Odds and Ends

It'll be a late night of work for me here, so this will be a quick post.

Eat an Animal for PETA Day Week

Via Instapundit, I learned that March 15 (next Tuesday) will be the Third Annual International Eat an Animal for PETA Day. Since seeing my first mosquito of the year this past Monday down here in subtropical Houston, I've known that spring is near at hand. I was already thinking of inaugurating this year's barbecue season. So now I have an additional thing to celebrate this weekend. Yourish suggests also taking some additional time on the following weekend to celebrate. Yeah. I know she got the Instalanche, but I respectfully submit that that particular idea is weak. This deserves more than a day or two: It should be a festival consisting of an entire work week sandwiched gloriously between a first weekend to inaugurate the festival and the second one to bid it farewell. Think of a sloppy Joe, and carry the metaphor further if you wish, spattering your calendar liberally with a few extra festival days here and there.

They say that chance favors the prepared mind. So how did I have this splendiferous idea? As I said, I did want to sit outside this weekend with a beer, my grill (And I'm too old-school to use anything but a charcoal grill.), and some animal prey. But some of my friends are planning a Mexican-themed barbecue already, as I learned today through email, and it's scheduled for this Saturday, the very day I was going to celebrate. Barbecuing on Sunday, the day after, would be a bit much. So next week it is, and Eat an Animal for PETA Week was born.

The Other Side of the Coin

The other day, I commented at length on how the Libertarians have made attacking capitalism easier for the religious right by supplying a convenient straw man. I haven't decided whether I'm going to comment on this at any more length, but I ended up visiting the main page of the American Conservative, where I learned that the article I ripped into was actually part of a point-counterpoint with a Libertarian! Predictably, his article is atrocious, giving more underserved credibility to the Robert Locke article. Here's the first paragraph, which pretty much demonstrates that I was spot-on.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete system of ethics or metaphysics. Political philosophies address specifically the state and, more generally, justice in human society. The distinguishing characteristic of libertarianism is that it applies to the state the same ethical rules that apply to everyone else. Given that murder and theft are wrong—views not unique to libertarianism, of course—the libertarian contends that the state, which is to say those individuals who purport to act in the name of the common good, has no more right to seize the property of others, beat them, conscript them, or otherwise harm them than any other institution or individual has. Beyond this, libertarianism says only that a society without institutionalized violence can indeed exist and even thrive.

Translation: Libertarianism is an uprooted tree. It can be grafted onto whatever belief system you want since no particular philosophical foundation (explicit or implicit) is required to be generally accepted in order to have a free society. (How did that Monty Python skit go? Something about a man debating a mud puddle on television or something like that....)

The most telling sentence is the last, which dismisses as irrelevant the importance in distinguishing between initiating the use of force against others and in using force in retaliation to the same. So can society exist with a bunch of random, one-on-one, "non-inistitutionalized" violence? No, but I guess he has to keep the anarchists happy by (also) leaving open the idea of rejecting government as such for functioning by means of "institutionalized violence".

Daniel McCarthy, opening with this wholesale jettison of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, plays right into Robert Locke's hands. "The ethical assumption of libertarianism—that it is wrong to murder and steal—is absolute, and other values may be absolute as well." How does this author know this? How will he figure out what other values are "absolute"? (I can see his antagonist, Locke, inviting him to church already....) Islamic militants claim to regard murder and theft as wrong. Would their beliefs result in a free society if widely accepted? No. And saying that basically all ethical systems condemn the same "moral absolutes", murder and theft, is just another way to pretend that these systems all equivalent. So he has admitted to moral relativism, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Try again, Mr. McCarthy.

Bush Doctrine

Be sure to read Charles Krauthammer's editorial on the Bush Doctrine. The following is choice. The Bush Doctrine is far from perfect, but it did start the avalanche.

[T]he critics of the Bush doctrine take refuge in a second Bush-free explanation. They locate the reason for this astonishing Arab spring, if not in people power from below, then in rot from above. These superannuated dictatorships, we are now told, were fossilized and frail, already wobbly and ready to fall, just waiting to be undone by the slightest challenge.

Interesting. If the rot was always there, why is it that these critics never said so before? They never suggested that we challenge these wobbly despots? In fact, they bitterly denounced the Bush doctrine for presuming to destabilize the region in pursuit of some democratic chimera? They opposed the Bush doctrine precisely because they preferred stability.

A Shot From the Left at Hillary

Tish Durkin, writing for the New York Observer, discusses why Hillary might not be so good for the Democratic party were she to run in '08. This has predictable flaws coming from a lefty, but makes some good points. Her last couple of paragraphs are typical of the piece.

If the Democrats are to retake the White House—and start retaking the country—it’s not enough for the nominee to be a star. It’s not enough for the nominee to galvanize those who already hate Mr. Bush. If the Democrats want to remake their party into something of nerve and heft and intellect, they need to call for a full and fair investigation that is not of the Whitewater kind. They have to delve, really delve, into what has gone wrong: why, apart from Ohio chicanery and inexplicable voter insanity, all these votes have been lost. That means questioning everything, including (heavens!) the gospel according to Terry McAuliffe. It means entertaining what has become a fairly obvious possibility: that Bill Clinton’s survival strategy—co-opting the Republican agenda while vilifying Republicans—may have been brilliant in the short run for him, but was not so brilliant in the long run for his party.

In those terms, the most disturbing potential of a successful Hillary Clinton candidacy isn’t that it might become mired in Whitewater or Monica or Vince Foster or any of the rest of it; they’ll have that stuff sorted. It’s that, at a time when the party needs to go on offense—intellectual offense, against its own torpor—she will dig in her heels and play what she plays best: defense.

On the one hand, you have that silly conspiracy theory about Ohio. But on the other, she does seem to grasp that Hillary's version of triangulation (i.e., pandering to the religionists) won't help the Dems in the long run: She follows the above quote with this: "In which case, whatever the fate of Hillary ’08, the Democrats—yet again—will lose."

I'd say this is partway on the right track. In any case, it's interesting.

-- CAV

Updates

3-9-05 Corrected personal pronoun for Meryl Yourish. My apologies!
3-10-05 Fixed incorrect link to Krauthammer. Hat tip to reader Adrian Hester.