Thursday, March 5, 2009

on the virtue of being real

S.L. just drew my attention to this story (Warning: Some unedifying stuff): http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/realvirtuality.html

The gist: Virtual reality is being extended to take in all five senses.

The technology is, how shall we say, cool (and hot and sweet and sour and ...).

The potential uses range from vapid to depraved to creepy.

But my favorite detail is the name of the article as it appears within the URL: Real Virtuality

It's nice to know that the art of the clever (what used to be known as wit) has not vanished from the earth.

rush to judgment

In the latest Imprimis (containing an address he gave in December), and apparently again at last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, Rush Limbaugh pronounced a sentence of excommunication on "big government conservatives" and other such false brethren. Doubtless he had in mind such "neoconservatives" as David Frum, a frequent target of his anger these days.

There is a history of conservatives extending the left foot of fellowship to other conservatives. Frum himself infuriated many "paleoconservatives" back in 2003 when he suggested that they were being unpatriotic and didn't deserve to be called conservatives. He was, in a sense, returning a favor paid to the neocons by Stephen Tonsor (a paleocon) way back in 1986, when he read neoconservatism out of the movement in bitter and hysterical terms.

My sympathies in this ongoing dispute lie very decidedly with Frum and the neocons, and indeed I would resist any suggestion that there is some sort of moral equivalence between Frum's 2003 piece and any of the paleoconservative rantings against neocons, or Limbaugh's latest stunt.

However, I don't think that the habit of excommunicating other people who choose to call themselves conservatives is a healthy one, whoever might engage in it. Conservatism is a diverse movement, encompassing people on opposite sides of many issues. So it has always been, and so it will always be. I happen to think that's a strength of the conservative movement--which in many ways isn't a movement at all, but a collection of disparate movements that share a few things in common. There are many conservatives whom I can't stand, but that doesn't make them non-conservatives.

Besides, what was Limbaugh trying to accomplish? Did he seriously think he would get Frum et al. to stop calling themselves conservatives? Or that he would get everyone else to stop calling them conservatives? I think he's too smart to have been pursuing either of those hopeless objectives. I'm more inclined to think he was doing what he usually does, and does so well--venting, grabbing publicity, and preaching his choir into a happy frenzy.

But the next time he pronounces a sentence of excommunication, he should be sure to dress and carry himself more pontifically. I might find him a bit more convincing that way, though no less silly.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

liberals, "liberals," and Liberals

Some words are so horribly ambiguous that they become meaningless, or nearly so. When such a word is also extremely useful, however, it may be worth going to the trouble of saying what you mean by it so that you can use it with a reduced chance of being misunderstood. The word "liberal" (along with forms like "liberalism") is one such word. I am very fond of it, and I consider myself a liberal. But I am aware that I might confuse some people by saying that.

So here is how I intend to "disambiguate" it (to sound like Wikipedia). "Liberal" and its variants will appear in my posts in the following ways:
liberal, liberality (1)
classical liberal, classical liberalism (2)
"liberal," "liberalism" (3)
Liberal (4)
The forms in group (1) will be used with meanings related to generous and the like. Those in (2) have to do with the modern political tradition, dominant in the American founding, that places the highest political priority on individual freedom and equality under law. Those in (3) will bear on the frequently very illiberal, thoroughly adulterated form of classical liberalism that has arisen in America and elsewhere since the early 20th century, sometimes referred to as progressivism (or, as I like to write it, "progressivism")--and that now dominates the so-called Democratic Party. (4) has to do with Canada's Liberal Party and other similarly named parties.

I try to be liberal. I am a classical liberal. I am not a Liberal. And I despise "liberalism" (and a few "liberals").

If I were writing to political philosophers, I would be able to refer to classical liberalism as liberalism. But I'm not. So I can't. The "liberals" have stolen a noble and valuable word. C'est la vie--"liberals" stealing things, I mean.

tangential remark on "feeling bad?"

By the way, it is not always appropriate to correct others' grammar. Hypothetically, if my wife had misused the word "good" as we woke up at 5:22 Monday morning, it would have been a poor time to say, "You mean 'well', right?". Purely hypothetical, you understand ... well, at least I wish.

feeling bad?

It is surprising how often the word "good" is misused.

At least once a week some student says, "Mr. Lee, I don't feel good," when she is feeling ill. My general response is, "I'm glad; you shouldn't feel good because you aren't, and neither am I." I hope this technique is successfully thought-provoking, not annoyingly petty.

Since I teach in a Christian school, the young folk eventually catch on to my meaning--at least the members of the class who aren't feeling ill. But I wonder--how often are we really aware of sin and its consequences in ourselves, in those around us, and in mankind as a whole?

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

the drug starts to wear off

Here's Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

DAVID BROOKS: This is not the Barack Obama I thought I knew.

Actually, it’s the same Obama it always was. Brooks, and others, were just so excited at the idea of a black President — or, more specifically, at the idea of themselves, voting for a black President — that they suspended all critical faculties. Now it’s buyer’s remorse. We’ll be seeing more of that.

Very well said, Glenn.

what's wrong with voters under 30

Insightful comment from user Amor de Cosmos on the Contentions blog over at Commentary:

We tend to forget that there is a generation of voters who never knew 1970’s America. They have lived in the relative prosperity brought about by Reaganism. They have not known punitive taxation, stifling regulation, and the cold hand of bureaucracy. They are about to learn the price of Utopia.

(Peter Wehner's post that prompted the comment is also worthwhile, on our new president's determination to undo every aspect of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution.)

You can learn from other people's mistakes (which requires historical memory), or from your own (i.e., from experience). As the old Yiddish proverb has it, Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.

how to subscribe to this blog or any other

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Instead of hopping around in your browser from one blog to another that you like to read, you can subscribe to the blogs--along with lots of other kinds of information feeds.

If this is totally new to you, you might want to read this tutorial from the BBC site. It's a good introduction.

Here's a really easy way to get started with blog subscriptions: On this blog, way down at the bottom of the sidebars on the right side of the window, you'll see a subscription section, which contains a little orange thing (called a "chicklet") and a link that says "Subscribe in a reader." Right-click on the link, and choose "Open in a new tab" or "Open in a new window." Then click on the new tab/window to see what is displayed (and come back to the tab/window where you're reading this for the rest of your instructions, when you're ready).

You should see (in the new tab/window) something that says "we have a thinking feeling" at the top, and "syndicated content powered by FeedBurner" right below that. Below all of that, and over on the right, there should be a box that says "Subscribe Now!" Below that is a bunch of little rectangle widgets, including one that says "Google" next to a little plus sign. Click on that.

Now you should find yourself looking at a Google page that has two big blue buttons that say, "Add to Google homepage" and "Add to Google Reader." If you have a Google homepage or want to have one, click on that button, and Google will step you through the process of adding our blog feed to your homepage or, if necessary, creating a homepage from scratch. If you'd rather just use the Google reader to look at all your news and blog feeds, then go with that. Again, Google will step you through the whole process, and will give you access to tutorials explaining how Google Reader works.

There are lots of other options, but if you really wanted one of them you wouldn't be reading this post!

fairness differs from mercy

Having condemned Toni Morrison's new novel, her views of language-as-oppression, and the critics' sycophancy, I want to add a qualification in the interest of full disclosure and of fairness:

I have not read the book, but only a review of it, along with lots of "critical" puffery. I have also watched an interview with TM on the book and on assorted other topics, such as the election of Barack Obama.

Why have I not read it? Because the "critics" who praise it praise it in ways that are either patently untrue, or that reflect values that I do not share, and at least one critic who has panned it has done so in a fair, balanced, and well-argued manner that presupposes literary values similar to my own. I am too busy to read books of such a character. Also, I have read enough of Ms. Morrison's other productions to know that she is fond of some very muddled ideas, is overrated as a stylist, and has a severely misguided agenda.

But I do not doubt that the book has some good passages and some good aspects. Toni Morrison is a human being who is capable of sympathetic and beautiful writing (though not in a style that particularly appeals to me). Some of her purposes in writing as she does are noble. I do not mean in any way to question her intentions. She is right to concern herself with racism, and with the plight of those who are helpless, and with the injustices (I would call them sins) that we inflict on each other daily, especially in our most closely knit circles. Our differences are mostly on the question of how to make the world better, not whether it needs to be made better, or even what about it needs to be fixed.


question: when is a critic not a critic?

Answer: When he's a cheerleader.

Here are some excerpts from what the "critics" have had to say about A Mercy--taken from the publisher's puff page, which has scores of these--with my comments in curly braces:

"Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history {oh?} and myth {that part is evident}, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable." (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

"Rich knowledgeability {is that anything like knowledge?} about 17th-century America is put to telling effect." (Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times)

"Morrison doesn’t write traditional novels so much as create a hypnotic state of poetic intoxication. You don’t read A Mercy, you fall into a miasma of language and symbolism. [It] offers an original vision of America in its primeval state, where freedom was a rare commodity." (Deirdre Donahue, USA Today) {Where do I begin?}

"What’s the opposite of ‘lazy’ in a fiction writer’s style and research? Industrious? Indefatigable? Morrison wears her knowledge lightly {that's for sure}, yet every page exhibits her control {?} of [the 17th century’s] objects and artifacts, its worries and dangers. She surrounds A Mercy’s more fanciful arabesques with a broad border of realism. . . . A book as masterfully wrought as A Mercy behooves its author {can a book behoove an author?} to swagger." (Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

And then there is this gem: "The stories in A Mercy are as layered and contested as the barely mapped topology traversed by its characters." (Neda Ulaby, NPR) {Do you think she might have meant topography? Or does Prof. Morrison also have a role in Princeton's mathematics department?}

My favorite comment on the book comes from the author herself (quoted by Cheryl Miller): "I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like..." How do you look, with or without blinking, at what something could have been like (if you're not God)?

I grant that she's not exactly a critic, but then she might as well be.

more of A Mercy

When I read Miller's review of A Mercy to my wife, we had a discussion that reminded me that Professor Morrison's Nobel acceptance speech contained this passage:

"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek--it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language--all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.... There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness."

Well, now. Don't I feel guilty for all the mean things I said about her nice little novel! I, with my little bit of knowledge of history and style, was just trying "to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness." Caught in the act.

Or maybe she just thinks it's good to destroy language, and I don't.

emerging literary genre: the unhistorical novel

For those of you who subscribe to Commentary, here is an excellent review by Cheryl Miller of a new novel that you really should read. (That is, you really should read the review, not necessarily the novel.)

For those of you who don't, here's a taste of what you're missing by not reading the review or the novel:

It's the 1680s, and there's an Anabaptist community (think Amish) in New York, Milton, where lives a freethinking Dutchman named Vaark. Being a freethinker among Anabaptists, he doesn't exactly fit in. So he and his wife live in isolation on their farm, along with a young Native American woman they've taken in, one Lina, whose family and tribe died of smallpox, an African woman named Sorrow who went crazy during her passage to America on a slave ship, an African-American girl, Florens, who was given to Mr. Vaark by her mother in payment of her master's debt, and two male homosexual farm hands. This group of outcasts live in a kind of Edenic harmony (is Milton anywhere near Woodstock?) until Mr. Vaark gets bitten by the greedy capitalist bug and destroys their idyllic existence. (Notice how deftly I managed to avoid giving away any plot spoilers.)

The novel, then, narrates an unremarkable series of events for late-17th-century America, involving a pretty average household of that day. What sets the book apart is the writing--or the style, for you literary types--and the character development and the richness of historical detail.

At one point, for example, Florens says, "I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, ever Sorrow talk"--a lovely picture of semi-literate rusticity if ever there was one. At another point, she says, "I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you." The reader is obviously meant to realize a deep truth about Florens--that she has at some point taken a remedial grammar course followed by a creative writing seminar--though this is never mentioned explicitly.

Or consider Lina's grief at Mr. Vaark's cutting down fifty trees without having first "asked their permission." Or her diagnosis of what is destroying him and them--apart from the obvious problems that "he is a man" and "a Europe": "Cut loose from the earth’s soul they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples." (If that analysis rings a bell, it's because it's straight out of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1845--or any of countless neo-Marxian discussions of alienated labor. Oh, sorry. Marx must have fished the ideas out of the residue of Native American wisdom--something he did, perhaps, during his period as a correspondent for a New York newspaper.)

Or this gem of the writer's craft: "
Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess." Ouch. A little dropoff in the level of formality there.

STOP! What is going on here? What feebly written, pathetic piece of trash is this? Why is Commentary running a review of some self-published bit of illiteracy that some poor deluded person who doesn't know any better has paid to have printed and listed on Amazon? Shouldn't we just pass over this kind of ephemera in silence, and spare the feelings of whatever wannabe author produced this junk?

Well, the novel in question is A Mercy, the latest creation of Toni Morrison--who, you may recall, won the Nobel Prize (for literature!) back in 1993, and is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus; Special Consultant to the Director of the Princeton Atelier; and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts, all at Princeton University.

What we have here, in short, is an example of the historical, cultural, and literary illiteracy begotten upon higher academia by multiculturalism, relativism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, neo-Marxianism, Freudianism, oppression studies, and a host of other isms and attitudes that often get lumped together as postmodernism--a cloud of unknowing that has been called "diversitarianism."

What to call such a book? It isn't a historical novel, clearly. I thought of calling it an "anachronistic novel," but that lacks punch. Let's dub this sort of thing the "unhistorical novel." It comforts me to know that it isn't only evangelicals who write them.


Sowell food for thought

Thomas Sowell puts so many things so well (hey! look at that!) Today's column, Power Of Life And Death Is In Our Words, is a good example. Here are three quotations that I thought hit the bull's eye:

"Unfortunately, people on the make seem to have a keener appreciation of the power of words, as the magic road to other power, than do people defending values that seem to them too obvious to require words."

"Barack Obama is today's most prominent example of the power of words. Conversely, the understated patrician style of country-club Republicans is no small part of their many problems."

"Republicans have always had more people who would make good presidents than people who would make good presidential candidates. So long as we have a democracy, that distinction is crucial."


finally, a stimulus that might help us

Economic historians are now pretty sure that the New Deal didn't end the Depression. It just prolonged it and deepened it into the Great Depression. World War II seems to have done the trick, instead.

Thus I greeted this news from the current world frenzy of stimulation as holding out some prospect of helping us--finally: The German government is using some of its stimulus package to buy weapons and fighting vehicles for the army.


Monday, March 2, 2009

Which season do YOU forget?

I ask a small child, "Can you tell me all four seasons?"

"Winter, spring, summer", she says.

So I try again, "No, all FOUR seasons. You know your seasons, right?"

"Winter, spring, summer", she repeats.

Well I think she is a bright girl, so I try another tactic: "Ok, how about you tell me the four most important events in world history?"

"Sure--there was Creation, Jesus first coming to die for us, and Jesus coming again."

"Are you sure you didn't miss one?"

"Um ... yes, at least I think so."

This story sounds silly. And yet many Christians have a huge blind spot--a profound neglect of that fourth key event when shaping their worldview. Well, actually it was the second key event, but you get the point.

[to be continued]

a question for anyone who predicted the Crash of '08

I recently heard someone praising a financial guru for having predicted October's, indeed all of 2008's, stock market meltdown. It happens that I was on that particular guru's mailing list for several patches of the last twenty years (not by choice), and so I also know that he predicted the '87 Crash, as well as the '89 Crash, the '90 Crash, the '91 Crash, the '92 Crash, ..., the bursting of the dot-com bubble (nailed one!), the end of civilization as we know it because of the expected (by him) Y2K computer bug, and--well, you get the point. Something about stopped clocks.

So the next guy who comes along boasting of having called the '08 Crash, ask him for a complete list of the other crashes, financial meltdowns, and other disasters that he has predicted.

reductio ad absurdum of open-mindedness

A former student who is teaching some high-school students how to write essays for standardized tests recently assigned them the question, "Should schools teach facts or open-mindedness?" The vast majority of them went for the second branch of this patently false dichotomy, but were unable to advance any arguments to support their thesis. She sensed that they all just knew that open-mindedness was the right answer, and duly fell in line.

What's wrong with this picture?

what's in a misnomer?

John Podhoretz's editorial in the latest Commentary puts the problem with the Obama-Reid-Pelosi "stimulus" bill quite nicely: It's one thing to advance policies that you think will benefit the country. It's another to conceal those policies under the name of economic stimulus and to railroad the thing through Congress without meaningful debate or scrutiny. (By "scrutiny," I have in mind, for example, letting our elected representatives read the bill before they have to vote on it.) It almost seems that these people are afraid of disclosure and debate on their cherished policies.

And so they have put over one of the (in dollar terms) biggest lies in American political history: A "stimulus" bill that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's economists estimate will slow the economy down. That's not a stimulus; that's a sedative. (In more ways than one.)

A ruse by any other name would seem as smelly.

another reason for DC non-statehood

There's a big advantage to having one statelet (or district) that is directly governed by Congress: It provides a kind of laboratory in which we can all see the effects of federal policies worked out, with no "blame the state government" or even "blame the President" excuse for Congress to hide behind.

No wonder Congress wants to push DC closer to statehood!


why do we suddenly think DC needs congressional representation?

As I mentioned on Saturday, we are on the verge of atoning for another one of our many national sins, namely our failure to give congressional representation to the denizens of the capital district (known today as the District of Columbia, or more frequently as DC).

Which got me to thinking: How could the framers have been so blind on this point? They allowed Taxation Without Representation into the Constitution! A blatant contradiction of one of America's dearest values! Bad framers!!

Or maybe they had a different understanding
from ours of the relationship between the states (or States, as they liked to call them) and the federal government. As a small minority of us knows, the Constitution established "checks and balances" between the three branches of the federal government. As an even smaller minority of us knows, it also set up checks and balances between the federal government and the states. It limited federal power by subordinating some of it to the power of the states. Which made it important that the seat of the federal government not be located within a state, for if it were so located, that state could interfere with the functioning of the federal government or could exercise undue influence over it. ("Put another $75 billion into the stimulus bill for Maryland's discretionary use and we'll turn the power back on.") And one of the chief ways the states exercised power and control over the federal government was through their Representatives and Senators. Therefore, DC wasn't a state and didn't have a congressional delegation.

Nowadays, because the powers ("rights") of the states have been largely eroded by the (federal) courts, we have mostly forgotten about federal-state checks and balances. The states seem to us more like mere territorial divisions of the federal system, responsible for supplying certain government services to their residents. (Note: "residents," not "citizens.") In other words--using New Jersey terminology--states are now to the federal government as counties are to state governments, or as municipalities are to county (and state) governments. In which case it is odd that there's this bit of territory in the US of A that isn't a state. That would be like Mercer County in New Jersey (which contains the state capital) not being a county, or like Morristown (the county seat of Morris County) not being a municipality.

But the analogy between DC and a county is a mistake. The reason Mercer County is a county is that the Constitution of New Jersey does not establish any checks and balances between the counties and the state. Counties are fully subordinate to the state. States were not supposed to be fully subordinate to the federal government, yet DC had to be in the interest of federal impartiality. Today, however, we think of states as being fully subordinated to the federal government, and so the analogy seems compelling to us.

If the states are in fact fully subordinate to the federal government--which is the only constitutional theory under which DC should be just like a state--then why not just retrocede DC back to Maryland, just as Alexandria (originally part of DC) was retroceded to Virginia in 1846? Then DC residents would vote and be represented as Marylanders, and since the federal government can order the states around freely, there would be no undue Maryland influence on the federal government--any more than there is undue influence on the Fed from New York, or on any other federal agency from the states where it has offices.

OR we could go back to the Constitution (which might require us to undo or to modify the 23rd Amendment), and let the residents of DC decide (individually) whether they want to move to a state in order to get to vote in federal elections.

My guess is that we'll deepen the current muddle by granting a congressman to DC, and then the courts will eventually decide that DC is really a state, and is entitled to two senators, and then we'll be arguing over whether DC is the kind of state that gets a star on the flag, since we won't want to have to redesign Old Glory yet again--anyway, 51 is such an ugly number--and of course there will be a move to rename DC to the State of Columbia, but that will botch up everyone's address form on his website since the postal abbreviation will have to change, and .............

I guess this is some of that change we could all believe in.


my foot!

Here's a story from the BBC about the recent discovery of what is believed to be the oldest known human footprint. Based on the dating of the footprint--I won't go into all the guesswork, theorizing, and assumptions that went into that--it has been assigned to Homo erectus, one of our nearest ancestors. The astonishing thing is that it looks just like a "modern" human footprint. (So how do we know it isn't just a Homo sapiens footprint? That would be the dating. H. sapiens isn't supposed to have been around yet. Hmmm.)

So where does this leave the evolution of human feet? Well, if we accept all the orthodox dating as it now stands, there's a footprint from 3.8 million years ago of an
Australopithicus something-or-other that looks pretty "apelike," and the next one we have is our new specimen, a 1.5-million-year-old footprint that looks pretty indistinguishable from a "modern" human print. In between? Nothing.

As the BBC puts it, "Exactly how that more ape-like foot developed into its modern version has remained unclear." Apparently that's because predators regard feet as a delicacy, so that they tend to be missing from the critters who managed to get themselves fossilized. And footprints are hard to find once they've been buried. So there's not much evidence to work with.

Thus the lack of any transitional feet- or footprint-forms is
exactly what the theory of evolution would predict! Whereas if they ever happen to find a transitional form, that will be exactly what the theory would predict! What could possibly falsify this theory?

O me of little faith...

Saturday, February 28, 2009

another "injustice" bites the dust

So on Thursday the Senate voted to expand the House of Representatives by two seats, with one going to the District of Columbia and the other to Utah. Apparently Utah is entitled to one because the Census hasn't been counting all those Mormon missionaries who are out of state but who permanently reside there.

DC is to get one because it has never had representation in Congress, and there mustn't be taxation without representation and so on. Harry Reid sees this as "moving to right a centuries-old wrong."


Be that as it may, it's an interesting question whether this can be squared with the Constitution. On the one hand, Article I, Section 2 says, "
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States," and of course the capital District is not a state (or State). On the other hand, the 23rd amendment (1961) grants DC a number of electors in the Electoral College "equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State." Lots of penumbras in there for the Supreme Court to work with!

My biggest worry about this is that if DC has a right to a Representative, I don't see why it isn't also entitled to two Senators. The GOP seems to be taking the view that the extra Utah seat makes up for the likely Democratic DC seat, but how are they going to prevent a creative Federal court from giving DC two Senators?


unread laws, boring version

I don't know about the rules in the US Congress, but in the British and Canadian Parliaments, a bill can't be voted on without being read aloud to the house two (or maybe it's three) times. I used to think that was weird, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in it.

Of course, they cheat nowadays by including other material "by reference," so that the bill just says, e.g., "The
Massively Convoluted and Bloated Set of Miscellaneous Spending Plans Intended to Get the Country back to Work, presented to this House on 20 February 2009 by the Right Honourable Minister for Government Efficiency, and amended by the Amendments to the Massively Convoluted and Bloated Set of Miscellaneous Spending Plans Intended to Get the Country Back to Work adopted on 19 February 2009 by the Special Select Committee for Parliamentary Continuity and presented to this House and adopted on 20 February 2009, is hereby the Law of the Land." As tangled as that is, you can read it aloud two or three times in just a few minutes, while the MCBSMSPIGCBW is free to run to, say, 1200 or more pages, and the Amendments to several hundred more pages.

Here's a revolutionary idea to think about: a constitutional amendment stating that no bill, motion, resolution, or other item of business can be adopted by either house of Congress unless it, and all documents referred to in it, directly or indirectly, has first been read aloud twice to that house--once when presented, and once, as amended, before the vote on it.

Not likely to be politically viable at the moment (apparently), but maybe the day will come.

unread laws, funny version

Rob Long hits a home run with this column in the latest National Review, titled "Excerpts from the unread parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" (subscription or registration required). If you doubt that the best way to make a very serious point is sometimes by being very funny, read this piece. Brilliant.

Friday, February 27, 2009

norm's grumpthink manifesto

What is grumpthink?
  • It is a kind of thinking, as opposed to mere sentimentality and other mushy thought-substitutes. This flags it immediately as old-fashioned.
  • It is critical thinking, in the sense that it doesn't tolerate sloppiness and imprecision, not even from friends.
  • It is willing to be individualistic in its outlook, if not positively contrarian or even curmudgeonly. It is thus deeply opposed to groupthink in all its forms, including, for example, today's epidemic of Hopenchange.
Its name notwithstanding, it is not misanthropic. It smiles at human foibles and silliness even as it skewers them, but is capable of hot indignation at duplicity and hypocrisy.

Great exemplars of grumpthink include Hamlet, who employs grumpthink especially with Polonius, Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern; the entire text of Gulliver's Travels (though the final section, especially, verges on misanthropy); and William
F. Buckley, Jr.'s "standing athwart history, yelling Stop." Masters of grumpthink include Evelyn Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, C.S. Lewis, the aforementioned WFB, Thomas Sowell, Roger Scruton, and Mark Steyn. As these examples suggest, grumpthink has an affinity with Christianity and with several recent forms of conservatism. To be fair, however, it has had some notable practitioners outside those traditions. One thinks of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell--not to mention the better writers at Saturday Night Live.

When is grumpthink called for? Any time people are doing misguided things in large groups--which is to say, any time. But the larger the groups, and the more misguided the things, the greater the need for grumpthink.

Events of the first weeks of the Obama administration and the 111th Congress suggest that the nation's and the world's need for grumpthink is now pressing and will remain so for the foreseeable future. They also suggest that grumpthinkers' mills will not lack for grist.

That's why I'm finally taking the blog plunge. The world cannot have too many people questioning the idiocies of our day. So I take my place athwart history and start yelling Nonsense.