Timshel Arts WWW

Archives

Friday, October 31, 2003

Fourteen for Halloween

Here are some more CDs that I've put on eBay:

The Outfield, "For You"
Dillon O'Brian, Scenes from My Last Confession
Nirvana, "Lithium"
Nirvana, "Come as You Are"
Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Nine Inch Nails, Fixed
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Greatest Hits
Ministry, (Psalm 69)
George Michael, "Fastlove"
George Michael, "Jesus to a Child"
George Michael, "Too Funky"
Meat Puppets, Too High to Die
Richard Marx, Repeat Offender
Mantissa, Mossy God

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:39 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week

The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Battles & Wars," by Zona Douthit.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:54 AM EST

 

Thursday, October 30, 2003

More on URI Anti-Semitism

I promised to keep an eye on the situation at the University of Rhode Island having to do with anti-Semitic graphiti targeting a female student. Although they've apparently caught the culprits, the school administration is still being stingy with the details. This, in particularly, looks suspicious to me:

The University of Rhode Island banned two students from its residence halls in response to the defacing of a dormitory with anti-Semitic symbols and slogans last week.

URI Director of Communications Linda Acciardo said the students were banned for their part in an Oct. 13 incident where a female student returned to campus after visiting home to find religious slurs written on her dorm room door.

University officials declined to release the names of the victim or suspects. ...

Dean of Students Fran Cohen, who would not comment on the case specifically, said the university must determine the suspects' motivation and knowledge before making a final penal decision. She added actions such as these could carry penalties up to and including dismissal from the university.

Until I'm told otherwise, I'm going to guess that the vandals weren't skinheads and/or frat boys. Although I can't recall any specific instances, my sense is that such students haven't benefited from the same anonymity subsequent to their capture, and their "motivation" wouldn't be considered a matter of doubt. Sounds like the ideals of "diversity" have gotten all tangled up with themselves.

But I could be wrong.

1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:20 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week

The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "Recollections of Switzerland," by Chistine L. Mullen.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:09 PM EST

 

A Coincidence, or My Childhood Haunting Me?

Well, last week I mentioned the Mad Magazine parody of Temple of Doom. This week, Sheila Lennon has found a collection of every Mad cover since 1952. "Inbanana Jones and the Temple of Goons" was in issue 250:

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:08 PM EST

 

Education, Meet Derbyshire

John Derbyshire's column today is in blog/diary format. The first and third items, which aren't presented as unrelated, make it clear that the politicization (read, "Marxification") of educational establishments is in serious need of reform. In the first anecdote, Derb does something that is forbidden in modern discourse: he paraphrases a professor's acts too exactly:

We were some way into the arrangements when my friend called me with a piece of news. Apparently a professor of political science at the liberal-arts college had taken strong exception to my NRO column of June 25. If you can't be bothered to read the piece, the gist of it is that a sufficient concentration of open homosexuals in the higher levels of an organization — and I was writing with particular reference to the Episcopal Church — changes the character of that organization, to the degree that heterosexuals feel unwelcome in it... Our poli-sci professor thought this "extreme," and objected to my presence on her campus.

Bear in mind here that I was coming to this college to talk about analytic number theory, not homosexuality or "straight flight." It was not the topic of my address that bothered the lady, but my opinions about unrelated matters... Her position was: "Mr. Derbyshire holds some opinions I consider extreme, and so I do not want him on my campus at all, in any capacity." She would presumably object to me being hired as a janitor on her campus, because of my opinions. [Emphasis in original.]

The other item illustrates the early strategies for making certain worldviews too horrible even to be stated by a non-demon who actually believes them:

Apparently graduates of British high schools can identify quite obscure members of the Hitler regime, while being unable to name a single prime minister or U.S. president, or to tell you which century the Wars of the Roses occurred in. ...

One cannot help but suspect that this has something to do with the fact that the British educational establishment, like our own, is dominated by Lefties, who all hold the peculiar conceit that Hitler was "right-wing," and therefore an ideological ancestor of, say, George W. Bush. Important to show the kiddies where these modern conservatives have their roots, you see. Important to impress on their receptive little minds the fathomless wickedness of the Right.

Unfortunately, Mr. Derbyshire's got it partly wrong, something he illustrates by getting it so right in the second paragraph: the young Brits surely know the name of at least "a single" U.S. president. Heck, they probably even know his middle initial.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:57 PM EST

 

Why's Everybody So Worried About Iraq's Sovereignty?

This, in my not so humble opinion, is the sort of thing that requires palpable backlash:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court will increasingly base its decisions on international law rather than the U.S. Constitution, according to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:44 PM EST

 

Frustrated, but with Substance

Steve is to be commended for introducing something new and substantive to the imminence/preemption debate. Unfortunately, it still falls along that frustrating line. To anchor what follows, here's a paragraph that I made as a comment to this post:

As for "imminent," I've gone over this ad nauseum. There was no imminence. That's why the war was called "pre-emptive." The President never said it was imminent, if you mean to include this among your "mounting evidence of deception." If you mean to bring us back to the pre-war debate, then we're just back in an area of substantive disagreement about what is necessary in a post–September 11 world, an area in which this President decided contrary to your beliefs.

First, the argument that I've won.

I've been saying consistently, lately, that — aside from the naked political hatred — the motivation of the "Bush Lied" mantra is just to restart the pre-war debate, not to reassess it (or prove actual lies) in light of subsequent discoveries. Oh sure, those who repeat the mantra will say that the thus-far-unfound WMDs represent new information, but it's still premature to justify reevaluating the information that we had before the war; I would also point out that evidence of the Iraq–al Qaeda link is apparently to be summarily left out of any reassessment.

Here's Steve now:

The president's supporters have recently been screaming themselves blue in the face saying "The president never said there was an imminent threat!" Well, they don't have to convince me. I never said that he did...

And that's why the pretense for war in Iraq is so very disturbing to those of us who care very deeply about the honor and reputation of this country.

As I've been saying: pre-war debate.

Second, the argument they'll never admit they've lost.

Not everybody will be as inclined as Steve to admit that this point, at least, did not represent deception on the part of the President. Steve links to an academic paper published in February of 2003 (in the heat of the war debate) by Robert Worley. Steve found Mr. Worley's paper through a retired colonel, whom he contacted looking for a military definition of "preemptive"; as Steve writes:

Looking up the nature and definition of preemptive war in confomity with United States Military doctrine is not an easy thing. Until Mr. Bush, America had no preemptive war policy.

I'll address Worley's paper in a moment, but here's the definition that Steve quotes:

preemptive war: initiation of war because an adversary's attack—using existing capability—is believed to be imminent. [emphasis in Worley]

Already, in Steve's comments section, commenter Michael sees this as proof that "Bush Lied":

Hi Steve, excellent detective work! You should inform Josh at Talking Points Memo about this find. He was having a contest about finding the best quote that proves that Bush lead us to believe Saddam was an imminent threat. As you discovered, the very nature of pre-emptive war is based on an imminent threat. Great post!

The only way to believe that this is an instance of deception is to suggest that the general public was aware of obscure military definitions, and so the President played on that acute knowledge to imply something that he actually refuted in his most important speech on the issue of war. Laugh test? Fail.

Last, the argument that only history will resolve.

Let me begin this part by saying that I've used "preemptive" and "preventive" interchangeably. Anybody with the time and desire to skim through a year and a half of my writing about this war will discern that this is so. I'm more concerned with explanation than with terminology, and among the frustrations of my argumentative life has been the degree to which others are willing to dismiss the former because they've managed to twist the latter.

Returning to the meme about presidential deception for a moment, I'd say it's reasonable to assert that the general public is with me on this one. Even being sufficiently pedantic to seek recourse to a dictionary, the relevant definition of "preemptive" is, "marked by the seizing of the initiative" (m-w.com). In other words: hitting them before they hit us.

So, having thus dismissed the idea that the President slyly inserted imminence where he said he had excluded it, let's turn to Worley's paper. The first thing to note about it is that he is clearly against the war, and this paper, published in the heat of the debate, must be seen in that context. Here is a comparison of three terms that Worley offers in his Summary section:

Preventive war, preemptive war, and preemptive strike are different concepts. Preemptive and preventive wars are not types of wars; instead, they describe motives for the timing of war initiation. A preventive war is undertaken when a state sees its relative advantage in decline, sees the inevitability of war, and chooses to initiate the war now while it still has the advantage. History and international law frown upon preventive war, seeing it as a disguise for naked aggression. Preemptive war, on the other hand, involves the initiation of military action because an adversary's attack is believed to be imminent. A preemptive strike is directed against an adversary's capability before it can be used. It is not conducted for purposes of initiating war. (PDF page 7)

The first thing to note is that preventive war is not, by definition, aggressive, as Steve asserts in the title of his post. More important to note is that we have three distinct terms here, two dealing with "war initiation," and one that is not "conducted" for that purpose. This is important because it bears directly on a confusion that appears in Worley's argument dealing with the Iraq war; he never describes circumstances that would justify preemptive war. In fact, in addressing that specific case, he slides right from "preemptive strike" to "preventive war," making the regime change the latter by definition:

The strategic difference between preemptive strike to destroy capability and a preventive war to overthrow the Iraqi government is the level of U.S. and international commitment required afterward.

Existing arms sanctions against Iraq and North Korea may retard but not prevent the acquisition of WMD. Preemptive strike against the capability is a complement to diplomatic and economic efforts. The overthrow of a government must be a last resort. (PDF page 33)

The unstated middle possibility — preemptive war — in the first paragraph is left vague in the second: "must be a last resort." Well, what circumstances represent a last resort? Part of the answer, I think, requires holding Worley's implied strategy up for scrutiny: would the U.S. have gotten away with a continued policy of sanctions and periodic-to-frequent "preemptive strikes"? No. That's what made the war urgent in its way — at least, "now or never." Diplomatic means had proven to be a dead end, entangled with the individual motivations of third-party nations. The "international community" was content to allow Hussein to make a joke of inspections. Moreover, once the threatening pose of the United States had been taken, anything less than the complete compliance of Hussein would have undermined U.S. credibility in future wrangles. In short, coerced acceptance of international demands requires that there eventually be a point at which the "last resort" is taken.

The resolution of this quandary relates to something that Steve emphasizes in a comment to his own post: that "existing capability" are "the most significant words in that definition" of "preemptive war." However, that emphasis is a creation of Worley's, not to be found in either of his source quotes, both of which were uttered before anything like al Qaeda was imagined and one of which was made by Secretary of State Daniel Webster before WMDs were a topic of conversation. To be sure, imminence implies that the weapons exist, but if the idea of imminence itself comes in for reconsideration on the grounds that modern technology means that imminence equals "too late," then there is no reason that the capabilities can't be months, or even a few years, away.

The fact that the administration spent so much time questioning the validity of imminence as a criterion for preemption points to an overriding argument. Namely, the administration presented its argument in terms of "preemption" rather than "prevention" (although different officials may have used the terms at different times). Consider, in this context, that now-famous passage in the President's State of the Union address (which was made before Worley published his paper, although he does not mention it):

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations will come too late.

The argument isn't made in terms that would accord with Worley's definition of preventive war:

preventive war: fighting a winnable war now to avoid risk of war later under less favorable conditions.

This definition applies to the pro-war argument only in part — that a nuclear Iraq would be impossible to force into compliance with international demands. However, the thrust of the argument, and the justification for immediate action, made reference to the gravity of an initial attack on Iraq's part whenever it was made. This is clearly in the tone of "preemptive war." Preventive war is based on a calculation to the effect of: "We're going to come into conflict, so we should get it done now."

What the administration sought to argue was that the gravity and apparent certainty of attack made imminence an unreasonable restriction. That is why Condoleezza Rice's statement about the mushroom cloud was an argument for preemption (in Worley's terminology), but not of imminence; she never said that Americans should be taking days off from work to head for the hills. Our action was meant to negate that necessity.

But as I said, I'm not a stickler for terminology, but for circumstances. Even under Worley's definition of preventive war, I'd come down on the side arguing that, when "less favorable conditions" means millions of civilians murdered as they go about their lives, unaware of the imminence of the threat, then historical definitions might be the things that require reevaluation.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:34 PM EST

 

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Bloglessness and Fecklessness

Sorry for my lack of entries, lately, and the tone of those that I've made. It's been a rough week, between the house almost literally falling apart, the not-quite-two daughter having a rough time adjusting to daylight savings, the lack of sleep, the lack of money, yet the too much work, and the weather today. I can add to my list of worries the dangerously in need of trimming trees around the house, which dropped huge branches into the driveway this morning.

I'm going to get a ballpark estimate on possible mortgages tomorrow. Don't know why; the ballpark is almost certain to be somewhere in the neighborhood of "not enough to buy anything bigger than a car." Y'know, I've been observing that the losing tribes on Survivor tend to earn their fate based on just plain bad decision making. I know I've made some bad decisions in my teenager-to-adult life, but... well, enough of that.

I've been holding on to a local columnist's take on Terri Schiavo's "right to die" for a few days now, and I think that, rather than fling the invective that first came to mind, I'm going to address it point by point, replete with links, in an effort to convince the columnist that she's wrong, probably because her sources haven't done their job of informing her. I'll send the link to her, and we'll see what happens.

As for the very-late column for this week: I'm working on it. I may end up just applying it to next Monday. I don't imagine there are many people checking back with fevered urgency to read my theory of everything part five.

But before I can do any of the free-time writing, I've got a full day's work to do because my daughter didn't seem to be feeling well this morning and the dog was impatient for the rain to stop so he could go outside, so "my day" didn't start 'till late. Then, I had to pick up my daughter from her grandmother's house and watch her because my wife had to stay at work for an extra hour and a half, and then I had to pick up the fixed window that our portable garage smashed when the wind tore the metal a few weeks ago.

Even before the work, though, the dog needs a walk... oh, and I need coffee. Lots o' lots o' coffee.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:31 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Lighthouse Keeper," by Ingrid Mathews.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:45 PM EST

 

Songs You Should Know 10/28/03

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "DayDream" by Joe Parillo.

"DayDream" Joe Parillo, Jazz
Stream (HiFi)
from Sand Box

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:20 AM EST

 

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Where the Weapons Went

It is important to remember that, before the war, everybody considered statements that Hussein had WMDs to fall somewhere between likely to reasonable. Where'd they go? Well, what about all that international traffic?

I have no way of attributing likelihood to these claims, but I do think we need reminders that the issue is far from settled.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:23 PM EST

 

Digging Out of Debt, the Second Batch

I've put 15 more CDs up on eBay. Once again, if you'd like to contribute to the cause of getting my family out of a rented house that, simply put, needs a new everything, please consider bidding on some CDs. Look at it this way: if I can get out of debt and, therefore, out of this house, I'll be less stressed out and even more rationally insightful. (Even more?)

Faith No More, "Songs to Make Love To"
Jeffrey Gaines, "Selections from Jeffrey Gaines"
Genesis, "No Son of Mine"
Genesis, "I Can't Dance"
Happy Mondays, Yes, Please!
Chris Harford, "Selections from Be Headed"
House of Large Sizes, My Ass-Kicking Life
INXS, "Not Enough Time"
The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Far Gone and Out"
Denis Leary, No Cure for Cancer
King Missile, Happy Hour
Life Sex & Death, The Silent Majority
Loose Ends, "Don't Be a Fool"
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Skynyrd Summer Sampler '95"
Mannheim Steamroller, Christmas in the Aire

3 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:09 PM EST

 

That's One Hell of a Broad Brush

Glenn Reynolds has found reason for some equivalence:

BARKING MOONBAT ALERT: The anti-Americanism of groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. comes in for lots of criticism, as it should. But as more proof that there's less and less difference between the far left and the far right, check out this photo I'm pretty sure that these are the kids of "Pastor" Fred Phelps, though this story doesn't say. The signs read: "God Blew Up the Shuttle," "God Hates America," and "God Hates Fag Enablers." ...

Yeah: No-show for the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or what's going on in North Korea, but he's going to come down from the clouds and hurl lightning bolts if two guys get married.

Here's a description of the event that equates the far right with the far left:

Hundreds of Long Islanders stood outside Mepham High School yesterday to blast a handful of out-of-town picketers who said teaching tolerance of gays led to the football hazing incident that has rocked the school.

The picketers - eight family members from a church in Topeka, Kan., gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Bellmore school at 7 a.m. waving anti-gay signs, including one that read "God Hates Fags." ...

The eight protesters - four children among them - were drowned out by some 400 counterdemonstrators organized by a gay rights group and an equal number of angry local parents.

Yup, you read that right. The comparison is between an organized international Marxist group with support from many in the major media, which has held up its protests (attended by thousands, perhaps millions worldwide) as proof of the unpopularity of world leaders and their policies, and a family of eight who were outnumbered fifty to one by the crowd that came out to "blast" them.

I guess two of the "less and less" differences between the two extremes are influence and size. It seems to me that one could go pretty far right before finding the median ideology between the two.

And funny how gay marriage isn't mentioned in the linked article.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:41 PM EST

 

Had Enough for Now

My list of blogs that I visit with strong rules against commenting thereon or bringing comments back to my own blog — because I haven't the time or the spare blood pressure — is growing. Steve just got his Absit Invidia page on it. There's just too much space between our views of the way the world actually is. Consider this post in which he links to a laudatory review of David Corn's book and then writes:

I don't think you have to be an enemy of this Administration to sincerely ask what's going on here. In fact, I think it's the patriot's responsibility to examine the facts and not just dismiss the mounting evidence of deception as "anti-Bush" or "anti-Conservative" bias.

The problem is that all of the particulars in this "mounting evidence of deception" are, in fact, instances anti-Bush or anti-Conservative propaganda. David Corn, who has been striving mightily to discard any pretense he had at reasonable analysis in order to swing with the heavies (e.g., Michael Moore) in the Lies and Deception category, is a perfect example. You can search this blog, or you can look elsewhere, but I've yet to see an important claim made by David Corn in the past few months that stands up to even minimal scrutiny — on everything from national defense to education.

Of course, some will say that it is my own bias that makes me take such an uncharitable view of Corn. All I can do is assert that it isn't and suggest that folks take up the more-specific arguments when they come around. But as for his book, who has the time to read a tome of lies and distortion when one knows going into it that any effort to debunk the claims will be dismissed by those who most need to hear it? There's just too much emotional investment in Corn and his ilk being right.

For an illustration of how that plays out, see the comments to this post on Absit Invidia. I suggested that Steve was wrong to declare, "None of the original justifications for aggressively attacking Iraq have been borne out." I then listed some rhetorical questions regarding those justifications that generated this response from Bil: "mmmm... Kool-Aid." (To another post Bil offered the jaw-dropping comment that the idea that an organized resistence effort is watching the American media to gauge our domestic temper is "ridiculous.")

Steve thereafter rejected all of my rhetorical implications without much by way of evidence, so I further responded with specific points and multiple links to information. Oh, and I made a short post clarifying two points. What does Steve react to? Why, the minor clarifications, of course.

Now, I've been going around in these circles with ideological enemies, neutral discussants, and even people whom I at one time considered friends (in the Internet sense of friendship) for months now. Based on this history, I can predict with confidence that not only will Steve let my specific points slide away into archive limbo, but he'll subsequently reassert the contested statements. This is just how these things have gone with the anti-Bush, anti-war people, and I don't have the time to bother with such "discourse."

All I have the time for, right now, is to acknowledge that, when pressed, these folks have laid out a strategy for Iraq that involves the United States putting forth a time table that we know cannot be followed only to have an excuse to back out and leave Iraq to the dogs (by way of the Europeans). This single aspect, in my book, renders the entire foreign policy of which it is a part insane. Not only is it morally repugnant, but it will quickly result in further attacks on our shores, and it will solidify the impression around the world that relatively insignificant pricks are all that are required to defeat "the great American army."

Well, I guess that, then, we'll have no reason not to dismantle that army and devote those funds to expanded benefits for the elderly. And those benefits programs wouldn't have to be designed to last, because the United States as currently constituted will not exist long enough for more than a handful if generations of old folks to come and go.

15 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:45 PM EST

 

Accepting Death Versus Willing It

Last night, I attended a lecture about stem cell research and intravenous fertilization by Catholic priest, neuroscientist, and bioethicist Tadeusz Pacholczyk. In conversation after the lecture, Terri Schiavo's plight came up, and Rev. Pacholczyk opined very strongly in support of keeping Terri nourished.

It just so happens that Andrew Sullivan has spoken to the very core of the discussion today. Not surprisingly, Sullivan is inclined to reject the religion that he (sort of) proclaims in favor of the ideals of modern society:

But keeping a vegetative person nourished for decades in order to placate that person's relatives - even when she has virtually no chance of reviving, and when her nearest kin opposes it - does not strike me as indisputably humane. And allowing someone to die a natural death is not the same as killing them. ...

The current papacy, in its extreme innovations with respect to the absolute primacy of life in all circumstances, strikes me as somewhat unbalanced. The message of Christ, after all, was that life begins in all its real glory after death. The extreme defense of keeping people on earth at all costs seems an odd priority for a Christian church.

In the Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru responds that "cutting off food and water from someone is pretty clearly willing death: the end of the action is to cause death, not, say, to avoid the pain that would come with surgery." Both Sullivan and Ponnuru quote the Catechism:

Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of 'overzealous' treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one's inability to impede it is merely accepted.

Rev. Pacholczyk pointed out two points that relate to this passage, and I agree with both. The first is that a feeding tube is neither burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, nor disproportionate; as illustration, he likened it to a long spoon. Similarly, it cannot be said that a person whose "life support" merely provides nourishment (as opposed to, say, a machine that physically pumps the heart) is in the process of dying — at least any more than any person alive is in the process of dying.

As with so many things these days, I phrase this in terms of my daughter. It was necessary, for a while, for my wife and I to take a direct role in feeding her. At that time, she was also incapable of expressing her desires vis-a-vis her "right to die." According to Sullivan's morality, it would seem to be a moral decision for us, her nearest of kin, to decide to stop feeding her.

The modernist "culture of death," rears its head at every turn, doesn't it? We simply don't understand everything that is going on inside the brains of those who cannot communicate because of injury, as brain imaging technology has only recently made clear. Why, as I've asked before, should the default be negative — death? As far as I know, nobody has ever come out of a coma and complained of experiencing decades of physical or psychological pain.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:16 PM EST

 

Monday, October 27, 2003

When the War Turned?

To be honest, I was going to let this Absit Invidia post go with just the brief comment I made thereon. But this is just too emblematic to let pass:

No... We're beyond a 'my president right or wrong' approach to Iraq. I was against the war but I shup up when the fighting started and didn't resume until Our fearless leader declared major combat operations ended on May 1. (I would not make that mistake again.)

And when did the problems begin? If the attacks have escalated, what else has escalated, but domestically? I'm sure the Ba'athist diehards were planning to slip into guerilla warfare all along, but I have little doubt that watching the Nine Dwarves on television and their allies throughout the liberal media have convinced the insurgents that they must keep up the "bold" work so as to force the U.S. forces to "scurry" home.

After a few lines indicating that Steve has swallowed the anti-Bush line without dilution, he writes this:

The dirty little secret is that Iraq WON'T be stabilized no matter how much we wave the flag. Any government that evolves from this debacle will be viewed as an American puppet and will be subject to constant attack - along the lines we see taking shape in Baghdad today.

Well, that was a declaration from his side of the debate before the war, wasn't it? It's a foregone conclusion. It need not be supported by the facts on the ground; it need not make reference to Iraqi opinions about their future government. It's just a truism because, well, it must be true if declarations of "quagmire" aren't to prove to have been foolish.

Let's not let these people make their truism a reality. True foolishness would be to put the reins in the hands of somebody without the will to punch through this difficult process. Things are not going that badly. They will improve. And we will all move on to the next necessary front in the war on terror.

2 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:30 PM EST

 

Consider Your Reaction

Well, it's happened; in the comments of a post on John Cole's Balloon Juice, an anti-Bush person has pointed to the most-recent attacks in Iraq as evidence of a "quagmire."

For my part, I read a report about suicide bombers attacking the Red Cross (for cryin' out loud!) on the first day of Ramadan (no less!), and I can't help but wonder why the response of Bush's enemies isn't more along the lines of this: "Well, even though we shouldn't be there in the first place, this situation clearly isn't acceptable. So, let's put aside our arguments and concentrate on presenting a unified front until an end has been made to the efforts of those who would pull Iraq into a quagmire."

Well, I can dream...

5 comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:11 AM EST

 

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Still a Bumpy Road, Not a Freeway

Another reminder that we should have no illusions that stabalizing Iraq, particularly Baghdad, will be just a matter of routine or a fluid, consistent improvement without spikes and slips:

The U.S. occupation authority evacuated its headquarters after Iraqi insurgents attacked the heavily guarded hotel with a missile barrage that killed an American colonel, wounded 18 people and compelled the visiting U.S. deputy defense secretary to head for safety. The brazen blow at the heart of the U.S. presence here clearly affected U.S. confidence about the rate at which it is defeating Iraq's underground insurgents.

I changed some of the language there, because I found to be suspect reporter Charles Hanley's use of such language as "retreated," "sent [Wolfowitz] scurrying," "bold blow," and "rattled U.S. confidence." It makes a bit of a difference, I'd say.

I also found this interesting:

Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the 1st Armored Division said he believed the insurgents timed the attack with the lifting this weekend of an overnight curfew in Baghdad and the reopening of a main city bridge.

"Any time we demonstrate a return to normalcy, there are those who will push back at that," said Dempsey, who is responsible for security in Baghdad.

Or maybe they timed it to correspond with the weekend "peace" rallies.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:08 PM EST

 

Get Me Out of Debt 31-cents at a Time

Well, I've got to get us out of this house. We've hoped to buy a home one day, but it's always been a medium-term-future type of thing. But the house that we're renting now is starting to fall apart, and frankly, I'm concerned for my family's health and safety.

So! I'm liquidating, beginning with my CD collection. I'll be putting all 1,000 or so of them on eBay over the course of the next few months. For those that don't sell over there, I'll set up a page on this site that has fixed prices. For the time being, I've put them up at absolute-minimum prices, some as low as $0.31 (just to cover the listing cost).

If you've wanted to help me out or somehow donate to this site, but just aren't interested in anything in my store, take a look at the CDs. Here are the first 20 (note that the CDs should become better as time goes on):

Ammonia, Mint 400
The Badlees, River Songs
The Beatles, "Baby It's You"
The Beatles, Anthology 1
The Beatles, "Free as a Bird"
The Beatles, "Real Love"
Black Sabbath, We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll
Blues Traveler, "Run-Around"
The Bogmen, Life Begins at 40 Million
Nick Cave, From Her to Eternity
Nick Cave, "Where the Wild Roses Grow"
Toni Childs, "Selections from House of Hope"
Alice Cooper, The Alice Cooper Show
Crush, Crush
The Dead Milkmen, Soul Rotation
Dinosaur Jr., Where You Been
Dixie Chicks, Fly
D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, with Grover Washington, Jr., "The Groove (Jazzy's Groove)"
The Doors, In Concert
Francis Dunnery, "American Life in the Summertime"

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:36 PM EST

 

Stumping for the Enemy

As I mentioned the other day, I don't see any way to intepret a "bring the soldier's home" initiative except as dangerously naive or implicitly treasonous. Cox & Forkum agree:

Anna, at Pet Bunny, has pictures of the real thing.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:15 PM EST

 

Respect for the Honorable Dead

I've been giving this news — in a report from Dana Milbank, who is often helpful to the anti-Bush crowd — quite a bit of thought since Steve of Absit Invidia made an anti-Bush screed out of it. Here's the basis for the controversy:

Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.

To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.

Here's Steve's reaction:

This president, who makes a fetish of Military worship, has never attended a funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. That, like the images of 330 flag draped coffins is bad politics... So much for the 'honorable man' propaganda that we've been spoon fed. An honorable leader would accept responsibility for his actions, justify them in terms of national security, and pay at least token homage to the kids killed on his watch. Running from politically damaging images isn't honorable, it's cowardly.

Every patriotic American - even many of us on the Libertarian Right - accepts as a necessary evil Military censorship of events impacting operational security. I'm satisfied knowing the complete and exhaustive whys, hows, and what fors of battles after they've happened. I don't need a heads up before an operation is launched.

But no American - even the strongest supporter of Mr Bush's administration - can justify a policy that censors the freedom of the press for political ends. And that's exactly what this policy does.

So where's the outrage?

The reason I've spent so much time with this report and Steve's question is that I don't believe that it is possible to honor fallen American military personnel too much. And I would not have us shying away from acknowledging their sacrifice and showing our gratitude for it by facing up to the consequences. However, both Steve's summary of the practice and his call for outrage oversimplify the issue.

Historically, according to Milbank, ceremonies for arriving coffins didn't begin until the Carter administration, after Vietnam, and were performed under and often attended by Reagan. When the first President Bush came to office, the practice continued until 1991, perhaps (or perhaps not) ending in part as a response to the newsmedia's covering a press conference given by the president while on the other part of a split screen coffins passed by. That's not the sort of thing that television newsrooms do by accident.

Under Clinton, certain arrival ceremonies were open to the press, although it looks like they were mostly for people who died in accidents or terrorist attacks (not Mogadishu?). And the second President Bush continued the practice through the Afghanistan war.

In other words, even beyond the justifications offered by the administration and the Pentagon (which you can read for yourself in the article), ending press coverage of arriving coffins was not a dramatic reversal of longstanding tradition. This is particularly true when it is considered that, as far as I can tell, such ceremonies have almost exclusively been performed after limited missions or discrete events, not as part of ongoing wars. As for President Bush's having not attended any funerals or memorials, even Milbank admits that Bush has marked — with at least "token homage" — the losses in speeches and has met with soldiers' families.

Now, nobody should doubt that the major media, which has proven itself to be more than sympathetic with anti-Bush sentiments, and the President's political enemies would endeavor to transform such ceremonies into propaganda points for their own causes. And it simply isn't the case that freedom of the press requires that cameras be allowed anywhere at any time. The press is free to cover local ceremonies and to report on the lives and deaths of those who've perished in Iraq.

Moreover, it seems to me beyond plausibility to suggest that President Bush has attempted to ignore, therefore refusing to pay tribute to, those who have died. He's merely done so without the fanfare, showing humble respect, without the false piety made so famous by his predecessor. In doing so, he has allowed the dead to remain local heroes, to remain somebody's son or daughter, father or mother, friend, family — not coffins moving across the television screen, paraded in aggregate as propaganda for those who have no solution to the danger that our nation faces but to undo the progress that the heroes died to make.

ADDENDUM (a week later):
As Glenn Reynolds notes, Maureen Dowd, ever quick to catch up with anti-Bush themes, has finally caught this one. Hey, maybe she's been trawling the blogs looking for material (hi, Mo!). As seems often to be the case, she makes my point by trying to make the opposite. Consider:

This sort of airbrushing is tasteless, because it diminishes our war heroes instead of honoring them. And pointless, since news outlets are running the names of the dead every day and starting to focus more on the heart-rending stories of the maimed.

Political calculations have now trumped the proclamations of virtue and symbolism that this White House would normally embrace.

It's bad enough to try to hide critical information when you can get away with it. It's really insulting to try to hide it when you can't get away with it.

Let me get this straight; the administration has "diminish[ed] our war heroes" by taking away the image of rows of coffins and leaving only the names and stories of the men and women in them?

Note that the President's actions in this respect so conflict with Ms. Dowd's caricature of him that she can only guess that he is making foolish and useless "political calculations" that conflict with a posture that he "would normally embrace." As I suggested back when the Plame Game was still limited to online whispers, Bush's enemies want so badly to see no good in him that they simultaneously credit him with historic degrees of cunning and deception and trump up controversies that would require him to be a bumbling political operative.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:08 PM EST

 

Saturday, October 25, 2003

Chong Speaks Out for Rush

I always did like Tommy Chong:

"I feel sorry for Rush," Mr. Chong said. "I'm glad I'm not Rush. My vice was pot; you can put it down, it's not addictive at all, though some say it's psychologically addictive. I feel sorry for anybody on heroin. He was on a painkiller called OxyContin that's been called Hillbilly Heroin."

Mr. Limbaugh, who is reportedly being investigated by legal authorities in Florida on suspicion of obtaining drugs without a prescription, is in rehab. Mr. Chong is in prison. This doesn't bother Mr. Chong?

"Not at all. It's a totally different case. Mine is political, his is medical. Is it unfair? Yes, it is. But I would hate to have Rush Limbaugh change the way they handle addicts. You don't put addicts in jail, you put them in rehab. You put political figures like myself in jail."

(via Sheila Lennon)

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:57 AM EST

 

Dust in the Light, now 99% evil-free!

According to Steve from Absit Invidia, I'm doing quite a bit better with my self improvement than I thought. I'll have to come up with some slogans.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:55 AM EST

 

Friday, October 24, 2003

Beyond Rhetoric in the Abortion Debate

I set out to limit myself to a specific point (and proclaimed that intention) in the comment section of a post by Bil of A Cry for Help, but found myself moving toward the larger issue. So, rather than break a limit that I myself suggested imposing, I thought I'd move it over here:

The act includes extensive findings that partial birth abortion is never medically necessary... in part because other forms of abortion are as safe or safer. My feeling is that the logic of this is inescapable: people would be (should be) appalled at the idea of killing unborn babies after they've been delivered; they now consider it abhorrent to kill them halfway out; they will ultimately have to conclude that killing them within the womb is just as abhorrent, except in extremely limited circumstances. So, ultimately, pro-abortion advocates see partial birth abortion as a sort of buffer.

The problem, as I'm beginning to understand it, is that there truly are "pro-choice" people who are honestly trying to make the right moral call. However, in their attempt, they are being pulled by more-extreme people through euphemisms and overblown rhetoric about pro-lifers. The choice is being seen as between siding with the extremists who would enable any type of fetus killing for any reason or siding with extremists who would insist that both the mother and child die so as not to perform an abortion. (Actually, I think the former has only recently begun to be clear.)

It's a false choice. Even conservative Catholics such as myself understand that when there are actually lives at stake, the moral picture becomes more complex. In other words, even the majority pro-life dream would still allow exceptions in cases in which there is substantial risk of death or health damage to the mother. In reality, the politics would probably end up requiring some additional exceptions, such as for rape and incest.

The alternative, with the inescapable logic going the other way, is to conclude that in or out of the womb is immaterial. And the "culture of death" will expand to monstrous limits.

Here's an anecdote the illustrates how muddled the thinking has become on the "pro-choice" side. During a conversation about abortion, a good friend of mine who is limitedly pro-choice stressed that her position is held entirely on the basis of choice. Yet, in the course of discussion, she subsequently argued in favor of Chinese forced abortions. It shouldn't take much by way of argument or clarification of what an abortion "looks like" to break the tenuous rationalizations that link such positions.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:47 PM EST

 

Proximity to a Re-education Camp

Roger Williams University is visible across the water when I walk the dog. Occasionally, I'll hear music wafting over the waves; the other night, cheers reverberated across the bay during one of the Red Sox, Yankees games that the Sox won. Today, I'm more interested in the silence.

Back in August, during an ostensibly non-partisan orientation for incoming freshmen on campus, speaker James Dale, a homosexual who was removed from the Boy Scouts, attacked President Bush and advocated for gay marriage. Far from providing balance, a second speaker was Judy Shepard, mother of Mathew Shepard (who we all know was, horribly, beaten to death for being gay). Mrs. Shepard explained to the young minds before her: "Churches are damaging us as a society. They don't allow us to grow."

But that wasn't a problem.

No, the problem arose when the campus Republican group published an issue of its monthy newsletter, The Hawk's Right Eye in which the students wrote about the strategy for pushing a radical homosexual agenda through a combination of indoctrination, censorship, and selective news. The president of the university, Roy Nirschel, responded by canceling the publication's funding and emailing the entire university community, saying:

In recent days, a publication of a student-funded organization has crossed seriously over the lines of propriety and respect. In the past, this organization has flirted with racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric. The most recent issue of their publication, the Hawks Right Eye, is pornographic in nature, puerile, mean spirited and stereotypes gay individuals as child molesters, criminals or deviants. The views expressed therein do not represent the viewpoint of the Republican Party or most individual members of the party.

You can read about the controversy in an account by Hawk's Right Eye editor Jason Mattera; Erin O'Connor has an un-ideological take on the issue and the obligations of the university. However, I'd like to take a closer look at the article through which the Providence Journal presented the story to its readership.

Reporter Linda Borg follows President Nirschel's lead in framing the conflict not as one of ideas, but of civility versus vulgarity, beginning her piece thus:

Is speech protected at any cost? When does provocative language cross the line into profanity?

These are the kinds of questions being bandied about at Roger Williams University, where a debate over free speech has pitted student conservatives against the president of the university.

The trap of this presentation is that among the conservative students' central complaints is that the realities of homosexual culture are airbrushed and sanitized for the general public, so the strategy in response is to highlight that which has been mitigated. Borg notes the "images," and President Nirshchel refers to pornography, but the pictures are of the sort taken at gay pride parades. Of course, the students added confrontational humor to their presentation, but if that makes their publication debatably pornographic, then Michael Moore and Al Franken might as well be Larry Flynt (who, it bears remembering, has been celebrated by some liberals as a free speech pioneer).

However, if the Hawk's Right Eye is an example of polemic, Borg's writing is an example of the less overt bias that is sold as objective reportage. She explains that an article entitled "The Thought Police" in the offending edition "asserted that a well-known gay-rights group indoctrinates students into homosexual sex." As any good dictionary will show, "asserted" implies, as m-w.com puts it, "stating confidently without need for proof or regard for evidence." The article in question actually cites an external source (Tammy Bruce) and explains the case.

In handling Judy Shepard's appearance, Borg makes no mention of the specific complaints against her, nor that she was not an single, isolated speaker with respect to her message. Writing of the subsequent controversy, however, Borg notes that it "has launched Jason Mattera... into the national spotlight." If a purportedly objective media article about liberal students whose activities have garnered broad coverage has similarly put that coverage in terms of publicity, I haven't seen it.

Regarding the breakdown of sources for Borg's story, the only quotations in support of the publication are Mattera himself and the Young America's Foundation, which is labeled as being one of the "national conservative organizations" that have responded to the case. Speaking against the publication are the university president, who is not ideologically labeled, and Student Senator Winter Lavier, who is also not labeled. Lest the reader believe that the Hawk's Right Eye has only politically neutral detractors, Borg quotes "self-described conservative" Provost Edward Kavanagh.

Most egregious, in this respect, is that political science professor June Speakman, the group's faculty adviser, who is quoted characterizing Mattera as a zealot using questionably civil tactics, is not identified as the sole Democrat on the Barrington Town Council, the adviser to the College Democrats, and apparently enough of a liberal to have debated Ann Coulter when she came to campus last year.

Ms. Lavier, by the way, is quoted as saying that she has "been attacked by the College Republicans" and wants "to protect the student body from such a hostile paper." Borg sets Lavier's comments up by writing:

Although the newsletter didn't spawn the protests that an ad by conservative columnist David Horowitz did at Brown University two years ago, a number of Roger Williams students said they felt personally attacked by Mattera's language, according to Kavanagh.

So the difference between the two controversies is that, in this case, it is the publication that is violent — albeit rhetorically. Through Ms. Lavier we also learn that a formal complaint against the Hawk's Right Eye has been filed by a student group called Sexual Advocacy For Everyone, whose ideology and purpose go without description.

As if deliberately to encapsulate the contrasting problems of the two types of presentation, hers and the conservative students', Borg undercuts her description of the low point of the Hawk's Right Eye with a low point of her own, writing:

The stories were accompanied by a brief article from WorldNet.Daily that describes, in sexually graphic language, the rape of a young man by an older man.

Although Borg gives us no reason not to believe otherwise, the story of that "young man" and "older man" was not some work of fiction concocted to stereotype homosexuals. The boy was 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising, who was bound, sodomized, and ultimately killed by 38-year-old Davis Don Carpenter and the adult's lover, 22-year-old Joshua Macabe Brown. The point of the piece, in this context, is to highlight the deafening media silence about this case, which Borg sees fit to perpetuate by leaving out the names and highlighting the "sexually graphic language."

Unfortunately, as I've said, this is the low-point of the Hawk's Right Eye, as well — not because it uses explicit description of a nauseating crime, but because it carries its sarcastic tone too far, making light of this nightmare of a story. So, yes, college students sometimes get carried away; they're still learning the subtleties, which are manifold in political writing.

Borg, on the other hand, has been writing for the Providence Journal for 15 years and is certainly well practiced at the subtleties of journalism... and polemic. The final sentence of the piece is a reference to a supposedly related story:

Providence police weigh hate-crime prosecution of two men accused of raping a woman they accused of being a lesbian. B-2.

Well, as the WorldNetDaily wrote, and the Hawk's Right Eye reprinted, with reference to that boy whose name Borg couldn't bring herself to utter:

Homophobic stories are always dwelt on... but when homosexuals are the culprits, the news is swept under the rug.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 06:48 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week

The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "A the Bronwyn Tale," by Andrew McNabb.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:15 AM EST

 

Resolution of Conflicts with Research

Since it's been awhile, I thought I'd spin by and see what Jody is up to these days. What I found was proof that the wise would do well to begin walking on their hands, because apparently, we've got the world turned upside down:

Married heterosexual couples can learn a great deal from gay and lesbian couples, far more than the stereotypical images presented by the television show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," according to the first published observational studies of homosexual relationships.

"Gay and lesbian couples are a lot more mature, more considerate in trying to improve a relationship and have a greater awareness of equality in a relationship than straight couples," said John Gottman, a University of Washington emeritus professor of psychology who directed the research along with Robert Levenson, a University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor.

"I think that in 200 years heterosexual relationships will be where gay and lesbian relationships are today," said Gottman, who now heads the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle.

The specific data isn't readily available, at this time, so I wouldn't be comfortable applying detailed analysis to the vague descriptions of the findings, which conflict not only with straight-world perception, but with pro-gay arguments that I've heard. Suffice to say that I can't help but see the potential for distortion when the researchers use such language as "more mature" to describe homosexual couples. Some of the quotations hint that "more mature" means taking one's relationship less seriously. Consider that "high levels of cardiovascular arousal" during conflict correlates with lower "relationship satisfaction" among married straights, but with higher relationship satisfaction among gays. And of course, attitudes about sex are front and center in the analysis.

As I said, I can't speak to specifics at this time, but this sort of stuff raises my suspicions:

Homosexual couples in the studies were recruited in the San Francisco Bay area and they filled out a questionnaire that assessed relationship satisfaction. Forty pairs — 12 happy gay couples, 10 unhappy gay couples, 10 happy lesbian couples and 8 unhappy lesbian couples — were chosen to participate in the study. The comparison sample of married couples was drawn from a larger study that recruited couples from around Bloomington, Ind. It was matched in terms of age, marital satisfaction, education and income to the homosexual couples and consisted of 20 happy and 20 unhappy couples.

In short, among the homosexuals, the happy-to-unhappy ratio of the sample was 22:18 (about a 20% separation), whereas the same for straights was 20:20. Of course, it's possible that this difference was accounted for in the results, but then again, it's possible that the homosexual "couples" weren't significantly comparable in relationship type to spouses.

My experience has been, with these studies that make what seem to be outrageous claims, that no opportunity is missed to nudge the results in the desired direction. But for now, let's just say that one of the arguments against gay marriage is that it will move heterosexuals closer to "where gay and lesbian relationships are today."

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:11 AM EST

 

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Imagery Beyond Language

Well, as blogger John McGuinness (I think) succinctly points out in a comment to Dr. Hern's description of his trade, the doctor has violated "the Truth About Abortion ban." Kate Michelman, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, apparently realizes the danger that such frankness poses to their evil sacrament; on the partial birth abortion ban, she writes, "They ran away with this debate in the public domain by constantly describing this procedure."

As it happens, the very first commenter to Hern's piece, one CatM, offers hope that the overturning of Roe v. Wade won't come in a flash from a conservative Supreme Court, as the Democrats fear, but will, rather, look more like an overwhelming. A whisper of truth can lead to an avalanche:

I Am Pro-Choice ...

and it still really bothered me to read that. I think late term abortions have to remain legal for women who need them for health reasons or who do not wish to carry a severely impaired child to term (most often this is used for cases of anencephaly, where the child has a neural tube defect and no higher brain and whose death shortly after birth is inevitable).

But it's hard to feel good about someone seeking an elective abortion at 17 weeks gestation, particularly when we have so many methods of birth control, including the morning after pill, and when most women know long before then that they are expecting.

Did you spot the aspect that gives me hope? Look at the parenthetical. Note the need to explain — to specify an extremely limited application, with recourse to technical-sounding words, no less. This tells me two things: 1) a few calculations of lives and probability could make such rationalization seem dreadful overreach, and 2) changing people's minds might be as simple as forcing them out from behind the language that they've used to justify murder. If the distancing language were used in another arena, such as academia-speak, it would be laughably obvious in its delicate charade: e.g., "a living pre-human."

This, too, would be laughable if it weren't a matter of life and death: "I think women who have elective abortions should have consequences, like having to attend classes on contraception."

Classes? On contraception?

Well, of course. We already know that classes on abortion are out of the question because they lead to reactions like this:

And regardless, if this is what doctors are doing to terminate unwanted pregnancies at 17 weeks, they need to come up with a better way. This is just horrid.

I have faith that, at some point, people like CatM, who seems to be trying to make the right decision, will figure out that they cannot walk that line. To maintain a viable pro-abortion movement, they have to include the Herns and the Michelmans, to whom an unborn child is, in Cat's words, of no more consequence than "some kind of insect."

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:10 PM EST

 

Speaking of Using Blogs for Promotion

I've picked up some readers in the past few months, so I thought it not unreasonable to point out the icon on the left of your screen that will take you to Confidence Place: The Timshel Arts Store, where you'll find various books and CDs from and by people for whom every sale means a great deal.

That includes me, of course.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 07:32 PM EST

 

The Marketing Corner

I have to agree with Craig from Lead and Gold about the Corner:

It was never one of my favorite blogs, but now it is becoming almost impossible to read. I know they think they are clever and funny with the pitches for Legacy, etc., but that has become so repetitive that it is tiresome.

Personally, I check the Corner regularly, but the promotions for books and other goods have become absolutely ridiculous, to the point of mocking the central illusion of blogs — that the reader is raised in standing in the interaction. It's like being invited to a private dinner party for an author who proceeds to pitch his book after every other mouthful.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:53 PM EST

 

Not Fewer Leaks, but the Right Leaks

Lane Core makes a fabulous suggestion:

I think what we really need are "leaks" of memos and e-mails from, say, NYT and WaPo and USAT about how the editorial staff decided to handle these particular "leaks". I think they would be much more revealing, and much more useful, to the American public.

Can you imagine the response to such a thing? You want to see heads roll...

1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:12 PM EST

 

What's Fair in Love and Taxes?

John Spears lays out all of the relevant numbers to ask a straight question about taxes: What's fair for rich people to pay?

This isn't something that we often ask, preferring instead to push and pull (too much vs. too little). When it comes to tax cuts, here's the bottom line: the top half of income earners pay 96% of taxes. How does one cut taxes in that case without its disproportionately benefiting "the wealthy"? (Yeah, yeah, we all know the answer... "one doesn't cut taxes, period.")

Of course, as with many other things, Spears's piece requires the reader to pay some attention to detail, which doesn't seem to be a very popular approach to solving the big questions of society and government.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:10 PM EST

 

Working for American Defeat and the Morale of the Enemy

I can't think of any other way to interpret ANSWER's call to "End the Occupation of Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!" except:

1. They have expended a whole lot of energy and resources organizing behind an idea that involved almost no rational consideration of its consequences.
or
2. They really do wish the United States to be defeated and even suffer further terrorist attacks in the future.

There's no middle ground, here. ANSWER's slogan is akin to insisting that the support structure of an occupied building be removed because the land ownership has been questioned. In fact, it's worse: this rally is like sending a memo to those who persist in attacking our troops and retarding the rebuilding of Iraq that they should redouble their efforts. Despicable.

I got this from Sheila Lennon, who disheartens me by promoting the rally. This isn't Vietnam.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:05 PM EST

 

Two Quick Things

First, go read Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus relaying some bits of conversation with Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, I'd bookmark it for easy reference during future arguments.

I also wanted to mention that today's Day by Day uses wordplay that I had been thinking just this morning, as it happens.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:54 PM EST

 

Monsters and Murderers

This Telegraph article about the child killers in North Korea is hard to read, but for that very reason, we must do so:

Evidence from a number of women who have escaped from the prison camps of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, reveals a pattern of infanticide, principally due to concern that babies conceived outside the country might not be "ethnically pure" ...

... a guard took a baby away from a woman married to a Chinese and put him in a box nearby. A doctor then explained that since the country was short of food, it should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, it was taken away and buried, she said. It was not clear whether they were alive or dead at the time. ...

"The woman assisted by Choi was given a labour-inducing injection and shortly thereafter gave birth. While Choi watched in horror the baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of the mother, who passed out in distress." ...

Two had survived for two days before a guard "came by, and seeing that two of the babies were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls".

And here's one in first person:

Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.

Oh wait. That's Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colorado, speaking out against the partial birth abortion ban. I guess the difference is the definition of what makes the babies undesirable — the definition of "ethnic purity," so to speak:

I received a call from another woman who hoped to become pregnant but wanted to be reassured that, in spite of passage of the "partial-birth" ban, she would still be able to terminate the pregnancy if a serious genetic defect were discovered at, say, 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The title of Hern's piece is "Did I Violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban?" To which, I reply, "Well, maybe not, but you're still a murderer, a hitman of babies."

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:33 PM EST

 

Stopping the Leak with More Water

Anti-Semitism has poked through the academic veil at the University of Rhode Island. President Robert Carothers's letter is stingy with the details, but generous with the irony:

Last week, one of our students returned from a weekend at home to find the door to her room defaced by anti-Semitic symbols and slogans. As shocking and sad as that discovery was, the fact that these acts were allegedly perpetrated by people she believed were friends was even more disturbing.

Coming just two weeks after the university held a very successful "Diversity Week" on the Kingston campus, it is painfully clear that we continue to have individuals among us who harbor bigotry and hatred in their hearts. While we believe strongly in the right to free speech, acting out that bigotry and hatred to the detriment of others is contrary to established university policy and our values as a community.

I'll keep an eye out for more information, but I'd say the odds are significantly better than even that the dogma and ethic of diversity are to be found among the causes of the incident (which is to say that white supremacists have been losing share in the anti-Semitism market). If the culprits prove to have also been lovers of "diversity" (in the American university sense), then the student paper's editorial board will have to add new layers of confused cliché to its already muddled stance.

We as a community should come together to discuss the incident and share our thoughts and feelings about what was done. This could be an opportunity to bring ignorant thought into the light of open discourse, and hopefully show those responsible, and others of the same mindset, the consequences of their spineless acts.

Those responsible for the anti-Semitic messages on the board do not deserve to be at a university, which are generally bastions of open-mindedness. But to simply expel them from the school and cast them out of sight would do little to alleviate the problem of hateful thought, speech and anti-Semitism.

As a university, we must do everything in our power to inform students about other religions and cultures. This situation highlights the importance of things like Diversity Week, organizations like Hillel and places like the Multicultural Center. The entire university must embrace the idea of diversity and the goals behind it.

Under no circumstances are actions like these acceptable or tolerable. But no matter how disgustingly insensitive words are, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In order to maintain an open democracy, speech cannot be restricted.

The axis of clarity that could straighten out this thinking is to insist that our investigation into each other's culture and beliefs must be honest, and we must realize that it is simply not possible to understand and accept — or even tolerate — every facet of them. Moreover, "the consequences of... spineless acts" must cease to consist of just more talk and "coming together."

As a matter of fact, I myself can only honestly claim a cursory understanding of Judaism, and I don't believe one must have more than that to treat those who follow it like fellow human beings. When hatred exists for reasons other than plain misunderstanding, further understanding will only melt into new forms that fit the hatred.

1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:21 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week

The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "from Ambushed," by Anne DuBose Joslin.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:00 AM EST

 

A Negative Presumption

Wesley Smith gets to the heart of the Terri Schiavo battle again today:

AS I LISTENED to the debate over the Internet, I could see the tug of war. On one side were many bioethicists, members of the medical intelligentsia, "right to die" advocates, Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, and his attorney, George Felos. On the other were disability rights advocates, right to lifers, Governor Jeb Bush, Terri's parents and their stalwart lawyer, Patricia Anderson, and the tens of thousands of people from all over the country and the world whose months of insistent emails and telephone calls had resulted in such overwhelming political pressure that Florida's government had felt compelled to act.

As the debate raged, some senators opposed the bill, believing that a husband should be permitted to make this tragic decision. But didn't they know that this particular husband, Michael Schiavo, was engaged to be married and already had one child with his fiancé (with another on the way)? Didn't they know he had denied Terri rehabilitation after promising a medical malpractice jury he would provide her with just such care? Didn't they know he wouldn't even let the nursing home personnel clean her teeth?

I think something that has been changing in the American mind is beginning to take political form. Perhaps the death crowd has just gone too far. Perhaps people are just beginning to put their finger on the central problem: our society seems to default to the negative, cynical outcome. Life or death? Death. Human fetus or fetal growth? Fetal growth.

I just read a column in the current print edition of National Review by Dennis E. Powell, who is in the midst of a unilateral divorce against his will. He points out that the principle holds for "no fault divorce": when there is disagreement about whether the marriage should be dissolved, the law picks dissolution.

These things go back and forth in a culture. Belief that mankind is fundamentally bad transforms into belief that mankind is fundamentally good. Let's hope and pray that we are shifting toward belief that human beings are fundamentally valuable and that traditional values are fundamentally moral. It's well past time.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:12 AM EST

 

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

More on Smith's Suicide

I'm reasonably sure that very few to none of the readers of this page know much about Elliott Smith. But seeing as I can honestly say that I don't believe that I've ever heard music that punctured my emotional walls more than his, I feel compelled to cover his death.

The most specific information that I've found is that he stabbed himself in the chest. I don't even know what to comment about that. It's just so... well, it's not a common method of suicide, or an easy one, from what I understand.

Turning to his life, however, I found his last Rolling Stone interview, from which this seems particularly meaningful:

Do you get tired of being tagged as "depressing"?

Yeah, it's a superficial tag. Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record you don't think "Godfathers of Punk." You just think, "Hey this is cool. It sounds great." The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory, but it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' is not word I would use to describe my music, but there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:55 PM EST

 

Literally Not Figurative

I emailed Glenn Reynolds two sentences comparing figurative and literal language for use in explaining why some criticism of him was wrong. Professor Reynolds posted my note but complained about the movie to which I made reference:

And really, Temple of Doom? Can't we get an example from one of the good Indiana Jones movies?

Well, I was merely going for vivid imagery, and I thought to use heart removal before I thought to use that movie, specifically. But still, I must confess that Temple of Doom was in very heavy rotation back when I was about ten years old and watching a lot of cable television, so it is burned into my memory much more than the other two movies (which were, I agree, better). I even remember the arcade game. And the Mad Magazine parody...

ADDENDUM:
Note: I used "burned into my memory" in the figurative sense, here, in contrast to, say, the literal sense in which the markings on the medallion that led to the Ark of the Covenant were burned into Nazi agent Toht's hand in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

1 Comment (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:45 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Sustenance," by Gary Bolstridge.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:43 PM EST

 

Songs You Should Know 10/21/03

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "David Melech" by Mozaik.

"Mozaik" Mozaik, Psychedelic Jewgrass
Stream (HiFi) Download
from Beyond Words

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:42 PM EST

 

Just Thinking 10/20/03

My Just Thinking column for this week is "The Physics of the Antichrist, a Theory of Everything, IV of VI: In Essence, God." This is the fourth essay in a six-part response to Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality.

In this edition, I:

• explain why it was useful to delve into what may very well be no more than science fiction (the Omega Point Theory)
• define "miracle" in terms that should be amenable to scientific exploration
• describe Tipler's possible mechanism of how the miracle of the Eucharist "works"
• suggest that soul and body are implementations of reality on different levels
• argue that these implementations are substantively different and, therefore, can be considered more complementary than distinct
• explore the implications for the spiritual meaning of the Eucharist
• divide knowledge into "essential" knowledge and "technical" knowledge
• call both forms of knowledge "divine" and relate them to our methods of prayer and learning
• and conclude that transubstantiation is a true and necessary component of theology

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:19 PM EST

 

Dammit, Elliott.

Elliott Smith's music is the kind that just reaches out to the listener. He was like that friend who everybody agrees ought to be famous, whose music makes him beautiful. It's often delicate and shy, sometimes with a melody or just a riff that seems to cradle the entire body and make you move, whether swaying, bobbing the head, or tapping the toes — just to do something in response. To reach back.

Sometimes when I listen to the music of Nick Drake, a British folk-rock musician from the '70s, I find myself whispering under my breath, "Dammit, Nick," even though he's been dead for decades. He had so much talent, such beauty in his music, and he died so young and so needlessly, overdosing — apparently by accident — on anti-depressants.

Well, dammit, Elliott. Why'd you go and do that? It makes no sense. Thousands of people in the world would have opened up to you, and all you would have had to do was to ask more explicitly than through the metaphors and melodies in your music.

Quite possibly my favorite Elliott Smith song is a quiet little one at the tail end of his album either/or. "say yes" is almost an afterthought; it's short and simple, but won't wear no matter how often the repeat button may be hit. Here are the lyrics (excuse the language):

I'm in love with the world through the eyes of a girl
who's still around the morning after
we broke up a month ago and I grew up I didn't know
I'd be around the morning after
it's always been wait and see
a happy day and then you pay
and feel like shit the morning after
but now I feel changed around and instead of falling down
I'm standing up the morning after
situations get fucked up and turned around sooner or later
and I could be another fool or an exception to the rule
you tell me the morning after
crooked spin can't come to rest
I'm damaged bad at best
she'll decide what she wants
I'll probably be the last to know
no-one says until it shows and you see how it is
they want you or they don't
say yes

Elliott Smith said no. Dammit, Elliott.

Find your way now, man.

Say yes.

No Comments (click to link)
Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:24 AM EST

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Random Links That I Wanted, but Was Unable, to Mention Today

I'm not entirely sure why, but I got heartier-than-usual laugh at today's Day by Day cartoon:

Reverend Donald Sensing has two long posts worth reading today. One is on marriage and church services, and the other is on Islam's compatibility (or incompatibility) with scientific ideals (in contrast to the relevant history of Christianity).

Wesley Smith is must reading on the Terri Schiavo case in the Weekly Standard today. Here's an excerpt. The second paragraph leads me to remember that the tube was pulled on the day of beatification of Terri's namesake, Mother Teresa:

Will Terri live or die? That can't be known. But this much is clear: The Schiavo case has changed everything. Our government leaders have been put on notice that tremendous numbers of people in this country are determined to halt the erosion of the sanctity/equality of life ethic in the practice of medicine. The routine practice of dehydrating the cognitively disabled who need a feeding tube--which occurs to the conscious and unconscious alike in all 50 states--is going to receive a badly needed review. The bioethics movement, which has been leading us down this treacherous slope, can no longer expect to pontificate from on high in medical matters of life and death and expect the people to just meekly go along.

In a sense, the Schiavo case is a miracle. Because so many people around the