Can Bugs Talk?

Sam (six-year-old): Dad, can bugs talk?

Me: No.

Sam: Why not?

Me: They don't have a language.

Sam: Are bugs like dolphins?

Me: Dolphins seem to have a language. Bugs are more like robots.

Sam: Robots can talk.

Me: Bugs are like non-talking robots.

Sam: Oh.

Dylann Roof

UPDATE: It looks like Salon has ruled Roof is not mentally ill.  It's the death penalty for Salon (unless he gets off on "societal-illness".)

Will many be arguing in the mainstream press that he should be spared the death penalty?

Columbine

In finishing Dave Cullen's very well written, "Columbine," I am reminded of something that seems to me true: there are no complete explanations for actions which are evil.  One chooses an evil action if and only if one chooses a lesser good over a greater and there can be no complete explanation for why one would do such a thing.  In the end, the will wills because it wills.

From the "basement tapes":

Dylan: "Hey mom. Gotta go. It's about a half an hour before our little judgment day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate as far as (inaudible) or something. Just know I'm going to a better place. I didn't like life too much and I know I'll be happy wherever the fuck I go. So I'm gone. Good-bye. Reb..."
Eric: "Yea... Everyone I love, I'm really sorry about all this. I know my mom and dad will be just like.. just fucking shocked beyond belief. I'm sorry, all right. I can't help it."
Dylan: (interrupts) "We did what we had to do."
Eric: "Morris, Nate, if you guys live, I want you guys to have whatever you want from my room and the computer room."

Now Playing

My eldest daughter: "This is a very true song."  (Does truth come in degrees?)

Never Assign Any Responsibility to a Victim

...and you get this kind of stupidity.

And now for an absolutely heartbreaking and tragic story of a woman whose love life led to a missing eyeball.

Celebrate Diversity in Our Brave New World

I give you the American Indian (i.e., what most American Indians have called themselves in spite of PC-whipped progressives) Native American, Republican,  Stalking Cat:

"Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You....

...ask what you can do for your country."

Taken at face value without qualification, JFK offered a false dilemma.  While it is not true that we should ask our country "what's in it for me," it is also not true that we should ask ourselves what we can do for our country as if our country's well-being is (or should be) an end in itself.  The well-being  of a country holds only if and because individual humans are flourishing and rights are being protected.  As such, I am to promote the well-being of my country in the same way that I promote the well-being of my car: as a means to an end--in the case of my country, the end is the flourishing of individuals (primarily the country's citizens and secondarily the humans it has no jurisdiction over.)  But I can and should promote as an end the flourishing of individuals, and it is primarily individuals within my own sphere of influence (family, neighbors, etc.) whose flourishing I am to promote.  Better to take care of what one has the means to care for than to pine for and opine about the utopia not in one's care.

The country (or state, or city...) is fundamentally for the individuals not the individuals for the country.  This brings to mind the following anecdote which bears repeating:

During the Great Depression, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia famously walked into a city welfare office to make an unannounced inspection and found one employee sprawled back in his chair, his feet on his desk, his hat on his head, and a sandwich in his hand. The mayor made an inquiry, and the welfare worker growled through his well-stuffed mouth that he was eating his lunch. LaGuardia strode over to him, knocked his hat off his startled head, and barked, “Stand up and take your hat off when you talk to a citizen!” To the reporter following him, he remarked, “There’s another son of a bitch who has no job.”

Right and Left on Race

This seems about right from KBJ:

Examine the following diagram (click to enlarge), which I just constructed:

Today's Left ranks the categories as follows: 4 > 2 > 1 > 3. Thurgood Marshall, the former Supreme Court justice, was not just biologically black; he was psychologically and culturally black. If you can't be in category 4 with the likes of Marshall, the next best place to be, to the Left, is in category 2. Individuals in category 2 are biologically white but think, feel, and act black.

It gets interesting after this. I think the Left ranks category 1 over category 3. Clarence Thomas is biologically black, like Marshall, but he's psychologically and culturally white, like John Roberts Jr. (Indeed, he has a white wife.) The Left hates this. I'm sure you know the names Thomas has been called, such as "Uncle Tom," "Oreo," and "Stepin Fetchit." The Left prefers the likes of John Roberts Jr, who is both biologically and culturally white, to the likes of Thomas. They would say that Roberts, but not Thomas, is authentic.

Rachel Dolezal was at one time in category 1. She wanted desperately to be in category 4, but, alas, that was ruled out by biology, so she did the next best thing: she moved to category 2. What say you?

The Moral Hazards of Bailouts and Welfare

Consider two moral hazards:

#1 The Hazard of Wall Street Bailouts: When you rescue people from their own behavior, then they are more likely to engage in even riskier behavior.

#2 The Hazard of Welfare: When you rescue people from their own behavior, then they are more likely to engage in even more unproductive or foolish behavior.

Progressives will balk at #2.  People who are on welfare, they will say, are on welfare due to no fault of their own.  They are victims of circumstance.  Of course to anyone with common sense, this is right to a point.  Everyone to an extent is a "victim of circumstance."  Children raised by relatives because their parents have died are prime examples.  At the same time, if this line of thinking goes too far there is a denial of agency and with it personhood.

But then notice that something similar can be said about #1.  Individual investors face stiff social pressures from their bosses to engage in risky behavior.  They have a job on the line and a family to support.  Those bosses have pressure from stockholders.  The stockholders face pressure from wives or husbands.  And so forth.  And then there are the people who work for the investment firms who are not engaged in any risky behavior, who will suffer from their company's collapse if there are no bailouts.

I am offering neither a condemnation of welfare nor support for bailouts, just a caution that both practices should be engaged in with a heap of trepidation.

On What is Left of Our Culture

Theodore Dalrymple on his communist father, political correctness, feminism, and more here.

Excerpt:

FrontPageMag: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.  

I take it as given that man, having contradictory desires, is always subject to frustration, even when happy. For example, we want both adventure and safety, and when we have the one we long for the other. All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

Modern man particularly - or so it seems to me - is particularly bad at recognising that much of his unhappiness or discontent stems from this inevitable source. Rather, he blames the structure of society and thinks that a perfection that will resolve all contradictions and eliminate all frustrations can be achieved, if only we abolished private property or followed the example of the 7th century followers of Mohammed. The attempt to force people to do so gives meaning to their existence, and of course a lot of sadistic pleasure into the bargain.

FrontPageMag: You discuss the horrifying suffering that women endure under the vicious and sadistic structures of Islam’s gender apartheid. You touch on the eerie silence of Western leftist feminists on this issue, noting “Where two pieties – feminism and multi-culturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

To be sure, the Left has long posed as a great champion of women’s rights, gay rights, minorti rights, democratic rights etc. Yet today, it has reached out in solidarity with the most fascistic women-hating, gay-hating, minority-hating and democracy hating force on the face of the earth – Islamism.

What gives? It’s really nothing new though is it? (i.e. the Left’s political pilgrimages to communist gulags etc.)

Dalrymple: I think the problem here is one of a desired self-image. Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world.

No Fundamental Right to Marry...PERIOD?

Public Discourse typically has some pretty good articles.  This is not one of them.  The author argues, in short, that homosexuals have no fundamental right to marry, since no one has a fundamental right to marry.  There just are no rights when it comes to marriage.  Like playing the violin, marriage is good, but there's no right to it.
The author is wrong.

Could Dennis Rodman Marry Himself?

Remember Rodman claiming that he was bisexual and was going to marry himself, way back in the simple days of 1996 when Democrats were neither trying to force every state to accept gay marriage nor claiming that it is a constitutional right buried in the 14th Amendment?  Remember those backward times?

Well, could Rodman have married himself?  One can love oneself (I plan to blog about self-love in the coming week.)  One can have sexual relations with oneself.  One can promise to be committed to oneself.  So why can't one marry oneself?  If marriage is not a natural kind of relationship (like the friendship relation, which can hold without government or societal sanction, recognition, or approval) but is merely a social construct, then surely one can marry oneself.  In fact, potential marriage relations on this way of thinking seem limitless.  It's almost as if we humans are godlike in our creative capacities.

Dick From the Internet

This is pretty funny.

It Follows

Meh.  Not even in my top twenty scariest movies.  Why Bob Mondello felt the need to review the film, and why I took his review as good evidence that the film would be an extraordinary horror flick is now a greater mystery to me than whatever it is that follows.  Pretty standard fare with all the usual plot devices.   I will give it this: the music was great and reminiscent of John Carpenter.

Transableism

Celebrate diversity with me!

OTTAWA — When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.
But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.
“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.

His goal was to become disabled.

Read the rest.  (Whatever you decide to do, we will fully support it.)

The Worst Day of the Year

I love this birthday girl.

Me: Birthdays are the dumbest day of the year.

Malea (12-yr-old): No, Dad, that's Labor Day.

Animals Go to Heaven or God Doesn't Exist

Eternal Salvation: It's not our place to judge

How could a powerful and loving God allow so much animal suffering?  In the case of humans, an answer might seem easy and forthcoming: free will.  Humans bring a lot of suffering on themselves, but the good of freedom makes the suffering worth it.  Not so, it seems, with non-human animals.  If God knew that non-human animals would suffer so much, why would he create them in the first place?  And if he were to create them, why would he allow so much suffering?  It seems that he wouldn't. So we have reason to think that God doesn't exist.

Philosopher, Trent Dougherty, has recently written a book on the issue.  He thinks that it's reasonable to believe that at least some animals go to heaven.  Not only that, but they will end up like the talking animals in Narnia. (!)  

Here is a link to a short podcast at Dale Tuggy's website on animal suffering (click on the arrow at the top left to listen.)  I haven't quite finished listening to it, but so far it's not only interesting but entertaining.  (I believe at about 6:30 he makes a reference to one of my philosophy colleagues who did a dissertation with Dougherty on this very issue.)  Tuggy interviews Dougherty about his own conversion to Christianity as well the Problem of Evil more generally in another episode here. I have listened to this interview in its entirety and also recommend it to the reader.  In some ways it sets the stage for the talk on the Problem of Animal Suffering in the first link.  

There's also an interesting discussion of cats, so cat lovers might find the first link particularly interesting.