People v. State

Wendy McElroy earlier this week posted two blog posts both inspired by Henry David Thoreau — Civil Disobedience and the Business of Living, and Agents of the State Are Morally Responsible for Their Actions. They’re related to each other and I highly recommend reading both, but Wendy’s conclusion in the former particularly speaks to my condition:

Thoreau’s famous act of civil disobedience — the refusal to pay a tax that supported war — was not the act of a determined political dissident. His one night in jail came about only because the state literally knocked on his front door in the form of a tax collector. At that point, Thoreau had to make a choice; he believed the Mexican-American War was immoral, violating both decency and rights. As long as he was not forced to participate in the ‘evil’, however, Thoreau seemed content to go about the business of living. (more…)

One “bobxxxx” attempted to leave 6 comments on my previous post about Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Establishment Clause. The first 5 were written in the space of 18 minutes. Here’s the first:

The reason every single biology teacher refused to teach anything about intelligent design (and this was before the trial that the creationists lost) is because intelligent design is bullshit.

Evolution is a basic scientific fact. There is no debate about it. Evolution is how the world works. The Magical Designer, also known as the Magic God Fairy, didn’t have anything to do with the development of life.             (more…)

That is, of course, an apology in this sense, not this sense.

Recently I removed from public visibility one of my earliest posts on this blog. The post was highly critical of a particular government employee I’d clashed with, for his role in a miscarriage of justice. Although I didn’t name him in the post, whom I was referring to was clear to some members of a community (unrelated to the legal profession) whose fellowship and opinions I value and respect. Although I was not pressured or even asked to remove the post, and although the post faithfully represented my honest (more…)

Patrick at Popehat, in a post titled Blogging The Black Dog, asks blogging readers of Popehat: “What keeps you doing it?  How do you motivate yourself to post day after day?” Speaking for myself, I answered as follows in this comment:

The question of motivation is intensified for the beginning blogger, as I am. While many of us and even many popular bloggers like to think they “write for themselves,” critics be damned, the popular bloggers certainly have a motivational advantage, in that it’s difficult to get up the gumption to spend a significant amount of time writing something substantial if you know hardly anyone’s going to read it. A solution I hit on in my previous blog was to make my blog kind of an index of my commentary on other (popular) (more…)