entirely safe and fun

So the yearly ritual of the Congressional debate over a “Flag Protection Amendment” (most recently considered by the Senate as S.J. Res 12 and by the House, last year, as H.J. Res 10) has come again to a close with, thankfully, no changes to the law. It’s a useful barometer of your congressthings’ attitudes toward civil liberties; are they committed enough to the open democratic ideal to stand on the same side of the line as flag-burners?

34 Senators showed some stones this time around, and you can check the link to see if you are represented by one of them. Odds are good you’re not, so that’s at least 66 more reasons to Vote Freshman.

Last year, the motion to amend actually passed in the House, 286-130 with 18 not voting. The result of the roll call can serve as the seed for a shopping list of representatives in greatest need of replacement on liberties grounds. But there are a lot of people who belong on that list. That’s why I recommend playing it safe. Vote Freshman!

I have been meaning to put in a brief word on Nick Gillespie’s interview with Jeremy Lott in Reason, which appeared on the web site two weeks ago. They talk about hypocrisy, and about Lott’s book on the topic. Lott outlines his argument pretty coarsely; I wish Gillespie had done a better job of eliciting a more articulate account from his subject.

The moral status of hypocrisy has been in the eye of the Western philosophical tradition at least since Aristotle. He argued that incontinence – recognizing good but failing to do it, basically hypocrisy in its larval form – is a superior state to mere vice. The now widely-held belief that consistency is the greatest ethical good to which we can aspire, a consequence of moral relativism becoming the default naïve ethical theory, is very temporally parochial. Freshmen studying philosophy get little surprises like this every day; the history of ideas fills a very big space.

Lott does add an interesting angle to the valorization of hypocrisy relative to forthright wrongdoing. At least part of his position is that hypocrisy can increase good society-wide, acting as a kind of ethical ratchet. Consider the case of kitten-eating, which is the ne plus ultra of evil…

The Forehead: If you’re so evil, eat this kitten.
The Tick: Eating kittens is just plain… plain wrong! And no one should do it, ever!
The Tick, “Armless but Not Harmless” (1994)

Suppose for the moment that The Tick is a moral saint, but that kitten-eating is actually quite widespread among supervillains like The Forehead, some of whom may recognize its (objective) plain wrongness. On Lott’s account, it is for the best if Chairface Chippendale and The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight publicly condemn kitten-eating, even if they indulge themselves in private, because it creates a climate in which further kitten-eating will be more difficult. It certainly creates a climate in which further public kitten-eating will be more likely to meet condemnation, and in which that condemnation is more likely to take hold. What’s most interesting is the thermodynamic (”virtuous cycle,” if you will) character of Lott’s position. This is not the unsophisticated thermodynamic argument of the Social Darwinist – “it’s good because it’s stable and self-stabilizing” – but rather a nuanced account in which the best way to see good done is to make it harder to do evil. In many ways, it’s a positive version of Singer’s argument in A Darwinian Left, and of Pinker’s in The Blank Slate. Singer and Pinker argue that it is dangerous and unnecessary to predicate ethical conclusions on “facts” about human nature which may turn out to be untrue (and also dangerous and unnecessary to blindly set aside what we do find out about human nature); Lott holds out the possibility of engineering the state of the world, using our outward behavior, as a way to ground our ethical conclusions.

Edit 5 July 2006: Life imitates art. Shooting puppies is surely the moral equivalent of eating kittens.

As described in comment-#557, an excerpt from the testimony of Inspector Legrasse:

The devotees of the tiny, foul thing gathered in the fane of the QTek 8500. Bluetooth accessories, including adherents of the debased A2DP, found their place with the MicroSD card among the caffeinated beverages and the office supplies. As the fluorescent lights shone eldritchly upon them, they called upon their absent master for its favors.

Suddenly, a hush – the arrival of the priest! It was a black can – not a Negra Modelo, but a truly black can – and it led the trembling half-and-half into the midst of the unclean company. It raised the knife, and a pongoid yawp arose from the throats (can I even call them throats? gorges?) of the congregation.

Unified in abandon and ecstasy, they cried as one: “Ph’ nglui mglw’ nafh 8500 Yoopies’ Shiping-center wgah’ nagl fhtagn.” The knife fell and fell again, the priest transported and possessed by his task, proxy to the One Who Will Ship Real Soon Now. The rite reached its unholy climax as the priest spat into the spilled milk.

The atmosphere was electrified as the milk spread and soaked into the paint of the cube shelf. A voice low beyond hearing spake unto each of the celebrants:

Colin, We are emailing you today to give you an update on your order of the QTEK 8500. We just received word that there has been a last minute delay by QTEK on shipping these devices. Due to this delay we now expect to ship your phone the middle of next week. We are very sorry for this delay and we are doing everything we can to get your order in and shipped out as soon as possible. We will send you an update next week if there are any other delays. Otherwise, you will receive an email with your tracking number as soon as it is shipped to you. Thanks, Shawn

Last weekend, our friend Taz mooted to Punam and I that we should go camping in Big Sur. Since our move had been delayed a week, we had the weekend free, and it’s always a pleasure to hang out with Taz. Besides, there’s no place you can go on the Big Sur coast of which you couldn’t say “well, gee, that’s as beautiful a place as I’ve ever been!” I apologize in advance for possible repetitive gushing in this post.

So Saturday morning we took off down 101, crossed the Hunter Liggett Army Reservation on Nacimiento-Ferguson Road, continued along that intensely windy and steep road to the coast, and then briefly went up highway 1 to the USFS’s Kirk Creek campground, where we claimed the high ground with site 26. Kirk Creek is slightly improved – there are toilets but not showers, and there are established firepits. It is certainly the very best campsite I’ve ever been in of any kind, mostly due to the view, as shown below. We set up Taz’s tent and decided to hike down to the beach while the sun was still high in the sky. We also realized that my phone was the only camera we had, so apologies in advance for picture quality issues (actually, the camera on my Sony-Ericsson w600i is good as phonecams go). It was a short hike, but we got our first taste of the place right off the bat. The trail was lined with flowers taller than most hikers: Continue reading ‘Up the redwood canyon’ »

All this and a new favicon!

The worst part of my condition is a terrible alienation: why, I wonder, is no one else being gotten by spiders? But it turns out that the Spiders got White Ninja and a record of it was made upon the Intar Webs. And I am, somehow, reassured by the fact that there’s a Next> button on that record, and that another adventure follows it. I shall read more, and be made whole; I will draw strength from his example.

Venal US Rep Tom DeLay’s (forced) retirement speech exhibits the kind of hubris for which the heroes of Greek drama were routinely struck down by the gods, or at least metamorphosed into less convenient forms like trees and whatnot. His continued life, and even his continued possession of a human shape, is one more piece of evidence for the non-existence of a just deity, in case one more was needed.

In other Vote Freshman news, the California Republican Party has managed to find perhaps the only eligible human being not preferable to Feinstein as her opponent. This Mountjoy fellow has gone on the record as favoring the continuing in force/re-enactment of the entire so-called PATRIOT Act, among other things… even Feinstein, given a chance to let portions of the Act die, recanted her earlier wholesale abandonment of the Constitution.

I believe the correct strategy in a case like this (similar in many ways to the 2004 Presidential election) is to choose another candidate at random. The noble stratagem of Vote Freshman becomes the desperate ploy of Vote Random Nutjob, which is sad.