Anyone ever seen this symbol before?
If you know where I got it from, please don’t say, because I don’t want to bias people’s potential information either way.
Archive for February, 2006
Be sure to tune into this tonight, and look back fondly upon more innocent days.
“The more people learn about the transaction that has been scrutinized and approved by my government,” said the President, “the more they’ll be comforted that our ports will be secure.”
Hold on. Don’t you mean “my administration” or even “my Executive Branch”? In order for you to be able to say “my government,” Mr. President, you’d have to have, say, a compliant lapdog of a Congress and a stacked Supreme Court.
Oh. Right.
Nevermind. Please carry on.
Six server crashes yesterday. One already this morning. No clue at to the cause. No idea where to start. No concept of what to fix. And with the work week starting, no time to deal with it. So if you need any of the sites running on this machine, you are shit out of luck. As am I.
I have to turn once again to Harper’s, but this time to February’s issue, in particular Matthew Chapman’s article, “God or Gorilla.”
Chapman is a descendant of Charles Darwin and managed to attend Pennsylvania’s recent Dover Panda Trial (a name coined by York Daily Record columnist Mike Argento), which resulted in a ruling that resoundingly and methodically tossed Intelligent Design from biology classrooms.
That explained, it’s not actually the evolution “debate” I want to get into here. Rather, there’s a tiny piece of Chapman’s article which I want to yank out of context.
Somewhere in the middle, Chapman describes filming an interview with a local reverend, being videotaped while doing so, and having a portion of that video (where Chapman describes being an agnostic) played the reverend’s church-going public.
When I upbraided [Reverend] Groves about this — he had not told me I was to be used in this way — he shrugged off my objections and told me it had been “educational.” He and his flock concluded that I had a different understanding of Christianity. Coming from Europe, mine was “more socialistic,” while his was more concerned with “individual salvation.”
Emphasis added there because that’s the bit I want to pull out of context, because it sent me off on something of a mental tangent after I read it.
However, much like my earlier item wherein I pulled out of context a segment from an article about viruses, I’m not sure I’ve quite got my conceptions around where I wanted to take the idea. Other than to say that I’ve been pondering the notion that any system which evinces to focus on “individual salvation” is a system ripe for abuse by those seeking power over other people’s lives.
I know, I know. Someone will chime in with the accusation that any system which is “more socialistic” is a system ripe for abuse by those seeking power over people’s lives. But the thing to remember on that count is that what the reverend in question viewed as “more socialistic” isn’t actually socialistic, but instead a preference towards respect for the social contract.
What I can’t quite figure, in fact, is why a spiritual life devoted to one’s “individual salvation” much qualifies as being Christian at all, given that the man for whom the religion is named tended, in fact, to preach about the social contract.
It keeps seeming to me that any system which demands of its followers a commitment primarily to “individual salvation” runs the rather hazardous risk of being abused by people whose own power and control would be greatly enhanced by keeping people focused selfishly on themselves instead of primarily (or at least to a great extent) with how humanely they treat each other.
Which is not to say that everyone who is concerned with their “individual salvation” also entirely disregards the social contract. It would be pointless to say that, since it simply isn’t true.
But I keep getting stuck on the idea that a focus on “individual salvation” is a focus on protecting one’s own ass in some theorized future existence at the expense of the one we all share in the here and now.
Which is why (although I said this wasn’t going to be about the evolution “debate”) is makes perfect sense for the Individual Salvationists to be the backers of Intelligent Design.
By which I mean, I think, that if the primary concern is with getting an official stamp of approval on one’s soul in order to pass through the mythical gates one day, understanding anything about the way our world in the here and now actually functions — siding, in other words, with the importance of scientific principles and the method that comes with them — becomes almost entirely irrelevant.
All of which is an extraordinarily long-winded way of explaining that I’ve got some kind of thoughts on the notion of “individual salvation” but I can’t quite seem to cobble together just what those thoughts are, or what, exactly, they might mean.
My server has crashed five times so far today. I haven’t the slighest idea of the cause. There’s no clear indication of why it’s suddenly happening.
But if you can’t connect to this site or any of the many others that all reside upon the same server, well now you know why.
Something I just noticed after posting the last item, when I went digging for information on what the state’s Libertarian Party might be up to.
While it’s pretty much a given that Portland won’t host the Republican convention in 2008, it seems that we are hosting the national convention for the Libertarians in 2006.
This of course means I need to trot out my all-time favorite line about Libertarians. from the defunct In Formation magazine: “There is nothing particularly innovative about short-sightedness and lack of compassion. Nevertheless, the way libertarians combine these elements is innovative.”
At the moment, that title sums up my current view of this year’s race for the Oregon governorship, which recently and surprisingly managed suddenly to become interesting.
Presumably it’s clear who is wishy-washy, who is the wacko, and who is Westlund.
Doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll vote for the latter. But it does describe the particular hurdles any one candidate would have to overcome in order to interest me much, at this particular moment in time.
It seems that in the February edition of Portland Monthly, they decided to join the throngs clouding the issue when it comes to the debate over legal bans on smoking in bars.
One need look no further than the title of their piece — “Inalienable Right or Hazard to Health?” — to see that they’re not so much interested in helping properly define the public policy issues as they are in engaging in the magazine equivalent of television’s sweeps month.
Now, I’ve written before about this debate (twice, in fact), in addition to spending a fair amount of time over at Portland’s Future Awesome discussing the issue.
I’ve said all along that I do consider the notion of worker health to be a legitimate issue for a public policy discussion. I’ve said as well that I have mixed feelings about it.
I’ve also said that there are elements to the debate which are not legitimate from a public policy standpoint, even though they are completely legitimate from the standpoint of personal opinion. And I’ve argued that anecdotal “evidence” of bar workers disliking a smoke-filled environment are irrelevant, because I can easily find anecdotal “evidence” of bar workers preferring a smoke-filled environment.
But to return to the title of the Portland Monthly piece, notice how it in essence characterizes the debate as being between a fairly unreasonable position versus a reasonable one — something that, in fact, actually mischaracterizes the debate.
As I’ve said, the worker health issue is up for grabs, and I’ve no problem with that debate taking place. For that matter, also legitimate is the question of the financial impact on bars when smoking bans arei mposed — but there are anecdotes and report on both sides of that, so I have no idea where the truth rests.
But everything else is irrelevant. And in reality, much of the so-called debate is between pro-smoking “inalienable right” arguments versus anti-smoking “inalienable rights” arguments.
As much as there are wingnut smokers who believe they have the right to smoke wherever they damn well please, there are as many wingnut non-smokers who believe they have an inherent right, for example, to be able to go to the bar two blocks from their house (say, Horse Brass) and not have to encounter smoke, rather than have to travel futher to go to a non-smoking bar (say, Doug Fir).
In essence, there are two distinct debates that outlets such as Portland Monthly like to conflate because it’s a better read. There’s the debate over worker health and financial impact on businesses. And then there’s the debate between personal and subjective opinion on smoking in and of itself.
The former is a legitimate public policy discussion. But the latter, all too often perpetuated by the media and hysterical partisans on both sides, is just smoke and mirrors.
It’s preaching to the choir, naturally. But still worth the time to go pick up the March issue of Harper’s, which features editor Lewis Lapham’s cover essay, “The Case for Impeachment.”
It’s not quite a semen-stained blue dress, but then maybe technically we were experiencing suffering the political equivalent of sweeps back when the Republicans were gunning for Bill Clinton, and therefore much easier to drum up a little hysteria.