Monday, June 30, 2003
Must Read from Mark Steyn
Yes, yes, I know everybody's linking it, but I've had the browser window open all day, so here's the must-read column from Mark Steyn about sundry matters related to the recent spat of Supreme Court rulings.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:26 PM EST
Just Thinking 06/30/03
My Just Thinking column for this week is "Waking Up to Dreams of an Ordinary Life," about making the adult decision to seek an ordinary life.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:49 PM EST
Andrew Sullivan: Dangerous Demagogue
I know! I know! I know I keep swearing off giving Andrew Sullivan the extra traffic tick of my IP address. But when I read this from David Frum, I just had to see what Sullivan was up to:
So we need to take preventive measures by writing marriage into the U.S. Constitution. Some proponents of same-sex marriage will say that this act is premature – they recommend that marital traditionalists wait until later, when it will of course be too late. Others take up the federalism argument, urging that each state be allowed to make its own decisions. In this case, though, federalism simply means letting the most liberal state in the country make policy for the other 49.
Well, here's the maniacal raving that Bill Frist's support for a marriage amendment to the Constitution inspired from Sullivan:
Tampering with the Constitution as a way to prevent states deciding, as they always have, what constitutes a legal marriage would be an assault on federalism, an assault on gay citizens, and the equation of the meaning of the United States with active discrimination against minorities.
It's true that Sullivan has argued that Frum is incorrect about the smoothness with which one state's legalization of gay marriage will become a federal reality. However, I've never seen him respond undismissively to counter-arguments after he's made his initial points. What is most disturbing about Sullivan's rant is the Ivy League–educated white European's attempt to leach rhetoric from very real and horribly serious issues that have roiled in this country since its founding. In the above passage, I'm referring to the "active discrimination against minorities." But in throwing out his demagogic net, Sullivan seeks to bring in another schismatically sized battle in the culture war:
I think Frist is also implying that only churches grant true marriage and that the state subsequently merely ratifies or acknowledges that sacred institution. Huh? Cannot atheists have civil marriage and view it as a simple human contract and a mark of citizenship - with no religious connotations whatsoever? Does Frist even acknowledge the full civic rights of non-believers at all, I wonder? The fact that the good doctor cannot apparently see a deep distinction between a religious marriage and a civil one shows, I guess, how close to theocracy today's Republicans have become.
Here's the simple truth: there can be no doubt that it would be foolish to use their small numbers as the guide for perspective about the impact of homosexual marriage and the debate about its legality. The first prerequisite to even considering the possibility of shifting the well-established meaning of marriage would be believable indications that this three percent of the population is not willing to burn down our entire society in order to reach their end. The indications are quite the opposite. Sullivan, for one, will pluck strings of racial friction; he will lead witch hunts for the "theocrats."
Moreover, he will lie. In trying to position himself as the reasonable one opposed to the fanaticism of Senator Frist, Sullivan writes, "this issue should be dealt with slowly and with democratic deliberation." Anybody who's read his work on this topic knows that, in order for this to fit within his broader position, Sullivan must define "democracy" as a system of government whereby judges in each state implement federal law.
Sullivan's definition of "theocracy" seems to be "rule by those who believe that marriage has always been between one man and one woman and that this arrangement is — in some way, vague or explicit — sacred." If that's the case, then the United States has never been otherwise than a "theocracy," and if you ask me, it's been a pretty successful one. The one thread of optimism that I have on this issue is that demagogues like Sullivan will push America away from the clutches of an explicitly atheistic judicial oligarchy back into the arms of a more sane and stable system of a representative democracy that is held firm by common sense rooted in a majority belief in a reality that expands beyond the individual's desires.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:10 PM EST
Sunday, June 29, 2003
You're Worth the Wait
Apart from some worthwhile statistics as well as some reason for optimism on behalf of the good guys (and gals) in the culture war, this article about a pro-abstinence convention in Las Vegas ends with a fantastic slogan:
"It doesn't matter who you are, what you believe. It's your body. It's your choice," said Galdamez, who spoke at the event. "You're worth the wait."
... and, I'll add for my daughter when she's old enough for such conversation, they aren't worth the risk and the loss.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:18 PM EST
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Ethnic Cleansing at Oxford
Get this — from a pathology professor, no less:
Mr Duvshani, who is in the last months of a master's degree in molecular biology, included a CV detailing his academic and outside experience, including his mandatory three-year national service in the Israeli army.
In a reply sent by email on June 23, Prof Wilkie wrote: "Thank you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they [the Palestinians] wish to live in their own country.
"I am sure that you are perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another lab if you look around."
Wilkie — the impotent, foot-stamping mental gnome — admits that it was "a mistake." Well, yeah! He ought to lose his job over this, but I'll be surprised if he does. The dwindling set of reasons to have respect for academics as a group just decreased by one.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:26 PM EST
That's Our Pat!
My representative has become so famous as to be featured in a Chris Muir cartoon... as clueless...
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:58 AM EST
Friday, June 27, 2003
One-Stop Snowballing in the Business World (Sorry... Shop Talk)
Craig Henry of Lead and Gold mentions a business-world concern that's been on my mind lately:
Ad Age (6-16-03) reports on a recent survey of big advertisers. One key finding is that on 43% of the clients think it is "very important" that "a single agency offer fully integrated services." This presents a problem for big agencies which have spent the last couple of decades acquiring a variety of firms in order to become a "one-stop shop" for big clients. Those agencies paid a premium to develop capabilities that most of their clients do not see as valuable.
"One stop shopping" is a convenience, and convenient channels are valuable only when the underlying good or service is unimportant or similar across outlets. Coke is Coke, so it makes sense to buy it where you shop for groceries or gas instead of making another stop. Has anyone every chosen a college solely because the campus was closer to the airport? "Gee, Oberlin is a great school, but Ohio State is much easier to get to. Guess I'll go there instead."
In most things, I'm a doityourselfer — for reasons both financial and having to do with interest (as well as an inordinate reaction to John Ruskin's suggestion in The Stones of Venice that artists and artisans ought to be able to put together a finished product on their own). However, when I do employ outside services, I make a point of separating aspects of a process, and it's for almost the opposite reason of wanting "specialists." To pick an example with which many of you might sympathize, if I found out that my high-speed Internet provider offered Web hosting, I would not seek to consolidate those bills.
A more on-point example: a friend of mine is in the process of self-publishing her first book. I copyedited the book and offered to put up a Web page for her. She had the cover designed by a small business in Newport, which turned out to be a member of some sort of coalition of small businesses that, all together, can essentially run your business for you. The cover designers sold my friend on their Web design services and then handed her off to a local "coalition" member for Web hosting.
Here's where the value of diversification comes in: almost by accident, I learned of my friend's arrangements — and that she was most of the way to a Web hosting agreement with undisclosed rates and services in an area in which cost of living and office space tends to make local hosts expensive. After a quick lesson about how the whole "Internet thing" works, my friend has decided to be her own Web master with some heavy assistance from me.
The moral is that a "one-stop shop" can get away with more unless the client happens to possess a high degree of knowledge about every step in the "stop." However, using different businesses for each step in a process will gain the client much more in overlapping expertise than it relinquishes in overlapping expenses. What I mean by this is that, even if I didn't offer, say, layout/production services for books, as a professional/freelance editor, I'd likely have some knowledge about that stage of the publishing process. It might not be much, but it'd be enough to know when things seem fishy. On the other end of the production company, a printer might pick-up the overlap where my knowledge ends. And if I did (as I do) production work myself, the client would have at least two points of reference to gauge prices and services, and I would have a reason other than actual friendship to raise "friendly" questions.
Craig is speaking at a much higher tier of the corporate world than I am, and I'll concede that it's likely that my point fades in significance as the breadth of the client company expands. Whatever the case, and whatever the reason for picking and choosing among companies, I think Craig has a brilliant idea:
Blogs, it seems to me, should be an integral part of that effort. They are superior to email or meetings for keeping a whole team up to speed and for thrashing out differences.
Now and then for my day job, I edit documents having to do with the third-party outsourcing of services (when a client hires a company that then hires another company to fulfill part of the contract). In the world of high-tech and information technology, these contracts can become intricate, making it difficult to discern who is in charge of the overall project. From the vendor/provider point of view, this becomes the all-important question of who "owns" the contract — which company is the irreplaceable hub? It seems to me that taking the initiative to set up a blog, while raising the risk of leakage of intellectual/talent leverage, would place that company immediately at the center of the project.
The way I'm envisioning it, such a procedure might be of very limited application. But for something as fluid as the publishing process, for example, a cross-stage blog would certainly move the process along — as well as give each person in the process extra involvement through which to spot strange goings on.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:21 PM EST
Hopefulness and Ignorance
Apart from some optimistic words for aspiring writers, John Derbyshire's blog-like column today presents this as an indication that his entire worldview could be incorrect:
Now along comes Philippe Legrain in The New Republic with a fine contrarian piece arguing that The U.S. is falling behind Europe and will continue to do so! "While living standards in the United States have risen by a healthy 16.1 percent over the past eight years, they are up 18.3 percent in the European Union... Not only does the European Union as a whole outpace the United States [in labor productivity, 1990-2002], so do ten of the 14 individual EU member states for which statistics are available." Holy triumphalism, Batman! Could it be that my entire worldview is just totally wrong?
I don't know where Legrain got those numbers from, and I ain't gonna give The New Republic money in order to find out, but I seem to recall looking into a similar factoid not long ago. The trick lies in the thing being described: "living standards." What's included in that? For one thing, you'll likely find "percentage of the week spent working," or somesuch, that would make a country such as France look like... ahem... a worker's paradise. It's also probable that "free healthcare" would boost the numbers, without taking into account the quality or efficiency of that care (or, to be sure, the necessity of relying on American medical ingenuity).
All of this goes to show that one can have "a clue what's going on," but that it takes a great deal of thought and research. The majority of pundits (although particularly liberal ones, to my experience) simply look at partial pictures — whichever part supports what they want to believe. Perhaps Derb's poet friend's saying should go like this instead: "Very few are willing to admit what's actually going on. Some people fake objectivity better than others, that's all."
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:24 PM EST
Ladies and Gentlemen: My Representative and Fellow Townsman
How embarrassing:
After presidential candidate Howard Dean spoke, Kennedy delivered an impassioned peroration against President Bush's tax cut. We hear that Kennedy told the crowd: "I don't need Bush's tax cut. I have never worked a [bleeping] day in my life."
And note that Kennedy's spokesman thinks the bleeped word to be the jaw-dropping part of that statement.
It's time for new representation in my home state, I'd say.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:52 AM EST
Good and Bad In Punnuru
By way of agreement and disagreement with Ramesh Punnuru, I offer two quotes:
Most states have dropped their laws against sodomy, as they should have; but the Court somehow construes this process of change as something in which it needs to intervene rather than as evidence that it need not.
Well said. The court threw its arm around this issue and walked with it through the swinging door of change in such a way as to imply that it has the authority to decide when the door may open and close.
I agree with Justice Thomas that the Texas law was "uncommonly silly." We should rejoice in the fact of its demise, but not the manner.
I don't altogether disagree with this, inasmuch as I wouldn't support sodomy laws in my own state, but it strikes me as odd to suggest that "we should rejoice" over an issue such as this. Rejoice? Now, that's silly. And dangerous: consider the form that celebrations have probably taken.
I'll tell you: with every action on this front, I'm noticing myself moving further and further to the political and social right. I can't be alone in that, and I'm beginning to wonder whether the plea for magnanimity from the side currently winning the culture war shouldn't be seen more as advice. I don't buy the argument that social conservatives have forced homosexuals to go further in their quest than they would have if offered a compromise. However, I do worry about the backlash if they go too far. I'll promise you this: I'll be very vocal in demanding temperance, tolerance, and magnanimity from my side when and if it comes to that.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:47 AM EST
The Vision That the Supreme Court Killed: Compromise
I thought I'd link to the column that I wrote about the Santorum controversy. In essence, the Supreme Court seems intent on making contentious social issues all-or-nothing battles:
I'm not leaning on the thoughtless crutch of relativism, here. Rather, in a world in which we all must interact at some level, resolving conflicting worldviews is crucial. This is especially true for divergent opinions about the appropriate roles and interactions of society and the individual. I think we forget, too easily, that enabling the coexistence of ideologically diverse citizens is a central objective of the United States. My vision of our country's purpose is as one that leads the way to enabling all people of all varying views to live and resolve differences peacefully.
Such an outcome is impossible unless "tolerance" is taken to mean a willingness to work with people when possible and, otherwise, to seek to move areas of disagreement down toward the community level so all can find somewhere --- within their own country --- to do their own thing. When the battle between irreconcilable views is made to be winner take all, truth becomes subservient to power and honest dealing collapses under deceit. The strength of arguments and the development of evidence among those willing to experiment become less important than a single word inserted by a hostile interviewer.
Watch for a new era of social upheaval and civil unrest that makes the sixties look like summer camp. Increasingly, the only question is becoming how far into submissive silence large segments of the American population are willing to sink before things get ugly. My guess: not far.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:27 AM EST
The "Unbiased" Media on Strom Thurmond
Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100
ABCNews on the radio this morning presented its quick mention of the Senator's death in much the same spirit — one of the enemies has died. John Miller offers a bit of a correction to that in the Corner (info that the Times sort of touches on way down):
Here’s what [Walter Russell] Mead wrote [in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago]: "For all his staunch conservatism and angry rhetoric, Mr. Helms is one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil-rights revolution." Mead continued: "Once the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s was enacted, Mr. Helms--along with some of his erstwhile segregationist colleagues like South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond--did something very revolutionary for Southern white populists. He accepted the laws and obeyed them." Helms and Thurmond "shunned violence," "hired African-American staffers and gave African-Americans the same level of constituency service they gave whites," and based their opposition to racial preferences on principle rather than racism.
Look, I don't know much about Strom Thurmond, and I'm certainly not a "follower" of his, but shouldn't supposedly objective media accounts be more, well, objective? And to the extent that they offer any twist at all, shouldn't it be respect for the dead and thanks for his service to the country? Even overtly conservative media didn't run headlines like, "Paul Wellstone, Foe of Limited Government, Dies."
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:03 AM EST
Why I Disappeared
By way of explanation of why I've been a bit light on the posts: today, I'm sending the files for the next Redwood Review. Single-handedly publishing a literary review can be a bit time consuming. On the bright side, I should be able to get the online version up next week, so you'll have a whole bunch more real stuff (as opposed to this blog stuff) to read.
Incidentally, on the nuclear finds in Iraq, I haven't commented because it continues to be useless. Most supporters of the war honestly don't need more than has already been discovered. On the other hand, those who opposed the war will accept nothing short of what they know is extremely unlikely to be found: a warehouse full of weaponized chemicals or biological agents inside missiles that can reach the United States... or something.
As for the unspeakable damage that the Supreme Court has done to our nation over the past few days, I think Mark Shea has said it best:
...if we act soon, then analysis of the Court's actions has the hope of being a diagnosis of a very sick society. If we sit around and do nothing, the analysis of the Court's actions will have the character of an autopsy.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:21 AM EST
The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "from A Whispering Through the Branches," by Justin Katz.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:02 AM EST
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Temperance Before I Go
I had wanted to offset that previous post with something on another topic. Unfortunately, we're out of food and have to run to the store, so it'll have to wait.
I do want to note, before I go, that there seems to me to be a natural human inclination to see the world in two ways: personally and intellectually, and finding the balance is a challenge for every social issue. Each point of view has negatives. Intellectually, one can conceive of all sorts of crazy conspiracies and justify all sorts of horrid policies. Personally, one can disbelieve the real effects of broad social policies that don't immediately affect one's life.
I'll return.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:46 PM EST
No White Flag
When I read the following paragraph in John Derbyshire's column yesterday, I started the clock for the incredulous Andrew Sullivan dismissal:
In this sense, the problem is not homosexuals or homosexuality. I am sure that God loves homosexuals and has a purpose for them. (I even think that their prowess in the "caring professions" offers some clue as to what that purpose might be.) The problem is the sexual revolution. The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of "coming out," of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression. A large part of the problem, too, is "heterophobia" — the dislike, mistrust, and contempt which many homosexuals feel towards normal people.
Well, the clock's still running, but I thought I'd mention my certainty that many an angry homosexual would be quick to rail at what they'll see as Derb's suggestion that "gays get back in the closet" in the context of Robert Knight's response to Jonah Goldberg's "Surrender, Fellow Conservatives" column (note: that's not the real title):
Mr. Goldberg, who disparaged the French people as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," and has written some witty stuff from time to time, suggests that it is time for us to pull down the flag and surrender to "gay" militants. In the face of a velvet onslaught from less than 2 percent of the population, he counsels conservatives to make "some painful capitulations - intellectual, moral, philosophical and financial."
I don't know about the cheese part, but Mr. Goldberg seems himself to have warmed to the role of "surrender monkey."
He then asks homosexual activists to show "magnanimity in victory." To paraphrase Bugs Bunny, "he don't know them very well, do he?"
In response to Knight, Ramesh Ponnuru comes to Jonah's defense in the Corner with this:
Robert Knight's screed against Jonah would be a lot more persuasive if a) he suggested a plausible strategy by which gay marriage or civil unions could be stopped or b) his own career of fighting gay rights had shown any success.
His first "if" would be valid, perhaps, if the Goldberg column to which Knight had been responding had offered any suggested strategies of its own. It did not; it merely cited evidence that the battle was over. This applies partially to the second "if" as well. What difference does Knight's personal success make? Some might argue that this bit of data only indicates that he needs reinforcements or a new strategy to keep the fight going.
And as for the subtle (unintentional?) propagandic slur that Knight has been "fighting gay rights," that could have come directly from an Andrew Sullivan rant. Ah... there's the connection. Goldberg seems always, when arguing with Sullivan, not to neglect to mention their friendship. It's all too muddy to sketch as yet (at least to me), but I just can't shake the "club" feeling — the sense that all of these arguments about society-changing (sometimes society-threatening) topics are merely games of squash to the byliners. I'd like to see, for example, some comment of this quick note on Sullivan's site:
RELATED ADVERTIZING LINKS: You know opponents of equal marriage rights are in trouble when an editorial against them is followed by ads touting "Casual Civil Unions in Vermont" and "In Depth: Homophobia." And in the Washington Times no less! The market trumps ideology every time.
The ads appear to have changed, although I did note that similar ad links are located at the bottom of Goldberg's column for today. But what's important here is that Sullivan is getting his surprised giggle from the fact that the Washington Times accepted advertisements (and somebody thought to pay for the ads) contrary to an editorial position. Consider that in light of Knight's list of instances of the homosexual lobby not being "magnanimous," particularly this one:
[Goldberg] doesn't mention the man who took out an ad in a Saskatchewan newspaper listing five Bible verses about homosexuality. The man was fined $4,500, as was the publisher. The money was awarded to three homosexual men who didn't like the ad.
Also consider it in light of the fact that the pro-gay-marriage argument of the week among conservatives (including Sullivan) was that the relative numbers simply made it impossible for gay marriage to adversely affect marriage as a whole. It seems to me that conservative defenders of gay marriage (or capitulators thereto) have painted themselves into a corner (no pun intended): they argue that the number of homosexuals precludes influence, but they also argue that the homosexual lobby's influence is too strong to resist. Little wonder that they have fallen back on imploring gays to be "magnanimous."
Sullivan, today, declares breathlessly (in response to the Supreme Court's sodomy ruling), "I can feel freedom dawning in this land again. The struggle of so many for so long is beginning to come true. What a privilege, what a joy, to be alive to witness it." I don't know that I've ever read Sullivan offer a magnanimous note. Any argument that advances his cause is fair game. Even assuming that he'll be a voice against his fellow homosexuals' going too far with their advantage (and I, for one, am not willing to give him that kind of credit in advance), his strategy amounts to pushing the boulder over the cliff and then worrying about what it'll land on.
Me, I'm worried. I'm pretty sure that I've lost readers as well as the good will of some influential bloggers over this issue. Even allowing for the possibility that I'm not seeing ways in which my arguments are unreasonable, I cannot for the life of me discern any inclination among many opinion makers to even consider possible consequences of the dramatic social change that is being foisted upon us, whether their motivation is ideological or sociocentric.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:18 PM EST
The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:38 AM EST
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
On a Lighter Note
Oops:
US authorities in Iraq have been forced to change the name of the planned Iraqi armed forces, after learning that the original title they came up with created an unfortunate acronym in Arabic.
The planned force was originally entitled the New Iraqi Corps, whose initials in Arabic produce a colourful synonym for fornication.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:41 AM EST
"You Drink, We Drive"
What a great idea:
You call us up. You tell us where and when you want to be picked up. scooterMAN will be there. He will arrive on a miniature foldaway scooter. The scooter is then put in a sealed bag in the boot of your car. scooterMAN then drives you home. Simple.
(via Sheila Lennon)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:39 AM EST
The Value of Analogy
Lane Core's got a good way of explaining how Democrats think tax cuts ought to work:
50,000 people go to a baseball game, but the game was rained out. A refund was then due.
But to whom?
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:34 AM EST
The Blessing That Never Should Have Been
We live in a society in which this is not considered a deplorable contradiction:
Willy Fields, a sanitation worker, rushes home to spend time with Jade every day after work.
"I can't wait to get home to see her, to see her smiling and I know she's not the healthiest girl in the world, but, you know, what she feels I feel, 'cause she's my heart," says Willy. "That's all I can say; she's my heart."
But...
"Jade is the best thing that could have ever happened to us, I mean she's our foundation, she's our rock. But if we had known, I didn't have an option," says Cynthia, who would have had an abortion if she knew about Jade’s condition.
"When looking at this child, first question is, why wasn't anything picked up on the sonogram," says Rachelle Harz, the malpractice lawyer who took the Fields' case. Harz won nearly $1.7 million dollars for the Fields when they settled their wrongful birth case out of court.
These people and their lawyers are dirt. First reason:
Are these suits driving good doctors out of the profession?
"I think they are. I think what's happened is physicians now are held to a level that perhaps many people could not see in their own life, they're basically held to perfection," says Shwayder.
And that standard, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is a major problem for doctors. They currently list twelve states where malpractice suits have caused insurance premiums to increase so much that they threaten to drive obstetricians out of business.
Second, in many ways more important, reason:
The disabled child that parents claim would have been "better off dead" might be severely retarded, like Jade Fields, or might be like 9-year-old Ryan Powers, who is also one of Harz's clients. After his parents won an out of court settlement, his story was profiled in "The Record," a New Jersey newspaper.
Ryan was born with spina bifida, and is paralyzed from the waist down. But mentally, he's normal. He's mainstreamed in a Catholic school, and on his last report card, his mother Karen told us he got straight A's. She didn't want to talk on camera about the wrongful birth lawsuit she brought against her doctor, saying she wanted "to put all that behind us." ...
"It seems as though we're questioning not only the value of life, but the value of people who are not perfect," says Anita Allen-Castellito, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a bio-ethicist.
Castellito worries that Ryan will be damaged emotionally if he learns that his mother testified that she would have had an abortion if she had known about his condition.
"Realistically how many children are going to hear that complicated story as opposed to the simpler message that 'I didn't want you, you're disabled, I didn't want a disabled child,'" says Castellito.
Of course, it's all about the money. Who pays? What are the costs to society?
Who cares?
(via Right Wing News)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:31 AM EST
Fishing for Dollars
So, when the state government has gotten so far out of hand that even apathetic Rhode Islanders begin to notice, what's the solution? Why, quietly instituted hidden taxes, of course!
The surprise legislative proposal, dropped into the budget endorsed last Friday night by the House Finance Committee, would require saltwater anglers to buy a fishing license, just as freshwater anglers do, at a cost of $18 annually for a state resident, $35 annually for a nonresident, or $16 for a three-day "tourist" pass.
If the saltwater licenses were structured like freshwater ones, they would be required for anyone 16 or older. Elderly and disabled residents could get free lifetime licenses.
The change, which would take effect July 1 if passed, was never the subject of a public hearing.
Hey, it's only a few bucks a year; citizens don't even need to have a say, because — really — who could object to the government's voting itself a new source of revenue? And besides:
"We have some people whose districts have a pond less than a quarter-mile away from the shore and they have to buy a license for that and not the shore," [House Finance Committee Chairman Paul Sherlock, D-Warwick] says.
Oh! It's only a matter of fairness. But wait a sec:
[director of the state Department of Environmental Management, Jan] Reitsma says one key problem is that the money raised would go into the state's general fund, rather than a dedicated account to pay for fishing habitat improvements, as freshwater license fees do.
Rhode Islanders: get these lying scumbags out of office!
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:21 AM EST
My State Is So Screwed Up
The problem in Rhode Island is that the people are so turned around ideologically, so confused by the conflicting demands of the region's liberalism, that they can't muster the will to protest anything that doesn't very specifically target them. Add in the blend of union power, the high proportion of academics, the rich shoreliners, the mobsters, and the tourism moguls, and you've got a population with enough money not to care too much about government waste (and government skimming) and sufficiently insulated from the real effects of their feel-good politics not to understand why money just won't fix it or why that slice of society caught between wealth and poverty objects to additional payments.
And that is why the entrenched crooks in state and local government get away with pretending those who object to their actions don't exist:
WPRO radio talk-show host Dan Yorke brought his microphone -- and about four dozen of his sign-toting listeners -- to the State House yesterday to cheer Republican Governor Carcieri on in his head-butting battle with state lawmakers over the state budget.
"Don't you feel . . . the con job?" Yorke asked the shirt-sleeved governor, who joined him at the microphone in a marble hallway, halfway between the House and Senate chambers.
"It's, 'Hey Don. Hey. You're a good guy.' But, you know what? You don't got a rat's . . . chance of getting anything done. I mean, that's what's going on in this building," Yorke told the governor on air. "You're not getting any respect."
"Well, it's not just me. OK? It's all of these people. It's all of us," Carcieri said to cheers from the ragtag crowd of talk-show fans in Bermuda shorts and sneakers and T-shirts that, in the case of Joe Faella from Johnston, read: "The Budget Sucks."
"I think what happens -- and what these people don't realize," Carcieri said of the state's overwhelmingly Democratic lawmakers, "and I realized shortly after I got here, is that what happens within the four walls of this building often bears little relationship with how people feel or what people care about outside this building.
A large part of the problem is that state workers get their raises and increases in benefits without reference to what's going on with the economy... except when the economy is doing well. In that case, they feel the lift in proportionate disproportionality. Check out this bit of bull from a state Democrat that ought to be considered criminally obfuscatory:
In interviews earlier in the day, House Finance Chairman Paul V. Sherlock, D-Warwick, and Deputy Finance Chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, denounced the increase in pension contributions as a "tax on one segment of the Rhode Island work force . . . [the] people who take care of people in our hospitals, the people who teach our children in schools . . . all the people who are meeting the needs of the state."
They defended their decisions to increase school aid by $15 million; undo the cutbacks and constraints that Carcieri sought in state payments to the people who run child-care centers, hospitals and senior centers; and leave Newport Jai Alai, the Lincoln dog track and the owners of the greyhounds that race there with enough money to stay and expand.
"To simply say he didn't raise taxes and we did is disingenuous. A tax is a tax is a tax," said Costantino, asserting that Carcieri's efforts to freeze some local aid payments would have forced cities and towns to raise their own local property taxes -- "the most regressive tax there is."
This is how stupid Rhode Island's leaders think their "subjects" are. The government can't cover the costs of its runaway spending? Well then, not to raise taxes on the average person (who has been struggling owing to the economy, and whose plight isn't being helped by the weather's effects on the tourism industry) would be to raise taxes on those whom the government pays. What a scam! In my view, this state representative is no less a liar, no less a con artist, than the grifter on the street.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:12 AM EST
For some reason, the news that I found on my daily jaunt around the Internet this morning has really driven my blood pressure off the scale. If you're reading this page from the bottom up, be aware of the frame of mind of the guy who wrote what you are about to read. If you're reading this page from the top down, well, now you know.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:51 AM EST
The Redwood Review Poem of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:38 AM EST
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Lack of Blogginess
I wanted to offer a quick apology for the dearth of posts so far this week. There are — and aren't there always — a variety of reasons that I haven't been blogging away, ranging from a few enthusiasm-sapping email conversations to actually doing that work thing that helps to feed my family. But none of those reasons are out of the ordinary.
Mostly, I'm trying to finish up this year's edition of the Redwood Review to ship it off to the printer this Friday. As you can probably imagine, when you're a one-man operation (although the other writers have been great at helping me to quickly cover a funding deficit at the last minute), publishing a literary review can be just a little time consuming.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:20 PM EST
Songs You Should Know 06/24/03
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Scared" by Mr. Chu.
"Scared" Mr. Chu, Hard Rock
Stream (HiFi)Download
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:58 AM EST
Let's Do, Ourselves, What the Supreme Court Refused to Do
I agree with David Frum: the Supreme Court decisions in the case of University of Michigan affirmative action feel like a defeat for progress toward a racism-free society. They are not, to be sure, the crushing defeat that some on the other side claim to have delivered, as Jonah Goldberg points out, but they do give the weasels of the academy room within which to wriggle.
My reaction, this "day after," is to say, "So be it." It's an unhealthy addiction to look to the Supreme Court, or the government in general, to resolve all issues of public conscience. Let society do what society's leaders refuse to do. This suggestion will take two broad forms:
1) Learning from Donald Rumsfeld and resorting to some straight-talk diplomacy. At its most explicit, this would involve calling the race-obsessed academics what they, in actuality, are: racists. Closed-minded bigots in robes. There's no two ways about it: they want to define Americans according to the color of their skin and construct policies accordingly. As with all bigotry, this is good for neither side, benefiting only the prejudices of the elite.
2) Wielding the free market. Expanding on the clarity encouraged in the previous point, it is obvious that we can no longer, in good conscience, patronize racist institutions. Would many folks send their children to a university that explicitly diminished the applications of blacks for admission? As consumers of the product of higher education, let's put a premium on race-blind admissions policies, making the lack of affirmative action a selling point for innovative college administrators.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:26 AM EST
Just Thinking 06/23/03
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:01 AM EST
Monday, June 23, 2003
The Academic Fantasy World
I was going to comment on that whiteness-studies article, but the whole thing is just so ludicrous. Not the least frustrating is the degree to which the entire process by which the content of such courses are translated to the average person (with the academy hand-in-hand with the media) so dramatically distorts what is being taught in order to make it sound reasonable. Dig just a very little bit, and you see that the entire process is malicious in nature.
Moreover, it's entirely false — entirely fabricated. Lane Core quotes the following:
Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn't happy about it.
The exercise, which recently involved Cairns and her classmates in a course at the University of Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When the moderator read a statement that applied to you, you stepped forward; if it didn't, you stepped back. After the moderator asked if you were certain you could get a bank loan whenever you wanted, Cairns thought, "Oh my God, here we go again," and took yet another step forward.
"You looked behind you and became really uncomfortable," said Cairns, a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near the back. "We all started together," she said, "and now were so separated."
Lane's comment is that "Naomi must come from the other side of the tracks." That was my initial impression, particularly since I read the article on a day that I discovered that I couldn't get enough credit on a lower-interest card to cover what I'm already paying off on a higher-interest card. Last fall, I learned that our financial situation is such that we can afford to pay ridiculous rent, but not to pay the same exact amount as a mortgage.
But Naomi isn't necessarily a little rich girl. In fact, I'd be willing to bet (cash, 'cause the house won't spot me) that Naomi has never attempted to get a bank loan — at least not without her parents' backing her. It is entirely possible that Naomi stepped forward in that classroom based on nothing more than the reassurances of her professor(s) that she most assuredly would get any loan for which she applied. In other words, the professors are very possibly telling young Naomi what reality is and then asking her to answer questions about... what reality is.
Here's a statement that I would had to the "privilege walk": Step forward if you believe that you can get into the University of Michigan law school with average grades, average scores, and average resources. Me, I'd step backwards on that one, too.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:58 PM EST
Saturday, June 21, 2003
Why the Threat?
Honestly, I wouldn't have had anything to say about this run-of-the-mill article about the first gay pride parade under the first gay mayor of Providence. But this is something that I just had to point out, particularly when the focus of the entire report is on the "diversity" and openness of the city:
"I think Providence has grown like many other places in the country," says Kate Monteiro, president of the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights. "Over the last 10 years to 15 years, we have joined the ranks of cities where it is OK to be different."
Like Cicilline himself, a former state representative who declared his sexual orientation before running for mayor, the city's once-closeted gay community is more open than ever.
"Gay and lesbian people have become much less willing to lie and pretend," says Monteiro. "They have also become less willing to spend their money with people who do not respect them."
I guess businesses will have to learn after "slipping" what Monteiro considers to be disrespectful. I would guess that my opposition to gay marriage might put me in the "disrespectful" column, although it isn't in opposition to homosexuals that I hold that position.
Of course, the context in which Monteiro's statement was made to the Providence Journal might have made a huge difference, but as it is within the article it sticks out like a sinister threat.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:49 PM EST
Friday, June 20, 2003
Wrapping Up the Week in Gay Marriage
Noah Millman writes wisely about homosexual marriage. This is not to say that I agree with him.
First of all, I think he presumes too much in implying that homosexuals would not have pushed for complete erasure of all perceived differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals no matter the actions of social conservatives. In general, one should be suspicious of any statement that follows the formula, "If only you'd given me enough then, I wouldn't have been forced to ask for too much now." More to the point, and without rhetorical circumambulation, suggesting that conservatives have "shot themselves in the foot" on this issue rings a bit too much like the statements of those who see whites or America or men as the root of all problems in the world — as the only non-passive party in a situation.
The practical difference in which this disagreement results isn't but so great. As one who believes theologically and socially that people must choose virtue of their own volition, I am, and have been, in favor of removing explicit restraints keeping homosexual relationships from becoming as healthy as they can be, such as any prohibition to contractual agreements, visitation rights, and the like. And I am, and have been, open to the possibility of a "civil union" formulation that would combine all of those contractual agreements. However, I believe that a palpable amount of social change is required before such a policy can be instituted. Toward ensuring the possibility for that change, the development of "civil unions" must go through the process of state-by-state legislation. Homosexuals would have to make their case and make some changes among themselves in order to persuade everybody else. This, in my view, is the only way that anything resembling a parallel arrangement to marriage can now — or ever could — be created without inevitable confluence.
Noah oversimplifies the history of this issue when he suggests that conservatives, as a group, took too hard a line at first. Some semblance of a hard line is to be expected, considering that the idea of gay marriage — even the idea of acceptance of homosexuality as an open lifestyle — is relatively new. However, for the great majority of conservatives, I think it would be more true to say that they are just waking up to the reality of the situation.
I know, for my part, that every new angle of the debate that I come across solidifies my opposition. Some of the less open-minded among those who disagree with me on this (Andrew Sullivan comes to mind) would dismiss this by assuming that I've merely been collecting bits of confirmation for my preexisting prejudices. I don't believe that to be the case at all. On Wednesday, local talk radio host Dan Yorke addressed gay marriage, and the conversation literally gave me a headache because the points being made were years behind people who've been involved in the debate for a while.
To come down out of the bleachers to give the team a defeatist, pep-down talk just before the crucial moment when the tide could turn either way, as Jonah Goldberg did in the Washington Times, is premature. The same is true of Noah Millman's lamentation that the tide has passed, when in fact it has hardly begun.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:18 PM EST
The Biology of Marriage in Cultural Context
In response to my suggestion that it is the women rather than the marriage certificate that settles men down, Diana Moon emailed a question that put the gay marriage debate in a context in which I haven't heard it considered. It offers a good opportunity for clarification:
In the Arab world, there is polygamous marriage and women have severely proscribed rights. Men don't seem to be "tamed" at all; yet the women are the same biologically there as they are here. How do you explain that?
What surprised me about this question is that I didn't have biology explicitly in mind when I made the comment; rather, I was concentrating on the culture within which we operate. Indeed, all of the arguments against homosexual marriage are culturally founded. The institution of marriage is part of our culture from which our society benefits; gay marriage would change the institution, and the argument against it is that it will detrimentally change the culture.
I don't think I'd be wrong to suggest that Diana is not holding up Arab marital practices for our emulation. As she says, the women are severely oppressed, the men are not "tamed," and (although she doesn't mention this) the practice of polygamy has harmful effects on men toward the lower end of the social hierarchy. Within this system, the underlying controls of biology and human nature cannot operate. In fact, although I don't know enough about Arab culture and history to state this as more than an impression, it could be for this very reason that Arab society expends so much effort attempting to minimize the influence of women on the culture.
The more I've delved into social and political issues, the more I've come to think that the central innovation of Western civilization is that it makes the best use of human nature. It acknowledges, for example, that economic freedom will motivate people toward progress. More on topic, rather than seeking to skew away from the family structure in which we find the most strength and motivation to combine responsibility and independence, it capitalizes on that very drive to keep the family, its children, and the overall society healthy. This is what opponents of gay marriage — most of whom would be more appropriately described as proponents of traditional families — are hoping to preserve.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:03 PM EST
Girls, Girls, Girls
This morning, when I blogged about Rob Smith's post about gay marriage, I didn't mention a tangential thought that I had. Smith mentions that his daughter is gay, and it occurred to me that, with every parent in the public light whom I've heard mention a gay child lately, it's been a daughter (Dick Cheney, Dick Gephardt, Cher, and now Rob Smith, off the top of my head). Well, Glenn Reynolds points to a study that might explain some of the reason for that:
The findings confirm what researchers have suspected for some time -- women may prefer to date one gender or the other, but they get sexually aroused by both.
Men, on the other hand, aren't nearly as flexible. Straight men like to watch women have sex, and gay men like to watch men. Case closed.
"This may well be relevant to the flexibility of female sexuality. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one reason why women transition more between sexual identities than men," said study co-author Michael Bailey, chairman of the psychology department at Northwestern University and author of "The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism."
First things first: beyond having questions about how representative a group who would sign up for such a study might be, I'm not extremely confident in the study's methodology — both the method of, umm, measurement and the interpretation of the data. For one thing, I can't tell whether the numbers reflect degree of arousal. For another thing, this statement looks suspiciously phrased:
But the women -- straight or lesbian -- tended to enjoy watching all the types of partners have sex. Only 63 percent responded most to sex involving their preferred gender, a much lower number than among the men.
If a significant segment of the women in the study were lesbians, given what little the article tells us, it could be that some percentage whose "preferred gender" was women were actually more aroused by sex involving men.
But take the study at face value. Wouldn't this have some relevance to the degree to which homosexuality among women is something that they're born with? "Fluid" sexuality looks a bit more like a choice, to me. And if it is more of a choice than it is generally presented to be, that would hardly support the concept of gay marriage. If lesbian marriage were to become socially accepted, women would have one less reason to choose men. Add in advancements in reproductive technology and the pool of potential mates becomes dangerously lopsided.
Oh, sure, there are women (and men) who would chuckle at this. Some feminazis may see it as a goal. However much appeal the idea might have for some women, a dramatically lowered marriage pool for men would, first, sift down to the lower economic classes and, then, turn into a volatile social dynamic.
ADDENDUM:
Although the person who emailed the ideas that this addendum will address promised to comment after a couple of days of consideration, I wanted to jot down some thoughts.The first point is that there are many more gay men than lesbians. I've no intention of disputing this, although I do want to make the suggestion that there's some room for visibility to affect perception. The real question, with respect to lesbians, female sexuality, and marriage, is the trend. However, even the absence of a noticeable increase in the number of lesbians would not conflict with the thesis that fluid sexuality among a significant percentage of women could become a harmful force in society down the road.
The second point of the email is that women are already having difficulty finding husbands, with a reference to the gender disparity in college attendance, about which I wrote at some length in early May. As a result, the email suggests, more women might opt for single motherhood.
Put all of this together. Granting credibility to the sexual arousal study (and I'm not yet entirely sold on its conclusions), I see no reason that women — whether single mothers or not — would not opt for same-sex marriages once they become legally ratified and more socially accepted, particularly if an increasing chunk of the male population shifts below such careers as require higher education. Consider Rob Smith's comment about his daughter's lesbian relationship:
My daughter is gay, and I am not one bit disappointed about it. She has found herself a good partner who puts up with her shit (and she has plenty, trust me) and lives a much better life than if she had hooked up with some Biker Bozo with a dick. She could have done a lot worse.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:00 PM EST
Killing of Convenience Now, Killing of Convenience Later
I think Mark Shea makes a great point:
Attn: short-sighted Boomers. Support euthanasia today, and your kids will be happy to avail themselves of it tomorrow when you get too old to change the Beatles CD yourself. You can't say Roe v. Wade hasn't taught anything to the ones who escaped the knife. There's a very simple lesson there: inconvenient people should die. Someday, O Boomer, you shall be inconvenient. A big demographic bulge of "useless eaters" perched atop an inverted Social Security pyramid. What O what shall overtaxed Gen X and Gen Y people do to ease the burden of having to pay for the retirement of the most narcissistic generation in history?
Tick tock.
For some contrast, I'm right between what are generally known as Generations X and Y, and my general impression is that the percentages who respect life are increasing, not the other way around. I guess we'll see when we see. That, however, is not a phrase that I'd take lightly if it were my life on the line. On the other hand, I sometimes get the impression that many Boomers think that they want to be "put out of their misery." Again, we'll see what their attitude is when they're in Dr. Faustus's position.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:04 AM EST
Oh, Just Some Kids at Nude Camp
I was going to post this story about nudist summer camps a few days ago, but didn't find the time. Mark Shea beat me to it. Here's my comment, which is about what I'd intended to post here:
What really stood out to me was the conspicuous absence of a couple of related questions. We're told they can't dress sexy (when they do dress, that is), and we're told that they keep a careful eye out for outside trespassers.
But...
Not a single question about sex itself. Even if between the counselors (screened as they are) and the campers there is a strict wall, what about between campers and campers? Or even counselors and counselors (they probably aren't all self-reliant adults).
One more conspicuous absence: any comment about the contradiction between forbidding sexy clothes and playing an inherently sexual game such as "strip volleyball." (What's the thrill of stripping, particularly at a nudist camp, if not the added tingle of sexuality?)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:53 AM EST
The Drug Detour of Addressing AIDS Isn't Going to Last
Beyond the dangerous complacency that seems to be increasing with HIV in modernized countries, Africa looks like it's on the fast track to making HIV drugs less effective:
The unregulated supply of Aids drugs in the non-industrialised world threatens to accelerate the development of drug-resistant HIV strains.
That is the conclusion of a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, just published in the British Medical Journal.
The study urges governments and international agencies to deal with the problem now. ...
Even in the rigid treatment patterns of the affluent west, HIV is becoming resistant to established anti-retrovirals - and this study says that governments and health authorities cannot afford to wait for more dangerous resistance to emerge in the developing world.
At what point will it settle in that behavior must change? That treatment must move toward prevention?
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:49 AM EST
Glenn Reynolds on Gay Marriage
The gay marriage debate has reached Instapundit. In opposition to David Frum's suggestion that gay marriage will further undermine the idea of motherhood via divorce court, Glenn Reynolds places Rob Smith, who thinks that increased genderlessness in the divorce court would be a good thing. One point that bears mentioning, and even Rob Smith agrees that it raises questions about his qualifications to discuss gay marriage, is that Smith has been married and divorced twice.
More than anything, this factor highlights the dubiousness of judging a proposed new form of marriage on the basis of failed marriage — on the basis of another social allowance that is eating away at the institution. I'm being equal opportunity, here: I think Frum picked a poor example to illustrate why gay marriages would affect all marriages. On the specific point, however, I'm inclined to believe that we would, somehow, manage to reach the end of the series of legal decisions having brought about everything bad that we feared without gaining any of the good things for which we'd hoped. In other words, the ideal of motherhood would be diminished without purging the endemic bias against men.
One way this could happen would be the courts' adopting a policy that seeks to capture one superficial attribute of what we might consider "motherhood" and use that instead. For example: time (i.e., lack of career). For same-sex marriages, this could lead to one ex-spouse's becoming a lifelong dependent of the other, but it would more likely be arbitrary, with the custodial parent subsequently pursuing a career anyway (perhaps retaining the child-support). Meanwhile, there's no reason that judges would have to shed their bias against men, in cases of heterosexual marriage, in the face of such a policy; the guidelines would not affect consideration of the "special bond between mother and child" that seems generally to be true, although it would have to be unspoken and unacknowledged. This is not unlike the general danger of political correctness: it pushes the real questions, issues, and ideas a layer (or several) beneath the discussion or policy.
Beyond this particular argument, it is instructive to look at the construction of Reynolds's post in light of this statement of Frum's:
So many of the people who advocate gay marriage are smart and sophisticated — and then they turn around and ask a question that makes you wonder whether, for all their intelligence and sophistication, they have given even ten minutes' serious thought to the reform they are advocating.
Consider that Reynolds places Frum and Smith in opposition without noting Smith's conclusion: "Do you really believe that 'Gay Marriage' won't be twisted into something it was never meant to be?" Without this nugget, Reynolds moves on, having supposedly illustrated that "deep thinkers and great Americans" can conclude differently on this particular aspect of the discussion, to write:
Personally, I'm in favor of legalizing gay marriage. I don't see that gay marriage diminishes marriage, any more than the many Jerry-Springer types who are allowed to get married now diminish marriage. I have gay friends who are, for all practical purposes, married. I don't see why barring them from going to the courthouse benefits anyone.
There are some conservatives who say that the advocacy of gay marriage is part of a campaign by some liberals to undermine marriage in general -- and I think there probably are some people on the left (or in whatever la-la land the MacKinnon / Dworkin types and their near-kin inhabit) who think that it will do that. But I rather suspect it will have the opposite effect. Let gays get married and they'll become a bulwark of the bourgeoisie. That's my prediction, anyway.
The problem should be obvious: this doesn't address any substantive points. It is the equivalent of saying, "Well, these two cancel out on one specific question, and I don't see anything wrong with it, so here's my conclusion." Well, that certainly didn't take ten minutes.
Even within Reynolds's commentary there is room for discussion. He admits that there are some on the left who think gay marriage will undermine marriage in general. But he doesn't spot the relevance that this has to his comparison in the first paragraph with that dangerous "any more." The wackos on Jerry Springer do diminish marriage, as do the divorces of sophisticates, but neither of these drags on the institution justify or excuse an additional burden. Picture each of these issues as a three-ounce weight. The two that are already in place don't exceed the capacity of a half-pound scale. However, putting on the third might very well pitch the whole thing over, even though it doesn't weight "any more" than the others.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:28 AM EST
The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:50 AM EST
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Why We Don't Do It in the Road
Sheila Lennon runs a great blog for the Providence Journal from which I acquire many interesting links. However, whenever she blogs anything political or ideological, I find myself shaking my head. We just hold very different ideas about the world.
Today, however, she writes something that I can get behind fully:
I'm an adult, I don't want to be protected from life in the name of public health or somebody else's morality.
Hear, hear. Here is evidence that we begin from some common principles. Unfortunately, the first step away from the apothegm finds us diametrically opposed in application:
If I get hit by an SUV from the side, I'll die for sure if I'm wearing a seat belt. If I'm not, I might get pushed to the other side of the car and live. Why can't I let my instincts make the decision about which risks to take today?
Alright, maybe it takes two steps for us to separate, because I, too, find seatbelt laws to be the first swerve onto a dangerous road of public control of individual behavior. On the other hand, with the realities of health insurance what they are (let alone what the realities would be were the government more involved in the practice), the public has some justification in determining whether Sheila's particular scenario balances with other types of fatal accidents in which a seatbelt will diminish the physical harm to the driver.
This is, I think, the difference in point of view that causes conservatives, when frustrated, to think liberals (or "mostly liberals") selfish. To use Shiela's phrasing, not many people want to increase their vulnerability to life in the name of some other adult's comforts and convenience. There is, of course, a balance to be struck, and in the case of seatbelts, I'd say the claims are pretty much a toss-up as the facts now stand.
However, the underlying differences aren't so inconsequential across all issues, as Shiela brings to the forefront with this paragraph:
On the one hand, the socially conservative Republicans are touting sexual abstinence, anti-abortion forces would make women (and girls) who "fall" from abstinence bear children if pregnancy results, and they'd shoo us all into church.
Ignore the hyperbole about social conservatives' intending to make church attendance legally obligatory. What is protecting the "right" to abortion if not seeking to be "protected from life"? Now, I don't have the time to go in search of the statistics, but I'm pretty confident in suggesting that somehow — amazingly — a majority of women manage to avoid pregnancy where it is not sought, despite Ms. Lennon's appeal to the precariousness of responsible behavior. If a fall results in a bruise, we must bear that bruise. Yet, if the fall somehow intertwines us with another human being, then he or she may be killed and removed. She even protects such women (and, yes, girls) from life with her writing by shifting into passive voice.
Having Ms. Lennon's post several times, I can't shake the feeling that she believes the social conservatives to be against abortion because they want to punish the sinner through the imposition of parenthood. If Lennon wants to argue that I oughtn't seek to legislate her fetishes, I'll agree. But it isn't merely "somebody else's morality" at play when it is a third person's life that is put at risk in the name of life having no consequences. What if, when that SUV pushes Shiela Lennon to the other side of a car, there is a child sitting in the passenger seat?
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:32 PM EST
The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:47 AM EST
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Andrew Sullivan Doesn't Like Dealing with Reality
Well, just in passing, I broke my self-prohibition on reading Andrew Sullivan. It gets me every time: I expect to find a standard argument or something that I can just shake my head at. Instead I come across surreal points that spur me to comment such as this:
MARRIAGE CANARDS: The latest tactic from the far right in opposition to gay marriage is that it will somehow destroy free speech. Huh? This is now David Frum's gambit. All of these arguments rely upon the enforcement of oppressive hate crime laws. But the problem here is the hate crime law, not equal marriage rights! You should certainly be able to live in a country where marriage is available to gays and straights alike and in which some straights are perfectly free to express how repulsive they find the notion of homosexuals having legally protected relationships. I'm for equality and free speech. But the issues should not be conflated.
Did you just slap your head and declare, "Of course! It's so simple!"? I didn't think so. In response to the suggestion that the combination of gay marriage and hate-crime laws would be dangerous, Sullivan argues that the first is the problem and, therefore, the combined effect should be inadmissible to the discussion. To borrow a phrase: huh? Tell you what, Andrew, you pull back hate-crime laws and find a way to ensure that homosexual advocacy groups and their allies won't push for them once gay marriage is made official, and I'll reconsider my opposition on this basis. (It occurs to me to ponder whether this impossibility is one reason that gay marriage advocates are going through the courts: such legalistic, compartmentalized arguments work better in a court of law.)
Then there's this:
Let's say that the gay presence in the population is 3 percent. Let's say that marriage will be half as likely for gays as straights. Out of 1000 marriages, around 15 are therefore likely to be same-sex. Of those fifteen, ten will probably be lesbian. What Stanley Kurtz is trying to argue is that 5 gay male marriages are more likely to affect the 995 other marriages than the other way round.
As I said earlier today, this ignores the disproportionate influence that homosexuals have on our culture. It may seem silly, but consider the current season of the show The Amazing Race. One of the dozen teams is a homosexual couple that calls themselves married. As I recall, only one team of heterosexuals was married, and they were middle-aged and thus eliminated early in the show. Every season has had a gay couple. I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with that, but it does go to show that homosexuals are far from 0.5% as visible as heterosexuals in our society.
Once again, on both counts, I cannot conclude otherwise than that Andrew Sullivan is simply being disingenuous.
ADDENDUM:
John Derbyshire offers Exibit A. (And, no, it doesn't count as an argument against him that Sullivan mocks him with his "Derbyshire Award.")1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:20 PM EST
What They Don't Want Us To Know
Lane Core puts his finger on the implications of major media's refusal to divulge that a headline-making kidnapper and child rapist is an illegal alien:
Interesting, how mainstream media chooses what to tell us about the perpetrators of crimes. If this child rapist had been an altar boy 25 years ago, they would have told us. If his brother-in-law were a minor Republican office holder in Outer Podunk, they would have told us. But, they don't tell us that he's an illegal alien.
Combined with doubts about the media's ability and/or desire to get facts right, this error of omission rightly raises questions about big-business news organizations' value — at least as they currently behave.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:24 PM EST
The Canadian Cultural Battle Over? Hardly.
David Frum's post on gay marriage in Canada is must-read material (and it's short, too). Here's a key passage:
Canadians can expect new battles in the years ahead as the authorities impose ever stricter restrictions on their freedom to express traditional views of homosexuality. And while the pressure groups and the courts may exempt the churches at first, it is hard to imagine that they will exempt them for long. The Canadian churches receive, after all, all kinds of public support. Not only are they exempt from taxes, but Catholic schools are subsidized from public funds. Would we permit people who receive public money to refuse to marry inter-racial couples? Hardly! So how can we allow them to persist in refusing to marry same-sex couples?
I realize that there's a ledge of hysteria off of which it is possible to tumble, but considering the attention that this issue gets, I can't help but shake my head at one thing: three percent! For three percent of the population, ancient religious institutions are being forced at figurative gunpoint to accede to the government's will and freedom of speech and the press is being tossed into new cultural prisoners' Zip-lock bags with the contents of their pockets, only to be returned upon completion of the society's life sentence.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:18 PM EST
Hatch's Unacceptable Plan
I wasn't going to say anything about this because it's so obviously wrong and so widely denounced that it seemed unnecessary:
[Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)] acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.
I don't know much about Hatch, but this is the second issue on which I've found him not to be a very reliable (or principled) ally; the first had to do with embryonic research, as I recall. Hey, that's two strikes. Perhaps I ought to be able to destroy the machine of his political career.
I battle the libertarians all the time on what expectations are reasonable on their part regarding the Republican Party and our "conservative coalition." But I prefer principle to power (particularly power held by somebody to whom I'm only connected based on shared principles), and I think politicians on the political right should make an effort to remember what it is they stand for. I understand that it must be awfully difficult to let go of that ring of power when it is on one's finger, but it is better to toss it than to lose power as well as a finger.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:09 PM EST
Cause and Effect Don't Matter When the Result Is Good
Good news out of Hollywood: explicit sex on the big screen is decreasing. However, some observers' explanations point to an important aspect of the cultural divide:
Hollywood's diminishing appetite for sex is partly attributed to the influence of a more socially conservative government under George Bush, the president, and his attorney general, John Ashcroft, a member of the Pentecostal church noted for his moral certitude.
Paul Verhoeven, the director whose film Basic Instinct drew more attention for Sharon Stone's risque leg-crossing scene than it did for the quality of its plot and acting, told Premiere magazine: "There's a drip-down effect of this government's position in the film industry, so you will see much more other things than nude scenes on your screen." He added: "What do you expect with Ashcroft who is an ultra-Christian puritan?"
Notice who's missing from this explanation? Why, we sheep-like masses, that's who. I don't mean to suggest that the leaders of the country don't matter or influence the culture — they do — but I can't help but wonder whether these sin-sellers of the silver screen ever consider that the conservatives in office are, themselves, an effect of a more-conservative populace.
The fact that the answer appears to be "no" suggests two important insights: 1) Despite all of their rhetoric, liberals don't care for people except as pawns or propaganda. 2) The point of view that, even in our representative democracy, the leaders dictate the ethic of the nation may be one reason that liberals are willing to do or say just about anything to regain power. (It's certainly in line with their tendency to work toward placing power in the hands of a few, whether judges or socialist dictators.)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:53 PM EST
The Declavenizer
As an editor of high-tech industry documents, I can confirm that business jargon is designed specifically to sound good while conveying nothing. That's the guiding understanding behind some new software:
New York-based Deloitte Consulting admits it helped foster confusing, indecipherable words like "synergy," "paradigm," and "extensible repository," but now it has decided enough is enough. On Tuesday it will release "Bullfighter" to help writers of business documents to avoid jargon and use clear language.
"We've had it with repurposeable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leveragable mindshare," Deloitte Consulting partner Brian Fugere said.
I would caution writers out there to be careful about going too far in the other direction. Such words as "leverage" and "synergy" have perfectly acceptable uses. The question to ask yourself — as a writer or, perhaps more, as a reader of business documents — is whether the words clarify or obscure the meaning and whether they are obviously inserted for decoration or weight. To be fair, however, through my experience writing grant proposals, general copy, and internal documents for bureaucratic purposes, I’ve found that it is often difficult to avoid the vague-speak when the questions being asked (often with undue gravity) are silly or simply meaningless.
My tolerance for the language, of course, excepts such new, unnecessary, and meaningless coinages as "incentivize," which I've refused to add to my spellchecker to this day.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:35 PM EST
You Never Know, Do You?
There's not much to say about this, except that it isn't a reason to take up smoking, but it's interesting and surprising enough to merit mention:
Nicotine could in future yield a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease, scientists have revealed.
Researchers found that a by-product of the compound which hooks smokers appears to protect the brain from the devastating dementia illness.
But the discovery should not be seen as an excuse to smoke. The substance, nornicotine, is toxic, and could not itself be used as a medication. But scientists believe further research might produce harmless compounds that mimic the action of nornicotine in fighting Alzheimer's.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:23 PM EST
Trying to Be Helpful for NRO Readers
If you've arrived at this page through Andrew Stuttaford's kind link in the Corner, please feel free to read everything on the blog and on the site — even to buy books and CDs.
However, since Mr. Stuttaford's citation addressed a particular issue (using my words in the service of the opposing argument), I thought I'd point out the relevant entries:
Conservative Brits on Gay Marriage
More Response to Stuttaford on Gay Marriage
Another Perspective on Gay Marriage
Stanley Kurtz Checks InI intend to give Stuttaford's latest point, that heterosexual men will have their work cut out for them should they attempt to make the argument for promiscuity to their wives based on gay marriage, further thought (and thought facilitated by my just-brewed morning coffee). As an initial response, I'd say that, while clever, this suggestion doesn't address the more pervasive influences that will serve to corrode marriage.
One route to the destruction of monogamy as part of marriage is through polygamy. Actually, this is two routes: the argument, which many suspect is lurking in the shadows, that polygamists will make for legal marriage on essentially the same bases as homosexual marriage and the evolution of polygamy within homosexual marriages themselves (both as a reproductive/parenting matter and as a function of "open" marriages).
The other route, that which most directly relates to Stuttaford's argument, is less tangible. Essentially, the question isn't whether married men will finally have the argument for which they've been waiting in order to bring about their swinging ends. That isn't the whole story of how social change works. My neighbors' getting a divorce wouldn't necessarily introduce the idea into my previously healthy marriage. Of course, the effects would be highly dependent on the specifics of a given situation. It could introduce the thought if my wife and I felt particularly akin to our neighbors. It might also give excuse and emotional justification for divorce during the inevitable rough spots.
The larger danger is the broader one — on a societal scale — to the idea of marriage. As it happens, I addressed this on the topic of divorce in a column just this week. The social influence is not only coworkers and other acquaintances who give us their specific example, but also the culture, as perpetuated through such things as television and movies. On the latter count, it can hardly be denied that, although they may only represent three percent or so of the population, homosexuals have a disproportionate influence on the public stage with which to portray what they believe that marriage — once they are fully included in the institution — ought to be.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:54 AM EST
The Redwood Review Poem of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:54 AM EST
Particularly Disappointed in the Minutia
Mark of Minute Particulars has ceased to return my email since the war in Iraq began, giving me the sense that our amicable relationship (virtual though it was) may have tapered off. Therefore, I'll be a little more candid — which is to say impolitic — than I might otherwise be regarding his response to my response (among others) to some moral obfuscation on his part: I'm very disappointed.
In a post from today, Mark dives into a poorly fitting and much attenuated analogy in order to avoid addressing any actual arguments against him. The overall construction of the post leaves me unable to conclude otherwise than that Mark, as smart as he is, has offered a perfect example of the lengths to which people are willing to go to justify an anti-war stance by finding fault with the war and with those who supported it. The endpoints just don't meet, and it ought to be apparent.
For a quick example of the ends not meeting, consider that Mark apparently believes the following sentences to work toward the same criticism:</
