So, want to throw away some money? Good, me too!

This is classic.

I think my favorite part is the (apparently serious) claim that velocirapors "today terrorize the goat herders of Puerto Rico".

(Snagged from softside.)

A challenge to my convictions

While taking a break from my drafting today, I stumbled across yet another article, this time on Salon. The whole thing was quite exciting, but the main quote which, perhaps all-too-predictably, jumped out at me follows:

'And then [Rabbi Eric Yoffie] launched into the most controversial part of his sermon -- an impassioned denunciation of right-wing homophobia that invoked the historical parallel of Nazism. "We understand those who believe that the Bible opposes gay marriage, even though we read that text in a very different way," he said. "But we cannot understand why any two people who make a lifelong commitment to each other should be denied legal guarantees that protect them and their children and benefit the broader society. We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations. And today, we cannot feel anything but rage when we hear about gay men and women, some on the front lines, being hounded out of our armed services. Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry."'

That is quite possibly the best and most succinct summation of the intelligent position on gay marriage and, more broadly, gay rights that I've ever read-- and it came from a religious leader.

Those who know me know that I have what might charitably be described as a seething hatred for religion in just about all its forms. Still, reading something like this makes me wonder if maybe, just possibly, there might yet be some good to be done by priests of every stripe, now that the texts have been preserved and the wealth has been built.

Still, I have to think that, heartening as it is to find a religious leader possessed of such strong moral fiber as Rabbi Yoffie obviously is, he is the marked exception, rather than the rule. My main problem with religion is not the belief in God(s); rather, it is the belief in the word of the men who purport to speak for said deities. The fundamental flaw in the system is this: humans are fallible. God(s), at least theoretically, are not. The state of omnipotence, etc., is so far beyond our experience as flawed mortals that we can never hope to comprehend it. Thus, anyone who claims to know the mind of God(s) well enough to tell other people what that God or Gods wants is guilty of the most awesome arrogance which, it seems to me, must lead inevitably to the abuse of power, due to that same damned fallibility.

It's people like Rabbi Yoffie who make me hope that I might be wrong.

A Bit of Mustard

Last night I dreamt that, during an Environmental Studies course, I wrote an entire paper about a world populated by sentient pigs (a bit of symbolism, that) who were so technologically advanced that they routinely cloned unconscious pig-bodies for themselves so that they could tranfer their consciousnesses into them when their current bodies entered advanced age. Through this method, they had achieved a sort of immortality.

The intent of the paper was to demonstrate the effect that individual mortality has on environmental policy - the point being, of course, that as long as people feel like they will die prior to major environmental degradation directly and substantially impacting their lives, they're generally perfectly content to pass the buck to the next generation, as it were.

I discarded the paper, however, when I realized that I couldn't reasonably claim that the ethical lives of sentient pigs would mirror human concerns.

And that is when I woke up, devastated.

Also, site pimpage: Reader2

On paiderastia and its fall from grace:

So, finally I post, after weeks of silence (and intermittent nagging from my fellow writers). At last, I give you a polemic, in honor of an article found in the Washington Blade Online. I won't rehash the entire thing, but the gist of it is this: a group of people are posing as teenagers in order to entrap those who solicit sex from underage persons online.

Now, I have no doubt that these people have nothing but the best of intentions in doing this; sexual abuse in any form is one of the worst crimes that can be committed, and I respect anyone who tries to effect change for the better. In this case, however, I think that the end does not, perhaps, justify the means. My question is this: what qualifies the members of Perverted Justice to judge the morality of sex between teenagers and adults? The answer, of course, is "the law", which mandates an age of consent for engaging in sexual activity.

That answer, however, leads us to an even thornier issue, which is the justice (or lack thereof) of the age-of-consent laws. Those laws vary widely across the United States, ranging from sixteen to eighteen from state to state, and, until recently, the ages were even different based on whether or not one's partner was of the same sex. Across the world, of course, the variance becomes ever more pronounced; in some of the more liberal countries around the globe, some of the men caught in Perverted Justice's sting operations would not even be committing a crime.

Now, personally, I don't think I could ever have sex with anyone who wasn't at least a very mature seventeen or eighteen, if only because I think about myself as a teenager, and the lack of experience and emotional insecurity with which I approached sex, and I shudder at having to deal with that kind of drama at this point in my life, without any other support.

Which brings me nicely to my next point: the Greeks.

It may be far too tired to bring up the classical vices when discussing queer theory these days, but I am a classicist and I think they're still relevant, so nyah. Anyway, as you no doubt know, intergenerational relationships were a vital part of life for the ancient Greeks, whose arts, sciences, and philosophies as the foundation of much of our modern thought and discipline. They accomplished all they did in spite of what the modern American establishment would call their "pedophilic" practices.

Alas, I don't really think that this long-gone history really gets us anywhere, because our society and those of the Greeks of ages past have very little in common; I very much doubt that the hysteria surrounding sexuality-- particularly as it applies to those perceived as "children"-- will be purged from our collective Puritan consciousness any time soon.

And that, I think, is really at the root of the problem: since no "right-thinking" adult could even entertain the possibility of a healthy, consensual relationship between a teenager and an adult, the resulting stigma and external pressure forces those involved in such relationships to sneak, hide and lie about what they feel, which will distort even the best of feelings. Again, I'm sure that there are indeed a lot of sleazy, predatory men out there who cause severe harm to their young prey, but they aren't the whole story, and I think it's a mistake to act as if they are. If these "teenagers" on the web are past puberty and healthy, is it really so impossible that they might be able to make up their own minds as to whether they want to have sex or not?

To me, such an attitude is woefully diagnostic of the disrespectfully paternalistic attitude taken by the adult establishment toward the youth in this country. I also think it's a great shame that rites of passage are nearly wholly absent from our culture, depriving us of signposts to help us along the path of pubescence. I, at least, would have liked nothing better than to have been taken under the wing of a mature, responsible adult who would've educated me in what it meant to be a man and what all the hormones surging through my body actually meant, as opposed to the half-hearted and blushing health classes and the secretive fumblings with boys my own age. Sadly, the former option belongs to another age, and I don't think it could ever be translated across the fear and shame that plagues our current one. So, we're left to figure things out for ourselves, and live with the consequences of both our own mistakes, and those of our parents'.

Literature and Text Messages Mate; Mutant Offsping Runs Rampant

This little gem, I think, irritates quite a few people, who, like me, love literature.

I can understand why it does, but I don't share the reaction. I think that, in the end, it's more useful to let people, and students in particular, fall off of the literary wagon when they choose to.

You either appreciate something for what it is, whether it's sports, or philosophy or literature, or you don't.

If someone doesn't, you can't make them, no matter how much you might want to.

And nothing kills the pleasure of reading good literature more than being forced to read it when you have absolutely no desire whatsoever to do so.

So, bring on the text messages. They'll find the people they're meant to find.

And that can't be an entirely bad thing.

The Engagement Question

Ben writes:

I wonder how capable normal citizens are of being informed. I wonder if the problem isn't structural rather than personal, and, if it is structural, if the best, most virtuous option isn't simply dropping out of the political theater altogether.

In 40 words, he articulates something I've grasped at, embraced, but been unable to express just right. My most recent attempt was here. I quote it again to amplify it. I hold mightily to this belief, even if Ben in part rejects it; it has been central to my human-humanistic turn of philosophy.

Speaking of things central to turns of philosophy, Ben mentions Wood's Creation of the American Republic. The latter's Radicalism of the American Revolution changed my life as a pup politico; I've been meaning to read it again. Like many things one reads, it wowed me perhaps more because of when I read it than what I read: it's not what it says about the Revolution, but its discussion, shocking to someone brought up on the bland civics of "democracy," of the sources of American values and institutions, with much more personal implications.

The Political Animal or "I wasn't expecting this to be a drunken post, but ..."

I'll be the first to admit it. I've had maybe a little too much wine.

But that's okay. We're allowed that on occasion. It's a human thing.

I've been reading a lot lately. I've been on an American Revolution kick. The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Democracy in America ... Most of the basics. I've missed out on Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, but I still have Wood's The Creation of the American Republic to go.

I'm trying to find myself. Lately, I don't even know if that idea even makes any sense. But it's very American. I'm trying to put myself in context.

But, I don't know if I'm that interested in engaging what has become the political culture of the United States anymore. Part of my reason for starting on this course of reading was so that I'd be able to do that more competently. Maybe I'm more interested in being non-partisan than I am in actually disengaging, but I don't know if it's even possible for that to be meaningful in our culture any more.

Aristotle holds that man, by his nature, is political. For him, there is no question of engagement.

But for me, there is, and maybe that speaks to the nature of the democracy we're living in. I wonder how capable normal citizens are of being informed. I wonder if the problem isn't structural rather than personal, and, if it is structural, if the best, most virtuous option isn't simply dropping out of the political theater altogether.

But then I wonder if doing so is simply a misguided effort to avoid grappling with difficult issues. I know that I do believe that the insistence and emphasis on excessive partisanship tends to get in the way of both a comprehensive understanding of the human aspect of political issues as well as the public good in general.

Q writes:

"I count myself as a member of the middle. It isn't the center: it doesn't exist between extremes, and it isn't a pastiche scrounged from bits of ideologies. Like centrism, it is based upon principle, but is realistic. To be in the middle, though, is to step beyond accepting packaged bits of left and right. No one's narrative is large enough to encompass the middle, nor small enough to fit in it. One in the middle believes there are principles that ought not to be compromised, but that no principle can understand humanity like a human can."

This is a sentiment that I am very sympathetic to, but I wonder about the use of principles that are inarticulable. And I wonder if articulable principles are worth a damn to begin with. I am very wary of theory. It tends to flatten all the rough spots of the human condition. It tends to simplify things that shouldn't be simple.

I wonder if the best politics isn't one of direct human engagement, one that rejects the institutionalization of human contact. One that insists on the intimate and close connection of people, unmediated by an inhuman, governing body.

But I don't know if there's room for that within politics today. I don't know if there has ever been room for that in politics anywhere. And I don't know if that's a good enough reason to abandon what it means to be engaged.

We might be aiming at perfection, but I don't think we should expect it. Even if expecting it is a very human sort of thing.

Little Bugs in Amber

I was driving home playing loudly and singing loudly Tori's "Winter." At the very Seattle five-way intersection at the end of the Denny exit off 5 South, I stopped for the traffic light and my voice caught in my throat as I looked up at the overpass, and saw flashing yellow lights and "AMBER ALERT" on the sign over the highway. Beneath it was a description of a vehicle and an Oregon plate to watch for. I thought, "That's happening now."

It's not as if I haven't seen the benign indifference of the world shining through before. For some reason it nailed me.

More anon on benign indifference.

Begging Off

I'm thoroughly behind on reading, which is why I missed my scheduled Sunday post.

I'll have a reply to Q's post below on Wednesday.

Hope you're all doing well.

On Bigotry; or, Politics

In politics as in life (and let us never confuse the two), there's a middle and a center.

The "sides" of the political "spectrum" take different forms across times and states. They may be consistently distinguished from rational sects in that they advocate state violence to advance some set of internally inconsistent social goals. They differ over the question of who is the proper object of the state's indecent attentions.

Those who are more fearful of authority figures per se tend to side with the left, willing to excuse its intolerance and imtemperance. Those more fearful of the concept of authority, rather than its embodiment in individuals, more commonly side with the right.

The left may be socialist, anarchist, communist, communitarian, or otherwise. The right may be nationalist, nationalist-socialist, anarchocapitalist, corporatist, or otherwise. But almost always they are there: the red team and the blue team.

Those who see the problems of the left-right narrative, but still accept its legitimacy, see themselves as a noble and impartial center. Centrists pick their policies -- usually based on a pragmatic morality, which arguably is no morality at all -- from the confining menus offered by right and left. They justify each policy on the basis the right or left uses to justify it. The policy and its justification are a package.

I count myself as a member of the middle. It isn't the center: it doesn't exist between extremes, and it isn't a pastiche scrounged from bits of ideologies. Like centrism, it is based upon principle, but is realistic. To be in the middle, though, is to step beyond accepting packaged bits of left and right. No one's narrative is large enough to encompass the middle, nor small enough to fit in it. One in the middle believes there are principles that ought not be compromised, but that no principle can understand humanity like a human can.

Leftists and partisans of the right mostly believe, whether they realize it or not, that truth can be profitably reduced to a handful of truths within a consistent and easily understood system. Centrists believe that is not so, and they construct reactive, provisional, and often unstable and dangerous, systems. All these systems, of left and right and center, because they are not self-sustaining, require the invention of bigotries to explain behaviors and propositions put forth by the opposition that are rational but incomptatible with one's own narrative. All righties are at last called corporatists, even if they are not. All leftists are billed as totalitarians, even if they are not. All centrists are made out to be linguini-spined moderates, even if they are not.

To be in the middle is to identify one's own bigotry, rather than identifying with it.

'Tizzy the Season

The neighbors are probably pissed that I'm already playing Christmas music. Loudly.

Too bad. They're lucky I didn't start in July as I usually do.

On Tocqueville and Democracy in America

I have, lately, been reading a wide variety of literature relating to the founding of the United States.

Right now, I'm in the middle of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville's prescience and insight have been roundly and correctly lauded, but there are some things that even Tocqueville gets wrong.

Late in the first volume of his work, Tocqueville states:

"The Union guarantees the independence and greatness of the nation, things which do not impinge immediately on private individuals. The state preserves the freedom, regulates rights, safeguards property, protects the life and entire future of each citizen.

The federal government stands at a great distance from its subjects; the regional government is within the reach of all. All you need to do for it to hear you is to raise your voice. Central governemnt has on its side the passions of a few outstanding men who are ambitious to direct it; regional government is supported by the self-interest of men of lower rank who hope to achieve power only in their own state. These are the men who, being close to the people, exercise the most power over them.

American have, therefore, much more to expect and fear from the state than from the Union and, according to the natural emotions of the human mind, they are bound to feel a closer attachement ot the former than to the latter."

Later, Tocqueville continues, predicting the decline of the federal government and the ascendency of state governments:

"If the sovereignty of the union were to come into confliect with that of the states, one can readily foresee that it would be defeated; I doubt whether the fight would ever be undertaken in serious fashion. Whenever determined resistance is offered to the federal government, it will be found to yield. Experience has shown so far that whenever a state has been stubbornly determined on anything and was resolute in its demands, it never failed to obtain it and when it has flatly refused to act it was left to do what it wanted ...

Besides, however strong a governemnt, it cannot escape the consequences of a principle once it has been established as the foundeation of its public constitution. The confederation was formed by the free will of the states which, by uniting together, did not forfeit their nationality nor become fused into one and the same nation. If, today, one of these same states wished to withraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to prove that it could not do so. The federal governent would not be able in any obvious way to rely upon either forc or law to overcome it."

Such broad statements of fact are common in the literature of the time, and it is clear that Tocqueville is confused about a number of things and disregarding quite a few others.

A general ascendency of federal government has taken place in the 150 years since Tocqueville's work has been published, and history has shown that United States citizens have a variety of things to fear from both the state and federal governmnents that unite them. Minorities within any given state, for example, generally have more to fear from their state rather than their federal government (both state-sanctioned Jim Crow laws and anti-gay state constitutional amendments serve as useful examples of this trend), though, of course this is not always the case (think federally-mandated Japanese Internment during WWII). Additionally, citizens of individual states, overall, tend to have more to fear from the federal than their state governments, for two important reasons.

In the first case, as the Anti-Federalists point out, the federal government is large, prohibitively complex and sits a long distance away from the people it governs. All of these things contribute to a federal tendency of abuse, neglect and corruption by making it difficult for the citizens to successfully police it. Corruption on the state level is more easily detected, in general, simply because by virtue of its nature state government is far smaller than its federal counterpart, generally less complex and therefor less opaque, and the citizens, living in daily contact with their state government, are more familiar with it and the people who run it.

Agents of the federal government, by comparison, do not govern from the heart of their constituencies and their distance from them weakens the natural bonds of affection they feel for their individual states, inclining them further towards abuse of their positions.

Secondly, individual federal legislators, in their federal capacity, purportedly govern in the interest of the full body of U.S. citizens, but are accountable only to the citizens of a given state or district. This, sometimes, and perhaps often, inclines them to partiality in the governance of the nation as a whole. The recent conflict of interest in the budget between bridges in the State of Alaska and hurricane relief in Louisiana serves as a good example of this tendency. The weakness of these states, politically, and their position as victims in the current debacle, serves further to illustrate the partiality of various factions in the federal government.

Tocqueville's last claim, above, relating directly to state secession is simply mistaken. One of the primary Anti-Federalists arguments against the Federal Constitution was the fact that it wasn't a compact between sovereign states, but rather a compact between the people of the states and a national government. The implications of this, the Anti-federalists claimed, was a reduction in state sovereignty, including the capacity to secede.

To Be a Stoic or "Philosophy and My Good Life, Part 1"

When I was much younger, I was infatuated with the ancient Stoics.

Best known for their dispassionate natures, as a dead school, their primary contribution to the culture these days is the word "stoic" and all its derivatives.

But my infatuation with their thought had very little do do with their philosophical position on human emotions. It was their cosmology that attracted me more than anything else, and, for the brief period that I seriously saw the world through a stoic lense, I was intensely happy.

Stoic thought seemed (and at times still seems) intuitively plausible to me on a variety of levels. The stoics observed that the universe is governed by rational laws and concluded from this that everything in the universee is governed by the rational principle. Since rationality always aims at some good end, it follows that the universe is a teleological universe, itself aiming at some good end, and that every event which occurs in the universe helps to bring the universe closer to this final goal. The stoic universe, in this sense, is a deterministic universe and there is very little that human beings have control over.

It is important, however, that people are distinguished from all other things in the universe by their share in the rational principle. That is, human beings, unlike all other things in the universe, are rational beings - a status that grants them certain and absolute control over a very limited number of things, namely, their internal states.

Both of these things - universal teleology and exceptionally limited human control - have a variety of different implications. Two of the most important are the folding of ethics into rationality and the reduction of human agency to an externally impotent and internally omnipotent duality. The stoics reduce free will to an internal question of radical assent or radical dissent and maintain that this is a substantial notion of what it means to be free. All human misery is caused by the choice to dissent from the rationally ordained teleological nature of the universe. Unfortunately for those who dissent, while such dissent is meaningful, it is also useless.

What is interesting about this is that, from a stoic perspective, human happiness becomes a matter of how the human character is constituted, since our character is the only thing we have any control over. For the stoics, to be happy is to be rational; to be rational is to be ethical, and to be ethical is to be happy.

Eventually, of course, my love affair with the stoics ended, primarily because in stoic cosmology, all actions aim towards the good despite themselves. Feeding a starving six year-old aims at the good just as much as punching him in the face and kicking him in the nuts does.

I think, however, that my rejection of stoicism on this point may have been too radical because the overall good end of the universal teleology, according to stoicism, doesn't fall within the proper circle of man's concern - though he may take some comfort from the fact that all human evils eventually work toward some good end. The only thing that falls within the proper circle of man's concern is the constitution of his own character.

There are other problems with stoicism of course - it radically impoverishes our notion of the human good, for example, by making our actions within the external world provisional rather than substantial.

I do think, however, that at least a provisional return to my stoic leanings might be in the wings, simply because of its emphasis on personal responsibility to oneself, if nothing else.

Nightswimming

I walked to the library this afternoon. It has been raining in Seattle for two days with the same measured intensity. The ground is yellow and orange with fallen, wet leaves.

I'm a naturalized Northwesterner: I don't do umbrellas, so my hair and my satchel were soaked by the time I got to the library. From there, on my way to the warmth and incandescent glow of a coffee place, I walked past dark Capitol Hill corners and alleys and porches made beautiful by the early-evening muted glow of a grey-blue sky, an occasional porchlight, the white noise of rain, and the perfect play of shadows.

I kicked at some puddles and leaves and remembered what J said years ago: "Someone has to understand, statistics in a way." She was refomulating something I had said, and it sounded better coming from someone else who was as sure of it was I was.

That's what is most beautiful about the complexity of this weather and this time of year, that makes it superior to a bright spring day. It is in this weather, not in any clearer, that one can derive happiness from longing and certainty from the law of large numbers -- a fallacy with no certainty to offer.

"A rich darkness they love and hate," indeed.

Be As

Ben writes on what it means to leave things behind.

It is said in Hedwig that, to be free, one must give up a little piece of oneself.

A wise friend wrote to me once: "Being alive, and free to do as I please, makes me happy. I have thrown away those things that held me back. If I am doing wrong, then I trust that God will pardon me, on that great day of which prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe."

A haunting Judybats lyric says that what we lose, we become.

So it is that some things are, and ought to be, left behind.

Pro Patria

I have on my MP3 player, because I'm weird this way, original recordings of a number of famous historical speeches. Yesterday I listened to FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy."

I'm not an FDR worshipper the way Zinn and the intelligentsia, through their exertions in every history textbook in the land, would have me be. Leave aside the politics, the morality of the New Deal and of the man himself. What I heard was a president who was presidential. He had a firm voice, a command and a sense of the script he read, the palpable gravitas talking heads profess to seek today, that now seems comical only because it is so improbably characteristic of a real politician. His speechwriters didn't mince words or deny reality, and this is key -- they acknowledged explicitly the reality of war:

"American industrial genius, unmatched throughout the world in the solution of production problems, has been called upon to bring its resources and talents into action. Manufacturers of watches, of farm implements, linotypes, cash registers, automobiles, sewing machines, lawn mowers, and locomotives are now making fuses, bomb-packing crates, telescope mounts, shells, pistols, and tanks.

"But all our present efforts are not enough. We must have more ships, more guns, more planes -- more of everything."

No speechwriter, no president, would come within a million miles of that today. We don't have planes, guns, bombs. We have terror, victory, dedication, faith, and a glut of "resolve." I wonder if each generation since my grandparents' is bound to become less acutely aware that war is hell, that death exists.

I also received yesterday an issue of my (high school) alma mater's glossy, blancmange, suck-up-and-ask-for-money alumni magazine. It tells of two grads who were Marines killed in Iraq. Their faces look familiar. I probably passed these boys in the hall.

The magazine quotes the Cincinnati Enquirer: "Marines were killed Wednesday when a huge bomb destroyed their lightly armored vehicle, hurling it into the air in a giant fireball." I'm no expert, but I'd guess that their bodies were blown into several different pieces, most of which were immediately incincerated into a fine red spray, and that's what's left of them.

When I was a sophomore, one was a junior and the other was a senior. I probably ate lunch at a table near one of them, or shared an elective with one of them, or stood near one of them at a pep rally, or worked a canned food drive with them. There probably aren't many complete pieces of them left. They should be like 25 and 26 and they were blown into a red mist that evaporated in the hot Iraqi sun.

One of the things that most scares me about Generation Y is how anesthetized they are to this, how much it is for them an abstraction. Ours are all-volunteer armed forces (for now), and a smaller than ever portion of the population makes up the armed forces. It has been decades since we had a president who could talk about the realities of war the way FDR or Eisenhower did. It may be that we no longer have a populace that has enough sense to understand and be scared that their boys could be shipped off to war and converted to red particulate spray by a roadside bomb or a few dozen rounds of .50 auto at close range.

Dulce et decorum est, one might say, were he more cynical than I.