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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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Thursday, October 28, 2010 :::
Megan McArdle has written a "can't we all get along?" kind of blog entry; I think it's worth reading something like this once in a while to remind ourselves how we ought to behave (I doubt the reminder works on anyone who doesn't, deep down, already know it). But I especially recommend this one for the excerpt of C.S. Lewis (I believe from "Mere Christianity") on the Biblical exhortation to love one's neighbor.
In particular, of the formulation "love the sinner but hate the sin", he says,For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all of my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Read the whole thing.
I should say, on a related note, that there have been reports of voting machines in Nevada that come with Harry Reid pre-selected and machines in North Carolina that respond to a straight-ticket Republican command by checking all of the Democrats. I am more inclined to blame technical glitches than deliberate sabotage. Anyone who has signed on a touch-pad at the grocery market knows that sometimes they don't always mark exactly where the pen is pressed. Anyone who has used or heard of Windows Vista knows that software bugs aren't always caught before the product is shipped. And I would guess that, if someone were going to sabotage a voting machine, it would be just as easy to have the machine tell the voter that their Angle vote would be cast for Angle while actually registering it for Reid as it would be to alert the voter to the fact that their Angle vote would go to Reid. I'm not saying that this isn't a point against relying on the electronic machines. I'm just saying that deliberate foul play is not only an unnecessarily uncharitable explanation, but not the most plausible available explanation. If your computerized voting machine is deliberately rigged to vote for the Democrats, you will probably leave the polling place unaware of it. I wouldn't put it past those stinking commies.Labels: civility
::: posted by Steven at 12:19 AM
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