Month: May 2009

John King’s Walls

Scott Adams imagines the future of the cell phone:

I was thinking about how different our lives will be as cell phone technology continues to improve. Someday your phone will be your only computer, and your home will have a screen in every room that senses the proximity of any phone that approaches. Push a button on your phone and it will take over any nearby screen to display a movie, recorded TV show, or music video. You could browse the web on the big screen, or create a Word document. You might want a wireless keyboard in some rooms, but for most applications your phone would control the cursor and allow you to do minor typing.

I've always wondered when the wall screen would come into mass use.

Waiting On 8

John Culhane previews tomorrow's prop 8 decision:

It will be interesting to see how the court handles the question of domestic partnership — the marriage equivalent without the name or the social approbation –  that remains in effect in California after Prop 8. In their decision in In Re Marriage Cases, the justices weren’t gulled by the argument that domestic partnership was “just as good” as marriage. Although there are many problems with the status, the court leveled the most telling criticism at it: If it’s just the same thing, why  go to the trouble to create it?

The whole idea is to fence same-sex couples out, thereby purposefully creating a class of second-class citizens. In one sense (not a practical one), this is even worse than a complete denial of marriage benefits to same-sex couples, which at least have been supported with legal and social arguments (however weak).

Yet during the oral argument in March…at least one Justice (Kennard) seemed to suggest that Prop 8 might be less objectionable because it doesn’t remove the rights of marriage, “just” the title. Will the court stand on that point? If so, what was all the shouting about last year?

What Mancow Teaches Us

A reader writes:

It was a startling revelation, wasn't it? Three comments:

1) Kudos to Mancow for having the balls to do it, and even more for telling the truth afterwards.

2) But, as many are noting, this was friendly waterboarding experimental extra-lite, with Mancow in almost complete control. Let's see him–or anyone else–take the real thing, even once, tied up with a rag stuffed in his mouth, administered by unfriendly pros, with no way to end it, preceded by several days of stress positions and followed by a little walling and a few weeks of sleep deprivation. Then let's talk about "torture".

3) Watch Mancow's reaction afterwards closely; look for the micro-emotions and body language: this guy has been deeply traumatized–I mean psychically, in the original Greek sense of the word: in the soul. Some of it may be attributable to the early experience he mentions of almost drowning TizianoEcceHomo as a child, but deeper even than that, Mancow has glimpsed the real evil of torture: every act of  torture–even "play" torture like this–betrays the deepest core of human trust: the trust in God.

Why? Because every man, created in the image of God, the imago dei, must–whether he wishes to or not, whether he knows it or not–stand and act in the place of God, with every decision, with every action, in every human relationship. The torturer therefore does not simply betray the laws of war, he betrays the imago dei: he betrays God, he betrays the other, he betrays himself, he betrays Trust itself.

The inarticulate terror you see flash for a moment across Mancow's face is the existential terror of a child–and we are all children–who sees that: a child faced with a world in which God cannot be trusted, in which God may indeed be actively evil: capricious, all-powerful, hateful, inexorable, inescapable. This is the deepest betrayal of all. This is the utter failure of human love.

"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power… But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

I am not a Christian. I prefer my Jesus neat. But if this understanding–the understanding of love–was not the point of his Passion, of the failure of love that brought about his torture and his death by torture, of his triumph over and utter repudiation of Orwell's nightmare–then it had no point, and has no point today.

And neither you nor I, though we hold our Jesus in different ways, believe that. We know different–and we know by trial.

"It's better for someone to have a heavy stone tied around his neck, and be thrown into the sea, than for that person to offend one of these little children."

We are all little children. Even the worst of us–perhaps especially the worst of us. Even the terrorist. Even the mass murderer. We would love to throw those sinners away, and we've tried to do just that for millennia–but it has never worked, and it never will work, because that is simply not the way reality works. There is no 'other'. There is only us. So to offend the worst among us–no matter how angry we are, no matter how much we feel they deserve it, no matter how much they do deserve it–is to offend the worst in us; it is simply to compound and perpetuate the original sin. It is an act of self-hatred, of spiritual suicide.

Let us be clear: 'offense' is not death itself–Jesus proved that–it is the betrayal of the imago dei, the betrayal of ourselves, the betrayal of God, the betrayal of our fellow men and women, no matter how lost they may appear to be. Offense is, simply, the failure of love; the failure of courage; the failure of the heart.

This entire debate about torture is nothing more–and nothing less–than the debate between fear and courage, between fear and love, between fear and strength. Watching Mancow stare into the depths–if only for a moment–we saw a man begin, perhaps, to understand that.

(Painting: Ecce Homo, by Titian.)

The Life Of A Blogger

Rob Horning goes hiking:

Contra Thoreau, retreating into nature, instead of bringing me back to myself, made me feel like less of a self and a bit more like one of the many undifferentiated bison one encounters out there. I don’t feel replenished for the assault on the backlog of posts I intend to read and write. Instead, as I was out hiking, I would think of this dormant blog and wonder how I’ll ever manage to catch up, a nagging thought that filled me with vague, unshakable uneasiness. Being adrift in the natural world had come to feel very unnatural; the serenity seemed like a taunt. This seems to me the inverse of the interconnected feeling I take for granted in the time I spend online, and I understood for the first time why people would do something as inane as Twitter their hikes from their iPhones…

The Divider

Jeffrey Toobin assesses Cheney's torture speech:

Even worse than Cheney’s distortions was the political agenda behind them. The speech was, as politicians say, a marker—a warning to the new Administration. “Just remember: it is a serious step to begin unravelling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11,” Cheney said. “Seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.” Cheney’s all but explicit message was that the blame for any new attack against American people or interests would be laid not on the terrorists, or on the worldwide climate of anti-Americanism created by the Bush-Cheney Administration, but on Barack Obama. For many months after the 9/11 attacks, Democrats refrained from engaging in the blame game with the Bush Administration. Cheney’s speech makes it clear that, should terrorists strike again, Republicans may not respond in kind.

I'll be spending some time this week on Cheney's gambit. He is playing the Dolchstoss card to rescue his own reputation. He will fail. And he must fail.