cost savings for consumers because the costs for energy consumption are already very low. Simple way to encourage changes like that to happen: raise the tax and cut the subsidies on energy.
2) Bills in the Senate are generally dumb in many ways. Seems like this problem is one of the many problems of "more government" not always being a good response to a problem by imposing costs on gasoline without imposing these costs in a flat carbon tax or a Pigovian system instead of our goofy attempt to call something cap and trade.
3) This is also known. In fact, it is precisely those costs that to me require some intervention in the first place because they are known and capable of being calculated easily with commonly available economic data and environmental studies. They are costs which have already happened in many cases and haven't been paid by producers or consumers of energy (or food in the case of meat, this is also true of water rights relative to agricultural efficiency). I think this is more why you need an externality tax at all (a straight carbon tax), because it imposes property and health costs that aren't accounted for in the generation of energy. Any global warming effect is, to me, secondary, because these costs are immediate and already exist. Setting the tax is therefore easy because you can simply tab up the costs (health and environmental costs which are not yet regulated) and weight them against the benefit of cheaper energy, and include whatever costs are uncompensated (which are substantial) in the bill paid by producers and consumers of energy. That has significant benefits for the overall global warming cause in that it starts the path of conservation or conversion away from carbon.

The national security implications are a fairly weak argument (we don't get most of our oil from "our enemies", much as people like to claim), but the self-dependency or a relative interdependency involving renewable resources would be a big help over a dependency on a carbon spewing product. In fact, one such motivation to me that we should be moving away from oil: Saudi Arabia wants to have a pay-out in the event that we successfully steer developed/developing economies away from petroleum energy sources. To which I reply: fuck off. You had almost a century to build up your infrastructure and public development with petro dollars. You have squandered it. That's a "you" problem. Enjoy.

Refining my Mill-ism

The reason article/debate from last week is getting quite a lot of circulation in my blog circle (it's heavily libertarian of course, so debates about libertarianism naturally should be of interest to other libertarians of their varying stripes). I wanted to circle back to a couple points as a result.

I think the structural argument of libertarianism is to say that coercion by force is the highest evil and that this is generally reserved to the state. So the state or the government is the first line of defence. But it would be fair to acknowledge, as Mill did, that there are a large variety of social forms that coerce people into conformity against their will or consent. The trouble becomes how to parse out the positive impacts of some of these (ie, the functional aspects of a society which has a large percentage of people who tend to agree on a few basic principles) from the negative impacts (ie, those social and non-governmental stigmas which are harmful to individual's rights and choices without any just cause, such as race, gender, religious affiliations/lack thereof, or sexual orientation rather than strict harmful behavioral issues such as criminal activity). So Kerry's point that many libertarians will tend to assume very often that people who are in fact oppressed by social forces are instead conforming by choice is probably valid and important. But again, it is a thin line to then argue that individuals should always be the tyranny of importance and that their choices should be totally free. Mostly because not all individuals subscribe to that set of value, even if it may or may not be to their advantage to do so. And partly because there are legitimate concerns, at times, about the ability of minority powers brought by individual choice (I would suggest that it is possible for too much to go on the plate at once and upset the fragile order that individuals could otherwise establish and maintain themselves). The way you escape this is then to have very decentralized power centers. So if the social conformity is in one place unacceptable to one's personal preferences, you can move and find a location which is more acceptable. Or you can advocate (supposing that the establishment of free speech is respected).

There are several concrete examples of these balance considerations that I go through regularly. Religion is one of the foremost. It is undoubtedly a powerful societal coercive force. It has in its history constructed powerful repressive agencies against social tolerance, expressed racial or sexist preferences, and been engaged in acts of repression and violence against people of other faiths, women, minorities, and so on. These acts are not in simple terms caused by "faith" however. They are largely caused by the societal coercion that the institutions of faith have created over centuries, and are used by an extreme few to justify acts of intolerance, bigotry, hostility, even abhorrent actions of torture and violence. None of which seem remotely consistent with the actual beliefs or tenets of the majority of religious peoples. It is easy for me as an atheist to express a preference that religion, in particular organized religion, be removed from its societal totem pole placement. But it is less necessary for me as an atheist to express a demand for a coercive removal of religious faith from those people that hold it. It's simpler instead to call on and appeal to those tenets that are likely to engage us in something positive (tolerance, love, relative obedience and fidelity rather than absolute and unquestioning, charity, and so on). The reason these are difficult to appeal to is in my mind because the individual beliefs of religious people are afflicted by organized religion to start with (tendency to groupthink, us vs them scenarios, and the ability of centralized religious authorities to abuse their position and advocate for silly things like slavery or sexism). Though it is possible that a central control over a flock of religious peoples has some benefits, it appears that many of the extremist movements are themselves a sort of reaction against such central control. Islam in particular works in this way, franchising out a radical interpretation of itself in direct opposition to a perception of a weaker faith. Christianists in Europe and America are, in my view, no different. At least if the movements of repression and retrograde society are limited to a fringe, they'd be easier to manage and counter with more reasonable approaches.

That brings us to how to oppose such forces while still retaining individual choices and liberties. There is, fortunately, little justification for using state coercive force on religion at all (reason being that such justifications could almost certainly be turned against reason or minority views such as atheism, all such views demand protection against the law of majority opinions and beliefs). So how do you create a force in opposition, or rather, is it necessary to? I'm not sure that it is necessary to create a homogeneous front opposing the plagues that organised social forces foment in society. I do agree that there is a need for individuals to express their preferences in a heterogeneous way and even to demand them. For example, I think that in the long run, the justifications for secular-basis of law, for movements such as feminism, opposition to racial stereotypes, acceptance of equal rights for homosexuals, and general charitable attitudes toward the poor or disenfranchised of any cause, are largely that the societies that have embraced such movements have benefited in a variety of ways over societies that have not. States with "expanded" rights for homosexuals have attracted the productive and intelligent homosexuals and benefited economically and culturally. Nations with relative equality between women and men have tremendous economic dynamism (though we're still shaking through the social choice problems and the roles of men and women in a world of nebulous gender roles, I think this is small potatoes relative to the gains of having more and more women, or people generally, who can be productive and influential in society). So it seems more likely that the best conception of libertarianism over the interests of individual libertarians is to expand and defend the individual rights that a society has gained and to ignore social constructs of the intended roles of individuals as a basis of irrelevant characteristics.

There's one caveat I make to all that: free speech. Advocating for an expanded protection of free speech is necessary, but as a consequence it means putting up with a wide variety of repulsive or irritating viewpoints that others will express. By "putting up with", I mean: allowing people the access and audience that will have them and be persuaded by them, for the very reason that allowing that access and audience gives the freedom to express your own controversial views, such as they are, in societies that do not allow for individually defended liberties against social forces or extra-governmental agency. In the long run, advocating a positive position against those who would demand a social negative is probably a better strategy. In that respect, I find a great deal of power to an argument like Kerry Howley's. But the reason for that power is that it is "limited" in its ability to create its own coercive authorities within society. Conforming to the cult of individualism is not for everyone, but defending the rights of other individuals is most certainly for libertarians.

Put another way, libertarianism, not the libertarians who subscribe to all or portions of its ideological conclusions, is simply another vehicle for conformity unless it is a message of anti-conformitity and permits people their egregious views, if only so they will permit us our radical individualism and expressions. Libertarians themselves are thus free to have pet causes, to express and advocate for views which liberate individuals where possible, but stops short of a conclusion that there are socially desirable outcomes for those individuals that they ought to choose instead.