A Friday Poem

A poem by James Hoch. It begins:

Out the window, starlings
          fidget in the wasted eaves

of a bar burned down last summer.
They pilfer, figure,
                                      engineer

charred wire, booth cushion,
          anything light enough

to haul by beak, wedge high
          between blackened 2 X 4.

A nest,
          a bed for the dying
or just born—

The rest here.

Totten In Baghdad

A beautfully written first-hand account of what it feels like in Iraq right now:

You know how it feels when you get into a black car in the afternoon with the windows rolled up in July? It’s an inferno outside, but inside the car it’s even hotter? That’s how Iraq feels in the shade. Sunlight burns like a blowtorch. If you don’t wear a helmet or soft cap the sun will cook your brain. First you get headaches. Then you end up in the hospital…

After having spent several days Baghdad’s Green Zone and Red Zone, I still haven’t heard or seen any explosions. It’s a peculiar war. It is almost a not-war. Last July’s war in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon was hundreds of times more violent and terrifying than this one. Explosions on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border were constant when I was there.

You’d think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer. It is Iraq’s most singular characteristic. I dread going outside because it’s hot, not because I’m afraid I will get hurt.

What To Do About Waziristan?

Blake Hounsell says to chill:

Zawahiri, who watched his previous organization get destroyed in Egypt during the 1990s, likely understands that the escalating campaign of terrorist bombings in Pakistan will strengthen Musharraf’s hand still further. But al Qaeda would enjoy a propaganda bonanza if the U.S. started seriously mucking around in the tribal areas. And then there’s the small problem that even the United States likely doesn’t **have** the ability to sneak into the tribal wilds of Pakistan with a compact strike force, kill the bad guys, and make a clean getaway without anyone noticing. This ain’t the movies. Better to give the Pakistanis the time to do it themselves.

HRC Update

The Human Rights Campaign, the money-bags gay group, was recently touting the imminence of various pieces of pro-gay legislation. We were told that the strategy of de facto merging with the DNC would mean a whole bunch of progress on a federal level: a hate crimes bill and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were now just around the corner. Well, as usual, when the rubber hits the road, HRC fails again. The latest hate crimes push has just failed, and HRC is promised a vote "this year". Nada on ENDA, or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," or the HIV immigration ban, or Uniting American Families Act. Chris Crain has the latest:

It all boils down to this: Democrats have controlled Congress for six months now, and no gay rights bill has made it to their priority list for passage. Now, according to HRC, all we’ve got is a "commitment" for a vote on hate crimes "this year." Even if that happens, that still leaves ENDA, "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," and a half-dozen other gay rights bills languishing in Congress.

And when "this year" is over, and maybe hate crimes at best will have gotten a vote, we already know what we’ll be told because we’ve heard it so many times before: 2008 is an election year, and gay rights is too hot a potato to touch right now.

But keep sending them your money.

God, Human Rights and Plato

A reader writes:

Ponnuru believes that without God there could be no human rights. And many others – not all of them Christianists – seem to agree. But there’s a very serious problem for this view, one which philosophers have known about since Plato wrote his dialogue Euthyphro. Unfortunately, it never gets mentioned in popular discussions of theism and morality.

The problem is simple. Ponnuru claims that human rights – and moral values more generally – derive their authority from the fact that God has ordained them. (This is the position philosophers call "theological voluntarism" or "divine command theory.") But what if God had ordained murder and rape as the morally obligatory ways of treating others? If Ponnuru is correct and rights and values have moral authority merely because God ordains them, then murder and rape would be morally obligatory. Note well: you can’t protest here and say that since God (who is perfectly morally good) would never ordain anything as immoral as murder and rape, murder and rape couldn’t have been morally obligatory. If you say this, you’d be appealing to a moral standard independent of (not ordained by) God.

So: either human rights and moral values have an authority independent of God’s commands or they derive all of their authority from the fact that God has ordained them. If the former, Ponnuru’s view is wrong. If the latter, Ponnuru must accept that human rights and moral values are arbitrary: whatever God says goes – no matter how horrible.

This dilemma – called the "Euthyphro dilemma" after Plato’s great dialogue – is often taken to be a devastating objection to the Ponnuru view that morality is grounded in God’s commands.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that if more people knew about Plato’s dialogue, there would be less public anxiety about religion. Lots of believe that without God there could be no morality. Plato saw centuries ago that this belief is problematic. This doesn’t show that there is no link between God and morality. (Aquinas, for example, rejected divine command theory, embracing what’s come to be called "natural law theory" instead.) But it does show, or so many think, that moral authority can’t consist simply in God’s commands.

Quote for the Day

"There are no immigration  benefits available to [gays] based on their relationship. With that said,         there’s certainly nothing that says a US citizen cannot move to another  country," – Chris Bentley, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizen and Immigration Services, January 2004.

Pick your spouse or your country, guys. This is America.