If she is considred a lost cause. Are her organs available for use by others? Certainly starving her will cause them to be less useful than otherwisae. Ugh.
Mark Steyn writes about the consequences of the failure of western liberals to acknowledge the interaction between welfare state coercion and reproductive libertarianism, a brith dearth.
I'll write soon about the investment consequences of this birth dearth.
People who oppose the death penalty should also be opposing Schiavo. She suffered from incompetent lawyering in the court case that established "facts" inimical to her interest (as frequently happens in criminal cases where the defendant can't afford a good lawyer). All subsequent cases were simply about the question of whether proper procedure was followed in the first case (and it was). Now she has been sentenced to die in a cruel and unusal manner.
I don't know whether she is in a permanent vegetative state or whether she is simply very paralyzed. I do know that if there is any chance at all that she is still concious, it is incredibly cruel to starve her to death and that she should be provided with a lethal injection if the system no longer wants to care for her.
And, if you can't cope with active euthenasia in this case, you certainly shouldn't support the removal of the feeding tube. Alternatively, if you think that starving her is acceptable, you should be ok with starving criminals in death penalty cases.
From Yahoo:
"Siding with the GOP when you live in the bluest state around is almost like wearing a Boston Red Sox jersey at a New York Yankees' home game," says Zipp in the April issue of PLAYGIRL. "I cannot tell you how many times a person assumed I voted for John Kerry in 2004. Most of the time, I don't have the heart to tell them, or the energy to discuss my reasons for going red this election year. But this is PLAYGIRL magazine so it's about time I was the one who bared what's underneath."
"After your coverage of my article about coming out and voting Republican, I did receive many letters of support from fellow Republican voters, but it was not without repercussions. Criticism from the liberal left ensued. A few days after the onslaught of liberal backlash, I was released from my duties at Playgirl magazine."After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, "I wouldn't have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.
Many blue staters like to characterize Republicans as the party of the rich and Democrats as the party of the downtrodden. Michael Barone notes that trustfunders my a huge margin vote Democrat, live in urban areas, etc.. I would add that in the last election the Democrats were the party of the billionaires including Kerry and his wife, George Soros, Warren Buffet, etc.
Barone characterizes these rich people as exerting power without responsibility. I think they are voting their self interest. In particular, they expect their future income to be a small fraction of their asset base and enjoy their status as having the largest asset bases around. As such they prefer that income rather than wealth be taxed heavily and largely Democrats are the party of higher taxes. They also prefer relative economic stagnation as that preserves their elite status and makes asset protection easier and that is what Democrat's increased regulatory approach provides.
They have the same interest as the landed aristocracy of old and it is not surprising that they have converted the Democrats to a politics that looks very similar to the conservative politics of old. The Republicans are the party of classical liberalism. John Stuart Mill would understand our politics completely if he were alive today.
Sammier observes that many people believe the Initiative Hypothesis: "The rate of both technological and material progress within a society inevitably increases with increasing freedom." He makes 2 interesting arguments:
1. low tech civilizations make softer/more-attractive targets than higher tech ones. viz. once the US shifted to a war footing, Al Queada et al decided it was easier to attack soft targets in Muslim countries rather than local US military or distant US civilians.
2. Small sates may be easier to police than larger states.
I would add that this would cause the local population to find extremist groups risky and might cause them to preemptively stop/kill them before they can become a danger to those around them. Notably, this option is probably only available to democracies that can afford to have citizens free enough to take this sort of initiative and very well run dictatorships with police states effective enough to catch all conspiracies.
Last week I attended the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San DIego and got into a hour long debate in the hallway with James Surowiecki author of The Wisdom Of Crowds. It started because in his talk, he argued that overly strong ties created feedback loops that led to a loss of information. I suggested that perhaps the risk was reduced because smart players would know that they could influence these loops to their own advantage and that therefore there would be a market equilibrium of suspicion that would prevent loops from getting out of hand. From this point we drifted into a discussion of the politization of the blogosphere. If I am recalling the converation correctly, he was dubious about this point and used as an example the fact that the rightwing blogosphere went after Eason Jordan full force without bothering to check whether his allegations were true or not. I was tired and observed somewhat inarticulately that the issue was more what Eason Jordan had said rather than whether it was true. Absent a copy of the video, there was no point in arguing truth/falsity. And the refusal ever to request a video was sufficient for conviction.
The discussion then flowed to the general question of which side of the blogosphere was more open to discussion from the other side. I argued that right wing media was inherently structured as oppositional to MSM and that since the MSM was liberal, rightwing readers spent much more time processing both sides of arguments (initiated in the liberal MSM). He argued that the MSM was non-partisan and that perhaps oppositionalism generated more heat than light. The substance of his claim that the NYTimes was non-partisan was that Jeff Gerth had vigorously gone after Clinton about Whitewater and that Judith Miller had been given a lot of space to repeat the "lies" of Ahmed Chalabi. He didn't want to talk about the more recent behavior of CBS or about the NYTimes coverage of the 2004. I made the much more moderate claim that the blogosphere bloomed in the past year during an election cycle in which the MSM was substantially liberal and vigorously pro-Kerry. He argued that the left was also exposed to the right direct from the whitehouse. I suggested that there is a substantial difference between Bush taking an explicitly right wing position and NYTimes coverage that claims not to be biased but clearly is; that it gives liberal readers the false sense that they are accessing the truth rather than just another viewpoint.
[Update: Catching up with recent news, it appears that the left spin is that the right is going after the free and independent press while the left goes after conservative activitsts; begging the question of whether or not the "free and independent press" they view as targets are not more reasonably viewed as left activists and missing the fact that the attacks have been on factual accuracy and not politics per se]
I further argued that the left and right prefer very different conversational models. In particular the left prefers comments and discussion boards in which everyone participates equally and there is no differentiation in the interface between cranks and legitimate and approved viewpoints. In contrast, the right prefers blogs with an author in full control and links that function as judgements on related material. The result is much more extremist noise accepted as truth in the left blogosphere as opposed to the right and a substantial dirft to madness. Links in the rightwing blogosphere function as a sanity check. He argued that there are lots of smart lefty blogs. I pointed out that if you look at traffic, the left blogosphere is much more dominated by discussion forums like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground than the right is by the Free Republic; that right traffic revolves much more around popular infividual bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Powerline who link out to others. We both agreed that Glenn Reynolds is a pretty unique institution and I mused on the possibility that Glenn's mad linking is what MADE the right wing blogosphere and saved us from madness. Scary thought.
On reflection, I think it more likely that community forums are much more acceptable on the left and blog ownership and control are much more acceptable on the right with the result that absent Glenn the politics would have converged in the way it has, but I am not entirely sure.
On saturday I was invited to attend a party promoted as follows:
Under our current administration's culture of fear, civil liberties and personal expression are under attack. But true Americanvisionaries have always been outlaws. Thus our party's motto: When fun is outlawed, only outlaws have fun.Come dressed as your favorite outlaw. Costume ideas range from Abbie Hoffman, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie & Clyde, James Dean,Angela Davis and Lenny Bruce to groups like the Black Panthers, Hell's Angels, the Weathermen and our most recent freedom-fighters, the RNC protesters.
The first national action of the Weather Underground occurred on October 8, 1969 in Chicago, in a four day protest against the Vietnam War known as the “Days of Rage”. Hundreds of members used clubs and chains to vandalize shops and cars in Chicago’s business district. After the melee, six members had been shot, and sixty-eight arrested.[...]In December of 1969, the national membership met for the last time in Flint, Michigan. Hung around the room were pictures of Communist dictators whom members sought to emulate; the dictators were Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevera, and Fidel Castro. It was then that the group formulated their terrorist strategies; they had deserted the possibility of a popular movement (Raynor 70).
[...]
in May of 1970, the Weather Underground issued a “declaration of war”: "Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of American justice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown, and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people. The group’s declaration proved to be true, as they soon bombed the headquarters of the New York Police Department and the barber shop at the U.S. Capitol Building. Twenty more bombings occurred between 1970 and 1975" (Raynor 71).
[...]
The shocking, unofficial ending of the Weather Underground came in 1981, with the robbery of a Brinks’ Armored Car, a robbery in which Kathy Boudin was a participant. Boudin had joined the “Family”, most of whom were members of the Black Liberation Army, an extremely radical and violent group that was an offshoot of the Black Panthers. The Family had committed various armed robberies throughout the tri-state area (allegedly to fund their plans for the liberation of blacks in America), but the robbery of the Brinks’ truck at the Nanuet Mall branch of the Nanuet National Bank in Nanuet, New York was their biggest heist ever. $1,585,000 was taken from the armored car and put in a van, transferred to a U-Haul, and driven down Route 59 towards Nyack (Castellucci 18). When the group reached a roadblock at the Nyack entrance of the New York State Thruway, violence ensued. Certain Family members (presumably Chui Ferguson and Sam “Solomon Bouines” Brown), with the exception of Boudin, shot and killed two Nyack police officers, and wounded another. Boudin’s failed escape marked the end of her career; an off-duty corrections officer tackled her to the ground, demanding to know who she was. Boudin only responded “I didn’t shoot him; he did” (Castellucci 9).
I assume most people went because they didn't know any better. I didn't because I did. And I assume the organizers did as well.
"
Update: My friends who told me about and attended thinks that I should not assume the organizers knew anything about the "outlaws" they named in the invitation. Fair point. I shouldn't assume and have since emailed the organizer. I will update when I have more information. I had told him my reason for not attending when he invited me. In his email to me he notes:
me personally, i went because the night's plans had changed and were now "let's have an adventure" with these strange people...and i didn't feel
strongly enough about the cause of the event one way or the other. also, for what it's worth, the party itself was not politicized in any way that i saw. people in a cramped place with a dj and a band and some costumes.
On some level, a party is just a party. So, no I don't hold the attendees particularly accountable for the theme and I'm glad everyone had fun. I just wish it was under a different banner. Although I am curious about what people actually chose as their costumes.
I went to a conference on the above yesterday at Columbia (organized by my mother!). There were lots of great speakers there, and they showed Columbia Unbecomming which demonstrated how eggregiously aweful the Middle East and Asian Languages Arts and Culture Department is at Columbia and how badly the administration has handled the situation. The overall content was fantastic but it suffered from overambition. In addition simply to having to many speakers, its more fundamental problem was that it was unclear whether the priority was promoting academic integrity or fighitng against anti-semitism/anti-zionism. Pursuit of the later weakened the former and vice-versa.
If the issue was academic integrity, professors and administrators who don't necessarily feel comfortable rallying for Israel would have had a higher likelihood of attendance and there presence there would have strengthened the hand of those who seek change in the administration either of MEALAC or Columbia and it would have been more difficult to claim that SPME or the David Project were simply trying to promote Israel's agenda over the free speech of the MEALAC professors. In this battle, perhaps, even anti-Israel academics like Rashid Khalidi might take part (in upholding the ideals of academia).
If the focus was rallying against anti-semitism, the academic integrity claim, lowers the integrity of the rally. Many of the speakers argued that those who claim to be anti-zionist rather than anti-semite are deluding themselves because if they really cared about human rights they would exhibit much more emotion about e.g. the genocide happening right now in the Sudan and that by reserving their vitriol for Israel it is hard to escape the conclusion that such people are much more upset about Jews than genocide. They futher showed that many of the substantive complaints about Israel's behavior are manifestly either false or unreasonable given the actual context and note that much of the anti-Israel vitriol actually originates with Arabs and Islamists who are both manifestly evil (note the genocide in the Sudan above) and motivated by hate. I would modify the comparison to argue that if people are going to complain about Israel they should also be complaining about France, Russia, and Spain, but otherwise I largely agree with these points.
The problem with making such points in the context of claims about academic integrity is that we are no longer talking about academic integrity but problems with a much larger political movement within which academy plays only a small part. The substance of these complaints is less what professors say or do in the classroom than what they are saying in public forums. In this battle Rashid Khalidi is most definitely the enemy and should be treated as such.
At various times Khalisi was being defended as a reasonable anti-Israel academic. At others it seemed he was being assailed as a dangerous crypto-anti-semite. It would help if we could decide.
Last night I went to a debate on the question of whether a woman's place is in the home. The debate content itself left me unfulfilled, but it did get me thinking about the need for children. If no one chose to have children and everyone retired, the real value of any retirement savings would drop to zero as the supply of goods and services on which to spend those funds also dropped to zero. The value of retirement savings is directly proportional to the productivity of the next generation. As the supply of good and services increase (because of population) the price goes down and the retirement dollars go further.
Having children is expensive but necessary. People who fail to have children but plan to retire are free riders on those that do have children. We as a society should tax the retirement savings of people who fail to have children at a substantially higher rate than those who do. The plan is simple. You can exit from Roth IRA's and 401k's tax free if you had children before your retirement. Your social security payments get taxed heavily if you failed to have children before you retired. We probably need a way of qualifying the quality of offspring but this would be a good start!