What I make of it is that Webb is a sleazeball politician pandering to the antihistorical superstitions of his white Southern supporters. Certainly Alexander “Cornerstone” Stephens is not the best person to cite as evidence that the Confederacy did not stand for the perpetuation of race slavery.

My question is what you make of Webb’s farrago of half-truths and red herrings.

Allen:

I think the key to judging the actions of the officer at the library is what if any training, instructions and guidelines they’ve received in regards to user not only the taser but in how to best deal with situations like this.

Why?

What sort of “training” do you think they’d need to understand that it’s not O.K. to torture a man who is already lying on the ground handcuffed with repeated electrical shocks?

I have no problem with looking at the problems that pervade the institutional culture of the UCPD, as far up the chain of command as you need to go. But I’ll be damned if The “Abu Ghraib” Defense is going to put me off holding these hired goons individually accountable for their actions.

Peter,

Do you think that it’s appropriate for police to respond to a violation of computer lab usage rules by torturing the rule-breaker with repeated electric shocks while he is lying helpless on the ground (including several shocks after he was already handcuffed), and while he offers no threat to anyone at all?

If so, you’re a fucking sociopath. Next.

Incidentally, this Halloween’s round of campus minstrel show partying included not only the “Halloween in the Hood” party at Johns Hopkins, but also an incident with two white frat boys at Whitman College in Washington state — also members of Sigma Chi (!) — who attended a “Survivor”-themed party in full blackface. As usual, the main excuse that these college juniors offered is that they were just too damned ignorant and thoughtless to be expected to know anything in particular about the history of blackface or why folks just might not be cool with it after all. See GT 2006-11-13: Thanks again, bro at http://radgeek.com/gt/2006/11/13/thanks_again for the details.

Kennedy: If the Cold War isn’t over then who’s fighting against collectivism? Collectivism is nearly universally embraced by Americans.

Well, sure, but of course that was true during the height of the Cold War, too. The anti-Communist mainstream weren’t fighting collectivism, they were just fighting for their own brand of managerial collectivism over the Soviet style.

If anything, blind deference to State prerogatives and identification with the established order of power are arguably much weaker forces now than they were around, say, 1962.

The argument that the party must put forth whoever is most likely to win has two flaws: …

That argument also seems a bit strained when it’s used as a reason for enthusiastic boosterism on behalf of a presidential ticket consisting of two established losers.

Unfortunately Hitchens adds this little bit at the end:

“And these [leftish Kurds who oppose the death sentence for Saddam], by the way, are the people that every liberal in the world is currently arguing that we should desert.”

Because, you know, we’re doing the Kurds some big favor by continuing the military occupation to prop up a “unified” Iraqi state at bayonet-point.

Donny,

I’m familiar with the economics behind patents and products like pharmaceuticals.

Saying “Oh, well, if it weren’t for patent laws there wouldn’t be enough investment in new drugs” has its own problems as an argument (enough for what? enough for whom?). But even if it were uncontroversially true that you get better results with patent laws than without them, I don’t see how that answers the question.

You didn’t say that healthcare should be provided through “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange” except when you can get better results from using coercion (e.g. by threatening legal force against firms that would be willing to provide generic medicines to willing customers). If that’s the principle you intend to endorse, then go ahead and endorse it, but you’ll need to drop the universal pronouncements about “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange” (since you’re willing to discard that principle in the name of expediency) and you shouldn’t be surprised when every busybody and medical welfare statist comes along with a new scheme for forced care, or forced denial of care, or forced prices for care, which would get better results for somebody or another.

If, on the other hand, you think that healthcare should always be provided through free, mutually beneficial exchanges, whatever benefits you might be able to extract through coercion, then you’ll have to explain how that could possibly be compatible with fining or jailing people for peacefully producing generic medicines and providing them to willing customers, in a “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange,” if they did so before an arbitrarily-declared, government-controlled time limit had expired.

Constant,

Partial deregulation can be economically disastrous.

Sure. For example, dumping existing healthcare subsidies for poor people and old people while keeping government-enforced monopoly pricing on drugs would be pretty crappy for the poor people and old people. (Generally speaking almost every government intervention has some countervailing intervention that’s intended to mop up after the mess it leaves. And we’ve got to repeal something or another at some point if we hope to repeal everything some day.) But anyway, like you I favor freedom regardless of economic consequences; I reject the idea that an injustice against anyone can be justified or excused by the fact that somebody else gets good results from it.

But while we’re on the subject of the economic consequences, we should keep in mind that the “disaster” being contemplated in the case of pharmaceutical R&D amounts to us being no worse off than we are now (not having new drugs on the market doesn’t mean that the old drugs will disappear). In fact we’d be better off, since all the drugs that are held at artificially high prices today through patent restrictions would eventually become available as generics. The putative harm consists in supposedly not being as much better off as we would have been if the inflated prices had been kept in place.

Even if that’s true it’s pretty weak for a “disaster,” and anyway I can’t see how anyone would even know whether it’s true or not without first managing to do socialist calculation of the most efficient levels of new drugs to have available 20 or 40 years from now (bearing in mind the necessary opportunity cost in other fields of research or production). Since socialist calculation is impossible, I don’t take the argument very seriously.

Me: Just out of curiosity, how did you calculate what the most efficient rate of long-term investment in drug research would be, absent a process of free market competition?

Steve: I did no such calculation. I trust that the efficient level of investment will be determined by estimates on the return on capital. Since that return will be lower in the face of lower profits … there will be an adjustment downward in the amount of R & D spending for the development of new drugs.

Ceteris paribus, sure. The question is why this is supposed to be worrisome, or even worthy of remark. If the U.S. government dropped agricultural price floors and subsidy programs tomorrow, that would probably reduce investment in domestic agribusiness, perhaps quite dramatically. If so, so what? Is that supposed to be “bad news” for people who plan to eat lunch in the more distant future?