update to grr

Apparently the irrational arguments aren't totally limited to the religious. I read this on an apparently "secular" conservative blog.

"If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in."

- What. The. Fuck? Does intelligence have anything to do with marriage? One could argue some of the smartest men were terrible husbands, in many cases unfaithful even when married, I certainly don't have the best track record in terms of attentiveness as a prospective mate myself. Where does any gender requirement fit into this aspiration that we're supposedly feeding the stupid people to have? It would seem to me to make more than enough sense to simply hold out "marriage" as an aspiration for the society of the stupid, and not worry too much about who an adult citizen chooses as a life partner from amongst other adult citizens.

Fortunately, I was not alone in castigating this idiocy. And I see charges like this being leveled which may be heartening. "As conservatives, we should be at the forefront of demanding individual rights and responsibilities - not circulating fear about change." I'm not quite sure how that's actually the premise of "conservative", since it is actually the classical definition of "liberalism". I assume they're following along with the premise of equality under law and limited government. But these were originally liberal concepts. I'm generally confused as to what any "social conservative" hopes to achieve. But when I see people define conservatism this way, it becomes more thoroughly muddy water.

grr. excommunicate them?

I pointed this out a couple days ago in a debate over gay marriage and its appeal to religion (since I've yet to see a successful attempt to appeal to reason on this matter). The problem at its core is that once one appeals to belief, then their position becomes immobile, and all who claim to share in those beliefs then are become bound to either uphold this belief or be banished in their acceptability within that community of believers, making disagreement and discourse practically impossible. But since this guy is a noted "conservative" leader in history, I felt an appeal to such figures might be more noteworthy the effort than purging my own frustration with this subject. Particularly since there's at least a hint of suggestion that there are religious arguments in favor of tolerance and freedom.

"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism"

- Barry Goldwater. 1981.

I end up in this boat a lot as a libertarian. I have to explain economics to people who claim this ideological "free market" mantle as "conservatives". And that gets annoying, walking people through the distinctions between regulations ("laws") and socialism or taxes and slavery, banking and deficits, etc. But then I am reminded of a much larger problem and cease my annoyance. I have to battle usually these very same people on the mantle of "limited government" and somehow them not making the connection that this means you don't get to impose, even by democratic fiat, the views of some religious sect upon the populace and still call this "limited government". You would call that theocracy.

It means instead that you, the prospective "conservative" base, are an asshole for usurping and altering the meaning of a phrase so blatantly and without any pretense for actually practicing the nature of your professed beliefs. That "limited government" concept requires that you tolerate dissent, something that most conservatives do not demonstrate a healthy ability to do. That you tolerate difference, a more obvious flaw given the general uniformity of "conservative" as a label for evangelical European-descendants (whites) and not inclusive of virtually any other groups of Americans (there was even an editorial in a DC paper the other day which essentially said that Obama's support base among blacks basically shouldn't count, only white support should). Indeed that you must embrace both of these as healthy, nature, and necessary for your OWN defence. The very idea that one can impose by fiat a religious decree as a law implies that others could impose their own interpretations (including those of other religions). Meaning ideas that will very likely go against these "populist" mandates of the present. It is a prescription for continuous religious war, conducted through the full force of rule of law. It is necessary to protect the ability of a person to be a religious zealot or fundamentalist, or a merely observant religious person or not at all, that we not permit the imposition of any pure religious law as binding force in our legal system. Muslims have a word for it: Sharia. But it's only different in the name and form from the version that many Christian fundamentalists here want.

I hope one day enough people wake up and realize that. Maybe we can start usurping religious terms in the meantime and start "excommunicating" people from America who don't grasp this idea of freedom as essential to living here. But to be fair, they're already forming their own shriveling political party and becoming further marginalized in society. If they could manage to express some ideas once in a while, then I'll listen. But as of today, I'm putting any religious right voter on notice that you should probably shut it. You're not adding anything to the debate. Reflect. Think before you speak. Count to ten, pray, whatever it is you have to do to start making some sense to the rest of the society. Because sooner or later you're going to find out that this society doesn't need you anymore if this is all you can produce for its value: angry irrational dissent with no legal merit under our system.

almost forgot...

TORTURE!

In the form of listening to an extended interview with perilously slippery arguments on the nature and utility of torture.

I could have told you this for free

more studies on the obvious

So Colbert is pretending to be a conservative if you're a "liberal" and is merely being funny if you're a conservative. Yes. Conservatives don't get the joke, what a shock. It's like the process for the Prestige, where the magician/performer must constantly live inside their act for it to work. The problem of course is did we really need a study to verify this? We've already seen how people with strong ideological opinions reinforce their beliefs in the face of criticism. And Colbert is critiquing the crazy lines of many conservative notions by taking them to extremes. Should we even expect conservatives to react with skepticism relating to their ideas and behaviors?

I missed this one

wha?

I am not surprised. We tend to need "role models" for women who effectively sell their bodies. Or at least, I'm not surprised that Hannity would think this to be the case (and not understand the irony of calling a pseudo-porn star a role model for young girls). I'm never surprised when a right-wing social conservative expresses an opinion that basically relegates women to some sub-standard social position. But it is at least entertaining when they're so blatantly idiotic and out of touch with the behavior of these supposed role models. I'd guess this will take up the slack for the lack of teabagging in the news.

hooray for good news that isn't bad news

our long national nightmare is over...or is it

So to echo the tone, we're not out of the woods yet. But it seems like there is an end to this dark and uncertain wood from which we previously could not see where the straight path lay. That's partly how a people get out of a mess like this, that they believe they can and will. But of course, we still have the descent through hell to account for as unemployment lags behind and carries along its blight of suffering. The spotted leopard to block our path as it were.

environmental notions

peaky

I like the point raised at the end. This sort of thing happens a lot (it happens all the time in debates about income inequality or taxes). Shifting the conversation in mid-stream to make a point that doesn't actually exist. In that case the real and undisclosed point being that the amount of power needed to electrify British homes was relatively minute in terms of the carbon footprint of the UK. 4%? We obviously know that home energy usage is important to individuals, because we pay the bills. But it seems disingenious to claim that one method of cleaner energy is less effective without actually acknowledging that they're both less effective.

The actual issue involved in nuclear power isn't safety (the USN has been using nuclear reactors for decades without incident) and it certainly isn't cleaner air (since it is far less polluting than coal or gasoline fuels). It's getting rid of the spent uranium fuel rods. The next vital comparison would include an analysis of how much it would cost to build these 10 nuclear plants versus an equal sized ocean-based wind power array, and how much maintenance, and disposal of spent fuels, would cost over the next 50 years or so. I would guess that the wind power would cost more for installation, but much less for yearly costs, but I haven't seen any numbers yet. I should probably look into these more carefully considering its very likely we will be building various alternative energy plants over the next 10 years or so. How much will that cost relative to the environmental cost of coal spewing into the air or nuclear waste? I'm not sure anyone knows the second part yet (the cost of environmental damages). But I'd guess we should at least have a price tag on energy infrastructural change.

espresso please hold the nipple

funny idea?

So...did we need a topless coffee shop? I'm not an expert on coffee, but this doesn't seem like it would be a necessary innovation to business practice. Perhaps it is amusing. But they could offer wi-fi and people could still look at boobs to perk up their mornings that way.

conversations that never happened

I was, as I often do, having a conversation that never actually happened. During this, I posed an interesting question while mentally acting as my false interrogator. Well, more like a statement that begs a question.

"You've changed".

First off, I'm pretty sure this is a false statement. But I had to at least offer up an explanation to myself as why this might be. The best analogy I could come up with, because it's always an analogy that's needed to give answers to myself, was this:

"Remember when you were a kid and how things looked then. What happens when you go back to that same place as a adult?"

Have things actually gotten smaller? Not usually, and certainly not substantially so. Our sense of space and time has changed. Usually the whole getting taller or bigger tends to skew the perspective a different way. The same sort of experience happens when a person goes from walking or biking everywhere to driving. Distances suddenly become as though they are much, much shorter, because our experience of time is dramatically lessened.

So what does that have to do with a person? I suspect the problem is that most people don't actually change all that much, if at all (at least, not without heavy medication or a drinking problem). The difference is largely the perspective that we see them in. In my case, this is probably more pronounced than most. I tend to graft things onto my behavior because I have a distinct lack of personality. But I'm basically the same around the same people as I was 10-15 years ago. I'm just better at burying the edges than most people. And I have some years of absence from many people in which to hide them. This unfortunately didn't do much for resolving the conundrum over which I was vociferously arguing conversationally with myself. But it seemed rather important at the time.

Better news. I read over more torture op-eds and I came to a certain realization. Cheney et al are actually right in one sense. The methods they used "worked". The problem is now that they're lying about what they "worked" for. We're being told in one breath that they worked and then told that they saved American lives in a ticking time bomb situation. Except what it looks like the torture methods were employed for was to manufacture evidence to justify a particular course of action by providing this crucial non-existent evidence. Being told what you want to hear is a hallmark of torture's "utility". This is often completely different than what you need to know. It makes no sense to say that we were torturing as a last resort in a ticking time bomb situation and then say we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times within a couple weeks of catching the guy and this mostly to develop intelligence linking his organization to Iraq rather than to collect actionable intelligence on future terror ops that he may have had knowledge of. That he "decided" after that to tell us what we wanted to hear is only natural. The "ticking time bomb" wasn't to the higher ups another 9-11 event but rather the political ability to mobilize the country into a war for some reason while it was still in a state of fear and hostility. Good times.

Thanks though. At least we know torture still "works".

here you can attack the source of information

global warming

This comes up frequently in other matters, but I noticed the parsing of poll data was mostly being argued over the issue of educational levels in countries. One thing that should be considered for the variance between say Buddhist and Islamist countries on global warming and human activity would be the dependence on oil as an export in many Islamic countries. Since we would naturally assume oil is involved in some way if one accepts the notion of anthropogenic global warming, then it may stand to reason that countries which depend on oil exports would make a considerable effort to minimize its importance. We see this argument constantly made against global warming skeptics who often receive funding from energy companies. Why could it not apply toward the general economy of an entire nation which essentially is a giant energy company?