The Henley Metric

Jim Henley has come up with a fascinatingly new cherry-picked metric for deciding which side is the Bad Side (hint: conservatives) and which is the Good Side (hint: the left):

Let me stress, the question is not, “Are there bad ‘liberal-inspired’ laws and regulations?” Of course there are. The question is whether there are any such whose aim is to dissuade you by making you feel terrible – physically and/or emotionally – about an otherwise legal course of action.

See what he did there? If bad lefty policies outnumber bad conservative policies in general by 1000-to-1, that wouldn’t count. All that counts for the Henley Metric – all you’re supposed to pay attention to – are whether a policy’s ‘aim is to dissuade you by making you feel terrible’ about doing something legal. Henley scores this a 1-to-nothing win for the left, and so, QED I guess.

Now, maybe he’s right. Maybe the left doesn’t propose policies whose specific form of badness involves ‘making me feel terrible’ about doing something. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to come up with examples either way. But if not, I submit that could be because they are too busy with their day job scribbling their yearly flood of policies which add up to steal half my f**king property from me year in year out. Hell, in that light I’d love it if they’d switch to a focus on this making-me-feel-terrible thing, if it meant they’d only steal, oh I dunno, a quarter of my property? I’d do that trade all day long in a heartbeat.

For me the highlight of Henley’s post however came at the beginning with the assertion that this – and this, in particular – is ‘why, though [he works] in Virginia, I insist on living in Maryland.’ Both states ‘answered the question’, you see, because the Maryland legislature legalized same-sex marriage whereas Virginia pushed through that mandatory-MRI-for-abortion thing.

Yeah, I’m real sure that that’s why Jim Henley lives in Maryland not Virginia. Because after all the experience of living in Montgomery County (in Maryland) must be like night-and-day for Jim Henley compared if he were to instead live in some redneck theocratic backwater such as, like, Fairfax County (in Virginia). Totally different experiences.