Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

Summer Blog Hiatus

    Hey everyone,

    It has been roughly 18 months, 1100 posts, and 50,000 visits. And I have to admit that I am a little bit blogged out. I started this blog initially because I wanted to find a community of people who wanted to talk about issues political and philosophical. And I have. You guys have been great. I greatly appreciate all my readers and all my commenters, especially my regular commenters, as you have made this experience much more fun and interesting than it otherwise would have.

    But with my computer breaking down (again), my job(s), and the traveling about I am planning on doing this summer, I just don't think I can sustain anything like my usual posting rate. Some of you have no doubt noticed that the last month or so has seen some slowdown, and it would only get slower.

    Also, for the moment, I am a bit worn by the whole thing. Part of it I think is that I haven't found blogging to be a particularly good medium for me to try out ideas in philosophy (others have, but I haven't). Part of it is that I have been somewhat disillusioned by the blogosphere, which are populated by the usual proportions of genuinely interesting thinkers, hacks, ideologues, and social climbers. (I think many of you have noticed my increasingly sceptical discussions of Daily Kos and its environs) And finally, I have several long term projects in the pipeline that I really should be focusing on.

    So, while I am not done, I think I am going to take a break for a couple months. I am really flattered and honored that you have decided to spend some your time each day (or each every other day) to come on over and visit. What I would like to do, for everyone who is interested, is to set an email list whereby I can let you know when I start back up again in the fall. So, if you just shoot me an email (ptaylorsmith04@yahoo.com) or leave a comment, I'll put it together. 

So, once again, I thank you all.

Patrick

Smoking....

    One of the things I find most curious about grad school (besides the simultaneous feelings of smugness at not selling out and guilt at doing something useless) is the prevalence of smokers compared to my undergraduate population. Amongst my Cambridge mates, smoking was pretty damn rare (at least cigarettes), but amongst my grad school compatriots it is very common. Almost everyone I hang out with on a regular basis either a)smokes regularly b)smokes sometimes or c) has quit but bums one every now and then.

    I have no great insight into why this should be the case. I think part of the reason seems to be that more of the phil grad students seem to come from the hip coffehouse misanthrope crowd than I originally anticipated. I would say that this might be due to the continental influence in the department, but it doesn't seem that the analytic/continental distinction strongly predicts smoking behavior either way. Nor does this trend seem particularly limited to philosophy graduate students...

    I dunno, food for thought.

Frustrating....

    One of the more frustrating things about American politics is that the American people, as a group, have a tendency to be on the right side of many of the most important policy issues of the day. The American people support abortion rights, stronger environmental regulation, and strongly support universal health care. And while some polls indicate a weakening opposition to gay marriage, a strong majority reject a constitutional amendment banning it, and when fully informed about the NSA wiretapping scheme, a majority oppose.

    One would think that the obvious truth that universal health care is a moral imperative would be sufficient to garner sufficient legislative truth. And failing that, you would think that the fact that we have the most expensive but least effective system in the first world, behind all the ones that guarantee universal coverage, would be enough. And failing that, you would think that the fact that it is in most major corporations competitive interests to great some kind of universal coverage because the system we have inefficiently requires them to cover workers (just ask GM how the current system screws them over compared to Japan). And failing that, you would think that massive support from the American people would get it done.

    But that ain't the case. The lobbyists of essentially one major set of corporate interests and the politicians on their payroll have been enough to derail reform. As I said, it is frustrating.

    P.S. Before I can be accused of idealizing the American People, it should be noted that on many hot button social issues they are quite stupid; large majorities of the American public support a ban on flag-burning and putting the Ten Commandments in courtrooms. Obviously, the masses are still susceptible to demagoguery.

So funny I almost choked on my Perrier...

   

This is one of the funniest things I have read in quite some time. Poor Jesus Christ. I think Satan has a point here:

Satan: Tim, this is just the Left’s way of saying, fine, let’s just cut and run. We shouldn’t even be in Armageddon, we shouldn’t even be fighting a battle to bring about the end of the world.

Russert:  So you think this story is mostly partisan.

Satan: Absolutely! Look, this is war. We’re fighting an enemy that is determined to utterly destroy us and rule for a thousand years. If these allegations turn out to be true, then we may have a few bad apples in the barrel. But 99.9999% of our troops are doing a great job day after day, under incredibly difficult circumstances. And sometimes, in the stress of the moment, some of them may snap and make bloodwurst out of children. Can any of us honestly say that, given the same circumstances, we wouldn’t do the same thing?

Jesus:  Yes!  There are clear–

Satan:  Well, look who’s casting the first stone.

Jesus:  –clear rules of engagement design to prevent this kind of—

Russert:  Mr. Christ, let him finish.

Satan: Look, the point is that there are lots of people who may have sincerely held beliefs about whether it’s appropriate to grind noncombatants into sausage, but I hardly think that Mr. Christ’s record entitles him to get holier than thou on the topic of children.

Now, this is referring in the piece to the most amusing accusation of pedophilia, but I think Satan has much more ammo in the chest: the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Egyptian children. Jesus is, of course, part of the same of the same entity that is responsible for that utterly unjustifiable genocide. I don't know who said it, but it goes something like "If God was truly all-Good, then statements connecting him to the brutalities of the Old Testament are not just false, but malicious lies."

May the Lord strike me down...

....or failing that, you could always use a Molotov cocktail. A new Grand Theft Auto rip-off based on staggeringly and disturbingly popular Left Behind novels where you use various weapons to smite gays, Jews, and other undesirables will hit stores soon.

    Out of curiosity, does anyone really doubt that the world post-Rapture world would actually be a much better place to live? Think about it, every annoying, delusional fundie jackass...gone! And a world government dominated by liberals. No more annoying currency exchanges from country to country. Sexual deviance and sodomy running rampant.  The world dominated by Satan...well I always felt that Satan got a bad rap in Paradise Lost anyway.

    Viva le Rapture!

Hypocrisy?

    So, it is really bad when Joe Lieberman contributes to Republican framing and talking points, but when Markos of Daily Kos does it, it is a-okay? He says:

Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn't believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.

    This is in the middle of post where Markos explains that he is a libertarian Democrat because he supports...everything that liberal egalitarians do, and perhaps one day he might explain how being a libertarian Democrat is consistent with lukewarm defenses of reproductive rights (funny how both privacy issues and gun control are mentioned, but not abortion),  but whatever.

    My question is this. Exactly who are these "extinct" liberals? Exactly what liberal bogeyman has argued that government is always the solution to our problems? That our first response should be "more bureaucracy"? Mario Cuomo? Ted Kennedy? FDR? Lyndon Johnson? Give me names. What disastrous regulatory endeavour have liberals supported that would have been best handled by a "business-government partnership"?

    I would take this "crashing the gate" stuff more seriously if I didn't see it as simply just more interest group politics, with the netroots being just another interest group. But when I see Markos, one of the netroots head honchos, spreading Republican anti-Dem talking points in order to score intra-party points, I despair.

So, I was flipping through the channels and found some softcore porn...

    And I decided to ask the assemblage about something that I have always found strange about Skinemax (nothing like a porn post to break the blogging doldrums).  Why is that softcore porn never employs dirty talk? Hardcore porn, or so I've heard, uses dirty talk. R-rated sexploitation Hollywood films sometimes do. Clearly, no one is saying something that violates the laws concerning late night cable. Wouldn't including dirty talk make the product much better than it currently is (which is pretty lame)? And it is not as if it is particularly difficult to write.

    Just seems like an odd omission, is all....

Once again....

    I am wondering where all my regular commenters are; they seem to have disappeared.

Apropos of the blame game...

    Matt Yglesias reinforces the point (not to imply he is responding to me) I just made concerning Professor Althouse. Equal distribution of blame for the current political and policy situation critically misjudges reality:

Unity ’08 informs us that “both parties and all of us who have been active in them share responsibility for the current political morass.” Democrats aren’t angels, but this is comparable to the observation that “Matt Yglesias and David Broder both write columns about politics.” Mine runs on this Web site, his goes in a giant, influential daily newspaper. He’s a regular on Meet The Press, I used to sometimes get invited to do five-minute spots on CNNfn before it went out of business. Democrats have no doubt done some stuff that’s contributed to some problems, whereas Republicans have governed the country unilaterally throughout the 21st century. The problems in America are, by any reasonable standard, overwhelmingly the Republicans’ fault.

Yup. Read the whole thing.

Annoying Television Characters...

    The Onion has a good list up (I am prepping for my first day of class tomorrow, so I won't be blogging a lot todoay). My two quibbles are with Wesley Crusher of TNG and Ross Gellar of Friends. Clearly, the most annoying characters on those shows were Dr. Pulaski and Phoebe Buffet, respectively.