Politblogo

Got inner turmoil?

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe---what you or I might call "reality"---but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one's hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!" 

On the other hand, those who were right are, as Krugman points out, DFHs.  They may have been right in the observable universe, but they weren't right in an ennobling way.  They were right in a childish, "I told you so" way, which only highlights their fundamental unseriousness.  It was easy for them to be right.  When DFHs are right, they are right in a dirty $@#$ing way.

You see, the real distinction between being right and being wrong is not one of verifiability.  It is one of aesthetics.  Was it difficult for you to come to your conclusion?  Did you suffer for it?  Was it dramatic?  Did you sit leaning forward, chin on fist, in pensive repose like that cliché thinker sculpture, only with more clothes?  It's the inner turmoil, and the hard decisions about other people's lives (whether they will live or not) that makes you a Serious Person.

But if the answer was obvious to you, plain as day, well, that's a pretty ugly way to come to the right conclusion.  No drama, no suffering, no inner turmoil.  You didn't even have an interesting pose.  There was nothing tragic about it.  You may as well have been at the grocery store or driving home or doing whatever it is that unserious, unimportant people do.

If you come to conclusions based on evidence, and if you see what obviously is unfolding before your eyes, and you do not have a Deep, Difficult Choice to make to sacrifice the lives of thousands, you are unserious and Serious People should ignore you.  Actually, the choice to sacrifice thousands of lives would prove that you were a Serious Person, because you certainly felt inner turmoil as you did so.

And the inner turmoil is what matters.

DEXTRE SMASH!!!!!

OK, fine, AG wants a new post.  What better thing to do than to point out that us Canadians are building giant space robots for the impending global invasion. 

Hat tip: Gigi

Bad ideas in the world of Canadian criminal law

It is universally entertaining to discuss abstract and hypothetical situations, the life-and-deathier the better.  For instance, many people apparently find it extremely entertaining to discuss the possibility of a terrorist parachuting into, oh, Round Top, Texas and detonating a neutron bomb or something, and whether we should prevent it by anaestheticlessly removing the fingernails of every Swedish grandmother or Palestinian-sympathizing penguin or whatever figures in their imagination.

One of my favorites is the one about "when does life begin?"  After all, all sorts of things come into the picture there.  Ensoulment, individuation, the meaning of life, 42, all those wonderful issues we get to debate.  It's an awesome thing to do when you're high on Mountain Dew. 

But when it comes to any actual law related to the concept, the simple question becomes this: even if you do have an opinion on the deep philosophical question of when life "begins": at what point  are you willing to tie up and intubate a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy in order to prevent her from doing so?  Because, you see, that's what it takes.  If you're like me, you'll recoil from the concept.  That recoil keeps the debate safely in the hypothetical realm, the world of fun and innocent lunchroom philosophical debates that everyone ought to have.  If you don't recoil from the idea, then you'll be very happy to base laws on the severe restriction of women's freedom on your lunchtime hypothetical musings about the origin of human existence.  There are, in fact, people like that.  For what it's worth.

I am willing, however, to take a crazed chainsaw murderer from a horror movie and, in fact, restrain him or her until I can figure out what to do with this person.  That is why I support the existence of laws on the prosecution or prevention of murder in some form or another.

Why are these two situations different for me?  First and foremost, there is an emotive one.  I am unashamed to say that I do judge some moral situations on an instinctive inner evaluation of relative suffering.  I know that I have to inflict months of torture on some women in order to prevent them from having abortions.  Unless we play silly semantic games with the concept of "suffering," I don't have to do this in the case of the crazed chainsaw murderer.  Even if I did, I would be saving large numbers of people---beyond the mere victims---from a potentially great deal of suffering.  My inner emotive evaluation of suffering forces me to see these things differently.

Even the debate-club ethical discussion forces me to take a position distinguishing these two situations.  In the case of the pregnant woman, she is facing a situation in which her very being and personal existence may be altered by carrying the pregnancy through.  To put it metaphorically, the very weight of her existence and consciousness is an order of magnitude greater than that of any fetus.  We cannot easily say this for the chainsaw murderer or his/her victims. 

Of course, I realize that this is the argument that abortion criminalizers are least moved by.  But the correct and honest response is to persuade us that their debate-club notions of life, the universe, and everything should be used as a basis for law.  Unfortunately, they have recently embarked on a strategy in Canada to circumvent that.   This strategy may very familiar to my American readers.  It is to consider the harming of a fetus during a violent act as a crime separate from that of harming the woman during that act.  I am not saying that this is a stealthy end-run around the distinction between the abortion-seeking woman and the chainsaw murderer.  I'm saying that it is a direct and open end-run around that, and extremely transparent to boot, which exploits the suffering of a small number of victims to enshrine in law a certain kind of debate-club ethics.

I don't normally write about this issue, as I have no personal direct or indirect experience of the matter.  But I thought I would do so this once, as it vaguely appears that it might have a chance to pass in Canada, which would be a bad idea for the same reason that it is a bad idea to enshrine in law anything that has so obviously not made it out of the high-school debating club level of thought* and for the same idea that it's a bad idea to allow any party to get around an up-front discussion of their political motivations.  It also connects a lot of other issues together.  Like why it's wrong to torture Swedish grandmothers or suspected members of the man-penguin armies, or anyone else for that matter.

*No offense to high-school debaters.  I was one too, and I enjoy that sort of thing.  Well, actually, some offense intended.  I think the formats are highly artificial and weird and possibly adversely affect the public discourse when debate-club graduates actually start careers without getting it out of their systems.

The scientist as actor

My Canadian readers may be familiar with this common phenomenon: I have a few American readers of this blog, and even among them, it is not uncommon to hear frustrated expressions of desire to become Canadian when their politics adds another razor-wire loop to the loopiness that it is.  My Canadian readers will also be familiar with the both the feeling of flattery tinged with a small amount of guilt: justified guilt that it is not deserved.

Via ReWind.it at Bread'n'Roses, we find this charming bit of news in the Notional Pest:

Until now, Environment Canada has been one of most open and accessible departments in the federal government, which the executive committee says is a problem that needs to be remedied.

It says all media queries must now be routed through Ottawa where "media relations will work with individual staff to decide how to best handle the call; this could include: Asking the program expert to respond with approved lines; having media relations respond; referring the call to the minister's office; referring the call to another department," the presentation says.

Gregory Jack, acting director of Environment Canada's ministerial and executive services, says scientists and "subject matter experts" will still be made available to speak to the media "on complex and technical issues." He would not explain how "approved lines" are being written and who is approving them.

This sort of thing will be no surprise to anyone following the saga of the frankly excellent Linda Keen, the Canadian nuclear regulator who stood up to a Canadian government presently dominated by an unadulterated Bushian neocon.  (Her total smackdown testimony linked from here.) And by dint of that, these tactics should be highly familiar to American readers, as they were learned from You Know Where.

Next year's baked goods are going to suck anyway

The Cookie Fascists have struck again!  Instead of recognizing my greatness and giving me my rightful due (a full supply of cookies next December), they have seen fit to give the Cookie Crown to another, another who was willing to pander to their narrow-minded definitions of "cookie."  I mean OATMEAL COOKIES???  Anybody can do that.

So now I know how it goes: assuming I don't go on strike and boycott next year, I will endeavour to make the most boring, blandest dough-disks imaginable, perhaps even ready-made, rather than the startlingly awesome confections that I made this year.  And I shall no longer listen to blandishments and praise, because these promises of greatness-recognition did not bear fruit.  Fie!

The Cookie Sultanate will have to wait another day because of the infidels.  Infidels, I say.  Infidels who gave out at least five prizes out of NINE contestants, and the name of Námo Mandos not among the winners.  Even the cookies that (might have) had interesting effects on canine digestion won a prize (judging a second-string contest).

One last thing: a big shout-out to the folks and loyal fans at Bread'n'Roses, especially GDK for the brownie recipe.  Y'all get to be sore losers along with me.

Be grateful you aren't starving

For some reason, I decided today to punish myself by reading redstate.com.  RedState, for my Canadian readers, is a wannabe Daily Kos for the right-wing.  The people who run it are the sort of Republicans who give off a sort of normal, less freepish aroma, but do not be fooled: they are actually completely loopy neocons and the like with the thinnest veneer of erudition. 
The difference between them and the freepers is the recognition that you have to put on a suit to get the creamier fraction of wingnut welfare.

So anyway, token funny-name* dude Pejman Yousefzadeh approvingly quotes this stunning piece of Jonah Goldberg-ian sophistry from some nobody writer in the NYT.

 

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you've just lost your job, there's something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that's elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

This is, in a nutshell, why capitalism---whatever its merits---exists in deep opposition to democracy. What is this guy really telling the victims of trade and, indeed, the rest of us?  What is the moral corollary of this logic, logic that the writer quite correctly identifies as emanating from capitalist ideology?

Be grateful that we allow you to survive.

I don't normally go after right-wing ideologues directly myself, happily preferring, as I do, what others call the circular firing squad; I have generally preferred to go after intellectually dishonest people who profess to be, in some way or another, on my side.  And I can't help but feel that this sort of logic also underlies those people as well, especially the well-meaning economists and the like. 

But when someone tells me, "Congrats!  We are not going to kick you onto the street today," I may indeed count my blessings for myself.  But I am not obliged to express any gratitude for it.   If I believe that I owe gratitude for survival to something, then I believe that it is my master.

*I can say this because in real life, I have a funny name like his.

Blogroll reform: your chance for glory

So it has come to my attention that the blogroll on the side has become very stale, as I no longer read the majority of the blogs mentioned there.  For instance, I added the "Catallarchy" when I decided to waste my time on a few weeks stint as resident troll for the annoying glibertarians that inhabit the place, but as glibertarians have approximately only one thing to say, it got old fast. 

Thus, in the near* future, I plan to completely overhaul it, eliminating most of what's there and adding a small number of things.  But, YOU---yes, YOU---have the chance to obtain a sublime honour from me: being added to my blogroll.  Just post a comment in this thread if you want to be on it and are not an offensive chunderloaf**.  This is my way of winnowing out the most worthy among you---because how often you obsessively check this rarely-updated blog is a telling measure of your worth as a human being.

*I haven't mentioned whereto*** "near" is relative.

**No offense to innocent chunderloaves.

***I love adverbial compounds.

The second day of Oilmas

Yesterday was Oilmas! $100 NYMEX, baby!

Chupaqueso!

Soon an arbitrary moment will pass, and we will write our cheques for 2008 rather than 2007, if we haven't already been doing that.  But more important is my discovery of this:

It is something my friend made at a party a few days ago.  He called it "chupaquesos."  It apparently comes from some webcomic.  Is it not awesome?  There is only one ingredient: grated cheese.  That's eat.  Just eat the fried cheese.  It is like a cheese omelette without the annoying eggs.

Rather than ring in the """New""" """Year""", I am ringing in the chupaqueso.

PS: I also had dessert at said party.  With another friend's awesome pineapple carrot cake.

By comparison, your tables were meagre indeed.

My stealth spamulator

Huh.  Turns out that a coooouple of coooooments were stuck in my spam filter, which I didn't know I even had.  Well, they have been released, a bit belatedly.  So billy pilgrim is not, in fact, banned.

This means that I have to check my TypePad control panel more frequently.  Sheesh.  I can't just leave it for weeks at a time like I normally do.