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Saturday, April 16, 2005Here's Cicero, first with the continuing resonance of creationism in Ameria, second with his own thoughts on evolution.The TurkeyBlog continues to think something like evolution has happened, and continues to happen. Whether it's all that's happened or adequate to explain the big leaps is a trickier issue. Why not divinely guided evolution? Something to offend everyone! 
posted by gbarto at 11:04 PM What he said: VodkaPundit's Will Collier has a nice roundup of what's really going on with the filibuster games.
posted by gbarto at 10:55 PM Whither Chirac? Will Franklin has quite a write-up on the EU Constitution heading south and how a Sarkozy-Chirac battle may be at the heart of it. There's only one place where he's a little off: Will a failed referendum on the European Union Constitution in France precipitate Chirac's early resignation?Nothing will precipitate Chirac's early resignation. Not while the prosecutors are lined up waiting for his presidential immunity to expire. (via Instapundit)
posted by gbarto at 10:11 PM Thursday, April 14, 2005I've been reading George Weigel's The Cube and the Cathedral, which looks at the real place Europe and the U.S. parted company. It wasn't over Iraq a few years ago. It was over God and man's place in the world and the shift started in earnest with the Great War, World War I. Weigel traces the intellectual origins of the crises back to the time of Aquinas and William of Ockham and lays out an interesting case for how the battle to keep the word "Christianity" out of the EU Constitution tells us more about the US-Europe split than anything said about the respective powers. The purpose of the book, by the way, is to warn against going down Europe's path. I'm about halfway through, but it's fast reading. I should have a full review tomorrow.
posted by gbarto at 11:15 PM  Which OS are You?  Which File Extension are You?
posted by gbarto at 1:05 AM  Which Website are You? (via Accidental Verbosity)
posted by gbarto at 12:57 AM Cicero looks at the fight over Uganda's anti-AIDS campaign, which features abstinence and condom advocates bickering over which message to use, even as countless Ugandans are infected and thus headed for death. He's not impressed with either side.
posted by gbarto at 12:24 AM Wednesday, April 13, 2005Chizumatic has Sturgeon's Law as applied to entertainment (specifically anime), not to mention a great football prank - training pigeons to come for a referee's whistle.Alas, the prank is probably urban legend, but if you're looking for a fun story and a look at what can go wrong with anime, drop by. Don't do much with anime, myself, but I have seen bits of the manga for Love Hina and Negima. The set-ups are the same at their essence, and very familiar: The girls are much more numerous, but there isn't a sight gag in it that couldn't have been used in Three's Company (provided they got it by the network censors). Three's Company, for those too young to remember, featured John Ritter as Jack Tripper, an aspiring chef rooming with a couple women for reasons that had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with an excuse for sexual humor and hijinks (but always this side of innocent). Love Hina and Negima are essentially the same, right down to the numerous oddballs who keep things going between scenes with the main oddballs. Den Beste voices the concern that there are too many characters, but Love Hina and Negima are both set at schools. As with any movies or tv shows in such settings, the cast list is long but the characters worth remembering only number five or six - the three to four in (potentially interlocking) love triangles and the one oddball you like. (For example, does anyone remember anybody other than Dawson, Pacey and Joey from Dawson's Creek?) The bigger issue with Love Hina and Negima is that the sight gags are ninety percent of the story. If you're looking for light laughs with a sweet story lurking in there somewhere, they're great. If you're looking for high art, look elsewhere.
posted by gbarto at 11:59 PM Tuesday, April 12, 2005Judicial ActivismInstapundit is writing today about judicial activism and the possibility that Sen. Maj. Leader Frist is hanging out with a nutcase. It's true that judicial activism is a problem. Activist judges spend too much time discovering things in the Constitution that even if there should enter explicitly into our law not by judicial fiat but by legislation. And given the number of statutes our elected officials have managed to get on the books (and the number of bureaucratically fashioned regulations emanating therefrom), it doesn't seem likely that we've got a big shortage of law. If the legislative and executive haven't gotten around to writing a law about something, it's just possible that the courts should defer to the other two branches in their concurrence that it's not time to make a law about it after all. Here's the problem: Are conservatives aiming to end judicial activism? Or to channel it in a different direction? I've read the Constitution a few times and don't remember a single word about abortion. Either for or against. As for the equal protection clause giving rise to privacy rights... I don't get it. I'm not a legal scholar, but looking at the ninth and tenth amendments - - it seems to me that this is a matter for the states unless it involves a right not mentioned but whose existence is apparent within the intellectual framework of our society and government. Privacy-shmivacy. The question is whether abortion is any of the government's business at any level. If there's a compelling state interest - i.e. the republic would be threatened by the practice's existence or unregulated existence, the feds can step in. Ditto at the state level. Unless reproductive freedom is of such high order that any problems posed by it paled in comparison to the damage done to the spirit of our enterprise if it were restricted. Glad to say, I don't actually have to solve this one. But my guidance would be as follows: If someone declares himself opposed to judicial activism and then suggests that the states should draft their own laws, he might be worth talking to. But if he instead invokes the sanctity of life and suggests that the Supreme Court ought protect all human life by ending abortion, don't bother with him. He's just another species of judicial activist. By the way, why don't the ninth and tenth amendments get more attention? Easy. They're a bit open-ended and threaten the single biggest conspiracy in Washington. For all the battling between the courts, the executive and the legislative, there's one point they pretty much agree on: Washington should run the show. A healthy consideration for these two amendments might lead reasonable people to suspect that at least half of what the courts have done and three quarters of what the other two branches have done since the 1930s should be junked. Maybe even before. If Judicial Review has turned into an excuse for the courts to invade any area of life they damn well please, the Commerce Clause has likewise been turned into a blank check for federal intervention by the legislature anywhere they can get the president to agree. And in the meantime, the two sides have also tacitly agreed (for the most part) to respect each other's nonsense while the areas of life for which smaller governments and private individuals have responsibility and power continue to erode. Our best outcome for the judicial activism gaming - though it will never happen - is for both sides to get ornery enough with each other to start invoking their perorogatives vis-à-vis each other instead of against us. One thing the Schiavo case reminds us is that the Congress can make the courts look. They can impose other restrictions too, including refusing to pay the courts' electric bills. In retaliation, the courts could start looking at the Commerce Clause as what it is: a tool for making it possible for people to do business in multiple states without needing an army of lawyers, not a justification for the feds to run everything. If Judicial Review started throwing out programs that gave the feds excessive authority while the Congress started moving actively to curtail the courts, we could get the government trimmed back to only being, oh, three or four times as large as it should be. Not to worry. It'll never happen because neither side wants to raise the stakes that high. So get out your popcorn and enjoy the show. Watch the courts protest that they're saving you from the fascists while the Congress boasts it's going to protect you from judicial activists. But just remember, they're not really pushing to make you freer, just to decide who gets to rule.
posted by gbarto at 10:20 AM Monday, April 11, 2005A Ramble about Peace and Stuff or A Problem of Attention? In You'll See It When You Believe It, Wayne Dyer tells us: In the oneness that is humanity we have practiced division to the detriment of the entire whole. Yes, we have had some shining lights who have attempted to help us see the folly of our ways, but essentially we have not been able to transcend our physical forms and see that our humanity is in our thinking, and that the totality of our thinking has always been that of divisiveness and separateness. (103)This sentence is only part of a larger passage that feels strange coming from Dyer. Specifically, it feels angry. But worse than that, it contains within it the very separateness that worries him: He separates those who know the way of peace from the great masses (implicitly placing himself among them) and declares that division is our normal way. Within this passage, Dyer is trying to preach hope. Talking about how a "critical mass" within a species can change the whole species, he's suggesting that a critical mass of people moving toward peace can move the whole of humanity away from war. But as he talks about how peace comes, we get another round of separation (earlier in the linear structure of the book): As each being reacted harmoniously rather than with enmity... there would be no soldiers to follow the orders of the generals.... When the designers stopped creating weapons, government officials would stop contracting to purchase weapons of destruction... (90-91)Dyer doesn't realize it, but he's creating dichotomies left and right here. There are generals, designers, government officials and other bad guys who keep things going and then there are the good guys who wash their hands of it. He's bought into the mindset that of course the generals, etc. are on the side of war, that they have to have it taken away from them. In fact, as part of the onesong of the universe, we have to take it away from ourselves. At the end of Dyer's chain, we're back to cowboys and Indians. There are the good guys - us enlightened folks saving humanity - and the lower orders - those who haven't caught on yet. I know Dyer means well, but there's an invititation to elitism here. To follow the vibe of Dyer's riff, it better only take a critical mass to shift things, because if it relies on enlightened anti-death folks winning the hearts and minds of those they disdain as evil or misguided over to the side of peace, there are going to be problems. Dyer wrote this book quite a while ago in his terms (1989) and I presume he has moved beyond this mindset. But reading the passage set off a chain of thoughts in my own mind that I believe give cause for real hope. Dyer's buddy Deepak Chopra is fond of quoting Mother Theresa's response to an invitation to join an anti-war protest: "Let me know when there's a march for peace." Mother Theresa said many things on many subjects, but this single sentence tells us all we need to know. Note the lack of judgment, the failure to condemn. This single sentence, all alone, lines up exactly with what a smarter Dr. Dyer tells us all the time: Put your attention on what you want. I think the thing that startled me in the passage, other than the anger, was that misplaced attention. If we attract what we think about, why is Dyer thinking about all this fracturing? Dyer is doing the old "what if they gave a war and nobody came?" shtick, but this game always posits a sinister elite hell-bent on getting people killed for the sake of personal power. Is it too much to imagine a president hesitant to use force and generals who view war as an ugly and barbaric last resort? I have the advantage of writing about 15 years after Dyer, so have seen a post-Cold War world he hadn't as he was writing. In the last decade, it's become military doctrine to minimize civilian casualties, preferably to zero. Our finest moments have come when advancing columns of enemy troops checked behind them to make sure their leaders weren't watching, before surrendering to free food and medical checkups and the promise of a good post-war life once things get settled. In Peace Is the Way : Bringing War and Violence to an End, Deepak Chopra can't help but acknowledge that we're using the rhetoric of peace as we undertake our latest wars. And that our objectives, perversely, align with peace in the long term, however misguided our approach seems to him. I don't know whether Dyer had it right, in spite of himself, and his own cells for peace have taken off, or whether this is just a continuation of an ongoing trend, but peace is on the way. But for all the chatter about everyone else defecting from the Doctor Strangeloves, it's actually the generals and political leaders who are showing the way. This time, the U.S. really is fighting the war to end all wars. Democracies, after all, almost never fight each other. The democratization of the Middle East is being undertaken with this knowledge. So, does this mean there will never be war again? Returning to the smaller levels of society, do we imagine that murder will end? There is no knowing what human beings are capable of. It's possible but we take our time in evolving and the hard part, as with the quest for peace among nations, is finding a way to get those who haven't caught the wave to bow before the proposition of peace. We hear about how violent people are, but better than 90% of us manage to go through our entire lives without killing anybody. It's not that hard for me not to kill anybody. The mystery is what happens with those who do. It's not that hard to imagine our nation not going to war for land or power anymore. It's harder to imagine our nation not going to war for principles intertwined with power. And hardest still if principle is also intertwined with a direct attack on us. We're going to have to wait a while to see if the country has caught up to what Bush's most ardent supporters would have us believe: that the U.S. has gone to war in the Middle East so there won't be any more wars resulting from events in the Middle East. There are the twin questions of whether it will work and whether it is in fact the intention. Let's be smart. Let's attract the right stuff. So, the current war in the Middle East is the U.S.'s last descent into the swamps of barbarism, a place to which we'll lower ourselves so that as we rise out of it we can bring others with us. Is that ugly? Awful? Noble? We'll assume it's useful. And we'll work to hold our leaders to the finest goals they've stated and the highest causes they've espoused. Peace in our time? Maybe. But peace cannot coexist with tyranny, cannot be claimed to exist just because people are only subjugated within the borders of nation states. Peace comes as we all discover our humanity. When U.S. and Australian military are the guys giving water to tsunami victims. When U.S. Marines are the guys who get the water and power functioning. And for the time being, when nations that would live in peace still have the stomach to stand with those who are living in tyranny. There is room for debate about whether making war on tyrants is just continuing the violence. But it is beyond the pale to call yourself pro-peace because you won't, even as your trading relationships provide the money and weapons to keep the tyrant in power. Whether it's Iraq with France or the U.S. with Saudi Arabia, this is where the final step on the road to peace comes - when we find it within ourselves to make the necessary sacrifices so that we're not complicit in tyranny. It is easy for teachers and doctors and lawyers to call for an end to the arms industry. It's not their jobs on the line. It's easy to protest the military when it's someone else's son on the front lines. But at a certain point, we have to realize we are all complicit in the system and the healing of the rifts that lead to violence is necessary for us all. That is, those of us stateside all benefit from the security that our efforts abroad are bringing (and thank God the efforts abroad are, since the Homeland Security joke isn't). Returning to what we're doing: The United States is, perversely enough, fighting a war to stop war. It sounds silly, perhaps, but it is sincere. It is a bold and noble thing, but not the boldest and noblest thing. It's not quite the route Ghandi would have taken. But that's because we, the people, are not prepared to take that route. It is, in a strange way, the easy way. Here comes the hard way: When we talk about the necessary sacrifices to avoid complicity in tyranny, it's not enough to march for divestment in South Africa, not enough to put an "I didn't vote for him" bumper strip on your car. Those who believe that we should not be at war in Iraq must be prepared to: - Send their sons and daughters to the military so we will have troops reluctant to shoot. - Eschew not just gas guzzlers, but produce that has been trucked in, public transportation and anything else that contributes to our consumption of oil. - Here's the biggie: In our lawsuit happy culture where a sprained ankle equals an expensive lawsuit, we must be prepared to die defenseless, confident that the freeing of our immortal souls from violence is more important than the preservation of our bodies from those who persist in warring ways. Must be prepared to back political leaders who will accept our deaths as the price of America's disavowal of violence. Must be prepared to wait and endure for what could be a very long time in order to show that the ultimate futility is attacking a people who are too committed to peace to give in and join the violence. The problem we face is one of control. It's easy to let go and let God when someone else is the target. But when you're a potential victim, you're going to instinctively desire some measure of control over your own destiny. The terrorists, for their part, sense that they must control your destiny if they are to control their own. The lure of freedom is too great, in their eyes, to be allowed to persist, lest it draw Muslims from what the terrorists perceive as the one true path. If we're suddenly above even battling with them, hoo boy! If you think the president should take action to keep us safe and our borders secure, you are complicit in our military. If you believe that we should be protected from a forced conversion to a Muslim nation, you are complicit in military culture. Or at least reliant upon it. We are not, I don't think, strong enough to die one by one until the terrorists become despondent in the face of our refusal to surrender. Ghandi faced the British, who felt it unseemly to let the carnage go too far. We are up against people who celebrated the successful slaughter of 3,000 people. The president has chosen an odd, but potentially lifesaving middle way. He knows that for all the peace rhetoric, neither America nor Europe will long stand for a politician who asks the people to make the real sacrifices necessary: indifference to death and willingness to do without those things that by their sale sustain tyrants. So he's doing the next best thing: Trying to create a Middle East culture more like the Western one, a culture that too much loves its freedoms and its pleasures to get dragged down by the harder demands that an all-encompassing religion brings. The West shucked off the hardest parts of the Judeo-Christian culture. We have no stonings, no crucifixions, no flailings. Intemperate youth are not stoned, but sent to midnight basketball. Candidly, we are asking the Muslims to likewise water down their faith, acting as though the dictates for getting into paradise can't be taken quite so seriously as they once were. This harmonization of the "Religion of Peace" and the religion of the "Prince of Peace" will come. But it's not always an easy road. Let's look at the evolution of U.S. beliefs. We're still largely Christian, but less so in numbers and less so in attitude and aspiration. The New Age is permeating the Christian religion creating lots of people whose values differ from those of the traditional church but align with a vaguer sense of what Christ was all about, especially the loving parts but not the rough stuff. But in the middle, we went through, and still are going through, a great hollowness that comes when church officials lose their authority and people had to determine for themselves what they believed and face head on the contradictions involved in following the Bible and following what they perceived to be the Bible's message. The smarter churches have picked up on this and are preaching a faith that is fervently, almost stridently, loving, healing and non-judgmental. The Muslims, too, will come down this road. But they're in a rough position. They're working through the same questions about divine right of king's, religious governance, etc, that we started working out of our systems in the sixteenth century. It took till the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for things to really take off for us. And it will take the Arab world time. Just look at the time it's taking this essay to get to the point. And it's just an essay, not a shift in world consciousness. Still, to get to the point: When we consider the dream of peace, there is a risk that even the best of us will allow hurt, resentment and fear to cloud our judgment so that we see at least some of our fellow human beings as enemies to be overcome, not souls to reach. But reeling from the horrors of the holocaust, the world has started to stumble forward in fits and starts, but in the right direction. Now is the time to leave aside our negative emotions both toward those we see as enemies and those we see as standing in the way of peace. If you want peace, open your heart to the idea that if those who want to kill us are worth trying to understand, there may even be hope for our own generals. As one who does want peace, and views Iraq as a strange step on the way, I think we must reorient our minds. We must stop being "anti-war" and be "for peace." That means we must align ourselves with peace, celebrating with every heart made glad by freedom and praying that more may join it. We must stop reading the news for the horror of war and start reading it for signs of hope. From the democratic revolutions sweeping the world to the (at least declared) benign aims of the largest military efforts underway, we are witnessing a shift in which individuals have charge of their own lives, for which they'll want and deserve more than the same old clash of nations. Seize the moment. We should stop fretting about war as it still exists and start really, truly to envision world peace.
posted by gbarto at 9:14 PM Sunday, April 10, 2005 You are a Sceptic. Philosophical skepticism originated in ancient Greek philosophy. One of its first proponents was Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 B.C.), who travelled and studied as far as India, and propounded the adoption of 'practical' skepticism. Subsequently, in the 'New Academy' Arcesilaos (c. 315-241 B.C.) and Carneades (c. 213-129 B.C.) developed more theoretical perspectives, whereby conceptions of absolute truth and falsity were refuted. Carneades criticised the views of the Dogmatists, especially supporters of Stoicism, asserting that absolute certainty of knowledge is impossible. Sextus Empiricus (c. A.D. 200), the main authority for Greek skepticism, developed the position further, incorporating aspects of empiricism into the basis for asserting knowledge. Greek skeptics criticised the Stoics, accusing them of dogmatism. For the skeptics, the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions which could not be said to be either true or false without relying on further propositions. This was the argument of infinite regress, whereby every proposition must rely on other propositions in order to maintain its validity. In addition, the skeptics argued that two propositions could not rely on each other, as this would create a circular argument (as p implies q and q implies p). For the skeptics logic was thus an inadequate measure of truth which could create as many problems as it claimed to have solved. Truth was not, however, necessarily unobtainable, but rather an idea which did not yet exist in a pure form. Although skepticism was accused of denying the possibility of truth, in actual fact it appears to have mainly been a critical school which merely claimed that logicians had not discovered truth. Which Hellenistic School of Philosophy Would You Belong To? brought to you by Quizilla (via Cicero)
posted by gbarto at 11:55 PM |
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