I’m sure there’s already an outfit called ‘Serial Vapist’ (after twenty seconds of searching, yes, in fact, there is).

Here’s Matt Ridley on vaping, and most of the specious arguments made in favor of regulation:

‘Vaping is the perfect example of a voluntary innovation derived from free enterprise that delivers better human health, at no cost to the taxpayer, and no inconvenience to society — and causes pleasure. I neither smoke nor vape and have no financial interest in either, but I wish it every success.’

I AM your father.

As posted: It’s no coincidence that libertarian-minded folk at Reason magazine are addressing the issue. E-cigarettes could be confusing the children in NYC.  The FDA has recently been on the manufacturer’s case.  The City Council takes the smoking ban (get Big Tobacco!) a step further:

What’s a little surprising may be the rush to moral judgment, condemnation and control.

Addition:  Delivering stuff into your lungs with a ‘portable chemistry set’ is going to have side-effects, if we’re honest, but relative to smoking cigarettes and relative to the level of potential moral panic going around, I remain skeptical and open to data. I also remain somewhat skeptical that a movement towards ever-expanding individual freedoms, often towards anarchy, won’t have side-effects either.

Compared to modern revolutionary movements, radical activism, collectivist Romantic tribalism and the morally panicked, one could do much worse.

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Get ready for some bloviating:

As this blog sees things, the posture of radical opposition to some existing rule or law, through claims of liberation from oppression, tends to yield an ever-growing list of new and/or hybrid rules and laws.  Radicals, after all, are still full of thoughts, beliefs, hopes, moral and aesthetic judgments etc.  No man is an island, least of all men enmeshed within liberatory, collectivist movements united against the oppressor.

It’s unsurprising that the Marxist tendency to conceive of all of life (personal and public) in economic terms, puts ever more pressure upon ‘capitalism’ and marketplaces (the freer flow of capital) to deliver meaning and purpose in people’s lives.  Though to be fair, some old-school Marxists are sticks-in-the-mud against the postmodern, post-Marxist drift towards radical individualism, nihilism and existentialism, critical of the many knowledge claims within the old systems.

Modern ideological movements tend to promise the good, the true and the beautiful all in one package.  (H)istory has a direction and a purpose which can be known; it can be visualized and actualized.  (H)istory, for the committed ideologue, has an end, and men’s ends can be known and actualized within this vision.

(S)cience, of course, provides precise mathematical and probabilistic knowledge of the Natural world, usually the best knowledge we have, based upon observation.  This knowledge can reach out and describe the material world, elements of which may actually empirically exist similar as they present themselves to our senses and the complex analyses some people perform.

What, I, personally, tend to see as a category error, however, lies in assuming the sciences can produce such knowledge transferable to (H)istory and (P)olitics without information loss; not merely what is, but what ought to be.

On that note, Theodore Dalrymple, prison psychiatrist, tries to take some claims of psychiatry down a peg or two.  Aside from the application of biology, medicine and psychology to people’s interior thoughts, psychology has had some serious reproducibility problems.

Perhaps that latest Self-Help indulgence, or that Psych 101 course applied to HR problem-solving is about as reliable as the abstract metaphysics of a young Man Of God?

Just look at that Parking Lot!:

Dalrymple comes at problems of psychiatry as a psychiatrist, and from the perspective of a humanist.  There’s deep suffering and deep wisdom in literature; the kind of which can cultivate humble self-reflection.  All people and all problems are not necessarily going to be solved in the DSM.

Some of [psychiatry’s] knowledge claims may be slightly inflated, hopes ready to be dashed and lives harmed, especially when they deal with people in prisons and on the edges of society, the most vulnerable and/or dangerous among us.

Any thoughts and comments are welcome.