Pun Salad

NHJournal has a couple of pretty damning stories about how school officials are trying to ban unapproved opinions from being expressed at the local soccer games: Bow High Slaps Parents With 'No Trespass' Order Over Pink Armbands Supporting Girls Sports.

Those dangerous pink armbands contained two X's. Which, as the story helpfully tells us, refer to the two X chromosomes girls are wont to have.

One of the players on the Plymouth team is one of those "males who identify as female".

There's an image at the link of a threatening letter (sent on Bow school district letterhead) prohibiting the protest organizer "from entering the buildings, grounds, and property of the Bow School District, including but not limited to all school administrative office buildings, parking lots, and athletic fields, until further notice."

But wait, there's more: "You are also prohibited from attending any Bow School District athletic or extra-curricular event, on or off school grounds."

The organizer claims, credibly enough, that the protest was in simply wearing the XX-pink armbands at the match, and caused no disruption whatsoever. The school district's letter claims the armband-wearing "was designed to and had the effect of intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging" the Plymouth player.

Which, frankly, seems like a stretch.

But it wouldn't be the first time school administrators acted like tinpot dictators to suppress opinions they don't like.

A second NHJournal story, posted yesterday, tells the story of a similar letter received by Kyle Fellers, another armband-wearing parent: XX: Two Strikes for Bow Fathers as School Issues Second 'No Trespass' Order. The letter contains similar allegations of "intimidating, threatening, harassing and discouraging" behavior. But:

The story goes on to note that the most probable outcome will be some expensive litigation paid for by Bow taxpayers, which Bow will lose.

Our Amazon Product du Jour, by the way, is a set of pink armbands promoting breast cancer awareness. I assume that would be acceptable to the Bow educrats, but I fantasize them combing the sidelines, examining any pink armbands seen for Acceptable versus Unacceptable symbolism.

Also of note:

• Need a few points shaved off your IQ? Jeff Maurer will help with that: I Read Trump's Platform Because My Dumb Job Requires It.

  Last week, I reviewed Kamala Harris’ platform. My takeaway was that she was trying to distance herself from the left-wing stuff that she supported in her first presidential run; if 2019 was her Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch phase, she is now trying to be Mark Robert Wahlberg, Serious Actor. Maybe you’re buying Kamala’s transition, maybe you’re not, but either way: Her intent was clear.

  I have now read Trump’s platform, and his intent is also clear: He wants to supplant Project 2025 with a vague, shape-shifting facsimile of a platform that contains few proposals that could be analyzed in any real way. Really: How the hell am I supposed to evaluate a “proposal” like “Republicans will end the global chaos and restore Peace through Strength”? Trump’s platform — called “Agenda 47” — is a hodgepodge of vague promises probably written by Trump himself, and by “written”, I mean “screamed at a staffer while on the toilet.”

  Still, I’ll try to do for Trump what I did for Harris: I’ll try to determine what the platform signals. I’m skipping the dog-bites-man stuff — you don’t need me to tell you that Trump still wants to Build 👏 The 👏 Wall. But surely something can be learned even from a sometimes-all-caps screed that traffics in unmeasurable outcomes and out-of-the-blue weirdness (e.g. “create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit”). So, I’m rating Trump’s plan according to three metrics that I think tell us something about how he’ll govern.

  Well, I've looked at it too, and… holy cow, that's a lot of random capitalization. If Trump didn't write it, someone aping his style certainly did. Typical sample:

  Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal. Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear, to immediately slash Inflation and power American homes, cars, and factories with reliable, abundant, and affordable Energy.

  I don't disagree with the position, by the way. Domestic energy production is a good thing.

• Whither libertarianism? Well, to trot out an old movie quote: "The only real answer to the question … is "hither". Some misguided people think that the answer is "thither", they're wrong, those theories are passé."

  But see what you think about two recent articles from more serious thinkers on the topic. First, Randy E. Barnett suggests some changes need to be made: Libertarianism Updated. He suggests five changes:

  First, the need for natural law ethics in addition to natural rights; second, the need to distinguish between libertarian ideal theory and second-best libertarianism in a world of governments and competing nations; third, the need for a libertarian theory of citizenship and civil rights; fourth, the need to separate the public-private binary from the government-nongovernment binary; and fifth, the need for a more refined theory of corporate power and corporate rights.

  They are all interesting, but let's skip down to number five:

  Finally, libertarians need to be as concerned with corporate state fascism as they are with state socialism. There are no corporations in the state of nature. As some nineteenth-century libertarians recognized—and some left libertarians insist today—there comes a point at which the size and scope of private corporations can pose as great, if not a greater, threat to liberty than government power—especially as the two become intertwined in ways that are difficult to disentangle in practice as we have witnessed in recent years.

  Imagine, for example, if the current handful of cell phone providers began electronically screening our calls for subversive communications, canceling those who were found to transgress some alleged moral norm. Would the fact they are “nongovernmental” make them any less a threat to individual liberty?

  I admit that reconsidering the rights of “private” corporations may be the most challenging of the five possible updates to libertarianism that I am suggesting are needed. A first step may be to recognize that not all corporations are created equal. Some, like Citizens United, the Boy Scouts, and the Little Sisters of the Poor truly are associations of natural persons whose natural and civil rights should be legally protected from the government. But others like publicly-traded corporations where ownership and control have been separated are more akin to artificial “creatures of the state”—the exact nature of which is subject to public regulation to protect the freedom of the individual.

  Barnett keeps things vague on this point, suggesting that he sees some obvious devils-in-the-details problems with going down this path. So do I. But I'll try to keep an open mind about it.

  Weighing in with a recent commentary on Barnett's article is Ilya Somin (at the paywalled Dispatch, sorry): Libertarianism Needs Careful Tweaks, Not Wholesale Updates.

  The state of libertarian thought may seem of little importance to anyone but committed libertarians (some of whom disagreed thoughtfully with Barnett’s piece). After all, libertarians are far from being a dominant force in either major political party. The Trump-era GOP has repudiated libertarian ideas it previously had some affinity for, such as promoting free trade and cutting entitlement spending. Democrats are far from libertarian as well. The idea—propounded by some conspiratorially minded people on both left and right—that libertarians secretly dominate American public policy is patently false.

  Though I don’t agree with most of Barnett’s assessment, I do think he’s right that libertarianism still needs some updates—just not the ones he proposes. Its traditional core remains valid, even more so than ever in some ways. Nevertheless, libertarianism needs a better theory of the tradeoffs between natural rights and utility; it needs better strategies to address large-scale public goods problems; and it needs to recognize that nationalism is the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world today.

  I find Somin more convincing than Barnett here, but (if you're interested in the topic) see what you think. You might also check out Timothy Sandefur's article at Discourse (to which Somin links): Libertarianism Doesn’t Need an ‘Update’. Which I won't excerpt, because I've already gone on too long.