Category: Thoughts

The Church keeps trying to convince people not to use condoms because it’s a sin. Perhaps they need some information about harm reduction.
Speaking of deliberate harm, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a great ode to alcoholism, and Michael Pollan (of “Botany of Desire”) has a great article in the NYT this week on obesity which I wanted to turn into some sort of rant about the way people cede control over their lives to marketers and corporations, and then blame the corporations for running their lives poorly.

Of course if you give your life over to alcohol or television or junk food or consumerism, it’s not going to be yours, and it’s not going to make you happy. Of course if you give your life over to a philosophy that has very strict absolutes you’re going to find uncomfortably sharp edges and contradictions, like persuading people that condoms are useless in order to prevent contraception, and being unable to recognize that you are spreading potentially fatal misinformation and are therefore responsible for the deaths of thousands.

If I’m a marketer of a branded lifestyle like, say, McDonalds or Catholicism is it my responsibility to make sure that my customers are emotionally healthy and moderate in their beliefs? If someone loves me in an uncomfortable way, I can distance myself from them, help them love themselves instead. But I don’t want to make myself unlovable. I want to still be loved, just not loved by this person, or not so immoderately. What does Disney do with someone who loves, really LOVES, Disney? What does the Catholic Church do with someone who is, perhaps, over-fanatic? They don’t want to shut down! They can’t.

If someone gives their life over to your control, even partially, what responsibility do you bear for that? If it’s my job to be loved and lovable, and someone grows obsessed, what do I do? A celebrity, a product, an ideology, a lifestyle… are they the same in their obligations to their fanatics?

I’d say an ideology has a greater obligation to avoid its adherents getting out of control, since adherence is part of its makeup, whereas a product doesn’t include fanaticism by default and isn’t as in control of, or responsible for, that fanaticism. But I’m not sure. Is McDonalds as much an ideological state apparatus (to get a little althusserian on you) as the Church? Urgh, I’m getting back to my thesis here…

Forbes portrays the Free Software Foundation in a rather negative light. Of course, the FSF is known for being doctrinaire and annoying, but I wouldn’t exactly call them “hit men.” Meanwhile, conspiracy mongering about the mono project. Come on guys. It’s software. I know you live it and breathe it. I live it and breathe it.

But this isn’t the movies. There are no hit men. X never marks the spot. It’s not called “evil” or “double-crossing” in this world, it’s mere unethical business practices and breach of contract. You want to see pirates and hit men, go run opium from Burma to Hong Kong.

Booksellers, like librarians, don’t want to submit to Ashcroft’s invasions of privacy and book-buying history.

Do people ever convert from Linux to Windows? Well, not really, no. And there’s plenty of good reasons for that, too.

hopeful about the Sox.
disgusted by the way some men behave.
angry at the way the country is being run.
sympathetic for the victims of the world bikini-waxing champion.

Since it’s Friday and after five PM, here are some creepy thoughts that make for great barroom conversation:

If you have a clone, is it OK to have sex with them? Does that count as masturbation, or incest? Probably incest, since they’d be like an identical twin. But what if you had a body part, like an arm, cloned and grafted to you– would it be OK to use that for sex? How about if it wasn’t attached to you– just a spare organ poking out of a nutrient-delivery system?

Many people refuse to eat meat because the animals cannot consent to it. Even if the animal flesh were grown in some sort of a vat, the animal would not have consented to the use of its genetic material. But if you could give a few stem cells, and grow your own human-steaks in a vat, and then eat your own legs for dinner, that would not involve any violation of rights or taking of lives. Is that the most ethical meat-eating possible, or is it cannibalism?

What is the line between the commonly accepted practice of veterinary artificial insemination and bestiality? If you are a veterinarian specialising in artificial insemination technology, at what point do you enjoy your career a little too much? From the legal point of view my guess is that masturbating horses is not a crime as long as you have the permission of the horse’s owner and you plan to freeze the semen in liquid nitrogen.

The amazing ability of the Red Sox to create hope and then destroy it strikes again. Bah, humbug.

Forbes is carrying an editorial about European pension systems and how they’re underfunded and over-generous, that taxes and pension funding make it too expensive to employ people, etc. etc. The implication is that the US has it all right. Bullshit. Yes, tax burdens on employment are lower, for the employers, but they fall onto the employees instead, which is pretty close. And of course the big issue is not how generous the pension, or how early the retirement age is, or how much vacation you get, but whether it’s funded properly. In the US and in Europe, it’s a PAYG system: Pay As You Go. Meaning that the workers today pay for the retirees of today. And if there are more retirees than workers, then you have a structural problem, and that’s the problem that most of the developed world is having. Not just those [epithet] Europeans.

It’s jingoistic and misleading to imply otherwise.

Brad DeLong comes through again with one, and two whoppers from Bush.

Discourse.net has a touching story about how our grandparents knew about creeping fascism and we’ve grown complacent. As I’ve asked before: how do you know when to leave? You don’t. You just don’t.

And the humor section is an email that’s been floating around of Bush/Cheney ’04 bumper sticker slogans. Here’s a few of the best:

Four More Wars!
Apocalypse Now
Because the truth just isn’t good enough
Compassionate Colonialism
Deja-voodoo all over again!
In your heart, you know they’re technically correct.
Leave no billionaire behind
Less CIA — More CYA
Lies and videotape, but no sex!

Hey you stupid fuck, why don’t you wake up and notice that your leader supports none of his supposed principles? Are you too in love with your SUV to care? Would it be too much to ask that you check the facts? Well, you’re going to get your ass kicked anyway.

Conventional wisdom has it that Massachussets can’t possibly vote any way other than Democratic, except for a Governor’s election, and I don’t doubt it. So what can I do, aside from vote, to convince people that Bush is a loony nutbag kleptocrat?

Also, where the hell are those stamps I had just a couple days ago?

Politics have been making me physically ill recently. I can only stand about twenty or thirty minutes of looking at this before I cringe and want to stop. So I’ve been reading the victorian-style novel Tipping the Velvet and the non-political contemporary nonfiction Kitchen Confidential instead. Good stuff.

But here’s the politics: The cover story in The Nation is titled “Blood in the Water,” about how the Dems are now on the attack. So, yeah, they’re attacking. Dean’s stumping madly, and everyone who sees him speak seems to be impressed with his candor and control– this is not sputtering, red-faced, clinton-conspiracy anger.

And of course Paul Krugman, celebrity economist is certainly making some carefully-documented, well-reasoned, statements that we’re being lied to. I’ll be seeing him speak at a Harvard Bookstore event this week.

Lies lies lies: Slate has an article about Condi’s misstatements on post-WWII history. And of course Brad DeLong has been keeping track of all the people keeping track of Bush’s lies. My favorite, however, is that even the
WSJ Editorial Page is questioning Bush’s integrity. When the avowedly rightist, pro-wealthy, pro-big-business WSJ editorial page is questioning you, you know you’re tainted. Jeff Skilling, Kenny Lay, Trent Lott, meet Dubya, Perle, and Cheney: the new recipients of the ostrakon.