Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Author: SUPREME OVERLORD trshmnstr

  • A libertarian analysis of Chevron deference

    A libertarian analysis of Chevron deference

    Why the hell would I bother to give deference to a damn evil oil (pronounced ohl) company? Well, Chevron deference has very little to do with oil, and nothing to do with genuflecting to a multi-national molester of Gaia. Chevron deference refers to the measure of how much a court should defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute when a case hinges on the ambiguity.

    As a trivial made-up example, let’s say that an employment law states that the “most senior” employee in a department is entitled to wear a crown in the office, enforceable by the NLRB. (yes, it’s a stupid example… so sue me) The NLRB creates regulations about what a crown is, what wearing a crown means, how to break seniority ties, etc. Of interest to us is the fact that the phrase “most senior” is left ambiguous by the statute. “Most senior” may be interpreted to mean oldest by age. “Most senior” may also be interpreted to mean the longest tenure at the company. Assuming that there is no clear statutory guidance to resolve that ambiguity, it’s up to the NLRB to determine what “most senior” means as they enforce the statute. The NLRB creates a regulation stating that “most senior” is by age. Years later, Sandy, an employee of Top Hats R Us files a complaint with the NLRB about the company’s blatant violation of the crown law. The NLRB sues Top Hats R Us for violating the crown law. Top Hats R Us rebuts by asserting that they followed the crown law. They provided the crown to Latitia, who has the longest tenure at Top Hats R Us. The NLRB counters back that “most senior” means oldest, not longest tenured.

    The court is placed in an interesting bind. How do they interpret the statute? Perhaps the court is inclined to agree with Top Hats R Us that “most senior” means longest tenured. Perhaps there’s some weight to be given to the NLRB’s interpretation of the statute given their administrative role. In Chevron v. A bunch of Hippies, the SCOTUS answered this question once and for all (lol).

    If Congress has explicitly left a gap for the agency to fill, there is an express delegation of authority to the agency to elucidate a specific provision of the statute by regulation. Such legislative regulations are given controlling weight unless they are arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute. Sometimes the legislative delegation to an agency on a particular question is implicit, rather than explicit. In such a case, a court may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by the administrator of an agency.

    Well, this may seem like a pretty easy decision for a libertarian. Either an agency gets to define the terms, or the people get a say in the interpretation of the terms. This takes some of the power out of the hands of the government. It’s very easy to over simplify the libertarian view on Chevron deference as “bias toward the agency means bias toward big government.”

    However, this line of thinking is wrong! Chevron deference is a separation of powers issue that requires a deeper analysis than a superficial “government bad”drive-by. If you view Chevron deference in the lens of administrative agency v. private citizen, you’re already heading down the wrong path. Chevron deference is about establishing the border between the executive branch and the judicial branch. It’s not overreaching administrative agency v. abused private citizen. It’s overreaching administrative agency v. overreaching activist court. This is Marbury v. Madison type stuff. Ilya Somin writes:

    As a general rule, deference to agencies tends to promote a pro-regulatory agenda, whether of the right or of the left. But there are notable cases where it might instead promote deregulation. It is worth remembering that Chevron itself deferred to a Reagan-era agency EPA policy that liberals thought did not regulate industry stringently enough. The plaintiff challenging the agency was the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent liberal environmentalist group. Ironically, Neil Gorsuch’s mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was the EPA administrator at the time the lawsuit began. The fact that his mother’s agency ultimately won the case evidently has not prevented Gorsuch from wanting to overrule it.

    The separation of powers argument against Chevron deference is a strong one. Critics claim that the judicial branch unconstitutionally abdicates its judicial power when it defers to an administrative agency. Somin explains:

    Article III of the Constitution gives the judiciary the power to decide “all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority.” Nowhere does the Constitution indicate that federal judges are allowed to delegate that power to the president or to the bureaucrats that work for him in the executive branch.

    The legislature makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the judicial branch interprets the laws. To be mixing and swapping these powers between branches is to undercut the fragile balance crafted by the founders. Cutting down to the core issue at hand, when the enforcement power of the executive branch requires some minimum amount of interpretation of the statutes that it enforces, how much of that interpretation is covered under the umbrella of the enforcement power, and how much is subject to reinterpretation by the judicial branch using their interpretation power? Justice Gorsuch has a very simple answer… all of it is subject to reinterpretation. This seems on first blush to be a fairly obvious statement. Where a branch is, by necessity, stepping on the toes of another branch, it would seem obvious that the other branch would have power to override the decisions of the overreaching branch. Chevron runs against that simple principle, thus Chevron is bad law.

    Well, you may ask, how is this even a controversy? It seems fairly cut and dried. It’s not.

    The Court [in Chevron] gave three related reasons for deferring to the EPA: congressional delegation of authority, agency expertise, and political accountability.
    Who haven’t yet been implicated in this mess? The legislature. Yeah, without the legislature passing crappy laws that are ambiguous and rely on administrative bureaus to do the real legislating through regulation, this wouldn’t be an issue. Yes, the legislative branch is the source of the mess that is Chevron deference. The reason for this will become clear later, but let’s just say for now that the legislature isn’t stupid, they know exactly what they’re doing when they pass these vague, crappy laws.
    Going back to the stated reasons for deference to agency interpretations, a problem with this scheme is that one of the factors is based on a fiction. Political accountability? Not necessarily so says Randolph May:

    Chevron itself involved a decision of the Environmental Protection Agency, an executive branch agency. With regard to executive branch agencies like EPA, or, say, the Departments of Commerce, Labor, or Transportation, it may be natural, as Justice Stevens did, to refer to the “incumbent administration” and to invoke the chief executive’s direct accountability to the people.

    But not so with the so-called independent agencies like the FCC, SEC, FTC, or the NLRB, with their potent brew of combined quasi-executive, quasi-legislative, and quasi-judicial powers. Unlike the single heads of executive branch agencies who may be terminated at will by the president, the independent agencies’ members serve fixed, staggered terms. And the prevailing view is that they may be fired by the president only for good cause.

    There are strict rules for holding agencies politically accountable, especially the independent agencies. The President, on a whim, cannot clean house at the EPA or the SEC. These bureaucrats may be even more fully insulated from the political winds than the judicial branch… a branch set up to specifically be insulated from politics.

    Quickly addressing agency expertise, I’ll say that as a person who has to deal with an expert agency on a daily basis (the USPTO), agency expertise is vastly overrated. If you trust the cop pulling you over to know his 4th and 5th Amendment jurisprudence, then maybe this “agency expertise” thing works for you, but for those of us in the real world, it’s laughable that the bureaucrats at these various alphabet soup agencies could be called “experts.”

    Another motivation discussed by the case was Congressional delegation. Can Congress even delegate their lawmaking authority? Is that Constitutional? Facially, no:

    The non-delegation doctrine, grounded in the separation of powers, arises from the very first word of the Constitution, after the Preamble: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States ….” (emphasis added). Taken at face value, that clear a statement would seem to preclude much of the “lawmaking” that goes on every day in the 300 and more executive branch agencies to which Congress over the years has delegated vast regulatory authority.

    However, FDR, riding on the coattails of Woody “The Real Lizzy Warren” Wilson and Teddy “Bloodthirsty Sociopath” Roosevelt (go read about them), did a number on the Constitution with his judicial intimidation tactics, including the non-delegation doctrine. Hell, how are these independent, legislatively controlled executive administrative agencies allowed to exist? Well, when you scratch the paint away, you’ll find a “living Constitution” argument:

    [This idiotic law review article] contends that the Founding Fathers made the Constitution flexible enough to meet administrative exigencies and did not intend to leave the enforcement of all laws to the President
    Remember, “flexible enough” means that we get to ignore the plain text meaning of the Constitution, and “did not intend” means that “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” in Article II of the Constitution does not actually mean all executive power, but only the executive power convenient to the totalitarian left. More seriously, there’s a good article here on the subject.
    Getting back to the subject at hand, current law says that the legislature can delegate their lawmaking responsibilities to executive and independent administrative agencies on a limited basis, and the agencies are tasked with executing intentionally ambiguous statutes laid out by Congress. This actually shifts the core question a bit. What if the administrative agencies aren’t interpreting the law nor executing the law, but actually making law? *shudder*
    I actually think that this is the closest interpretation to the truth, and I think it highlights what’s actually at the root of the problem. Chevron deference is merely a diseased branch on a rotten tree, the trunk of which is legislative abdication of responsibility. The judicial branch should excise the headless fourth branch of government wholecloth, and should slap the legislature back to the 19th century. The political accountability for laws rests on Congress. The expertise as to the meaning of the law rests on Congress. The delegation of authority by Congress is unconstitutional, and the court’s unwillingness to tell Congress to do their damn job is what is creating this issue with Chevron deference.  It’s time for the Supreme Court to bring back the non-delegation doctrine!
    The good news is that it looks like the SCOTUS is using the new Chevron unfriendly majority to move against Chevron deference. The better news is that it looks like SCOTUS is going to chip away at the hostility toward the non-delegation doctrine, too!
    Stay tuned during this next court session. Perhaps we’ll see a bit of power stripped away from the unconstitutional administrative branch. It’d be the first step away from handing unfettered power to these technocratic abominations in nearly 80 years.
  • Trashy Tries Philosophy Pt. 1: Is this really it?

    Trashy Tries Philosophy Pt. 1: Is this really it?

    As always, when it comes to philosophy and theology, I like to start with a disclaimer that I’m not the most well-read on these topics, so I may stumble onto other people’s ideas without attribution. I may use terms that already exist, but in different ways. Also, I may stumble into traps with just as much lack of awareness. I’m intentionally vague in some areas because I don’t want to be liable for knowing the ins and outs of certain philosophies that I only know superficially.

    When thinking about this specific topic, I was reminded of the beginning of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. His book has definitely influenced this article.

    I’m a big picture guy. I don’t like the feeling when I have a glimpse of a portion of the system, but don’t have an understanding of the system as a whole. This has worked both in my benefit and to my detriment in life. Math class was really hard when the teacher didn’t explain why the math worked, but only how the math worked. My learning curve as a software engineer was all that much steeper as I worked through all of the previously built functions of our product to learn how they worked rather than just trust that they’d do what their name implied. However, once I got over the hump, I was better at my job than my peers. My need to understand the big picture has been quite helpful in law… except where my manager needs me to just do things without understanding why.

    This need for systemic understanding also asserts itself in my political, philosophical, and theological life (I don’t consider those to be three separate areas, but three expressions of one area of my life… my worldview). You all may recognize some of the consequences of my need for systemic understanding. For example, I don’t find pragmatism very interesting or important. How things are accomplished don’t matter as much to me as whether things should be accomplished. Once I have settled on policy X being good*, and movement in the direction of X is good and any movement away from X is bad.

    * I’m using good and bad in the colloquial form. Below, as we get into the meat of this article, I’ll be using good and bad in a much more measured and intentional way.

    Is This Really It?

    The most basic philosophical question that I find interesting is “Is this really it?”, or , rephrased and reversed “Is there anything beyond the scientifically observable universe?” David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among others, basically said no. Most other well known schools of philosophers said yes, while building up a variety of different metaphysical constructs. We’ll come back to those constructs later, but let’s dwell on the question a bit longer and see if we can derive any practical applicability out of it. What does it mean for you and I if there is nothing beyond what can be observed and what can be reasoned?

    Well, it can be used to build a foundation for morality. Let’s define a few terms to start. Morality, for the purposes of this article, is the framework used to determine whether a certain action/inaction is good or bad. Good is something that conforms to a certain moral framework. Bad is something that does not conform to a certain moral framework. Amoral is something that exists outside of the moral framework (choosing a color of socks to wear today, for example). Morality can usually be distilled into a set of first principles (i.e. foundational principles), which, in applied form, creates a worldview.

    So, what does the absences of metaphysics mean for morality? Well, there seem to be three ways you can go: 1) nihilism – there is no morality; 2) normative morality – morality is baed on what is observed, felt, and intuited; 3) reasoned morality – morality is based on what is reasoned. For reasons I’ll expand on below, I believe that the first option is the only consistent moral framework in the total absence of metaphysics.

    Let’s start with the second option, normative morality. My general impression is that most normative frameworks are light on foundation and heavy on post hoc rationalization of really shitty behavior. Setting that aside for the moment, let’s figure out what normative morality is. Generally, it’s a genre of philosophies that use subjective or objective observations of reality to set the basis for their moral framework. This comes in many flavors, such as Greek hedonism (whatever feels pleasant is good),  relativistic postmodernism (good is based on lived experience), and utilitarianism (good is based on maximization of well-being). The first thing that strikes me about these “internal” philosophies is that they’re all fuzzy. They’re all based on a state of mind. While all of these philosophers would be on solid ground by starting every sentence with “I feel that . . . “, those who apply these philosophies make a fatal mistake when they expand the feelings of one onto all of humanity. The assumed egalitarianism is problematic. Taking hedonism as an example, what feels pleasurable to me may feel unpleasurable to you. As a trivial example, you may love the feeling of skydiving, and I may hate it. Is skydiving good or bad? The best we can say is that skydiving is good for you and bad for me in a hedonistic context. However, have we done anything by saying that skydiving is good for you and bad for me? Not really. We’re simply adding a layer of abstraction to the already assumed premise that skydiving feels good for you and feels bad for me.

    What happens when add the complication of an action having impact on more than one person? Rape feels good to STEVE SMITH, but feels bad to his victim. Now we’re at an impasse. We can add in concepts like lived experience (postmodernism) to attempt to bolster the victim’s position in this standoff. We can even try to quantify good and bad (utilitarianism) in a way that STEVE SMITH only feels marginally better and the victim feels massively worse, but the problem still remains. At some point, where one group’s good feelings are directly connected to the bad feelings of another group, the first group’s infliction of bad feelings on the second group is a good as long as there are enough of the first group and few enough of the second group. A rapesquatch village can have their way with a single victim until the victim is tortured to death because the intensely bad feeling of being raped to death by a roving gang of horny cryptids is outweighed by the marginally good feeling that a rapesquatch feels multiplied by the number of rapesquatches that partake, whether that be 10, 100, 1000, or 10 million.

    Finally, these normative philosophies give an overvalued weight to the subjective feelings and observations of a person. It doesn’t take much navel gazing to realize that there are people who feel and observe things that are not valid. Some of this is due to lack of information, such as when you get mad at the wrong person when you see that somebody took a bite out of your pumpkin pie while you were in the bathroom. Some is because your perceptions can be biased by your preconceptions, such as how every single hurricane is because of climate change these days. At the very least, it should be said that feelings and subjective observations have limited applicability outside of the person who has those feelings and subjective observations. What about the next person who has contradictory feelings and observations? Do they have a contradictory morality? What if a person’s feelings and observations change? Does their morality change? There’s nothing weightier here than one person’s whims. What we’re describing is a set of preferences and tastes, with the commensurate weight. “Good” and “bad” are nothing more than labels, like “fashionable” and “tacky”.  Cutting through the rhetoric, I’m attempting to expose the fact that these internal-based moralities aren’t really moralities at all. They’re rationalizations for preference and taste built on the empty foundation of nihilism.

    All moralities under the normative umbrella suffer from the “is/should” problem (this is why I called them “normative moralities”). Just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean that it should be that certain way. Ignoring the subjective aspects of the observer, empirical evidence doesn’t teach any moral or ethical principles. To derive such principles, one has to apply intuition, insight, or reason to the evidence. Now we’re falling into the same issue, these “external” moralities are really just “internal” moralities based more heavily on sensory input than on states of mind. While these sensory inputs are more strongly anchored in an objective reality than the observer’s whims, the influence of those whims are merely reduced, rather than eliminated. In essence, we have a set of preferences and tastes with the added weight of a relationship with evidence derived from the objective reality. It’s hard to get less abstract than this, because there are so many different forms of this type of philosophy out there. Utilitarianism often falls into this category. However, this is where the “is/should” problem comes in. How much more ethical weight does this evidence provide? Just because animals fight to the death doesn’t mean that murder is good.  Somebody with the presupposition that nature is good would say that the fact that animals fight to the death means that murder is good. Somebody with the presupposition that nature is evil would say that the fact that animals fight to the death means that murder is bad. If we enter the analysis without presupposing the morality of nature, then the fact that animals fight to the death has zero bearing on the morality of murder. This is the crux of the “is/should” problem. The only time that evidence of a practice or condition in objective reality can be used in favor of the morality of the practice or condition is when you presuppose that nature is moral, which is . . . metaphysics! Observational moralities have to be built on a metaphysical foundation in order to be coherent.

    This leads directly into reasoned moralities. Reasoned moralities, despite being vaunted due to the application of reason, are also normative moralities, with all the same faults and flaws. Reason is really good at applying an existing moral framework. “If A then B” works really good at proving B if A is presupposed, but just like before, you have to presuppose something in order for reason to be applied. In parallel to above, if reason can be used in favor of the morality of B when you presuppose A, the presupposition of A is . . . metaphysics! Without some sort of supernatural principle/framework/entity/etc that supports A, your reasoned morality is built on the same nihilism as the other forms of normative moralities.

    Another way to view the inherent shortcomings in these normative moralities is to view them through the lens of authority. Why should I conform to your morality? Why should you conform to your morality? If the answer, when you get to the foundation, is “because it makes me feel good”, then morality is nothing more than etiquette or preference. This is true whether the morality is a simple hedonism, or whether it is couched in much more complexity, such as Darwinist morality (good is to evolve). To attribute any more weight to good feelings than mere preference or taste is an exercise in indulging one’s ego.

    To finish out this first edition of trashy’s sophomoric blatherings, I’ll address nihilism. Nihilism, in my opinion, is one of two self-consistent moral frameworks. The other is moral absolutism based on divine natural law. We’ll obviously dive into more detail on that later. However, nihilism also has some weaknesses. One is that most humans seem to have some sort of moral compass/conscience, and the conscience is essential to their being. People who override their conscience tend to accumulate undesirable consequences in their lives. Sure, much of that may be explained by the “morality as etiquette” model (socially, poor etiquette results in negative social consequences). However, there’s something profoundly disturbing to most humans about living in a world where there is no right and no wrong, and where nothing means anything. People stare into the abyss and become profoundly afraid. I don’t think I’ve met a single person who has been able to retain a truly nihilist view for a significant period of time. Usually, their nihilism evolves into a squishy moral relativism or into existentialism.

    Clearly, if we are to reject all metaphysics as a moral foundation, we’re choosing to dive headfirst into the abyss. That may be a satisfactory answer for a select few, but the next article will address the alternative, the various metaphysical constructs that can serve as a foundation for morality.

  • True Thoughts and Conspiracies – A Trashy Form of Fiction

    True Thoughts and Conspiracies – A Trashy Form of Fiction

    Stephen, a rotund man with an acute case of rosacea and a few beads of sweat trickling down his face, carefully navigated his boxers over his deflating erection, visibly working hard to avoid tipping over onto the bed. He ran his fingers up the side of his wife’s still naked body, trigger her back to pucker up into pert goosebumps.

    “That was great Janice, we need to do this more often,” Stephen softly whispered, trying not to disturb her post-coital glow. She refocused her eyes on him lovingly, her smile psychically channeling her internal ecstasy into Stephen’s understanding.

    “Mmmmmm, honey, this … this was so good!” Janice purred, sensuously wriggling under the covers in a way that made Stephen want to crawl right back into bed for another round of mattress wrestling. However, his subconscious gave a pinch like a lactose intolerant rectum on a first date at an Indian restaurant. Stephen knew that he couldn’t keep up with his mid-life crisis. She was still a supple 23 with smooth skin and curvaceous volume in just the right places. He was a flabby, hairy 45 year old with a big house and a bigger checkbook. He knew he wasn’t enough to satisfy her; that’s what today was about.

    “You know, we still have enough time to catch a movie. I heard that First Man movie is good.” Stephen emerged from the requisite catatonia after an orgasmic emission. “I’ve always been fascinated by movies about the Apollo program, Apollo 13 was great!”

    “It’s all fake, you know,” a voice jarringly interjected from the chaise in the reading nook. “The moon landings were a hoax.” The voice was disturbingly earnest, with just a hint of condescension. Just the tone one would expect from the half-naked twenty-something Adonis of a man tapping away on his iPhone in the corner of the bedroom.

    “What the hell are you talking about, Brad?” Stephen shot back, launching all-out thermonuclear body language war with the man whore in his reading spot. Stephen made a mental note to bleach the hell out of that chaise before sitting there again. If only that furniture could speak…

    He snapped out of his train of thought with a realization that he couldn’t afford therapists for all of the furniture that was violated during today’s extended game of hide the pickle. Not while paying for that bitch of an ex-wife’s therapist, too. God, what a wrinkled old cunt!

    Brad had leisurely removed his thong-ridden sweaty ass cheeks from Stephen’s sacred retreat, and was slowly getting dressed while he put together a parting shot that would extricate him from the room with his payment and without fucking up next week’s scheduled romp time with Stephen and Janice. He really wanted that damned 84″ QLED TV, whether or not it meant doing the devil’s threesome with some rich geezer and his glorified whore.

    “The moon landing was a hoax. An American bluff to the Soviet space race dominance.” Brad muttered without addressing anybody in the room. He hoped beyond hope that this was the end of the conversation and he could go home and take a shower. He could feel that whore’s randy juices congealing in his beard, and he internally cringed at the thought of how much beard wax it would take to return his chin mane to its former glory.

    “Brad, you aren’t even old enough to have seen the moon landing, how would you even know?” Janice sat up in bed, any remaining aura of afterglow having been replaced with a mix of mild annoyance and reluctant curiosity. Brad noticed her perky bosoms settle into an oddly attractive asymmetry, like a cute girl with a crazy eye. Janice, following Brad’s gaze, covered her mammaries in reflexive embarrassment.

    “It’s all out there… you know, on the Internet. The videos were clearly produced in Hollywood. The artifacts are more of science fiction than science fact. I mean, you can even see the flags waving in the breeze! Who do they think that they’re fooling?” Brad felt his hackles rising, and he resigned himself to getting into this debate yet again. These ignorant fools don’t even know that the moon landing is fake… they probably think that Al Quaeda did 9/11 and Sandy Hook was done by a disturbed autist.

    “Your-” Stephen started.

    “Let me ask you a question, before you get started,” Brad interrupted, pausing for dramatic effect before continuing. “What evidence do you have that the moon landing actually happened?”

    “Well, uhh,” Stephen was caught off guard and gathered himself under the disguise of thoughtful contemplation. “There are people who claim to have gone to the moon. There is a large amount of equipment still around that was used to send people to the moon. There is video of men on the moon. Hell, I’ve even seen a moonrock.”

    “What do you find most convincing from that evidence?” Brad questioned, pretending not to notice that Stephen’s Trump-like penis was slowly retreating through the slit in his boxers into it’s fungal habitat like a snail tentacle after encountering a patch of salt.

    “Well, I guess the video is most convincing,” Stephen tried to hide his defensiveness by leaning onto the edge of the bed, unintentionally flaunting his scrunched up coin purse through the widened hole in the front of his only clothing.

    “The video?” Brad scoffed, barely reining in a condescending “harumph” that would’ve been the last nail in the coffin of his plans to continue to rock the world of that naked vixen whose cheek still showed the remnants of his primal rut. “The video could just as easily have been fabricated. In fact, it has many issues that indicate possible fabrication. If you strip away your trusting bias, you-”

    “Trusting bias? I’m the one with a bias?” Stephen shoved away from the bed, causing Janice to flinch in a way that tore her out of whatever trance was allowing her to tolerate this idiotic debate. She slid out of the sheets, and walked, intentionally seductively, to the closet to grab some clothes. Movie or no, she was going to get dolled up, if only to make Brad feel jealous and to distract Stephen from this inanity. She knew how Stephen was, he’d talk all night if somebody didn’t distract him.

    “Yes, you’re too trusting of the media and the government. Humor me for a moment and approach the moon landing from a skeptic’s point of view,” Brad was clearly enjoying this a bit too much. He could feel the blood coursing back into his flaccid meat tube.

    “Ok, I’ll play along. As a skeptic, I see a bunch of video seeming to show people in suits on a rocky surface with low gravity. I see a rock that doesn’t look like a normal rock I could find in my backyard. I’ve seen a full sized model of a rocket that could plausibly send these men into space. I’ve heard more than one person talk as though they have been to the moon.” Stephen was also enjoying this a bit too much, although not with the sexual repercussions that were stretching Brad’s thong under his sweatpants. “I guess that if I didn’t trust what I was told about these things, they could represent anything from a legitimate trip to the moon to a conspiratorial hoax. I don’t have any direct evidence that anybody has actually been on the moon.”

    Brad nodded in approval, cutting in before Stephen could assert dominance. Brad chuckled internally as he recognized the same power play he used while directing the three person play that was the violation of Janice. “But why wouldn’t you believe them? They have no reason to lie, right?”

    Brad paused, locking eyes with Stephen and not faltering when Janice sauntered back into the room, stuffed into a mini-skirt and halter top that looked like it was about to burst. “Wrong! They were losing the space race! The Soviets beat them to every major milestone, and the Americans were desperate for the upper hand. It was a pivotal time in the Cold War, and the Americans couldn’t afford to lose this one.”

    “I mean, I guess that’s plausible, but Occam’s Razor seems to suggest that it’s more likely that they actually did it rather than some massive conspiracy including thousands of people to fake a moon landing.” Stephen, unlike Brad, made no attempt to hide his notice of Janice’s provocative dress.

    “What is there to believe if we can’t trust the history books, the contemporary records, and the testimony of others?” Janice contributed, to the shock of both Brad and Stephen.

    “That’s just it!” Stephen supported “If we don’t trust the government and historians about the moon landing, what can we trust them about? What is truth when you don’t trust anything outside of your own first-hand experience?”

    “Now you’re talking! Question everything!” Brad said, betraying his love for the X-files and for pot. “How do you even know that there is a place called New Zealand? There are pictures and videos, and people pretend that they have been there, but without actually going there, I have no idea that such a place exists.”

    Stephen, obviously annoyed at this turn of conversation, pulled Janice close, pressing her soft body against his. “You’re a moron, but your point is well taken. I can’t know that something is the truth unless I’ve directly observed it. Everything else is built on some sort of social trust. It’s an assumption that people won’t collectively and casually lie to you about history and science and other things that you can’t and won’t verify.”

    “So, are we going to watch First Man?” Janice asked, sliding her hand down Stephen’s pantleg in an obvious sign of impatience.

    “See you next week, Brad,” Stephen asserted with a finality that caused Brad to turn and walk out the door.

  • GlibFit 3.0 week 10 – Completion!! Happy Thanksgiving!!

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    Congratulations!! We have made it through another session of glibfit!! I hope you achieved your goals, or at least learned something!

     

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    If anybody is interested in taking the reins for the next round of GlibFit, let me or SP or somebody know. I’m thinking that late March or early April is a good starting point for the next GlibFit, but I don’t really want to lead the next one. Frankly, I’m running out of material.

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    Happy Thanksgiving and happy GlibFitting from me and Mrs. trshmnstr!!

  • Radical Individualism is a Blight on the Libertarian Movement

    I’ve written in the past about my view of rights. Specifically, I see them as characteristics of relationships. To paint with a broad brush, they’re the boundaries of the authority a party can assume within a certain relationship. I really like the way it tidies up certain libertarian gray zones, like minors and animals.

    Anyway, there are two ways that libertarians tend to view rights: Deferentialism and Restraintism. Deferentialism is “live and let live.” Restraintism is “mind your own business.” My conception of rights as characteristics of relationships falls heavily on the Restraintist side. One of the big themes of my article on these libertarian views of rights is that Deferentialism cedes any moral standing, but Restraintism retains moral standing. I wrote:

    Deferentialism is ineffective in two ways. First, people, even Deferentialists, tend to have a line drawn in the sand where they shift from relativistic deference to the individual to a more absolutist stance. For example, Cosmotarians tend to be Deferentialists up to the point where their particular identity politics ox is gored. Second, Deferentialism gives no answer to Cultural Marxism. Deferentialists are either forced to kowtow to the virulent left, or they end up drifting authoritarian.

    Radical Individualism is very strongly correlated with Deferentialism. The radical individualist not only rejects the government meddling that all libertarians loathe, but they also reject any attempt of society, the community, family, or friends to influence their behavior. I believe that the moral relativism inherent in “live and let live” results in a wholecloth rejection of authority, even in situations where the authority may be legitimate. In order to stay philosophically consistent, the radical individualist ends up sounding like the punk 17 year old whining that his parents can’t tell him what to do anymore. This is the most superficial way that radical individualism harms broader libertarianism.

    "man is by nature a social being since he stands in need of many vital things which he cannot come by through his own unaided effort. Hence he is naturally part of a group by which assistance is given him that he may live well. He needs this assistance with a view to life as well as to the good life." - Thomas Aquinas
    “You can tell me what to do, daddy”

    Libertarianism has a reputation for being something you grow out of once you get real life experience. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that it makes sense on paper, but the real world is too complex for it to work. I think that a large portion of that sentiment comes from the outsized influence of the most virulent form of radical individualism, Objectivism. I’ll freely admit that I’ve never read a word of Rand, and I’m not beating the library’s door down to get a copy of Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. However, her influence is felt far and wide through the libertarian movement, and it undergirds the complaints that libertarianism is a pipe dream of maladjusted teenagers.

    Taking it down another level, the radical individualist answer to the complexities of the real world tends to be “fuck everything except for my rights.” You’re never going to hear me get squishy on self-ownership, but when this all or nothing attitude transcends the government-citizen relationship, the line blurs between fervent defender of self-ownership and weapons grade asshole.

    Not to pick on her, but Nikki’s view on children is an outcropping of radical individualism. (For those who do not remember, Nikki basically believed that children had full agency and that parental discipline/guidance/control was essentially a form of abuse). Despite the fact that the parent-child authority dynamic is perfectly natural and is seen in many species besides our own, Nikki’s complete inability to decouple the illegitimate authority of the state from the legitimate authority of parents led to a facially ridiculous outcome. Whether viewed emotionally, in a utilitarian lens, practically, or in a principled lens, treating children as having full agency is a non-starter.

    "man’s natural instinct moves him to live in civil society, for he cannot, if dwelling apart, provide himself with the necessary requirements of life, nor procure the means of developing his mental and moral faculties" - Pope Leo XIII
    “I’m gonna make sure you listen to me next time, you brat!”

    Just because the most visible and outspoken authority is abused doesn’t mean that there is no legitimate authority in the world. However, most legitimate authority is voluntary authority. I listen to my boss’s instructions because I want to be paid. The day I no longer need my paycheck is the day that my boss loses his authority over me.

    Of course, I’m talking in abstraction when it comes to authority relationships as if a person has carte blanche authority over another. Every authority relationship has boundaries. In the government context, those boundaries are called rights. In a familial context, violation of those boundaries is called abuse. In social settings, those boundaries are called manners, propriety, or a handful of other names.

    However, I don’t think this point needs any more belaboring. It’s not particularly interesting or controversial to say that all relationships have boundaries.

    What’s more interesting is Distributism, specifically their foundational belief that the nuclear family is the base social unit, not the individual. I’m sympathetic to this belief primarily because I think that the modern shift away from traditional family has been on the back of government programs and government incentives. If I were to jump to the crux of the issue with radical individualism, I think this is it: radical individualism is unsustainable absent government subsidy.

    Literal individualism (never marrying, never procreating) is self-defeating as a concept. You live your life, you die, and your specific form of individualism is gone like a fart on the wind. Not saying you can’t live this way or that society should disfavor people who live this way, but it’s a transient way of life. You cannot base a society on a concept that, if practiced by all, would result in the extinction of your society within one generation.

    Subsidized individualism (single parenthood, divorce, etc.) only works because government is paying for it. I was watching The Sands of Iwo Jima the other day, and there was a scene where a woman tries to trap John Wayne’s character into a marriage because her husband had run out on her (or died in the war, I forget which). Being a single parent in the 19th and early 20th centuries was ROUGH. There was no “affordable preschool”, there were no flexible work hours, there was no FMLA. There were no anti-discrimination laws for hiring single moms. By and large, people remarried quickly and relied on family to help them out in the interim. Family was necessary…. fundamental, even.

    The subsidies go even further than you see at first glance. Even though all demographics take advantage of the “free” public schooling available to babysit their kids for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 13 years, the effects of removing that subsidy would be felt quite unevenly across demographics. Nuclear families, while being thoroughly inconvenienced (especially those who have an inflated two income lifestyle), have the blueprint to retake supervisory authority over their kids. One parent works. One watches the kids. Icky patriarchial family structure.

    What about subsidized individualists? What happens to the single mom or dad when the government subsidies go away? Sure, the affluent can afford hired help for raising the kids, but the masses can’t afford such a thing. The masses… they could go broke paying for daycare/private school, and a few probably would. Most would change their situation by either creating a nuclear family or relying on extended family to help out. Either way, family is the core. When you take the subsidies away, all that is left is family.

    This is why radical individualism is a blight on libertarianism. It’s either self-defeating on a societal level (in the case of literal individualism), or it’s based on a lifestyle that is antithetical to libertarianism on a societal level (in the case of subsidized individualism).

     

    "Mommy's going to drown me in the bathtub later, isn't she?"
    You know what would make this dynamic even better? A whole bunch of government incentives aligned to tear this family apart!

    I didn’t really address voluntary community in this article for two reasons. 1) I’m not convinced that community isn’t a form of extended family. 2) Voluntary community has a history of helping on the fringes, not massively altering the incentives across society.

    Instead of turning this into an essay, I’ll just leave a few questions for the commentariat’s consideration. If the family is the base unit of society, what does a dysfunctional family mean for society? Does any of this actually matter when it comes to governance, or is it just useful as a framework to convince others to embrace libertarianism? How do individuals interact in a family-centric society?

  • GlibFit week 9 wrapup – Incorporating fitness into your lifestyle

    Okay, this week I get to be a nasty nasty hypocrite. This is all about incorporating fitness into your lifestyle. As somebody who has been bouncing in and out of motivation, I’m in a “do as I say, not as I do” position.

    Image result for eating

    Fitness as some form of torturous summer camp never lasts. Diets, cleanses, purges, bootcamps, and all the other 5 or 10 week challenges (oh wait…) get you only so far as you have established a habit. That means:

    1) setting fitness as a priority of your lifestyle. Do things in your daily life that healthy people do, like walking 10,000 steps, like eating natural foods, like getting 30 minutes to an hour of HIIT exercise at least 3 days a week, like keeping track (even if only vaguely) of what you eat, like setting goals and meeting them.

    2) adjusting your intensity to your goals. Thrashing between crash diets and binge periods is a great way to gain weight and hate yourself. When you live a goal-based fitness lifestyle, you may increase your intensity at times when you have hard goals, and you may reduce your intensity at times when your goals are less strenuous. When you set realistic goals and match your intensity to those goals, you do less yo-yo’ing and you have more likelihood of maintaining your motivation.

    Image result for fitness lifestyle

    HIIT Workout of the Week

    Go pick something from a previous week!

    Recipe of the week

    Healthy Shrimp Scampi

  • GlibFit Week 8 Wrapup – Proper Form

    CLANK!!!! BHUFF!! CRASH!!!

     

    Oh yeah, there’s a crossfitter throwing weight around like a lunatic. Any bets on how long before his next injury? Oh wait, there it is!

    The weight floor is a great piece of people watching if you like to see who cares more about appearances and who cares more about results. Ever see that guy who basically yanks on the barbell, using the momentum to reduce the strain on his muscles? How about that person who locks out their joints to take the strain?

     

    Alright, this has to be one of you guys!

     

    It’s all over the place! Knowing your lifts and using proper form is more efficient and has a much lower likelihood of injury.

    Seriously, nobody gives a shit how many plates you have on your bar. Drop weight and do things correctly. Learn the difference between lifting with power and yanking. Learn how to modify your cadence to achieve endurance versus peak strength. Generally, fewer reps and a faster cadence gets you peak strength. More reps and a slower cadence builds endurance.

    Image result for strength training for women

     

    By the way, women. You won’t get “bulky” by lifting more weight. You’re not a man and you’re not on steroids, so you’re much more likely to get “toned” than to get “bulky”. Seriously. You may see some gains on the scale, but that’s only because you’re replacing loose pillowy fat with dense, lean muscle. The metrics that actually matter (appearance, fitness, and performance) will universally improved when you strength train.

     

    HIIT workout of the week

    Read it from the source, here.

     

    Healthy meal of the week

    This isn’t actually a meal, but it’s instructions on how to properly cook a healthy food.

    Specifically, salmon. People abuse the hell out of salmon and it still tastes half decent. Eventually it’ll get chalky and chewy once you render all the fat out, but you shouldn’t cook it that far.

    Once I learned how to properly cook salmon, I realized why half decent isn’t good enough. I’ve essentially ruined restaurant salmon for myself except at nice restaurants. The key, just like almost everything else cooking, is to cook based on temperature rather than time.

    We usually get cheap Aldi Atlantic salmon and it tastes better than an overcooked Pacific Sockeye. We should splurge for a good salmon filet and see how it turns out!

    Essentially, the method is as follows:

    -pat dry before cooking to prevent steaming the fish

    -cook the filet on medium-low heat to prevent chalkiness

    – cook to 120 before giving a quick sear on the meat side and pulling the fish

    Method here.

  • GlibFit Week 7 Wrapup – Interval v. Consistent training

    I don’t know if this is a common preconception, but before I knew better, I thought interval training was a bunch of bullshit used by soccer moms to avoid the mundane monotony and increased effort of a sustained consistent training pace.

    Image result for interval training

    The reality is quite different. Interval training benefits heart health, burns fat efficiently, and has other health benefits. If you’re going to spend time in the gym, you owe it to yourself to get the best results the most efficiently. Nobody wants to put in the effort for so-so results. high intensity interval training gets you better results in less time (granted, you need to exert more effort during the high intensity portion). Double up on the efficiency by combining cardio and strength training, and you’re going to see great results quickly.

    Image result for images workout training

     

    HIIT workout of the week

    It’s build your own HIIT workout week!!!

    Read it and weep!

     

    Healthy meal of the week

    Healthy Pad Thai

  • GlibFit Week 6 wrapup – 10k steps a day

    We’ve spent a few weeks talking about food, but that’s only half of the equation. The other half is activity.

    Mrs. trshmnstr wants to make sure that priorities are in order when it comes to working out. While the type and the amount and the intensity all matters when you’re trying to hit a goal, the important thing when starting out is to get your body moving on a daily basis. Mrs. trshmnstr recommends 10k steps a day as a goal. If you do nothing else, this will incrementally improve your fitness level.

    This is especially important when you’re largely sedentary during the day. I, as an example, spend most of my workday sitting on my ass. Sometimes I use the standing desk to get on my feet, but the most I move in a day is to the pisser and back. Getting a base level of movement into my life improves energy, which improves mood.

    It doesn’t take all that much to get to 10,000 steps. I find that I get 3-4k steps as a sedentary person. Add in an evening walk, a couple laps around the office during lunchtime, a trip up and down the stairs instead of the elevator, or a few extra steps from parking at the far end of the parking lot, and you’re getting pretty close to 10k steps.

    The great thing about 10k steps as a goal is that most smartphones track steps these days, you don’t need anything except comfortable shoes, and it doesn’t take very long. It’s the perfect first goal for somebody who doesn’t have the time to get into the gym for an hour. You can be on a phone call, you can talk with a coworker, you can spend time with a spouse, you can do quite a few things while walking.

    Anyway, enough trying to sell this concept. Seriously, don’t be a lump.

    Workout of the week

    Complete the following circuit four times, resting 1 minute after jumping rope in each round.

    1. Mountain Climbers

    Reps: 45

    2. Pushups

    Reps: 20-30

    3. Front Plank

    Duration: 1 min.

    4. Jump Rope

    Duration: 1 min.

    (see this and more workouts here: https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/10-hiit-workouts-to-get-you-shredded-for-summer/2-jump-rope-interval-workout/)

    Recipe of the week

    Shrimp-and-Vegetable summer rolls

     

  • 8 Forms of Capital or Why Equality of Outcome is Impossible

    One of my favourite Canadians, the Canadian Mike Rowe (Curtis Stone) introduced me to an interesting concept that solidified in my mind why equality of outcome is ridiculously impossible.

     

    Curtis pulled this from a book that I haven’t read, but he cites it in the video if you’re interested. Frankly, the concept is a bit hippy-dippy for me, so you may see a bit of measured skepticism from me.

    The premise of the video is that there are 8 forms of capital:

    Financial capital – money

    Material capital – non-liquid assets

    Living capital – plants/animals/ability to cultivate plant and animals

    Social capital – relationships with others

    Cultural/Power capital – things your community values, tradition, powerful connections, reputation

    Intellectual capital – book knowledge

    Experiential capital – practical knowledge

    Spiritual/Habitual capital – religious attainment, unflappability, disposition toward success

    My broad definition of capital captures all of these. Capital is a thing of value that is able to be bestowed upon others in an exchange. You can group these categories into three main groups. Asset Capital  – (Financial, Material, Living), Human Capital (Intellectual, Experiential), and Relational Capital – (Social, Cultural, Spiritual). I’ve sort of modified the spiritual capital category to include non-spiritual habits. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call spirituality a form of capital, so I’m bolstering it. Similarly, I’ve bolstered cultural capital to include reputation and powerful connections such as exists when you’re a government representative, for example.

    The reason why equality of outcome will never happen is simple. You can only confiscate and redistribute asset capital. It is impractical to the extreme to redistribute Human Capital and Relational Capital.

    A prog may argue, however, that it doesn’t matter. The only “real” capital is Asset Capital. So, they go full commie… from each according to their ability to each according to their need, and we’re all now on exact equal footing asset-wise. How long before somebody with more human and relational capital trades something of value for some money? Now that person has $10 more than the rest of us and one less chicken. How long before the carpenter lends his services to me, takes my tree and returns me a finished table in exchange for $100? It’s not long before the communist utopia turns into a mess of inequality and oppression again.

    It comes down to a basic truism. Knowledge, relationships, assets, habits, and power are all of value, and they’re all interrelated to one another. Just like a loom increases the value of a textile worker, non-asset capital increases the ability of a person to acquire asset capital. After all, rich people do rich people things and poor people do poor people things. When a poor person wins the lottery, they’re as likely as not to be broke within a few years.

    I don’t know if I fully believe in this model. Calling things like traditions and religious attainment “capital” seems a bit wonky. However, this exposes a basic truth. Equality of opportunity will, by definition, result in inequality of outcome. We each have a unique mix of these 8 categories of “capital”, and even when presented with the same base set of laws and opportunities, we will apply our “capital” differently from one another. Equality of outcome is exposed as the soft bigotry that it is. It’s a forced leveling, a social engineering to subsidize those who have less human and relational capital and to punish those who have more of it.