Tag: contract

Fall’s Eve

I, like many, consider September 1 the start of Autumn. In fact, I advance all seasons by 21 days. And most of the time the earth is flat. I thought you might want to know.

What lawyers are doing lately

If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

Miloš Miljković

Status versus contract redux

Steve Robinson, who always leaves me wanting more so rarely does he blog or podcast, has fostered 50 boys over the years, housed his dying father-in-law, housed his dying parents, and now is housing his daughter’s family of three. Somewhere along the way, the coin dropped:

We have all embraced the idea that a multi-generational home is not a financial “last resort”, a rescue operation, a pit stop to self-sufficiency, or an end game for losers. It is how families normally (should) exist. A multi-generational household is a world-wide cultural norm, a given, not an embarrassing alternative lifestyle choice, pragmatic financial arrangement (nor even an admirable “noble sacrifice”) that says to the world “we cannot afford to sustain our nuclear, self-sufficient family or pay our medical bills”. In short, we all understand that living together as adults with kids is “normal”… even when it is difficult. None of us see ourselves as the recipients of some mercy, condescension, assistance, or being given a “loan” that will come due in some future emotional hostage taking family battle.

This is very not-America-in-2026. There may be a Chud in the basement, but nobody’s happy about it.

I don’t think living with my son’s family will ever be a financial necessity for my wife and me. And my late father-in-law made it his grim mission never to be dependent on his children as his mother was dependent on him after his father’s premature death. I’ve re-written this rest of this paragraph repeatedly; suffice that he succeeded in never becoming a financial burden.

But here’s the thing: I’ll take that burden 9 days out of 10 over the statist individualism of Sweden:

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

It’s reprise of what we used to talk about as “status versus contract.” Life without status-based obligations to other people sounds pretty terrible to me.

On this blog’s trajectory

While writing the preceding item, I thought that I must have written something or a few things around October-November 2014, when my wife and I each lost our surviving parent within two weeks and 5 hours of each other. Indeed I did, and I like what I wrote. I think it’s kind of timeless..

Nonsectarian Prayer

I had forgotten that the perfect nonsectarian prayer for public meeting was written many decades ago by one of our greatest writers:

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

(I prefer no prayer to “nonsectarian” prayer, and that’s a preference of many decades’ duration.)

Legal news, one click down from SCOTUS

The Institute for Justice publishes a weekly collection of pithy case summaries from U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal:

…

New Hampshire parents (and a grandparent) are barred from school property after wearing pink wristbands at high school soccer game in protest of a trans player on the visiting team. First Circuit: Seems like a First Amendment problem.

…

During an oversight visit to a federal immigration facility, N.J. congresswoman has a confrontation with federal officials. She’s later charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. She claims immunity under the Speech and Debate Clause and alleges vindictive prosecution. Third Circuit: She loses on two of the counts against her and we remand on the third. Dissent: Sure seems like she’s being treated worse than Jan. 6 defendants.

…

Allegation: Woman peacefully protests fatal police shooting by grilling hot dogs and hamburgers outside Lafayette, La. mayor’s house. She is arrested for obstructing the roadway, which she wasn’t, and strip searched at jail. Unlawful retaliation for speech? Unconstitutional arrest without probable cause? Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: Qualified immunity is made up and wrong, and also it doesn’t apply here.

…

Student visiting Michigan court as part of a vocational program falls asleep while judge is giving career advice. Yikes! The judge has her locked up for several hours and then puts her on fake trial. She sues. Judge: The “trial” may have been fake, but I am a real judge entitled to real judicial immunity. Sixth Circuit: We’ll give you points for chutzpah, but not immunity.

…

Is possessing virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the privacy of the home protected by the First Amendment? Seventh Circuit: Under binding precedent, yeah, it seems to be protected. Two-judge concurrence: Perhaps SCOTUS should give a fresh look-see to its early-aughts precedent on this subject.

…

Arkansas sex offender serves most of his 30-year-sentence, is granted parole, and seeks to live on property owned by family trust. Yikes! His parole officer fabricates a nonexistent daycare nearby and bars him from living there—a situation that other officials, apprised of the lie, do not remedy. A due-process violation? Eighth Circuit: There is no constitutional right to early release, so no.

Short Circuits excerpts for August 28. You can subscribe for free.

I’m a big first amendment guy, but virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, even in the privacy of the home, strikes me as beyond the constitutional pale. I do remember Thomas Becket’s passionate admonition against punishing merely dangerous Richard Rich, but possessing kiddie porn is more than dangerous.

Celibacy, Chastity, Abstinence

Kevin Williamson, after a great accounting of Why Everybody Hates Capitalism, distinguishes three things that too often are treated as synonymous:

Celibacy, properly understood, does not refer to a state of sexual abstinence per se—it refers to the state of being unmarried or the state of having sworn off marriage, with the understanding that Christian morality requires sexual abstinence as a consequence of the unmarried state. Chastity, in the Christian moral vocabulary, does not refer exclusively to sexual abstinence, either, but to keeping sex in its place: Catholic doctrine speaks of chaste marriage, meaning one in which the dual unitive (we Catholics love our jargon) and procreative functions of sex are properly integrated into the marital relationship. Chastity may mean abstinence in one context and forbid practicing abstinence in another. Abstinence, of course, is the word for what often is meant by celibacy: abstaining.

Maybe some day he’ll get around to “immaculate conception,” too (which I didn’t capitalize because Orthodoxy holds no such doctrine, but I nevertheless know what it means).

Power to pick up and leave

British political commentator David Goodhart argues that globalization has created two types of people—the anywheres and the somewheres. The anywheres enjoy the benefits of the new networked world. They move comfortably through cyberspace and around the physical world. Their identity is the identity of the global network. The ability to move around networks freely is the new marker of power. Power is the ability to live in multiple places at once. To have the power to pick up and leave. The sense of meaning traditionally found in “place” is replaced with the freedom found in the app.

Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence

Shorts

  • I can’t figure out what made her so loveable. I think it was the sincerity of her artificiality—that she put herself together in the most artificial way possible, but believed in it like a kid believing that a cap pinned to his shoulders could make him fly. When she talked and sang, she was completely direct and honest, even into old age. The rhinestones were heavy, she told a family member, so she wanted to rest on a fluffy bed of cotton in the casket. She was one of a kind. (Frederica Mathewes-Green)
  • Under the circumstances, handing Darline Graham a Senate seat is tantamount to handing Trump himself a Senate seat. It’s akin to Caligula installing his horse in the chamber, this time with the people’s consent. Which, as others have noted, makes last night’s result feel like a logical outcome for the modern GOP. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government. (Justin Smith-Ruiu)
  • Vote Republican. Vote red otherwise we’re all dead. … Your support of the Democrat party makes me seriously question how much I’m going to talk to you in the future. I don’t talk to democrats. They’re filth. Period. (Alleged remark of a clergyman grooming an emotionally fragile teenage girl) in the late twenty-teens.
  • How firm. How furious. How fleeting. (Frank Bruni’s description of one current Republican candidates reaction to January 6. I won’t name the candidate because it fits about 90% of the GOP.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Red family, blue family: a prequel

I discovered that the “red family, blue family” meme (which I’ve blogged on here and here) is not brand new. Indeed, it was anticipated, in those exact terms, in February 2005 by Doug Mulder, who wrote quite a thought-provoking article about it (PDF version here).

Mulder, a self-described liberal (and apparently an academic in the social sciences; and/or perhaps a Unitarian minister, as some allusions hint) starts with the 2004 Presidential election, which left coastal liberals agog:

Some large number of Bush voters told the pollsters that they based their vote on “moral values.” Well, duh. When we’d voted against Bush – the reverse Robin Hood, the warmaker, the guy who kept hinting (against all evidence) that Saddam had been about to give nuclear weapons to al Qaeda – we’d voted our moral values too.

Trying to make sense of it, he resorted to a 1996 book:

George Lakoff’s friends are probably even more liberal than mine. He’s a professor at Berkeley, a cognitive scientist who started applying his work to political cognition in the mid-nineties. His 1996 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think still stands as the most complete analysis of the polarized worldviews of the American political scene.

And indeed, Lakoff’s work, which I don’t recall encountering before, is very interesting — and, as I recognized even before I read Mulder’s critique, deeply flawed.

Both liberals and conservatives use what he calls the Nation-As-Family metaphor. Both talk about the government as if it were a parent, and citizens as if they were siblings. The government defends, educates, rewards, and punishes its citizens – like parents with children.

The difference Lakoff found between liberal and conservative thinking, however, came from the frame each put on family. In other words: What is the stereotypic ideal family that the nation should be modeled on?

From conservative rhetoric, Lakoff constructed a frame he called the Strict Father family. (The red and blue boxed text comes from the Rockridge Institute website.) Liberals, on the other hand, seem to use a frame Lakoff called the Nurturant Parent family.

One of Lakoff’s big flaws is that his outline of the “Strict Father Family” sounds utterly attavistic. Armed with awareness of James Ault’s PBS documentary Born Again, and a much later book by the producer, finding that fundamentalist lives and Churches are not actually abhorrent in practice, Mulder tries to get behind what Lakoff found behind superficially similar “government as parent” metaphors — “behind the behind” if effect.

The families Ault found at [a Worcester, Massachusetts fundamentalist church] – extended families in which multiple generations remain deeply involved in each other’s lives – aren’t supposed to exist any more, especially not in a Massachusetts edge city like Worcester.

So Mulder tries to refine Lakoff’s “Strict Family” versus “Nurturant Family” into “Given Family” versus “Chosen Family” or, just a tad deeper still, “Inherited Obligation Family” versus “Negotiated Commitment Family.”

Holy smokes! We’re back, in gussied-up garb, to the old “from status to contract” theory in the sociology of law! Not that it was discredited, mind you. That it’s still being echoed suggests quite the opposite. And I’ve known for a long time that it forms one of the deep divides between what I would call “true conservatives” (think Wendell Berry and Front Porch Republic) and both liberals and the sort of faux conservatives who can’t stop babbling the praises of “capitalism’s creative destruction” and such.

This time, though Mulder is himself liberal, it’s the liberal iteration of family — the “Negotiated Commitment Family” — that sounds repulsive, while the “Inherited Obligation Family” seems real, and human, and durable. (Or is that just my conservative bias showing?)

Mulder steps out of his not-quite-neutral role to advise liberals on how to stop scaring conservative voters who, for instance, rejected John Kerry:

The truth about liberals – that we more often than not choose to commit ourselves to marriage, children, church, and most of the other things conservatives feel obligated to, and that we stick by those commitments every bit as faithfully, if not more so – easily gets lost…

Consider, for example, liberal parents. The Negotiated Commitment model offers them very little in exchange for the effort and expense that they put into parenting. They don’t have to do it, and they can’t demand that children reciprocate after they grow up. Most liberal parents understand the situation. But they volunteer to raise children anyway. Liberals join the Peace Corps, work in soup kitchens, and stand together with unpopular oppressed peoples rather than walking away from. Why? Because liberals are serious, committed people.

Our rhetoric needs to capture the seriousness of our beliefs and commitments. We should, for example, miss no opportunity to use words like commitment and principle.  Our principles should be stated clearly and we should return to them often, rather than moving towards a nebulous center whenever we are afraid of losing.

John Kerry didn’t lose because he was a liberal. He lost because people couldn’t figure out what he was. They couldn’t recite his principles or predict where he would come down on future issues. Republican slanders stuck to him because he projected no clear image of his own.

There is a lot to promote about liberalism and the Negotiated Commitment model behind it. We take people as they are, rather than demanding that they fit themselves into an increasingly outdated set of roles…

This is very rich and evocative stuff. it ramifies in a host of specific hot issues:

  • Abortion
  • Same-sex marriage
  • Social Programs
  • Freedom
  • Taxes
  • The gushing enthusiasm of Chamber of Commerce speakers like Richard Florida, who’s really keen on strip-mining smart kids from Hicksville and planting them in yeasty, creative urban settings (okay; maybe that’s a “pet peeve” instead of a “hot issue”).

You don’t have to be an egghead to engage Mulder, but you do need a modest block of time to read this rather long article, which richly rewards the effort.

But don’t forget my contribution: that in SAT terms:

inherited obligation is to status as negotiated commitment is to contract

Status versus contract is an idea whose time may again have come — though if Mulder is right (that contract will grow as a compelling political guiding principle because more and more people are living it daily), it may not work to the advantage of conservatism until we experience a great crackup that cures our hubris.