The BBC had an interesting story today on Islam in the Ningxia province, “the heartland of Islam in China.” Chinese Islam is, according to the story, more progressive than the variety found in the Middle East. There are even a few female imams.

Beijing's tight control over religious practice means Chinese Muslims have been isolated from trends sweeping through the rest of the Islamic world.

According to Dr Khaled Abou el Fadl from the University of California in Los Angeles, that means that ancient traditions like female jurists – which have been stamped out elsewhere – have been able to continue in China.

“The Wahhabi and Salafis have not been able to penetrate areas like China and establish their puritanical creed there,” said Dr Khaled Abou el Fadl.

Prof. Eric Muller gets an email from Alec Rawls, son of the late philosopher John Rawls. Here’s the email:

It really is astounding that you can continue to grasp at straws in order to make scurrilous attacks. Are you ever going to vet one of your own charges for accuracy before you post it? You are such an incompetent asshole. Crawl back in your hole. Or let Michelle keep chopping your limbs off like Monty Python's Black Knight. Either way, moron. I presume you are taking comfort from all the brain dead bigots in law schools across the nation who don't want to know the truth about internment. You are their champion! Enjoy it, because amongst honest people, you are exposed as a complete fraud, now and forever.

Not only is Alec Rawls an utter jackass, he’s also a misogynist:

Faced with an invader, the combination of woman’s instinct to submit, and the tendency for her political thinking to revolve around the personal, can be a disastrous pairing for a nation that allows women to vote. The problem is even worse in Europe because European society has become thoroughly feminized. The European man no longer thinks like a man.

I wonder if Alec has been blogging under the pseudonym “Kim du Toit”?

Sadly, this apple fell pretty far from the tree.

Ed Brayton finds an amusingly ironic Google ad at the blog of my favorite anti-gay bigot.

Mr. Cramer has added a disclaimer to the top of his blog, so that no one will associate him with, you know, “those people.”

(Back in January, I blogged about another ironic Google ad.)

Mister Hats is having a end-of-summer sale on their entire stock of straw hats, so I couldn't resist buying a new one.

Like my felt winter hat, this one is a Bailey. It has a thin leather band, which is rather unusual, and makes it more casual-looking than my Scala straw hat.

See below for a picture.

« All done!

My wife recently bought an old Alphasmart Pro on eBay to use as a portable fiction writing tool. (It's much more durable than a laptop.)

Apparently this one belonged to a kid in junior high school, since it stored a dreadful “five paragraph essay” on the benefits of learning to swim, as well as this rap song:

Jumpin, Jumpin
Thou shall get your party on

Chorus
Ladies leave your man at home
The club is full of ballers and there pockets full grown
And all you fellas leave your girl with her friends
Cuz this 11:30 and the club is jumpin jumpin

Though he say for he got a girl
Yeah its true your got a man
But the party ain’t gon stop
So let’s make it hot, hot

Last weekend you stayed at home alone and lonely
Couldn’t find your man he was chillin with his homies.
This weekend your going out
If he try to stop you your going out.
And your new outfit and your Fendi shoes.
You and your crew parlayin at the hottest spot tonite.

Your gonna find the fellas rollin in the Lexus.

“Thou shall get your party on.” That must have been on the tablet that Moses dropped.

Seen on a church sign today in Fayette County:

I had to wonder — will that really increase their resale value?

Matthew Yglesias turns off comments on his blog:

I'm sorry it's come to this, especially for folks who've been commenting on this site in a while, but I think the time has come to shut comments down, at least as a default option. We've become totally overwhelmed by trolls who come to write in the spirit of deliberate insult and misreading rather than fairminded debate, and the folks more "on my side" are just left responding in kind.

While my evidence isn't good enough to be featured on a late-night "documentary" on the Sci-Fi Channel (or even the State of the Union), I think you'll agree that this is no time to be "reasonable" or "sensitive". Here is my evidence:

I propose that the Tarzissian space aliens from the planetary system of Bellatrix Orion have started abducting Pundits. I have reason to believe that Andy is just part of the first wave.

Fortunately, the Aliens lack a sophisticated understanding of our political mores so this fake Andy can be easily spotted, however some abductions aren’t so easily discovered:

“Solid” intelligence from “reliable” sources indicates that Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds was replaced almost two years ago by a cheap Casio synthesizer.

Heh. Er… I mean, “gee, that’s too bad.”

The Tarzissian space aliens have also snatched away Mike Hollihan, but have not replaced him. They must have realized that he was irreplacable.

(þ Brad DeLong.)

From CNN:

Researchers have found high concentrations of platinum in women who got silicone breast implants....

Flying back from Long Island today, the security guy at MacArthur airport (I’m not sure whether he was with the TSA or not) checked the expiration date on my Tennessee driver’s license. He told me that it had expired. I pointed out the extension sticker on the back, and he let me through. He told me that if the license had actually been expired, I would have had to go back to the counter, presumably to present further proof that I was indeed the person I claimed to be.

God forbid that someone fly with an expired driver’s license.

Lee Iacocca is leading an effort to raise 11 million dollars to fund human clinical trials of a potential cure for type I (juvenile) diabetes. Mr. Iacocca has already given a million of his own money to the cause: one million down, ten million to go. So go donate some money.

Have faith, Will! One day, men’s hats will come back in style, and you and I will be ahead of the fashion curve.

Tyler Cowen, remarking on an NYT article on charging prison inmates for room and board, says

I'm not comfortable with this notion, since I don't think government prisons should move toward becoming profit centers.

That’s an understatement. If one is of a libertarian bent (as I am) with regard to victimless crimes such as drug use and prostitution, the problem would seem to be that imprisoning people doesn’t cost the government nearly enough. After all, the marginal prisoner is a lot more like Tommy Chong than Charles Manson.

From an economic point of view, the problem is that a huge portion of the cost of incarceration is borne by the person being incarcerated: which, of course, is the intent, for otherwise the threat of imprisonment wouldn’t have a disincentive effect on behaviors the state has prohibited. But since the full cost of imprisonment is not borne by the state, economics suggests that there will be too much of it.

Here’s my not-entirely-facetious* suggestion for getting government incentives right with regard to imprisonment. For each person the state imprisons, the state should hire, at whatever price the free market will bear, an innocent person who will be imprisoned under the same conditions for the same amount of time. (It need not be one single person for the full duration of the sentence. Presumably this job would have very high turnover.)

This way, the government will imprison someone only if the benefit to the government (which will be aligned to some degree with that of the public in a democracy) is greater than the cost, as determined by the free market, to the person being imprisoned.

Of course, there are other costs of imprisonment the state bears, such as maintaining buildings and hiring prison guards, so we would might end up with too little imprisonment under a such a one-for -one scheme. So perhaps the state should hire four innocents to be imprisoned for every five actual prisoners, or two for every three.

At any rate, the government would be a lot less cavalier about locking people up left and right under if it followed such a plan.

Comments on blogs are a mixed bag. Sometimes they’re excellent, as those at Crooked Timber almost always are, and sometimes they’re uniformly awful despite the quality of the blog, like those at Political Animal.

Sometimes you stumble on a real gem buried in blog comments, like this bit by Charlotte Pressler, professor of philosophy and English at South Florida Community College, at Matthew Yglesias’s blog:

I teach an introductory philosophy course in rural South Florida and so might be able to contribute some analysis (quickly, before Hurricane Charley gets here). Almost all my students are evangelical and/or charismatic Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and almost all believe that truth is relative. I found this contradiction interesting, and looked into it further.

It appears to have two sources. First, my students apply the word “truth” to all of the statements they believe, and don’t distinguish between claims of fact and claims of value. They are not encouraged to make such a distinction by the local culture; the local authorities frequently describe obvious value claims as “facts,” adding that “you can’t argue with facts.” “Truth,” in my students’ dialect, thus winds up meaning something like “my basic orientation to the world, the way I see things, my perspective”—which would be correctly described as personal, individual, and “relative.”

I might add that an article in the journal Teaching Philosophy (apologies to the author, whose name I can’t remember) argued that the beginning philosophy students who claim that “truth is relative” are really trying to say something like this: “I don’t agree with Mom & Dad any more about a whole lot of things, and I love them, so I don’t want to say they’re wrong, but I don’t want to give up my own point of view either.”

The second reason my students believe that truth is relative, however, strikes me as much more pernicious. They have grown up in small, tribal, tightly-knit, highly conformist communities that (needless to say) did not encourage free discussion or debate. In college, they meet for the first time people who do not share their presuppositions, and they begin to get an inkling that the wider world contains many more. They have never been asked to defend their own belief systems before, and, in all honesty, some of their beliefs are quite indefensible. When students in this position say that truth is relative, they are trying to exempt their own belief system from the requirement of rationality. They want to be able to go on believing whatever their local community has decided to believe, even though both argument and evidence are against them. Again, they are encouraged in this by the local authorities, who teach them to devalue reason and (especially) “book learning.”

The fact is that my students will be ostracized by their local communities (it’s called “disfellowshipping”) if they disagree in any point with their community’s creed. It is a public, brutal shaming, and any human who could avoid it, would. If this sheds any light on the “relativism” of the American public (or, perhaps, the persistence of “creation science” and other follies), I would be glad.

(Reproduced with permission from the author.)

Prof. Pressler really should be blogging.

The local group that I play boardgames with, the Memphis Strategy Boardgaming Community was the subject of a writeup in today’s Commercial Appeal (reg. required).

The accompanying picture is of Joe, Alan, and me posing in front of a Settlers of Catan board. (We actually played Modern Art that evening.) That’s me in the hat, and the drink in my hand is Maker’s Mark.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't care what the context or who it is--prison rape is no laughing matter. This is especially true in the case of a person who, although a scumbag, has not been proved to be a murderer in a court of law.

Prisons are nasty, brutal places, and dehumanize all parties involved. I don't know that there's a viable alternative to prison--especially for hardcore violent offenders, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to figure one out. Jokes about prison life don't really make matters better, and the overall feeling that prisoners somehow "deserve" what they get (even though non-violent offenders are the most common victims) is nothing short of disgusting.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the megalomanical dictator of Turkmenistan, "has ordered the construction of a palace made of ice in the heart of his desert country, one of the hottest on earth."

Perhaps he fancies himself as Kubla Khan from the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

UPDATE: Great minds think alike.

Eugene Volokh applies his theory of political slippery slopes to gay rights, noting that anti-gay bigots do indeed have something to fear from the end of government anti-gay discrimination, such as anti-sodomy laws.

The gay rights movement has won many victories, and has influenced many people even where it hasn't (yet) won -- such as in the gay rights debate -- by essentially asking "How does it hurt you?" How does it hurt me that two homosexual adults can have consensual noncommercial sex with each other in their own home? How does it hurt me that they can get married, or adopt children? (One can say that it may hurt their children, but many people, myself included, are skeptical about that.)

But that question ignores those gay rights proposals that would reduce the liberty of others—and it ignores the way the various proposals are, as a matter of practical politics, interconnected. As a logical matter, it’s possible to bar the government from discriminating based on sexual orientation, but to leave private parties free to do so. But as a psychological matter, many people’s judgments about what private people (or government officials acting in their private capacity) may do are affected by what the government may do. The more homosexual relationships are legitimized, the more many (not all, but many) people in the middle of the political spectrum on this question will condemn even private discrimination against homosexuals.

The analogy to race discrimination that gay rights advocates often cite is really quite apt here. People who oppose homosexuality are understandably worried that their views will become as stigmatized—and acting on those views will in many ways become as illegal—as racist views are now. And one way to fight this possibility is to fight it early, for instance in the marriage debate, rather than to wait until that’s lost and the gay rights movement moves even more firmly towards restricting the private sector.

Prof. Volokh sees the analogy to race discrimination, but in his final paragraph he goes on to say this:

So the result is pretty sad: Maybe we do have, as a practical matter, a choice between a regime that suppresses the liberties of homosexuals and benefits those who don't approve of homosexuality, and a regime that benefits homosexuals and suppresses the liberties of those who don't approve of homosexuality. Perhaps it's clear that one of the options, despite its flaws, is better than the other; as I said, I strongly support some parts of the gay rights program and tentatively support some others, despite the risks that I identify. [emphasis added]

Perhaps? Let’s alter that last paragraph a little:

So the result is pretty sad: Maybe we do have, as a practical matter, a choice between a regime that suppresses the liberties of blacks and benefits those who don't want to associate with blacks, and a regime that benefits blacks and suppresses the liberties of those who don't want to associate with blacks. Perhaps it's clear that one of the options, despite its flaws, is better than the other; as I said, I strongly support some parts of the civil rights program and tentatively support some others, despite the risks that I identify.

There are some libertarians who think that private employers, private businesses, and private landlords should be able to discriminate on the basis of race, while government should not. I disagree with this position (it’s at the top of my “Why I am not a libertarian” list), but I can respect it.

But if Prof. Volokh is right, and the slippery slope condemns us to one extreme or the other, restrictions on the liberty of racial minorities, or restrictions on the liberties of racial bigots, I can’t imagine a decent human being who would choose the former over the latter. And if it comes down to a choice between restricting the liberty of gays, and restricting the liberty of anti-gay bigots, it’s perfectly clear to me what the right answer is.

I sincerely hope you get that Federal judgeship you’re gunning for, Prof. Volokh. You’re smart, fair-minded, and seem to be a first-rate legal scholar. If I were President, I’d nominate you.

But I also sincerely hope that when you get it, you’ll grow a spine, and start denouncing bigotry for what it is.

UPDATE: According to Clayton Cramer, I'm part of an "enormous threat to civil liberties." (Hat tip to Will Baude.)

Very soon now, college campuses will be swarming with incoming freshmen. I have two pieces of advice for any who might be reading this blog. More to the point, I have two pieces of advice for incoming freshman boys. Never having been a freshman girl, I don’t have any particular advice for them, although perhaps some of what I have to say will be applicable.

First, if you are not an experienced drinker, you do not have a good idea how much alcohol you can handle. Always keep this in mind, because if you drink more than you can handle, you are likely to make a complete jackass of yourself. For example, if you drink the better part of a bottle of Absolut vodka, you might throw up in the social room of the freshman girls dormitory, get thrown out by the RA, and not remember it the next day. Or, if you get thoroughly schnockered drinking fuzzy navels, you might call the cute girl you have a crush on, confess your love, and not remember it the next day.

Second, always be really nice to all the freshman girls, because they are taking notes, and they are sharing them. If you do something to make a complete jackass of yourself, perhaps something involving alcohol, they will tell all their female classmates about it, and you will have problems getting dates for the next four years. You’ll probably have to date girls from another school in your city, who will not know what a jackass you are.

Juan Non-Volokh writes:

Dahlia Lithwick has her first guest column in the New York Times today. It's a very thoughtful piece on the unintended consequences of rape shield laws. It is further proof that most of the Times' guest columnists are better than the real thing.

Would that this were true of guest bloggers at the Volokh Conspiracy.

The controversial Ten Commandments monument is making a stop (reg. required) in the Memphis area today, at Six Flags over Jesus and at the First Assembly of God Church.

If you go, be sure to take special note of number 2.

Over at Flack Central Station, conservative economist Arnold Kling sees a nefarious plot in the new survey-based happiness research, pioneered by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith.

Referring to the paper How Not to Buy Happiness by Cornell economist Robert Frank, Kling writes:

... [I]t is Robert Frank who wants to impose a rigid conformity on our mode of living. In his model society everyone would commute by mass transit to work. So much for people who like to work from home, or live in a rural environment, or walk to work.

I am afraid that “happiness research” amounts to nothing but a flimsy excuse for left-wing academics to claim that they should be given control over how the rest of us live.

Kling doesn't bother mentioning that Frank makes no public policy recommendations in his paper. The paper could just as well be taken as personal advice to individuals: a Lexus won’t make you any happier than a Honda; you’ll be happier if you buy a smaller house close to where you work, instead of a large house far away; no one ever wished on his death bed that he’d spent more time at the office.

The most interesting passage in Kling’s essay is the following bit:

In making his case, Frank places a heavy intellectual burden on "happiness research." As I have pointed out before, economists traditionally have not bothered to try and measure happiness. We take it for granted that people act in their best interests.

Frank, on the other hand, takes seriously the notion that happiness can be measured by surveys. He views the fact that surveys show little increase in happiness over the past few decades as evidence that higher incomes do not lead to more happiness.

Frank’s problem, according to Kling, is that he takes new evidence seriously. Kling, on the other hand, is a virtuous economist who never questions traditional assumptions.

Kling reminds me of the Catholic priests railing against the Copernican revolution in astronomy:

It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour? (From the Wikipedia article on Galileo.)

Like the Catholic priests in the 17th century, Kling's world-view is upset by new evidence, and he'll add epicycle upon epicycle to preserve his central assumption.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)