entirely safe and fun

Mark Foley put his ass in that seat

Slightly (link update 3 Oct 2006)Rather creepy Florida Republican Representative Mark Foley has resigned over emails which suggest an inappropriate interest in a (then) 16-year-old Congressional page. The page was a young man; this is the sort of thing that makes you un-electable as a Florida Republican. This means that, unless a retired or defeated veteran can be found, another freshman will be joining Congress this year. The campaign I dream of running - Vote Freshman, an effort to rein in the expansion of state power by replacing experienced professionals with a mix of trainees and still-untarnished idealists - is running itself. Yay!

Have a nice election day!

At this point, let me dream a little more: I’d like to see Mark Foley replaced by former professional wrestler Mick “Mankind” Foley. Seriously, I’d pay for tickets.

Speaker: “The gentleman from Florida with the sock puppet on his hand has the floor.”
Mr. Foley: “No, Mr. Speaker, you have the floor… in your face! Mankind has done this to you! Mankind has reduced you to a floor-eating worm!”

The return of Battle Pope!

Pope Benedict XVI makes one a little nostalgic for the pontificate of his scholarly predecessor. He is a public figure, wrongly seen as representative of the West in much of the Muslim world (an image he certainly cultivates). John Paul II, at least, had some idea of the value of diplomacy and tact; Benedict exhibited his shortcomings in that department when he cravenly donned the mask of 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus to say “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”But of course, religious wackos never do their best work alone. The predictable response was riots and terror of the kind that makes one almost forget the hundreds of millions of completely non-idiotic Muslims who make up the huge majority of that faith’s adherents. Much of the protest, happily, was peaceful, calling for an outright apology from Benedict over his remarks. I rate it unlikely that he will apologize (after all, his god is bigger or whatever).

In Jakarta, though, the organizer of a reportedly peaceful demonstration trumped the papal pedi-oral insertion with pure absurdity, taking top honors for saying the single stupidest, and funniest, thing uttered in the course of this brouhaha. A certain Heri Budianto proclaimed that “Only Muslims can understand what jihad is. It is impossible that jihad can be linked with violence, we Muslims have no violent character [my emphasis].” Maybe he ought to go on a standup tour with venal former US Representative Tom DeLay and his buddy, Baptist minister Rick Scarborough!

If it weren’t funny, it might be sad. Keep smiling.

Update: Still a putz.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a speech to the American Legion: “…[A]ny kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong… can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.” He means, of course, that dissent is treason.

Hubris is an occupational hazard of leading large systems, which are able to accomplish as a whole goals that no single man could reach. Ten thousand men move a mountain at your command. You think, “Gee, I just moved a mountain! I have a miraculous mountain-moving power!” To the extent that Rumsfeld truly thinks that America’s goals and actions in the War on MoistureTerror are not merely right, but unquestionable, he’s suffering from hubris — maybe not suffering, actually, but he’s addled by it. He cannot take seriously any question about his vision, and the model world he lives in grows more and more remote from the messy reality.

“Moral and intellectual confusion” is not what gives rise to America’s vital debate over the conduct of Bush’s war; we’re asking moral questions, and because we’re in a morally complex situation, we’re getting a wide range of difficult answers. We’re not confused - we’re struggling with a hard problem. For Rumsfeld to suggest otherwise is insulting, and deeply anti-American. His apparent hankering for a one-party state would be embarassing if it weren’t so frightening.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has a thought-provoking (= “provoked me”) commentary on Rumsfeld’s insult to the loyalty of his political opponents. The major point I think he misses is the near inevitability of hubris when men are empowered beyond the limits of their mammal brains. It takes a constant stream of self-examination and openness to criticism to push that rock uphill, and the Secretary has shown neither philosophical inclinations nor any special eagerness to engage dissenters.

Rumsfeld again: “Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and distortions that are being told about our troops and about our country. America is not what’s wrong with the world.” America is not what’s wrong with the world in a general sense, but contra the Secretary it’s capable of doing wrong, and its size and strength can amplify mistakes into disasters… hell with “can,” they have. We need to live the examined national life, despite the efforts of powerful men to reduce politics to reflex.

Mel Gibson: “I am not an anti-semite.”

Duck: “I am not a duck.”

Update: Jeff Rowland points out that Gibson is also not a crook, despite the quacking, swimming, etc. Update 2 Aug 2006: Wendy Molyneux and Jay Dyckman, at McSweeney’s, offer insight into sad hateful wrecks of men, and hold out hope for healing (”…get him to agree that the Jews were not responsible for at least the [1990s-2000s] Myanmar conflict near the Thai border, the one featuring those creepy 12-year-old Htoo twins.”).

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.

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.

I almost forgot banana-republic dictator wannabe Bob Ney in my list of the most loathsome Congressthings. Comes now news that the “Gentleman from Ohio” is facing a primary challenge (!) after resigning his position as chair of the House Administration Committee; he’s under a cloud for (apparently) accepting bribes more or less openly from the Abramoff apparatus. Sounds like another inbound newbie!  So good news for my Vote Freshman plan - I can’t vote in Ohio, but I can certainly applaud when an incumbent does so much to rule out his re-election.

Perhaps Mr. Ney can hang out in the big house with James Traficant, who will at least make him feel better about his hair.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The protester interrupted the ceremony [a meeting between PRC President Hu and US President Bush] by shouting to Bush to stop the Chinese president from “persecuting the Falun Gong.”

Bush later addressed the matter when he met with Hu in the Oval Office. “He just said this was unfortunate and I’m sorry it happened,” said Dennis Wilder, acting senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council staff. Bush hates our freedom.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh criticizes Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold’s article in Time (itself railing quite incoherently about the civilian leadership in the Iraq war), in which Newbold says:

In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won’t Get Fooled Again [sic]. To most in my generation, the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation’s leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture–who became career members of the military during those rough times–the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it.

Cavanaugh snarkily observes that “there’s no foreign policy question that can’t be solved by considering the lyrics of The Who.” Fair enough.

The things I’m still boggling over are Newbold’s two alternative interpretations for the lyrics, both of which are so wide of the mark as to beggar mere correction. The thrust of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is that every political system is, at its teleological bottom, the same: just a mechanism of control, run by the people who are best at accumulating and retaining power, to serve their own ends. True-believer partisans of the old or the new order who figure that they’ve made some fundamental change or suffered some fundamental loss have missed the point, been fooled. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Newbold wins teh priz0r when he wraps up his paragraph with the following nugget: “It’s 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.” But The Who don’t say that we won’t get fooled again - on the contrary, they suggest we “get down on our knees and pray / we don’t get fooled again,” because that’s exactly what just happened. And they had it right. We will be fooled again, and be ready to believe again, and be fooled again, in some sort of horrible Nietzschean cycle of Eternal Recurrence where every possible ideology has its day in the “sun”.

Someone should probably enlighten the producers of CSI: Miami.