Roderick has a good post up called A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, which does an excellent job of deflating one of the common rejoinders that Ron Paul boosters make to Ron Paul’s libertarian critics–specifically to those, like me, who consider Paul’s anti-libertarian position on abortion or immigration to be a poison pill. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

There’s a lot of interesting exchange going on in the comments. Here are excerpts from five different comments that oppose treating Ron Paul’s support for forced pregnancy as a poison pill:

David Miller:

Given the complexities of NAFTA (and the same is true of immigration and abortion), it does seem to me rather silly to use this as a litmus test, ….

Max Raskin:

Immigration, free trade, abortion, and cosmopolitanism don't really mean anything if any of the other candidates get elected and throw us into World War Five.

Rich Paul:

If I have to tolerate Kansas outlawing abortion in order for Kansas to tolerate New Hampshire legalizing drugs, then I think it a good trade.

Otto Kerner:

To me, personally, it seems clear that federalism and opposing the war are much more important libertarian issues than immigration and abortion.

Stephen W. Carson:

To those who support Paul but voice their criticisms of his positions on immigration, abortion, whatever... Hurrah! To those who don't support Paul, for whatever reason, I have only one question: What is your plan for stopping the killing?

Perhaps it is rude to point this out; perhaps it is even dirty pool. Certainly it is not a demonstration that their reasoning is flawed. Nevertheless, can you guess what all five of these commenters have in common when it comes to abortion?

If you’re baffled, try reading the first block quotation in Roe v. Wade Day #34.

Here’s an interesting passage I noticed in an article in the New York Times Magazine, which was mostly about companies trying to sell fancy new mattresses.

The story of our ruined sleep, in virtually every telling I've heard, begins with Thomas Edison: electric light destroyed the sanctity of night. Given more to do and more opportunity to do it, we gave sleep shorter and shorter shrift. But the sleep that we're now trying to reclaim may never have been ours to begin with. It's a myth, A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, told me. And it's a myth that even some sleep experts today have bought into.

… More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a first sleep and second sleep — also included a curious intermission. There was an extraordinary level of activity, Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took cold-air baths, reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself, Ekirch told me. It's the seamless sleep that we aspire to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.

… Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming Insomnia: A Cultural History, explains that in the 18th century, we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time. Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away. She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal.

— Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine (2007-11-18): The Sleep-Industrial Complex

Besides grousing about one of my linguistic pet peeves — the sloppy misuse of the idiom ____________-industrial complex, the only other thing that I’d like to add is that filing the institutions that currently structure most Americans’ sleep patterns under the vague label of our lifestyle tends to obscure the issue. Depending on your age, the two main institutions that regiment your sleeping schedule are either (1) school, or (2) your job. The first has little to do with lifestyle choices; it’s something that’s forced on children by both their parents and by the government for a good 10-12 years of their lives. After a decade or more of forced training, the job you take is nevertheless a matter of adult choices. But the economic and political environment that structures and constrains those choices — and tends to favor centralized, regimented, official forms of employment not only through cultural prejudice but also through government-enforced subsidy and monopoly — deserves much more critical scrutiny than the term lifestyle conveys. In both cases, the daily schedules that we keep are no better described as an adopted style than is a straightjacket.

Jim Brossert is a deranged bully who is apparently prone to violence when he doesn’t get his way. Most recently, he barged into a private place of business with an army combat knife, defaced the bar-keep’s private flagpole and stole his American flag, used his status as a retired soldier to justify his violent tantrum, and then hollered a challenge for unarmed bystanders to fight him while still wielding a huge knife.

For this act of vandalism and petty theft, Sarge praises Jim Brossert as an American Hero.

At Shirley Buxton’s blog, commenter Maverickti, who describes the American flag as holy, says I am a baptised Roman Catholic, serving my 19th year in the Army. When I saw Jim doing what he did, I cheered!

At Lone Star Blog, commenter John Harbaugh suggests trespassing in a private place of business and harassing or intimidating the barkeep and his customers, in order to drive the bar out of business: I think that the INS should visit the bar owner. Once or twice a day until his clientèle quit coming. … If I lived in Reno, I would start showing up myself. I am also a crazy Vet.

Also, Maverickti shows up again to say hoo-rah! for Jim Brossert and the Holy American Flag once more: to Mr. Jim Brossert: You make me proud! You are the ideal that I enlisted to protect. Know that I am sending your video to everyone I know to show how a TRUE AMERICAN acts when he sees what is not right. That was truly a heroic deed. In response to an earlier commenter who has the temerity to point out that taking somebody else’s flag is, you know, stealing, and that maybe these freedom-loving types might not want to associate themselves with that sort of thing, Maverickti adds George, it's a free country, you can leave any time. The sooner the better.

J.F., Command Master Chief, US Navy (retired), believes that freedom of speech and expression includes the right to express yourself by vandalizing and stealing other people’s private property: So now, the Soviet Socialist State of NV along with it Socialist Commandos, the ACLU, want to prosecute the U.S. army vet for exercising his First Amendment which protects every American’s right to speak and express themselves, Reno city counsel has the authority to enact an ordinance if not already on the books that would deescalate these types of situations but, the question is, did they and will they?

A.B. thinks Having the Mexican flag diplayed above our beloved American flag is a personal insult to myself and all my fellow veterans.If you love Mexico so much go back! Apparently stealing other people’s stuff and challenging them to fight you for it — when they are unarmed and you have a big combat knife in your hand — is an appropriate response to a personal insult.

C. W. GMC(SW/AW) USN Ret. thinks To those who think that vet was wrong, why don’t you ask a vet what flag means to them before you condemn him. … Sure maybe that Vet could have handled it different but as far as I’m concerned he handled it was the way many more of us should have the courage to do. Next time you see a vet why not let them know that what they did truly means something and it was appreciated.

S.E. of Shingle Springs, California claims that it is treason — a federal crime punishable by death — not to conform to voluntary guidelines based on military etiquette when you fly a flag on your own property: Mexican Flag flying over USA flag being cut down by vet…GOOD FOR HIM. It is TREASON to fly the flag of another country above our own. You are in our country and must show the proper respect as such. This is the USA , not Mexico, if you must fly your countries flag, thatn do it repctfully and in accordance with DOD guidline of proper flag etiquette. You can look up the BSA’s website on proper flag etiquette if you are unsure. As a retired member of the armed forces I am very proud of the vet that cut it down-god bless him.

J.C. from Tahoe, whose family is full of LEGAL immigrants AND veterans, is sick of people coming to the US and demanding we give them rights.

Please note that not all retired soldiers are crazy or violent creeps, or cheerleaders for crazy, violent creeps. Many are perfectly decent people. But please also note that these particular veterans, these apologists and sycophants for vandalism, petty thieving, and vigilante censorship, who associate the cause of America and their beloved flag with the freedom to intimidate and steal from people who offend you, and who display not the slightest bit of concern for private property or freedom of expression when it comes to their delicate sensibilities about Patriotic Correctness, are exactly the same bunch of whiners who petulantly demand a clap on the back and a validation of the awesome superiority of their personal career choice at every opportunity, because, after all, they Defend Our Freedom.

From what, exactly? With defenders like these, who needs attackers?