I have been keeping bookmarks of the many, many blogs about the torture memos over the last few days meaning to summarize them but, ultimately, I decided the whole thing was too depressing and I let the whole sordid business pass without comment.
The final straw was a comment at The Corner claiming that the difference between Clinton’s crime and Bush’s was that Bush was always motivated by a desire to do good for his country.
As synchronicity would have it, I am currently reading Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good & Evil. The current chapter is about the myth of evil – the idea that evil is something special and different.
Some flavours of the myth:
Evil is always intentional
Evil is motivated by pleasure
The victim of evil is innocent.
Evil is conducted by people different from us.
Evil is in our natures.
Evil is the opposite of good (and order and peace).
Evil people are selfish egotists.
The author of the list, Roy Baumeister, concludes
The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the mth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it…Belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.
I am very happy that the reds are back on top of the table despite the recent poor run of form. I am also delighted that we are in the semis of The Champions League. The League Cup and World Club Cup and Charity Shield trophies were nice too.
But I can’t tell you how sad the ignomious end to the FA Cup run made me.
I understand that you really, really want to win the Premiership and the Champions League. I get that. I do too.
And I understand that you need to rest players at the end of a long hard season. But still I am sad.
The FA Cup has a special place in my heart. For the 76 cup, I dressed up all of my cuddly toys in red – Bugs as a player and Uncle Ted as a fan – and put them in my window. I treasure the heartache of that defeat as much as the joy when we beat Liverpool in 77. I still remember looking forward to school so i could rub Gavin Mantel’s nose in it.
And so, I think it was disrespectful to field a team of reserves in an FA Cup semi-final. At Wembley Stadium no less!
It was disrespectful to Wembley Stadium, to the oldest competition in Football and, especially, to my memories.
Could you not have played a decent playmaker? Scholes was fit. And Giggs. Even Nani or Carrick!
Why did you stay in the competition so long, only to throw it away in such an easy game against such weak opposition? It was just one more game! One goal and we would have been in the final! You may think 11 wins is enough, but I, for one, would have been overjoyed with one more.
“Something” was recorded during the Abbey Road sessions. It took 52 takes in two main periods, the first session involved a demo take on Harrison’s 26th birthday, 25 February 1969, followed by 13 backing track takes on 16 April. The second main session took 39 takes and started on 2 May 1969 when the main parts of the song were laid down in 36 takes, finishing on 15 August 1969 after several days of recording overdubs.
With more than 150 versions, “Something” is the second most covered Beatles song after “Yesterday”. It began accumulating cover versions from other artists almost immediately after its release by the Beatles.
“Something” continues to garner accolades from the musical establishment years after its release, with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website naming it as the 64th-greatest song ever. According to the BBC, “Something” shows more clearly than any other song in The Beatles canon that there were three great songwriters in the band rather than just two.” The Beatles’ official website itself said that “Something” “underlined the ascendancy of George Harrison as a major song writing force”.[28] In 1999, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) named “Something” as the 17th-most performed song of the 20th century, with five million performances in all.
I’ve been meaning to play with Garage Band since we got the Mac. Today was the day.
It turns out that making music is harder than they make it look on the telly. It took me a lot more than 52 takes!
BloggingHeads.tv has captured the market in political debate where the debators actually listen to one another and address each others points. They sometimes even agree! Gasp!
I gave up listening to atheist vs believer debates a while back as they never seem to move the argument forward in any meaningful way – there are only so many times you can hear that religion gave us the Inquisition and that morality without God is not possible. I decided to risk one more encounter because I thought the Bloggingheads format might lead to a more enlightening discussion and because I enjoy reading both Ross Douthat’s and Heather MacDonald’s writings.
I was not disappointed.
Heather MacDonald was magnificent. I wish she were getting Ross’s spot on the NYT Op-ed page. It’s great that Kristol is gone and it’s great that a non-crazy, non-partisan conservative is getting his spot – but it would be sooo much more fantastic to have smart, secular conservative who does not argue in ALL CAPS in such a prominent seat.
I have never seen such polite passion as Heather’s in a debate and she has the BEST debate winning technique – if I ever go on BlogggingHeads, I am so gonna get me one of those web cams that will hyper-zoom at the most intense moments so I can go all googley-eyed on my opponent. I don’t know how Ross was able to withstand the pressure.
Ross seemed to be on his best behavior and didn’t fling any of the wild accusations that believers usually fling at non-believers.
Heather made fantastic point after fantastic point – so many I lost track. I don’t know if she had prepared notes but her soundbites could not have been better had she rehearsed them in the mirror beforehand.
Here are a few I remember:
The sermon on the mount is not necessarily a defence of unfettered capitalism.
I don’t think many of us would want to have lived during a time when the church was at the peak of its power.
Humans are endowing Christianity with values that comes from ourselves. not from God.
If you want to posit “God” as a placeholder for ignorance of the first cause, fine, but I will not grant you the Christian version of God as loving and just.
Ross did an admirable job under the googley-eyed circumstances but didn’t quite hold his own. His best defence was to fling non sequiturs whenever Heather landed a particularly powerful shot.
Ross v Heather was worth a thousand Hitchens v Mad Creationist debates. Bloggingheads FTW!
New Majority is a site for non-crazy conservatives to plan their route back from the wilderness led by David Frum (a former speechwriter for Bush). It’s mostly pretty good and the crazies are (mostly) confined to the comments.
Frum asked readers to submit their frustrations about the tax code and proposals for making it better. I submitted my T= rI – B proposal:
My proposal addresses both benefits and taxes in one swoosh.
Replace all taxes with a single, flat rate income tax. No deductions. No tax credits. No payroll tax. No sales tax. No distinctions between earned income and income from capital gains, dividends, profits, gambling or inheritance.
Income is income. Income is taxed at a flat rate.
Replace all benefits with a single flat rate benefit. No pensions. No disability No food stamps. No unemployment benefits. No social security. No means testing.
Everyone receives the same benefit. Government may decide to scale the benefit for minors to encourage/discourage children.
To calculate your tax liability, you add up all your income (I) and multiply it by the current tax rate (r) and subtract the current level of benefit (B).
If the number is positive, that’s how much tax you owe. If it’s negative, the government mails you a check.
The thing that annoys me most every year, is the idea that I might get in trouble because I don’t understand the tax code.
Tax day was hell for me this year because I had to wade through pages of ambiguous opinions about which state I should pay taxes to when I spent half the year working in another state and the other half working in a state that I didn’t live in.
And because turbo tax has started its inevitable slide from Delight the User to Make them Swear at the Screen.
I have been keeping bookmarks of the many, many blogs about the torture memos over the last few days meaning to summarize them but, ultimately, I decided the whole thing was too depressing and I let the whole sordid business pass without comment.
