An Open Letter to Country Music Singers

Dearest Country Music Singers,

Ordinarily, I would not be writing to you. However, my co-workers are unaware of the meaning of the phrase "appropriate volume", and so I have been bombarded with your songs for months now. After all of this, I feel that there is something that you should know:

I already know the name of the country in which I live. I do not need to be reminded.

Imagine this: a single country song may use the word "America" twice per chorus. That chorus is repeated four or five times per song. Let's go with four. That song is repeated on the radio station every three hours (because I guess they lost their other tapes?). In a given workweek I am forced to hear your song 13 times. That's 106 occurrences of the word "America" from one song per week. Now, there are four or five different songs with this same pattern.

Let me repeat that, since repetition doesn't seem to annoy you people like it does the rest of us: four or five different songs from the same playlist all with the same pattern. 424-530 occurrences of the word per week! Just from the radio!

It's like you have nationalistic Tourette's. Yes "nationalistic", not "patriotic". Using the name of your country unnecessarily to make a quick buck in your niche market wouldn't be too patriotic, now, would it?

Have a nice day.

-SCM

Hanging in the Balance

I'm just going to riff on this. If you happened to see Jon Stewart's takedown of Ken Blackwell this week, you already know about the book he's co-authored (Blackwell has, that is), The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.

A question that came out during the interview that I want to address somewhat is the tension between individual liberty and common good. Senator Blackwell wants to have the debate, so let's have it.

First, I'd like to make a point that good ol' Tommy Hobbes made in his Leviathan some time ago: in order to establish a society, or have any sort of common good, man must lay down some individual liberties. Common good always presupposes a sacrifice on the part of individual liberty. What is total individual liberty? Hobbes' state of nature, the condition of war of all against all, the "solitary, nasty, brutish, poor, and short". A lawless state.

But what is the other side of the coin? A state purely devoted to common good, with no individual liberty? 1984 comes to mind. The purpose of Orwell's "thought crime" was to show how far a deprivation of individual autonomy can be taken, and what horrors result.

No one would advocate either wholly pursuing individual liberty, or wholly pursuing common good. So, I'd like to point out to Senator Blackwell, and his conservative friends, that the choice we have to make is not one or the other. I don't think they seriously think it is. I am simply attempting to frame the discussion. Clearly, what we want is some kind of balance between the two things. There must be a balance point between individual liberty and the common good.

What our debate must ask is two questions: first, where is that balance point? Second, is that point fixed? Both of these questions speak to our current political discourse, whether it be over healthcare reform, financial reform, appellate court appointees, or what have you.

I'm not sure how to answer that first question, but let me attempt to answer the second question: No. The balance point between common good and individual liberty should not be fixed. It must be possible to move it according to the needs of our society, and the possibility of expansion on either side of the equation. A mass upswing on the individual liberty side, say, in a "free" market system where banking institutions are betting against the very stocks they are selling, carries with it a mass downswing on the common good side. Adjustments must be made to balance things, and keep them in balance.

This maybe provides a glimpse at how we might go about answering the first question: since neither thing is absolute good, sacrifices have to be made on either side. They must be made whenever one side of this balanced equation overtakes the other side, and threatens it.

How much does Obama's administration threaten the side of individual liberty? As far as the eye can see, not very much at all. Blackwell's inability to give Stewart one specific example of how the administration is threatening it, even after ostensibly writing a book on the subject, is a strong testimony to that very fact.

Tenets of the Blah Blah Blah Party

1. Our Platform: political platforms are quite useless.

People use positions on "salient issues" to determine who they will vote for. These positions rarely make any difference at all in terms of how things actually turn out.

2. Party loyalty is absurd.

3. Patriotism is the plural form of patting yourself on the back.

4. Voting is really a waste of your time. The choice between showboat A and showboat B is non-substantive.

5. Every tenet of every political party, including this one, is false.

6. Our Agenda: We have no agenda.

Agendas do nothing but generate criticism. You either did enough, or you didn't do enough. You're either too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Whatever you do, it won't be what you planned, the way you planned it. As long as you had a plan, you failed to achieve it.

Simple and effective

The nasty influence of Rock Music

My, do things such as this ever crack me up.

Okay, so a group planned to kill a cop and then blow up all his cop buddies at the funeral. That's not funny. Claiming a religious basis for waging war on America, is also not funny.

What does is the description of the militant group's training video which included the line, "It is edited to a backing track of rock music."

Lincoln Waged War on Half the Country?

I've been trying to understand this whole tea party movement thing. I don't think I'll ever be successful in that project.

Short version of the story: I found this website, which led me to a story (linked below) with this quote:

"The president who had the least fidelity to the Constitution was Abraham Lincoln, who waged war on half the country, even though there's obviously no authority for that, a war that killed nearly 700,000 people. President Obama is close to that end of lacking fidelity to the Constitution."

-author and judicial analyst Andrew P. Napolitano

Lincoln the war-wager, eh? Not the man who said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

A Consequentialist's Thoughts on John Travolta's trip to Haiti

To quote Kurt Vonnegut's Uncle Alex, "Well, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

What's nice? This.

John Travolta uses his personal jet to fly supplies to the people of Haiti (I hope it isn't lost on you that I say "the people of Haiti" rather than "Haiti"). This is an action of positive moral value. Why? Because it will help people who need to be helped.

I am going to belabor this point, so bear with me.

It's moral value is not affected by being in accord or not being in accord with the man's principles, or the principles of Scientology. It may or not be, I don't even know. Would being in accord with said principles be the cause of the good done by the action?

It's moral value is not affected by being in accord or not being in accord with the principles of "Christian morality" (whatever they are supposed to be!). Again, would being in accord with these principles be the cause of the good done by the action?

It's moral value is not affected by the presence of the press. Even if he did this for the sake of publicity, it doesn't affect the moral appraisal. That is to say, his intent is not relevant. Would performing this action out of a desire to become famous preclude the good that is done by the action from being good?

What I want to say is the basis for evaluating Mr. Travolta's actions (and not just his, ours as well, and those of anyone else) ought to be the consequences of the action. There are problems with this standard, to be sure, just as there are problems with any other ethical or moral standard (if anyone wants to raise some of them, I'll happily try and defend myself).

Mr. Travolta's claim in this clip echos a standard of Peter Singer's ethics: If we can help someone in need, at relatively little cost to ourselves, then we ought to do so. In his book, The Life You Can Save Singer goes to great lengths to spell out exactly what "relatively little cost" means for acting to end world poverty. I think we can summarize it somewhat imprecisely by "whatever you can stand to lose anyway without altering your standard of living." That doesn't, of course, mean that there won't be sacrifices. A pet example of Singer's is drinking tap water rather than bottled water. Another is wearing canvas shoes rather than shoes that are a) more expensive and/or b) made from animal skins. We can lose these luxuries without changing our standard of living, however.

Further, the cost is "relatively little" compared to the harm that may result from failure to act in accordance with this principle. Not flying supplies to the people of Haiti, say, may be tantamount to allowing someone to die. We needn't pad the numbers, although surely more than one life can be saved by Travolta's action: just one life saved is sufficient to outweigh the cost of flying the supplies there yourself, in your own jet, especially if you have the time and resources to do so.

Now, we don't all have private jets, or millions of dollars. And if we all did, and we all flew supplies down there, we'd probably not be able to land our planes. My point in holding up this example as an example of an action with positive moral value is not to say that we should do what John Travolta did. But to say that we should act according to the principle that explains why his action is good.

Well done, Mr. Travolta, and thanks for the good news.