Defending SPAM, or "Welcome to the flea-market of ideas":

And now let us turn to the conservatism blog. He has a post on unsolicited commercial email (spam) here. As I have already made clear, there is a simple, effecient solution for SPAM that is better than any of the regulatory schemes that I have heard proposed. But let us not dwell on that.

Let us also not start with the other potential problems of SPAM regulation, like the fact that it is a pretty blatant restriction on speech (but see below), (ah, but it's commercial speech!--ed. Who's afraid of commercial speech? Oh let's leave that for another day), or the fact that one has to actually figure out what Spam is. (Is all email which is not specifically requested and proposes a commercial transaction spam? What about when you click the "Yes, send me special offers!" box? Who can send you those special offers? What if the email links to a website that proposes a commercial transaction? What if the email is just soliciting money for charity? And so on. Let's ignore these questions.)

Instead, let's first just deal with one of Stephen's assertions (he does get worked up about things): "It's not an annoyance: it's theft."

No, it's really not. It is said (perhaps apocryphally) that Alexandre Dumas had a bowl full of coins sitting in his entryway, so that his friends could take whatever they needed without having to mortify themselves by asking for money. Needless to say, he lost all of his many fortunes at various points in his life, but he had lots of friends (some of the time, anyway). At any rate, an unfiltered email account is a bowl of coins in your front hall-- your time and inbox space is there for the taking, and it's a little apalling how shocked people are when industrious money-making scoundrels decide to take it.

Simply put, theft is taking somebody's property by fraud or by force. Leaving aside fraudulent spam (a separate and more difficult case), Spam does not lie, and it does not take anything from you that you do not offer it. Think of how ludicrous it is to accuse somebody who calls you on the telephone of theft. Indeed "annoyance" is precisely the word for it. Annoyances of this sort do not become theft merely by being writ large.

It's also not clear what Stephen thinks spammers "Steal." Your time? Unlikely-- it takes no longer to delete Spam email than it does any other email, and surely not every unwanted communication is a theft, (no more than a passerby who you do not like "steals" your time by saying "hello, sir," as he passes) Your bandwidth? Again, each Spam email is no more bandwidth-costly than any other email you don't want, and it's you who lay yourself out to be taken. If you don't wish to receive emails from those who you do not know, you can treat your inbox as you treat your living room and only open the door to callers you have invited. But it's hardly fair to throw open your doors and indiscriminately tell people to "come in," and then demand Federal regulation when they do, even if they do in droves. And as somebody who definitely writes far more emails than he receives, I hardly think I'm a thief or even a moocher. . . .
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The real thing that bothers Stephen is not an individual piece of Spam, which is indistinguishable (as a philosophical matter) from any other individual piece of email that one does not wish to read or receive. And I certainly receive plenty of notes from uninteresting people, many of whom are addressing me specifically and proposing no transaction. What bothers Stephens and other anti-SPAMmers is that mass-mailing and random email generation have made it profitable for people to send undesirable emails in large quantities. These complainers are like the delicate lady who wanders into a flea market, and then declares that the resulting din is insufferable and should be made to stop. The lady should go home and receive visitors on her own terms. (See, for example, my solution here).

And finally, there's the elephant in the corner that nobody likes to talk about-- Spam works. Spammers don't send you offers to naturally increase your breast size because they are malicious, or get some perverse pseudo-sexual kick out of "stealing" your precious bandwidth. They send you offers because some small but non-vanishing portion of their recipients respond. That is why I mentioned the flea-market. I have no doubt that plenty of people are annoyed by the din, but our typical solution to being annoyed by somebody else's speech is to either counter-speak or go elsewhere. So if you wish to use your email account to communicate with your friends and intimates, set up a filter to keep out the dross. But if you find that the dross sometimes has something useful to say to you, then you take upon yourself the obligation to decide for yourself who is useful to you and who is not (and the further obligation to let other people decide on their own who is useful to them). Asking the Federal government (or the state government for that matter, or even the mayor) to make categorical pronouncements about whose speech is useless and whose you would rather keep around is precisely the sort of majoritarian tyranny that I had thought the First Amendment was designed to proscribe.

If Spam were truly value-less, nobody would bother to send it. But I see no reason why your dislike of unsolicited email should stop me from receiving some, let alone stop me from sending some. And now a confession: I have bought something through Spam, just as Stephen insists that I should not (is this why you've been consigned to the ninth circle of hell?--eds. No, I think that was because of my libertine libertarianism). (Some of the famous Iraqi-playing cards, if you're curious). The email proposed a transaction I hadn't been able to find elsewhere at a price I was happy to pay, and I did it and haven't regretted it. Welcome to the flea-market.

If you've got better things to do with your bandwidth, fine. I certainly understand, and sometimes when I delete my fifth offer of the hour to naturally increase my breast size, I see what drives anti-Spammers to temptation. But for the sake of free speech and the chaotic marketplace of pretty crappy ideas, resist this temptation. Leave the rest of us alone to send and receive our unsolicited commercial email in peace. Spam is a giant tragedy of the commons, of that I have no doubt. But the solution, then, is to either properly impose costs where they belong (as by a miniscule email tax), or to fence off one's own yard to keep out errant livestock. One ought not simply slaughter everybody else's black cows on the grounds that the commons should be kept safe for sheep.

Have no fear, Will:

Your brief pro-Republican tendencies have a rational explanation. It's because, as Garrison Keillor explains, "In the past, when times were simpler, we could afford the luxury of disagreement. But we can't anymore. Today, it's important that we all be Republicans. Your friends are. Your true friends. Why not you?"

come on, sing with me now

"We're all Republicans now,
We've all come around somehow
We are one land
One old party that's grand,
We're all Republicans now.
Affirmative action must go,
Unless you're somebody we know.
We'll get conservative judges back on the bench,
Cut government spending and down with the French
No more arguments, we've taken a vow.
No more dissent, just smile and bow,
We're all Republicans
We're all Republicans
We're all Republicans now"

[if you haven't been listening to A Prairie Home Companion well, tsk tsk, your loss]

Copyright infringement blog returns:

from Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter

the first (semi-)affair begins:

"'Henry doesn't love me,' she said gently, as though she were teaching a child, using the simplest words to explain a difficult subject, simplifying . . . She leant her head back against the guichet and smiled at him as to say, it's quite easy really when you get the hang of it. 'He'll be happier without me,' she repeated. An ant moved from the woodwork on to her neck and he leant close to flick it away. He had no other motive. When he took his mouth away from hers the ant was still there. He let it run on his finger. The taste of lipstick was like something he'd never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world."
- Book I, Part 2, Ch. 2

the second affair (first real) begins:

"The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love': the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience. . . .
. . . She turned suddenly to him and said, 'It's so good to talk to you. I can say anything I like. I'm not afraid of hurting you. You don't want anything out of me. I'm safe.'
'We're both safe.' The rain surrounded them, falling regularly on the iron roof.
She said, 'I have a feeling that you'd never let me down.' The word came to him like a command he would have to obey however difficult. . . .
She pressed against him with her hand on his side. When the sound of Bagster's feet retreated, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they both had thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust, and pity."
- Book II, Part 1, Ch. 3

O'Connor:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor thinks that the court did "the best it could" in the case of Bush v. Gore. Far be it from me to seriously critique the judgment of a Supreme Court Justice on a case that she knows far more about than I do, but I am skeptical. I don't understand why the court took the case, why having taken the case it stayed the vote-counting, or why Kennedy and O'Connor didn't go with the Rehnquist opinion or the Breyer opinion rather than the curious middle ground that they carved out for themselves. O'Connor suggests that it was time pressure, and I think she may be right that the court could reach no better decision in that time period. So why did it make a decision at all?

Conservatism:

And while I'm (briefly) being pro-Republican, here's a New York Times magazine article about conservatives on college campuses (though they seem to have inexcusably passed over Sara Butler). It's a very even and pretty interesting piece, though the professors that the author talked to at the end are a little disturbing. Their fear is that now that conservative groups are on campus, "Students are much more willing to write off something as 'liberal talk'." Let me say that I am skeptical.

That is, I think it's likely that the presence of a few conservative groups on campuses (they are still, let us be clear, in the overwhelming minority) will cause students to write things off as "liberal talk" when those things are, in fact, "liberal talk." But it's really implausible that the presence of a few overwhelmed Sara Butlers is going to cause those of moderate political bent to dismiss well-reasoned arguments, or to stop "thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them." If anything, it's the liberals who will have to think a little more complexly.

Well Said, Sir!:

Continuing to confirm my belief that not all senior Republican Senators are like Santorum and Lott, Richard Lugar (who I can proudly say is from Indiana) has an opinion piece in the Washington Post, admonishing the Bush administration for declaring "Mission Accomplished" when the mission is so very far from accomplished. Nation-building, he reminds us, is precisely what we ought to be engaged in here.

The administration should state clearly that we are engaged in "nation-building." We are constructing the future in Iraq. It's a complicated and uncertain business, and it's not made any easier when some in the Pentagon talk about quick exit strategies or say dismissively that they don't do nation-building. The days when Americans could win battles and then come home quickly for a parade are over.
President Bush should make clear to one and all that he will declare "Mission accomplished" in Iraq not on the basis of our military victory or the date of our withdrawal but on what kind of country we leave behind.

Bated Breath:

And it's been over 24 hours and Sara Butler still hasn't produced her promised pronouncement on abortion. (sigh). Does she have something better to do with a 3-day weekend than blog?

Girls:

Nick Tarasen has eliminated his comments, and I approve of that choice, but he has sadly also eliminated his permalinks in the process. Anyway, I'm referencing the Friday post called "The Squirrels Are Smarter Than The Guys".

Nick writes: "Why is it that schools like Caltech are comfortable being 60% male, but no school is comfortable being 60% female?"

Ahem: How about Vassar?

UPDATE: Nick complains that that's not the same, because Vassar used to be a girl's school. Well, yes I know that. But Caltech used to be a boy's school. That's my point. Both started admitting people of the opposite gender at about the same time, and both now have about equal-and-opposite percentages of gender. And nobody seems to care that deeply about either one, though both are reaching out to even their balance. That, I think, is good anecdotal evidence (a contradition in terms) that there's no double-standard.

And why would schools want gender balance? Because a lot of students care about sex and romance when they pick a school, and it thus behooves a school to balance things out. I'm not going to discuss whether Vassar's "drunkenness and destructiveness" in dormitories is appreciably less than Caltech's or MIT's or CMU's.

Nerd-Nivana, take 2:

Women's Wear Daily (no, I never heard of it before in my life) has published a list of the top 10 most fashionably dressed universities.

Guess whose university doesn't make the cut? I have chosen. . . wisely.

[this link courtesy of my mother, who attended #6. So kind and quick she is to point out whenever any place she attended (Arkansas; Illinois)] beats mine.]