The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Should The US Bring Back The Draft?

by Elias Isquith April 23, 2012

Tom Ricks thinks so: Since the end of the military draft in 1973, every person joining the U.S. armed forces has done so because he or she asked to be there. Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded, fighting two sustained foreign wars with troops standing up to multiple combat deployments and extreme stress. This is precisely the reason it is time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has ...

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Testing ideology

by Guest Authors April 23, 2012

~by James Hanley Fellow reader Stillwater, responding to my critique, writes: you [Hanley] keep insisting there is this significant difference between our theories, our policies, our preferred values, our analytical methods. If there isn’t a category difference captured by all those distinctions, then we’re talking about subtle shading on the edges of things. But if there is a category difference captured by all that, then the lumping seems entirely appropriate since there are clear-cut divisions distinguishing two schools of thought ...

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Does America Need a Draft? Hell No.

by BlaiseP April 22, 2012

Tom Ricks says we need a draft. This is nonsense. If we want to prevent stupid wars, make the country pay for them. Since the end of the military draft in 1973, every person joining the U.S. armed forces has done so because he or she asked to be there. Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded, fighting two sustained foreign wars with troops standing up to multiple combat deployments and ...

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The Zen of Twee

by David Ryan April 22, 2012

From the New York Magazine article The Twee Party: One afternoon last June, the quaint silhouette of a three-masted sailboat made its way into New York Harbor and pulled up at the Red Hook Marine Terminal. The Black Seal, a 70-foot-long schooner, had just completed a 3,000-mile wind-powered round trip to the Dominican Republic. There, it had taken on twenty metric tons of cocoa beans, mostly from La Red de Guaconejo organic-cacao cooperative, whose beans are said to yield chocolate with ...

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Leaguefest 2012: Rooms Going Fast

by Burt Likko April 21, 2012

If you are planning on coming to Leaguefest 2012 on Memorial Day Weekend (May 25-May 28), please make your reservations soon. Our group rate will not be valid after April 25, only a few days from today. At $79 a night, the rate can’t be beat for a holiday weekend. And you’ll have the chance to meet and mingle with many front-pagers, prominent commenters, and several of the Ordinary spouses. (I should say that they’re Extraordinary Spouses, not in the ...

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Wardsmith’s WTO Blanket Party

by BlaiseP April 20, 2012

Presented as-is, promoted from his comment Like almost all of you, I have mixed feelings about the police. As a law-abiding tax-paying citizen with property that needs protecting, I am in favor of a coercive force that keeps the “bad guys” in check. As a libertarian minded citizen, I am concerned always and everywhere with “coercive” forces. Long ago, Patrick had asked me to write about this, but the memories were a bit too painful at the time. They still ...

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The Henchman’s Diary

by Tod Kelly April 20, 2012

September 18 – Got fired today. After more than two years of hard and loyal work, I was given the shaft. It’s all just political bulls**t. It’s true I was late again, but lots of guys are late every now and then and they don’ get fired, so explain that. I happen to know that Ted fired me because he knew I was gunning for his job as night manager. I thought about calling the day manager, who is way, ...

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The power of Christ compels you! (to watch this bit of Southern California surf history)

by David Ryan April 20, 2012

I remember the huge South swell referred to in this film, and on another occasion seeing Chris O’Rourke, wearing his helmet, getting tubed at Simons, a fast, hard-breaking right that was my father’s favorite spot.

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It’s not a war, and I am not a warrior.

by David Ryan April 20, 2012

Andrew Sullivan, in 2006, failing to give credit where credit is due: First, they came for the homos, then the near-dead, then the pregnant women. But you know who their ultimate target will be: I am a breeder. Not just a breeder, but a breeder who has bred. I treasure my children, and regard them as the greatest among many gifts my union with my wife has brought me. I know as well as anyone else that conceiving children ...

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Gaming the Police

by Mike Dwyer April 20, 2012

The UC-Davis pepper spray incident has come back into the news lately. Far be it from me to ignore. Back in November I left this comment on a post here at The League. I think it still holds up (with minor editing). What I will say first though is that obviously some mistakes were made at UC-Davis.

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Jurisprudence blogging 2: Hart

by Murali April 20, 2012

In my previous post in this series, I gave a rough outline of Austin’s views and a number of criticism levelled against it. Now, I’ll reveal my hand: All those criticisms were levelled by HLA Hart in his book: The concept of law. Hart’s theory of law is therefore founded on the very same criticisms made of Austin’s theory. In this post, I’ll quickly gloss over the criticisms and use those criticisms as a springboard from which I can describe ...

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“Girls be making HBO shows, am I right?”

by Ethan Gach April 20, 2012

This gives a brief (if overly patronizing and insensitive) summary of what bothered me about HBO’s new show: Girls. I didn’t know much about it going in, other than I was pretty excited. Anyone who’s been watching Game of Thrones has probably seen a trailer for it in the last month, and the pilot finally aired last Sunday. And a week out the critical cycle is well underway, with initial praise followed by some (mild?) backlash, followed by a breakdown of the ...

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The Medicine Show Man: A remembrance of Levon Helm.

by BlaiseP April 20, 2012

Levon Helm was a musician’s musician. Raised near Helena, Arkansas, home of the King Biscuit Time, the longest-running radio show, he was raised in the very heart of what would become rock and roll. As a kid, he saw Elvis Presley in concert and Little Richard but it would be Jerry Lee Lewis‘ drummer, Jimmy Van Eaton who inspired him to become one of rock and roll’s greatest drummers. I think of Levon Helm and the image of the magical ...

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Thursday Art Walk

by Ethan Gach April 19, 2012

“Whaam!” (1963) by Roy Fox Lichtenstein.

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It’s The Base, Stupid

by Elias Isquith April 19, 2012

Mark Kleiman thinks the recently announced decision by Gov. Romney to give the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is a mistake: [Romney] needs to convince moderate swing voters that he’s not in fact a wingnut but has merely been playing one on TV The post is sarcastically titled, “Moving to the center.”

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On Faith After the Holocaust

by J.L. Wall April 19, 2012

(I promised myself I would attempt to respond to this article on Yom HaShoah. The latter fell sooner than I thought, and no complete response, I suspect, is possible. So with my caveat aside…) Ron Rosenbaum takes to—of all places!—The Chronicle of Higher Education to wonder how and why Jews can continue to believe in God after the Holocaust. (To be more accurate, the driving question of the article is why we don’t demand better responses from our leaders and ...

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Tax Credits and Subsidies

by Jason Kuznicki April 19, 2012

My former colleague Will Wilkinson offers some insightful comments on our intuitions regarding taxes, subsidies, and fiscal policy. To wit: I think the assumption on the right is that first we work to make money on the market, and then later the government swoops in and takes a bite from the fruit of our labour. And that’s acceptable, up to a point. The government has important work to do. It needs money. And we all ought to pay our fair ...

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Intellectual Art, Popular Media, and Getting Away from Aesthetic Subjectivity

by Ethan Gach April 18, 2012

In the May 2012 issue of the Atlantic, writer Taylor Clark has an excellent profile of videogame developer Jonathan Blow. He’s misanthropic, severely thoughtful, and somewhat abrasive. But he’s also a brilliant creator and a near perfect example of what Clark thinks the medium needs more of: developers willing to make smart videogames. Because for Clark the medium is currently an “artistic backwater” that produces only a few truly artful videogames in a sea teeming with “dumb” ones. Many think that Clark is ...

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Barack Obama And The Supertanker Of State

by Elias Isquith April 18, 2012

In response to my recent post on what I called Obama 2012′s rather limited ambitions, valued reader CK MacLeod wrote the following. My emphasis: …look at “the Reagan Era” from the perspective of a committed ideological conservative – how little was changed in the way we do things, as opposed to how we talk about them. His greatest conservative achievement might have been entrenching the resistance to everything you’d like to see from [Obama] – though there are other factors ...

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You’re so vain, you probably think this post is about you.

by David Ryan April 17, 2012

From a note that I sent to Alan Jacobs, a few days after Steve Jobs died: My cousin was a reader at Paramount. This was back before FinalCutPro and Sony PD150. This was back when video cameras cost $750/day to rent and a cuts only editing suite cost $50/hour, plus another $45/hour if you needed someone who knew how to run the machines.

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Depicting Christians

by Burt Likko April 17, 2012

Over at the Atlantic, Eleanor Barkhorn complains that the closeted young Christian characters of Blue Like Jazz depict rather than shatter stereotypes about evangelical Christians in the movies. For her, the promise of the movie was to present a positive, nuanced, and lifelike view of Christians in the real world and instead resorts to many of the cheap shots and tropes that so irritate Christians about the movies. As a threshold matter, I’m sticking with the theory that one can be Preachy ...

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