Thursday, July 31, 2003
Diversity Kills
The whole philosophy behind "diversity" and "tolerance" really does make an ideal case study of the dangers of encouraging skewed or dishonest thinking. Here's Rod Dreher with some specifics:
We [in Dallas] have an incompetent police chief who keeps his job in large part because he's the city's first African-American top cop, and any criticism of him is instantly attacked as racist by what passes for black leadership in this city (this, despite the fact that 42 percent of the homicides in Dallas so far this year have been blacks). We have a city manager form of municipal government, so the mayor is relatively week. The city manager, who could fire the chief in a trice, won't, and because the city manager is Hispanic, an attack on him is ... well, you get the picture (another 42 percent of the homicides this year have been Hispanic). The white establishment doesn't want to rock the boat, and besides, most of them live in enclaves that aren't really hit by crime.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:54 PM EST
The Price of Being Right
Y'know, I don't need this... considering where my interests lie.
I've started handing out the latest Redwood Review, and ironically, I sometimes find myself hoping that people won't explore timshelarts.com further to the point of reading the bulk of my writing. For example, the other day, I handed a copy to an extremely friendly guy at an art gallery who, if I had to bet, I would guess is gay. He asked which pieces I had written, and my first thought was, "I hope he doesn't find my blog."
The point is this: my life would be a lot easier if I didn't hold the views that I do, or at least if I kept them to myself. I can't do that because, well, because I think my views are correct and that the issues on which I hold them are important. I hope the sort of people whom I'd be inclined to respect, but who disagree with me on certain issues such as gay marriage, will understand that it isn't a personal issue that I have with them or a broad-brush condemnation of "people like them." I view the issue in the context that the President expressed yesterday: we are all sinners, and the particular sins of particular groups ought not be seen as overriding their humanity or right to compassion, nor are they so egregious as to overshadow, for me, my own (plentiful) sins.
In fact, if they were so inclined, people who stumble upon my unpopular (in my region and vocation) opinions could read back far enough on this Web site to find that my position has hardened as I've read about the issue and considered its implications beyond my own initial feelings. By the same token, until I've got reason to think otherwise, I'll give people the benefit of the doubt that, out of good will, they will choose the position that they think works out to the net benefit of everybody... if they only look into the question beyond what their philosophical preferences might imply.
Just before I ran to the post office, I read yet another response from Stanley Kurtz to Andrew Sullivan, and it consists centrally of a message that I imagine Kurtz has programmed as a shortcut key on his keyboard: "Andrew Sullivan has not addressed my suggestion that..." This is how it has been for years: Sullivan addresses only what he's got prepared arguments for and addresses suggestions only to the extent that it suits his purposes. In their exchanges, Kurtz has made the same statements over and over again to the extent that one might believe that there are multiple Andrew Sullivans, each requiring the same rhetorical ground to be re-trod.
On the way to the post office, local radio talk host Dan Yorke reminded me why this re-treading is necessary. He was only teasing for a discussion that he intended to start later, but he (a Catholic) obviously disagrees with the Vatican's statements against legitimizing gay relationships. I don't have time to tune in, now, but I've heard Yorke talk about gay marriage before, and his position is similar to Glenn Reynolds's: there are good arguments on both sides, but "I don't see anything wrong with it." Yorke's phrase of choice was, "How does it affect my marriage at all?"
Of course, if you limit your view merely to your own individual marriage, it is much easier to see opposition to gay marriage as your problem. What this points to is the fact that such people don't seem to have really considered the arguments of those who oppose gay marriage. I don't mean this in the sense that they can't possibly have considered it, because they disagree with me. Rather, it isn't possible to honestly consider the social arguments against gay marriage — and not just the handy religious fundamentalist arguments that are about as far as reporters seem inclined to go for the occasional obligatory opposition statement — and honestly restrict your own statement of support for the movement without reference to potential social ramifications.
I'm trying to piece together relatively effective and simple rhetorical points that would move quickly from the initial positions that people tend to take through to where the argument currently stands among those who've paid attention. Needless to say, talk radio may not be the venue for such considered discussion, but maybe when I've got a routine, I won't be so disinclined to take on the burden of preventing the public's lack of consideration from allowing gay marriage to squeeze its way into reality by way of emotional appeal and the court system.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:09 PM EST
Reasonableness as a Fallback Position
It seems that a backlash in the polls and the President's straight-marriage friendly remarks have persuaded Andrew Sullivan that demagogic rhetoric about segregationism and theocracy weren't the way to go in securing what he sees as gay rights. Now he's back to the more reasonable realm of federalism:
Okay, so here's something that I don't support but offer to the president as a suggestion. He wants to reserve marriage to heterosexuals but he doesn't want to hurt, wound or marginalize gay people. I'm prepared to accept that is his genuine position. But it won't be convincing if all he does is back the FMA, as currently worded. How to avoid that nightmare? He could back an alternative amendment that says merely that no state should be forced to recognize the marriages in any other state. That essentially codifies federalism and prevents a nationalization of gay marriage through the courts (a highly unlikely scenario, in my view anyway). And it doesn't tell states what they can and cannot do for their own residents. It doesn't impose a single definition of marriage on the whole country. And it preserves state autonomy. That seems to me a sensible compromise if some kind of amendment looks impossible to stop. It's conservative in the right sense. I, for one, want to see federalism work on this matter. Why? Because I think the experience in one state will reduce the fear and panic elsewhere. But those who predict disaster also have a chance to prove their case. Isn't that the way this country is supposed to work?
Put aside the fact that Sullivan admits, beforehand, that he himself does not support this "sensible compromise" (i.e., it would be damage control). I believe that this whole issue strikes at the core of what we want our society to be, and I'm very sympathetic to the argument that the states ought to be allowed a maximum of self-determination in that respect. So, let's take Sullivan's suggestion seriously. Here's the new amendment:
No state may be forced to recognize the marriages in any other state.
Surely Mr. Sullivan doesn't want to open the door for a return of miscegenation, and it seems to be overkill to uproot a tradition of full faith and credit that is already well established within the United States, so perhaps we ought to specify exactly what it is that the amendment would be driving at (particularly considering Sullivan's previously expressed concerns about amendments that allow for broad interpretation), including language that closes the back-door of polygamy:
No state may be forced to recognize marriages in any other state that do not involve the union of a man and a woman.
Well, perhaps we're working our way toward compromise, but this new amendment doesn't offer any guidance as to what it would mean for a state to "be forced" to recognize particular marriages. This would tie the hands of the federal government, presumably, but what about, say, an Arkansas judge taking it upon himself to declare, from within his state, that Arkansas must recognize gay marriages in Massachusetts? Surely, all of his appeals to the fairness of the American people and his assertion that "The two states contemplating equal marriage rights both have majorities in support of the move" suggest that Sullivan is amenable to the argument that the people in each state — deciding, in the spirit of federalism, what they want their society to be — oughtn't have new forms of marriage forced upon them by a state judicial oligarchy. After all, why rely on judicial activism based on public polls when we can just put such issues to democratic or representative votes? So, here's where we are, taking the obvious step of disallowing judges to invent might-as-well-be-marriages:
No state shall be required to recognize marriages performed in any other state that do not involve the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
There you go. That looks like a reasonable compromise. Unfortunately, I don't think that those who would propose such an amendment would gain the support of the portion of the American citizenry that deems homosexual marriage unacceptable anywhere within the United States. After all, some fault the current language of the Federal Marriage Amendment for allowing marriage-like arrangements. Certainly, there is reason to suspect that what the new language would gain in support by leaving open the possibility of gay marriage for individual states will not come near making up for the support that the very same opening will lose. Sullivan wouldn't be proposing that the President put forward a compromise that is certain to fail (to Sullivan's advantage) would he?
Perhaps Jonah Goldberg should write a column suggesting that homosexual activists should have pushed for civil unions, instead of full marriage, when they had a chance, but now must content themselves with appealing to the people and legislatures of each individual state to define a new legal arrangement that would apply to relationships that are not, and cannot be, considered marriage, as it has been defined in our culture as far back and broadly as it is reasonable to look.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:47 PM EST
Getting Back Three Hours of Your Life
Y'know, back in the early spring, I waited nearly three hours to see a doctor. I just got fed up and stormed out, but maybe I should have sued, at least to get back the monetary value of my time.
Then again, I rather suspect that rampant litigation has something to do with the doctor market being such that they can get away with doing that to their clients.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:03 AM EST
The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week
The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "Recollections of Switzerland," by Chistine L. Mullen.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:03 AM EST
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Do Celebs Believe in God?
Of course, one should look anywhere but to celebrities for insights into the existence of God. However, one can look to them for insights into people's handling of belief in God. Two celebrities' responses to the question, "Is there a God?," deserve comment:
The Onion: Is there a God?
Winona Ryder: Is there a God?
O: Yes, does God exist?
WR: Um, I don't know. I really don't know. I hate to be so boring, but I don't know.
I suppose it was good of Winona to be so honest, and I'd like to think that her not knowing is not because she's been so distracted by things of this world that she hasn't gotten around to considering God. However, it is telling that her not knowing is of concern to her simply because it makes her boring. It's all about fashionable statements. Actually, it's all about the celebrity and then about the statement.
George Carlin, in contrast, is a bit more interesting:
The Onion: Is there a God?
George Carlin: No. No, there's no God, but there might be some sort of an organizing intelligence, and I think to understand it is way beyond our ability. It's certainly not a judgmental entity. It's certainly not paternalistic and all these qualities that have been attributed to God. It's probably a dispassionate... That's why I say, "Suppose He doesn't give a shit? Suppose there is a God but He just doesn't give a shit?" That's the kind of thing that might be at work.
What I love about George's answer is that it points to the two flaws that seem increasingly difficult to overcome in honestly assessing reality as God-less: the necessity for intelligence in it all, and its being beyond our ability to fully comprehend. So, the initial response is "no," but then there's a, "well, there could be something, but I don't want to believe that it's God as people with whom I've disagreed my whole life might define Him."
One might also wonder how George can be so certain about whether God is "judgmental" if He is "way beyond our ability" to understand. I often wonder whether the question that most frightens people like George Carlin is, "Suppose He does give a shit?"
(via Mark Shea)
ADDENDUM:
I should note that I realize that the Onion is satire, and that I spent a full day debating whether to address the above-linked page seriously. This section, however, does not strike me as satire, particularly considering that the great majority of the celebrities' responses are neither funny nor satirically revealing of their character traits. Here's what the Web site's FAQ section has to say about the A.V. department from which the above was taken:What is The Onion A.V. Club, and how does it relate to The Onion?
This division of The Onion features Q&A interviews with entertainers, essays, and reviews of movies, music, and books, as well as the Savage Love column and the comic strips Red Meat and Pathetic Geek Stories.I've emailed for clarification, but it seems as if the purpose of this section of the paper is to present legitimate, if quirky, interviews and reviews. At any rate, the points that I've made are such that they would apply to certain actual people, even if these specific quotes turn out to be fake.
ADDENDUM II:
Stephen Thompson, editor of the Onion A.V. Club, informs me, "Everything in the A.V. Club is real."... unless his email was satire as well...
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:59 PM EST
No Essays, Just Slogans
Sorry. I've done my morning scan of potential topics, even starting and deleting one post, but just cannot get in the frame of mind to write about anything that I've found. I did, however, find inspiration for a slogan among Lane Core's multiple posts about fallacious reportage at the New York Times:
The War Against Error
It'd make a good blog name, too, I think.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:15 AM EST
Not a Bright Morning Opener
What a sad story:
AT 3.30pm each day George wanders a kilometre from home in search of a miracle.
The loyal jack russell terrier waits at the bus stop where he used to meet his owner Amity Hartnett-Campbell after school, before making the return trip alone.
The sad daily journey has become a ritual for the grieving pet since Amity was killed in a car crash four months ago.
Everything can change in an instant. God accept her soul.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:48 AM EST
The Redwood Review Poem of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:48 AM EST
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
We'll See Whether We Can Believe It
Well, as much as I dislike predictable outcomes, here's my order for the final five comedians on Last Comic Standing:
Bottom of the heap: Dat Phan. I really don't think this is anything personal; he just went and did the my-mother-has-a-funny-accent routine. His delivery was better than I've seen it, but after the first scrunchy face, I find myself telling the television, "We get it! You're Vietnamese!"
Fourth: Tess. Her schtick seemed a little forced and rehearsed at times, but that thong joke was just great, and the strange blend of tramp and innocent cutie is unique and offers a lot of rich territory.
In the middle: Rich Vos. I liked Rich throughout the season, and I like his comedic style. I just think this wasn't his forum. I think he might be one of those comics who need a little time to unravel their sets. The five minute snippet just didn't give him time to build up to his punchlines. I think he'd be a good host of some show or a good character on a sitcom.
Runner up: Cory. She's just a classically funny lady. I thought some of her punchlines either needed more punch or better buildup, but her delivery is strong and her material is easy to relate to. (Anybody notice that her hands were shaking?)
The official winner: Ralphie May. What can I say? He had me laughing very hard. He's got presence, timing, priceless expressions, and good material. And I was pleasantly surprised by his politics. (Not that that should necessarily matter for comedy...)
The real winner: Dave Mordal. Dave covered every base. He was good extemporaneously during the show, his material was fantastic and original yet true to life, his delivery was professional, his persona was interesting, and he didn't play down to his audience. I still think it ultimately won't matter that he lost on this show.
ADDENDUM (08/06/03):
I've noticed this old post getting a number of hits now that Dat Phan has won the whole shebang. For thoughts on that... umm... turn of events, click here.3 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:18 PM EST
Songs You Should Know 07/29/03
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Crazy Child" by me.
"Crazy Child" Justin Katz, Pop/Rock
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:47 PM EST
Another "Army of God"... Great!
No really: great:
''If I have any information about Fedayeen or Saddam's followers, I must tell them. We must make friends with the Americans. I see them as angels. I call them God's army,'' said Sajida, a Shi'ite Muslim who says her two brothers were killed by Saddam.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:25 PM EST
If I Start Singing Showtunes, You'll Know Why
I am extremely busy... and extremely tired. That's not a good combination, although any posts that I do make may have that a delirious quality that might not be unrewarding.
As my first act of probably-not-as-funny-as-I-think silliness, I give you my new slogan: "The hardest working man with no business."
Yeah, I know.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:22 PM EST
Delusion as It Always Has Been
In response to my column this week, Randy Barnett pointed me to his wrap up of his guest-blogging adventure, which further addresses the increasingly disconnected worldview of the Left.
For the most part, I don't think anything that he writes there contradicts what I've written. The fact that New Media has risen to the challenge of responding to the homogenous voice of the mainstream is certainly an indication that society as a whole is pulling back from the leftward madness. I begin to differ, however, to the extent that Barnett seems to imply that the problems exist in some significant proportion on both sides of the political line and that they have always existed thus, merely toning down or raising their rhetoric given current reality. To be sure, delusion is not a partisan playmate, but one ought not dismiss the reality that society does — people do — shift across the spectrum. It isn't a wave in which everybody stands and sits but remains in their places.
Consider this, which he quotes from ritingonthewall's JB:
the radical left bugs me more than before, but i think that's because they're more vocal about their views. chomsky is easy to dismiss when he and his disciples sit down and shut up, but that doesn't mean that the basic set of views isn't there.
likewise, the really crazy right is pretty quiet right now as things are going at least sort of well. they have less to complain about, not least of which because the party that they're generally identified with now has a wider platform. also because they have more to lose for shooting off their mouths.
there's also the status quo dynamic. the right (not the far right as far as i'm concerned) is in power. the left isn't. thus, compared to the status quo, the left is further left. along with the blockbuster theory at asymmetrical information on in-power versus out-of-power factions, it isn't hard to construct a discursive milieu wherein the left seems way, way further out than it was, say, four years ago.
but that doesn't mean things are "objectively" all that different.
This passage, I'd argue, was written from within a "social construction" in which two sides are battling on pretty much equal terms, and the only rational position is between them. This, to possibly coin a phrase, is faux moderatism, and peels with just a little perspective. Chomsky, for example, is not as easy to dismiss as JB would have us believe. He is, after all, a famous "scholar." A high-profile academic. There is no correlation for such a position on the right. The University is entirely dominated by liberals, most of them far to the left of middle.
Chomsky, Said, whomever... they've never shut up, and it is only because their ideas are influential — in the case of Said, arguably affecting foreign policy in a Big Picture way — that conservatives, driven into think tanks and alternative media, have found it necessary to address them. JB is correct in saying that the masses' not paying attention to Chomsky et al. "doesn't mean that the basic set of views isn't there," but only in a limited historical sense. The views are, actually, relatively new, historically speaking, and are now reaching such a stark lunacy, particularly in context of world events, that others are beginning to recoil. As the others recoil, the delusions of the Chomskyites will likely increase in intensity (partly to account for their not being treated as the sages that they know themselves to be).
But the point returns to this: where are the crazy rightists whom JB would place in opposition to Chomsky? Not in academia. Not in the media. Not in Hollywood. Not in wherever it is that writer-types hang out. How, then, can it be said that they (we?) have quieted down, when they didn't have a megaphone to begin with? Here's one possibility: the Leftists sought out "crazy rightists" for the purpose of presenting them as representatives of the right. In that sense, the "crazy right" was partially a component of the liberal social construction (witness the Berkeley study about conservatives that JB also addresses).
As for the Left just seeming more Left because the government has moved right, well, there are apparently moderate Democrats who don't happen to think that's the case:
"The Democratic Party is at risk of being taken over from the far left," U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, the group's chairman, told reporters at a two-day DLC convention here.
Back to Randy's (and my) suggestion: society is pulling right, exposing the kooks on the left, who are in turn retreating farther left. It isn't that the Left, broadly speaking, hasn't moved; it has. Things are objectively "all that different." The government may be more conservative, and conservatives may have more outlets for discourse, but the mainstream suppliers of information are still "asymmetrical." In fact, the reality of a conservative government and of an international stage that currently acts as a quick-result testing ground for the political ideas of both sides have contributed directly to the requirement among those who would perpetuate the Leftist myths to distort reality.
Under the influence of JB, Barnett moderates himself as if out of sight of his original suggestion:
This very new contrast between the two media may account for the perception that the Left is doing this more (when they really are not). The new media is available as a contrast and is itself identifying more instances of this happening on the Left and in the old media.
In his original post, Barnett's point was that the Left is more obviously making facts fit their view and shifting those facts as necessary to fit their social construction. In this light, what I've just quoted from his subsequent post misses the point: the New Media is forcing the Left to tell one lie to cover the other, so to speak. Without the New Media — and the broader shift of society — the lies on top of lies wouldn't have been necessary because the first lies would have stuck; the flip-flops would not have just been less obvious, they would not have been made because the flip would have gone unchallenged at any significant level of visibility.
As I've said before, clarity and confidence have been made to seem the enemies of truth. And this factor has so permeated our society that taking that view is often an instinctive reaction, particularly among those who strive to stand in the middle.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:40 AM EST
Monday, July 28, 2003
What Can Be Hidden
Well, they aren't the weapons we want to be digging up:
U.S. soldiers discovered 40 anti-tank mines, dozens of mortar rounds and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder on Monday buried in Saddam Hussein's hometown - enough for a month of attacks on U.S. troops. ...
U.S. soldiers dug up the freshly buried weapons outside an abandoned building that once belonged to Saddam's Fedayeen militia in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown and power base in which he still enjoys widespread support.
But it's great that we found them. What strikes me with this news is that this is how our enemies handle weapons to which they want immediate access while on the run. Considering the even more secretive nature of the weapons that we really want to find as well as the likelihood that they were hidden by a regime still in power, this find gives some indication of what we face in that search.
So that's what strikes me about this news. What strikes me about the way in which it is presented is the large five-paragraph serving of bad news that the Associated Press inserted where I've put the ellipsis in my quotation. Can't have readers getting too optimistic, now can we?
On the other hand, radical Iraqi militants are helping to lighten the reportage by choosing names that obviously skipped a round or two of focus groups and test marketing: "Jihad Salafi Group." Salafi? That sounds like an excursion to view Italian meats in the wild.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:06 PM EST
Giving Everybody Candy
One reason that I've been light on the blogging today is that I'm in the process of reading Stanley Kurtz's comprehensive (long) exploration of the slippery slope portion of the argument against gay marriage. I'm reading it interspersed with the other things that I have to do (you know, like work), so I haven't got anything to say in response to the article as a whole.
However, one statement that Kurtz makes toward the beginning, that is probably in response to an argument that I've seen before and am beginning to question, is, "To consider what comes after gay marriage is not to say that gay marriage itself poses no danger to the institution of marriage." The objection that this seeks to fend off for the purposes of this particular piece appeared recently in Tom Sylvester's exchange with Law Professor Stephen Clark. "Why are same-sex couples entitled to so little consideration that they can be exploited as social insulation against the 'threat' of group-marriage?" wrote Clark, and Sylvester conceded that it was "an incredibly powerful point."
But was it? Perhaps subsequent to the assumption that gay marriage is an inalienable right, which is an assumption against which many, including me, would argue. But if the push for gay marriage is seen for what it is — a request for a new definition to marriage — then the "powerful point" becomes, at best, "emotionally influential rhetoric." From that perspective, it's similar to a complaint that a third grader might make against a teacher who, sharing her candy with another teacher, refuses to give a piece to the student on the grounds that she would then have to give a piece to everybody in the class. Even if the student in some sense "deserves" a piece of candy, it isn't an affront to his rights that he acts as "insulation" between the relative privileges of teachers and students in that situation.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:39 PM EST
Our Racist Nation
Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the naked racism that is enabled by the doctrine of "multiculturalism."
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:21 AM EST
Just Thinking 07/28/03
My Just Thinking column for this week is "A Social Construction Coming Unglued," about social constructionism and the unraveling of the Left.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:10 AM EST
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Wow, Is It Sunday Night?
Whoa! A whole weekend without a single post. That hasn't happened since I started blogging!
Well, I apologize, if apologies are due. I've been extremely busy helping to rebuild a friend's book, and the 2003 Redwood Reviews came in late on Friday. They came out very well, and now comes the fun part of sending them out into the world. Actually, the whole process of publishing is fun — each stage in its way (some, to be sure, in a tedious way).
Another reason that I haven't posted is that, although I've looked, I haven't found any topics that have overcome the apathy barrier. However, I do have a Just Thinking column in the works, and as soon as I see something worth posting, I'll be sure to do so.
Hope you had a great weekend.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:00 PM EST
Friday, July 25, 2003
Measuring... Something
Although the whole thing isn't online any longer, last July, I wrote an essay in which I suggested:
Perhaps we find it difficult to intertwine morality and mechanics because we have no "scientific" language with which to discuss emotions in the same way we once had no mathematical language with which to discuss the physical universe. We can examine chemicals in the brain, as we can discuss chord structures in music, but these studies cannot make the leap to actually explaining what, how, or why we feel, which is a fluid subject of essences. In short, we are still acting in the emotional dimension similarly to how pre-Newtonian carpenters acted in the physical dimension; they intuited the laws of physics as we now intuit the ethical laws of emotion.
I'm reminded of that idea by an ongoing experiment performed globally by parapsychologists:
Now, imagine the Earth as a brain; humans - perhaps all life - as brain cells; and a network of Random Event Generators (REGs, like high-speed, electronic coin tossers) as electrodes. This is the Global Consciousness Project and it appears to be measuring, well _ something. Begun in 1998, it now involves more than 75 networked computers known as Eggs ("electrogaiagrams") in about 30 countries, including the US, UK (two), Russia, Fiji, Cuba and Romania.
The project grew from experiments by Dr Roger Nelson of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. For over 20 years, researchers at this leading parapsychology institute have been studying the effects of human consciousness on REGs, demonstrating to their satisfaction that individual minds can subtly influence random mechanical processes and create deviations from expected chance results.
Nelson's team claims that periods of widespread attention or concentration correspond to notable fluctuations in the Egg network's data. For example, significant results were recorded after the Turkish earthquakes of August 1999, millennium eve, the 2000 US presidential elections, and September 11 2001, when the GCP network responded in a "powerful and evocative way".
If this experiment were to be revealed as a fraud or anomaly, I'd attribute that failure to a lack of the proper tools or method of measurement rather than scoff at supernaturalists. On the opposite end of the spectrum would be those for whom even further successful and expanded experiments in this area would be proof that there is no God because they could point to the processes whereby the "something" occurs.
It's exciting and, not conversely, comforting to come across entirely new discoveries, new realms of understanding. But we should never expect measurements in the physical reality to address the emotional reality. Entirely as an exercise of imagination, I can foresee these discoveries expanding to the point at which it would be possible to suggest that these effects of "attention or concentration" are a mild version of the force that caused the universe and keeps it running. Even that would not be enough to tell us why or who. The good news is that we don't need cutting-edge science to tell us that.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:05 PM EST
Actual Causal Link Between IVF and Views of Children
Whereas I concentrated, yesterday, on humanity's rights in relation to the individual in the context of IVF, Pia de Solenni directs her focus on children:
Reproductive liberty has come to mean the liberty of parents to determine everything (medically possible) about their child. It means nothing about the rights of that child to be created within the conjugal embrace of loving and committed parents. It means nothing about the rights of the child to be accepted even if she's not perfect. Soon, it might mean that parents can return the child if she isn't up to the specifications they desired (this is not absurd: think of wrongful-birth suits).
Children born any-how deserve our love, and people of any age deserve the respect that they earn. But
the fact that an individual child doesn't lose worth does not translate into a society in which children don't lose worth.No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:44 PM EST
Counting the Differences
This gathering spot for Southern New England bloggers is going to be fun. Today, I "met" David Grenier, whose blog sports advertisements for Dennis Kucinich in '04 as well as Industrial Workers of the World.
David notes the humorous tale of Marc Schultz, who was apparently visited at the bookstore in which he works by some plain-clothes FBI agents because somebody in a nearby coffee shop had reported him as a suspicious character reading suspicious material:
Trippi's partner speaks up: "Any reading material? Papers?" I don't think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: "I'll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that's why we're here, just checking it out. Like I said, there's no problem. We'd just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that."
I thought it was a cute story, the sort about which we do well to chuckle in post-9/11 America, and Mr. Schultz certainly relays it in a manner suggesting that he's had many a good chuckle since it happened. My fellow Rhode Islander David, however, takes the opportunity (sans direct link) to propose turning the humorous tale into a light-hearted game:
So can anyone tell me the difference between our post-9/11 security state and, say, Bolshevist Russia? I mean, aside from the fact that Russians had health care.
Okay... let's see... I've got three differences:
One: Not only was Atlanta freelance writer Marc Schultz not imprisoned or executed, but he managed to sell his account — complete with a picture — to "the second-most broadly distributed newspaper in Georgia" (circulation: 140,000).
Two: A global clandestine organization largely populated by young, swarthy, often-bearded men recently "visited" thousands of people at their place of business and murdered 3,000 of them.
Three: Socialists liked Bolshevist Russia (healthcare!).
Oh, yes. Mingling with my fellow Rhode Island bloggers is going to be a whole lot of fun.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:33 AM EST
The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:22 AM EST
Thursday, July 24, 2003
"But Lukewarm Water Doesn't Kill a Frog..."
Eugene Volokh has added two posts on the topic of Leon Kass and IVF. In the first one he touches on something that I'd intended to address from an email that he'd sent me; this is from the post:
No-one, to my knowledge, views [IVF] children as less than human, or differently human, or having a different relation to us than naturally born children. No-one, to my knowledge, views humanness any differently because IVF-born people exist. Next time you talk to someone, imagine that he was born by IVF. Would it remotely matter to your evaluation of his worth, his personality, or anything else that he was conceived in vitro rather than in utero? What possible difference could that make to how we should treat him? And if it makes no difference, then what possible difference does his existence make to our understanding of our humanness?
Well, a grandparent does not view his grandchild as less than or differently human just because the child was born to unmarried teenage parents. That doesn't mean that the births of such children ought to be considered advisable behavior, and making it so would have broad implications for how we see society. I realize that this comparison is extremely limited, but what it gets at is that acceptance of the person born, by no fault of his own, under different circumstances than usual is not an indication that thorough acceptance of that method of birth doesn't affect our view of society and, extended, our view of humanity.
In fact, I'd argue that the acceptance of IVF children is, itself, an indication of our changed view of humanity: we've broadened it to include children not conceived in the womb. Only if we did consider IVF children to be less than human would our conception of "human" have remained unchanged. Now, it is quite another discussion whether this change was significant and, if so, worthwhile, and into that discussion would come such factors as killed and frozen embryos as well as the happiness of infertile couples. This is where Volokh could place his argument that he knows "of absolutely no evidence that IVF played any role" in other social trends, and where others could suggest that he also has no evidence that they did not.
His second post on the issue deals more directly with my belief that IVF expanded the definition of "human" to include those not conceived in the womb. Here's Volokh:
A correspondent writes that, though IVF-born people are clearly fully human, "The prior question of what it means to be a human -- formerly only possible through the physical union of a man and a woman -- is deeply implicated by all assisted reproductive technologies."
That just makes no sense to me; how could "what it means to be a human" possibly be affected by the location of the conception? First, as I understand it, it has always been possible to impregnate a woman by injecting sperm into her -- it doesn't require any advanced technology. I'm not sure whether a turkey baster would literally do the job, but I am pretty sure that it doesn't require vastly sophisticated tools.
Second, what would we say about an argument criticizing Caesarean sections (not just their use in a particular case, but their availability more generally), as follows: "The prior question of what it means to be a human -- formerly only possible through vaginal delivery -- is deeply implicated by all assisted delivery technologies"?
His choice of comparison suggests that Mr. Volokh doesn't see the problem with this for the reason that he's standing on it. Each stage of this progression involves a slightly different question, but he treats them as interchangeable. In a strict sense, adding Caesarean section birth to the only other way in which childbirth can happen changes something that all living human beings had had in common before that time. Similarly, turkey-baster conception would remove the common factor that all human beings were born through sex. These two examples both could be seen as having huge significance in matters of religion; they also affect our social view of the process of creating children (e.g., the emotional connection obviated by turkey basters and the added weight that the pain of childbirth gives to the decision to conceive). All things considered, however, I think you'd be hard pressed, as Mr. Volokh intimates, to find somebody who would prefer dead babies and mothers to whatever limited shift is involved in allowing non-vaginal birth.
However, one factor that ought to be considered as included in that limited shift is the ways in which it affects society's view of humanity. For example, to the extent that these practices prepared the way for IVF, they contributed to whatever wrong is represented by the new innovation. IVF, in its turn, has removed the common quality that all human beings were conceived within the womb. When I persisted, via email, with Mr. Volokh, asking what, exactly, he would accept as evidence that Leon Kass was right about IVF, he wrote back that Kass "could point to absolutely any actual causal link between IVF and absolutely any change in people's attitudes towards life, humanity, ancestors, descendants, etc." As I wrote in the previous post, and as I'll explain now, this "actual causal link" is prima facie.
It is certainly reasonable — perhaps ultimately correct — to suggest that removing "conceived within the mother's womb" from our generally held understanding of what it means to "be human" brought benefits to certain parents (and, by extension, the children who never would have been born) that outweigh the costs. But among these costs would be the fact that IVF has obviously — as made apparent by their direct linkage by Bova and Volokh — had an effect on our willingness to consider removing born of two parents from the definition of humanity in order to accept cloning.
After making the Caesarean section comparison Mr. Volokh states:
Our third, more detailed, argument would be "What it means to be a human depends on what people are like, how they act, what they think, and what their genetic endowment is, but not on whether they entered the world through a vagina or through an incision in the abdomen."
On the social scale at which Kass was addressing IVF and now addresses cloning, this third argument does not just apply to the child born, and focusing on that child is, to my mind, the central deception of proponents of the ever more socially significant "progress" of science. As a point of fact, IVF and even Caesarean sections have changed how we act, what we think, and what we are like. Kass's point was that changes to the process of conception would affect our view of humanity, not our view of an individual human.
This, however, is not an underlying problem of which Mr. Volokh is necessarily aware; he just rejects the claim that humanity has a right to dictate what humans can do to themselves (and, ostensibly, their children). The fact is that Mr. Volokh thinks the breeding of "super-humans" would be "wonderful." To be fair, his post was made too quickly to permit an exploration of what would be allowable in this direction, but if he's willing to allow genetically enhanced intelligence as a progression of thought that begins with IVF, I don't see what basis he would have for giving one's children wings... or fangs.
When Volokh insists that the "big caveate" for such steps would be that "they don't have unfortunate side effects," he clearly means side effects for the individual child. What he does not address — almost explicitly — are the unfortunate side effects for society and for humanity. Unarguably, that range of side effects cannot be comprehended, and my central question for those who take Mr. Volokh's position is: what gives them the right to make decisions for themselves as individuals that have unknowable consequences for all of us and for all of our descendents... ever.
I mean absolutely no disrespect — quite the contrary — when I suggest that somebody with Eugene Volokh's biography is likely to see the results of the social policy that he advocates in a much different light than the average person. The challenge for the rest of us is not to let the intellectual elite continue to use a narrow focus on the specific step that we face and an outright denial of our legitimate claims on them as individuals to persuade us further down this path on which they've such a tremendous advantage
ADDENDUM:
It didn't fit well within the flow of the argument, but I do want to note that, in my view, the simple fact of killed and frozen embryos is an insurmountable cost to IVF and an "unintended consequence" that, of itself, has directly contributed to lowered value of human life.1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:10 PM EST
Boiling the Frog on the Road to Hell
If I were one to believe that there's more to reality than a materialist view permits — and I am such a one — I might be inclined to think that something's going at this time in history to connect a bunch of seemingly disparate issues. Unfortunately, using the same analogies for all might come to sound more like reaction than thoughful response. So, although it's applicable, since I've already used the boiling the frog analogy today, I'll come up with something else. (It's extemporaneous, so forgive its cutesieness.)
Three guys are tied together at the Crossroads. One, who is wearing a sweater, wants to go north, arguing that it's the road to Heaven. Another, in a t-shirt, wants to go south, arguing that it's the way to Betterhereandnow. They decide that the third companion, in a long-sleaved button-down shirt, will decide between their arguments. At the outset, the Button Down suggests that they walk to the next intersection in the direction that is supposedly toward Betterhereandnow, despite Mr. Sweater's warnings that it is, in actuality, the road to Hell. As they walk, Mr. Sweater begins to complain of the heat, and by the time they get to the next intersection, Button Down has to admit that it is considerably warmer and suggests that they stop to discuss which way to turn. Arguing to continue on the same path, T. Shirt says, "Mr. Sweater gave all kinds of dire warnings at the Crossroads, and this is obviously not Hell. Why should we listen to him now?"
Now the context for this parable-on-the-fly. Noting the 25th birthday of the first test-tube baby (pictured here, although the article's not in English), Ben Bova writes:
Scientific American quoted Leon Kass, a biologist at the University of Chicago, who warned in 1978 that "the idea of humanness and of our human life and the meaning of our embodiment and our relation to ancestors and descendants" were at risk because of the first test-tube baby.
Fast forward to 2003. Test-tube babies are commonplace and the world hasn't self-destructed. But now people are pointing quaking fingers at the idea of cloning human beings.
"Cloning threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next. It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will." Who said that? The self-same Leon Kass.
The point is that every new capability in biology — particularly a new capability that deals with the creation of children — has been proclaimed to be wrong, evil or immoral by people who fear change. Yet today we live longer, healthier lives than any preceding generation of human beings.
To this, Eugene Volokh adds: "Indeed." Glenn Reynolds says a little more:
Leon Kass's fears about in vitro fertilization didn't exactly pan out. So why are we listening to him now on cloning?
Well, "we" aren't. But the White House, sadly, is.
Unless Professor Reynolds is referring to some unquoted statements, I'd like to know how Kass's "fears" have not panned out or — more correctly — are not in the process of panning out? This is prima facie territory; we're talking about cloning! How does that not represent a further step toward changing "the idea of humanness and of our human life and the meaning of our embodiment and our relation to ancestors and descendants"? Sure, Louise Brown is not a 25-year-old anti-Christ, but consider some of the issues that have popped up in society during her lifetime: partial-birth abortion; physician assisted suicide; cloning; Peter Singer.
One could argue (if one could find anybody to listen) that if a particular social trend does in fact end up harming society, everybody who ever warned against the trend, at any stage, has been proven correct — just too late, unfortunately. I don't believe that this is entirely true, inasmuch as taking a wrong road toward Heaven (to keep with my parable) can make temporarily heading back in the general direction of Hell advisable. However, to argue for continuation of a trend on the basis that a particular stage didn't bring society all the way to the forewarned destination is not an argument at all.
As the battle over cloning gets underway, I'd like to know for the record: do Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds support reproductive cloning? Will they support designer babies, when it comes to that? Will they support the growth of clones into which individuals can transfer their own brains? Will they support the generational transformation of families of particular lineage with sufficient resources into a super race? A super species? This may seem like the stuff of science fiction, now, but I'd like to know where people stand so that I'll be better able assess their positions when they point to Leon Kass circa 2003 as an example of the mistaken warnings of the past.
I guess what I'm asking comes down to this: what would be enough to convince Bova, Volokh, and Reynolds that Kass was not laughably wrong?
ADDENDUM:
While I'm on the topic, I thought I'd also note Bova's assertion that "Even the test-tube babies are getting along quite well, thank you."I assume he's not referring, here, to the 400,000 frozen embryos or the IVF children with various syndromes.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:27 PM EST
In Their Own World; Intellectual Conceit
In a post about campus conservatives, Erin O'Connor mentions something that seems to relate to all of the various issues involving people living in their socially constructed worlds, defining their own ideology as truth, and presenting falsehood as fact. O'Connor quotes from a Philadelphia Enquirer article that includes the tale of one college girl's receipt of an F on a paper that took the anti–affirmative action position and writes the following:
I would lay money on how this went: the professor sees himself not as an ideologue, but as one whose job it is to help students learn to see beyond their prejudices and unexamined assumptions. He does not see himself as particularly political, but rather as one whose clear thinking on questions of power, discourse, oppression, and opportunity has led him to the one right conclusion on the affirmative action issue. Thus, when students like Catherine Carre write essays defending positions he finds abhorrent, he can fail them not for having bad politics (he would never do that), but for being unable to think logically and write clearly. This is how invidiously the politically one-sided academy works. In the absence of balance, professors come to view their opinions as truth, they begin to feel free to penalize students who think differently than they, and they are able to fool themselves into believing that what they are doing is teaching those students to think, when what they are really doing is teaching them that in order to get an A, they must think--or appear to think--like the person who is giving the grade.
During my experience with higher education, I certainly came across the attitude that my thinking or writing must be off because my conclusion was wrong (in the professor's or admission board's view). The real danger is that this approach to "truth" among academics appears to be expanding into areas that have more direct implications for society than, say, 19th century American literature, such as psychology... and beyond.
I guess the question is whether the professors will be capable of the self-criticism necessary to observe what they've been doing or will sink further into the reality of their own creation. Actually, that's the question that faces just about all of us.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:29 PM EST
Even Its Reporters Don't Believe Reuters
If the media had any inclination to treat itself with anything even remotely resembling its proclivities for scandals and controversy in other parts of the public sphere, this would quickly be investigated:
This is from a story that Reuters news service ran this week with my byline:
"Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday . . . Media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters."
Got problems with that?
I do, especially since I didn't write it.
Unbelievable stuff, and I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that one reason competing news agencies don't investigate each other is that they're all guilty of similar indiscretions. Well here's my memo to the mainstream media: Keep it up, and in the very near future, nobody is going to believe a single thing you say.
I sincerely hope that they don't bring down freedom of expression and the free flow of information when they fall.
(Both Tim Blair and Lane Core beat me to this one. Oh, and yes, this post was written by the below-credited Justin Katz on this day July 24, 2003.)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:32 PM EST
Prayer vs. Perversity
Noting that the most often cited offense of John Ashcroft is that he not only allows, but encourages prayer in his office, Jonah Goldberg offers up a great arrow to put in your rhetorical quiver:
After all, when Bill Clinton was defiling an intern -- and vice versa -- the standard mantra from the left was "Who does it hurt?" Well, if you think consensual sex between an intern and the President doesn't hurt anybody I need to know why you think consensual prayer hurts people.
Prayer: the last objectionable private activity.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:20 PM EST
Hunter on a Different Planet
I've been saving a guest post on Glenn Reynolds's MSNBC blog by Randy Barnett for the column that I'm writing for next Monday, but I've been inspired to point out something specific that relates to it. Barnett writes:
But what I am now coming to appreciate is that increasing numbers of persons on the Left create in their minds a false world in which to live -- a world that better suits their preconceptions. They are not content to disagree with the goals of their opposition or about predictions of future policy results. They must make up facts about the world that fit their theories -- like the "homeless" crisis that immediately vanished when Clinton took office.
I couldn't help but think of this when Shiela Lennon linked with great approbation to a bit of dementia by Hunter S. Thompson:
The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.
Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.
The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.
As is so often said on the right: you cannot parody these people. They live in a parody.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:16 PM EST
What's to Be Expected in the Culture War
I spotted this letter by Benjamin Thorp of Providence, RI, in the Providence Journal, and although it doesn't relate to anything that I had to say, today, I wanted to offer my "hear, hear."
Benjamin's main complaint is about the paper's biased coverage of issues having to do with homosexuality. Indeed: the paper's glossy, idealized coverage of the gay marriage debate (not that their reportage indicated that there's really anything to debate) back in October 2002 played a role in pushing me toward my current hard-line position. This time, the issue at hand is a local Boy Scout troop that's bucking the organization's policies on homosexuals. The Projo, as is to be expected, sides with the troop.
Did I say, "as is to be expected"? Well, as Benjamin points out, somebody not familiar with the twists and turns of the culture war might not think so:
Of course, most homosexual men are not child abusers, but according to a recent study published by the Family Research Council, statistics show that homosexual men, who represent less than 3 percent of the adult-male population, commit one-third or more of the cases of child sexual molestation. For those who can't do the math, that means that gay men are at least 10 times as likely to abuse children as the rest of the male population -- an alarming statistic. While policies that exclude certain groups can seem unfair, it is sometimes necessary to have such policies for serious reasons, such as the protection of children.
It is amazing to me that a newspaper that for months plastered its front pages with the child-sexual-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church would run a story that is thinly veiled advocacy of the idea of homosexual men spending the night in close quarters with young boys.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:04 PM EST
Celebrity Profiles
I'm not quite sure what position to take with this:
The Chicago Police Department apologized Tuesday for issuing a community alert saying a suspect wanted for a series of sexual assaults in Wicker Park resembled the entertainer Ice Cube, prompting a Chicago TV station to use a video of the rapper when it reported the story Monday night.
"We acknowledge the information should not have been in the alert," police spokesman Dave Bayless said of the reference to Ice Cube. "We took immediate corrective action. We apologized to Ice Cube for what was an honest mistake and came with no ill intent."
I can understand not wanting one's name to be brought into a bad story with which it is not connected in any substantive way. But on the other hand, Ice Cube has a familiar face (that's why he's called a "celebrity"), and if a wanted criminal looks like him, it seems foolish for the police not to alert the community in a way that they'll understand. When I was a kid, I spotted somebody after a bit of vandalism, and the local police showed me their book o' sketches. I remember thinking that a number of the sketches looked like celebrities. If it will help to catch a criminal as well as to make citizens aware of what to look for, why not take the most direct route?
Indeed, it seems as if it would narrow the range of people adversely affected by a description (black, medium height, medium build) down to just people who look like Ice Cube. Ice Cube isn't really going to suffer by the fact that he shares some features with a criminal, and to the extent that he does, it's attributable to the emphasis that the local TV news station placed on that aspect of the story. And this from a spokesman for the rapper/actor is almost laughable:
"This is an unfortunate and hurtful situation for Ice Cube," Labov said. "That his good name ever came in association with the events currently taking place in Chicago's Wicker Park area is damaging to Ice Cube as a father, husband and artist."
Has Labov ever read any of his client's lyrics? (To be fair, on a relative scale, Ice Cube isn't bad, but that relative scale is way off on one side of the objective one.)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:50 PM EST
Bush's Limb and the Boiling Frog
I generally agree with conservatives who take the relatively optimistic view that liberals and Democrats are currently swinging hand-over-hand out onto a limb that may not even be connected to the tree. However, in the must-read column for this week, George Will reminds us that President Bush is crawling out onto a limb of his own — a thick one, but still apt to break if he puts too much strain on it:
This is the summer of conservatives' discontent. Conservatism has been disoriented by events in the past several weeks. Cumulatively, foreign and domestic developments constitute an identity crisis of conservatism, which is being recast -- and perhaps rendered incoherent.
George W. Bush may be the most conservative person to serve as president since Calvin Coolidge. Yet his presidency is coinciding with, and is in some instances initiating or ratifying, developments disconcerting to four factions within conservatism. ...
What blow will befall conservatives next? Watch the Supreme Court, the composition of which matters more than does the composition of Congress.
For some reason that I haven't figured out, Steinbeck's East of Eden is a big seller this summer (I know, in part, because of all the Google search hits to my site on the word "timshel"). In that book, Steinbeck relates the lesson of the frog and the pot of water: if you throw a frog into water that's already boiling, it'll hop out; however, if you put the frog in and then heat the water, it won't notice the change until it's too late.
This may sound silly (and I've certainly mixed metaphors with this post), but conservatives of the sort that George Will is addressing ought to start considering that it might ultimately be better to throw the country into their opposition's boiling water. Of course, that would be a frightening risk, but President Bush needs to be made to see that it is a risk that we are willing to take.
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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 @ 09:50 AM EST
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
A Story for Wonder and a Wonderful Joke
Jay Nordlinger kicks off today's Impromptus with some words about the recently deceased Cuban-American Salsa singer Celia Cruz. I love this story:
Celia did travel to the Guantanamo Naval Base once, in 1990. Miami congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who accompanied her, remembered: "She walked over to the fence that separates the base from the rest of Cuba and reached through to take soil from the Cuban side. Then something eerie happened. She was performing on this very hot, still day. But all of a sudden, the Cuban flag starts to ripple. There was no wind, and the base's flag that was a few feet away didn't move. But the Cuban flag was waving. We were all astounded."
Read the whole column, but be sure, at the very least, to catch the joke toward the end. (I think it would be better told using a "slap in the face" rather than a "kick in the rear.")
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:47 PM EST
An Honest Question About Psychology and Psychiatry
What is the purpose of psychology? I'd always taken the view that it is primarily to help people to be more content, to overcome unnecessary barriers to their happiness. Of course, there's also the secondary justification of just wanting to know how the human mind works. What I call "secondary" is certainly the more scientific aspect, but studying humanity — studying anything, really — is generally done with an eye toward improving the human condition.
The problem with the degree to which these two mindsets blend in psychology is that it is far easier for people to, and for people to be instructed to, deny problems rather than address them. Somebody with Tourette's Syndrome can only hope to manage the problem, which means a lifetime of effort and occasional slips. How much easier it would be (for that individual) if the entire world just ceased to care about the decorum that the Tourette's sufferer tended to break! This is where psychology, as the area of study that helps society to define and identify what is abnormal, has the dangerous flaw of being a useful, although rather blunt, tool for social engineering.
Psychology has never, as far as I know, been broadly approached with the strong internal definition that it is only meant to observe what is normal and abnormal as an abstract exploration of truth. Rather, research and application are closely linked, meaning that sometimes desired applications will guide the research, usually along ideological or (more coarsely) political lines. Consider:
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
- Fear and aggression
- Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Need for cognitive closure
- Terror managementOf course, this is an extreme example, but as such, it offers a clearer view of the approach taken among the researchers' peers. Having been afforded such a view, it is incumbent upon the general population to look more deeply into the entire psychologically based social engineering project. I'm not going to go into the largest issue that I think indicates that we are already waist-deep in this quicksand, but consider that the American Psychiatric Association has recently debated removing pedophilia from its big book of disorders, while participants in an international psychiatric conference in Australia pondered the delusional aspects of religion.
Will we even be capable of reining this in, at this point? Only if we're honest about which knots need to be tightened, and it is likely that only a very small percentage of the population will find their own lifestyles unaffected by the squeezing.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:43 PM EST
The Redwood Review Poem of the Week
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:48 AM EST
Don't Buy the "Smear Campaign" Hype (Or Be so Sure About Who Is Smearing Whom)
[Note: a whole lot of people are coming to this relatively old post, so I thought I'd point out that I've picked up the topic again with all the latest information (which isn't much more than all the old information) as of September 29 here and here.]
Sheesh! Pop a controversial name like "Valerie Plame" into Google, and you uncover a whole lot of speculation presented as evidence for a lynching. The left half of the Internet is seething that "the White House" "outed" Valerie Plame, who works in some undisclosed capacity within the CIA, as the wife of Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who filed the now-famous report about the Niger-Iraq documents being false. This story will certainly expand, and it's already meeting up with the dubious claims of a "smear campaign" against the reporter who quoted some malcontents in the military. As Drudge subsequently illustrated, in that case, word choice, vague or specific, appears to be of utmost importance, and questionable parsing seems to be the dagger in the dark.
The Minuteman, in the best roundup of the Plame/Wilson epoch that I've seen, observes the web of quotation attributions and careful references to "administration" versus "government" officials. They are obviously being treated as different by all sources involved, and nobody with direct information has disclosed from which group the damning Wilson-Plame-CIA connection came. The Minuteman concludes, for the time being:
My current evaluation - Novak was coy in his original column as to sources. TIME pretty probably had CIA, or at least "government" sources, for info similar to Novak's. Consequently, the headline for this scandal might be "CIA in Disarray - Feud Outs Agent". If fallout from the Iraqi war includes a politicized and divided CIA, that is bad for the nation.
But better for Bush than the alternative, which is that his own aides outed a covert agent and compromised national security in order to punish an opponent.
If you're inclined to go in search of information, don't; there's just not enough out there to justify the time beyond what the Minuteman provides. Based on the little that is known (and I'm sure more is forthcoming), I'm thinking that there are deeper, broader battles being fought than simply the administration versus the Wilsons or even internecine feuding in the CIA. Consider this statement from Wilson to Newsday:
Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.
What strikes me as odd, in that paragraph, is that every bio of Wilson that I've found, such as this one, identifies his wife as "the former Valerie Plame." In that light, neither the release of "her relationship to him" nor the divulgence of her maiden name appears to be sinister. It is the "outing" of her as a CIA agent that is causing the rumbles of accusations, which makes this, from Wilson, peculiar, too:
But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."
So, did the "administration officials" out Plame, or are they significant mostly for claiming that she suggested her husband take the trip? What's the controversy, as it relates to the White House, here? I'm starting to get the sense that a whole lot is going on underneath the surface. As I've said, if it is the White House attempting various smear campaigns, the administration is doing so in about as bumbling a manner as possible, something that it can ill afford in a nation with a hostile press. Of course, another possibility is that somebody is (or somebodies are) trying to damage the President's credibility and cast him as a less trustworthy figure than the American people take him to be.
Hmmm. Let's take another look at Wilson's biography...
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:39 AM EST
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Well, This I CAN Believe
Alright, I thought Dat Phan was much funnier tonight than he's been on any previous show, certainly funnier than Jeff, but I still don't think he should have been there to win tonight.
Dat just doesn't do it for me. I want to like him, and he's got some funny material but... I don't know. It's that intangible something. Maybe he just lost me with the long set making fun of his mother. I just don't find stupid-oriental humor unique or, well, humorous. And even his funny material — like the joke about people making fun of him on the street inadvertently saying actual words — I don't like his delivery. He also stumbles over lines and laughs at the jokes that he's about to tell.
On the other hand, tonight's show was worthwhile if only to remind me why I joined most of the people in the comic house (apparently) in disliking the cowboy. He did racial humor, too — in his case, Texan whites. Maybe it's just race-based jokes of any kind that turn me off. They're facile and don't shake out any real Truth.
At least I'm equal opportunity about it.
ADDENDUM (08/06/03):
I've noticed this old post getting a number of hits now that Dat Phan has won the whole shebang. For thoughts on that... umm... turn of events, click here.2 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:18 PM EST
Songs You Should Know 07/22/03
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Bellbottom Biker Blues" by You.
"Bellbottom Biker Blues" You, Alternative Rock
Stream (HiFi)
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:25 PM EST
A New Game: Identify the Bigot
I'm willing to bet that few people would be able to identify this man by sight:
I'd also be willing to bet that you wouldn't be surprised if I told you he was some Southern segregationist, perhaps a mayor who supports the Klan in his town. Well, he's not, so here's another clue. He wrote the following, on the letterhead of his public office, to a black man from outside of his territory seeking to bring about colorblind government policy within that territory:
The people of [this place] have a simple message to you: go home and stay there. We do not need you stirring up trouble where none exists.
[We] do not take kindly to your ignorant meddling in our affairs. We have no need for itinerant publicity seekers, non-resident troublemakers or self-aggrandizing out-of-state agitators. You have created enough mischief in your own state to last a lifetime.
We reject your "black vs. white" politics that were long ago discarded to the ash heap of history. Your brand of divisive racial politics has no place in [this place], or in our society. So Mr. [Uppity], take your message of hate and fear, division and destruction and leave. Go home and stay there, you're not welcome here.
Figure it out? The picture is, and the letter is from, Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell. The troublemaking black man is Ward Connerly, who issued this much more intelligent response.
If I weren't inclined to feel akin to other people based on beliefs more than on skin color, I'd be pretty darn embarrassed. I wonder if Dingell's fellow Democrats and/or fellow Michiganders will let him know how embarrassed they are... or ought to be.
(via Erin O'Connor)
1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:43 PM EST
Oh Well, Drudge Pulled Back on Revealing the Administration's Wickedness
It's not a good sign when online news services refuse to perpetuate stories about the administration's "smear campaign":
PRESS: Maybe it was another miracle. Last week Lloyd Grove devotes almost half a page in "The Washington Post", a reliable source, to talk about Matt Drudge, reporting that after the ABC News showed a report from Iraq by one of their journalists interviewed some American soldiers who were very critical about having to stay so long in Iraq, and they said -- one of them said Donald Rumsfeld ought to be fired. Lloyd Grove reports that the White House contacted you and informed you that that reporter happened to be Canadian, and he happened to be gay.
DRUDGE: Well...
PRESS: Do you feel you were being used by the White House and why did you let them...
DRUDGE: Oh reporters... (CROSSTALK)
DRUDGE: ... used in Washington, D.C., I don't know. That would be a new phenom that I don't think I would get credit for. I don't know how Lloyd Grove found this out. I certainly didn't tell him. He instant messaged me as we do, and he says, what's this, the White House tipping you off on the background on this reporter, who, again, you're correct, got the interview of the summer so far...
(CROSSTALK)
DRUDGE: ... to actually have enlisted men calling for the resignation of Rumsfeld on camera showing their face unprecedented...
PRESS: And their badges.
DRUDGE: And their badges unprecedented, but we're in a new media era where satellite television is going to change the dynamic of war. I'm not prepared to come on MSNBC and talk about my sources, as I don't -- I would never ask you about your sources. Do White House staffers of all ranks help me in research and tipping off stories, yes, they do. But if you're asking me, if White House...
PRESS: Do you think...
DRUDGE: ... staffers said do you know what, the ABC News guy is gay, go after him. That's not how it happened, and it's not my fault if people in this town conceive it as that...
I guess my biggest problem with the "smear campaign" theory is this: if it were true, it would indicate that the administration has no clue how to perform even the simple hard-ball tactics taught in Politics 101. They would have brought the story more publicity to throw dirt that has tended not to stick in recent years and that the intended "victim" is entirely open about. You have to want to find dirt on the administration to believe that this was some sort of organized attack.
My second biggest problem derives from the huge clue that the rest of the mainstream media didn't grab this dirt (on Bush) and run with it — a pretty good indication that any bad-light-Bush story has shaky foundations.
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:42 PM EST
Monday, July 21, 2003
Extemporanea for the Evening
Josh Claybourn went and brought up Tom Kinkade. Here's my fifty-three cents:
As one who has swung the pretentious artist club pretty hard in his day, I'll take the contrarian view: I love Kinkade. The first jigsaw puzzle that my wife and I put together once upon a time was of a Kinkade painting. His work is like fantasy-novel cover art without the soft-core porn; he is to Norman Rockwell what Tolkien is to Mark Twain.
Does it make me feel? Sure does, and something other than agitation, depression, hatred, or incredulity that somebody makes a living creating modern "art." Does it make me think? Sure does: "How easily we become conditioned to forget aesthetics and the wonder of the border where experience meets imagination." The question of a Kinkade painting is: what's hiding just out of sight? And I'm absolutely sick of self-referential concept art whose only concept, lately, has been better said by Austin Powers: "I'm fooling you and you don't like it."
I'm with the low-brow on this one and hope that we'll find out that Kinkade reads Harry Potter, drives an SUV, and types his letters on a PC. What does it say about the high-brow when a "vapid Hallmark card" is likely to feature better poetry than that produced by a laureate?
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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:53 PM EST
Tipped to the Dirt by Someone on the Internet
Mark Shea alerted me to the evil machinations of the executive branch:
Uh Oh
Not a good sign when the White House engages in this kind of stuff. I hope this was some lower level functionary's Big Idea and am skeptical that Bush would resort to such a tactic.
Mark linked to Josh Claybourn, who defined the "this":
Uniter, not a Divider?
In response to a story on troop morale, which is clearly declining, the White House communications division went after the reporter's sexual orientation and nationality. No word yet on what that had to do with the story, or who approved the personal attack.
Josh got the story from Ryan Reynolds:
White House Smear Campaign
You would hope that things like this aren't true, but you certainly don't put it past professional politicians -- sadly, even those in the White House -- to do it.
Six months ago, Bush looked invincible in 2004. Now ... who knows? The intelligence the administration received on Iraq looks shaky at best -- whether or not the president believes it was "darn good."
So what do we have now? A sputtering economy, a soaring deficit, a continual loss of lives in a country where they're hating us more and more every day after liberating them and, today, word that a member of the communications office is trying to smear media members through homophobia and xenophobia just because they did a story on plummeting troop morale.
My goodness, not the smear campaign! The iniquity! So how was this "personal attack" perpetrated? Well, I'm all prepped to turn to the source material (in our trustworthy, unbiased friend, the Washington Post):
Some folks in the White House were apparently hopping mad when ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman did a story on Tuesday's "World News Tonight" about the plummeting morale of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq.
So angry, in fact, that the next day, a White House operative alerted cyber-gossip Matt Drudge to the fact that Kofman is not only openly gay, he's Canadian.
Yesterday Drudge told us he was unaware of the ABC story until "someone from the White House communications shop tipped me to it" along with a profile of Kofman in the gay-oriented magazine the Advocate. On Wednesday, for 6 hours 38 minutes, the Drudge Report bannered Kofman's widely quoted ABC story -- in which enlisted people questioned the Army's credibility and one irked soldier went on camera to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign -- and linked to the Advocate piece with the understated headline "ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN."
That's right, the White House was so angry — so "hopping mad" — about the ABCNews report that it made a point of bringing it to the attention of Matt Drudge and his six-million-plus daily readers. IMPEACH, IMPEACH! And the bastards even told Drudge where he could find information about the reporter! Sure, maybe they just noticed that the infamous Advocate article is the second hit on Google when you search the reporter's name, but still, the tricky manipulators surely knew that if Drudge looked into the gay Canadian reporter's past, he would find out that Kofman was, indeed, a gay Canadian.
Imagine the evil of the mind that would resort to such appeals to — ominous music — homoxenophobia! And the evil genius of the person who "authorized" this indirect, Internet-based smear-attack-campaign! Now, what would be the word for those who instantly translate vaguely related conversations between Matt Drudge and "someone from the White House communications shop" into dirt on the President? (I'm assuming Drudge didn't mean this White House Communications Office, but the Post article certainly doesn't rule the possibility out.)
ADDENDUM:
I thought I'd clarify that, despite etymological implications, "homoxenophobia" would not be defined as "fear of alien twins."2 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:08 PM EST
The Media Hyperventilating Is Getting Ridiculous!
Is it the media establishment's intention to pick through every declassified page released by the administration to find any single syllable that might help a Democrat win in 2004? If so, The Washington Post certainly seems onboard:
"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.
See, the "Where are the WMD" line didn't stick no matter how many headlines repeated it. Now they're trying to back out of that issue and into another one:
The declassified sections of the NIE were offered by the White House to rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.
I hope everybody is learning to laugh when reading such media rhetoric as, "The result could be to raise more questions." It's almost as if the Post is losing confidence in its own ability to distort reality; it's already "raising more questions," so what's with the "could"? I'd say this prospective controversy won't catch either, for one simple reason: only the mainstream media was paying so little attention to what was really being argued to even be able to pretend that the possibility that a cornered Hussein would resort to WMD terrorism was some sort of top-secret intelligence assessment before the war.
But I'm not even ready to take the Post's summary as accurate:
One of the judgments was that Hussein "appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with convent
