All Thoughts Being Equal

Note: This post was adapted from a Facebook comment I made in a closed group. In the March 2011 edition of their National Health Statistics Report , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published results on sexual identity from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth. More recently (July 2014 edition of the NHSR) they published the results of the 2013 National Health Interview Survey[1]. This got passed around with headlines like "Gay population smaller than previously thought." According to the report, Proper counter-propaganda tactics would be to pull out other statistical nuggets for comparison. As a particularly evocative example, only 1.7% of the American population self-identifies as Mormon [1] , so they're outnumbered 2 to 1 even with this maybe-lowball stat. Similarly, the Southern Baptist churches claim roughly 16 million members, which is about 5% of the U.S. population [2] ... not all that much bigger than the LGBTQ population...

I. Robin Koerner, a liberty-minded Brit whom I heard speak at last year's Washington State Libertarian Party convention , has a new article out at Huffington Post called Your Problem With Guns or Gays Is Not Political . Given my moderate bias against guns, shockingly, I kind of agree with him. But I also think this is a case that nicely illustrates how the personal is (sometimes) political. I recommend that you go read the whole thing, but I also want to excerpt some juicy quotes. First, Koerner describes his own British noncommittal stance towards guns. As he puts it, "guns feature nowhere in British culture." I expect that most Americans would in practice find "taking tea" a bit odd, even though we academically know what it is from various imported movies and television shows, and many Americans like tea. But then Koerner gets into the meat of his point: Many decent people who have no interest in guns simply can't imagine what it must be like to be ...

The other day I decided to skip class in favor of a discussion with my friend. Well, it was worth it: from that discussion came the ideas in my previous post as well as what you'll read below. To summarize the last post: it was an analysis (and meta-analysis) of the classic Dickens fable, "A Christmas Carol." Suffice to say, the negative portrayal of Scrooge enrages free-market fundamentalists and intrigues me, because Dickens implies that it's possible for a person to be "not charitable enough." Enough for whom? Well, for society, I suppose. (And God, if you believe in a god and if your god believes in a certain level of charity from every human being.) This, more or less, segued into a discussion of human rights, and (in my opinion) a very good economic argument for defining them. How? Follow me..