Postmodern Conservative.

ICANN. You Can't.

Ah, the internet -- home of the free. Run by a nonprofit organization empowered to make arbitrary decisions on a rolling basis. Why?

The suffix .xxx was rejected by ICANN last year, but it could also prove to be a popular suffix under the more relaxed policy. However, Twomey told Agence France-Press that the organization will still try to block or reject any domain name that it deems inappropriate for security or moral reasons.

This is not a very encouraging standard -- or procedure -- but is there really a better alternative? Not governmental oversight. Especially intergovernmental oversight. Any bright ideas out there in the tubes?

Fake Life, All Too Human

Read Andrew, or rather one of his readers, on Second Life and the increasingly concerning (but here, mostly perceptive) Michael Gerson:

Gerson writes:

"But Second Life is more consequential than its moral failures. It is, in fact, a large-scale experiment in libertarianism. Its residents can do and be anything they wish. There are no binding forms of community, no responsibilities that aren't freely chosen and no lasting consequences of human actions. In Second Life, there is no human nature at all, just human choices."

A world without consequences? That's not libertarianism, it's liberalism.

Well, liberalism is life where the only consequence of there not being consequences is the proactive corrective of concentrated public power. Second Life -- or the convivial junkheaping of human 'nature' with human 'choices', anyway -- is, yes, cultural libertarianism. Of course, it should be of no surprise that this 'works' best of all in fake life, and it should be most distressing to speculate upon how popular the surrender of increasing portions of real life in favor of fake life will become for exactly that reason. On the other hand, such a turn might do the best and most humane job of thinning the herd, leaving real life to those who 'value' it for reasons incidental to 'choice'. Yet somehow fake life, I bet, will get realer and realer the bigger it gets, until finally it starts initiating events in the real world, not reacting to them.

Update 1: Will Wilkinson hates Gerson's "idiotic column," indicting "censorious moralizing scolds" everywhere. Another great victim of the Bush Administration has been popular confidence in the idea that a human being can both hold people in contempt -- or mere disapproval -- for their behavior while somehow mustering the incredible restraint necessary not to fight with every fiber of his or her being to ban that behavior nationwide and start making arrests.

Update 2: Matt Yglesias links to Brink Lindsey, godfather of the correct conclusion that cultural libertarianism is the "soft consensus" on top in this country and the incorrect conclusion that this is not stinging proof of the pathetic depths to which we Libertine Bourgeois have sunken. Spring break is the new free lunch, yes, but America still crawls with moralizing scolds, to varying degrees censorious or polite, and the silent soft consensus remains 'social democratic' -- populist, protectionist, instinctively arrayed against cultural libertarianism more than any other strain. No surprise Hillary, very weak here, has brought on Gephardt.   

The Inactivism Question, on the Web and in Real Life

It goes without saying, and's already been said, that maybe sometimes -- as in the case of weird, creepy, and totally depressingly already media-saturated dark dreams of anti-heroic mass-murdering freakazoid college-agers -- having less knowledge, less information, is better. Just as doing more isn't going to reverse the Virginia Tech scourge nor prevent its avatars in the future, so knowing more won't save us, either. Neither facts nor instrumentalizations. Radical responses to radical evil require radical innocence, and radical innocence is a charismatic gift of inactivism, holy inactivism. It is not anti-intellectual to not be for coming to know as much as we can as soon as we can.

That said, I wanted to link to Scott McLemee in honor of his stalwart attempt to visit Friday's Tocqueville Forum panel on P.R. at Georgetown, a smashing good time and noble enterprise graced by the professional dignity and personal sweetness of Jeremy Beer, Jonathan Imber, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, champions all and not afraid of haute French cuisine (I'm talking snails, livers, brains, here, comrades). Special kudos too to the one & only Matt Crawford. Also thanks to Stanley Kurtz for his probity and frankness. Anyone linkable I've left off inadvertently, harrass me at once. Until then, this being as good as any a place to start with S-Mac, in light of the graf supra, away we go.