L’esprit d’escalier

Update on pure crap:

2010-10-22T21:07:00.002-04:00

The terrible, awful, no good complaint against Faux News by the DGA was dropped. No surprise there.

Google's tax rate isn't 2.4%

2010-10-22T20:52:00.003-04:00

This is one of those things that drives me batty. A sloppily written story from Bloomberg implied that Google's effective tax rate is a mere 2.4%, and the blogosphere swallowed it whole. It should take anyone that isn't a moron no more than 20 seconds to pull up Google's audited financials and see that their effective tax rate has been between 22 - 28% for the past 3 years, but people are dumb and gullible.

So where did that number come from? It's basically a recycled Bloomberg story. They did a marginally interesting story in May about transfer pricing, and when they crunched the numbers they found that income that had been routed to Ireland would ultimately be taxed at 2.4% by Ireland (12.5 statutory rate less deductions for fees paid to Bermuda). They recycled that 2.4% figure back into the Google story, and voila! Dipshits all over the blogosphere - even congresspeople! - are vomiting back that piece of crap that they gulped down without thinking.

NY Times sexes up boring case with false corporate personhood angle

2010-09-29T22:54:00.001-04:00

On Monday, the SCOTUS granted cert on FCC v AT&T. The case turns on the meaning of “person” as defined in a particular statute (5 USC 552(b)(7)(C)) and, accordingly, has exactly zero to do with the doctrine that corporations are persons as a matter of constitutional law.

That pesky fact doesn’t stop Adam Liptak from the NY Times; he’s got a narrative and he’s sticking with it:

The new cases follow the court’s decision in January in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to spend money in candidate elections.

The problem: the cases really don’t have anything to do with Citizens United. They follow CU sequentially, but not causally. One may as well say that the sun rising in the east followed Liptak’s article. It’s true, but the two don’t have anything to do with one another.

Liptak’s misleading story was picked up and distorted further, leading to inane posts like this one at The Atlantic Monthly:

While this case is not a carbon copy of Citizens United and justices are not guaranteed to vote similarly, the Citizens breakdown may serve as a helpful barometer of where votes may fall on FCC. After all, both cases have at their core the issue of corporate "personhood" and the rights that accompany it.

Not really. In fact, we _know_ that AT&T is a “person” under FOIA, because FOIA clearly defines “person” to include corporations:

“person” includes an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or public or private organization other than an agency

So the question for the Supreme Court is how to read the statute, and, specifically, how to interpret the term “personal privacy.” If “personal privacy” is “privacy” that accrues to a “person,” then the definition of “person” per FOIA should control, meaning that corporations have “personal privacy.” If, on the other hand, “personal privacy” is something like a technical term, or a distinct term of its own, then the definition of “person” in the statute isn’t controlling and we would look to ordinary usage to determine its own meaning. A Third Circuit panel – comprising two Clinton appointees and a GWB appointee – found the former:

After all, "personal" is the adjectival form of "person," and FOIA defines "person" to include a corporation. We agree. It would be very odd indeed for an adjectival form of a defined term not to refer back to that defined term…. Further, FOIA's exemptions indicate that Congress knew how to refer solely to human beings (to the exclusion of corporations and other legal entities) when it wanted to. Exemption 7(F), for example, protects information gathered pursuant to a law enforcement investigation that, if released, "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual." 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(F) (emphasis added). Yet, Congress, in Exemption 7(C), did not refer to "the privacy of any individual" or some variant thereof; it used the phrase "personal privacy."

It’s a reasonable opinion, although the opposite reading is reasonable, too. The other position – that “personal privacy” is a term distinct from its component words – is, IMHO, the better reading of the statute, although regardless of which position prevails “corporate personhood” has nothing to do with it.

The stupid at Americablog burns

2010-09-26T07:29:00.003-04:00

This NYT article discusses how some are planning to oppose the reelection of judges that held that the gay marriage ban was unconstitutional. There are all sorts of interesting issues afoot here: the tension between substantive justice and democratic process, a vanguard judiciary and democratic legitimacy, and so on.

Americablog's take on this topic so pregnant with interesting subjects?

What part of this is any different than the Soviet Union or any other two-bit dictatorship?

What? It's worth it to read that one again, and then step back and really savor the inanity: yes, we're just like the Soviet Union because we have elections.

Fantastic.

Democratic Governors Association Complaint: Pure Slop

2010-09-18T19:53:00.003-04:00

The DGA filed a complaint against Faux News with the Ohio Election Commission. It's pure crap. Here's the gist: the (R) gubernatorial candidate in OH, John Kasich, was on Faux and they put his fundraising website's address on the screen. According to the thin filing, this was in-kind contribution from a corporation, which is prohibited by ORC 3517.10(I)(5).

Try reading the law next time, guys.

Here's 3517.01(e), creating an exception from the definition of "contribution" for "[a]ny contribution as defined in section 3517.1011 of the Revised Code that is made, received, or used to pay the direct costs of producing or airing an electioneering communication."

Next we turn to 3517.1011 to see how it defines "contribution:"
A communication that appears in a news story, commentary, public service announcement, bona fide news programming, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcast, cable, or satellite television or radio station, unless those facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate

There's plenty of fun to be had from wondering whether Faux News is controlled by a political party, but as a legal matter it clearly falls within the scope of "bona fide news programming." What that tells us is that its communications will not - can not - constitute a in-kind contribution.

In short, the DGA complaint is crap.

Nitpicking: Thinkprogress

2010-01-03T17:42:00.003-05:00

Thinkprogress, apparently, doesn't read its own links:

Of course, assassination of this nature is illegal under international law and two Executive Orders,

"Of course," if one reads the first link:

Thus, as long as the international armed conflict with the virtual-State of al-Qa’eda continues, the killing of al-Qa’eda combatants such as al-Havethi is certainly not assassination.

If one reads the second link:

Although such covert attacks might be illegal in the absence of provocation, in the light of the continuing terrorist threat a state-sponsored killing of Usama bin Laden or other terrorist figures would be justifiable as an Article 51 action, as well as permissible under established exceptions to Executive Order 12333.

Morons.

Palin is the gift that keeps on giving.

2009-11-19T20:33:00.002-05:00

From Palin's book:

He then launched into a discussion of nutrition physiology, holding forth on the importance of carbohydrates to cognitive connections and blah-blah-blah.

Whiskey Fire notes:

And in one sublime sentence, an agglomeration of comedy gold on the scale of Scrooge McDuck's money bin, in which Palin says Steve Schmidt is a dick for suggesting she can't make cognitive connections while making a cognitive connection with "blah-blah-blah," we discern the yawning abyss of stupid through which Sarah Palin stumbles as she fails at everything, I can't take any more, the end.

Palin is just fucking outstanding. More like this, please, GOP.

2009-11-16T19:46:00.003-05:00

If conservatives are like a room full of 12 year-old remedial students, Allahpundit is an average 12 year-old. Quite a bit smarter than his peers, but still not terribly impressive in the grand scheme of things.

With that, check out his "expose" on how Stern has failed to register as a lobbyist despite not being require to.

Quoth the mediocre-intelligence blogger:

At 9 am ET today, Americans for Tax Reform and the Alliance for Worker Freedom will deliver a letter to both chambers of Congress and to US Attorney Channing Phillips in Washington DC, demanding a federal investigation of Andrew Stern, president of the SEIU. They will claim that Stern, who stopped registering as a federal lobbyist in 2007, has continued his lobbying efforts.

Shocking!

The relevant law here is 2 USC 1602(10), defining "lobbyist" as:

any individual who is employed or retained by a client for financial or other compensation for services that include more than one lobbying contact, other than an individual whose lobbying activities constitute less than 20 percent of the time engaged in the services provided by such individual to that client over a 3-month period.

According to the wizkids that Allahpundit cites, Stern spent a whopping 22 days lobbying Obama. So, in the parallel world where the earth orbits the sun in 110 days, Stern easily satisfies the definition of lobbyist. (assuming each visit was a whole day, which I'm sure the geniuses at Hot Air built into their model. I mean, you don't work for Michelle Malkin w/o being one smart cookie).

The Creepiness of the Conservative Base

2008-11-01T20:54:00.003-04:00

So, it looks like Obama's step-aunt is in the country illegally. The generally sane blog Tigerhawk has conjured up an impressive mix of the very creepy and the very stupid.

First, the creepy:

How is he supposed to enforce our borders when his own kith and kin are illegals and he has done nothing about it?

Clearly, per Tigerhawk, people with illegal immigrant relatives have an affirmative duty to turn their relatives into the INS. Water is thicker than blood for conservatives, it seems. I'd advise getting far, far away from one's conservative family; there's no telling what they'll tattle about.

The stupid:

The problem, of course, is that this revelation would put Obama in a very difficult spot as president.

It does? The implication seems to be that presidents are in "very difficult spots as president" when they have personal interests in the outcome. The upshot: McCain would benefit - immensely - from the tax cuts he's proposing. Does that mean he has some inextricable conflict of interest that makes his judgment impossible to trust? His judgment is obviously untrustworthy, but it's not for that reason. Presidents make decisions on topics that impact them and their relatives all the time. Yet it's only in this context - the context of a black relative - that this issue is raised.

Pretty convenient. Oh, and fucking retarded.

Reforming the Reform: Sarbanes-Oxley Edition

2006-12-02T11:02:00.000-05:00

On reread, this is an excruciatingly boring post.

Tigerhawk, who has been weirdly diligent in addressing the shortcomings and opportunity costs of SOX, notes that some Democrats (who are probably concentrated in NY and Conn.) are looking to reform the notoriously expensive SOX. The costs are so high, that it's probably driving corporations to list their stock on foreign exchanges, the most popular of which is the London Exchange.

Cutting to the chase: the first problem SOX was aimed at is management malfeasance, and to correct that, the law requires the CEO and CFO to personally vouch for the statements of financial position. Further, it creates civil and criminal liability for wrongly certifying certain statements about compliance with regulation. While there is a mens rea requirement (the false certification must be knowing or willful), even the risk of being unsuccessfully prosecuted is risk enough to register in a jurisdiction where, other things being equal, one doesn't assume that risk.

The real meat of SOX, though, is in section 404 of the law, which requires extensive testing of internal controls (internal controls are those procedures that aim at preventing error or fraud. An example would be managerial oversight of the person actually cutting the checks). This section is extraordinarily expensive and, as my colleagues tell me, also extraordinarily boring for the auditor. This is where I think SOX misses the boat. As I see it, the real problem that SOX should have aimed at isn't the dearth of internal control testing; in fact, an audit of entities that aren't covered by SOX generally has enough testing of internal controls to attest to the adequacy of internal controls. Section 404, then, provides a series of diminishing returns.

Instead, the real problem, in addition to executive malfeasance, is the cozy relationship between auditing firms and their clients. It's basic common sense that a firm has fairly strong incentives to avoid irking its clients, and this is exactly what caused Arthur Anderson to pass on correcting Enron's wildly dishonest accounting.

So how do we remedy this deleterious coziness?

One suggestion that's frequently floated is to require corporations to regularly rotate auditing firms. If you know you're not going to have a corp as a client in a few years, there's less reason to hide any shenanigans that may be found. But is that right? Well, it might be if not for the little fact that corporations share information with one another, and an auditing firm will have an incentive to create a "business-friendly" reputation. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are only a handful of auditing firms with the size and sophistication to audit corps that are big enough to be publicly traded. That means that the rotation is so small that a corp will inevitably end up with the same auditing firms over and over. In that environment with such fierce competition, a business-friendly reputation is of paramount importance.

What's SOX's answer? It created a quasi-governmental entity, the PCAOB, to oversee auditing firms. One of its more important roles is to, in effect, audit the auditors by reviewing the audit workpapers, the primary work product that forms the basis of the auditor's conclusions that the financial matters are accurately disclosed.

Here's where auditor sloppiness (if not abetting of fraud) comes into play. It can be very easy for an auditing firm to just say that it tested items thoroughly even if it didn't (this was a problem with Arthur Anderson's audits of Enron, for instance). If a firm did that, the PCAOB would be none the wiser after looking through the audit workpapers. Fixing that problem is simple: require auditing firms to provide evidence that they tested what they say they tested (if I say that a sample of checks were correctly written, to document that I'd actually stick copies of those checks into the workpapers). This would enable the PCAOB to, in effect, reaudit the corporation - this should enhance both the integrity of the corporation and the auditing firm by adding transparency to the relationship between the two.

Do this, eliminate Section 404 internal control testing, and the rest takes care of itself.

Are conservatives more generous? Devil, meet details

2006-11-19T16:19:00.000-05:00

A while back, a study came out of a Massachusetts philanthropy organization purporting to show that red states were more generous than blue states. While the analysis seemed convincing at first glance, once the methodology was out in the open it became clear that it was deeply flawed. The best take down of the study was this post at Just One Minute.

Tom Maguire now points us to another study purporting to show that conservatives are more generous than liberals. And the devil may be in the details yet again.

Two points on which the analysis may get slippery: first, the definition of conservative. The reviews already note that the study's author seems to define conservative fairly narrowly (nuclear family, regular practicioner of relion - that "regular" may turn out to be important, as it could mean he's only talking about those people that attend church every single week. And that brings me to the next point.....).

Second, how is generosity being defined? Since he seems to be talking about church going conservatives, a substantial portion of the giving being factored into the analysis could very well be tithing. Tithing is, legally speaking, charitible giving, but the point of the study isn't to demonstrate that the church going conservatives get more itemized deductions, but that their actions are morally commendable, and moreso than liberals. So is tithing as morally commendable as giving to, say, a soup kitchen? I would argue that it isn't. Christians that give to the church of their choice derive a benefit from it. Without that tithing, the church of their choice would be out of business. Since church goers aren't coerced into going church, but go because they want to go (critiques of religion as gunmen writ large notwithstanding), it's clear that church goers do derive a benefit from supporting their church.

It could be countered that, while tithing does support the church, churches do have a social mission. However, a fairly small amount of the amount tithed actually goes to charitible activities. I've found that it's rare to find a church that devotes more than 20% of its expenditures in a given year to bona fide charitible activities (and the majority far less), with everything else going to overhead and expenses for the worship services. If any other charity had that kind of ratio of charitible spending to non-charitible spending, they'd be under investigation by the IRS for being a sham charity. Tithing, then, functions more like morally neutral dues than it does morally commendable charitible contribution

Free Trade and Distributional Politics

2006-11-18T13:23:00.000-05:00

The Blue Crab directs us to a by-the-numbers Opinion Journal article that claims that protectionist policies are incoherent when advanced by champions of the blue collar. The Crab sums it up for us:

I have seen a number of left wing bloggers touting the protectionist agenda as a good thing. But like the isolationist tendencies they have, these are bad ideas. But exactly like the anti-Wal-Mart jihad, it is doing the bidding of the unions at the expense of the poor.

I'm a full stop supporter of free trade (that's one thing Clinton Dems and economic conservatives can agree on: we're all liberals in the classical sense).

That said, the gains from free trade are not unambiguously good: the gains are spread broadly, and the losses are concentrated within sectors in which we no longer have a comparative advantage vis-a-vis our domestic markets. So it's no surprise that states with sectors that are getting rocked by globalization (the carolinas w/ textiles; the rust belt w/ manufacturing) are retreating to protectionism in the absence of policies that can take those broad gains and distribute them in such a way that even people in those regions hit the hardest by trade can support trade. (there was a small flurry of posting on this topic in the liberal blogosphere about a month ago, but I can't seem to find the links).

It's isn't surprising, and it isn't irrational: the point of regional support of protectionism is to reduce the small-but-broad gains made in states that win on free trade in order to prevent the localized-but-deep losses in those states that lose on free trade. That's perfectly rational - in fact, it may very be the definition of rationality (in the economic sense).

Curiously, for an editorial board of a paper centered economics, the Opinion Journal suggests that unions started opposing free trade in the '60s because of their political support for democrats, rather than the obvious economic reason that the '60s were the last time America enjoyed comparitive advantage in industries that unions represented.

Hamdan & Jurisdiction: Cliff Notes Edition

2006-07-01T10:10:00.000-04:00

At Blogs for Bush, Mark Noonan addresses the jurisdictional question in the Hamdan case thusly:

[This] seems to say that no judge has an ability to hear a case arising out of the detainees in Gitmo - except the US Court of Appeals in DC, and that only as it relates to appeals of status - ie, someone claiming to not legitimately be deteined in Gitmo (this, I presume, designed to prevent the transfer of a prisoner from the jurisdiction of the US to Gitmo). The Act goes on to say that the DC Court of Appeals shall have exclusve jurisdiction - that seems to mean that once the DC Court has spoken, all judicial appeals are exhuasted.The court's reasoning made sense to me.

Statutory construction is never easy, especially when there are statutory cross-references all over the place, but as I read both the act and the decision (pdf), the basic issue is whether the act excludes pending habeus claims from general appellate jurisdiction. With that in mind, here's how Justice Stevens read it.

This is the summary structure of the act:

(e) the court doesn't have jurisdiction over:
(1) habeus
(2) determinations of the tribunals re: proper detention
(3) final decisions of the tribunals
(h) effective date:
(2) sections (e)(1) & (2) apply to pending cases.

As I read it, and as the court read it, (h)(2) means that the act didn't touch pending habeus cases. If pending habeus cases are also removed from jurisdiction, then there's literally no reason for (h)(2) to exist. It'd be a meaningless subsection that the Congress inserted because they had to make the bill take up 3 pages, and they'd already tried switching to Courier New, but that only got them to 2.75 pages.

That's pretty much where the action is, IMHO, in the jurisdictional question. And, as every other commentator has noted, it's a pretty close call (Scalia's explanation of how the subsection isn't just spacefiller is pretty good - I recommend everyone read the relevant portions of the majority and then Scalia's dissent. It's not easy reading, but it's worthwhile.)

What's Going on in Fantasy Land Right Now?

2006-06-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Right Wing News thinks that a vote can swing an election. But, in what must have something to do relativity or quantam physics or something, it only makes a difference if you vote for a major party candidate. I would think, of course, that my one vote, out of the thousands and thousands of votes for a given election, wouldn't matter regardless of which party I voted for*. But see, I don't work for that bastion of nobel laureates at Human Events. Apparently, Human Events is like a black hole: the laws of statistics (and the virtue of rationality) break down in its presence.

Imagine that, though: to write that crap, he actually had to walk over to a typewriter, think of something stupid, and then commit it to writing.

Amazing.

* It should be self-evident that a single vote doesn't make much of a difference, which is why voting isn't predicated on rationality; it can only be grounded in the citizen's duty. The upshot is that one actually is wasting one's time if one doesn't vote for the best candidate regardless of party.

Form, not strength of conviction

2006-05-15T13:37:00.000-04:00

In another post in an interesting series, Andrew Sullivan attempts to differentiate Christianism from garden-variety ethics by the intensity of the belief. So, while a Kantian atheist really believes that “X is wrong,” a Christianist really, really believes that “X is wrong,” and correspondingly tries to assert those beliefs through the political process more strongly. There’s more “oomph” to the religious belief, if you will.

As I understand Sullivan to say, this added oomph derives from the non-provisional nature of the religious conviction. The flipside to this is that non-religious worldviews are provisional and subject to change; in turn, more political leeway is granted those that disagree with us. The obvious counter, of course, is that I hold many beliefs as non-provisional. I hold that murder is wrong, and this belief is absolutely non-provisional and non-negotiable. It doesn’t seem, though, that our imposition of this belief through politics is any sense theocratic, or similar to the logic of Christianism.

On many of the moral propositions on which there’s broad agreement, then, Sullivan’s distinction is simply untenable. Just because I believe something non-provisionally doesn’t mean it’s of a kind with Christianist politics.

So where do we locate the difference between capital-L Liberal politics and Christianist ones? Let’s start with some of the hallmarks of Christianist political activity: pornography, decency (cursing and the like), and homosexuality*. All of these things have in common a “thick” conception of the self toward which all people ought to tend. In short, the Christianist position on all of these is one of eudaimonia. There is an ideal, thick conception of the self, and the law ought to be used to encourage movement toward that ideal. You should be straight, virtuous, chaste, etc., regardless of your good intentions or the consequences of your actions. That’s the Christianist position, and it is distinctly eudaimonian. By contrast, Liberal conceptions of the political sphere (notably Rawls’s, to whom this post is obvious indebted) begin from the presupposition that these thick conceptions of the self (the Rawlsian “comprehensive doctrine”) should not be enforced through political coercion. The politically Liberal notion of politics is a space in which people can pursue happiness so long as others aren’t harmed; the Christianist notion tries to shrink the boundaries of that space to coincide perfectly with the Christianist notion of the virtuous self.

* Bracketing abortion for the sake of simplicity

Genetics and Sexual Identity

2006-05-13T10:55:00.000-04:00

Apparently, some study has come out noting a difference in brain chemistry between lesbians and straight women. Kevin Nelstead at The Earth is Not flat, writes:

While genetics is important, it is a poor foundation for ethics.

It's still ethically relevant, though. To the extent a trait is immutable, the ethical calculus changes. In that case, the Christianist has to resort solely to the notion that homosexual acts are wrong while homosexuality itself isn't (much as in the alcoholism analogy).

In the long term, that's a loser distinction for Christianists. Most people rightly feel that sexuality is deeply tied to identity in a way that the decision to drink or not isn't. Given that deep tie between identity and sexual identification, the distinction between actor and activity becomes pretty hard to make, if not downright incoherent.

Here's Kevin again:

This kind of reasoning is easy to counter: if chimpanzees eat each other (yes, chimps in the wild have been observed to be cannibalistic), than it should be okay for humans to do the same.

Kevin is right that genetic disposition is insufficient for the morality of a given action. Genetics doesn't determine the moral calculus; it needs to be supplemented by a moral proposition. I'd suggest that a principle of non-harm is sufficient to transform genetic disposition into a morally neutral activity or state. In other words, if the behavior or state doesn't unreasonably do harm to another, and it's genetically predisposed, it's morally acceptable. That seems to track my intuition: if ya can't help it, and it's not hurting anybody, what's the fuss about? The principle of non-harm crisply differentiates being gay from both alcoholism* and cannibalism.

* The rejoinder: what if an alcoholic doesn't know anybody - say the alcoholic lives on his own island with no human contact, such that his alcoholism doesn't run afoul of the principle of non-harm. This is an appeal to eudaimonia: he's not hurting anyone else, yet he clearly isn't thriving or living up to his potential. That's an argument that could certainly be made. Suffice to say for the moment that I don't find it too compelling: while his actions couldn't be said to be good, I don't know if one can go so far as to call them unethical. I tend to see thriving as supererogatory icing on the ethical cake, if you will.

What will the New World Order look like?

2006-02-04T21:51:00.000-05:00

Friends and family know I'm as on-guard as anyone when it comes to parsing the signs of the apocalypse on various websites (note: that first link is particularly useful, as it will set up an email account for you to autosend emails to your damned loved ones in case of Rapture. Bookmark it). Recently, my attention has turned to a vexing and critical question in the field of Rapture Studies: what will be the likely legal structure of the New World Order?

Let's turn to already existing bodies to see if any are fitting or otherwise provide a model for the NWO*:

First, we have the WTO. The WTO, like other international bodies, is purely voluntary. If a country wants out, it can leave the group. Now, I have a hard time imagining that there will ever be a transnational body that will govern through coercion, the way national governments do vis-a-vis their citizenries. I mean, what country would voluntarily give up their sovereignty?

At any rate, the WTO won't be the situs of a future one-world government or New World Order for two reasons: first, since all of its rules and by-laws require consensus (meaning some country like Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, or America can derail any proposed human rights-based rules), its body politic is too weak and decentralized to pass rules over the objections of its members. Second, its rules are trade-related. One could argue that some of the decisions are in a gray zone between trade and social policy, but its one thing to, say, restrict certain shrimp nets and a whole other thing to require free speech rights.

I think I could see international government(s) being formed on the model of the EU, in which economic benefits are conditioned on acceptance of non-economic intranational rules. Turkey's troubled attempt at accession to EU membership is a perfect example: in order for Turkey to reap the economic benefits of EU membership, it has had to adopt European laws on things like civil liberties and human rights. Additionally, the EU isn't quite as consensus-based (I think. This summary made my head hurt, so I just guessed about the consensus thing).

The EU provides at least one thing we'd want our NWO to possess: the ability to bootstrap non-economic law into economic law. Two more things we still need: (1) majoritarian, rather than consensus, governance. Whether this be straight one-nation-one-vote or a weighted system (ala the IMF, where votes are weighted in proportion to capital donated) will be up to the Morning Star to decide. (2) the coercive power of the State. It could be argued that our NWO will have to be coercive, like a national state re: its citizenry, rather than voluntary. And, since no country will voluntarily give up its sovereignty, the NWO is just a figment of the Wacky Religious Right.

I have two responses to this latter objection. First: Get behind me, Satan!

Second, I think this argument relies on oversimplified notions of coercion and consent. It could be argued that I freely choose to abide US laws. Hey, I could always choose not to, but I'd just have to deal with the consequences. That, of course, is ridiculous: something is coercive if it doesn't allow any other reasonable choices. Jail isn't a reasonable choice. Similarly, if our economic regime provides enough benefits such that non-participation is not a reasonable choice, it will carry the force of coercion. (I'd argue the WTO carries this force).

So if the WTO couldn't become such a body, and the EU couldn't (being geographically limited), what body could be the seed of a future New World Order?

Interestingly, there's been talk among conservatives to start a WTO-like body that would link economic advantage to democratic institutions and civil rights. Such a body would have the non-economic bootstrapping; a problem is that Americans are notoriously (or famously) weary of strong transnational bodies, perhaps because they don't want to quicken the Second Coming. It's possible that the isolationist tendencies in conservatism could be assuaged by a weighted voting system (guess who'd get that weight?), but that remains to be seen. At any rate, if the NWO is on its way, I think Babylon will best be birthed in an Democratic Trade Bloc.

* The UN is absent, as Satan won't be able to utilize it until his emissary John Bolton has reformed it and made it a competent authority.

Health Savings Accounts: the quick explanation

2006-01-23T20:13:00.000-05:00

Here's Kevin Drum:

The debate over HSAs is going to get mighty wonky over the next few months, but always keep this explanation in mind as you're trying to make sense of the charges and countercharges. The fundamental idea behind HSAs is not to provide better healthcare, it's to provide less healthcare. Conservatives want you to think twice before spending a hundred bucks for your regular pap smear.

That's pretty accurate. It's reasonable to wonder if some sectors are made inefficient by overconsumption, but I can't see how health care, where prevention is so key to efficiency, is one of them.

Adorno. He's so dreamy

2005-10-29T12:43:00.000-04:00

There are times I really love Theodor Adorno. Interestingly, there are passages in his writings that could pass for a really smart article in National Review. I'm not sure if conservativism has come around to pomo & marxian analysis (it certainly has in some instances; witness the classic, if simplified, Kuhnianism of ID proponents: science is an institutional formation, rather than a discipline whose boundaries are shaped by an internal logic, etc.), or if Adorno has always been latently conservative. Perhaps it's that the most annoying forms of leftism have appropriated the language of Heidegger. If that's the case, then Adorno's scorching hatred of Heidegger would be structurally aligned with conservative critiques of annoying leftism. At any rate, this passage from The Jargon of Authenticity is great:

The jargon channels engagement into firm institutions and, furthermore, strengthens the most subaltern speakers in their self-esteem; they are already something because someone speaks from within them, even when that someone is nothing at all.

That's a pretty cutting, and accurate, description of identity politics in its stupidest form, that of the "recovery of the authentic voice."

PETA: such an easy target, people forget to think

2005-08-08T20:28:00.000-04:00

Marlowe's Shade points us to this oddball column at NRO by one Wesley Smith.

A lot of strange things with the theory advanced in the NRO article. First:

Animal liberationists, [Joseph Bottum, editor of the Natural Law journal First Things] said, have taken this philosophical view a crucial step
further: “First they accept that all suffering is evil. Then they deny that
suffering can be ranked, which means that all suffering, whether in humans or
animals, is equally evil.”

Contra Bottum, utilitarianism doesn't require that all suffering is identical, regardless of the being that is undergoing the suffering. Singer, for example, hierarchalizes sufering by cognitive sophistication - the suffering of an advanced primate like a gorilla or a person is worse, ethically, than that undergone by a worm.

That's sloppy thought #1.

Then there's this:

“But animal liberationists recognize the truth that only humans are moral agents in the world. Thus, when we cause suffering, it is evil. But when animals cause suffering, it is not.” That clicked for me. I have long perceived the animal-liberation movement to be deeply misanthropic, , and Bottum’s theory explains why. If indeed “we are all animals,” then there is no hierarchy of moral worth. Since...all suffering is evil...then the belief that cattle ranching equals Auschwitz becomes a logical conclusion.

So sloppy thought #2 is the equation of recognition that humans are uniquely moral with misanthropy. With power comes responsibility, Spiderman sayeth, and similarly moral knowledge entails responsibility to do what is moral. The reductio ad absurdem is even more stark: is Smith seriously arguing that a lion is acting immorally by eating a zebra? Or is he suggesting that, because animals don't have moral duties, we shouldn't either? He probably agrees with the rest of us sane people that humans have moral duties that don't attach to animals. Per his own criterion, he's a misanthrope.

He could argue, of course, that there's something about another's moral knowledge that affects one's moral duty to the other. This would go something like this: because a lion has no moral knowledge, I assume no moral duty to it. Ergo, killing the lion is morally indifferent. What's problematic with that, and this is precisely what animal rights adherents point to, is that babies don't seem to have any moral knowledge (if they did, parenting would be a lot easier). Despite that, it's wrong to kill babies. So moral knowledge doesn't seem to help us at this juncture. (The argument could go on with all kinds of rejoinders and counters, but let's set those aside for the time being).

I guess he means this: if we say that torturing animals is as bad as torturing people, then we thereby demean human suffering. This is, to put it mildly, underdeveloped. Prima facie, it seems odd: if I say torturing a black man is as bad as torturing a white man, am I thereby demeaning the suffering of the black man? No, of course not. So to Mr. Smith, I say: rethink, rewrite.

The last "thought" (to be generous) is this: "...human contact with animals is seen, by definition, as causing animals to suffer...." This is just weird. It has nothing to do with anything else in the article. While cattle slaughter, chicken burning, and keeping chimps in 3'x3' cages were all mentioned, there was nothing about mere contact (and I'd be willing to bet that more than a few PETA members have cats or dogs, with whom they have more than mere contact). I think this bizarre-o non sequitur pretty much sums up the worth of this column.

Guh?

2005-07-06T12:35:00.000-04:00

Dig this bizarre-o FauxNews poll:

According to the latest FOX News poll, over half of Americans feel more proud to be an American this Fourth of July than last, and a majority believes they are more patriotic than their neighbors.

What kind of lunatic wakes up and thinks that s/he feels more patriotic than last 7/4? That's just weird.

The upcoming SCOTUS fight

2005-07-01T14:59:00.000-04:00

Brad Plummer nails it:

Some lunatic winger will get nominated -- maybe even Janice Rogers Brown -- the Democrats in the Senate will say, "Oh hell no" and launch a filibuster. So the battle will rage on for a while, Bush's "base" will get riled up and motivated to send in lots and lots of money, conservative judicial activists will blast their opponents with fairly superior firepower, and bobbing heads in the media will start carping on those "obstructionist" Democrats (bonus carping here if the nominee is a woman, minority, and/or Catholic). Finally Bush will give a very somber speech about withdrawing his nominee, announce that he's very disappointed in the Senate, toss in a few bonus 9/11 references, and nominate some slightly-less-lunatic ultraconservative instead. The new nominee gets treated as the "compromise" candidate, is lauded far and wide as a moderate, and finally gets confirmed after pressure on the Senate Dems to "act like grown-ups" by television pundits who can afford to get their abortions abroad and will have no problem with a Supreme Court hostile to labor and environmental protections.

(HT: Political Animal)

Congress responds to Kelo

2005-07-01T09:49:00.000-04:00

In response to the Kelo decision, the House passed an appropriations amendment, which would deny federal funds to states that use eminent domain for "ecomonic development". Here's the important part, the language of which is from a similar bill (the amendment isn't up on Thomas yet):

a) In General- The power of eminent domain shall be available only for public use.
(b) Public Use- In this Act, the term `public use' shall not be construed to include economic development.

If actually used, this would invite tons of litigation. The bill suggests that "public use" and "economic development" are mutually exclusive, when it's clear that plenty of eminent domain projects are intended for economic ends (viz., baseball stadia). Will "economic development" be construed in terms of private ownership? Probably not, or else they would've just put that in the bill. That reading is equally unlikely since Republicans [heart] privatization of government functions and private/public partnerships.

So what does it mean? It looks like it'll come down to some mushy 'intent' standard. I mean, it certainly seems to overturn Kelo, but the gazillions of cases that aren't so clear will have the litigation red carpet rolled out for them by this bill.

Alternately, I suppose it could be like a nuclear arsenal: valuable primarily as a threat.

Neoplatonism and politics

2005-06-30T09:59:00.000-04:00

Jeff at the Bernoulli Effect points us to this bit from Woody Allen:

As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 . . . it's too small, history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings.... History is the same thing over and over again.

Jeff adds:

My mind is reeling over the last two days from the staggering ability of rich, spoiled Americans to forget what happened on 9/11. And Woody Allen is the ultimate New Yorker!

I'm a bit surprised by this reaction, for two reasons. First, what Allen said was pretty much the standard neoplatonic aesthete talking points: this world of politics and war, the prose of the world (per Hegel), is transitory; only beauty is eternal and worthy of the artist's endeavors, blahblahblah. We see this talking point elsewhere in the interview:

I'm probably more interested in eternal human feelings and conflicts....The same feelings and problems will persist 5000 years from now. Like the Greek tragedies which still touch us today, which still work.

In other words, while there may be different wars and struggles, there are certain things that are eternal: love, anger, etc. By contrast, particular conflicts are "ephemeral." Inasmuch as the artist's project is to tap into these eternal themes, those are the things that an artist should focus on. (again, I'm not defending this Romantic aesthetic, only making it explicit).

Second, it doesn't seem to me that Allen was saying that 9/11 wasn't horrible, only that it's not an interesting topic for art (this position is certainly debatable, but not at all unusual for what I'd [awkwardly] call aesthetic neoplatonism). In other words, his point was about art, not 9/11.

Sodomy & Seduction

2005-06-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

I've always thought of Foucault as philosophy beach reading. As long as you keep your distance from the methodological and epistemological difficulties (Foucault claims to unearth different modes of thought in which "knowledge" is produced, but he is no less a prisoner of his own era [or episteme] than the objects of his study, so isn't his claim to objectivity blahblahblah), then it's pretty fun, light reading. Since I do keep my distance from those meta problems, any Deep Thoughts I have about his thought is usually of the Jack Handey variety. Better still, it's of the college stoner variety ("See, if I were an 18th century botanist, here's what I'd do....." I thought that this very morning, in fact).

One of the fun things about The Order of Things (TOoT) is his willingness to get swept up in other logics. This text traces the history of how knowledge is produced, and there's a pretty large section devoted to methods of classification among, as you may have guessed, 18th century botanists. Baudrillard once hypothesized that the terms of a discourse seduce the speaker; ya get so wrapped up in what you're saying that that which is said drives the speaker, rather than th'other way around. And this is what happens throughout TOoT - Foucault drops the academic-y passive voice, and seems to write as if he were advocating or teaching these old-timey modes of analysis. It's really pretty cool, and one doesn't even notice until Foucault is pages and pages into this voice.

Another way of taking another's voice is prominent in Zizek's Organs without Bodies. Here, Zizek takes a one-off mention by Deleuze that his philosophy could be characterized as "buggery" of other philosophers, and expands it into a running theme (hence the chapter titled "Taking Deleuze from Behind"). The idea of this strange sodomy is that the author transforms another into his/her marionette, forcing the other to say what the author would otherwise say. More simply, it's twisting the words of the other into the shape of the author's own thought.

The curiuos thing about TOoT is the oscillation between sodomy and seduction. One moment, Foucault will be speaking in the old-timey voice, and the next will be twisting the old-timey thought into new-timey boxes. So, for example, the old-timey voice slowly transforms into the voice of Levi-Strauss, a 20th century structuralist. I'm sure there's a lot more cool stuff that could be wrung out of that progression from seduction to sodomy, but I'm lazy like that.

That's as deep as I go when I'm beach reading.

A Seat at the Cool Kids' Table; or, The Event

2005-06-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

Cool kid Gaunilo has invited me to the blog meme table. My intermittent posting and half-baked didacticism has finally paid off.

1. How many books have I ever owned?

Yikes. If "lots" qualifies, I'll go with that. Otherwise, I'd put a conservative estimate at around 500. My travel library (those books that go with me from apartment to apartment) is around 200. A pretty stupid amount of books, given that my average stay at an apartment is just under a year, but, like a lot of people doing this particular "4 questions," the following type of thought pops into my head when packing: "What if I wake up at 5 one morning and need to find out what Adorno thinks about hermeneutics? Gosh, I don't think I can afford not to take Negative Dialectics." Of course, I have no idea what Adorno thinks about hermeunitics because that impulse has never struck me. But it might.

2. Last book I bought:

If by "bought" we substitute "swiped from a friend," then it would be the Bible. Funny, it was never part of my travel library.

3. Last book I read:

I'm almost done with three (like Gaunilo, I read books together): Zizek's Organs without Bodies; Foucault's Order of Things; and Ricouer's Oneself as Another. There's quite a bit of cool resonance between them, as all of them deal pretty heavily with the ontology of the Event. Inasmuch as an action exists, it has some strange existence, cuz you can't just reach out and touch an Event in the same way one can touch a table. This problematic is interesting to me for two reasons: when I was younger, I used to wonder how it was that people developed the language of verbs. With "table," it seems pretty easy: here's the "table", there's the table, and voila: you got yerself a stable sign. With verbs, though, it's as if the action exhausts itself in its own self-positing; the touching of the table is over as soon as it occurs. Finding the referent, then, seems like catching light in a bottle (metaphors? not my strong suit).

This self-exhaustion dovetails with my mild OCD: after I lock my door, I usually have to unlock it and relock it several times, because the locking exhausts itself and now is gone. The only way to be absolutely positive the door is locked is to unlock it and lock it again. And so this elaborate ritual goes in the morning.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

Baudrillard's Cool Memories. It's short, eminently readable, and is suffused with an ethic of resignation. It's very epigrammatic, so there's no narrative per se, but one gets the impression that his wife or a girlfriend has just left him (or vice versa), and this book, nominally a travel memoir, is the working-through of that gap or interstice as he flies from place to place. Because of the almost-aphoristic style, the text hints at a rich emotional terrain, so that the experience of the book is, as it were, interstitial. Like the narrator, the experience of the book exists as an in-between space, and is in transit between the text and an imaginary toward which the text points. Accordingly, much of the book is written in the present progressive, with the Events exhausting themselves at their moments of self-positing. As bombastic and pretentious as Baudrillard's academic texts are, this is a truly subtle and beautiful work. For better or worse, the way Baudrillard writes this book is the way I think (yeah, my love letters have theses.....and footnotes).

Heidegger's Being and Time. It's jam-packed with everything (I shoulda been a blurb writer, clearly), and was the fount of every major (continental) school of philosophy. This is one of those books that I do wake up at 5 am to peruse.

Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Why? Because it's right. About everything. Philosophy proper can stop after Sartre.

Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's a great novel, and, more autobiographically, it showed me that philosophy isn't just a series of dry propositions whose truth value is tested: philosophy means something, and is uniquely capable of teasing out the significance of things. I've found that philosophy provides the best vocabularies and methods for articulating the weirdness and beauty of the world (I know, my Constructivist Club Card is at risk, what with the positing of a language-independent emotional world and all, but a reconciliation of the two is outside the scope of this post - to redeem myself, perhaps the above should be amended to say that philosophy provides the best way of worldmaking).

Y'all it: Bill Wallo; Nick; Sara Jane; bls.

Misread?

2005-06-17T22:02:00.000-04:00

I think we might see a category mistake at Anti-Climacus:

a human rights problem is first a problem for that particular country. Arbitrary though it's boundaries might be, unchosen by the people in it[....]: it's still first the problem of the people in the country. They are, in a Sartrean sense, condemned to be free; to resist or accept their country's internal situation, and they must choose one or the other[....]But of course--of course--we cannot sit idly by as outside observers; we owe a duty of support[....]

This is, by and large, a comment I can agree with. However, one word juts out and suggests an unfortunate subtext: "first." In what sense is it "first" the troubled citizenry's problem? Nick seems to suggest that the existence of boundary isn't a fact that is to be ethically naturalized, a fact that negates our ethical responsibility to assist the people that lie outside our boundary ("we cannot sit by idly by as outside observers"). As I read Sartre, his position would be that to suggest that boundaries are some in-itself fact of nature would be to live in bad faith. Just as it is bad faith for Pierre to conceive of himself as a waiter (in the same way a rock is hard), it is bad faith to think that our ethical duties stop at national boundaries.

"You see, Mr. X, as a citizen of the other country (in the same way a rock is hard) should really try to help himself first before our ethical duty to assist is triggered." This would be similar to the passage in Being and Nothingness in which the woman on a date feels her suitor's hand on her leg; not knowing what to do, she imagines the hand as a non-human thing that just happens to be on her leg. In this way, she is able to defer her decision and to evade her freedom. That evasion through perceiving the other as other-than-free (an en-soi rather than its own por-soi) is the moment of faith.

So Nick is correct that the other-citizen is bound by the transcendental conditions of freedom; but his/her responsibility to him/herself in no way mitigates our ethical responsibility, our freedom to help. This is noted by Nick, but the placement of that "first" seems to cut against the plain meaning of this admission.

Politically or pragmatically speaking, this "help 'em iff [if and only if] they can't help themselves" may be correct, and is one I endorse, but if it's being used to transform Sartre's ontological notion of freedom into a political philosophy of rugged individualism, then I don't think it's tenable.

Of course, it could be that I've misread the entire post, given that it all hinges on one word.

[ht: Wallo World]

In which your humble author lays out the conditions of batshit-ness

2005-06-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

I take the following to be a reasonably complete list of the factors involved when determining whether one is batshit-crazy Religious Right:

a) Substantive political beliefs and substantive religious beliefs are perfectly co-extensive.
b) Political inquiry and religious inquiry are methodologically intertwined (ie, “Should shellfish be banned from grocery stores? Let’s see what the Bible has to say!”)
c) Bad perm/hair
d) Proclivity for pastels and floral patterns/tacky suits
e) Southern accent
f) Conservative politics

(a) creates a rebuttable presumption of being batshit crazy. To whit, many has been the occasion after which a friend of mine has met my family and then noted that, despite their religious and political beliefs, they are not batshit crazy. “See, I told you so,” I say.

(b) is a world unto itself, so it’ll be useful to delineate some of the more common varieties. In its strong version (b'), political belief is wholly and uncritically determined by religious belief, and isn’t even supplemented by political reasoning as such. This is properly Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. A slightly weaker version (b''), which is probably only distinguished by its use of political rhetoric, finds the Dominionist conclusion and then ornaments that argument with political arguments (this is the batshit corollary to a genus of the Public Reason principle, in which respect for democracy is located in the type of rhetoric deployed: so long as a political stance is supported by some secular reasoning, the determination doesn’t run afoul of the requirements of Public Reason, and is legitimate). The weakest (b''') takes religious reasoning as a starting point, and then weighs that against properly political reasoning (ie: “Blasphemy is bad, so it should be probably be banned. On the other hand, the principle of free speech is a valuable contributor to our civic culture. I’ll weigh the two and make a decision”).

(b') is clearly a sufficient condition for being batshit-crazy. I’m inclined to say (b'') is, also, a reliable indicator of being batshit-crazy, although there are some reasonable people that will disagree with me. Against those people, I would argue for the (b'')-batshit thesis by noting its explanatory power: including (b'') as a sufficient condition has the virtue of marking virtually everyone at Townhall as totally insane. (b''') is not a characteristic of the batshit crazy; rather, it simply describes how Christians think through political issues (or how people generally think politics, if we substitute ethical inquiry for religious reasoning [the latter being a subset of the former])

Taken together, (c), (d), and (f) are usually enough to create a rebuttable presumption of being batshit.

Of course, add (e) to the above, and you arrive at this:

I rest my case.

Excuses, excuses

2005-06-13T22:55:00.000-04:00

Three reasons I haven't been blogging:

- My laptop is busted

- Work is busy; it's non-prof audit season

- Y'know how a lot of lefties got the post-election political blues/rage? It hit me late. On the theory that it's better to keep quiet than spew "I hate X," I decided to take some time and chilllll.

Secondary rights & resistance

2005-06-13T22:31:00.000-04:00

The always-worth-reading Bill Wallo o'er at Wallo World cites Daniel at Duck of Minerva:
Daniel also points out that saying the “right” to bear arms prevents genocide is no different than saying due process, equal protection, or other civil liberties prevent genocide: “If we could guarantee those rights everywhere in the world, there wouldn’t be any genocide. If we can’t guarantee them - which we can’t - then we also can’t guarantee a right to bear arms either.”
This is a pretty smart comment, but I'm not sure that it's solid as it appears at first glance. This is an astute observation: the right to guns is, on reflection, something of a secondary right. Like due process and the separation of powers, the right to guns is a safeguard of our primary rights (speech, religion, equality, etal.).

Briefly, I take it as a first principle that secondary rights, such as the right to bear arms and due process, are logically subsequent to primary rights. Say we lived in a dictatorship in which there was an enlightened despot that guaranteed our rights to speech, to fair trials, etal. (and that s/he would be followed by an endless series of enlightened despots). If that were the case, I'd be fine. Other rights (due process, the right to vote) would be superfluous. In other words, secondary rights are only important because we can't be sure primary rights will be guaranteed.

One key difference between, say, due process and the right to bear arms, though, is that the former is susceptible to suspension by executive privilege. The latter could be suspended as well, though I would expect that it would be more difficult to take the guns of an armed citizenry than it would be to suspend procedural rights. Rather, it may or may not be more difficult, but I'd think that an attempt to round up the guns of yahoos would give government more pause. Due process is a concept, and pretty easy to eliminate, as President Bush has demonstrated. A gun, however, is a real-world entity, and can only be seized by physical force. Accordingly, I'd expect it to be more resistant to erasure.

Morons on the move!

2005-06-10T12:16:00.000-04:00

The quasi-kerfuffle over the WTC museum o' freedom has found its own website. They must have some serious substantive concerns, right? Uh, no. They do have stupid questions, however:

[a] Why is a memorial alone not sufficient?
[b] How would a “narrative
of hope” be told?
[c] Why should visitors be greeted with a “we must
understand how we brought this on ourselves” exhibit?

a: If you recall, conservatives endlessly bloviated about how 9/11 was an "attack on freedom." If anyone dared to suggest there may have been a political motivation, rather than just a blind hatred of freedom, they were asked things like "why are you blaming America?" and "why do hate freedom?" Now that there's going to be a museum dedicated to conservatives' favorite pet theory (ie, their bluff has been called), what do you think they do? They whine and bitch, of course. At any rate, here's the explanation for the stupid: 9/11 was an attack on freedom. Accordingly, we ought to commemorate that which was under attack.

b: Through an historical narrative of the path of freedom. D'uh.

c: I don't see any solid evidence on the above site about a "blame America first" exhibit, but I do see lots of baseless accusations and hearsay. As Lionel Hutz would say, those are kinds of evidence. Sure, it's fun to make a fuss and protest and act like a grown-up, but they probably should've waited until they had, y'know, reason to fuss and protest.

Factory work has always been middle class, right?

2005-06-10T10:18:00.000-04:00

On yesterday's edition of the knee-jerk protectionist Lou Dobbs Tonight, Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, dropped the following piece of idiocy [paraphrased]: If we stay with the WTO, we're going to start seeing nothing but low-paying jobs you only need a high school diploma for. We're losing all of our manufacturing jobs, our middle class.

What a dipshit. But, it must be noted, his idiocy evinces a peculiarly American type of idiocy; Americans are ridiculously prone to conceptual naturalization. In other words, instead of asking "Why are things this way," we say "things have always been this way. It must be a law of nature." One example: those that don't have health care treat our current system as a fact of nature. In polls, they routinely communicate their concern over health care (and lack thereof), but in those same polls signal that nothing can be done.

Similarly, Sanders treats the middle class-ness of manufacturing as a natural fact. In his fucking stupid universe (and our American universe, unfortunately), manufacturing jobs are middle class jobs in the same way that bears are mammals. This is, of course, either ridiculously stupid or tragically forgetful of the long struggle by unions to win those favorable contractual terms. Rather than fight the WTO (a fight which both Quixotic and ill-informed), he should be working with the Service Workers' Union to secure a future for the American middle class.

Ohio: Heart of Darkness It All

2005-06-02T14:28:00.000-04:00

This letter from the Cleveland PD pretty clearly lays out why I'm so ambivalent about moving back to Ohio:

A member of my church gave to me a copy of the Ohio Restoration Project....The
project will target 2,000 pastors throughout the state to become "patriot
pastors." These patriot pastors will be briefed on a specific political agenda
and asked to submit names of their parishioners in order to increase a database
to 300,000 names. These pastors will be asked to place voter guides in their
church pews....At the end of the document are the words, "America has a mission
to share a living savior with a dying world."

Ick. I was raised in close proximity to the batshit Religious Right, and I've always retained a fascination with crappy evangelical culture. Having been on the east coast for the last decade, I've been able to explore that fascination at a certain remove. Now that I'm heading back into the land of bad perms and Jesus & Nascar muscle-Ts, though, I'm not sure how I'll cope. Whatever happens, it probably won't be pretty. (the light-to-non-existent blogging has been a direct result of said ambivalence)

(HT: Kos)

Ricouer

2005-05-26T16:47:00.000-04:00

The world lost one of its most brilliant thinkers last week when Paul Ricouer passed away. I was fortunate enough to have taken a seminar on Ricouer with one of his friends, David Stewart, so I was exposed to a broad swath of his thought. If I were smarter and a better philosopher, I would write like Ricouer. His writing was incredibly lucid, and traversed enormous terrain in both analytic and continental philosophy. Deleuze has written quite a bit about the philosopher as the friend of wisdom; Ricouer put this conception to work.

Long time no blog

2005-05-26T16:26:00.000-04:00

Two things happened this weekend:

1) I graduated law school

2) I got engaged

With luck, I'll return to my usual bloviating tomorrah.

Update: Forgot to mention. My lady? Here's one of the many reasons I love her so. Brilliant. I'm not entirely sure it's all parody, though, and I don't know if that's creepy or weirdly intriguing.

A great pomo debate should follow!

2005-05-17T19:47:00.000-04:00

Jim over at @Large recently posted about post-modernism. In his considered opinion:

Current postmodernist expression is simply more bad breath from modernism. It is a deconstructive reaction to modernism, not knowing what it is, but merely what it is not. It's just post-something else. It doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up, but it certainly knows what it does not [want] to be: [Its] parent.

Your humble author has asked "Bill" [ed: quotes indicating the fluidity of identity in the blogosphere - ha!] the following questions, all of which I feel strongly about:

1. What do you think about the relationship between iterability and differance.

2. How has panopticism affected the realm of biopower in terms of the recent debate over smoking bars?

3. Which ideological state apparatus most clearly reifies Weber's thesis of the protestant work ethic?

I'm playing my hands close to my chest, but I think the answer to 3 will be the most telling.

Postscript: get a load of this from his post: "postmodernism is more a vacuum than a presence." True. Very true.

Holocaust-a-go-go

2005-05-16T14:52:00.000-04:00

This post from Rude Pundit says it all. Exerpt:

But, c'mon, why bother apologizing when the right is so fuckin' fond of
trottin' out the Holocaust whenever they want to forcefully make an "argument."
Remember when Grover Norquist compared the
"fairness" of the estate tax to "the morality of the Holocaust"? That was sooo
clever. 'Cause, see, with the estate tax, the government "discriminates" by
taking some money from really, really rich dead people; and in the Holocaust,
the Nazis "discriminated" by killing millions of men, women, and children and
burning their bodies. You can see how readily the two are analogous.

He's got more examples, by the by, all of which are insane. Which reminds me of the Anchoress. In commenting on Robert Novak's slow-news-day column about how it's wrong for people to request public records, she unleashes this gem:

Incredibly sleazy but more troubling than mere sleaze, and I say this as a
former Democrat. The GOP never did anything like this, not on a continual,
incessant, pro-active sort of basis. The Nazis did, though - character
assassination was job 1 for them.

So you see, not only is requesting public records wrong, it's objectively pro-Nazi.

What slayed me is Amy K in the comments section: "You can always count on the left for elevated and reasoned discourse. " Uh-huh.

Two comments on federalism

2005-05-11T09:10:00.000-04:00

I came across a shmaht comment on federalism at Reason's Hit and Run. The occasion for the comment is a post that links to an editorial from the Moonie Times, which basically calls bullshit on the GOP's purported interest in federalism.

First comment: "I'm starting to think that the erosion of federalism is less a result of lust for power than an egotistical take on "moral leadership." The liberals' need for political correctness and the conservatives' endorsement of "life politics" has only made things worse." (panurge)

That nails it. To take the atrocious (from a federalist perspective) partial birth abortion ban, ostensible federalists supported it because the life of fetii is more important than constitutional limits on federal power. The problem is that everyone thinks their particular issue is more important than federalism. When every issue is an exception, from drinking ages to domestic abuse, it's federalism that becomes the exception.

Navigation of meaning

2005-05-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

Gaunilo has a really, really interesting post up at Gaunilo's Island. Much of it centers on a view of Christianity as an ethical navigation of meanings:

Christianity must be understood as a community and a mode of discourse that operates according to a logic of openness and continual negotiation of identity. I don't see Christian identity as constituted by boundaries that we are transgressing in being too accepting; I see Christianity as a community for whom its identity is its central task and eschatological condition - as an embodied community of argument centered around the liturgy and inhabited by the Spirit.

A little later, he writes: "My money rests instead on the ethical vision that is produced by the most compelling narrative, and eventuates in the richest surplus of meaning."

There's a lot in this post, but I'd like to take a quick look (when I should be studying international sales contracts...) at the suggested internal link between ethical navigation and the surplus of meaning.

One of the things that's always interested me in Christianity is its fundamental beauty.* It's the beauty of absence: what is usually thought of as beautiful in the Mona Lisa, for example, is the strangeness of the smile. The beauty of the painting lies in that which escapes the painting, that which is absent from the painting (the reason for the smile). Similarly, certain pieces of beauty have a longing in them that makes them agonizingly beautiful. Briefly, this is the aestheticization of absence. I think we see this absence in Christianity: at the pivotal moment of Christianity, when Christ is on the cross, he asks why this is happening. Notably, there's no response. I find that amazing: at possibly the most crucial point in the Passion, Jesus/God himself doesn't know why he's there ("Of father, why have you forsaken me"). Had God responded with a power point presentation of the four-fold root of his suffering, the passage would lose its ability to compel. Like the Mona Lisa, the beauty of the faith resides in a fundamental absence.

How is this absence squared with the surplus of meaning? Usually, we'd posit God as the source of meaning, which throws these two things into tension. But if we see God as a Lacanian super-signifier, the Big Father that sutures signifiers together into a univocal chain of signifiers, then the absence of God entails the polysemy of meaning. Without a super-signifier excluding possible meanings, everything is awash in different meanings. This is what I thought was so clever in the film About Schmidt: in this new landscape, the goal isn't to reassemble the Big Daddy (this would be Jesus as Osiris – Christianity as the putting-back-together of the god); it's to navigate the plenitude of meaning in an ethical way.

*One of these days, I'm gonna work out an aesthetic epistemology. Contemporary epistemology has already shown the way out of correspondence, so prima facie I don't think it'd be too hard to take one more step and locate truth in aesthetics.

Jesus's IPod

2005-05-05T18:25:00.000-04:00

Grammar note: I just won't play up to religious exceptionalism by not adding the possessive 's' at the end of 'Jesus.' That's right, I said it.

Anyhoo, I can't remember whom I should hat-tip, but someone linked to this mildly-funny-but-not-really SF Gate article about what would be on Jesus's IPod. Maybe I didn't find it amusing cuz it seems so obvious to me: he'd totally have nothing but the fucking Get Up Kids.

Duh.

Toward an analysis of abortion

2005-05-04T20:54:00.000-04:00

Ella's Dad over at Ragged Edge has written one of the more sophisticated analyses of abortion that one is liable to see. It's not often that people cut through the emotional rhetoric and really get to the matter at hand. It's pretty long and in-depth, but I'll excerpt it as best I can to convey the essence of the argument:

What was curious to my abortion-supporting friends last summer was why I'm anti-abortion: not because I believe "life" beings at conception, but precisely because I don't know when "it" starts....

With the calculus being thus - the certain end of what may be a living human being on the one hand versus the promotion of consequence-free hedonism on the other - the only reasonable answer is the one that errs on the side of caution....

Good argument. Typically, when a life may be at stake, we err on the side of the caution. For example, if I'm hunting in the woods and see a figure in the distance that may or may not be a deer, I won't shoot on the off chance that it's a person. This is the moral precautionary principle, and it's clearly a good principle.

So far as I can tell (and I haven't spent long hours agonizing over this question - this analysis is purely provisional - hopefully I'll get some good pointers on the weaknesses), there are two ways in which the Precautionary Principle can be met when it comes to abortion. (note: I'm bracketing the option of adoption for the time being).

First, there's a difference in what is weighed between the hunting hypo and abortion. In the former, what is lost is just a shot at getting a deer. More deer will come along. In the case of abortion, what is weighed is not "consequence-free hedonism" but the enormous opportunity costs incurred in having a kid. Kids are enormously expensive, both monetarily and emotionally, and require that the parent forego a number of other non-monetary options (a career; or, in this world, the choice of a partner, since many are less willing to date single parents; etc.). As I noted at ED's blog, this weighing of life and money is the rule, not the exception. Worker safety regs, for example, take note of the expenses of saving lives and issue regs that will efficiently ensure some level of worker safety. In other words, a measure that would cost a million dollars to save one life is a measure that will be rejected as inefficient. What this tells us is that, even when what is at stake is clearly a person, monetary concerns are not irrelevant.

A hypothetical: let's say that collecting a one-time tax on the wealthiest of 50%, to be applied to health care for the poor, would save 5 lives. Other things being equal (ie, assume no long-term effects on the economy), should we collect the tax? I have a feeling that people would say no, it's not acceptable. With abortion, though, when we aren't even clear that what's at stake is a person, the contention is that money and opportunity costs are no object. Perhaps the money-for-life tradeoff is morally wrong; however, the fact that we're so willing to accept the swap in so many other areas suggests that the life-at-all-costs approach to abortion is misguided.

One more consideration: let's say our hypothetical hunter is in the field, and sees a figure in the distance. It's brown, it's eating leaves off shrubbery, and it has horns. These are the things that we typically associate with deer-ness, so we shoot. The analog in the abortion case is that many people associate a brain with personhood. In the same way people associate horn-ness and brown-ness with "deer." Similarly, the existence of a brain seems like a minimal condition of personhood. So we're not awash in a gray zone of total incertitude - there are some factual states that enable us to infer personhood. Of course, some of us don't see the existence of a functioning brain as the minimal condition of personhood, but the general consensus is that it is (I think it's especially notable that even in the Schiavo case most Terri-bloggers argued that her brain had some minimum functionality; rare was the person that argued that a lump of flesh sans brain was a person with full rights).

In short, we're able to discern relevant facts by which we can infer personhood. We may be wrong, of course, but our hypothetical hunter may be wrong. What's significant is the existence of facts by which we can reasonably infer the personhood of the object.

Streak says it so I don't have to

2005-05-03T22:17:00.000-04:00

Read it all. Here's a snippet:

I got into it with a very conservative gentleman. We have moments of clarity as if we are on the same field, but then the ground shifts and it is clear we aren't talking about the same stuff at all....

Today has been one of those days. I have written about those demons that come out when we are tired and weak and distraught. Mine come out when there are clouds and I am down. Today they reminded me that I am almost 40 and that my "career" is not what I had hoped. My brain struggles to fight them off--reminding those smug bastards that there is more to life than career, and that in that accounting, I am quite rich. More rich than I deserve. But those bastards keep taunting me; reminding me that my Ph.D., doesn't amount for shit.

I know they lie. I know they lie. But it hurts, and it drags me down today. Right now, though, as I write this, some evening sun has broken through. that is nice. I feel a surge of relief, like adrenalin, or like when you realize you have been holding your breath and start breathing again.
This is one of those down times, and those who read this blog recognize them. I am moody. I have to keep reminding myself of the truth of who I am, and not try to engage people on some other blog in a fake contest. It won't convince them, and it won't convince the demons.

But I don't have to take their shit either.

Channelling Friedman

2005-05-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

At Betsy's Page, the eponymous proprietess links to an article at NRO which argues that Bush's first hundred days have been going pretty swimmingly. The NRO article concludes that Bush is a thoroughbred that's already winning the race. In the comments, Carol contends that Bush is actually a pitcher just getting going in the third inning.

I'd agree that Bush is a thoroughbred, only he's one that's defending against Shaq. When you guard Shaq, you play him hard for the first two and half quarters, and then by the third or fourth quarter, he starts tiring out, and you start pulling ahead. That's what Bush is doing: with Iraq and Social Security, he's throwing and taking a lot of hard fouls in the hopes that the opponent tires out and he can start pulling ahead when things go down the final stretch. That's what thoroughbreds do: they guard Shaq close and then grab the checkered flag. Whether Bush will foul out, or ride the nurse shark of progress remains to be seen, but I think that's the strategy.

Smarter Than I is up

2005-05-03T08:51:00.000-04:00

Smarter than v.3.0, in which the raddest posts in the blogoshpere are culled, is up at Pseudopolymath.

Hopefully, a new trend

2005-04-30T01:14:00.000-04:00

So Georgiana Preskar has responded in comments to Dave Rattigan's review of her book Seeds of Destruction, which seemed to be a standard born-again screed against liberalism, modernism, and puppies. All jokes aside, I must say I'm surprissed and pleased that she's responded. I'm usually not one for trumpeting either blogosphere triumphalism or authorial virtue, but Ms. Preskar has certainly impressed me of the significance of the latter.

So, before I start taking issue with the specific points raised in her response, a hearty "good job!" is due. Good job, Ms. Preskar (the Ms. indicating my solidarity with bra-burning, man-hating feminists, of course).

Swung on and missed

2005-04-28T09:20:00.000-04:00

William Demski, proponent of intelligent design, badly misunderstands the role of religion in the ID/evolution debate:

The other side is just as happy to press their cause in churches. By the way, check out the staff directory of the National Center for Selling Evolution (NCSE)....The first photo you’ll see is of Josephine Bergson in a white clerical collar. In the caption we are told that “audiences appreciate her ability to demonstrate the compatibility of neo-Darwinism and Christianity.” The point to appreciate is that this debate is anything but religion-neutral for the other side.

This is a pretty bad reading of the role of religion in the debate. What's going on is that various proponents of ID (not Demski, but the lay folks in this debate) have claimed that Christians have a positive duty to support ID, because it's the only thing consistent with a literal reading of the Bible, or with the Bible generally. The evolutionist counter is to say that, to the contrary, evolution is consistent with the Bible. Note what the evolutionist isn't saying: s/he isn't saying that Christians have a positive duty to adhere to evolutionism; rather, since both sides are consistent with Christianity, we ought to evaluate the evidence without reference to religion.

In other words, the evolutionist counter is merely to rebut the original ID claim and return the debate to, y'know, science. Which is the terrain on which the debate should be taking place.

So why would Mssr. Demski so badly misread what's going on? I'd imagine it's because it fits in neatly with the whole "evolution is a religion!" slogan that ID'ers love to screech to anyone that will listen.

[edited for clarity - as Ultimate175 notes, the original wording suggested I meant that Demski himself had claimed Christians have a positive duty to adhere to ID]

The relativism industry I: Moral objectivity & facts

2005-04-23T13:31:00.000-04:00

As I was trawling through right-wing Christian sites, I came across this post about abortion. It's a well-written description of how people may rationalize the decision to have an abortion. Here's the part that caught my eye:

In our current “dictatorship of moral relativism,” it is entirely possible to convince ourselves that obvious fallacies such as this can be true.....Thinking in this manner creates complete anarchy in the psyche. If there are no absolutes, then I cannot find my way.

The majority of the post is oriented toward rationalization, which is a different beast from relativism altogether. The author discusses rationalization as a mode of thinking wherein the agent tries to blur clear black and white lines. In doing so, the agent makes the decision a hard choice, with the result that the agent is able to grant her/himself a greater margin of error. If it's a hard choice, the agent can't be blamed for making what turns out to be the wrong case.

This doesn't really have anything to do relativism. Instead, it turns on "situational ethics," or "moral particularism," which, roughly, is the idea that moral principles aren't useful. There is a wrong or a right decision in any given situation, but we can't discover which action is right simply by recourse to moral principles. For example, we all probably agree murder is wrong. What about self-defense? Well, there's an exception to the principle in that case. And as we keep going through different scenarios, we start seeing that there are so many exceptions that the principle, by itself, isn't determinative of the correct answer. When every case is an exception, it's hard to see how a principle even exists, or if it does, how it is useful. That's the gist of it (a full defense of this philosophy is outside the purview of this post, by the way).

As should be clear, it isn't relativism: moral particularism presupposes that there is a right action in any given situation, and the rightness of the action is wholly independent of the agent. By contrast, relativism is the thesis that the rightness of an action or principle hinges on the belief of the agent. It's the direct opposite of moral particularism, then, in that the truth of morality is agent-dependent.

As moral particularism highlights, many moral arguments turn on factual disputes. Abortion is the clearest example of this. The moral acceptability of abortion turns on the personhood of the fetus.

In the comments to that post, grannygrump writes: "the whole idea of declaring that some human beings are not "persons" is moral relativism in action. It's saying that each person can choose which other human beings constitute "persons" or not...." If this were an accurate depiction of the pro-choice position, it'd be correct, but it isn't an accurate depiction. The truth of the proposition that a fetus isn't a person is independent of the agent that believes it. In other words, I don't get to "choose" whether a fetus is a person, no more than I get to choose whether Rome is in Italy. The disagreement is factual.

Strangely, not even the recognition that many disputes are factual, rather than moral, stops the "relativism industry" (a term I'll use to designate the organizations and individuals that keep droning on about the evils of relativism) from claiming that factual disputes are actually part and parcel of relativism:

An interesting feature of Cultural Relativism is that it seems to indicate that the moral disagreements between cultures are not actually moral disagreements, but are disagreements of fact. Again, let’s take the issue of abortion. The Pro-Life position argues that it is wrong to take the life of an innocent human being. The Pro-Choice position actually agrees with the Pro-Life position on this essential point.

From the foregoing, we can take a stab at one way the relativism industry defines relativism: relativism is disagreement over relevant factual issues when both sides agree that the moral principle at issue is objectively true.

Maybe there's a way that isn't totally incoherent, but I don't see one.

But Bunny....I loved you!

2005-04-20T18:07:00.000-04:00

I can feel a massive Morrissey phase creeping up on me. Morrissey, springtime, the new cut that lets me pomp my hair, new combat boots (finally...thanks matt!*), best girlfriend in the universe. Yep. Despite the stress I'm under,** I can tell everything's gonna be a'ight.

* I've got that song, but...this is ridiculous...I don't have a double cassette deck, and I don't know anyone in the new hood, so I can't boost someone else's.

** Enormous, enormous stress.

On Relativism: Intro

2005-04-20T14:31:00.000-04:00

I've never given too much thought about moral relativism. Its conclusions never struck me as even remotely plausible (how can murder be right?), and there really haven't been many forceful defenses of what I'd call brute relativism (which would be the simple proposition: "murder is right if the actor thinks it is," without caveats and qualifications). As a result, I was never curious about its intellectual foundations, and assumed there was some perfect demolishment out there which I'd get around to reading someday. There is, and I did.

Christian culture, however, has created something of a thriving cottage industry out of chalking up every evil in the modern world to the scourge of relativism. This hyperventilating and borderline pathological tendency seems to have become practically Pavlovian, so there's a lot of questionable thinking out there. Because relativism is being used as the scapegoat for everything from hangnails to starving children in Africa, its use probably merits some kind of investigation. I suppose you could say that, rather than being roused from my dogmatic slumber, I've been poked repeatedly with a sharp stick and forced to wake up and take notice.

Following will most likely be a boring interrogation on how the concept is used and why it's gotten that way (I expect the answer to the latter can be summed thusly: follow the money).

Seeds of awful writing

2005-04-20T09:52:00.000-04:00

I love it when people shred awful writing, movies, etal. An excellent and most amusing example is Slactivist's on-going (and interminable) reading of Left Behind. Here's how his reading opens:

Pages 1-3.
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.

It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.

Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)

Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does -- minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of -- in this case -- egos.

The character Rayford Steele is, like the authors, no longer a young man. Younger authors might not have been compelled to give their protagonists names -- "Steele" and "Buck" -- that seem such a blatant assertion of male virility. Bev is apparently not the only LaHaye who seems oblivious to phallic imagery.

If you're thinking I'm reading too much into all this, that this theme isn't really as present in the text as I'm making it out to be, consider the opening lines:

Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ...

That's more than just subtext.

I'm anxiously awaiting Fred's review of the movie, but at his present pace it may be a few decades.

In this vein, I've found Dave Rattigan's series on a book called The Seeds of Destruction, yet another book in the burgeoning Christian culture-war industry. Here's his thesis:

At the heart of it, if I can put it crudely, is this: Someone is pissed as hell that after years of the media and society being the guardians and evangelists of their political, religious and moral agenda, someone else is being given a crack of the whip. The issue isn't control or brainwashing or agendas. In so far as those terms offer fair and accurate descriptions, they've always been with us. The issue is that certain conservative Christians like Preskar had it good for so long, they're damn well pissed that they're not the ones doing the brainwashing any more.

Sounds about right. What about awful writing and naive regurgitation of suburban ideology? Oh, it's in there:

Our little white house with its large back yard, Mom baking apple pies, Dad coming home from work, a dog and cat, riding horses, playing Cowboys and Indians and dolls are many of my recollections of childhood.

I always find it interesting when the message of the Gospels is conflated with suburban idyll. At any rate, I'm sure the rest of Dave's series will be equally good.

Smarter than I: II

2005-04-18T11:22:00.000-04:00

This carnival is living up to its name. The posts received blew me away so much that any pithy summaries I could come up with were utterly inadequate to the task at hand. Some of these were gut-bustingly funny; some incredibly thought-provoking; and some just unbelievably beautiful. It's amazing the depth and the breadth of talented prose on the net. One thing I know is that there are many people smarter than I both past and present. So here are the latter in terms of the former.

Kant: We call sublime what is absolutely large ...That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small. (popular demand)

Sun-Tzu: To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. (from Mark at Pseudo-Polymath)

Freud: But this uncertainty disappears in the course of Hoffmann's story, and we perceive that he intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician's spectacles or spy-glass - perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own person once peered through such an instrument. (from Bora at SciencePolitics) [Ed: this post is long, but so very worth it]

Bertrand Russell: This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self. (check out A. Rickey's comment, too) (from Sanctimonious Hypocrite)

Kant (again): Which restriction is an obstacle to enlightenment, and which is not an obstacle but a promoter of it? I answer: The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. (from Jim at Decorabilia)

Roland Barthes: If one wishes to connect a mythical schema to a general history, it is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential funtion. How does he receive this particular myth today? (scroll down to Septimus's comment) (from Jim at Decorabilia)

Ralph Waldo Emerson: There is properly no history; only biography. (from Mark at Pseudo-Polymath)

Paul Ricoeur: To bring about the economy of the gift in a modern context. Should this not be the challenge and joy especially for those who know about the strange economy of God and have received the economy of salvation? (from Rana at Frogs and Ravens)

Found randomly on the web cuz I know nil about science: The new science of virus molecular systematics is shedding a great deal of light on the distant relationships of, and in some cases on the presumed origins of many important groups of viruses. (from PZ Meyers at Pharyngula)

Alexander Pope: Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? (from Brian Thompson)

Juvenal (who didn't even have the benefit of our asinine headlines): It is difficult not to write satire. (from Ferdinand at Conservative Cat)

Last & late but not least:

Homer Simpson: Mmmmm......sacrilicious...... (from John of Locusts and Honey)

Kerry & military benefits: a long record

2005-04-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

Kerry is currently soliciting stories about hardships faced by military families that stem from inadequate benefits. He'll then read those stories into the congressional record to support a bill to boost benefits. Polipundit's response:

John Kerry is now professing an interest in helping the members of the military and their families. As the wife of a Marine Corps veteran, I am all for that. For the past several decades, however, Kerry has not exactly been known for his support of military spending.

See, if I were writing at Polipundit, I probably would've searched Thomas for support of my contention that Kerry is only recently interested in benefits for veterans and military men and women. And if I had, I would have found that my statement is completely unsupported. If there's been one consistent supporter of benefits for servicemen and women, it's been Kerry.

I would think there are enough reasons to criticize Kerry without having to make stuff up.

At any rate, some examples of bills he sponsored or cosponsored:

S.205: A bill to amend title 5, United States Code, to equalize the treatment of members of the Armed Forces of the United States and former employees of the Federal Government for purposes of eligibility for payment of unemployment compensation for Federal service. (102nd Congress)

S.334: A bill to provide child care services to families of members of the Armed Forces of the United States who are serving on active duty, to provide eligibility for certain health benefits for members who are released from active duty in connection with the Persian Gulf conflict, and for other purposes. (102nd Congress)

S.347: A bill to amend chapter 171 of title 28, United States Code, to allow members of the Armed Forces to sue the United States for damages for certain injuries caused by improper medical care provided during peacetime. (100th Congress)

S.2120: To amend section 3104 of title 38, United States Code, to permit certain service-connected disabled veterans who are retired members of the Armed Forces to receive compensation concurrently with retired pay, without deduction from either.(100th Congress)

S.1334: A bill to amend title 10, United States Code, to establish a demonstration project to evaluate the feasibility of using the Federal Employees Health Benefits program to ensure the availability of adequate health care for Medicare-eligible beneficiaries under the military health care system. (105th Congress)

S.2358: An Act to provide for the establishment of a presumption of service-connection for illnesses associated with service in the Persian Gulf War, to extend and enhance certain health care authorities relating to such service, and for other purposes. (105th Congress)

Yeah, that Kerry. What a bandwagon jumper.

Health care

2005-04-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

Here's Angry Bear:

The data very consistently shows that the US does not have a very good health care system when measured in terms of the health of its people, or when measured in terms of how its citizens feel about the health care they get... and it has a horrible health care system when these mediocre outcomes are juxtaposed with its astronomical costs.

But this is just a sample; there's virtually no metric in which the US health care system provides better care than those of other countries, other than in care for the very rich. The reality is that the average person in the US receives mediocre care that is extremely expensive.Here's some anecdotal evidence from commenter Lucian K. Truscott IV at Political Animal:

I have a conservative Republican friend who got a diagnosis of colon cancer recently. He had very poor but quite expensive HMO insurance and looked into what the treatment and cost would be. Answer: surgery which would have left him on a colostomy bag, expensive co-pay, and over the max coverage he had.
His sister lives in Paris, so he flew over there. Upon landing in France, he became eligible for health coverage. He was afforded the very best and most up-to date treatment for colon cancer -- it gets technical, but it involved shrinking the tumor with radiation and then surgery, which meant he didn't need a colostomy bag. He was treated over a period of almost a year, and has been back a couple of times for check-ups to make sure the cancer hasn't come back. Cost: about $1000. To his credit, he thinks the American way of health is insane.

There must be some downside to switching to a French model, or else one would expect we already would have done so. What is it? That's an honest question, as I have no idea about this stuff.

Coming soon: smarter than I

2005-04-13T10:06:00.000-04:00

The deadline is approaching for the upcoming Smarter than I. You've still got time, so hop to it! Send a link to a post you dig, plus a brief description, to smarterthani [at] hotmail.com.

Here's Jim on what this whole deal-y is:

I'm gearing up for the second installment of smarter than I, the carnival where you submit other bloggers' work. I'd like to include a new category: superior commentary. Often the best thing about a particular post is the witticism, ingenuity, or rhetoric it inspires. So, this time around, you'll be allowed two entries--your link to a posting and a comment of genius.

smarter than I is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult carnival out there. It's rather easy to send a link--and that's all you have to do. It's hard to choose just one, especially if, like most bloggers, you're addicted.

Send them to smarterthani at hotmail dot com by Wednesday, April 13, 3:00 pm PST. And thanks in advance to all those who will help spread the word.

Read the very first smarter than I here, and a statement of purpose here.

Bookmarks, I hardly knew ye

2005-04-13T09:36:00.000-04:00

I love Firefox and all, but it's got some glitches that kill me. I turned the computer on this morning, and no bookmarks. None. After some rooting around, I guess this has happened to a handful of people - the bookmarks just vanish. What I didn't know was that when you close Firefox, it backs up your bookmarks and overwrites previous backups. So when I closed it to do a system restore, *poof* there went my backed-up bookmarks.

So, if there any passing computer folks out there, am I right about what happened? And what should I do? I'm not going back to internet explorer, but Firefox's glitches annoy me to no end.

Huh.

2005-04-12T16:15:00.000-04:00

Via Pandagon is this head scratcher of an opinion piece:

One of the most frequently offered arguments by proponents of same-sex marriage is that it is not gays wanting to marry a member of the same sex that threatens the institution of marriage, it is the high divorce rate among heterosexuals.
One reason this argument is so often made is that it appeals to the religious as well as the secular, to conservatives as well as liberals. This is too bad, because the argument is a meaningless non sequitur. First, while divorce ends a given marriage, it does not threaten marriage as an institution.

All I can say is: huh. Somehow, divorce isn't a threat to marriage, but gays.....huh. As it turns out, it's the standard "we can't redefine marriage because then I'll have to buy a new dictionary, this one not being updated since 1859 and marriage being the only word I look up, which I do daily to assuage my fears that incredibly high levels of divorce haven't changed the definition from 1859" style argument.

Seriously, what a nutter.

Two columnists I loathe.

2005-04-09T09:04:00.000-04:00

Maggie Gallagher. She's really annoying. Every college newspaper has that one wiener conservative that moans and complains about how hard it is to be a conservative on campus. And then they write something that isn't about how everyone thinks they're stupid because they're conservative, and you learn that people think they're stupid because they're stupid. And conservative. But mostly stupid.

I'd bet anyone reading this (except Gallagher, who may or may not read this after I email her the link) that she was that person. The wounded but self-righteous tone still comes through clear as a bell in her columns.

Danny Pipes. He seems not-retarded, but then he goes and makes the strangest and most colossal errors. For example, his column the other day began thusly:

With the passage last week of a budget bill in Israel, the government of Ariel Sharon appears to be ready to remove more than 8,000 Israelis living in Gaza with force, if necessary.In addition to the legal dubiousness of this step and its historical unprecedented nature (challenge to the reader: name another democracy that has forcibly removed thousands its own citizens from their lawful homes)

Gosh, forcing people out of their homes must be unprecedented! Why, that could never happen in a place like A-mur-i-ka!

Why my girlfriend thinks I do a shitty job washing the dishes when I'm actually harnessing the secret interiority of soap

2005-04-08T15:15:00.000-04:00

What happens when we wash dishes? If I remember my junior high science class correctly, the soap emulsifies the fat clinging to the bowl (the same process that makes milk). Making soapmilk is a physical change, not a chemical change, so it requires a lot more scrubbin'. I don't know about you, but I find it a more plausible idea that the soap kills dirt on contact, as a kind of chemical transformation. Add a little heat, and the the magic inside the otherwise harmless soap is unleashed.

That makes a lot more sense than soap milk.

In theory, it allows me to leave food particles on the dishes, since that food becomes clean non-food itself simply by dint of coming into contact with the magical properties of dish soap.

What do soap experts have to say?

A: "The implicit legend of this type of product rests on the idea of a violent, abrasive modification of matter: the connotations are of a chemical or mutilating type: the product “kills” the dirt. "

B: "Roche in Boulder Colorado interviewed me for job. They knew I was the inventor of the Electric Windmill Car and knew I would come up with some innovative ideas on memory pills for total recall and I would gain immense insight into drugs for a cancer cure working on their assembly line in Boulder Colorado but they did not hire me on Orders from Bush and Kennedy etc who want to stifle my inventions."

C: "I require the implementation of my intellectual data regarding the concepts of "0" and its' copyright dollars paid so as to finance this fusion project in Australia with international involvement. Mathematicians become very upset when confronted with my dividing and multiplying by 0. Seeing and hearing mathematicians and physicists tearing their hair out over my concepts of "zero" is to believe it."

Objections to the nomination of John Bolton

2005-04-08T08:22:00.000-04:00

Jay Nordlinger responds briefly in The National Review to Barbara Boxer's criticism of John Bolton's nomination as UN ambassador (provisionally, I'll observe that it's a response in the syntactic sense. It is structured to look like a response; whether it actually is a response is an entirely separate question):

And here's Sen. Barbara Boxer, on John Bolton, Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "He's been very contemptuous of the U.N." Well, no sh**, senator. And you haven't? You weren't contemptuous when Saddam Hussein's government chaired the nuclear-disarmament committee?....Liberalism used to mean something — e.g., opposition to tyranny and lies. And now? Opposition to George W. Bush seems most important.

There are two lines of counterobjection here: the first is the hippie objection (Republicans are all about peace and flowers, and the UN hasn't been helping the world in either of these areas). As an objection to Boxer, this misses the mark. One of Boxer's main objections to Bolton was his opposition to various peace-and-flower-maximizing treaties (notably, those treaties banning chemical weapons and nuclear weapons). As a general counterobjection, though, it could be said to be the objection from corruption: to the extent that the UN is corrupt and/or impotent, it is unable to maximize the peace and flowers that patchouli-wearing Republicans have come to see as the primary goal of foreign policy ("freedom, man!").

If Bolton's criticisms have tracked this line of reasoning, that'd be great. Clearly, corruption is a huge problem at the UN, and a strong proponent of reform could do much good.

The problem, though, is that the antecedent of that proposition is patently false

Bolton isn't a critic of the UN's effectiveness per se; he's ideologically opposed to the very existence of all forms of internationalism and international law. As a sovereignty fetishist, he's committed to opposing treaties and international organizations on principle. What is crucial to note is that this opposition is independent of any concerns about effectiveness or corruption.

In short, his problem is with sovereignty, and not UN corruption: "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law...because...the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States." The concern evinced here turns on the issue of constraints on future US action. In fact, it is this ideological opposition to internationalism that opponents of his nomination hone in on: "Mr. Bolton has never made secret his disdain for the United Nations, for multilateralism and for consensus-seeking diplomacy in general."

The general counterobjection from corruption is clearly misplaced. What bothers opponents to Bolton's nomination isn't that he will fight corruption, it's that he will fight the very existence of institutions that have been accused (correctly) of corruption.

Marriage for some; miniature american flags for others

2005-04-06T10:27:00.000-04:00

Remember how, in the wake of 9/11, everyone was wearing flag pins and ribbons, or putting flags on their cars and all that? That irked me to no end. I hate ribbons and pins. If there were a ribbon to signify that beating children is wrong, and everyone wore one for "Don't beat children" day, and I worked at an anti-child abuse non-profit (as opposed to one of those slick, well-funded pro-child abuse non-profs), I still wouldn't wear it.

Anyways, what made it all the more insufferable was that, since I was a teller at a bank, I was constantly being asked by customers and coworkers why I wasn't wearing a ribbon. "Where's your ribbon?" they'd ask, as if I'd been clutching it to my heart while thinking about how much I love America, and accidentally dropped it behind the desk. "Here, have another one, dear." I'd just smile and say thanks. I didn't want to be that guy that starts ranting about how stupid ribbons and pins are. You know who I mean: the guy on the corner handing out Lyndon LaRouche flyers ("In such matters as those, there are apprentice game-masters, and there are also what is merely human wreckage reprogrammed as virtual devil dolls.") The one who thinks ribbons are a tool of the Illuminati to subvert 4-day simultaneous rotations of the cubic Earth.

The thing that really got me was that these same people that were putting miniature american flags on their cars were people that didn't vote; didn't register for jury duty; and didn't bother to read about local referendums. No, their civic duty was fully discharged when they sang "God Bless the USA" at the 9/11 prayer vigil.

That explains why I just shake my head when states pass one of those toxic marriage amendments, as Kansas did yesterday.

As a good federalist, I'm of the opinion that if the voters of Kansas want to ban gay marriage, it's their prerogative. I wouldn't if I were them, but whatever. The problem, though, is that the language of the marriage amendments doesn't just ban gay marriage: it bans civil unions, and probably bans a host of partnership benefits (the ability to put one's partner on one's insurance plan, for example) that could accrue to any non-married couple.

There's a double unconscionability: first, the drafters of the amendment know that the amendment goes far beyond the prohibition of gay marriage, yet they lie to the people and claim it just bans gay marriage. That's totally counter to responsible governance. The people, though, have no less an obligation to try to understand a law before they vote on it. In that sense, the citizenry and the media blew it. A responsible citizen should have asked, "What am I being asked to pass? What will its effects be?" Instead, they just waved their miniature american flags and voted for whatever.

Who'd have thought it possible?

2005-04-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

Some people are smarter than I.

We all have times when we read posts and think they just captured a subject perfectly. It's fitting, and past due, then, that we have a carnival of those posts that make us reel with their insight and ingenuity. Mad props to Jim over at decorabilia for the idea, and mad props for his great presentation of a great idea. Although it is a little disconcerting that, in addition to being hit with bloggers smarter than I, I have to deal with a blogger more clever than I in the process.

(I spent all of my smoke breaks at work reading and rereading the Perry Mason post, by the way. Totally brilliant stuff going on at chicago boyz)

Sally gets a blog!

2005-04-05T23:00:00.000-04:00

I'm not keen on capital-R Romanticism, but there are some people that have a real gift for beautiful prose. When I have to write beautiful prose, I have to labor over it, continually editing and rewriting, dropping in some alliteration here, some internal rhyming there. The end result....usually doesn't quite match my ambition, unfortunately.

My girlfriend, though, has some innate feel for the language that charms the hell out of me. Plus, she cracks me up. Hopefully I'm not setting the bar too high. At any rate, here's a snippet (or the majority, actually) of the inaugural post from The Sleeper Car:

After approximately 2 and a half years living in Greenpoint, I have moved to Bay Ridge. To sleep. A good one year of Greenpoint was spent devoid of sleep. A haze that I was partly to blame for but mostly the fault of others. The insomnia haze called my old apartment was ripe with the worst neighbors ever.

Nightime has now bestowed upon me a new blessing. The blessing of quiet. I can sometimes hear my naughty cats scampering around at 4 in the morning. But mostly I can my hear my boyfriend dream. Or I can listen to my own.

Although I escaped from a tiny railroad aprtment we now live in The Sleeper Car.

I [Heart] Matt Taibbi

2005-04-04T00:31:00.000-04:00

It's true, and that despite the dead pope column, which just wasn't that funny. The man occasionally flashes true genius, though, a rare enough thing and even rarer in newspaper/newsweekly columnists. I was reminded of this as I was perusing righty blogs, and came across this woefully misinformed Vodkapundit post:

Tom Friedman needs to stop using poker analogies:

And this poker hand is seven-card stud, no-limit Texas Hold 'Em.

If you don't know, in Seven Card Stud, each player is dealt seven cards. Two down, then four up, then one down. There is betting after each card is dealt, starting with the first up card.

Texas Hold'em is an entirely different beast.

As Taibbi observes, though, mixing metaphors is Friedman's stock in trade:

The hallmark of the Friedman method is a single metaphor, stretched to column length, that makes no objective sense at all and is layered with other metaphors that make still less sense. The result is a giant, gnarled mass of incoherent imagery. When you read Friedman, you are likely to encounter such creatures as the Wildebeest of Progress and the Nurse Shark of Reaction, which in paragraph one are galloping or swimming as expected, but by the conclusion of his argument are testing the waters of public opinion with human feet and toes, or flying (with fins and hooves at the controls) a policy glider without brakes that is powered by the steady wind of George Bush’s vision.

Another gem:

"The Long Bomb," March 2. On the eve of war, Friedman puts us in a special kind of movie theater, one that has movable chairs instead of seats: "If this were not about my own country, my own kids and my own planet," he writes, "I’d pop some popcorn, pull up a chair and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds." (Is there a place in the world where one can pop one’s own popcorn and then "pay money" to watch something?) But as it turns out, we’re watching not a movie, but a crap game; Bush is about to undertake a "shake of the dice." By the third paragraph, Bush has abandoned dice for football: he is about to throw "The Long Bomb." We then find out that Friedman’s wife is opposed to the war, but soon go back to the crap game and the "audacious shake of the dice." In the end, we find out that this has not been craps or football all along, but shop class:
"So here’s how I feel," he concludes. "I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table–a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas."

This must be derived from the popular expression: "He sure has guts. Like a mahogany table." Only in this case, the guts only have one leg.

I was assigned Friedman's book The Olive Tree and the Lexus this semester, and lemmee tell ya: Taibbi ruined it for me. I couldn't actually read the book; I was way too busy trying to figure out how the electric herd could build a mass transit system to download the supernovas of ingenuity. I almost got whiplash from constantly shaking my head in exasperation.

A radical realignment

2005-04-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

At Topmost Apple, bls points us toward this article by John Coleman, writer of the always-thoughtful blog Ex Nihilo, on libertarianism. Bls conjectures that John at Ex Nihilo is working towards a distinctly Christian libertarianism, and, as I read him, notes that the time is ripe for democrats to harness the libertarian disaffection with the Republican Party.

To put it plainly: I think bls is dead-on. For a while, democrats have been stumbling in this direction through some of their positions: support of gay rights is easily and frequently cast as a question of personal autonomy, and the Clintonian democrats' fiscal conservativism as a decision not to be put at the mercy of foreign treasury bond holders. Both of these are classically libertarian, in that they favor greater, not less, self-determination. It's high time that Democrats' rhetoric explicitly foregrounded this.

I'd like to point out that this libertarian movement on the left is met by an equally counter-intuitive movement to Marxism on the right. John notes that libertarianism "is a political philosophy designed to protect personal philosophies." This, then, is the source of the notion that libertarianism is a non-political political philosophy: it carves out spaces from which politics are exiled.

Being a good marxist (in the sense of fidelity, rather than skill), this is the part where I observe that the decision to exile politics from a given sphere is itself a political act. In fact, as the constitutive moment of politics, it may actually be the political gesture sine qua non. Interestingly, the Christian Right has picked up on this, and used the analytical tools of Marxism quite effectively. As good marxists do, they've pointed out that there is no such thing as a depoliticized space. For example, the vanguard of the Religious Right, homeschoolers, have made a huge stink about the absence of God from public schools. While people say that this simply maintains neutrality, the newly-minted marxists of the Christian Right counter that the pose of neutrality is itself a deeply political decision. ("Failure to adopt an explicit world view in a philosophic position is in itself a world view.")

Neutrality also comes under attack in the sciences. Picking up where Thomas Kuhn left off, they theorize that science isn't a neutral method by which Truth is attained. Rather, science is a vast repository of values and politics. Just as feminists, post-structuralists, and marxists before them, the Religious Right collapses the difference between the "order of justification" (methods of attaining truth) and the "order of discovery" (the institutions in which science occurs). Why is evolution true? Because, the ID proponent tells us, evolutionists control the institutions - the tenure track committees, editorships at journals - that generate truth.

Roles have reversed in truly weird fashion. When one man decides to marry another man, it's the Religious Right outside the church with placards, screaming "The personal is the political!", while people on the left object that, no, the personal is just the personal, and the political machine shouldn't be brought to bear on another's personal decisions.

These are strange times.

The limit of the law

2005-04-01T15:12:00.000-05:00

L'affaire de Schiavo had made me think about the curious relationship between the law and its exceptions. Since the law qua Law is, by necessity, a generalizing system, there will always be cases that fall through the cracks. In other words, because law is a set of rules, it will inevitably either capture too little or too much in its logic. For example, the high standard of proof for criminal cases ensures that some guilty people will be found innocent. The Schiavo case could be construed as proof of the law; it's the miscarriage of justice that constitutes the law as law. After all, for the law to be law, there's gotta be a miscarriage of justice. As you can see, I haven't found a clear way to articulate this. But, at a minimum I figured there was some interesting stuff about law we could ferret outta this.

It was good to find this article U.Chicago theorist Eric Santner, who hooks up l'affaire with Gitmo in a pretty nifty fashion:

With respect to Guantanamo Bay, to cite the most obvious example, the Bush administration has argued that the detention centers there effectively occupy a lawless zone, a site where a permanent (if undeclared) state of exception or emergency is in force. The prisoners have been stripped of all legal protections and stand exposed to the pure force of American military and political power. They have ceased to count as recognizable agents bearing a symbolic status covered by law. They effectively stand at the threshold where biological life and political power intersect. That is why it is fundamentally unclear whether anything those in power do to them is actually illegal.

If places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay represent sites where life, lacking all legal status and protection, stands in maximal exposure to Pure political power, then the case of Terri Schiavo—and here I am thinking of the law passed by Congress that was intended to keep her alive—offers us a strange reversal. We find here the paradox of an intrusive excess of legal “protection” that effectively serves to suspend the law (the judicial process running its course in the Florida courts) and take direct hold of human life. A law designed to lift a single individual out of an ongoing judicial process is essentially a form or caprice, law in its state of exception (a sanctioned suspension of legality).

(HT: Charlotte Street)

See ya in hell!

2005-04-01T13:19:00.000-05:00

Cuz that's where I'm headed after cracking up over this: Terri's blog.

Oh man.....words fail me.

[HT: The Liferaft of Love, who will doubtlessly be joining me in eternal punishment]

Social Security

2005-03-31T21:18:00.000-05:00

Here's Mark at Pseudopolymath (a smart conservative & christian blog) on Social Securty reform:

We would like one hand for our legislators to engage in long range planning and think of the future without engaging in partisan short term dogfights....For on the flip side, when the President asks for us to open the question of SS and proposes we consider ways of improving the system in place, what occurs? Partisan warfare erupts. The salient questions isn't why does this partisan warfare occur, but to what end. As I see it, opening up discussion is rarely a bad thing with respect considering long range consequences.

[ed: on reread, I'm talking past Mark's point, but I've been wanting to mention SS at some point. Mark's point, which is well-taken, is that a lot of the rhetoric on SS reform is just political jockeying, and there's definitely something to that]

Given that this is the notorious third rail, partisan warfare is inevitable. I think it also bears mentioning that the way in which Bush posed the problem invited a fiery debate. He didn't say there was a problem and then open a space for brainstorming. He posed a solution that didn't really seem to fit the problem, and which could all-too-easily be chalked up to ideological advancement. Privatization is a good thing, but it's an answer to a question that wasn't asked. By itself, privatization just doesn't address the problem that was raised (per even the most ambitious versions of privatization, it would account for 3-5% of the program, leaving the other >90% of the problem).

That stark mismatch between problem and proposal just screams "hidden agenda."

Still, the conversation has been jump-started by Bush, and that really is a good and necessary thing. Just like with Iraq, good effects will have been secured through really, really dodgy reasoning. Maybe that was a strategic decision (as it clearly was with Iraq [cf: Wolfowitz's acknowledgement that the WMD emphasis was a "bureaucratic" decision]), or maybe Bush has keen instincts and less keen rational faculties, or maybe it was just accidental. Either way, the current discussion is a Good Thing.

I got the protest monkey blues

2005-03-30T15:38:00.000-05:00

I've decided today that the protest monkeys need to learn a new trick, as this one is getting boring. Even the NY Post said as much. Don't get me wrong; I've truly enjoyed the screeching insanity that has issued from the protest monkeys, but they need to learn a new dance. Isn't the time ripe for protesting the latent satanism of "hard rock"? Yeah, that'd be pretty funny.

So, even though we're probably only a week or so from the critical mass of insanity (when the Illuminati/Hospice industry conspiracy is "discovered"), it just isn't worth it.

So, if you read this, protest monkey (once I trackback to you, that is), remember: I was listening to Napalm Death backwards last night, and I swear I heard them tell me to kill my parents.

More lies in the Terri Schiavo kerfuffle

2005-03-28T20:45:00.000-05:00

John Fund writes a bunch of stuff here that bears only a passing resemblance to anything that actually happened.

Fund misses a few important things and seems to flat-out lie about one. First: the court decision was 4/19, not 4/20, and it denied the INS's request to remove Elian from the country, not from his relative's house.

Fund: "On Thursday, April 20, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...turned down the Justice Department's request to order Elian removed from the home of his Miami relatives.

The Court (2000 WL 381901): "Plaintiff [Elian], however, now moves for an injunction 'to preclude [Plaintiff's] physical removal from the jurisdiction of the United States during the pendency of this appeal.' We conclude that Plaintiff is entitled to such an injunction and grant the motion."

These two couldn't be more different. Fund's reading is that the decision was in response to a Justice Dpt. request, whereas the actual case has Elian requesting relief. (At first, I thought there must be some other decision, since the two are so clearly different. How could a journalist misread plain language like that? But, Fund quotes language that shows up in the case quoted above, so it looks like he did, in fact, misread the case that badly)

Reno then obeyed the court order by not allowing Elian to leave the country until the legal issues had been settled. By that time, the state court had ruled that the relatives didn't properly have custody; this was a concession that the INS could take Elian and return him to the custody of his father. [note: edited for clarity]

Further, they weren't trampling states' rights, because that restraining order of January issued by the florida judge was rescinded by the Florida state supreme court, which correctly recognized that its jurisdiction was pre-empted by the federal government. This is from the court's decision on April 13:

Elian Gonzalez's physical presence in this country is at the discretion of the federal government. The state court cannot, by deciding with whom his custody should lie, subvert the decision to return him to his father and his home in Cuba. This court is prohibited from acting by the Supremacy Clause of the united States Constitution from acting in this case....

The remedy sought in this court is custody of the child. While the court recognizes the many, many authorities that establish that domestic relations, family law, is an area reserved to the state courts, Petitioner fails to recognize the fundamental nature of his case--it is an immigration case, not a family case.

The United States through the Attorney General has articulately and bluntly insisted that reunification will occur. The basis for the custody claim is that the child should not live in Cuba, with his father, and is better off here. The Court's ability to reach that decision is derailed by the federal government decision that he must return to Cuba, his homeland, and be with his father. This court cannot second guess the INS.

Fund concludes:

"I've consistently said that I can't go beyond what my powers are, and I'm not going to do it," the governor says. Janet Reno and the Clinton administration showed no such restraint when it came to Elian Gonzalez.

This is true only in the bizarro world that Fund inhabits. In the real world, the feds didn't trample state rights, but acted in accordance with long standing principles of federal preemption in immigration cases; and they didn't operate outside of the law by violating a court order as Fund would love Jeb to do vis-a-vis Schiavo.

Sky Captain Adorno and the Banality of Evil

2005-03-27T13:27:00.000-05:00

(This is a little something I wrote 9/04. It's not particularly current nor Easter-y. I just liked it.)

So, Sally and I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow over the weekend. Before going to the flick, we had a bite to eat and a drink, and started talking about a book Sally had just purchased: Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrel, ostensibly a kind of Harry Potter for adults. She mentioned that she figured people like these kinds of books for the escapist value, and I agreed. We figured that the escapism functions by creating an alternate world into which the reader can venture, thereby leaving the real world behind. To put it into kind-of Deleuzian terms, they create an imminent plane (Deleuze-speak for alternate reality) that parallels the world of the real. What followed was a conversation about 'serious' art. The kinds of works that get tagged as serious seem to incorporate elements of the cacaphony of the 'real' world. Mahler's symphonies, for example, are accorded a great deal of critical respect because of they way they include jagged edges that disrupt the subject's immersion in the imminent field. The conventional wisdom is that Mahler inserts traces of the chaos of the real world into his pieces, and prefigured the chaos of the 20th century in his symphonies (so the theory goes).

Interestingly, this kind of artistic strategy is then susceptible to objections from both the right and the left; righties (read: classicists, or aesthetes) get annoyed that the piece is getting into politics of a sort. The lefty objection is more interesting: they argue that, by absorbing the chaos of the real into the artistic plane of imminence, they make it beautiful, they aesthetize it, and thereby reduce or trivialize the shock or the affect that horrible things ought to induce. This is the sense of Adorno's maxim: there can be no poetry after the Holocaust.

Fortuitous, then, that we chose to see the movie we did. After about 20 minutes, I started noticing that all of the conventions, scenery, plot elements, etc., were those of a typical WWII movie. Every signifier was telling the viewer that this is occurring during WWII. But, it is supposed to be 1934 or so: pre-war.

Why would this be? When the theme begins to be developed, the reasoning behind the odd timing becomes evident. The movie deals with the horror of instrumental reasoning. In other words, in the film the world is beset by machines, which in turn are all part of one giant machine. We see technocratic and amoral scientists, the mundanity of bureaucracy that underlies the running of the machine, and, at its core, machines that operate without the benefit of human ethics.

In short, the movie develops a parallel holocaust. One of the key features of post-holocaust theory (see: Hannah Arendt) is the idea that what made the holocaust so uniquely evil was precisely the banality of that evil. It wasn't run and created by evil supervillains; instead, the people running it were middle managers. If it weren't for the insanity and barbarity of their enterprise, they'd be mistaken for company men at postwar IBM: they punched in, operated computers, took lunch breaks, had strategy conferences, all without a thought for the monstrosity in which they were complicit.

The movie operates, then, within the exact same problematic as the holocaust itself, and runs roughly parallel to it in history. Per the leftist critique of 'serious' art, you can see why this is troubling. The movie itself is filled with lush, beautiful visuals. Even when confronted with the heart of the machine, you can't help but think that the complexity of it all is beautiful. Plus, its location within the genre of the fantastic makes us less sensitive to the evil of the machine inside the film - we can only marvel at it. Basically, the viewer disregards the evil and gazes only at the process. The money shot: the movie forces the viewer to reproduce the very amoral instrumental logic that lies at the core of the banality of evil. If what makes the holocaust so evil is that those running it forget about the evil of their ends, it's a little creepy that the viewer does the same thing vis-a-vis the machine in the movie. The spectator is so overwhelmed by the visuals that s/he doesn't really stop to think about the horror on screen.

Weird, right? Kinda cool, but weird.

The Harrowing: Super Jesus Kicks Ass

2005-03-26T22:28:00.000-05:00

There are only a few hours left of The Harrowing. No point to this post. I just wanted to write "Super Jesus."

An amoral space: the strange ethics of capitalism

2005-03-26T12:04:00.000-05:00

Brandon at Bad Christian linked to The Matthew's House Project. Apparently the director of the site, Zach Kincaid, was just fired from Oklahoma Baptist University for writing a letter to the editor criticizing the building of a massively expensive church.

I haven't gone through the site too thoroughly, but so far it looks a really smart online magazine/journal that investigates culture and religion, often using tools of cultural criticism. The first piece I checked out is an interview with Vincent Miller, a theology prof at Georgetown. Miller's concern in the interview is commodification. Commodification is the process whereby things are converted into products. For Marx, the author of the concept, labor is commodified in capitalism. Whereas we used to labor when we needed to make something for ourselves, now our labor is converted into a product which can be bought and sold on the market.

Since capitalism thrives on the market, everything that can be commodified will be commodified. We can see this quite plainly in the growth of securitization. Everything financial in nature - contracts, future earnings, debt - can be transformed into securities, which are then bought and sold on financial markets.

We see an analog to this in advertising. At the simplest level, the car commercial I'm watching is trying to sell me a car. However, it's clearly trying to associate the car with a set of less tangible things: for example, I can tell that, if I drive this car, I'll be able to buy the freedom of the open road, or the transgressive pleasure of flaunting speed limits. This is the commodification of social relations. I'm buying the car, but what I'm really buying is enjoyment, family togetherness, etc.

The commodity, also, is distinctly a thing of the industrial age. The commodity doesn't have a history - it comes to us ex nihilo, new and shiny. As Miller puts it:

A commodity is not necessarily a thing but a thing seen a certain way, and how the thing is seen is in abstraction from its origins, from its conditions of production, from the land and the space where the products grow, and from the laborers that then produce it and bring it to market. All those things don't appear, so when you walk into the produce section and see a banana there, all you see is whether it's an attractive banana or not and how much it costs. You don't see anything about the labor struggles in Latin America, how Equador coming online has undercut the labor gains of the last 30 years in Central America.

In other words, part of the existence of the commodity qua commodity is that we don't look for the man behind the curtain. Stronger still, it may even be unethical to look behind the curtain. If we are to believe some Christian bloggers, it is morally wrong to base our consumption habits on the means of production. This is truly weird; presumably, I can base my decision to not buy something on self-interest ("I don't like Taco Bell"); I can even base my decision to abstain on enlightened self-interest ("I like Taco Bell, but it's bad for me"); but it is unethical to base my abstention on ethics ("Taco Bell treats its workers unethically").

The curious upshot is that capitalism wants to create a purely amoral space, a space purely for self-interest; the logic of the market, then, entails that it is immoral to violate the amorality of the space of the market. We can be consumers, and nothing more.

Emergence

2005-03-25T06:44:00.000-05:00

From the comments here:

For the most part I don't live in the world of white Evangelicalism...nor its debates....as a young African american Christian whether or not Emergent is more in line with Calvin's Institutes gets little sympathy from me....I was checking my 9-year old out of the Children's ministry they have there. We were walking down the hall and I noticed he had a very perplexing look (His name is Israel...a very voracious reader of fantasy books) on his face. I asked him what was wrong. He asked, "Why are all the pictures of Jesus in 'our' church white?" ...But here's the deal though. We all agreed out of that two hour discussion that came from my son's probing question that this church needs to do something about issues relating to racial reconciliation and multi-ethnic participation and representation in the Church.

My comments from the blog:

I'm not perfectly fluent in bureaucrat-ese, but multi-ethnic participation sounds like code for 'do nothing of substance.'

The emergent church debate is actually quite important to the above issue; by focusing on the historical formation of the ideologies that drive the Church, the emergents provide some awfully helpful tools in this kind of area. I mean, we all know Jesus wasn't a porcelain-skinned western European, yet this image continues to dominate (american) church iconography.

The problem doesn't turn on vague mush like 'racial sensitivity' - rather, it turns on the question of why the white church continues to actively promote the falsehood that Jesus was "safe": a clean & well-kempt caucasian. How does this white-washed Jesus play into a larger white-washed theology?

I could go on, but that outlines an approach that an emergent would (or should) take. So the emergent thing, as emphasizing critical analysis, has quite a lot of bearing on "real problems." The emergent movement is a negative moment within a larger arc. I think this is why there's so much fuss over what the Emergent Church is: it's a negative, de-ideologizing moment. As a matter of positive theology, it's not so dissimilar from standard theology. We shouldn't underestemate the negative critqu of emergence, however.

The anti-truth squad: Congressional Edition

2005-03-22T22:05:00.000-05:00

The following congresspeople have lied through their teeth regarding Congress's "Terri Law" (mind you - some of the links are PDFs and some are Word docs):

- Sen. Rick Santorum (PA): "What the statute that [Whittemore] was dealing with said was that he shall hold a trial de novo."

This is total bullshit. The law only enabled the judge to consider violations of federal law. A first-year law student could tell there were none.

- Rep. Mark Souder (IN): "This Act aims to ensure that a proper diagnosis can be made and that the wishes of Terri and her family are truly being followed."

The law only allows for rehearing of federal claims. There's nothin' in it about diagnoses, and certainly nothin' in it about following the wishes of the family.

- Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX): "The latest House bill to protect Terri's life gives her parents the eligibility to bring a suit in federal district court...[and] calls for the feeding tube to be reinserted until such a hearing can take place."

This one is just weird; it really doesn't bear any discernible relationship to reality.

- Rep. Mark Green (R-WI) - "U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Green Bay) issued the following statement Monday morning on his vote in favor of legislation that would, in effect, save the life of Terri Schiavo by requiring her feeding tube be reconnected."

Again, no relationship to reality whatsoever. You have to wonder why he'd say something like this. I know congresspeople are busy and don't read their own laws, but one would expect that they'd understand the general contours, if only so they don't look like functional illiterates when releasing public statements.

The war on the judiciary

2005-03-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

Via Atrios, here's Santorum on the district court judge's refusal to grant a temporary restraining order in the Schiavo case:

What the statute that [Whittemore] was dealing with said was that he shall hold a trial de novo," the Pennsylvania Republican explained. "That means he has to hold a new trial. That's what the statute said....Judges should obey the law. And this judge - in my mind - simply ignored the law.

What's remarkable about this is that this isn't what the law said at all. This is the important part of the statute:

The United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida shall have jurisdiction to hear, determine, and render judgment on a suit or claim by or on behalf of Theresa Marie Schiavo for the alleged violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo under the Constitution or laws of the United States relating to the withholding or withdrawal of food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life....In such a suit, the District Court shall determine de novo any claim of a violation of any right...within the scope of this Act

In other words, the court is only authorized to rule on whether any federal rights have been violated. It is absolutely not authorization to hold a brand new trial. The "de novo" language only means that, even if another court has ruled that federal rights weren't violated, the district court should look at the claims anew.

This is pretty revolting. Santorum is a lawyer, and should be able to read a federal statute. What this means is that either he's actually incomparably stupid, or he's lying in order to stir up a war on the judiciary. The latter, of course, fits perfectly within conservative ideology (see also: recent bills to remove certain issues from the jurisdiction of federal courts). Santorum is trying to fit a correct decision, made in accordance with a statute that he just voted for, under the rubric of judicial activism. There are plenty of reasonable ways to critique "activist judges," but flat-out lying isn't one of them.

For all intents and purposes, 'judicial activism' has morphed into 'I didn't like the decision.'

UPDATE: via Thomas, it turns out Santorum was a sponsor of the bill. He sponsored a bill he didn't even understand

Or, of course, he's totally unprincipled and willing to lie to rile his base up.

Lifetime material? I think not.

2005-03-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

At Political Animal, Kevin Drum writes:

Apparently George Bush and other Texas Republicans think that pulling the plug on hopeless patients is perfectly OK as long as money is the issue and no one on the Christian right is protesting.

Mr. Drum is referring to this, explained by Atrios here:

In 1999 then governor Bush signed a law which allowed hospitals to withdraw life support from patients, over the objections of the family, if they consider the treatment to be nonbeneficial.

I think Mr. Drum is missing something crucial here: none of the cases mentioned by atrios etal. have been formerly pretty, middle-class women with backstories that read like a Lifetime movie.

As you can see, it's clearly a case of apples and oranges.

Rationality, insanity, same sex marriage

2005-03-15T18:29:00.000-05:00

I'll put my cards on the table: I thought the CA decision was stellar. I say this not because it's the first court to take the advice that I had been tying to telepathically beam to courts across the country, but because it was correct on the merits (so was I, of course, which is mere coincidence).

At any rate, an interesting problem is raised by Law Dork:

The question this raises is whether the statutes being tested in these cases should actually fail under a true "rational basis" test.
The answer would seem to be no: The state gives a reason that has some support (i.e., encouraging procreation), and the "fit" of the state interest with the classification needn't be all that successfully achieved under rational basis for the statute to be upheld.

For the non-law dorks that may or may not read this blog, here's what Chris is getting at: when someone challenges the constitutionality of your everyday, humdrum law, the state just has to show that it has a reason for the law isn't totally bizarre. This is the rational basis or rational relationship (RR) test. So, if New York says that butchers have to wash their hands before they get to work, and some disgruntled butcher thinks that the law is unconstitutional, the state just has to prove to the court that the reason for the law isn't totally bizarre. It doesn't have to be a good reason; it just can't be insane.

To cut to the chase:

The judge claimed that the state's nominal interest in procreation is insane. I have no reason to doubt the good judge here: it seems clear to me that the stated reason, procreation, is actually quite insane. Literally: as far as I can tell, one may as well argue that the ban on same sex marriage is aimed at helping the lions of the Serengeti. Neither makes any sense whatsoever, and to the extent that either is even remotely plausible, an immensely complex causal chain has to be posited. Let's run through a version, shall we?

P1. Some people are on the cusp of sexual identity
P2. Same sex marriage legitimizes homosexuality in some sense
P3. If homosexuality were legitimized, those mentioned in P1 would be more likely to identify as gay
P4. At least some of those mentioned in P3 would have otherwise married and had kids
Conclusion: If gay marriage is legalized, some kids won't be born that otherwise would be.

If there's a more plausible version of the alleged harm that gay marriage would bring about as it relates to the state's interest in procreation, I'd love to hear it. So far, I haven't seen a non-religious argument against gay marriage that makes much sense.

Is there anything crazier than the LaHayes?

2005-03-13T23:36:00.000-05:00

I don't think so. At any rate, here's Greg at the Parish, talking about the Jerusalem Prayer Team :

[A]ccording to their own material: "The Jerusalem Prayer Team is a prayer movement of people around the world...The mission of the Jerusalem Prayer Team (is) To guard, defend and protect the Jewish people and Eretz Yisrael until Israel is secure, and until the Redeemer comes to Zion."

Who is part of this wonderful movement? "Dr. Tim LaHaye, Mrs. Anne Graham Lotz, Dr. Pat Robertson, Dr. Adrian Rogers, Mr. Pat Boone, Dr. John Hagee, Mr. Bill McCartney, Ms. Kay Arthur, Rev. Tommy Tenney, Dr. A.R. Bernard, Dr. Stephen Olford, and Dr. Jay Sekulow are just a few of the more then 300 Christian Leaders who are part of the Jerusalem Prayer Team."

Why do I care? Because they have a new focus. This is from an email they sent recently. It was forwarded to me, by the way; I am not on their mailing list. "I am outraged! Our Lord's last words to us commanded that we were to be witnesses unto Him, first in Jerusalem. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders are organizing WorldPride 2005, an international parade in the city of Jerusalem. This is not heaven witnessing; it is hell."

What will this tidal wave of gay people do in Zion? This is a quote. I'm not making it up. "They plan to fill the hotels and restaurants, and party like Sodomites, while the world press takes pictures."

I'll just cut to the chase: what a bunch of fucking retards. Seriously, if you use your Little Orphan Annie decoder, "The Jerusalem Prayer Team" becomes "huge ass-munch."

Past the buffet; hang a left at phenomenology

2005-03-13T20:58:00.000-05:00

In this post, I laid out the theoretical grounds for my Christian project, which is based largely on John Rawls's theory of reflective equilibrium. Here's the quick version: when we assess given theories, we don't assess them in a vacuum. We have some really, really important pre-existing ideas, and some that aren't as important. For example, I couldn't accept a religion that thinks murder is OK. On the other hand, my belief that, say, permed hair deserves its own circle of hell is a pretty marginal belief; if I found the rest of a belief system compelling, I could ditch my disdain of permed hair, but I couldn't ditch my belief that murder is wrong. When we assess belief systems, we maintain our core pre-existing beliefs but are free to adjust at the margins.

We find the same pattern at work in variants of Christianity. I, for one, couldn't accept a Christianity that thinks homosexuality is morally wrong. As baffling as this to some (most of whom move their lips when they read), this is central to my pre-existing belief system. The standard response to people like me is to disdainfully refer to such a Xianity as a “buffet religion”: 'you just pick and choose what you want.' The obvious rejoinder is: 'yeah...so what, fucktard?' There's no obvious reason why I shouldn't pick and choose what I want. Still, there's some intuitive force to this response, and as such it warrants a rational reconstruction.

The key idea underlying this objection-from-the-buffet is that religion ought to be, in some meaningful sense, transformative. A religion that just neatly conforms to all of our pre-existing ideas would appear to be sterile and dead. Why adopt a religion if it merely reproduces all of the ideas that one already has? Wouldn't that be just a lifeless religion, or a crutch for one's ideology?

That seems to me to be the truth at the heart of the argument-from-the-buffet: religion is a fundamentally transformative enterprise, and to the extent it simply props up already-existent theories, it is just an alibi or excuse for behavior.

So, then, let's take the case of a socially conservative altruist; she already believes that abortion and homosexuality are wrong, and also goes out of her way to help others. Her ethics perfectly track those of right-wing Christians. Ethically, then, the possibility of transformation is foreclosed: her ethics already perfectly track those of a Christian. Still, we'd expect to see a transformation, wouldn't we?

And there should be. While none of her ethical beliefs should change (what would they change to?), and none of her motivations should change (we shouldn't do good acts just to get to heaven, right?), something changes. All of her acts, all of her experience, is radically reoriented toward Jesus Christ. Suddenly, the world presents itself as that-which-is-to-be-experienced through Christ. That which-is-to-be is pure negativity; that which is as-yet is necessarily not-yet. As in the famous passage from Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the world is presented as a series of gaps and lacunae (nothingness). What is critical, then, is that there is always more we can do; the world is always lacking God. Fuck, Christ himself said so (cf: “Father, why have you forsaken me?”). [ed - see below*]

So there is a transformation; contra the Christian Right (aka “True Christians”), the necessary and sufficient transformation is phenomenological, not ethical. The world qua world is transformed, and us via that.

* A short version of what I was getting at is provided nicely in this passage from Bultmann, reflecting on God as the "Wholly Other":

The statement that the God who determines my existence is nevertheless the "Wholly Other" can only have the meaning that as the "Wholly Other" he confronts me who am a sinner. Furthermore, in so far as I am world, he confronts me as the "Wholly Other." To speak of God as the "Wholly Other" has meaning, then, only if I have understood that the actual situation of man is the situation of the sinner who wants to speak of God and cannot; who wants to speak of his own existence and cannot do that either. He must speak of it as an existence determined by God; but he can only speak of it as sinful, as an existence such that he cannot see God in it....(emphasis mine)

The key here is that our separation from God entails that we see in the world the absence of God. At the pivotal moment of faith, God is missing ("where art thou?")

Ideology and Art, part I

2005-03-09T13:23:00.000-05:00

Occasionally, discussions of art will pop up on the blogosphere; unfortunately, they tend to discuss the issue with all of the conceptual depth, historical knowledge, and patience of a 12 year-old. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that said bloggers will reach a 12 year-old’s conclusion: art should be pretty. Oh, and it should look like something, like, say, pretty flowers in a pretty vase. That seems to be the beginning and the end of the critique. But what critical power this theory has! For example, all of the resources of this theory can be brought to bear on classics of modern art like Duchamp’s Fountain: it isn’t pretty. On the other hand, it sure looks like what it is. So I suppose it’s a bit of a wash.

This inauspicious start has motivated me to work through some of the classic philosophical essays on art, and particularly those essays that reflect on the role of ideology in art. Today I started (re)reading Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (I “read” it once, but didn’t understand a lick of it). So far, it looks like Heidegger’s essay won’t reflect on ideology, but it sure displays a ton of it. Listen to this passage, in which Heidegger wildly projects his fetishization of the volk, the peasant farmer, onto a painting of a shoe (ie, he romanticizes the peasant farmer as a simple, happy worker that gets fulfillment out of back-breaking labor):

On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field….When [the peasant woman] takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue…she knows all this without noticing or reflecting.

Ah, those noble but stupid farmers! If only they knew, as we do, that they’re deeply authentic people! Yeah, all this out of a picture of shoes.

Pro-torture = Patriotism

2005-03-04T11:37:00.000-05:00

Silly me, I had always thought that torture is wrong, and America shouldn't engage in it. As it turns out, by criticizing America's use of torture, I'm actually engaging in treason and supporting North Korea. It's a little-known fact that Kim Jong-il is a regular reader of blogs, and uses them to justify his atrocities. See, I would've thought that a bizarre way of thinking, but I guess I'm mistaken:

I'll say only this: when radical leftists complain about the torture and human rights abuses that the United States supposedly engages in, they give aid and comfort to countries like North Korea that actually do engage in human rights abuses.

The Cult of Children & the impossibility of the ethical

2005-03-02T15:20:00.000-05:00

In this post, I expressed my loathing of contemporary fetishization of children. This post from K-Punk is the perfect articulation of the theoretical bases of that loathing: :

Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is, in Lacanian terms, an Impossible polemic. How could anyone not be on the side of the children, of the future, he asks, when the 'child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of women to control their reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes as a "fight for our children - for our daughters and sons," and thus as a fight for the future? What, in that case, would it signify not to be "fighting for the children"?' (2-3)

Hence we are all coralled into holding hands with little orphan Annie and singing rousing hymns to the redemptive telos of 'tomorrow'. Yet tomorrow is indeed 'always a day away': it never arrives, not contingently, but structurally....
'In breaking our hold on the future, the sinthomosexual, himself neither martyr nor proponent of martyrdom for the sake of a cause, forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms. Against the promise of such an activism, he performs, instead, an act: the act of repudiating the social, of stepping, or trying to step...beyond compulsory compassion, beyond the future and the snare of images keeping us always in its thrall. Insisting, with Kant, on a freedom from pathological motivation, on a radical type of selflessness no allegory ever redeems, the sinthomosexual stands for the wholly impossible ethical act. And for just that reason the social order .... proves incapable of standing him.'

It's that last line that seals the deal for me; there's always seemed something profoundly disingenuous and even cynical about an ethic that insists that 'someone, please, think of the children!' An action premised on the (structurally) elusive Children appears more as an egoism premised on the interiorization of the future. The 'children' seem to become the phantasmic projection of one's own future, such that 'won't someone think of the children!' is little more than 'won't someone please think of me!' (hopefully I'm not misreading - I still struggle with translating theory into the more legible language [to me, anyway] of analytic philosophy).

southern-fried politics

2005-03-01T10:08:00.000-05:00

Digby nails it:

Let's just get this one thing straight. The theory that non-southerners are
intolerant of "his kind" is undisputably wrong. We have happily voted for
southern white males many times. It's southerners who refuse to vote for anyone
who comes from anywhere else.

But, just being happy to vote for southern white males isn't good enough,
is it? We don't properly get into macho, good ole boy culture. Ok. Let's try
that. I have absolutely no problem with a born again, cowboy hat wearing
president from a southern state who hunts and drives fast cars and even, dare I
say it, engages in the most macho sport of all --- clearing brush. He can tie on
a six gun and practice quick drawing in the rose garden for all I care. I am not
offended by any of those things.

But again, that's the problem, isn't it? It is not enough to be tolerant.
We must adopt both their style and their policies before they are happy.
Everyone must be a NASCAR fan. If you are not, they will take it to mean that
you disrespect their love of NASCAR. Everyone must hunt. If you don't, then you
are being intolerant of their love of hunting. If you don't talk about religion
the way they talk about it, you are not properly religious. Rappers must wear
cowboy boots, hispanics must speak English, we all have to drive American trucks
with confederate flags on the back and drink Jack and be exactly like these
macho, southern white men before they will feel secure enough to vote with
us.

Show me the money

2005-02-25T09:56:00.000-05:00

At LifeSteward, we are directed to a story about the U of FL demand for Judge Greer's recusal.

My question:

Underlying these calls for Greer's impeachment/recusal is the notion that he hasn't applied the law correctly, and that his personal feelings have gotten in the way of good decisions. For that to be half-way plausible, though, there'd have to be a showing of how he's misapplied or ignored law.

While there have been vague mentions of FL statutes and general legal principles, no one has done the hard work of trawling through FL case law to discuss how, specifically, Greer has dropped the ball. Absent that, the Terry-bloggers' efforts look like nothing so much as sour grapes: ya don't like the law, so blame the judge.

With that in mind, are there any in-depth critiques of Greer's decisions? Alternately, is there somewhere I can go to read his decisions (I've already checked out the appellate decisions, which are of limited use)?

Paging Diogenes

2005-02-22T17:04:00.000-05:00

Unfogged reads my mind:

On the one hand, god bless Kos and Atrios for the work they are doing--they're among the few who are pushing back. On the other hand, it doesn't feel like my game anymore. I realize that what I want to do, what I like to think of myself as engaged in, is explaining, or changing minds, or laying out reasons. Bare political advocacy requires a certain faith in one's own rightness; a tight enough grasp on the end to think it justifies the means--and maybe I just don't have that. If I throw too much spin on something, I begin to doubt myself, and doubt my cause. That makes me suited for some things, but a crappy political advocate.

Damn, do I understand this post. On the one hand, it can be enormously frustrating to find that even those with whom one sympathizes politically are mere advocates, and forego well-formed arguments in favor of demagoguery. On the other hand, it provides a lot more grist for the mill when all sides push weak arguments. Either way, though, it can be profoundly dispiriting to see such....well, lack of doubt in one's own rightness (which is probably why I've been sticking to immanent-discourse blogs lately [read: continental theory blogs and religion blogs]).

NY Times & tax shelters

2005-02-22T11:34:00.000-05:00

Here's Allan Sloan in today's WaPo:

The New York Times editorial page is unsparing when it comes to flogging tax-dodging corporations. Corporate tax avoidance, it intoned in a typical piece last April, is "both a straightforward fiscal problem" and "a broader threat to our civic culture." Indeed. Last week, the New York Times Co. didn't exactly practice what the New York Times editorial page preaches.

Cool......Who knew that the New York Times actually owned its own country somewhere? I wonder if it has its own navy, like the Scientologists, or if they're just content with lax corporate tax policies and practices. Cuz that's what the passage above implies. The NY Times preaches against government provision of "corporate welfare"; if they don't practice what they preach, then it's clear they must be a government that doles out "corporate welfare" (scare quotes indicating that your humble author doesn't necessarily share the negative characterization of corporate tax incentives).

Of course, the Times isn't a government, and the only way it could be seen as hypocritical is if it had been criticizing other companies for taking advantage of loopholes and/or the government's lax enforcement. This point is recognized by The Captain o'er at Captain's Quarters:

That's the problem with newspapers and businessmen in general who rail against tax cuts and investment protections in the tax code. Most of them operate or contribute to corporations that exploit these legal structures without hesitation -- as they should, if legal -- to benefit themselves and their shareholders. And yet they castigate others who do so, accusing them of threatening our "civic culture" and other hyperbolic rants about the evils of corporations. It's hypocrisy at its most base and ludicrous level. (emphasis mine)

Let's turn to the editorial in which the Times talks about corporate practices threatening the civic culture. If that editorial is calling for greater ethical responsibility on the part of corporations to forego tax shelters, then the Captain is absolutely right that the Times is being ludicrously hypocritical.

From the 4/13/04 Times:

Despite one of the highest ostensible corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, American companies are in fact among the least taxed. This oddity undermines the integrity of the system and makes a mockery of those who actually pay their fair share. It would be far healthier to reduce the corporate tax rates modestly while simplifying the system to ensure compliance as John Kerry is proposing.

Far from casting the issue as an ethical duty that accrues to corporations, the Times is looking at it as a systemic and political problem. The paper isn't shaking its fist righteously at corporations that are making use of perfectly legal measures to reduce their tax burden - which, as The Captain correctly observes, they should do - but rather claiming that the tax system itself is broken and shouldn't allow corporations to do some of the things they're currently allowed to do.

As the Times points out earlier in the editorial, the problem with making a "mockery of those who actually pay their fair share" isn't an ethical one, either; it's a political one. A system that allows for wild fluctuations between taxonomically equal entities undermines civic culture and leads to social unrest, as has happened in Latin America. Again, the point is political and pointedly not ethical.

[Quick and hopefully-not-too-fawning update: I'm consistently impressed with the calibre of comments on most blogs, the occasional blogswarm notwithstanding. The CQ comments are no exception. This is why I don't understand some bloggers' decision to disable commenting; often enough, the comments are really keen and include angles and ideas that add greatly to the overall value of the blog]

Analogies

2005-02-21T20:38:00.000-05:00

At Red Oasis in a Blue State, Red writes about the recent (and inevitable, as I've noted many times) decision to throw out the charges against the neo-Mennonite (check out beardo in the back) Philly 5:

Perhaps this was not her intention, but on the surface it appears that, to Dembe, Christian groups are equivalent to the KKK and the Nazis. Christians are now the same as a murdering band of thugs hell-bent on turning back the clock of racial equality? They are now no different than a regime that systematically slaughtered 6 million people in less than a decade?

So, the question is: how are the Philly 5 like Nazis? It's all speech that lots of other people don't like and find highly offensive, but whose rights should be protected nonetheless.

As an empirical statement, that should be uncontroversial. Plenty of people find the beliefs of the Philly 5 and their ilk highly offensive. If we construe it subjunctively, it's also uncontroversial: "even if you think antigay speech is offensive, we protect the speech of those that are most offensive (nazis and KKK)." This is the counter-example strategy, and we see it all the time. Reciting the free speech rights of various awful groups has become a rhetorical trope: "yeah, I don't like what you're saying, but we protect the rights of even the worst groups [followed by the rights of KKK and nazis]" (examples: here, here, and here) This is standard issue, and it's also an intuitively sensical way to construct a counterexample. If X is worse than Y, yet we protect the rights of X, then it's logical that we protect the rights of Y.

A third possibility is that she was using an analogy. In itself, though, that's really not a big deal. As I've pointed out before, an analogy compares one aspect of two different things. An analogy doesn't conflate two things; far from it, the efficacy of a metaphor relies on the difference between them.

An example: say I'm talking with a friend about something, I think she's relying on puffery to make her point, and I then assert that she's acting like Goebbels. Am I actually asserting that she's "the same as a murdering band of thugs hell-bent on turning back the clock of racial equality?" No, of course not. I'm picking out a trait common to both (namely, their propagandizing). In the Philly 5, it's a pretty reasonable guess that the views of the 5 were unpopular (in fact, many of their defenders have said just that). Inasmuch as the views of the KKK and anti-gays are politically unpopular, then, they are similar. Further, given the aforementioned legal trope about the KKK, it's a far-from-shocking metaphor.

The question of bias

2005-02-21T18:43:00.000-05:00

Reacting to a speech by NY Times editor Bill Keller, in which he opines that blogs are inherently biased, Commonwealth Conservative writes:

The problem with blogs is their inherent bias? Is that meant to be ironic? I’d say the problem with the NY Times is its inherent bias.

The MSM is clueless, and growing moreso by the day.

Keller's statement evinces the ideology of the '50s emphasis on Consensus: we had a select number of institutions that were a shared referent, creating a coherent intranational identity of sorts (whether or not the historical experience tracked the ideology of Consensus is another question altogether). Keller, of course, is a byproduct of the Consensus, one of whose last vestiges resides in the MSM; they really think they're an unbiased fount of information around which Americans of all stripes can gather.

The lingering question is whether the MSM is, in fact biased. It's certain that they have some kind of bias. As Marxists and postmoderns were noting decades ago, a necessary component of doing the news is selecting the news. In a sense, then, they generate the category 'news.' That much seems self-evident, and is one of the growing number of issues on which conservatives and marxists are in agreement. A second question is whether the MSM pervasively reflects a liberal slant.

I'm gonna bracket that question for the moment, in favor of glip comparison. One interesting feature of the current MSM criticism by conservatives (and marxists, of course) is how critiques of MSM deploy the language of conspiracy theorists: bias is always 'latent' and 'insidious'. In other words, prima facie there's no detectable bias, but once you scratch the surface the web of bias becomes apparent. Hence the hub-bub over Eason Jordan: the key that unlocked the conspiracy had been found. It's all very paranoic; watching it is not unlike watching an Oliver Stone movie.

I googled "MSM" & "bias". Here are some snippets of the The Jawa Report, the first page I found that was more than a 4-line "gotcha!":

"Ultimately, as we might already suspect, the media creates 'news'....And unfortunately the massive private sector human intelligence operation we call journalism has turned into a mouthpiece for an ideology"

From a JFK conspiracy site: "Stone's crime was not that his movie presents a myth, but that he had the audacity and power to challenge the myths of his critics. It is, in the critics' view, the job of the news media to determine the country's paradigm, to define our perceptions, to give broad interpretations to major events, to create the myths which guide our thought and action."

The Jawa Report comments section: "You're right, the left-wing bias of the press has had a serious impact upon society and people don't even realize it."

JFK: "Who did the president, who killed Kennedy, fuck man! It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin' shooters don't even know!"

The moral: watch out. You're caught in the web, and you don't even know it.

Wedding Planning

2005-02-20T18:15:00.000-05:00

Yep, it's that special time in a man's life when he has to fight the good fight and insist that there be no children whatsoever in his wedding. Who's that one lunatic that my hero S.Z. at World O' Crap is always mocking? I think it's Doug Giles. Anyways, the man is right about one thing: there's too much fucking cutesy-poo shit these days, and churches are ground-zero for it.

Y'know, contemporary evangelical christianity fetishizes children, and it gives me the heeby-jeebies. The last time I went to my parents' church, they had this nauseating segment where they brought a bunch of kids up to the front, and the Sunday school teacher did a little Q&A with the kids. Like, she'd ask them banal crap like "Who's our saviour? And how much does he love us?" It was absolutely grotesque, and all the more so because all of these infantilized adults around me were getting all sentimental, and probably thinking things like "That's.......how I should love the lord!"

Ick.

Well, I've been thinking about writing a post for the Christian Carnival, but I don't think this one will pass muster.

Fracture/Method

2005-02-17T08:34:00.000-05:00

Brandon over at Bad Christian laid out his musical autobiography, and asked for the same from others (check out Streak's, too). Since my comment was starting to overspill the bounds of acceptable length, bloggin' it is better.

While Brandon ended up at folk, I started at folk. When I got kinda good on guitar, though, it really, really bothered me that folk is so musically limited. There are only a handful of chord progressions, after all, yet folk embraces this Romantic ideology of the author-as-genius. I couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance, so I started listening to music that fractures sound. I've found that there are three main ways to fracture a given chord progression:

Texturally: My Bloody Valentine is a good example. They overload a song with so many sounds and layers that you end up not listening to the chord changes - I guess you could say it collapses a linear, or horizontal, chord progression into one massive synchronic, or vertical, scale.

Tempo - Slow a chord progression down until it's entirely unrecognizable as a progression at all. It's almost the inverse of the MBV method. Rather than overload a progression, ya stretch it out. Best example: Labradford (if you check out the music page, check out "Pico" from 1996's Labradford). See also: Stars of the Lid.

Arpeggiation: Instead of strumming a progression, you break each chord into component notes. This is best done by utilizing notes that don't fit into the given chord. That way, the tonal center of the chord is displaced and makes the chord less recognizable as itself. Exemplar: Six Parts Seven. Interestingly, I've also found that there are a good many Christians playing in this style (Unwed Sailor, for example).

Now to copy quotes from Brandon and Streak that are ripe for good-spirited mocking and to give assorted shout-outs.

Streak: "I was an Amy Grant fan and saw her in concert a few times. I still like her voice, and we listen to her Christmas album every year." Really, this mocks itself. No commentary necessary.

"I listened to a lot of stuff that makes me wince now. Def Leppard (though the first album was decent) Rush and a few others." Def Leppard ruled. I don't know if anyone remembers, but inside the Hysteria cassette was a mail-away offer for their "official biography". Yeah, I bought it. And it was awesome. I still read it once a year. Actually, I just think it'd be funny if I did.

Brandon: "I was totally jazzed when I heard Jesus Freak from DC Talk on the local radio station...." That song came out when I was going through my terrible-music-is-hilarious phase. I'd drive around, blaring that song paired with assorted tracks from Mary Kate & Ashley's Sleepover Party and Vanilla Ice's totally underrated "gangsta comeback album" Mind Blowin'.

General shoutout: I still like the folk. Good stuff. Also, that was the best post topic ever.

The Village: 90 minutes of suck

2005-02-14T23:42:00.000-05:00

Lame, lame lame. Until I figured out the silly ending, I figured the bad acting and ridiculous dialogue mighta been worth it. A cool payoff can make stuff like that worth it, but there was no payoff. Unless you're 15 and high, this movie blows.

Text and meaning

2005-02-14T10:37:00.000-05:00

At GetReligion, tmatt discusses the question of meaning in the text:

...[T]he next step is to figure out what the creator of the signal was actually trying to say. I call this "finding the secular subject." Once you have found this big-button topic, you can move on to applying the teachings of your faith to that same subject.

The problem, of course, is that it is often hard to find out precisely what some of the artists of popular culture are trying to say. Often, it seems that they do not know. I mean, "knowing" is such an old-fashioned concept, you know?...In the end, it is often hard to find interviews with the artists in which they clearly express what they are thinking.

First, applause for taking a look at the semantics of pop culture. That said, why reinvent the wheel? There's tons of literature on this subject (the most famous of which is probably Barthes's Mythologies). At any rate, there's a conceptual asymmetry between the project and its method in the above. If we're looking at a text to find the meaning imparted to its audience, the question of 'intended meaning' is peripheral at best; the vast majority of the audience isn't going to read some obsucure interview and then watch/read the piece in light of the author's intent. Stronger, we could ask if the intentions elicited in an interview actually change the meaning located in the text; it would be a strange kind of meaning that, while located in the film, is altered by words uttered in another context altogether.

At the same time, these pieces are all intertextual to some extent, and refer back to other texts in the same and other genres. So a method adequate to its object will read these texts together to find a common ideology immanent in all of them. The vast body of texts will have particular meanings which will in turn inform the audience's reading of the new text.

That method, then, impliedly answers this concern:

I was amazed at the degree to which some of the writers and artists were...not anxious to address the central question: What were you trying to say?

If the meaning is immanent in the text, we need look no further than the text. To the question "what were you trying to say," the answer is simply "the text." As tmatt acknowledges, the bare text certainly seems to underdetermine the meaning therein: "Also, some artists are not interested in telling potential ticket buyers what the signal is all about." So where is the meaning? It derives from the triangular structure text-audience-ideology; the third term, ideology, mediates the relationship between the audience and the text, and informs the audience's reading. For example, if I'm watching a movie on Lifetime, there are certain signs I look for to tell me what kind of movie I'm watching. Some of these are internal to the text (particular archetypal characters, for examples), while some are extra-textual (the Lifetime logo in the corner of the screen). This assembly of intra- and extra-textual signifiers informs my reading and creates meanings in conjunction with the actual movie I'm watching.

I've often noted that there is a striking similarity between post-modernism and recent Christianity, and this is an occasion on which the latter could probably benefit from the theoretical groundwork established by the latter.

Hume, FDR, blahblahblah

2005-02-10T08:53:00.000-05:00

The background: Brit Hume made very unethical use of ellipses to make it sound like FDR's plan was just like Bush's. The best thing I've read yet comes from LizardBreath on the comment section on Jane Galt's site:

The quote, as Hume reported it, states that FDR planned to phase out government-funded Social Security. This is not just false, it's surprising. I might say, very very surprising. We've been talking about Social Security for years in this country, and I've never before heard anyone cite FDR to say that it was originally intended to be a temporary program.

If you misquote Reagan to say "Socialism is a better, more humane way to run a society than capitalism", "Whoops, I misunderstood" is not a believable excuse, because Reagan's position on socialism is well known. Likewise here: finding a quote that on a careless misreading seems to say that FDR supported something that is the reverse of what you have always known him to have supported does not excuse a selective quotation to support the misreading. It is simply unbelievable that Hume saw a quote as surprising as the truncated version and didn't do the double-take and check to see what FDR had really said.

He lied.

A genererous C-...

2005-02-09T01:31:00.000-05:00

...would be low for this essay by Arthur, as it turns out. [note: this has been edited; what I initially wrote reflected a wild misreading of Arthur's post. Apologies around]. A snippet:

The critics are right: poverty throughout the developing world is merely a symptom. If we truly want to help people throughout the Third World (does anyone still use this term?) we should tackle the causes of poverty: unrepresentative, unresponsive, corrupt and nepotistic political culture, and economic systems that are holdovers from the golden age of socialist delusion.

He's right that there are systemic problems in the economies of these questions, but does that really bear on the separate question of whether these countries should be relieved of their debt? It seems like that may be an open question. Clearly, when a country labors under so much debt that the interest rates are a drag on its economy such that it can't recover, debt relief is a good idea (ethically and economically). What we'd need to see is an economic analysis of these unspecified Third World countries regarding their structural debt (IMF obligations and whatnot) versus the debt that accrues due to their inefficiences. (HT: A Constrained Vision)

Ideological and rhetorical gauntlets

2005-02-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

At The Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman writes:

In other words, if Dean gets the DNC chairmanship, he plans to throw down
the ideological gauntlet.
But Democrats better hope that if he does that during these times when their party has faced power-reducing defections from the center, he doesn't further throw down their party as well.

As against this, Dean is actually relatively moderate. He's a known budget hawk and a muscular multilateralist, for example. While an ideological gauntlet may be thrown down, it's really not an extreme one that will alienate too many people. It's entirely possible that he was selected to throw down a rhetorical and institutional gauntlet, much as the Harry Reid seems to be doing by emphasizing the differences between parties and building political discipline. Following Esmay, Dean is the ideal militant moderate. Ultimately, I don't think these are bad things at all: the Dems have done plenty of soul-searching, and the time has come to pick a path. In keeping with that, my hunch is that Dean was selected as something of a reassuring father-figure, someone that knows exactly what needs to be known. In marketing terms, I suppose one could say that he's a well-defined brand, and can help the Democrats rebrand themselves and become a known quantity.

One of the problems faced by Kerry was that people didn't seem to know what he stood for, and that (stupid) perception has attached to Democrats as a whole; Dean will probably go a ways toward rectifying that image problem.

Minutiae on Iraq

2005-01-30T16:37:00.000-05:00

At In the Agora, Joshua Claybourn writes:

High turnout among the South Africans wasn't seen as the test of the South African elections' legitimacy, and neither should it be the sole test in Iraq.

There are two things that strike me as off about this analogy, one of which is pragmatic, while the other is rooted more in justice. First, the pragmatic: in South Africa, I don't think we were particularly concerned about a civil war or campaign of terror if the white voters were underrepresented. By contrast, this is precisely the concern that drove the movement to postpone the election and has animated many of the dire warnings that the election won't necessarily be a panacea. If Sunnis are greatly underrepresented, this line of argument goes, the citizenry may not feel they have a voice in the government, and may voice their dissatisfaction through violence.

It's the logical corollary of Bush's 'transformative power of democracy' thesis, which holds that if people gain a voice via democracy, they'll channel their energies peacefully. What I find interesting is that the reasoning of many on the left about legitimacy tacitly makes use of Bush's logic. It only challenges the facts on the ground while accepting the force of that logic.

If nothing else, that goes to show that Bush really does have command of the terms of the public discourse.

The second reason I don't find the analogy particularly apt derives from our sense of just-desserts. If the whites in South Africa were underrepresented, well, sucks to be them. In other words, since so many whites directly benefited from apartheid, there's a certain retributive justice in their subsequent disenfranchisement. I've found that my intuitions don't always match up with everyone's, but in this case, if Sunnis don't vote for whatever reason, I have a feeling that the reaction is more likely to be (and should be) 'that's not good,' rather than 'sucks to be them'.

The dangers of analogizing: Exhibit A

2005-01-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

At A Constrained Vision, Katie quotes Steven Hayword approvingly:

Others have made the observation that liberals say there is no Social Security crisis, or if there is, we can wait and fix it later, while on the subject of climate change, their position is that we have to take drastic action RIGHT NOW to ward off harm that will not appear for 50 to 100 years or more.

This seems like a pretty weak analogy. I'm no environmentalist, mind you, but if I understand the reasoning correctly, things we do to the environment today will be harder to undo tomorrow. This seems to make a good deal of sense: I save money from throwing some chemical into my pond out front rather than disposing of it correctly. However, it'll ultimately end up costing more to undo the damage I've done, since environmental problems are notoriously intractable and actions, once done, are very hard to undo (check out the size of superfund projects, for example). With respect to global warming, a common argument is that it will be impossible to undo. These are the points with which honest anti-environmentalists (for lack of a better term) will have to grapple.

Briefly, on social security: Hayword writes, "Conversely, waiting on Social Security reform will mean that the costs only grow larger, and the options for dealing with it narrower and more painful." That's pretty uncontroversial, I think. I don't see how it bears on the question of social security, however. In some other world, private accounts might work, but in this world the transition and transaction costs are liable to be nothing short of enormous. If we could magically convert the current system into a private account system, most people would be hunky-dory with it (perhaps with some tinkering at the margins). But this isn't an ideal world, and we can't magically switch systems without transition and transaction costs.

So Hayword has got the key concepts, but he applies them all wrong: if we wait on the environment, we accrue enormous extra costs; if we act now on social security, we accrue enormous costs.

White socks and black shoes?

2005-01-28T13:12:00.000-05:00

Regarding the Cheney-as-Pats-fan kerfuffle, Kevin Drum has this to say:

This is not the biggest deal in the world, but it sure is peculiar —
especially since, as the bottom picture from a ceremony today shows, Cheney had
a dark overcoat with him.

That's more-or-less the correct response, and reflects the tone of most bloggers I've read (despite the weirdly overblown frothing on some right wing sites about "elitist condescension"). It's certainly not a big deal, but.....huh? I can say for a fact that my mom would've killed me if I'd dressed like that in a similar setting.

Rand & Berkely

2005-01-26T08:51:00.000-05:00

I have no idea why in retrospect, but I read an article on Ayn Rand by NRO's Andrew Stuttaford in today's NY Sun. I found this part pretty amusing:

Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand.

I agree with the premise, but not the conclusion that Rand's prose somehow transubstantiates into something grand (as Busby's choreography did). It's just crap. I can see the point: the hackneyed, hyper-formalized style in which Rand writes does resemble the melodramas of the 30s......y'know, I hate the melodramas of the 30s. Total crap. They're good subjects for papers and essays, because there's no subtlety or complexity to get in the way of the operation of ideology, but I think that explains adequately why the only people that seem to like those films are comparative literature students and the like.

I could imagine a counter to that: there's something charming about how the makers of those films didn't have any idea they were doing little other than transmitting ideology. I could see that, I guess; naivete is sometimes charming. That counter also has the virtue of differentiating Rand, since she knew exactly what she was doing and was correspondingly charmless.

BFF? Liberation Theology and Born Again Political Engagement

2005-01-22T15:06:00.000-05:00

(note: the intro is long; I've bolded the first words where the post turns to the meat of the issue)

When I was in college, I was seriously considering applying to some graduate programs that heavily utilized certain marxist and marxian modes of analysis. A handful of people said that I just wouldn't 'get it', however, since these modes of analysis are only fully available to leftists; and despite being a liberal, I'm certainly not a leftist (I love me some capitalism, for example). This bothered me considerably; it just struck me as impossibly daft to believe that some substantive political ideology is entailed by purely formal categories of reasoning.* Since then, I've become more and more interested in the problematic of the division of and relationship between formal reasoning and particular normative, ethical, or political beliefs.

This problematic is particularly stark in the curious isomorphism (structural identity) between certain species of postmodern marxist logic and Evangelical Christian logic. For example, when it comes to pedagogical indoctrination, both hold strikingly similar positions; as I wrote elsewhere:

The view of many evangelical Christians tracks certain post-structuralist and marxist views: there's no such thing as a neutral study, and the claim to neutrality is itself a deeply ideological and evangelizing act.

There's a weird, arational tension here for me; as much as I love marxian analysis, when evangelicals deploy it, I want to cry foul.......but why? I actually agree with their reasoning to an extent, but like my less-than-encouraging college pals, I claim that reasoning for my team.

All of this extended introduction brings me to this (very smart) post at Harbinger about liberation theology. This passage caught my eye:

In general, I accept Hauerwas’ ‘church as polis’ ecclesiology. Such a notion of the church guards against the compartmentalization of political and theological attitudes, a partitioning that inappropriately renders theology irrelevant to the political, one of the most important features of human existence.

Purely formally, this boundary-elimination seems wonderful to me. The compartmentalization is a reification of a staid Victorian ideology that starkly splits the private from the public; this split, in turn, enables the social power structure to operate within the private sphere, leaving the subject without a political venue in which to seek recourse. The antidote: The personal is the political! So far, so good.

For me, however, this acceptance of the formal reasoning embodied in the above is belied by my negative reaction to the deployment of said reasoning by the Religious Right. In fact, one could characterize the recent emergence of the Religious Right as a mass acceptance of this formal reasoning; they determined that their religious lives aren't, or shouldn't be, divorced from their lives in the body politic, and acted on that reasoning. To sharpen that point, it's precisely that conflation that liberals have been absolutely railing against since the Kerry/Bush race. Their argument is based on the concept of Public Reason: for a democracy to be legitimate, its decision must be based on ideas that are accessible to everyone.

There's clearly a tension between these two ideas, however. My question is: how do we reconcile them? Do we argue, as my leftist college pals did, that the formal reasoning of 'the personal is the political' entails certain substantive political values? Do we abandon the normative notion that 'the personal is political' is always good? To do the latter ends in an adjudication between substantive values that seems arbitrary to me. Or do we bite the bullet and admit that 'the personal is political' isn't good or bad, and that its value rests solely on the substanive beliefs that are being justified by recourse to 'the personal is political'? Finally, should we abandon the idea altogether that the personal is the political?

* A bit more technically, marxism may entail substantive political beliefs if one holds all of Marx's ontological theses, one of which is a belief about the essence of man (for Marx, man is homo economicus; our sense of worth is derived from our labor and its fruits). Jettison that one belief, though, and the substantive political beliefs about state redistribution are no longer necessary. Since marxists jettisoned those beliefs long ago under the sway of post-modernist denials of essentialism, it was clear to me that one can be a contemporary marxist and an unabashed fan of capitalism. That's me in a nutshell.