The idea is to stop an individual from drinking “too much” sugary drink during a snack or meal. Under the ban, sometimes you’d be able to buy more than 16 ounces of soda in a single container, sometimes not.

Bloomberg has touted the ease of evading the regulation as a reason not to be disturbed by it. Settle down, doomsayers! If you’re so thirsty, just buy a more expensive multiple of small servings! Meanwhile, he’s saving us from the plight of obesity, or so he pretends to think. People are dying, Bloomberg reminds us. True enough, we’re all mortal. And we all take various risks in the process of living our lives. Sometimes in relation to the food and drink we ingest! Ergo, why not make the time we have left as uncomfortable and tyranny-ridden as possible? (Hmm…mightn’t the oppression itself, though, serve to abbreviate our life spans–or anyway chip away at the quality of our lives–by thwarting our ability to judge for ourselves how to sustain our lives, including how to apportion what we ingest, as well as by depressing our spirits vis-a-vis how hard it has become to escape the mandates and rhetoric of the gun-toting nannies of the world? It might!)

Whether the ban is futile or one more step toward telescreens in every room to monitor our every nutritional move, or both, New Yorkers who reject this immoral violation of their rights now have a friend in Justice Milton Tingling, who has blocked implementation of the ban in part on the grounds of its “uneven enforcement.”

“Uneven enforcement” is the least of the problem. I’m sure you can imagine that if the law were allowed to stand, Bloomberg and other government functionaries bloated with statist inclinations would have no problem saying “hey, sure, let’s harden the prohibition to make it more consistent.” Next he’d be soliciting bids from telescreen companies.

To be sure, Justice Tingling also decries the blubbery “administrative Leviathan” that would be spawned by the ban.

The city is appealing the ruling. Who will win? Bloomberg, arch enemy of adipose and individual rights, or the rights of liquid-drinking New Yorkers?

The point I am approaching is that I often know that I have a certain book in my library but am unable to easily get the book because it’s in a box somewhere instead of on a shelf. Recently I came across a recommendation of The Art of Cross-Examination by Francis Wellman. This volume, purchased many years ago, is in my library and may even be on a shelf, but I did not bother to look. Via Google I soon found two free pdf editions, one more cleanly typeset than the other, and downloaded the cleaner version to the Goodreader app on my iPad mini. These days, a reasonably readable free electronic edition of almost any classic text out of copyright can be gotten within a few minutes.

Part Two of The Art of Cross-Examination includes transcripts of famous cross-examinations. I began reading John K. Porter’s examination of Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield on instructions from God, as Guiteau believed or pretended to believe. Wellman writes that the defendant was “cleverly led [by Porter's cross-examination] to picture himself to the civilized world as a moral monstrosity.” Porter grills the assassin about when God inspired him to do the deed, when he realized the notion had been instilled by God, whether he initially disagreed with God about the feasibility of killing the President, etc. Goiteau’s thought of killing Garfield seems exactly like the kind of thought that might occur to a person had no deity implanted it. His insistence that God authorized the deed seems like what a rationalization of his own decision to commit it would seem like.

If one believes in God, how does one distinguish between a thought that has not been injected into one’s head by God but which one has convinced oneself (or at least is trying to convince oneself) has been thus injected, and a thought that has in fact been thus injected? In light of the fact that there is no God, there is no way to do it, no distinction to be made. The former is always the case.

The few articles I’ve read so far are informative and relatively well-written. (In relation to what? Good question. Other tech sites.) However, look at the following two paragraphs from a piece on the iPad mini, “The iPad mini is the best tablet,” authored by the initially pseudonymous “W C Staff,” whose implied collectivity does not prevent him or them (Seamus Bellamy and Brian Lam, we learn eventually) from referring to a singular self in such scissors-worthy self-referential sentences  as “I’m embarrassed to say this because I’ve been part of the problem by not talking enough about the heft” (my, that is embarrassing):

Basically, the mini makes any full sized tablet feel as cumbersome and as ridiculous as a Nano does compared to an iPod classic, or an Air does next to a 17-inch Macbook, or an iMac does next to an Mac Pro. In most of those cases, we don’t need the power–we need the convenience. In the case of a tablet, where most of us can go to a computer if we need more power, having more makes even less sense; this is not the kind of gadget you need more power in, and lying on a bed, sofa, or packing it in a bag for travel, the mini is superior in all contexts as compared to its big brother.

Sure, yes, it’s smaller but there are compromises. Yes it’s harder to touch type on in landscape–but typing on any iPad is miserable and it’s easier to thumb type in portrait. Yes, it is only as fast as an iPad 2 and sometimes a 3, making it less than half the speed of the iPad 4. Yes, it does not have a high end retina display like the iPad 4, and the Android and Amazon tablets have better resolutions and sometimes better screens overall. Yes, one day, it may be upsold with a retina display and you may have wished you waited. That might come as soon as next year.

We have here redundancy; breaches of parallelism; wordiness; the horrific (yet, by all evidence, ubiquitous) insistence on phrases like “compared to” or “superior as compared to” in the expressing of comparisons when standard-issue comparison-expressing phrases like “better than” or “bigger than” do just fine, as compared to the alternative of not-fine; lapses in verb tense.  So we have the mini “basically” (as opposed to derivatively? tangentially?) making its big brother look ridiculous. We have “as ridiculous as a Nano does compared to an iPod classic” instead of “as ridiculous as a Nano next to an iPod classic” (if we’re going to keep the “next to” in all three examples in our coordinate structure), or “superior in all contexts as compared to its big brother” instead of “better in all contexts than its big brother.” We have “upsold” instead of–instead of what? We have “one day…you may have wished you waited” instead of “one day…you may wish that you had waited.” The author or authors should also be introduced to the hyphen. Etc.

What’s the solution? Copy-editing. Hire a copy editor, tech sites. Because I’m embarrassed to say that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Don’t just talk about the heft.

For me, I have been waiting for the iPad Mini for some time.

Different story, different writer:

The iPad mini—at least for me—allows me to type easily…

Same story, same writer:

For me, I didn’t feel that way…

For me, I don’t think I’m nitpicking, given how many other examples of wordiness can be found in each of the above articles.

Does any writer genuinely fear that the naked and alone pronoun “I” (or, for that matter, “me”) will unless slathered in redundancy be confused with “you,” “he,” “they,” or some other uber-familiar pronoun? Isn’t the first person singular pronoun very well established in its reference to self? As pronouns go, it cannot be surpassed for clarity. At least I think so. For me.

Assertions of knowledge are always asserted by a self making a claim to know. The better informed a writer is, the smarter he is, the wiser he is, the more confident he may be in voicing his judgments. Even so, the possibility of error or incompleteness may be taken as a given unless the writer is also making a special effort to imply infallibility. Yet some writers seem to fear that their most ordinary and uncontroversial articulations of personal assessments will be taken as too obnoxiously egotistical and assertive of identifiable fact unless linguistically wet-noodle-ified. Paradoxically, the result of the linguistic linguini is that the judgmentalism-eschewing self calls distracting and wordy attention to itself. The point of the article is set aside until the author can exorcise the demon of self. “Look at me! I’m not foisting my preferences and analysis on you!! I, for me, am not trying to pick a fight here! I’d never impose me and my subjectively perceived universe on you and your subjectively perceived universe, which latter, however contradictory to mine, is ever so equally valid! Ah me! Wonderful, tentative, card-carryingly nonjudgmental, unedited me! Oh frabjulous day, coolah coolay!”

For you, do you agree with me? Because, you know (and I know), for me, and for you, you sure should.

Of course Obama is hard-core leftie and vicious, much worse than Romney; so we would have had a better chance to expand our freedom and improve our economy with Romney than with Obama. But Romney is muddled at best. In Massachusetts, he signed off on Romneycare, the proto-clone of Obamacare. Romney would most likely have sought to entrench aspects of Obamacare he “could agree with,” and otherwise fecklessly prepared the way for the next Democratic incursions. It may well be true, as Romney infamously speculated, that 47%+ of voters “can’t” be–or, at least in the short term, won’t allow themselves to be–reached by any appeal to values of freedom and self-reliance and non-robbery-of-thy-neighbors. But let’s find that out instead of trying to guess at it by offering only a muddled and self-contradictory alternative to full-throttle Obama-style statism. Alleged friends of freedom who divine from this defeat that the best way to proceed is to give up for lost even more of our rights and freedoms so as to avoid alienating the most recalcitrant Obama supporters are following the same failed strategy that has so often served to entrench and expand the welfare state since at least the New Deal. You don’t win battles you don’t fight.

What should Republicans in Congress do now? For one, obstruct. Don’t, for example, raise the debt ceiling–i.e., act instead as if the ceiling is a ceiling. Offer, at the very least, a balanced budget. Why not? And push for it. Don’t give up when demonized by the lib-dems. Expose their obfuscations and lies. Etc.

For two, explain–clearly, simply, repeatedly–what is at stake, what will happen to our wealth and freedom if the looters of our wealth and freedom are allowed to keep on stealing them and eroding our ability to foster our own well-being. Explain how our wealth and freedom will decline, ever more precipitously. And how it will then be harder not only for the productive people, but for everybody, to survive. Europe is the preview. Explain also that stealing stuff is wrong.

In a recent post at Cato’s libertarianism.org in which he endorses psycho-speculations of Roy’s motives offered by Ron Neff, George H. Smith reports that Roy toward the end of his life told him that he believed that anarchism is impractical. But a sarcastic remark by Smith, which he recalls now with regret, unfortunately ended the conversation before Roy could elaborate. Ron Neff, for his part, cites Roy’s earlier reference to the messy situation in Lebanon. “He referred to the condition into which Lebanon had fallen after the shelling of Beirut by Israel in September of [1982], and he said that that was what anarchism would produce.” For Neff, the import of this example is somehow unlikely to represent what he calls “the whole story” of Roy’s rejection of his famously influential anarchist views. Another old friend of Roy’s, Jeff Riggenbach, offers a fine profile of Roy for Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast that stresses the influence of Roy’s early anarchism but also scrupulously neglects to mention his eventual repudiation of that anarchism.

That anarchism or anarcho-capitalism can’t coherently function to objectively protect individual rights doesn’t seem a bad reason for believing that anarchism is impractical from the perspective of someone who values life, justice, rights, liberty. In the anarcho-capitalist society, what indeed is to be done about competing gangs—oops, competing “defense agencies”? Would a government concerned about (actual) rights and (actual) freedom and (actual) justice be justified in outlawing fundamentally competing brands of physically-enforced justice? Would a genuinely just, libertarian “defense agency” be justified in “competing with”—i.e., using force to stop—a “defense agency” determined to impose reparations for slavery, to impose reparations for the taking of Indian land, to stop abortions by force, or to extract the “surplus labor value” that the rich capitalists “steal” from their employees?

That anarchism is incompatible with the protection of individual rights is obvious from reading the news. Look at what the Mafia Defense Agency does. Look at what the PLO Defense Agency does. Look at what the Al Qaeda Defense Agency does. Such annoyingly obtrusive facts as the chronic conduct of these defense agencies are meaningless, though, we’re told. Anarchists tend to reply, “There you go again. That kind of bloody conflict among power-lusting gangs is not what we mean by defense agencies or an anarcho-capitalist society. What we mean is the smoothly functioning rights-respecting ‘defense agencies’ of our disconnected-from-facts-on-the-ground theoretical books and journal papers, a society in which everybody is always carrying around a copy of the Libertarian Law Code and has sworn to it eternal fealty, ever ready to submit to arbitration in case of a dispute the defense agencies can’t resolve amongst themselves as if the last three thousand years of human history had never happened. Human beings aren’t evil by nature, after all.”

In other words, anarchists merely assume that none of the proposed defense agencies would in fact actually be competing at the most fundamental level—i.e., at the level of what vision and package of justice, rights, and proper use of coercion they would be promoting in the brochure—a level at which they would not be inclined in good faith to accept binding adjudication of disputes if they happen to hold the exact opposite view of rights and justice as the party doing the adjudicating.

What happens, according to the anarcho-capitalists, in the anarcho-capitalist society with respect to fundamentally different uses of coercion? Is it that the defense agencies will be free to compete at the very most fundamental level, but that they simply won’t want to, all criminal, leftie and jihadic motivations for violating actual rights having evaporated as soon as the anarcho-capitalist program gets the go-ahead? Or would there, after all, be some kind of mutually accepted and enforced ban on the wrongful use of force? If the latter, would there or would there not be enforceable mechanisms in place for adjudicating disputes among the defense agencies, and for declining to renew the license of a defense agency that tries to blow up World Trade Centers in the name of the Allah Defense Code?

Problem, though: as soon as any such reasonable, enforceable constraints are imposed on the defense agencies independently of their preferences in a particular dispute, we are talking about an apparatus of limited government, not about anarchism or anarcho-capitalism. The defense agencies would be governed by this government. They wouldn’t be allowed to secede to institute a contrary program of justice, rights and coercion.

To be sure, unfettered government is also misbegotten with respect to the purpose of safeguarding genuine rights. So what, then, would be a practical means of protecting life, liberty and property in a society? We the people would have to institute a government restricted to the defense and enforcement of individual rights, an institution the attaining and maintaining of which depends a lot on education, ideas and culture. (Which means that anarchists are wrong to suggest, as some do, that governments virtually automatically devolve into tyrannies—ideas and culture being potent in their view except when they matter not at all.) Such a limited government could accept a lot more competition in means of protecting rights than we see today; but it could not permit citizens to protect their rights anywhichway whatever, especially when there is no immediate threat to life and limb.

According to Neff, it’s unlikely that Roy Childs could have honestly come to the view that his youthful and rationalistic arguments for anarchism were mistaken. (By rationalism, here, I mean theoretical web-spinning that may be very smart and persuasive on its own self-contained terms but which inadequately takes into account critical facts on which the theory should be based.) For Neff, Roy’s change of mind was more likely strategic than genuine, a product of short-term political calculation. “I do not think he meant by [his claim that anarchism is not practical] that anarchism was an ideal that could never be achieved, or that competing defense agencies could not behave justly. I think he meant that anarchism merely exacerbated the alienation from American culture its adherents already felt, especially adherents who came from an Objectivist background,” Neff contends, as if Roy hadn’t pointed to Lebanon. (Only Roy’s every explicit reference to the question of anarchism versus limited government in his later years would tend to suggest that he meant what he said.)

Says Smith: “Though speculative, Neff’s explanation of what was really going on with Roy’s refutation of anarchism is, in my judgment, exactly on point, so I refer readers to his account for additional details.” In the same article, Smith also suggests that Roy’s employment of Objectivistic arguments in certain essays defending anarchism was mediated primarily by his desire to appeal rhetorically to Objectivist readers rather than by his own sympathy with Objectivist ideas.

All this strained imputation of merely strategic profession of conviction strikes me as gratuitous at best, a smear at worst. If Smith and Neff are right, Roy, dead at 43, was one of the most disingenuous severely-ailing non-writers of an essay he never got around to that ever bestrode lower Manhattan. But is it really so implausible to suppose that their good friend changed his mind about anarchism because Roy was a good thinker and a man of integrity who concluded that anarcho-capitalism is incoherent as a means of instituting a free society in large part due to the hardly irrelevant fact that it is?

I’m not sure why these files are being offered so inexpensively, since the demand would be there for somewhat higher prices still a lot lower than the old prices for cassettes or CD-ROMs. These MP3 prices are much better than even The Teaching Company’s frequent cut-rate sale prices for courses. Now would be the time to download from the ARI eStore any sets or individual lectures you are interested in, as for sure the prices are not going to go lower.

Ms. Frost, who sold earlier this year, said she was especially perplexed by Mr. Goldstein’s construction project since he had spent so many years agitating on behalf of his neighbors and their property rights as the Atlantic Yards developer, Forest City Ratner, muscled in. (Forest City Ratner also was the development partner for the headquarters of The New York Times Company.)

¶Mr. Goldstein called the comparison “laughable and offensive.”

¶“Are you kidding me?” he said by e-mail when first asked to comment on his neighbors’ displeasure.

¶In his calmer moments…

Why is the article writer or any reader treating as even vaguely equivalent the following: 1) coercively throwing a person off of property he owns and 2) a person’s developing his own property? The property owner discussed here has been adding an extension to his home on his own property. He has not been using eminent domain to take over neighboring plots owned by somebody else. Goldstein is consistent if in the one case he fought a developer using eminent domain to steal properties and in the other fought neighbors attempting to forcibly stop him from developing his own property. In each case, he defended property rights against those seeking to violate property rights.

“I don’t like how X is exercising his rights” is no argument for violating the rights of property owner who develops his own property. Lots of people dislike lots of things that other people do. If we could exercise the power of law to prevent others from doing anything we happen to dislike, there would be little or nothing that any of us could freely do by right. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to the use and control of property we honestly acquire, should be protected precisely so that we can act to sustain and improve our lives as we see fit despite the desire some others may have to interfere.