A Political Bird

01:32 am

As you know, I am an Obama supporter. But I am also a Republican, and I am a Republican because I don't believe that good governance comes from single-party rule.

As a Republican, then, I am disappointed - no, repulsed - no, horrified by the McCain campaign of recent months.

I am not going to discuss policy. Many policy positions of the Republican Party are unsustainable, but that is not what needs addressing.

What needs addressing is "Who is Obama". What needs addressing is "William Ayers". What needs addressing is the robocalls, the angry rallies, the cresendoing drumbeat of hate, hate, hate that is engulfing what was once a political party, not a conspiracy to seize power.

McCain, Palin, you are contributing to the destruction of your party, to the cost of everyone for whom that party means more that a new bumper sticker every four years. If for no-one else but them, do not do this. Fight with honor. Make us proud.

08:30 am - Link

Former 1960s radical Bill Ayers appeared (as himself) in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which was narrated by Lili Taylor.

Taylor was in High Fidelity with Tim Robbins who was in The Hudsucker Proxy with Steve Buscemi.

And Steve Buscemi was in Tanner on Tanner with, yes, Barack Obama.

That's only four degrees of separation -- a closer connection than either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times was able to establish in their exhaustive attempts to find any links between the former '60s radical and the current Democratic nominee for president.

09:13 pm

Okay, as a liberal (and therefore interested) and a Republican (and therefore nearly powerless), a suggestion to the Democrats out there: can you all stop insulting each other, please? Obama and Clinton are very similar candidates!

Seriously. Go drink some tea, play Facebook Chess, write an eleven-hundred-word breakdown of McCain's total lack of a substantive energy policy - whatever. And whenever you feel tempted to complain about any of your allies, consider this: my party gave me two warmongers and a theocrat as the only viable candidates. You guys got off frelling lucky.

That's all.

09:18 pm - Linkbit: the Pope and the President

P.Z. Myers on Benedict XVI meeting George W. Bush - outraged, as you should be. Outraged, to a great extent, because in all the "coverage" of this "event", and indeed in the "event" itself, there is not shown the slightest awareness that these men we are seeing praise each other and be praised in return are complicit in horror and terrible horror.

I know I, for one, am tired of this eternal drumbeat of dreadful revelations, each of which has effected not the slightest visible good in its wake. But that exhaustion is no excuse. Each beat of this drum stands for the agony of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. The least we can do is stand for them.

(P.S. On a much more minor point, Expelled came out today. Do not watch it. Expelled is a terrible movie, morally and cinematically.)

03:53 pm - Rule 101: "All players must always abide by all the rules then in effect, ...

...in the form in which they are then in effect."

The above sentence is extracted from the first rule of Peter Suber's game of self-amendment, "Nomic". As some of you know, I am a fan of this game, to the point where I and a Livejournal friend of mine decided to set one up on Livejournal.¹

The reason why Rule 101 was placed in the ruleset is explained simply enough by the author:

Nomic even makes some rules explicit in order to make them amendable, when in most games they are implicit —rules to obey the rules, rules that players each start with zero points, and so on. No tacit understanding that one brings to most games simply qua games, let alone any explicit rule, is beyond the amendment power of Nomic. After Nomic was first published in Scientific American,² a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

bradhicks

1. The friend is active_apathy, the game is nomicide. It's not the first, but it's the longest-lived so far. Slash advertisment. ^
2. Editor's note: the <em> tag that appears to have been erroneously applied to the magazine title has been appropriately replaced with an <i> tag. ^

Current Mood: under the weather

08:55 am - Next up: the canine case against bacon.

The very title "The Feminist Case Against Abortion" is an obvious fraud. Serrin M. Foster, the author, is - intentionally or not - falsely claims the mantle of a popular, progressive ideology to support an claim which, at best, has nothing to do with it.

Why can I speak so strongly about this? Because, in the modern U.S. political dialectic, "feminist" and "against abortion" have clearly defined, mutually incompatible meanings.

Let us begin with "feminist".

A feminist is concerned with the rights of women. She or he¹ believes that many women are, through legal, social, or other means, denied opportunities, powers, and freedoms that they fairly deserve, and that this situation needs remedying.

That definition in mind, let us consider "against abortion".

Someone is against abortion if they believe that abortions should be prohibited.

I accept that this could be a controversial reading. However, it is the only correct reading in this context. Why? Because almost everyone agrees that abortion is a moral wrong. In fact, almost every pro-choice advocate, when asked, will say that abortion is wrong. What makes it legally permissible in this country is the consensus that abortion is, sometimes, less wrong than the alternative. And, being as we're an independent sort of people and rightly distrustful of governmental power, and being that a fetus is incapable of a moral choice (be it person or not), we give the right to decide whether it is less wrong to the competent moral agent with the most at stake: the mother. We give her all the support we can, but no other method exists for reducing the misery of the horrible situations that make abortion an option.

In light of this, "against abortion" can only be interpreted as "...universally". And, justifying this reading, a ban is what Foster seems to defend.

And, as such a ban reduces the powers and freedoms (and even the opportunities) of a woman - the mother - it cannot by any means be a feminist view. It can only be a view that a feminist may have for other reasons.

And that is why Serrin Foster is perpetrating a deception when she claims a "feminist" case against abortion.

1. I will not dignify with a response those who believe that men cannot be feminists.