Did Laura Ingraham take an idiot pill this morning?
The whole show so far this morning (first 90 minutes) have been nothing but idiocy from Ingraham. The two points that have sent me writing are 1) the living constitution, and 2) her strident theocracy.
1) Ingraham mocks the idea that the Constitution needs to be interpreted according to contemporary standards. I have a libertarian friend who takes this position, but also has the kind of beliefs on other issues that support his view of the Constitution. He holds that the Constitution does not permit redistributive social welfare, or indeed social welfare of any kind, including social security. It does not permit regulation of drugs, or of the characteristics of products in general. He rejects innovations that began to happen immediatly, in the founding generation (Marbury v. Madison, for instance), not to mention much of the wartime coordination which was implimented in the Civil War, WWI, and WII, to say nothing of the Patriot Act. While my libertarian friend believes it would be good policy to go back to the very original intent of the Federal power, he is under no illusion that there is any public support for such a move. Ingraham wants to talk the talk of a founding document, but its clear she would not scale Federal power back to an eighteenth century context. Indeed, at the moment she's praising FCC fines of broadcasters. Give me liberty or give me death? Not if it offends, apparently. Ingraham would very probabaly favor a very radical shift of power from the states, but not in the form which a literal, historicist reading of the Constitution would provide. Upon what basis then does she argue that we should retain those powers not innumerated in the Constitution.
2) Ingraham had a Seperation of Church and State guy on, and from Ingraham's statements, either the secularists get to impose their views on the majority, or the majority of believers get to impose their religion on the minority. Indeed when her guest argued that the very purpose of the Constitution's Bill of Rights was to protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority, she mocked the idea. "Where does it say that?" She must be so completely unaware of the writings of James Madison, that the name itself must be unfamiliar to her. I've blogged at leangth about this (here), so I'll just say that there may be a solution in which no body does any imposing somewhere in between the them or us position of Ms Ingraham.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Publishing Rights
Ross Scaife has forwarded Bob Kraft's handy guide for protecting your rights when dealing with a publisher.
http://www.stoa.org/index.php?p=79
Ross Scaife has forwarded Bob Kraft's handy guide for protecting your rights when dealing with a publisher.
http://www.stoa.org/index.php?p=79
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Seeing is Believing
Any advertiser will tell you its much easier to sell something with pictures. As primates, our primary sense is sight. Pictures are powerful. They are powerful whether you want to disuade women from having abortions, or whether you want to highlight the costs of war. Dennis Prager puts it nicely, "We care about what we can see." This is one of the reasons we make Peterson a giant news event, and ignore genocide in Sudan. The Earthquake in Bam lacked the flood of pictures and quickly fell from memory, despite 30,000 dead. The Ache Tsunami has dozens of home videos taken by tourists on the beaches and in hotel rooms watching as the water comes in. The death toll there was roughly 120,000 (maybe 180,000) and so was four to six times as bad, but the pictures were fantastic. Bam was a headline for several days. Ache was the news for over a week, and clung to the headlines for even longer. People have mostly forgotten the Bam earthquake, but most will always remember the Tsunami. That's the power of pictures.
Laura Ingraham and James Dobson, among others, have been pushing ultrasounds as a method for preventing abortions. That's fine, to a point. I have no probem with people being a little more cognizant of what they are doing, and as I said above, we don't know nearly as well until we see a thing. But many of these commontators on the right, especially Ingraham complains about the liberal media's bad news pictures comming out of Iraq. The Left wants us to see pictures of killed and maimed servicemen, as well as Iraqis, because they know that confronted with pictures, some people will go soft on the war. I know a lot of people who just don't give the war enough thought to remind themselves what the alternative death toll would be, from an Iraqi dictator, or from terrorists striking at pizzarias, discos, train stations, and other civilian targets rather than at armored soldiers who can shoot back. "We care about what we can see."
My complaint is that when each takes their own issue, they claim they just want the information to get out, because more information is a good thing. The other guys, however, are biased advocates who are using prejudicial, provacative pictures. These conflicting claims have to go both ways. People want to use pictures because they're effective, and they want an effective medium because they are advocates. There are people like Jim Pinkerton, who argue that information wants to be free, and tends to be a free speech absolutist, but for many people, only their information deserves a free hearing, and the rest should be criticized.
Along these lines (though no pictures are involved) is the contraversy over Ward Churchill. Academics, like Bill Bennett and Glenn Reynolds are standing up for the principle of free speech and academic freedom, even while criticizing the Churchill's ideas. Bennett frequently asserts that the best way to deal with bad speech is to counter it with good speech, not to suppress it. This is, of course, Mill's notion that the best test for an idea is rigourous scrutiny, not protection.
Any advertiser will tell you its much easier to sell something with pictures. As primates, our primary sense is sight. Pictures are powerful. They are powerful whether you want to disuade women from having abortions, or whether you want to highlight the costs of war. Dennis Prager puts it nicely, "We care about what we can see." This is one of the reasons we make Peterson a giant news event, and ignore genocide in Sudan. The Earthquake in Bam lacked the flood of pictures and quickly fell from memory, despite 30,000 dead. The Ache Tsunami has dozens of home videos taken by tourists on the beaches and in hotel rooms watching as the water comes in. The death toll there was roughly 120,000 (maybe 180,000) and so was four to six times as bad, but the pictures were fantastic. Bam was a headline for several days. Ache was the news for over a week, and clung to the headlines for even longer. People have mostly forgotten the Bam earthquake, but most will always remember the Tsunami. That's the power of pictures.
Laura Ingraham and James Dobson, among others, have been pushing ultrasounds as a method for preventing abortions. That's fine, to a point. I have no probem with people being a little more cognizant of what they are doing, and as I said above, we don't know nearly as well until we see a thing. But many of these commontators on the right, especially Ingraham complains about the liberal media's bad news pictures comming out of Iraq. The Left wants us to see pictures of killed and maimed servicemen, as well as Iraqis, because they know that confronted with pictures, some people will go soft on the war. I know a lot of people who just don't give the war enough thought to remind themselves what the alternative death toll would be, from an Iraqi dictator, or from terrorists striking at pizzarias, discos, train stations, and other civilian targets rather than at armored soldiers who can shoot back. "We care about what we can see."
My complaint is that when each takes their own issue, they claim they just want the information to get out, because more information is a good thing. The other guys, however, are biased advocates who are using prejudicial, provacative pictures. These conflicting claims have to go both ways. People want to use pictures because they're effective, and they want an effective medium because they are advocates. There are people like Jim Pinkerton, who argue that information wants to be free, and tends to be a free speech absolutist, but for many people, only their information deserves a free hearing, and the rest should be criticized.
Along these lines (though no pictures are involved) is the contraversy over Ward Churchill. Academics, like Bill Bennett and Glenn Reynolds are standing up for the principle of free speech and academic freedom, even while criticizing the Churchill's ideas. Bennett frequently asserts that the best way to deal with bad speech is to counter it with good speech, not to suppress it. This is, of course, Mill's notion that the best test for an idea is rigourous scrutiny, not protection.
Friday, February 04, 2005
Mandela on Poverty
Mandela is in London for the Make Poverty History conference. The second link to Oxfam, includes this line, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." Mr Mandela is, hardly surprising, a communist, which goes a long way to explain why he has this backwards. Poverty is not man-made and unnatural. Its wealth that is not natural and is made by man. Man has lived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, for ten thousand years as a farmer (although most of the world for less than 5000), and for two hundred years with knowledge of industry, science, and economics. This last two-hundred year condition is not the natural one. Mandela, and his Oxfam sponsors, are profoundly deluded on this score.
I went to see an Oxfam film on sustainable farming in college. Being an alert history major (this is now nearly twenty years ago) I quickly was able to identify the film as communist propaganda. They seem to be pushing the same line. I'm interested in real sustainable farming, and the abolition of world poverty. But I am, as an Aristotelian, commited to knowing the world as it is, and then going about its change with a full understanding of human nature. The end of poverty will not be the result of Western guilt over their own conquest of poverty, but in the development of the third world, especially of its worker skills, infrastructure, and the rule of law.
Mandela is in London for the Make Poverty History conference. The second link to Oxfam, includes this line, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." Mr Mandela is, hardly surprising, a communist, which goes a long way to explain why he has this backwards. Poverty is not man-made and unnatural. Its wealth that is not natural and is made by man. Man has lived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers, for ten thousand years as a farmer (although most of the world for less than 5000), and for two hundred years with knowledge of industry, science, and economics. This last two-hundred year condition is not the natural one. Mandela, and his Oxfam sponsors, are profoundly deluded on this score.
I went to see an Oxfam film on sustainable farming in college. Being an alert history major (this is now nearly twenty years ago) I quickly was able to identify the film as communist propaganda. They seem to be pushing the same line. I'm interested in real sustainable farming, and the abolition of world poverty. But I am, as an Aristotelian, commited to knowing the world as it is, and then going about its change with a full understanding of human nature. The end of poverty will not be the result of Western guilt over their own conquest of poverty, but in the development of the third world, especially of its worker skills, infrastructure, and the rule of law.
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