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| Coming This Spring
PS If my voice was 25% lower, I'd sound like Darth Vader.
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| Happy Holidays I just finished my internship at the Bryan/College Station CBS affiliate. A "Happy Holidays" sign on the way home prompted me to post this. Yes, Jesus is the reason for the season, and trying to take the holiday away from that is truly a shame.
At KBTX they naturally try to be an active part of the community, and to that end the anchors took turns ringing a bell for Goodwill outside of a bank somewhere. Crystal (one of the anchors) said she'd been ringing the bell and telling people "Merry Christmas" for about an hour with little success and was about to go out of her mind from boredom. Just to keep her sanity, she began saying different things to people. To one girl coming into the bank, she said "Happy Holidays". The girl glared at her and said forcefully, "Merry Christmas." The anchor was of course taken aback by the hostility in the statement and replied "Merry Christmas..."
The moral of this story is, militant Christianity is not going to get us anywhere. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood," remember? Influencing out nation for Christ does not mean fighting battles to make sure that people use His name when they talk about holidays. That's something Christians seem to excel at--combatting the effect instead of the cause. If you want to be Christlike, then have a cheerful "Merry Christmas" ready for anyone who offers you any kind of season's greeting. And if the only "witnessing" you're planning on doing this Christmas is harassing the bell-ringer who's out giving their time to help people, you'd better at least put some change in the bucket.
P.S. Apparently, bell ringers don't really care if you put change in the bucket or not. But if you're not going to, don't put your head down and try to walk far around them as though you're hoping they won't notice you. Just be friendly.
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| A Healthy Dose of UtilitarianismThis post started out as a comment in response to Shaun's post, which started out as a comment in response to Rachel's, which quoted a segment of a post by Russel Kirk.
Re: Standards and Conservativism
Our current policies on tobacco, marijuana, and alcohol may not be coherent, but saying there's no standard for outlawing marijuana that wouldn't outlaw brownies too is ridiculous. On the most basic level you could point out that marijuana is, by any rational measure, a lot more addictive than brownies. You can't just say that since many things can be addictive, we have to throw in the towel and not ban anything based on addictiveness. You have to have arbitrary lines.
I think at some point the government has to be able to say, "we can't find a perfectly universal standard for applying this, but we know that _____ is destroying people's lives, and we're going to try to reduce that."
If you think you believe in a clear-cut standard of never protecting people from themselves, think again.
Should you let an extremely depressed person have an assisted suicide? What about someone under the influence of a mind-altering substance? What about a little kid? Well why not? Because they can't make an objective decision? Even sober, happy adults will never have the information or capacity to always make objective and good decisions, so unless you plan on devising a system that protects the right of little babies to kill themselves, your system must have arbitrary lines.
Usually there are very, very brief (relatively) times in a person's life when they are suicidal. The rest of the time their more objective and better-functioning self realizes that it doesn't want to be dead. So if you average that person's wants over time, you'll find almost invariably that they don't actually want to be dead. Suicide is, by most accounts, an irreparable mistake. The value of mistakes is that you learn from them, but you can't learn from something when you're dead. The government is doing a person a great disservice by letting them kill themselves.
It makes perfect sense that a system with a goal of maximum well-being to all of its citizens would prevent one of its citizens from making a really, really serious and irreparable mistake while allowing them to make small, medium, and even very large ones. Most mistakes, though regrettable at the time, provide experience which ultimately works to improve a person's quality of life.
But maybe the well-being of citizens isn't your basis for a system of government. Maybe you think liberty is more important than the well-being of citizens. But I think that you'll find that most citizens like liberty because it makes them happy--meaning that it improves their well-being. If you want to have standards which can realistically be expected to harm people, then you must either demonstrate how it's actually better for them (e.g. slippery slope future-communism arguments), or provide a reason why a government should value something over the well-being of its citizens. But before you do either, please note that with my arguments I have never once valued the "greater good" over the well-being of an individual citizen.
What I did do is suggest that the government should go against a citizen's wishes at times when the person can very accurately be judged to be going against their own overall preferences. Call it delayed liberty. Our government was designed in the same way: our desires are averaged and converted into policy, but not instantly, because we make stupid mistakes on a whim. The Supreme Court most notably serves (or is supposed to serve) as "ballast" and slows down any kind of change, whether good or bad. If you applied founding fathers' same idea to policy, suicide would be legal, but only after the suicidee went through a lengthy and difficult process to get authorization for the suicide.
If you look at it that way, it might make at least a little bit of sense that alcohol (or brownies) might be legal when marijuana is not. In a person's most objective state, with the benefit of retrospect, many adults might tell you that overall, alcohol (or brownies) has improved their quality of their life, whereas it seems probable that far less adults would tell you that drugs did the same.
And now back to derivatives.
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| I spent 3 hours helping a hypnotherapist with his computer yesterday. For some reason the place I work seems to be a magnet for conservative conspiracy theorists.
ATTENTION: WE TRADED ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY TO RUSSIA IN EXCHANGE FOR THEIR RESEARCH ON CHILD BRAINWASHING.
Okay, Government, the secret's out. Better start runnin'.
PS. AT&T is dead. Long live AT&T.
(okay, a few months late there...)
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