“The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much. Bloomberg thinks he’s stopping people from smoking. He’s just turning them onto loosies,” says Lonnie Warner, known to his customers on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan as “Lonnie Loosie,” of his business selling single cigarettes on the street. Doing so is a misdemeanor, the New York Times reports, and Mr. Warner has been arrested fifteen years in the four years he’s been doing this, resulting in some stays for a few days in Riker’s Island. He and his two partners make from $120 to $150 a day.

The city and the state have created his market for him:

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has outlawed smoking in restaurants, bars and playgrounds, and outside hospital entrances. Even city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas are now off limits to smokers. Then there have been successive rounds of taxes — the most recent one, a $1.60 rise in the state tax in July — that raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to $12.50 at many Midtown newsstands.

This kind of story leaves one torn between the recognition that even minor breaking of a trivial law harms the general respect for the law and the recognition that such laws, imposed by prigs and busy-bodies upon people who like other vices than the ones they like (Bloomberg does not seem as concerned for peoples’ livers as he is for their lungs), equally harm the general respect for the law. The state is not absolved from responsibility just because it does this kind of thing legally.

People naturally respond in such ways when pushed too far by the state — Banning smoking in bars? What possible business is it of the city’s if people smoke in bars? — and the state is responsible for encouraging disrespect for the law when it pushes them too far. If Bloomberg wants to impose this kind of restriction upon his victims, he bears some responsibility for encouraging people to break the law. Mayors, provoke not thy citizens to wrath, as St. Paul might have said.

Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art and thought, “”My monkey could have painted that.” (What do you mean you don’t have a monkey? What are you, some kind of philistine?) Some enterprising researchers decided to test to see if people could indeed tell the difference between a Rothko and a Koko:

For a paper in press at Psychological Science, Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner of Boston College collected 72 undergrads, 32 of which were studio-art majors, and showed them 30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.

The first 10 pairs were unlabeled (signatures were scrubbed with Photoshop). Among the last 20 pairs, half were labeled correctly and half were labeled incorrectly (such that, say, a de Kooning was called a Koko and vice versa).

How did the students do? In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality most of the time. (See the attached chart.) And preferences were pretty immune to labels.

Labels did manage to sway judgments of quality, at least among psychology students. While art students gave the same ratings to professional works no matter the condition, psychology students gave higher judgments of quality to pros when correctly labeled than when unlabeled or incorrectly labeled. (79% vs 66% and 63%, respectively.)

Fans of contemporary art probably think they have been vindicated. But A. Barton Hinkle has the perfect riposte: You would never find one-third of the population confusing the work of Monet with that of a monkey.

(more…)

About the best thing that can be said about Ayn Rand is that few people take her seriously. Although her books are still widely read, Rand’s pseudo-religious cult—Objectivism—is largely ignored or disdained even by the fans of her work. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, as Alyssa Berznak relates in a heart-breaking tale of when her father fell under Rand’s selfish spell:

My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand.

[. . .]

What is objectivism? If you’d asked me that question as a child, I could have trotted to the foyer of my father’s home and referenced a framed quote by Rand that hung there like a cross. It read: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself. Nowadays, Rand’s bit is best summed up by the rapper Drake, who sang: “Imma do me.”

Read more . . .

(Note: Berznak’s story is a prime example of why I think it is important to continue to denounce Ayn Rand. The novelist’s resurgence in popularity is due in large part to people who self-identify as Christians. The fact that otherwise sensible believers continue to support the weird cult leader is simply inexplicable to me. As Rand herself would say, you can side with her or Christ—but not both.)

In the latest addition to my Jane Austen Theorem*, Mark T. Mitchell explains how Jane Austen teaches us to be a gentlemen:

Austen’s gentlemen (I’m thinking especially of Darcy here) understand the call of duty; they are committed to family, reputation, propriety, and self-control. To be sure, Darcy takes himself quite seriously, but aren’t these pursuits serious by nature? To neglect one’s duty, to be careless of one’s family and reputation, to ignore the bounds of propriety and to indulge the appetites without restraint are not the actions of a gentleman. They represent, conversely, the behavior of a boor. Or, perhaps equally fitting, they are the actions of a male who has no sense of what it means to be a man. Such characters may be Guys or Peter Pans but they are not men and surely not gentlemen.

Read more . . .

*Carter’s Jane Austen Theorem states that all complex behavior of advanced mammals can be explained by reference to the novels of Jane Austen. See also: Jane Austen and Game Theory and Jane Austen and Baboon Metaphysics