Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Cops, the CIA, and Russia versus Ukraine

Welcome friends!

Lot’s of things going on right now that really deserve some comment such as the newly ascendent Republican Party’s attempt to do away with regulations on their Wall Street patrons and those anti-Islamization marches in Germany and the funny reactions to them in the media.  However, since this is my last post for 2014 I thought I’d take a little time out and look at some current events I’ve been avoiding mentioning not because I don’t think they’re important but because they don’t seem to involve the sort of conceptual confusion Im driven to sort out.  In other words, I’m just not sure I have much to add to the conversation.  But that’s never really stopped me before, has it?  So let’s make a clean sweep of it.

How about those recent instances of the US police using deadly force in questionable circumstances generally involving our swarthier compatriots?  Let me start with a few rather obvious observations if I may and then proceed on to what I consider a more dubious line of discussion.

First, it seems to me pretty clear to me that we may have to revisit how we train our police force.  Policing is a tricky and dangerous business at the best of times but particularly so here in the US where an alarming number of people carry guns about and where even those who can’t manage to pass our laughably inadequate background checks for buying guns can easily pick one up whenever they like by simply breaking into any house on the block and taking one.  The police response to this quasi-militarized state of affairs has been to adopt a doctrine of overwhelming force (or shock and awe lite I suppose might be a good way to think about it).  This doctrine postulates that the best way to keep things under control during any sort of potentially violent confrontation is to watch for any hint of a problem and if any such hint is forthcoming to apply sufficient force to end the situation quickly before things get out of hand.  The theory sounds reasonable on paper but I’m not so sure about the practice.  The problem of course is that when we train people to act like this we run the risk that we may get some small percentage of disproportionate responses.  Someone looks sideways at a cop and end up getting dragged to the pavement and strangled.  I appreciate of course that if one’s ethics run strictly along consequentialist lines might argue one cannot really evaluate this sort of thing without looking at the other side of the equation: how many unnecessary fatalities has this hair trigger response policy prevented?  However, I guess I don’t feel that does it for me.  I can’t help but feel there’s some question of duty involved as well.  It seems to me the police are there to protect and serve and when they arrive at a disturbance and make a bad situation much worse by killing someone unnecessarily that’s just a rather significant problem for me.  I understand they may feel they were just trying to do their job and sometimes accidents happen but that’s where I suspect we may part company because I think a big part of their job is avoiding those sorts of accidents.  Police work is not just a matter of rushing in and trying to resolve a situation any old way and letting the chips fall where they may.  I suppose the implication is that I feel we should accept the risk of things sometimes getting out of hand in order to avoid situations where cops unintentionally end up playing the role of the out of control aggressor even if that leads to some innocent people getting killed from bad guys that the police have failed to neutralize in a timely fashion.  I know, that’s a tough one but there you have it.

Second, I think we really need some accountability when police screw up, which they are liable to do no matter what sort of policies or training we may have in place.  This is a serious business.  It’s one thing to argue the police didn’t intend to kill anyone so it’s not really murder it’s just something unfortunate that happened during a violent altercation.  It’s something else entirely to say that being involved in this type of unfortunate event is professionally acceptable for a police officer.  To me a member of the police force killing an unarmed civilian is like a commercial airline pilot flying his plane into a mountain or a cruise ship captain running his ship onto a reef.  Never mind the issue of criminal charges, can we at least agree that the police officers involved in these incidents should be invited to find more suitable employment?  Something requiring a little less judgment?  People rely on the police for protection from thugs and murders.  How can one rely on them if one suspects they might accidentally kill someone themselves?

Third, of course if there are grounds for suspecting criminal negligence or even worse intentional murder we need someone like the FBI to get in there right away, investigate the hell out of it, and either bring charges or give us some confidence that no one on the police force has gotten away with anything.  Again, we all need to have confidence in our police force.  

Now let me take a quick look at what I described previously as a somewhat more dubious suggestion, which is that racism is a significant component of this issue.  I’m sure the statistics will show that most of the unarmed people being killed by police are “black” as we say here in the US.  However, I think what’s much less obvious is what that signifies.  The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for one reason or another a disproportionate share of the violent criminals in our country also fall into this category so one would naturally expect them to account for a disproportionate share of people involved in violent confrontations with police.  On the other hand, although I don’t feel we have anywhere near as much overt racism about as there was when I was young, I think one must admit we do have a historical legacy of racism that has probably survived in local pockets here and there.  Even when we don’t have actual racism we may very well have the related phenomenon that I’ve referred to in earlier posts as “culturalism,” which of course can be highly correlated with race in many places.  Obviously, whenever you have the police coming from one cultural background and the people being policed from another you run the risk of all sorts of strange things happening.  It’s not just the issue that some police officers may come to believe that people from certain cultures or backgrounds are more likely to be involved in criminal activity and thus be tempted to treat them differently consciously or otherwise.  It can also involve more mundane factors like people from different cultures interpreting behaviors differently so for example where one culture sees a dignified response to arbitrary authority another culture may see a suspicious lack of compliance with a reasonable request.  I guess the most I’d be willing to say about this particular issue right now is that someone should be looking into it and trying to ensure the police treat everyone properly.  The US is a multiracial and multicultural society and we simply cannot afford to tolerate any nonsense along those lines.

Not much of an analysis?  Well, that’s what I’m talking about.  That’s why I didn’t do a post on it.  So let’s move on.  How about the recent report about the CIA torturing people?  Another big issue but again I’m not sure I have anything useful to add to the discussion.  Actually I thought we had put this torturing people for information business behind us sometime around the start of the eighteenth century when we determined it generally results in the tortured party either making things up or telling people what they think people want to hear.  Of course if torture doesn’t get you any reliable information there’s little point to getting into the thorny ethics of the matter.  I guess one might still want to talk about torture in non-informational contexts.  For example, one could get into the issue of whether it’s morally preferable to punish people for legal transgressions with some brief torture like getting walloped a few times with a whip versus an extended time out in prison, which tends to be our cultural preference, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.  Anyway, to get back to the issue at hand, this notion of torturing people for information, it turns out the issue was apparently not consigned to oblivion many centuries ago as I thought; no, the CIA believes right now that torturing people is an effective way to get information.  They’ve apparently said as much to the US Congress in official testimony.  Damn.  I guess were going to have to do this the long way.

As far as the ethics of torturing people for information goes it seems to me we’ve got all kinds of things going on. One rather well known strand is the potential conflict between consequentialist and deontological (that would be duty based) ethical thinking relating to this issue.  A consequentialist may say of course it’s unfortunate that we would ever need to torture anyone but if doing so resulted in information that allowed us to prevent two other people from being tortured or killed or whatever then we’d still be coming out ahead in some sense.  The duty based argument would run more along the lines that it’s just wrong to torture people for information and it’s better to hold onto your ethical beliefs and let the chips fall where they may, including on top of other people, if the alternative is to sell your soul to the Devil to get all allegorical about it.  I don’t know the answer to that one.  Sounds complicated.  I probably lean toward the duty based approach myself because I just can’t help but feel if one gets too consequentialist one might end up engaging in all manner of questionable behaviors.  However, I also suppose there are other things going on.

Two other potentially relevant issues to me are that not all torture is equal and not all information is equally important so we probably have a lot of room for discussion relating to those issues.  Are we talking about torturing people in the sense that they’re uncomfortable at the moment but fine again later (including being fine in the head of course)?  That might still be unacceptable but it seems somehow less bad than if we were talking about permanent injuries or psychological scars.  As far as information goes I would think the potential value of the information might have some sort of significance.  Can we get the information some other way?  Do people’s lives depend on it?

Another potentially relevant issue to me involves the characteristics of the victim.  If one really feels someone is withholding information that would help one prevent someone else being tortured or killed then that person isn’t really what anyone could reasonably call an innocent victim.  He or she would be complicit in some way in the torture or death that one is trying to get information to stop or avoid.  The implication that these people are guilty of something to some degree raises the issue of whether we’re able to maintain the conceptual distinction between torturing people for information and torturing people as punishment.  Is it more acceptable to torture someone for information if that person arguably deserves to be tortured because he or use is complicit in the torture or death of someone else?  If that’s the case then it seems to me there’s a lot riding on the degree of confidence one has that the person actually has the information in question and is holding out on one in the manner I just suggested.  So what about the case where one thinks someone might or might not have the information?  Where does one draw the line?

Listening to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s views on the matter really brought these issues home to me.  He was in the media recently spouting off about how he was more concerned about guilty detainees getting released to fight again than about detaining (and implicitly torturing) “a few that in fact were innocent.”  That pretty much turns on its head the so-called Blackstone’s Formulation, which proposes we should prefer ten guilty people to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.  Never heard of the principle?  Well, neither did I.  However, apparently it’s a principle that people who know about such things consider a bedrock of Western jurisprudence and that has been cited a number of times by the US Supreme Court.  And we’re not talking about an academic dispute here.  Innocent people are definitely involved.  The CIA torture report estimated that up to the twenty-five percent of the people we’re talking about may have been captured as a result of mistaken identity and one such fellow, Gul Rahman, actually died under torture.  One can’t help but wonder whether Mr. Cheney’s cavalier attitude toward apparently innocent victims like Mr. Rahman has to do with the fact that they are foreigners from the Middle East.  One suspects Mr. Cheney might revise his moral views if the innocent person being detained, tortured, and possibly accidentally killed were someone more like Mr. Cheney himself.

Well, I certainly can’t resolve anything right now.  My point is simply that this is a hugely complicated issue that needs some serious social debate.  Too bad we mostly tend to get sensationalism and political grandstanding.  We all know torture is wrong in some vague general sense but during an emergency when lives are at stake we somehow all contrive to be looking the other way although we sure raise a ruckus later on, don’t we?

Enough of that.  It’s giving me the creeps.  How about Ukraine?  Hey, I have no idea!  Sorry.  Obviously I feel countries should respect one another’s borders but on the other hand as a historically and geographically challenged American I have no confidence at all that I understand any of the considerations that play into this conflict.  I must admit I always thought Ukraine was a region of Russia but I suppose that’s because when I was growing up we tended to equate the entire USSR with Russia.  But still; Kiev isn’t Russian?  It’s in a different country where they speak their own language?  Seems strange.  Are we talking about real countries with real borders that have some sort of historical or intrinsic significance or did someone just make them up a few years ago?  As you can see I’m still struggling with the basic facts of the matter so you can forget about me thinking through any thorny territorial disputes.

Nevertheless, let me just review what I’ve gleaned from my rather casual attempt to keep abreast of the issue thus far.  We went from the USSR to Russia and Ukraine (and lots of other countries) but we somehow ended up with a bunch of ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and some important Russian military installations being located in Ukraine, then we had some political turmoil resulting in the hasty and possibly legally questionable departure of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader, then we may or may not have had ultranationalist Ukrainians telling the ethnic Russians to get the hell out, then we had the Russian Ukrainians (?) deciding they wanted to carve out their own little country or territory or whatever it is, then we had the Russian military trying to help them out but not wanting to admit as much of course, then someone shot down a commercial airplane, then ... OK, I have to stop; I’m getting one of my headaches again.  Look, I like Ukraine well enough given that I don’t know anything about the place and I’m trying to like Russia as well although they sure don’t make it easy, do they?  (And not just on this issue.)  I wonder, is to much to ask that they get together and come up with some solution that doesn’t involve embroiling the world once again in some ridiculous decades long territorial dispute?  It’s just too damned far away for America to sort it out and one shudders to think of the Europeans trying to sort out anything at all.  How about this?  Russia: remove your military, stop arming the separatists, and respect Ukraine’s borders.  Ukraine: create some effective protections or political institutions for your ethnic Russian population and make a deal with Russia so it can keep its naval installation or oil deal or whatever the hell it is they’re so agitated about.  We’re past that already?  Fine.  Just do it the old fashioned way and shoot one another.

Time for one more?  How about ISIS?   They sound like a bunch of murderous thugs to me but of course they’re not the first group of murderous thugs to come out of that part of the world.  I suppose if people in the region want some help fighting them we probably have a moral responsibility to help them out.  But we can’t sort out everyone on our own, can we?  I wish we could but there’s just not enough money and time in the world to do that.

Well, that’s my annual end of the year rubbage sale of unhelpful commentary on random news of the day.  Hmm, maybe I should end on a positive note.  How about the Nobel Peace Price going to Mala Yousafzai of Pakistan for her work getting local women some access to education and to Kailash Satyarthi of India for his work relating to child labor.  So gratifying to hear about someone trying to do something positive in that part of the world.  I salute you both!

That’s it for me for this year.  See you in the next.

References

Anthony Zurcher.  Cheney: ‘No problem’ with detaining innocents.  BBC.  December 15, 2014.  http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-30485999.

Greg Botelho.  Malala, Satyarthi accept Nobel Peace Prize, press children's rights fight.  CNN.  December 10, 2014.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/world/asia/nobel-peace-prize-awarded/index.html?hpt=hp_t2.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Merry Christmas 2014

Welcome friends!

It was a dark and stormy night.  Well, dark and cold anyway.  Yes, the winter solstice is upon us once again and that can only mean one thing: spring must surely follow.  Winter first of course.  But when the days begin to grow longer flowers and bunny rabbits are sure to arrive sooner or later.  Always a nice feeling, right?  Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Yuletide season or as I guess they say now Christmas.

Yes, Christmas.  Such a complicated time for adults of a certain age and even more so for adults of a certain age who are humanists... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Moral Relativism Revisited

Welcome friends!

I know last time I declared my intention to play the conservative game of ranting and raving until I feel faint and then swooning onto a divan but it’s just so damned boring I don’t think I can keep it up.  OMG!  I must think!  As a sort of remedial treatment I thought I might spend a few moments this time dabbling in something a bit more philosophical so I’ve decided to revisit the idea of ethical relativism.  It’s all related.  Aren’t social conservatives always banging on about moral relativism?  It’s not like I’m taking a week off to fly down to Mexico and drink myself into a stupor or anything like that.

So the other day I found myself leafing through a mildly entertaining little book entitled Fifty Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre, who from the biographical blurb appears to be a reasonably well educated guy but alas not a professional philosopher, and all the little two and three page summaries were going pretty much as I expected until I got to the entry on ethical relativism with the less than entirely obvious chapter title One Man’s Meat..., which I thought I had read previously on a website that shall go unnamed but which turned out to be something quite different.  Now ever since taking Philosophy 101 never mind how many years ago I’ve considered myself very much your typical ethical relativist so I assumed I knew where we were headed.  Wrong!  Turns out when some people talk about ethical relativism they have in mind something very different from what I have in mind.  If you’ve read my blog at all you’ll understand I couldn’t resist trying to straighten the issue out at least in my own mind.  I just don’t like confusion, especially involving words.  Makes it so difficult to know what one is even talking about.

First, let me just review moral relativism in the sense I understand it.  To me, the distinctive thing about ethics, the feature that makes it such a perennially interesting topic of conversation, is that there is no objective or shall we say scientific way to demonstrate the correctness of moral propositions.  In some cases one may be able to derive certain propositions from other propositions using logic, which I suppose would be objective.  However, that only gets one so far.  Like any logical system one has to start somewhere.  In the case of ethics I think if you go back far enough you’ll eventually arrive at some sort of fundamental proposition or set of propositions you feel just must be right.  Like many other people I believe that feeling derives from a sort of ethical intuition or emotion I believe some philosophers call one’s moral sense.  But if someone disagrees with you at that level you’re basically screwed in terms of your ability to engage them intellectually.  Let’s say you’ve worked your way back to a statement like, I don’t know, it’s wrong to kill someone for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  You may think you must have hit bedrock with this one and you’re preparing to work your way back up to some point of contention when the sociopath in the back of the room pipes up and says oh no I disagree, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people for no reason whatsoever.  So awkward when that happens.  You’d really like to tell whoever it is to put a sock in it, right?  Hey buddy!  You’re wrong!  End of story!  Unfortunately, there’s no mutually accessible logical proposition or sensory data that can demonstrate to the person he or she is wrong in any sort of objective way that person would feel bound to accept.  You can try to work your way back further still of course maybe to something like mankind is a social animal in the hope that maybe the sociopath arrived at his or her annoying conclusion through some flawed bit of logic but my point is there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to a point on which you can both agree.  Hence the relativism.

Now let’s think about how Mr. Dupre presented moral relativism in his little summary article.  He explained the relativism bit, which seemed fine, but he then continued on to associate moral relativism with the proposition that one cannot judge the morality of other people.  Because it’s all relative you see.  Thus, the way it was presented in this article moral relativism can be associated with a sort of flabby anything goes outlook on ethical issues (or to put it in a somewhat more flattering light a more open minded outlook on ethical issues than would otherwise be the case).

It was at this point my finely tuned intellect detected something was amiss.  Although I endorse the idea of ethical relativism I certainly don’t feel myself to be any more open minded about ethical matters than the next guy.  Not by a long shot.  If you’re doing something I think is immoral I’ll be happy to let you know about it.  I do it all the time.  I don’t necessarily expect anyone to obey my ethical dictates or whatever but I’m ready to talk it to death, that’s for sure.  Indeed, I think my readiness to engage people on ethical matters has led some people to describe me from time to time as a bit of what we call in this country a hard ass.  So what’s going on here?  Am I not understanding something important about ethical relativism?

Well, after a refreshing beverage or two and a few brief moments of consternation I determined the crux of the problem here must involve this notion one can start out with moral beliefs about something, read a bit of philosophy about how there is no objective interpersonally valid basis for determining what is moral, and end up being agnostic about whatever it was that you formerly had an opinion about.  I mean, just how is something like that meant to happen?  Well, I think the key to understanding why this story makes sense to some people is you have to imagine the protagonist is an ethical absolutist who supports the proposition that unless one can demonstrate one’s moral beliefs are objective and interpersonally valid in a way that is not relative to any particular person then one should give up those beliefs and get all flabby and anything goes on everyone.  That particular proposition is in no way inherent in moral relativism itself.

I think a good way to see what’s going on here is to take another concept that is defined relative to a particular person like taste for example.  Now I may think some food tastes good and you may not.  I don’t really have a way to demonstrate to you that whatever it is actually tastes good in some interpersonally valid way thus disproving your claim it tastes bad to you.  It’s not that kind of proposition.  I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk like that.  It’s not the normal way of using the word is it?  When we talk about something tasting good we mean relative to the particular person or group of people doing the tasting whether we say so or not.  It would be a pretty peculiar sort of statement indeed to claim something really tastes good to someone (as a member of the group of people bound to acknowledge the postulated objective way of determining what tastes good) even though that person is busy spitting it out in disgust.  However, and this is my main point, recognizing the relativistic dimension of what we mean by taste does not require one to become agnostic about how food tastes.  That’s ridiculous.  Either the food tastes good to me or it doesn’t.

It’s the same thing with ethics.  The fact I cannot find an objective basis for proving the superiority of my moral sentiments does not require me to become agnostic about those sentiments or about ethical matters in general.  I’m a person like anyone else and I have moral beliefs based on my moral sentiments and I can use logic to reason my way to other ethical propositions that might not otherwise be obvious.  So some things will appear moral to me and some things will not.  And we can talk about it.  Indeed, to take the argument a step further one’s ethical beliefs about what one ought to do if one determines other people are acting unethically don’t seem to me to be involved in any way.  An ethical relativist might subscribe to an anything goes sort of approach to other people acting unethically or a confrontational I’m not putting up with anything no matter how trivial sort of approach.  That’s a matter one needs to work out within the context of one’s own moral belief system.  We still have to get in there and discuss when it makes sense to talk and when it makes sense to start interfering with the behavior of other people.  It doesn’t just fall out of moral relativism.  That why I do so much talking about the liberal ethos and the significance of distinguishing activity one may believe is unethical and one wouldn’t do oneself but doesn’t involve having a significant effect on other people and therefore properly resides in the realm of personal liberty from activity that shares the former characteristic but also affects other people in a significant way thus creating an interpersonal conflict that may require one to take a more active role.

To summarize, I think the basic problem with the presentation of moral relativism in the little book I was reading is it viewed ethical relativism through the lens of an ethical absolutist and of course found it lacking.  What the discussion highlighted for me is not so much a problem with moral relativism as a problem with moral absolutism, which is that it puts unrealistic epistemological requirements on ethical propositions.  The only way to get where one needs to go under the moral absolutist perspective is to make something up, that is to declare something factually true because you believe it or would like it to be so.  That type of thinking presumably underlies the social conservative argument that religions are necessary for human society because only religions can provide a suitably objective basis on which to rest one’s absolutist ethical beliefs, the only alternative to which they believe is a flabby anything goes moral agnosticism.  Talk about getting one’s cart before one’s horse!  Hello!  Religion must be true because we think we need it to be true?  Hey, I think I need a glass of beer right about now but that doesn’t mean I’m justified in believing I have one in my hand.  But as I’ve pointed out before I suppose this must be why so many social conservatives get so agitated over seemingly inconsequential transgressions of their ethical codes.  The way conservatives see it denying the objective correctness of any part of their code throws the entire foundation of ethical behavior into question.  With conservatives it’s all about The Word.  Cut your hair incorrectly today and what’s next?  Murdering your neighbor and eating his brain?  Because for social conservatives those are the only alternatives: accept some code word for word as originally carved on a stone somewhere in the Middle East most likely or become a wild man with no ethical beliefs whatsoever.

So much less confusing to just appreciate ethical beliefs for what they really are, isn’t it?  Easier to discuss and hash out ethical differences where possible.  Less room for bullying and head chopping.  No need to pit one religion against another in a fight for global supremacy.  No need to make things up.  And we can all still fight for what we think is right.  So are we agreed?  Moral relativism yes.  Flabby anything goes moral agnosticism no.  Thank goodness for that.  Now maybe we can all start talking about ethical issues in a way that actually makes sense.  Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Republicans Ascendant

Welcome friends!

Well, we’ve gotten another election out of the way here in the US.  This one was a particularly ugly and disheartening one for liberals and humanists alike as Americans handed control of the US Congress back to the social and economic conservatives of the Republican Party.  In honor of the inauspicious occasion I thought I might take a moment to assess where we are and what it all means.  Two questions spring to mind: What might we expect to see from the Republicans in the next couple of years?  What does the Republican victory tell us about the likely future tenor of politics here in the US over the next few years?

With respect to the first question I think it makes the most sense to look at the issues the Republicans have been doing the most talking about recently.  On that basis I suppose the primary objective of the new Republican Congress will be to get the US into an assuredly quite expensive and most likely rather dubious ground war in Syria... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Economic Conservatism Chinese Style

Welcome friends!

I thought this time out I might as well complete my thoughts from last week.  In case you can’t remember back that far or have chosen to forget, which would be entirely understandable, I was discussing how I spend most of my time fighting the good fight against the two headed monster of conservatism here in the US but I realize each head of our domestic monster has a foreign counterpart that’s both uglier and meaner.  Last time I talked about social conservatism in majority Muslim countries, which makes our own domestic social conservatism look like tiddlywinks.  This time I thought I might say a few words about the strident economic conservatism coming out of the authoritarian market state that is contemporary China, which I suppose in some ways must represent an alluring albeit as yet unattainable Shangri-La for economic conservatives here in the US.  

I suppose if you’re a relative old timer like me and you haven’t been following the news very closely for the past several decades you may have a little trouble visualizing contemporary China... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Social Conservatism Muslim Style

Welcome friends!

I was just thinking the other day how everything is relative.  Take conservatism for example.  I’m always railing against the two headed monster of conservatism that dwells here in the US.  But each head of our domestic monster has a corresponding foreign head that’s twice as ugly and twice as mean.  Of course, maybe it’s not an appropriate comparison.  I’m living here so I’m mostly concerned with the monster in my backyard.  People in other countries can do whatever they want as far as I’m concerned if only they remember to stay far, far away and not try to fly a plane into my house.  But maybe that’s unrealistic.  Trade, transportation, and communications have evolved to such an extent that I suppose in some ways we’re all basically living in the same great global village.  There’s a scary thought.  Maybe I do have to keep an eye on the two headed monster of foreign conservatism as well.  But I don’t like it.  No siree; I don’t like it one little bit.

Well, let’s take social conservatism first.  Now when I think of social conservatism run amok I tend to think mostly of conservatives in those predominantly Muslim countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because they seem to me to exemplify a certain particularly virulent form of social conservatism that doesn’t mince words when it comes to opposing the liberal ethos that underlies our American way of life and the ways of life of many of our liberal comrades around the globe as well.  (The corresponding locus of foreign economic conservatism must be the authoritarian market state that China has become, but let’s do one thing at a time, shall we?)  If you think American conservatives are at odds with the liberal ethos you should check out an article I read the other day about the results of a survey someone took a few years ago of attitudes in the Muslim world.  A clash of civilizations you say?  Well, I don’t know anything about that.  It seems to me we’ve got plenty of conservatives right here who think along the same general lines as our bearded foreign friends.  And there are plenty of Muslims both here and abroad who don’t subscribe to the sort of rabid social conservatism that is the subject of my post today.  If you think my beef is with Islam you’re barking up the wrong tree buddy.  I’m talking about the historical struggle between liberals and humanists on one side and social conservatives on the other.   

The article in question covered so many interesting results; where to begin?  Well, here’s a funny one.  Many of those who responded to this survey supported the adoption of sharia (i.e. Islamic religious law).  At the same time many also claimed to support political democracy at least over the alternative of relying on a strong leader... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, October 2, 2014

The Surprising History of the Republican Party

Welcome friends!

I found myself in a bit of a quandary this week.  I thought at first I might do a little something on that conservative nut job who’s been running around the woods of rural Pennsylvania killing random police officers as part of his own personal war of liberation against the federal government of the US.  Personally I put a good deal of the blame on the Tea Party and its rabid anti-government rhetoric.  It’s probably asking a lot but could we please all try to put a little thought into what we say?  I know most conservative politicians and pundits are just saying whatever they can to stir people up, get themselves or their candidates elected, and shave a bit off their taxes or whatever, but do they know there are some awfully malleable and credulous people out there who take their hateful anti-government rants seriously?  It’s just so unfortunate and yet so damned predictable.  Now that I’m thinking about it I suppose it’s the domestic version of what must go in the Middle East every day.  Just as crazy talk by certain Muslim clerics inevitably leads various bearded hotheads and nut jobs to hide in the desert chopping the heads off little kids so crazy talk by the Tea Party here in the US leads various rural hotheads and nut jobs to hide in the woods shooting random police officers and federal employees.  Nobody intends this sort of thing to happen, of course, but everyone knows it will.  And how about someone murdering people who put their lives on the line every day trying to protect his sorry ass from violent jerks like, well, like himself for example?  You’d think they’d deserve some respect but I guess what comes to mind for these anti-government types is hiding in the shrubbery and shooting them in the back.  But hey, what can I say about that sort of thing that I haven’t already said a million times?  The Tea Party will thrive as long as people here in the US keep buying what it’s peddling and according to the news stories I’ve read on the likely direction of the next batch of Congressional elections people here in the US just can’t get enough of the stuff.  Yes indeed, I suppose the Age of Aquarius is well and truly over.  We’re in the Age of the Conservative Nut Job now.  Hey, that’s funny.  I might have to write up some lyrics for that.  I’m picturing a music video with a pack of assorted fat cats (CEOs, stock brokers, bank officials), a team of corrupt Republican politicians, and a horde of impoverished and educationally challenged countryfolk standing in a circle holding hands and singing about doing away with democracy in favor of the magic of the unfettered marketplace or maybe even of complete anarchy.  In the final scene they all pull out assault rifles and machine guns and start shooting wildly in every direction.  It ends with one of those cat screech sound effects and maybe a baby crying in the distance.

But no, just as I was thinking of doing something on that I read an article dealing with the history of the Republican Party.  I know, that doesn’t sound very interesting, does it?  I almost wasn’t going to read it, but I did, and it was actually so damned amusing that I thought I should say a few words about it.  It made me think how we’re all stuck in the brief moment of our own lifetimes, aren’t we?  It really takes some effort to realize that things weren’t always as they are now nor are they likely to remain as they are now in the future.  Take the Republican Party for example... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Send In The Clowns

Welcome friends!

I read one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time the other day so I thought  I might as well share it this time out.  I’ve been so heavy and serious lately I feel it’s high time I lightened up a bit.  The piece was about how most people here in the US feel the current Congress is the worst in their lifetimes.  Wait, that’s not the funny part.  The funny part is that voters have apparently determined to address this thorny issue by voting in additional Republicans thus allowing them to gain control of both the House and Senate.  It’s funny because the obvious and direct cause of most of the dysfunction in Congress over the past several years has been the Republican Party itself, so one can’t help but wonder how these voters are connecting the dots if, indeed, they perceive any dots at all and have any interest in connecting them.  Really, I want to know how voting in additional Republicans will render Congress more functional.  Do you know?

I’ve probably mentioned before, but I might as well review.  I think there are two primary features of the current Republican Party that make it the mighty engine of dysfunction that it has become... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Beauty and the Beast

Welcome friends!

I just remembered a newspaper article that caught my eye a few weeks ago so let me say a few words about that before I forget about it.  It was somewhat interesting to me because it brought to mind that vexed nexus of the beautiful and the good, or the bad, as the case may be.  You know, beauty is truth, truth beauty, and all that rot.  Plus it involved guns.  And you know how Americans love guns.

So let’s first just do a quick summary of the article.  It appears a certain minor television actress named Shannon Richardson from the great state of Texas (where else?) was recently sentenced to eighteen years in prison for sending letters contaminated with the deadly poison ricin to the President of the US, the then mayor of NCY Michael Bloomberg, and the then director of an organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mark Glaze.  The text of the letters set forth Ms. Richardson’s thoughts on the thorny issue of gun control:  “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns.  The right to bear arms is my constitutional God-given right.  What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Friday, August 22, 2014

Respect My Authority!

Welcome friends!

Tough couple of weeks, right?  With all the mayhem going on in the world I hardly knew which way to turn, but after a feverish five minutes of careful consideration I decided it might be most appropriate to say a few words about the recent social unrest in Missouri.  (For my foreign friends, we’re talking about one of those sparsely populated conservative states in the vast wilderness between the west and east coasts of the US in what people here somewhat facetiously call the heartland of the country, somewhere near Kansas or Nebraska I should imagine.)  If you’ve been out of touch with the News from America for the past few days it’s another one of those cases where a cop has gunned down an unarmed young man and race may or may not have been a factor, which isn’t really all that unusual, but I think I’ve only talked about race relations once before so maybe this is another good opportunity.  I was tempted to talk a bit about Richard Dawkins latest attempt to enlighten us via oracular “tweet,” this one involving a supposed moral mandate to abort fetuses with disabilities, but maybe I’ll save that one for another time.  I just did a post on a funny Richard Dawkins tweet and it seems that could very easily become a full time job if I let it.  I also thought briefly of saying something about the Arabs and Israelis murdering one another (and one another’s kids) in Gaza but really that’s just more of the same isn’t it?  It’s a tragedy of course, but apparently they’re going to do what they’re going to do, the future be damned.

So let’s just have a quick recap of what we’re talking about this time out.  Apparently we had a couple of what we used to call dead end kids walking down the middle of the road in some lost city out on the prairie somewhere, a cop drove by and told them to get to the side, one thing led to another, and the cop ended up shooting one of them six times including twice in the head... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!