” He’s bald with a bushy beard and sometimes an ear-ring or two. He looks like any one of a hundred Daddy Bear guys …”

Why the hell would any man put a goddamn ring through his ear … or any other part of him for that matter? In aid of what?

There must be some wavelength to human experience – or in the experience of some humans – that is invisible to me. I have asked guys getting voluntary tattoos why, as well.

The answer I got was always along the lines of “I just think it’s cool”.

“Why is it ‘cool’ ? What makes it cool? ”

“I dunno … I just think it is”

My only conclusion has been that whatever it was that convinced them that it was “cool”, it was not a rational evaluation or cost benefit analysis process which was accessible to me, that was behind it. Or else the benefit seemed so trivial and ultimately worthless, that I could not see it as any kind of benefit in any event.

It’s a big country with > 300 million people in it. That you can locate anecdotes doesn’t mean that a scenario is at all probable. The question at hand is not whether it is possible that Kevin Williamson is a homosexual. The question is whether that is at all likely given that he’s been married. Again, one of the more recent assessments of the prevalence of homosexual conduct (Edward Laumann et al) put it at 2.8% of the adult population. If you’re looking at a population of middle-aged bachelors, of course that share is a great deal higher. If you’re looking at middle-aged married men, it’s a great deal lower. If you’re looking at middle-aged divorces, it might be higher or lower but certainly in single-digits and not something you would assume about someone. (You can do a text search of his 2009 book on Amazon. His wife is not mentioned in the acknowledgements, which suggests they were no longer married by 2009, or at least separated; the Texas Divorce Index has no listing for them, so they weren’t divorced during his residence there (2000-04, 2008); a White Pages search locates an Amanda Norris Williamson of the right age in Carlisle, Pa, which suggests they separated during his interlude in Philadelphia and she stayed in Pennsylvania).

No you’re not and no I’m not. Transactions are mutually beneficial. They’re entered into voluntarily because each party gets something (though one may benefit more than the other). What the vendor gets out of it is his surplus. What the consumer gets is his surplus. You impose an excise, and you add a third party, the state. The total surplus available to all parties to the transaction declines some; that’s the deadweight loss. The remaining surplus is reapportioned between the vendor, the consumer, and the state. Both the vendor surplus and the consumer surplus decline in this scenario (because it’s apportioned to the state and there’s some deadweight loss). The change in the vendor’s surplus is his portion of the tax burden, the change in the consumer’s is his portion.

https://www.sfgate.com/g00/performance/article/Mormon-author-Carol-Lynn-Pearson-tries-to-2546687.php?i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3d&i10c.ua=1&i10c.dv=6

Ian
April 7, 2018 at 10:32 am
“Not quite sure how this has gained currency, so I think it’s worth noting that Kevin D. Williamson has never said he’s gay. Here he is in conversation with Charles C.W. Cooke (from this podcast @ 17m50s):

[Y]ou get this every day […] it doesn’t matter what you or I ever write, “you’re a racist, you’re a sexist, you’re a homophobe”, and […] people call you a religious fundamentalist all the time, you know, even though you’re an atheist […] You know I get half the time that I’m a homophobe, and half the time that I’m a closeted homosexual, and then well maybe there’s some crossover between those, as some people imply that both of those things are true.

I’m not sure classical liberalism really has anything to do with it.”

The classical liberalism point is actually well made in the Continental Telegraph article, and is the main driver of that post, rather than the gayness of KW or not (he could have selected some other person as an example), that being:

https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/culture/kevin-d-williamson-is-gay-aint-that-a-victory-for-classical-liberalism/

“Which is the thing I note about this current furore. Absolutely no one thinks that Williamson’s sexuality has anything to do with anything other than his own sexuality. He’s not being attacked nor defended upon the basis of it. His ideas, sure, they’re being machine gunned. And I think that’s a vast advance. In that properly classical liberal direction.

We rather went from no one knowing about the sexuality of a commentator, through to both a prurience about it and also an assumption that leaning one way would mean belonging to one particular thought gang, to today’s who gives a shit? Yes, that is a better society. It’s a pretty good definition of that classical liberalism in fact, that where and when you affect some third party we need to take note but for the vast majority of how you live your life who gives a shit?”

On the topic of married gay people and how many are there, I slogged my way through the book “Coming Out Under Fire” (about LG people in the military being forced out; that was in the days before they added the BTXYZ part) and one thing mentioned quite often was that a gay couple and a lesbian couple would marry each others partners for the record, and then privately shift back to the preferred pairing. There are certainly anecdotes abounding of heterosexual married couples divorcing when one of them leaves to be with a romantic partner of the same sex.
One instance I know about is that of a Mormon writer, Carol Lynn Pearson, whose husband left her for his male lovers, but came back to the family (they ahd several kids) when he needed medical care. It was a big story in the LDS community back in the day.

https://people.com/archive/carol-lynn-pearson-pens-a-moving-memoir-on-her-gay-husbands-death-from-aids-vol-27-no-5/

What proportion of LG people do these kinds of things?
Only Kinsey knows, and he made up the numbers.

It suggests he’s not deferential to the gay lobby and it suggests he doesn’t assess institutions or controversies by the degree of deference offered the tastes and prejudices of active homosexuals. There number of homosexuals who have that particular disposition is small, at least among people who write.

Other than producing theatre criticism, there’s nothing about Williamson’s subject matter, interests, reactions, and mannerisms which suggests a gay sensibility. In re Jason Lee Steorts, who threw a public hissy fit when Mark Steyn quoted an old joke by Dean Martin (Q “How do you make a fruit cordial? A “Be nice to him”), that’s not the case.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec9XhidyjCI

You found a remark by an unidentified pseudonymous person in a comment box not only persuasive but probative, You also find the fact that he’s bald and has on occasion worn an earring to be persuasive. What you didn’t find persuasive was an actual public document which allows a probability assessment.

Again, you’re interested in the distribution of consumer and producer surplus under two different scenarios, one with the excise and one without. You have a loss of surplus to both parties, some of which takes the form of revenue to the government and some of which is deadweight loss.