Why we’re doomed

Via email, from my favorite Republican:

The Government is spending enough on Medicaid and social workers that they could finance a decent program for the poor but we won’t get it from that communist bastard.

And the bastard we got it from wouldn’t be a Communist?

I’ve been trying to get the guy to think in principles for years. He’s not an idiot, just a fairly typical conservative retiree, which is why the GOP (and the rest of the country with it) is toast.

Who needs a contract?

Beck calls out homeboy Jim Sollisch of Marcus Thomas Advertising, for advocating that people just quit paying their credit card bills:

I wouldn’t have a man like that on my payroll for anything in the world.

That’s because Billy doesn’t run an ad agency.

About 20 years ago, for about 6 months (I left for grad school), I worked the mail room at Lowe Marschalk, which was in the old TV3 building by the library in downtown Cleveland. Ponderosa Restaurants was their big account. I got to see the creative team at work and play, and frankly, I preferred the ladies in Billing. These folks were clever rather than intelligent, and why should it be otherwise? They have the job of inducing you to buy something without making any reasoned arguments whatsoever, because there’s no time or space for that. And that’s just what this piece is about…and really, all his pieces that I’ve seen. An ask.com search brings up quite a few of them, mostly from the Washington Post.  He can make words dance without making them actually work. And it’s hard to justify firing a guy for doing on his own time the thing that you pay him for. Yes, Venlet or Billy or I can’t write without getting principle mixed up in it, but Jim Sollisch isn’t paid to have principles.

Yes, he’s disgusting, but so is his whole industry, really: a tapeworm in the bowels of capitalism. That being the case, why not do unto Marcus Thomas what Sollisch would do to the credit card people (Jim, you go first!). Alltel, Dunlop, Pizza Hut, Tarkett, White Outdoor… why should you guys pay your bills? MT is obviously gouging you; if everyone quit paying, they’d have to lower their rates. That would be fair, wouldn’t it?

“The Palins used Levi”

I’m seeing the meme a lot from lefty commenters about the Levi Johnston media tour.  Let’s review what actually happened: Sarah begins the race of her political life, and suddenly Bristol is knocked up. So, how do we deal with this with Christian principles and political savvy?  We say, “They made a mistake, but they’re getting married.”  That might indeed have been a sincere intent. The couple gets trundled before the camera, proving that they’re a real couple and that Sarah isn’t afraid of this skeleton in her closet (mostly because it isn’t a skeleton, and isn’t hers).  It wasn’t a matter of “using”; it was a matter of Sarah squeezing the lemonade out of the lemon she was given by Levi and Bristol.  It was damage control, that wouldn’t have happened had damage not been done. And personally, judging by what’s happening now, I think that Levi wasn’t coerced to go on TV; I think he sucked up the attention like any kid his age.

The boy is a cad. He might grow up to be something; he’s not an idiot. But he threw himself into a situation he wasn’t ready for. He might have though it was cool to be diddling the daughter of the Governor of Alaska, without thinking through how that made him a public issue. I’m sure the campaign was hard on the couple. But I still say that if Todd didn’t bring out the shotgun, he has no reason to complain. And Springerizing himself and his baby mommy is not the way to make himself look like anything but rubbish; indeed, it’s compounding his original mistake.

What do Iran and West Virginia have in common?

They’ve both tried to ban Barbie:

House Bill 2918, introduced Tuesday, would make it unlawful to sell Barbie and similar dolls “that promote or influence girls to place an undue importance on physical beauty to the detriment of their intellectual and emotional development.”

“That’s the image out there that’s the most impressionable on our younger children, especially our little girls — ‘I want to be like Barbie,’” said the bill’s sponsor, Delegate Jeff Eldridge, D-Lincoln. “If we had that other image of Barbie being smart, and beautiful as well, I think that would be a great image to send to our young kids. “

What can you say about a state where even the Democrats are Puritanical morals-pushers? Back when my sister and I played Barbies together, they were always smart, because, duh, who wants to spend their playtime with stupid people?

Don’t create in public view

What foolish young men these were! Johnnie Boyd Jr. actually worked. They could have milked him for a lifetime, living on what he could produce. Instead, they wanted his pride and joy, right now, and killed him for it. Wiser, older heads would have killed and robbed him slowly.

They’ll die when the government runs out of wealth. That’s little consolation to Mr. Boyd. But justice will happen.

The ongoing Perigo snark

Billy sent me off to look at the brouhaha at SOLO. I haven’t been following it, because I came to the conclusion that SOLO doesn’t stand for “Sense of life Objectivists”, but is a comment on their sex lives. I was having trouble getting to the earliest comments, which I wanted to check out just because I was so appalled by Lindsay’s original post, which had passed my attention earlier:

Yes, even though the performance is fashionably homogenised and rushed, the beauty of Schubert’s Ave Maria—glorious music set to evil lyrics—remains irresistible to anyone with a soul. Until it can answer this, Objectivism will languish. Until we have not just a bunch of Halley concertos, but an understanding of their objective necessity and superiority, we will get nowhere. Hate to sound like a cracked record, but we have not been found wanting in epistemology, economics or politics. It’s the esthetics, Stoopid. As I’ve said so many times, it’s time for Objectivists to take The Romantic Manifesto seriously. More than that—to affirm unabashedly the objective superiority of Romantic music.

Well, first of all, did Schubert set that to evil lyrics? He set it to Walter Scott, not the Latin hymn (that was a later retread), and since I don’t know its context in Lady of the Lake, I’m not prepared to say that a character praying to the BVM is ipso facto evil in Objectivist terms. Second, the great music of the Catholic church (as opposed to some of the truly awful music of the recent Catholic church) is not Romantic in any sense at all, musicological or Objectivist. It’s not about Man in any sense, but entirely about Somebody Whom Objectivists don’t believe in. So if the Catholics are “beating Objectivism’s ass”, there must be another reason. There’s no need to get philosophical; just ask the Objectivist couples with more than one child to stand up.

Religion and reason

No, no, this blog really isn’t going to be All Religion All The Time. I’m not aspiring to be a butch version of The Anchoress. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

I’m sure that there are regular visitors who think I’ve gone beyond the bend, that I’m totally mired in irrationality. Not so. But I’ve come to a break with the Randroid paradigm.

Man was created as a rational animal. That we have brains implies that God wants us to use them. (The same must be true of genitals.). However, since the Fall, man has not been a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. Faced with 2 + 2, we will swear that the answer is 5, if 5 = “what makes us happy in the short term”. Man is not intellectually incapable of rationality; he is morally incapable, because people will not remove their heads from their asses enough to go the distance that reason demands. The laws of morality may be logically deducible, but they’ll be blanked out in practice even if ego doesn’t steer one away from discovering them to begin with. It’s like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. And if you insist that people will think, against their own self interest, you will beat your head against the wall. That’s where Objectivists hit the wall and burn, where St. Ayn Herself hit the wall (Smoking? Branden?). We are sinners, and blanking out (i.e., not using our minds as God clearly intended) is just another of our sins.

Beck talks about how unique the American experiment is, and he’s right. It took a self-chosen collection of neophilic Protestants to pull it off. It required folks with a functioning moral compass who were also used to solving doctrinal problems on their own. Catholics wouldn’t have done it; the tradition is steeped in authoritarianism . In France, it was atheist ex-Catholics making revolution, so you had people who thought reason alone was sufficient, and were used to top-down imposition of their ideas. Which is why the Jacobins and all their intellectual heirs through to the present day were as awful as they were.

Now the experiment is ending, because “thou shalt not steal or covet” is not part of most people’s moral equipment.  We’ve allowed our spiritual infrastructure to be destroyed. It might be more my job to rebuild the infrastructure than to man the pumps in the sinking Ship of State — that, and to serve as a counterbalance to those of my fellow Christians who want to socialize protection from temptation.

For those who don’t like this particular direction: I’m not sure I like it. I signed up for the roller coaster, and if I’m going down fast and want to puke my colon out, well, that’s life. Or it’s like dropping acid; you just have to accept that the rest of the day is going to be weird, and roll with it

World’s highest-paid whore

A student who is auctioning her virginity to pay for a masters degree in Family and Marriage therapy has seen bidding hit £2.5million ($3.7m).

This is truly bizarre, on many levels. Virginity, outside of any context, is simply a lack of experience, and if it has any value, it’s a negative one. And virginity is valued in the J-C-I religious tradition in relationship to marriage, which this is definitely not about. Would you take marriage therapy from somebody who had sold herself for almost $4m? I guess that depends on your view of marriage, eh?

Since there’s no context to value virginity, these guys are bidding at having first crack at a prostitute — and an inexperienced prostitute at that. And no, her retirement after her first trick doesn’t change that reality. And where are they bidding? She’s from San Diego; isn’t exchanging money for sex illegal in every state in the union? How does Ms. Dylan know that she’s not being set up for a prostitution sting, and that the virtually unlimited coffers of government aren’t behind the dizzying heights of the bidding?

Now, I don’t get a say in whether she’s a whore or not, or whether men want to pay too much for her services. Everybody gets to go to Hell in their own way, if they want to. I’d try to show her a different way. I’m just saying that there are some strange and unexamined values at work here.

Nailing the essence of elite

Good piece on Sarah Palin as “one of us”:

Bet she hasn’t even read Ian McEwan’s latest novel and can’t explain Frank Gehry’s vision for a new architecture.

I’ll bet she can explain it, just like my wife can: “That building looks like alien poop.” And as soon as she found out about the built-in avalanches at the Peter B. Lewis Building, she’d say, “That’ll never fly in Alaska.”

Objectivists against choice

“Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child’s life upon others”

Which is no problem at all if there are people who WANT to take that cost on. If not, the kid can starve. Think of that as being a >3rd trimester abortion, and it’s all OK. At least the kid got to live some outside the womb, which is an improvement on <4th trimester abortions.

This particular Randroid brain fart comes from an allegedly “libertarian” site, and was inspired by something Diana Hsieh wrote. It was on the Lew Rockwell blog Tuesday, and today WorldNetDaily linked the Lifenews story.

The problem with this is that, in spite of fancy footwork to hide it, it’s an attempt to set up a moral imperative for abortion. One doesn’t need to drink the pro-life Flavr-aid to see that as an attempt to impose a personal value on others… which is, ironically, what pro-lifers are accused of. And Hsieh’s piece in particular totally misses what Christians are about re Downs. Nobody “worships retardation”. It’s objectively a bad thing, a symptom of fallen Nature. But for Christians, it’s an opportunity to show the love of Christ, to serve…in short, to be altruistic. So, given that it’s so readily assailable on that particular Objectivist ground, why all this talk of “Christians love retards because they’re even stupider than Christians are?” It’s because it fits in with the Peikoffian narrative about religion being the chief danger to the world today. They have to be doing it because they hate reason. That may be so, if you believe that it’s always unreasonable for one human to aid another without a clear path of payback (and I don’t recall Rand ever going that far), but “A, therefore E” is a hard sell unless you can explain B, C and D.

Now, I generally don’t pay much mind to Randroid going-on (And when will ARI give their marching orders to vote for Obama to keep that crazed Pentecostalist bitch away from the White House?), but it rather bothers me to see elimination of “useless eaters” touted as a “libertarian” position. YMMV, and if so, that’s why I have comments.

UPDATE: Wachel weighs in, without my highfalutin’ analysis:

Seriously, what an asshole.

UPDATE 9/19: Provenzo and Hsieh come out swinging. Death threats are not exactly a credible pro-life action.
Provenzo’s defence of abortion rights is besides the point. The offensive argument is that anyone who knowingly has a Downs baby and does not have the funds to support it for life is a looter. I guess it’s easier and more satisfying to beat on those irrational pro-lifers than the folks who steal money to support Downs kids. And no, Diana, I haven’t seen the argument “distorted”, nor do I believe that I’m distorting it now.