So it is now the federal government’s role to micro-manage baseball and to prevent a single Florida woman who is trapped in a living hell from dying with dignity. We’re getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government – at the most distant level – has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution. Today’s conservatism is becoming yesterday’s liberalism.
iPOD THEREFORE iAM: A smart retort to my little essay on iPod culture. Money quote:
[W]hat’s wrong with a little narrowcasting, anyway? Social life is a difficult thing — fraught with awkwardness, quirky taboos, the fear of rejection, and the discomfort of confrontation. The unfamiliar and the unexpected can stimulate but they can also exasperate — and exacerbate ill will. We surround ourselves with the familiar and unthreatening precisely because ordinary life is threatening enough, even within the confines of the familiar. To be sure, a select few will always strive to broaden their cultural horizons — but then, a belief in the value of broadened cultural horizons is itself a cultural position, and a surprisingly comfortable one at that.
The question is not whether we will narrowcast our lives. The question is how to create a broadcast society out of narrowcast people.
I don’t disagree with that. In my piece, I readily confessed to loving my iPod and to the pleasures of choosing rather than serendipity. My point is that we are gaining but also losing. I’m no Luddite. Far from it. But I think you can enjoy technology’s advances, which are often also advances of individual freedom, while having ambivalent feelings about what we also leave behind.
THE CONSCIENCE CAUCUS: I’m going to take a page from Josh Marshall and start citing prominent or even not prominent conservatives who are actually addressing the scandal of torture as government policy rather than acquiesce in or actively support it. Jeff Jacoby has another column worth reading. I see now that Porter Goss will not deny that the CIA has deployed illegal methods of torture in the last three years. I am relieved – but not reassured – that he says it’s no longer going on.
REPEAL THE MEDICARE ENTITLEMENT: It’s the only course for fiscal sanity, if we want to avoid tax hikes (and I do).
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It takes one’s breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn’t agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.” – the inimitable Harvey Mansfield, in the Weekly Standard.
The Dish 