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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Monday, June 28, 2004 :::
It's reboot time again, which means everything comes at once:- When I first heard that the tobacco-growers cartel was to be terminated by buying out the quota-holders, I thought it might be worth the Danegeld to end the program, but it sounds like they're overpaying. And that's without considering the principle of the thing.
- Not apropos a web page I have on the stack, I just saw a video for a song called "You're The Only One". I'd heard of this song, from a short interview with the singer. She'd written each verse about a different ex-boyfriend. If she or the interviewer noticed the irony, it didn't come out in the interview.
- There was recently a piece in the Economist about the status of women in the Arab world.
- Jonah Goldberg defends dogma, i.e. unthinking adherence to certain principles. His main point:
A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas. I'm not certain I agree with him (especially at the very end, where he endorses crack), but he makes a good case. He's right that "such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas," but it would also be correct to say that "such things are only possible in a society where there are people who aren't chained to the walls of their cells." It's clear that he doesn't mean to take things to that extreme (Goldberg rarely means to take anything to an extreme), and his case isn't as simple as that. I'm really not sure how to conclude this paragraph, so I'm just going to gracelessly drop it, okay?
His point reminds me of the point (as harped on by C.S. Lewis) that you can't derive any principles without axioms, and you can't derive moral principles without moral axioms (as Lewis puts it, "you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.") In other words, any moral code will require some dogma. - Again apropos the MTV that I'm watching right now rather than the web pages I have open: I often see an ad for a movie that doesn't make me want to see the movie, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a TV ad for a movie I less wanted to see than "Napoleon Dynamite". I remember the ads for "Kangaroo Jack", and I know that, had I been offered the choice between seeing the movie and being clubbed to death with one of my limbs, I'd have seen the film. If you asked me the same question for "Napoleon", though, I'd need time to consider.
- Oil would be cheaper if people weren't worried about terrorism. Also, being clubbed to death with one's limb would be unpleasant.
Incidentally, I'm more bearish on oil than I was a month back. On the demand side, I'm less optimistic for China. On the supply side, I guess I have some hope for Iraq. The Saudis, incidentally, are planning to drill new wells, but those won't come on-line for a year and a half or so. - Look, MTV, if you have to mute out every word in the alleged song, why don't you just play something different? There's a lot of good stuff out there -- you probably wouldn't even have to resort to something more than six months old, the mere consideration of which I know would frighten you to incontinence.
- I have an organic chemistry nomenclature page open. Yeah, I'm a geek.
- Ramesh Ponnuru's recent National Review cover piece on
the Lord of Darkness Eliot Spitzer is now on the web. Sorry about the typo -- I assure you, it's quite likely to happen again. - David Frum has a checklist for "how you know you've been in Sweden too long". Some are funny.
- Some guy claims that Briticisms are taking over. Most of the idioms he mentions don't strike me as foreign, or even stilted -- "gone missing" is foreign? Really?
- There's an old study evaluating news-source bias by comparing how often they cite different think tanks versus how often Congressmen with various ADA ratings cite each think tank.
- In one sense, this article is about the history of racial interactions in Australia. In an other sense, it's about intellectual dishonesty. You probably don't want to read it unless you have too much free time -- I don't expect to remember anything from it in half a year.
- The UK has been promoting the use of trains over other forms of transportation for environmental reasons. It turns out that cars are more fuel efficient, largely because of train safety standards.
::: posted by Steven at 4:15 AM
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