Within Reason!
Jul. 27th, 2005 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, last night I hauled my butt down to The Elysian Brewery to hang out with Ron Bailey, who had just the coolest job I can imagine: he's science correspondent for the libertarian magazine Reason, which I tend to read because unlike many libertarian rags this one actually tries to point out real-world solutions to real-world problems.
Sometimes, though, Ron gets the really tough jobs. In his latest column, he got down with the Young Earth Creationists at Creationism Mega-Con 2005, in which speaker after speaker took to the stadium to denounce unformitarianism, the belief (yeah, it is a belief, but without it nothing at all makes any sense, so what can you do?) that the laws of physics were the same yesterday as they are today. Listening to an unending stream of evangelics would have driven me mad. Must have been fun.
Ron was there with Peter Bagge, a cartoonist and illustrator who regularly appears in Reason and who lives in Seattle. Frequently, his column has a Seattle bent, as in a recent column where here discusses the Monorail, Light Rail, and other transportation woes.
Ron was there to discuss his new book, Liberation Biology, which is basically a libertarian argument about why governments should stay out of personal decisions for how we enhance or entertain ourselves with biological or chemical changes to our brains and bodies. I mentioned in passing that he was making a static vs. dynamist argument, and Ron pointed out that he and Virgina Postrel (who published the most recent formulation of this argument, although one can be found in Wilson & Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy) thought along the same lines because, well, she was editor at Reason when she hired him for the job he holds now.
Although Ron and I had a sprightly conversation about transhumanist issues and tattooing (among other things), and I turned him on to Greg Egan's short stories that dovetail with his own passion, such as Chaff or Reasons To Be Cheerful, the most fascinating conversation I witnessed was between one of the locals and Jonathan Adler, the professor of Constitutional Law at Case Western University and a regular columnist for National Review Online, the official organ of Catholic Neoconservatism.
Jonathan described himself as NRO's "Token Libertarian" who frequently has to post rebuttals to the more statist and "the law can solve this" impulses (funny how they never equate "more law" with "more government"), but sometimes he gets his own say. We had a brief conversation about who at NRO was crazy and who was not: Jonah? Mad. Lowry? Mad. Hansen? Clever. Santorum? Uh... don't bother trying. Derbyshire: Brilliant, in a depressing way, as he gets the science and technology and all it implies, he just loathes the consequences. I mentioned my essay May You Get Everything You Ask For, and he mentioned that he recalled reading it. Yay! I've gotten my sixteenth minute!
But the conversation was about Lincoln, and I heard a great many things about Abraham Lincoln that I'd never heard. He suspended habeas corpus for an entire legislature at one point, and at another he ordered the arrest of the Chief Justic of the Supreme Court. Neither order was ever carried out because nobody would enforce the orders, but the discussion was whether the haigiography of Lincoln was being overwhelmed by the recent bad press: not that he was gay, which is one of those silly arguments that's kind of pointless, but that his actions make him morally dubious. Adler was of the opinion that it was a complicated time and he was a complicated man, but he was morally preferable to the South, which was much more communitarian, repudiated the Declaration along with the Constitution, and in comparison to Lincoln's order of the arrest of the entire legislature of Massachusetts executed the legislators of West Virginia. All of them.
The crowd was full; although 22 people had signed up, 30 showed. Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times was there, and I wonder what his take on the event will be. I wonder if something like this was even newsworthy. There was a woman there whose name I forget who was handing out Morgan Catha for County Council buttons and had recently finished a study from the last election showing that the libertarians took more votes away from Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.
I had forgotten just how amazingly good the beer at the Elysian is. I had only one glass of the Dragonstooth Stout-- my first in five years-- and it was as smooth, creamy, and oddly sweet as I had remembered. I wish I had excuses to head up there more often. Their blue cheese burger was damn good, too, but oh! my heart! my valves! I can't do that very often.
Sometimes, though, Ron gets the really tough jobs. In his latest column, he got down with the Young Earth Creationists at Creationism Mega-Con 2005, in which speaker after speaker took to the stadium to denounce unformitarianism, the belief (yeah, it is a belief, but without it nothing at all makes any sense, so what can you do?) that the laws of physics were the same yesterday as they are today. Listening to an unending stream of evangelics would have driven me mad. Must have been fun.
Ron was there with Peter Bagge, a cartoonist and illustrator who regularly appears in Reason and who lives in Seattle. Frequently, his column has a Seattle bent, as in a recent column where here discusses the Monorail, Light Rail, and other transportation woes.
Ron was there to discuss his new book, Liberation Biology, which is basically a libertarian argument about why governments should stay out of personal decisions for how we enhance or entertain ourselves with biological or chemical changes to our brains and bodies. I mentioned in passing that he was making a static vs. dynamist argument, and Ron pointed out that he and Virgina Postrel (who published the most recent formulation of this argument, although one can be found in Wilson & Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy) thought along the same lines because, well, she was editor at Reason when she hired him for the job he holds now.
Although Ron and I had a sprightly conversation about transhumanist issues and tattooing (among other things), and I turned him on to Greg Egan's short stories that dovetail with his own passion, such as Chaff or Reasons To Be Cheerful, the most fascinating conversation I witnessed was between one of the locals and Jonathan Adler, the professor of Constitutional Law at Case Western University and a regular columnist for National Review Online, the official organ of Catholic Neoconservatism.
Jonathan described himself as NRO's "Token Libertarian" who frequently has to post rebuttals to the more statist and "the law can solve this" impulses (funny how they never equate "more law" with "more government"), but sometimes he gets his own say. We had a brief conversation about who at NRO was crazy and who was not: Jonah? Mad. Lowry? Mad. Hansen? Clever. Santorum? Uh... don't bother trying. Derbyshire: Brilliant, in a depressing way, as he gets the science and technology and all it implies, he just loathes the consequences. I mentioned my essay May You Get Everything You Ask For, and he mentioned that he recalled reading it. Yay! I've gotten my sixteenth minute!
But the conversation was about Lincoln, and I heard a great many things about Abraham Lincoln that I'd never heard. He suspended habeas corpus for an entire legislature at one point, and at another he ordered the arrest of the Chief Justic of the Supreme Court. Neither order was ever carried out because nobody would enforce the orders, but the discussion was whether the haigiography of Lincoln was being overwhelmed by the recent bad press: not that he was gay, which is one of those silly arguments that's kind of pointless, but that his actions make him morally dubious. Adler was of the opinion that it was a complicated time and he was a complicated man, but he was morally preferable to the South, which was much more communitarian, repudiated the Declaration along with the Constitution, and in comparison to Lincoln's order of the arrest of the entire legislature of Massachusetts executed the legislators of West Virginia. All of them.
The crowd was full; although 22 people had signed up, 30 showed. Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times was there, and I wonder what his take on the event will be. I wonder if something like this was even newsworthy. There was a woman there whose name I forget who was handing out Morgan Catha for County Council buttons and had recently finished a study from the last election showing that the libertarians took more votes away from Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.
I had forgotten just how amazingly good the beer at the Elysian is. I had only one glass of the Dragonstooth Stout-- my first in five years-- and it was as smooth, creamy, and oddly sweet as I had remembered. I wish I had excuses to head up there more often. Their blue cheese burger was damn good, too, but oh! my heart! my valves! I can't do that very often.
