Paterfamilias

This post by Digbydrone, Tristero, basically exhausts the entire taxonomic range of logical fallacy, although it does provide an object lesson in the proper use of the phrase, "begs the question." The observation that present conditions exist, ergo they exist doesn't even count as philosophy when you're stoned. I know whereof I speak.

Tristero doesn't appear to know what libertarianism is, having confused it with some kind of bowdlerized anarchism. Libertarians come in many varieties and differ in their beliefs about the proper scope of a constitutionally limited government, but libertarians believe in a constitutionally limited government. Libertarianism is a governing philosophy, and although it claims that the best possible mechanism for good governance is a system in which authority is strictly delimited and deliberately confined to certain, very particular uses, it is no less a theory of government than totalitarian Maoism. Even the most extreme minarchist ultimately requires a governing agency for the maintenance of property "rights." Scratch a libertarian, and you will always find a statist with a confused and naive superstition about the self-limiting nature of power.

As for debunking this Island-of-Doc-Moreau anarcho-libertarian argument-against-the-state, our friend Tristero might have stuck to an appeal to tradition, which, although a fine logical fallacy in its own right, is a lot less egregiously retarded than his weirdly metaphoric attempt to make government into an analogue of breathing. That's right: a hierarchical subset of post-agricultural, socio-cultural organization is the same as a basic biological necessity. Now, obviously people can survive without government--marooned on a desert island, or treking the wilderness, or living in neolithic isolation somewhere--at least for some modest period of time, which calls the comparison into question. Equally obviously, all terrestrial vertebrates, along with acquatic mammals and reptiles, breathe, and yet most, if not all, seem to do just fine without a bicameral legislature. I am not saying this to be snide, either. Even if we stipulate that government is necessary, inevitable, and universal, it is still not the same as breathing. Its necessity, inevitability, and universality (which, by the way, I emphatically do not stipulate) arise from totally different circumstances and conditions. Even if we stipulate that humans are so-called social animals, that our social organizations are fundamental and innate to our species, as genetically inherent in their way as the organization of a colony of eusocial insects, still it would not be the same as breathing. (And, by the way, Wislon and Hölldobler will explain to you that eusocial colony behavior is not genetically predetermined either.)

Anyway, Tristero isn't smart or serious enough to spend much more time on, but let's back up over the corpse once more before fleeing the scene.

Every society, no matter how small, has rules, ie, a government.

Governments promulgate and enforce rules, yes, but rules are not synonymous with government. Plenty of organizations and social units have rules and are not governments. Oh, what's an easy example? How about fucking families? How about offices? How about consensus-based vegan food cooperatives? How about string quartets? Does the violist jail the second violinist for missing the downbeat? Again, I'm not asking just to be facetious, but to point out that a consequence cannot be used in isolation to prove a cause. The existence of rules implies government; it correlates with government; but it is not the same as government.

Tristero's two arguments are: 1.) It is impossible not to have government; 2.) If we did not have government, things would be bad. They render each other incoherent. If government is literally inevitable ("unavoidable" is his word), then a counterfactual conditional about its absence is totally meaningless. If, on the other hand, it is possible, merely undesirable, not to have government, then government is not, in fact, inevitable. Emergent properties are not fundamental conditions, even though they may appear as such.

via Montag, who emailed me the link

Doc Pangloss to the Rescue

Is the Deepwater spill "Obama's Katrina"? I say it is his Chicago fire. I say it is his St. Patrick's Day Flood. His Pompei. His Lisbon quake. His Götterdämmerung. Look, I know that George W. Bush failed by not personally parachuting into New Orleans to run the sump pump, but you know, the problem was simply that earthen levees, however well maintained and properly designed, cannot ultimately protect a hugely inappropriate city from its fateful geography in the face of one of nature's most powerful and destructive forces. As for the oil spill, frankly, I think Obama was probably smart to risk appearing timorous by not airlifting himself into the middle. It isn't like he could be heroically redeemed by the inevitable failure of human technology in the face of the disaster. He would've just looked like an asshole, and an ineffectual one at that. Now he can "direct the clean-up" at arm's length and head-fake some more progressive idiots by harmlessly haranguing BP about corporate responsibility or some shit. A few conservative types have taken the occasion to bitch, but for the most part, they pull their punches for fear of sounding like faggot environmentalists. Progressives, meanwhile, will just come up with a way to blame Nader.

Foodie Friday: Escabeche

Although probably Mediterranean in origin, escabeche is to my mind quintissentially South American. Like ceviche, it consists of fish in an acidic marinade, but because here both the fish and the marinade are cooked, escabeche is a better preparation for a cheaper, more oily, fishier fish than you might otherwise choose for a raw preparation. I particularly like whole mackerel. You might also try something like bluefish. As a general rule, I buy a whole mackerel or two and fillet them myself, reserving the head, bones, fins, and tail for making fish stock.

4 mackerel fillets, 4-6 oz. each.
1 red onion, halved and sliced paper thin
1 shallot, halved and sliced paper thin
1 cayenne pepper, chopped
zest of 1 lemon
1 bunch green onions, cut into 2" pieces
2 cups oyster mushrooms
1 cup mint or flat parsley, chiffonade
1 cup white wine
red wine vinegar
juice of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lime
flour
sea salt
black pepper, freshly ground
raw sugar
extra virgin olive oil

Heat oil in a good, heavy sauté pan until very hot. Season the fish fillets on both sides with salt and pepper. Dredge in flour. Pan-fry 1 or 2 at a time, depending on the size of your pan. Sear them skin side first, then flesh side, until golden and just firm. Remove and rest on paper towels to absorb excess oil.

Now add the red onion and shallot to the oil. Salt lightly. Cook until just beginning to soften. Add the cayenne, lemon zest, and a few pinches of sugar. Cook for another minute or two. Add the mushrooms and green onion. Sauté together until the mushrooms start to soften. Add the wine, vinegar, lemon and lime juice, and perhaps a bit more salt to taste. Simmer together until the liquid becomes slightly syrupy. Remove from heat.

Chop the fish into bite-sized chunks. Place in a shallow bowl. Mix the mint into the onion-mushroom mixture and pour over the fish. Cover and let stand at room temperature for at least 1 hour. Serve at room temperature with rice and warm corn tortillas.

Redistribution

So I was reading Julian Sanchez's latest on the CRA, Rand Paul, etc., and since he mentions reparations, I just want to say that I, for one, would support a massively intrusive federal program to tax all white people and transfer one million dollars each to every African-American descendent of slaves. Call in the national guard, motherfuckers.

I do not expect to see a white paper on this anytime soon, though.

Should. Would. Hood.

"Hey, guys, let me blow your twelfth-century minds with some eighteenth-century concepts."

-my buddy A., after watching Robin Hood

I will begin by praising Mel Gibson. Yes, Braveheart is a turducken of anachronism, a beast stuffed so full of out-of-place-out-of-time details which are in turn stuffed with yet more of the same that it threatens to explode in the oven. Yes, he rallies the troops with a set piece speech about freedom, but ultimately, as in all Mel Gibson movies, the carnage is driven by Mel's insane, but amusing, pathological need to avenge his own symbolic emasculation through acts of increasingly exsanguinate violence up to and including his own ultimate martyrdom. Also, did I mention the carnage? Real, awesome, movie carnage--preposterous in its bloodiness, full of gouts, spurts, severings, and general brutality. Getting killed in a Gibson flick--and you are almost certain to get killed in a Gibson flick--looks like it fucking hurts. Gibson's brain tumor has also not reduced his fair mastery of film combat. He understands that for every close-up of a pike impaling a horse or an axe splitting a head, there must be a long shot of the armies on the field, so that we can tell who the fuck is fighting whom. Finally, Gibson is not afraid to give his movies at least one formidable villain. He understands that a powerful adversary adds to the tension by making us doubt the protagonist's chances of success. Come on, the casting of Patrick McGoohan as Edward Longshanks was inspired. Action and sword-and-sandal and historical epics these days just don't get the need for a good villain. They are all revealed to be pusillanimous cowards, ineffectual and effeminate dolts. Darth Vader declines to a racist Japanese frog cartoon.

So. I seem to recall that Ridley Scott once made a good movie, but now his brain is mush. Robin Hood, who is supposed to be a charming rogue, is transformed into a dour advocate for universal manhood suffrage, or some shit, a kind of post-Machiavellian, pre-Lockean universalist moral philosopher. Did I mention that his stonemason father wrote the Magna Carta? Reader, he did, which Russell Hood remembers in a crypto-Freudian, repressed-memory-recovery scene straight out of Communion. So affectless and charmless is Crowe that every one of his lines should have been rewritten as, "I guess so," the only variety derived from his ever-changing accent. Was it really necessary to have Robin Hood invent freedom and liberty? The reviewers who compare his anti-royal shtick to today's Tea Party yahoos do the latter a disservice. Was it really necessary to stage a 1/10-scale, nearly shot-for-shot recreation of Spielberg's Normandy landing, except that it is the Nazis (uh, well, the French), landing in England as part of some sort of insanely ahistorical pastiche of the First Baron's War and the Norman Conquest? For cinema's sake, Ridley, the American filmic models for Robin Hood aren't Patton, Washington, and Cincinnatus; they're Billy the Kid and Jesse James, the rogue outlaws of the American movie Western!

The acting is universally terrible, with the exception of Max Von Sydow, who appears to be having a fine old time in this piece of shit. Indeed, his aged and eccentric Sir Walter Loxley is much closer to the character of Robin Hood in humor and temperment than anyone else in the whole damned movie. Cate Blanchett could have been replaced with a low-sodium rice cake; Russell Crowe is out-acted by Maid Marion's pack of mangy dogs; Mark Strong is just happy to be working. Everyone sucks. This movie sucks. Blanchett/Marion's fucking woman-into-battle-disguised-in-armor-Lord-of-the-Rings-ripoff sucks. Ridley Scott's late discovery of fast-cut, hand-held, solarized combat sequences sucks. What is this, Three Kings? Where's Clooney? Hell. I need ya, Decks. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old blade runner, I need your magic.

The Sanity Clause

Here is a novel strategy to make it illegal to defend your client.

Oh well. As my uncle is fond of observing, all defendants are guilty . . . just not necessarily of what they've been accused of.

Whackistan

Oh, haha, people in other countries are crazy. Oh, they believe such crazy things. They believe in conspiracy theories. They are so primitive and naive. They are not well-informed like Americans. Oh, they are so paranoid.

One result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies. American military leaders slip quietly in and out of the capital; the Pentagon uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist.

Yes, I cannot imagine how extremely secretive military policies, the most significant of which involves using flying robots to murder people, could lead to conspiratorial thinking! It is so crazy! I know that if my family were vaporized by some invisible robotic angel of death, I would definitely conclude that the remote operator represented a people and government who were seeking to forge strong bonds of mutual interest in order to move together forward toward a better understanding of our reciprocal interests in building a forward-moving partnership for cooperation together.

Oh, and by the way:

Lawyers in Pakistan have a strong streak of political Islam. Mr. Habib, who has had militants as clients, argues that Al Qaeda is an American invention.

If by invention, he means creation, then he's, you know, RIGHT!

Mark It Zero!

I love cycling, and for a complete and total amateur I'm a strong enough rider, but even if I dropped everything and dedicated my life to training, I would never compete professionally, because I am not a superhuman genetic anomoly, and this is what makes the arguments about "doping" so very hard for me to understand. I mean, what you have are superb natural athletes, genetically gifted with unusual strength and endurance, with unusually efficient cardiopulmonary abilities, who through modern fitness, training, and nutritional regimes (even excluding so-called performance-enhancing drugs) have broken down and rebuilt their bodies as machines for movement. There is nothing natural about a top-ranked touring cyclist--or, they achieve peak natural performance through the most artificial of means. So. Doping. Using chemicals to increase red cell production, or to speed healing, or to ameliorate aches and pains . . . what is the distinction? I mean, wasn't Lance Armstrong's chemotherapy an artificial means of enhancing his performance, when you extend the anti-doping logic to its furthest rational conclusion? Isn't taking an Aleve on the morning after a hard day of climbing?

If you want to make it against the rules to use EPO, I guess that's fine. It's arbitrary, of course, but so is "the player may not cross the blue line ahead of the puck" or "a serve that does not bounce in the diagonally opposite service box is a fault." But please, let's not pretend that it is a question of morality, less yet an artificial dilution of something natural and pure.

The Ratchet Effect, Part Infinity

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said.

-The Times

Considered historically, it will become clear that the job of Republican governments is to invent novel, ad hoc expansions of state power, while the job of Democratic governments is to consolidate and systematize them. Far from repudiating supposed Bush-era "excesses," the Obama regime has sought--usually successfully--to entrench and to codify them. This is just the latest example.

And yes. I did. Tell yinz. So.

Including, but Not Limited to . . .

The fact that it took a gang of rightwing Kulturkampf commandos to kick Thomas Jefferson out of the State of Texas' history curricula makes me grin, seeing as how it was long the conservative position that liberal subversives were the ones trying to tear the great man down by endlessly harping on his slaveholding. The whole Texas educational brouhaha is really just further indication that the purpose of education is not to engage young minds, or whatever, but to inculcuate certain cultural biases and intellectual predispositions. Anyway, Matthew Yglesias' guest blogger, Dara Lind, doesn't seem to understand what the phrase "such as" means, i.e. that it's a synonym for e.g., which is by definition a partial list. In any case, it seems to me that the fact that the Black Panthers and Thoreau's civil disobedience make it into the curriculum at all is something worth praising, albeit while never forgetting that education is a fraud.

Her actual complaint is that while civic action by whites--the Boston Tea Party and Thoreau's tax dissent--are evidently painted in a positive light, the hoary, American-mythic tale of a deracinated and saintly Martin Luther King is going to be used to club out any notions about the importance of direct action in the Civil Rights struggle. Fair enough, except that I am yet young enough to remember my own high-school history, and this picture of King and the Civil Rights movement is not a departure from it. It is the normative, recieved, official history of that era. Rosa Parks was just tired, and all that. That doesn't make such bad history any less a target for mockery and derision, but the bad history itself is hardly novel. Meanwhile, if you can turn kids on to Thoreau's radicalism--and I, for one, think of Thoreau as one of our great native radicals--and then throw King at them, well, the dumb ones will draw no connections and not be harmed by it, but the smart ones will understand the lineage, and they may yet profit from an understanding that would otherwise be withheld from them.