j a c k *

Dying Thoughts...

Final thoughts on the Schiavo affair, and then I'll let the subject die.

1. The anti-euthanasia crowd's only secular argument is that if it's allowed at all then unscrupulous relatives will conspire with doctors to kill you for inheritance or insurance.  The argument is so stupid that it needs no rebuttal, but it nonetheless has led to a slew of vicious and repugnant attacks on the character of the husband.  As with all faith-based positions, if there's no one to blame one has to be invented.

2. Dehydration is an ugly way to die, but it's the fault of the anti-euthanasia people themselves.  They have no right rubbing our noses in it.  If it weren't for their self-righteous whining that keeps assisted suicide illegal, we'd be able to do more than just withdraw medical support.  We wouldn't treat a dog that badly.

3. If these life-is-precious clowns were really doing what they said instead of this nonsense, I might even respect them.  We'd still have a disagreement over both abortion and euthanasia, but they would probably be a lot more busy trying to outlaw capital punishment, end all conflict in the middle east, cure AIDS in Africa, get all children vaccinated, and end poverty and hunger.  But no, their most important issue is fighting for the rights of the brain-dead, and they'll threaten to kill anyone who doesn't agree.

4. Truth is a moral value, medical truths doubly so.  Do we really want doctors pressured to make diagnoses that conform with some political ideal?  Does anyone really think it would be better to find a doctor who tells you what want to hear even if it's false than to find one who's willing to tell you the truth even if it's unpleasant?

5. How much does an emergency session of Congress cost?  I suppose we could call the whole sordid affair a giant public service advertisement for living wills.  Viewed that way it might even have done some good.

- jack*

Dubious Doubt...

The doubt amplification machine is crying wolf again, this time in the form of Dr. William Hammesfahr, a Florida neurologist who claims that he could cure Terri Schiavo.  This synthetic tempest in a teapot which has congress in emergency session, interrupted the President's vacation, and has the media in an uproar, all to inflame the passions of a few crazed anti-euthanasia voters (and distract from Tom DeLay's legal troubles), needs a pretext.  Very few people believe that the brain-dead should be kept alive involuntarily.  Governor George W. Bush even signed a Texas law allowing hospitals to terminate hopeless patients against the wishes of the family.  Instead the vast majority of conservatives need a cover story -- they need to be convinced that this woman is not really a vegetable.

Enter Dr. Hammesfahr.  He claims to have treated people in similar conditions and seen them improve, and he modestly affirms that he has been nominated for a Nobel prize for this work.  True to form, having one authority on their side emboldens the right to think they can overthrow the consensus of the rest of the scientific and medical establishment.  But this doctor, like the argument, is a sham.  He has no record of treating people like Schiavo, he's been disciplined by the Florida Board of Medicine, and he has not been nominated for a Nobel.  His long association with pro-life causes won him a letter of recommendation from his Republican Representative, that's all.

Some other members of the woman's family are also actors in this deception, although their role is unwitting and tragic.  Brains are complex.  Parts of the brain can fail such as to utterly destroy the person while leaving autonomic and reflexive functions relatively intact.  And the brains of healthy people can fool themselves, in their deep denial, that the thinest shreds of evidence prove what they want desperately to believe.  The family deserves sympathy and compassion, and the straight and honest medical truth.  Offering false hope to these people is a most heinous and despicable act.

Despite deceptive graphs, most people in the country don't think Mrs. Schiavo's body should be kept alive against the express wishes of her husband.  Judge after judge has ordered the feeding tube removed.  The best the wingnuts can come up with is a lying quack.  Who among the red state voters will stand up for sanity?  At long last, Republicans, have you no sense of decency?

- jack*

Bashing the Bashers...

But the habitual use of name-calling as an expression of the user’s personal identity and power is a tad more worrisome when its practitioners surpass pre-school age. There’s a word for these practitioners -- bullies.

P.M. Carpenter, BuzzFlash

Many Republicans seemed to have reacted with a kind of giddy leering to the ascendancy of Howard Dean to the chair of the DNC.  Dean is seasoned and experienced politician who brings with him a vast network of grassroots support and a demonstrated ability to rally that support into fundraising and campaigning.  By any objective measure he's someone the GOP should take seriously, and yet they posture and prance as if he's a liability for the Democratic Party.  None of this makes any sense until you realize that Republican strength comes, at it's core, from derision and ridicule.

This is a party of bullies.  The normal rules of discourse do not apply to such people.  They don't debate, they mock; they don't rebut, they scoff; they are not working on a strong argument, they are trying out new put downs.  Their strength has come from being willing to heap contempt and abuse on those who would oppose them, while carefully avoiding substantive discussion and dismissing awkward "facts."

To their eyes, Dean is already compromised.  The full force of the conservative spanking machine pummeled him during his campaign about the so-called "Dean Scream" speech, and they believe that their pundit-wielded wedgie cost him the primaries.  They think they have found his sore spot like the cowed kid in the school yard, and if he ever gets to be a problem all they have to do is call him "unstable" or say "it's a scream!" and all the other kids will laugh and poor Howie will be rendered impotent.  It's like having the bed-wetter as hall monitor -- a bully's dream!  They have their best weapon ready without even having to invent any new material.

But this is not a sign of a deeply antisocial psychology in the conservative character, nor does it say that Americans are sycophants who only follow bullies.  Or it doesn't merely indicate those things.  No, these are tactics in a long-term strategy which attacks the very concept of rational discourse itself.  The goal, in broad terms, is to identify as many liberal ideas as possible with things that Americans reject.  The tactic is to push and defend any statement  in concert with this goal as free speech, freedom of expression, personal opinion, constructive criticism.  At the same time any idea that would challenge or refute this goal is attacked as unfounded, biased, unprofessional, improper, insulting.  The conservative pundits spew vicious lies and nonsense all the time, but they are the fastest to cry foul when anyone tries to argue back.  Listen to liberal talk radio some time and count the number of times conservatives call in to complain about the "shrill tone."

I think the thing that conservatives don't realize as they revel in Howard Dean's new office ("the gift that keeps on giving" I heard one say) is that Dean got to where he is precisely because he stood up to the bullying tactics.  When all the main Democratic candidates were echoing GOP talking points about the necessity of the Iraq War, Dean was the one who was willing to stand up and say no -- this was not a good thing to do and we should not be there.  After Dean was out of the race (and I don't think it was the scream that did it) Kerry stuck with his principled and reasoned stance and got ridiculed for that anyway.  The smears are disgusting and sickening, and the continuing jabs and taunts from the right -- without anything substantive to respond to -- hurt at a deep emotional level.  We want someone who can hit back, and Dean's one of our best shots.  If he can't do it we'll find someone else.

- jack*

Lazy Theists...

Apparently The Raving Atheist is as perplexed as I am by people who say they are "spiritual," especially when contrasted with being religious.  RA takes several cracks at it, including reviewing the testimony of supposed experts, and manages to make the matter funny but no less incomprehensible.  As with many things it was cocktail party chat that made me realize there was something serious to investigate here.  Discussing religion and child-rearing, one guest made this exact statement:

I'm not religious, but I like to think of myself as a spiritual person.

It's the use of the phrase "like to think of myself" that's really key.  This is not simply a value-neutral observation that this person holds certain beliefs which, although embracing a supernatural metaphysics, are not part of an organized religious tradition.  Something like that could be said in a more factual and less value-laden manner.  In fact the only time we use this turn of phrase is when we are saying something about ourselves that might seem boastful.  "I like to think of myself as honest," or "I like to think of myself as compassionate," etc.  We are assigning to ourselves some positive attribute.

It's also usually an attribute that we expect others to gage, not something we judge about ourselves or something that has an objective measure.  We don't ever say "I like to think of myself as someone with nominal cholesterol levels," for example, since no matter how good that may be it's not something anyone can dispute.  If you are someone who likes parties, you would simply say "I like parties" and not use the more convoluted form because you are the one expected to make that assessment.  On the other hand if you think people enjoy having you at parties you might be more circumspect in expressing that opinion.

So we know: 1) spirituality is an attribute of a person that is socially positive, and 2) we expect people will have some ability to judge other people's spirituality.  So any theory of spirituality which indicates that it is a private or internal matter must be wrong.  Spirituality is something that we can observe in people, and that we hope people will observe in us.

This leads me to only one interpretation: it's a dodge.  Religion is a powerful social force.  The public declaration of one's commitment to religion acts as a marker for the good or trustworthy members of the community.  Somehow organized religion manages to push this PR point despite the long history of monstrous deeds done despite of -- or in the name of -- those same religions.  People who profess their spirituality are trying to ride the good PR associated with religion without having to actually spend the effort practicing a religion, or work out the personal, social and philosophical knots associated with embracing a fully naturalistic worldview.

Perhaps this is too cynical.  Perhaps they mean something else by spiritual, but I've never been able to figure out what it might be.

- jack*

Future of Failure...

To neoconservatives, therefore, truth is not a value in its own right. To them, information must be culled for useful kernels, facts that can then be exploited to create an emotional response within the target audience. Once this desired political climate – manufactured consent, if you will – is created, the neoconservatives are free to promote an aggressive policy to achieve their policy goals.

Robert Parry, Neocon Amorality

The neoconservatives aren't really so "neo" after all.  They are the same people who brought us the "great Satan" rhetoric of the 80's and who armed the Taliban and Saddam.  Their methods remain unchanged.  Generate fear through sexed up intelligence; dismiss doubters as anti-American; spend vast amounts on military or covert action; keep all information secret, but if anything leaks call it the necessary cost of this important struggle; blame failure on the naysayers while claiming credit for anything that goes right anywhere in the world.  They are nothing if not consistent.

The issue of manufactured consent runs to the heart of the neocon agenda.  They do not take the operation of government seriously.  If this were a company and the officers were blatantly dismissing and even contradicting reality, running up massive debts with no plan to pay them down, canceling programs with a proven track record and funding projects with nothing to show but a string of failures, the shareholders would be up in arms.  Companies that do these things go down.  And yet the neocons run roughshod over the whole operation as if they were competent, turning department after department over to the one thing they are serious about: propaganda.

Those who would ridicule reality turn and take notice of the careful measurements of one special slice of reality: the focus group.  From Frank Luntz's political laboratory comes the Frankenstein language that characterizes the entire neocon effort, and he is a sinister master who will be obeyed.  How else to explain his commanding tone:

...the New American Lexicon requires you to STOP saying words and phrases that undermine your ability to educate the American people. So from today forward, YOU are the language police. From today forward, these are the words never to say again.

The words?  Among others: "global," "outsourcing," and "government."  People actually like their local government, Luntz notes, for the services it provides.  The Federal Government shall henceforth be called "Washington," to distance it from the city workers who pick up your trash.  But what possible reason do those who run the government have to want to vilify it?

Not that long ago, here in the Silicon Valley, we had a number of companies that were formed to speculate on the Internet boom.  Usually called e-something or something dot-com, the worst of these companies placed PR over results.  They spent vast sums on building their brand rather than on serving their clients.  They ran up huge debts on investor money while the officers strutted around like kings, dismissing all reality checks up until the very day that the $1000 office chairs were repossessed.  These people, for all their excesses, at least had an exit strategy in mind.  If they built up the value of their brand they figured they could be bought out by some larger company, netting everyone millions.  If there was no buyout and the bottom fell out the officers would go on to form a new start-up.  No harm no foul.

Who do the neocons expect to bail out the U.S. Government after they have talked the brand down to nothing?

- jack*

Peak Snack Bowl...

Overnight those cheap goods in Wal-Mart, which are the no-think economist's facile justification for Wal-Mart's decimation of communities, small businesses and employment, shoot up in price.

I've been in long meetings all week, and will be until Sunday.  Long, long meetings.  Fortunately my colleagues are all clever and witty people, or getting up early and driving through traffic would be a lot less bearable.  For the most part we don't talk politics, but world views come into contrast nonetheless.  There was some snack mix on the conference table for everyone to share, and at some point one of the engineers was picking through it for the candy pieces he liked.  Another piped up, "Hey, don't pick out the brittle!  You have to take the bad with the good you know."

The other replied, "No you don't," and crunched his peanut brittle.  Ah, I thought to myself, must be a Republican.

It's not that I think that picking through the free snacks is a political act, nor do I think it's particularly sociopathic.  The mix contained mostly good things, and if the people who got to it first had the candy and cashews and those who were less hungry had to cope with peanuts and pretzels then that's no great loss.  We were going out to dinner anyway, so perhaps saving calories for only the things you really like is more responsible than eating a big handful just to get the one thing you want.

But something about the way he said it made it sound that he thought the whole notion of having to share a common resource was, well, liberal.  And liberal in the derogatory way that right-wingers use.  If we were talking about a more scarce resource, one that we all depend on to survive, would a true conservative soften their me-first philosophy and embrace a more equitable distribution?  We see with oil, for example, a desperate rush among the "conservatives" not to conserve, but instead to be the first to burn up the easiest to pump and therefore most profitable parts of the fossil fuel snack bowl.  On the other hand the conservative governance in this country is unwilling to touch the relatively benign pretzels of reducing CO2 emissions.  The philosophy is tragic, but except possibly in kindergarten those who council restraint cannot get much traction.

The company took us out to dinner that night and we gorged ourselves on so many appetizers that many of us left half our generous main dishes half eaten.  Indeed the fellow I pegged as a Republican snickered derisively at the Democrats among us discussing exit polls and peak oil.  Americans have been awash in cheap and plentiful goods for decades, and even people in low-paying jobs have cars, TVs and cell phones.  We feel entitled to these things and look with suspicion on anyone who would suggest that we curb our gluttony.  The modern GOP tell people what they want to hear -- that the U.S. is a super-power, that the free market does the right thing, and everyone has a right to cheap goods forever -- so if terrorists attack go out and shop!  It remains to be seen what happens when the fairy tale collapses.

- jack*