Month: July 2008

Allahpundit is unimpressed with Christianist dismay at McCain’s clarified position on gay adoption:

First [McCain] said he’s personally opposed to letting gays adopt, then he qualified it by adding that the states should decide and that if there aren’t enough straight parents to go around then, yeah, gay parents are better than none at all…I can understand social cons wanting a national mandate against abortion since it’s a matter of life and death, but when I read something like “Why do so many politicians use the federalist approach to get out of a sticky situation?” in a context like this, I confess, I fear for the safety of the conservative alliance. Anyone here want to make the case that the states aren’t perfectly capable of handling this issue? You don’t have to argue on behalf of gay adoption to argue on behalf of federalism, although if there’s any compelling case for why orphanages are preferable to gay parents, I’m all ears for that, too.

"I don’t suppose you’ve, by any chance, have seen the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine, which is, you know, a huge thing. It’s got Obama in his Muslim dress with a turban, and he’s there with his wife. His wife has a "mad at the world" afro, circa 1968, she — she’s got bandoliers and an assault weapon, and there in their fireplace is burning the American flag. The New Yorker finally got it right," – G. Gordon Liddy.

Steve Chapman questions the connection between gun ownership and suicide:

As it turns out, the claims about guns and suicide don’t stand up well to scrutiny. A 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences was doubtful, noting that the alleged association is small and may be illusory.

Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck says there are at least 13 published studies finding no meaningful connection between the rate of firearms and the rate of suicides. The consensus of experts, he says, is that an increase in gun ownership doesn’t raise the number of people who kill themselves—only the number who do it with a gun.

Obama’s appeal is in part related to how he resurrects American soft power and restores the United States’ image around the world

which 82 percent of the respondents in the new [WaPo] poll said has been badly damaged during Bush’s presidency. By 2 to 1, Americans think that Obama would do more to improve the country’s image abroad than McCain would.

And how’s this for a sea-change:

On social issues such as abortion and same-sex civil unions, 56 percent prefer Obama, 32 percent McCain.

Charles Leadbeater praises the web:

The expansion of our shared memory in millions of mini-archives should be an unalloyed good, especially for an ageing society in which millions of people will be losing their memories and, as a result, their sense of themselves in the decades to come.

The Glittering Eye predicts a blogospheric shift:

From what I’ve been reading lately in a number of blogs I expect that we’re about to see a great pivot in the blogosphere on the subject of Afghanistan. The Bush Administration has recently provided a little wiggle room for redeploying troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and I’ve seen a number of posts viz. this one from Juan Cole and this one from Newshoggers that taken together suggest to me that people who opposed moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan will begin to support the idea and people who’ve been complaining for six years that we should be sending more troops to Afghanistan will start supporting withdrawal from Afghanistan.

We’ll see. I don’t buy a zero sum argument that we cannot do both, but the drain in resources in Iraq cannot be sustained indefinitely, especially as the Taliban seems to be regrouping in parts of Afghanistan. You can withdraw from Iraq and surge in Afghanistan and still reduce the overall number of troops deployed. The force in Afghanistan is far smaller than in Iraq and the allies much more supportive.

A reader writes:

Let’s see, in the last year I have gone to Flagstaff (2.5 hours from Phoenix BY CAR), Show Low (3 hours from Phoenix BY CAR), Tucson (2 hours), Bisbee (3 hours), Lake Havasu City (3.5 hours), Sedona, (2 hours), Greer (4 hours), Prescott (1.5 hours), Jerome (1.5 hours), and various other destinations, and I never knew any of them required a private plane !!!

What is wrong with me?

Martin Seligman, who assisted the U.S. government in the torture of detainees, was made famous by his dog torture experiments. Graeme Wood wonders about the similarities:

The parallels between the logic of human and canine torture — sacrificing the well-being of the few (terrorists and dogs) for the well-being of the many (innocents and depressives) — are worrisomely obvious. What’s less obvious is which way the argument cuts. Seligman, a morally thoughtful man and a self-professed dog lover, condemns torture, yet his experiments suggest a moral calculus that might allow it. If torturing a terrorist to save actual human lives isn’t permissible, then by what logic could he torture dozens of dogs for a smaller — and perhaps less certain — payoff? Today, many universities would, I suspect, reject his experiments (and a lot of other fascinating research) on ethical grounds.

These comparisons are notoriously tricky to deploy in an ethically scrupulous way. In the novel Elizabeth Costello, a poet objects to a comparison between abattoirs and WWII death camps. "If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews." Indeed: caution against glib moral comparison seems extremely wise right now, as do hasty condemnation or absolution of anyone involved in the torture controversy. Seligman has already caught undeserved blog-flak because of the reports about Mayer’s book, even though he almost certainly never knowingly abetted torture. Our ethical approaches to each question — whether to torture dogs, and whether to torture people — do seem like they should be related, though. And whatever our conclusions, it seems worth noting, again with worry, that we appear to be doing to people what many have already decided it is wrong to do to dogs.

More Merton:

What about the men who run around the countryside painting signs that say "Jesus saves" and "Prepare to meet God"? Have you ever seen one of them? I have not, but I often try to imagine them, and I wonder what goes on in their minds. Strangely, their signs do not make me think of Jesus, but of them. Or perhaps it is "their Jesus" who gets in the way and makes all thought of Jesus impossible. They wish to force their Jesus upon us, and He is perhaps only a projection of themselves. They seem to be at times threatening the world with judgement and at other times promising it mercy. But are they asking simply to be loved and recognized and valued, for themselves?

In any case, their Jesus is quite different from mine. But because their concept is different, should I reject it with horror, with distaste? If I do, perhaps I reject something in my own self that I no longer recognize to be there. And in any case, if I can tolerate their Jesus then I can accept and love them. Or I can at least conceive of doing so.

Let not their Jesus be a barrier between us, or they will be a barrier between us and Jesus.