A Description of a Really Nice Sausage

The suppression of information is unequivocally

2005-01-22T17:31:00.000-05:00

wrong.

So it turns out colleges are trying to teach kids

2005-01-17T11:42:00.000-05:00

critical thinking and good English. The Washington Times put out a report on a California college professor of poly-sci flunking a Kuwaiti student's final exam. Purportedly, because it had a pro-U.S. sentiment.

Atrios includes a link to the essay and a premature justification for the professor's alleged other actions, including berating the youth and telling him to get psychological treatment.

I can't say anything about the berating, but if this is actually the young man's essay, I can conjecture he probably deserved a failing grade.

I don't know the precise assignment, nor the professor's rubric for evaluation. But typically undergraduate writing requires—or should at least aim to—a certain level of sophistication fifth-grade writing lacks.

The problem is simply the poverty of real ideas. Though the essay question references a source, the student refutes none but the most general of their points. Instead of arguing the question itself, he goes on to list later accomplishments of the United States. Instead of refuting the thesis, he makes an argument based on cultural relativity.

The thesis itself,

Dye and Zeigler contend that the constitution of the United States was not “ordained and established” by “the people” as we have so often been led to believe. They contend instead that it was written by a small educated and wealthy elite in America who representative of powerful economic and political interests. Analyze the US constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America’s elite interest.

probably shouldn't appear political sharp or even surprising to someone who's just been through a semester of basic political science. If the United States' foundation had been "ordained and established by the people," some institutions such as the electoral college, indirect election of senators, and dare I say it, probably even First Amendment protections might not have made it in. Athenian democracy is an example of how hordes can tyranize; American democracy originally was about protection of certain (but not all) minorities from hordes.

(Moreover, if we count as "the people" both blacks and women, then the original Constitution missed ordination by probably two-thirds of the population.)

The young man in question is claimed by the article to be 17. It's disappointing if this is true that a young man skilled enough to get into college earlier than most American college students could write so poorly.

I also find it rather jaundiced of the Times to refer to the young man in their lead paragraph as

A 17-year-old Kuwaiti student whose uncles were kidnapped and tortured by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invaders more than a decade ago

but that's their angle and they'll fuck it for all it's worth.

Just push it on the stack of Crazy Liberal Elitist Professors Brainwashing Kids to Hate America. It's getting pretty tall.

Howard Dean's much-maligned scream

2005-01-09T23:45:00.000-05:00

last year during the primaries was the most genuine and sincere moment I've witnessed by a politician ever.

Granted, I'm only twenty-three. But, still.

The proof that pornography isn't so strong

2005-01-02T11:33:00.000-05:00

as people like Naomi Wolf say is that it's so damned easy to beat up on pornography. Who is standing up for porn in more than a limp, strictly principled way? Mind you, there's politics afoot too, but where were those defending porn before the bizarre congressional hearing back in November?

What I find wondrous is that the voices against porn seem to reach audiences. There are people who don't like porn. There are groups of men who along with groups of women will listen to anti-porn crusaders lecture, will read columns by Naomi Wolf, and will nod along as if they hadn't enjoyed a picture of people fucking lately.

Last of all things do I want to be painted as an anti-intellectual, but it seems to me that funding studies on the effects of pornography are silly. I've watched, viewed, and consumed pornography before. Probably most men have, and a sizable minority of women. I can tell you what happens, what are the effects. I get horny. I look at naked women having sex and it makes me want to have sex. I see them having sex in different and varied ways and it expands my idea of what sex is and what it can be, makes it less boring.

Naomi says that porn turns men off from actual women. She cites young women who fear that porn has transformed men's expectations of them, and fear they have to act like pornstars to keep their attention.

It's hard to begin the demolition. While I can't demean the young women expressing their thoughts and fears, and I sympathize, I can't understand taking their fears as a basis for an examination of the effects of porn on men. To use an extreme example (and I'm fond of hyperbole), the fears of some parents that their kids' gay boy scout troop leader might molest them is no indication at all of the actual risk of molestation—which is quite low.

If we take internet porn as an example, one thing we find is that the stereotypical face of porn is withered and cracked. There are still busty women with meticulously-groomed beavers doing two men at a time, doing double-penetration, doing cum-shots over their pancaked make-up and crisp tanlines. But there are others. Amateur porn—porn that at least looks as though made by non-professionals, is popular. Teenie sites get thousands of hits, featuring attractive but generally naturally-curved young women doing simple strip-teases, and maybe light hardcore. There are granny sites, for Christ's sake. Fat sites. Ethnic, girl-next-door, lesbian, and gay.

There is variety, in other words. Old formulae have been superseded as surely as Newton by Einstein. And I argue that this diverse potential fantasy-life available to girls and guys alike is similar to that provided by games such as Grand Theft Auto III, which through its tacit encouragement of violence offer to the steady, civilized, great non-violent swath of population an opportunity to live beyond the shackling influence of society.

I will not lie about this: at a certain level, killing people is fun. As it is one of the things humans are best at, it must be. Torturing people is fun. Blowing up your enemies is fun. No one should ever do these things for real, because they hurt other people—real people—and the sorrow of victims' families and friends is very real indeed. But that fact does not render the divertimental aspect of killing/maiming tedious—only verboten.

So it's nice to get into a consequence-free world once in a while and experience the things which in real life we cannot. This is only an extension of the kinds of benefits we get from art and literature, ways of extending human perception and experience—implicitly, extension beyond what the average human is capable. People read adventure books because they'll never quit their office job and explore the jungle. People see dramatic movies because they seldom in their lives experience the same tensions. They play GTAIII because they will never actually do a drive-by of a rival gang—in fact, I must think those people who actually do drive-bys find a game simulating it rather silly.

I watched porn because I was never going to actually bang two schoolgirls at once in the gym locker room. Some girls I found attractive, others not. Actually, I find a lot of traditional pornstars repugnant; their overly-tanned skin is inelastic and yellow, their breasts are aseptic and lumpy, their vulvas look like ravaged bits of steak. I find anal sex repugnant, as I do the idea of cumming on a woman's face. But those options are out there for those who want it, and especially for those whose significant others can't or won't give it to them.

The appeal of actual sexual experience, in particular the feel of flesh, the smells and aromas, the touch, the contact, is much greater than anything porn can offer. Porn is at best an adjunct to imagination. I found as I matured into porn as a young man that certain pic-sets, for instance, just weren't that sexy. For me, those tended to be sets in which the girl was simply naked right away and standing in some anonymous place, or with wide-open-beaver shots, or pics of unexcited girls simply flashing their tits for some beads.

A boob by itself does not an erection make. The appeal of visual pornography, alike literary, is that it aids in setting up an imaginary encounter. I found pic-sets sexy that showed the girl initially somewhat clothed, or in which the girl looked straight into the camera—basically, me—and looked like she wanted me, like she was doing it simply for me. Good porn need not even show a woman completely naked; as long as it helps the viewer to imagine that he's about to fuck, it's good.

(A lot of Playboy, for instance, I found lacking, because you figured out the formula after awhile and it was obvious the girls didn't want to fuck me.)

Real sex is much better than porn. Real sex, too, involves the imagination as much as it involves the genitals, but it is a much more potent activator of the imagination, too. The woman you are with need not be perfect in the traditional sense—in fact, preferences often work in the opposite direction. You reach and touch, and are touched back. You can smell perfume commingled with a little bit of sweat. You kiss, and are kissed back. She is wet; you made her so. She is yours—for the moment, just yours, and not shared with everyone who has a DSL connection.

I don't think other cultures keep women and men locked and dressed up because of their ancient wisdom regarding sexual drives. I think they're simply less liberated than some of us Americans are, which isn't saying as much as you might think, because despite porn and Madison Ave. most Americans rarely if ever are exhibitionists.

Mystery can be sexy—but this is because of the effects on the imagination. Vide supra—see above. Keeping the hair covered for all but your husband just serves to create a fetishism for hair. Not that I object to fetishisms, but why position one as inherently better than others?

Porn is, in and of itself, a net good. A boon for humanity. Not on the order of penicillin, but still good. Much of the pornography made is bad, but so are most paintings on any given day. Tastes for porn are simply a bit blunted without a long, open history of connoisseurship, so for many, any porn will do. Much of the pornography industry is bad, probably worse back in the day, but still bad. We need a Sinclair Lewis to blow that open. But Americans will abandon their porn when they abandon their meat. Mark my words.

And someday, maybe more people will stick up for porn. In the meantime, begin the flamefests. I'll start: you're a filthy, brutish pervert with far too much brains to be indulging in this awful vice. Now it's your turn. Only, be creative, eh? I want my imagination stroked.

Regarding national pride

2005-01-02T11:06:00.000-05:00

it seems to me that some people mix up incidentals with the imperatives of national greatness. When acting to preserve America, they also act to preserve English, Christianity, special creation, and apple pie. But while these may be typically ethnic American pleasures—yeah, I'm positing an American ethnicity, and simply so in a dependent clause, without any of the tonnes of PhD dissertations required to back that up—what's really important for American success are a series of ideas orthogonal to the ECAP complex: things like representative government, checks and balances, separation of powers, innocence until proven otherwise, freedom of expression, religious and otherwise.

I mention this because many seem to want—at least, through what they say and say to me—to preserve ECAP at the possible expense of the orthogonal series. Just one example would be the archetypal phrase: "To protect the American way of life, citizens should steel themselves against the civil liberties boogeyman and embrace stronger security."

Many Americans feel that what's deserving of protection in America is the openness and free way of life we enjoy—that pave the road ECAP rolls teeteringly on. I feel this way, and I think this feeling is something that might distinguish America from just any other industrial power in the world today.

France is French. China is Chinese. Until recently (and perhaps still), it's nearly impossible to be a German citizen without a German parent. But America, despite the fact that it is overwhelmingly white and protestant, a snapshot of Britain, is not necessarily just American. We have too many hyphenations to claim a core American ethnic identity anymore. People come in bringing their own cultures and assimilate to varying degrees. What the ECAP crowd finds distasteful is that some immigrants and their families do not adapt ECAP as their badge but retain JSS—Japanese, Shinto, and sushi—as their link with their past.

That's fine. ECAP is the link to the past many Americans have; no one should begrudge anyone their link to the past, although they may find it distasteful. But ask an ardent ECAP-badger about the possibility, for instance, of a massive population infusion transforming the United States into a country predominantly of Arabs, who speak Arabic and worship in mosques, but who otherwise learn about and enthuse about separation of powers, innocence until proven otherwise, equal rights for all, and the rest of the orthogonal series. ECAP-badgers accused with this scenario will go bat-shit. Because America for them is not America without ECAP.

Personally, I feel that if such a situation (unlikely, of course, given ethnic majorities' power, even when dwindling, to make immigration and life for immigrants hard) were to occur, it would be fine. The crucial inheritance, that of the orthogonal series, descended without incident. If America in the twenty-fifth century (if still existing as such) were colonized by aliens speaking by telepathy and feeding upon human intestines, I should not have a problem with it as such if the aliens still respected the orthogonal series.

(Mind you, aliens having taken over the world and enslaved mankind bothers me greatly, and I'm sure ECAP-badger master-strawman-makers will work cereal magic out of what I've just said, but the fact is my commitment to humanity far exhausts my commitment to America, even the American ideal and the orthogonal series—though I must say, I believe the health of the human body politic is dissolved in a big bottle of Enlightenment ideals, besides others, though I'll abandon that position if I'm shown conclusively to be wrong.)

Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily finds it odd

2004-12-18T16:54:00.000-05:00

that no one listening to his radio show will defend evolution. Given he writes for WorldNetDaily, I'm surprised even I found the link—Farah's mock surprise is akin to Ann Coulter asking her readers: does anyone here really, really like this Clinton guy? and getting only silence.

I like it when economists

2004-12-17T20:20:00.000-05:00

like Atrios get so riled up that they'll say:

I want to add that while any mandatory private savings plan is, to me, an abominably bad idea, whether it's just "abominable" or "super nuclear fuck abominable" will depend a great deal on the details of said plan.

NPR is my favorite non-internet source of news

2004-12-15T13:40:00.000-05:00

because hosts like Alex Chadwick when they have on Grover Norquist will

ask if there's really a chance for flat tax reform in a country with almost a century of progressive taxation and a lot of people who kinda sorta really do like it; and
will also point out—interrupting, if necessary—that the limp thing Norquist calls the death tax is actually officially known as the inheritance tax.

Which is not to say that on—e.g.—CNN he wouldn't get the same reception. Which is why I'll say it explicitly: on, e.g., CNN Norquist would not be received the same way. I surmise that on FOX News he would have been provided with a colorful thesaurus with which to continue to rename the inheritance tax to maximize public revulsion. But that's just me being snarky.

The current faddish meme concerning the spinelessness of corporate news media has prompted me to wonder if the same hasn't been at least cyclically true since its advent—which is ultimately irrelevant to moral judgments about same and opinions as to whether correcting this is a worthy goal, it has to be said.

Corporations are organizations magically endowed with "personhood," a legal definition I in my naïve medical school shroud will leave sufficiently vague. But those corporations which aren't, for instance, simply pragmatically created out of small businesses to shield their owners from liability, and so we're chiefly talking about large corporate entities—multinationals, big industry groups, companies that generally because of the risk of liability and the problem of capital owe their size to incorporation—we might start to understand them a bit as complex systems rather than single entities, just as an understanding of humans is enriched by study of its complex structures and feedback loops.

So one of the things we can do is examine the feedback loops. The most obvious one is that of shareholder-board-CEO and the connections it has with share price, company value, etc. The understands that in the current Wall Street climate, many corporations act in such a way as to maximize short-term gains in stock price, sometimes even at odds with long-term value. That is of course a function of shareholder values, corporate bylaws (insofar as the electoral rights shareholders possess), and executive accountability. So the range of effects from this simple loop can be quite variable; Google being an example of a company which has chosen to sharply inhibit the effects of shareholder input through diluted voting rights in its IPO stock, which the Scrip has to say has been validated by investors buying into the stock. But of course many companies take the opposite route, and we'll superciliously name SCO as one which has essentially staked the entire company on a court case against IBM—although, of course, SCO hopes to make money selling licenses to the intellectual property it says Linux users infringe, chiefly the only hope for revenue it entertains is litigious.

Another loop involves the market. Every company has customers. So there are interactions between aggregate demand, competitors, and branding. Corporations may be induced to behave in certain ways to maximize customer loyalty, or to boost its image among potential customers. Grand-schemedly, both ethical and unethical behavior can come of this—apropos of energy companies, for instance, an entity might grant money in exchange for publicity to various environmental causes, winning loyalty from green consumers, while simultaneously lobbying for access to protected areas for oil drilling, which in the long run could benefit price-conscious consumers by providing low-cost fuel.

The Scrip's politics hopefully perforated that last paragraph.

Interactions between corporate entities and regulatory bodies constitute another major loop. Political power is both sought and in some instances wielded, especially by larger corporations. At the same time, political power itself is diffuse, and nominally in the hands of what I hate to call THE PEOPLE, but which is, essentially, the governed/governing society. Their proxies, the legislators, officials, judges, etc., are more easily courted, and often are; but ultimately even crooked politicians will need a modicum of popular support, and so much is spent in political marketing, both on behalf of the issue the corporation cares about, and on behalf of patron politicians to maintain their offices.

Of course, political pressures flow in the opposite direction as well, as the example of tobacco companies illustrates well. The Scrip's point in this fractured diatribe is not to point to linear pathways, but to show that a variety of inputs really drive corporate behavior.

There are institutional paths of control which arise from the fact that it's people—flesh-and-blood human beings—that ultimately formulate and carry out the actions of the corporation. CEOs may be more or less psychotic; vice-presidents more or less inept; middle managers of widely divergent degrees of intelligence; accountants of more or less malleable integrity; employees more or less belonging to the Chordata; whistleblowers with random shrillness; and so on.

I'm sure there are many other paths of control, as well, and a dedicated complex systems analyst, which the Scrip is not, would exhaust his keyboard on them. In brief, I can think of:

industry and contractual obligations;
relationships with former employees, pensioners, people on unemployment, etc.;
interactions with the boom and bust cycle; and
not to be underestimated, company vision and culture— or what we could with another couple of pages come to know as the corporate fiction.

Some of these are inner loops of one or more of the main ones mentioned previously. But the loops are only useful to talk about in terms of their interactions, anyway. CEOs, hired by boards, act in such a way (usually) to ensure their continued employment by placating the board, and by proxy the shareholders, which can involve placating customers and overcoming regulatory hurdles while appeasing political interest groups, but at the risk of infuriating political groups, alienating potential customers, being undersold or acquired by the competition, and sending stock prices into the tank. Plus, they may be megalomaniacal, or good corporate citizens, or simply have dreamed of running a company in some idealized way, or whatever.

But what the Scrip hopes is obvious is not the extent of the loops, nor of their interactions, but that nowhere is any sense of a corporate conscience expressed, nor any standard at all, save for those dynamic equilibria to which all the feedback loops together contribute.

I suppose this is actually obvious. But it helps to understand that in talking about the spinelessness of the media, we're not simply talking about

institutions shirking their duties, or
consumers uninterested in hard-hitting news, or
changes in political climate, or
the litany;

but instead we're talking about entities which are driven by a number of inputs, including institutional narratives about journalistic standards, the realities of consumption, pressure from successful competition, and in the drive for success also fighting for access, positioning narratives according to popularity, and also to some extent effecting news in their corporate machinations.

So—basically, if we judge it the public's interest to receive the best news possible, and we define good news as being

timely
relevant
accurate
ethical (in the sense of, divulgence is ethically preferred to secrecy)
efficient;

well then corporate newsmedia, while they may provide very good or in some cases the best news, are by no means set up to do so, or are even optimally configured for such. They are set up to effect an equilibrium between the many different input-output channels, and this can be manifested anywhere along the actual news quality curve. Really bad news outlets generally will tend to do more poorly in terms of ratings, and hence in stock value, but there are mitigating circumstances, and bad or mediocre news outlets that identify a specific audience that favors their message can be quite successful, if only in their specific niche.

Rumsfeld's one of those writers

2004-12-14T13:34:00.000-05:00

who does his best thinking on the page. If only he had written down his thoughts for Iraq, we'd be square.

From WSJ in 2001, Donald gives us some advice as potential cabinet officials. Somewhat down in the list is this gem:

It's easier to get into something than to get out of it.

Since he headed up Gerald Ford's transition team, he might possibly have been talking about the former unelected President's jammies. Or perhaps the current unelected President's jammies. I guess we'll just never know.

PZ Myers and company take on SETI

2004-12-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

here and it's got me thinking about a couple of things.

and this is tangential, but—what does it say about the rhetoric of time and place that I can use the word here to refer to something outside this text? Obviously something very trite about the nature of the web which a four year-old could probably explain quite succinctly to my addled brain. So, and
who wants to start a pool concerning the possibility of huge, fundamental change happening in theoretical physics and cosmology?

You probably won't make as much money as you do betting on football, although certainly more than I could earn foolishly counting on the Lions week in and out—but like with Steve Hawking's and Kip Thorne's famous bet, you might end up with free porn.

But right now there's a lot of what I'm going to call weird shit going on in these disciplines. After grappling with the issue for a few decades, most astronomers now agree that the vast majority of matter in the universe is dark, i.e., not visible and quite possibly very exotic. Meanwhile, though the twentieth century opened pretty promisingly what with relativity, quantum mechanics, and Hubble, you still got mathematicians running around with their infinities cut off trying to integrate them. From string theory we've gone to branes and M theory.

What the hell's going on?

If I were going to make a movie about Christ's life,

2004-12-12T11:41:00.000-05:00

and admittedly, I'm neither Christian, orientologist, theologian, filmmaker, nor even a fan of gospel movies particularly, I would approach it very understatedly—cut out superfluous music, eschew dramatic camera angles, just simply follow the man and the message.

Cuz like here I went expecting Gibson's Passio to be something new, something I could attach to as a non-Christian, and of course I apparently knew absolutely nothing of Gibson's religious sensibilities, nor despite his use of native languages his willingness at the end of the long baby jesus brigade to simpy hand over yet another honky savior who looks more like a mechanic and part-time bassist for a rockabilly band down in like Savanna, GA with a bad haircut than the son of God—and so here I am pontificating (my—that's a pun-and-a-half) my own filmic treatment of Yeshwa's execution.

I should note here that my ideas about Jesus and his life are more informed by art than by Gospel, though I have read them. So if I make a few refernces to paintings below, please pardon.

And so numero uno we get someone swarthy to play Jesus. Next, we fire the cinematographer. Or at least pay him much less.

There's that initial scene in Passio that's all blue and foggy, and it almost reminds me a bit of El Greco's Agony in the Garden, except Gibson's Jesus isn't all taffied and stretched and—really, it seems a lot murkier and it's not at all clear from the camera work that Jesus is actually communing with spirits and not simply some wacko alone in Gethsemane, like some local pastor who shall remain nameless though he got away with exhibition.

We don't need crap like this. I would think that the story of the savior's death and triumph over it (i.e., Death) would be exciting and important enough that it didn't require special lighting, cliché vaguely Middle-Eastern-sounding wailing music, etc.

Moreover, I like this other painting whose title escapes me, circa 1600s and in a kind of Caravaggiesque style, showing Jesus and John the Baptist emerging from the water following Jesus's baptism, and the dude looks weary, bedraggled, clearly soaked and dragging his besotted cloak half-off, a bit out of shape with a stout body and a little belly. Right there is like his whole capacity for suffering, not a strong, knotted kouros but a panting, patient guy who takes everything in stride. He knows what he can do to ameliorate things, but he knows what he has to do to effect the salvation of mankind. So he does it.

Which makes the agony problematic for me, and in particular giving any weight to any of Jesus's sufferings is problematic for me, not just because I can think of worse ways to be tortured and killed (and here Gibson led us on the sadistic rampage for a good reason, I think, in an effort to convince people who hadn't really thought about it how brutal Jesus's treatment had to have been), but because the "reward," if you like, or at least the consequences of his suffering are so great as to render the torture moot. If I were assured of resurrection and a place by God's side as his son and Judge of Mankind, I'd be saying, "Where's the red-hot pincers? You can't flay me properly, silly Romans, without red-hot fucking pincers!"

But I'll tell you what I'd leave in—the sadism I'd leave in. This is the passion, after all, the lesson is that sin's wages are blood and pain and death, and in this final orgy of pain comes the absolution of man. It's like, if you can't stand watching sausage being made, maybe you shouldn't eat it. Plus, the role of the Jews. I realize that for centuries Jews 'N' Jesus were to pogroms as alcohol is to unwanted pregnancies; I am aware that for many people, social development in the twenty-first century has yet to eclipse that of shit-stained, angry, starving peasants in Merovingian France. Still—that's the way the story goes. Plus, at least we all realize that because some Jews killed a guy 2000 years ago, that act's culpability doesn't transfer to people today who maybe haven't had an ancestor's foot on Palestinian soil in over a millennium, right? We do realize that, right?

Last things last: ditch the devil in that weird Sinead O'Connor guise. The devil should be in the details, a theoretical presence. Also, those hokey scenes of Jesus's homelife—oh my God.

However, if I were to make this movie, even if it were only about the passion, as Gibson's was, I don't think I could resist doing a flashback to the nativity using the same iconography of the crossed wooden beams in the stable's structure as European painters have used for centuries. I think it's just so damned clever. Oh, and real crucifixion, too, iconography be goddamned.

Pictures.

2004-11-29T17:29:00.000-05:00

George Will writes about liberal campuses, and Leiter replies, satisfyingly, but less than elegantly. So here I am.

The following diagram shows what should be intuitively obvious in any given political society:

Political opinions range from liberal to conservative, although most people bunch up right in the middle. The political line is drawn to roughly split the population in half—sort of grading politics on the curve. Okay.

This:

is how America looks. For a variety of reasons, America's political spectrum is skewed to the right. Where most of the industrialized world considers the drawing line between Conservatism and Liberalism is firmly in the field of the Democratic Party. In fact, it borders on being a fringe belief.

The reason I've done this is to illustrate something straight out of Stephen J. Gould. Academia fosters diversity of opinion—this is true. But it so happens that the broadest area of ideological space is situated to the left of the American dividing line, because the American dividing line is so far right to begin with. There's a lot more room on the left for different ideas to thrive. Whereas, you can't really keep going right unless you want to be a fascist.

So there should be no surprise at the abundance of leftist opinions in Academia—it's like an ecological sorting, with more room in the fitness landscape on the "wrong" side, from Mr. Will's point of view, than the "right."

Of course, Evolution is a subject this country doesn't like to deal with, another consequence of the righward shift.…

Worth mentioning

2004-11-27T09:50:00.000-05:00

that the people are stupid meme is trite. Trite like seeing a guy getting kicked in the balls is trite. Parse that all by yourselves.

But like I mean if you're one of the elite who is not stupid, than evidence to the contrary is your finding profundity or novelty in the observation that those who are not, are. You should realize this already. It's like a black guy saying, "These non-black people are white!" At least, in a suitably third- or fourth-race-deficient country.

Moreover, as stupid people undoubtedly outnumber smart people by orders of magnitude, a productive attitude is less supercilious and more accommodating. Less overtly supercilious, more superficially accommodating. It's like, you live with penguins, you eat raw fish.

And but the majority of stupid people is not just a demographic fact of the moment; it's virtually guaranteed by a number of generic and universally-applicable scientific principles. First, that of normal distributions. Second, by Murphy's Law of Civilizations. And lastly, because the abundance of evidence in hand demonstrates God to be analogous to a baked sixteen year-old playing The Sims by removing all doors from a small house and slowly watching his avatar starve and piss himself to death.

Credo quia absurdum.

2004-11-25T09:21:00.000-05:00

"If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

I tell you what else I've come to loathe—

2004-11-24T15:28:00.000-05:00

Anti-intellectualism. Sure, the danger is elitism, alienating the demos, yeah, whatever, okay, but votes aren't going to get you a solvent social security. The state of Texas as red as a baboon's ass isn't going to deliver a safe trip to Mars, despite the common chromophilicity. Ideas will, and smart people with ideas, and conversations between people who have ideas and don't mind having theirs challenged or expanded upon.

No virtue in talking small, or simply, unless you want the country to revert to a Jeffersonian farmer-state. It'd be hard to maintain aircraft carriers as a nation of farmers.

Fuckin' Alma redemptoris.

What's up with C-SPAN lately?

2004-11-24T15:16:00.000-05:00

Outside legislative business, all it seems to be anymore is American Enterprise Institute this, Cato that, Apple-Pie Brigade thusly.

I'm not going to engage in criticizing the media, because that's like panning Gucci this season in favor of Armani, and I just don't have the strength to be that silly. But still.

It's like I'm starting to fetishize this guy.

2004-11-24T15:01:00.000-05:00

Let's get one thing straight:

2004-11-24T14:51:00.000-05:00

Not a big fan of Clinton the President. The man actually founded an organization to move the Democratic Party centrally. Like now we're all going to debate whether to give flag burners the death penalty or merely life in prison?

The healthcare thing failed. Opposition in Somalia sent him packing, plus Rwanda happened. Economy was fantastic, but we're talking things like

Internet boom.
Historical trend in increasing productivity carried over from the 80s.
Irrational exuberance.
Other economical-sounding things I haven't had the time to explore or make up whole-cloth.

Plus a number of silly measures escaped out from under him like a jambalaya fart: Communications Decency Act and Digital Milennium Copyright Act to name a few. Freakin' police sobriety-checkpoints along the Information Superhighway.

But: two SCOTUS judges, plus tougher environmental standards, plus getting uptight conservatives in Congress to give up cigars.

Let's review.

2004-11-24T14:09:00.000-05:00

From the National Review's John Derbyshire:

Invited to choose between a president who is (a) a patriotic family man of character and ability who believes the universe was created on a Friday afternoon in 4,004 B.C. with all biological species instantly represented, or (b) an amoral hedonist and philanderer who “loathes the military” but who believes in the evolution of species via natural selection across hundreds of millions of years, which would I choose? Are you kidding?

No one's kidding here. I'd be inclined myself to choose (a), as family men of character and ability are not only rare in the landscape of politics, but are likely at this time to be actively selected against.

But let's not be too hasty—I'm thinking there are a couple of leaders whose attitudes toward the military, had they gone more toward loathing than lustfulness, would have benefitted not only America but several other empires, nations, principalities, duchies grand and lite, plus a city-state or two.

More chordally, I think we have to wonder just which hypothetical choice Mr. Derbyshire is here pondering. For while there are superficial similarities to a couple of recent presidents here and abroad, esp. if one is prone to allow personal political affiliations to interfere with his or her view of reality, no such contest has taken place in the world.

Moreover if it had and, say, 48% of the electorate had gone and supported (b), I think I would be mighty upset. Stupendously so. Even if I wished that (a) had had a little more science education and were a bit less beholden to Conservative religious interests.

However—no, let's just look at a recent example, shall we? Because I want to point out that Derbyshire's hypothetical, although parable-like, if not completely parabolic (at least—some kind of -bolic), is naïve of real political experience. Which is, in a review of the Nation, the marrow we're digging at, correct?

Okay—

So let's compare the 43rd and 42nd presidents, as they are the most recent. William Jefferson Clinton is a family man. So is George W. Bush. Both are patriotic. WJC suffers in the character department because of what's likely a sequence of extramarital affairs, at least one conducted while president. At the same time, GWB suffers in the ability department as a result of having never had to work very hard to get anywhere—and, once gotten there, promptly getting booted out until recently.

So like so far there's no obvious choice. Certainly no "Are you kidding?" (AYK) choice. So but let's dig deeper, as Derbyshire is fond of doing.

Fondness for the military is a hard thing to measure, as analogously there are people who accept the existence of guns as protective measures, and then there are people with walk-in gun safes. Apropos 42 and 43, both avoided Vietnam. WJC by plane, moving to Canada. GWB by train and automobile, effectively skipping out on much of the last part of his improbably-obtained Air National Guard duty. But in darkness of Vietnam (I'm loathe to say in light of), I can hardly blame either for their efforts. Forty-two used his military often in foreign interventions. Forty-three only twice, so far, but what a pair of interventions! So they like tie there, too.

TO BE CONTINUED....

Usually I reserve a special kind of contempt

2004-11-22T23:14:00.000-05:00

for people who claim possession of the capital-T TRUTH and preach denigration of all heterodox positions, and that's still a useful position to take in most situations, in most places, with most nefarious truth-claiming characters—but you know what? America denies evolution's role in the development of complex life, and she is wrong. Contemptuously, madly, utterly and completely wrong.

And let me go a little easier on myself, while masochism is still legal: I, nor any evolutionary biologist, nor any biologist for that matter, cannot and will not claim special knowledge. We have what scientists have wrought for the past century and a half: careful observation and theory, applied consistently to the evidence. Undoubtedly, there are many particulars which are currently misunderstood, or just plain wrong. But that evolution has occurred is a fact.

So now, America—learn to deal with it.

Are economists stupid?

2004-11-19T11:49:00.000-05:00

The Angry Economist asks in a pretty snarky way why our legislative bodies create conditions which limit choices for people in exchange for providing what is at least thought to a be a public good. He touches on building codes, minimum wage, and compulsory and publicly-funded education.

Sometimes I like to pretend I'm being as little disingenuous as possible, and this is one of those dress-up moments—but all the same, I recommend actually reading his blog entry, and some of his others, rather than relyin on my description. Boy, is that guy angry.

My feeling, as a non-economist and part-time poor person, is that the litany of public policies complained about are more about setting reasonable extremes of last resort than restricting choice, although by nature these and any non-trivial law will result in some phase-space of potential human choice ablated.

Objecting to building codes on the grounds that they restrict the choices of the poor is ludicrous. Back in my hometown of —&mdash&;mdash;, we had a similar incident where some of us in the town thought that perhaps the central square's commemorative pungee pits ought to have some sort of wall or fence around them, or at least that we should break up the sidewalks that led directly into them. Our idea was, people are generally not going to want to walk into the pungee pits. The other political contingent in town argued that our measures treated people as idiots and that the pits were fine as-was.

Well, it happened that for awhile, because of the stalemate, nothing happened to the commemorative pungee pits, and one morning we found Jakob Crylhamar, a vocal crotchet on the other side of the aisle, buried up to his chest in pungee stick. I believe his last words as we tried to wrench him out were, "I meant to do that." But still, I don't believe him. I guess I'm a skeptic at heart.

I emphasize: I'm not an economist, although economists and I share wonk- and assholery in common, so what I've said is most likley economically irrelevant. Asshole-wise, however, it's as informative as hell.

What the hell is the matter with you people anyway?

2004-11-10T10:14:00.000-05:00

Like nuclear waste from Yucca Mountain, regionalism and secessionism has creeped from the fissures of what we long ago thought was its secure tomb to cloud the whole country with a foul miasma. A miasma is what pre-germ theory thinkers considered a noxious cloud that infected people with disease.

Lefties have been joking about joining Canada. Righties have joked about booting the blue states. What the hell is this all about? In a few years we're all going to be Muslim, anyway.

Look, we got a good thing going. Over two hundred years, one constitution. One little hiccup along the way—but we ended up trading a Republican for Savannah and three amendments and a Ku Klux Klan later, everything was money. Sort of.

But like when I was a kid and we played at the basketball court, the two teams, nominally friends, were of course a bit vicious to each other on the court. Rough picks, flying elbows, a pot of yo' mamma jokes so deep we with our little arms couldn't hope to scrape the bottom. And occasionally things were heated enough to prompt some little shit to threaten to take "his" ball and go home. I still don't know whose fucking ball that was.

But listen: we would then all, even his teammates, threaten to beat the shit out of him if he pussied out like that, and one of two things would happen. A) he would give in and we'd go on playing, or B) he'd still leave, we'd steal the ball from his drunk dad's negligently-unlocked shed, and then kick the shit out of him before the next basketball game.

So it's simple people, really. We're playing basketball. We love it. It's tiring, but it's rewarding, even when some bully pulls down the net. So if someone tries to puss out with the ball, you just gang up on him and make sure we keep playing. 'Cause otherwise, it's go inside, take a bath, and do your homework.

Fucking homework, people—do you really know what's at stake here?

Guest Blog

2004-11-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

A Conservative colleague of mine has asked to respond to the previous post in a way more fully realized than in a comment. As the Scrip has nothing else either intelligent, incoherent, or spiteful to say today, the following is his reply.

Okay ha-ha. But I'll tell you what--you liberals make fun of some things that we conservatives actually do hold very close to heart. For instance, when in Commandment 12 you slyly reference our President's saying a couple of days ago, that he would reach out to all who shared our goals. Of course, in teh context of this post, it's supposed to say that Conservatives aren't really all that Christian and that we neglect other people to serve our own ends.

But what many liberals don't realize is what it means to be a Christian. I don't think many liberals who think they are Christians really even are. I'm not trying to insult anybody but it's just that I think you can't be a real Christian and be a liberal today. Abortion's just one small part o fit. Liberals don't have moral values like we Conservatives do. And so you know what? We Conservatives are just doing A) what progressives have done for decades, and B) extending our hand to thsoe on the wrong side who want to be saved.

I mean look, Christians will try all their mite to help a heathen find Christ, and in that context may feed him, clothe him, look after him, and so on. To those who want to find Christ, who just can't find the way, we Christians are there as a light--not even a light, really, but a mirror--a big shiny mirror so that Christ's light can find them and they can come out of the wilderness.

But for those who aren't just not looking for Christ, but who don't care to even bother acknowledging Him, or who deny Him, much as it breaks our hearts inside to know they are Hellbound, it's just not fair to those we can help to extend them kindness and resources too. They're not comin over, they don't want to be saved, and so if we can't help their heavenly souls, how can we hypacritically help their fragile mortal bodies? Christ Himself would not have condoned it.

This carries over to politics. For decades we have been suppressed, had our God forced from public life, stripped from courthouses, the moral foundation of this country tattered to shreds, and now finally we have a chance to rectify all of that. Not just for us, understand, but for God. If it were just for us, it would be meaningless, no one would care, everyone would just kill and rape and pilalge every one else and it would be anarchy. But God watches over us, and its for Him that we are now transforming our country. And so now, when we have worked so hard to get to the point where we can roll back the evils of liberals, would we say to the losing side, "Hey come on board, let's work together to maintain the status quo!" Of course we wouldn't. We can't. If we were weak and just humans left ehre on Earth without an Intelligence, like Darwin said, we might. But we are conscious of our duty toward God and so we can't. We won't. I know it sounds a lot like we're trying to exclude people from the process but they just don't realize what we're doing, and why we have to do it, and so for the sake of God and teh project we're bound on, we have to do it regardless. We would have done it without electoral victory, if we could've, but this is much tidier.

I'm going off I know but I'll just say a few more things if I can. I'll overlook the embryos thing because it just gets ugly but you guys know you have to KNOW that embryos are people. I mean, what do they become? Would you kill retards too, because they're not HUMAN enough? I mean come on.

The thing about homosexuals too. We don't hate homosexuals. We remember that you must hate the sin and not he sinner. But like I said above we can't compromise and give in politically and give these sinners any sign that we might condone their sin, because then we'd be like Sodom and Gomorrah. We just hate how so many people think that loving people and accepting them means that you have to accept their sins and the consequences of them, too. This is what I mean about how a lot of liberals who think their Christians aren't really. If you want to accept a fag and love him then you must help him stop sinning and bring him to Christ. Ideally, anyway. But if he won't come to Christ and he revels in his sin, why then it's nothing we Christians can do to stop him--it IS a free country, after all--but we're not about to let him make sin the status quo here. No sirree bob. And I'm sorry if that seems "exclusionary" or "politically incorrect" to liberals but that's the way it is. Homosexuals are unrepentant sinners.

The last thing I want to say is about Commandment 7, cuz a lot of liberals seem to think that Bush is dumb, when he's not. He is so smart. This thing "insight" you say in that commandment is really more of like liberal code for "smarty-pants." And I don't want to say that smarty-pantses aren't good people, they can be. Everyone's a sinner in God's eyes, and we all have faults, and smarty-pantses can be otherwise good people with Christ in they're hearts except they're not really humble, in their minds, before God. I know lots of smarty-pants. When they're just making puns and jokes and quipping that's fine; sometimes I don't understand them, (especially my colleague with this blog), but I get along with them all right.

But some smarty-pants try and play smarty-pants with language and morals and God, and we just can't allow that. Either you're with us or against us. For abortion or not. For gay marriage or not. It astounds me, and I think most of us true Christians, how eager you liberals are whenever theres some controversy, to figure out where some middle ground is. It's like you're favourite color is grey. Why is that you do that? I mean, and this just might be a mistake on our part, but it seems like that's what you focus on, not whether something is Right or Wrong, Godly or satanic, but how many hairs you can split. And Kerry, for instance, was a master hair-splitter. Against abortion, but pro-choice? How in heck can you be that? How can you go to Vietnam and fight you heart out for this country, then come back and talk against the people fighting it? These look like flip-flops to us. You guys call it "insight," to make it sound impressive and good, but I think it's just giving your word, which is the strongest, most important thing you can give as a person and a sinner on this world, and then gonig back on it.

George W. Bush says what he's going to do and he does it. And he knows that in his heart it's not his poor sinner's intuition making these decisions, because a sinner's intuition is no better than Adam's, and look where that got us. He knows that the big decisions, the right decisions, are made by God, and he is the vehicle for them. And he tells us so. Kerry would have used his Adam's intuition and we would have been worse off for it, whether or not it seems good for us now. That's why we true Christian Conservatives didn't vote for Kerry--even though it seemed to our poor fallen ears that he had a better plan for all of us, we couldn't let ourselves be tempted again, when we knew the voice fo God was in George W. Bush. Might it've been in Kerry eventually? Maybe. I don't like to think that any person is permanently out of reach of salvation, even a catholic. But I didn't want to coutn onthat happening when George W. Bush, the obvious moral leader, was right there on the ballot above him.

But I've gone on long enough. I don't want to wear out my colleague's blog-thing. But anyway I hope I've made a few points about why we true Christian Conservatives chose the candidates we did, and why we're going to act the way we're going to act in the next few years. You see, cause I know many of you liberals mean well, and I'm sorry that you're on the wrong side and I know your going to be very flustered and confused inthe next couple of years and even thouh I don't think I can convince you or even get you to understand fully what's happened, like I said I don't think anyone's out of touch with God so much that they can't be Saved, so I had to at least make this effort to tell you why.

Thanks, and God Bless,
Suleiman Razumovsky

As the Decalogue

2004-11-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

delivered by Moshe was superseded by the Twofold Commandment of Love delivered by Christ, we have entered a new era spoken of in Revelation, and these shall be the rules we live by:

Thou shalt not aide thy fellow man.
Thou shalt revel in righteous moral certainty.
Thou shalt hate homosexuals.
Protect thee embryos from harm, for yea I say unto you cellular blastocysts are the same as a man.
Remember thou art anointed.
Know that the LORD helps those who invoke HIS might continuously.
Thy leaders shall all be simple; for the LORD abhors insight.
The LORD thy God forgives sins in HIS name.
Thou shalt demean liberal traitors with all thy heart.
Thou shalt fear the LORD's wrath at every second; for HIS indignation at your country may rain down terror upon innocent civilians.
Thou shalt be an obedient soldier unto the LORD.
Thou shalt extend thy hand only to those good people who share thy and thy LORD's goals.
Thou shalt neglect they self-interest, for the LORD's way is hard.

Pandering.

2004-11-06T20:59:00.000-05:00

Richard Viguerie says that Conservatives now with a solid majority and a play-along president should "stop pandering to moderates." One wonders, though—screw this, I wonder, can a decades-long anti-progressive hegemony really come to pass now that we are all reflectively, agonizingly aware of the historic moment? Does shit like this happen if you know it's going to happen? Did people notice what was going on with the New Deal?

Granted, it's probably not even entirely accurate to say that since the New Deal we've had a unanimously progressive society. For one thing, progressivism predates FDR. For another, as shocked as I am about the sudden power-grab, these tendencies have been coming—the revolution, if that's what it is, began in the eighties. Abstinence-only, indeed.

Abstention is, in my considered intellectual opinion, for pussies.