by Jason Kuznicki on February 7, 2011
“If everyone in the world were homosexual, the human race would die out.” Or as Kenneth Minogue — not ordinarily a lazy thinker — recently put it:
If one’s notion of responsibility includes a concern with the continuance of our civilization, then there is a clear conflict between such responsibility and the advancing of homosexuality as an equally valid sexual option to heterosexuality. (The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, p 310.)
Wordier, but I think effectively the same. As it’s been pointed out, this is a lousy argument. The refutation? If everyone in the world sought a cure for cancer, there would be no food, and the human race would die out too.
Arguments like these ought to be embarrassing, but for some reason they’re not. They are a scathing indictment of dentists, accountants, musicians, teachers, and basically everyone except subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers. Only they pass the (apparently, I guess, sorta) Kantian test. If everyone in the world were moral philosophers, the human race would die out, and of this I feel increasingly confident.
You want a maxim to universalize? Find someone you can really love, body and soul. Commit to that person. Consider having children, if your biology and personal situation allows it. Even if the biology fails you, consider adopting.
But then gay and straight people would have to share a moral maxim. And there would be cooties on it.
by E.D. Kain on February 7, 2011
[reposted from Sunday]
If I could draw your attention to the top of the page for a moment you will see a number of pages listed in our navigation bar. Beginning with “Home” you will then progress on to the “Masthead” and from there make your way to the “Contact” page and then the “Blogroll”. Finally you will come to a very new addition – “Sites” – and if you hover your mouse there for just a moment you will see a menu drop down and a link to a blog appear: Not a Potted Plant, by Burt Likko, aka Transplanted Lawyer. Mr. Likko has been blogging at Not a Potted Plant for years; he has also been a regular commenter here at The League.
Now, if you were to click on that link you would see that it took you to a very familiar looking page, quite reminiscent of the one you’re on now. You see, we’ve begun hosting reader/blogger blogs at the site, and Burt’s is the first of the bunch, the guinea pig if you will – our beta tester.
The idea is this: we want to host a handful of blogs here at the site from regular League commenters who also happen to be bloggers. We have some ideas on how to promote the work of these bloggers, and we hope the additional content will be good for the larger site as a whole, and drive traffic all across the board. A rising tide and all that. Or something to that effect. Also we think of the site and its writers and commenters as a community, and we want to expand that community.
In any case, please do welcome Mr. Likko to the newly expanded (if still somewhat experimental) League of Ordinary Gentlemen. He has a welcome post up here.
If you are a regular commenter and also happen to be a blogger and feel that you might be interested in doing something similar, drop me a line. There’s no guarantee – this is going to be (at least at first) a rather limited endeavor. Nor is there any guarantee that this will work one way or another, and at some point we may scrap the whole idea. It seems like a good idea at the moment, and we’ll ride that notion for as long as it takes us.
by E.D. Kain on February 7, 2011
This is
an excellent speech by British writer Phillip Pullman, author of
The Golden Compass (via):
The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.
That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for…
I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.
And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?
This reminds me of this post by Roger Ebert, another writer who has written eloquently and often about similar issues.
To me, this pushback against privatization and the encroachment of private, profit-driven interests into the public sphere is perhaps the closest thing to authentic conservatism (at least in terms of wanting to conserve anything) that we have in this country (and why I think of Ebert as something of a conservative progressive in an odd sort of way).
Profit is fine, as far as motivations go, but it leaves out a whole host of other human compulsions and needs and desires. Public libraries are a good example. How can we determine their value? All they do is cost in strictly financial terms. Some might argue that we should in some form or another privatize our libraries, or at least make them self-sufficient rather than rely on tax dollars. Of course this, like so many other privatization schemes, is hugely regressive and undermines the entire purpose of a public sphere to begin with. Which is perhaps the point. Or take prisons – is efficiency and cost-saving really a reason to turn incarceration into a profit-driven industry?
There are more important freedoms than economic freedoms and even economic freedoms can be understood in different ways (not just the freedom to choose what to buy or how to run your business, for instance, but the freedom to be able to afford to buy things like healthcare in the first place). Public education, public libraries – these are essential pieces of our society that we can’t put a price tag on. In the red and black ink-stained columns of our little theoretical ledgers, all we can see is their cost, not the value they create. Which is why education is one of the first places we see cuts, then healthcare for the poor, then libraries and other ‘non-essential’ public services. And this worries me deeply. [click to continue…]
by Guest Authors on February 6, 2011
Greetings to the League from “
Jonny the Fiancé” (Think “Joe the Plumber” and “Tito the Builder”). While Lisa is at her mother’s I have self-motivated to organize some of my thoughts on today’s noteworthy events, the 100th Birthday of Ronald Reagan and the Superbowl.
These occur amid an increasingly uncertain situation in Egypt, where black and white categorizations of the repressive government and the righteous street give way to multiple shades of grey. The Muslim Brotherhood, proud assassin of peacemaker Anwar Sadat, is a major stakeholder of the uprising. Mubarak’s Egypt has been a safe and stable, if corrupt, puppet regime. The Egyptian military, largest ground force in the region with 1.3 million troops, has impeded unrest in Gaza, cut arms smuggling and stood alongside the Turkish Army as a bulwark against Iranian or Syrian aggression. That and they have so far been blessedly restrained with their lethal capacities and seem intent to protect and shepherd the people above all.
There are no such shades of grey in tonight’s Superbowl matchup. Green Bay, community-owned and loyal to its relatively small but football-loving town, would be my sentimental favorite against any other team. Aaron Rodgers is athletic (like Roethlisberger), honorable (…), and stepped in for a legend at his position without missing a step.
However, as a rabid Ravens fan it won’t even come down to liking the Packers. I hate the Steelers like Lisa hates Lebron James and Mark Teixeira. Haloti Ngata, already a fan favorite, became a god around here when he broke Big Ben’s nose during our last regular season matchup. Howard Fineman’s recent editorial manages to simultaneously embrace the Steelers’ bad-boy image while denouncing it as a New York sports media conspiracy. I guess you have to love your team, right or wrong.
I sometimes envy people who are able to approach more complex judgments with the same binary analysis I apply to football, and I think I can safely say that Ronald Reagan was the most consequential and powerful person in his era to view the world in this way. Every biography and documentary about Reagan extols his tendency to idolize the good guys, the white-hats, sheriffs and allied generals that he would go on to always insist on portraying. In his youthful summers he was a lifeguard and fashioned his identity around coming to the rescue. When it came to communism, President Reagan was less interested in making distinctions among the Vietnamese, Chinese and Soviet varieties and more inclined to ride to the rescue, stamping out nationalist Marxist revolts with the same vigor that he rooted out communists in the 1950s film industry.
I am no fan of Reagan-era internationalism. His evangelical anticommunism, under the watchful eye of George Schultz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, led to the empowerment of many tin pot dictators in our hemisphere whose constant warring against internal Marxists justified sanctioned suppression with steady streams of U.S. aid, arms and advisors. However, the nature of Reagan’s personality and worldview helped to set the stage for a showdown in another hemisphere between a peaceful people and a repressive ruler that helped to define a nation in my lifetime – The people-powered Phillipine “EDSA” revolt. [click to continue…]
by Rufus F. on February 6, 2011
In a previous discussion, I used the awkward term “inner states” to describe the religious experience, attempting to distinguish internal from external events, such as “miracles”. Basically, I was trying to say that the latter are much easier to prove or disprove than the former, which being so wholly individual are hard for outsiders to even comment on.
One of the things I had in mind was Meister Eckhart’s essay about abgescheidenheit, a somewhat tricky word that Raymond Blakney translates as ‘disinterest’, instead of the more typical ‘seclusion’, ‘solitude’ or ‘detachment’. Personally, I agree that solitude doesn’t work; but I also think Eckhart really is talking about something like total detachment, both from the self and external things, an idea a bit like ‘nothing’ in zen meditation. Here, again, the external world is totally beside the point and really a barrier to an inner ‘bubbling forth’ of God. Eckhart believes this detachment or disinterest is the highest of all virtues. [click to continue…]
by E.D. Kain on February 6, 2011
If I could draw your attention to the top of the page for a moment you will see a number of pages listed in our navigation bar. Beginning with “Home” you will then progress on to the “Masthead” and from there make your way to the “Contact” page and then the “Blogroll”. Finally you will come to a very new addition – “Sites” – and if you hover your mouse there for just a moment you will see a menu drop down and a link to a blog appear: Not a Potted Plant, by Burt Likko, aka Transplanted Lawyer. Mr. Likko has been blogging at Not a Potted Plant for years; he has also been a regular commenter here at The League.
Now, if you were to click on that link you would see that it took you to a very familiar looking page, quite reminiscent of the one you’re on now. You see, we’ve begun hosting reader/blogger blogs at the site, and Burt’s is the first of the bunch, the guinea pig if you will – our beta tester.
The idea is this: we want to host a handful of blogs here at the site from regular League commenters who also happen to be bloggers. We have some ideas on how to promote the work of these bloggers, and we hope the additional content will be good for the larger site as a whole, and drive traffic all across the board. A rising tide and all that. Or something to that effect. Also we think of the site and its writers and commenters as a community, and we want to expand that community.
In any case, please do welcome Mr. Likko to the newly expanded (if still somewhat experimental) League of Ordinary Gentlemen. He has a welcome post up here.
If you are a regular commenter and also happen to be a blogger and feel that you might be interested in doing something similar, drop me a line. There’s no guarantee – this is going to be (at least at first) a rather limited endeavor. Nor is there any guarantee that this will work one way or another, and at some point we may scrap the whole idea. It seems like a good idea at the moment, and we’ll ride that notion for as long as it takes us.
by Lisa Kramer on February 5, 2011
I mentioned a month or so ago that since my engagement, I’ve sort of re-channeled the views I usually apply to politics into everyday living. “Re-channeled” might be a bit much – I can never shake the political bug – more like incorporated. The line between personally applied values and political ideology is even murkier than it used to be for me, and that was a pretty murky line to begin with. Last night, Jonny and I baked a loaf of bread, a small feat that we’re still so proud of that our second loaf is in the preparation stage as I write this (yup, the first loaf was gone in less than 24 hours). We probably could’ve baked it for a few extra minutes, but it was still the best bread I’ve ever tasted. It was also a really awesome way to spend a Friday night, and I’m not quite sure what that says about my sense of fun.
The bread thing was easy. I had been reading Radical Homemakers, got up yesterday morning, asked Jonny if we had any plans that evening, and when he said no, said, “let’s bake bread.” Done. A lot of future decisions have been equally simple. When we get a bigger house, let’s get a hammock. Let’s get an old dog and a young dog at the same time. Let’s limit eating out to once a month. And tradeoffs, like, the fact that I will one day (again, this goes with the bigger house) get tacky, inflatable, outdoor Christmas decorations in exchange for Jonny getting tacky, inflatable, outdoor Ravens decorations any time they make the playoffs. Fair deal.
[click to continue…]
by Will on February 4, 2011
How about a break from arguing over the mandate?
I’m in the middle of Burr, Gore Vidal’s fictional account of the life of America’s most reviled duelist. Why am I reading it? Well, the only other work of historical fiction I’ve read from Vidal was a pretty fun read. And Michelle Bachmann says that Burr turned her into a conservative.
I admit this piqued my curiosity. Bachmann doesn’t cite something from the conservative canon (Rand, God and Man at Yale, Conscience of a Conservative etc) as part of her conversion moment. Burr was what really stuck. Vidal’s irreverent take on the founding generation was apparently too much for Bachmann to bear.
Here’s where I admit I’m biased: I’m really enjoying the book. Burr as imagined by Vidal is a tremendously funny character. And I’ve always been interested in historical revisionism, so an insider-y account of the revolutionary generation is right up my alley. I also think that historical fiction can be genuinely illuminating: As told by Vidal, Jefferson’s casual indifference to political violence is reminiscent of Lenin. Washington, meanwhile, is transformed from the father of his country to one of the most incompetent generals in history. I don’t think of Jefferson as a proto-Bolshevik, of course, but Burr is a useful reminder that one of the man’s most celebrated phrases involves a tree of liberty getting periodically refreshed by bloody conflict. And Washington, for all his political and strategic acumen, has never been regarded as a brilliant military tactician.
So it”s a good read, but I don’t think Vidal’s characters should be taken too seriously. In the novel, Burr is an old man whose memoirs are quite clearly selective and influenced by self-interest or self-regard. His remembrances are a corrective to nostalgia for the revolutionary era, not an objective account of the period.
So why would anybody feel threatened by this book?
I really think this sort of thing is telling, if only because it elides the difference between nationalism and patriotism. A nationalist like Bachmann can’t stand the thought taking the Founders down a peg or two, even in a work of fiction. Anything that questions the official hagiography surrounding Washington or Jefferson is a threat to our founding mythos. You might think I’m exaggerating, but this extends beyond her dislike of Vidal’s fiction. She quite literally misrepresents the historical record to erase the Founders’ blemishes.
I consider myself a patriot, but I’ve always been uncomfortable with this peculiar brand of nationalist myth-making. It reeks of dishonesty. More importantly, it suggests a sense of nationalistic insecurity I just don’t feel. I truly believe I’m lucky to have been born a citizen of the United States. I think it’s self-evident that we live in a remarkably free, remarkably prosperous country. Acknowledging our faults and the faults of our predecessors does nothing to shake this conviction. But then, I’m not cowering in the corner, terrified that a novel is going to somehow undermine the very real accomplishments of men like Washington, Jefferson, or Hamilton.
History is complicated, and we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. But patriotism shouldn’t depend on a selective national mythology. After the illusion is shattered, what’s left? For Bachmann, nothing at all.
by Scott H. Payne on February 4, 2011
Just when you thought maybe, possibly, potentially we’d get a wee, little break from WikiLeaks, a Norwegian politician goes and
nominates Assange and the site for a Nobel Peace Prize. One can practically hear the tectonic rolling of eyes at this news.
Snorre Valen, a 26-year-old legislator from Norway’s Socialist Left Party, told The Associated Press he handed in his nomination in person on Tuesday, the last day to put forth candidates.
“I think it is important to raise a debate about freedom of expression and that truth is always the first casualty in war,” Valen said. “WikiLeaks wants to make governments accountable for their actions and that contributes to peace.”
Undoubtedly, much will be made about the fact that the nomination comes from someone in the “Socialist Left Party”, at least by those who would oppose the nomination and WikiLeaks efforts more generally. But I’m inclined to agree with Valen and believe that his nomination is a good idea.
I say that not because I necessarily think that WikiLeaks is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize (it would seem that they are a long shot in any case). Rather, I agree that it is important to raise the debate about freedom of speech and what I take to be the more important debate that I think WikiLeaks has kicked off: trust in government.
There has been a lot of debate about whether WikiLeaks’ actions have been a good or a bad thing; whether they have acted out of necessity or irresponsibly. But my continued belief is that the focus specifically on WikiLeaks is really to miss the point of the larger dynamics at play here. [click to continue…]
