Disqus - Latest Comments for slarrow

Re: What are Philosophers Good For?

slarrow — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 07:19:23 -0000

Darned if I can remember the name of the movement, but I remember an epistemology course back in my college days in which the professor mentioned the New Excitement in Philosophy: approaching philosophy materially in the way Will described. I always thought of it as the "philosophers in the laboratory" school of thought.

That seems to be what Will thinks philosophers may be good for. I think it's something far more pragmatic: getting people to think. That's actually always been what philosophers are good for; Socrates gained notoriety (and condemnation) for getting the young to fight their way to their conclusions instead of just accepting them.

I think the difficulty right now is that due to the extreme specialization of philosophy and its subsidized life in the Academy, professional philosophy is done for other professional philosophers. Just looking throughout history, how often has that been the case? Consequently, does it not suggest the present ennui may be a result more of the structure of philosophical society rather than the water level in the philosophical well?

One final "besides": isn't it the height of hubris to essentially say, "We've got everything pretty much figured out now?" We laugh at those kinds of statements from past figures (no more patents needed in early 1900s, who needs more than 640K ram?). Why exactly are we making them now? I have no problem providing comic fodder for my great-grandchildren, but I'd like to do it deliberately, not ironically.

Re: Philosophers Join the Fray

slarrow — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 08:52:56 -0000

Actually, I think this may work. I've only skimmed some of the older stuff, and I think these people may have some adjusting to do when confronted with the typical range of commentary you get on blogs. But this is a chance to make these folks realize that what they consider neutral ground is actually comprised of their assumptions. Aristotle told us that the unexamined life is not worth living; I think these people may find out that they haven't examined themselves nearly as thoroughly as they thought they had.

Re: Philosophers Join the Fray

slarrow — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:21:43 -0000

Damn. You're right. I was visualizing the wrong pithy quote in my head: "all men by nature desire to know." I can practically see it on my mental page of my Pocket Aristotle. Sigh; that's what I get for relying on visual memory for quotations.

Re: Freedom Isn't Free

slarrow — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 11:12:39 -0000

I read the report you mentioned, David. I rather prefer ScrappleFace's take on it. It gets to the real heart of the issue rather nicely. A good satirist is useful that way.

Re: Rep. McDermott To Undergo Ethics Investigation

slarrow — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 08:12:21 -0000

Aieee! Don't give the SOB a promotion! Your title has "Sen. McDermott" instead of Rep. McDermott. What a frightening notion.

Re: Men Can Take Care Of Children

slarrow — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 12:01:26 -0000

Maybe this class can be useful, but it also bugs me a little bit too. There's just a trace of condenscension about it, but I can't tell if it comes from the program or from the reporter's article.

As it happens, I've done a pretty fair job of adjusting to parenthood...but then again, I was 9 1/2 when my youngest brother was born. I'd been around babies a little bit. My wife, on the other hand, was an only child. The adjustment was harder for her. Even now, she's more prone to panic or worry than I am when it comes to our little Bear.

Experience matters, and I think classes like this may become more important as more and more parents come from only-child households or have siblings so close to them in age that they were never around babies.

Re: Speaking Of Paying Pundits For Support...

slarrow — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:01:36 -0000

An endorsement disclosure...what a great idea!

(Of course, it could also become something of a status thing. Us little fish don't need no stinkin' disclosure 'cos no one knows who we are! *wink*)

Seriously, though, an accurate disclosure could do a lot for establishing credibility of a source (especially if they forthrightly stated their biases on that or a similar document.)

Re: Lest We Forget

slarrow — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:01:45 -0000

Yeah, David's post was disappointing: "He's OUR icon, you can't have him!" A shame.

For better or worse, Martin Luther King, Jr., is no longer a man but a legend. It may take another twenty years before he can be fairly evaluated on a historical basis instead of a political one.

Re: Lest We Forget

slarrow — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:02:22 -0000

Nor am I surprised that your first reaction to a characterization I made of you is to accuse me of bad faith, David. I actually thought it was a pretty fair reading, and your response only confirms my initial presumption.

Your article citation doesn't help much. The evidence the author offers that King would support modern-day affirmative action is extraordinarily thin; four stunted quotations is hardly the definitive comeback to Rob's assertions. It looks like this writer just cherry-picked his own set of quotations to create his article (after creating a straw-man by saying that the other side had only one quote to work with.)

Suppose for a moment, though, that King really would have supported affirmative action; all that does is create a tension between that position and the "content of character" rhetoric that has garnered near-universal agreement. Then he'd have to face the same question modern-day proponents have to face: when is enough enough, and do the benefits outweigh the continuing use of judging by skin color (part and parcel of the original problem)?

Of course, that requires that we treat him as a man and a thinker instead of an icon we can use to slam opponents on OUR issues, which is exactly what you and Willis and Myers are doing. Besides, if we conservatives cannot "claim" him, why demand we respect him with a holiday? Is it really about honoring someone whose contributions toward harmony and unity are held up as a example for ALL Americans, or is it about you making the other side admit it's wrong?

For my part, I DO honor Dr. King, not least of which for his appeal to God's law over human law and his Biblical justification for the renunciation of hatred in nonviolent protests. And I will also contend his rhetoric of "content of character" is universal and applicable today and that his scattered quotations about affirmative action-like programs is tactical and tied to a world that has changed drastically in 40 years. And I will finally say that if you insist on being the arbiter of what can and can't be said and accuse me of bad faith when I disagree, then you can go to blazes!

Re: A Perspective On Affirmative Action

slarrow — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:01:44 -0000

You're changing the subject, Oliver. The point of Rob's post is to force supporters of affirmative action to face that their position (1) has real costs, and (2) imposes those costs in an unjust manner. Which of these do you deny?

We can go round and round on just how hard it is for "black people" (which is a problem because it treats "black people" as a single monolithic block which just ain't so), but is it really going to get us anywhere? I don't think there are many on the Right who wouldn't happily stomp on actual practicing racists, nor do many on the Right deny that there are unique problems facing some/many black people. But the charge against affirmative action as the remedy is that (a) it's unjust and (b) it's counterproductive. What do you say to those concerns?

Re: Thirty Two Years Of Dead Children

slarrow — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:01:54 -0000

Actually, JadeGold, I don't believe the kind of legislation you're talking about would pass Court scrutiny under the current understanding. Heck, not even partial-birth abortion made it past some federal judges.

The sticking point is "health of the mother." Conservatives oppose such an innocuous-sounding exception because it has in fact been used as a loophole to escape restrictions. (Actual attempts to define what constitutes a legitimate health concern are rife with their own philosophical problems, not least of which is the sacred cow of "privacy.")

So the kind of "easy" legislation you claim the GOP could pass is liable to either being stomped on by the courts or so flexible as to not actually change facts on the ground. It would also have used up the political capital on the issue. A very cunning suggestion, JadeGold, to challenge the other side to fire using blanks to demonstrate their sincerity.

Re: The Missing $9 Billion

slarrow — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:01:52 -0000

JadeGold and David are jumping to conclusions. The article does not state that $9 billion is missing. It's saying that it was not properly accounted for in the existing paperwork.

What happened to the money? We don't know. But this is largely a function of accounting, not disbursement. There isn't evidence to support the claim that we've been "overcharged" as in JadeGold's laundry example.

Nor is it accurate to say we "lost" the money. Rather, this is analogous to you having $50 in your pockets on payday and having $1.50 a week later. Did you lose that money? Nah, you spent it, but you may not remember where it went.

Now, am I happy if the report is true? Not particularly. But I am sensitive to the context and the considerations Bremer mentions at the end of the article. Therefore, I don't jump to ridiculous conclusions about the actual use of the money, nor do I consider it evidence of anything larger as JadeGold would have us do.

Re: The Missing $9 Billion

slarrow — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:01:35 -0000

David, I'm not saying the amount is minor. I'm saying that you're misstating the nature of the report and drawing conclusions it does not support.

Let me try to make the point again. The $9 billion is not missing from the treasury; it is missing from the books. Read the article and follow the steps. The U.S. occupation authority gives the money to an Iraqi ministry; thus, the US knows where that money goes initially. The folks at the CPA were counting on the ministry itself to keep proper records when it disbursed the funds. As it turned out, in many cases their confidence was misplaced; for a number of reasons, the ministries did not keep track of the money they paid out in a satisfactory manner. Among these reasons are some nefarious ones like fraud and bribery, to be sure; the article mentions ghost employees, for example. But there are also other perfectly innocuous factors like the need to pay those administrators and security forces who were trying to put the government back together without the old glue of cronyism and threats that existed under Saddam.

There's also a cultural divide, too. Western-style accounting and GAAP adherence takes time to learn and adjust to. (Incidentally, JadeGold, like many other things you get wrong, you mangled that quote. Bremer wasn't saying that Western accounting wasn't used or couldn't be used; he was saying it is unreasonable to expect Iraqis to pick up the system immediately in the aftermath of the military action.) The CPA was also making an effort to let Iraqis do the work without US personnel always standing over their shoulder; Bremer even notes in the article that this is US and UN policy that this critical report either ignores or blithely reverses.

Now, how much of that $9 billion was "wasted or lost or otherwise misspent"? Again, we don't know. (And thus all the insinuations about all the money being lost or stolen are jumping to conclusions not supported by the evidence.) Indeed, we may never know. For my part, though, I believe most of it was spent as it ought to be because of the huge amount involved. Even a relatively small percentage of 9,000 million dollars sets up quite a few corrupt officials as minor princelings (a la the Russian mafia.) Given that the possible theft would have well over a year ago, I would have expected such players to be making a greater move than they are; at the very least, I would have suspected the blogosphere would have picked up on it without needing this kind of audit. Granted, this is speculative, but it's at least minimally plausible.

Now, given all that, what precisely is the mistake here? Presumably it is not demanding greater tracking of the money that got paid. But how would that have worked, exactly? If the CPA had refused to release more money until the other money had been accounted for, they would have run the risk of delaying payment to the people who were rebuilding the government as well as alienating those who were supposed to be their allies (plus the cultural friction there.) In other words, to avoid this admittedly embarrassing report, they would have risked derailing the restoration of an Iraqi civil government that was already degraded far beyond what they had expected. It is easy to second-guess now and say, "Oh, they should have done such-and-such" because you never know for certain what the negative aspects of that course of action would have been. It's theoretical, while the costs of the action taken are real and can be seen.

Again, do I like it that we don't know for certain where $9 billion went? Of course not, and I certainly wouldn't accept it from an American business or governmental agency. But this ain't home; it's Iraq trying to feel its way to a new era after thirty years of tyranny and corruption. But while it's easy to wail about "lost" money or that it's in Bremer's chinos or down a spiderhole, it's just a brute fact that the untracked money is a consequence of a course of action designed to get the Iraqis back on their feet. Given that the sovereignity transfer was early and that the elections yesterday were so successful, it may well have been a gamble that worked. (and I hope this doesn't post twice...but it probably will. Sigh.)

Re: The Missing $9 Billion

slarrow — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:01:57 -0000

Rob, if you're around and can kill one of my duplicate comments above, I'd appreciate it.

Minor quibble with you on a couple of points: the ill-equipped troops charge is also something of a canard. The troops didn't seem to suffer from bad equipment during the three-week war (and let's not forget what a surprising--and-stunning--military success that was.) The equipment became an issue as the nature of the battle changed. Given the nature of military procurement and the turf wars in the Pentagon, the re-outfitting of the troops to meet the new direction of the threat has not been that bad.

On discharging the military, that was probably a mistake. But again, we're seeing with our eyes the costs of taking that course of action. What risks came with keeping the military intact? Possibly greater intelligence to the deposed enemy on our positions and maneuevers, a possibility of rebellion or coup from the military, a continuing distrust and fear of the army and police from the populace, and just the ever-present worry of whether the man with the uniform and gun was really on the side of a free Iraq or just another Saddam loyalist biding his time.

It's easy to see the benefits of what might have been and bemoan the costs of what has occurred. But my complaint with the Left is that they fail to see the costs of what might have been and minimize the benefits of what has occurred. To David's credit, he has not pooh-poohed the successes in Iraq yesterday. But I still think he needs to think about this $9 billion with a little greater rigor.

Re: The Missing $9 Billion

slarrow — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 07:02:34 -0000

As it happens, JadeGold, I've had two accounting courses as part of preparation for a B.A. in computer science (geared toward supporting business applications instead of engineering particular problems.) I also worked for a company for three years that followed an open-book philosophy, so I got to refresh my memory every quarter when they passed out the income statement and statement of cash flows. So save your bluster for somebody who can't see through your ridiculous spiel.

""The folks at the CPA were counting on the ministry itself to keep proper records when it disbursed the funds. " YES. That's what the article itself said. Your little extended quote is a non sequitur; it has nothing to say about the course of action the CPA expected to take and the one it had to take.

The proper charge here is actually not poor planning but rather poor intelligence; the plan presumed an Iraqi government with a certain level of internal professionalism it did not in fact possess. That's unfortunate but understandable; it's hard to get accurate information out of a police state, and we didn't have the spies in place to get that info out (and couldn't have in the two years of Bush's term up until then; this was a long-term strategic blindness.)

These are the facts on the ground, and I lay them out to pinpoint the real oversights and failures instead of taking your approach, which is to overstate the charges recklessly and hope they will stick. I see you pull many of the same cheap stunts in your reply to Rob.

Pah. Lightweight.

Re: The Missing $9 Billion

slarrow — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:02:39 -0000

JadeGold, I'll give you this: you're persistent. It's the same note over and over, but at least you don't stop. Nothing will satisfy you until everyone acknowledges that your shallow reasoning and reckless accusations are golden truth.

I'll go over this one more time and then leave you to spit in the wind some more. The money was given to agencies without proper accounting controls. You may claim that "they're responsible, they should have known better, they're negligible", but the blunt fact is that action needed to be taken to get the ball rolling. My argument is not that the CPA's only responsibility was to throw money; I'm saying that it was Bremer's judgment not to put the cart before the horse and worry about getting results instead of worrying about getting everything done by the book.

The costs of such an approach include the possibilities of bribery and fraud, and this audit has discovered some of those. But unless you expect me to believe that the audit found $9 billion (or more, as you "assure" me) worth of phony employees and nonexistent building materials, don't tell me all the money was squandered or ill-used because you cannot know. There is a difference between "unaccounted for" and "falsely accounted for", and I am not amused to see you rush past that difference to score partisan political points.

This is my final word on the matter. I am not interested in continuing conversation with one who must at every turn accuse me of ignorance, deceit, or bad faith. Keep your poison to yourself, neighbor.

Re: Michael Savage: Jackass

slarrow — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:02:38 -0000

Amen!! He's a vicious b*stard, an Internet troll with a talk show. Bad luck to him.

Re: Citizens Don't Need To Be Protected From Low Prices

slarrow — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 13:03:03 -0000

Rock on, Wal-Mart!

I've lived in Wal-Mart country all my life. I grew up in Northwest Arkansas (Rogers, the site of the first Wal-Mart store.) My first job was with a grocery store owned by Wal-Mart. One of my slogans is, "All good things come from Wal-Mart."

And so someone is complaining about Wal-Mart's low prices again? The bugaboo of monopolization is rearing its ugly head once more? Hah. Let the folks of the region deal with that if it ever occurs. They can handle it with far more savvy and flexibility than some general-purpose law (that ought not be passed in the first place; politicians ought not tell business owners what to charge.)

Happily, I see that Ben Stein wrote a little something on this very topic. Man, I like that guy.

Re: Senate Democrats Pushing For Gannon Inquiry?

slarrow — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:02:52 -0000

The whole thing bemuses me. I don't know whether to encourage the Left in continuing to beat a dead horse or entreat them to stop making over-the-top, malicious, partisan fools of themselves. Who knew that within the paragons of respect for all and defenders of virtue lurked such gossip harridans?

Re: Like The Berlin Wall

slarrow — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:02:51 -0000

These are indeed heady and significant times, Rob. Oh, it could all go pear-shaped so quickly; the capacity of people to screw up good things is as high as it's ever been. But this feels much like 1989 in which both Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall were noteworthy. Maybe it could go either way, but I'm voting for the Berlin Wall route (in part because we have a continuity of leadership today we did not have in 1989.)

Re: Gannon Not Getting Much Media Play

slarrow — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:03:22 -0000

"But maybe this isnâ€™t getting a lot of media play because its just a dumb story. I wonder if that has ever crossed their minds."

Well, of course not, Rob. Whatever were you thinking?

I'll chalk it up to Friday fatigue.

Re: Stupid Guest Choice

slarrow — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:03:21 -0000

Ye gods, what part of "marginalize racists" is so @!%@# hard to understand?

Re: Socialist / Libertarian Quiz?

slarrow — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:02:56 -0000

The irritating thing is that Gary used this test to test whether one was a socialist or not. But socialism is essentially an economic system, and most of the above questions are not economic in nature.

There's a legitimate debate about the proper reach of the state, but Gary just likes calling people names like socialist and bigot. I do hope he's not this unpleasant in real life (which is my final comment on or response to him; I'm trying to cut down on my troll-feeding.)

Re: Socialist / Libertarian Quiz?

slarrow — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:03:19 -0000

Seth, I think socialism is a bit more restricted than that--for the purposes of this discussion, at least. The original purpose seems to be identification, so precision of terminology is rather important.

I agree that we use "socialism" in the larger sense you mention, but I still think that's a shorthand for another, better term. For a more detailed explanation of what I've got in mind, the FAQs on this quiz do a good job of defining the freedom axes as economic and personal.

Re: AP Poll on SS Retirement Views

slarrow — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:02:54 -0000

Yeah, sounds like a good explanation to me. Much of the political case for Social Security depends on the economic ignorance of American citizens (fear about losing money, the "gamble" charge, the reassurances about the "trust fund", historical rates of return, etc.) The more you know about basic economic issues, the more sense the President is making.

That's no guarantee that the President's plan is the best, nor is it to say that the plan isn't vulnerable to some fairly subtle economic factors that require further expertise to anticipate. But the basic point remains: people who do not understand basic economics and are willing to put their futures in the hands of others are afraid of change because that's when their vulnerability cannot be denied. When you believe in the magic cupboard, the scariest thing in the world is that someone will turn off the magic.

Re: No More Death Penalties For Minors

slarrow — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:03:41 -0000

Sigh. Except this isn't the Supreme Court's damn job to decide this kind of thing, at least not according to the reasoning they're using. It's another Lawrence v. Texas in which they substitute their moral judgement for that of the political branches of the several states.

The folks over at NRO's The Corner are nailing the Court on this angle.

Re: Are The Benefits Worth The Costs

slarrow — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:04:07 -0000

That's an answer? Ye gods....

Rob, I'm with you. By making tyrants worry about their own power and giving oppressed peoples hope that they themselves might find freedom, Bush has done a great and good thing. But for our purposes, this action keeps the peoples of a hostile region concerned with their own affairs instead of either looking to harm us or allying with those who would like to harm us.

It's all been a calculated gamble, but Middle East "stability" was killing us anyway.

Re: Say Anything's First Comment Ban

slarrow — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:04:20 -0000

Good decision. I was surprised you let it go on as long as you did. You've shown a great deal of restraint dealing with those with whom reasonable and respectful disagreement seem impossible because they are neither reasonable nor respectful themselves.

Perhaps Gary will comfort himself with the thought that you can't stand dissent or that he was winning. Feh. He can believe what he likes--and start his own blog! But someone who presumes ignorance, incompetence, and bad faith without allowing for the possibility of honest disagreement is poisonous to a discussion.

Cheers for making him find some other outlet elsewhere to spew his unpleasantness, and good luck in not rising to the bait when the next Gary Gunnels comes down the pike.

Re: Say Anything's First Comment Ban

slarrow — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:04:02 -0000

Eh, I'd still advise against it, Rob. What are you going to do--put him on probation? Keep monitoring him as a special case?

Look, he's obviously old enough to have done his homework on lots of things, so he's old enough to learn how to have a respectful conversation by now. The fact that he acts as he does suggests that the leopard may not change his spots so easily.

You might consider this description, too.

Re: Senator Byrd: Hypocrite

slarrow — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:04:12 -0000

Eh, you may have to deal with this for a few days. It's probably a consequence of banning Gary; some nut decides he wants to feel like a martyr too. Doesn't change the fact that you've made the right decision, though.

Re: Rags To Riches - A True Story

slarrow — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 13:04:09 -0000

This man is amazing. Hope he sells a lot of books and inspires a lot of people.

Re: "We Welcome Diversity"

slarrow — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:03:47 -0000

About that story...Rich Lowry from National Review has this from an insider.

Looks like another case of presidential undermining by some holdover "unnamed" hacks. Par for the course, apparently.

Re: Lethal Injection Too Cruel For Dogs

slarrow — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:04:28 -0000

This reminds me of a debate we had in a philosophy of law class about barbarism. Everybody was ready to condemn it, but when it came time to define it...well, that was a lot harder. The difficulty is finding a common thread you can use to formulate a principle because the instances of barbarism we cited differed from each other in significant respects. It was hard to find some other standard that didn't rely heavily on gut reactions.

So what do you do when you don't have the gut reaction that capital punishment is barbaric (like me)? Can you even start to find common ground to discuss the issue, or is it all about one guy's intuitions trumping another?

(food for thought...but we'll see where it goes from here.)

Re: Leftist Stance On Small Business Revealed

slarrow — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 10:04:20 -0000

The irritating thing about Yglesias' reasoning is that it isn't reasoning. He doesn't argue for an inheritance tax; he simply states that if you get an inheritance, the government should take a big bite, and dem's the berries.

This is something that some people just don't seem to get. When your rationale is "tax everything that moves" (the closest I can come to what Yglesias might think on this), then things stop moving. When your system is based on economic activity and things stop moving, life gets worse. People who insist on viewing everything by economic status end up supporting measures that hurt the ones they purport to help (e.g., Yglesias' whole "f--- the small businessman" actually costs some of his employees their jobs, a more vital hit than the one the businessman suffers.)

Re: Thirteen Year Old To Get Abortion

slarrow — Fri, 06 May 2005 10:05:24 -0000

Oh, likwid, Jen's source does deserve more refutation than that. Try this link. Here's another, more substantial analysis from Just One Minute of the back-and-forth including followup.

And back off of Jen just a little bit. I think she's wrong in the typical pro-choice way (i.e., ignore the existence of the baby). But we pro-life people get charged with ignoring the plight of the woman, and there's enough to that to give us pause. Just because she's got Gold in her name doesn't make her another JadeGold. She's being civil, so cut her some slack.

That said, the question for Jen is: do you take the existence of the child seriously, and do you deny that child's essential innocence in the circumstances of her conception? Finally, let's stipulate this girl was not raped in the emotion-packed meaning of the term (i.e., forced sex through violence) even though it may have been statutory rape (in which prosecute the man to the fullest extent of the law.) If the girl carries the child to term and gives it up for adoption, what happens to most of your objections about the alleged quality of life for both mother and child?

Re: Thirteen Year Old To Get Abortion

slarrow — Fri, 06 May 2005 12:06:05 -0000

Thanks for directly answering my questions, Jen. I see, upon further review, that you did not in fact argue about quality of life (you just said "right on" to one who did; probably where I got the notion.)

I think there are still a few conceptual problems with the "her body, her choice" formulation, though. For one thing, at one point does the entity inside a woman stop being just another part of her body and start being someone to be respected in his own right? When my wife was pregnant with our son and we could feel him kick, we never thought of it as her body acting up. He was kicking my wife; she wasn't kicking herself. Who would talk like that? But saying "her body, her choice" obscures that rather clear distinction, doesn't it?

Here's another wrinkle: two women conceive at the same time under similar circumstances. They find out on the same day. Both fetuses are developing normally. One starts buying baby clothes and taking prenatal vitamins that very afternoon; the other schedules an appointment with an abortion clinic. Which fetus is human and which one isn't, and do you see the danger in defining that based on the opinions of another person?

At bottom, the formulation "her body, her choice" disappoints me because it just punts on tough questions like these. And I too would love to see a world where women "would not even consider engaging in sexual intercourse until they were in a sanctioned, loving, committed relationship". I call that "marriage" (and for so thinking sex outside marriage is wrong, not least in part because of the harm it can cause, I get called a troglodyte. It's a funny old world.) But by no means is the existence of that state of affairs a precursor for seriously considering abortion. The world need not be perfect in all other respects before we can try to stop abortions.

Re: News For Regular Readers

slarrow — Wed, 04 May 2005 08:05:33 -0000

Pardon me for wanting to sing, "ding dong, the witch is dead...."

Good for you, Rob. First, there are a number of rules of netiquette JG long ignored that you let slide. But, to paraphrase the Vegas tourist commission, what happens on the Web stays on the Web. I'm wary enough about people breaking this rule (which is why I go by "slarrow"); heck, I even disagree with Jeff Johnson on the etiquette of pressing a libel case, even as I enjoy the smackdown he administered to JadeGold. But threatening to crusade against your livelihood because of a spurious claim of breach of confidentiality (in which he has no standing, being neither a client nor a subject of your profession) seems to me an automatic ejection.

I've long wondered how you had the patience to let JadeGold hang around so long. JG's presence tended to distort your threads; instead of the comments being about the topics, sooner or later they all became about him against all the ignorant/stupid/dishonest people (i.e., everyone else.) It's a bit of a shame because JG apparently has a decent mind. But decent minds abound on the Web without having to descend into personal viciousness every single time. Now that he's gone, perhaps I can comment more with no fear of getting railroaded by a troll.

There's always that loudmouthed guy at the bar who knows everything about everything and won't stop until everyone acknowledges that they are stupid and dishonest and that his package is bigger than theirs. It's always a relief when the guy gets tossed out of the joint. Thanks, Rob!

Re: Not A Good Spokesman

slarrow — Mon, 09 May 2005 14:05:32 -0000

I'm pretty strongly against abortion myself, as I hope is clear. But I want no part of this wack job.

Sometimes when we criticize lefties for not condemning the Michael Moores of the world, they shoot back that we should ostracize our nutzos. Consider this my small contribution to that endeavor. This is one of the few cases where I would let the "anti-choice extremist" label stick (and I'm condemning him for publicizing the names of abortion doctors, not the sex stuff. Well, okay, the sex stuff too...ye gods!)

Re: Waiting Period For Abortions Legalized In Georgia

slarrow — Wed, 11 May 2005 15:06:18 -0000

Let's back up a second, LoadTheMule. You first asked why the state had a right to impose a waiting period, comparing it to free speech. When Rob countered with a waiting period for handguns, you shifted to the reason for implementing those laws. You're mixing things up here. You've got to establish that abortion is a right like those in the First Amedment instead of like those in the Second Amendment before you can talk about whether there are sufficiently good reasons for state action.

Presume that gets ironed out. With respect, I think the charge "try to overturn it, not limit the right" is bogus. The point LTM made earlier is that it's a right; you can't overturn rights if it's truly a right. If it's a phony right sustained only by a illegitimate judicial power grab, then you can overturn it--but then you shouldn't be talking about "respecting" that right. If it is a true right, then it's perfectly legitimate to try to limit it; rights as such are generally defined in our founding documents, but we have to figure out how to define their scope somehow.

None of this has to do with whether the reasons for having a waiting period are good...but I'm stepping away from this computer soon and don't know when I'll be back. Have fun.