The Onion, have my children.#

HUNTSVILLE, AL—In the seven months since she got herself knocked up, graphic designer Amy Glennon, 27, has been walking around the Calendarz, Inc. office acting like the Queen of Sheba just because she's pregnant, coworker Stephen DeGrassio announced Monday.

"Amy thinks she's Big Miss Important," DeGrassio said Monday. "She's behaving like a total priss. It's like, 'Ooh, look at me! I'm pregnant! I'm gonna have a baby!' Hey, calm down. People have babies all the time."

Richard Tallent writes about sin and homosexuals.#

I completely agree with her, but there is another side as well. Any Christian who treats gays differently than the gossips, heterosexuals outside of marriage, adulterers, gluttons, elitists, selfish, etc. that they also know is a hypocrite. If you hold someone in lower esteem than yourself just because you think their sin is "gross" or "unnatural" or whatever compared to yours or others', you are completely missing the point: everyone sins. The ways and extents to which we break God's laws may have different natural consequences (murder > hatred, thievery > coveting), but the spiritual consequence is the same: not being where God wants us to be. We all need forgiveness.

The Black Saint on Hayden Christensen in Star Wars.#

It just doesn't seem possible that Christensen could turn into the galaxy's greatest bad ass, Darth Vader. While credit is due to the character's costume design and to actor David Prowse, much of what makes Vader memorable is James Earl Jones's voice. He's like the Shaft of villains. And while Jones gave Vader a sort of regal elegance, he wasn't above getting a little ghetto when the time was right.

Richard Tallent explains why he feels protectionism helps innovation.#

If the mother of invention is necessity, our ability to innovate in a particular industry is proportional to the number of people working in that industry. Only someone actually doing the day-to-day work will ever be able to discover and invent new ways to do that work. Thus, as software development moves overseas, the innovation and creative output from that industry will also move. Anyone who thinks we Americans can hold our economic position by just all sitting at desks thinking real hard about how to re-engineer someone else's job is kidding themselves.

John Quiggin wonders about George W. Bush and 2004.#

The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it's worth a hard and dispassionate look.

Richard asks a question about marriage...#

On what principle can we—can I—justify denying the ability and, more importantly, the propriety of people loving more than one person? Nate quotes a Malcolm Gladwell where the latter says "institutions [...] are where we hide when we can't find our principles." It's a naive question (but naive questions are often the important ones to ask): is there a good explanation for why we are marrying? Or do we do it because, while there may once have been a good reason for doing it, we only do it now because it's the way we've always done it? We can question why these men made fools of themselves so publicly and have a laugh about it, but you'll notice that nobody questions the institution that caused them make fools of themselves.

I don't know, I'm just a hustlah homie.

Richard is pushing his -edge beliefs on me.#

AKMA links to Naomi Wolf's accusation of Harold Bloom, 20 years later.#

From AKMA:

People who know me well know that I'm deeply loyal to Yale (for historic, familial reasons as well as fond personal experience) — but even more than I am loyal to Yale, I'm repulsed by people (especially people in my vocational areas of ordained ministry and teaching) taking advantage of their position to intimidate and exploit those whom they should be serving. Nothing could warrant the Yale administration's opaque and evasive defense against the consequences of their inaction.

From the comments of AKMA's post:

I find myself agreeing with Camille Paglia on this one—if Naomi Wolf's aim really is exposing systemic problems at Yale, she would have been better off approach the problem from that angle, not making an accusation against Harold Bloom for something that happened twenty years ago and cannot be corroborated by any reports filed or interviews given twenty years ago. And if Ms. Wolf cannot provide any evidence of systemic problems beyond a couple of deans avoiding her phone calls, then she's guilty of turning a single incident into a scandal involving the University.

From Naomi Wolf:

In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student's inner thigh—a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now: I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge.

Notice the unflattering picture of Harold on page 2. Nice choice.

Ryan Overbey ponders about gay marriage supporters and their foes.#

So I issue a challenge. Do any of you, my dear readers, support a marriage amendment? And if so, why? Feel free to comment below. But this game will have rules. You are not allowed to say "Because I want to protect marriage", or "Because I want to defend the sanctity of marriage." If you do attempt these meaningless lines of argument, then give them meaning. Define them. Tell us why allowing gay people to marry will damage the institution itself, will dilute the meaning of union for other couples. If you sincerely believe that permitting gay marriage will lead to the collapse of our social institutions and family structures, do us the favor of telling us why you believe it is so. And try not to be like the Baptist protester in Boston, who stated frankly and unironically that God would destroy the state in the same way He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. You can do better than that.

Jorrit Wiersma writes about his dear daughter.#

I may sometimes seem a little negative about her when I talk about how she's not speaking much or how she can sometimes nag. But she's such a sweet little girl. And she does listen to her parents very well— of course, we hope that's because we taught her that she can't mess with her parents, but it might just be her personality :). She's quite good with her hands: drawing, playing with lego, and throwing balls. And she can sing quite well. And she's become very good at parroting what we say. Of course, I don't really know what other two-year olds are like, but this morning when she was crying and shouting because she was of the opinion that I didn't give her enough attention and I told her that it was really enough now and that she should stop crying, she did stop. So you see, that is just so sweet that I can't help but to be proud of her and love her.

That's superb.

Harry Brighouse writes about Nader and voting.#

I have never found the 'vote for someone you believe in' principle compelling — we should allocate our vote in such a way that maximizes the expected probability of it contributing to a good all things considered outcome. This sometimes means holding your nose and voting for a Democrat. It may sometimes mean voting for a Republican. But in this race I thought, and still think, that there was a very good case to be made that voting for Nader was the best thing to do.

Ryan McGee explains How NOT to date me.#

I'm not going to give a timeline, although that would be a hilarious exercise in masochism. Rather, I'm gonna given five basic tips on how not to approach a relationship with me. If you, like, just wanna freak 'til the sun comes up, so long as you don't have open sores feel free to disregard any and all of the following tips. These tips, incidentally, come from at least one experience with at least one woman in the past year. Mostly, they have a few iterations apiece. That fact in and of itself bespeaks the fact that I myself have a long way to go as well, but it's much more fun to blame other people. Hell, I blame myself nearly every day on this website, let's take some of that inner anger and blowtorch these beeyotches to Kingdom Come.

And he continues with part 2.

The result of a day of school without my book, but a laptop preloaded with pages.#

A note on this: My Linear Algebra professor just scribbled something out on the board and said, "Whatever... I don't know what I'm doing." It was perfect.

Decon Recon writes on Kuro5hin.org about population growth and "what to do about it."#

To humanely transform population growth rates in less developed countries, two main objectives must be implemented: 1. Grassroots economic development; 2. Massive efforts at public health education and medical care. The alternative is severe conditions in many of the least economically developed countries.

These are our choices: 1. Allow population growth and its impacts on disease epidemics, environmental degradation, futures wars, collapsing countries, etc., to go unchecked. 2. Invest in our future. The later is morally and economically the wiser path.

Some critics of western development strategies argue that developed nations should stay out of the business of population control in developing nations. Certainly, developing nations and communities of the poor will be primary agents in solving their social crises, but probably not the only agents. Pragmatically, it seems both economic and educational programs for the poorest countries cannot become extensive without the input and/or aid of developed nations. Who manages what and how is another question.

I think that is interesting when people talk about how the population needs to be smaller and then go on to say that all these things (disease, environmental destruction, wars, etc) are bad--but aren't they the things that are reducing the population the most?

It is my opinion that:

We will get whatever we deserve, whatever that is. If humans destroy the majority of current life on this planet then the planet is probably better off without else. It has recovered from catastrophe before and it could presumable do it again. Similarly, it has created life before so even if we completely eradicate everything on Earth, we won't have beat nature. If the poor countries with the largest population growth don't get their act together, then why not take them off welfare?

Political intervention doesn't help any where else, so why would it help here? I find it hard to believe that the magical technologically advanced Westerns can go fix the problems (that we created) for the indigenous populations of poor country X. How long after screwing up will it take to admit we were wrong and go home?

Aaron Swartz is interviewed by Jasper.#

(This is part fisk and part interesting quotation grabbing.)

For example, you have a right guaranteed by US copyright law to make a backup copy of software in case the original copy goes bad for some reason. It would be very unfair if they could take those rights away.

When you're forced to follow laws passed by a government of the people, that's one thing, but when you have to follow all sorts of additional restrictions added by some unaccountable corporation, it's quite a different situation.

I wonder what Aaron's measurement of "fair" is. And look at the backwards think on that: Governments are accountable, but corporations are not. Even though when you don't vote governments keep going, but when you stop paying corporations they disappear.

So, that's still a matter of controversy, but this isn't so unreasonable. Even mainstream organizations like the Assocation for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest association of computing professionals, is against this idea.

Appeal to authority.

And even more importantly, I think the government shouldn't be giving authors control over how we express ourselves. The International Olympic Committee should not be able to stop groups from calling themselves the "Gay Olympics", Mattel should not be able to stop people from singing about "Barbie Girl" or taking pictures of "Food Chain Barbie" Barbie, and Dr. Suess shouldn't be able to stop people who write in his style.

I don't disagree with everything that Aaron says. I like this bit very much.

You can't just punish people because they took away a "potential sale". Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales. One reason people might be buying less CDs is because they're spending their money on DVDs.

He doesn't come right out and say it, although I'm not sure if it's because he doesn't think of it. But this is an observation orthogonal to observing that patents and copyrights are monopolies (of law), plain and simple, and have all the same negative consequences. François-René Rideau writes about this in Government and Microsoft: a Libertarian View on Monopolies which I read on November 25th.

As mjd explains it, we're naturally designed to associate ourself with our "tribe" of ancient days. Now we don't live so much in tribes, but we still feel some urge to be part of a community, and to have friends whose honor we defend and whose common ideas we fight for, right or wrong. As part of the tribe, we want to evangelize and get people to join us, but we also want to attack anyone who would insult us and stop anyone who would leave us. We don't think of it in the same rational way as a common item, it's no longer an issue of reason, it's an affront to the tribe, and you can't let that stand. I think this is probably worst in politics, for whatever reason, where once people associate with a tribe, they'll defend it even if it's completely corrupt and acting against almost all their interests — even normally highly intelligent rational people. This is not to say I'm immune, I find myself doing it all the time — it's a very tough habit to break.

I like this description of "tribes" later on in the interview.

Aaron Swartz links to Seth Finkelstein's Libertarianism Makes You Stupid and continues with a series of his own.#

From Seth Finkelstein:

However, I regard the Libertarianism as a kind of business-worshiping cultish religion, which churns out annoying flamers who resemble nothing so much as street-preachers on the Information Sidewalk.

In order to understand how one gets from the "moral principles" above to the sort of fanatical proselytizing seen everyday on discussion lists, it's important to grasp how the ideology actually works out, from theory to practice.

To start off, Libertarianism is highly axiomatic. Note how the above quote touts its logically consistent approach. There's a set of rules to be applied to evaluate what is proper, and the outcome given is the answer which is correct in terms of the moral principle of the theory. Are the religious thinking connections starting to become evident? This doesn't mean there can't be religious-type schisms in applying the axioms (for example, there's one regarding abortion). But in practice, the rules are simple and tight enough to produce surprisingly uniform positions compared to common political philosophies.

It is interesting because Seth rarely actually says why or how Libertarians are wrong on the things he thinks they are wrong about. He claims they redefine words, but does not give the "proper" definitions or the ones used by Libertarians.

 

From Aaron Swartz's opening:

Government regulation, for example, is inherently bad, while property and contracts are inherently good. But you can't really have property without government regulation enforcing it! So to convince a libertarian that he should support your government regulation, you don't discuss the costs and benefits of the regulation, but instead try to convince him that the regulation is a consequence of some implied contract or is really just another form of property.

And this belief in certain types of government regulation ends up destroying the free market that the regulation was meant to protect. A free market may require some freedom of contract, but if everyone is forced to sign a contract promising not to compete, then there's not much of a market left!

I wonder why he thinks you need government regulation to enforce property and contracts? And by definition a contract cannot be forcibly signed.

From Aaron's Question for Free-Market Libertarians:

Anyway, there's a fundamental contradiction in the theory that bothers me. Take two people, the homeless man pushing a cart in San Francisco, and the rich corporate mogul flying around the world in his jet. Now, arguendo, let's grant the premise that the homeless man is homeless because he's a worthless grunt who doesn't contribute to society, and the rich man is rich because the market has determined he's worthwhile. The homeless man shouldn't get money from the state, because that would make him dependent and even less likely to seek out work. But what about their children? Rich man's son will live in luxury his entire without working a day. It's pushing it to say that this was OK for his father, but can you truly say it's fair because the market is rewarding him for choosing excellent parents?

Libertarians think that said homeless man shouldn't get money from the State, but are not opposed to him getting money from other people. If you care about him, why not donate your own money, rather than stealing from me?

Why is a child's right to rob from me to survive?

 

Another one from Aaron Swartz about how far intellectual property could extend. (But I don't "believe" in intellectual property and the piece is short enough for you to go read the whole thing. The comments are choice as well.)

Holt Uncensored writes Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do).#

The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be.

The list:

1. Repeats, or "Crutch Words."
2. Flat Writing, or "Something is conveyed in this sentence, but who cares? The writing is so flat, it just dies on the page."
3. Empty Adverbs, or "words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck the meaning out of every sentence."
4. Phony Dialogue, or using "dialogue, so the characters *show* us what the author can't *tell* us."
5. No-Good Suffixes, like "ness", "ize", "ly", "ing", etc: "Not all "ness" words are bad - goodness, no - but they are all suspect."
6. The 'To Be' Words, you should "replace them with active, vivid, engaging verbs. Muscle up that prose."
7. Lists: "It doesn't matter what you list - nouns, adjectives, verbs - the result is always static."
8. Show, Don't Tell: "The moment we can visualize the picture you're trying to paint, you're showing us, not telling us what we *should* see.."
9. Awkward Phrasing "makes the reader stop in the midst of reading and ponder the meaning of a word or phrase."
10. Commas: "you can't delete commas just because you don't like the pause they bring to a sentence or just because you want to add tension. "

George Orwell in May of 1945 writes about the decay of the English language and what can be done about it, this was probably bookmarked from the same place as the above.#

Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes

[...]

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

The central problem that Orwell finds is that the writers, particularly of political prose, do not seem to say much of anything at all. This is either a purposed misleading or a self-confusion, regardless of the cause it is eroding modern intellect.

Orwell rails against metaphors that are dying and used incorrectly. A brilliant quotation:

Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Orwell cites word padding and the transmutation of verbs into phrases as a useful tool of confusion. In generally, Orwell seems to suggest that motto of modern prose is, "If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." This includes the use of words in every scenario until they become meaningless and the method of inflating argument by word choice:

Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,

I find this to be the essential criticism of Orwell's. It defines the problem in general enough a way that the thinker can use it to write the rest of the essay by gathering evidence.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

[...]

People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying.

After declaring the case, Orwell begins to discuss the effects. This is what it does to the meaningless speeches of politicians who do not write their speeches and have forgotten the oratory tradition of great leaders:

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

Orwell notes that he is merely talking about writing that intends to induce thought: political, scientific, explanatory, etc. As opposed to literary works that should be free to do whatever they please.

The preservation of language is something that is also very important to Jacques Barzun, who wrote about it in the book The Culture We Deserve in the essays What Critics Are Good For and License to Corrupt.